Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield Part 4

straight. But the letter as he'd writ to Romeo niver reaches him, an'

Romeo hears as how Juliet's really dead, and he buys a bottle o' pison, an' comes to Juliet's grave i' the night-time, an' there he meets Paris, as has come to put flowers there an' pray for Juliet's soul, knowin'

no better and lovin' her very dear. An' him an' Romeo fights, and Romeo kills him, an' opens the vault, an' go's in, an' theer's Juliet, lyin'

stiff an' stark, because the physic ain't had time to work itself off yit. An' he kisses her, an' cries over her, and then he teks the pison, and dies. An' just as he's done it, Juliet wakes up, and finds him dead, and she takes his knife, an' kills herself, poor thing, an' that's the hend on 'em.'

The old sentimentalist's eyes were moist, and her voice choked, as she concluded her legend. It was the first love-story d.i.c.k had ever heard, and in pity at the beautiful narrative, which no clumsiness of narration could altogether rob of its pathos, he was crying too. There is no audience like an impressionable child, and the immortal story of love and misfortune seemed very pitiful to his small and tender heart.

'Why, theer! theer! d.i.c.k! It's only a story, my dear, wrote in a book,' said Mrs Jenny. 'It most likely ain't true, an' if it is, it all happened sich a time ago as it's no good a-frettin' about it. Why, wheeriver did you get all them warts? 'She took one of the hands with which d.i.c.k was rubbing his eyes. 'You should have 'em looked tew, they quite spile your hands. I must get Rufus Smith to have a look at 'em.

You know who we'm agoin' to see, don't you? You've heard tell o' the Dudley Devil, d.i.c.k?'

'Yes,' said d.i.c.k. 'Ichabod goes to him for his rheumatism.'

'It's on'y a step away. That's his cottage, over there. We'll get him to charm the warts away.'

A hundred yards farther on Mrs. Jenny checked the pony, and, dismounting from the vehicle, bade d.i.c.k tie him to an elder-shoot and follow her.

They went through a gap in a ruinous hedge, and traversed a furzy field, at the farther side of which stood the wizard's hut, a wretched place of a single story, with a shuttered window and a thatched roof full of holes and overgrown with weeds. As they approached the door a mighty clatter was audible within, and Mrs. Jenny held the boy's hand in a tightened grasp, fearful of devilry. As they stood irresolute to advance or retreat, a big cat dashed out at the doorway with a feline imprecation, and the wizard appeared, revengefully waving a stick, and swearing furiously.

'Cuss the brute,' he said, 'the divil's in her, sure an' sartin'.'

It seemed not unlikely to the onlookers, the cat being the wizard's property, and therefore, by all rule and prescription, his prompter and familiar. She was not of the received colour, however, her fur being of a rusty red. But as she raised her back, and spat at her master's visitors from under her chubbed tail, she looked demoniac enough for anything. And from the fas.h.i.+on in which, her anathema once launched, she sat down and betook herself to the rearrangement of her ruffled coat, it might have been conjectured that it was not purely personal to them, but that they were attacked merely as types of the human race, whose society she and her master had forsworn.

'Cuss her!' reiterated the wizard. 'Where's her got tew? My soul, what's this?'

He peered with a short-sighted terror-stricken scowl on Mrs. Jenny and her charge, as if for a moment the fancy had crossed him that his refractory familiar had taken their shapes. His gray lips muttered something, and his fingers worked oddly as he took a step or two forward, clearly outlined in the cold winter suns.h.i.+ne against the black void beyond his open door.

'Why, Rufus, what's the matter?' asked Mrs. Jenny. 'Don't look like that at a body.'

'It's you, mum?' said the necromancer. A look of relief came into his wizened face. 'I didn't know but what it might be----' His voice trailed off into an indistinct murmur, and he smeared his hand heavily across his face, and looked at it, mistrustfully, as if he rather expected to find something else in its place. 'Cuss her!' he said again, looking round for the cat.

'What's she done?' demanded Mrs. Jenny.

'Done? Ate up all my brekfus, that's what she's done,' rejoined the wizard. The familiar grinned with a relish of the situation so fiendishly human that d.i.c.k clung closer to Mrs. Rusker's hand, and devoutly wished himself back in the trap. To his childish sense the incongruity of one gifted with demoniac powers being helpless to prevent the depredations of his own domestic animal did not appeal. As for Mrs.

Jenny, she had piously believed in witchcraft all her life, and was quite as insensible to the absurdity as he.

'I want you to look at this young gentleman's hands,' said Mrs. Busker.

'He's got warts that bad. I suppose you can charm 'em away for him?'

Appealed to on a point of his art, the wizard's air changed altogether.

He a.s.sumed an aspect of wooden majesty.

'Why, yis,' he said. 'I think I'm equal to that Step inside, mum, and bring the young gentleman with you.'

'Couldn't you-------' Mrs. Busker hesitatingly began, 'couldn't you do it outside?'

'The forms and ceremonies,' said the necromancer, with an increase of woodenness in his manner, 'cannot be applied out o' doors. Arter you, mum.'

He ushered them into the one room of his hut, and the cat, with her tail floating above her like a banner, entered too, evading a kick, and sprang upon a rotten deal shelf, which apparently acted as both dresser and table.

Rufus closed the ruinous door, thereby intensifying the gloom which reigned within the place. The floor was of simple earth, unboarded, and the air smelt of it Here and there a fine spear of ghostly sunlight pierced a crack in roof or wall. By the time their eyes had become accustomed to the gloom they saw that Rufus, on his knees on the floor, was scratching a circle about himself with a sc.r.a.p of a broken pot, and the indistinct rhythmic murmur of the spell he muttered reached their ears.

