Before his eyes could return normally to their orbits or his breath to his windpipe, the incredible vision had vanished. Jinny had, in fact, had an overdose of commissions in the other purlieus of Chipstone, and having fetched the drum from its winter quarters as directed by Miss Polly Flippance that noon—it had, in fact, been pawned, and the piano was still irredeemable—she was hastening on her homeward circuit as fast as Methusalem could be induced to go.
The rustic who had received the drum looked at him with unconcealed contempt. A man who did not know that!
It was as if he had given his drum a terrific bang. Jinny?—Jinny Quarles then! Who else? In the boom of that name reverberated a clamour of memories and of emotions, old and new. Images of a solemn-eyed mite, of a merry little maid, of a sedate Sunday scholar, and of the amazing creature of to-day, went all interflashing with one another. Yes, the little Jinny who had shared the wagon and his secret with him that fateful Sunday, and who if ever by a rare chance she had flitted across his thoughts, figured always as this same little girl in her grand pink Sunday pelisse, trimmed with pink velvet and fringes, was now grown up; bonneted, bewitching, incredible.
“But where—where was her grandfather?” he stammered. “Asleep inside?”
“Asleep?” The rustic grinned. “A long sleep, Oi should reckon. Whoy, we ain’t seen the Gaffer for years.”
“Don’t stand there gossiping.” It was the female martinet at her sternest.
“It’s not his fault,” said Will. “I was asking about old Daniel Quarles. Is he really dead?”
“Dead? Not to my knowledge. At least I have never noticed Jinny in black.”
“Then where _is_ he? Why isn’t he looking after Jinny?”
“You don’t mean to say he lets Jinny go out and do his job?”
“The most natural person I should think,” said Miss Flippance. “Really I haven’t time to discuss village carriers, if the show is to open to-night. . . . Do be careful of that drum. No, not inside, blockhead. Come back!”
As the tambour-laden slave did not seem to hear, his affrighted fellow-serfs yelled to him to bring the drum outside again, and when he was come, the despot’s skirts rustled majestically back into the tent—they were long and hunched out quite fashionably, which accentuated the humiliation of the male element. But Will remained at the tent door, like Abraham after an angel’s visit, thunderstruck and dumbfounded, but with consternation, not reverence. It was, he thought, the grossest carelessness that had ever occurred in the history of the globe. A respectable girl like that—why, what was the world coming to? Sent gadding about the country like a trollop, perched up horsily behind a carter’s whip—this was what little Jinny had been allowed to grow up into! And that girl at “The Black Sheep”—she who had looked so innocent, whom he had mentally seen as a May Queen, crowned with garlands, dancing girlishly round a Maypole—this was what lay under her poetic semblance. And at the same time—pleasing and perturbing thought—both the unsexed Carrier and the maidenly May Queen were in reality little Jinny: no stand-offish stranger, needing deferential approach, but—in a way—his very own: the meek poppet whose cheek he had always pinched patronizingly, in whose eyes he had always seen himself as a grown-up god.