Jinny the Carrier

Overwhelmed by the uncanny divination of the dressmaker—a “wise woman” in good sooth it now appeared—she sank into a chair, her whole being aquiver with a premonition that she had reached the crucial point of her destiny. Who was it coming on a horse? Who but Will, that incarnation of equestrian grace? He was coming to rescue her, the dear silly, imagining her menaced by the flood. As if she had not got Methusalem! As if Blackwater Hall was not an Ararat! But his foolishness was part of the Fate—might he not even ride his horse through the doorway, lying along its back to avoid the lintel, and thus be practically “on his hands and knees”? In her grandfather’s present happy mood, the old man might very well accept that solution. And Will himself would be “carried in,” and might equally accept the compromise. Absorbed in her sophistic day-dream, she sat there till even the old man at his tube remembered breakfast. Nor did she again volunteer to help in the fields. All day she stayed at home over her Monday housework and wash-tub, awaiting the horseman, afraid to stir out.

And with equal patience her grandfather sat at his all-day show. Engineers and gesticulating figures appeared on the broken bank for his delectation, and a mile or so lower down labourers began to shovel gault (culch, he called it to Jinny), and lighters laden with it tried to sink themselves in the breach, but some were swirled away like bandboxes and others turned turtle—a comical sight that made him roar with laughter. At last exciting operations with ropes, stretched across the river, succeeded in keeping some in place. After that a big-sailed barge came to the rescue—he could even recognize the two punters with long poles who eked out the sail. Ravens’ grandson, that ne’er-do-well, and Ephraim Bidlake, whose grandfather’s barge used to “competition wuss than coaches,” he told Jinny. They had brought a cargo of the blue-grey stuff—hundreds of sacks—and “dinged” it into the breach, wellnigh clogging it up. And then—oh side-splitting drollery!—the dyke had gone and “busted” in another weak place—near the bridge. And they were left “like dickies” with empty sacks, while the folk in the new-swamped fields went scurrying like rats.

So continuous were her grandfather’s shouts of glee that Jinny ceased to attend to them, and would not come up to see even the new gap. She was the more amazed when at supper he talked of having seen “ ’Lijah Skindle” fishing from the window of Frog Farm. “Oi called ye to come and see,” he said reproachfully when she expressed incredulity. “He got his line danglin’ from a broomstick!”

The sight of Miss Gentry astride a broomstick seemed far likelier to Jinny. In the first place, no window of the farmhouse was visible from theirs; in the second, how could Elijah Skindle be living there?

“What would Mr. Skindle be doing at Frog Farm?” she said.

“So long as he ain’t taken Annie there!” he answered. “Oi shouldn’t wonder ef the whole place comes tumblin’ down like they fir-trees. For the more Oi set thinkin’ on it, the more Oi see as it’s to punish that competitioning pirate that the flood’s been sent.”

“Don’t talk like that, Gran’fer. I expect you’ve been dozing.”

“Oi tell you Oi seen him and his broomstick,” he cried angrily. “And when he couldn’t catch nawthen, he tied his han’kercher on it and signalled with it, too.”

She did remember now that Elijah and Will had become thicker than their respective relations to Blanche seemed to warrant, and she had shrewdly divined that Will wanted to flaunt his indifference to his rejection, and Elijah to pose as the magnanimous conqueror. It was not impossible, therefore, that the horse-doctor, summoned to Snowdrop or Cherry-blossom on the Saturday afternoon, had been caught by the torrential rain and the gale and persuaded to stay the night in that spare bedroom once occupied by Mr. Flippance. But more probably it was only another of the old man’s illusions. “Why, there wasn’t even any smoke from the chimney,” she reminded him.

“Mebbe there was too much water in it,” he chuckled.

Jinny’s blood ran cold, but not on account of the Flynts. She was still too obsessed with the vision of Will arriving on a horse to imagine him or his parents immured by the waters. No, the feeling that stole over her was that Elijah Skindle was not living at the farm, but that while the occupants had evacuated it, he had been drowned outside it—swept away with his trap—and that her grandfather had seen yet another ghost.

“If anybody was signalling,” she pointed out, “the engineers and the wherrymen would have seen him.”

“They can’t see through a brick wall,” he retorted crushingly. “Frog Farm ain’t got no eyes on the Brad. Depend on’t, ’tis the Lord’s finger.”

She was still incredulous. But the moment supper was over, she ran up to examine the farmhouse afresh. The wind had “sobbed down”; the sky was sprinkled with stars, seen through frequent rifts in the clouds; and the moon, though only a crescent, emerging through a cloud-rack, shed a silver radiance over the watery waste, and cast over it black rippling bands of shadow from the bare elms and poplars rising from it in such unearthly beauty. And there in the region of Frog Farm, perceptible even to the naked eye, a mysterious reddish-yellow light, like some new star, threw its far-reaching beams upon the softened flood. A closer examination revealed that some of the trees of the fir-copse had been sapped and now lay heaving gently—the old man, she remembered, had alluded to fallen firs—and that the ruddy rays came from a farm bedroom, no longer shut out by the foliage. The smoke, too, was rising again. It was clear that the house was not uninhabited, and that her grandfather might very well have seen Elijah Skindle, while the absence of smoke all day might be traceable to the inability of the occupants to get a light earlier from sodden matches.

