Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield Part 3

'All right,' said Ichabod, reshouldering the sack he had meanwhile balanced on the coping of the bridge. 'See as thee beesn't late for tay-time.'

With that, having discharged his conscience, he went on again, and the two boys stayed behind.

'What are you running away for?' asked Eichard.

'Why, feyther said it was brought to him as you and me had shook hands and had took on to be friends with one another, and he told me to go into the brewus and take my shirt off.'

'Take your shirt off?' inquired the other. In Joe's lifetime, short as it was, he had had opportunity to grow familiar with this fatherly formula, but it was strange to Master Richard. 'What for?'

'What for! Why, to get a hidin', to be sure.'

'Look here!' said Richard, having digested this, 'you come and stop in one of our barns. Have you had your tea?'

'No,' returned Joe, 'I shouldn't ha' minded so much if I had.'

'I'll bring something out to you,' said the protector.

So the two lads set out together, and to evade Ichabod, struck off at a run across the fields, Joe pantingly setting forth, in answer to his comrade's questions, how he was going to be a sailor or a pirate, 'or summat,' or to have a desert island like Crusoe. Of course, it was all admirable to both of them, and, of course, it was all a great deal more real than the fields they ran over.

The runaway was safely deposited in a roomy barn, and left there alone, when once again a life of adventures began to a.s.sume a darkish complexion. It was cold, it was anxious, it seemed to drag interminably, and it was abominably lonely. If it were to be all like this, even the prospect of an occasional taking off of one's shirt in the brewhouse looked less oppressive than it had done.

The hidden Joe, bound for piracy on the high seas, or a Crusoe's island somewhere, gave a wonderful zest to Master Richard's meal But an hour, which seemed like a year to the less fortunate of the two, went by before a raid upon the well-furnished larder of Perry Hall could be effected. When the opportunity came, Master Richard, with no remonstrance from conscience, laid hands upon a loaf and a dish of delicious little cakes of fried pork fat, from which the lard had that day been 'rendered,' and thus supplied, stole out to his hereditary enemy and fed him. The hereditary enemy complained of cold, and his host groped the dark place for sacks, and, having found them, brought them to him.

'I say,' said Joe, when he had tasted the provender, 'them's scratchings. That's gay and fine. I never had as many as I should like afore. Mother says they're too rich, but that's all rubbish.'

He made oily feast in the dark, with the sacks heaped about him. With Master Richard to help him, he began to swim in adventure, and the pair were so fascinated and absorbed that one of the farm-servants went bawling 'Master Richard' about the outlying buildings for two or three minutes before they heard him. When at last the call reached their ears they had to wait until it died away again before the surrept.i.tious host dare leave the barn, lest his being seen should draw attention to the place.

Then Joe, who had been hunting wild beasts of all sorts with the greatest possible gusto, began in turn to be hunted by them. The rattlesnake, hitherto unknown to Castle Barfield, became a common object; the lion and the polar bear met on common ground in the menagerie of Joe's imagination. Whatever poor blessings and hopes he had, and whatever schoolboy wealth he owned, he would have surrendered all of them to be in the brewhouse of the Mountain Farm, even though he were there to take his shirt off But the empty, impa.s.sable, awful night stood between him and any refuge, and he must need stay where he was, and sweat with terror under his sacks, through all the prodigious tracts of time which lay between the evening and the morning. He was to have been up and afoot for Liverpool before dawn, but tired nature chose the time he had fixed for starting to send him to sleep, and when Master Richard stole into the barn with intent to disperse the sacks and clear away any sign of Joe's occupancy, he found him slumbering soundly, with a tear-stained cheek resting on a dirty brown hand.

There had been the wildest sort of hubbub and disorder at the Mountain Farm all night. Mrs. Mountain had wept and wrung her hands, and rocking herself to and fro, had poured forth doleful prophecy. Samson, who had begun with bl.u.s.ter, had fallen into anxiety, and had himself traced the course of the brook for a full mile by lanthorn-light. The farm hands had been sent abroad, and had tracked every road without result. Of course the one place where n.o.body so much as thought of making inquiry was the house of the hereditary foe, but pretty early, in the course of the morning, the news of Joe Mountain's disappearance, and something of the reasons for it, reached Perry Hall. Everybody at Perry Hall knew already what a terrible personage Samson Mountain was, and his behaviour on this occasion was the theme of scathing comment.

Master Richard was guilty at heart, but exultant. Being a boy of lively imagination, he took to a secrecy so profound, and became so strikingly stealthy, as to excite observation and remark. He was watched and tracked to the barn, and then the discovery came about as a matter of course. The Reddys made much of Joe--they had no quarrel with an innocent persecuted child--but their kindness and commiseration were simply darts to throw at Samson.

