VI

Caleb’s eyes followed the heaving mail-bag.

“Bundock’s buoy-oy fares to be jolly this mornin’.”

“He does be lively sometimes,” agreed Martha.

Suddenly Caleb became aware of the letter in his hand.

“Dash my buttons, Martha! We disremembered to ask him to read it.”

It can no longer be concealed that despite her erudition Martha could not read writing nor write save by imitating print. The cursive alphabet was Phœnician to her.

“I didn’t forget,” she answered with her masterly calm. “Bundock’s too leaky. You heard him tell all the gossip and scandal. And it ain’t true about Jinny, for Master Peartree saw them riding in the other Sunday and Farmer Gale’s little boy sat between them. Besides, Bundock’s a man, and I don’t want a man to read my letter from Caroline.”

The point seemed arguable, but Caleb meekly suggested the little boy she had just mentioned—only a mile and a half away. He would be at school, Martha pointed out.

Caleb looked at the letter as a knifeless cook at an oyster.

“What’s the clock-time?” he asked.

“Not quite certain. I set the clock by Jinny last Friday, but it stopped suddenly yesterday, when I was reading you St. Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians. Haven’t you heard it not striking?”

Caleb shook his head.

“Afeared Oi’m gooin’ deafish, dear heart. But we’ll know the clock-time on Friday,” he added philosophically. “And when Jinny comes she can read the letter likewise.”

But Martha was blushing. “No, no, not Jinny! She’s a young girl.”

“Thank the Lord for her lively face!” agreed Caleb.

“Maybe she oughtn’t to read a letter to a married woman,” explained Martha shyly, “being a girl without mother or sisters, brought up by her grandfather.”

“But Cousin Caroline wouldn’t write naught improper.”

“Of course not—but it mightn’t be proper for an orphan girl to read. Maybe it’s not even proper for you, and that’s why she addressed it to me.”

Caleb felt as bemused as before a Bundock witticism.

“Joulterhead!” said Martha, with a loving smile. “And you’ve had fourteen!”

The letter fell from his nerveless fingers. “Cousin Caroline confined again!” And the clacking of all those innumerable infants filled the air—like the barking of the black geese on the wintry mud-flats. But he recovered himself. “Why, she’s a widow, not a pair.”

“Widows can be re-paired,” said Martha.

“Must have been a middlin’ bold man to goo courtin’ a family that size,” Caleb reflected.

He picked up the letter and poised it in his hand.

“Don’t feel as weighty as St. Paul’s letters,” he said.

“The text doesn’t mean his letters were heavy,” explained Martha. “ ‘His letters, say they, are weighty and powerful’—that’s what I was reading you when the clock stopped. Any fool can write a heavy letter—he’s only got to write on a slate.”

“That’s a true word,” said Caleb, admiring her.

“Whereas,” pursued Martha, “the whole Bible has been got inside a nutshell.”

“Lord!” said Caleb. “I suppose it was a cokernut!”

“Not at all. Only a walnut.”

“Fancy! But was there walnuts in the Holy Land?”

“I didn’t say ’twas done in Palestine.”

“Then there wasn’t walnuts there?” His face fell.

“I don’t remember—oh, yes—Solomon asked his love to come into the garden of nuts.”

“But it don’t say walnuts?” he inquired wistfully.

“I can’t say it does.”

“Then maybe there won’t be pickled walnuts in the New Jerusalem?”

“Not all the righteous have your carnal appetite,” said Martha severely.

“You just said Solomon’s sweetheart liked nuts,” said Caleb stoutly. “And dedn’t the Holy Land flow with milk and honey?” He had a vision of it, seamed and riddled like his native mud-flat, but with lacteal creeks and mellifluous pools.

“You put me out so,” snapped Bundock, suddenly reappearing before the engrossed couple, “that I forgot to kill my two frogs after all!” And going to the Frog Cottage doorway, he knocked officially before opening it and committing the letter to the empty interior.

“You’ll be witness that I delivered it constitutionally,” he said, “for I can’t be expected to come a third time.”

“ ’Tis a windfall your coming a second,” cried Caleb eagerly, “bein’ as we can’t read the letter.”

Martha made facial contortions to remind him that Bundock was barred. “ ’Tain’t you we want to read it,” he hurriedly added, “but when a letter comes all of an onplunge, time a man’s peacefully trimmin’ the werges, he ain’t prepared like. You haven’t got a moment—did, Oi’d be glad o’ your counsel on the matter.”

“Well, since I’ve wasted so much of the Queen’s time——!” said Bundock, flattered.

They adjourned to the parlour to give him a rest, and denuding himself of both cap and bag of office, he occupied oracularly the long-unused arm-chair, while Caleb, uncomfortably perched on a seat of slippery horsehair, started to unfold the situation.

“Take off your hat,” broke in Martha. “Mr. Bundock will be thinking you’ve no manners.”

“Oi’ll be soon gooin’ outside again,” said Caleb obstinately, and re-started his story.

“Do let me explain,” interrupted Martha at last.

“Do let me get a word in,” cried Caleb.

“Well, take off your hat.”

“Oi’ll be gooin’ outside soon, Oi tell ye.”

“Then you can put it on again.”

“Oi shall never make Bundock sensible, ef you keep interruptin’ me.”

“You see, Mr. Bundock, it’s this way——” began Martha.

“Oi’ve told him all that,” said Caleb. “Let me speak.”

“Well, take off your hat,” said Martha.

“Oi’ll be gooin’ outside agen, won’t Oi?”

Bundock was examining the letter which had been laid on the table as for an operation.

“But it don’t look like a woman’s writing,” he interrupted. “That would be spidery.”

“ ’Tain’t likely she could write herself in that condition,” began Caleb, but Martha’s face again hushed him down.

“There’s neither seal nor sticking envelope,” pursued the expert. “Nothing but a wafer. Comes from a poor man.”

