"Ah!" said the sportsman, "and how's Mr. Bowden faring? I've forgot Ditsworthy of late."
"Foxes haven't," was all the warrener replied. And yet a sight of the honeycombed and tunnelled miles of the burrows might have justified an opinion that all the foxes of Devonshire could have done no lasting hurt here. In legions the rabbits lived. They swarmed, leapt from under the foot, bobbed with twinkling of white scuts through the fern and heather, sat up, all ears, on every little knap and hillock, drummed with their pads upon the hollow ground, scurried away in scattered companies and simultaneously vanished down a hundred holes at sight of dog or man.
This, then, was the place and these were the people, animals and things that Plym encompassed with her growing volume before she thundered in many a cataract and shouting waterfall through the declivities beneath Dewerstone and left Dartmoor. Much beauty she brings to the lowlands; much beauty she finds there. The hanging woods are very fair; and the great shining reaches where the salmon lie; and those placid places where Plym draws down the grey and azure of the firmament and spreads it among the water-meadows. She flows through Bickleigh Vale and by Cann Quarry; she passes her own bridge, and anon, entering the waters of Laira, passes unmarked away to the salt blue sea; but she laves no scene more pregnant than these plains where the stone men sleep; she passes no monument heavier weighted with grandeur of eld than that titan menhir of Thrushelcombe by Ditsworthy, where, deep set in the prehistoric past, it stands sentinel over a hero's grave. Great beyond the common folk was he who won this memorial--a warrior and leader at the least; or perchance some prophet who wrought men's deeds into the gaunt beginnings of art and song, fired his clan to the battle with glorious fury, and welcomed them again with pæan of joy or dirge of mourning. But one chooses rather to think that these tumuli held ashes of the men who fought and conquered; who lifted their lodges to supremacy; who bulked as large in the eyes of the neoliths as their gravestones bulk in ours. The saga and the singer both are good; but deeds must first be done.
Of Plym also it may be said that nowhere in all its journey does it skirt a home of living men more sequestered and distinguished than the broad, low-roofed and granite-walled Warren House of Ditsworthy. Notable and spacious mansions rise as the stream flows into civilisation; abodes, that have entered into history, lift their heads adjacent to its flood; but none among them is so unique and distinctive; and none at any period has sheltered a family more eager, strenuous and full of the strife and joy of living than Elias Bowden and his brood.
CHAPTER III
HARMONY IN RUSSET
Sheepstor lies beneath the granite hill that names it like a lamb between a lion's paws. Chance never played artist to better purpose, for of the grey roofs and whitewashed walls that make this little village, there is scarcely one to be wished away. Cots and farm-buildings, byres and ricks cluster round about the church; a few conifers thrust dark spire and branch between the houses, and fields slope upward behind the hamlet to the shaggy fringes of the tor. A medley of autumnal orange and copper and brown now splashes the hills everywhere round about; and great beeches, that hem in the churchyard and bull-ring, echo the splendour of the time and spread one pall of radiant foliage on all the graves together. Behind the church, knee-deep in thick-set spinneys, ascends the giant bulk of Sheep's Tor, shouldering enormous from leagues of red brake-fern, like a ragged, grey dragon that lifts suddenly from its lair. The saddle of the hill falls westerly in a more gentle slope, and sunset paints wonderful pictures there; while beyond, breaking very blue through the haze of distance, Lether Tor and Sharp Tor's misty heights inclose the horizon.
A river runs through the village, and at this noon hour in late November the brook made all the music to be heard; for not a sound rose but that of the murmuring water, and not any sight of conscious life was to be noted. Clear sunshine after rain beat upon the great hill; its ruddy pelt glowed like fire under the blue sky, and beneath the mass a church tower, whose ancient crockets burnt with red-gold lichens, sprang stiffly up. Sheepstor village might now be seen through a lattice of naked boughs, fair of form in their mingled reticulations and pale as silvery gauze against the sunlight. Their fretwork was touched to flame where yellow or scarlet leaves still clung and spattered the branches. Yet no particular opulence of colour was registered. All the tones remained delicate and tender. The village seen afar off, seemed painted with subdued greys, pale yellows and warm duns; but at approach its deserted street was proved a haunt for sunshine and glittered with reflected light and moisture.
One cottage near the lich-gate of the churchyard had served to challenge particular attention. The building was of stone, but little of the fabric save one chimney-stack appeared, for on the south side a huge ivy-tod overwhelmed all with shining green; to the north a cotoneaster of uncommon proportions wrapped the house in a close embrace, covered the walls and spread over the roof also. Its dense, stiff sprays of dark foliage were laden with crimson berries; they hung brilliantly over the white face of the cottage and made heavy brows for the door and windows. A leafless lilac stuck up pale branches on one side of the entrance; stacks of dry fern stood on the other; and these hues were carried to earth and echoed in higher notes by some buff Orpington fowls upon the roadway, and a red setter asleep at the cottage door. Over all this genial and spirited colour profound silence reigned; and then the mystery of the deserted village was solved by sudden drone of organ music from the church. It happened to be Sunday, and most of those not engaged at kitchen fires were attending service.
At last, however, a human being appeared and a man came out from the cottage of cotoneasters with a metal pail in his hand. He wore Sunday black but had not yet donned his coat, and his shirt-sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. His fore-arms were somewhat slight, but hard and brown; and his face had charmed any student of faces by its obvious kindness of heart and innate merriment of disposition. Bartley Crocker was thin and tall. He stood about six feet, yet weighed not quite eleven stone. He was, however, tough and very energetic where it pleased him so to be. Small black whiskers clung beneath his ears, while the rest of his face was shorn. His upper lip was short, his mouth full and rather feeble, his colour clear and pale. His eyes were small, somewhat sly, and the home of laughter. He was five-and-twenty and lived with a widowed mother and a maiden aunt under the berried roof of the cottage. The Crockers kept cows and poultry, and Bartley was a good son to his mother, though not a good friend to himself. He had a mind, quick but not deep, and his feelings were keen but transitory. He belonged to the order of Esau, won wide friendship, yet woke a measure of impatience among reflecting people, in that he spent his time to such poor purpose and wasted an unusually good education and a splendid native gift of nervous energy on the sports of the field. He had, in fact, become a man without putting away childish things--an achievement as rare among rustics as it is common under conditions of university education. Yet nobody but his mother ever blamed him to his face, and the tone of her voice always robbed her reproaches of the least forceful quality. She was proud of him; she knew that the men could not quarrel with him and that the girls were all his friends.