MARY JANE MARRIED
UNIFORM WITH THE PRESENT VOLUME.
Post 8vo, illustrated boards, 2s.; cloth, 2s. 6d.
MARY JANE’S MEMOIRS.
By GEORGE R. SIMS.
WITH A PHOTOGRAPHED PORTRAIT OF MARY JANE.

“A quite Defoe-like revelation. It is, in effect, a series of social sketches drawn by a keen and humorous observer. Can be heartily recommended to all and sundry.”—Globe.

“A very entertaining autobiography.... Mary Jane has a faculty for observing character, and a power of delineating its movements and development, not distantly related to those of Mr. Sims himself. Mary Jane has so full a fund of exciting incident to draw upon, and so pleasant a manner of philosophizing, in her homely way, upon the ups and downs of a servant’s life, that should she ever take the field as a novelist independently of her present sponsor, he will have a formidable rival to contend with.”—Scotsman.

“Mr. Sims has portrayed in an amusing manner the trials, woes, and triumphs of domestic servants. There is such an amount of truthfulness in the narrative that we can almost accept the portrait of Mary Jane as that of the authoress of the memoirs Mr. Sims is supposed to edit, and to believe that it is really genuine.”—Metropolitan.

“There are some pages in these memoirs which it is impossible to read without laughing heartily, while the chapters devoted to the account of the Chelsea mystery are almost tragic in their intense realism.... Dickens never did anything better than ‘Mrs. Three-doors-up,’ or ‘Mr. Saxon, the author, and his mother-in-law.’. The book is full of unvarnished naturalism of a healthy, sensible, wholesome kind. It is quite the best thing Mr. Sims has yet written.”—Whitehall Review.

“Those who have not yet made Miss Buffham’s acquaintance will here find in her a very entertaining narrator of vast experiences in the way of domestic service.”—Daily News.

“Much of the book is broad comedy, and most laughter-provoking, and reminds one of the best of the famous ‘Mrs. Brown.’. Generally, the book is remarkable for its Defoe-like verisimilitude, and added to this is an inexhaustible fund of humour and broad though harmless fun.”—Public Opinion.

“Genuine amusement awaits the public in the perusal of Mary Jane’s experiences, edited by the popular writer who has put them into book form. This view of the world from the housemaid’s pantry is full of shrewd observation and apparently unconscious humour, and is throughout diverting.”—Morning Post.

“Mary Jane’s experience of domestic service makes a very entertaining book. She sees some strange things, and describes them in a lively, good-tempered way.”—St. James’s Gazette.

“Mr. Sims is a clever story-teller, but he is to be admired for his philanthropic spirit even more than for his artistic skill. Mary Jane’s observations are shrewd and suggestive. There is a realistic tone about the whole which makes these records interesting.”—Congregational Review.

ALSO BY GEORGE R. SIMS.

Each the same size and prices.

ROGUES AND VAGABONDS.
THE RING O’ BELLS.

LONDON: CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY.

MARY JANE MARRIED

Tales of a Village Inn
BY
GEORGE R. SIMS
AUTHOR OF “MARY JANE’S MEMOIRS,” “THE DAGONET BALLADS,”
“ROGUES AND VAGABONDS,” “THE RING O’ BELLS,” ETC.

London
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1888
[The right of translation is reserved]

CONTENTS.

MARY JANE MARRIED.

CHAPTER I.
MARY JANE EXPLAINS.

It is no use my trying to stop myself. I’m sure I’ve tried hard enough. When I changed my name from Mary Jane Buffham to Mary Jane Beckett by marrying Harry, my sailor sweetheart (God bless him!), I said to myself—Now, Mary Jane, my girl, no more pens and ink. You’ve written a book and had it published, and the newspaper gentlemen have been most kind in what they said about it. You’d better be satisfied with that, and do your duty in that state of life unto which you have been called, that state being mistress of a sweet little hotel—inn, some people will call it, but it’s quite as much right to be called an hotel as lots of places that have “Hotel” up in big letters all over them—in a pretty village not very far from London. Of course I have enough to do, though Harry takes a good deal off my shoulders; but there are so many things that a landlady can do to make a house comfortable that a landlord can’t, and I take a great pride in my dear little home, and everybody says it’s a picture, and so it is. Harry says it’s my training as a thorough servant that makes me such a good mistress, and I dare say it is. Our house is called “The Stretford Arms,” and we put “Hotel” on the signboard underneath it soon after we had it, and made it pretty and comfortable, so that people—nice people—came to stay at it.

But, oh dear me, before we got it what a lot of trouble we had! If you have read my “Memoirs” you know all about me and Harry, and how I left service to marry him, and he made up his mind—having a bit of money saved, and some come to him from a relative—to take a nice little inn in the country; not a public-house, but something better, with plenty of garden to it for us to have flowers, and fruit, and fowls, and all that sort of thing; and we made up our minds we’d have one with a porch and trellis-work, and roses growing over it, and lattice windows, like we’d seen in a play before we were married.

We hadn’t gone into business when my book came out in a volume. When the publisher sent me a copy, I thought, “Oh, how proud I shall be when I show this to Harry!” I declare I could have cried with rage when I took the brown paper off and saw the cover. It was most wicked, and upset me awfully. There on the cover was a picture of me sitting in my kitchen with a horrid, grinning policeman, with his arm round my waist. I threw the book on the floor, the tears streaming down my face. It was such a bitter disappointment.

Harry came in while I was crying, and he said, “Why, my lass, what’s the matter with you?” And I sobbed out, pointing to the book, “Look at that, Harry!” Harry picked the book up, and when he saw the cover his face went crimson under the sunburn.

He said, “Did this ever happen, Mary Jane?” and I said, “No, Harry. Do you think I would ever have demeaned myself like that?”

He looked at the grinning idiot of a policeman for a minute, and then he brought his fist down hard right on his nose (the policeman’s). Then he said, “Put it out of my sight, and never let me see it again.” But presently he said, “There must be something about you and a policeman in the book, or they wouldn’t have put him hugging you on the cover. Which chapter is it? I’ll read it and see what the truth of this business is.”

I recollected then that there was something about a policeman, so I said, “No, Harry, dear, don’t read it now; you’re not in a fit state of mind. But whatever there is, I swear he didn’t sit in my kitchen with his arm round my waist; and he—he—he wasn’t—a grinning idiot like that.”

I took the book away from Harry, and wouldn’t let him see it then. But he kept on about it all the evening, and I could see it had made him jealous as well as savage; and it was very hard—all through that horrid picture the pleasure I had looked forward to was quite spoilt. But so it is in this world; and how often it happens that what we have been longing for to be a pleasure to us, when it comes is only a disappointment and a misery!

Harry said to me that evening that he would go to London and see the publishers, and have it out with them about the picture. He said it was a libel on my character, and he wasn’t going to have his wife stuck about on all the bookstalls in a policeman’s arms. But, I said to him, the publishers didn’t mean any harm, and it was no good being cross with them, or making a disturbance at their office.

But some time afterwards I wrote a little note to Messrs. Chatto and Windus about it, and Mr. Chatto wrote back that he was very sorry the picture had caused words between me and my husband, and, in the next editions, it should be altered, and soon after that he sent me a proof of the new cover, and it was Harry with his arm round my waist instead of the policeman, which makes all the difference.

There were many things that I shouldn’t have written, perhaps, if I’d been quite sure that they would be published, and my husband would read them; but, after all, there was no harm, and I only wrote the truth. I wrote what I saw, and it was because it was the real experience of a real servant that people read it, and, as I have reason to know, liked it. And now, after I have been landlady of a village hotel, doing a nice trade both in the bar and in the coffee-room (why coffee-room, I don’t know, for there is less coffee drunk in it than anything), I find myself putting down what I have seen and heard on paper, just as I did in my “Memoirs.”

People say to me sometimes, “Law, now, fancy your noticing that!—I never did;” and that’s the secret of my being an authoress, I suppose. I keep my eyes open, and my ears too; and if I see a character, I like to watch it, and find out all about it.

I’ve seen some strange characters in our inn, I can tell you; and as to the people in the village, why, when you come to know their stories, you find out that every place is a little world in itself, with its own dramas being played out in people’s lives just the same as in big towns. Yes, there are village tragedies and village comedies, and the village inn is the place to hear all about them. I haven’t got an imagination, so I can’t invent things, and I think it’s a good thing for me, because I might be tempted to make up stories, which are never so good as those that really happen. I thought when I came to this village I should have nothing to write about, but I hadn’t been in it long before I found my mistake. I hear a lot, of course, in the bar-parlour, because it’s like a club, and all the chatty people come there of an evening and talk their neighbours over, and I hear lots more in the house from the market women and from our cook and the people about the place, and I can promise you that I have learnt some real romances of real life—rich and poor, too—since I became the landlady of the ‘Stretford Arms.’

We didn’t get into the place all at once. Oh dear me, what an anxious time it was till we found what we wanted! and the way we were tried to be “done,” as Harry calls it, was something dreadful. Harry said he supposed, being a sailor, people thought he didn’t know anything; but when we came to compare notes with other people who had started in the business, we found our experiences of trying to become licensed victuallers was quite a common one.

We had a beautiful honeymoon first; but I’m not going to write anything about that, except that we were very happy—so happy that when I thanked God for my dear, kind husband and my happy life, the tears used to come into my eyes. But all that time is sacred. It is something between two people, and not to put into print. I don’t think a honeymoon would come out well in print. It is only people who are having honeymoons who would understand it.

After we had had a nice long honeymoon, Harry began to think it was time we looked out for something; so he said, “Now, little woman, this is all very nice and lazy and lovely, but we must begin to think about the future. The sooner we look for a place the better.”

So every day we read the advertisements in the papers of public-houses and inns and hotels in the country which were for sale.

Whenever we saw “nice home,” or “lovely garden,” or “comfortable home just suited to a young married couple,” we wrote at once for full particulars. When we wrote to the agents about the best ones, I found that it was very like the paragon servants advertised—they had just been disposed of, but the agent had several others equally nice on hand if we would call.

It was very annoying to find all the “lovely gardens” and “charming homes,” which were so cheap, just gone, and to get instead of them particulars of a horrid place at the corner of a dirty lane, with only a back yard to it, or something of that sort.

We went to see some of the places the agents or brokers sent us, and they were very much nicer in the advertisements than they were in themselves.

One house we went to look at we thought would do, though the situation seemed lonely. We wrote we would come to see it on a certain day, and when we got there, certainly there was no mistake about its doing a good trade. They asked a lot of money for it, but the bar was full, and in the coffee-room were men who looked like farmers having dinner and ordering wine, and smoking fourpenny cigars quite fast. And while we were having dinner with the landlord in his room, the servant kept coming in and saying, “Gentleman wants a room, sir,” till presently all the rooms were gone, and people had to be turned away.

“It’s like that now nearly always,” said the landlord. “If it wasn’t that I must go out to Australia, to my brother, who is dying, and going to leave me a fortune made at the diggings, I wouldn’t part with the house for anything.”

“Where do the people all come from?” said Harry. “The station’s two miles off.”

“Oh,” said the landlord, “there’s something against the Railway Hotel—it’s haunted, I believe, and this last month everybody comes on here. If you like to start the fly business as well, you’ll make a lot of money at that. Flys to meet the trains would fill you up every day.”

We went away from the house quite convinced that it was a great bargain, and Harry said he thought we might as well settle with the agents, for we couldn’t do better.

But when we got to the station we had just missed a train, and had an hour to wait, so we went to the Railway Hotel. I sat down in a little room, and had some tea, while Harry went into the smoke-room to hear the talk, and see if he could find out about the place being haunted, and if it was likely to be haunted long.

In half an hour he came back looking very queer. “Mary Jane,” he said, “that swab ought to be prosecuted”—meaning the landlord of the inn we had been after.

Then he told me what he’d found out in the smoke-room, hearing a man talk, who, of course, didn’t know who Harry was. He was making quite a joke about what he called the landlord’s “artful dodge,” and he let it all out.

It seems the place we had been after had been going down for months, and the landlord had made up his mind to get out of it before he lost all his capital. So to get a good price he had been getting a lot of loafers and fellows about the village to come in and have drinks with him and fill up the place, and the day we came nobody paid for anything, and the farmers in the coffee-room were all his friends, and it was one man who kept taking all the bedrooms that the servant came in about when we were there.

Wasn’t it wicked? But it opened our eyes, and showed us that there are tricks in every trade, and that we should have to be very careful how we took a place by its appearance.

But, cautious as we were after that, we had one or two narrow escapes, and I may as well tell you something about them as a warning to young people going into business. Of course we laughed at the tricks tried to be played on us, because we escaped being taken in, but if we had invested our money and lost it all in a worthless concern, we shouldn’t have been able to laugh. Perhaps Harry would have had to get another ship, and I should have had to get another situation, and be a servant again. And a nice thing that would have been with my ba——

But I must not anticipate events. I know more about writing now than I did when I put my “Memoirs” together, and I’m going to see if I can’t write a book about our inn, and our village, and all that happened in them, without troubling the gentleman who was so kind to me over my first book. I wish he had seen to the outside as well as the inside, and prevented that nasty, impertinent, grinning policeman behaving so disgracefully in my kitchen on the cover.

I say we can afford to laugh now; and there are many things in life to laugh at when we are on the safe side that we might cry at if we weren’t. I know that I always laugh when people say about me not having changed my initials, but being Mary Jane Beckett instead of Mary Jane Buffham, and they quote the old proverb:

“Change your name and not the letter,
Change for the worse and not the better.”

I laugh, because I have changed for the better; and Harry’s as good as gold and as gentle as a baby—well, a good deal gentler, for I shouldn’t like Harry to pull my hair, and put his finger in my eye, and kick me like my ba——

But I am anticipating again.

I was writing about the houses we went to look at before we fixed on the ‘Stretford Arms.’ There was one not quite in the country, but out in a suburb of London—a new sort of a suburb: rather melancholy, like new suburbs are when some of the houses are only skeletons, and the fields are half field and half brickyard, and old iron and broken china lie scattered about, with a dead cat in a pond that’s been nearly used up and just shows the cat’s head; and a bit of rotten plank above the inch or so of clay-coloured water. And there’s generally a little boy standing on the plank, and making it squeeze down into the water and jump up again, and smothering himself up to the eyes in squirts of the dirty, filthy water, which seems to be quite a favourite amusement with little suburban boys and girls. I suppose it’s through so much building always going on.

We went to look at a nice house, that certainly was very cheap and nicely fitted up, in this new suburb; and there was a fair garden and a bit of a field at the back. It stood on the high-road, or what would be the high-road when the suburb was finished, and we were told it would one day be a fine property, as houses were letting fast, and all being built in the new pretty way; you know what I mean—a lot of coloured glass and corners to them, and wood railings dotted about here and there, something like the Swiss Cottage, where the omnibuses stop—Queen Anne, I think they call them.

We wanted to be more out of town, but we heard such glowing accounts from the broker about this place, we hesitated to let it go. The landlord, we were told, was giving up the business because he had to go to a warmer climate for the winter, being in bad health, and, having lost his wife, he had nobody to leave behind to look after the place. If ever you try to take a business, dear reader, I dare say you will find, as we did, that the people who are going to sell it to you never give up because things aren’t good, but always because they’ve made so much money they don’t want any more, or because they have to go and live a long way off. I suppose it wouldn’t do to be quite truthful in advertising a business for sale, any more than in giving a servant a character. If the whole truth and nothing but the truth was told in these cases, I fancy very few businesses would change hands and very few servants get places.

We had only seen this house in the new suburb once on a very fine day in the autumn, and it looked very nice, as I told you; but, as luck would have it, we made up our minds to go down without saying we were coming, one wet Saturday afternoon. “Let’s see how it looks in bad weather,” said Harry. So I put on my thick boots and my waterproof, and off we went.

Certainly that new suburb didn’t look lively in the rain. The mud was up to your ankles in the new roads, and the unfinished houses looked soaked to the skin, and seemed to steam with the damp.

When we got to the house we went in and asked for the landlord. “He’s very ill in bed,” said the barmaid, who had her face tied up with a handkerchief.

“What’s the matter with him?” said Harry.

“Rheumatics,” said the barmaid. “He’s regular bent double, and twisted into knots with it.”

The barmaid didn’t know us or our business, so Harry gave me a look not to say anything, and then he got the girl on to talk about the house.

“House!” she said, putting her hand to her swollen face; “’tain’t a house; it’s a mausolium—it’s a mortchery. Why, the cat as belongs to the place can’t hardly crawl for the rheumatiz. And the master, who came here a healthy, upright young man a year ago, he’s a wreck, that’s what he is, and the missis died here. If he don’t sell the place and get out of it soon he’ll die here too.”

“And how long have you been barmaid here?” asked Harry.

“Oh, I ain’t the regular barmaid. She’s gone away ill. I’m the ’ousemaid; but I serve in the bar when any one wants anything, which isn’t often now, for the people declare as they catch cold only standing in the place.”

“What’s the matter with it?” I asked.

“What’s the matter with it?” said the girl. “Why, damp’s the matter with it. It was built wet, and it’ll never get dry. And there ain’t no drainage yet; and when it rains—— Well, you should see our cellars!”

“I think I will,” said Harry, “if you’ll allow me;” and by pitying the girl, and one thing and another, Harry managed to get her to let him see the cellars.

It was really something shocking. The cellars were full of water, and the beer and the spirits were actually floating about.

“It’s only on days when it’s pouring wet we get like that,” said the girl; “but the damp’s always in the house.”

“Yes,” said Harry, “it would be.” With that he finished his glass of beer and biscuit, and said “Good day,” without troubling to leave word for the landlord that he had called.

“My dear,” he said, when we got outside, “I don’t think this place’ll do. I want a business ashore, not afloat.”

“Oh, Harry,” I said, almost with a little sob, for it did seem as if we were never to be dealt fairly with—“oh, Harry,” I said, “isn’t it dreadful? Fancy that we might have gone into that place and died there for all these people cared.”

“Self-preservation, my dear,” said Harry; “it’s only a natural thing, if you come to think of it. This poor fellow wants to get out, and to get himself out he must let somebody else in. So long as he doesn’t die there, it doesn’t much matter to him who does.”

I didn’t answer, but I felt quite sad all the way home. It seemed to me that life was one great game of cheat your neighbour, and I began to wonder if to get on in business we should have to cheat our neighbours too. And that evening, when we were in our lodgings, sitting by the nice cosy fire, and I was doing my work, and Harry was smoking his big brown meerschaum pipe, I told him how sad I felt about all this trickery and deceit, and I asked him if perhaps there might not be some business that we could buy that wasn’t so full of traps and dodges as the public-house business. He shook his head, and said, “No. He was sure a nice little country inn was what would suit us, and it was only a question of waiting a little, and keeping our wits about us, and we should get what we wanted, and be none the worse for the experiences we picked up in the search.”

And we did pick up some experiences, and I wish I had time to write them all out: I am sure that hundreds of thousands of pounds of hard-earned money would be saved, and many suffering women and helpless children be shielded from misery.

Harry has got his eyes pretty wide open, and he knows how to take care of himself, but he has often said to me that in trying to get a public-house he met more land-sharks lying in wait for his money than ever he saw in Ratcliff Highway lying in wait for the sailors. I should like to show up some of these nice little advertisements of desirable houses you see in the daily papers, but perhaps it wouldn’t do. I’m always so afraid of that law which sends you to prison for writing what is true—the law of libel, I think it is called. But this I will say, that I hope no young married couple with a bit of money will ever take a public-house except through a really respectable broker. Don’t be led away by a beautiful description: and when you call on the broker and he won’t tell you where it is till you have signed a paper, don’t sign it. If you do you’ll have to pay for it. The broker and the man who is selling the property will “cut you up”—that’s what Harry calls it—between them, and you’ll probably go into the house only to leave it for the place which is called “the house,” and where there are plenty of people who have got there through putting all their little fortune into one of these “first-class houses” as advertised.

We had plenty of them tried on us, and of course we saw plenty of genuine concerns. Some brokers are very nice, and all is square and above-board; and they let you know all about the property, and tell you the truth about it, and don’t make you sign anything before they tell you where it is to be seen.

At one place which wasn’t a swindle we had an adventure which I can’t help telling. It was a very pretty place just by a lock on the river, with gardens and roses, and a place for a pony, and quite a pretty view, and the rooms very cosy and comfortable, and Harry and I quite fell in love with it.

“I do believe this place will do, dear,” I said, being quite worn out with seeing so many.

“Yes,” said Harry, “it’s a perfect little paradise. I think we could be very happy here, my darling, and the customers seem nice, quiet sort of people, don’t they?”

We talked like that before we’d made our business known and been shown over the place.

Presently we went round the outhouses, and as I was going on a little ahead I went into one before our guide came up. I went right in, and then I gave a shriek and ran out, feeling as if I should fall to the ground.

There, lying on the straw, stark and staring, I had seen the dead body of a man, and, oh, that dreadful face! I shall never forget it while I live.

“What’s the matter?” cried Harry, running to me and catching me in his arms just as I was fainting.

“Oh, oh!” I gasped; “there’s a dead man in there.”

“Oh, that’s nothing,” said the guide. “There’s always something of the sort in that shed. It’s kept on purpose.”

“What!” I stammered; “always a corpse there?”

“Yes, ma’am. You see, most of the people as throws theirselves into the river get carried into this lock, so we’re always on the look-out for ’em, and this is the inquest house. Lor’, ma’am, you wouldn’t believe what a lot of custom they bodies bring to the house! What with friends coming to identify ’em, and the inquest and the funeral, it’s a very good thing for the house, I can tell you.”

“Oh, Harry,” I said, as soon as I felt a little better; “I could never be happy here. Fancy these roses and flowers, and yet always a corpse on the premises. Let’s go away; we don’t want to see any more.”

But we did get settled at last. We found the place where I’m writing these Memoirs—the ‘Stretford Arms.’ It is called so after the Stretfords, who were the great family here, and it’s on what used to be their property, and nice people they were—some of them—but a queer lot some of the others, with stories in the family to make the Police News Sunday-school reading to them. The house is very pretty, quite countryfied, and standing back from the road, with a garden on each side of it, and lots of trees. And the windows are latticed, and there are creepers growing all over the walls, and it looks really just like the pretty house Harry and I saw in the melodrama and fell in love with.

We got it through a respectable broker, who was very useful to us, and told us everything we had to do, and put us right with the brewer and the distiller, and managed “the change” for us capitally, and gave us excellent advice about the house and the class of customers we should have to deal with, and was very obliging in every way.

He told us that it was just the house to suit us, and we should just suit the house. He said it was a mistake to suppose that a man who could manage one house could manage another. “There are men for houses and houses for men,” he said, “and this was the house for a quiet, energetic young couple, with taste and pleasing manners, and plenty of domestic management.”

It was nice of him—wasn’t it?—to say that, and he didn’t charge for it in the bill. He explained that it was a house which might easily be worked up into a little country hotel, if it had a good housewife to look after it; and Harry and I both felt that we really were lucky to get it, and we made up our minds to try and make it a nice, quiet hotel for London people, who wanted a few days in the country, to come and stay at.

I remember hearing my old master, Mr. Saxon, say how nice it was to know a really pretty country inn where one could have a room and breathe pure air for a few days, and eat simple food, and get away from the fog and the smoke, and feel truly rural.

“Harry,” I said, “as soon as we’re straight, and everything’s in order, I’ll write and let a lot of my old masters and mistresses know where I am. Perhaps with their recommendation we might get a nice little connection together for the hotel part. The local people will keep the bar going all right.”

“Yes,” said Harry, “that wouldn’t be a bad plan; and don’t you think that literary gentleman you lived with—the one that had the bad liver—might come, and recommend his friends? I should think it was just the house for a literary gentleman. Why, I believe I could write poetry here, myself.”

The dear old goose!—I should like to see his poetry. He’s always saying that some day he shall write his Memoirs, and then I shall be nowhere.

