Jinny the Carrier

a motto which caused the hurdle-maker to remark that it was lucky his “good wife” had left the room.

That loquacious lady had fallen strangely silent. The wine which had loosened all the other tongues seemed to have constricted hers. Perhaps it was merely the already mentioned preoccupation with her pies or other dishes still in the oven. Or perhaps it was the encounter for the first time in her life with a great rival tongue. It consorted with this latter hypothesis that she could be heard babbling now from her kitchen like a cricket on the hearth, and her elaboration of a temperature theme came distractingly across the larger horizons of Mr. Flippance’s discourse, playing havoc with his account of Macready’s Farewell at Drury Lane that March, and obscuring the moral of the vacant succession. Charles Kean? Pooh! Not a patch on his father. Had they seen him in Dion Boucicault’s new play at the Princess’s, Love in a Maze? No? Then before voting for Charles Kean he would advise them to go—or, rather, not to go. He had never denied the merits of the manager of Sadler’s Wells especially as Sir Pertinax Macsycophant, though he knew his young friend Willie preferred Mr. Phelps in Othello. “I say whom the mantle fits, let him wear it,” summed up Mr. Flippance oracularly, and launched into an exposition of how he would run “The National Theatre.” No Miss Mitford tragedies for him with Macreadys at thirty pounds a week, still less Charles Kean Hamlets at fifty pounds a night, but real plays of the day—he did not mean the sort of things they did at the Surrey, which were no truer to life than the repertory of the marionettes, but why not, say, the Chartist movement and the forbidden demonstration on Kennington Common? Or let Mr. Sheridan Knowles, instead of talking his Baptist theology at Exeter Hall, write a “No Popery” play, with Cardinal Wiseman as the villain. (Hear, hear! from Miss Gentry.) Of course there was the danger the censor would quash such plays as he had quashed even Miss Mitford’s Charles the First, but then he, Mr. Flippance, knew old John Kemble, and would undertake to persuade him that times had changed.

Mrs. Flippance, who had displayed some restiveness under the long appraisal of male talent, displayed yet more when Mr. Flippance was now provoked to rapturous boyish memories of the censor’s sister, Mrs. Siddons. But Blanche and Barnaby listened so spellbound that they ceased finally to hear their mother’s inborne monologue at all.

It was at this literally dramatic moment that Bundock appeared at the banquet with the explanation that nobody would answer his knocking, and tendered the bridegroom a pink envelope which he had benevolently brought on from Frog Farm on his homeward journey. Miss Gentry, unused to these bomb-shells, uttered a shriek, which more than ever riveted the postman’s eyes on her flamboyant efflorescence.

“Steady! Steady!” said Tony, opening the telegram with unfaltering fingers. “Take some more fizz. And give brother Bundock a glass.”

He read the fateful message, and the anxious watchers saw strange thoughts and feelings passing in lines across his forehead, and in waves across the folds of his flabby clean-shaven jowl. Then his emotions all coalesced and crashed into laughter, noisy, but not devoid of grimness. “Listen to this!” he cried. “‘Sincere condolences. Married Polly this morning. Duke.’”

Mrs. Flippance turned scarlet. “He’s married Polly!” she shrieked. “The beast! The insulting beast!”

“Easy! Easy!” said the bridegroom to this second perturbed female. “It isn’t him Polly’s married—it’s his marionettes. Chingford, the telegram is marked. I expect the caravan is honeymooning in Epping Forest. Give me Boulogne.”

But nobody was listening to him any longer. The hysterics that had been only a rumour in church became a reality now. Miss Gentry had produced salts for her darling and was calling for burnt feathers, and Blanche and Barnaby, tumbling over each other kitchenwards, only set their mother’s tongue clacking fortissimo. Even Mr. Purley was slapping the bride’s hands as she shrieked on the sofa—he was deeply moved by her convulsions, never having seen a doll in distress. Bundock alone remained petrified, the empty champagne-glass in his hand, his eyes still glued on Miss Gentry, and the bubbles in his veins re-evoking that effervescence of the Spring in which even a rear-ward consciousness of green mud had not availed to blunt the charm of opulent beauty. Through the tohu-bohu Mr. Flippance calmly scribbled a counter-telegram: “Congratulations on your marriage. Condolences to Polly.”

“Pity we ain’t got some of that Scotch stuff to quiet her,” said the agitated hurdle-maker.

“Whisky, do you mean?” said Tony.

“No, no! That new stuff they should be telling of—discovered by that Scotch doctor—puts you to sleep, like, and onsenses you.”

“Oh, chloroform!” said Tony.

“Ay, that’s the name. Masterous stuff for females to my thinking.”

“So it is, I understand.” Mr. Flippance smiled faintly. “But not for cases like this.”

“The parsons won’t let you use it!” Bundock burst forth. “They say it’s against religion. I suppose they want the monopoly of sending you to sleep.” He sniggered happily.

“I’ll chloroform her,” Mr. Flippance murmured. He could well understand Cleopatra’s fury at being replaced by a woman so superficially unattractive as dear Polly, especially as she herself, catching at any stage career in her impecunious days, had not even been married by the fellow.

