THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE

I

Jinny’s passage through Long Bradmarsh with her overflowing freight of fares and live stock was like a triumphal progress. The loungers outside “The King of Prussia” actually raised a cheer. Fresh from the excitement of the Mott inquest, they knew the adventurous significance of her dripping cart-wheels and dry tilt, and were quick to see the symbolic significance of her carrying the disabled driver of “The Flynt Flyer,” though its destruction was still unknown to them. At the instance of Elijah, she went round by Foxearth Farm, so as to put up Maria and the poultry there, as well as to reassure Blanche of his safety. Though the interview with the latter was naturally veiled from the occupants of the cart, it was obvious to them that it was Mrs. Purley who was doing the talking. Her voice, wafted to them through walls which dulled the actual words, was like an endless drone, each sentence fusing breathlessly into the next in a maddening meaninglessness. Elijah returned with a dejected mien: due not merely, it transpired, to the cascade that had broken over him, but to the fact that Blanche was just washing her head (that generation did not speak of its hair) and unable to see him. “As if you hadn’t suffered enough from water,” said Jinny sympathetically.

She had her first view that day of Mr. Skindle’s bridal mansion. Its two stories rose in new red brick on the outskirts of Chipstone, in a forlorn field that was just being “developed,” and its architecture, from bow-window to chimney-stack, was an imitation of the residence of Dr. Mint, the leading human doctor.

“There’s Rosemary Villa!” said Elijah proudly, and Will smiled at the recollection of Bundock’s jape and Blanche’s merriment.

Ere Elijah, leaping down first, could mount his beautifully whitened steps, the door was opened excitedly and a gaunt grey-haired charwoman, with a smear on her cheek, dropped her grate-blacking brush and fell upon Elijah’s neck in a spasm of emotion.

“Thank God! Thank God!” she sobbed.

“Here! Don’t do that!” said Elijah, writhing in her grasp. He was blushingly disconcerted by this assertion of maternity before company: she had so long accepted the position of drudge that he had forgotten that his absence during the flood might reawaken the mother. “You’re all black!” he explained, disentangling himself.

“That’s mourning for you!” Jinny called merrily from her cart, and the jest relieved the situation. She looked curiously at the lank, aproned figure, fancying she caught a hint of grace in the movement of the limbs and a gleam of fire in the dark eyes. But this dim sense of the tragic passing of romance could not even faintly obscure her own happiness, on which the imminent separation from Will was the only cloud. Except for the thrilling contact achieved in helping him to alight, she had to part with him less cordially than with Caleb, who to her surprise and Martha’s gave her a smacking kiss ere he stepped down. “Thank you, dearie—ye’ve saved our lives,” he said. Jinny scoffed at that—the gratitude was due to Bidlake and Ravens. “Well, the missus’ll have to kiss them,” he sniggered. “You do your own kissing,” said Martha sharply. “And keep your kissing for your own, too.” All this talk of kissing but aggravated the pang of the frigid parting with the one person who mattered.

“Good-bye; see you soon,” was all Will said.

“You bet your bottom dollar on that,” she flashed, with a relieved smile, reading into his words a promise to come over the very next day.

“Oh, I’ll pay you next time,” he smiled back, and she had a delicious sense of his meaning to pay his lost wager in the currency with which Caleb had just acquitted his debt. She promised the old people she would come round on Friday and tell them how Frog Farm stood—if it did stand! But though her eyes exchanged with Will’s secret promises for the morrow, an eternity of loneliness seemed to lie before her, as she drove back to the town, magnanimously blowing the “Buy a Broom Polka” to apprise her faithless clients.

II

So many commissions clamoured for her from folk with relations in the flooded area that she had no difficulty in redeeming her dress from the pawnshop that very day. But it was not on account of the many calls upon her that she arrived home in the dark. It was because she had forgotten to command her faithful ferry’s attendance, and been forced to take the amazed Methusalem miles round by the farther bridge. Her grandfather would be anxious, she feared: then it occurred to her—not wholly with satisfaction—that he might have followed her day’s movements by telescope. But she found him as happy as she had left him, and with the hearth blazing like a bonfire, reckless of logs. He had not observed her rescue of the Flynts, for, as she had warned him, his overtaxed right eye had become inflamed and throbbed with little darts of pain, and he had been compelled to fall back on the voluptuous venom of his reflections, supplemented by a text which he had hunted out with his other eye.

“It come into my mind all of an onplunge,” he chuckled, putting a bony finger on a verse. “The horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea,” she saw with a shudder. “That won’t be long afore he follows his hoss,” said the Gaffer grimly as he polished his lens for the spectacle. “Oi will sing to the Lord,” he read out, “for He hath triumphed gloriously.”

“Don’t be so wicked, Gran’fer,” she cried.

“Wicked! That’s roighteous—to sing to the Lord.”

“You don’t want people drowned!”

“Dedn’t he want us to starve?”

“Looks more like his starving now. We can afford to forgive. You’re reading the wrong end of the Bible, Gran’fer. We’ve got to turn the other cheek.”

“Sow Oi would, ef anybody was bussin’ me,” he cackled.

Jinny flushed and turned both her cheeks away.

“Why, the day Oi met Annie at Che’msford Fair——” he began.

“I don’t want to hear about Annie,” she said severely. “She wasn’t your wife.”

