ABEL AT HOME.—JAN OBJECTS TO THE MILLER’S MAN.—THE ALPHABET.—THE CHEAP
JACK.—“PITCHERS.”
POOR Abel was not fated to get much regular schooling. He particularly
liked learning, but the interval was all too brief between the time when
his mother was able to spare him from housework and the time when his
father began to employ him in the mill.
George got more lazy and stupid, instead of less so, and though in some
strange manner he kept his place, yet when Master Lake had once begun to
employ his son, he found that he would get along but ill without him.
To Jan, Abel’s being about the windmill gave the utmost satisfaction. He
played with his younger foster-brothers and sisters contentedly enough,
but his love for Abel, and for being with Abel, was quite another thing.
Mrs. Lake, too, had no confidence in any one but Abel as a nurse for her
darling; the consequence of which was, that the little Jan was constantly
trotting at his foster-brother’s heels through the round-house,
attempting valiant escalades on the ladders, and covering himself from
head to foot with flour in the effort to cultivate a miller’s thumb.
One day Mrs. Lake, having sent the other children off to school, was bent
upon having a thorough cleaning-out of the dwelling-room, during which
process Jan was likely to be in her way; so she caught him up in her arms
and went to seek Abel in the round-house.
She had the less scruple in availing herself of his services, that there
was no wind, and business was not brisk in the windmill.
“Maester!” she cried, “can Abel mind Jan a bit? I be going to clean the
house.”
“Ay, ay,” said the windmiller, “Abel can mind un. I be going to the
village myself, but there’s Gearge to start, if so be the wind rises.
And then if he want Abel, thee must take the little un again.”
“Sartinly I will,” said his wife; and Abel willingly received his charge
and carried him off to play among the sacks.
George joined them once, but Jan had a rooted and unconquerable dislike
to the miller’s man, and never replied to his advances with any thing
more friendly than anger or tears. This day was no exception to others
in this respect; and after a few fruitless attempts to make himself
acceptable, in the course of which he trod on the sandy kitten’s tail,
who ran up Jan’s back and spat at her enemy from that vantage-ground,
George went off muttering in terms by no means complimentary to the
little Jan. Abel did his best to excuse the capricious child to George,
besides chiding him for his rudeness—with very little effect. Jan dried
his black eyes as the miller’s man made off, but he looked no more
ashamed of himself than a good dog looks who has growled or refused the
paw of friendship to some one for excellent reasons of his own.
After George had gone, they played about happily enough, Jan riding on
Abel’s back, and the sandy kitten on Jan’s, in and out among the
corn-sacks, full canter as far as the old carved meal-chest, and back to
the door again.
Poor Abel, with his double burden, got tired at last, and they sat down
and sifted flour for the education of their thumbs. Jan was pinching and
flattening his with a very solemn face, in the hope of attaining to a
miller’s thumb by a shorter process than the common one, when Abel
suddenly said,—
“I tell thee what, then, Jan: ’tis time thee learned thy letters. And
I’ll teach thee. Come hither.”
Jan jumped up, thereby pitching the kitten headlong from his shoulders,
and ran to Abel, who was squatting by some spilled flour near a sack, and
was smoothing it upon the floor with his hands. Then very slowly and
carefully he traced the letter A in the flour, keenly watched by Jan.
“That’s A,” said he. “Say it, Jan. A.”
“A,” replied Jan, obediently. But he had no sooner said it, than, adding
hastily, “Let Jan do it,” he traced a second A, slightly larger than
Abel’s, in three firm and perfectly proportioned strokes.
His moving finger was too much for the kitten’s feelings, and she sprang
into the flour and pawed both the A’s out of existence.
Jan slapped her vigorously, and having smoothed the surface once more, he
drew A after A with the greatest rapidity, scrambling along sideways like
a crab, and using both hands indifferently, till the row stretched as far
as the flour would permit.