“Can you read my writing, Bundock?” he asked loudly, proceeding to read to him in stentorian tones as if from the telegram. “Polly, care of Duke’s Marionettes, Chingford. Come home at once and all shall be forgotten and forgiven. Your heart-broken——”

But Mrs. Flippance was already on her feet and the telegram in fragments on the floor. “I won’t have her here!” she cried. “You’ve got to choose between us!”

“My darling! Who could hesitate? Try a little gin.” He hovered over her tenderly. “Take down a different reply, Bundock, please.” He dictated the message he had really written.

“Condolences to Polly!” repeated Mrs. Flippance, smiling savagely. “I should think so. I doubt if he has even legally married her.”

“Oh, trust Polly for that! She’s got her head square on.”

At this Mrs. Flippance showed signs of relapse.

“Poor Polly!” said Tony hastily. “Fancy her being tied to a man like that!”

“I don’t know that she could have done much better,” snorted Mrs. Flippance.

“But fancy Polly being wasted on a man who packs for himself! Another glass, Bundock?”

“Not while I’m on the Queen’s business, thank you,” said the postman.

“But you’re not. Aren’t your letters delivered?”

“What about your telegram?”

“True, true. O Bundock, what a sense of duty! You recall us to ours. We must drink to the Queen! The Queen, ladies and gentlemen——” he filled up Bundock’s glass.

“I can’t refuse to drink that,” sniggered Bundock. “Wonderful what one day’s round can bring forth!” he said, putting down his glass. “I began with a baby—I mean the midwife told me of one—went on to a corpse—and now here am I at a wedding! It’s in a cottage by the holly-grove—the corpse, I mean——”

“We don’t want the skeleton at the feast,” interrupted Tony. Bundock hastened to turn the conversation to the grand new house Elijah Skindle was building—Rosemary Villa.

Blanche pouted her beautiful lips in disgust: “Don’t talk of a knacker—that’s worse than a corpse.”

But Bundock was anxious to work off that Elijah called his house “Rosemary Villa” because rosemary was good for the hair, and having achieved this stroke, prudently departed before the laughter died. Blanche seemed especially taken with his gibe at that poor grotesque Mr. Skindle.

After his departure, flown with stuff for scandal and witticism, headier to him than the wine, the party grew jollier than ever. They played Pope Joan with mother-o’-pearl counters and then Blanche sang “Farewell to the Mountain,” by ear, like—a bird, without preliminary fuss or instrumental accompaniment, and Mr. Flippance crying “Encore!” and “Bis!” spoke significantly of the possibility of including an annual opera season in English in his Drury Lane repertory. Why should Her Majesty’s Theatre and the Italian tongue have a monopoly? Ravished, Blanche gave “The Lass that Loves a Sailor,” her eyes languishing, and this led Mr. Purley on to dancing the old Essex hornpipe, whose name sounded like his own, with Barnaby banging a tray for the tambourine and Will’s throat replacing the melodeon. To Miss Gentry, beaming in Christian goodwill upon the merry company, it appeared strangely multiplied at moments. But the more the merrier!

When the happy pair had departed for Boulogne via the Chipstone barouche, what wonder if Will, finding himself alone in the passage with Blanche, and not denied a kiss, felt his last hesitations deliciously dissolved. How restful to absorb this clinging femininity, this surrendered sweetness! With what almost open abandonment she had sung “The Lass that Loves a Sailor” at him, with what breaking trills and adoring glances! Marriage was in the air—two examples of it had been brought to his ken in one morning—and he now plumply proposed a third. A strange awakening awaited him.

Blanche grew suddenly rigid. Her imagination had already been inflamed by Cleopatra, clinging to whose aromatic skirts she saw herself soaring to a world of romance and mystery. She had swallowed credulously the exuberant play of Mr. Flippance’s fantasy round her feats of wasp-killing, and was willing to do even that on the stage if it enabled her soles to touch the sacred boards. In her daydreams Will had already begun to recede. But now that Mr. Flippance had discovered a voice in her too, and operatic vistas opened out under his champagne and his no less gaseous compliments, she could not suddenly sink to the comparative lowliness of a box-seat. That song which Will had taken for the symbol of her submission was really the final instrument of his humiliation.

Rejected by the girl who has snuggled into one’s heart, evoked one’s protective emotions, exhibited herself all softness and sweetness! It was incredible! He did not know whether he was more angry or more ashamed, and he was tortured by this warm, creamy, scented loveliness which a moment before had seemed under his palms to mould as he would, and was now become baffling, polar, and remote.

“Blanche! Blanche!” he cried, trying to retain her hand, and tears actually rolled down his cheeks. But underneath all the storm he heard a still small voice crying: “Jinny! Jinny! Jinny!”

So he had been saved from this fatuous marriage, from this supple, conceited minx with her imitative scents and mock graces. The genuine simple rosebud of a Jinny was waiting, waiting for him all the time, the Jinny round whose heart his own heart-strings had been twined from mysterious infancy, who touched him like the song of “Home, Sweet Home,” heard when miserable in Montreal, the darling lovable little Jinny as pretty as she was merry, no real exemplar of the unmaidenly, only a dutiful supporter of her grandfather and his business, at most a bit unbalanced by her mannish role; Jinny the girl with the brains to appreciate him, and whom he alone could appreciate as she deserved! How wonderful were the ways of Providence! How nearly he had been trapped and caged and robbed of her!

