Chapter XI: Winter’s Tale (2)

A perverse imp kept telling her that the funeral meats would be unusually abundant. But she had no heart to board the Watch Vessel, to encounter these unknown fellow-mourners. She wanted to mourn in solitude. And her quest had failed. The last hope for her grandfather had been extinguished—Dap had followed Sidrach—and the best thing to do was to get home as quickly as poor Methusalem could manage it. He should rest, not here where she might meet the returning Daps and perhaps be recognized through Daniel Quarles’s cart, but when they got to “The Jolly Bargee,” where she must have a bit of bread and cheese brought out to her. Yet she could not tear herself away from this squalid, sublime waterside, and driving along the cart-route behind the sea-wall to a safe distance, she got out near a little wooden pier and walked on the rough earth of the sea-wall, which was luxuriant with pigweed and sea-beet, strewn with wisps of hay and straw from passing carts, and covered with dead little white-shelled crabs. There was something akin to her mood in the pleasant pain of the acrid mud-smell.

At “The Jolly Bargee” she was jarred by the slow easy laughter from the tap-room—the trickery of the “Brandy Hole chap” was still under facetious debate. Before her set face, the gorged Nip, rejoining her at the inn-door with conscious drooping tail, turned on his back and grovelled guiltily: but she ignored his abasement, and having gulped down her snack of bread and cheese—an unwelcome and unforeseen expense—drove on with the same brooding air. She was dazed by the wonder and pathos of the little Commander’s death, the whole genial breathing mass become as insensitive as his glass eye: would he get that back at the Resurrection, she pondered, or would there be his original eye? Thence she passed to the thought of the dead Sidrach, the large handsome man of a hundred and five, strong as a bull of Bashan, whom she was supposed to be visiting, and she wondered dully what report of him she should bring back to her grandfather. Abandoning herself as usual to Methusalem’s guidance in this deep brooding, she discovered after an hour or so that in his ignorance of these roads he had gone miles out of their way, down Smugglers’ Lane, and when after half an hour of readjustment she had got on the right homeward road, her own subconscious gravitation to the waterside took her back to it. And while she gave Methusalem a rest here, the white moon and the early November sunset began to brood over the mud-flats, transfiguring them with strange scintillant gold, and Jinny felt a divine lesson in the transfiguration, and the solemn voice of the clergyman echoed in her ears: “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” Doubtless the Commander was already in communion with the Angel-Mother.

The problem of Sidrach was still unsolved when the feeding-field she had seen preparing in the morning loomed again on her vision like a reminder of the urgency of that question. She envied Master Peartree’s sheep munching so imperturbably in their hurdles while she had been going through all these emotions and perplexities. With their black noses and feet they looked, she thought, as though they had been drinking from a pool of ink, and her thoughts wandered again from her problem, and she let Methusalem drink from a pool of water. Though it was only four o’clock, the moon had turned a pale ochre and was shining full and high in the heavens, its continents clearly showing. There was no sound save the chewing of the sheep, the gulping of her horse, the wistful tinkling of a wether’s bell, and from afar the fainter clanging of a cow-bell. Even Nip, feeling unforgiven, was subdued. Life was beautiful after all, she felt, as she watched the great splashes of sunset below the moon, the glimmering rose-tint on the horizon, the glint upon the pool, the tangle of magical gold in the branches. Somehow a way would be opened for her through this network of mendacity.

But by the time she got to her door, the Common was covered again with a grey mist, just oozing rain, and Blackwater Hall was a place of shrouded terrors. No light was showing through the shutters or through the chinks in door or window, and she had a sudden clammy intuition that her grandfather had solved her problem for her by the simple process of dying like Sidrach and the Commander. Silent and weird lay thatch and whitewash under the moon. She hammered at the house-door and then at the shutters, her heart getting colder and colder.

She tried the door again, then hearing Nip barking mysteriously from within, she went round to the kitchen-door. To her joy and amazement it was wide open, and a ray of moonlight resting on a little pool of beer on the brick floor showed that the tap of the beer-barrel which was kept there was dribbling. Even in that anxious moment her economical instinct prevailed, and as she was tightening the tap, there permeated through the living-room door a heavenly snore—no lesser adjective could convey the relief it brought. With a bound she was up the couple of stone steps and, unlatching the door, she sent a faint blue glimmer from the kitchen into the shuttered darkness, that was relieved only by the flicker of an expiring lamp and a last spark from a dying log. In that dim discord of lights she saw her grandfather’s head on the thumb-holed tray, his hair and beard a dull grey spread, dividing a darker jug from two beery glasses. The absence of his Bible-pillow seemed symbolic of his degradation.

