What a lot there is in the world that you must die not knowing anything about because you don’t get mixed up with it! I don’t know if that’s quite the way to say what I mean, but it came into my head looking over the things I had put down in my diary that I thought would be worth telling about in my new book of experiences as the landlady of a village inn. At first it was all so new and strange to me that I didn’t quite gather what it meant, some of it. As a servant, of course, I saw a good deal, and many strange characters, but in their family life mostly. A servant can’t see much of the outside life of her people—in fact, if you come to think of it, servants don’t see much outside at all, unless it’s shaking a cloth in the garden; and many a time when I was a servant have I made that a very long job on a fine morning, with the sun shining and the birds singing; for it was so beautiful to breathe the fresh air, and feel the soft wind blowing in your face with just a dash of the scent of flowers in it. A dash of the scent!—dear, dear, that’s how your style gets spoiled by what you have to hear going on round you! I suppose my style will get public-housey in time, if I’m not careful. It’s hearing the customers say, “Just a dash of this in it, ma’am,” and “Just a dash of that,” and so on.
Seeing the outside view of life—life away from the home—and being always in a place where all sorts of people and all sorts of characters come, I have learned things that I might have been a servant a hundred years{44} and never have known. You get a pretty good view of life under the roof of an inn, and not always a view that makes you very happy—but there’s good and bad everywhere, even in the church.
I know of a clergyman who was a very fine preacher indeed, and a strict teetotaller and never entered a public-house, but he managed to be very cruel to his wife on gingerbeer and lemonade. And it came out afterwards in the courts, when the poor lady tried to get a separation, fearing for her life, that on the day her husband had knocked her down and emptied the inkpot down her throat, he had gone off straight to a school meeting and delivered the prizes for the best essay on being kind to animals, and had made all the people cry by the beautiful way he spoke about dogs and horses and cats.
Our clergyman, the curate, is very different to that, though I must say he is eccentric. He comes into our coffee-room now and then, and will have a glass of ale and sit and read the newspaper, because he lives by himself in lodgings up in the village. He likes talking to Harry, and he seems to like talking to me; but though he’s a very agreeable gentleman, I’m always rather sorry to see him come in, especially when his pockets look bulgy. He’s one of those people who go about in awful places with hammers, and chip bits of rock and stone off, and dig up bits of ground; and he’s always got his coat-pockets full of sand and grit, and chalk and bits of stone, and sometimes a lot of weeds and ferns pulled up by the roots. I asked Mr. Wilkins, the parish clerk, what the name for these people was, and he told me geologist, those that went after the stones, and botanist, those that went after the roots; and he said Mr. Lloyd—“the Reverend Tommy” he is called in the village when he isn’t there to hear—was both, and was a great authority, and wrote papers about rocks and roots and the rubbish he dug up, for learned societies to read, and that he belonged to a good many of them, and had a right to put half the letters of the alphabet after his name if he chose.
I’ve seen the Reverend Tommy come into our place of an afternoon as red as a turkey-cock, the perspiration pouring down his face, mudded all over his clothes—he{45} always wore black, which made it look worse—and looking that dirty and untidy and disreputable that if he hadn’t been known he’d have been taken for a tramp.
It certainly was very trying for me to see him sit down in our nice, neat, pretty little coffee-room, putting pounds of mud on the carpet, and turning all the dirty things out of his pockets on to our nice tablecloth. Poor dear man; I’m sure he never thought he was doing any harm, for he didn’t live in this world; he lived in a world of hundreds of thousands of years ago—a world that our world has grown up on top of, so it was explained to me afterwards.
I’d never heard of such things before. Of course I knew there was a Noah’s Ark, and that the Flood drowned lots of animals, and carried lots of things out of their proper places and put them somewhere else, as even a small flood will do. A flood that happened where my brother John lives, who went to America years ago, as I told you in my “Memoirs,” washed his house right away, and floated it miles down the river, and put it on an island, and it’s been there ever since, and he and his family in it, they liking the situation better, and, as he says, having been moved free of expense. John wrote me about that from America himself, so it must be true, and it is a most wonderful place for adventures, according to John. Of course, if a flood can do that nowadays, the great Flood that covered the earth must have mixed up things very much before it went down.
