I told you that when we took over the ‘Stretford Arms’ we kept most of the people about the place, and among them the barmaid, Miss Ward—Clara we generally called her. She was a great help to us, knowing the ways of the place and the customers; for you may be sure everything was very strange to us at first. If I were to tell you that once or twice I really felt inclined to sit down and cry, you would laugh at me; but it was true. I said to Harry, when we went to bed the first night, quite worn out, “Harry, we shall be ruined! We’ve gone into a business we know nothing about, and we shall lose all our money.”
Harry laughed, and said I was a goose, and he was soon fast asleep. But I lay awake for ever so long, imagining all manner of dreadful things; even seeing ourselves seized for rent, the customers having all gone away through my knowing nothing about the business. And when I wasn’t thinking of that, I was seeing a great big navvy come into the bar and begin to swear, and throw quart pots at the plate glass, and Harry jumping over the bar and having a fight with him, and both of them rolling over on the floor, and knocking their heads against the spittoons.
If once I begin to think instead of going to sleep, I think dreadful things, and they seem quite real at the time. I wonder why it is that everything in your life seems going wrong sometimes when you lie awake at night, and when you’ve been to sleep and wake up in the morning everything seems to have come right again?{29}
I know that the first night at our new home, when I didn’t sleep, beside the things I’ve told you, I imagined people coming and taking our rooms, and staying for a week and not paying their bills, and I couldn’t get out of my head a story I had once heard about a gentleman who stayed a month at an hotel, and lived on the fat of the land, borrowed ten pounds, and went away leaving a very heavy box, and when the box was opened it was full of nothing but bricks.
And I was dreadfully frightened about the licensing laws. I didn’t know much about them, but I had read cases in the papers about landlords being summoned, and the first night, when it was closing time, and the customers in our bar and smoking-room were slow in going, and Harry had to say, “Now, gentlemen, please!” twice, and still they stopped talking, and one old gentleman didn’t seem as if he’d ever get into his overcoat, being a little paralyzed on one side, I felt inclined to drop down on my knees and say, “Oh, do go; please go! Fancy if the policeman comes and Harry’s summoned!”
Of course I soon got over this sort of thing, and now they tell me I make a very good landlady indeed; but at first everything made me dreadfully nervous, and I made a few mistakes.
Miss Ward, as I told you, was our right hand. She was a tall, rather pretty girl, with dark hair and eyes, and about five-and-twenty, with a history, which she told me one afternoon when we were slack, and we were both sitting in the parlour doing needlework.
Her father was a farmer in Essex, but, times being bad, she was taken by her uncle, who had a large hotel and no children of his own, and brought up like a lady, only just superintending things that her aunt, being an invalid, couldn’t see to.
Her uncle had made a fortune with his hotel, and could have retired, but instead of that he took to sporting, and went to race meetings, and was a good deal away from home.
After a time, people began to notice a change in his manner, and he neglected his business altogether, and would come home sometimes with his dog-cart full of legs{30} of mutton, and poultry, and things, which he said he’d bought cheap. One day he brought home fifty ducks in his trap; and another day he brought six mastiff dogs, and they were all kept chained up in the yard, and a nice noise they made.
But that wasn’t the worst. He got very violent if his wife objected to his buying things, and she said she was sure he wasn’t right in his head. After a terrible quarrel about his buying four billiard tables, and having them sent home, with nowhere to put them, he went off, and was away for weeks, and when he came back he never said where he’d been, but letters began to come, and his wife opened them, and it seemed he’d been about the country and had bought horses and traps everywhere, and had left them at different yards at hotels, and there they were, eating their heads off—the horses, not the traps.
And they found out that he’d bought a sailing vessel at Brighton, and it was lying on the beach; and in London he’d been to a sale and bought a lot of pictures, and had them sent to a furniture depository, where they were standing at a fearful rent.
It seemed as though he couldn’t think of enough ways to fool his money away, and they found he’d got rid of thousands.
His wife went to a solicitor to see what could be done to stop him getting rid of any more, and when he found it out he jumped about the place and smashed the furniture, and went down in the cellar with a hammer and broke bottles, till you could have swum about the place in mixed wine.