Who had been with him? she wondered. What boon companion had tempted him from his habitual moderation? She could not imagine. She shook him to awaken him, and lifted up his head. But it fell back in a stupor, and under the draught from the kitchen-door the lamp-flicker went out. She groped about, replenishing the lamp and trying to light it with a spill from the fire, but the greying log only charred the paper. She fumbled in vain among the china shepherdesses on the mantelpiece for her flint and the iron and steel gauntlet, and going out to get her lighting-up matches from her cart, she overturned the other arm-chair that stood in a novel situation at the table—probably the guest had drawn it up there. But the noise left the Gaffer’s snore unweakened. Well, at any rate he had solved her problem—at least for the moment—she thought bitterly, as she groped her way back to the glimmering grate. But even the chemical matches would not light, whether by friction or when placed on the charred log: evidently the long damp had impaired them, and they even snapped under her fingers. How lucky it was one need not rely on such new-fangled gewgaws, she thought when—by a happy inspiration—she found the solid steel and stone with the tinder-box in the Gaffer’s pockets; and soon the lamp was lit and the fire glowing ruddily under the bellows. Then she made herself some kettle-broth (hot water with bread soaked in it), which, sipped before the fire, was almost as cheering as the blazing logs, and resisting the temptation to cook one of the bloaters, she fed the still subdued Nip from the bread.

When he was cosily couched in his basket, and with a last summoning of her spent energies, she had rubbed down Methusalem, she tried to fold her third charge, but the old man still snored steadily, and when she sought again to raise his head from the tray, he swore inarticulately in his sleep, and she was too worn out to persist or even to remove the tray and glasses. She wanted to sleep herself, after all these emotions and the long day in the air, and her cracked mirror showed her a drawn face that yawned and closed weary eyes against itself. But it now occurred to her that she could not get to bed with Gran’fer in the room, she must sleep in an arm-chair or on the settle, or stretched on the floor with the cushion for pillow. But the floor through her early start was unswept, the settle was too narrow, and the chair soon got so hard that after a last attempt to rouse the sleeper, she put an old cloak over his shoulders, a stout log on the fire, turned out the lamp—setting her shadow leaping monstrously—and dragged herself up the dark, fusty staircase to his room, where she let herself fall dressed on his bed. She did not dare get between the sheets, for fear he might wake up in the night and come up to bed. Lying there, muttering the prayers she was too tired to kneel for, she had an underthought that Providence was giving her a hint: assuredly in the coming winter nights she must leave him in the room that was warmed all day by the fire, exchanging bedrooms, though not for the reason he had once suggested—a reason that made her last conscious thought a shame-faced memory. But her next thought was one of pleasant wonder—sunshine splashing the whitewashed sloping walls through the undrawn blind of a little lattice. What was this strange spacious room? How came she there in her clothes? Then memory resurged, and feeling she had slept dangerously long, she sprang up, unhooked the casement, and drew a deep breath of fresh air, as she gazed on this unfamiliar morning view of the Common and the hoar-frosted fields, dazzling her eye with floating colour-specks from the sun that cut redly through the foliage of a fir-tree. Particularly she relished the silver rim of the Brad now descried on the horizon. It made her feel sickish to descend from that space and freshness to the dark, airless, shuttered room with its musty, beery smell and its all-pervading snore. Swiftly she threw open the shutters and the casement, and let the light and air stream in.

The chill draught and the noise she made seemed to rouse the Gaffer at last, for as she was returning from the kitchen with some kindlings for the fire in her apron, he opened his eyes with a start and stared at her.

“Where’s Sidrach?”

She was taken aback: she had not yet prepared her story. Indeed the waking in the big attic and the puzzle of his condition had driven her own problem out of her head.

“Sidrach?” she murmured. Should she out with his death and be done with it?

“Ay, he got riled ’cause Oi wouldn’t let him smoke. Where’s he got to?”

It was now her turn to stare at him. “Nonsense, Gran’fer,” she said gently, “that’s a dream you’ve been having.”

“Mebbe.” He blinked in the sunlight, mystified. Suddenly his face darkened. “Why do ye tell me lies agen? There’s his tumbler!”

He pointed to one of the beery glasses she had left still standing. Commonplace as the glass looked with its lees, she was glad he had not pointed at it the evening before in the weird moonlight with her brain full of the poor dead Dap.

“Don’t tell me!” she said in a voice she tried in vain to make stern. “It wasn’t Sidrach that was drinking with you. Who _was_ it?”

“It was Sidrach, Oi’m tellin’ ye,” he protested. “Oi put out his beer with his tumbler and his chair to be ready soon as ye brought him back, he bein’ a rare one for his liquor. But the hours passed slow as a funeral crawl, it got owl-light and you not back, ne yet a rumble of your cart upon the road, so at last molloncholy-like Oi lights the lamp and makes a roaring fire and drinks by myself, and then Oi locks and bolts up and stoops down to put on another log, and when Oi looks up, there he sets in his chair in his best Sunday smock, all clean and white.”

