This eBook was produced by Les Bowler.
[Picture: Book cover]
[Picture: Even the sandy kitten was neglected, or got a rap on its nose
with the slate-pencil, when to toy with the moving point had been too
great a temptation to be resisted]
JAN OF THE WINDMILL.
* * * * *
A Story of the Plains.
* * * * *
BY THE LATE
JULIANA HORATIA EWING.
AUTHOR OF “SIX TO SIXTEEN;” “FLAT IRON FOR A FARTHING;”
“MRS. OVERTHEWAY’S REMEMBRANCES,” ETC.
* * * * *
WITH ELEVEN ILLUSTRATIONS BY
MRS. W. ALLINGHAM
(HELEN PATERSON).
* * * * *
FIFTH EDITION
* * * * *
LONDON:
GEORGE BELL & SONS, YORK STREET,
COVENT GARDEN.
1890.
* * * * *
Dedicated
TO MY DEAR SISTER
MARGARET.
J. H. E.
* * * * *
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
THE WINDMILLER’S WIFE.—STRANGERS.—TEN SHILLINGS A WEEK.—THE 1
LITTLE JAN.
CHAPTER II.
THE MILLER’S CALCULATIONS.—HIS HOPES AND FEARS.—THE 14
NURSE-BOY.—CALM.
CHAPTER III.
THE WINDMILLER’S WORDS COME TRUE.—THE RED SHAWL.—IN THE 20
CLOUDS.—NURSING V. PIG-MINDING.—THE ROUND-HOUSE.—THE
MILLER’S THUMB.
CHAPTER IV.
BLACK AS SLANS.—VAIR AND VOOLISH.—THE MILLER AND HIS MAN. 27
CHAPTER V.
THE POCKET-BOOK AND THE FAMILY BIBLE.—FIVE POUNDS’ REWARD. 33
CHAPTER VI.
GEORGE GOES COURTING.—GEORGE AS AN ENEMY.—GEORGE AS A 38
FRIEND.—ABEL PLAYS SCHOOLMASTER.—THE
LOVE-LETTER.—MOERDYK.—THE MILLER-MOTH.—AN ANCIENT DITTY.
CHAPTER VII.
ABEL GOES TO SCHOOL AGAIN.—DAME DATCHETT.—A COLUMN OF 49
SPELLING.—ABEL PLAYS MOOCHER.—THE MILLER’S MAN CANNOT MAKE
UP HIS MIND.
CHAPTER VIII.
VISITORS AT THE MILL.—A WINDMILLER OF THE THIRD 54
GENERATION.—CURE FOR WHOOPING-COUGH.—MISS AMABEL ADELINE
AMMABY.—DOCTORS DISAGREE.
CHAPTER IX.
GENTRY BORN.—LEARNING LOST.—JAN’S BEDFELLOW.—AMABEL. 63
CHAPTER X.
ABEL AT HOME.—JAN OBJECTS TO THE MILLER’S MAN.—THE 66
ALPHABET.—THE CHEAP JACK.—“PITCHERS”.
CHAPTER XI.
SCARECROWS AND MEN.—JAN REFUSES TO “MAKE 77
GEARGE.”—UNCANNY.—“JAN’S OFF.”—THE MOON AND THE CLOUDS.
CHAPTER XII.
THE WHITE HORSE.—COMROGUES.—MOERDYK.—GEORGE CONFIDES IN THE 84
CHEAP JACK—WITH RESERVATION.
CHAPTER XIII.
GEORGE AS A MONEYED MAN.—SAL.—THE “WHITE HORSE.”—THE 91
WEDDING.—THE WINDMILLER’S WIFE FORGETS, AND REMEMBERS TOO
LATE.
CHAPTER XIV.
SUBLUNARY ART.—JAN GOES TO SCHOOL.—DAME DATCHETT AT 98
HOME.—JAN’S FIRST SCHOOL SCRAPE.—JAN DEFENDS HIMSELF.
CHAPTER XV.