It was this Flood that made Mr. Lloyd go about with a hammer looking for bits of the animals that were drowned in it, as far as I could make out. And when he found bits he was almost mad with delight. “Fossils” he called the things, but how he could know they were bits of animals was a wonder to me; they might have been anything. He showed me a lump of chalk one day that he said was a bit of an animal that had lived in our village thousands of years ago!
He made a horrid mess with his things while he was having a glass of ale and looking at his “specimens,” as he called them, but it was nothing to where he lodged. His landlady told me that she never went into the room because he didn’t like her to, but he made his bed himself,{46} and it was just pushed up in the corner, and all the rest of the room was bones and rocks and bits of chalk, and on the wall he’d got skulls and shinbones and bits of skeletons of different animals, and some pictures of animals so hideous that the landlady’s daughter, a young married woman, on a visit to her mother, going in out of curiosity and not knowing what she was going to see, had a shock that made her mother very, very anxious about her, and especially as the poor girl would keep on saying, for some time afterwards, “Oh, mother, that hideous animal with the long nose! I can see it now.”
But it was all right, fortunately; because, when the landlady told me that it was all over, I asked, and she said, “It’s all right, my dear, thank goodness, and a really beautiful nose.”
She came to have tea with us one evening soon after that, and through our talking about her daughter and the fright in Mr. Lloyd’s room, it led to her telling me many things about our clergyman that I didn’t know. I knew he was a dear, kind old gentleman, and, when his head wasn’t full of the Flood and old bones, just the clergyman for a village like ours. Kind to the old and gentle to the young, treating rich and poor alike, he was always ready with a good, comforting word of wholesome Christianity for those who were in trouble.
He came to our place often after he got to know us, because he liked to come in of an evening now and then, and have a pipe with Harry in our own private sitting-room. He had never been in foreign countries, and he loved to hear about all the places Harry had seen, but he didn’t care much about the towns and the people. He always wanted to know more about the soil and the trees and the animals, and what the cliffs and rocks were like, and asked Harry all sorts of funny questions, which of course he couldn’t answer, as it wouldn’t do for the mate of a merchantman to go about the world with his head full of Noah’s Ark and the Flood. He asked Harry if he hadn’t brought skulls from New Zealand, and other places he had been to, and I said, “No, indeed he hasn’t. Do you think I’d have married him if he’d carried dead men’s heads about with him?{47}”
I was sorry directly I’d said it, and coloured up terribly—which is a horrible failing I have. I believe I shall go red when I’m an old woman; it isn’t blushing—that’s rather pretty, and I shouldn’t mind it—it’s going fiery red, which is not becoming.
Mr. Lloyd noticed how hot I’d gone, and he smiled and said, “Don’t mind me, Mrs. Beckett. I know you didn’t mean anything.” But there was a look in his face presently that told me I had touched a sore place. It was only a shadow that crept across his face, and a look that came into his eyes, but it told me a good deal, and after he’d gone I said to my husband—
“Harry, Mr. Lloyd’s been in love at some time and has had a disappointment.”
“Old Tommy in love!” said Harry; “then it must have been with a young woman who lived before the Flood. Nothing after that date would have any attraction for him.”
“Don’t be so absurd, Harry,” I said. “Women know more about these things than men do, and I’m as certain as that I sit here that Mr. Lloyd has been crossed in love, and that it’s through skulls.”
Something happened to stop our conversation—a gentleman and lady, I think it was, who wanted apartments—and Mr. Lloyd and his skulls went out of my head, till his landlady came to tea, and I got talking about him.
Then I told her what had been my idea, and I asked her if she knew anything.
“Know anything about the Reverend Tommy being in love, my dear?” she said. “Why, that’s the story of his life!”
