Chapter XXVI: How It Was Dreary Beside the Gorge

Even on Dartmoor the hours after noon on Saturday may not be violated by work. It is a time of beer-drinking, debt-renewing, and ballad-singing; when the heads of families are gathered together into one place--the village inn; and the wives assemble in the market town to lay up provision for the coming week.

It was a Saturday in November, and the little village of Lew-upon-the-Moor appeared deserted. Ballads were being sung hoarsely and incoherently in Eastaway’s inn, where that worthy soul was rattling into the till the wages he had just paid out; but the long street was empty, except for geese and dogs and the inevitable plague of fowls. Not even the witless face of old Y. was to be seen looking over his gate. The last summer visitor had left a month ago, and the parlour in every cottage had been set in order and closed for six long months. The reign of the winds had commenced.

Looking down the village one might have observed a quaint object in the middle of the road. It was a three-legged milking-stool. It was also a symbol of independence and a defiance to the parish. If a cart had come that way the driver would have dismounted to remove the stool, so that his horse should not stumble over it, and would then have replaced it prudently rather than with reverence. Even the animals avoided that stool. Every living creature had learnt to respect the tongue of its owner. Mrs. Cobbledick had always milked her cows in the middle of the road, and she intended to persevere in that practice so long as she might live.

In due time Ann appeared with a milking-pail, which had an indifferent claim to newness and cleanliness, leading Artful Twoad, her favourite cow, by a piece of rope, twisted about the animal’s neck, and so rotten that a single tug would have snapped it. Having placed the cow precisely in the centre of the road, with many a “Do ye get up,” “Do ye get back,” and “Do ye bide still,” for it had never yet occurred to her that it would be easier to shift the stool than to place the cow beside it, she wiped her hands upon her apron, which by its appearance might have been used for cleansing the interior of a grate, and devoted herself to professional duties, calling out occasionally to Willum who was loafing beside the kitchen fire before going to loaf in the village inn.

Soon there came a mighty gust of wind which threatened to remove Mrs. Cobbledick, milking-stool, and Artful Twoad from the face of the moor. Both ladies objected, one of them by whisking her tail, and the other by screaming “Christmas!” her customary expletive, which had the merit of being not merely harmless but actually tinged with a suggestion of sanctity.

“Come out,” she called. “There be a frisky wind. Do ye good, old dear.”

After a little more admonition Willum appeared, hands in his pockets and apparently rooted there. He considered the time had come for him to exchange the fireside for the inn, that he might relieve his distressing malady by copious draughts of ale. Not that he expected any foaming gifts from Eastaway. A distinct coldness had sprung up between the stonebreaker and the house of Cobbledick, since Willum had acquired the tombstone by such unscrupulous methods. The scholar never entered the bar-room until he had first satisfied himself, either that Eastaway was absent or that several villagers were present with him. Possession being in that community the entire ten points of the law, Eastaway had come to regard the thirty shillings due to him for the stone as a bad debt; but he had not yet come to regard the mean old widow and her crafty son as brother and sister, although Griffey the preacher made a point of insisting that he should do so. As, however, Griffey regarded his brothers and sisters in practice very much as a man who is digging regards worms, the publican did not feel compelled to conform to his pulpit teachings.

“Don’t ye take her head. Her won’t hurt I,” cried the widow when Willum, under a sudden fit of energy, made as though he would hold the rotten rope, and thereby run the risk of straining himself. “You be getting thin, Willum. You be wasting cruel. You mun eat more butter.”

Willum raised objections. He explained that liquid foods were assimilated with greater ease and possessed far superior flesh-forming qualities. In his opinion the food most admirably adapted to his case was the exhilarating beverage prepared from farinaceous grain by a process of fermentation. “I mun drink more beer,” was his summing up of the matter; and that he might put this laudable design into immediate practice he extorted sixpence from the widow by means of a few churchyard coughs.

“It be getting rough on the moor,” said Ann, butting her grey head into Artful Twoad’s side to make that patient animal more mindful of its duties.