WILLUM GIVES JAN SOME ADVICE.—THE CLOCK FACE.—THE HORNET 104
AND THE DAME.—JAN DRAWS PIGS.—JAN AND HIS PATRONS.—KITTY
CHUTER.—THE FIGHT.—MASTER CHUTER’S PREDICTION.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE MOP.—THE SHOP.—WHAT THE CHEAP JACK’S WIFE HAD TO 118
TELL.—WHAT GEORGE WITHHELD.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE MILLER’S MAN AT THE MOP.—A LIVELY COMPANION.—SAL LOSES 127
HER PURSE.—THE RECRUITING SERGEANT.—THE POCKET-BOOK TWICE
STOLEN.—GEORGE IN THE KING’S ARMS.—GEORGE IN THE KING’S
SERVICE.—THE LETTER CHANGES HANDS, BUT KEEPS ITS SECRET.
CHAPTER XVIII.
MIDSUMMER HOLIDAYS.—CHILD FANCIES.—JAN AND THE 137
PIG-MINDER.—MASTER SALTER AT HOME.—JAN HIRES HIMSELF OUT.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE BLUE COAT.—PIG-MINDING AND 143
TREE-STUDYING.—LEAF-PAINTINGS.—A STRANGER.—MASTER SWIFT IS
DISAPPOINTED.
CHAPTER XX.
SQUIRE AMMABY AND HIS DAUGHTER.—THE CHEAP JACK DOES 154
BUSINESS ONCE MORE.—THE WHITE HORSE CHANGES MASTERS.
CHAPTER XXI.
MASTER SWIFT AT HOME.—RUFUS.—THE EX-PIG-MINDER.—JAN AND THE 161
SCHOOLMASTER.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE PARISH CHURCH.—REMBRANDT.—THE SNOW SCENE.—MASTER 168
SWIFT’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE WHITE HORSE IN CLOVER.—AMABEL AND HER GUARDIANS.—AMABEL 179
IN THE WOOD.—BOGY.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE PAINT-BOX.—MASTER LINSEED’S SHOP.—THE NEW 188
SIGN-BOARD.—MASTER SWIFT AS WILL SCARLET.
CHAPTER XXV.
SANITARY INSPECTORS.—THE PESTILENCE.—THE PARSON.—THE 195
DOCTOR.—THE SQUIRE AND THE SCHOOLMASTER.—DESOLATION AT THE
WINDMILL.—THE SECOND ADVENT.
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE BEASTS OF THE VILLAGE.—ABEL SICKENS.—THE GOOD 204
SHEPHERD.—RUFUS PLAYS THE PHILANTHROPIST.—MASTER SWIFT SEES
THE SUN RISE.—THE DEATH OF THE RIGHTEOUS.
CHAPTER XXVII.
JAN HAS THE FEVER.—CONVALESCENCE IN MASTER SWIFT’S 211
COTTAGE.—THE SQUIRE ON DEMORALIZATION.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
MR. FORD’S CLIENT.—THE HISTORY OF JAN’S FATHER.—AMABEL AND 217
BOGY THE SECOND.
CHAPTER XXIX.
JAN FULFILS ABEL’S CHARGE.—SON OF THE MILL.—THE 230
LARGE-MOUTHED WOMAN.
CHAPTER XXX.
JAN’S PROSPECTS, AND MASTER SWIFT’S PLANS.—TEA AND 238
MILTON.—NEW PARENTS.—PARTING WITH RUFUS.—JAN IS KIDNAPPED.
CHAPTER XXXI.
SCREEVING.—AN OLD SONG.—MR. FORD’S CLIENT.—THE PENNY 246
GAFF.—JAN RUNS AWAY.
CHAPTER XXXII.
THE BAKER.—ON AND ON.—THE CHURCH BELL.—A DIGRESSION.—A 253
FAMILIAR HYMN.—THE BOYS’ HOME.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE BUSINESS MAN AND THE PAINTER.—PICTURES AND POT 261
BOILERS.—CIMABUE AND GIOTTO.—THE SALMON-COLORED OMNIBUS.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
A CHOICE OF VOCATIONS.—RECREATION HOUR.—THE BOW-LEGGED 265
BOY.—DRAWING BY HEART.—GIOTTO.
CHAPTER XXXV.
“WITHOUT CHARACTER?”—THE WIDOW.—THE BOW-LEGGED BOY TAKES 270
SERVICE.—STUDIOS AND PAINTERS.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE MILLER’S LETTER.—A NEW POT BOILER SOLD. 277
CHAPTER XXXVII.
SUNSHINE AFTER STORM. 282
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
A PAINTER’S EDUCATION.—MASTER CHUTER’S PORT.—A FAREWELL 286
FEAST.—THE SLEEP OF THE JUST.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
GEORGE AGAIN.—THE PAINTER’S ADVICE.—“HOME-BREWED” AT THE 294
HEART OF OAK.—JAN CHANGES THE PAINTER’S MIND.
