The Miller's Niece, and some distant connections

Front matter

AND SOME DISTANT CONNECTIONS BY HENRY W. LUCY AUTHOR OF ' GIDEON FLEYCE, Jrt TC. LONDON HODDER AND STOUGHTON 27 PATERNOSTER ROW MDCCCXCVI CONTENTS PAGE THE MILLER'S NIECE i THE COBLEDICK TRAGEDY .... 94 THE COLONEL m MR. JOSIAH SMITH'S CABMAN . . .142 BACK O' WHIDDY . . . . .161 FROM THE CHAPEL ROOF . . . .192 THE LITTLE SMALLWARE SHOP — A VERY VULGAR STORY CONTENTS VI PAGE ROOMS 23 AND 24 — A STORY OF A FOURTH STOREY 232 SOMEBODY'S CHILD . . . .253 MRS. WHITE-SMITH'S AFTERNOON PARTY . 275 MR. JONES: A PART OF HIS LIFE — AND OF MINE ....... 296 THE UNDERSTUDIER

Chapter I

Somewhere on the great main highway going north -by -west from London, there lies a little town which once upon a time played a big part in English history. A great battle was fought in a meadow close by its now crumbling walls. A mile or two off, following the winding river past the park gates where the hounds meet, lies the wreck of one of the chief cities of our Roman conquerors. So, what with bones and skulls ploughed up from the battle-field, and coins and fragments of earthenware vessels dug up from the grave of the dead-and-buried city, the museum at Battleborough (which is stuck in a back street and fills some cheerless rooms approached by a naked B wooden staircase) is not a bad place wherein to pass an idle hour. Like all small country towns in peaceful England, Battleborough is from time to time rent from circumference to centre by the fiercest struggles heard of since the Capulets and the Montagues died out, and Venice found peace.

Sometimes the casus belli is supplied by a new sewer, around the excavations of which the in habitants range themselves under the banners provided by the two local papers. On one of these it is written that, the sewer completed, Battleborough will be the happiest and most healthful place in the world. The other declares that not only will the sewer, when finished, run in the wrong direction and poison everybody, but that no sewer is needed, and that the scheme is floated merely to put money into the purse of Mr. Councillor Higginbottom, or to gratify the boundless ambition of Alderman Dibble. For many years Battleborough was the scene of a fearsome contest about a Market Hall, which ended in the erection of a building so enormous in extent, so imposing in appearance, that it utterly swamps the little town, asserting itself from all possible points of view, dwarfing the Castle, the Grammar School, the Town Hall, and all the other public buildings with which antiquity has dowered Battleborough.

Of course it is never full, and so far from paying, as promised, eight per cent interest on the capital invested, it does not meet its current expenses. Indeed the Battle borough Sentinel, which wanted the Market Hall built higher up the street and from a rival set of plans, has not scrupled to print an article in which it says the Market Hall will in the end land the borough in serious financial difficulties. The actual wording of the passage here paraphrased runs thus : ' This monstrous outcome of political rancour and municipal rottenness is hanging like a white elephant around the neck of the good old town, and will at no distant date sink it fifty fathoms deep in the shoals of the Bankruptcy Court.' Mr. Josiah Smith, F.R.S.A., was musing on these matters one bright January afternoon as he sat at the open window of an old Battleborough hotel which looks down the High Street.

The sun was flooding the broad street with a warm light, to which the northern zone of the planet had not for many months been accustomed, and the shadows cast upon the pavement from the many angled gables and roof-trees of the shops were something to walk in gratefully. A light wind was blowing from the south. A caged bird was singing somewhere from an open window. There was a faint scent of flowers from a bountiful dish of snowdrops and crocuses on Josiah's table. It seemed as if a day from the coming spring had lost its way and dropped into the middle of January. The High Street looked so sleepy and so peaceful, that if Josiah had not caught sight over the roofs of the houses of one of the ugly towers of the portentous Market Hall, he would have doubted whether any one ever spoke here in a voice above a whisper.

There were at least as many as ten people in the street, but they moved about in a slow noiseless manner, as if they too were shadows. There did not appear to be any customers in any of the shops, for the proprietors were standing at the doors of their several estab lishments looking dreamily at each other across the street. A man crossing the road with a bucket of water in either hand stopped in the middle apparently plunged in a brown study, in which, as far as possible disturbance from passing carts and carriages was concerned, he might have continued till sundown. Into this stillness suddenly strode a man who seemed of quite another race from that which peoples Battleborough. He came up the hill from the railway station, and of course might thence have come from anywhither, supposing he had reached Battleborough by rail.

