THE MILLER’S MAN AT THE MOP.—A LIVELY COMPANION.—SAL LOSES 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.
FOR some years the ex-servant of the windmill had been rather favored by
fortune than otherwise. He found the pocket-book, and, though he could
not read the letter, he got the five-pound note. Since then, his gains,
honest and dishonest, had been much beyond his needs, and his savings
were not small. Suspicion was just beginning to connect his name and
that of the Cheap Jack with certain thefts committed in the neighborhood,
when he made up his mind to go.
His wealth was not generally known. Many a time had he been tempted to
buy pigs (a common speculation in the district, and the first stone of
more than one rustic fortune), but the dread of exciting suspicion
balanced the almost certain profit, and he could never make up his mind.
For Master Lake paid only five pounds a year for his man’s valuable
services, which, even in a district where at that time habits were
simple, and boots not made of brown paper, did not leave much margin for
the purchase of pigs. The pig speculation, though profitable, was not
safe. George had made money, however, and he had escaped detection. On
the whole, he had been fortunate. But that mop saw a turn in the tide of
his affairs, and ended strangely with him.
It began otherwise. George had never felt more convinced of his power to
help himself at the expense of his neighbors than he did after getting
Sal’s information, and keeping back his own, before they started to join
in the amusements of the fair. He was on good terms with himself; none
the less so that he had not failed to see the Cheap Jack’s chagrin, as
the woman poured forth all she knew for George’s benefit, and got nothing
in return.
The vanity of the ignorant knows no check except from without; under
flattery, it is boundless, and the Cheap Jack’s wife found no difficulty
in fooling George to the top of his bent.
George was rather proud, too, of his companion. She was not, as has been
said, ill-looking but for her mouth, and beauty was not abundant enough
in the neighborhood to place her at much disadvantage. Fashionable
finery was even less common, and the Cheap Jack’s wife was showily
dressed. And George found her a very pleasant companion; much livelier
than the slow-witted damsels of the country-side. For him she had
nothing but flattery; but her smart speeches at the expense of other
people in the crowd caused the miller’s man to double up his long back
with laughter.
A large proportion of the country wives and sweethearts tramped up and
down the fair at the heels of their husbands and swains, like squaws
after their Indian spouses. But the Cheap Jack’s wife asked George for
his arm,—the left one,—and she clung to it all the day. “Quite the lady
in her manners she be,” thought George. She called him “Mr. Sannel,”
too. George felt that she admired him. For a moment his satisfaction
was checked, when she called his attention to the good looks of a
handsome recruiting sergeant, who was strutting about the mop with an air
expressing not so much that it all belonged to him as that he didn’t at
all belong to it.
“But there, he ain’t to hold a candle to you, Mr. Sannel, though his coat
do sit well upon him,” said the Cheap Jack’s wife.
It gratified George’s standing ill-will to the Cheap Jack to have “cut
him out” with this showy lady, and to laugh loudly with her upon his arm,
whilst the hunchback followed, like a discontented cur, at their heels.
If there was a drawback to the merits of his lively companion, it was her
power of charming the money out of George’s pocket.
The money that he disbursed came from the right-hand pocket of his red
waistcoat. In the left-hand pocket (and the pockets, like the pattern of
the waistcoat, were large) was the lost pocket-book. It was a small one,
and just fitted in nicely. In the pocket-book were George’s savings,
chiefly in paper. Notes were more portable than coin, and, as George
meant to invest them somewhere where he was not known, no suspicions need
be raised by their value. The letter was there also.
There were plenty of shows at the mop, and the Cheap Jack’s wife saw them
all. The travelling wax-works; the menagerie with a very mangy lion in
an appallingly rickety cage; the fat Scotchman, a monster made more
horrible to view by a dress of royal Stuart tartan; the penny theatre,
and a mermaid in a pickling-tub.
One treat only she declined. The miller’s man would have paid for a
shilling portrait of her, but she refused to be taken.
The afternoon was wearing away, when Sal caught sight of some country
bumpkins upon a stage, who were preparing to grin through horse-collars
against each other for the prize of a hat. As she had never seen or
heard of the entertainment, George explained it to her.
It was a contest in which the ugliest won the prize. Only the
widest-mouthed, most grotesque-looking clowns of the place attempted to
compete; and he won who, besides being the ugliest by nature, could
“grin” and contort his features in the mode which most tickled the fancy
of the beholders. George had once competed himself, and had only failed
to secure the hat because his nearest rival could squint as well as grin;
and he was on the point of boasting of this, but on second thoughts he
kept the fact to himself.
