Margery, who secretly believed herself very like her mistress, and dressed as near to Honor as she dared. Mrs. Loveys nodded approval of this statement; Mr. Cramphorn stoutly questioned it.
"What d'you say, Churdles?" asked Pinsent; "or be you tu auld to call home the maids you felt kind-like towards in last century when you was full o' sap?"
"I say 'tis time to go to work," replied Mr. Ash, who never answered a question involving difference of opinion between his friends. "Come, Collins, 'Thirty Acres' to finish 'fore sundown, an' theer's full work 'pon it yet! An' you, Tommy Bates; you fall to sharpenin' the knives for the cutter, this minute!"
He rose, walked with spreading feet and bent back across the road, then dipped down into a great field on the other side. There lay a machine-mower at the edge of the shorn hay, to the nakedness of which still rippled a russet ocean of standing grass. Colourless light passed in great waves over it; the lavender of knautias, together with too-frequent gold of yellow rattle, flashed in it; and the great expanse, viewed remotely, glowed with dull fire of seeding sorrels. Above, danced butterflies; within, the grasshoppers maintained a ceaseless stridulation; and soon the silvery knives were again purring at the cool heart of the undergreen, while ripe grassheads, flowers, sweet clovers, tottered and fell together in shining lines, where Churdles Ash, most just embodiment of Father Time, pursued his way, perched aloft behind two old horses. At each corner the jarring ceased a moment, and the old man's thin voice addressed his steeds; then an angle was turned, and he tinkled on again under the dancing heat. Elsewhere Tommy Bates prepared another knife, and sharpened its shark-like teeth with a file; Pinsent brought up a load of hay from a further field; Cramphorn ascended one rick, and took the harvest from the forks; while Sally and Collins turned the drying grasses at hand, and pursued the business of tossing them with dexterity begotten from long practice. Mr. Libby crept about in the near neighbourhood of the girl, but conscious that Jonah, from the high vantage of the rick, kept sharp eyes upon her, adventured no horseplay, and merely complimented her under his breath upon her splendid arms.
Meanwhile, Christopher Yeoland had seen Honor to her home and so departed.
Bear Down lay in the centre of hay lands immediately beneath the Moor. Above it stretched the heather-clad undulations of Scor Hill, and beneath subtended forest-hidden slopes. The farm itself was approached through a little avenue of sycamores, whose foliage, though it fell and turned to sere, black-spotted death sadly early in most autumns, yet made dimpled play of cool shadow through summer days on the great whitewashed barn beneath it. Then, through a grass-grown yard and the foundations of vanished buildings, one reached a duck-pond set in rhododendrons, and a little garden. The house itself was a patchwork of several generations, and its main fabric stood in shape of a carpenter's mitre, whose inner faces fronted east and south. Each portion had its proper entrance, and that pertaining to the frontage which faced dawn was of the seventeenth century. Here a spacious granite doorway stood, on one side of whose portal there appeared the initials "J.E.", set in a shield and standing for one John Endicott, who had raised this stout pile in the past; while on the other, a date, 1655, indicated the year of its erection. The fabric that looked southwards was of a later period, yet each matched with the other well enough, and time, with the eternal mists of the Moor for his brush, already began to paint modern stone and slate into tune with the harmonious warmth of the more ancient wing. Behind the farmhouse were huddled a dairy, outbuildings, and various erections, that made fair medley of rusty red tile, warm brown wood-stack, and silver thatch. A little lawn rolled away from the granite walls of the farm front, and the parterres, spread snugly in the angle of the building, were set with rough quartz and gay under old-world flowers. Here throve in many-coloured, many-scented joy martagon lilies—pale, purple, and lemon—dark monkshoods, sweet-williams, sweet-sultans, lavender, great purple poppies, snapdragons, pansies, stocks, and flaming marigolds. Along the streamlet, coaxed hither from Scor Hill to feed the farm, grew ferns and willow-herbs, wild geraniums of varied sorts, wood strawberries, orpine, and other country folks. The garden was a happy hunting-ground for little red calves, who wandered bleating about it in the mists of early morning; and for poultry, who laid their eggs in thickets of flowers, scratched up dust-baths in the beds, and hatched out many a clutch of chicks or ducklings under sheltered corners. Against the weathered forehead of its seventeenth-century wing Endicott's displayed an ancient cherry tree that annually shook forth umbels of snowy blossom about the casements, and, later, jewelled these granite walls or decorated the venerable inscription on the lintel with ruby-red fruit seen twinkling through green leaves. Elsewhere ivy and honeysuckle and everlasting pea climbed on a wooden trellis, and in one sheltered nook stood a syringa and a great japonica, whose scarlet brightened the cloud-coloured days of early springtime, whose pomaceous harvest adorned the spot in autumn.
