Jan of the Windmill: A Story of the Plains
by Juliana Horatia Ewing · English · Gutenberg #5601 · 485,817 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Jan of the Windmill: A Story of the Plains
Author: Juliana Horatia Ewing
Release date: May 1, 2004 [eBook #5601]
Most recently updated: March 3, 2015
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5601
Credits: This eBook was produced by Les Bowler
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JAN OF THE WINDMILL: A STORY OF THE PLAINS ***
This eBook was produced by Les Bowler.
[Picture: Book cover]
[Picture: Even the sandy kitten was neglected, or got a rap on its nose
with the slate-pencil, when to toy with the moving point had been too
great a temptation to be resisted]
JAN OF THE WINDMILL.
* * * * *
A Story of the Plains.
* * * * *
BY THE LATE
JULIANA HORATIA EWING.
AUTHOR OF “SIX TO SIXTEEN;” “FLAT IRON FOR A FARTHING;”
“MRS. OVERTHEWAY’S REMEMBRANCES,” ETC.
* * * * *
WITH ELEVEN ILLUSTRATIONS BY
MRS. W. ALLINGHAM
(HELEN PATERSON).
* * * * *
FIFTH EDITION
* * * * *
LONDON:
GEORGE BELL & SONS, YORK STREET,
COVENT GARDEN.
1890.
* * * * *
Dedicated
TO MY DEAR SISTER
MARGARET.
J. H. E.
* * * * *
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
THE WINDMILLER’S WIFE.—STRANGERS.—TEN SHILLINGS A WEEK.—THE 1
LITTLE JAN.
CHAPTER II.
THE MILLER’S CALCULATIONS.—HIS HOPES AND FEARS.—THE 14
NURSE-BOY.—CALM.
CHAPTER III.
THE WINDMILLER’S WORDS COME TRUE.—THE RED SHAWL.—IN THE 20
CLOUDS.—NURSING V. PIG-MINDING.—THE ROUND-HOUSE.—THE
MILLER’S THUMB.
CHAPTER IV.
BLACK AS SLANS.—VAIR AND VOOLISH.—THE MILLER AND HIS MAN. 27
CHAPTER V.
THE POCKET-BOOK AND THE FAMILY BIBLE.—FIVE POUNDS’ REWARD. 33
CHAPTER VI.
GEORGE GOES COURTING.—GEORGE AS AN ENEMY.—GEORGE AS A 38
FRIEND.—ABEL PLAYS SCHOOLMASTER.—THE
LOVE-LETTER.—MOERDYK.—THE MILLER-MOTH.—AN ANCIENT DITTY.
CHAPTER VII.
ABEL GOES TO SCHOOL AGAIN.—DAME DATCHETT.—A COLUMN OF 49
SPELLING.—ABEL PLAYS MOOCHER.—THE MILLER’S MAN CANNOT MAKE
UP HIS MIND.
CHAPTER VIII.
VISITORS AT THE MILL.—A WINDMILLER OF THE THIRD 54
GENERATION.—CURE FOR WHOOPING-COUGH.—MISS AMABEL ADELINE
AMMABY.—DOCTORS DISAGREE.
CHAPTER IX.
GENTRY BORN.—LEARNING LOST.—JAN’S BEDFELLOW.—AMABEL. 63
CHAPTER X.
ABEL AT HOME.—JAN OBJECTS TO THE MILLER’S MAN.—THE 66
ALPHABET.—THE CHEAP JACK.—“PITCHERS”.
CHAPTER XI.
SCARECROWS AND MEN.—JAN REFUSES TO “MAKE 77
GEARGE.”—UNCANNY.—“JAN’S OFF.”—THE MOON AND THE CLOUDS.
CHAPTER XII.
THE WHITE HORSE.—COMROGUES.—MOERDYK.—GEORGE CONFIDES IN THE 84
CHEAP JACK—WITH RESERVATION.
CHAPTER XIII.
GEORGE AS A MONEYED MAN.—SAL.—THE “WHITE HORSE.”—THE 91
WEDDING.—THE WINDMILLER’S WIFE FORGETS, AND REMEMBERS TOO
LATE.
CHAPTER XIV.
SUBLUNARY ART.—JAN GOES TO SCHOOL.—DAME DATCHETT AT 98
HOME.—JAN’S FIRST SCHOOL SCRAPE.—JAN DEFENDS HIMSELF.
CHAPTER XV.
WILLUM GIVES JAN SOME ADVICE.—THE CLOCK FACE.—THE HORNET 104
AND THE DAME.—JAN DRAWS PIGS.—JAN AND HIS PATRONS.—KITTY
CHUTER.—THE FIGHT.—MASTER CHUTER’S PREDICTION.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE MOP.—THE SHOP.—WHAT THE CHEAP JACK’S WIFE HAD TO 118
TELL.—WHAT GEORGE WITHHELD.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE MILLER’S MAN AT THE MOP.—A LIVELY COMPANION.—SAL LOSES 127
HER PURSE.—THE RECRUITING SERGEANT.—THE POCKET-BOOK TWICE
STOLEN.—GEORGE IN THE KING’S ARMS.—GEORGE IN THE KING’S
SERVICE.—THE LETTER CHANGES HANDS, BUT KEEPS ITS SECRET.
CHAPTER XVIII.
MIDSUMMER HOLIDAYS.—CHILD FANCIES.—JAN AND THE 137
PIG-MINDER.—MASTER SALTER AT HOME.—JAN HIRES HIMSELF OUT.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE BLUE COAT.—PIG-MINDING AND 143
TREE-STUDYING.—LEAF-PAINTINGS.—A STRANGER.—MASTER SWIFT IS
DISAPPOINTED.
CHAPTER XX.
SQUIRE AMMABY AND HIS DAUGHTER.—THE CHEAP JACK DOES 154
BUSINESS ONCE MORE.—THE WHITE HORSE CHANGES MASTERS.
CHAPTER XXI.
MASTER SWIFT AT HOME.—RUFUS.—THE EX-PIG-MINDER.—JAN AND THE 161
SCHOOLMASTER.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE PARISH CHURCH.—REMBRANDT.—THE SNOW SCENE.—MASTER 168
SWIFT’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE WHITE HORSE IN CLOVER.—AMABEL AND HER GUARDIANS.—AMABEL 179
IN THE WOOD.—BOGY.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE PAINT-BOX.—MASTER LINSEED’S SHOP.—THE NEW 188
SIGN-BOARD.—MASTER SWIFT AS WILL SCARLET.
CHAPTER XXV.
SANITARY INSPECTORS.—THE PESTILENCE.—THE PARSON.—THE 195
DOCTOR.—THE SQUIRE AND THE SCHOOLMASTER.—DESOLATION AT THE
WINDMILL.—THE SECOND ADVENT.
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE BEASTS OF THE VILLAGE.—ABEL SICKENS.—THE GOOD 204
SHEPHERD.—RUFUS PLAYS THE PHILANTHROPIST.—MASTER SWIFT SEES
THE SUN RISE.—THE DEATH OF THE RIGHTEOUS.
CHAPTER XXVII.
JAN HAS THE FEVER.—CONVALESCENCE IN MASTER SWIFT’S 211
COTTAGE.—THE SQUIRE ON DEMORALIZATION.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
MR. FORD’S CLIENT.—THE HISTORY OF JAN’S FATHER.—AMABEL AND 217
BOGY THE SECOND.
CHAPTER XXIX.
JAN FULFILS ABEL’S CHARGE.—SON OF THE MILL.—THE 230
LARGE-MOUTHED WOMAN.
CHAPTER XXX.
JAN’S PROSPECTS, AND MASTER SWIFT’S PLANS.—TEA AND 238
MILTON.—NEW PARENTS.—PARTING WITH RUFUS.—JAN IS KIDNAPPED.
CHAPTER XXXI.
SCREEVING.—AN OLD SONG.—MR. FORD’S CLIENT.—THE PENNY 246
GAFF.—JAN RUNS AWAY.
CHAPTER XXXII.
THE BAKER.—ON AND ON.—THE CHURCH BELL.—A DIGRESSION.—A 253
FAMILIAR HYMN.—THE BOYS’ HOME.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE BUSINESS MAN AND THE PAINTER.—PICTURES AND POT 261
BOILERS.—CIMABUE AND GIOTTO.—THE SALMON-COLORED OMNIBUS.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
A CHOICE OF VOCATIONS.—RECREATION HOUR.—THE BOW-LEGGED 265
BOY.—DRAWING BY HEART.—GIOTTO.
CHAPTER XXXV.
“WITHOUT CHARACTER?”—THE WIDOW.—THE BOW-LEGGED BOY TAKES 270
SERVICE.—STUDIOS AND PAINTERS.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE MILLER’S LETTER.—A NEW POT BOILER SOLD. 277
CHAPTER XXXVII.
SUNSHINE AFTER STORM. 282
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
A PAINTER’S EDUCATION.—MASTER CHUTER’S PORT.—A FAREWELL 286
FEAST.—THE SLEEP OF THE JUST.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
GEORGE AGAIN.—THE PAINTER’S ADVICE.—“HOME-BREWED” AT THE 294
HEART OF OAK.—JAN CHANGES THE PAINTER’S MIND.
CHAPTER XL.
D’ARCY SEES BOGY.—THE ACADEMY.—THE PAINTER’S PICTURE. 300
CHAPTER XLI.
THE DETECTIVE.—THE “JOOK”.—JAN STANDS BY HIS MOTHER’S 303
GRAVE.—HIS AFTER HISTORY.
CHAPTER XLII.
CONCLUSION. 308
CHAPTER I.
THE WINDMILLER’S WIFE.—STRANGERS.—TEN SHILLINGS A WEEK.—THE LITTLE JAN.
STORM without and within!
So the windmiller might have said, if he had been in the habit of putting
his thoughts into an epigrammatic form, as a groan from his wife and a
growl of thunder broke simultaneously upon his ear, whilst the rain fell
scarcely faster than her tears.
It was far from mending matters that both storms were equally unexpected.
For eight full years the miller’s wife had been the meekest of women. If
there was a firm (and yet, as he flattered himself, a just) husband in
all the dreary straggling district, the miller was that man. And he
always did justice to his wife’s good qualities,—at least to her good
quality of submission,—and would, till lately, have upheld her before any
one as a model of domestic obedience. From the day when he brought home
his bride, tall, pretty, and perpetually smiling, to the tall old mill
and the ugly old mother who never smiled at all, there had been but one
will in the household. At any rate, after the old woman’s death. For
during her life-time her stern son paid her such deference that it was a
moot point, perhaps, which of them really ruled. Between them, however,
the young wife was moulded to a nicety, and her voice gained no more
weight in the counsels of the windmill when the harsh tones of the
mother-in-law were silenced for ever.
The miller was one of those good souls who live by the light of a few
small shrewdities (often proverbial), and pique themselves on sticking to
them to such a point, as if it were the greater virtue to abide by a
narrow rule the less it applied. The kernel of his domestic theory was,
“Never yield, and you never will have to,” and to this he was proud of
having stuck against all temptations from a real, though hard, affection
for his own; and now, after working so smoothly for eight years, had it
come to this?
The miller scratched his bead, and looked at his wife, almost with
amazement. She moaned, though he bade her be silent; she wept, in spite
of words which had hitherto been an effectual styptic to her tears; and
she met the commonplaces of his common sense with such wild, miserable
laughter, that he shuddered as he heard her.
Weakness in human beings is like the strength of beasts, a power of which
fortunately they are not always conscious. Unless positively brutal, you
cannot well beat a sickly woman for wailing and weeping; and if she will
not cease for any lesser consideration, there seems nothing for an
unbending husband to do but to leave her to herself.
This the miller had to do, anyhow. For he could only spare a moment’s
attention to her now and then, since the mill required all his care.
In a coat and hat of painted canvas, he had been in and out ever since
the storm began; now directing the two men who were working within, now
struggling along the stage that ran outside the windmill, at no small
risk of being fairly blown away.
He had reefed the sails twice already in the teeth of the blinding rain.
But he did well to be careful. For it was in such a storm as this, five
years ago “come Michaelmas,” that the worst of windmill calamities had
befallen him,—the sails had been torn off his mill and dashed into a
hundred fragments upon the ground. And such a mishap to a seventy feet
tower mill means—as windmillers well know—not only a stoppage of trade,
but an expense of two hundred pounds for the new sails.
Many a sack of grist, which should have come to him had gone down to the
watermill in the valley before the new sails were at work; and the huge
debt incurred to pay for them was not fairly wiped out yet. That
catastrophe had kept the windmiller a poor man for five years, and it
gave him a nervous dread of storms.
And talking of storms, here was another unreasonable thing. The morning
sky had been (like the miller’s wedded life) without a cloud. The day
had been sultry, for the time of year unseasonably so. And, just when
the miller most grudged an idle day, when times were hard, when he was in
debt,—for some small matters, as well as the sail business,—and when, for
the first time in his life, he felt almost afraid of his own hearthstone,
and would fain have been busy at his trade, not a breath of wind had
there been to turn the sails of the mill. Not a waft to cool his
perplexed forehead, not breeze enough to stir the short grass that glared
for miles over country flat enough to mock him with the fullest possible
view of the cloudless sky. Then towards evening, a few gray flecks had
stolen up from the horizon like thieves in the dusk, and a mighty host of
clouds had followed them; and when the wind did come, it came in no
moderate measure, but brought this awful storm upon its wings, which now
raged as if all the powers of mischief had got loose, and were bent on
turning every thing topsy-turvy indoors and out.
What made the winds and clouds so perverse, the clerk of the weather best
knows; but there was a reason for the unreasonableness of the
windmiller’s wife.
She had lost her child, her youngest born, and therefore, at present, her
best beloved. This girl-babe was the sixth of the windmiller and his
wife’s children, the last that God gave them, and the first that it had
pleased Him to take away.
The mother had been weak herself at the time that the baby fell ill, and
unusually ill-fitted to bear a heavy blow. Then her watchful eyes had
seen symptoms of ailing in the child long before the windmiller’s good
sense would allow a fuss to be made, and expense to be incurred about a
little peevishness up or down. And it was some words muttered by the
doctor when he did come, about not having been sent for soon enough,
which were now doing as much as any thing to drive the poor woman
frantic. They struck a blow, too, at her blind belief in the miller’s
invariable wisdom. If he had but listened to her in this matter, were it
only for love’s sake! There was something, she thought, in what that
woman had said who came to help her with the last offices,—the miller
discouraged “neighbors,” but this was a matter of decency,—that it was as
foolish for a man to have the say over babies and housework as it would
be for his wife to want her word in the workshop or the mill.
Perhaps a state of subjection for grown-up people does not tend to make
them reasonable, especially in their indignations. The windmiller’s wife
dared not, for her life, have told him in so many words that she thought
it would be for their joint benefit if he would give a little more
consideration to her wishes and opinions; but from this suppressed idea
came many sharp and peevish words at this time, which, apart from their
true source, were quite as unreasonable and perverse as the miller held
them to be. Nor is being completely under the control of another,
self-control. It may be doubted if it can even do much to teach it. The
thread of her passive condition having been, for the time, broken by
grief, the bereaved mother moaned and wailed, and rocked herself, and
beat her breast, and turned fiercely upon all interference, like some
poor beast in anguish.
She had clung to her children with an almost morbid tenderness, in
proportion as she found her worthy husband stern and cold. A hard
husband sometimes makes a soft mother, and it is perhaps upon the baby of
the family that her repressed affections outpoured themselves most fully.
It was so in this case, at any rate. And the little one had that
unearthly beauty which is seen, or imagined, about children who die
young. And the poor woman had suffered and striven so for it, to have it
and to keep it. The more critical grew its illness, the intenser grew
her strength and resolution by watchfulness, by every means her instinct
and experience could suggest, to fight and win the battle against death.
And when all was vain, the maddening thought tortured her that it might
have been saved.
The miller had made a mistake, and it was a pity that he made another on
the top of it, with the best intentions. He hurried on the funeral,
hoping that when “all was over” the mother would “settle down.”
But it was this crowning insult to her agony, the shortening of the too
brief time when she could watch by all that remained to her of her child,
which drove her completely wild. She reproached him now plainly and
bitterly enough. She would neither listen to reason nor obey; and
when—with more truth than taste—he observed that other people lost
children, and that they had plenty left, she laughed in his face that
wild laugh which drove him back to the mill and to the storm.
How it raged! The miller’s wife was an uneducated, commonplace woman
enough, but, in the excited state of her nervous system, she was as
sensible as any poet of a kind of comforting harmony in the wild sounds
without; though at another time they would have frightened her.
They did not disturb the children, who were in bed. Four in the old
press-bed in the corner, and one in a battered crib, and one in the
narrow bed over which the coverlet was not yet green.
The day’s work was over for her, though it was only just beginning for
the miller, and the mother had nothing to do but weep, and her tears fell
and fell, and the rain poured and poured. That last outburst had
somewhat relieved her, and she almost wished her husband would come back,
as a flash of lightning dazzled her eyes, and the thunder rattled round
the old mill, as if the sails had broken up again, and were falling upon
the roof of the round-house. All her senses were acute to-night, and she
listened for the miller’s footsteps, and so, listening, in the lull after
the thunder, she heard another sound. Wheels upon the road.
A pang shot through her heart. Thus had the doctor’s gig sounded the
night he came,—alas, too late! How long and how intensely she had
listened for that! She first heard it just beyond the mile-stone. This
one must be a good bit on this side of it; up the hill, in fact. She
could not help listening. It was so like, so terribly like! Now it spun
along the level ground. Ah, the doctor had not hurried so! Now it was
at the mill, at the door, and—it stopped.
The miller’s wife rose to run out, she hardly knew why. But in a moment
she checked herself, and went back to her seat.
“I be crazed, surely,” said the poor woman, sitting down again. “There
be more gigs than one in the world, and folk often stops to ask their way
of the maester.”
These travellers were a long time about the putting of such a simple
question, especially as the night was not a pleasant one to linger out
in. The murmur of voices, too, which the woman overheard, betokened a
close conversation, in which the familiar drawl of the windmiller’s
dialect blended audibly with that kind of clean-clipt speaking peculiar
to gentlefolk.
“He’ve been talking to master’s five minute an’ more,” muttered the
miller’s wife. “What can ’ee want with un?” The talking ceased as she
spoke, and the windmiller appeared, followed by a woman carrying a young
baby in her arms.
He was a ruddy man for his age at any time, but there was an extra flush
on his cheeks just now, and some excitement in his manner, making him
look as his wife was not wont to see him more than once a year, after the
Foresters’ dinner at the Heart of Oak. There was a difference, too. A
little too much drink made the windmiller peevish and pompous, but just
now he spoke in a kindly, almost conciliating tone.
“See, missus! Let this good lady dry herself a bit, and get warm, and
the little un too.”
A woman—ill-favored, though there was no positive fault to be found with
her features, except that the upper lip was long and cleft, and the lower
one very large—came forward with the child, and began to take off its
wraps, and the miller’s wife, giving her face a hasty wipe, went
hospitably to help her.
“Tst! tst! little love!” she cried, gulping down a sob, due to her own
sad memories, and moving the cloak more tenderly than the woman in whose
arms the child lay. “What a pair of dark eyes, then! Is’t a boy or
girl, m’m?”
“A boy,” said a voice from the door, and the miller’s wife, with a
suppressed shriek of timidity, became aware of a man whose entrance she
had not perceived, and to whom she dropped a hasty courtesy.
He was a man slightly above the middle height, whose slenderness made him
seem taller. An old cloak, intended as much to disguise as to protect
him, did not quite conceal a faultlessness of costume beneath it, after
the fashion of the day. Waistcoats of three kinds, one within the other,
a frilled shirt, and a well-adjusted stock, were to be seen, though he
held the ends of the old cloak tightly across him, as the wind would have
caught them in the doorway. He wore a countryman’s hat, which seemed to
suit him as little as the cloak, and from beneath the brim his dark eyes
glared with a restless, dissatisfied look, and were so dark and so fierce
and bright that one could hardly see any other details of his face,
unless it were his smooth chin, which, either from habit or from the
stiffness of his stock, he carried strangely up in the air.
“Indeed, sir,” said the windmiller’s wife, courtesying, and setting a
chair, with her eyes wandering back by a kind of fascination to those of
the stranger; “be pleased to take a seat, sir.”
The stranger sat down for a moment, and then stood up again. Then he
seemed to remember that he still wore his hat, and removed it, holding it
stiffly before him in his gloved hands. This displayed a high, narrow
head, on which the natural hair was worn short and without parting, and a
face which, though worn, was not old. And, for no definable reason, an
impression stole over the windmiller’s wife that he, like her husband,
had some wish to conciliate, which in his case struggled hard with a very
different kind of feeling, more natural to him.
Then he took out a watch of what would now be called the old turnip
shape, and said impatiently to the miller, “Our time is short, my good
man.”
“To be sure, sir,” said the windmiller. “Missus! a word with you here.”
And he led the way into the round-house, where his wife followed,
wondering. Her wonder was not lessened when he laid his hand upon her
shoulder, and, with flushed cheek and a tone of excitement that once more
recalled the Foresters’ annual meeting, said, “We’ve had some sore times,
missus, of late, but good luck have come our way to-night.”
“And how then, maester?” faltered his wife.
“That child,” said the windmiller, turning his broad thumb expressively
towards the inner room, “belongs to folk that want to get a home for un,
and can afford to pay for un, too. And the place being healthy and out
of the way, and having heard of our trouble, and you just bereaved of a
little un”—
“No! no! no!” shrieked the poor mother, who now understood all. “I
_couldn’t_, maester, ’tis unpossible, I could _not_. Oh dear! oh dear!
isn’t it bad enough to lose the sweetest child that ever saw light,
without taking in an outcast to fill that dear angel’s place? Oh dear!
oh dear!”
“And we behindhand in more quarters than one,” continued the miller,
prudently ignoring his wife’s tears and remonstrances, “and a dear season
coming on, and an uncertain trade that keeps a man idle by days together,
and here’s ten shillings a week dropped into our laps, so to speak. Ten
shillings a week—regular and sartin. No less now, and no more hereafter,
the governor said. Them were his words.”
