When man builds a house on Dartmoor, he plants trees to protect it. Sometimes they perish; sometimes they endure to shield his dwelling from the riotous and seldom-sleeping winds. Round the abode of Humphrey Baskerville stood beech and pine. A solid old house lurked beneath, like a bear in its grove. People likened its face to the master's—the grey, worn, tar-pitched roof to his hair, and the small windows on either side of the door to his eyes. A few apple trees were in the garden, and currant and gooseberry bushes prospered indifferent well beneath them. Rhubarb and a row of elders also flourished here. The latter were permitted to exist for their fruit, and of the berries Mrs. Susan Hacker, Humphrey's widowed housekeeper, made medicinal preparations supposed to possess value.
Hawk House lay under a tor, and behind it the land towered to a stony waste that culminated in wild masses of piled granite, where the rowan grew and the vixen laid her cubs. From this spot one might take a bird's-eye survey of Humphrey Baskerville's domain. Gold lichens had fastened on the roof, and the folk conceited that since there was no more room in the old man's house for his money, it began to ooze out through the tiles.
Humphrey himself now sat on a favourite stone aloft and surveyed his possessions and the scene around them. It was his custom in fair weather to spend many hours sequestered upon the tor. Dwarf oaks grew in the clitters, and he marked the passage of the time by their activity, by the coming of migrant birds, by the appearance of the infant foxes and by other natural signs and tokens. Beneath Hawk House there subtended a great furze-clad space flanked with woods. The Rut, as it was called, fell away to farms and fertile fields, and terminated in a glen through which the little Torry river passed upon her way to Plym. Cann Wood fringed the neighbouring heights, and far away to the south Laira's lake extended and Plymouth appeared—faint, grey, glittering under a gauze of smoke.
The tor itself was loved by hawks and stoats, crows and foxes. Not a few people, familiar with the fact that Humphrey here took his solitary walks and kept long vigils, would affirm that he held a sort of converse with these predatory things and learned from them their winged and four-footed cunning. His sympathy, indeed, was with fox and hawk rather than with hunter and hound. He admitted it, but in no sense of companionship with craft did he interest himself in the wild creatures. He made no fatuous imputation of cruelty to the hawk, or cunning to the fox. His bent of mind, none the less, inclined him to admire their singlehanded fight for life against long odds; and thus he, too, fell into fallacy; but his opinion took a practical turn and was not swiftly shattered, as such emotions are apt to be, when the pitied outlaw offers to the sentimental spectator a personal taste of his quality.
If a hawk stooped above his chickens, he felt a sort of contempt for the screaming, flying fowls—let the hawk help itself if it could—and did not run for his gun. Indeed, he had no gun. As men said of this or that obstinate ancient that he had never travelled in a train, so they affirmed, concerning Humphrey Baskerville, that he had never in his life fired a gun.
He sat and smoked a wooden pipe and reflected on the puzzles of his days. He knew that he was held in little esteem, but that had never troubled him. His inquiring spirit rose above his fellow-creatures; and he prided himself upon the fact, and did not see that just in this particular of a flight too lofty did he fail of the landmarks and sure ground he sought.
A discontent, in substance very distinguished and noble, imbued his consciousness. He was still seeking solace out of life and a way that should lead to rest. But he could not find it. He was in arms on the wrong road. He missed the fundamental fact that from humanity and service arise not only the first duties of life, but also the highest rewards that life can offer. He had little desire towards his fellow-creatures. His mind appeared to magnify their deficiencies and weakness. He was ungenerous in his interpretation of motives. Mankind awoke his highest impatience. He sneered at his own shortcomings daily, and had no more mercy for the manifold disabilities of human nature in general. In the light of his religion and his learning, he conceived that man should be by many degrees a nobler and a wiser thing than he found him; and this conclusion awoke impatience and a fiery aversion. He groped therefore in a blind alley, for as yet service of man had not brought its revelation to his spirit, or opened the portals of content. He failed to perceive that the man who lives rationally for men, with all thereby involved in his duty to himself, is justifying his own existence to the limit of human capacity.
Instead, he fulfilled obligations to his particular God with all his might, and supposed this rule of conduct embraced every necessity. He despised his neighbour, but he despised himself also. Thus he was logical, but such a rule of conduct left him lonely. Hence it came about that darkness clothed him like a garment, and that his kind shunned him, and cared not to consider him.
He sat silent and motionless. His gift of stillness had often won some little intimate glimpse of Nature, and it did so now. A fox went by him at close quarters. It passed absorbed in its own affairs, incautious and without fear. Then suddenly it saw him, braced its muscles and slipped away like a streak of cinnamon light through the stones.
It made for the dwarf oaks beneath the head of the tor, and the watcher saw its red stern rise and its white-tipped brush jerk this way and that as it leapt from boulder to boulder. A big and powerful fox—so Humphrey perceived; one that had doubtless stood before hounds in his time, and would again.