Books: Jan of the Windmill

J >> Juliana Horatia Ewing >> Jan of the Windmill

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Poor Abel was not fated to get much regular schooling. He
particularly liked learning, but the interval was all too brief
between the time when his mother was able to spare him from
housework and the time when his father began to employ him in the
mill.

George got more lazy and stupid, instead of less so, and though in
some strange manner he kept his place, yet when Master Lake had once
begun to employ his son, he found that he would get along but ill
without him.

To Jan, Abel's being about the windmill gave the utmost
satisfaction. He played with his younger foster-brothers and
sisters contentedly enough, but his love for Abel, and for being
with Abel, was quite another thing.

Mrs. Lake, too, had no confidence in any one but Abel as a nurse for
her darling; the consequence of which was, that the little Jan was
constantly trotting at his foster-brother's heels through the round-
house, attempting valiant escalades on the ladders, and covering
himself from head to foot with flour in the effort to cultivate a
miller's thumb.

One day Mrs. Lake, having sent the other children off to school, was
bent upon having a thorough cleaning-out of the dwelling-room,
during which process Jan was likely to be in her way; so she caught
him up in her arms and went to seek Abel in the round-house.

She had the less scruple in availing herself of his services, that
there was no wind, and business was not brisk in the windmill.

"Maester!" she cried, "can Abel mind Jan a bit? I be going to clean
the house."

"Ay, ay," said the windmiller, "Abel can mind un. I be going to the
village myself, but there's Gearge to start, if so be the wind
rises. And then if he want Abel, thee must take the little un
again."

"Sartinly I will," said his wife; and Abel willingly received his
charge and carried him off to play among the sacks.

George joined them once, but Jan had a rooted and unconquerable
dislike to the miller's man, and never replied to his advances with
any thing more friendly than anger or tears. This day was no
exception to others in this respect; and after a few fruitless
attempts to make himself acceptable, in the course of which he trod
on the sandy kitten's tail, who ran up Jan's back and spat at her
enemy from that vantage-ground, George went off muttering in terms
by no means complimentary to the little Jan. Abel did his best to
excuse the capricious child to George, besides chiding him for his
rudeness--with very little effect. Jan dried his black eyes as the
miller's man made off, but he looked no more ashamed of himself than
a good dog looks who has growled or refused the paw of friendship to
some one for excellent reasons of his own.

After George had gone, they played about happily enough, Jan riding
on Abel's back, and the sandy kitten on Jan's, in and out among the
corn-sacks, full canter as far as the old carved meal-chest, and
back to the door again.

Poor Abel, with his double burden, got tired at last, and they sat
down and sifted flour for the education of their thumbs. Jan was
pinching and flattening his with a very solemn face, in the hope of
attaining to a miller's thumb by a shorter process than the common
one, when Abel suddenly said, -

"I tell thee what, then, Jan: 'tis time thee learned thy letters.
And I'll teach thee. Come hither."

Jan jumped up, thereby pitching the kitten headlong from his
shoulders, and ran to Abel, who was squatting by some spilled flour
near a sack, and was smoothing it upon the floor with his hands.
Then very slowly and carefully he traced the letter A in the flour,
keenly watched by Jan.

"That's A," said he. "Say it, Jan. A."

"A," replied Jan, obediently. But he had no sooner said it, than,
adding hastily, "Let Jan do it," he traced a second A, slightly
larger than Abel's, in three firm and perfectly proportioned
strokes.

His moving finger was too much for the kitten's feelings, and she
sprang into the flour and pawed both the A's out of existence.

Jan slapped her vigorously, and having smoothed the surface once
more, he drew A after A with the greatest rapidity, scrambling along
sideways like a crab, and using both hands indifferently, till the
row stretched as far as the flour would permit.

Abel's pride in his pupil was great, and he was fain to run off to
call his mother to see the performances of their prodigy, but Jan
was too impatient to spare him.

"Let Jan do more!" he cried.

Abel traced a B in the flour. "That's B, Jan," said he.

"Jan do it," replied Jan, confidently.

"But say it," said his teacher, restraining him. "Say B, Jan."

"B," said Jan, impatiently; and adding, "Jan do it," he began a row
of B's. He hesitated slightly before making the second curve, and
looked at his model, after which he went down the line as before,
and quite as successfully. And the kitten went down also, pawing
out each letter as it was made, under the impression that the whole
affair was a game of play with herself.

"There bean't a letter that bothers him," cried Abel, triumphantly,
to the no less triumphant foster-mother.