Very willing indeed he was to escort his companion to a show in the open
air for which nothing was charged, and they plunged valiantly into the
crowd. The crowd was huge, but George’s height and strength stood him in
good stead, and he pushed on, and dragged Sal with him. There was some
confusion on the stage. A nigger, with a countenance which of itself
moved the populace to roars of laughter, had applied to be allowed to
compete. Opinions were divided as to whether it would be fair to native
talent, whilst there was a strong desire to see a face that in its
natural condition was “as good as a play,” with the additional
attractions of a horse-collar and a grin.
The country clowns on the stage fumed, and the nigger grinned and bowed,
and the crowd yelled, and surged, and swayed, and weak people got
trampled, and everybody was tightly squeezed, and the Cheap Jack’s wife
was alarmed, and withdrew her hand from George’s arm, and begged him to
hold her up, which he gallantly did, she meanwhile clinging with both
hands to his smock.
As to the hunchback, it is hardly necessary to say that he did not get
very far into the crowd, and when his wife and George returned, laughing
gayly, they found him standing outside, with a sulky face. “Look here,
missus,” said he; “you’re a enjoying of yourself, but I’m not. You’ve
got the blunt, so just hand over a few coppers, and I’ll get a pint at
the King’s Arms.”
Sal began fumbling to find her pocket, but when she found it, she gave a
shriek, and turned it inside out. It was empty!
If the miller’s man had enjoyed himself before, he was not to be envied
now. The Cheap Jack’s wife poured forth her woes in a continuous stream
of complaint. She minutely described the purse which she had lost, the
age and quality of her dress, and the impossibility of there being a hole
in her pocket. She took George’s arm once more, and insisted upon
revisiting every stall and show where they had been, to see if her purse
had been found. Up and down George toiled with her, wiping his face and
feeling that he looked like a fool, as at each place in turn they were
told that they might as well “look for a needle in a bottle of hay,” and
that pickpockets were as plenty at a mop as blackberries in September.
He was tired of the woman now she was troublesome, and fidgetingly
persevering, as women are apt to be, and he was vexed to feel how little
money was left in his right-hand pocket. He did not think of feeling in
the left one, not merely because the Cheap Jack was standing in front of
him, but because no fear for the safety of its contents had dawned upon
him. It was easy for a woman to lose her purse out of a pocket flapping
loosely in the drapery of her skirts, but that any thing stowed tightly
away in a man’s waistcoat under his smock could be stolen in broad
daylight without his knowledge did not occur to him. As little did he
guess that of all the pickpockets who were supposed to drive a brisk
trade at the fair, the quickest, the cleverest, the most practised
professional was the Cheap Jack’s wife.
She had feigned to see “something” on the ground near an oyster stall,
which she said “might be” her purse. As indeed it might as well as any
thing else, seeing that the said purse had no existence.
As she left them, George turned to the Cheap Jack. “Look ’ee here,
Jack,” said he; “take thee missus whoam. She do seem to be so put about,
’tis no manner of use her stopping in the mop. And I be off for a pint
of something to wash my throat out. I be mortal dry with running up and
down after she. Women does make such a caddle about things.”
“You might stand a pint for an old friend, George, my dear,” said the
Cheap Jack, following him. But George hurried on, and shook his head.
“No, no,” said he; “tak’ thee missus whoam, I tell ’ee. She’ve not seen
much at your expense to-day, if she have lost her pus.”
With which the miller’s man escaped into the King’s Arms, and pushed his
way to the farthest end of the room, where a large party of men were
drinking and smoking.
At a table near him sat the recruiting sergeant whom he had noticed
before, and he now examined him more closely.
He was of a not uncommon type of non-commissioned officers in the English
service. Not of a very intellectual—hardly perhaps of an
interesting—kind of good looks, he was yet a strikingly handsome man.
His features were good and clearly cut; his hair and moustache were dark,
thick, short and glossy; his dark eyes were quick and bright; his figure
was well-made, and better developed; his shapely hands were not only
clean, they were fastidiously trimmed about the nails (a daintiness
common below the rank of sergeant, especially among men acting as
clerks); and if the stone in his signet ring was not a real onyx, it
looked quite as well at a distance, and the absence of a crest was not
conspicuous. He spoke with a very good imitation of the accent of the
officers he had served with, and in his alertness, his well-trained
movements, his upright carriage, and his personal cleanliness, he came so
near to looking like a gentleman that he escaped it only by a certain
swagger, which proved an ill-chosen substitute for well-bred ease.