It was noon when Reddy put the trembling adventurer into his trap, and with his own hands drove him home. The two enemies met and glowered at each other.

'I've found your lad and brought him home,' said Reddy; 'though I doubt it's a cruel kindness to him.'

Samson, with all the gall in his nature burning at his heart, lifted Joe from the trap and set him on the ground in silence. Reddy, in silence, turned his horse's head, touched him with the whip, and drove away. Joe was welcomed home by a thrashing, which he remembers in old age.

The episode bore fruit in several ways. To begin with, Master Joe was packed off to a distant school, far from that to which young Reddy was sent. But the boys found each other out in the holidays, and became firm friends on the sly, and Joe was so loyal and admiring that he never ceased to talk to his one confidante of the courage, the friendliness, the generosity, the agility, and skill of his secret hero. The confidante was his sister Julia, to whom the young hereditary enemy became a synonym for whatever is lovely and of good report. She used to look at him in church--she had little other opportunity of observing him--and would think in her childish innocent mind how handsome and n.o.ble he looked. He did not speak like the Barfield boys, or look like them, or walk like them. He was a young prince, heir to vast estates, and a royal t.i.tle in fairyland. If story-books were few and far between, the sentimental foolish widow, Jenny Busker, was a mine of narrative, and a single fairy tale is enough to open all other fairy lore to a child's imagination. If the little girl worshipped the boy, he, in his turn, looked kindly down on her. He had fought for her once at odds of two to one, and he gave her a smile now and then. It happened that in this wise began the curious, half-laughable, and half-pathetic little history which buried the hatreds of the Castle Barfield Capulet and Montague for ever.

III

In this Castle Barfield version of Romeo and Juliet the parody would have been impossible without the aid and intervention of some sort of Friar Laurence. He was a notability of those parts in those days, and he was known as the Dudley Devil. In these enlightened times he would have been dealt with as a rogue and vagabond, and, not to bear too hardly upon an historical personage, whom there is n.o.body (even with all our wealth of historical charity-mongers) to whitewash, he deserved richly in his own day the treatment he would have experienced in ours. He discovered stolen property--when his confederates aided him; he put the eye on people obnoxious to his clients, for a consideration; he overlooked milch cows, and they yielded blood; he went about in the guise of a great gray tom-cat. It was historically true in my childhood--though, like other things, it may have ceased to be historically true since then--that it was in this disguise of the great gray tom-cat that he met his death. He was fired at by a farmer, the wounded cat crawled into the wizard's cottage, and the demon restored to human form was found dying later on with a gun-shot charge in his ribs.

There were people alive a dozen--nay, half a dozen--years ago, who _knew_ these things, to whom it was blasphemous to dispute them.

The demon's earthly name was Rufus Smith, and he lived 'by Dudley Wood side, where the wind blows cold,' as the local ballad puts it His mother had dealt in the black art before him, and was ducked to death in the Severn by the bridge in the ancient town of Bewdley. He was a lean man, with a look of surly fear. It is likely enough that he half expected some of his invocations to come true one fine day or other, with consequences painful to himselt The old notions are dying out fast, but it used to be said in that region that when a man talked to himself he was talking with the universal enemy. Rufus and his mother were great chatterers in solitude, and what possible companion could they have but one?

It is not to be supposed that all the ministrations for which the people of the country-side relied upon Rufus were mischievous. If he had done nothing but overlook cattle and curse crops, and so forth, he would have been hunted out. Some pa.s.sably good people have been said, upon occasions, to hold a candle to the devil. With a similar diversion from general principle, Rufus was known occasionally to perform acts of harmless utility. He charmed away warts and corns, he prepared love philtres, and sold lucky stones. He foreran the societies which insure against accident, and would guarantee whole bones for a year or a lifetime, according to the insurer's purse or fancy. He told fortunes by the palm and by the cards, and was the sole proprietor and vendor of a noted heal-all salve of magic properties.

He and his mother had gathered together between them a respectable handful of ghastly trifles, which were of substantial service alike to him and to his clients. A gentleman coming to have his corns or warts charmed away would be naturally a.s.sisted towards faith by the aspect of the polecat's skeleton, the skulls of two or three local criminals, and the shrivelled, mummified dead things which hung about the walls or depended head downwards from the ceiling. These decorations apart, the wizard's home was a little commonplace. It stood by itself in a bare hollow, an unpicturesque and barn-like cottage, not altogether weather-proof.

