Part 4

It was a dangerous inquiry on Miss Cramphorn's part, and it is within the bounds of possibility that she knew it. Had she been aware that her sole parent was glaring, like an angry monkey, from a point in the hedge within six yards of her, Sally had scarcely put that disingenuous problem. The answer came instantly. Honor's pup fell headlong into the road and greeted its descent with a yell; like lightning a pair of tweed-clad arms were round Sally, and a rough, amber-coloured moustache against her lips.

"Sir--give awver! How dare 'e! What be doin' of? You'm squeezin' me--oh----!"

There was a crash in the hedge, the bark of a dog and the oath of a man. Then Christopher felt himself suddenly seized by the collar and dragged backwards. He turned red as the sunset, swore in his turn, then realised that no less a personage than Jonah Cramphorn had been witness to his folly. Trembling with rage, Bear Down's head man accosted the squire of Little Silver.

"You! You to call yourself a gen'leman! Out 'pon 'e--to rape a gal under her faither's awn eyes! By God, 'tis time your wicked thread was cut an' Yeolands did cease out of the land! Small wonder they'm come down to----"

"Shut your mouth, you fool!" retorted Christopher savagely. "How dare you lay a finger upon me? I'll have you up for breaking other people's hedges, and, what's more, I've a mind to give you a damned good hiding myself."

"You tell like that, you hookem-snivey young blackguard! I'd crack your blasted bones like a bad egg--an' gude riddance tu! Ban't she my awn darter, an' wasn't you carneying an' cuddlin' of her in broad day? 'Struth! I could spit blood to think such things can happen! An' me to be threatened by you! You'll hide me--eh? Thank your stars I didn't shoot 'e. An' if I'd slayed the pair of 'e 'twouldn't have been no gert loss to clean-livin' folks!"

"I'm ashamed of you, Cramphorn--reading evil into everything that happens," said Yeoland calmly.

"God stiffen it! Hear him! Hear him! Preachin' my duty to me. You lewd, stalled ox, for two pins----"

"Put that gun down or I'll break it over your head!" answered Christopher; but the other, now a mere maniac, shaking and dancing with passion, refused. Whereupon Yeoland rushed at him, twisted the gun out of his hands, and threw it upon the ground. The next moment Jonah had hit his enemy in the face with a big fist; Christopher struck back, Sally screamed, and Cramphorn spit blood in earnest. Then they closed, and Jonah's dog, grasping the fact that his master was in difficulties, and needed assistance, very properly fastened on one of Yeoland's leathern leggings and hung there, as both men tumbled into the road.

The girl wrung her hands, lifted her voice and screamed to the only being visible--a man with a cart of peat outlined against the sunset on the heather ridges of the Moor. But he was a mile distant and quite beyond reach of poor Sally's frantic appeal. Then both combatants rose, and Cramphorn, returning to battle, got knocked off his feet again. At the same moment a man came round the corner of the road, and mended his steps upon hearing a frenzied announcement that two fellow-creatures were killing each other. A moment later he hastened between the combatants, took a hard blow or two from both, swept Christopher aside with no particular difficulty, and saved the elder from further punishment.

Sally wept, thanked God, and went to minister to her parent; while the new-comer, in a passionless voice that contrasted strangely with the rapidity of his actions, accosted Yeoland.

"What is this? Don't you know better than to strike a man old enough to be your father?"

"Mind your own business," gasped Christopher, brushing the dust off himself and examining a wound in his wrist.

"It's anybody's business, surely."

The other did not answer. His passion was rapidly cooling to shame. He scanned the speaker and wished that they might be alone together. The man was tall, very heavily built, one who would naturally move with a long and tardy stride. His recent energy was the result of circumstances and an action most unusual. He still breathed deep upon it.

"I'm sure you'll regret what has happened in a calmer moment, and pardon me for helping you to your senses," he said.

"So he shall regret it, I'll take my dying oath to that," spluttered Mr. Cramphorn. "Idle, lecherous, cold-hearted, hot-blooded beast as he be."