Everybody said that his brain was softening, or something of the sort, and he would have to be put under restraint. Poor Clara told me they had a dreadful time with him, and it came to the worst one evening, when there was a ball and supper being given in the big room belonging to the hotel. Everything was ready for the supper; pies and jellies, and creams, and tipsy cakes: and her uncle went into the supper-room when the table was all beautifully laid; and when the guests began to come in, he ordered them all out, saying it was his house,{31} and he wasn’t going to have a pack of people dancing and singing, when they ought to be in bed and asleep; and, before anybody knew what he was going to do, he seized the jellies and the creams and threw them at the guests, regularly bombarding them, so to speak, before anybody could stop him. It was a dreadful sight. The poor ladies shrieked, as jellies and creams came all over them; and one gentleman was smothered all over his head with a dish of tipsy cake, the custard running down over his face.
The people who were just coming in at the doorway couldn’t get back, because the people behind pressed forward; and there were tongues, and hams, and patties, and fowls, and jellies, and greasy things flying right and left and all among them—that madman seizing things with both hands to hurl at them.
When Miss Ward told me about it first, I couldn’t for the life of me help laughing. I could see the jellies and the creams hitting the people, and I thought how ridiculous they must have looked; but, of course, it was very dreadful, and that was the finishing stroke to the house. People wouldn’t come there to have things thrown at them by the landlord. And when he was put in an asylum, where he died, it was found out he had got rid of so much money, and was liable for so much more, that his affairs had to be wound up and the business sold. Out of the wreck there was only just enough left for the aunt to live on, and so Miss Ward had to go out as a barmaid, her own father not being able to offer her a home, through a large family, and farming having become so bad.
She had had a good education, though, and could play the piano and spoke a little French, and was very ladylike; and that, I dare say, made me take to her at once. I liked her so much that I always tried to make the place as easy for her as I could; and when one day she said she hoped I would have no objection to her young man coming there to see her occasionally, I said, “Oh dear no; certainly not.”
I knew myself how hard it was never to be able to speak a word to your sweetheart, when perhaps he’s got plenty of time of an evening, now and then, just to come and say a few words to you and cheer you up.{32}
When I told Harry he was quite agreeable. You may be sure he remembered how he used to come and see me, and how much happier we had been when we could see each other comfortably without deceiving anybody.
“She’s a nice girl,” he said, “and I’m sure her young man will be respectable, and not one of those low fellows, who get in with barmaids and lead them on to change bad money for them, and do all manner of dreadful things with the till.”
It was about a week after that, one Sunday afternoon, that Miss Ward’s young man, who lived in London, came to our house for the first time. Directly I saw him I didn’t like him. He’d got red hair, which, of course, oughtn’t to be against a man, because it’s a thing he can’t help—but there was what I call a “shifty” look in his face. He never looked at you when he spoke to you, and when you shook hands with him, his hand was one of those cold, clammy hands that I never could abide.
But he was very agreeable. He brought me a cucumber and a bunch of flowers, and, it being teatime, we asked him to join us. He was very affectionate and nice to Miss Ward, and as they sat there with us, and she kept looking up in his face, and showing how proud she was of every word he said, my thoughts went back to the day when Harry came home from sea, and my good, kind mistress let him come down in the kitchen and have tea with us, and that softened me towards Miss Ward’s young man—Mr. Shipsides his name was—and I made up my mind I’d done him a wrong in not liking him.
How he did talk, to be sure! All that teatime nobody else could get a word in edgeways. He told us all about the business he’d bought in London, and what a nice home he was getting together, to be ready for Miss Ward when she married him. Poor girl, how her eyes brightened as he talked of all the beautiful things she was to have in her home!
He said that he’d taken a splendid shop, and stocked it in the grocery line, having been an assistant at a grocer’s, and come into money lately, and that he had the promise of all his former masters’ customers to deal with him. He told us the first day he opened he had the shop crowded{33} all day, and had to take on two extra assistants, and that among his customers were dukes, marquises, earls, and barons.
