But to alarm her grandfather before she had made a thorough search would only confirm him in his delusions. Peeping through the casement of the living-room, she was relieved to see and hear him at the table, safely asleep on his after-dinner Bible. With his beard thus buried in the text, he might sleep for hours in the warmth and buzzing silence. Lucky, she thought, as she tip-toed past, that he had not made the discovery himself. He would probably have accused poor Mr. Skindle again, even set out after the innocent vet. with his whip. Then perhaps actions for assault and battery, for slander, for who knew what!
Horse-stealing was unheard of in these parts, and who save a dealer in antiquities would steal Methusalem? No; as in a fit of midsummer madness—under the depression of the drought and his depleted nosebags—he had bolted! After all, old horses were probably as uncertain as old grandfathers. Was there to be a new course of senility for her study, she wondered ruefully: had she now to school herself to the vagaries of horsey decay as she had schooled herself to human? But, of course, she surmised suddenly, it was the dragging the poor horse up in the middle of the night that had turned his aged brain, and the hammering-in of the staple had lent the last touch of alarm. He had been liable to panic even in his prime. Perhaps he had bolted before Gran’fer’s very eyes, mane and tail madly erect. That might explain the uneasy look with which the old man had met her return—a sidelong glance almost like Nip’s squint after an escapade—his taciturnity as of a culprit not daring to confess his carelessness, as well as his welcome blindness to the wedding fineries she had been too desperate to remove. But no, he would not have sat down under such a loss, or brisked up so swiftly under the smell of dinner, or pressed the food so solicitously upon her with the remark, “There’s a plenty for both of us, dearie—-do ye don’t be afeared.” It would almost seem as if he had been noting her self-denial: at any rate such an assurance could not coexist with the loss of their means of livelihood.
It was a mystery. The only thing that was clear was that Methusalem must be recaptured before her grandfather was aware of his loss. Such a catastrophe, coming after the scene in the small hours, might have as morbid an effect upon him as that nocturnal episode had evidently had upon Methusalem himself.
Bonnetless, with streaming ringlets, in her lace-adorned dress, she wandered farther and farther in quest of her beloved companion. It was some time before she discovered that her other friend was at her heels. Surely Nip would guide her to Methusalem, as he had guided her through the darkness. But this abandonment to his whim only led her to the cottages with which he was on terms of cupboard affection, and dragged her into the very heart of the tragedy retailed by Bundock to the wedding-party, to the home of a dead labourer.
“His fitten were dead since the morning,” the widow informed her with lachrymose gusto. “At the end he was loight-headed and talked about puttin’ up the stack.”
The neighbours were still more ghoulishly garrulous, and the odour of this death pervaded their cottages like the smell of the straw steeped in their pails, and as the housewives turned their plaiting-wheels they span rival tales of lurid deceases, while a woman who was walking with her little girl—both plaiting hard as they walked—removed the split straws from her mouth to proclaim that she had prophesied a death in the house—having seen the man’s bees swarm on his clothes-prop. She hoped they would tell his bees of his decease. But desirable as it was to meet a white horse—that bringer of luck—nobody had set eyes on a wild-wandering Methusalem. Nor was he in the village pound.
She found herself drifting through the wood where she had once sat with Will, and through the glade where the tops of the aspens were a quiver of little white gleams. Had Methusalem perhaps come trampling here? That was all her thought, save for a shadowy rim of painful memory. Bare of Methusalem, the wood at this anxious moment was as blank of poetry as the lanky hornbeam “poles,” or the bundles of “tops” lying around. One aspen was so weak and bent it recalled her grandfather, and the white-barked birches craned so over the other trees, she was reminded of a picture with giraffes in Mother Gander’s sanctum. But of horses there was no sign. Picking up a wing covert of a jay, not because of the beautiful blue barring, but because it would make fishing flies for Uncle Lilliwhyte, she now ran to his hut with a flickering hope that he would have information, but it was empty of him, and she saw from the absence of his old flintlock that he was sufficiently recovered to be poaching. She emerged from the wood near Miss Gentry’s cottage. But the landlady, who had the deserted Squibs in her arms, could only calculate that Methusalem had left his stable at the same moment as the dead labourer’s soul had flown out of his body, and that there was doubtless a connexion. “Harses has wunnerful sense,” said the good woman. Jinny agreed, but withheld her opinion of humans. She felt if only all the horses jogging along these sun-splashed arcades of elms could speak, the mystery would soon be cleared up. For Methusalem was of a nose-rubbing sociability. But it was only the drivers of all these lazy-rolling carts—fodder, straw, timber, dung, what not—that presumed to speak for their great hairy-legged beasts. To one wagoner lying so high on his golden-hued load that his eye seemed to sweep all Essex, she called up with peculiar hope: he confessed he had been drowsing in the heat. “So mungy,” he pleaded. Indeed the afternoon was getting abnormally hot and stuffy, and Jinny had to defend her bare head from the sun with her handkerchief. Hedgers and ditchers had seen as little of a masterless, bare-flanked Methusalem as the thatcher with his more advantageous view-point. Leisurely driving in the stakes with his little club, this knee-padded, corduroyed elder opined that it would be “tempesty.” And they could do with some rain.
That the rain was indeed wanted as badly as she wanted Methusalem was obvious enough from the solitude about the white, gibbet-shaped Silverlane pump and the black barrel on wheels round which aproned, lank-bosomed women should have been gossiping, jug or pail in hand. In the absence of this congregation Jinny had to perambulate the green-and-white houses of the great square and hurl individual inquiries across the wooden door-boards that safeguarded the infants. Only the village midwife had seen a horse like Methusalem as she returned from a case. She had been too sleepy, though, to notice properly. From this futile quest Jinny came out on the road again. But wheelwright and blacksmith, ploughman and gipsy, publican and tinker, all were drawn blank.
Beside trees tidily bounding farms, or meadows dotted with cows and foals, and every kind of horse except Methusalem, past grotesque quaint-chimneyed houses half brick, half weather-board, the road led Jinny on and on till it took her across the bridge. Here on the bank she recognized the plastered hair of Mr. Charles Mott, who was fishing gloomily. No, he had not seen a white horse—worse luck!—and would to God, he added savagely, that he had never seen a black sheep. Jinny hurried off, as from a monster of profanity, for Mr. Mott’s disinclination for his wife’s society, especially on chapel days, was, she knew, beginning to perturb the “Peculiars”; and with the sacramental language of the marriage service yet ringing in her ears, it seemed to our guileless Jinny ineffably wicked to be sunk in selfish sport instead of cherishing and comforting the woman to whom you had consecrated yourself.
She moved on pensively—the road after descending rose somewhat, so that Long Bradmarsh seemed to nestle behind her in a hollow, a medley of thatch and slate, steeple and chimney-stacks, hayricks and inn-signs, and fluttering sheets and petticoats. But the forward view seemed far more bounded than usual, deprived as it was of the driver’s vantage-point: to the toiling pedestrian her familiar landscape was subtly changed, and this added to the sense of change and disaster.