“That’s why I tarned from iniquity. But she ain’t nobody’s wife now.”

“No, poor thing!” she said. “And it’s a pity she’s Mr. Skindle’s mother, for he makes her do all the chares of his big new house.”

“Well, but she’s a woman, ain’t she?” he asked with unexpected lack of sympathy. “She’d have to do her husband’s chares.”

“Not at her age!”

“At her age? Annie’s a young woman.”

“Compared with you, perhaps,” she smiled.

“Git over me, her having a lad that size. Oi count she’s worritin’ over him, cooped up in Frog Farm.”

“Not now. They’re all safely out of it.”

“What! That pirate thief’s got safe!”

“Thank God!”

“That ain’t God’s doin’—that’s some evil interferin’ sperrit what comes out o’ dead bodies, says John Wesley. Who took ’em off?” he demanded fiercely.

“They came off in Bidlake’s barge,” she said weakly. “And don’t you be so unchristian. Isn’t it enough he’s——?”

“That ain’t right, interferin’ with the texts!” he interrupted doggedly. “Oi never could abide they Bidlakes. Ephraim’s grandfather come competitioning on the canals, wuss than Willie Flynt.”

“Well, Mr. Flynt can’t competition any more, can he? I expect,” she added with difficult lightness, “he’ll be coming round now to make friends.”

“Come round, will he? Just let him show his carroty head inside my doorway—he’ll be outside like fleck, Oi promise ye.”

“But if he wants to make it up——!”

“He’s got to goo down on his hands and knees fust.”

“Perhaps he will,” she suggested. Indeed she had little doubt of it. That wonderful moment, with its climax of mouth to mouth, had reduced this long foreseen obstacle to a grotesque bogy. In the light of mutual and confessed love the perspective changed, and if she had once thought that she could not have borne to see him grovel even for her sake, that it would actually impair the love grovelled for, she had now been uplifted into a plane of existence in which for him not to humour her grandfather seemed as childish as the nonagenarian’s own demand.

The old man now turned on her a red-rimmed probing eye. “He’d never come crawlin’ to me ef he warn’t arter summat. And he’s been tryin’ to git round you fust—don’t tell me! What’s his game?”

“Perhaps—he’d like—a partnership.”

“Oi dessay he would!” he chuckled ironically. “He’s got brass enough for anythin’. Why, the chap was arter you once. Ye dedn’t know it, but there ain’t much hid from Daniel Quarles. Oi suspicioned him the fust moment he come gawmin’ to the stable. And what’ll he bring to the pardnership? Cat’s-meat and matchwood?”

His coarseness jarred every nerve, but she kept to his key of jocosity. “Didn’t you say he had brass?”

“He, he, he!” he cackled. “But it’s the wrong kind o’ brass. Ef he wanted to be a pardner, why dedn’t he come when he had his coach and hosses?”

“He did. Don’t you remember?”

“Did he?” he said blankly. “Then why dedn’t Oi take ’em?”

“That was all my fault, Gran’fer.”

“No, it warn’t, dearie. It was ’cause he said Oi’d made muddles. Oi remember now. He come and swabbled, and chucked a pot at me. And he’s got to goo down on his hands and knees for it!”

Jinny saw it was hopeless to unravel these blended memories of Will and Elijah, as grotesquely interwoven as one of her own nightmares, on whose formation it seemed to throw light. She was glad, though, that the sharp edges of the actuality had now faded.

“Yes, yes—he shall,” she promised soothingly.

“And then there was that weddin’-cake what Mr. Flippance sent us,” burst up now from the labouring depths.

“Yes—wasn’t that a lovely cake?” she agreed.

“Oi offered him a shiver—shows ’twarn’t me as wanted to swabble. But he lifted his whip at me and Oi snapped it in two like my ole pipe when John Wesley stopped my smokin’. Oi don’t want no pardnerships.”

“Of course not, Gran’fer.”

“Daniel Quarles it’s been for a hundred year, and Daniel Quarles it’s a-gooin’ to remain.”

“Of course. Daniel Quarles.”

“And he’s got to goo down on his hands and knees.”

“And so have I,” she laughed, “for we’ve let our bonfire die down. Poor Mr. Flynt—he’s got a great admiration for you, spite that you’ve licked him.”

“Oi guessed you and him been gammickin’. You can’t hide much from Daniel Quarles. And ef that little Willie has got a proper respect for his elders and betters, that shows Oi larnt him a lesson.”

“You did, Gran’fer. He’s a changed man. There! Isn’t that a nice blaze again? He’s broken his right arm, too, poor fellow.”

But here she had blundered. The old man’s face lit up, not from the fire, but with a roaring flame of its own. “Thank the Lord,” he shouted, “as hears the prayer of the humble. The high arm shall be broken, says the Book, and it’s come true. The arm what dreft the hosses is broken like the coach!” He ended with a fresh cackle and rubbed his skinny hands before the blaze.

“You didn’t pray for that?” said Jinny, white and rebuking. “That was unchristian.”

“That’s what King David prayed, Jinny, and he was a man after God’s own heart. ‘Break thou the arm of the wicked’—Oi’ll show it you in the Psalm.”

“I don’t want to see it—King David wasn’t a Christian yet. And we’ve got to forgive and forget, and not bear a grudge for ever, especially when a man’s down. Think of John Wesley.”

