The quavering melody ended with a big sneeze, and Jinny, fearing the brothers would indeed be reunited, rushed to close the window and light the fire. Though she felt confusedly that her grandfather, waiting for Sidrach, and drinking too freely in his melancholy, had probably dreamed it all, she was not sure that he had not really seen Sidrach’s ghost. How else would the flint and steel have got into his pocket? In any case she was reminded that her secret was not safe. In concealing a death one forgot to reckon with the ghost, and Sidrach’s might at any time divulge it suddenly to his brother, even if the present visitation was only a dream. Dap’s ghost, too, was another possibility that must be taken into account. “I’ll tell you where Sidrach’s got to,” she said desperately, as a yellow flame leapt up, “he’s got to heaven.”

“To heaven?” repeated the old man vaguely.

“To heaven!” she said inexorably. “He hasn’t been in Chelmsford for weeks. He was very old, you see, a hundred and five.”

The Gaffer began to tremble. “Ye don’t really mean Sidrach’s gone to heaven?”

She nodded her head sadly. “He fell down,” she explained.

“Fell down to heaven?” he asked dazedly.

“His body fell downstairs—his soul went up to God.”

“Then he come downstairs agen last night, dear Sidrach,” he said solemnly; “he come to have a glass and a gammick with his little brother.”

Jinny was not prepared to deny it, and though the idea jarred, it was after all difficult to see snoring senectitude with the poetry attaching to Angel-Mothers. She removed the dirty glasses silently.

“And where’s his stockin’ o’ gold?” he inquired suddenly. “Why didn’t ye bring back that?”

“There wasn’t any,” she said gently. “He died poorish.”

“They’ve stole it,” he cried. “They’ve robbed me. ’Twas me he meant it for.”

“No, no—all he left was used up in the funeral.”

“Ay, they ain’t satisfied with carts nowadays,” he commented bitterly. “Like that doddy little Dap. Did you goo to the churchyard to see the grave?”

“Yes,” she replied unflinchingly, sustained by the verbal accuracy. “I’ve got you a bloater for breakfast,” she added cheerfully.

“That’s the cowld chill he caught as a cad, gatherin’ eggs on the ma’shes,” he said musingly. “Ague they calls it—never got over it. And tramped with his pack-horses in all weathers. And rollin’ about here and there and everywheres. ‘You’ll never make old bones, Sid,’ Oi says to him.”

“A hundred and five is pretty old, Gran’fer,” Jinny reminded him. “King David only says seventy, that’s exactly one and a half lives your brother had.”

“Give me the Book,” he said brokenly.

With trembling hands she brought the great Family Bible he had inherited with the house. But his object seemed to be neither verification of the text nor prayerful reading, for he next asked for pen and ink, and then having ascertained the exact date of Sidrach’s death, he adjusted his spectacles and chronicled it with a quavering quill opposite Sidrach’s birth-date.

“He’s gone to heaven,” he said. “That’s more than some folks’ll do—even on their hands and knees. Do ye warm my beer for me this marnin’, dearie, for Oi fare to be cowld and lonely in my innards, and Oi’d fain smoke a pipe myself, same as Oi hadn’t promised the old man o’ God.”

VI

The year ended gloomily for Jinny. December was cold. In the mornings the fields looked almost snowy with hoar-frost, but the actual snow did not come till near Christmas. Her grandfather refused to be moved from his bedroom—one was safer from thieves up there, he now urged—so a fire upstairs every evening was added to her work. But the monotony of existence and of the struggle therefor was broken by two letters and an episode, albeit all interconnected.

Both letters were from Toby, the naval gunner, Dap’s eldest son, and the one for her grandfather was enclosed in hers, as Toby was not sure the old gentleman was still alive, one of his sisters having heard that there was a piece in the paper about his death at the age of a hundred and five. He had only found her own address after the funeral, he wrote, a packet of letters from her having come to hand in the clearing up. For although his poor father with his last breath had asked that his telescope be given to little Jinny Boldero as a token of love and remembrance, he had died without telling them where to send it. It would now be forwarded in due course. For two months he had borne much pain with Christian resignation, she learnt with sorrow and respect. The other letter, addressed “Mr. Daniel Quarles,” she had no option but to hand over, but did so with anxiety, for she had not yet broken the news of Dap’s death, and whether he received it with regret or with unchristian satisfaction, it would assuredly agitate him. As she watched him open it, she saw a piece of paper flutter from it, and she caught it in its fall.

“That’s mine!” he cried, snatching it from her fingers. “Pay the person naimed——” he read out dazedly. “What’s that?”

“That must be a money order,” she explained, though with no less surprise.

“A money order?” he repeated.

“You’ve seen post-office orders, surely,” she said, not realizing that they had only become common a decade ago with the introduction of penny postage, and that nobody—not even his children—had ever sent him one before. “ ’Tis a way of sending money—you can send as much as two pounds for threepence. How much is yours for?”

Overlaid memories of his late eighties struggled to the surface. “Oh, ay,” he said, not answering her. “That was a blow for the carriers—that and the penny post. Folks began to write to the shops; dedn’t matter so much here, but the Che’msford carriers complained bitter as the tradesmen sent out their own carts with the goods.”

“But how much is it for?” repeated Jinny impatiently.

He studied it afresh, holding it away from her like a dog with its paw on a bone. “Three pound!” he announced with rapturous defiance. “Ye took away my foiver. But this be for the person naimed on the enwelope, and that’s Daniel Quarles.”

“But what’s it for?” she asked.

“It’s for me,” he said conclusively, and was going up to his room like a magpie with its treasure.

“Yes, but read the letter,” she urged.

