Noon was tolling from the square church-tower when Jinny espied again her treasured picture of it, rising from a harmony of golden ricks and lichen-spotted tiles, just as on that happy, enchanted day when she had journeyed to the funeral of her mother’s Aunt Susannah. How quickly one came—she thought with pleased astonishment—free of the detours and delays of custom, or the pretence thereof! There would be ample time to visit the grave of her father and mother before going on to the Watch Vessel, especially as it was thus on her way. But, remembering with a sad smile the dispute as to whether her grandfather could go to his sister’s funeral in his cart, she took care to draw up her shabby vehicle in a nook beyond the lych-gate. Nip had vanished—like the “Brandy Hole chap”—she found; probably he was also at “The Jolly Bargee.” Leaving Methusalem to his well-earned if not well-filled nose-bag, she returned to the gate.
The monkey-trees and weeping willows were unchanged, though in the path leading to the church-porch there was an avenue of young rose-bushes which she did not remember, and screened by them, to the right, a freshly dug grave which made her shudder. She hastened towards the crumbling tower—still more crumbled now—which her memory connected with the sacred spot. The blackberry-bushes still swathed it, though they were now stripped of their fruit, and in its shadow she found again, not without surprise, the familiar stone, the object of so much whimsical wrangling. Still Roger Boldero lay “safely neaped in Christ.” She was almost certain that her grandfather had sent a couple of pounds to Commander Dap to have the stone changed, since the inscription, it appeared, could not well be emended otherwise. Yes, surely he had ordered that “neaped” should be turned into “asleep,” for she remembered counting the letters and rejoicing to find them the same in number. But on the whole she was pleased the word had not been changed: her Angel-Mother had wanted it, she remembered, in memory of her happiness with Roger Boldero. As she stood there, musing on these two, feeling her mother’s soft cheek against hers and recalling that smoke-reeking, hairier, burlier, yet somehow more shadowy figure, many pictures flashed and waned, and most vividly of all came the vision of her grandfather’s strong shoulder supporting the coffin, and the kindly old Commander leading her off stealthily to this very spot, and she heard the death-bell tolling again with its long solemn pauses.
And then suddenly with a queer little thrill she awoke to the fact that the death-bell was tolling, that a company in black was bearing a coffin. She moved farther behind the tower, she was not in black, and felt almost an interloper. Presently there came from the rose-bushes the sonorous voice of a clergyman intoning the great words. She did not want to be delayed further, nor did she want to pass by the grief-stricken group, which consisted—she saw as she peeped from her hiding-place—of half a dozen men and women, all elderly and all weeping: with a small band of sailors in the background, whose left arms bore black silk handkerchiefs tied in a bow. She looked around for another way out of the churchyard, and finding a side gate escaped almost happily, jumped on her cart, and drove off towards the shore, thinking pleasantly of the genial little Dap and the dinner she would not be too late for; a meal which now, after this long drive, began to seem the paramount consideration.
The village rose russet from the trees, and she curved round exquisite corners of white cottages with Christmas roses in their gardens, and presently she came out by the grass-covered sea-wall. She hardly saw the sordidness of the shore—-the litter of pigs, poultry, boats, sheds, barrels—so great a seascape burst upon her, broken by a long narrow island, that added subtle shades and hazes to the far-spreading shimmer and fantasy, the water glinting and moving, dotted with red-sailed smacks and barges. Even the slimy posts that stuck up from it near the shore had a romantic air, being young tree-trunks that still stretched odd limbs.
But all this glory faded into nothingness when, catching sight of the Watch Vessel moored on the “hard” of gravel, at the place where she had first patted Methusalem, she saw that the flag was at half-mast. She scarcely needed to make the inquiry: the flag, the funeral, the nautical handkerchiefs, all rushed into a black unity. Dear old Commander Dap was dead.
V
A perverse imp kept telling her that the funeral meats would be unusually abundant. But she had no heart to board the Watch Vessel, to encounter these unknown fellow-mourners. She wanted to mourn in solitude. And her quest had failed. The last hope for her grandfather had been extinguished—Dap had followed Sidrach—and the best thing to do was to get home as quickly as poor Methusalem could manage it. He should rest, not here where she might meet the returning Daps and perhaps be recognized through Daniel Quarles’s cart, but when they got to “The Jolly Bargee,” where she must have a bit of bread and cheese brought out to her. Yet she could not tear herself away from this squalid, sublime waterside, and driving along the cart-route behind the sea-wall to a safe distance, she got out near a little wooden pier and walked on the rough earth of the sea-wall, which was luxuriant with pigweed and sea-beet, strewn with wisps of hay and straw from passing carts, and covered with dead little white-shelled crabs. There was something akin to her mood in the pleasant pain of the acrid mud-smell.
At “The Jolly Bargee” she was jarred by the slow easy laughter from the tap-room—the trickery of the “Brandy Hole chap” was still under facetious debate. Before her set face, the gorged Nip, rejoining her at the inn-door with conscious drooping tail, turned on his back and grovelled guiltily: but she ignored his abasement, and having gulped down her snack of bread and cheese—an unwelcome and unforeseen expense—drove on with the same brooding air. She was dazed by the wonder and pathos of the little Commander’s death, the whole genial breathing mass become as insensitive as his glass eye: would he get that back at the Resurrection, she pondered, or would there be his original eye? Thence she passed to the thought of the dead Sidrach, the large handsome man of a hundred and five, strong as a bull of Bashan, whom she was supposed to be visiting, and she wondered dully what report of him she should bring back to her grandfather. Abandoning herself as usual to Methusalem’s guidance in this deep brooding, she discovered after an hour or so that in his ignorance of these roads he had gone miles out of their way, down Smugglers’ Lane, and when after half an hour of readjustment she had got on the right homeward road, her own subconscious gravitation to the waterside took her back to it. And while she gave Methusalem a rest here, the white moon and the early November sunset began to brood over the mud-flats, transfiguring them with strange scintillant gold, and Jinny felt a divine lesson in the transfiguration, and the solemn voice of the clergyman echoed in her ears: “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” Doubtless the Commander was already in communion with the Angel-Mother.
The problem of Sidrach was still unsolved when the feeding-field she had seen preparing in the morning loomed again on her vision like a reminder of the urgency of that question. She envied Master Peartree’s sheep munching so imperturbably in their hurdles while she had been going through all these emotions and perplexities. With their black noses and feet they looked, she thought, as though they had been drinking from a pool of ink, and her thoughts wandered again from her problem, and she let Methusalem drink from a pool of water. Though it was only four o’clock, the moon had turned a pale ochre and was shining full and high in the heavens, its continents clearly showing. There was no sound save the chewing of the sheep, the gulping of her horse, the wistful tinkling of a wether’s bell, and from afar the fainter clanging of a cow-bell. Even Nip, feeling unforgiven, was subdued. Life was beautiful after all, she felt, as she watched the great splashes of sunset below the moon, the glimmering rose-tint on the horizon, the glint upon the pool, the tangle of magical gold in the branches. Somehow a way would be opened for her through this network of mendacity.
But by the time she got to her door, the Common was covered again with a grey mist, just oozing rain, and Blackwater Hall was a place of shrouded terrors. No light was showing through the shutters or through the chinks in door or window, and she had a sudden clammy intuition that her grandfather had solved her problem for her by the simple process of dying like Sidrach and the Commander. Silent and weird lay thatch and whitewash under the moon. She hammered at the house-door and then at the shutters, her heart getting colder and colder.