Oh dear, what fun it would be! But he wouldn’t have patience to go on long; he hates pens and ink.

But when he said about the literary people I didn’t answer all at once. I should like Mr. Saxon to come, but I don’t think I should like it to be a literary house altogether. Literary gentlemen are so queer in their ways, and they are not so particular as they might be with the ink, and they do burn the gas so late, and some of them smoke in bed; and there was another thing—if we had a lot of literary people down, they might get hold of the characters and the stories of the place, and then where would my book be?

So I said, “No, dear; I think we’ll ask Mr. Saxon to come, but we won’t try to get any more writers just yet. What we want are nice, quiet married couples and respectable elderly gentlemen—people who can appreciate peace and quietness, and won’t give much trouble.”

Ah me! when I think of the respectable elderly gentleman who did come, and then remember that I thought elderly respectable gentlemen were desirable guests, I feel inclined to——

* * * * *

Oh, dear, dear, how unkind of you, baby! You needn’t have woke up just as I’ve got a few minutes to myself. All right, dear, mamma’s coming. Bless his big blue eyes! Oh, he is so like Harry!

CHAPTER II.
THE SQUIRE’S ROOM.

After we got into our new house everything was very strange at first. Harry knew something about the business, having been with a relative, who was in the same line, for six months that he didn’t go to sea; but to me it was something quite new.

We took on the people who had been with the late owners, and that was a great help to us—one girl, the barmaid, being a very nice young woman, and a great comfort to me, telling me many things quietly that prevented me looking foolish through not knowing.

She was about four-and-twenty, and rather pretty; Miss Ward her name was, and she didn’t mind turning her hand to anything, and would help me about the house, and was quite a companion to me. She said she was very glad we had taken the place, because she hadn’t been comfortable with the people who had left it. The master was all right, but his wife was very stuck up, having been the daughter of a Government clerk, and she wouldn’t have anything to do with the business, saying it was lowering, and only dressed herself up and sat in her own room, and read novels, and wanted everybody about the place to attend on her instead of the customers, and was very proud and haughty if any of them said “Good evening, mum,” to her, hardly having a civil word for them, though it was their money she dressed herself up on.

She and her husband were going to have a real hotel instead of an inn, she having come into money, which was why we got the place so cheap.

Certainly it was left beautifully clean, that I will say; and there was an air of gentility about the place that was comforting. When Harry had first talked about going into this sort of business I felt rather nervous. My idea of an inn was a place where there were quarrels and fights, and where you had to put people out, and where wives came crying about ten o’clock to fetch their husbands home.

But I felt quite easy in my mind as soon as we were settled down in the ‘Stretford Arms,’ and very nice and cosy it was of an evening in our parlour, with three or four nice respectable people sitting and smoking, and Harry, “the landlord” (dear me, how funny it was to hear him called “landlord” at first!), smoking his pipe with them, and me doing my needlework. Every now and then Harry would have to get up and go into the bar, to help Miss Ward, and say a word or two to the customers, but they were all respectable people; and the light and the warmth and the comfort made a nice dozy, contented, sleek feeling come over me.

I don’t know what made me think it, but the first night in our little parlour I felt as if I ought to purr, because I felt just as I should think a cat must feel when she settles down comfortably in front of the fire, on that round place that is in the middle of a fender.

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!”

It was no good for the poor young lady to argue that young Mr. Owen was a private gentleman, and hadn’t anything to do with the business—the old Squire wouldn’t listen to her. “If ever you marry that man, Di,” he said, “you’re no daughter of mine, and I’ll never speak to you again as long as I live.”

Miss Di never said any more, but moped a good deal; and Mr. Owen never came to the Squire to ask for her hand, because, of course, she’d told him that it was no use.

But the Squire went on just as reckless as before, gambling and enjoying himself, and being up in London more than ever.

One morning he came down by the first train from London, looking very pale, and he went straight up to the Hall, and got there just as Miss Di had come down to breakfast. “Di,” he said, “I’m going away, and you’ll have to go away too. I’ve lost the Hall.”

It was true; he’d actually played for the Hall, the old place where he was born, and lost it at cards, having parted with everything else long before. They say that altogether he must have gambled away a hundred thousand pounds—at any rate he was ruined, for all his estate and all his property had been lost, and he was in debt.

Miss Di looked at her pa, and said, “What am I to do?”

“Come abroad with me,” he said; “we must live cheaply for a little while somewhere.”

“No, I sha’n’t,” said the girl; “as long as you kept a home for me, I obeyed you as your daughter. As you have gambled my home away, I shall go where there is one for me. I shall marry George Owen.”

And marry him she did very soon after. The Squire wasn’t at the wedding, you may be sure. He went away abroad, and lived there for years—how nobody knew; and strangers took the Hall and the lands; and the name of Stretford, that had been in the place for hundreds of years, died out of it; the village inn, the ‘Stretford Arms,’ being the only thing that kept it alive.

And it was in the best bedroom of that inn—a dear old-fashioned room it is, with a great four-post bedstead, and an old oak chest, and a big fireplace with old brass dogs for the logs of wood—that the old Squire lay, years afterwards, dying.

It was years before we came to the place, but the room the old Squire lay in seemed a sacred place to me directly I had heard the story, and over and over again when I’ve had a fire lighted there for a guest who was expected, I’ve stood and watched the firelight flickering on the old oak panels, and I’ve seen the old Squire’s handsome face lying on the pillow of the great four-post bedstead.

He had come back from abroad, terribly broken and ill and poor. He said he knew he was dying, and he wanted to die as near the old place as possible. He wouldn’t have anything to do with his daughter, Mrs. Owen, and would never take a penny from her, though she was very rich; and when he came back, and she wanted to see him and get him to consent to be taken to her house, he said, “No, he didn’t want to die in pawn. He’d as soon have the sheriff’s officer or a Jew money-lender sitting by his death-bed as a pawnbroker or a pawnbroker’s wife.”

It’s wonderful how with some people this family pride will keep up to the last. Of course it isn’t so much nowadays, when ladies of title marry rich tradesmen, and are very glad to get them, and noblemen don’t mind making a marine-store dealer’s daughter a lady, if her pa has enough money to give her a fine dowry.

But the Squire was one of the proud old sort that began to go out when railways began to come in. That’s how Mr. Wilkins, the parish clerk, who uses our parlour regularly of an evening, puts it. It was Mr. Wilkins—quite a character in his way, as you’ll say when you know more about him—who told me the story of the old Squire after whose Arms our house is named.

The people who had our house at the time were the Squire’s butler and his wife, and of course they made their dear old master as comfortable as they could, and made his bill as light as possible, for he would pay for everything with the little bit of money he’d got, and would swear just as he used to do in former days if they didn’t let him have his bill regularly.

One day he said to the doctor, “Doctor, how long do you think I shall live?”

“Why do you ask?” said the doctor.

“Because I must cut my cloth according to my measure,” said the Squire. “I want to know how long I’ve got to spread my money over. My funeral will be all right, because I’ve paid for that beforehand.”

Which he had, as was found out afterwards.

Well, the doctor was in a fix. He knew if he said a long time the poor old gentleman would begin to starve himself and do without his wine, and if he said a short time he thought it would be cruel; so he said that it all depended upon the turn his illness took.

It was in the winter time that the Squire lay ill at the “Arms,” and Christmas was coming.

As it came nearer, the Squire grew weaker and weaker, and everybody saw he was going home. One evening the landlady went up to the Squire’s rooms, and found him out of bed with his dressing-gown on, sitting in a chair and looking out of the window. It was a bright, frosty evening and the moon was up, and you could see a long way off.

She went in on tiptoe, fancying he might be asleep, and not wanting to wake him, and she saw he was looking out over the fields right away to the old Hall. It stood out in the moonlight far away, looking very haunted and gloomy, as it often does now when I look at it from that very window.

The tears were running down the old man’s face, and he was quite sobbing, and the landlady heard him say to himself, “The dear old place! Ah! if I could only have died there I could have died happy.”

Mr. Owen used to come every day to ask after the Squire, and the landlady told him about this, and he set about thinking if something couldn’t be managed. He knew the Squire wouldn’t take charity or be beholden to anybody, or accept a favour; and the thing was—how could he be got back to the Hall believing it was his own?

Mr. Owen told his wife—the Squire’s daughter—and they both put their heads together, as the saying is. Miss Di, as she was always called about here, suddenly had an idea, and Mr. Owen went to London that night.

The next day the Squire was told that an old friend wanted to see him, and when he was told it was a friend of the old wild days he said, “Let him come—let him come.”

The friend was Colonel Rackstraw—that was the name, I think—a great gambler, like the Squire—and it was to him the Squire had lost the Hall.

It was quite a meeting, those two old fellows seeing each other again, they say, and they began to talk about old times and the adventures they had had, and the Squire got quite chirrupy, and chuckled at things they remembered.

“Ah, Rackstraw,” says the Squire presently, “I never had your luck; you were always a lucky dog, and you broke me at last. I didn’t mind anything but the old place—that settled me.”

“Well,” says the Colonel, “I haven’t done much good by it. There it stands. The people I let it to have cleared out (which wasn’t true), and I’ll sell it cheap.” (He’d sold it long ago, and the people living in it were big wholesale tailors.)

“So the old place is for sale?” says the Squire.

“Yes; will you buy it?”

“I, my dear fellow! I’m a pauper.”

“Of course, of course; I forgot,” says the old Colonel. “Well, I’ve come to cheer you up a bit. I suppose you never touch the pictures now?”

“No, no,” says the Squire, “not for a long time. I haven’t had any money to lose.”

“I should like to have had a quiet game with you for auld lang syne,” says the Colonel. “Shall I ring for a pack?”

“I should like it. I should like to have one more turn with you, old friend, before I die; but—but——”

“Oh, come, it’ll do you good—cheer you up; and as to the stakes—well, we’ll play for silver, just to make the game interesting.”

After a lot of coaxing the old Squire consented, and the Colonel got the cards, and pulled a table up to the bed, and they began to play.

The Squire soon forgot everything in playing. The old excitement came back; his cheeks got red, and his eyes grew bright, and he kept making jokes just as they say he used to do.

He had wonderful luck, for he won everything, and he was so excited he must have fancied himself back again at the club by the way he went on. When he had won they made the stakes higher, and he kept winning, till he had won quite a lot. The Colonel had bank-notes in his pocket and he paid them over, and presently he said—

“Look here, Stretford, I’ll play you double or quits the lot.”

The Squire was like a boy now. “All right,” he said; “come on.” He won, and the Colonel had to owe him a lot of money.

When the Squire was quite worked up the Colonel cried out, “A thousand!” He lost it. “Double or quits!” He lost again—and so on till he had lost a fortune: and then he pretended to be awfully wild, and brought his fist down on the table and shouted out, “Confound it, I’m not going to be beaten! I’ll play you the Hall against what you’ve won.”

I wish you could hear Mr. Wilkins tell the story as he told it to Harry and me in our bar parlour. He made us quite hot the way he described this game with the Colonel and the dying Squire, and he made it quite real, which I can’t do in writing. We were quite carried away, and I knew when it came to the Hall being staked, and Mr. Wilkins described the Squire sitting up, almost at death’s door, and laughing and shouting, and evidently carried away by “the ruling passion” (that’s what Mr. Wilkins called it), that he must have believed himself back again at his club and the devil-may-care fellow he was in those days.

“Done!” said the Squire.

And then they played for the old Hall that the Squire had lost ten years ago.

And the Squire won it!

As he won the game he flung the cards up in the air, and shouted out so loud that the landlady ran up, thinking he was in a fit or something.

“I’ve won it!” he cried. “Thank God—thank God!” Then he fell back on the bed, and burst out crying like a child.

The doctor came in to him and gave him something, and by-and-by they got him to sleep.

“He’ll rally a bit,” said the doctor; “the excitement’s done him good, but he’ll go back again all the quicker afterwards.”

* * * * *

The next morning it was all over the village that the Squire was better, and was going back to the Hall again; that he’d come into money or something, and had bought it back again. Mr. Owen arranged everything—him and Miss Di—or Mrs. Owen, I should say.

The people came from far and near, and gathered about the old place when they heard that the Squire was coming, and they determined to give him a grand welcome.

The doctor had a long conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Owen that morning, and determined to try the experiment. He got the Squire up and dressed, and, well wrapped up, he was carried down and put in a close carriage, and then they drove away to the Hall.

The people shouted like mad when they saw the Squire coming, and they took the horses out, and dragged the carriage right up to the doors.

The landlord of the “Arms” was there in his old butler’s coat, and he received the Squire, and he was taken into the big room, which had been the justice-room, and the villagers all crowded in; and the Squire, sitting in his old easy-chair by the fire, received them, and, after he had had some stimulant, made a little speech that brought tears into the people’s eyes, and thanked them, and said he should die happy now, for he should die master of the dear old place.

* * * * *

After that the Squire never left his bed, but he was very happy; he lay in the old room—the room his wife had died in—and all the old things were about him, just as he had left them; and on Christmas Day he told the doctor to send for his daughter and “the pawnbroker.”

They came, and the Squire kissed his daughter, and said he was so happy he couldn’t let anything mar his happiness; so he forgave her and kissed her, and then held out his hand and said, “Mr. Owen, they tell me that for a pawnbroker you are a very decent fellow.”

He didn’t live very long after that—only a few weeks; but he saw his daughter every day, and she was holding his hand when he died. It was just in the twilight he went—only the firelight let everything in the room be seen.

He had been sinking for days, and hadn’t said much; but he seemed to get a little strength for a moment then. He had had his wife’s portrait brought from Mrs. Owen’s and hung on the wall opposite his bed. He looked at that—a long, loving look—and his lips seemed to move as if he was saying a little prayer.

Then he pressed his daughter’s hand, and she stooped and kissed him, and listened to catch his words, for he spoke in a whisper.

“God bless you, dear,” he said; “I’m at peace with everybody, and I’m so glad to die in the old place. Tell the pawnbroker”—a little smile passed over his face as he whispered the word—“tell the pawnbroker that I forgave——”

Miss Di could catch no more. The lips moved, but no sound came. Then all was quiet. A little gentle breathing, then a deep long sigh—a happy sigh—and then—the end.

* * * * *

When Mr. Wilkins first told me and Harry that story, the way he told it (oh, if I could only tell it in writing like that!) made me cry, and Harry—he pulled out his handkerchief and had a cold just like he had when the clergyman was reading our marriage service. Several times while that service was on I thought Harry had a dreadful cold, but he said afterwards, “Little woman, it wasn’t a cold; it was the words and the thoughts that came into my heart and made it feel too big for my waistcoat; and I felt once or twice as if I should have liked to put my knuckles in my eyes, and boo-hoo, like I used to when I was a boy.”

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——

* * * * *

The cat asleep in baby’s cradle! Oh, Harry! and I only left you with him for half an hour while I did my writing. Don’t laugh! please don’t laugh! I’ve heard the most terrible things about cats in babies’ cradles. I declare I can’t trust you with baby for a second. Thought they looked so pretty together, did you? A nice thing if I’d found my dear baby with its breath sucked by the cat, and its father looking on laughing!

CHAPTER III.
MISS WARD’S YOUNG MAN.

I told you that when we took over the ‘Stretford Arms’ we kept most of the people about the place, and among them the barmaid, Miss Ward—Clara we generally called her. She was a great help to us, knowing the ways of the place and the customers; for you may be sure everything was very strange to us at first.

If I were to tell you that once or twice I really felt inclined to sit down and cry, you would laugh at me; but it was true. I said to Harry, when we went to bed the first night, quite worn out, “Harry, we shall be ruined! We’ve gone into a business we know nothing about, and we shall lose all our money.”

Harry laughed, and said I was a goose, and he was soon fast asleep. But I lay awake for ever so long, imagining all manner of dreadful things; even seeing ourselves seized for rent, the customers having all gone away through my knowing nothing about the business. And when I wasn’t thinking of that, I was seeing a great big navvy come into the bar and begin to swear, and throw quart pots at the plate glass, and Harry jumping over the bar and having a fight with him, and both of them rolling over on the floor, and knocking their heads against the spittoons.

If once I begin to think instead of going to sleep, I think dreadful things, and they seem quite real at the time. I wonder why it is that everything in your life seems going wrong sometimes when you lie awake at night, and when you’ve been to sleep and wake up in the morning everything seems to have come right again?

I know that the first night at our new home, when I didn’t sleep, beside the things I’ve told you, I imagined people coming and taking our rooms, and staying for a week and not paying their bills, and I couldn’t get out of my head a story I had once heard about a gentleman who stayed a month at an hotel, and lived on the fat of the land, borrowed ten pounds, and went away leaving a very heavy box, and when the box was opened it was full of nothing but bricks.

And I was dreadfully frightened about the licensing laws. I didn’t know much about them, but I had read cases in the papers about landlords being summoned, and the first night, when it was closing time, and the customers in our bar and smoking-room were slow in going, and Harry had to say, “Now, gentlemen, please!” twice, and still they stopped talking, and one old gentleman didn’t seem as if he’d ever get into his overcoat, being a little paralyzed on one side, I felt inclined to drop down on my knees and say, “Oh, do go; please go! Fancy if the policeman comes and Harry’s summoned!”

Of course I soon got over this sort of thing, and now they tell me I make a very good landlady indeed; but at first everything made me dreadfully nervous, and I made a few mistakes.

Miss Ward, as I told you, was our right hand. She was a tall, rather pretty girl, with dark hair and eyes, and about five-and-twenty, with a history, which she told me one afternoon when we were slack, and we were both sitting in the parlour doing needlework.

Her father was a farmer in Essex, but, times being bad, she was taken by her uncle, who had a large hotel and no children of his own, and brought up like a lady, only just superintending things that her aunt, being an invalid, couldn’t see to.

Her uncle had made a fortune with his hotel, and could have retired, but instead of that he took to sporting, and went to race meetings, and was a good deal away from home.

After a time, people began to notice a change in his manner, and he neglected his business altogether, and would come home sometimes with his dog-cart full of legs of mutton, and poultry, and things, which he said he’d bought cheap. One day he brought home fifty ducks in his trap; and another day he brought six mastiff dogs, and they were all kept chained up in the yard, and a nice noise they made.

But that wasn’t the worst. He got very violent if his wife objected to his buying things, and she said she was sure he wasn’t right in his head. After a terrible quarrel about his buying four billiard tables, and having them sent home, with nowhere to put them, he went off, and was away for weeks, and when he came back he never said where he’d been, but letters began to come, and his wife opened them, and it seemed he’d been about the country and had bought horses and traps everywhere, and had left them at different yards at hotels, and there they were, eating their heads off—the horses, not the traps.

And they found out that he’d bought a sailing vessel at Brighton, and it was lying on the beach; and in London he’d been to a sale and bought a lot of pictures, and had them sent to a furniture depository, where they were standing at a fearful rent.

It seemed as though he couldn’t think of enough ways to fool his money away, and they found he’d got rid of thousands.

His wife went to a solicitor to see what could be done to stop him getting rid of any more, and when he found it out he jumped about the place and smashed the furniture, and went down in the cellar with a hammer and broke bottles, till you could have swum about the place in mixed wine.

Everybody said that his brain was softening, or something of the sort, and he would have to be put under restraint. Poor Clara told me they had a dreadful time with him, and it came to the worst one evening, when there was a ball and supper being given in the big room belonging to the hotel. Everything was ready for the supper; pies and jellies, and creams, and tipsy cakes: and her uncle went into the supper-room when the table was all beautifully laid; and when the guests began to come in, he ordered them all out, saying it was his house, and he wasn’t going to have a pack of people dancing and singing, when they ought to be in bed and asleep; and, before anybody knew what he was going to do, he seized the jellies and the creams and threw them at the guests, regularly bombarding them, so to speak, before anybody could stop him. It was a dreadful sight. The poor ladies shrieked, as jellies and creams came all over them; and one gentleman was smothered all over his head with a dish of tipsy cake, the custard running down over his face.

The people who were just coming in at the doorway couldn’t get back, because the people behind pressed forward; and there were tongues, and hams, and patties, and fowls, and jellies, and greasy things flying right and left and all among them—that madman seizing things with both hands to hurl at them.

When Miss Ward told me about it first, I couldn’t for the life of me help laughing. I could see the jellies and the creams hitting the people, and I thought how ridiculous they must have looked; but, of course, it was very dreadful, and that was the finishing stroke to the house. People wouldn’t come there to have things thrown at them by the landlord. And when he was put in an asylum, where he died, it was found out he had got rid of so much money, and was liable for so much more, that his affairs had to be wound up and the business sold. Out of the wreck there was only just enough left for the aunt to live on, and so Miss Ward had to go out as a barmaid, her own father not being able to offer her a home, through a large family, and farming having become so bad.

She had had a good education, though, and could play the piano and spoke a little French, and was very ladylike; and that, I dare say, made me take to her at once. I liked her so much that I always tried to make the place as easy for her as I could; and when one day she said she hoped I would have no objection to her young man coming there to see her occasionally, I said, “Oh dear no; certainly not.”

I knew myself how hard it was never to be able to speak a word to your sweetheart, when perhaps he’s got plenty of time of an evening, now and then, just to come and say a few words to you and cheer you up.

When I told Harry he was quite agreeable. You may be sure he remembered how he used to come and see me, and how much happier we had been when we could see each other comfortably without deceiving anybody.

“She’s a nice girl,” he said, “and I’m sure her young man will be respectable, and not one of those low fellows, who get in with barmaids and lead them on to change bad money for them, and do all manner of dreadful things with the till.”

It was about a week after that, one Sunday afternoon, that Miss Ward’s young man, who lived in London, came to our house for the first time. Directly I saw him I didn’t like him. He’d got red hair, which, of course, oughtn’t to be against a man, because it’s a thing he can’t help—but there was what I call a “shifty” look in his face. He never looked at you when he spoke to you, and when you shook hands with him, his hand was one of those cold, clammy hands that I never could abide.

But he was very agreeable. He brought me a cucumber and a bunch of flowers, and, it being teatime, we asked him to join us. He was very affectionate and nice to Miss Ward, and as they sat there with us, and she kept looking up in his face, and showing how proud she was of every word he said, my thoughts went back to the day when Harry came home from sea, and my good, kind mistress let him come down in the kitchen and have tea with us, and that softened me towards Miss Ward’s young man—Mr. Shipsides his name was—and I made up my mind I’d done him a wrong in not liking him.

How he did talk, to be sure! All that teatime nobody else could get a word in edgeways. He told us all about the business he’d bought in London, and what a nice home he was getting together, to be ready for Miss Ward when she married him. Poor girl, how her eyes brightened as he talked of all the beautiful things she was to have in her home!

He said that he’d taken a splendid shop, and stocked it in the grocery line, having been an assistant at a grocer’s, and come into money lately, and that he had the promise of all his former masters’ customers to deal with him. He told us the first day he opened he had the shop crowded all day, and had to take on two extra assistants, and that among his customers were dukes, marquises, earls, and barons.

Harry looked up at that and said, “Do you mean to say that swells like that come to your shop after their grocery?” “Not themselves,” said Mr. Shipsides; “but their names are on my books.” “You’re doing very well,” said Harry, “if you’ve got a business like that—you must be making money fast.” “I am,” said Mr. Shipsides; “but of course I can’t put much by yet, because I’ve got relatives’ money in the business that helped to start me, and that’s all got to be paid out first, and the place cost me a lot of money to fit up and stock; but by-and-by, if things go on as they are now, I shall be on the high-road to fortune, and Clara will ride in her carriage.”

Of course, I said I hoped she would; but all the same, it made me wince a little. I had just a little feeling of womanly jealousy, which, I suppose, was only natural, at the idea of my barmaid riding in her carriage, while I was taking a twopenny ’bus, in a manner of speaking, for, of course, where we lived there were no twopenny ’buses, or sixpenny ones either for the matter of that.

I think it took Harry a bit aback, too, hearing the fellow go on like that, for he said, “I hope when you’ve got your carriage you’ll drive down here with it. It’ll do us good, you know, to let folks see that we’ve got a connection with carriage people.”

