“Yes, Gran’fer, lots!”
“Do ye don’t tell me no fibs. Oi’ve noticed your appetite fallin’ lower and lower like the flood, and now there’s a’mos’ nawthen o’ neither. And ye used to be my little mavis!”
“You don’t want me to eat snails or worms?”
“ ’Tis your singin’, Oi mean.”
“There is Hey!” she chanted obediently.
“Ye’re the most aggravatin’ gal—minds me o’ your great-gran’mother. Ye need your mouth for eatin’, not singin’.”
After a sleepless night, unable to bear this inactivity, she ran round to the Bidlake lodgings to suggest that as young Mr. Flynt seemed to be sailing for Australia, it might be a neighbourly action to show him Hezekiah’s hints to travellers. But she gathered from the happy mother that the absent Ephraim had already talked to Will about the heavier clothes and the bedding, and that Will had said how fortunate it was he had sold off his summer suits, so as in any case to get the latest make at Moses & Son’s on his passage through London. Jinny suspected he had sold them off to raise funds for the voyage. Still the bravado of this pretence of a London outfit did not displease her. She learnt too that there had been a question of Will’s convoying the ex-convict’s daughters to their impatient parent, as the Ephraim Bidlakes would not be ready for ages, but it had been thought scarcely proper in view of their age and looks—a decision Jinny thought wise. Indeed, the idea that he was not to be thus companioned almost reconciled her, by contrast, to his departure.
When she got home she found to her surprise that her grandfather was entertaining Martha Flynt, who was far from the spruceness she usually achieved for outsiders of the other sex. She looked draggled and worn after her long and windy walk. What astonished Jinny most was that the old rheumatic woman should have trudged so far, and she opined that her business must be pressing and must be with herself. For it could hardly lie in the Christadelphian texts with which Martha seemed to be battering and bemusing the nonagenarian, whose great Bible lay open between them, and who was disconcerted to find her texts really there.
Martha had never set foot in Blackwater Hall before, so far as Jinny could remember, and very strange it was to see her sitting over her cup of tea which she must have made for herself at her host’s invitation. With all his perturbation over the texts, he seemed only too brisked up by this amazing visit from a female, the first unwhiskered being, save Jinny, he had met for many moons. It was a fillip he did not need, Jinny considered: the old good food again, the sweet security, the satisfaction of revenge, had made his eyes less bleared, filled out his flacked cheeks and given him a new lease of strength and sanity—a sort of second wind—and this visit might only over-stimulate him. She did not like the undercurrent of excitement that showed itself in the twitching of his limbs and eyelids, especially when Martha declared he could not be really accepting the Book as all-inspired if he believed man’s heaven lay in the skies. “Whither I go, ye cannot come,” she repeated.
“We’ll see about that,” said Daniel Quarles fiercely, and clenched his fists as if he meant to storm the gates of cloudland. “And ain’t ye forgittin’ ’Lijah what went up to heaven with a chariot and bosses o’ fire? That won’t happen to ’Lijah Skindle, damn him—he’ll have the chariot o’ fire, but he won’t git no higher. He, he, he!”