  Produced by Al Haines. JOHN HERRING A WEST OF ENGLAND ROMANCE BY SABINE BARING-GOULD AUTHOR OF 'MEHALAH' IN THREE VOLUMES VOL. I. LONDON [All rights reserved] PREFACE. (ADDRESSED TO THOSE WHO ARE NOT OF In a tale of the West of England in which are introduced some of the lowest types of rustic humanity to be found there, it is impossible to avoid the use of the local dialect. This dialect has, however, been modified, as much as possible to render it intelligible without transforming it into the language of the schools. The vulgar dialect is regardless of gender and reckless in the use of cases. A cow is he, and a tom-cat wags her tail. At a trial in Exeter, at the Assizes, a man was charged with the murder of his wife, a woman with an aggravating tongue. The jury found a verdict of 'Not Guilty' against the clearest evidence, and, when the Judge expressed his surprise, 'Ah, your lordship,' said the foreman in explanation, 'us ain't a-going to hang he for the likes of she.' It is perhaps necessary to explain that 'the Cobbledicks' are no creation of the imagination—the clan has only been dispersed of recent years; the old man who lived in a cyder-cask is dead, but he was alive ten years ago. The clan was literally one of half-naked savages. CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME CHAPTER
JOHN HERRING. CHAPTER I. THE COBBLEDICKS. 'Log!' said the voice of Cobbledick the Old from a cyder cask. 'I be a logging like the blue blazes,' answered Cobbledick the younger. Then a dry and dirty hand emerged from the cask, and with a gorse bush struck at the girl—that is, at Cobbledick the younger. She evaded the blow. 'Be quiet, vaither, or I won't log no more!' 'You won't?' with a horrible curse; 'then I'll make you, if I whacks and whacks till you be all over blood and prickles. There, I will, I swear. Glory rallaluley!' On a spur of Dartmoor that struck out into the proximity of cultivated land, stood a cromlech or dolmen—a rude monument of a lost race, reared of granite slabs. This spur of moor was a continuation or buttress of Gosdon Beacon, which, next to Yestor, is the highest point attained by Dartmoor, and is indeed the second highest mountain in the south of England. The dolmen was composed of four great slabs of granite set on edge, two parallel to the other two, with a fifth stone closing one end. The whole five supported an enormous quoit or block, plain on the nether surface, but unshaped above. Local antiquaries, pretending to knowledge, but actually ignorant, called this erection a Druid altar, and pointed to a sort of basin on the top formed by the weather, with a channel from it to the edge, and this they asserted was a receptacle for the blood of human victims, and a means of lustration for those who stood below. Other antiquaries, knowing a great deal, and not ashamed to confess ignorance where knowledge ended and guesswork began, said simply that the monument belonged to prehistoric times, and that they neither knew who had built it, nor for what purpose it was raised. The country folk called it the 'Giant's Table.' On the lee side of this cromlech was a cyder cask, tethered to the cromlech by a piece of cord passed through the bung-hole, and attached to a stout stick within the monument, entering between the interstices of the blocks. In this cask lived an old man, named Grizzly Cobbledick by his neighbours. He had lived in the cask many years. Some miles away, to the north, in another parish, that of Nymet, lived the parent stock from which he sprung, in an old tumble-down cottage, sans windows, sans doors, sans chimney, sans floors, sans everything save the 'cob'—that is, mud walls—and the ragged roof of thatch. This hovel was what the Germans would call the 'Stamm-burg' of the Cobbledicks. That is to say, it was the ancestral cradle of the race; it was also the hive in which they continued to dwell. They lived there, apart from their fellows, with whom they held no communication, never entering a village nor dealing at any shop, never seen at market or merry-making, least of all at church. Their unsociable habits went further. They allowed no one to invade their hovel and pry into their mode of living. If any of them saw a person stand still near the house to observe it, or to watch a Cobbledick at his work or his play, a yelp called the whole clan together, and with howls and curses they set on the inquisitive visitor, pelting him with stones, and flinging sticks at his head, so that he was glad to beat a retreat. The Cobbledicks were half-naked