The Virgin in Judgment - Eden Phillpotts

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HOUSE

      A river destined to name the greatest port in the west country, makes humble advent at Plym Head near the Beam of Cater in mid-Dartmoor. Westward under the Harter Tors and south by the Abbot's Way to Plym Steps the streamlet flows; then she gathers volume and melody to enter a land of vanished men. By the lodges of the old stone people and amid monuments lifted in a neolithic age; beside the graves of heroes and under the Hill of Giants, Plym passes and threads the rocky wilderness with silver. And then, suddenly, a modern dwelling lifts beside her--a building of stern aspect and most lonely site. Round about for miles the warrens of Ditsworthy extend, and countless thousands of the coney folk flourish. The district is tunnelled and tracked by them; the characteristics of the heath are altered. For the turf, nibbled close at seasons, shows no death, but spreads in a uniform far-flung cloth of velvet, always close shorn and always green. Its texture may not be rivalled by any pasture known, and so fine has it become under this cropping of centuries that the very grass itself seems to have suffered dwarfing and reduction to a fairy-like tenuity Of blade. Grey lichens are woven through the herbage here and there, and sometimes these silvery filigranes dominate the turf and create fair harmonies with the rosy ling in summer and the red brake-fern of the fall.

      Inflexible Ringmoor approaches Ditsworthy on one side; while beyond it roll the warrens. Shell Top and Pen Beacon are the highest adjacent peaks of the Moor; and through the midst runs Plym with the solitary, stern Warren House lifted upon its northern bank.

      A gnarled but lofty ash has defied the upland weather and grown to maturity above this dwelling. It rises wan in the sombre waste and towers above the squat homestead beneath it. Granite walls run round about, and the metropolis of the rabbits, with natural and artificial burrows, extends to the very confines of the building. A cabbage-plot and a croft or two complete man's work here; while at nearer approach the house, that looked but a spot seen upon such an immense stage, is found to be of considerable size. And this is well, because, at the date of these doings, it was called upon to hold a large family.

      Fifty years ago Elias Bowden reigned at Ditsworthy, and with his wife, nine children, and ten dogs, lived an arduous, prosperous existence on the product of the warrens and other moorland industries. Rabbits were more valuable then than now, and Mr. Bowden received half a crown a couple, where his successors to-day can make but tenpence.

      Elias and his boys and girls did the whole work of Ditsworthy. All had their duties, and even the youngest children--twin sons now aged nine--were taught to make netting and help with the traps. There were six sons and three daughters in the family; and the males were called after mighty captains, because Elias loved valour above all virtues. Such friendships as happen in large families existed among the children, and the closest and keenest of these associations was that between the eldest boy and second girl. David Bowden was eight-and-twenty and Rhoda was twenty-one. A very unusual fraternity obtained between them, and the man's welfare meant far more to his sister than any other mundane interest. After David came Joshua, the master of the trappers, aged twenty-five; and he and the eldest girl, Sophia--a widow who had returned childless and moneyless to her home after two years of married life--were sworn friends. Then, a year younger than Rhoda, appeared Dorcas--a "sport" as Mr. Bowden called her, for she was the only red child he had gotten. The two boys, Napoleon and Wellington, aged thirteen and fifteen, shared the special regard of Dorcas; while the twins were mutually sufficing. One was called Samson and the other Richard--after the first English monarch of that name. Mrs. Bowden had lost three children in infancy, and deplored the fact to this day. When work at the warren pressed in autumn, and the family scarce found leisure to sleep, the mother of this flock might frequently be heard uttering a futile regret.

      "If only my son Drake had been spared," she often cried at moments of stress; and this saying became so familiar among the people round about, that when a man or woman breathed some utterly vain aspiration, another would frequently cap it thus and say, "Ah, if only my son Drake had been spared!"

      A distinguishing characteristic of this family was its taciturnity. The Bowdens wasted few words. Red Dorcas and her father, however, proved an exception to this rule; for she chattered much; and he enjoyed a joke and could make and take one. Of his other girls, Rhoda was most silent. She, too, alone might claim beauty. Sophia was homely. She had a narrow, fowl-like face inherited from her mother; and Dorcas suffered from weak eyes; but Rhoda, in addition to her straight and splendid frame, was well favoured. Her features were large, but very regular; her contours were round without promise of future fatness; her nose and mouth were especially beautiful; but her chin was a little heavy. Rhoda's hair was pale brown and in tone not specially attractive; but she possessed a great wealth of it; her feet and hands were large, yet finely modelled; her eyes had more than enough of virginal chill in their cool and pale grey depths. David somewhat resembled her. He was a clean-cut and sturdy man, standing his sister's height of five feet nine inches, and having a slow-featured face--handsome after a conventional type, yet lacking much expression or charm for the physiognomist. He shared his thoughts with Rhoda, but none else. Neither parent pretended to know much about him, but both understood that it would not be long before he left Ditsworthy. David was learned in sheep and ponies, and he proposed to begin life on his own account as a breeder of them. At present his work was with his father's sheep and cattle, for Elias ran stock on the moor. As for Rhoda, her duties lay with the dogs, and she usually had two or three galloping after her; while often she might be seen carrying squeaking, new-born puppies in her arms, while an anxious bitch, with drooping dugs, gazed up at the precious burden.

      Sober-minded and busy were these folk. Elias had few illusions. In only one minor particular was he superstitious; he hated to see a white rabbit on the warrens. Brown and yellow, grey, and sometimes black, were the inhabitants of the great burrows, but it seldom happened that a white one was observed. Occasionally they appeared, however, and occasionally they were caught. Elias never permitted them to be killed. The master's lapse from rationality in this matter was respected, and if anybody ever saw a white rabbit, the incident was kept secret.

      Enemies the warren had, and foxes took a generous toll; but the hunt recompensed Mr. Bowden for this inconvenience, although it was suspected that his estimates of loss were fanciful. Once the usual fees had been delayed by oversight, and Sir Guy Flamank, M.F.H. and Lord of the Manor, was only reminded of his lapse on meeting Elias at "The Corner House," Sheepstor.

      "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

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