Jill: A Flower Girl

by L. T. Meade

He was very much startled and amazed at his own action that morning. He had not only made love to a very young and very pretty girl, but he had asked her to come down to the country god share his bit of a cottage with him.

He had asked her to take him for better, for worse. He had asked her to belong to him for ever and ever; it was really a tremendous thing to do, a rash, overwhelming sort of thing. Here was Silas, a grim, sour, gnarled old bachelor (he was not very far from forty years of age), asking a bit of a lass whom he knew little or nothing about to be his wife, Silas was known amongst the neighbours as a woman-hater—as a gruff, disagreeable, churlish sort of man, and yet now he was in love; absolutely in love with a pretty girl who possessed a pair of dark eyes for her dower, who was nothing whatever but a London flower girl, possessed of all the knowledge, and probably all the wickedness, that that name implied, and who owed somebody or other the large, the enormous sum of five pounds.

“It’s a good thing as she wouldn’t have me,” said Silas, as he sat in the front of the waggon, and “gee-upped” to his horses. “It’s a right good thing for me. She’d have been my undoing, sure as sure; a dainty bit of a thing with a purty way and a proud look; full of breedin’; and yet nothing but a London gel. Oncommon like the flowers all the same; painted up by the Almighty hisself—roses in her cheeks, fire in her eyes, and—my word! her lips, haven’t they a dash of colour in ’em! The Almighty made her very ’ticing—there’s no doubt on that pint. Worn’t she sweet just when she ’anded me that coffee; my word, it tasted like new honey. But all the same it’s well I’m rid on her. I’ll have forgotten her by Monday. There’s the new colt to be broken in, and that bed of dahlias wants thinnin’; I’ll say anything too that Jonathan’s coorting that wench Hepsibah, ’stead of looking arter the young sparrer-grass. Oh, my hand’s full, and I’m well quit of a bit o’ a girl like that ’un.”

Having reached home, Silas put up his tired horses, watered and groomed them, saw to their comforts in every particular, and then went into the little cottage which he had offered to share with Jill.

Silas was a very prosperous market-gardener. He had what might be called a certain knack with flowers and vegetables. Under his touch they throve. His blossoms were larger than those of any other market-gardener round. He did not go in so extensively for fruit, but even his fruit was better and more abundant than his neighbours’.

It was generally known that Silas was a man of substance. Every Monday he might have been seen trudging on foot to the nearest market town, entering the Bank, and going home again with a satisfied expression on his strong, rough face.

Everyone knew what Silas did in the Bank. He was storing his money there, putting away every week his hard-earned savings.

Notwithstanding his success, however, he was a very morose and churlish man. He never exchanged friendly words with his fellow creatures. He never invited his neighbours to partake of his hospitality. He was very good to his flowers, and scrupulously kind to his animals. But that he had any duties to perform to humanity at large, never entered into his calculations.

Although his small farm was so prosperous, and his horses so comfortably housed, the little cottage where he lived himself was of the most meagre description. It was very old, and in its best days was but a poor residence.

Silas said, however, that the two-roomed dwelling was good enough for him, and he would have been a brave man, and she a remarkable plucky woman, who had dared to suggest to Silas Lynn that he might with advantage enlarge his dwelling.