"Get cool," said the stranger, "and don't use foul language. There are remedies for most evils. If he's wronged you, you can have the law of him. Put some cold water on his head."

Sally, to whom the last remark was addressed, dipped her apron in the brook by the wayside, but Mr. Cramphorn waved her off.

"Get out o' my sight, you easy minx! To think that any cheel o' mine would let strange men put theer arms around her in broad day!"

"I'm entirely to blame--my fault altogether--not hers," said Christopher. "I felt in a cuddling mood," he added frankly. "I wouldn't have hurt a hair of her head, and she knows it. Why should it be worse to kiss a pretty girl than to smell a pretty flower? Tell me that."

"Theer's devil's talk for 'e!" gurgled Jonah.

"You miserable old ass--but I'm sorry--heartily sorry. Forgive me, and go to Doctor Clack and get a soothing something. And if I've hurt your gun I'll buy you a new one."

"Likely as I'd have any dealin's wi' a son of Belial Beelzebub same as you be! I'll put the law to work against 'e, that's what I'll do; an' us'll see if a woman be at the mercy of every gen'leman, so-called, as loafs 'pon the land because he'm tu idle to work!"

"That'll do. Now go off about your business, Cramphorn, and let us have no more nonsense. We ought both to be ashamed of ourselves, and I'm sure I am. As a Christian man, you must forgive me; I'm sure, as a Christian girl, Sally will."

"Leave her alone, will 'e! I won't have her name on your tongue. Us'll see if folks can break the laws; us'll see----"

He strode off, pulling his daughter by the hand, and entirely forgetting his gun beside the way; but after the irate father had departed, Yeoland recovered his weapon and found it unhurt. He then picked up Honor's pup, and overtook the stranger who was proceeding in the direction of Little Silver.

"How came you to get that man into such a white heat?" the latter asked him.

"Well, I kissed his daughter; and he was behind the hedge at the critical point and saw me."

"Ah!"

"I'm a chap who wouldn't hurt a fly, you know. But I'm particularly happy about some private affairs just at present, and--well, my lightness of heart took that turn."

The other did not smile, but looked at Christopher curiously.

"You said a strange thing just now," he remarked, in a deep voice, with slow, dragging accents. "You declared that to kiss a girl was no worse than to smell a flower. That seemed a new idea to me."

Yeoland opined that it might well be so. This was no woman's man.

"I believe it's true, all the same," he answered.

"Isn't there a lack of respect to women in the idea?"

The speaker stood over Christopher by two inches. His face had a cold comeliness. His features were large, regular, and finely modelled; his complexion was dark; his eyes were grey; he wore a moustache but no other hair upon his face. A great solidity, slowness, and phlegm marked his movements and utterances, and his handsome countenance was something of a mask, not from practised simulation or deliberate drilling of feature, but by the accident of flesh. A high forehead neither declared nor denied intellect by its shape; the man in fact showed but little of himself externally. One might, however, have predicted a strenuous temperament and suspected probable lack of humour from a peculiar sort of gravity of face. His eyes were evidently of exceptional keenness; his speech was marked by an uncertainty in choice of words that denoted he was habitually taciturn; his manner suggested one who kept much of his own company and lived a lonely life--either from necessity or choice.

*CHAPTER V.*

*PAGAN ALTARS*

The men proceeded together, and Christopher's companion made himself known by a chance question. He inquired the way to Bear Down, whereupon Yeoland, aware that a kinsman of the Endicotts was expected, guessed that this must be he.

"You're Myles Stapledon then?"

"I am. I walked from Okehampton to get a glimpse of the Moor. Came by way of the Belstones and Cosdon--a glorious scene--more spacious in some respects than my native wilds down West."

"You like scenery? Then you'll be joyful here. If Honor had known you were walking, I'll dare swear she would have tramped out to meet you; still, thank the Lord she didn't."

"You know her well to speak of her by her Christian name," said Stapledon slowly.

