CHAPTER X

HORSE, GROOM, AND BRIDE

_Then lay my tott’ring legs so low_ _That have run very far,_ _O’er hedges and o’er ditches,_ _O’er turnpike gate and bar,_ _Poor old horse! Poor old horse!_ Somerset Song.

I

NORMALLY the nonagenarian preserved scant memory of the happenings of the present, vivid though his youthful recollections were: But the great wedding-cake, served up at every meal for days, co-operated with the intensity of the scene to stamp his quarrel with Will upon his feebly registering brain. Especially did Nip’s standing supplication for his quota revive and deepen the impression. “On your hands and knees!” he would cry savagely, as he threw the lucky dog a luscious morsel. And even when Nip was absent at meal-times—as his mistress contrived more than once, in her anxiety to pamper neither him nor her grandfather’s resentment—the old man would growl grimly: “Carry him in!” Aching enough at heart from her own quarrel with Will, she had the wretched feeling that if by some impossibility she and her rival could ever again come together, the grotesque oaths of these two obstinate males would keep the family breach unhealed.

But sentiment cannot retain its acuteness under business worries and carking household cares. The rich cake eaten through so monotonously became to Jinny a sort of ironic symbol of the declining fortunes of Blackwater Hall. It contributed indeed no little to the decay of the old business, not merely by the great sum that had to be paid to the confectioner, but through the loss of the considerable customer whose hymeneal festivities its absence overgloomed. Marie Antoinette’s advice to the starving to eat cake did not come into the Spelling-Book, otherwise Jinny might have reflected how near they were come to adopting it. Not that her grandfather had as yet occasion to suspect the bareness of the larder. Unlike Mother Hubbard he never went to the cupboard, the cupboard always comfortably coming to him. Moreover, some rabbits shot by the farmers as the falling crops uncovered them, and presented to the ancient by annual custom, served to postpone the evil day. Jinny was hardly conscious how much she stinted herself for his sake, so poor was her appetite become. It was only once—-when passing the big Harvest Dinner barn where Farmer Gale’s men roared drunken choruses—that she felt a craving for food. This valuable freedom from hunger she attributed to the heat: in the winter, she told herself, she could always stoke for the week at the Tuesday and Friday meals so amiably provided at Mother Gander’s. That worthy lady would also doubtless refill grandfather’s beer-barrel at cost price. It was fortunate he did not smoke or snuff. Methodism had its points.

A more serious problem was presented by Methusalem—growing distended by overmuch grass—and even her goats coveted an occasional supplement to the hedgerows and the oak scrub if their milk was to run freely. But of hay or cabbages her store was small, and these finicking feeders, though they condescended to eat horse-chestnuts, would not even accept a gnawed apple. The poultry, too, must soon be eaten, if they could not be properly fed, and the thought of instructing her grandfather to twist a familiar neck made her blood run cold. With such a varied household to cater for, our little housekeeper began to envy Maria, who, according to Mrs. Flynt, raised her large and frequent families on everything and anything on earth, rhubarb-leaves being the one and only pabulum pigs turned up their snouts at. It was not the least painful part of this novel pinch of poverty that Jinny felt herself compelled to forgo those calls with little presents for the Pennymoles, the Bidlakes, and the poor and the bed-ridden in general, with which she had diversified her deliveries: she did not realize that her mere presence would have been a creature comfort.

But of these pangs and problems the world knew naught, hearing her little horn making its gay music and seeing her still jauntily perched on her driving-board in her elegant rose-pink frock and with the latest fancy whipcord edge to the straw of her bonnet. Her music, indeed, was far livelier than the wheezy notes of the Flynt Flyer’s guard, though otherwise the red-coated clodhopper who had been stuck up on the coach a few days after its visit to Blackwater Hall, lent the last touch to its fascinations. But if passengers, other than Elijah Skindle and one or two equally unbusinesslike young men, were no longer content to crawl along in her cart, that historic vehicle showed scant sign of defeat. Already when the removal of the hoops in the hot weather had threatened to expose too clearly the nakedness of the land, parcels of stones on the model of the swain-chaser had begun to cumber it up, and when one Monday morning the Flynt Flyer came swaggering in new pea-green paint, the Quarles Crawler turned up on Tuesday mountainous with the old boxes and cypress clothes-chests routed out of the ante-room, and emptied of their litter.

It was at this point that the Gaffer had had to be put into the plot. He had long since begun to smell a rat—having a super-sense for his business, however his other senses might fail—and it would have been impossible to heave up the boxes without him, or to explain their removal without imparting some notion of the tragic truth. And the truth did not diminish his resentment against young Caleb’s boy or his vigilance against further robbers. “Carry him in!” he would cackle and croak as he bore out the emptied “spruce-hutches” to the cart or carefully permutated their positions in it. Then with hoarse thunder: “On your hands and knees, ye pirate thief!”

But these ostentated boxes—while they saved the pride of the Quarleses—did but damage the remainder of their custom. The faithful few had been held back by solicitude for Jinny’s livelihood: seeing her now so flourishing, the very tail-board lowered on its chains and groaning under protruding “portmantles,” her last clients save Peculiars lapsed in silent relief, one after another. Daily, poor Jinny expected to see four horses on the rival vehicle and its circuit extended to Colchester. But that would have meant for Will a grandeur inconsistent with the petty commissions which he still deigned to execute: it would have allowed some of her old custom to return to her. And he was sullenly bent on driving her—literally—out of the business. But he enhanced the dignity of his profession by copying from an old inn of the pack-horse days its signboard of “The Carriers’ Arms,” depicting a rope, a wanty-hook, and five packing skewers. These, painted in black on the pea-green, seemed to proclaim his formal annexation and monopoly of the local carrying trade.

Jinny began to think seriously of buying up from the barns some straw from the reaped sheaves and competing with the cottagers in the all-pervasive plaiting industry. Splitting straws was no despicable occupation in the valley of the Brad, where it was done by enginery, and provided even children of six and old men of eighty with the opportunity of adding to the family income. Tambour-lace and other things also entered into her thoughts. The only thing that never entered into them was the idea of ceasing to ply. So long as the boxes and the cart held together, the Flynt Flyer should always see the rival vehicle imperturbably jogging. In every sense she would “carry on.”

II

August was ending aridly. Methusalem’s sensitive nose was protected from flies by green bracken. Calves snuggled in the hot meadows, meditatively chewing, an image of somnolence, their tails flicking whitely. Stooks or manure-heaps had reduced the fields to geometrical patterns. Tall hollyhocks leaned dustily like ruined towers. Bucolic conversation was of the absent rain. Rooks were more destructive than ever. Swedes were doing badly and every one had waited to sow turnips, rape, or mustard. They had no fodder even for winter stock. Master Peartree began to worry over his sheep as they munched the sapless grass. In the waterless little villages the ground was hard as iron, and Bundock strode over the swamps around Frog Farm as fearlessly as now frequently. “A regular doucher” was the general demand upon Providence, though it was couched—for church and chapel—in less vivid terms. These prayers enabled Bundock to work off one of his old aphorisms, saved for a rainless day. “It’s no use praying for rain,” he chuckled to the countryside, “till you see the storm-clouds.” “But you don’t scarce need to pray then,” the countryside pointed out, to his disgust.

In Jinny’s soul, too, there was drought, and she seemed to share Bundock’s view that prayer was waste of breath. Not that her evening prayers were left unsaid, but in her apathy and weariness no private plea was added to the prescribed form, though the Spelling-Book commended the asking for extra mercies, provided also one begged for a perpetual continuance of the Protestant Succession. What deliverance could there be for her? God Himself, she felt obscurely, could not help her, any more than she had ever been able to help little mavises fallen from their nests and deserted by their mothers. Their thrilling-eyed vitality and exquisite flutterings had only made her miserable. But perhaps God was now as sorry for her.

One grown-up mavis, too, she remembered, a victim to the winter battle of life, the neck half severed from the half-plucked body, the liquid eye gazing appealingly at her, the legs stirring feebly in a welter of feathers. She had nerved herself to grant its dumb plea: she had stamped sharply on its skull and seen its eye fly out on the path like a bright bead. Could God do aught less drastic for her? Not that she ever dreamed of dying: she must live on, however mutilated, for it was impossible to conceive her grandfather getting along without her. Consider only his trousers! How loosely they were now flapping round his shrunken calves, almost like a sailor’s. Soon the winter winds would be piping through them. Without her to take in a tuck, where would he be? And who would cut his hair and trim his beard?

It was her grandfather who was mainly responsible for the discontinuance of her chapel habit on Lord’s Day. His increased fretfulness and fractiousness since he was become aware of the rival power, made it imprudent to leave him for long except unavoidably—not to mention the danger to herself of awkward meetings at chapel with that rival power—and there was the further difficulty of getting to Chipstone, now Farmer Gale’s trap was out of the question. But she was not without a nearer place of worship—for to the scandal of the Peculiars, particularly Bundock, she now began to attend the parish church of Little Bradmarsh, whose emptiness with its parade of free seats after eleven o’clock was a standing pleasantry in the spheres of Dissent. The convenience of proximity was not, however, its main attraction for Jinny, and Miss Gentry would have rejoiced less had she understood that a change of heart or doctrine or the magnetism of the Reverend Mr. Fallow had as little to do with Jinny’s apparent conversion; though the fact that Jinny had never forgotten her one childish glimpse of the prayer-absorbed pastor doubtless served to reassure the girl as to the not altogether ungodly character of his edifice.

She had entered to cart over to the Chipstone hospital some fruit laid before the altar at the Harvest Thanksgiving by the one prosperous worshipper. For Mr. Fallow was still an unwavering client of hers, almost the last outside her own communion, possibly because having neither family nor flock to distract him from his classics, he had scarcely observed the coach.

In the “Speculi Britanniæ Pars,” in which he had once hunted out her genealogy—to his own satisfaction and nobody’s hurt—Essex was compared to Palestine for its flow of “milke and hunny.” And “hunny” was still her staple link with the tall fusty-coated, snuff-smeared figure, stooping over his hives or his Virgil, both sacredly fused for him in the Fourth Georgic. She marketed his surplus, exchanging it for firkins of butter and—O aberrations of the godliest—canisters of Lundy Foot. And it was after disposing of some of his smaller tithes—for the parish had remained outside the recent Commutation Act of 1836—that Jinny had been thus led to set foot in his church. There were in those days no floral decorations to mar the completeness with which the arches and pillars ministered to her troubled mood. The outside she had always found soothing, with its grey old stonework and its lichened tower rising amid haystacks and thatched cottages with dormer windows. But how much cooler the peace that fell upon her, when she passed through the old, spiky, oak door and under the long, wooden, vaulted roof into a dimness shot with rich stained glass. Mr. Fallow had been one of the earliest clergymen of the century to remove the whitewash from the old painted walls of his church, and though the royal arms—the lion and the unicorn—still lingered over the chancel, there was no other jar in the spiritual harmony except the stove, whose pipe went hideously up and along the ceiling. Ignoring that, however, in the effect of the whole and forgetting everything else, Jinny sank upon a pew-bench and abandoned herself to the unholy influences of architecture, so restful after her chapel with its benches and table-desk, ugliness unadorned. Not even a gradual consciousness of neglected duty could impair the divine tranquillity.

But the sober beauty of the place might not have sufficed to draw her again, but for a strange circumstance. One of the stained-glass figures, dully familiar to her from without as a leaden glaze, proved when seen from within in all the glory of art to be an angel of the very type under which her childish vision had imagined her hovering mother. And that it actually was mystically interfused with her mother, as her emotion had immediately intertwined it, was demonstrated by the fact that even when she at last went forward to gather up the plums and apples, the eyes followed her about in protection and benediction. Miss Gentry’s legend of her moving angel lost its last shade of improbability, and it was with a new humility that Jinny repeated to her at the first opportunity her remorse for the permuted pot.

Nor did the angel’s emanation of guardianship prove illusory, for outraged though Miss Gentry had been by the suggestion that her moustache needed a hair-restorer, she graciously intimated—after the second Sunday of Jinny’s attendance—that the debt for the dress could be worked off in commission charges. It was a vast relief, for the Bundock-borne rumour of her apostacy had alienated the bulk of her co-religionists and exchanged the lingering remorse of earlier deserters for a sense of rectitude and foresight. Bundock’s sympathy with the Brotherhood almost reinstated him in its good graces. “But it brings its own punishment,” he pointed out consolingly. “Fancy putting a parson over herself to poke his snuffy nose into everything. That’s a pretty dress, Jinny, he’ll say, is it paid for? Or, that’s a cranky old grandpa you’ve got—why don’t ye put him in the poorhouse?”

It was as well poor Jinny did not overhear him, or she might have doubted whether her load of boxes was so uniformly imposing as she imagined. The Deacon, who did hear him, and who spent his life poking into holes and reprimanding sinners, was even more righteously indignant at the interference of parsons. “Inquisitive as warmin in a larder,” he described them. “Fussing around the poor, but without a drop of rum in their milk of human koindness.” Mr. Fallow—it would appear—had interfered on behalf of his parishioner in the threatened lawsuit with Miss Gentry: he had persuaded the guileless rat-catcher to promise to clear her cottage for nothing, and this although Mrs. Mott was paying her in full for his wife’s silk dress, the responsibility for which he had righteously repudiated.