CHAPTER XL.
D’ARCY SEES BOGY.—THE ACADEMY.—THE PAINTER’S PICTURE. 300
CHAPTER XLI.
THE DETECTIVE.—THE “JOOK”.—JAN STANDS BY HIS MOTHER’S 303
GRAVE.—HIS AFTER HISTORY.
CHAPTER XLII.
CONCLUSION. 308
CHAPTER I.
THE WINDMILLER’S WIFE.—STRANGERS.—TEN SHILLINGS A WEEK.—THE LITTLE JAN.
STORM without and within!
So the windmiller might have said, if he had been in the habit of putting
his thoughts into an epigrammatic form, as a groan from his wife and a
growl of thunder broke simultaneously upon his ear, whilst the rain fell
scarcely faster than her tears.
It was far from mending matters that both storms were equally unexpected.
For eight full years the miller’s wife had been the meekest of women. If
there was a firm (and yet, as he flattered himself, a just) husband in
all the dreary straggling district, the miller was that man. And he
always did justice to his wife’s good qualities,—at least to her good
quality of submission,—and would, till lately, have upheld her before any
one as a model of domestic obedience. From the day when he brought home
his bride, tall, pretty, and perpetually smiling, to the tall old mill
and the ugly old mother who never smiled at all, there had been but one
will in the household. At any rate, after the old woman’s death. For
during her life-time her stern son paid her such deference that it was a
moot point, perhaps, which of them really ruled. Between them, however,
the young wife was moulded to a nicety, and her voice gained no more
weight in the counsels of the windmill when the harsh tones of the
mother-in-law were silenced for ever.
The miller was one of those good souls who live by the light of a few
small shrewdities (often proverbial), and pique themselves on sticking to
them to such a point, as if it were the greater virtue to abide by a
narrow rule the less it applied. The kernel of his domestic theory was,
“Never yield, and you never will have to,” and to this he was proud of
having stuck against all temptations from a real, though hard, affection
for his own; and now, after working so smoothly for eight years, had it
come to this?
The miller scratched his bead, and looked at his wife, almost with
amazement. She moaned, though he bade her be silent; she wept, in spite
of words which had hitherto been an effectual styptic to her tears; and
she met the commonplaces of his common sense with such wild, miserable
laughter, that he shuddered as he heard her.
Weakness in human beings is like the strength of beasts, a power of which
fortunately they are not always conscious. Unless positively brutal, you
cannot well beat a sickly woman for wailing and weeping; and if she will
not cease for any lesser consideration, there seems nothing for an
unbending husband to do but to leave her to herself.
This the miller had to do, anyhow. For he could only spare a moment’s
attention to her now and then, since the mill required all his care.
In a coat and hat of painted canvas, he had been in and out ever since
the storm began; now directing the two men who were working within, now
struggling along the stage that ran outside the windmill, at no small
risk of being fairly blown away.
He had reefed the sails twice already in the teeth of the blinding rain.
But he did well to be careful. For it was in such a storm as this, five
years ago “come Michaelmas,” that the worst of windmill calamities had
befallen him,—the sails had been torn off his mill and dashed into a
hundred fragments upon the ground. And such a mishap to a seventy feet
tower mill means—as windmillers well know—not only a stoppage of trade,
but an expense of two hundred pounds for the new sails.
Many a sack of grist, which should have come to him had gone down to the
watermill in the valley before the new sails were at work; and the huge
debt incurred to pay for them was not fairly wiped out yet. That
catastrophe had kept the windmiller a poor man for five years, and it
gave him a nervous dread of storms.
And talking of storms, here was another unreasonable thing. The morning
sky had been (like the miller’s wedded life) without a cloud. The day
had been sultry, for the time of year unseasonably so. And, just when
the miller most grudged an idle day, when times were hard, when he was in
debt,—for some small matters, as well as the sail business,—and when, for
the first time in his life, he felt almost afraid of his own hearthstone,
and would fain have been busy at his trade, not a breath of wind had
there been to turn the sails of the mill. Not a waft to cool his
perplexed forehead, not breeze enough to stir the short grass that glared
for miles over country flat enough to mock him with the fullest possible
view of the cloudless sky. Then towards evening, a few gray flecks had
stolen up from the horizon like thieves in the dusk, and a mighty host of
clouds had followed them; and when the wind did come, it came in no
moderate measure, but brought this awful storm upon its wings, which now
raged as if all the powers of mischief had got loose, and were bent on
turning every thing topsy-turvy indoors and out.
