Maurice Malherb was close on fifty, and he had chosen to plough the earth for his partage in the world's work. A younger son of his house, he had turned from the junior's usual portion, and, by some accident of character, refused a commission and sought the peaceful occupations of agriculture. He had already wasted some portion of his patrimony upon land near Exeter; and he was seeking new outlet for his energies when arose a wide-spread ardour for cultivation of Dartmoor. The age of enterprise dawned there; "newtake" tenements sprang up like mushrooms upon this waste; and a region that had mostly slept since Elizabethan miners furrowed its breast and streamed its rivers for tin, awoke. As a grim crown to the Moor, Prince Town and its gigantic War Prison was created; while round about young woods budded, homesteads appeared, and wide tracts of the Royal Forest were rented to the speculative and the sanguine.
Maurice Malherb was among those first attracted by the prospect. A famous Dartmoor hero had influenced him in this decision, and he was now spending a week with Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, at Tor Royal, and examining the knight's operations in husbandry. He saw Dartmoor for the first time, and the frank, stern face of it challenged him. For three days he rode forth alone; and then he wandered to Cater's Beam and discovered the dewy cup where rivers rise beneath it. To the right and left he looked and smiled. His dark eyes drank up the possibilities of the land. Already he pictured dykes for draining of the marshes; already he saw crops ripening and slow oxen drawing the ploughshare in the valley. Of the eternal facts, hard as granite and stern as nature, that lurked here under the dancing summer air, he knew nothing. The man was fifteen hundred feet above the sea, in the playground of the west wind. The inveterate peat encompassed him—the hungry, limeless peat, that eats bone like a dog and fattens upon the life-blood of those who try to tame it. He gazed upon a wilderness where long winters bury the land in snow or freeze it to the granite core for months—save where warm springs twinkle in the mosses and shine like wet eyes out of a white face. Here the wise had observed and passed upon their way; but Maurice Malherb was not wise. August ruled the hour; the ling bloomed under the heat; a million insects murmured and made a pleasant melody. Dartmoor for a moment smiled, and weary of the tame monotony of green meads, hedges elm-clad, and fields of ruddy earth, Malherb caught hope from this crystal air and enormous scene outspread, fell to picturing a notable future, and found his pulses leap to the great plans that thronged his mind.
He was of a square and sturdy habit of body. A clean-shorn countenance, deep-set black eyes beneath black brows, a large mouth underhung, and a nose very broad but finely moulded, were the distinguishing attributes of his face. Restlessness was alike the characteristic of his expression and of his nature. Generosity and pride dominated him in turn. His failures were the work of other people; his successes he claimed himself. His wife, his son, his daughter, the blood in his veins, the wine in his cellar, were all the best in the world. His demonian temper alone he deplored; yet in that, also, he found matter for occasional satisfaction; since, by a freak of atavism, he resembled at every physical and mental point an ancestor from the spacious times, whose deeds on deep and unknown seas had won him the admiration and friendship of Drake.
Malherb already saw a homestead spring upwards upon the green hill beneath Fox Tor. There would he lift his eyrie; there should successive generations look back and honour their founder; there—thunder broke suddenly upon his dreams and the bay horse shifted his fore-feet nervously beneath him. Whereupon he lifted his eyes, and found that a great storm was at hand. Unperceived it had crept out of the north while he stood wrapped in meditation; and now a ghastly glamour extended beneath it, for the Moor began to look like a sick thing, huddled here all bathed with weak yellow light from a fainting sun. Solitary blots and wisps of cloud darkened the sky and heralded the solid and purple van of the thunderstorm. All insect music ceased, and a hush, unbroken by one whisper, fell upon the hills. Cater's Beam suggested some prodigious, couchant creature, watchful yet fearless. Thus it awaited the familiar onset of the lightning, whose daggers had broken in its granite bosom a thousand times and left no scar.
The wanderer spurred his horse, and regained firm foothold on the crest of the land; then, bending to a torrent of rain, he galloped westward where the gaunt wards and barracks of Prince Town towered above the desolation. But the tempest broke long before Malherb reached safety; darkness swallowed him and he struggled storm-foundered among the unfamiliar hills. Then fortune sent another traveller, and a young man, riding bare-backed upon a pony, came into view. Sudden lightning showed the youth, and, waiting for a tremendous volley of thunder that followed upon it, Malherb shouted aloud. His voice, though deep and sonorous, sounded thin as the pipe of a bird thus lifted immediately after the peal.
"Hold there! Where am I, boy? Which is the way to Tor Royal?"
"You be going right, sir," shouted the lad; "but 'tis a long road this weather. Best to follow me, if I may make so bold, an I'll bring 'e to shelter in five minutes."
The offer was good, and Mr. Malherb accepted with a nod.
"Go as fast as you can; I'll keep behind you."
Both horses were moorland bred, for the visitor rode a stout hackney lent by his host. Yet Malherb had to shake up his steed to keep the native in sight. Presently the youth dismounted, and his companion became aware of a low cabin rising like a beehive before him. It stood at the foot of a gentle hill, within a rough enclosure of stone. Some few acres of land had been reclaimed about it, and not far distant, through the murk of the rain, its granite gleaming azure under the glare of the lightning, stood an ancient and famous stone.