Christopher was but two years younger than his companion, but one had guessed that a decade separated them.

"Know her! Know Honor! I should rather think I did know her. She's my sun and moon and stars. I suppose she hoped to tell you the great news herself, and now I've babbled it. Engaged--she and I--and I'm the happiest man in all the South of England."

"I congratulate you. My cousin promised to be a pretty woman--just a dinky maid in short frocks when last I saw her. And your name----?"

"My name is Yeoland."

"The Squire of Godleigh, of course?"

"That proud personage; and there lies Endicott's--under the wind-blown sycamores where the whitewash peeps out. Your luggage is there before you, no doubt. This is my way: to the left. You go to the right, pass that farm there on your left, follow the road and so, after about five minutes, find yourself in the presence of the Queen of the Moor. Good-bye. We shall meet again."

"Good-bye, and thank you."

Stapledon moved onwards; then he heard a man running and Christopher overtook him.

"One moment. I thought I'd ask you not to mention that scrimmage on the hillside. Honor would quite understand my performance, but she'd be pained to think I had struck or been struck by that lout, and perhaps---well. She'll hear of it, for Cramphorn and his daughter are Bear Down people, but----"

"Not from me, rest assured."

"A thousand thanks. You might mention that you met me returning from Throwley and that the pup is a gem. I'll bring it along some time or other to-morrow."

Again they separated, and such is the character often-times exhibited in a man's method of walking, that appreciation of each had been possible from study of his gait. Stapledon appeared to move slowly, but his stride was tremendous and in reality he walked at four miles an hour; the other, albeit his step looked brisk, never maintained any regularity in it. He stopped to pat a bruised knee, wandered from one side of the road to the other, and presently climbed the hedge to get a sight of Bear Down, with hope that Honor might be seen in her garden.

But at that moment the mistress of Endicott's was welcoming her cousin. They greeted one another heartily and spoke awhile together. Then, when Myles had ascended to the room prepared for him, Mr. Endicott listened to his niece's description of the new arrival.

"Better far than his photograph," she said. "More expression, but too big. He's a tremendous man; yet very kind, I should think, and not proud. Almost humble and most austere in dress. No rings or scarf pin--just grey everything. He looks older than I thought, and his voice is so curiously deep that it makes little things in the room rattle. We were in the parlour for two minutes, and every time he spoke he vibrated one particular bass note of the piano until I grew quite nervous. He has very kind eyes--slate-coloured. I should say he was extremely easy to please."

"A fine open-air voice, certainly, and a good grip to his hand," said the blind man.

"Yet no tact, I fear," criticised Honor. "Fancy beginning about poor old Bear Down wanting attention, and hoping that he might put some money into it before he had been in the house five minutes!"

"Nervousness. Perhaps you surprised him."

But, later in the day, Myles endeavoured to repair a clumsiness he had been conscious of at the time, and, after collecting his thoughts--honestly somewhat unsettled by the sight of Honor, who had leapt from lanky girl to beautiful woman since last he saw her--his first words were a hearty congratulation upon the engagement.

"Endicott's stock is very nearly as old, but there's a social difference," he said bluntly. "'Tis a very good match for you, I hope. You'll live at Godleigh, of course?"

"It's all a long, long way off, cousin; and I'm sure I cannot guess how you come to know anything at all about it," said Honor.

Then the traveller told her, beginning his narrative at the point where he had asked Christopher the road to Bear Down. He concluded with a friendly word.

"Handsome he is, for certain, with the wind and the sun on his cheek; and a man of his own ideas, I judge; an original man. I wish you joy, Honor, if I may call you Honor."

"What nonsense! Of course. And I'm glad you like my Christo, because then you'll like me too, I hope. We have very much in common really. We see things alike, live alike, laugh alike. He has a wonderful sense of humour; it teaches him to look at the world from the outside."

"A mighty unwholesome, unnatural attitude for any man," said Mark Endicott.

"Yet hardly from the outside either, if he's so human as to want a wife?" asked Honor's cousin.

