That night Jael was expected by her father to share her room and bed with the woman who was to be her second mother. Jael’s heart was full, her bosom heaved, at one moment the tears rushed into her eyes, and then, in pride and anger, she restrained them. Her dark brows met loweringly above her eyes, and she looked at Mrs Bagg with a scowl. At one moment her lip quivered, and then she bit it, and in biting it gave a hard look to her mouth, with hard lines on either side.
She would hardly speak to Mrs Bagg. At supper she laid the table in her rough, untidy way, and was reprimanded by the widow.
‘Do look here! The ends of the cloth are not even,’ said Mrs Bagg. ‘It looks as if it were chucked on anyhow.’
‘It is chucked on anyhow,’ answered Jael, surlily. ‘If you can’t eat off the cloth you can leave alone eating till you get home.’
‘Jael,’ said her father, ‘I will not allow you to speak in that impertinent fashion to Mrs Bagg, as has been, and is to be a mother to you. Get down your catechism, and see what that says about respect due to them as is set over you.’
Jael thereupon refused to speak at all.
‘Show the lady up to your room,’ said her father, after supper. ‘We keep early hours here, for with me times is irreg’lar—according to tide. My rest is broken with vessels as wants to come up and go down through the bridge.’
For this reason Mr Shamgar Tapp occupied a little room on the ground floor. His duties took him out at night occasionally, and he was able, by having his room below to leave the house and return to it without disturbing his daughter.
When Mrs Bagg came into the room devoted to Jael, she looked around her. Jael’s clothes were scattered about in untidy fashion. She shook her head.
‘Sack o’ dew!’[1] exclaimed Mrs Bagg. ‘We shall have to make a power of changes here. There’s a place for everything, and let everything be in its proper place.’
‘Right,’ said Jael; ‘act on it, and take yourself back to Fingrinhoe.’
Mrs Bagg pretended not to hear her, and proceeded to divest herself of her garments. Such an eminently tidy woman was she that she folded up her clothes and laid them on the chair as if she laid them there for their long last rest; her shoes she set with toes in line under the chair, and having suspended her gown to a crook on the door, she proceeded to stroke it down, to get the plaits in lines, with as much care and pains as if she were curry-combing a horse.
‘And now,’ said Mrs Bagg, ‘where’s the cap-stand?’
‘I don’t wear caps,’ answered Jael.
‘If there was a swing-glass here,’ mused the widow, ‘I’d manage to put the cap on that, but there bain’t, mussy on me if I know what to do. I can’t have that crumpled. Deary life! I know what shall be done. Run, Jael, down stairs, and fetch a broom up here, and I’ll plant the broom up between the backs of two chairs set ag’in one another, and the cap a-top. It’ll do. Necessity is the mother of invention.’
‘Sack o’ dew!’ exclaimed Mrs Bagg, when she had provided herself with a besom and placed it in the required position, and adjusted her cap on the top, and brought down the ribbons on each side evenly, and had walked round it admiringly, holding the candle. ‘Sack o’ dew!’ she said, ‘it’s almost human, it’s so lovely.’
That was more than could be said for the lady herself at that moment, attired in a very short crimson skirt—a cut down gown that served as petticoat, and had been cut and cut till it reached but little below her knees. She wore black stockings, and had very stout calves. There was a bald patch on the top of her head, on account of which she divided her hair on the left side and rolled it over the bald place, and made a curl on the right side, like a breaking seventh wave. She had removed her gown and wore her stays.
‘That I should have lived to see this!’ said Mrs Bagg. ‘What creatures men—I mean human beings—be. How they rises to emergencies, and when put to their mettles how their talents appear. That besom does beautifully, doesn’t it, Jael?’
Jael remained in a corner; she crouched, with her elbows on her knees, looking sullenly at the floor in front of her. No appeal of Mrs Bagg could induce her to look up and admire the cap on the extemporised stand. The widow, however, was content to talk without eliciting answers; and when she had completely undressed herself she got into bed, without taking the least heed of Jael, and blew out the candle.