But his soiled boots and his mud-bespattered trousers showed that he had been walking, apparently a long distance, evidently through muddy lanes. The lithe straight figure, with the swinging walk, seemed very familiar to Josiah. As the new-comer partly turned his head to look up at the window where the caged bird was singing, he saw with surprise it was Frank Fisher. Frank was an old schoolfellow whom Josiah had met in later years in London, where he was doing something more than studying for an artist. He was really selling his pictures, and seemed on a fair way to competence, if not to fame. This was a long time ago, nearly ten years, and in the meantime Josiah had lost sight of him. He disappeared from the particular point at which their circles met, and Josiah had ceased to think of him, just as Frank would have ceased to think of Mr. Smith if that erudite person had finally disappeared in one of the excavations he was in the habit of superintending.

They were both busy, and had other things to think of than old school fellows and disappearances which, if sudden, were not attractively mysterious. Josiah asked about him once or twice when he found an opportunity, and received replies which pointed vaguely to the certainty that ' something had happened ' in the country. Some said Frank was married, others that he had loved and lost ; whilst some were of opinion that he had loved and had failed to win. Information was vague, but the impression was precise. Frank had not done very well, else why should he have left London ? If he were married properly and desirably, he would of course have brought his wife to London, and built himself a house in the Queen Anne style at Hampstead, hampering him self in a respectable way with indebtedness to the builder.

Frank had chosen to go his own way, and it was at this moment leading him down the High Street at a rapid swinging pace, which caused the medita tive tradesmen at their open doors slowly to turn their heads and gape at the phenomenon. Josiah added to their perplexity and imparted something like an atmosphere of excitement to the street by presently rushing after Frank, catching him up just before he fell under the black shadow of the stupendous Market Hall. He was not quite so glad to see Josiah as that placid personage thought he should have been. But this feeling passed off in a moment. He had evidently debated in his own mind whether he should be friendly or forbidding. Old instincts prevailed, and Battleborough received another shock by the spectacle of two men violently shaking hands with each other, working away for their lives as if their arms were a pump and the house on fire.

Battleborough had had enough of excitement for one day, so Josiah suggested that if Frank were remaining in the town he had better come and stay at his hotel, where they could be as brisk as they pleased without bringing about fatal disturbance in the sleepy street. Yes, Frank would stay in Battleborough. Such indeed had been his intention. He had arrived in the town at some dead hour of the night by the mail train going north. He had left his luggage at the station and then gone for a walk. ' An extraordinary proceeding, but I suppose none of the hotels were open.' ' I did not try,' he said, producing a pipe of German manufacture a few sizes smaller than the Market Hall. ' I only know the parcel office was closed, and I left my traps with a porter, who, now I think of it, was probably a night man, and will not be discoverable till to-night, if indeed he has not appropriated the things.' ' But it is now three o'clock in the afternoon, and the train arrived, or at least was due, at three o'clock this morning.

You must have had a nice long walk.' ' It was long, and if one is fond of the country it was nice. There and back it makes twenty five miles, and as I breakfasted at eight and have had nothing since, perhaps you would not mind dining early.' After dinner, Frank, whose friendship had been rather spasmodic than soothing, began to settle down into something more like his own manner. He once more produced out of his trousers pocket the huge wooden piece of architecture he called a pipe — a thing with a bowl large enough to serve as a store for a week's reserve of tobacco for an ordinary man. Josiah was anxious to learn something of Frank's history. He already knew that he was not married. A man who has a pistol -pocket made in the rear of his trousers, and where the free-born American carries a pistol thrusts the stem of his pipe, is not likely also to have a wife.

It had an odd effect, and must have been uncomfortable to have this gigantic pipe-head standing out by his thigh, the stem being disposed down the leg of his breeches. To Frank it seemed neither ludicrous nor inconvenient. It was handy when he wanted it (which he often did), and when he had finished he could stick it in there without the trouble of making too sure that the sod was extinguished. In full confidence he told Josiah he had had a good deal of trouble with his pipes before he thought of this device. He was always losing them by leaving them about, or was suddenly reminded that he had not lost them by a smell of burning and discovery that his pocket was smouldering. After all it did not come to much what he told Josiah of his life during the past ten years. He had been abroad, he said, studying.

