Jinny the Carrier

Not a very refined couplet or procedure perhaps, but Jinny was never a drawing-room heroine, and the valentine was dear to the great heart of the Victorian people. Besides, do not the grandest dames relax at Carnival?

Jinny half expected a similar insult from Will by the same post, and though St. Valentine’s Day passed without bringing her one, she still expected a retort in kind the day after. And when Bundock appeared with a voluminous letter, directed simply to “Jinny the Carrier, Little Bradmarsh, England,” her disappointment at Mr. Flippance’s flabby handwriting was acute, though otherwise she would have been excited, not only by his letter, but by the foreign stamp, the first she had ever received. “So he’s still in Boulogne,” Bundock observed casually, lingering to pick up the contents. “I hope he’s sending you the money to pay Mrs. Purley.”

“Why should he send it through me?” she said sharply.

“Well, since he’s writing to you, it would save stamps, wouldn’t it? I do think it was rough on Mrs. Purley, though, a wedding breakfast like that, though I expect he bought his own champagne—and clinking stuff it was, nigh as good as the sherry at poor Charley’s funeral. However, she’s marrying her own daughter now—Mrs. Purley, I mean—and lucky she is too to have escaped young Flynt, who is off to Australia without a penny—looks to me almost as if they’re hurrying on the marriage so that Will may be best man before he goes, he and ’Lijah are that thick! He, he, he! Funny world, ain’t it? You’ve heard my riddle perhaps—Why are marriages never a success? Because the bride never marries the best man! He, he! Well, she came near doing it this time—he, he, he! Though whether she’s the best woman for either of ’em is a question.”

“That’s their own business,” Jinny managed to put in.

“So ’tis, but with ’Lijah a member of the Chipstone Temperance Friendly Society, he’ll hardly like a wife who washes her head in beer.”

“What nonsense! How can you know that?”

“Fact. It’s to make her hair wavy. There’s nothing her brother Barnaby don’t let out to my poor old dad. She was at it the day you all came to the Farm. It wasn’t that she had her bodice off and her hair down after the douche,”—Bundock seemed to savour these details—“she didn’t want him to smell it.”

“Well, you seem to smell out everything,” she said severely.

“I do have a nose like Nip’s!” he chuckled. But although Mr. Flippance’s letter was under it, he was forced to go off without even discovering that it did contain a financial document. Very amazed indeed was Jinny to see it drop out, this IOU, which was for herself and not Mrs. Purley, and represented half a crown! Retiring to her kitchen, she studied the large-scrawled pages.

Many and mixed were Jinny’s feelings as she ploughed through this bulky document, swollen by the opulent handwriting. Having no notion about investments, she vaguely imagined that Spanish robbers had impounded Cleopatra’s money, and it added to her sense of the unsettled state of the Continent. As for the IOU, she was angrily amused to think that he had already paid her the half-crown on the very morning of the bacon and mushrooms so fondly recalled, and that she had bought him his wedding present—a Bible—with it. To pay little debts twice over while defrauding the big creditors (and she had reason to think Miss Gentry as well as the Purleys had been left unpaid) seemed to her only an aggravation of fecklessness. But perhaps the Flippances had not meant to be dishonest: it was those Spanish freebooters that were to blame, who had captured the gold destined for Little Bradmarsh. The humiliation of his reference to Blanche was hard to bear—it made her want to dismiss Will altogether—but oddly enough a still keener emotion was kindled by Mr. Flippance’s obsession with Australia. Yes, Australia was in the air, it was a net into which everybody was being swept. Will was going from her—and to a place bristling with blacks and snakes and convicts and desperado diggers. Never had she received so perturbing a letter.

VII

In the menacing silence of Will, she began to study this interloping and kidnapping Australia. For it was not only his silence that menaced: through the hundred threads of her carrying career—antennæ always groping for news of him—she learned that his resolve was fixed. Indeed, Frog Farm was almost the only place on her rounds where his departure was not talked of. At the fountain head she could collect no information, for Martha was the only person she now saw there and the old lady seemed anxious, after receiving her parcels, to rush back to the clearing up of the colossal mess of the receded flood: a work in which the scrupulously invisible Will was understood to be lending a hand almost as vigorous as his father’s, albeit a single hand. But if the other was still in its sling, it was getting dangerously better, she gathered from Bundock’s father.

That he would go without another word to her was highly probable. Was there not in Finchingfield a hot-tempered farmer who had kept silence for seven years after his wife’s death? Miss Gentry, who in her Colchester days used to make his wife’s gowns—the lady riding in behind him to be measured—said it was from remorse because he had once used an improper expression to her. And this same Essex obstinacy was liable to manifest itself in less noble forms, as her grandfather’s feuds had proved abundantly. Will would shake off the soil of old England as surlily as he had shaken it off in his boyhood. As he had run away from his parents, so he would now run away from her, though far more unreasonably. But this time she would at least know where he was going, and her tortured soul reached out hungrily to picture his new world. The Spelling-Book was absolutely blank about Australia—how empty and worthless loomed that storehouse of information, with this gigantic lacuna!—but from a bound magazine volume of Miss Gentry’s, borrowed for the first time, she drew confirmation of her worst fears. It was a place that needed many more stations and out-stations of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and there were mosquitoes that could only be kept off by lighted torches, and biting spiders as big as your palm; after frying at 105 in the shade, you might shiver the next moment in the icy blast of the “Southern Buster.” And there were dust-winds to boot. If you went to the cemetery of Port Phillip, you would see that the majority of deaths were between the ages of thirty and forty. This premature mortality was due to the excessive drinking of cold water natural in so droughty a country. What a blessing that Will was not, like Mr. Skindle, a member of the Temperance Friendly Society! Nor was the labour market, congested as it was with ticket-of-leave men and bounty-emigrants from England, really superior to that of the old country, while house-rents were twice as high. As for the interior, another number of the magazine contained a story in which “an ill-favoured man with his arm in a sling” was pursued by a bull amid mimosa swamps in a setting of blacks with tomahawks and whites with pistols. “The Bull and the Bush,” she murmured whimsically to herself, but at heart she was cold with apprehension.