The cat, perched upon the dresser, purred as if her internal machinery were running down to final collapse, and her contracting and dilating eyes borrowed infernal fires from the chance ray of suns.h.i.+ne in which she sat. The brute's rusty red head, so lit, fascinated d.i.c.k, and the mingled rhythms of her purring and the wizard's mounted and mounted, until to his bewildered mind the whole world seemed filled with their murmur, and the demoniac head seemed to dilate as he gazed at it.

Suddenly, Rufus paused in his sing-song, and the cat's purr ceased with it, as though her share of the charm was done.

'Come into the ring,' said Rufus. His voice was shaky, and if there had been light enough to see it, his face was gray with terror of his own hocus-pocus. The cat's head had dropped out of the line of sunlight, and she had coiled herself up on the dresser among a disorderly litter of crockery ware. d.i.c.k, relieved from the fascination of her too-visible presence, obeyed the summons, and Rufus, seating himself upon a broken stool, took his hand in moist and quivering fingers, and touching the warts one by one, recommenced his mumble. It had proceeded for a minute or so, when a crash, which, following as it did on the dead stillness, an earthquake could scarce have equalled, elicited a scream from Mrs.

Jenny and brought the wizard to his knees with a yell of terror.

'My blessid!' he cried, with clacking jaws, 'I've done it at last! Get thee behind me, Satan!'

In terror-stricken earnest he believed that the Great Personage he had pa.s.sed all his life in trying to raise had answered to his call at last. So, though it was unquestionably a relief to him to find that the appalling clatter had merely been caused by his familiar's pursuit of a mouse among the crockery, a shade of disappointment may have followed the discovery.

'Cuss her!' he said, for the third time that morning, and with additional unction. 'Her'll be the death of me some day, I know her will!'

IV

A summer sunset filled all the sky above Castle Barfield and its encircling fields. The sun had disappeared, leaving behind him a broad reflected track of glory where, here and there, a star was faintly visible. A light wind was blowing from the hollow which sheltered the town towards the higher land whereon the rival houses of Eeddy and Mountain faced each other. Below, it was already almost night, and as the wind blew the shadow mounted, as if the wind carried it. The rose and gold left by the departing sun faded down the sky, and settled at the horizon into a broad band of deep-toned fire, which, to one facing it in ascending from the lower ground, seemed to bind the two houses together. Some such fancy might have been in the head of Mrs. Jenny Rusker, as she went in the warm evening air towards the little eminence on which stood the long low-built house of Samson Mountain, already a-twinkle with occasional lights in the gloom, its own bulk cast against the fast-fading band of sunset.

Mrs. Jenny, hale and vigorous yet, and still a widow, was older by fifteen years than on the day when she unfolded to d.i.c.k Reddy the story of Romeo and Juliet. Fifteen years was a good slice out of a lifetime, even in Castle Barfield in the first half of the century, when time slipped by so quietly and left so little trace to mark his flight.

She pa.s.sed the gate which opened on the public road, and entered the Mountain domain. The air was so still that the bubble of the boundary brook was clearly audible a hundred yards away, with nothing to accent it but the slow heavy flap of a late crow, winging his reluctant flight homewards, and save for him, sky and earth alike seemed empty of life, and delivered wholly to the clinging peace of evening. So that when Mrs.

Jenny came to the only clump of trees in her line of progress between the gate and the house the little scream of surprise with which she found herself suddenly face to face with an unexpected human figure was justified.

'Sh-h-h! 'said the figure's owner. 'Don't you know me, Aunt Jenny?'

'd.i.c.k!' said Mrs. Jenny, peering at him. 'So it is. You welly frightened the life out o' me. What brings you here, of all places in the world?'

'Can't you guess?' asked d.i.c.k. He was tall and broad-shouldered now, an admirable fulfilment of the physical promise of his boyhood, and far overtopped Mrs. Rusker. 'It isn't for the first time.'

'I feared not,' said the old woman. 'You was allays main venturesome.'

'It will be for the last, for some time, Aunt Jenny. I leave Castle Barfield to-morrow.'

'Leave Barfield?' cried the old woman. 'Why, d.i.c.k, wheer are ye goin'?

You ain't agoin' to do nothin' rash, that I do hope.'

'I am going to London,' said d.i.c.k, 'and I must see Julia before I go.

You must help me. You are going to the house now, aren't you?'

'Going to London?' repeated Mrs. Eusker, who had no ears for the last words after that announcement. 'What's made you so hot foot to go to London all of a minute like?'

'It was decided to-day. My father suspects what is going on. I feel sure of it, though he has never said a word about it. You know he always meant to make a doctor of me--it was my own choice when I was quite a little fellow, and it has always been understood. Last month he asked me if I was of the same mind still, and to-day he told me that my seat is taken in the coach from Birmingham. You know my father, Aunt Jenny, as well as I do. He has been a very good father to me, and I would not give him pain or trouble for the world. I could not refuse. Indeed, it is my last chance of ever doing anything for myself and making a home for Julia.'

'My dear, they'll never hear on it, nayther of 'em. Samson Mountain 'd rather see his daughter in her coffin than married to any kin of Abel Reddy's. Though he loves her, too, in a kind o' way. An' your father's jist as hard; he's on'y quieter with it, that's all They'll niver consent Niver, i' this world.'

'Then we must do without their consent, that's all. I must see Julia to-night, and you must help me. Tell her that I am here and must see her. Oh, Aunt Jenny, you are surely not going to desert us now, after helping us so often.'

'I'm dub'ous, my dear. I hope good may come of it, but I'm dub'ous. I'm doubtful if I did right in helping you, again your father's will, an'

Mr. Mountain's, too.'