“To my lookin’-at-it-an’-thinkin’-o’t-too”—the Gaffer made one breathless word of it—“ ’tis a blessin’ to be riddy of all them gaolbirds, swearers, drinkers, smokers, and fornicators.”
“Hush!” The Commander tried to wink his glass eye towards Jinny.
“She don’t understand. Oi remember, the year my good-for-nawthen Gabriel smashed up a threshin’-machine (and the poor farmer dedn’t git no compensation neither, though ef his furniture had been smashed ’twould have come on the Hundred) that wery same year Ebenezer Wagstaff—for ’twas the coronation year of King William, Oi remember, just afore my Emma desarted me——”
“That was a Sailor King,” interrupted Dap, half to stave off fulminations against Jinny’s dead mother. “Began as middy under Cap’n Digby in the unlucky Royal George—a ninety-eight gun ship she was——”
“Ye put me off the track, drat ye, aldoe it leads back to Ebenezer Wagstaff all the same, seein’ as the Prince might ha’ rubbed showlders with a thief as was sentenced for stealin’ half-a-suvran from a barge on the Brad. He could ha’ been hanged for it in them days, mind you—the case bein’ as clear as day or rather as black as night. But they marcifully brought him in guilty to stealin’ nine and ’levenpence and that saved his neck, being a navigable river, and the judge give him the option of gaol or jinin’ the Navy.”
“And a proper thing too. Set a thief to catch a Frenchy, and him used to taking prizes by water. Nowadays before the captain hoists his pennant he’s got a crew dumped on him that’s no choice of his—mealy-mouthed lubbers, full of book-larnin’, who don’t know a brigantine from a topsail schooner: it’s the red ensign that gets all the good stuff, not the white. You mark me, it’ll be the downfall of England.”
“England’ll never fall down while she’s got God-fearin’ congregations,” maintained Daniel Quarles, and Jinny’s devout little heart thrilled to hear it.
In the pleasant sunny graveyard there were apiaries and a dismantled tower almost smothered by blackberry-bushes, and the tombs and gravestones passed imperceptibly into a garden of monkey-trees and weeping willows. These wrought in her no stirring of memories, but as she had got off the coach, the standing church tower, square and ivy-wrapped, had composed beautifully with ricks of all sorts, with trees, old tiles, and thatch, into a picture that seemed as much hers as the waterside.
The parson—Susannah had remained a Churchwoman—was some minutes late, and Jinny was gratified to note how strong her grandfather was: how pillar-like he stood in his long black mourner’s cloak under the weight of the coffin at the churchyard gate, while all the other bearers, his obvious juniors, shifted and sweated. Nor did he blubber either like the Commander, whose weakness, considering how often she had been adjured to be “spunky,” and not—now that she was “grown up”—to cry, was as disconcerting as the double existence of his wife in the coffin and the empyrean. However, Dap grew “good” again when the thrilling if still more disconcerting episode of lowering his Susannah as far as possible from the skies and banking her safely against ascent, was over; and—Daniel Quarles having gone vaguely roving over the churchyard—the widower led her stealthily in his absence to a stone behind the ruined tower—in the “unconsecrated” or Dissenting area—and read to her the inscription, following it for her confirmation with his black-gloved forefinger:
Here Lies Roger Boldero