Harry looked up at that and said, “Do you mean to say that swells like that come to your shop after their grocery?” “Not themselves,” said Mr. Shipsides; “but their names are on my books.” “You’re doing very well,” said Harry, “if you’ve got a business like that—you must be making money fast.” “I am,” said Mr. Shipsides; “but of course I can’t put much by yet, because I’ve got relatives’ money in the business that helped to start me, and that’s all got to be paid out first, and the place cost me a lot of money to fit up and stock; but by-and-by, if things go on as they are now, I shall be on the high-road to fortune, and Clara will ride in her carriage.”
Of course, I said I hoped she would; but all the same, it made me wince a little. I had just a little feeling of womanly jealousy, which, I suppose, was only natural, at the idea of my barmaid riding in her carriage, while I was taking a twopenny ’bus, in a manner of speaking, for, of course, where we lived there were no twopenny ’buses, or sixpenny ones either for the matter of that.
I think it took Harry a bit aback, too, hearing the fellow go on like that, for he said, “I hope when you’ve got your carriage you’ll drive down here with it. It’ll do us good, you know, to let folks see that we’ve got a connection with carriage people.”
Miss Ward laughed at that, but Mr. Shipsides coloured up almost as red as his hair, and I saw he didn’t like it, so I turned the conversation. But he always got it back on to himself, and the wonderful fellow he was, and the wonderful things he was going to do. He made out that he was very highly connected, although he’d been a grocer’s assistant, and said his father was the son of a baronet, but had married against his father’s (the baronet’s) wish, and had gone away—being proud—and never spoken to any member of the family again; and when he died had made himself and his brothers and sisters vow they would never seek a reconciliation.
“I never heard of a Sir anything Shipsides,” Harry said.
“That’s very likely,” said the fellow, “because that{34} wasn’t the name. My father was so indignant that he changed it by Act of Parliament; but his real name was one that is known and respected throughout the length and breadth of the land.”
And afterwards we found out that his father wasn’t dead at all, but alive, and that he was——
But I mustn’t anticipate.
Mr. Shipsides, after tea was over, had a cigar with Harry while Miss Ward went into the bar, the house being opened again. Harry got out a box of cigars and put them on the table, always doing the thing well, like a sailor, for though he is in business on shore, he’ll never quite get rid of the sea. I had to go upstairs to see to things, and Harry went into the bar, so Mr. Shipsides was left alone with a bottle of whiskey and the box of cigars. He didn’t stop long, saying he had to catch a train back to town, so he said good-bye to Miss Ward and shook hands with Harry in the bar, and went off.
And when Harry went into the parlour the whiskey-bottle was half empty, and quite a dozen cigars were gone, and as Shipsides couldn’t have smoked them in the time, he must have filled his pockets.
Harry and I looked at each other when we found it out, but I said, “Don’t say anything before Miss Ward, it will only hurt her feelings;” but after that I tried to get into her confidence about her young man, having an uneasy feeling that he wasn’t quite good enough for her.
But what she said about him made him out to be quite a beautiful character. She said that he had brought up his younger brother and his sisters, and had paid for their education out of his salary, and that he was a most steady young fellow, and had been teacher in a Sunday-school, and was always asked to tea with the clergyman on the Sundays that he didn’t come to see her.
“But how did he get the money to buy this grand business he talks about?” I said.
“Oh,” she said, “it was left him in his late master’s will. His master had a great respect for him because he managed his business so well while he was ill. It wasn’t quite enough to start the business, but the rest he borrowed from his friends.{35}”
“Well, my dear,” I said, “I hope you’ll be very happy.”
“I’m sure we shall,” she said; “he’s so steady and so affectionate, and he consults me about everything for our home, and everything I want I’m to have.”
“Aren’t you going to live at the business, then?” I asked.
“Oh no,” she said; “Tom” (that was his Christian name) “says it’s not a nice locality to live in, so he’s taken a house a little way out.”
