CHAPTER LXXIV.
GOING TO NEW JERUSALEM ON A WHITE DONKEY
And now we must pay a visit to Mrs. Peckaby; for great events were happening to her on that night.
When Lionel met her in the day, seated on the stump, all disconsolate, she had thrown out a hint that Mr. Peckaby was not habitually in quite so social a mood as he might be. The fact was, Peckaby's patience had run out; and little wonder, either. The man's meals made ready for him in any careless way, often not made ready at all, and his wife spending her time in sighing, and moaning, and looking out for the white donkey! You, my readers, may deem this a rather far-fetched episode in the story; you may deem it next to impossible that any woman should be so ridiculously foolish, or could be so imposed upon; but I am only relating to you the strict truth. The facts occurred precisely as they are being narrated, and not long ago. I have neither added to the story nor taken from it.
Mrs. Peckaby finished out her sitting on the stump under the gray skies. The skies were grayer when she rose to go home. She found on her arrival that Peckaby had been in to his tea, that is, he had been in, hoping to partake of that social meal; but finding no preparation made for it, he had a little relieved his mind by pouring a pail of water over the kitchen fire, thereby putting the fire out and causing considerable damage to the fire-irons and appurtenances generally, which would cause Mrs. Peckaby some little work to remedy.
"The brute!" she ejaculated, putting her foot into the slop on the floor, and taking a general view of things. "Oh, if I was but off!"
"My patience, what a mess!" exclaimed Polly Dawson, who happened to be going by, and turned in for a gossip. "Whatever have done it?"
"Whatever have done it? why that wretch Peckaby," retorted the aggrieved wife. "Don't you never get married, Polly Dawson, if you want to keep on the right side of the men. They be the worst animals in all creation. Many a poor woman's life has been aggrivated out of her."
"If I do get married, I shan't begin the aggrivation by wanting to be off to them saints at New Jerusalem," impudently returned Polly Dawson.
Mrs. Peckaby received it meekly. What with the long-continued disappointment, the perpetual "aggrivations" of Peckaby, and the prospect of work before her, arising from the gratuitous pail of water, she was feeling unusually cowed down.
"I wish I was a hundred mile off," she cried. "Nobody's fate was never so hard as mine."
"It'll take you a good two hours to redd up," observed Polly Dawson. "I'd rather you had to do it nor me."
"I'd see it further—afore it should take me two hours—and Peckaby with it," retorted Mrs. Peckaby, reviving to a touch of temper. "I shall but give it a lick and a promise; just mop up the wet, and dry the grate, and get a bit of fire alight. T'other things may go."
Polly Dawson departed, and Mrs. Peckaby set to her work. By dint of some trouble, she contrived to obtain a cup of tea for herself after awhile, and then she sat on disconsolately as before. Night came on, and she had ample time to indulge her ruminations.
Peckaby had not been in. Mrs. Peckaby concluded he was solacing himself at that social rendezvous, the Plough and Harrow, and would come home in a state of beer. Between nine and ten he entered—hours were early in Deerham—and to Mrs. Peckaby's surprise, he was not only sober, but social.
"It have turned out a pouring wet night," cried he. And the mood was so unwonted, especially after the episode of the wet grate, that Mrs. Peckaby was astonished into answering pleasantly.
"Will ye have some bread and cheese?" asked she.
"I don't mind if I do. Chuff, he gave me a piece of his bread and bacon at eight o'clock, so I ain't over hungry."
Mrs. Peckaby brought forth the loaf and the cheese, and Peckaby cut himself some and ate it. Then he went upstairs. She stayed to put the eatables away, raked out the fire, and followed. Peckaby was already in bed. To get into it was not a very ceremonious proceeding with him, as it is not with many others. There was no superfluous attire to throw off, there was no hindering time with ablutions, there were no prayers. Mrs. Peckaby favoured the same convenient mode, and she had just put the candle out, when some noise struck upon her ear.
It came from the road outside. They slept back, the front room having been the one let to Brother Jarrum; but in those small houses, at that quiet hour noises in the road were heard as distinctly back as front. There was a sound of talking, and then came a modest knock at Peckaby's door.
Mrs. Peckaby went to the front room, opened the casement, and looked out. To say that her heart leaped into her mouth would be a most imperfect figure of speech to describe the state of feeling that rushed over her. In the rainy obscurity of the night she could discern something white drawn up to the door, and the figures of two men standing by it. The only wonder was that she did not leap out; she might have done it, had the window been large enough.
"Do Susan Peckaby live here?" inquired a gruff voice, that seemed as if it were muffled.
