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Julian Hawthorne
Published by Good Press, 2019
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“Ay, surely; but ye must keep it in mind, sir, that Scholar Gloam was a wondrous odd man. He’d been his whole life shut up with his books and his studies, and no doubt had a vast deal of that sort of learning; but of worldly knowledge, as I might say, he’d none at all whatever, no more than a child. Little he’d heard of his father’s doings, be it with the handsome housekeeper or anything else; and little he dreamed—ye can make affidavit—that her son had any claim to call himself his brother, though ’twas told him once afterwards, as we’ll come to presently. Nay, but my thought of him is, he was a simple, honest gentleman at that time, kind of heart and thinking ill of no one; only a bit strange and distant, d’ye see, as was no harm in the world for him to be. And being quite the same thing to him whether he lived in a palace or a mud hut, so long as he might study his fill, why, likely he’d an easy enough time of it.
“And ’twould have been smooth enough sailing for the whole of them only for one thing, which is to say as how, ever and anon, in the mid of a big run of luck, that there mill would take on a spell of its laughing; and with that folks would be giving it a wide berth, and business would slack up again. It was no use the old woman and David a swearing that a bit of rust on the axle was the cause of it all; for, mind ye, there was no steering round that black fact of the old miller’s having met his death on the wheel; and, too, though they was never done hunting for that bit of a rust spot, they never found it, or if ever they thought they had, lo! there’d be the laugh in their faces again, so to say, the next morning. Ay, ’twas a bad, unholy sound that, sir; but the Scholar, strange to be told, seemed less to mind it than anyone; the cause being, mayhap, as how he was a wondrous absent-minded man anyway, and the only one as had never been told the true story of how the old miller came by his end.
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