The Project Gutenberg EBook of Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield, by David Christie Murray This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray Author: David Christie Murray Release Date: August 8, 2007 [EBook #22274] Last Updated: September 16, 2016 Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JULIA AND HER ROMEO *** Produced by David Widger JULIA AND HER ROMEO: A CHRONICLE OF CASTLE BARFIELD By David Christie Murray Author Of ‘Aunt Rachel,’ ‘The Weaker Vessel,’ Etc. Contents I II III IV V VI I In the year eighteen hundred and twenty, and for many years before and after, Abel Reddy farmed his own land at Perry Hall End, on the western boundaries of Castle Barfield. He lived at Perry Hall, a ripe-coloured old tenement of Elizabethan design, which crowned a gentle eminence and looked out picturesquely on all sides from amongst its neighbouring trees. It had a sturdier aspect in its age than it could have worn when younger, for its strength had the sign-manual of time upon it, and even its hoary lichens looked as much like a prophecy as a record. A mile away, but also within the boundaries of Castle Barfield parish, there stood another house upon another eminence: a house of older date than Perry Hall, though of less pleasing and picturesque an air. The long low building was of a darkish stone, and had been altered and added to so often that it had at last arrived at a complex ugliness which was not altogether displeasing. The materials for its structure had all been drawn at different periods from the same stone quarry, and the chequered look of new bits and old bits had a hint of the chess-board. Here Samson Mountain dwelt on his own land in the midst of his own people. The Mountain Farm, as it was called, and had been called time out of mind, was separated from the Perry Hall Farm by a very shallow and narrow brook. The two houses were built as far apart from each other as they could be, whilst remaining in their own boundaries, as if the builder of the later one had determined to set as great a distance as he could between his neighbour and himself. And as a matter of fact the Reddys and the Mountains were a sort of Capulets and Montagues, and had hated each other for generations. Samson and Abel kept up the ancient grudge in all its ancient force. They were of the same age within a week or two, had studied at the same school, and had fought there; had at one time courted the same girl, had sat within sight of each other Sunday after Sunday and year after year in the parish church, had each buried father and mother in the parish churchyard, and in the mind of each the thought of the other rankled like a sore. The manner of their surrendering their common courtship was characteristic of their common hatred. Somewhere about the beginning of this century a certain Miss Jenny Rusker, of Castle Barfield, was surrounded by quite a swarm of lovers. She was pretty, she was well-to-do, for her time and station, she was accomplished—playing the harp (execrably), working samplers in silk and wool with great diligence and exactitude, and having read a prodigious number of plays, poems, and romances. What this lady’s heart forged that her mouth did vent, but no pretty young woman ever looked or sounded foolish to the eyes or ears of her lovers. Mountain and Eeddy were among her solicitors. She liked them both, and had not quite made up her mind as to which, if either of them, she would choose, when suddenly the knowledge of the other’s occasional presence in her sitting-room made the house odious to each, and they surrendered the chase almost at the same hour. Miss Jenny satisfied herself with a cousin of her own, married without changing her name, had children, was passably happy, as the world goes, and lived to be a profoundly sentimental but inveterate widow. Mountain and Eeddy married girls they would not otherwise have chosen, and were passably happy also, except when the sore of ancient hatred was inflamed by a chance meeting on the corn exchange or an accidental passage of the eyes at church. They had no better authority for hating each other than that their fathers had hated each other before them. The fathers had the authority of the grandfathers, and they, that of the greatgrandfathers. It was Saturday afternoon. There was a bleak frost abroad, and even the waters of the brook which divided the two farms were hard frozen. The sun hung low in the western sky, lustreless as a wafer, but ruddy. The fields were powdered with thin snow, and the earth was black by contrast with it. Now and then a shot sounded far away, but clear and sharp, from where the guests of my lord of Barfield were killing time in the warren. A labouring man, smock-frocked, billy-cocked, gaitered, and hob-nailed, was clamping down the frozen lane, the earth ringing like iron under iron as he walked. By his side was a fair-haired lad of nine or ten years of age, a boy of frank and engaging countenance, carefully and even daintily dressed, and holding up his head as if he were a lord of the soil and knew it. The boy and the labourer were talking, and on the frosty silence of the fields the clear treble of the boy’s speech rang out clearly and carried far. A burly man, with a surly red face, who had stooped to button a gaiter, in a meadow just beyond the brook, and had laid down his gun beside him the while, heard both voice and words whilst the speaker was a hundred yards away. ‘But don’t you think it’s very wicked, Ichabod?’ The labourer’s voice only reached the listener in the meadow. He spoke with the Barfield drawl, and his features, which were stiffened by the frozen wind, were twisted into a look of habitual waggery. ‘Well,’ said he, in answer to his young companion, ‘maybe, Master Richard, it might be wicked, but it’s main like natur.’ ‘I shan’t hate Joe Mountain when I’m a man,’ said the boy. The surly man in the field, hearing these words, looked on a sudden surlier still, and throwing up his head with a listening air, and holding his ankle with both hands, crouched and craned his neck to listen. ‘May’st have to change thy mind, Master Richard,’ said the labourer. ‘Why should I change my mind, Ichabod?’ asked the boy, looking up at him. ‘Why?’ answered Ichabod, ‘thee’lt niver have it said as thee wast afraid of any o’ the Mountain lot.’ ‘I’m not afraid of him,’ piped the engaging young cockerel ‘We had a fight in the coppice last holidays, and I beat him. The squire caught us, and we were going to stop, but he made us go on, and he saw fair. Then he made us shake hands after. Joe Mountain wouldn’t say he’d had enough, but the squire threw up the sponge for him. And he gave us two half-crowns apiece, and said we were both good plucked uns.’ ‘Ah! ‘said Ichabod, with warmth, ‘he’s the right sort is the squire. And there’s no sort or kind o’ sport as comes amiss to him. A gentleman after my own heart.’ ‘He made us shake hands and promise we’d be friends,’ said Master Richard, ‘and we’re going to be.’ ‘Make him turn the brook back first, Master Richard,’ said Ichabod. The two were almost at the bridge by this time, and the listener could hear distinctly. ‘Turn the brook back?’ the boy asked. ‘What do you mean, Ichabod?’ ‘Ax thy feyther, when thee gettest home,’ answered Ichabod. ‘He’ll tell thee all the rights on it. So fur as I can make out—and it was the talk o’ the country i’ my grandfeyther’s daysen—it amounts to this. Look here! ‘He and the boy arrested their steps on the bridge, and Ichabod pointed along the frozen track of the brook. ‘Seest that hollow ten rods off? It was in the time o’ Cromwell Hast heard tell o’ Cromwell, I mek no doubt?’ ‘Oliver Cromwell,’ said Master Richard. ‘He was Lord Protector of England. He fought King Charles.’ ‘Like enough,’ said Ichabod. ‘In his daysen, many ‘ears ago, there was the Reddys here and the Mountains there’—indicating either house in turn by pointing with his thumb—‘just as they be now. The Reddy o’ that day—he was thy grandfeyther’s grand-feyther as like as not—maybe he was his grandfeyther for aught as I can tell, for it’s a deadly-dreadful heap o’ time long past—the Reddy o’ that day went to the wars, and fowt for Cromwell. The Mountain o’ that time stopped at hum. Up to then they’d niver been misfriended as fur as I know. That’s how it’s put about, anyway. But whilst the Reddy was away what’s the Mountain do?’ The boy was looking at Ichabod, and Ichabod, stooping a little to be the more impressive, was looking at him. The surly-faced man with the gun had hitherto been concealed by the hedge beside which he had knelt to fasten his gaiter, and neither of the two had suspected his presence. It was natural, therefore, that both of them should start a little when his voice reached them. ‘Well?’ The voice was sour and surly, like the face, and the word was rapped out sharp and clear. Master Richard and Ichabod turned with one accord. ‘Well?’ says the surly man, ‘what does the Mountain do?’ Ichabod, less discomfited by the suddenness of the interruption than might have been expected of him, rubbed the frozen base of his nose with a cold forefinger and grinned. Master Richard looked from one to the other with a frank and fearless interest and inquiry which became him very prettily. The surly man bestowed a passing scowl upon him, and turned his angry regard again upon Ichabod. ‘Come, now,’ he said, ‘you backbiting, scandal-mongering old liar! What does the Mountain do? Out with it!’ ‘Why, nayther thee nor me was there at the time, gaffer,’ responded Ichabod, his frosty features still creased with a grin. ‘So nayther thee nor me can talk for certain. Can us?’ ‘I suppose,’ said the surly, burly man, ‘you’re going to stuff that young monkey with the old lie about the stream being turned?’ Ichabod made no verbal response, but continued to rub his nose with his forefinger, and to grin with an aspect of uncertain humour. The surly man stooped for his gun, threw it over his arm, and stared at Ichabod and his young companion with eyes of hatred and disdain. Then, having somewhat relieved his feelings by a curse or two, he turned his back and went off with a long, heavy, dogged- looking stride, his feet crunching noisily through the frosty grasses. ‘It eeat for me to talk about my betters, and them as the Lord has put in authority over us,’ said Ichabod, with an expression which belied these words of humility; ‘but I put it to thee, Master Richard. Dost think that old Mountain theer looks like a likeable un? No, no. Might as well expect cat an’ dog t’ agree as Reddy and Mountain.’ This speech was made in a carefully modulated tone, when he and the boy were at some distance from the surly man, who was still visible, three or four fields away. ‘What was it about the brook, Ichabod?’ asked Master Richard. ‘Why,’ said Ichabod, ‘when that old longaway grandfeyther o’ thine was away a-fighting for Cromwell, ‘tis said his neighbour turned the brook so as to bring in four-score acres o’ land as ud niver have been his by right. The Reddy o’ that day died in the wars, and his widder could mek no head again the Mountain lot; but her taught her son to hate ‘em and look down upon ‘em, and hated an’ looked down upon is the name on ‘em from that day to this.’ ‘But Joe Mountain didn’t do it,’ said Master Richard. ‘No, no,’ assented Ichabod. ‘But it’s i’ this way. It’s i’ the blood. What’s bred i’ the bone will come out i’ the flesh. Afore thee makest friends with young Joe Mountain, Master Richard, thee ax thy feyther.’ Master Richard, lapsing into silence, thought things over. ‘Ichabod,’ he said at last, ‘is a boy bound to be bad if he has a bad grandfather?’ ‘Sure!’ said Ichabod, who was not going to be worsted in argument for want of corroborative fact if he could help it. Master Richard thought things over a little while longer, and returned to the charge. ‘Suppose the boy with the bad grandfather had a good grandmother, Ichabod?’ ‘None of the Mountain lot ever had,’ Ichabod replied. There was no item in Ichabod’s creed more fixed than this—the Mountains of Mountain Farm were hateful and contemptible. He had imbibed the belief with his mother’s milk and his father’s counsel. His grandfather had known it for the one cardinal certainty of nature. Just as the serving-men of Capulet hated the serving-men of Montague, so the oldest servants of the Mountains hated the older servants of the Reddys. The men made the masters’ quarrel their own. There was a feudal spirit in the matter, and half the fights of this outlying district of the parish were provoked by that ancient history of the brook. At this time of day it mattered very little indeed if the history was true or false, for neither proof nor disproof was possible, and the real mischief was done past remedy in any case. ‘Are you sure our side fought for Cromwell, Ichabod?’ Master Richard. asked, after another long and thoughtful silence. ‘To be sure,’ said Ichabod. ‘I don’t think it can be true, then, about the brook,’ said the boy, ‘because Cromwell won, and everybody who was on his side had their own way. Mr. Greenfell teaches history at school, and he says so.’ This was nothing to Ichabod, whose intellect was not constructed for the reception of historical evidences. ‘Then ax thy feyther, Master Richard,’ he answered; ‘he’ll tell thee the rights on it.’ The boy walked on pondering, as children of his age will do. The seniors would be surprised pretty often if they could guess how deep and far the young thoughts go, but, then, the seniors have forgotten their own young days, or were never of a thinking habit. Ichabod clamped along with his mind on beer. The boy thought his own thoughts, and each was indifferent for a while to outer signs and sounds. But suddenly a little girl ran round a corner of the devious lane with a brace of young savages in pursuit. The youthful savages had each an armful of snowballs, and they were pelting the child with more animus than seemed befitting. The very tightness with which the balls were pressed seemed to say that they were bent less on sport than mischief, and they came whooping and dancing round the corner with such rejoicing cruelty as only boys or uncivilised men can feel. The little girl was sobbing, half in distress, and half because of the haste she had made, and Master Richard’s juvenile soul burnt within him at the sight like that of a knight-errant. He had read a great deal about knights-errant for the time which had been as yet allowed him for the pursuit of literature, and he was by nature a boy of much fire and gentleness, and a very sympathetic imagination. So the big heart in the small body swelled with pity and grew hot with valour, and, without parley, he smote the foremost boy, who happened to be the bigger of the two, and went headlong into fight with him. Ichabod followed the young master’s lead without knowing, or in the smallest degree caring, why, and tried to seize the smaller savage, who skilfully evaded him and ran. The little maiden stood and trembled with clasped hands as she looked upon the fray. Ichabod lifted his smock-frock to get his hands into the pockets of his corduroys, and watched with the air of an old artist standing behind a young one. ‘You shouldn’t work at it so much, Master Richard,’ said Ichabod. ‘Tek it easier, and wait for him. That’s it!’ The combat was brief and decisive. The youthful savage carried the heavier metal, but he was slow with it; but suddenly, as if to show that he was not altogether without activity, he turned and ran his hardest Master Richard, with blue-gray eyes still glistening and hands still clenched in the ardour of battle, turned upon the little girl, who was some two years younger than himself At the sight of her he turned shy and blushed, and the little girl turned shy and blushed also. She looked at the ground, and then she looked at Richard, and then she looked at the ground again. She was slender and delicate, and had very beautiful soft brown eyes, and the hero of a minute back was abashed before her. ‘You ‘m a Mountain, baint you?’ said Ichabod, looking at her with disfavour. She looked shyly at him, but did not answer. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked, stooping towards her. ‘Julia Mountain,’ said the child, in a trembling treble. ‘Ah!’ said Ichabod, ‘I thought so. Come along, Master Richard, or else we shall niver get hum again afore dark.’ Master Richard walked away with backward glances, shyly directed at the little girl, and the little girl stood with her cheek inclining to her shoulder, and the shoulder drawn up a little, as if to shelter her, and looked after him. This exchange went on until Ichabod and the boy had turned the corner of the lane, when Miss Julia Mountain ran home as fast as her small legs would take her, and Master Richard Reddy, with a vision in his mind, walked alongside his companion. ‘You should tek a lesson or two, Master Richard,’ said Ichabod, ‘and then thee’dst do a heap better. I’m rusty nowadaysen, but I used to love it when I was a young un.’ Master Eichard heard nothing of this or of the advice which followed it. He enacted many times over the small adventure of the last five minutes, and at the end of every mental history he traced, the little figure stood in the lane looking shyly at him over one shoulder as he turned the corner. II Samson Mountain went home in an ill-temper, and, as was usual with him when in that condition, did everything he had to do with a sulky and noisy emphasis, bursting open doors with unnecessary violence, slamming them with needless force behind him, and clamping heavily from room to room. His wife, who was submissive at the surface, but unconquerable at bottom, knew these signs, and accepted them with outer show of meekness. Samson tramped into the sitting-room, and there found his wife alone. He flung to the door behind him with a crash which would have been startling if it had been unexpected, and fell heavily into a roomy arm-chair by the fireside. Mrs. Mountain took no notice of this, but went on placidly with her sewing. Samson threw his heavily-booted feet noisily into the fender, and still Mrs. Mountain went on placidly, without so much as looking at him. Stung by this disregard of his obvious ill- humour, Samson made a lunge with his foot at the fire-irons, and brought them down with a bang. ‘Lawk a daisy me, Samson,’ said his wife mildly. ‘What’s the matter with the man?’ ‘Matter!’ growled Samson. ‘It’s a thing as ud get a saint to set his back up. I was down i’ the bridge leasowe bare an hour ago, and who should I see but that young imp of a Reddy along wi’ that old viper of a Bubb. Thee know’st the chap—that Ichabod.’ ‘I know him, Samson,’ answered Mrs. Mountain. ‘He’s the most impudent of all of ‘em.’ ‘They stood atop o’ the bridge,’ pursued Samson, ‘and I could hear ‘em talkin’. Th’ ode rip was tellin’ the young un that outworn lie about the brook. I’d got a shot i’ the barrel, and I’d more than half a mind to ha’ peppered him. I’d ha’ done it if it had been worth while.’ ‘There’s no end to their malice and oncharitable-ness,’ said Mrs. Mountain. ‘I heard the young imp say he’d fowt our Joe and licked him,’ pursued Samson. ‘If ever it should come to my knowledge as a truth I’d put Master Joe in such fettle he wouldn’t sit down for the best side a month o’ Sundays.’ ‘They ‘m giving the child such airs,’ said his wife, ‘it’s enough to turn the bread o’ life which nourishes.’ Mrs. Mountain had an object in view, and, after her own fashion, had held it long in view in silence. The moment seemed to her propitious, and she determined to approach it. ‘Young toad!’ said Samson, rising to kick at the coals with his heavy-heeled boot, and plunging backward into the chair again. ‘To hear him talk—that fine an’ mincin’—you’d think he was one o’ my lord’s grandchildren or a son o’ the squire’s at least,’ said Mrs. Mountain, approaching her theme with circuitous caution. ‘Ay!’ Samson assented ‘It’s enough to turn your stomach to listen to him.’ ‘If they go on as they’re goings pursued his wife, circling a little nearer, ‘we shall live to see fine things.’ ‘We shall, indeed,’ said Samson, a little mollified to find his wife so unusually warm in the quarrel. ‘There’s no such a thing as contentment to be found amongst ‘em. They settle up to be looked upon as gentlefolks.’ ‘Yes; fine things we shall live to see, no doubt, if we don’t tek care. But thanks be, Samson, it’s left in our own hands.’ ‘What be’st hoverin’ at?’ demanded Samson, turning upon her with his surly red face. ‘Things ain’t what they used to be when you an’ me was younger,’ said Mrs. Mountain. ‘The plain ode-fashioned Barfield talk as you and me was bred up to, Samson, ain’t good enough nowadays for the very kitchen wenches and the labourers on the farm. Everybody’s gettin’ that new-fangled!’ ‘Barfield’s good enough for me, and good enough for mine,’ said Samson, with sulky wrath. ‘It’s good enough for we, to be sure, but whether it’s good enough for ourn is another churnin’ o’ butter altogether,’ his wife answered. ‘It ud seem as if ivery generation talked different from one another. My mother, as was a very well-spoken woman for her day, used to call a cup o’ tay a dish o’ tay, and that’s a thing as only the very ignorant ud stoop to nowadays.’ Samson growled, and wallowed discontentedly in the big arm-chair. ‘A mother’s got her natural feelings, Samson,’ Mrs. Mountain continued, with an air and tone of mildest resignation. ‘I don’t scruple to allow as it’ll hurt me if I should live to see our Joe looked down upon by a Reddy.’ ‘Looked down upon!’ cried Samson. ‘Where’s the Reddy as can count acre for acre agen us, or guinea for guinea?’ ‘The Reddy’s is fairly well-to-do, Samson,’ said Mrs. Mountain; ‘very nigh as well-to-do as we be.’ ‘Pooh!’ returned Samson. ‘Oh, but they be, though,’ his wife insisted. ‘Pretty near. There’s nothing so much between us as’d prevent ‘em from taking airs with us if they could find out anything to do it for.’ ‘If they could!’ Samson assented. ‘Abel Eeddy was a bragger and a boaster from his cradle days.’ ‘That’s where it is,’ cried Mrs. Mountain, in a tone which implied that Samson had made a discovery of the first importance, and that this discovery unexpectedly confirmed her own argument. ‘Let ‘em have the least little bit of a chance for a brag, and where be you?’ ‘You might trust ‘em to tek advantage on it if they had it,’ said her husband. ‘Of course you might,’ said she, with warmth, ‘and that’s why I’m fearful on it.’ ‘Fearful o’ what?’ demanded Samson. ‘O’ these here scornful fine-gentleman ways as’ll be a thorn in our Joe’s side as long as he lives, poor little chap, unless we put him in the way to combat again ‘em.’ ‘Ah!’ Samson growled, suddenly enlightened. ‘I see now what thee beest drivin’ at. Now, you take a straight sayin’ from me, Mary Ann. I’ll have no fine-mouthed, false-natur’d corruption i’ my household. If the Reddys choose to breed up that young imp of theirn to drawl fine and to talk smooth above his station—let ‘em.’ ‘Well, Samson,’ returned Mrs. Mountain, who knew by long experience when her husband was malleable, ‘you know best, and you’re the master here, as it’s on’y fit and becomin’ an’ in the rightful nature o’ things as you should be.’ 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 compass 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, Dick?’ 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.’ ‘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 assume 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 surreptitious 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, impassable, 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 bluster, 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 nobody 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 noble 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 title 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 nobody (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 passably 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 assisted 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. Dick was her especial favourite, as was only natural, for he was pretty enough and regal enough with his childish airs of petit 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 Dick 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, Dick’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. Dick 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 circumstances 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 Dick 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. Dick chatted gaily as the shaggy-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 passed the field of battle on the road, and Dick 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 Dick 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 pass 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 passing 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. Dick 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 f...