The first year that we had the ‘Stretford Arms’ was one of great anxiety to us, as you may be sure. All our capital was invested in the business, and not only all our capital, but a good deal of money that Harry’s friends had lent him to help us to take it. If things had gone wrong with us it would have been dreadful, and I don’t know what we should have done. It was a great relief to both our minds when, from the first, we found that we had a property which, with care and good management, could be improved. Some properties, especially in our trade, go all the other way, and nothing will save them. There are so many things that will take the business from an hotel, and when they happen no power on earth can stop your going down. You may spend your money, you may advertise, you may work yourself to the bone, but down, down, down you go, and the longer you cling to the hope of things taking a turn, the more money you lose.
Of course, we couldn’t tell what would happen when we took the ‘Stretford Arms,’ and my want of experience in the business made me very nervous. But from the first we began to get confidence, and that is a wonderful thing. When you can see things are going right, you can do a lot that you can’t do when things are wavering or going wrong.
But, though we very soon got confidence, and felt comfortable in our minds, we were just as careful as ever, and we determined not to leave anything to chance. We{128} were very economical ourselves, and we only laid out money on the place a little at the time, knowing how true the old proverb is which says, “Learn to walk before you try to run.”
We didn’t have more servants than we could help, and Harry and I worked like niggers, as the saying is; though Harry, who had seen niggers at work, says it isn’t a good one, for some niggers do just as much as you make them do, and not a bit more.
But after the first year in the ‘Stretford Arms,’ I couldn’t do so much as I had done, because I had my dear little baby boy to think about, and I wasn’t quite so well and strong for a little time after that as I had been before, and Harry wouldn’t let me even do what I might have done.
He said my health was far more precious to him than anything else in the world, and that we’d much better pay a few pounds a year extra in wages than a lot of money in doctor’s bills. So after baby was born we had a nurse for him, and another housemaid, and a few months after that, when business kept on improving, and we found that we were getting a nice little hotel connection, we took on an odd man. His duties were to clean the boots, to carry the luggage up and down, to look after the pony, and, when we weren’t busy, he filled up his time with odd jobs and in the garden.
We were very glad we had him, for a nicer, civiller, more obliging fellow I never met with. It was quite a pleasure to ask him to do anything, because you saw at once that you had pleased him by giving him a chance of showing how useful he could be. There aren’t many of that sort about, so that we were lucky to get him.
He came to us in this way. We had been talking about having an odd man, and getting rid of the boy who looked after the pony and did the boots, etc., because the boy was the plague of our lives, and we never knew what he was going to be up to next. He was a boy named Dick, that we took on to oblige Mr. Wilkins, who recommended him as a smart boy; and there was another reason, which was that his grandmother, a very decent old woman, who lived in the village, couldn’t afford to keep him at home, and{129} wanted him out somewhere where he could sleep on the premises.
We took him, and he certainly was smart. He had been educated at a good charity school (as I was myself, so I’ve nothing to say against that), but, unfortunately, he’d learnt to read and write and nothing very much else. He couldn’t cipher, and his writing was very bad, and his spelling not over grand. So he couldn’t be got into an office, and his poor old grandmother was worrying herself into the grave about what to do for him, when Mr. Wilkins mentioned him to Harry, and Harry, who’d just bought our pony, took him.
He was a nice-looking lad, and always very respectful, and spoke nicely, though using words above his station and in the wrong place; but there was no reliance to be placed upon him, and he forgot things he was told to do over and over again.
For a long time we couldn’t make out what made him so slow over his work, and so careless; but we found it out at last. He was a great reader, and took in a lot of trash, written for boys, about pirates and highwaymen, and all that sort of thing, and his head was filled with romantic nonsense instead of thinking about his work.
Harry found it out first one day going into the stables, when nobody had seen the boy for an hour, and finding him sitting down comfortably in one of the stalls smoking the end of a cigar, and reading “The Boy Highwayman.”
Harry boxed his ears for smoking in the stables, and was so mad with him he told him to go; but the boy began to cry, and Harry said he would give him another chance, but read him an awful lecture, saying he might burn us all down in our beds, and telling him if he read such rubbish he would come to be hanged.
He went on all right for a little while after that, though his work was not done properly; but one day our nursemaid, Lucy Jones, a nice, well-behaved girl of eighteen, came to me and asked me if she could speak to me about a private matter.
I said “Yes,” and then she said she wanted to show me a letter which she had found inside one of her boots when she went to put it on.{130}
I took the letter and read it, and it made my blood run cold. This is the letter, which I kept as a curiosity:—
My darling Miss Jones,
“This comes hoping that you will dain to smile on my suit. I have long love you from a fur. Will you elope with me to forring climbs, where we may live happy. You shall have silks and sattings and jewls, and be the envy of all my dashing companons. I shall be verry proud of you at the hed of my bord, when it is spred with the feest, and all my brave, dare-devill fellowes shall tost you as their cheifs inamerato. This is French, but it means a bride. If you will fly with me name your own time. It must be nite, and I will have the hosses redy. Bring all your jewls and money. If we are follered I am prepaired to die in your defense; but have no fere. The man does not brethe the God’s air that is to take his pray from
“Dashing Dick.
“If you accep my hoffer, deer Miss Jones, put your answer in your boots when you put them out to be clened. I will make you a Quene. Don’t delay, as my brave Band is waiting for their horders.”