Then by a strange coincidence she found reassurance. Calling on Mrs. Bidlake in her confinement, she found the mother well and the new child vigorous. But it was not from their condition merely that emanated the novel atmosphere of happiness that radiated over the household: perhaps, indeed, the well-being was only a consequence of the happiness. For the Bidlakes, too, were off to Australia, though not to the goldfields. The cloud over the family had lifted at last. Not that Hezekiah had been proved innocent, but that he was become opulent. Released on ticket-of-leave, the sturdy ploughman had got a position with a cottage and garden in that “splendid suny clim” as he now called it, and then, just as he was about to send for Sophy and Sally, he had won six hundred and forty acres on the outskirts of Port Phillip in a lottery run by the Bank of Australasia! If he could borrow the capital from the bank, as was not improbable, he would be able to cut up his prize into ten-acre allotments and build houses on it—by that you simply doubled or trebled your outlay in a few years. His sister should have a house anyhow, and in the meantime her husband could help him manage or farm the vast estate. As for the “dere gels” there would be no need for them to work now, though if they wanted pocket-money they would be snapped up for service, and get as much as sixteen pounds a year each. He had already sent fifty pounds towards the passage-money, and would raise more when he knew if they would all come out, and moreover he understood that there was a Family Colonization Society in London to which Ephraim might apply for an advance. What a change, this going out of theirs, from that dreadful departure in the prison coach for the hulks and Botany Bay! Jinny, sharing their tears of joy, was vastly relieved on her own account at the paradise the grotesquely spelt letter conjured up, and she rejoiced to reflect that all that ancient barbarous harshness of magistrates and judges had led under Providence to the enrichment of Britain’s new soil with the sweat of her skilled agriculturists, and was even opening up new horizons for their innocent relatives. For assuredly this was a paradise on earth, if Hezekiah’s letter was not a shameless lure for his brother-in-law.

Think of tea at eighteenpence a pound—even a shilling if bought by the chest!—think of sugar at twopence-halfpenny, and neck of mutton at a penny a pound, nay, a whole sheep for five shillings. Think of pork at twopence and the best cows’ butter at sixpence; and after one has been reduced to turnips and dry bread, think of a land where ox-tails can be had for the skinning and sheeps’ heads and plucks by the barrow for the fetching away. A land where, as he wound up rapturously, any man who worked could have his bellyful, and where everything was plentiful except women, so that his girls would be able to pick and choose among the “gumsuckers” and have “cornstalks” for husbands. They shouldn’t marry among the “prisoners,” please God, for he didn’t reckon himself in that set, having done nothing to be ashamed of, though he did see now that threshing-machines were necessary when you had a lot of land.

“If they want women so badly, I might do worse than go myself,” said Jinny laughingly.

“No, no, whatever would Little Bradmarsh do without you?” said Ephraim.

“They did without me well enough,” she said bitterly. Indeed her first fine faith in human nature could not be mended as easily as the broken bridge, nor did the depreciatory allusions of her old customers to the deceased coach, and their compliments at her return, soften her cynicism. And as she spoke, she felt a sudden yearning to be done with them all: the infection of the new world began to steal into her veins too, but she knew her own exodus was impossible while her grandfather lived, and though she played with the idea and asked if she might copy Hezekiah’s instructions for the passage, her real design was to gather information for Will’s sake. It was very worrying though to copy the recommendations in the original spelling. “Of kors i don’t now wot the shipps is like nowerdies, but the nu chums ses they dont give no solt, onni roc-solt (solt is peny a pound here, peper 2d. nounc) and you’ll want thik warm close and moor beding.” There was an elaborate list of provisions necessary to supplement the ship’s dietary during the four weary months—it hardly needed copying, since it embraced a little of everything edible that would keep—but she was glad again that Will was not a temperance man when she found a bottle of brandy recommended as an indispensable medicine for the contingencies of the voyage.

Neglecting even the last instalment of her debt to Miss Gentry—had not the dressmaker given her the alternative of working it out?—Jinny began to acquire the longest-lived comestibles, storing them secretly in one of the ante-room chests. And it was by this concentration on Will’s interests that she managed to live through his dreadful silence, nay, to enjoy long spells of day-dreaming in which these edibles were for their joint Australian larder. The goldfields her imagination dismissed as bristling with “desperado diggers.” It was on the more idyllic images of her magazine article, written before the days of the discovery of gold, that her imagination fed. For though the writer denigrated the urban labour market, he admitted that there was plenty of room for rural labour, and then—with what seemed so uncanny a prying into her affairs that it flushed her cheek and made her heart beat faster—he postulated a young couple without capital setting up housekeeping together, and instructed them to take employment with a farmer while saving up enough to buy a small farm or herd of their own. The system, it appeared, was that the employer supplied rations as well as money-wages, and that while the husband worked on the land, the wife could do the farm cooking. (How lucky she had had so much experience, Jinny thought.) Nay, these rations, said the article (pursuing her affairs to what the blushing reader thought the point of indelicacy) would practically suffice for the children too, and when they grew up—-but her delicious daydream rarely went so far as this calculation of them as independent labour-assets.

The happy couple would also be permitted to keep a few cows, pigs, and fowls. Here the thought of Methusalem would intrude distressfully, and the difficulty of transporting him to the Antipodes. But when he had been left at Frog Farm in the loving hands of Caleb and Martha (become almost his parents-in-law), under promise of leisurely grazing for the rest of his life, with perhaps a rare jaunt to Chipstone market for their household needs, this ideal solution only reminded her of the phantasmal nature of the whole scheme, for Frog Farm could certainly not be saddled with her grandfather. But lest she should remember too cruelly its visionary character, the day-dream would at this point dart off swiftly on the journey through the Bush in quest of an idyllic spot free from blacks and provided with a generous employer.

Fortunate that this journey was to be so inexpensive, there being no inns (not even “The Bull and Bush”), but every settler being compelled by a wise decree of this wonderful State to give the bona fide traveller board and lodging for nothing. What a lovely journey that would be—if only one dodged the blacks and the diggers and the swamps with the alligators. She saw herself and Will bounding along like kangaroos (with Nip of course in attendance, she did not intend to take up with a dingo instead) through mimosa-bushes (like the scrub on the Common, only gaudier), and eating their dinner-packets under giant gum-trees, so enchantingly blue, whose tops, five hundred feet high, one might climb so as to survey the route for signs of native camps or friendly farmers. If there was no settler in sight by the time darkness fell, they would just perch themselves like birds in a nest of high branches out of all danger, and go to sleep under the starry heaven, which she saw vividly with the old constellations.

