Jinny the Carrier

IX

If, in the very heart of the romp at Blackwater Hall, Jinny’s insight could perceive that this reconciliation of her two males (or her two mules as she called them to herself) had left her marriage problem unsolved, still more did afterthought bring home the sad truth. There was no way of leaving the old man, no way of adding Will to the household. The latter alternative she never even suggested. It would bring her husband into public contempt to be thus absolutely swallowed up by the female carrier, and supported as in a poorhouse. So far off seemed the possibility of marriage that the Gaffer was considerately left in ignorance of the engagement—the only man in a radius of leagues from whom it was hidden, though Will was constantly about the cottage, having supplanted poor Ravens as a house repairer. But ever since the Gaffer had clapped him in the trunk—and the old man had forgotten he was not the first to do so—his affections had passed to the victim of his humour, and he often recalled it to Will with grins and guffaws as they sat over their beer. “Ye thought to git over Daniel Quarles,” he would chuckle, poking him in the ribs, “but ye got to come in on your hands and knees! Ho, ho, ho!” He seemed to imagine Will called on purpose to be thus twitted with his defeat, though as a matter of fact the privation of his pipe was a great grievance to the young man, and supplied a new obstacle to his taking up his quarters there as son-in-law. But outwardly Will had fallen into Jinny’s way of humouring the old tyrant, and this parade of affection rather shocked her, for she felt that Will was more interested in the veteran’s death than in his life. Once when, recalling the delectable memory, the Gaffer remarked, “Lucky ye ain’t as bonkka as Sidrach, Oi count they had to make him a extra-sized coffin,” she caught an almost ghoulish gleam in her lover’s eyes. He had indeed lugubriously drawn her attention to a paragraph in the paper saying that six thousand centenarians had been counted in Europe in the last half-century. Evidently the age of man was rising dangerously, he implied. The worst of it was that Jinny herself, though she would have fought passionately for the patriarch’s life, found shadowy speculations as to the length of his span floating up to her mind and needing to be sternly stamped under. For she had told Will definitely that so long as her grandfather lived, she could neither marry nor leave England. Gloomily he cited Old Parr—he seemed to have become an authority on centenarians—who had clung to existence till 152. “At that rate I shall be over eighty,” he calculated cheerlessly.

“Oh, it isn’t very likely!” she consoled him.

“Well, it’s lucky we aren’t living before the Flood, that’s all I can say,” he grumbled. “Fancy waiting six hundred years or so!”

“I wish we were living before our flood,” she said. “Then you’d have your livelihood.”

“And what would have been the good of that without you? You’d have stuck to your grandfather just the same.”

No, there was no way out. Australia resurged, black and menacing, and finally she even wrote herself to the London agents about his ship, consoled only by the entire supervision of his wardrobe and the famous trunk. And the only wedding that followed on their engagement was Elijah’s. For—according to Bundock’s father—till that had become certain, Blanche had refused to marry, despite the calling of her banns. “I didn’t think that a man who once aspired to me could ever keep company with a common carrier,” was her final version to Miss Gentry. “It shows how right you were to spurn him,” said that sympathetic spinster, who had transferred her adoration of the Beautiful from the faithless Cleopatra to the clinging Blanche, and figured at the altar in her now habitual rôle of bridesmaid.

And it was on that very wedding-day—so closely does tragedy tread on the sock of comedy—that poor Uncle Lilliwhyte fell asleep in a glorious hope of resurrection. Jinny had not suspected the imminence of his last moments till the evening before, though she and Will had paid him several visits at his now weathertight hut. But she had become rather alarmed about him, and returning from her round one Tuesday, she set off alone, as soon as supper was over. Will had seen sufficient of her during the day, and it was understood he was to give his mother his company that evening, for Martha had fallen into a more distressful state than ever. “Will’s got to go just the same,” she kept moaning when Jinny came, “and Flynt vows he’ll never be baptized into the Ecclesia, and turns round and tells me I lack faith. Me, who’ve learnt him all the religion he knows!”

There was a full moon as Jinny set out with a little basket for the invalid. Nip trotted behind her, and the trees and bushes cast black trunks and masses across her path, almost like solid stumbling-blocks. The bare elms and poplars rose in rigid beauty in the cold starry evening. Death was far from her thoughts till she reached the hut and saw the sunken cheeks in their tangle of hair illumined weirdly from the stove, which lay so close to the patriarch’s hand he could replenish it from his bed of sacks.

“Just in time, Jinny!” he said joyfully. “Oi was afeared you wouldn’t be.” His excitement set him coughing and, frightened, she knelt and put her jug of tea to his lips.

“There! Don’t talk nonsense!” she said, as a faint colour returned to his face.

He shook his head. “ ’Tis the tarn of the worms at last.”

“Not for twenty years. Look at Gran’fer.”

“Oi can’t grudge ’em,” he persisted. “Oi’ve took many a fish with ’em, and Oi’ve been about the woods from a buoy-oy, master of beast and bird and snake, and Oi know’d Oi’d be catched myself one day. And that’s onny fair, ain’t it?”

“Don’t talk like that—it’s horrible.”

“Ye’re too softy-hearted, Jinny, or ye wouldn’t be here fussin’ over the poor ole man in the trap. And ef ye’d been more of a sport, ye’d ha’ understood it’s all a grand ole game. Catch-me-ef-you-can, Oi calls it.”

“It’s dreadful, I think—the hawks and weasels eating the little birds.”

“Then why do the little birds sing so? Tell me that! It’s all fun, Oi tell ye, and they’re havin’ it theirselves with the flies and the worms. Take your Nip now. [Nip, hearing his name, wagged his tail.] Oi’ve seen that animal, what looks so peaceful squattin’ there by the fire, stand a-roarin’ like when you shuts the flap o’ the stove time he tries to git at a rat-hole. Ten men couldn’t howd him.”