In a very few minutes she was asleep.
The cool manner in which the woman appropriated Jael’s room and bed, her indifference to Jael’s comfort and feelings, heightened the girl’s dislike and stirred up bitter and angry passions in her heart.
Mrs Bagg was snoring, snoring already—snoring vociferously, triumphantly, with defiant snorts, like those of the warhorse ready for the battle.
Jael’s nerves were not finely strung, but, such as they were, and at that time they were in a condition of irritation, the trumpetings from Mrs Bagg’s nose jarred them and tortured them to exasperation. If Mrs Bagg had snored evenly and in moderate tones, it might have been supportable, but she had a Baggonian snore of her own. She inhaled the air through her nose, which vibrated at each inhalation as if filled with concertina metallic tongues, and then blew it forth between her lips in a blunted whistle. Jael could not, had she wished it, sleep with a woman so noisy at night, who shook the bod as though she was worked by a screw propeller.
Just as she was resolved to put a towel over the lady’s mouth, so as to force her to do all breathing through her nostrils, Jael heard a scratching sound at the window, and looking towards it, saw a stick with some holly leaves at the end being rubbed against the glass.
She stole across the room to the window, and cautiously opened the casement. The night was so full of twilight that she could see and distinguish Jerry standing below.
‘I say, Jael,’ he whispered, ‘come down, I want to tell you something.’
‘What is it?’ she asked also in a loud whisper.
‘Come down, it’s a long story, and a bad one. You only can help me. I’m all but undone.’
‘What is it, Jerry?’
‘Come down, I say, I can’t halloo my secrets for the seamews to know them.’
She slipped off her shoes, and descended the stairs so lightly, that even had not Mrs Bagg’s trumpet drowned all inferior sounds, she would not have been heard. The door was never locked; she opened it and went out. ‘Come on to the bridge, Jerry,’ she said; ‘I won’t go far from the house, nor stay out many minutes, so you must be quick in telling me what you want.’ She was in a defiant mood, indifferent to what her father might say if he found her going out at night, and yet she had sufficient self-regard to curtail the interview, and not to leave the line of rails near the cottage.
When she reached the bridge she leaned against it, as customary, with her hands behind her, and her feet together on one of the sleepers. The night was still, the gulls were awake and chattering, calling to one another, and chuckling over their catches in the empty channel. What was mud by daylight was silver now, reflecting the clear illumined sky. The gulls’ white wings caught the light from above, and as they fluttered down they seemed like great falling snovvflakes. To the north-east a clump of fine trees about an old manor-house stood out against the luminous sky as blots of ink, and the noble tower of Brightlingsea church rose against it distinctly visible in the night—more distinct than it was often by day, when the haze obscured it. ‘What do you think, Jerry?’ she said, her bosom heaving, ‘what do you think? Father has brought home Mistress Bagg to be a mother to me, and she has turned me out of my bed.’
‘You’re in trouble then,’ said Mustard. ‘By George! so am I. What do you suppose I have done? I have made an ass of myself—I have enlisted. I have taken the Queen’s money, and whatever is to be the end of it, I do not know.’
‘Enlisted, Jerry!’
‘Yes, I have; and I was a fool. I know very well that I shall be sent out to India or to Africa, and have to fight, and be killed, or die of cholera, or rattlesnakes, or ticdoloreux.’
‘Oh, Jerry!’
‘Do you believe in presentment? I do. But I won’t go out. I’ll desert, and if I’m caught, I shall be shot, and that will be the end of me.’
‘But—why did you enlist?’
Jael took her hands from behind her and folded them over her beating heart, then unlaced them, and put one hand on the bridge rail and drew it forward and backward; she had forgotten her own distress for the moment at these unexpected tidings.
‘Why did I enlist!’ repeated Jeremiah. ‘There’s a cold-blooded question for a girl to ask! Why did I enlist?’ in a tender tone, ‘Because your father insulted me that grossly that I couldn’t bear it, but felt I must drown myself or become a soldier.’