“Her new husband,” said Caleb, and set Martha grimacing again.

“Oi’ll be soon gooin’ outside,” he protested, misunderstanding.

“What you want,” summed up Bundock judicially, “is a mixture of discretion with matrimony, seasoned with a sprinkle of learning.”

“He talks like the Book!” said Caleb admiringly.

“But where is this mixture?” inquired Martha eagerly.

“She don’t exist,” said Bundock. “But Miss Gentry is the nearest lady that can read, and Fate is just sending me with a letter and a packet to her.”

The couple looked doubtful.

“She ain’t matrimony,” said Caleb.

“No,” admitted Bundock, “but I guess she’s old enough to be, though I haven’t seen her census paper—he, he! And besides she’s a dressmaker!”

“What’s that to do with it?” asked Caleb.

“I see your missus understands,” said Bundock mysteriously.

“But she won’t walk five miles to read my letter,” urged the blushing Martha.

Caleb had one of the great inspirations of his life.

“And ain’t it time you got a new gownd?”

Martha flushed up. “Oh, Caleb! Don’t let us run to vanity!”

“Wanity, mother! It ain’t tinkling ornaments nor cauls nor nose-jewels,” protested Caleb, with a vague reminiscence of her Biblical readings. “And ye’ve had naught since the sucking-pig Oi bought ye for your sixtieth birthday.”

But Martha shook her head, quoting firmly:

“Then why not a bonnet?” suggested Bundock. “That would be cheaper than a gown.”

“Ay, a bonnet!” agreed Caleb, though he sounded it a “boarnt.”

Martha flashed a resentful glance which, however, Bundock took for but another thrust at Caleb’s obstinate hat.

“I don’t want a new bonnet,” she cried indignantly.

“It needn’t be new,” said Bundock helpfully. “Just have your old bonnet whitened. That’s on her bill-paper:

“That’s a good notion,” said Caleb. “You don’t want it bran-span-new. Posty’ll tell her to come over here to get your old boarnt and then we’ll spring Cousin Caroline’s letter on her for her to read!” He chuckled. Bundock chuckled too, swelling at the adoption of his advice.

“And now that I’ve stopped gammicking so long, I may as well sample that cowslip wine, Mrs. Flynt,” he observed graciously.

But Martha had vanished.

VII

Miss Gentry had apartments in one of the most elegant cottages to be found in Little Bradmarsh. Protected by palings, it stood all alone on the high road, painted a vivid green, with three pollarded lime-trees in front like sentinel mops. At the base of the trim little garden the front door rose above two wooden steps with a little porch and ostentated a brass plate with the inscription:

In proof of which, from the cottage window, whose green shutters lay folded back, a visite or jacket of black silk, and a polka jacket, and a trio of straw bonnets, Tuscan or Leghorn, appealed to the passing eye: one of them a bonnet cap with a quilting of net and broad blue strings, another resplendent with purple ribbons and the new-treated straw plait that the Queen and Mrs. Mawhood favoured, and the third of drawn silk on little wires. The pictures of the period with a wonderful unanimity and monotony display a single style of bonnet, but artists in those days were men, and Miss Gentry could have told you better. “I’ve looked down from a pew in the gallery of my Colchester Church on Easter Sunday,” she told Jinny once, “and tried in vain to find two fellow-bonnets.”

But her professional door with its immaculate paint and shining brass was so forbiddingly respectable that clients mostly preferred to seek access through her landlady’s back door, where the flutter of washing from the clothes-line on its green square poles in the little orchard was reassuring; not to mention her chickens.

“Practical” was the unfailing adjective in those parts. Miss Gentry was not undeserving of it, for her dresses were cheap without being vulgar, while her knack of whitening the straw enabled the poorest, in the succession of new bonnets, to keep pace with Victoria on the throne. A stranger might have thought another species of dressmaker existed, whose confections, though exquisite, would never fit, or who designed, but could not execute; whereas the only other person for miles round at all in the sartorial line was an equally “Practical Breeches-Maker,” placarding from a flower-potted cottage window his “Strong, Stylish Pantaloons.” But the thought of unpractical pantaloons—say, without buttons or belts—or of theoretical trousers, was simple compared with the image evoked by Mr. Henry Whitefoot’s door-plate, proclaiming that victim of the London pick-pocket a “Practical Chimney-Sweep”: as by contrast with some exquisite dream Ethiopian, only platonically black, darkly revolving flues and fireplaces, sweeping shadow-chimneys with fleckless brushes, and carrying off ideal bags of the soot that never was on sea or land.

But perhaps in Miss Gentry’s case the word “Practical” was necessary to offset the business-damage of the tradition that had followed her from her native Colchester. For Miss Gentry had had a “revelation.” It had occurred in her girlhood, but the halo of it still circled round her chignon. Seated in church, full of worldly thoughts—possibly studying the infinite variety of bonnets—she had seen the stained-glass angel move. What this flutter of wing and lifting of leg “revealed” had never been clear: unless—as a wag maintained—it portended the flight of Miss Gentry herself. That hegira of hers from Colchester to Bradmarsh had not, alas, increased her prophetic prestige: what right has a “furriner” to come with “revelations”? Even her fellow-Churchfolk—she was one of the few Bradmarshians that clung to the Establishment—looked askance on the miracle, feeling it indeed as reprehensibly Papish, and as lending colour to the suspicion that she was a “French” dressmaker: a suspicion strengthened at once by her elegant handiwork, and by her full-bosomed plenitude, swarthy complexion, and more than embryonic moustache. It was forgotten that if these did imply Gallic blood, it would have been, not the Papish, but that Huguenot strain whose inpour into the county had at one time carried the French liturgy into Essex churches. As a matter of fact Miss Gentry was so fanatical a Church woman that she supplemented all her bills and receipts by tracts in defence of the Establishment, purchased at her own expense from a mysterious reservoir in Colchester. Nevertheless, such is the contrariety of mankind, the large accession she represented to the parish church—where on wet Sundays only the Apostle’s two or three were gathered together—was discounted by her felt queerness.