He consented to sit down and study it. “Good God!” he blubbered soon. “Poor Dap’s dead.”

“Dead?” echoed Jinny mendaciously.

“You read it for yourself, dearie. An awful pity, a man in the prime of life. ’Tis from his boy in the Navy as he ast to send me three pounds what he owed me. That was wunnerful honest of him, to remember, seein’ as Oi don’t, aldoe Oi count the Lord put it into his heart, knowin’ Oi wanted money terrible bad. But Oi allus felt he was a good chap underneath: ’twarn’t his fault he had a glass eye. That made him look at the nose, like, and git frownin’ and quarrelsome. Three pound! That’s a good nest-egg.”

“Yes,” said Jinny, glad the death was passing off so peacefully, “and he’s sending me his telescope.”

“He don’t say that,” he said, peering at the letter again.

She turned red. “I had a line too—didn’t you notice yours had no stamp? I’ll change your order for you at the post office,” she went on hurriedly. Mentally she had worked out that two of the pounds represented the price of the new gravestone the Commander had never purchased, and the third his idea of interest for all these years. Doubtless he had been too tactful to send them back in his lifetime. Anyhow she agreed with her grandfather that it was really all the Lord’s doing, for nothing could be timelier. Even her poultry was now being steadily sacrificed, and this great sum would get her beautifully over Christmas and New Year and start that with a handsome balance in hand. But she had counted without her grandfather.

“No, you don’t!” The Gaffer’s hand closed grimly on the precious paper. “That’s a nest-egg, Oi’m tellin’ ye.”

“But what are you going to do with it?” she inquired in distress.

“That’s for Annie.”

“Mr. Skindle’s mother! But he’s rich as rich.”

“He don’t never buy her nawthen. He come here and told me sow out of his own mouth, the hunks. Oi had to pay for her packet o’ hairpins.”

“Well, anyhow she’ll have her Christmas dinner, and that’s more than you’re sure of,” she risked threatening.

“You’ve got the telescope, hain’t ye?” he urged uneasily.

“I can’t sell that. That’s for remembrance.”

“Ye can remember him without a telescope. And ef he had his faults, ’tain’t for you to remember ’em, seein’ as ye’d never a-bin here at all ef he’d done his duty by Emma and King Gearge. But Oi reckon he couldn’t see everythink with that glass eye, and Oi ought to ha’ carried silks and brandy myself ’stead o’ parcels and culch. Did, Oi’d a-got a stockin’ like Sidrach’s and not had to deny myself bite and sup for your sake.” And he hobbled stairwards, the post-office order clutched in his skeleton claw. “Do ye write to Dap’s buoy-oy and thank him for payin’ his dues, and say as Oi hope he won’t put no fooleries on his father’s stone, and he’d best copy what Oi had put on your father’s and mother’s.”

Jinny duly wrote, if not in these terms. But when the telescope came, she felt anything but thankful. For, welcome as it was in itself, it came by the coach. She had been too distraught to foresee this, though she recognized that it was the natural way. And apart from the sting to her own pride, it agitated her grandfather profoundly. He had been nodding at the hearth, but the clamour of the coach aroused him, and ere she could get to the door he had sprung up with an oath.

“Don’t let him over my doorstep!” he cried, pursuing her. “He’s got to come in on his hands and knees.” He jostled her aside and seized the bolt, but his hand trembled so, he could not shoot it.

“How can he crawl in, if you bolt the door?” she said tactfully.

He was staggered: the possibility of the opposition obstinacy relaxing had never even occurred to him. Recovering, he urged that the enemy would try to rush over the sill.

“No fear, Gran’fer. He’ll never cross our threshold unless you carry him in!”

She spoke with unconscious admiration of Will’s tenacity. Indeed the image of the young man crawling to her grandfather or even to herself would have been repellent, had it been really conceivable.

“Carry him in!” the Gaffer laughed explosively, and that burst of derision made him almost good-humoured. He let himself be pushed gently towards the inner room, while Jinny, with her pulse at gallop, opened the door.

The tension and friction of nerves proved sheer waste. The long narrow parcel was brought to the door by the hobbledehoy guard, and the driver remained, imperturbably important, on his box, looking almost as massive as an old stager in his new, caped greatcoat and coloured muffler, though the face under the broad-brimmed festively sprigged hat was very different from the mottled malt-soused visages of the coaching breed. It seemed but an idle glance that Jinny cast at it, or at the Christmas congestion of the coach, overflowing with passengers and literal Christmas boxes, and with hares pendent even from the driver’s seat. Nevertheless, as ever when they met, long invisible messages passed between Jinny and Will, and not all her defiance could disguise her humiliation at this second triumph of the coach, coming as it did when the fortunes of the cart were at their blackest. For the Gaffer refused sullenly to part with his piece of paper—she did not even know where he had hidden it—and with Uncle Lilliwhyte too poorly to forage for her, she was almost tempted to apply for the Christmas doles that were by ancient bequest more abundant at Mr. Fallow’s church than applicants for them. But her instinct of “uprightness” saved her: better that the last of her poultry should be sacrificed for the sacred repletions of the season. She did indeed dally with the notion of keeping Christmas not with, but from, her grandfather—possibly his failing memory might for once prove an advantage—but she had a feeling that apart from the profanity of ignoring it, the festival was too ingrained in the natural order to be overlooked, for did not Christmas mark the pause in the year, when with the crops in the ground and the little wheat-blades safely tucked under the snow, and the beer brewed and the pigs killed and salted, the whole world rests and draws happy frosted breath? No, the old man’s instinct would surely trip her up, if she tried to run Christmas as an ordinary day.