Closer to the real was her picture of the tenement with which the ideal farmer (when found) would provide his young couple. There would just be a few poles driven into the ground to support the roof of gum-bark, with its hole to let out the smoke. But of course one need not live much indoors in that climate—despite the occasional vagaries of the “Southerly Buster”—and it would be all the easier not to have to spend money on furniture. Why, put in Nip’s basket, lay out Will’s razor and slippers, set out her Spelling-Book and the Peculiar Hymn-Book the young rebel had thrown into the bushes, hang up his hat and her bonnet, and the place already begins to look like home. As for Will’s box—presumably conveyed to the chosen spot by the local carrier in a bullock-cart—it is so large it will crowd out everything else and furnish the place of itself. Decked with a rug it will serve as sofa, covered with a cloth it becomes a table. Lucky she has not brought a box of her own, but has squeezed her things into his—in that wonderful, incredible fusion of two existences!

It was hard to wake from these day-dreams to the wretched reality, and yet Uncle Lilliwhyte profited from one of these awakenings, for her Australian hut had reminded her of his English specimen, and she hurried to see it and him. She found them both in a bad way. His wading overmuch in the flood in quest of salvage had brought back more than a touch of his rheumatism, while the winds and rain had left his shanty leakier than ever. They were both breaking up, the ancient and his shell, and she now did her best to patch both up. Already in her new affluence she had called in young Ravens to mend her grandfather’s bedroom ceiling and redaub the gaps in the walls, and it was simple to turn this Jack-of-all-trades and fountain of melody on to the derelict hut in the woods. The poor old “Uncle” had hitherto built his fire as well as he could on the ground on the leeward side of his hut; Jinny now installed an old stove which she bought up cheap at the pawnbroker’s and conveyed to the verge of the wood. But the hole in the roof that might serve for Australia would not do for England, and after Ravens had re-thickened the walls with fresh faggots and re-thatched the hut with shavings presented by Barnaby, Jinny was amused to find that what seemed an iron chimney turned out on closer inspection to consist of three old top-hats. Where the ancient had picked up these treasures—whether in the flood or in his normal scavenging—he refused to say. “Happen Oi’ve got a mort o’ culch ye don’t know of,” he cackled, enjoying her admiration of his architecture. She wanted to have a floor to the hut, but this, like the exchange of his sacking for a pallet-bed, he opposed strenuously. “Gimme the smell o’ the earth,” he said. “Ye’ve shut out the stars and that’s enough.” He accepted, however, a bolster for a pillow.

By such interests and devices, aided by her regular rounds, Jinny staved off too clear a consciousness of the inevitable parting, which would not even have the grace of a parting. But the inexorable moment was like a black monster bearing down upon her—and yet it was not really advancing, it was rather something retreating: it could not even be visualized as a shock against which one could brace one’s shoulders. There was the horror of the impalpable in this silent drift away from her.

But when at last the day of departure was named, and came vibrating to her across a dozen subtle threads, the negative torture turned to a positive that was still more racking. It was on the Friday—unlucky day!—that Will was to leave for London, and here was already Tuesday. Some of her threads conveyed even the rumour that, in order to save a little cash for his start at the Antipodes, he meant to work his passage. And here was she unable to pack his box or even to slip her provisions into it; doomed by all the laws of sex and proper spirit to watch—bound hand and foot as in a nightmare—the receding of the mate whose lips had sealed her his. By the Wednesday morning even her grandfather observed something was wrong.

“Ye ain’t eatin’ no breakfus.”

“Yes, Gran’fer, lots!”

“Do ye don’t tell me no fibs. Oi’ve noticed your appetite fallin’ lower and lower like the flood, and now there’s a’mos’ nawthen o’ neither. And ye used to be my little mavis!”

“You don’t want me to eat snails or worms?”

“ ’Tis your singin’, Oi mean.”

“There is Hey!” she chanted obediently.

“Ye’re the most aggravatin’ gal—minds me o’ your great-gran’mother. Ye need your mouth for eatin’, not singin’.”

After a sleepless night, unable to bear this inactivity, she ran round to the Bidlake lodgings to suggest that as young Mr. Flynt seemed to be sailing for Australia, it might be a neighbourly action to show him Hezekiah’s hints to travellers. But she gathered from the happy mother that the absent Ephraim had already talked to Will about the heavier clothes and the bedding, and that Will had said how fortunate it was he had sold off his summer suits, so as in any case to get the latest make at Moses & Son’s on his passage through London. Jinny suspected he had sold them off to raise funds for the voyage. Still the bravado of this pretence of a London outfit did not displease her. She learnt too that there had been a question of Will’s convoying the ex-convict’s daughters to their impatient parent, as the Ephraim Bidlakes would not be ready for ages, but it had been thought scarcely proper in view of their age and looks—a decision Jinny thought wise. Indeed, the idea that he was not to be thus companioned almost reconciled her, by contrast, to his departure.

When she got home she found to her surprise that her grandfather was entertaining Martha Flynt, who was far from the spruceness she usually achieved for outsiders of the other sex. She looked draggled and worn after her long and windy walk. What astonished Jinny most was that the old rheumatic woman should have trudged so far, and she opined that her business must be pressing and must be with herself. For it could hardly lie in the Christadelphian texts with which Martha seemed to be battering and bemusing the nonagenarian, whose great Bible lay open between them, and who was disconcerted to find her texts really there.

Martha had never set foot in Blackwater Hall before, so far as Jinny could remember, and very strange it was to see her sitting over her cup of tea which she must have made for herself at her host’s invitation. With all his perturbation over the texts, he seemed only too brisked up by this amazing visit from a female, the first unwhiskered being, save Jinny, he had met for many moons. It was a fillip he did not need, Jinny considered: the old good food again, the sweet security, the satisfaction of revenge, had made his eyes less bleared, filled out his flacked cheeks and given him a new lease of strength and sanity—a sort of second wind—and this visit might only over-stimulate him. She did not like the undercurrent of excitement that showed itself in the twitching of his limbs and eyelids, especially when Martha declared he could not be really accepting the Book as all-inspired if he believed man’s heaven lay in the skies. “Whither I go, ye cannot come,” she repeated.

