Harry told me that when he heard that he felt that if he could have met the fellow he’d have knocked him down—sailors being very chivalrous, I think the word is, I mean, when women are concerned; and all the way home he thought of poor Miss Ward, and how I was to break it to her that her lover was a scoundrel.
I had to do it; and, in trying to do it gently, I blurted it all out, and the poor thing fainted right away, and was so ill afterwards she had to go to bed. I went and sat with her and comforted her, and she cried and told me everything. That mean fellow had actually had thirty pounds out of her—all her savings, that she’d drawn out of the Post Office Savings Bank to give him, towards the capital he wanted for the grand business he was doing with dukes, marquises, earls, and barons.
It was a long time before she got over the shock, but it was a lesson to her, and at last she began to see that she was well rid of such a vampire.
And a long time after that we found out—that is, Harry did—a lot more about the beauty. Happening to go to another house one day—a public-house in London—Harry, who knew the landlord, told him about our barmaid and her lover, and when he described him the landlord said, “Why, that’s the fellow who had twenty pounds out of the barmaid at the ‘Hat and Feathers’ at Hendon!” And then Harry’s friend went and talked about it in the trade, and by-and-by it was found out that Mr. Shipsides had got over one hundred and fifty pounds out of different barmaids at different places, and that he was engaged to marry them all, and he’d stayed at some of the houses, just like he had at ours, and never paid a farthing—only at one place he’d borrowed five pounds of the landlord as well.
The last that we found out about him was that he’d gone to Australia with the wife of a small shopkeeper he’d lodged with afterwards, and that she’d robbed her husband of one hundred pounds to go with him. I’m sorry for her when she got to Australia and her hundred pounds was gone.
Miss Ward wasn’t with us long after that. I don’t think she felt quite comfortable. She fancied perhaps that in——
* * * * *
“Is it a bad half-sovereign? Of course it is, you stupid girl! What’s the good of bringing it to me now? Why, the fellow’s half a mile away by this time! Thought he must be respectable, as he asked for a sixpenny cigar? Nonsense! He wanted nine and sixpence change for this thing. I declare I can’t sit down quietly for ten minutes but something goes wrong!”
CHAPTER IV.
THE REVEREND TOMMY.
What a lot there is in the world that you must die not knowing anything about because you don’t get mixed up with it! I don’t know if that’s quite the way to say what I mean, but it came into my head looking over the things I had put down in my diary that I thought would be worth telling about in my new book of experiences as the landlady of a village inn.