The abundance of black sloes, they said, foretold a hard winter, and as the winter approached, Jinny’s outlook grew darker. Even to keep a roof over their heads was not easy with the thatch everywhere holed by starlings. Driblets came through the old man’s bedroom ceiling and were caught in a pail. And as for the walls, Daniel Quarles cursed the builder who had put in such bad mortar that “big birds came and picked the grit out o’ the lime.” The rain drove even through the closed lattices. To keep the living-room dry, he had made Jinny purchase putty, of which he daubed no less than three pounds over the rotting woodwork of the window. A stumpy piece of log he also nailed to the bottom of the window to block up the crevices, though he could do nothing with the top of the kitchen door through the little vine that grew over it, and which in some years yielded several pounds of small white grapes.

And if it was high time that her Hall should be patched up, Jinny often thought with commiseration of poor Uncle Lilliwhyte in his leaky hut throughout all these rains. Even from a selfish point of view, his health was a consideration. If he broke up, a main source of supply would disappear, and any day he might be at least temporarily paralysed by his rheumatism, and need provender instead of supplying it. A frail reed indeed to rely on, and Jinny began to wonder if she had been wise in training Nip so carefully not to hunt rabbits. With food and shelter thus alike insecure, Jinny, remembering the formula of her sect, resolved to “ask in faith.” Perhaps too conscious a resolution impaired the faith—at any rate Providence, even with an accessory at court in the shape of the Angel-Mother, proved stony, and the Angel-Mother herself appeared limited in her powers, however limitless her sympathy. She could not even make folks demand tambour lace. Jinny began to wonder if no terrestrial powers remained to be invoked in the old man’s behalf. What had become of all the children, whose names were recorded in the fly-leaf of his hereditary Bible, and only some of whom had their deaths chronicled? Cautiously she probed and pried into corners she had never dared approach before, instinctively feeling them full of cobwebs and grime. And her instinct was justified—each child had been more “obstropolus” than the others. One of the daughters was always “a slammacks” and had married beneath her, another—a beauty even fairer than Jinny’s mother—had, on the contrary, caught a London linen-draper on his holidays and looked down on her father, who would starve rather than eat a bit of her bread. One boy had “’listed,” another been beguiled into the Navy by that “dirty little Dap,” a third—a lanky youth nicknamed “Ladders”—had gone to London to see the coronation of King William, and had disappeared, while his devil-may-care younger brother had shot a rabbit at night and been transported to “Wan Demon’s Land,” a name that made Jinny shudder. This last was the only son of whose present locality he was even vaguely aware, though, oddly enough, the sailor son had once sent him word that, landing with a boat’s crew upon an island called “Wan Couver,” he had come upon “Ladders” in the service of the Hudson Bay Company, living in a stockaded fort called after the Queen, and surrounded by naked, painted Indians. But as none of these children were ever to dare cross their father’s doorstep again, there did not seem much help to be looked for from any quarter of the globe that might contain them. And Jinny was sorry she had not left the cobwebbed corners in their original mystery, for as the stories multiplied, the old man began to loom as a sort of sinister raven that drives out its own offspring, though gradually she came to see behind all the stories the same tale of a cast-iron religion against which the young generation broke itself. Or was it only a cast-iron obstinacy, she asked herself, after working out that the first at least of these family jars must have occurred before her grandfather’s oft-narrated encounter with John Wesley.

It was with a new astonishment that she learnt he had been careful to make his will, lest Blackwater Hall should fall into the hands of his youngest surviving rascal. “And who’ve you left it to?” she inquired innocently.

“Why, who has the nat’ral right to it? Sidrach, in course, as ought to has had it ’stead o’ me, he bein’ the eldest. He’s been cut out o’ the wote, too, what goos with the property and what’s worth pounds and pounds.”

He was so convinced of the righteousness of this will, and appeared so genuinely fond of his brother, that Jinny was afraid to suggest the strong probability of Sidrach predeceasing him. Indeed Sidrach began now to play a larger and larger part in his thoughts, his mind reverted to the early days of the “owler,” and gradually the prosperity of those days shone again over the patriarch in “Babylon.” Sidrach now loomed as a star of hope, and Daniel spoke constantly of paying his long-projected visit to him at Chelmsford, designing apparently to drive the cart himself, and to inform his brother of the magnanimous bequest that was coming to him—a legacy that would suggest to Sidrach corresponding magnanimity in the living present. Afraid the Gaffer would actually set forth on this dangerous and visionary quest, Jinny did her best to discredit the notion of Sidrach’s opulence, and quoted “Rolling stones gather no moss,” but the Gaffer argued tenaciously that if his eldest brother had not been comfortably off, he would have come to seek the shelter of their roof-tree, or at least applied for their assistance, as he must be getting old, or at least (he modified it) too old to work. Jinny offered to write to Sidrach to inquire, but her grandfather could not find the ten-year-old letter inviting the visit. No, he would go over and find Sidrach instead, and Jinny was reduced to pointing out from day to day how unfavourable the weather was for the excursion. As the days grew shorter and shorter, the project, finding no opposition to nourish it, seemed to subside. Jinny was almost conscience-stricken when one Sunday after church Mr. Fallow showed her a paragraph in the Chelmsford Chronicle, stating that “another link with the past” had been broken by the death “last Monday from a fall downstairs” in the Chelmsford poorhouse of a centenarian named Sidrach Quarles, who claimed to be a hundred and five, and who was certainly well over the hundred, his recollections, which were a source of entertainment to all visitors, going back to the days when England was still ruled by a “furriner,” meaning thereby George II.