“I don’t see what you mean by leading a fellow on!” he reproached Blanche hoarsely, with no feigned sense of grievance, as he gazed at the mocking mirage of her loveliness. But underneath the tears and the torment, his heart seemed to have come to haven.

“Jinny!” it sang happily. “Jinny! Jinny! Jinny!”

XII

On arriving home, Jinny’s first thought after giving the Gaffer his dinner and swallowing a few mouthfuls to overcome her faintness—her mood of self-torture would not allow more—was to give Methusalem some oats extracted by stratagem from the old man’s padlocked barn. She had scraped together a few handfuls and was bearing them towards his manger in a limp sack when she perceived that the stable-door was open and gave on a littered emptiness. Her heart stood still as before the supernatural. True, the new padlock was clawing laxly at its staple as if forced open, but then it had not been there at all till that very morning, and for Methusalem to leave his stable voluntarily was as unthinkable as for a sheep to abandon a clover-field. Yet there stretched the bare space, looking portentously vast. What had happened? She ran round the little estate, as though Methusalem would not have bulked on the vision from almost any point, and then she peered anxiously over the Common, as if he could be concealed among the gorse or the blackberry-bushes. The hard ground of the road, marked only by the dried-up ruts of her own wheels, gave no indication of his hoofs. It flashed upon her that padlocks were after all not so ridiculous, but examining more closely the one that drooped by the stable-door, she saw that its little key was still in it. Evidently the old man had forgotten to turn it. The cart was still in its shed, looking as dead to her now as a shell without its snail, though the image was perhaps a little too hard on Methusalem.

But to alarm her grandfather before she had made a thorough search would only confirm him in his delusions. Peeping through the casement of the living-room, she was relieved to see and hear him at the table, safely asleep on his after-dinner Bible. With his beard thus buried in the text, he might sleep for hours in the warmth and buzzing silence. Lucky, she thought, as she tip-toed past, that he had not made the discovery himself. He would probably have accused poor Mr. Skindle again, even set out after the innocent vet. with his whip. Then perhaps actions for assault and battery, for slander, for who knew what!

Horse-stealing was unheard of in these parts, and who save a dealer in antiquities would steal Methusalem? No; as in a fit of midsummer madness—under the depression of the drought and his depleted nosebags—he had bolted! After all, old horses were probably as uncertain as old grandfathers. Was there to be a new course of senility for her study, she wondered ruefully: had she now to school herself to the vagaries of horsey decay as she had schooled herself to human? But, of course, she surmised suddenly, it was the dragging the poor horse up in the middle of the night that had turned his aged brain, and the hammering-in of the staple had lent the last touch of alarm. He had been liable to panic even in his prime. Perhaps he had bolted before Gran’fer’s very eyes, mane and tail madly erect. That might explain the uneasy look with which the old man had met her return—a sidelong glance almost like Nip’s squint after an escapade—his taciturnity as of a culprit not daring to confess his carelessness, as well as his welcome blindness to the wedding fineries she had been too desperate to remove. But no, he would not have sat down under such a loss, or brisked up so swiftly under the smell of dinner, or pressed the food so solicitously upon her with the remark, “There’s a plenty for both of us, dearie—-do ye don’t be afeared.” It would almost seem as if he had been noting her self-denial: at any rate such an assurance could not coexist with the loss of their means of livelihood.

It was a mystery. The only thing that was clear was that Methusalem must be recaptured before her grandfather was aware of his loss. Such a catastrophe, coming after the scene in the small hours, might have as morbid an effect upon him as that nocturnal episode had evidently had upon Methusalem himself.

Bonnetless, with streaming ringlets, in her lace-adorned dress, she wandered farther and farther in quest of her beloved companion. It was some time before she discovered that her other friend was at her heels. Surely Nip would guide her to Methusalem, as he had guided her through the darkness. But this abandonment to his whim only led her to the cottages with which he was on terms of cupboard affection, and dragged her into the very heart of the tragedy retailed by Bundock to the wedding-party, to the home of a dead labourer.

“His fitten were dead since the morning,” the widow informed her with lachrymose gusto. “At the end he was loight-headed and talked about puttin’ up the stack.”

The neighbours were still more ghoulishly garrulous, and the odour of this death pervaded their cottages like the smell of the straw steeped in their pails, and as the housewives turned their plaiting-wheels they span rival tales of lurid deceases, while a woman who was walking with her little girl—both plaiting hard as they walked—removed the split straws from her mouth to proclaim that she had prophesied a death in the house—having seen the man’s bees swarm on his clothes-prop. She hoped they would tell his bees of his decease. But desirable as it was to meet a white horse—that bringer of luck—nobody had set eyes on a wild-wandering Methusalem. Nor was he in the village pound.