At first the letter made me so indignant I couldn’t laugh, though it was so ridiculous. I guessed at once who it was had sent it to her by the writing, and its coming in her boots, and the answer to be put back in her boots.
The girl was quite indignant. “I never heard such impudence in my life, ma’am!” she said. “And a bit of a boy like that, too!”
“You’ve never given him any encouragement, I suppose!” I said.
“Never, ma’am. The only time he ever spoke to me on such a subject was when he asked me to walk out with him on Sunday, and then I said he’d better go home and read to his grandmother. Encouragement! I hope I know myself better, ma’am, than to keep company with the likes of him. Why, he’s ever so much younger than me, ma’am.”
“I only asked, Lucy,” I said. “I didn’t suppose you had encouraged him.{131}”
I didn’t, because I knew Lucy had set her cap, so to speak, at a young fellow in the village—a handsome young fellow, too—with a little black moustache, that was quite unique in the neighbourhood; but I asked her, because, having been in service, I know how girls will sometimes encourage forward lads—pages, for instance—being fond of larking, and saying, “Oh, there’s no harm; he’s only a boy.” So I thought I’d just ask Lucy the question.
I saw by her style she was quite innocent in the matter; so I told her to leave the letter with me, and I would speak to my husband about it, and he would decide what should be done.
When I showed the letter to Harry he couldn’t help laughing, though he was very cross. “The young varmint!” he said.
“What are you going to do?” I said. “You must get rid of the boy. He isn’t safe to be about the place with notions like that in his head. I’m very sorry for his poor old grandmother; but he’ll come to a bad end soon, and I don’t want him to come to it here.”
“Oh, I shall give him the sack,” said Harry; “but I’m sorry for him, because it’s the trash he’s been reading that has put this stuff into his head.”
After dinner, Harry sent for Master Dick, and, when the young gentleman came in, showed him the letter, and asked him what he meant by writing such wickedness to our nursemaid.
The boy never changed colour a moment. He looked straight at Harry, and said, “Did she show it to you, sir?”
“She showed it to Mrs. Beckett,” said Harry.
“Then it was very unladylike of her,” said the boy, “and she’s a mean sneak. No man likes his love-letters to be shown about.”
“Love-letters, you young rascal!” cried Harry; “what business have you putting your love-letters in a respectable young woman’s boots? And, besides, this isn’t a love-letter, it’s asking the girl to elope, and it’s full of wickedness about jewels, and a band of daring fellows. What do you mean by it, sir?”
Master Dick looked at Harry a minute. Then he struck an attitude.{132}
“What I do after I’ve left your service, sir, is my own business, isn’t it?”
“No, it isn’t,” said Harry; “it’s mine, because you’re placed with me by your grandmother, and it’s my duty to see that you don’t do anything to disgrace yourself if I can help it. Whose horses are you going to have ready, pray? And where are you going to get the silks and satins and jewels from? A nice idea, indeed! I’ve a good mind to send for a policeman.”
The boy turned very red at that, and his manner made Harry think he was frightened that something might be found out.
So, instead of dismissing the boy there and then, he gave him a good talking to, and said he should decide what was to be done with him afterwards.
Then Harry came to me, and said, “Mary Jane, there’s something wrong with that boy. I’m afraid he’s been up to no good.”
“Of course he hasn’t,” I said. “He certainly wasn’t up to any good when he wrote that wicked letter to Lucy.”
“It isn’t that only I’m thinking of. I’m afraid, putting two and two together, that he’s been making ready to run away, and that perhaps he’s got what doesn’t belong to him.”
“You don’t mean you think he’s been stealing?”
“Yes, I do,” said Harry; “but the thing is, how am I to make sure? I’ll go and make inquiries.”
Harry went and asked the other servants, and the people about the place, a few questions, and at last he found out that Master Dick had been seen going pretty often into a shed where we kept some empty cases and lumber. So Harry went to it quietly, and turned it thoroughly over, and then he came on a box hidden away that aroused his suspicions. He broke the box open, and inside it he found an old pistol and a belt, and a pair of his old sea-boots, that must have been taken from our spare room upstairs, and an old red flannel shirt, and a lot of penny numbers about boy pirates and highwaymen, and right at the bottom of the box two pairs of my best stockings and some old bows of ribbons, and one or two{133} trifles like that, which the young rascal had evidently taken at different times when he had been at work about the house.
Harry came and told me, and said he supposed the pistol and the belt, and the red shirt, and the boots were for the young gentleman to dress himself up in when he took to the road or to the sea, whichever it was to be, and my stockings and the bits of ribbons were the satins and jewels, etc., which he was going to present to Lucy, if she consented to elope with him, and be the bride of the chief of the “band of daring fellows,” which was himself, viz. Dashing Dick.
“Oh, Harry!” I said, “how shocking! Who would believe that a boy, decently brought up, could be so wicked!”
Of course, after we found he had taken things, we couldn’t keep him, even if we had looked over that letter to our nursemaid, and so Harry went to his grandmother and told her that our place didn’t suit her boy, as he had too much liberty, and then he told her that the boy had taken one or two little things, and he must be punished. We shouldn’t, of course, give him into custody and ruin him for life for my stockings and Harry’s boots, but that sort of thing, if not checked in time, would go on till it became wholesale robbery.
The old lady was very much upset, and said, what could she do, as the boy was quite beyond her control. So Harry said he would try and think, but he should give the boy notice, and send him home, as he couldn’t............