“_Oi’ll_ clear her cottage,” he added darkly, and it seemed to Bundock that the parson had succeeded only in patching up the feud. But what was to be expected of the canting crew, the postman inquired. The new Chipstone curate had called on his father, and Bundock related with a chuckle how the bed-ridden old boy had patronizingly regretted that, being on his back, he could do nothing to help his visitor. “He sent him away with a bed-flea in his ear,” gloated Bundock. Mr. Joshua Mawhood recalled a bigger flea in the same clerical ear. The hapless curate had offered him a ticket for a lecture on “Economy.” “Come with me Bradmarsh way,” the rat-catcher had retorted, “and Oi’ll show you Mrs. Pennymole’s cottage, and if you’ll show me how she can bring up her nine childer on eleven shillings a week, Oi’ll eat your shovel-hat.” Bundock, unable to find a still larger flea, fell back on hypothesis. “If I’d been a Churchman and a chap in a white choker came to mine,” he said, “I’d tell him to mind his own business, and I dare say he’d be insulted, though I’d be giving him splendid advice. You know where the door is, I’d say, for you didn’t come in by the chimney. Now walk out, or else——!” And carried away by his own drama, Bundock administered a hearty kick to the apparently still-lingering phantom.

Needless to say, Mr. Fallow exercised none of this imagined prying into Jinny’s affairs. Like his pew-opener, whose long caped coat with the official red border found now a fresh justification, he was only too glad of her uninvited attendance, and the considerable accretion she brought to his congregation. Her presence freshened up for himself his old sermons: for her sake he even put in new Latin quotations. But Jinny enjoyed more the three musicians in the gallery—’cellist, flautist, and bassoonist—whose black frock-coats and trousers made them as important in quality as they were in quantity, and when after they had played a few bars the congregation sang:

“_Awake my soul, and with the sun_ _Thy daily stage of duty run,_”

Jinny felt herself rapt far indeed from her daily stage of duty. Even the pew-opener shuffling about in his list slippers to poke up the stove or a small boy, or to snuff the guttering tallow candles on dark mornings, could not bring her to earth.

And another factor than the church and its mother-angel helped Jinny over this dreary time. This was her dog. For only now did Nip emerge into his full caninity, or at least only now did Jinny learn to appreciate him to the full. In howsoever leaden a mood she started her carrying work, Nip’s ecstasy soon tinged it with gold. His blissful staccato barks, his tall inflated tail, his upleapings at her as she harnessed Methusalem, his gallopings and gambollings round that stolider fellow-quadruped, his crazy friskings and curvetings—who could resist such joy of life? Often it seemed to Jinny that he was returning thanks to his Maker for the sunshine or the good smells, rebuking unconsciously her heart-heaviness, bidding her cry no more over spilt milk, but just lap up what she could. “Cheer up, Jinny!” she heard him bark. “Men are brutes and women fools and gran’fers grumpy and customers cruel, but life is jolly and odours numerous and where there’s a way there’s a Will.” And infected by these sentiments of his, she would crack her whip, and Methusalem would prick up his ears and pretend for her sake to go faster, and there would be a lull in the ache at her heart.

Nip, however, was less consoling when the rival carriers met on the road. Then his invincible persuasion that the two were one brought Jinny considerable discomfort. For Will persisted in his later tactics of slowing down, whether to take stock of her appearance or to rub in the odious comparison of their respective equipages, so that while these were in proximity, Nip was able to feel himself shepherding them, and he ran from one to the other, rounding them up. Even when Jinny manœuvred off down the first by-way, Nip, not to be baulked, would travel between one and the other, growing more and more desperate as they grew more and more distant, till at last, fearful of losing both, he exchanged his frenzied shuttling between them for a still more frenzied standstill midway between the mutually receding vehicles—you saw him almost literally torn in two. Finally, after plaintive ululations of protest, he would trot back, with hang-dog look and drooping tail, to the shabby cart, where his mistress throned, grim and pale, amid her manifold mock parcels.

III

But it was neither Mr. Fallows sermons nor Nip’s that gave Jinny her first real sense of religion; not even the bass-viol and flute, though she heard them with ecstasy, nor the collects and litanies, though she perused them with interest. It came to her one pitch-black night when she had too confidently ventured out to bring first aid—a jug of real tea with some bread and butter—to poor rheumatic Uncle Lilliwhyte, whom earlier that day, while gathering mushrooms for supper, she had discovered in a deserted charcoal-burner’s hut.

She had not known before that Farmer Gale had carried out his threat of evicting the nondescript from his cottage on the plea of needing it for a labourer, and although she had been compelled to suspend the ministrations which had set Mr. Fallow looking for the Lady Bountiful in her blood, she felt vaguely responsible for Uncle Lilliwhyte’s declined fortunes, so parallel to her own. Would, in fact, the Cornishman have turned him out if Jinny had allowed that all-powerful arm to remain round her waist at the cattle-market; nay, could she not have cheered and nourished a subject countryside?

The unsavoury ancient was lying on some coarse sacking in a clearing still half charred. Literally “sackcloth and ashes,” Jinny thought, as she groped her way along the glade by the twinkle of his candle through the chinks of his ramshackle hut. An old flintlock, some snares, nets and rods, and a cooking-pot seemed all its furniture. She was horrified to think—as she gazed at the gaps in the roof—that the prayer for rain might be granted. But to her surprise the old man was sharing the communal aspiration—“a good rine as’ll make the seeds spear”—though not hopeful of the boon immediately. He did not want to be a “wet-’ead,” he declared paradoxically, but the ground would be harder before the sun met the wind. Such solicitude on behalf of soil belonging so largely to the farmer who had evicted him seemed to Jinny touchingly Christian.

It was only when she had turned her back on his glimmering light and got into the thick of the woods that they became curiously unfamiliar. Great trees that she did not know existed came colliding against her, tangles of roots tripped her up on her favourite paths; she stumbled into unfriendly pricklinesses of every species. She seemed, indeed, ridiculously lost within a furlong of her own door: how this black labyrinth had got there she could not understand, but it looked as if she might be all night escaping from it. She was even uneasily expecting one of the snakes Uncle Lilliwhyte hunted to glide perversely under her feet, she bruising its head and it biting her heel as the curse in Genesis predicted. Of course, if she could spit into its mouth after chewing some Spanish bugloss, it would instantly die. So at least Miss Gentry had assured her. But how find the rare bugloss in this blackness, or how spit accurately into the serpent’s mouth?

Why had she not brought a lantern, she asked herself. Was it really because she was jug and package laden, or had it been only conceit? She asked the question still more self-reproachfully when, after smashing the empty jug in a stumble which left her knuckles bleeding, she heard the gurgle of a water-hen and realized that she was far off her track and nearly into the Brad. She could not swim, but even a swimmer in such a moonless, starless void would not see the shore. Cautiously feeling her way among the willows, she groped towards the pasture-land, paradoxically pleased when she fell over a sleeping cow. She lay there some minutes in the warm darkness, not anxious to move on, for the river wound perilously in and out, one could still hear it rippling deliciously in the reeds, and the odours of the night were as exquisite. And then through the measureless blackness a faint suggestion of grey began to make itself perceptible or rather divinable, so shadowy was it, a lesser shade of black rather than an adumbration of light; it was as if behind the blank firmament some star was striving to shine.

And suddenly, mystically, she felt that this hinted radiance was God, the Light behind life’s darkness, and the words of the twenty-third Psalm came to her mind with all the force of a revelation. “_The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters._” How divinely apt was every word! So long as she had not wanted for aught, so long as she had not needed to be led, she had not really felt the meaning of the words: now that she was strayed and a-hungered, she knew overpoweringly that she had a shepherd. He was behind her watching, as surely as she watched over her grandfather. Now she understood what the Peculiars meant when they got up to testify. She must go back to them, bear witness this very next Sunday. Mr. Fallow’s church had no place for such testimonies. Women could not speak even at Morning Service.

And as if to complete her conversion, there was a swift pattering, a joyous bark, and a cold nose in her fevered palm. She had only to attach her handkerchief to Nip’s collar to be guided safely home. But it was Nip that was really her shepherd, she told herself, or at least her sheep-dog: it was Nip that was leading her beside the still waters. Dog was after all only God spelt backwards, she thought, with a sense of mystic discovery. And remembering all that Nip had done to bring her back to faith in life, she felt he was indeed a divine messenger. But then it was borne in upon her that if she testified her true thoughts, the Brethren would deem her irreverent. After all, it was Mr. Fallow who might understand better, he who spoke of his bees with love, and had once cited to her a passage from a Roman poet about bees being part of the divine mind. The Roman writer was not a Catholic, he had explained carefully, seeing her dubious face.

IV

In her gratitude to the dressmaker, Jinny had become more than ever her intellectual parasite, and a wealth of information from “The Christian Mother’s Miscellany” and “Culpeper’s Herbal”—to say nothing of the spinster’s own sibylline rhymes—enriched the walk to and from church, which Miss Gentry graciously permitted her carrier and debtor to take in her society next Sunday morning. They parted indeed inside, Miss Gentry plumping herself unrebuked into the curtained three-benched pew of the dead and gone squire whom old Farmer Gale had dispossessed. Jinny was thus unable to exchange glances with her at the thrilling announcement read out by the cleric, who after the Second Lesson declared curtly—as if it were the most natural thing in the world—that Mr. Anthony Flippance, widower, of Frog Farm, and Miss Bianca Cleopatra Jones, spinster, of Foxearth Farm, both of this parish, proposed to enter into holy matrimony. At once a whirligig of images circled round Jinny and she saw dizzily the explanation of a disappearance that had puzzled her, for Tony had vanished from “The Black Sheep” without leaving a tip, the old waiter grumbled. What had led up to this adventure, she wondered, and how was Polly taking her intended stepmother?

“Isn’t that the Showman you’ve spoken of?” Miss Gentry inquired, as the congregation of seven streamed out, swollen by musicians, sexton, clerk, and pew-opener. “The fomenter of ungodliness?”

“It certainly seems my old customer,” replied Jinny, somewhat evasively. “But I didn’t know he was living at Frog Farm.”

“Didn’t you tell me he was going to turn your chapel into a playhouse?”

“So he said once, but nothing seems to have come of it.”

“More’s the pity,” Miss Gentry surprised Jinny by commenting. She added, “Even a playhouse would do less harm.”

“I—I don’t see that,” Jinny stammered, protesting.

“It’s as clear as daylight. The Devil stamps his sign plainly on a playhouse: he forges God’s name on a chapel. And who is this Miss Jones?”

“I don’t know. I never heard of any girl at Foxearth Farm called Cleopatrick—what a funny name!”

“Cleopatra,” corrected Miss Gentry grandly, her bosom expanding till it strained her Sunday silk. “A great Queen of Egypt in the days of old. Born under Venus and died of the bite of an asp!”

“What’s an asp?” said Jinny.

“It’s what they call the serpent of old Nile!”

“Good gracious!” Jinny exclaimed. “Couldn’t they have given Her Majesty agrimony wine?”

“Neither horse-mint nor wild parsnip could avail: there is no ointment against suicide,” Miss Gentry explained. “She killed herself.”

“A queen kill herself! What for?”

“What does one kill oneself for?” Miss Gentry demanded crushingly. “For love, of course. But I hope her namesake is more respectable. Cleopatra never published the banns. But how comes this Miss Jones to be at Foxearth Farm? I thought the people were called Purley—hurdle-makers, aren’t they?”

“Yes—it must be a lodger. They do take lodgers. I must ask Barnaby—I meet him on the road sometimes.” She stood still suddenly, going red and white by turns like the revolving lens of a lighthouse.

Miss Gentry stared, then smiled in sentimental sympathy “Is he a nice boy?” she cooed.

“Who? Ye-es, very nice,” Jinny stammered. “But I’ve just remembered Miss Jones isn’t his sister!”

“Who said she was? Oh, Jinny, Jinny!” Miss Gentry sometimes became roguish.

“She’s only his stepsister,” Jinny explained desperately. “Mrs. Purley’s first husband was called Jones.”

If the bride should really be the Purley creature—the fair charmer who rode so often in Will’s coach as to be almost “keeping company” with him! What a lifting of a nightmare! What a sudden horizon of rose! But no, it was too good to be true!

“But I never heard she was called Cleopatra,” she wound up sadly.

“People often have a second name hidden away like a tuck,” said Miss Gentry.

“But her first name isn’t the same either, it’s Blanche.”

“But Bianca _is_ Blanche!” bayed Miss Gentry, like an excited bloodhound. “Only more grand and foreign-like.”

Jinny’s colours revolved again.

“Is it?” she breathed. But she remembered Mr. Flippance’s address had been announced as Frog Farm. If he had thus ousted young Mr. Flynt, she urged, how could he be living so amicably under his rival’s roof? Besides, how should Mr. Purley’s second wife, a matron as famous for her cheeses as her spouse for his hurdles, have christened her girl so outlandishly? No, Joneses were as abundant as hips and haws, and this Miss Jones could only have come to their out-of-the-way parish—like Mr. Flippance—for reasons of statutory residence, though why the Showman should bury himself to be married, Miss Gentry declared to be an exciting enigma. Perhaps he liked a quiet wedding, Jinny suggested, having too many acquaintances in towns, and with that she dismissed the hope from her mind.

But it was not so easy to dismiss the topic from Miss Gentry’s. That lady was rolling the hymeneal discussion under her tongue. She pointed out that Foxearth Farm was not in Little Bradmarsh and was prepared to discuss the romantic ramifications, if it should turn out on the wedding-day that the bride was disqualified. But Jinny cruelly took the sweet out of her mouth. Foxearth Farm _was_ in the parish, she declared. “It’s one of those funny bits, lost, stolen, or strayed into other parishes. I know because of the women from there who come upon our parish for blankets when they’re laid aside——”

“Oh, Jinny!” deprecated Miss Gentry, to whom, maternity was as sordid and surreptitious as matrimony was righteously romantic.

But Jinny, innocently misunderstanding, persisted. “Why, I remember the fuss when the steam-roller tried to charge our parish for doing up a scrap of the road beyond Foxearth Farm.”