She might, of course, as he had originally suggested, sell or at least pawn her telescope, but even if she could have brought herself to that, she could not have got it away from him, for he had annexed it from the first moment and sat peering out of it from the vantage-point of his bedroom lattice. He was at his spy-glass the moment he woke, enchanted when he could descry people or incidents far-off—it was as if his long seclusion from the outer world was over—and he would call out like a child and tell Jinny what he had seen. Sometimes it was Master Peartree and his dog, sometimes Bidlake ferrying on the Brad or a couple seeking warmth in a cold lane; now a woodman cutting holly branches with his billhook, anon Bundock bowed by his bag or Mott with his fishing-rod, and once he cried out he could see Annie coming out of Beacon Chimneys, though Jinny suspected that the tall figure with the “wunnerful fine buzzom” was really Farmer Gale’s new wife. Particularly protected did her grandfather now feel against thieves, whose stealthy advent he would henceforward detect from afar. Delighted as she was in her turn with the new toy that kept him happy even on a reduced diet, she had to keep his fire going all day now, and to be up and down closing the window through which he would stick the telescope. Sometimes he directed his tube heaven-ward, though not for astronomical purposes. “Happen Oi’ll see Sidrach coming down for a gossip,” he said.

Just before Christmas he informed her he had decided that the right thing to do with the nest-egg was to purchase Sidrach a gravestone with it, and he instructed her to write a letter of inquiry to Babylon. But although this seemed to her a more logical use of it than he knew, she disregarded his instruction. The nest-egg was too precious. The time might come when he would ask for bread, and was she to give him a stone?

VII

Neglected on the coast in favour of New Year, Christmas was celebrated in the inland valley of the Brad with the conventional accessories, and every Christmas the mummers had been wont to attend on the Master of Blackwater Hall; as well as the waits. Jinny with no coin to offer to either, the last of her poultry doomed for the Christmas dinner, and Uncle Lilliwhyte also on her hands, had this year to beg both companies to refrain, alleging her grandfather was too ill. The weather was seasonable, the robin hopped as picturesquely on the snow as on the Christmas card Jinny had enclosed with her thanksgiving letter to Gunner Dap. The cottage, prankt with its holly and mistletoe, had a fairylike air—everything was perfect, even to the Christmas pudding. But only Nip and Methusalem were happy. To the Gaffer the breach of an immemorial tradition gave a troubling sense of void.

“Where’s the waits? Where’s Father Chris’mus? Where’s St. Gearge?” he kept saying peevishly. Jinny put him off with vague replies or none. Once he alarmed her by asking suddenly: “Where’s the Doctor?” She was reassured when he began spouting:

He passed on to imagine himself as St. George, and seizing the poker for a sword declaimed vigorously, if imperfectly:

“Ain’t we a-gooin’ to see the mummers?” he inquired angrily as Christmas Day waned.

“Perhaps they are ill or it’s too cold,” she suggested feebly.

“But they’re gooin’ around to other folk!” he protested. “Oi seen ’em through my glass!”

“Well, then you have seen them,” she said still more feebly. Inwardly she wondered if he had detected herself, on her way to church, carrying off some Christmas dinner to Uncle Lilliwhyte’s hut. The telescope was a new terror added to life.

She had wanted to invite the prop of her larder to take his Christmas dinner with them, but her grandfather refused violently to sit down with such a “ragamuffin.” His sense of caste was acute, and as Jinny’s sense of smell was equally acute, she would not have persisted, even had renewed rheumatism not confined the ancient to his hut.

The day after Christmas that year was Friday, and after the comparative festivity of the holiday it required no small force of will to go round uselessly in the north wind, when one day a week would have more than sufficed for such odd commissions as still came her way. The snow had fallen thicker in the night, and robins, starlings, finches, blackbirds, little blue-tits (pick-cheeses she called them), and other breakfastless birds had all been tapping at her window for crumbs. But the remains of the feast made a good meal for her grandfather and he was in the best of humours, praising the acting of the mummers, which he did not now remember he had not seen this Christmas, and remarking upon the “wunnerful fine woice” of old Ravens’ grandson among the waits. Apparently his memories of other years had fused together into an illusion concerning the day before. As Jinny set out, she found herself wishing he would forget his quarrel with Will. Not, of course, that she could forget hers!

There were grey snow-clouds in the sky, and as she ploughed past the sheepfolds, scarring the purity of the road with her cart-tracks, she beheld patriarchal sheep, standing almost silent with round, snow-white beards: only a green shoot peeped here and there from the speckless white expanse. Methusalem’s muffled footsteps gave her a sense of dream, and, when the wind was not in her face, she watched her breath rising white in the air with some strange sense of exhaling her soul. But beneath this mystic daze went an undercurrent of wonder as to how she could meet the New Year.

Returned from her round—and she was glad, having shown herself and got her meal, to creep home under cover of the early darkness—she half expected to find the Gaffer as ill as she had feigned, but though he was still peering out into the night, there was no sign he was in the grip of the cold; on the contrary he seemed to have found fresh strength and brightness, whether from the nest-egg or this renewed ocular intercourse with his world. “Oi seen you all along the road,” he chuckled. In this new mood she was easily able to persuade him to exchange a goat for Methusalem’s provender. He would not part with his three pounds, but they gave him a sense of security, almost of gaiety. Indeed their existence made as wonderful a difference to herself as to him. Hidden away though the money order was, she felt the old man would be forced to produce it if ever hunger got too keen, and so the knowledge of it sustained her as the proximity of a boat sustains a swimmer. It was scarcely a paradox that without its assistance she could not have got through the first month of the New Year. For January brought the “hard winter” foretold by the sloes. Outwardly it was a bright world enough, with children skating on the ponds and ditches: indeed the frost brought out a veritable flamboyance of colour in the animal creation, and at one of her moments of despair when she had humbled herself in vain to offer lace to the new Mrs. Gale, Jinny was redeemed by the motley pomp of the cocks shining on the farmyard straw, and the glowing hues of the calves that bestrode it with them, all overbrooded by the ancient mellow thatch. Her heart sang again with the row of chaffinches perched on the white stone wall, and looking at the trees silhouetted so gracefully against the sky, she decided that winter bareness was almost more beautiful than summer opulence.

