Tales from Dickens Part 7

"Why," he would say, "how much better to be silly than as wise as you!

_You_ don't see shadowy people like those that live in sleep--not you.

Nor eyes in the knotted panes of gla.s.s, nor swift ghosts when it blows hard, nor do you hear voices in the air, nor see men stalking in the sky--not you. I lead a merrier life than you with all your cleverness.

_You're_ the dull men. _We're_ the bright ones. Ha, ha! I'll not change with you, not I!"

Haredale, who had been so kind to Barnaby's mother, was a burly, stern man who had few acquaintances and lived much alone. When first he came to live at The Warren an enemy of his, Sir John Chester, had circulated suspicious rumors about him, so that some came half to believe he himself had had something to do with his brother's murder.

These whispers so affected Haredale that as time pa.s.sed he grew gloomy and morose and lived in seclusion, thinking only how he could solve the mystery of the murder, and loving more and more the little Emma as she grew into a beautiful girl. He neglected The Warren so that the property looked quite desolate and ruined, and at length superst.i.tious people in the neighborhood came to mutter that it was haunted by the ghost of Rudge, the steward, whose body had been found in the pond.

The old bell-ringer of the near-by church even said he had seen this ghost once, when he went, late one night, to wind the church clock. But of course others, who knew there were no such things as ghosts, only smiled at these stories.

Sir John Chester, who so hated Haredale, was just as smooth and smiling and elegant as the other was rough. Haredale had been Sir John's drudge and scapegoat at school and the latter had always despised him. And as the years went by Sir John came to hate him.

His own son Edward had fallen in love with Emma, Haredale's niece, and she loved him in return. Sir John had been all his life utterly selfish and without conscience. He had little money and was much in debt and wanted his son to marry an heiress, so that he himself could continue his life of pleasure. Edward, however, gave his father to understand that he would never give up his love for Emma. Sir John believed that if Haredale chose, he could make his niece dislike Edward, and because he did not, Sir John hated Haredale the more bitterly.

Emma had a close friend named Dolly Varden, the daughter of a locksmith.

Dolly was a pretty, dimpled, roguish little flirt, as rosy and sparkling and fresh as an apple, and she had a great many lovers.

One of these was her father's apprentice, who lived in the same house.

His name was Simon Tappert.i.t--a conceited, bragging, empty-headed young man with a great opinion of his own good looks. When he looked at his thin legs, which he admired exceedingly, he could not see how it was that Dolly could help worshiping him.

Tappert.i.t had ambitions of his own and thought himself a great man who was kept down by a tyrannical master, though the good-natured locksmith was the kindest man in London. He had formed a society of apprentices whose toast was, "Death to all masters, life to all apprentices, and love to all fair damsels!" He was their leader. He had made them all keys to fit their masters' doors, and at night, when they were supposed to be asleep in bed, they would steal out to meet in a dirty cellar owned by an old blind man, where they kept a skull and cross-bones and signed high-sounding oaths with a pen dipped in blood, and did other silly things. The object of the society was to hurt, annoy, wrong and pick quarrels with such of their masters as happened not to please them.

With such cheap fooleries Tappert.i.t had convinced himself that he was fit to be a great general.

But with all his smirking, Dolly Varden only laughed at him. To tell the truth, she was very fond of young Joe Willet, whose father kept the Maypole Inn, very near The Warren where her friend Emma Haredale lived.

Joe was a good, brave fellow, and was head over ears in love with Dolly, but Dolly was a coquette, and never let him know how much she cared for him. Joe was not contented at home, for his father seemed to think him a child and did not treat him according to his years, so that but for leaving Dolly Varden he would long ago have run away to seek his fortune.

Both Joe and Dolly knew how Edward Chester loved Emma Haredale, and they used sometimes to carry notes from one to the other, since the hatred of Sir John for Emma's uncle often prevented the lovers from meeting.

Sir John found this out, and bribed a hostler at the Maypole Inn to spy for him and prevent, if he could, these letters pa.s.sing. The hostler was an uncouth, drunken giant that people called Maypole Hugh, as strong as an ox, and cruel and cunning. Hugh watched carefully, and from time to time would go to Sir John's house in London and report what he had seen.

