"We must make him as welcome as we can, for father's sake," she said.
CHAPTER II
The hamlet of Shaugh Prior, a gift to the monks of Plympton in time past, stands beneath Shaugh Moor at the edge of a mighty declivity. The Church of St. Edward lifts its battlemented tower and crocketed pinnacles above a world of waste and fallow. It is perched upon a ridge and stands, supported by trees and a few cottages, in a position of great prominence. The scant beauty that this holy place possessed has vanished under restoration; but there yet remain good bells, while a notable font-cover, cast forth by vanished vandals, is now returned to its use.
Round about the church dark sycamores shine in spring, and at autumn drop their patched and mottled foliage upon the dust of the dead. Broad-bosomed fields ascend to the south; easterly a high road climbs to the Moor, and immediately north of Shaugh the slopes of High Down lead by North Wood to Cadworthy Farm and Cadworthy Bridge beyond it.
From High Down the village and its outlying habitations may be perceived at a glance. The cots and homesteads converge and cluster in, with the church as the central point and heart of the organisation. Around it dwellers from afar are come to sleep through their eternal night, and a double row of slates, like an amulet, girdles the ancient fane. Here and there flash white marble in the string of grey above the graves of the people; and beside the churchyard wall stand heaped a pack of Time's playing cards—old, thin, and broken slates from graves forgotten—slates and shattered slabs that have fallen away from the unremembered dust they chronicled, and now follow into oblivion the bones they marked.
A school, a rectory, 'The White Thorn' inn, and a dozen dwellings constitute Shaugh Prior, though the parish extends far beyond these boundaries; and on this spring day, one thrush warbling from a lilac bush at a cottage door, made music loud enough to fill the hamlet.
Undershaugh Farm stood near on the great hill that fell westerly to Shaugh Bridge, at watersmeet in the valley; and upon the land hard by it, two men tramped backward and forward, crossing and re-crossing in the bare centre of a field. They were working over sown mangold and enriching the seed under their feet by scattering upon it a fertile powder. The manure puffed from their hands in little golden clouds under the sunlight. The secret of this mixture belonged to one man, and none grew such mangolds as he could grow.
Undershaugh was the property of Nathan Baskerville, innkeeper, and he had let it for twenty years to a widow; but Mr. Baskerville took an active personal interest in the welfare of his property, and Mrs. Priscilla Lintern, his tenant, was very well pleased to follow his advice on all large questions of husbandry and rotation. As did the rest of the world, she knew his worth and wisdom.
Nathan Baskerville had original ideas, and these were a source of ceaseless and amicable argument between him and his elder brother, Vivian Baskerville, of Cadworthy. But Mr. Nathan's centre of activity and nidus, from which his enterprises and undertakings took shape and separate being, was 'The White Thorn' public-house. Here, at the centre of the little web of Shaugh Prior, he pursued his busy and prosperous life.