And it was, still more oddly, from the Peculiars that she received the bulk of her custom, and this despite her top-lofty airs towards them, and the tracts suggesting that souls, no less than bonnets, could be bleached as good as new. Possibly their more elastic spirituality vibrated more readily to the moving angel: perhaps the real bond of sympathy was that they knew her unpopular with the Church: like themselves a butt of legend, and lacking even their advantage of Bradmarsh birth.

But even the Churchwomen did not utterly deny patronage to this talented needlewoman, nor refuse her the deference due to weekday gloves, a parasol, and bills with printed headlines; they did not even discountenance her crusade against Dissent, though her copious allusions to Providence “moving in a mysterious way” were felt to be too broadly autobiographic. Moreover, in view of the caustic remarks upon cardinals, Puseyites, black-robed priests, and winking pictures, by which her tracts began to diversify the attack upon Dissent—for John Bull was getting alarmed at the new Roman invasion—it was a source of surprise that she failed to see the beam in her own eye. For if Virgins could not wink in Rimini, why should Angels wobble in Colchester? To add to her oddity, her brain was full of ancient maggots of astrology and medicine, crept in from “Culpeper’s Herbal,” her one bedside book.

That Bundock should be bringing a bonnet commission to this excellent and industrious, if freakish female, was the more laudable, inasmuch as he nourished a prejudice against her and her tracts. Not that he held with Catholic or evangelical Dissenters any more than with the Church proper. As a follower of Tom Paine, whose “Age of Reason” he read piously in bed every Sunday morning—the passage asserting that to make a true miracle Jonah should have swallowed the whale was a regular Lesson—he regarded himself as a great free spirit in an illiterate and priest-ridden world, one whose God was everywhere except in Church. Not that he could follow the Master’s excursions into trigonometry or astronomy or knew anything of his idol’s “Rights of Man,” being indeed singularly free from the contemporary unrest of the industrial townsman, and combining, like greater men, a crusty conservatism for the old order with a radical rejection of its spinal creed. Possibly his devotion to the still youthful Queen was part of his softness for the sex, for the only part of “The Age of Reason” that left him unconvinced was its impugnment of the wisdom of Solomon, its contention that “seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines are worse than none.” But it was not Tom Paine, nor even Bob Taylor’s “The Devil’s Chaplain,” it was the long years of his father’s paralysis that had first sapped his faith in the pharmacopœian aspects of prayer, though he considerately concealed his defection from his bed-ridden parent, and even the visiting elders withheld the racking information. The old Bundock was not, however, to be deceived, on this point at least.

“My son is moral, only moral,” he would say, with a sigh.

To such a temperament Miss Gentry must needs be antipathetic, and to mark his distaste, Bundock was wont to leave the Colchester packets of tracts as well as the “practical” correspondence at the side door, shedding the light of his countenance only on the landlady. But on this occasion, having a message to deliver as well as a missive and a packet, he performed resoundingly on the green knocker, and Miss Gentry herself, attended by Squibs, her ebony cat, appeared in the narrow, little passage, frenziedly stitching at a feminine fabric. Behind her, through the open back door, was a gleam of blossoming orchard and dangling chemises.

“Good morning, Bundock,” she said graciously; “lovely weather.”

“It’s all right overhead,” he grumbled, “but underfoot, especially at Frog Farm—whew!”

“You had to go to Frog Farm?” she inquired sympathetically.

“Yes, but there was a letter for Frog Cottage too. So I—he, he!—I killed two frogs with one stone.”

“Two birds, you mean,” said Miss Gentry, embosoming her letter with a romantic air and laying her packet on a chair. She added in alarm: “Would you like a glass of water?”

“I don’t need drink,” said Bundock, mastering the apoplectic assault, “it’s other folks that need brains.”

“My, were the old Flynts unusually trying?” she asked sympathetically.

“They want you to clean the gammer’s bonnet,” he answered brusquely.

“That’s not so foolish.” Her needle was moving busily again. “Have you brought it?”

“No.”

“That does seem foolish.”

“I’m not a bonnet-bearer! They want you to fetch it.”

“Me! Five miles to clean a bonnet! When I’m so busy! And in all that mud!”

“It ain’t so muddy this side o’ Swash End, and it’s not two miles each way by the fields.”

“Yes, with horrid cows!”

Bundock felt protective. “Cows ain’t bulls.”

“Well, I won’t go. You tell Mrs. Flynt she must come to me.”

“How can I tell her? I shan’t likely be going that way for months, thank my stars.” Miss Gentry quivered a little at the expression, wondering under what planet he was born.

“Well, I’ll write to her,” she said conclusively.

“What! And me take the letter!” In his indignation he almost blurted out that the same difficulty of reading it would arise.

“Then I’ll tell Jinny to bring the bonnet!”

Bundock felt baffled. Instead of cunningly helping the Flynts to get their letter read, he had only secured that minx of a carrier a commission. He scowled at the dressmaker, seeing her moustache as big as a guardsman’s and believing the worst of the legends about it: even that the real reason she left Colchester was that the bristly-bearded oysterman to whom she was engaged had refused to shave unless she did. “I’ll be wishing you a good morning,” he said icily, hitching up his bag.

“Good morning,” said Miss Gentry. But she omitted to slam the door in his face as he expected, indeed she had gradually advanced into the porch, stitching unrelaxingly. And Bundock now became acutely aware that he could not turn his back on her without revealing the stain on Her Majesty’s uniform, that even by lowering the mail-bag he had just hitched up, he could not cover up what certain rude ploughboys had already commented on. He understood it was green. In this dreadful situation he began backing slowly as from the presence of royalty, making desperate conversation to cover his retreat.