She found herself drifting through the wood where she had once sat with Will, and through the glade where the tops of the aspens were a quiver of little white gleams. Had Methusalem perhaps come trampling here? That was all her thought, save for a shadowy rim of painful memory. Bare of Methusalem, the wood at this anxious moment was as blank of poetry as the lanky hornbeam “poles,” or the bundles of “tops” lying around. One aspen was so weak and bent it recalled her grandfather, and the white-barked birches craned so over the other trees, she was reminded of a picture with giraffes in Mother Gander’s sanctum. But of horses there was no sign. Picking up a wing covert of a jay, not because of the beautiful blue barring, but because it would make fishing flies for Uncle Lilliwhyte, she now ran to his hut with a flickering hope that he would have information, but it was empty of him, and she saw from the absence of his old flintlock that he was sufficiently recovered to be poaching. She emerged from the wood near Miss Gentry’s cottage. But the landlady, who had the deserted Squibs in her arms, could only calculate that Methusalem had left his stable at the same moment as the dead labourer’s soul had flown out of his body, and that there was doubtless a connexion. “Harses has wunnerful sense,” said the good woman. Jinny agreed, but withheld her opinion of humans. She felt if only all the horses jogging along these sun-splashed arcades of elms could speak, the mystery would soon be cleared up. For Methusalem was of a nose-rubbing sociability. But it was only the drivers of all these lazy-rolling carts—fodder, straw, timber, dung, what not—that presumed to speak for their great hairy-legged beasts. To one wagoner lying so high on his golden-hued load that his eye seemed to sweep all Essex, she called up with peculiar hope: he confessed he had been drowsing in the heat. “So mungy,” he pleaded. Indeed the afternoon was getting abnormally hot and stuffy, and Jinny had to defend her bare head from the sun with her handkerchief. Hedgers and ditchers had seen as little of a masterless, bare-flanked Methusalem as the thatcher with his more advantageous view-point. Leisurely driving in the stakes with his little club, this knee-padded, corduroyed elder opined that it would be “tempesty.” And they could do with some rain.

That the rain was indeed wanted as badly as she wanted Methusalem was obvious enough from the solitude about the white, gibbet-shaped Silverlane pump and the black barrel on wheels round which aproned, lank-bosomed women should have been gossiping, jug or pail in hand. In the absence of this congregation Jinny had to perambulate the green-and-white houses of the great square and hurl individual inquiries across the wooden door-boards that safeguarded the infants. Only the village midwife had seen a horse like Methusalem as she returned from a case. She had been too sleepy, though, to notice properly. From this futile quest Jinny came out on the road again. But wheelwright and blacksmith, ploughman and gipsy, publican and tinker, all were drawn blank.

Beside trees tidily bounding farms, or meadows dotted with cows and foals, and every kind of horse except Methusalem, past grotesque quaint-chimneyed houses half brick, half weather-board, the road led Jinny on and on till it took her across the bridge. Here on the bank she recognized the plastered hair of Mr. Charles Mott, who was fishing gloomily. No, he had not seen a white horse—worse luck!—and would to God, he added savagely, that he had never seen a black sheep. Jinny hurried off, as from a monster of profanity, for Mr. Mott’s disinclination for his wife’s society, especially on chapel days, was, she knew, beginning to perturb the “Peculiars”; and with the sacramental language of the marriage service yet ringing in her ears, it seemed to our guileless Jinny ineffably wicked to be sunk in selfish sport instead of cherishing and comforting the woman to whom you had consecrated yourself.

She moved on pensively—the road after descending rose somewhat, so that Long Bradmarsh seemed to nestle behind her in a hollow, a medley of thatch and slate, steeple and chimney-stacks, hayricks and inn-signs, and fluttering sheets and petticoats. But the forward view seemed far more bounded than usual, deprived as it was of the driver’s vantage-point: to the toiling pedestrian her familiar landscape was subtly changed, and this added to the sense of change and disaster.

She passed Foxearth Farm near enough to see again the barouche now awaiting the honeymooners, and to hear the voices of Will and Blanche mingling in a merry chorus. There was an aching at her heart, but everything now came dulled to her as through an opiate. Methusalem was the only real thing in life. She wanted to make her inquiry of the driver, but her legs bore her onwards to a glade where she could rest on one of Mr. Purley’s felled trunks. Even there the chorus pursued her, spoiling the music of the little stream that babbled at her feet, and the beauty of willow-herb and tall yellow leopard’s-bane and those white bell-blossoms of convolvulus twining and twisting high up among the trees still standing.

It was well past five before, footsore and spent, she stopped on her homeward road at the Pennymole cottage for information and a glass of water. This must be her last point, for standing as it did at the Four Wantz Way, it overlooked every direction in which Methusalem could possibly have gone, had he come thus far, while the size of the Pennymole family provided over a score of eyes. She found herself plunged into the eve-of-Sabbath ritual—all the seven younger children being scrubbed in turn by the mother in a single tub of water, and left to run about in a state of nature, or varying stages of leisurely redressing.

But neither the nude nor the semi-decent nor Mrs. Pennymole herself, with her bar of yellow soap, had seen even the tip of Methusalem’s tail, and the extinction of this last hope left Jinny so visibly overcome that the busy mother insisted on her sitting down and waiting for tea. She urged that “father” would soon be home, as well as the two elder boys, all at work in different places, and “happen lucky” one of the three would have seen the missing animal. Jinny felt too weak to refuse the tea, and though the thought of her neglected grandfather was as gnawing as her hunger, she reasoned with herself that she would really get to him quicker if refreshed. The elder lads came in very soon, one after the other, each handing his day’s sixpence to his mother and receiving a penny for himself. But neither brought even a crumb for Jinny. Mrs. Pennymole beguiled the time of waiting for the master and the meal by relating, in view of the labourer’s death, how she had lost two children five years ago.

