V
While Jinny was thus pursuing omniscience and equipping herself to meet the masterful young man, and while the young man in question was adding the mastery of the horn to his conquests, their roads failed to cross. Jinny went to chapel the Sunday following the thunderstorm, but Will was too alarmed by the communal expectation of public autobiography to venture there again, and his parents were only too glad to ignore his home-staying and to resume their private Christa-peculiar-delphian service, being sufficiently fortified by his preoccupation with the Bible. What had driven Will to the Book again was the outrageous appearance on Saturday night of Uncle Lilliwhyte as parcel-bearer. Recovering from his relief that the parcel did not contain snakes, but the conventional household stores, Will found himself angry on his mother’s behalf. What right had Jinny to foist such a fusty ragamuffin upon them, the gay strings of whose rotting beaver only accentuated his griminess? Jinny must know that his mother ranked uncleanliness next to ungodliness. And Uncle Lilliwhyte would be a fixture too, unless violently shaken off—he was Jinny’s neighbour; as natural a go-between as Will’s own neighbour, Master Peartree. He had already bribed off the shepherd: must he be blackmailed by both?
And so, while Essex was at prayer, Will was concocting a furious Oriental epistle, demanding a clean envoy, if Jinny was too lazy to come herself. This was not so difficult to demand, though laziness seemed as unknown to the Hebrews as gloves. He had dallied, indeed, with his original idea of fetching the household parcels from Chipstone himself, but somehow he could not bring himself to so complete a severance of relations with Jinny, especially as after the appearance of Uncle Lilliwhyte in the new rôle of goods-deliverer, his mother had surprisingly suggested that to spare Methusalem’s legs, the old nondescript might always in future bring the weekly parcel for a penny or two. Will had put this suggestion emphatically aside—it would mean exposing his mother to a contact she detested—but he wound up his letter to Jinny by threatening to become his own carrier unless the service was conducted with propriety. Nip duly returned that same Sunday afternoon with the answer that if he would send his esteemed order in writing, Mr. Daniel Quarles would have pleasure in executing his commission through a scrupulously scoured ambassador. Will started replying instantly that it was not his order: let her mark that he was not the householder, merely the “scribe.” To write out the order, however, gave him unexpected pause. Who could have realized that “parrafin,” “sope” and “shuggar” were alike unenjoyed by the heathen Jews? A pity that Frog Farm was itself so “flowing with milk and honey”: with what confidence he could have drawn on the resources of Palestine! True, one might dodge—lamps and oil were abundant enough in Judæa, and purification and sweetness could be suggested with airy allusiveness. But in the end he only wrote grandly, “Household order the same as uzual.”
Before this order had been executed, however, chance brought about a meeting. Not that Miss Gentry, near whose wayside cottage it occurred, would have called it chance. For that deft needlewoman, besides believing in her own stained-glass miracle, cherished, as we know, a naïve faith in “Culpeper’s Complete Herbal”—a faith doubtless sustained by the attacks on the Pope or on infidel physicians that might lurk snakelike in its most innocent-seeming herb. Under the stimulus of this elementally indelicate work—never permitted to stray from her bedside, though imparted in filtered form to Jinny—she would tie woody nightshade round her neck for her dizziness, and buy watercress from Uncle Lilliwhyte to wash away pimples with the juice. And if these herbs were, as Culpeper testified, under the respective governance of Mercury and the Moon, how much more so human life! Miss Gentry had indeed remarked to Will that very afternoon (when he at last brought his mother’s bonnet to be “bleached as good as new”) that her own horoscope, cast in infancy by her aunt, had shown that the first time she went upon a voyage she would be drowned: a reading whose infallibility her happy survival demonstrated, since she had never been foolish enough to set foot upon a vessel. “But for the deciphering of this horoscope,” she had pointed out, “I should surely now have been drowned, for I am naturally as fond of voyages as you.”
It must be admitted that if Miss Gentry had thus pathetically perished, Will would not have taken his mother’s bonnet to her, nor met Jinny that afternoon. But then would he have met Jinny but for the foolish sheep? Even the ovine fates, it would appear, are interblent with the human.
This sheep suddenly dawned upon Jinny’s vision as Methusalem with his cunning nose was trying to open a gate that led over a private road, on either side of which its fellows grazed. Preoccupied with the task of clasping Nip so that he should not frighten the flock in his passage, she did not at first observe that in the gap between the hinge of the gate and the post, a sheep’s head was jammed, and that Methusalem’s success in lifting the latch bade fair to asphyxiate it. The silly creature, having escaped from the flock, had evidently tried to jump back again through this gap, at a point just large enough to admit its head, and with the failure of the leap, the head had descended into the narrowest portion and there remained in pillory. In the creature’s terror at the approach of the cart and Nip’s excited barking, its efforts to free itself became more convulsive than ever. Checking Methusalem in the middle of his pet trick, and fastening up Nip, Jinny jumped down and with soothing words seized the head of the frantic sheep, which was still thrusting itself backward and forward, though without the sense to jump upwards towards the broader space. But alas, its spasmodic struggles prevented her from getting a sufficient grip on it to lift the wedged and weighty head. She saw its ear was torn and bleeding, and to her imagination it was going black in the face. She looked round desperately. On the other side of the gate lay the flock, scattered apathetically over the pasture they had reaped and manured, chewing a tranquil cud, like self-righteous citizens before the writhings of one of their own black sheep: of a good Samaritan or shepherd there was no sign. She climbed over the gate and strove to lift the agonizing head from the other side, but she only increased the sufferer’s frenzy as well as Nip’s.
“Be quiet, Nip!” she shouted, almost hysteric herself. And as she raised her eyes to admonish the yapping terrier, she espied to her joy a puffing pipe and a stick advancing towards her cart; whether a young man or old she was not aware. He was simply man as saviour, and he was at the gate and working at the rear of the struggling head before she had quite realized it was Will, and a certain added pleasure at the sight of this man in particular had scarcely time to well up before it was swamped by the far greater pleasure of seeing the sheep deftly released. It staggered, however, as Will let it go, and lay sideways on the road, gasping, and Jinny observed with horror a raw ring round its throat where the wool was cut through as by a cord. But before she could get through the gate to its assistance, it had risen feebly, and as she came towards it, it trotted off timidly. Vastly relieved, she tried to coax or chevy the truant back to its companions. But it refused to go: on the contrary, it retreated, and in solitary self-sufficiency began to crop the wayside grass.
“Hasn’t spoiled her appetite!” said Will, with a laugh.
“They don’t seem to feel things as much as us,” agreed Jinny.
“No, indeed.” He knocked the ashes out of his pipe and pocketed it. “Fancy, if you’d got your head nipped like that!”