“I did give you your tracts, didn’t I?” he babbled.

“If you mean the packet,” said Miss Gentry in stern rebuke, “there it lies. I haven’t opened it!”

“Do you mean that I have?” he asked indignantly, gaining another yard in this rear-guard action. “We don’t have to open an oyster to know what’s inside.”

Miss Gentry’s brow grew as swarthy as her moustache—at the reminder of her lost oysterman, Bundock supposed in dismay.

“Don’t you always send out tracts after I bring you packets?” he explained hastily, still retreating with his face to the foe.

“Not when they’re patterns,” said Miss Gentry crushingly. “And how do you know it’s not The Englishwomen’s Magazine?”

She turned back into the passage, and he hoped she would slam the door on her triumph, but she took up the packet instead. “We shall soon see,” and snipping the string with mysteriously produced scissors, she read out unctuously: “Ishmael and the Wilderness.”

Bundock did not know which way to turn. Why in the name of propriety did she not go back to her workroom and close her door? Miss Gentry, without the clue to his lingering attitude, observed invitingly, tapping the packet: “If this won’t make you see the beauties of the Establishment, nothing will.”

He grinned uncomfortably. “Always willing to see the beauties of any establishment.”

It was very strange. Give him a female, even with a moustache, even tepefied by tracts, and something from the deeps rose up to philander. Not that there wanted a lurid fascination in this exotic and literate lady: his very loathing was a tribute to a vivid personality.

Miss Gentry, however, was shocked. She put down the tracts. She knew herself “born under Venus,” but romance and respectability were never disjoined in her day-dreams, and as the channel of a revelation she felt profaned. “Don’t talk like that,” she said sharply. “You’re a married man.”

“ ’Tis a married man knows how to appreciate beauty,” he replied, receding farther nevertheless as in ironic commentary.

“For shame!” Her needle stabbed on. “And you setting up to be holy!”

“Me?” Surprise brought his strategic retreat to a standstill. “I never set up to be a stained-glass saint.”

Again he had blundered. The black eyes flashed fire. “You who move mountains!” she cried angrily.

“Me move mountains?” Bundock was bewildered.

“A little grain of mustard-seed,” he heard her saying more tremulously. “And if a sycamine-tree could move—! Surely you don’t hold with the unbelievers!”

It was precisely whom Bundock did hold with, but the big black eyes seemed suddenly tearful and appealing, her needle seemed entering his breast, and she swam before him as a fine, voluptuous female. Through the passage he saw the apple-trees in bridal bloom and the white feminine washing, and the Master’s remark on the apparent miracle of the extraction of electric flashes from the human body thrilled in his memory.

“Of course not,” he heard himself saying soothingly, while his legs felt going forward, losing all the ground so laboriously won.

“Then you do believe the angel moved?” she asked eagerly.

“Don’t I see her moving?” he replied.

Miss Gentry looked down from her doorstep more in sorrow than in anger. “You’re a married man!” she reminded him again.

“And does marriage pick out a man’s eyes—like a goat-sucker?” He felt too near her now to back out, and he put forth his hand for hers, not without nervousness at the needle. Could his father have seen him now, he might have thought his son not even “moral.” But Miss Gentry dexterously met the amorous palm with a tract. “That’ll open your eyes,” she said.

To feel a flabby piece of paper instead of a warm hand is not conducive to theological persuasion: all Bundock’s dissenting blood rushed to his head.

“There’s two opinions about that,” he snorted.

“There are two opinions,” Miss Gentry assented placidly; “one wrong and the other mine.”

“Oh, of course!” he sneered. “The Church is always infallible.”

“We’re eighteen and a half centuries old,” said Miss Gentry freezingly.

“Did you put that in your census paper?” retorted the humorist.

Miss Gentry winced. She was weary of the jokes that had desolated Bradmarsh, yet she was conscious of having let her landlady’s estimate of her age go by default.

“I had no paper to fill up,” she reminded him frigidly. “But if there was a census of religions, you’d certainly be among the mushrooms.”

“Better than being among the mummies.” Bundock’s father might have clapped his palsied hands, to hear this defender of the faith. But Miss Gentry mistook this fair retort in kind for another allusion to the personal census.

“I thought you could discuss like a gentleman!” It was a cunning shaft, and Squibs, seizing this moment to rub herself against the postman’s leggings, he replied more mildly: “What’s the use of going by age—except the Age of Reason?”

“Then be guided by Reason.” Miss Gentry stitched implacably. “If the Almighty meant prayer to be medicine, why did He create castor-oil?”

Bundock was dumbfounded.

“Or Epsom salts?” she added triumphantly.

“They’re for cattle which can’t pray,” he answered with an inspiration.

Miss Gentry’s needle stabbed the air. But she recovered herself. “Then why do you eat rhubarb pie?”

“Because it’s nice.” He grinned.

“But rhubarb’s a medicine!”

He countered cleverly. “We don’t mind taking medicine—so long as we’re well!” We! He was identifying himself with his despised Brethren: such is human nature under attack. But Miss Gentry was not at the end of her resources.

“Well, what do you do when you break your legs? Pray the bones straight?”

“But we don’t break our legs. I never heard of a Peculiar breaking his leg.”

“But why shouldn’t a Peculiar break his leg?”

“That’s not my affair. He don’t. I’ve got Peculiars all over my beat, and never have I known one to break a leg. A broken heart, now——!”

“But if he did break a leg?” persisted Miss Gentry.

“If any one could break a leg, it would be me!” he said crossly.

“Well, then what would you do—if you broke your leg?”

Bundock was worn out. “What’s the good of meeting troubles half-way?” he snapped, turning on his heel.

“Yours seem to have come more than half-way,” scoffed Miss Gentry.