No fewer than four were down at once with the black thrush. Two boys lay on the sofa, one at each end, an infant in the bassinet under the table, and a girl in the bed. One of the sofa patients had swellings behind his ears the size of eggs, but they were lanced and he lived to earn his three shillings a week. The other, a fine lad of thirteen, died at three in the afternoon. The girl died at half-past eleven at night—beautiful she looked; like a wax statue. The undertaker was afraid to put them in their coffin; afraid to bring contagion to his own children. “Perhaps your husband would do it,” he suggested to her. But her husband, poor man, couldn’t. “How would you like to put your childer in coffins?” he asked the undertaker. The doctor wouldn’t let her follow the funeral, she was so broken.

But it was Jinny who was broken now. These reminiscences were more painful for her than for the mother who—inexhaustible fountain of life—scoured her newer progeny to their accompaniment. Yes, existence seemed very black to Jinny, sitting there without food, or Will, or Methusalem, or anything but a grandfather; and the china owl with a real coloured handkerchief tied round its head, which was the outstanding ornament of the mantelpiece, seemed in its grotesque gloom an apt symbol of existence. She was very glad when cheery, brawny Mr. Pennymole burst in, labouring with a story in which whisker-shaking laughter bubbled through a humorous stupefaction.

He had begun to tell the story almost before he had perceived and greeted Jinny, and Methusalem’s disappearance, on which he could throw no light, served to enhance it. To him, too, the day had brought an earth-shaking novelty—there must be something in the moon. For thirty years, he explained, as he took off his coat and boots (though not his cap), he had risen at half-past four. But waking that morning at one o’clock, he had got to sleep again, and the next thing he knew—after what seemed to him a little light slumber—was a child saying: “Mother, what’s the time?” Half-past five, mother had replied—Mrs. Pennymole here corroborated the statement at some length; adding that it was Jemima who inquired, she being such a light sleeper, and always so anxious to be off to school: an interruption that her lord sustained impatiently, for this was the dramatic moment of the story. Half-past five! Up he had jumped, never made his fire nor his tea, never had his pipe, and instead of leaving home at twenty to six, still smoking it, he had rushed round to his brother-in-law’s, where fortunately he was in time for the last cup o’ tea, and then out with his horses as usual!

“And I made him tea and sent it round to the field,” gurgled Mrs. Pennymole as she unhooked her bodice for the last baby. “He had two teas!”

Mr. Pennymole and Jinny joined in her laugh. “Sometimes I’ve woke at ’arf-past three,” he explained carefully. “But then I felt all right.” He recapitulated the wonder of his oversleeping himself, as he drew up to the table, where the bulk of his progeny was already installed, and it overbrooded his distribution of bread and jam in great slices.

“And I was up at four!” Mrs. Pennymole bragged waggishly.

“Yes, upstairs!” Mr. Pennymole retorted, sharp as his knife, and the table was in a roar, not to mention the four corners of the room, where those of the brood squatted who could not find places at the board. Everybody sat munching the ritual hunk, though for the black strong tea the adults alone had cups, two mugs circulating among the swarm of children, whose clamours for their fair turn had to be checked by paternal cries for silence. Mrs. Pennymole pressed both husband and guest to share her little piece of fat pork fried with bread, but they knew better what was due to a nursing mother. Jinny felt grateful enough for the bread and jam and the tea, cheap but at least not from burnt crusts, and sugared abundantly, despite that sugar—as Mrs. Pennymole complained—had gone up “something cruel.” But though such a meal was luxury for her nowadays, she could hardly help wistful mouth-watering visions of the wedding-feast, from the known dumplings to the unknown champagne. It was for a strange company she had exchanged the wedding-party, she thought ruefully, as she refused a third slice of bread. She could not well accept it, when each child, solemnly asked in turn whether it would like a second, had replied with wonderful unanimity in the affirmative, and Mr. Pennymole, with his eye on the waning loaf, had remarked that children had wonderful healthy appetites, though that was better than doctors. She was glad, however, to be given a wedge of bread and cheese, though when her host jabbed his into his mouth at the point of his knife, it called up a distressing memory of a gobbet of wedding-cake thrown to a dog, and she became suddenly aware that Nip was no longer with her. She remembered seeing him last as she sat on the log, and she rightly divined that—wiser than she—he had gone to the wedding-meal!

Before she could get away from her Barmecide banquet, the brother-in-law and his wife came in, and then the whole story of the oversleeping had to be laughed and marvelled over afresh. The more often Mr. Pennymole told the story, the more his sense of its whimsicalness and wonder grew upon him, and the more his audience enjoyed it. “I made his tea,” cackled Mrs. Pennymole. “I sent it round to the field. So he had two teas!” The cottage rocked with laughter. Only the owl and Jinny preserved their gravity. And even Jinny could not resist the infection when Mrs. Pennymole boasted to her visitors that she herself had been up at four, and Mr. Pennymole, with an air of invincible shrewdness, pointed out that it was “upstairs” she had been. So that though neither of the new-comers could throw light upon the Methusalem mystery, Jinny left the cottage refreshed by more than tea, and with the flavour of the corpse-talk washed away. The humour of it all even went with her on her long homeward tramp. In imagination she heard the oddness of the oversleeping and the duplication of the teas still savoured with grins and guffaws, while the little ones dribbled bedwards, while the elder boys were scrubbed in the scullery, and while the indefatigable Mrs. Pennymole was washing the hero of the history down to his waist. Her fancy followed the tale spreading over the parish, told and retold, borne by Bundock to ever wider circles, adding to the gaiety of the Hundred, abiding as a family tradition when that babe at Mrs. Pennymole’s breast was a grandmother—the tale of how for thirty years Mr. Pennymole had got up at half-past four, and how at long last the record was broken!

