Arminell, a social romance - Baring-Gould Sabine

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of view. Then we talk of the whole class as supremely barbarous, grotesque and separate from us by leagues of intervening culture, a class that puts verdigris kerchiefs on and magenta bows, as our forefathers before Christ painted their bodies with woad. And we argue—these people have no human instincts, no tender emotions, no delicate feelings—how can they have, wearing as they do green ties and magenta bows? Have the creatures eyes? Surely not when they wear such unæsthetic colours. Hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Not with emerald-green kerchiefs. If we prick them they do not bleed. If we tickle they cannot laugh. If we poison them, ​they will not die. If we wrong them—bah! They wear magenta bows and are ridiculous.

      It needs, may be, a sod taken from their soil, a little dust from their hearth shaken over our heads to open our eyes to see that they have like passions and weaknesses with ourselves. Arminell, without speaking, turned to Samuel, and looked at him.

      What was there in this poor creature to deserve such faithful love? He was a ruin, and not the ruin of a noble edifice, but of a commonplace man. There was no beauty in him, no indication of talent in his face, no power in the moulding of his brow. He looked absurd in his short, shabby, patched, velveteen coat, his breeches and gaiters on distorted limbs. His attitudes with the ill-set thigh were ungainly. And yet—this handsome woman had given up her life to him.

      "He don't seem much to you, perhaps, miss," said Joan, who eagerly scanned Arminell's face, and with the instinctive jealousy of love discovered her thoughts. "But, miss, what saith the Scripture? Look not on his countenance or on the height of his stature. You should ha' seen Samuel before his accidents. Then he was of a ruddy countenance, and goodly to look on. I always see him as he was."

      She still searched Arminell's face for token of admiration.

      "Lord, miss! tastes differ. Some like apples and others like onions. For my part, I do like a hand wi' two fingers on it, it is uncommon, it is properly out o' the way as hands are. And then, miss, Samuel do seem to me to ha' laid hold of eternity wi' two fingers and a thumb, having sent them on before him, and that is more than can be said of most of us poor sinners here below."

      She still studied the girl's countenance, and Arminell controlled its expression.

      "Then," Joan continued, "as for his walk, it is lovely. ​It is ever dancing as he goes along the road. It makes one feel young—a girl—to have his arm, there be such a lightness and swing in his walk."

      "But—" Arminell began, then hesitated, and then went on with a rush, "are you not discontented, impatient, miserable?"

      "Why so, miss?"

      "Because you have loved him so long and see no chance of getting him."

      "No, miss. If I get him here, I get him to give me only half a hand; if I get him in the other world, I get his whole hand, thumb and two first fingers as well. I be content either way."

      Chapter 9: TANDEM.

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      CHAPTER IX.

       Table of Contents

       TANDEM.

      On the edge of a moor, at the extreme limits to which man had driven back savage nature, where were the last boundary walls of stone piled up without compacting mortar, was a farm-house called Court. It stood at the point where granite broke out from under the schistose beds, and where it had tilted these beds up into a perpendicular position. A vast period of time had passed since the molten granite thus broke forth, and the ragged edges of upturned rock had been weathered down to mere stumps, but on these stumps sat the homestead and farm-house of Court, with a growth of noble sycamores about it.

      A stream brawling down from the moor swept half round this mass of old worn-down rock, a couple of granite slabs had been cast across it, meeting in the middle on a rude pier, and this served as a foot-bridge, but carts and waggons traversed the water, and scrambled up a steep ascent cut out of the rock by wheels and winter runs.

      If Court had been a corn-growing farm, this would have been inconvenient, but this Court was not. It was a sheep and cattle rearing farm, and on it was tilled nothing but a little rye and some turnips.

      In an elastic air fresh from the ocean, at a height of a thousand feet above the sea, the lungs find delight in each inhalation, and the pulses leap with perennial youth. ​Pecuniary embarrassments cease to oppress, and the political outlook appears less threatening.

      At the bottom of yonder valley three hundred feet above the sea-level, where a steamy, dreamy atmosphere hangs, we see that England is going to the dogs; the end of English commerce, agriculture, the aristocracy, the church, the crown, the constitution is at hand—in a word, the Saturday Review expresses exactly our temper of mind. A little way up the hill, we think the recuperative power of the British nation is so great, the national vigour is so enormous, that it will shake itself free of its troubles in time—in time, and with patience—in a word, we begin to see through the spectacles of the Spectator. But when we have our foot on the heather, and scent the incense of the gorse, and hear the stonechat and the pewit, and see the flicker of the silver cotton grass about us, why then—we feel we are in the best of worlds, and in the best little nook of the whole world, and that all mankind is pushing its way, like us, upward with a scramble over obstacles; it will, like us, in the end breathe the same sparkling air, and enjoy the same extensive outlook, and be like us without care.

      From Court what a wonderful prospect was commanded. The Angel in the Apocalypse stood with one foot on the land, and the other in the sea; so Court stood half in the rich cultivated garden of the Western Paradise, and half in the utter desolation of treeless moor. To south and west lay woodlands and pasture, parks and villages, tufts of Scotch fir, cedars, oak and elm and beech, with rooks cawing and doves cooing, and the woodpecker hooting among them; to the east and north lay the haunt of the blackcock and hawk and wimbrel, and tracts of heather flushed with flower, and gorse ablaze with sun, and aromatic as incense.

      Far away in the north-west, when the sun went down, he ​set in a quiver of gold-leaf, he doubled his size, and expired like the phœnix in flame. That was when he touched the ocean, and in touching revealed it.

      What a mystery there is in distance? How the soul is drawn forth, step by step, over each rolling hill, down each half-disclosed valley. How it wonders at every sparkle where a far-off window reflects the sun, and admires where the mists gather in wooded clefts, and asks, what is that? when the sun discloses white specks far away on slopes of turquoise; as the Israelites asked when they saw the Manna. How a curling pillar of smoke stirs up interest, rising high and dispersing slowly. We watch and are filled with conjecture.

      As the afternoon sun shines sideways on the moor-cheek, it discloses what it did not reveal at other times, the faintest trace of furrows where are no fields now, where no plough has run since the memory of man. Was corn once grown there? At that bleak altitude? Did the climate permit of its ripening at one time? No one can answer these questions, but how else account for these furrows occasionally, only under certain aspects discernible? And to Court there was a corn-chamber, a sort of tower standing on a solid basement of stone six feet above the ground, a square construction all of granite blocks, floored within with granite, and with a conical slated roof, and a flight of stone steps leading up to it. A tower—a fortress built against rats, who will gnaw through oak and even lead, but must break their teeth against granite.

      The corn-chamber was overhung by a sycamore, and at its side a rown, or "witch-bean" as it is locally called—a mountain ash—had taken root, flourished and ripened its crimson berries.

      On the lowest step but one of the flight leading to the corn-chamber sat Thomasine Kite, the daughter of the white-witch, Patience. The evening was still and balmy in ​the valleys; here

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