Books: Jan of the Windmill
J >>
Juliana Horatia Ewing >> Jan of the Windmill
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 This etext was produced by Les Bowler, St. Ives, Dorset.
JAN OF THE WINDMILL (A Story of the Plains)
by JULIANA HORATIA EWING.
DEDICATED TO MY DEAR SISTER MARGARET.
CONTENTS.
Chapter I. The windmiller's wife.--Strangers.--Ten shillings a
week.--The little Jan.
Chapter II. The miller's calculations.--His hopes and fears.--The
nurse-boy.--Calm.
Chapter III. The windmiller's words come true.--The red shawl.--In
the clouds.--Nursing v. pig-minding.--The round-house.--The miller's
thumb.
Chapter IV. Black as slans.--Vair and voolish.--The miller and his
man.
Chapter V. The pocket-book and the family bible.--Five pounds'
reward.
Chapter VI. George goes courting.--George as an enemy.--George as a
friend.--Abel plays schoolmaster.--The love-letter.--Moerdyk.--The
miller-moth.--An ancient ditty.
Chapter VII. Abel goes to school again.--Dame Datchett.--A column of
spelling.--Abel plays moocher.--The miller's man cannot make up his
mind.
Chapter VIII. Visitors at the mill.--A windmiller of the third
generation.--Cure for whooping-cough.--Miss Amabel Adeline Ammaby.--
Doctors disagree.
Chapter IX. Gentry born.--Learning lost.--Jan's bedfellow.--Amabel.
Chapter X. Abel at home.--Jan objects to the miller's man.--The
alphabet.--The Cheap Jack.--"Pitchers".
Chapter XI. Scarecrows and men.--Jan refuses to "make Gearge."--
Uncanny.--"Jan's off."--The moon and the clouds.
Chapter XII. The white horse.--Comrogues.--Moerdyk.--George confides
in the Cheap Jack--with reservation.
Chapter XIII. George as a moneyed man.--Sal.--The "White Horse."--
The wedding.--The windmiller's wife forgets, and remembers too late.
Chapter XIV. Sublunary art.--Jan goes to school.--Dame Datchett at
home.--Jan's first school scrape.--Jan defends himself.
Chapter XV. Willum gives Jan some advice.--The clock face.--The
hornet and the Dame.--Jan draws pigs.--Jan and his patrons.--Kitty
Chuter.--The fight.--Master Chuter's prediction.
Chapter XVI. The mop.--The shop.--What the Cheap Jack's wife had to
tell.--What George withheld.
Chapter XVII. The miller's man at the mop.--A lively companion.--Sal
loses her purse.--The recruiting sergeant.--The pocket-book twice
stolen.--George in the King's Arms.--George in the King's service.--
The letter changes hands, but keeps its secret.
Chapter XVIII. Midsummer holidays.--Child fancies.--Jan and the pig-
minder.--Master Salter at home.--Jan hires himself out.
Chapter XIX. The blue coat.--Pig-minding and tree-studying.--Leaf-
paintings.--A stranger.--Master Swift is disappointed.
Chapter XX. Squire Ammaby and his daughter.--The Cheap Jack does
business once more.--The white horse changes masters.
Chapter XXI. Master Swift at home.--Rufus.--The ex-pig-minder.--Jan
and the schoolmaster.
Chapter XXII. The parish church.--Rembrandt.--The snow scene.--
Master Swift's autobiography.
Chapter XXIII. The white horse in clover.--Amabel and her
guardians.--Amabel in the wood.--Bogy.
Chapter XXIV. The paint-box.--Master Linseed's shop.--The new sign-
board.--Master Swift as Will Scarlet.
Chapter XXV. Sanitary inspectors.--The pestilence.--The parson.--The
doctor.--The squire and the schoolmaster.--Desolation at the
windmill.--The second advent.
Chapter XXVI. The beasts of the village.--Abel sickens.--The good
shepherd.--Rufus plays the philanthropist.--Master Swift sees the
sun rise.--The death of the righteous.
Chapter XXVII. Jan has the fever.--Convalescence in Master Swift's
cottage.--The squire on demoralization.
Chapter XXVIII. Mr. Ford's client.--The history of Jan's father.--
Amabel and Bogy the Second.
Chapter XXIX. Jan fulfils Abel's charge.--Son of the mill.--The
large-mouthed woman.
Chapter XXX. Jan's prospects, and Master Swift's plans.--Tea and
Milton.--New parents.--Parting with Rufus.--Jan is kidnapped.
Chapter XXXI. Screeving.--An old song.--Mr. Ford's client.--The
penny gaff.--Jan runs away.