Abel’s pride in his pupil was great, and he was fain to run off to call
his mother to see the performances of their prodigy, but Jan was too
impatient to spare him.
“Let Jan do more!” he cried.
Abel traced a B in the flour. “That’s B, Jan,” said he.
“Jan do it,” replied Jan, confidently.
“But say it,” said his teacher, restraining him. “Say B, Jan.”
“B,” said Jan, impatiently; and adding, “Jan do it,” he began a row of
B’s. He hesitated slightly before making the second curve, and looked at
his model, after which he went down the line as before, and quite as
successfully. And the kitten went down also, pawing out each letter as
it was made, under the impression that the whole affair was a game of
play with herself.
“There bean’t a letter that bothers him,” cried Abel, triumphantly, to
the no less triumphant foster-mother.
Jan had, indeed, gone through the whole alphabet, with the utmost ease
and self-confidence; but his remembrance of the names of the letters he
drew so readily proved to be far less perfect than his representations of
them on the floor of the round-house.
Abel found his pupil’s progress hindered by the very talent that he had
displayed. He was so anxious to draw the letters that he would not learn
them, and Abel was at last obliged to make one thing a condition of the
other.
“Say it then, Jan,” he would cry, “and then thee shall make ’em.”
Mrs. Lake commissioned Abel to buy a small slate and pencil for Jan at
the village shop, and these were now the child’s favorite toys. He would
sit quiet for any length of time with them. 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.
For a while Jan’s taste for wielding the pencil was solely devoted to
furthering his learning to read. He drew letters only till the day that
the Cheap Jack called.
The Cheap Jack was a travelling pedler, who did a good deal of business
in that neighborhood. He was not a pedler pure, for he had a little shop
in the next town. Nature had not favored him. He was a hunchback. He
was, or pretended to be, deaf. He had a very ugly face, made uglier by
dirt, above which he wore a mangy hair cap. He sold rough pottery, cheap
crockery and glass, mock jewelry, low song-books, framed pictures,
mirrors, and quack medicines. He bought old bottles, bones, and rags.
And what else he bought or sold, or dealt with, was dimly guessed at by a
few, but fully known to none.
Where he was born, what was his true name or age, whether on any given
occasion he was speaking less than lies, and what was the ultimate object
of his words and deeds,—at these things no one even guessed. That his
conscience was ever clean, that his dirty face once masked no vile or
petty plots for evil in the brain behind, that at some past period he was
a child,—these things it would have tasked the strongest faith to
realize.
He was not so unpopular with children as the miller’s man.
The instinct of children is like the instinct of dogs, very true and
delicate as a rule. But dogs, from Cerberus downwards, are liable to be
biassed by sops. And four paper-covered sails, that twirl upon the end
of a stick as the wind blows, would warp the better judgment of most
little boys, especially (for a bargain is more precious than a gift) when
the thing is to be bought for a few old bones.
Jan was a little afraid of the Cheap Jack, but he liked his whirligigs.
They went when the mill was going, and sometimes when the mill wouldn’t
go, if you ran hard to make a breeze.
But it so happened that the first day on which the Cheap Jack came round
after Jan had begun to learn his letters, he brought forth some wares
which moved Jan’s feelings more than the whirligigs did.
“Buy a nice picter, marm?” said the Cheap Jack to Mrs. Lake, who, with
the best intentions not to purchase, felt that there could be no harm in
seeing what the man had got.
“You shall have ‘Joseph and his Bretheren’ cheap,” roared the hunchback,
becoming more pressing as the windmiller’s wife seemed slow to be
fascinated, and shaking “Joseph and his Brethren,” framed in satin-wood,
in her face, as he advanced upon her with an almost threatening air.
“Don’t want ’em? Take ‘Antony and Cleopatterer.’ It’s a sweet picter.