She thrilled again.

“But how could he get in, if you’d locked up?”

“That’s what Oi says to him. ‘Good Lord, Sidrach,’ Oi says, ‘how did you get here?’ ‘Come in the coach from Che’msford,’ says he. ‘The coach,’ says Oi, wexed, ‘ye didn’t want to back up the jackanips what’s come competitioning here, and Jinny gone to fetch ye, too. But how did ye get through the door?’ Oi says. ‘You draw me some beer, Danny,’ says he. ‘For Oi count ye’ve finished the jug.’ So Oi goos to the kitchen with the jug, and there sure enough stands the door wide open—happen Oi hadn’t shut it good tightly—and there passin’ along the road by the Common Oi catches sight of the coach, lookin’ all black in the dusk and glidin’ away wery quiet, same as ashamed to be in our cart-racks. ‘You pirate thief,’ Oi says, shakin’ my fist at the driver, ‘ye’ll never come into this house save on your hands and knees.’ But when Oi goos back with my jug brimmin’ over, Sidrach warn’t there. ‘Sidrach!’ Oi calls, ‘Sidrach!’ No answer. Oi goos about beat out and crazy ’twixt here and the kitchen and then the clock strikes, and that remembers me to look in the tother room, and there Oi hears him chucklin’ to hisself in one of they big empty boxes ye left at home this marnin’. ‘Out ye come,’ says Oi, laughin’ too, for he was allus up to his pranks, was Sid. ‘And Oi’m proper glad to see you, old chap,’ Oi says. With that he comes out of his box, with a little o’ the dust on his white smock, and he hugs and coases me—wery cowld his hands and face was from the long jarney—and Oi drinks his health and he drinks mine, and we clinks they glasses together and has rare sport gammickin’ of the times when Oi was in my twenties and he taken me to see the cock-fightin’ and that old Christmas Day his dog won the silver spoon in the bear-baitin’ at ‘The Black Sheep,’ and Oi told him as Annie were free now but seein’ as he was come to stay, Oi dedn’t want nobody else and he needn’t be afeared he’d be tarned out ef Oi died, bein’ as Oi’d left the house to him by will and testament. ‘Little Danny,’ says he, ‘you’re a forthright brother, but no fear o’ the poorhouse for neither on us, for Oi was born with that silver spoon in my mouth, and Oi’ve got a stockin’ chock-full o’ gold,’ and he shows me it, hunderds of spade guineas, each with the head of Gearge III, fit to warm the cockles of your heart, and we clinked glasses agen and sang three-times-three, merry as grigs, and then the devil possesses him to pull out his pipe and baccar. ‘No, ye don’t,’ says Oi, ‘not for all the gold in Babylon,’ and Oi runs to pocket the flint and steel on the mantelpiece, and to block out the fire, and he laughs and howds his pipe over the lamp and draws like a demon. Oi rushes to the lamp and tarns it out and then back to the fire, but aldoe that give a goodish light, Sidrach, he warn’t there no more.” He was almost blubbering.

“But how did he look?” said Jinny, whose kindlings had long since slid from her apron.

“A hansum bonkka man, Oi keep tellin’ ye. Ain’t ye seen him nowhere? Where’s he got to? Just there he sat singin’ with his great old woice:

‘_Two bony Frenchmen and one Portugee,_
_One jolly Englishman can lick all three._’”

The quavering melody ended with a big sneeze, and Jinny, fearing the brothers would indeed be reunited, rushed to close the window and light the fire. Though she felt confusedly that her grandfather, waiting for Sidrach, and drinking too freely in his melancholy, had probably dreamed it all, she was not sure that he had not really seen Sidrach’s ghost. How else would the flint and steel have got into his pocket? In any case she was reminded that her secret was not safe. In concealing a death one forgot to reckon with the ghost, and Sidrach’s might at any time divulge it suddenly to his brother, even if the present visitation was only a dream. Dap’s ghost, too, was another possibility that must be taken into account. “I’ll tell you where Sidrach’s got to,” she said desperately, as a yellow flame leapt up, “he’s got to heaven.”

“To heaven?” repeated the old man vaguely.

“To heaven!” she said inexorably. “He hasn’t been in Chelmsford for weeks. He was very old, you see, a hundred and five.”

The Gaffer began to tremble. “Ye don’t really mean Sidrach’s gone to heaven?”

She nodded her head sadly. “He fell down,” she explained.

“Fell down to heaven?” he asked dazedly.

“His body fell downstairs—his soul went up to God.”

“Then he come downstairs agen last night, dear Sidrach,” he said solemnly; “he come to have a glass and a gammick with his little brother.”

Jinny was not prepared to deny it, and though the idea jarred, it was after all difficult to see snoring senectitude with the poetry attaching to Angel-Mothers. She removed the dirty glasses silently.