They walked through the sunlit churchyard in constrained silence, Miss Gentry feeling as if the steam-roller had gone over roses. But stimulated by the iron pole and the four steps, by which ladies who rode pillion anciently mounted and dismounted, she began wondering who would be making the bride’s dress. That gave Jinny a happy idea. How if she got Miss Gentry the work—that would be a slight return for all she owed her!

“Why shouldn’t _you_ make it?” she inquired excitedly. “I could speak to Mr. Flippance, now that I know where he is.”

“Hush, child, don’t profane the Sabbath! Men don’t count in wedding matters,” said Miss Gentry in complex correction. “Nor would I care about the patronage of stage people.”

“But she mayn’t be stage.”

“Like runs to like,” Miss Gentry sighed, and Jinny felt the Colchester romance hovering again. But it did not descend. Instead, Miss Gentry remarked that she ought to have known that it could not be a local beauty. No play-actor with any brains at all could be attracted by anything hereabouts, especially when they could not achieve the acquaintance of women of real attraction and intellect, these preferring the company of cats to that of strolling sinners. Nevertheless, far be it from her wilfully to rob Jinny of a commission.

“I wasn’t thinking of my commission,” Jinny protested with a little flush.

“I couldn’t dream of it otherwise. Squibs and I need so little and have more work than we can manage.”

“Squibs?” Jinny murmured.

“The place is overrun with rats,” Miss Gentry explained. “What will it be when the cold drives them in from the ditches? However, fortunately that horrible old Mawhood stands compelled to clear the cottage before winter. That was the compromise our too kindly pastor let him off with.”

“So you told me. Shall I order the Deacon at once?”

“The Deacon?” Miss Gentry sniffed. “Bishops they’ll call themselves next.”

“There _is_ a bishop,” Jinny reminded her. “Bishop Harrod.”

“Wretched little rat-catchers!” Miss Gentry hissed. “Setting themselves up against the Church Established. I’m so glad you’re done with them.”

“But I’m not,” Jinny confessed shyly. “I’m still Peculiar.”

“You are, indeed!” Miss Gentry cried, startled. “Do you mean to tell me that after the glorious privilege of sitting under Mr. Fallow——!” Words failed her, and they also failed Jinny, to whom this unfamiliar metaphor conjured up a puzzling picture of the vicar perched on her Sunday bonnet. The girl was the first to recover her breath.

“Gran’fer told me my mother wanted me to be Peculiar,” she explained. “I can’t go against my Angel-Mother.” Then she blushed prettily, never having mentioned the angel mother since childhood, and feeling somehow as if she had profaned a sacred secret.

“If your angel mother was alive,” cried Miss Gentry with conviction, “it’s to our church that she would come—to our grand old church with its storied windows!”

A divine thrill ran through all Jinny’s frame. Her belief that her mother and the painted angel were mysteriously one was sealed. The oracle had spoken.

Miss Gentry, swelling at her silence—Jinny heard the silk crackling—felt herself indeed an oracle. Squibs had his pick of the plates at that Sunday dinner, enjoying a Sabbath rest from rats, and basking in his mistress’s lap, a black curled-up breathing mass of felicity.

V

As Jinny jogged along next Tuesday morning, diverging from her usual beat to take in the hurdle-maker’s home, that lay—like a geological “fault”—in the wrong parish, the plan that formed itself in her mind was to approach the question of the bride and the wedding-dress by way of Barnaby Purley, the youth who had so chivalrously come to her rescue by delivering at Uckford Manor the keg of oil overlooked by her on that memorable journey with Elijah Skindle. It was because Foxearth Farm possessed this hobbledehoy scion and a trap of its own that Jinny had never done its marketing, nor come face to face with the creature of whom with sidelong eye she caught tantalizing glimpses in the Flynt Flyer. “Not bad-lookin’” was the countryside’s appraisal of her, which was rather ominous, indicating as it did considerable beauty, and conjoined as it was with a rumour of easy conquests, culminating in the coach-owner. But a good square look at her had not been attainable, even on Sunday, for though the family was Church of England—Mr. Giles Purley being even a churchwarden—it preferred to worship in the parish church to which it did not parochially belong. Jinny told herself she was hastening at this first opportunity purely in Miss Gentry’s interest, for fear the bridal gown had been ordered elsewhere. But she could not quite disguise from herself her consuming anxiety to discover whether this everyday Miss Jones was really a Cleopatra, though she called her poignant emotion mere curiosity, and deemed herself as apathetic at heart as the bumble-bees now crawling miserably about her cart, which could be flicked into a feeble flight and drone, but which soon relapsed into their torpor.

In truth the suppressed hope of finding Blanche safely paired with the Showman was now quickening her pulses and restoring the wild rose to her cheeks. The September day, too, for all the long-continued drought, and despite the drowsy bumble-bees, was not devoid of animating influences, especially the delicious smell of burnings from the fields, where men tossed from their prongs brown masses of weed into red and smoking heaps, or carried like merry devils fiery forks from one pile to another. Monstrous fungi clove in pied picturesqueness to the elm-trunks, and a hawthorn grove with its scarlet berries was like a vast radiant smile. Overhead the sun, a shimmery thin-clouded sphere, showed like an eye in a great white peacock’s wing. The hips and blackberries were interfused in the hedges, the ivy flowered on the squat church towers, the Virginia creepers were reddening the cottages, and the dahlias grew tall in the little front gardens. In the orchards the pear-trees and apple-trees were heavy with fruit. Around them the turnip-fields looked more like spreads of mustard, so thick were the slender yellow-flowering stems pushing between the crop proper. And everywhere was life; pecking poultry scattering before Methusalem’s feet, and little frogs playing leapfrog; swarms of the Daddy-long-legs and gigantic spiders, great quarrelling families of rooks, quiet chewing cattle, pigs nosing for acorns or windfall apples, hares or great rats or weasels scuttling across the road, partridges straying fearlessly in the stubble, swallows darting unpromisingly high, and when Jinny passed over the little brick bridge, at which a black drainage-mill waved what seemed its four crossed white combs, a pair of superb swans hissed their proud protectiveness over a very drab cygnet.

Driving through an avenue of firs and hornbeam, and past a dirty pond with two flagged mounds in the middle, she reached the clearing where the hurdle-maker operated, with his farmhouse for base of his combined industrial, agricultural, and pastoral occupations.

Mr. Giles Purley, a rosy-wrinkled apple-faced ancient, stood in his shirt-sleeves, looking as pleasantly untidy as his farmyard, which was full of felled logs and split wood, and bean and corn stacks, and ramshackle sheds. He was planing off knots with a bill-hook, and as Jinny drove up to the gate of the old timbered red house, he greeted her with a cheery grumble at the drought which forced such winter work prematurely upon him. Jinny was abashed to find no pretext for her visit coming to her tongue, so she stammered out that she wanted to see Barnaby, and the droll look that twinkled across his father’s face sent her colour up still higher. “Always wants a change, they youngsters,” he chuckled benevolently, “whether ’tis of work or sweet-hearts.”

At this point Jinny became aware of Barnaby himself, who, equally in his shirt-sleeves, was smiling sheepishly up at her from the ditch which he was discumbering with a hook. “Lilies of the walley they stick in their buttonholes,” went on his father waggishly, “as if weeds was ever aught but weeds. There ain’t one that showlders his sack o’ corn or sticks to his dearie. Sheep’s eyes they can make, but as for sheep-hurdles——!” The note was now earnest. It seemed an unpropitious moment to tackle Barnaby.

And to make it more impossible, Blanche herself suddenly bounded from the orchard, flourishing a great corroded pear.

“Nipped thirteen!” she cried gaily.

“Not bad-lookin’,” forsooth! To Jinny she appeared in her bloom and colour like a rich peach dipped in cream: overripeness was the only flaw her beauty suggested to this girl in her teens. But the chill at Jinny’s heart did not prevent her crying out with equal gaiety, “What an unlucky number—for the wasps!”

Barnaby laughed adoringly from his ditch, Mr. Giles Purley in simple joy of the slaughter. The pigs, he explained gleefully, had gnawed at the pear-bags and Blanche was “wunnerful masterous” at nipping the wasps as they crawled out of the forbidden fruit. Asps, Jinny found herself thinking, would have a bad time at such bold hands, though they made the Cleopatra likelier—she slued her eyes round to see the rings on them, but the engagement finger was hidden by the big pear, and Miss Jones, her gaiety checked, was eyeing her like the intruder she was.

“She can kill two at once,” Barnaby called up.

“Like you with the lasses,” flashed his father, to his confusion.

“It’s nothing,” said Blanche coldly. “They haven’t time to curl their tails round.”

“Who? The lasses?” asked Jinny, and to her relief the beautiful Blanche vouchsafed a smile.

“You won’t be stung if you don’t think you’ll be,” the girl explained more cordially. Then, unable to retain the proud secret longer, even from the Carrier, she burst forth, “I’m going on the stage with it.”

“What!” Jinny gasped.

“Only as a beginning, of course. ‘Bianca, The Bare-Handed Wasp-Killer,’ it’ll be on the bills.”

“Rubbidge!” came explosively from Mr. Purley. “And where will Mr. Flippance get the wapses in the winter? A circus-slut indeed—I wonder what your mother can be thinkin’ of! And what’s Mr. Honeytongue going to bill _you_ as, Barnaby? Not champion hurdle-maker, I’ll go gaff!”

“Wait till you see me,” said Barnaby with sullen mysteriousness. “You don’t know a circus from a theaytre.”

“You’ll stick to your shackles and bolts,” said his parent grimly, “and peel the bark off, too!”

At the mention of Mr. Flippance, Jinny’s heart beat fast: she felt hovering on the verge of the revelation, and the Bianca and the stage-project rekindled her hope. But Mr. Purley’s grievance had to be worked off first. “They’re too lazy to peel the wood,” he explained to Jinny. “But that’s the main thing for hurdles—to strip ’em well against rain. Same as you was full-dressed in a pouring rain—the time it ’ud take you to dry! If you was naked now——”

“Oh, dad!” Barnaby remonstrated, to his parent’s confusion, and enjoyed this tit-for-tat.

“When do you expect Mr. Flippance, Mr. Purley?” Jinny asked him hastily.

“Oh, he never comes in the mornings,” Blanche replied, and this appropriation of the question seemed to Jinny to continue the promise of Bianca and the stage-project.

“Then can I speak to—to his intended?” she flashed brilliantly, with a clever smile.

“She’s gone to her dressmaker,” said Blanche simply.

It was a double blow, and Jinny winced before it. In that twinkling of her eye Blanche seemed years younger, diabolically handsome, a nipper of buds as well as of wasps. But a worse blow awaited her, for she had scarcely regained her composure when the distant sound of a wheezy horn and a sense of an impending avalanche brought Blanche into bounding activity again.

“Why, there’s Will!” she exclaimed with a comic, happy start. “And me not dressed yet!” And without a word to the little Carrier, she ran gaily into the house.

Frantically clutching Nip who was about to spring to meet the coach, Jinny cried vague thanks to the hurdle-maker and hurried Methusalem down a by-way so narrow that she could hardly squeeze through the untrimmed “werges” neglected of Barnaby.

VI

When she heard the coach well on its way again on the Chipstone road, with Blanche divined within, she found herself possessed by an unexpected urging towards Mr. Flippance. She had no real round any longer—only the hours to fill and her grandfather to half deceive—and perhaps, despite Miss Gentry’s own opinion, the bridegroom might yet be able to prevent her being cut out by the rival pair of scissors. The truth was, Jinny felt a physical need of the toning up the Showman somehow imparted to life. To drive around the rest of the day with practically no business but her own thoughts would be too dreadful. He must surely babble happily about his bride, and apart from the interest of her identity, some of his glow could not but radiate to her. And there was Caleb and Martha to see, too—how were they faring, these dear, simple creatures, too long unvisited? But then—thought that froze the heart!—had she not declared she would never set foot in Frog Farm again? No, she answered herself defiantly—and no memory of hereditary quibbling, nothing of her sense of humour, rose to trouble the reply—all she had said was that Will should never _see_ her there. And Will was safely chained to the Chipstone road.

All the same she looked round apprehensively and with wildly beating heart before she allowed Methusalem to lift the latch of the familiar gate, and she had somehow expected so great a transformation in the farmhouse under its new and sinister activities, and was conscious of so vast a change in herself since she had last seen it, that its primitive black front almost startled her, so unchanged did it appear. True, the ferrets’ cages were gone, but their absence only made it more its old self, and the moan of the doves was as reassuring as the singing of the kettle on her own hearth. Caleb’s red shirt-sleeves looked for once in keeping with the scene, arising as they did out of yellow flame-tinged clouds from the rubbish-heap which he was burning, and the pleasant pungent smell of which filled her eyes with tears, half smoke, half emotion. Even in that glow the homely hair-circled face was capable of a new illumination.

“Gracious goodness, there’s Jinny!” He ran to the house-door. “Mother! Mother!” he cried in jubilant agitation.

Martha emerged at a hobbling run, apron-girded. Despite the glow, _her_ face darkened.

“You give a body a turn,” she grumbled. “I almost thought ’twas the Golden City coming down.”

“’Tis nigh as good,” he retorted boldly, “bein’ as Jinny was same as gone there. And bless me, ef she don’t look ghosty!”

“Good morning, Jinny!” said Martha coldly. “We don’t need a carrier now—with our coach to get everything.”

Jinny’s cheeks turned far from “ghosty.” “I haven’t come to you—only to Mr. Flippance.”

“But he gets everything, too, through Willie.”

“I know that—I merely want to speak to him.”

“You can’t now.”