Miss Ward laughed at that, but Mr. Shipsides coloured up almost as red as his hair, and I saw he didn’t like it, so I turned the conversation. But he always got it back on to himself, and the wonderful fellow he was, and the wonderful things he was going to do. He made out that he was very highly connected, although he’d been a grocer’s assistant, and said his father was the son of a baronet, but had married against his father’s (the baronet’s) wish, and had gone away—being proud—and never spoken to any member of the family again; and when he died had made himself and his brothers and sisters vow they would never seek a reconciliation.

“I never heard of a Sir anything Shipsides,” Harry said.

“That’s very likely,” said the fellow, “because that wasn’t the name. My father was so indignant that he changed it by Act of Parliament; but his real name was one that is known and respected throughout the length and breadth of the land.”

And afterwards we found out that his father wasn’t dead at all, but alive, and that he was——

But I mustn’t anticipate.

Mr. Shipsides, after tea was over, had a cigar with Harry while Miss Ward went into the bar, the house being opened again. Harry got out a box of cigars and put them on the table, always doing the thing well, like a sailor, for though he is in business on shore, he’ll never quite get rid of the sea. I had to go upstairs to see to things, and Harry went into the bar, so Mr. Shipsides was left alone with a bottle of whiskey and the box of cigars. He didn’t stop long, saying he had to catch a train back to town, so he said good-bye to Miss Ward and shook hands with Harry in the bar, and went off.

And when Harry went into the parlour the whiskey-bottle was half empty, and quite a dozen cigars were gone, and as Shipsides couldn’t have smoked them in the time, he must have filled his pockets.

Harry and I looked at each other when we found it out, but I said, “Don’t say anything before Miss Ward, it will only hurt her feelings;” but after that I tried to get into her confidence about her young man, having an uneasy feeling that he wasn’t quite good enough for her.

But what she said about him made him out to be quite a beautiful character. She said that he had brought up his younger brother and his sisters, and had paid for their education out of his salary, and that he was a most steady young fellow, and had been teacher in a Sunday-school, and was always asked to tea with the clergyman on the Sundays that he didn’t come to see her.

“But how did he get the money to buy this grand business he talks about?” I said.

“Oh,” she said, “it was left him in his late master’s will. His master had a great respect for him because he managed his business so well while he was ill. It wasn’t quite enough to start the business, but the rest he borrowed from his friends.”

“Well, my dear,” I said, “I hope you’ll be very happy.”

“I’m sure we shall,” she said; “he’s so steady and so affectionate, and he consults me about everything for our home, and everything I want I’m to have.”

“Aren’t you going to live at the business, then?” I asked.

“Oh no,” she said; “Tom” (that was his Christian name) “says it’s not a nice locality to live in, so he’s taken a house a little way out.”

I didn’t say any more, but I thought a good deal. Still, the poor girl might be right about her lover; and his filling his pockets with the cigars might only be a peculiarity. The richest people often do that sort of thing, because I remember Harry telling me about a nobleman, Lord Somebody, who was invited to lunch on board a ship in harbour that Harry was on. There was a beautiful cold champagne luncheon laid out, and Harry saw this nobleman, while everybody was eating, put two roast fowls in his coat-pockets, and then try to get a bottle of champagne in as well. The captain was very indignant, and went up to him and said, “You can eat as much as you like, sir, but don’t pocket the things.” Lord Somebody turned very red, and said, “Dash it, sir! do you know I’m a nobleman?” “You may be a nobleman,” said the captain; “but I’m hanged if you’re a gentleman; and if you don’t put those cold fowls back on the table you’ll go ashore a jolly sight quicker than you came aboard.” The lord who did that was a well-known nobleman, and very rich, so that pocketing things isn’t any proof of a man being a nobody or poor.

Two or three days after that Harry went to London on business, and when he came back he said, “I say, little woman, do you remember that Shipsides telling us that dukes, marquises, earls, and barons were his customers?”

I said, “Yes, I do.”

“Well,” said Harry, “I know where he got that from. There’s a tea advertised all along the railway lines in all the stations, and it says on it, ‘as supplied to dukes, marquises, earls, and barons.’ He’s seen that, and that put it into his head. If he’d tell one lie he’d tell another, and mark my words, Mary Jane, Miss Ward’s young man is a humbug.”

Two Sundays after that Mr. Shipsides came down again, but we didn’t ask him in to tea. We had company, which was one reason, but really we didn’t want to encourage him, feeling sure he was a man who would take advantage of kindness.

But it was an awful nuisance, for all the evening he was leaning over the bar, talking to our barmaid, and taking her attention off her work. I didn’t like to say anything, no more did Harry, especially as we weren’t very busy, many of our regular customers not being in on Sunday evenings, when we did more of a chance trade than anything—principally people who’d been down to the place for the day from London, or people driving home to town, and that sort of thing.

When it was closing time the fellow didn’t offer to go, so Harry said, “I say, Mr. Shipsides, the train for London goes in ten minutes. You’ll have to hurry to the station to catch it.”

He went away then, and we closed the doors; but about twenty minutes afterwards there came a ring at the bell, just as we were going upstairs to bed.

Harry went to the door, but didn’t open it, saying, “Who’s there?”

“Me,” said a voice.

“Who’s me?”

“Mr. Shipsides.”

And if it wasn’t him come back again. So Harry opened the door and asked him what he wanted.

“I’ve missed the train,” he said; “so I’ll have to take a room here for the night.”

Harry didn’t know what to say, so he let him in, and gave him a candle, and showed him upstairs to a room.

We didn’t like it at all, but Harry said we couldn’t turn a customer away; and of course Shipsides only came as a customer, and would have to pay for his room.

The next morning he came down, and walked into the coffee-room as bold as brass, and ordered his breakfast. He had eggs and bacon and a chop cooked, and then he wanted hot buttered toast and marmalade.

I waited on him, though I didn’t like it, but I wouldn’t send Miss Ward in. Harry said it was better not.

He talked away to me nineteen to the dozen, but quite grand, just as if he was patronizing our house, and he had the impudence to say that the tea wasn’t strong enough, and would I make him some more, and when he began to tell me how he liked his tea made I flushed up and said, “I think I ought to know how to make tea, Mr. Shipsides.”

“Oh! of course,” he said; “but where do you buy your tea? Perhaps it’s the fault of the article, and not the making.”

“Oh!” I said; “the tea is all right—it’s the same that’s supplied to the dukes, marquises, earls, and barons. You’ve seen it advertised at all the railway-stations.”

I couldn’t help saying it, he made me so indignant. He didn’t say anything, but I made the next tea very weak on purpose, and he drank it without a murmur.

After he’d done his breakfast I put the time-table in front of him, and I said, “The next train’s at 9.15. Hadn’t you better go? You’ll be late to business.”

“Oh no,” he said. “Now I’m here I’ll stop for the day. I’ve a customer at one of the big houses near here. I’ll go and look him up.”

He went out, but he came back at dinner-time and ordered a dinner in the coffee-room. He wanted fish, but I said, “We don’t have fish on Mondays—it isn’t fresh.” So he had soup and a fowl and bacon, and when I said, “What beer will you have?” he said, “Oh, I’ll drink a bottle of wine for the good of the house. Bring me a bottle of champagne.”

I went to Harry about it, and he went in and said, “Look here, old man; let’s understand each other. Of course, you’re not here at my invitation.”

“Oh no,” answered the fellow. “I’m here for my own pleasure, Mr. Beckett, and I suppose I can have what I like, if I pay for it.”

“Certainly,” said Harry; and he went and got him the champagne.

I could see Miss Ward didn’t quite like it. She felt that it wasn’t quite the thing, she being our barmaid, for him to come staying there, and swelling about the place, instead of attending to his business in London.

But he didn’t see there was anything out of the way, evidently, for after dinner he went into the bar-parlour and called for a cigar: “One of your best, old man, and none of your Britishers”—that’s what he had the impudence to say.

You may be sure Harry didn’t put the box down by him this time. He got a cigar out and put it in a glass, and brought it to him.

The champagne had evidently made him even more talkative than usual, for he began to find fault with the place, and to tell us what we ought to do. I stood it for a little while, and then I let out. “Mr. Shipsides,” I said, “I think we are quite capable of managing our own business, although it isn’t like yours—one that manages itself.”

“Oh, no offence, I hope,” he said, “only you’re young beginners, and I didn’t think you were above taking a hint. I’ve stayed at some of the best hotels in the kingdom in my time, you see, and I know how things ought to be done.”

I was so wild that I took my work-basket and went and sat in the bar; and presently he came there and began talking to Miss Ward, which I thought very rude, and it didn’t look well at all.

Harry had gone out to see the builder, who was going to fix up some stabling for us, as we meant to have a nice place for people driving to put up their traps and horses; and the cook wanted to speak to me in the kitchen about the oven, which had gone wrong, so I went to her; and presently I thought it was a good chance to call Miss Ward out of the bar and tell her to give Mr. Shipsides a gentle hint that he was making too free.

So I said, “Cook, just tell Miss Ward I want her for a moment.”

Miss Ward came, and I spoke to her as nicely as I could, and she saw that I was right, and promised to tell her young man that we would like him to keep his place, and not interfere with our business.

We went back together, and, when we get to the bar, if there wasn’t that fellow actually serving a customer, just as if he were the landlord of the place. It took my breath away. “Well, I never!” I said. “If your young man stops here much longer, Miss Ward, he’ll put his name up over the door.”

Poor girl, she blushed to her eyes. “It is only his way,” she said; “he doesn’t mean any harm.” Then she went into the bar and whispered something to him, and he came and took his hat and went out. But he came back at teatime and ordered his tea in the coffee-room, and rang the bell for more coals to be put on the fire, and made such a fire up that it was enough to roast the place, and while he was sitting toasting himself in front of it two coffee-room customers arrived, a lady and gentleman who had come by train—very nice people. They took our best bedroom, and had some nice luggage that looked very genteel. They ordered dinner in the coffee-room for seven o’clock, and when I went in to lay the table that fellow had gone and sat down at the piano, and was banging away at it and singing a horrid music-hall song.

“Don’t do that,” I said, quite sharply. “There are ladies and gentlemen staying in the house, and they won’t like it.”

He shut the piano and went and stuck his back against the fire, and stood there with his coat-tails over his arm.

“Harry,” I said to my husband when he came in, “you must get rid of that fellow. If you don’t, I will!”

So Harry went to him and said, “Look here, Shipsides, I don’t think our hotel is good enough for you. I should be glad if you’d pay your bill and take your custom somewhere else.”

He looked Harry up and down in his nasty, red-haired, contemptuous way, and then he said, “All right, Beckett”—no Mr., mind you—“all right, Beckett; if you’re independent, so am I. I’ll say good-bye to Clara and be off.”

“When you’ve paid your bill,” says Harry.

“Oh, that’ll be all right! I’ll send you a cheque.”

“I don’t want a cheque for twenty-five shillings,” says Harry. “Cash’ll do for me.”

“I haven’t got the cash with me,” says the fellow; “and if my cheque isn’t good enough, you can stop it out of Clara’s wages.”

And with that he walks into the bar, kisses Clara before the customers, sticks his hat on one side, defiant like, and walks out of the place as bold as brass.

And that was the last we saw of Miss Ward’s young man, and the last she saw of him too, poor girl—for bad as we thought him, he turned out to be worse.

A few days after he went, Harry had to go to town to see the brewers, and, having an hour or two to spare after he’d done his business, he thought he’d go and look at Shipsides’ shop, and see what sort of a place it was.

He knew the address, because Miss Ward used to write to her lover at it, and sometimes her letters lay about to be sent to post.

When he got to the street and found the number, it was a grocer’s—but quite a little common shop, full of jam in milk-jugs and sugar-basins, and flashy-looking ornaments given away with a pound of tea; and the name over the door wasn’t Shipsides at all.

Harry walked in, and said, “I want to see Mr. Shipsides.”

A little old man, in a dirty apron, behind the counter looked at him, and said, “Private door; knock twice.”

Harry thought that was odd; but he went out and knocked twice, and presently a woman came and asked him what he wanted.

“Mr. Shipsides,” said Harry.

“Oh!” says she, “are you a friend of his?”

“Yes,” says Harry, not knowing what else to say at the moment.

“Then,” said the woman, “p’r’aps you’ll tell me when you saw him last, for I haven’t seen him for a week; and he’s been and let himself in unbeknown to me, and taken his box out somehow, and we want to summons him for the rent.”

When Harry saw how the land lay—that’s his sailor way of putting it, and I’ve caught lots of sailor expressions from him—he altered his tack—that’s another—and told the woman that he wanted money of Mr. Shipsides too; and at last he got her to talk freely, and she told him that the fellow was very little better than a swindler, and she went upstairs and brought down a lot of letters and showed them to Harry, and told him they had all come that week for the fellow—and what did he think she ought to do?

They were all in different female handwritings, and two were in Miss Ward’s, which Harry recognized.

“It’s my belief,” said the woman, “he’s a regular bad ’un, and has been imposing on a lot of young women, and he ought to be ashamed of himself, for, after he’d left, a poor woman came here after him and said she was his wife and was in service, and she wanted him to come to her missus and explain as she was married, as she was going to be turned away through circumstances which, being a respectable married woman, ought not to count against her.”

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.

At first it was all so new and strange to me that I didn’t quite gather what it meant, some of it. As a servant, of course, I saw a good deal, and many strange characters, but in their family life mostly. A servant can’t see much of the outside life of her people—in fact, if you come to think of it, servants don’t see much outside at all, unless it’s shaking a cloth in the garden; and many a time when I was a servant have I made that a very long job on a fine morning, with the sun shining and the birds singing; for it was so beautiful to breathe the fresh air, and feel the soft wind blowing in your face with just a dash of the scent of flowers in it. A dash of the scent!—dear, dear, that’s how your style gets spoiled by what you have to hear going on round you! I suppose my style will get public-housey in time, if I’m not careful. It’s hearing the customers say, “Just a dash of this in it, ma’am,” and “Just a dash of that,” and so on.

Seeing the outside view of life—life away from the home—and being always in a place where all sorts of people and all sorts of characters come, I have learned things that I might have been a servant a hundred years and never have known. You get a pretty good view of life under the roof of an inn, and not always a view that makes you very happy—but there’s good and bad everywhere, even in the church.

I know of a clergyman who was a very fine preacher indeed, and a strict teetotaller and never entered a public-house, but he managed to be very cruel to his wife on gingerbeer and lemonade. And it came out afterwards in the courts, when the poor lady tried to get a separation, fearing for her life, that on the day her husband had knocked her down and emptied the inkpot down her throat, he had gone off straight to a school meeting and delivered the prizes for the best essay on being kind to animals, and had made all the people cry by the beautiful way he spoke about dogs and horses and cats.

Our clergyman, the curate, is very different to that, though I must say he is eccentric. He comes into our coffee-room now and then, and will have a glass of ale and sit and read the newspaper, because he lives by himself in lodgings up in the village. He likes talking to Harry, and he seems to like talking to me; but though he’s a very agreeable gentleman, I’m always rather sorry to see him come in, especially when his pockets look bulgy. He’s one of those people who go about in awful places with hammers, and chip bits of rock and stone off, and dig up bits of ground; and he’s always got his coat-pockets full of sand and grit, and chalk and bits of stone, and sometimes a lot of weeds and ferns pulled up by the roots. I asked Mr. Wilkins, the parish clerk, what the name for these people was, and he told me geologist, those that went after the stones, and botanist, those that went after the roots; and he said Mr. Lloyd—“the Reverend Tommy” he is called in the village when he isn’t there to hear—was both, and was a great authority, and wrote papers about rocks and roots and the rubbish he dug up, for learned societies to read, and that he belonged to a good many of them, and had a right to put half the letters of the alphabet after his name if he chose.

I’ve seen the Reverend Tommy come into our place of an afternoon as red as a turkey-cock, the perspiration pouring down his face, mudded all over his clothes—he always wore black, which made it look worse—and looking that dirty and untidy and disreputable that if he hadn’t been known he’d have been taken for a tramp.

It certainly was very trying for me to see him sit down in our nice, neat, pretty little coffee-room, putting pounds of mud on the carpet, and turning all the dirty things out of his pockets on to our nice tablecloth. Poor dear man; I’m sure he never thought he was doing any harm, for he didn’t live in this world; he lived in a world of hundreds of thousands of years ago—a world that our world has grown up on top of, so it was explained to me afterwards.

I’d never heard of such things before. Of course I knew there was a Noah’s Ark, and that the Flood drowned lots of animals, and carried lots of things out of their proper places and put them somewhere else, as even a small flood will do. A flood that happened where my brother John lives, who went to America years ago, as I told you in my “Memoirs,” washed his house right away, and floated it miles down the river, and put it on an island, and it’s been there ever since, and he and his family in it, they liking the situation better, and, as he says, having been moved free of expense. John wrote me about that from America himself, so it must be true, and it is a most wonderful place for adventures, according to John. Of course, if a flood can do that nowadays, the great Flood that covered the earth must have mixed up things very much before it went down.

It was this Flood that made Mr. Lloyd go about with a hammer looking for bits of the animals that were drowned in it, as far as I could make out. And when he found bits he was almost mad with delight. “Fossils” he called the things, but how he could know they were bits of animals was a wonder to me; they might have been anything. He showed me a lump of chalk one day that he said was a bit of an animal that had lived in our village thousands of years ago!

He made a horrid mess with his things while he was having a glass of ale and looking at his “specimens,” as he called them, but it was nothing to where he lodged. His landlady told me that she never went into the room because he didn’t like her to, but he made his bed himself, and it was just pushed up in the corner, and all the rest of the room was bones and rocks and bits of chalk, and on the wall he’d got skulls and shinbones and bits of skeletons of different animals, and some pictures of animals so hideous that the landlady’s daughter, a young married woman, on a visit to her mother, going in out of curiosity and not knowing what she was going to see, had a shock that made her mother very, very anxious about her, and especially as the poor girl would keep on saying, for some time afterwards, “Oh, mother, that hideous animal with the long nose! I can see it now.”

But it was all right, fortunately; because, when the landlady told me that it was all over, I asked, and she said, “It’s all right, my dear, thank goodness, and a really beautiful nose.”

She came to have tea with us one evening soon after that, and through our talking about her daughter and the fright in Mr. Lloyd’s room, it led to her telling me many things about our clergyman that I didn’t know. I knew he was a dear, kind old gentleman, and, when his head wasn’t full of the Flood and old bones, just the clergyman for a village like ours. Kind to the old and gentle to the young, treating rich and poor alike, he was always ready with a good, comforting word of wholesome Christianity for those who were in trouble.

He came to our place often after he got to know us, because he liked to come in of an evening now and then, and have a pipe with Harry in our own private sitting-room. He had never been in foreign countries, and he loved to hear about all the places Harry had seen, but he didn’t care much about the towns and the people. He always wanted to know more about the soil and the trees and the animals, and what the cliffs and rocks were like, and asked Harry all sorts of funny questions, which of course he couldn’t answer, as it wouldn’t do for the mate of a merchantman to go about the world with his head full of Noah’s Ark and the Flood. He asked Harry if he hadn’t brought skulls from New Zealand, and other places he had been to, and I said, “No, indeed he hasn’t. Do you think I’d have married him if he’d carried dead men’s heads about with him?”

I was sorry directly I’d said it, and coloured up terribly—which is a horrible failing I have. I believe I shall go red when I’m an old woman; it isn’t blushing—that’s rather pretty, and I shouldn’t mind it—it’s going fiery red, which is not becoming.

Mr. Lloyd noticed how hot I’d gone, and he smiled and said, “Don’t mind me, Mrs. Beckett. I know you didn’t mean anything.” But there was a look in his face presently that told me I had touched a sore place. It was only a shadow that crept across his face, and a look that came into his eyes, but it told me a good deal, and after he’d gone I said to my husband—

“Harry, Mr. Lloyd’s been in love at some time and has had a disappointment.”

“Old Tommy in love!” said Harry; “then it must have been with a young woman who lived before the Flood. Nothing after that date would have any attraction for him.”

“Don’t be so absurd, Harry,” I said. “Women know more about these things than men do, and I’m as certain as that I sit here that Mr. Lloyd has been crossed in love, and that it’s through skulls.”

Something happened to stop our conversation—a gentleman and lady, I think it was, who wanted apartments—and Mr. Lloyd and his skulls went out of my head, till his landlady came to tea, and I got talking about him.

Then I told her what had been my idea, and I asked her if she knew anything.

“Know anything about the Reverend Tommy being in love, my dear?” she said. “Why, that’s the story of his life!”

“I knew it,” I said; and I thought what a triumph it would be for me over Harry, for I must confess I do like to prove him wrong now and then. Men—even the best of them—will persist in thinking women don’t know much about anything except how to boil potatoes, how to make beds, and how to nurse babies, and I have known a husband who even wanted to show his wife how to do that till she lost her temper, and said, “Oh, as you know such a lot about it, perhaps you’ll tell me whose babies you’ve been in the habit of nursing!”

Harry—though I don’t want to say a word against him as a husband and a father, for a better never breathed, God bless him!—has little faults of his own, and good-tempered as I am and hope I always shall be, yet once or twice he has nearly put me out, and made me speak a little sharp, and it’s generally been about baby. A nicer, plumper, healthier baby there doesn’t exist, but Harry is that foolish over him, you’d think he (the baby, not Harry) was made of glass and would break. Of course I’m very fond of showing him to my female friends who come to see me, and sometimes I just undress him a little to show them what lovely little limbs he has. If Harry comes in, he begins to fidget at that directly. “You’ll give that child his death of cold,” he says; “the idea of taking him out of his warm bed and stripping him.”

Of course that makes me indignant. No mother likes to be told how to nurse her own child before other mothers.

Once when he came in like that I didn’t take any notice, but I just undressed baby a little more. It was a very warm room, and there was a bright fire, so it didn’t hurt, and I thought I would just show the other ladies that I didn’t give the management of the nursery over to Harry.

What made me do it, perhaps, more than anything was, that Mrs. Goose—a dreadful mischief-making old woman, that I must tell you about by-and-by—was in the room, and she curled her lip in a very irritating way, and said—

“Well, I never! What do sailors know about babies? I should like to have seen my husband interfering between me and my infant when I was young!”

“Ah,” said Harry, “things were different in olden times, I dare say.”

“Olden times!” says she. “My youngest is only eighteen come next Michaelmas, Mr. Beckett; but, of course, a man who would teach his wife how to manage her infant——”

“Oh, please don’t take any notice, Mrs. Goose,” I said; “it’s only one of my husband’s funny ways.” And I took baby’s nightgown right off, and let him kick his dear little legs up, and crow on my lap, with only his little flannel on.

“Funny ways or not, my dear,” said Harry, “that baby belongs to me as much as it does to you, and I’m not going to have its constitution ruined just to amuse a lot of old women.”

With that, if he didn’t come and pick up baby and its nightgown, put the gown on, take baby in his arms, and walk upstairs with it to its cot.

“Harry, how dare you!” I cried; and I felt so indignant I could have stamped my foot, for that horrid Mrs. Goose had seen it, and I should be the laughing-stock of the village.

I ran upstairs after Harry, quite in a passion, and I pushed the door to; and, gasping for breath, I said, “Don’t you ever do that again! I won’t be insulted in my own house before people.”

“Mary,” he said, gently; “come here, my lass.”

“No, I won’t,” I said; and then I felt as if I could shake myself like I used to in a temper at school, and then I began to cry.

He had put baby in its little cot; and he came and took my hand and drew me towards him.

“My little wife,” he said, “we’ve scarcely had a wry word since we’ve known each other—never an unkind one. Don’t let our first quarrel be about the child we both love so dearly. Come, my lass, kiss me and make it up. There may be troubles ahead that we shall have to face, and that we shall want all our strength to meet. Don’t let’s begin making troubles for ourselves about nothing.”

