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.”