This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler
[Picture: Book cover]
[Picture: Post Bridge]
KNOCK AT A VENTURE
BY
EDEN PHILLPOTTS
AUTHOR OF “THE SECRET WOMAN,” “THE AMERICAN
PRISONER,” ETC., ETC.
* * * * *
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1906
_All rights reserved_
* * * * *
COPYRIGHT, 1905,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
* * * * *
Set up and electrotyped. Published August, 1905.
* * * * *
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
* * * * *
To
MY FRIEND
William Crossing
FIRST LIVING AUTHORITY ON PREHISTORIC
AND MEDIÆVAL DARTMOOR
CONTENTS
PAGE
MOUND BY THE WAY 1
‘CORBAN’ 111
“A PICKAXE, AND A SPADE, A SPADE” 133
JONAS AND DINAH 167
BENJAMIN’S MESS 187
CROSS WAYS 205
JOSEPH 257
A TRAVELLER’S TALE 275
THE TWO WIDOWS 297
WITH BELL, BOOK AND CANDLE 323
MOUND BY THE WAY {3}
CHAPTER I
Where the sylvan character of the scene changes; where fields give place
to hanging woods and they in their turn thin to poverty and obliquity
under eternal stress of western winds, a gate, resting by its own weight
against a granite post, indicates the limits of agriculture and forestry
upon the southern confines of the Moor. Beneath this standpoint Devon’s
unnumbered breasts billow to the misty horizon, and dimpling valleys,
between the arable lands and higher wealds, are marked by orchards, water
meadows and the winding ways of rivers. These, borne aloft, have come
from far, and now, with slower current and ampler volume, roam
melodiously through pleasant lees, through denes and dingles of sweet
flowers, beneath the music of birds and the shadows of great woodlands,
to their confluence with the sea. Here, too, lie hamlets and rise
crocketed church towers; peat reek sweetens the air; blue doves croon
through blue smoke on many a low thatched cot; and life moves in
simplicity and apparent peace. The habitations of men glimmer with
white-washed walls at fringes of forests, at wind-blown crossways, about
small village greens, on lonely roads, by steep hillsides and among sunny
combes. Homesteads rise in isolation along the edges of the great
central loneliness; whole villages lie in the lap of the hills; and the
manifold planes of this spacious scene, whether under flying
cloud-shadows or grey rain, midday sunlight or the splendour of summer
moons, commingle in one vision, whose particulars only vary to the play
of the dawn and sunset lights, to the hands of the roaming elements, to
the seasons that bring in turn awakening life and music, high
colour-pageants and dying pomps, ultimate sobrieties and snows.
Beyond the gate to the Moor rises a steep road of broken granite and
flint. It climbs upward, straight and dogged, into the world of the
heather and, pursued a little, reveals the solemn sweep and dip of the
circumambient waste. To the skyline tumbles this billowy ocean, and the
ripples upon the crest of each mighty wave are granite. Here rise the
tors, adorned at this August season with purple ling to their footstools
of stone; here subtend wildernesses between the high hills; and the sheep
bells jangle upon them, and the red kine bellow from the watercourses. A
rook, his feathers blown awry, hops thrice, then ascends heavily; but the
kestrel, with greater distinction of flight, glides away from his perch
upon a stone, ere he swoops aloft with long reaches, to hang motionless
in the air, like a brown star afar off. The moorland world extends in
vast, undulating mosaic of olive and dun, thinly veiled by the bloom of
the ling and splashed with golden furze and grey granite. The expanse is
touched to umber and velvet warmth in sunshine; is enriched with the
pure, cool purple of cloud-shadows; is brightened into sheer
emerald-green, where springs burst from their peat-moss cradles amid
seeding cotton-grass; is lightened throughout its sombre heath tones with
glistening sheets of polished fern, where the tracts of the bracken stand
under direct sunlight. There is warmth of colour in its breezy
interspaces—warmth, won from the ruddiness of ripe rush-heads and
manifold grasses all bending and swaying in waves under the wind.