“I knew it,” I said; and I thought what a triumph it would be for me over Harry, for I must confess I do like to prove him wrong now and then. Men—even the best of them—will persist in thinking women don’t know much about anything except how to boil potatoes, how to make beds, and how to nurse babies, and I have known a husband who even wanted to show his wife how to do that till she lost her temper, and said, “Oh, as you know such a lot about it, perhaps you’ll tell me whose babies you’ve been in the habit of nursing!{48}”
Harry—though I don’t want to say a word against him as a husband and a father, for a better never breathed, God bless him!—has little faults of his own, and good-tempered as I am and hope I always shall be, yet once or twice he has nearly put me out, and made me speak a little sharp, and it’s generally been about baby. A nicer, plumper, healthier baby there doesn’t exist, but Harry is that foolish over him, you’d think he (the baby, not Harry) was made of glass and would break. Of course I’m very fond of showing him to my female friends who come to see me, and sometimes I just undress him a little to show them what lovely little limbs he has. If Harry comes in, he begins to fidget at that directly. “You’ll give that child his death of cold,” he says; “the idea of taking him out of his warm bed and stripping him.”
Of course that makes me indignant. No mother likes to be told how to nurse her own child before other mothers.
Once when he came in like that I didn’t take any notice, but I just undressed baby a little more. It was a very warm room, and there was a bright fire, so it didn’t hurt, and I thought I would just show the other ladies that I didn’t give the management of the nursery over to Harry.
What made me do it, perhaps, more than anything was, that Mrs. Goose—a dreadful mischief-making old woman, that I must tell you about by-and-by—was in the room, and she curled her lip in a very irritating way, and said—
“Well, I never! What do sailors know about babies? I should like to have seen my husband interfering between me and my infant when I was young!”
“Ah,” said Harry, “things were different in olden times, I dare say.”
“Olden times!” says she. “My youngest is only eighteen come next Michaelmas, Mr. Beckett; but, of course, a man who would teach his wife how to manage her infant——”
“Oh, please don’t take any notice, Mrs. Goose,” I said; “it’s only one of my husband’s funny ways.” And I took baby’s nightgown right off, and let him kick his dear little legs up, and crow on my lap, with only his little flannel on.{49}
“Funny ways or not, my dear,” said Harry, “that baby belongs to me as much as it does to you, and I’m not going to have its constitution ruined just to amuse a lot of old women.”
With that, if he didn’t come and pick up baby and its nightgown, put the gown on, take baby in his arms, and walk upstairs with it to its cot.
“Harry, how dare you!” I cried; and I felt so indignant I could have stamped my foot, for that horrid Mrs. Goose had seen it, and I should be the laughing-stock of the village.
I ran upstairs after Harry, quite in a passion, and I pushed the door to; and, gasping for breath, I said, “Don’t you ever do that again! I won’t be insulted in my own house before people.”
“Mary,” he said, gently; “come here, my lass.”
“No, I won’t,” I said; and then I felt as if I could shake myself like I used to in a temper at school, and then I began to cry.
He had put baby in its little cot; and he came and took my hand and drew me towards him.
“My little wife,” he said, “we’ve scarcely had a wry word since we’ve known each other—never an unkind one. Don’t let our first quarrel be about the child we both love so dearly. Come, my lass, kiss me and make it up. There may be troubles ahead that we shall have to face, and that we shall want all our strength to meet. Don’t let’s begin making troubles for ourselves about nothing.”
I didn’t kiss him quite at once. I stood for a minute trying to look as cross as I could, but I couldn’t keep it up. He clasped my hand so lovingly, and there was such a grieved look in his eyes, that I gave an hysterical little cry, and threw my arms round his neck, and hid my face on his breast and cried. Oh, how I cried! But it wasn’t all sorrow that I had been naughty; I think a good many of the tears were tears of joy—the joy I felt in having a husband that I could not only love, but honour and respect and look up to. And I sobbed so loudly that baby put out his dear little fat arm, and said, “Mum, mum;” and then I fell on my knees by the cot, and thanked God for{50} my baby and my Harry, and I didn’t care for all the Mrs. Gooses in the whole wide world.