“And where’s his stockin’ o’ gold?” he inquired suddenly. “Why didn’t ye bring back that?”

“There wasn’t any,” she said gently. “He died poorish.”

“They’ve stole it,” he cried. “They’ve robbed me. ’Twas me he meant it for.”

“No, no—all he left was used up in the funeral.”

“Ay, they ain’t satisfied with carts nowadays,” he commented bitterly. “Like that doddy little Dap. Did you goo to the churchyard to see the grave?”

“Yes,” she replied unflinchingly, sustained by the verbal accuracy. “I’ve got you a bloater for breakfast,” she added cheerfully.

“That’s the cowld chill he caught as a cad, gatherin’ eggs on the ma’shes,” he said musingly. “Ague they calls it—never got over it. And tramped with his pack-horses in all weathers. And rollin’ about here and there and everywheres. ‘You’ll never make old bones, Sid,’ Oi says to him.”

“A hundred and five is pretty old, Gran’fer,” Jinny reminded him. “King David only says seventy, that’s exactly one and a half lives your brother had.”

“Give me the Book,” he said brokenly.

With trembling hands she brought the great Family Bible he had inherited with the house. But his object seemed to be neither verification of the text nor prayerful reading, for he next asked for pen and ink, and then having ascertained the exact date of Sidrach’s death, he adjusted his spectacles and chronicled it with a quavering quill opposite Sidrach’s birth-date.

“He’s gone to heaven,” he said. “That’s more than some folks’ll do—even on their hands and knees. Do ye warm my beer for me this marnin’, dearie, for Oi fare to be cowld and lonely in my innards, and Oi’d fain smoke a pipe myself, same as Oi hadn’t promised the old man o’ God.”

VI

The year ended gloomily for Jinny. December was cold. In the mornings the fields looked almost snowy with hoar-frost, but the actual snow did not come till near Christmas. Her grandfather refused to be moved from his bedroom—one was safer from thieves up there, he now urged—so a fire upstairs every evening was added to her work. But the monotony of existence and of the struggle therefor was broken by two letters and an episode, albeit all interconnected.

Both letters were from Toby, the naval gunner, Dap’s eldest son, and the one for her grandfather was enclosed in hers, as Toby was not sure the old gentleman was still alive, one of his sisters having heard that there was a piece in the paper about his death at the age of a hundred and five. He had only found her own address after the funeral, he wrote, a packet of letters from her having come to hand in the clearing up. For although his poor father with his last breath had asked that his telescope be given to little Jinny Boldero as a token of love and remembrance, he had died without telling them where to send it. It would now be forwarded in due course. For two months he had borne much pain with Christian resignation, she learnt with sorrow and respect. The other letter, addressed “Mr. Daniel Quarles,” she had no option but to hand over, but did so with anxiety, for she had not yet broken the news of Dap’s death, and whether he received it with regret or with unchristian satisfaction, it would assuredly agitate him. As she watched him open it, she saw a piece of paper flutter from it, and she caught it in its fall.

“That’s mine!” he cried, snatching it from her fingers. “Pay the person naimed——” he read out dazedly. “What’s that?”

“That must be a money order,” she explained, though with no less surprise.

“A money order?” he repeated.

“You’ve seen post-office orders, surely,” she said, not realizing that they had only become common a decade ago with the introduction of penny postage, and that nobody—not even his children—had ever sent him one before. “’Tis a way of sending money—you can send as much as two pounds for threepence. How much is yours for?”

Overlaid memories of his late eighties struggled to the surface. “Oh, ay,” he said, not answering her. “That was a blow for the carriers—that and the penny post. Folks began to write to the shops; dedn’t matter so much here, but the Che’msford carriers complained bitter as the tradesmen sent out their own carts with the goods.”

“But how much is it for?” repeated Jinny impatiently.

He studied it afresh, holding it away from her like a dog with its paw on a bone. “Three pound!” he announced with rapturous defiance. “Ye took away my foiver. But this be for the person naimed on the enwelope, and that’s Daniel Quarles.”

“But what’s it for?” she asked.

“It’s for me,” he said conclusively, and was going up to his room like a magpie with its treasure.

“Yes, but read the letter,” she urged.

He consented to sit down and study it. “Good God!” he blubbered soon. “Poor Dap’s dead.”

“Dead?” echoed Jinny mendaciously.

“You read it for yourself, dearie. An awful pity, a man in the prime of life. ’Tis from his boy in the Navy as he ast to send me three pounds what he owed me. That was wunnerful honest of him, to remember, seein’ as Oi don’t, aldoe Oi count the Lord put it into his heart, knowin’ Oi wanted money terrible bad. But Oi allus felt he was a good chap underneath: ’twarn’t his fault he had a glass eye. That made him look at the nose, like, and git frownin’ and quarrelsome. Three pound! That’s a good nest-egg.”