“But if they are starving and signalling,” she cried agitatedly, “we must tell people. We must send a boat.”

“We can’t get no boat,” he said philosophically.

“But you’ve seen plenty of boats,” she urged. “I saw two myself rowing over the five-acre field. And there’s that fowling-punt on the bank.”

“That! Oi seen that fleetin’ bottom up! Ye can’t goo out to-night. Ye’d be drownded. Why, look there! That’s a dead cow from the Farm meadow!”

“Where? I can’t see anything.”

“There! Bobbin’ near the copse.” He pointed and snatched the glass from her. “Why, that’s a hoss,” he shouted exultantly, “a black hoss! That should be Snowdrop, ef it ain’t Cherry-blossom!” He was on his feet now, quivering with excitement, his blanket falling from his shoulders.

“Why, how can you be sure in this light?” she said, trembling no less. “It may be a brown horse, or even a plough-horse.”

“That’s a black coach-hoss sure enough, black as his heart, the pirate thief. What did Oi tell ye? ‘Wengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Oi will repay.’ ” He looked so solemn in the moonlight, with his white beard, and his white-sleeved arm pointing starward, that she almost felt his standpoint had a prophetic justification. But she shook off the spell.

“Sit down, Gran’fer,” she pleaded, readjusting his blanket. “Mr. Flynt was in his right.”

“Ef he was in his right, why has the Lord drownded his hoss?” he demanded fiercely. “Do ye set down, yerself.” And he clutched her wrist with his bony hand.

“Let me go!” she cried. “There’s Mr. Skindle to be saved too.”

“There ain’t no danger for them—’tis your boat what ’ud come into colloosion with trees and cattle and fences and—why, just look at that!”

He dropped her hand to scrutinize the strange object awash. “Hallelujah!” he cried hysterically. “That’s the top o’ the coach! Dedn’t Oi say ’twas a funeral coach?”

She shivered, and a cloud, coming just then over the moon, seemed to eclipse her resolution to rouse the neighbours. The sudden pall of darkness made the old man clutch her again—his own evocation of the funeral coach had frightened him. “Oi won’t be left alone by night,” he quavered and wiped a watery eye. Jinny refused to take it as pathos. “You’ll blind yourself with that telescope,” she said sternly. But inwardly she felt he was not so wrong. In that dim fitful light there was more danger to the would-be rescuers than to the party so snugly gathered round some bedroom hearth in Frog Farm. That ruddy lamplight, still brighter by the extinction of the moon, beamed reassuringly over the waters. Skindle’s broomstick-rod might have represented merely an effort to break the monotony of imprisonment—it was no proof that they had been cut off from their larder. And with the waters now calmer, the house that had stood the gale was not likely to subside in the night. No, they were probably safer where they were than if “rescued.” She must wait till the morning.

A loud thumping at the kitchen-door shattered her speculations. Jinny’s heart beat almost as loudly. So the horseman had come at last, unheard in their excitement, choosing the back door as less of a surrender. Will had escaped then. He was not water-logged. She flew down the stairs three at a time. Poor Will! Poor Snowdrop—or was it Snowdrop that was saved and was now bearing his master to the heart that would give him compensation for all his shattered fortunes? Alas, no proud cavalier waited to bear her off clasped to his breast, no smoking steed—only a tatterdemalion before whose malodorous corduroys and battered beaver she recoiled in as much disgust as disappointment, though Uncle Lilliwhyte bore in his grimy claws a plump partridge, for which he demanded only twopence.

“But the season’s over,” she murmured.

“That’s onny the tother day and ’twarnt me as killed it,” he said. “The Lord don’t seem to care about they game laws; He killed even on Sunday.”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” Jinny rebuked him. “We can’t understand His ways.”

“They do seem wunnerful odd,” admitted the nondescript. “Ever since Oi was a brat Oi’ve tried to puzzle ’em out, but it git over me. Same as a man now perished in this here flood, and went straight to hell. Wouldn’t that be a cur’ous change for the chap—like the Lord larkin’ with him!”

“Perhaps there’ll be a flood that will put out hell one day,” said Jinny evasively.

“Martha Flynt should be sayin’ there ain’t no hell to put out. That looks as if ye’ve got to goo to Heaven, do what ye will.”

“Oh, I don’t think she means that,” said Jinny, smiling despite her heavy heart.

“That’s what the humes sounded like as her and the looker used to sing of a Sunday afore Master Will come home and stopped ’em. Oi used to listen to ’em chance times—put me in mind of my young days like—but Oi don’t howd with their doctrines.”

“With whose then?” asked Jinny, interested.

“With nobody’s. Dedn’t Oi say, git over me? Ef the Lord was to offer me Heaven or Hell, which d’ye think Oi’d choose?”

“Is there a catch in it?” she asked cautiously.

“We’ve got to be catched in one or the tother,” he said, misunderstanding. “But Oi mislikes ’em both. Will you be buyin’ the bird?”

