Part 25 (1/2)
Mrs. Blanchard now sank into silent perambulation of the deserted chambers. In the kitchen the whitewash was grimy, the ceiling and windows unclean. Ashes of a peat fire still lay upon the cracked hearthstone, and a pair of worn-out boots, left by a tramp or the last tenant, stood on the window-sill. Dust and filth were everywhere, but no indication of dampness or decay.
”A proper auld rogue's-roost of dirt 'tis just now,” said Will; ”but a few pound spent in the right way will do a deal for it.”
”An' soap an' water more,” declared Mrs. Blanchard, escaping from her reverie. ”What's to be spent landlord must spend,” she continued. ”A little whitewash, and some plaster to fill them holes wheer woodwork's poking through the ceiling, an' you'll be vitty again. 'Tis lonesome-like now, along o' being deserted, an' you'll hear the rats galloping an' gallyarding by night, but 'twill soon be all it was again--a dear li'l auld plaace, sure enough!”
She eyed the desolation affectionately.
”Theer's money in it, any way, for what wan man can do another can.”
”Aye, I hope so, I b'lieve 'tis so; but you'll have to live hard, an'
work hard, an' be hard, if you wants to prosper here. Your gran'faither stood to the work like a giant, an' the sharpest-fas.h.i.+on weather hurt him no worse than if he'd been a granite tor. Steel-built to his heart's core, an' needed to be.”
”An' I be a stern, far-seein' man, same as him. 'Tis generally knawn I'm no fule; and my heart's grawed hard, tu of late days, along wi' the troubles life's brought.”
She shook her head.
”You'm your faither's son, not your gran'faither's. Tim was flesh an'
blood, same as you. T'other was stone. Stone's best, when you've got to fight wi' stone; but if flesh an' blood suffers more, it joys more, tu.
I wouldn't have 'e differ'nt--not to them as loves 'e, any way.”
”I sha'n't change; an' if I did to all the world else, 'twouldn't be to you, mother. You knaw that, I reckon. I'm hopeful; I'm more; I'm 'bout as certain of fair fortune as a man can be. Venwell rights[6] be mine, and theer's no better moorland grazing than round these paarts. The farm-land looks a bit foul, along o' being let go to rack, but us'll soon have that clean again, an' some gude stuff into it, tu. My awn work'll be staring me in the faace before summer; an' by the time Phoebe do come to be mistress, n.o.body'll knaw Newtake, I promise 'e.”
[6] _Venwell rights_ = Venville rights.
Mrs. Blanchard viewed with some uneasiness the spectacle of valley-born and valley-nurtured Phoebe taking up her abode on the high lands. For herself she loved them well, and the Moor possessed no terrors for her; but she had wit to guess that her daughter-in-law would think and feel differently. Indeed, neither woman nor man might reasonably be blamed for viewing the farm without delight when first brought within the radius of its influence.
Newtake stood, a squat and unlovely erection, under a tar-pitched roof of slate. Its stone walls were coated with a stucco composition, which included tallow as an ingredient and ensured remarkable warmth and dryness. Before its face there stretched a winding road of white flint, that climbed from the village, five miles distant, and soon vanished amid the undulations of the hills; while, opposite, steep heathery slopes and gra.s.sy coombs ascended abruptly to ma.s.ses of weathered granite; and at the rear a hillside, whereon Metherill's scattered hut-circles made incursions even into the fields of the farm, fell to the banks of Southern Teign where she babbled between banks of brake-fern and heather. Swelling and sinking solemnly along the sky, Dartmoor surrounded Newtake. At the entrance of the yard stood a broken five-barred gate between twin ma.s.ses of granite; then appeared a ragged outbuilding or two, with roofs of lichen-covered slate; and upon one side, in a row, grew three sycamores, bent out of all uprightness by years of western winds, and coated as to their trunks with grey lichen.
Behind a cowyard of shattered stone pavement and cracked mud stood the farm itself, and around it extended the fields belonging thereto. They were six or seven in number, and embraced some five-and-fifty acres of land, mostly indifferent meadow.
Seen from the winding road, or from the bird's-eye elevation of the adjacent tor, Newtake, with its mean s.h.i.+p-pens and sties, outbuildings and little crofts, all huddled together, poverty-stricken, time-fretted, wind-worn, and sad of colour, appeared a mere forlorn fragment of civilisation left derelict upon the savage bosom of an untamable land.
