“Wait till the Brad flows over the dyke,” he chuckled. “That’ll spill all over Long Bradmarsh, ay, and run down towards Chipstone.”
“Oh, you don’t think it will get over the dyke?” she said anxiously.
“Mebbe to Babylon itself,” he said voluptuously.
“All the more reason they should try to save what they can,” she urged. “Time and tide wait for no man, and why should any man wait for the tide? It’s like with shepherds and stockmen that can’t ever have their Sunday. Come down to dinner.”
But the Gaffer’s eye was glued to his tube. “That’s as good as harvest!” he exclaimed in shocked exhilaration. “Dash my buttons ef they ain’t thatchin’ the stack they carted over from Pipit’s meadow. And they’re makin’ new mangold and potato clamps.”
“So long as they don’t get largesse,” Jinny maintained.
The Gaffer groaned. “Largesse or no largesse, Oi never seen sech a Sunday in all my born days. What a pity Sidrach dedn’t live to see it!”
When she at last got him to surrender the spy-glass, she could not refrain from taking a peep herself. She was astonished at the swift rise of the waters. Already the hedgerows were disappearing, while an avenue of elms rising mysteriously out of a lagoon was the sole indication of a road she had passed on her way to church. A swan and cygnets were now sailing upon it, with darker and less distinguishable objects tossing around. A bed of osiers seemed to be in its natural element as it rose from the waters that islanded a farm. The black, snow-powdered barn looked like the upturned hull of some squat galleon, and the haystacks thatched as with hoar-frost had the air of cliffs crumbling before the sea. One clump of bare trees rose out of the glassy void like the rigging of a sinking ship. Her world had suffered a water-change into something rich and strange in which only the rare protuberances enabled her to trace out the original earth-pattern. Even seagulls were floating, and frank-herons wheeling, and kingfishers diving. Her grandfather watched her like one who had provided the show. “That makes me feel a youngster agen,” he cried. “ ’Tis like the good ole times when there warn’t no drainage-mills ne yet Frog Farms.”
“Frog Farm isn’t swept away?” she cried with a sudden clamminess at her heart.
“Oi wouldn’t give much for the farniture downstairs,” he said, with sinister satisfaction. “That’s the lowest house in the parish. And then ye deny ’tis the Lord’s hand a-chastenin’ the evil-doers. Oi reckon though they’ve packed their waluables in the coach, the pirate thieves, and scuttled off Beacon Hill way.”