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 stage-coaches, post-chaises, and waggons, 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 inn-keeper himself having Ions 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.”
THE END