IX
If, in the very heart of the romp at Blackwater Hall, Jinny’s insight could perceive that this reconciliation of her two males (or her two mules as she called them to herself) had left her marriage problem unsolved, still more did afterthought bring home the sad truth. There was no way of leaving the old man, no way of adding Will to the household. The latter alternative she never even suggested. It would bring her husband into public contempt to be thus absolutely swallowed up by the female carrier, and supported as in a poorhouse. So far off seemed the possibility of marriage that the Gaffer was considerately left in ignorance of the engagement—the only man in a radius of leagues from whom it was hidden, though Will was constantly about the cottage, having supplanted poor Ravens as a house repairer. But ever since the Gaffer had clapped him in the trunk—and the old man had forgotten he was not the first to do so—his affections had passed to the victim of his humour, and he often recalled it to Will with grins and guffaws as they sat over their beer. “Ye thought to git over Daniel Quarles,” he would chuckle, poking him in the ribs, “but ye got to come in on your hands and knees! Ho, ho, ho!” He seemed to imagine Will called on purpose to be thus twitted with his defeat, though as a matter of fact the privation of his pipe was a great grievance to the young man, and supplied a new obstacle to his taking up his quarters there as son-in-law. But outwardly Will had fallen into Jinny’s way of humouring the old tyrant, and this parade of affection rather shocked her, for she felt that Will was more interested in the veteran’s death than in his life. Once when, recalling the delectable memory, the Gaffer remarked, “Lucky ye ain’t as bonkka as Sidrach, Oi count they had to make him a extra-sized coffin,” she caught an almost ghoulish gleam in her lover’s eyes. He had indeed lugubriously drawn her attention to a paragraph in the paper saying that six thousand centenarians had been counted in Europe in the last half-century. Evidently the age of man was rising dangerously, he implied. The worst of it was that Jinny herself, though she would have fought passionately for the patriarch’s life, found shadowy speculations as to the length of his span floating up to her mind and needing to be sternly stamped under. For she had told Will definitely that so long as her grandfather lived, she could neither marry nor leave England. Gloomily he cited Old Parr—he seemed to have become an authority on centenarians—who had clung to existence till 152. “At that rate I shall be over eighty,” he calculated cheerlessly.
“Oh, it isn’t very likely!” she consoled him.
“Well, it’s lucky we aren’t living before the Flood, that’s all I can say,” he grumbled. “Fancy waiting six hundred years or so!”
“I wish we were living before our flood,” she said. “Then you’d have your livelihood.”
“And what would have been the good of that without you? You’d have stuck to your grandfather just the same.”
No, there was no way out. Australia resurged, black and menacing, and finally she even wrote herself to the London agents about his ship, consoled only by the entire supervision of his wardrobe and the famous trunk. And the only wedding that followed on their engagement was Elijah’s. For—according to Bundock’s father—till that had become certain, Blanche had refused to marry, despite the calling of her banns. “I didn’t think that a man who once aspired to me could ever keep company with a common carrier,” was her final version to Miss Gentry. “It shows how right you were to spurn him,” said that sympathetic spinster, who had transferred her adoration of the Beautiful from the faithless Cleopatra to the clinging Blanche, and figured at the altar in her now habitual rôle of bridesmaid.
And it was on that very wedding-day—so closely does tragedy tread on the sock of comedy—that poor Uncle Lilliwhyte fell asleep in a glorious hope of resurrection. Jinny had not suspected the imminence of his last moments till the evening before, though she and Will had paid him several visits at his now weathertight hut. But she had become rather alarmed about him, and returning from her round one Tuesday, she set off alone, as soon as supper was over. Will had seen sufficient of her during the day, and it was understood he was to give his mother his company that evening, for Martha had fallen into a more distressful state than ever. “Will’s got to go just the same,” she kept moaning when Jinny came, “and Flynt vows he’ll never be baptized into the Ecclesia, and turns round and tells me I lack faith. Me, who’ve learnt him all the religion he knows!”
There was a full moon as Jinny set out with a little basket for the invalid. Nip trotted behind her, and the trees and bushes cast black trunks and masses across her path, almost like solid stumbling-blocks. The bare elms and poplars rose in rigid beauty in the cold starry evening. Death was far from her thoughts till she reached the hut and saw the sunken cheeks in their tangle of hair illumined weirdly from the stove, which lay so close to the patriarch’s hand he could replenish it from his bed of sacks.
“Just in time, Jinny!” he said joyfully. “Oi was afeared you wouldn’t be.” His excitement set him coughing and, frightened, she knelt and put her jug of tea to his lips.