“Happen you’re right, Jinny,” he said, softening. “We’ve got to forgive the evil-doer, and ef the Lord’s got him in hand Oi count we needn’t trouble—he’ll git all he desarves.”

And with that Jinny felt fairly content.

III

But though the ground was thus prepared for his advent, Will did not come. “What are you prinkin’ yourself for?” her grandfather asked in the morning. “It ain’t your day.” It was certainly not her day. It was more like a night—a long agony of expectation with every rustle of wind on the dead leaves sounding like his footstep. Towards dusk she even swept the water-logged landscape with the now neglected telescope. If she did not find him, she found—what was almost as soothing—a reason for his not coming. The broken bridge! How could he go all those miles round? Joyfully she called herself a fool, and awaited the letter he would send instead. The letter would fill up the Thursday and on the Friday she would go to him.

But even this milder expectation of a visit from Bundock went unfulfilled. At first she thought with some relief that Bundock was again shirking the circuit. But no! The glass revealed the slave of duty serving Beacon Chimneys. Throwing on her jacket, but bonnetless, she ran across the Common to meet her letter. But Bundock only gave her grumbles at the overstrain on his feet, and leaving him, to hide her dismay, she walked blindly up Beacon Hill till she was startled to come upon Master Peartree in the bosom of his new-born flock. It did not even occur to her that this was a proof he had escaped the flood, and that the occasion called for congratulation. But the sight of his lambs bounding and his ewes scooping out mangolds brought to mind his old account of a sheep that had broken its arm “in a roosh,” and at once a second rush of joy at her silliness and a still more paradoxical pleasure in Will’s broken arm flooded her soul. How could he write, the poor boy? It was not that she had really forgotten the state of his arm—indeed, she had thought of the sling as clogging the springiness of his walk, and making it still more impossible for him to come—only she must be going crazy again, she felt; just as in the days when she had taken home wedding-cakes and brought Elijah hairpins. Her eyes now filled with happy tears and, joyous as the yeanlings whose tails vibrated with such voluptuous velocity as they sucked, she gave chase to a little black lamb and kissed its sable nose.

That brought her thoughts back to the flood by way of Mother Gander’s hostelry and its drowned landlord, and she inquired at last about Master Peartree’s losses. They had been limited to one bullock, she was glad to hear, though no such glow of Christian feeling possessed her as she had recommended to her grandfather, when the shepherd-cowman proceeded to estimate that what with stacks, root-crops, and winter-wheat, Farmer Gale was the poorer by several thousand pounds. Other shepherds had been badly hit, but he himself—thanks to the Almighty—had got more twins and triplets than ever, and taking her round his plaza of straw he showed her the yellow-splashed, long-legged lambkins in the thatched pens, one set of which he would have to feed by bottle, for handsome mothers did not give the most milk, he moralized.

She ran homewards as full of the joy of life as the leaping lambs, though she was living only for the morrow. Through the frosty air she felt a first breath of spring, birds were singing, and even beginning to build, and the flood, she was sure, was falling. But when next day she reached Rosemary Villa, the gaunt drudge informed her that only the old Flynts were in! Her heart turned to lead. So he had not stayed in for her, though she, for her part, had raced to him by the shortest routes, irrespective of business, cutting through Chipstone proper by a single side-street. It was not till she had learnt that he was gone, like Elijah and all the world, to Mr. Mott’s funeral, that her heart grew light again—she seemed to batten on tragedies these days. Of course Will could not avoid this mark of respect, he who had always put up his coach in the courtyard of “The Black Sheep,” and perhaps she ought to have gone to the funeral too, and would probably have encountered it had she not skipped the High Street in her eagerness. She remembered now some lowered blinds in the street she had scuttled through, and a slow booming bell, whose disregarded notes now at last donged their message to her brain. But perhaps it was better so—her redeemed frock was too gay, her winter shawl and bonnet without a single touch of black. She ought to have borne the inevitable funeral in mind though, she told herself reproachfully. In her present guise she could hardly station even in the courtyard. It was fortunate “Mother Gander” no longer expected to see her within. How embarrassing it would have been for the widow to meet the confidante of her unmeasured denunciations! Probably the whole place would be closed for the day, though she supposed the Chelmsford coach with the passengers from London would have to come in as usual.

Apprised by the barking of Nip, the Flynt couple had descended, looking uneasy, for they had been speaking of her not long before. Their hostess-drudge had started the ball as she closed the door upon Will, outward bound for the funeral. “You’d think he’d found a fortune, not lost one,” the melancholy creature had commented, warmed by that youthful sunshine. “I reckon he wasn’t happy hartin’ Jinny’s business,” Caleb had surmised. “And to be happy is as good as a fortune.” Upon which Martha, who was equally in the passage “to see Will off,” had surprised them by a sudden sob. “She’s thinkin’ of that poor drownded young man,” Caleb had apologized, leading her gently upstairs. “Oi do hope Will’ll keep a proper face for the funeral.”

That appropriate face, however, had continued to be Martha’s, and the explanation thereof when they were alone had surprised Caleb more than the sob.

“I knew she’d rob me of Will. I knew it from the first moment she wanted to read his letter to me.”

“Rob you of him!”

“They’re in love. Are you blind?”

“You don’t say! Lord! Little Jinny! Why, she’s a baiby!”