“We’ll see about that,” said Daniel Quarles fiercely, and clenched his fists as if he meant to storm the gates of cloudland. “And ain’t ye forgittin’ ’Lijah what went up to heaven with a chariot and bosses o’ fire? That won’t happen to ’Lijah Skindle, damn him—he’ll have the chariot o’ fire, but he won’t git no higher. He, he, he!”

Martha was momentarily baffled by Elijah’s ascension, but recovering her nerve, she dealt John iii. 13, “No man hath ascended up to heaven.”

Partly to soothe the old man, partly to give Martha a chance of speaking out, Jinny here intervened with the suggestion that he himself should ascend up to his room and bring down the telescope to amuse his guest withal. Obviously relieved—for he felt himself in a tight textual corner—he hastened upstairs.

It was then that the old woman, bursting into tears, and clutching at Jinny’s arm, sobbed out: “Oh, Jinny, you’ve got to come back with me—you’ve got to come back at once!”

Jinny turned cold and sick. What had happened to Will?

“But what for?” she gasped.

“To Willie!”

Her worst fears were confirmed. “Is he hurt?”

“I wish he was a little,” Martha sobbed. “But even his arm’s all right now.” What Martha went on to say Jinny never remembered, for she was suddenly sobbing with Martha. But hers was the hysteria of relief, and when she at last understood that what Martha was asking was that she should come back and marry Will, so that he should stay near his mother, her heart hardened again. It was not that she made any attempt to deny her love—things seemed suddenly to have got beyond that—but Martha, she felt, knew not what she asked, seeming to have divined from her boy’s demeanour a lover’s quarrel, but without any inkling of the real tangle and deadlock. Even if she humiliated herself, as Martha half unwittingly suggested, it was all a blind-alley.

“My making it up won’t keep him in England,” she urged. “He’s got no money. And no more have I.”

She might have been more willing to make a last desperate dash of her head against the brick wall, had she understood how Martha had fought against her from the first and how pitiable was her surrender now, but no suspicion of that underground opposition had ever crossed her mind, nor did Martha now confess what indeed she no longer remembered clearly.

“But there’s room for you in Frog Farm, dearie. We’d love to have you. We’ve always loved you.”

“I can’t,” Jinny moaned. “It’s all no use. And I’ve got Gran’fer!” Indeed, Martha’s passionate plea had curiously clarified and steadied her mind, reconciling her to the inevitable. To go to Will was exactly what she had been yearning to do. But when the plea for such action came through Martha’s mouth, she could see it from outside, as it were, realize its futility and cleanse her bosom of it. She felt strangely braced by her own refusal.

“But I’ve got some provisions for the voyage,” she said, “that you might smuggle into his box—I know it’s big enough. And I do hope, Mrs. Flynt, he’s not going to work his passage.”

“I only wish he was, for he mightn’t find a ship. But you see Flynt would go and advance him the money and insist he must go steerage like a gentleman. He’s got no heart, hasn’t Flynt,” she wept, “he only wants to settle down in peace after Will and the flood, and sit under his vine and fig-tree.”

“Don’t cry—here’s Gran’fer coming down. I tell you what I will do, Mrs. Flynt, I will call for his box.”

“Oh, bless you, Jinny!” Martha fell on her neck. “If you come, he won’t go! That’s as sure as sunrise.”

“And then I can bring him his provisions,” Jinny pointed out sceptically, as she disentangled herself from Martha’s arms. Then both females were dumbed by the sight of the Gaffer returning in his best smock and with his beard combed! He tendered Martha the telescope with a debonair gesture. But Martha, her mission comparatively successful, departed so precipitately that the poor old man felt his toilette wasted, not to mention his telescope.

“She’s a flighty young woman,” was his verdict, “as full o’ warses as our thatch o’ warmin. Sets herself up agin John. Wesley as searched the Scriptures afore she was born.” And laying down his telescope, he turned over the pages of his Bible, and perpending her textual irritants and questing for antidotes, fell quietly asleep.

He was delighted when she returned the next afternoon, and he played Genesis v. 24, with a snort of triumph, by way of greeting. Martha tremulously countered with Acts ii. 34, and denied that Enoch had gone up to heaven, but it was obvious her heart was not in the game, and Jinny was glad when Ravens’ ladder was clapped against the casement and his padded knees appeared in an ascension of a purely terrestrial character, however celestial the melody that accompanied it. For the Gaffer had grown fond of this bird-of-all-work, now in the rôle of thatcher, and would hasten to hover about him, fussily directing the operations of his club, shears, or needle, correcting the words and airs of his songs, and even joining him in duets. Ravens’ encouragement of the older bird had become almost as alarming to Jinny as his shameless delay in sending in his bill and his positive refusal to charge for Uncle Lilliwhyte’s repairs, but this afternoon his advent was welcome, though the noise and jingle of the duets outside made her conversation with Martha difficult.

“He mustn’t go—he mustn’t go,” Mrs. Flynt sobbed. “It’s like the New Jerusalem coming down and going up again.”

Jinny quite appreciated that. “I thought he wouldn’t let me call for his box,” she said quietly.

“No, the pig-headed mule! He’s going to carry it himself.”

“In what? It’s not easy to get anything but me.”

“He knows that. That’s why he’s carrying it. On his shoulders, I mean.”

“With his arm just healed!”

“There won’t be much inside—he’s going to buy his things in London!”

“But the box itself—why, it’s big enough to pack himself in!”

“I know, I know, dearie. But Caleb says he carried it himself all the way from Chipstone. And chock-full, too!”

Jinny suppressed a faint smile. “I remember,” she said. “But perhaps he’ll break down before he gets it to Chipstone,” she added encouragingly.

“Oh, do you think so, dearie?” Then Martha’s face fell. “But he only means to carry it to ‘The King of Prussia.’ There’s a commercial traveller going from there in a trap to catch the same coach.”

“Then let us hope he’ll never get to ‘The King of Prussia.’ ” Martha shook her head. “You see, Flynt’s offered to bear a hand.”