As Jinny produced two of her only three pennies, she began to realize for the first time the revolution in her fortunes implicit in the destruction of the coach. But her heart was aching too poignantly for any joy of victory. She could not savour, as her grandfather was savouring, the miraculous collapse of the competition. Victory or defeat—heaven or hell—she thought ruefully, she misliked them both. She was consumed with yearning, anxiety and compassion for the young rival who had failed to “come on a horse,” who had perhaps no longer even a single horse to come on. Nor did the fate of Snowdrop or Cherry-blossom—that superb vitality turned into a floating carcase—leave her jubilant. In the morning, indeed, she was to awake to a sense of her triumph. But what endless hours of insomnia and nightmare had first to be lived through! Again Queen Victoria, who was also quite intelligibly Miss Jinny Boldero, was saved by “The Father of the Fatherless” from the gins and stratagems of the red-haired villain who cut away London Bridge just as Her Majesty was going over it in her gold coronation coach with its six black ponies and its canvas tilt. Struggling in the cold waters, she was held up by Henry Brougham, Esq., who helped her to scramble athwart the naked carcase of a black pony on which she floated to shore, when it stood upon its feet, and with Queen Jinny astride the saddle and Miss Gentry (in bridal attire) not at all surprisingly on the pillion, galloped towards Blackwater Hall across the dry Common where anglers sat with broomsticks. And while she was lying along the pony’s mane to get through the door to the red-haired young man (now become the hero), just as she was beginning to feel Passion’s force, that stupid Miss Gentry came crack with her neck against the lintel, and off rolled her head on the floor, its moustache dabbled in blood. Picking herself up, and her scattered bedclothes, and rubbing her bruised crown, Jinny congratulated herself on sleeping in a chest of drawers in such proximity to the floor.

But the bang, slight as it was, had cleared away the vapours of sleep and she awoke to a consciousness of victory brimming her veins with vital joy. Song, so long strange to her lips, unless simulated to lull Gran’fer, came back to them as she dressed, and when she prayed “Give us this day our daily bread,” it was no longer an almost despairing cry to a deaf heaven.

Running upstairs to see if Frog Farm was safe, she was relieved to find it smoking imperturbably, though up to its bedrooms in water, and a glimpse of Caleb at the casement serenely lowering a bucket into the flood was still more reassuring. But she was thunderstruck when her grandfather gleefully pointed out that the bridge to Long Bradmarsh had broken down, almost as in her dream, and she half looked round for the coronation coach. Doubtless, she felt, surveying the broken bankside arch, which lay in uncouth masses impeding the current and sending it swirling through the still-standing central arch, the breach hard by in the dyke had helped to sap the bridge, and she was glad to see this breach being already repaired by her friends, Bidlake and Ravens, with a gang of labourers, for they were clearly heaven-sent minions for the expedition to Frog Farm.

But if she sang on as she cleared the breakfast things, her grandfather was in still higher feather. Not only had the morning brought to him as to Jinny a keener realization of the collapse of their mushroom rival, but he had discovered floating near the bridge a black horse which he persisted was the second horse, and though Jinny maintained it was the same horse, the old man had more faith in heaven. So occupied was he in gloating over this distant horse swirling against the ruined brickwork, with its stiffened leg pointing skywards, that he had not seen Methusalem harnessing under his nose, and it was not till Nip started his hysteric prelude to departure that Mr. Quarles was aroused to Jinny’s proceedings.

“Ye can’t goo out in the flood,” he called down in alarm.

“It’s Tuesday,” she called up. The blood was dancing gaily in her veins. The frosty morning air was fresh and invigorating. She was young and unconquered. The long anxiety was over. Methusalem had survived the coach, even as he had survived the murderous wiles of Elijah! She put her horn to her lips and blew a challenge to the world.

“But there bain’t no bridge,” cried her grandfather.

“Daniel Quarles hasn’t been downed by a coach,” she said, “and he isn’t going to be downed by a flood.”

“No, by God, he ain’t!” cried the old Carrier delightedly. “Oi’ll goo round miles by the next bridge sooner than miss my day. And they false customers’ll ha’ to come to me on their hands and knees ere Oi takes ’em back. Goo to the coach, ye warmints, Oi’m done wi’ ye! And Oi wish ye joy of your fine black hosses all a-jinglin’ and a-tinklin’. He, he, he! Make muddles, do Oi? Oi never made no muddle like that, stablin’ my hosses with the frogs. Do ye give a squint at that carcase, Jinny, as ye pass by and ye’ll see it ain’t the one but the tother.”

“And do ye don’t squint into that spy-glass no more,” she called up in merry earnest. “Do, ye’ll get a glass eye.”

He laughed. “No fear. Have they writ ye yet about Sidrach’s stone?”

Annoyed with herself at having called up that memory, she feigned deafness. “You’ll find partridge for your dinner,” she called out, and flicking playfully at Methusalem she burst forth joyously: “There is Hey——”

“There is Ree!” responded the sepulchral bass from above, and then as the old horse stepped out, both voices declared in duet that ’twas Methusalem bore the bells away. Jinny, waving her whip with a last backward glance at her grandfather, saw him wildly agitating his telescope, to which his coloured handkerchief was tied like a flag of victory.