“A cunning woman. Came after him even when you’d have thought he was safe behind the flood! This letter will be all that’s left to me! You mark my words!”

“Don’t, dear heart. You’re wettin’ the letter—it’ll spile. But dedn’t Oi leave my mother to come to you, as the Book commands?”

“That’s different. He’s all I’ve got. I can’t trust him to Jinny—she’s too flighty—always singing.”

“Sow’s the birds, but look what noice nests they make! ’Tain’t as if ’twas that Purley gal as Bundock warned us of, allus lookin’ at herself like a goose in a pond. We ought to be thankful as Will’s showed sow much sense. There’s plenty o’ good farmers along the road, but there’s no weeds to Jinny even three fields back.”

“I don’t wonder you go kissing her! Pity you can’t marry her yourself!”

“Oi’d have no chance agin Will’s looks, dear heart. He takes arter his mother, ye see.”

Dulcifying as this jocose finale had proved, it did not diminish the awkwardness of now meeting Jinny, but Martha, who had not even the consolation of finding an Ecclesia flourishing in Chipstone, was anxious to hear how far the flood had subsided from their beloved Frog Farm. They were both experiencing all the pangs of exile, aggravated by the discomforts of a house with monotonously boarded floors, forbiddingly fine furniture, and light and water coming unnaturally out of taps, and their grievances and yearnings for a return to reality now monopolized a conversation which Jinny strove in vain to divert to Will. She was reduced to looking at her cart for indications of the depths she had splashed through unobservantly, and could extract nothing about Will except that he insisted on paying for their board and lodging, and that this would surely take his last penny. “He’ll have to look for a job now, he’ll have no time or money to think of foolishness,” Martha told her meaningly. But this broad hint conveyed nothing to her. In her affection for the old woman it never occurred to her that she would not make a welcome daughter-in-law, now the competition was over. And knowing as a scientific fact that your ears burned if people had been talking of you—whereas hers had been tingling with the frost—she went away, all unsuspicious, in quest of the coveted young man.

The funeral was over now, she saw from the many coaches returning singly or in procession through and from the High Street. Surely the grandest funeral ever known (she thought), doubtless out of consideration for so tragic a passing, though somewhat confusing to the moral of her Spelling-Book. Elijah, whom she met changing from a coach into his trap, confirmed her impression of grandeur, and looked forward—on grounds of special information—to the toning up of the churchyard with a monument as big as money could buy, surmounted by angels, “not weeping, mind you, but blowing trumpets like Will’s.” Elijah wore a beautiful new top-hat, flat-brimmed and funereally braided. “Very lucky I had just got it for my wedding,” he confided to her.

“You won’t forget to take off the braid?” she smiled. “And when is it to be?”

“We’re having the banns read next Sunday. Blanche won’t wait a day longer, though I’m so frightfully busy through the flood—it’s a regular gold-stream.”

“And how’s Mr. Flynt’s arm?” she asked.

“He won’t let me see it now—I never knew such an obstinate pig. He’s gone to Dr. Mint.”

“What, just now?”

“No, no, he’s gone home—to Rosemary Villa, I mean.”

As soon as he was out of sight, Jinny turned Methusalem’s head back to the Villa. She hung about uncomfortably for some minutes in the thought that Will might be coming along or would be looking out of a window. But after ten unpleasant minutes she descended from her seat and fumbled shyly with the new brass knocker, feeling far more brazen than it. She almost cowered before the upstanding figure of the septuagenarian Mrs. Skindle—it vaguely reminded her of Britannia with a broom—but stammering out that she had forgotten to ask if the Villa needed anything, she ascertained that Will had not returned. To pitch her cart at the door was impossible, to go to meet him might lead to missing him, so there was nothing for it but desperately to prolong the conversation till he should reach home. Her tactics proved fatal, for her cheerful reference to Elijah’s coming marriage loosed upon her a deluge of hysterical tears, and she found herself the confidante of sorrows as tragic as Mrs. Mott’s. Poor Mrs. Skindle, throwing herself upon this sympathetic outsider, so providential a vent for her surcharged emotions, vociferated that all her children had abandoned her, that she was to be put away in the poorhouse. In vain Jinny, standing in that bleak passage, her heart astrain for Will’s coming, strove to assuage a grief which irritated rather than touched her. She could hardly bring her mind to bear upon this creature with the broom, so inopportune and irrelevant did the outburst seem, so sordid a shadow on her own romance. With surface words she assured the poor woman that all this was only in her imagination. But Mrs. Skindle, though admitting she had only divined it, kept iterating that a nod was as good as a wink, and that she wasn’t even a blind horse. Her son had gone to see Blanche on the Wednesday and had come back with the announcement of his marriage next month, and Blanche had made it a condition that his old mother should be put away. “She’d pison me, if she wasn’t afraid for her swan’s neck. And so I’ve got to be put out o’ sight. ’Tain’t as if I can’t earn my bread with this broom and duster, but she’s too grand to have me charin’ in Chipstone.”

“Well, then, what prevents you going somewhere else?” Jinny asked impatiently.

“I can’t go traipsin’ about to new places and new faces at my age. And I don’t want to go agin ’Lijah neither—he ought to ha’ been married long since, and wasn’t it me spurred him on to look that high? And won’t he have the loveliest wife in Chipstone? What’s your game, trying to drive me away? Why, if I leave Chipstone I’d never see my grandchicks.”

