tion>Eden Phillpotts
Sons of the Morning
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4064066096809
Table of Contents
"
BOOK I.
SONS OF THE MORNING
CHAPTER I.
THE BEECH TREE
Above unnumbered sisters she arose, an object noteworthy even amid these aisles, where, spun from the survival of the best endowed, fabrics of ancient forest enveloped the foot-hills of the Moor and belted heather and granite with great woodlands. A dapple of dull silver marked her ascension and glimmered upwards through the masses of her robe. From noble girth of moss-grown trunk she sprang; her high top was full of a silky summer song; while sunbeams played in the meshes of her million leaves and cascades of amber light, born from her ripening harvest, streamed over the dark foliage. She displayed in unusual perfection the special symmetry of her kind, stood higher than her neighbours, and fretted the blue above with pinnacles of feathering arborescence, whose last, subtle expression, at that altitude, escaped the eye. Her midmost boughs tended from the horizontal gradually downward, and the nether branches, rippling to earth like a waterfall, fashioned a bower or music-making dome of translucent green around about the bole. Within this arbour the roots twisted down their dragon shapes into the dark, sweet-scented earth, and fortified the beech against all winds that blew. So she stood, queen of the wold, a creation loved by song-birds, a treasure-house for squirrels, pigeons, and the pheasants that, at autumn-time, strutted gorgeous in the copper lake of her fallen leaves. Beneath her now, cool and moist in twilight of shadows, grew delicate melampyre that brought light into the herbage, stood the wan seed-vessels of bygone bluebells, and trailed grasses, with other soft, etiolate things that had never known direct sunshine. The pale trunk was delicately wrought with paler lichens, splashed and circled upon its bark; while mossy boulders of granite, lying scattered within the circumference of the tree's vastness, completed this modest harmony of grey and silver, lemon and shadowed green.
Woodland roads wound at hand, and in a noontide hour of late July these paths were barred and flooded with golden sunlight; were flanked by trunks of gnarled oak and wrinkled ash; were bridged with the far-flung limbs of the former, whereon trailed and intertwined festoons of ivy and wreaths of polypody fern that mingled with tree mosses. Through this spacious temple, seen under avenues of many a pillar, sparkled falling water where the sisters Teign, their separate journeys done, murmured together and blended their crystal at an ancient bridge. Henceforth these two streams sweep under hanging woods of larch and pine, by meadows, orchards, homesteads, through the purple throat of oak and fir-crowned Fingle, and so onwards, by way of open vales, to their sad-coloured, heron-haunted estuary. Hand in hand they run, here moving a mill-wheel, there bringing sweet water to a hamlet, and ever singing their changeful song. The melody of them deepens, from its first baby prattle at springs in Sittaford's stony bosom, to the riotous roar of waterfalls below; lulls, from the music reverberated in stony gorges, to a whisper amid unechoing valleys and most placid pasture lands. Finally salt winds with solemn message from the sea welcome Teign; and mewing of gulls on shining mud-flats; and the race and ripple of the tides, who joyfully bring the little stream to that great Lover of all rivers.
Leading from dingles on the eastern bank to interspaces of more open glades beside the great beech tree, a bridge, fashioned of oak saplings, still clothed with bark and ash-coloured lichen, crossed the river; and, at this sunlit moment, a woman stood upon it and a man shook the frail structure from his standpoint on the bank. His purpose was to alarm the maiden if he could; but she only laughed, and hastened across sure-footed.
Honor Endicott was two-and-twenty; of tall, slight habit, and a healthy, brown complexion. Her face betrayed some confusion of characteristics. In repose the general effect suggested melancholy; but this expression vanished when her eyes were lighted with laughter or her lips parted in a smile. Then the sad cast of her features wholly disappeared and, as the sky wakes at dawn or sunset, Honor was transfigured. A beholder carried from her not the impression of her more usual reserve, but the face, with its rather untidy black hair, pale brown eyes and bright lips all smile-lighted. Happily she laughed often, from no vain consciousness of her peculiar charm, but because she possessed the gift of a humorous disposition, in the modern acceptation of that word, and found the world, albeit lonely and not devoid of grey days, yet well stored with matter for laughter. This sense, than which heredity—that godmother, half fairy, half fiend—can bestow no better treasure on man or woman, kept the world sweet for Honor. Her humour was no paltry idiosyncrasy of mere joy in the ridiculous; but rather a quality that helped her to taking of large views, that lent a sense of just proportion in affairs, that tended to tolerance and leavened with charity her outlook on all things. It also served to brighten and better an existence, not indeed unhappy, but unusually lonely for a young woman.
She held up a pretty brown hand, and shook her head at the man.
"Christopher," she said, "supposing that your bridge had broken, and I had tumbled in?"
"I should have saved you, without doubt—a delicious experience."
"For you. What a subject for a romance: you, the last of your line; I, the last of mine, being swept to death by old Teign! And my farm would be desolate, and your woods and hills and ancestral hall, all bundled wretchedly into Chancery, or some such horrid place."
"On the contrary, I save you; I rescue you at great personal peril, and we join hands and lands, and live happily ever afterwards."
"There's a heron! You frightened him with your folly."
The great bird ascended from a shallow, trailed his thin legs over the water, then gathered speed, rose clear, steered with heavy and laborious flight amid overhanging boughs, and sought a lonelier hunting-ground elsewhere.
"Brutes! I always walk right on top of them when I'm not carrying my gun. I hate to think of the number of young trout they eat."
"Plenty left to grow big and be caught all the same," said Honor, as she peeped down to watch grey shadows, that sped up stream at sight of her and set little sandclouds rising under the clear water where they flashed away.
"Nothing like a Devon trout in the world, I think," she added. "I caught a half-pounder in the Wallabrook last night, just at the end of the evening rise, with that fly, like a 'woolly bear' caterpillar,
