Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield Part 2

The first effect of the oil of flattery seemed to be to harden him.

'I be, and I mean to be,' he answered, with added surliness. 'If the speech and the clothes and the vittles as have been good enough for me ain't good enough for any young upstart as may follow after me, it _is_ a pity.'

Mary Ann kept silence and looked meek. Samson growled and bullied a little, and wore the airs of a dictator. By and by a serving-maid came in and began to arrange the table for tea, and a little later a boy and a girl stole noiselessly into the room.

'Joe,' said Samson sternly, 'come here!' The boy approached him with evident dread. 'What's this I hear about thee and that young villin of a Reddy?'

'I don't know, father,' the boy answered.

'I heard him makin' a boast this afternoon,' said Samson, rolling bullyingly in his arm-chair, 'as you and him had fowt last holidays, and as he gi'en you a hiding.'

Joe said nothing, but looked as if he expected the experience to be repeated.

'Now, what ha' you got to say to that?' demanded his father.

'Why,' began Joe, edging back a little, 'he's bigger nor I be, an' six months o'der.'

'Do you mean to tell me,' cried Samson, reaching out a hand and seizing the little fellow by the jacket, 'do you mean to tell me as you allowed to have enough to that young villin?'

'No,' Joe protested. 'That I niver did. It was the squire as parted us.'

'You remember this,' said his father, shaking him to emphasise the promise. 'If ever you agree to tek a hiding from a Reddy you've got one to follow on from me. D'ye hear?'

'Yes, father.'

'Tek heed as well as hear. D'ye hear?'

'Yes, father.'

'And here's another thing, mind you. It's brought to me as you and him shook hands and took on to be friends with one another. Is that trew?'

Joe looked guilty, but made no answer. 'Is it trew?' Still Joe returned no answer, and his father changing the hand with which he held him, for his own greater convenience, knocked him off his feet, restored him to his balance, knocked him off his feet again, and again settled him.

'Now,' said Samson, 'is it trew?'

The boy tried to recoil from the uplifted threatening hand, and cried out 'No!'

'Now,' said Samson, rising with a grim satisfaction, 'that's a lie.

There's nothin' i' the world as I abhor from like a lie I'll teach thee to tell me lies. Goo into the brewus and tek thy shirt off; March!'

The little girl clung to her mother's skirts crying and trembling. The mother herself was trembling, and had turned pale.

'Hush, hush, my pretty,' she said, caressing the child, and averting her eyes from Joe.

'March!' said Samson, and Joe slunk out of the room, hardening his heart as well as might be for endurance. But when he was once out of sight of the huge bullying figure and threatening eye and hand, the sight of his cap lying upon a chair in the hall supplied him with an inspiration. He seized the cap, slipped out at the front door, and ran.

The early winter night was falling fast by this time. Half a dozen stars twinkled intermittently in the black-blue waste of sky, and when the lad paused to listen for possible sounds of pursuit the hollow moaning of the wind and the clang of bare wintry poles mingled with the noise of his own suppressed breathing.

The runaway fancied himself bound (as all British runaway boys seem bound) for sea, and he set out without delay to walk to Liverpool. He got as far as the brook which formed the limit to his father's farm, and lingering before he set foot upon the bridge, began to cry a little, and to bemoan his chances and the dear ones left behind. His father came in for none of Joe's regrets. It was in the nature of things to the boy's mind that his father should administer to him periodical thrashings, whether he had earned them or not. It was the one social relationship which existed between them. It was only quite of late that Joe had begun to discern injustice in his father's bullyings. Children take things as they come, and to the mind of a child--in a modified sense, of course--whatever is, is right. That a thing exists is its own best justification. There is no reason to seek reasons for it. But Joe Mountain, having nearly outgrown this state of juvenile acquiescence, had begun to make inquiry of himself, and, as a result, had familiarised himself with many mental pictures in which he figured as an adventurer rich in adventures. In his day the youth of England were less instructed than they are now, but the immortal Defoe existed, and Lemuel Gulliver was as real as he is to-day. Perhaps the Board schools may have made that great mariner a little less real than he used to be. Joe believed in him with all his heart, had never had the shadow of a doubt about him, and meant to sail straight from Liverpool to Lilliput. He would defer his voyage to Brobdingnagia until he had grown bigger, and should be something of a match for its inhabitants.