“Well, but would you see them anyhow, even supposing they’re hatched?”

“I reckon there’s days I’d be allowed out and I could see ’em as they went by in their baby-cart.”

“Well, at that rate you’d be happier in the poorhouse.”

“Yes,” with a burst of weeping, “I’d be happier there. Happen I’d better go there.”

“But I don’t believe your son will let you,” Jinny reassured her, and tore herself away, miserably conscious of a sort of Nemesis for her strategic lingering. She dismissed the scene from her mind. But it added to the heaviness of her heart as she drove slowly about the streets with never a glimpse of the face she sought, and the ache of his absence began to be complicated by the fear that it was wilful, or at least not unavoidable. Surely it was not possible for three days to elapse without their meeting, had he been as keen as she. Even the funeral, she now felt grimly, was not an absolute necessity of life! He could have got out of it. No, there was something behind, more sinister than funerals. She went anxiously over her one brief episode of happiness. Had she done or said anything to offend him? Was it that, on reflection, he had resented the little trick she had played at the flooded farm in luring him outside his door? Yes, that must be it. And she had sillily rubbed it in with her last words: “You bet your bottom dollar on that!” But no, he could hardly be resenting the innocent device without which they would never have known the wonder of their first kiss. The wonder? But was it a wonder to him? Tumultuous thoughts of Blanche and more shadowy others tore at her bosom. He did not really care, did not really need her.

The sport of elemental passions, she drove vaguely around, hoping against hope to espy him. She was a creature of pure feeling—unsophisticated by fiction or drama—and darkling images of death came to her for the first time. And for the first time she let her work go undone. It was no mere apprehension of meeting “Mother Gander” that finally kept her from the courtyard of the inn, no mere sense that with the sweeping away of competition she could afford to neglect for once even the commissions she already held; it was the absolute distraction of her mind. She could have borne final separation more easily than this uncertainty.

As she jogged home, she realized miserably that Will had at last succeeded in stamping out her business, if only for a day.

IV

But on her way to church on the Sunday—thanksgiving was clearly due for her restored fortunes and the fast-falling flood—all her misery, which his Saturday silence had only intensified, melted away in a moment at the sound of his voice and the sight of his sling. To add to her rapture came the thought that, a turning later, she would have encountered Miss Gentry! But his exclamation: “Why, whatever became of you, Jinny? It’s been hell!” radiated so much heaven that the closing of his lips upon hers was almost a retrogression, perturbed as it was by her shyness in the open air. And, of course, she ought to have gone to the inn-yard where he had been waiting, she saw the moment he began explaining; that was the natural station for her cart to have come to. “Do forgive me making you suffer so,” she pleaded. “But I didn’t like to go in, with Mrs. Mott in that state!”

But Mrs. Mott had not been “in that state” he corrected almost laughingly. On the contrary, with her usual unexpectedness and extremism, she had reopened the bar immediately and served there herself in her handsomest dress, with the gold chain heaving once more on the bereaved bosom. Will himself had been forced to clink glasses with her. “He wouldn’t have liked to see us gloomy—like them Peculiars,” she had said. “He was always one for jollity and life.”

The anecdote enhanced the lovers’ own joy of life, and though Jinny steered for church (if by a zigzag path to avoid other worshippers) they never got out of the fir-grove, where a tree sapped by the flood presented a comparatively dry seat amid the sodden gull-haunted ways. Perhaps it was the thrushes that encouraged them—despite the dankness—to “stick to it, stick to it.” It was certainly more comfortable for kissing, Jinny shamelessly confessed, snuggling into the cloak he had bought to cover his sling. “When we stand up, you’re too proud to stoop,” she laughed blissfully. “You make me crane my neck up.”

“That’s only through the sling,” he apologized.

“Never mind—you’re not such a Goliath—nothing so tall as Elijah!”

His eyes blazed fiercely. “Why,” she laughed, “you don’t mind not being tall?”

“Of course not,” he said mendaciously. “Only you haven’t been measuring yourself against Elijah, I hope.”

“Measuring myself—?” she began, puzzled. Then her silvery laugh rippled out. “Oh, you jealous goose! But his size’ll be a bit awkward for Blanche, won’t it?” Then a sudden memory flushed both their faces, and hastily drawing a copy of the Chelmsford Chronicle from his pocket, he directed her attention to the thrilling accounts of the great flood and the greater funeral, and her fitful attempts to peruse them constituted the only rational moments of the morning.

It was odd how the reflection of events in the mighty Essex organ seemed to redouble their importance, and how even Will swelled in Jinny’s eyes when she saw him catalogued among “leading citizens” present at “the last obsequies of the popular proprietor of ‘The Black Sheep.’ ” And if Will failed to loom as large as Charley—whose death, fortunate in its journalistic opportunity, instead of being swamped by the flood, came as its climax—nevertheless he appeared in print no fewer than three times. The second occasion was the destruction of “The Flynt Flyer,” and this obituary was so long and complimentary that it almost made amends for his loss, even though he knew the details to be highly imaginative. In the third notice he owed his eminence to his father, who, Jinny learned with surprise, had been the beneficiary of a miracle. “Among the most singular of the effects produced by the Bradmarsh floods,” ran the paragraph that drew Caleb from the long obscurity of his seventy winters and which was as prolix and breathless as a sentence of Mrs. Purley’s, “may be cited the fact of a small cornstack some four yards long, recognized by a shepherd named Peartree as belonging to Mr. Caleb Flynt, of Frog Farm, father of Mr. William Flynt, the lamentable destruction of whose coach and horses under sensational circumstances is recorded in another column, having been lifted from its place by the waters that so suddenly burst upon this remote homestead; and, after floating about at their mercy, like a dismasted and rudderless ship, being deposited in safety in a higher field, wholly uninjured, save by the wet—in as firm and compact a condition as before the flood—and, apparently, without a single blade of straw in its body or its roof having been disturbed from its relative position, while other stacks in the same field, belonging to his former employer, Farmer Gale, were almost totally ruined.”