‘How many years will you have, Jerry?’ Her voice shook, she was pained to think she would lose him, and yet—a little proud to think of him as a gallant soldier in scarlet.
‘Not a year, not half a year, not two months. Are you deaf! Did you not hear me? I said I should desert.’
‘But you cannot desert, Jerry.’
‘I can and I will, unless I am bought out. You must do that. It costs only ten pounds under three months, and fifteen over that. Ten pounds—what is ten pounds when my life and happiness is concerned? You would not have me whiten the desert with my bones, and saturate the soil of the Indies with my gore, would you?’
‘Have you got ten pounds, Jerry?’
‘No I haven’t, but you have.’
‘I—Jerry!’
‘Yes—you have; you’ve a pot full of sovereigns. You are flush with gold; what’s ten pounds to you? You told me yourself you had fifty.’
‘But, Jerry, my father has that, it is not mine yet. If it were mine I would gladly let you have the money—but—’
‘Oh, yes, I understand ifs and buts.
‘“If all the loaves were made of But
And all the seas of If,
There’d be no paupers in the land
For all would have enough.’
‘You must pronounce the last word eniff, or the rhyme don’t come right,’ explained Jerry.
‘But, Jerry, my father would never consent—’
‘Do you take me for a jackass? I, that was first boy in the school, and gained a Bible and Prayer-book out of Lord Thistlethwaite’s charity by learning a score of the Psalms of David by heart? I never thought of asking your father. The money is yours, not his.’
‘I’ll tell you what it is,’ said Jeremiah Mustard, sententiously; ‘you told me yourself he was going to give you a second mother. He’ll have heaps on heaps of children by her, and you’ll be put out in the cold and your nose be turned out of joint; and they’ll make use of you as a nurse to the squallers; and—what was I saying? Why—that woman will twist your father round her finger, and wheedle out of him all your money, and gild herself with it from top to toe—or—if she don’t herself, she will her brats of children. I know what stepmothers are. I’ve read about them in print, and what’s in print must be true. Why, she has driven you out of your bed already, she’ll turn you out of the house next, because it is too small for you and her, aud her swarm of babies——. As for your father, he’ll love you no more, he’ll be so wrapped up in the new babies, and he’ll be led about by that woman, tied to her apron strings. It always is so. I believe there’s something about it somewhere in Scripture, only I cannot name the chapter and verse, I’m so excited and angry.’
‘But—Jerry.’
‘Let me say my say,’ he went on; ‘I see clear as daylight that you have no one to stand by you but myself, and what you must do is to throw in your lot with mine. I’ve hit it, Jael! We’ll go to America together. You dig up that pot of gold, and we will start at once for London, and see the agent for Canada, and get a free passage, as for man and wife. They’ll perfectly scream for joy out there to have such a settler as me, able-bodied, young, and clever having been first boy in the school, and able to say a lot of Psalms by heart, among others the one hundred and nineteenth. We’ll get a free passage, and then, with your fifty pounds, we’ll buy a farm. Why, Jael, they sell the land there for half-a-crown an acre, and that will make four hundred acres. Farmer Marriage hasn’t got one so big as that, and he’s churchwarden and guardian, and he rents his from the squire; we shall own ours. By George! we shall be grand folks! That will be happiness. No soldiering for me, and no-mother-in-lawing—no, I mean step-mothering for you.’
Jael put up her hand to her brow, then over her lips which were trembling, but the hand trembled also; she stayed it by resting her elbow in the hollow of the other hand crossed before her. A tear came out of her eye and hung on her long dark lash, but Jeremiah could not see it, though the light from the north was on her face. He could not see the tear, but he saw how handsome she was, and her face was pale and cold in that mysterious light from the hidden sun, shining far away within the arctic circle. ‘That will be happiness,’ he continued; ‘you and I will have a nice little house together, with a green door and windows, and white curtains, and an umbrella stand in the hall.’
He took her hand from her mouth, and held it between his. His hand was hot, she felt his pulses beating, she tried to withdraw her fingers, but he would not allow her.