I didn’t kiss him quite at once. I stood for a minute trying to look as cross as I could, but I couldn’t keep it up. He clasped my hand so lovingly, and there was such a grieved look in his eyes, that I gave an hysterical little cry, and threw my arms round his neck, and hid my face on his breast and cried. Oh, how I cried! But it wasn’t all sorrow that I had been naughty; I think a good many of the tears were tears of joy—the joy I felt in having a husband that I could not only love, but honour and respect and look up to. And I sobbed so loudly that baby put out his dear little fat arm, and said, “Mum, mum;” and then I fell on my knees by the cot, and thanked God for my baby and my Harry, and I didn’t care for all the Mrs. Gooses in the whole wide world.

Writing about our first quarrel over baby has led me away from what I was going to tell you about the Reverend Tommy. Harry wasn’t at the tea-table, we being extra busy in the bar, so I and Mr. Lloyd’s landlady were alone.

She didn’t want much urging, I found, to talk about her lodger—in fact, I should think he was the principal subject of conversation, whenever she went out to tea.

I’m not going to repeat all the things she told me about his queer ways at home, because I don’t think people who let lodgings ought to be encouraged to pry into the private life of their lodgers and reveal it, or to tell about their ways and habits in the room for which they pay rent, and where they ought to be as private as in their own home.

Before we got the ‘Stretford Arms,’ Harry and I were in lodgings for a short time, and some day I will tell you something about that.

But the story about the Reverend Tommy that his landlady told me I can repeat, because it was about his past life; and it seems he used to talk about it himself sometimes, but always among the gentry. I mean, it was a subject—kind and unassuming as he was—that he never spoke of to his inferiors. I can quite understand the feeling. I could tell the ladies and gentlemen who stay at our place about Harry, and my having been a servant; but I should not care to talk in the same way to our barmaid, or our potman, or our cook.

This was the story—not as the landlady told it; for if I told it her way, I should have to wander off into something else every five minutes. If there is one thing I dislike it is people who can’t stick to the point when they are telling a story.

The Reverend Tommy, years and years ago, it seems, and long before he came to be our clergyman, was the curate at a place just beyond Beachy Head, an old-fashioned village that was on the Downs, hidden in among them, in fact—a place full of very old houses and very old people, quite shut away from the world; for you could see nothing of anything except the trees and the tops of the hills, the village lying down in a deep, deep hollow.

At least, that is the sort of village I gathered it was from the landlady, who said Mr. Lloyd had described it to her and showed her photographs of it.

He was quite a young man then, and, though the place was dull, it suited him, because of the cliffs and hills and places round about, where no end of wonderful old bones and fossils and things were to be found.

All the time that he could spare he was climbing the cliffs and hammering away at them to find the treasures that he thought such a lot of. They were only fisher folk who lived near the cliffs, and they soon got used to the young clergyman, who climbed like a goat, and would be let down by ropes, and do things that would have made Mr. Blondin feel nervous, and all to hammer away at the cliffs and the rocks.

Mr. Lloyd’s favourite place was a cliff just beyond Beachy Head—it was a very dangerous one, and many years ago a man had been killed there—a young fellow who used to do just what Mr. Lloyd did. People told him about it, but it didn’t frighten him. He said, “Oh, he must have been careless, or gone giddy. I’m all right.” But it was a very nasty place, being a straight fall from top to bottom, with only horrid jagged bits of cliff sticking out.

I can quite understand what it was like, because on our honeymoon we went for a day or two to the seaside, and Harry showed me a cliff that he had gone over when he was a boy after a seagull’s nest, and it made me go hot and cold all over to look at it, and when we stood at the edge I clutched hold of Harry’s coat and felt as if we must go over, it looked so awful. I hate looking over high places; it gives me a dreadful feeling that I must jump over if somebody doesn’t catch hold of me and keep me back. That’s a very horrid feeling to have, but I have it, and nobody ever got me up on the Monument. I can’t even bear to look down a well-staircase. I always see myself lying all of a heap, smashed on the floor at the bottom; and even when once in London I used to have to go over Westminster Bridge, I always walked in the middle of the road among the cabs and carts and omnibuses, even in the muddiest weather.

Perhaps the young woman that I’m coming to presently in this story—story it isn’t, because it’s true, but you know what I mean—had the same sort of feeling,—vertigo, I think they call it. At any rate, one evening when the Reverend Tommy was out with his hammer and his coil of rope and things that he used, right on the highest and loneliest part of the cliff, he saw a young woman looking over. It was a summer evening, and quite light and quite still. There wasn’t a soul in sight but this young woman, and the Reverend Tommy wondered what she was doing there all alone. As he got close to her he saw she was quite a young woman, and very nicely dressed, and that she was very pretty.

But before he could get right up to her—she hadn’t heard him coming, as he was walking on the turf of the Downs—this young woman gave a little cry, swung forward, and in a second had disappeared over the edge of that awful cliff.

The young clergyman rushed to the spot, knelt on the edge and peered over, and then he saw this poor girl hanging half-way between life and death. As she had fallen, one of the rugged juts I told you of had caught under the bottom of a short tight-fitting cloth kind of jacket she wore, and there it held her. It made my blood run cold when the landlady described it to me, as she had heard it of a lady Mr. Lloyd had told it to.

He shouted out to her, but he got no answer; so he made up his mind she had fainted. He looked about and shouted, but he could see nobody near. Then he looked over the cliff again, and it seemed to him that the girl’s jacket was giving way under the strain, and that in a minute she would be hurled to an awful death on the rocks below.

I don’t know how he did it, because the landlady couldn’t tell me, not knowing about ropes and things, but in some way Mr. Lloyd made his rope fast. I think he drove a big stake or wooden peg into the turf, and piled stones on it—at any rate, he made his rope fast, as he thought, and then, with his hammer in his pocket, he swung himself over and went down bit by bit, steadying himself every now and then by digging his foot into holes in the side of the cliff.

He managed to swing himself right down by the side of the poor girl, and spoke to her and told her to have courage; but she was senseless.

He lowered himself a bit more, and then with his hammer beat out a place in the cliff where it was hard, just room enough for him to put his two feet in and take the strain off the rope.

Then he looked above him and below him to see if there was any place that was safe to stand on without the rope, as he wanted to tie that round the poor girl’s body.

He found a place just on the other side where he could stand and hold on by a jutting piece of cliff, and he got there somehow—he never remembered himself quite how—but his hands were fearfully bruised in doing it, and it was as much as he could do to hold on when he got there.

The girl had come to a little, but it was getting darker, and he could only just see her face by the time he had made himself quite firm on the little ledge.

When he spoke to her she answered him, and cried to him to save her, and he told her not to attempt to move or struggle, and, with God’s help, he would save her.

She was quite quiet; she seemed dazed, he said—and no wonder at it; I should have lost my senses altogether—and he managed to get the rope across her, and then pass it round under her arms, but he couldn’t leave go with both hands to tie it, and he had to beg and pray of her to try and do it herself. She was afraid at first to move her arms, for fear she should fall; but he found that her heels were resting on a bit of cliff, so that there would not be so much danger if she did it quietly.

Well, at last she got it tied round her all right, and then, with one hand, he made the knot she had tied the rope in quite firm, she helping him; and then it was quite dark, and there they were, with the sea moaning below them, and the stars up above them.

When she felt a little safer she began to groan and cry, and say that she should die, and to pray, and to say that God had punished her for all her sins.

He comforted her, and told her to be a brave girl, but that she must stop quite still, for he had to climb up the face of the cliff again to the top if she was to be rescued from her awful position.

She begged and prayed of him not to leave her, but he said he must—that he could do nothing more for her if he stopped there, and they would have to wait till the daylight for help, because the coastguard’s beat lay some distance away from the edge, and it was no good shouting, as the wind blew strong from the land and carried their voices right out to sea.

When he had made her a little braver he began to go slowly up the side of the cliff, using his hammer to make little steps.

It was an awful climb, and every minute it seemed as though he would have to loose his hold and fall, and be dashed to pieces. But he was one of the best cliff-climbers in England, and young and strong then, and at last he reached the top.

He was so numb and worn out and bruised when he got to the top that he fell down on the grass and lay there quite a minute before he could move. Just as he was pulling himself together, he looked up and saw the coastguard in the distance.

He shouted at the top of his voice, and the coastguard came running to him, and, when he heard what was the matter, shook his head. “It’ll be an awful job pulling the poor girl up,” he said. “She won’t have the sense to keep kicking herself away from the side of the cliff, and it’s likely she’ll be dreadfully injured.”

“Well, it’s the only chance,” said the parson; “we must be careful, and go slow.”

They were careful, and they went slow—so slow that when they at last dragged the poor girl up she was in a dead swoon, and she never spoke or opened her eyes, but lay there like a dead thing. They saw that she was cut and injured, too, for blood was on her face, and when they touched her arm she groaned and shuddered.

Of course, something must be done, so the parson picked her up in his arms and carried her, senseless as she was, across the Downs to the place where he lodged.

Luckily, it wasn’t far, and he had told the coastguard to go at once into the village and knock up the doctor and send him.

The young clergyman’s landlady stared, you may be sure, when she saw her lodger coming home at that time of night carrying a young woman; but he explained what had happened, and the landlady gave up her room, and laid the poor girl on her bed, and got brandy and bathed her face with cold water, and at last brought her to.

It was a month before the girl could be moved, she was so injured, and all that time, when he could, the clergyman, would sit with her and read to her—for none of her friends came to see her.

She said she had no friends, when they asked her—that she was an orphan and a shop-girl in London; that she had been ill, and left her situation to come to the seaside, and had gone out in the evening, and turned giddy, and fallen over the edge of the cliff. They sent to her lodgings in Eastbourne and got her boxes for her, but no letters came for her, and she never offered to write any. And—well, you can guess what would happen under such circumstances—the young clergyman fell head over heels in love with the beautiful girl he had saved.

She was very beautiful. The landlady told me she had once seen a photograph of her that the Reverend Tommy kept in his room, and that it was an angel’s face.

The end of it was the Reverend Tommy proposed to the girl—Annie Ewen, she said her name was; and, without stopping to think how little he knew of her or her antecedents, they were married the month after the rescue from the cliff.

They were happy for a month—very happy. The girl seemed grateful to the young clergyman, and tried all she could to deserve his affection; but the cloud soon came into the sky, and a big, black cloud it was.

One day, when the clergyman came home, he found his wife crying. She said it was a headache—that she was ill, and out of sorts. The next day when he came home, after his parish work, the house was empty. His young wife had gone, and left behind her a letter—a letter which no one ever saw but the man to whom it was written; but what it was was guessed at through other things that were found out afterwards.

The girl hadn’t fallen over the cliff. She had thrown herself over—to kill herself; to kill herself because a man she believed true was false, and had deserted her, and she had the same terror of shame and disgrace that many a poor girl has who knows that she is to be left alone to bear the punishment of loving a man too much and trusting him too well.

She told the clergyman she wished to save him the shame of what must be known if she stopped there; that he could say she had gone to her friends, who were abroad, for a time.

The blow broke poor Mr. Lloyd, for he worshipped that woman. He would have forgiven or borne anything. He tried to find her and tell her so, and would have opened his arms for her to come back to him and be his honoured wife.

He did find her at last; but when he found her he could not say the words he wanted to speak. It was too late.

He found her a year afterwards with another man—the man who had caused her to seek the death from which the clergyman had saved her. But she loved the other man best, and though he had refused to marry her and save her from shame she had gone back to him.

Oh dear me! I’m a woman myself, and I know what queer things our hearts are; but it does seem to me sometimes that it is easier for a bad man to win and keep a girl’s love than for a good man. This girl, you see, would rather be what she was with a man who treated her badly than the loved and honoured wife of the young clergyman who had saved her. Woman certainly are——

* * * * *

What’s the matter in the bar? It’s that new barmaid. “Oh, Miss Jenkins, how careless of you! I’m so sorry, sir. I hope it hasn’t hurt you very much. You must be careful how you open soda-water, Miss Jenkins, or somebody’s eye will be knocked out with a cork, and I wouldn’t have such a thing happen here for the world. Come into the parlour, please, sir, and sit down. I’ll hold a knife to it to stop it going black. I am so sorry!”

CHAPTER V.
THE LONDON PHYSICIAN.

Our hotel being just a nice driving distance from London, and a very easy and convenient distance by train, and the village being really very quaint and pretty, and nice scenery and walks all round us, we made up our minds that, if we were lucky, we should soon be able to make it a staying-place—that is, a place people would come and stop at for a day or two, or perhaps a week, who wanted a little fresh air and not to be too far from town. We had every accommodation, and very pretty bedrooms, and private sitting-rooms, and all we wanted was the connection—the last people never having worked it up as an hotel, being satisfied with the local trade and the coffee-room customers, of which there were a good many in the summer.

Harry said, as soon as we had put our nice new furniture in and done the rooms up a little, that he thought we ought to advertise. The refurnishing was very nice, but it cost a lot of money; and, as we paid for everything in cash, of course we had to buy useful cheap things. I had to select the things, as Harry said he was no good at that; so we went to London together, and looked over one or two big furniture places.

It was a great treat, but, of course, nothing was very new to me, as I had lived in good houses and seen lots of beautiful furniture and had the care of it—and a nice bother it was to keep dusted, I can tell you, especially in London, where directly you open a window the dust and dirt seem to blow in in clouds, and if you don’t open a window it gets in somehow. It was the ornamental carving, and the chairbacks and things with fret-work, that used to be the greatest worry. Fret-work it was, and no mistake, and I used to fret over it, for it would take me hours to work my duster in and out and get the things to look decent.

Harry had never seen such beautiful things as we were shown before, and he kept standing and staring at them really with his mouth almost open, and it was as much as I could do to get him to leave the beautiful things and look at the ordinary ones that we wanted.

The salesman—a very nice young man—when he saw Harry admired the things, kept showing us cabinets and suites and bookcases that were really grand. “How much is that wardrobe?” said Harry, pointing to a very fine one. “Two hundred and forty pounds,” said the salesman; and I thought Harry would have dropped into a thirty-pound armchair that was just behind him.

He whispered to me that it seemed wicked for people to give all that money for a wardrobe just to hang a few old clothes up in.

“A few old clothes?” I laughed, and wondered what he would have said if he could have seen the number of dresses some ladies have, and known the prices they pay for them. But I didn’t begin talking to him about that, because I wanted to get our business done and get back again home, and he would have liked to stop there all day looking at the things and talking to the nice salesman.

We chose what we wanted—a few simple things, cheap but pretty, and in the very newest style, and Harry gave a cheque for them. I can’t tell you how proud I felt as I stood by and saw my husband take out his cheque-book and flourish the pen round; and the way he said, “Let’s see, what’s the day of the month?” was really quite grand.

It was three days before the goods came down, and when they did, on a big van, there was quite a little crowd outside to see them unloaded. When they had been carried upstairs and put in their places, and I had finished off the rooms with the mats and the toilet-covers that I had made all ready, and had put the antimacassars in the sitting-rooms, and stood the ornaments that we had bought on the little cabinet, everything looked lovely.

And all that afternoon I kept going into the different rooms and looking at them and admiring them, and I fancied I could hear the guests, when they were shown in, saying, “How very nice! how very neat and comfortable! what excellent taste!” and paying me compliments on my sitting-rooms and bedrooms.

Oh dear me! I know more about hotel customers now than I did then, and I don’t expect any of them to go into raptures about anything. It’s generally the other way; they always find something to grumble at. We had one gentleman who, all the time he was with us, did nothing but grumble at the pattern of the wall-paper in his bedroom (a very pretty paper it was, being storks with frogs in their mouths, and some other animal sitting on its hind legs that I’ve never met anybody who could tell me its name), and he declared that he had the nightmare every night through looking at it; and another gentleman wanted all the furniture shifted in his room because it was green, and he hated green; and another said the pattern of the carpet made him bilious; and we had a lady who used to go on all day long to me about the bedroom furniture, and say it was so vulgar that if she lived with it long she believed that she would begin to use vulgar language. Then she went into a long rigmarole about the influence of your surroundings, or whatever you call it, till I quite lost my patience, and said we couldn’t refurnish the house for everybody who came.

It was the same with the beds. One person wouldn’t sleep in a wooden bedstead, because—— Well, you know the usual objection to wooden beds, but such a thing, I am sure, need never have been mentioned in my house, for one has never been known; and if they do get into bedsteads it’s the fault of the mistress of the house and the servants in nine cases out of ten.

Another gentleman, who was put in a room with a brass bedstead—the only room we had to spare—shook his head, and said he was sorry he had to sleep on brass, as it destroyed the rural character of the place. Give him a good old four-poster and he felt he was sleeping in the country, but with a brass bedstead you might just as well be in London.

And if the customers didn’t grumble about the bedsteads, they did about the beds. It was really quite heart-breaking at first, when we were very anxious to please, and so, of course, listened to everything people had to say, so as to alter what was wrong, if possible. But it was no use. We had nearly all feather beds at first, and then the customers all hated feather beds and said they weren’t healthy, and we bought mattresses, and then half the people that came said they preferred feather beds, and couldn’t sleep on mattresses.

And as to the bolsters and the pillows, the grumbling about them used to be terrible. I think we must have had an extra fanciful lot of people, for one swore the pillows were too hard, and another that they were too soft. There was one old gentleman who stayed with us three weeks, and all that time we never managed to make his bed right. I made it myself, the housemaid made it, and I even got cook to come and make it, to see if by accident she could make it right. But it was no use; every morning he swore he hadn’t slept a wink because the bed wasn’t made his way, and he kept on about it till he had his breakfast, and then he began to grumble about the tea, and say nobody in the house knew how to make a decent cup of tea. Then it was the same with the bacon, and with the eggs: they were never right. I believe that old gentleman was what you call a born grumbler; nothing was ever right while he was with us. He grumbled so much that I said to Harry we must be careful with his bill, for I felt sure he would fight every item, as some of them do; but when I took it to him he just looked at the total and threw down a couple of banknotes, and never said a word or examined a single item.

I’ve found that often with people who grumble at everything—they don’t grumble at the bill; and people you think have been pleased with everything, you have to argue with them for half an hour to make them believe they’ve had a meal in the house.

But these people aren’t so much bother as the customers who make it a rule to grumble at the wines and the spirits and the beer. Harry used to get quite wild at first when they used to send for him over a bottle of wine, before a lot of people, and say, “Landlord, just taste this wine.” Harry used to have to take a glass, of course, and put on a pleasing expression, and taste it and say, “There’s nothing the matter with it, sir!”

But, they would have it that it wasn’t sound, or it was new, or it was corked, or it was something or the other; and the same with the spirits. There are a lot of people who go about and pretend to be great judges of sixpenny-worths of whiskey and brandy, and sniff at it, and taste it, and palate it as if you were selling it ten shillings a bottle and warranting it a hundred years old. And they’re not at all particular about saying out loud that it isn’t good. I heard one gentleman say one day, when our coffee-room was quite full of customers, “Very nice people who keep this house; pity they sell such awful stuff.”

It made me go crimson; I felt so indignant, because it wasn’t true. Harry is most particular, and if anything were wrong he would speak to the distillers at once; but there is nothing wrong, for he is an excellent judge of whiskey and brandy himself, and we always pay the best price to have the best article, because that is what we believe in. Some people, especially young beginners, do doctor their stuff, I know, to make a larger profit; but it is a great mistake, for it soon gets known, and the house gets a bad name.

I’ve heard a gentleman myself, when asked to go into a certain house with a friend, say, “No, thank you; if I have anything to drink there, I’m always ill for a week afterwards.” The tricks of the trade are all very well, but trade that’s done by trick doesn’t last long, and in inn-keeping, as in any other business, honesty is the best policy in the long run.

These complaints worried us very much, and made Harry almost swear—a thing which, being a sailor, he can’t help sometimes, but doesn’t do often, and then only something very mild, quite different to real sea-swearing, which I’ve heard is very strong indeed.

He was telling another gentleman in our business who came to see us one day about it, and the gentleman said, “My boy, we all have to put up with that sort of thing. But I’ll tell you what to do. If you give a man a good bottle of wine, and he grumbles at it, and pretends there’s something wrong with it, the next bottle he orders give him the worst you’ve got in your cellar, and it’s ten to one he’ll smack his lips and say, ‘Ah, that’s something very different now.’ Then you say, ‘Yes, sir; it was a mistake yesterday—a mistake of the cellarman’s.’ ‘Ah,’ he will say, ‘I am a connoisseur, and my opinion of a wine is taken by the best judges.’ You humour him and flatter him a bit, and if he stays long enough he’ll drink up all the common wine that you’ve got, pay the top price, and recommend your house everywhere for its ‘capital cellar.’”

Of course Harry wouldn’t play such a trick, but it would have served some of the customers right if he had. There are people who think it shows what a lot they know to grumble at the quality of everything—especially at hotels, where some gentlemen never forget to let everybody know that they are capital judges of wines and spirits. With the cigars, too, there is trouble sometimes, though, of course, not so much, as hotel customers who smoke good cigars generally carry their own Havannahs, and for the ordinary cigars, except in the bar and the smoking-room, there is not much call.

But sometimes a gentleman who is sitting in our parlour talking to us, will ask for a Havannah cigar, and Harry will offer him one of the best—and they are really good, for Harry is a judge, and has been with his ship to Havannah, and smoked them green. And I’ve known a gentleman—after smoking the Havannah a little while—say, it was a British cigar in a Havannah box; he could tell by the flavour. And the same gentleman, one evening that we were out, asked for a cigar, and our barmaid gave him one of the threepenny ones by mistake, and he liked it, and said that was something like a cigar. He said Harry had been swindled in the others.

Of course I don’t say all gentlemen are like this. Plenty of them who come to our place do know good wine and good cigars, and when they get them, appreciate them, and don’t mind paying for them.

It is always the people who grumble so much about the quality that are the worst judges, and they do it to be thought good judges. I only mention these things to show what innkeepers have to put up with, and how difficult it is for them always to please their customers, though they try as hard as they can.

Soon after our hotel was quite ready and repainted and repapered, we determined to advertise. We put an advertisement in a London paper, and the next morning we had twenty or thirty letters. “Oh, Harry,” I said, “that advertisement has brought us a lot of customers already.” I expected all the letters were ordering apartments. So when I opened them I was very disappointed. They were all from different newspapers, and guide-books, and railway time-tables, and things of that sort, enclosing our advertisement cut out, and saying, “The cost for inserting this advertisement in so-and-so will be so much;” and soon after that, we began to be pestered with men coming in with big books in a black bag which were just coming out, and they talked for an hour to try and convince us that we ought to put our advertisement in their books.

Some of these books were going all over the world, and everybody was sure to read them; they would be put in every hotel in Europe and Asia and Africa and America, and I don’t know where else besides.

Harry listened for a long time, till the advertisement man began to point out that we should be advertised all over the world for thirty shillings, and then Harry said, “Thank you—but we can’t go into your book till we’ve enlarged our premises. If we are to have customers from Europe and Asia and Africa and America, we shall want a barracks instead of a village hotel.”

But our first advertisement did bring us some customers, and from London, too. It was very nicely worded, because we had copied one that was in the Daily News, and altered it to suit our hotel. We said: “Pretty and quiet little country hotel. Charming apartments. Picturesque scenery. Moderate terms. Very suitable for ladies and gentlemen desiring home comforts, perfect privacy, and salubrious air.”

We got several answers to the advertisement from people who didn’t come. The questions they asked were awful—it took me a whole day nearly to answer them. Were we on gravel soil? Where did we get our water from? Was the church High or Low? How far off was the nearest doctor? Was the air bracing or relaxing?—and, some of them, if these things were all satisfactory, were good enough to say that they would come if we could take them on inclusive terms. One lady and her three daughters, after writing four pages every other day, wanted the best sitting-room and three bedrooms, fire and light, breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, and late dinner, for two guineas a week for the four of them, no extras to be charged.