But she changed her mind when she watched—with a new sympathy born of fellow-anxiety—the struggle for food among the birds. Coots had flocked in from the coast to add to the competition of land-species, and frozen little forms or bloody half-feathered fragments, but especially dead starlings with lovely shades of green and purple, pathetically imponderable when picked up, all skin and feather—sometimes decapitated by sparrow-hawks—abounded on the hard white roads. As she began to feel the same grim menace brooding over her grandfather and herself, that social unrest which reached even Bradmarsh in faint vibrations began to take possession of her, and she arrived at a revolutionary notion which would have horrified Farmer Gale far more than her outrageous demand for a law that nobody should be paid less than ten shillings a week. She actually maintained that every man should be pensioned off by the parish on reaching the age of ninety! But the view found no sympathy in an age of individualism, to which the poorhouse was the supreme humiliation. Even Uncle Lilliwhyte, who was now on the mend again—though too weak to fend for anybody but himself—told her to her surprise that every man ought to put by for a rainy day. It was this slavish sluggishness of the poor that was the real stumbling-block to reform, she thought, though remembering Uncle Lilliwhyte’s leaky habitation, she treasured up his reply as a humorous example of the gap between precept and practice.

Even more unsympathetic was Mrs. Mott’s attitude. She scoffed at the idea that every man should be pensioned off at ninety. “Poisoned off at twenty,” was her emendation.

“Well, you do your best,” Jinny laughed.

Mrs. Mott’s blue silk bodice crackled. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t you sell them liquor?”

“It’s good liquor,” said Mrs. Mott, flushing.

“I was only joking. But joking apart, it doesn’t do them much good.” And Jinny thought of how even her grandfather had fuddled himself, with or without ghostly assistance.

“If I gave up my bar,” said Mrs. Mott hotly, “who would pay the rent of our chapel?”

“Well, but the chapel got along before you joined,” Jinny reminded her mildly.

“Heaping up debt!” shrilled Mrs. Mott, with flashing eyes.

“Then what’s the good of poisoning off the men?” argued Jinny, smiling. “Where would your bar be without them?”

“Women could learn to drink,” said Mrs. Mott fiercely, “and smoke too.”

But the latter accomplishment seemed so comically impossible to Jinny—who had never seen Polly over her cigar and milk—that she burst out laughing at the image of it, and her laughter made Mrs. Mott fiercer, and that lady said for two pins she’d wear pink pantaloons like the Bloomerites. As Jinny did not offer the pins, but laughed even more merrily at the new picture presented to her imagination, relations with Mrs. Mott became strained, and when at their next meeting Jinny sensibly remarked that if the law really gave Mr. Mott his wife’s possessions, it was useless going to it, all that lady’s indomitable spirit turned against her whilom confidante. “You take his part like everybody else,” she cried bitterly. “But don’t think I haven’t seen him ogling you!”

“Do you mean I’ve ogled him?” said Jinny, incensed.

“I don’t say that, but you can’t dislike his admiration—why else are you on his side?”

“I am not on his side—I detest him.”

Mrs. Mott flew off at a tangent. “Then you ought to be grateful to me for protecting you against him.”

Jinny was now as indignant as her hostess. “How have you protected me?”

“Haven’t I kept you always out of his way?”

“Oh, is that why you’ve had me in the kitchen?”

“Of course.”

Jinny felt at once chilled and inflamed. “It’s not true,” she cried recklessly. “When I first came to the kitchen, Mr. Mott was still in love with you, and I only went there because you didn’t like to show yourself.”

Such reminders are unforgivable, and Jinny would probably never again have enjoyed Mrs. Mott’s hospitality, even had she not then and there shaken it off. It was only with an effort she could prevent herself declaring that Mrs. Mott would have to carry her into the kitchen before she entered it again. But when she got out in the cold air, she felt suddenly as foolish as Will and her grandfather had been. With starvation bearing down on Blackwater Hall like some grim iceberg, the loss of two full meals a week was a disaster. She was not even sure that the courtyard as well as the kitchen would not be closed to her, for Mrs. Mott seemed a woman without measure, whether in her religion, her affections, her politics, or her quarrels. Possibly, however, the poor lady overlooked her use of it, for the cart continued to draw up there with its air of immemorial and invincible custom. But if Jinny thus still kept up appearances, it was with a heart that grew daily heavier.

In looking back on this grim period, Jinny always regarded the crawling up of the wounded hedgehog as marking the zero-point in her fortunes. It was actually crawling over her doorstep like Will in her grandfather’s imagination. What enemy had bitten off its neck-bristles she never knew—she could only hope it was not Nip—but catching sight of the dark, ugly gash, she hastened to get a clean rag as well as some crumbs and goat-milk. The poor creature allowed the wound to be dressed, and seemed to nose among the crumbs, but it neither ate nor drank. She packed it in straw in a little box and placed it in a warm corner of the kitchen, instructing Nip sternly that it was tabu.

“Caught a pig?” said the Gaffer with satisfaction, stumbling into the middle of this lesson in the higher ethics. “That’s a wunnerful piece o’ luck, a change from rabbits, too.”

