xnny tbe Carrier 1 — '- ■■ — j 1 i . . 1 THE NOVELS OF ISRAEL ZANGWILL CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO DREAMERS OF THE GHETTO GHETTO COMEDIES GHETTO TRAGEDIES THE GREY WIG THE KING OF SCHNORRERS THE MANTLE OF ELIJAH THE MASTER THEY THAT WALK IN DARKNESS THE CELIBATES' CLUB WITH LOUIS COWEN THE PREMIER AND THE PAINTER Jinny the Carrier NEW NOVELS: 7s. NET EACH THE THREE BLACK PENNYS Joseph Hergesheimer (In preparation, by the same author) JAVA HEAD THE MOON AND SIXPENCE Somerset Maugham STORM IN A TEACUP Eden Phillpotts THE ROLLING STONE C. A. Dawson Scott A SAILOR'S HOME and Other Stories Richard Dehan THE OLD MADHOUSE A posthumous novel by William de Morgan THE BONFIRE Anthony Brendon Jinny the Carrier By Israel Zangwill LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN EPISTLE DEDICATORY Dear Mistress of Bassetts, You and Audrey have so often proclaimed the need — ^in our world of sorrow and care — of a " bland " novel, defining it as one to be read when in bed with a sore throat, that as an adventurer in letters I have frequently felt tempted to write one for you. But the spirit bloweth where it listeth, and seemed perversely to have turned against novels altogether, perhaps because I had been labelled " novelist," as though one had set up a factory. (Two a year is, I believe, the correct output.) However, here is a novel at last — my first this century — and th,ere is a further reason for presuming to associate you with it, because it is largely from the vantage-point of your Essex homestead that I have, during the past twenty years, absorbed the landscape, character, and dialect which finally insisted on finding expression, first in a little play, and now in this elaborate canvas. How often have I passed over High Field and seen the opulent valley — tilth and pasture and ancient country seats — stretching before me like a great poem, with its glint of -^Ainding water, and the exquisite blue of its distances, and Bassetts awaiting me below, snuggling under its mellow moss-stained tiles, a true English home of " plain living and high thinking," and latterly of the rural Muse ! I can only hope that some breath of the in- spiration which has emanated from Bassetts in these latter 428500 vi EPISTLE DEDICATORY days, and which has set its picturesquely clad poetesses turning rhymes as enthusiastically as clods, and weaving rondels as happily as they bound the sheaves, has been wafted over these more prosaic pages — something of that " wood-magic " which your granddaughter — soul of the idyllic band — has got into her song of your surroundings. ^he glint of blue where the estuary flows ^ Or a shimmering mist o'er the valets green and gold : A little grey church which ^mid willow-trees shows ; A house on the hillside so good to behold With its yellow plaster and red tiles old, The clematis climbing in purple and green, And down in the garden ^mid hollyhocks bold Sit Kathleen, Ursula, Helen, and Jean, And yet it must not be thought that either " Bassetts " or " Little Baddow " figures in the " Little Bradmarsh " of my story. The artist cannot be tied down : he creates a composite landscape to his needs. Moreover, in these last four or five years a zealous constabulary can testify out of w^hat odds and ends the strange inquiring figure, who walked, cycled, or rode in carriers' carts to forgotten hamlets or sea-marshes, has composed his background. Nor have I followed photographic realism even in my dialect, deeming the Cockneyish forms, except when unconsciously amusing, too ugly to the eye in a long sustained narrative, though enjoyable enough in those humorous sketches which my friend Bensusan, the true conquistador of Essex, pours forth so amazingly from his inexhaustible cornucopia. I differ — in all diffidence — from his transcription on the sole point that the Essex rustic changes " i " into " oi " in words like " while," though why on the other hand " boil " should go EPISTLE DEDICATORY vii back to " bile " can be explained only by the perversity which insists on taking aspirates off the right words and clapping them on the wrong, much as Cockney youths and girls exchange hats on Bank Holiday. I have limited my own employment of this local vowelling mainly to the first person singular as sufficiently indicative of the rest. In the old vexed question of the use of dialect, my feeling is that its value is simply as colour, and that the rich old words, obsolete or unknown elsewhere, contribute this more effec- tively and far more beautifully than vagaries of pronuncia- tion, itself a very shifting factor of language even in the best circles. It is not even necessary for the artistic effect that the reader should understand the provincial words, though the context should be so contrived as to make them fairly intelligible. In short, art is never nature, though it should conceal the fact. Even the slowness and minuteness of my method — ^imposed as it is by the attempt to seize the essence of Essex — are immeasurable velocity and breadth compared with the scale of reality. In bringing this rustic complex under the category of comedy I clash, I am aware, with literary fashion, which demands that country folk should appear like toiling insects caught in the landscape as in a giant web of Fate, though why the inhabitants of Belgravia or Clapham escape this tragic convention I cannot understand. But I do not think that you, dear Aunt by adoption, see the life around you like that. Even, however, bad you and I seen more gloomily, the fashionable fatalistic framework would have been clearly inconsistent with the " blandness " of your novel. Such a novel must, I conceive, begin with " once upon a time " and end with " they all lived happy ever after," so that my task was simply to fill in the lacuna between these two viii EPISTLE DEDICATORY points, and supply the early-Victorian mottoes, while even the material was marked out for me by Dr. Johnson's defini- tion of a novel as " a story mainly about love." I am hope- ful that when you come to read it (not, I trust, with a sore throat), you will admit that I have at least tried to make my dear " Jinny " really " live happy ever after," even though — ^in the fierce struggle for literary survival — she is far from likely to do so. But at any rate, if only for the moment, I should be glad if I had succeeded in expressing through her my grateful appreciation of the beautiful country in which my lot, like Jinny's, has been cast, with its many lovable customs and simple, kindly people. Your affectionate Nephew, THE AUTHOR Sussex New Year 1919 CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE PREAMBLE i I. BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT 4 II. JINNY ON HER ROUNDS 34 III. JINNY AT HER HOMES 70 IV. WILL ON HIS WAY 100 V. WILL AT HOME 154 VI. SUNDAY AT CHIPSTONE 195 VII. COMEDY OF CORYDON AND AMARYLLIS 234 VIII. CUPID AND CATTLE 264 IX. TWO OF A TRADE 320 X. HORSE, GROOM, AND^BRIDE 357 XL WINTER'S TALE 432 XII. WRITTEN IN WATER 472 XIIL THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE 503 JINNY THE CARRIER PREAMBLE /'// tell you who Time ambles withal, " As You Like It.'^ Once upon a time — but then it was more than oncej it was^ m fact, every Tuesday and Friday — Jinny the Carrier, of Black- water Hall, Little Bradmarsh, went the round with her tilt-cart from that torpid Essex village on the Brad, through Long, Bradmarsh (over the brick bridge) to worldly, bustling Chipstone, and thence home again through the series of droughty hamlets" with public pumps that curved back — if one did not take the wrong turning at the Four Wantz Way — to her too aqueous birthplace : baiting her horse, Methusalem, at " The Black Sheep " in Chipstone like the other carters and wagoners, sporting a dog with a wicked eye and a smart collar, and even blowing a horn as if she had been the red-coated guard of the Chelmsford coach sweeping grandly to his goal down the High Street of Chipstone. Do you question more precisely when this brazen female flourished ? The answer may be given with the empty exactitude of science and scholarship. Her climacteric was to the globe at large the annus mirabilis of the Great Exhibition, when the lion and the lamb lay down together in Hyde Park in a crystal cage. But though the advent of the world-trumpeted Millennium could not wholly fail to percolate even to Little Bradmarsh. a more veracious chronology, a history truer to local tradition, would date the climax of Jinny's unmaidenly career as " before the Flood." Not, of course — as the mention of Methusalem might mislead A 2 JINNY THE CARRIER you into thinking-— the Flood which is still commemorated in toyshops and Babylonian tablets, and anent which German scholars miraculously contrive to be dry ; but the more momen- tous local Deluge when the Brad, perversely swollen, washed away cattle, mangold clamps, and the Holy Sabbath in one fell surge, leaving the odd wooden gable of Frog Farm looming above the waste of waters as nautically as Noah's Ark. In those antediluvian days, and in that sequestered hundred, farm-horses were the ruling fauna and set the pace ; the average of which Methusalem, with his " jub " or cross between a lazy trot and a funeral procession, did little to elevate. It was not till the pride of life brought a giddier motion that the Flood — but we anticipate both moral and story. Let us go rather at the Arcadian amble of the days before the Deluge, when the bicycle — even of the early giant order — had not yet arisen to terrorize the countryside with its rotiferous mobility, still less the motor-mammoth swirling through the leafy lanes in a dust- fog and smelling like a super-skunk, or the air-monster out- soaring and out-Sataning the broomsticked witch. It is true that Bundock, Her Majesty's postman, had once brought word of a big-bellied creature, like a bloated Easter-egg, hovering over the old maypole as if meditating to impale itself thereon, like a bladder on a stick. But normally not even the mail or a post- chaise divided the road with Master Bundock ; while, as for the snorting steam-horse that bore off the young Bradmarshians, once they had ventured as far as roaring railhead, it touched the postman's imagination no more than the thousand-ton sea- monsters with flapping membranes or cloud-spitting gullets that rapt them to the lands of barbarism and gold. Blessed Bundock, genial Mercury of those days before the Flood, if the rubbered wheel of the postdiluvian age might have better winged thy feet, yet thy susceptible eye — that rested all- embracingly on female gleaners — was never darkened by the sight of the soulless steel reaper, cropping close like a giant goose, and thou wast equally spared that mechanic flail-of-all- work that drones through the dog-days like a Brobdingnagian bumble-bee. For thine happier ear the cottages yet hummed with the last faint strains of the folk-song: unknown in thy sylvan perambulations that queer metalHc parrot, hoarser even than the raucous reality, which now wakens and disenchants every sleepy hollow with echoes of the London music-hall. PREAMBLE 3 Rural Essex was long the unchanging East, and there are still ploughmen who watch the airmen thunder by, then plunge into their prog again. The shepherds who pour their fleecy streams between its hedgerows are still as primitive as the herdsmen of Chaldea, and there are yokels who dangle sideways from their slow beasts as broodingly as the Bedouins of Palestine. Even to-day the spacious elm-bordered landscapes through which Jinny's cart rolled and her dog circumambiently darted, lie ignored of the picture postcard, and on the red spinal chimney- shaft of Frog Farm the doves settle with no air of perching for their photographs. Little Bradmarsh is still Little, still the most reclusive village of all that delectable champaign ; the Brad still glides between its willows unruffled by picnic parties and soothed rather than disturbed by rusty, ancient barges. But when Gran'fer Quarles first brought little Jinny to these plashy bottoms, the region it watered — not always with discretion — was unknown even to the gipsy caravans and strolling show- men, and quite outside the circuit of the patterers and chaunters who stumped the country singing or declaiming lampoons on the early Victoria ; not a day's hard tramp from Seven Dials where they bought their ribald broadsheets, yet as remote as Arabia Felix. CHAPTER I BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT He comes, the herald of a noisy world. With spattered boots, CowPER, " The Task." I It had rained that April more continuously than capriciously, but this morning April showed at last her fairer face. The sun- shine held as yet no sense of heat, only the bracingness of a glad salt wave. Across the spacious blue of the Essex sky clouds floated and met and parted in a restful restlessness. The great valley swam in a blue sea of vapour. Men trod as on buoyant sunshine that bore them along. The buds were peeping out from every hedge and tree, the blackthorn was bursting into white, the whole world seemed like a child tiptoeing towards some delightful future. Primroses nestled in every hollow : the gorse lay golden on the commons. The little leaves of the trees seemed shy, scarcely grown familiar with the fluttering of the birds. All the misery, pain, and sadness had faded from creation like a bad dream : the stains and pollutions were washed out, leaving only the young clean beauty of the first day. It was a virgin planet, fresh from the hands of its Maker, trembling with morning dew — an earth that had never seen its own blossoming. And the paean of all this peace and innocence throbbed exultingly in bird-music through all the great landscape. Over the orchard of Frog Farm there were only two larks, but you would have thought a whole orchestra. A blot against this background seemed the blood-red shirt of Caleb Flynt in that same orchard ; a wild undulating piece of primeval woodland where plum-trees and pear-trees indeed flourished, but not more so than oaks and chestnuts, briars and brambles, or fairy mists of bluebells. The task of regenerating it BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT 5 had been annually postponed, but now that Caleb was no longer the Frog Farm '* looker," it formed, like his vegetable garden, his wheat patch, or his wife's piggery, a pleasant pottering- ground. He worked without coat or smock, chastening the tanker grass while the dew was still on it — or in his own idiom, " while the dag was on the herb." White-bearded and scythe- bearing, he suggested — although the beard was short and round and he wore a shapeless grey hat — a figure of Father Time, incarnadined from all his wars. But in sooth no creature breathed more at one with the earth's mood that morning than this ancient " Peculiar," whose parlour bore as its text of honour — in white letters on a lozenge of brown paper : " When He giveth quietness, who then can make trouble ? " Quietness was, indeed, all around him in this morning fresh- ness : the swish of the scythe, the murmurous lapse of shorn grass, the drone of insects, the cooing of pigeons from the cote, the elusive cry of the new-come cuckoo, seemed forms of silence rather than of sound. And his inner peace matched his outer, for, as his arms automatically wielded the scythe, his soul was actually in heaven — or at least in the New Jerusalem which, according to his wife's novel Christadelphian creed, was to be let down from heaven for the virtuous remnant of earth — and at no distant date ! Not that he definitely believed in her descend- ing city, though he felt a certain proprietary interest in it. " Oi don't belong to Martha's Church," he reassured his brethren of the Peculiar faith, " but Oi belongs to she and she belongs to me." In this mutual belonging he felt himself the brake and Martha the spirited mare who could never stand still. No doubt her argument that we were here to learn and to move forward was plausible enough — ^how could he traverse it, he who had himself changed from Churchman to Peculiar ? But her rider : " We don't leave the doctrine, we carry it with us," struck him as somewhat shifty. And her move from " Sprinkling " to " Total Immersion " — even if the submergence did in a sense include the sprinkling — ^was surely enough progression for one lifetime. He did not like " this gospel of gooin' forrard " : an obstinate instinct warned him to hold back, though with an uneasy recog- nition that her ceaseless explorations of her capacious Bible — to him a sealed book — must naturally yield discoveries denied to his less saintly and altogether illiterate self. Discoveries indeed 6 JINNY THE CARRIER had not been spared him. Ever since she had joined those new- fangled Christadelphians — " Christy Dolphins " as he called them — she had abounded in texts as crushing as they were unfamiliar ; and even the glib Biblical patter he had picked up from the PecuUars was shown to imply at bottom the new teaching. Curtain lectures are none the less tedious when they are theological, and after a course of many months — each with its twenty-eight to thirty-one nights — Caleb Flynt was grown w^earisomely learned in the bold doctrine launched by the great John Thomas that " the Kingdom of God on earth " actually meant on earth and must be brought about there and nowhere else, and that Immortality enjoyed except in one's terrestrial body — however spiritualized — ^was as absurd a notion as that it v;as lavished indiscriminately upon Tom, Giles, and Jerry. The worst of it was he could never be sure Martha was not in the right — she had certainly modified his belief in " Sprinkling " — and he fluttered around her " New Jerusalem " like a moth around a lighthouse. Had anybody given a penny for his thoughts as he stooped now over his scythe, the fortunate investor would have come into possession of " the street of pure gold, as it were transparent glass," not to mention the sapphires and emeralds, the beryls and chrysolites and all the other shining swarms of precious stones catalogued in Revelation. If he had kept from her the rumour that had reached his own ears of such a treasure-city of glass actually arising in London at this very moment, it was not because he believed this was veritably her celestial city, but because it might possibly excite her credulity to the pitch of wishing to see it. And the thought of a journey was torture. Already Martha had dropped hints about the difficulties of " upbuilding " in the lack of local Christadelphians to institute a " Lightstand " : the wild dream of some day breaking bread in an " Ecclesia " in London had been adum- brated : it was possible the restless female mind even contem- plated London itself as a place to be seen before one died. But surely the New Jerusalem, if it descended at all, would — ^he felt — descend here, at Little Bradmarsh. A heaven that meant girding up one's loins and wrenching out one's roots was a very problematic paradise, for all the splendour with which his inward eye was now, despite himself, dazzled. BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT II From this jewelled Jerusalem Caleb was suddenly brought back to the breathing beauty of our imperfect earth, to pear- blossom and plum-blosson, to the sun-glinted shadows under his trees and the mellow tiles of his roof. The sound of his own name fell from on high — like the city of his daydream — accom- panied by a great skirring of wings, and looking up dazedly, the pearly gates still shimmering, his eye followed the tarred side- wall of the farmhouse till, near the roof, it lit upon his wife's night-capped head protruded from the tiny diamond-paned casement that alone broke the sheer black surface of the wood. A sense of the unusual quickened his pulses. It stole upon him, not mainly from Martha's face, which, despite its excited distension, wore — over wrinkles he never saw — the same russet complexion and was crowned by the same glory of unblanched brown hair that had gladdened his faithful eyes since the beginning of the century ; but, more subtly and subconsciously, through the open lattice which framed this ever-enchanting vision. In the Flynt tradition, windows — restricted at best by the window tax still in force — were for light, not air. Had folks wanted air, they would have poked a hole in the wall ; not built a section of it " of transparent glass." People so much under the sky as Caleb and Martha Flynt had no need to invite colds by artificial draughts. They were getting a change of air all day long. But their rooms — their small, low-ceiled rooms — were not thus vivified, even in their absence ; the ground-floor windows were indeed immovable, and an immemorial mustiness made a sort of slum atmosphere in this spacious, sun-washed solitude. Hence Caleb's sense of a jar in his universe at the familiar, flat pattern of the wall dislocated into a third dimension by the out- flung casement : a prodigy which he was not surprised to find fluttering the dovecot, and which presaged, he felt, still vaster cataclysms. And to add to the auspices of change, he observed another piebald pigeon among his snowy flock. " Yes, dear heart," he called up, disguising his uneasiness and shearing on. Martha pointed a fateful finger towards the high-hedged, oozy path meandering beyond the orchard gate, and dividing the sown land from the pastures sloping to the Brad. " There's Bundock coming up the Green Lane ! " 8 JINNY THE CARRIER *' Bundock ? " gasped Caleb, the scythe stopping short. ^^ You're a-dreamin'." That Brother Bundock, who had been prayed over for a decade by himself and every Peculiar in the vicinity, should at last have taken up his bed and walked, was too sudden a proof of their tenets, and the natural man blurted out his disbelief, ^* But I see his red jacket," Martha protested, " his bag on his shoulder." " Ow ! " His tone was divided between relief and disappoint- ment. " You mean Bundock's buoy-oy ! " He drew out the word even longer than usual, and it rose even beyond the high pitch his Essex twang habitually gave to his culminating phrases. " Whatever can Posty be doin' in these pa-arts ? " he went on, with a new wonder. " And the chace that squashy," said Martha, who from her coign of vantage could see the elderly figure labouring in the remoter windings, " he's sinking into it at every step." "Ay, the mud's only hazeled over. Whatever brings the silly youth when the roads be in that state ? " " It'll be the Census again ! " groaned Martha. Caleb's brow gloomed. He feared Martha was right, and anything official must have to do with that terrible paper-fiUing which had at last by the aid of Jinny been, they had hoped, finally accomplished some weeks before. Ever since the first English census had been taken in the first year of the century, Martha had been expecting a plague to fall upon the people as it had upon the Israelites when King David numbered them. But although she had been disappointed, there was no doubt of the plague of the Census itself. ^' Haps it's a letter for the shepherd," hazarded Caleb to vcomfort her. '" Who'd be writing Master Peartree a letter ? He can't read." '" Noa ! " he answered complacently, for his wife's learning seemed part of their mutual " belonging." The drawbacks of this vicarious erudition were, however, revealed by his next remark ; for on Martha crying out that poor Bundock had sunk up to his knees, Caleb bade her be easy. " He won't be swal- lowed up like that minx Cora ! " But Martha's motherly heart w^as too agitated to recognize the Korah of her Biblical allusions — she vaguely assumed it was some scarlet woman englutted in the slimy saltings of Caleb's BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT 9 birthplace. " Run and lead him into the right path," she exhorted. But Caleb's brain was not one for quick reactions. Inured for nigh seventy years to a world in which nothing happened too suddenly, even thunderbolts giving reasonable notice and bogs getting boggier by due degrees, he stood dazedly, his hands paralysed on the nibs of his arrested scythe. " Happen the logs Oi put have sunk down ! " he soliloquized slowly. " If I wasn't in my nightgown I'd go myself," said Martha impatiently. " 'Tis a lesson from the Lord not to lay abed." " The Lord allows for rheumaties, dear heart," said Caleb soothingly. " He'll be up to his neck, if you don't stir your stumps." " Not he, Martha. Unless he stands on his head." Caleb meant this as a literal contribution to the discussion. There was no wilful topsy-turveydom. He was as unconscious of his own humour as of other people's. " But he'll spoil his breeches anyways," retorted Martha with equal gravity. " And the Lord just sending his wife a new baby." " Bundock's breeches be the Queen's," said Caleb reassuringly. But laying down his scythe, he began to move mazedly adown the orchard, and before the postman's mud-cased leggings had floundered many more rods, the veteran was sitting astride his stile, dangling his top-boots over a rotten-planked brook, and waving in his hairy, mahogany hand his vast red handkerchief like a danger signal. '' Ahoy, Posty ! " Bundock responded with a cheerful blast on his bugle. " Ahoy, Uncle Flynt ! " " Turn back. Don't, ye'U strike a bog-hole." " I never go back ! " cried the dauntless Bundock. And even as he spoke, his stature shrank till his bag rested on the ooze. " The missus was afeared you'd spoil the Queen's breeches," said Caleb sympathetically. *' Catch hold of yon crab-apple branch." " Better spoil her breeches than be unfaithful to her uniform," said the slimy hero, struggling up as directed. " I've got a letter for you." Caleb's flag fell into the brook and startled a water-rat. " A letter for us I " 10 JINNY THE CARRIER He splashed into the water, still dazedly, to rescue his hand- kerchief, avoiding the plank as a superfluous preliminary to the wetting ; and, standing statuesque in mid-stream, more like Father Neptune now than Father Time, he continued incredu- lously : " Who'd be sendin' us a letter ? " " That's not my business," cried Bundock sternly. He came on heroically, disregarding a posterior consciousness of damp clay, and picking his way along the grassy, squashy strip that was starred treacherously with peaceful daisies and buttercups, over- hung by wild apple-trees, and hedged from the fields on either hand by a tall, prickly tangle and congestion — as of a vegetable slum — in which gorse, holly, speedwell, mustard, and lily of the valley (still in green sheaths), strove for breathing space. At the edge of a palpable mu dhole he paused perforce. Caleb, who, when he recovered from his daze at the news of the letter, had advanced with dripping boots to meet him, was equally arrested at the opposite frontier, and the two men now faced each other across some fifteen feet of flowery ooze, two studies in red ; Caleb, big-limbed and stolid, in his crimson shirt, and Bundock, dapper and peart, in liis scarlet jacket. The postman's face was lightly pockmarked, but found by females fascinating, especially under the quasi-military cap, Hairlessness was part of its open charm : his sun-tanned cheek kept him juvenile despite his half-century, and preserved from rust his consciousness of a worshipping womanhood. Caleb, on the contrary, was all hair, little bushes growing even out of his ears, and whiskers and beard and the silver-grey mop at his crown running into one another without frontiers — the " Non- conformist fringe " in a ragged edition. " Sow sorry to give ye sow much ill-convenience," he called apologetically. '' Oi count," he added, having had time for reflection, " one of our buoy-oys has written from furrin parts. And he wouldn't be knowing the weather here." " 'Tain't any of your boys," said Bundock crossly, " because it comes from London." " That's a pity. The missus'U get 'sterical when she hears it's for us, and it's cruel hard to disappoint her. There ain't nobody else as we want letters from. Can't you send it back ? " " Not if I can deliver it," said Bundock stiffly. " But ye can't — unless you chuck it over." BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT ii The slave of duty shook his head. " I daren't risk the Queen's mail like that." " But it's my letter." " Not yet, Uncle Flynt. When it reaches your hand it may be considered safely, legally, and constitutionally delivered. But, till then, 'tis the Queen's letter, and don't you forget it." Caleb scratched his head. " If 'twas the Queen's letter, she could read it," he urged obstinately. " And so she can," rejoined Bundock. " She has the right to open any letter smelling of high treason, so to speak, and nobody can say her nay." " But my letter ain't high treasony," said Caleb indignantly. " And if Wictoria wants to read it, why God bless her, says Oi." Bundock sighed before the bovinity of the illiterate mind. *' The Queen has got better things to do than read every scribble her head's stuck on to." " Happen Oi could ha' retched it with a rake," Caleb mused. " What a pity you ain't got spladges, like when Oi was a buoy-oy, and gatherin' pin-patches on the sands. And fine and fat they was too when ye got 'em on the pin ! " His tongue clucked. Bundock looked his contempt. " A pretty sight, Her Majesty's uniform lumbering along like a winkle-picker ! " " Bide a bit then," said Caleb, " and Oi'll thrash through the hedge and work through agen in your rear." It was a chivalrous offer, for a deep ditch barred the way to the freshly ploughed land, and a tough and prickly chaos to the pasture land ; but Bundock declined churlishly, if not un- heroically, declaring there was a letter for Frog Cottage too. And when Caleb, recovering from this vindication of his wife's prophesyings, offered to transmit it to the shepherd, " What guarantee have I," asked Bundock, " that it reaches him safely, legally, and constitutionally ? Nay, nay, uncle, a man must do his own jobs." " Then work through the bushes yourself. Don't, ye'll be fit to grow crops on." " Lord, how I hate going round — circumbendibus ! " groaned Bundock. " 1 might as well be driving a post-cart." " There's a mort of worser things than gooin' round, '^ said Caleb. " And Oi do be marvelling a young chap like you should 12 JINNY THE CARRIER mind a bit of extra leg-work, bein' as how ye've got naught else to do but to put one leg afore the 'tother." " Indeed ? " snapped Bundockj this ignorant summary of his duties aggravating the moist clayey consciousness that resided at the seat of Her Majesty's trousers. " Ef ye won't keep to the high roads, you ought to git a hoss what can clear everything," Caleb went on to advise. " And break my neck ? " " Posty always had a hoss when I was a cad." " Or lay in the road with a broken back and Her Majesty's mai] at the mercy of every tramp ? " pursued Bundock. " No, no, one cripple in a family is enough." Caleb looked pained. " You dedn't ought to talk o' your feyther like that. And him pinchin' hisself and maybe injurin' his spinal collar to keep you at school till you was a large buoy-oy ! " III Bundock's irritation at his Boeotian critic was suddenly diverted by the spectacle of a female figure bearing down upon him literally by leaps and bounds — it seemed as if the steeplechase method recommended by Caleb was already in action. The postman felt for his spectacles, discarded normally in the interests of manly fascination. " Lord ! " he cried. " Has your missus joined the Jumpers ? " Caleb turned his head, not unalarmed. With so skittish a theologian anything was possible. But his agitation subsided into a smile of admiration. " She thinks of everything," he said. The practical Martha was in fact advancing with an improvised leaping-pole that had already carried her neatly over the brook and would obviously bring Bundock over the boglet. But why — Caleb wondered — was she risking her " bettermost "' skirt ? His own mother, he remembered, had not hesitated to tuck up her petticoats when winkles had to be gathered. And why was Martha's hair massed in its black net cap with a Sunday stylishness ? " Morning, Mrs. Flynt," cried Bundock, becoming as genial as the weather. Females, even sexagenarian, so long as not utterly uncomely, turned him from an official into a man. " Morning, Mr. Bundock ! " Martha called back across the mudhole. " I hope your father's no worse ! " BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT 13 Bundock's brow clouded. Still harping on his father. " He's not so active as you," he replied a bit testily. " Thank the Lord ! " said Caleb fervently. Then, colouring under Bundock's stare, " For the missus's legs," he explained. And to cover his confusion he snatched the pole from her and hurled it towards Bundock, who had barely time to jump aside into a still squidgier patch. But in another instant the dauntless postman secured it, and with one brave bound — hke Sir Walter Scott's stag — had cleared the slimiest section, and his staggering, sliding form was safely locked in Caleb's sanguineous shirt- sleeves. Safely but not contentedly, for at heart he was deeply piqued at this inglorious position of Her Majesty's envoy ; the dignified newsbearer, the beguiler of loneliness, the gossip welcomed alike in the kitchens of the great and the parlours of the humble. Morbidly conscious of his unpresentable rear, he kept carefully behind the couple, while Caleb explained the situation to Martha, breaking and blunting the news at one hammer-blow. " There's a letter for us ! From Lunnon ! " Martha was wonderful. " What a piece ! What a master ! " he thought. One might live with a woman for half a century, yet never fathom her depths. Not a gasp, not a cry, not a sigh of vain yearning. Merely : " Then it'll be from Cousin Caroline. When she went back to London at Michaelmas she promised to let us know if she reached home safe, and if your brother George was better." " Ay, ay ! " he assented happily. " Oi'd disremembered Cousin Caroline." It was a merciful oblivion, for his Cockney cousin had come from Limehouse in August and stayed two months, protesting that it was impossible to bide a day in a place where there wasn't a neighbour to speak to except a silly shepherd who was never at home ; where water was scooped filthily from a green-scummy pond instead of flowing naturally from a tap ; where on moonless nights you could break your leg at your own doorstep ; where frogs croaked and cocks crowed and pigeons moaned and foxes barked at the unholiest hours ; where disgusting vermin were nailed on the trees and where you broke out in itching blotches, which folks might ascribe to " harvesters," but which were susceptible of a more domestic explanation. Moreover, Cousin Caroline had brought a profuse and uninvited progeny, whose 14 JINNY THE CARRIER unexpected appearance in Jinny's cart, though vaguely com- forting as recalling the days when the house resounded with child-life, was in truth at disturbing discord with the Quakerish calm into which Frog Farm had subsided after the flight of its teeming chicks. As Caleb came along now, convoying Bundock through the lush orchard grass, the echo of Cousin Caroline's querulous voice rasped his brain and made him wish she had pretermitted her promise to write. As for his ailing brother George, information about whom she was probably sending, it was obvious that he was-no worse, else one would assuredly have heard of his funeral. Had not George carefully let him know when he got married ? Caroline was a Churchwoman — he remembered suddenly — she had compromised Frog Farm by eking out Parson Fallov/'s miserable congregation. And now she had sent her letter just at a season to plague and muddy a worthy Dissenter. " Sow sorry to give ye sow much ill-convenience, Mr. Bundock," he repeated, as they reached the farmhouse. IV Frog Farm, before which Bundock stood fumbling in his bag, was — as its name implies — situated in a batrachian region, croakily cheerless under a sullen sky, a region revealed under the plough as ancient sedge-land, black with rotted flags and rushes. But the scene was redeemed at its worst by the misty magni- ficence of great spaces, whose gentle undulations could not counteract a sublime flatness ; not to mention the beauty of the Brad gHding like the snake in the grass it sometimes proved. The pasture land behind the farmhouse and sloping softly down to the river — across which, protected by a dyke and drained by little black mills working turbine wheels, lay the still lower Long Bradmarsh — was the salvage of a swamp roughly provided with a few, far-parted drains by some pioneer squatter, content — on the higher ground where a farmhouse was possible — to fell and slice his own timber and bake his own tiles. At the topmost rim, on a road artificially raised to take its wagons to the higher ground or " Ridge " of the village, rose this farmhouse with its buildings, all dyked off from the converted marsh by a three- foot wall of trunk-fragments and uncouth stones, bordered by bushes. The house turned its back on the Brad, and had not BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT 15 even hind eyes to see it — another effect of the window tax — and had the rear of the house not been reheved by the quaint red chimney bisecting it, the blankness would have been unbearable. But if little of good could have been said of its architecture behind its back, and if even in front it ended abruptly at one extremity like a sheer cliff or a halved haystack, with one gable crying for another to make both ends meet, it was as a whole picturesque enough with all that charm of rough wood, which still seems to keep its life-sap, and beside which your marble hall is a mere petrifaction. Weather-boarded and tarred, it faced you with a black beauty of its own, amid which its diamond- paned little lattices gleamed like an Ethiopian's eyes. In the foreground, haystacks, cornricks, and strawstacks gave grace and colour, fusing with the spacious landscape as naturally as the barns and byres and storehouses, the troughs and stables and cart-sheds and the mellow, immemorial dung. But what surprised the stranger more than its lop-sidedness was the duplication of its front door, for there were two little doors, with twin sills and latches. It had, in fact, been partitioned to allow a couple of rooms to the shepherd-cowman, when that lone widower's cottage was needed for an extra horseman. Master Peartree's new home became known as Frog Cottage. The property was what was here called an " off-hand farm," the owner being " in parts," or engaged in other enterprises, and for more than a generation Caleb Flynt had lived there as " looker " to old Farmer Gale, the cute Cornish invader who had discovered the fatness of the oozy soil, and who had been glad to install a son of it as a reconciling link between Little Bradmarsh and " the furriner." Caleb belonged to that almost extinct species of managers who can dispense with reading and writing, and his semi-absentee employer found his honesty as meticulous as his memory. While the Flynt nestlings were growing up, the parent birds had found the nest a tight fit, but with the gradual flight of the brood to every quarter of the compass, the old pair had receded into its snugger recesses — living mainly by the kitchen fire under the hanging hams. Thus when last year Farmer Gale's son, succeeding to the property and foolishly desiring a more scientific and literate bailiff, delicately intimated that having bought all the adjoining land, he had been compelled to acquire therewith the rival looker, the old Flynts were glad enough to be allowed for a small rent the life-use of the farmhouse i6 JINNY THE CARRIER and the bits of waste land around it, subject to their providing living room for old Master Peartree, who was to pasture his flock of sheep and a few kine in the near meadows. Martha, indeed, always maintained that Caleb had made a bad bargain with the new master — did not the whole neighbourhood pronounce the young widower a skinflint ? — but Caleb, who had magisterially negotiated with the new bailiff the swapping of his wood-ashes for straw for her pet pig, Maria, limited his discussions with her to theology. " When one talks law and high business," he maintained, " we must goo back to the days afore Eve was dug out of Adam." V Bundock, restored to his superiority by the deprecatory expectancy of the old couple, observed graciously that there was no need to apologize : anybody was liable to have a letter. Indeed, he added generously, with nine boys dotted about the world. Frog Farm might have been far more troublesome. " Eleven, Mr. Bundock," corrected Martha with a quiver in her voice. " I don't reckon the dead and buried, Mrs. Flynt. They don't write — not even to the dead-letter office." He cut short a chuckle, remembering this was no laughing matter. " And the other nine might as well be dead for all the letters you bring me," Martha retorted bitterly. " No news is good news, dear heart," Caleb put in, as though to shield the postman. He was not so sure now that this vmfor- tunate letter had not disturbed her slowly won resignation. "We've always yeared of anything unpleasant — like when Daniel married the Kaffir lady." , " That was Christopher," said Martha. " Ow, ay, Christopher. 