Into the Highways and Hedges

by F. F. Montrésor

People said that the two calamities of his life had soured him, that he had never been the same after the death of his wife, and that the accident that had made his first-born, his favourite son, grow up deformed in body, had given a morbid twist to the father's mind.

It may have been so; but it is more probable that the "twist" was there before,—born with him as surely as the colour of his eyes, and the shape of his head, and that it was only accentuated by circumstances.

His wife had died in childbirth; and, out of his passionate and extreme grief, grew, hardly controllable, an aversion for the innocent cause of it.

Tom Thorpe "fathered" his brother to the best of his ability, and kept him out of his real father's sight. Barnabas grew up sturdy and strong; a lover of "out-of-door" pursuits; a hater of books; a child possessed of immense animal spirits, noisy, and rather unruly, who played truant from school whenever he could, and took the consequent thrashings carelessly; a lad with a violent temper and a kind heart; who never puzzled his brains about anything, and was popular in spite of being slightly overbearing and obstinate, as all his forbears had been; a man who became a wanderer on the face of the earth, and startled every one who had known him by the suddenness and power of his "conversion".

He had been fifteen years in that service, to which he had given heart and life, when Margaret first saw him.

During that time he had come back to the farm at intervals, drawn by an overmastering longing for his native marshes; and, possibly, by a strong though undemonstrative affection for Tom. He had always returned, as he had gone, alone; until the night when he had brought home his wife.

It was late October. In the south, the trees still clung to their red and gold glories, and there was mellowness in the air, the afterglow of departing summer; but here, in the north, winter had already claimed possession, and had cut short brusquely the tender leave-takings of the warm weather.

The few trees that there were, little gnarled stunted specimens, had been violently bereft of their leaves, and leaned to one side, adapting themselves to the constant bullying of the gales, that swept through their thin knotted branches, and dashed against Caulderwell Farm, as if in hopes of, at last, laying that stern and sturdy old building low.

The lonely house looked cold and desolate enough from outside; but the heart of it, the cheerful kitchen where Mr. Thorpe and his son sat, was warm, even hot, on the coldest of nights.

The man who planned the farm had made the kitchen the noblest room in it. The prim "best parlour," and even the dining-room which no one ever used, but which boasted a curiously blazoned ceiling, were nothing in comparison.