“Yes,” said Jinny, glad the death was passing off so peacefully, “and he’s sending me his telescope.”

“He don’t say that,” he said, peering at the letter again.

She turned red. “I had a line too—didn’t you notice yours had no stamp? I’ll change your order for you at the post office,” she went on hurriedly. Mentally she had worked out that two of the pounds represented the price of the new gravestone the Commander had never purchased, and the third his idea of interest for all these years. Doubtless he had been too tactful to send them back in his lifetime. Anyhow she agreed with her grandfather that it was really all the Lord’s doing, for nothing could be timelier. Even her poultry was now being steadily sacrificed, and this great sum would get her beautifully over Christmas and New Year and start that with a handsome balance in hand. But she had counted without her grandfather.

“No, you don’t!” The Gaffer’s hand closed grimly on the precious paper. “That’s a nest-egg, Oi’m tellin’ ye.”

“But what are you going to do with it?” she inquired in distress.

“That’s for Annie.”

“Mr. Skindle’s mother! But he’s rich as rich.”

“He don’t never buy her nawthen. He come here and told me sow out of his own mouth, the hunks. Oi had to pay for her packet o’ hairpins.”

“Well, anyhow she’ll have her Christmas dinner, and that’s more than you’re sure of,” she risked threatening.

“You’ve got the telescope, hain’t ye?” he urged uneasily.

“I can’t sell that. That’s for remembrance.”

“Ye can remember him without a telescope. And ef he had his faults, ’tain’t for you to remember ’em, seein’ as ye’d never a-bin here at all ef he’d done his duty by Emma and King Gearge. But Oi reckon he couldn’t see everythink with that glass eye, and Oi ought to ha’ carried silks and brandy myself ’stead o’ parcels and culch. Did, Oi’d a-got a stockin’ like Sidrach’s and not had to deny myself bite and sup for your sake.” And he hobbled stairwards, the post-office order clutched in his skeleton claw. “Do ye write to Dap’s buoy-oy and thank him for payin’ his dues, and say as Oi hope he won’t put no fooleries on his father’s stone, and he’d best copy what Oi had put on your father’s and mother’s.”

Jinny duly wrote, if not in these terms. But when the telescope came, she felt anything but thankful. For, welcome as it was in itself, it came by the coach. She had been too distraught to foresee this, though she recognized that it was the natural way. And apart from the sting to her own pride, it agitated her grandfather profoundly. He had been nodding at the hearth, but the clamour of the coach aroused him, and ere she could get to the door he had sprung up with an oath.

“Don’t let him over my doorstep!” he cried, pursuing her. “He’s got to come in on his hands and knees.” He jostled her aside and seized the bolt, but his hand trembled so, he could not shoot it.

“How can he crawl in, if you bolt the door?” she said tactfully.

He was staggered: the possibility of the opposition obstinacy relaxing had never even occurred to him. Recovering, he urged that the enemy would try to rush over the sill.

“No fear, Gran’fer. He’ll never cross our threshold unless you carry him in!”

She spoke with unconscious admiration of Will’s tenacity. Indeed the image of the young man crawling to her grandfather or even to herself would have been repellent, had it been really conceivable.

“Carry him in!” the Gaffer laughed explosively, and that burst of derision made him almost good-humoured. He let himself be pushed gently towards the inner room, while Jinny, with her pulse at gallop, opened the door.

The tension and friction of nerves proved sheer waste. The long narrow parcel was brought to the door by the hobbledehoy guard, and the driver remained, imperturbably important, on his box, looking almost as massive as an old stager in his new, caped greatcoat and coloured muffler, though the face under the broad-brimmed festively sprigged hat was very different from the mottled malt-soused visages of the coaching breed. It seemed but an idle glance that Jinny cast at it, or at the Christmas congestion of the coach, overflowing with passengers and literal Christmas boxes, and with hares pendent even from the driver’s seat. Nevertheless, as ever when they met, long invisible messages passed between Jinny and Will, and not all her defiance could disguise her humiliation at this second triumph of the coach, coming as it did when the fortunes of the cart were at their blackest. For the Gaffer refused sullenly to part with his piece of paper—she did not even know where he had hidden it—and with Uncle Lilliwhyte too poorly to forage for her, she was almost tempted to apply for the Christmas doles that were by ancient bequest more abundant at Mr. Fallow’s church than applicants for them. But her instinct of “uprightness” saved her: better that the last of her poultry should be sacrificed for the sacred repletions of the season. She did indeed dally with the notion of keeping Christmas not with, but from, her grandfather—possibly his failing memory might for once prove an advantage—but she had a feeling that apart from the profanity of ignoring it, the festival was too ingrained in the natural order to be overlooked, for did not Christmas mark the pause in the year, when with the crops in the ground and the little wheat-blades safely tucked under the snow, and the beer brewed and the pigs killed and salted, the whole world rests and draws happy frosted breath? No, the old man’s instinct would surely trip her up, if she tried to run Christmas as an ordinary day.