“Oh, Will, I’m so glad,” said Jinny. “I don’t mean about Farmer Gale.”

“I do. Mean hunks! Think what he paid dad all those years. But is it true about our stack, I wonder. Papers aren’t always correct.”

“Aren’t they?” She nestled closer.

“Oh dear no. You should have been in America! Haven’t you noticed it says Elijah rescued us? Such a mix-up with his housing us. That’s why I didn’t tell poor old dad till I could run up and see for myself.”

She moved back. “Oh, is that what you came for?”

“Of course not, darling. But being here, I may as well have a look.”

“Well, you’ll be able to, while I’m at church. I suppose you wouldn’t come,” she added shyly.

“Church?” he laughed. “Why, it’s nearly over!” He pointed to a pale, struggling sun that had well passed its zenith.

V

Mr. Fallow was, in fact, just at his Fifthly and Finally, with Nip for sole representative of Blackwater Hall. That faithful congregant, discovering that Jinny had dodged him as usual, had set out for church forthwith, and was utterly disconcerted to find her pew vacant. It was noted, however, that he remained awake during the sermon, pricking up his ears at the recurrent word “Methuselah,” which no doubt sounded to him like his old companion’s name. Mr. Fallow’s timely sermon on Noah’s Flood proved no less rousing to the human hearers, though it began unpromisingly with the text: “And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years; and he died.” But Miss Gentry, already ruffled by Jinny’s absence, wondered why so much honour should be done to Mr. Bundock “Why preach a sermon against a postman?” she asked Jinny afterwards.

The fact was, of course, that those “sceptical sophisms” which Mr. Fallow took the opportunity to traverse and confute came from “The Age of Reason,” but as Miss Gentry had heard them only from Bundock, she did not know they were inspired by Tom Paine. At any rate it was satisfactory to have them demolished and the veracity of the Bible vindicated by the very arithmetical tests with which the atheists juggled. They had “set the story of Noah and his ark as on a level with the ”Arabian Nights“ and the ages of the Patriarchs as no less fabulous than the immortality of the giants of mythology.” Well, but here was the text, Mr. Fallow thundered: “And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died.” A statement splendidly bare—bare as Truth alone could afford to be. But let them follow it, these dear brethren and sisters, into all its ramifications, trace the scattered threads of chronology and exhibit their marvellous congruity. Noah’s grandfather lived nine hundred sixty and nine years; and he died. But at the age of 187 he had begotten Lamech, and at the age of 182 Lamech had begotten Noah. Methuselah was then just 369 years old when the hero of the Flood was born. And the Flood came, we were told in a later chapter, in the six hundredth year of Noah’s life; 600 added to 369 made 969. “And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years; and he died.” Had the figures made 970, the Bible would have indeed ceased to be the infallible Word of God, and atheism could have crowed, unanswered. For Methuselah was not in the ark; and every living creature outside was destroyed from the earth!

Whether he himself perished in the Flood, or whether—as the preacher preferred to believe, the aged patriarch had been removed—like his father Enoch before him—from the evil to come, was a minor issue compared with the glorious certainty that 369 added to 600 made 969 and not 970. Had Lamech or Noah been begotten one year later, or the Flood recorded as one year earlier, what a catastrophe for mankind! How the sophists would have gloated over their perverse arithmetic! Happily such discrepancies were the mere dream of the impious. “And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years; and he died.”

Nip refused to sit through the prayer for sceptics that followed. With the cessation of the word “Methuselah” his interest waned, and the dismal conviction overcame him that Jinny had gone back to the chapel. Tearing off at a great rate, he soon, however, scented the truants homing across the Common.

“Why, where have you been?” said his mistress, as if he were the sinner!