What made the winds and clouds so perverse, the clerk of the weather best
knows; but there was a reason for the unreasonableness of the
windmiller’s wife.
She had lost her child, her youngest born, and therefore, at present, her
best beloved. This girl-babe was the sixth of the windmiller and his
wife’s children, the last that God gave them, and the first that it had
pleased Him to take away.
The mother had been weak herself at the time that the baby fell ill, and
unusually ill-fitted to bear a heavy blow. Then her watchful eyes had
seen symptoms of ailing in the child long before the windmiller’s good
sense would allow a fuss to be made, and expense to be incurred about a
little peevishness up or down. And it was some words muttered by the
doctor when he did come, about not having been sent for soon enough,
which were now doing as much as any thing to drive the poor woman
frantic. They struck a blow, too, at her blind belief in the miller’s
invariable wisdom. If he had but listened to her in this matter, were it
only for love’s sake! There was something, she thought, in what that
woman had said who came to help her with the last offices,—the miller
discouraged “neighbors,” but this was a matter of decency,—that it was as
foolish for a man to have the say over babies and housework as it would
be for his wife to want her word in the workshop or the mill.
Perhaps a state of subjection for grown-up people does not tend to make
them reasonable, especially in their indignations. The windmiller’s wife
dared not, for her life, have told him in so many words that she thought
it would be for their joint benefit if he would give a little more
consideration to her wishes and opinions; but from this suppressed idea
came many sharp and peevish words at this time, which, apart from their
true source, were quite as unreasonable and perverse as the miller held
them to be. Nor is being completely under the control of another,
self-control. It may be doubted if it can even do much to teach it. The
thread of her passive condition having been, for the time, broken by
grief, the bereaved mother moaned and wailed, and rocked herself, and
beat her breast, and turned fiercely upon all interference, like some
poor beast in anguish.
She had clung to her children with an almost morbid tenderness, in
proportion as she found her worthy husband stern and cold. A hard
husband sometimes makes a soft mother, and it is perhaps upon the baby of
the family that her repressed affections outpoured themselves most fully.
It was so in this case, at any rate. And the little one had that
unearthly beauty which is seen, or imagined, about children who die
young. And the poor woman had suffered and striven so for it, to have it
and to keep it. The more critical grew its illness, the intenser grew
her strength and resolution by watchfulness, by every means her instinct
and experience could suggest, to fight and win the battle against death.
And when all was vain, the maddening thought tortured her that it might
have been saved.
The miller had made a mistake, and it was a pity that he made another on
the top of it, with the best intentions. He hurried on the funeral,
hoping that when “all was over” the mother would “settle down.”
But it was this crowning insult to her agony, the shortening of the too
brief time when she could watch by all that remained to her of her child,
which drove her completely wild. She reproached him now plainly and
bitterly enough. She would neither listen to reason nor obey; and
when—with more truth than taste—he observed that other people lost
children, and that they had plenty left, she laughed in his face that
wild laugh which drove him back to the mill and to the storm.
How it raged! The miller’s wife was an uneducated, commonplace woman
enough, but, in the excited state of her nervous system, she was as
sensible as any poet of a kind of comforting harmony in the wild sounds
without; though at another time they would have frightened her.
They did not disturb the children, who were in bed. Four in the old
press-bed in the corner, and one in a battered crib, and one in the
narrow bed over which the coverlet was not yet green.
The day’s work was over for her, though it was only just beginning for
the miller, and the mother had nothing to do but weep, and her tears fell
and fell, and the rain poured and poured. That last outburst had
somewhat relieved her, and she almost wished her husband would come back,
as a flash of lightning dazzled her eyes, and the thunder rattled round
the old mill, as if the sails had broken up again, and were falling upon
the roof of the round-house. All her senses were acute to-night, and she
listened for the miller’s footsteps, and so, listening, in the lull after
the thunder, she heard another sound. Wheels upon the road.
