The little Felise looked at him furtively, almost afraid; then, as a dog passed by the door and he did not hurt it, by degrees she gathered courage and ventured to stand by the great waterwheel.
Driven by the pent-up force of water in the deep black pool above, the moss-grown, dripping wheel rolled round and round, the ground trembled under her feet, and the spray and splash beneath foamed white at the foot of the circle.
Forth from a narrow window, like an arrow-slit in the dark wall above the wheel, there drifted out an impalpable dust of flour, which settled on the grass and ivy and blue veronica flowers, and on Felise’s jacket. The hard nether millstone ground small and relentlessly, and the white powder of the crushed wheat floated out into the air.
She would stand there for half an hour at a time, watching the green wheel rolling on itself, listening to the musical rhythm of the hopper beating time to the heavy rumble and the splash. Old Bond’s eye never moved from her.
Sometimes she went round up the steps to the edge of the black pool in the rickyard, and gazed down into the dark water. If she stayed there too long old Bond used to come up after her and say, “Now, miss, your uncle will be a-wanting of you.” He did not like her to look earnestly down into the pool. There is an old country superstition that if you gaze too long and too intently at water, ultimately it will draw you into it. Old Bond would not let her stay there long. Felise made no resistance, but went away whenever he wished.
Once when she came she had three red roses in her hand; and, after looking awhile at the green wheel, presently she went quickly up to old Bond, and put the three roses into his hand. Before he could open his slow mouth to speak she was gone. The ploughboys used to say that if you wanted Luke to look at anything you must get someone with a lever to turn his head for him, as sailors turn a capstan.
Bond never forgot the three red roses. “She be a lady, she be,” he said.
He had drilled his under-worker into wheel-like regularity. The fellow had no volition; he minded the millstones, and the hopper, and the bins as if he had been a pear-tree cog himself in the machinery of the mill, while Bond shone at the doorway the day through.
But in the evenings of summer this happy man shot rats, hiding himself behind a low rick of stubble near the black pool in the rickyard, so as to fire down upon them as they scampered across to his pigsties—these were land-rats, ordinary rascals—or thinning out the brown water-rats as they swam in the brooklet below the mill. Sitting on a log Bond waited so quiet, so patient, so still, that in the end the rats were no match for him. The most patient creature in the world is the toad, which will squat a whole day till he catches his fly. Bond was not one whit behind the toad.
Every beast of the wood, or the hedge, or the burrow, over and above the beasts of the chase and of the warren, according to the ancient writers, is to be called “rascal.” Bond applied that term freely both to land and water rats, for the first took his barley-meal, and the second was forever drilling holes in the banks of the stream and wasting the water. He watched for them with the patience of relentless hatred. Ofttimes he sat there through the long stilly evenings of summer, till the solitary candle of the mill was lit and shone feebly forth upon the green wheel under him, casting vast, uncertain, and moving shadows on the wall and dam.
Thus the miller of Glads Mill was a happy man, for he possessed an inexhaustible fund of stolidity. No nervousness and haste, no rushing to and fro, no worry and wear and tear; nor any aspiration deep and high after the beautiful or the true. No longing for any man’s applause; no sigh for the light in any woman’s eye. He was complete in himself, like a tree.
If a man could select his fate, what better could he choose than this?
To be in strong, good health; to have plenty of simple food and a never-failing appetite; to sleep like the wall of the mill; to feel no anxiety for wife or children; to labour for no ever-receding ideal of fortune or art; above all, to be content.
See the thin fallen cheek of the man who labours with thought; see the brow from which the hair wears at the temples; see the dark rims beneath the eyelids; the stoop, the ever-increasing ailments that undermine the constitution. Compare these with the oaklike health of the stolid miller.
Beauty—what is beauty, forsooth? Form and colour; that is, surface only. Fortune—what is fortune? Nothing is ever a pleasure or a real profit to him who has to labour for it. Truth—you die in the pursuit, and the sea beats the beach as It did a thousand years ago.
The stolid are alone happy. Yet there drops from the azure heaven a beam of light, and whomsoever that ray touches must follow it to the end, though cheeks grow pale, though shoulders stoop, though ache and pain increase. The path of the gods pursues beauty, but the stolid are alone happy.
The miller existed, and in his existence—in all the years the heavy wheel had rolled round, till now that streaks of grey appeared in his hair—he had never known
