“Quite right, Mr. Mipps, quite right!” retorted the schoolmaster, and then turning to Imogene, he said: “Mr. Mipps wants us at once.” Denis was about to make an angry retort, but Imogene passed him and went into the kitchen, followed by Mrs. Waggetts and the sandy-haired Rash, that gentleman carefully shutting the door behind him.
Denis now found himself alone with young Jerk. The would-be hangman was helping himself to a thimble of rum, and politely asked the squire’s son to join him; but Denis refused with a curt: “No, I don’t take spirits.”
“No?” replied the lad of twelve years. “Oh, you should. When I feels regular out and out, and gets fits of the morbids, you know, the sort of time when you feels you may grow up to be the hanged man and not the hangman, I always takes to myself a thimble of neat rum. Rum’s the drink for Britons, Mister Cobtree. Rum’s wot’s made all the best sailors and hangmen in the realm.”
“If you go on drinking at this rate,” replied Denis, “you’ll never live to hang that schoolmaster.”
“Oh,” answered Jerry thoughtfully, “oh, Mister Denis, if I thought there was any truth in that, I’d give it up. Yes,” he went on with great emphasis, as if he were contemplating a most heroic sacrifice, “yes, I’d give up even rum to hang that schoolmaster, and it’s a hanging what’ll get him, and not old Mipps, the coffin knocker.”
Denis laughed at his notion and crossed to the kitchen door listening. “What can they be discussing in there so solemnly?” he said, more to himself than to his companion. But Jerry Jerk tossed off the pannikin of rum, clambered on the high stool behind the bar, and leaned across the counter, fixing Denis with a glance full of meaning.
“Mister Cobtree,” he whispered fearfully, “you are older than I am, but I feel somehow as if I can give you a point or two, because you’ve got sense. I’m a man of Kent, I am, and I’m going to be a hangman sooner or later, but above all I belongs to the Marsh and understands her, and them as understands the Marsh—well, the Marsh understands them, and this is what she says to them as understands her: ‘Hide yourself like I do under the green, until you feels you’re ready to be real mud.’ I takes her advice, I do; I’m under the green, I am, but I can be patient, because I knows as how some day I’ll be real dirt. You can’t be real dirt all at once; so keep green till you can; and if I has to keep green for years and years, I’ll get to mud one day, and that’ll be the day to hang that Rash and cheat old Mipps of his body.” And to encourage himself in this resolve Jerry took another thimbleful of rum.
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you,” said Denis.
“Don’t try to,” replied the youngster, “don’t try to. You’ll get it in time. The Marsh’ll show you. She takes her own time, but she’ll get you out of the green some day and ooze you up through the sluices, and then you’ll be a man of Kent, and no mistaking you.”
Denis, not able to make head or tail of this effusion, laughed again, which brought Jerry Jerk with a bound over the bar.
“See here, Mister Cobtree,” he hissed, coming close to him; “I likes you; you’re the only one in the village I does like. Oh, I’m not wanting anything from you; I’m just speaking the truth—you’re the only one in the village I haven’t hanged in my mind, and, what’s more to the point, you won’t blab if I tell you (but there, I know you won’t), you’re the only one in the village I couldn’t get hanged!”
“What on earth do you mean?” said the squire’s son.
“What I’ve said,” replied the urchin, “just what I’ve said, and not another word do you get from me but this: listen! Do you hear that sexton in there a-mumbling? Well, what’s he mumbling about? Ah, you don’t know, and I don’t know (leastways not exactly), but there’s one who does. Come over here,” and he led Denis to the back window and pointed out over Romney Marsh. “She knows, that there Marsh. She knows everything about this place, and every place upon her. Why, I’d give up everything I’ve got or shall get in this world, everything—except that schoolmaster’s neck—to know all she knows, ’cos she knows everything, Mister Cobtree, everything, she does. In every house there’s murmurings and mumblings a-going on, and in every dyke out there there’s the same ones, the very same ones a-going. You can hear ’em yourself, Mister Cobtree, if you stands among ’em. You try. But, oh, Mister Denis”—and he grabbed his arm imploringly—“don’t try to understand them dykes at night. She don’t talk then, she don’t; she does—she just does then. She does all wot the mumbles and murmurs have whispered to do; and it’s death on the Marsh at night. I found that out,” he added proudly. “Do you know how?”
“How?” queried Denis.
“By going out on her in the day, and gradually getting used to wot she says; that’s how; and that’s the only way.”
Just then a most infernal noise arose from the front of the inn, and before Denis had disengaged himself from the earnest clutches of his guardian angel, and before the murmurs of Mr. Mipps had ceased in the kitchen, the bar was swarming with seamen—sailors—rough mahogany men with pigtails and brass rings, smelling of tar and, much to the admiration of Jerk, reeking of rum, filling the room with their jostling, spitting,