“He’s never got a rat anyhow,” said Jinny with satisfaction.

“More shame to his breed. Oi count he’s frighted away my fox all the same. There’s one what comes and looks in at me every evenin’ just like Nip there, onny wild about the eyes like. Oi reckoned he’d be squattin’ there to-night for a warm, too, friendly-like, but he’ll find both on us cowld soon, the fire and me.” And a racking spasm of coughing accented his prognostic.

“You mustn’t talk like that. You mustn’t talk at all. I’ll send Dr. Mint to-morrow.”

He raised himself convulsively on his sacking, throwing off the rags and tags that covered him, and revealing the grimy shirt and trousers that formed his bed-costume. His grey hair streamed wildly, almost reaching the bolster. “Ef ye send me a doctor,” he threatened, “Oi’ll die afore he gits here!”

“Do lie down.” She pressed him towards his bolster.

“Oi won’t take no doctors’ stuff,” he gurgled, as his head sank back.

“But why?” she said, covering him up with his fusty bedclothes. “You’re not one of us, surely!”

“A Peculiar? Noa, thank the Lord. Oi told ye Oi don’t believe nawthen of all they religions. Git over me, the whole thing.”

“But if you won’t have medicine, you must pray, like we do.”

“Ye don’t catch me doin’ the one ne yet the tother. Oi count Oi can git along without ’em as much as the other critters in the wood. They don’t have neither.”

“Yes, they do—at least Nip and Methusalem have medicine when they’re sick. I give it ’em myself.”

“Oi reckon that’s what makes ’em sick—relyin’ on Skindles and sech. Oi never seen a stoat nor a squirrel take physic, and ye don’t want nawthen livelier, and Oi never seen a animal goo down on his knees, unless ’twas a hoss what slipped. He, he, he!”

When the cough into which his gaggle passed was quieted, Jinny reminded him sternly that men were not animals, that he had an immortal soul, and she asked whether he would see Mr. Fallow or one of the various chapel ministers. That proved the most agitating question of all.

He sat up again, his face working in terror. “None o’ that, Oi tell ye. Oi ain’t afeared o’ the old black ’un. He’ll end all my pains, though Oi ain’t tired o’ life even with ’em—no, not by a hundred year. But do ye don’t come scarin’ me with your heavens and hells, for Oi don’t want to believe in ’em.”

“But I remember your saying once, we’ve got to have one or the other.”

“And Oi told ye Oi mislikes ’em both.”

“Not really? You wouldn’t really dislike heaven.”

He shuddered. “Lord save me from it! Oi’ve thought a mort lately about that Charley Mott—Oi used to see him drunk with his mates—and ef he’s in heaven among they parsons and angels, Oi warrant he’s the most miserable soul alive.”

“Lie down! I oughtn’t to have let you talk!” she said, so shocked that she charitably supposed his wits were going. This apprehension was enhanced when, just as her hand had pressed his relaxing form back to his bolster, she felt him grow rigid again with an impulse so violent that she was jerked backwards.

“Where’s my wits?” he exclaimed in odd congruity with her thought. “Oi’ve nigh forgot the teapot!”

She hastened to offer again the half-sipped jug, which she had stood by the stove. He waved it away.

“Not that! Gimme the spade!”

“The spade?”

“Ay, it stands in the corner—Oi ain’t used it since my old lurcher died. D’ye think he’s in heaven—Rover—and all they rats we digged up together?”

“You’re not going to dig up a rat?” she said in horror.

“No fear. But Oi won’t have nobody else ferret it out.” And from his bed he tried to shovel away the earth near the stove. But his strength failed. She took his spade. “I’ll do it. What is it?”

“ ’Tis in the earth,” he panted, “like Oi’ll be. And Oi reckon Oi’d as soon be buried here as anywheres.”

She turned faint. Did he mean her to dig his grave?

“This isn’t consecrated ground,” she said feebly.

“Oi count it’s got as lovely a smell as the churchyard earth,” he said. “But let ’em bury me where they will, so long as Oi don’t wake up. Ye ain’t diggin’, Jinny.”

Mystified and trembling, and wishing she had not come without Will, she stuck the spade in deeper and threw up the clods. Set her teeth as she might, she could not shake off the thought that she was digging his grave, and they began to chatter despite the warmth from the stove. The lurid glow streaming from it seemed sinister in the darkness of the windowless hut, and she paused to let in a streak of moonlight through a gap in the door. But the night outside in its vastness and under its blue glamour seemed even more frightening, and the cold blast that blew in made the ancient cough again. She reclosed the door, and with trembling spade resumed her strange task. Suddenly her blade struck a metallic object.

“That’s it!” he cried gleefully. “And ye wanted to put boards over it!”

More mystified than ever, she drew up a heavy old teapot of Britannia metal—never had she handled such a weighty pot.

“Pour it out! Pour it out!” he chuckled.

She held the spout over her jug, which made him laugh till he nearly died. But by thumping his shoulders she got his breath back. She understood now what moved his mirth, for though nothing had issued from the spout, the lid had burst open and a rain of gold pieces had come spinning and rolling all over the hut. It seemed like the stories the old people told of the treasures of gnomes and pixies. There seemed hundreds of them, glittering and twirling.

“All for you, Jinny,” he panted with his recovered breath. “All for you.”

“Why, wherever did you get all this?” she replied, dropping on her knees to gather the shimmering spilth.

“That’s all honest, Jinny, don’t be scat. ’Tis the pennies Oi’ve put together, man and buo-oy this sixty year and more.”

“But what for?” she gasped.

“For you. And fowrpence or fi’pence a day tots up.”

“No, I mean why did you do it?” Her brain refused to take in the idea that all this fabulous wealth was hers. “Why didn’t you live more comfortable—why didn’t you get another cottage?”