She might, of course, as he had originally suggested, sell or at least pawn her telescope, but even if she could have brought herself to that, she could not have got it away from him, for he had annexed it from the first moment and sat peering out of it from the vantage-point of his bedroom lattice. He was at his spy-glass the moment he woke, enchanted when he could descry people or incidents far-off—it was as if his long seclusion from the outer world was over—and he would call out like a child and tell Jinny what he had seen. Sometimes it was Master Peartree and his dog, sometimes Bidlake ferrying on the Brad or a couple seeking warmth in a cold lane; now a woodman cutting holly branches with his billhook, anon Bundock bowed by his bag or Mott with his fishing-rod, and once he cried out he could see Annie coming out of Beacon Chimneys, though Jinny suspected that the tall figure with the “wunnerful fine buzzom” was really Farmer Gale’s new wife. Particularly protected did her grandfather now feel against thieves, whose stealthy advent he would henceforward detect from afar. Delighted as she was in her turn with the new toy that kept him happy even on a reduced diet, she had to keep his fire going all day now, and to be up and down closing the window through which he _would_ stick the telescope. Sometimes he directed his tube heaven-ward, though not for astronomical purposes. “Happen Oi’ll see Sidrach coming down for a gossip,” he said.

Just before Christmas he informed her he had decided that the right thing to do with the nest-egg was to purchase Sidrach a gravestone with it, and he instructed her to write a letter of inquiry to Babylon. But although this seemed to her a more logical use of it than he knew, she disregarded his instruction. The nest-egg was too precious. The time might come when he would ask for bread, and was she to give him a stone?

VII

Neglected on the coast in favour of New Year, Christmas was celebrated in the inland valley of the Brad with the conventional accessories, and every Christmas the mummers had been wont to attend on the Master of Blackwater Hall; as well as the waits. Jinny with no coin to offer to either, the last of her poultry doomed for the Christmas dinner, and Uncle Lilliwhyte also on her hands, had this year to beg both companies to refrain, alleging her grandfather was too ill. The weather was seasonable, the robin hopped as picturesquely on the snow as on the Christmas card Jinny had enclosed with her thanksgiving letter to Gunner Dap. The cottage, prankt with its holly and mistletoe, had a fairylike air—everything was perfect, even to the Christmas pudding. But only Nip and Methusalem were happy. To the Gaffer the breach of an immemorial tradition gave a troubling sense of void.

“Where’s the waits? Where’s Father Chris’mus? Where’s St. Gearge?” he kept saying peevishly. Jinny put him off with vague replies or none. Once he alarmed her by asking suddenly: “Where’s the Doctor?” She was reassured when he began spouting:

“_Oi carry a bottle of alicampane._”

He passed on to imagine himself as St. George, and seizing the poker for a sword declaimed vigorously, if imperfectly:

“_Oi’ll fight the Russian Bear, he shall not fly,_
_Oi’ll cut him down or else Oi’ll die._”

“Ain’t we a-gooin’ to see the mummers?” he inquired angrily as Christmas Day waned.

“Perhaps they are ill or it’s too cold,” she suggested feebly.

“But they’re gooin’ around to other folk!” he protested. “Oi seen ’em through my glass!”

“Well, then you _have_ seen them,” she said still more feebly. Inwardly she wondered if he had detected herself, on her way to church, carrying off some Christmas dinner to Uncle Lilliwhyte’s hut. The telescope was a new terror added to life.

She had wanted to invite the prop of her larder to take his Christmas dinner with them, but her grandfather refused violently to sit down with such a “ragamuffin.” His sense of caste was acute, and as Jinny’s sense of smell was equally acute, she would not have persisted, even had renewed rheumatism not confined the ancient to his hut.

The day after Christmas that year was Friday, and after the comparative festivity of the holiday it required no small force of will to go round uselessly in the north wind, when one day a week would have more than sufficed for such odd commissions as still came her way. The snow had fallen thicker in the night, and robins, starlings, finches, blackbirds, little blue-tits (pick-cheeses she called them), and other breakfastless birds had all been tapping at her window for crumbs. But the remains of the feast made a good meal for her grandfather and he was in the best of humours, praising the acting of the mummers, which he did not now remember he had not seen this Christmas, and remarking upon the “wunnerful fine woice” of old Ravens’ grandson among the waits. Apparently his memories of other years had fused together into an illusion concerning the day before. As Jinny set out, she found herself wishing he would forget his quarrel with Will. Not, of course, that she could forget hers!