“What’s ten shilling a week to me, and my child dead and gone?” moaned
the mother, in reply.
“_What’s ten shillings a week to you_?” cried the windmiller, who was
fairly exasperated, in tones so loud that they were audible in the
dwelling room, where the stranger, standing by the three-legged table,
stroked his lips twice or thrice with his hand, as if to smooth out a
cynical smile which strove to disturb their decorous and somewhat haughty
compression. “What’s ten shilling a week to you? Why, it’s food to you,
and drink to you, and firing to you, and boots for the children’s feet.
Look here, my woman. You’ve had a sore affliction, but that’s not to say
you’re to throw good luck in the dirt for a whimsey. This matter’s
settled.”
And the miller strode back into the inner room, whilst his wife sat upon
a sack of barley, wringing her hands, and moaning, “I couldn’t do my duty
by un, maester, I couldn’t do my duty by un.”
This she repeated at intervals, with her apron over her face, as before;
and then, suddenly aware that her husband had left her, she hurried into
the inner room to plead her own cause. It was too late. The strangers
had gone. The miller was not there, and the baby lay on the end of the
press bedstead, wailing as bitterly as the mother herself.
It had been placed there, with a big bundle of clothes by it, before the
miller came back, and he had found it so. He found the stranger too,
with his hat on his head, and his cloak fastened, glancing from time to
time at the child, and then withdrawing his glance hastily, and looking
forcedly round at the meagre furnishing of the miller’s room, and then
back at the little bundle on the bed, and away again. The woman stood
with her back to the press-bed, her striped shawl drawn tightly round
her, and her hands folded together as closely as her long lip pressed the
heavy one below.
“Is it settled?” asked the man.
“It is, sir,” said the miller. “You’ll excuse my missus being as she is,
but it’s fretting for the child we’ve a lost”—
“I understand, I understand,” said the stranger, hastily. He was pulling
back the rings of a silk netted purse, which he had drawn mechanically
from his pocket, and which, from some sudden start of his, fell chinking
on to the floor. Whatever the thought was which startled him, he thought
it so sharply that he looked up in fear that he had said it aloud. But
he had not spoken, and the miller had no other expression than that of an
eager satisfaction on his face as the stranger counted out the gold by
the flaring light of the tallow candle.
“A quarter’s pay in advance,” he said briefly. “It will be paid
quarterly, you understand.” After which, and checking himself in a look
towards the child, he went out, followed by the woman.
In the round-house he paused however, and looked back into the meagre,
dimly lighted room, where the little bundle upon the bed lay weeping.
For a moment, a storm of irresolution seemed to seize him, and then
muttering, “It can’t be helped for the present, it can’t be helped,” he
hurried towards the vehicle, in the back seat of which the woman was
already seated.
The driver touched his hat to him as he approached, and turned the
cushion, which he had been protecting from the rain. The stranger
stumbled over the cloak as he got in, and, cursing the step, bade the man
drive like something which had no connection with driving. But, as they
turned, the windmiller ran out and after them.
“Stop, sir!” he cried.
“Well, what now?” said the stranger, sharply, as the horse was pulled
back on his haunches.
“Is it named?” gasped the miller.
“Oh, yes, all that sort of thing,” was the impatient reply.
“And what name?” asked the miller.
“Jan. J, A, N,” said the stranger, shouting against the blustering wind.
“And—and—the other name?” said the windmiller, who was now standing close
to the stranger’s ear.
“What is yours?” he asked, with a sharp look of his dark eyes.
“Lake—Abel,” said the windmiller.
“It is his also, henceforth,” said the stranger, waving his hand, as if
to close the subject,—“Jan Lake. Drive on, will you?”
The horse started forward, and they whirled away down the wet, gray road.
And before the miller had regained his mill, the carriage was a distant
speck upon the storm.
CHAPTER II.
THE MILLER’S CALCULATIONS.—HIS HOPES AND FEARS.—THE NURSE-BOY.—CALM.
THE windmiller went back to his work. He had risked something over this
business in leaving the mill in the hands of others, even for so short a
time. Then the storm abated somewhat. The wind went round, and blew
with less violence a fine steady breeze. The miller began to think of
going into the dwelling-room for a bit of supper to carry him through his
night’s work. And yet he lingered about returning to his wife in her
present mood.
He stuck the sharp point of his windmiller’s candlestick {14} into a sack
that stood near, and drawing up a yellow canvas “sample bag”—which served
him as a purse—from the depths of his pocket, he began to count the coins
by the light of the candle. He counted them over several times with
increasing satisfaction, and made several slow but sure calculations as
to the sum of ten shillings a week by the month, the quarter, the half,
and the whole year. He then began another set of calculations of a kind
less pleasant, especially to an honest man,—his debts.
“There’s a good bit to the doctor for both times,” he murmured; “and
there’s the coffin, and something at the Heart of Oak for the bearers,
and a couple of bottles red wine there, too, for the missus, when she
were so bad. And both the boys had new shoes to follow in,—she would
have it they should follow”— And so on, and so on, the windmiller ran up
the list of his petty debts, and saw his way to paying them. Then he put
the money back into the sample bag, and folded it very neatly, and stowed
it away. And then he drew near the inner door, and peeped into the room.
His poor wife seemed to be in no better case than before. She sat on the
old rocking-chair, swinging backwards and forwards, and beating her hands
upon her knees in silence, and making no movement to comfort the wailing
little creature on the bed.
For the first time there came upon the windmiller a sense of the fact
that it is an uncertain and a rather dangerous game to drive a desperate
woman into a corner. His missus was as soft-hearted a soul as ever
lived, and for her to sit unmoved by the weeping of a neglected child was
a proof that something was very far wrong indeed. One or two nasty
stories of what tender-hearted women had done when “crazed” by grief
haunted him. The gold seemed to grow hot at the bottom of his pocket.
He wished he had got at the stranger’s name and address, in case it
should be desirable to annul the bargain. He wished the missus would cry
again, that silence was worse than any thing. He wished it did not just
happen to come into his head that her grandmother went “melancholy mad”
when she was left a young widow, and that she had had an uncle in
business who died of softening of the brain.
He wished she would move across the room and take up the child, with an
intensity that almost amounted to prayer. And, in the votive spirit
which generally comes with such moments, he mentally resolved that, if
his missus would but “take to” the infant, he would humor her on all
other points just now to the best of his power.
A strange fulfilment often treads on the heels of such vows. At this
moment the wailing of the baby disturbed the miller’s eldest son as he
lay in the press-bed. He was only seven years old, but he had been
nurse-boy to his dead sister during the brief period of her health,—the
more exclusively so, that the miller’s wife was then weakly,—and had
watched by her sick cradle with a grief scarcely less than that of the
mother. He now crept out and down the coverlet to the wailing heap of
clothes, with a bright, puzzled look on his chubby face.
“Mother,” he said, “mother! Is the little un come back?”
“No, no!” she cried. “That’s not our’n. It’s—it’s another one.”
“Have the Lord sent us another?” said the boy, lifting the peak of the
little hood from the baby’s eye, into which it was hanging, and then
fairly gathering the tiny creature, by a great effort, into his arms,
with the daring of a child accustomed to playing nurse to one nearly as
heavy as himself. “I do be glad of that, mother. The Lord sent the
other one in the night, too, mother; that night we slept in the
round-house. Do ’ee mind? Whishty, whishty, love! Eh, mother, what
eyes! Whishty, whishty, then! _I’m_ seeing to thee, I am.”
There was something like a sob in the miller’s own throat, but his wife
rose, and, running to the bed, fell on her knees, and with such a burst
of weeping as is the thaw of bitter grief gathered her eldest child and
the little outcast together to her bosom.
At this moment another head was poked up from the bedclothes, and the
second child began to say its say, hoping, perhaps, thereby to get a
share of attention and kisses as well as the other.
“I seed a lady and genle’m,” it broke forth, “and was feared of un. They
was going out of doors. The genle’m look back at us, but the lady went
right on. I didn’ see her face.”
Matters were now in a domestic and straightforward condition, and the
windmiller no longer hesitated to come in. But he was less disposed to a
hard and triumphant self-satisfaction than was common with him when his
will ended well. A poor and unsuccessful career had, indeed, something
to do with the hardness of his nature, and in this flush of prosperity he
felt softened, and resolved inwardly to “let the missus take her time,”
and come back to her ordinary condition without interference.
“Shall un have a bit of supper, missus?” was his cheerful greeting on
coming in. “But take your time,” he added, seeing her busy with the
baby, “take your time.”
By-and-by the nurse-boy took the child, and the woman bustled about the
supper. She was still but half reconciled, and slapped the plates on to
the table with a very uncommon irritability.
The windmiller ate a hearty supper and washed it well down with home-made
ale, under the satisfactory feeling that he could pay for more when he
wanted it. And as he began to plug his pipe with tobacco, and his wife
rocked the new-comer at her breast, he said thoughtfully,—
“Do ’ee think, missus, that woman ’ud be the mother of un?”
“Mother!” cried his wife, scornfully. “She’ve never been a mother,
maester; of this nor any other one. To see her handle it was enough for
me. The boy himself could see she never so much as looked back at un.
To bring an infant out a night like this, too, and leave it with
strangers. Mother, indeed, says he!”
“Take your time, missus, take your time!” murmured the miller in his
head. He did not speak aloud, he only puffed his pipe.
“Do you suppose the genle’m be the father, missus?” he suggested, as he
rose to go back to his work.
“Maybe,” said his wife, briefly; “I can’t speak one way or another to the
feelings of men-folk.”
This blow was hit straight out, but the windmiller forbore reply. He was
not altogether ill-pleased by it, for the woman’s unwonted peevishness
broke down in new tears over the child, whom she bore away to bed,
pouring forth over it half inarticulate indignation against its unnatural
parents.
“She’ve a soft heart, have the missus,” said the windmiller,
thoughtfully, as he went to the outer door. “I’m in doubts if she won’t
take to it more than her own yet. But she shall have her own time.”
The storm had passed. The wolds lay glistening and dreary under a watery
sky, but all was still. The windmiller looked upwards mechanically. To
be weatherwise was part of his trade. But his thoughts were not in the
clouds to-night. He brought the sample bag, without thinking of it, to
the surface of his pocket, and dropped it slowly back again, murmuring,
“Ten shilling a week.”
And as he turned again to his night’s work he added, with a nod of
complete conviction, “It’ll more’n keep _he_.”
CHAPTER III.
THE WINDMILLER’S WORDS COME TRUE.—THE RED SHAWL.—IN THE CLOUDS.—NURSING
V. PIG-MINDING.—THE ROUND-HOUSE.—THE MILLER’S THUMB.
STRANGE to say, the windmiller’s idea came true in time,—the foster-child
was the favorite.
He was the youngest of the family, for the mother had no more children.
This goes for something.
Then, when she had once got over her repugnance to adopting him, he did
do much to heal the old grief, and to fill the empty place in her heart
as well as in the cradle.
He was a frail, fretful little creature, with a very red face just fading
into yellow, about as much golden down on his little pate as would
furnish a moth with plumage, and eyes like sloe-berries. It was
fortunate rather than otherwise that he was so ailing for some weeks that
the good wife’s anxieties came over again, and, in the triumph of being
this time successful, much of the bitterness of the old loss passed away.
In a month’s time he looked healthy, if not absolutely handsome. The
windmiller’s wife, indeed, protested that he was lovely, and she never
wearied of marvelling at the unnatural conduct of those who had found it
in their hearts to intrust so sweet a child to the care of strangers;
though it must be confessed that nothing would have pleased her less than
the arrival of two doting and conscientious parents to reclaim him.
Indeed, pity had much to do with the large measure of love that she gave
to the deserted child. A meaner sentiment, too, was not quite without
its influence in the predominance which he gradually gained over his
foster brothers and sisters. There was little enough to be proud of in
all that could be guessed as to his parentage (the windmiller knew
nothing), but there was scope for any amount of fancy; and if the child
displayed any better manners or talents than the other children, Mrs.
Lake would purse her lips, and say, with a somewhat shabby pride,—
“Anybody may see ’tis gentry born.”
“I’ve been thinking,” said the windmiller, one day, “that if that there
woman weren’t the mother, ’tis likely the mother’s dead.”
“’Tis likely, too,” said his wife; and her kindness abounded the more
towards the motherless child. Little Abel was nurse-boy to it, as he had
been to his sister. Not much more than a baby himself, he would wrap an
old shawl round the baby who was quite a baby, stagger carefully out at
the door, and drop dexterously—baby uppermost—on to the short, dry grass
that lay for miles about the mill.
The shawl was a special shawl, though old. It was red, and the bright
color seemed to take the child’s fancy; he was never so good as when
playing upon the gay old rag. His black eyes would sparkle, and his tiny
fingers clutch at it, when the mother put it about him as he swayed in
Abel’s courageous grasp. And then Abel would spread it for him, like an
eastern prayer carpet, under the shadow of the old mill.
Little need had he of any medicine, when the fresh strong air that blew
about the downs was filling his little lungs for most of the day. Little
did he want toys, as he lay on his red shawl gazing upwards hour by hour,
with Abel to point out every change in their vast field of view.
It is a part of a windmiller’s trade to study the heavens, and Abel may
have inherited a taste for looking skywards. Then, on these great open
downs there is so much sky to be seen, you can hardly help seeing it, and
there is not much else to look at. Had they lived in a village street,
or even a lane, Abel and his charge might have taken to other
amusements,—to games, to grubbing in hedges, or amid the endless
treasures of ditches. But as it was, they lay hour after hour and looked
at the sky, as at an open picture-book with ever-changing leaves.
“Look ’ee here!” the nurse-boy would cry. “See to the crows, the pretty
black crows! Eh, there be a lapwing! Lap-py, lap-py, lap-py, there he
go! Janny catch un!”
[Picture: “Look ’ee here!” the nurse-boy would cry]
And the baby would stretch his arms responsive to Abel’s expressive
signs, and cry aloud for the vanishing bird.
If no living creature crossed the ether, there were the clouds.
Sometimes a long triangular mass of small white fleecy clouds would
stretch across half the heavens, having its shortest side upon the
horizon, and its point at the zenith, where one white fleece seemed to be
leading a gradually widening flock across the sky.
“See then!” the nurse-boy would cry. “See to the pretty sheep up yonder!
Janny mind un! So! so!”
And if some small gray scud, floating lower, ran past the far-away
cirrus, Abel would add with a quaint seriousness, “’Tis the sheep-dog.
How he runs then! Bow-wow!”
At sunset such a flock wore golden fleeces, and to them, and to the
crimson hues about them, the little Jan stretched his fingers, and
crowed, as if he would have clutched the western sky as he clutched his
own red shawl.
But Abel was better pleased when, in the dusk, the flock became dark
gray.
“They be Master Salter’s pigs now,” said he. For pigs in Abel’s native
place were both plentiful and black; and he had herded Master Salter’s
flock (five and twenty black, and three spotted) for a whole month before
his services were required as nurse-boy to his sister.
But for the coming of the new baby, he would probably have gone back to
the pigs. And he preferred babies. A baby demands attention as well as
a herd of pigs, but you can get it home. It does not run off in
twenty-eight different directions, just when you think you have safely
turned the corner into the village.
Master Salter’s swine suffered neglect at the hands of several successors
to the office Abel had held, and Master Salter—whilst alluding to these
in indignant terms as “young varments,” “gallus-birds,” and so forth—was
pleased to express his regret that the gentle and trustworthy Abel had
given up pig-minding for nursing.
The pigs’ loss was the baby’s gain. No tenderer or more careful nurse
could the little Jan have had. And he throve apace.
The windmiller took more notice of him than he had been wont to do of his
own children in their babyhood. He had never been a playful or indulgent
father, but he now watched with considerable interest the child who, all
unconsciously, was bringing in so much “grist to the mill.”
When the weather was not fine enough for them to be out of doors, Abel
would play with his charge in the round-house, and the windmiller never
drove him out of the mill, as at one time he would have done. Now and
then, too, he would pat the little Jan’s head, and bestow a word of
praise on his careful guardian.
It may be well, by-the-by, to explain what a round-house is. Some of the
brick or tower mills widen gradually and evenly to the base. Others
widen abruptly at the lowest story, which stands out all round at the
bottom of the mill, and has a roof running all round too. The projection
is, in fact, an additional passage, encircling the bottom story of the
windmill. It is the round-house. If you take a pill-box to represent
the basement floor of a tower-mill, and then put another pill-box two or
three sizes larger over it, you have got the circular passage between the
two boxes, and have added a round-house to the mill. The round-house is
commonly used as a kind of store-room.
Abel Lake’s windmill had no separate dwelling-house. His grandfather had
built the windmill, and even his father had left it to the son to add a
dwelling-house, when he should perhaps have extended his resources by a
bit of farming or some other business, such as windmillers often add to
their trade proper. But that calamity of the broken sails had left Abel
Lake no power for further outlay for many years, and he had to be content
to live in the mill.
The dwelling-room was the inner part of the basement floor. Near the
door which led from this into the round-house was the ladder leading to
the next story, and close by that the opening through which the sacks of
grain were drawn up above. The story above the basement held the
millstones and the “smutting” machine, for cleaning dirty wheat. The
next above that held the dressing machine, in which the bran was
separated from the flour. In the next above that were the corn-bins. To
the next above that the grain was drawn up from the basement in the first
instance. The top story of all held the machinery connected with the
turning of the sails. Ladders led from story to story, and each room had
two windows on opposite sides of the mill.
Use is second nature, and all the sounds which haunt a windmill were soon
as familiar and as pleasant to the little Jan as if he had been born a
windmiller’s son. Through many a windy night he slept as soundly as a
sailor in a breeze which might disturb the nerves of a land-lubber. And
when the north wind blew keen and steadily, and the chains jangled as the
sacks of grist went upwards, and the millstones ground their monotonous
music above his head, these sounds were only as a lullaby to his
slumbers, and disturbed him no more than they troubled his foster-mother,
to whom the revolving stones ground out a homely and welcome measure:
“Dai-ly bread, dai-ly bread, dai-ly bread.”
For another sign of his being a true child of the mill, his nurse Abel
anxiously watched.
Though Abel preferred nursing to pig-minding, he had a higher ambition
yet, which was to begin his career as a windmiller. It was not likely
that he could be of use to his father for a year or two, and the fact
that he was of very great use to his mother naturally tended to delay his
promotion to the mill.
Mrs. Lake was never allowed to say no to her husband, and she seemed to
be unable, and was certainly unwilling, to say it to her children.
Happily, her eldest child was of so sweet and docile a temper that
spoiling did him little harm; but even with him her inability to say no
got the mother into difficulties. She was obliged to invent excuses to
“fub off,” when she could neither consent nor refuse.
So, when Abel used to cling about her, crying, “Mother dear, when’ll I be
put t’help father in the mill? Do ’ee ask un to let me come in now! I
be able to sweep ’s well as Gearge. I sweeps the room for thee,”—she had
not the heart or the courage to say, “I want thee, and thy father
doesn’t,” but she would take the boy’s hand tenderly in hers, and making
believe to examine his thumbs with a purpose, would reply, “Wait a bit,
love. Thee’s a sprack boy, and a good un, but thee’s not rightly got the
miller’s thumb.”
And thus it came about that Abel was for ever sifting bits of flour
through his finger and thumb, to obtain the required flatness and
delicacy which marks the latter in a miller born; and playing lovingly
with little Jan on the floor of the round-house, he would pass some
through the baby’s fingers also, crying,—
“Sift un, Janny! sift un! Thee’s a miller’s lad, and thee must have a
miller’s thumb.”
CHAPTER IV.
BLACK AS SLANS.—VAIR AND VOOLISH.—THE MILLER AND HIS MAN.
IT was a great and important time to Abel when Jan learned to walk; but,
as he was neither precocious nor behindhand in this respect, his
biographer may be pardoned for not dwelling on it at any length.
He had a charming demure little face, chiefly differing from the faces of
the other children of the district by an overwhelming superiority in the
matter of forehead.
Mrs. Lake had had great hopes that he would differ in another respect
also.
Most of the children of the neighborhood were fair. Not fair as so many
North-country children are, with locks of differing, but equally
brilliant, shades of gold, auburn, red, and bronze; but white-headed, and
often white-faced, with white-lashed inexpressive eyes, as if they had
been bleaching through several generations.
Now, when the dark bright eyes of the little Jan first came to be of
tender interest with Mrs. Lake, she fully hoped, and constantly
prophesied, that he would be “as black as a rook;” a style of complexion
to which she gave a distinct preference, though the miller was fair by
nature as well as white by trade. Jan’s eyes seemed conclusive.
“Black as slans they be,” said his foster-mother. And slans meant
sloe-berries where Mrs. Lake was born.
An old local saying had something perhaps to do with her views:—
“Lang and lazy,
Black and proud;
Vair and voolish,
Little and loud.”
“Fair and foolish” youngsters certainly abounded in the neighborhood to
an extent which justified a wish for a change.
As to pride, meek Mrs. Lake was far from regarding it as a failing in
those who had any thing to be proud of, such as black hair and a possible
connection with the gentry. And fate having denied to her any chance of
being proud or aggressive on her own account, she derived a curious sort
of second-hand satisfaction from seeing these qualities in those who
belonged to her. It did to some extent console her for the miller’s
roughness to herself, to hear him rating George. And she got a sort of
reflected dignity out of being able to say, “My maester’s a man as will
have his way.”
But her hopes were not realized. That yellow into which the beefsteak
stage of Jan’s infant complexion had faded was not destined to deepen
into gipsy hues. It gave place to the tints of the China rose, and all
the wind and sunshine on the downs could not tan, though they sometimes
burnt, his cheeks. The hair on his little head became more abundant, but
it kept its golden hue. His eyes remained dark,—a curious mixture; for
as to hair and complexion he was irredeemably fair.
The mill had at least one “vair and voolish” inmate, by common account,
though by his own (given in confidence to intimate friends) he was “not
zuch a vool as he looked.”
