Orphan Dinah
By
Eden Phillpotts
Author of "Miser's Money," etc.
1920
London : William Heinemann
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN. 1920.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. THE HILLTOP
II. FALCON FARM
III. SUPPER
IV. AT BUCKLAND-IN-THE-MOOR
V. THE ACCIDENT
VI. ON HAZEL TOR
VII. AT GREEN HAYES
VIII. THE OLD FOX-HUNTER
IX. A HOLIDAY FOR SUSAN
X. TALKING WITH DINAH
XI. NEW BRIDGE
XII. AFTERWARDS
XIII. JOE ON ECONOMICS
XIV. THE FACE ON THE ROCK
XV. BEN BAMSEY'S DOUBTS
XVI. SUNDAY
XVII. DINAH
XVIII. MAYNARD
XIX. LIGHT OF AUTUMN
XX. THE HUNTER'S MOON
XXI. FUNERAL
XXII. AT WATERSMEET
XXIII. IN A SICK-ROOM
XXIV. "THE REST IS EASY"
XXV. JOHN AND JOE
XXVI. MR. PALK SEEKS ADVICE
XXVII. DISCOVERY
XXVIII. THE LAW
XXIX. JOE TAKES IT ILL
XXX. THE NEST
XXXI. JOE'S SUNDAY
XXXII. JANE AND JERRY
XXXIII. JOE HEARS THE SECRET
XXXIV. AN OFFER
XXXV. FOR RIGHT AND JUSTICE
XXXVI. THE WEDDING DAY
XXXVII. SHEPHERD'S CROSS
XXXVIII. RETURN FROM THE HONEYMOON
CHAPTER I
THE HILLTOP
The spectacle of a free horizon from Buckland Beacon, at the southern
rampart of Dartmoor, challenges the least discerning eye by the
accident of its immensity, and attracts an understanding vision for
weightier reasons. Beheld from this high place, Dart Vale and the
land beyond it afford a great composition of nature, orbicular and
complete. Its obvious grandeur none can question, but there is much
more to be said for it, and from beneath the conspicuous and
rhetorical qualities there emerge enduring distinctions. The scene
belongs to an order of beauty that does not grow old. Its
sensitiveness to light and the operations of the sky; its gracious,
yet austere, composition and its far flung arena for the masques and
interludes of the dancing hours render it a centre of sleepless
variation. Its native fabrics, now gay, now solemn, are a fit habit
for the lyrical and epic seasons, and its garments are transformed,
not only by the robings and disrobings of Spring and Winter, but at a
point's change in the wind, at a rise or fall of temperature. These
delicacies, with the more patent magic of fore-glow and dawn, sunset
and after-glow, crepuscule and gloaming, are revealed under the most
perfect imaginable conditions; for, by many chances and happy
hazards, earth here responds to air in all its heights and depths so
completely that each phenomenon finds all needful for fullest
achievement. One might study the vision a thousand times, yet find
no picture resemble another, even in detail of large forms; for the
actual modelling changes, since light and atmosphere deal with
forest, rock and ridge as though they were plastic--suppressing here,
uplifting there, obliterating great passages at one moment and
erecting into sudden prominence things concealed at another. The
hill sinks at the pressure of a purple shadow; the unseen river
suddenly sparkles its presence at a sunbeam.
In this hour, after noon on a day of mid September, the light was
changing, not gradually at the sun's proper declension, but under the
forces of a south-west wind bringing up vapour at twenty miles an
hour from the distant sea.
From the rounded and weathered masses of the Beacon, the hill sloped
abruptly and a receding foreground of dying fern and grey, granite
boulders broke on a gap of such extent that earth, reappearing far
below, was already washed by the milky azure of the air, through
which it glimmered and receded and presently again rose to lofty
lands beyond. The ground plan was a mighty cup, over which the
valley undulated, rising here to knap and knoll, falling there into
coombs and plains, sinking to its lowest depths immediately beneath
the view point, where Dart wound about lesser hills, not small in
themselves, yet dwarfed by the greatness of the expanse and the
loftiness of the horizon's brim. Upon that distant and irregular
line, now melting into the thick air, border heights and saliencies
sank and rose, repeating on a vaster scale the anatomy of the river
basin. They lifted through the hazes until they faded upon the sight
into the gathering clouds, that loomed still full of light, above
their grey confines. The sea was long since hidden.
