A fair imposter : a story of Ermoor

Contents

CHAP. f*CB

I. STOKE EDITH . . . . ■ I

II. MISS carmichael's WOOER ... 10

Chapter I

* Next came the moor-land, The moor-land, the moor-land— Next came the moor-land, It stretched for many a mile.'

Spring begins late on Exmoor — on the 'Old Forest' pure and simple, not the sunny slopes and deep-wooded combes that run down to the sea — and autumn sets in early.

It is grey and misty on the hill tops for six months in the year, and for the other six it is windy and rainy, with now and then a splendid exception. There are days when the roof of mist that has hung for weeks over the moor lifts, and the dense white wall of fog melts away, and the horizon widens, and the colour of the heavens above is blue, and the grass on the hills is green, and the encircling arm of the sea is seen glittering below like a sea of glass in the sunshine.

Stoke Edith, a moorland village perched at the head of one of the deep-wooded combes that intersect the purple slopes of Exmoor, enjoyed these special privileges of climate. In its sheltered position, with the hills rising above it, sheltering it from the south and the west, it did

A not get much sun at any time in the year. For some months in winter it did not get any ; but it made up for it in wind and rain and mist, and when there was a driving sleet coming in from the channel, or a wild northeaster tearing across the moor, it got the full benefit of it.

No one could understand why the village had been perched in that desolate spot. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say why a church had been planted there. The church was at least two centuries older than the village ; the village had grown up around it.

It stood on the windy hill, in the midst of a bare rolling waste of moorland, an ugly grey stone building with no pretensions to architecture ; and a neglected graveyard rose up the steep hillside behind it. The low moss-grown wall that had once separated the yard from the surrounding moor had crumbled away in places, and the heather and the whortleberry had climbed over it and claimed it for their own. It was hard to say where the churchyard left off and the moor began.

The wild open moorland that rose above Stoke Edith was dreary enough all the year round. The rolling slopes and wide plains of purple and grey were barren and bare, a treeless waste, the haunt of the bittern and the red deer. There were no tors to break the dreary monotony of the landscape, and save in some sheltered combe, no whin bushes or gorse, only wide stretches of rank grass and heather and bracken as far as the eye could reach.

The village of Stoke Edith lay in a sheltered position in a dip of the hills. The village consisted of a long, straggling street ; most of the houses were built of dull grey stone like the church, or with thick cob walls, deeply thatched to stand the weather; and they were inhabited by labouring folk who worked on the farms in the valley below.

It was an unpicturesque spot, but with a certain rugged beauty of its own. All around it lay the dreary moor, barren uplands exposed to scorching sun and drenching rain, and fierce blasts of wind that came driving in from the sea. It lay off the highway, so that few strangers ever found their way to Stoke. A cross road beyond the church led across the hills and joined the coach road to Barnstaple, three miles distant, and a lower road led down to the shore. A steep, precipitous path cut in the side of the combe, a villainous road at any time, but in spring and autumn, when the moorland streams were swollen with heavy rains, a roaring torrent. No one could understand why the path through the combe had been cut. It had been cut ages ago, when smuggling was rife among the dwellers on Exmoor, when Stoke Edith was a village of smugglers. The sea was handy, and there was little fear of detection. Perhaps the path had been cut for their convenience.

It was seldom used now. There is no smuggling done at the present day, everybody knows. It no longer pays; or people have grown more virtuous. However this may be, the road through Gallantry Combe was no longer used ; it was choked with a tangle of briar, and the ' Hacketty path ' was overgrown with grass and heather. The moor had claimed it for her own.

The rude sons of the soil devoted themselves to more legitimate pursuits ; but fearsome stories were still rife of the old smuggling days. A smuggler, or pirate, or hill robber, they were not clear which, was buried at the cross road above the village; the paving stones that covered his last resting-place were still visib!e, and a blasted oak near which his gibbet had been set up still upraised a gaunt, threatening arm to the wild sky. Superstition still lingered among the hills, and no one would pass the uncanny spot after nightfall. It was rumoured that the poor gibbeted wretch was restless; that no stake, driven however deeply through his body, could keep him down, could prevent his taking an evening walk across the moor when the moon was low.

The countryside was alive with legends of Black Willy. They were only legends. No one had actually met him on his midnight rounds. The villagers talked of him with hushed voices when they gathered round the ingle nook, and recounted ghostly tales of panting packhorses, and a phantom horde of smugglers who might be heard urging on their laden beasts with fearsome oaths, while decent folk were trembling in their beds. They had not been heard for some years past now ; or people had ceased to listen for them. The coastguard had relaxed their vigilance ; excise officers no longer wasted their time in spying about the lonely moorland roads. They had withdrawn themselves from Stoke Edith, when their occupation was gone.

The village was eight miles from the nearest town, but the eight miles that led up Winniford Hill, and across the Chains to Stoke Edith, in the sleets and snows and rains and mists peculiar to that favoured locality, everybody allowed were the worst eight miles in the county.

The Rectory adjoined the church ; a gate from the Rectory garden led into the yard. The house, like the church, was built of grey stone, and, like it, was exposed to the elements on all sides. When the wind blew at Sloke it blew unmistakably, and the rain when it fell hit hard. The stunted firs and the gaunt, ragged thorns stretching their bare limbs upward to the angry sky all sloped one way, as if cowering from the winds that came tearing up the combe from the sea.

Windwhistle was the significant local name for the crossway on the moor that lay beyond the church and the rectory gate, and it fitly described the tumult that raged round the house in stormy weather.