Chapter XXXII. The baker.--On and on.--The church bell.--A
digression.--A familiar hymn.--The Boys' Home.
Chapter XXXIII. The business man and the painter.--Pictures and pot
boilers.--Cimabue and Giotto.--The salmon-colored omnibus.
Chapter XXXIV. A choice of vocations.--Recreation hour.--The bow-
legged boy.--Drawing by heart.--Giotto.
Chapter XXXV. "Without character?"--The widow.--The bow-legged boy
takes service.--Studios and painters.
Chapter XXXVI. The miller's letter.--A new pot boiler sold.
Chapter XXXVII. Sunshine after storm.
Chapter XXXVIII. A painter's education.--Master Chuter's port.--A
farewell feast.--The sleep of the just.
Chapter XXXIX. George again.--The painter's advice.--"Home-brewed"
at the Heart of Oak.--Jan changes the painter's mind.
Chapter XL. D'arcy sees Bogy.--The academy.--The painter's picture.
Chapter XLI. The detective.--The "Jook".--Jan stands by his mother's
grave.--His after history.
Chapter XLII. Conclusion.
JAN OF THE WINDMILL.
CHAPTER I. THE WINDMILLER'S WIFE.--STRANGERS.--TEN SHILLINGS A
WEEK.--THE LITTLE JAN.
Storm without and within?
So the windmiller might have said, if he had been in the habit of
putting his thoughts into an epigrammatic form, as a groan from his
wife and a growl of thunder broke simultaneously upon his ear,
whilst the rain fell scarcely faster than her tears.
It was far from mending matters that both storms were equally
unexpected. For eight full years the miller's wife had been the
meekest of women. If there was a firm (and yet, as he flattered
himself, a just) husband in all the dreary straggling district, the
miller was that man. And he always did justice to his wife's good
qualities,--at least to her good quality of submission,--and would,
till lately, have upheld her before any one as a model of domestic
obedience. From the day when he brought home his bride, tall,
pretty, and perpetually smiling, to the tall old mill and the ugly
old mother who never smiled at all, there had been but one will in
the household. At any rate, after the old woman's death. For
during her life-time her stern son paid her such deference that it
was a moot point, perhaps, which of them really ruled. Between
them, however, the young wife was moulded to a nicety, and her voice
gained no more weight in the counsels of the windmill when the harsh
tones of the mother-in-law were silenced for ever.
The miller was one of those good souls who live by the light of a
few small shrewdities (often proverbial), and pique themselves on
sticking to them to such a point, as if it were the greater virtue
to abide by a narrow rule the less it applied. The kernel of his
domestic theory was, "Never yield, and you never will have to," and
to this he was proud of having stuck against all temptations from a
real, though hard, affection for his own; and now, after working so
smoothly for eight years, had it come to this?
The miller scratched his bead, and looked at his wife, almost with
amazement. She moaned, though he bade her be silent; she wept, in
spite of words which had hitherto been an effectual styptic to her
tears; and she met the commonplaces of his common sense with such
wild, miserable laughter, that he shuddered as he heard her.
Weakness in human beings is like the strength of beasts, a power of
which fortunately they are not always conscious. Unless positively
brutal, you cannot well beat a sickly woman for wailing and weeping;
and if she will not cease for any lesser consideration, there seems
nothing for an unbending husband to do but to leave her to herself.
This the miller had to do, anyhow. For he could only spare a
moment's attention to her now and then, since the mill required all
his care.
In a coat and hat of painted canvas, he had been in and out ever
since the storm began; now directing the two men who were working
within, now struggling along the stage that ran outside the
windmill, at no small risk of being fairly blown away.
He had reefed the sails twice already in the teeth of the blinding
rain. But he did well to be careful. For it was in such a storm as
this, five years ago "come Michaelmas," that the worst of windmill
calamities had befallen him,--the sails had been torn off his mill
and dashed into a hundred fragments upon the ground. And such a
mishap to a seventy feet tower mill means--as windmillers well know-
-not only a stoppage of trade, but an expense of two hundred pounds
for the new sails.
Many a sack of grist, which should have come to him had gone down to
the watermill in the valley before the new sails were at work; and
the huge debt incurred to pay for them was not fairly wiped out yet.
That catastrophe had kept the windmiller a poor man for five years,
and it gave him a nervous dread of storms.