A chief quality of this spectacle appeared in the three dissimilar
and different coverings that draped it. The body of the earth lay
wrapped in a triple robe, and each garment was slashed and broken, so
that its texture flowed into and revealed the others. Every furlong
of these rolling leagues, save only where the river looped and twined
through the middle distance, was clad with forest, with field, or
with wilderness of heath and stone; and all, preserving their special
qualities, added character of contrast to their neighbours. There
was not a monotonous passage from east to west in this huge
spectacle. Tilth and meadow oozed out through coppice and hanger;
the forests ascended the steep places and fledged the hills, only
drooping their dark wings where furze and stone climbed higher still,
until they heaved upon the sky. The immemorial heights changed not,
save to the painting of the seasons; the woods, that seemed as
ancient as they, were largely the work of man, even as the tesselated
patterns of the fields that spread, shorn of their corn, or still
green with their roots, among them. The verdant patchwork of mangel
and swede, the grey of arrish, and the gloom of freshly broken earth
bosomed out in gentle arcs among the forests, breaking their ragged
edges with long, smooth billows of colour. They shone against the
summer sobriety of the trees, for the solid masses of the foliage
were as yet scarcely stained with the approaching breath of the fall.
But woodlands welcomed the light also, and the sunshine, though
already softened by a gathering haze that advanced before the actual
clouds, still beat into the copse and spinney, to fringe with a
nimbus of pale gold the boss of each great tree and outline it from
the rest. Light rained and ran through the multitude of the trees,
drowning their green and raying all their faces with a dim and
delicate fire.
In a gap southward, shrunk to velvet tapestry among clumps and
sheaves of pine and oak, spread the lawns of Holne Chase--great park
lands, reduced by distance to a garden. There the last sun gleam
wakened a transient emerald; then it was gone, as a jewel revealed
for a moment and hidden in its casket again.
The woods of Buckland bear noble timber and each tree in many a glen
is a giant, thrusting upward from vast bole to mossy branch, until
its high top ascends among its neighbours to sunlight and storm.
They are worthy of the hills that harbour them, and in their combined
myriads affect the operations of the air, draw the rain clouds for
their own sustenance and help to create the humidity that keeps Dart
Vale so dewy and so green. Down and down they roll endlessly,
sinking away into the likeness of a clinging moss; for seen afar,
they look no more upon this great pattern of rising and falling
earth, than a close integument. Their size is lost against the
greater size of the undulations they clothe; they shrink to a close
pelt for the land--no heavier than the leagues of the eagle fern, or
the autumnal cloth of purple and gold flung upon the hills above them.
To-day the highest lights were in the depths, where Dart flashed at a
fall, or shone along some placid reach. She was but a streak of
polished silver seen from aloft, and her manifold beauties hidden;
while other remote spots and sparks of light that held the eye
conveyed no detail either. They meant a mansion, or the white or
rosy wash on cottage faces. A grey smudge, sunk in the green to
westward, was a village; a white lozenge in the woods beneath, the
roof of a moorland church. Here and there blue feathers of wood
smoke melted upward into the oncoming clouds; and thinly, through
vapours beyond, like a tangle of thread, there twined high roads,
ascending from invisible bridges and hamlets to the hills.
And then, little by little, detail faded and the shadows of the
clouds grew denser, the body of the clouds extended. Still they were
edged with light, but the light died as they thickened and lumbered
forward, spreading their pinions over the Vale. The air gradually
grew opaque, and ridge after ridge, height after height, disappeared
in it. They were not blotted out, but washed away, until the fingers
of the rain felt dumbly along the bosom of Buckland Beacon, dimmed
the heath and furze to greyness, curled over the uplifted boulder,
found and slaked the least thirsty wafer of gold or ebony lichen that
clung thereto.
A young man, who had been standing motionless upon the Beacon, felt
the cool brush of the rain upon his face and woke from his reverie.
He was of a recipient, intelligent aspect, and appeared to admire the
great spectacle spread before him; but whether, behind the thing
seen, any deeper emotion existed for him; whether to the outward and
visible sign there responded any inward and spiritual grace, was a
question not to be answered immediately. He prepared to descend,
where a building stood upon the hill below him half a mile distant.
There he was expected, but as yet knew it not.