Too dear? Do you know what sech picters costs to paint? Look at
Cleopatterer’s dress and the jewels she has on. I don’t make a farthing
on ’em. I gets daily bread out of the other things, and only keeps the
picters to oblige one or two ladies of taste that likes to give their
rooms a genteel appearance.”
The long disuse of such powers of judgment as she had, and long habit of
always giving way, had helped to convert Mrs. Lake’s naturally weak will
and unselfish disposition into a sort of mental pulp, plastic to any
pressure from without. To men she invariably yielded; and, poor specimen
of a man as the Cheap Jack was, she had no fibre of personal judgment or
decision in the strength of which to oppose his assertions, and every
instant she became more and more convinced that wares she neither wanted
nor approved of were necessary to her, and good bargains, because the man
who sold them said so.
The Cheap Jack was a knave, but he was no fool. In a crowded
market-place, or at a street door, no oilier tongue wagged than his. But
he knew exactly the moment when a doubtful bargain might be clinched by a
bullying tone and a fierce look on his dirty face, at cottage doors, on
heaths or downs, when the good wife was alone with her children, and the
nearest neighbor was half a mile away.
No length of experience taught Mrs. Lake wisdom in reference to the Cheap
Jack.
Each time that his cart appeared in sight she resolved to have nothing to
do with him, warned by the latest cracked jug, or the sugar-basin which,
after three-quarters of an hour wasted in chaffering, she had beaten down
to three-halfpence dearer than what she afterwards found to be the shop
price in the town. But proof to the untrained mind is “as water spilled
upon the ground.” And when the Cheap Jack declared that she was quite
free to look without buying, and that he did not want her to buy, Mrs.
Lake allowed him to pull down his goods as before, and listened to his
statements as if she had never proved them to be lies, and was thrown
into confusion and fluster when he began to bully, and bought in haste to
be rid of him, and repented at leisure—to no purpose as far as the future
was concerned.
“Look here!” yelled the hunchback, as he waddled with horrible swiftness
after the miller’s wife, as she withdrew into the mill; “which do you
mean to have? _I_ gets nothing on ’em, whichever you takes, so please
yourself. Take ‘Joseph and his Bretheren.’ The frame’s worth twice the
money. Take the other, too, and I’ll take sixpence off the pair, and be
out of pocket to please you.”
“Nothing to-day, thank you!” said Mrs. Lake, as loudly as she could.
“Got any other sort, you say?” said the Cheap Jack. “I’ve got all sorts,
but some parties is so difficult to please.
“Wait a bit, wait a bit,” he continued, as Mrs. Lake again tried to make
him (willing to) hear that she wanted none of his wares; and, vanishing
with the uncanny quickness common to him, he waddled swiftly back again
to his cart, and returned, before Mrs. Lake could secure herself from
intrusion, laden with a fresh supply of pictures, the weight of which it
seemed marvellous that he could support.
“Now you’ve got your choice, marm,” he said. “It’s no trouble to me to
oblige a good customer. There’s picters for you!”
“_Pitchers_!” said Jan, admiringly, as he crept up to them.
“So they are, my little man. Now then, help your mammy to choose. Most
of these is things you can’t get now, for love nor money. Here you
are,—‘Love and Beauty.’ That’s a sweet thing. ‘St Joseph,’ ‘The
Robber’s Bride,’ ‘Child and Lamb,’ ‘Melan-choly.’ Here’s an old”—
“Pitcher!” exclaimed Jan once more, gazing at an old etching in a dirty
frame, which the Cheap Jack was holding in his hand. “Pitcher, pitcher!
let Jan look!” he cried.
It was of a water-mill, old, thatched, and with an unprotected wheel,
like the one in the valley below. Some gnarled willows stretched across
the water, whose trunks seemed hardly less time-worn and rotten than the
wheel below. This foreground subject was in shadow, and strongly drawn,
but beyond it, in the sunlight, lay a bit of delicate distance, on the
rising ground of which stood one of those small wooden windmills known as
Post-mills. An old woman and a child were just coming into the shade,
and passing beneath a wayside shrine. What in the picture took Jan’s
fancy it is impossible to say, but he gazed at it with exclamations of
delight.