It was about a week after our advertisement appeared that we got our first visitor through it. A very nice old gentleman, with beautiful silver hair and gold spectacles, and a hand portmanteau, arrived one evening, and told us that he’d seen our advertisement, and he’d come to give the place a trial.

He told us that he was a London physician, and had been ordered a few days’ holiday; and he had seen our advertisement, and thought, if it suited, it would be just the place for him to send some of his patients to. He said he had a big practice among City men, and he had often to tell them to go and sleep in the country for a week or so because of their nerves; but as they wanted to get to business every day he couldn’t send them far, and we were just the right distance.

Harry was delighted when he heard the gentleman say that, because it was just the sort of connection he wanted—people who wanted to be quiet and go to bed early, and wouldn’t want a lot of waiting on till all hours of the morning; and people of that sort, business people, are always so respectable.

You may be sure we made the celebrated London physician as comfortable as we could, and gave him the best rooms, and waited on him hand and foot, and I went into the kitchen myself to look after cook while his meals were being prepared, because our cook was what you call “unequal.”

One day everything would be beautiful, a credit to the best hotel in the kingdom, and the next day everything would be spoiled. And she always was at her best when we’d nobody particular in the house, and she was always at her worst when it was a very particular customer. And she had a vile temper, too, as most cooks have, through standing so much over the fire, and wanted a lot of humouring, especially when she knew everything depended on her and I was anxious.

When the London physician came, I remembered how particular doctors are about food for their patients, especially for those that have nerves, and stomachs, and gout, and other things that come from overwork and anxiety, some of them saying that a badly-cooked dinner is at the bottom of many ailments that people suffer from, such as dyspepsia and indigestion.

So I stopped in the kitchen as much as I could to keep cook up to the mark for the London physician, and, to make her try her best, I told her if she suited she was to have her wages raised when we began to get busy.

She did try her best, and came out really quite grand once or twice in entrées and fancy puddings that I didn’t know she knew anything about, so that all the time the London physician was with us his dinners were fit for a nobleman.

He enjoyed them, too, and no mistake, and there wasn’t much that went up that came down again. “Ah, my dear madam,” he said to me one day, when I came to clear away and found that he’d finished a whole apple charlotte, and only left a quarter of a wine-jelly that cook had made—“ah, my dear madam, your salubrious air has made a new man of me. Why, before I came down here the very sight of food almost made me ill!”

He was very affable and chatty, not only to me, but to everybody, and we all liked him very much. Of an evening, he said he felt lonely in his sitting-room, so he would come down and sit in the bar-parlour, and have his pipe and talk with Mr. Wilkins, and the one or two of our neighbours that made it a sort of a local club.

He was a very nice talker, and full of anecdotes. So he soon got to be quite a favourite, and Mr. Wilkins told him about the people in the neighbourhood, and of course that story about the Squire’s room that I told you when I began these Memoirs.

He said it was a very pretty story, and then he asked about the people who lived at the Hall now. “Oh,” said Mr. Wilkins, “it’s the eldest son of the Phillipses, the wholesale clothes people, who lives there now. The old people are dead, and he’s the master of the place, and lives there with his family. They’re very rich, for his father made an immense fortune in business.” (Mr. Phillips was the gentleman I told you about who comes and talks to Harry sometimes about foreign parts, through having run away to sea himself when a boy.)

“Is he married?” said the London physician.

“Oh yes,” I said, joining in the conversation; “he married a very rich young lady, and has a large family.”

“Let’s see,” he said, “she was a Miss Jacobs, wasn’t she?”

“Yes, sir; that was the name. She’s a very beautiful woman. I’ve got a picture of her in an illustrated newspaper, if you’d like to see it.”

“Thank you, I should very much.”

I went and got out a back number of an illustrated lady’s paper that had Mrs. Phillips in it, sketched at the Lord Mayor’s ball.

“That’s her, sir,” I said, pointing to her picture; “but she’s really handsomer than she looks here. That dress was made for her in Paris, it says here. Everybody noticed her at the ball, not only because she was so beautiful, but because of her diamonds. They say she’s got the finest jewellery in the county.”

The London physician looked at the picture, and said she was certainly very handsome; and then he asked about the house they lived in, and if the grounds were very fine.

“Fine!” said Mr. Wilkins; “they’re grand! Haven’t you seen them?”

“No; I didn’t know that they were open.”

“They aren’t,” said Mr. Wilkins; “but I can always go when I like and take a friend. I’m going up there to-morrow to see the head gardener. If you’d like to go, sir, I should be very pleased to show you over the place.”

“Thank you. I’ll go with pleasure. I should like to leave a card at the hall, as I knew Mrs. Phillips’s brother once. I might inquire after his health. Is Mr. Phillips at home?”

“No; he’s on the Continent. Mrs. Phillips would have been with him, but she’s ill in bed.”

“Oh, I’m sorry for that,” said the physician. “Never mind, I can see the grounds with you.”

The next day Mr. Wilkins called and took our guest up to the Hall, and when he came back he said, “What a delightful old place! I don’t wonder at the old Squire feeling the loss of it so much.”

“Did you see the house, sir?” I said.

“Oh, yes; Mr. Wilkins got the butler to take me over it. What a beautiful drawing-room!”

“Yes, it is, sir,” I said. “Ah, you can do a lot with money—and they’re rolling in it.”

He had been with us nearly a week when this happened. The morning after that he said he must go to London for the day to make some arrangements, but he would be back in the evening, and he hoped, if he found all well at home, to be able to stay a few days longer. He said he’d be back by the six o’clock train, and would I have dinner ready for him at half-past.

He came back and said he was very sorry, but he found he shouldn’t be able to stay as he had hoped, so would I have his bill ready for him in the morning, when he would have to return to town.

“I hope you have been comfortable, sir?” I said.

“Very comfortable indeed, Mrs. Beckett, and I shall certainly recommend all my patients who want a few days’ change and rest to come to you.”

That evening, about nine o’clock, one of our customers came into the bar-parlour looking very pale. It was Mr. Jarvis, the miller, whose mill was about five minutes’ walk from the lodge gates of the Hall.

“What’s the matter, Jarvis?” everybody said, for they saw something was wrong directly they looked at him.

“Oh,” he said; “it’s nothing. I shall be all right directly; but I’ve had a narrow escape. You know how narrow the lane is near my place. Well, as I was walking along coming here I heard wheels, and before I could get out of the way a dog-cart came along at a fearful pace, and the shaft caught me and threw me into the hedge. It was a mercy I wasn’t killed. I shouted after the man who was driving, and he turned round and used the most fearful language at me. What with the fright and my rage at being treated like that, it’s no wonder if I look queer. Give me six o’ brandy neat, Mrs. Beckett, please.”

“How disgraceful!” said the London physician. “Do you know the driver?”

“No, he don’t belong about here. I couldn’t see his face, because he didn’t carry no lights; but he were a Londoner. I could tell by the way he spoke.”

The conversation turned on Londoners and their horrid ways in the country, and how they drove over people; and Mr. Wilkins said that there ought to be something done to stop it, for at holiday times and on Sundays a lot of roughs came from London, and, when they got drunk in the evening, drove at such a rate and so carelessly that it was a mercy people weren’t killed every day.

He said there ought to be two or three of the inhabitants in places that suffered from the nuisance made special constables, and be about every Sunday evening to look out for the wretches, and have them caught and brought to justice.

The conversation was still on the same subject when it was closing time, and they all had to go. The London physician told me he was going by the half-past nine train in the morning, and to be sure and have his bill ready: and I promised to see that it should be. Then he said good night and went to bed; and we went to bed about a quarter of an hour after, and I went to sleep and dreamed that a man in a dog-cart was driving over me, and I was running away, and the faster I ran the faster he drove, and I was just falling down and the dog-cart was coming over my body, when somebody shouted, “Hi! hi! hi!” and I woke up with a start.

And somebody was shouting “Hi!” and hammering at our bedroom door.

I sat bolt upright in bed to see if I was awake, and then I woke Harry, who’d sleep, I believe, if somebody was hammering on his head instead of on the door.

“Harry!” I screamed, “there’s something the matter. See who it is.”

He got up and opened the door, and there was Jones, our village policeman.

“Hullo!” says Harry, “how the devil did you get in?”

“Walked in,” he said; “do you know your front door’s open?”

“What!” said Harry. “Why, I bolted and barred it myself.”

“It’s open now, then,” said Jones. “I only found it out by accident. It looked shut all right when I passed it twice before, but just now when I came by I could see a streak of light, and I pushed it and it flew back wide open, so I found my way upstairs and woke you. You’d better come down.”

Harry was out after the policeman in a minute, and I got up and dressed, knowing something must be wrong, for I’d seen Harry bolt up that door with my own eyes.

It was about five in the morning, and just getting daylight. I went down all of a tremble, and my heart beating loud enough to be heard all over the house. I found Harry and the policeman examining the door.

“It’s been done from the inside,” said Harry; “that’s certain. What can it mean?”

“Who’s in the house?” said the policeman.

“Only the servants and ourselves and the gentleman who’s been staying here for a week,” I said.

“Go and see if the servants are in bed, please, ma’am,” said Jones.

I went and knocked at their doors, and they thought they were all oversleeping themselves, and late, and jumped up directly I knocked.

“Well,” said the policeman, when I told him, “you’d better see if that gentleman’s in the house still.”

“Oh, nonsense!” I said; “I can’t go and disturb him at this hour. Whatever would he think? Besides, it mightn’t be wise to let him know about this. It isn’t a thing to do the house good.”

“I’d like you to go,” said Jones, “just for me to be able to say I ascertained as no one had left the house. Which is his room?”

“I’ll take you,” said Harry; and they went upstairs together. Presently Harry came tearing down.

“Mary Jane;” he said, looking as scared as if he’d seen a ghost, “the London physician’s gone, and he’s taken his portmanteau with him!”

I couldn’t speak. I dropped down flop on the stairs with horror.

And at that very minute a man on horseback came dashing through the streets, and pulled up by our door as Jones ran out to see what it could be.

It was a groom from the Hall. “I’m going to the station for help,” he said. “The Hall’s been broken into in the night by burglars, and the missus’s jewellery——”

* * * * *

“What’s that? It’s in the best sitting-room, Susan. It’s something smashed. Oh dear me, whatever can it be? What! the best vase! Of course; the cat got on the mantelpiece! Well, whose fault is it? I told you you’d shut it in one day by accident, and now you see what’s happened!”

CHAPTER VI.
MR. AND MRS. SMITH.

It was a long time before I got over the burglary at the Hall. It was a most daring thing, and the detective that came down from London, said it was the work of an old hand. A nice haul the wretches had made, though they hadn’t got all Mrs. Phillips’s diamonds and jewels, because, it seems, the best had been sent to the bank, but they had taken a lot that were in her room, and valuable plate and things, and got clean away with everything.

We didn’t learn all about it till next day. The first story that went about when people got up in the morning was that Mrs. Phillips had been murdered in her bed, but, thank goodness, it wasn’t as bad as that; but the nurse that slept in the next room to her, got a nasty knock on the head, hearing a noise and coming in, which made her so queer that she was a long time before she could say what the man was like she saw in the room, ransacking the things.

But what gave us the most dreadful shock first of all, was the disappearance of the London physician, and him going out in the middle of the night and leaving our front door open.

Directly we told the policeman, he said, “He’s the man.”

“What man?” I said.

“Why, the man that committed the burglary.”

I couldn’t believe that. I said it was nonsense. A London physician wouldn’t go breaking into people’s houses at night. But he certainly was gone, and his hand portmanteau too, and he didn’t come back again the next morning, and then we recollected about his going up to the Hall with Mr. Wilkins, and his having seen the grounds and been shown over the house by the butler.

But it was such a dreadful idea that it was a very long time before I could believe it, and I didn’t quite till the detective came down from London and began to ask questions.

We’d never asked the physician his name, and no letters had come for him, which he explained by saying, that as he wanted to be quite quiet and rest, he had ordered no letters to be forwarded, only he was to be telegraphed to in case of anything very particular, and of course we should have taken up any telegram that came, and said, “Is this for you, sir?” because there was nobody else staying in the house. His going away like that and not coming back again, wasn’t what a first-class London physician would have done, so it was evident he’d deceived us about himself, and if he’d done that, why shouldn’t he be the burglar?

The detective said it was a “put-up job”—that’s what he called it. He said the Hall had been “marked,” and this fellow had come to stay at our house so as to take his observations and find out all he could, and “do the trick” (those were the detective’s words) as soon as he saw a good opportunity.

Poor Mr. Wilkins was nearly mad to think that he’d been the one to take him over the grounds and introduce him to the butler, and so let him find out all he wanted to, and you may be sure that we were pretty mad, too, that the burglar who burgled the Hall should have been a visitor staying at our house. Our first visitor, too, and one we’d been so proud of, and thought was going to do us such a lot of good!

It wasn’t his not paying his bill so much that we minded as the scandal!

Harry said, “Well, we wanted to get something about our house in the papers, and, by Jove, missus, we’ve got it! It’s all over the county now. I shouldn’t wonder if our hotel wasn’t known as ‘The Burglar’s Arms.’”

“Oh, Harry,” I said, “don’t say that—it’s awful. If we got a name like that no respectable person would pass a night here.” I began to think, when Harry said that, about an inn I’d seen on the stage, where awful things are done—a murder, I think; by two awful villains who stayed there, though they made you laugh. Their names were Mr. Macaire and Mr. Strop, I think; but how the landlord could have taken them in dressed as they were, and putting bread and cheese and onions in their hats, and stuffing their umbrellas with meat and vegetables, I couldn’t understand. You could see they were bad characters, but no one would ever have suspected that silver-haired, golden-spectacled old gentleman, who really looked just what he said he was—a London physician.

I must confess that for a good many nights after the awful discovery I didn’t feel very comfortable. It made me nervous to think that we should never know who was sleeping under our roof. I’m sure I should never have suspected that nice amiable old gentleman of being a burglar.

We got over it after a bit, and when no trace was found of the burglar, and the excitement was over, I didn’t think so much about it. All that was found out was that the man in the dog-cart who nearly drove over the miller was an accomplice. They traced the wheels away from the Hall, and the detective said the man in the dog-cart had waited for the physician and driven him off with the “swag.” (That’s what the detective called it.)

A few days after that another old gentleman came, and wanted a room, but he’d only got a black bag, and I was so nervous that I told him we were full, and he went back to the station, and went on somewhere else.

Of course it was a stupid thing to do, but my nerves were bad, and being an old gentleman and having no luggage it gave me a turn, and I sent him away on the spur of the moment.

Afterwards we found out he was a big solicitor in London, and very savage with myself I was for my foolishness.

Soon after that two more customers came, and I was not a bit frightened of them, for they were just the sort of people we wanted. It must have been a little more than a fortnight after the burglary that the station fly brought us a young lady and gentleman with some lovely luggage—honeymoon luggage I saw it was at once by the new dress trunks, and the new dressing-bags, and I knew it was a honeymoon by the way the young gentleman helped the young lady out of the fly and the bashful way he came in and said, “Can I have apartments here for myself and my wife?”

“Certainly, sir,” I said; “I will show you the apartments we have vacant.”

We had all the apartments vacant, but of course it’s never business to say that. I took him upstairs, the lady following, and showed him the best sitting-room and the best bedroom, and he said to his wife, “I think these will do, dear, don’t you?” and she said, “Oh, yes! they are very nice indeed,” and then she went to the window and looked out into the garden, and said, “Oh, what a pretty garden!”—and then he went and looked out too, and she slipped her arm through his, and they stood there together, and I saw him give her a little squeeze with his arm, and it made me think of my own honeymoon, when Harry used to squeeze my arm just like that.

When I went downstairs the young gentleman followed me to settle with the fly, and I told him not to bother about the things—everything should be sent upstairs directly. He was very shy and awkward, I thought—shyer and awkwarder than Harry had been; but then, of course, he wasn’t a sailor, and sailors have a knack of accommodating themselves to circumstances at once.

When I went up to take their orders for dinner, I knocked at the door, and I heard them move before the young gentleman said, “Come in.”

I’m sure they were sitting side by side on the sofa, and when I went in he was standing up by the fireplace, and the young lady was looking out of the window, with her face close to the glass, just as if they hadn’t been within a mile of each other!

“What time will you have dinner, please?” I said; “and what would you like?”

He turned to her and asked her what I had asked him.

“Six o’clock, I think, dear,” she said.

“And what shall we have?”

“What you like, dear.”

I saw that they didn’t quite know what to say, so I suggested what we could get easiest, and they said, “Oh, yes; that will do capitally,” and seemed quite pleased that I had helped them.

“Will you take dinner, here, sir,” I said, “or in the coffee-room?”

“Oh, here, please, if you don’t mind,” said the young lady, turning round from the window in a minute, and looking at me quite anxiously.

“Oh, it’s no trouble,” I said. “All your meals can be served here.”

“Thank you,” she said; and they both seemed quite relieved at not having to go down in the coffee-room.

Before dinner they went out for a little walk, and I stood at the door and looked after them as they strolled away.

Oh, how happy they looked!—his arm through hers, and his head bent down a little listening to her. It made a tear come into my eye as I watched them.

I think it is so beautiful to see young sweethearts together like that, in the first beautiful sunshine of their married life, without a care, without a thought except for each other. I think it must be one of the most beautiful things in life, that first happy married love, that first “together,” with no good-bye to come, and the future looking so bright and peaceful. Troubles must come, we know. It’s very few couples who can go on to the end of the journey loving and trusting and worshipping like that; but even when the troubles come, there is that dear old happy, holy time—the purest and most sacred happiness that we get in this world—to look back upon; and it is so bright in our memory that its light can reach still to where we stand in the darkness, and make that darkness less.

I know it’s sentimental, as they call it, to talk like that; but I can’t help being sentimental when I write about that happy boy-husband and girl-wife—write it at a time when I have had my own little troubles of married life; only little ones, Harry is so good—and my own love and my own honeymoon get mixed up in my mind with theirs, and that makes sentimental thoughts come into my head.

When they came in just before dinner, the table was ready laid for them, and I had gathered some flowers and made a nice nosegay, and put it in a glass, to make the table look nice; and I waited on them myself—Susan, the housemaid, carrying the dishes up for me.

The young lady looked so pretty with her hat off when she sat down to dinner, her cheeks bright with the air and the sunshine, and her eyes—those beautiful, gentle brown eyes that have such a world of love in them—watching her husband every moment, that for a minute I stood and looked at her instead of taking the cover off the soles.

She caught my look, and went so red, poor girl; and I felt quite confused myself, and was afraid I had made her uncomfortable by my awkwardness.

The young gentleman served the fish all right, but when I put the next dish in front of him—a roast chicken—he looked at it quite horrified, and the young lady she looked horrified too. Then they both looked at each other and laughed.

“I—I’m afraid—I—er—can’t carve this properly,” he stammered. “Would you mind cutting it up downstairs?”

I smiled, and said, “If you like, sir, I’ll carve it.”

“Oh, thank you so much,” he said; “I’m such a bad carver.”

I took the chicken on to the side-table, and cut it up for them; and from that minute both their spirits rose. I’m sure that chicken had been on their minds from the moment they ordered it.

They had a bottle of champagne with their dinner; and to follow the chicken I had made a fruit tart, and they both said it was beautiful, and they ate it all. I told them I made it myself, and the young lady said it was very clever of me, and asked me how to make pastry as light as that. I told her my way, and they got quite friendly, and asked me about the hotel, and how long I’d been there; and then I told them how I’d lived in service; and then the young lady asked me how long I’d been married, and all the shyness wore off, and they began to laugh quite merrily; and the young gentleman, when he heard Harry was a sailor, said he hoped he should see something of him, as sailors were jolly fellows.

After they’d had some tea, I said to Harry, “Harry, I shall take them up our visitors’ book that we’ve bought. They’re our first customers since we’ve had it, and must put their names in for us.”

We bought that visitors’ book after the burglar had stayed with us that we’d never asked his name, because Harry said we must always ask people’s names in future, and you can do it in a nicer way by saying, “Please enter your name in the visitors’ book.”

I got the book, and was going upstairs with it, when Harry said, “Wait a minute. Won’t it be better to write a few names in first? P’r’aps they won’t like to be the first, being on a honeymoon; it will be so conspicuous, and everybody who comes afterwards will see their names, being the first, and they mightn’t like it.”

That was quite true, and I understood what Harry meant; so, not to be deceitful and write false names, I wrote my maiden name first, and then Harry wrote H. Beckett, and I went into the bar and got Mr. Wilkins, who had just come in, to write his name, and then we put the names of some of the people who came in of an evening.

When I went in, the young lady was sitting in the arm-chair reading a book out loud, and the young gentleman was smoking a cigar, sitting by the table, listening to her.

“If you please, sir,” I said, “will you kindly write your names in our visitors’ book?”

If I’d asked them to come to prison they couldn’t have looked more terrified. I saw both their faces change in a moment, the young lady’s going quite white, and the young gentleman’s quite red.

His hand trembled as he took the cigar out of his mouth. But he recovered himself in a moment, and said, “Certainly—with pleasure.”

I gave him the book, and put the pen and ink by him, and I saw him exchange glances with the young lady, as much as to say, “Don’t be frightened. I’ll manage it.”

Then he took the pen and wrote in a bold, distinct hand, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith, from London.”

“Thank you,” I said; and took the book and went downstairs.

“Harry,” I said, “there’s something wrong upstairs.”

“Good gracious!” he said; “whatever do you mean?”

“I don’t know what I mean,” I said; “but that young gentleman has signed a false name in our visitors’ book.”

Harry looked grave for a minute, and he didn’t like the idea any more than I did, and I felt so sorry that there should be anything that might be wrong, because I had taken to the young lady and gentleman so much, and they seemed so very nice.

Presently Harry said, “Perhaps it’s a runaway match.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t think so, because of the luggage and the dressing-bags.”

“Oh, they might have had them all ready,” he said; “if people are going to run away they can have luggage.”

“They are so young,” I said; “it—it can’t be anything worse than that, can it?”

“Oh no,” said Harry, “I’m sure it’s not. Come, cheer up, little woman; don’t let’s get frightened because we’ve had one bad lot in the house! Nice hotel-keepers we shall be if we’re going to be nervous about everybody that puts up at the ‘Stretford Arms!’”

I tried to laugh, but I didn’t feel comfortable, and all that night I kept thinking about it, and in the morning, when I took the breakfast up to the sitting-room, I think they saw by my manner that I suspected something, and they both looked very uncomfortable.

We didn’t talk at all. I only just said “Good morning,” and I put the eggs and bacon on the table and left them.

About ten o’clock they went out for a walk, and I went upstairs to see that the rooms had been properly tidied up by the housemaid.

When I went into the bedroom the first thing that caught my eye was the young gentleman’s dressing-bag. It was closed, and the waterproof cover was over it, but not fastened.

I lifted it off the chair on which it stood, to put it on the chest of drawers while the chair was dusted, and as I did so the waterproof flap flew back, and I saw that there were three initials stamped on the leather, and the initials were “T. C. K.”

“I knew it!” I exclaimed; and I rushed downstairs and told Harry.

“If his surname begins with K, it’s certain his name isn’t Smith,” said Harry.

“I don’t want you to tell me that!” I said, a little sharply. “I do know how to spell. What I do want to know is what we are going to do?”

“How do you mean?”

“How do I mean! I suppose we are not going to let people stay at our hotel under false names after the lesson we’ve had with the London physician.”

Harry looked puzzled.

“Well, my dear,” he said, “I haven’t much experience yet, and I don’t know. I suppose as long as people pay their bill and behave themselves, they can stay under what name they choose. Besides,” he said, his face brightening, and being evidently struck with an idea, “people do travel nowadays under false names. The Queen, when she travels, calls herself the countess of something or other, and so do many crowned heads.”

“Perhaps they do,” I said; “but you don’t want me to believe that we’ve got crowned heads staying in our house.”

