Chapter X: Horse, Groom, and Bride (3)

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

“I haven’t time!”

“Why, what have _you_ got to do?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“One can’t consider the supers!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Here it is!” She pounced joyfully.

“Just my luck!” He took it ruefully.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XI

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m sorry,” she repeated veraciously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Whisky, do you mean?” said Tony.

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

“Oh, chloroform!” said Tony.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At this Mrs. Flippance showed signs of relapse.

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

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

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

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

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

“What about your telegram?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But Gran’fer didn’t know——!”

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

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

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

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

He examined her cautiously through the little panes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A terrible suspicion flashed upon Jinny.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But where have you put it?”

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

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

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

“Really? More than a sovereign?”

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

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

“More than double that!”

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

He hurried towards the stairs.

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

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

“A foiver!” he cried, waving it.

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

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