At the junction of two roads, that cross at right angles within a hundred
yards of the moor-gate, there stands a blackthorn of venerable shape. It
is a deformed, grotesque tree, much bent and shrivelled. Its boughs are
coated with close fabric of grey encrustations, but such clothing has
failed to protect its carcase against a century of winters and biting
winds. In autumn the scanty foliage is still brightened by a meagre crop
of fruit; but life crawls with difficulty up the zigzag bones of this
most ancient thorn, while each spring its tardy sap awakes less of the
tree, and leaves increasing concourse of abrupt and withered twigs to rot
above and below the centre of vitality. Beneath this ruin you shall note
a slight hillock of green grass, where foxgloves shake aloft their purple
pyramids of blossom and a rabbit’s hole lies close beside them. Of
artificial barrow or modern burying-place there is no suggestion here;
and yet this mound by the highway side conceals a grave; and the story of
the human dust within it is the truth concerning one who lived and
smarted more than a hundred years ago. Men were of the same pattern then
as now, but manners varied vastly; and the Moor-man, who farms upon the
grudging boundaries of that great central desert to-day, and curses the
winds that scatter his beggarly newtakes with thistledown and fern seed,
might wonder at the tales this same wild wind could tell him of past
times and of the customs of his ancestors.
Human life on the Moor is still hard enough, but modern methods of
softening the rough edges of existence were even less considered in the
beginning of the century, when American and French prisoners of war
sorrowfully sighed at Prince Town. In those days the natives of the
Devonshire highlands endured much hardship and laughed at the more
delicate nurture of the townfolk, as the wandering Tuaregs laugh when
their softer fellows exchange tent and desert for the green oases of many
palms and sweet waters. Then food was rough on Dartmoor and drink was
rougher. Cider colic all men knew as a common ill; most beverages were
brewed of native herbs and berries; only upon some occasion of rare
rejoicing would a lavish goodwife commission “Johnny Fortnight,” the
nomad packman, to bring her two or three ounces of genuine Cathay as
entertainment for her cronies.
It was rather more than a century ago that one, John Aggett, dwelt within
two hundred yards of the thorn-bush already described; and the remains of
his cottage, of which the foundation and a broken wall still exist, may
yet be seen—a grey ghost, all smothered with nettles, docks and trailing
briars. A cultivated patch of land formerly extended around this
dwelling, and in that old-world garden grew kale and potatoes, with apple
trees, an elder, whose fruit made harsh wine, and sundry herbs, used for
seasoning meat or ministering to sickness. No evidence of this
cultivation now survives, save only the ruined wall and a patriarchal
crab-apple tree—the stock that once supported a choicer scion, long since
perished.
Here, a mile or two distant from Postbridge in the vale of Eastern Dart,
resided John Aggett and his widowed mother. The cottage was the woman’s
property; and that no regular rent had to be paid for it she held a lucky
circumstance, for John by no means walked in his laborious father’s
footsteps. Work indeed he could; and he performed prodigious feats of
strength when it pleased him; but it was not in the details of his
prosaic trade as a thatcher that he put forth his great powers. Business
by no means attracted him or filled his life. As a matter of fact the
man was extremely lazy and only when sports of the field occupied his
attention did he disdain trouble and exertion. He would tramp for many
miles to shoot plovers or the great golden-eyed heath poults and bustards
that then frequented the Moor; he cared nothing for cold and hunger on
moonlight winter nights when wild ducks and geese were to be slain; and
trout-fishing in summer-time would brace him to days of heroic toil on
remote waters. But thatching or the thought of it proved a sure narcotic
to his energies; and it was not until Sarah Belworthy came into his life
as a serious factor that the young giant began to take a more serious
view of existence and count the ultimate cost of wasted years.
Man and maid had known one another from early youth, and John very well
remembered the first meeting of all, when he was a lanky youngster of
eleven, she a little lass of eight. Like the boy, Sarah was an only
child, and her parents, migrating from Chagford to Postbridge, within
which moorland parish the Aggetts dwelt, secured a cottage midway between
the home of the thatcher and the village in the valley below. Soon
afterward the children met upon one of the winding sheep tracks that
traverse the Moor on every hand. They were upon the same business, and
each, moving slowly along, sought for every tress, lock or curl of
sheeps’ wool that hung here and there in the thorny clutch of furze and
bramble.
The boy stopped, for Sarah’s great grey eyes and red mouth awoke
something in him. He felt angry because the blood flowed to his freckled
face; but she was cool as the little spring that rose in their path—cool
as the crystal water that bubbled up and set a tiny column of silver sand
shivering among the red sundews and bog asphodels at their feet.
