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.{16}
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.{17}
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.{18} 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{19} 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{20} 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{21} 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.{22} “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{23} 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{24} 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.
{25}
* * * * *
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,{26} 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{27} 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!