My lady of Cleeve

“‘I give the lives of these gentlemen to you. Your secret is your own’”
MY LADY OF CLEEVE
BY PERCY J. HARTLEY
ILLUSTRATIONS BY HARRISON FISHER AND HERMAN PFEIFER
NEW YORK DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 1908
Copyright, 1908 By DODD, MEAD & COMPANY Published, January, 1908
MY LADY OF CLEEVE
“Yonder is Cleeve!” said the sergeant.
I held up my hand and the troopers halted. The rain, which had been falling steadily since noon, had now ceased; and a watery gleam of sunshine bursting from the sullen stormclouds overhead lighted up the crest of the hill upon which we stood, and the well-wooded Cleeve valley below us, than which there is none more beautiful in all Devonshire. Behind us lay the barren surface of the torrs—mile upon mile of rock-strewn, wind-swept summits—thrusting their gaunt and rugged outlines high into the air in spurs as varied as they were fantastical. But at our feet the ground fell sharply away, covered with a wealth of golden gorse and bracken and scattered clumps of timber that grew ever thicker toward the bottom of the valley; yielding nevertheless the glimpse of a white road which wound its way serpentlike down the centre.
Here and there also the glitter of water showed through the trees, where some streamlet kissed by the sun’s rays shone with the radiance of burnished silver. From thence the woods rose in one dense mass upon the opposite slope, until they broke at length upon the very edge of the rocky cliffs that guard this portion of the coast, and beyond these again were the dark green waters of the Channel.
It was a scene that at any other time would have compelled my ardent admiration. The fertile valley nestling at our feet, clothed with its rich carpet of oaks and beeches, and rendered doubly welcome by contrast with the bleak, treeless surface of the torrs through which we had toiled since daybreak. But befouled with mud, wet and weary, we were in no condition to mark its beauties or to appreciate them. Moreover, though it was yet early June, a cold wind was rising, rustling in the treetops below us and bringing with it the odour of the sea.