“Chris shall have the money, then; an’ gude luck to ’em both, say I.”
He departed, with great astonishment the main emotion of his mind. Nothing could well have happened to surprise him more, and now he felt that he should rejoice, but found it difficult to do so.
“Braave news, no doubt,” he reflected, “an’ yet, come to think on it, I’d so soon the devil had given him a job as Grimbal. Besides, to choose him! What do Clement knaw ’bout farmin’? Just so much as I knaw ’bout verse-writin’, an’ no more.”
CHAPTER XV
“THE ANGEL OF THE DARKER DRINK”
Patches of mist all full of silver light moved like lonely living things on the face of the high Moor. Here they dispersed and scattered, here they approached and mingled together, here they stretched forth pearly fingers above the shining granite, and changed their shapes at the whim of every passing breeze; but the tendency of each shining, protean mass was to rise to the sun, and presently each valley and coomb lay clear, while the cool vapours wound in luminous and downy undulations along the highest points of the land before vanishing into air.
A solitary figure passed over the great waste. He took his way northward and moved across Scorhill, leaving Wattern Tor to the left. Beneath its ragged ridges, in a vast granite amphitheatre, twinkled the cool birth-springs of the little Wallabrook, and the water here looked leaden under shade, here sparkled with silver at the margin of a cloud shadow, here shone golden bright amid the dancing heads of the cotton-grass under unclouded sunlight. The mist wreaths had wholly departed before noon, and only a few vast mountains of summer gold moved lazily along the upper chambers of the air. A huge and solitary shadow overtook the man and spread itself directly about him, then swept onwards; infinite silence encompassed him; once from a distant hillside a voice cried to him, where women and children moved like drab specks and gathered the ripe whortleberries that now wove purple patterns into the fabric of the Moor; but he heeded not the cry; and other sound there was none save the occasional and mournful note of some lonely yellowhammer perched upon a whin. Into the prevalent olive-brown of the heath there had now stolen an indication of a magic change at hand, for into the sober monotone crept a gauzy shadow, a tremor of wakening flower-life, half pearl, half palest pink, yet more than either. Upon the immediate foreground it rippled into defined points of blossom, which already twinkled through all the dull foliage; in the middle distance it faded; afar off it trembled as a palpable haze of light under the impalpable reeling of the summer air. A week or less would see the annual miracle peformed again and witness that spacious and solemn region in all the amethystine glories of the ling. Fiercely hot grew the day, and the distances, so distinct through mist rifts and wreaths in the clearness of early morning, now retreated—mountain upon mountain, wide waste on waste—as the sun climbed to the zenith. Detail vanished, the Moor stretched shimmering to the horizon; only now and again from some lofty point of his pilgrimage did the traveller discover chance cultivation through a dip in the untamed region he traversed. Then to the far east and north, the map of fertile Devon billowed and rolled in one enormous misty mosaic,—billowed and rolled all opalescent under the dancing atmosphere and July haze, rolled and swept to the sky-line, where, huddled by perspective into the appearance of density, hung long silver tangles of infinitely remote and dazzling cloud against the blue.
From that distant sponge in the central waste, from Cranmere, mother of moorland rivers, the man presently noted wrinkles of pure gold trickling down a hillside two miles off. Here sunshine touched the river Taw, still an infant thing not far advanced on the journey from its fount; but the play of light upon the stream, invisible save for this finger of the sun, indicated to the solitary that he approached his destination. Presently he stood on the side of lofty Steeperton and surveyed that vast valley known as Taw Marsh, which lies between the western foothills of Cosdon Beacon and the Belstone Tors to the north. The ragged manes of the latter hills wind through the valley in one lengthy ridge, and extend to a tremendous castellated mass of stone, by name Oke Tor.
