At our first stop, Reading, when the guard came to the door and politely inquired, “Are you ladies all right? Can I get you anything?” I asked him if he would be so good as to take charge of the big rush bag. I suggested that he could tie it on to the back buffer at the very end of the train. I assured him it was nothing that would hurt. But he only smiled, and said he had plenty of room in his own compartment; the basket would be quite safe there, no one would touch it. I could quite believe it!
When he came down the platform at Swindon he looked very pale and out of sorts, I thought. Conscience-stricken, I pressed a shilling into his hand, and begged him to get himself a good cup of tea. He said he would, and certainly seemed to have revived when next he passed.
We got it home, eventually, without Abigail detecting it—I wanted to save Virginia’s face before the handmaiden—as we took the basket, wrapped up in my mackintosh, in the wagonette with us, Abigail following behind in the luggage-cart. She did say later, however, that she wished that pedlar and his awful kippers and bloaters could be suppressed by law. He had evidently just been round, she said, and she could smell his wretched fish all the way as she drove up. We didn’t tell her what we had hidden in the old barn.
We buried them darkly at dead of night. The only soft spot we could find, that admitted of a good-sized trench being dug without much trouble, was the moist earth beside the brook in the lower orchard.
Next morning, at breakfast-time, when the small dog ran in to greet us, his nose and paws showed signs of active service as he joyfully dabbed brown mud on the front of our fresh print frocks, and waggled his tail with the air of a dog who is conscious of heroic achievements. Abigail followed him with the bacon-dish, which, in her excitement, she tried to balance on the top of the coffee-pot.
“You’d never believe what a high tide there has been in the brook!” she began. “A spring tide, I should think. It’s washed up hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of large fish on to the bank. Never saw such a thing in my life before. First I knew of it was slipping on one on the kitchen hearthrug. Dandie had brought one in—wanted me to grill it for his breakfast, I suppose! Then I found he’d carried one up to the mat outside your bedroom door, and just dropped a few others here and there about the house. So I went out to see where he got ’em from. Judging by the smell, they must have lain there for weeks. Wish I’d been here with a net at the time. I’ve never caught a live fish in my life, though I’ve often tried to fish in the pond on Peckham Rye.”
Naturally we expressed great interest, and suggested immediate cremation in the kitchener.
Later on, the handy man was decidedly sceptical. His grandfeyther had once caught a trout in that brook (only he gave long biographical, geographical and historical details, which proved that it wasn’t that brook at all); but he hadn’t a-seed any hisself a-coming down.
Abigail scornfully pointed out that high tides came up, and these fish had been washed up from the river, which is 700 feet below; and she flapped one as evidence before his astonished eyes.
Seeing is believing in our village!