The shock Jinny received at this was more of life than of death. It made her realize she had never quite believed in Sidrach’s existence, and this sense of his substantiality almost swamped the minor fact of his decease. She saw no reason why he should not remain substantial. Now that she had perhaps been guilty of baulking her grandfather’s last chance of seeing his beloved brother, she did not feel equal to robbing him of his last hope of assistance. He might even agitate himself over making a fresh will, and it was far better to let Providence or the lawyer folk decide on his heir. No doubt when the dread necessity arose, the youngest son would be raked up from somewhere. But that dark moment still seemed far. The longer her grandfather lived, the more she had got used to the idea of his never dying. True, Sidrach had died, though his habit of living had been even more ingrained, but they did not take proper care of you in a workhouse, and besides he had died of an accident. She would keep Daniel from that fate, even as she would keep him from the poorhouse.

As she sat at his side by the fire that Sunday night, knitting him a muffler, her thoughts were playing so pitifully over poor old Sidrach in his bleak pauper’s grave, that she was not at all surprised when her grandfather announced with sudden decision that he would go to see Sidrach the very next day. With a chill at her heart as though a dead hand had been placed on it, she told him gently that it was nonsense and that he must wait now till the spring.

But he shook his head obstinately. “Don’t seem as ef Oi’ll last out till the spring.”

She laughed forcedly. “What an idea!”

“Not unless there’s an election and Oi can buy grub with my wote-money,” he explained. “And Oi ain’t heerd as Parlyment is considerin’ the likes of us.”

“You’ve always had plenty to eat!” she protested, colouring up.

“That ain’t enough in the larder when Oi looks, ne yet for Methusalem in the barn. Ye’ve got to have a store like the beer in my barrel. Where’s my flitch? Where’s my cheeses? Same as we’re snowbound, like the year Sidrach went away, where would Oi get my Chris’mus dinner? ’Tis a middlin’ long way to Babylon, but Oi’ll start with the daylight and be back between the lights, and ef Oi’m longer, why the moon’s arly. Oi’ll be proper pleased to see dear Sidrach again—he larnt me my letters and Oi’ll bring him back to live with us, now he’s gittin’ oldish. It ain’t good for a man to live alone, says the Book, and that’ll be good for us too, he bein’ as full o’ suvrans as a dog of fleas.”

“Nip isn’t full of fleas,” she said with mock anger, hoping to make a diversion. “Why, you scrub him yourself!”

But he went on, unheeding. “Daniel Quarles has allus been upright, and he’d sooner die than goo to his darter or the poorhouse.”

She thought miserably that the poorhouse was where he would have to go to find any traces of his beloved Sidrach, and she set herself by every device of logic or cajolery to discourage this revived dream of the journey. He might not even find Sidrach in such a big city, she now hinted, but he laughed at that. Everybody knew Sidrach, “a bonkka, hansum chap with a mosey face and a woice like the bull of Bashan and as strong too. Wery short work he’d ha’ made of Master Will. Carry him in, indeed! Carried him out—and with one hand—that’s what Sidrach would ha’ done! Why, he’s tall enough to light the street-lamps in Che’msford!”

These street-lamps, Jinny gathered, still figured in his mind as of oil, and she was able by dexterous draughts on his reminiscences to put off the evil day of his expedition. But whenever there was visible dearth at table, the thought of his rich brother, flared up again.

Could Blackwater Hall perhaps be sold, she thought desperately, and the money spent on his declining years. The thought was stimulated by a meeting of the Homage Court which came from railhead in the “Flynt Flyer,” and before which Miss Gentry’s landlady as a copyholder had to do “suit and service” in the Moot Hall to the Lords of the Manor.

But Jinny ascertained that Beacon Chimneys, a ramshackle place with much land, had been bought up recently by Farmer Gale for his new bride at fifty shillings an acre, farm and buildings thrown in; a rate at which Blackwater Hall would not even yield the forty shillings supposed to be its annual value as a voting concern—whereas the Gaffer’s view, cautiously extracted, ran: “Ef you spread suvrans all over my land, each touchin’ the tother, you pick up your pieces and Oi keep my land.” Moreover, Mr. Fallow, to whom she had broached the idea, reminded her feelingly that old people could not be moved. He was keenly interested, however, to learn that the tenure was an example of Borough English and hunted up the local Roll of Customs (7th Edward IV) proclaiming that “Time out of the Mind of Man” the “ould auncient Custom of the Bourow” had been for the heritage to go to the “youngest Sonne of the first wife.”

At heart Jinny was glad the idea of selling the Hall was impracticable: for what would have become of Methusalem and the business of “Daniel Quarles, Carrier”? To surrender before the “Flynt Flyer” would have been a bitter pill indeed.