Jan had, indeed, gone through the whole alphabet, with the utmost
ease and self-confidence; but his remembrance of the names of the
letters he drew so readily proved to be far less perfect than his
representations of them on the floor of the round-house.

Abel found his pupil's progress hindered by the very talent that he
had displayed. He was so anxious to draw the letters that he would
not learn them, and Abel was at last obliged to make one thing a
condition of the other.

"Say it then, Jan," he would cry, "and then thee shall make 'em."

Mrs. Lake commissioned Abel to buy a small slate and pencil for Jan
at the village shop, and these were now the child's favorite toys.
He would sit quiet for any length of time with them. Even the sandy
kitten was neglected, or got a rap on its nose with the slate-
pencil, when to toy with the moving point had been too great a
temptation to be resisted. For a while Jan's taste for wielding the
pencil was solely devoted to furthering his learning to read. He
drew letters only till the day that the Cheap Jack called.

The Cheap Jack was a travelling pedler, who did a good deal of
business in that neighborhood. He was not a pedler pure, for he had
a little shop in the next town. Nature had not favored him. He was
a hunchback. He was, or pretended to be, deaf. He had a very ugly
face, made uglier by dirt, above which he wore a mangy hair cap. He
sold rough pottery, cheap crockery and glass, mock jewelry, low
song-books, framed pictures, mirrors, and quack medicines. He
bought old bottles, bones, and rags. And what else he bought or
sold, or dealt with, was dimly guessed at by a few, but fully known
to none.

Where he was born, what was his true name or age, whether on any
given occasion he was speaking less than lies, and what was the
ultimate object of his words and deeds,--at these things no one even
guessed. That his conscience was ever clean, that his dirty face
once masked no vile or petty plots for evil in the brain behind,
that at some past period he was a child,--these things it would have
tasked the strongest faith to realize.

He was not so unpopular with children as the miller's man.

The instinct of children is like the instinct of dogs, very true and
delicate as a rule. But dogs, from Cerberus downwards, are liable
to be biassed by sops. And four paper-covered sails, that twirl
upon the end of a stick as the wind blows, would warp the better
judgment of most little boys, especially (for a bargain is more
precious than a gift) when the thing is to be bought for a few old
bones.

Jan was a little afraid of the Cheap Jack, but he liked his
whirligigs. They went when the mill was going, and sometimes when
the mill wouldn't go, if you ran hard to make a breeze.

But it so happened that the first day on which the Cheap Jack came
round after Jan had begun to learn his letters, he brought forth
some wares which moved Jan's feelings more than the whirligigs did.

"Buy a nice picter, marm?" said the Cheap Jack to Mrs. Lake, who,
with the best intentions not to purchase, felt that there could be
no harm in seeing what the man had got.

"You shall have 'Joseph and his Bretheren' cheap," roared the
hunchback, becoming more pressing as the windmiller's wife seemed
slow to be fascinated, and shaking "Joseph and his Brethren," framed
in satin-wood, in her face, as he advanced upon her with an almost
threatening air. "Don't want 'em? Take 'Antony and Cleopatterer.'
It's a sweet picter. Too dear? Do you know what sech picters costs
to paint? Look at Cleopatterer's dress and the jewels she has on.
I don't make a farthing on 'em. I gets daily bread out of the other
things, and only keeps the picters to oblige one or two ladies of
taste that likes to give their rooms a genteel appearance."

The long disuse of such powers of judgment as she had, and long
habit of always giving way, had helped to convert Mrs. Lake's
naturally weak will and unselfish disposition into a sort of mental
pulp, plastic to any pressure from without. To men she invariably
yielded; and, poor specimen of a man as the Cheap Jack was, she had
no fibre of personal judgment or decision in the strength of which
to oppose his assertions, and every instant she became more and more
convinced that wares she neither wanted nor approved of were
necessary to her, and good bargains, because the man who sold them
said so.

The Cheap Jack was a knave, but he was no fool. In a crowded
market-place, or at a street door, no oilier tongue wagged than his.
But he knew exactly the moment when a doubtful bargain might be
clinched by a bullying tone and a fierce look on his dirty face, at
cottage doors, on heaths or downs, when the good wife was alone with
her children, and the nearest neighbor was half a mile away.

No length of experience taught Mrs. Lake wisdom in reference to the
Cheap Jack.

