The moment she saw and smelt the creek she knew she had carried it in her soul all along: the white hut with its flagged mast, the great Watch Vessel, the tumble of cottages, sheds, barrels, pecking fowls, grubbing black pigs, recumbent ladders, discoloured boats with their keels upwards, black rotting barges, and rigged smacks stranded on hard steep mud. The sea came in sluggishly through a broad green chine, half slime, half green water, spitted with gaunt encrusted poles to mark the channel. The water seemed even wider than she remembered, and yet not so wide, for it was split by an island or a promontory that gave a second sail-dotted expanse between her and the farther shore. She yearned now towards that ultimate hump of hazy woodland, and it was to remain for ever bathed in the quiet beauty which wrapped it around as Methusalem toiled up to the “Leather Bottel.” They were to stay the night there, for Daniel would have none of the Commander’s hospitality, he being still unforgiven. Besides, the child might be afraid of the corpse.

It was while sitting on that sea-wall with the octogenarian that evening, her great grown-up fingers toying once again with tiny white shells that strewed its top, and pewits again trying to lead her from their young, that she first heard in broken outlines how these waters had washed her into being. Something, too, she gleaned from her refound relative-in-law, the chief mourner, whose cocked hat, tattooed arm and genial senescence—not to mention his house-boat—were one of the pleasantest impressions or re-impressions of the funeral; and whose fascinating trick of rolling one eye while the other was fixed in a glassy stare almost made the child lose the sense of what he was saying. The death of his wife had reminded the veteran of the death of Nelson—nearly forty years before—and his tremulous tones grew still shakier as he recalled how the flags over the hut and the Watch Vessel and every other flag in England had flown at half-mast, though of course there were more joyous aspects of “Trafalgar” to be celebrated in bottles of Bony’s own brandy. He frankly admitted he had himself been “three sheets in the wind”—an image of bed-linen fluttering on a clothes-line that long puzzled her. He took her abaft the Watch Vessel—it was a way of leaving Daniel Quarles alone with his dead sister—and recounted his astonishment at seeing her father’s boat spued up like Jonah out of the whale.

“A handsome man,” he told her to her pleasure. But he spoilt it all by adding, “though he would talk the hind leg off a dog.”

“But wasn’t that cruel?” the little girl faltered.

Dap laughed. “He never did it really, dearie, and if the leg had come off, he’d have helped the lame dog over a stile. And so many lingos—parleyvooing in French and swearing in Double Dutch. I don’t wonder your angel mother fell in love with him.”

“My angel mother!” echoed Jinny excitedly. “Was my mother an angel?”

The veteran was taken aback. For a child who must be past nine such primitiveness was startling. He had spoken loosely, hardly knowing whether he alluded to Emma’s present heavenly abode or to her sweet-temperedness on earth. He did not know that little Jinny read nothing but literature in which angels were a common feature of the landscape, and that Miss Gentry had not measured her for her blacks without dwelling on her own stained-glass specimen.

“She was as pretty as one,” said the Commander after an instant, “and now she is one.” Thus it was that Jinny’s mother, already felt as a hovering sweetness, took on definite wings, and even when Jinny’s maturer experience amputated them from her earthly existence, they were what she still hovered over her child with.

“Susannah and she’ll make a pair now,” he added, feeling suddenly disloyal to the corpse at home.

“Susannah?” queried Jinny, for her grandfather had been calling his sister “Pegs”—“poor Pegs!”

“Your mother’s aunt.”

It was a new idea, an angel’s aunt. She saw the twain flying, Susannah sailing with more sweeping pinions, her mother softly rustling.

The funeral was in style, and Jinny helped to set out the refreshments in the saloon. There was some dispute as to whether her grandfather could join the grand procession in his tilt-cart, but though he urged that squires were proud to be buried from farm-wagons, he consented to ride—like a fish out of water—inside a mourning-coach, and not even on the box.

