SHAKESPEARE, Romeo and Juliet.
Bernard's affection was as strong as his aversion had been. Poor
little boy, no one had been accustomed enough to sickly children, or
indeed to children at all, to know how to make him happy or even
comfortable, and his life had been sad and suffering ever since the
blight that had fallen on him, through either the evil eye of Nan the
witch, or through his fall into a freezing stream. His brother, a
great strong lad, had teased and bullied him; his father, though not
actually unkind except when wearied by his fretfulness, held him as a
miserable failure, scarcely worth rearing; his mother, though her
pride was in her elder son, and the only softness in her heart for
the little one, had been so rugged and violent a woman all the years
of her life, and had so despised all gentler habits of civilisation,
that she really did not know how to be tender to the child who was
really her darling. Her infants had been nursed in the cottages, and
not returned to the castle till they were old enough to rough it--
indeed they were soon sent off to be bred up elsewhere. Some failure
in health, too, made it harder for her to be patient with an ailing
child, and her love was apt to take the form of anger with his
petulance or even with his suffering, or else of fierce battles with
her husband in his defence.
The comfort would have been in burning Crooked Nan, but that beldame
had disposed of herself out of reach, though Lady Whitburn still
cherished the hope of forcing the Gilsland Dacres or the Percies to
yield the woman up.
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