“Oi ain’t never been so happy as since Farmer tarned me out. To lay on the earth, that’s what Oi wanted all my life—onny Oi dedn’t know it.”

“Then what was the good of the money?”

A crafty look came into the hollow eyes and overspread the wan features. “They’d have had me, they guardians, ef Oi dedn’t have money. Oi wasn’t a-gooin’ to die in the poorhouse like my feyther, time they sold him up. Ef ye got the brads, they can’t touch ye. Do, the Master ’ould git into trouble. They put mother and me sep’rit from feyther, and when Oi seen her cryin’ Oi swore in my liddle heart Oi’d die sooner than stay there or tarn ’prentice. Oi dropped through a window the night o’ feyther’s funeral—for the Master had thrashed me—but Oi’d promised mother Oi’d come back for her, and ’twarn’t many year afore she was livin’ with me upright in the cottage. Happen you seen her, though she never seen you.”

“Yes, I know,” said Jinny softly. “She was blind.”

“Cried her eyes out, to my thinkin’. But Oi says to her marnin’ and night, ‘Cheer up, mother,’ Oi says, ‘so long as we’ve got the dubs, they can’t touch us, and ef they parish gents tries to lay hands on me, they’ll git such a clumsy thump with the teapot they’ll know better next time.’ She never seen the teapot, mother dedn’t, but she used to waggle her fingers about in it and laugh like billy-o.”

Jinny felt nearer weeping as she culled these spoils of a lifetime. Many of the coins were curious; mintage of an earlier reign. She was peering in a cobwebbed corner when the barking of Nip as well as a familiar footstep in the clearing announced a welcome arrival. How glad she was Will had not been able to keep away! And then suddenly—at last—came the realization of her riches, of the solution of her financial problem!

“Quick! Quick!” whispered the old man hoarsely, and signed to her to hide the teapot. To soothe him she put it swiftly in her basket.

“You’re sure there’s nobody else ought to have it?” she asked anxiously.

“Oi ain’t got no friend ’cept you and the fox. And ye don’t catch him in the poorhouse. But Oi’ll die happy, knowin’ as Oi’ve saved you from it. Don’t let ’em come in!” he gasped, as a tapping began.

“It’s only young Mr. Flynt.”

“Willie, d’ye mean?”

She blushed in the friendly obscurity. “He’s come to see me home.”

“He mustn’t come in!”

“I’ll tell him.”

She set down the basket and went out into the blue night. It was no longer terrifying. Will with his ash stick seemed a match for all the powers of darkness. But she drew back from his kiss. Death was too near. In whispers she explained the situation, forgetting even to mention the gold. “I oughtn’t to leave him—he oughtn’t to die alone.”

“Nonsense, sweetheart. You can’t stay all night with a dirty old lunatic!”

“Don’t talk so unchristianly, Will. You don’t deserve——!” But she shut her lips. She could not go now into the happiness the “dirty old lunatic” was bringing them.

“Make him up a good fire and say you’ll be back first thing in the morning. I’ll come and take you. There!”

“Couldn’t—couldn’t you stay with him, Will?”

“Me? You said he wouldn’t have me! And I haven’t got enough baccy on me.”

She went back tentatively. She found Uncle Lilliwhyte lying on his back on his sacks with closed eyes, and there was blood on the bolster. The earth had been shovelled in again and the soil flattened tidily with the back of the spade. The superfluous precaution—automatic effect of lifelong habit—had evidently cost him dear.

“He can come in now,” he said feebly.

“But he doesn’t want anything,” she explained. “You lie still.”

“Oi’d like him to come.” She went softly to the door and called.

“Here I am, uncle!” cried Will cheerily.

“ ’Tain’t you Oi want. But happen ef your mother ’ud come and talk things over——”

“My mother?” said Will, startled. Martha, he knew, would have the same repugnance as he to this feckless, grimy, impossible creature: an aversion which even the wasted features could not counteract.

“It don’t seem to git over she,” he explained, “but Oi never could hear proper, bein’ at the keyhole in a manner o’ speakin’. But ef she’d come and explain——!”

“Yes, she will,” said Jinny. “She must, Will.”

“I’ll tell her,” he murmured.

“He’ll bring her in the morning,” she promised emphatically. “You take a little more tea now and get to sleep.” She covered him up carefully and stuck a great log in the stove.

“Do ye take that fowlin’-piece, young Flynt,” he said, opening his eyes. “And be careful—it’s loaded.”

“Thanks, I’ll take it in the morning.”

“And there’s the coppers and silver, Jinny. That’s at the bottom o’ the sack Oi’m on. And old tradesmen’s tokens too.”

“In the morning—you go to sleep now,” she said tenderly. But she still lingered, reluctant to leave him, and was very relieved when Ravens (now become a woodman with an adze) looked in to see the old man, and, unembittered by the sight of the lovers, consented to pass the night in the hut he had mended.

X

Swinging home through the wood, through aisles flooded only with moonlight, the young lovers soon left the thought of death behind them. Indeed from the hut itself there had soon come following them the careless strains of the incurable caroller:

“What a hefty basket!” said Will at last. “Whatever have you been carrying the old codger?”

“It’s what I’m carrying off,” she laughed. “But give it me, if it’s too much for your poor arm.”

“It’s not so heavy as my box,” he smiled.

“But it saves carrying that,” she said happily.

“How do you mean?”

“That’s your farm in there—your English farm! Australia is off.” She enjoyed his obvious fear that the scene in the hut had been too much for her brain. “Goose!” she cried. “Goose with the golden eggs. Just take a peep.”

“There’s only your jug and teapot.” He was more mystified than ever.

But her happiness waned again when the riddle was read.

“You surely don’t expect me to pocket your money,” he said, as soon as his slower brain had taken in the situation.

“Oh, Will! Surely what is mine is yours!”

“Not at all. What is mine is yours.”