It might have represented some forsaken, night-foundered abode of men, torn by earthquake or magic spell from a region wholly different, and dropped and stranded here. It sulked solitary, remote, and forgotten; its black roof frowned over its windows, and green tears, dribbling down its walls in time past, had left their traces, as though even spring sunlight was powerless to eradicate the black memories of winters past, or soften the bitter certainty of others yet to come. The fields, s.n.a.t.c.hed from the Moor in time long past, now showed a desire to return to their wild mother again. The bars of cultivation were broken and the land struggled to escape. Scabious would presently throw a mauve pallor over more than one meadow croft; in another, waters rose and rushes and yellow iris flourished and defied husbandry; elsewhere stubble, left unploughed by the last defeated farmer, gleamed silver-grey through a growth of weeds; while at every point the Moor thrust forward hands laden with briar and heather. They surmounted the low stone walls and fed and flourished upon the clods and peat that crowned them. Nature waved early gold of the greater furze in the van of her oncoming, and sent her wild winds to sprinkle croft and hay-field, ploughed land and potato patch, with thistledown and the seeds of the knapweed and rattle and bracken fern. These heathen things and a thousand others, in all the early vigour of spring, rose triumphant above the meek cultivation. They trampled it, strangled it, choked it, and maddened the agriculturist by their st.u.r.dy and stubborn persistence. A forlorn, pathetic blot upon the land of the mist was Newtake, seen even under conditions of sunlight and fair weather; but beheld beneath autumnal rains, observed at seasons of deep snow or in the dead waste of frozen winters, its apparition rendered the most heavy-hearted less sad before the discovery that there existed a human abode more hateful, a human outlook more oppressive, than their own.
To-day heavy moorland vapours wrapped Newtake in ghostly raiment, yet no forlorn emotions clouded the survey of those who now wandered about the lifeless farm. In the mind of one, here retracing the course of her maidenhood, this scene, if sad, was beautiful. The sycamores, whose brown spikes had burst into green on a low bough or two, were the trees she loved best in the world; the naked field on the hillside, wherein a great stone ring shone grey through the silver arms of the mist, represented the theatre of her life's romance. There she had stolen oftentimes to her lover, and in another such, not far distant, had her son been born. Thoughts of little sisters rose in the naked kitchen, with the memory of a flat-breasted, wild-eyed mother, who did man's work; of a father, who spoke seldom and never twice--a father whose heavy foot upon the threshold sent his children scuttling like rabbits to hidden lairs and dens. She remembered the dogs; the bright gun-barrel above the chimney-piece; the steam of clothes hung to dry after many a soaking in ”soft” weather; the reek of the peat; the brown eyes and steaming nostrils of the bullocks, that sometimes looked through the kitchen window in icy winter twilights, as though they would willingly change their byres for the warmth within.
Mrs. Blanchard enjoyed the thought that her son should reanimate these scenes of her own childhood; and he, burning with energy and zeal, and not dead to his own significance as a man of money, saw promises of prosperity on either hand. It lay with him, he told his heart, to win smiling fatness from this hungry region. Right well he knew how it came about that those who had preceded him had failed, missed their opportunities, fooled themselves, and flung away their chances.
Evidences of their ignorance stared at him from the curtains of the mist, but he knew better; he was a man who had thought a bit in his time and had his head screwed on the right way, thank G.o.d. These facts he poured into his mother's ear, and she smiled thoughtfully, noted the changes time had wrought, and indicated to him those things the landlord might reasonably be expected to do before Will should sign and seal.
The survey ended, her son helped Damaris into a little market-cart, which he had bought for her upon coming into his fortune. A staid pony, also his purchase, completed the equipage, and presently Mrs. Blanchard drove comfortably away; while Will, who yet proposed to tramp, for the twentieth time, each acre of Newtake land, watched her depart, then turned to continue his researches. A world of thought rested on his brown face. Arrived at each little field, he licked his pencil, and made notes in a ma.s.sive new pocketbook. He strode along like a conqueror of kingdoms, frowned and scratched his curly head as problem after problem rose, smiled when he solved them, and entered the solution in his book.
For the wide world was full of young green, and this sanguine youth soared lark-high in soul under his happy circ.u.mstances. Will breathed out kindness to all mankind just at present, and now before that approaching welfare he saw writ largely in beggarly Newtake, before the rosy dawn which Hope spread over this cemetery of other men's dead aspirations, he felt his heart swell to the world. Two clouds only darkened his horizon then. One was the necessity of beginning the new life without his life's partner; while the other, formerly tremendous enough, had long since shrunk to a shadow on the horizon of the past.
His secret still remained, but that circ.u.mstance was too remote to shadow the new enterprise. It existed, however, and its recurrence wove occasional gloomy patterns into the web of Will Blanchard's thought.
CHAPTER III
OVER A RIDING-WHIP