The Nebuly Coat. John Meade Falkner

stalls as the architect entered the choir, and made for him at once as the hawk swoops on its quarry. Westray did not attempt to escape his fate, and hoped, indeed, that from the old man’s garrulity he might glean some facts of interest about the building, which was to be the scene of his work for many months to come. But the clerk preferred to talk of people rather than of things, and the conversation drifted by easy stages to the family with whom Westray had taken up his abode.

      The doubt as to the Joliffe ancestry, in the discussion of which Mr. Sharnall had shown such commendable reticence, was not so sacred to the clerk. He rushed in where the organist had feared to tread, nor did Westray feel constrained to check him, but rather led the talk to Martin Joliffe and his imaginary claims.

      “Lor’ bless you!” said the clerk, “I was a little boy myself when Martin’s mother runned away with the soldier, yet mind well how it was in everybody’s mouth. But folks in Cullerne like novelties; it’s all old-world talk now, and there ain’t one perhaps, beside me and Rector, could tell you that tale. Sophia Flannery her name was when Farmer Joliffe married her, and where he found her no one knew. He lived up at Wydcombe Farm, did Michael Joliffe, where his father lived afore him, and a gay one he was, and dressed in yellow breeches and a blue waistcoat all his time. Well, one day he gave out he was to be married, and came into Cullerne, and there was Sophia waiting for him at the Blandamer Arms, and they were married in this very church. She had a three-year-old boy with her then, and put about she was a widow, though there were many who thought she couldn’t show her marriage lines if she’d been asked for them. But p’raps Farmer Joliffe never asked to see ’em, or p’raps he knew all about it. A fine upstanding woman she was, with a word and a laugh for everyone, as my father told me many a time; and she had a bit of money beside. Every quarter, up she’d go to London town to collect her rents, so she said, and every time she’d come back with terrible grand new clothes. She dressed that fine, and had such a way with her, the people called her Queen of Wydcombe. Wherever she come from, she had a boarding-school education, and could play and sing beautiful. Many a time of a summer evening we lads would walk up to Wydcombe, and sit on the fence near the farm, to hear Sophy a-singing through the open window. She’d a pianoforty, too, and would sing powerful long songs about captains and moustachers and broken hearts, till people was nearly fit to cry over it. And when she wasn’t singing she was painting. My old missis had a picture of flowers what she painted, and there was a lot more sold when they had to give up the farm. But Miss Joliffe wouldn’t part with the biggest of ’em, though there was many would ha’ liked to buy it. No, she kep’ that one, and has it by her to this day—a picture so big as a signboard, all covered with flowers most beautiful.”

      “Yes, I’ve seen that,” Westray put in; “it’s in my room at Miss Joliffe’s.”

      He said nothing about its ugliness, or that he meant to banish it, not wishing to wound the narrator’s artistic susceptibilities, or to interrupt a story which began to interest him in spite of himself.

      “Well, to be sure!” said the clerk, “it used to hang in the best parlour at Wydcombe over the sideboard; I seed’n there when I was a boy, and my mother was helping spring-clean up at the farm. ‘Look, Tom,’ my mother said to me, ‘did ’ee ever see such flowers? and such a pritty caterpillar a-going to eat them!’ You mind, a green caterpillar down in the corner.”

      Westray nodded, and the clerk went on:

      “ ‘Well, Mrs. Joliffe,’ says my mother to Sophia, ‘I never want for to see a more beautiful picture than that.’ And Sophia laughed, and said my mother know’d a good picture when she saw one. Some folks ’ud stand her out, she said, that ’tweren’t worth much, but she knew she could get fifty or a hundred pound or more for’t any day she liked to sell, if she took it to the right people. Then she’d soon have the laugh of those that said it were only a daub; and with that she laughed herself, for she were always laughing and always jolly.

