CHAPTER VI
ON HAZEL TOR
John Bamsey was a youth who had not yet felt the edge of life. His own good parts were in a measure responsible for this fortune, and the circumstances destined to make trial of his foundations and test what fortitude his character might command, were yet to come. He was quick minded and intelligent, and his success had made him vain. His temper was short, and in his business of water-keeper, he held it a virtue to preserve a very obstinate and implacable front, not only to declared evil-doers, but also against those who lay under his suspicion.
He was superior in his attitude to his own generation and therefore unpopular with it; but he set down a lack of friendship to natural envy at his good fortune and cheerful prospects. He liked his work and did it well. The fish were under his protection and no ruth obscured his fidelity to them. Into his life had come love, and since the course thereof ran smoothly, this experience had chimed with the rest and combined, by its easy issue, to retard any impact of reality and still leave John in a state of ignorance concerning those factors of opposition and tribulation which are a part of the most prosperous existence.
Dinah accepted him, after a lengthy period of consideration, and she was affectionate if not loverly. He never stayed to examine the foundation of her compact, nor could he be blamed, for he had no reason to suppose that she had said "yes" from mixed motives. A girl so direct, definite and clear-sighted as Dinah, seemed unlikely to be in two minds about anything, and John, knowing his own hearty passion and ardent emotions, doubted not that, modified only as became a maiden's heart, she echoed them. Yet there went more to the match than that, and others perceived it, though he did not. Dinah's position was peculiar, and in truth love for another than John had gone largely—more largely than she guessed herself—to decide her. There was little sex impulse in her—otherwise her congenital frankness with man and woman alike had been modified by it. But she could love, for a rare sense of gratitude belonged to her, and the height and depth of her vital affections belonged to her foster-father, Benjamin Bamsey. Him she did love, as dearly as child ever loved a parent, and it was the knowledge that such a match would much delight him, that had decided Dinah and put a term to her doubts. But she had become betrothed on grounds inadequate, and now was beginning, as yet but dimly, to perceive it. Her disquiets did not take any shape that John could quarrel with, for she had not revealed them. She was honestly fond of him, and if she did not respond to his ardour with such outward signs of affection as he might have desired, his own inexperience in that matter prevented any uneasy suspicion on his part. He judged that such reserve in love was becoming and natural to a maiden of Dinah's distinction, and knew not the truth of the matter, nor missed the outward signs that he might have reasonably expected.
The beginning of difficulty very gradually rose between them, and since they had never quarrelled in their lives, for all John's temper and Dinah's frankness, the difference now bred in a late autumn day gave both material for grave thought.
They met by appointment, strolled in the woods, then climbed through plantations of sweet-smelling spruce, till they reached great rocks piled on a little spur of the hillside under Buckland Beacon. Here the granite heaved in immense boulders that broke the sweep of the hill and formed a resting-place for the eye between the summit of the Beacon and the surface of the river winding in the lap of the Vale beneath.
Hazel Tor, as these masses of porphyry were called, now rose like a ridge of little mountainous islets from a sea of dead heath and fern. The glories of the fall were at an end, and on an afternoon when the wind was still and the sky grey and near, pressing down on the naked tree-tops, Dinah, sitting here with her sweetheart, chatted amiably enough. The cicatrix on her cheek was still red, but the wound had cleanly healed and promised to leave no scar.
Johnny, however, was doubtful.
"I won't say you won't be marked now."