Each time that his cart appeared in sight she resolved to have
nothing to do with him, warned by the latest cracked jug, or the
sugar-basin which, after three-quarters of an hour wasted in
chaffering, she had beaten down to three-halfpence dearer than what
she afterwards found to be the shop price in the town. But proof to
the untrained mind is "as water spilled upon the ground." And when
the Cheap Jack declared that she was quite free to look without
buying, and that he did not want her to buy, Mrs. Lake allowed him
to pull down his goods as before, and listened to his statements as
if she had never proved them to be lies, and was thrown into
confusion and fluster when he began to bully, and bought in haste to
be rid of him, and repented at leisure--to no purpose as far as the
future was concerned.

"Look here!" yelled the hunchback, as he waddled with horrible
swiftness after the miller's wife, as she withdrew into the mill;
"which do you mean to have? _I_ gets nothing on 'em, whichever you
takes, so please yourself. Take 'Joseph and his Bretheren.' The
frame's worth twice the money. Take the other, too, and I'll take
sixpence off the pair, and be out of pocket to please you."

"Nothing to-day, thank you!" said Mrs. Lake, as loudly as she could.

"Got any other sort, you say?" said the Cheap Jack. "I've got all
sorts, but some parties is so difficult to please.

"Wait a bit, wait a bit," he continued, as Mrs. Lake again tried to
make him (willing to) hear that she wanted none of his wares; and,
vanishing with the uncanny quickness common to him, he waddled
swiftly back again to his cart, and returned, before Mrs. Lake could
secure herself from intrusion, laden with a fresh supply of
pictures, the weight of which it seemed marvellous that he could
support.

"Now you've got your choice, marm," he said. "It's no trouble to me
to oblige a good customer. There's picters for you!"

"PITCHERS!" said Jan, admiringly, as he crept up to them.

"So they are, my little man. Now then, help your mammy to choose.
Most of these is things you can't get now, for love nor money. Here
you are,--'Love and Beauty.' That's a sweet thing. 'St Joseph,'
'The Robber's Bride,' 'Child and Lamb,' 'Melan-choly.' Here's an
old" -

"Pitcher!" exclaimed Jan once more, gazing at an old etching in a
dirty frame, which the Cheap Jack was holding in his hand.
"Pitcher, pitcher! let Jan look!" he cried.

It was of a water-mill, old, thatched, and with an unprotected
wheel, like the one in the valley below. Some gnarled willows
stretched across the water, whose trunks seemed hardly less time-
worn and rotten than the wheel below. This foreground subject was
in shadow, and strongly drawn, but beyond it, in the sunlight, lay a
bit of delicate distance, on the rising ground of which stood one of
those small wooden windmills known as Post-mills. An old woman and
a child were just coming into the shade, and passing beneath a
wayside shrine. What in the picture took Jan's fancy it is
impossible to say, but he gazed at it with exclamations of delight.

The Cheap Jack saw that it was certain to be bought, and he raised
the price accordingly.

Mrs. Lake felt the same conviction, and began to try at least to get
a good bargain.

"'Tis a terr'ble old frame," said she. "There be no gold left
on't." And no more there was.

"What do you say?" screamed the Cheap Jack, with his hand to his
ear, and both a great deal too close to Mrs. Lake's face to be
pleasant.

"'Tis such an old frame," she shouted, "and the gold be all gone."

"Old!" cried the hunchback, scowling; "who says I sell old things?
Every picter in that lot's brand new and dirt cheap."

"The gold be rubbed off," screamed Mrs. Lake in his ear.

"Brighten it up, then," said the Cheap Jack. "Gold ain't paint;
gold ain't paper; rub it up!" and, suiting the action to the word,
he rubbed the dirty old frame vigorously with the dirty sleeve of
his smock.

"It don't seem to brighten it, nohow," said Mrs. Lake, looking
nervously round; but neither the miller nor George was to be seen.

"Real gold allus looks like this in damp weather," said the Cheap
Jack. "Hang it up in a warm room, dust it lightly every morning
with a dry handkerchief, an' it'll come out that shining you'll see
your face in it. And when summer comes, cover it up in yaller gauze
to keep off the flies."

Mrs. Lake looked wistfully at the place the Cheap Jack had rubbed,
but she had no redress, and saw no way out of her hobble but to buy
the picture.

When the bargain was completed, the Cheap Jack fell back into his
oiliest manner; it being part of his system not only to bully at the
critical moment, but to be very civil afterwards, so as to leave an
impression so pleasant on the minds of his lady customers that they
could hardly do other than thank him for his promise to call again
shortly with "bargains as good as ever."

