Jacquetta and Other Stories

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JACQUETTA

AND OTHER STORIES

JACQUETTA

The Story of Jael

THE STORY OF JAEL

The Story of Jael, Chapter I: Gull-Fleet

THE STORY OF JAEL

CHAPTER I

GULL-FLEET

The river Colne, once upon a time, was seized with the desire of being a second Nile. We are speaking of course of that præhistoric age in which imagination runs riot, and sets down all its fancies as facts. The Nile brings down mud which it deposits over the surface of Egypt, and fertilizes it. Mud! thought the Colne, I can do a neat thing in mud. I can beat the Nile in the amount of slimy material I can bring on my waters and cast down where my waters reach. But it was not in mud that the Nile was to be equalled and excelled. A delta! thought the Colne. I can delticulate—a præhistoric verb and passable—into any number of mouths. Then the Colne proceeded near its embouchure to ramify in various directions, like a fan. But the attempt proved a failure, and in the end the Colne was forced to find her way to the sea through a single channel out of the many abortive ones she had run, leaving these latter some longer, some shorter, all smothering themselves

in mud, and annually contracting. The Colne in the world of rivers is an instance of the great pretence and poor execution, and has its counterpart in the world of men.

Crafty millers have cast their eyes on these channels, and have run dams across their extremities with sluices in them, and when the tide flows into the creeks and flushes them full, it pours up through the sluice gate and brims the basin beyond; but when the water tries to return with the ebb, No, no, says the miller, you come as you will, you go as I choose! The trap is shut, and the water is caught and allowed to run away as the miller orders, and is made to turn a wheel and grind corn before it goes.

That water, as it trickles down the empty channel blushing brown with humiliation, finds that channel which erewhile was an arm of green and glittering water, deteriorated into a gulf of ill-savoured ooze, alive with gulls chattering, leaping, fluttering, arguing, gobbling.

At the mouth of the Colne, and yet not on it, nor on the sea, but lost and entangled among the creeks that end in mud-smother, lies the port of Brightlingsea. The name it takes from its first settler, Brit-helm, the Dane with the bright helmet by which he was known, who ran his boat across an arm of the sea, and squatted on what was then an island. It was Brithelm’s Isle; but now it is no more an island. One long creek runs past it for several miles eastward to St Osyth’s Priory, and almost reaches the ocean, perhaps at one day it may have done so. Another, in an opposite direction, cuts across the land to the Maldon river, and actually reaches the great bay of the Blackwater, so that in its mid channel the tides meet, and strik e each other in their wavelets angrily. And again, another above Brightlingsea runs behind the little port and tries to reach the sea, and did reach it in historic times, but is now stopped by a causeway and a miller’s dam. That road marks the spot where Brithelm’s boat crossed in ancient days. In later times a causeway was carried over on piles driven into the ooze, and then the sea began to choke itself at the extremity, and to deposit banks of mud behind the cause way, which finally became dry land, and so Brithelm’s Isle ceased to be an Isle.

Nowadays, it is along this road that the Brightlingsea people have to go when they drive or walk to the market town of Colchester, and a very long détour it obliges them to make. When a railway was run by a private company up the river, it was carried across the mouth of this creek three miles down over a timber bridge, but as boats were accustomed to enter the channel and run up to the quay by the mill, the bridge was fashioned so as to open and allow a small craft to pass through. Then, to make sure that the bridge was complete for the train to pass across it, a guard or pointsman was stationed in a wooden hut near the end of the bridge, whose duty it was to let the boats through, and also to close the bridge again for the passage of the train.

Conceive of an express rushing along the bridge whilst a schooner was in the act of passing, and consider to which would the encounter be the most unpleasant. The object in life set before the pilot of the bridge over Gull-Fleet was to prevent such encounters.