“Oh, well!” said Jinny. “Then it’s all settled.”

“But he won’t have his father, either. Nearly bullied his head off. So Flynt’s going to keep behind him all the way in case of a breakdown.”

The picture of Caleb slinking furtively along the roads, behind his boy and the box, moved Jinny’s risible muscles, and she burst into a laugh that was not far from tears.

“Don’t, Jinny! I can’t bear it. You can’t love him, or you wouldn’t sit there and laugh. I always knew you weren’t the right girl for him!”

Jinny took this as the babbling of a mind distraught. “You’ll get over it,” she assured the old woman, patting the thin hand with the worn wedding-ring. “And he’s bound to come back.” The necessity of quieting Martha was fortifying: Jinny was like a queasy passenger saved from sea-sickness by having to look after a still worse sailor. She was the soul of the company at tea, staving off the duel of texts and sending Ravens into ecstasies over her quips and flashes. There was one bad moment, however, when Daniel Quarles candidly remarked to Mrs. Flynt: “Ravens should be tellin’ me as your Willie’s gooin’ furrin. Ye’ll be well riddy o’ the rascal.”

“Willie’s an angel!” cried Martha hysterically.

“How could there be angels ef there ain’t no heaven?” he queried, with a crafty cackle. “Noa, noa, Mrs. Flynt, it ain’t no use kiverin’ up as he’s a bad egg. But one bad in a dozen or sow is fair allowance. Ye’re luckier than me, what hadn’t even one good ’un. Now ef Ravens here had been my buo-oy——!”

Jinny saw Martha a bit of the way home. She had now found a new compromise. “Tell Will that Ravens will come with my cart.”

“And what will be the good of that?”

“It will save him the strain of carrying the box. And then as to-morrow’s my day, I shall have to meet my cart at ‘The King of Prussia.’ ”

“Oh, Jinny, then you will!”

“Yes—but don’t tell him. Only say Ravens will call for the box at eight o’clock—that will give him time to walk if he jibs at the cart for himself.”

It had all been arranged with the obliging bird-of-all-work, and Ravens had left Blackwater Hall that evening, carolling even more blithely than usual, when Jinny found—evidently pushed under the house-door—a mysterious cocked-hat addressed “Miss Boldero.” With trembling fingers she opened it, her heart thumping. “To hell with Ravens! You can keep him!”

This utterly unexpected flash of an utterly unforeseen jealousy, and the thought that he had been drawn so spatially near again, was all that stood between her and despair that last dreadful night.

VIII

When the fateful Friday dawned, it found Jinny fast asleep, worn out after long listening to a wind that would soon be tossing a ship about. In those harsh hours she had felt it would be impossible to get up and go on her round in the morning. But no sooner were her eyes unsealed, than there sprang up in her mind the thought that, did she fail her customers to-day, gossip would at once connect her breakdown with Will’s departure. So far, she had reason to believe, Martha’s guess at their relations had not penetrated outside. But eyes were sharp and tongues sharper, and she must not be exposed to pity. Under this goad she sprang up instanter and did her hair carefully before the cracked mirror and dressed herself in her best and smartest. She would go around with gibe and laughter and fantasias on the horn, and whatever was consonant with celebrating the final retreat of the coach.

The morning was quiet after the blustrous night, but the year, like her fate, was at its dreariest moment—no colour in sky or garden, no hint of the Spring—and at breakfast a reaction overcame her. But this time her grandfather did not observe her depression: he was too full of the crime of ’Lijah, who—according to Martha—was putting his mother in the Chipstone poorhouse prior to installing his bride in Rosemary Villa. So garrulous was he this morning that Jinny—her mind morbidly possessed by a story of a miner who was found dead of starvation in the Bush with a bag of gold for his pillow—ceased to listen to his diatribes, retaining only an uneasy sense that he was twitching and jerking with the same excitement as when Martha had first come. “And Oi count ye’ll be doin’ the same with me one day,” she heard him say at last, for he was shaking her arm. “But Oi’d have ye know it’s my business, not yourn—Daniel Quarles, Carrier.”

Jinny wearily assured him that there was no danger of her ever marrying, and she felt vexed with Martha for coming and starting such agitated trains of thought in his aged brain. Possibly the foolish mother might even have broached to him her desire to rob him of his granddaughter.

“Ye ought to be glad Oi’ve give ye food and shelter and them fine clothes ye’ve titivated yourself with,” he went on, unsoothed, “bein’ as there ain’t enough in the business for myself. ’Tis a daily sacrifice, Jinny, and do ye don’t forgit it.”

The prompt arrival of Ravens made a break, but she had to cancel with thanks her request for his services with the cart, and then, when the old man was settled at his Bible, and her bonnet and shawl were on, she collapsed in the ante-room, sinking down on the chest in which she had hoarded Will’s provisions, and feeling her resolution oozing away with every tick of the Dutch clock. Impossible to whip up a pseudo-gaiety, to make the tour of all these inquisitive faces! And through the lassitude of her whole being pierced every now and then her grandfather’s voice, crying “Tush, you foolish woman!” She knew it was not meant for her, but for an imagined Martha whose texts he was confuting, but it sounded dismally apposite, and when once he declared “Wiser folks than you knowed it all afore you was born,” she bowed her head as before the human destiny.

When the clock struck nine, he came stalking in. “Why, Jinny! Ain’t to-day Friday?”

She raised a miserable face. “Yes, but I’m going to-morrow instead!”

“To-morrow be dangnationed!” he cried, upset. “Oi’ve, never missed my Friday yet.”

“But I don’t feel like going to-day.”

“That’ll never do, Jinny. Ye’ll ruin my business with your whimwhams and mulligrubs. And it don’t yarn enough as it is.”

“There’s no competition—it doesn’t matter now.”

“And is that your thanks to the Lord for drowndin’ Pharaoh and his chariot and hosses?”

But she put her head back in her hands. “Do let me be!” she snapped.

“Don’t ye feel well, Jinny?” he said, with a change of tone. “Have ye got shoots o’ pain in your brain-box?”

“I’m all right, but I don’t want to go to-day. I should only make muddles.”

“We don’t make muddles,” he said fiercely.