The Cheap Jack was a man of many voices. The softness of his
parting words to Mrs. Lake, "I'd go three mile out of my road,
ma'am, to call on a lady like you," had hardly died away, when he
woke the echoes of the plains by addressing his horse in a very
different tone.

The Wiltshire carters and horses have a language between them which
falls darkly upon the ear of the unlearned therein; but the uncouth
yell which the Cheap Jack addressed to his beast was not of that
dialect. The sound he made on this occasion was not, Ga oot! Coom
hedder! or, There right! but the horse understood it.

It is probable that it never heard the Cheap Jack's softer
intonations, for its protuberant bones gave a quiver beneath the
scarred skin as he yelled. Then its drooping ears pricked faintly,
the quavering forelegs were braced, one desperate jog of the
tottering load of oddities, and it set slowly and silently forward.

The Cheap Jack did not follow his wares; he scrambled softly round
the mill, like a deformed cat, looking about him on all sides. Then
he made use of another sound,--a sharp, suggestive sound, whistled
between two of his fingers.

Then he looked round again.

No one appeared. The wheels of the distant cart scraped slowly
along the road, but this was the only sound the Cheap Jack heard.

He whistled softly again.

And as the cart took the sharp turn of the road, and was lost to
sight, the miller's man appeared, and the Cheap Jack greeted him in
the softest tone he had yet employed. "Ah, there you are, my dear!"

Meanwhile, Mrs. Lake sat within, and looked ruefully at the damaged
frame, and wished that the master, or at least the man, had happened
to be at home.

It is to be feared that our self-reproach for having done wrong is
not always so certain, or so keen, as our self-reproach for having
allowed ourselves to suffer wrong--in a bad bargain.

Whether this particular picture was a bad bargain it is not easy to
decide.

It was scandalously dear for its condition, and for what it had cost
the hunchback, but it was cheap for the pleasure it gave to the
little Jan.

CHAPTER XI.

SCARECROWS AND MEN.--JAN REFUSES TO "MAKE GEARGE."--UNCANNY.--"JAN'S
OFF."-THE MOON AND THE CLOUDS.

The picture gave Jan great pleasure, but it proved a stumbling-block
on the road to learning.

To "make letters" on his slate had been the utmost of his ambition,
and as he made them he learned them. But after the Cheap Jack's
visit his constant cry was, "Jan make pitchers." And when Abel
tried to confine his attention to the alphabet, he would, after a
most perfunctory repetition of a few letters that he knew, and hap-
hazard blunders over fresh ones, fling his arms round Abel's neck
and say coaxingly, "Abel dear, make Janny PITCHERS on his slate."

Abel's pictures, at the best, were of that style of wall decoration
dear to street boys.

"Make a pitcher of a man," Jan would cry. And Abel did so, bit by
bit, to Jan's dictation. Thus "Make's head. Make un round. Make
two eyes. Make a nose. Make a mouth. Make's arms. Make's
fingers," etc. And, with some "free-handling," Abel would strike
the five fingers off, one by one, in five screeching strokes of the
slate-pencil. But his art was conventional, and when Jan said,
"Make un a miller's thumb," he was puzzled, and could only bend the
shortest of the five strokes slightly backwards to represent the
trade-mark of his forefathers.

And when a little later Jan said one day, "'Tis a galley crow, that
is. NOW make a pitcher of a MAN, Abel dear!" Abel found that the
scarecrow figure was the limit of his artist powers, and
thenceforward it was Jan who "made pitchers."

He drew from dawn to dusk upon the little slate which he wore tied
by a bit of string to the belt of his pinafore. He drew his foster-
mother, and Abel, and the kitten, and the clock, and the flower-pots
in the window, and the windmill itself, and every thing he saw or
imagined. And he drew till his slate was full on both sides, and
then in very primitive fashion he spat and rubbed it all out and
began again. And whenever Jan's face was washed, the two faces of
his slate were washed too; and with this companion he was perfectly
happy and constantly employed.

Now it was Abel who gave the subjects for the pictures, and Jan who
made them, and it was good Abel also who washed the slate, and
rubbed the well-worn stumps of pencil to new points upon the round-
house floor.

They often went together to a mound at some little distance, where,
seated side by side, they "made a mill" upon the slate, Jan drawing,
and Abel dictating the details to be recorded.

"Put in the window, Jan," he would say; "and another, and another,
and another, and another. Now put the sails. Now put the stage.
Now put daddy by the door."