savages. They wore, for warmth not for decency, some wretched rags. When the scanty supply of garments failed entirely, then the whole crew dispersed over the country, hunting by moonlight for a fresh supply; they stole whatever came in their way that could be converted into covering to clothe their nakedness. Anything served—a potato-sack or a flour-bag. One or other would change into coat or gown by making in it slits for head and arms. Once a farmer lost an oilcloth stack-covering. It was deliberately taken off his stack one rainy night before he had thatched his wheat. He recognised it torn up and utilised as curtains to the open holes that served as windows to Cobbledick Castle. The farmer prosecuted, but first a rick and then a stack was burned, and he was glad to stay proceedings and suffer the savages to keep his oilcloth, fearing for the thatch of his farmhouse, and himself, his wife and babes beneath it. When the neighbourhood was aware that the Cobbledicks ran short of raiment, old worn garments were purposely left out at night on hedges for their use. The migration of Grizzly Cobbledick to the parish of South Tawton took place in this wise. It marked an epoch in the history of the race. The Cobbledicks had not arrived at that stage of civilisation in which property becomes personal. Their views as to property were undeveloped. The world belonged in part to the Cobbledicks, and the rest did not. What belonged to the Cobbledicks belonged to the family, not to any individual in the family. They owned land, reclaimed from the waste long ago, clay land overgrown with rushes, partly bog; but this land was not the property of this Cobbledick or that, male or female, old or young, it belonged to all, on the principle of the Russian mir. Not only so, but the utensils of the house and of the farm were common, so also were the garments. The pipkin cooked for the whole family, and the hoe raised the potatoes for all to eat. The pipkin was not private property when Poll stirred it, the hoe was not private property when Dick worked with it, and the potato-sack was not owned by him or by her who wore it. If, by any chance, it were taken off, it thereby fell back into the common store. The Cobbledicks never had been civilised. They were autochthones. The oldest inhabitant of Nymet remembered them. They did not increase much, but they did not die out. Their congeners, named the Gubbins, lived in the Lydford glens in Charles the First's reign, when a poet thus described them:—
One night a star fell from heaven and descended into the hovel of the Cobbledicks through the hole in the roof which allowed the smoke of the communal fire to ascend; and this spark sank into the heart of Old Grizzly—he was not Old Grizzly then. What his name was then in the clan never transpired. That divine spark conveyed to this particular Cobbledick the idea of personal property. This idea, once conceived, becomes to the social body what a backbone is to the physical organism. There is all the difference in social conditions between those who have accepted personal property and those who have not arrived at it, that exists between vertebrate animals and invertebrate polypi. Cobbledick rose from his lair by the fire where he had been snoring, caught up a female for whom he had long been sighing, stuffed a wisp of hay into her mouth to prevent her from alarming the sleepers, threw her over his shoulder, and strode out of the Cobbledick hovel. The dispersion at Babel was caused by the discovery of the possessive pronouns. After having carried his burden beyond earshot, Cobbledick set her down, pulled the plug out of her mouth, and said, 'If you holler, I'll smash your head. So hold thee gab and come along of I.' The female was overawed into submission, and she paddled along at his side. When day broke they found themselves on a shoulder of down in close proximity to Cosdon. Rambling over the moor, the woman hopping and squealing as she touched the gorse with her bare legs, they lighted on the grey cromlech, and the male, curling his tongue in his mouth, produced a loud cluck. The female, as an imitative animal, clucked responsive. 