“The missus means he’s abed,” Caleb explained, rushing to Jinny’s relief, and indeed the information brought a smile back to her twitching lips. “Minds me of a great old tortoise, diggin’ hisself into his blankets. Do him good to be up with the sun, same as when Oi was a scarecrow, soon as the wheat was sown.”

“You don’t want to tell everybody you began as a scarecrow,” said Martha frigidly.

“Ef we’re rich now, dear heart, and can ride in our own coach, ’tis the Lord’s hand, not ours. Oi watched over wheat and winter beans, and ’arly peas, and winter oats, and then spring barley, but all the time the Lord was watchin’ over me.”

“Not as a scarecrow,” said Martha severely.

“Oi warn’t a scarecrow ploughin’-time, bein’ set on the middle hoss to flick the whip, and chance times when ’twas too frosty to plough Oi went to Dame Pippler’s to school.”

“I never heard that before,” said Martha.

“Dedn’t like to tell ye,” he confessed, “being as ’twas too cowld to howd the slate-pencil, and the book-larnin’ leaked out ’twixt the frosts. ’Twas a penny a week wasted.”

Martha saw their visitor was amused at this revelation after fifty years of wedlock. “Jinny wants to be going on,” she observed testily. “Look at all her boxes.”

“Oi’m proper pleased to see ’em, for as Oi says to Willie, Oi hope as you ain’t hart Jinny’s business and grieved the Lord. Ye can’t sleep, Oi says, ef ye’ve grieved the Lord.”

“Then Mr. Flippance must be a saint,” laughed Jinny. But she was touched to tears.

Caleb had, however, not finished his apologia for his lack of learning, and was to be diverted neither by Jinny’s jests nor his wife’s grimaces. “And in the summer,” he explained carefully, “Oi got to goo out with my liddle old gun agin they bird-thieves, though peas and pebbles was all the shot my feyther——”

“Can’t you try some at Mr. Flippance’s window?” interrupted Jinny, fearful the fretful Martha would soon close her door upon her.

“Oi’d have to stand sideways for that!” He pointed to a hooked-back casement. “Fust he kivers hisself up, then he opens hisself out”—he chuckled contemptuously—“’tis ‘in dock, out nettle,’ as the sayin’ goos.”

Jinny lifted her little horn to her lips and blew a blast so literally rousing that hardly had its echoes died than from the black casement framework a red unshaven face, like the rayed rising sun on an inn signboard, dawned above clouds of flamboyant dressing-gown.

“Jinny! Hurrah!” cried the apparition in delighted surprise. “The very person I’ve been wanting for weeks!”

In the effulgence of that great rubicund sphere of a face Jinny’s mists began to dissolve—after all, with all his faults he belonged to her rosy past, to the good old times ere black horses or red men had arisen to rend her. “Then why didn’t you let me know?” she smiled.

“Just what I was thinking of doing. So glad you’ve saved me a letter. Never was so hard-worked in my life. Good morning, ma,” he threw to Mrs. Flynt, whose set face now relaxed into a maternal mildness, “do I smell breakfast?”

“Ye could ha’ smelt it afore seven, friend,” said Caleb, growing dour as Martha grew soft. “And the missus a bit paltry to-day, too!”

“Am I late? I’m so sorry. Why, I thought it was Will’s horn!”

“Mr. Flippance overslept himself, dearie,” Martha said reproachfully.

“But you hate food spilin’,” Caleb protested.

“Not so much as _I_ hate spoilt food!” said Tony. “Not that a good housekeeper like Mrs. Flynt would really let food spoil—any more than you your wheat-patch.”

“Ef ye had helped gittin’ that bit o’ corn in,” retorted Caleb, “ye’d fare to have more to sleep on.”

“There’s more than one kind of work, Caleb,” said Martha severely. “There’s brain-work for them that have never been scarecrows.”

“Yes, indeed, Mrs. Flynt!” said Tony earnestly. “I’m worked to a shadow.”

“And there was no such hurry to get the corn in,” Martha added.

“With all they prayers for rine gooin’ on, ye can’t be too careful,” Caleb urged.

“But what work had you got, Mr. Flippance?” Jinny laughed.

“Getting married. Didn’t you know?”

She was startled. “But you’re not married already?”

“No such luck. When the lady says ‘Yes,’ you think all your troubles are over. But they’re only beginning.”

Caleb’s face relaxed in a grin, whereupon Martha’s hardened to a frown. “Marriage is no laughing matter,” she said, with a glower at her husband.

“No, indeed, Mrs. Flynt!” endorsed Tony. “What with the forms and questions and ceremonies and witnesses and what not, and rings to buy and bouquets to order—it’s worse than a dress rehearsal!”

“But you’ve had the rehearsal,” Jinny reminded him.

“I was young and strong. Now you’ve got to help me.”

“_Me?_” Jinny was enchanted at this smoothing of the path for Miss Gentry. “But I’m so busy,” she protested professionally. “I can’t wait till you’re up.”

“Jinny’s too busy,” Martha corroborated. And in her eagerness to be rid of the girl, she unconsciously clucked to Methusalem, and so exactly like Jinny that the noble animal actually started.

“Wait! Wait!” Mr. Flippance shouted down wildly. “Do wait! Such a lot to consult you about. Haven’t even got a best man yet. Find me one and I’ll call down blessings on your head!”

“I don’t want you to call them _down_,” she jested up. “That’s the trouble.”

“I’ll be down before you can say ‘Jack Robinson.’”

“I wasn’t going to suggest _him_!” And she reined in her fiery steed.

Martha had hurried to her kitchen to bring in the belated breakfast, and the convulsion into which Jinny’s last remark appeared to throw Caleb was left unchecked by wifely grimaces. The veteran alternated between gurgles and roars so continuously that Jinny, flattered as she was by the reception of her jest, began to feel uneasy.

“That fair flabbergasted him,” he gasped, getting his breath at last. “How can Oi, says Oi, ef Oi’m a buoy-oy, Oi says.” He wiped the tears from his whiskered cheeks and blew his nose into his great “muckinger.”

“But he didn’t ask _you_ to be best man,” she said, puzzled. “And you aren’t a boy.”

“’Twas master as called me a buoy-oy,” he explained, his eyes still dancing, “so as to keep down my wages. Oi’ve got three hosses same as the min, Oi says, and can plough my stetch similar-same as them and cut and trave up my corn better’n Bill Ravens as felt the teeth of the sickle two days arter he started and couldn’t work no more, though double-money time, as Oi can sartify bein’ as ’twar me what tied my neckercher round his arm with the blood pourin’ down like sweat, and lucky ’twarn’t his wife, Oi says, but another woman gooin’ behind him to be larnt how, she bein’ in confinement. But master he wouldn’t listen to nawthen. Oi’ll give you easy ploughin’ was all he promised, ye’re onny a buoy-oy, he says, obstinacious like, and Oi stayed on a bit, not mislikin’ the cans of tea the wives brought, all hot and sweet, and the big granary with pillars and fower on us thrashin’ and rattlin’ on the big oak floor, jolly as a harvest supper, and Bill Ravens—that be the feyther of the rollin’ stone as shears chance times for Master Peartree—singin’ like the saints in Jerusalem, all except for the words. But at last, bein’ as feyther wanted the money and Oi needed time to look for a farmer not so nippy, gimme a week off, says Oi to old Skindflint. A week off! says master. What for? Gooin’ to git married?”

At this point the convulsion recommenced, and Jinny, though she understood how the Flippance wedding had set his memories agog, had still to wait for enlightenment as to why they were agrin.

“Married, Oi says! How can Oi git married, ef Oi’m a buoy-oy?”

It was out at last, the great repartee of his life, and Jinny felt he was right to cherish its memory. She occupied the period of his renewed cachinnation in descending from her seat and giving Methusalem his impoverished nosebag. Her action reminded Caleb to offer to show her the enlarged stables, with the old roof raised to admit the coach. Then, colouring as if at an indelicacy, he hastily inquired how her grandfather was, remarking with commiseration that he must be getting a bit elderly.

Never had Jinny known him so loquacious—the absence of Martha was combining with her own advent to loosen his usually ruly member. And at last the pent-up flood of his grievances against the Showman burst forth. The return of Will, Jinny gathered, had been dislocating enough, even before his new-fangled coach had brought the stir of the great world and Bundock almost daily, but now the house and the hours were all “topsy-tivvy,” worse than in Cousin Caroline’s time. He would do Will the justice to say that it wasn’t his fault—Will had been against putting up a “furriner” in their spare bedroom—but the “great old sluggaby” had come and ingratiated himself so with the rheumatic but romantic Martha, and offered such startling prices—a pound a week for board and lodging—“enough to feed the whole Pennymole family for a fortnight”—that she had forced her will upon both the male Flynts. “The trouble with Martha is,” Caleb summed up, “she allus wants what she wants.” Mr. Flippance, he explained, “got a piper for her from her Lunnon Sin Agog—funny name that for the Lord’s House, even in Lunnon—and that piper fared to be all about the Christy Dolphins and their doin’s—the _Loightstand_, Martha called it. And she read me a piece out of it how Mr. Somebody, husband o’ Sister T’other, was baptized by Elder Somebody Else; and she wanted me to goo and do likewise.”

“But you _are_ nearly one of them, aren’t you?” Jinny smiled.

He looked uneasy.

“Oi don’t want to be baptized a Jew,” he said plaintively. “Martha she argufies as Paul says _we_ are the Jews, bein’ Abraham’s seed in our innards. So long as she calls us the Lord’s people, Oi fair itches to be one, but that goos agin the stomach like to call yourself a Jew. Same as she was satisfied with the New Jerusalem part, Oi’d goo with her. For ef the Book says, ‘No man hath gone up to heaven,’ or ‘Whither Oi goo, ye cannot come,’ that proves as heaven’s got to come to us, and happen Oi’ll live to see it droppin’ down with its street of pure gold same as transparent brass. But Oi won’t be swallowed up whole like a billy-owl swallows a mouse.”

“What’s that you’re saying, Caleb?” said Martha, now perceived back at her house-door.

“He was telling me about the _Lightstand_,” said Jinny glibly.

Martha beamed again. “Ah, it won’t be long before that light spreads, though now the world is all shrouded in darkness and superstition. But salvation is of the Jews.”

“That ain’t writ in the Book?” inquired Caleb anxiously.

“Salvation is of the Jews,” repeated Martha implacably. “John iv. 22. There’s nine of us now in Essex alone, the _Lightstand_ says, not reckoning London. They don’t know about another that’s on the way Zionwards,” she added mysteriously.

“Meaning me?” said Caleb nervously.

“Meaning a man with brains and book-learning,” said Martha sternly, “and he’s ready to see you now, Jinny.”

“Well, nine ain’t no great shakes,” Caleb murmured.

“We are the salt of the earth,” Martha reminded him. “A pinch of salt goes a long way.”

“Ay, when it rolls in a pill-box,” Caleb reflected ruefully. “And hows the old chapel, Jinny?” he said aloud. “Willy never goos now.”

Jinny coloured up: one of her pretexts for apostacy seemed null and void.

“I’ll see you when I come out, I suppose,” she said evasively, as she followed Martha within.

VII

The parlour of Frog Farm had not the peculiar mustiness which greeted Jinny’s nostrils when last she peeped into it that tragic morning of Maria’s illness, but there was by way of compensation a reek of stale tobacco and the odours of the breakfast bacon and mushrooms, while in lieu of the sacrosanct tidiness there was a pervasion of papers, with a whole mass of scripts sliding steadily from the slippery sofa. The brown-lozenged text on the wall: “When He giveth quietness, who then can make trouble?” seemed to shriek for Caleb’s answer: “Friend Flippance.” Other documents bulged and bristled from both pockets of the dressing-gown as from greasy paniers.

“Bless you, Jinny,” Tony gurgled from his breakfast-cup. He eyed her rapturously. “What a pretty pair you’ll make at the wedding!”

“It’s no use, Mr. Flippance,” said Martha, beaming, “I’ve told you before I won’t go into a church.”

Mr. Flippance, who had been mentally coupling his bride and Jinny, replied with but the briefest muscular quiver, that the only thing that reconciled him to Martha’s absence was that she was incapacitated by matrimony from the rôle of bridesmaid. This morning he would not trouble her to wait. “You can ‘withdraw’ from me,” he said jocosely.

Martha was jarred by this profane use of the sacred vocabulary, and moreover felt it almost as improper to leave Jinny alone in her house, even with a budding bridegroom. “Jinny’s got no secrets from me,” she said tartly; and Mr. Flippance, divining his error, remarked blandly, “Nor have I.” And as Martha started to dust the mantelpiece ornaments and to discover cigar-ash in her china shoes, he drew Jinny’s attention to the “beautiful” silk sampler that hung over them. “And all worked with Mrs. Flynt’s own hand! What a wonderful lion—and as for the unicorn, she’s got it to the life!”

“Oh, it’s only what I did when a girl,” said Martha, blushing modestly. “Only I didn’t like to hang it up then, because I’d left no room for the foreign trees like my sisters put in!”

“Well, but you’ve got in the alphabet, big and little, and all the figures! Wonderful!”

“That’s where Willie learnt his A B C from,” said Martha, radiant.

“Ah, that gay deceiver!” sighed Mr. Flippance. “He told me he was a Yankee, but now I find he’s only a yumorist. Still he’s a chap any woman can be proud of—what do _you_ say, Jinny?”

Jinny, who had seated herself on the sofa, carefully steadied the slipping manuscripts as she replied with a forced lightness:

“I say, if you want a best man, you can’t find a better.”

“Ah, that’s the trouble. He won’t take part in a Church ceremony neither, he says he’s got to consider the old folks—at the chapel,” he added promptly. “But at any rate we shall have the best bridesmaid.”