IV

Methusalem waded stolidly towards the river, his cart nearly floating in places. On the drier artificial slope leading up to the bridge she drew rein, and, jumping down, walked cautiously over the two still standing arches to hail Ephraim Bidlake, now some hundred yards down the opposite bank. As she put her horn to her lips to summon him, she saw, quanted up-stream, another barge with a reinforcement of sacks, and as it must pass under the bridge she moved to the other side to send her message by it as it came along. But the posse of mud-grimed men with a last push of their submerged poles fell prostrate before her, as in some Oriental obeisance, and she heard the tops of the gault-sacks scraping against the brickwork of the arch as the boat passed under it, so high was the water. It reminded her again of her nightmare. But no heads came crack as they glided through, and running to the other side, she spoke the rising crew.

Turning, she became aware of Bundock standing, bag-bowed, on the dyke, amid a mass of sodden straw, gazing in horror at the ruins and the dead horse bashing against them, swathed in yellow weed. She advanced to the edge of the void and hailed him across some fifteen feet of eddying water.

“Ahoy, Bundock!”

“For God’s sake, Jinny!” he cried, startled. “Go back! That’ll give way.”

“Not with my weight!” she laughed. “You going across?”

“How can I?”

“There’s boats, barges, wherries, lighters, punts, and swimming,” called Jinny, “and you’ve got to do your duty to the Queen.”

“And haven’t I done it?” he said pathetically, exhibiting his soused leggings. “But there’s only three letters for Little Bradmarsh and all for the same man.”

“I can guess who that is,” she said. “And yet you won’t kill three frogs with one stone.”

Bundock burst into laughter. “So you’ve heard my joke,” he said happily. “I do liven folks up, don’t I, though few have the brains to appreciate aught beyond the Bellman’s silly puns.” Then his ruddy, pitted countenance resumed its melancholy mien. “But I can’t joke about the flood, Jinny, you mustn’t expect me to. There’s poor Charley Mott!”

“Why, what’s he got to do with water?” Jinny jested.

“Haven’t you heard? He’s drowned.”

Jinny’s laugh froze on her lips. Charley had obstinately gone to fish in the troubled waters of the Brad, the postman related, despite the weather. All the Sunday morning he had fished from the dyke, and was just walking off to dine with some pals at “The King of Prussia” when the bank burst, and he was caught by the torrent and smashed among the whirling blocks. It was exactly like the moral of the Spelling-Book, and Jinny saw before her as on a scroll of judgment the grey blurred type of Lesson XV: “Harry’s Downfall.” True, Harry had been torn by wild beasts as well as shipwrecked on the coast of Barbary, but in a country without the larger carnivora a complete analogy could not be expected.

“Poor Mr. Mott,” she sighed. And then, remembering the case put by Uncle Lilliwhyte, had the luckless young man indeed gone straight from water to fire, she wondered. “It’ll be a relief for Mrs. Mott anyhow,” she said.

“A relief?” gasped Bundock. “Why, she’s carrying on like mad. Says it’s all her fault for trying to drive him to chapel. And that it was Deacon Mawhood that egged her on to drive him on the curb. And that he was worth a dozen Deacons, and she won’t have any more to do with you Peculiars. Why, when I brought her the letters this morning, if she hadn’t kept me such a time pouring out all Charley’s virtues, I might have got across before this bridge broke down. Not that I could have delivered my letters anyhow.”

“I think it broke in the night,” said Jinny. Then she fell silent, disconcerted by these illogical manifestations of human nature, and she did not remember where she was till she found Nip tugging at her dress and cowering on the brink of the abyss, as if afraid she would be walking on. The wherry, she perceived too, was now coming up, and young Ravens’ voice was floating melodiously across the waters:

“There’s your ferry, Bundock!” she called.

“And what’s the good of going across?” he asked. “By what I see I couldn’t possibly get to Frog Farm.”

“But I’m going there!”

“What!” He gazed towards her side of the river, the willows surging from which alone marked the former bank. Plover were flying with dismal cries over the unseen pastures.

He shook his head: “One inquest’s enough for Chipstone.”

“I’ll take your letters,” she said with a sudden thought that made her happier.

Bundock resisted the offer. His repugnance to seeing the Queen’s mail sacrilegiously carried by a member of Her Majesty’s sex was deep-seated, and it was only because he took seriously Jinny’s threat to write to his sovereign that he finally handed the three letters by a compromise to Ephraim Bidlake. Needless to say that as soon as Bundock’s pouched back was turned, that faithful henchman transferred them to Jinny.

When he took her little horse and cart on board his broad-built wherry, he imagined she only wanted to be ferried across, but she had soon spurred him to the great adventure across the “drowned” meadows. It was a question of life-saving, she said, and for the British Navy as embodied in Bidlake and Ravens, this was enough. Fortunately the females were now lodged on shore, awaiting Mrs. Bidlake’s annual event. Moreover the wherry, relieved by the other barge, had a slack moment, and with Jinny to guide them from the vantage-point of her driving-board over hidden snags in the shape of submerged stiles, sheds, mounds or bushes, the two men punted boldly over the left bank. The mast had been lowered, for apart from the danger of boughs catching in the sail, the trees made a wind-screen to the pastures.