"He wants a wife," she answered calmly, "to take the seat next him at the theatre, to walk beside him through the picture-gallery, to compare notes with, to laugh with at the fun of the fair, as he calls it."

Mr. Endicott's needles tapped impatiently.

"Vain talk, vain talk," he said.

"It may be vain, uncle, but it's none the less true," she answered. "If I do not know Christopher, who does? The companionship of a congenial spirit is the idea in his mind--perhaps in mine too. He's a laughing philosopher, and so platonic, so abstracted, that if he had found a man friend, instead of a woman, he would have been just as content to swear eternal friendship and invite the man to sit and watch the great play with him and laugh away their lives together."

"I hope you don't know Mr. Yeoland as well as you imagine, Honor," said Mark Endicott.

"You misjudge him really, I expect," ventured Myles, his thoughts upon a recent incident. "Think what it would be to one of active and jovial mind to sit and look on at life and take no part."

"'Look on!'" burst out the blind man. "Only God Almighty looks on; and not even He, come to think of it, for He's pulling the strings."

"Not so," said Myles; "not so, Uncle Endicott. He put us on the stage, I grant you; and will take us off again when our part is done. But we're moved from inside, not driven from out. We play our lives ourselves, and the wrong step at the entrance--the faulty speech--the good deed--the bad--they all come from inside--all build up the part. Free-will is the only sort of freedom a created thing with conscious intelligence can have. There's no choice about the theatre or the play; but neither man nor God dictates to me how I enact my character."

Mark Endicott reflected. He was a stout Christian, and, like an old war-horse, he smelt battle in this utterance, and rejoiced. It was left for Honor to fill the silence.

"It's all a puppet-show, say what you will, cousin," she summed up; "and anybody can see the strings that move nine dolls out of ten. A puppet-show, and a few of us pay too little for our seats at it; but most of us pay too much. And you need not argue with me, because I know I'm right, and here is Mrs. Loveys to say that supper's ready."

A week later it was practically determined that Myles should concern himself with Bear Down; but the man still remained as unknown to Honor as in the moment of their first meeting. His money interested her not at all; his character presented a problem which attracted her considerably during those scanty hours she found heart to spend away from her lover. It happened that Christopher having departed on a sudden inspiration to Newton Races, Honor Endicott and her cousin set out together for an excursion of pleasure upon the high Moor.

The day was one in August, and hot sunshine brooded with glowing and misty light on hills and valleys, on rivers and woods, on farm lands and wide-spread shorn grasses, where the last silver-green ribbons of dried hay, stretching forth in parallel and winding waves, like tide-marks upon great sands, awaited the wain. Stapledon walked beside Honor's pony, and together they passed upwards to the heather, beside an old wall whose motley fabric glimmered sun-kissed through a blue shimmer of flowers, and faded into a perspective all silvery with lichens, broken with brown, thirsty mosses, many grasses, and the little pale pagodas of navelwort. Beech trees crowned the granite, and the whisper of their leaves was echoed by a brook that murmured unseen in a hollow upon the other side of the road. Here Dartmoor stretched forth a finger, scattered stone, and sowed bracken and furze, heather and rush and the little flowers that love stream-sides.

The travellers climbed awhile, then Myles stopped at a gate in the old wall and Honor drew up her pony. For a moment there was no sound but the gentle crick-crick-crick from bursting seed-pods of the greater gorse, where they scattered their treasure at the touch of the sun. Then the rider spoke.

"How fond you are of leaning upon gates, Myles!"

He smiled.

"I know I am. I've learned more from looking over gates than from most books. You take Nature by surprise that way and win many a pretty secret from her."

The girl stared as at a revelation. Thus far she had scarcely penetrated under her cousin's exterior. He was very fond of dumb animals and very solicitous for them; but more of him she had not gleaned until the present.

"Do you really care for wild things--birds, beasts, weeds? I never guessed that. How interesting! So does Christo. And he loves the dawn as much as you do."