“But that’s what I said.”

“Don’t turn and twist—I know you’re cleverer than me.”

Her hand sought his. “Don’t let us have a storm in a teapot!”

But he rumbled on. “With all my worldly goods I thee endow—it’s the man says that.”

“You’ve been reading the marriage service.”

“And how would you know it, if you hadn’t?”

That suspended the debate on a kiss. “You see I’d be almost as bad as poor Charley Mott,” he pointed out.

“I see,” she said humbly. Indeed she felt herself so much a part of him now that she wondered how she could have failed to look at it from his point of view. Her defeat of his coach—under Providence—had humiliated him enough. To have turned suddenly into an heiress was an aggravation of her success; now to make him appear a fortune-hunter would be the last straw.

“But couldn’t I buy the farm and you rent it of me?” she ventured, with a memory of Hezekiah Bidlake.

“Everybody would think just the same——”

“Well, but somewhere else—where nobody knows us——?”

“You wouldn’t come somewhere else—not till I’m eighty!”

“Don’t be absurd! Anyhow you’ll look beautiful with a white beard.”

“Why not get him a minder with the money? Then we could go to Australia together.”

“Leave him to a stranger! He’d die. But so long as the farm was in England, it wouldn’t be so bad, even if I couldn’t come just yet.”

He did not answer, and as they walked on silently, her daydreams resurged, her nipped buds began bursting into wonderful flower. They parted at her door without further reference to money questions, but her face was brimming with happiness as the pot with guineas.

In that rosy mood—when her grandfather, nid-nodding over the hearth, roused at her return—she could not refrain from pouring out her teapot on the table, and changing his grumbles at her absence into squeaks of delight. She meant to pour out her story too, but he cut her short.

“That’s mine!” he cried, exultant. “That’s the gold Sidrach brought me!”

“No, no, Gran’fer. That comes from——!”

“But there’s the wery spade guineas!” He dabbled his claws in the coins.

“Oh, is that what they are? But there’s heads of Victoria, too.”

“That’s what he saved in Babylon. Dedn’t Oi say as he died warrum?”

“But you must listen, Gran’fer. Uncle Lilliwhyte——” she recapitulated the story.

“They’re mine anyways!” He scooped them up in his skinny palms and let them fall into the pot with a voluptuous clang. “Ye gits quite enough out o’ my biznus.”

This seemed so exactly the reverse of Will’s attitude that she found herself smiling ruefully at the way she was caught again between her “two mules.” But she could not thus lose her marriage-portion. “Uncle Lilliwhyte gave them to me for myself,” she said firmly.

“And don’t ye owe me back all the money Oi paid when your feyther died?”

Jinny was taken aback. “How much did you pay?”

“Hunderds and hunderds. Dedn’t, he’d a-been a disgraced corpse, and your mother too.”

Jinny was silent. The Angel-Mother seemed rustling overhead. The Gaffer closed shutters and bolted doors with rigorous precautions, and hugging the teapot to his bosom stumbled up to bed. Depressed by this unexpected seizure of her windfall, she found herself too utterly weary after her long day’s work and excitement to open the shutters again, much as she disliked an airless room; she had scarcely energy to pull out her chest of drawers. For a few minutes she watched from her bed the blue flickering flame of the log, then knew no more till suddenly she saw above the dead fire a monstrous shadow curling over the chimney-piece and along the ceiling: in another instant she traced it to something still more horrible—her grandfather’s legless trunk appearing over the hearthstone, with his nightlight in one hand and the teapot in the other. The rush-candle shook in its holed tin cylinder and set his grisly counterpart dancing. Jinny’s blood ran cold. Evidently some one had murdered him for the gold and this was his ghost. Then she told herself it was one of her nightmares, and she looked around for Henry Brougham, Esq., to clear up the situation. But with a soft thud the trunk dropped as through a trap-door and there was nothing left but a great glimmering hole where the hearthstone should have been. Instantly she realized that it was only a secret hiding-place in which her magpie of a grandfather was bestowing the treasure—yes, there was the hearthstone slewed round as on a pivot. This must be that old smugglers’ storehouse he and gossip had sometimes hinted at—with perhaps the long underground passages of ancient legend, reaching to Beacon Chimneys, nay, to the parsonage itself.

She closed her eyes carefully as his shadow heralded his re-ascent. He came up almost as noiselessly as that giant spectre, and between her lids she saw him scrutinize her. Reassured to see his shanks again, she emitted one of his snores, wondering whimsically if she did snore, or if any other girl had ever heard herself snore, and a smile almost broke the impassivity of her cheeks. Satisfied with the snore, he stooped down and she saw the hearthstone veer back to its place. “Well, I can always get it when I want it,” she thought cheerfully, as his slow stockinged feet bore him and his more sinister shadow upstairs.

For some time she lay awake, pondering over the fate of her money, which seemed like Cleopatra’s to be “in bonds,” and wondering whether poor Uncle Lilliwhyte was still alive; then everything faded into a vision of Mr. Flippance jogging marionettes for rugged miners who poured out their teapots at the box-office, reducing it to such a swamp that its boxes floated in the tea.

At breakfast, finding her grandfather abnormally restless, she asked him a little maliciously if he had slept all right.

“Oi’ll sleep better to-night,” he said, and chuckled a little. He seemed indeed very happy at having his treasure so well warded, and though his exuberance was alarming, she felt that the excitement of happiness was a lesser danger than that long depression of penuriousness. If the defeat of the coach had seemed to give him a second lease of life, what might not his new wealth do for him? He might really become an Old Parr, and poor Will be kept waiting till the twentieth century!