II

THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER AND WHO HE WAS

About this time residents in the neighborhood of The Warren and the Maypole Inn began to tell tales of a mysterious man who roamed about the country-side.

He was seen often and by many persons, always at night, skulking in the shadow or riding furiously on a horse. He was fierce and haggard and discourteous to travelers, wore a slouch hat which he never took off, and generally kept the lower part of his face m.u.f.fled in a handkerchief.

He always went alone. Some said he slept in church-yards, others that he never slept at all, and still others that he was a wicked man who had sold his soul to the Evil One.

One night he rested at the Maypole Inn, and a little while after he had gone, Varden the locksmith, Dolly's father, as he drove home, found Edward Chester lying in the road, having been wounded and robbed of his money. Barnaby Rudge had seen the attack and was bending over him. He had been too frightened to give aid, but from his description Varden knew the robber was the stranger who had stopped at the inn.

The honest locksmith took Edward into his chaise, drove him to Barnaby's house, which was near by, and left him in care of Mrs. Rudge, where a doctor soon dressed the wound, which was not serious.

Next day Mr. Varden came to see how the wounded man was. As he sat talking with Mrs. Rudge a tapping came at the window. She went to the door. The locksmith heard her cry out, and sprang forward to find standing there, to his astonishment, the robber of the night before. He grasped at him, but the woman threw herself before him, clasped his arm and besought him, for her life's sake, not to pursue the man.

The locksmith had known Barnaby's mother all his life, but so strange was her action now (especially since she refused to answer any question, begging him to ask her nothing) that he almost wondered if she herself could be in league with a crime-doer. Her apparent agony touched him, however, and, raising no alarm, he went home in great puzzle of mind.

He would have been far more disturbed if he had known the whole truth.

For the mysterious stranger he had seen, who by night had haunted the neighborhood, was none other than Mrs. Rudge's husband, Barnaby's father, the steward who everybody believed had been murdered with his master, and whose body had been found in the pond.

Rudge himself had committed that wicked deed. He had killed both master and gardener, and to cover the crime had put his own clothes, his watch and ring on the latter's body and sunk it in the pond. When, on the night of the murder, he told his wife what he had done, she had shrunk fearfully from him, declaring that, although being his wife she would not give him up to justice, yet she would never own him or shelter him.

He had fled then with the money he had stolen, and that night, while she lay sick with horror, Barnaby had been born with his poor crazed brain, the look of terror in his baby face and the birth-mark of blood on his wrist.

For many years the guilty wretch had wandered the earth, but he could not escape the knowledge of his deed. And at last his conscience had driven him back to the scene of his crime, friendless, penniless, fearful of the sunlight, slinking by night like a ghost about the house in which he had murdered his master, and hounding his miserable wife for money with which to buy food and drink. The poor woman had kept her terrible secret, giving him every coin she could save, striving so that Barnaby, unhappily born as he was, should never know the shame of having his father suffer death on the gallows. When Rudge had come to her house that day he had thought her alone, and she had saved him from capture only by begging the locksmith to stay his hand.

After his hairbreadth escape from Varden, Rudge hid himself in a narrow street. When the next dawn came, as he searched for some dark den in which he might lie sheltered till another night, he saw Simon Tappert.i.t issuing with his noisy apprentice crew from the cellar in which they held their meetings. He entered its door, made friends with the villainous blind man who kept it and there established his headquarters.

Once more, one night after the wounded Edward had been taken to his own home, Rudge hunted out his trembling wife and demanded money, threatening to bring harm to Barnaby if she refused him, and she gave him all she had.

But this time dread of him made her desperate. When morning came she went to Haredale and told him that she and her son could no longer live on his bounty. The next day, with Barnaby, who carried on his back his beloved raven, Grip, she left the house afoot, telling no one where they were going lest her husband find her out, and pushed far into the country to find a home in some obscure village. And though Rudge, the murderer, and the blind man (who was much more crafty and cunning than many men with eyesight) searched for them everywhere, it was a long time before they found any trace.

Perhaps Joe and Dolly Varden missed poor cheery Barnaby more than did any one else. But several events occurred soon after this that gave them other things to think of.