I didn’t say any more, but I thought a good deal. Still, the poor girl might be right about her lover; and his filling his pockets with the cigars might only be a peculiarity. The richest people often do that sort of thing, because I remember Harry telling me about a nobleman, Lord Somebody, who was invited to lunch on board a ship in harbour that Harry was on. There was a beautiful cold champagne luncheon laid out, and Harry saw this nobleman, while everybody was eating, put two roast fowls in his coat-pockets, and then try to get a bottle of champagne in as well. The captain was very indignant, and went up to him and said, “You can eat as much as you like, sir, but don’t pocket the things.” Lord Somebody turned very red, and said, “Dash it, sir! do you know I’m a nobleman?” “You may be a nobleman,” said the captain; “but I’m hanged if you’re a gentleman; and if you don’t put those cold fowls back on the table you’ll go ashore a jolly sight quicker than you came aboard.” The lord who did that was a well-known nobleman, and very rich, so that pocketing things isn’t any proof of a man being a nobody or poor.
Two or three days after that Harry went to London on business, and when he came back he said, “I say, little woman, do you remember that Shipsides telling us that dukes, marquises, earls, and barons were his customers?”
I said, “Yes, I do.”
“Well,” said Harry, “I know where he got that from. There’s a tea advertised all along the railway lines in all the stations, and it says on it, ‘as supplied to dukes, marquises, earls, and barons.’ He’s seen that, and that put it into his head. If he’d tell one lie he’d tell another, and mark my words, Mary Jane, Miss Ward’s young man is a humbug.{36}”
Two Sundays after that Mr. Shipsides came down again, but we didn’t ask him in to tea. We had company, which was one reason, but really we didn’t want to encourage him, feeling sure he was a man who would take advantage of kindness.
But it was an awful nuisance, for all the evening he was leaning over the bar, talking to our barmaid, and taking her attention off her work. I didn’t like to say anything, no more did Harry, especially as we weren’t very busy, many of our regular customers not being in on Sunday evenings, when we did more of a chance trade than anything—principally people who’d been down to the place for the day from London, or people driving home to town, and that sort of thing.
When it was closing time the fellow didn’t offer to go, so Harry said, “I say, Mr. Shipsides, the train for London goes in ten minutes. You’ll have to hurry to the station to catch it.”
He went away then, and we closed the doors; but about twenty minutes afterwards there came a ring at the bell, just as we were going upstairs to bed.
Harry went to the door, but didn’t open it, saying, “Who’s there?”
“Me,” said a voice.
“Who’s me?”
“Mr. Shipsides.”
And if it wasn’t him come back again. So Harry opened the door and asked him what he wanted.
“I’ve missed the train,” he said; “so I’ll have to take a room here for the night.”
Harry didn’t know what to say, so he let him in, and gave him a candle, and showed him upstairs to a room.
We didn’t like it at all, but Harry said we couldn’t turn a customer away; and of course Shipsides only came as a customer, and would have to pay for his room.
The next morning he came down, and walked into the coffee-room as bold as brass, and ordered his breakfast. He had eggs and bacon and a chop cooked, and then he wanted hot buttered toast and marmalade.
I waited on him, though I didn’t like it, but I wouldn’t send Miss Ward in. Harry said it was better not.{37}
He talked away to me nineteen to the dozen, but quite grand, just as if he was patronizing our house, and he had the impudence to say that the tea wasn’t strong enough, and would I make him some more, and when he began to tell me how he liked his tea made I flushed up and said, “I think I ought to know how to make tea, Mr. Shipsides.”
“Oh! of course,” he said; “but where do you buy your tea? Perhaps it’s the fault of the article, and not the making.”
“Oh!” I said; “the tea is all right—it’s the same that’s supplied to the dukes, marquises, earls, and barons. You’ve seen it advertised at all the railway-stations.”
I couldn’t help saying it, he made me so indignant. He didn’t say anything, but I made the next tea very weak on purpose, and he drank it without a murmur.
After he’d done his breakfast I put the time-table in front of him, and I said, “The next train’s at 9.15. Hadn’t you better go? You’ll be late to business.”
“Oh no,” he said. “Now I’m here I’ll stop for the day. I’ve a customer at one of the big houses near here. I’ll go and look him up.”
He went out, but he came back at dinner-time and ordered a dinner in the coffee-room. He wanted fish, but I said, “We don’t have fish on Mondays—it isn’t fresh.” So he had soup and a fowl and bacon, and when I said, “What beer will you have?” he said, “Oh, I’ll drink a bottle of wine for the good of the house. Bring me a bottle of champagne.”
I went to Harry about it, and he went in and said, “Look here, old man; let’s understand each other. Of course, you’re not here at my invitation.”