'Bags!' said Cobbledick male, and by this simple formula he had claimed the cromlech as personal property to himself, his heirs and assigns. The idea of property had swelled to large dimensions in his heart since he had first admitted it. The tract of moor was at that time—we are speaking of seventy years ago—wholly uninclosed. Since that date many encroachments have been made, and much of the furzy waste placed under cultivation. Xenophon opens his 'Anabasis' with the words, 'The Greeks began it.' In the record of the conquest and reclamation of the moor it stands written, 'The Cobbledicks began it.' First they filled up the interstices between the blocks of granite of the dolmen with turf and moss, then they strewed the floor with bracken, and made bed and seat of heather. Then they marked out a portion of the moor, collected stones from off the surface with infinite labour, and fenced it round with these stones set as a dry wall. This they tilled, and, their appetite for property growing, they inclosed more. The tillage was rude, but then it was the beginning of tillage to the whole Cobbledick race. It took that race six thousand years to arrive at a crooked stick with Mrs. Grizzly dragging it, and Mr. Grizzly driving with a switch, and his weight resting on the tail of the simple plough. When he took his weight off, to quicken the motions of Mrs. Grizzly with the switch, the plough levered out of the ground, she fell, and he also was thrown forward on his nose. When Grizzly left the ancestral seat, he carried with him, in addition to a woman, two ferrets in a bag, and a sharp flintstone. With the ferrets he caught rabbits, and with the stone he flayed them. Grizzly was a neolithic man. On their first taking possession of the cromlech, Grizzly fought his wife for the sack she wore. He wanted to utilise it as a screen for the entrance. The door was to the south, but the south wind is a rainy wind and must be shut out. Mrs. Grizzly resisted, for the same heavenly spark that had brought to him the idea of appropriating one woman as wife, had carried to her also the idea of keeping as her own, her very own, the one potato-sack in which she walked and worked and slept. This resistance on her part stimulated invention on his. He devised a screen of wattles and heather for the door, and this proved a better shelter than any sack could have made. Thus we see how the sense of property quickens invention. The heavenly spark never expired in the breasts of the Cobbledicks; they felt no desire, like the Apostles of old and reformers of the present day, to revert to the conditions from which they had escaped. The spark burned brighter, it demanded fuel. They proceeded to obtain a cow. How they procured it nobody knew, though all suspected. The Cobbledicks disappeared from Tawton parish for several days. When they reappeared they were driving a cow before them down the flanks of Cosdon. Had they fished her out of the swamps round Cranmere pool? or had they gone far, far beyond, and acquired her in the South Hams, and driven her across the moor, leaving no traces in the spongy soil and on the blooming heather whereby they might be traced, in the event of those from whom she had been acquired disputing their right to make off with her? But if this latter were the case, what labour and perseverance it must have cost them to convey a cow across brawling torrents, over granite-strewn mountains, and through treacherous bogs! This was the way of the Cobbledicks. When they wanted anything, they went after it over the moor. Beyond was El Dorado, between the pathless waste, a barrier forbidding pursuit. They never robbed their neighbours of anything beyond turnips and field potatoes. They had made sufficient advance along the path of social culture to recognise a sort of fellowship with their neighbours, and to respect the property of near neighbours. But this sense of fellowship did not extend beyond the moor. On the other side was a sea full of fish, into which whoever would might dip his net. One day the female Cobbledick became a mother, and Grizzly a father. Soon after this the wife died. Grizzly dug a hole in the floor of the cromlech, just under where the fire burned, and laid her there. She was pleased, when alive, to sit over the red ashes, spreading out her toes, and laughing at the yellow flames. Under the hearthstone she should lie, with her face to the ashes, and her toes turned to the blaze. The Cobbledick ideas were growing. The first dawn of that sentiment which in another generation might flower into poetry had appeared in Grizzly's mind. But the experiment was not happy. At night, as Grizzly slept, he thought he saw the old woman working her way up out of the ground, throwing the earth forth like a mole, and then peering at him from a corner. After that she dived again and disappeared. Presently he felt her heave the earth under him where he lay, and roll him over, so that he could not sleep. He was very angry, and he got a great piece of granite and beat the floor hard with it. But this was of no avail. Next night the old woman was heard scratching with her nails at the bases of the granite slabs. Once she had been given a hunch of saffron cake by a farmer's wife, and she had picked all the currants out and eaten them, before attacking the substance. She was now at work on the granite, picking out the hornblend, mistaking the black grains for currants. 