This was George Sannel, the miller’s man.
Master Lake had had a second hand in to help on that stormy night when
Jan made his first appearance at the mill; but as a rule he only kept one
man, whom he hired for a year at a time, at the mop or hiring fair held
yearly in the next town.
George, or Gearge as he was commonly called, had been more than two years
in the windmill, and was looked upon in all respects as “one of the
family.” He slept on a truckle-bed in the round-house, which, though of
average size, would not permit him to stretch his legs too recklessly
without exposing his feet to the cold.
For “Gearge” was six feet one and three-quarters in his stockings.
He had a face in some respects like a big baby’s. He had a turn-up nose,
large smooth cheeks, a particularly innocent expression, a forehead
hardly worth naming, small dull eyes, with a tendency to inflammation of
the lids which may possibly have hindered the lashes from growing, and a
mouth which was generally open, if he were neither eating nor sucking a
“bennet.” When this countenance was bathed in flour, it might be an open
question whether it were improved or no. It certainly looked both
“vairer” and more “voolish!”
There is some evidence to show that he was “lazy,” as well as “lang,” and
yet he and Master Lake contrived to pull on together.
Either because his character was as childlike as his face, and because—if
stupid and slothful by nature—he was also of so submissive, susceptible,
and willing a temper that he disarmed the justest wrath; or because he
was, as he said, not such a fool as he looked, and had in his own
lubberly way taken the measure of the masterful windmiller to a nicety,
George’s most flagrant acts of neglect had never yet secured his
dismissal.
Indeed, it really is difficult to realize that any one who is lavish of
willingness by word can wilfully and culpably fail in deed.
“I be a uncommon vool, maester, sartinly,” blubbered George on one
occasion when the miller was on the point of turning him off, as a
preliminary step on the road to the “gallus,” which Master Lake expressed
his belief that he was “sartin sure to come to.” And, as he spoke,
George made dismal daubs on his befloured face with his sleeve, as he
rubbed his eyes with his arm from elbow to wrist.
“Sech a governor as you be, too!” he continued. “Poor mother! she allus
said I should come to no good, such a gawney as I be! No more I
shouldn’t but for you, Master Lake, a-keeping of me on. Give un another
chance, sir, do ’ee! I be mortal stoopid, sir, but I’d work my fingers
to the bwoan for the likes of you, Master Lake!”
George stayed on, and though the very next time the windmiller was absent
his “voolish” assistant did not get so much as a toll-dish of corn ground
to flour, he was so full of penitence and promises that he weathered that
tempest and many a succeeding one.
On that very eventful night of the storm, and of Jan’s arrival, George’s
neglect had risked a recurrence of the sail catastrophe. At least if the
second man’s report was to be trusted.
This man had complained to the windmiller that, during his absence with
the strangers, George, instead of doubling his vigilance now that the men
were left short-handed, had taken himself off under pretext of attending
to the direction of the wind and the position of the sails outside, a
most important matter, to which he had not, after all, paid the slightest
heed; and what he did with himself, whilst leaving the mill to its fate
and the fury of the storm, his indignant fellow-servant professed himself
“blessed if he knew.”
But few people are as grateful as they should be when informed of
misconduct in their own servants. It is a reflection on one’s judgment.
And unpardonable as George’s conduct was, if the tale were true, the
words in which he couched his self-defence were so much more grateful to
the ears of the windmiller than the somewhat free and independent style
in which the other man expressed his opinion of George’s conduct and
qualities, that the master took his servant’s part, and snubbed the
informer for his pains.
In justice to George, too, it should be said that he stoutly and
repeatedly denied the whole story, with many oaths and imprecations of
horrible calamities upon himself if he were lying in the smallest
particular. And this with reiteration so steady, and a countenance so
guileless and unmoved, as to contrast favorably with the face of the
other man, whose voice trembled and whose forehead flushed, either with
overwhelming indignation or with a guilty consciousness that he was
bearing false witness.
Master Lake employed him no more, and George stayed on.
But, for that matter, Master Lake’s disposition was not one which
permitted him to profit by the best qualities of those connected with
him. He was a bit of a tyrant, and more than one man, six times as
clever, and ten times as hard-working as George, had gone when George
would have stayed, from crossing words with the windmiller. The safety
of the priceless sails, if all were true, had been risked by the man he
kept, and secured by the man he sent away, but Master Lake was quite
satisfied with his own decision.
“I bean’t so fond myself of men as is so mortal sprack and fussy in a
strange place,” the miller observed to Mrs. Lake in reference to this
matter.
Mrs. Lake had picked up several of her husband’s bits of proverbial
wisdom, which she often flattered him by retailing to his face.
“Too hot to hold, mostly,” was her reply, in knowing tones.
“Ay, ay, missus, so a be,” said the windmiller. And after a while he
added, “Gearge is slow, sartinly, mortal slow; but Gearge is sure.”
CHAPTER V.
THE POCKET-BOOK AND THE FAMILY BIBLE.—FIVE POUNDS’ REWARD.
OF the strange gentleman who brought Jan to the windmill, the Lakes heard
no more, but the money was paid regularly through a lawyer in London.
From this lawyer, indeed, Master Lake had heard immediately after the
arrival of his foster-son.
The man of business wrote to say that the gentleman who had visited the
mill on a certain night had, at that date, lost a pocket-book, which he
thought might have been picked up at the mill. It contained papers only
valuable to the owner, and also a five-pound note, which was liberally
offered to the windmiller if he could find the book, and forward it at
once.
Master Lake began to have a kind of reckless, gambling sort of feeling
about luck. Here would be an easily earned five pounds, if he could but
have the luck to find the missing property! That ten shillings a week
had come pretty easily to him. When all is said, there _are_ people into
whose mouths the larks fall ready cooked!
The windmiller looked inside the mill and outside the mill, and wandered
a long way along the chalky road with his eyes downwards, but he was no
nearer to the five-pound note for his pains. Then he went to his wife,
but she had seen nothing of the pocket-book; on which her husband
somewhat unreasonably observed that, “A might a been zartin _thee_
couldn’t help un!”
He next betook himself to George, who was slowly, and it is to be hoped
surely, sweeping out the round-house.
“Gearge, my boy,” said the windmiller, in not too anxious tones, “have
’ee seen a pocket-book lying about anywheres?”
George leaned upon his broom with one hand, and with the other scratched
his white head.
“What be a pocket-book, then, Master Lake?” said he, grinning, as if at
his own ignorance.
“Thee’s eerd of a pocket-book before now, thee vool, sure-ly!” said the
impatient windmiller.
“I’se eerd of a pocket of hops, Master Lake,” said George, after an
irritating pause, during which he still smiled, and scratched his poll as
if to stimulate recollection.
“Book—book—book! pocket-_book_!” shouted the miller. “If thee can’t
read, thee knows what a book is, thee gawney!”
“What a vool I be, to be sure!” said George, his simple countenance
lighted up with a broader smile than before. “I knows a book, sartinly,
Master Lake, I knows a book. There’s one,” George continued, speaking
even slower than before,—“there’s one inzide, sir,—a big un. On the
shelf it be. A Vamly Bible they calls un. And I’m sartin sure it be
there,” he concluded, “for a hasn’t been moved since the last time you
christened, Master Lake.”
The miller turned away, biting his lip hard, to repress a useless
outburst of rage, and George, still smiling sweetly, spun the broom
dexterously between his hands, as a man spins the water out of a stable
mop. Just before Master Lake had got beyond earshot, George lowered the
broom, and began to scratch his head once more. “I be a proper vool,
sartinly,” said he; and when the miller heard this, he turned back.
“Mother allus said I’d no more sense in my yead than a dumbledore,”
George candidly confessed. And by a dumbledore he meant a humble-bee.
“It do take me such a time to mind any thing, sir.”
“Well, never mind, Gearge,” said the miller; “if thee’s slow, thee’s
sure. What do ’ee remember about the book, now, Gearge? A don’t mind
giving thee five shilling, if thee finds un, Gearge.”
“A had un down at the burying, I ’member quite well now, sir. To put the
little un’s name in ’twas. I thowt a hadn’t been down zince christening,
I be so stoopid sartinly.”
“What are you talking about, ye vool?” roared the miller.
“The book, sir, sartinly,” said George, his honest face beaming with
good-humor. “The Vamly Bible, Master Lake.”
And as the windmiller went off muttering something which the Family Bible
would by no means have sanctioned, George returned chuckling to a
leisurely use of his broom on the round-house floor.
Master Lake did not find the pocket-book, and after a day or two it was
advertised in a local paper, and a reward of five pounds offered for it.
George Sannel was seated one evening in the “Heart of Oak” inn, sipping
some excellent home-brewed ale, which had been warmed up for his
consumption in a curious funnel-shaped pipkin, when his long lop-ears
caught a remark made by the inn-keeper, who was reading out bits from the
local paper to a small audience, unable to read it for themselves.
“Five pound reward!” he read. “Lor massy! There be a sum to be easily
earned by a sharp-eyed chap with good luck on ’s side.”
“And how then, Master Chuter?” said George, pausing, with the steaming
mug half-way to his lips.
“Haw, haw!” roared the inn-keeper: “you be a sharp-eyed chap, too! Do
’ee think ’twould suit thee, Gearge? Thee’s a sprack chap, sartinly,
Gearge!”
“Haw, haw, haw!” roared the other members of the company, as they slowly
realized Master Chuter’s irony at the expense of the “voolish” Gearge.
George took their rough banter in excellent part. He sipped his beer,
and grinned like a cat at his own expense. But after the guffaws had
subsided, he said, “Thee’s not told un about that five pound yet, Master
Chuter.”
The curiosity of the company was by this time aroused, and Master Chuter
explained: “’Tis a gentleman by the name of Ford as is advertising for a
pocket-book, a seems to have lost on the downs, near to Master Lake’s
windmill. ’Tis thy way, too, Gearge, after all. Thee must get up yarly,
Gearge. ’Tis the yarly bird catches the worm. And tell Master Lake from
me, ’ll have all the young varments in the place a driving their pigs up
to his mill, to look for the pocket-book, while they makes believe to be
minding their pigs.”
“’Tis likely, too,” said George. And the two or three very aged laborers
in smocks, and one other lubberly boy, who composed the rest of the
circle, added, severally and collectively, “’Tis likely, too.”
But, as George beat his way home over the downs in the dusk, he said
aloud, under cover of the roaring wind, and in all the security of the
open country,—
“Vive pound! vive pound! And a offered me vive shilling for un. Master
Lake, you be dog-ged cute; but Gearge bean’t quite such a vool as a
looks.”
After a short time the advertisement was withdrawn.
CHAPTER VI.
GEORGE GOES COURTING.—GEORGE AS AN ENEMY.—GEORGE AS A FRIEND.—ABEL PLAYS
SCHOOL-MASTER.—THE LOVE-LETTER.—MOERDYK.—THE MILLER-MOTH.—AN ANCIENT
DITTY.
ONE day George Sannel asked and obtained leave for a holiday.
On the morning in question, he dressed himself in the cleanest of smocks,
greased his boots, stuck a bloody warrior, or dark-colored wallflower, in
his bosom, put a neatly folded, clean cotton handkerchief into his
pocket,—which, even if he did not use it, was a piece of striking
dandyism,—and scrubbed his honest face to such a point of cleanliness
that Mrs. Lake was almost constrained to remark that she thought he must
be going courting.
George did not blush,—he never blushed,—but he looked “voolish” enough to
warrant the suspicion that his errand was a tender one, and he had no
other reason to give for his spruce appearance.
It was, perhaps, in his confusion that he managed to convey a mistaken
notion of the place to which he was going to Mrs. Lake. She was under
the impression that he went to the neighboring town, whereas he went to
one in an exactly opposite direction, and some miles farther away.
He went to the bank, too, which seems an unlikely place for tender tryst;
but George’s proceedings were apt to be less direct than the simplicity
of his looks and speech would have led a stranger to suppose. When he
reached home, the windmiller and his family were going to bed, for the
night was still, and the mill idle. George betook himself at once to
where his truckle-bed stood in the round-house, and proceeded to light
his mill-candlestick, which was stuck into the wall.
From the chink into which it was stuck he then counted seven bricks
downwards, and the seventh yielded to a slight effort and came out. It
was the door, so to speak, of a hole in the wall of the mill, from which
he drew a morocco-bound pocket-book. After an uneasy glance over his
shoulder, to make sure that the long dark shadow which stretched from his
own heels, and shifted with the draught in which the candle flared, was
not the windmiller creeping up behind him, he took a letter out of the
book and held it to the light as if to read it. But he never turned the
page, and at last replaced it with a sigh. Then he put the pocket-book
back into the hole, and pushed in after it his handkerchief, which was
tied round something which chinked as he pressed it in. Then he replaced
the brick, and went to bed. He said nothing about the bank in the
morning nor about the hole in the mill-wall; and he parried Mrs. Lake’s
questions with gawky grins and well-assumed bashfulness.
Abel overheard his mother’s jokes on the subject of “Gearge’s young
’ooman,” and they recurred to him when he and George formed a curious
alliance, which demands explanation.
It was not solely because the windmiller looked favorably upon the little
Jan that he and Abel were now allowed to wander in the business parts of
the windmill, when they could not be out of doors, to an extent never
before permitted to the children. Part of the change was due to a change
in the miller’s man.
However childlike in some respects himself, George was not fond of
children, and he had hitherto seemed to have a particular spite against
Abel. He, quite as often as the miller, would drive the boy from the
round-house, and thwart his fancy for climbing the ladders to see the
processes of the different floors.
Abel would have been happy for hours together watching the great stones
grind, or the corn poured by golden showers into the hopper on its way to
the stones below. Many a time had he crept up and hidden himself behind
a sack; but George seemed to have an impish ingenuity in discovering his
hiding-places, and would drive him out as a dog worries a cat, crying,
“Come out, thee little varment! Master Lake he don’t allow thee
hereabouts.”
The cleverness of the miller’s man in discovering poor Abel’s retreats
probably arose from the fact that he had so rooted a dislike for the
routine work of his daily duties that he would rather employ himself
about the mill in any way than by attending to the mill-business, and
that his idleness and stupidity over work were only equalled by his
industry and shrewdness in mischief.
Poor Abel had a dread of the great, gawky, mischievous-looking man, which
probably prevented his complaining to his mother of many a sly pinch and
buffet which he endured from him. And George took some pains to keep up
this wholesome awe of himself, by vague and terrifying speeches, and by a
trick of what he called “dropping on” poor Abel in the dusk, with hideous
grimaces and uncouth sounds.
He once came thus upon Abel in an upper floor, and the boy fled from him
so hastily that he caught his foot in the ladder and fell headlong.
Though it must have been quite uncertain for some moments whether Abel
had not broken his neck, the miller’s man displayed no anxiety. He only
clapped his hands upon his knees, in a sort of uncouth ecstasy of spite,
saying, “Down a comes vlump, like a twoad from roost. Haw, haw, haw!”
Happily, Abel fell with little more damage to himself than the mill-cats
experienced in many such a tumble, as they fled before the tormenting
George.
But, after all this, it was with no small surprise that Abel found
himself the object of attentions from the miller’s man, which bore the
look of friendliness.
At first, when George made civil speeches, and invited Abel to “see the
stwones a-grinding,” he only felt an additional terror, being convinced
that mischief was meant in reality. But, when days and weeks went by,
and he wandered unmolested from floor to floor, with many a kindly word
from George, and not a single cuff or nip, the sweet-tempered Abel began
to feel gratitude, and almost an affection, for his quondam tormentor.
George, for his part, had hitherto done some violence to his own feelings
by his constant refusal to allow Abel to help him to sweep the mill or
couple the sacks for lifting. He would have been only too glad to put
some of his own work on the shoulders of another, had it not been for the
vexatious thought that he would be giving pleasure by so doing where he
only wanted to annoy. And in his very unamiable disposition malice was a
stronger quality even than idleness.
But now, when for some reason best known to himself, he wished to win
Abel’s regard, it was a slight recompense to him for restraining his love
of tormenting that he got a good deal of work out of Abel at odd moments
when the miller was away. So well did he manage this, that a marked
improvement in the tidiness of the round-house drew some praise from his
master.
“Thee’ll be a sprack man yet, Gearge,” said the windmiller,
encouragingly. “Thee takes the broom into the corners now.”
“So I do,” said George, unblushingly, “so I do. But lor, Master Lake,
what a man you be to notice un!” George’s kinder demeanor towards Abel
began shortly after the coming of the little Jan, and George himself
accounted for it in the following manner:—
“You do be kind to me now, Gearge,” said Abel, gratefully, as he stood
one day, with the baby in his arms, watching the miller’s man emptying a
sack of grain into the hopper.
“I likes to see thee with that babby, Abel,” said George, pausing in his
work. “Thee’s a good boy, Abel, and careful. I likes to do any thing
for thee, Abel.”
“I wish I could do any thing for thee, Gearge,” said Abel; “but I be too
small to help the likes of you, Gearge.”
“If you’re small, you’re sprack,” said the miller’s man. “Thee’s a good
scholar, too, Abel. I’ll be bound thee can read, now? And a poor gawney
like I doesn’t know’s letters.”
“I can read a bit, Gearge,” said Abel, with pride; “but I’ve been at home
a goodish while; but mother says she’ll send I to school again in spring,
if the little un gets on well and walks.”
“I wish I could read,” said George, mournfully; “but time’s past for me
to go to school, Abel; and who’d teach a great lummakin vool like I his
letters?”
“I would, Gearge, I would!” cried Abel, his eyes sparkling with
earnestness. “I can teach thee thy letters, and by the time thee’s
learned all I know, maybe I’ll have been to school again, and learned
some more.”
This was the foundation of a curious kind of friendship between Abel and
the miller’s man.
On the same shelf with the “Vamly Bible,” before alluded to, was a real
old horn-book, which had belonged to the windmiller’s grandmother. It
was simply a sheet on which the letters of the alphabet, and some few
words of one syllable, were printed, and it was protected in its frame by
a transparent front of thin horn, through which the letters could be
read, just as one sees the prints through the ground-glass of “drawing
slates.”
From this horn-book Abel labored patiently in teaching George his
letters. It was no light task. George had all the cunning and
shrewdness with which he credited himself; but a denser head for any
intellectual effort could hardly have been found for the seeking. Still
they struggled on, and as George went about the mill he might have been
heard muttering,—
“A B C G. No! Cuss me for a vool! A B C _D_. Why didn’t they whop my
letters into I when a was a boy? A B C”—and so persevering with an
industry which he commonly kept for works of mischief.
One evening he brought home a newspaper from the Heart of Oak, and when
Mrs. Lake had taken the baby, he persuaded Abel to come into the
round-house and give him a lesson. Abel could read so much of it that
George was quite overwhelmed by his learning.
“Thee be’s mortal larned, Abel, sartinly. But I’ll never read like
thee,” he added, despairingly. “Drattle th’ old witch; why didn’t she
give I some schooling?” He spoke with spiteful emphasis, and Abel, too
well used to his rough language to notice the uncivil reference to his
mother, said with some compassion,—
“Were you never sent to school then, Gearge?”
“They should ha’ kept me there,” said George, self-defensively. “I
played moocher,” he continued,—by which he meant truant,—“and then they
whopped I, and a went home to mother, and she kept un at home, the old
vool!”
“Well, Gearge, thee must work hard, and I’ll teach thee, Gearge, I’ll
teach thee!” said little Abel, proudly. “And by-and-by, Gearge, we’ll
get a slate, and I’ll teach thee to write too, Gearge, that I will!”
George’s small eyes gave a slight squint, as they were apt to do when he
was thinking profoundly.
“Abel,” said he, “can thee read writing, my boy?”
“I think I could, Gearge,” said Abel, “if ’twas pretty plain.”
“Abel, my boy,” said George, after a pause, with a broad sweet smile upon
his “voolish” face, “go to the door and see if the wind be rising at all;
us mustn’t forget th’ old mill, Abel, with us larning. Sartinly not,
Abel, mun.”
Proud of the implied partnership in the care of the mill, Abel hastened
to the outer door. As he passed the inner one, leading into the
dwelling-room, he could hear his mother crooning a strange, drony, old
local ditty, as she put the little Jan to sleep. As Abel went out, she
was singing the first verse:—
“The swallow twitters on the barn,
The rook is cawing on the tree,
And in the wood the ringdove coos,
But my false love hath fled from me.”
Abel opened the door, and looked out. One of those small white moths
known as “millers” went past him. The night was still,—so utterly still
that no sound of any sort whatever broke upon the ear. In dead silence
and loneliness stood the mill. Even the miller-moth had gone; and a cat
ran in by Abel’s legs, as if the loneliness without were too much for
her. The sky was gray.
Abel went back to the round-house, where George was struggling to fix the
candlestick securely in the wall.
“Cuss the thing!” he exclaimed, whilst the skin of his face took a
mottled hue that was the nearest approach he ever made to a blush. “The
tallow’ve been a dropping, Abel, my boy. I think ’twas the wind when you
opened the door, maybe. And I’ve been a trying to fix un more firmly.
That’s all, Abel; that’s all.”
“There ain’t no signs of wind,” said Abel. “It’s main quiet and unked
too outside, Gearge. And I do think it be like rain. There was a
miller-moth, Gearge; do that mean any thing?”
“I can’t say,” said George. “I bean’t weatherwise myself, Abel. But if
there be no wind, there be no work, Abel; so us may go back to our
larning. Look here, my boy,” he added, as Abel reseated himself on the
grain-sack which did duty as chair of instruction, and drawing, as he
spoke, a letter forth to the light; “come to the candle, Abel, and see if
so be thee can read this, but don’t tell any one I showed it thee, Abel.”
“Not me, Gearge,” said Abel, warmly; and he added,—“Be it from thy young
’ooman, Gearge?”
No rustic swain ever simpered more consciously or looked more foolish
than George under this accusation, as he said, “Be quiet, Abel, do ’ee.”
“She be a good scholar, too!” said Abel, looking admiringly at the
closely written sheet.