Maypole Hugh, the savage hostler, had continued his spying work for Edward's father, and Sir John determined it was high time to break off his son's attachment for Emma Haredale.

One day Dolly was carrying a letter from Emma at The Warren to Edward, and as she pa.s.sed through the fields, Hugh attacked her, throwing his arms around her and pretending to make coa.r.s.e love to her. She was dreadfully frightened and screamed as loud as she could. Joe, as it happened, was walking within sound of her voice, and ran like the wind to her aid.

In another moment Hugh had leaped the hedge and disappeared and Dolly was sobbing in her rescuer's arms. She was afraid to tell Joe who had frightened her, for fear the hostler would take his revenge by harming him, so she only said she had been attacked by a man whom she had never seen.

In her scare she had forgotten all about the letter she had carried, and now she discovered it was gone. It was nowhere to be found.

This, of course, was because Hugh had stolen it. It was to get the letter that he had frightened her, and he was soon on his way to carry it to Sir John. Dolly did not guess this. She wrote to Emma telling her of the mishap, and this note Joe, to whom she intrusted it, knowing no reason to distrust the hostler, gave to Hugh to deliver. So Sir John got both missives in the end.

Emma Haredale, not understanding why Edward returned no answer to her letter, was hurt, and thought him cold. Sir John, seizing his opportunity, told her one day (pretending sorrow while he did so) that his son, naturally fickle, had fallen in love with some one else, to whom he was soon to be married.

Emma, not dreaming the father of the man she loved could be such a false liar, believed him, and when Edward wrote her, speaking of his poverty and telling her he was going to leave England to try to better his prospects, she thought his manly letter only an excuse to part from her.

Proud, though heartbroken, she did not answer it, and so, thanks to his father's selfish scheming, Edward sailed away to the West Indies, hopeless and despairing.

Another left England at the same time whose going meant far more to Dolly Varden. This was Joe. His father, the innkeeper, had been restraining him more and more, until his treatment had become the jest of the country-side, and Joe had chafed to the point of rebellion at the gibes that continually met him. One day, at the jeer of an old enemy of his, his wrath boiled over. He sprang upon him and thrashed him soundly in the inn before the a.s.sembled guests. Then, knowing his father would never forgive him, he went to his own room and barricaded the door. That night Joe let himself down from his window and before daylight was in London.

He went first to the locksmith's house to tell Dolly he had run away and that he loved her, but Dolly being a flirt, only laughed. To tell the truth, she was so very fond of Joe that she didn't like to show him how sorry she was. So the poor fellow went away thinking she cared very little (though as soon as he was out of sight she nearly cried her eyes out), and enlisted as a soldier. That same night Joe started from London to fight in the war in America. And it was a long time before either he or Edward Chester was heard of again.

III

BARNABY GETS INTO TROUBLE

Five years went by, and Edward Chester remained in the West Indies and prospered. For five years Joe Willet fought in the war in America. And for five years Barnaby Rudge with his mother and Grip, the raven, lived unmolested in their little village and were happy.

At the end of the five years three things happened at about the same time: Edward started back to England from the West Indies with a fair fortune in his pocket; Joe was sent back from America with one arm gone, and Barnaby and his mother left their village home again, secretly, and set out for London, hoping to lose themselves in its hugeness. The wily blind man, the companion now of Rudge, the murderer, had found them out!

He came one day and made Mrs. Rudge give him all the money she had been able to lay by in these five years except a single gold piece. He told her he would return in a week for more and that if she had not got it then, he would entice Barnaby away to join in the evil life of his father. So she left the village the very next morning, and she and Barnaby trudged afoot all the weary way to the great city.

Though they knew nothing of it, there was great excitement in London.

Lord George Gordon, a well-meaning but crack-brained n.o.bleman, led astray by flatterers till he believed he had a G.o.d-given mission to drive all Catholics out of England, had, sometime before this, begun to hold meetings and to stir up the people with the cry of "No Popery!"

He declared that the religion of the country was in danger of being overthrown and that the Pope of Rome was plotting to make his religion supreme. And this idea he talked wherever he went. He was a slender, sallow man who dressed in severe black and wore his hair smoothly combed, and his bright, restless eyes and his look of uncertainty made it clear that he was no man to lead, but was rather himself the misled dupe of others.