Bundock clapped his hand to the mud-patch, stung in his tenderest part. He wheeled round prestissimo, raging with repartee. But the door had closed—too late! Solitary, the sable Squibs dominated the doorstep—like a sardonic spirit.

Bundock was turning away angrily, though now fearlessly, when with a sudden thought he caught up the cat and plucked out one of her hairs. It was not revenge—it was merely that his youngest daughter had a sty, for which he believed the black hair an infallible remedy.

JINNY ON HER ROUNDS

I

Thus it was that the days passed without any literate and discreet female descending on Frog Farm or any rejuvenation appearing in Martha’s bonnet; and the unread letter lay—guarded by two china dogs—on the parlour mantelpiece awaiting the carrier. For it had been decided, after nightly discussions that were a change for Caleb from the Christadelphian curtain-lectures, to fall back on Jinny after all. She was to read it to Martha in Caleb’s careful absence, and was to be stopped if the improper seemed looming.

Alas, the best-laid schemes of mice and Marthas gang agley, and by the day that Jinny’s horn resounded along the raised road that led to the farm, the world was changed for Caleb and Martha. There was, in fact—for the first time in Jinny’s experience—neither of the twain to meet her as Methusalem ambled under the drooping witch-elms towards the twin doors.

It was a tilt-cart,—with two tall wheels, and although Jinny steered it and packed it and unpacked it, and scoured it and hitched Methusalem to it, its weather-beaten canvas blazoned in fading black letters the legend:

You gather that she operated under the shadow of a great name, greatest as being masculine. Self-standing careers for women had not yet dawned on the world. If the first faint cloud of feminism had appeared that very year in New York, no bigger than a man’s pants, the Bloomerites had but added to the gaiety of mankind, and in rural Essex, with the exception of dressmaking, wherein man appeared unnatural, women were the recognized practitioners only of witchcraft or fortune-telling or the concoction of philters; professions that were the peculiar province of crones scarcely to be considered sexed. Though women earned money by plaiting straw, they had husbands on the premises. Widows, of course, for whom there was no provision outside the Chipstone poorhouse, were allowed to maintain themselves more manfully than spinsters: but then they were “relicts” of the masculine, had served—so to speak—an apprenticeship under it. But the business of plying between Chipstone and Bradmarsh was a peculiarly male occupation, and even the venerable name of Daniel Quarles would not have sufficed to shield or install Jinny had she jumped into his place as abruptly as Nip was apt to jump into the cart.

No, Rome was not built in a day, nor could Jinny have become the carrier “all of an onplunge,” as Caleb would have put it. That would have shocked the manners and morals of Bradmarsh, both Little and Long, and upset the decorum of Chipstone. A gradual preparation had been necessary, a transition by which Jinny changed into the carrier as imperceptibly as she had ripened into the girl. At first the small “furriner”—the carried and not the carrier—reposing in the cart because, after smallpox had snatched away both her parents in the same week, her grandfather, who had imported her, had nowhere else to put her; playing in the great canvas-covered playground that held as many heights, depths, and obstacles as a steeplechase course; petted by every client for her helplessness before her helpfulness gave her a second lease of favour; bearing a literally larger and larger hand in “Gran’fer’s” transactions as he grew older and older; correcting with cautious tact his memories, his accounts, his muddled bookings and deliveries, in due course ousting the octogenarian even from his place on the driving-board and carrying him first by her side and then inside in his second childhood, just as he had carried her in her first—a stage in which his cackle with the customers carried on the continuity of the male tradition; leaving him at home on bad days—whether his own or Nature’s—and then altogether in the winter, and then altogether in the spring, and then altogether in the autumn, and finally—when he reached his nineties—altogether in the summer; Jinny the Carrier was—it will be seen—a shock so subtly prepared and so long discounted as to have been practically imperceptible. She might crack Daniel’s heavy whip, but nobody felt the flourish as other than vicarious, if not indeed a sort of play-acting evoking the pleasure a more sophisticated audience finds in Rosalind’s swashbucklings. Not that she made any brazen pretences to equality in lifting boxes; she sat with due feminine humility while male muscles swelled and contracted under her presiding smile and the rippling music of her thanks.

Here was, in fact, the prosaic purpose of the little horn slung at her side—her one apparent embellishment of the tradition: it summoned her slavish superiors so that she might be spared alighting and re-climbing with goods. In face of the accuracy of her operations, this display of helplessness probably helped to remove the sting of an otherwise intolerable feminine sufficiency: it was perhaps the secret of her popularity. Even with the most Lilliputian packets nobody expected Jinny to descend and knock at their doors—one blast and old and young tumbled over one another to greet the coming or speed the parting parcel. It was indeed as if a good fairy should condescend to do your marketing, a fairy in a straw bonnet (piquantly tied under the chin in a bow with drooping ends), a fairy whose brilliant smile and teeth and flowing ringlets could convert even an order for jalap into poetry, nay, induce in the eternal masculine a craving for more. In fine, so topsy-turvily had this snail-paced transition worked, so slowly had Jinny’s freedom broadened down from precedent to precedent, that when strangers expressed disapproval at these mannish courses, Little Bradmarsh was shocked, Long Bradmarsh surprised, and Chipstone scornful. Not that they were at all prepared to argue the question in the abstract. Their prejudice against carrying as a profession for women remained as rooted and unshaken as the critic’s. Women? Who was speaking of women? Jinny was Jinny—a being unique and irreplaceable, “bless her bonny fice.” It contributed to her unquestionability that the Quarleses had been carriers for a hundred years—and more.