“Marnin’ to ’e,” said John, who already knew the small stranger by sight.
“Marnin’, Jan Aggett.”
“An’ what might your name be, if I may ax?”
“I be called Sarah, but Sally most times; an’ I be wool-gatherin’ same as
you.”
“Hast-a got gude store?”
“But little yet.”
“I’ll shaw ’e all the best plaaces, if you mind to let me.”
“Thank ’e, Jan Aggett. My mother’s a gert spinner.”
“An’ my mother’s a gert spinner tu.”
“Not so gert as mine, I reckon.”
“Never was better’n my mother.”
“Mine be better, I tell ’e! Her spins black wool an’ white together into
butivul, braave grey yarn; an’ auld Churdles Ash—him what’s got the loom
to Widecombe, do buy it for money, wi’ gladness.”
“Ban’t much black wool in these paarts; an’ my mother knits her worsted
into clothes for me. But I’ll share what I find with you now.”
“I lay I’ll find a plenty for myself.”
“I lay you will. An’ I’ll shaw ’e wheer the blackberries be in autumn
time, an’ wheer the best hurts be got out Laughter Tor way; an’ wheer the
properest rexens for cannel-making{10} do graw.”
“Sure you’m a very kind-fashioned bwoy, Jan Aggett.”
“You’d best to call me just ‘Jan,’ like other folks.”
“So I will; an’ you’d best to call me ‘Sally.’”
“Burned if I doan’t then! An’ us’ll be friends.”
From that time forward the lonely children became close companions; and
when years passed and Sarah ripened to maidenhood, while John brought
forth a straw-coloured moustache and thick beard that matched his sandy
locks, the pair of them were already regarded by their own generation as
surely bound for marriage in due season.
There came an afternoon when the girl had reached the age of eighteen and
John was just arrived at man’s estate. They worked together during
harvest time, and the thatcher, standing on a stack ladder, watched the
girl where she was gleaning and likened her pink sunbonnet to some bright
flower nodding over the gold stubbles. Presently she came to him with a
bundle of good corn under her arm.
“’Tis long in the straw this year,” she said. “You must thresh it for me
when you can and hand me the straw for plaiting. I can sell all the hats
an’ bonnets tu, as I’m like to weave. An’ parson do allus give me half a
crown each year for a new straw hat.”
John came down from his perch and picked up the little sheaf. Then, the
day’s work done, they dawdled up the hill, and Sarah, hot and weary,
after toil in great sunshine, sometimes took John’s hand, like a little
child, when the road revealed no other person.
Up through the lanes from the farm of Cator Court to the higher land they
made their way, crossed over the river nigh Dury and passed beside a wall
where scabious drew a sky-blue mantle over the silver and ebony lichens
of the granite. Pennyworts also raised their little steeples from the
interstices of the old wall; briars broke its lines; red berries and
black twinkled among the grasses, and dainty cups and purses of ripe
seeds revealed their treasures; flowers not a few also blossomed there,
while butterflies gemmed the golden ragwort, and bees struggled at many
blossoms. A mellow murmur of life gladdened the evening, and the sun,
slow sinking behind distant Bellever, warmed the world with rich
horizontal light. At a break in the stones dripped a stream in a little
dark nest of ferns. Here, too, stood a stile leading into heavy woods,
and one sentinel beech tree arose at the corner of a gamekeeper’s path
through the preserves. Hither, weary with her labours and desiring a
brief rest, Sarah turned, climbed the stile, and sat down beneath the
tree. John accompanied her and they reclined in silence awhile where the
ripe glory of September sunshine sent a shimmer of ruddy and diaphanous
light into the heart of the wood and flamed upon the bole of the great
beech. A woodpecker suddenly departed from the foliage above the silent
pair. He made off with a dipping, undulatory motion and cheerful
laughter, as who should say, “two is company and three none.”
John turned to Sarah and sighed and shook his head while he tickled her
hand with a straw from the sheaf. She did not withdraw it, so he came a
little nearer and put the straw up her arm; then followed it with two of
his own fingers and felt her moist skin under them.
She laughed lazily, and the music fired his heart and sluggish tongue.
“Oh, God, Sally, how long be I to dance upon your beck and call for
nought? How long be I to bide this way while you hang back?”