That railway from Brightlingsea up the Colne went no further than the next village, Wyvenhoe, where it touched the G.E.R., but was there ever, among coy railways such a coquette as this little affair? It sidled up to the burly, stately G.E.R. and said, ‘Take me on,’ and ‘Let us love one another,’ and then, when the G.E.R. grunted, and puffed, and said, ‘I don’t particularly like you, I don’t—to be plain—see much good in you,’ then this little pouting Mignon went into sulks, and turned her back on the G.E.R. and said, ‘You nasty, ugly monster, I hate you! I can have my own puff-puffs! I will have my own dear little cosy station, and my own servants—officials in my own livery.’ So the little coquette set up her private establishment, and got to spending money lavishly, and, it was whispered, but the whisper may have been wicked scandal—got dipped. So then she set up a little scream from the whistles of one of her little engines, and drew a long puff, and cast two piteous little lines of rail towards the G.E.R., and said, not in words, but by gestures, ‘I have been naughty, take me on, on your own terms.’ Then the G.E.R. grandly put out his hand to her and took her. Now, at the time when our story moves its course, this little absurd, coy little railway was not married to G.E.R., but was only coughing to draw attention to her, and making signals that meant, if they meant anything, ‘Come to my help, dear duck of a G.E.R.’ But G.E.R. was looking another way, to Walton, and had shut his ears and would not hear the appeals. And the little B. and W.R. was unhappy, and a little careless about the times it kept, and the charges it made, and did capricious things which old and well-conducted railways would never think of doing. But B. and W.R. was in a sulky mood, and didn’t care what it did, didn’t care what folks said, didn’t care to do its duty, and

seemed to have lost all moral discrimination between right and wrong.

But there was one point on which the B. and W.R. did not fail, and that was in the maintenance of the pilot at Gull-Fleet Bridge. It let the paint come off its wood-work, and the waiting-rooms be without fire, and diminished its staff to a sort of maid-of-all-work, who sold tickets, stationmastered, stoked and poked, and acted as guard—but it never gave notice to quit to the pilot, Shamgar Tapp.

On the marsh in the sun on a blazing summer day, lay the daughter of the said Shamgar Tapp, a tall handsome girl—tall when standing up, handsome always—playing with a tame gull.

The marsh was now dry and hard. It is a tract of turf with veins and arteries ramifying through it, that flush with water at high tide, the refluence of the Colne river rolled back by the invading sea. But the turf itself is not overflowed except at neap tides. Now it was baked to the consistency of brick, and the thrift that grew over it was in flower, from white to pink in satiny shades that flickered and shifted with every breath of air over the water. The girl’s name was Jael, and she came by it in this way: When Mrs Tapp presented her husband with a daughter, ‘The finest and biggest she-baby as ever was or ought to be,’ said her intimate friend, Mrs Bagg, who nursed her. Mrs Tapp thought she had done enough for Shamgar and the world, and shrank from the rearing of the finest and biggest she-baby into a big and masculine girl, so she gave her husband and baby and nurse the slip, and left them to make the best of life without her.

‘And now,’ said Shamgar, ‘what the dooce am I to do

with this wopping baby? I wish it had pleased the Lord to leave Clementina’ (that was his wife) ‘and take the baby.’ He looked at the creature then smacking its lips. ‘What in the world shall I do with it? If it were oyster-spat I’d know what to do with it. I’d put it on a light gravelly bottom, and see it didn’t get choked with mud, and may be, now and again, feed it with barley-meal. But a real live rampaging and roaring female baby, and so big too! What ever shall I do? And as to naming it. It don’t look a Clementina, there is black hair on its thing of a head; and my Clementina had fair hair, a sort of a parsnip, and pale eyes, and this thing has eyes that look about to be as dark as mine. It don’t seem to me to have any elements of a name ending in ina about it. I know what I’ll do. I’ll go to Scripture. I’ll see in the book of Judges whether Shamgar the son of Anath, the which slew of the Philistines six hundred men with an ox-goad. What was I saying? oh!—whether my Scriptural ancestor, or what ever he was, had a daughter, and if he had, what was her name?’

Then he pulled down his Bible, not a book much read, as might be seem by the cleanness of the edges and the dustiness of the cover.