“Oh no,” answered the fellow. “I’m here for my own pleasure, Mr. Beckett, and I suppose I can have what I like, if I pay for it.”
“Certainly,” said Harry; and he went and got him the champagne.
I could see Miss Ward didn’t quite like it. She felt that it wasn’t quite the thing, she being our barmaid, for him to come staying there, and swelling about the place, instead of attending to his business in London.
But he didn’t see there was anything out of the way,{38} evidently, for after dinner he went into the bar-parlour and called for a cigar: “One of your best, old man, and none of your Britishers”—that’s what he had the impudence to say.
You may be sure Harry didn’t put the box down by him this time. He got a cigar out and put it in a glass, and brought it to him.
The champagne had evidently made him even more talkative than usual, for he began to find fault with the place, and to tell us what we ought to do. I stood it for a little while, and then I let out. “Mr. Shipsides,” I said, “I think we are quite capable of managing our own business, although it isn’t like yours—one that manages itself.”
“Oh, no offence, I hope,” he said, “only you’re young beginners, and I didn’t think you were above taking a hint. I’ve stayed at some of the best hotels in the kingdom in my time, you see, and I know how things ought to be done.”
I was so wild that I took my work-basket and went and sat in the bar; and presently he came there and began talking to Miss Ward, which I thought very rude, and it didn’t look well at all.
Harry had gone out to see the builder, who was going to fix up some stabling for us, as we meant to have a nice place for people driving to put up their traps and horses; and the cook wanted to speak to me in the kitchen about the oven, which had gone wrong, so I went to her; and presently I thought it was a good chance to call Miss Ward out of the bar and tell her to give Mr. Shipsides a gentle hint that he was making too free.
So I said, “Cook, just tell Miss Ward I want her for a moment.”
Miss Ward came, and I spoke to her as nicely as I could, and she saw that I was right, and promised to tell her young man that we would like him to keep his place, and not interfere with our business.
We went back together, and, when we get to the bar, if there wasn’t that fellow actually serving a customer, just as if he were the landlord of the place. It took my breath away. “Well, I never!” I said. “If your young man{39} stops here much longer, Miss Ward, he’ll put his name up over the door.”
Poor girl, she blushed to her eyes. “It is only his way,” she said; “he doesn’t mean any harm.” Then she went into the bar and whispered something to him, and he came and took his hat and went out. But he came back at teatime and ordered his tea in the coffee-room, and rang the bell for more coals to be put on the fire, and made such a fire up that it was enough to roast the place, and while he was sitting toasting himself in front of it two coffee-room customers arrived, a lady and gentleman who had come by train—very nice people. They took our best bedroom, and had some nice luggage that looked very genteel. They ordered dinner in the coffee-room for seven o’clock, and when I went in to lay the table that fellow had gone and sat down at the piano, and was banging away at it and singing a horrid music-hall song.
“Don’t do that,” I said, quite sharply. “There are ladies and gentlemen staying in the house, and they won’t like it.”
He shut the piano and went and stuck his back against the fire, and stood there with his coat-tails over his arm.
“Harry,” I said to my husband when he came in, “you must get rid of that fellow. If you don’t, I will!”
So Harry went to him and said, “Look here, Shipsides, I don’t think our hotel is good enough for you. I should be glad if you’d pay your bill and take your custom somewhere else.”
He looked Harry up and down in his nasty, red-haired, contemptuous way, and then he said, “All right, Beckett”—no Mr., mind you—“all right, Beckett; if you’re independent, so am I. I’ll say good-bye to Clara and be off.”
“When you’ve paid your bill,” says Harry.
“Oh, that’ll be all right! I’ll send you a cheque.”
“I don’t want a cheque for twenty-five shillings,” says Harry. “Cash’ll do for me.”
“I haven’t got the cash with me,” says the fellow; “and if my cheque isn’t good enough, you can stop it out of Clara’s wages.”
And with that he walks into the bar, kisses Clara before the customers, sticks his hat on one side, defiant like, and walks out of the place as bold as brass.{40}
And that was the last we saw of Miss Ward’s young man, and the last she saw of him too, poor girl—for bad as we thought him, he turned out to be worse.