George could hardly disguise the sudden look of fury in his face, but he
hastily covered up the letter with his hands in such a manner as only to
leave the first word on the page visible. There was a deeply cunning
reason for this clever manœuvre. George held himself to be pretty
“cute,” and he reckoned that, by only showing one word at a time, he
could effectually prevent any attempt on Abel’s part to read the letter
himself without giving its contents to George. Like many other cunning
people, George overreached himself. The first word was beyond Abel’s
powers, though he might possibly have satisfied George’s curiosity on one
essential point, by deciphering a name or two farther on. But the clever
George concluded that he had boasted beyond his ability, so he put the
letter away. Abel tried hard at the one word which George exhibited, and
gazed silently at it for some time with a puzzled face. “Spell it, mun,
spell it!” cried the miller’s man, impatiently. It was a process which
he had seen to succeed, when a long word had puzzled his teacher in the
newspaper, before now.
“M O E R, mower; D Y K, dik,” said Abel. But he looked none the wiser
for the effort.
“Mower dik! What be that?” said George, peering at the word. “Do’ee
think it be Mower dik, Abel?”
“I be sure,” said Abel.
“Or do ’ee think ’tis ‘_My dear Dick_’?” suggested George, anxiously, and
with a sort of triumph in his tone, as if that were quite what he
expected.
“No, no. ’Tis an O, Gearge, that second letter. Besides, twould be _My
dear Gearge_ to thee, thou knows.”
Again the look with which the miller’s man favored Abel was far from
pleasant. But he controlled his voice to its ordinary drawl (always a
little slower and more simple sounding, when he specially meant
mischief).
“So ’twould, Abel. So ’twould. What a vool I be, to be sure! But give
it to I now. We’ll look at it another time, Abel.”
“I be very sorry, Gearge,” said Abel, who had a consciousness that the
miller’s man was ill-pleased in spite of his civility. “It be so long
since I was at school, and it be such a queer word. Do ’ee think she can
have spelt un wrong, Gearge?”
“’Tis likely she have,” said George, regaining his composure.
“Abel! Abel! Abel!” cried the mother from the dwelling-room. “Come to
bed, child!”
“Good-night, Gearge. I’m main sorry to be so stupid, Gearge,” said Abel,
and off he ran.
Mrs. Lake was walking up and down, rocking the little Jan in her arms,
who was wailing fretfully.
“I be puzzled to know what ails un,” said Mrs. Lake, in answer to Abel’s
questions. “He be quite in a way to-night. But get thee to bed, Abel.”
And though Abel begged hard to be allowed to try his powers of soothing
with the little Jan, Mrs. Lake insisted upon keeping the baby herself;
and Abel undressed, and crept into the press-bed. He fell asleep in
spite of a somewhat disturbed mind. That mysterious word and George’s
evident displeasure worried him, and he was troubled also by the unusual
fretfulness of the little Jan, and the sound of sorrow in his baby wail.
His last waking thoughts were a strange mixture, passing into stranger
dreams.
The word Moerdyk danced before his eyes, but brought no meaning with it.
Jan’s cries troubled him, and with both there blended the droning of the
ancient plaintive ditty, which the foster-mother sang over and over again
as she rocked the child in her arms. That wail of the baby’s must have
in some strange manner recalled the first night of his arrival, when Abel
found him wailing on the bed. For the fierce eyes of the strange
gentleman haunted Abel’s dreams, but in the face of the miller’s man.
The poor boy dreamed horribly of being “dropped on” by George, with
fierce black eyes added to the terrors of his uncouth grimaces. He
seemed to himself to fly blindly and vainly through the mill from his
tormentor, till George was driven from his thoughts by his coming
suddenly upon the little Jan, wailing as he really did wail, round whose
head a miller-moth was sailing slowly, and singing in a human voice:—
“The swallow twitters on the barn,
The rook is cawing on the tree,
And in the wood the ringdove coos,
But my false love hath fled from me.
Like tiny pipe of wheaten straw,
The wren his little note doth swell,
And every living thing that flies,
Of his true love doth fondly tell.
But I alone am left to pine,
And sit beneath the withy tree;
For truth and honesty be gone,
And my false love hath fled from me.”
CHAPTER VII.
ABEL GOES TO SCHOOL AGAIN.—DAME DATCHETT.—A COLUMN OF SPELLING.—ABEL
PLAYS MOOCHER.—THE MILLER’S MAN CANNOT MAKE UP HIS MIND.
ABEL went to school again in the spring, and, though George would have
been better pleased had he forgotten the whole affair, he remembered the
word in George’s young woman’s love-letter which had puzzled him; and
never was a spelling-lesson set him among the M’s that he did not hope to
come across it and to be able to demand the meaning of Moerdyk from his
Dame.
Without the excuse of its coming in the column of spelling set by
herself, Abel dared not ask her to solve his puzzle; for never did
teacher more warmly resent questions which she was unable to answer than
Dame Datchett.
Abel could not fully make up his mind whether it should be looked up
among two-syllabled or three-syllabled words. He decided for the former,
and one day brought his spelling-book to George in the round-house.
“I’ve been a looking for that yere word, Gearge,” said he. “There’s lots
of Mo’s, but it bean’t among ’em. Here they be. Words of two syllables;
M, Ma, Me, Mi; here they be, Mo.” And Abel began to rattle off the
familiar column at a good rate, George looking earnestly over his
shoulder, and following the boy’s finger as it moved rapidly down the
page. “Mocking, Modern, Mohawk, Molar, Molly, Moment, Money, Moping,
Moral, Mortal, Moses, Motive, Movement.”
“Stop a bit, mun,” cried George; “what do all they words mean? They
bothers me.”
“I knows some of ’em,” said Abel, “and I asked Dame Datchett about the
others, but she do be so cross; and I thinks some of ’em bothered she
too. There’s mocking. I knows that. ‘What’s a modern, Dame?’ says I.
‘A muddle-headed fellow the likes of you,’ says she. ‘What’s a mohawk,
Dame?’ says I. ‘It’s what you’ll come to before long, ye young
hang-gallus,’ says she. I was feared on her, Gearge, I can tell ’ee; but
I tried my luck again. ‘What’s a molar, Dame?’ says I. ‘’Tis a wus word
than t’other,’ says she; ‘and, if ’ee axes me any more voolish questions,
I’ll break thee yead for ’ee.’ Do ’ee think ’tis a very bad word,
Gearge?” added Abel, with a rather indefensible curiosity.
“I never heard un,” said George. And this was perhaps decisive against
the Dame’s statement. “And I don’t believe un neither. I think it
bothered she. I believe ’tis a genteel word for a man as catches oonts.
They call oonts _moles_ in some parts, so p’r’aps they calls a man as
catches moles a molar, as they calls a man as drives a mill a miller.”
“’Tis likely too, Gearge,” said Abel. “Well! Molly we knows. And
moment, and moping, and moral.”
“What’s moral?” inquired George.
“’Tis what they put at the end of Vables, Gearge. There’s Vables at the
end of the spelling-book, and I’ve read un all. There’s the Wolf and the
Lamb, and”—
“I knows now,” said George. “’Tis like the last verse of that song about
the Harnet and the Bittle. Go on, Abel.”
“Mortal. That’s swearing. Moses. That’s in the Bible, Gearge. Motive.
I thought I’d try un just once more. ‘What’s a motive, Dame?’ says I.
‘I’ve got un here,’ says she, quite quiet-like. But I seed her feeling
under ’s chair, and I know’d ’twas for the strap, and I ran straight off,
spelling-book and all, Gearge.”
“So thee’ve been playing moocher, eh?” said George, with an unpleasant
twinkle in his eyes. “What’ll Master Lake say to that?”
“Don’t ’ee tell un, Gearge!” Abel implored; “and, O Gearge! let I tell
mother about the word. Maybe she’ve heard tell of it. Let I show her
the letter, Gearge. She’ll read it for ’ee. She’s a scholard, is
mother.”
There was no mistaking now the wrath in George’s face. The fury that is
fed by fear blazes pretty strongly at all times.
“Look ’ee, Abel, my boy,” said he, pinching Abel’s shoulder till he
turned red and white with pain. “If thee ever speaks of that letter and
that word to any mortal soul, I’ll tell Master Lake thee plays moocher,
and I’ll half kill thee myself. Thee shall rue the day ever thee was
born!” he added, almost beside himself with rage and terror. And as,
after a few propitiating words, Abel fled from the mill, George ground
his hands together and muttered, “Motive! I wish the old witch had
motived every bone in thee body, or let me do ’t!”
Master George Sannel was indeed a little irritable at this stage of his
career. Like the miller, he had had one stroke of good luck, but
capricious fortune would not follow up the blow.
He had made five pounds pretty easily. But how to turn some other
property of which he had become possessed to profit for himself was,
after months of waiting, a puzzle still.
He was well aware that his own want of education was the great hindrance
to his discovering for himself the exact worth of what he had got. And
to his suspicious nature the idea of letting any one else into his
secret, even to gain help, was quite intolerable.
Abel seemed to be no nearer even to the one word that George had showed
him, after weeks of “schooling,” and George himself progressed so slowly
in learning to read that he was at times tempted to give up the effort in
despair.
Of his late outburst against Abel he afterwards repented, as impolitic,
and was soon good friends again with his very placable teacher.
Much of the time when he should have been at work did George spend in
“puzzling” over his position. Sometimes, as from an upper window of the
mill he saw the little Jan in Abel’s arms, he would mutter,—
“If a body were to kidnap un, would they advertise he, I wonders?” and
after some consideration would shake his white head doubtfully, saying,
“No, they wants to get rid of un, or they wouldn’t have brought un here.”
Happily for poor little Jan, the unscrupulous rustic rejected the next
idea which came to him as too doubtful of success.
“I wonder if they’d come down something handsome to them as could tell
’em the young varmint was off their hands for good and all. ’Twould save
un ten shilling a week. Ten shilling a week! I heard un with my own
ears. I’d a kep’ un for five, if they’d asked me. I wonders now.
Little uns like that does get stole by gipsies sometimes. Varmer Smith’s
son were, and never heard on again. They falls into a mill-race too
sometimes. They be so venturesome. But I doubt ’twouldn’t do. Them as
it belongs to might be glad enough to get rid of un, and save their
credit and their money too by turning upon I after all.”
The miller’s man puzzled himself in vain. He could think of no mode of
action at once safe and certain of success. He did not even know whether
what he possessed had any value, or how or where to make use of it. But
a sort of dim hope of seeing his way yet kept him about the mill, and he
persevered in the effort to learn to read, and kept his big ears open for
any thing that might drop from the miller or his wife to throw light on
the history of Jan, with whom his hopes were bound up.
Meanwhile, with a dogged patience, he bided his time.
CHAPTER VIII.
VISITORS AT THE MILL.—A WINDMILLER OF THE THIRD GENERATION.—CURE FOR
WHOOPING-COUGH.—MISS AMABEL ADELINE AMMABY.—DOCTORS DISAGREE.
ONE of the earliest of Jan’s remembrances—of those remembrances, I mean,
which remained with him when childhood was past—was of little Miss
Amabel, from the Grange, being held in the hopper of the windmill for
whooping cough.
Jan was between three and four years old at this time, the idol of his
foster-mother, and a great favorite with his adopted brothers and
sisters. A quaint little fellow he was, with a broad,
intellectual-looking face, serious to old-fashionedness, very fair, and
with eyes “like slans.”
He was standing one morning at Mrs. Lake’s apron-string, his arms clasped
lovingly, but somewhat too tightly, round the waist of a sandy kitten,
who submitted with wonderful good-humor to the well-meant strangulation,
his black eyes intently fixed upon the dumplings which his foster-mother
was dexterously rolling together, when a strange footstep was heard
shuffling uncertainly about on the floor of the round-house just outside
the dwelling-room door. Mrs. Lake did not disturb herself. Country folk
were constantly coming with their bags of grist, and both George and the
miller were at hand, for a nice breeze was blowing, and the mill ground
merrily.
After a few seconds, however, came a modest knock on the room-door, and
Mrs. Lake, wiping her hands, proceeded to admit the knocker. She was a
smartly dressed woman, who bore such a mass of laces and finery, with a
white woollen shawl spread over it, apparently with the purpose of
smothering any living thing there might chance to be beneath, as, in Mrs.
Lake’s experienced eyes, could be nothing less than a baby of the most
genteel order.
The manners of the nurse were most genteel also, and might have quite
overpowered Mrs. Lake, but that the windmiller’s wife had in her youth
been in good service herself, and, though an early marriage had prevented
her from rising beyond the post of nursemaid, she was fairly familiar
with the etiquette of the nursery and of the servants’ hall.
“Good morning, ma’am,” said the nurse, who no sooner ceased to walk than
she began a kind of diagonal movement without progression, in which one
heel clacked, and all her petticoats swung, and the baby who, head
downwards, was snorting with gaping mouth under the woollen coverlet, was
supposed to be soothed. “Good morning, ma’am. You’ll excuse my
intruding”—
“Not at all, mum,” said Mrs. Lake. By which she did not mean to reject
the excuse, but to disclaim the intrusion.
When the nurse was not speaking, she kept time to her own rocking by a
peculiar click of her tongue against the roof of her mouth; and indeed it
sometimes mingled, almost confusingly, with her conversation. “You’re
very obliging, ma’am, I’m sure,” said she, and, persuaded by Mrs. Lake,
she took a seat. “You’ll excuse me for asking a singular question,
ma’am, but _was your husband’s father and grandfather both millers_?”
“They was, mum,” said Mrs. Lake. “My husband’s father’s father built
this mill where we now stands. It cost him a deal of money, and he died
with a debt upon it. My husband’s father paid un off; and he meant to
have built a house, mum, but he never did, worse luck for us. He allus
says, says he,—that’s my husband’s father, mum,—’I’ll leave that to
Abel,’—that’s my maester, mum. But nine year ago come Michaelmas”—
Mrs. Lake’s story was here interrupted by a frightful outburst of
coughing from the unfortunate baby, who on the removal of the woollen
shawl presented an appearance which would have been comical but for the
sympathy its condition demanded.
A very red and utterly shapeless little face lay, like a crushed
beet-root, in a mass of dainty laces almost voluminous enough to have
dressed out a bride. As a sort of crowning satire, the face in
particular was surrounded by a broad frill, spotted with bunches of pink
satin ribbon, and farther encased in a white satin hood of elaborate
workmanship and fringes.
[Picture: A very red and utterly shapeless little face lay, like a
crushed beet-root, in a mass of dainty laces almost voluminous enough to
have dressed out a bride]
The contrast between the natural red of the baby’s complexion and its
snowy finery was ludicrously suggestive of an over-dressed nigger, to
begin with; but when, in the paroxysms of its cough, the tiny creature’s
face passed by shades of plum-color to a bluish black, the result was
appalling to behold.
Mrs. Lake’s experienced ears were not slow to discover that the child had
got whooping-cough, which the nurse confessed was the case. She also
apologized for bringing in the baby among Mrs. Lake’s children, saying
that she had “thought of nothing but the poor little chirrub herself.”
“Don’t name it, mum,” replied the windmiller’s wife. “I always say if
children be to have things, they’ll have ’em; and if not, why they
won’t.” A theory which seems to sum up the views of the majority of
people in Mrs. Lake’s class of life upon the spread of disease.
“I’m sure I don’t know what’s coming to my poor head,” the nurse
continued: “I’ve not so much as told you who I am, ma’am. I’m nurse at
the Grange, ma’am, with Mr. Ammaby and Lady Louisa. They’ve been in
town, and her ladyship’s had the very best advice, and now we’ve come to
the country for three months, but the dear child don’t seem a bit the
better. And we’ve been trying every thing, I’m sure. For any thing I
heard of I’ve tried, as well as what the doctor ordered, and rubbing it
with some stuff Lady Louisa’s mamma insisted upon, too,—even to a frog
put into the dear child’s mouth, and drawed back by its legs, that’s
supposed to be a certain cure, but only frightened it into a fit I
thought it never would have come out of, as well as fetching her ladyship
all the way from her boudoir to know what was the matter—which I no more
dared tell her than fly.”
“Dear, dear!” said the miller’s wife; “have you tried goose-grease, mum?
’Tis an excellent thing.”
“Goose-grease, ma’am, and an excellent ointment from the bone-setter’s at
the toll-bar, which the butler paid for out of his own pocket, knowing it
to have done a world of good to his sister that had a bad leg, besides
being a certain cure for coughs, and cancer, and consumption as well.
And then the doctor’s _imprecation_ on its little chest, night and
morning, besides; but nothing don’t seem to do no good,” said the poor
nurse. “And so, ma’am,—her ladyship being gone to the town,—thinks I,
I’ll take the dear child to the windmill. For they do say,—where I came
from, ma’am,—that if a miller, that’s the son of a miller, and the
grandson of a miller, holds a child that’s got the whooping-cough in the
hopper of the mill whilst the mill’s going, it cures them, however bad
they be.”
The reason of the nurse’s visit being now made known, Mrs. Lake called
her husband, and explained to him what he was asked to do for “her
ladyship’s baby.” The miller scratched his head.
“I’ve heard my father say that his brother that drove a mill in Cheshire
had had it to do,” said he, “but I never did it myself, ma’am, nor ever
see un done. And a hopper be an ackerd place, ma’am. We’ve ground many
a cat in this mill, from getting in the hopper at nights for warmth.
However,” he added, “I suppose I can hold the little lady pretty tight.”
And finally, though with some unwillingness, the miller consented to try
the charm; being chiefly influenced by the wish not to disoblige the
gentlefolk at the Grange.
The little Jan had watched the proceedings of the visitors with great
attention. During the poor baby’s fit of coughing, he was so absorbed
that the sandy kitten slipped through his arms and made off, with her
tail as stiff as a sentry’s musket; and now that the miller took the baby
into his arms, Jan became excited, and asked, “What daddy do with un?”
“The old-fashioned little piece!” exclaimed the nurse, admiringly. And
Mrs. Lake added, “Let un see the little lady, maester.”
The miller held out the baby, and the nurse, removing a dainty
handkerchief edged with Valenciennes lace from its face, introduced it as
“Miss Amabel Adeline Ammaby;” and Mrs. Lake murmured, “What a lovely
little thing!” By which, for truth’s sake, it is to be hoped she meant
the lace-edged handkerchief.
In the exchange of civilities between the two women, the respective
children in their charge were admonished to kiss each other,—a feat which
was accomplished by Jan’s kissing the baby very tenderly, and with all
his usual gravity.
As this partly awoke the baby from a doze, its red face began to crease,
and pucker, and twist into various contortions, at which Jan gazed with a
sort of solemn curiosity in his black eyes.
“Stroke the little lady’s cheeks, love,” said Mrs. Lake, irrepressibly
proud of the winning ways and quaint grace which certainly did
distinguish her foster-child.
Jan leaned forward once more, and passed his little hand softly down the
baby’s face twice or thrice, as he was wont to stroke the sandy kitten,
as it slept with him, saying, “Poor itta pussy!”
“It’s not a puss-cat, bless his little heart!” said the matter-of-fact
nurse. “It’s little Miss Amabel Adeline Ammaby.”
“Say it, love!” said Mrs. Lake, adding, to the nurse, “he can say any
thing, mum.”
“Miss _Am—abel Ad—e—line Am—ma—by_,” prompted the nurse.
“Amabel!” said the little Jan, softly. But, after this feat, he took a
fit of childish reticence, and would say no more; whilst, deeply
resentful of the liberties Jan had taken, Miss Amabel Adeline Ammaby
twisted her features till she looked like a gutta-percha gargoyle, and
squalled as only a fretful baby can squall.
She was calmed at last, however, and the windmiller took her once more
into his arms, and Mrs. Lake carrying Jan, they all climbed up the narrow
ladder to the next floor.
Heavily ground the huge stones with a hundred and twenty revolutions a
minute, making the chamber shake as they went round.
They made the nurse giddy. The simplest machinery has a bewildering
effect upon an unaccustomed person. So has going up a ladder; which
makes you feel much less safe in the place to which it leads you than if
you had got there by a proper flight of stairs. So—very often—has
finding yourself face to face with the accomplishment of what you have
been striving for, if you happen to be weak-minded.
Under the combined influences of all these causes, the nurse listened
nervously to Master Lake, as he did the honors of the mill.
“Those be the mill-stones, ma’am. Pretty fastish they grinds, and they
goes faster when the wind’s gusty. Many a good cat they’ve ground as
flat as a pancake from the poor gawney beasts getting into the hopper.”
“Oh, sir!” cried the nurse, now thoroughly alarmed, “give me the young
lady back again. Deary, deary me! I’d no notion it was so dangerous.
Oh, don’t, sir! don’t!”
“Tut, tut! I’ll hold un safe, ma’am,” said the windmiller, who had all a
man’s dislike for shirking at the last moment what had once been decided
upon; and, as the nurse afterwards expressed it, before she had time to
scream, he had tucked Miss Amabel Adeline Ammaby’s finery well round her,
and had dipped her into the hopper and out again.
In that moment of suspense both the women had been silent, and the little
Jan had gazed steadily at the operation. As it safely ended, they both
broke simultaneously into words.
“You might have knocked me down with a feather, mum!” gasped Mrs. Lake.
“I couldn’t look, mum. I couldn’t have looked to save my life. I turned
my back.”
“I’d back ’ee allus to do the silliest thing as could be done, missus,”
said the miller, who had a pleasant husbandly way of commenting upon his
wife’s conversation to her disparagement, when she talked before him.
“As for me, ma’am,” the nurse said, “I couldn’t take my eyes off the dear
child’s hood. But move,—no thank you, ma’am,—I couldn’t have moved hand
or foot for a five-pound note, paid upon the spot.”
The baby got well. Whether the mill charm worked the cure, or whether
the fine fresh breezes of that healthy district made a change for the
better in the child’s state, could not be proved.
Nor were these the only possible causes of the recovery.
The kind-hearted butler blessed the day when he laid out three and
eightpence in a box of the bone-setter’s ointment, to such good purpose.