“Wannell were going after his bullocks, but he’s let ’em bide,” replied Willum. “Says ’tis as much as his life is worth to go up on Dartmoor wi’ the frisk blowing.”

“So ’tis. Don’t ye go up, Willum. You’d be pixy-led sure enough and get stugged. ’Tis the first year the Dart have took no one,” she went on, screwing her head round to contemplate the ruddy features of her son.

“Year ain’t over yet,” the scholar reminded her.

“Dart don’t take ’en in winter. Takes ’en in summer. One year a man, next year a maid. ’Tis how it used to be, but the old ways have changed. Took that lady last year, Dart did. Her went in after the little maid that Dart were taking, and Dart took she instead. Her warn’t a maid, ’cause her were married. Bide still, Artful. The old ways have changed. Cows don’t give milk like they used to when I was a maid.”

Seeing that Willum was anxious to join the ballad-singers and fatten upon malted liquors, the mischief-making dame changed her subject, that she might detain her son until the milking was finished, and hinted darkly that the note, which Beatrice had left in her charge for the owner of the cottage by the gorge, might be “discovered” and forwarded to the person who had the most right to it.

“I tore ’en up,” Willum replied, with a malicious grin. “Tore ’en up the day after I shot his old cat. He wouldn’t pay for ’en. Told I to go and work. Let ’en work hisself.”

“Told ye to work,” cried the widow shrilly. “The mucky twoad! Her called ’en ‘dear Jack,’ in the letter,” she went on, relapsing into pure scandal. “Called herself ‘Bill.’ What du it mean, Willum?”

“It ain’t for me to say,” replied the scholar mysteriously. “Her was bad, and he’m bad, sure enough. Her wouldn’t call herself by a man’s name if her warn’t bad.”

“You never caught ’em together,” muttered the strictly moral old woman sorrowfully.

“They got away from I,” her son explained. “I never could find ’em. They went too quick for I. Got into lew places on Dartmoor where I couldn’t find ’em.”

“They was ashamed to be seen,” commented Mrs. Cobbledick, as she rose from her stool. “Honest folk like we stops in the village. Us don’t go on Dartmoor to talk. I milks Artful in the middle of the road, ’cause I ain’t ashamed to be seen. I’m proud of it, Willum. Honest folk be always proud to be seen. They don’t hide themselves on Dartmoor. And when a maid calls herself Bill--well, I wouldn’t let she stop wi’ me if her didn’t pay us well.”

With these virtuous sentiments her son entirely agreed. As he moved away, to spend the evening in the vitiated atmosphere of the bar-room, he summed up the situation with the remark, “Her won’t marry ’en. Her be a lady, and he be only half a gentleman, though he reckons he’m a whole one; and he bain’t a scholar, though he reckons he be; and he’ve only one eye, though he reckons us don’t know it.”

“Her b’ain’t no lady,” cried Mrs. Cobbledick, harsh naturally upon her own sex. “Her be no better than an actress.” This was the unkindest thing the unkindly soul could think of. “Artful be more of a lady than she. Get over, Artful! Come back early, Willum,” she called after the slouching figure. “I’ll have a nice supper for ye, old dear.”

Five minutes later the village street was once more silent and deserted--given over to the geese and fowls--and the three-legged stool occupied the centre of the road until dusk.

That same afternoon Burrough was lying upon his bed. He was not well. He had a feverish headache, and his temperature was slightly above normal. For the last two days he had not been out; he was depressed by the wild and wintry weather, by the knowledge that he could do no work, by the overwhelming sense of his loneliness, and by the fact that he had heard nothing of Beatrice since the fisherman’s visit. Ill in body and worried in mind as he was, he began to wonder whether the experiences of that day had actually occurred. He had been dreaming a great deal lately owing to the disturbed condition of his brain; and sometimes he doubted whether he had been visited by the onion-seller in the first instance, and then by Poltesco, and whether he had walked out that evening and talked with old Y. under the Vicarage wall. His dreams had become a confused mixture of Breton valleys, Cornish cliffs and moors, pilchards and onions, old men with lanterns, screaming women and owls, and behind everything the vision of Beatrice, not quite as he had known her, but a graver, wiser Beatrice, sitting alone in fields of blue-flowered flax--that was the influence of the Breton--her hands clasped before her, and her distracting face always turned slightly away from him. He awoke with struggles, but the dream-picture accompanied his waking hours, until he found it no easy matter to sift the grain of fact from the chaff of imagination.