It fell upon a day that Mrs. Jenny Rusker drove over from Castle Barfield to pay Rufus a visit. She rode in a smart little trap, the kind of thing employed by the better sort of rustic tradesmen, and drove a smart little pony. She was a motherly, foolish, good creature, who, next to the reading of plays and romances, loved to have children about her and to make them happy. On this particular day she had Master Richard with her. She kept up her acquaintance with both her old lovers, and was on terms of rather coolish friendship with them. But she adored their children, and would every now and again make a descent on the house of one or other of her old admirers and ravish away a child for a day or two.

Mrs. Jenny had consoled herself elsewhere for the loss of lovers for whom she had never cared a halfpenny, but she had never ceased to hold a sort of liking for both her old suitors. Their claims had formerly been pretty evenly balanced in her mind, and even now, when the affair was ancient enough in all conscience to have been naturally and quietly buried long ago, she never met either of her quondam lovers without some touch of old-world coquetry in her manner. The faintest and most far-away touch of anything she could call romance was precious to the old woman, and having a rare good heart of her own under all her superannuated follies, she adored the children. d.i.c.k was her especial favourite, as was only natural, for he was pretty enough and regal enough with his childish airs of _pet.i.t grand seigneur_ to make him beloved of most women who met him. Women admire the frank masterfulness of a generous and half-spoiled boy, and Mrs. Jenny saw in the child the prophecy of all she had thought well of in his father, refined by the grace of childhood and by a better breeding than the father had ever had.

So she and d.i.c.k were great allies, and there was always cake and elderberry wine and an occasional half-crown for him at Laburnum Cottage. It was only natural that, so fostered, d.i.c.k's affection for the old lady should be considerable. She was his counsellor and confidante from his earliest years, and the little parlour, with its antiquated furniture and works of art-in wool, its haunting odour of pot-pourri emanating from the big china jar upon the mantelshelf, and its moist warm atmosphere dimly filtered through the drooping green and gold of the laburnum tree, whose leaves tapped incessantly against the lozenged panes of its barred windows, was almost as familiar in his memory in after years as the sitting-room at home at the farm.

d.i.c.k conferred upon its kindly and garrulous old tenant the brevet rank of 'Aunt' Jenny, and loved her, telling her, in open-hearted childish fashion, his thoughts, experiences, and secrets. Naturally, the story of the fight with the paynim oppressors of beauty came out in his talk soon after its occurrence, and lost nothing in the telling. Mrs. Jenny would have found a romance in circ.u.mstances much less easily usable to that end than those of the scion of one house rescuing the daughter of a rival and inimical line, and here was material enough for foolish fancy.

She cast a prophetic eye into the future, and saw d.i.c.k and Julia, man and maid, reuniting their severed houses in the bonds of love, or doubly embittering their mutual hatred and perishing--young and lovely victims to clannish hatred and parental rigour--like Romeo and Juliet.

The boy's account of the fight was given as he sat by her side in her little pony-trap in the cheerfully frosty morning. d.i.c.k chatted gaily as the s.h.a.ggy-backed pony trotted along the resounding road with a clatter of hoofs and a jingle of harness, and an occasional sneeze at the frosty air. They pa.s.sed the field of battle on the road, and d.i.c.k pointed it out. Then, as was natural, he turned to the family feud, and retailed all he had heard from Ichabod, supplemented by information from other quarters and such additions of fancy as imaginative children and savages are sure to weave about the fabric of any story which comes in their way to make tradition generally the trustworthy thing it is.

Mrs. Busker was strong on the family quarrel. A family quarrel was a great thing in her estimation, almost as good as a family ghost, and she gave d.i.c.k the whole history of the incident of the brook and of many others which had grown out of it, among them one concerning the death of a certain Reddy which had tragically come to pa.s.s a year or two before his birth. The said Reddy had been found one November evening stark and cold at the corner of the parson's spinney, with an empty gun grasped in his stiffened hand, and a whole charge of small shot in his breast.

Crowner's quest had resulted in a verdict of death by misadventure, and the generally received explanation was that the young fellow's own gun had worked the mischief by careless handling in pa.s.sing through stiff undergrowth. But a certain ne'er-do-well Mountain, a noted striker and tosspot of the district, had mysteriously disappeared about that date, and had never since come within scope of Castle Barfield knowledge.

Ugly rumours had got afloat, vague and formless, and soon to die out of general memory. d.i.c.k listened open-mouthed to all this, and when the narrative was concluded, held his peace for at least two minutes.

'_She_ isn't wicked, is she, Aunt Jenny?' he suddenly demanded.

