CHAPTER XXVII.—AT THE STANNARIES.
‘We shall have a delightful day,’ said young Lady Alice joyously, as the sweet scent of the bruised heather and the steam of the wet earth came floating on the breeze, and the clouds rolled off majestically seawards, leaving the broad surface of Dartmoor, like a purple robe dashed with green, flecked and dappled by the dancing sunbeams. ‘A delightful day for our peep at the old Stannaries,’ repeated the girl. ‘The air will be all the fresher and the weather steadier, for the heavy shower of this morning.’
Lady Alice, the youngest and, some said, the cleverest of the Earl’s daughters, was an indulged child, and there was a carriage at High Tor which she regarded as her very own. This was a low wagonette, built of light osier-work, lined with dark blue, and drawn by a hairy-heeled pony, quite as shaggy as a bear, and not much bigger than a Newfoundland dog. The villagers for miles around were tolerably familiar with the jingle of the bells that were attached to the pony’s collar; but on the present occasion the boy in livery who held the reins had been bidden to strike into one of the rugged roads that led into the moor itself, where hamlets were scarce, and even isolated dwellings few and far between.
‘It would be a thousand pities,’ said Lady Alice presently, turning towards Ethel, who sat beside her in the wagonette, ‘not to shew you the Stannaries—which are among our principal lions hereabouts—before the winter-storms set in. It is not always pleasant or quite safe to go so far into the moor after apple-harvest.’
‘But you forget,’ said Ethel, smiling, ‘that I, in my ignorance, have not the very faintest idea as to what Stannaries may be.’
‘Is it possible!’ exclaimed the child, turning upon her governess a glance of that pitying wonder with which the very young receive a confession of deficient information on the part of their elders. ‘Did you really never hear, Miss Gray, of our Cornish and Devon tin-mines?—we call them Stannaries because stannum is the Latin word for tin, you know—which were worked, ever so many hundreds and thousands of years ago, by Phœnicians and Carthaginians and Jews I believe, and Romans I am sure. Very ancient they are at anyrate, and very curious; and I want to shew you ours, the only ones in this part of Dartmoor, with the stone huts of the miners still standing, although no tin has been taken out of the lodes for many a long year.’
Ethel laughed good-humouredly at her own scanty stock of local lore.
‘I have read,’ she said gently, ‘of tin mines in Cornwall, and of that place with the odd name Marazion, which made people fancy the Lost Tribes were to be looked for somewhere near the Land’s End, and how the Phœnicians came of old in ships to fetch the tin away. But I did not know they came to Devon too.’
‘O yes; they did,’ persisted Lady Alice, eager for the credit of her county. ‘Our workings are quite as ancient as the great Cornish mines, though not so big. And there was once a Mayor of Halgaver, and a sort of diggers’ law on the moor, as there is among the gold-seekers in Australia now. I have heard Papa speak of it. But there is the farmhouse’—pointing to a dwelling, screened by black firs from the cold north-east winds, which crowned a swelling ridge of high ground—‘our explorings. You are a capital walker, and so am I; and the way to enjoy the moor and understand it is to cross it on foot.’
The pony, wagonette, and lad in livery being duly left at the farm, the two girls set off together to traverse the distance that intervened between the ridge on which the house was built and a bleak table-land from which cropped up, like fossil mushrooms, many gray stones of various shapes.
‘Those are the Circles—the Rounds as the poor people call them,’ said Lady Alice in her character of cicerone. ‘Nobody in these parts cares to be near them after dark. They are said to be haunted, but that is all nonsense of course.’