Writing about our first quarrel over baby has led me away from what I was going to tell you about the Reverend Tommy. Harry wasn’t at the tea-table, we being extra busy in the bar, so I and Mr. Lloyd’s landlady were alone.
She didn’t want much urging, I found, to talk about her lodger—in fact, I should think he was the principal subject of conversation, whenever she went out to tea.
I’m not going to repeat all the things she told me about his queer ways at home, because I don’t think people who let lodgings ought to be encouraged to pry into the private life of their lodgers and reveal it, or to tell about their ways and habits in the room for which they pay rent, and where they ought to be as private as in their own home.
Before we got the ‘Stretford Arms,’ Harry and I were in lodgings for a short time, and some day I will tell you something about that.
But the story about the Reverend Tommy that his landlady told me I can repeat, because it was about his past life; and it seems he used to talk about it himself sometimes, but always among the gentry. I mean, it was a subject—kind and unassuming as he was—that he never spoke of to his inferiors. I can quite understand the feeling. I could tell the ladies and gentlemen who stay at our place about Harry, and my having been a servant; but I should not care to talk in the same way to our barmaid, or our potman, or our cook.
This was the story—not as the landlady told it; for if I told it her way, I should have to wander off into something else every five minutes. If there is one thing I dislike it is people who can’t stick to the point when they are telling a story.
The Reverend Tommy, years and years ago, it seems, and long before he came to be our clergyman, was the curate at a place just beyond Beachy Head, an old-fashioned village that was on the Downs, hidden in among them, in fact—a place full of very old houses and very old people, quite shut away from the world; for you could{51} see nothing of anything except the trees and the tops of the hills, the village lying down in a deep, deep hollow.
At least, that is the sort of village I gathered it was from the landlady, who said Mr. Lloyd had described it to her and showed her photographs of it.
He was quite a young man then, and, though the place was dull, it suited him, because of the cliffs and hills and places round about, where no end of wonderful old bones and fossils and things were to be found.
All the time that he could spare he was climbing the cliffs and hammering away at them to find the treasures that he thought such a lot of. They were only fisher folk who lived near the cliffs, and they soon got used to the young clergyman, who climbed like a goat, and would be let down by ropes, and do things that would have made Mr. Blondin feel nervous, and all to hammer away at the cliffs and the rocks.
Mr. Lloyd’s favourite place was a cliff just beyond Beachy Head—it was a very dangerous one, and many years ago a man had been killed there—a young fellow who used to do just what Mr. Lloyd did. People told him about it, but it didn’t frighten him. He said, “Oh, he must have been careless, or gone giddy. I’m all right.” But it was a very nasty place, being a straight fall from top to bottom, with only horrid jagged bits of cliff sticking out.
I can quite understand what it was like, because on our honeymoon we went for a day or two to the seaside, and Harry showed me a cliff that he had gone over when he was a boy after a seagull’s nest, and it made me go hot and cold all over to look at it, and when we stood at the edge I clutched hold of Harry’s coat and felt as if we must go over, it looked so awful. I hate looking over high places; it gives me a dreadful feeling that I must jump over if somebody doesn’t catch hold of me and keep me back. That’s a very horrid feeling to have, but I have it, and nobody ever got me up on the Monument. I can’t even bear to look down a well-staircase. I always see myself lying all of a heap, smashed on the floor at the bottom; and even when once in London I used to have to go over Westminster Bridge, I always walked in the{52} middle of the road among the cabs and carts and omnibuses, even in the muddiest weather.
Perhaps the young woman that I’m coming to presently in this story—story it isn’t, because it’s true, but you know what I mean—had the same sort of feeling,—vertigo, I think they call it. At any rate, one evening when the Reverend Tommy was out with his hammer and his coil of rope and things that he used, right on the highest and loneliest part of the cliff, he saw a young woman looking over. It was a summer evening, and quite light and quite still. There wasn’t a soul in sight but this young woman, and the Reverend Tommy wondered what she was doing there all alone. As he got close to her he saw she was quite a young woman, and very nicely dressed, and that she was very pretty.
