Knock at a Venture

by Eden Phillpotts

CHAPTER I

Where the sylvan character of the scene changes; where fields give place to hanging woods and they in their turn thin to poverty and obliquity under eternal stress of western winds, a gate, resting by its own weight against a granite post, indicates the limits of agriculture and forestry upon the southern confines of the Moor. Beneath this standpoint Devon’s unnumbered breasts billow to the misty horizon, and dimpling valleys, between the arable lands and higher wealds, are marked by orchards, water meadows and the winding ways of rivers. These, borne aloft, have come from far, and now, with slower current and ampler volume, roam melodiously through pleasant lees, through denes and dingles of sweet flowers, beneath the music of birds and the shadows of great woodlands, to their confluence with the sea. Here, too, lie hamlets and rise crocketed church towers; peat reek sweetens the air; blue doves croon through blue smoke on many a low thatched cot; and life moves in simplicity and apparent peace. The habitations of men glimmer with white-washed walls at fringes of forests, at wind-blown crossways, about small village greens, on lonely roads, by steep hillsides and among sunny combes. Homesteads rise in isolation along the edges of the great central loneliness; whole villages lie in the lap of the hills; and the manifold planes of this spacious scene, whether under flying cloud-shadows or grey rain, midday sunlight or the splendour of summer moons, commingle in one vision, whose particulars only vary to the play of the dawn and sunset lights, to the hands of the roaming elements, to the seasons that bring in turn awakening life and music, high colour-pageants and dying pomps, ultimate sobrieties and snows.

Beyond the gate to the Moor rises a steep road of broken granite and flint. It climbs upward, straight and dogged, into the world of the heather and, pursued a little, reveals the solemn sweep and dip of the circumambient waste. To the skyline tumbles this billowy ocean, and the ripples upon the crest of each mighty wave are granite. Here rise the tors, adorned at this August season with purple ling to their footstools of stone; here subtend wildernesses between the high hills; and the sheep bells jangle upon them, and the red kine bellow from the watercourses. A rook, his feathers blown awry, hops thrice, then ascends heavily; but the kestrel, with greater distinction of flight, glides away from his perch upon a stone, ere he swoops aloft with long reaches, to hang motionless in the air, like a brown star afar off. The moorland world extends in vast, undulating mosaic of olive and dun, thinly veiled by the bloom of the ling and splashed with golden furze and grey granite. The expanse is touched to umber and velvet warmth in sunshine; is enriched with the pure, cool purple of cloud-shadows; is brightened into sheer emerald-green, where springs burst from their peat-moss cradles amid seeding cotton-grass; is lightened throughout its sombre heath tones with glistening sheets of polished fern, where the tracts of the bracken stand under direct sunlight. There is warmth of colour in its breezy interspaces—warmth, won from the ruddiness of ripe rush-heads and manifold grasses all bending and swaying in waves under the wind.

At the junction of two roads, that cross at right angles within a hundred yards of the moor-gate, there stands a blackthorn of venerable shape. It is a deformed, grotesque tree, much bent and shrivelled. Its boughs are coated with close fabric of grey encrustations, but such clothing has failed to protect its carcase against a century of winters and biting winds. In autumn the scanty foliage is still brightened by a meagre crop of fruit; but life crawls with difficulty up the zigzag bones of this most ancient thorn, while each spring its tardy sap awakes less of the tree, and leaves increasing concourse of abrupt and withered twigs to rot above and below the centre of vitality. Beneath this ruin you shall note a slight hillock of green grass, where foxgloves shake aloft their purple pyramids of blossom and a rabbit’s hole lies close beside them. Of artificial barrow or modern burying-place there is no suggestion here; and yet this mound by the highway side conceals a grave; and the story of the human dust within it is the truth concerning one who lived and smarted more than a hundred years ago. Men were of the same pattern then as now, but manners varied vastly; and the Moor-man, who farms upon the grudging boundaries of that great central desert to-day, and curses the winds that scatter his beggarly newtakes with thistledown and fern seed, might wonder at the tales this same wild wind could tell him of past times and of the customs of his ancestors.

Human life on the Moor is still hard enough, but modern methods of softening the rough edges of existence were even less considered in the beginning of the century, when American and French prisoners of war sorrowfully sighed at Prince Town. In those days the natives of the Devonshire highlands endured much hardship and laughed at the more delicate nurture of the townfolk, as the wandering Tuaregs laugh when their softer fellows exchange tent and desert for the green oases of many palms and sweet waters. Then food was rough on Dartmoor and drink was rougher. Cider colic all men knew as a common ill; most beverages were brewed of native herbs and berries; only upon some occasion of rare rejoicing would a lavish goodwife commission “Johnny Fortnight,” the nomad packman, to bring her two or three ounces of genuine Cathay as entertainment for her cronies.

It was rather more than a century ago that one, John Aggett, dwelt within two hundred yards of the thorn-bush already described; and the remains of his cottage, of which the foundation and a broken wall still exist, may yet be seen—a grey ghost, all smothered with nettles, docks and trailing briars. A cultivated patch of land formerly extended around this dwelling, and in that old-world garden grew kale and potatoes, with apple trees, an elder, whose fruit made harsh wine, and sundry herbs, used for seasoning meat or ministering to sickness. No evidence of this cultivation now survives, save only the ruined wall and a patriarchal crab-apple tree—the stock that once supported a choicer scion, long since perished.

Here, a mile or two distant from Postbridge in the vale of Eastern Dart, resided John Aggett and his widowed mother. The cottage was the woman’s property; and that no regular rent had to be paid for it she held a lucky circumstance, for John by no means walked in his laborious father’s footsteps. Work indeed he could; and he performed prodigious feats of strength when it pleased him; but it was not in the details of his prosaic trade as a thatcher that he put forth his great powers. Business by no means attracted him or filled his life. As a matter of fact the man was extremely lazy and only when sports of the field occupied his attention did he disdain trouble and exertion. He would tramp for many miles to shoot plovers or the great golden-eyed heath poults and bustards that then frequented the Moor; he cared nothing for cold and hunger on moonlight winter nights when wild ducks and geese were to be slain; and trout-fishing in summer-time would brace him to days of heroic toil on remote waters. But thatching or the thought of it proved a sure narcotic to his energies; and it was not until Sarah Belworthy came into his life as a serious factor that the young giant began to take a more serious view of existence and count the ultimate cost of wasted years.

Man and maid had known one another from early youth, and John very well remembered the first meeting of all, when he was a lanky youngster of eleven, she a little lass of eight. Like the boy, Sarah was an only child, and her parents, migrating from Chagford to Postbridge, within which moorland parish the Aggetts dwelt, secured a cottage midway between the home of the thatcher and the village in the valley below. Soon afterward the children met upon one of the winding sheep tracks that traverse the Moor on every hand. They were upon the same business, and each, moving slowly along, sought for every tress, lock or curl of sheeps’ wool that hung here and there in the thorny clutch of furze and bramble.

The boy stopped, for Sarah’s great grey eyes and red mouth awoke something in him. He felt angry because the blood flowed to his freckled face; but she was cool as the little spring that rose in their path—cool as the crystal water that bubbled up and set a tiny column of silver sand shivering among the red sundews and bog asphodels at their feet.

“Marnin’ to ’e,” said John, who already knew the small stranger by sight.