He had spent a good deal of time in Germany, had learnt to drink thin beer and talk a thick language. He had seen all the picture galleries between Dresden and Madrid, Antwerp and Florence. He had sketched in them all, selling his pictures on the spot just for what they would bring. Sufficient for the day were the earnings thereof, and Frank, who, if he had only decently married and embarked upon the Queen Anne house at Hampstead or St. John's Wood, would have speedily paid off the mortgage, probably had not at the present moment fifty pounds in hand. He had in his wanderings picked up a good deal of health, a little flesh and much muscle. His twenty-five-mile walk after his night's journey in the train had apparently taken no more out of him than ordinary man suffers after adopting the great Johnsonian suggestion and taking a walk down Fleet Street.

He was scarcely as yet in the prime of life, being, as near as Josiah knew, thirty-five years of age. His face had that odd characteristic sometimes noted, that whilst across the street or a few feet off you would think its owner younger than his age, when you come to sit by him and hear him talk, or watch him fall into a fit of meditation, he seems at least ten years older. Frank had evidently had trouble beyond those losses and partial conflagrations of which he spoke just now. It may have happened years ago. It may have been the cause of his going abroad ; it may have come to him in foreign lands. Whatever it was, wherever it had chanced, the memory of it had evidently come back recently with acute pain. He was as restless as if he had the toothache or suppressed gout. He ate his dinner voraciously after campaigning fashion ; to an acute observer another indication of his recent mode of life.

Ten years ago Frank was rather fastidious, and was always the pink of courtesy. He didn't eat with his knife now. But he ate in a hurry, gulping his meat down with mighty draughts out of a tankard of the size of which he spoke contemptuously. Perhaps this country walk in the too early morning had merely been the outcome of this restlessness. It must have been a dreadful thing to Frank in his present mood to be shut up in a railway carriage for five hours. But, then, what was he doing at Battleborough, and would not a walk of something less than twenty-five miles and an absence of twelve hours have sufficed to soothe his restlessness ? Josiah started on the track of this walk once or twice, but Frank always sheered off, grunting out between the whiffs of his por tentous pipe references to foreign or not particularly relevant subjects.

Among other of his peculiarities, Frank did not appear to have any notion of going to bed. Midnight had sounded from the old church tower close by. A deeper stillness had fallen on the solitude of Battleborough. The waitress — thank Heaven there was no male meddler about the coffee-room of this hotel — looked in once or twice and ostentatiously poked the fire or trimmed the lamp. Then came the landlady, who wished to know what time the gentlemen would have breakfast. After a pause she came in again and said good-night! They said good-night She was gone. The lights were put out in the passage, and Frank and Josiah were probably the only people awake in Battleborough. ' I know this place very well,' Frank said, after a long pause, during which he sat steadily staring at the fire and gradually disappearing amid a cloud of smoke. ' The first ten-pound note I ever earned was for a sketch I made of a butcher's shop with the proprietor standing at the door.

You may have observed that the proprietors mostly do stand at the doors of the shops here. This one was so like Falstaff that I expect the gay old roysterer must have spent a little time at Battleborough either before or after the battle in which he took such a distinguished part. Of course it was the shop, not the butcher, that made the picture. A wonderful old place with an over hanging front, through which the supporting beams honestly showed themselves. I saw a building something like it at Fribourg, on the borders of the Black Forest.' This was a promising opening, though the scent was now going a little wrong. If Frank once got into the Black Forest he would certainly lose himself. ' Did you paint anything else in Battleborough?' Josiah asked, with innocent intent to bring him back. ' Yes, I painted everything.

The Castle, bits of the Grammar School, and the old church on the southern highway. That is one of the finest churches in this part of the country. It had a very good organ, and the singing was fair. But the sermon was lamentable, the poorest hash of dead and dry discourse, the thinnest of what Mr. Carlyle, if he went to church, would call " thrice boiled colewort." It was a painful contrast, the grand old church, and in the pulpit this feeblest specimen of humanity. Here one literally found sermons in stones. It did me good to be amid the solemn stillness. It was perfect rest to sit there quiet and alone. It was well when the organ played ; it was more than bearable when the choir sang some simple hymns of the style just then coming into repute. But when this sparrow-twittering from the pulpit began, I used to feel inclined to walk up the aisle to the pulpit and take out bodily the round little fat man with his full-moon face, whom a satiric stroke of fortune had ordained to talk of high things in this old church.