“Let me be. I can’t harness.”

“Well, then Oi’ll do it, dearie. You just set there—Oi’ll put the door a bit ajar and once you’re in the fresh air you’ll be all right.”

She heard him shuffle back into the living-room and thence into the kitchen as the shortest way to the stable, and then, almost immediately, she became aware of a little noise at the garden-gate. She was sitting opposite the clock, and through the slit at the doorway she beheld, to her amaze, a red-headed figure outside the gate, sitting on a box and mopping its brow as it gazed sentimentally at the cottage. Even in the wild leaping of her pulses, the grotesqueness of their both sitting gloomily on boxes—so near and yet so far—tickled her sense of humour. But as she sat on, smiling and fluttering, she saw him rise, cast a cautious look round, open the gate, and steal towards the living-room. In a bound she was within and waiting by the closed casement, and as his expected peep came, the lattice flew back in his face and her hysteric mockery rang out.

“I thought you’d never look on my face again!”

It was almost a greater surprise than when she had appeared with Methusalem walking the waters, for he had counted her just as surely set out on her Friday round as the sun itself, and his sentimental journey safe from misunderstanding (or was it understanding?).

“Oh, don’t cackle!” he snarled. “I might have guessed you’d try to catch me.”

She gulped down the sobs that were trying to strangle her speech. How glad she was that she had on her best frock! “I overslept myself!” she said gaily. “Gran’fer’s harnessing. I see you’ve brought your box! You’re just in time!”

“I haven’t brought my box!” he snapped.

“Do ye don’t tell me no fibs,” she parodied.

“I mean, it’s going from ‘The King of Prussia.’ ”

“Really? Well I’ll take it over the bridge for you.”

“Thank you! I’m taking it there myself.”

“This don’t seem the shortest cut to Long Bradmarsh,” she observed blandly.

He glowered. “Shows how easily I can carry it. I’m having a good-bye look at all the old places.”

But below this surface conversation they were holding one of their old silent duologues. Jinny’s heart was beating fast with happiness and triumph as her eyes told him he would never get away now, and he, hypnotized by that dancing light in them, dumbly acknowledged he was self-trapped. Yet how they were going to get out of their impasse, and how his pride was to be reconciled with their reconciliation, neither had the ghost of an idea. “I see,” she replied, as if accepting his explanation of his visit. “But as to this old place, I’m afraid Ravens has rather changed the look of it with his new thatch.”

He snorted at the name.

“But you’ll find it unchanged inside,” she added affably, “if you come in.”

“Don’t begin that again! You know I can’t.”

“Dear me! I had forgotten that old nonsense. Well, you can come nearer and peep in.” Her face shone at the window.

His face worked wildly with the struggle not to approach hers. “I did have a peep. Good-bye, I’ve got the coach to catch.”

“Well, the cart will be ready in a moment. Gran’fer is so slow harnessing. Hark! Nip’s getting impatient.”

He raised his hat. “Thank you, but I told you I was my own carrier.”

“Good-bye, then. Pity you came so out of your way.”

He turned, and his feet dragged themselves hopelessly gateward.

She waved her hand desperately through the casement.

“Good luck, Will! Hope you’ll strike plenty of nuggets!”

“Thank you, Jinny!” He opened the gate.

“You’ll let me know how you’re getting on.”

“If you like!” The gate clicked behind him. Her mother-wit leapt to stave off the moment beyond which all her frenzied questing for some solution would be waste.

“Oh dear me, Will! Where is my memory going? Put your box in the porch a moment, will you?”

“What for?”

“I’ve got a few little things for the voyage—I really forgot.”

“Oh, Jinny!” He came back through the gate. “But I don’t need to bring the box to the door. I’ll take the things from you through the window.”

“But I want to pack them in properly—I can’t on the road.”

“There’s nobody passing.”

“You never can tell. We don’t want Bundock——”

“But I’ll pack them in myself.”

“I’d never trust a man—in fact I expect I’ll have to repack all the rest. Look at Mr. Flippance.”

But still he hung back. “There’s lots of room.”

“I know. Like a sensible man you’re getting your outfit in London. Bring it along. Or shall I lend you a hand?”

“No! No!” He hurriedly shouldered the huge box and Jinny heard its contents shifting like a withered kernel in a nutshell. It was the same American trunk with the overarching lid, and as he swaggered up the garden with it, it seemed to her as if time had rolled back to last Spring. But what comedies and tragedies had intervened between the two box-carryings, all sprung from the same obstinacy! And yet, she felt, she did not love him the less for his manly assertiveness: how sweet would be the surrender when their sparring was over and her will could be legitimately embraced in his, held like herself in those masterful, muscular arms.

Her mind was really in her Australian hut as he dumped the box at her feet. No, it would hardly do for a table, she thought, with that lid-curvature. Then she braced herself for a tricky tussle.

“Well, where’s the goods?” he said lightly.

“Don’t be so unbelieving—they’re in that spruce-hutch. Four months, you know, you’ve got to provide against.”

“I know,” he said glumly, unlocking his trunk and throwing up the lid violently. He would have liked to smash the springs. But the lid, lined with cheap striped cloth, stood up stiffly, refusing to give him a pretext for postponing his journey.

Jinny from her doorway gazed at the jumble in the great void.

“Shove it forward a bit,” she said carelessly, moving backwards within.

“What for?”

“Your end of the box is not under cover.”

“Why should it be?”

“It might rain and spoil your things—I’m sure I saw a drop.” She tugged at the handle and the trunk slid along the porch and some inches over the sill. Unostentatiously he pulled it back a bit, but she jerked it in again. “Do leave it where I can see the things,” she said with simulated fretfulness. “Good gracious!” She drew out the frock-coat he had sported for the Flippance wedding. “What’s this grandeur for?”

“Oh, for funerals and things like that!”

“In the Bush? And fancy packing it next to the blanket. It’s all over hairs. I’ll brush it and sell it for you—Ravens will be wanting one for the wedding.”

“What wedding?” he demanded fiercely.

“Mr. Skindle’s, of course. Weren’t you invited?”

He winced, and unrebuked she threw his wedding raiment over the provision-chest. “We’d best keep this on top,” she said, drawing out the blanket, “else you won’t get at it.”

