“There’s bread and there’s jelly,” she said, misunderstanding, “and perhaps Uncle Lilliwhyte will be round with something—he’s about again.”
“There ain’t nawthen better than hedgehog,” the Gaffer said decisively. “And ’tis years since Oi tasted one. Sidrach doted on ’em roasted, used to catch ’em in the ditch-brambles.”
“But we’ve got to cure this, not kill it,” she protested.
“Ye don’t cure pigs that size,” he laughed happily.
For once Jinny failed to appreciate a joke. “It threw itself on our protection,” she insisted. “We can’t take advantage of it like that. Besides, it’s been bitten and might be unhealthy.”
But he was contumacious, and it was only on her undertaking to get him a chicken for his dinner that he consented to forgo the dainty in hand.
To acquire this in the absence of coin involved the barter of the remaining goats in a large and complex transaction with Miss Gentry’s landlady, and although this set Jinny and Methusalem up for weeks, yet since it meant the exhaustion of her last reserves, the wounded hedgehog became to happier memory a sort of symbol of desperation. True, there were still the telescope and the money order, but one could not easily lay one’s hand on them—they bristled even more fiercely than the poor hedgehog.
All Jinny’s care of that confiding beast proved wasted. In vain she renewed the dressing on its neck, in vain Nip and her grandfather were kept off. The third morning it was found on its back, more helpless than Uncle Lilliwhyte, with its hind paws close together but its front paws held up apart, as though crying for mercy. Its nose and paws came up dark brown on the lighter spines around, the eyes were closed and almost invisible, buried like the ears amid the bristles. The rag still adorned its neck.
Jinny gave her poor little patient a decent burial and a few tears. “ ’Tain’t no use cryin’ over spilt milk,” the Gaffer taunted her. “Ye’ve gone and wasted good food, and Oi count the Lord’ll think twice afore He sends ye a present agen.”
The Gaffer was mistaken. Little Bradmarsh was about to flow, if not with milk and honey, with hares and rabbits and horses and sheep and haystacks and potatoes and mangolds and even chairs, step-ladders, fences, gates, watering-pots, casks, boxes, hurdles, hen-coops, and wheelbarrows. For after January had ended in a crescendo of rain, wind, sleet and the heaviest snowfall in his memory, came a diminuendo movement of sleet, thaw, and rain, though the wind raged unabated, and after that—the Deluge!