But as she gazed, she grew aware of a new phenomenon.
“Why, the Brad’s going backwards!” she said.
He snatched the glass from her hand. “So it be!” he agreed. “But that’s onny where the little river busts in agen the wrong way and pours along the top o’ the real river.”
Jinny was thrilling all down her spine. Again the sibylline prophecy of Miss Gentry rang in her ears:
When the Brad in opposite ways shall course,
Lo! Jinny’s husband shall come on a horse,
And Jinny shall then learn Passion’s force.
Overwhelmed by the uncanny divination of the dressmaker—a “wise woman” in good sooth it now appeared—she sank into a chair, her whole being aquiver with a premonition that she had reached the crucial point of her destiny. Who was it coming on a horse? Who but Will, that incarnation of equestrian grace? He was coming to rescue her, the dear silly, imagining her menaced by the flood. As if she had not got Methusalem! As if Blackwater Hall was not an Ararat! But his foolishness was part of the Fate—might he not even ride his horse through the doorway, lying along its back to avoid the lintel, and thus be practically “on his hands and knees”? In her grandfather’s present happy mood, the old man might very well accept that solution. And Will himself would be “carried in,” and might equally accept the compromise. Absorbed in her sophistic day-dream, she sat there till even the old man at his tube remembered breakfast. Nor did she again volunteer to help in the fields. All day she stayed at home over her Monday housework and wash-tub, awaiting the horseman, afraid to stir out.
And with equal patience her grandfather sat at his all-day show. Engineers and gesticulating figures appeared on the broken bank for his delectation, and a mile or so lower down labourers began to shovel gault (culch, he called it to Jinny), and lighters laden with it tried to sink themselves in the breach, but some were swirled away like bandboxes and others turned turtle—a comical sight that made him roar with laughter. At last exciting operations with ropes, stretched across the river, succeeded in keeping some in place. After that a big-sailed barge came to the rescue—he could even recognize the two punters with long poles who eked out the sail. Ravens’ grandson, that ne’er-do-well, and Ephraim Bidlake, whose grandfather’s barge used to “competition wuss than coaches,” he told Jinny. They had brought a cargo of the blue-grey stuff—hundreds of sacks—and “dinged” it into the breach, wellnigh clogging it up. And then—oh side-splitting drollery!—the dyke had gone and “busted” in another weak place—near the bridge. And they were left “like dickies” with empty sacks, while the folk in the new-swamped fields went scurrying like rats.
So continuous were her grandfather’s shouts of glee that Jinny ceased to attend to them, and would not come up to see even the new gap. She was the more amazed when at supper he talked of having seen “ ’Lijah Skindle” fishing from the window of Frog Farm. “Oi called ye to come and see,” he said reproachfully when she expressed incredulity. “He got his line danglin’ from a broomstick!”