'Tis a wonder he could take to a thick-lipped lady. Oi couldn't fancy a black-skinned woman, even if she was the Queen of Sheba. Oi shook hands with one once, though, and it felt soft. They rub theirselves with oil to keep theirselves lithe." Martha replied only with a sigh. The Kaffir lady, for all her coloured and heathen horror, at least supplied a nucleus for visualization, whereas all her other stalwart sons, together with one married daughter, had vanished into the four corners of the Empire — building it up with an unconsciousness mightier than BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT 17 the sword — and only the children who had died young — two girls and a boy — remained securely hers, fixed against the flux of life and adventure. Occasionally indeed an indirect rumour of her live sons' doings came to her, but correspondence was not the habit of those days when even amid the wealthier classes a boy might go out to India and his safe arrival remain unknown for a semestrium or more. The foreign postage, too, was no incon- siderable check to the literary impulse or encouragement to the lazy. Indeed postage stamps were still confined to half a dozen countries. It was but a decade since they had come in at all and letters with envelopes or an extra sheet had ceased to be " double " ; postcards were still unknown, and in many parts postmen came as infrequently as carriers, people often hastening to scrawl replies which the same men might convey to the mail-bags. " Kafiirs ain't black," corrected Bundock. " They're coffee- coloured. That's what the name means." Martha sighed again. So far had her brooding fantasy gone that she sometimes pictured baby grandchildren as innocently dusky as the hybrid young fantails which no solicitude could keep out of her dovecot, and which were a reminder that heaven knew no colour-boundaries. " Don't be nervous," Bundock reassured her. " I'll find it." " Oh, no hurry, no hurry ! " said Caleb, beginning to perspire distressingly under the postman's exertions and to mop his hairy brow with his brook-sopped handkerchief. How these youngsters grew up ! he was thinking. Brats one had seen spanked waxed into mighty officers of State. " Shall I brush your breeches, Posty ? " he inquired tactlessly. " What's the use till they're dry ? " snapped Bundock. " Come in and dry them before the kitchen fire," said Martha. " This sun'll dry them," he said coldly. " Not so sHck as the fire," Caleb blundered on. " 'Tain't like you was a serpent walking on your belly." Bundock flushed angrily and right-wheeled to hide the seat of his trousers. " Why you should go and catch your letter when the roads are in that state ! " he muttered. " You could ha' waited till they dried ! " Caleb said depre- catingly. " I did wait a post-day or so," said Bundock with undiminished resentment. " But there's such a thing, uncle, as duty to my Queen. Things might have got damper instead of drier, like the i8 JINNY THE CARRIER time the floods were out beyond Long Bradmarsh, and I might have had to swim out to you." Caleb was impressed. " But can you swim ? " he inquired. " That's not the point," growled Bundock. " I don't say I'd ha' faced the elements for you, but if somebody with real traffic and entanglement were living here, e.g. the Duke of Wellington, I should have come through fire and water." " The Dook at a farm ! " Caleb smiled incredulously. " In the Battle of Waterloo," said Bundock icily, " the whole fight was whether he or Boney should hold a farm." *' You don't say ! " cried Caleb excitedly. " And who got it ? " " Well, it wasn't Froggy's Farm." And Bundock roared with glee and renewed self-respect. Caleb guffawed too, but merely for elation at the Frenchy's defeat. The calm and piping voice of Martha broke in upon this robustious duet, pointing out that there was no Duke in residence and no need for natation, but that since Jinny called for orders every Friday he might have given her the letter. " Give the Queen's mail to a girl ! " Bundock looked apoplectic. " Jinny never loses anything," said Martha, unimpressed. " She'll lose her character if she ain't careful," he said viciously ; " driving of a Sunday with Farmer Gale." " That's onny to chapel," said Caleb. " A man that rich'U never take her there ! " sneered Bundock. " Why, Jinny's only a child," said Martha, roused at last. " And the best girl breathing. Look how she slaves for her grandfather ! " " Jinny ! Jinny ! " Bundock muttered. " Nothing but Jinny all the day and all the way." How often indeed had she snatched the gossip from his mouth, staled his earth-shaking tidings, even as the Bellman anticipated his jokes ! " Let me catch her carry- ing letters, that's all. I'll have the law on her, child or no child. I expect she blows that horn to make the old folks think she's got postal rights ! " He did not mention that in his vendetta against the girl it was he who never hesitated to poach on the rival preserves, and that he was even now carrying a certain packet of tracts which he had found at " The Black Sheep " awaiting Jinny's day, and which he had bagged on the ground that he had a letter for the same address. " Jinny would have saved your legs," said Martha dryly. Caleb turned on her. " Ay, and his leggings too ! " he burst BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT 19 forth with savage sarcasm. But at great moments deep calls to deep. " Women don't understand a man's duty. And Posty's every inch a man." Bundock tried to look his full manhood : fortunately the dis- covery of the letter at this instant enabled him to gain an inch or two by throwing back his shoulders, so long bent under the royal yoke. " Mrs. Flynt," he announced majestically. " For me ? " gasped Martha. " For you," said Bundock implacably. " Mrs. Flynt, Frog Farm, Swash. End, Little Bradm.arsh, near Chipstone, Essex. Not that I hold it's proper to write to a man's wife wMe he's alive — but my feelings don't count." And he tendered her the letter. " It does seem more becoming for Flynt to have his Cousin Caroline's letter," admitted Martha, shrinking back meekly. Bundock relaxed in beams. " I'm wonderfully pleased with you, Mrs. Flynt," he said, handing Caleb the letter. " You're a shining example, for aU you stand up for that chit. When I think of Deacon Mawhood's wife and how she defies him with that bonnet of hers ! " " What sort of bonnet ? " said Martha, pricking up her ears. '' You haven't heard ? " Bundock's satisfaction increased. '^ It's like the Queen's — drat her ! I mean, drat Mrs. Mawhood — made with that new plait — ' Brilliant's ' the name. They turn the border of one edge of the straw inwards and that makes it all splendiferous." " Pomps and wanities," groaned Caleb. " And she a deacon's wife ! " Bundock sniggered. His sympathy with the husband was deeper and older than theology. " I told you," Martha reminded Caleb, " what would come of 'electing a ratcatcher a deacon." " A righteous ratcatcher," maintained Caleb sturdily, " be higher than a hungodly emperor." " You haven't got any emperors," said the practical Martha. " And how many kings have joined your Ecclesia ? " put in Bundock. " All the kings of righteousness ! " answered Martha in trumpet- tones. Bundock was quelled. " Well, I can't stop gammicking," he said, shouldering his bag. 20 JINNY THE CARRIER " Won't you have a glass of pagles wine ? '' said Martha, relapsing to earth. " No, thank you. I've got a letter for Frog Cottage too ! " " For Master Peartree ! " cried Martha. " And all in one morning. Well, if that's not a miracle ! " " You and your miracles ! " he said with a Tom Paine brutality. " Why I saved up yours till another came for Swash End. And so I've managed to kill " His face suddenly changed. The brutal look turned beatific. But his sentence was frozen. The good couple regarded him dubiously. " What's amiss ? " cried Martha. Bundock gasped for expression like a salmon on a slab. " To kill " burst from his lips again, but the rest was choked in a spasm of cachinnation. " You'll kiU yourself laughin'," said Caleb. Bundock mastered himself with a mighty effort. " So as to kill — ha, ha, ha ! — to kill — ha, ha, ha ! — two frogs — ha, ha, ha ! — with one stone ! " Martha corrected him coldly: " Two birds, you mean." " Ay," corroborated Caleb, " the proverb be two birds." " But here," Bundock explained between two convulsions, "it's two frogs.'' Caleb shook his head. " Oi've lived here or by the saltings afore you was born, and brought up a mort o' childer here. Two birds, sonny, two birds." Bundock's closing chuckles died into ineffable contempt. " Good morning," he said firmly. " You're sure you. won't have a sip o' pagles wine ? " repeated Martha. He shook his head sternly. " If I had time for drinking I'd have time to tell you all the news." He turned on his heel, presenting the post-bag at them like a symbol of duty. " Anything fresh ? " murmured Martha. Bundock veered round viciously. " D'you suppose all Brad- marsh is as sleepy as the Froggeries ? Fresh ? Why, there's things as fresh as the thatch on Farmer Gale's barn or the paint on Elijah Skindle's new dog-hospital or the black band on the chimney-sweep's Sunday hat." " Is Mrs. Whitefoot dead ? " inquired Martha anxiously. " No, 'twas only his mother-in-law in London, and when he BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT 2r went up to the funeral he had his pocket picked. Quite spoilt his day, I reckon — ^ha, ha, ha ! " " Buryin' ain't a laughin' matter," rebuked Caleb stolidly. " It depends who's buried," said Bundock. " I shouldn't cry over Mrs. Mawhood. Which reminds me that the Deacon sent out the Bellman to say he couldn't be responsible for her debts." " Good ! " cried Caleb. Martha paled, but was silent. " Only the Bellman spoilt it as usual with his silly old jokes. Proclaimed that the Deacon had put his foot down on his wife's bonnet." " He, he, he ! " laughed the old couple. Bundock turned a hopeless hump. " Good niorning ! " " And thank you kindly for the letter," called Martha. " Don't mention it," said Bundock. " And besides I killed — ho, ho, ho ! — two frogs ! " They heard his explosions on the quiet air long after he and his royal hump had vanished along the Bradmarsh road. VI Caleb's eyes followed the heaving mail-bag. " Bundock's buoy-oy fares to be jolly this mornin'." " He does be lively sometimes," agreed Martha. Suddenly Caleb became aware of the letter in his hand. " Dash my buttons, Martha ! We disremembered to ask him to read it." ' W^ It can no longer be concealed that despite her erudition Martha could not read writing nor write save by imitating print. The cursive alphabet was Phoenician to her. ^ " I didn't forget," she answered with her masterly calm. " Bundock's too leaky. You heard him tell all the gossip and scandal. And it ain't true about Jinny, for Master Peartree saw them riding in the other Sunday and Farmer Gale's little boy sat between them. Besides, Bundock's a man, and I don't want a man to read my letter from Caroline." ^ The point seemed arguable, but Caleb meekly suggested the little boy she had just mentioned — only a mile and a half away. He would be at school, Martha pointed out. Caleb looked at the letter as a knifeless cook at an oyster. " What's the clock-time ? " he asked. Not quite certain. I set the clock by Jinny last Friday, but (C 22 JINNY THE CARRIER it stopped suddenly yesterday, when I was reading you St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians. Haven't you heard it not striking ? " Caleb shook his head. " Afeared Oi'm gooin' deafish, dear heart. But we'll know the clock-time on Friday," he added philosophically. " And when Jinny comes she can read the letter likewise." But Martha was blushing. " No, no, not Jinny 1 She's a young girl." " Thank the Lord for her lively face ! " agreed Caleb. " Maybe she oughtn't 'to read a letter to a married woman," explained Martha shyly, " being a girl without mother or sisters, brought up by her grandfather." " But Cousin Caroline wouldn't write naught improper." " Of course not — but it mightn't be proper for an orphan girl to read. Maybe it's not even proper for you, and that's why she addressed it to me." Caleb felt as bemused as before a Bundock witticism. " Joulterhead ! " said Martha, with a loving smile. " And you've had fourteen ! " The letter fell from his nerveless fingers. " Cousin Caroline confined again ! " And the clacking of all those innumerable infants filled the air — like the barking of the black geese on the wintry mud-flats. But he recovered himself. " Why, she's a widow, not a pair." " Widows can be re-paired," said Martha. " Must have been a middlin' bold man to goo courtin' a family that size," Caleb reflected. He picked up the letter and poised it in his hand. " Don't feel as weighty as St. Paul's letters," he said. " The text doesn't mean his letters were heavy," explained Martha. " ' His letters, say they, are weighty and powerful ' — that's what I was reading you when the clock stopped. Any fool can write a heavy letter — ^he's only got to write on a slate." " That's a true word," said Caleb, admiring her. " Whereas," pursued Martha, " the whole Bible has been got inside a nutshell." " Lord ! " said Caleb. " I suppose it was a cokernut ! " " Not at all. Only a walnut." " Fancy ! But was there walnuts in the Holy Land ? " " I didn't say 'twas done in Palestine." " Then there wasn't walnuts there ? " His face fell. BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT 23 " I don't, remember — oh, yes — Solomon asked his love to come into the garden of nuts." " But it don't say walnuts ? " he inquired wistfully. " I can't say it does." " Then maybe there won't be pickled walnuts in the New Jerusalem ? " " Not all the righteous have your carnal appetite," said Martha severely. " You just said Solomon's sweetheart liked nuts," said Caleb stoutly. " And dedn't the Holy Land flow with milk and honey ? " He had a vision of it, seamed and riddled like his native mud-flat, but with lacteal creeks and mellifluous pools, " You put me out so," snapped Bundock, suddenly reappearing before the engrossed couple, " that I forgot to kill my two frogs after all ! " And going to the Frog Cottage doorway, he knocked officially before opening it and committing the letter to the empty interior. " You'll be witness that I delivered it constitutionallv," he said, " for I can't be expected to come a third time." " 'Tis a windfall your coming a second," cried Caleb eagerly, " bein' as we can't read the letter." Martha miade facial contortions to remind him that Bundock was barred. " 'Tain't you we want to read it," he hurriedly added, " but when a letter comes all of an onplunge, time a man's peacefully trimmin' the werges, he ain't prepared like. You haven't got a moment — did, Oi'd be glad o' your counsel on the matter." " Well, since I've wasted so much of the Queen's time ! " said Bundock, flattered. They adjourned to the parlour to give him a rest, and denuding himself of both cap and bag of office, he occupied oracularly the long-unused arm-chair, while Caleb, uncomfortably perched on a seat of slippery horsehair, started to unfold the situation. "Take off your hat," broke in. Martha. "Mr. Bundock will be thinking you've no manners." " Oi'll be soon gooin' outside again," said Caleb obstinately, and re-started his story. " Do let me explain," interrupted Martha at last. " Do let me get a word in," cried Caleb. " Well, take off your hat." " Oi'll be gooin' outside soon, Oi tell ye." 24 JINNY THE CARRIER " Then you can put it on again." " Oi shall never make Bundock sensible, ef you keep inter- ruptin' me." " You see, Mr. Bundock, it's this way " began Martha. " Oi've told him all that," said Caleb. " Let me speak." " Well, take off your hat," said Martha. " Oi'll be gooin' outside agen, won't Oi ? " Bundock was examining the letter which had been laid on the table as for an operation. " But it don't look like a woman's writing," he interrupted. " That would be spidery." " 'Tain't likely she could write herself in that condition," began Caleb, but Martha's face again hushed him down. " There's neither seal nor sticking envelope," pursued the expert. " Nothing but a wafer. Comes from a poor man." " Her new husband," said Caleb, and set Martha grimacing again. " Oi'll be soon gooin' outside," he protested, misunderstanding. " What you want," summed up Bundock judicially, " is a mixture of discretion with matrimony, seasoned with a sprinkle of learning." " He talks like the Book ! " said Caleb admiringly. "But where is this mixture ? " inquired Martha eagerly. " She don't exist," said Bundock. " But Miss Gentry is the nearest lady that can read, and Fate is just sending me with a letter and a packet to her." The couple looked doubtful. ** She ain't matrimony," said Caleb. " No," admitted Bundock, " but I guess she's old enough to be, though I haven't seen her census paper — he, he ! And be- sides she's a dressmaker ! " " What's that to do with it ? " asked Caleb. " I see your missus understands," said Bundock mysteriously. " But she won't walk five miles to read my letter," urged the blushing Martha. Caleb had one of the great inspirations of his life. " And ain't it time you got a new gownd ? " Martha flushed up. " Oh, Caleb ! Don't let us run to vanity ! " " Wanity, mother ! It ain't tinkling ornaments nor cauls nor nose-jewels," protested Caleb, with a vague reminiscence of her BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT 25 Biblical readings. " And ye've had naught since the sucking- pig Oi bought ye for your sixtieth birthday." But Martha shook her head, quoting firmly : " Let me he dressed fine as I will, Birds, flowers, and worms exceed me stillP " Then why not a bonnet ? " suggested Bundock. " That would be cheaper than a gown." " xA.y, a bonnet ! " agreed Caleb, though he sounded it a " boarnt." Martha flashed a resentful glance which, however, Bundock took for but another thrust at Caleb's obstinate hat. " I don't want a new bonnet," she cried indignantly. " It needn't be new," said Bundock helpfully. " Just have your old bonnet whitened. That's on her bill-paper : ' Bonnets Bleached As Good As New.' " " That's a good notion," said Caleb. " You don't want it bran-span-new. Posty'll tell her to come over here to get your old boarnt and then we'll spring Cousin Caroline's letter on her for her to read ! " He chuckled. Bundock chuckled too, swelling at the adoption of his advice. " And now that I've stopped gammicking so long, I may as well sample that cowslip wine, Mrs. Flynt," he observed graciously. But Martha had vanished. VII Miss Gentry had apartments in one of the most elegant cottages to be found in Little Bradmarsh. Protected by palings, it stood all alone on the high road, painted a vivid green, with three pollarded lime-trees in front like sentinel mops. At the base of the trim little garden the front door rose above two wooden steps with a little porch and ostentated a brass plate with the inscription : Miss Gentry Late of Colchester Practical Dressmaker and Milliner. In proof of which,^from the cottage window, whose green shutters lay folded back, a visile or jacket of black silk, and a polka jacket, and a trio of straw bonnets, Tuscan or Leghorn, appealed 26 JINNY THE CARRIER to the passing eye : one of them a bonnet cap with a quilting of net and broad blue strings, another resplendent with purple ribbons and the new-treated straw plait that the Queen and Mrs. Mawhood favoured, and the third of drawn silk on little w^ires. The pictures of the period with a wonderful unanimity and monotony display a single style of bonnet, but artists in those days were men, and Miss Gentry could have told you better. " I've looked down from a pew in the gallery of my Col- chester Church on Easter Sunday," she told Jinny once, " and tried in vain to find two fellow-bonnets." But her professional door with its immaculate paint and shining brass was so forbiddingly respectable that clients mostly pre- ferred to seek access through her landlady's back door, where the flutter of washing from the clothes-line on its green square poles in the little orchard was reassuring; not to mention her chickens. " Practical " was the unfailing adjective in those parts. Miss Gentry was not undeserving of it, for her dresses were cheap without being vulgar, while her knack of whitening the straw enabled the poorest, in the succession of new bonnets, to keep pace with Victoria on the throne. A stranger might have thought another species of dressmaker existed, w^hose confections, though exquisite, would never fit, or who designed, but could not execute ; whereas the only other person for miles round at all in the sartorial line was an equally " Practical Breeches-Maker," placarding from a flower-potted cottage window his " Strong, Stylish Pantaloons." But the thought of unipisictical pantaloons — say, without buttons or belts — or of theoretical trousers, was simple compared with the image evoked by Mr. Henry White- foot's door-plate, proclaiming that victim of the London pick- pocket a " Practical Chimney-Sweep " : as by contrast with some exquisite dream Ethiopian, only platonically black, darkly revolving flues and fireplaces, sweeping shadow-chimneys with fleckless brushes, and carrying off ideal bags of the soot that never was on sea or land. But perhaps in Miss Gentry's case the word " Practical " was necessary to offset the business-damage of the tradition that had followed her from her native Colchester. For Miss Gentry had had a " revelation." It had occurred in her girlhood, but the halo of it still circled round her chignon. Seated in church, full of worldly thoughts — possibly studying the infinite variety of bonnets — she had seen the stained-glass angel move. What this BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT 27 flutter of wing and lifting of leg " revealed " had never been clear : unless — as a wag maintained — it portended the flight of Miss Gentry herself. That hegira of hers from Colchester to Bradmarsh had not, alas, increased her prophetic prestige : what right has a " furriner " to come with " revelations " ? Even her fellow-Churchfolk — she was one of the few Bradmarshians that clung to the Establishment — looked askance on the miracle, feeling it indeed as reprehensibly Papish, and as lending colour to the suspicion that she was a " French " dressmaker : a suspicion strengthened at once by her elegant handiwork, and by her full- bosomed plenitude, swarthy complexion, and more than em- bryonic moustache. It was forgotten that if these did imply Gallic blood, it would have been, not the Papish, but that Hugue- not strain whose inpour into the county had at one time carried the French liturgy into Essex churches. As a matter of fact Miss Gentry was so fanatical a Church woman that she supple- mented all her bills and receipts by tracts in defence of the Establishment, purchased at her own expense from a mysterious reservoir in Colchester. Nevertheless, such is the contrariety of mankind, the large accession she represented to the parish church — ^where on wet Sundays only the Apostle's two or three were gathered together — was discounted by her felt queerness. i\nd it was, still more oddly, from the Peculiars that she received the bulk of her custom, and this despite her top- lofty airs towards them, and the tracts suggesting that souls, no less than bonnets, could be bleached as good as new. Possibly their more elastic spirituality vibrated more readily to the moving angel : perhaps the real bond of sympathy was that they knew her unpopular with the Church : like themselves a butt of legend, and lacking even their advantage of Bradmarsh birth. But even the Churchwomen did nof utterly deny patronage to this talented needlewoman, nor refuse her the deference due to weekday gloves, a parasol, and bills with printed headlines ; they did not even discountenance her crusade against Dissent, though her copious allusions to Providence " moving in a mysterious way " were felt to be too broadly autobiographic. Moreover, in view of the caustic remarks upon cardinals, Puseyites, black-robed priests, and winking pictures, by which her tracts began to diversify the attack upon Dissent — for John Bull was getting alarmed at the new Roman invasion — it was a source of surprise that she failed to see the beam in her own 28 JINNY THE CARRIER eye. For if Virgins could not wink in Rimini, why should Angels wobble in Colchester ? To add to her oddity, her brain was full of ancient maggots of astrology and medicine, crept in from " Culpeper's Herbal," her one bedside book. That Bundock should be bringing a bonnet commission to this excellent and industrious, if freakish female, was the more laud- able, inasmuch as he nourished a prejudice against her and her tracts. Not that he held with Catholic or evangelical Dissenters any more than with the Church proper. As a follower of Tom Paine, whose " Age of Reason " he read piously in bed every Sun- day morning — the passage asserting that to make a true miracle Jonah should have swallowed the whale was a regular Lesson — he regarded himself as a great free spirit in an illiterate and priest-ridden world, one whose God was everywhere except in Church. Not that he could follow the Master's excursions into trigonometry or astronomy or knew anything of his idol's " Rights of Man," being indeed singularly free from the con- temporary unrest of the industrial townsman, and combining, like greater men, a crusty conservatism for the old order with a radical rejection of its spinal creed. Possibly his devotion to the still youthful Queen was part of his softness for the sex, for the only part of " The Age of Reason " that left him unconvinced was its impugnment of the wisdom of Solomon, its contention that " seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines are worse than none." But it was not Tom Paine, nor even Bob Taylor's " The Devil's Chaplain," it was the long years of his father's paralysis that had first sapped his faith in the pharma- copceian aspects of prayer, though he considerately concealed his defection from his bed-ridden parent, and even the visiting elders withheld the racking information. The old Bundock was not, however, to be deceived, on this point at least. " My son is moral, only moral," he would say, with a sigh. To such a temperament Miss Gentry must needs be anti- pathetic, and to mark his distaste, Bundock was wont to leave the Colchester packets of tracts as well as the " practical " correspondence at the side door, shedding the light of his coun- tenance only on the landlady. But on this occasion, having a message to deliver as well as a missive and a packet, he performed resoundingly on the green knocker, and Miss Gentry herself, attended by Squibs, her ebony cat, appeared in the narrow, little passage, frenziedly stitching at a feminine fabric. Behind her. BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT 29 through the open back door, was a gleam of blossoming orchard and dangling chemises. " Good morning, Bundock," she said graciously ; " lovely weather." " It's all right overhead," he grumbled, " but underfoot, especially at Frog Farm — whew ! " " You had to go to Frog Farm ? " she inquired sympathetically. " Yes, but there was a letter for Frog Cottage too. So I — he, he ! — I killed two frogs with one stone." " Two birds, you mean," said Miss Gentry, embosoming her letter with a romantic air and laying her packet on a chair. She added in alarm : " Would you like a glass of water ? " " I don't need drink," said Bundock, mastering the apoplectic assault, " it's other folks that need brains." " My, were the old Flynts unusually trying ? " she asked sympathetically. " They want you to clean the gammer's bonnet," he answered brusquely. " That's not so foolish." Her needle was moving busily again. " Have you brought it ? " '' No." " That does seem foolish." " I'm not a bonnet-bearer ! They want you to fetch it." " Me ! Five miles to clean a bonnet ! When I'm so busy ! And in all that mud ! " " It ain't so muddy this side o' Swash End, and it's not two miles each way by the fields." " Yes, with horrid cows ! " Bundock felt protective. " Cows ain't bulls." " Well, I won't go. You tell Mrs. Flynt she must come to me." " How can I tell her ? I shan't likely be going that way for months, thank my stars." Miss Gentry quivered a little at the expression, wondering under what planet he was born. " Well, I'll write to her," she said conclusively. " What ! And me take the letter ! " In his indignation he almost blurted out that the same difficulty of reading it would arise. " Then I'll tell Jinny to bring the bonnet ! " Bundock felt baffled. Instead of cunningly helping the Flynts to get their letter read, he had only secured that minx of a carrier a commission. He scowled at the dressmaker, seeing her 30 JINNY THE CARRIER moustache as big as a guardsman's and believing the worst of the legends about it : even that the real reason she left Colchester was that the bristly-bearded oysterman to whom she was engaged had refused to shave unless she did. " I'll be wishing you a good morning," he said icily, hitching up his bag. '' Good morning," said Miss Gentry. But she omitted to slam the door in his face as he expected, indeed she had gradually advanced into the porch, stitching unrelaxingly. And Bundock now became acutely aware that he could not turn his back on her without revealing the stain on Her Majesty's uniform, that even by lowering the mail-bag he had just hitched up, he could not cover up what certain rude ploughboys had already com- mented on. He understood it was green. In this dreadful situation he began backing slowly as from the presence of royalty, making desperate conversation to cover his retreat. " I did give you your tracts, didn't I ? " he babbled. " If you mean the packet," said Miss Gentry in stern rebuke, " there it lies. / haven't opened it ! " " Do you mean that / have ? " he asked indignantly, gaining another yard in this rear-guard action. " We don't have to open an oyster to know what's inside." Miss Gentry's brow grew as swarthy as her moustache — at the reminder of her lost oysterman, Bundock supposed in dismay. " Don't you always send out tracts after I bring you packets ? " he explained hastily, stiU retreating with his face to the foe. " Not when they're patterns," said Miss Gentry crushingly. " And how do you know it's not 7 he Englishzvoma^i' s Magazine ? " She turned back into the passage, and he hoped she would slam the door on her triumph, but she took up the packet instead. " We shall soon see," and snipping the string with mysteriously produced scissors, she read out unctuously : " Ishmael and the Wilderness." Bundock did not know which way to turn. Why in the name of propriety did she not go back to her workroom and close her door ? Miss Gentry, without the clue to his lingering attitude, observed invitingly, tapping the packet : " If this won't make you see the beauties of the Establishment, nothing will." He grinned uncomfortably. " Always willing to see the beauties of any establishment." It was very strange. Give him a female, even with a mous- tache, even tepefied by tracts, and something from the deeps BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT 31 rose up to philander. Not that there wanted a lurid fascination in this exotic and literate lady : his very loathing was a tribute to a vivid personality. Miss Gentry, however, was shocked. She put down the tracts. She knew herself " born under Venus," but romance and respect- ability were never disjoined in her day-dreams, and as the channel of a revelation she felt profaned. "'Don't talk like that," she said sharply. " You're a married man." " 'Tis a married man knows how to appreciate beauty," he replied, receding farther nevertheless as in ironic commentary. " For shame ! " Her needle stabbed on. " And you setting up to be holy ! " " Me ? " Surprise brought his strategic retreat to a standstill. " I never set up to be a stained-glass saint." Again he had blundered. The black eyes flashed fire. " You who move mountains ! " she cried angrily. " Me move mountains ? " Bundock was bewildered. " A little grain of mustard-seed," he heard her saying more tremulously. " And if a sycamine-tree could move — ! Surely you don't hold with the unbelievers ! " It was precisely whom Bundock did hold with, but the big black eyes seemed suddenly tearful and appealing, her needle seemed entering his breast, and she swam before him as a fine, voluptuous female. Through the passage he saw the apple-trees in bridal bloom and the white feminine w^ashing, and the Master's remark on the apparent miracle of the extraction of electric flashes from the human body thrilled in his memory. " Of course not," he heard himself saying soothingly, while his legs felt going forward, losing all the ground so laboriously won. " Then you do believe the angel moved ? " she asked eagerly. " Don't I see her moving ? " he replied. Miss Gentry looked down from her doorstep more in sorrow than in anger. " You're a married man ! " she reminded him again. " And does marriage pick out a man's eyes — like a goat- sucker ? " He felt too near her now to back out, and he put forth his hand for hers, not without nervousness at the needle. Could his father have seen him now, he might have thought his son not even " moral." But Miss Gentry dexterously met the amorous palm with a tract. " That'll open your eyes," she said. To feel a flabby piece of paper instead of a warm hand is not 32 JINNY THE CARRIER conducive to theological persuasion : all Bundock's dissenting blood rushed to his head. " There's two opinions about that," he snorted. " There are two opinions," Miss Gentry assented placidly ; " one wrong and the other mine." " Oh, of course ! " he sneered. " The Church is always infallible." " We're eighteen and a half centuries old," said Miss Gentry freezingly. " Did you put that in your census paper ? " retorted the humorist. Miss Gentry winced. She was weary of the jokes that had desolated Bradmarsh, yet she was conscious of having let her landlady's estimate of her age go by default. " I had no paper to fill up," she reminded him frigidly. " But if there was a census of religions, you'd certainly be among the mushrooms." " Better than being among the mummies." Bundock's father might have clapped his palsied hands, to hear this defender of the faith. But Miss Gentry mistook this fair retort in kind for another allusion to the personal census. " I thought you could discuss like a gentleman ! " It was a cunning shaft, and Squibs, seizing this moment to rub herself against the postman's leggings, he replied more mildly : " What's the use of going by age — except the Age of Reason ? " " Then be guided by Reason." Miss Gentry stitched implac- ably. "If the Almighty meant prayer to be medicine, why did He create castor-oil ? " Bundock was dumbfounded. " Or Epsom salts ? " she added triumphantly. " They're for cattle which can't pray," he answered with an inspiration. Miss Gentry's needle stabbed the air. But she recovered herself. " Then why do you eat rhubarb pie ? " " Because it's nice." He grinned. " But rhubarb's a medicine ! " He countered cleverly. " We don't mind taking medicine — so long as we're well ! " We ! He was identifying himself with his despised Brethren : such is human nature under attack. But Miss Gentry was not at the end of her resources. " Well, what do you do when you break your legs ? Pray the bones straight ? " BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT 33 " But we don't break our legs. I never heard of a Peculiar breaking his leg." " But why shouldn't a Peculiar break his leg ? " " That's not my affair. He don't. I've got Peculiars all over my beat, and never have I known one to break a leg. A broken heart, now ! " " But if he did break a leg ? " persisted Miss Gentry. " If any one could break a leg, it would be me ! " he said crossly. •' Well, then what would you do — if you broke your leg ? " Bundock was worn out. " What's the good of meeting troubles half-way ? " he snapped, turning on his heel. " Yours seem to have come more than half-way," scoffed Miss Gentry. Bundock clapped his hand to the mud-patch, stung in his tenderest part. He wheeled round prestissimo, raging with repartee. But the door had closed — too late ! Solitary, the sable Squibs dominated the doorstep — like a sardonic spirit. Bundock was turning away angrily, though now fearlessly, when \vith a sudden thought he caught up the cat and plucked out one of her hairs. It was not revenge — it was merely that his youngest daughter had a sty, for which he believed the black hair an infallible remedy. CHAPTER II JINNY ON HER ROUNDS Give me simple lah outing folk, Who love their work, Whose virtue is a song To cheer God along. Thoreau. Thus it was that the days passed without any literate and discreet female descending on Frog Farm or any rejuvenation appearing in Martha's bonnet ; and the unread letter lay — guarded by two china dogs — on the parlour mantelpiece awaiting the carrier. For it had been decided, after nightly discussions that were a change for Caleb from the Christadelphian curtain- lectures, to fall back on Jinny after all. She was to read it to Martha in Caleb's careful absence, and was to be stopped if the improper seemed looming. Alas, the best-laid schemes of mice and Marthas gang agley, and by the day that Jinny's horn resounded along the raised road that led to the farm, the world was changed for Caleb and Martha. There was, in fact — for the first time in Jinny's experience — neither of the twain to meet her as Methusalem ambled under the drooping witch-elms towards the twin doors. It was a tilt-cart, . with two tall wheels, and although Jinny steered it and packed it and unpacked it, and scoured it and hitched Methusalem to it, its weather-beaten canvas blazoned in fading black letters the legend : Daniel Quarles *5 Carrier Little Bradmarsh. You gather that she operated under the shadow of a great JINNY ON HER ROUNDS 35 name, greatest as being masculine. Self-standing careers for women had not yet dawned on the world. If the first faint cloud of feminism had appeared that very year in New York, no bigger than a man's pants, the Bloomerites had but added to the gaiety of mankind, and in rural Essex, with the exception of dressmaking, wherein map. appeared unnatural, women were the recognized practitioners only of witchcraft or fortune-telling or the concoction of philters; professions that were the peculiar province of crones scarcely to be considered sexed. Though women earned money by plaiting straw, they had husbands on the premises. Widows, of course, for whom there was no pro- vision outside the Chipstone poorhouse, were allowed to maintain themselves more manfully than spinsters : but then they were " relicts " of the mascuhne, had served — so to speak — an apprenticeship under it. But the business of plying between Chipstone and Bradma];sh was a peculiarly male occupation, and even the venerable name of Daniel Quarles would not have suflBced to shield or install Jinny had she jumped into his place as abruptly as Nip was apt to jump into the cart. No, Rome was not built in a day, nor could Jinny have become the carrier " all of an onplunge," as Caleb would have put it. That would have shocked the manners and morals of Bradmarsh, both Little and Long, and upset the decorum of Chipstone. A gradual preparation had been necessary, a transition by which Jinny changed into the carrier as imperceptibly as she had ripened into the girl. At first the small " furriner " — the carried and not the carrier — reposing in the cart because, after smallpox had snatched away both her parents in the same week, her grandfather, who had imported her, had nowhere else to put her ; playing in the great canvas-covered playground that held as many heights, depths, and obstacles as a steeplechase course ; petted by every client for her helplessness before her helpfulness gave her a second lease of favour ; bearing a literally larger and larger hand in " Gran'fer's " transactions as he grew older and older ; correcting with cautious tact his memories, his accounts, his muddled bookings and deliveries, in due course ousting the octogenarian even from his place on the driving-board and carrying him first by her side and then inside in his second childhood, just as he had carried her in her first — a stage in which his cackle with the customers carried on the continuity of the male tradition ; leaving him at home on bad days — whether 36 JINNY THE CARRIER his own or Nature's — and then altogether in the winter, and then altogether in the spring, and then altogether in the autumn, and finally — when he reached his nineties — altogether in the summer ; Jinny the Carrier was — it will be seen — a shock so subtly prepared and so long discounted as to have been practically imperceptible. She might crack Daniel's heavy whip, but nobody felt the flourish as other than vicarious, if not indeed a sort of play- acting evoking the pleasure a more sophisticated audience finds in Rosalind's swashbucklings. Not that she made any brazen pretences to equality in lifting boxes ; she sat with due feminine humility while male muscles swelled and contracted under her presiding smile and the rippling music of her thanks. Here was, in fact, the prosaic purpose of the little horn slung at her side — her one apparent embellishment of the tradition : it summoned her slavish superiors so that she might be spared alighting and re-climbing with goods. In face of the accuracy of her operations, this display of helplessness probably helped to remove the sting of an otherwise intolerable feminine sufficiency : it was perhaps the secret of her popularity. Even with the most Lilliputian packets nobody expected Jinny to descend and knock at their doors — one blast and old and young tumbled over one another to greet the coming or speed the parting parcel. It was indeed as if a good fairy should condescend to do your marketing, a fairy in a straw bonnet (piquantly tied under the chin in a bow with drooping ends), a fairy whose brilliant smile and teeth and flowing ringlets could convert even an order for jalap into poetry, nay, induce in the eternal masculine a craving for more. In fine, so topsy-turvily had this snail-paced transition worked, so slowly had Jinny's freedom broadened down from precedent to precedent, that when strangers expressed disapproval at these mannish courses. Little Bradmarsh was shocked. Long Bradmarsh surprised, and Chipstone scornful. Not that they were at all prepared to argue the question in the abstract. Their prejudice against carrying as a profession for women remained as rooted and unshaken as the critic's. Women ? Who was speaking of women ? Jinny was Jinny — a being unique and irreplaceable, " bless her bonny fice." It contributed to her unquestionability that the Quarleses had been carriers for a hundred years — and more. JINNY ON HER ROUNDS 37 II Nor did Jinny, for her part, generalize on the other side or take any conscious interest in the emancipation of her sex. Her horn blew no challenge to the world. It did not even occur to her that she was doing anything out of the common — the tilt-cart had been her nursery, it was now her place of business. She had come into its foreground so unconsciously that it was not as a good fairy that she saw herself, nor even as an attractive asset of the Quarles concern, but as a busy toiler — driven from morning to night rather than driving — and handicapped not only by her household and garden work, her goats and poultry, but by a nonagenarian grandfather, shaky in health and immovable in opinion. Fortunately for her temper — and for the chastening of a tongue only too a-tingle with rustic wit — Jinny regarded the cantankerous patriarch as no more an object for back-talk than a suckling. It had become second nature to soothe and humour him ; and she knew him as she knew the highways and byways in the dark or the snow : where to turn and where to go round, where to skirt a swamp and where to shave a ditch. By way of compensation there was his affection — as primitive as Nip's or Methusalem's — and evoking as primitive a response. For Jinny was none of your genteel heroines with ethereal emotions and complex aspirations. •It was not that Nature had not cast her for a poetic part — she was small and slender enough, and her light grey eyes behind dark lashes sufficiently subtilized her expression, and when she was hesitating between two words — not two opinions, for she always had one — her little mouth would purse itself enchantingly. There was gentility too about her toes. As her grandfather remarked with his archaic pronouns and plurals : " That has the smallest fitten I ever saw to a wench 1 " She certainly did not dress the part, for despite the witchery of the bonnet, her worka- day skirt and stout shoes proclaimed the village girl, as her hands proclaimed the drudge who scoured and scrubbed and baked and dug and manured : indeed what with her own goats and her farmyard commissions, she was almost as familiar with the grosser aspects of animal life as that strangely romanticized modern figure, the hospital nurse. The delicate solicitude of Martha on her behalf was thus a pure morbidity, for in going to and fro like a weaver's shuttle, Jinny could scarcely remain 38 JINNY THE CARRIER ignorant that women were as liable to offspring as any other females, though it seemed a part of Nature's order that had no more to do with herself than the strange, hirsute growths on the masculine face — or for the matter of that on Miss Gentry's. Mr. Fallow, the old pastor of Little Bradmarsh, who, though despised and rejected of Dissent, required — being human — comestibles, candles, and shoe-strings from Chipstone, as well as the disposal of his honey and his smaller tithes, was among Jinny's favourite clients, her original horror of Bradmarsh Church having been early modified by an accidental peep one weekday morning, which revealed its priest as its sole occupant. Yet, standing in his place in his white surplice, 'he was going through the service with such devout self-forgetfulness that the confused child wondered whether the Satan of worldliness had him so entirely gripped as she had been given to understand. She did not know that this very praying all to himself would have shocked Miss Gentry as savouring of the abhorred High Churchmanship. Indeed " little better than a Papist " the Chipstone curate had pronounced the harmless old widower. He for his part had long admired the little carrier, and perceiving the fine shape of her calloused fingers, no less than the smallness of her sturdy shoes, and enjoying the tang of her tongue — for the cottage women, though nimbler than their lords, were not witty — ^he had indulged his antiquarian vein (and the abundant leisure due to the ravages of Dissent) by tracing for her a less plebeian and more Churchy pedigree. Foiled in the hope of connecting her with Francis Quarles of " Emblems " fame, he found in Norden's list of the Ancient Halls of Essex a Spring Elm Manor apper- taining to one Jonathan Quarles. The flockless pastor had even journeyed in quest of this Hall and found illogical confirmation in the fact of its continued existence, in all the pride of muUioned windows and lily-strewn if muddy moat, though with its private chapel turned into a stable and its piscina bricked over. Hence- forward he saw in the exuberant vitality and imperious obstinacy of Daniel Quarles only an impoverished reincarnation of hard- living but ecclesiastically correct squiredom, while in Jinny, with her generous visits to the ailing and bed-ridden on her route, he elected to behold a re-embodied Lady Bountiful, pride of a feudal parish. What was prosaically certain, however, was that Jinny had not even the education of Bundock's bunch of girls, the only school she had ever attended being the Peculiars' JINNY ON HER ROUNDS 39 Sunday-school held at a house adjoining the chapel in an interval between the services. Thither, as to the sen'ices — ^her grand- father being a Wesleyan — she had been convoyed regularly by Caleb, packed into a cart with as many of the Flynt boys as had not vet flown off. But the business itself forced reading and writing upon her, though when its sole responsibility devolved on her, and it was no longer necessary to confute the old man's memory by the written word or figure, she found herself agreeably able to dispense with the learned arts. Welcomed at lonely farmyards where fierce dogs sometimes broke their chains for the joy of licking her hand or of flying at Nip's throat ; not less welcome in village High Streets, where every other house would ply her fussily with orders that she took coolly and without a single note, her bosom knowledge of every- body's business and her dramatic interpretation of any abnormal commission infusing life into her work that saved her from slips of memory ; adored by all the swains and yokels who hauled her goods and chattels up and down, but radiating only a frosty sunshine in return, for none had ever been able to pass the ice- barrier that separated her private self from her professional geniality ; jumping down herself only to give Christian burial to hapless moles, rats, shrews, leverets, and blood-stained feathers, or to glean for lonely old women or the numerous and im- poverished Pennymole family the unconscious largesse of more careless drivers — turnips, lumps of coal, wisps of hay ; chaffering with beaming shopkeepers on behalf of her clients, and hail- fellow-well-met with her fellow-carriers, encountered at cross- roads or " The Black Sheep " ; Jinny pursued her unmaidenly career in fine weather or foul, sometimes wayworn, wind-whipped, rain-drenched, and with aching forehead, but more often with a vital joy that was not least keen when Methusalem — cloud- exhaling and clogged by snow that sometimes raised the road as high as the hedges — had to plough his way along a track hewn out by labourers, with here and there a siding cut in the glittering mass for carts to pass each other by. Those were days not devoid of danger : road, hedge, ditch, and field obliterated in one snowy expanse. Once Jinny's cart had to be dug out like a crusted fossil of the Ice Age — and only the agonized howling of Nip had brought rescue. 