Though not unconscious of a subterranean hostility in Martha, which she put down to the new business rivalry, and though still perturbed about the Duchess, Jinny felt distinctly better for this visit, not to mention the half-crown, that now rare coin. She was still more heartened two days later when Bundock brought a letter from Mr. Flippance stating that, strange to say, Cleopatra did not find the Lady Agnes dress suitable. It would make her feel she was only playing at marrying, she said, and she was too respectful of holy matrimony to desecrate it by any suggestion of unreality: indeed she was already being fitted by the leading Chipstone artist. The dress was, however, turning out so dubiously that she would be glad if Jinny’s French friend would call upon her at Foxearth Farm with a view to preparing a “double.” As for Jinny being bridesmaid, he must reluctantly ask her to abandon the idea, as Cleopatra considered her too short.

“That’s the Flippance fist,” said Bundock, lingering to watch her read the letter, “scrawls all over the shop. I don’t mind your answering by post,” he added maliciously, “now I’ve got to go there so much. I often kill—he, he, he!—two frogs with one stone now. So you’re to be bridesmaid, Tony tells me.”

“Nothing of the sort,” said Jinny, “and mind your own business.”

“It is my business,” he said in an aggrieved tone. “Didn’t he ask me to be best man? As if in this age of reason I could take part in superstitious rites!”

“I don’t see any superstition about marrying,” said Jinny.

“I’m not so sure—tying a man to a woman like a dog to a barrel. But anyhow, why drag in heaven?”

“Because marriages are made there, I suppose,” said Jinny.

“Stuff and nonsense! And then the rice and the old shoes they throw!”

“I saw you throw one when your sister got married.”

“Maybe. But I didn’t believe in it.”

“Then why did you throw it?”

He hesitated a moment. “They say if you don’t believe in it, it’s even luckier than if you do.”

Jinny laughed heartily.

“I’m not joking!” Bundock declared angrily.

“If you were, I shouldn’t be laughing,” said Jinny.

“Oh well, go to church!” Bundock retorted in disgust. “And I hope the beadle will give you an extra prod next Sunday.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t pretend. Everybody knows that church is a double torture—first the parson sends you to sleep with his sermon, and then the verger wakes you up with his rod.”

Jinny laughed again.

“Don’t tell me!” said Bundock. “My own father was forced to go—all the labourers on the estate, poor chaps, dead-sleepy after the week’s work, and that rod used to puggle ’em about. No wonder dad chucked both squire and parson.”

“It doesn’t happen in Mr. Fallow’s church,” Jinny assured him.

“Because nobody goes!” And Bundock hurried off with this great last word, and Jinny saw his bag heaving with the mirthful movement of his shoulders.

Somewhat to Jinny’s surprise, Miss Gentry from being Cleopatra’s alternative dressmaker developed into her adorer, it appearing that the lady displayed not only proportions most pleasing to the technical eye—“just made for clothes,” Miss Gentry put it—but a positive appetite for tracts. She loathed Dissent, it transpired, and to be married by a minister would seem to her little better than living in sin. A very paragon of propriety and an elegant pillar of the faith, Miss Cleopatra Jones, spinster, worshipped regularly with the churchwarden and his family in the wrong parish church. Miss Gentry, ravished by this combination of respectability and romance, did not once compel the fair client to attend upon her, travelling to Foxearth Farm instead in Jinny’s cart. It was impossible for Jinny’s doubts of Cleopatra’s immaculacy to survive Miss Gentry’s encomiums. While Miss Gentry ascended to the bedroom of her beautiful and still golden-haired client, posed in an atmosphere of old oak bedsteads and panelled linen presses, Jinny would sit with the second Mrs. Purley in her dairy—a cheerful, speckless room which enjoyed a specially spacious window, dairies being immune from the window-tax—while that bulkier edition of Blanche made cheeses and conversation. Mrs. Purley made conversation irrespective of her auditor, for she needed no collaborator: indeed a second party coming athwart this Niagara of monologue would have been swept aside like a straw.

As a great musician can take a few simple notes, and out of this theme evoke endless intricacies, enlargements, repetitions, echoes, duplications, parallelisms, and permutations, and then transform the whole into another key and give it you all over again, so out of a simple happening, like her feeding of a sick chicken, or her discovery that a hen had laid her clutch in the hedge, Mrs. Purley, without for a moment interrupting the milling of curd or the draining of whey, could improvise a fugal discourse that went ramifying and returning upon itself ad infinitum. It reminded Jinny of Kelcott Wood, where every day from three to five, on these September afternoons, hundreds of starlings, perched like bits of black coal on the mountain-ashes, kept up a ceaseless chattering, shrilling, clucking, querying, cackling.