It was odd as the barge passed between two willows on the margin of the river, to see these trees reflected doubly, at once in stream and in flood. There was no difficulty in avoiding the larger flotsam, though one of Farmer Gale’s haystacks was only staved off with Bidlake’s pole, and it was not till they had quanted to the farmhouse itself that the steering became troublesome, for there were no windows at the back, at which they were arriving, there were farm-buildings and floating stacks waiting to embarrass them at the front, the so-called Frog Cottage presented a blank black wall at one side, while the windowed side-wall, from which Martha had once beheld Bundock marching through morasses, was encumbered, not only by the wreckage of the stable and the mangled body of the coach, but by Caleb’s wild “orchard,” in whose mystically rising oak-branches and pear-tree-tops poultry, to which fear had restored wings, were seen to be roosting. But by taking a wide course over the wheat-patch so as to avoid the stacks, the barge was able to double Frog Cottage safely, to glide triumphantly into dock, and lie alongside Frog Farm. The exciting manœuvre had been accomplished in grim silence—even Ravens forgetting to sing as they bumped over the chaotic remains of the old log-dyke and raised wagon-road—and it was not till it was over that Jinny found breath to blow her horn. And as she did so, she was startled to see behind the diamond panes of the closed casement of the central bedroom—now on a level with her driving-board and almost opposite it—a head that vaguely recalled Mr. Duke’s.

But the next instant she recognized Maria, and the old black sow was pushed aside, the casement flung open and a red-haired head flung out. And if Jinny had stared incredulously at the sight of the pig, what word can convey the dilatation of Will’s eyes as they now beheld the little Carrier perched on her accustomed seat, whip in hand, as though on the solid road! It was some seconds before he even perceived the barge sustaining her cart.

“What do you want?” broke harshly from his lips.

Such ungraciousness after the perils of her voyage jarred upon her. “Don’t you want anything from Chipstone?” she asked, with a malice she had not intended.

“No,” he barked.

“Well, here’s your letters I’ve carried,” she said demurely. “The postal service, like the coach service, has broken down.” She hurled the letters through the window just as he was banging it to, but ere it could close it was thrown open again, and Elijah, Maria, Martha, and Caleb were tumbling over one another in their eagerness to greet her.

“Jinny!” came from all their mouths, even, it seemed, from Maria’s, and she saw through dimming eyes that the bedroom was a chaos of furniture and fowls.

“Here, catch hold of that rope, one of ye,” cried Ephraim Bidlake. “Tie it to a bedpost.” He had already fastened the stem of the boat to an oak, but the current was swinging out the stern.

It was with a thrill that Jinny found herself gazing for the first time into Will’s bedroom, though its normal character was disturbed by its emergency use as a sitting-room, poultry-run, pigsty, and salvage store. The wet crinkled motto: “When He giveth quietness, who then can make trouble?” was lying as if in ironic questioning atop a pile of parlour ornaments, and Martha’s silk sampler lay stained and sodden on the very chair on which Mr. Flippance had sat admiring it. “Unstable as water,” human destinies seemed to Jinny as she surveyed the jumble in the whitewashed attic. But there was too much bustle for reflection, nor could she even see clearly what Will himself was doing, for Maria and Elijah were jostling each other at the window in their efforts to get through, and the vet.’s cap fell on the deck in his agitation.

“Pigs first!” called Jinny, and as though obediently, Elijah clutching at the edge of her tilt scrambled on the foot-board of the cart and thence to the deck. “Nice behaviour, leaving us to starve,” he grumbled in the same pachydermatous spirit, as he clapped his cap on his chilled cranium.

“How could you starve with all those fowls?” said Jinny.

“They weren’t for weekday eating, the old woman said. Nothing since Sunday but dry bread!”

“As long as it was dry,” Jinny laughed.

“It wasn’t even that! Simply sopping.”

“Well, all prisoners get bread and water,” said Jinny in mock consolation. Ravens had hastened to pull out a greasy package. Elijah waved it aside with a sniffy air. “Thanks—I’ll wait till we land now.”

“Elijah not fed by Ravens,” laughed Jinny. Outwardly she was in the gayest of moods, bandying words again in quite her old vein. But it was a feverish gaiety—underneath, every nerve was astrain for Will’s reappearance with all it forboded of ecstasy and conflict. “Come along, Maria,” she called, for the barge had drifted out a little on its window-rope, and the sow’s eagerness was damped. Now encouraged, she allowed herself to be helped into the cart by Caleb above and Bidlake below. After the fowls had been chivied beside her, there was a delay.

“The missus be in our bedroom packin’ some things for the night,” apologized Caleb, returning to the window. “She can’t sleep without her nightcap, it wouldn’t be decent, and she likes me to change my red shirt for bed.”

“But where will you sleep?” Jinny now asked, feeling suddenly responsible as for an eviction.

