Pitter-patter was the dominant note of the rest of the year. The prayer for rain had been only too successful, and the blackbirds whistled their thanksgiving over their worms. But humanity grumbled with its wonted ingratitude. There were warm and windy days, and cold and sparkling days, but the roads never quite dried up. The short cuts to Frog Farm became impassable for Bundock; in the coursing season the long-grassed marshlands clove to the spectators’ gaiters, and when the beagles were out, Jinny had the satisfaction of seeing Farmer Gale and breathless bumpkins floundering over sodden stubble-fields or ankle-deep in mud, what time baffled whippers-in piped plaintively, or jetted husky cries at their scattered pack. Glad as she was to eat of the leporine family, she detested sport for sport’s sake, even the fox-hunting, though her poultry-run had just been raided and a dog-fox had snarled fearlessly at Nip from the ditch. Once, when the hare, crossing her cart with the dogs at his very heels, cleared the broad ditch with a magnificent leap, Jinny clapped her hands as though at a Flippance melodrama.

Sport for life’s sake was another affair, and she looked back regretfully to the good old times described by her grandfather, when the farmer, having finished his day’s work, would go out rabbit-shooting to preserve his crop, or when the fox could be shot, snared, or even hooked, as a dangerous animal. Now, when poor old Uncle Lilliwhyte had found Jinny’s vulpine enemy dead in one of his gins, caught by a claw, that rising vet., Mr. Skindle, was called in to make a post-mortem examination, and it was only because he certified that the sacred animal had died of starvation, and not been poisoned, that the old woodman escaped the worst rigours of the unwritten law. As it was, his crime in setting the trap at all on land not his own, and his failing—through a new attack of rheumatism—to examine it before the fox died, almost resulted in his being officially driven from his derelict hut into the Chipstone poorhouse; a fate he only escaped by passionate asseverations that he had always been and till death would continue “upright,” by which he meant “independent.”

That was in one sense more than Jinny could call herself, for her store of barley or rye for her breadmaking was dangerously low, and she had come to depend a good deal on the food brought by this queer raven at prices more corresponding to his gratitude than to market value. She still peddled her goats’ milk for a trifle among her neighbours, the abundant blackberries gave her fruit (though she could not afford the sugar for jam), she had gathered nuts as industriously as a squirrel, she ensured jelly for her grandfather by making it out of her own apples, while by exchanging the bad apples with a neighbour who kept pigs, she got Methusalem some “green fodder” in the shape of tares. But it was an unceasing strain to keep things going in the old style, and Uncle Lilliwhyte’s spoils were more than welcome, for his activities varied from codling-fishing to eel-spearing, and from fowling on the saltings to collecting glass-wort for pickling. His rabbits and hares came with suspiciously injured legs, and Jinny seeing the bloody-blobbed eyes could only hope they had not been long in his wire loops. As she felt the long, warm, beautiful bodies, she had to tell herself how pernicious they were to the root-crops or the young apple-trees.

More legitimate spoils arrived when the old man was well enough to crawl to the nearest salt-marsh with his ancient fowling-piece, for, when the ebb bared the mud, countless sea-birds came to feed, and more than once a brace of mallards offered Jinny a vivid image of her inferiority to the rival carrier, so gorgeously shimmering was the male’s head, so drab the female’s. For while the driver of the Flynt Flyer had been blossoming out in the frock-coat he had first sported for the Flippance wedding, Jinny had been refraining even from her furbished-up gown, reserving it mentally for a last resource and feeling herself lucky that it was still unpawned. But one day when the vehicles met—for despite the heaviness of the going Jinny foolishly and extravagantly continued to plod her miry rounds—she caught Will looking down so compassionately at her spotting shoes that she straightway resolved to buy another pair at any sacrifice. Savage satisfaction at her defeat she could have borne, but this pity she would not brook. Better sell the goats, especially as Gran’fer would need a new flannel shirt for the winter. The animals were not very lucrative, and one out of the three would suffice to supply milk for herself and—by its bleat—her grandfather’s sense of stability. But she had reckoned insufficiently with this last: he admitted he had no great stomach for her goats’ cheese, and felt a middling need for flannel, but he clung to his nannies as though without them his world would fall to pieces. That her shoes were doing so, he did not remark.