II

Nor did Jinny, for her part, generalize on the other side or take any conscious interest in the emancipation of her sex. Her horn blew no challenge to the world. It did not even occur to her that she was doing anything out of the common—the tilt-cart had been her nursery, it was now her place of business. She had come into its foreground so unconsciously that it was not as a good fairy that she saw herself, nor even as an attractive asset of the Quarles concern, but as a busy toiler—driven from morning to night rather than driving—and handicapped not only by her household and garden work, her goats and poultry, but by a nonagenarian grandfather, shaky in health and immovable in opinion. Fortunately for her temper—and for the chastening of a tongue only too a-tingle with rustic wit—Jinny regarded the cantankerous patriarch as no more an object for back-talk than a suckling. It had become second nature to soothe and humour him; and she knew him as she knew the highways and byways in the dark or the snow: where to turn and where to go round, where to skirt a swamp and where to shave a ditch. By way of compensation there was his affection—as primitive as Nip’s or Methusalem’s—and evoking as primitive a response. For Jinny was none of your genteel heroines with ethereal emotions and complex aspirations.

It was not that Nature had not cast her for a poetic part—she was small and slender enough, and her light grey eyes behind dark lashes sufficiently subtilized her expression, and when she was hesitating between two words—not two opinions, for she always had one—her little mouth would purse itself enchantingly. There was gentility too about her toes. As her grandfather remarked with his archaic pronouns and plurals: “That has the smallest fitten I ever saw to a wench!” She certainly did not dress the part, for despite the witchery of the bonnet, her workaday skirt and stout shoes proclaimed the village girl, as her hands proclaimed the drudge who scoured and scrubbed and baked and dug and manured: indeed what with her own goats and her farmyard commissions, she was almost as familiar with the grosser aspects of animal life as that strangely romanticized modern figure, the hospital nurse. The delicate solicitude of Martha on her behalf was thus a pure morbidity, for in going to and fro like a weaver’s shuttle, Jinny could scarcely remain ignorant that women were as liable to offspring as any other females, though it seemed a part of Nature’s order that had no more to do with herself than the strange, hirsute growths on the masculine face—or for the matter of that on Miss Gentry’s.

Mr. Fallow, the old pastor of Little Bradmarsh, who, though despised and rejected of Dissent, required—being human—comestibles, candles, and shoe-strings from Chipstone, as well as the disposal of his honey and his smaller tithes, was among Jinny’s favourite clients, her original horror of Bradmarsh Church having been early modified by an accidental peep one weekday morning, which revealed its priest as its sole occupant. Yet, standing in his place in his white surplice, he was going through the service with such devout self-forgetfulness that the confused child wondered whether the Satan of worldliness had him so entirely gripped as she had been given to understand. She did not know that this very praying all to himself would have shocked Miss Gentry as savouring of the abhorred High Churchmanship. Indeed “little better than a Papist” the Chipstone curate had pronounced the harmless old widower.

He for his part had long admired the little carrier, and perceiving the fine shape of her calloused fingers, no less than the smallness of her sturdy shoes, and enjoying the tang of her tongue—for the cottage women, though nimbler than their lords, were not witty—he had indulged his antiquarian vein (and the abundant leisure due to the ravages of Dissent) by tracing for her a less plebeian and more Churchy pedigree. Foiled in the hope of connecting her with Francis Quarles of “Emblems” fame, he found in Norden’s list of the Ancient Halls of Essex a Spring Elm Manor appertaining to one Jonathan Quarles. The flockless pastor had even journeyed in quest of this Hall and found illogical confirmation in the fact of its continued existence, in all the pride of mullioned windows and lily-strewn if muddy moat, though with its private chapel turned into a stable and its piscina bricked over. Henceforward he saw in the exuberant vitality and imperious obstinacy of Daniel Quarles only an impoverished reincarnation of hard-living but ecclesiastically correct squiredom, while in Jinny, with her generous visits to the ailing and bed-ridden on her route, he elected to behold a re-embodied Lady Bountiful, pride of a feudal parish. What was prosaically certain, however, was that Jinny had not even the education of Bundock’s bunch of girls, the only school she had ever attended being the Peculiars’ Sunday-school held at a house adjoining the chapel in an interval between the services. Thither, as to the services—her grandfather being a Wesleyan—she had been convoyed regularly by Caleb, packed into a cart with as many of the Flynt boys as had not yet flown off.

But the business itself forced reading and writing upon her, though when its sole responsibility devolved on her, and it was no longer necessary to confute the old man’s memory by the written word or figure, she found herself agreeably able to dispense with the learned arts.

Welcomed at lonely farmyards where fierce dogs sometimes broke their chains for the joy of licking her hand or of flying at Nip’s throat; not less welcome in village High Streets, where every other house would ply her fussily with orders that she took coolly and without a single note, her bosom knowledge of everybody’s business and her dramatic interpretation of any abnormal commission infusing life into her work that saved her from slips of memory; adored by all the swains and yokels who hauled her goods and chattels up and down, but radiating only a frosty sunshine in return, for none had ever been able to pass the ice-barrier that separated her private self from her professional geniality; jumping down herself only to give Christian burial to hapless moles, rats, shrews, leverets, and blood-stained feathers, or to glean for lonely old women or the numerous and impoverished Pennymole family the unconscious largesse of more careless drivers—turnips, lumps of coal, wisps of hay; chaffering with beaming shopkeepers on behalf of her clients, and hail-fellow-well-met with her fellow-carriers, encountered at cross-roads or “The Black Sheep”; Jinny pursued her unmaidenly career in fine weather or foul, sometimes wayworn, wind-whipped, rain-drenched, and with aching forehead, but more often with a vital joy that was not least keen when Methusalem—cloud-exhaling and clogged by snow that sometimes raised the road as high as the hedges—had to plough his way along a track hewn out by labourers, with here and there a siding cut in the glittering mass for carts to pass each other by. Those were days not devoid of danger: road, hedge, ditch, and field obliterated in one snowy expanse. Once Jinny’s cart had to be dug out like a crusted fossil of the Ice Age—and only the agonized howling of Nip had brought rescue.