“I expect you’ll be married by the time I’m back,” he remarked with aloofness.

“Not I. I’ll never marry now. I’ve seen too much of men’s foolishness.”

“Going to be an old maid?”

“If I live long enough!” Her vaunt of youth was dazzling.

“Well, I hope you won’t!” he said fervently.

“Won’t live? Oh, Will!”

“Won’t fade into that. You know what I mean. The sweetest rose must fade.”

“So will this muffler—fortunately. Haven’t you taken your dad’s ‘muckinger’ by mistake?”

“No, no—you leave that be.”

“What a let of Sunday collars!”

“Weekdays too I like a clean collar.”

“Ow, this onrighteous generation,” she said in Caleb’s voice, “all one to them, Sundays or no Sundays.” She pulled up his cloak.

“You leave that cloak be!” he said, laughing despite himself.

“But now your sling’s off, you don’t need it.”

“Yes, I do. Let it be, please.”

But she unrolled it mischievously and a packet of letters fell out—her letters about the great horn.

“Well, didn’t I say men were silly!” she cried. “Fancy taking that to Australia.” And she made as if to hurl them towards the living-room fire.

“Give ’em to me!” He reached for them angrily, and that gave her an idea.

“But they’re mine!” Standing at the end of the box, which made a barrier between them, she held them mockingly just beyond his reach. He came forward, then perceiving one foot was right across the forbidden sill, he jerked himself back violently. Then balancing himself well on his soles, with a sudden swoop he curved his body forward to the utmost. It only resulted in his nearly falling athwart the open box. He recovered his balance and the perpendicular with some difficulty and no dignity.

“Take care!” she cried in almost hysterical gaiety. “You nearly crossed that time.”

“You give me my property!” he cried furiously.

“They’re as much mine as yours.”

“Not by law. You’ve no legal right to detain my property.”

“And who’s detaining it? You’ve only got to come and take it!”

His anger was enhanced by the sounds of Daniel Quarles returning with the cart, a carolling, lumbering, barking medley. It would be intolerable to be caught as though trying to cross the threshold.

“Give it me,” he hissed. “I don’t want to meet him.” And as she tantalizingly tendered the packet nearer, he lunged towards her at a desperate angle, and overreaching himself as she deftly withdrew it, fell prone into the open box, his legs asprawl in the air.

“Curl ’em in, quick,” she whispered, with an inspiration, tucking his legs in before he knew what was happening. But as the lid closed on him, he was not sorry to be spared the encounter.

“Get rid of him!” he implored through the keyhole.

“Business pouring in, Gran’fer!” she cried cheerily, as the Gaffer came up astare. “Bear a hand! No, no, not into the cart. It’s to wait here. There is Hey,” she began chanting.

“There is Ree,” came his antiphone, as he grasped the other handle. “Lord, that’s lugsome!” he panted, dropping it as soon as it was inside and letting himself fall upon it. “Whew!” he breathed heavily. Nip, too, all abristle leaped on the box and yapped hysterically, as though nosing for a rat. This was the last straw. Will, whose head the Gaffer was pressing through the far from inflexible lid, and who already felt asphyxiating, gave a vigorous heave.

“Why, it’s aloive!” cried the Gaffer, jumping up nervously. Then as the lid flew up, Nip was hurled into space and Will’s red poll popped up. “It’s a Will-in-the-box,” cried Jinny.

“Willie Flynt!” gasped the Gaffer.

“Yes, Gran’fer,” she said in laughing triumph. “And you carried him in!”

“Ha, ha, ha!” A great roar of glee came from the jubilant junior, and in the act of scrambling up, his knees relaxed in helpless mirth and he let himself fall forward once more in the box, in a convulsion of merriment. “Daniel Quarles, Carrier! Ha, ha, ha!”

“And see, Gran’fer!” cried Jinny in still greater triumph. “He came in on his hands and knees!”

Daniel Quarles’s bemused countenance changed magically.

“Ho, ho, ho!” he croaked. “On his hands and knees! Ho, ho, ho!”

Will’s spasms froze as by enchantment.

“Come along, Will,” said Jinny, hauling him out. “It’s a fair draw and you’ve got to shake hands.”

Will manfully put out his hand. “You nearly squashed me, Mr. Quarles,” he said ruefully.

“Ye wanted settin’ on,” said the Gaffer, chuckling, and he took the fleshy young hand in his bony fingers. “Ye sot yourself to ruin us. But what says the Book?” he demanded amiably. “He that diggeth a pit shall tumble into——”

“A box,” wound up Jinny merrily.

“Oi never knowed he was there, did, Oi’d a-tarned that key,” said her grandfather, guffawing afresh.

“And everybody would have thought me in Australia, and then after long years a skeleton would have been found,” said Will, with grim humour.

Jinny clapped her hands. “Just like Mr. Flippance’s play, The Mistletoe Bough!”

She had closed the house-door. A timid tapping at it, which had gone unobserved, now grew audible.

“There’s your dad!” said Jinny.

Will’s eyes widened. “My dad?” he breathed incredulously.

“Git in the box!” whispered the Gaffer, almost bursting with glee. “Git in the box!” His sinewy arms seized the young man round the waist.

Will struggled indignantly. “I nearly choked!” he spluttered.

“Sh!” Jinny with her warning finger and dancing eyes stilled him. “Just for fun—only for a moment!”

Her instinct divined that to let the old man have his way would be the surest method of clinching the reconciliation. He could then never go back on her later, never resent the trick played upon him. It would become his trick, his farce, it would provide a fund of happy memories for the rest of his life. And as she cried “Come in!” and the latch lifted and Caleb’s white-rimmed, cherubic countenance was poked meekly through a gap, while her grandfather, stroking his beard, composed his face to an exaggerated severity, Jinny felt that life was almost too delicious for laughter.

“Hullo, young chap!” was the Gaffer’s genial greeting. “What brings you here?”

“Oi—Oi happened to be passin’,” explained Caleb awkwardly, while his puzzled eyes roved from the girl to his senior, and then towards Nip, who was cowering in a corner, too nerve-shattered to leap on the lid again. “You ain’t seen my Willie?” He moved forward questingly.