‘They look cold and ghostly enough even in broad daylight,’ said Ethel, as they pushed on along a broad smooth track of emerald green, one of several green belts that varied the dull purple of the sea of heather. Overhead, on tireless wing, the hawk wheeled. The lapwing, with complaining note, skirred the plain, striving with world-old artifice of drooping wing and broken flight, to lure away the human intruders from her flat nest, full of speckled eggs. The moorland hare, dark-furred and long-limbed, broke abruptly from her seat and galloped off unpursued. The Circles were reached at last, and proved to be quaint rings of dilapidated buildings, all of unhewn stone and of the rudest construction. Here and there the huts, roof and walls alike composed of rough slabs, were intact. Nothing could be more desolate than the appearance of these bare, gaunt hovels, reared by the hands of the long dead, standing solitary in the midst of a desert.
‘Here they lived once upon a time, those old people, the heathen miners, whose bronze tools and lumps of ore and morsels of charred wood are even now sometimes picked up by boys who hunt for birds’ eggs on the moor. They worked near the surface, and never drove their galleries very deep into the earth. And then came Christian times, when these hovels were inhabited by very different dwellers, until at last the mines were given up as no longer worth the labour of winning the tin.’
Ethel looked around her with a kind of awe. She had imagination enough to enable her to realise the dim Past, when these deserted huts were peopled by inhabitants strange of garb and speech, gnomes of the mine utterly unlike to any who now tread English ground. In fancy she could behold the motley throng of Pagan toilers, whose bronze picks had once rung against gneiss and granite, mica and sandstone, on the now silent moor. There the Briton, his fair skin stained with woad, and the small and swarthy mountaineer whose forefathers had preceded the Celt in ownership of the land, had laboured side by side with Spaniard, Moor, and Goth, with Scythian, Arab, and Indian—slaves all, and mostly captives in war, whom the cruel policy of Rome consigned to far-off regions of the earth, much as our justice stocked Virginian plantations and Australian cattle-runs with the offscourings of ignorance and crime.
It was at the grave as it were of a dead industry that Ethel now stood. The ground, honeycombed by what resembled gigantic rabbit-burrows, was strewed here and there with dross and scoriæ, and blackened by fire, wherever the remains of a rude kiln told of smelting carried on long ago.
‘I have all sorts of things to shew you,’ said Lady Alice impatiently. ‘Just look into one of the huts, and then wonder how human beings could ever have made a home of such a place. See! It is just like a stone bee-hive—no windows. That was for warmth, I suppose. The little light they wanted came in at the door, no doubt. And up above there, where you see the hole between the stones, the smoke must have found its way out, after it had half-choked the lungs and blinded the eyes of those inside the hut. They wanted a good peat-fire though, to keep them alive when the great snows of winter fell; and they had it too, for just see how hard and black the earthen floor has become in the course of years. Now then for the mine where the Roman sword was found, and then for the Pixies’ Well.’
The Pixies’ Well proved to be a curious natural depression in the rocky soil, thimble-shaped, and about twenty feet in depth, carpeted with moss of the brightest green from the brink to where the water glimmered starlike from amid rank weeds beneath.
‘They say the fairies used to dance round this well on Midsummer night and dip stolen children in the water, that they might never long to go back to earth again, but live contentedly in Elfland. Our Devonshire people believe all sorts of things still, you must know, though they are getting ashamed of talking about them before strangers.—Are you tired, Miss Gray?’
Miss Gray was not tired, and her mercurial pupil thereupon proposed a visit to a new attraction.
‘The idea of it came into my head while we were looking down into the well,’ explained Lady Alice; ‘and though the Hunger Hole is not one of the sights of the Stannaries, still if you are not afraid of a longer walk, we might visit it and yet be at home in good time. It is a mile or more from here.’
‘That is an odd name, the Hunger Hole,’ said Ethel. ‘I suppose there is some legend to account for so ominous a word?’
‘There is indeed,’ said the Earl’s youngest daughter as, by Ethel’s side, she left the ring of ruinous huts and passed along a strong causeway that led towards the west; ‘and moreover, in this case there can be no doubt about its being true. A young Jacobite—it was just after the Northern rising in 1715—fled to a country-house near here, Morford Place, where his mother’s family lived, hoping to be sheltered and enabled to embark secretly for France. There had been treachery at work, however, for the fugitive’s intentions were revealed to the authorities; and on the morning of the very day when he arrived in mean disguise, constables and soldiers had searched the mansion from garret to cellar.