'Her'll do with these great stones as her did with the cake,' said Grizzly; 'her got that all crumbled with hunting the currants, and her'll treat the stones same way, and bring the table down on our heads.' After that he disappeared for three days, and when he returned he was rolling a cyder-cask before him down Cosdon. This cask he brought alongside of the cromlech, and attached it to the old house in the manner described. He lined it with fern, and retired into it, along with the child, at night. He would no longer sleep in the stone mansion that was being undermined by the dead wife. He did not object to occupy it by day; and when he ate, he always threw some crumbs or bits of meat into the fire, to satisfy the cravings of the old woman. He supposed that she picked at the stones because she was hungry. The child slept with him in the cyder-cask till she grew too big, and made it uncomfortable for her father. One night he had cramp in his leg, and kicked out, and kicked her forth, head over heels; then he bade her go for the future to the old house, and sleep there and be darned, glory rallaluley. Occasionally, in spring, when all is waxing and wanton, the Methodists held revival meetings on the down, and Old Grizzly was accustomed then to prowl about the outskirts of the assembly, listening to the preachers, and to the hymns and rhapsodical outcries of the converted. These camp meetings reminded him in some particulars of the ways of the primitive Cobbledicks. The new feature, unfamiliar to him, was the association of religion with these orgies. From such meetings Grizzly had picked up a few cant expressions which he used for rounding his sentences without in the least understanding their import. If he began a sentence with a curse, he finished it with a hallelujah, much as a grocer, having put an iron weight into one scale, heaps the other with sugar till the balance is complete. Cobbledick father and daughter were not in the unseemly condition of nudity affected by their relatives at Nymet. These latter so far resembled Adam and Eve in the period of man's innocency that they were naked and were not ashamed, but with the sense of personal property came the sense also of self-respect. The land on which Grizzly and his wife squatted belonged to the manor of West Wyke, of which the Battishills were lords, and the Squire took care that his tenants should not go unprovided with old clothes. The Battishills were very poor, and wore their garments till the last moment consonant with respectability; then they passed them on to the squatters, whom they made, if not respectable, at least decent. 'Log!' screamed the old man from the cask. 'I be a logging[1] like the blue blazes,' answered the girl, and she spoke the truth. [1] To 'log' is to rock. Thus a logan stone is a rocking stone, and a woman logs her baby in its cradle. She was seated with her back to one of the great stones of the 'Giant's Table,' with a bare foot resting on the cask on each side of the restraining rope. She worked her feet alternately, so as to produce a vibratory motion in the barrel from left to right. The old man liked being rocked to sleep; he exacted the task of his daughter: and only when he began to snore and ceased to swear, dare Joyce Cobbledick desist from logging and retire to her own lair. The evening had fallen. The sun was set, but a haze of light hung like a warm hoar frost over the head of Cosdon, though darkness had settled down in the valleys, and the village of Zeal began to twinkle out of all its windows. The air was still. The rush of the stream over the granite masses that choked its course was the only sound audible, save the fretting of the cask on the turf in its oscillations. The girl was tired, and one of her feet was bleeding. She had cut it with a sharp stone that day. Joyce Cobbledick was aged eighteen. She was a tall, well-built girl, with bright colour, a low forehead, and dark eyes. Her hair was as uncombed and uncared for as the mane of a moorland pony. It