40 JINNY THE CARRIER III It was the first time he had justified his air of managing the whole concern round which he barked and bounded and scurried as though Methusalem and Jinny were his minions. He had indeed commandeered them — jumping originally out of nowhere on to the tail-board — and however he strayed from the path of their duty in his numberless tangential excursions and expedi- tions, they knew he would never abandon them. Like many other great characters Nip was a mongrel. His foundation was fox-terrier, and he had preserved the cleverness of the strain without its pluck. To strangers, indeed, he seemed a very David among dogs, attacking, as he sometimes did, canine Goliath s. But no dog is a hero to his mistress, and after he had adopted her. Jinny discovered that these resounding assaults on the bulkier were but bravado passages, based on his flair that the bigger dog was also the bigger coward. That was where his brains came in, as well as his baser breed. A sniff at a real fighter and Nip would evade combat, sauntering off with a nonchalant air. A splash of brown on his brainpan and about his ears, and a dab of black on his snout were — with his leathern collar — the sole touches of relief in his sleek whiteness. His head — beautifully poised and shaped — with its bright dark- brown eye, eloquently expressive and passing easily from love to greediness, from shyness to shame, invited many a pat from lovers of the soulful. Yet to hear' him bolt a rabbit was to imagine a demon on the war-path : in a flash the cart would be left a furlong behind or athwart ; his raucous staccato yells filled the meadows with echoes of blood-lust and revenge. But long experience had dulled Jinny's solicitude for Bunny : never once was there a sign of a kill. Sometimes, indeed, when Nip was hunting a rat, the creature would run across the path under his very nose, but that nose, pushing eagerly for far-off game, never seemed able to readjust itself to what was under it. All the which maladroitness was probably artfulness, Nip scenting shrewdly that a successful sports-dog would have been hounded out. He knew well the foolish, treacherous heart of his mistress, who actually misled the hunt those autumn mornings that brought the high-mettled hares across their path with ears taut . and every muscle tragically astrain. Up would come the beagles, with a long processional flutter of waving white tails, nosing JINNY ON HER ROUNDS 41 forlornly and barking dismally, while he — panting to put them right — was tied paw and paw. How they set him quivering, those horn-tootlings of the gorgeous Master, though they did not go to his bowels as much as those staccato chivies that suggested that the green-and-white gentleman was one of them- selves rather than a biped, or as those more elaborately contorted cries and rousing thong-cracks of the Whipper-in. A fellow- feeling makes us wondrous kind. And when all these hunters — four-footed or two-footed — including the draggletail of fat, breathless farmers and wheezing females, were remorselessly sent the wrong way by his brutal mistress, the poor dog could not refrain from wailing. Even when the hare did not cross her path, her horn, imitating the professional toot, would allure and misguide the distant dogs. Nip's own relatives, the foxhounds, more rarely came his way, but though his mistress's sympathies with the quarry were less marked — ^her chickens being precious — Nip was still held in. But amid all his disgust the cunning dog remembered that his days of foraging for himself — before he had picked up Jinny — had not been rosy and replete : caterers like Jinny, he realized, did not grow on every cart, not to mention the cushioned basket from which he could bark at everything on the road, or within which, with a huge grunt of satisfaction, he could curl into an odorous dream. A contrast in all save colour was the stolid Methusalem, though he too was of hybrid stock. While his hairy fetlocks proclaimed a kinship with the draught-breed of the shire, he lacked that gross spirit, and while his flying mane and tail flaunted an affinity with the fiery Arab, he was equally deficient in that high mettle. By what romantic episode he had come into being, whether through the wild^oats of an Arabian ancestor, or the indiscretion of a mere circus-horse, or whether his tossing hair and tail were the heritage from a Shetland pony — as his moderate stature suggested — is not recorded in any stud-book. But it was impossible to see him without the word " steed " coming into the mind, and equally impossible to sit behind him without thinking of a plough-horse. " When Oi first see that rollin' in the brook afore 'twas broke in," Gaffer Quarles would relate, " Oi was minded of the posters of Mazeppa at the Fair, and christened that accordin'." It was only when he discovered that this blonde beast was a whited sepulchre, that " Mazeppa " 42 JINNY THE CARRIER was exchanged for " Methusalem," as though that antediluvian worthy had always been a doddering millenarian, and not at one time in the prime of his hundreds. The name had at least the effect of banishing expectation ; his mere amble was an agreeable surprise. As a matter of fact Methusalem had still his Mazeppa moments. They came on Tuesday and Friday evenings when he was loosed from the shafts ; at which moments he would roll on his back, kick up his heels and gallop madly round the goat- pasture to the alarm of the tethered browsers. And even at his professional pace he always kept his mane flying. One accom- plishment, however, Methusalem had which no " Mazeppa " steed could have bettered, nay, which made a circus pedigree plausible. He could lift the latch of gates with his nose and walk through. It was a trick which Jinny, with her habit of not alighting, had fostered in him : if the gate did not swing to, she could usually close it with the butt-end of her whip — through the cart-rear at the worst — a procedure which, with her further habit of using short cuts and even private tracks like that at Bellropes Park, saved not a little time, and was some compensa- tion for Methusalem's general crawl. If the local carrying business had grown indistinguishable from Jinny, it seemed no less bound up with her four-footed com- panions, whose ghostly figures, seen looming through the vv^intry dusk, sent a glow of warmth through the bleak countryside. IV But to-day Jinny's horn, Nip's yap, and Methusalem's pseudo- spirited pawing, were alike powerless to evoke the familiar forth- bustling of Caleb and Martha. Only cocks crowed and doves moaned, while from the river-slope came the lowing of cattle. Alarmed for the lonely and aged couple. Jinny jumped down and tapped at the door. Nobody replying, she lifted the latch and came from the joyous spring sunshine on a chill, silent piece of hall-way in which even the tall clock had stopped dead. She peeped perfunctorily into the musty parlour on her way to the kitchen — the lozenge-shaped motto : " When He giveth quiet- ness, who then can make trouble ? " seemed to have taken on a strange and solemn significance. But she knew that the kitchen was the likeliest lair, so not pausing to examine, the ominously Hiopened letter addressed to Mrs. Flynt which she espied on the JINNY ON HER ROUNDS 43 mantelpiece, she pressed on to the rear. The kitchen, however, was still more desolate, not only of the couple, but of the habitual glow on the cavernous hearth. What wonder if Nip, who had followed her, set up an uncanny whining ! She halloaed up the staircase, but that only aggravated the silence. She dashod next door to the shepherd's section — similar solitude ! With a feeling of lead at her heart she rushed back into the ironic sun- shine and towards the orchard — now unbearably beautiful in its blossoming — and as she was approaching a remote corner that harboured the pigsty in which Martha's pet sow carried on a lucrative maternity, she was half relieved to collide with Caleb who was moving houseward with haggard eyes and carpet slippers. " Is anything the matter ?" she gasped. " Sow glad you've come. The missus keeps arxing for you. We've been up all night with her." " With your wife ? " He looked astonished. " Noa, Maria ! " Jinny's full relief found vent in a peal of laughter. " It's no laughin' matter — the missus wants ye to tell the wet to come at once." " But what's the matter with her ? " inquired Jinny, still unable to rise to his seriousness. " A snout-ache ? " " She's a goner," said Caleb solemnly. " We've reared up nine boys, but Maria's been more trouble than the lot. The missus would bring her up by hand, and Oi always prophesied she wouldn't live." Amusedly aware that Maria's progeny had already exceeded sixty. Jinny offered to visit the patient. " Do — that'll comfort the missus and ye'll know better what to tell Jorrow. Oi'U hold your hoss. You know the way — behind the red may-tree." Jinny smiled again. The idea of Methusalem needing restraint amused her, but she did not dispel Caleb's romantic illusion. The sick sty was visible through a half-door that gave at once air and view, and over which Nip at once bounded on to the startled Martha's back as she hung over the prostrate pig on its bed of dirty straw. Maria belonged to the Society of Large Black Pigs, and snuffed the world through a long, fine snout ; but life had evidently lost its savour, for the poor sow was turning restlessly. 44 JINNY THE CARRIER " Oh, Jinny ! " moaned Martha. " She had thirteen last time, and I knew it was an unluckv number." " Nonsense ! " quoth Jinny gaily. " Twelve would have been less lucky — at the price I got you ! " " Yes, dearie, but I'm not thinking of prices. She was a birthday present for my loneliness." " I know," said Jinny gently. " No, you don't." She wrung her hands. The self-possession Caleb had admired when the letter broke on their lives was no longer hers. " You've got lots of Brethren and Sisters, but I've got nobody to break bread with, no fraternal gatherings to go to, and even Flynt won't be immersed, though he's in his sixty- nine and we must all fall asleep some day. So it was a comfort to have Maria following me about everywhere like Nip does you, and I do believe she's got more sense than the so-called Christians here, and would be the first to pray for the peace of Jerusalem with me if she could only speak. But now even Maria may be taken from me. You'll send Jorrow at once, won't you, dearie \ " " But what's the matter with her ? " " Can't you see ? All night she kept rooting up the ground. Oh, I hope it isn't fever." " Rubbish ! Look at the skin of her ears. And she isn't coughing at all. What's she been overeating ? " " Nothing — only the grass Flynt has been cutting." " Why don't you give her a dose of castor-oil ? " " She won't take it. She knows we've covered it up — I told you she's got as much brains as a Christian." " Let me try and get it down." " It is down. The piglets ate the mess up." " Oh dear 1 " laughed Jinny. " That zvill need Jorrow. Anything else, Mrs. Flynt ? " '^ I can't think this morning. Ask Flynt." Caleb, however, proved equally distraught. " There was summat extra special, Oi know," he said, his red- shirted arm clinging heroically to Methusalem's bridle, " for here's the knot in my hankercher. But what it singafies Lord onny knows." " It wasn't a new shirt ? " she suggested slyly. He shook his head. " Noa, noa ; this keeps her colour as good as new. But the missus did make a talk about my Sunday neckercher." JINNY ON HER ROUNDS 45 " I'll get you a new one. Plain or speckled ? " " Oi leaves that to you, Jinny — you know more about stoylish things." V On her winding and much-halting way to Chipstone, Jinny took advantage of the absence of the noble family and the com- plaisance of her customer, the lodge-keeper, to smuggle her plebeian vehicle through Bellropes Park, which was not only a mile shorter, but dodged the turnpike with its aproned harpy of a tollman ; she loved the great avenues of oaks, and the shining lake, the game of swans, and the sense of historic splendour ; and Nip, as if with a sense of stolen sweets, sniffed never more happily, though when they got within view of the water, he had to be summoned back to ]iis headquarters-basket by a stern military note, a combat between himself and the swans not commending itself to his mistress. Some of these irascible Graces floated now on the margin, meticulously picking their tail-feathers, contorting their necks. But vastly more exciting were those of the flock far out on that spacious sparkle of brown water. They seemed to be going spring-mad and threshing the scintillating water with their wings, oaring themselves thus along, each one infecting the other, till the water itself seemed to be leaping in a shimmering frenzy of froth. Even the ducks reared up or stood on their l\eads in a sort of intoxication. And this sense of the joy and beauty of the spring communicated itself to the girl, not in jubilance, but in some exquisite wistfulness : some craving of the blood for mysterious adventure. Something seemed calling at once out of the past and out of the future. And then her thoughts wandered back to Frog Farm and the Flynts and the far-scattered youths with whom she had formerly ridden to Sunday-school, and suddenly by a flash from her subconsciousness she recognized the writing of the unopened letter on Martha's mantelpiece : of the letter she had scarcely looked at. Surely, though the curves were bolder, it was the work of the very same male hand that had written on the fly-leaf of a Peculiar hymn-book the inspired quatrain — which she had admired from her childhood — beginning : Steal not this book for fear of shame : an admonition she thought peculiarly appropriate to the holy 46 JINNY THE CARRIER book it guarded. And with the memory of the fly-leaf surged up also the face — the long-forgotten, freckled face of the youngest and most headstrong of the Flynt boys : the Will, flouted as " Carrots," but in her opinion the handsomest of the batch, who had always loomed over her with such grown-up if genial grandeur, and had given her his bull-roarer and threaded birds' eggs for her before she had come to think their collection wicked. What a hullabaloo when the boy disappeared — he must have been hardly thirteen, she began computing — and she, the child of nine or so who could have comforted the distracted Martha, had dared say no word, because he had made her swear on that very hymn-book to keep his flight silent. Just as she was permeated by the solemnity of the book and the oath on it, he had thrown it away, she remembered, thrown it into the bushes from the wagon in which he was driving her home from chapel. The details of that forgotten summer Sunday began to come back : most vividly of all, the boy struggling and sobbing when his buttons were cut off. He had been so proud of his new velvet jacket with its manifold rows of blue buttons, and lo ! after Sunday-school his father had appeared with a somewhat crestfallen look and a pair of scissors, saying, " You don't want all this flummery," while Elder Mawhood — evidently the admonishing angel — ^had stood grimly by, intoning " Pride is abominable. Wanity must be rooted out." The boy had choked back his sobs, and apparently found solace in the evening hymns, and was further soothed by being allowed at his own request to drive the party home. It was felt — especially by Martha — some compensation for the buttons was due to him. Thus when the wagon had reached Swash End and the bulk of the Flynt family got off according to custom — mud and weather permitting — and walked up to Frog Farm, leaving Jinny to be driven round the long detour to her home at Black- water Hall, she was left alone with Will. It was then that, having asked her if she could keep a secret and being assured she could, he informed her to her admiring horror that the moment he had safely delivered her on the road by the Common, he would turn his horse's head for Harwich, where (stabling the horse and wagon so that his parents might trace his intention) he would take ship as a cabin-boy or a stowaway for America, where he was sure to come across his JINNY ON HER ROUNDS 47 brother Ben, and never would she see him again in Bradmarsh till he had made his fortune. She could see him now, under a late sunset that was like his hair, with his flashing, freckled face, his blazing blue eyes, and his poor, defaced jacket, the thready stubs of the big buttons showing like scars. Their quaint dialogue came back vividly to her. " Oh, Will, but can't you make your fortune here ? " " No, thank you — no more chapel for me ! " " I know it's hard— and you did look beautiful with the buttons — but isn't it more beautiful to please God ? " " Rubbish ! What does God care about my buttons ? " " He's pleased, just as I like your giving me birds' eggs." " But I didn't give my buttons — they were snatched from me — through that beastly old Mawhood." " But Elder Mawhood knows what God wants." " Let him cut off his own nose and not go smelling into every- body's business. The other day he made poor old Sister Tarbox get riddy of her cat." " That was kindness, because it had to be shut up alone all Sunday while she was at chapel." " I believe it was only to make more rats for him to kill." " That's not true. Will. You know Sister Tarbox is too poor to have her cottage cleared." " Well, let him look after his rats and cats — not me." " An elder must do his duty." " I hate elders and deacons and hymn-books. Yah ! I'm done with religion, thank God." " Oh, Will, you mustn't speak hke that 1 " " Fancy stewing in chapel in weather like this ! " " Isn't this just the weather to thank God for ? " " No— it's all siUiness." " Oh, WiU ! " " Yes, it is ! You ask Brother Bundock — I don't mean old Mr. Bundock. I asked him once who wrote our hymn-book and he said, ' 'Twixt you and I, the village idiot ! ' " " You are talking wickedly. Will " — there were tears in the voice now. " You mustn't run away, that's more wicked." " Oh — I was an idiot myself to tell you. You are going to peach on me, I suppose." " Peach ? " 48 JINNY THE CARRIER " Tell your grandfather about my running away." " Not if you don't do it." " But I shall do it ! And you promised to keep the secret. To tell would be more wicked than me." " I won't tell, but you mustn't go." " I must. Swear not to betray me. Kiss my hymn-book." It was with some soothed sense of restored sanctities that she had pressed her lips to the holy cover — she still remembered its smell and taste, salted with a tear of her own — but what a fresh and mightier shock, that throwing of the book into the bushes ! " Stop ! Stop ! " She heard the little girl's horror-struck cry over the years ; remembered how, as he laughed and drove on furiously with her, the phrase " drive like the devil " had come to her mind, charged for the first time with meaning. Wilful boy had had his way : he had escaped from England and even — despite his diabolism — by the aid of the ninepence she had insisted on bringing down from her money-box while he waited trustfully outside her grandfather's domain. But she had not responded in kind to the lordly kiss he had blown her as he drove off to America. " Good-bye, Httle Jinny ! " " Good-bye, Will. Say your prayers ! " " Not me ! " " Then I shall pray for you ! " When the hue and cry was out, and bellmen were busy with his carroty head and velvet jacket with the buttons cut off, little Jinny had also gone a-huncing — but for the outraged hymn-book. It lay now still hidden in a drawer — the one secret of her life — unmentioned even when by the bulky clue of the horse and cart the fugitive had been traced, as he designed. Yes, she must disinter this hymn-book of his from its hiding- place, compare the inscription — she knew by now the rhyme was not original — ^with her memory of Martha's letter. What was its postmark, she wondered. Well, she would find that out, indeed the whole contents, on her return to Frog Farm, Perhaps he was coming back — his fortune already made. And the revived sense of his wickedness was mixed with a sense of her own soon- forgotten resolve — or threat — to pray for him, and was blurred in some strange emotion, in which the glamorous freshness of child-feeling mingled with a leaping of the heart that was like the spring-joy of the swans. JINNY ON HER ROUNDS 49 VI But Jorrow could not make the journey that day to that remote farm. There were more important animals more expen- sively endangered and more easily accessible. Old sows were so fussy, and to judge by the symptoms it was a mere case for castor-oil. But precisely because Jinny had herself recom- mended this drug-of-all-work she felt unconvinced : it seemed a mere glib formula for being " riddy " of her. There was another resource, Elijah Skindle, who, having settled in Chipstone only five years ago, practised only among parvenus like himself. It was not because he was a " furriner," nor even because he had started as a knacker and still had a nondescript status, that Jinny shrank from calling him in now : she had more than once deposited damaged dogs with him or deported them mended. But she objected to the appraising gaze he fixed upon her on these occasions, though to be sure her objection to these jaunts was not so strong as Nip's, who, seeing in every canine co-occupant of the cart a possible supplanter, bristled and whined and barked till the rival was safely discharged. But, on her way home, over- coming her repugnance — for Martha's sake, if not Maria's or duty's — she stopped her cart outside his pretentious black gauze blind and blew a rousing blast. A tall, black-eyed, grey-haired woman, issuing from the office door with a broom, who appeared to be Mr. Skindle's mother, informed her that 'Lijah was " full up " : however, he could be found at the kennels if Jinny insisted on seeing him. She pointed vaguely to a field behind the house, visible through an unpaved alley yawning between the sober Skindle window and its flamboyant neighbour, the chemist's. But it was in vain that Jinny clucked to Methusalem to thread the alley. The beast refused absolutely. Alighting with some dim understanding of his instinct, she walked to the field-gate over which a horse was gazing at her. Lifting the latch, she wandered among other happily scampering horses in search of the kennels, finding at first only a barn-like structure, a glance through whose doors at the flagstoned paving that sloped to a centre -turned her sick. For a pyramid of horses' feet was the least repulsive indication, though even the homely skewers so agreeable to Squibs took on a sinister hue. The spectacle, however, served to make the kennels, when at last discovered, a lesser horror. But it was the first time she 50 JINNY THE CARRIER had seen dogs so far gone in distemper, and these rheumy-eyed skeletons, each chained in its niche, sullied the springtide and haunted her for days. She caught up Nip, who had come to heel, as though he too might pine suddenly into skin and bone. Nip himself, it must be confessed, regarded these shadows of his species with indifference, if not with satisfaction, as negligible competitors. Elijah Skindle, discovered on his knees in the act of feeding a pathetic poodle, was as unstrung by the sight of Jinny as Jinny by the sight of the dogs. His black cutty pipe fell from his lips and he nearly stuck the dog's spoon into his own open mouth. But mastering himself, and without raising his cap or his pipe or changing his attitude, he gasped out : " Hullo ! Nip ill ? " Jinny replied curtly — for there was a familiarity that repelled her in his calling Nip by his right name — ," No, a sow at Frog Farm — Little Bradmarsh, you know." His heart leapt. Frog Farm meant an old inhabitant, local prejudice was then beginning to melt at last ! But, " Rather out of my radius," he said with pretended indifference. " Be- sides," as he reached for his pipe, " my nag's gone lame." " I could give you a lift," said Jinny, outwitted for once, since it never struck her that this was precisely what Elijah had fished for and why he had lamed his beast. The spoon trembled in his hand, but he replied grumblingly, " But then I should have to come at once." " I'm afraid so," said Jinny. Mr. Skindle rose and brushed his knees. " Anything to oblige a lady," he said. " It isn't me, it's Maria," said Jinny icily. VII But Jinny was not altogether outmanoeuvred, for while Mr. Skindle was getting his case of utensils, she filled up the rest of her seat — it was a stuffed seat covered with sacking — by means of a peculiarly precious parcel, needing a vigilant eye : no new device this, but her habitual protection against bores or adorers, and Skindle, she feared, was both. This swain-chaser or maid- protector was kept in a corner of the cart ready for emergencies, being an elongated package of stones, marked " Fragile." The stones had to be jagged and uncouth or Nip would have squatted JINNY ON HER ROUNDS 51 on it and roused suspicion. This was the only parcel she lifted herself, and it figured in her own mind as " The Scarecrow." And so, despite Mr. Skindle's offer to nurse it on his knees, she put him behind her — not as a Satan, for his seductiveness was small. He had, it is true, a good styside manner, and his slim figure, outlined by a trimly cut pepper-and-salt suit, effused a sense of vitality. But his straw-coloured moustache, which was not without its female votaries, was for Jinny more of a puzzle than a decoration, for she could not reconcile its flowingness with the desolating baldness that any shifting of his cap revealed. His cranium was, in fact, like the advertisement of a hair-restorer in the picture preceding the application thereof. As fixed a feature of his face as the grey cap which concealed his calvity was the black cutty pipe stuck in his stained teeth, nor had Jinny ever seen him without a large pearl horseshoe pin in his tie. " Please don't smoke," she said, as he climbed in by the tail- board, " Gran'fer would smell it." " And why shouldn't he ? " " He's a Wesleyan." " Oh ! " He laughed without comprehension, a shade scoff- ingly. " And the smell might get into people's parcels," she added. Bestowing himself under the tilt as well as he could on a box, grazed at his side by a ledge he considered too narrow to sit on, and threatened with decapitation through a plank holding the smaller parcels that ran athwart the cart just above his head, Mr. Skindle gazed up over this shelf at the glorious view of the back of Jinny's bonnet and feasted his eyes on her graceful dorsal curves and the more variegated motions of her driving arm, not to mention the succession of lovely rural backgrounds made for her figure by the arch of the awning. And his ill-humour melted, and though his pipe grew cold his heart began to glow. But Jinny took no more notice of him than if he had been himself a box. No wonder he began to feel closed and corded up, bursting though he knew himself to be with soul-riches. For a full mile, his extinct pipe in his teeth, he heard only the monotonous snap of Methusalem's hoofs as if everything along the road was snapping in a frost. The unjaded steed had actually started off at almost a trot, and as the Gaffer explained once, " a boss what has long lopes knocks his fitten together." Then — as if to mark how completely her passenger was forgotten — one of her grand- ^2 JINNY THE CARRIER father's songs began to steal from her lips. It was not " High Barbary " nor " Admiral Benbow," nor yet his favourite " Oi'm seventeen come Sunday," which the nonagenarian sang daily with growing conviction. It was — and Nip would have been the first to be surprised, had he understood it — the old English air : The hunt is up, the hunt is up, and it is wellnigh day, And Harry our King has gone huntynge, to bring the deer to hay. Perhaps it was the influence of her horn ; perhaps she was an artist who could enjoy in song what she could not suffer in life. Or perhaps she loved the lilt of the old song and never thought of the meaning, or only of the bravery of the spectacle and the gay coming of the dawn. For, all untrained as she was, she vibrated peculiarly to music, and one of the wonderful moments of her young life was when she first heard a hymn sung in parts at the Sunday-school ; to her ear, accustomed only to the solo quavering of the Gaffer, was revealed harmony ; a starry new universe and a blood-tickling enchantment in one. Almost at the first outbreak of the hunting song Nip appeared at a run, and with two bounds he established himself in his mistress's lap — invidiously enough in Elijah's eyes. For that silvery little voice, rippling along the lonely road with the unconscious joyance of a blackbird's, completed the spell which the spring landscape — seen in that series of pictures framed by the arch of the tilt — was weaving on the doomed veterinary surgeon. There were sheep, big and little, lying in the wide fields and great, newly ploughed spaces of red, freshly turned earth — for the first time Elijah felt the scarecrows as a degradation of all this primeval beauty. Apple-trees flowered in the cottage gardens and in the hedges was early May-blossom, and on the brinks primroses, anemones, and even a few precocious bluebells rioted in an intoxicating fertility of beauty. Larks rose palpitat- ing with song, bumble-bees boomed, butterflies flittered, and ever and anon came the haunting cry of the cuckoo. And when Jinny's voice soared up too, Elijah Skindle's heart seemed melting down his spine. JINNY ON HER ROUNDS S3 VIII " That's a lucky dog of yours," he said desperately, when the music ceased. " That's what I thought at your place," she replied through the back of her head. " Not had distemper yet ? " He saw her shoulders shudder. There was an awkward silence. " You know I'd gladly look after him gratis," he blundered on, " and you too." Then, in a horrible consciousness of the patho- logical implication, he awaited the lash of her tongue. But she must have been abstracted. For she only said politely : " TPianks very much. But I always go to Jorrow's." Yes, he reflected bitterly, and always went there for other people unless Skindle's was expressly stipulated. But they were now approaching the first village after Chipstone, and the outside world intruded on the idyll. A dozen times he vaulted up and down to prevent interloping young men — some- times armed with nosegays — receiving parcels too proximately ; and he had a proud and malicious pleasure in their disconcerted unspoken surmise as to his privileged situation. The small coin of conversation appertaining to these deliveries Jinny did not refuse him, and every cluck she gave to Methusalem, every ripple of laughter on her busy way, deepened the spell. The unexpected faces ; the quaint cottage interiors ; the cheerful-smiling women in high green aprons who received stay-laces or bobbins, sugar or tea-packets, in bare dough-powdered or soap-frothed arms ; the panting figures that toiled after the cart with forgotten bundles ; the dogs — the fiercer in their barrels and boxes, the milder waving free and friendly tails ; the quaint commissions and monitions, the salutations and farewells — " I'll remember the twopence," " And tell my brother, won't you, about the christen- ing," " I don't want any more of her puddings, they put the miller's eye out " — all this fascinating bustle and chatter, spiced with friendly laughter, seemed to belong to an enchanted earth of which gaiety was the ground-note, not animal groaning. The windings of her horn completed his sense of fairyland. In the remoter woodland regions he was possessed alternately with a disapprobation of her recklessness in trusting herself thus alone with a male, far from help, and a surprise at his own passivity in so provoking and romantic a situation. Of course he 54 JINNY THE CARRIER was going to behave like the gentleman he was, but why was she so irritatingly sure of it ? Did she think he wasn't flesh and blood ? She might at least show some consciousness of his chivalry 1 But his resentment at her professional nonchalance only served to confirm his long-standing suspicion that here at last was the girl for him : that he was choosing well if not wisely. Doubtless Chipstone and his mother would say he was marrying too much beneath him. But look at the farmers' daughters — what lumps beside her ! He admitted, of course, that the Blanche of Foxearth Farm to whom his mother mainly aspired was an exception, but then this Purley minx was hopelessly out of reach, stuck up on her pedestal of beauty, conceit, and culture, and throwing over even her affianced wooers. As for his neigh- bour, the chemist's girl — what could his mother see in her except that annuity which would not even survive her, and she not looking particularly strong ! No, with the present satisfactory amount of sheep-rot, glanders, and distemper he could afford to please himself. And if Jinny couldn't play the piano like the land-surveyor's widow, why one must content oneself with the horn, pending initiation into the higher life. Together they would work up the business. With Jinny's connexion — though of course she must give up carrying and become a lady — there would surely be a trail of sick beasts in her wake : Jorrow would soon be out-distanced. They would live away from his office ; that could all be turned into dog-hospital. Such were the kennels in the air built by the enamoured Elijah as he sat on boxes or hampers or panted under their weight in his officious deliveries : an officiousness which drove out of her head the keg of oil destined for Uckford Manor. " Oh, dear 1 " she murmured suddenly, a mile later.^ Forcing the explanation from her, he cried joyfully, " Let's go back." Jinny shook her head. " No time," she said, and flicked at Methusalem. " But I don't mind being late." " I'm not thinking of you — but of the pig." " Bother the pig." " Is that the way you study your patients ? " " I've got better things to study." He could only say it to her back, but he threw enough intensity into it to come out on the other side of her. JINNY ON HER ROUNDS 55 " Indeed ! " The back seemed impenetrable. " You going into another business ? " " Why ever should I when I'm getting on so famously — ten pound a week, if a penny." It was an opportunity made to his hand. " I know," he went'on, as the back remained rigid, " that folks pretend it's not as high-class as real doctoring, but believe me it needs more brains." " Does it ? " " Stands to reason. A human being can tell you what he feels and where the pain lays, but with a dumb beast you've got only your own sense and skill to go on : it's us vets that should really be at the top of the profession." " But sick babies are dumb too," Jinny reminded him. " Sick babies have talking mammas," he replied genteelly. Jinny did not imitate them, and silence fell again, tempered by Methusalem's snappings. Really, it was very awkward, EUjah felt, thus proposing to a girl behind her back. But he struggled gallantly. " Take stomach staggers now — if those horses you saw Waiting to be killed tlds evening had been treated in time ! " " The horses in your field ? " cried Jinny, shocked. " But they looked so lively." " They're all like that," he explained. " Once out of harness they get a bit jaunty again, but they're worth more dead than alive." " It's dreadful killing off a horse that has served one ! " Jinny burst out. " Just for a few shillings ! " " A few shillings ? Why there's horses over two-fifty pounds ! Flesh, I mean," he explained, with a chuckle. " Not to mention the skin, hair and bones. " Why, there's eighty pounds of intestines for sausage-skins ! " " Oh, do hold your tongue ! " cried Jinny, feeling sick again. " Yes, and what about his tongue ! " retorted Elijah tri- umphantly. " It ain't only Frenchies that get that. And his tail waving for funerals ! And his hoofs in your own shoe- buttons ! " Jinny felt indeed as though hoofs had descended on her feet, and she could almost have sacrificed Methusalem's high-waving tail to adorn her passenger's obsequies. " My neighbour, the chemist — ^he buys the blood ! "continued the ghoulish Elijah. "He makes it into " 56 JINNY THE CARRIER But just here at a cross-road Jinny's horn signalled to a smart young man in a velvet waistcoat, who was driving a trap, and brought him to a standstill. Would Barnaby deliver a keg of oil at Uckford Manor if he was passing that way ? That Manor was, it transpired, the one goal and purpose of Barnaby's journey. Jinny — well aware young Purley was homeward bound for Foxearth Farm — gave him a radiant smile, and Elijah threw him the keg and a furious look, a reliable fellow-feeling informing him that the velvety liar was going at least two miles out of his way. Downright dishonest he felt it, seeing that neither the young man's time nor his trap was his own, but belonged to his father, the hurdle-maker. But what could you expect of Blanche's brother ? , Let Jinny beware of the family fickleness^ let her lean on a less showy but manlier breast. " I wonder you don't arrange your things village by village instead of letting 'em lay all over the vehicle," he observed as she drove on. " I shan't forget where to drop you," came the answer over her cold shoulder. Then silence fell more painfully than ever, and the monotonous tick-tack of Methusalem maddened his conscious ear. The mon- strous possibility began to loom up that Jinny's affections were pre-engaged to some one of these numerous young men. His eye fell upon a coil of rope hung round a loose hoop of the tilt, and morbid thoughts of using it — whether on the young men or himself was not clear — floated vaguely in his usually serene soul. Presently he noted other coils on other ribs, and their plurality suggested it was for the young men, not himself, that rope was appropriate. What else were they there for^ he wondered dully ? Yes, let her fiances go hang : engagements could always be broken off — nothing venture, nothing have ! To nerve himself for the great question he took advantage of the pause at Long Bradmarsh while Methusalem was drinking at the trough of " The King of Prussia." But this imitation of Methusalem on a stronger fluid was fatal, for in Jinny's persistent silence, the animal's tick-tacks now grew soothing : he settled himself more comfortably on the emptier floor of the cart, with his head on a soft bundle, and watched the nape of Jinny's neck till it faded into a great white sea of floating ice. He was struggling in it for hours, but at last the cold waves passed over JINNY ON HER ROUNDS 57 his head, and Jinny, turning to throw out a parcel, saw that his cap had fallen off in his writhings, leaving his baldness almost indecently glaring. So deep was he in his daymare that he was quite unaware of Jinny's colloquy with another male whom her horn had hailed as they passed over the bridge to Little Bradmarsh. Not that there was anything in Ephraim Bidlake to excite apprehension, for he was a stalwart Peculiar, safely married, and residing with his family and two twin-nieces of his wife's — Sophy and Sally — • on board the billyboy whose great boomless black sail Jinny had espied darkening the water with its shadow. Bidlake's barge was a cross between a Norfolk wherry and a ferry-boat, and plied up and down the Brad, loading at the wharves with its half-lowered mast for crane, or carrying man and cattle across the bridgeless sections when it had nothing better to do. There was not much money coming in at the best, and it was often Jinny's privilege to eke out the barge's larder under pretence of presents for the motherless Sophy and Sally, so tragically fathered. For Ephraim Bidlake, a shaggy giant with doglike eyes, had brought the " little furriners " from Hampshire when their mother died after their father — ^Mrs. Bidlake's brother — had been transported to Botany Bay for burning a rick in some old agricultural riot against the introduction of machinery. The blot on their scutcheon had been concealed from the new neigh- bourhood, but had been gradually confided by Mrs. Bidlake to Jinny with protestations of her brother's innocence — had he not been made a constable in the very convict ship ? By degrees, too, she had conveyed to the girl a vivid picture of the trial and ^ deportation. For the devoted sister had walked the bulk of the way to Winchester, in the hope of proving his innocence by collecting testimonies to his character, and had joined the mob of weeping women who hung round the gaol gates night and day, or crowded the court, only to witness the sanctimonious cruelty of the bewigged judges, and the tragic exodus of the damned in the prison coach, guarded by a file of soldiers, to lie in the hulks at Southampton till they were shipped to savage Australia, there to be assigned to brutal stockowners. It was an experience which had cost Mrs. Bidlake dear ; her next child had been stillborn, and to this day she had never reared but one more infant, and that a still delicate one. But for the comfort of the Peculiar faith it would have been a cheerless household. She 58 JINNY THE CARRIER was now again brought to bed : it was to inquire about her that Jinny had hailed the barge, and very sad she was to learn from Brother Bidlake — when he had punted within earshot — that the new baby had succumbed after a few hours, though the " missus," thank God, was recovering and the twins were " wunnerful good and helpful." She was not sorry, however, that the undoctored infant had departed with a precipitation which rendered an inquest unlikely, for inquests were the bane of the Brotherhood. IX It was twilight when Methusalem drew up again before the twin doors. This time Caleb did not fail. " Sow glad you ain't brought the wet ! " " But I have — ^he's snoring inside," Jinny called down. " Lord ! " said Caleb, taking another look. " Oi did see his head, but by this owl-light Oi thought 'twas a cheese." Jinny's laugh rippled out and Elijah Skindle started up and sneezed. He looked round dazedly for his cap. •' We've arrived ? " he asked shamefacedly, clapping it on. '' Yes," said Jinny, " but the pig's all right. I fear you've had a wasted journey." She jumped down. " Wasted ? " He sat up ardently. " Don't say wasted." "' A good nap is a comfort," she agreed. " I may have dozed off — your singing rocked me to sleep, I reckon. But all the while I've been trying to tell you " His voice broke. " I know," she said softly. " I heard you." *' Did I talk in my sleep ? " he asked innocently. " Through your nose." He winced as at a blow on it. " That's — that's nature," he stammered : " I don't suppose even females are free from snoring." " Maria isn't," observed Jinny, patting Methusalem. Martha hurried out happily, with a piece of sugar for the same favoured beast. " Maria's been walking with me ! " she cried rapturously. " And eating hearty," added Caleb. " If you ask me, she was drunk." " Oh, Fiynt ! " cried Martha. " Aren't you ashamed to speak like that about your own pig ; and before strangers ? " JINNY ON HER ROUNDS 59 " But that rolled and kicked last night same as a sow Oi seen once that swallowed a thick wine. Happen Maria got swillin' at old Peartree's beer-barrel ! " " How could she do that ? " Jinny protested. " Turned on the tap like a Christian. Same as your Methu- salem opens our gate." Elijah picked up his pipe and his cap and scrambled down. " Appears to me I've been brought here under false pre- tences." " We'll pay you all the same," said Caleb with dignity. " But how am I to get back to Chipstone- ? " He had followed Maria in reckless abandonment, and now came the prose of life with its questions. " If we're going to pay the gentleman," put in Martha, " he may as well have a look at Maria." Mr. Skindle agreed it was as well to make a possible future patient's acquaintance, but repeated his inquiry. " There's Shanks's mare," said Jinny blandly. Caleb pointed towards the brook. " It's onny seven miles by Swash End through Plashy Walk." " Plashy Hall has a dog," objected Elijah. "Well, you're used to dogs," said Jinny. " My instrument-case is too heavy. You'll have to give me a lift to your house." " With pleasure," she said. " But Blackwater Hall is still farther from Chipstone." " Anyhow I can get a trap from the village," he said firmly. " No, you can't, and even if you walk to Long Bradmarsh it's a toss-up if you'll get anything at * The King of Prussia.' " " Well, take me as far as the bridge — I'll pay extra." " I can't guarantee Methusalem will go back." " That's all right," he said cheerfully. " Horses know I stand no nonsense. And now. Uncle, as soon as I've lit my pipe, I'll be ready for the pig. Got a match ? " To his disgust, Caleb produced a lucifer and a phial of sulphuric acid for dipping it in. The now well-established friction matches — that boon to the idle and extravagant — had not yet reached Frog Farm, where even flint and steel had been dispossessed but slowly. But the relit pipe was comforting. " Wait a moment, Mr. Flynt," said Jinny, tendering a packet as he started convoying the vet "Your neckerchief ! " 6o JINNY THE CARRIER " Neckerchief ! " cried Martha. " And what about my new bonnet ? " " 'Twas only to be cleaned," Caleb reminded her. " And by the same token, mother, don't forget we settled the wet was to read the letter." Elijah raised his eyebrows. " i\h, yes — rU get it." And Martha hurried within. " You see, Jinny," Caleb explained, " the missus got a letter from Cousin Caroline, and we thought the gentleman here could make one job of it with the pig." " But why can't I read it ? " " You ain't married." " No more is Mr. Skindle." Elijah flushed furiously. " Noa — but ef it's too — too womanish, Oi'U arx him kindly to break it to me, sow Oi can break it to the missus when he's gone." " Is this the letter ? " asked Jinny, as Martha reappeared with it. " That's her — came all of an onplunge," he repeated. " But that's not from your Cousin Caroline ! " said Jinny, with a thrill of excitement as she took it. " Noa ? " gasped Caleb, as if the world was tumbling about his ears. Then he smiled. " You're making game — you ain't opened her yet." " But who else is it from ? " cried Martha, catching her excite- ment. " Can't you see ? It's from Will." " Will ! " Martha gave a great cry, and clutched at the letter. " My baby WiU ! " Caleb scratched his head. " Now which would be Will ? " " Will was the freckled, good-looking one," said Jinny. " Oh, Jinny," said Martha. " They were all good-looking — took after Flynt. Dear heart, you can't ha' forgotten our tot after all that flurry. 