‘That the poor refugee should be concealed at Morford seemed impossible, and yet as the roads were beset and the harbours watched, escape over sea was not for the moment to be thought of. The squire of Morford bethought him of the place that we are going to see, which was then known to very few, and where priests had often been hidden, when every Jesuit who came to England carried his life in his hand. So young Mr John Grahame—that was his name—was lodged in the grotto that we shall presently see, and sometimes one of the ladies of the family, his cousins, and sometimes a trusty servant, carried him food. But the poor young man had some secret enemy who could not rest until assured of his destruction, for just as the rigour of the pursuit seemed to be over, and it was arranged that the fugitive should be put on board a smuggling craft bound for the French coast, Morford Place was again searched, and a chain of sentries posted, with orders to shoot whoever tried to pass them by.
‘Day after day dragged on, and no food could be conveyed to the unfortunate occupant of the Hiding Hole—the Priest’s Hole, as they called it then—while the dragoons scoured the country, questioning the folks in every village if a stranger had been seen. No doubt it was hoped that famine would force the Jacobite to leave his retreat; but after a time the soldiers grew tired of waiting, or the authorities imagined they had been on a false scent. At anyrate the troops were withdrawn. But when some of the Morford family stole, trembling, to the unfrequented spot where their luckless kinsman lay hid, they stood aghast to see the raven and the carrion-crow flapping and screaming about the grotto—a sure sign that there was death within. True enough, poor young Grahame had perished of want, sooner than venture forth to be dragged to the jail and the gibbet; and ever since that day the place has borne the name of the Hunger Hole.’
By this time the stony causeway had given place to a narrow footway that led through one of those swamps that vary the undrained surface of Dartmoor. To left and right rose tall reeds, thick enough to simulate a tropical cane-brake, while wild flax, mallows, and stunted alder-bushes abounded. The moor-hen sprang from her nest among the bulrushes that bordered the sullen pools of discoloured water, and the snake crept hissing through the coarse grass, as if angry at the unwonted trespass on his haunts. The unstable ground, even at that dry season of the year, shook beneath the feet of the explorers; and it was easy for Ethel to give credence to her pupil’s statement that even the hardy moorman avoided Bitternley Swamp in winter.
‘The place took its name from the bitterns that used to abound here,’ said Lady Alice; ‘but there is no nook too lonely for the men whom the London bird-stuffers employ, and the last bittern was shot two years since. Soon there won’t be a feathered creature, except pheasants and partridges and perhaps the saucy sparrows, left alive.—But that’—as they passed a sheet of dark water, stained by the peat of the morass until it resembled ink in hue—‘is Blackpool; and yonder, among those rocks on the bank above, is the Hunger Hole. You cannot see the opening of the grotto from here—that is the beauty of it—but wait till we get quite close, and then you will understand how naturally the cave was made to hide in.’
Even when the two girls had got clear of the swamp and scrambled up the rude flight of steps, nearly effaced by time and rains, that facilitated the scaling of the precipitous bank, Ethel could see no signs of the grotto they sought, until her youthful companion pulled aside the hazel boughs, that grew between two angles of lichen-incrusted rock, and disclosed, about a yard above their heads, a narrow fissure, too low for a person of ordinary stature to enter without stooping, and even then half-hidden by grass and brambles.
‘That is the Hunger Hole,’ said Lady Alice triumphantly. ‘A fugitive may lie concealed here, I think, if the enemy were ranging all the moor to capture him. It is higher inside than at the mouth, and the bridge within gives access to the inner chamber. Come; we must be quick.—Ah! there is no danger,’ added the girl, mistaking the cause of her companion’s hesitation.
‘I am not afraid; I was merely thinking of the sad story of this place,’ said Ethel with a shudder that she could not repress. And passing over the boulders of loose rock, they entered Indian file into the Hunger Hole.