‘No, no, Jael,’ he said, ‘hand in hand we shall go through life together. You have no one else to look after you and care for you and love you. Now that your father has taken up with that old tabby, and is patting of her, and scratching her under the chin, and she a purring, he has no thoughts for you, not a bit of love left in his heart fit to set on a threepenny piece, not as much as makes a dose of quinine for the ague.’
‘If I thought my father did not love me——’ began Jael, and then broke down. She had not been an accommodating daughter, had followed her own will, but she loved her rough father, and she believed that in his rude, unshapen heart, he loved her.
‘He don’t love you. I ask any one who hears me,’ said Jeremiah, ‘is it possible that he can love you when he goes over to Fingrinhoe and fetches you a mother from there, and that woman, Mrs Bagg? It is impossible. Every scrap of love is gone out of him—if he ever had any.’
Then for a few minutes they stood silent, hand in hand, Jael looking dreamily across the silver of the empty channel—dull silver, with one thread in it of liquid, quivering mercury. The tide was rising and flowing in, up the channel, gurgling round the beams that supported the bridge.
‘The tide has begun to flow,’ said Jeremiah. ‘The day after to-morrow at four o’clock in the morning the Cordelia is going to sail for London. She’s got a load of peas and beans, and is coining back with drain tiles. I’ll tell Tom May to expect you, and about half-past three you come aboard and slip into the fo’castle crib, and no one will say a-word, and lie hid there till we’re off. When we get to town we’ll go and see the Agent for the Dominion of Canada, somewhere in Victoria Street, I think he is, and we’ll get our passages out. You bring your fifty pounds along with you——’
‘But, Jerry, how about your enlisting?’
‘I’ll chance that. I told you I should desert, and if there be a fuss and I be caught, why we must shell out ten pound to clear me. But we’ll try to get off without that. It would be a shame and a sin to throw away ten pound, that is eighty acres, when we can keep them. So, I say, we will chance it. Then we shall go to Liverpool together and cross the great Atlantic, and, as the story books say, be happy ever after on our estate of four hundred acres, and umbrella stand in the hall.’
‘No, Jerry, I cannot take the money.’
‘You must, Jael. We shall want it. We cannot do without it. You will see what a figure I shall cut, what a fortune I shall make when I’ve something to start from. That has always stood against me—having nothing. You can’t begin from nothing, any more than you can stand upon nothing. They call money in hand capital, but I don’t, I call it pedestal. It is not that which crowns but that which supports. What would this bridge be, if it were not for these sustaining posts? Well, your fifty pounds will be the supporting beams on which the line of our life will be carried.’
‘I cannot take it, Jerry, without my father’s consent.’
‘You will leave your mother’s money to this second woman to use, I suppose. Jael! I thought you’d more good feeling and respect for the memory of her that’s gone than to think of such a thing. What will be your poor dear mother’s feelings in heaven when she sees Mrs Bagg buy a crinolette, and a chignon for herself, and a perambulator for the baby—bought out of her savings, out of her money which she intended for you, which she always desired you to have?’
Jeremiah felt Jael’s hand twitch in his own.
‘Oh, Jael!’ he said, ‘if you love me, consider my feelings, and do what I ask.’ He put his arms round her.
Then they heard—was it a sea-bird screaming? No, it was Mrs Bagg at the window calling, ‘Jael! Jael! Oh, you wicked, oh you audacious girl! That ever! What will your poor dear father say? Come in this instant.’
The girl withdrew from Jeremiah’s embrace, her brows contracted, all the softness and tremulousness that had come over her went away; she was hard and firm now.
‘Jeremiah,’ she said, ‘I must go in. Perhaps she has not seen you. But it does not matter. Good-bye, Jerry!’
‘Good-bye, dear Jael, till to-morrow twenty-four hours at four in the morning, when we go off together with the tide—and don’t forget the preserved ginger, I’m partial to that.’
Original footnotes edit
- ↑ An Essex exclamation, corrupted from the Sucre Dieu of the Huguenot settlers at the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.