Lady Louisa’s mamma triumphantly hoped that it would be a lesson to her
dear daughter never again to set a London doctor’s advice (however
expensive) above a mother’s (she meant a grandmother’s) experience.
The cook said, “Goose-grease and kitchen physic for her!”
And of course the doctor very properly, as well as modestly, observed
that “he had confidently anticipated permanent beneficial results from a
persevering use of the embrocation.”
And only to the nurse and the windmiller’s family was it known that Miss
Amabel Adeline Ammaby had been dipped in the mill-hopper.
CHAPTER IX.
GENTRY BORN.—LEARNING LOST.—JAN’S BEDFELLOW.—AMABEL.
AFTER the nurse and baby had left the mill, Mrs. Lake showered extra
caresses upon the little Jan. It had given her a strange pleasure to see
him in contact with the Squire’s child. She knew enough of the manners
and customs, the looks and the intelligence of the children of educated
parents, to be aware that there were “makings” in those who were born
heirs to developed intellects, and the grace that comes of discipline,
very different from the “makings” to be found in the “voolish”
descendants of ill-nurtured and uneducated generations. She had no
philosophical—hardly any reasonable or commendable—thoughts about it.
But she felt that Jan’s countenance and his “ways” justified her first
belief that he was “gentry born.”
She was proud of his pretty manners. Indeed, curiously enough, she had
recalled her old memories of nursery etiquette under a first-rate upper
nurse in “her young days,” to apply them to the little Jan’s training.
Why she had not done this with her own children is a question that cannot
perhaps be solved till we know why so many soldiers, used for, it may be,
a quarter of a century to personal cleanliness as scrupulous as a
gentleman’s, and to enforced neatness of clothes, rooms, and general
habits, take back to dirt and slovenliness with greediness when they
leave the service; and why many a nurse, whose voice and manners were
beyond reproach in her mistress’s nursery, brings up her own children in
after life on the village system of bawling, banging, threatening,
cuddling, stuffing, smacking, and coarse language, just as if she had
never experienced the better discipline attainable by gentle firmness and
regular habits.
Mrs. Lake had a small satisfaction in Jan’s brief and limited intercourse
with so genteel a baby, and after it was all over she amused herself with
making him repeat the baby’s very genteel (and as she justly said
“uncommon”) name.
When Abel came back from school, he resumed his charge, and Mrs. Lake
went about other work. She was busy, and the nurse-boy put Jan to bed
himself. The sandy kitten waited till Jan was fairly established, so as
to receive her comfortably, and then she dropped from the roof of the
press-bed, and he cuddled her into his arms, where she purred like a
kettle just beginning to sing.
Outside, the wind was rising, and, passing more or less through the outer
door, it roared in the round-house; but they were well sheltered in the
dwelling-room, and could listen complacently to the gusts that whirled
the sails, and made the heavy stones fly round till they shook the roof.
Just above the press-bed a candle was stuck in the wall, and the dim
light falling through the gloom upon the children made a scene worthy of
the pencil of Rembrandt, that great son of a windmiller.
When Mrs. Lake found time to come to the corner where the old press-bed
stood, the kitten was asleep, and Jan very nearly so; and by them sat
Abel, watching every breath that his foster-brother drew. And, as he
watched, his trustworthy eyes and most sweet smile lighting up a face to
which his forefathers had bequeathed little beauty or intellect, he might
have been the guardian angel of the nameless Jan, scarcely veiled under
the likeness of a child.
His mother smiled tenderly back upon him. He was very dear to her, and
not the less so for his tenderness to Jan.
Then she stooped to kiss her foster-child, who opened his black eyes very
wide, and caught the sleeping kitten round the head, in the fear that it
might be taken from him.
“Tell Abel the name of pretty young lady you see to-day, love,” said Mrs.
Lake.
But Jan was well aware of his power over the miller’s wife, and was apt
to indulge in caprice. So he only shook his head, and cuddled the kitten
more tightly than before.
“Tell un, Janny dear. Tell un, there’s a lovey!” said Mrs. Lake. “Who
did daddy put in the hopper?” But still Jan gazed at nothing in
particular with a sly twinkle in his black eyes, and continued to squeeze
poor Sandy to a degree that can have been little less agonizing than the
millstone torture; and obdurate he would probably have remained, but that
Abel, bending over him, said, “Do ’ee tell poor Abel, Jan.”
The child fixed his bright eyes steadily on Abel’s well-loved face for a
few seconds, and then said quite clearly, in soft, evenly accented
syllables,—
“Amabel.”
And the sandy kitten, having escaped with its life, crept back into Jan’s
bosom and purred itself to rest.
CHAPTER X.
ABEL AT HOME.—JAN OBJECTS TO THE MILLER’S MAN.—THE ALPHABET.—THE CHEAP
JACK.—“PITCHERS.”
POOR Abel was not fated to get much regular schooling. He particularly
liked learning, but the interval was all too brief between the time when
his mother was able to spare him from housework and the time when his
father began to employ him in the mill.
George got more lazy and stupid, instead of less so, and though in some
strange manner he kept his place, yet when Master Lake had once begun to
employ his son, he found that he would get along but ill without him.
To Jan, Abel’s being about the windmill gave the utmost satisfaction. He
played with his younger foster-brothers and sisters contentedly enough,
but his love for Abel, and for being with Abel, was quite another thing.
Mrs. Lake, too, had no confidence in any one but Abel as a nurse for her
darling; the consequence of which was, that the little Jan was constantly
trotting at his foster-brother’s heels through the round-house,
attempting valiant escalades on the ladders, and covering himself from
head to foot with flour in the effort to cultivate a miller’s thumb.
One day Mrs. Lake, having sent the other children off to school, was bent
upon having a thorough cleaning-out of the dwelling-room, during which
process Jan was likely to be in her way; so she caught him up in her arms
and went to seek Abel in the round-house.
She had the less scruple in availing herself of his services, that there
was no wind, and business was not brisk in the windmill.
“Maester!” she cried, “can Abel mind Jan a bit? I be going to clean the
house.”
“Ay, ay,” said the windmiller, “Abel can mind un. I be going to the
village myself, but there’s Gearge to start, if so be the wind rises.
And then if he want Abel, thee must take the little un again.”
“Sartinly I will,” said his wife; and Abel willingly received his charge
and carried him off to play among the sacks.
George joined them once, but Jan had a rooted and unconquerable dislike
to the miller’s man, and never replied to his advances with any thing
more friendly than anger or tears. This day was no exception to others
in this respect; and after a few fruitless attempts to make himself
acceptable, in the course of which he trod on the sandy kitten’s tail,
who ran up Jan’s back and spat at her enemy from that vantage-ground,
George went off muttering in terms by no means complimentary to the
little Jan. Abel did his best to excuse the capricious child to George,
besides chiding him for his rudeness—with very little effect. Jan dried
his black eyes as the miller’s man made off, but he looked no more
ashamed of himself than a good dog looks who has growled or refused the
paw of friendship to some one for excellent reasons of his own.
After George had gone, they played about happily enough, Jan riding on
Abel’s back, and the sandy kitten on Jan’s, in and out among the
corn-sacks, full canter as far as the old carved meal-chest, and back to
the door again.
Poor Abel, with his double burden, got tired at last, and they sat down
and sifted flour for the education of their thumbs. Jan was pinching and
flattening his with a very solemn face, in the hope of attaining to a
miller’s thumb by a shorter process than the common one, when Abel
suddenly said,—
“I tell thee what, then, Jan: ’tis time thee learned thy letters. And
I’ll teach thee. Come hither.”
Jan jumped up, thereby pitching the kitten headlong from his shoulders,
and ran to Abel, who was squatting by some spilled flour near a sack, and
was smoothing it upon the floor with his hands. Then very slowly and
carefully he traced the letter A in the flour, keenly watched by Jan.
“That’s A,” said he. “Say it, Jan. A.”
“A,” replied Jan, obediently. But he had no sooner said it, than, adding
hastily, “Let Jan do it,” he traced a second A, slightly larger than
Abel’s, in three firm and perfectly proportioned strokes.
His moving finger was too much for the kitten’s feelings, and she sprang
into the flour and pawed both the A’s out of existence.
Jan slapped her vigorously, and having smoothed the surface once more, he
drew A after A with the greatest rapidity, scrambling along sideways like
a crab, and using both hands indifferently, till the row stretched as far
as the flour would permit.
Abel’s pride in his pupil was great, and he was fain to run off to call
his mother to see the performances of their prodigy, but Jan was too
impatient to spare him.
“Let Jan do more!” he cried.
Abel traced a B in the flour. “That’s B, Jan,” said he.
“Jan do it,” replied Jan, confidently.
“But say it,” said his teacher, restraining him. “Say B, Jan.”
“B,” said Jan, impatiently; and adding, “Jan do it,” he began a row of
B’s. He hesitated slightly before making the second curve, and looked at
his model, after which he went down the line as before, and quite as
successfully. And the kitten went down also, pawing out each letter as
it was made, under the impression that the whole affair was a game of
play with herself.
“There bean’t a letter that bothers him,” cried Abel, triumphantly, to
the no less triumphant foster-mother.
Jan had, indeed, gone through the whole alphabet, with the utmost ease
and self-confidence; but his remembrance of the names of the letters he
drew so readily proved to be far less perfect than his representations of
them on the floor of the round-house.
Abel found his pupil’s progress hindered by the very talent that he had
displayed. He was so anxious to draw the letters that he would not learn
them, and Abel was at last obliged to make one thing a condition of the
other.
“Say it then, Jan,” he would cry, “and then thee shall make ’em.”
Mrs. Lake commissioned Abel to buy a small slate and pencil for Jan at
the village shop, and these were now the child’s favorite toys. He would
sit quiet for any length of time with them. Even the sandy kitten was
neglected, or got a rap on its nose with the slate-pencil, when to toy
with the moving point had been too great a temptation to be resisted.
For a while Jan’s taste for wielding the pencil was solely devoted to
furthering his learning to read. He drew letters only till the day that
the Cheap Jack called.
The Cheap Jack was a travelling pedler, who did a good deal of business
in that neighborhood. He was not a pedler pure, for he had a little shop
in the next town. Nature had not favored him. He was a hunchback. He
was, or pretended to be, deaf. He had a very ugly face, made uglier by
dirt, above which he wore a mangy hair cap. He sold rough pottery, cheap
crockery and glass, mock jewelry, low song-books, framed pictures,
mirrors, and quack medicines. He bought old bottles, bones, and rags.
And what else he bought or sold, or dealt with, was dimly guessed at by a
few, but fully known to none.
Where he was born, what was his true name or age, whether on any given
occasion he was speaking less than lies, and what was the ultimate object
of his words and deeds,—at these things no one even guessed. That his
conscience was ever clean, that his dirty face once masked no vile or
petty plots for evil in the brain behind, that at some past period he was
a child,—these things it would have tasked the strongest faith to
realize.
He was not so unpopular with children as the miller’s man.
The instinct of children is like the instinct of dogs, very true and
delicate as a rule. But dogs, from Cerberus downwards, are liable to be
biassed by sops. And four paper-covered sails, that twirl upon the end
of a stick as the wind blows, would warp the better judgment of most
little boys, especially (for a bargain is more precious than a gift) when
the thing is to be bought for a few old bones.
Jan was a little afraid of the Cheap Jack, but he liked his whirligigs.
They went when the mill was going, and sometimes when the mill wouldn’t
go, if you ran hard to make a breeze.
But it so happened that the first day on which the Cheap Jack came round
after Jan had begun to learn his letters, he brought forth some wares
which moved Jan’s feelings more than the whirligigs did.
“Buy a nice picter, marm?” said the Cheap Jack to Mrs. Lake, who, with
the best intentions not to purchase, felt that there could be no harm in
seeing what the man had got.
“You shall have ‘Joseph and his Bretheren’ cheap,” roared the hunchback,
becoming more pressing as the windmiller’s wife seemed slow to be
fascinated, and shaking “Joseph and his Brethren,” framed in satin-wood,
in her face, as he advanced upon her with an almost threatening air.
“Don’t want ’em? Take ‘Antony and Cleopatterer.’ It’s a sweet picter.
Too dear? Do you know what sech picters costs to paint? Look at
Cleopatterer’s dress and the jewels she has on. I don’t make a farthing
on ’em. I gets daily bread out of the other things, and only keeps the
picters to oblige one or two ladies of taste that likes to give their
rooms a genteel appearance.”
The long disuse of such powers of judgment as she had, and long habit of
always giving way, had helped to convert Mrs. Lake’s naturally weak will
and unselfish disposition into a sort of mental pulp, plastic to any
pressure from without. To men she invariably yielded; and, poor specimen
of a man as the Cheap Jack was, she had no fibre of personal judgment or
decision in the strength of which to oppose his assertions, and every
instant she became more and more convinced that wares she neither wanted
nor approved of were necessary to her, and good bargains, because the man
who sold them said so.
The Cheap Jack was a knave, but he was no fool. In a crowded
market-place, or at a street door, no oilier tongue wagged than his. But
he knew exactly the moment when a doubtful bargain might be clinched by a
bullying tone and a fierce look on his dirty face, at cottage doors, on
heaths or downs, when the good wife was alone with her children, and the
nearest neighbor was half a mile away.
No length of experience taught Mrs. Lake wisdom in reference to the Cheap
Jack.
Each time that his cart appeared in sight she resolved to have nothing to
do with him, warned by the latest cracked jug, or the sugar-basin which,
after three-quarters of an hour wasted in chaffering, she had beaten down
to three-halfpence dearer than what she afterwards found to be the shop
price in the town. But proof to the untrained mind is “as water spilled
upon the ground.” And when the Cheap Jack declared that she was quite
free to look without buying, and that he did not want her to buy, Mrs.
Lake allowed him to pull down his goods as before, and listened to his
statements as if she had never proved them to be lies, and was thrown
into confusion and fluster when he began to bully, and bought in haste to
be rid of him, and repented at leisure—to no purpose as far as the future
was concerned.
“Look here!” yelled the hunchback, as he waddled with horrible swiftness
after the miller’s wife, as she withdrew into the mill; “which do you
mean to have? _I_ gets nothing on ’em, whichever you takes, so please
yourself. Take ‘Joseph and his Bretheren.’ The frame’s worth twice the
money. Take the other, too, and I’ll take sixpence off the pair, and be
out of pocket to please you.”
“Nothing to-day, thank you!” said Mrs. Lake, as loudly as she could.
“Got any other sort, you say?” said the Cheap Jack. “I’ve got all sorts,
but some parties is so difficult to please.
“Wait a bit, wait a bit,” he continued, as Mrs. Lake again tried to make
him (willing to) hear that she wanted none of his wares; and, vanishing
with the uncanny quickness common to him, he waddled swiftly back again
to his cart, and returned, before Mrs. Lake could secure herself from
intrusion, laden with a fresh supply of pictures, the weight of which it
seemed marvellous that he could support.
“Now you’ve got your choice, marm,” he said. “It’s no trouble to me to
oblige a good customer. There’s picters for you!”
“_Pitchers_!” said Jan, admiringly, as he crept up to them.
“So they are, my little man. Now then, help your mammy to choose. Most
of these is things you can’t get now, for love nor money. Here you
are,—‘Love and Beauty.’ That’s a sweet thing. ‘St Joseph,’ ‘The
Robber’s Bride,’ ‘Child and Lamb,’ ‘Melan-choly.’ Here’s an old”—
“Pitcher!” exclaimed Jan once more, gazing at an old etching in a dirty
frame, which the Cheap Jack was holding in his hand. “Pitcher, pitcher!
let Jan look!” he cried.
It was of a water-mill, old, thatched, and with an unprotected wheel,
like the one in the valley below. Some gnarled willows stretched across
the water, whose trunks seemed hardly less time-worn and rotten than the
wheel below. This foreground subject was in shadow, and strongly drawn,
but beyond it, in the sunlight, lay a bit of delicate distance, on the
rising ground of which stood one of those small wooden windmills known as
Post-mills. An old woman and a child were just coming into the shade,
and passing beneath a wayside shrine. What in the picture took Jan’s
fancy it is impossible to say, but he gazed at it with exclamations of
delight.
The Cheap Jack saw that it was certain to be bought, and he raised the
price accordingly.
Mrs. Lake felt the same conviction, and began to try at least to get a
good bargain.
“’Tis a terr’ble old frame,” said she. “There be no gold left on’t.”
And no more there was.
“What do you say?” screamed the Cheap Jack, with his hand to his ear, and
both a great deal too close to Mrs. Lake’s face to be pleasant.
“’Tis such an old frame,” she shouted, “and the gold be all gone.”
“Old!” cried the hunchback, scowling; “who says I sell old things? Every
picter in that lot’s brand new and dirt cheap.”
“The gold be rubbed off,” screamed Mrs. Lake in his ear.
“Brighten it up, then,” said the Cheap Jack. “Gold ain’t paint; gold
ain’t paper; rub it up!” and, suiting the action to the word, he rubbed
the dirty old frame vigorously with the dirty sleeve of his smock.
“It don’t seem to brighten it, nohow,” said Mrs. Lake, looking nervously
round; but neither the miller nor George was to be seen.
“Real gold allus looks like this in damp weather,” said the Cheap Jack.
“Hang it up in a warm room, dust it lightly every morning with a dry
handkerchief, an’ it’ll come out that shining you’ll see your face in it.
And when summer comes, cover it up in yaller gauze to keep off the
flies.”
Mrs. Lake looked wistfully at the place the Cheap Jack had rubbed, but
she had no redress, and saw no way out of her hobble but to buy the
picture.
When the bargain was completed, the Cheap Jack fell back into his oiliest
manner; it being part of his system not only to bully at the critical
moment, but to be very civil afterwards, so as to leave an impression so
pleasant on the minds of his lady customers that they could hardly do
other than thank him for his promise to call again shortly with “bargains
as good as ever.”
The Cheap Jack was a man of many voices. The softness of his parting
words to Mrs. Lake, “I’d go three mile out of my road, ma’am, to call on
a lady like you,” had hardly died away, when he woke the echoes of the
plains by addressing his horse in a very different tone.
The Wiltshire carters and horses have a language between them which falls
darkly upon the ear of the unlearned therein; but the uncouth yell which
the Cheap Jack addressed to his beast was not of that dialect. The sound
he made on this occasion was not, Ga oot! Coom hedder! or, There right!
but the horse understood it.
It is probable that it never heard the Cheap Jack’s softer intonations,
for its protuberant bones gave a quiver beneath the scarred skin as he
yelled. Then its drooping ears pricked faintly, the quavering forelegs
were braced, one desperate jog of the tottering load of oddities, and it
set slowly and silently forward.
The Cheap Jack did not follow his wares; he scrambled softly round the
mill, like a deformed cat, looking about him on all sides. Then he made
use of another sound,—a sharp, suggestive sound, whistled between two of
his fingers.
Then he looked round again.
No one appeared. The wheels of the distant cart scraped slowly along the
road, but this was the only sound the Cheap Jack heard.
He whistled softly again.
And as the cart took the sharp turn of the road, and was lost to sight,
the miller’s man appeared, and the Cheap Jack greeted him in the softest
tone he had yet employed. “Ah, there you are, my dear!”
* * * * *
Meanwhile, Mrs. Lake sat within, and looked ruefully at the damaged
frame, and wished that the master, or at least the man, had happened to
be at home.
It is to be feared that our self-reproach for having done wrong is not
always so certain, or so keen, as our self-reproach for having allowed
ourselves to suffer wrong—in a bad bargain.
Whether this particular picture was a bad bargain it is not easy to
decide.
It was scandalously dear for its condition, and for what it had cost the
hunchback, but it was cheap for the pleasure it gave to the little Jan.
CHAPTER XI.
SCARECROWS AND MEN.—JAN REFUSES TO “MAKE GEARGE.”—UNCANNY.—“JAN’S
OFF.”-THE MOON AND THE CLOUDS.
THE picture gave Jan great pleasure, but it proved a stumbling-block on
the road to learning.
To “make letters” on his slate had been the utmost of his ambition, and
as he made them he learned them. But after the Cheap Jack’s visit his
constant cry was, “Jan make pitchers.” And when Abel tried to confine
his attention to the alphabet, he would, after a most perfunctory
repetition of a few letters that he knew, and hap-hazard blunders over
fresh ones, fling his arms round Abel’s neck and say coaxingly, “Abel
dear, make Janny _pitchers_ on his slate.”
Abel’s pictures, at the best, were of that style of wall decoration dear
to street boys.
“Make a pitcher of a man,” Jan would cry. And Abel did so, bit by bit,
to Jan’s dictation. Thus “Make’s head. Make un round. Make two eyes.
Make a nose. Make a mouth. Make’s arms. Make’s fingers,” etc. And,
with some “free-handling,” Abel would strike the five fingers off, one by
one, in five screeching strokes of the slate-pencil. But his art was
conventional, and when Jan said, “Make un a miller’s thumb,” he was
puzzled, and could only bend the shortest of the five strokes slightly
backwards to represent the trade-mark of his forefathers.
And when a little later Jan said one day, “’Tis a galley crow, that is.
_Now_ make a pitcher of a MAN, Abel dear!” Abel found that the scarecrow
figure was the limit of his artist powers, and thenceforward it was Jan
who “made pitchers.”
He drew from dawn to dusk upon the little slate which he wore tied by a
bit of string to the belt of his pinafore. He drew his foster-mother,
and Abel, and the kitten, and the clock, and the flower-pots in the
window, and the windmill itself, and every thing he saw or imagined. And
he drew till his slate was full on both sides, and then in very primitive
fashion he spat and rubbed it all out and began again. And whenever
Jan’s face was washed, the two faces of his slate were washed too; and
with this companion he was perfectly happy and constantly employed.
Now it was Abel who gave the subjects for the pictures, and Jan who made
them, and it was good Abel also who washed the slate, and rubbed the
well-worn stumps of pencil to new points upon the round-house floor.
They often went together to a mound at some little distance, where,
seated side by side, they “made a mill” upon the slate, Jan drawing, and
Abel dictating the details to be recorded.
