“You’ve always had plenty to eat!” she protested, colouring up.
“That ain’t enough in the larder when Oi looks, ne yet for Methusalem in the barn. Ye’ve got to have a store like the beer in my barrel. Where’s my flitch? Where’s my cheeses? Same as we’re snowbound, like the year Sidrach went away, where would Oi get my Chris’mus dinner? ’Tis a middlin’ long way to Babylon, but Oi’ll start with the daylight and be back between the lights, and ef Oi’m longer, why the moon’s arly. Oi’ll be proper pleased to see dear Sidrach again—he larnt me my letters and Oi’ll bring him back to live with us, now he’s gittin’ oldish. It ain’t good for a man to live alone, says the Book, and that’ll be good for us too, he bein’ as full o’ suvrans as a dog of fleas.”
“Nip isn’t full of fleas,” she said with mock anger, hoping to make a diversion. “Why, you scrub him yourself!”
But he went on, unheeding. “Daniel Quarles has allus been upright, and he’d sooner die than goo to his darter or the poorhouse.”
She thought miserably that the poorhouse was where he would have to go to find any traces of his beloved Sidrach, and she set herself by every device of logic or cajolery to discourage this revived dream of the journey. He might not even find Sidrach in such a big city, she now hinted, but he laughed at that. Everybody knew Sidrach, “a bonkka, hansum chap with a mosey face and a woice like the bull of Bashan and as strong too. Wery short work he’d ha’ made of Master Will. Carry him in, indeed! Carried him out—and with one hand—that’s what Sidrach would ha’ done! Why, he’s tall enough to light the street-lamps in Che’msford!”
These street-lamps, Jinny gathered, still figured in his mind as of oil, and she was able by dexterous draughts on his reminiscences to put off the evil day of his expedition. But whenever there was visible dearth at table, the thought of his rich brother, flared up again.
Could Blackwater Hall perhaps be sold, she thought desperately, and the money spent on his declining years. The thought was stimulated by a meeting of the Homage Court which came from railhead in the “Flynt Flyer,” and before which Miss Gentry’s landlady as a copyholder had to do “suit and service” in the Moot Hall to the Lords of the Manor.
But Jinny ascertained that Beacon Chimneys, a ramshackle place with much land, had been bought up recently by Farmer Gale for his new bride at fifty shillings an acre, farm and buildings thrown in; a rate at which Blackwater Hall would not even yield the forty shillings supposed to be its annual value as a voting concern—whereas the Gaffer’s view, cautiously extracted, ran: “Ef you spread suvrans all over my land, each touchin’ the tother, you pick up your pieces and Oi keep my land.” Moreover, Mr. Fallow, to whom she had broached the idea, reminded her feelingly that old people could not be moved. He was keenly interested, however, to learn that the tenure was an example of Borough English and hunted up the local Roll of Customs (7th Edward IV) proclaiming that “Time out of the Mind of Man” the “ould auncient Custom of the Bourow” had been for the heritage to go to the “youngest Sonne of the first wife.”
At heart Jinny was glad the idea of selling the Hall was impracticable: for what would have become of Methusalem and the business of “Daniel Quarles, Carrier”? To surrender before the “Flynt Flyer” would have been a bitter pill indeed.