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LUKE BARNICOTT.

by

WILLIAM HOWITT.

And Other Stories.







Twenty-Eighth Thousand.

Cassell & Company, Limited:
London, Paris, New York & Melbourne.




CONTENTS.


                                         PAGE

    THE STORY OF LUKE BARNICOTT             5

    THE CASTLE EAST OF THE SUN             49

    THE HOLIDAYS AT BARENBURG CASTLE       67




[Illustration: After Young Luke.]




THE STORY OF LUKE BARNICOTT

BY WILLIAM HOWITT.


The village of Monnycrofts, in Derbyshire, may be said to be a
distinguished village, for though it is not a city set on a hill, it is
a village set on a hill. It may be seen far and wide with its cluster of
red brick houses, and its tall gray-stone church steeple, which has
weathered the winds of many a century. The distant traveller observes
its green upward sloping fields, well embellished by hedgerow trees, and
its clumps of trees springing up amongst its scenes, and half hiding
them, and says to himself as he trots along, "a pleasant look-out must
that hamlet have." And he is right; it has a very pleasant look-out for
miles and miles on three sides of it; the fourth is closed by the
shoulder of the hill, and the woods and plantations of old Squire
Flaggimore. On another hill some half-mile to the left of the village,
as you ascend the road to it, stands a windmill, which with its active
sails always seems to be beckoning everybody from the country round to
come up and see something wonderful. If you were to go up you would see
nothing wonderful, but you would have a fine airy prospect over the
country, and, ten to one, feel a fine breeze blowing that would do your
heart good. You would see the spacious valley of the Erwash winding
along for miles, with its fields all mapped out by its hedges and
hedgerow trees, and its scattered hamlets, with their church towers,
and here and there old woods in dark masses, and on one side the blue
hills of the Peak beckoning still more enticingly than Ives's Mill, to
go there and see something wonderful. On another side you would see
Killmarton Hall and its woods and plantations, and, here and there
amongst them, smoke arising from the engine-houses of coal mines which
abound there; for all the country round Monnycrofts and Shapely, and so
away to Elkstown, there are or have been coal and ironstone mines for
ages. Many an old coal mine still stands yawning in the midst of
plantations that have now grown up round them. Many a score of mines
have been again filled up, and the earth levelled, and a fair
cultivation is here beheld, where formerly colliers worked and caroused,
and black stacks of coals, and heaps of grey shale, and coke fires were
seen at night glimmering through the dark.

Near this mill, Ives's mill, there is another hamlet called Marlpool, as
though people could live in a pool, but it is called Marlpool, as a
kettle is said to boil when only the water boils in it, because it
stands on the edge of a great pool almost amounting to a lake, where
marl formerly was dug, and which has for years been filled with water.
The colliers living there call it the eighth wonder of the world,
because they think it wonderful that a pool should stand on the top of a
hill, though that is no wonder at all, but is seen in all quarters of
the world. But the colliers there are a simple race, that do not travel
much out of their own district, and so have the pleasure of wondering at
many things that to us, being familiar, give no pleasure. So it is that
we pay always something for our knowledge; and the widow Barnicott who
lived on this hill near Ives's mill, at the latter end of the time we
are going to talk of, used to congratulate herself when her memory
failed with age, that it was rather an advantage, because, she said,
everything that she heard was quite new again.