'Tis only seven or eight years since he " " Ay, ay," cried Caleb. " Him what mowed the cat's whiskers." " No, dear heart, that was Ben." " To be sure. Ben's the barber in New York — or some such place." " No, Caleb. That's Isaac." " Isaac ? Then Will 'ud be the one what married the coffee- coloured lady." " I told you the other day that was Christopher." JINNY ON HER ROUNDS 6i " Ay, him in Australia." " Africa surely," put in Elijah, puffing at his pipe with superior amusement, " They furrin places be much of a muchness," said Caleb. " And my buoy-oys were as like as a baker's dozen." " There were girls in the batch," corrected Martha. " But how you can forget that dreadful Sunday night, you who snipped the darling's buttons ! " " If I don't see the pig soon," interrupted Elijah, losing patience, " the light'll be gone altogether." " Oi'U git a lantern," said Caleb placidly. " Oi often used to set and wonder how they lads knowed theirselves, the one from the 'tother. Well, the Lord bless 'em all, says Oi, wherever they goo, and whichever they be.'^ " So you see," said Jinny, with a faint blush hardly visible by owl-light, " there's no need to waste Mr. Skindle's time over the letter." " No more there ain't ! " said Caleb dazedly. " Come along, sir ! " X But Martha still clung strangely to the letter she had snatched back. " You mustn't strain your eyes. Jinny," she said. " I'll light the lamp. And you'll take a cup of tea first. You must be tired out." " But I can see quite well," said' Jinny. Indeed the sky, despite the risen moon, remained blue, and splashes of dying sunset burned magically through the yet empty branches of the quiet trees. There was a great sense of space and peace and beauty : a subtle waft from the stacks ; the note of the thrush was full of evening restfulness. Jinny took the letter from the reluctant Martha. " He must be back in England ! " she cried. " Look at the stamp." Martha staggered against the cart. " It's very good of God," she said simply. Her emotion communicated itself to Jinny. Through misty eyes the girl watched a solitary heron winging on high through the great spaces, its legs sticking out like a tail. " Ah, dearie," said Martha, recovering herself, " never forget, to say your prayers '' 62 JINNY THE CARRIER '' I don't," said Jinny -with equal simplicity. But she remem- bered with fresh remorse that she had forgotten those for the runaway. " Ever since I was a little girl," said Martha, " I've wanted to please God. But of late. Jinny, I fear I've wanted Him to please me." " WeU, now He has," said Jinny. " You'll have Will as weU as Maria," and plucking out a hairpin she inserted it to rip open the loose wafer-closed envelope. " Stop ! " cried Martha. " Suppose it's bad news." " Nonsense, Mrs. Flynt ! Look how firm the writing is." *' Firm — ^yes, he always was firm — even before he drove off with the cart. Don't you remember that night — no, 'twas before your grandfather fetched you to these parts-r-he wasn't seven, but that pig-headed he sulked in the wood all night — roosted up a tree like a bird, and never a move or a word when we came halloaing with torches ! " " Well, he's not hiding now, for the postmark's London and " " No, don't open it yet, Jinny — suppose he should be married like Christopher ! " Jinny laughed uneasily. " Two black daughters-in-law aren't very likely. Much more likely she'll be blonde." " No, he can't be married," said Martha on reflection. " He never could abide girls. I don't mean you, dearie ; you scarcely had your second teeth, had you ? " Jinny began to rip the envelope. " We shall soon see." But Martha snatched away the letter again. " I'm sure you'll spoil your pretty eyes," she persisted. " Day-stars, Will called 'em once." Jinny laughed still more uneasily. " Then I ought to be able to read by 'em. But I'll light my night-star." And she moved towards the cart-lamp. " It isn't your lighting-up time yet, is it ? You don't want to be wasteful." " Well, come in and light me a candle a moment." " You seem in a great hurry to read it ! " said Martha fretfully. " Me ? " Jinny flushed furiously. " I thought you'd want to hear what he says." " Don't I know what he says ? That he is in England again and coming to see his old mother ? Isn't that enough for one night ? " JINNY ON HER ROUNDS 63 " It's a great deal, certainly. But suppose — he wants some- thing." " Ah, that's true ! " Martha was visibly perplexed. She did not herself understand the suddenly awakened jealous instinct that resented Jinny's superior acquaintance with Will's hand- writing, that was subconsciously urging her to hug this letter to her bosom and not share its sacred contents with a girl she at last — especially after Bundock's recent innuendo — realized as grown-up, and who seemed, moreover, to be claiming a co- proprietorship. And so it was difficult for her to frame an objection satisfactory to her conscious intelligence. But the letter was now in her possession, and that was a strong asset for her subconsciousness. " 'Tis a pity to tear open such a beautiful envelope," she said. " You have your cup o' tea. I'll steam it over the kettle." " I'm afraid I haven't time for tea, especially having to take Mr. Skindle a bit back," said Jinny, almost as mystified as Martha herself. " I'm late already, and Gran'fer will be roaring for his supper. I must read it now or never." " If it was anything unpleasant," wavered Martha, " Flynt would be very upset. And after sitting up all night with Maria — no, he must have a good sleep — better put it off till the morning." " To-morrow, I won't be here. No, not till next Friday." " But I've got to go to-morrow to Miss Gentry and she can read it." " Oh ! " said Jinny. " Yes, Flynt wants to have my bonnet cleaned — vanity and waste, I call it." " But won't that tire you — such a long walk ? Why can't I take the bonnet to-night ? I'll be passing her house." " We haven't finished talking it over yet, Flynt and me," parried Martha. " I might be having a new bonnet, you see, dearie." " Well, of course, it's just as you wish. But suppose it rains to-morrow." " Rains ? " repeated Martha, feeling — she knew not why — like an animal at bay. Then she drew a great breath of relief. Footsteps and voices were borne towards them. " Caleb ! " she cried joyfully, " Will's in London — he's coming to see his old mother." " Good buoy-oy ! " cried Caleb jovially. It was only what he 64 JINNY THE CARRIER had expected the letter would say, but at heart he shrank from the change — he had finally equated himself to the dual solitude, and the home-coming prodigal loomed as menacing as Cousin Caroline. " Good boy ? " echoed Martha. " I should think he is — never cared for girls. And still unmarried." " There's a chance for you. Jinny," chaffed Caleb. " Oh, how can you talk such nonsense ! " Jinny was furiously angry.. " Basket, Nip," she called sharply, and climbed up to her seat almost as swiftly as he leapt into his. " x4re you coming, Mr. Skindle ? " In her abstraction and to busy herself about something, she automatically removed the parcel of stones from the driving-seat. " In a jiffy." Elijah did not bound as obediently as Nip — ^he could not lose the chance to pontificate before her. " Not at all so well as you think, Mrs, Flynt. We experts can see what even the breeder can't. Keep her upon corn and peas — give her just soft stuff." And he vaulted not ungracefully to Jinny's side. " Thank you, sir," said Martha, impressed. " Have you paid him ? " she inquired of Caleb in a formidable whisper. " Dedn't Oi say Oi'd pay him for nawthen ? " he answered still more audibly. " Well, take off your hat for good-bye." " But Oi ain't inside," said the obstinate, if confused, Caleb. Jinny cracked her whip fiercely, and Methusalem joyously turned his nose for home. " Good night, Jinny. Thank'ee for reading Cousin Caroline's letter," Caleb called after the receding vehicle. XI It was symptomatic of Jinny's new^ mood that she scarcely noticed that Mr. Skindle now shared her sacking. Her mind was wandering again over the ground covered by the Sunday-school wagon, and certain birds' eggs, losing their later cloud of guilti- ness, lay suffused with childhood's holy light. Methusalem went unguided through quiet ways. The large, low moon, a pink clown's face, peered through leafless elms and gradually grew golden. To the right of the winding road rooks cawed persis- tently, and once a small flight flew towards the cart ; to the left JINNY ON HER ROUNDS 65 more melodious birds whistled slow, high notes, or thrilled and gurgled plaintively, or scurried off, startled, as the cart passed. One kept on crying " Quick, quick, quick," with a metallic sound as of shears snipping the grass, but Methusalem was not to be hurried. There was time to admire wherever a thatched cottage made a picturesque point or a pond mirrored the dying sunset ; time to savour the subtle balm, where hayricks stood at the far margin of fields. Sometimes a little pig would run round terrified and finally squeeze itself under the fence, or a big gander would stand and hiss. Sometimes the road narrowed to a Gothic nave, but for the most part there was nothing but a far- diffused sense of keen air and great flat spaces, the dark blue circle of sky with rolling white clouds, the large green fields with their distant border of thin trees ; a view unclosed and unbounded save by the horizon, though impalpably veiling itself as they journeyed. Elijah Skindle's mood had changed no less than Jinny's. Though he now sat in the coveted proximity to her, and could pr5pose to her profile instead of her nape — and her bonnet was of the narrow-flanked pattern, condemned by the more prudish of her sex, that left the profile visible — he was subtly conscious that he was really farther from her than before. Even when the delivery of the few remaining parcels necessitated a slight thawing on Jinny's part, the whole spirit seemed to have gone out of the adventure. It was grown tasteless as a thrice-warmed dish. The very horn had lost its thrill. Even if he found a vehicle at " The King of Prussia," he was thinking, it would be an expensive trip : they might charge him all Caleb's half- crown. He found himself morbidly counting the coils of cord — there were five in all, he made out. And when the rooks he called crows sailed towards him, they gave a still more sable hue to his thoughts. He counted them, too, remembering how his peasant mother — now installed as his woman-of-all-work — used to curtsy to a solitary magpie, and the rhyme she taught him about the crows : " One's unlucky, two lucky, three is health, four is wealth, five is sickness, and six is death." Odd that matrimony was not mentioned, unless it was included in " two." There were certainly five crows, he thought dismally — a sinister coinci- dence with the coils of cord. Then, cheering up, he interpreted the omened sickness as that of the local live-stock, a sickness greater than Jorrow could cope with, and he reflected that after E 66 JINNY THE CARRIER all Jinny's was a hard and toilsome life and her frigidity was perhaps due to its never occurring to her that he was willing to raise her to his status. Perhaps she thought he was just itching to take liberties. Well, he could understand her coyness : other men might indeed exploit such a chance ; but he, he assured himself again, was a gentleman. " That's a slow couple," he said, boldly breaking the long silence. " Seems to me they fly as fast as the other rooks," said Jinny. " I mean the Flynts," he said. " Oh ! " said Jinny. There was resentment in her tone. She had not liked his calling Caleb " Uncle," understanding well the urban contempt that lurked in declaring oneself a rustic's nephew, and feeling, too, that however slow in the uptake Caleb might be, his wealth of homely crafts, knacks, instincts, life-wisdom,, and nature- knowledge gave him a richer and deeper quality than this pert townsman. But Elijah persisted in his urban appraisal. " No go in them I " " Dear old turtles ! " sighed Jinny. " But so long as they go at the same pace ! " " Ah ! " he said eagerly. " You believe in like to like ? " " Well, fancy a turtle married to a hare ! " " But a pair of hares now — ? " He seized his opportunity. " You and me, eh ? " " Speak for yourself, Mr. — Bunny ! " " I'm paying you a compliment. Jinny, classing you with me for smartness. There isn't a girl from Bradmarsh to Chipstone that can hold a candle to you. So that's why, seeing a man must marry somebody sometime, and looking around as becomes a man who's getting a bit — a bit " " Bald ? " prompted Jinny blandly. " And what does that matter ? " he said, too intent now to be fobbed off by raillery. " The point is that with the practice and position I'm getting now, it would be a good lift for you." " I thought I was giving you a lift," said Jinny icily. " So you were — so you are — ^in that sense. But I didn't need even that. My nag wasn't really lame. I only made an excuse ^o talk this over. See ? " ''* A very lame excuse," flashed Jinpy. JINNY ON HER ROUNDS 67 ■ • " There was never any way of talking to you — you always so busy with parcels and me with patients. I'm not one of your flirting kind with fancy waistcoats, I want to settle down, and I've taken a favour to you." Even Jinny's ready tongue had no repartee to this massive complacency. She could only articulate : ^' Have you, now ? " " Yes, I have. And I'd like to see you driving of a Sunday in my smart trap. Come, what do you say ? " " Thank you," she said coldly. " I'd rather stay in my old cart." " But it's such a shame — you so spruce and spry — tied to this ramshackle cart, when you might be adorning a higher sphere and sitting in mv parlour instead of being at everybody's beck andcaU."- He had chosen precisely the worst form of appeal. Confronted with this picture of parlour-stodginess, her role of Jinny the Carrier — Jinny the pet and friend-in-need of the countryside — seemed infinitely dear and desirable. And what subtly added to her anger was some dim presentiment in herself of other forces coming into her life, forces threatening to emerge from their picture-past, and to trouble the placid current of her career. Like Caleb she shrank from change. To shuttle for ever 'twixt Bradmarsh and Chipstone; with her grandfather, Nip, Methu- salem, all immortal and unchanging as herself — this was all she asked of heaven : this and not too much rain and wind. " You want me to sit in your parlour ? " she cried in white revolt. He took off his cap and bowed gallantly : " In silks and satins." Then suddenly realizing his baldness, he clapped it on again. " And give up my work ! " There was an ominous light in Jinny's eyes. But love is blind ! Even the bats now beginning to swoop in the dusk could see more clearly than Elijah. " I promise you you shan't do a stroke ! " said the fatuous young man. " As the wife of a veterinary surgeon, you'd be a lady." " And what would become of Gran'fer ? " " He'd have warm corduroys and plenty of gruel in the Chipstone poorhouse." " You heartless knacker ! Get off my cart. Whoa ! Methu- salem, whoa ! " " How you fly at a man ! I've already got my mother living 68 JINNY THE CARRIER with me, and she and your grandfather wouldn't get on, being of a different class. But I'd be willing to pay his rent and get a woman to look after him." " Nobody shall look after him but me. And his business — who is to look after that ? " " Don't worry. Some other carrier'U crop up." *' There isn't going to be any other carrier here but Daniel Quarles, understand that." " Well, if you think you'll find anybody to marry your grand- father " he said sullenly. " Who wants to marry ? I shall never give up the road." " If you're so fond of driving, there's always my trap." " No good setting traps for me. I'll hang in a cage in no man's parlour. I must fly about in the woods like now — free 1 " " Birds in the woods are sometimes hungry," her wooer reminded her. " Suppose your business falls off — or things go to famine prices like five or six years ago. The gallon loaf ain't always a shilling. Ten years ago I remember flour was two and ten the stone, and that only seconds, ^nd tea was five shillings. With me you'd be sure of the fat of the land always — there's no difference with me 'twixt Sundays and weekdays." " Oh, it's a stuffed bird you want for your parlour." " Rubbish, I've got six stuffed birds in my parlour — ^in the loveliest glass cases ! " " But they don't sing ! " And Jinny burst mockingly into a song that had hitherto been a mere tune to her : " /'// be no submissive wife^ No, not I " He lost his temper. " Oh, you needn't make such a fuss over yourself. I dare say I can find plenty of wives — ^with my connexion." " Among pigs ? " she said sweetly. She jumped down and began to light the lamp. " This is your getting-out place." " It's nothing of the sort — I go on to the bridge." " Impossible. My horse is lame." " I know all about that." And snatching up the reins she had dropped, " Gee-up ! " he called suddenly. But Methusalem knew better. '"^ You'll never get home that way," said Jinny, smiling. *' Then how the hell ? " he began furiously. JINNY ON HER ROUNDS 69 " Shanks's mare," she reminded him again. " That's not lame." He gave her a long, nasty look as though meditating the law of the stronger. But he tried pleading first. " By the time- I walk home, my mother'll have locked up ; thinking I'm sitting up with a patient." " There's the poorhouse ! " He winced. " You've got to carry me," he said sullenly, " or I'll have the law on you." " There's no law to make me carry aught save goods." And she sang on carelessly : " Should a humdrum husband say, That at home I ought to stay — - — " The little voice, rippling through those demure lips, wellnigh stung him to close her mouth with the masterful gag of kisses, but a remnant of sanity warned him not to spoil a fine animal practice by a scandal. Besides Jinny had her whip, and what was still more formidable, her horn. " I'll be even with you for this ! " And jumping down, he strode off furiously. " Hullo 1 Mr. Skindle ! Hullo ! " " Keep away from me ! " It was at once an appeal and a warning. " Don't you want your case of instruments ? Not that you'll be in time to kill those poor horses to-night." With an unsmothered oath he turned back and clambered into the interior, upsetting Nip's basket in his fury ; the result of which neglect to let sleeping dogs lie was that the unsagacious animal mounted growling guard over the instrument-case, as before a burglar. " You'd best get it for me," he said sullenly. " And by the way, how much do I owe you ? " " Never mind," she said blandly, handing him his burden. " You promised to be even with me." " The little vixen ! " he thought, as he trudged towards a farm where he remembered doctoring a horse. " She ought to be put in the ducking-pond ! What a lucky escape ! " CHAPTER III JINNY AT HER HOMES I remember the black wharves and the slips And the sea-tides tossing free^ And Spanish sailors with bearded lips And the beauty and mystery of the ships And the magic of the sea. Longfellow, " My Lost Youth." I Blackwater Hall, the home of Daniel Quarks and liis grand- daughter, was none of your old manor-houses with muUioned windows and carven music-galleries, fallen in grandeur and rent. It had barely done yeoman's service, being just a low white- washed and thatched cottage, whose upper windows under the overhanging eaves seemed deep-set eyes under jutting brows. Nor was it near the Blackwater, though from its comparatively high ground the broadening river first began to glimmer on the view when you came to the edge of Bradmarsh Common and looked across its brown expanse towards the bluish haze of the background. It was in reality nearer the Brad, which as seen foreshortened from it seemed to lave the roof of Frog Farm and sentinel it with its willows. Blackwater Hall should in fact — Jinny would jest — have been called Common Cottage. For it was just a way of living on the Common, protected from the elements, yet sucked up into them : a sort of transparent, transpirable shell amid this universal flying, fluttering, hopping, creeping, crawling, soaring, swooping, scampering, twisting, droning, humming, buzzing, barking, chirping, croaking, cawing, and singing : a human nest niched on the edge of a chaos of twigs, roots, old amorphous trunks, tangled faded fern-branches, mossy patches, gorse, JINNY AT HER HOMES 71 ferruginous-leaved oaks, shrubs, ant-heaps innumerable, rabbit- warrens, wild apple, wild plum, black heather, and endless stubs to catch the feet, or branches to whip the face, or thorns to prick the fingers. A garden path to the Hall lay between homely flowers, periwinkle and marigold and the like. Behind the Hall lay the Quarles estate of an acre and a lug or two, with its poultry-run, its tethered goats, its vegetables, its clothes-lines, its thatched stables, its odd sheds and little barn, and its well. If Daniel Quarles was not nid-nodding over his big Bible or on the bench in the front porch, or pruning the vine over the kitchen door, or exercising his lopping and topping rights on the Common, it was here the nonagenarian was to be found pottering : planting, hoeing, watering, or weeding. He would usually groom Methusalem of a morning — it was his way of asserting his hold over the business — and on Tuesday and Friday evenings, when the wayworn Jinny drove up along the grassy path 'twixt cottage and Common, rutted only from her own wheels, he would generally rub down Methusalem after high tea. Otherwise the multiform labour of house and land, of cooking and bread-baking and goat-milking and scrubbing and washing, all fell upon the little Carrier. And even the work the Gaffer did was far outbalanced by the work he made. And yet it was Daniel's personality, not Jinny's, that was impressed on the house, even as his name remained on the cart. Her own exiguous claim upon life combined with piety and affection to leave everything as she had found it when he brought her here ; not only in the big attic where eight had once huddled and which he now occupied in solitary state, sadly conscious of the great, snoreless silences, but in both the ground-floor rooms over which it stretched. The one with the window was the living-room, and the other — on which the front door opened and where a Dutch clock with hanging weights greeted the visitor with a cheery tick that relieved its deadness — was piled pell-mell with old cypress chests and other litter of the progeny he had outlived, as well as with a few boxes or parcels left by neighbouring clients or as yet undelivered to them. These two rooms communicating, the box-room served both as a business office and a passage to the living-room, from the rear of which you ascended by a door the wriggling staircase to the patriarch's big bedroom, or tumbled down two steps from another doorway to a combination of kitchen, larder, wood-cellar, and scullery, lit 72 JINNY THE CARRIER up and aired by one small swinging pane, a den which even Jinny could not keep free of cobwebs and smells. Here was the Gaffer's beer-barrel, and the thumb-hole tray, painted with tigers, on which she brought in his morning draught from it. Here also were the jug and basin of her toilette, for bedroom Jinny had none ; the need of disturbing the ancient chests or the office — which would have been a sad blow to her grandfather — being avoided through the fortunate talent of the chest of drawers in the living-room for turning into a bed. Its drawers, in which the bedding was concealed, would come out and hook on to one another, while legs would swivel out from beneath them. It was not gay — this room-of-all-work — despite its over- population of china shepherdesses with their swains and hounds and its rank growth of dried grass in vases — all doubled and distorted by the cracked, fustily gilt mirror on the mantelpiece — for the oaken beams of the ceiling, from which hung a gigantic rusty key, had been plastered over, and the walls — ^in a similar quest of gentility — dulled with a grey paper, sedulously re- matched when it fell to pieces ; far livelier was the staircase paper — all hearts and roses — ^if only you could have seen it in the dusky windings and under the menacing bulge of the plaster ceiling. Apart from the shepherdesses and vases, among wliich Jinny was not sorry to see a growing mortality, as the Gaffer fumbled for his spectacles, the room was not over-furnished, a small carved wooden settle by the cavernous hearth, a small square, central table without flaps, two squat and cushioned arm-chairs, with one prim wooden chair, and a little lamp with a monstrous fat globe, constituting almost the minimum of necessaries ; even their united libraries, the Gaffer's Family Bible and Jinny's " Peculiar Hymn-Book " and " Universal Spelling-Book, " being constrained to repose, like the shepherdesses, on top of the chest of drawers — that shifty piece of furniture whose mysterious recesses secreted also the hymn-book recovered from the bushes. That article of bigotry and virtue, hurled from him by the angry boy, lay — ^long-forgotten — in the top drawer behind the roUed-up wire mattress that uncoiled by a spring. Yet this shabby room with its drab paper and squat furniture — vivified most of the year only by that tireless tick of the Dutch clock from the office, or the purring of the kettle from the kitchen — made for Jinny the holy conception of home. The very cracks JINNY AT HER HOMES 73 in the mirror had become second nature ; a glass that looked one squarely in the face would have put her eye out, and if in an utterly impossible moment the Gaffer had considerately replaced the old one, the tresses she tamed into seemliness by it would have been a sorry sight. Here, without books or friends, mere living was a happiness, especially at night after Gran'fer, whose big Bible invariably turned from a table-book into a pillow, had woke up and remarked he was getting sleepy, and been steered up the corkscrew staircase to his bed. Then, in a silence broken by no human sound — save the snoring of the Gaffer from above — and in a security symbolized by the unlocked gates and doors. Jinny would sit in delicious relaxation with her sewing or knitting or bonnet-trimming, finding compensation for the long laborious day : listening in summer to the late singing birds or gazing in winter at the glowing logs with their delicate flicker of blue, while Nip in his virtuous basket snored in harmony with the Gaffer or uttered joyous yells in his dream-hunting. In those hours Jinny demanded nothing of man or God, though when she had produced her bed like a conjurer out of its mahogany recesses, prayers came automatically to the sleepy little figure kneeling beside it, with the dark hair flowing over the white shoulders. That was a pretty sight, but only the cracked mirror saw it. II Yet back, deep .back in Jinny's baby consciousness, lay another home altogether, a home richer in comfort and love ; giving not on a tumbling common, but on a strange, flat water- side— with stately dream-ships in swelling white, and black barges, and little boats with ochre or orange sails, and a pervading savour of salt and mud ; the real Blackwater Hall she felt dimly, though its name escaped her. In this overlaid life there was a filmy female figure that fed and bathed and rocked one, and kissed the place one had banged, and sometimes held one as passionately as if against some monster that was trying to tear one's face from that flower-soft cheek ; it could scarcely be that burly figure, spasmodically appearing and disappearing, for that too was kind in its different way, and had a knee less cumbered by clothes across which one could ride astride, and pullable hair on its face and curling smoke issuing 74 JINNY THE CARRIER from its mouth more profusely than from the kettle's. Out of this general background, like mountains from a plain, stood out a few episodes of peculiar vividness, but of no apparent signi- ficance— in one she sat on a rough sea-wall playing with innu- merable tiny white shells while a bird, hovered over her crying, as if trying to induce her to follow it seaward, but before she could do so the female figure had appeared, frantically scolding and caressing, and had carried her, struggling and kicking, back to a cot. In another she was carried by the burly being to a little room with a strange little bulbous window and a queer smell, where she was kissed by an elderly figure with a cocked hat and a fixed eye that had a strange afiinity to the window. Later she seemed to be living in the strange building that held this room : it had a canvas roof, a flag at one end and a mast with ropes at the other, yet puzzlingly was not a ship, for she saw herself running down the stairs to pat Methusalem in the road. But these shadowy and usually submerged images all leapt into renewed vitality one delectable Wednesday when, clad in a new black dress, hurriedly stitched together by Miss Gentry, she divided the driving-board with her grandfather (looking odd in his white funeral smock beside her blackness), while Methusalem, equally refreshed and exhilarated by the novel roads, almost hurried them by square-towered hamlets and dear little bridges spanning crawling streams to the quaint cemetery where the old man's sister was to lie. How Nip would have loved the expedi- tion she thought in after days ! But he Jbad not yet adopted her. It was on this trip that she began to hear things that solidified the filmy figures — but it was only from the Gaffer's spasms of imprecation tailing off into anecdote that she was able in the course of years to piece together her parental history. Boldero, she learnt incidentally, was her real name, not Quarles : a correction that mattered less, since nobody had ever called her anything but Jinny. She gathered that the Gaffer had purposely neglected to perpetuate her father's name : he was cancelled and annulled. Roger Boldero, she came gradually to undei stand, was one of those superior souls of uncertain status who, having got command of a little sailing vessel, were wafted joyously to and fro, exchang- ing the silks and spirits of France and the tobacco of Holland JINNY AT HER HOMES 75 for the coins of England without any regard for the benighted principles handicapping human intercourse by taxation. Al- though her father finally came to own the cargoes he ran, he was at first the mere carrier for speculative capitalists ; under cover, moreover, of an honest freight of non-dutiable articles. Carrying was thus in Jinny's blood, both by land and sea, and it is no marvel she made a success of it. But the conjuncture of the two bloods came by the queerest of accidents. The Tommy Devil — the fearsome name of Roger Boldero's boat was only the Essex name for the swift that flew^ gigantically in gay wood over its cutwater — being caught one night in a sudden gale at a season of high tides, found herself driven towards a lee shore of her native county. It was a perilous situation, and rather than be dashed on the beach broadside on. Skipper Boldero put his helm up and daringly essayed to land nose first on the mud. But the lugger, whose lightness was so admirable against the King's cutters, and which had been still further lightened of her ankers of brandy and stone bottles of Schiedam — these, through an interruption by the blockade men, " waiting to be called for " in certain " fleets " and ditches farther along the coast — could not keep her head against the veering welter. With desperate resource- fulness Boldero improvised a drogue by lashing spars and a spare sail to a rope and trailing it at the stern, and, thus steadied before the wind, the Tommy Devil escaped broaching to, and despite the following sea that tilted her figurehead into the depths, she was finally dumped high and wet on the beach, on the very verge of the sea-wall — both uninjured. It was a fine piece of seamanship (though aided by the rare steep- ness of this bit of beach and the high water), and the storm be- ginning to abate and the water to recede, the sails were lowered and the skipper and crew turned thankfully in. They were not wanting in men — carrying of this kind needed large and able-minded crews — yet all hands being worn out by hours of battling with wind and wave — " dilvered," as old Daniel put it — a watch was deemed superfluous for a vessel no longer at sea, and the Tommy Devil reposed from stem to stern with all the soundness of conscious virtue watched over by Providence. Now it happened that Lieutenant Dap, commander of His Majesty's Revenue Cutter, then prowling in the ofling in quest of gin-tubs — ^he had been pressed as a youth, served under Nelson, and had exchanged to the Preventive Service when he 76 JINNY THE CARRIER married that rustic beauty Susannah Quarles, sister of Daniel — was returning with a lantern at the first peep of dawn to the *' Leather Bottel," to knock up his boat's crew. His anxious day in Brandy Hole Creek — as everybody called the little place — ^had ended happily : Susannah's seventh baby had been saf^y and punctually launched — and the proud and prolific father was anxious to be back sweeping up the prizes that led to prefer- ment. It being a high occasion, and to impress Mrs. Dap's neighbours, he had come ashore in a cocked hat, and he felt almost knocked into one when he beheld, towering over the sea- wall, the great masts of a vessel that loomed gigantic in that place and light. He rubbed his one eye — the other he had lost in his original struggle against the pressgang — but the mysterious jetsam remained, and a closer inspection showed it the kind of longish craft whose huge lugsails his clumsier man-o'-war could rarely overtake, despite his square sail yards. But boldly, as befitted a man with a Nelsonic eye, and without waiting even to summon his men, he hailed the stranded stranger. No reply. Nor did even a shower of such small stones as the muddy beach afforded have any effect on the uncanny bark. There was nothing left but to board her — ^which the hero achieved single- handed, clambering over the sagging bulwark and standing alone on the slanting deck. Roger Boldero, aroused to find himself challenged by the cocked hat and stony eye of the Law, displayed, though blinking at the lantern, as great a sang-froid as in the presence of the elements. There was, in fact, far less danger. Of the forbidden articles only lace was left on board, and lace has been designed by the said watchful Providence to occupy small space and be easily invisible. A wink to his second in command, and two of the crew who were in excess of the legal number for that small tonnage, smuggled themselves overboard — here being one of the advantages of terra jirma. The few odd kegs, flagons, and cigar-boxes were the ship's own stores Boldero maintained, and he would be very glad if the " Commodore " would join him in sampling them now. Softened by the title, the bold Dap nevertheless declined : the vessel was his prize, he declared. " And what is to prevent us taking you as our prize ? " asked Roger blandly, having by now discovered that Dap was alone. " You can't move an inch," said Dap. " But we shall float off as soon as the tide rises." JINNY AT HER HOMES 77 " Precisely. But it won't come as high again, not till the next spring tide. Meanwhiles I've a gig's crew ashore and a cutter within gunshot." Boldero was taken aback. He realized that he was — in nautical parlance — " neaped." What a miserable misadventure ! What a reward for his seamanship ! But, masking his consterna- tion, he rejoined with a smile, " Then you can't take your prize in tow either." He proceeded to point out laughingly that there was no question of capture on either side, that there was not a tittle of evidence against him, that he was an honest trader, as his manifest and cargo would show — and that even if His Majesty, through his admirable if over-zealous representative, insisted on taxing his own little modicum of alcohol and tobacco, it had not been technically landed. The nice point whether a cargo which lands inside its ship instead of outside can be said to have landed, side-tracked the question of the status of the ship herself, and entailed so great a consumption of the cheroots and liquor — despite the unearthly hour — that their fiscal value must have been considerably reduced. But the obdurate Dap still insisting they were dutiable, Roger Boldero invited him to seal them up till he sailed, as he had certainly no intention of landing them here. He pointed out, however, that though the tide, like Time, waited for no man, he would have to wait for the tide ; and that during this disagreeable interval the hope of again offering the " Commodore " the cordial, if lop-sided, hospitality of his cabin must disappear if the fomenters of friendship were put in bond. Even this argument might have shattered itself against Dap's fuddled sense of duty had not the twice aforesaid Providence now sent on board a rival cocked hat with a feather salient. With the growing light the local exciseman — of the shoregoing branch of the service — had likewise discovered the strange quarry. But the gleam in the hunter's eye died when Lieutenant Dap intro- duced him to his friend Boldero, who was celebrating with him the birth of his seventh baby, and whose society for the next month would, he was sure, add to the amenities of life in Brandy Hole Creek. And " my friend Boldero " did not fail to become it, for Lieutenant Dap's cruising was confined to the waters on whose border he had built his nest : and he was frequently hove to. And during those tedious four weeks, made still more tedious by rain, Boldero had himself rowed out more than once to the 78 JINNY THE CARRIER " Channel groper " whose black hull, copious white boats, formidable guns and flaming-flannelled red-capped crew were plainly visible from the beached lugger ; and he moved genially among the blue-trousered tars and did full justice to the Lieu- tenant's gin-toddy and had his fingers often in the Lieutenant's snuff-box and lent a sympathetic ear to his methods and devices against those rascally smugglers with their manoeuvre of rowing dead to windward. Their spirit-casks were slung with ropes, the Lieutenant explained, so that their confederates on shore could load them easily on their horses, but only the other night the blockade-men had discomfited a formidable shore-gang of fifty who, despite their stout ashpoles, had been unable to carry off anything except their wounded. He would have caught the lugger, too, had she not kept doubling. The commander of the amphibious Tommy Devil even shared in an exciting, if unsuccessful, chase after a suspicious landing- party, going out with a galley-crew in a rain-storm in a borrowed tarpaulin petticoat. And once the one-eyed hero — who felt himself none the less a Nelson because his eye had been lost in resisting entry into the navy — returned Roger Boldero's visit, and after broaching sundry of the happily unsealed kegs, the two skippers repaired arm in arm — the attitude was necessary — to see the seventh baby and present the fond mother with material for a lace cap. Now while Daniel Quarles's sister had been lying as helpless as the lugger, his last unmarried daughter, Emma, a beauty still more engaging, was housekeeping for Aunt Susannah and minding the other four children (two were dead). She had come in Daniel Quarles's cart, and her father was to fetch her again as soon as Susannah was up (or down). He should already have come for her, but the rains had made such glue of the roads that a queerly spelt letter came instead, saying he would wait till they hardened. This delay, brief as it was, sufficed to bring the neaped mariner under the spell of the landlocked village maid, so sweet to look on, so serviceable about a house, and so motherly with a baby that the novel thought of matrimony was popped into a rover's head. She, for her part, was still more swiftly subjugated by the jolly Roger and the Tommy Devil, and the mutual confession v/as precipitated by the opposite menaces of tide and cart, each threatening to bear them apart. It was a race between these I. JINNY AT HER HOMES 79 and the course of true love, which must flow rapid to flow at all. But it did not flow smooth, for when Daniel Quarles arrived to convey his daughter home and found a rival vehicle waiting uncouthly on the beach to bear her off, he roundly damned the " furriner " who aspired to be his son-in-law, and he included in his maledictions the Preventive Service and all its works, especially the new baby, not to mention the times and the tides. For, though he had long ago found grace and become a Wesleyan, he had embraced the new doctrine with the old robustiousness. The natural man was no more to be mitigated than a hedgehog. Had he become a Quaker, he would have turned the other