CHAPTER IV.
Village Evidence—'Gray' on the Brain—Too Well He Knew—Mr Robins and the Baby—He Had Not Done Badly
here is certainly a penalty paid by people who keep entirely clear of gossip, though it is not by any means in proportion to the advantages they gain. The penalty is that when they particularly want to hear any piece of news, they are not likely to hear it naturally like other people, but must go out of their way to make inquiries and evince a curiosity which at once makes them remarkable.
Now every one in the village except Mr Robins heard of the baby found in the Grays' garden, and discussed how it came there, but it was only by overhearing a casual word here and there that the organist gathered even so much as that the Grays had resolved to keep the child, and were not going to send it to the workhouse. Even Bill Gray knew the organist's ways too well to trouble him with the story, though he was too full of it himself to give his usual attention at the next choir practice, and, at every available pause between chant and hymn, his head and that of the boy next him were close together in deep discourse.
It had occurred to Mr Robins' mind, in the waking moments of that restless night, that there might have been—nay, most probably was—some mark on the child's clothes which would lead to its identification, and, for the next few days, every glance in his direction, or, for the matter of that, in any other direction, was interpreted by him as having some covert allusion to this foundling grandchild of his; but the conversation of some men outside his yew-hedge, which he accidentally overheard one day, set his anxiety at rest.
From this he gathered that it was generally supposed to be a child belonging to a gypsy caravan that had passed through the village that day.
'And I says,' said one of the men with that slow, emphatic delivery in which the most ordinary sentiments are given forth as if they were wisdom unheard and undreamt of before; 'and I don't mind who hears me, as Gray did oughter set the perlice on to 'un to find the heartless jade as did 'un.'
'Ay, sure! so he did oughter; but he ain't on gumption, Gray ain't; never had neither, as have known him man and boy these fifty year.'
'My missus says,' went on the first speaker, 'as she seed a gypsy gal with just such a brat as this on her arm. She come round to parson's back door—my Liza's kitchen gal there and telled her mother. She were one of them dressed-up baggages with long earrings and a yeller handkercher round her head, a-telling fortunes; coming round the poor, silly gals with her long tongue and sly ways. She went in here, too.' Mr Robins guessed, though he could not see the jerk of the thumb in his direction. 'Mrs Sands told me so herself—the organist's listening was quickened to yet sharper attention—'she says she had quite a job to get rid of her, and thought she were after the spoons belike. But she says as she'd know the gal again anywheres, and my missus says she'd pretty near take her davy to the child, though as I says, one brat's pretty much like another—haw, haw! though the women don't think it.'
And the two men parted, laughing over this excellent joke.
It was most curious how that little out-of-the-way house of the Grays and its unremarkable inmates had suddenly become conspicuous; the very cottage was visible from all directions—from the churchyard gate, from the organist's garden, from various points along the Stokeley road; but perhaps this may have been because Mr Robins had never cared to identify one thatched roof from another hitherto. As for the Grays, they seemed to be everywhere; that man hoeing in the turnip-field was Gray, that boy at the head of the team in the big yellow wagon was Tom, and Bill seemed to be all over the place, whistling along the road or running round the corner, or waiting to change his book at the organist's gate. If Mr Clifford spoke to Mr Robins it was about something to do with the Grays, and even Mr Wilson of Stokeley stopped him in the road to ask if some people called Gray lived at Downside. It was most extraordinary how these people, so insignificant a week ago, were now brought into prominence.
Even before Mr Robins had overheard that conversation he had had a fidgety sort of wish to go up to the Grays' cottage, and now he made a pretext of asking for a book he had lent Bill, but went before the school came out, so that only Mrs Gray was at home as he opened the gate and went up the path.
It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon, and Mrs Gray was sitting outside the door, making, plain as she was, a pretty picture with the shadows of the young vine-leaves over the door dappling her print gown and apron and the baby's little dark head and pink pinafore, a garment that had once been Bill's, who had been of a more robust build than this baby, and moreover, had worn the pinafore at a more advanced age, so that the fit left a good deal to be desired, and the colour had suffered in constant visits to the wash-tub, and was not so bright as it had been originally.