“You don’t mean me?” said Jinny, colouring under his admiring gaze. “Because it’s impossible. I haven’t the time—or the money.”

“Is it the dress you’re thinking of? Surely the Theatre Royal, Chipstone, can run to that?” And pulling a protrusive scroll from a pocket of his dressing-gown, he unfurled it beatifically, exposing a poster with the coupled names of Anthony Flippance and Cleopatra Jones in giant letters.

“Anthony and Cleopatra!” he breathed in a ravishment. “The moment she told me her second name was Cleopatra I knew it was useless fighting against the fates.”

“But have you bought our chapel then?” Jinny inquired.

“Bought your chapel?” Mr. Flippance was mystified. “Why on earth should I buy your chapel?”

“You—you might have turned it into a theatre!” she stammered apologetically.

He waved the suggestion away with a jewelled hand. “Only a new Temple of Thespis could live up to Anthony and Cleopatra. We are building!”

“Where?” Now it was Jinny that was mystified—she had seen no such enterprise afoot.

“Here!” He tapped the other pocket of his dressing-gown. “Plans!” He rolled up his poster reluctantly. “Cleopatra wanted to see it in print. Didn’t I say what a work getting married was? But now that the bridesmaid’s settled——!”

“But she’s not!” said Jinny, more alarmed than when he was trying to cast her for the bride, perhaps because the danger of being sucked in was greater.

“Oh, Jinny!” He looked at her with large reproachful eyes and mechanically threw bacon to Nip, who had at last sniffed his way in, and who, fortunately for Martha’s composure, caught it ere it reached her carpet. “You see she wants to have the thing all regular and respectable, and all her family are in Wales. She hasn’t got a parent handy to give her away. And having led a wandering life, she hadn’t even a parish to marry in. I never thought you’d desert an old pal.”

“But I’m no pal of hers—I don’t even know her.”

“Oh, Jinny!” And just arresting a paper-slide, he extricated a photograph from the imperilled mass. “The new Scott Archer process,” he declared proudly. “Knocks your daguerreotypes into the middle of last week. Good gag that, eh?”

But it was Jinny who seemed knocked into that period; and not only by this new triumph of the camera. For in this wonderful breathing image she recognized—in all save size, for this seemed a Cleopatra swelling to regal stature—the beauteous human doll she had last seen walking down the steps of a toy house, conning a part.

“But she’s married!” she gasped.

“Not yet. Would to heaven it _were_ all over!” said Mr. Flippance airily, but his great brow grew black for an instant ere he turned it sunnily on Martha. “Oh, ma, _could_ I have more of these marvellous mushrooms?”

“I’ll see, you greedy boy,” she smiled, retreating.

“Well, who could help saying encore to such items?” He turned reproachfully on Jinny. “You nearly shocked the old lady.”

“But didn’t you—didn’t you call her the Duchess?” Jinny stammered. “Oh, but perhaps it is Mrs. Duke’s sister—she looks taller.”

“That’s because she’s got no legs,” he explained paradoxically. “But it’s all right—The Loveliest Leading Lady in London.” (Jinny heard the capital letters distinctly.)

He went on to explain that London didn’t know this yet, and that some time must elapse before Cleopatra would be in a position to demonstrate it on the spot, owing to local jealousies. But Jinny came back remorselessly to her point.

“But surely she was married to Mr. Duke!”

“Hush! Appearances are deceptive. They were just close friends.”

“You couldn’t well be closer—in that doll’s house,” said Jinny scornfully. And her own words reminded her how he had denounced the Duchess as a “squeaking doll” whose “golden” hair was spurious.

“Now you shock _me_, Jinny,” said Mr. Flippance severely. “Pure as the driven snow is my Cleo, stainless as the Lady Agnes, shut up in that great oak chest on her wedding morn, sweet as her namesake, Bianca, in _The Taming of the Shrew_.”

“Why does she tame shrews?” asked Jinny, puzzled.

“That’s a play by Shakespeare”—the name not occurring in the Spelling-Book, left Jinny unimpressed. “A shrew is a vixen.”

This natural history left Jinny still less impressed. “That’s nonsense,” she said. “A shrew is tiny and lovely to look at, with darling rounded ears. I buried one the other day, and its eye was as bright as life.”

“It’s only a way of speaking,” he explained, “as you call a woman a cat. Katharina’s the polecat of the play that her husband has to tame with a whip, but Bianca is a dove, gentle and spotless.”

“Doves are not so gentle,” said Jinny. “They peck each other dreadfully. I like vixens better, at least they seem fonder of their family when you peep down their earths.”

Mr. Flippance, who had never in his life seen either a shrew or a vixen or a polecat or observed the habits of doves, was taken aback. He had even a vague sense of blasphemy, some ancient religious images whirring confusedly in his brain. “Understand this, Jinny,” he said sharply, abandoning the shifting sands of metaphor, “Cleo gave Mr. Duke her companionship and her artistic co-operation, but as for marrying him—bring me that Book!”

He indicated the precious volume which Mrs. Flynt had left in the parlour for his study of the text-evidence of the Christadelphian teaching. But Jinny took his Bible oath for granted. Sincerity and righteous indignation radiated from every round inch of his face, and Jinny, despite her farmyard experience, was too nebulous in her ideas of human matings not to be shaken. In truth he had been vastly relieved by the discovery that the couple had pretermitted the ceremony and that he was saved the tedium and expense of a divorce suit, though he wondered why Mr. Duke with his meticulous book-keeping and contracts should be so loose where women were concerned, while he, so averse from parchments and figures, had a proper respect for the marriage-tie. Human nature was devilishly deep, he thought: no wonder a man got drowned if he tried to fathom himself.

But Jinny, though she now believed she had misunderstood the ducal _ménage_, was not without an instinctive distrust. “She didn’t want to live in the caravan,” she protested.

“No,” he agreed, misapprehending the local idiom. “It was that pig-headed wire-puller who wanted it. Duke’s the villain of the piece, abusing my darling’s innocence and exploiting her artistic aspirations. He got round the poor girl, knowing her aunt had left her all her money. Cleo, my dear Jinny, is the niece of the famous Cleopatra, the Cairo Contortionist, after whom she was christened, and whose death a year or so ago eclipsed the gaiety of Astley’s and Mr. Batty’s new Hippodrome.”

“Was she so beautiful?” asked Jinny, somewhat awed.

“I was in love with her myself in my youth,” Mr. Flippance replied simply. “But though you could gossip with her round the coke-brazier at the back of the ring, she always made you feel that no man was worthy to chalk the soles of her tight-rope shoes. And her niece, as you have doubtless perceived, has the same grand manner.”

“Then why did she keep company with Mr. Duke?”

Jinny returned to the sore spot, Mr. Flippance felt, like a buzzing bluebottle.

“If you don’t believe me,” he cried, “show me the little Dukes and Duchesses. Where are they? Produce ’em.”

He looked at her fiercely—as demanding a rain of coroneted cherubs from the air.

The bold stroke put the climax to Jinny’s obfuscation. Marriage without children was practically unknown on her round, though the children often died. “Don’t you see he wanted to compromise her?” pursued Tony triumphantly, after giving the cherubs a reasonable time to materialize. “He thought she’d never dare break away with her money, and that he could spend her last farthing on boosting himself into the legitimate. He’s all right with the marionettes—a dapster as you say here,” Mr. Flippance admitted magnanimously. “But as an actor he could no more expect to please _my_ public than to keep Cleo hidden in a bushel. He might throw up the sponge and go back to his _fantoccini_—but what career was that for Cleo? She broke with him on the nail—the partnership, I mean. And I ask you, ma,” he wound up, with an appreciative sniff as Martha re-entered, not only with mushrooms but freshly fried bacon, “what woman of spirit could do otherwise?”

Mrs. Flynt beamed assent, and her apparent acquaintance with the facts contributed to lull Jinny’s uneasiness. Surely the pious Martha would not connive at scandalous proceedings. Relieved, she sat silent; wondering—while Mr. Flippance did jovial justice to the encore dish—what the Duchess would think if she knew that she, Jinny, could have anticipated her in the rôle of the second Mrs. Flippance. And what would Polly have thought of her as a stepmother, she wondered still more whimsically. Perhaps between them they could have made a man of him. She had never seen his daughter over her cigar and milk or her sense of Polly as a pillar of respectability might have been shattered.

“And how is Miss Flippance?” she said.

His face changed suddenly—rain-clouds overgloomed the sun. His fork fell from his fingers. “You don’t know what daughters are,” he blubbered. “She’s left me!”

“Left you?”

“Ask ma,” he half sobbed. It was infinitely pathetic.

“Don’t let it get cold again,” Martha coaxed.

“I can’t eat.” He lit a cheroot abstractedly, and the old woman and the young girl followed his silent puffings with a yearning sympathy, while Nip begged, unheeded.

“Mad on marionettes is Polly,” he said at last. “The moment I got rid of ’em, she packed up my things and was off.”

“Stole your things?” cried the startled Jinny.

“No—no. She knew I should be moving on for the banns—Cleo likes a quiet place—so she left me tidy. That was her sole conception of her duty to her legal pa. But she had always looked upon me as a thing to be tidied—not a soul to be loved and cherished.” He wiped an eye with the sleeve of his dressing-gown and asked brokenly for his brandy. Martha hurried to his bedroom.

“But perhaps your daughter’ll come back,” Jinny suggested soothingly.

“God forbid!” he cried. “I mean they’d be at it hammer and tongs. Perhaps Providence does all things for the best.”

“But where has she gone?” Jinny’s sympathy was now passing to Polly, as she began to grasp the true complexity of her exodus.

“To her grandmother in Cork, I expect.” He blew a placid puff. “Did I never tell you my pa’s real wife—the one he didn’t live with, I mean—was originally the widow of a well-to-do cheesemonger? Polly always looked up her nominal granny when we played Ireland. She likes respectable people.”

“Is that why she won’t come to the wedding?” Jinny inquired cruelly, for Polly’s refusal to countenance it again stirred up her doubts.

Mr. Flippance was angered afresh. “I tell you, my Cleopatra can hold up her head with the whitest cheesemonger’s widow in the land. But it’s hard,” he said, reverting to pathos and flicking his cigar-ash mournfully into the just-dusted shoe, “to be left without a daughter at such a crisis. Think how she would have stage-managed everything—even bought the ring.” The tragedy of his situation mastered him. “Forgive my emotion—I was always one to wear my heart on my sleeve.” He wiped his eyes on it again. “Nobody will ever pack like Polly. Ah, thank you, ma,” he said, as Martha reappeared with the brandy bottle. “Have you half a crown?” he added, pouring himself out a careless quota. “You see,” he explained, setting down his glass dolefully, and tendering Martha’s half-crown to the astonished Jinny, “though old pals desert one at the altar, Tony Flip doesn’t forget his obligations.”

“But what’s it for?” Jinny took the coin tentatively.

“You lent me it when that wicked Duke demanded money on the contract.”

“Oh, thank you!” Jinny was touched—a half-crown seemed as large as her cart-wheel nowadays. Half remorsefully she suggested that a far better bridesmaid would be the girl at Foxearth Farm.

He shook his head. “I’ve been into that. But there are—objections. It doesn’t do, you see, for the super to be taller than the leading lady. Now you being shorter——”

“But if Miss Jones were to wear very low heels——”

“But that would only make Miss Purley look still taller,” he said, puzzled.

“I mean Miss Purley to wear the low heels—_she_ is a Miss Jones, too.”

“What?”

“Blanche Jones is her name—she’s only old Purley’s stepdaughter.”

He started up. “Then Mrs. Purley was formerly Mrs. Jones?”

“Yes.”

“Hurrah!” He seized the surprised Martha by the waist and began waltzing with her, while Nip barked with excitement.

“Quiet, Nip! What’s the matter?” cried Jinny, smiling.

“A relation at last! Don’t you see that Mrs. Jones can give the bride away?”

“But she’s not really a relation.”

“All these Joneses are one large family,” he said airily.

“But you don’t need a relation,” Martha pointed out. “A friend will do.”

“Really? I must study the stage-directions—I mean,” he corrected himself hastily, “yours may be different from the Church of England.”

“But I know all the same, for we weren’t allowed to marry in our own chapels, leastways not till after Willie was born.”

“Well, anyhow, I’m sure Cleopatra would prefer a relation. Mrs. Jones is a Churchwoman, I hope. It’s necessary, ma, you know,” he apologized.

“Yes—her husband’s a churchwarden,” said Jinny.

“A churchwarden! Hurrah! Better and better. Then _he_ shall give Cleo away.” He bumped the beaming, breathless Martha round again.

“But he isn’t even called Jones,” Jinny reminded him.

“A husband takes over his wife’s Jonesiness. Bless you, Jinny!” He seized her hand and dragged her likewise into the circular movement. “Now we go round the mulberry-bush, the mulberry-bush, the mulberry-bush——”

Caleb, coming past the door at this instant, stood spellbound. Had Mr. Flippance been really converted, and was it the joy of the New Jerusalem? Or had Martha now “moved on,” and was this the new dancing sect of which one heard rumours?

Martha’s caperings ceased at sight of him. “It’s the wedding,” she said somewhat shamefacedly. “I’m just going to pickle your walnuts, dear heart,” she added sweetly. “And Jinny must be getting to her work, too.”

At which delicate hint, Jinny, faintly flushing, rose to take her leave, and Nip, who had been whining his impatience, was already gambolling hysterically without, before she remembered she had forgotten the very purpose of her visit.

“Oh, by the way, Mr. Flippance,” she said, as she followed Nip, “I suppose the wedding-gown is ordered.”