But his raptures at seeing united at last the twain he had done so much to bring together, served to suspend a debate that had brought the first cloud on the morning’s happiness. Having to walk smartly to Blackwater Hall with no time for dalliance, they had come at last to a serious talk about their plans, and it transpired that Will’s mind was playing about the new Australian goldfields. He seemed dangerously in the grip of the “yellow fever,” which, spreading from a Mr. Hargreaves and Summer Hill Creek, had circled the world in less than nine months. He recited to Jinny the legends of the new diggings, the quartz that was three-fourths gold, the aureous streams, the nuggets the size of melons. When he spoke of purchasing shovels and blankets, it was not, alas, for their joint home, nor were the “cradles” of his conversation indelicately domestic. How could he talk of going away, she asked, with tears in her eyes, when they had only just got to know each other? Well, of course, he didn’t mean to-morrow, with his arm like that! She needn’t begin to cry yet, but obviously this hidebound old England was no place for a man without capital. Did she expect him to become a farmhand to Farmer Gale? Of course he could go on shearing sheep and doing odd jobs and sink into a Ravens, always singing, with nothing to sing about! But if they were to marry, he must find a decent livelihood. Hard, irrefutable truths! If only—she thought—they had both been less silly while he still had his coach and horses! Impossible to suggest to a man like Will that she might manage to earn enough for him as well as for her grandfather! Of course if he had lost his arm altogether—but that was too wicked a speculation to gloat over! Had Methusalem been younger and stronger, the cart might perhaps have taken on extra rounds, with Will in command. But even that would probably have jarred his pride. No, he was a ruined man, and adventure—as he truly urged—was his only chance. And yet she clung tighter to his one good arm, glad of the respite the other had given her, and hoping that the Angel-Mother would somehow intervene to keep him in the country—if not the county—she hovered over. Sufficient for the day was the good thereof; here was Will, and Nip, and the Sunday pie in the oven—the first good dinner since Christmas, the preparation of which for her lip-smacking elder had served to keep her sane during those days of torturing suspense. How glad she was the meal would be worthy of their visitor!

A faint uneasiness did indeed begin to creep under her happiness as they crossed the rutted road that divided the Common from her gate, but she was hardly conscious what it was, vaguely putting it down to Nip’s dangerous attempts to caress them with his muddy paws.

“Here we are!” she cried gaily. “Lucky Gran’fer never asks about the sermon.”

He drew her to him. Hurriedly ascertaining that there was no eye or telescope bearing upon her, she submitted to the long ardour of his kiss. Then she drew him in turn towards the gate.

“But I’ve kissed you good-bye,” he said.

“Good-bye?” she repeated blankly. “Aren’t you coming in?”

“How can I come in?”

Even then she hardly realized the situation. Foreseen as it had long been, it had so softened in her own mind—especially after her comparative success in soothing down her grandfather—that she did not realize it remained in Will’s in all its original crudity. “You’re not thinking of that nonsense!” she said, smiling. “We’ll just lift up the latch and walk in! Won’t Gran’fer be surprised?” But her smile was uneasy.

“You’ve forgotten, Jinny, he won’t have me over his doorstep.”

“Oh, is that the reason you didn’t come all the week?” The greyness creeping beneath her happiness began to spread out like a clammy fog.

“Well, how could I have got to you? I couldn’t stand about the Common in the wind and rain on the chance you might catch sight of me.”

“I’d have stood about for you,” she said simply.

“And didn’t I stand about at ‘The Black Sheep’?”

“Yes, that was my fault, sweetheart. But anyhow we won’t stand about here.” And she tugged at his arm. “Where else could you have dinner?”

“I can get some at ‘The King of Prussia.’ I’ll be just in time if I go now.”

“You desert me to get dinner!”

“You know that’s nonsense, dearest, considering I could get both if I came in.”

“Then why don’t you come in?”

“You know I can’t.”

“Because of those few high words? How absurd!”

“We won’t go into that now.”

“Yes, we will. You don’t want to eat humble pie. But it isn’t humble pie,” she laughed, with a desperate attempt at merriment, “it’s steak and kidney pie! So there!”

“But, Jinny, he forbade me to cross his sill!”

“You old goose! He never thought we’d cross it arm in arm. Like this! Come along—won’t he open his eyes and wipe his spectacles!”

He shook off her arm. “It’s no laughing matter, Jinny. An oath is an oath.”

“An oath!” she repeated dully. The violence of that grotesque collision had blurred her memory of its minutiæ.

“You can’t have forgotten? He laid his hand on the Bible—he vowed to the Almighty I should never cross your threshold.”

She essayed a last jaunty smile. “Unless on your hands and knees. Don’t forget that part.”

“Is it likely I could forget such an insult?”

“Well then, that’s all right!” Her smile became braver. “We’ll crawl in together, two little babies. Come along, petsy.” And she stooped down comically.

“How can you be so childish, Jinny?”

“Isn’t it all childish? Down you go, Willie!”

But he stiffened himself physically as well as morally. “Give in to such a humiliation?”

“You won’t really be giving in,” she said, with a happy thought. “With only one arm, you can only come in on your hand and knees. So you’ll outwit him after all. Come along, poor little lopsided creature, Jinny’ll help you—and Gran’fer will forget to count your limbs, my poor brave boy!”

“It’s you that are forgetting,” he said harshly. “It’s impossible.”

“What’s impossible?”

“That I should crawl to your grandfather.”

“I see! It’s your pride you love, not me.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is.” She snatched her hand from his. “Nothing can bring you to your knees.”

“It’s not true. I’d go on my hands and knees to you, as if I was in chapel, and I’d crawl on ’em across your threshold and thank God for what laid on t’other side—but you see, Jinny, what breaks me up is that I made a vow too.”

“You?”

“You don’t seem to remember anything.”

“I dare say I was a bit dazed at all the silliness. But if you swore too not to cross our threshold, why, I’ll go and let you in by the lattice. And perhaps Gran’fer will be that tickled, he’ll laugh and forget about his cranky old oath. Or perhaps he’ll reckon you have scrambled in on your hands and knees. Oh dear, isn’t it funny? See you in a moment, Will.” She put her hand on the latch of the gate.

He shook his head. “Neither by door nor by window.”