“Mr. Skindle’s kindly offered to put us all up till we looks round,” said Caleb.

“It’s the big house I’m furnishing for my wedding regardless,” Elijah explained. “And I’m going to give them their food, too, and it isn’t the sort of food they’ve given me either. But when you’re cooped up with folks in danger of your life, you get closer to them and don’t grudge expense, especially when they’re in low water.”

“In low water?” echoed Jinny. “Oh, Mr. Skindle!”

“You know what I mean,” Elijah replied. “Poor Will’s lost his horses—such a come-down. Not that he ever had enough to appeal to a girl brought up to be a lady. In my new house now there’s three spare bedrooms—I’ll get my mother to make ’em all ready—that’ll be one apiece for ’em if they care to spread themselves.”

“But then how about Maria?” Jinny jested.

“Maria!” he grunted. “It’s all her fault. I always said she was the fussiest pig I ever attended. A mere cramp, through not taking exercise all this rainy weather; fright cured her in a jiffy. But think of the valuable time she’s cost me! I wouldn’t have come but to oblige Will. No wonder they call the place Frog Farm.”

“I don’t hear any croaking but yours,” flashed Jinny. “Why, if time is all you’ve lost, you’re lucky. Where’s your horse?”

“You didn’t think I’d risk Jess on these roads in the weather we’ve been having? I only agreed to come in the coach Saturday night and go back Sunday morning with Farmer Gale and his wife when they drove in to chapel. Poor Blanche! She must have been in a terrible twitter when I didn’t turn up at the Sunday dinner!”

“I wonder she didn’t come out for you in a boat?” said Jinny slyly.

“She’d be thinking I’d been called to another patient. We medical gents can never call our time our own,” he explained, but there was a tremor of uneasiness in his words. He pulled out his empty pipe and stuck it between his blackened teeth. Caleb here appeared with uncouth bundles, and Martha (embellished by sudden Sunday clothes) with a last frightened chicken, and as the barge had now quite tautened its window-rope and left a watery gap, Martha’s descent was a fluttering episode.

“Not so easy as the New Jerusalem coming down,” gasped Caleb, when she was safely installed inside the cart with Maria and the poultry and the dazed Nip.

Ephraim Bidlake, intimating he could not wait on this jaunt to lower any of the furniture, had gone off—in a little dinghy he carried—to rescue the fowls in the orchard branches, and their fearful cackling and the excitement of his perilous quest now drew all eyes, except Jinny’s, which remained furtively bent on the window, from which the drifting of the barge had carried her away. It was with relief that she heard Martha suddenly exclaim:

“But where’s the boy?”

“Oi count he’s got such a mort o’ new-fangled things,” scoffed Caleb. “Tooth-brushes and underclothes and shavin’-strops—happen he’ll want a whole portmantle. Oi offered to help him with his poor arm, but he’s that fiery and sperrited—ye remember, Jinny, how he lugged his great ole box all the way Chipstone!”

“But what’s the matter with his arm?” Jinny asked anxiously.

“Didn’t you see his sling?” called Elijah proudly.

“Broken?” Jinny murmured, paling.

“Only a simple fracture.” He puffed complacently at his pipe, forgetting it was empty.

“You’ve got to go back, Caleb, and help the poor lad,” said Martha, with renewed agitation.

“Then you might as well get my hand-bag from my room,” Elijah added. “I didn’t think of it in the rush.”

Ravens, labouring mightily with his pole to larboard, pushed the barge back to the window, and as Caleb obediently clambered in again, Martha, growing calmer, began telling Jinny how Will had swum out to the stable to save the horses, but had only got his arm kicked for his pains. And then, of course, he couldn’t help her in carrying any of her furniture upstairs—it was a mercy he got back at all—and, it being Sunday, “Flynt” would help only to save life, though you’d have thought from Maria’s squeals, as she was haled upstairs, that she was being slaughtered rather than saved. As for Mr. Skindle, he seemed stricter with the Sabbath than even the Peculiars, and would do nothing but try to light the fire.

“You were at home. I hadn’t got but the clothes I stood in,” Elijah explained. “What should I have done if I’d gone up to my neck in water?”

“Here’s your bag,” Caleb’s voice broke in from the window, “but Will won’t come, Martha!”

“Won’t come?” shrilled Martha, and before Jinny could stop her, she was on the footboard and had disappeared through the casement.

“He’s an ungrateful, ill-tempered fellow,” Elijah commented, picking up his bag, and changing his collar as he talked. “I don’t call him a gentleman. He can’t forgive that his arm was set by a vet., and he sits about like a broody hen. Asked me not to mention it, which, of course, as a gentleman, I won’t. What good do you suppose it would do me to have it known—I said to him—seeing I’ve already got the family connexion with Maria? But he got very cross,” Elijah wound up innocently, “though I said I wouldn’t even charge pig’s price, but would swap the fee and Maria’s too against his horses, provided I could recover the carcases.”

“I’ve got to stay here,” cried Martha, reappearing hysterically at the window. “He won’t come.”

“What nonsense!” cried Jinny, losing her temper. “We’ll all go and pull him out.”

