The Trumpet-Major | Page 8

of the regiments quite
excited her. She thought there was reason for putting on her best cap,
thought that perhaps there was not; that she would hurry on the dinner
and go out in the afternoon; then that she would, after all, do nothing
unusual, nor show any silly excitements whatever, since they were
unbecoming in a mother and a widow. Thus circumscribing her
intentions till she was toned down to an ordinary person of forty, Mrs.
Garland accompanied her daughter downstairs to dine, saying,
'Presently we will call on Miller Loveday, and hear what he thinks of it
all.'

II. SOMEBODY KNOCKS AND COMES IN
Miller Loveday was the representative of an ancient family of
corn-grinders whose history is lost in the mists of antiquity. His
ancestral line was contemporaneous with that of De Ros, Howard, and
De La Zouche; but, owing to some trifling deficiency in the possessions
of the house of Loveday, the individual names and intermarriages of its
members were not recorded during the Middle Ages, and thus their
private lives in any given century were uncertain. But it was known
that the family had formed matrimonial alliances with farmers not so
very small, and once with a gentleman- tanner, who had for many years
purchased after their death the horses of the most aristocratic persons in
the county--fiery steeds that earlier in their career had been valued at
many hundred guineas.
It was also ascertained that Mr. Loveday's great-grandparents had been
eight in number, and his great-great-grandparents sixteen, every one of
whom reached to years of discretion: at every stage backwards his sires
and gammers thus doubled and doubled till they became a vast body of
Gothic ladies and gentlemen of the rank known as ceorls or villeins,
full of importance to the country at large, and ramifying throughout the

unwritten history of England. His immediate father had greatly
improved the value of their residence by building a new chimney, and
setting up an additional pair of millstones.
Overcombe Mill presented at one end the appearance of a hard-worked
house slipping into the river, and at the other of an idle, genteel place,
half-cloaked with creepers at this time of the year, and having no
visible connexion with flour. It had hips instead of gables, giving it a
round-shouldered look, four chimneys with no smoke coming out of
them, two zigzag cracks in the wall, several open windows, with a
looking-glass here and there inside, showing its warped back to the
passer-by; snowy dimity curtains waving in the draught; two mill doors,
one above the other, the upper enabling a person to step out upon
nothing at a height of ten feet from the ground; a gaping arch vomiting
the river, and a lean, long-nosed fellow looking out from the mill
doorway, who was the hired grinder, except when a bulging fifteen
stone man occupied the same place, namely, the miller himself.
Behind the mill door, and invisible to the mere wayfarer who did not
visit the family, were chalked addition and subtraction sums, many of
them originally done wrong, and the figures half rubbed out and
corrected, noughts being turned into nines, and ones into twos. These
were the miller's private calculations. There were also chalked in the
same place rows and rows of strokes like open palings, representing the
calculations of the grinder, who in his youthful ciphering studies had
not gone so far as Arabic figures.
In the court in front were two worn-out millstones, made useful again
by being let in level with the ground. Here people stood to smoke and
consider things in muddy weather; and cats slept on the clean surfaces
when it was hot. In the large stubbard-tree at the corner of the garden
was erected a pole of larch fir, which the miller had bought with others
at a sale of small timber in Damer's Wood one Christmas week. It rose
from the upper boughs of the tree to about the height of a fisherman's
mast, and on the top was a vane in the form of a sailor with his arm
stretched out. When the sun shone upon this figure it could be seen that
the greater part of his countenance was gone, and the paint washed

from his body so far as to reveal that he had been a soldier in red before
he became a sailor in blue. The image had, in fact, been John, one of
our coming characters, and was then turned into Robert, another of
them. This revolving piece of statuary could not, however, be relied on
as a vane, owing to the neighbouring hill, which formed variable
currents in the wind.
The leafy and quieter wing of the mill-house was the part occupied by
Mrs. Garland and her daughter, who made