“You wouldn’t eat it?” she cried in horror.

“Why, what else?” he asked in surprise.

“There’s bread and there’s jelly,” she said, misunderstanding, “and perhaps Uncle Lilliwhyte will be round with something—he’s about again.”

“There ain’t nawthen better than hedgehog,” the Gaffer said decisively. “And ’tis years since Oi tasted one. Sidrach doted on ’em roasted, used to catch ’em in the ditch-brambles.”

“But we’ve got to cure this, not kill it,” she protested.

“Ye don’t cure pigs that size,” he laughed happily.

For once Jinny failed to appreciate a joke. “It threw itself on our protection,” she insisted. “We can’t take advantage of it like that. Besides, it’s been bitten and might be unhealthy.”

But he was contumacious, and it was only on her undertaking to get him a chicken for his dinner that he consented to forgo the dainty in hand.

To acquire this in the absence of coin involved the barter of the remaining goats in a large and complex transaction with Miss Gentry’s landlady, and although this set Jinny and Methusalem up for weeks, yet since it meant the exhaustion of her last reserves, the wounded hedgehog became to happier memory a sort of symbol of desperation. True, there were still the telescope and the money order, but one could not easily lay one’s hand on them—they bristled even more fiercely than the poor hedgehog.

All Jinny’s care of that confiding beast proved wasted. In vain she renewed the dressing on its neck, in vain Nip and her grandfather were kept off. The third morning it was found on its back, more helpless than Uncle Lilliwhyte, with its hind paws close together but its front paws held up apart, as though crying for mercy. Its nose and paws came up dark brown on the lighter spines around, the eyes were closed and almost invisible, buried like the ears amid the bristles. The rag still adorned its neck.

Jinny gave her poor little patient a decent burial and a few tears. “ ’Tain’t no use cryin’ over spilt milk,” the Gaffer taunted her. “Ye’ve gone and wasted good food, and Oi count the Lord’ll think twice afore He sends ye a present agen.”

The Gaffer was mistaken. Little Bradmarsh was about to flow, if not with milk and honey, with hares and rabbits and horses and sheep and haystacks and potatoes and mangolds and even chairs, step-ladders, fences, gates, watering-pots, casks, boxes, hurdles, hen-coops, and wheelbarrows. For after January had ended in a crescendo of rain, wind, sleet and the heaviest snowfall in his memory, came a diminuendo movement of sleet, thaw, and rain, though the wind raged unabated, and after that—the Deluge!

WRITTEN IN WATER

I

The floods of ’52 are still remembered in East Anglia. The worst and most widespread were in November, but “February Fill-Dyke” brought the more localized catastrophe in Little Bradmarsh. The village, lying as it did along the left bank of the Brad, was caught between two waters, the overflow of the streams to the north that ran down silt-laden towards this bank, and the backwash over the bank from the Brad itself, which, already swollen by rain, and by the waters pumped into it from the marsh-mills on its right bank, was prevented overflowing southwards by the dyke that further protected Long Bradmarsh.

It was Nip that brought Jinny the news, though she did not understand its purport till the service was over. For it was to church that he brought it. That ancient building, standing isolated on its green knoll flaked with gravestones, had begun to appeal to him as much as to Jinny, and despite her efforts to dodge or shake him off, he had become a regular churchgoer. Nobody seemed to mind his sitting in her pew or squatting by the stove: perhaps so exiguous a congregation could not be exigent, and in that aching void even a canine congregant was not unwelcome. But his mistress, despite the sense she shared with Mr. Fallow of divine glimmerings in the animal creation, had always an uneasy feeling of indecorum, especially when Nip snored through the sermon like a Christian, and she was congratulating herself that the “Fifthly and Finally” had been safely reached without him, when in he trotted—far wetter and muddier than on the day he had plumped on Will’s knees in the chapel. The sight of him dripping steadily along the aisle towards the stove did not interrupt the hymn: the worshippers, though the morning had begun with a set-back to snow, were in no wise surprised by a return to rain. Only that Saturday night it had rained “cats and dogs”: one dripping dog was therefore no alarming phenomenon. They did not realize that Nip had largely swum to church.

But when, at the church-door, they began to fumble with their umbrellas, they saw with wide eyes of astonishment and dismay that though a mere sleety drizzle misted the air, below the lych-gate a strange expanse of waters awaited their feet. Except for one broad finger of land pointing along the centre of a vast yellow lake, their world was suddenly turned to water, and Jinny had a weird wonder as to what the dead would think could they rise and see the transformation wrought in the earthy spot where they had laid themselves so securely to sleep.

