Urith: A Tale of Dartmoor

by S. Baring-Gould

Luke Cleverdon, Curate of Mary Tavy, walked slowly up the hill from the bridge over the brawling River Tavy towards Willsworthy. He was a tall, spare young man, with large soft brown eyes, and a pale face. His life had not been particularly happy. His parents had died when he was young, and old Cleverdon, of Hall, had taken charge of the boy in a grumblingly, ungracious fashion, resenting the conduct of his brother in dying, and encumbering him with the care of a delicate child. Luke was older than young Anthony, and possibly for a while old Anthony may have thought that, in the event of his wife giving him no son, Hall and his accumulations would devolve on this frail, white-faced, and timid lad. The boy proved to be fond of books, and wholly unsuited for farm life. Consequently he was sent to school, and then to College, and had been ordained by the Bishop of Exeter to the Curacy of Tavy St. Peter, or Petery-Tavy, as it was usually called. His uncle had never shown him affection, his young cousin, Anthony, had been in everything and every way preferred before him, and had been suffered to put him aside and tyrannise over him at his will. Only in Bessie had he found a friend, though hardly an associate, for Bessie's interests were other than those of the studious, thoughtful boy. She was a true Martha, caring for all that pertained to the good conduct of the house, and Luke had the dreamy idealism of Mary. The boy had suffered from contraction of the chest, but had grown out of his extreme delicacy in the fresh air of the country, and living on the abundant and wholesome food provided in a farm. His great passion was for the past. He had so little to charm him in the present, and no pursuit unfolding before him in the future, that he had been thrown as a lad to live in the past, to make the episodes of history his hunting fields. Fortunately for him, Dartmoor was strewn with prehistoric antiquities; upright stones ranged in avenues, in some instances extending for miles, with mysterious circles of unhewn blocks, and with cairns and kistvaens, or stone coffins, constructed of rude slabs of granite. Among these he wandered, imagining strange things, peopling the solitude, and dreaming of the Druids who, he supposed, had solemnised their ritual in these rude temples.

Old Cleverdon was angered with the pursuits of his nephew. He utterly despised any pursuit which did not lead to money, and archæology was one which might, and often did, prove expensive, but was not remunerative from a pecuniary point of view. As soon as ever Luke was ordained and established in a curacy, the old man considered that his obligation towards him had ceased, and he left the poor young man to sustain himself on the miserable salary that was paid him by his non-resident Rector. But Luke's requirements were small, and his only grief at the smallness of his stipend was that it obliged him to forego the purchase of books.

He was on his way to Willsworthy, four miles from the parish church, at the extreme end of the parish, to pay a pastoral visit to Mistress Malvine, who was an invalid. Before reaching the house he came to a ruined chapel, that had not been used since the Reformation, and there he suddenly lighted upon Urith.

His pale face flushed slightly. She was seated on a mass of fallen wall, with her hands in her lap, occupied with her thoughts. To her surprise, on her return late on the preceding night, before the breaking of the storm, her mother had not followed her accustomed practice of covering her with reproaches; and this had somewhat disconcerted Urith. Mrs. Malvine was a woman of not much intelligence, very self-centred, and occupied with her ailments. She had a knack of finding fault with every one, of seeing the demerits of all with whom she had to do; and she was not slow in expressing what she thought. Nor had she the tact to say what she thought and felt, and have done with it, she went on nagging, aggravating, exaggerating, and raking up petty wrongs or errors of judgment into mountains of misdemeanour, so that when at one moment she reproved such as had acted wrongly, she invariably in the next reversed positions, for she rebuked with such extravagance, and enlarged on the fault with such exaggeration as to move the innate sense of proportion and equity in the soul of the condemned, and to rouse the consciousness of injustice in the accused.

Such a scene had taken place the previous day, when her mother, aided by the blundering Uncle Solomon, had driven Urith into one of her fits of passion, in which she had run away. When Mistress Malvine discovered what she had done—that she had actually pressed her child beyond endurance, and that the girl had run to the wilderness, where she could no more be traced, when the day and evening passed without her return, the sick woman became seriously alarmed, and faintly conscious that she had transgressed due bounds in the reprimand administered to Urith for rejecting the suit of Anthony Crymes. Consequently, when finally the girl did reappear, her mother controlled herself, and contented herself with inquiring where she had been.

Luke Cleverdon knew Urith better than did his cousins; in his rambles on the moor, as a boy, he had often come this way, and had frequently had Urith as his companion. The friendship begun in childhood continued between them now that he was curate in charge of souls, and she was growing into full bloom of girlhood.

He now halted, leaning both his hands on his stick, and spoke to her, and asked after her mother.

Urith rose to accompany him to the house. "She is worse; I fear I have caused her trouble and distress of mind. I ran away from home yesterday, and might have been lost on the moor, had not"—she hesitated, her cheek assumed a darker tinge, and she said—"had not I fortunately been guided aright to reach home."

"That is well," said Luke. "We are all liable thus to stray, and well for us when we find a sure guide, and follow him."

For a young man he was gaunt. He was dressed in scrupulously correct clerical costume, a cassock and knee-breeches, white bands, and a three-cornered hat.