“Put in the window, Jan,” he would say; “and another, and another, and
another, and another. Now put the sails. Now put the stage. Now put
daddy by the door.”
On one point Jan was obstinate. He steadily refused to “make Gearge”
upon his slate in any capacity whatever. Perhaps it was in this habit of
constantly gazing at all things about him, in order to commit them to his
slate, which gave a strange, dreamy expression to Jan’s dark eyes.
Perhaps it was sky-gazing, or the windmiller’s trick of watching the
clouds, or perhaps it was something else, from which Jan derived an
erectness of carriage not common among the children about him, and a
quaint way of carrying his little chin in the air as if he were listening
to voices from a higher level than that of the round-house floor.
If he had lived farther north, he could hardly have escaped the suspicion
of uncanniness. He was strangely like a changeling among the miller’s
children.
To gratify that old whim of his about the red shawl, his doting
foster-mother made him little crimson frocks; and as he wandered over the
downs in his red dress and a white pinafore, his yellow hair flying in
the breeze, his chin up, his black eyes wide open, with slate in one
hand, his pencil in the other, and the sandy kitten clinging to his
shoulder (for Jan never lowered his chin to help her to balance herself),
he looked more like some elf than a child of man.
He had queer, independent ways of his own, too; freaks,—not naughty
enough for severe punishment, but sufficiently out of the routine and
unexpected to cause Mrs. Lake some trouble.
He was no sooner firmly established on his own legs, with the power of
walking, or rather toddling, independent of help, than he took to making
expeditions on the downs by himself. He would watch his opportunity, and
when his foster-mother’s back was turned, and the door of the round-house
opened by some grist-bringer, he would slip out and toddle off with a
swiftness decidedly dangerous to a balance so lately acquired.
Sometimes Mrs. Lake would catch sight of him, and if her hands were in
the wash-tub, or otherwise engaged, she would cry to the nurse-boy,
“Abel, he be off! Jan’s off.” A comic result of which was that Jan
generally announced his own departure in the same words, though not
always loud enough to bring detection upon himself.
When his chance came and the door was open, he would pause for half a
moment on the threshold to say, in a tone of intense self-satisfaction,
“He be off. Abel! Janny’s off!” and forthwith toddle out as hard as he
could go. As he grew older, he dropped this form; but the elfish habit
of appearing and disappearing at his own whim was not cured.
It was a puzzle as well as a care to Mrs. Lake. All her own children had
given trouble in their own way,—a way much the same with all of them.
They squalled for what they wanted, and, like other mothers of her class,
she served them whilst her patience lasted, and slapped them when it came
to an end. They clung about her when she was cooking, in company with
the cats, and she put tit-bits into their dirty paws, and threw scraps to
the clean paws of the cats, till the nuisance became overwhelming, and
she kicked the cats and slapped the children, who squalled for both.
They dirted their clothes, they squabbled, they tore the gathers out of
her dresses, and wailed and wept, and were beaten with a hazel-stick by
their father, and pacified with treacle-stick by the mother; and so
tumbled up, one after the other, through childish customs and
misdemeanors, almost as uniform as the steps of the mill-ladders.
But the customs and misdemeanors of the foster-child were very different.
His appetite to be constantly eating, drinking, or sucking—if it were but
a bennet or grass-stalk—was less voracious than that of the other
children. Mrs. Lake gave him Benjamin’s share of treacle-stick, but he
has been known to give some of it away, and to exchange peppermint-drops
for a slate-pencil rather softer than his own. He would have had
Benjamin’s share of “bits” from the cupboard, but that the other children
begged so much oftener, and Mrs. Lake was not capable of refusing any
thing to a steady tease. He could walk the whole length of a
turnip-field without taking a munch, unless he were hungry, though even
dear old Abel invariably exercised his jaws upon a “turmut.” And he made
himself ill with hedge-fruits and ground-roots seldomer than any other
member of the family.
So far, Jan gave less trouble than the rest. But then he had a spirit of
enterprise which never misled them. From the effects of this, Abel saved
his life more than once. On one occasion he pulled him out of the
wash-tub, into which he had plunged head-foremost, in a futile endeavor
to blow soap-bubbles through a fragment of clay-pipe, which he had picked
up on the road, and which made his lips sore for a week, besides nearly
causing his death by drowning.
From diving into the deepest recesses of the windmill it became hopeless
to try to hinder him, and when Abel was fairly taken into the business
Mrs. Lake relied upon his care for his foster-brother. And Jan was wary
and nimble, for his own part, and gave little trouble. His great delight
was to gaze first out of one window, and then out of the opposite one;
either blinking as the great sails drove by, as if they would strike him
in the face, or watching the shadows of them invisible, as they passed
like noon-day ghosts over the grass.
His habit of taking himself off on solitary expeditions neither the
miller’s hazel-stick nor Mrs. Lake’s treacle-stick could cure by force or
favor.
One November evening, just after tea, Jan disappeared, and the yellow
kitten also. When his bed-time came, Mrs. Lake sought him high and low,
and Abel went carefully, mill-candlestick in hand, through every floor,
from the millstones to the machinery, but in vain. Neither he nor the
kitten was to be found.
It was when the kitten, in chase of her own tail, tumbled in sideways
through the round-house door, that Mrs. Lake remembered that Jan might
possibly have gone out, and she ran out after him.
The air was chill and fresh, but not bitterly cold. The moon rode high
in the dark heavens, and a flock of small white clouds passed slowly
before its face and spread over the sky. The shadows of the driving
sails fell clearly in the moonlight, and flitted over the grass more
quickly than the clouds went by the moon.
Mrs. Lake was not susceptible to effects of scenery, and she was thinking
of Jan. As she ran round the windmill, she struck her foot against what
proved to be his body, and, stooping, saw that he was lying on his face.
But when she snatched him up with a cry of terror, she found that he was
not dead, nor even hurt, but only weeping pettishly.
In the first revulsion of feeling from her fright, she was rather
disposed to shake her recovered treasure, as a relief to her own
excitement. But Abel, whose first sight of Jan was as the light of the
mill-candle fell on his tear-stained face, said tenderly, “What be amiss,
Janny?”
“Jan can’t make un,” sobbed his foster-brother.
“What can’t Janny make? Tell Abel, then,” said the nurse-boy.
Jan stuck his fists into his eyes, which were drying fast, and replied,
“Jan can’t make the moon and the clouds, Abel dear!”
And Abel’s candle being at that moment blown out by a gust of wind, he
could see Jan’s slate and pencil lying at some distance apart upon the
short grass.
On the dark ground of the slate he had made a round, white, full moon
with his soft slate-pencil, and had tried hard to draw each cloud as it
passed. But the rapid changes had baffled him, and the pencil-marks were
gray compared with the whiteness of the clouds and the brightness of the
moon, and the slate, though dark, was a mockery of the deep, deep depths
of the night-sky.
And in his despair he had flung the slate one way and the pencil another,
and there they lay under the moonlight; and the sandy kitten, who could
see more clearly on this occasion than any one else, was dancing a
fandango upon poor Jan’s unfinished sketch.
CHAPTER XII.
THE WHITE HORSE.—COMROGUES.—MOERDYK.—GEORGE CONFIDES IN THE CHEAP
JACK—WITH RESERVATION.
WHEN the Cheap Jack’s horse came to the brow of the hill, it stopped, and
with drooping neck stood still as before. The Cheap Jack was busy with
George, and it was at no word from him that the poor beast paused. It
knew at what point to wait, and it waited. There was little temptation
to go on. The road down the hill had just been mended with flints; some
of these were the size of an average turnip, and the hill was steep. So
the old horse poked out his nose, and stood almost dozing, till the sound
of the Cheap Jack’s shuffling footsteps caused him to prick his ears, and
brace his muscles for a fresh start.
The miller’s man came also, who was sulky, whilst the Cheap Jack was
civil. He gave his horse a cut across the knees, to remind him to plant
his feet carefully among the sharp boulders; and then, choosing a smooth
bit by the side of the road, he and George went forward together.
“You’ve took to picters, I see,” said George, nodding towards the cart.
“So I have, my dear,” said the Cheap Jack; “any thing for a livelihood;
an _honest_ livelihood, you know, George.” And he winked at the miller’s
man, who relaxed his sulkiness for a guffaw.
“_You’ve_ had so little in my way lately, George,” the hunchback
continued, looking sharply sideways up at his companion. “Sly business
has been slack, my dear, eh?”
But George made no answer, and the Cheap Jack, after relieving his
feelings by another cut at the horse, changed the subject.
“That’s a sharp little brat of the miller’s,” said he, alluding to Jan.
“And he ain’t much like the others. Old-fashioned, too. Children mostly
likes the gay picters, and worrits their mothers for ’em, bless ’em! But
he picked out an ancient-looking thing,—came from a bankrupt pawnshop, my
dear, in a lot. I almost think I let it go too cheap; but that’s my
failing. And a beggarly place like this ain’t like London. In London
there’s a place for every thing, my dear, and shops for old goods as well
as new, and customers too; and the older and dirtier some things is, the
more they fetches.”
There was a pause, for George did not speak; and the Cheap Jack, bent
upon amiability, repeated his remark,—“A sharp little brat, too!”
“What be ’ee harping on about him for?” asked George, suspiciously. “I
knows what I knows about un, but that’s no business of yours.”
“You know about most things, my dear,” said the Cheap Jack, flatteringly.
“They’ll have to get up very early that catch you napping. But what
about the child, George?”
“Never you mind,” said George. “But he ain’t none of the miller’s, I’ll
tell ’ee that; and he ain’t the missus’s neither.”
“What is he to _you_, my dear?” asked the dwarf, curiously, and, getting
no answer, he went on: “He’d be useful in a good many lines. He’d not do
bad in a circus, but he’d draw prime as a young prodigy.”
George looked round, “You be thinking of stealing _he_ then, as well as”—
“Hush, my dear,” said the dwarf. “No, no, I don’t want him. But there
was a good deal of snatching young kids done in my young days; for
sweeps, destitute orphans, juvenile performers, and so on.”
“_He_ wouldn’t suit you,” grinned George. “A comes of genteel folk, and
a’s not hard enough for how you’d treat un.”
“You’re out there, George,” said the dwarf. “Human beings is like
’osses; it’s the genteelest as stands the most. ’Specially if they’ve
been well fed when they was babies.”
At this point the Cheap Jack was interrupted by his horse stumbling over
a huge, jagged lump of flint, that, with the rest of the road-mending,
was a disgrace to a highway of a civilized country. A rate-payer or a
horse-keeper might have been excused for losing his temper with the
authorities of the road-mending department; but the Cheap Jack’s wrath
fell upon his horse. He beat him over the knees for stumbling, and
across the hind legs for slipping, and over his face for wincing, and
accompanied his blows with a torrent of abuse.
What a moment that must have been for Balaam’s ass, in which she found
voice to remonstrate against the unjust blows, which have, nevertheless,
fallen pretty thickly ever since upon her descendants and their
fellow-servants of ungrateful man! From how many patient eyes that old
reproach, of long service ill-requited, yet speaks almost as plainly as
the voice that “rebuked the madness of the prophet!”
The Cheap Jack’s white horse had a point of resemblance to the “genteel
human beings” of whom he had been speaking. It had “come of a good
stock,” and had seen better and kinder days; and to it, also, in its
misfortunes, there remained that nobility of spirit which rises in
proportion to the ills it meets with. The poor old thing was miserably
weak, and sore and jaded, and the flints were torture. But it rallied
its forces, gave a desperate struggle, and got the cart safely to the
bottom of the hill. Here the road turned sharply, and the horse went on.
But after a few paces it stopped as before; this time in front of a small
public-house, where trembling, and bathed in perspiration, it waited for
its master.
The public-house was a small dark, dingy-looking hovel, with a reputation
fitted to its appearance.
A dirty, grim-looking man nodded to the Cheap Jack and George as they
entered, and a girl equally dirty, but much handsomer, brought glasses of
spirits, to which the friends applied themselves, at the Cheap Jack’s
expense. George grew more sociable, and the Cheap Jack reproached him
with want of confidence in his friends.
“You’re so precious sharp, my dear,” said the hunchback, who knew well on
what point George liked to be flattered, “that you overreaches yourself.
I don’t complain—after all the business we’ve done together—that it’s
turned slack all of a sudden. You says they’re down on you, and that’s
enough for me. I don’t complain that you’ve got your own plans and keeps
’em as secret as the grave, but I says you’ll regret it. If you was a
good scholar, George, you could do without friends, you’re so precious
sharp. But you’re no scholar, my dear, and you’ll be let in yet, by a
worse friend than Cheap John.”
George so bitterly regretted his want of common learning, and the
stupidity which made him still slow to decipher print, and utterly
puzzled by writing, that the Cheap Jack’s remarks told strongly. These,
and the conversation they had had on the hill, recalled to his mind a
matter which was still a mystery to the miller’s man.
“Look here, Jack,” said he, leaning across the dirty little table; “if
you be such a good scholar, what do M O E R D Y K spell?”
“Say it again, George,” said the dwarf. But when, after that, he still
looked puzzled, George laughed long and loudly.
“You be a good scholar!” he cried. “You be a fine friend, too, for a
iggerant man. If a can’t tell the first word of a letter, ’tis likely
’ee could read the whole, too!”
“The first word of a _letter_, eh?” said the dwarf.
“The very first,” said George. “’Tis a long way you’d get in it, and
stuck at the start!”
“Up in the corner, at the top, eh?” said the dwarf.
“So it be,” said George, and he laughed no longer.
“It’s the name of a place, then,” said the Cheap Jack; “and it ain’t to
be expected I should know the names of all the places in the world,
George, my dear.”
It was a great triumph for the Cheap Jack, as George’s face betrayed. If
George had trusted him a little more, he might have known the meaning of
the mysterious word years ago. The name of a place! The place from
which the letter was written. The place where something might be learned
about the writer of the letter, and of the gentleman to whom it was
written. For George knew so much. It was written to a gentleman, and to
a gentleman who had money, and who had secrets; and, therefore, a
gentleman from whom money might be got, by interfering in his secrets.
The miller’s man was very ignorant and very stupid, in spite of a certain
low cunning not at all incompatible with gross ignorance. He had no
knowledge of the world. His very knowledge of malpractices and mischief
was confined to the evil doings of one or two other ill-conditioned
country lads like himself, who robbed their neighbors on dark nights, and
disposed of the spoil by the help of such men as the Cheap Jack and the
landlord of the public-house at the bottom of the hill.
But by loitering about on that stormy night years ago, when he should
have been attending to the mill, he had picked up enough to show him that
the strange gentleman had no mind to have his proceedings as to the
little Jan generally known. This and some sort of traditional idea that
“sharp,” though penniless men had at times wrung a great deal of money
from rich people, by threatening to betray their secrets, was the sole
foundation of George’s hopes in connection with the letter. It was his
very ignorance which hindered him from seeing the innumerable chances
against his getting to know any thing important enough, even if he could
use his information, to procure a bribe.
He had long given up the idea as hopeless, though he had kept the letter,
but it revived when the Cheap Jack solved the puzzle which Abel could not
explain, and George finally promised to let his friend read the whole
letter for him. He also allowed that it concerned Jan, or that he
supposed it to do so. He related Jan’s history, and confessed that he
had picked up the letter, which was being blown about near the mill, on
the night of Jan’s arrival.
In this statement there was some truth, and some falsehood; for in the
opinion of the miller’s man, if your own interest obliged you to confide
in a friend, it was at least wise to hedge the confidence by not telling
all the truth, or by qualifying it with lies.
This mental process was, however, at least equally familiar to the Cheap
Jack, and he did not hesitate, in his own mind, to feel sure that the
letter had not been found, but stolen. In which he was farther from the
truth than if he had simply believed George.
But then he was not in the neighborhood five years back, and, as it
happened, he had never heard of the lost pocket-book.
CHAPTER XIII.
GEORGE AS A MONEYED MAN.—SAL.—THE “WHITE HORSE.”—THE WEDDING.—THE
WINDMILLER’S WIFE FORGETS, AND REMEMBERS TOO LATE.
EXCITEMENT, the stifling atmosphere of the public-house, and the spirits
he had drunk at his friend’s expense, had somewhat confused the brains of
the miller’s man by the time that the Cheap Jack rose to go. George was,
as a rule, sober beyond the wont of the rustics of the district, chiefly
from parsimony. When he could drink at another man’s expense, he was not
always prudent.
“So you’ve settled to go, my dear?” said the dwarf, as they stood
together by the cart. “Business being slack, and parties unpleasantly
suspicious, eh?”
“Never you mind,” said George, who felt very foolish, and hoped himself
successful in looking very wise; “I be going to set up for myself; I’m
tired of slaving for another man.”
“Quite right, too,” said the dwarf; “but all businesses takes money, of
which, my dear, I doesn’t doubt you’ve plenty. You always took care of
Number One, when you did business with Cheap John.”
At that moment, George felt himself a sort of embodiment of shrewd
wisdom; he had taken another sip from the glass, which was still in his
hand, and the only drawback to the sense of magnified cunning by which
his ideas seemed to be illumined was a less pleasant feeling that they
were perpetually slipping from his grasp. To the familiar idea of
outwitting the Cheap Jack he held fast, however.
“It be nothin’ to thee what a have,” he said slowly; “but a don’t mind
’ee knowin’ so much, Jack, because ’ee can’t get at un; haw, haw! Not
unless ’ee robs the savings-bank.”
The dwarf’s eyes twinkled, and he affected to secure some pictures that
hung low, as he said carelessly,—
“Savings-banks be good places for a poor man to lay by in. They takes
small sums, and a few shillings comes in useful to a honest man, George,
my dear, if they doesn’t go far in business.”
“Shillings!” cried George, indignantly; “pounds!” And then, doubtful if
he had not said too much, he added, “A don’t so much mind ’ee knowing,
Jack, because ’ee can’t get at ’em!”
“It’s a pity you’re such a poor scholar, George,” said the Cheap Jack,
turning round, and looking full at his friend; “you’re so sharp, but for
that, my dear. You don’t think you counts the money over in your head
till you makes it out more than it is, now, eh?”
“A can keep things in my yead,” said George, “better than most folks can
keep a book; I knows what I has, and what other folks can’t get at. I
knows how I put un in. First, the five-pound bill”—
“They must have stared to see you bring five pound in a lump, George, my
dear!” said the hunchback. “Was it wise, do you think?”
“Gearge bean’t such a vool as a looks,” replied the miller’s man. “A
took good care to change it first, Cheap John, and a put it in by bits.”
“You’re a clever customer, George,” said his friend. “Well, my dear?
First, the five-pound bill, and then?”
George looked puzzled, and then, suddenly, angry. “What be that to you?”
he asked, and forthwith relapsed into a sulky fit, from which the Cheap
Jack found it impossible to rouse him. All attempts to renew the
subject, or to induce the miller’s man to talk at all, proved fruitless.
The Cheap Jack insisted, however, on taking a friendly leave.
“Good-by, my dear,” said he, “till the mop. You knows my place in the
town, and I shall expect you.”
The miller’s man only replied by a defiant nod, which possibly meant that
he would come, but had some appearance of expressing only a sarcastic
wish that the Cheap Jack might see him on the occasion alluded to.
In obedience to a yell from its master, the white horse now started
forward, and it is not too much to say that the journey to town was not
made more pleasant for the poor beast by the fact that the Cheap Jack had
a good deal of long-suppressed fury to vent upon somebody.
It was perhaps well for the bones of the white horse that, just as they
entered the town, the Cheap Jack brushed against a woman on the narrow
foot-path, who having turned to remonstrate in no very civil terms,
suddenly checked herself, and said in a low voice, “Juggling Jack!”
The dwarf started, and looked at the woman with a puzzled air.
She was a middle-aged woman, in the earlier half of middle age; she was
shabbily dressed, and had a face that would not have been ill-looking,
but that the upper lip was long and cleft, and the lower one unusually
large. As the Cheap Jack still stared in silence, she burst into a noisy
laugh, saying, “More know Jack the Fool than Jack the Fool knows.” But,
even as she spoke, a gleam of recognition suddenly spread over the
hunchback’s face, and, putting out his hand, he said, “Sal! _you here_,
my dear?”
“The air of London don’t agree with me just now,” was the reply; “and how
are you, Jack?”
“The country air’s just beginning to disagree with me, my dear,” said the
hunchback; “but I’m glad to see you, Sal. Come in here, my dear, and
let’s have a talk, and a little refreshment.”
The place of refreshment to which the dwarf alluded was another
public-house, the White Horse by name. There was no need to bid the
Cheap Jack’s white horse to pause here; he stopped of himself at every
public-house; nineteen times out of twenty to the great convenience of
his master, for which he got no thanks; the twentieth time the hunchback
did not want to stop, and he was lavish of abuse of the beast’s stupidity
in coming to a standstill.
The white horse drooped his soft white nose and weary neck for a long,
long time under the effigy of his namesake swinging overhead, and when
the Cheap Jack did come out, he seemed so preoccupied that the tired
beast got home with fewer blows than usual.
He unloaded his cart mechanically, as if in a dream; but when he touched
the pictures, they seemed to awaken a fresh train of thought. He stamped
one of his little feet spitefully on the ground, and, with a pretty close
imitation of George’s dialect, said bitterly, “Gearge bean’t such a vool
as a looks!” adding, after a pause, “I’d do a deal to pay _him_ off!”
As he turned into the house, he said thoughtfully, “Sal’s precious sharp;
she allus was. And a fine woman, too, is Sal!”
* * * * *
Not long after the incidents just related, it happened that business
called Mrs. Lake to the neighboring town. She seldom went out, but a
well-to-do aunt was sick, and wished to see her; and the miller gave his
consent to her going.
She met the milk-cart at the corner of the road, and so was driven to the
town, and she took Jan with her.
He had begged hard to go, and was intensely amused by all he saw. The
young Lakes were so thoroughly in the habit of taking every thing,
whether commonplace or curious, in the same phlegmatic fashion, that
Jan’s pleasure was a new pleasure to his foster-mother, and they enjoyed
themselves greatly.
As they were making their way towards the inn where they were to pick up
a neighbor, in whose cart they were to be driven home, their progress was
hindered by a crowd, which had collected near one of the churches.
Mrs. Lake was one of those people who lead colorless lives, and are
without mental resources, to whom a calamity is almost delightful, from
the stimulus it gives to the imagination, and the relief it affords to
the monotony of existence.
“Oh, dear! oh, dear!” she cried, peering through the crowd: “I wonder
what it is. ’Tis likely ’tis a man in a fit now, I shouldn’t wonder, or
a cart upset, and every soul killed, as it might be ourselves going home
this very evening. Dear, dear! ’tis a venturesome thing to leave home,
too!”
“’Ere they be! ’ere they be!” roared a wave of the crowd, composed of
boys, breaking on Mrs. Lake and Jan at this point.
“’Tis the body, sure as death!” murmured the windmiller’s wife; but, as
she spoke, the street boys set up a lusty cheer, and Jan, who had escaped
to explore on his own account, came running back, crying,—
“’Tis the Cheap Jack, mammy! and he’s been getting married.”
If any thing could have rivalled the interest of a sudden death for Mrs.
Lake, it must have been such a wedding as this. She hurried to the
front, and was just in time to catch sight of the happy couple as they
passed down the street, escorted by a crowd of congratulating boys.
[Picture: If any thing could have rivalled the interest of a sudden death
for Mrs. Lake, it must have been such a wedding as this]
“Well done, Cheap John!” roared one. “You’ve chose a beauty, you have,”
cried another. “She’s ’arf a ’ead taller, anyway,” added a third. “Many
happy returns of the day, Jack!” yelled a fourth.
Jan was charmed, and again and again he drew Mrs. Lake’s attention to the
fact that it really _was_ the Cheap Jack.
But the windmiller’s wife was staring at the bride. Not merely because
the bride is commonly considered the central figure of a wedding-party,
but because her face seemed familiar to Mrs. Lake, and she could not
remember where she had seen her. Though she could remember nothing, the
association seemed to be one of pain. In vain she beat her brains.
Memory was an almost uncultivated quality with her, and, like the rest of
her intellectual powers, had a nervous, skittish way of deserting her in
need, as if from timidity.
Mrs. Lake could sometimes remember things when she got into bed, but on
this occasion her pillow did not assist her; and the windmiller snubbed
her for making “such a caddle” about a woman’s face she might have seen
anywhere or nowhere, for that matter; so she got no help from him.
And it was not till after the Cheap Jack and his wife had left the
neighborhood, that one night (she was in bed) it suddenly “came to her,”
as she said, that the dwarf’s bride was the woman who had brought Jan to
the mill, on the night of the great storm.
CHAPTER XIV.
SUBLUNARY ART.—JAN GOES TO SCHOOL.—DAME DATCHETT AT HOME.—JAN’S FIRST
SCHOOL SCRAPE.—JAN DEFENDS HIMSELF.
EVEN the hero of a tale cannot always be heroic, nor of romantic or
poetic tastes.
The wonderful beauty of the night sky and the moon had been fully felt by
the artist-nature of the child Jan; but about this time he took to the
study of a totally different subject,—pigs.
It was the force of circumstances which led Jan to “make pigs” on his
slate so constantly, instead of nobler subjects; and it dated from the
time when his foster-mother began to send him with the other children to
school at Dame Datchett’s.
Dame Datchett’s cottage was the last house on one side of the village
main street. It was low, thatched, creeper-covered, and had only one
floor, and two rooms,—the outer room where the Dame kept her school, and
the inner one where she slept. Dame Datchett’s scholars were very young,
and it is to be hoped that the chief objects of their parents in paying
for their schooling were to insure their being kept safely out of the way
for a certain portion of each day, and the saving of wear and tear to
clothes and shoes. It is to be hoped so, because this much of discipline
was to some extent accomplished. As to learning, Dame Datchett had
little enough herself, and was quite unable to impart even that, except
to a very industrious and intelligent pupil.
Her school appurtenances were few and simple. From one of them arose
Jan’s first scrape at school. It was a long, narrow blackboard, on which
the alphabet had once been painted white, though the letters were now so
faded that the Dame could no longer distinguish them, even in spectacles.
The scrape came about thus.
As he stood at the bottom of the little class which gathered in a
semicircle around the Dame’s chair, his young eyes could see the faded
letters quite clearly, though the Dame’s could not.
“Say th’ alphabet, childern!” cried Dame Datchett; and as the class
shouted the names of the letters after her, she made a show of pointing
to each with a long “sallywithy” wand cut from one of the willows in the
water-meadows below. She ran the sallywithy along the board at what she
esteemed a judicious rate, to keep pace with the shouted alphabet, but,
as she could not see the letters, her tongue and her wand were not in
accord. Little did the wide-mouthed, white-headed youngsters of the
village heed this, but it troubled Jan’s eyes; and when—in consequence of
her rubbing her nose with her disengaged hand—the sallywithy slipped to Q
as the Dame cried F, Jan brought the lore he had gained from Abel to bear
upon her inaccuracy.
“’Tis a Q, not a F,” he said, boldly and aloud.
A titter ran through the class, and the biggest and stupidest boy found
the joke so overwhelming that he stretched his mouth from ear to ear, and
doubled himself up with laughter, till it looked as if his
corduroy-breeched knee were a turnip, and he about to munch it.
The Dame dropped her sallywithy and began to feel under her chair.
“Which be the young varment as said a F was a Q?” she rather unfairly
inquired.
“A didn’t say a F was a Q”— began Jan; but a chorus of cowardly little
voices drowned him, and curried favor with the Dame by crying, “’Tis Jan
Lake, the miller’s son, missus.”
And the big boy, conscious of his own breach of good manners, atoned for
it by officiously dragging Jan to Dame Datchett’s elbow.
“Hold un vor me,” said the Dame, settling her spectacles firmly on her
nose.
And with infinite delight the great booby held Jan to receive his thwacks
from the strap which the Dame had of late years substituted for the birch
rod. And as Jan writhed, he chuckled as heartily as before, it being an
amiable feature in the character of such clowns that, so long as they can
enjoy a guffaw at somebody’s expense, the subject of their ridicule is
not a matter of much choice or discrimination.
After the first angry sob, Jan set his teeth and bore his punishment in a
proud silence, quite incomprehensible by the small rustics about him,
who, like the pigs of the district, were in the habit of crying out in
good time before they were hurt as a preventive measure.
Strangely enough, it gave the biggest boy the impression that Jan was
“poor-spirited,” and unable to take his own part,—a temptation to bully
him too strong to be resisted.
So when the school broke up, and the children were scattering over the
road and water-meads, the wide-mouthed boy came up to Jan and snatched
his slate from him.
“Give Jan his slate!” cried Jan, indignantly.
He was five years old, but the other was seven, and he held the slate
above his head.
“And who be _Jan_, then, thee little gallus-bird?” said he, tauntingly.
“I be Jan!” answered the little fellow, defiantly. “Jan Lake, the
miller’s son. Give I his slate!”
“Thee’s not a miller’s son,” said the other; and the rest of the children
began to gather round.
“I be a miller’s son,” reiterated Jan. “And I’ve got a miller’s thumb,
too;” and he turned up his little thumb for confirmation of the fact.
“Thee’s not a miller’s son,” repeated the other, with a grin. “Thee’s
nobody’s child, thee is. Master Lake’s not thy vather, nor Mrs. Lake
bean’t thy mother. Thee was brought to the mill in a sack of grist, thee
was.”
In saying which, the boy repeated a popular version of Jan’s history.
If any one had been present outside Dame Datchett’s cottage at that
moment who had been in the windmill when Jan first came to it, he would
have seen a likeness so vivid between the face of the child and the face
of the man who brought him to the mill as would have seemed to clear up
at least one point of the mystery of his parentage.
Pride and wrath convulsed every line of the square, quaint face, and
seemed to narrow it to the likeness of the man’s, as, with his black eyes
blazing with passion, Jan flew at his enemy.
The boy still held Jan’s slate on high, and with a derisive “haw! haw!”
he brought it down heavily above Jan’s head. But Jan’s eye was quick,
and very true. He dodged the blow, which fell on the boy’s own knees,
and then flew at him like a kitten in a tiger fury.
They were both small and easily knocked over, and in an instant they were
sprawling on the road, and cuffing, and pulling, and kicking, and
punching with about equal success, except that the bigger boy prudently
roared and howled all the time, in the hope of securing some assistance
in his favor.
“Dame Datchett! Missus! Murder! Yah! Boohoo! The little varment be a
throttling I.”
But Mrs. Datchett was deaf. Also, she not unnaturally considered that,
in looking after “the young varments” in school-hours, she fully earned
their weekly pence, and was by no means bound to disturb herself because
they squabbled in the street.
Meanwhile Jan gradually got the upper hand of his lubberly and far from
courageous opponent, whose smock he had nearly torn off his back. He had
not spent any of his breath in calling for aid, but now, in reply to the
boy’s cries for mercy and release, he shouted, “What be my name, now,
thee big gawney? Speak, or I’ll drottle ’ee.”
“Jan Lake,” said his vanquished foe. “Let me go! Yah! yah!”
“Whose son be I?” asked the remorseless Jan.
“Abel Lake’s, the miller! Boohoo, boohoo!” sobbed the boy.
“And what be this, then, Willum Smith?” was Jan’s final question, as he
brought his thumb close to his enemy’s eye.
“It be the miller’s thumb thee’s got, Jan Lake,” was the satisfactory
answer.
CHAPTER XV.
WILLUM GIVES JAN SOME ADVICE.—THE CLOCK FACE.—THE HORNET AND THE
DAME.—JAN DRAWS PIGS.—JAN AND HIS PATRONS.—KITTY CHUTER.—THE
FIGHT.—MASTER CHUTER’S PREDICTION.
JAN went back to school. Though his foster-mother was indignant, and
ready to do battle both with Dame Datchett and with William Smith’s aunt
(with whom, in lieu of parents, the boy lived), and though Abel expressed
his anxiety to go down and “teach Willum to vight one of his own zize,”
Jan steadily rejected their help, and said manfully, “Jan bean’t feared
of un. I whopped un, I did.”
So Mrs. Lake doctored his bruises, and sent him off to school again. She
yielded the more readily that she felt certain that the windmiller would
not take the child’s part against the Dame.
No further misfortune befell him. William, if loutish and a bit of a
bully on occasion, was not an ill-natured child; and, having a turn for
humor of a broad, unintellectual sort, he and Jan became rather friendly
on the common, but reprehensible ground of playing pranks, which kept the
school in a titter and the Dame in doubt. And, if detected, they did not
think a dose of the strap by any means too high a price to pay for their
fun.
For William’s sufferings under that instrument of discipline were not to
be measured by his doleful howlings and roarings, nor even by his ready
tears.
“What be ’ee so voolish for as to say nothin’ when her wollops ’ee?” he
asked of Jan, in a very friendly spirit, one day. “Thee should holler as
loud as ’ee can. Them that hollers and cries murder she soon stops for,
does Dame Datchett. She be feared of their mothers hearing ’em, and
comin’ after ’em.”
Jan could not lower himself to accept such base advice; but his superior
adroitness did much to balance the advantage William had over him, in a
less scrupulous pride.
As to learning, I fear that, after the untoward consequences of his zeal
for the alphabet, Jan made no effort to learn any thing but cat’s-cradle
from his neighbors.
On one other occasion, indeed, he was somewhat over-zealous, and only
escaped the strap for his reward by a friendly diversion on the part of
his friend. The Dame had a Dutch clock in the corner of her kitchen, the
figures on the face of which were the common Arabic ones, and not Roman.
And as one of the few things the Dame professed was to “teach the clock,”
she would, when the figures had been recited after the fashion in which
her scholars shouted over the alphabet, set those who had advanced to the
use of slates to copy the figures from the clock-face.
Slowly and sorrowfully did William toil over this lesson. Again and
again did he rub out his ill-proportioned fives, with so greasy a finger
and such a superabundance of moisture as to make a sort of puddle, into
which he dug heavily, and broke two pencils.
“A vive be such an akkerd vigger,” he muttered, in reply to Jan, who had
looked up inquiringly as the second pencil snapped. “’Twill come aal
right, though, when a dries.”
It did dry, but any thing but right. Jan rubbed out the mass of thick
and blotted strokes, and when the Dame was not looking, he made William’s
figures for him. Jan was behindhand in spelling, but to copy figures was
no difficulty to him.
Having helped his friend thus, he pulled his smock, to draw attention to
his own slate. The other children wrote so slowly that time had hung
heavy on his hands; and, instead of copying the figures in a row, he had
made a drawing of the clock-face, with the figures on it; but instead of
the hands, he had put eyes, nose, and mouth, and below the mouth a round
gray blot, which William instantly recognized for a portrait of the mole
on Dame Datchett’s chin. This brilliant caricature so tickled him, that
he had a fit of choking from suppressed laughter; and he and Jan, being
detected “in mischief,” were summoned with their slates to the Dame’s
chair.
William came off triumphant; but when the Dame caught sight of Jan’s
slate, without minutely examining his work, she said, “Zo thee’s been
scraaling on thee slate, instead of writing thee figures,” and at once
began to fumble beneath her chair.
[Picture: “Zo thee’s been scraaling on thee slate, instead of writing
thee figures,” and at once began to fumble beneath her chair]
But William had slightly moved the strap with his foot, as he stood with
a perfectly unmoved and vacant countenance beside the Dame, which made
some delay; and as Mrs. Datchett bent lower on the right side of her
chair, William began upon the left a “hum,” which, with a close imitation
of the crowing of a cock, the grunting of a pig, and the braying of a
donkey, formed his chief stock of accomplishments.
“Drat the thing! Where be un?” said the Dame, endangering her balance in
the search.
“B-z-z-z-z!” went William behind the chair; and he added, _sotto voce_,
to Jan, “She be as dunch as a bittle.”
At last the Dame heard, and looked round. “Be that a harnet, missus, do
’ee think?” said William, with a face as guileless as a babe’s.
Dame Datchett rose in terror. William bent to look beneath her chair for
the hornet, and of course repeated his hum. As the hornet could neither
be found nor got rid of, the alarmed old lady broke up the school, and
went to lay a trap of brown sugar outside the window for her enemy. And
so Jan escaped a beating.
But this and the story of his first fight are digressions. It yet
remains to be told how he took to drawing pigs.
Dame Datchett’s cottage was the last on one side of the street; but it
did not face the street, but looked over the water-meadows, and the
little river, and the bridge.
As Jan sat on the end of the form, he could look through the Dame’s open
door, the chief view from which was of a place close by the bridge, and
on the river’s bank, where the pig-minders of the village brought their
pigs to water. Day after day, when the tedium of doing nothing under
Dame Datchett’s superintendence was insufficiently relieved to Jan’s
active mind by pinching “Willum” till he giggled, or playing cat’s-cradle
with one of his foster-brothers, did he welcome the sight of a flock of
pigs with their keeper, scuttling past the Dame’s door, and rushing
snorting to the stream.
Much he envied the freedom of the happy pig-minder, whilst the vagaries
of the pigs were an unfailing source of amusement.
The degree and variety of expression in a pig’s eye can only be
appreciated by those who have studied pigs as Morland must have studied
them. The pertness, the liveliness, the humor, the love of mischief, the
fiendish ingenuity and perversity of which pigs are capable, can be fully
known to the careworn pig-minder alone. When they are running away,—and
when are they not running away?—they have an action with the hind legs
very like a donkey in a state of revolt. But they have none of the
donkey’s too numerous grievances. And if donkeys squealed at every
switch, as pigs do, their undeserved sufferings would have cried loud
enough for vengeance before this.
Jan’s opportunities for studying pigs were good. As the smallest and
swiftest of the flock, his tail tightly curled, and indescribable
jauntiness in his whole demeanor, came bounding to the river’s brink,
followed by his fellows, driving, pushing, snuffing, winking, and
gobbling, and lastly by a small boy in a large coat, with a long switch,
Jan was witness of the whole scene from Dame Datchett’s door. And, as he
sat with his slate and pencil before him, he naturally took to drawing
the quaint comic faces and expressive eyes of the herd, and their hardly
less expressive backs and tails; and to depicting the scenes which took
place when the pigs had enjoyed their refreshment, and with renewed vigor
led their keeper in twenty different directions, instead of going home.
Back, up the road, where he could hardly drive them at the point of the
switch a few hours before; by sharp turns into Squire Ammaby’s grounds,
or the churchyard; and helter-skelter through the water-meadows.
The fame of Jan’s “pitcher-making” had gone before him to Dame Datchett’s
school by the mouths of his foster-brothers and sisters, and he found a
dozen little voices ready to dictate subjects for his pencil.
“Make a ’ouse, Janny Lake.” “Make thee vather’s mill, Janny Lake.”
“Make a man. Make Dame Datchett. Make the parson. Make the Cheap Jack.
Make Daddy Angel. Make Master Chuter. Make a oss—cow—ship—pig!”
But the popularity obtained by Jan’s pigs soon surpassed that of all his
other performances.
“Make pigs for I, Janny Lake!” and “Make pigs for I, too!” was a sort of
whispering chorus that went on perpetually under the Dame’s nose. But
when she found that it led to no disturbance, that the children only
huddled round the child Jan and his slate like eager scholars round a
teacher, Dame Datchett was wise enough to be thankful that Jan possessed
a power she had never been able to acquire,—that he could “keep the young
varments quiet.”
“He be most’s good’s a monitor,” thought the Dame; and she took a nap,
and Jan’s genius held the school together.
The children tried other influences besides persuasion.
“Jan Lake, I’ve brought thee an apple. Draa out a pig for I on a’s
slate.”
Jan had a spirit of the most upright and honorable kind. He never took
an unfair advantage, and to the petty cunning which was “Willum’s” only
idea of wisdom he seemed by nature incapable of stooping. But in
addition to, and alongside of, his artistic temperament, there appeared
to be in him no small share of the spirit of a trader. The capricious,
artistic spirit made him fitful in his use even of the beloved slate;
but, when he was least inclined to draw, the offer of something he very
much wanted would spur him to work; and in the spirit of a true trader,
he worked well.
He would himself have made a charming study for a painter, as he sat
surrounded by his patrons, who watched him with gaping mouths of
wonderment, as his black eyes moved rapidly to and fro between the
river’s brink and his slate, and his tiny fingers steered the pencil into
cunning lines which “made pigs.” “The very moral!” as William declared,
smacking his corduroy breeches with delight.
Sometimes Jan hardly knew that they were there, he was so absorbed in his
work. His eyes glowed with that strong pleasure which comes in the very
learning of any art, perhaps of any craft. Now and then, indeed, his
face would cloud with a different expression, and in fits of annoyance,
like that in which his foster-mother found him outside the windmill, he
would break his pencils, and ruthlessly destroy sketches with which his
patrons would have been quite satisfied. But at other moments his face
would twinkle with a very sunshine of smiles, as he was conscious of
having caught exactly the curve which expressed obstinacy in this pig’s
back, or the air of reckless defiance in that other’s tail.
And so he learned little or nothing, and improved in his drawing, and
kept the school quiet, and had always a pocket well filled with sweet
things, nails, string, tops, balls, and such treasures, earned by his
art.
One day as he sat “making pigs” for one after another of the group of
children round him, a pig of especial humor having drawn a murmur of
delight from the circle, this murmur was dismally echoed by a sob from a
little maid on the outside of the group. It was Master Chuter’s little
daughter, a pretty child, with an oval, dainty-featured face, and a prim
gentleness about her, like a good little girl in a good little story.
The intervening young rustics began to nudge each other and look back at
her.
“Kitty Chuter be crying!” they whispered.
“What be amiss with ’ee, then, Kitty Chuter?” said Jan, looking up from
his work; and the question was passed on with some impatience, as her
tears prevented her reply. “What be amiss with ’ee?”
“Janny Lake have never made a pig for I,” sobbed the little maid, with
her head dolefully inclined to her left shoulder, and her oval face
pulled to a doubly pensive length. “I axed my vather to let me get him a
posy, and a said I might. And I got un some vine Bloody Warriors, and a
heap of Boy’s Love off our big bush, that smelled beautiful. And vather
says a can have some water-blobs off our pond when they blows. But Tommy
Green met I as a was coming down to school, and a snatched my vlowers
from me, and I begged un to let me keep some of un, and a only laughed at
me. And I daren’t go back, for I was late; and now I’ve nothin’ to give
Janny Lake to make a draft of a pig for I.” And, having held up for the
telling of her tale, the little maid broke down in fresh tears.
Jan finished off the tail of the pig he was drawing with a squeak of the
pencil that might have come from the pig itself and, stuffing the slate
into its owner’s hands, he ran up to Kitty Chuter and kissed her wet
cheeks, saying, “Give I thee slate, Kitty Chuter, and I’ll make thee the
best pig of all. I don’t want nothing from thee for ’t. And when
school’s done, I’ll whop Tommy Green, if I sees him.”
And forthwith, without looking from the door for studies, Jan drew a fat
sow with her little ones about her; the other children clustering round
to peep, and crying, “He’ve made Kitty Chuter one, two, three, vour,
_vive_ pigs!”
“Ah, and there be two more you can’t see, because the old un be lying on
’em,” said Jan.
“Six, seven!” William counted; and he assisted the calculation by
sticking up first a thumb and then a forefinger as he spoke.
Some who had not thought half a ball of string, or a dozen nails as good
as new, too much to pay for a single pig drawn on one side of their
slates, and only lasting as long as they could contrive to keep the other
side in use without quite smudging that one, were now disposed to be
dissatisfied with their bargains. But as the school broke up, and Tom
Green was seen loitering on the other side of the road, every thing was
forgotten in the general desire to see Jan carry out his threat, and
“whop” a boy bigger than himself for bullying a little girl.
Jan showed no disposition to shirk, and William acted as his friend, and
held his slate and book.
Success is not always to the just, however; and poor Jan was terribly
beaten by his big opponent, though not without giving him some marks of
the combat to carry away.
Kitty Chuter wept bitterly for Jan’s bloody nose; but he comforted her,
saying, “Never mind, Kitty; if he plagues thee again, ’ll fight un again
and again, till I whops he.”
But his valor was not put to the proof, for Tommy Green molested her no
more.
Jan washed his face in the water-meadows, and went stout-heartedly home,
where Master Lake beat him afresh, as he ironically said, “to teach him
to vight young varments like himself instead of minding his book.”
But upon Master Chuter, of the Heart of Oak, the incident made quite a
different impression. He was naturally pleased by Jan’s championship of
his child, and, added to this, he was much impressed by the sketch on the
slate. It was, he said, the “living likeness” of his own sow; and, as
she had seven young pigs, the portrait was exact, allowing for the two
which Jan had said were out of sight.
He gave Kitty a new slate, and kept the sketch, which he showed to all
in-comers. He displayed it one evening to the company assembled round
the hearth of the little inn, and took occasion to propound his views on
the subject of Jan’s future life.
(Master Chuter was fond of propounding his views,—a taste which was
developed by always being sure of an audience.)
“It’s nothing to me,” said Master Chuter, speaking of Jan, “who the boy
be. It be no fault of his’n if he’s a fondling. And one thing’s sure
enough. Them that left him with Master Lake left something besides him.
There was that advertisement,—you remember that about the five-pound bill
in the paper, Daddy Angel?”
“Ay, ay, Master Chuter,” said Daddy Angel; “after the big storm, five
year ago. Sartinly, Master Chuter.”
“Was it ever found, do ye think?” said Master Linseed, the painter and
decorator.
“It must have been found,” said the landlord; “but I bean’t so sure about
it’s having been given up, the notice was in so long. And whoever did
find un must have found un at once. But what I says is, five-pound notes
lost as easy as that comes from where there’s more of the same sort.
And, if Master Lake be paid for the boy, he can ’fford to ’prentice him
when his time comes. He’ve boys enough of his own to take to the mill,
and Jan do seem to have such an uncommon turn for drawing things out, I’d
try him with painting and varnishing, if he was mine. And I believe he’d
come to signs, too! Look at that, now! It be small, and the boy’ve had
no paint to lay on, but there’s the sign of the Jolly Sow for you, as
natteral as life. You know about signs, Master Linseed,” continued the
landlord. For there was a tradition that the painter could “do
picture-signs,” though he had only been known to renew lettered ones
since he came to the neighborhood. “Master Lake should ’prentice him
with you when he’s older,” Master Chuter said in conclusion.
But Master Linseed did not respond warmly. He felt it a little beneath
his dignity as a sign-painter to jump at the idea, though the rest of the
company assented in a general murmur.
“Scrawling on a slate,” the painter and decorator began—and at this point
he paused, after the leisurely customs of the district, to light his pipe
at the leaden-weighted candlestick which stood near; and then, as his
hearers sat expectant, but not impatient, proceeded: “Scrawling on a
slate is one thing, Master Chuter: painting and decorating’s another.
Painting’s a trade; and not rightly to be understood by them that’s not
larned it, nor to be picked up by all as can scrawl a line here and a
line there, as the whim takes ’em. Take oak-graining,”—and here Master
Linseed paused again, with a fine sense of effect,—“who’d ever think of
taking a comb to it as didn’t know? And for the knots, I’ve worked
’em—now with a finger and now a thumb—over a shutter-front till it looked
that beautiful the man it was done for telled me himself,—‘I’d rather,’
says he, ‘have ’em as you’ve done ’em than the real thing.’ But young
hands is nowhere with the knots. They puts ’em in too thick.”
The company said, “Ay, ay!” in a tone of unbroken assent, for Master
Linseed was understood to have “come from a distance,” and to “know a
good deal.” But an innkeeper stands above a painter and decorator
anywhere, and especially on his own hearth, and Master Chuter did not
mean to be put down.
“I suppose old hands were young uns once, Master Linseed,” said he; “and
if the boy were never much at oak-graining, I’d back him for
sign-painting, if he were taught. Why, the pigs he draas out, look you.
I could cut ’em up, and not a piece missing; not a joint, nor as much as
would make a pound of sausages. And if a draas pigs, why not osses, why
not any other kind?”
“Ay, ay!” said the company.
“I be thinking,” continued Master Chuter, “of a gentlemen as draad out
that mare of my father’s that ran in the mail. You remember the coaches,
Daddy Angel?”
“Ay, ay, Master Chuter. Between Lonnon and Exeter a ran. Fine days at
the Heart of Oak, then, Master Chuter.”
“He weren’t a sign-painter, that I knows on. A were somethin’ more in
the gentry way,” said Master Chuter, not, perhaps, quite without malice
in the distinction. “He were what they calls in genteel talk a”—
“Artis’,” said Master Linseed, removing his pipe, to supply the missing
word with a sense of superiority.
“No, not a artis’,” said Master Chuter, “though it do begin with a A,
too. ’Twasn’t a artis’ he was, ’twas a”—
“Ammytoor,” said the travelled sign-painter.
“That be it,” said the innkeeper. “A ammytoor. And he was short of
money, I fancy, and so ’twas settled a should paint this mare of my
father’s to set against the bill. And a draad and a squinted at un, and
a squinted at un and a draad, and laid the paint on till the pictur’
looked all in a mess, and then he took un away to vinish. But when a
sent it home, I thought my vather would have had the law of un. I’m
blessed if a hadn’t given the mare four white feet, and shoulders that
wouldn’t have pulled a vegetable cart; and she near-wheeler of the mail!
I’d lay a pound bill Jan Lake would a done her ever so much better, for
as young a hand as a is, if a’d squinted at her as long.”
“Well, well, Master Chuter,” said the painter and decorator, rising to
go, “let the boy draw pigs and osses for his living. And I wish he may
find paint as easy as slate-pencil.”
Master Linseed’s parting words produced upon the company that somewhat
unreasonable depression which such ironical good wishes are apt to cause;
but they only roused the spirit of contradiction in Master Chuter, and
heightened his belief in Jan’s talents more than any praise from the
painter could have done.
“Here’s a pretty caddle about giving a boy’s due!” said the innkeeper.
“But I knows the points of a oss, and the makings of a pig, if I bean’t a
sign-painter. And, mark my words, the boy Jan ’ull out-paint Master
Linseed yet.”
Master Chuter spoke with triumph in his tone, but it was the triumph of
delivering his sentiments to unopposing hearers.
There were moments of greater triumph to come, of which he yet wotted
not, when the sevenfold fulfilment of his prediction should be past
dispute, and attested from his own walls by more lasting monuments of
Jan’s skill than the too perishable sketch which now stood like a text
for the innkeeper on the mantelpiece of the Heart of Oak.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE MOP.—THE SHOP.—WHAT THE CHEAP JACK’S WIFE HAD TO TELL.—WHAT GEORGE
WITHHELD.
A MOP is a local name for a hiring-fair, at which young men and women
present themselves to be hired as domestic servants or farm laborers for
a year. It was at a mop that the windmiller had hired George, and it was
at that annual festival that his long service came to an end. He betook
himself to the town, where the fair was going on, not with any definite
intention of seeking another master, but from a variety of reasons:
partly for a holiday, and to “see the fun;” partly to visit the Cheap
Jack, and hear what advice he had to give, and to learn what was in the
letter; partly with the idea that something might suggest itself in the
busy town as a suitable investment for his savings and his talents. At
the worst, he could but take another place.
The sun shone brightly on the market-place as George passed through it.
The scene was quaint and picturesque. Booths, travelling shows, penny
theatres, quack doctors, tumblers, profile cutters, exhibitors and
salesmen of all sorts, thronged the square, and overflowed into a space
behind, where some houses had been burnt down and never rebuilt; whilst
round the remains of the market cross in the centre were grouped the lads
and lasses “on hire.” The girls were smartly dressed, and the young men
in snowy smocks, above which peeped waistcoats of gay colors, looked in
the earlier part of the day so spruce, that it was as lamentable to see
them after the hours of beer-drinking and shag tobacco-smoking which
followed, as it was to see what might have been a neighborly and cheerful
festival finally swamped in drunkenness and debauchery.
George’s smock was white, and George’s waistcoat was red, and he had made
himself smart enough, but he did not linger amongst his fellow-servants
at the Cross. He hurried through the crowd, nodding sheepishly in answer
to a shower of chaff and greetings, and made his way to the by-street
where the Cheap Jack had a small dingy shop for the sale of coarse
pottery. Some people were spiteful enough to hint that the shop-trade
was of much less value to him than the store-room attached, where the
goods were believed to be not all of one kind.
The red bread-pans, pipkins, flower-pots, and so forth, were grouped
about the door with some attempt at effective display, and with cheap
prices marked in chalk upon their sides. The window was clean, and in it
many knick-knacks of other kinds were mixed with the smaller china ware.
And, when George entered the shop, the hunchback’s wife was behind the
counter. Like Mrs. Lake, he paused to think where he could have seen her
before; the not uncomely face marred by an ugly mouth, in which the upper
lip was long and cleft, and the lower lip large and heavy, seemed
familiar to him. He was still beating his brains when the Cheap Jack
came in.
George had been puzzled that the woman’s countenance did not seem new to
him, and he was puzzled and disturbed also that the expression on the
face of the Cheap Jack was quite new. Whatever the hunchback had in his
head, however, he was not unfriendly in his manner.
“Good morning, George, my dear!” he cried, cheerfully; “you’ve seen my
missus before, eh, George?” George was just about to say no, when he
remembered that he had seen the woman, and when and where.
“Dreadful night that was, Mr. Sannel!” said the Cheap Jack’s wife, with a
smile on her large mouth. George assented, and by the hospitable
invitation of the newly married couple he followed them into the dwelling
part of the house, trying as he did so to decide upon a plan for his
future conduct.
Here at last was a woman who could probably tell all that he wanted to
know about the mystery on which he had hoped to trade, and—the Cheap Jack
had married her. If any thing could be got out of the knowledge of Jan’s
history, the Cheap Jack, and not George, would get it now. The hasty
resolution to which George came was to try to share what he could not
keep entirely to himself. He flattered himself he could be very civil,
and—he had got the letter.
It proved useful. George was resolved not to show it until he had got at
something of what the large-mouthed woman had to tell; and, as she wanted
to see the letter, she made a virtue of necessity, and seemed anxious to
help the miller’s man to the utmost of her power.
The history of her connection with Jan’s babyhood was soon told, and she
told it truthfully.
Five years before her marriage to the Cheap Jack, she was a chambermaid
in a small hotel in London, and “under notice to leave.” Why—she did not
deem it necessary to tell George. In this hotel Jan was born, and Jan’s
mother died. She was a foreigner, it was supposed, and her husband also,
for they talked a foreign language to each other. He was not with her
when she first came, but he joined her afterwards, and was with her at
her death. So far the Cheap Jack’s wife spoke upon hearsay. Though
employed at the hotel, which was very full, she was not sleeping in the
house; she was not on good terms with the landlady, nor even with the
other servants, and her first real connection with the matter was when
the gentleman, overhearing some “words” between her and the landlady at
the bar, abruptly asked her if she were in want of employment. He
employed her,—to take the child to the very town where she was now living
as the Cheap Jack’s wife. He did not come with her, as he had to attend
his wife’s funeral. It was understood at the hotel that he was going to
take the body abroad for interment. So the porter had said. The person
to whom she was directed to bring the child was a respectable old woman,
living in the outskirts of the town, whose business was sick-nursing.
She seemed, however, to be comfortably off, and had not been out for some
time. She had been nurse to the gentleman in his childhood, so she once
told the Cheap Jack’s wife with tears. But she was always shedding
tears, either over the baby, or as she sat over her big Bible, “for ever
having to wipe her spectacles, and tears running over her nose ridic’lus
to behold.” She was pious, and read the Bible aloud in the evening.
Then she had fainting fits; she could not go uphill or upstairs without
great difficulty, and she had one of her fits when she first saw the
child. If with these infirmities of body and mind the ex-nurse had been
easily managed, the Cheap Jack’s wife professed that she could have borne
it with patience. But the old woman was painfully shrewd, and there was
no hoodwinking her. She never allowed the Cheap Jack’s wife to go out
without her, and contrived, in spite of a hundred plans and excuses, to
prevent her from speaking to any of the townspeople alone. Never, said
Sal, never could she have put up with it, even for the short time before
the gentleman came down to them, but for knowing it would be a paying
job. But his arrival was the signal for another catastrophe, which ended
in Jan’s becoming a child of the mill.
If the sight of the baby had nearly overpowered the old nurse, the sight
of the dark-eyed gentleman overwhelmed her yet more. Then they were
closeted together for a long time, and the old woman’s tongue hardly ever
stopped. Sal explained that she would not have been such a fool as to
let this conversation escape her, if she could have helped it. She took
her place at the keyhole, and had an excuse ready for the old woman, if
she should come out suddenly. The old woman came out suddenly; but she
did not wait for the excuse. She sent the Cheap Jack’s wife civilly on
an errand into the kitchen, and then followed her, and shut the door and
turned the key upon her without hesitation, leaving her unable to hear
any thing but the tones of the conversation through the parlor wall. She
never opened the door again. As far as the Cheap Jack’s wife could tell,
the old woman seemed to be remonstrating and pleading; the gentleman
spoke now and then. Then there was a lull, then a thud, then a short
pause, and then the parlor-door was burst open, and the gentleman came
flying towards the kitchen, and calling for the Cheap Jack’s wife. The
fact that the door was locked caused some delay, and delay was not
desirable. The old nurse had had “a fit.” When the doctor came, he gave
no hope of her life. She had had heart disease for many years, he said.
In the midst of this confusion, a letter came for the gentleman, which
seemed absolutely to distract him. He bade Sal get the little Jan ready,
and put his clothes together, and they started that evening for the mill.
Sal believed it was the doctor who recommended Mrs. Lake as a
foster-mother for the baby, having attended her child. The storm came on
after they started. The child had been very sickly ever since they left
London. The gentleman took the Cheap Jack’s wife straight back to the
station, paid her handsomely, and sent her up to town again. She had
never seen him since. As to his name, it so happened she had never heard
it at the hotel; but when he was setting her off to the country with the
child, she asked it, and he told her that it was Ford. The old nurse
also spoke of him as Mr. Ford, but—so Sal fancied—with a sort of effort,
which made her suspect that it was not his real name.
“Yes, it be!” said George, who had followed the narrative with
open-mouthed interest. “It be aal right. I knows. ’Twas a gentleman by
the name of Ford as cried his pocket-book, and the vive-pound bill in the
papers. ’Tis aal right. Ford—Jan Ford be the little varment’s name
then, and he be gentry-born, too! Missus Lake she allus said so, she
did, sartinly.”
George was so absorbed by the flood of information which had burst upon
him all at once, and by adjusting his clumsy thoughts to the new view of
Jan, that he did not stop to think whether the Cheap Jack and his wife
had known of the lost pocket-book and the reward. They had not. The
dark gentleman had no wish to reopen communication with the woman he had
employed. He thought (and rightly) that the book had fallen when he
stumbled over his cloak in getting into the carriage, and he had refused
to advertise it except in the local papers. And at that time the Cheap
Jack and Sal were both in London.
But George’s incautious speech recalled one or two facts to them, and
whilst George sat slowly endeavoring to realize that new idea, “Master
Jan Ford, full young gentleman, and at least half Frenchman” (for of any
other foreigners George knew nothing), the Cheap Jack was pondering the
words “five-pound bill,” and connecting them with George’s account of his
savings when they last met; and his quicker spouse was also putting two
and two together, but with a larger sum. At the same instant the Cheap
Jack inquired after George’s money, and his wife asked about the letter.
But George had hastily come to a decision. If the tale told by the woman
were true, he had got a great deal of information for nothing, and he saw
no reason for sharing whatever the letter might contain with those most
likely to profit by it. As to letting the Cheap Jack have any thing
whatever to do with the disposal of his savings, nothing could be further
from his intentions.
“Gearge bean’t such a vool as a looks,” thought that worthy, and aloud he
vowed, with unnecessary oaths, that the money was still in the bank, and
that he had forgotten to bring the letter, which was in a bundle that he
had left at the mill.
This disappointment did not, however, diminish the civility of the Cheap
Jack’s wife. She was very hospitable, and even pressed George to spend
the night at their house, which he declined. He had a dread of the Cheap
Jack, which was almost superstitious.
For her civility, indeed, the Cheap Jack’s wife was taken to task by her
husband in a few moments when they were alone together.
“I thought you was sharper than to be took in by him!” said the
hunchback, indignantly. “Do you believe all that gag about the bank and
the bundle? and you, as soft to him, telling him every blessed thing, and
he stowed the cash and the letter somewheres where we shall never catch a
sight of ’em, and got every thing out of you as easy as shelling a pod of
peas.” And in language as strong as that of the miller’s man the Cheap
Jack swore he could have done better himself a hundred times over.
“Could you?” said the large-mouthed woman, contemptuously. “I wouldn’t
live long in the country, I wouldn’t, if it was to make me such a owl as
you’ve turned into. It ain’t much farther than your nose _you_ sees!”
“Never mind me, Sal, my dear,” said the hunchback, anxiously. “I trusts
you, my dear. And it seems to me as if you thought he’d got ’em about
him. Do you, my dear, and why? And why did you tell him the truth,
straight on end, when a made-up tale would have done as well, and kept
him in the dark?”
“Why did I tell him the truth?” repeated the woman. “’Cos I ain’t such a
countrified fool as to think lies is allus the cleverest tip, ’cos the
truth went farthest this time. Why do I think he’s got ’em about him?
First, ’cos he swore so steady he hadn’t. For a ready lie, and for
acting a lie, and over-acting it at times, give me townspeople; but for a
thundering big un, against all reason, and for sticking to it stupid when
they’re downright convicted, and with a face as innercent as a baby’s,
give me a country lump. And next, because I can tell with folks a deal
sharper than him, even to which side of ’em the pocket is they’ve got
what they wants to hide in, by the way they moves their head and their
hands.”
“Which side is it of him, Sal?” said the hunchback, with ugly eagerness.
“The left,” said Sal; “but it won’t be there long.”
CHAPTER XVII.
THE MILLER’S MAN AT THE MOP.—A LIVELY COMPANION.—SAL LOSES HER PURSE.—THE
RECRUITING SERGEANT.—THE POCKET-BOOK TWICE STOLEN.—GEORGE IN THE KING’S
ARMS.—GEORGE IN THE KING’S SERVICE.—THE LETTER CHANGES HANDS, BUT KEEPS
ITS SECRET.
FOR some years the ex-servant of the windmill had been rather favored by
fortune than otherwise. He found the pocket-book, and, though he could
not read the letter, he got the five-pound note. Since then, his gains,
honest and dishonest, had been much beyond his needs, and his savings
were not small. Suspicion was just beginning to connect his name and
that of the Cheap Jack with certain thefts committed in the neighborhood,
when he made up his mind to go.
His wealth was not generally known. Many a time had he been tempted to
buy pigs (a common speculation in the district, and the first stone of
more than one rustic fortune), but the dread of exciting suspicion
balanced the almost certain profit, and he could never make up his mind.
For Master Lake paid only five pounds a year for his man’s valuable
services, which, even in a district where at that time habits were
simple, and boots not made of brown paper, did not leave much margin for
the purchase of pigs. The pig speculation, though profitable, was not
safe. George had made money, however, and he had escaped detection. On
the whole, he had been fortunate. But that mop saw a turn in the tide of
his affairs, and ended strangely with him.
It began otherwise. George had never felt more convinced of his power to
help himself at the expense of his neighbors than he did after getting
Sal’s information, and keeping back his own, before they started to join
in the amusements of the fair. He was on good terms with himself; none
the less so that he had not failed to see the Cheap Jack’s chagrin, as
the woman poured forth all she knew for George’s benefit, and got nothing
in return.
The vanity of the ignorant knows no check except from without; under
flattery, it is boundless, and the Cheap Jack’s wife found no difficulty
in fooling George to the top of his bent.
George was rather proud, too, of his companion. She was not, as has been
said, ill-looking but for her mouth, and beauty was not abundant enough
in the neighborhood to place her at much disadvantage. Fashionable
finery was even less common, and the Cheap Jack’s wife was showily
dressed. And George found her a very pleasant companion; much livelier
than the slow-witted damsels of the country-side. For him she had
nothing but flattery; but her smart speeches at the expense of other
people in the crowd caused the miller’s man to double up his long back
with laughter.
A large proportion of the country wives and sweethearts tramped up and
down the fair at the heels of their husbands and swains, like squaws
after their Indian spouses. But the Cheap Jack’s wife asked George for
his arm,—the left one,—and she clung to it all the day. “Quite the lady
in her manners she be,” thought George. She called him “Mr. Sannel,”
too. George felt that she admired him. For a moment his satisfaction
was checked, when she called his attention to the good looks of a
handsome recruiting sergeant, who was strutting about the mop with an air
expressing not so much that it all belonged to him as that he didn’t at
all belong to it.
“But there, he ain’t to hold a candle to you, Mr. Sannel, though his coat
do sit well upon him,” said the Cheap Jack’s wife.
It gratified George’s standing ill-will to the Cheap Jack to have “cut
him out” with this showy lady, and to laugh loudly with her upon his arm,
whilst the hunchback followed, like a discontented cur, at their heels.
If there was a drawback to the merits of his lively companion, it was her
power of charming the money out of George’s pocket.
The money that he disbursed came from the right-hand pocket of his red
waistcoat. In the left-hand pocket (and the pockets, like the pattern of
the waistcoat, were large) was the lost pocket-book. It was a small one,
and just fitted in nicely. In the pocket-book were George’s savings,
chiefly in paper. Notes were more portable than coin, and, as George
meant to invest them somewhere where he was not known, no suspicions need
be raised by their value. The letter was there also.
There were plenty of shows at the mop, and the Cheap Jack’s wife saw them
all. The travelling wax-works; the menagerie with a very mangy lion in
an appallingly rickety cage; the fat Scotchman, a monster made more
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