“Us couldn’t be gerter friends.”
“Ess fay, but us could. Wheer do friendship lead to ’twixt men an’
women? Dost hear? I knaw you’m butivul to see, an’ purtiest gal in
Postbridge an’ such like; an’ I knaw a man o’ my fortune an’ poor brain
power’s got no right—an’ yet, though ’tis bowldacious so to do, I ban’t
built to keep away from ’e. I peek an’ pine an’ dwindle for ’e, I do.”
“‘Dwindle,’ dear heart! Wheer’s the signs of that? You’m stronger an’
taller an’ better’n any man on East Dart.”
“Did ’e say ‘better,’ Sally? Did ’e mean it? ’Tis a year since I fust
axed ’e, serious as a man, an’ a dozen times ’twixt then an’ now I’ve
axed again. I swear I thought as I’d seen love light in them misty eyes
of thine, else I’d have troubled ’e less often. But—but—”
“Wouldn’t I have sent ’e away wi’ a flea to your ear when fust you axed,
if I’d meant all I said, you silly gawkim?”
Then he put his arm round her and hugged her very close. No artifice
restrained the plump natural curves of her waist; her garments were thin
and the soft body of her beneath them fired him.
“Give awver! You’m squeezin’ me, Jan!”
“Say it then—say it out—or I’ll hug ’e, an’ hug ’e, an’ hug ’e to death
for sheer love!”
“You gert thick-headed twoad! Caan’t ’e read awnly a woman’s words to
’e? Haven’t ’e found out these long months? Didn’t ’e even guess how
’twas when we went christening Farmer Chave’s apple trees down-along by
night, an’ I slapped your face for comin’ to me arter you’d been fooling
with that slammocking maypole of a gal, Tom Chubb’s darter? You’m blind
for all your eyes.”
He gave an inarticulate grunt and poured huge noisy kisses on her hair
and face and little ears.
“Christ A’mighty! Sweatin’ for joy I be! To think it—to think you finds
the likes o’ me gude enough for ’e! Theer—theer. Hallelujah!”
He shouted and danced with the grace of a brown bear, while she smoothed
herself from his salutations and sat up panting after such rough embrace.
Then he took out his knife and sought the beech tree behind them. Sunset
fires were dying away. Only a starry twinkling of auburn light still
caught the high tops of the tallest trees and marked them out against the
prevailing shadows of the woods.
“’Tis a deed should be cut on the first bark as meets your eyes after the
woman’s said ‘yes’ to ’e,” declared John.
Then, turning to the trunk where lichens painted pale silver patterns on
the grey, he set to work, at the height of a man’s heart, and roughly
fashioned the letters “S. B.” and “ J. A.” with a scroll around them and
a knot beneath to indicate the nature of true love.
“Theer let it bide, sweetheart, for our childer’s childer to see when
we’m sleepin’ down-along.”
“Go away with ’e, Jan!”
Presently they moved onward to their homes.
“Braave news for my mother,” said the girl.
“Braaver news for mine,” declared John.
The sun had set and the twilight was in Sarah’s grey eyes as she lifted
them to him. Together they passed upward, very slowly, with her head
against his shoulder and his arm round her.
“’Tis a pleasant thing seemin’ly to have a huge gert man to love ’e.”
“Ess fay, my bird! You’ll live to knaw it, please God.”
From their lofty standpoint spread a wide scene of waning light on a
fading world; and above the eastern horizon, through the last roses of
the afterglow, imperceptibly stole a round shield of pale pearl. Aloft
the sleeping wind-clouds lost their light and turned slate-grey as the
misty phantom of the moon gathered brightness, and the western nimbus of
sunset faded away.
Then John took his lips from his love’s and gave her the sheaf of gleaned
corn and left her at her father’s door, while he tramped on up the hill.
His mother trembled before the long-anticipated truth and knew the first
place in his heart was gone at last.
“As purty as a pictur in truth,” she said, “but something too taffety
{16} for the wife of a day labourer.”
“Not so,” answered the man. “She’m an angel out o’ heaven, an’ she’ll
come to be the awnly wife worth namin’ on Dartymoor. For that matter she
ban’t feared of a day’s work herself, an’ have awftentimes earned a
fourpenny piece ’pon the land.”