“Wedding-gown!” he repeated. “You don’t think Cleo has any need of wedding-gowns! Why the Lady Agnes dress—Act One—is the very prop. for the occasion, and brand new, for she had just got Duke to put on _The Mistletoe Bough_. Otherwise I should have been asking you for the address of that wonderful French friend of yours—the bearded lady, you know. But if you won’t be a bridesmaid, you’ve got to come to the show—yes, and the wedding breakfast too—I won’t take any refusal. It’ll be at Foxearth Farm, and I’m ordering oceans of sweet champagne. Well, thank you a million times for finding Cleo a father. Good-bye, dear. God bless you!” He had shuffled without and now kissed his hand to the moving cart.

“What about a new wedding-gown for _you_?” Jinny called back. “A dressing-gown, I mean.”

“Yumorist!” came his chuckled answer.

VIII

Though not unconscious of a subterranean hostility in Martha, which she put down to the new business rivalry, and though still perturbed about the Duchess, Jinny felt distinctly better for this visit, not to mention the half-crown, that now rare coin. She was still more heartened two days later when Bundock brought a letter from Mr. Flippance stating that, strange to say, Cleopatra did not find the Lady Agnes dress suitable. It would make her feel she was only playing at marrying, she said, and she was too respectful of holy matrimony to desecrate it by any suggestion of unreality: indeed she was already being fitted by the leading Chipstone artist. The dress was, however, turning out so dubiously that she would be glad if Jinny’s French friend would call upon her at Foxearth Farm with a view to preparing a “double.” As for Jinny being bridesmaid, he must reluctantly ask her to abandon the idea, as Cleopatra considered her too short.

“That’s the Flippance fist,” said Bundock, lingering to watch her read the letter, “scrawls all over the shop. I don’t mind your answering by post,” he added maliciously, “now I’ve got to go there so much. I often kill—he, he, he!—two frogs with one stone now. So you’re to be bridesmaid, Tony tells me.”

“Nothing of the sort,” said Jinny, “and mind your own business.”

“It _is_ my business,” he said in an aggrieved tone. “Didn’t he ask me to be best man? As if in this age of reason I could take part in superstitious rites!”

“I don’t see any superstition about marrying,” said Jinny.

“I’m not so sure—tying a man to a woman like a dog to a barrel. But anyhow, why drag in heaven?”

“Because marriages are made there, I suppose,” said Jinny.

“Stuff and nonsense! And then the rice and the old shoes they throw!”

“I saw _you_ throw one when your sister got married.”

“Maybe. But I didn’t believe in it.”

“Then why did you throw it?”

He hesitated a moment. “They say if you don’t believe in it, it’s even luckier than if you do.”

Jinny laughed heartily.

“I’m not joking!” Bundock declared angrily.

“If you were, I shouldn’t be laughing,” said Jinny.

“Oh well, _go_ to church!” Bundock retorted in disgust. “And I hope the beadle will give you an extra prod next Sunday.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t pretend. Everybody knows that church is a double torture—first the parson sends you to sleep with his sermon, and then the verger wakes you up with his rod.”

Jinny laughed again.

“Don’t tell me!” said Bundock. “My own father was forced to go—all the labourers on the estate, poor chaps, dead-sleepy after the week’s work, and that rod used to puggle ’em about. No wonder dad chucked both squire and parson.”

“It doesn’t happen in Mr. Fallow’s church,” Jinny assured him.

“Because nobody goes!” And Bundock hurried off with this great last word, and Jinny saw his bag heaving with the mirthful movement of his shoulders.

Somewhat to Jinny’s surprise, Miss Gentry from being Cleopatra’s alternative dressmaker developed into her adorer, it appearing that the lady displayed not only proportions most pleasing to the technical eye—“just made for clothes,” Miss Gentry put it—but a positive appetite for tracts. She loathed Dissent, it transpired, and to be married by a minister would seem to her little better than living in sin. A very paragon of propriety and an elegant pillar of the faith, Miss Cleopatra Jones, spinster, worshipped regularly with the churchwarden and his family in the wrong parish church. Miss Gentry, ravished by this combination of respectability and romance, did not once compel the fair client to attend upon her, travelling to Foxearth Farm instead in Jinny’s cart. It was impossible for Jinny’s doubts of Cleopatra’s immaculacy to survive Miss Gentry’s encomiums. While Miss Gentry ascended to the bedroom of her beautiful and still golden-haired client, posed in an atmosphere of old oak bedsteads and panelled linen presses, Jinny would sit with the second Mrs. Purley in her dairy—a cheerful, speckless room which enjoyed a specially spacious window, dairies being immune from the window-tax—while that bulkier edition of Blanche made cheeses and conversation. Mrs. Purley made conversation irrespective of her auditor, for she needed no collaborator: indeed a second party coming athwart this Niagara of monologue would have been swept aside like a straw.

As a great musician can take a few simple notes, and out of this theme evoke endless intricacies, enlargements, repetitions, echoes, duplications, parallelisms, and permutations, and then transform the whole into another key and give it you all over again, so out of a simple happening, like her feeding of a sick chicken, or her discovery that a hen had laid her clutch in the hedge, Mrs. Purley, without for a moment interrupting the milling of curd or the draining of whey, could improvise a fugal discourse that went ramifying and returning upon itself _ad infinitum_. It reminded Jinny of Kelcott Wood, where every day from three to five, on these September afternoons, hundreds of starlings, perched like bits of black coal on the mountain-ashes, kept up a ceaseless chattering, shrilling, clucking, querying, cackling.

But she soon ceased to hear Mrs. Purley, was even lulled by the cascade. Very familiar grew every pan, dipper, vat, tub, press, cheese-cloth, or straw-mat, while the one readable article she knew by heart. It was the inscription on a china mug, in which Mrs. Purley sometimes put milk, and it recorded the virtues of a black-haired, black-whiskered head painted thereon. “The Incorruptible Patriot. . . . The Undaunted Supporter of the People’s Rights. . . . The Father of the Fatherless. . . . The Pride and Glory of his Country” . . . such were a few of the attributes ascribed, with a profuseness resembling Mrs. Purley’s conversation, to a certain Henry Brougham, Esq., who, as Jinny learnt from Miss Gentry, was really and truly “a love,” having defended Queen Caroline when Miss Gentry was a schoolgirl. Queens were as liable to ill-luck as herself, Jinny began to suspect, recalling that Egyptian asp, and she became a little anxious for Victoria, who now came to figure in her dreams, as defended against French fire-eaters by this black-avised man, with the protruding nose, retreating forehead, and weak chin. Somehow—it was unintelligible when she woke up, but quite clear in her dream—the defended Victoria was also herself, for was not Henry Brougham “The Father of the Fatherless”?

Adjoining the dairy was a room, lit from it—to avoid taxation—by a pane in the door. Jinny sometimes had an uneasy sense that Blanche was inspecting her through that pane. Otherwise she hardly ever encountered the vespacide, who betrayed indeed no sense of rivalry, for the relations between Will and the little Carrier were unknown, and Blanche would, in any case, have considered so humble a personage negligible or at least nippable.

For if this handsome creature was—as she had struck Jinny-a shade overripe, it was not for lack of volunteer pluckers, and the mutability which Mr. Giles Purley had gently derided in his son had been even more marked in his stepdaughter. Fortunately Will was unaware of the episodes that had preceded his return to England. And not only did he regard himself as the first male that had ever squeezed that fair hand, but, untaught by its prowess as a wasp-killer, he believed her a passive victim to his own compelling charm. And the apparent perfection of Blanche’s surrender was the more grateful to him after the granite he had kept striking in Jinny. But the mobility which had hitherto marked Miss Blanche’s affections was now manifesting itself in a novel shape, for like Miss Gentry, she had come under the spell of Cleopatra, though a very different Cleopatra from the ardent Churchwoman who revealed herself to the dressmaker. The Cleopatra who magnetized the cheese-maker’s daughter, and who, carelessly abetted by Mr. Flippance’s sketchy promises, filled the ignorant girl with dramatic and palpitating ambitions, was a queen of the footlights, an inspirer of romantic passions, and in her unguarded moments—as when you sat on her bed at midnight with your hair down—a teller of strange Bohemian stories, a citer of perturbing Sapphic songs, the melodies of which she could even whistle. What wonder if Mrs. Hemans—Blanche’s favourite poet hitherto—began to pall! She had been proud enough of her culture, leaving, as she felt it did, the parental perspectives far behind her; but now boundless horizons seemed opening up before her, and the _London Journal_ which Cleopatra swallowed with her meals seemed to Blanche to contain nothing so alluring as Cleopatra’s own career.

It was by quite accidentally overhearing a remark of Blanche’s, and not by dint of Mr. Flippance’s repeated invitation, that Jinny was finally strung up to attend the great wedding. The probability that Will and Blanche would be at the feast was a drawback that prevailed over the lure of a good square meal, and even over the glamour of that mysterious nectar—champagne. But when she heard Blanche instruct her mother that she would certainly not have to lay a place for “that common carrier,” in a flame that might almost have consumed her letter-paper, Jinny wrote her acceptance to Mr. Flippance, and expended his half-crown, which she had laid by for a rainy day, on a wedding present which would do him good—a Bible, to wit.

In prevision of the great day she left off wearing her best gown, cleaned it, and by the aid of Miss Gentry and a bit of lace gave it a new turn. After the wedding it must, alas, be pawned! Jinny, though she had hitherto entered the pawnshop only to pledge or redeem things for her customers, had schooled herself to the inevitable. So had Mr. Flippance, whose idea of a best man had now sunk to Barnaby. But he was used to handling unpromising performers, he said, though he regretted the absence of a dress rehearsal, more especially for Mrs. Purley, who, having been induced to mother Cleopatra (nothing would induce Mr. Purley to father her), was unlikely, he feared, to confine herself to a simple “I do.” That was not, he groaned drolly, her idea of a speaking part. He deplored, too, that there were not enough bells or bell-ringers in the Little Bradmarsh church to ring an elaborate joy-peal, as Cleopatra was so anxious to have every property and accessory of holy matrimony complete. It was for this reason, doubtless, that Miss Gentry, after reducing the rival dress to a rag, ultimately emerged as the bridesmaid.

IX

For the convenience of Foxearth Farm, as well as of Will, who, though a bit sulky about his mother’s waiting on the Showman, was too entangled with Miss Purley to refuse to grace the festal board, the ceremony had been fixed for a Saturday at ten, and on that morning Jinny had meant to rise with the sun, so as to do the bulk of her day’s chares in advance. What was her dismay, therefore, to open blinking eyes on her grandfather standing over her pseudo-bed in his best Sunday smock, whip in hand, and to hear through her wide-flung casement Methusalem neighing outside and the cart creaking!

“Am I late?” she gasped, sitting up. Then she became aware of a beautiful blue moonlight filling the room with glory, and of a lambent loveliness spreading right up to the stars sprinkled over her slit of sky.

“’Tis your wedding-day, dearie,” said the ghostly figure of the Gaffer, and she now perceived there were wedding favours on his whip, evidently taken from Methusalem’s May Day ribbons, which he must have hunted out of the “glory-hole” where odds and ends were kept.

Bitterly she regretted having excited his brain by informing him of her programme. He was evidently prepared to drive her to the ceremony.

“But it’s too early,” she temporized.

“Ye’ve got to be there for breakfus, you said, dearie,” he reminded her.

“No, no,” she explained. “The wedding breakfast with fashionable folk is only a sort of bever or elevener at earliest.”

He chuckled. “Ye’re gooin’ to be rich and fashionable—won’t it wex that jackanips! Oi suspicioned ’twas you he war arter the fust time he come gawmin’ to the stable. Ye can’t deceive Daniel Quarles. On your hands and knees, ye pirate thief!” He cracked his whip fiercely. “Up ye git, Jinny, ye’ve got to titivate yerself. Oi’ve put the water in your basin.”

“But Gran’fer,” she said, acutely distressed, “it’s not _my_ wedding.”

“Not your wedding!”

“Of course not.”

“Then whose wedding be it?” he demanded angrily. “’Tain’t mine, seein’ as Oi’m too poor to keep Annie though she’s riddy of her rascal at last.” He seized her wrists and shook her. “Why did you lie to me and make a fool o’ me?”

So this was why Gran’fer had embraced her so effusively last night when she avowed her programme for the morrow; this was why he had given her blessings in lieu of the expected reproaches for her projected absence; this was why he had gone up to bed humming his long-silent song: “Oi’m seventeen come Sunday.”

It was a mistake, she felt now, to have stayed at home for his sake on the Friday, changing the immemorial day of absence. He had been strange all day, without grasping what was the cause of his unrest, and Nip’s parallel uneasiness had reacted upon him. It was not, however, till she had incautiously remarked that Methusalem too was off his feed, that he cried out in horror that she had forgotten to go on her rounds. Smilingly she assured him she had not forgotten: indeed the void in her whole being occasioned by the loss of Mother Gander’s gratis meal had been a gnawing reminder since midday. But imagining—and not indeed untruly—that her work was gone, he had burst into imprecations on “the pirate thief.”

As she sat up now on her mattress, helpless in her grief, her mind raced feverishly through the episode, recalling every word of the dialogue, unravelling his senile misapprehension; half wilful it seemed to her now, in his eagerness to clutch at happier times.

“It’s nothing to do with the coach competition, Gran’fer. It’s only because I’ve got to be out to-morrow for a wedding!”

“A wedding! She ain’t marrying agen?”

“Who?”

“Annie.”

“Annie? Which Annie?”

“There’s onny one Annie. ’Lijah’s mother.”

“Old Mrs. Skindle! What an idea! It’s a friend of mine, a gentleman you’ve never seen.”

At this point she had had, she remembered, the fatal idea of showing him her furbished-up frock to soothe him, for he was trembling all over.

“Would you like to see what I’m going to wear?”