“He’s locked himself in my bedroom—the one with the side window—you can’t get in from here.” She wrung her hands; these days of durance and danger had evidently told upon her nerves.

“I’ll smash the door in and his head too!” growled Ravens, his foot on the window-sill.

“No, no,” Jinny commanded, swinging herself suddenly past him. “You take your wife down, Mr. Flynt. She’s too excited. I’ll rout him out.”

Martha protested shrilly that where she had failed, a stranger could not succeed. No, she must stay with her boy, tend his poor arm! But the men overruled her and were returning her gently but firmly to the footboard of the cart when she cried desperately:

“Wait! Wait! I’ve forgotten something under my pillow.” “I’ll get it!” Jinny promised. “What is it?”

But Martha refused to say. It was very precious. It was in an envelope. It wasn’t for Jinny to see. In vain Jinny declared she wouldn’t open the envelope. Martha’s hysteric protests mingled with the frenzied cackling of the fowls that Ephraim Bidlake was still chasing.

Leaving the males to pacify Martha and deposit her in the cart, Jinny stooped under the barge-rope and threaded the litter betwixt the bed and the right-hand door—the other door, she knew, gave on the bedroom bisected by Frog Cottage. Pausing but a moment to look down the now literal well of the staircase, in which dead mice floated, she rapped imperiously at the connubial chamber under the gable.

“Go away, mother!” came the fretful answer.

“I’m not your mother—if I were I’d slap you. A nice state you’ve got her into!”

“What do you want?” he said in a changed tone.

“Your mother’s left something precious in an envelope under her pillow.”

“I thought you said you’d never cross my doorstep.”

“I didn’t—I came by the window-sill.” But even as her lips gave the obvious repartee, her mind beheld her grandfather scrambling into the room of the Angel-Mother, and it all seemed ineffably silly in view of the tragic realities of life. As if she would not have crossed even an enemy’s threshold to bind up a broken arm!

“Well, suppose you return the same way,” he retorted.

“That’s what I mean to do,” she said, angry again. “I’ve got my rounds.”

“What! In the barge?”

“I don’t want a boat. Long Bradmarsh has kept its head above water and Methusalem’s going just as strong as before the flood.” Then, afraid she had recalled his own dead horses, she added hurriedly: “How’s your arm?”

“That’s nothing, thank you. Good-bye.”

“Not without the envelope.”

Their words came muffled through the door-panels, and a barrier as obstructive seemed to divide their spirits, though they yearned dumbly towards each other.

“I’ll put it under the door,” he said surlily.

“I don’t wonder you’re ashamed to look me in the face.”

Jinny was thinking of his behaviour to his mother. But it was an unfortunate remark. Will was ashamed, mortally ashamed of his defeat. He had come along from over the seas, he felt, swelling and strutting and jeering! Poor little Jinny! Poor, comical little village carrier! Oho, he’d soon crush her! Oho, he’d soon make an end of her! And now! His coach smashed up, his horses drowned, his capital gone, his savings—the bulk spent on his fine clothes—barely sufficient to carry him along while seeking some new employment, even his parents impoverished by the flood, their very roof perhaps about to collapse over his head! While she—! Here she was with her invincible old cart, walking the waters, posing as the saviour of the whole family, carrying on the postal service and the coach service, blowing her triumphant trumpet on her immemorial Tuesday round, her old clients doubly at her mercy! What humiliation could be more bitter?

And the worst of it all was that the ache of passion, nourished by her rejection of his new advances, had become intolerably poignant. Jinny! Jinny! He seemed to hear it all around him, Jinny! Jinny! from morning to night—and even all through the night, floating through his dreams like a strain of music. And Jinny herself was ever before him night and day, with her eyes laughing and her tongue stinging.

But now that she was there in the flesh, with only a door between them, he felt he could not open it. He must never look in her face again till he had rehabilitated his fortunes. No word of love had ever been spoken between them. But could he see her, stand near her now, and not speak it? And a fine story it would sound, even if his lips proved spiritless enough to attempt it. He had loved her from the first moment he had seen her in the courtyard of “The Black Sheep,” nay, from childhood, and had tried to steal her business! Had loved her and might have driven her, with the grandfather she supported, to die in a ditch! And now that it was he who was in the ditch, could he come prating of love, add her enhanced scorn to his self-contempt? No, he had missed his opportunities! A nice hand to offer her—even if there was any chance of her taking it—a hand swathed in a sling, symbol of his crippled fortunes! He must set out on his travels again—that was clear—work his passage—as soon as his bones had grown together—to those new Australian goldfields that everybody was talking of, and then, when his self-respect had grown together too, he would write to her and ask her to wait for him. And if she still said “No”—or had already said “Yes” to a better man—why what else had he deserved, monkeying around with a flirt who was not worthy even of Elijah!

As Jinny now heard him moving speechlessly to get the envelope, the voice of Ravens carolling the popular “Gipsy King,” told her that Martha had been quieted down—unlike the fowls, which were still squawking under Bidlake’s coaxings.

Suddenly she heard Will laughing.

“What’s up?” she called, more brightly.