“No,” said Harry, laughing, “I’m sure they’re not crowned heads, but they may be big swells who are travelling in—in something.”

“Incognito, you mean.”

I knew the word from a story I’d read with that title to it.

“Yes, that’s it. Perhaps they’re a young earl and countess.”

“No, they’re not, or they’d have coronets all over their bags, and on their brushes.”

While we were talking, the young couple came in, and went up to their sitting-room and rang the bell.

I went up, and they ordered luncheon. While I was taking the order, Harry came up and called me out of the room.

“Here’s a telegram for Mr. Smith,” he said; “somebody knows him by that name, at any rate.”

I took the telegram in and handed it to the young gentleman. The young lady, who was sitting down, jumped up and watched him with a frightened look in her eyes as he tore the envelope open.

He read the telegram, and sank down on to the sofa.

“I’ve an important telegram,” he stammered. “We must go home at once: somebody ill. Let me have my bill. What time’s the next train to London?”

I looked at the clock.

“In half an hour, sir,” I said.

“Order a fly to the door, then. We shall be ready. Pack your things, dear,” he said to the young lady; and then, turning to me, “Let me have the bill at once.”

This new turn worried me more than anything. There was evidently something very wrong. Harry agreed with me, and we both felt glad they were going.

I took up the bill, and he paid it, and said he was sorry to have to go, and he gave me half-a-sovereign, saying, “For the servants,” and then he and the young lady went downstairs and got into the fly.

I noticed that she had a thick veil on, but I could see she had been crying and was trembling like an aspen leaf.

When they had driven off, I said to Harry, “Thank goodness they’re gone! It’s quite a load off my mind.”

“Well,” he said, “it’s a rum go. We’ve been trying all we know to get people to come to our house, and when they do come we’re jolly glad to get rid of them.”

I didn’t answer him, but I never got Mr. and Mrs. Smith out of my head all that afternoon, and I made up my mind they’d be a mystery to me for the rest of my life.

But they were not.

That very afternoon, just as we were sitting down to tea, two gentlemen drove up in the station fly, and one of them came in and asked to see the landlord.

Harry came out to him, and I followed.

“Have you had a young gentleman and lady staying here lately?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, beginning to tremble, for I expected something dreadful was coming. “Yes, sir; they came yesterday.”

“Are they here now?”

“No, sir, they left this afternoon.”

The gentleman said something—it was only one word, but it meant a good deal. He said “D——!”

“If you please, sir, is there anything wrong about them?” I asked, feeling that I must know the truth.

“Wrong? I should think there was!” the gentleman yelled out—he really did yell it. “I’m that young lady’s guardian, and she’s a ward in Chancery, and that young scoundrel’s married her without my consent—without the Lord Chancellor’s consent—and he’ll spend his honeymoon in Holloway. That’s what’s wrong.”

“Oh dear!” I said. “Poor young gentleman!”

“Poor young gentleman;” the old gentleman yelled. “D——d young scoundrel! The girl’s got ten thousand a year, and he’s the beggarly youngest son of a beggarly baronet, who has to work for his living. Did they say where they were going?”

“No, sir,” I said.

It was a little white story, but I couldn’t find it in my heart to say “To London,” for fear it might be true. I wasn’t going to help to send a handsome young gentleman to prison for marrying his sweetheart and taking her away from that horrid Court of Chancery, which, judging by the outside, must be a dreadful place for a young girl to be brought up in.

The old gentleman swore a little more, then he jumped into the fly again, said something to the other old gentleman, and drove off again back to the station.

“I hope they won’t be caught,” I said to Harry. “Poor young things! How dreadful to be hunted about on their honeymoon, and the poor young lady to be always dreaming that her husband is being seized and dragged away from her and put into prison.”

* * * * *

About a week after that Harry was reading the paper, when suddenly he shouted out, “They’re caught!”

“Oh, Harry, no!” I said. I knew what he meant.

“Yes, they are!”

Then he read me the account. The young gentleman, Mr. Thomas C. Kenyon, was brought before the Lord Chancellor. He was arrested at Dover just as they were going on board the steamer for France. Our hotel was mentioned as one of the places they’d been traced to, but, though it was another advertisement, we didn’t want it at that price—we’d had enough of newspaper advertisement of that sort; and the young gentleman was ordered to be imprisoned.

Oh, how my heart ached for that dear young lady when I read that! Harry said it was an infernal shame, and I said so too, only I didn’t say the word Harry did.

There was a lot of talk at our bar about it, and it made the bar trade brisk for some time—lots of people coming in from the village to have a glass and ask about the case who didn’t use our house as a rule; but I could have thrown something at that Mrs. Goose, who came in, of course, and said right out before everybody, “My dear, you ought to keep a policeman on the premises to take up the people who come to stay with you.”

But some time afterwards we heard that the young gentleman had been released, having apologized, and having got his friends and the young lady’s friends to try and melt the Lord Chancellor’s heart, or whatever a Lord Chancellor has in the place of one; and that evening Harry opened three bottles of champagne, and invited all our regular customers to join him in drinking long life and happiness to the first young couple who had stayed at our hotel, Mr. and Mrs. Kenyon—or, as they were always called at the ‘Stretford Arms,’ “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”

* * * * *

They came to see us soon after the young gentleman was released. They came and stayed with us, and had their old rooms; but they weren’t shy or bashful this time, but, oh, so nice!—and they said they would do all they could to recommend us, and they did. In fact, we owe a great deal to them, and they were very lucky customers to us after all. This time they brought a beautiful victoria with them, and a pair of lovely horses and a coachman and a groom. Our stabling was just ready, so we were able to take them in, and they drove about the place, and were the admiration of the village, and it’s wonderful how Harry and I went up in the estimation of the inhabitants of the place through our having carriage company staying at our hotel.

When “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” left they shook hands heartily with Harry and with me, and they told us——

* * * * *

Met our pony galloping down the lane? Why, he’s in the stable! The door’s open? Oh, that boy! I’ve told him twenty times what would happen. Harry, put on your hat and go after him at once. The pony’s got loose, and he’s galloping down the lane as hard as he can go.

CHAPTER VII.
MR. SAXON’S GHOST.

I think I have mentioned how, soon after we had got our house straight and ready to be an hotel, I sent a nice, respectful letter to those of my old masters and mistresses that I thought I should like to know where I was, so that we might perhaps have their patronage.

Of course I did not expect them all to pack up at once, and leave their homes and come and stay with us, but I thought at some time or other one or two of them might want to go somewhere, say, from Saturday to Monday, and they might say, “Oh, let us go down and see how Mary Jane is getting on!”

But the one I was most anxious to get down was Mr. Saxon—the author I told you such a lot about in my “Memoirs”—because I knew he wrote in the papers about the places he visited, and I thought if we made him comfortable, and the place suited him, and the air did his liver good, he might write about our hotel, and give it what Harry calls “a leg up,” though, of course, it isn’t right, because an hotel doesn’t have legs.

Mr. Saxon wrote a line of congratulation to us. I think it was to say he was glad we were settled so comfortably, and he’d come and see us one day, but we only guessed it was that, after reading over the letter for about two hours, because he wrote so dreadfully that you had to get as near what he meant as a word that was readable here and there would let you.

After the letter we heard no more, and as months went by we’d quite given up expecting him, when one morning we had a telegram from him, and that not being in his handwriting (thank goodness!), we could read it. It was this: “Keep me sitting-room and bedroom. Arrive this evening.—Saxon.”

“Oh, I’m so glad!” I said. “I hope he’ll like the place. We must make him comfortable and humour him, and he’ll give us a nice advertisement.”

“I hope he will,” said Harry; “but, I say, my dear, you don’t think he’ll go on like he does in your ‘Memoirs,’ do you?”

“Oh, he’s a little odd, and he’s sure to be a bit fidgety, but you’ll soon get used to him,” I said; and then I went upstairs and got the best rooms ready, and put the furniture just how I knew he liked it. Two tables in the sitting-room—one for him to eat on, and the other for him to write on—and I put a great big linen-basket in the room for a waste-paper basket, and I put the big inkstand on the table, and I sent out for a dozen pens and a new blotting-pad; and I put an easy-chair for him to sit in, because I remembered how particular he was about his chairs, always declaring that he never could get one that was fit to sit in, and I made the place look so nice and comfortable that I said to Harry, “There now, I don’t believe even he can grumble at it.”

We wished he had said whether he was coming to dinner or not, because we could have had the table all laid ready for him; but as he only said “this evening,” we made up our minds he would arrive by the train which got in at 8.15; and that was the one he did come by.

When the fly drove up we went outside to welcome him, and we saw there was another gentleman with him—a big gentleman, with a large round face and a fair moustache and blue eyes, who looked like a German, but we found out afterwards he wasn’t—through Mr. Saxon, who, when we asked what nation the gentleman was, said, “Oh, I don’t think he knows himself, but his father was a Russian and his mother was a German, and so I suppose he’s a Swede.”

When Mr. Saxon got out he was going on at the other gentleman about something dreadfully, and I said to myself, “Oh dear, he’s come down in a bad temper! We must look out for squalls.”

The other gentleman said, “Well, Mr. Saxon, it was not my fault; didn’t you tell me you would pack the manuscript yourself?”

“No, I didn’t. Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters now. I’m getting used to everything. I’ve come down here on purpose to finish that story, and you’ve left the manuscript behind, and it’s wanted in a hurry. I’m working against time. Don’t say anything. It’s my punishment—it’s my doom. Heaven doesn’t want me to prosper. I’m to be ruined, and you are only the humble instrument sent by Providence to accomplish my ruin.”

“Well, sir, hadn’t I better telegraph?”

“Telegraph! To whom? Who knows which manuscript I want? Besides, it couldn’t get here in time. I wanted to finish that story to-night. Now it’s impossible. If my greatest enemy had employed you to play me a trick, you couldn’t have played me one that would have caused me more inconvenience.”

The Swedish gentleman looked very miserable, and all this time there was me and Harry and the fly-driver standing with the door of the fly open, and Mr. Saxon was going on at the Swedish gentleman, taking no notice of anybody.

So I thought I’d interrupt, and I said, “I hope you’re well, Mr. Saxon?”

He turned on me in a minute, and said, “No, Mary Jane, I am not well. I’m half dead.”

“I’m very sorry, sir. What’s the matter with you?”

“What’s the matter with me!” he said. Then he gave a withering glance at the Swedish gentleman, and said, “Idiots, Mary Jane—that’s the disease I’m suffering from! Idiots!”

Then he nodded to Harry, and walked into the house, and Harry showed him upstairs to his sitting-room.

I helped the flyman to get the rugs and the small things out of the fly and carried them in, and the Swedish gentleman paid the man.

I noticed all he did, because I said to myself, “This is somebody new. I suppose he’s Mr. Saxon’s new secretary.” And so he was, as he told me afterwards, when he came down and had a pipe in the bar-parlour, Mr. Saxon being busy upstairs writing, having found the manuscript after all in the portmanteau, where he’d put it himself.

“Mr. Saxon seemed a little put out just now,” I said to him.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” he said. “His liver’s bad. He can’t help it. He must go on at somebody when he’s like that, and I’m getting used to it.”

Presently I went upstairs and knocked at the sitting-room door. When I went in Mr. Saxon was groaning, but writing away for his life.

“If you please, sir,” I said, “I only want to know if you would like any supper.”

“What!” he yelled—really he used to yell sometimes, and that’s the only word for it. “Supper! Good heavens, Mary Jane, do you want me to wake the house up in the middle of the night screaming murder? Look at me now. Do you see how yellow I am? Can’t you see the agony I’m suffering? Supper! Yes, bring me some bread and beetlepaste and a pint of laudanum in a pewter. That’s the supper I want!”

“Lor’, sir,” I said, beginning to be used to him again through old times coming back, “I shouldn’t like you to have that in my house. I hope we’re going to do you good and make you better here. I’m sure we shall do our best.”

He looked up at that, and said, “Thank you, I know you will. You mustn’t mind me if I grumble and growl a bit. I can’t help it. I’m ill, and the least thing makes me irritable.”

“Oh, we sha’n’t take any notice, sir. We hope you’ll do just as you like here, and if there’s anything you want, tell us, so that we can get it for you.”

He turned quite nice after that, and began chatting with me so pleasantly, you’d think he was the most agreeable gentleman in the world if you didn’t know him. He asked about the house and the customers, and all about the people who lived in the neighbourhood, and, thinking to amuse him, I told him a lot of queer things about the people who came to the house, and were characters, being quite taken off my guard, till I saw him jotting down something on the blotting-pad, and then I saw what a stupid girl I’d been. He was taking notes, and I knew he’d go and use up all my characters and make stories of them. So I stopped short all at once, and pretended I’d left somebody downstairs waiting for me.

It was a narrow escape, and I only just remembered his old tricks in time, and what a dreadful man he was for putting everybody into his stories. I knew he’d put his own pa and ma and all his brothers and sisters and all his relations in stories, and nobody ever told their experience about anything, or an adventure that had happened to them, but he’d have it all in his note-book before you could say Jack Robinson.

I remember what he did once, when I was in his service. He went down to stay with his ma at Cheltenham at a boarding-house for a day or two, and his ma told him a lot of things about the people in the house, and the queer characters they were, and what they said and did, never dreaming of any harm; and the very next week if he didn’t write a paper about “Life in a boarding-house,” and put all these people in, only making them a good deal worse than they were, because he couldn’t help exaggerating if he was to be killed the next minute for it.

His pa, it seems, who came down to the boarding-house too, had let out to several people that it was his son who was the Mr. Saxon who wrote for the newspapers, and had persuaded a lot of the people to read what he wrote; and the Monday after, when the paper on boarding-houses came out, a lot of the people staying at the same boarding-house as his ma bought it, and saw themselves in it, and things that only the landlady could know—it was the landlady who had told his ma—and they were so indignant they all gave notice and left, except some that didn’t care and stopped, and were so nasty his ma had to leave. I heard him tell the story, and that’s how I knew, and it was remembering that that made me drop the conversation before I put my foot in it in the same way.

When I got downstairs, the Swedish gentleman was talking to Harry, and telling him some of the wonderful adventures he and Mr. Saxon had had abroad, and we sat talking till it was closing time. Then the Swedish gentleman said, “I must go upstairs to the governor and get all his medicines out.”

“All his medicines!” I said. “Why, how many does he take?”

“Oh, it’s awful!” said the Swedish gentleman. “We have to carry a whole portmanteau full everywhere. There’s the medicine for his dyspepsia, and the medicine for his liver, and the embrocation for his rheumatics, and the wash for his hair, and three different sorts of pills, and a tonic, and now he takes powdered charcoal, and we have to carry a great bottle full of that—and I have to put them all out, so that he can find them directly he wants them—and then there are his clothes to unpack and his books. I tell you we shall want a furniture-van to take us about soon.”

The Swedish gentleman went upstairs, and presently he came down again looking as white as death.

“Oh, Mrs. Beckett,” he said, “whatever shall I do? Look here.” He held up a lot of underclothing all smothered with black patches.

“Why, whatever is it?” I said.

“It’s the bottles broken in the portmanteau,” he said. “The governor kept worrying me so while I was packing I didn’t know if I was on my head or my heels, and I’ve put the bottle of powdered charcoal and the bottle of cod liver oil too close together, and they’ve broken each other in the jolting, and mixed and run about all over the clothes.”

It was a nice mess, and no mistake. The cod liver oil and the charcoal had made a nasty, sticky blacking, and smothered everything.

“Whatever shall I do?” said the Swedish gentleman. “If the governor finds it out he’ll go on at me for a month.”

I thought a minute, and then I said, “Well, sir, the best thing will be for me to have them all washed to-morrow. I’ll get them done at once and sent home. Perhaps he won’t want them before they’re ready.”

He left the things with me and went upstairs again to put the medicines out, and then we went upstairs to bed. Passing Mr. Saxon’s door I knocked just to ask him about breakfast in the morning, and when I opened the door he was dancing about in an awful rage, and the Swedish gentleman was standing in the middle of the room looking the picture of misery.

Mr. Saxon was shouting out, “I can’t sleep without it—you know I can’t! Not one wink shall I have this blessed night. It’s murder, downright cold-blooded, brutal murder, and you’re my murderer!”

“Well, sir,” said the Swedish gentleman, “you didn’t tell me the bottle was empty. It’s in a wooden case for travelling, and I couldn’t see it was empty.”

“What is it you want, sir?” I said. “If it’s anything I can get you——”

“Oh, I dare say you can get it me!” exclaimed Mr. Saxon, “I’ve no doubt you keep it on draught! Do you draw bromide of potassium in people’s own jugs?”

“Bro—— what, sir?”

“Bromide of potassium. I have to take it every night. I must. My nerves are in such a state, I can’t sleep without it; and this gentleman, knowing that, has let me come away without it. I sha’n’t go to bed. I’ll sit up all night. If I go to bed I shall go mad, because I sha’n’t be able to go to sleep. Go to bed, all of you. I’ll go out for a walk. There’s a forest near here; I can roam about that all night. I must do something, for I can’t go to sleep without my bromide of potassium.”

“Oh,” I said, “perhaps the country air will make you sleep.”

“No, it won’t,” he said; and he began to put on his hat and coat. “I must go and walk about the forest all night. If I get tired I can hang myself to the branch of a tree.”

“Oh, please don’t do that,” I said, for I knew I shouldn’t sleep a wink thinking of him roaming about the forest in his excited state.

“Oh, very well,” he said, taking off his hat and coat and flinging them down on the floor, “then perhaps you’ll tell me what I am to do. I won’t go to bed and lie awake all night. It’s too awful.”

The Swedish gentleman, who was looking awfully worried, let him go on, and, when he’d done, he said quietly—

“Don’t put yourself out like that, sir; you’ll only be ill all day to-morrow. Let me go to a chemist’s.”

I was just going to say that there wasn’t a chemist’s in the village, and the doctor lived a mile and a half away, when I saw that the Swedish gentleman was trying to make signs to me not to say anything, so I held my tongue.

At first Mr. Saxon refused. He said he wasn’t going to have a respectable chemist dragged out of his warm bed at that time of night because he was surrounded with idiots; but the Swedish gentleman quieted him a bit, and then beckoned me to come outside.

When the door was shut he said, “Come downstairs with me, Mrs. Beckett, and show me a light, please.”

“Yes, sir,” I said; “but you’ll have to go a mile and a half to get what you want.”

“No, I sha’n’t,” he said. “Come downstairs to the parlour.”

When we got there he pulled the empty medicine bottle out of his pocket, and said, “Get me some cold water.”

I got him some cold water, and he put it in a tumbler. Then he said, “Give me a little salt.”

I gave him the salt, and he put it in the water. Then he mixed it up well with a spoon, and then he tasted it. “That’ll do,” he said. Then he poured it into the medicine-bottle, and corked it up.

“Now,” he said, “I’ll put on my hat and coat, and you let me out and bang the door loud.”

I did, and waited five minutes; and then he knocked, and I let him in.

He was quite out of breath.

“Why, you’ve been running!” I said.

“Yes; I’ve been running up and down outside to make me look as if I’d been a long way. Now, I’ll go upstairs and give the governor his bromide of potassium.”

“But it’s salt and water.”

“Never mind; he’ll think it’s the bromide, and that’s all that’s necessary. I know Mr. Saxon, and I know how to manage him.”

And he did certainly, for the next morning, when I went to take breakfast up to the sitting-room, there was Mr. Saxon looking quite jolly, and he said he’d had the best night’s rest he’d had for a year.

“And if I hadn’t had the bromide,” he said, “I shouldn’t have closed my eyes all night.”

The Swedish gentleman never let a muscle of his face move, but I caught him looking at me, and there was a twinkle in his light blue eyes that said a good deal.

There was no doubt about his understanding Mr. Saxon, and knowing how to manage him.

* * * * *

The next evening Mr. Saxon hadn’t any work to do, and so after dinner he and the Swedish gentleman came and sat in the bar-parlour along with Mr. Wilkins and the company, and he and the Swedish gentleman joined in the conversation, and they both told such wonderful stories that it made our village people open their eyes. Mr. Wilkins generally had all the talk, but he had to sit still because Mr. Saxon didn’t let him get a word in edgeways when he was once fairly started.

Of course he must talk about awful things—things to make your blood curdle—it wouldn’t be him if he didn’t do that; and the stories he told made what hair Mr. Wilkins had on his head stand upright, he being a very nervous man, and believing in ghosts and supernatural things.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” said Mr. Saxon.

“Well, I do to a certain extent,” said Mr. Wilkins; “but I’ve never seen one.”

“You’ve never had a conversation with a dead man?”

“Lor’, no,” said Mr. Wilkins, “nor nobody else, I should think.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Saxon, “I have.”

We were all silent directly, and I began to feel creepy, and as if somebody was breathing on the back of my neck, which is a feeling I always have when people begin to tell ghost stories.

“I’ll tell you about it,” said Mr. Saxon; and then he began. Of course I can’t tell it in his own words, because I had to write it down from memory afterwards, but this is something like it.

“When I was a young fellow,” said Mr. Saxon, “and a clerk in my father’s office in the City, I used to knock about a good deal of an evening and see life, and as my father and mother wouldn’t let me have a latchkey, and didn’t like me coming in at all hours, I left home, and went to live by myself in lodgings in a street running off the Camden-road. There were a lot of other young fellows living in the house—all of them lads studying for veterinary surgeons at the Royal Veterinary College in Great College-street. Lots of the houses in this neighbourhood were filled with these young fellows, as many of them came up from the country for the ‘term,’ and, of course, wanted to live near the College.

“One of the nicest of them, and my particular friend, was Charley Ransom. He was a good-looking lad about eighteen, but very reckless, and a good deal fonder of billiard-rooms, and betting, and music-halls, than he was of work. He’d been up for an examination and failed, and he told me that his old dad down in the country was very wild with him, and that if he didn’t pass this term he would have to go back home and go into an office as a clerk.

“He made up his mind to try, but he was in with a bad set, and they got him out of an evening when he ought to be studying, and unfortunately he was a fellow that a very little drink made excited, and then he lost his head, and no freak was too mad for him.

“At this time I had just begun to get things that I wrote put into the newspapers, and as I had to be at the City all day, I used to go straight home and shut myself up in my room, and work till very late, sometimes till one in the morning; but I always went out for a walk before going to bed, no matter what time it was when I left off.

“Once or twice when I was going out I met Ransom coming in, looking very queer, and walking very unsteady, and from that, and what the landlord told me, I knew he was ‘going wrong.’

“One Sunday morning I met him in Park-street, and we walked into the Park together, and I ventured to say I thought it was a pity he didn’t try and settle down and be steady, as I was sure he’d never pass his exam. the way he was going on, and he might be wrecking all his future life.

“He took my advice in good part, and said I was quite right, but he couldn’t help it. He’d got a lot of trouble, and he was up a tree.

“‘What is it?’ I said. ‘Tell me; I may be able to help you.’

“‘No; you can’t, old fellow,’ and then he told me his trouble, and a very dreadful one it was. It seems he’d been squandering money and gambling, and had got into debt, and, not wanting his father to know, he’d raised money. He wouldn’t tell me how, because he said it would incriminate another fellow; but I knew it was in some way that might land him in a police-court.

“He had hoped to have got the money again, poor lad; he’d been betting to get it back again, but he’d only got deeper into the mire, and now every day might bring exposure, disgrace, and ruin.

“I was very sorry, but I couldn’t help him. I hadn’t any money to spare. All I could do was to beg him to write to his father, tell him everything, and get assistance there.

“This he refused to do. I found out afterwards that his father had sustained heavy losses, and was himself in straitened circumstances.