On one point Jan was obstinate. He steadily refused to "make
Gearge" upon his slate in any capacity whatever. Perhaps it was in
this habit of constantly gazing at all things about him, in order to
commit them to his slate, which gave a strange, dreamy expression to
Jan's dark eyes. Perhaps it was sky-gazing, or the windmiller's
trick of watching the clouds, or perhaps it was something else, from
which Jan derived an erectness of carriage not common among the
children about him, and a quaint way of carrying his little chin in
the air as if he were listening to voices from a higher level than
that of the round-house floor.

If he had lived farther north, he could hardly have escaped the
suspicion of uncanniness. He was strangely like a changeling among
the miller's children.

To gratify that old whim of his about the red shawl, his doting
foster-mother made him little crimson frocks; and as he wandered
over the downs in his red dress and a white pinafore, his yellow
hair flying in the breeze, his chin up, his black eyes wide open,
with slate in one hand, his pencil in the other, and the sandy
kitten clinging to his shoulder (for Jan never lowered his chin to
help her to balance herself), he looked more like some elf than a
child of man.

He had queer, independent ways of his own, too; freaks,--not naughty
enough for severe punishment, but sufficiently out of the routine
and unexpected to cause Mrs. Lake some trouble.

He was no sooner firmly established on his own legs, with the power
of walking, or rather toddling, independent of help, than he took to
making expeditions on the downs by himself. He would watch his
opportunity, and when his foster-mother's back was turned, and the
door of the round-house opened by some grist-bringer, he would slip
out and toddle off with a swiftness decidedly dangerous to a balance
so lately acquired.

Sometimes Mrs. Lake would catch sight of him, and if her hands were
in the wash-tub, or otherwise engaged, she would cry to the nurse-
boy, "Abel, he be off! Jan's off." A comic result of which was
that Jan generally announced his own departure in the same words,
though not always loud enough to bring detection upon himself.

When his chance came and the door was open, he would pause for half
a moment on the threshold to say, in a tone of intense self-
satisfaction, "He be off. Abel! Janny's off!" and forthwith toddle
out as hard as he could go. As he grew older, he dropped this form;
but the elfish habit of appearing and disappearing at his own whim
was not cured.

It was a puzzle as well as a care to Mrs. Lake. All her own
children had given trouble in their own way,--a way much the same
with all of them. They squalled for what they wanted, and, like
other mothers of her class, she served them whilst her patience
lasted, and slapped them when it came to an end. They clung about
her when she was cooking, in company with the cats, and she put tit-
bits into their dirty paws, and threw scraps to the clean paws of
the cats, till the nuisance became overwhelming, and she kicked the
cats and slapped the children, who squalled for both. They dirted
their clothes, they squabbled, they tore the gathers out of her
dresses, and wailed and wept, and were beaten with a hazel-stick by
their father, and pacified with treacle-stick by the mother; and so
tumbled up, one after the other, through childish customs and
misdemeanors, almost as uniform as the steps of the mill-ladders.

But the customs and misdemeanors of the foster-child were very
different.

His appetite to be constantly eating, drinking, or sucking--if it
were but a bennet or grass-stalk--was less voracious than that of
the other children. Mrs. Lake gave him Benjamin's share of treacle-
stick, but he has been known to give some of it away, and to
exchange peppermint-drops for a slate-pencil rather softer than his
own. He would have had Benjamin's share of "bits" from the
cupboard, but that the other children begged so much oftener, and
Mrs. Lake was not capable of refusing any thing to a steady tease.
He could walk the whole length of a turnip-field without taking a
munch, unless he were hungry, though even dear old Abel invariably
exercised his jaws upon a "turmut." And he made himself ill with
hedge-fruits and ground-roots seldomer than any other member of the
family.

So far, Jan gave less trouble than the rest. But then he had a
spirit of enterprise which never misled them. From the effects of
this, Abel saved his life more than once. On one occasion he pulled
him out of the wash-tub, into which he had plunged head-foremost, in
a futile endeavor to blow soap-bubbles through a fragment of clay-
pipe, which he had picked up on the road, and which made his lips
sore for a week, besides nearly causing his death by drowning.

From diving into the deepest recesses of the windmill it became
hopeless to try to hinder him, and when Abel was fairly taken into
the business Mrs. Lake relied upon his care for his foster-brother.
And Jan was wary and nimble, for his own part, and gave little
trouble. His great delight was to gaze first out of one window, and
then out of the opposite one; either blinking as the great sails
drove by, as if they would strike him in the face, or watching the
shadows of them invisible, as they passed like noon-day ghosts over
the grass.

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