‘I can’t see that he had,’ mused Shamgar, studying the book, with his dark, bushy brows contracted. ‘In the days of Shamgar, the son of Anath, in the days of Jael, the highways were unoccupied. What was the relation in which they stood to one another is not particularised; but as Jael became the wife of Heber, and struck a tent-peg through the temples of Sisera long after Shamgar was gone to glory, I guess she was his daughter. Therefore , and so because—you darned blustering, howling babe—Jael shall you be. Amen.’

Seventeen years had passed, and Jael, from being a big babe, had grown into a big girl strong, finely built, who strode about the marshes, leaped the tidal runs, shouted to the gulls and skuas and the kittiwakes that flew about the flats, and had a face a nutty brown, and black, thick hair, cut short like a boy’s, and lips red as ‘butter-haves’ Do you know what butter-haves are? They are the rose hips in the hedges. That is their Essex name.

An idle girl was Jael, brought up to no particular work. She did, indeed, in a fashion, manage her father’s house, but that house was very small, and his demands not great. The major portion of her day was spent racing over the marshes, playing with the gull, sometimes bathing in the ‘fleet,’ where there was a ‘hard’ or gravelly bed, sometimes rowing, and when at home sometimes quarrelling with her father.

He was a headstrong man, and she was a headstrong girl. He a man full of passion and will; and—she one could see it in the swelling dark veins, in the sharp-cut, contracting nostrils, in the flashing eyes—a very little was needed, a few years, maybe only a few months, a hard opposition to her will, a great wrong, and the girl would flare and rage as her father flared and raged.

If one could have stood over her now, like the sun, and looked down into her face, one would not have been surprised at the sun looking so long and ardently at it. The brow was broad and low, but the curling, glossy dark hair over it made it look lower than it really was. The dark eyebrows were arched and the lashes long. U nder them were splendid, eager, brown eyes, set within these long lashes. The lower part of the face was oval. Those red, merry lips were, when smiling, accompanied by deep, satellite dimples in the gold-brown cheeks.

As she lay on the marsh turf, with her knees up, she held her hands above her face, not to screen the sun from it, but to serve as a perch for the gull, and a protection to her eyes from his beak.

‘Again,’ she said, ‘come, Jack, again! You missed last time,’ and she put a piece of bread between her lips and threw the bird into the air.

It fluttered about her, using its wings without confidence, for a couple of pin-feathers had been clipped in one, and yet not enough to prevent it from rising and taking a short flight. The white bird hovered, lurched, wheeled over her, casting shadows across her face, and then made a sudden drop and drive at her lips. Instantly, she struck and sent the bird back into the air, and, as the gull screamed with mortification, she laughed joyously. As she laughed the bit of bread fell out of her mouth.

‘Here!’ she called, ‘Jack, here is another. Come, boy, don’t be beaten. Try again. What! Skulking? No, no, Jack! Once more. Ha-hah, old fellow! Supposing some other, and bigger Jacks, some day make a dash at my lips! Sha’n’t I only beat them away? Ay, old bird, with a much rougher stroke than I give you. Psha! I’ve hit away some of your breast feathers, and they are falling about me like snow! Ah—’ she made a stroke with both hands now, and started up—‘you mean, cowardly creature! That was a peck at my eyes! Jack, you might have blinded me! Jack, that was not fair! You do not understand fun.

You lose your temper. I had not put the bread between my lips, and was unprepared for you, and down you dive at my eyes. Spite, old bird! Wicked bird! Spite, that! You shall not do that again.’

She sprang to her feet.

‘Now—you rascal, you!’ she exclaimed, threatening the gull, which had settled at her feet on the ground. ‘I shall not forget and forgive that. I hate meanness. I hate cowardice, and it was cowardly of you to strike at my eyes when I was not expecting you. Come, Jack, hop on my hand, and now, fair play. I will put the bread in my lips, and you shall peck and try to take it—without flying, and I without striking. I will hold my other hand behind my back. No! Tired of playing? Very well. I bear no malice; let us kiss and be chums.’ She had put her right hand behind her, and had raised the left, on the wrist of which sat the gull, expanding and closing its wings, balancing itself as she changed her position. All at once Jael’s right hand was caught, a hand was thrust under her chin, her face was turned up, and a kiss pressed on her lips.