A few days after he went, Harry had to go to town to see the brewers, and, having an hour or two to spare after he’d done his business, he thought he’d go and look at Shipsides’ shop, and see what sort of a place it was.
He knew the address, because Miss Ward used to write to her lover at it, and sometimes her letters lay about to be sent to post.
When he got to the street and found the number, it was a grocer’s—but quite a little common shop, full of jam in milk-jugs and sugar-basins, and flashy-looking ornaments given away with a pound of tea; and the name over the door wasn’t Shipsides at all.
Harry walked in, and said, “I want to see Mr. Shipsides.”
A little old man, in a dirty apron, behind the counter looked at him, and said, “Private door; knock twice.”
Harry thought that was odd; but he went out and knocked twice, and presently a woman came and asked him what he wanted.
“Mr. Shipsides,” said Harry.
“Oh!” says she, “are you a friend of his?”
“Yes,” says Harry, not knowing what else to say at the moment.
“Then,” said the woman, “p’r’aps you’ll tell me when you saw him last, for I haven’t seen him for a week; and he’s been and let himself in unbeknown to me, and taken his box out somehow, and we want to summons him for the rent.”
When Harry saw how the land lay—that’s his sailor way of putting it, and I’ve caught lots of sailor expressions from him—he altered his tack—that’s another—and told the woman that he wanted money of Mr. Shipsides too; and at last he got her to talk freely, and she told him that the fellow was very little better than a swindler, and she went upstairs and brought down a lot of letters and showed them to Harry, and told him they had all come that week for the fellow—and what did he think she ought to do?{41}
They were all in different female handwritings, and two were in Miss Ward’s, which Harry recognized.
“It’s my belief,” said the woman, “he’s a regular bad ’un, and has been imposing on a lot of young women, and he ought to be ashamed of himself, for, after he’d left, a poor woman came here after him and said she was his wife and was in service, and she wanted him to come to her missus and explain as she was married, as she was going to be turned away through circumstances which, being a respectable married woman, ought not to count against her.”
Harry told me that when he heard that he felt that if he could have met the fellow he’d have knocked him down—sailors being very chivalrous, I think the word is, I mean, when women are concerned; and all the way home he thought of poor Miss Ward, and how I was to break it to her that her lover was a scoundrel.
I had to do it; and, in trying to do it gently, I blurted it all out, and the poor thing fainted right away, and was so ill afterwards she had to go to bed. I went and sat with her and comforted her, and she cried and told me everything. That mean fellow had actually had thirty pounds out of her—all her savings, that she’d drawn out of the Post Office Savings Bank to give him, towards the capital he wanted for the grand business he was doing with dukes, marquises, earls, and barons.
It was a long time before she got over the shock, but it was a lesson to her, and at last she began to see that she was well rid of such a vampire.
And a long time after that we found out—that is, Harry did—a lot more about the beauty. Happening to go to another house one day—a public-house in London—Harry, who knew the landlord, told him about our barmaid and her lover, and when he described him the landlord said, “Why, that’s the fellow who had twenty pounds out of the barmaid at the ‘Hat and Feathers’ at Hendon!” And then Harry’s friend went and talked about it in the trade, and by-and-by it was found out that Mr. Shipsides had got over one hundred and fifty pounds out of different barmaids at different places, and that he was engaged to marry them all, and he’d stayed at some of the houses, just like he{42} had at ours, and never paid a farthing—only at one place he’d borrowed five pounds of the landlord as well.
The last that we found out about him was that he’d gone to Australia with the wife of a small shopkeeper he’d lodged with afterwards, and that she’d robbed her husband of one hundred pounds to go with him. I’m sorry for her when she got to Australia and her hundred pounds was gone.
Miss Ward wasn’t with us long after that. I don’t think she felt quite comfortable. She fancied perhaps that in——
* * * * *
“Is it a bad half-sovereign? Of course it is, you stupid girl! What’s the good of bringing it to me now? Why, the fellow’s half a mile away by this time! Thought he must be respectable, as he asked for a sixpenny cigar? Nonsense! He wanted nine and sixpence change for this thing. I declare I can’t sit down quietly for ten minutes but something goes wrong!{43}”