And talking of storms, here was another unreasonable thing. The
morning sky had been (like the miller's wedded life) without a
cloud. The day had been sultry, for the time of year unseasonably
so. And, just when the miller most grudged an idle day, when times
were hard, when he was in debt,--for some small matters, as well as
the sail business,--and when, for the first time in his life, he
felt almost afraid of his own hearthstone, and would fain have been
busy at his trade, not a breath of wind had there been to turn the
sails of the mill. Not a waft to cool his perplexed forehead, not
breeze enough to stir the short grass that glared for miles over
country flat enough to mock him with the fullest possible view of
the cloudless sky. Then towards evening, a few gray flecks had
stolen up from the horizon like thieves in the dusk, and a mighty
host of clouds had followed them; and when the wind did come, it
came in no moderate measure, but brought this awful storm upon its
wings, which now raged as if all the powers of mischief had got
loose, and were bent on turning every thing topsy-turvy indoors and
out.
What made the winds and clouds so perverse, the clerk of the weather
best knows; but there was a reason for the unreasonableness of the
windmiller's wife.
She had lost her child, her youngest born, and therefore, at
present, her best beloved. This girl-babe was the sixth of the
windmiller and his wife's children, the last that God gave them, and
the first that it had pleased Him to take away.
The mother had been weak herself at the time that the baby fell ill,
and unusually ill-fitted to bear a heavy blow. Then her watchful
eyes had seen symptoms of ailing in the child long before the
windmiller's good sense would allow a fuss to be made, and expense
to be incurred about a little peevishness up or down. And it was
some words muttered by the doctor when he did come, about not having
been sent for soon enough, which were now doing as much as any thing
to drive the poor woman frantic. They struck a blow, too, at her
blind belief in the miller's invariable wisdom. If he had but
listened to her in this matter, were it only for love's sake! There
was something, she thought, in what that woman had said who came to
help her with the last offices,--the miller discouraged "neighbors,"
but this was a matter of decency,--that it was as foolish for a man
to have the say over babies and housework as it would be for his
wife to want her word in the workshop or the mill.
Perhaps a state of subjection for grown-up people does not tend to
make them reasonable, especially in their indignations. The
windmiller's wife dared not, for her life, have told him in so many
words that she thought it would be for their joint benefit if he
would give a little more consideration to her wishes and opinions;
but from this suppressed idea came many sharp and peevish words at
this time, which, apart from their true source, were quite as
unreasonable and perverse as the miller held them to be. Nor is
being completely under the control of another, self-control. It may
be doubted if it can even do much to teach it. The thread of her
passive condition having been, for the time, broken by grief, the
bereaved mother moaned and wailed, and rocked herself, and beat her
breast, and turned fiercely upon all interference, like some poor
beast in anguish.
She had clung to her children with an almost morbid tenderness, in
proportion as she found her worthy husband stern and cold. A hard
husband sometimes makes a soft mother, and it is perhaps upon the
baby of the family that her repressed affections outpoured
themselves most fully. It was so in this case, at any rate. And
the little one had that unearthly beauty which is seen, or imagined,
about children who die young. And the poor woman had suffered and
striven so for it, to have it and to keep it. The more critical
grew its illness, the intenser grew her strength and resolution by
watchfulness, by every means her instinct and experience could
suggest, to fight and win the battle against death. And when all
was vain, the maddening thought tortured her that it might have been
saved.
The miller had made a mistake, and it was a pity that he made
another on the top of it, with the best intentions. He hurried on
the funeral, hoping that when "all was over" the mother would
"settle down."
But it was this crowning insult to her agony, the shortening of the
too brief time when she could watch by all that remained to her of
her child, which drove her completely wild. She reproached him now
plainly and bitterly enough. She would neither listen to reason nor
obey; and when--with more truth than taste--he observed that other
people lost children, and that they had plenty left, she laughed in
his face that wild laugh which drove him back to the mill and to the
storm.
How it raged! The miller's wife was an uneducated, commonplace
woman enough, but, in the excited state of her nervous system, she
was as sensible as any poet of a kind of comforting harmony in the
wild sounds without; though at another time they would have
frightened her.
They did not disturb the children, who were in bed. Four in the old
press-bed in the corner, and one in a battered crib, and one in the
narrow bed over which the coverlet was not yet green.
The day's work was over for her, though it was only just beginning
for the miller, and the mother had nothing to do but weep, and her
tears fell and fell, and the rain poured and poured. That last
outburst had somewhat relieved her, and she almost wished her
husband would come back, as a flash of lightning dazzled her eyes,
and the thunder rattled round the old mill, as if the sails had
broken up again, and were falling upon the roof of the round-house.
All her senses were acute to-night, and she listened for the
miller's footsteps, and so, listening, in the lull after the
thunder, she heard another sound. Wheels upon the road.