It was thus with only a moderate uneasiness that she left him, stealing with her basket to the rendezvous at the hut. In the wood she met Ravens hurrying to find breakfast, and he sang out that Martha and Will had relieved him, and that Uncle Lilliwhyte was better. As she approached the clearing, she saw the old woman come out of the hut with a bottle in her hand and a face absolutely transfigured. The whining, peevish, latter-day Martha was gone: a radiance almost celestial illumined her features—it seemed to transcend even the bonnet and to rim it with a halo. This was a woman walking not on the dead dank leaves of a frost-grey wood, but through the streets of the New Jerusalem. Behind her came Will, with a little cynical smile playing about his mouth till he espied Jinny, when his face took on the same ecstatic glow as his mother’s. Jinny could not but feel enkindled in her turn by all this spiritual effulgence, and it was three glorified countenances that met on this March morning.

“He’s broken bread with me,” breathed Martha, “and I’ve helped him put on the Saving Name.” She displayed her bottle with drops of water beaded on the mouth. She had baptized—albeit only by an unavoidable reversion to sprinkling—her first convert. The dream of years had been fulfilled at last, and the apostolic triumph had lifted her beyond humanity, fired her with a vision in which, a conquistador of faith, she was to turn all Little Bradmarsh, nay, Chipstone itself, into one vast synagogue. This were indeed the New Jerusalem. “And it was Will that led my feet,” she said, kissing him to his disconcertment. “And go where he may now, Jinny, he can’t take that away from me. And I shall always have his letter to inspire me to win other souls.” She touched the left side of her bodice, and poor Jinny, suddenly reminded that her grandfather had robbed her of her last chance of keeping Will in England, felt envious of Martha’s exalted source of consolation.

“I’ve got to go now and cook Flynt’s dinner,” said Martha. “But he won’t have much appetite for it if he’s got any right feeling left, when he hears that another man, a stranger, has been before him in the path of righteousness. Maybe you’ll write to the Lightstand, Willie, to say there’s a new brother in Little Bradmarsh.”

“I’ll tell ’em the Ecclesia has doubled its membership,” said Will, with a faint wink at Jinny, to which the girl did not respond. “Do you think, mother,” he asked with mock seriousness, “the New Jerusalem will come down in Australia same as here?”

“Of course,” said Martha.

Again Will winked at Jinny. But she frowned and shook her head. Her study of Australia had instructed her sufficiently that it was on the other side of the globe, and she knew that Will was having fun with the idea of the golden city coming down two opposite ways at once, but she felt it criminal to break Martha’s mood, and indeed was not certain she herself understood how the Australians escaped falling off into space. Discouraged by her stern face, Will murmured he’d put his mother on the road and be back. She smiled and nodded at the promise, but her heart was heavy with a sense of inevitable partings as she went in to the lingering ancient.

The death-bed conversion was evidently a success, for she found him almost as radiant as Martha, though with a more unearthly light, while the gleaming as of dewdrops on his dishevelled hair, and the stains of damp over his bolster seemed to convict his spiritual preceptress of a dangerous recklessness. But he was probably beyond saving in any case, Jinny reflected, and what other medicine could have given him that happy exaltation? The logs roared in the stove, and all was joy and warmth that rimy morning.

“Oi’ve tarned a Christy Dolphin!” he announced jubilantly.

“Yes, I’m so glad. Drink this before it gets cold.”

He waved it away. “Oi suspicioned all the time as that be the right religion. No hell at all, ye just goos to sleep, and when the New Jerusalem comes down for they righteous, ye don’t git up.”

“You’ll wake up—you and your mother,” she assured him, standing her jug by the stove.

“That’s what Mrs. Flynt says. ‘Ye ain’t done no harm,’ she says, ‘and when the trumpet blows for the saints, your bones will git their flesh agen, same as now.’ ”

There was little enough on them to go through eternity in, she thought, gazing at his shrunken arms, which he had left outside the coverings in repudiating the tea. “Won’t that be wonderful!” she said, the tears in her eyes.

“That’ll be wunnerful wunnerful,” he agreed. “That fares to be what Oi calls a real heaven—your own body, not a sort o’ smoke-cloud ye wouldn’t know was you ef you met it, your own flesh and blood, livin’ on this lovely earth with the birds and the winds and the sun and the water, all a-singin’ and a-shinin’ for ever and ever. And no bad folks ne yet angels to worrit ye, no liddle boys to call arter ye—why it’s just ginnick! Oi reckon Oi’ll choose this same old spot.”

“Yes, it’s a lovely spot,” said Jinny, but she wondered whether he had not made his own version of Martha’s New Jerusalem, which she herself had always understood to be more jewelled than natural.

“Your mother will be able to see it too,” she added gently, as she put the tea to his lips.

A beautiful smile traversed the sunken features. But suddenly a frenzy of terror swamped it. He sat up with a jerk that dashed her jug to the stove, shivering it into fragments. “But ef Oi waked, Oi’d need my money agen!” he shrilled.

What Jinny always remembered most vividly, when she recalled this tragic moment, was the red lettering on the sacks he lay on, exposed by his upright posture.

“Gay, Bird & Co., Colchester,” her eyes read mechanically. When he fell back and hid that inscription, his face was at peace again. That acuteness of terror—the quintessence of the morbidity of a lifetime—had stopped his heart.

She was terribly shaken by this sudden and grotesque end. She felt his pulse, but without hope. She had never seen human death before, but she had a vague idea that you closed the eyes and put pennies on them. She had no pennies with her. She remembered there were some in the sack he lay on, pennies and shillings, but she did not dare disturb him to get at them. She was obscurely glad she had not to wrestle with the problem of whether she ought to get his teapot buried with him, for the contingency of his resurrection. Her grandfather would never surrender it, she felt, and if she descended into his mysterious underground and abstracted it, that might upset his wits altogether. Besides, Uncle Lilliwhyte’s face was now taking on a strange beauty, as though his pecuniary anxieties were allayed.