      “Michael were well pleased with his strapping wife, and used to like to see the people stare when he drove her into Cullerne Market in the high cart, and hear her crack jokes with the farmers what they passed on the way. Very proud he was of her, and prouder still when one Saturday he stood all comers glasses round at the Blandamer, and bid ’em drink to a pritty little lass what his wife had given him. Now he’d got a brace of ’em, he said; for he’d kep’ that other little boy what Sophia brought when she married him, and treated the child for all the world as if he was his very son.

      “So ’twas for a year or two, till the practice-camp was put up on Wydcombe Down. I mind that summer well, for ’twere a fearful hot one, and Joey Garland and me taught ourselves to swim in the sheep-wash down in Mayo’s Meads. And there was the white tents all up the hillside, and the brass band a-playing in the evenings before the officers’ dinner-tent. And sometimes they would play Sunday afternoons too; and Parson were terrible put about, and wrote to the Colonel to say as how the music took the folk away from church, and likened it to the worship of the golden calf, when ‘the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up again to play.’ But Colonel never took no notice of it, and when ’twas a fine evening there was a mort of people trapesing over the Downs, and some poor lasses wished afterwards they’d never heard no music sweeter than the clar’net and bassoon up in the gallery of Wydcombe Church.

      “Sophia was there, too, a good few times, walking round first on her husband’s arm, and afterwards on other people’s; and some of the boys said they had seen her sitting with a redcoat up among the juniper-bushes. ’Twas Michaelmas Eve before they moved the camp, and ’twas a sorry goose was eat that Michaelmas Day at Wydcombe Farm; for when the soldiers went, Sophia went too, and left Michael and the farm and the children, and never said good-bye to anyone, not even to the baby in the cot. ’Twas said she ran off with a sergeant, but no one rightly knew; and if Farmer Joliffe made any search and found out, he never told a soul; and she never come back to Wydcombe.

      “She never come back to Wydcombe,” he said under his breath, with something that sounded like a sigh. Perhaps the long-forgotten break-up of Farmer Joliffe’s home had touched him, but perhaps he was only thinking of his own loss, for he went on: “Ay, many’s the time she would give a poor fellow an ounce of baccy, and many’s the pound of tea she sent to a labourer’s cottage. If she bought herself fine clothes, she’d give away the old ones; my missis has a fur tippet yet that her mother got from Sophy Joliffe. She was free with her money, whatever else she mid have been. There wasn’t a labourer on the farm but what had a good word for her; there wasn’t one was glad to see her back turned.

      “Poor Michael took on dreadful at the first, though he wasn’t the man to say much. He wore his yellow breeches and blue waistcoat just the same, but lost heart for business, and didn’t go to market so reg’lar as he should. Only he seemed to stick closer by the children—by Martin that never know’d his father, and little Phemie that never know’d her mother. Sophy never come back to visit ’em by what I could learn; but once I seed her myself twenty years later, when I took the hosses over to sell at Beacon Hill Fair.

      “That was a black day, too, for ’twas the first time Michael had to raise the wind by selling aught of his’n. He’d got powerful thin then, had poor master, and couldn’t fill the blue waistcoat and yellow breeches like he used to, and they weren’t nothing so gay by then themselves neither.

      “ ‘Tom,’ he said—that’s me, you know—‘take these here hosses over to Beacon Hill, and sell ’em for as much as ’ee can get, for I want the money.’

      “ ‘What, sell the best team, dad!’ says Miss Phemie—for she was standing by—‘you’ll never sell the best team with White-face and old Strike-a-light!’ And the hosses looked up, for they know’d their names very well when she said ’em.

      “ ‘Don’t ’ee take on, lass,’ he said; ‘we’ll buy ’em back again come Lady Day.’

      “And so I took ’em over, and knew very well why he wanted the money; for Mr. Martin had come back from Oxford, wi’ a nice bit of debt about his neck, and couldn’t turn his hand to the farm, but went about saying he was a Blandamer, and Fording and all the lands belonged to