The older man tried to answer, then a guffaw burst from that toothless mouth, and turning his back he blew his nose thundrously into his handkerchief, while his lean sides shook like a jelly. “Why ever should we see your Willie?” cried Jinny, saving the situation. “Ain’t he gone furrin?”

Caleb rubbed his eyes. “But Oi seen him at this door—he’ll be late for the coach.”

“At this door?” the Gaffer succeeded in saying, and then his handkerchief came into play again and he sneezed and coughed and blew like a grampus.

“Oi seen him just by the sill, swingin’ forth and back like a parrot on a perch.”

At that Jinny had some pains to keep a stiff lip, and even the box-lid quivered, but not with laughter, she surmised.

“I’m afraid you must have dreamed it,” she replied.

“Lord!” quoth Caleb, and dropped dazedly on the box. To see the Gaffer’s face when the lid shot up under his visitor was worth more than Mr. Flippance’s finest show. The very soul of old English mirth was there. You would have thought that this crude device had never entered human brain before, was as fresh as the first laughter of Eden. And what heightened the humour of the situation was that Caleb was by no means overpleased to find Will had no intention of catching his coach. Nor did he begin to enter into the spirit of the thing till, admitting that Martha would “exult in gladness,” it occurred to him what a surprise for her it would be to get her boy delivered back to her inside the box. Eagerly the two old men imagined the scene, catching fire from each other, improvising Martha’s dialogue for her, from her amazement at seeing the box back, down to the colossal climax, till the mere idea had them both rolling about in helpless quiverings and explosions. Nor could Will, though he said he’d be danged if he’d stuff himself in again, and groused he’d got cramp in every limb, altogether escape the contagion, while to witness the roisterous merriment of the two hairy ancients gave Jinny such an exquisite joy of life as not even her lover’s first kiss had given her. Such an assurance streamed from it of life being sound at the centre: a bubbling fount of sweetness and love and innocent laughter. It wiped out for ever the memory of that morbid doubt of the nature of things that had assailed her as she sat under the gaze of the stuffed owl in Mrs. Pennymole’s cottage, the day of the rape of Methusalem. Tears welled through her smiles as Will at last bade his father lend a hand in transporting the box to the waiting cart. It must return to Frog Farm, even if he was not inside it.

“And I don’t believe there ever were any provisions, Jinny,” he grinned, with an afterthought.

“Oh yes, there are,” said Jinny. “Look! And a bottle of brandy too!”

“You dear!” he began, but Jinny cut him short with warning signals. The sudden revelation of their relations might undo all the good of the spree, by reviving her grandfather’s apprehensions of desertion. Indeed, when the hurly-burly was over, he could scarcely fail to ask himself what this sportive intimacy of the young couple portended, especially as he had even in the past suspected the answer. The truth must be broken to him cautiously, and with that reflection came the chilling remembrance that all this hubbub and laughter had solved nothing, that the situation, though superficially eased, was essentially the same as before, that the problem had only been postponed. Putting Will in a box was not keeping him in England. He would probably have to sail just the same, and the pain of parting be borne afresh, and even if he remained, she could not abandon her grandfather. But she shook off these thoughts. Enough for the moment that Will was hers again.

“Oi’ve never laughed so much since Oi seen that Andraa at Che’msford Fair the day Oi fust met Annie!” said her grandfather, wiping his eyes, as she set off on her delayed round, with Will at her side, and Caleb and the box in the cart, and Nip bounding like mad along the muddy road.

But it was impossible to keep Caleb in mind. Will was too impatient and too famished a lover for that, and it is not often that you sit at your sweetheart’s side when you ought to be whirling towards the Antipodes. Caleb could not help seeing happy backs, circumplicated—in the more solitary roads—by arms, and the hope, first implanted by Martha, that he would be relieved of Will after all, and in so desirable a fashion, grew more and more assured, though the occasional rigidity of the bodies under observation unsettled him afresh.

“Aren’t you late for the coach?” he heard Bundock’s voice inquire at one of these prim intervals.

“No, too early!” laughed Will.

“But you’re going the wrong way!”

“The first time I’ve gone right!” said Will, and with magnificent indiscretion he turned and kissed Jinny.

“Oh dear!” Jinny gasped, red as fire. “It’ll be all over Chipstone by to-night.”

“I wanted the banns proclaimed as soon as possible,” he said, unabashed.

Then they became aware of a curious gulping sound behind them which drowned even Methusalem’s tick-tacks. They turned their heads. Caleb—convinced at last—had buried his face in the famous “muckinger” mentioned between them only that morning.

“What’s up, dad?” cried Will sympathetically. “Got a toothache?”

“It’s the joy at you and Jinny,” he sobbed apologetically. “And to think that some folk are near-sighted and can’t see God, their friend.”

“Meaning me, dad?” asked Will, not untouched.

“Meanin’ mother, Willie. Lord, what a state Oi left her in—all blarin’ and lamentation. ‘Have faith,’ Oi says to her. But Oi’m afeared she’s got too much brains and book-larnin’!”

“Oh, I say, dad!” laughed Will. “Wouldn’t Bundock like to hear that?”

“Bundock’s of the same opinion,” said Caleb, meaning the bed-ridden Bundock. “ ‘Few texts and much faith,’ he says to me once. And faith cometh by hearin’, don’t one of ’em tell us? Singafies the ear can’t take hold of a clutter o’ texts.”

“Oh, but surely Mrs. Flynt has faith?” protested Jinny.

“She’s too taken up with other folks’ faith,” Caleb maintained stoutly. “Wanted Mrs. Skindle to break bread with her and look for the New Jerusalem—she ain’t found much of a Jerusalem, poor lone widder. And wanted to baptize that Flip gen’leman, but he never would come to the scratch. And tried her tricks and texts on your poor old Gran’fer, she let out. But when it comes to takin’ a sorrow from the hand of God, her friend, she sets and yowls like a heathen what runs naked in the wilderness. Oi’m done with that Christy Dolphin stuff—it don’t bring the peace of God, and Oi’ll tell her sow to her head the next time she’s at me to be a Jew!”

He mopped up the remains of his tears. “And same as Oi did jine the Sin agog,” he added pensively, “how do Oi know she wouldn’t goo on gooin’ forrard?”