Winnie—what is it?” cried my Aunt.
But no Winnie was there. In her stead lay a dead man, with a white-fringed cap on, and a black, stubbed beard, the growth of some three or four days, and a little line of the white of one eye shining between its half-closed lids.
It was now my Aunt’s turn, and with a loud yell, and overturning the coffin, she jumped out of the bed, and ran screaming along the gallery, where she fell, and fainted on the floor.
When she came to herself, she was in her own room and bed once more, with Winnie beside her; and she exclaimed, so soon as recollection quite returned—
“Oh, save me, Winnie, save me.”
“You’re quite safe, ma’am, dear.”
“Where are we?”
“In the inn, ma’am.”
“Bolt the door, Winnie; bolt the door, and lock it—they’re all murderers.”
“Drink some water, ma’am.”
“Lock the door, you fool! We shall be murdered.”
“The maid was here, ma’am, very sorry you were so frightened; but you went into the wrong room, and they could not help it.”
X
How It All Happened
Gradually the facts came to light, though not fully for a long time afterward.
The Good Woman was one of those inns pleasantly known to our great-grandfathers. The old London road had run by its steps; and the wheels of old stagecoaches, post-chaises, and wagons, had dustied its windows once. But, unluckily for The Good Woman, she stood upon the apex of a curve of that great channel of traffic which modern reform and a county presentment cut off; and the London road, henceforward running in a straight line from Dwiddleston to Huxbridge—fifteen miles—leaves The Good Woman full three miles on one side.
With the opening of the new line, and the “Crottworthy Arms,” the halcyon days of the old inn ended. Its gabled frontage, steep roofs, and capacious premises—a world too wide for its shrunk business—fell gradually to decay. The old proprietor retired to his farm in Cheshire; and his nephew succeeded, got desperately into debt, was sued in all directions, and judgments wielded by exasperated creditors glimmered terribly through the storm, threatening to dash him to pieces. At this crisis, the ill-starred innkeeper, having ventured by night to Maryston—all his excursions of late had been in the dark—took cold, and died of a catarrh in three days.
The inn, nearly reduced to a state of siege; the innkeeper himself having long been an invisible and intangible substance, hid away from warrants, arrests, and other personal dangers, among the dilapidated lumber rooms and garrets of the old house; the people thinking more of a moonlit flitting than of improving the traffic of the forlorn “Good Woman;” when the proprietor died, that procedure upon his part was kept as secret as every other of late had been, and not altogether without cause, for there were those among his incensed creditors who were by no means incapable of the legal barbarity of arresting his corpse.
Thus came the mystery and suspicion with which my Aunt and Winnie were received—the coffin being expected hourly, and a grave opened, in the dark, in the neighbouring churchyard. The Irish maid, whose head was full of the disguises and stratagems of which she had heard so much in her own ingenious and turbulent country, was, for a while, disposed to think that the unseasonable visitors were myrmidons of the law in disguise. The fat, dowdy woman, who emerged, with blubbered cheeks, when they entered, and whose lamentations subsequently my Aunt heard when she visited her trunk on the stairhead, was the widow of the departed proprietor.
The rest, I think, explains itself; and the reader will be, no doubt, glad to learn that my Aunt’s visit to Winderbrooke was, on the whole, satisfactory, and that she lived for many years to recount, by the fireside, to hushed listeners, this “winter’s tale” of her adventures in The Good Woman.
Wicked Captain Walshawe, of Wauling
I
Peg O’Neill Pays the Captain’s Debts
A very odd thing happened to my uncle, Mr. Watson, of Haddlestone; and to enable you to understand it, I must begin at the beginning.
In the year 1822, Mr. James Walshawe, more commonly known as Captain Walshawe, died at the age of eighty-one years. The Captain in his early days, and so long as health and strength permitted, was a scamp of the active, intriguing sort; and spent his days and nights in sowing his wild oats, of which he seemed to have an inexhaustible stock. The harvest of this tillage was plentifully interspersed with thorns, nettles, and thistles, which stung the husbandman unpleasantly, and did not enrich him.
Captain Walshawe was very well known in the neighborhood of Wauling, and very generally avoided there. A “captain” by courtesy, for he had never reached that rank in the army list. He had quitted the service in 1766, at the age of twenty-five; immediately previous to which period his debts had grown so troublesome, that he was induced to extricate himself by running away with and marrying an heiress.
Though not so wealthy quite as he had imagined, she proved a very comfortable investment for what remained of his shattered affections; and he lived and enjoyed himself very much in his old way, upon her income, getting into no end of scrapes and scandals, and a good deal of debt and money trouble.
When he married his wife, he was quartered in Ireland, at Clonmel, where was a nunnery, in which, as pensioner, resided Miss O’Neill, or as she was called in the country, Peg O’Neill—the heiress of whom I have spoken.
Her situation was the only ingredient of romance in the affair, for the young lady was decidedly plain, though good-humoured looking, with that style of features which is termed “potato”; and in figure she was a little too plump, and rather short. But she was impressible; and the handsome young English Lieutenant was too much for her monastic tendencies, and she eloped.
In England there are traditions of Irish fortune-hunters, and