She understood now the new light that had shot into his eye as he touched the lace trimming.

“Similar-same to what your Great-Aunt Susannah wore the day she married that doddy little Dap! Ye ain’t a-gooin’ to make a fool o’ yerself similar-same. Who’s the man?” he had demanded fiercely.

“You don’t know him, I told you—it’s a Mr. Flippance!”

A beautiful peace had come over the convulsed face. “Flippance! Ain’t that the gent what’s come to live in Frog Farm? That’s a fust-class toff, no mistake. Uncle Lilliwhyte should be tellin’ me, when he come with the watercress on Tuesday, as Mr. Flippance pays a pound a week for hisself alone!”

That was the point at which her grandfather had kissed her with effusion, crying: “Ye’ll be in clover, dearie!” while she, licking her chaps at the thought of the morrow’s banquet, had playfully answered that there would certainly be “a mort to eat.” The prospect set him clucking gleefully.

“Spite o’ that rapscallion!” he had chuckled, enlarging thereupon to her on the way the Lord protects His righteous subjects, and enlivening his discourse with adjurations to “the pirate thief” to take to his hands and knees. Had followed reproaches for hiding the news from him, reproaches to Mr. Flippance for not calling on him, not even inviting him to the wedding: soothing explanations from her that Mr. Flippance knew he was too poorly to go that far; assurances she would be back as early as possible.

She ought to have understood his delusion or self-delusion, she thought, when he had clung to her in a sudden panic.

“Then ye will come back—ye ain’t leavin’ me to starve! Ye won’t let that jackanips starve me out?”

And when she had reassured him, and caressed him, even promised to bring him something tasty from the wedding breakfast, he had gripped her harder than ever—she could still feel his bony fingers on her wrist—but of course they actually were on her wrists as she sat there now against her pillow—“ye’ll live here with me—same as afore!”

“Why ever shouldn’t I?” she had answered in her innocence. “We’ll always live with you—Methusalem, Nip, all of us.” What unlucky impulse of affection or reassurance had made her stoop down to kiss the dog in his basket—all her being burnt with shame at the remembrance of her grandfather’s reply, though at the time it had touched her to tears.

“God bless ye, Jinny. Oi know this ain’t a proper bedroom for you, but Oi’ll sleep here if you like, and do you and he move up to mine.”

She had put by the offer gently. “Nonsense, Gran’fer. You can’t shift at your age—or Nip either.”

“Oi bain’t so old as Sidrach,” he had retorted, not without resentment, “and Oi doubt he ain’t left off bein’ a rollin’ stone. And Oi reckon Oi can fit into that chest of drawers better than when Oi was bonkka.”

But the shrivelled form, with the hollow cheeks, flaming eyes, and snowy beard, was still shaking her angrily, and her sense of his pathos vanished in a sick fear, not so much for herself, though his fingers seemed formidably sinister, as for his aged brain under this disappointment. “Why did you say ’twas your wedding morn?”

The Dutch clock, providentially striking three, offered a fresh chance of temporizing.

“There, Gran’fer! Can’t be my wedding morn yet, only three o’clock!”

He let go her hands. “Ain’t ye ashamed to have fun with your Gran’fer?” he asked, vastly relieved. “But it’s a middlin’ long drive to Chipstone before breakfus.”

“It’s not at Chipstone—the wedding’s at Little Bradmarsh.”

“Oh!” he said blankly.

“So there’s lots of time, Gran’fer, and you can go back to bed.”

“Not me! Do, Oi mightn’t wake in time agen.”

“I’ll wake you—but I’ll be fit for nothing in the morning, if I don’t go to sleep now.”

“The day Oi was married,” he chuckled, “Oi never offered to sleep the noight afore—ne yet the noight arter! He, he!”

“Go away, Gran’fer!” she begged frantically. “Let me go to sleep.”

“Ay, ay, goo to sleep, my little mavis. Nobody shan’t touch ye. What a pity we ate up that wedding-cake! But Oi had to cut a shiver to stop his boggin’ and crakin’, hadn’t Oi, dearie?”

“Quite right. Better eat wedding-cake than humble-pie!” she jested desperately.

“Ef he comes sniffin’ around arter you’re married, Oi’ll snap him in two like this whip!”

“Don’t break my whip!” She clutched at the beribboned butt.

“That’s my whip, Jinny! Let that go!”

“Well, go to bed then!” With a happy thought, she lit the tallow candle on her bedside chair and tendered it to him. It operated as mechanically upon his instinctive habits as she had hoped.

“Good night, dearie,” he said, and very soon she heard him undressing as usual, and his snore came with welcome rapidity. Then she sprang out of bed, pulled on some clothes, and ran out to release the angry and mystified Methusalem from the shafts and to receive his nuzzled forgiveness in the stable. But when she got back to bed, sleep long refused to come; the sense of her tragic situation was overwhelming. Even the great peace of the moonlit night could not soak into her. It was impossible to go to the wedding now, she felt. When at last sleep came, she was again incomprehensibly Queen Victoria hemmed in by foes, and protected only by “The Father of the Fatherless” with his black whiskers. She awoke about dawn, unrefreshed and hungry, but a cold sponging from the basin her grandfather had prepared enabled her to cope with the labours of the day. She looked forward with apprehension to the scene with the old man when he should realize that the grand match was indeed off, but she could think of nothing better than going about in her dirtiest apron to keep his mind off the subject. The precaution proved unnecessary. He slept so late and so heavily—as if a weight was off his mind—that when he at last awoke he seemed to have slept the delusion off, as though it were something too recent to remain in his memory. As for the scene in the small hours, that had apparently left no impress at all upon his brain. In fact, so jocose and natural was he at breakfast, which she purposely made prodigal for him, that the optimism of the morning sun, which came streaming in, almost banished her own memory of it too: it seemed as much a nightmare as her desperate struggle against the foes of Victoria-Jinny. The lure of the wedding jaunt revived, and the thought of the domestic economy she would be achieving thereby, made her sparing of her own breakfast. She had a bad moment, however, when her grandfather suddenly caught sight of the horseless cart outside.

“Stop thief!” he cried, jumping up agitatedly.

Jinny was vexed with herself. To have left that reminder of the grotesque episode!

“It’s that ’Lijah!” he shrieked. “He’s stole Methusalem.”

“Hush, Gran’fer!” she warned him. “Suppose anybody heard you!”

But he ran out towards the Common and she after him. His tottering limbs seemed galvanized.

“My horse is all right,” she gasped, catching him up in a few rods. “I was too tired yesterday to put my cart away, that’s all.”

He turned and glared suspiciously at her. “That’s _my_ hoss—and my cart, too! Can’t you read the name—‘Daniel Quarles, Carrier.’ But ye won’t never let me put no padlock on my stable!”

“Your horse is there safe—come and see!”

He allowed himself to be led to the soothing spectacle.

“But Oi’ll put a padlock at once, same as in my barn,” he said firmly. “Don’t, that rascal ’Lijah will grab him without tippin’ a farden!”

X

The overlooked cart proved a blessing, not a calamity, for the operation of padlocking the stable-door before the horse was stolen so absorbed the Gaffer that Jinny found it possible, after all, to don her finery and slip off to the wedding unseen even of Nip, who was supervising the new measures for Methusalem’s safety. Curiosity to see Miss Gentry’s creation in action had combined with the pangs of appetite and her acceptance of the invitation to make temptation irresistible, and she calculated that she could be back by noon, and that, pottering over his vegetable patch or his Bible, the old man would scarcely notice her absence.

When she reached the church, she found the coach stationed outside, and though the liveried guard was lacking to-day, the black horses looked handsomer than ever with their red wedding-favours, while the pea-green polish of the vehicle reduced her to a worm-like humility at the thought of the impossibility of her cart taking part in to-day’s display. Evidently Will had brought the bridegroom from Frog Farm. Out of the corner of her eye she espied Will himself, sunning himself on his box, and her heart thumped, though all she was conscious of was the insolent incongruity of his pipe with the occasion, the edifice, his new frock-coat, and the posy in its buttonhole. Fearing she was late, she hurried into the church. But nothing was going on, though the size of the congregation—far larger than usual—was an exciting surprise. There was no sign of any of the wedding-party, not even Mr. Flippance, and after imperceptibly saluting her Angel-Mother, she sank back into a rear pew, half pleased to have missed nothing, half uneasy lest there be a delay. Turning over a Prayer Book in search of the Wedding Service, she came for the first time, and not without surprise, on the Fifth of November Thanksgiving “for the happy deliverance of King _James I_ and the Three Estates of _England_ from the most traitorous and bloody-intended massacre by Gunpowder: And also for the happy Arrival of King _William_ on this Day, for the Deliverance of our Church and Nation.” King William’s arrival struck her as providential but confusing—for though he had apparently detected the Popish barrels in the nick of time, how came there to be two kings at once? Suddenly she was aware, by some tingling telegraphy, that the bride and bridesmaid had arrived outside in a grand open carriage. Mr. Fallow in his surplice came in at the clerk’s intimation and took up his position at the altar rails, the musicians struck up “The Voice that Breathed o’er Eden,” and then there was a sudden faltering, and a whispering took place ’twixt parson and clerk, and Mr. Fallow was swallowed again by his vestry, while the clerk disappeared through the church door. It was realized that Mr. Flippance was not in the church, and it was understood that the bride’s face was being saved in the vestry, where, however, as time passed, the agitated congregation divined hysterics.

Jinny—thinking of her neglected grandfather—was what he called “on canterhooks.” Had Mr. Flippance not then come in the coach, had he been carelessly left in bed as usual? Catching her Angel-Mother’s eye, she received a distinct injunction to go out in search of him, but she was too shy to move in the presence of all those people, though she had a vision of herself frantically harnessing Methusalem and carting the bridegroom to church in his dressing-gown—would carpet slippers be an impediment to matrimony, she wondered. Mr. Fallow came in again, looking so worried that she recalled an ecclesiastical experience he had related to her: how one of his parishioners, nowadays a notorious Hot Gospeller, had “found religion” on the very verge of setting out to be married, and had passed so much time on his knees, absorbed in the newly felt truth, that it was only through his friend the bell-ringer stopping the church clock that he was married by noon; if indeed—a doubt which ever after weighed on Mr. Fallow—he was legally married at all. What if at this solemn moment of his life Mr. Flippance should similarly find religion! She devoutly hoped the discovery would be at least delayed till he was safely married. Good heavens! perhaps the Bible she had given him was in fault! Perhaps she was responsible for his rapt remissness. Disregarding the congregation’s eyes, she went boldly into the vestry.

Here, sure enough, she found the heroine of the day supported by a trio of ladies. The outstanding absence of Mr. Flippance left Jinny but a phantasmagoric sense of a bride, still composed indeed, but so ghastly that despite her glamour of veil-folds and orange-blossom she scarcely looked golden-haired; of a bridesmaid hardly recognizable as Miss Gentry, for the opposite reason that it was she with her swarthy splendour, opulent bosom, and glory of silk and flowers who seemed the Cleopatra; of a Blanche so appallingly queenly in her creamier fashion under the art of the rival dressmaker, that her own cleaned gown seemed but to emphasize her shabbiness and dowdiness. Acoustically the voice of Mrs. Purley expatiating on the situation was the dominant note, but through and beneath the cascade Jinny was aware of Miss Gentry explaining to the bride that the horses which had brought the bridegroom were not responsible for his disappearance. Not unpropitious, but of the finest augury were these sable animals, omens going by contraries. So they _had_ brought Mr. Flippance!

They were tossing their bepranked heads, Jinny found, and champing their bits, as if sharing in the human unrest. Will was no longer smoking placidly on his box, but in agitated parley with Barnaby and his father. She heard the inn suggested, and saw the Purleys posting towards it. She herself ran round to the tower, fantastically figuring Mr. Flippance on his knees on the belfry floor amid the ropes and the cobwebs, but even the one bell-ringer seemed to have sallied in search of the bridegroom, or at least of the inn.

The churchyard was large and rambling and thickly populated—pathetic proof there had been life in the church once—and it was in a sequestered corner behind a tall monument that Jinny with a great upleap of the heart at last espied the object of her quest, though he seemed even more unreal than Miss Gentry in his narrow-brimmed top-hat, satin stock with horseshoe pin, and swallowtail coat, while his face was as white as his waistcoat.

“What are you doing?” came involuntarily to her lips.

“Reading the tombstones,” he said wistfully. “So peaceful!”

“But they’re waiting for you!”

“They’re waiting for everybody. That’s the joke of it all.”

“I don’t mean the gravestones.”

“Look! There’s a French inscription. And that name must be Flemish, see!”

“I haven’t time!”

“Why, what have _you_ got to do?”

“I mean, _you_ haven’t got time. It’s your wedding!”

“Don’t rub it in! What long grass! So we go to grass—all of us. Thanks for your Bible, by the way!”

So her apprehensions had been right. It _was_ religion that was bemusing him.

“So glad you like it. Come along!” she said in rousing accents.

“All flesh is grass,” he maundered on. “And rank grass at that!”

“It’s only thick here because they can’t mow this bit,” she explained. “Too many tombs!” She plucked at his sleeve.

“So it’s hay we run to!” he said, disregarding her “O Lord! Mr. Fallow’s tithes, I suppose.”

“Well, why waste good hay? He’s waiting for you.”

“Well, _he’s_ got plenty of time by all accounts.”

“I mean, _she’s_ waiting,” she cried, in distress.

“Is she there already? Look at that bird cracking its snail on the gravestone.”

“It’s an early bird—_you’ll_ be late.”

“Don’t worry. Tony Flip never missed his cue yet. Funny, isn’t it, how it all comes right at night—especially with Polly there! Perhaps _she’ll_ come, if we give her a little time.”