cheek in a violent collision with the striker's jaw. He enjoyed being angry, and that his wrath was " righteous " only added to its zest. And " righteous " it now was. The trouble was not that Captain Boldero was a Churchman : the fellow was flippantly ready to embrace anything on earth that included Emma. It was not even that Daniel " suspicioned " him a smuggler. Smuggling — even if you had a brother-in-law in the Government — was quite as respectable as poaching, and in days when the rural labourer could not have lived had he not eked out his obolus by occasional rabbits (with the necessary vegetables), only an obtuse squirearchy could hold that sinful. But even the squire had no opprobrium for the smuggler : gentry and peasantry were at one in backing up the manly patriot who thwarted a wicked Government, supplied Britons with the cup that cheers and their country with a fine naval reserve and early information of Froggy's movements. The shores of Essex as of all Britain were honeycombed — apart from their large natural resources and their ruins and haunted houses — with artificial hiding-places, cellars, vaults, and secret passages, and every man's hand was against the Ishmael of the Customs House. Farmers left their gates open at night to facilitate the cavalcades and coaches-and-six, and were but little surprised to find tea or tobacco coming up overnight on their fields like mushrooms. Even parsons were disposed to regard such treasures as drifted their way as heaven-sent flotsam, and Government circles themselves — in that era of purchasable votes and votable purchases — had not the ethical toploftiness which characterizes all Governments to-day. No, it was not Boldero the Smuggler, but Boldero the Smoker that found himself hurled into outer darkness the day poor shrinking Emma was borne off in her 8o JINNY THE CARRIER father's cart. *' No puffing pirate shall cross my threshold,'^ swore Daniel, but the accent was on the puffing, not the pirate. For tobacco had become tabu in the Wesleyan ranks : the godless practice of smoking was formally forbidden to the ministers. Swiss Protestantism indeed had once included its prohibition in the Ten Commandments. If Methodism did not thus re-edit the Decalogue, its horror of the abomination was no less keen, and a change of practice being always easier than a change of heart, Daniel Quarles had poured a deal of spiritual energy into the sacrifice of his pipe. The " rapscallion Boldero," he declared, not only sinned himself, but was the cause of sin in others, trafficking as he did in the unholy weed. If Emma insisted on a " smoker," wasn't there the miller at Long Brad- marsh, he inquired with grim facetiousness, meaning that the grotesque Griggs had a vote by living in a house with a chimney. But Emma for all her gentle airs had proved " obstropolus." She had discovered that Susannah's husband smoked as prodi- gally as Roger — though it had been hidden from the old man on his rare visits — and that so far from bedevilling men, tobacco tended to angelicize them. Would indeed that her father haloed himself with these clouds ! Besides, she shrewdly suspected that even a Wesleyan archangel, appearing suddenly as a suitor, would have fared similarly, and that the smoke was only a cover for a wish to keep his last girl. And so, though the lover was left lamenting, and the ^ommy Devil duly floated off without the lass, it was not long that Emma was left stranded in Blackwater Hall. With a parent removed by Providence every Tuesday and Friday, even the flabbiest female may be stiffened, and the end was smuggled matrimony ; though very soon the blessing of a minister brought Methodismx into their madness. Roger Boldero not only became a Wesleyan like his wife and her father, but was one of the first Dissenters to be married in their own chapel by their own clergy under the new Act. The odd union had turned out happy, but with one dismal drawback — ;the Bolderos could not rear children. They fared worse even than the Bidlakes, and with no such obvious reason. One hapless infant after another died, and when at last, in their late middle years, little Jinny was safely steered through three winters, it was they who were taken as if in lieu of their progeny. The pair had finally settled down by the same waterside that had united them — the attractions of " Brandy Hole Creek " JINNY AT HER HOMES 8i having been enhanced by the perpetual presence of their relative by marriage, Commander Dap, who with the subsidence of spirit duties and smuggling had found his mobile cutter replaced by the moored " Watch Vessel 23." Here with Susannah and his children and five satellites (and their wives and families) the veteran lived in domestic beatitude under the title of Chief Coast Guard Officer. High on the beach, and boarded by a commodious staircase, the houseboat seemed a standing reminder of the adventure of the Tommy Devil. Under its challenging eye, that adventurcPus bark had sailed out and home, till that last fatal voyage when the lugger foundered almost within sight of a little Sussex port, which for weeks after was mysteriously littered with washed-up tobacco-bales. Though Roger Boldero was rescued, it had been the beginning of the end of his pros- perity, already undermined by the diminution of duties, and a few years later both he and Emma were dead simultaneously of smallpox. Again the carrier's cart must fare to the Creek to fetch the penniless little orphan, and there — ^soon after Will Flynt's flight — Daniel brought her back for the burial of his sister Susannah. It was what buried Will's memory too and replaced him in her prayers by a new being, conceived as her " Angel Mother." HI The moment she saw and smelt the creek she knew she had carried it in her soul all along : the white hut with its flagged mast, the great Watch Vessel, the tumble of cottages, sheds, barrels, pecking fowls, grubbing black pigs, recumbent ladders, discoloured boats with their keels upwards, black rotting barges, and rigged smacks stranded on hard steep mud. The sea came in sluggishly through a broad green chine, half slime, half green water, spitted with gaunt encrusted poles to mark the channel. The water seemed even wider than she remembered, and yet not so wide, for it was split by an island or a promontory that gave a second sail-dotted expanse between her and the farther shore. She yearned now towards that ultimate hump of hazy woodland, and it was to remain for ever bathed in the quiet beauty which wrapped it around as Methusalem toiled up to the " Leather Bottel." They were to stay the night there, for Daniel would have none of the Commander's hospitaHty, he being still unforgiven. Besides, the child might be afraid of the corpse. 82 JINNY THE CARRIER It was while sitting on that sea-wall with the octogenarian that evening, her great grown-up fingers toying once again with tiny white shells that strewed its top, and pewits again trying to lead her from their young, that she first heard in broken outlines how these waters had washed her into being. Something, too, she gleaned from her refound relative-in-law, the chief mourner, whose cocked hat, tattooed arm and genial senescence — not to mention his house-boat — ^were one of the pleasantest impressions or re-impressions of the funeral ; and whose fascinating trick of rolling one eye while the other was fixed in a glassy stare almost made the child lose the sense of what he was saying. The death of his wife had reminded the veteran of the death of Nelson — nearly forty years before — and his tremulous tones grew still shakier as he recalled how the flags over the hut and the Watch Vessel and every other flag in England had flown at half-mast, though of course there were more joyous aspects of " Trafalgar " to be celebrated in bottles of Bony's own brandy. He frankly admitted he had himself been " three sheets in the wind " — an image of bed-linen fluttering on a clothes-line that long puzzled her. He took her abaft the Watch Vessel — it was a way of leaving Daniel Quarles alone with his dead sister — and recounted his astonishment at seeing her father's boat spued up like Jonah out of the whale. " A handsome man," he told her to her pleasure. But he spoilt it all by adding, " though he would talk the hind leg off a dog." " But wasn't that cruel ? " the little girl faltered. Dap laughed. " He never did it really, dearie, and if the leg had come off, he'd have helped the lame dog over a stile. And so many lingos — parleyvooing in French and swearing in Double Dutch. I don't wonder your angel mother fell in love with him." " My angel mother ! " echoed Jinny excitedly. " Was my mother an angel ? " The veteran was taken aback. For a child who must be past nine such primitiveness was startling. He had spoken loosely, hardly knowing whether he alluded to Emma's present heavenly abode or to her sweet-temperedness on earth. He did not know that little Jinny read nothing but literature in which angels were a common feature of the landscape, and that Miss Gentry had not measured her for her blacks without dwelling on her own stained-glass specimen. JINNY AT HER HOMES 83 " She was as pretty as one," said the Commander after an instant, " and now she is one." Thus it was that Jinny's mother^ already felt as a hovering sweetness, took on definite wings, and even when Jinny's maturer experience amputated them from her earthly existence, they were what she still hovered over her child with. "Susannah and she'll make a pair now," he added, feeling suddenly disloyal to the corpse at home. " Susannah ? " queried Jinny, for her grandfather had been calling his sister " Pegs " — " poor Pegs ! " " Your mother's aunt." It was a new idea, an angel's aunt. She saw the twain flyings Susannah sailing with more sweeping pinions, her mother softly rustling. The funeral was in style, and Jinny helped to set out the refreshments in the saloon. There was some dispute as to whether her grandfather could join the grand procession in his tilt-cart, but though he urged that squires were proud to be buried from farm-wagons, he consented to ride — like a fish out of water — inside a mourning-coach, and not even on the box. The Commander and Jinny shared his dismal grandeur, she sitting bodkin though there was an empty seat opposite, which " the seventh baby " had been expected to occupy. But Toby had not arrived from his ship — he was a gunner — in time, and the earlier progeny were still more scattered. The widower held his handkerchief in his fist, but owing to the heat of a discussion on the manner the Navy had gone to the dogs — or returned from them — since the Admiralty had set up a gunnery school on a Portsmouth ship, he used it only to mop his brow. " Excellent, indeed 1 " He was mocking at the ship's name. " The ruination of the sarvice I tell you. It all comes from doing away with the pressgang — stands to reason they picked out the finest chaps — " here the Gaffer snorted — " Oh you may sniff, but for fighting you want guts and muscle. Look what England was in them days and what she is coming to now." " To my lookin'-at-it-an'-thinkin'-o't-too " — the Gaffer made one breathless word of it — " 'tis a blessin' to be riddy of all them gaolbirds, swearers, drinkers, smokers, and fornicators." " Hush ! " The Commander tried to wink his glass eye towards Jinny. 84 JINNY THE CARRIER " She don't understand. Oi remember, the year my good-for^ nawthen Gabriel smashed up a threshin' -machine (and the poor farmer dedn't git no compensation neither, though ef his furniture had been smashed 'twould have come on the Hundred) that wery same year Ebenezer Wagstaff — for 'twas the coronation year of King William, Oi remember, just afore my Emma desarted me " That was a Sailor King," interrupted Dap, half to stave off Eliminations against Jinny's dead mother. " Began as middy under Cap'n Digby in the unlucky Royal George — a ninety-eight gun ship she was " " Ye put me off the track, drat ye, aldoe it leads back to Ebenezer Wagstaff all the same, seein' as the Prince might ha' rubbed showlders with a thief as was sentenced for stealin' half- a-suvran from a barge on the Brad. He could ha' been hanged for it in them days, mind you — the case bein' as clear as day or rather as black as night. But they marcifuUy brought him in guilty to stealin' nine and 'levenpence and that saved his neck, being a navigable river, and the judge give him the option of gaol or jinin' the Navy." " And a proper thing too. Set a thief to catch a Frenchy, and him used to taking prizes by water. Nowadays before the captain hoists his pennant he's got a crew dumped on him that's no choice of his — mealy-mouthed lubbers, full of book-larnin', who don't know a brigantine from a topsail schooner : it's the red ensign that gets all the good stuff, not the white. You mark me, it'll be the downfall of England." " England'll never fall down while she's got God-fearin' con- gregations," maintained Daniel Quarles, and Jinny's devout little heart thrilled to hear it. In the pleasant sunny graveyard there were apiaries and a dismantled tower almost smothered by blackberry-bushes, and the tombs and gravestones passed imperceptibly into a garden of monkey-trees and weeping willows. These wrought in her no stirring of memories, but as she had got off the coach, the standing church tower, square and ivy-wrapped, had composed beautifully with ricks of all sorts, with trees, old tiles, and thatch, into a picture that seemed as much hers as the waterside. The parson — Susannah had remained a Churchwoman — was some minutes late, and Jinny was gratified to note how strong her grandfather was : how pillar-like he stood in his long black JINNY AT HER HOMES 85 mourner's cloak under the weight of the coffin at the churchyard gate, while all the other bearers, his obvious juniors, shifted and sweated. Nor did he blubber either like the Commander, whose weakness, considering how often she had been adjured to be " spunky," and not — now that she was " grown up " — to cry, was as disconcerting as the double existence of his wife in the coffin and the empyrean. However, Dap grew " good " again when the thrilling if still more disconcerting episode of lowering his Susannah as far as possible from the skies and banking her safely against ascent, was over, and — Daniel Quarles having gone vaguely roving over the churchyard — the widower led her stealthily in his absence to a stone behind the ruined tower — in the " unconsecrated " or Dissenting area — and read to her the inscription, following it for her confirmation with his black- gloved forefinger : Here Lies Roger Boldero After Many Stormy Voyages Safely Neaped in Christ. He arrested himself suddenly and whisked her round the tower. " But we didn't read it all," she protested. " Oh, it only says : ' And also Emma Boldero, Wife of the Above.' But don't tell your grandfather." The child wondered why she was to keep Emma's relationship to the Above a secret — she had already gathered from her grandfather that he knew it — and she was distressed as well as puzzled at the strange quarrel that broke out in the homeward coach. " It ain't at all a proper word," said Daniel Quarles. " You might as well put ' carted to Christ ' on mine." " That'll be your affair," persisted the widower, " but this ain't. And how you came to see it gets over me." The Gaffer flushed uneasily. " Oi've got two eyes, I suppose," he jerked. The naval veteran glared glassily. " Them that pay the piper call the tune," he retorted defensively. " Besides," he added more gently, " Emma always said she'd have it some- how on her tombstone." " Emma was a silly." " Hush 1 " Dap again indicated the child with his glassy eye, now trickling without the other as in half-mourning. 86 JINNY THE CARRIER " Oi won't hush it up. That's got to goo. The mason's got to cut another for me. Who arxed you to pay pipers ? " " Such a handsome stone to be torn up ! It's a desecration, it's unlawful." " Unlawful ? Whose darter is she, mine or yourn ? " " Not yours. You cut her off." " She cut me off. And ef poor Pegs and you had done your duty by my gal, he'd ha' never crossed your doorstep." *' He'd ha' met her on the sea-wall. I couldn't help his beholding her looks, any more than you could help having a handsome daughter — or for the matter of that, a handsome sister." His handkerchief came out again. " Oi'm not denying their looks — a man with half an eye could see that. 'Tis just the handsome gals as seems to throw their- selves away," he added musingly. " Maybe they are unhappy at home," suggested the widower, with equal philosophic aloofness. " Or in the housen they stays at," assented the Gaffer. " But let bygones by bygones. It may be the Lord dumped him. down for our good. All Oi say is, that word's got to goo. A Church- man may not see the blasphemy, but think o' what John Wesley would ha' said to it." " He'd ha' said 'twas a wicked extravagance to waste such a fine stone." " The mason'U take it back. Happen there'll be another Roger Boldero dead and neaped some day." " Very likely," sneered the veteran. " And also an Emma, Wife of the Above." " Hush ! " The little maid nudged him, wondering he should forget his own monition. " That has more sense than you ! " cried the Gaffer in high glee. "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings!" And drawing the astonished Jinny to his bristly beard, he kissed her lips with a hearty smack. Despite these half-understood discords. Jinny was very sorry to leave the stony-eyed veteran and the motley waterside. " Sometimes," she confided to the more sympathetic swivel eye, as her grandfather was harnessing Methusalem for their return, " I wish I had never come to earth at all." Again Dap was startled by her simplicity — ^had not Daniel been telling him what a useful little body she was in the business ? JINNY AT HER HOMES 87 " But then you'd never have had your grandfather — or me," he said, stroking her cheek. " I should have had God — and my angel mother ! " IV " Noa, arter she run away with her Boldero Oi'd never cross her doorstep, never," confessed the old carrier, picking up the story later, as she rode beside him on their day's work. He was getting so old now that he preferred to talk of twenty rather than of two years before, • and the veneer of book-education which his unexpected inheritance of the business had necessitated had fallen away, and he was speaking more and more in the idioms of his illiterate youth, curiously tempered at times by the magnificent English of his Bible. " But that was wicked ! " said Jinny decisively. She felt it wrong indeed that a father should thus cut off his daughter, but to have done this when that daughter was an angel (even if only in the making), still more when that daughter was her own mother, seemed to her confused consciousness the climax of iniquity. " Wicked ! The contrairy ! Oi'd taken my Bible oath never to set foot over her doorstep. So Oi dedn't have no chance, you see." Tinny was silenced. She herself had succumbed to an oath, and that indeed on a less awful book. " Arter she had lost two childer," he went on, " and the third got measles, she sent a man on hossback to beg me to take oflF the spell. Thought, d'ye see, dearie, that for her frowardness and disobedience Oi'd laid a curse on 'em all. Like one of our Methody preachers, the chap seemed, with all the texts to his tongue's tip, and pleaded that wunnerful he 'most made me believe Oi did have the evil eye. But though of course Oi hadn't no more to do wi' the deaths of your little brothers and sisters than a babe unborn — or you yourself, for the matter o' that, as was a babe unborn — Oi couldn't break my oath and goo and pretend to cure the wean, and so when the measles turned to pneumonia and it died, she got woundily distracted, and writ me two sheets sayin' as Oi was a child-murderer. That didn't worrit me no more than the child's death, seein' as the Lord does everything for the best, though Oi had to pay double 88 JINNY THE CARRIER on the letter. But one fine arternoon the preachin' chap comes again and says she'd been layin' paralysed-Hke for a month and wouldn't Oi come and forgive her afore she kicked the bucket ! " " Oh, Gran'fer ! " Jinny protested. '' Oi'm givin' you his words," said the Gaffer defensively. " At least that was the meanin', though 'haps he put it different, me not havin' his gift o' the gab. But bein' never a man to nuss rancour, when folks own up, Oi said that even ef Oi could forgive my darter, never could Oi enter a house harbourin' that rascal Boldero " " Oh, Gran'fer ! " she protested again. "There's no call to bristle up — he wasn't your father yet. * But Boldero ain't at home, he's off on a jarney,' says the chap. ' D'ye swear that ? ' says Oi. ' By God, Oi will,' says he. ' Then od rabbet, Oi'll goo,' says Oi." " But," urged Jinny, " if you had taken your oath " " You wait till Oi've broke it ! Oi knew 'twould be dead o' night by the time Oi got to Brandy Hole Crick and Oi made him swear too he wouldn't let on to a soul, partic'ler to that rascal Boldero or my sister Pegs and her cock-eyed son of a cocked hat ; and off we scuttles in a twinklin', him on his hoss and me on mme- " Methusalem ? " " Noa, Jezebel. Methusalem and you wasn't born yet ! " " Were we both in heaven, then ? " " Hosses don't come from heaven." " From where then ? " " From stables o' course. And you should see them two animals gallopin' like hell. 'Twas a race for the Crick. We went down this wery road like fleck and turned off by the smithy " " And who won ? " asked Jinny breathlessly. " He hadn't a chance, his hoss bein' that winded already, and him a heavyweight ; Oi had the best part of an hour with your mother afore he crossed the doorstep." " But how could you break your Bible oath ? " persisted Jinny. He chuckled. " Oi dedn't cross her doorstep. Oi'd sworn not to, and a Quarles never breaks even his plain word, bein' a forth- right family. 'Twas gettin' on to buU's-noon and like pitch, but Oi could see her bedroom above by the light in it, and up Oi climbs on Jezebel's back and lifted myself up hy the sill and got JINNY AT HER HOMES 89 my knee acrost it and pushed open the casement. Lord, how she screamed ! Up she flew from her dyin'-bed — ^no more paralysis or sich-like maggots and moUigrubs Oi warrant you ! '* And his chuckle broadened into a hearty laugh. Jinny was strangely reHeved. " Then she didn't die ! " " How could she die, silly, when you wasn't there yet ? Od rabbet, wasn't your feyther flabbergasted to see. her up and bobbish and me holdin' her hand ! " " My father ! But he was on a journey ! " " Yes, to me, the great ole sinner. You ain't guessed 'twas him with the gift o' the gab ? But no more did Daniel Quarles, never conceivin' a sailor on hossback and him swelled in the stomach with prodigal livin' since the day he diddled Pegs's husband and tried to diddle me out o' my darter. But Oi'll do him the justice to say he never did blab to the Daps about my comin' — and no more dedn't your mother." Jinny's hand sought her grandfather's, though through the whip-handle in his she could only secure a finger. " But why should you hide your goodness, Gran'fer ? " " 'Twasn't no goodness, only nat'ral, Emma bein' punished and chastised enough from on high. Why, if Pegs and her false- eyed mannikin'd a-got wind as we'd made it up, Emma and me and Roger, they'd ha' come to think they was in the right arter all, lettin' Emma be kidnapped by a furriner. x\nd that 'ud ha' been the last straw. As ill luck would have it Dap come knockin' there that wery dead o' night, he havin' just come home from a trip and heard from Pegs as her niece was dyin'. Oi shan't soon forgit the start Oi got at that knockin', all on us settin' so hearty at supper, and Emma in her scarlet dressin'-gownd, smart as a carrot. Noigh quackled Oi was, with the brandy gooin' the wrong way. Your feyther he goes to the door with his face full o' lobster and sputters through the crack as they'd got a new doctor who was operatin' on her and wery 'opeful." He chuckled again. '' And Oi count 'twas a better doctor than any in Brandy Hole Crick, for wery soon there was a new baby — though that died too, Oi'm thankful to say ! " "You aren't ! " The little listener loosed his finger. Ik " Yes, Oi am, dearie." He cracked his whip. " Otherwise ■Wouldn't Pegs ha' gone to her grave believin' it was my onfor- ^■nveness laid a spell on the tothers ? That's what womenkind ^Be. Same as when the Faith Healers got hold of her. Arter 90 JINNY THE CARRIER you was oiled and prayed over, they said 'twas want o' faith had killed all the tothers." . " Was I oiled and prayed over ? " " Well, you see when you come, poor Emma felt elders and oils was all there was left to try — there's a rare lot of you Peculiars down them parts and all the way to Southend, and they'd been gettin' round her like gulls round the plough — so the instant you started barkin' " " Barking ? " gasped the little girl. " You had the croup — so she turned Peculiar," he explained. " Like you," he added reproachfully. " And a wery dangerous thing to do, bein' as you might ha' died like the tothers. Did, she'd ha' been had up for child-murder — what she accused me of." " And why weren't the doctors had up, that didn't save all my little brothers and sisters ? " asked Jinny. " That's just how your mother used to argufy," he said angrily, flicking at poor Methusalem. " Turnin' everything topsy-tivvy, Oi says. And what was the result ? Two years arter you was prayed and oiled out o' croup, she was took herself with smallpox and wouldn't see a soul except elders and deacons and sich-like truck. Oi will say for your father though, that he was alius firm with her ; naught she could say could turn him from his Wesleyan principles, and when he caught her smallpox he had the doctor in like blazes and took all the medicine he could lay hands on. But Emma would stick to her own way — though she died of it, poor thing." " But didn't you tell me father died the same day as my angel inother ? " " Ain't that w^hy Oi come for you in my cart, bein' as the creditors sold up every thin' except the infected beddin' ? " " I know, Gran'fer," she interrupted. " But then didn't father die of his way just as much as mother of hers ? " " That's a nat'ral death when you die with a doctor," he maintained. " And were you there when they died ? " said the child after a mournful pause. His brow clouded obstinately. " How could Oi be, dearie, bein' as Oi'd taken my Bible oath ? " " You could ha' gone through the window ? " " With folks lookin' on and nusses about, as 'ud ha' thought JINNY AT HER HOMES 91 me loony. Why, 'twas impossible for me even to goo to the funeral." " Oh, Gran'fer ! " He looked fiercer, and poor Methusalem got another flick. " Wouldn't Pegs be there, she havin' her nat'ral feelin' ? Could Oi let her think Oi'd come 'cos Oi was sorry Oi hadn't made it up with my darter afore she died ? Nay, that 'ud a-been right-down deceit, bein' as there wasn't no ground for remorse. Happen he'd a-been at the churchyard too with his fish-eye — dedn't you see the stone he put up, drat his imperence, as ef Emma and Roger was aught of hisn — mebbe he'd a-preached to me as Oi ought to ha' forgiven my darter time she was still alive. 'Twas on the cards he'd say Oi'd broken your mother's heart, the blinkin' fool, he not knowin' 'twas me as raised her from the dead and had her goffling lobster with your feyther in a scarlet dressin'-gownd time he was knockin' at her door to make inquirations " " Yes, I've heard about that," she interrupted. " Who told you ? " he said suspiciously. ** There was only three of us inside the door and two's dead." " rou told me." " Me ! Oi never told a soul — Oi'll take my Bible oath." " You told me just a minute ago." " Ah ! " He was appeased. " That may be. But Oi never told you afore — Oi'll take my oath." " No, never before, Gran'fer." There was a pause of peace. Jinny was afraid to stir up the subject for weeks. But her little brain had been busy with the story, and finally taking advantage of a not unfriendly reference to Roger Boldero, she asked : " And was that the last time you saw father, when he was eating lobster with my angel mother in the dead of night ? " " Nay, nay, Oi seen lots of 'em both, afore Oi was shet out agen by molloncholy circumstances." " Ah 1 " Jinny brightened up. " And did you always go in by the window ? " " 'Twasn't in the house : 'twas on board the Tommy Devil. And that ain't got no doorstep." He laughed gleefully. ^'' Then did you go in by the porthole ? " asked Jinny, smiling. ^' Lord, missie, wherever did ye get that word ? Ah, Oi mind e now — you was aboard the Watch Wessel the time we buried 92 JINNY THE CARRIER poor Pegs. No, dearie, Oi just shinned up the ladder, loight as a bird with that liddle ole oath off my showlders. But Pegs and her one-eyed fool of a pardner never suspicioned naught, for Oi never would set foot on the Tommy Devil except she was layin^ up in coves and cricks where the Gov'ment turned its glass eye — he, he, he ! Not that Oi had much stomach for his etarnal brandy — you can't take a satisfactory swig o' that and keep your sea-legs — but your feyther he kept a cask o' beer special for me, and Emma she 'ad alius cold roasts and kickshaws to be washed down with it. Oi reckon Oi was on board with your parents nigh once a month." " Then what a pity they didn't invite you on board years before ! " " Ay, 'twas a pity. Only none of us 'ad never thought o' that way out." " Or that way in," added Jinny excitedly. "" Why, you might have gone to my mother the day after your oath ! " The Gaffer sighed. " Mebbe that 'ud only ha' ruinated your folks quicker. For Oi ain't been on the lugger a dozen times afore she went down and your feyther was picked up by the revenue cutter, bein' the onny toime he was took at sea — he, he, he ! Thussins there wasn't no place to meet in, and to goo over Emma's window-sill was too risky, for Pegs and her friends was alius spyin' around, and there wasn't a sharper eye in the Gov'ment than that dirty little Dap's— when he was oif duty." " Bnt why didn't they come to see you at Blackwater Hall ? " " Nay, they couldn't do that. That was in my oath too. Never shall they cross my doorstep, neither — Oi'd sworn it on the Book ! " " But why didn't they come in through our window ? There's hardly ever anybody on the common ? " " We never thought o' that, neither." He heaved a deeper sigh. " Ay, 'twas a pity," he repeated. That night Jinny caught his eye resting more than once on the vases of dried grass before their casement. " He was a bonkka man, your feyther," he observed at last. " Wery big-built, and it's a middlin' weeny window." JINNY AT HER HOMES 93 V Though Jinny winced at her grandfather's attacks on the Pecuhar Faith of her angel mother, she gfew in time to under- stand the odd magnanimity he had evinced in letting her go to Sunday-school with the Flynt family and pick up the doctrine. That her one surviving child should be brought up of the sect that had saved it, was, it transpired, poor Emma's dying request, as conveyed by his sister Susannah Dap to the unforgiving father, whose oath never to cross his daughter's doorstep still held when he drew up Methusalem at it after the double funeral, and found the house empty even of Jinny. ^, " ' Child-stealin', that's what it is,' Oi told Pegs when Oi boarded the Watch Wessel," he recounted once to his granddaughter in the cart. " ' Ain't you got enough o' your own ? ' says Oi. ' 'Twas through your havin' one too many that Jinny's here at all,' Oi says. ' Then,' says she, sharp as a needle, ' the more reason she's mine. You cut oil her mother,' says she, ' and now, Daniel, Jinny cuts you off.' * Not so fast, sister,' says Oi. ^ Whatever my conduct to Emma — and folks with stone eyes don't alius see through stone walls — the poor little brat haven't enough sense to cut me off, and Oi don't cut her t)fl, for Oi ain't got to wisit sins to the fourth generation, not bein' the Almighty, thank the Lord. That's my lawful property. Pegs,' Oi says, ' and same as you don't hand her over, Oi'll summons you and carry off two o' yourn in my cart — and what's more Oi'll ill-treat 'em cruel and hide 'em twice a day with my whip.' " '' You didn't mean it," said Jinny. " Dedn't Oi, though ? " " But they were your nephews and nieces ! " " The more right to wallop 'em. You should ha' seen Pegs climb down. She know'd well as Oi never broke my word, she bein' o' the same forthright family. Right up and down, Jo Perry, as the sayin' goos. Do to others as they'd like to do to vou — that's good Christian gospel. Pegs she went as pale as a white butterfly and hiked you out on deck in your little yaller frock lookin' as pritty as a gay. Lord, Oi reckonized you on the nail, though Oi'd never clapped eyes on you afore." " You'd never seen me before ? " cried Jinny, amazed. " How could Oi see you — you came arter the ^omtny Devil 94 JINNY THE CARRIER was at the bottom, and your feyther never got the dubs from the insurance company, bein' a flaw in the articles as swallered up all the rest of his cash in the lawsuit. But you'd got his ways and your mother's looks " — Jinny flushed with pleasure — '' and 'steddy cuttin' me off, you — ^h.a, ha, ha ! — made straight for my great ole beard and pulled out a great ole fistful." " Ought I to have cut it off ? " laughed Jinny happily. '' ' D'ye see that. Pegs,' says Oi, ' blood's thicker than water. Will vou come along o' your gran'fer, liddle maid ? ' says Oi." '^ And what did I say ? " asked Jinny breathlessly. " You dedn't say naught — you bust into tears, bein' as you thought Oi was the auctioneerer and you'd been sold with every- thing else, poor liddle ole orphan, and then Pegs catches hold o' you and says you was clinging to her. But Oi soon stopped that lob-loll, for Oi holds you over the rail and shows you Methusalem all prancin' in his pride, and ' Won't you go with your gran'fer's hoss, liddle maid ? ' says Oi." " And what did I say then ? " " You dedn't say naught, but in a twinklin' you jumps out o' Susannah's arms, scrambles down the accommodation ladder, and was rubbin' noses with Methusalem. And Oi count his was as damp as yourn, bein' as- he'd come without a stop." " Dear old Methusalem ! " And nothing would content Jinny but she must jump down and rub noses with him now, and again both noses were damp. But as Methusalem had seized the opportunity to come to a standstill, and Jinny, lost in shadowy memories, continued the caress ten seconds too long, the old rcarrie declared with sudden querulousness that he hadn't got time for loolishness, and that since he had burdened him- self with Jinny his business had gone " to rack and ruina- tion." " Peculiar, Pegs warned me, Oi'd have to bring you up," he added, as Jinny hastily clambered back to his side. " And Peculiar's the word for your gooin's on. Not that Methusalem's got more sense nor you. Oi count ef there w^as churches for cattle, he'd a-stoyled hisself Brother Methusalem and kicked over his drench." It was the Gaffer's instinctive conviction that faith went with the father. In thus yielding to Emma's dying breath he may, JINNY AT HER HOMES 95 apart from the pressure of death- bed wishes, have found vent for a lingering resentment against the seductive Boldero. Or was it that he had a lurking apprehension that the one child of Emma's which had at least survived prayer, might really be a testimony to the teaching, and as such entitled to share it ? Jinny at any rate had absolute faith in the doctrine. It rested on the fifth chapter of James as clearly as the big Bible containing that chapter rested on the chest of drawers. Once indeed when the Gaffer w^as unbearably mocking, she had been goaded to read him the basal verses : " Is any sick among you ? let him call for the elders of the church ; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord : " And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up : and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him." But the Gaffer had not collapsed as she expected. It only meant a spiritual saving, in case he died, Daniel Quarles maintained, unruffled : otherwise why speak of his sins being forgiven ? Moreover it didn't say you couldn't have a doctor, too. Crestfallen, the child wept in a corner and did not recover her spirits till at Sunday-school Elder Mawhood had supplied her for the first part of the Gaffer's contention with Mark xvi. 18 : " They shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover " ; while Martha, who was still at that date a Peculiar, comforted and eqL]ipped her against the second part with Asa, King of Judah, who (II Chronicles xvi) was diseased in his feet : "yet sought not to the Lord but to the physicians." The Lord's wishes in the matter were thus seen to be clearly in- dicated. " And the Lord's the same now as then, isn't He ? " Martha wound up crushingly. " You ask, your grandfather that." The courage to launch this counter-attack never came to her, however, and henceforward she and her grandfather lived in that kindly toleration of each other's folly which comes from holding the proofs of it, yet letting sleeping dogmas lie. What after all was the old man's obduracy. Jinny told herself, but part of the perverseness and obstinacy of age ? The fact that she now never needed either doctors or elders saved her from any personal problem. Such waverings as she had felt at fifteen were not towards Wesleyanism, but towards Martha's mushroom doctrine. 96 JINNY THE CARRIER The texts of this convert to the latest thing in creeds were cer- tainly staggering, and her scorn for the still unconverted, sublime. *' We don't take some bits o' the Word and leave others." That was an argument not easy to answer, and the bits now exhumed in support of Christadelphianism by the tireless discoverer of King Asa were ever accumulating. Fortunately Jinny was far too busy for religious discussions or doubts, and the " angel mother," softly hovering, made a restful background for the one true Faith. VI And a sensational episode in the history of the local Brethren came to strengthen the sect as well as to add to the number of Jinny's homes : came too, at the very crisis when the impossibility of carrying the Carrier with her through the coming winter threatened to leave her stranded alone at " The Black Sheep " during the midday rest at Chipstone. It would have been easy enough in summer to sit in her cart in the courtyard munching her bread and cheese, while Methusalem was lost in his nosebag, and clients were coming with commissions, but the parcel-shed had no stove, and to wait in the bar or taproom or even the parlour — all alike masculine haunts where one could hardly dump the " scarecrow " or swain-chaser beside one — was not a pleasant prospect. Jinny's and the Brotherhood's good fortune began — such are the ways of Providence — ^with the death of the landlord. Mother Gander — so everybody called Jeff Gander's buxom spouse — had fought like a lioness to save him. " Not a doctor for miles around," as the paralysed old Bundock put it trium- phantly from his bed-of-all-news, " but she carted him over, and set 'em all consulting and quarrelling. There was two from London, one of 'em a bart, and all wasted. Charlie the potboy, as he was then, feelingly told my boy, the postman, that he could ha' set up a public-house with the fees. Not that I approve o' public-houses, but leastways they give you more waluable drinks than doctors does. And when poor Jeff was gone, and Mother Gander was carrying on like crazy, comes the Parson and tells her 'tis the Lord's will. " ' Then if it's the Lord's will,' says she, like lightning, for she was always quick in the uptake, ' why do you run down the Peculiars as just begs the Lord to alter His will, instead o' throw- JINNY AT HER HOMES 97 ing their hard-earned gold to the doctors ? ' That was the way her eyes opened to the Truth, and she learnt how to save her soul as well as her money." The Peculiars, they often lamented, were " not strong enough " in Chipstone : they looked yearningly " over the water " — to Rochford where the great Banyard himself was prophesying ; or to Woodham where no less than five hundred Brethren and Sisters fevered themselves in a hall too small for the throngs that sought admission. But their own meetings, though, if we may trust Caleb, " noice things were brought out," were numerically disheartening. The capture of " The Black Sheep " — a hostelry to which all social roads radiated — was thus an event of considerable importance. Nevertheless the dismay of the Gongregationalists, of whose community Mother Gander was a fallen pillar, was not counter- poised in jubilation by the Brethren. For if a stronghold had been captured, the devil had not been dispossessed. Mother Gander doffed her gold chain, but Sister Gander gave no sign of emptying her liquor into the gutters, and to be proud of a con- vert against whose establishment you have to admonish one another is not simple. The Peculiars managed it, however, after some heart-searching. It was true old Bundock had been wont to make great play with Banyard's declaration — universally admired as a gem of humour — " If you want to get me to a public-house, you'll have to take a horse and hook me." But after all. Elder Mawhood pointed out, " The Black Sheep " was far more than a public-house : as the headquarters for the mail- coach it was part of the constitution of the country, and it was better for the farmers to eat their ordinary under a God-fearing roof — even if they would drink with it — than for the profits of [ their custom to go to a rival house which would contribute no farthing to the Brethren's treasury. It was Brother Flynt, however, who supplied the finest soothing-powder. " Oi used to [ condemn myself," he said, ''but 'twasn't no good. You must ; drink when you're harvestin'. Don't, you'll be drippin' as you I: goo." If he did not drink now that his harvesting days were ^ over, that did not prove other drinkers were wicked. You had to consider circumstances. And playing the Sancho Panza still more unexpectedly, he hinted that there was such a thing as over-zeal. " They used to call me a Banyard as a revilin' word, them as made fun of us, but to tell the truth Oi've never got out o' my warm bed in the middle o' the noight to pray as he exhorted 98 JINNY THE CARRIER — ^leastways, not in winter. We've got to be thankful for Sister Gander, and not expect her to goo all the way at the start. She don't want to lose her business as well as her husband." But it appeared that Mother Gander did not want to go without a husband either. She suddenly, and before her year of mourning was up, married Charley Mott, the aforesaid potboy, not half her age, and this was a fresh upset for the Brethren, modified only by the conversion of Charley. The Congrega- tionalists took the opportunity to give the couple " rough music," and the whok neighbourhood joined in with kettles and pokers. Brother Bundock from his omniscient bed at first proclaimed the scandal as a divine chastisement on his Brethren for having failed to " admonish " her to give up purveying " beer and 'bacca " — he himself would have dared it, he declared without fear of contradiction, had he only had his legs — but finally, when the storm blew over, he would relate with gusto how she had weathered it. " What with hating us and hating her marriage and hating the new landlord with his jackanip's airs, they quit her, nearly all her customers, and them as was faithful looked askance at her between the drinks. So she oils with her silks and on with her apron and vip with her sleeves, and back to the kitchen ! She'd been poor Jeff's cook, you know, in the long, long ago, and 'twas her steak and kidney puddens and her gravies and sauces that he married, and now she was back at the old game. WTiether 'twas partly to escape the sour looks that she burrowed in her kitchen or whether the whole thing was female artfulness I don't pretend to say, but in two months she'd cooked 'em all back again. Don't come in good time, you couldn't get a chair at the ordinary for all the tips at Chipstone, and my boy, the postman, he told me he hears everybody joking over the rhubarb tart and saying as the Lord's will is best. And she never come out o' that kitchen till she'd cooked it all down." It was during the dark interval that Jinny and Sister Mott alias Mother Gander were first drawn together, the girl being summoned to the kitchen to receive instructions for such pur- chases from local tradesmen as the lady-hermit found indis- pensable yet dreaded to make in person. The fact that the little carrier was of the despised sect cemented the relationship. Jinny passed her midday respite in the warm kitchen, even