"Oh, dear good gentlemen, yes!" she responded, in a tremble of excitement. "Please what is it?"
"The white donkey's come to take her to New Jerusalem."
With a shrieking cry of joy that might have been heard all the way up Clay Lane, Mrs. Peckaby tore back to her chamber.
"Peckaby," she cried, "Peckaby, the thing's come at last! The blessed animal that's to bear me off. I always said it would."
Peckaby—probably from drowsiness—made no immediate response. Mrs. Peckaby stooped down to the low bed, and shook him well by the shoulder.
"It's the white quadruple, Peckaby, come at last!"
Peckaby growled out something that she was in a state of too great excitement to hear. She lighted the candle; she flung on some of the things she had taken off; she ran back to the front before they were fastened, lest the messengers, brute and human, should have departed, and put her head out at the casement again, all in the utmost fever of agitation.
"A minute or two yet, good gentlemen, please! I'm a'most ready. I'm a-waiting to get out my purple gownd."
"All right, missus," was the muffled answer.
The "purple gownd" was kept in this very ex-room of Brother Jarrum's hid in a safe place between some sheets of newspaper. Had Mrs. Peckaby kept it open to the view of Peckaby, there's no saying what grief the robe might not have come to, ere this. Peckaby, in his tantrums, would not have been likely to spare it. She put it on, and hooked it down the front, her trembling fingers scarcely able to accomplish it. That it was full loose for her she was prepared to find; she had grown thin with fretting. Then she put on a shawl; next, her bonnet; last some green leather gloves. The shawl was black, with worked coloured corners—a thin small shawl that hardly covered her shoulders; and the bonnet was a straw, trimmed with pink ribbons—the toilette which had long been prepared.
"Good-bye, Peckaby," said she, going in when she was ready, "You've said many a time as you wished I was off, and now you have got your wish. But I don't want to part nothing but friends."
"Good-bye," returned Peckaby, in a hearty tone, as he turned himself round on his bed. "Give my love to the saints."
To find him in this accommodating humour was more than she had bargained for. A doubt had crossed her sometimes, whether, when the white donkey did come, there might not arise a battle with Peckaby, ere she should get off. This apparently civil feeling on his part awoke a more social one on hers; and a qualm of conscience darted across her, suggesting that she might have made him a better wife had she been so disposed. "He might have shook hands with me," was her parting thought, as she unlocked the street door.
The donkey was waiting outside with all the patience for which donkeys are renowned. It had been drawn up under a sheltering ledge at a door or two's distance, to be out of the rain. Its two conductors were muffled up, as befitted the inclemency of the night, something like their voices appeared to have been. Mrs. Peckaby was not in her sober senses sufficiently to ask whether they were brothers from the New Jerusalem, or whether the style of costume they favoured might be the prevailing mode in that fashionable city; if so, it was decidedly more useful than elegant, consisting apparently of hop sacks, doubled over the head and over the back.
"Ready, missus?"
"I be quite ready," she answered, in a tremble of delight. "There ain't no saddle!" she called out, as the donkey was trotted forward.
"You won't want a saddle; these New Jerusalem animals bain't like the ord'nary uns. Jump on him, missus."
Mrs. Peckaby was so exceedingly tall, that she had not far to jump. She took her seat sideways, settled her gown, and laid hold of the bridle, which one of the men put into her hands. He turned the donkey round, and set it going with a smack; the other helped by crying "Gee-ho!"
Up Clay Lane she proceeded in triumph. The skies were dark, and the rain came soaking down; but Mrs. Peckaby's heart was too warm to dwell on any temporary inconvenience. If a thought crossed her mind that the beauty of the pink ribbons might be marred by the storm, so as somewhat to dim the glory of her entrance into the city and introduction to the saints, she drove it away again. Trouble had no admission in her present frame of mind. The gentlemen in the hop sacks continued to attend her; the one leading the donkey, the other walking behind and cheering the animal on with periodical gee-ho's.
"I suppose as it's a long way, sir?" asked Mrs. Peckaby, breaking the silence, and addressing the conductor.
"Middlin'," replied he.
"And how do we get over the sea, please, sir?" asked she again.
"The woyage is pervided for, missus," was the short and satisfactory response. "Brother Jarrum took care of that when he sent us."
Her heart went into a glow at the name. And them envious disbelievers in Deerham had cast all sorts of disparaging accusations to the brother, openly expressing their opinion that he had gone off purposely without her, and that she'd never hear of him again!