“Two nights afterwards, while I was at work, there came a knock at my door, and one of the young fellows came in. ‘Oh, Mr. Saxon,’ he said, ‘such a terrible thing’s happened! Charley Ransom’s poisoned himself accidentally.’ As soon as I had recovered from the shock Ransom’s friend told me all about it. Charley, who had been suffering with a troublesome cough, carried a bottle of ‘drops’ in his pocket, which he took when the cough was bad. That afternoon he had had a small bottle filled with poison which he was going to use in a chemical experiment. It was supposed that, the cough coming on, he had by mischance taken the poison instead of the drops. He had been found lying in an insensible state in the lavatory of a billiard-room in Park-street, and had been taken to the hospital.

“I guessed the truth at once. In a moment of despair and desperation Ransom had committed suicide.

“I went to the hospital that evening to make inquiries. I was told that the case was almost hopeless, and that death might be expected at any moment.

“The landlord telegraphed to Charley’s father, and the next day the poor old gentleman came up. He was allowed to see his son, but the lad was unconscious, and, being able to do nothing, the father came away.

“That night a message came to the house from the hospital.

“Ransom was dead!

“The next morning, when I got to the city, I found my father there before me. He called me into his office and told me I must pack up at once and go to the South of France. My mother was there with my two sisters, and both of them had been attacked with scarlet fever. My mother wanted me to go out to her at once, as she did not like to be there alone with this anxiety on her mind.

“I returned to my lodgings, and, as I should probably be away some time, I paid my rent and a week in lieu of notice, and left. I was not at all sorry to turn my back upon the place, for Ransom’s terrible fate had made me very miserable.

“I went to Nice, and when I got there soon found something to distract my thoughts from Ransom. My sisters were seriously ill. For a month it was a battle between life and death, and it was two months before they could be moved. In this fresh trouble I forgot all about poor Charley. Under any other circumstances, I should have tried to get the English newspapers, and have watched for the inquest.

“When my sisters were well enough to travel we returned to London, but only for a day, as they were to go at once to the seaside. I went down with them to Eastbourne, which was the place recommended by the doctors.

“The first evening that we were there, after dinner I strolled out. It was just twilight, and, lighting my pipe, I turned away from the sea, and walked along the road leading to the Links. The quietness of the country, and the stillness of the night, set me meditating, and I began to think of Charley Ransom. I was tired with my walk, and I sat down on a seat under one of the big trees, and was soon lost in reverie.

“How long I sat there I don’t know, but presently I became conscious that somebody was sitting beside me. I struck a match to relight my pipe, which had gone out, and the light of the vesta fell full on the face of the man who was my companion.

“I could not speak—for a second I could not move. It was no human being that sat beside me. The face I saw was the white face of death—the face of the man who had poisoned himself and died in a London hospital—the face of Charley Ransom!

“I rose with an effort, and walked—almost ran—away. I am not ashamed to confess that in that moment of horror I was an absolute, abject coward. I walked on at full speed until I got to the town and saw the lights of the shops, and mixed with the crowd, and then only I began to recover myself.

“I said to myself that I had been deceived by my imagination—that there was nobody by me on that seat. I had been thinking of Ransom, and had imagined that I saw him. Such things, I knew, had often occurred to imaginative people.

“By the time I reached home I was convinced that I had been the victim of an hallucination.

“I determined to conquer my folly, and the next evening I went to the same place and sat down. There was no one there. The road was lonely and deserted. I sat on till it was dark, and no one came. I rose to go. I walked a little distance away, and then I turned round.

“There was a man on the seat now. I walked back again—trembling, but determined to know the truth. When I came within a few yards I could see the man’s face.

“It was that white, dead face again—it was the face of Charley Ransom!

“With a supreme effort I went right up to the ghost. Its head was bent a little, its eyes were on the ground.

“‘Ransom!’ I said.

“The face was slowly lifted. The strange lack-lustre eyes looked into mine.

“It was the dead man’s ghost!

“One look was sufficient to convince me, and then I took to my heels and fairly bolted.

“Laugh at me, if you will—call me a coward—but put yourself in my place, and say what you would have done. One doesn’t stop to reason—one doesn’t think of what a ghost can do, and what it can’t. The sight of a man you know to be dead and buried sitting within arm’s-length of you is enough to shock the nervous system of a brave man—and a brave man I am not, and never was.

“I didn’t go that walk again. No power on earth would have tempted me to pass, after the sun had gone down, that haunted seat. That, Mr. Wilkins, is the ghost I saw and spoke to—the ghost of the man who took poison and died in the hospital—the ghost of my fellow-lodger, Charley Ransom.”

“Awful!” said Mr. Wilkins, as Mr. Saxon finished.

I didn’t say anything, but that ghostly blowing on the back of my neck was worse than ever, and I made up my mind that we’d burn a nightlight that night. I couldn’t sleep in the dark with Mr. Saxon’s ghost in my head, I was sure of that.

Harry was the first to speak. “I suppose you did see it, sir?” he said. “But why should Mr. Ransom’s ghost come all the way to Eastbourne after you?”

“Ah!” said Mr. Saxon; “I’ll tell you why. It had been ordered there for change of air.”

“A ghost ordered to Eastbourne for change of air?”

“Yes; it seems that the man who had died in the hospital that night was a man named Lansom. By one of those mischances which will sometimes happen, there was a confusion through the similarity of the names, and a messenger was sent to Ransom’s friends and Ransom’s address to give information of his death.”

“The mistake wasn’t rectified till after I had left the next day. It was nobody’s business to write to me, and nobody knew where I was, so I didn’t hear of it. Ransom got better, and, when he was well enough to be moved, was sent to Eastbourne. It was Ransom, and not his ghost, that I had seen on the seat. The deathly look of the face was due to the effect of the poison he had taken.”

“And he wasn’t punished?” I said.

“No; the poison was supposed to have been taken accidentally, for nothing came out about his trouble. The young fellow who had got him into it made a clean breast of it to the other fellows, and the students at the College, like the good-hearted fellows they are, in spite of their little failings, made a subscription and paid the man who could have prosecuted all that was due to him.”

“Three cheers for the vets.!” said Harry.

“Quite so,” said Mr. Saxon; “I’ve known a good many in my time, and, take them altogether, a better set of fellows, though a bit noisy now and again, doesn’t exist.”

* * * * *

I’ve been able to finish Mr. Saxon’s story without being interrupted, for a wonder. I shouldn’t have used it here, only it’s a little triumph for me to have got something out of him for my book. He’s got plenty out of other people. I don’t suppose he thought when he was telling it to make Mr. Wilkins’s hair stand up that I was taking it all in to use for my book. He can’t say anything, because it’s the way he’s served other people all his life. Tit for tat, Mr. Saxon—and one to Mary Jane.

CHAPTER VIII.
MRS. CROKER’S “No. 2.”

It was pretty late when we went to bed the night that Mr. Saxon got telling stories, because after everybody had gone he sat on with Harry, and he and the Swedish gentleman didn’t seem to be inclined to go to bed at all, till at last I had to say it was long past twelve o’clock, and we should all lose our beauty sleep, and at last I got them to take their candles and go up to bed.

There weren’t any letters for Mr. Saxon next morning, so they both went out for a walk, asking me the nicest walk to go.

They were quite jolly, Mr. Saxon being full of jokes, and insisting upon going behind the bar before they started and pretending to serve the customers, and asking questions about everything he saw; and when I told him anything, the Swedish gentleman had to put it down in the little black book he carried in his pocket, and I noticed he was always making notes in it—whenever Mr. Saxon thought of anything the other having to put it down for him. If a customer came in with a curious manner, Mr. Saxon would say, “Put that down;” and out came the book. If Harry told about something that had happened to him on a voyage, it was, “Put that down;” and I noticed the Swedish gentleman always pulled out about a dozen papers before he found the book. It seems Mr. Saxon picked up handbills, and cut things out of the paper, and wrote things on bits of paper, and everything had to go into the Swedish gentleman’s pocket, till he looked quite bulged out.

Mr. Saxon, when he came in, wrote till dinner-time, and the Swedish gentleman had to copy all he wrote, and when he couldn’t read the words Mr. Saxon went on at him and said his common sense ought to tell him what they were, but there wasn’t anything to attract attention till they had their dinner. They had a very good dinner, and the air had evidently given them an appetite; but Mr. Saxon kept chaffing all the time, and saying the Swedish gentleman would have to be lifted out of his chair by a steam-crane if he ate any more, and begging him not to make us bankrupt, because we were young beginners.

And he told me while they were travelling abroad they had gone to an hotel where the meals were fixed price, and after staying two days the landlord came and offered them a pound to go somewhere else because the Swedish gentleman was ruining him. But I noticed that Mr. Saxon ate quite as much as the other; perhaps not so much meat, but he ate nearly all the apple-pie and three-quarters of a cold jam tart, and the Swedish gentleman didn’t touch the pastry at all.

And after Mr. Saxon had eaten all the pastry, if he didn’t tell me never to put such things on the table again for him, as they were poison; so the next day I only made a milky pudding, and then, if he didn’t say, “What, no pastry! Oh dear me! Here, Mrs. Beckett, go and make us half-a-dozen pancakes.”

What are you to do with a man like that?

The second day, in the morning, I saw that Mr. Saxon had got out of bed the wrong side.

He was groaning when I went to lay the breakfast, and he said his liver was bad, and his life was a burden to him; and certainly he did look green and yellow. And he was looking at himself in the glass, and going on because his hair wouldn’t lie down; and he kept banging it and saying he looked like a death’s-head, and he should be glad when he was in his grave.

I had put his letters—a dozen, I should say—on the table; but just as he was going to open them the Swedish gentleman came in and snatched them away.

“No, sir,” he said; “you have your breakfast first. I see how you are this morning; and there’s sure to be something in the letters to annoy you, so have your breakfast first. I know you won’t eat any if you open them.”

He was right, for when I went to clear the things away Mr. Saxon was walking up and down the room in a dreadful rage, and the perspiration was streaming down his face.

“The wretches, the fiends!” he said, “to dare to say this to me! The scoundrels! but I’ll teach them a lesson; I’ll tell them what I think of them.”

And directly the cloth was off he seized the pen and ink and began writing page after page on letter-paper, and then tearing it up and groaning, and then beginning again.

“There!” he said, “that’s the sort of thing to say to wretches like that. Take that to the post at once.”

The Swedish gentleman took it and put it in his pocket, and went outside the door.

I followed him with the crumb-brush, and I said, “Shall I send the boy to the post with it, sir?”

He said, “Oh no; it’s all right. I sha’n’t post it at all.”

“What!” I said; “not post it?”

“No, bless you; if I were to post all the letters he writes to people when he’s in a rage he wouldn’t have a friend left in the world. I burn them instead. Why, when he’s put out like he is now he writes the most awful things to people. They don’t understand him, and might think he meant it; but I do understand him, and I don’t post the letters.”

“But don’t you tell him?”

“Oh yes; when he’s cooled down a bit, and had time to think; and then he’s very glad. He’s made no end of enemies through writing in a rage when I haven’t been by to stop the letters going; but he sha’n’t make any more if I can help it.”

“What a pity it is he has such a hasty temper,” I said.

“It is, because it gives people a wrong impression of him. But he can’t help it; it’s nervous irritability, and rages and furious letter-writing are only the symptoms.”

“Ah,” I said, “I know. He used to be like that when I was with him; but he’s all right when you know him.”

“Yes,” he said, “he’s like the gentleman in the song—

‘He’s all right when you know him;
But you’ve got to know him fust.’”

When I told Harry about the bromide and about the letters that weren’t posted, he said—

“I say, missis, do you think he’s all right?”

“What do you mean, Harry, by ‘all right’?”

“Why, all right here,” and he touched his forehead.

“Why, of course he is. It’s only his curious way.”

“Well,” said Harry, “if you say so, I suppose it’s right. You know more about him than I do; but if I’d met him without being introduced I should have said that he was a lunatic, and the big foreigner was his keeper.”

That was a nice idea, wasn’t it? But, of course, a character like Mr. Saxon isn’t met with every day; and perhaps it’s a good job it isn’t. Too many of them would make things uncomfortable.

All that day Mr. Saxon was very excited, and I could see it was his liver by the look of him; and he kept groaning and saying his head ached, and he felt as if he’d been beaten black and blue.

He said he couldn’t write and he couldn’t read, and he couldn’t sit still, and so he came downstairs into our parlour and made Harry come and sit and talk with him. But he talked so much himself, Harry never had a chance. Harry did manage to say once what a fine thing it must be to be able to make money, and have your name stuck about the hoardings; and that was enough—that started him.

“A fine thing!” he said; “why, I’m the most miserable wretch that ever trod the earth! For twenty years I haven’t known what it is to be well for a single day. I’m always doubled up, I’m always in pain, I can’t go anywhere, I shun society, and I can’t eat anything without being ill for a week.”

“But you manage to write a good deal,” said Harry.

“Ah! I used to, but that faculty’s gone now. I’m too ill. I shall have to give up soon. Then I shall be ruined, and die in the workhouse. It’s an awful thing, Beckett, after working hard all your life, to die in the workhouse.”

“Can’t say, sir,” said Harry jokingly; “I never tried it.”

But Mr. Saxon wouldn’t joke. He kept on talking in such a melancholy way that at last we all began to feel miserable. He said that life was all a mistake—that it was no good trying to be anything in the world, because death was sure to come, and that misery and trouble were our portions from the cradle to the grave. Then he began to tell the most dreadful stories about people he’d known, and the awful things that had happened to them; and Harry, who wasn’t used to that sort of thing, got up and said, “Excuse me, Mr. Saxon, I’ll go and get a little fresh air. If I listen to you much longer I shall begin to believe that I’d better take the missis and the baby and tie them round my neck and jump into the canal, before anything worse happens to us.”

“Oh, don’t mind me,” said Mr. Saxon; “I’m always like that when I’ve got dyspepsia—and I’ve got it awfully this afternoon.”

“Well,” said Harry, “the best thing for that is exercise. Come and have a good walk.”

They went out, Harry and Mr. Saxon and the Swedish gentleman, and when they came back they were all roaring with laughter. Mr. Saxon had forgotten all about his ailments, and Harry told me Mr. Saxon and the Swedish gentleman had been pretending that they were two agents from London, who were down to look for the next heir to a John Smith, who had died in Australia worth a hundred thousand pounds, and they’d been into all the cottages making inquiries and questioning the people about their great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, and Harry said that they’d set the whole village agog, and that half the people in it had tried to make out that they once had a relative named Smith. Harry laughed when he told me, because it was so droll, the way all the people began to tell Mr. Saxon their family histories, the Swedish gentleman taking it all down, as grave as a judge, in his note-book.

He said it was as good as a play. But it was an awful nuisance when people kept coming in and wanting to see the two gentlemen, and leaving bits of paper with the names of their ancestors written on, and old samplers, and I don’t know what. And one old gentleman from the almshouses, who hadn’t been out of his room for three months, was brought down in a wheelbarrow, with his family Bible to show his mother’s maiden name was Smith; and he was so disappointed not to find the hundred thousand pounds waiting for him, that Harry had to give him a shilling and a bit of tobacco to comfort him.

It really was too bad of Mr. Saxon to have played a joke like that, because people in a country place always have an idea that they are “next of kin,” or whatever you call it, to rich people, and that there is unclaimed money waiting for them.

You have only to mention that somebody of their name is advertised for or inquired for, and they are certain that they are coming into a fortune. Almost every old lady in a country place believes that there is a fortune left to her somewhere, if she only knew where to look for it.

But Mr. Saxon got nicely paid out for his joke. There was an old lady who lived in the village, a regular character, called Mrs. Croker, though her real name was Mrs. Smith—Croker having been the name of her first husband and Smith of her second; but she went back to her first husband’s name when her second ran away. She was an awful tartar if all they say of her was true, and no wonder the first one died and the second ran away. She was married from the village, her family living there for centuries, and that’s how her history was so well known.

She married a very quiet, middle-aged man first, and went to live in London with him, where he worked at his trade; but she was the master, it seems, from the first. They had a little house over Lambeth way. She made him scrub the stairs and clean the steps, and do all the house-work that a woman generally does, before he went to his work and after he came home from it; and he had to give her all his money, and she allowed him so much a day, just enough for his fare and his dinner that he had to get out. And woe betide him if he didn’t come home to his tea to the minute he ought to be home!

He was due home at half-past five from his work, and at five-and-twenty minutes to six the tea was all cleared away, and he had to go without for being late. Then she used to set him to do cleaning or whatever had to be done, and she always found him a job, because she said it wasn’t good for a man to be idle.

Once a friend called to see poor Mr. Croker, I was told, but she answered the door and gave the friend a bit of her mind. She said when a man came home he belonged to his wife, and she wasn’t going to have any dissolute companions coming there after him luring him into bad ways.

You can guess what a nice sort of woman she was; perhaps being over forty when she married had something to do with it.

Poor Mr. Croker was a very mild little man who daren’t say his soul was his own, and he obeyed like a lamb, and was very kind to her with it all, and I dare say loved her very much—for I’ve heard, and I dare say it’s true, that men do love women like that sometimes much better than women who let themselves be trodden on.

On Sunday Mr. Croker had to work harder than ever, because his wife went to church in the morning, and left him at home to do the cooking and get the dinner ready, and when she came home she sat down and let him dish it up, and a nice to-do there was if everything wasn’t quite right.

On Sunday afternoon she used to have a nap, and to keep Croker out of mischief she used to give him the Sunday-school books that she had had when a little girl to read, and, to make sure he didn’t go to sleep or get lazy, she used to make him learn the collect for the day and a hymn while she was asleep, and he had to say them when she woke up.

It seems hardly possible that a man would lead such a life, but poor Croker did, and I know that it is true, for I can judge by her goings-on now, when I see her very often; and all the people who knew about her married life tell the same story, and poor Croker’s “mates” in his workshop told what they had heard from him when he died, and there was an inquest on him.

But I must not anticipate.

To show how she treated her husband, it was a fact—and she confessed it herself—that she didn’t even let him have what she had in the way of crockery. She had nicer things, china and that sort of thing, which she used for herself, but poor Croker had his tea in a big yellow mug, and had a common cracked old plate to have his dinner on, and had his beer in the same old yellow mug, while she had hers in a glass; and even the beer was different, he having to fetch her a pint of the best, while he was only allowed half a pint of the common.

It was one Sunday afternoon that Mr. Croker came to his end, and it was really through his being so afraid of his wife.

It seems she never allowed him to smoke, because she said it was a wasteful habit; but he used to keep a pipe at the shop, and smoke it secretly till he got near his home, and then call at a friend’s house and leave it for fear she should search his pockets and find it on him.

He had some way of not smelling of tobacco by having a chronic cough, which made him always take a coughdrop that hid the smell of tobacco; and that was enough, because I shouldn’t suppose that Mrs. Croker ever so far unbent her dignity as to kiss the poor man.

Sunday was his great trial, because he was never allowed out till evening, and then she always went with him for a short stroll. Not being able to get a smoke that day made him want it all the more—which is only human nature, and always has been.

At last, noticing that she used to sleep very soundly of an afternoon, he got artful, and would learn his collect beforehand in his dinner-hour at the shop, and, when she was asleep and snoring, creep out of the room with his hymn-book, and learn that over a pipe down in the shed that was at the bottom of the yard, where the coals were always kept, they having no underground coal-cellar in the little house they lived in. He was afraid to smoke in the garden, for fear the neighbours should see him and by chance let her know he had been smoking. So he used to crawl into the shed, and had made himself a comfortable corner there, and a seat on an old basket turned upside down, and he had a candle, which he stuck up to read by; and that was his most enjoyable half-hour on Sunday.

He always managed to go in with some coals, so that, if she woke up and missed him, he could say, when he came in, he had been to the coal-shed. He had to work the kitchen fire in the summer very carefully, so as to make it always want coals just at that time.

His end was very awful. It seems that Mrs. Croker, who was always one to drive a bargain, and had bought no end of things cheap, which she hoarded away, being a miser, as you may guess, had been offered a big can of oil, that is burned in lamps, cheap by a neighbour who had the brokers in, and been sold up or something of the sort, and she had bought it and had it taken into this shed.

One dark Sunday afternoon, poor Croker, knowing nothing about the oil, went into the coal-shed and lit his candle, and sat down to learn his hymn and have his pipe, when, in settling himself down, he knocked over the can that he didn’t know was there, and it made him jump, and in his fright down he came and the candle too, and he and the candle fell into a pool of the oil, and everything was in a blaze in a minute.

His screams brought assistance, and he was got out, but not before he was so burned that he never got over it, but died a little while after.

It was at the inquest that it came out why he was there smoking, one of his mates volunteering and giving off a bit of his mind before the coroner could stop him.

Mrs. Croker, after she got over the shock, said it was a judgment, and it all happened through men deceiving their wives; but other people who knew all about her put it differently.

Two years after Mr. Croker’s quiet Sunday pipe had caused his end, Mrs. Croker, who must have had a tidy bit of money, because she had saved a good deal out of Croker’s wages, and was always thrifty, and had his club and insurance money, married again. This time she married a younger man, a man in good work, named Dan Smith. I suppose Mr. Smith thought she had a bit of money, and didn’t know what a character she was.

At any rate, Mrs. Croker became Mrs. Smith, and she tried the same game on with Daniel as she had with the other.

But Daniel didn’t take it quite in the same way. He humoured her at first, and cleaned the steps and cooked the dinner; but they say it was over the collect and the hymn on Sunday afternoon that they fell out.

He said if she went out Sunday mornings he should go out Sunday afternoons, and he should smoke his pipe out of doors and in the house, too. He wouldn’t give up his baccy for the best woman breathing.

They had awful quarrels about it, and neither would give way; and, what’s more, Mr. Smith wouldn’t hand over all his wages every week as Mr. Croker had done.

She must have led him a pretty life in consequence, for one Saturday morning Mr. Smith went out, and he didn’t come home to dinner, and he didn’t come home to tea. Mrs. Smith worked herself up into an awful rage, and was getting ready to make it warm for him when he did come in—but he didn’t come in to supper, and he didn’t come in all night.

Then she got awfully frightened, and the next morning, Sunday, she went down to the works and found out where the foreman lived, and went to see if he could tell her anything. The foreman told her that Dan had left his employment, having given a week’s notice the Saturday before, and had wished them all good-bye; and then she knew that her husband hadn’t meant to come home—in fact, that he had run away from her.

She went on anyhow about him then, and called him dreadful names, and said he was a villain, and vowed she would find him, if she went to the end of the world after him, and have him up for deserting her.

She didn’t get much sympathy from anybody, because people knew how she’d treated her first husband, and they said she didn’t deserve to have another; but some of the mischievous people played jokes on her. One would come to her and say, “Oh, Mrs. Smith, your husband was seen last night with a young woman in a public-house at Bow.”

Off she would go to the place, and insist on seeing the landlord, and make a fine to-do, accusing him of harbouring her husband. Wherever people told her her husband had been seen she would go, till she had been half over London, and she began to be known as “the old gal who was looking for her husband.”

But at last she gave up the search and sold up her home, and came back to live in her native village near where our house is; and then she pretended to be very poor, and used to ask herself out to tea to different people’s houses as often as she could, and would come in and talk about her wrongs, till people used to have to make all sorts of excuses to get rid of her.

She was said to wear all her clothes one set on top of the other, and she certainly looked very bulky always; and whenever she called and people were at tea, she’d have a cup, and manage to take a lump or two of sugar extra and put in her pocket, and was always asking to be obliged with a stamp, which she didn’t pay for, and all that sort of thing.

She managed to make friends with us somehow soon after we came, and when we weren’t at tea or dinner when she came in, she would have an awful attack of the spasms, and, of course, at first I used to say, “Have a little brandy, or a little gin,” and she never said “No.”

I had managed to stop her calling so often when Mr. Saxon started that story about the Mr. Smith who had died in Australia. She heard of it, and she was certain it was her husband, and down she came to our place and insisted on seeing the agents.

We tried to get rid of her, saying they weren’t in, but she said she’d stay till they did come in, and at last Mr. Saxon had to see her to try and get rid of her.

