* * * * *

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!

CHAPTER III.

MISS WARD’S YOUNG MAN.

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?

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 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, 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.

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 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 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.”

“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.”

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.

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, 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 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.

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?

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 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!”

CHAPTER IV.

THE REVEREND TOMMY.

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 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 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, 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?”

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!”

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.

“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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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!”