Within doors the farm was fashioned on a generous plan, and contained large, low-ceiled rooms approached through one another by a method most disorderly and ancient. Once, in the heyday of Endicott prosperity, these chambers had been much occupied; now, as became practical farmers, the men—generation by generation—had gradually drifted from the luxuries of many dwelling-rooms. Their wives and daughters indeed struggled against this defection, but masculine obstinacy won its way, until the huge and pleasant kitchen began to be recognised as the house-place also, while other apartments became associated with Sunday, or with such ceremonious events as deaths and marriages might represent.
Almost to the farm walls each year there rippled some hundreds of acres of grass, for no other form of agriculture served the turn so well at that high altitude. Roots and corn they grew, but only to the extent of their own requirements. Of stock Bear Down boasted much too little; hay was the staple commodity, and at this busy season Honor watched the heavens with a farmer's eye, and personally inspected the undergrass, its density and texture, in every field.
A late, cold spring had thrown back the principal harvest somewhat during the year in question; yet it promised well notwithstanding. Mr. Cramphorn alone declared himself disappointed; but seldom had a crop been known to satisfy him, and his sustained discontent throughout the procession of the seasons counted for nothing.
Honor, despite education and reasonable gift of common sense, never wholly pleased her parents. Her father largely lacked humour in his outlook, and he had passed doubly sad: in the knowledge that the name of Endicott must vanish from Bear Down upon the marriage or decease of his daughter, and in the dark fear that one so fond of laughter would never make a farmer. Indeed, his dying hope had been that the weight of supreme control might steady the girl to gravity.
Now, Christopher gone, Honor entered her house, and proceeded into the kitchen. A little separate parlour she had, but particular reasons led to the spending of much time in the larger apartment. Nor was this an ordinary kitchen. You are to imagine, rather, a spacious, lofty, and comfortable dwelling-room; a place snug against the bitter draughts which often bulged up the carpets and screamed in the windows throughout the farm; a chamber warm in winter, in summer cool. Peat fires glowed upon its cavernous and open hearth, and, like Vesta's sacred brands, they never wholly died by night or day. Above the fireplace a granite mantel-shelf supported shining metal-ware—brass candlesticks and tin receptacles polished to splendour; a pair of old stirrups were nailed against the wall, with a rack of guns—mostly antique muzzle-loaders; while elsewhere, suspended in a pattern, there hung a dozen pair of sheep-shears. Oak beams supported the roof, and from them depended hams in canvas bags. At one corner, flanked by two bright warming-pans, stood a lofty clock with a green dial-plate and ornate case of venerable date; and about its feet there ranged cream-pans at this moment, the crust of whose contents matched the apricot tone of kitchen walls and made splendid contrast with the blue-stone floor where sunlight brightened it. The outer doorstone had yielded to innumerable steel-shod boots; it was worn clean through at the centre, and a square of granite had been inserted upon the softer stone. Beside the fire stood a brown leathern screen, and beneath the window, where light, falling through the leaves of many geraniums, was cooled to a pale green, there stretched a settle.
The kitchen was full of sound. A wire-haired fox-terrier pup worried a bit of rabbit-skin under the table, and growled and tumbled