Then a laugh and she was let go. ‘Pecked and got my ripe fruit, and made friends,’ was shouted in her ear. She turned, flaming with anger and shame to the roots of her hair, and saw before her a young man in a blue jersey, and dark blue breeches, and a straw hat on his head.

The Story of Jael, Chapter II: A Pair of Jays

CHAPTER II

A PAIR OF JAYS

That was the beginning of their acquaintance, or friendship, or love affair. I say or, not and, because it was not acquaintanceship and friendship and love in one, or in rapid development from one to the other. The tie between them was elastic, sometimes very close, sometimes very loose; sometimes it was real love, and sometimes only cold, nodding acquaintance. The reason for this variation of relation was to be sought in Jael, not in Jeremiah Mustard.

Jael was impulsive, hot and capricious. Sometimes she quarrelled with Jeremiah, as—it must be confessed—she quarrelled with her father, and as—but that was allowable—she quarrelled with her gull.

It is a curious fact that man—and woman also—is never contented with what he has, but always wishes for what he has not; grumbles at what is, and desires what is not; and pants with unutterable longing for what cannot be. The artist who paints exquisitely sulks over his pictures and craves to be a musician, and curses his folly when he was a

boy in not practising his fingers on the piano; and the sailor wants to be a soldier, and the soldier longs for a deck and the blue sea; and the girl’s ideal of happiness is to be a wife, and the wife sighs to be an unencumbered maiden again; and the first fiddle in the great orchestra of life envies the cornopean, and the cornopean longs for the double bass, and the man who saws on that elephantine instrument is conscious how absurd he looks poking his head from behind the great stem, and sighs ‘I want to be a fluter!’ and the conductor is disgusted at swaying the bâton, and would like to sit in the audience; and in the audience those in the reserved seats say that the only situation for hearing the music properly is back in the shilling or sixpenny places, and those in the rear growl because they are where the draught creeps round their feet and ears, and their benches are uncushioned, and—because they are not in the fauteuils reserved for the wealthy.

So was it with Shamgar Tapp. He was condemned by his profession as pilot over Gull-Fleet to be always at his post—to have indeed a very light task, but a monotonous and trying one—and his soul was full of ambition to see the world, to visit Asia, Africa, and America. Why should every young cub at Brightlingsea be able to follow his desires and go in a sailing craft somewhere, and see something beyond the flat coast of Essex, and sea, purer, bluer than the estuary of the Colne?

‘I’ve heard tell,’ said Mr Shamgar Tapp, ‘that there be black people—niggers. Why am I never to set my eyes on a nigger? Why has Providence so ordained that I can never go sailing to Africa, and see niggers?—Or—if that be too much—why doesn’t niggers come here and show theirselves off to me? There was a parcel of ’em came to Colchester and performed on the banjo and knuckle-bones there, but I couldn’t go. I must stay here, and mind the bridge always so. Everything in this world goes contrary. The parson, he came here t’other day, and said we couldn’t expect to have everything in this world. No, I dare say not—but shall I see niggers in the world to come? I doubt but such as go there will have left their black skins behind them, and there’ll be a pretty state of things for me—never seen a nigger in all my life, and never a chance of seeing any for all eternity. It isn’t,’ argued Shamgar, ‘the nigger himself I care for so much; it is that I want to satisfy my mind about him. From all I can see, the sun burns us brown, just the same as roasting coffee or doing a chop; it don’t make smut of us. Well, I believe—and till I see and satisfy myself with my own eyes, I will believe—that the real nigger is a sort of a deep red brown—a very dark chestnut; but as for being black—real black—get along!’

Tapp was working the crank turning the bridge, which had been opened to allow of a boat laden with straw to pass out with the falling tide.