From his position upon the bed he could command the moorland track, which heaved in the form of an arc right in front of his window. He could see everything that passed; the big horned sheep, the bullocks, and shaggy ponies. He looked continually along that rough bend of narrow road, wishing it was summer, longing to see some familiar creature of his own species start suddenly into view. Nobody had come that way during the two days of his illness--which was mental rather than physical--except the postman bringing him daily newspapers, but no letters, no small envelope bearing the Sennen postmark. He felt sure that Poltesco’s report had been unfavourable. Three weeks had passed since the fisherman’s strange visit, and Beatrice had not spoken. It could only be because she did not like to tell him that his artificial eye would repel her, as the artificial leg of the old fisherman had repelled her years before.

It began to grow dusk. Burrough stretched himself back upon the bed and closed his eyes. No one would come along the moorland track that day. Presently he roused himself to take his temperature. It had gone up slightly.

He went on dreaming. Again the Breton became a prominent figure, almost an obsession. Burrough imagined him planting his onions, harvesting them, stringing them, crossing to Plymouth that he might hawk them in desolate places, and returning with a few shillings’ profit in his pocket to commence the trivial round again. He thought of the man’s wife and children, wondered how they managed to live, where their clothes came from, how often they had a meal; and he envied the simple faith which made the success of the onion crop dependent upon the good-will of their blessed saints. Then he opened his eyes, dreading to fall again into the troubling realm of dreamland. Darkness was coming rapidly across the moor; the track was almost obscured; but his imagination had become so heightened, and the thought of the onion-seller possessed his mind so completely, that he actually saw the Breton, swinging along towards the gorge, with the pole upon his shoulder, and a string of bronzed onions hanging at each end.

“This won’t do at all,” he muttered, turning aside with a shudder.

He looked again. The darkness seemed to have increased marvellously in those few seconds, and it was not at first easy to distinguish the dull grey track between the black gorse-bushes. The apparition had vanished. Then a pony dashed across, its mane and tail streaming wildly, and Burrough heard others in front of his cottage apparently stampeding. There was a moment of silence, and then came a gentle rap-rap upon the door.

Burrough sprang up, his head aching violently, but somehow not at all surprised. He was dressed, so he passed quickly downstairs, wrenched the door open, for the recent rains had caused the woodwork to swell, and was greeted at once with the shy smile and soft “good day” of the Breton, who was not an apparition at all, but the same man who had visited the cottage three weeks before, an hour or so before the coming of Poltesco, and had for some unaccountable reason remained an obsession ever since.

“You were kind to me the last time,” said the man in his own language. “So I have come back to tell you something you may like to know.”

“I am very glad to see you,” Burrough replied heartily. “I am very lonely, and I am not well. Come in and talk to me, and spend the night here if you like.”

“No, no,” said the Breton. “I must walk a long way to-night. I am going home.”

He lowered the pole from his shoulder, and pointed at the two remaining strings of bulbs. “Those are all I have left. I shall sell them as I go to Plymouth.”

“You will leave them here. I will buy them,” said Burrough.

“Thank you,” the Breton replied simply, and he gave a little sigh which was more eloquent than words. He could go back to his wife with money in his pockets, and tell her he had sold all his onions, and had moreover sold them well.