But it was cold, it was darkening fast, it was past his ordinary tea-time. Liverpool and Lilliput were far away, pretty nearly equidistant to the juvenile mind, and but for Samson's shadow the tea-table would have looked alluring. To be sure of tea, and a bed to sleep in afterwards, it seemed almost worth while to go back to the brewhouse and obey the paternal command to take his shirt off. To do the child justice, it was less the fear of the thrashing than the hot sense of rebellion at unfairness which kept him from returning. His father had beaten him into that untrue cry of 'No,' and had meant to force him to it, and then to beat him anew for it. Joe knew that better than Samson, for Samson, like the rest of us, liked to stand well with himself, and kept self-opinion in blinkers.

Joe set foot on the bridge. He had crossed the boundary brook hundreds of times in his brief life, and it had generally come into his mind, with a boyish sense of adventure, that when he did so he was putting foot into the enemy's country. But the feeling had never been so strong as now. The Mountain Farm was home, and beyond it lay the wide, wide world, looking wide indeed, and bleak and cold. What with hot rebellion at injustice and cold fear of the vast and friendless expanse, Joe's tears multiplied, and leaning his arms upon the low coping of the bridge, with his head between them and his nose touching the frozen stone, he began to cry unrestrainedly.

Suddenly he heard a footstep, and it struck a new terror into his soul.

Freebooters, footpads, kidnappers, _et hoc genus omne_, roamed those fields by night, in course of nature. To the snug security of the home fireside and bed their images came with a delightful thrill of fear, but to be here alone and in the midst of them was altogether another thing.

He crept crouching across the bridge, and stowed himself into the smallest possible compa.s.s between the end of the stonework and the neighbouring hedgerow, and there waited trembling. His pulses beat so fast and made such a noise in his ears that he was ready to take the sound of footsteps for the tread of a whole ogreish army, when he heard a voice.

'Hode on a minute, while I shift the sack.'

The sack? It was easy--it was inevitable--to know that the sack contained a goblin supper.

'I shall be late for tea, Ichabod,' said another voice, 'and then I shall get a blowing-up for coming.'

Let him who sighs in sadness here, Rejoice, and know a friend is near.

Joe sprang from his hiding-place, and startled Master Richard and Ichabod more than a little.

'That thee, d.i.c.k?'

He knew it well enough, but it was quite delightful to be able to ask it with certainty.

'Hillo,' said Master Richard, recognising his sworn friend. 'What are you doing? Are you trapping anything?'

'No,' the hereditary enemy answered. He had been crying, the poor little chap, until he had been frightened into quiet, and now on a sudden he was as brave and as glad again as ever he had been in his life. Once more adventures loomed ahead for the adventurous, and he shone within and grew warm with the sweet reflux of courage as he whispered, 'I'm running away from home!'

Once again, the feat was glorious.

'No?' said Master Richard, smitten with envy and admiration. 'Are you?

Really?'

'Yes,' Joe answered. 'I'm agooin' to Liverpool, to begin wi'.'

This was exquisitely large and vague, and Master Richard began to yearn for a share in the high enterprise upon which his friend had entered. He had half a mind to run away from home himself, though, to be sure, there was nothing else to run away from. In Joe's case there was a difference.

'Where are you going to stay to-night?' asked Master Richard. The question sounded practical, but at bottom it was nothing of the sort.

It was part of the romance of the thing, and yet it threw cold water on Joe's newly-lighted courage, and put it out again.

'I don't know,' said Joe, somewhat forlornly.

'I say,' interjected Ichabod, 'is that young Mountain, Master Richard?'

'Yes,' said Master Richard.

'Thee know'st thy feyther is again thy speakin' to him, and his feyther is again his speakin' to thee.'

'You mind your own business, Ichabod,' said the young autocrat, who was a little spoiled perhaps, and had been accustomed to have his own way in quite a princely fashion.

'I'm mindin' it,' returned Ichabod. 'It's a part o' my business to keep thee out o' mischief.'

'Ah!' piped Master Richard, 'you needn't mind that part of your business to-night.'