But her nerves were giving way—she threw open the door and looked out eagerly, not for the lover, but for the man who seemed necessary in these rough moments. The dead must not be left alone, she knew that, or she would have set out to meet Will. Perhaps if she left him alone, his shy friend the fox would come trotting in, now he was so still. The parish authorities must doubtless be summoned to take charge of him. But ought he to have a pauper funeral—ought she not to steal back enough of his money to save him from that? But she remembered with relief that he had expressed indifference as to what became of his body—so long as it was restored to earth, its good old mother. As she moved a few paces without, in her peering for Will, she saw the blue smoke rising through the three top-hats, and in spite of the dead man’s doctrines and apprehensions, she could not help fancying it was his spirit soaring towards the abode of the Angel-Mother.

When Will returned, she was relieved to find Ravens striding beside him. That sunny-souled factotum, who had meant to hie to the Skindle wedding, now found himself transformed instead into a corpse-watcher, while Will, taking Jinny a bit of his way, went off by the shortest cuts to Chipstone Poorhouse, as probably the centre of authority for parish funerals.

“There’s the coroner, too,” Ravens called after him.

“Will there be an inquest?” Jinny asked.

“Must be,” said Will, and Jinny, alarmed for Martha’s sake, ran back on pretence of her basket, and surreptitiously wiped the bolster. As they left the clearing, they heard Ravens singing in the hut.

XI

When their roads parted, Jinny insisted on returning to her grandfather, whose excitement now recurred to her mind. She was still a little uneasy about the pauper funeral, but Will had emphatically agreed with her that the teapot could not now be recaptured. Nor could it be drawn upon, he declared: the old grabber would assuredly have counted the contents. Jinny suspected that Will was pleased rather than sympathetic at her having ceased to be an heiress. The death of Uncle Lilliwhyte, so much the junior of Daniel Quarles, could not but set both their minds on the thought of a similar cutting of their Gordian knot, but the thought—dreaded or welcome—was not allowed to appear in their conversation, finding expression only in Will’s aggrieved assumption of the Gaffer’s immortality. “Even if I was to strike a nugget as big as a prize marrow, we’d be no forrarder,” he had grumbled, and Jinny, with jangled nerves, had accused him of selfishness, when that poor old uncle was lying dead.

As she approached Blackwater Hall, a creepy conviction began to invade her that their knot was already cut: after that scene in the hut she was aquiver with presages of death and disaster. The absence of smoke—surely Gran’fer’s hearth was not already cold—added to her alarm. She remembered again his effervescence at breakfast; why should his heart not stop too? And when she saw the broad garden-gate open, and the house door ajar, her own heart nearly stopped. Her intuition, she felt, had not deceived her. Yet he was nowhere in the house. Ante-room, living-room, kitchen, all were empty of him. The fire was out. In the bedroom lay his telescope, a discarded toy. She was about to sweep the horizon with it, when she had an inspiration. The smugglers’ storehouse! He had gone down to count his gold, and the stone had rolled back—The Mistletoe Bough in another version. Tearing downstairs, she managed, after much fumbling with the poker, to make it revolve, and peered down into the dark clammy depths.

“Gran’fer! Gran’fer!” she cried. But only the dank silence welled up. He was undoubtedly dead, lying there stark among his guineas. She was scrambling down into the vault. But no! What nonsense! He must be pottering about with a spud, currycombing Methusalem, or doing some other odd job his renewed strength permitted. She hauled herself up—at any rate that would postpone the dread vision—and rushed round to the stable. That door too was open—Methusalem was gone! So was the cart. Nor was there any sign of Nip.

In her relief it was almost a pleasure to trace the wheels on the road. But soon she saw black again. It was his last drive—the last drive of Daniel Quarles, Carrier. That was the meaning of his excitement of the morning. He had gone out for the last time on his old rounds, and would meet Death on his driving-board, face to face, as he had met so many wintry storms and buffets. Staying only to roll back the stone, she raced out in his tracks.

But his course led unluckily to the Four Wantz Way and there she could no longer disentangle his cart-ruts. However, Mrs. Pennymole, reinstated in her scoured ground floor, had reassuring news enough, though it carried a new apprehension.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes when I catched sight of him with the May Day favours all a-flyin’ and a-flutterin’ on whip and harness, and lookin’ that strong with a great old smile over his dear old phiz, and Nip barkin’ fit to bust. ‘Where be you off to?’ I cries as he dashes by, whippin’ past like fleck—I never seen Methusalem go that pace, seemin’ a’most as if he was glad to have his old master back agen, meanin’ no disrespect to you, Jinny.”

“No, of course not,” said Jinny impatiently. “But what did he say?”

“I didn’t rightly hear, I’m tellin’ you, seein’ how he tore towards the bridge. But ’twas summat about ’Lijah! I yeard that!”

“Good heavens!” cried Jinny, and thanking Mrs. Pennymole, she tore equally towards the bridge, wondering if she could get a vehicle at “The King of Prussia.” It was clear the old wretch—there was really no other name for him—had gone to sell Methusalem again. Set up with all that gold, he meant to retire, and, inflamed by it, he could not resist the extra five pounds offered by the vet. And this time Mr. Skindle would not risk impounding her horse, he would slaughter instanter. Yes, her eerie premonitions had been justified, but they were warnings about Methusalem, not about her grandfather.

At the repaired bridge Farmer Gale’s dog-cart came along with himself and his wife, but she was too shy to ask for a lift. Nor was there anything to be got immediately at “The King of Prussia.” She toiled on through footpaths grey-silted from the flood till she reached the by-way that branched off to Foxearth Farm. Here she paused, wondering if it was worth while to go down it on the chance of finding Barnaby’s trap available. And while she hesitated, there came bowling by from church the Skindle wedding-party in grand carriages. But though she cowered into the hedge, their insolent prosperity only soothed her somewhat by reminding her that Elijah had other work to-day than killing, and that, in any case, there was now no motive for it, unless perhaps revenge. To her surprise, in the rear of the procession, sharing Barnaby’s bepranked trap, rode Will. His face beside Barnaby’s seemed one large smile: even the unexpected sight of herself would hardly explain such broad cheerfulness in a man who, though profiting by a wedding, had come from arranging a pauper funeral, not to mention an inquest. But perhaps he was rejoicing at his escape from that overblown Blanche.

