“But then how about Maria?” Jinny jested.
“Maria!” he grunted. “It’s all her fault. I always said she was the fussiest pig I ever attended. A mere cramp, through not taking exercise all this rainy weather; fright cured her in a jiffy. But think of the valuable time she’s cost me! I wouldn’t have come but to oblige Will. No wonder they call the place Frog Farm.”
“I don’t hear any croaking but yours,” flashed Jinny. “Why, if time is all you’ve lost, you’re lucky. Where’s your horse?”
“You didn’t think I’d risk Jess on these roads in the weather we’ve been having? I only agreed to come in the coach Saturday night and go back Sunday morning with Farmer Gale and his wife when they drove in to chapel. Poor Blanche! She must have been in a terrible twitter when I didn’t turn up at the Sunday dinner!”
“I wonder she didn’t come out for you in a boat?” said Jinny slyly.
“She’d be thinking I’d been called to another patient. We medical gents can never call our time our own,” he explained, but there was a tremor of uneasiness in his words. He pulled out his empty pipe and stuck it between his blackened teeth. Caleb here appeared with uncouth bundles, and Martha (embellished by sudden Sunday clothes) with a last frightened chicken, and as the barge had now quite tautened its window-rope and left a watery gap, Martha’s descent was a fluttering episode.
“Not so easy as the New Jerusalem coming down,” gasped Caleb, when she was safely installed inside the cart with Maria and the poultry and the dazed Nip.
Ephraim Bidlake, intimating he could not wait on this jaunt to lower any of the furniture, had gone off—in a little dinghy he carried—to rescue the fowls in the orchard branches, and their fearful cackling and the excitement of his perilous quest now drew all eyes, except Jinny’s, which remained furtively bent on the window, from which the drifting of the barge had carried her away. It was with relief that she heard Martha suddenly exclaim:
“But where’s the boy?”
“Oi count he’s got such a mort o’ new-fangled things,” scoffed Caleb. “Tooth-brushes and underclothes and shavin’-strops—happen he’ll want a whole portmantle. Oi offered to help him with his poor arm, but he’s that fiery and sperrited—ye remember, Jinny, how he lugged his great ole box all the way Chipstone!”