Jan of the Windmill Part 7

In the exchange of civilities between the two women, the respective children in their charge were admonished to kiss each other,--a feat which was accomplished by Jan's kissing the baby very tenderly, and with all his usual gravity.

As this partly awoke the baby from a doze, its red face began to crease, and pucker, and twist into various contortions, at which Jan gazed with a sort of solemn curiosity in his black eyes.

"Stroke the little lady's cheeks, love," said Mrs. Lake, irrepressibly proud of the winning ways and quaint grace which certainly did distinguish her foster-child.

Jan leaned forward once more, and pa.s.sed his little hand softly down the baby's face twice or thrice, as he was wont to stroke the sandy kitten, as it slept with him, saying, "Poor itta p.u.s.s.y!"

"It's not a puss-cat, bless his little heart!" said the matter-of- fact nurse. "It's little Miss Amabel Adeline Ammaby."

"Say it, love!" said Mrs. Lake, adding, to the nurse, "he can say any thing, mum."

"Miss AM--ABEL AD--E--LINE AM--MA--BY," prompted the nurse.

"Amabel!" said the little Jan, softly. But, after this feat, he took a fit of childish reticence, and would say no more; whilst, deeply resentful of the liberties Jan had taken, Miss Amabel Adeline Ammaby twisted her features till she looked like a gutta-percha gargoyle, and squalled as only a fretful baby can squall.

She was calmed at last, however, and the windmiller took her once more into his arms, and Mrs. Lake carrying Jan, they all climbed up the narrow ladder to the next floor.

Heavily ground the huge stones with a hundred and twenty revolutions a minute, making the chamber shake as they went round.

They made the nurse giddy. The simplest machinery has a bewildering effect upon an unaccustomed person. So has going up a ladder; which makes you feel much less safe in the place to which it leads you than if you had got there by a proper flight of stairs. So--very often--has finding yourself face to face with the accomplishment of what you have been striving for, if you happen to be weak-minded.

Under the combined influences of all these causes, the nurse listened nervously to Master Lake, as he did the honors of the mill.

"Those be the mill-stones, ma'am. Pretty fastish they grinds, and they goes faster when the wind's gusty. Many a good cat they've ground as flat as a pancake from the poor gawney beasts getting into the hopper."

"Oh, sir!" cried the nurse, now thoroughly alarmed, "give me the young lady back again. Deary, deary me! I'd no notion it was so dangerous. Oh, don't, sir! don't!"

"Tut, tut! I'll hold un safe, ma'am," said the windmiller, who had all a man's dislike for s.h.i.+rking at the last moment what had once been decided upon; and, as the nurse afterwards expressed it, before she had time to scream, he had tucked Miss Amabel Adeline Ammaby's finery well round her, and had dipped her into the hopper and out again.

In that moment of suspense both the women had been silent, and the little Jan had gazed steadily at the operation. As it safely ended, they both broke simultaneously into words.

"You might have knocked me down with a feather, mum!" gasped Mrs.

Lake. "I couldn't look, mum. I couldn't have looked to save my life. I turned my back."

"I'd back 'ee allus to do the silliest thing as could be done, missus," said the miller, who had a pleasant husbandly way of commenting upon his wife's conversation to her disparagement, when she talked before him.

"As for me, ma'am," the nurse said, "I couldn't take my eyes off the dear child's hood. But move,--no thank you, ma'am,--I couldn't have moved hand or foot for a five-pound note, paid upon the spot."

The baby got well. Whether the mill charm worked the cure, or whether the fine fresh breezes of that healthy district made a change for the better in the child's state, could not be proved.

Nor were these the only possible causes of the recovery.

The kind-hearted butler blessed the day when he laid out three and eightpence in a box of the bone-setter's ointment, to such good purpose.

Lady Louisa's mamma triumphantly hoped that it would be a lesson to her dear daughter never again to set a London doctor's advice (however expensive) above a mother's (she meant a grandmother's) experience.

The cook said, "Goose-grease and kitchen physic for her!"

And of course the doctor very properly, as well as modestly, observed that "he had confidently antic.i.p.ated permanent beneficial results from a persevering use of the embrocation."

And only to the nurse and the windmiller's family was it known that Miss Amabel Adeline Ammaby had been dipped in the mill-hopper.

CHAPTER IX.

GENTRY BORN.--LEARNING LOST.--JAN'S BEDFELLOW.--AMABEL.

After the nurse and baby had left the mill, Mrs. Lake showered extra caresses upon the little Jan. It had given her a strange pleasure to see him in contact with the Squire's child. She knew enough of the manners and customs, the looks and the intelligence of the children of educated parents, to be aware that there were "makings"

in those who were born heirs to developed intellects, and the grace that comes of discipline, very different from the "makings" to be found in the "voolish" descendants of ill-nurtured and uneducated generations. She had no philosophical--hardly any reasonable or commendable--thoughts about it. But she felt that Jan's countenance and his "ways" justified her first belief that he was "gentry born."

She was proud of his pretty manners. Indeed, curiously enough, she had recalled her old memories of nursery etiquette under a first- rate upper nurse in "her young days," to apply them to the little Jan's training.

Why she had not done this with her own children is a question that cannot perhaps be solved till we know why so many soldiers, used for, it may be, a quarter of a century to personal cleanliness as scrupulous as a gentleman's, and to enforced neatness of clothes, rooms, and general habits, take back to dirt and slovenliness with greediness when they leave the service; and why many a nurse, whose voice and manners were beyond reproach in her mistress's nursery, brings up her own children in after life on the village system of bawling, banging, threatening, cuddling, stuffing, smacking, and coa.r.s.e language, just as if she had never experienced the better discipline attainable by gentle firmness and regular habits.

Mrs. Lake had a small satisfaction in Jan's brief and limited intercourse with so genteel a baby, and after it was all over she amused herself with making him repeat the baby's very genteel (and as she justly said "uncommon") name.

When Abel came back from school, he resumed his charge, and Mrs.

Lake went about other work. She was busy, and the nurse-boy put Jan to bed himself. The sandy kitten waited till Jan was fairly established, so as to receive her comfortably, and then she dropped from the roof of the press-bed, and he cuddled her into his arms, where she purred like a kettle just beginning to sing.

Outside, the wind was rising, and, pa.s.sing more or less through the outer door, it roared in the round-house; but they were well sheltered in the dwelling-room, and could listen complacently to the gusts that whirled the sails, and made the heavy stones fly round till they shook the roof. Just above the press-bed a candle was stuck in the wall, and the dim light falling through the gloom upon the children made a scene worthy of the pencil of Rembrandt, that great son of a windmiller.

When Mrs. Lake found time to come to the corner where the old press- bed stood, the kitten was asleep, and Jan very nearly so; and by them sat Abel, watching every breath that his foster-brother drew.

And, as he watched, his trustworthy eyes and most sweet smile lighting up a face to which his forefathers had bequeathed little beauty or intellect, he might have been the guardian angel of the nameless Jan, scarcely veiled under the likeness of a child.

His mother smiled tenderly back upon him. He was very dear to her, and not the less so for his tenderness to Jan.

Then she stooped to kiss her foster-child, who opened his black eyes very wide, and caught the sleeping kitten round the head, in the fear that it might be taken from him.

"Tell Abel the name of pretty young lady you see today, love," said Mrs. Lake.

But Jan was well aware of his power over the miller's wife, and was apt to indulge in caprice. So he only shook his head, and cuddled the kitten more tightly than before.

"Tell un, Janny dear. Tell un, there's a lovey!" said Mrs. Lake.

"Who did daddy put in the hopper?" But still Jan gazed at nothing in particular with a sly twinkle in his black eyes, and continued to squeeze poor Sandy to a degree that can have been little less agonizing than the millstone torture; and obdurate he would probably have remained, but that Abel, bending over him, said, "Do 'ee tell poor Abel, Jan."

The child fixed his bright eyes steadily on Abel's well-loved face for a few seconds, and then said quite clearly, in soft, evenly accented syllables, -

"Amabel."

And the sandy kitten, having escaped with its life, crept back into Jan's bosom and purred itself to rest.

CHAPTER X.

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.