Speeding along in this merrier mood, Jinny had almost reached home by a short cut through the woods, when she espied a gay-stringed, battered beaver and learned the tragic truth.

XIII

Uncle Lilliwhyte was carrying by its long legs the spoil of his rusty flintlock—Jinny was glad to see it was only a legitimate curlew with its dagger-like bill. He offered the bird for sale, but she was afraid it had fed too long on the marsh mud. She was glad to hear, though, he had called that very morning and sold her grandfather truffles—Uncle had a pig’s nose for truffles, and her grandfather a passion for them.

“He hadn’t got change for a foive-pun’ note,” Uncle Lilliwhyte reported. “And Oi hadn’t, neither,” he chuckled. “So ye owes me tuppence.”

Jinny was amused at her grandfather’s magnificent mendacity—his lordly way of carrying off his pennilessness.

“Never mind the twopence now,” she said. “You haven’t seen Methusalem, I suppose?”

She had supposed it so often that she took the answer for granted. This reply struck her like a cannon-ball.

“Not since ’Lijah Skindle took him away this marnin’!”

“Elijah Skindle took him!” she gasped, breathless yet relieved. “What for? Where?” Had her grandfather’s fears been justified then?

“To his ’orspital, Oi reckon. Trottin’ behind the trap he was, tied to it. A sick ’oss don’t want to goo that pace though, thinks Oi. ’Twould be before bever,” he added, when she demanded the exact hour.

“When I was at church! But Methusalem wasn’t sick when I left home.”

“Must ha’ been took sick—or it stands to reason your Gran’fer wouldn’t ha’ let him goo!”

“But Gran’fer didn’t know——!”

“Arxin’ your pardon, Jinny—Mr. Quarles waved to ’em as they went off. And Oi’ll be thankful to you for the tuppence, needin’ my Sunday beer.”

She groped in her purse. “But if Mr. Skindle took him back to Chipstone, how comes it nobody has seen him?”

“He went roundabouts by Bog Lane and Squash End, ’tis all droied-up nowadays. And took Bidlake’s Ferry, Oi reckon, stead o’ the bridge.”

A sinister feeling, as yet formless, began to creep into Jinny’s veins. Handing the nondescript his twopence and the jay feather, she ran out of the wood and then in the dusking owl-light by a field-path, and through a prickly hedge of dog-rose and blackberry that left her with scratched fingers, into her own little plot of ground. The stable door was now locked, though its aching emptiness was still visible through the weather-boarding as she passed by; the house-door was even more securely fastened, and all the windows were tightly closed. She rattled the casement of the living-room and heard her grandfather finally hobbling down the stairs.

He examined her cautiously through the little panes.

“Ye’ve left me in the dark,” he complained, turning the window-clasp. “Oi’m famished. Where you been gaddin’ in that frock?”

“Did you send Methusalem away?” she cried impatiently.

He put a scooped hand to his ear. “What be you a-sayin’?”

“Open the door!” she called angrily. “You mustn’t shut me out.”

“We’ve got to be careful, Jinny.” He moved to the door. “There’s a sight o’ bad charriters about.”

“Yes, indeed. What did Mr. Skindle want here?” she asked, as the bolts shot back.

“Skindle!” He pondered. “Young ’Lijah, d’ye mean? He brought me a pot.”

“That was long ago—what did he want this morning?”

“This marnin’? Oh, ay”—the sidelong look returned with remembrance and was succeeded by one of defiance—“That’s my business.”

A terrible suspicion flashed upon Jinny.

“You haven’t sold Methusalem?” she cried.

He winced. “That’s my property. Daniel Quarles, Carrier. And by the good rights, Oi——”

“You have sold him!” she hissed in a fury strange to herself. And she found herself shaking the old man by the arms, shaking him as he had shaken her that very morning in the small hours. And he was cowering before her, the fierce old man, cowering there on his own doorstep.

“Oi couldn’t see ye starve,” he pleaded.

“Oh, it’s not me you were thinking of!” she said harshly, not caring whether she was just or not. “You might have trusted yourself to me after all these years.” Indignation at Elijah’s supposed swindling mingled with her wrath—the idea of his getting Methusalem, an animal worth his weight in gold, for a miserable five-pound note! She gave the old man a final shake, imaginatively intended for Mr. Skindle. “Where’s the money?” she cried, letting him go.

He recovered himself somewhat. “That’s my money,” he said sullenly.

“But where have you put it?”

Cunning and obstinacy mingled in his eye. “Oi’ve put it safe agin all they thieves!”

“I don’t believe you’ve got any money!” she said, matching cunning by cunning. “You just let Mr. Skindle rob you.”

“Noa, Oi dedn’t. Oi got more than Methusalem was worth.”

“Really? More than a sovereign?”

“A suvran!” He cackled with a crafty air. “More than double that!”

“More than two sovereigns?” said Jinny in tones of ingenuous admiration.

“More than double that!”

“More than four sovereigns?” Enthusiasm shone in her eyes through the dusk.