III

It was the first time he had justified his air of managing the whole concern round which he barked and bounded and scurried as though Methusalem and Jinny were his minions. He had indeed commandeered them—jumping originally out of nowhere on to the tail-board—and however he strayed from the path of their duty in his numberless tangential excursions and expeditions, they knew he would never abandon them.

Like many other great characters Nip was a mongrel. His foundation was fox-terrier, and he had preserved the cleverness of the strain without its pluck. To strangers, indeed, he seemed a very David among dogs, attacking, as he sometimes did, canine Goliaths. But no dog is a hero to his mistress, and after he had adopted her, Jinny discovered that these resounding assaults on the bulkier were but bravado passages, based on his flair that the bigger dog was also the bigger coward. That was where his brains came in, as well as his baser breed. A sniff at a real fighter and Nip would evade combat, sauntering off with a nonchalant air. A splash of brown on his brainpan and about his ears, and a dab of black on his snout were—with his leathern collar—the sole touches of relief in his sleek whiteness. His head—beautifully poised and shaped—with its bright dark-brown eye, eloquently expressive and passing easily from love to greediness, from shyness to shame, invited many a pat from lovers of the soulful. Yet to hear him bolt a rabbit was to imagine a demon on the war-path: in a flash the cart would be left a furlong behind or athwart; his raucous staccato yells filled the meadows with echoes of blood-lust and revenge. But long experience had dulled Jinny’s solicitude for Bunny: never once was there a sign of a kill. Sometimes, indeed, when Nip was hunting a rat, the creature would run across the path under his very nose, but that nose, pushing eagerly for far-off game, never seemed able to readjust itself to what was under it. All the which maladroitness was probably artfulness, Nip scenting shrewdly that a successful sports-dog would have been hounded out. He knew well the foolish, treacherous heart of his mistress, who actually misled the hunt those autumn mornings that brought the high-mettled hares across their path with ears taut and every muscle tragically astrain. Up would come the beagles, with a long processional flutter of waving white tails, nosing forlornly and barking dismally, while he—panting to put them right—was tied paw and paw. How they set him quivering, those horn-tootlings of the gorgeous Master, though they did not go to his bowels as much as those staccato chivies that suggested that the green-and-white gentleman was one of themselves rather than a biped, or as those more elaborately contorted cries and rousing thong-cracks of the Whipper-in. A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind. And when all these hunters—four-footed or two-footed—including the draggletail of fat, breathless farmers and wheezing females, were remorselessly sent the wrong way by his brutal mistress, the poor dog could not refrain from wailing.

Even when the hare did not cross her path, her horn, imitating the professional toot, would allure and misguide the distant dogs. Nip’s own relatives, the foxhounds, more rarely came his way, but though his mistress’s sympathies with the quarry were less marked—her chickens being precious—Nip was still held in. But amid all his disgust the cunning dog remembered that his days of foraging for himself—before he had picked up Jinny—had not been rosy and replete: caterers like Jinny, he realized, did not grow on every cart, not to mention the cushioned basket from which he could bark at everything on the road, or within which, with a huge grunt of satisfaction, he could curl into an odorous dream.

A contrast in all save colour was the stolid Methusalem, though he too was of hybrid stock. While his hairy fetlocks proclaimed a kinship with the draught-breed of the shire, he lacked that gross spirit, and while his flying mane and tail flaunted an affinity with the fiery Arab, he was equally deficient in that high mettle. By what romantic episode he had come into being, whether through the wild oats of an Arabian ancestor, or the indiscretion of a mere circus-horse, or whether his tossing hair and tail were the heritage from a Shetland pony—as his moderate stature suggested—is not recorded in any stud-book. But it was impossible to see him without the word “steed” coming into the mind, and equally impossible to sit behind him without thinking of a plough-horse. “When Oi first see that rollin’ in the brook afore ’twas broke in,” Gaffer Quarles would relate, “Oi was minded of the posters of Mazeppa at the Fair, and christened that accordin’.” It was only when he discovered that this blonde beast was a whited sepulchre, that “Mazeppa” was exchanged for “Methusalem,” as though that antediluvian worthy had always been a doddering millenarian, and not at one time in the prime of his hundreds. The name had at least the effect of banishing expectation; his mere amble was an agreeable surprise. As a matter of fact Methusalem had still his Mazeppa moments. They came on Tuesday and Friday evenings when he was loosed from the shafts; at which moments he would roll on his back, kick up his heels and gallop madly round the goat-pasture to the alarm of the tethered browsers. And even at his professional pace he always kept his mane flying. One accomplishment, however, Methusalem had which no “Mazeppa” steed could have bettered, nay, which made a circus pedigree plausible. He could lift the latch of gates with his nose and walk through. It was a trick which Jinny, with her habit of not alighting, had fostered in him: if the gate did not swing to, she could usually close it with the butt-end of her whip—through the cart-rear at the worst—a procedure which, with her further habit of using short cuts and even private tracks like that at Bellropes Park, saved not a little time, and was some compensation for Methusalem’s general crawl.

If the local carrying business had grown indistinguishable from Jinny, it seemed no less bound up with her four-footed companions, whose ghostly figures, seen looming through the wintry dusk, sent a glow of warmth through the bleak countryside.

IV

But to-day Jinny’s horn, Nip’s yap, and Methusalem’s pseudo-spirited pawing, were alike powerless to evoke the familiar forth-bustling of Caleb and Martha. Only cocks crowed and doves moaned, while from the river-slope came the lowing of cattle. Alarmed for the lonely and aged couple, Jinny jumped down and tapped at the door. Nobody replying, she lifted the latch and came from the joyous spring sunshine on a chill, silent piece of hall-way in which even the tall clock had stopped dead. She peeped perfunctorily into the musty parlour on her way to the kitchen—the lozenge-shaped motto: “When He giveth quietness, who then can make trouble?” seemed to have taken on a strange and solemn significance. But she knew that the kitchen was the likeliest lair, so not pausing to examine, the ominously unopened letter addressed to Mrs. Flynt which she espied on the mantelpiece, she pressed on to the rear. The kitchen, however, was still more desolate, not only of the couple, but of the habitual glow on the cavernous hearth. What wonder if Nip, who had followed her, set up an uncanny whining! She halloaed up the staircase, but that only aggravated the silence. She dashed next door to the shepherd’s section—similar solitude! With a feeling of lead at her heart she rushed back into the ironic sunshine and towards the orchard—now unbearably beautiful in its blossoming—and as she was approaching a remote corner that harboured the pigsty in which Martha’s pet sow carried on a lucrative maternity, she was half relieved to collide with Caleb who was moving houseward with haggard eyes and carpet slippers.