But the first impression of plumbless depth was contradicted by the hedgerows standing up—despite their reflections—much as before, still with a light powder of the morning’s snow, and when Jinny advancing to the gate, amid a chaos of ejaculatory comment that would have done credit to a full-sized congregation, probed the lake with the point of her umbrella, she exhibited barely three inches of moist tip. Reassured except for Sunday shoes, the bulk of the worshippers plashed forwards more or less boldly. But Miss Gentry refused to be comforted: she was already half hysterical and clutching at Jinny, for she recalled her anciently prophesied doom of drowning. What was the use of a lifelong refusal to set foot on the water? The water was come to her, as the Clown opined of Ophelia. Jinny could quiet her only by promising to see her safely to her door. With a jump the girl reached the four steps by which the ladies anciently mounted to their pillions, and running up, she surveyed the vista of waters, amid which the three pollarded lime-trees before Miss Gentry’s cottage rose like a landmark. She could now make a mental map of the driest route. For from this observation-post, though she had a sodden sense of mist and rain and blowiness, the sense of an unbroken aqueous expanse disappeared. She could see water, water, but not everywhere, nor were even the watery parts submerged uniformly. It was like some infallible illustration of the ups and downs of Little Bradmarsh. Never before, not even under the varying strains of Methusalem, had she realized how undulating the village was for all its apparent flatness. She saw now how much a few feet counted, and how the majority of the cottages and the farmhouses—all the ancient ones indeed—had planted themselves along that dry finger: “the Ridge” they called it, she remembered, though the name had hitherto been a mere sound to her ear, for so gradual was its slope that she had never felt the ascent nor put on the brake in descending. But to see it culminating in the Common and her own dear Blackwater Hall was now a cheering spectacle. While a white-flecked, wind-whipped waste of yellow water was spreading where yesterday blackened pastures had stretched, here were brown fields quite untouched by the flood-water, with their furrows chalked out in snow. One field all winter white, with thin blades just peeping up, looked friendly rather than forlorn—such was the effect of contrast. Lower down the Ridge were stretches covered with a deposit of silt and leaf-mould, with plough-handles sticking up, and between these and the flooded regions was a half-and-half world that reminded Jinny of the salt-marshes: a maze of pools and pondlets and water-patterns in a greenish slime mottled with hillocks.

Taking off her precious shoes and stockings, Jinny descended from her observation-post and plunged the “little fitten” admired of her grandfather into the chilling muddy lake, which seemed to have risen since she gauged it. Miss Gentry, clenching her teeth, followed her example, but in the effort to grasp at once her skirt, shoes, and muff (with prayer-book couchant), and to prevent her umbrella from soaring off on adventures of its own, she made more twitter than progress, and when, at their first stile, Nip, plunging through the bars, dived into the field and swam boldly forward, Miss Gentry with a shriek perched herself on the stile and refused to come down. Jinny, baring her legs still higher, strove to laugh away her patron’s fears, but her very precaution of tucking up had driven the dressmaker into a new frenzy.

“There’s no risk so long as we dodge the ditches,” Jinny pointed out, “and you can see those by the hedges. And look up there—there’s your lime-trees signalling their feet are dry.”

“Yes, but I can’t get to them. Oh, Jinny, go and fetch me your cart. Do be a love.”

“Sunday?”

“It’s a question of life and death.”

“Very well,” Jinny pretended. “If I cut through that field with the cows I shan’t be long,” she said with cunning carelessness.

But she had not gone many yards ere, as she expected, she heard Miss Gentry plashing desperately behind her with cries of “Wait for me, Jinny! Wait!” Miss Gentry did not reflect that the cows would not be out in that weather; to face those fearsome inches under escort was a lesser evil than the possible dangers from panic-stricken cattle that now rose before her mind, and with one horn of the dilemma a bull’s, her choice was precipitated.

At the Four Wantz Way new terrors arose for the poor lady. It was not from the swirl of waters that met there, for her road now stretched visibly upwards, but from the fact that the Pennymoles were occupied in moving their treasures to “the high room.” The genial paterfamilias darting to his doorstep—with the kerchiefed owl he was rescuing in his hand—had his own flood of authoritative lore to pour out, but he could make no headway till Miss Gentry had blushingly apologized for her bare feet, and been assured that no respectable man would look at them. Then, though his hearers stood splashed and blown about, he held even Jinny spellbound with a description of Long Bradmarsh as he had known it in his boyhood before the embankment was put up, and when his parents had often had, even in summer, to open the back door of their cottage to let the water pour out. And what a work it had been, clearing up the muck afterwards! “That’s a terrible thing, the power of water,” he said solemnly. “People don’t know what it means who ain’t seen it. And it’s rising every minute.”

“What did I tell you, Jinny?” cried Miss Gentry. “Oh, Mr. Pennymole, will my house be safe?”

“It’s one thing, mum, to be in the flood and another to be out of it,” he responded oracularly.

“Come along!” said Jinny impatiently. “Your cottage has got two steps to begin with, and even if it gets up to your garden, you’ll be safe inside.”

“Beggin’ your pardon, Jinny,” corrected the oracle. “That fares to sap the foundations, and then crack! bang! you think it’s a big gun, and down comes walls and ceilings. My gran’fer seen a whole row of cottages washed away. And then there’s flotsam what bangs about and smashes you in.”

Miss Gentry clutched wildly at Jinny, dropping shoes and muff into the swirl. “And Squibs does hate to get her feet wet,” she babbled.

Alarmed at the effect of his pronouncement, the oracle hastened to tone it down and to pick up her things.

“No need to get into a pucker, mum. You’re all right, same as you’re in the high room. And Oi count ye’ve got a grate upstairs, which is more than we’re blessed with this weather. That gre’t ole stove can’t git up.”

“And you could sew in your bedroom,” Jinny added soothingly. “You’ve never known it get higher than the ground floor, have you, Mr. Pennymole?”

“Not in my born days,” answered the oracle.

“But there’s always new things happening,” wailed Miss Gentry.

“That’s wunnerful true,” Mr. Pennymole admitted, smiling. “Oi never thought Oi’d fare to oversleep myself. But the day there was that grand wedding at the church, Oi hadn’t time to make my tea.”

“And then he had two teas!” put in Mrs. Pennymole hilariously.

But before the story had proceeded far, they all became aware of people hastening from every quarter towards the unsubmerged regions, not for safety, but for salvage; carts and even wagons with teams began to come up, and the bustle and cackle recalled Mr. Pennymole to public duty.

Leaving his wife to finish telling the story, as well as transferring the furniture, he joined a party hurrying on to Farmer Gale’s five-acre field, and as Jinny and Miss Gentry passed along, they saw potato clamps being dug up, cattle driven higher, corn and hay unstacked and transported, and even threshing in hasty operation. The Sunday clothes of those who hadn’t stayed to “shiften,” but emphasized the profanity of the scene.