But she soon ceased to hear Mrs. Purley, was even lulled by the cascade. Very familiar grew every pan, dipper, vat, tub, press, cheese-cloth, or straw-mat, while the one readable article she knew by heart. It was the inscription on a china mug, in which Mrs. Purley sometimes put milk, and it recorded the virtues of a black-haired, black-whiskered head painted thereon. “The Incorruptible Patriot.... The Undaunted Supporter of the People’s Rights.... The Father of the Fatherless.... The Pride and Glory of his Country” ... such were a few of the attributes ascribed, with a profuseness resembling Mrs. Purley’s conversation, to a certain Henry Brougham, Esq., who, as Jinny learnt from Miss Gentry, was really and truly “a love,” having defended Queen Caroline when Miss Gentry was a schoolgirl. Queens were as liable to ill-luck as herself, Jinny began to suspect, recalling that Egyptian asp, and she became a little anxious for Victoria, who now came to figure in her dreams, as defended against French fire-eaters by this black-avised man, with the protruding nose, retreating forehead, and weak chin. Somehow—it was unintelligible when she woke up, but quite clear in her dream—the defended Victoria was also herself, for was not Henry Brougham “The Father of the Fatherless”?

Adjoining the dairy was a room, lit from it—to avoid taxation—by a pane in the door. Jinny sometimes had an uneasy sense that Blanche was inspecting her through that pane. Otherwise she hardly ever encountered the vespacide, who betrayed indeed no sense of rivalry, for the relations between Will and the little Carrier were unknown, and Blanche would, in any case, have considered so humble a personage negligible or at least nippable.

For if this handsome creature was—as she had struck Jinny-a shade overripe, it was not for lack of volunteer pluckers, and the mutability which Mr. Giles Purley had gently derided in his son had been even more marked in his stepdaughter. Fortunately Will was unaware of the episodes that had preceded his return to England. And not only did he regard himself as the first male that had ever squeezed that fair hand, but, untaught by its prowess as a wasp-killer, he believed her a passive victim to his own compelling charm. And the apparent perfection of Blanche’s surrender was the more grateful to him after the granite he had kept striking in Jinny. But the mobility which had hitherto marked Miss Blanche’s affections was now manifesting itself in a novel shape, for like Miss Gentry, she had come under the spell of Cleopatra, though a very different Cleopatra from the ardent Churchwoman who revealed herself to the dressmaker. The Cleopatra who magnetized the cheese-maker’s daughter, and who, carelessly abetted by Mr. Flippance’s sketchy promises, filled the ignorant girl with dramatic and palpitating ambitions, was a queen of the footlights, an inspirer of romantic passions, and in her unguarded moments—as when you sat on her bed at midnight with your hair down—a teller of strange Bohemian stories, a citer of perturbing Sapphic songs, the melodies of which she could even whistle. What wonder if Mrs. Hemans—Blanche’s favourite poet hitherto—began to pall! She had been proud enough of her culture, leaving, as she felt it did, the parental perspectives far behind her; but now boundless horizons seemed opening up before her, and the London Journal which Cleopatra swallowed with her meals seemed to Blanche to contain nothing so alluring as Cleopatra’s own career.

It was by quite accidentally overhearing a remark of Blanche’s, and not by dint of Mr. Flippance’s repeated invitation, that Jinny was finally strung up to attend the great wedding. The probability that Will and Blanche would be at the feast was a drawback that prevailed over the lure of a good square meal, and even over the glamour of that mysterious nectar—champagne. But when she heard Blanche instruct her mother that she would certainly not have to lay a place for “that common carrier,” in a flame that might almost have consumed her letter-paper, Jinny wrote her acceptance to Mr. Flippance, and expended his half-crown, which she had laid by for a rainy day, on a wedding present which would do him good—a Bible, to wit.

In prevision of the great day she left off wearing her best gown, cleaned it, and by the aid of Miss Gentry and a bit of lace gave it a new turn. After the wedding it must, alas, be pawned! Jinny, though she had hitherto entered the pawnshop only to pledge or redeem things for her customers, had schooled herself to the inevitable. So had Mr. Flippance, whose idea of a best man had now sunk to Barnaby. But he was used to handling unpromising performers, he said, though he regretted the absence of a dress rehearsal, more especially for Mrs. Purley, who, having been induced to mother Cleopatra (nothing would induce Mr. Purley to father her), was unlikely, he feared, to confine herself to a simple “I do.” That was not, he groaned drolly, her idea of a speaking part. He deplored, too, that there were not enough bells or bell-ringers in the Little Bradmarsh church to ring an elaborate joy-peal, as Cleopatra was so anxious to have every property and accessory of holy matrimony complete. It was for this reason, doubtless, that Miss Gentry, after reducing the rival dress to a rag, ultimately emerged as the bridesmaid.