He hurried towards the stairs.

“You’re not going to bed?” she called with mock anxiety. “You haven’t had supper!”

“We’ll have plenty o’ supper now. He, he!” His gleeful cackle descended from the winding staircase. Before he returned, chuckling still, she had lit the lamp and put out some cold rabbit-pie and a jug of beer on the tiger-painted tray.

“A foiver!” he cried, waving it.

She snatched at the note and tore it in two and let the pieces flutter away.

“Help! Thieves! She’s robbed me,” screamed the Gaffer. He scrambled on his knees after the fragments.

“Hush! How dare you sell Methusalem?” He cowered again before her passion.

“That was eating us out of house and home!” he whimpered.

“Get up! There’s your supper.”

He rose like a scolded child, clutching the scraps of thin paper. She put on her bonnet.

“Where ye gooin’?”

“To Mr. Skindle, of course.”

“Too late for that!”

“No, it isn’t.”

“But ye won’t git Methusalem back.”

“Oh, won’t I, though!”

“But ye’ve tore up his foiver!”

“I don’t care.” But alarmed at heart over her insane deed, she took the pieces from his unresisting hand and put them in her purse. “Don’t bolt me out or I’ll break the window.”

“But listen, dearie, Mr. Skindle won’t be there—the place’ll be shut up!”

“All the better. I’ll break it in.”

“But what’s the good o’ that? Poor old Methusalem’s out o’ his misery by now!”

Her heart stood still. “What do you mean?” She was white and shaking.

“ ’Lijah kills at seven,” he said, “afore his supper.”

“Oh, my God!” she gasped, the completeness of the tragedy impinging on her for the first time. “You sold him to be killed! No, no!” she cried, recovering. “He wouldn’t give five pounds just for a carcase!”

“Then ef that ain’t killed yet,” said the Gaffer, “that won’t be till to-morrow night.”

A sensible remark for once, Jinny thought, subsiding almost happily into a chair. It had been silly even to contemplate setting out afresh after all the day’s journeyings. In this weather the doomed horses would be shut up in Mr. Skindle’s field,—she recalled their joyous gambollings—the first thing in the morning she would set out to the rescue. And yet what if her grandfather should be wrong, what if Mr. Skindle killed before breakfast! No, delay might be fatal, and she started up afresh and, unlocking the stable-door, brought in her lantern.

“Ye’re not gooin’ to Mr. Skindle at this time o’ day?” protested the Gaffer from his soothing tray.

“I must.” She lit the candle in the lantern.

“Well, give my love to his mother!” She thought it sarcasm and went off even more embittered against him.

She had not gone far before she met the returning reveller. Nip’s ears were abased and his eyes edge-long, but in an instant, aware she was glad of his company, he welcomed her roysterously to it. But the blackness that now began to fall upon the pair was not wholly of the night. Great livid thunder-clouds were sagging over them, and of a sudden the whole landscape was lit up with blue blazings and shaken with terrific thunder. And then came the rain—the long-prayed-for rain, with its rich rejoicing gurgle. Providence, importuned on all sides, now asserted itself in a pour that was like solid sheets of water, and the parched soil seemed swilled in a few seconds. To plough along was not only difficult but foolhardy. Heaven had clearly thrown cold water on the project. She crept almost shame-facedly back to her still guzzling grandfather.

“Got a wettin’,” he chuckled. “Sarve ye right to be sow obstropolus. And sarve you right too!” he added, launching a kick towards the shivering and dripping animal. Nip, though untouched, uttered a dreadful howl, and grovelled on his back.

“Do you want to kill them both?” cried Jinny. She was now sure that Methusalem was beyond reprieve—the point of Mr. Skindle’s strategy in purchasing him, so as to leave her no sphere but matrimony, was penetrating to her mind, and, by the side of such “a dirty bit,” Will’s frank and blusterous methods began to appear magnanimity itself. To have found out, too, probably from Bundock, that she would be away at the wedding! The sly skunk!

XIV

For a full hour after Nip and her grandfather slept the sleep of the innocent in their beds, she sat up watching the storm, with no surprise at this unrest of the elements. No less a cataclysm was adequate to the passing of Methusalem. This sympathy of Nature indeed relieved her, some of her stoniness melted, and her face—as if in reciprocation—became as deluged as the face of the earth-mother. All the long years with Methusalem passed before her vision, ever since that first meeting of theirs outside the Watch Vessel: their common adventures in sunshine and snow, in mud and rain, her whip only an extra tail for him to whisk off his flies withal: ah, the long martyrdom from those flies, especially the nose-fly that spoilt the glory of July. She heard again that queer tick-tack of his hoofs, his whinnying, his coughing, saw the spasmodic shudder of his shoulder-joints, the peculiar gulp with which he took his drench. How often they had gone together to have a nail fixed, or his shoes roughed for the winter! What silly alarms he had felt, when she had had to soothe him like a mother, coax him to pass something, and on the other hand what a skill beyond hers in going unguided through the moonless, swift-fallen winter night! How happily he had nibbled at the beans in his corner-crib or the oats in his manger, what time he was brushed and combed—would that beloved mane get into rats’-tails no more? Was she never again to feel that soft nose against her cheek in a love passing the love of man? Could all this cheery laborious vitality have ended, be one with the dust she had so often brushed from his fetlocks? That joy which had set him frisking like an uncouth kitten when he was released from the shafts, was it not to be his now that he was freed for ever? Was he to be nothing but a carcase? Nay—horror upon horror—would he survive only as glove-or boot-buttons, as that wretch of a Skindle calculated? Would that triumphant tail wave only at human funerals, his own last rites unpaid? A remembrance of her glimpse at the charnel-house made her almost sick. Fed to the foxhounds perhaps! Could such things be in a God-governed world?