sharing the cook's meal. And when at last Sister Mott resumed JINNY AT HER HOMES 99 her blue silk bodice and faced her tradesmen and her customers, new and old, the run of the kitchen and the freedom of the joint remained gratuitous to .the lucky Jinny. Here under the great bacon-hung oak beams of the ancient apartment, before a huge fire mirroring itself rosily in the copper pans and skillets, she could sit thawing her toes beside the clanking smokejack, while the v\dnd howled through the arch of the sleety courtyard. CHAPTER IV WILL ON HIS WAY Permit me oj these unknown lands f inquire, Lands never tilVd, where thou hast wandering been. And ail the marvels thou hast heard and seen : Do tell me something oJ the miseries felt In climes where travellers freeze, and where they melt. Crabbe, " Tales of the Hall." The coach from railhead to Chipstone was an hour and a half late, and not all the flourish of its horn as it thundered into the courtyard of " The Black Sheep '•' could disguise the fact. Not that it was the fault of the coach : it had waited for the mail train, and this, for those parts, parvenu monster had found an obstruction on the line, and was helpless to go round it, as the driver and the guard complacently pointed out. Their glory and their tips were shrunk like their circuit — unchanged along the short route, they could no longer prod the slumbering traveller with insinuatory farewells : they knew themselves, these Chipstone worthies, a last lingering out-of-the-way survival of the old order, doomed like the broad coaching road and the old hostelries to decay ; already they had seen the horned guard decline in places to the omnibus cad, even as the ancient " shooter " of highwaymen had sunk to the key-bugler ; yet they preserved the grand manner before the revolution that was deposing them — the Tom Pratt and Dick Burrage of a generation of travellers — and while dispensing their conversation like decorations and drinking your health as a concession, they retailed with gloomy satisfaction every railway colHsion and holocaust, as though coaches never overturned, and declared the English breed of horses would be ruined. And when certain lines set up third-class carriages they denounced the cruelty of packing WILL ON HIS WAY loi the poor in roofless, seatless trucks, as though they themselves had never brought into port frost-bitten peers or dames sodden through their oilskin umbrellas. But to-day " Powerful warrum " was the grumble of the passengers, even of those on the roof, the majority being — thus early in May — still smothered in box-coats ; as for the unfor- tunates compressed inside, who had likewise not yet cast a clout, and had similarly mistrusted the sunshiny spell with which that pouring April had ended, they mopped their brows and cursed the fickle British climate. But though the sun had suddenly become hot enough to sour milk, it could not sour the temper of the bronzed young man — his face nigh as ruddy as his hair — who sat on the box-seat and conversed with Tom Pratt almost as an equal. Even the long delay on the line had left him unruffled, thanks largely to the blue-eyed girl in the train who before his clean-shaven cosmopolitan air had shown signs of tenderness, and whose address his purse now held — more precious than a fiver. Verily a pleasant change after the Eveless back- blocks of Canada. And the idea of calling this " warrum " ! He smiled to think of the hells he had known — Montreal with mosquitoes, New York in a damp heat. Why, this couldn't even melt a man's collar. And how refreshing was the trimness of the Essex countryside—* the comfortable air of immemorial cultivation — after the giant untidiness of the New World. How soothing these long, green, white-sprinkled hedgerows with their ancient elms, this old, historic highway with thatch and tile, steeple and tower, after the corduroy roads of round logs or the muddy, dusty, sandy tracks. How adorable these creeper-covered cottages after log- cabins in backwoods ; rotting floors on rotten sleepers and the mud paste fallen out of the walls. He forgot that it was predsely this that he had fled from nearly a decade ago — this dead, walled-in life, so petty and pietistic — and he congratulated himself afresh on the wisdom of that abrupt resolution to sell his clearing to a second-hand pioneer and to farm at home with the profits. His clothes alone would have kept him in good humour. Not only were the heavier in what he had learned to call his trunk, but those on his back were the first he had ever had made to measure. And they were made '• too — -I'ke rthe tieckcloth and shawl and fal-lals he was bringing tb hi3 'pa-reiltS " from America " 102 JINNY THE CARRIER — by the world-famous firm of " Moses & Son " (opposite Aldgate Church), whose imposingness was enhanced in his eyes by finding it — on the Saturday he first hied thither — haughtily aloof : a blank wilderness of shutters in a roaring world, with no gleam through their chinks from the seven hundred gas- burners. But he had finally stormed the " Private Hall," toiling — as invited by rhyme — up " the stairs of solid oak," and had gained the heights " where orders were bespoke," and there — in that rich-carpeted " showroom with the giant chandelier," in a setting of Corinthian columns, sculptured panels, and arabesque ceilings — dark enchanters with tape-measures like serpents over their shoulders hati made obeisance to him and enfolded him with their coils. Even his billycock hat verified the bardic boast : There's not another Hat-mart in the town Which casts such lustre on the human crown. Left to himself he would have liked a wideawake, but that arbiter elegantiarum^ the small boy, he was warned, had not quite acquiesced in that. If it was not a coat of many buttons that he now sported, it was scrimp enough to show off the fine lines of his figure ; for the movement towards ample waistcoats and wide trousers was not yet encouraged by his Aldgate mentors, and pockets on the hips had been conceded him with reluctance. In his large American trunk reposed a still grander suit of Sunday sable, though he had shied at a frock coat, and was glad to learn from these hierophants of the mode that morning jackets were no longer confined to the stable-yard or the barrack-room, but were permissible even in the country house — and there was no question but Frog Farm was that. He had already worn his blacks once, on his visit to the Great Exhibition, and they made, he found, a distinct difference to the policemen in top-hats whose guidance he sought in the labyrinths of the metropolis. The delay in this visit to the Exhibition — the goal of his journey to London — had turned out an advantage, he felt, giving him time for these measured elegancies. If he had been unable to be in at the opening, as he had .grandly designed in Canada when ignorant that this involved guineas and season- tickets, he had managed to squeeze for a glimpse of the Queen outside if :not' inside the P^rk^ and the first five-shilling day — after all, only' the- fduft!>-Myas grandeur enough for a whilom WILL ON HIS WAY 103 ploughboy and cabin-boy. Although nine ten-pound notes made a warm waistcoat-lining, he was not under the illusion that he had returned with more than a competence. One would have thought London itself a Greater Exhibition to a young man who had never seen it before : especially London at carnival with its colossal crowds swollen by visitors from all countries in all complexions and costumes : London with its 'numberless gay 'buses (plying mostly to Hyde Park), its swifter gliding cabriolets of the new pattern invented by Mr. Hansom, and the more stolid procession of four-wheeled clarences, not to mention the fashionable and civic carriages with the scarlet-and- gold pomp of flunkeys and outriders : London with its countless curious street-criers, costermongers, ballad-mongers, watercress sellers, muffin and hot-pie men, birdcage dealers, tract-peddling Lascars in white robes, and vendors of everything from corn- salves to speeches on the scaffold ; blowsy, rowdy London that turned into a dream-city when those strange figures with rods glided through the twilight, flecking the long, grey streets with points of fire. But though Will Flynt was not insensitive to these fascinating phenomena, and even rode about recklessly in the cabriolets at eightpence a mile, yet London had not the spell to hold him. Only the Great Exhibition had drawn him across the Atlantic. While awaiting impatiently for the five-shilling day, he duly did the Tower and the Zoo (sixpence extra for Mr. Gould's humming- birds in the twenty-five glass cases), paid twopence to go into St. Paul's, and a shilling to see the Great Globe in Leicester Square, patronized Phelps at Sadler's Wells, and the horses at xA.stley's, had a peep at Vauxhall, enjoyed " Rush, the Norwich Murderer," at Madame Tussaud's, and submitted the boots these operations begrimed to the red-coated shoeblacks of the Ragged Schools — London's new word in philanthropy. But though he liked the quarter in which his quaint galleried hotel, " The Flower Pot," was situated, with the Spitalfields Market and the tall old houses of the silk-weavers, whose vast casements with their little panes rose story on story, he was no sooner through with the visit to the Exhibition than without a day's delay — as promised in that letter to Martha — he took train and coach to Little Bradmarsh. Beholding him thus on the County Flyer hurrying towards Frog Farm, after only a single visit to^the stupendous spectacle, 104 JINNY THE CARRIER one may suspect that he did not know his own heart as well as he imagined. But he himself had no doubt of the magnet he obeyed, and he had found on his boat not a few rich Canadians — and the Dominion already boasted four thousand carriage-folk — - who confessed to have yielded to the same irresistible attraction. There was indeed little else talked of on the voyage : even the wonders of the boat itself — a new Yankee iron and screw steamer of nearly two thousand tons and quite five hundred horse-power that brought them to Liverpool in eleven days from Halifax, and had spittoons and wedding-berths like the Yankee river- steamers, and to see which the Liverpudlians had flocked with their sixpences — paling before the world-marvel awaiting them in London. And London itself was talking of it no less : for once London was staggered. And if London was thus shaken, how much more the provinces and the world at large ? Did not indeed the flags of all nations wave over the great glass building, whose mere material would have been enough to set the globe agog, even if it had not contained contributions from every corner of civilization except Germany, which in that antediluvian age figured in the catalogue only as " The States of the ZoUverein." What wonder if with all the excursions and alarums and millen- nial visions that attended its birth, the Press reeking with paragraphs, poems, discussions, wrangles, skits, prophecies, and forebodings, crowds equal to the population of provincial towns gathered at the Park to watch it rise, and to stare at the end- lessly inrolling vans and the sappers and miners at work in their uniforms. One M.P. — military and moustachio'd — won the immortality of the comic prints by fulminating against the invasion of Freethinking foreigners who would pillage London and ruin the honour of British womanhood : more sober minds feared the Chartist mobs and the Red Republicans : even the Catholics, already flaunting their cardinals and ringing their unhallowed church bells, would profit by the Continental wave. The House of Lords resounded with protests and petitions against the profanation of the Park, and apprehensions as to the fate of the building erected therein were equally rife : the great glass roof would be splintered by hailstones, the walls would be overturned by the wind, the galleries would collapse under the swarming multitudes, and Anarchism would seize its opportunity amid the dismantled treasures of the globe. But one unfailing WILL ON HIS WAY 105 factor was on the Exhibition's side : the scheme was attacked by the Times, And so Paxton's building rose steadily till the great day when through an avenue of three-quarters of a million spectators the Queen and " that Queen's indefatigable husband " — as a panegyrist of the period put it — drove to declare it open to the elect thirty thousand who had already found it so, while through glittering nave and transept, with their fountains, trees, flowers, and statues, the " Hallelujah Chorus " thundered from a thousand voices, two hundred orchestral instruments, and a dozen giant organs ; and the millennial hope welled up in a grand climax of universal emotion. And hoary grandsires should hereafter tell — proclaimed the poet of the Great Catalogue — ^what in this famous century befell : grey Time should chronicle the victories gained, since Mercy o'er the world and Justice reigned : W^hat time the Crystal Hall sent forth her dove And signed the League of Universal Love. But although our Canadian pioneer had thus ample excuse for the unrest that forbade him to miss this Messianic spectacle, it was not — even he would have admitted — the Great Exhibition which had first unsettled his stolid labours. That oscillation had been communicated some two years earlier, and by a shock that had set the New World rattling even more noisily than the Old was shaken by the Great Exhibition. The discovery of gold in California was a seismic vibration that depopulated Eastern towns, shot sober lawyers into wagons, sent clergymen flying along mule-trails, swept timid tradesmen across the foodless and robber-haunted Rocky Mountains, whirled schoolmasters fifteen I thousand miles round Cape Horn, and dumped them all waist- high in auriferous mud and shimmering water, to be fed by Indian squaws. It was under the lure of the Californian legend that Will had originally looked about for a purchaser of his cleared acres. But by the time the farm was off his hands, the .glamour of easy gold had faded, and with a sum in his pockets mfficient for a little respite, life seemed suddenly larger than bcre, and he found himself possessed by a strange craving riot :o be away from the old country in that year of years — the year ►f the Great Exhibition. io6 JINNY THE CARRIER II Chipstone had seemed strangely shrivelled as the County Flyer tore through it ; the High Street unexpectedly narrow and the great, gorgeous shops, against whose panes he had flattened his youthful nose, curioiftsly small and drab, with diminutive sun-bHnds ; yet the quaint, blistered bulge of the old timbered houses was fascinatingly as he remembered it, and when the spirited quartet of tinkling steeds slackened under the archway crowned by the ironwork sign of " The Black Sheep," he saw through a warm dimness that the ancient inn still gave on the stable-yard with this same Tudor bulge, and that the courtyard itself was little less rambling than the picture he carried in his memory. There was the same mass-meeting of cocks crowing on the same golden dunghill, the same litter of barrels, boxes, baskets, and parcels of laundry-work, while the gardens of the whitewashed old cottages backing the black- tarred stables and cartsheds seemed caught up as incongruously as ever in the horsey medley. Why, there was the very shed which had sheltered the farm-wagon the Sunday he was to drive it to Harwich. And there — yes, actually there on the same doorstep, under the same hanging ironwork lamp, was Ostler Joe, the shambling, bottle-nosed hunchback, whose figure — in its reassurance of stability — struck him as positively beautiful, and whose head seemed aureoled by the mist. But where was that more expected face, where was the hair-swathed visage of Caleb Flynt ? Brushing the mist from his eyes, he looked anxiously round the seething, sun-drenched courtyard. " Hullo, Joey," he said at last. " Wouldn't my dad wait ? " It was a pleasant voice with something of a twang : but the twang was no longer local. " Oi dunno your feyther from Adam," said Joe cheerfully, mopping his face with his shirt-sleeve. " Yes, you do — old Mr. Flynt — Frog Farm." Joe shook his head — it seemed no longer a saint's. " Oi never heerd nobody mention Frog Farm nowadays. It's a dead place.'^ He shambled off on his many tasks with an aliveness that tightened the contraction Will felt at his heart. His father dead ? " But look here, Joe ! " He pursued the factotum. " You remember me — little Will Flynt ? " " Can't say as Oi does — moind that box now." WILL ON HIS WAY 107 " It's my box— r-and I wrote to dad to meet me with a trap. Guess he got tired of fooHng around." " There's warious traps." The hunchback waved a busy hand. " No — he's not here. And how am I to get my trunk home ? " " Bradmarsh carrier goos at three — you're in kick." He heaved a parcel now into a driverless tilt-cart, where a little white dog boisterously mounted guard. " That's 'er ! " he said. " Take you too if you're smart." " Daniel Quarles ! " A fresh wave of reassurance radiated from that old household word on the familiar tilt. So the venerable carrier was still plying, how then could the compara- tively juvenile Caleb be extinct ? The May Day ribbons not removed from Daniel's horse, and making it a snow-white steed from fairyland, dispelled the last funereal images. Surely had Caleb Flynt really died, old Quarles would never have left so lively a topic untapped -with Joey. But here Will's meditations were agreeably cut short by another vision from auld lang syne- — the laced mob-cap and blonde kiss-curls of Mother Gander, to whom Dick Burrage was gloating over the train's misadventure. There were pouches under the blue eyes, and no gold chain now heaved mth her blue silk bosom : otherwise she was her old comely self. But fresh from his grand hotel in Spital Square, Will no longer regarded her as an awful and aristocratic personage, able to eat meat at every meal. An easy accost and inquiry about the old Flynts of Frog Farm brought him soothing information. Lord bless his soul, people living a healthy life like that never died — unless they took medicine. She couldn't say they had been to chapel lately — indeed she had gathered from the postman that the old wife had taken up with some New Jerusalem crankiness. " But you'll find the Bradmarsh carrier in the parcel-shed — that black one. You ask her ! " And with a wave towards the arch she turned again to the beaming Dick Burrage. Will thought the " her " referred to a chambermaid who was just passing, but he saw no need of such guidance — the parcel- shed was obvious enough. His mind was occupied with the odd fact that Mother Gander had apparently become a sister in the spirit to his own father, while his mother had moved on to another eccentric doctrine. Ah well, changes were bound to' come. Not everybody could be of the same immutable granite as himself. io8 JINNY THE CARRIER He found the parcel-shed deserted save for a young girl who, busily heaping up parcels into the willing arms of Joey, did not even look up. Somewhat depressed by the chapel-memories the landlady had conjured up, he stood a moment, absently watching the operation, and wondering why the agreeably pretty creature should be dispatching so many parcels — wedding-cake came into his mind, though the oddly varying shape of the parcels was not consistent with the hypothesis. He would willingly have loitered —the chapel-cloud was dissipating — but the carrier was clearly not here, and, as the church clock opposite was booming three, he was afraid old Daniel might be starting off without him, so he hurried back to the pranked and pawing steed, only to find himself derided and defied by the little dog, which he now observed was also adorned with, a May Day bow. And then he remembered he was hungry. The block on the line had robbed him of his dinner, and he wondered whether to go off with that grim Gaffer Quarles would be so enjoyable as walking — after a square meal. No, why should he be thus whisked oil ? Why not a leisurely spread at " The Black Sheep " preceded by another glimpse of the girl in the shed, and then a long stroll home by the dear old field-paths, through Plashy Walk and Swash End, dry enough, doubtless under this sun ? Besides, his slow old parent might be on the way after all — there was no certainty the carrier with his compulsory windings and detours would not miss him. Yes, it would be kinder to his father to give him another hour or so. " The May Queen " he murmured to the air, brooding over Methusalem's belated ribbons. Yes, they would surely have made her that ; though perhaps the old custom was no longer kept up. True, she hadn't the blue eyes or the plumpness of the girl in the train, and was not stately enough for a queen — though of course you couldn't really tell how Victoria looked outside her royal carriage. But then you couldn't imagine the blue-eyed minx in a royal carriage at all : you placed her smiling behind bars, manipulating beer-handles. " It's all right," Joey startled him by announcing, toppling his tower of parcels into the cart. " Oi've made inquirations. The old Flynt chap be aloive and kickin'." " Oh, thank you." Will's last shade of uneasiness vanished. He slipped a sixpence into Joey's palm. " Put my box in — I'm not going myself — say it's for Frog Farm." And he jostled back to WILL ON HIS WAY 109 the parcel-shed, through the bustle of boxes and jangling of bells, barging into other carriers from other circuits, stumbling over dogs that yelped, tangling himself in the whip of a postboy who was frantically buttoning his waistcoat, and nearly run over by the great coach just wheeling round. He was more disappointed than surprised when he at last reached the shed to find it empty, though far fuller than before of mere people. Still, there was always dinner. Ill But dinner was not always. " No, I'm afraid it's all gone," said Mother Gander. She was blocking the way at the foot of the stairs, where a painted hand under pendent stag-horns directed you upwards to the " Parlour " — " The Black Sheep " would have none of your new-fangled " Coffee Rooms " — and Will Flynt, sniffing up the odours of beer, sand, tobacco, gin, snuff, and tallow like an ambrosial air, felt a further elation in the thought of its being now a beckoning not a monitory hand : to ascend to those unexplored heights, mysteriously grand to the boy, seemed symbolic of his rise in life. " But haven't you got ^w^thing ? " His face fell. " Nothing fit to offer," said the landlady. " But I'm hungry — and I've got to wait here." " You're not staying for the night ? " she queried. " I may," he said, to encourage her to produce some food. " Oh, but we haven't a room empty." He reddened. Was it possible she recognized the hobnailed lad of yore, refused to serve him or to allow him up her aristo- cratic stairs ? " You haven't a room empty ? " he repeated incredulously. " There's a poky garret," she said, " and another man would have to go through it to his bedroom, and he goes to bed very late and gets up very early. But even our best rooms are stuffy and our corridors are that dingy people are always tumbling against the brooms the maids leave about ; when they're not tumbling down the stairs. Look how steep they are ! The whole house is badly built — it was never meant for an hotel — and the service is disgraceful." Will, overwhelmed, stammered out deprecation of her abuse. The inn was most picturesque, he urged, and it was not the fault no JINNY THE CARRIER of the house if the coach was late ; as for himself a crust of bread and cheese would suffice to stay his pangs. " Well, go up and see what you can get," she rejoined scep- tically, moving aside. Relieved to find the barrier raised, he ascended the dog-legged staircase ; his boyish awe resurging. Alas ! even the landlady's disparagement had not prepared him for this dishevelled scene — dirty plates and greasy knives and forks and tobacco-stoppers and sloppy pewter pots that had stamped bleary rims on the fly-haunted table-cloth, and a waiter in his shirt-sleeves dining, like a gentleman, off the ruins. " Wegetables and pastry is hoff ! ' murmured this disturbed gentleman. Will was retreating — bread and cheese at the bar amid the glinting bottles and shining beer-handles seemed more appetizing — but the waiter had sprung up, his mouth still masticating but his coat conjured on, and had him fixed instanter on a Windsor chair at a clean little sun-splashed table by a side window that was refreshingly open and gave on the cheery courtyard. A cut of the devastated joint, strong mustard pickles, a hunch of good bread, a pint of porter and the freedom of the cheese to follow, soon dispelled the dismalness of the room; an effect to which the attendant magician contributed more literally by his great trick of vanishing crumbs and disappearing plates, including his own half-eaten meal. How good it was, this cold roast beef of old England, how equally redolent of the dear old country those hunting pictures on the low wainscoted walls, with all their gay bravado. There were four of them : ^he Meet, Breaking Cover, Full Cry, The Death ; all populous with spirited pink gentlemen and violently animated dogs and horses, culminat- ing in the leading dog tearing the fox, and the leading gentleman waving his tall hat in rapture. He quaffed voluptuously at his frothing pewter pot. To the Queen of the May — ay, why not drink to her ? " How's Mr. Gander ? " he asked irrelevantlv, with a sudden image of the bull-necked landlord and his massive gold scarfpin. The waiter — on the point of disappearing — materialized himself again, and stared at the questioner. *' He ain't anyhow," he gasped at last. " At least that's a secret 'twixt him and his Maker." " Dead ? " It was Will's turn to gasp. Could so much gross vitality be extinct, or even rarefied ? WILL ON HIS WAY iii " Dead and married over. She's Mrs. Mott now, though the old customers will keep on with the Mother Gander, just as I have to bite my tongue not to call her husband Charley." He lowered his voice. " He was the potboy once." Will whistled. " What women are ! " was in that knowing note. How pleasant it was thus to discuss — with beer and pickles ! — life and death and the sex. " Yes, sir — the potboy, and busting with pride if I let him hand up the plates at the Bov/ling Club dinner." A sigh accented the cruel change. " You've been away, sir, I presoom." " Half round the world," said Will with airy inaccuracy. " But why didn't you go in for her ? " " Me ! With my old woman ! Besides / wasn't going to turn Peculiar — no, not for ten ' Black Sheep.' You've heard o' Peculiars, sir ? " " Ye-es." A cayenne pod in the pickles made him cough. " Thick as blackberries about these parts — and as full of texts as the bush of prickles." The waiter's voice sank again. " She made poor Charley into one of 'em. He's got to go to chapel three times every Sunday and once on Wednesday." " Poor chap ! " There was sympathy as well as mockery in Will's tone. " But can you tell me " — ^he had a sudden remem- brance— " why she runs down this place so ? Is it her Peculiar conscience ? " " Ah ! I've heard others arx that too. My opinion ain't worth a woman's tip, but I can't help fancying it's more defiance than conscience. Time was, you see, sir, folks kept away, and it sort o' soured her. I don't want your rotten custom, she as good as says to all and sundry. Take it to landladies who've arxed your permission to marry. And so they come all the more, sir, yes, and cringing to have rooms, and pays her whatever she asks. There was lots o' grumbling in the old days : now you never hear a complaint, except from herself. My stars, the money she's making ! But I can't say I envy Charley — not even when he bullies me. Although in marriage if it's not one cross it's another, ain't it, sir ? Or perhaps you're one o' the lucky ones." " I'm not married at all." " That's what I mean." And the waiter sighed again. " Got all you want, sir ? " " Everything, thank you — not wanting a wife." 112 JINNY THE CARRIER His laugh, gurgling away into his pewter pot, evoked only a deeper sigh, on which the waiter seemed wafted without. IV Simultaneously — through the opening or closing door — some- thing was wafted within. Our complacent young man at his place in the sun, with the glow of freedom at his heart and of porter at his throat, was startled by something leaping on his knees, which, autom.atically fended and thrust away, was felt as clinging claws scraping down his new trousers. Coughing and spluttering, and with the beery glow changing to a choke, he perceived that it was the carrier's little white dog, the very same that had warned him off its master's goods ; unmistakable by its pink bow. So the doddering patriarch had not yet started, he thought lazily, though he must now be back in his cart or his canine sentry would not have gone off for a farew^ell prowl. He helped himself to another cut of beef, and his thoughts wandered from Mother Gander to a builder's widow he had known in a Montreal boarding-house, a widow to whom he could certainly have played the Charley had he cared to go so far. He seemed to hear her foolish whimpering the day he left for the backwoods, but he became aware that it was only the carrier's dog whining. It was begging so prettily on its hind legs, looking so appeaUng in its pink bow, that he was soon feeding it rather than himself, and morsel after morsel fell to it, each gulped down with such celerity that from the creature's instantly renewed and unchang- ingly pathetic posture of supplication, an absent-minded man would have doUbted if he had fed the brute at all. But finally the young man pushed away his cheese-plate, and dropping with plenary satisfaction upon a horsehair and mahogany arm-chair that stood by the empty grate, he lit his cherrywood pipe with a brimstone match and followed his springtide fancies in clouds of his own making. Thus the second pounce of the dog on to his knees found him acquiescent, even caressing, and with a beatific grunt the animal curled itself up as to an seon of repose. Then a horn sounded, and with a convulsive start the creature was off his lap and scratching and yapping at the closed door. Will, too, had a moment of wild wishing he had engaged a seat in the cart — the thought of walking in this heat was no longer alluring — but it was equally unimaginable to get up now and WILL ON HIS WAY 113 rush like the animal. Besides, he hadn't paid his bill, he remem- bered not discontentedly. Meanwhile the distracted little dog had darted back to the window and leapt on the sill, but it was obviously cowering before the depth of the jump. He was feeling he really must get up and do its will, when to the satis- faction of the slothful man and the bliss of the active beast, the door opened, and like a streak of lightning the white figure had forked across the room and vanished. He turned his head lazily to the window to see if it would catch its cart, but was only in time to see the tail-board with his own box disappearing through the archway, pursued by Joe with a belated bundle. Then the new-comers claimed his languorous attention. V Strictly speaking, there was only one new-comer and he was hanging back at the sight of the London-tailored guest, being himself in moleskins and bent and fusty, though Mother Gander was clearly beckoning him forward. " The' gentleman's just going," she said sweetly. Will knew not whether to be drowsily pleased at the status he had achieved in his own neighbour- hood, or sluggishly wrathful at this renewed attempt to be rid of him. " Plenty left," he observed encouragingly, puffing im- movably. " Oi reckon, sister, Oi'll feed in the taproom." The voice sent strange vibrations of resentment through Will's being, and particularly through his nostrils, where a mysterious smell of aniseed was called up, whether from memory or the actual moleskins he could not make out. " You'll do no such thing," said Mother Gander sharply. " It's less trouble here. Remember what James says." Who was James — was her husband not Charley ? — ^Will was wondering dreamily. " Chapter two, warse two — Oi take your p'int," answered this odd figure, whose wizened face with the straggling whiskers seemed loathsomely familiar. But though the beady eyes under the moleskin cap were turned for a moment full on his, remem- brance stirred but feebly through his after-dinner lethargy, and it was not till the intruder had sinuously and softly skirted the great dining-table and begun solemnly turning the faces of the H 1 14 JINNY THE CARRIER hunting pictures to the wall, like naughty school-children, that he was dully conscious of the secret of his abhorrence. There — on the very first day of his return — was Joshua Mawhbod, the button-snipping villain of his story ! Mother Gander stood by silent, as one properly censured. Neither did she protest when, slashing a giant gobbet oflE the beef, he carried it on the point of the carving-knife to Will's mustard- strewn meat-plate, and bearing the same with its dirty knife and fork to the remotest corner of the table, fell to with audible enjoyment. " I'll send you your milk. Deacon," she said, turning to leave the room." " Don't copy Jael too far," he answered, with a grimace. " Copy who ? " asked Mother Gander, mystified. " Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite — her as killed Sisera. Like me he asked for water, and, like you, she gave him milk. But she meant to nail him like a stoat." " Me murder you ! " said Mother Gander with a scandalized air. But she was clearly impressed by his erudition. " 'Tis onnymyfun. But you look up Judges, chapter fower. They're beacons to us — they old Hebrews and Hebrewesses — beacons." " Would you rather not have the milk ? " Mother Gander was still a little puzzled. " 'Tain't for me to refuse a sister's kindness. And the best way to repay her is to take it with rum. Bein' as there's a wisitor, the leetlest drop o' rum in it, to show Oi don't howd with your rebukers in that regard. Send the bottle separate, to be plain to all beholders." " And send me another pint of porter, please," added Will. He felt he must justify his stay even as the Deacon must justify his drink. The ecclesiastical preferment that had come to Eld^r Mawhood amused him — ^his boyish resentment faded suddenly, and the respectable rat-catcher — after all, the motor-impulse of his fortunes — now loomed through a cloud of kindly indulgence ; even touched with the glamour of early memories, with the magic of those far-off winters whose approach had brought the expert to Frog Farm as surely as it brought in from the hedges the creatures against whom he waged cunning battle in the war- zone of the barns and outbuildings. How thrilled the boy had been by the great traps and the pack of ferrets — nay, had not WILL ON HIS WAY 115 the strange old man seemed himself a larger ferret, with his tight-fitting moleskins, sidling motions, and curiously small shining eyes ? What a joy his annual visit — with what fearful interest the bunch of children had listened to the annual contract, made for gross sums, or for particular buildings, sometimes calculated per tail of rats ! The Elder had always made a point of the cost of the shoe-leather involved in the isolation of Frog Farm. Aniseed, Will suddenly remembered, had played a con- siderable part in beguiling the victims, and the scent of it, coming up again, — dream-whiff or reality — was now incongruously mingled with a flavour of youth and innocence, touching our rustic Ulysses almost to tears. He wheeled his arm-chair window-wards to hide his emotion, and puffed into the court- yard. " Oi don't object to your smokin'," mumbled the Deacon. " Thank you," said Will. " You don't remember me, I'm afraid, Mr. Mawhood." " Deacon " he could not bring his tongue to. " I'm Will Flynt, the looker's boy you were always so kind to. You let me set your traps and dose the bait." The Deacon shot a beady look at him, but shook his head. " Why, you let me smell your ferret once, don't you remember, when it came out of the hole by the Brad, and you said that though I hadn't heard a squeak or a scamper, your nose could tell there had been rats in the run." " There was swarms of boys at Frog Farm, all bad 'uns. Oi never knew 'em by tail — but Oi dessay Oi do remember ye in the rough." Will was strangely disappointed. " Don't you remember I lent you my slate to hide the trap from that cute old rascal ? " " Ay, warmints alius runs to cover," said the Deacon vaguely. " And when caught he wouldn't eat the bait, surely you remember ? " " They never does. Rats has more sperrit than lions," said the Deacon with enthusiasm. The abortive attempt to recall himself to the rat-catcher was ended by the return of the waiter, whose delicate balance of rum- bottle, milk-glass, and pewter pot on the tiniest of trays, was ii6 JINNY THE CARRIER afmost upset by the sight of the blank backs of the hunting pictures. He seemed as startled as though he was not in the conjuring line himself. Depositing the drinks, with his usual sleight of hand, at both ends of the room simultaneously, he made as if to reverse the pictures. But the Deacon emitted a sibilance so terrifying that he did the vanishing trick instead. The old man then produced from either pocket a pale-yellow, pmk-eyed creature, and emptied the milk-glass into a saucer. " How thirsty they gets this weather," he observed, as they lapped greedily at the milk. " Pore things — their need is greater than mine." VI Will was sipping his porter ^f^wo, and the Deacon his rum strepitoso — the ferrets back in his pockets — when the door opened afresh, and a new figure protruded through it, likewise drawing back when the room which should have been empty at that hour was seen to be in occupation. This was, how- ever, a very different figure from the Deacon's : a figure jovial and ponderous, sporting a floral dressing-gown and carpet slippers, and with all the air of having just left an adjacent bedroom. " Come in — don't mind me," called Will cheerfully. The smoker's invitation not being negatived by the muncher and bibber, the massive visitor padded forwards, revealing more clearly liis heav}''-jowled hairless rubicund face and the motley multitude of stains on his gay dressing-gown, and waving a roll of clammy-smelling posters. " Just come by the coach — and in the nick o' time," he observed genially. And espying in the reversed pictures a favourable background for his operations, he circumvented the table (not without surprise and disgust at the corner where the moleskinned man grunted, guzzled, and guttled), and hung up two of the bills on the nails without any observable astonishment at the state of the pictures or any apparent atten- tion to anything but his own interests ; stepping backwards to survey the effect with such absorption of mind that through the girdle of his dressing-gown his spine collided with the table. " No, my boy ! " he addressed Will. " They can't print like that in Chipstone." From his arin-chair Will could easily read the more glaring headlines : WILL DN HIS WAY 117 TO-NIGHT AT S E V E N — L I F E - S IZ E DUKE'S MARIONETTES Hamlet And The Ghost Margaret Catchpole Pantomime-Ballet THE MISTLETOE BOUGH The Beggar oj Bethnal Green Edmund, Orphan of the Castle The High Road to Marriage As Performed Before all the Crowned Heads Of Europe, America, and Australia N.B. — Miss Arabella Flippance at the Piano " Sounds bully," he observed politely. " Bully's the word, my young American friend," said the Showman. " What a pity the mail-coach was late — we mJght have had 'em stuck up for the ordinary and caught some shilling patrons. You're staying here for the night, I hope." " No — I've got to go on." " What a pity ! I was about to oiler you a front seat." " Me ? Why ? " " Must fill up somehow," said the Showman frankly, " People never go to a play unless they think they can't get in. And as we only open to-night, there's not been time to advertise our bumper houses. You see, sonny, we lay up here for the winter, and if we'd started before this heat-wave we'd have caught more colds than coppers." " Is it open-air then ? " " No, but the next thing to it — a tent ! By squinting out of that window you'll see the whole caboodle rising on the meadows like a giant mushroom. Why not stop here and pick up a young lady ? I'll give you two seats." " Don't want more than one seat when I've got a girl," laughed Will. Then the face of the girl in the parcel-shed came up, at ii8 JINNY THE CARRIER once alluring and rebuking, and he repeated that seriously he miist be off. " Never mind — better luck next act," said the Showman, and tugged furiously at the bell-pull, and the waiter appeared with a glass of brandy and water, as though he added thought-reading to his conjuring accomplishments. " Well, here's to our better ! " began the Showman. His eye, raised towards Will at the window, caught suddenly some- thing in the courtyard, and setting down his untasted glass and snatching up his posters he disappeared almost as frantically as the dog. " He's forgot he ain't dressed," chuckled the waiter. " Seems to be a merry gent," said Will. " Lives here all the while the show is on," said the waiter, not without pride. " Pays me a shilling every time I go in." '' I hope on the same principle Mother Gander will pay m/?," said Will, laughing, and ordered his bill : which he found as unreasonable as the food was excellent. He did not, however, mulct the waiter of the handsome tip, designed to show him not a woman but a man and a gentleman at that, and the waiter finally disappeared with congees instead of with, conjurings. " I know you will excuse me, old fellow," said the Showman, re-entering, *' but business before pleasure. Fact is, I got up too late to catch the carriers, but now I've got the postman to leave my bills at all the public-houses on his next round. Good fellow, Bundock, though why he should boast so over killing two frogs with one stone, I don't understand. It seems an operation as cruel as it is simple." Here he swigged at his neglected glass. " He made a point, too, of my not em.pjoying the Bellman." " You'd have done better with the Bellman here in Chipstone and over at Latchem," volunteered Will. " Where Bundock mostly goes, you'll never get 'em to come." " That's what Bundock said. But don't you believe it, sonny." He held up a huge hairy forefinger, half gilded with a great ring. " They're only a canting lot o' sons of slow-coaches. They've never had the chance of knowing what they like. Temptation's the thing." The diaconal sibilance that greeted this sinister sentiment fell unheeded on the Showman's ear, or rather he did not distmguish WILL ON HIS WAY 119 it from the worthy Mawhood's general medley of guttural and nasal noises. " There's no greater temptation," added the Showman, " than Shakespeare and the Ballet." Will shook his head. " They don't know one from t'other. Did — I mean, if they did " — ^he had slipped into the old idiom — " they'd be scandalized. Why, I went to see a piece of Shake- speare at Sadler's Wells myself last week, and I'm bound to say 'twas a bit thick — though splendidly acted, mind you." " You needn't tell me that, Phelps ! " He smacked his fleshy lips voluptuously, " Lord ! What a job that man had to clear out the beer-sellers, babies, and filthy-mouthed roughs, and now it's the quietest show in London. What was the piece ? " " Can't remember the name — about a nigger." " Othello ? " ^' That's it — sounded a rather Irish name for a nigger I thought." " Irish ? Ah, yes — ha, ha, ha 1 You had me there ! By Jove, that's a new wheeze ! " And he roared genially, while the innocent, and it is to be feared sadly illiterate. Will tried to look like a successful humorist. " Anyhow," he said, " you won't get 'em from Little Bradmarsh, no, nor Long Bradmarsh either. They think all actors are wicked." " And so they be ! " burst forth the Deacon at last. " Hobs and Jills ought to be kept apart ! " He stuck his knife towards the poster. " The High Road to Marriage^ indeed ! High road to Hell ! " " Hear, hear," agreed the Showman surprisingly, rattling his glass. '' Well put, old cock. But these ain't actors ; only puppets. You can't be wicked in wood." '' I'm afraid I must be off," said Will, rising. " Then here's luck to you," He finished his glass. " And may you die before you're buried ! " " Thanks, I hope I shan't do either, Mr. Duke," He took his hat and stick. " Not Duke, old man. Flippance, Anthony Flippance, univer- sally docked to Tony Flip, Duke only goes with the Marionettes. I bought 'em lock, stock, and barrel — the oldest circuit in East Anglia, and the name going well with the crowned heads," " But there are no crowned heads in America," said Will, smiling. 