"We have often met at cock-light. It is a bond we have--the love of the morning hour. But don't you like Nature too?"

"Not madly, I'm afraid. I admire her general effects. But I'm a little frightened of her at heart and I cringe to her in her gracious moods. Christo's always poking about into her affairs and wanting to know the meaning of curious things; but he's much too lazy to learn."

"There's nothing so good as to follow Nature and find out a little about her methods in hedges and ditches, where she'll let you."

"You surprise me. I should have thought men and women were much more interesting than rabbits and wild flowers."

"You cannot get so near to them," he answered; "at least, I cannot. I haven't that touch that opens hearts. I wish I had. People draw the blinds down, I always think, before me. Either so, or I'm more than common dense. Yet everybody has the greater part of himself or herself hidden, I suppose; everybody has one little chamber he wouldn't open to God if he could help it."

"Are you a Christian, Myles? But don't answer if you would rather not."

"Why, it makes a man's heart warm by night or by day to think of the Founder of that faith."

Again Honor was surprised.

"I like to hear you say so," she answered. "D'you know I believe that we think nearly alike--with a difference. Christ is much dearer to me than the great awful God of the Universe. He was so good to women and little children; but the Almighty I can only see in Nature--relentless, unforgiving, always ready to punish a slip, always demon-quick to see a mistake and visit the sins of the fathers on the children. Nature's the stern image of a stern God to me--a thing no more to be blamed than the lightning, but as much to be feared. Christ knew how to forgive and weep for others, how to heal body and soul. The tenderness of Him! And He fought Nature and conquered her; brought life where she had willed death; health where she had sent sickness; stilled her passion on blue Galilee; turned her water into wine."

"You can credit all that?"

"As easily as I can credit a power kinder than Nature, and stronger. Yes, I believe. It is a great comfort to believe; and Christopher does too."

"A beautiful religion," said Myles; "especially for women. They do well to love One who raised them out of the dust and set them up. Besides, there is their general mistiness on the subject of justice. Christianity repels me here, draws me there. It is child's meat, with its sugar-plums and whips for the good and naughty; it is higher than the stars in its humanity."

"You don't believe in hell, of course?"

"No--or in heaven either. That is a lack in me--a sorrowful limitation."

"Yet, if heaven exists, God being just, the man whose life qualifies him for it has got to go there. That's a comforting thought for those who love you, Myles."

The word struck a deep note. He started and looked at her.

"How kind to think of that! How good and generous of you to say it!"

The voice of him sent an emotion through Honor, and, according to her custom when moved beyond common, she fell back upon laughter.

"Why, we're getting quite confidential, you and I! But here's the Moor at last."

They stood upon Scor Hill and surveyed their subsequent way, where it passed on before. Beneath swelled and subtended a mighty valley in the lap of stone-crowned hills--a rare expanse of multitudinous browns. Through every tone of auburn and russet, sepia and cinnamon, tan and dark chocolate of the peat cuttings, these colour harmonies spread and undulated in many planes. From the warmth and richness of velvet under sunshine they passed into the chill of far-flung cloud-shadows, that painted the Moor with slowly-moving sobriety and robbed her bosom of its jewels, her streamlets of their silver. Teign wound below, entered the valley far away under little cliffs of yellow gravel, then, by sinuous courses, through a mosaic of dusky peat, ripe rushes, and green banks overlaid with heather, passed where steep medley and tanglement of motionless boulders awakened its volume to a wilder music. Here, above this chaos of huge and moss-grown rocks, scarlet harvests of rowan flung a flame along the gorges; grey granite swam into the grey-green of the sallows; luxuriant concourse of flowers and ferns rippled to the brown lips of the river; and terraces of tumbling water crowned all that unutterable opulence of summer-clad dingle with spouts, with threads, with broad, thundering cataracts of foaming light. Here Iris twinkled in a mist that steamed above the apron of mossy-margined falls; here tree shadows restrained the sunlight, yet suffered chance arrows of pure amber to pierce some tremulous pool.