When all but the last swallows had departed, and Christmas began to loom in the offing, the Sidrach obsession resurged, and there being a spell of bright, clear weather, the only way she could devise to stave off the expedition was to pretend to undertake it herself. This was the more necessary as she was not certain the scheme did not cover a crafty design to drive Methusalem back to the knacker’s for the five pounds. She would start very early and go, not to Chelmsford, but to “Brandy Hole Creek.” Instead of waiting her Christmas letter to Commander Dap, she would visit him personally. He was, after all, a relative and would not like to see his brother-in-law starve—of course she would accept nothing for herself. Already she had intended to skirt the subject at Christmas, but to ask assistance openly was painful, while if one was too reticent one might be misunderstood. In conversation one could feel one’s way.
So on a misty morning of late November, when the peewits were calling over the dark fields, she set out, the old man watching her off with a lantern.
“And do ye bring back Sidrach,” he called after her, “sow we can all live happy.”
For answer she blew her horn cheerily, feeling this was less a lie than speech. She would come back with help of some sort—that was certain. Whether she would confess that the help came from Commander Dap or would attribute it to Sidrach, or whether it would be wiser to come back with the discovery of Sidrach’s death, trusting to its staleness to blunt the blow and to the news of Dap’s assistance to overcome it, or whether it would be imprudent to mention Dap at all, not merely because it would be hard to explain how she had met the Commander of the Watch Vessel at Chelmsford, but because her grandfather in his inveterate venom against Dap was capable of refusing his favours—on all these distracting alternatives she hoped to make up her mind during the day. Here, too, she would perhaps have to feel her way. But she now miserably realized the wisdom of the Spelling-Book’s “writing-piece”: “Lying may be thought convenient and profitable because not so soon discovered; but pray remember, the Evil of it is perpetual: For it brings persons under everlasting Jealousy and Suspicion; for they are not to be believed when they speak the Truth, nor trusted, when perhaps they mean honestly.” She meant honestly enough, God knew, but into what a tangle she was getting. She consoled herself with the thought that anyhow there would be no pretending that day in her business—to spare Methusalem on so long a journey the empty boxes had been left at home.
Single drops oozed upon her as she started, but as the mist lifted, though it revealed sodden, blackened pastures on both sides of her route, the underlying betterness of the weather manifested itself, and soon under an arching blue Methusalem was almost trotting over withering bracken and fallen leaves in a world of browns and yellows, while an abnormally friendly robin perching on the cart-shaft, and the scarlet-berried bryony festooning the hedgerows, contributed with the gleaming holly-berries to colour her darkling mood. There was a certain refreshment, too, in going off by this new route, where she for her part was as unknown. It was odd how the mere turning her back on the Chipstone Road transformed everything. Even the path—though this was not so pleasant for Methusalem—had at first an upward tendency, and her mere passing evoked stares and comments. This surprised her in turn till she remembered Will’s disapprobation. She did not realize that the visible emptiness of the cart, with its implication that she was not plying, only driving it to some male headquarters, mitigated the sensation, and she congratulated herself there was no old client to observe the absence of cargo. In the first few miles she met no soul she knew except the taciturn lout who had once directed her to Master Peartree’s shearing-shed, and who was now preparing a feeding-ground for the flock, pulling out mangolds with a picker and hurling them over the hurdled field from a broken-pronged fork. The sheep had to go to this higher ground for fear of floods, he informed her in a burst of communicativeness, and it wasn’t half as eatable.
Passing a row of thatched, black-tarred cottages at a moment when the mothers were coming to the garden gates to speed their broods to school, she offered lifts till her space was packed with little ones. The old cart was now alive with youth and laughter, and the flocks of rooks from the elms were out-chattered. The road lay between great fields flanked by broad ditches, along which argosies of yellow leaves went sailing, and there were shooters with dogs, happy duck-ponds, old towers and steeples, black barns, gabled old houses with verge-boards over the windows, quaint inn-signs and mossy-tiled granges, and the ground kept humping itself and dropping more erratically than her home circuit, but never sufficiently to spoil the sublime flatness in which single figures stooping to turn over the soil showed like quadrupeds in a vast circle. She must needs go a bit out of her way to reach the school, which lay in a little town on the estuary, and it was a thrilling moment when from her seat she had her first far-off glimpse of the very waters that had beglamoured her childhood—outwardly it was only the gleam as of a white river with hazy land beyond, and on the hither side a few black huts looking almost like vessels; but over everything was wrapped a dreamy peace, which the clamour of the actual children could not penetrate, while in her nostrils—though it was surely too far off to be wafted to her—there arose the strange, salty, putrid odour of fenland, offensive and delectable. And as the road curved slowly towards the shore, all the charm and mystery of childhood seemed to be in those barges with the red-brown sails, those grassy knolls and unlovely mud-flats, in which rotting boats stuck half sunken.
Before she could deposit her charges in their classrooms some had dropped off and were looking for treasure in the flat, dyke-seamed fields. They had arrived too early for school, they explained. But she felt rewarded for carrying them to the waterside when she espied the long, low hull and great brown sail of Bidlake’s barge. With a blast of her horn she summoned the trio of females, but only the twins mounted to the deck to wave hands at her as the broad wherry came tacking and gliding past, the shaggy Ephraim explaining in an indecorous shout that the missus was to be “laid aside” again, and this time he was looking around for a nice quiet lodging on shore for her and the girls. How handsome Sophy and Sally were growing, she thought, how charmingly they had smiled, just as if she had never left off bringing them presents. What a comfort they were so grown up now; they should soon be fending for themselves.
After the barge was wafted away, she remained on the shore a few minutes, fascinated by the lattice-work reflection of the clouds on the water, which through their scudding over it against the stream seemed to be going in opposite directions at once. She did not know why this phenomenon was agitating the recesses of her being; but suddenly there flashed up from the obscure turmoil the lines of Miss Gentry in her sibylline mood:
When the Brad in opposite ways shall course,
Lo! Jinny’s husband shall come on a horse,