“Well of all the—!” And then an envelope was pushed under the door. “She hasn’t opened it yet!”

Jinny stooped down. It was the letter from Will that Martha would not let her read in the Spring of ’51!

“Well, she knew what was in it,” said Jinny, her eyes misting. “And you oughtn’t to laugh at such a proof of love. Nobody else would call that a precious treasure.”

The word “love” sent vibrations through them both, despite the woodwork between.

“Well, there’s money in the others anyhow,” he said, and three opened envelopes came unexpectedly under the door—the letters she had just brought to him.

“What are these for?” she asked.

“You may as well have them—commissions for the coach.”

“For me?” Jinny said, touched.

“Yes, I’d be obliged if you helped me out.”

“Oh, Will!” Her voice was as broken as his pride seemed to be. But his mood was less of meekness than of self-scourging.

“Well, you said the coach service had broken down,” he reminded her.

“I didn’t mean to twit you—I’m sorry——”

“What for? You told me I’d get stuck and come to you to pull me out.”

“But I’m so sorry, really. Poor Snowdrop! Poor Cherry-blossom!”

“Didn’t you call it a funeral coach? Good-bye, you’ve got the treasure.”

“You’d better come too.”

“No, thank you.”

“You needn’t be beholden to the cart if that’s what’s sticking in your gizzard. You can get off at the dyke.”

“Not me. You won’t see me again—not for a long time.”

“Rubbish! I can see you now through the keyhole.”

“So long as I don’t see you,” he said gruffly.

“You’ll see me before you’re a day older.”

“Bet my bottom dollar I won’t.”

“A dashing young lad from Canada,” she carolled. “Once a great wager did lay— Why have you buried your face in your hands?” she broke off.

“I haven’t—it’s to shut you out!”

“Aha! So I do come in all the same.”

Loud cries of “Jinny! Jinny!” now intimated, like the silence of the rescued poultry, that the barge was preparing to cast off.

“Just coming!” she called loudly. “Good-bye, you sullen, runty idiot. They can’t wait any longer.”

“Good-bye!” he growled.

Her look was mischievous as she ran off. But that he could not see: he could only hear the noisy banging of the opposite door. He had already forgotten his wager. But by hook or crook she meant to lure him out, if only for an instant. That was why she came as noisily back and thumped at his door again. “You can’t be left without food,” she said.

“That’s my business. Let me be.”

“Not till I know you won’t starve. There’s Ravens’ dinner-packet you can have.”

“Take it away,” he roared.

Her eyes twinkled. He had played into her hands, empty as they were. “I won’t take it away,” she said. There was a sound as of angry dumping outside his door. Then the opposite door banged and silence fell.

After a moment Will, drawing a sigh, half of relief, half of despair, opened his door and the next moment—he never knew how it had happened exactly (still less did he realize that there was no dinner-packet there at all), but since he had only one arm it seemed to him afterwards it could not be he that had enfolded her, even if he had done so with his eyes when her merry mocking face shone so trickily upon the landing, while Jinny always felt that it was precisely the arm out of action that had come round her, just as it was his not coming on a horse that had made her feel Passion’s force—but there they were (by some irresistible flood) in each other’s arms, with Jinny’s flower-soft cheek pressed with a wonderful warmth to his own, and her silvery little voice crooning: “Oh, my poor Will! Oh, my poor Will!” He knew immediately that there had been nothing like this in all his motley experience, nothing at once so pure, so sweet, so tender. This was the love that lifted, not degraded.

But Jinny, though she had no comparative lore of love and was all the more absorbed in the absolute wonder, uniqueness and completeness of it, knew more swiftly than her lover that this was no time for dallying. In what seemed to him a mere flash of lightning the whole episode was cruelly over, he was being helped into the barge, while Bidlake was in his bedroom untying the rope, and Jinny with motherly zeal and uncanny knowledge was scrambling together his things for the night. For her, too, the moment of breaking away had been hard, and as her face moved from his, it seemed like passing from a sunny clime to a polar world. But as she now busied herself with his little equipment, the glow was back again at her heart, and the transfigured world of that magic moment was hers again.

As the wherry began to move off at last, and Frog Cottage was doubled again, Martha, who had been laid snugly inside the cart surrounded by her live stock, with blankets from the bed thrown over her, threw them off, stretched her arms to her receding farm and burst into a new passion of tears.

“Dear heart! Dear heart!” cried Caleb, almost as agitated.

“Shall we ever see our things again?” she sobbed.

“That’s nawthen to cry over, dear heart, even ef we don’t. We’ve got to thank the Lord for givin’ us the use of Frog Farm all they long years.”

But Martha sobbed on, unconsoled.

“And Will’s been taken from me too.”

“No, no, Martha,” Caleb reassured her. “There he is by the starn, smokin’ his pipe. ’Tis middlin’ clever to my thinkin’ to fill it one-handed.”

Still Martha refused to be comforted. So spasmodic were her gulpings that Nip set up a sympathetic howl and Maria a perturbed squeal. But none of these sounds—not even Ravens’ singing—could drown the celestial music Will and Jinny heard in their hearts.