As if to corroborate this interpretation, he jumped down and caught her to him in the open daylight, while Barnaby’s vehicle sympathetically disappeared after the others round the by-way.

“Oh, Jinny, Jinny!” he cried. “Such a lark!”

“But Gran’fer——!” she gasped, extricating herself.

He burst into a roar of laughter. “Have you heard it already?”

“Heard what? I’m looking for Gran’fer!”

“Haven’t you met him on the road? He started back ahead of me!”

She drew a breath of relief. “With Methusalem?”

“And a fare,” he grinned. “I had to go on to the coroner or else I too——”

But she no longer heard. “I must have missed him on the footpaths,” she said happily.

“You’ll find him at Mr. Fallow’s,” he said, and then laughter caught him again and rapt his breath.

“But do speak! Do speak! What’s this mystery?”

“Your Gran’fer’s eloped!”

“What?”

He wiped the tears from his eyes.

“Do speak!” She almost shook him. “Eloped with who?”

“ ’Lijah Skindle’s mother.”

“Annie?” she murmured involuntarily.

“Carried her off from the poorhouse! I was only in time for the tail-end of the fun.”

“But how could he get at her?”

“Well, I tell you I only saw it at the point the Master came into it. But others saw more, and I’ve picked up spicy details from the paupers and the wretched porter—Jims, you know.”

“Yes, I know Mr. Jims.” A vision of the fat little man in his peaked cap and blue uniform rose before her. The dismal brick building in its iron enclosure was half a mile before you got to Chipstone—administered under the Gilbert Act by half a dozen parishes clubbed together.

“Well, your Gran’fer, rigged up to the nines with his best smock and beaver, and ribbons on his whip and a bunch of wallflowers and primroses sticking out of the spout of the teapot he carried, rings at the gate, and when Jims came to take in the parcel, as he thought, the old man pushes through and makes for the wards, Jims runs after him, and when he asks him what he wants, he answers, ‘Annie! I’ve come for Annie!’ ‘Who’s Annie?’ asks Jims. ‘We don’t keep Annies—there’s only old women, and it ain’t visiting day.’ ‘Do ye don’t tell me no fibs,’ says your Gran’fer, and when Jims tries to stop him, he catches him in the stomach with his teapot and leaves him winded. Then off he scuttles to the stairs, and ‘Where’s Annie?’ he cries to an old pauper woman sweeping them. This creature happened to know Mrs. Skindle was Annie, so she says, ‘She’s washing Mr. Robinson in his bedroom.’ ‘What?’ shrieks your Gran’fer, swelling like a turkey-cock with jealousy. ‘You just show me where that bedroom is!’ The frightened old woman takes him up the stone stairs to the little yellow-ochred room where they had stowed the old dotard all by himself—I don’t think he’s as old as your Gran’fer, but he’s quite a helpless driveller—and there, the old woman told me, your Gran’fer gives a great cry ‘Annie!’ and Mrs. Skindle drops the flannel, and there they were crying and laughing and kissing like two children, and he calling her ‘My darling! My beautiful Annie!’ ”

“More than you’ve ever called me,” said Jinny, herself inclined to laugh and cry and even to kiss.

The story was interrupted by an idyllic interlude. “But I expect Gran’fer’s rather short-sighted without a telescope,” she commented, disentangling herself blushingly.

“I was in the Master’s room,” resumed Will, “speaking to him about the funeral, and hearing a lot about the guardians and the parish authorities and such-like grand folk, when in rushes Jims and pants out his tale, and we all race around till we find the old couple coming down the staircase with arms round each other’s waists, and your Gran’fer tells us fiercely he’s taking her away, and opens the teapot to show he can support two wives if he wants to! ‘Hold hard!’ says the Master. ‘I won’t stop you, though I ought to have twenty-four hours notice, because I know the guardians haven’t made such a good bargain with Mr. Skindle that they’ll try to keep her, but you can’t take away the parish clothes.’ For of course the old woman was wearing that blue cotton dress——”

“It’s got white stripes if you look close,” put in Jinny.

“ ‘Well, Oi can’t take her away without clothes,’ roared your Gran’fer. He said he counted it unrespectable enough that they should allow her to wash a strange old man, alone in a room, and that if they didn’t mend their ways he’d have a piece put in the paper about it all. ‘Well, let ’em give me back my own clothes,’ says Mrs. Skindle. ‘I’ve got to have twenty-four hours’ notice about that,’ says the Master. ‘Ha, you’ve stole ’em!’ says your Gran’fer. ‘You be careful what you’re sayin’,’ says the Master, bridling up. ‘Who wants her rags and jags?’ But in the end it was all settled friendlywise—your Gran’fer buying up some of the cast-off grandeur of the matron’s (they drove a good bargain with your Gran’fer, the pair of screws, but he was free and flush with his teapot), and off the happy pair went at last, the bride as spruced up as the bridegroom, and I saw him hand her into the wedding-cart with her bouquet, while the old gentlemen in the corduroys and the old ladies in blue, and especially the little orphans, raised a cheer. Even Jims waved. I expect he’d had a drop out of the teapot.”

“Daniel Quarles, Carrier-Off,” laughed Jinny, half hysterically, for scandalized and startled though she was, a rosy light, whose source was yet unclear to her, seemed rising on her horizon.

