The Trumpet-Major | Page 5

of an ancient building
formerly a manor-house, but now a mill, which, being too large for his
own requirements, the miller had found it convenient to divide and
appropriate in part to these highly respectable tenants. In this dwelling
Mrs. Garland's and Anne's ears were soothed morning, noon, and night
by the music of the mill, the wheels and cogs of which, being of wood,
produced notes that might have borne in their minds a remote
resemblance to the wooden tones of the stopped diapason in an organ.
Occasionally, when the miller was bolting, there was added to these
continuous sounds the cheerful clicking of the hopper, which did not
deprive them of rest except when it was kept going all night; and over
and above all this they had the pleasure of knowing that there crept in
through every crevice, door, and window of their dwelling, however
tightly closed, a subtle mist of superfine flour from the grinding room,
quite invisible, but making its presence known in the course of time by
giving a pallid and ghostly look to the best furniture. The miller
frequently apologized to his tenants for the intrusion of this insidious
dry fog; but the widow was of a friendly and thankful nature, and she

said that she did not mind it at all, being as it was, not nasty dirt, but the
blessed staff of life.
By good-humour of this sort, and in other ways, Mrs. Garland
acknowledged her friendship for her neighbour, with whom Anne and
herself associated to an extent which she never could have anticipated
when, tempted by the lowness of the rent, they first removed thither
after her husband's death from a larger house at the other end of the
village. Those who have lived in remote places where there is what is
called no society will comprehend the gradual levelling of distinctions
that went on in this case at some sacrifice of gentility on the part of one
household. The widow was sometimes sorry to find with what
readiness Anne caught up some dialect-word or accent from the miller
and his friends; but he was so good and true-hearted a man, and she so
easy-minded, unambitious a woman, that she would not make life a
solitude for fastidious reasons. More than all, she had good ground for
thinking that the miller secretly admired her, and this added a piquancy
to the situation.
On a fine summer morning, when the leaves were warm under the sun,
and the more industrious bees abroad, diving into every blue and red
cup that could possibly be considered a flower, Anne was sitting at the
back window of her mother's portion of the house, measuring out
lengths of worsted for a fringed rug that she was making, which lay,
about three-quarters finished, beside her. The work, though
chromatically brilliant, was tedious: a hearth-rug was a thing which
nobody worked at from morning to night; it was taken up and put down;
it was in the chair, on the floor, across the hand-rail, under the bed,
kicked here, kicked there, rolled away in the closet, brought out again,
and so on more capriciously perhaps than any other home-made article.
Nobody was expected to finish a rug within a calculable period, and the
wools of the beginning became faded and historical before the end was
reached. A sense of this inherent nature of worsted-work rather than
idleness led Anne to look rather frequently from the open casement.
Immediately before her was the large, smooth millpond, over-full, and
intruding into the hedge and into the road. The water, with its flowing

leaves and spots of froth, was stealing away, like Time, under the dark
arch, to tumble over the great slimy wheel within. On the other side of
the mill-pond was an open place called the Cross, because it was
three-quarters of one, two lanes and a cattle-drive meeting there. It was
the general rendezvous and arena of the surrounding village. Behind
this a steep slope rose high into the sky, merging in a wide and open
down, now littered with sheep newly shorn. The upland by its height
completely sheltered the mill and village from north winds, making
summers of springs, reducing winters to autumn temperatures, and
permitting myrtle to flourish in the open air.
The heaviness of noon pervaded the scene, and under its influence the
sheep had ceased to feed. Nobody was standing at the Cross, the few
inhabitants being indoors at their dinner. No human being was on the
down, and no human eye or interest but Anne's seemed to be concerned
with it. The bees still worked on, and the butterflies did not rest from
roving, their smallness seeming to shield them from the stagnating
effect that this turning moment of day had on