“An’ soap an’ water more,” declared Mrs. Blanchard, escaping from her reverie. “What’s to be spent landlord must spend,” she continued. “A little whitewash, and some plaster to fill them holes wheer woodwork’s poking through the ceiling, an’ you’ll be vitty again. ’Tis lonesome-like now, along o’ being deserted, an’ you’ll hear the rats galloping an’ gallyarding by night, but ’twill soon be all it was again—a dear li’l auld plaace, sure enough!”
She eyed the desolation affectionately.
“Theer’s money in it, any way, for what wan man can do another can.”
“Aye, I hope so, I b’lieve ’tis so; but you’ll have to live hard, an’ work hard, an’ be hard, if you wants to prosper here. Your gran’faither stood to the work like a giant, an’ the sharpest-fashion weather hurt him no worse than if he’d been a granite tor. Steel-built to his heart’s core, an’ needed to be.”
“An’ I be a stern, far-seein’ man, same as him. ’Tis generally knawn I’m no fule; and my heart’s grawed hard, tu of late days, along wi’ the troubles life’s brought.”
She shook her head.
“You’m your faither’s son, not your gran’faither’s. Tim was flesh an’ blood, same as you. T’other was stone. Stone’s best, when you’ve got to fight wi’ stone; but if flesh an’ blood suffers more, it joys more, tu. I wouldn’t have ’e differ’nt—not to them as loves ’e, any way.”
“I sha’n’t change; an’ if I did to all the world else, ’twouldn’t be to you, mother. You knaw that, I reckon. I’m hopeful; I’m more; I’m ’bout as certain of fair fortune as a man can be. Venwell rights[6] be mine, and theer’s no better moorland grazing than round these paarts. The farm-land looks a bit foul, along o’ being let go to rack, but us’ll soon have that clean again, an’ some gude stuff into it, tu. My awn work’ll be staring me in the faace before summer; an’ by the time Phoebe do come to be mistress, nobody’ll knaw Newtake, I promise ’e.”
Mrs. Blanchard viewed with some uneasiness the spectacle of valley-born and valley-nurtured Phoebe taking up her abode on the high lands. For herself she loved them well, and the Moor possessed no terrors for her; but she had wit to guess that her daughter-in-law would think and feel differently. Indeed, neither woman nor man might reasonably be blamed for viewing the farm without delight when first brought within the radius of its influence.
Newtake stood, a squat and unlovely erection, under a tar-pitched roof of slate. Its stone walls were coated with a stucco composition, which included tallow as an ingredient and ensured remarkable warmth and dryness. Before its face there stretched a winding road of white flint, that climbed from the village, five miles distant, and soon vanished amid the undulations of the hills; while, opposite, steep heathery slopes and grassy coombs ascended abruptly to masses of weathered granite; and at the rear a hillside, whereon Metherill’s scattered hut-circles made incursions even into the fields of the farm, fell to the banks of Southern Teign where she babbled between banks of brake-fern and heather. Swelling and sinking solemnly along the sky, Dartmoor surrounded Newtake. At the entrance of the yard stood a broken five-barred gate between twin masses of granite; then appeared a ragged outbuilding or two, with roofs of lichen-covered slate; and upon one side, in a row, grew three sycamores, bent out of all uprightness by years of western winds, and coated as to their trunks with grey lichen. Behind a cowyard of shattered stone pavement and cracked mud stood the farm itself, and around it extended the fields belonging thereto. They were six or seven in number, and embraced some five-and-fifty acres of land, mostly indifferent meadow.