'She? Who? 'asked Mrs. Eusker in return. 'The little girl, Julia.'

'Wicked? Sakes alive, whativer is the boy talking about? Wicked? O'

course not. She's a dear good little thing as iver lived.'

'Ichabod said that all the Mountains were wicked. But I know Joe isn't--at least, not very. He promised me a monkey and a parrot--a green parrot, when he came back from running away. But he didn't run away, because father found him and took him home. His father gave him an awful thrashing. He often thrashes him, Joe says. Father never thrashes me.

What does his father thrash him for?' 'Mr. Mountain's a harder man than your father, my dear. An' I fear as Joe's a bit wild, like his father when he was a boy, and obstinit. Theer niver was a obstinater man i'

this earth than Samson Mountain, I do believe, an' Joe's got a bit on it in him.'

'She's pretty,' said d.i.c.k, returning with sudden childish inconsequence to the subject uppermost in his thoughts. 'Joe isn't Why is it that the girls are always prettier than the boys?'

'I used to think it was the other way about when I was a gell,' said Aunt Jenny, with perfect simplicity. 'But she is pretty, that's true.

But then her mother was a likely la.s.s, an' Samson warn't bad lookin', if he hadn't ha' been so fierce an' cussid. An' to think as it should be you, of all the lads i' Barfield, as should save a Mountain. An' a gell too.. I suppose as you'll be a settin' up to fall in love wi' her now, like Romeo and Juliet?'

'What was that? 'asked the boy.

'It's a play, my dear, wrote by a clever man as has been dead iver so many 'ears, William Shaakespeare.'

'Shakespeare?' said d.i.c.k. 'I know. It's a big book on one of the shelves at home, full of poetry. But what's Romeo and Juliet?'

'Romeo and Juliet was two lovers, as lived a long time ago in a place called Verona. I don't know where it is,' she added quickly, to stave off the imminent question already on the boy's lips. 'Somewhere abroad, wheer Bonyparty is. Juliet's name was Capulet, an' Romeo's was Montague, an' the Capilets and the Montagues hated each other so as they could niver meet wi'out havin' a bit of a turn-up one with another. They was as bad as the Reddys an' the Mountains, only i' them daysen folks allays wore swords an' daggers, so's when they fowt they mostly killed each other. Well, one night old Capilet gi'en a party, an' asked all his friends, an' everybody wore masks, so's they didn't know half the time who they was a-talkin' tew, as was the fashion i' them times, an' Romeo, he goes, just for divilment, an' he puts on a mask tew, so as they didn't know him, else they'd ha' killed him, sure an' certain. An' theer he sees Juliet, an' she was beautiful, an' he falls plump in love wi'

her, an' she falls in love wi' him, an' they meets o' nights, i' the moonlight, on the window-ledge outside her room, but they had to meet i' secret, 'cause the two fam'lies was like cat an' dog, an' there'd ha'

been awful doin's if they'd been found out. Well, old Capilet--that was Juliet's feyther--he finds a husband for Juliet, a nice chap enough, a count, like Lord Barfield, on'y younger an' likelier. An' Juliet, she gets welly mad, because she wants to marry Romeo. And then, to mek matters wuss, Romeo meets one o' Juliet's relations, a young man named Tybalt, as hates him like pison, an' they fowt, an' Romeo killed him.

Well, the Capilets was powerful wi' the king as ruled in Verona, like Joseph used to be with Pharaoh in the Holy Land, my dear, an' Romeo, he has to run away an' hide himself, else p'raps they'd ha' hung him for killin' Tybalt, though it was Tybalt as begun the fight, so poor Juliet's left all alone. An' her marriage day's a-gettin' near, and old Capilet, he's stuck on her marryin' the count, an' the day's been named, and everything provided for the weddin'. Well, Romeo takes a thought, an' goes to a friar, a kind o' priest, as was a very book-learned man, and asks if he can help him. And at first he says no, he can't, an'

Romeo gets that crazed, he's goin' to kill himself, but by an' by he thinks of a plan. He gives Juliet a bottle o' physic stuff to send her to sleep, and make her look as if she was dead. Then her relations 'll be sure to bury her i' the family vault, an' he'll write to Romeo to come back to Verona i' the night-time an' take her out o' the vault, an'

goo away quiet wi' her till things have blown over, an' they can come back again. An' Juliet takes the physic, an' everybody thinks her dead, her father, an' her mother, an' her old nuss, an' Paris--that's the name of the gentleman as they wanted her to marry--an' there's such a hullabaloo an' racket as niver was. An' they buried her i' the vault, wi' all her relations, an' the old friar thinks as it's all a-comin'