Chapter Five.
Evening.
“Aw, aim for th’ Tump, measter; aim for th’ Tump,” said the carter, slanting his whip to indicate the direction. “When you gets thur, look’ee, go for th’ Cas’l; and when you gets thur, go athwert the Vuzz toward th’ Virs; and when you gets drough thaay, thur be Akkern Chace, and a lane as goes down to Warren. Tchek! Woaght!”
At the foot of the Downs, along whose base the highway road wound, Geoffrey had paused to take counsel of a carter, who had just descended with a load of flints, before venturing across the all-but-trackless hills. The man very civilly stopped his waggon and named the various landmarks by which he would have guided his own course to Andrew Fisher’s. Geoffrey had started early in the evening, intending to go all the way to Warren House, for he carried with him the rug (strapped to the saddle) which Margaret and May had forgotten, and for which the rude old man had written. This rug, which Mrs Estcourt gave him, was in fact his passport, for he scarcely knew how Margaret would take his coming to fetch her in that rather abrupt way. Guessing what the man meant more by the slant of his whip than his words, he turned off the road on to the sward, and ascended the hill.
A long narrow shadow of man and horse, disproportionately stretched out, raced before him along the slope. The hoofs of the grey hardly cut the firm turf, dry with summer heat; the vivid green of spring had already gone, and a faint brown was just visible somewhere in the grass. Dark boulder stones—sarsens—bald and smooth, thrust their shoulders out of the sward here and there; hollowed out into curious cuplike cavities, in which, after a shower, the collected raindrops remained imprisoned in tiny bowls hard as the fabled adamant of mediaeval story. Round white bosses—white as milk, and globular like cannon-shot—dotted the turf, fungi not yet ripened into the dust of the puff-ball. Now and again the iron shoes dashed an edible mushroom to pieces, turning the pink gills upwards to shrivel and blacken in the morrow’s sun. The bees rose with a shrill buzz from the white clover, which is the shepherd’s sign of midsummer. Swiftly the grey sped along the slopes, the shadow racing before grew longer and fainter as the beams of the sun came nearly horizontally. Already the ridges cast a shadow into the hollows—into the narrow coombes, where great flints and chalk fragments had rolled down and strewed the ground as with the wreck of a titanic skirmish. Thickets of green furze tipped with yellow bloom, and beneath, peeping out, the pale purple heath-flower. On the stunted hawthorn bushes standing alone, stern sentinels in summer’s heat and winter’s storm, green peggles hardening, which autumn would redden and ripen for the thrush. Odorous thyme and yellow-bird’s-foot lotus embroidering the grassy carpet; wide breadths of tussocky grass, tall and tough, which the sheep had left untouched, and where the hare crouched in her form, hearkening to the thud of the hoofs.
On past the steep wall of an ancient chalk-quarry, spotted with red streaks and stains as of rusty iron, where the plough-boys search for pyrites, and call them thunderbolts and “gold,” for when broken the radial metallic fibres glisten yellow. Past a field of oats, rising hardly a foot high in the barren soil—in the corner an upturned plough with rusty share and wooden handles painted red. Down below in the plains between the hills squares of drooping barley and bold upstanding wheat, whose tender green the sun had invaded with advancing hues of gold. Over all the brooding silence of the summer eve, one brown lark alone singing in the air above the plain, far away from the distant ridge the faint tinkle of a sheep-bell. Now the sun was down the lower eastern atmosphere thickened with a dull red; the shepherds discerned the face of the sky, and said to-morrow would be fine.
Up the steep side of the “Tump” at last, slackening speed perforce, and checking the grey on the summit. It was a great round hill, detached, and somewhat like a huge bowl inverted, with a small circular level space, on what at a distance seemed an almost pointed apex, a space bare of aught but close-cropped herbage. Westwards was the dim vale, a faint mist blotting out steeple and tower—a mist blending with the sky at the horizon, and there all aglow. Eastwards, ridge upon ridge, hill after hill, with spurs running out into the narrow plains between, and deep coombes. He gazed earnestly over these, looking for signs and landmarks, but found none. The rough trail was lost—the hoof marks cut in the winter when the earth was soft were filled up by the swelling turf, and covered over with thyme. Those who laboured by day in the plains, weeding the fields, were gone down to their homes in the hamlets hidden in the valleys. At a venture he struck direct for the east, anxious to lose no time; for he began to fear he should miss Margaret, and soon afterwards luckily crossed the path of a shepherd-lad, whistling as he and his shaggy dog wended for “whoam.”
“Which is the way to Mr Fisher’s?” asked Geoffrey.
“Thaay be goin’ into th’ Mash to-morrow,” answered the boy, whose thoughts were differently engaged.
“Tell me the way to Mr Fisher’s—the Warren.”