“I went up to the cart under pretence of patting Nip,” Will went on, “and asked the old boy where he was off to. ‘Home, of course,’ he answers friendly. ‘You should be going to chapel first, you old rip,’ I told him. ‘We’re going to be married in church,’ answers Mrs. Skindle stiffly. ‘I’m Church of England.’ ‘That’s all right, Annie,’ he says, patting her hand, ‘we’ll look in on Mr. Fallow about they banns,’ and singing ‘Oi’m Seventeen come Sunday,’ drives off with her.”

But Jinny refused to sympathize with the course of true love. “He’s not really going to marry her?” she now cried. “But that’s dreadful!”

“You scandalous creature! It would be more dreadful if he didn’t!”

“But at his age!”

“Why, he’s quite young yet,” laughed Will. “One hundred and fifty-two is his little span, remember.”

She let herself relax under his laughter. “Will they ring a peal of Grandsire Triples at his wedding?” she asked whimsically. Then with renewed anxiety: “Oh, but I do hope it hasn’t all excited him too much,” she cried. “I’d best get home as quick as possible.”

“Home? You don’t mean Blackwater Hall?”

“Where else?”

“You can’t go there. As your Gran’fer remarked to the Master, that’s no place for a respectable female.”

She stared at him. “Besides,” he said, “you don’t want to interfere with the young couple.”

“But I’ve not cooked the dinner!”

“Let the bride do that. She’s as strong as a horse. It’s the best thing that could have happened for both of ’em. After fending for all of us at Rosemary Villa, Blackwater Hall will be a holiday to her.”

“But I must go and see about things. She won’t know where anything is. And even if she cooks the dinner, she’ll want my apron. She can’t spoil her fineries.”

“That’s enough,” he said sternly. “I don’t often quote my father, but I’m bound to say some people are near-sighted and can’t see God, their friend. You’ve done with Blackwater Hall.”

“But where am I to go then?”

He laughed. “And what about Frog Farm?” He took her arm. “And we, too, must get tied up as soon as possible. No, Jinny, we can’t do better than follow in your Gran’fer’s footsteps. The way he held that grey-headed old woman’s hand in the wedding-cart, while I—you’re right, I haven’t called you ‘beautiful’ enough.” He paused to do so without words. “The old boy’s taught me a lesson, dashing in like that, while I’ve been sitting growling and grizzling and wasting our best years.”

“But you see, Will, it couldn’t be before. And he was sacrificing himself to me, poor Gran’fer, if he wanted her so badly all the time. Just see how he waited till he could support her!”

“On your money! Under the roof you re-thatched for him!”

“It wasn’t my money. And it was Ravens who did the roof.”

“You paid for it!”

“No, I didn’t,” she protested.

“Why not?”

“He won’t send me in the bill.”

“Oh, won’t he!” Will clenched his fist. “I’ll jolly soon stop his singing if he don’t hurry up with it! And why didn’t you ask me to mend your thatch?”

“You couldn’t come in.”

“You don’t come in to the roof.”

“That might have been a way of coming in,” she laughed, “it was so leaky. Anyhow you might have done Uncle Lilliwhyte’s—it is his money that has saved us all.”

“In a roundabout way,” he admitted.

She snuggled to him. Happiness, which had hitherto seemed like the soaped pig at village sports, was seizable at last. “Won’t it be wonderful when we’re in the hut!” she said.

He opened his eyes. “You don’t propose to live in Uncle Lilliwhyte’s hut with the three top-hats!”

“Of course not,” she said, blushing. “It’s in Australia. There’s just poles stuck in the ground.”

“Why, when have you been in Australia?”

“Never you mind! You see, I’ve already saved up a little towards my passage and——”

But her words died on his lips. “I don’t know that we need pull up our stakes,” he said when he released her. “Farmer Gale’s looking for a looker.”

“You don’t really mean that?” she said.

“He does, anyhow. I just met him in his dog-cart and he’s mad about his flood-losses. ‘You should have paid a good man,’ I told the hunks to his head.”

“Oh, but, Will,” she said, shrinking, “you don’t like Farmer Gale!”

“Well, he’s safely married now, and after all, my father had the place first. . . . It belongs to the family. . . . Anyhow,” he broke off masterfully, “I’d pay my wife’s passage-money.”

“Then I’ll be able to buy Methusalem,” she said in cheerful submission. “He’s only five pounds—I suppose your father would take care of him.”

“Rather! It would be a refuge from the New Jerusalem.”

“But we’ll take Nip with us, sweetheart—it won’t be the goldfields, you know, just a farm. And we can take over the Bidlake girls too, if you like.”

“Lord, what a crowd! But I don’t see Nip on an emigrant ship.”

“Haven’t I heard of dog-watches?” she smiled.

“I guess you’d smuggle him in somehow,” he laughed. “I’ve noticed you generally get your own way. And captains are but men.”

“I thought they were sea-dogs,” she laughed.

“You generally get the last word too,” he grumbled with adoring admiration. “But I tell you, Jinny, though there may be more money, all these new countries are terribly raw.”

“I know—‘no longer an egg, not yet a bird, only a smell,’ ” she quoted with wistful humour, and these words of his in the English wood last May evoked again for both of them all the magic of their love at its dawning.

They walked on in silence towards Frog Farm. After all, with their united treasure of youth, energy, and love, their livelihood was no grave problem. Larks were carolling, the little wrens piping, and ringdoves calling, calling, for the Spring was near after all, and the daffodils had already come. It seemed indeed a vain snapping of the heart-strings to leave such a homeland.

“That’ll be winter soon in Australia,” mused Will tenaciously.

“Not if we were together,” Jinny whispered, although the more she pondered during that wonderful walk the more the Antipodes receded to their geographical distance, the more shadowy grew the danger of falling off her planet. But, however they were to decide, she could see no reason—once her grandfather’s wedding-bells had rung—why they should not all live—wherever they all lived—happy ever after.