CHAPTER III.—Mountain Legislation, and its Executive of Blood.
After dinner that day, and while the gentlemen were yet at table, Mary and Julia, who, as we have said, had relieved their mother of those benevolent attentions which she had been in the habit of paying to the neighboring sick and poor, proceeded on their way to the cottage of a destitute woman in the next village, who was then lying in what was considered to be a hopeless state. The proctor himself, while he exacted with a heartless and rapacious hand the last penny due to him, was yet too good a tactician to discountenance these spontaneous effusions of benevolence on the part of his wife and daughters. With a good deal of ostentation, and that peculiar swagger for which many shrewd and hard-hearted men of the world are remarkable, he actually got the medicine himself for the helpless invalid in question, not forgetting at the same time to make the bystanders in the apothecary's shop acquainted with the extent of his own private charity and that of his family besides. The girls had proceeded a part of the way on their charitable errand, when it occurred to them that the medicine, which their father had procured on the preceding day, had been forgotten, and as the sick woman was to commence taking it at a certain hour that evening, it was necessary that either one or both should return for it.
“You needn't come back, Julia,” said Mary; “I will myself run home and fetch it. And accordingly her sister went back at a quick step towards her father's house. The spot where Julia stood to await the return, of her sister was within a few yards of a large white-thorn double ditch, on each side of which grew a close hedge of thorns, that could easily afford room for two or three men to walk abreast between them. Here she had not remained more than a minute or two, when, issuing from the cover of the thorns, and approaching her with something of a stage strut, our friend, Buck English, made his appearance.
“Miss Joolia,” he exclaimed, with what was intended for a polite bow, “I hope you will pardon me for this third liberty I teek in offering to spake to you. I see,” he proceeded, observing her rising indignation, “that you are not inclined to hear me, but I kim here to give you a bit of advice as a friend—listen to my proposals, if you're wise—and don't make me the enemy of yourself or your family, for so sure as you reject me, so certainly will you bring ruin upon both yourself and them. I say this as a friend, and merk me, the day may come when you will oll remember my words too late.”
There was a vehemence in his language, which could admit of no mistake as to the fixed determination of his purpose; his lips were compressed, his eyebrows severely knit, and his unfeeling, hyena eye scintillated with a fire that proceeded as much from an inclination to revenge as affection. Julia Purcel, however, though a women, possessed no whit of her sex's cowardice; on the contrary, her bosom heaved with indignant scorn, and her eye gave him back glance for glance, in a spirit that disdained to quail before his violence.
“Do you dare to threaten me or my family, sir?” she replied; “I think you should know us better than to imagine that the threats of a ruffian, for such I now perceive you to be, could for a moment intimidate either them or me. Begone, sir, I despise and detest you—until this moment, I looked upon and treated you as a fool, but I now find you are a villain—begone, I say; I scorn and defy you.”
“You defy me, do you?”
“Yes, I have said it, I defy you.”
“Well, then, so be it,” he replied, “you must take the consequences, that's all, and let your favorite, M'Carthy, look to himself too.”
Having uttered these significant words, ha reentered the double ditch, along which a common pathway went, and in a minute or two was out of sight.