Arrived at the top of Clay Lane, the road was crossed, and the donkey was led down a turning towards the lands of Sir Rufus Hautley. It may have occurred to Mrs. Peckaby to wonder that the highway was not taken, instead of an unfrequented bye-path, that only led to fields and a wood; but, if so, she said nothing. Had the white donkey taken her to a gravel-pit, and pitched headlong in with her, she would have deemed, in her blind faith, that it was the right road to New Jerusalem.
A long way it was, over those wet fields. If the brothers and the donkey partook of the saintly nature of the inhabitants of Salt Lake City, possibly they did not find it a weary one. Mrs. Peckaby certainly did not. She was rapt in a glowing vision of the honours and delights that would welcome her at her journey's end;—so rapt, that she and the donkey had been for some little time in one of the narrow paths of the wood before she missed her two conductors.
It caused Mrs. Peckaby to pull the bridle, and cry "Wo-ho!" to the donkey. She had an idea that they might have struck into the wrong path, for this one appeared to be getting narrower and narrower. The wood was intersected with paths, but only a few of them led right through it. She pulled up, and turned her head the way she had come, but was unable to distinguish anything, save that she was in the heart of the wood.
"Be you behind, gentlemen?" she called out.
There was no reply. Mrs. Peckaby waited a bit, thinking they might have lagged unwittingly, and then called out again, with the like result.
"It's very curious!" thought Mrs. Peckaby.
She was certainly in a dilemma. Without her conductors, she knew no more how to get to New Jerusalem than she did how to get to the new moon. She might find her way through the wood, by one path or another; but, once on the other side, she had no idea which road to turn the donkey to—north, south, east, or west. She thought she would go back and look after them.
But there was some difficulty in doing this. The path had grown so narrow that the donkey could not easily be turned. She slipped off him, tied the bridle to a tree, and ran back as fast as the obscurity of the path allowed her, calling out to the gentlemen.
The more she ran and the more she called, the less did there appear to be anybody to respond to it. Utterly at a nonplus, she at length returned to the donkey—that is, to the spot, so far as she could judge, where she had left it. But the donkey was gone.
Was Mrs. Peckaby awake or asleep? Was the past blissful dream—when she was being borne in triumph to New Jerusalem—only an imaginary one? Was her present predicament real! Which was imagination and which was real? For the last hour she had been enjoying the realisation of all her hopes; now she seemed no nearer their fruition than she had been a year ago. The white donkey was gone, the conducting brothers were gone, and she was alone in the middle of a wood, two miles from home, on a wet night. Mrs. Peckaby had heard of enchantments, and began to think she must have been subjected to something of the sort.
She rubbed her eyes; she pinched her arms. Was she in her senses or not? Sure never was such a situation heard of! The cup of hope presented palpably to her lips, only to vanish again—she could not tell how—and leave no sign. A very disagreeable doubt—not yet a suspicion—began to dawn over Mrs. Peckaby. Had she been made the subject of a practical joke?
She might have flung the doubt from her, but for a distant sound that came faintly on her ears—the sound of covert laughter. Her doubt turned to conviction. Her face became hot; her heart, but for the anger at it, would have grown sick with the disappointment. Her conductors and the donkey were retreating, having played their joke out! Two certainties forced themselves upon her mind. One, that Peckaby and his friends had planned it; she felt sure now that the biggest of the "brothers" had been nobody but Chuff, the blacksmith: the other certainty was, that she should never be sent for to New Jerusalem in any way. Why it should have been, Mrs. Peckaby could not have told, then or afterwards; but the positive conviction that Brother Jarrum had been false, that the story of sending for her on a white donkey had only been invented to keep her quiet, fixed itself in her mind in that moment in the lonely wood. She sunk down amidst the trees and sobbed bitterly.
But all the tears combined that the world ever shed could not bring her nearer to New Jerusalem, or make her present situation better. After awhile she had the sense to remember that. She rose from the ground, turned her gown up over her shoulders, found her way out of the wood, and set off on her walk back again in a very humble frame of mind, arriving home as the clock was striking two.
She could make nobody hear. She knocked at the door, she knocked at the window, gently at first, then louder; she called and called, but there came no answer. Some of the neighbours, aroused by the unwonted disturbance, came peeping at their windows. At length Peckaby opened his; thrusting his head out at the very casement from which Mrs. Peckaby had beheld the deceitful vision earlier in the night.
"Who's there?" called out Peckaby.
"It's me, Peckaby," was the answer, delivered in a forlorn tone. "Come down and open the door."
"Who's 'me'?" asked Peckaby.