A pang shot through her heart. Thus had the doctor's gig sounded
the night he came,--alas, too late! How long and how intensely she
had listened for that! She first heard it just beyond the mile-
stone. This one must be a good bit on this side of it; up the hill,
in fact. She could not help listening. It was so like, so terribly
like! Now it spun along the level ground. Ah, the doctor had not
hurried so! Now it was at the mill, at the door, and--it stopped.
The miller's wife rose to run out, she hardly knew why. But in a
moment she checked herself, and went back to her seat.
"I be crazed, surely," said the poor woman, sitting down again.
"There be more gigs than one in the world, and folk often stops to
ask their way of the maester."
These travellers were a long time about the putting of such a simple
question, especially as the night was not a pleasant one to linger
out in. The murmur of voices, too, which the woman overheard,
betokened a close conversation, in which the familiar drawl of the
windmiller's dialect blended audibly with that kind of clean-clipt
speaking peculiar to gentlefolk.
"He've been talking to master's five minute an' more," muttered the
miller's wife. "What can 'ee want with un?" The talking ceased as
she spoke, and the windmiller appeared, followed by a woman carrying
a young baby in her arms.
He was a ruddy man for his age at any time, but there was an extra
flush on his cheeks just now, and some excitement in his manner,
making him look as his wife was not wont to see him more than once a
year, after the Foresters' dinner at the Heart of Oak. There was a
difference, too. A little too much drink made the windmiller
peevish and pompous, but just now he spoke in a kindly, almost
conciliating tone.
"See, missus! Let this good lady dry herself a bit, and get warm,
and the little un too."
A woman--ill-favored, though there was no positive fault to be found
with her features, except that the upper lip was long and cleft, and
the lower one very large--came forward with the child, and began to
take off its wraps, and the miller's wife, giving her face a hasty
wipe, went hospitably to help her.
"Tst! tst! little love!" she cried, gulping down a sob, due to her
own sad memories, and moving the cloak more tenderly than the woman
in whose arms the child lay. "What a pair of dark eyes, then! Is't
a boy or girl, m'm?"
"A boy," said a voice from the door, and the miller's wife, with a
suppressed shriek of timidity, became aware of a man whose entrance
she had not perceived, and to whom she dropped a hasty courtesy.
He was a man slightly above the middle height, whose slenderness
made him seem taller. An old cloak, intended as much to disguise as
to protect him, did not quite conceal a faultlessness of costume
beneath it, after the fashion of the day. Waistcoats of three
kinds, one within the other, a frilled shirt, and a well-adjusted
stock, were to be seen, though he held the ends of the old cloak
tightly across him, as the wind would have caught them in the
doorway. He wore a countryman's hat, which seemed to suit him as
little as the cloak, and from beneath the brim his dark eyes glared
with a restless, dissatisfied look, and were so dark and so fierce
and bright that one could hardly see any other details of his face,
unless it were his smooth chin, which, either from habit or from the
stiffness of his stock, he carried strangely up in the air.
"Indeed, sir," said the windmiller's wife, courtesying, and setting
a chair, with her eyes wandering back by a kind of fascination to
those of the stranger; "be pleased to take a seat, sir."
The stranger sat down for a moment, and then stood up again. Then
he seemed to remember that he still wore his hat, and removed it,
holding it stiffly before him in his gloved hands. This displayed a
high, narrow head, on which the natural hair was worn short and
without parting, and a face which, though worn, was not old. And,
for no definable reason, an impression stole over the windmiller's
wife that he, like her husband, had some wish to conciliate, which
in his case struggled hard with a very different kind of feeling,
more natural to him.
Then he took out a watch of what would now be called the old turnip
shape, and said impatiently to the miller, "Our time is short, my
good man."
"To be sure, sir," said the windmiller. "Missus! a word with you
here." And he led the way into the round-house, where his wife
followed, wondering. Her wonder was not lessened when he laid his
hand upon her shoulder, and, with flushed cheek and a tone of
excitement that once more recalled the Foresters' annual meeting,
said, "We've had some sore times, missus, of late, but good luck
have come our way to-night."
"And how then, maester?" faltered his wife.
"That child," said the windmiller, turning his broad thumb
expressively towards the inner room, "belongs to folk that want to
get a home for un, and can afford to pay for un, too. And the place
being healthy and out of the way, and having heard of our trouble,
and you just bereaved of a little un" -
"No! no! no!" shrieked the poor mother, who now understood all. "I
COULDN'T, maester, 'tis unpossible, I could NOT. Oh dear! oh dear!
isn't it bad enough to lose the sweetest child that ever saw light,
without taking in an outcast to fill that dear angel's place? Oh
dear! oh dear!"