“Is anything the matter?” she gasped.

“Sow glad you’ve come. The missus keeps arxing for you. We’ve been up all night with her.”

“With your wife?”

He looked astonished. “Noa, Maria!”

Jinny’s full relief found vent in a peal of laughter.

“It’s no laughin’ matter—the missus wants ye to tell the wet to come at once.”

“But what’s the matter with her?” inquired Jinny, still unable to rise to his seriousness. “A snout-ache?”

“She’s a goner,” said Caleb solemnly. “We’ve reared up nine boys, but Maria’s been more trouble than the lot. The missus would bring her up by hand, and Oi always prophesied she wouldn’t live.”

Amusedly aware that Maria’s progeny had already exceeded sixty, Jinny offered to visit the patient.

“Do—that’ll comfort the missus and ye’ll know better what to tell Jorrow. Oi’ll hold your hoss. You know the way—behind the red may-tree.”

Jinny smiled again. The idea of Methusalem needing restraint amused her, but she did not dispel Caleb’s romantic illusion.

The sick sty was visible through a half-door that gave at once air and view, and over which Nip at once bounded on to the startled Martha’s back as she hung over the prostrate pig on its bed of dirty straw. Maria belonged to the Society of Large Black Pigs, and snuffed the world through a long, fine snout; but life had evidently lost its savour, for the poor sow was turning restlessly.

“Oh, Jinny!” moaned Martha. “She had thirteen last time, and I knew it was an unlucky number.”

“Nonsense!” quoth Jinny gaily. “Twelve would have been less lucky—at the price I got you!”

“Yes, dearie, but I’m not thinking of prices. She was a birthday present for my loneliness.”

“I know,” said Jinny gently.

“No, you don’t.” She wrung her hands. The self-possession Caleb had admired when the letter broke on their lives was no longer hers. “You’ve got lots of Brethren and Sisters, but I’ve got nobody to break bread with, no fraternal gatherings to go to, and even Flynt won’t be immersed, though he’s in his sixty-nine and we must all fall asleep some day. So it was a comfort to have Maria following me about everywhere like Nip does you, and I do believe she’s got more sense than the so-called Christians here, and would be the first to pray for the peace of Jerusalem with me if she could only speak. But now even Maria may be taken from me. You’ll send Jorrow at once, won’t you, dearie?”

“But what’s the matter with her?”

“Can’t you see? All night she kept rooting up the ground. Oh, I hope it isn’t fever.”

“Rubbish! Look at the skin of her ears. And she isn’t coughing at all. What’s she been overeating?”

“Nothing—only the grass Flynt has been cutting.”

“Why don’t you give her a dose of castor-oil?”

“She won’t take it. She knows we’ve covered it up—I told you she’s got as much brains as a Christian.”

“Let me try and get it down.”

“It is down. The piglets ate the mess up.”

“Oh dear!” laughed Jinny. “That will need Jorrow. Anything else, Mrs. Flynt?”

“I can’t think this morning. Ask Flynt.”

Caleb, however, proved equally distraught.

“There was summat extra special, Oi know,” he said, his red-shirted arm clinging heroically to Methusalem’s bridle, “for here’s the knot in my hankercher. But what it singafies Lord onny knows.”

“It wasn’t a new shirt?” she suggested slyly.

He shook his head. “Noa, noa; this keeps her colour as good as new. But the missus did make a talk about my Sunday neckercher.”

“I’ll get you a new one. Plain or speckled?”

“Oi leaves that to you, Jinny—you know more about stoylish things.”

V

On her winding and much-halting way to Chipstone, Jinny took advantage of the absence of the noble family and the complaisance of her customer, the lodge-keeper, to smuggle her plebeian vehicle through Bellropes Park, which was not only a mile shorter, but dodged the turnpike with its aproned harpy of a tollman; she loved the great avenues of oaks, and the shining lake, the game of swans, and the sense of historic splendour; and Nip, as if with a sense of stolen sweets, sniffed never more happily, though when they got within view of the water, he had to be summoned back to his headquarters-basket by a stern military note, a combat between himself and the swans not commending itself to his mistress. Some of these irascible Graces floated now on the margin, meticulously picking their tail-feathers, contorting their necks. But vastly more exciting were those of the flock far out on that spacious sparkle of brown water. They seemed to be going spring-mad and threshing the scintillating water with their wings, oaring themselves thus along, each one infecting the other, till the water itself seemed to be leaping in a shimmering frenzy of froth. Even the ducks reared up or stood on their heads in a sort of intoxication. And this sense of the joy and beauty of the spring communicated itself to the girl, not in jubilance, but in some exquisite wistfulness: some craving of the blood for mysterious adventure. Something seemed calling at once out of the past and out of the future. And then her thoughts wandered back to Frog Farm and the Flynts and the far-scattered youths with whom she had formerly ridden to Sunday-school, and suddenly by a flash from her subconsciousness she recognized the writing of the unopened letter on Martha’s mantelpiece: of the letter she had scarcely looked at. Surely, though the curves were bolder, it was the work of the very same male hand that had written on the fly-leaf of a Peculiar hymn-book the inspired quatrain—which she had admired from her childhood—beginning: