It came home to us, you see, having the ‘Stretford Arms;’ and it being in our house that it all happened, long, long ago—and that room, the Squire’s room, was my pride after that, and I kept it a perfect picture; but I never dusted it or arranged it without thinking of the poor old gentleman sitting in the big armchair, and looking out in the moonlight at the old home that he had lost—the home his race had lived and died in for hundreds of years.
Of course as soon as we’d got over the first effect of the story, we asked Mr. Wilkins to explain how it had been done, though we guessed a good deal.
He told us that it was all through Mr. George Owen—(“He was a brick,” said Harry, and though I couldn’t call him a brick, because somehow or other “brick” isn’t a woman’s word, I said he was an angel, which Harry says is the feminine of “brick”)—and it was he who had arranged the whole thing.
The wholesale tailors were going away for three months, and Mr. Owen had got them to let him rent the place of them for the time, and longer if he wanted it, and then he had gone off to London and found the Colonel, who was an old bachelor living in Albany something—whether the barracks or the street I forget—and, knowing the whole story from Miss Di, he had begged him to come down and assist in the trick—if trick is the word for such a noble action.
The Colonel had played to lose, the money being Mr. Owen’s, and it had all been arranged, and he was very glad to do it for his old friend, for though a born gambler, the Hall had always stuck in his throat—to use a common saying.
I wrote the story down when Mr. Wilkins had told it us, because I thought if ever I wrote the memoirs of our inn, I couldn’t begin with a better one than the story of old Squire Stretford, seeing that the strangest part of it took place in our house, and that our house is the ‘Stretford Arms,’ and the Stretfords are bound up with the history of the place.
Mr. and Mrs. Owen left the neighbourhood soon after that; they sold their house, and went to live in another part of the country, and the wholesale tailors came back again. The eldest son of the tailors has the place now, and he sometimes comes in and has a chat with Harry. When he was a boy he ran away to sea, and his people never knew what had become of him for ever so long, and gave him up for dead, till one morning his ma came down to breakfast and found a letter from him, dated from some awful place where cannibals live. It was some island that Harry knew quite well, having been there with his ship, but since cannibalism had been done away with, it being many years after the wholesale tailor’s eldest son was in those parts.
Of course he is a middle-aged man now, this eldest son, and settled down, and has the business, and is quite reformed; but he likes to come and talk to Harry about that cannibal island, and foreign parts which they have both visited. I think it is likely to be a very good thing for us in business, Harry having been a sailor. People seem to like sailors, and, of course, if they can talk at all, and can remember what they have seen, their conversation is sure to be interesting.
When Harry sometimes begins to spin a yarn of an evening, everybody leaves off talking and listens to him, not because he is the landlord, but because he has something to say that is worth listening to, about places and people that nobody else in the company knows anything about. I wish I could use some of his stories here, but I can’t, because I am only going to write about what belongs to our hotel and the village, and the things that I see and hear myself.
When the gentleman who lives at the Hall that was the home of the Stretfords for so many years comes in of an evening, of course we always ask him in the——