“What do you want?” broke harshly from his lips.
Such ungraciousness after the perils of her voyage jarred upon her. “Don’t you want anything from Chipstone?” she asked, with a malice she had not intended.
“No,” he barked.
“Well, here’s your letters I’ve carried,” she said demurely. “The postal service, like the coach service, has broken down.” She hurled the letters through the window just as he was banging it to, but ere it could close it was thrown open again, and Elijah, Maria, Martha, and Caleb were tumbling over one another in their eagerness to greet her.
“Jinny!” came from all their mouths, even, it seemed, from Maria’s, and she saw through dimming eyes that the bedroom was a chaos of furniture and fowls.
“Here, catch hold of that rope, one of ye,” cried Ephraim Bidlake. “Tie it to a bedpost.” He had already fastened the stem of the boat to an oak, but the current was swinging out the stern.
It was with a thrill that Jinny found herself gazing for the first time into Will’s bedroom, though its normal character was disturbed by its emergency use as a sitting-room, poultry-run, pigsty, and salvage store. The wet crinkled motto: “When He giveth quietness, who then can make trouble?” was lying as if in ironic questioning atop a pile of parlour ornaments, and Martha’s silk sampler lay stained and sodden on the very chair on which Mr. Flippance had sat admiring it. “Unstable as water,” human destinies seemed to Jinny as she surveyed the jumble in the whitewashed attic. But there was too much bustle for reflection, nor could she even see clearly what Will himself was doing, for Maria and Elijah were jostling each other at the window in their efforts to get through, and the vet.’s cap fell on the deck in his agitation.
“Pigs first!” called Jinny, and as though obediently, Elijah clutching at the edge of her tilt scrambled on the foot-board of the cart and thence to the deck. “Nice behaviour, leaving us to starve,” he grumbled in the same pachydermatous spirit, as he clapped his cap on his chilled cranium.
“How could you starve with all those fowls?” said Jinny.
“They weren’t for weekday eating, the old woman said. Nothing since Sunday but dry bread!”