In the end—though she shrank from the three golden balls on her own behalf—there was nothing for it but to pledge her wedding-frock under pretence it was a customer’s. But in her dread lest the pawnbroker should recognize the dress, the sharpness which extracted the utmost from him for her distressed clients was replaced by a diffident acceptance of barely enough for the shoes.

This discussion about her live stock, however, gave her an idea. She carted part of her poultry to and fro in a crate, and their clucking and fluttering gave an air of liveliness to the business and made even Will Flynt believe it had woke up again, especially as he saw the smart new shoes on the little feet, supplemented presently by a new winter bonnet, which, despite his experience with his own mother’s bonnet, he did not divine was merely an old one, whitened and remodelled by Miss Gentry.

Thus the equinoctial season found the little Carrier still upon her seat, defiant of competition and radiating prosperity from the crown of her bonnet to the sole of her shoe. Even the plainness of her skirt and shawl seemed only an adaptation to the weather. But she would have been better off by her log fire, making the local variety of Limerick lace with which she was on other days trying to eke out her infrequent sixpences. Though the rain abated towards the end of October, halcyon days and even hours alternated with hours and days of turbulent winds and hailstorms, and the sky would change in almost an instant from a keen blue, with every perspective standing out clear and sun-washed, to a lowering roof of clouds spitting hailstones, and a gentle wind would be succeeded by half a gale that stripped their flames from the poplars and sent the reddened beech-leaves whirling fantastically. In November these blasts grew more biting, Nip cowered in his basket within the cart, and the calves in the fields sheltered themselves behind the blown-down trunks of elms. Shivering, Jinny reminded herself that the real object of her rounds was the bi-weekly gorge at Mother Gander’s.

They were indeed more generous than ever, these midday meals, so relieved was Jinny’s hostess to find she had not really been baptized into Mr. Fallow’s church. Mrs. Mott even had the Gaffer’s beer-barrel replenished gratis. Not that she had any suspicion of the girl’s straits. Though parcels were no longer left at the bar for Jinny, the poor woman was too taken up with her own troubles to draw the deduction from that. Beneath her imposing blue silk bodice beat a wounded heart, and in Jinny’s society she found consolation for the lack of her husband’s.

For a quarrel had begun between the Motts which was destined to shake all Chipstone with its reverberations. Mr. Charles Mott had profanely refused to be “Peculiar” any longer. The endeavour to draw him to the Wednesday services had proved the last straw. To him religion and Sunday were synonyms, and he had been willing to concede the day to boredom. He was a sportsman and was ready to play fair. But his wife was not playing fair, he considered, when she pretended that ratting, coursing, and dicing remained reprehensible even on weekdays. Expostulatory elders had vainly pointed out to him that it was only the Churchman who made so much of Sunday and so little of every other day, and Deacon Mawhood had been compelled to order several goes of rum at “The Black Sheep” to find opportunities of explaining to its landlord that his cravat-pin and plethora of rings were an offence. Let him note how his admirable wife had given up her gold chain. “Well, I don’t want no chain,” Charley had retorted, and his cronies still acclaimed the repartee. He had, in fact, broken his chain and would not even go to the Sunday chapel.

“You and me have both got our cross to bear,” Deacon Mawhood sighed sympathetically to the distraught lady. “There’s saints among us as won’t even keep a cat or a bird because the thought of them may come ’twixt the soul and chapel. Oi sometimes suspicion it’s a failing in roighteousness to keep a husband or a wife—partic’lar when they riots on your hard-earned savings.”

The grievances which the poor hostess of “The Black Sheep”—now become a keeper of one—poured into Jinny’s ear, fully confirmed all the Spelling-Book had told her of the wickedness of man—its preoccupation with the male gender had left woman unimpugned. But it was more under Mr. Mawhood’s encouragement than Jinny’s that this female pillar of the chapel now sent the Bellman round Chipstone with his bell and his cocked hat and his old French cry, to inform all and sundry that she would not be responsible for her husband’s debts.