There were grey snow-clouds in the sky, and as she ploughed past the sheepfolds, scarring the purity of the road with her cart-tracks, she beheld patriarchal sheep, standing almost silent with round, snow-white beards: only a green shoot peeped here and there from the speckless white expanse. Methusalem’s muffled footsteps gave her a sense of dream, and, when the wind was not in her face, she watched her breath rising white in the air with some strange sense of exhaling her soul. But beneath this mystic daze went an undercurrent of wonder as to how she could meet the New Year.

Returned from her round—and she was glad, having shown herself and got her meal, to creep home under cover of the early darkness—she half expected to find the Gaffer as ill as she had feigned, but though he was still peering out into the night, there was no sign he was in the grip of the cold; on the contrary he seemed to have found fresh strength and brightness, whether from the nest-egg or this renewed ocular intercourse with his world. “Oi seen you all along the road,” he chuckled. In this new mood she was easily able to persuade him to exchange a goat for Methusalem’s provender. He would not part with his three pounds, but they gave him a sense of security, almost of gaiety. Indeed their existence made as wonderful a difference to herself as to him. Hidden away though the money order was, she felt the old man would be forced to produce it if ever hunger got too keen, and so the knowledge of it sustained her as the proximity of a boat sustains a swimmer. It was scarcely a paradox that without its assistance she could not have got through the first month of the New Year. For January brought the “hard winter” foretold by the sloes. Outwardly it was a bright world enough, with children skating on the ponds and ditches: indeed the frost brought out a veritable flamboyance of colour in the animal creation, and at one of her moments of despair when she had humbled herself in vain to offer lace to the new Mrs. Gale, Jinny was redeemed by the motley pomp of the cocks shining on the farmyard straw, and the glowing hues of the calves that bestrode it with them, all overbrooded by the ancient mellow thatch. Her heart sang again with the row of chaffinches perched on the white stone wall, and looking at the trees silhouetted so gracefully against the sky, she decided that winter bareness was almost more beautiful than summer opulence.

But she changed her mind when she watched—with a new sympathy born of fellow-anxiety—the struggle for food among the birds. Coots had flocked in from the coast to add to the competition of land-species, and frozen little forms or bloody half-feathered fragments, but especially dead starlings with lovely shades of green and purple, pathetically imponderable when picked up, all skin and feather—sometimes decapitated by sparrow-hawks—abounded on the hard white roads. As she began to feel the same grim menace brooding over her grandfather and herself, that social unrest which reached even Bradmarsh in faint vibrations began to take possession of her, and she arrived at a revolutionary notion which would have horrified Farmer Gale far more than her outrageous demand for a law that nobody should be paid less than ten shillings a week. She actually maintained that every man should be pensioned off by the parish on reaching the age of ninety! But the view found no sympathy in an age of individualism, to which the poorhouse was the supreme humiliation. Even Uncle Lilliwhyte, who was now on the mend again—though too weak to fend for anybody but himself—told her to her surprise that every man ought to put by for a rainy day. It was this slavish sluggishness of the poor that was the real stumbling-block to reform, she thought, though remembering Uncle Lilliwhyte’s leaky habitation, she treasured up his reply as a humorous example of the gap between precept and practice.

Even more unsympathetic was Mrs. Mott’s attitude. She scoffed at the idea that every man should be pensioned off at ninety. “Poisoned off at twenty,” was her emendation.

“Well, you do your best,” Jinny laughed.

Mrs. Mott’s blue silk bodice crackled. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t you sell them liquor?”

“It’s good liquor,” said Mrs. Mott, flushing.

“I was only joking. But joking apart, it doesn’t do them much good.” And Jinny thought of how even her grandfather had fuddled himself, with or without ghostly assistance.

“If I gave up my bar,” said Mrs. Mott hotly, “who would pay the rent of our chapel?”

“Well, but the chapel got along before you joined,” Jinny reminded her mildly.

“Heaping up debt!” shrilled Mrs. Mott, with flashing eyes.

“Then what’s the good of poisoning off the men?” argued Jinny, smiling. “Where would your bar be without them?”

“Women could learn to drink,” said Mrs. Mott fiercely, “and smoke too.”

But the latter accomplishment seemed so comically impossible to Jinny—who had never seen Polly over her cigar and milk—that she burst out laughing at the image of it, and her laughter made Mrs. Mott fiercer, and that lady said for two pins she’d wear pink pantaloons like the Bloomerites. As Jinny did not offer the pins, but laughed even more merrily at the new picture presented to her imagination, relations with Mrs. Mott became strained, and when at their next meeting Jinny sensibly remarked that if the law really gave Mr. Mott his wife’s possessions, it was useless going to it, all that lady’s indomitable spirit turned against her whilom confidante. “You take his part like everybody else,” she cried bitterly. “But don’t think I haven’t seen him ogling you!”