To George’s eyes this was not visible as a fault. The sergeant was as
much “the swell” as George could imagine any man to be.
George Sannel could never remember with distinctness the ensuing events
of that afternoon. Dim memories remained with him of the sergeant
meeting his long stare with some civilities, to which he was conscious of
having replied less suitably than he might have wished. At one period,
certainly, bets were made upon the height of himself and the handsome
soldier, respectively, and he was sure that they were put back to back,
and that he proved the taller man; and that it was somehow impressed upon
him that he did not look so, because the other carried himself so much
better. It was also impressed upon him, somehow, that if he would
consent to be well-dressed, well-fed, and well-lodged, at the expense of
the country, his own appearance would quickly rival that of the sergeant,
and that the reigning Sovereign would gladly pay, as well as keep and
clothe, such an ornamental bulwark of the state. At some other period
the sergeant had undoubtedly told him to “give it a name,” and the name
he gave it was sixpenny ale, which he drank at the sergeant’s expense,
and which was followed by shandy-gaff, on the same footing.
At what time and for what reason George put his hand into his left-hand
waistcoat pocket he never could remember. But when he did so, and found
it empty, the cry he raised had such a ring of anguish as might have
awakened pity for him, even where his ill deeds were fully known.
The position was perplexing, if he had had a sober head to consider it
with. That pickpockets abounded had been well impressed upon his slow
intellect, and that there was no means of tracing property so lost, in
the crowd and confusion of the mop. True, his property was worth
“crying,” worth offering a reward for. But the pocket-book was not his,
and the letter was not addressed to him; and it was doubtful if he even
dare run the risk of claiming them.
His first despair was succeeded by a sort of drunken fury, in which he
accused the men sitting with him of robbing him, and then swore it was
the Cheap Jack, and so raved till the landlord of the King’s Arms
expelled him as “drunk and disorderly,” and most of the company refused
to believe that he had had any such sum of money to lose.
Exactly how or where, after this, the sergeant found him, George could
not remember, but his general impression of the sergeant’s kindness was
strong. He could recall that he pumped upon his head in the yard of the
King’s Arms, to sober him, by George’s own request; and that it did
somewhat clear his brain, his remembrance of seeing the sergeant wipe his
fingers on a cambric handkerchief seems to prove. They then paced up and
down together arm in arm, if not as accurately in step as might have been
agreeable to the soldier. George remembered hearing of prize money, to
which his own loss was a bagatelle, and gathering on the whole that the
army, as a profession, opened a sort of boundless career of opportunities
to a man of his peculiar talents and appearance. There was something
infectious, too, in the gay easy style in which the soldier seemed to
treat fortune, good or ill; and the miller’s man was stimulated at last
to vow that he was not such a fool as he looked, and would “never say
die.” To the best of his belief, the sergeant replied in terms which
showed that, had he been “in cash,” George’s loss would have been made
good by him, out of pure generosity, and on the spot.
As it was, he pressed upon his acceptance the sum of one shilling, which
the miller’s man pocketed with tears.
What recruit can afterwards remember which argument of the skilful
sergeant did most to melt his discretion into valor?
The sun had not dried the dew from the wolds, and the sails of the
windmill hung idle in the morning air, when George Sannel made his first
march to the drums and fifes, with ribbons flying from his hat, a recruit
of the 206th (Royal Wiltshire) Regiment of Foot.
* * * * *
As the Cheap Jack and his wife hastened home from the mop, Sal had some
difficulty in restraining her husband’s impatience to examine the
pocket-book as they walked along.
Prudence prevailed, however, and it was not opened till they were at home
and alone.
In notes and money, George’s savings amounted to more than thirteen
pounds.
“Pretty well, my dear,” said the Cheap Jack, grinning hideously. “And
now for the letter. Read it aloud, Sal, my dear; you’re a better scholar
than me.”
Sal opened the thin, well-worn sheet, and read the word “Moerdyk,” but
then she paused. And, like Abel, she paused so long that the hunchback
pressed impatiently to look over her shoulder.
But the letter was written in a foreign language, and the Cheap Jack and
his wife were no wiser for it than the miller’s man.