This erection, with its battlements and embrasures, outlying scarps and counterscarps, remarkably suggests the deliberate and calculated creation of man. It stands upon a little solitary hill at the head of Taw Marsh, and wins its name from the East Okement River which runs through the valley on its western flank. Above wide fen and marsh it rises, yet seen from Steeperton’s vaster altitude, Oke Tor looks no greater than some fantastic child-castle built by a Brobding-nagian baby with granite bricks. Below it on this July day the waste of bog-land was puckered with brown tracts of naked soil, and seamed and scarred with peat-cuttings. Here and there drying turfs were propped in pairs and dotted the hillsides; emerald patches of moss jewelled the prevailing sobriety of the valley, a single curlew, with rising and falling crescendos of sound, flew here and there under needless anxiety, and far away on White Hill and the enormous breast of Cosdon glimmered grey stone ghosts from the past,—track-lines and circles and pounds,—the work of those children of the mist who laboured here when the world was younger, whose duty now lay under the new-born light of the budding heath. White specks dotted the undulations where flocks roamed free; in the marsh, red cattle sought pasture, and now was heard the jingle-jangle of a sheep-bell, and now the cry of bellowing kine.
Like a dark incarnation of suffering over this expansive scene passed Clement Hicks to the meeting with John Grimbal. His unrest was accentuated by the extreme sunlit peace of the Moor, and as he sat on Steeperton and gazed with dark eyes into the marshes below, there appeared in his face the battlefield of past struggles, the graves of past hopes. A dead apathy of mind and muscle succeeded his mental exertion and passion of thought. Increased age marked him, as though Time, thrusting all at once upon him bitter experiences usually spread over many years of a man’s life, had weighed him down, humped his back, thinned his hair, and furrowed his forehead under the load. Within his eyes, behind the reflected blue of the sky, as he raised them to it, sat mad misery; and an almost tetanic movement of limb, which rendered it impossible for him to keep motionless even in his present recumbent position, denoted the unnatural excitation of his nerves. The throb and spasm of the past still beat against his heart. Like a circular storm in mid-ocean, he told himself that the tempest had not wholly ended, but might reawaken, overwhelm him, and sweep him back into the turmoil again. As he thought, and his eye roved for a rider on a brown horse, the poor wretch was fighting still. Yesterday fixed determination marked his movements, and his mind was made up; to-day, after a night not devoid of sleep, it seemed that everything that was best in him had awakened refreshed, and that each mile of the long tramp across Dartmoor had represented another battle fought with his fate. Justice, Justice for himself and the woman he loved, was the cry raised more than once aloud in sharp agony on that great silence. And only the drone of the shining-winged things and the dry rustle of the grasshoppers answered him.
Like the rest of the sore-smitten and wounded world, he screamed to the sky for Justice, and, like the rest of the world, forgot or did not know that Justice is only a part of Truth, and therefore as far beyond man’s reach as Truth itself. Justice can only be conceived by humanity, and that man should even imagine any abstraction so glorious is wonderful, and to his credit. But Justice lies not only beyond our power to mete to our fellows; it forms no part of the Creator’s methods with us or this particular mote in the beam of the Universe. Man has never received Justice, as he understands it, and never will; and his own poor, flagrant, fallible travesty of it, erected to save him from himself, and called Law, more nearly approximates to Justice than the treatment which has ever been apportioned to humanity. Before this eternal spectacle of illogical austerity, therefore, man, in self-defence and to comfort his craving and his weakness, has clung to the cheerful conceit of immortality; has pathetically credited the First Cause with a grand ultimate intention concerning each suffering atom; has assured himself that eternity shall wipe away all tears and blood, shall reward the actors in this puppet-show with golden crowns and nobler parts in a nobler playhouse. Human dreams of justice are responsible for this yearning towards another life, not the dogmas of religion; and the conviction undoubtedly has to be thanked for much individual right conduct. But it happens that an increasing number of intellects can find solace in these theories no longer; it happens that the liberty of free thought (which is the only liberty man may claim) will not longer be bound with these puny chains. Many detect no just argument for a future life; they admit that adequate estimate of abstract Justice is beyond them; they suspect that Justice is a human conceit; and they see no cause why its attributes should be credited to the Creator in His dealings with the created, for the sufficient reason that Justice has never been consistently exhibited by Him. The natural conclusion of such thought need not be pursued here. Suffice it that, taking their stand on pure reason, such thinkers deny the least evidence of any life beyond the grave; to them, therefore, this ephemeral progression is the beginning and the end, and they live every precious moment with a yearning zest beyond the power of conventional intellects to conceive.