“Do you mean I’ve ogled _him_?” said Jinny, incensed.

“I don’t say that, but you can’t dislike his admiration—why else are you on his side?”

“I am not on his side—I detest him.”

Mrs. Mott flew off at a tangent. “Then you ought to be grateful to me for protecting you against him.”

Jinny was now as indignant as her hostess. “How have you protected me?”

“Haven’t I kept you always out of his way?”

“Oh, is that why you’ve had me in the kitchen?”

“Of course.”

Jinny felt at once chilled and inflamed. “It’s not true,” she cried recklessly. “When I first came to the kitchen, Mr. Mott was still in love with you, and I only went there because you didn’t like to show yourself.”

Such reminders are unforgivable, and Jinny would probably never again have enjoyed Mrs. Mott’s hospitality, even had she not then and there shaken it off. It was only with an effort she could prevent herself declaring that Mrs. Mott would have to carry her into the kitchen before she entered it again. But when she got out in the cold air, she felt suddenly as foolish as Will and her grandfather had been. With starvation bearing down on Blackwater Hall like some grim iceberg, the loss of two full meals a week was a disaster. She was not even sure that the courtyard as well as the kitchen would not be closed to her, for Mrs. Mott seemed a woman without measure, whether in her religion, her affections, her politics, or her quarrels. Possibly, however, the poor lady overlooked her use of it, for the cart continued to draw up there with its air of immemorial and invincible custom. But if Jinny thus still kept up appearances, it was with a heart that grew daily heavier.

In looking back on this grim period, Jinny always regarded the crawling up of the wounded hedgehog as marking the zero-point in her fortunes. It was actually crawling over her doorstep like Will in her grandfather’s imagination. What enemy had bitten off its neck-bristles she never knew—she could only hope it was not Nip—but catching sight of the dark, ugly gash, she hastened to get a clean rag as well as some crumbs and goat-milk. The poor creature allowed the wound to be dressed, and seemed to nose among the crumbs, but it neither ate nor drank. She packed it in straw in a little box and placed it in a warm corner of the kitchen, instructing Nip sternly that it was tabu.

“Caught a pig?” said the Gaffer with satisfaction, stumbling into the middle of this lesson in the higher ethics. “That’s a wunnerful piece o’ luck, a change from rabbits, too.”

“You wouldn’t eat it?” she cried in horror.

“Why, what else?” he asked in surprise.

“There’s bread and there’s jelly,” she said, misunderstanding, “and perhaps Uncle Lilliwhyte will be round with something—he’s about again.”

“There ain’t nawthen better than hedgehog,” the Gaffer said decisively. “And ’tis years since Oi tasted one. Sidrach doted on ’em roasted, used to catch ’em in the ditch-brambles.”

“But we’ve got to cure this, not kill it,” she protested.

“Ye don’t cure pigs that size,” he laughed happily.

For once Jinny failed to appreciate a joke. “It threw itself on our protection,” she insisted. “We can’t take advantage of it like that. Besides, it’s been bitten and might be unhealthy.”

But he was contumacious, and it was only on her undertaking to get him a chicken for his dinner that he consented to forgo the dainty in hand.

To acquire this in the absence of coin involved the barter of the remaining goats in a large and complex transaction with Miss Gentry’s landlady, and although this set Jinny and Methusalem up for weeks, yet since it meant the exhaustion of her last reserves, the wounded hedgehog became to happier memory a sort of symbol of desperation. True, there were still the telescope and the money order, but one could not easily lay one’s hand on them—they bristled even more fiercely than the poor hedgehog.

All Jinny’s care of that confiding beast proved wasted. In vain she renewed the dressing on its neck, in vain Nip and her grandfather were kept off. The third morning it was found on its back, more helpless than Uncle Lilliwhyte, with its hind paws close together but its front paws held up apart, as though crying for mercy. Its nose and paws came up dark brown on the lighter spines around, the eyes were closed and almost invisible, buried like the ears amid the bristles. The rag still adorned its neck.

Jinny gave her poor little patient a decent burial and a few tears. “’Tain’t no use cryin’ over spilt milk,” the Gaffer taunted her. “Ye’ve gone and wasted good food, and Oi count the Lord’ll think twice afore He sends ye a present agen.”

The Gaffer was mistaken. Little Bradmarsh was about to flow, if not with milk and honey, with hares and rabbits and horses and sheep and haystacks and potatoes and mangolds and even chairs, step-ladders, fences, gates, watering-pots, casks, boxes, hurdles, hen-coops, and wheelbarrows. For after January had ended in a crescendo of rain, wind, sleet and the heaviest snowfall in his memory, came a diminuendo movement of sleet, thaw, and rain, though the wind raged unabated, and after that—the Deluge!