The Commander and Jinny shared his dismal grandeur, she sitting bodkin though there was an empty seat opposite, which “the seventh baby” had been expected to occupy. But Toby had not arrived from his ship—he was a gunner—in time, and the earlier progeny were still more scattered.

The widower held his handkerchief in his fist, but owing to the heat of a discussion on the manner the Navy had gone to the dogs—or returned from them—since the Admiralty had set up a gunnery school on a Portsmouth ship, he used it only to mop his brow.

“Excellent, indeed!” He was mocking at the ship’s name. “The ruination of the sarvice I tell you. It all comes from doing away with the pressgang—stands to reason they picked out the finest chaps—” here the Gaffer snorted—“Oh you may sniff, but for fighting you want guts and muscle. Look what England was in them days and what she is coming to now.”

“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:

He arrested himself suddenly and whisked her round the tower.

“But we didn’t read it all,” she protested.

“Oh, it only says: ‘And also Emma Boldero, Wife of the Above.’ But don’t tell your grandfather.”

The child wondered why she was to keep Emma’s relationship to the Above a secret—she had already gathered from her grandfather that he knew it—and she was distressed as well as puzzled at the strange quarrel that broke out in the homeward coach.

“It ain’t at all a proper word,” said Daniel Quarles. “You might as well put ‘carted to Christ’ on mine.”

“That’ll be your affair,” persisted the widower, “but this ain’t. And how you came to see it gets over me.”

The Gaffer flushed uneasily. “Oi’ve got two eyes, I suppose,” he jerked.

The naval veteran glared glassily. “Them that pay the piper call the tune,” he retorted defensively. “Besides,” he added more gently, “Emma always said she’d have it somehow on her tombstone.”

“Emma was a silly.”

“Hush!” Dap again indicated the child with his glassy eye, now trickling without the other as in half-mourning.

“Oi won’t hush it up. That’s got to goo. The mason’s got to cut another for me. Who arxed you to pay pipers?”

“Such a handsome stone to be torn up! It’s a desecration, it’s unlawful.”

“Unlawful? Whose darter is she, mine or yourn?”

“Not yours. You cut her off.”

“She cut me off. And ef poor Pegs and you had done your duty by my gal, he’d ha’ never crossed your doorstep.”

“He’d ha’ met her on the sea-wall. I couldn’t help his beholding her looks, any more than you could help having a handsome daughter—or for the matter of that, a handsome sister.” His handkerchief came out again.

“Oi’m not denying their looks—a man with half an eye could see that. ’Tis just the handsome gals as seems to throw theirselves away,” he added musingly.

“Maybe they are unhappy at home,” suggested the widower, with equal philosophic aloofness.

“Or in the housen they stays at,” assented the Gaffer. “But let bygones by bygones. It may be the Lord dumped him down for our good. All Oi say is, that word’s got to goo. A Churchman may not see the blasphemy, but think o’ what John Wesley would ha’ said to it.”

“He’d ha’ said ’twas a wicked extravagance to waste such a fine stone.”

“The mason’ll take it back. Happen there’ll be another Roger Boldero dead and neaped some day.”

“Very likely,” sneered the veteran. “And also an Emma, Wife of the Above.”

“Hush!” The little maid nudged him, wondering he should forget his own monition.

“That has more sense than you!” cried the Gaffer in high glee. “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings!” And drawing the astonished Jinny to his bristly beard, he kissed her lips with a hearty smack.

Despite these half-understood discords, Jinny was very sorry to leave the stony-eyed veteran and the motley waterside.

“Sometimes,” she confided to the more sympathetic swivel eye, as her grandfather was harnessing Methusalem for their return, “I wish I had never come to earth at all.”

Again Dap was startled by her simplicity—had not Daniel been telling him what a useful little body she was in the business?

“But then you’d never have had your grandfather—or me,” he said, stroking her cheek.

“I should have had God—and my angel mother!”