“Didn’t I say I’d never cross your doorstep?” she urged. “And yet I came.”

“You came through the window.”

“Well, I’ll come by the door. There! That’s a fair offer. I’m not going to stick to silliness—when it’s so silly!”

“All very well,” he said coldly. “But you know you can’t get through my door.”

“Goodness gracious! Have I grown so fat?”

“Don’t pretend. You know it’s the flood. Besides, it wouldn’t be any good my going through the window. What I said when I raised my hand to heaven was that your grandfather should never see me in his house——!”

“Just what I said—I remember now,” she interrupted. “I said you’d never see me in Frog Farm. And yet you did—and lost your bet too.” Her face was gay again. “So I gave in first, you see, sweetheart, and now you’ve got to play fair.”

“You don’t listen—you cut into my words. What I swore was that your grandfather should never see me in his house unless he carried me in!”

Her gaiety grew hysterical. “Ha, ha, ha!” she laughed. “Grandfather’s given up carrying ages ago. I’m his deputy now. Oh dear!” She measured him with a rueful eye. “Well, I can but try!” And she put her arms round his hips.

“Don’t make light of an oath, Jinny.” He pushed her off with his left hand.

“ ’Twas you that made light of an oath—taking the Lord’s name over trifles.”

“I never took the Lord’s name,” he said sullenly. “I only lifted my hand.”

“Well, you can’t lift it now—and serve you right! You surely never expected Gran’fer to lug a sulky lout over his doorstep.”

“Of course not. I never expected I’d want to cross it. Why, Jinny, though you were there in the room, I was that blind——!” And his hand sought hers again.

“Leave me alone!” she cried. “You and your miserable vows!”

“I’d cut my tongue out if I could unsay the words.”

“You can unsay ’em more easily with your tongue in.”

“A man can’t go back on his sworn word. Women don’t understand.”

“So you said about horses. And nicely you managed yours! Oh, forgive me, I didn’t mean to crow. That was your misfortune. But this is your fault. It’s your pride you’re in love with; not me. Good-bye; Gran’fer will be starving.” She lifted the gate-latch angrily.

“But only good-bye for the moment,” he pleaded. “I can’t cross your threshold, but you can cross mine.”

She answered more gently, but her tone was tired and helpless. “And what would be the good, unless you and Gran’fer make it up?”

“I’m not marrying your grandfather!”

Something patronizing in the sentence jarred afresh. “You’d better go back to Blanche—it’ll be too late soon.”

“I wouldn’t touch Blanche with Bidlake’s barge-pole!”

The magnificence of the repudiation had its effect—it swamped in both the recollection that it was Blanche who had done the refusing.

“You don’t expect me to give up Gran’fer at his age?” she said more mildly.

“We’ll get him a minder—when I come back from Australia!”

Australia put the climax to her weariness. “Oh, yes, I don’t wonder it’s so easy for you to go.”

“It isn’t easy for me to go, even as far as Chipstone,” he protested passionately. “But it’s your grandfather you love, not me.”

“I love you both. Only think how old he is. It’s like quarrelling with a child. And he is in his second childhood almost, though I wouldn’t say it to anybody else. There are times when he seems quite his old self, wonderfully strong and sensible, but there are moments when he quite frightens me. He can’t bear to be crossed, and he forgets almost everything that happens nowadays.”

“Then perhaps he’s forgotten our upset!”

“No, that’s the unfortunate part. But we must just make a little joke of it. Down on your marrow-bones, Willie!” And she laid her hand on his shoulder with a last sprightly effort.

But even as his shoulder subsided, it swelled up again, like a pressed gutta-percha ball. “It’s all grandfather with you, your husband doesn’t count.”

“Husband, indeed!” She withdrew her hand as if stung. “You’re going quicker than your coach ever went.”

“Oh, very well—I’m off to Australia!”

“As you please. I’ll call for your box!”

“I’ll have no truck with a cart of yours.”

“There’s no other way of getting things to Chipstone,” she reminded him blandly.

“I’ll shoulder it sooner,” he burst forth.

“Ah, then you won’t be going just yet!”

“Damn my arm! I’ll not stay in this wretched country another fortnight! I’ll never look on your face again.”

She began humming: “A dashing young man from Canada——!”

His face grew black with anger, and he strode away even before she had passed through the gate.

VI

Righteous resentment saved Jinny from the collapse of the previous week. That dreadful gnawing of uncertainty was over. Whatever she had said, she was sure now that he did love her, even if she came second to his pride. That a way out of their difficulties would soon present itself to her nimble brain she did not doubt: her one fear was that he would find the way to Australia first, and it was a comfort to remember his helpless arm and his empty purse—“no money to think of foolishness,” as his dear old mother had put it. Already on the Tuesday after the unheard sermon, she found a means of communicating with him without a lowering of her own proper pride. For the fourteenth of the month was nigh upon them, and the shops—even apart from the stationer’s—-were ablaze with valentines, a few sentimental, but the overwhelming majority grotesque and flamboyant, the British version of Carnival. After long search she discovered a caricature that not only resembled Will in having carroty locks, but carried in its motto sufficient allusiveness to the quarrel with her grandfather to make it clear the overture came from her. Not that the overture looked conciliatory to the superficial eye. Quite the contrary. For apart from the ugliness of the visage, the legend ran: