I didn’t go into the bar much, having the house to see to, and getting the rooms to look pretty, and fitting them up as bedrooms, we being quite determined to make it a little hotel where people could stop.
We made one of the rooms look very pretty, and bought some old volumes of Punch and Fun for it, and a picture or two, and called it the coffee-room; and we kept another room for the local people to have bread and cheese and chops in. As soon as we were quite ready we had “Hotel” put up big, and I wrote nice letters to all my masters and mistresses, and I wrote specially to Mr. Saxon, asking for his patronage.
I was very anxious to get him, because I thought perhaps if we made him comfortable he would put us a nice paragraph in some of the papers he wrote for, and that would be a good advertisement.
I soon began to find out a good deal about our customers and our neighbours, and the people who lived in the village. The most famous people, as I have said before, were the Stretfords, the family whose land our house was on, and whose arms were on our signboard.
We hadn’t anything to do with the Stretfords ourselves, and they didn’t live in the place any longer, the house having passed to a stranger, and all the property being in other people’s hands, but the place was saturated with stories of the old Squire’s goings-on. Poor old Squire! He was dead long before we took his “Arms,” and everything belonging to him had gone except his name; but the old people still spoke of him with love and admiration, and seemed proud of the dreadful things he had done.
When I say dreadful I don’t mean low dreadful, but high dreadful—that is, things a gentleman may do that are not right, but still gentlemanly—or, rather, they were gentlemanly in the Squire’s time, but wouldn’t be thought so nowadays.
I’ve heard old people tell of “the days when they were young,” and the things that were thought nothing of then for a gentleman to do. There is a dear old gentleman with long white hair who uses our house, who lived servant in a great family in London sixty years ago, and his father before him, and the stories he tells about the young “bloods”—that is what he calls them—are really wonderful.
They were a nice lot certainly in those days. If they went on like it now they would be had up before a magistrate, and not allowed to mix with respectable people. They were great drinkers and great fighters and great gamblers, and thought nothing of staggering about the streets and creating a disturbance with the watch or pulling off knockers, and doing just the sort of mischief that only very young fellows and little rough boys do in the streets now.
Squire Stretford was one of the good old sort of country gentlemen, with red faces and ruffled shirts, who carried snuffboxes and sticks with a tassel to them, and didn’t think it any harm to take a little too much to drink of an evening. And he was a great gambler, and would go up to London to his club and gamble, till, bit by bit, he had to part with all his property to pay his debts.
He had a daughter, a fine, handsome girl she was, so I was told, and a lovely rider. Miss Diana her name was, and she was in love with a young fellow who lived at a great house not far from the Hall—a Mr. George Owen. His father was a pawnbroker in London, having several shops; but the son had been to Oxford, and had never had anything to do with taking in people’s watches and blankets and flat-irons. When Miss Diana told her papa that if she couldn’t have George Owen she would never have anybody, he was in a dreadful rage. “Good heavens, Di,” he said, “you must be mad! Marry a fellow who lends money on poor people’s shirts and flannel petticoats? Marry the man that’s got our plate, and your poor mother’s jewels; a Jew rascal, who only lends about a quarter what things are worth, and sells them in a year if you don’t redeem them? Why, you’ll be proposing the dashed fellow who serves me with a writ for my son-in-law next!”