How the people would have stared if they had seen me striding up the aisle, and how terrified the little man would have been ! I could have done it quite easily,' he said, laughing quietly to himself and stretching out his two brawny arms ; ' and I declare that more than once I had to walk out of the church lest the temptation should be too strong for me. He was a very good man, I believe, and had not the slightest notion that he was talking twaddle. He would have made an excellent draper, or would have shone in the grocery line. Or, if his tendency towards the Church was irresistible, he would have been a great comfort as deacon. Some how or other he got his B.A. degree, and the Bishop, careless of the fact that he was contributing substantially towards the disestablishment of the Church, placed the poor man in this incongruous position.' ' Still it would have been a little awkward if you had yielded to temptation.

There is, as far as I know, no particular place in the Liturgy where you might have stopped him. Since you have been abroad there has been a Public Worship Act passed, which creates a locus standi for the Aggrieved Parishioner. But I do not think that the Act provides for a parishioner, however aggrieved, walking up the aisle to the pulpit, taking up the parson under his arm and dropping him outside among the tombstones. Besides, though you may have been aggrieved, you were not, I suppose, a parishioner.' The artful Josiah was pumping now. ' No, I was only staying here sketching. But I liked the place, and had some friends in the country close by, and so lingered on a good deal.' ' Did you sketch anything else ? ' ' Yes ; I made a very good sketch of a Magi strate's Court in a little room off the Market Place.

There was not much to be got out of the room. Four bare walls ; for furniture, three chairs, a table, and a little space railed off in which men stood, charged with all sorts of crimes, from killing a rabbit to slaying a man. I made very good portraits of the three sober, not to say stupid, men in the three chairs, and of the clerk taking down the evidence. This last was a back view. I got a sketch in profile of five reporters, three on one side and two on the other. This was a big case, you will understand. There was quite a crowd of people surging outside. But the room being so small, it was thought best to avoid invidiousness by keeping out the public altogether. Then there was a chuckle -headed policeman standing close at my right elbow. There were half a dozen more in the background, but I did not get them in.' ' I suppose you did the prisoner ? ' ' Yes ; I think I did him pretty well too, though that was naturally the hardest job.' Frank was talking in slow jerky tones, quite altered from the amused manner in which he had recalled his temptation in the church.

There did not seem anything particular in it, though it did cross Josiah's mind to ask how he had managed to get in where the public were not admitted. But he went on, and when a pause came, Josiah had forgotten this question and asked instead, ' Did you work out the sketch ? ' 'No.' ' Have you got the sketch ? ' ' No ; I could not bring it away. ' How was that ? ' 'Well, you see, I did it with a black-lead C pencil on the wall of the cell to which I was removed, after the three wise men in the three Windsor chairs had made up their minds to commit me for trial on a charge of wilful murder.' Frank said this so quietly, without the slightest variation from the low, almost sleepy tone in which he had been speaking, that Josiah thought it was a joke. ' No,' he said, positively yawning as he rose and thrust the pipe -stem into its appointed receptacle. ' It is no joke.

Ten years ago I was tried for wilful murder in this charming old town, and I suppose very narrowly escaped being hanged. So now good-night. I will tell you all about it in the morning if you care to know. But when a man has walked twenty-five miles and only had eight pipes he begins to feel in need of rest' Josiah began to suspect that much smoking had made Frank mad.

Chapter II Josiah

came down to breakfast the next morning a little late, and with a general sensation of having taken in by the pores too much tobacco-smoke. He liked a cigar himself, but drew the line at a pipe the size of which suggests that the most convenient way to fill it would be with a pitch fork. Frank was just the sort of fellow to smoke in the room before breakfast, and Josiah sniffed cautiously as he slipped into the room prepared to make protest against this barbaric habit. But the room was empty and the air fresh and pure. A bright fire burned in the grate, and the window was open, letting in the keen sunlit morning air. As Frank had not yet come down, Josiah went out for a stroll through the High Street. Frank not having shown up when he returned, he went up to his room with intent to rouse him.

The door was open, and the room in the condition of confusion that might have been expected after a night's tenancy by a man with such a pipe. Josiah rang the coffee-room bell, and asked if the gentleman had breakfasted. ' Oh no, sir,' said the landlady, evidently glad to get rid of Frank on any terms. ' He would not have any breakfast, but paid his bill, and told me to tell you he had gone for a walk, and that you were not to wait breakfast for him, as he might be late.' ' Paid his bill ! Why, I thought he was going to stay here for some days.' ' Well, I hope not, sir,' said the bristling land lady, permitting the long-pending storm to break forth. ' A gentleman as sits up till all hours of the night and then smokes in his bedroom, walking about in his boots till the gentleman underneath can't get a wink of sleep, is more free nor welcome.' Josiah felt that all this was a little hard on him.