The Cheap Jack saw that it was certain to be bought, and he raised the
price accordingly.
Mrs. Lake felt the same conviction, and began to try at least to get a
good bargain.
“’Tis a terr’ble old frame,” said she. “There be no gold left on’t.”
And no more there was.
“What do you say?” screamed the Cheap Jack, with his hand to his ear, and
both a great deal too close to Mrs. Lake’s face to be pleasant.
“’Tis such an old frame,” she shouted, “and the gold be all gone.”
“Old!” cried the hunchback, scowling; “who says I sell old things? Every
picter in that lot’s brand new and dirt cheap.”
“The gold be rubbed off,” screamed Mrs. Lake in his ear.
“Brighten it up, then,” said the Cheap Jack. “Gold ain’t paint; gold
ain’t paper; rub it up!” and, suiting the action to the word, he rubbed
the dirty old frame vigorously with the dirty sleeve of his smock.
“It don’t seem to brighten it, nohow,” said Mrs. Lake, looking nervously
round; but neither the miller nor George was to be seen.
“Real gold allus looks like this in damp weather,” said the Cheap Jack.
“Hang it up in a warm room, dust it lightly every morning with a dry
handkerchief, an’ it’ll come out that shining you’ll see your face in it.
And when summer comes, cover it up in yaller gauze to keep off the
flies.”
Mrs. Lake looked wistfully at the place the Cheap Jack had rubbed, but
she had no redress, and saw no way out of her hobble but to buy the
picture.
When the bargain was completed, the Cheap Jack fell back into his oiliest
manner; it being part of his system not only to bully at the critical
moment, but to be very civil afterwards, so as to leave an impression so
pleasant on the minds of his lady customers that they could hardly do
other than thank him for his promise to call again shortly with “bargains
as good as ever.”
The Cheap Jack was a man of many voices. The softness of his parting
words to Mrs. Lake, “I’d go three mile out of my road, ma’am, to call on
a lady like you,” had hardly died away, when he woke the echoes of the
plains by addressing his horse in a very different tone.
The Wiltshire carters and horses have a language between them which falls
darkly upon the ear of the unlearned therein; but the uncouth yell which
the Cheap Jack addressed to his beast was not of that dialect. The sound
he made on this occasion was not, Ga oot! Coom hedder! or, There right!
but the horse understood it.
It is probable that it never heard the Cheap Jack’s softer intonations,
for its protuberant bones gave a quiver beneath the scarred skin as he
yelled. Then its drooping ears pricked faintly, the quavering forelegs
were braced, one desperate jog of the tottering load of oddities, and it
set slowly and silently forward.
The Cheap Jack did not follow his wares; he scrambled softly round the
mill, like a deformed cat, looking about him on all sides. Then he made
use of another sound,—a sharp, suggestive sound, whistled between two of
his fingers.
Then he looked round again.
No one appeared. The wheels of the distant cart scraped slowly along the
road, but this was the only sound the Cheap Jack heard.
He whistled softly again.
And as the cart took the sharp turn of the road, and was lost to sight,
the miller’s man appeared, and the Cheap Jack greeted him in the softest
tone he had yet employed. “Ah, there you are, my dear!”
* * * * *
Meanwhile, Mrs. Lake sat within, and looked ruefully at the damaged
frame, and wished that the master, or at least the man, had happened to
be at home.
It is to be feared that our self-reproach for having done wrong is not
always so certain, or so keen, as our self-reproach for having allowed
ourselves to suffer wrong—in a bad bargain.
Whether this particular picture was a bad bargain it is not easy to
decide.
It was scandalously dear for its condition, and for what it had cost the
hunchback, but it was cheap for the pleasure it gave to the little Jan.