"It's me," repeated Mrs. Peckaby, looking up.
And what with her height and the low casement, their faces were really not many inches apart; but yet Peckaby appeared not to know her.
"You be off, will you!" retorted he. "A pretty thing if tramps be to come to decent folks' doors and knock 'em up like this. Who's door did you take it for?"
"It's me!" screamed Mrs. Peckaby. "Don't you know me? Come and undo the door, and let me come in. I be sopping."
"Know you! How should I know you? Who be you?"
"Good heavens, Peckaby! you must know me. Ain't I your wife?"
"My wife! Not a bit on't. You needn't come here with that gammon, missis, whoever you be. My wife's gone off to New Jerusalem on a white donkey."
He slammed to the casement. Mrs. Peckaby, what with the rain and what with the disappointment, burst into tears. In the same moment, sundry other casements opened, and all the heads in the vicinity—including the blacksmith Chuffs, and Mrs. Chuff's—were thrust out to condole with their neighbour, Mrs. Peckaby.
"Had she been and come back a'ready?" "Did she get tired of the saints so soon as this—or did they get tired of her?" "What sort of a city, was it?" "Which was most plentiful—geese or sage?" "How many wives, besides herself, had the gentleman that she chose?" "Who took care of the babies?" "Did they have many public dances?" "Was veils for the bonnets all the go?" "Was it a paradise or warn't it?" "And how was Brother Jarrum?"
Amongst the many questions asked, those came prominently, tingling on the ears of the unhappy Mrs. Peckaby. Too completely prostrate with events to retort, she suddenly let drop her gown, that she had kept so carefully turned, and clapped both her hands upon her face. Then came a real, genuine question from the next door casement—Mrs. Green's.
"Ain't that your plum-coloured gownd? What's come to it?"
Mrs. Peckaby, somewhat aroused, looked at the gown in haste. What had come to it? Patches of dead-white, looking not unlike paint, covered it about on all sides, especially behind. The shawl had caught some white, too, and the green leather gloves looked, inside, as though they had had a coat of whitewash put on them. Her beautiful gownd! laid by so long!—what on earth had ruined it like that?
Chuff, the blacksmith, gave a great grin from his window. "Sure that there donkey never was painted down white!" quoth he.
That it had been painted down white and with exceedingly wet paint too, there could be little doubt. Some poor donkey humble in his coat of gray, converted into a fine white animal for the occasion, by Peckaby and Chuff and their cronies. Mrs. Peckaby shrieked and sobbed with mortification, and drummed frantically on her house door. A chorus of laughter echoed from all sides, and Peckaby's casement flew open again.
"Will you stop that there knocking, then?" roared Peckaby, "Disturbing a man's night's rest."
"I will come in then, Peckaby," she stormed, plucking up a little spirit in her desperation. "I be your wife, you know I be, and I will come in."
"My good woman, what's took you?" cried Peckaby, in a tone of compassionating suavity. "You ain't no wife of mine. My wife's miles on her road by this time. She's off to New Jerusalem on a white donkey."
A new actor came up to the scene—no other than Jan Verner. Jan had been sitting up with some poor patient, and was now going home. To describe his surprise when he saw the windows alive with nightcapped heads, and Mrs. Peckaby in her dripping discomfort, in her paint, in her state altogether, outward and inward, would be a long task. Peckaby himself undertook the explanation, in which he was aided by Chuff; and Jan sat himself down on the public pump, and laughed till he was hoarse.
"Come, Peckaby, you'll let her in," cried he, before he went away.
"Let her in!" echoed Peckaby, "That would be a go, that would! What 'ud the saints say? They'd be for prosecuting of her for bigamy. If she's gone over to them, sir, she can't belong legal to me."
Jan laughed so that he had to hold his sides, and Mrs. Peckaby shrieked and sobbed. Chuff began calling out that the best remedy for white paint was turpentine.
"Coma along, Peckaby, and open the door," said Jan, rising. "She'll catch an illness if she stops here in her wet clothes, and I shall have a month's work, attending on her. Come!"
"Well, sir, to oblige you, I will," returned the man. "But let me ever catch her snivelling after them saints again, that's all! They should have her if they liked; I'd not."
"You hear, Mrs. Peckaby," said Jan in her ear. "I'd let the saints alone for the future, if I were you."
"I mean to, sir," she meekly answered, between her sobs.
Peckaby in his shirt and nightcap, opened the door, and she bounded in. The casements closed to the chorus of subsiding laughter, and the echoes of Jan's footsteps died away in the distance.