Life in Battleborough had been very pleasant till Frank burst in upon its silent scene. Josiah was exceedingly comfortable at the hotel, and was the object of several of those delicate attentions which landladies pay to quietly-disposed gentlemen who go to bed at decent hours and do not smoke in the coffee-room. He was getting on nicely with his great work on Under ground England, which it may be desirable to explain has nothing to do with mines, but gives what Josiah trusts will be found an interesting account of archæological vestiges of the earlier denizens of these islands. Josiah had rather meant to take Frank over the buried Roman city that lay at the gates of Battleborough. Now he was gone as mysteriously as he had come, and had left disorder and distrust behind him. What did the man mean by these mysterious pedestrian excursions ?

Josiah made up his mind to trouble no more about Frank. Friendship established at school and revived after an interval of ten years is a delicate flower, and is trodden under foot by walks of the kind which seem to have a peculiar fascination for Frank. Josiah did not get on very well with his work, which required a cool head and undisturbed nerves. He was certain Frank would turn up again. It was impossible to sit down to write with the feeling of expectation that the silence would be broken by the sound of a heavy foot on the stairs, and that the faint scent of the crocuses would be smothered by the vile smell of a pipe. Frank did not come. But the second morning after his departure there arrived a letter. It was dated ' The Mill, Ellandale, Wednesday morning,' and ran thus : — Dear Josiah — I did not mean to run away from you the other morning.

But after I had had my tub I felt a strong walking fit on, and not being quite certain where it might lead me, I observed the precaution of paying my bill. I am glad I did so, for I have settled down here for a bit, and have taken seriously to sketch ing again. It is a charming place, and turns to me the face of an old friend. I used to stop here awhiles, ten years ago, and find little change, though people, like myself, are older. I have my old room at the mill, and, what is better, there is a room on the same floor for you. As you are one of those wretched creatures with nerves, and have, on reading thus far, vividly pictured yourself lying awake through the night listening to the roar of the mill stream flowing under your bedroom floor, I may as well dispel the pleasing illusion. Sandy he belongs to the mill, And the mill belongs to Sandy still ; but Sandy, or his forefathers, observed the wise precau tion of erecting their house at a convenient distance from the mill.

You will like to know this. But what is more to the point is the remarkable opportunity you will find here of adding a few particulars to Underground England. I fancy that at one time Julius Cæsar or some other distinguished person of that epoch must have lived a few feet underneath the present level of Ellandale. However that be, the ploughmen here are always turning over cylindrical pottery, which I believe are the chimney-tops of the buried city. Come and dig it up, there's a good man, and for goodness' sake tell us who or what it is we are living over. I had a talk yesterday afternoon with old Medge's ploughman, whom I overheard using bad language about one of these things he had just turned up. He will have it they are old drain-pipes. But I am sure they are Roman chimney-tops, and you would, after very short and inexpensive inquiry, be able to settle the question whether the Romans used patent flues.

You need not walk unless you like. You can take train from Battleborough which will land you at Rib ston, where I will be to meet you on the arrival of the train at three to-morrow afternoon. So no more at present from yours truly, Frank. It is probable that if Josiah had, untrammelled, taken his own way, he would have declined this invitation and stayed where he was. He felt that the excitement into which he had been plunged ever since Frank, comet -like, dashed across the orbit of his peaceful progress, was unhealthful both for body and mind. He was unable to concentrate his mind upon his task, and whereas under favourable circumstances he had added to his great work as much in a week as would make ten lines of print, he had done absolutely nothing for the last four days. But this man Frank gave him no choice.

He was like the centurion, saying to one, Go, and he goeth, and to Josiah, Come, ' and,' added Josiah, with a comical air of perplexity, ' he cometh. If he had only given me time to write and propose other arrangements. But he has fixed the hour, and the train, and the place ; there is nothing left for me but to go.' To do justice to Josiah's native shrewdness, the bait about the ancient Roman chimney-pots had not the slightest weight with him. He did not know whether Frank meant this for a low joke, but was sure that if he were in earnest it did not matter, since his ignorance on all that related to tesselated antiquity was appalling. Frank was at the station to meet him on the following afternoon, and took his arrival quite as a matter of course. He seized hold of Josiah's modest valise, and with a hearty ' Come along, old man,' trudged off down the lane at a per fectly ridiculous pace.