But once she got in his room, there she stuck. It was no good his saying the man Smith had been in Australia fifty years—she knew better. For everything he said she had an argument ready, and she demanded the name of his employers, and I don’t know what; and as he had some writing to do he got out of temper, and then she slanged him, and said he was in the conspiracy, and at last he put her out of his room and locked the door.

We got her away after she’d shouted at him outside his door for a quarter of an hour; but when he went out the next morning for a walk she was waiting for him, and she followed him and the Swedish gentleman through the village, shouting at them, till everybody came out of their doors, and Mr. Saxon had to run fast to get away from her, because she couldn’t run far with three or four complete sets of clothes on.

When Mr. Saxon returned he came in the back way and sat down in a chair.

“Good heavens, Mary Jane,” he said, “that old woman will drive me mad! Can’t she be put in the pound?”

I said it was a pity he had put that story about, because it would never do to say there was no Mr. Smith—all the other people would be so indignant. He must think of something to persuade Mrs. Smith it wasn’t her husband.

“I know,” said the Swedish gentleman; “we must show her a photograph of the real Mr. Smith, and say that’s the man. Then she can’t say it’s her husband.”

“But I don’t carry photographs about with me,” said Mr. Saxon. Then he asked me if I had one.

“No,” I said, “not that she wouldn’t recognize, because she’s looked through my album over and over again, and I can’t borrow one of anybody in the village, because she’d recognize that too. She knows everybody’s business.”

“Oh, leave it to me, sir,” said the Swedish gentleman; “I’ll manage to get one.”

So he went out and got a photograph, and I heard afterwards how he got it. He certainly was very clever at scheming and planning, seeming to like it.

He went to the photographers in the nearest town to us and asked if they had any photographs of celebrities, and they said, “No; there was no demand for them.” Then he asked if they had any photographs of anybody who didn’t live in the place or near the place. The photographer thought a minute, and then said, “Yes; he thought he had.” He went to a drawer, and brought out a photograph of a man.

“I’m sure that is a stranger,” he said; “you can have this.” The Swedish gentleman had said he wanted an old photograph to do a conjuring trick with, but didn’t want anybody who was an inhabitant.

He paid a shilling for the photo, and brought it back. When he got near our house he met Mr. Saxon, who had gone out for a stroll, and that blessed Mrs. Croker was watching for him, and was on to him again demanding particulars of her husband’s death in Australia and of her fortune. She wasn’t going to let a lot of people that had no claim on him get it.

Mr. Saxon asked the Swedish gentleman in German if he’d got a photo. “Yes,” he said.

Then Mr. Saxon turned to Mrs. Croker and said, “Madam, I suppose you would know your husband’s photograph?”

“Yes, I should,” she said.

“Then, madam, my friend will show you the photograph of our Mr. Smith, and you will see it is not your husband.”

The Swedish gentleman took out his pocket-book and took the photograph he had bought from it.

“There, madam,” he said, “that is the Mr. Smith.”

“Ah!” shouted the woman; “I knew it. That is my husband!”

And it was. The photographer had given the Swedish gentleman a copy of the photograph of Daniel Smith. When Mrs. Croker came to the village she had had a dozen taken to send about, in case she ever heard of any clue in distant parts. The photographer had taken more than had been ordered—she wouldn’t pay for them, and he had to keep them. He had given one to the Swedish gentleman.

That evening Mr. Saxon packed up and fled. He went away in a close carriage, and drove to a station four miles off, to elude the vigilance of Mrs. Croker.

She used to go to London about once a week regularly to look for him, and she was quite convinced that some day she would receive the hundred thousand pounds that her husband left in Australia. She was convinced that she had been hoaxed at last by receiving news of the death of the real Daniel Smith. He had died at——

* * * * *

What’s that smell of burning? It’s from the kitchen. Why, cook, what are you thinking of? You know how particular No. 7 is, and these cutlets are burned to a cinder. You—— Why, good heavens, the woman’s drunk!

CHAPTER IX.
OLD GAFFER GABBITAS.

It’s got about. I wouldn’t have had it happen for the world; but Mr. Wilkins has got to know that I write stories. He told me the other evening that he was going to buy my book, and he hoped I’d write my name in it.

“What book?” I said, going very red.

“Why, your ‘Memoirs,’ ma’am,” he said. “My daughter up in London, that I went to see last week—she’s a great reader, and I do believe that she has read everything, ancient and modern—and we were having a lot of conversation about you, and I was saying what a nice lady you were, and about your husband being a sailor, and one or two things I dropped made her prick up her ears, and she asked me a lot of questions, and presently she said, ‘Father, what’s Mrs. Beckett’s christian name?’ Well, of course I knew what it was, through your having written it in the visitors’ book, as you remember, when you asked me to write mine too, when it was new, and you wanted to take it up for ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’ to put their names in. So I said, ‘Mrs. Beckett’s christian name, my dear, is Mary Jane.’

“‘I thought so,’ said my daughter.

“Of course I asked her why she should think your name was Mary Jane, ma’am, and then she said, ‘She’s a celebrated authoress. She’s written a book all about us (my daughter is in domestic service), and it’s the truest book I ever read about servants. It’s her “Memoirs” and all about the places she lived in, and the people she lived with. She said in the book she was going to marry Harry and have a country inn.’

“‘Harry’s the landlord’s name, right enough,’ I said; and from one or two things my daughter told me were in that book, ma’am, I’m sure I have the honour of addressing the talented authoress.”

I blushed more than ever when Mr. Wilkins said that, and I felt very uncomfortable. I never thought it would get about that I wrote books, and I felt that if it was known it might injure our business, as folks wouldn’t like to come and stay at an hotel, if they thought the landlady was studying their characters to make stories about them for print. I saw it was no good denying it, so I put a bold face on the matter, and I said, “Mr. Wilkins, it is quite true; but I want you to give me your promise you won’t say a word of what you have found out to anybody else.”

“Good gracious, ma’am!” said Mr. Wilkins. “Why should you hide your candle under a bushel? It’s a great thing to be a writing lady nowadays.”

“Yes: but I’m not a lady, Mr. Wilkins,” I said, “and I’ve my husband’s business to attend to, and I don’t want the people about here to know me as anything else but the landlady of the ‘Stretford Arms.’”

I explained to him as well as I could why it wasn’t advisable for me to be known as an authoress, especially an authoress who wrote about what she saw, and put real live people in her books; and, after a little talk, Mr. Wilkins said he saw what I meant, and he thought I was right, and he gave me his word of honour he wouldn’t breathe my secret to a soul.

After that, of course, I was obliged to take him a good deal into my confidence, and as once or twice he had seen me writing, it was no good my denying that I was at work on more “Memoirs,” and he very soon jumped to the conclusion that it was our inn and its customers, and the people in the place, that I was writing about. Then he asked me point-blank if he was in, and I said, “Yes, Mr. Wilkins; you are.”

Bless the little man, you should have seen him when he heard that. He positively glowed all over his face, and begged and prayed of me to let him see what I’d written about him. I said he should one day, that I’d only just put down some notes at present, and that they weren’t in shape yet.

After that, he was on at me whenever he got a chance about my new “Memoirs.” “I can give you a lot of things to put in,” he said, “because I’ve lived here man and boy, and there isn’t a soul whose history I don’t know. When are you going to publish ’em, ma’am?”

“Oh,” I said, “not yet. It wouldn’t do while we’re here. A nice time I should have of it, if the people here got hold of the book, and came and asked me how I dared put them in!”

“But you aren’t going to leave here?”

“Not yet, of course; but I hope we shall have a better house some day. If we make this a good business we shall sell it, and buy another—a real hotel, perhaps, with waiters in evening dress, and all that sort of thing; but there’s plenty of time to think about that.”

Poor little Mr. Wilkins! certainly he couldn’t have taken more interest in my new work if he’d been writing it himself; and I really believe he did think he was what they call collaborating; for, after a time, whenever he brought me a bit of information, he would say, “Won’t that do for our ‘Memoirs’?”

Our “Memoirs!” It made me a little cold to him at first, because I have an authoress’s feelings; but I saw he didn’t mean any harm, and I soon forgave him, and we were the best of friends. I will acknowledge here that he was of very great service to me; and having been the parish clerk so many years, and his father before him, and having an old-established little business in the place, he had many opportunities of knowing things which I couldn’t have found out. I can say what I like of him now, because the old gentleman, at the time I am writing, is far, far away, and isn’t likely to see or hear of my book. But I must not anticipate. I shall tell you his story by-and-by in its proper place, as it happened long after this.

He certainly kept his word, and never told anybody of what he’d found out, and nobody here ever said anything to me about my “Memoirs,” except one person, and when that one person said it, it took my breath away more than Mr. Wilkins did.

I must tell you about that now, or else I shall forget it. It shows the danger of expressing your opinions too freely in a book.

We were always changing our cooks—in fact, cooks were our great difficulty; and female cooks in hotels generally are a difficulty, and even harder to manage than cooks in private families.

The one I had the most trouble with was a middle-aged woman, who came from London, very highly recommended from her last place. She was capital at first—punctual, clean, and as good with her vegetables as she was with the joints and pastry, and that was a great thing, for some English cooks think vegetables are beneath their notice and ought to be left to the kitchenmaid; but I am very strong on vegetables in plain English cooking—especially in an hotel. I know from our customers, who have travelled about, that the vegetables are the weak points in most hotels, and potatoes and cabbage will be served with an expensive dinner that would be a disgrace to a cookshop.

A gentleman told me one day, after he’d had his dinner, when I’d cooked the vegetables myself, that he’d been travelling about the country, and it was the first time he’d eaten a well-cooked potato since he’d left home. He said vegetables were murdered as a rule, and were so badly served, that the waiter didn’t even give them their names, but called them “veg” (pronounced vedge). I’ve heard that said myself at a restaurant in London where Harry took me to dinner, so I know it’s true. “Veg on five,” said our waiter. That was for the boy to put vegetables on table No. 5. Then another waiter put his head into the lift and shouted, “Now, then, look sharp with the veg, there!”

Yes, and “veg” was the word for what we got. Three nasty, half-boiled, diseased-looking potatoes, that had been out of the saucepan half an hour if they had been a minute, and a dab of cabbage—“dab” is the only word—and the cabbage was tasteless, sodden stuff, floating in water; and not a particle of salt had that cabbage or potato seen.

That was a lesson to me, because I felt what I didn’t like I couldn’t expect our customers to like. So I said to myself, “No veg at the ‘Stretford Arms,’ Mary Jane; you’ll give your customers good sound, honest vegetables, cooked well, with as much care as the meat or the pastry or the pudding.”

I’ve wandered a little bit, I know, but I can’t help it. I do feel so strongly on the shameful treatment of vegetables by the ordinary English cook. Now, to come back to the cook I was telling you about. She went on beautifully for a month, and I thought I’d got a treasure; and then she went and fell in love with a young fellow in the village—a very decent young fellow, but a bit too fond of gallivanting. He was a good-looking chap, and the girls encouraged him, as they will do, for I’ve noticed that if a man’s at all decent-looking there are always plenty of girls ready to encourage him to be a flirt. He fell in love with our cook—at any rate, he walked out with her once or twice, and then she told me they were engaged.

Unfortunately, he left off his work at seven every evening, and when our cook couldn’t go out with him, I dare say he wasn’t particular if he laughed and joked with the other young women of the place, who could get out.

Cook got to hear of something of the sort, and it made her dreadfully jealous, and she was always coming to me and saying, “Oh, please, ma’am, we aren’t very busy this evening; can I just run out and get a piece of ribbon?” or, “Oh, if you please, ma’am, could you spare me for ten minutes this evening?” And if I couldn’t let her go she’d be careless and ill-tempered, and work herself up into quite a rage—of course, fancying that her young man was “up to his larks,” as the kitchenmaid used to call it, when she chaffed poor cook about it.

I let her go out as often as I could when we were slack; but when we were busy, and there were late dinners to cook, and meat teas and early suppers, it wasn’t possible, and I had to be firm, and say no.

One evening, when we’d let the best sitting-room to a London lady and gentleman, and they’d ordered dinner at seven, cook came to me about ten minutes to, and said, “Please, ma’am, everything’s all ready, and Mary can dish up and see to the rest, if you’ll let me go out. I won’t be long.”

“No,” I said; “I really can’t, cook. I’m expecting people by the next train, and they’ll very likely want something cooked at once.”

“Oh, ma’am, do, please; it’s very particular.”

“Nonsense, cook,” I said; “you’ve been out twice this week. You only want to see your young man, and I can’t have it. You’re making yourself ridiculous over him, and neglecting your work. Go back to the kitchen at once.”

“Oh, then, you won’t let me go?” she said, turning fiery red.

“No. I’ve told you so.”

“Oh, that’s it, is it?” she said. “That’s your fellow-feeling for servants, is it? But it ain’t the sort of stuff you put in your ‘Memoirs.’”

“My what?” I gasped.

“Your ‘Memoirs’! Oh, you know what I mean, Miss Mary Jane Buffham. You’re a nice one to stick up for the poor servants, you are! Why don’t you practise what you preach?”

I never was so insulted in my life. It was all my work to prevent myself taking that woman by the shoulders and shaking her—the idea of her daring to throw my “Memoirs” in my face—my own servant, too!

But I kept my temper, and I said quietly, “Cook, you forget yourself.”

“No, I don’t,” she said, with an exasperating leer. “It’s you that forget yourself. You’re a missus now, but you weren’t always, and when you weren’t, you could reckon missuses up as well as anybody.”

“Go out of the room directly,” I said.

“Oh, I’m a-going! You can give me notice if you like. I’m sick of your twopenny-halfpenny public-house. I’ve always lived with gentlefolk before, and been treated as such.”

“Go out of the room!” I shouted, stamping my foot; “and go out of the house.”

“Yes, I will. I’ll go now, this very minute; but I want a month’s money.”

“You sha’n’t have a penny more than’s due to you, you impudent hussy!” I said. “There!” and I banged her wages up to date down on the table; “there’s your money. Now go and pack your box and be off, or I shall have you turned out.”

She took the money, counted it, and then threw it on the table.

“I want a month’s money or a month’s notice,” she said.

“Then you’ll have to get it,” I said. “Be off, or I’ll send for a policeman.”

“Oh!—hadn’t you better send for the one who used to cuddle you in the kitchen, while your other chap was away at sea?”

I did lose my temper at that. It was more than human flesh and blood could bear. I gave a little scream, and then I ran at her, took her by the shoulders, and ran her right out of the room, and banged the door in her face and locked it. And then I fell back into a chair; and if I hadn’t cried I should have had hysterics.

Harry was just outside when I turned cook out, and she began at him. He saw how the land lay, and he made short work of her, though she kept going on about me all the time. He made her pack and be off within a quarter of an hour; and I had to go into the kitchen, hot and crying and excited as I was, and the kitchenmaid and I had to dish up the dinner, and do all the rest of the cooking that evening.

When I had five minutes I went upstairs and bathed my face and put myself tidy; but I had such a dreadful splitting headache, I could hardly see out of my eyes.

When I came down again, Harry was in the parlour smoking his pipe and staring at the ceiling, and he didn’t look very good-tempered.

“Oh, that wretched woman,” I said; “she’s upset everything.”

Harry didn’t speak.

“Harry,” I said, “haven’t you anything to say? Aren’t you sorry for me to have been so upset?”

“Oh yes,” he said, “I’m sorry; but I wish that d——d policeman was at Jericho!”

That cat!—that ever I should call her so—to go and drag that policeman off the cover of my book and throw him at Harry, and all because I wouldn’t let her go and see her young man before she’d cooked the best sitting-room’s dinner!

It was a blow to me to have what I’d said in my book thrown in my face by my own servant. After that I felt inclined to ask a girl before I engaged her if she’d read my “Memoirs,” and if she said she had, to say, “Then you won’t suit me,” because that book puts wrong notions into girls’ heads. If ever there’s a second edition, there’s one or two things about servants in it that I shall certainly alter. And every bit about that policeman will come out. I made up my mind to that long ago.

Writing about the cook who threw my “Memoirs” in my face, and the rage she put me in, has quite put poor Mr. Wilkins’s nose out of joint. I told you how he was always bringing me things to put in my “Memoirs” of the village and our inn. Lots of the things he came to me full of were no use at all, and I had to tell him so. He seemed to think a book was a sort of dust-bin, into which you shot any rubbish you picked up. But, of course, people who are not authors don’t understand these things—they don’t know that everybody isn’t interested in just what interests them.

But one evening, he came in looking very important, and he had a very, very old gentleman with him—a white-haired, apple-faced old fellow, all wrinkles, who looked like a picture I’ve seen somewhere of a very old man. The gentleman who painted it was a foreigner, I think. I know it was in an illustrated paper, and said, “An Old Man’s Head,” by some name I couldn’t pronounce, and I’m sure I couldn’t spell from memory.

When Mr. Wilkins brought him in he walked with a stick, being a bit bent and feeble; and Mr. Wilkins took his hand, and led him to the fire, and everybody made way for him.

“I’ve brought you a new customer, Mrs. Beckett,” said Mr. Wilkins, with a look which was as much as to say, “Here’s something for our ‘Memoirs.’”

I nodded to the new old gentleman, and said I hoped he was well, and what would he take.

He said he’d take a hot rum-and-water, and I had it brought, and he settled down comfortably in the arm-chair.

“Are you all right, Gaffer?” said Mr. Wilkins.

“Yes, thank’e,” said the old man, in a piping sort of voice. “I’m all right, Muster Wilkins. It’s the fust time I’ve been here for many a year, though; old place be altered surely.”

“My old friend is a very celebrated man, Mrs. Beckett,” said Mr. Wilkins. “He doesn’t live here now, but he’s come to stay with his daughter who does, and I’ve brought him out along with me this evening, and I’ve promised to see him safe home again, haven’t I, Gaffer?”

“Yes, you have, Muster Wilkins.”

“This is old Gaffer Gabbitas, ma’am, as you may have heard of. He was pretty well known about these parts once, weren’t you, Gaffer?”

“Yes, yes; a long time ago. There wasn’t many betterer known than Tom Gabbitas, as I was called afore I got old and folks took to callin’ me Gaffer. Dear me, how it do bring back old times to be sitting here! But it’s all changed, all changed. It’s ten year since I left the village, Muster Wilkins, and went to live in London along o’ my son.”

“Ay, and you were an old man then, Gaffer. Why, you must be a hundred nearly!”

“No, no, Muster Wilkins, though I hope to be, for—thank the Lord!—I’ve all my faculties still; but I ain’t so old as that. I’m only ninety, come next Michaelmas Day.”

“Only ninety.” It almost made me smile to hear the old gentleman talk like that; but he certainly was a wonderful old fellow for his age, for he could see and hear, and he seemed to be pretty strong generally, only a bit feeble when he walked.

“And how many years is it since the murder, Gaffer?” said Mr. Wilkins.

I pricked up my ears at that. Murder! So this old gentleman had something to do with a murder. I understood why Mr. Wilkins had brought him, and why he kept looking across at me, as much as to say, “I’ve got something for you this time, ma’am, and no mistake.”

“Fifty year since the murder,” said the Gaffer. “Quite fifty year; and twenty since they found poor Muster Crunock’s body.”

“Fancy that, ma’am!” exclaimed Mr. Wilkins. “A murder was committed here—two murders—fifty years ago, and one body wasn’t found till thirty years after.”

“Here!” I exclaimed, “not here in this house. You don’t mean to say there was a murder at the ‘Stretford Arms’?”

“No—here—in this village! The murder was at Curnock’s farm, two miles from here—the second murder—but Gaffer’ll tell you all about it; he was in it, weren’t you, Gaffer?”

“Yes, yes; I was in it—I was in it.”

I couldn’t help shuddering. It made me creepy to look at that venerable old man and think that he’d been in a murder.

It took Mr. Wilkins a long time to get the story out of the old gentleman, and it took the old gentleman longer to tell it, for he kept wandering, and he would leave off and go into a lot of outside matters to make himself remember whether a day was a Monday or a Tuesday, when it didn’t matter which it was. You know the sort of thing; but when he had finished his story I was bound to confess it was a very wonderful thing, and it was all true, for Mr. Wilkins borrowed the old newspaper that the Gaffer had kept, and showed it me there.

Fifty years ago, it seemed, in the village next ours—the village where Curnock’s farm was—there was a terrible trouble about the tithes. The parson was disliked by the people, especially the farmers, and some of the farmers wouldn’t pay the tithes at all, and stirred the people up against him, and as far as I could make out, Ned Curnock, a young farmer in the neighbourhood, was the ringleader; so the parson got the law of him, and had a lot of his goods seized and taken away to pay the tithes.

He was fearfully mad about that, and swore he’d be revenged. At that time Tom Gabbitas was a labourer on the farm, and an old servant, for he was forty then.

Ned Curnock and another man—a young fellow, the son of a farmer—went out one night to waylay the parson, who had been to the Squire’s house to a party, and had to ride home through a dark lane. They said they’d give him a jolly good hiding, and that was all they meant to do. The only man who knew they’d gone, and what their errand was, was Tom Gabbitas, for he heard them talking it over, they not knowing he was near them, it being dark at the time.

About ten o’clock they went out, with two big sticks, and about eleven o’clock they came back. Ned Curnock was as white as death, and his clothes were all over blood. Tom met them, and they confided in him and told him what had happened, making him take an awful oath he’d never reveal a word to any living soul that could harm either of them.

It seems they’d met the parson, and pulled him off his horse, and begun to thrash him, when he had pulled out a pistol to shoot them. They got it from him, and somehow or other it went off and shot the parson, and they ran away; but they said they were sure he was killed, and it was a murder job.

Tom Gabbitas ran off to the place to get help, and when he got there he found other people there too. The parson was just dead; but he’d had time to say that he’d been murdered by two men, and he’d recognized one of them as Ned Curnock.

Tom only stopped to hear that, and bolted back and told his master, who was terribly frightened, and said he should be hanged, and how was he to escape? The young fellow who was with him said, “You must hide till the coast’s clear. Where can you hide? They’ll think you’ve run away.”

So they thought it out, and Curnock remembered that in his barn there was a trapdoor which opened on to a kind of cellar in the ground. So he went to the barn, and opened the trap, and got in, and they strewed things about over the top, so that the trap would be hidden. It was agreed that Tom Gabbitas was to take him food and drink there twice a day, which he could do, because he could go into the barn about his work without suspicion.

The other young man went home quietly, saying he was safe, as nobody but Gabbitas and Curnock knew he was in it, and they wouldn’t blab.

The people and the police came to the farm that night, but Tom said his master had gone out and hadn’t come in. The farm was searched and watched all night and all the next day, and then everybody said that Ned Curnock had got clear away. Rewards were offered, and the description of Curnock was sent all over England; but, of course, he was never found, and at last he was forgotten.

But something awful had happened in the meantime. Tom took his master food all right the first day, going cautiously into the barn, and, when nobody was about, lifting the trap. His master would put his head up then, and take the food, and ask, “What news?” The third night, when everybody was sure Curnock had gone, the other young fellow came to see about some things of his Curnock had bought, he said, and hadn’t settled for; but, of course, it was to get into the barn and see Curnock.

He went, and Tom took the dark lantern and went first, and when they were in they lifted the trap. Curnock was tired of being there, and he said escape was hopeless, and he should go and give himself up and make a clean breast of it.

“No,” said the other fellow, “don’t do that; you shall escape, and get clean away this very night. I’ll come to you at midnight and tell you how.”

Then Tom and this young fellow went back into the house, where there was only an old female servant—Curnock being a bachelor—and the young fellow gave Tom money, and told him he’d better rise early in the morning and walk to the nearest town, and take the stage-coach and go to London, and wait for his master at a place he was told of.

Tom went, and three days after, instead of his master, the young fellow came. “It’s all right, Tom,” he said; “Mr Curnock’s got clear away and gone to America. I’m going to buy his farm and send the money out to him.”

“What am I going to do?” said Tom.

“Oh, you can come back, and work on my farm. There’s always a job for you there, and I’ll give you and your wife a cottage on my place.”