“You see what Dissenters are!” said Miss Gentry in disgust.

“It’s a matter of life and death,” quoted Jinny maliciously. But Miss Gentry did not recognize her own words. Jinny went on to praise the true Christianity of these labourers, who though ground down to a miserable wage, were now dashing to Farmer Gale’s assistance even in his absence—for he had apparently not yet returned from his place of worship at Chipstone. One cornstack saved, she calculated, would be worth more than he had paid Mr. Pennymole in the last five years.

“In this dreadful day of the Lord, it’s souls that want saving, not stacks,” said Miss Gentry.

Arrived at last on her own doorstep, she collapsed in Jinny’s arms. What was the use of not going to Boulogne, she demanded, if she was to be drowned in her bed? At least she might have had the hope of seeing her dear Cleopatra again. And surely the darling must have written, must have sent her address. Bundock must have lost the letters, or, worse, suppressed them! He owed her a grudge because she had resisted his importunities. Yes, Jinny—dead to Passion—had no idea to what lengths people born under other planets would go—even though married! But, extricating herself, Jinny, with that cold blood of hers, left her patron to the consolations of Squibs; she must get home to her grandfather, she explained; he would be worrying over her fate.

II

She found him at his telescope, as outraged as Miss Gentry, and enjoying himself immensely over the spectacle that shattered his Sunday dullness. His big Bible had been lugged upstairs, and now lay on the bed, open at the Deluge; and the bucket that received his ceiling-drippings had been kicked over in his excitement. “That’s the Lord’s punishment on they Sabbath-breakers,” he said gleefully. Nor could all Jinny’s arguments—as she wiped up his private flood—bring home to him his inverted logic. “The Lord knowed ’twas in their hearts to break it,” he persisted. “ ‘And it repented the Lord that He had made man.’ ”

“Oh, it’s not so bad as the flood of 2352,” said Jinny, airing her Spelling-Book chronology.

“Wait till the Brad flows over the dyke,” he chuckled. “That’ll spill all over Long Bradmarsh, ay, and run down towards Chipstone.”

“Oh, you don’t think it will get over the dyke?” she said anxiously.

“Mebbe to Babylon itself,” he said voluptuously.

“All the more reason they should try to save what they can,” she urged. “Time and tide wait for no man, and why should any man wait for the tide? It’s like with shepherds and stockmen that can’t ever have their Sunday. Come down to dinner.”

But the Gaffer’s eye was glued to his tube. “That’s as good as harvest!” he exclaimed in shocked exhilaration. “Dash my buttons ef they ain’t thatchin’ the stack they carted over from Pipit’s meadow. And they’re makin’ new mangold and potato clamps.”

“So long as they don’t get largesse,” Jinny maintained.

The Gaffer groaned. “Largesse or no largesse, Oi never seen sech a Sunday in all my born days. What a pity Sidrach dedn’t live to see it!”

When she at last got him to surrender the spy-glass, she could not refrain from taking a peep herself. She was astonished at the swift rise of the waters. Already the hedgerows were disappearing, while an avenue of elms rising mysteriously out of a lagoon was the sole indication of a road she had passed on her way to church. A swan and cygnets were now sailing upon it, with darker and less distinguishable objects tossing around. A bed of osiers seemed to be in its natural element as it rose from the waters that islanded a farm. The black, snow-powdered barn looked like the upturned hull of some squat galleon, and the haystacks thatched as with hoar-frost had the air of cliffs crumbling before the sea. One clump of bare trees rose out of the glassy void like the rigging of a sinking ship. Her world had suffered a water-change into something rich and strange in which only the rare protuberances enabled her to trace out the original earth-pattern. Even seagulls were floating, and frank-herons wheeling, and kingfishers diving. Her grandfather watched her like one who had provided the show. “That makes me feel a youngster agen,” he cried. “ ’Tis like the good ole times when there warn’t no drainage-mills ne yet Frog Farms.”

“Frog Farm isn’t swept away?” she cried with a sudden clamminess at her heart.

“Oi wouldn’t give much for the farniture downstairs,” he said, with sinister satisfaction. “That’s the lowest house in the parish. And then ye deny ’tis the Lord’s hand a-chastenin’ the evil-doers. Oi reckon though they’ve packed their waluables in the coach, the pirate thieves, and scuttled off Beacon Hill way.”

Without replying, she gazed through a tremulous telescope at the distant point where the Brad seemed to wind immediately behind the roof of Frog Farm but the convolutions and dip of the land, aided by an intervening copse, hid everything from her except the quaint chimney, though the smoke fluttering in the wind showed that if the Gaffer’s hypothesis was correct, evacuation must have been recent. It was something, though, to see the farmhouse still uncollapsed, though her imagination surrounded it with water like the more visible farm. She was glad to remember that Master Peartree at least would have been in his hut on higher ground, keeping vigil over the lambing ewes.

“Somebody ought to go and see if they’ve really got away,” she said anxiously.

“They’ll be all right ef the Lord don’t want to punish ’em,” he said surlily. “And ef He do, ’tain’t for nobody to baulk Him!”

After dinner he forwent his nap. The Lord had sent him not only a spectacle but a great new eye, and had even denuded the trees that might in summer have blocked his view, and he was not the man to “sin his mercies.” Jinny had ceased to be anxious about his catching cold at the casement—evidently his life of driving had inured him—so, wrapping a blanket round his smock and the new-knitted muffler round his throat, she left him to enjoy himself while she cleared away the frugal meal.