Burrough felt restored. He was tingling with expectation of good news as he brought the Frenchman to his fireside, and the headache left him as though by enchantment. Here was a second mysterious visit. Had the Breton gone through Cornwall in the course of his wanderings; met Beatrice there; told her the story of the lonely seigneur, who had shown him kindness in the tiny chateau upon Dartmoor; received a message for him from her, one of those cryptic messages in which Beatrice so delighted? Had he beneath that rough jersey, very much like the one Poltesco had worn, something from the Cornish princess for the unfortunate and unhappy King of Trevalyor? That fairy-tale, which was not all a fairy-tale, came back vividly to Burrough’s mind. How long ago it seemed! And how different their little kingdom by the river had been then!

“Tell me. Have you been in Cornwall?” he asked.

He was disappointed when the man smiled and shook his head. He had not been west of Plymouth. He had been in the mid-Devon villages, in the low, deeply-wooded swamp land, among the still almost primitive people of Zeal Monachorum and Bow, and the ancient hamlets along the northerly fringe of the moor. That morning he had been in Chagford, and had sold onions to the best known of the Dartmoor guides.

“Have you come from Chagford? Can you swear you come from there?” said Burrough excitedly, mindful of Poltesco’s deceitful story, of which this promised to be a repetition.

The Breton swore by the blessed saints, who had brought him a plentiful harvest of onions, and had enabled him to sell them at excellent profit, and had, moreover, taken his wife and children beneath their protection during his long absence, that he was speaking nothing but the truth. To satisfy Burrough he described the village, and when he had done so with complete accuracy, the young man expressed himself satisfied, and begged him to proceed.

“The guide is a good man. He, too, was kind to me,” said the Breton, puffing at the cigarette which his host had given him. “He told me he had been a great journey to a wild place, to the grande marais which he called Cranmere. He had done a service for a young lady.”

“Yes,” said Burrough, when the man paused. “Go on.”

“The young lady sent him a letter, and told him to take it to Cranmere. There is a box----”

“I understand all that,” the other interrupted. “I know all about the postal system of Cranmere. Give me names. Who sent the letter?”

“I do not know. The guide did not say. But the letter was for you.”

Burrough leaned forward. He placed a hand upon the Breton’s knee, and asked earnestly, “How do you know that?”

“Because the guide told me who that letter was for. He asked me if I had heard of you. I told him I had seen you----”

“How did you know my name?”

“That evening after I left you I went into the village, and I asked for your name. You had been very good to me. I came here cold and unhappy. I had tramped a long way and sold no onions. You brought me in. You gave me tea and tobacco, and let me sit by your fire. When I left you I was happy and warm. I sold my onions well. You had brought me good fortune. You were my patron. So I asked for your name that I might remember it in my prayers.”

Burrough was deeply touched. He took the Breton’s hand and shook it warmly, murmuring a few words of gratitude, not so much for the pious remembrance as for the information he had brought. He was grateful to discover that there were men eager to go out of their way to perform a kindly service in return for a very little kindness. He knew that not a single commoner would have made a dozen steps to bring him the information which this poor alien had brought gladly. He thanked the Breton again and again.

“It is nothing,” said the man simply. “I have not come out of my way. I could see that the guide did not wish you to know about the letter, but he did not ask me to keep silence. I would not interfere between you and the lady. But if I have helped you, and if I have made you happy, I am glad. There is one thing which makes a man happy, whether he is a gentleman or a poor onion-seller, and that is love. Is it not so?”

“You have done for me more than you know,” Burrough told him. “You have made me very happy.”

“Then I am happy too,” said the Breton.

“You came to me before cold and unhappy, and you say I sent you away warm and satisfied. I was miserable and ill when you came just now, and you have made me happy. You have made me well.”

The Breton’s honest eyes gleamed with pleasure, and he laughed as innocently as a child.

“It was the blessed St. Francis,” he said. “I wondered whether you would wish me to come and tell you, or whether you would not desire to know. There were magpies on the moor, and I prayed to St. Francis and said, ‘If one magpie flies across the road I will not go. If two fly across I will.’ And the holy St. Francis heard my prayer and sent two.”