A pang shot through her heart. Thus had the doctor’s gig sounded the
night he came,—alas, too late! How long and how intensely she had
listened for that! She first heard it just beyond the mile-stone. This
one must be a good bit on this side of it; up the hill, in fact. She
could not help listening. It was so like, so terribly like! Now it spun
along the level ground. Ah, the doctor had not hurried so! Now it was
at the mill, at the door, and—it stopped.
The miller’s wife rose to run out, she hardly knew why. But in a moment
she checked herself, and went back to her seat.
“I be crazed, surely,” said the poor woman, sitting down again. “There
be more gigs than one in the world, and folk often stops to ask their way
of the maester.”
These travellers were a long time about the putting of such a simple
question, especially as the night was not a pleasant one to linger out
in. The murmur of voices, too, which the woman overheard, betokened a
close conversation, in which the familiar drawl of the windmiller’s
dialect blended audibly with that kind of clean-clipt speaking peculiar
to gentlefolk.
“He’ve been talking to master’s five minute an’ more,” muttered the
miller’s wife. “What can ’ee want with un?” The talking ceased as she
spoke, and the windmiller appeared, followed by a woman carrying a young
baby in her arms.
He was a ruddy man for his age at any time, but there was an extra flush
on his cheeks just now, and some excitement in his manner, making him
look as his wife was not wont to see him more than once a year, after the
Foresters’ dinner at the Heart of Oak. There was a difference, too. A
little too much drink made the windmiller peevish and pompous, but just
now he spoke in a kindly, almost conciliating tone.
“See, missus! Let this good lady dry herself a bit, and get warm, and
the little un too.”
A woman—ill-favored, though there was no positive fault to be found with
her features, except that the upper lip was long and cleft, and the lower
one very large—came forward with the child, and began to take off its
wraps, and the miller’s wife, giving her face a hasty wipe, went
hospitably to help her.
“Tst! tst! little love!” she cried, gulping down a sob, due to her own
sad memories, and moving the cloak more tenderly than the woman in whose
arms the child lay. “What a pair of dark eyes, then! Is’t a boy or
girl, m’m?”
“A boy,” said a voice from the door, and the miller’s wife, with a
suppressed shriek of timidity, became aware of a man whose entrance she
had not perceived, and to whom she dropped a hasty courtesy.
He was a man slightly above the middle height, whose slenderness made him
seem taller. An old cloak, intended as much to disguise as to protect
him, did not quite conceal a faultlessness of costume beneath it, after
the fashion of the day. Waistcoats of three kinds, one within the other,
a frilled shirt, and a well-adjusted stock, were to be seen, though he
held the ends of the old cloak tightly across him, as the wind would have
caught them in the doorway. He wore a countryman’s hat, which seemed to
suit him as little as the cloak, and from beneath the brim his dark eyes
glared with a restless, dissatisfied look, and were so dark and so fierce
and bright that one could hardly see any other details of his face,
unless it were his smooth chin, which, either from habit or from the
stiffness of his stock, he carried strangely up in the air.
“Indeed, sir,” said the windmiller’s wife, courtesying, and setting a
chair, with her eyes wandering back by a kind of fascination to those of
the stranger; “be pleased to take a seat, sir.”
The stranger sat down for a moment, and then stood up again. Then he
seemed to remember that he still wore his hat, and removed it, holding it
stiffly before him in his gloved hands. This displayed a high, narrow
head, on which the natural hair was worn short and without parting, and a
face which, though worn, was not old. And, for no definable reason, an
impression stole over the windmiller’s wife that he, like her husband,
had some wish to conciliate, which in his case struggled hard with a very
different kind of feeling, more natural to him.
Then he took out a watch of what would now be called the old turnip
shape, and said impatiently to the miller, “Our time is short, my good
man.”
“To be sure, sir,” said the windmiller. “Missus! a word with you here.”
And he led the way into the round-house, where his wife followed,
wondering. Her wonder was not lessened when he laid his hand upon her
shoulder, and, with flushed cheek and a tone of excitement that once more
recalled the Foresters’ annual meeting, said, “We’ve had some sore times,
missus, of late, but good luck have come our way to-night.”
“And how then, maester?” faltered his wife.
“That child,” said the windmiller, turning his broad thumb expressively
towards the inner room, “belongs to folk that want to get a home for un,
and can afford to pay for un, too. And the place being healthy and out
of the way, and having heard of our trouble, and you just bereaved of a
little un”—
“No! no! no!” shrieked the poor mother, who now understood all. “I
_couldn’t_, maester, ’tis unpossible, I could _not_. Oh dear! oh dear!
isn’t it bad enough to lose the sweetest child that ever saw light,
without taking in an outcast to fill that dear angel’s place? Oh dear!
oh dear!”