But before he could get right up to her—she hadn’t heard him coming, as he was walking on the turf of the Downs—this young woman gave a little cry, swung forward, and in a second had disappeared over the edge of that awful cliff.
The young clergyman rushed to the spot, knelt on the edge and peered over, and then he saw this poor girl hanging half-way between life and death. As she had fallen, one of the rugged juts I told you of had caught under the bottom of a short tight-fitting cloth kind of jacket she wore, and there it held her. It made my blood run cold when the landlady described it to me, as she had heard it of a lady Mr. Lloyd had told it to.
He shouted out to her, but he got no answer; so he made up his mind she had fainted. He looked about and shouted, but he could see nobody near. Then he looked over the cliff again, and it seemed to him that the girl’s jacket was giving way under the strain, and that in a minute she would be hurled to an awful death on the rocks below.
I don’t know how he did it, because the landlady couldn’t tell me, not knowing about ropes and things, but in some way Mr. Lloyd made his rope fast. I think he drove a big stake or wooden peg into the turf, and piled stones on it—at any rate, he made his rope fast, as he thought, and then, with his hammer in his pocket, he{53} swung himself over and went down bit by bit, steadying himself every now and then by digging his foot into holes in the side of the cliff.
He managed to swing himself right down by the side of the poor girl, and spoke to her and told her to have courage; but she was senseless.
He lowered himself a bit more, and then with his hammer beat out a place in the cliff where it was hard, just room enough for him to put his two feet in and take the strain off the rope.
Then he looked above him and below him to see if there was any place that was safe to stand on without the rope, as he wanted to tie that round the poor girl’s body.
He found a place just on the other side where he could stand and hold on by a jutting piece of cliff, and he got there somehow—he never remembered himself quite how—but his hands were fearfully bruised in doing it, and it was as much as he could do to hold on when he got there.
The girl had come to a little, but it was getting darker, and he could only just see her face by the time he had made himself quite firm on the little ledge.
When he spoke to her she answered him, and cried to him to save her, and he told her not to attempt to move or struggle, and, with God’s help, he would save her.
She was quite quiet; she seemed dazed, he said—and no wonder at it; I should have lost my senses altogether—and he managed to get the rope across her, and then pass it round under her arms, but he couldn’t leave go with both hands to tie it, and he had to beg and pray of her to try and do it herself. She was afraid at first to move her arms, for fear she should fall; but he found that her heels were resting on a bit of cliff, so that there would not be so much danger if she did it quietly.
Well, at last she got it tied round her all right, and then, with one hand, he made the knot she had tied the rope in quite firm, she helping him; and then it was quite dark, and there they were, with the sea moaning below them, and the stars up above them.
When she felt a little safer she began to groan and cry, and say that she should die, and to pray, and to say that God had punished her for all her sins.{54}
He comforted her, and told her to be a brave girl, but that she must stop quite still, for he had to climb up the face of the cliff again to the top if she was to be rescued from her awful position.
She begged and prayed of him not to leave her, but he said he must—that he could do nothing more for her if he stopped there, and they would have to wait till the daylight for help, because the coastguard’s beat lay some distance away from the edge, and it was no good shouting, as the wind blew strong from the land and carried their voices right out to sea.
When he had made her a little braver he began to go slowly up the side of the cliff, using his hammer to make little steps.
It was an awful climb, and every minute it seemed as though he would have to loose his hold and fall, and be dashed to pieces. But he was one of the best cliff-climbers in England, and young and strong then, and at last he reached the top.
He was so numb and worn out and bruised when he got to the top that he fell down on the grass and lay there quite a minute before he could move. Just as he was pulling himself together, he looked up and saw the coastguard in the distance.
