“I should have had God—and my angel mother!”
IV
“Noa, arter she run away with her Boldero Oi’d never cross her doorstep, never,” confessed the old carrier, picking up the story later, as she rode beside him on their day’s work. He was getting so old now that he preferred to talk of twenty rather than of two years before, and the veneer of book-education which his unexpected inheritance of the business had necessitated had fallen away, and he was speaking more and more in the idioms of his illiterate youth, curiously tempered at times by the magnificent English of his Bible.
“But that was wicked!” said Jinny decisively. She felt it wrong indeed that a father should thus cut off his daughter, but to have done this when that daughter was an angel (even if only in the making), still more when that daughter was her own mother, seemed to her confused consciousness the climax of iniquity.
“Wicked! The contrairy! Oi’d taken my Bible oath never to set foot over her doorstep. So Oi dedn’t have no chance, you see.”
Jinny was silenced. She herself had succumbed to an oath, and that indeed on a less awful book.
“Arter she had lost two childer,” he went on, “and the third got measles, she sent a man on hossback to beg me to take off the spell. Thought, d’ye see, dearie, that for her frowardness and disobedience Oi’d laid a curse on ’em all. Like one of our Methody preachers, the chap seemed, with all the texts to his tongue’s tip, and pleaded that wunnerful he ’most made me believe Oi did have the evil eye. But though of course Oi hadn’t no more to do wi’ the deaths of your little brothers and sisters than a babe unborn—or you yourself, for the matter o’ that, as was a babe unborn—Oi couldn’t break my oath and goo and pretend to cure the wean, and so when the measles turned to pneumonia and it died, she got woundily distracted, and writ me two sheets sayin’ as Oi was a child-murderer. That didn’t worrit me no more than the child’s death, seein’ as the Lord does everything for the best, though Oi had to pay double on the letter. But one fine arternoon the preachin’ chap comes again and says she’d been layin’ paralysed-like for a month and wouldn’t Oi come and forgive her afore she kicked the bucket!”
“Oh, Gran’fer!” Jinny protested.
“Oi’m givin’ you his words,” said the Gaffer defensively. “At least that was the meanin’, though ’haps he put it different, me not havin’ his gift o’ the gab. But bein’ never a man to nuss rancour, when folks own up, Oi said that even ef Oi could forgive my darter, never could Oi enter a house harbourin’ that rascal Boldero——”
“Oh, Gran’fer!” she protested again.