“That’s a slow couple,” he said, boldly breaking the long silence.
“Seems to me they fly as fast as the other rooks,” said Jinny.
There was resentment in her tone. She had not liked his calling Caleb “Uncle,” understanding well the urban contempt that lurked in declaring oneself a rustic’s nephew, and feeling, too, that however slow in the uptake Caleb might be, his wealth of homely crafts, knacks, instincts, life-wisdom, and nature-knowledge gave him a richer and deeper quality than this pert townsman. But Elijah persisted in his urban appraisal.
“Dear old turtles!” sighed Jinny. “But so long as they go at the same pace——!”
“Ah!” he said eagerly. “You believe in like to like?”
“Well, fancy a turtle married to a hare!”
“But a pair of hares now—?” He seized his opportunity. “You and me, eh?”
“I’m paying you a compliment, Jinny, classing you with me for smartness. There isn’t a girl from Bradmarsh to Chipstone that can hold a candle to you. So that’s why, seeing a man must marry somebody sometime, and looking around as becomes a man who’s getting a bit—a bit——”
“And what does that matter?” he said, too intent now to be fobbed off by raillery. “The point is that with the practice and position I’m getting now, it would be a good lift for you.”
“I thought I was giving you a lift,” said Jinny icily.
“So you were—so you are—in that sense. But I didn’t need even that. My nag wasn’t really lame. I only made an excuse to talk this over. See?”
“There was never any way of talking to you—you always so busy with parcels and me with patients. I’m not one of your flirting kind with fancy waistcoats, I want to settle down, and I’ve taken a favour to you.”
Even Jinny’s ready tongue had no repartee to this massive complacency. She could only articulate: “Have you, now?”
“Yes, I have. And I’d like to see you driving of a Sunday in my smart trap. Come, what do you say?”
“Thank you,” she said coldly. “I’d rather stay in my old cart.”
“But it’s such a shame—you so spruce and spry—tied to this ramshackle cart, when you might be adorning a higher sphere and sitting in my parlour instead of being at everybody’s beck and call.”’
He had chosen precisely the worst form of appeal. Confronted with this picture of parlour-stodginess, her rôle of Jinny the Carrier—Jinny the pet and friend-in-need of the countryside—seemed infinitely dear and desirable. And what subtly added to her anger was some dim presentiment in herself of other forces coming into her life, forces threatening to emerge from their picture-past, and to trouble the placid current of her career. Like Caleb she shrank from change. To shuttle for ever ’twixt Bradmarsh and Chipstone; with her grandfather, Nip, Methusalem, all immortal and unchanging as herself—this was all she asked of heaven: this and not too much rain and wind.