III

The miller of Glads Mill was a happy man. How many times in her girlhood had the little Felise, wandering round the hamlet, stayed to listen to the rumble of the great wheel, and to glance furtively at the whitened half-length of the miller leaning on the hatch! So few doors now are constructed in this manner that, for the miller’s attitude to be understood, it is almost necessary to explain that a hatch is a door which shuts in two pieces. The upper half may be left open to admit air, while the lower half is closed; and it was upon the top of this lower half that the miller leant his arms and razed steadfastly outwards. This attitude has been the chosen one of millers for many generations.

Luke Bond, the miller of Glads Mill, was seldom seen in any other position. He was there most of the day, and far into the evening, rarely going down into the hamlet. Stout, short, redheaded, and broad of face, his arms, shoulders, and big head filled the upper half of the doorway.

Innumerable wooden witticisms were showered on him by the hamlet youth; he was compared to the moon rising in a fog; sometimes they shouted “Sunset” at him; they alleged that of a dark evening they came up there to see their watches by the light of his red head. Old Bond never took the least heed; he continued to rise, and set, and shine in the doorway more steadfast than all the other luminaries.

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 but one moment when a flash from the world of romance lit up the neutral tones of his life. This was when Felise put the three red roses in his hand. These were the only flowers planted in his path, but these had never faded.

He never forgot the gift. Clad in immovable content, nothing could rouse any latent aspiration in his heart; but still he dwelt much upon these roses in his quiet mind, wondered about them, puzzled over the memory of them, tried to understand what they meant. There are some flowers that never die.