But at the time when my story opens, Beckey Barnicott was not a widow.
She was the wife of Luke Barnicott, the millers man, that is, Ives's
man. Luke Barnicott had been the miller's man at Ives's mill some time;
he was a strapping, strong young fellow of eight-and-twenty. Old Nathan
Abbot had the mill before Ives had it, and Luke Barnicott was Nathan
Abbot's miller. There are many tales of the strength and activity of
Luke Barnicott still going round that part of the country. Of the races
that he ran on Monnycrofts' common side, and on Taghill Delves, amongst
the gorse and broom and old gravel pits: of the feats he did at
Monnycrofts and Eastwood wakes, and at Elkstown cross-dressing, where
the old Catholic cross still stood, and was dressed in old Catholic
fashion with gilded oak leaves and flowers at the wakes: of the
wrestlings and knocking-down of the will-pegs, and carrying off all the
prizes, and of jumping in sacks, and of a still greater jumping into and
out of twelve sugar hogsheads all set in a row, and which feat Luke was
the only one of the young fellows from all the country round that could
do. Luke was, in fact, a jolly fellow when Beckey married him, and she
was very proud of him, for he was a sober fellow, with all his frolics
and feats, and Beckey said that the Marlpool might be the eighth wonder
of the world, but her Luke was the ninth, because he could take his
glass and be social-like, but never came home drunk. And, in fact, no
millers get drunk. I can remember plenty of drunken fellows of all
trades, but I don't remember a drunken miller. There is something in
their trade that keeps them to it, and out of the ale-house. The wind
and the water will be attended to, and so there is not much opportunity
to attend to the beer or the gin-shop. Besides, if a miller were apt to
get drunk, he would be apt to get drowned very soon, in the mill stream,
or knocked on the head by a sail.

There's something pleasant and sober and serious in a mill. The wheel
goes coursing round, and the pleasant water sparkles and plunges under
it, or the great sails go whirling and whirling round, and the clear air
of the hill top gives you more cheeriness than any drink; and the
clapper claps pleasantly; and the mill keeps up a pleasant swaying and
tremor, and the flour comes sliding down the hoppers into the sacks, and
all is white and dusty, and yet clean; the mill and the sacks and the
hoppers and the flour, and the miller's clothes, and his whiskers, and
his hat; and his face is meally, and ruddy through the meal, and all is
wholesome and peaceful, and has something in it that makes a man quietly
and pleasantly grave.

Luke Barnicott was now the staid and grey-haired man of sixty: he had no
actual need of the hair-powder of the mill to make him look venerable.
On Sundays, when he was washed and dressed-up to appear at church, his
head seemed still to retain the flour, though it had gone from his
clothes, and his ruddy face had no mealy vail on it. Beckey, his wife,
was grown the sober old woman, but still hale and active. She came to
church in her black gipsy hat, all her white mob cap showing under it,
in large patterned flouncing gown, in black stockings, high-heeled
shoes, and large brass buckles that had been her grandmother's. On week
days she might be seen in a more homely dress fetching water from the
spring below, or digging up the potatoes in the garden for dinner. At
other times she sat knitting in the fine weather on a seat facing to the
evening sun, but giving shade in the earlier part of the day, under a
rude porch of poles and sticks over the door, up which she trained every
year a growth of scarlet runners, whilst around and under the windows
grew the usual assortment of herbs, rue and camomile, rosemary and
pennyroyal.