“But have you invited her? Does she know?”

“If she don’t, it’s not for want of telegrams to every possible address.”

“But she may be in Cork, you said. You can’t keep the bride waiting.”

“She shouldn’t have come so early—it’s the first time I’ve known her punctual. The early bird catches the snail, eh?”

“But it’s half-past ten! And there’s a crowd too—I don’t know where they all come from. Come along!”

“One can’t consider the supers!”

“Well, consider me then. I’ve got to get back to Gran’fer!”

“The true artist always has stage-fright, Jinny. Give me a moment. I’ll be on soon.”

“All right.” She was vastly relieved. “Have you got the ring?”

“Tony Flip never forgets a property. See!” And whisking it suddenly out of his waistcoat pocket, he seized her left hand and slipped it on her gloved wedding-finger. “That’s where it ought to be, Jinny!”

She pulled it off, outraged, and flung it from her.

“On your wedding day, too!” she cried.

“Now it’s lost,” he said cheerfully, “and the bearded bridesmaid will have to go home with the unblushing bride.”

“You ought to have given it to Barnaby,” she said.

Anxious and remorseful, she went on her knees, groping feverishly in the long grass. “On your hands and knees” kept sounding irrelevantly in her brain. Mr. Flippance watched her like a neutral. “I’d forgotten that the woman runs away with the piece,” he explained to her distracted ear. “I thought marriage was a show with two principals. But if there’s got to be a leading lady, why not stick to Polly?”

“You should have thought of that before,” she murmured.

“Correct as Polonius, Jinny. Even when I get the theatre, it’ll only be hell over again. Why couldn’t I stick to the marionettes? I charge thee fling away ambition, Jinny—by that sin fell the angels. But you’ve only flung away my ring.”

“Here it is!” She pounced joyfully.

“Just my luck!” He took it ruefully.

“I thought you said she was so pure and wonderful!” she reminded him.

He winced. “That wouldn’t prevent her bullying me,” he replied somewhat lamely.

“What about the taming of the shrew?” she asked.

“By Jove! You’re right, Jinny! Petruchio’s the game! Whips and scorpions, what?” His face took on a little of its old colour. “It’s getting up so early that has upset me. After all, Jinny, a lovely woman who loves you and puts all her money on you isn’t to be picked up every day.”

“Of course not. Anyhow it’s too late to change now.”

“Don’t say that! As if I didn’t want to change before there was anything to change—oh, you know what I mean.”

“It’s too late now!” she repeated firmly. She stood over him, a stern-faced little monitor of duty. “Come along!”

“Go ahead—the rose-wreathed victim will be at the altar.”

They moved on a little. He paused as with sudden hopefulness. “You don’t happen to know if there’s a great oak chest with a spring lock in Foxearth Farm?”

“How should I know?” she murmured, apprehensive now for his reason.

He sighed. “Well, never mind—it’ll all be all right at night. And what’s it all for, anyhow? ‘Wife of the above,’” he read out weirdly. “How they cling on!”

But Jinny had gone off into a reverie of her own. The tombstone formula he had recited struck a long-buried memory, and in a flash she saw again a quiet graveyard and a stone behind a tumbledown tower, and Commander Dap’s black-gloved forefinger tracing out her mother’s epitaph to a strange solemn little girl. All the wonder and glamour of childhood was in that flash, all the strangeness of life and time, and her eyes filled with tears. When the mist cleared away, Mr. Flippance was gone. She ran frantically around among the tombs like a sheep-dog till at length the sound of Mr. Fallow’s ecclesiastical voice floated out to her, and hurrying back into the church, she felt foolish and tranquillized to find the service well forward.

XI

Jinny had misread Mr. Fallow’s look: it was not fear of dragging on beyond the legal hour—noon was still too remote—but impatience at being kept away from his antiquarian lore by such trifles as matrimony, especially matrimony which was no longer, as in pre-Reformation days, preceded by the Holy Communion and symbolic of the union of Christ and His Church. Had there been a care-cloth to be thrown over the couples’ heads, such as existed in Essex churches in 1550, even matrimony might have interested him. But as it was, his thoughts ran on old cheeses. He had been comparing his Latin edition of Camden’s “Britannia” (1590) with the two-volume folio translation, a century later, by a worthy bishop, and was half scandalized, half excited, to find that the translator had introduced a wealth of new matter. Incidentally Mr. Fallow had learned the Hundred was celebrated for its huge cheeses—_inusitatæ magnitudinis_—of ewes’ milk, and that to make them the men milked the ewes like women elsewhere. And these huge cheeses were consumed not only in England, but exported—_ad saturandos agrestes et opifices_—“to satisfie the coarse stomachs of husbandmen and labourers,” as the bishop put it. When had this manufacture of giant cheeses from ewes’ milk died out in Essex? Mr. Fallow had already seized the opportunity of interrogating Mrs. Purley, whose reputation as a cheesemaker had reached him. But appalled by the voluminousness of her ignorance, he had taken sanctuary in his church and was still brooding over the problem as his lips framed the more trivial interrogatories of the ceremony.

For Jinny, however, it was a thrilling moment when Mr. Fallow lackadaisically called upon the couple “as ye will answer at the dreadful Day of Judgment” to avow if they knew any impediment to their lawful union. That in face of so formidable a threat neither came out with “Mr. Duke,” though she still half expected him to pop up in person from the void, was for her sweet stupidity the final proof of the bride’s immaculacy. And the whole service she thought beautiful and moving, having missed the gross beginning thereof. She was startled to hear the bridegroom addressed by Mr. Fallow as Anthony, and the bride with equal familiarity as Bianca Cleopatra. Otherwise the ceremonial seemed far too highflown for this terrestrial twain, though somehow not at all transcending the relationship in which her own soul could stand towards its spiritual comrade. But the replies of the three principals came all in unexpected wise. Mr. Flippance’s “I will” was so ready and ringing, and his countenance so rosy, that Jinny wondered which was the actor—the Flippance of the churchyard or the Flippance of the church. The ex-Duchess, on the other hand, still pallid, faltered her affirmation almost in a whisper, at any rate it was not so loud as his comment: “I’ve told you always to speak sharp on your cue.” Certainly no husband could ever have asserted himself at an earlier moment—was he perhaps already following Jinny’s hint, or was it only the stage-manager responding mechanically to stimulus? As for Mrs. Purley, she showed even more stage-fright, her “I do” failing even as a gesture, and having to be prompted. “Too small a speaking part for her,” commented Tony later, with a twinkle.

When everything was over and the register signed and Barnaby, breaking down under the weight of his financial duties, had wished the bride many happy returns—a felicitation only dispelled by his father saluting her as “Mrs. Flippance”—that now reassured lady, sweeping regally to her carriage, her train over one arm and her husband over the other—smiled at the admiring avenue of villagers and small boys as though they had thrown her the bouquet she held. When Mr. Flippance, gay and debonair, had handed Mrs. Flippance, looking golden-haired again, into their barouche, and been driven off with the hood up and his beautiful doll beside him, Jinny perceived Will handing the gorgeously gowned Blanche with parallel ceremoniousness into the coach, where the transmogrified Miss Gentry was already installed behind the bulwark of her great bouquet. And then Jinny became aware of Barnaby hovering shyly between her and the trap which held his parents, and indicating dumbly that the niche vacated by his sister was now for her. She had a sudden feeling that they did not want her in the coach beside those grand gowns hunched out with starched petticoats. As if she would have set foot in it! No, not for all the gowns in the world! But they were right, she thought bitterly—what had she to do with all this grandeur and happiness? The honeymoon was even to be in Boulogne, she had gathered. And she heard some force, welling up from the dark depths of herself, cry to Barnaby: “I can’t come—I’m so sorry. But Gran’fer was upset in the night. Please excuse me to Mr. Flippance.”

At this the bitterness passed from her soul to poor Barnaby’s. Everybody was pairing off: the Flippances, his parents, Will and his sister: there was nobody left for him but Miss Gentry.

“But there’ll be oysters as well as dumplings,” he pleaded. “Will brought them from Colchester.”

Jinny’s famished interior—in making such a skimpy breakfast it had counted on the wedding meal—seconded his plea desperately. But the mention of Will was fatal. As a hermit’s sick fantasy conjures up the temptation he knows he will resist, so Jinny saw yearningly, vividly, but hopelessly, the spread banquet, the dumplings soused in gravy, the brown bread and butter for the oysters, the juicy meats, the mysterious champagne-bottles, the sunny napery, the laughing festival faces, and, above all, the curly aureole of Will’s hair.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated veraciously.

In a panic the youth ran after the receding barouche. “Jinny won’t come,” he gasped.

“Don’t stop, coachman,” said Mrs. Flippance sharply.

“Tell her,” called back Mr. Flippance, “she must—or I’ll never ask her to my wedding again!”

Poor Barnaby tore back to the coach. “I say, Miss Gentry, you’re a friend of Jinny’s—do make her come.”

“A friend of Jinny’s!” It was an even unluckier remark than the reference to Will. A patron, an educator, an interpreter of herbs and planets, gracious and kindly, who might even—in private—admit the little Carrier to confidences and Pythian inspirations, yes. But a friend? How came Mr. Flippance to commit such a _faux pas_ as to bring a carrier into equality with her and Blanche? Why had not the adorable Cleopatra been firmer with the man? “I can’t _order_ her to come,” she reminded Barnaby majestically. “It’s not like for a parcel.”

As the horses tossed their wedding-favours and the coach jingled off with its fashionable burden, even the trap moving on under the stimulus of Mrs. Purley’s rhetoric, the whole scene became a blur to Jinny, and standing there by the old pillion-steps, she felt herself dwindled into a little aching heart alone in a measureless misery. How tragic to be cut off from all this gay eating and drinking! There was almost a voluptuousness in the very poignancy of her self-mutilation. What a blessing we all do run to hay, she brooded, in a warm flood of self-pity.

But if Jinny thus saw the wedding-guests through a blur of self-torturing bitterness, their feast did not begin as merrily as she beheld it, despite that Mrs. Purley, as soon as she had exchanged her bonnet-cap with the net quilting for a home cap, served up unexpected glasses of gin. Anthony, no less than Barnaby, was upset by Jinny’s absence, and Cleopatra resented this fuss over a super. But still more disgruntled by the gap at the table was, odd to say, Will. For his soul had not been so placid as his pipe. The glimpses he had caught of Jinny were perturbing. Overpowering as were the presences of the bride and Blanche, or rather, precisely because they were overpowering, they struck him as artificial by the side of this little wild rose with her woodland flavour, and the memory of their afternoon in the ash-grove came up glowing, touched as with the enchantment of its bluebells. Blanche, for her part, was peevish at Will’s taciturnity. Miss Gentry, still rankling under Barnaby’s suspicion that she was the Carrier’s bosom friend, was particularly down upon that youth’s naïve attempt to confine the conversation to Jinny, though it confirmed her suspicion of the state of things between those two. Mr. Purley in his turn had been dismayed by Blanche’s fineries: the young generation forgot that their fathers were only farmers compelled to take lodgers in bad seasons. Thus it was left to Mrs. Purley to sustain almost the whole burden of conversation. But her preoccupation with her little serving-maid and the kitchen, plus her uneasiness at eating in this grand room away from her hanging hams and onions, interposed intervals of silence even in her prattle, and the theme of her facetious variations—her fear in church that the bridegroom had bolted—did not add to the general cheeriness. The old wainscoted parlour, with its rough oak beams across the ceiling, had seldom heard oysters swallowed with gloomier gulps.

Fortunately the pop of the sweet champagne brought a note of excited gaiety into the funereal air, and glass-clinking and looking to one another and catching one another’s eye were soon the order of the early-Victorian day. Mr. Flippance, acknowledging the toast of the bride and bridegroom, did not fail to thank Mr. and Mrs. Purley for the precious treasure they had solemnly entrusted to his unworthy hands, a being whose beauty equalled her brains, and whose virtue her genius. Mr. Purley deprecatingly murmured “Don’t mention it,” meaning of course his share in the production of this prodigy, but Mrs. Purley, fresh from her church rôle, began to feel that she had dandled Cleopatra in her arms. In replying for himself and his “good wife”—for the age assumed that Mrs. Purley could not speak—Mr. Purley could not wish the newly married couple anything better than to be as happy as they had been. “Literally ‘a good wife,’ eh?” interlarded Tony genially. “None better,” asseverated Mr. Purley. “I’m close, but she’s nippy.” “You’re thinking of Blanche,” Barnaby called out gaily, through the laughter. “I don’t say as your mother’s nippy in words,” Mr. Purley corrected, with a twinkle. He went on to wish as much happiness to all the unmarried people present, at which Miss Gentry giggled and markedly avoided Barnaby’s eye; while Will, reconciled to fate several glasses ago, squeezed Blanche’s hand under the table. Even when Mr. Purley, becoming a little broad, referred to the time when his “good wife” had first ventured into “The Hurdle-Maker’s Arms,” Miss Gentry joined in the hilarity. Her passion for the church-going Cleopatra had convinced her that the stage was not necessarily of the devil—_The Mistletoe Bough_, she had found, was only the same story that had been written as a poem (“Ginevra”) by a Mr. Rogers, who, she had gathered, was a most respectable banker, and she was looking forward to her Mistress-ship of the Robes at the coming Theatre Royal, and even to witnessing her darling’s debut as Lady Agnes from the front. Several hysterical embraces had already passed between her and the bride—somewhat to Blanche’s jealousy—and all things swam before her in a rosy mist as she now pulled a cracker with Mr. Purley and read unblushingly:

“_When glass meets glass and Friendship quaffs,_ _From lip to lip ’tis Love that laughs!_”

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.