“And Knox,” added Ned. “But for him there’s no shadow of doubt things would have happened differently. But as luck would have it you confided in him, and so did I; and being what he is, he puts his intellects into the thing and saved us.”
“I shan’t forget it,” said Kellock.
“And we shan’t forget you,” declared Knox. “You’re all three mighty well out of this, and though you’ve been an amazing ass, yet there was a fine quality in your foolishness that saved the situation. You’ve all got peace with honour in fact; and may you profit by your lesson and your luck.”
Then Knox and Kellock set off down the hill together.
CHAPTER XXX
FIRE BEACON HILL
Free horizons stretched about the grassy summit of Fire Beacon, a culminating ridge above Dart.
It ascended from a glorious ambit of hill and valley, moor and sea; and on this silvery noon of early summer, light rained out of the zenith and echoed in the scattered cloud argosies that sailed from the north to seaward. Under them spread a mosaic of multicoloured fields netted with hedges and knotted with copses or spinneys, grey hamlets and little thorpes. The million breasts of Artemis Devonia undulated beneath the shining patchwork and faded into distance over many leagues of sunkissed weald and wold, until they rippled dimly to the foothills and forest edges of Dartmoor, where the high lands were flung hugely out from east to west. To-day the Moor shone full of delicate colour under the sun. It rose and fell in a lustrous opaline sky line of gentle salients; it melted at the magic of the universal light and seemed no more than a delicate veil of grey and azure imposed transparently upon the brighter blue above it. From Hey Tor to Rippon it rolled, to Buckland and Holne Moor, with shadowy glimpses of Hameldon and remote Cosdon; to Dean Moor and Harford, by Eastern Beacon and Western Beacon, Lee Moor and Shell Top and far border heights that brooded through the milky hazes of the west.
Beneath Fire Beacon lay the clustered dwellings of East Cornworthy, and beyond them, deep in the heart of the land, shone Dart where there bent away Bow Creek above Stoke Gabriel. The river wound argent through a dimple of the bending hills, while easterly, by broad passages of woodland and fallow, opened the ways to the sea. Tor Bay stretched there with white Torquay glittering pearly under her triple hills; and far beyond them, touched through the haze by a falling sunshaft, glimmered the headlands eastward, cliff beyond cliff, where the red sandstone of Devon gave to the golden oolites of Dorset. Then ranged the sea-line and rolled wide waters soaked with light, whereon the clouds not only flung down their shadows, but poured their reflections also, so that the sea was radiant as the land.