FRIAR LAURENCE’S HOUSE.
Now Friar Laurence, though unconnected with the cloth, had in his time performed the last offices to a larger number of people than any other practitioner in the mountains. In his own person he had not unfrequently united the offices of both sexton and grave. But that side of his business was recreation rather than solid work. His real calling might rank as one of the fine arts. Like the painter and the author, his stock-in-trade was small, and easily obtained. The art lay in employing his properties with skill. They consisted in a bamboo, a banana-leaf, a bit of bark, a leaf or two, and a little human hair. Furnished with these simple tools, Friar Laurence would, for the trifling sum of a whale’s tooth, or a bolt of bark-cloth, lay low the head on which the hair had grown. So widespread was the Friar’s reputation that, when the mad white men had come and forbidden the noble art of war, he had found it convenient to reside for some months in an inaccessible mountain-cave, and had returned to Verona with his occupation gone, and a head crammed with the wisdom born of solitary meditation.
To Friar Laurence then did Romeo repair one dark still night. The wise man sat on a log at his threshold airing his shrunken legs. He eyed Romeo’s whale’s tooth with bleared and watery eyes, and asked enigmatically what tree he wanted felled. When he understood the situation he seemed disappointed, and only told Romeo to return the following night with a white man’s bottle full of the stuff they call kerosene. This entailed a journey of thirty miles the following day to fetch the precious liquid from the nearest store; but Romeo was ready to do more than this, and at sunset the Friar received the bottle, a square black one. He emptied into a cocoa-nut shell all the oil except a wine-glassful, and filled up the bottle with an opaque muddy-looking fluid.
That night beneath the tavola-tree, where they had their tryst, did Romeo tell Juliet that the moment for carrying out their sorrowful plan had come. She had just been telling him that her misery was so great that she could not bear to live longer. But when Romeo showed her in the dim light the ominous gin-bottle, two huge cigarettes, and a box of matches, and further whispered the dread name Langaingai, life seemed suddenly to have become less unbearable than before. But Romeo was terribly in earnest, and she, half consenting, followed him. Silently they trod the narrow path that led to Romeo’s yam-patch. A babbling stream bordered it, and on the bank beneath a huge banyan-tree they sat down side by side. Juliet was weeping, but Romeo, with set face, stared at the bottle tight clenched in his hand. Sadly he lighted one of the cigarettes, and, handing it to Juliet, said, “You shall drink first, and when you are dead I will drink too, and follow you. You must smoke this as soon as you have drunk down to there,” and he indicated the place half-way down the bottle with his thumb-nail.
Juliet’s blood ran cold. With a little shiver she pushed the bottle away, saying, “Be of a good mind, Aisala, and drink first, for you are the stronger; and when you are dead it will be easy for me to die after you.”
But Romeo saw that she was dissembling, and that black fear filled her heart. He gloomily drew the cork, and put the neck of the bottle to his nose. It smelt horrible, for the kerosene was floating on the top. He turned fiercely upon Juliet.
“Are you going to fool me?” he cried. “Know now that you shall drink first, that we may die together.”
He seized her roughly by the wrist and tried to force the foul-smelling bottle between her lips. Life had never seemed so sweet to Juliet as at that moment. If Romeo chose to die—well, that was his affair; but as for her—she preferred life. She struggled and screamed, and with a bitter cry Romeo released her, and putting the bottle to his own lips drank greedily. Seeing this, and beside herself with fear, Juliet fled shrieking down the path to Verona, and roused the whole village with her cries.
“In his yam-patch,” she cried—“he is dead! He has drunk Langaingai.”