But altogether, the faded pinafore and the vine-leaf shadows, and the love in the woman's face, made a harmonious whole, and the song she was singing, without a note of sweetness or tune in it, did not jar on the organist's ear, as you might have supposed, knowing his critical and refined taste.
'Good afternoon, Mrs Gray,' he said; 'I came for the book I lent your son the other day. Why, is this your baby?' he added with unnecessarily elaborate dissimulation. 'I did not know you had any so young.'
'Mine? Lor' bless you, no. Ain't you heard? Why, I thought it was all over the place. Gray, he found it in the garden just there where you be standing, a week ago come to-morrow. Ain't she a pretty dear, bless her! and takes such notice too, as is wonderful. Why, she's looking at you now as if she 'd aknown you all her life. Just look at her! if she ain't smiling at you, a little puss!'
'Where did she come from?'
'Well, sure, who 's to know? There was some gypsy folks through the place, and there 've been a lot of tramps about along of Milton Fair, and there was one of 'em, they say, a week or two ago with just such a baby as this 'un. My master he 've made a few inquirements; but there! for my part I don't care if we don't hear no more of her folks, and Gray's much of the same mind, having took a terrible fancy to the child. And it's plain as she ain't got no mother worth the name, as would leave her like that, and neglected too shameful. As there ain't no excuse, to my way of thinking, for a baby being dirty, let folks be as poor as they may.'
Somewhere deep down in Mr Robins's mind, unacknowledged to himself, there was a twinge of resentment at this reflection on the mother's treatment of the baby.
'She 's as sweet as a blossom now,' went on Mrs Gray, tossing the baby up, who laughed and crowed and stretched its arms. Yes, he could see the likeness, he was sure of it; and it brought back to his mind with sudden vividness a young mother's look of pride and love as she held up her little girl for the father's admiration. Mother and child had then been wonderfully alike, and in this baby he could trace a likeness to both.
Mrs Gray went maundering on, as her manner was, interspersing her narrative with baby nonsense and endearments, and Mr Robins forgot his errand, which was, after all, only a pretext, and stood half-listening, and more than half back in the old days of memory, and once he so far forgot himself as to snap his fingers at the child, and touch one of its warm, little hands, which immediately closed round his finger with a baby's soft, tenacious grasp, from which it required a certain gentle effort to escape.
'A pleasant, chatty sort of man the organist,' Mrs Gray said, having talked nearly all the time herself, with only a word or two from him now and then as reply; 'and not a bit of pride about him, let folks say what they like. Why, he stopped ever so long and had a deal to say; and there, Bill, you just run down with the book, as he went off after all without it.'
Mr Robins went home slowly across the fields in a curiously softened frame of mind. Perhaps it was the soft west wind, fragrant with sweet spring scents of cowslips and cherry blossom, or the full glad sunshine on all the varied green of tree and hedge, a thousand tints of that 'shower of greennesses' poured down so lavishly by the Giver of all good things; perhaps it was the larks springing up from the clover in such an ecstasy of song; or perhaps it was the clasp of a baby's hand on his finger. He noticed the spring beauty round him as he had not noticed such things for many a day, stooping to pick a big, tasselled, gold-freckled cowslip, and stopping to let a newly-fledged, awkward, young bird hop clumsily out of the way, with a sort of tenderness and consideration for young things unusual to him.
His mind was more at rest than it had been for the last three weeks. The baby's crowing laughter seemed to drive out of his memory the wailing cry and the hollow cough and the sad, beseeching voice saying 'Father,' and then the pitiless beating rain, which had been haunting him for the last three weeks. The sight of the baby, loved and cared for, had taken away a misgiving, which he had hardly been conscious of himself. After all, he had not done badly by the child. Mrs Gray was a kind motherly sort of body, and used to babies, which Jane Sands was not, and she would do well by the child, and he himself could see, without any one being the wiser, that the child did not want for anything, though he would not be held responsible in any way for it.