was dark brown. Her jaws were heavy and her cheek-bones high, like those of her ancestry. There was some beauty about her—the beauty of a fine animal; she was perfectly supple in every limb, admirably proportioned, easy and even graceful in her movements, unrestrained by shoes and cumbrous clothing. Her face was even fine, but there was nothing like intelligence illumining her dark eyes. She wore a thin print gown, and that was in tatters from her knees by scrambling through hedges to steal turnips, and brushing through gorse brakes after rabbits. Presently the girl intermitted her trampling movement, believing the old man to be asleep. The stars were coming out. The one street of Zeal, lying between rich meadows and wood, was like a necklace of diamonds embedded in black velvet. Joyce leaned forwards to listen if her father were snoring. All was still in the cask, preternaturally still. She bent her head lower. Then, suddenly, with a roar, 'Darn your eyes, glory rallaluley!' an old grey, frowzy head and face shot out of the barrel, and with it a long arm. A heavy blow of the furze bush fell across the girl's head and cheek, making her cry out with pain. She recovered her position in a moment, and dashed her feet together savagely at the cask. The violence of the action was more than the cord could endure, already fretted against the rugged edges of the granite blocks. It snapped, and in a moment the cask was driven forward by the impetus of Joyce's angry kick. It rolled over and over, ran down a bank, then along an incline of smooth turf, dashed against a stone which somewhat diverted its course, bounded into the high road, where it shot forth its tenant, and continued its course in rapid revolutions down the road that here ascended from the valley. Joyce uttered a cry, sprang to her feet, and ran after the rolling barrel towards the highway, and there saw her father lying stretched across the road, stunned and speechless. CHAPTER II. WHAT THE CASK DID. As Joyce stood on the bank about to leap down into the road to her father's assistance, she was arrested by a sight calculated to fill her with dismay. A chaise drawn by a pair of horses was approaching from the direction of Okehampton at a brisk pace. The cask was in full career down the road, gaining velocity as it rolled. A curve hid it from the postillion, and Joyce stood breathless, powerless to warn the post-boy or arrest the cask, watching for the result. The boy was in spirits; he cracked his whip, and stimulated the horses—fresh from the stable at Okehampton—to take the hill in style. The cask was whirling on. Then it reached the sweep in the road, and it went direct against the bank, danced light-heartedly up it, reeled back, swung itself round and shot straight down the road at the horses. In another moment it was on them, leaping at them like a tiger at the throat of his prey. What followed was so sudden, and the light was so imperfect, that Joyce could not quite make out what she saw. She heard a loud cry from the post-boy, who was thrown. Whether one of the horses went down and floundered to his feet again she was not sure; she believed it was so. Next moment the chaise was off the road, the two frightened animals tearing away with it over the common. Forgetful of her father in the excitement of the spectacle and in dread of the final catastrophe, Joyce ran after the carriage, which she saw bounding over heaps of peat that had been cut and laid to dry, lurching into hollows, jolting over tufts of gorse, and jarring against stones. Then she saw against the light of the horizon the figure of a man emerging from the window of the chaise, trying to open the door. Almost simultaneously the wheel of the carriage struck a huge block of granite, and in an instant the chaise was thrown on one side, the horses were kicking furiously, and the whole converted into a wreck of living beasts and struggling men and splintered fragments of carriage. 'Ho, heigh! stay them osses,' yelled the post-boy, who had picked himself up and was running over the down. 'Sit on their necks; kip 'em down.' Joyce ran also, and reached the spot soon after him. The postillion went straight at the horses, regardless of everything else, and cut their traces; whereupon they ran off, and he careered in full pursuit after them. 'Leave the beasts alone, boy,' shouted a young man who had disengaged himself from the shattered carriage, and was helping out a young lady. 'Leave the beasts and come here.' 'No, no, sir! The osses fust. Them's my concern.' And away went the boy. 'Here, girl,' said the same young man to Joyce, as she came up; 'help me.' He signed to her what to do, to raise a man who was lying motionless among the fragments of the carriage, to carry him a little distance, and lay him on the turf at full length. 'Stay by him whilst I go for the young lady.' Joyce nodded. The young lady was seated on the rock that had upset the carriage. 'What frightened the horses?' she asked. 'I do not know. Are you hurt?' 'My foot is sprained. I cannot walk; but no bones are broken, of that I have satisfied myself. How goes my father?' 'He is seriously injured.' 'He did wrong to try and open the door. The carriage must have fallen over on him.' 'Will you remain here whilst I go back to him? 'Certainly. The moss is soft as a cushion on this stone.' 'Your father, I fear, is seriously hurt. As you say, he was leaning out of the window when the coach turned over, and it went down on the side where he was.' 'Bring me my cloak from the chaise. It is chilly, and the spot is desolate. Il me donne les frissons.' She spoke with wonderful composure. She might have been on a picnic, and the dish with the chicken pie broken; yet she had narrowly escaped death herself, and her father was lying dead a few feet from her. The young man looked at her face, a little surprised at her perfect coolness. The face was wax-like, of transparent whiteness; there was no colour in it. But then she was cold and possibly frightened, though betraying no fear in her manner. Her features were regular and of extraordinary beauty. Her eyes were large and the lashes long; her hair abundant and black. Of emotion in her face there was none. 'I remember my father said he had suffered from the rheumatism. Pray take him from off the grass.' The young man thought to himself, 'He will never suffer from that more;' but he made no answer. He went back to the man lying on the turf, knelt over him, and examined him. Joyce stood by with arms folded. 'Is there any house near to which this gentleman could be removed? he asked. 'West Wyke,' answered Joyce. 'Where is that?' She made a motion with her chin, indicating the direction. 'And is there a gate to be had on which I can lay him?' She jerked her chin again. 'Now, sir,' said the post-boy, coming up, 'I've got the osses quiet, what can I do for you?' 'This gentleman must be removed at once on a hurdle or gate. Run and bring me one.' 'Be he hurted cruel bad?' asked the boy. 'He is dead.' 'Deary me!' exclaimed the post-boy. 'What a mussy it weren't one of the osses. Make us truly thankful. I'll get you a gate.' 'I'll help you,' said Joyce. 'You don't look a sort to carry a gate. Do you call yourself a man or a rat?' Presently the two returned with a hurdle; that is to say, Joyce was carrying one on her head, casting occasionally a contemptuous glance at the dapper little fellow at her side. 'Is my father able to speak yet?' asked the lady. 'No,' answered the young man. 'Do not be alarmed. We must carry him to a house, where he can be put to bed, and then we will return for you. Do you mind being left alone, or can you walk as far as to the house?' 'I have already told you that I cannot walk. You are forgetful, monsieur.' 'Then this girl will remain with you till we return.' 'Very well. If she likes to remain she may remain. It is her affair.' The young lady spoke with a foreign—a French accent, which was pretty. Indeed, there was a foreign grace in her attitudes, and taste in her dress, which showed that, if an Englishwoman, she must have lived a great deal in France. The gentleman returned to Joyce; he was a tall and fine young man, with dark hair and moustache and frank blue eyes. 'Will you remain here with the lady while we go on to the house?' Joyce nodded and went over to the rock on which the young lady was seated. She planted herself before her. 'The 'ouse to which we must carry the gent be yonder,' said the post-boy. 'I seed him as I went for the gate.' 'Do not be alarmed if we carry your father.' 'I shall not be alarmed.' Then the post-boy going before and the young gentleman following, they proceeded very gently to carry the motionless form in the direction of West Wyke. Joyce remained with the young lady; she studied her with great attention from head to foot. The sky was clear, and there was still much light entangled in the upper atmosphere. The whole of the north was full of silvery twilight. 'I niver seed a born leddy afore so close,' said Joyce. 'I am a born lady,' replied the other, haughtily. 'Did I say you wasn't? Have you any other rags on but what I sees?' 'Rags!' indignantly. 'What do you mean, girl?' 'Look here,' said Joyce, 'I hasn't. Fust comes the gown, and then comes I. Down in the good land to Zeal and Tawton, where the lanes be cut deep, I seed there be nethermost hard rock, then over that comes shellat, then a sort of gravelly trade (stuff), then a top o' that meat airth; and over all, like the gown, the waving green grass. Up here on the moor t'ain't so. There's the granite and then the moss, and if you scrats through the moss you comes right on and on to the stone. That be like us as lives up here, vaither and I, but wi' the quality it be different, as lives in lew (sheltered) places; they has more coverings nor us, night and day, I reckon.' 'You have no more clothes on you than that thin gown?' 'No, us be like moor rock, fust the moss, then the stone.' 'Are you begging?' 'I never axes for naught; what I wants I takes.' The lady shivered and drew back on her seat. She was disgusted with the appearance, and offended at the rudeness of the girl. 'Why don't clothes grow on our backs, thick and warm as the wool on sheep, the fur on rabbits, and the moss on moorstones?'Twould come handier,' observed Joyce Cobbledick. The lady made no reply. 'Wot's that man, that young man as spoke to you and I?' asked Joyce. 'I do not know his name.' 'He don't belong to you?' 'Most certainly not,' with a contemptuous shrug. 'Where did you get mun?' 'He is travelling with us—that is all. He joined my father in taking a chaise from Launceston.' 'Why didn't y' travel by the mail-coach? Her goes by ivery day.' 'The coach had left Launceston when we arrived there from Falmouth, so we engaged a chaise. My father was in haste to reach Exeter, and that person joined us. I do not know his name, neither do I care. My father satisfied himself, I presume, of his respectability. That is all.' 'Where do'y come from, mistress? Over t'other side of the moor I reckon.' 'I come from France.' Joyce was puzzled. Her geographical knowledge was too limited for her to know of France. 'I reckon that be a long way off, t'other side o' Prince's Town and the prisons, surely. Be there savages in them parts?' 'Savages! certainly not.' 'There be here. I be one. I be a Cobbledick, and the Cobbledicks be all savages. But vaither and I be better nor the rest out Nymet. They be savages and no mistake.' 'I have no doubt of it.' 'I say, young lady, is that man as they carried on the gate to West Wyke your vaither?' 'He is my father.' 'Did he bang you about much? Did he whack you often wi' a bunch of vuzz? Not but you'd mind over much wi' all them pack o' clothes to your back.' 'Certainly not.' 'Did you have to rock him to sleep o' nights in a barril?' 'No.' 'Mebbe you niver had much dodging out of the way of the stones he throwed at your head.' 'Of course not.' 'My old vaither doth all these to me. He whacks me wi' brimmles and vuzz, and he throws turves and stones at me, and I has to rock mun every night or he wouldn't sleep a wink. Of all the proper blaggards in the world there ain't an ekal to vaither. But I reckon vaithers is vaithers all the world over. They be all like oaksticks, some crookeder nor others, but none straight. You don't mind over much what has happened to yours?' The young lady only imperfectly understood the girl, owing to the rudeness of her speech and her strong provincial brogue. 'There be my old vaither rolled out of his barril right across the high road, and I don't know if he've a broke his neck or no; and I don't kear hover much, no more nor you does because your vaither ha' gone and done the same.' 'What do you mean, girl?' 'I mean what I sez. I know what broke necks mean. I ha' broke the necks o' rabbits scores and scores o' times. Him's just the same, ivery bit and croome.' The young lady shuddered. She did not cry, but her breath caught in her throat. 'Mon Dieu! Ce n'est pas vrai! Comme cette fille me fait peur!' 'What be that jabber about? You oughtn't to mind.' 'For the love of God, girl, do not frighten me. It is wicked—it is cruel. It is not true.' 'Not true!' echoed Joyce; 'I knows it be. I knows a broke neck in a man as in a rabbit.' 'Be quiet. If you want money, en voilÀ, take and leave me tranquil.' Joyce struck her hand aside. 