Suddenly she heard a roar as of distant thunder, followed by a great shout from above.

“It’s busted! It’s busted!”

She rushed up in alarm, nearly upsetting his bucket herself.

“Behold!” he cried Biblically, handing her the glass. “That’s busted a piece out of the bank.”

She looked—and beheld indeed! In the embankment that guarded Long Bradmarsh gaped a breach of some fifty yards, while giant blocks of clay that must have weighed tons were swirling like children’s marbles towards the Long Bradmarsh meadows whence panic-stricken labourers were now fleeing backwards.

“It’s caught ’em, the Sabbath-breakers,” said the Gaffer ecstatically. “That didn’t wait to flow over the dyke.”

“I’ve got to go and give help on the Ridge,” she said resolutely. And not all his arguments or threats could stay her cart. “Christ said the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” she urged, and the text silenced him. But it was not so easy to dispose of the pietism of Methusalem, whose blank incredulity before her threatened disturbance of the holy day was only overcome by the convincing commonplaceness with which Nip barked around. The poor horse must have imagined that he had overslept himself and that it was Tuesday. Fortunately “the Ridge” lay downwards for him, and the crowds and the everyday bustle finally disillusioned him of his Sunday feeling, and he allowed his cart to be laden with the carrots, swedes, and mangolds that had lain in such snug rows packed betwixt hurdles and a sort of straw thatch kept down by long poles. At first Jinny kept looking round for the rival carrier, but either he would not demean his coach to such service, or he was water-bound.

Jinny asked several people whether they had seen the Flynts and whether Frog Farm would be safe, but if nobody could supply any information, nobody thought there would be any serious danger.

“They’ll be all right,” said Farmer Gale bitterly. “It’s my land there that’s drowned, and my stacks that are floating.” He was on the scene now, directing operations, cursing his looker. For the first time the breezy Cornishman doubted his father’s cuteness in buying up soil whose fatness was only due to its centuries of repose under water. “The land’ll be out of heart for years,” he lamented. Jinny could not help a secret satisfaction in seeing the hard-hearted farmer confronted by a force as remorseless as that which had swept Uncle Lilliwhyte out of his cottage. Nor could she escape a still subtler pleasure in thus heaping coals of fire on his head. But both these joys as well as her anxiety about Frog Farm were soon lost in the glow of service. It was such a delight to be no longer shamming work, while to give had become an almost forgotten pleasure.

When she returned to the field for a second load, the flood was already creeping over it, and the early darkness and a pale quarter-moon threw a new weirdness over these unknown waters. She found the lane outside still more flooded, and as Methusalem plashed homewards, she encountered Uncle Lilliwhyte rising from the waters like a disreputable river-god. He was dexterously spearing mangolds as they floated past, and stacking them, mixed with drowned hares, in a wheelbarrow, itself apparently flotsam. He had an air of legal operations, there was none of the furtive look that goes with bulges in smock-frocks, and Jinny, too, thought he was justly avenged on his evictor, though she refused to desecrate the Sabbath by buying any of his spoils. She could not help feeling rewarded when Nip appeared with a rabbit gratis. As he had not killed it, she refrained from rebuking him, and he came in subsequently for the bones. But his pride at having thus at last achieved his ideal almost turned his head, and all the more bitter was his humiliation when his next epoch-making capture—a dead rat—was rejected with reproach.

III

If Jinny had much to tell her grandfather over the rabbit stew, he in his turn had no lack of material for excited conversation. Both were exhilarated, rejuvenated by the metamorphosis of their landscape; it seemed, more pungently even than snow, to re-create the wonder of the world. It was a gay young grandfather that rattled off the farces and tragedies of the day’s drama: a sodden haystack hurled into the Brad, a cart of mangolds overturned in a watery field, a bullock swimming for dear life and landing safely on a mound where stampeded horses cowered; dead ewes floating—and just in the lambing season too!—men in boats rescuing pigs and poultry from the grounds of water-logged cottages, and hauling clothes and bedding through the windows.

“There’s hundreds o’ Farmer Gale’s acres drowned what was cropped with seed,” he said with gloomy relish, “and regiments o’ rats ha’ saved theirselves atop of his stacks. When they’ve goffled their fill they wentures down for a drink, the warmints, and then up again. Same as ’twixt the devil and the deep sea for they onfortunit stacks.”

That night a white mist rising from the waters blotted out everything, but the next morning, when Jinny went up to induce her grandfather to descend to breakfast, she found to her surprise and relief that though the Brad was still hurling itself through the breach, the bulk of Long Bradmarsh was still unflooded, still alive with salvage parties. The low arms of the marsh-mills were still working with frantic efficiency. What miracle had saved this village? Her grandfather explained that there must still be some righteous men there. But Jinny, looking through his glass for herself, discovered—after a preliminary peep at the Frog Farm chimney, whose smokelessness was a fresh relief—that the breach-water instead of flowing evenly over Long Bradmarsh had half found, half scooped out for itself, a sort of river-bed. Turning aside before a slight rise, it had veered round sharply eastward, and then curving back westward, when it met another obstacle three hundred yards later, it had finally poured itself over the dyke back into the Brad.

“That’s a mercy,” she said, expounding it.

“But now there’s a chance of both they rivers flowin’ over,” he pointed out hopefully.

But as she gazed, she grew aware of a new phenomenon.

“Why, the Brad’s going backwards!” she said.

He snatched the glass from her hand. “So it be!” he agreed. “But that’s onny where the little river busts in agen the wrong way and pours along the top o’ the real river.”

Jinny was thrilling all down her spine. Again the sibylline prophecy of Miss Gentry rang in her ears: