Jinny—well aware young Purley was homeward bound for Foxearth Farm—gave him a radiant smile, and Elijah threw him the keg and a furious look, a reliable fellow-feeling informing him that the velvety liar was going at least two miles out of his way. Downright dishonest he felt it, seeing that neither the young man’s time nor his trap was his own, but belonged to his father, the hurdle-maker. But what could you expect of Blanche’s brother? Let Jinny beware of the family fickleness, let her lean on a less showy but manlier breast.
“I wonder you don’t arrange your things village by village instead of letting ’em lay all over the vehicle,” he observed as she drove on.
“I shan’t forget where to drop you,” came the answer over her cold shoulder.
Then silence fell more painfully than ever, and the monotonous tick-tack of Methusalem maddened his conscious ear. The monstrous possibility began to loom up that Jinny’s affections were pre-engaged to some one of these numerous young men. His eye fell upon a coil of rope hung round a loose hoop of the tilt, and morbid thoughts of using it—whether on the young men or himself was not clear—floated vaguely in his usually serene soul. Presently he noted other coils on other ribs, and their plurality suggested it was for the young men, not himself, that rope was appropriate. What else were they there for, he wondered dully? Yes, let her fiancés go hang: engagements could always be broken off—nothing venture, nothing have!
To nerve himself for the great question he took advantage of the pause at Long Bradmarsh while Methusalem was drinking at the trough of “The King of Prussia.” But this imitation of Methusalem on a stronger fluid was fatal, for in Jinny’s persistent silence, the animal’s tick-tacks now grew soothing: he settled himself more comfortably on the emptier floor of the cart, with his head on a soft bundle, and watched the nape of Jinny’s neck till it faded into a great white sea of floating ice. He was struggling in it for hours, but at last the cold waves passed over his head, and Jinny, turning to throw out a parcel, saw that his cap had fallen off in his writhings, leaving his baldness almost indecently glaring.
So deep was he in his daymare that he was quite unaware of Jinny’s colloquy with another male whom her horn had hailed as they passed over the bridge to Little Bradmarsh. Not that there was anything in Ephraim Bidlake to excite apprehension, for he was a stalwart Peculiar, safely married, and residing with his family and two twin-nieces of his wife’s—Sophy and Sally—on board the billyboy whose great boomless black sail Jinny had espied darkening the water with its shadow. Bidlake’s barge was a cross between a Norfolk wherry and a ferry-boat, and plied up and down the Brad, loading at the wharves with its half-lowered mast for crane, or carrying man and cattle across the bridgeless sections when it had nothing better to do. There was not much money coming in at the best, and it was often Jinny’s privilege to eke out the barge’s larder under pretence of presents for the motherless Sophy and Sally, so tragically fathered. For Ephraim Bidlake, a shaggy giant with doglike eyes, had brought the “little furriners” from Hampshire when their mother died after their father—Mrs. Bidlake’s brother—had been transported to Botany Bay for burning a rick in some old agricultural riot against the introduction of machinery. The blot on their scutcheon had been concealed from the new neighbourhood, but had been gradually confided by Mrs. Bidlake to Jinny with protestations of her brother’s innocence—had he not been made a constable in the very convict ship? By degrees, too, she had conveyed to the girl a vivid picture of the trial and deportation. For the devoted sister had walked the bulk of the way to Winchester, in the hope of proving his innocence by collecting testimonies to his character, and had joined the mob of weeping women who hung round the gaol gates night and day, or crowded the court, only to witness the sanctimonious cruelty of the bewigged judges, and the tragic exodus of the damned in the prison coach, guarded by a file of soldiers, to lie in the hulks at Southampton till they were shipped to savage Australia, there to be assigned to brutal stockowners. It was an experience which had cost Mrs. Bidlake dear; her next child had been stillborn, and to this day she had never reared but one more infant, and that a still delicate one. But for the comfort of the Peculiar faith it would have been a cheerless household. She was now again brought to bed: it was to inquire about her that Jinny had hailed the barge, and very sad she was to learn from Brother Bidlake—when he had punted within earshot—that the new baby had succumbed after a few hours, though the “missus,” thank God, was recovering and the twins were “wunnerful good and helpful.” She was not sorry, however, that the undoctored infant had departed with a precipitation which rendered an inquest unlikely, for inquests were the bane of the Brotherhood.
IX
It was twilight when Methusalem drew up again before the twin doors. This time Caleb did not fail.
“Sow glad you ain’t brought the wet!”
“But I have—he’s snoring inside,” Jinny called down.