The Barnicotts lived at the old Reckoning House, so called because, when
the collieries were active, just in that quarter, the men were paid
their wages there. It was a very ordinary-looking brick tenement, now
divided into two dwellings, in one of which to the west lived Luke and
Beckey, and on the east side lived Tom Smith, the stockinger or
stocking-weaver, and Peggy his wife. Tom Smith's frame kept up a pretty
constant grating and droning sound, such as you hear in many a village
of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and Leicestershire, and in some parts
of Normandy, and it was almost the only sound that you heard about the
Reckoning House, for neither of the families had any children, except
one boy, the young Luke Barnicott, the grandson of the old Barnicotts.
The Barnicotts' only son Patrick had been a great trouble to his
parents, the shadow-spot in their lives. He had got amongst a wild set
of young fellows of the neighbourhood, had been sharply scolded by old
Luke, and in a fit of passion had gone for a soldier. He had died in the
war in Spain, and his wife had died soon after of a fever, caught in
nursing somebody suffering under that contagious affection. They had
left their only child to the old folks, who was now a lad of about
fourteen, and as mercurial and mischievous an imp as the neighbourhood
could furnish. From the moment that he could run about he was in some
scrape or some danger. He strolled about the common, plaguing asses and
sheep and cattle that were grazing there, hunting up birds' nests and
wasps' nests, hanging over the sides of a deep pond just below the
Reckoning House, surrounded by thick trees, and more than once had gone
headlong in, and came home streaming with water like a spout on a rainy
day. Old Luke said he would go after his father if he escaped drowning
or tumbling into some pit; and poor old Beckey was just like a hen with
a duckling with this one little vagabond. Sometimes he was seen climbing
on the mill sails, sometimes on the very ridge of a house, and looking
down the chimney for swallow nests, at other times he was up in trees so
high, swinging out on a long bough after some nests, so dizzily, that it
made his poor old granny's head ache for a week after. They put him as
soon as possible to the school in Monnycrofts to keep him out of danger,
but sometimes, instead of reaching the school, he had been wiled away by
his love of rambling into some distant wood, or along some winding
brook, and looking after fish, when he should be conning his lesson. At
others, instead of returning home at night after school, he was got into
the blacksmith's shop, watching old Blowbellows at the glowing forge,
and often in danger of having his eyes burnt by the large flying sparks,
or having a kick from a horse that was being shod. Sometimes poor old
Beckey had to go to the village of a dark stormy winter's evening to
hunt up the truant with her lanthorn, and would find him after all at
one of the pits sitting by the blazing fire, in a cabin made of blocks
of coal, listening to the talk of the colliers over their ale.

When, however, young Luke Barnicott had nearly reached the age of
fourteen, and had been set to scare birds in the fields, and to drive
plough for the farmers, and gather stones from the land, and had gleaned
in the autumn, and slid on the Marlpool in the winter, he took a fancy
to become a collier. He was arrayed in a suit of coarse flannel,
consisting of wide trousers and a sort of short slop, with an old hat
with the brim cut off, and was sent down sitting on a chain at the end
of a rope into the yawning pit sixty yards deep. There he was sent to
drive a little railway train of coal waggons drawn by a pony in these
subterranean regions, from the benk or face of the coal stratum, where
the colliers were at work, to the pit's mouth; but Luke soon grew tired
of that. He did not fancy living in the dark, and away from the sun and
pleasant fields, so one day, as the master of the pits was standing on
the pit-bank, up was turned Luke Barnicott, as invalided. He was lifted
out of the chain by the colliers, and as he writhed about and seemed in
great pain, the coal-master asked where he was hurt. He replied, in his
leg. "Show me the place," said the master. Luke, with a good deal of
labour and a look of much distress, drew off a stocking and showed a leg
black enough with coal dust, but without any apparent wound. "Where is
the hurt?" asked the master. "Here," said Luke, putting his hand
tenderly on the calf. The master pressed it. Luke pretended to flinch,
but the master did not feel satisfied. "Bring some water and wash the
leg," he said, and water was soon brought in an old tin. The leg was
washed, but no bruise, no blueness were visible. "Pshaw!" said the
master, "that is nothing to make a squeak about." "Oh, it is the other
leg, I think," said Luke. "The other leg!" exclaimed the master. "What!
the fox has a wound and he does not know where! Pull off the other
stocking." The stocking was pulled off by the colliers, but no injury
was to be found! "Come, Barnicott," said the master, "so you are playing
the old soldier over us! Why, what is the meaning of it?" "To say the
truth, master," said Luke, with a sheepish look, "the fact was--I was
daunted!"

At this confession the colliers set up a shout of laughter; and the
master, with a suppressed smile, bade him begone about his business.
After this Luke was some time at a loose end; he had nothing to do, and
nobody would employ him. The story of his being "daunted" flew all round
the neighbourhood, and he was looked on as a lazy, shifty lad, that was
not to be trusted to. He strolled about the common, the asses and the
sheep, and the geese, and the young cattle grazing there had a worse
time of it than ever. The old people were in great