And her cart too would go—of the old life there would be nothing left any more. She could see the bill pasted up on the barn-doors: “Carrier’s Cart on Springs, with Set of Harness, Cart Gear, Back Bands, Belly Bands——” But what nonsense! Who would advertise such a ramshackle ruin? “A Shabby, Cracked Canvas Tilt, Patched with Sacking”—fancy that on a poster! No, like its horse, it would be adjudged fit only to be broken up. Perhaps somebody wearing Methusalem on his shoes would sit on the bar of a stile made of its axle-tree.

She woke from her reverie and to the wetness of her face, streaming with bitter-sweet tears. The moon rode almost full, and in the pale blue spread of sky sparse stars shone, one or two twinkling. She opened the door and went out into the night. What delicious wafts of smells after the long mugginess of the day! The elms and poplars rose in mystic lines bordering the great bare spaces. Surely the death of Methusalem had been but a nightmare—if she went to the stable, there would he be as usual, snug and safe in his straw. She sped thither, over the sodden grass, with absolute conviction. Alas, the same endless emptiness yawned, the manger looked strange and tragic in the moonlight. She thought of a divine infant once lying in one, wrapped in his swaddling-clothes, and then looking up skywards she saw a figure hovering. Yes, it was—it was the Angel-Mother, so beautiful in the azure light. At the sight all her anguish was dissolved in sweetness. “Mother! Mother!” she cried, stretching up her arms to the vision. “Comfort thee, my child!” came the dulcet tones. “Methusalem is not dead, but sleeping!”

At the glad news Jinny burst into tears, and, in the mist they made, her mother faded away. But she walked in soft happiness back to the house, and said her prayers of gratitude and went believingly to bed and slept as when she was a babe.

So long did she sleep that when she woke, the old man was standing over her again, just as the morning before, save that now he was in his everyday earth-coloured smock and wore a frown instead of a wedding-look, and the sunshine was streaming into the room.

“Where’s my breakfus, Jinny?” he said grumpily.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, yawning and rubbing her eyes. “I must have overslept myself.” And then she remembered Mr. Pennymole’s story, and a smile came over her face.

“There’s nawthen to laugh at,” he said savagely. “Ef ye goo out at bull’s noon, ye’re bound to forgit my breakfus. And that eatin’ his head off too! Ye know there’s no work for him. Ye dedn’t want to bring him back.”

“Back?” she almost screamed. “Is Methusalem back?”

“As ef ye dedn’t know!” he said, disgusted.

Disregarding him and everything else, she sprang out of bed, rolling the blanket round her, and with bare feet she sped to the stable. But she had hardly got outside before the jet of hope had sunk back. It was but another of her grandfather’s delusions.

But no! O incredible, miraculous, enchanting spectacle! There he was, the dear old beast, not dead but sleeping, exactly as the Angel-Mother had said, not a hair of his mane injured, not an inch of his tail less, and never did two Polynesian lovers rub noses half so passionately as this happy pair.

Jinny would have rubbed his nose still more adoringly had she known—as she knew later—the rôle it had played in his salvation. The threatening thunder-clouds had made Mr. Skindle put off his slaughtering till the morning, so that he himself might get home before the storm broke. The doomed horses he left shut in his field—who cared whether they got wet? But as soon as the coast was clear of Skindle and his latest-lingering myrmidons, Methusalem had simply lifted the latch of the gate with his nose and gone home. Mr. Skindle, oblivious of this accomplishment of his, though he had seen it practised on his never-forgotten journey with Jinny, had imagined him conclusively corralled. Mr. Charles Mott, returning with some boon companions from a distant hostelry where the draughts were more generous than he was allowed at “The Black Sheep,” was among the few who saw the noble animal hurrying homewards, and he told Jinny the next Tuesday that she ought to enter Methusalem for the Colchester Stakes. His unusual rate of motion was also reported by Miss Gentry, who, lying awake with a headache after the excitement of the day, had heard him snort past her window just when the storm was ebbing. He must have sagely sheltered while it raged and have arrived at Blackwater Hall soon after Jinny had beheld her vision.

But as yet Jinny attributed the miracle to her Angel-Mother. And what a happy Sunday morning was that, with the church bells all clearly ringing “Come and thank God and her!” She did not fail to obey them, though not without a sharp turn in that padlock, and with the little key safe in her bosom. And having happily ascertained from Mother Gander that the five-pound note was valid in pieces, she dropped them into Mr. Skindle’s letter-box together with remarks that drew heavily on her Spelling-Book’s “Noun Adjectives of Four Syllables.” Cadaverous (Belonging to a Carcase); Execrable (Hateful, Accursed); Sophistical (Captious, Deceitful); Sulphureous (Full of Brimstone); and Vindictive (Belonging to an Apology) were among her proudest specimens. They were not calculated to encourage Mr. Skindle’s matrimonial hopes.