Jan of the Windmill Part 9

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 pa.s.sing 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 Wilts.h.i.+re 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 p.r.i.c.ked 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 sc.r.a.ped 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.

CHAPTER XI.

SCARECROWS AND MEN.--JAN REFUSES TO "MAKE GEARGE."--UNCANNY.--"JAN'S OFF."-THE MOON AND THE CLOUDS.

The picture gave Jan great pleasure, but it proved a stumbling-block on the road to learning.

To "make letters" on his slate had been the utmost of his ambition, and as he made them he learned them. But after the Cheap Jack's visit his constant cry was, "Jan make pitchers." And when Abel tried to confine his attention to the alphabet, he would, after a most perfunctory repet.i.tion of a few letters that he knew, and hap- hazard blunders over fresh ones, fling his arms round Abel's neck and say coaxingly, "Abel dear, make Janny PITCHERS on his slate."

Abel's pictures, at the best, were of that style of wall decoration dear to street boys.

"Make a pitcher of a man," Jan would cry. And Abel did so, bit by bit, to Jan's dictation. Thus "Make's head. Make un round. Make two eyes. Make a nose. Make a mouth. Make's arms. Make's fingers," etc. And, with some "free-handling," Abel would strike the five fingers off, one by one, in five screeching strokes of the slate-pencil. But his art was conventional, and when Jan said, "Make un a miller's thumb," he was puzzled, and could only bend the shortest of the five strokes slightly backwards to represent the trade-mark of his forefathers.

And when a little later Jan said one day, "'Tis a galley crow, that is. NOW make a pitcher of a MAN, Abel dear!" Abel found that the scarecrow figure was the limit of his artist powers, and thenceforward it was Jan who "made pitchers."

He drew from dawn to dusk upon the little slate which he wore tied by a bit of string to the belt of his pinafore. He drew his foster- mother, and Abel, and the kitten, and the clock, and the flower-pots in the window, and the windmill itself, and every thing he saw or imagined. And he drew till his slate was full on both sides, and then in very primitive fas.h.i.+on he spat and rubbed it all out and began again. And whenever Jan's face was washed, the two faces of his slate were washed too; and with this companion he was perfectly happy and constantly employed.

Now it was Abel who gave the subjects for the pictures, and Jan who made them, and it was good Abel also who washed the slate, and rubbed the well-worn stumps of pencil to new points upon the round- house floor.

They often went together to a mound at some little distance, where, seated side by side, they "made a mill" upon the slate, Jan drawing, and Abel dictating the details to be recorded.

"Put in the window, Jan," he would say; "and another, and another, and another, and another. Now put the sails. Now put the stage.

Now put daddy by the door."

On one point Jan was obstinate. He steadily refused to "make Gearge" upon his slate in any capacity whatever. Perhaps it was in this habit of constantly gazing at all things about him, in order to commit them to his slate, which gave a strange, dreamy expression to Jan's dark eyes. Perhaps it was sky-gazing, or the windmiller's trick of watching the clouds, or perhaps it was something else, from which Jan derived an erectness of carriage not common among the children about him, and a quaint way of carrying his little chin in the air as if he were listening to voices from a higher level than that of the round-house floor.

If he had lived farther north, he could hardly have escaped the suspicion of uncanniness. He was strangely like a changeling among the miller's children.

To gratify that old whim of his about the red shawl, his doting foster-mother made him little crimson frocks; and as he wandered over the downs in his red dress and a white pinafore, his yellow hair flying in the breeze, his chin up, his black eyes wide open, with slate in one hand, his pencil in the other, and the sandy kitten clinging to his shoulder (for Jan never lowered his chin to help her to balance herself), he looked more like some elf than a child of man.

He had queer, independent ways of his own, too; freaks,--not naughty enough for severe punishment, but sufficiently out of the routine and unexpected to cause Mrs. Lake some trouble.

He was no sooner firmly established on his own legs, with the power of walking, or rather toddling, independent of help, than he took to making expeditions on the downs by himself. He would watch his opportunity, and when his foster-mother's back was turned, and the door of the round-house opened by some grist-bringer, he would slip out and toddle off with a swiftness decidedly dangerous to a balance so lately acquired.

Sometimes Mrs. Lake would catch sight of him, and if her hands were in the wash-tub, or otherwise engaged, she would cry to the nurse- boy, "Abel, he be off! Jan's off." A comic result of which was that Jan generally announced his own departure in the same words, though not always loud enough to bring detection upon himself.

When his chance came and the door was open, he would pause for half a moment on the threshold to say, in a tone of intense self- satisfaction, "He be off. Abel! Janny's off!" and forthwith toddle out as hard as he could go. As he grew older, he dropped this form; but the elfish habit of appearing and disappearing at his own whim was not cured.

It was a puzzle as well as a care to Mrs. Lake. All her own children had given trouble in their own way,--a way much the same with all of them. They squalled for what they wanted, and, like other mothers of her cla.s.s, she served them whilst her patience lasted, and slapped them when it came to an end. They clung about her when she was cooking, in company with the cats, and she put t.i.t- bits into their dirty paws, and threw sc.r.a.ps to the clean paws of the cats, till the nuisance became overwhelming, and she kicked the cats and slapped the children, who squalled for both. They dirted their clothes, they squabbled, they tore the gathers out of her dresses, and wailed and wept, and were beaten with a hazel-stick by their father, and pacified with treacle-stick by the mother; and so tumbled up, one after the other, through childish customs and misdemeanors, almost as uniform as the steps of the mill-ladders.

But the customs and misdemeanors of the foster-child were very different.