120 JINNY THE CARRIER *' Pardon me, sonny," contradicted Mr. Flippance. " But I've just come from there," said Will crushingly. " And how about the Emperor of Brazil ? " " Oh ! " said Will blankly. He seemed really to have heard of this personage. Then recovering, he said : *' But have you played before him ? " " That's not my affair," said Mr. Flippance. " It ain't my responsibility what Duke's done or left undone — if Duke was his name, which I take leave to question. 'Twixt you and I, I doubt if it would pay to work Brazil. But, as I said, I bought it as a going concern, lock, stock " " And lies," snapped the Deacon. Mr. Flippance turned his large red face benevolently towards the moleskins. " Lies is a harsh word. Legends, old cock, legends." " Oi bain't a bird," rasped the Deacon. " Stick to the truth." '' Lord love us, a Quaker ! " Mr. Flippance winked at Will, who smiled — man of the world to man of the world. " As if anybody would take a thing that size and smell for a rooster ! " The Deacon reached for the rum-bottle in deadly silence. Will, with a fear — soon proved superfluous — that he meant it for a missile, hastened to remark that anyhow there were no crowned heads in Australia. " Where were you educated, sonny ? " retorted Mr. Flippance. And he began whistling the then favourite air : "The King of the Cannibal Islands." He broke off to point out that kings and queens were as thick in the man-eating islands round Australia as old cocks in Essex, though they didn't wear mole- skins, or indeed anything but their own skins. Besides, he added as an afterthought, wasn't Queen Victoria monarch of Australia too ? Will, taken aback again, had to admit it. " But you haven't played before Victoria ? " he murmured. Mr. Flippance winked more widely as he explained that a study of the posters would show that the Marionettes themselves never claimed to have performed before crowned heads. It was the plays that had been performed. He turned suddenly upon the rum-soothed Deacon. " You're not denying, my Quaker friend, that Queen Victoria's seen Hamlet t " " You leave me and the Queen out of it," growled the Deacon. " Ha ! Then you admit she's seen Hamlet ? " WILL ON HIS WAY 121 " Oi don't know nawthen about it. Why should she see Hamlet ? " " Because he was the Prince of Denmark," said Tony, winking again at his now bosom friend. " But you Methody Quaker dead-aHve go-to-meeting sons of Sundayfied slugs crawl about thinking yourselves holier than Victoria, God bless her, even when it's wood, never having seen society or ever had a drink outside Chipstone." The Deacon was roused at last. " Never had a drink outside Chipstone ! " His breast heaved with a sinister movement — w^as it a wheeze of wrath or of laughter ? " Oi'U goo bail my round is bigger nor yourn. There ain't scarce a barn in East Anglia what don't know me." Tony's great jaw fell. " A barnstormer ! You ! Rats \ What do you play ? " " It ain't play— it's work." " Yes, I know — but what's your repertory ? " " My what ? " " Your pieces." " Oi bain't onny a piece-worker." " In what ? " " In what you said. It ain't always per tail." " Retail, do you mean ? " said the puzzled Tony. Will, who had listened to. the conversation with an ever- expanding grin, here burst into a guffaw. Tony turned on him. " Is he kidding me ? " he asked half angrily, half amicably. The answer — like Will's departure from this enthralling parlour — was staved off by the advent of yet another head popped into the doorway. This time it was a heavily greased head with scrupulously parted hair, and was attached to a spruce young man with a spring posy in his buttonhole.. But his bear's-grease outsmelt his primroses. " Hullo, Tony ! " cried the aromatic apparition. " Up already ! " " Fve got to work for my living," Mr. Flippance retorted. " The dormouse season is over. You coming in, Charley, to see the show to-night ? " " Me 1 I've got better things to do, old boy." The young landlord turned to the Deacon. " Can vou let me have five or six live 'uns ? " The Deacon shook his head. " Oi don't want to disoblige 122 JINNY THE CARRIER brother, Oi do my duty according to Peter — ' nat'ral brute beasts made to be taken and destroyed ' — but they bain't meant by the Almoighty to be taken for sport, and Oi don't howd with fox-hunting neither." " So I see." Mr. Charles Mott glanced glumly at the backs of the pictures. " Ef you want to be riddy o' warmints, shoot 'em, says Oi, or nip their brushes in traps." *' Oh, oh ! " came involuntarily from Will at this blasphemy. The Deacon transfixed him with his glittering eye, but went on without pausing: "And ef you want to be riddy o' rats, come to me. Don't set a-worshippin' your prize-terriers, like Ephraim jined to his idols." " I did come to you to be rid o' the warmints, and now I want half-a-dozen spunky 'uns. Make your own price, but if you won't supply 'em I'll get 'em from Bill Nutbone." " That's doubly sinful — to goo to the heathen." He turned to Will. " Ef you're so fond o' ferrets, young man, Oi could spare you this pair — cheaper than you'll get 'em from Nutbone." He let their pink eyes protrude from his pockets. Will eagerly closed with the offer. If Frog Farm proved as dull as he was now beginning to fear — after this contrast of Anthony Flippance and Joshua Mawhood — ratting or rabbiting might be a providential diversion. " But I can't carry them in my pockets," he said impressively. " Just made by Moses & Son, London. And I've got a long walk. Besides, I'd like them in cages." " Oi'l] send 'em by the carrier on Friday," promised the rat- catcher. " Frog Farm, you said. Good day to you, Brother Mott." " Good day. Deacon. Sorry we can't do business. Queer old cuss," he said, winking at Will as the door closed. '' Belongs to the Peculiars." " I — I've heard of them." Will coloured a bit. Tony, who had listened to the dialogue with enlightenment, here stalked out in half-genuine horror : " Holy Moses & Son ! The publican and sinner prefers rats to Shakespeare ! " " Stow it, Tony ! " called the landlord after him. " One preacher's enough." And, smiling, he changed the blanks into hunting pictures almost as deftly as his waiter would have done it. WILL ON HIS WAY 123 He had scarcely effected the transformation, however, before the Deacon popped his head in again. Mr. Mott looked Hke a caught schoolboy, but though the beady eyes looked straight at the flamboyant hunters, Mr. Mawhood only said : " Oi forgot to lend a law-book." " What sort of a law-book d'ye want ? " " Miss Gentry's got a counter-claim. Ef Oi won't pay for my wife's silk dress as Oi never ordered, she says my ferrets killed her chickens." " That's not a counter-claim, Mr. Mawhood," advised Will. " It's a lyin' claim, anyways. What killed her chickens was her own black devil. Squibs. Her and her angels ! " " You go down to the bar and see if the missus can find you a book — but wouldn't a lawyer be better ? " " The good Lord forbid ! Oi'd sooner goo to a doctor. Well, thank you kindly, brother — one good turn desarves another. Foive, Oi think you said." " Or six. First thing in the morning. Spunky 'uns, remem- ber." The Deacon sighed and disappeared again. " Poor old chap ! " Sure of his rats, Mr. Mott was now touched to sympathy. " His missus is a Tartar, no mistake. Still with them rounds of his, he dodges her a good deal." And he sighed like the Deacon and followed him — bear's-grease after aniseed — and Will, alone at last, followed too, though without a sigh, being still — as the waiter said — " one of the lucky ones." In the corridor he turned the wrong way, finding bedroom doors instead of the staircase. He paused a moment to gaze at a stuffed specimen of the sacred animal that stood with brush rampant against a scenic background under a glass case, and a stuffed trout that swam movelessly through a mimic stream. Then he became aware to his surprise that Tony Flip, still in his dressing-gown and still hugging the balance of his posters, was pacing the corridor restlessly, like a caged lion, though it turned out to be really like a tame creature denied his cage. " They won't let me in," he said miserably. And he indicated an open bedroom door opposite the fox, with a view of house- maids at work, angry at the hour. One was 'making his bed, thumping it viciously ; another raised swirls of dust with a broom. Slops stood blatantly around. " They won't even take free seats," he groaned. 124 JINNY THE CARRIER VII " What did I tell you ? " said Will. " Oh, it ain't because they think it wicked, the hussies. They turn up their noses at it, just because it's under their noses. If they had to go to Greenwich Fair to see it, they'd fight to get in. Candidly, cocky, have you ever seen a better biU ? " " It seems only too much," ventured Will. " It don't say all at the same performance. In practice it all comes down to The Mistletoe Bough, the silliest of the lot, a bride who shuts herself in a chest for fun, you know, and moulders into a spirit. But think of Richardson's — what they cram into tw^enty- five minutes! You saw that at Greenwich, I suppose, Easter time." " No, I only got to London in time for the Great Exhibition." /' You've been to^that ? " The Showman's eyes sparkled. ■" What I came back for." " That's a Show ! ! " And a note of immeasurable envy mixed with the rapture of the rival impresario. " But what a chance missed ! " " How so ? " " No drinks." " I got lemonade." " That's not a drink — that's a gas. Lord, I thought, looking at that bumper house, with a proper Christian bar, they could pay off the National Debt." " You've seen it then ? " " Was there at the opening. Stood so near the Royal Party I patted the head of little Wales, and the Goldstick and Chamber- lain walking backwards from the Presence nearly shoved me into the Chinese Ambassador just as he was salaaming on his stomach. Didn't little Albert Edward look sweet in his High- land costume ? " " I wasn't inside then," confessed Will, " and I only had eyes for the Queen and her cream-coloured horses. You've got a season ticket, I suppose." " With the Prince Consort's compliments. The fact is, I supplied the elephant for the Queen's howdah." ''Did you?" " Yes, didn't you see it in the Indian compartment ? They wanted to show off the magnificent trappings she got from the WILL ON HIS WAY 125 Rajah, and they thought of getting a real hve elephant, which would have been no end of trouble amid all those precious vases. But I happened to know of a stuffed elephant at a show down here in Essex, so I entered into correspondence with Buckingham Palace and loaned the beast for the season — buying him up first, of course--^and sent him up in my caravan that had to be roused from its winter sleep and completely unpacked. Yes, trouble enough ! But talk of the Koh-i-noor, that elephant'll be worth his weight in gold when he comes back — Queen Victoria's elephant as visited by the nobility and gentry of the world. I annex the Great Exhibition. See ! " " I wish I'd noticed him," said Will wistfully. " I only saw her statue in zinc, seven yards high. But there's so much to see — machinery and jewels and Mexican figures, it makes your head ache, and I couldn't even get a look at that Koh-i-noor, such a crush round it. But did you see the Preserved Pig ? " The Showman's eyes twinkled. " Mr. Woods, d'ye mean ? " " Mr. Woods ? " " The Chancellor, of the Exchequer. Haven't you noticed how they've left off abusing the income tax now they've got the show to talk about ? By Jove," he chuckled, " what a haul for the Exchequer if they bring the Crystal Palace under the window tax ! " " No, no ! Best Berkshire breed. The real marvel of the Exhibition ! None o' your stuffed creatures, but a natural pig cured whole. Weighs three and a half hundredweight ; five foot and a half from tail to snout. 'Twas done by a provision m.erchant in Dublin — Smith — I took note of the name." " That name will be immortal," said Mr. Flippance gravely. " Yes, and there was a monster pigeon-pie ! " said Will with the same unsuspicious enthusiasm. The church clock, striking four at this point, made the Show- man bound frantically to his doorway. " Not done yet, you snails and sluts ! When am I to get these bills to the tent ? Do you realize we open to-night ? You'll ruin the show." " I'll take them," volunteered Will. " My road lays by the field." " A friend in need is a friend indeed." Tony thrust the heavy roll effusively into Will's hands. " Ask for my daughter — she'll help you to stick 'em up on the bill-boards." " Your daughter ? " murmured Will. He would have resented 126 JINNY THE CARRIER his sudden reduction to a bill-poster but for the romantic vision of the Bohemian petticoat. " I can't pull the strings on both sides of the stage at once, can I ? Not to mention the women's and boys' voices, and the piping Gaffers. Lord, she's got a head on her, has Polly. And pops in and out to play the piano too." With pleasant flutterings of the springtide fancy, the young man lightly strode with his roll under his arm to the field where a long chocolate-coloured caravan — apparently the vehicle that had transported the elephant — stood horseless at an aperture in the mammoth mushroom described by Tony Flip. Labourers in shirt-sleeves were carrying in ropes and rough benches. Small boys and large dogs stood around, and there was a litter of straw, cardboard, shivered packing-cases, and dirty paper. Two trucks covered with tarpaulin, and a vast box with a high-pitched roof marked " Duke's Marionettes," completed the confusion. Will, peeping in, saw a stage already set, at the border of which a girl on her knees was tacking a row of tin footlight-holders. The rear was already roped off, and the benches seemed to rise like a gallery. Evidently the thing was done in style — crowned heads or no crowned heads. Not without a thrill he w^alked in, and across the grassy floor, but romance fled when the girl, raising her head, presented a face almost as massive as her father's, and ravaged by smallpox to boot. Polly had indeed " a head on her," he thought, though long pendent ear-rings preserved its femininity. Politely concealing his chill, he murmured " Miss Flippance," and explained he had been instructed to deliver the bills to her. She received them and him with an indifference that would have been galling had she been prettier, and was not gratifying even from a massive brain. " Silly nonsense ! " she grumbled, unrolling them. " To open before you've done your posting and circularizing. There won't be a soul ! " " Oh, surely — this weather ! " he murmured. Miss Flippance threw him an annihilating glance. " If dad once gets an idea into his head, you can't get it out with a forceps." Will stared at this vigorous young lady, who, with a poster unfurled in her hand, proceeded to yell directions and rebukes at the bench-arranging clodhoppers. It was an insult to his sex, he felt resentfully. No woman, however ugly, had WILL ON HIS WAY 127 the right to order men about, men who were not even married to her. " Nincompoops ! They'll never be ready for to-night," said Miss Flippance, acknowledging his existence again. " Would to heaven dad had gone up to London to see the Exhibition — and not hustled us like this." " But he was there at the opening." Miss Flippance stared at him. " Were you with him ? " " No such luck. I didn't even see the stuffed elephant." '' Has he stuffed you with that ? " Miss Flippance emitted a mirthless laugh, and Will looked at once angry and sheepish. " Not that way, you hulking brutes ! Turn 'em round. . . . And besides, it's ridiculous to give Hamlet, High art don't take south of Scarborough." " Well, I saw Othello in London last week," he contradicted sharply — she should see he was no mere gull : " And the pit was packed." " Yes — in April. But try it in the dog-days." " Too warm, eh ? " he sniggered. She turned away as from an idiot. That hurt him more than having swallowed her father's royal rodomontade. Did she then think the plot of Othello glacial ? Or had she no sense of humour ? Yes, that was it — the sex had been denied the sense of humour. True, it shrieked with laughter if you tickled it, but the tickling must be physical. Ah, she was at it again, bustling and bullying the superior sex. Well, he wasn't going to paste bills under her. Let that lazy liar of a Showman do his own dirty work. " Good afternoon," he called out huffily, and walked out of the great tent in a far less romantic mood than when he had entered it. And then, as he came through the opening in the can- vas, his eyes nearly started out of their sockets : Daniel Quarles's cart stood outside the tent, and there, perched on the driving- board, holding the reins, and calmly instructing the shirt-sleeved yokels to deliver the big drum to Miss Flippance, was the girl of the parcel-shed ! VIII Before his eyes could return normally to their orbits or his breath to his windpipe, the incredible vision had vanished. Jinny had, in fact, had an overdose of commissions in the other purlieus of Chipstone, and having fetched the drum from its 128 JINNY THE CARRIER winter quarters as directed by Miss Polly Flippance that noon — it had, in fact, been pawned, and the piano was still irredeemable — she was hastening on her homeward circuit as fast as Methu- salem could be induced to go. " Who was that ? " Will gasped. The rustic who had received the drum looked at him with unconcealed contempt. A man who did not know that ! " That war Jinny ! " he said. It was as if he had given his drum a terrific bang. Jinny ? — Jinny Quarles then ! Who else ? In the boom of that name reverberated a clamour of memories and of emotions, old and new. Images of a solemn-eyed mite, of a merry little maid, of a sedate Sunday scholar, and of the amazing creature of to-day, went all interflashing with one another. Yes, the little Jinny who had shared the wagon and his secret with him that fateful Sunday, and who if ever by a rare chance she had flitted across his thoughts, figured always as this same little girl in her grand pink Sunday pelisse, trimmed with pink velvet and fringes, was now grown up ; bonneted, bewitching, incredible. " But where — where was her grandfather ? " he stammered. " Asleep inside ? " " Asleep ? " The rustic grinned. " A long sleep, Oi should reckon. Whoy, wp ain't seen the Gaffer for years." " Don't stand there gossiping." It was the female martinet at her sternest. " It's not his fault," said Will. " I was asking about old Daniel Quarles. Is he really dead ? " '• Dead ? Not to my knowledge. At least I have never noticed Jinny in black." " Then where is he ? Why isn't he looking after Jinny ? " " Eh ? But he must be a hundred ! " *' You don't mean to say he lets Jinny go out and do his job ? " " The most natural person I should think," said Miss Flippance. " Really I haven't time to discuss village carriers, if the show is to open to-night. ... Do be careful of that drum. No, not inside, blockhead. Come back ! " As the tambour-laden slave did not seem to hear, his affrighted fellow-serfs yelled to him to bring the drum outside again, and when he was come, the despot's skirts rustled majestically back into the tent — they were long and hunched out quite fashionably, which accentuated the humiliation of the male element. But WILL ON HIS WAY 129 Will remained at the tent door, like x^braham after an angel's visit, thunderstruck and dumbfounded, but with consternation^ not reverence. It was, he thought, the grossest carelessness that had ever occurred in the history of the globe. A respectable girl like that — why, what was the world coming to ? Sent gadding about the country like a trollop, perched up horsily behind a carter's whip — this was what little Jinny had been allowed to grow up into ! And that girl at " The Black Sheep " — she who had looked so innocent, whom he had mentally seen as a May Queen, crowned with garlands, dancing girlishly round a Maypole — this was what lay under her poetic semblance. And at the same time — pleasing and perturbing thought — both the unsexed Carrier and the maidenly May Queen were in reality little Jinny: no stand-offish stranger, needing deferential approach, but — in a way — ^his very own : the meek poppet whose cheek he had always pinched patronizingly, in whose eyes he had always seen himself as a grown-up god. Miss Flippance, sweeping out again, and finding him still hanging about, immovable, had a new thought. '' Pardon me — has my father engaged you ? " He coloured up in anger. " I brought his bills in passing — that's all." " Oh, I thought you might be looking for a job. There's this drum, you know." He could have knocked her down. But she was evidently quite in earnest, this outrageous, humourless female, only second in self-sufficiency to Jinny the Carrier. The world seemed suddenly emasculated. " I'm no musician," he said surlily. " But you look a strong young man and it's muscle we want^ not music. You'd only have to stand here about half an hour a day. This afternoon, of course, you might join the Bellman round the town — I've ordered him for five." " Miss Flippance," said Will, mastering himself and speaking with crushing dignity, " have you observed my clothes ? " " They don't matter," she assured him. " We provide the uniform." " Do I look," he snorted, " like a drummer at a dime show .? " " If you've come as a walking gentleman," replied Miss Flippance simply, " you've come to the wrong shop. We're only wires.'' 130 JINNY THE CARRIER " Oh, I know ail about that." And he slashed savagely with his stick at the insulting tambour, which uttered a bass roar of agony. " Splendid ! But you might have smashed it ! " cried Miss Flippance. " Where's the drumstick ? " " Am I the drumstick's keeper? " he answered, with an odd Biblical reminiscence. " Nincompoops ! Thickheads ! Zanies ! Where's the drum- stick ? " But nobody had seen the drumstick. Jinny hadn't brought it, the slaves assured her. She assured them, still more emphati- cally, that they had dropped it off the drum in taking it out. And no inch of it being visible where the cart had stood, she drew the deduction that it was now speeding towards Long Bradmarsh. She turned to Will. " Do run after her — the men are so busy — • she can't be far, and she has to stop every now and again." He glared at her. Then something inside him whispered that that was the obvious thing to do — ^impishly to pretend to obey her, and then to keep her waiting for the drumstick — eternally. Yes, he would be revenged on behalf of his sex. " Yoicks ! Tally-ho ! " he cried with an advent of glee that he felt justifiably malicious. And, waving his own stick wildly, he bounded with mock frenzy towards the field gate by which the cart had gone off. " You won't catch her like that," bawled Miss Flippance after him. " Across the fields ! Head her off ! " But he would not take orders from any woman, he told himself, so feigning deafness he ran doggedly into the Long Bradmarsh road, and turning a sharp elbow, felt his heart leap up to see the now familiar cart at a standstill before a wayside cottage. But even as he gazed it started afresh. He tore on madly. The back of the tilt vanished round another bend. " Following a drumstick " passed grotesquely across his mind. What an odd home-coming ! What a queer renewal of acquaintance with Jinny — after that solemn oath- taking in the wagon ! Presently he heard a wild scampering through the bushes on his right, and his canine friend of the inn was leaping and frisking and joyously barking beside him. They ran together — owing to the dog's leisurely tangents and curvatures he could just keep up with WILL ON HIS WAY 131 it. But with the sweat now pouring from his forehead, the inner imp began asking what he was running for, since he had already- deceived and chastised Miss Flippance, left her eternally expec- tant. Why not now drop into the pleasant saunter home he had planned ? But the poor dog was panting in this heat — he answered the imp-^it must have run miles since its meal in the parlour. Apoplexy threatened perhaps, hydrophobia even. Look at its lolling tongue ! He snatched it up : it must be restored to its inconsiderate mistress, to whom, at the same time, a still more important rebuke could be administered, if indeed any vestiges of decency yet remained in the minx. But the little terrier struggled spasmodically in his arms — the ungrateful brute ! He must save it from itself, then, just as he must save its mistress from herself. Clamping it to his breast with iron muscles, he toiled frenziedly forwards. Then the far, faint sound of a horn came like elfin mocking laughter on the sultry air, and with a suddeyn convulsion the animal wrested itself free, and Will was left hopelessly pursuing, not the cart, but the dog. He had indeed the pleasure of seeing the former slacken to receive the latter, but the vehicle was wafted away again so smoothly that to the poor perspiring pedestrian Methusalem appeared in his original Mazeppa role. The chase ran along wide horizons — great ploughed lands or meadows with grazing cattle — the level broken only by ricks, roofs, and trees, mainly witch-elms, with a few poplars. Some- times these elms clustered in groves, sometimes a few helped to make the hedge-line; as often they rose solitary in arrogant individualism. To the right was a delicious sense of the saltings and of mewing sea-birds ; and mysteriously, as in the heart of the fields, red-brown barge sails or the tall, bare poles of vessels could be seen upstanding. And once where the road mounted. Will caught a glimpse of the Blackwater, and ships floating, and the dim, blue shore beyond. But at the top of this hill he was too breathed to continue. He sat down, wiped his forehead, and surveyed the view ; far from soothed, however, by its simple restfulness. If only his father had come to meet him, as his letter had requested, he thought savagely, all this wouldn't have happened ! 132 JINNY THE CARRIER IX Anyhow there was no need to follow the glaring high road any- longer. On the left he could see the clump of Steeples Wood, and he knew that once he had cut through that, he could find the swift field-path through Hoppits that would save miles of the high road and not bring him out on it till the Silverlane Pump. He strolled with a sense of relief towards the wood, but hardly had its green groves closed refreshingly upon him when, reminding himself he was a trespasser, he quickened his pace again, and hurried through the oak plantations and over the wonderful carpet of bluebells with but a slight eye to the sylvan beauty. Even when he reached the field-path bounded bv the ditch and the dog-rose hedge, he did not relax his speed, having bethought himself that the poor horse would surely be given drink at the trough of the Silverlane Pump, and that there would probably be a delay at "The Silverlane Arms," even if he should not have succeeded in heading the Carrier off altogether. And from that point she would surely need his protection, so lonely was the road till you sighted Long Bradmarsh with the drainage windmills and the bridge. And the no less necessary sermon could be combined with the protection. He found the wheel of the village pump chained up. Evidently the water was running scarce. It looked not unlike a gibbet, this tall pump, and he could imagine a criminal dangling from the spout. There was little water in the trough, and the water- butt of the inn was almost equally dry ; a wayside mudhole haunted by geese represented a pool. He remembered these arid villages in such strange juxtaposition with his own oozy birthplace — ^was it here or at Kelcott that he had made a boyish fortune, bringing water at a halfpenny a pint ? His mother, he recalled with a faint smile, had been against the business because Jesus had said to the woman of Samaria " Give me to drink," though he had trumped her text with the injunction to the Israelites : " Ye shall also buy water of them for money." It all made him super-conscious of thirst, and he went into the inn, and ordering a pint of ale, inquired if the Carrier had passed by. " Which way be you a-gooin' ? " said the tapster. It irritated him to be questioned, and he replied tartly that he was going home. He gulped down his liquor and put his question to a group of children playing around the pump. They scratched WILL ON HIS WAY 133 their heads and gaped at him, and the youngest put shy, chubby hands to its smeary face. " The white horse and the girl ! " he explained, and the shy child started screaming, and a woman burst from a cottage door and dragged it within, glaring sus- piciously at the " furriner." A labourer riding a plough-horse barebacked, and leading another, came from the Bradmarsh direction. " Has the Carrier passed you ? " he asked. " D'ye want a lift ? " was the reply. He lost his temper. " Haven't you got enough buvsiness o' your own ? " " Not much," said the labourer naively. " Ground be as 'ard as the road. Curous, baint it, arter all that soakin'. " He replied more civilly, glad his rudeness was misunderstood. " Yes, it's always either too little or too much." " And ye can't sow unless 'tis none-or-both," added the philosophic ploughman, plodding on. " Gimme a foUowin' toime ! " The rustic meant a season in which rain and sunshine came in rapid alternation, but Will ruefully reflected that the " followin' toime," in the sense he was having it, was far from satisfactory. But at that moment there was a cheerful bark, and that inconsistent dog was curveting around him, its tail thumping wildly against hi^ trousers in an ecstasy of recognition. So he was too late, he thought with a strange heart-sinking ; knowing I its rearguard habit. He pushed it away with his foot. If the ^ beast thought he was going to carry it again, it was jolly well mistaken. No more cart-chasing for him. His " following time " was over. And as the creature persisted in gambolling round his legs, he made a swish in the air with his stick to drive it on its way, and it uttered a fearsome yell ; it being part of Nip's slyness to cry before he was hurt. But for once Nip was not a laggard, but an advance courier, and Fate brought Methusalem round the corner at the exact instant of his yell. " How dare you strike my dog ? " It was an inauspicious reunion. Jinny had checked Methusalem, and her grey eyes were blazing down from their dark lashes ; her face framed in its bonnet glowed like a dark flower, and he was confusedly aware that that lonely hamlet's high-street was suddenly pullulat- ing with people — the tapster and gapers at the inn door, the ploughman looking backwards, excited at last, the little children 134 JINNY THE CARRIER mysteriously out again with their mother, and other mothers and infants (in arms or at skirt) surging agitatedly from nowhere, whether at Nip's cry or Jinny's. Even the pump seemed to have spouted an old man, while an old lady arose, like an ancient Venus, from the pond. And every eye, he felt, was stabbing at the maltreator of Jinny's animal ; the cackle seemed a sinister clamour as of vengeance mounting from that swarm of sym- pathizers. " I didn't strike him," he answered sulkily. Clearly she had not recognized him — a position not without its advantages. Doubtless the raw youth of her childish memories was effectually buried beneath this manly form, set off by the elegant London suit, this well-barbered head, and the face that had exchanged freckles for the stamp of experience. " As a matter of fact," he added, " I fed the brute at the inn." " Which brute ? "retorted Jinny sharply. But at this moment Nip, who had been calmly lapping the dregs of the pool, intervened by leaping up to lick Will's hand. " I beg your pardon," she murmured, coming to a standstill. " Granted," he said, not to be outdone in graciousness, and beginning to enjoy the advantage her ignorance of his identity gave him. " But that's no proof I haven't beaten him. You remember the saying : A zvomatiy a dog^ and a walnut-tree^ The more you heat them, the better they he^ "That's all nonsense," said Jinny, bridling up again. He changed the subject quickly. " Have you got a drum- stick ? " " Gracious 1 Do you want to try ? " He laughed. " It's for the drum at the show. Miss Flippance thinks you didn't deliver it." " Why, it was tied on the drum. The fool of a man must have dropped it — if he hasn't poked it inside the drum. Did you look under the benches ? " " No. That's it ! I remember now seeing the man take the drum inside by mistake. He must have dropped it on the way back." " Don't you think it would have been more sensible to look before you leaped — especially such a long leap ! And what a pace you must have come in this heat ! " WILL ON HIS WAY 135 He flushed faintly. " I'm a good walker. I know the cuts.'' " Well, if you get back as quick as you came, there won't be much time lost." She clucked up Methusalem. " Good after- noon— hope you'll find your stick, and that you'll drum-in a good house." What ! She too thought him capable of being a drum-banger, a minion of marionettes. Had women then no eye — no percep- tion of clothes — as well as no humour ? The mob was melting away under their amiable parley, but he now rallied it afresh : " Stop ! " he called desperately after Jinny. " Stop ! " But Nip's joyous bark at the resumption of the journey drowned all lesser remarks, and again the cart receded on the horizon — an horizon he knew houseless and arid, no region for a lonely, good-looking girl. Let poor pockmarked Polly Flippance brave the wild, if female carriers there must be : not his Jinny. No, he must reveal himself at the next stop, he must remonstrate, protest. But the trouble was that the thing w^ould not stop, and that there would be no stop now — he knew — for several miles. Per- spiring, panting, hallooing and waving his stick and utterly oblivious of the scandalized street, he pursued at his swiftest, and Methusalem being no serious competitor in the long run. Jinny heard him at last, and looking back through the tilt over the dwindled packages, saw the pitiful, gesturing figure, and to his infinite relief the cart drew up. " What have you lost now ? " she called. " Your sandwich- boards ? " * " I'm not going back to Miss Flippance," he panted, " Fm going Bradmarsh way." " Then why ever didn't you say so ? " she replied calmly. " Jump up ! " Jump up ? She asked a strange young man to jump up ? Then what else could she have done if he had said who he was — a fact of which he had indeed been just about to make royal proclamation. " You take passengers ? " he gasped. He remembered now that Joey had told him the cart would take him, but then he had had no idea that " her " was not the vehicle. She was equally surprised : " Why else did you run after me ? " Run after her ? He did not like the phrase. Girls ran after men — girls of a sort — to some extent girls of every sort : that 136 JINNY THE CARRIER was the doctrine in his set. And yet he had run after her — it called for explanation. " I wasn't running after you," he said slowly, " it was only that — that I couldn't believe my eyes to see you like that." ^' Like what ? " She was frankly puzzled. ** Driving about alone in this God-forsaken part. It's — " scandalous, he was about to say, but before the glimmering fire in her eyes he altered the word — " it's dangerous." " Dangerous ! " Her little laugh rippled out. " I thought you said you knew these parts." " So I do — I'm an Essex man, even though I mayn't look it, having been half round the world." '* Have you now ? Well, it's the big cities that are dangerous, Gran'fer says." " Maybe he's right," he admitted, wincing a little before the candid grey eyes. " But don't you understand that a woman carrier is — " again he toned down his word — " outlandish." Her amusement danced in her eyes. " Inlandish, I suppose you mean." " Don't laugh," he said, forgetting that the unrevealed Will had no right to that tone. " You know it's an unwomanly occupation." " Laughing ? " " You know what I mean. For one thing a woman can't know much about horses — and she oughtn't to have to do with 'em anyhow — it's not natural." " May she have to do with donkeys ? " Jinny inquired sweetly. He frowned. " Chaff's no good." " But I never give my horse any — do I, Methusalem dear ? " Such word-mockery was bewildering to his simpler brain. He opened his mouth, but nothing came, and his vexation only increased for finding no vent. " May she have to do with pigs ? " queried Jinny again. " Pigs are at home," he conceded. " Not always," she said demurely. '^ I meet lots on this very road." " And you might meet worse than pigs on a lonely road like this — you might meet men " " Like I've met one now." " Yes, but it happens to be me ! " he said, again all but for- WILL ON HIS WAY 137 getting her ignorance of his identity. " Usually it would be dangerous." " Well, but wouldn't it be just as dangerous for a male carrier ? " " Not at all. He can fight." " And if he met a woman ? " she said slyly. '' There's no danger in a woman." " Then why are you running away from Miss Flippance ,? " " Miss Flippance ! " he cried in angry astonishment. " Who says I'm running away from Miss Flippance ? " " Well, you've run from her to me. And if you say you weren't running after me, you must have been running away from her." " Don't you try to bamboozle me. I tell you I've been half round the world, and nowhere have I seen a woman carrier," '' If you'd ha' stayed at home you would have," said Jinny. " So it seems. And in America there are those Bloomerites — come over here, too, I hear, nowadays, the hussies. Want to wear the breeches." " Do they ? " inquired Jinny with genuine interest. " I've often thought it would be more convenient for me jumping up and down, and there would be yards of stuff less. Some of those Chipstone ladies quite scavenge the streets with their long skirts, padded out by all those petticoats, don't you think ? " He grew almost as auburn as his hair : such secrets of the toilette, babbled by a young girl he still thought good at heart, outraged his sense of decorum. " No, I don't think ! " he answered angrily. " WeU, try," she suggested sweetly. " Put yourself into our place." " It's you putting yourselves into our place that's the trouble," he retorted. " What will women be up to next, I wonder." Here it was Jinny's turn to flare up. She had never — it has been already remarked — thought of herself as up to anything, rarely even thought of herself as a woman, least of all as a repre- sentative of her sex. But challenged now to her face for the first time, she felt she must hold the pass for all womanhood. " We women will be up to whatever we please." " Not if you want to please the men." Jinny's young face flashed fire and roses. " And who wants to please the men ? " 138 JINNY THE CARRIER He laughed complacently. " I never met a woman who didn't." The girl's fire died into cold contempt. " I don't think you know much about women." " Me ? Why, I've knocked about since you were in pinafores — and pelisses ! " *' I shouldn't be surprised, Mr. Drummer," said Jinny with judicial frigidity, " if you knew less about women than I know about horses." " I've seen half the world, I teU you." She flicked up Methusalem. " But not the better half." He winced again. " Fiddlesticks ! " was all he could find to answer. " Drumsticks ! " rejoined Jinny gaily, and with a mocking flourish of her horn, she receded afresh. Something stronger than his will now shot him forward crying : " I say, Jinny ! " He meant by crying that old familiar name to disclose himself, and then to have it out with her, side by side on the driving-board. She turned her head. " Do you want to jump on or don't you ? " she called. It was the last straw. Jinny — he had forgotten — was not a name privileged for the friend of her pelisse and pinafore days : any male might use it, just as any wayside rough might abuse its owner. " I don't," he shouted savagely. " I'll never patronize a woman carrier." " A dashing young lad from Buckingham ! " She had started singing, whether to herself or at him, he could not tell, and he strode behind the cart almost as rapidly as Methusalem before it, to find out whether she was still answering back. But apparently she had forgotten him — that was the most pungent repartee of all — and the gaiety of the chorus only added salt to the smart : " Still he'd singjol de rol iddle ol. Still he'd singjol de rol lay " The thin silver treble reminded him incongruously of her Sunday-school singing, and the revival of that long-faded picture of himself driving her home only emphasized the jarring present. He turned furiously down Plashy Walk, where the rollick of the chorus soon ceased to penetrate and the white fragrance of the WILL ON HIS WAY 139 wonderful hawthorn avenue made a soothing passage-way. His tongue felt acrid with anger, ale, and running, and Frog Farm, with the faces of his parents, now began to loom more emotionally before him, because of the tea as well as the tenderness awaiting him. For neither of these luxuries was likely to be absent, even if his letter — or his father — had gone astray. Let her protect herself, this minx of a carrier. Time's odd changeling for his sober little Jinny. Serve her right if some horrid instrument of fate should take down her pride ! By the time he had come through the mile of hawthorn, and defied the Plashy Hall dog with his stick, she had passed out of his thoughts, and his indignation against her had changed to indignation against the impudent attempt — obvious from the notice-boards — to deny him and the public this old-established right-of-way. Things would not have got even thus far had he remained in Little Bradmarsh, he was thinking, and he was already brooding over a plan of campaign as he was climbing over the stile back into the high road. And then his vaulting leg remained suspended an instant in air in sheer astonishment. Jinny was facing him from her perch of vantage, smiling sweetly from her witching bonnet, her cart athwart the road, in fact he could hardly step off the stile without treading on Methusalem's toes. Relaxing his motion, he sat down on the stile, staring at her. X " Why, Will ! " exclaimed Jinny, and there was now a strange softness in her face and voice. " How stupid of me not to recognize you when I've got your box all the time ! " His mind, still perturbed about the right-of-way, and bent now upon home, could not adjust itself so suddenly to the new situation. Again his mouth opened without issue. Her smile faded. " I'm Daniel Quarles's granddaughter," she said with a little quaver. " Little Jinny of Blackwater Hall." " So you've remembered me at last ! " His voice came out harsh, though inwardly he was melted by this new sweetness. " Then did you know me all the time ? " " Of course — the moment I clapped eyes on you." He was not consciously romanticizing. " That's what I've been thinking as I waited here for you. I'm 140 JINNY THE CARRIER so glad. Because that shows you were only teasing me, saying all those horrid things." Then a new thought struck her to self-mockery. " Of course — I'm getting silly — it wasn't so wonderful of you recognizing me, with the name of Daniel Quarles on the cart." And she laughed merrily. " Do you know why I didn't recognize you ? It wasn't only Miss Flippance put me off, and that I couldn't connect you with drums and marionettes — it was you yourself that blocked the way." " I don't understand." " The old you, I mean — I was thinking about him all the time we were talking, and that funny new you wasn't like him one bit." " Thinking of me ! " He was touched. ..." Whatever made you think of me ? " " Didn't I just tell you I've got your box ? And of course I knew you were coming back. We've been expecting you for days." " Oh, then mother did get my letter ! " His latent ill-humour flowed into the new channel. " Of course." " Then why didn't dad come to meet me ? " Her mouth twitched humorously at the corners with the suspicion the letter was still unread, but she replied : " I suppose because he's old and hasn't got a trap any more, and he knew that Tuesday was my day. Jump up, I'm ever so late 1 " He shook *his head. " I can't jump up." " Why, what's the matter. Will ? " Her voice was anxious and tender. " Have you hurt your ankle, running ? " " No, no ! " he said petulantly. " Didn't you hear me say I'd never patronize a woman carrier ? " She smiled in relief. " Yes — I heard you say it. But that was the silly you." His face hardened. " Silly or sensible, I stick to my word." " Drumsticks ! " she mocked again. " Jump up and tell me all about your affair with Miss Flippance." " Don't be saucy. Jinny. It don't become you:" For the life of him he could not accept her as grown up, much less as an equal, though she sat on high, dominating the situation, whip in hand and horn at girdle, spick and span and cool ; while he, astride the stile, was a forlorn figure, with dusty shoes and hot, lowering look. WILL ON HIS WAY 141 " It becomes me as much as silliness does you," said Jinny. " I don't see the silliness." " Why, you can't live a week at Frog Farm without patronizing me. Who else is there ? There isn't hardly a trap to be had even miles around. Why there was a young man I drove out to Frog Farm last week, and a fine to-do he had getting home ! " It was not calculated to soothe him. " And what need had you to drive a young man ? " " It was for Maria — your mother's pig. She was ill ; her whole litter might have been lost." He frowned more darkly. Pigs, he had but just admitted, might reasonably come into the feminine ambit : still, if girls did get to know coarse facts, they might at least have the decency not to talk about them. "And did he call you Jinny ? " he grunted. " He didn't call me Maria." " Well, traps or no traps," he said sullenly, " you'll get no orders from me. I've fended for myself in the Canadian back- woods, where there wasn't even a woman to sew on buttons, and I certainly don't need one now." But she was- still smiling. " Do you know the song of the dashing young lad from Buckingham ? " " I know you do. But what's that to do with it ? " She re-started the merry tune, but markedly altered the words- 1 " J dashing young lad from — Canada^ Once a great wager did lay T^hat he^d never use "Jinny the Carrier^ But — he gave her an order straightway ! " " No, he won't." " Don't interrupt. You've already given it. But still he^d singfol de rol iddle ol " " What order have I given you ? " " To carry your box, of course — . , Still he^d singfol de rol lay " " But that was before I had the ghost of an idea- " Do join in the chorus : Still he'^d singfol de rol iddle ol " j> 142 JINNY THE CARRIER " ril have my trunk at once I " he cried furiously, and sprang off the stile. " Fol de Tol arilol lay I " she wound up with easy enjoyment. " Give me my trunk," he commanded again. " What — on this lonely road — in this weather ! " " That's my business 1 " " No, it isn't — ^it's mine." She touched up Methusalem and turned his eager nose homewards. Will ran round with the turning animal. " Give me my trunk ! " He was white with determination. " And don't you call that an order ? " She cracked her great Vv'hip. He sprang to the tail-board, hanging on by one arm, and clutched at the trunk with the other, dragging it out. But he had forgotten to reckon with the faithful guardian. Nip, excited as at a rabbit, sprang from the basket in which he had been resting his four weary limbs and growled ominously, and as the burglarious arm did not draw back, the terrier — 0 almost human ingratitude ! — sprang at it and made his beautiful white teeth meet in its fleshy middle. " You little beast ! " Alarmed more for his finery than his flesh, he snatched back the elegant London sleeve and dropped off the cart, which soon disappeared down a grim and lonely lane. XI He examined the wound in his coat, and finding to his relief that it could be neatly patched up, he stripped off the garment and surveyed his abraded skin, tooth-marked and red-flecked ; Nip's signature in blood. Then the horrible thought of hydro- phobia— he had witnessed a dreadful case in Montreal — popped again into his mind : after all, it was as hot as July, and no sane dog would have behaved so disgracefully ! And then, pricked up by the sound of the horn, which came vaunting and taunting from the lane, he started running after the cart yet once more : he must find out if the dog would drink. But even the rumbling of the vehicle could no longer be heard, and he was slackening hopelessly when he became aware how involuted was this lane, and that by trespassing across a ploughed field he could gain several furlongs. Bounding over the ditch with his coat slung over his arm, and nearly tearing it afresh in breaking WILL ON HIS WAY 143 through the blackberry hedge, he ran as recklessly as a fox- hunter across the furrows, breaking out again like a footpad when he heard Methusalem's leisurely trot, and catching that unreluctant animal by the beribboned headstall. Jinny mani- fested no surprise. " I thought you'd get over your silliness," she said, smiling. " Jump up then ! " " I'm not jumping up ! " He was angrier and hotter than ever. " Fve come to give your dog a drink." " Eh. ? But we've passed ' The Silverlane Arms.' " " This is no joking matter. He must have water." " He doesn't need any. Surely I can look after my own dog — that's not a man's place, too, is it ? " " It's not a question of that — but if he doesn't drink, it may be fatal." " Nonsense. A kind cottager offered him water only a mile back — ^he didn't want it. . . . What's the matter ? You're looking so strange. . . . Have you had a sunstroke ? " The alarm! in her voice reflected the alarm in his face, and his alarm was in turn augmented by hers. He had a weird vision of that man in Montreal, thrown into convulsions by the sound of a splash and trying to bite his attendants, and a ghastly memory came to him of a Bradmarsh woman who had frizzled for her foaming child the liver of the dog that had bitten it. " Suppose your dog should be mad ? " he asked, with white lips that already felt frothy. " Nip ? Nonsense." " He bit me." " Oh, I'm so sorry. Where ? Let me see." " I won't." " But Nip never bites." " All the more suspicious. Try him with some water, please." " Where can I get water ? Nip finds his own." " You mean to say you don't carry water ? " " I'm not a water-carrier." " How can you laugh ? It's a question of life and death. Surely there must be a pond somewhere." " You know there's nothing hereabouts. Why, you used to come to Kelcott to sell water at a halfpenny a pint. Don't you remember ? You bought me a monkey-on- a-s tick out of the profits." 