He shouted at the top of his voice, and the coastguard came running to him, and, when he heard what was the matter, shook his head. “It’ll be an awful job pulling the poor girl up,” he said. “She won’t have the sense to keep kicking herself away from the side of the cliff, and it’s likely she’ll be dreadfully injured.”
“Well, it’s the only chance,” said the parson; “we must be careful, and go slow.”
They were careful, and they went slow—so slow that when they at last dragged the poor girl up she was in a dead swoon, and she never spoke or opened her eyes, but lay there like a dead thing. They saw that she was cut and injured, too, for blood was on her face, and when they touched her arm she groaned and shuddered.
Of course, something must be done, so the parson picked her up in his arms and carried her, senseless as she was, across the Downs to the place where he lodged.{55}
Luckily, it wasn’t far, and he had told the coastguard to go at once into the village and knock up the doctor and send him.
The young clergyman’s landlady stared, you may be sure, when she saw her lodger coming home at that time of night carrying a young woman; but he explained what had happened, and the landlady gave up her room, and laid the poor girl on her bed, and got brandy and bathed her face with cold water, and at last brought her to.
It was a month before the girl could be moved, she was so injured, and all that time, when he could, the clergyman, would sit with her and read to her—for none of her friends came to see her.
She said she had no friends, when they asked her—that she was an orphan and a shop-girl in London; that she had been ill, and left her situation to come to the seaside, and had gone out in the evening, and turned giddy, and fallen over the edge of the cliff. They sent to her lodgings in Eastbourne and got her boxes for her, but no letters came for her, and she never offered to write any. And—well, you can guess what would happen under such circumstances—the young clergyman fell head over heels in love with the beautiful girl he had saved.
She was very beautiful. The landlady told me she had once seen a photograph of her that the Reverend Tommy kept in his room, and that it was an angel’s face.
The end of it was the Reverend Tommy proposed to the girl—Annie Ewen, she said her name was; and, without stopping to think how little he knew of her or her antecedents, they were married the month after the rescue from the cliff.
They were happy for a month—very happy. The girl seemed grateful to the young clergyman, and tried all she could to deserve his affection; but the cloud soon came into the sky, and a big, black cloud it was.
One day, when the clergyman came home, he found his wife crying. She said it was a headache—that she was ill, and out of sorts. The next day when he came home, after his parish work, the house was empty. His young wife had gone, and left behind her a letter—a letter which no one ever saw but the man to whom it was written; but{56} what it was was guessed at through other things that were found out afterwards.
The girl hadn’t fallen over the cliff. She had thrown herself over—to kill herself; to kill herself because a man she believed true was false, and had deserted her, and she had the same terror of shame and disgrace that many a poor girl has who knows that she is to be left alone to bear the punishment of loving a man too much and trusting him too well.
She told the clergyman she wished to save him the shame of what must be known if she stopped there; that he could say she had gone to her friends, who were abroad, for a time.
The blow broke poor Mr. Lloyd, for he worshipped that woman. He would have forgiven or borne anything. He tried to find her and tell her so, and would have opened his arms for her to come back to him and be his honoured wife.
He did find her at last; but when he found her he could not say the words he wanted to speak. It was too late.
He found her a year afterwards with another man—the man who had caused her to seek the death from which the clergyman had saved her. But she loved the other man best, and though he had refused to marry her and save her from shame she had gone back to him.
Oh dear me! I’m a woman myself, and I know what queer things our hearts are; but it does seem to me sometimes that it is easier for a bad man to win and keep a girl’s love than for a good man. This girl, you see, would rather be what she was with a man who treated her badly than the loved and honoured wife of the young clergyman who had saved her. Woman certainly are——
* * * * *
What’s the matter in the bar? It’s that new barmaid. “Oh, Miss Jenkins, how careless of you! I’m so sorry, sir. I hope it hasn’t hurt you very much. You must be careful how you open soda-water, Miss Jenkins, or somebody’s eye will be knocked out with a cork, and I wouldn’t have such a thing happen here for the world. Come into the parlour, please, sir, and sit down. I’ll hold a knife to it to stop it going black. I am so sorry!{57}”