"’Tis one of the worst of 'em," said Granfa positively. "’Tis so scarlet as wool. Get up, and leave be all your praying and sweating, you foolish man. You do drive me plum mad with your foolishness. How don't 'ee do your own work fittee and leave the dear Lord mind his own business? He don't want to be told at his time of life what to do. Oh, you do drive me mad."
"Another lost lamb," groaned Trewhella. "Another soul in the pit. Oh, I do pray wi' all my heart that my poor lill son may find favor in the Lord's eyes and become a child of grace to preach the Word and confound the Gentiles."
"Did ever a man hark to such nonsense in his life?" exclaimed Granfa.
"I shouldn't argue with him in one of his moods," advised Jenny, looking at her husband coldly and distastefully.
"Oh, dear Lord, give me strength to heal the blindness of my family and make my poor lill son a sword in the side of unbelievers."
Then presently the gloom would pass; he would go out silently to the fields, and after a day's work come back in a fever of earthly desires to his wife.
There were shadows in Bochyn, for all the sunlight and birdsong and sweetpeas blossom.
Chapter XLIII: Bow Bells
SUMMER went by very quickly in the deserted orchard, and in fine September weather young Frank's first birthday was celebrated with much goodwill by everybody. Zachary, with the successful carrying of a rich harvest, ceased to brood so much on the failure of humanity. He became his own diligent self, amassing grain and gold and zealously expurgating for reproduction in bleak chapels that winter a volume of sermons by an Anglican bishop. Young Frank began to show distinct similarities of feature to Jenny, similarities that not even the most critical observer could demolish. He showed, too, some of her individuality, had a temper and will of his own, and seemed like his mother born to inherit life's intenser emotions. Jenny was not yet inclined to sink herself in him, to transfer to the boy her own activity of sensation. Mrs. Raeburn was thirty-three when Jenny was born: young Frank arrived when his mother was ten years younger than that. It was not expected that she should feel the gates of youth were closed against her. Moreover, Jenny, with all the fullness of her experience, was strangely young on the eve of her twenty-fourth birthday, still seeming, indeed, no more than eighteen or nineteen. There was a divine youthfulness about her which was proof against the Furies, and, since the diverting absurdities of young Frank, laughter had come back. Those deep eyes danced again for one who from altitudes of baby ecstasies would gloriously respond. May was another triumph for affection. There was joy in regarding that little sister, once wan with Islington airs, now happy and healthy and almost as rose-pink as Jenny herself. How pleased her mother would have been, and, in retrospect, how skeptical must she have felt of Jenny's ability to keep that promise always to look after May.
Life was not so bad on her birthday morning, as, with one eye kept continuously on young Frank, Jenny dressed herself to defy the blusterous jolly October weather. She thought how red the apples were in the orchard and with what a plump they fell and how she and May had laughed when one fell on young Frank, who had also laughed, deeming against the evidence of his surprise that it must be matter for merriment.