144 JINNY THE CARRIER " How you babble ! Then I must go in suspense ? " " Drumsticks ! Here, Nip ! " The dog was in her lap in a twinkling. She pulled off her driving-glove and thrust her fingers into its mouth. " Bite, Nip, bite." Will felt his first conscious flash of romance in all that fagging chase. It was like dying together. But Nip's teeth refused to close on his mistress's fingers — instead he growled ominously at Will. " Bite, you naughty dog ! " And she pressed his reluctant teeth together. " There ! " She held down towards Will two fingers faintly ridged in red and white. But instead of feeling a reassuring sanity, an impulse he felt really mad streamed through his veins to seize the little fingers in his strong hands and to pull her down from the seat of the mighty, down towards the inner breast pocket that held his bank-notes. But his stick and his coat and Methusalem's bridle, all of which he was holding simultaneously, cluttered up his hands sufficiently to clog the impulse. " That proves nothing," he said sulkily. " And wasn't he lapping at the pool after you struck him ? " " Ah, that's true." His face lit up. " Then you did strike him ? " " Don't tease. Yes, I'd forgotten, he lapped then, or rather I scarcely noticed it." " I suppose you shut your eyes when going for him, just like a bull does." " I didn't go for him, I tell you. I just swished my stick." " Well, if you'd kept your eyes open, you'd have seen him drinking and saved your fright." He was disappointed as well as irritated. " Then when you let him bite you, you knew there was no danger." " There's never any danger on these roads — didn't I tell you so ? Why, there was more danger in that monkey you gave me, for I sucked the paint off." " I don't remember giving you any monkey." " I didn't want a monkey, but you maie me take it — like that oath in the wagon. Perhaps you've forgotten that too." " I can remember giving you a kiss," he jerked defiantly. " That I can't remember," said Jinny quietly. " Suppose you've had so many since." WILL ON HIS WAY 145 " Lots ! " said Jinny. " Good-bye again, if you're so silly. Gee up, Methusalem ! " But he clung to the bridle and was dragged along, to Nip's shrilled agitation. " Let go," said Jinny. " Don't be silly." " Not till I have mv trunk." "That's sillier stiU." "Give me my trunk." " I think you have gone mad. Will." " That's not your affair, Miss Quarles, I want my trunk." " I was ordered to deliver it at Frog Farm." " xA.nd I order you to deliver it to me." " Let go."" She cracked her whip in his direction. " You little spitfire ! If you touch me with that whip I'll have an action against you — as well as against your dog." " Let go my horse then." " I'm within my legal rights, as any male carrier would know. I demand my trunk." " And I demand my horse. Let go ! " " I won't." He was running along with it now, keeping pace with the mystified Methusalem. " Oh, Will ! " she cried. " And you said that on a lonely road I might meet a man." " Well — you have now ! " he said viciously. " Yes — the first in all my life to give me trouble." That hurt worse than any whip. He loosed the festive bridle, staggering a little, and the cart rolled past him. Only what was that little object in the road ? Ah, in the altercation she had forgotten to put on her glove again after that dramatic offer of her fingers to the dog — it had tumbled down. 'Twould pay her out to lose it, he thought savagely. However, he thrust it into the inner waistcoat pocket where his paper fortune reposed so comfortingly. But as again he saw the tail-board with his now protruding box vanishing round a corner, a blind rage began to possess him. Surely he was not thus entirely to be thwarted and overridden. Surely, at least, he would not endure her actual delivery of his box at Frog Farm. No, he must head her off again, if only outside his own gate. Across his border a woman carrier must in no circum- stances be countenanced. And once more the unfortunate Will Flynt ploughed through the hedges and meadows, not always K 146 JINNY THE CARRIER remembering the prickly places ; and finally chased by a bull on which he had to turn several times with his coat and his stick, just like a toreador ; though, remembering what Jinny had just said about the bull shutting its eyes, he dodged it at the charging crises, and thus saved both, coat and skin. But he was forced to scramble ignominiously over a fence into the high road, still a good mile from Bradmarsh Bridge, at the very moment the cart came clattering up. But if Jinny had observed the Spanish bull-fight she gave no sign. What she said, as she reined in Methusalem, was much more surprising. " I've been thinking you were within your legal right, Will. Fm sorry. A carrier must deliver goods as ordered. So if you're still silly ! " If she had stopped before the final clause, he might have been touched by the unexpected surrender. As it was, he only said icily, " How much do I owe you ? " " Sixpence," she said as frigidly, " unless you'd like a reduction for my not taking it all the way." "No, thank you." He passed the coin, grazing her warm fingers. " By the way, you didn't happen to see my glove ? " she said. " Your glove ? " he repeated. Why, indeed, should he fetch and carry for her ? Let her be punished for her negligence. He moved towards his box. " Oh, well — I suppose it'll be there on Friday," she said. " I'm the only person who ever goes that cut." " Drumsticks aren't the only things that are dropped," he observed maliciouslv. " No," she agreed simply. She did not even seem to remember how she had trounced " that fool of a man.^^ No sense of humour in the sex, he reflected again. " Do hold the brute ! " he cried, for Nip was again showing his teeth in defence of the box. " If you kept off a bull, you don't need protection against a terrier," she replied, and to his further amazement there was a note of admiration in her voice. " The weaker the thing the harder it is to fight," he rejoined significantly. He had his back now to the cart, and he hoisted his trunk upon it. " You're not going to carry it ? " There was incredulity in WILL ON HIS WAY 147 her voice, for it was a box that looked nearly as long as him- self. " Who else ? " He shifted the box to his right shoulder, which he had padded with his coat. " I thought you'd go home and get a truck or something."* " And leave it on the road ? " " It's just as safe as my glove." " There's no safety for either," he said oracularly, " if a man like me comes along." And he swaggered forwards with his huge load. " Why, you're as strong as the bull ! " said Jinny. '' I am." He was flattered. ^' And as obstinate as a mule ! " He increased his pace. '' Good-bye, WiU ! " He did not answer. Methusalem caught him up. " Since you are going to Frog Farm," said the Carrier, " why not take your folks' groceries too ? I don't usually get 'em till Friday, but when I got your order to go there to-day ! " " Why should I do your jobs ? " " Just what I told you. You can't live a week at Frog Farm without me." " Give me the parcel." His forehead was already beaded with perspiration, but his left hand heroically held out his stick : " Slide the string on this." She shook her head. " Still he^d sing fol de rol lay,^' she trilled, and in a minute he was hopelessly left behind. The road had already begun the ascent towards Long Bradmarsh, but he heard her goading Methusalem to greater efforts, as though in fear lest he should repent under the burden of his obstinacy. XII . As soon as she was safely out of sight. Will, breathing heavily, slackened his showy pace, and very soon lowered his load altogether and sat down upon it, while he wiped his streaming countenance. The physical relief was great. A lark was singing overhead and his eyes followed it restfuUy till he couldn't tell whether the throb was singing or the song throbbing. He must smoke his pipe by this wayside grass after aU that scurrying and 148 JINNY THE CARRIER squabbling. Fumbling for his matches, he felt the bulge of the glove and softened still more. Anyhow he had been victorious over the vixen, and he was resting on his laurels, so to speak. Now that she realized he would never recognize her as a carrier, he could afford to give her one of the Canadian fal-lals he had bought at Moses & Son's for his mother, and which now reposed in the box arching beneath him. That would make her think he had not forgotten her even in Canada, and anyhow it would show her he bore no malice for the bite or even for her bark. Surveying the landscape, he recognized that by going on a little he would strike the turning to the bridge and " The King of Prussia," where he might possibly find a trap. The hussy need never know he had broken down. But as he sat there lazily smoking and evoking his boyhood and her part therein, the best part of an hour sped glamorously, and suddenly he saw red. Caleb Flynt, equally coatless, was hastening from the Bradmarsh direction as fast as his aged limbs could carry him. " Hullo, dad ! " he cried, startled. " Same old shirt ! " Caleb grinned. " Keeps her colour, don't she ? " " But why didn't you come to meet me ? " said Will, recalling his grievance. " Oi did — soon as Jinny come and told us she'd passed you carrying your chest and you might want a hand. Is that the hutch ? Dash my buttons, you must ha' growed up like Samson ! Fancy carryin' that all the way from Chipstone in the strong sun ! " Will did not deny the feat — the explanation would really have been too complicated. In his embarrassment, he overlooked that his father had not really answered his question. " And how's mother ? " he said. " Mother's in a great old state. 'Nation mad with Jinny." " Why, what's Jinny done ? " " Sow neglectful. ' Bein' as you passed him by,' says mother to she, ' why dedn't you stop and pick up the chest ? '" He looked uncomfortable. " And what did Jinny say ? " " She said she dedn't reckonize the old you when she dreft by, and besides she was singing-like." He winced at the reminder of the song, but was grateful to her for telling so truthful a lie : instinctively he felt that his folks having accepted a woman carrier with such brainless acquiescence would fail to enter into the fine shades of his feeling. WILL ON HIS WAY , 149 " Mother hadn't a right to make a noise with Jinny," he said. " She only kitched of a fire for a moment. 'Twas more over you than over Jinny, Oi should reckon. Bust into tears, she did, and when Oi said maybe as Jinny was mistook she nearly bit my head off. ' Too lazy-boned to goo and give a hand to your own buoy-oy,' says she. ' Ain't he shifted for hisself nigh ten years ? ' says Oi. ' Can't you wait ten minutes more ? Oi count he'll be here before the New Jerusalem,' says Oi. That dedn't pacify her much, bein' a female. Cowld-blooded — she called me. * There's feythers,' says she, ' as 'ud be trimmed out with colours like Jinny's hoss — not leave it to a gal as is no relation to decorate even her dog in his honour.' ' That's for May Day,' says Oi. ' All wery fine,' says she. ' But May Day's over and gone six days ' — she's a rare un for figgers is mother — ' time enough,' says she, ^ for God to create the world in.' ' Maybe you'd like flags flourishin' and flutterin', says Oi, jocoshus like, ' but Oi ain't got no flags save my old muckinger.' And with that, bein' more shook than I let on, Oi blowed my nose into it, wery trumpet- like, and that seemed to quieten her, for her tantarums be over now, and the onny noise she's makin' is the fryin' o' them little old weal sausages for you." " Good ! " cried the Prodigal Son, his face transfigured. " She remembered my passion for veal sausages ! " " ' And there's pickled walnuts too 1 Put them out likewise,' says Oi, ^ for 'tis a poor heart that never rejoices.' " " But that's your passion, not mine." " That's what mother said. ' But baint Oi to get no com- pensation ? ' says Oi. And why dedn't you write to her all these years, Willie ? " His face darkened again. " I'm no great shakes with a quill. And there wasn't anything to say. I did write once to tell you I was safe across the Atlantic and was gone to make my fortune." " We dedn't never get no letter." " No — it came back months after. I forgot to put England on it, thinking maybe Essex was enough. But it seems there's a Mount Essex in the States, down Wyoming w^ay, and the Yanks always think everything is for them. So I thought I'd best let things be, being, on the go in those days." Caleb fully sympathized with the plea. *' And have ye made your fortune. Will ? " he inquired meekly. " That depends on your idea of a fortune," Will parried. But ISO JINNY THE CARRIER he had a complacent consciousness of those bank-notes behind the glove. *' My idea of a fortune be faith in God," said Caleb. " Yes, yes, I know." The young man got off the box im- patiently. Caleb tugged at one of its handles. " liOrd, that's lugsome ! " he said, letting the long heavy chest subside. " Ef you ain't come back rich, you've come back middlin' powerful. All the way from Chipstone ! " He clucked his tongue admiringly. Having once left the miracle undenied, and feeling the situation now altogether beyond explanation to the bucoHc intellect, Will again silently acquiesced in the Herculean imputation and took the other handle. " But why didn't you bring a cart or a truck ? " he asked as they began walking cumbrously towards the bridge. " Ain't got nowt but a wheelbarrow," Caleb explained. " Times is changed — Oi ain't looker no more, and there's two housen now. Old Peartree got to have a separate door, but 'twas a good bargain Oi put my cross to with the son o' the Cornish furriner what Oi warked for these thirty-nine year. Mother will have it she'd ha' made a cuter deal, she bein' a dapster in figgers and reckonin' out to a day when the New Jerusalem will be droppin' down, but Oi don't howd with women doin' men's business, bein' as your rib can't be your head." " I quite agree," said Will, surprised to find such enlightened sentiments in his queer old parent. " But tell me about Ben and Isaac and the others." ^' They don't write neither. We was lookin' to you to tell us about the others as went furrin. Ben should be a barber in America, and they say as Christopher's got a woife, colour o' coffee." " Nonsense, dad ! " " Well, maybe 'twas Isaac." " No Flynt would marry a nigger woman," said Will decisively. " Oi'm right glad to hear it," said Caleb. " For Oi count the young 'uns 'ud come out streaky and spotty like pigeons or cattle, and though they likely turn white when they die, and their souls be white all the time, Oi could never be comfortable along o' finch-backed gran'childer." With such discourse they beguiled the heavy way, trudging WILL ON HIS WAY 151 behind their tall shadows, till at the gate of the drive of Frog Farm they saw Martha peering eagerly along the avenue of witch-elms. In another instant Will, letting go his box-handle, was choked in her hug and wetted by her tears. " I can smell those sausages right here, mother," he said, with a smile and a half sob. " How do ye howd r " And he empha- sized the homely old idiom by patting her wrinkled cheek. She caught his hand in hers, and he was touched by the thin worn wedding-ring on the gnarled and freckled hand. His eyes roved round. " But surely this ain't the house I was born in. Why, that was a giant's castle." Caleb looked a bit uneasy : " You're sure this be Will ? " he asked Martha in one of his thundrous whispers. " Why, I'd know him in a hundred." " Well, there's onny nine or ten." And he laughed gleefully. " Do be easv, Caleb. You're getting as unrestful as Bun- dock." " I'm Will right enough," Will intervened. " Only everything seems to have got so small. Come along, dad." He took up his side of the box. " Gracious goodness ! " cried Martha, perceiving it at last. " My poor Will ! Lugging that from Chipstone ! Why didn't you call to Jinny to stop and take it ? " *' How was I to know that that was Jinny's cart dashing by I " he said, moving forward quickly. " I suppose you didn't ask her to stay for the sausages ? " he added lightly. " I couldn't ask her, dearie," said Martha. " She was terrible late, she said, and I know how crotched her wicked old grand- father gets at feeding-time." " How big she's grown ! " he observed carelessly. " Big ! " They both repeated the word, but from a different surprise. " You said you didn't see her," said Martha sharply. " I saw a big young woman flying by in the cart — I didn't know then it was Jinny." " But you just said everything's growed so little," chuckled Caleb. " So it has — all except Jinny." " And she isn't so very big," said Martha, " rather undersized, some folks would say." " Well, I'm not so oversized myself," said Will. 152 JINNY THE CARRIER " Will's seen her toplofty over Methusalem/' explained Caleb. " Wait till he sees her on her pegs." " But I did see her on her pegs," said Will, " at ' The Black Sheep ' 1 " " Then why did you goo and carry that little old box ? " inquired Caleb. ** She wasn't in the cart then — ^how was I to guess she was the Carrier ? " he answered crossly. " But you could ha' ast for the Bradmarsh carrier." " The coach was late," he snapped. " But Jinny hadn't started yet," persisted Caleb. " Bein' as you seen her there." " Legends, my boy, legends." Tony Flip's euphemism for lies rang in Will's brain. But legends, he was finding, are not easy to sustain. One lie breeds many, and he was sorry now he had allowed himself to be made a champion weight-lifter. " I thought being so late 'twas no use asking for the Carrier— 'twas you I expected," he said, turning the war back into the enemy's country. But they had now lumbered up with the box to the twin doors, and the task of dumping down the subject of discussion in a convenient place stayed the cross-examination. The feast for the Prodigal Son had been laid in the parlour, and the scent of the fried sausages came appetizingly on the evening air, more poetic than any of Nature's competing odours. " Why, there's my letter !" cried W^ill at the parlour door, beholding it on the mantelpiece. " You might have let me know vou couldn't meet me." He went in and took it down. " Not opened ? " he cried crossly, the muggy atmosphere of the sealed chamber adding to his irritation. " And I told you exactly the day and hour I was coming ! " " We haven't had time to get it read yet, dearie," said Martha mildly. " I was going to take it to the dressmaker, but Saturdays I'm so busy and Sunday was Sunday, and yesterday I felt as if my ribs were grating together, and to-day was too hot." " Well, I shan't write again in a hurry," he said peevishly, and was about to tear the letter in twain. But Martha snatched it from him with a cry and sHpped it into her bosom. " Sit down. Will," she pleaded. " Your sausages are spoiling." But the Prodigal Son would not batten at once upon the fatted WILL ON HIS WAY 153 calf. He felt too dusty, he said, and then, imperiously pushing at the diamond-paned casement and realizing with disgust it would not open, vanished in search of soap. " He can't be well," whimpered Martha. " Don't worrit, dear heart," Caleb consoled her. " Oi count even Samson wanted a wash arter he'd lugged that little old gate up the hill from Gazy." CHAPTER V WILL AT HOME Is not this the merry month of May^ When love-lads masken in fresh array ? How falls ity then, we no merrier he^n. Like as others, girt in gaudy green ? Spenser, " The Shepheards Calendar." Time hung heavy on Will's hands the first few days of his return, as heavy as the meals heaped before him by the adoring Martha. There was as much for " bever " as for breakfast, yet quantity did not suffice him. He became almost as finnicking and fractious as Cousin Caroline, not content, for example, to strain the pond-water through muslin for the larger insects, but insisting on its being boiled : indeed hinting preposterously that the mortality among his unknown brothers and sisters might have been connected with potations on which Caleb and Martha had patently flourished. He held views on the house-refuse, ignoring Caleb's plea that " the best drain be a pig," and by making hinges the very first evening for the lower windows to open by, he had raised such a draught in the house that it was all they could do to keep their bedroom and their kitchen air-tight, and even Martha was glad when on the Wednesday afternoon he went off to get some fishing in the Brad, and the windows could all be closed up again. But the few dace and bull-heads that rewarded his rod left too many intervals for reflection, and in the unsettlement of his thoughts, before settling down to a judicious expenditure of his ninety pounds, he felt he needed more deadening exertion. He tried poHng against the stream to that ancient faery island — somebody's half-decked shooting punt was doing no good rusting on the bank in the off-season, he thought — but the process soon WILL AT HOME 155 became automatic and his mind was still restless, while after the islands of the St. Lawrence this enchanted playground of his youth seemed tame and its prettiness trivial. He fed his fancy on a salt-water expedition for the Thursday : recalled the great catches of flat-fish he and his brothers had made, the sport to be got out of the voracious if inedible " bull- rout," but it would be a very long walk, and what if when one arrived the tide should be too low ? So he walked inland around Bradmarsh Common. But though it was, he told himself, the " old haunts " that he went out for to see, he omitted to revisit that venerable landmark. Gaffer Quarles. Conscience adjured him he ought to look up the old carrier, whether for respect or reproof — and he actually did hover around Blackwater Hall — • but pride forbade his entering, lest he stumble upon the new Carrier. The Hall appeared even more dwindled to him than Frog Farm as he stood surlily surveying it ; even the Common — after the Canadian prairie — seemed no longer to roll towards the blue infinities. He had a strong impulse to burst in on that careless old Daniel and give him a piece of his mind, even at the risk of meeting his gadabout granddaughter ; but the bleating of the goats sounded forbidding, and as he was hesitating he found himself under the gaze of another gaffer, the crown of whose battered beaver tied on to its brim with coloured strings gave him a festal grotesquerie. Will remembered this ancient, though despite his gay headgear he now seemed inexpressibly grimy in his patched corduroys, his two ragged coats, and the dirty towel wound round his throat. It was the Quarles's nearest neighbour, " Uncle " Lilliwhyte, who lived in a cottage also on the Common ; trading in cress, cherries, and mushrooms, driving home obstreperous cows and doing other odd jobs. This worthy was now exercising his equal right of gathering sticks on the Common, and the sordid association seemed to reduce Jinny to the same shrunken proportions as her cottage. " Buy a nadder, sir ? " " Sir ! " Yes, after all, his father had been a " looker," not a mere labourer, he himself had a waistcoat lined with bank-notes and cut by Moses & Son, why should he expect a sense of dignity from a girl of so lowly a status ? Let her earn her livelihood as she wished — it was not his affair, except in so far as she should have none of his custom. A cock crew lustily, and it subtly heartened him up. Yes, he would go in now, give her 1S6 JINNY THE CARRIER back her glove, professing to have just picked it up, and wash his hands of her for ever. " No, thank you, uncle," he said, with an irrelevant memory of the ancient's blind mother, " what should I do with an adder ? " " But that's a real loive nadder, just kitched, sir." He cautiously displayed its hissing head and darting tongue. " There's many a slowworm killed for a woiper, pore things, Onny fowrpence, sir ! " " Well, here's sixpence," said Will graciously. " No, no," he explained hastily, as the ancient began handing over the wriggling reptile. " Kill the beggar." And he hurried homewards. On second thoughts — inspired perhaps by some dim impression of a female figure flitting among the clothes-lines behind the Hall — he would not risk an encounter with Jinny, but make a special call upon poor, lonely old Daniel on the morrow. Jinny would then be out on her rounds.' And if he took care to go at about the hour she was due at Frog Farm, he could avoid her at both places. Yes, that were tactics worthy of a man of the world. Casual conversation with his elders reminded him, however, that Jinny was not expected that Friday. She had already left the parcel of groceries on the Tuesday. He was thus safe from her for eight days— he had only to remain at home. But the discovery that the whole of Friday was free from any possibility of her appearance at Frog Farm, and that Blackwater Hall was equally immune from her presence, seemed to remove the zest of his diplomacy. Neighbour Quarles remained un visited, his solitude unmitigated, and Will wandered aimlessly on the high road between Bradmarsh and Chipstone. The year was at its most beautiful moment. The hedges were white with hawthorn, and the fresh young leaves on the trees gave an exquisite sense of greenness without blurring the structural grace of the branches, while the unspoiled cadence of the cuckoo's cry came magically over the sunny meadows. But Will could only swish viciouslv with his stick at the hedges and litter the lanes with ruined blossom. It was with no little surprise that, as he and his elders sat at high tea on this same evening, they heard the windings of Jinny's horn. The three sprang up : then Will sat down again. " Ain't you comin' out to see Jinny ? " asked Caleb. " Let the boy drink his tea," said Martha. WILL AT HOME 157 " But youTain't never spoke to her yet," persisted Caleb. " And you used to give her eggs." " Let the boy eat his eggs himself," said Martha sternly. " Oi dedn't mean they eggs," laughed Caleb. " Do go and see what Jinny can want," Martha commanded him. '• I shouldn't be surprised if it is eggs — now that Mr. Flippance has opened his show he'll be wanting them regularly." " Whatever for ? " asked Will. " He sucks 'em raw, like weasels, him and his darter," explained Caleb. " They should say it's good for the woice, and by all accounts showmen fares to have a mort o' pieces to speak." " But why doesn't Jinny sell him her own eggs ? " asked wm. " How do you know she has them ? " asked Martha quickly. *' Hasn't she ? " he said lightly, reddening like the comb of the cock he had heard crowing. " Not enough. That old sinner eats her out of house and home." " Mr. Flippance ? " murmured Will. " No, no. Her grandfather. Why don't you go, Caleb ? " Will sat on stolidly, helping himself to more tea and pouring the milk into the slop-basin. Presently Caleb returned, announc- ing that Jinny had brought something for Will — she could only legally deliver it to Mr. Flynt, junior, she said. Will turned redder than at the egg-talk. " But I never ordered anything," he said. " You can't prewent folks sendin' you presents, same as they're foolish enough," Caleb reminded hijn. A fantastic fear that the blue-eyed girl of the train was dis- charging some proof of devotion at him made him drum nervously with his teaspoon. " But who knows I'm back home ? " he answered Caleb. Through the open house-door came the gay strains of a fresh young voice : * " But still he^d singfol cle rol iddle ol ! " " Don't she sing pritty ? " sighed Caleb. " I'd sooner hear her singing about Zion," said Martha. " She's rather flighty, to my thinking." " That's the first time Oi heard ye say a word agen Jinny," said Caleb, ''* leastways behind her back." 158 JINNY THE CARRIER Will, tingling between the two tortures — the song without and the table-talk within — sprang up brusquely. " Drat the girl — my tea'll get cold. Sit down, dad, I'll see what she's brought." II Jinny sat stiffly on her seat, Nip clasped in her arms. The singing had ceased. Despite himself Will felt an odd pleasure in the sight of the trim figure so competently poised above Methu- salem, and he was touched to note Nip's tail agitating itself amicably at the sight of him. " Good evening," she said politely. " I am glad to see it has not developed." " What hasn't developed ? " " Your hydrophobia. And I am keeping the dog tight, you notice." He winced. " Oh, I'm not afraid of him." " But I am — he's already bitten you once : get the cages, please, while I hold him." " The cages ? " He had a confused idea that Nip was to be caged, was dangerous after all. " They're near the tail-board. Nothing to pay." He went behind the cart, wondering, semi-incredulous ; did indeed perceive a couple of cages in the dusk, and reaching for one, drew back his hand in a hurry from some darting, snapping, creamy, pink-eyed yellowness. " Oh ! " he cried involuntarily. " What's the matter ? Oh, I had forgotten they bite too." " What is this practical joke ? " he cried angrily. " Eh r " said Jinny. " Didn't you order a pair of ferrets to be sent by the Carrier ? " His eyes grew wide. " I beg your pardon — I'd quite for- gotten." " I thought Deacon Mawhood wasn't a likely jaker. Polecats, he said. Have you got the cages ? " she asked, not looking back. " I'm — I'm getting them," he stammered, and began cautiously haling them towards him. " The Deacon asked me to say the hob and the jill must be kept apart." " I know," he grunted, almost as shocked as over her mention WILL AT HOME 159 of Maria's litter. The impudicity of her calling was again borne in on him. " Anything else ? " burst from him sardonically. " No — except there's no need to cope them. I don't know what coping is." " It's what you want," he said brutally. " Muzzling." " Afraid of my bite, too ? " asked Jinny, and turning towards the interior shelf that held the smaller parcels, she began to sing softly to herself : ^'A dashing young lad from Buckingham.^^ He had been expecting " Canada " at the end, and felt some- how disappointed at its absence. " But when I gave the order," he rejoined notwithstanding, " I didn't know that the Bradmarsh Carrier was a girl." "That didn't prevent you using her when you did know," she said quietly. " When have I used her ? " he cried hotly. " Well, what about this ? " She produced from the shelf in the cart a long parcel half enclosed by a string in broken, dirty paper, within v/hich showed a layer of grimy straw. " But what is it ? " " That's not my business." She tendered it downwards. " I never ordered this." " Hadn't you better open it ? " she asked with a twinkle. He dumped down the cages violently, to the alarm of the ferrets, and tore it open, only to shudder back before the clammy-looking coils. " An adder as well ? " said Jinny. " You going to open a menagerie ? " " It's dead," he said. " Did you want a live one ? " " I didn't want one at all — I never ordered it." " Why, Uncle Lilliwhyte told me he sold it to you for fourpence and you gave him twopence extra to kill it." " I beg your pardon — he misunderstood." It was his second apology. " But what a dirty way to deliver it." " Did you expect me to nurse a viper in my bosom ? " Again this indelicate speech, hardly atoned for by its wit. '' The old ragamuffin ! " he muttered furiously. "How did the idiot know it was me ? " i6o JINNY THE CARRIER " Fellow-feeling, I suppose," said Jinny. " Now you're saucy again. You must have told him it was me." " Right for once. Honest uncle was upset at your forgetting to tell him where to send your purchase. I was milking my goats and saw you hanging about." Again he flushed uneasily. " And how much do I owe you ? " he asked hurriedly. " Twopence for the viper, being only a short w^ay. The Deacon says he prefers to pay the freightage on the ferrets, and to collect it from vou himself." He put down the straw-entangled snake on top of one of the cages, and pulled out a coin. " Have you got change for sixpence ? " " Not unless I loose Nip." She fumbled with one hand in her pocket. He glowered. " Oh, next time will do," he said angrily. " Oh, then, there is to be a next time ! " " Not so far as I am concerned." " Sure you don't want any more wild animals ? " " No," he shouted, " Don't be so fierce. The drumstick is found, you will be glad to hear." He grunted. " And the show is doing big business, Mr. Flippance tells me. He was so set up he gave me a pair of new gloves." " That old braggart ! What business had he to give you gloves ? " " Didn't I lose one through his drumstick ? " " But then 'tis me ought to pay for them," he protested. " You ? What nonsense ! Why ? " " It was on my account you lost the glove — through trying to get a bite." She smiled. '' You talk as if I were an angler." " I wish you were ! Anything but a carrier." " Don't say that. Would you like me to buy another pair of gloves — on your account ? " " If you would ! " he said eagerly. " Thank you ! But still he^d singfol de rol iddle oL What size do you take ? " WILL AT HOME i6i " Stow that fol-de-riddling — you know I don't mean gloves for meP " Are you taking back the ord^er ? " she said, with feigned disappointment. " I never gave you an order ! " he said, goaded. " I'd cut my tongue out sooner." " Keep your tongue between your teeth. You'll want it to give me an order with before you're a week older." " Never ! I'd as soon shoe a horse with a hairpin." He snatched up his cages decisively, one in each hand, and the adder rolled on to the ground, bursting its strawy cerements. The girl's grey eyes flashed steel-like. " And can't I drive as well as Gran'fer ? And don't I know the roads ? " And she uplifted her horn from her girdle and blew a resounding blast of defiance. It set all the cocks crowing behind the house and brought Caleb bustling from within it. " Did you summon me, Jinny ? " he asked. " Gracious, Will, whatever you got there ? " His eyes expanded to see the sinuous animals swirling fiercely against their wires ; in coming nearer to peer at them, he stumbled over the snake and uttered a cry. " It's all right," caUed Jinnv. " It's dead." " You killed it, Willie ? " he asked. " With a drumstick," said Jinny gravely. " Fiddlesticks, father ! " said Will angrily. " Oi don't care what sort o' stick you killed that with," said Caleb, " so long as it's a dead corpse. But do ye come in now — mother's grousin' about the tea gittin' cold." " I like cold tea. Go in, father. I'm just coming." He harked back to her blast of rebellion. " You may be able to drive, and you may know the roads. But can't you see how unnatural it is, you perched up there and blowing a horn like Dick Burrage of the County Flyer ? " " And do I blow it as fine as he ? " she asked eagerly. " Anybody can blow a horn," he answered curtly. " Can they now ? " She was piqued again. " I'd like to see anybody do it. Why, Gran'fer can't." " Gran'fer hasn't got much breath left. I'm not talking of men in their eighties." " He is in his nineties," she corrected. " Exactly. I meant anybody with proper lungs." L i62 JINNY THE CARRIER " Can you blow it ? " " Why shouldn't I be able to blow it ? " " All right ! Blow it ! " said Jinny gravely. She unslung it with one arm and held it down. He gazed at it, taken aback, sandwiched between his cages. " It's no good opening your mouth," she said. " I'm not going to stick it in. You'll have to put down those horrible beasts and do that yourself. Why don't they keep still ? They make my head ache." He moved to the back of the house to place the ferrets out of the way, kicking the poor adder before him — it was a needed relief to his feelings. Returning, thus purged, he took the proffered horn — it was not a professional coach-horn or post-horn, but just the little instrument of a master of foxhounds curling into a circle above — and with but scant misgiving put it to his mouth, and blew. But the silence remained unbroken. He puffed on and on with solemn pertinacity. Not a sound issued. His cheeks swelled to bursting-point, and grew redder and redder with shame and vexation. But silence still reigned. " You mustn't put it inside your lips," corrected Jinny. " Think you're tum-tumming into a comb." He readjusted it sullenly, but the music within was still coy. '' Slacken your lip," she advised. " Try to splutter br-r-r-rr into it." But whatever he spluttered into it, nothing came out. " I never realized it was quite so difficult, even the lipping," said Jinny simply. " Of course I didn't expect you to do the double or treble tonguing at once." " What do you mean, tonguing ? " he inquired morosely. " Dividing the notes. Say ' Tucker, Tucker, Tucker ' into it." " But it's blowing, not saying," said Will obstinately. But secretly he modified his methods, and at last a ghostly plangency or a staccato squeak began to reward his apoplectic agonizings, and the still prisoned Nip, who had been yawning in utter boredom, now accompanied the music with a critical and lugubrious howling. Upon this spectacle and situation reissued the guileless Caleb, and had the Crystal City itself come down upon earth, his eyes could scarcely have orbed themselves more spaciously. " He didrCt summon you," observed the merciless Jinny. WILL AT HOME 163 " Go away, father ! What are you staring at ? " yapped the tortured young man. " You do be a fine musicianer ! " And Caleb grinned. " But do ye don't play now — mother's git tin' into her tantarums over your tea." " The instrument must be out of order," said Will, handing it up crossly to Jinny. Remorselessly she drew from it a clarion call that made the welkin ring and the poultry-yard respond in kind. " How the cocks crow ! " she observed artlessly. " Thinks because she blows a horn she's a devil of a fellow," Will remarked witheringly to his receding father. " Say, Jinny, why don't you wear the breeches ? " " Like those Bloomerites you told me of ? I will," she responded sweetly, " if you think it more becoming." " Me ! You don't suppose / notice what you wear." " Then how do you know I'm not wearing 'em now^ ? " " You have me there ! " And he smiled despite himself. The smile lit up the face under the aureole of red hair — it seemed to Jinny a sudden glimpse, through a rift of Time, of the boy she had known. " All the same," he protested, " if I had a horn, I could learn it in an hour." ''' Well, get one," said Jinny. " Where can I get one ? " he retorted fretfully. " Dearie ! Your tea ! " It was Martha herself now. " Oh, I'd get you one," said Jinny carelessly, " but I'll wager you won't blow it properly in a week, much less an hour ! " " A week ! What nonsense ! In a moment." " In a moment ? " " I was speaking to mother. What'll you wager ? " " A pair of gloves," said Jinnv. " Done ! " said Will. She clucked to Methusalem. " Good-bye," she called to the couple as the cart moved oflE. " I'll deliver your order next Friday, Will — without fail."