“And we behindhand in more quarters than one,” continued the miller,
prudently ignoring his wife’s tears and remonstrances, “and a dear season
coming on, and an uncertain trade that keeps a man idle by days together,
and here’s ten shillings a week dropped into our laps, so to speak. Ten
shillings a week—regular and sartin. No less now, and no more hereafter,
the governor said. Them were his words.”
“What’s ten shilling a week to me, and my child dead and gone?” moaned
the mother, in reply.
“_What’s ten shillings a week to you_?” cried the windmiller, who was
fairly exasperated, in tones so loud that they were audible in the
dwelling room, where the stranger, standing by the three-legged table,
stroked his lips twice or thrice with his hand, as if to smooth out a
cynical smile which strove to disturb their decorous and somewhat haughty
compression. “What’s ten shilling a week to you? Why, it’s food to you,
and drink to you, and firing to you, and boots for the children’s feet.
Look here, my woman. You’ve had a sore affliction, but that’s not to say
you’re to throw good luck in the dirt for a whimsey. This matter’s
settled.”
And the miller strode back into the inner room, whilst his wife sat upon
a sack of barley, wringing her hands, and moaning, “I couldn’t do my duty
by un, maester, I couldn’t do my duty by un.”
This she repeated at intervals, with her apron over her face, as before;
and then, suddenly aware that her husband had left her, she hurried into
the inner room to plead her own cause. It was too late. The strangers
had gone. The miller was not there, and the baby lay on the end of the
press bedstead, wailing as bitterly as the mother herself.
It had been placed there, with a big bundle of clothes by it, before the
miller came back, and he had found it so. He found the stranger too,
with his hat on his head, and his cloak fastened, glancing from time to
time at the child, and then withdrawing his glance hastily, and looking
forcedly round at the meagre furnishing of the miller’s room, and then
back at the little bundle on the bed, and away again. The woman stood
with her back to the press-bed, her striped shawl drawn tightly round
her, and her hands folded together as closely as her long lip pressed the
heavy one below.
“Is it settled?” asked the man.
“It is, sir,” said the miller. “You’ll excuse my missus being as she is,
but it’s fretting for the child we’ve a lost”—
“I understand, I understand,” said the stranger, hastily. He was pulling
back the rings of a silk netted purse, which he had drawn mechanically
from his pocket, and which, from some sudden start of his, fell chinking
on to the floor. Whatever the thought was which startled him, he thought
it so sharply that he looked up in fear that he had said it aloud. But
he had not spoken, and the miller had no other expression than that of an
eager satisfaction on his face as the stranger counted out the gold by
the flaring light of the tallow candle.
“A quarter’s pay in advance,” he said briefly. “It will be paid
quarterly, you understand.” After which, and checking himself in a look
towards the child, he went out, followed by the woman.
In the round-house he paused however, and looked back into the meagre,
dimly lighted room, where the little bundle upon the bed lay weeping.
For a moment, a storm of irresolution seemed to seize him, and then
muttering, “It can’t be helped for the present, it can’t be helped,” he
hurried towards the vehicle, in the back seat of which the woman was
already seated.
The driver touched his hat to him as he approached, and turned the
cushion, which he had been protecting from the rain. The stranger
stumbled over the cloak as he got in, and, cursing the step, bade the man
drive like something which had no connection with driving. But, as they
turned, the windmiller ran out and after them.
“Stop, sir!” he cried.
“Well, what now?” said the stranger, sharply, as the horse was pulled
back on his haunches.
“Is it named?” gasped the miller.
“Oh, yes, all that sort of thing,” was the impatient reply.
“And what name?” asked the miller.
“Jan. J, A, N,” said the stranger, shouting against the blustering wind.
“And—and—the other name?” said the windmiller, who was now standing close
to the stranger’s ear.
“What is yours?” he asked, with a sharp look of his dark eyes.
“Lake—Abel,” said the windmiller.
“It is his also, henceforth,” said the stranger, waving his hand, as if
to close the subject,—“Jan Lake. Drive on, will you?”
The horse started forward, and they whirled away down the wet, gray road.
And before the miller had regained his mill, the carriage was a distant
speck upon the storm.