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. Under 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.
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