It was a procedure which scandalized Chipstone. Since the day when a neighbouring village had set up its “cage” for drunken men in the pound, with the other strayed beasts, no such blow had been dealt at the dignity of man. But Charley and his crew met it with derisory laughter. All Mrs. Mott’s property was his—or rather theirs: he could sell the lease of “The Black Sheep” over her head, if she did not behave herself. Nay, he could sell her very self at the market cross, the bolder maintained, not without citing precedent. By many the Bellman was blamed for compromising the dignity of his sex: by none so contemptuously as by Bundock. For the Crier, not taking his own announcement seriously, had embellished it with facetious gags that set the street roaring. “I wouldn’t say if they were funny,” complained Bundock. “Anybody can play on the word ‘Peculiar,’ and certainly peculiar it is to put your husband in the stocks, so to speak. I don’t deny Charley’s legs sometimes need that support. But what can you expect if you marry your pot-boy? You must take pot-luck. He, he, he!”

To which the bulk of Chipstone Christendom added that however prodigal the ex-potman, he did not waste so much money as his wife lavished on that ridiculous sect of hers. A hundred pounds for the bishop at his jubilee birthday, it was said with bated breath—“a noice fortune!” Really, Charley was only too long-suffering not to take his property, including his wife, more strictly in hand, and when it was learnt that lawyers’ letters were actually passing between the bedrooms of the parties there was general satisfaction. In short, public opinion was as outraged by Mrs. Mott’s treatment of her husband as by her original acquisition of him. The only difference was that Mr. Mott was now a martyr.

The insult to the male sex was especially resented by the tradesmen to whom the martyr stood so profitably indebted, and under their incitement a new ban might have been put on “The Black Sheep” but for the reluctance of Will Flynt, who, though second to none in reprobation, refused to shift the headquarters of his coach to the rival establishment. That would only be hurting Charley’s business, he pointed out, and indirectly themselves. The economic aspects of revenge had not occurred to these muddle-heads, and they were grateful to the coach-driver for the reminder. They did not know that his true motive for sticking to “The Black Sheep” was that Jinny was to be encountered in its courtyard on Tuesdays and Fridays. Nor was Jinny herself aware how profusely she was repaying Mrs. Mott for her meals.

As if this scandal among the “Peculiars” was not enough, Deacon Mawhood himself came into ill odour more literally. For in carrying out his agreement to clear the Gentry cottage of rats, he had committed the crime of which Uncle Lilliwhyte had been acquitted: he had operated by poison, to wit, and the stench of the dead vermin in their holes nearly crazed the excellent dressmaker, already sufficiently distracted by the silence of her bosom friend, Mrs. Flippance, swallowed up in Boulogne as in a grave. Miss Gentry, like Mother Gander, now wept on Jinny’s shoulder, though it had to be done outside the garden gate, and even there the wafts caught one. If it had not been for the prediction that she would be drowned, did she ever set foot on a boat, she would have been in Boulogne weeks ago with her darling, but, like a ghost, she could not cross water. Indeed she would already have been a ghost but for her strong smelling-salts, her decoction of scabious against infection, and the fumigation of the cottage. Jinny did not shrink from bearding her spiritual superior in his bar and giving Mr. Joshua Mawhood a taste of her tongue. If that was his notion of religion, he ought to be cast out of his chapel, and she would let Mrs. Mott know of what a hoggish “illusion” he had been guilty—(Illusion, Sham or Cheat—“The Universal Spelling-Book”).

But the Deacon, standing on the letter of his bond, was impermeable to reproach—nay, had a sense of righteousness, as having incidentally punished a distributor of tracts no less offensive than his dead rats. Not even the remonstrances of Mr. Fallow, who had arranged the compromise over Mrs. Mawhood’s dress, could bring the Deacon to a sense of sin, still less of compensation. “Her rats were eating the pears like hollamy,” he said, “and Oi’ve cleared cottage and orchard of ’em.” Mr. Fallow was so interested to know what “hollamy” was, that he went away with a diminished sense of failure. But neither dictionaries nor octogenarians could throw any light on its etymology. The most plausible conjecture he could reach was that it must be “hogmanay,” gifts made at the year’s end.