‘What are reason and the faculty of observation given to a man for, if they are to lead him to knock his nose against stone walls, or lose his way in a marsh? Doesn’t reason, and the light of nature, and daily observation show that the sun browns the skin, and doesn’t blacken? The sun black a man’s skin as a shoe-boy blacks a boot!—get along!’

The bridge was closed, the lines united.

‘Life is made up of contrarinesses,’ said Tapp; ‘else why should I have been left a widower with that rollicking she-baby—that Jael to bring up. Lord! what a bother I had with her, and spoon-feeding and teething, and now—she’ll be running after all the boys. That’s the way with gals. Then there’s her money, that is, her mother’s money; it was thirty-eight pounds, but I’ve made it up to forty; the which is potted and put away. I’ll go and see it is all right.’

He took his spade and went into the marsh; at one spot known only to himself he removed the turf. ‘Right it is,’ said Tapp. ‘Forty pounds all in gold. I’m not a fool to trust that to banks and speculators, and sink in railways, and put into funds that goes up and down, up and down, like a ship’s deck, and may go down, down some day altogether. Not I. There is the pot—an old preserved ginger pot, and forty sovereigns in it—Jael’s own money. Ill give it her when she marries, and I’ve seen the back of her.’

‘Look there!’ said Jael, touching the arm of Jeremiah—they were together, sitting under a thorn-tree on the land above the marsh. ‘Father’s looking at my treasure. I never told you of that. My mother had some money, and father keeps it for me.’

‘How much?’

‘Oh I do not know—forty or fifty pounds.’

‘That’s a great lot.’

‘Is it? I have no use for it now; but I may some day, if we get married. Father hides the pot about in different places, so that no one may discover where it is; but I always know. He’s not afraid of telling me. But if he didn’t tell me, I should know. I could watch him.’

‘Fifty pounds! Why you might buy a boat with that.’

‘I dare say I might, but father won’t let me have the money till I marry; then I shall have it, and then you may do what you like with it.’

‘Fifty pounds!’ again repeated Jeremiah, ‘Why, if I had that I could buy a share in the Cordelia along with Tom May. He was saying yesterday in the ‘Anchor’ he wanted a mate. We’d go after chalk to Kent—there’s a lot required for the new sea wall, and we’d catch sprats when we couldn’t go after oysters. I’d make a pint of money in no time. That’s the worst of it; if you want to reap money, you must sow money. There’s the trouble with me. I’ve nothing, and so I never can get anything. I see lots of chances before me, but I can’t take hold of them, because, like the man without arms, I can’t grip. It’s all money does it. You’d soon see; if I had a little to start with, what a lot I’d make. I’ve brains. I can see through a milestone, but I can’t make a start without some thing to start on. Fifty pounds would just do it. Pot your money! What an idea! Invest it. Lend it to me, and I will turn it over and over, and every time it turns it will grow. Go and ask your father to lend me the money.’

‘It is of no use. He is suspicious of all speculations.’

‘Then take it.’

‘What—my money?’

‘Yes, your money.’

‘But father would not let me.’

‘It is your money, not his.’

Jael shook her head. ‘Father will not part with the money till I marry; so he who wants the money must take me along with it.’

‘How old are you, Jael?’

‘I’m just on eighteen.’

‘And I am twenty-one; just of age, and come into my property.’

‘What is your property, Jerry?’

‘Nothing—nothing at all. There is the aggravation. I have brains. I was the best boy in the school; always head of the class; but I can do nothing, begin nothing, gain nothing, because I’ve nothing to begin with. If you were a mathematician, Jael, you’d know that you may try to multiply naught till you’re black in the face, and naught is the product. You must have a cipher of some value, and tack naughts to that before you can make tens, and hundreds, and thousands, and millions. But without a cipher to begin with, with naught but a naught, all the adding of naughts makes naught but naught. That’s my situation. I could do wonders if I had something to begin upon.’

‘There’s nothing for it, then,’ said Jael, with her face grave, ‘but for you to go to father and ask him to give us to you.’

