CHAPTER I
THE HILLTOP
The spectacle of a free horizon from Buckland Beacon, at the southern rampart of Dartmoor, challenges the least discerning eye by the accident of its immensity, and attracts an understanding vision for weightier reasons. Beheld from this high place, Dart Vale and the land beyond it afford a great composition of nature, orbicular and complete. Its obvious grandeur none can question, but there is much more to be said for it, and from beneath the conspicuous and rhetorical qualities there emerge enduring distinctions. The scene belongs to an order of beauty that does not grow old. Its sensitiveness to light and the operations of the sky; its gracious, yet austere, composition and its far flung arena for the masques and interludes of the dancing hours render it a centre of sleepless variation. Its native fabrics, now gay, now solemn, are a fit habit for the lyrical and epic seasons, and its garments are transformed, not only by the robings and disrobings of Spring and Winter, but at a point's change in the wind, at a rise or fall of temperature. These delicacies, with the more patent magic of fore-glow and dawn, sunset and after-glow, crepuscule and gloaming, are revealed under the most perfect imaginable conditions; for, by many chances and happy hazards, earth here responds to air in all its heights and depths so completely that each phenomenon finds all needful for fullest achievement. One might study the vision a thousand times, yet find no picture resemble another, even in detail of large forms; for the actual modelling changes, since light and atmosphere deal with forest, rock and ridge as though they were plastic—suppressing here, uplifting there, obliterating great passages at one moment and erecting into sudden prominence things concealed at another. The hill sinks at the pressure of a purple shadow; the unseen river suddenly sparkles its presence at a sunbeam.
In this hour, after noon on a day of mid September, the light was changing, not gradually at the sun's proper declension, but under the forces of a south-west wind bringing up vapour at twenty miles an hour from the distant sea.
From the rounded and weathered masses of the Beacon, the hill sloped abruptly and a receding foreground of dying fern and grey, granite boulders broke on a gap of such extent that earth, reappearing far below, was already washed by the milky azure of the air, through which it glimmered and receded and presently again rose to lofty lands beyond. The ground plan was a mighty cup, over which the valley undulated, rising here to knap and knoll, falling there into coombs and plains, sinking to its lowest depths immediately beneath the view point, where Dart wound about lesser hills, not small in themselves, yet dwarfed by the greatness of the expanse and the loftiness of the horizon's brim. Upon that distant and irregular line, now melting into the thick air, border heights and saliencies sank and rose, repeating on a vaster scale the anatomy of the river basin. They lifted through the hazes until they faded upon the sight into the gathering clouds, that loomed still full of light, above their grey confines. The sea was long since hidden.
A chief quality of this spectacle appeared in the three dissimilar and different coverings that draped it. The body of the earth lay wrapped in a triple robe, and each garment was slashed and broken, so that its texture flowed into and revealed the others. Every furlong of these rolling leagues, save only where the river looped and twined through the middle distance, was clad with forest, with field, or with wilderness of heath and stone; and all, preserving their special qualities, added character of contrast to their neighbours. There was not a monotonous passage from east to west in this huge spectacle. Tilth and meadow oozed out through coppice and hanger; the forests ascended the steep places and fledged the hills, only drooping their dark wings where furze and stone climbed higher still, until they heaved upon the sky. The immemorial heights changed not, save to the painting of the seasons; the woods, that seemed as ancient as they, were largely the work of man, even as the tesselated patterns of the fields that spread, shorn of their corn, or still green with their roots, among them. The verdant patchwork of mangel and swede, the grey of arrish, and the gloom of freshly broken earth bosomed out in gentle arcs among the forests, breaking their ragged edges with long, smooth billows of colour. They shone against the summer sobriety of the trees, for the solid masses of the foliage were as yet scarcely stained with the approaching breath of the fall. But woodlands welcomed the light also, and the sunshine, though already softened by a gathering haze that advanced before the actual clouds, still beat into the copse and spinney, to fringe with a nimbus of pale gold the boss of each great tree and outline it from the rest. Light rained and ran through the multitude of the trees, drowning their green and raying all their faces with a dim and delicate fire.
In a gap southward, shrunk to velvet tapestry among clumps and sheaves of pine and oak, spread the lawns of Holne Chase—great park lands, reduced by distance to a garden. There the last sun gleam wakened a transient emerald; then it was gone, as a jewel revealed for a moment and hidden in its casket again.
The woods of Buckland bear noble timber and each tree in many a glen is a giant, thrusting upward from vast bole to mossy branch, until its high top ascends among its neighbours to sunlight and storm. They are worthy of the hills that harbour them, and in their combined myriads affect the operations of the air, draw the rain clouds for their own sustenance and help to create the humidity that keeps Dart Vale so dewy and so green. Down and down they roll endlessly, sinking away into the likeness of a clinging moss; for seen afar, they look no more upon this great pattern of rising and falling earth, than a close integument. Their size is lost against the greater size of the undulations they clothe; they shrink to a close pelt for the land—no heavier than the leagues of the eagle fern, or the autumnal cloth of purple and gold flung upon the hills above them.
To-day the highest lights were in the depths, where Dart flashed at a fall, or shone along some placid reach. She was but a streak of polished silver seen from aloft, and her manifold beauties hidden; while other remote spots and sparks of light that held the eye conveyed no detail either. They meant a mansion, or the white or rosy wash on cottage faces. A grey smudge, sunk in the green to westward, was a village; a white lozenge in the woods beneath, the roof of a moorland church. Here and there blue feathers of wood smoke melted upward into the oncoming clouds; and thinly, through vapours beyond, like a tangle of thread, there twined high roads, ascending from invisible bridges and hamlets to the hills.
And then, little by little, detail faded and the shadows of the clouds grew denser, the body of the clouds extended. Still they were edged with light, but the light died as they thickened and lumbered forward, spreading their pinions over the Vale. The air gradually grew opaque, and ridge after ridge, height after height, disappeared in it. They were not blotted out, but washed away, until the fingers of the rain felt dumbly along the bosom of Buckland Beacon, dimmed the heath and furze to greyness, curled over the uplifted boulder, found and slaked the least thirsty wafer of gold or ebony lichen that clung thereto.
A young man, who had been standing motionless upon the Beacon, felt the cool brush of the rain upon his face and woke from his reverie. He was of a recipient, intelligent aspect, and appeared to admire the great spectacle spread before him; but whether, behind the thing seen, any deeper emotion existed for him; whether to the outward and visible sign there responded any inward and spiritual grace, was a question not to be answered immediately. He prepared to descend, where a building stood upon the hill below him half a mile distant. There he was expected, but as yet knew it not.