"And we behindhand in more quarters than one," continued the miller,
prudently ignoring his wife's tears and remonstrances, "and a dear
season coming on, and an uncertain trade that keeps a man idle by
days together, and here's ten shillings a week dropped into our
laps, so to speak. Ten shillings a week--regular and sartin. No
less now, and no more hereafter, the governor said. Them were his
words."
"What's ten shilling a week to me, and my child dead and gone?"
moaned the mother, in reply.
"WHAT'S TEN SHILLINGS A WEEK TO YOU?" cried the windmiller, who was
fairly exasperated, in tones so loud that they were audible in the
dwelling room, where the stranger, standing by the three-legged
table, stroked his lips twice or thrice with his hand, as if to
smooth out a cynical smile which strove to disturb their decorous
and somewhat haughty compression. "What's ten shilling a week to
you? Why, it's food to you, and drink to you, and firing to you,
and boots for the children's feet. Look here, my woman. You've had
a sore affliction, but that's not to say you're to throw good luck
in the dirt for a whimsey. This matter's settled."
And the miller strode back into the inner room, whilst his wife sat
upon a sack of barley, wringing her hands, and moaning, "I couldn't
do my duty by un, maester, I couldn't do my duty by un."
This she repeated at intervals, with her apron over her face, as
before; and then, suddenly aware that her husband had left her, she
hurried into the inner room to plead her own cause. It was too
late. The strangers had gone. The miller was not there, and the
baby lay on the end of the press bedstead, wailing as bitterly as
the mother herself.
It had been placed there, with a big bundle of clothes by it, before
the miller came back, and he had found it so. He found the stranger
too, with his hat on his head, and his cloak fastened, glancing from
time to time at the child, and then withdrawing his glance hastily,
and looking forcedly round at the meagre furnishing of the miller's
room, and then back at the little bundle on the bed, and away again.
The woman stood with her back to the press-bed, her striped shawl
drawn tightly round her, and her hands folded together as closely as
her long lip pressed the heavy one below.
"Is it settled?" asked the man.
"It is, sir," said the miller. "You'll excuse my missus being as
she is, but it's fretting for the child we've a lost" -
"I understand, I understand," said the stranger, hastily. He was
pulling back the rings of a silk netted purse, which he had drawn
mechanically from his pocket, and which, from some sudden start of
his, fell chinking on to the floor. Whatever the thought was which
startled him, he thought it so sharply that he looked up in fear
that he had said it aloud. But he had not spoken, and the miller
had no other expression than that of an eager satisfaction on his
face as the stranger counted out the gold by the flaring light of
the tallow candle.
"A quarter's pay in advance," he said briefly. "It will be paid
quarterly, you understand." After which, and checking himself in a
look towards the child, he went out, followed by the woman.
In the round-house he paused however, and looked back into the
meagre, dimly lighted room, where the little bundle upon the bed lay
weeping. For a moment, a storm of irresolution seemed to seize him,
and then muttering, "It can't be helped for the present, it can't be
helped," he hurried towards the vehicle, in the back seat of which
the woman was already seated.
The driver touched his hat to him as he approached, and turned the
cushion, which he had been protecting from the rain. The stranger
stumbled over the cloak as he got in, and, cursing the step, bade
the man drive like something which had no connection with driving.
But, as they turned, the windmiller ran out and after them.
"Stop, sir!" he cried.
"Well, what now?" said the stranger, sharply, as the horse was
pulled back on his haunches.
"Is it named?" gasped the miller.
"Oh, yes, all that sort of thing," was the impatient reply.
"And what name?" asked the miller.
"Jan. J, A, N," said the stranger, shouting against the blustering
wind.
"And--and--the other name?" said the windmiller, who was now
standing close to the stranger's ear.
"What is yours?" he asked, with a sharp look of his dark eyes.
"Lake--Abel," said the windmiller.
"It is his also, henceforth," said the stranger, waving his hand, as
if to close the subject,--"Jan Lake. Drive on, will you?"
The horse started forward, and they whirled away down the wet, gray
road. And before the miller had regained his mill, the carriage was
a distant speck upon the storm.
CHAPTER II. THE MILLER'S CALCULATIONS.--HIS HOPES AND FEARS.--THE
NURSE-BOY.--CALM.
The windmiller went back to his work. He had risked something over
this business in leaving the mill in the hands of others, even for
so short a time. Then the storm abated somewhat. The wind went
round, and blew with less violence a fine steady breeze. The miller
began to think of going into the dwelling-room for a bit of supper
to carry him through his night's work. And yet he lingered about
returning to his wife in her present mood.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19