‘Us? What do you mean?’

‘Me, and the pot, and the sovereigns, and the gull.’

‘I’ll risk it,’ said Jeremiah; ‘but I don’t want the gull no more than I do the pot.’

‘Who takes me takes the gull, and he who takes the money must have the ginger pot also to hold it in.’

‘What do you say, Jael? Shall I risk it?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Why not? We are both as strong as ever we are likely to be, and able to keep house together.’

Afar off stood Shamgar. He had caught sight of the two.

‘Ah,’ said he, ‘there they are—that pair o f chattering good-for-nothing, mischievous jays—Jael and Jerry—J. and J. Looking on, were they, whilst I was digging up the pot. I shouldn’t be surprised if Jael were to tell that fellow all about it. I must hide it elsewhere. I don’t trust him or any one knowing where the girl’s money is hid. It would be as bad as putting it in a bank, or speculating with it. I wonder what they’re a-talking about? A pair of darned chattering, good-for-nothing, pecking, mischievous jays. Up to wickedness of some sort, I’ll be bound. Whatever did my wife, Clementina, mean by leaving of me with that girl to bring up. I wish she’d come back from the world of spirits, just for a moment—I wish she would—and, by Gorr! I’d pull her nose.’

The Story of Jael, Chapter III: A Jael-Oress

CHAPTER III

A JAEL-ORESS

Jael went on the railway bridge, climbed to the rail and sat on it, swinging her feet, and looking round at her father’s cottage. Jerry had risked it—he had gone in to see old Tapp, and ask for the ginger pot, and Jael, and the gull, and the sovereigns. The tide was rushing away below, through the tarred posts of the bridge, swirling and sweeping along with it strands of sea-tangle.

‘Hah!’ exclaimed Jael, ‘there goes a shepherd’s purse?’ as she saw a black seaweed pouch drive by. ‘If Jerry gets the money we shall want purses into which to put it.’

In the broad estuary of the Colne was the little vessel that had recently passed through the swing bridge; its sail was spread, and it was speeding out with the rapidly ebbing tide. Down Mersea Fleet, the channel opposite, another boat was coming, also with wings spread, also straw laden; both were on their way to town with their loads, to supply some of the many mews of the metropolis.

‘See!’ exclaimed Jael, ‘there’s yonder boat coming this

way, and the boat that has gone through the bridge is going from just the opposite direction, and they will both sail out together with the tide and wind into the blue deep sea, and take their course together—just like Jerry and me. Why!’ she suddenly exclaimed, ‘what is the meaning of that? Here comes Jerry, jumping and running as if father had touched him with the red-hot poker. Jerry! what is it? Stay!—where are you going? What has father said?’

The young man, looking hot, angry, and agitated, came up. ‘It is no use,’ he swore. ‘Confound it! What an ass I was to go, and what a fool you were to advise me. I shall enlist; it is of no use staying here. Good-bye, Jael—when I’m gone, you will think of me.’

Not another word of farewell—he was off, over the bridge, running, and, having reached the further side, leaped the light rail that divided the line from the marsh, and went across it, in the direction of his own home. Jael had descended from the rail on which she had been sitting; she stood with her hands behind her, holding it, looking after young Mustard, her feet planted together on one of the sleepers of the line.

The colour rose and dyed her brown cheek a rich apricot, and then went. What was the meaning of Jerry running away?

Then she heard her father calling her, but was too preoccupied by her thoughts to attend and answer. She was roused by his hand roughly grasping her shoulder.

‘Come! come in, you girl; come in at once,’ and he dragged her by sheer force to his cottage. When there, he shut the dcor.

‘It has come to this,’ said he; ‘you send lovers to me with the impertinence to ask for you—and such lovers too.’

Jael folded her arms.

‘Only one, father.’

‘And isn’t that one enough? A boy of twenty, or one-and-twenty, without a trade, a good-for-naught! And pray how long has this been going on?’

‘What, father?’

‘What! What? This love-making, without axing of my leave, and just picking up the worst fish in the whole net.’