'What'll you do wi' he now? Mother be poked under the hearthstone, where the fire can warm her. But when Old Grizzly goes, I shan't put he along o' mother. He can't sleep under the table now, and her'll lead'n a life of it, if he be put under the hearthstone along of she. Her niver worrits me, but her don't leave old vaither alone not one minnit of nights. Her does it because he knacked her, and beat her scores and scores o' times when her were alive. Now her thinks her turn be come. But her's got no vice in her. It be all play, only vaither be that crabbed he don't put up wi' it. When Old Grizzly goes, I'll up wi' his heels and send him into a bog once for all. He'll be wet and cold there I reckon, and the moss grows so thick over them quaking bogs, that once in there be no getting out, no more than when you're gone under the ice on Rayborough Pool. Then he'll leave me in peace I reckon.' 'You will do that, you long cripple (viper), you!' screamed the old man, who had overheard the arrangements planned for his interment, and disapproved of them. 'You will do that!' He rushed on Joyce from behind, raining furious blows on her with his fists. 'You will stog me in a bog, will'y? I'll put you in fust, curs'd ever-lasting rallaluley if I don't.' The old man yelled with fury. He stepped backwards and leaped at Joyce, and beat and swore. The young lady was frightened, and cried out for help. The horrible old man seemed to her to be some superhuman apparition rising out of the moor soil—a vampyre, a ghoul from a cairn, come to destroy the wretched girl before her. 'You chuck down thicky (that) stone, vaither?' cried Joyce, as he stooped and took up a piece of granite in both hands. 'I won't, I won't. I'll mash you first, you unnat'ral varmint! You nigh upon killed me by rolling me over and over in the cask, and shan't I nigh upon do the same by you? Glory rallaluley, blast me blue!' Joyce was unquestionably stronger than old Cobbledick, and might have disarmed him, but the divine spark had been communicated to her; it flickered faintly in her dim soul, and a dumb instinct forbade her raising her hand against her father. She had borne his brutality for many a year, and had not resented it. She was his child, for him to deal with as he thought best. The sense of property had become strongly rooted in the minds of this branch of the Cobble dicks, and as forces are correlated, and heat, and light, and electricity, and sound are but the same force acting in different ways, so was it with the sense of possession. In the breast of Joyce it had transformed itself into a consciousness of filial duty. Joyce put up her hand to ward off the blow. Then the young man who had carried the injured gentleman away arrived, running up, summoned by the cries, and with one stroke of the stick he held in his hand, he made the old man drop the stone. 'In another moment he would have beaten out your brains,' said he, panting. 'I reckon he would,' observed Joyce. The old man howled with pain, dancing about holding his arm where struck. 'Who are you? What are you doing here?' asked the gentleman. 'Never you heed he,' said Joyce. 'Hers old vaither.' 'Help me away from this horrible place,' entreated the lady: 'I have fallen among savages in a dreadful wilderness. Am I in England, in Europe—or is this the wilds of Northern Canada?' 'She is lame,' said the young man to Joyce. 'Assist me in conveying her to the house yonder.' Joyce put herself submissively on one side. 'How is my father?' asked the young lady. 'No better,' he replied. 'This strange girl tells me he has broken his neck.' He was silent. He could not tell her the truth. It must be broken gently to her. 'I should wish to know if it be so.' 'Let us hope for the best. I have sent the post-boy to Okehampton for a doctor. He will know better than I what is the matter, and what must be done.' 'But you can surely tell me whether he be alive or dead.' 'He is still unconscious.' 'I know he be dead,' said Joyce roughly. 'What's a broke is a broke, and his neck be broke as sure as a bit o' cloam. I told her so.' 'Is he dead?' again asked the young lady. She was now being carried to the house. There was no tremor in the arms that rested on the shoulders of her bearers. 'I asked you a simple question. It is unmannerly to refuse an answer.' 'I believe he is dead,' said he with an effort. 'I am very sorry,' was her calm reply. The young man stopped; the girl Joyce stopped also. The twilight from the north-west was full on the white lovely face; there was no expression of distress on it, none of grief—not a trace of a tear in her large dark eyes. 'Why do you not go on? I said I am very sorry, naturally. He was my father. What else should I say?' |
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