The house was a bare, cheerless stone building, more resembling a farmhouse than a rectory. It had been built low, and the windows were deeply set in the wall, and a starved hedge of thorn divided it from the road. The place had a forlorn, neglected look. The slates that had fallen from the roof lay buried beneath growths of grass and nettle on the path ; the walls were mottled with lichen, and moss was growing on the roof. Some of the window shutters had fallen away from their hinges, and the woodwork was cracking with exposure and want of paint. No repairs had been done to the place for years. The present Rector had held the living over forty years, and little or nothing had been done to it in his time. There had never been any money to spare for repairs ; or, for the matter of that, for anything else. When the living fell in, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners would bring in a fine bill for dilapidations, and — and there would be no one left to pay it but an orphan girl with a library of musty old books and a few sticks of furniture for her dowry.

The Reverend Michael Carmichael had come to the living some forty years ago, and he had brought his bride with him. She had left him, after a few years' isolation on this dreary wild, with a little motherless lad.

He had brought up the child according to his lights ; loving him passionately, denying him nothing, and spoiling him according to the most approved fashion. When the boy grew up and disappointed him, he was unreasonable enough to blame Providence. After a stormy university career, Frank Carmichael left Oxford without a degree. His college debts nearly ruined his father. They were not paid off yet. A portion of his income was still mortgaged to an Oxford money-lender, though Frank had been dead to him for over eighteen years. " Father and son had quarrelled soon after that Oxford episode, and Frank had gone abroad. He showed his gratitude for the love and care that had been bestowed upon him in the usual way. From the day he quitted the paternal threshold until the time our story opens, nothing had been heard of him.

During those eighteen years a little baby sister, halfsister, had been born and grown to womanhood. The Rector, tired of his lonely life, had married his housekeeper, a rosy-cheeked dairymaid, and Celia Carmichael was the offspring of the marriage. It was rumoured that father and son had both been aspirants for the dairymaid's hand ; and that, yielding to the persuasions of her friends, she had accepted the father. It was from th:s unhappy state of things the quarrels had arisen, and Frank Carmichael had been banished from his home.

Poor Martha had not long enjoyed her distinction as the Rector's wife. She had died when Celia was three years old, and Mr Carmichael had to bring up this child of his age as he had brought up twenty years ago the child of his youth. He thanked heaven every day of his life that it was a girl. Girls, he was wont to declare, were easier to manage than boys, much easier — but he did not know. He had got to find out. At seventy, or thereabouts, things are found out slowly j they do not rush upon the mind.

Celia Carmichael had grown up as the flowers grow up, fed by the air and sunshine and dew. She had not been overburdened with education. She had had the run of the Rector's library ever since she could read, and she had a box full of yellow backs, romances and novels hidden away upstairs in the attic. They had belonged to her half-brother Frank. They had been packed off up there out of sight when he had gone away, and Celia, when turning over some lumber one day, unearthed them.

She did not tell anybody of her find ; she read them — she devoured them — in secret, and she built up all sorts of romances of her own out of them. She could not have gone on living in that lonely place without something for her young fancy to feast upon. A girl is only a girl — she will be an old woman by-and-by. If she has not a lover of her own, she is never tired of hearing about "other girls' lovers.

It was Celia's fault that she had not had a lover ; a sturdy yeoman who farmed the best land in the Combe was always hanging about Windwhistle for a sight of her bright eyes. But the Rector's daughter had no mind for an uncouth yeoman. She looked higher. She remembered she was a Carmichael. She forgot all about the dairymaid her father had lifted, for so brief a time, out of her humble sphere. She remembered only that she was a Carmichael.

The Rector had no patience with his daughter's folly. He had no ambitions himself. He was a wear)', disappointed man ; at seventy he was past making plans. When he died, Celia would be unprovided for. He would have welcomed with joy any honest farmer who sought her for his wife. It would be better for her to marry a farmer than to be thrown on the world with nothing but the dilapidations for her dowry. She would only be going back to her proper sphere. She had no right to look higher.

But Celia thought otherwise.

She was more a Carmichael than she was a Lake. Her peasant mother had given her her dairymaid charms of roses and cream, her full lips and rounded chin. It was rounded now, but it might grow double by-and-by, like her old grandmother's, Nance Lake up at Wytchanger; it might amplify, fold over fold, as the years went by, and her pretty red lips might grow heavy and hard. Beyond this, and her dark hair, of true Stoke Edith darkness, and her splendid constitution, which she had inherited from her peasant forefathers, Celia was a Carmichael.

She had the grey blue eyes and the short high nose of the Carmichaels, and the slight upward curl of her upper lip, that gained her the reputation of being proud and scornful among the dwellers in the Combe. People forgot her mother was a dairymaid when Celia shot fierce darts of scorn at them beneath her dark lashes, and curled her beautiful, Juno-like lips ; she might have been a princess in disguise for the airs she gave herself. More than once, when her yeoman lover had been on the eve of declaring his passion, she had stopped him in her scornful way, and he had not found courage to approach the subject again.

' Highty tighty ! ' old Janet exclaimed when she heard how her young mistress had sent her lover away — Janet had acted as housekeeper at the rectory ever since Celia was born — 'bless the child, what does she expect? Does she think a Prince '11 come courting to Stoke?' — she pronounced it ' Stock.'

The Combe had heard somehow that Nathaniel Snow had been rejected by Celia — a man of substance who could have bought the Rector up a dozen times over, and paid that long bill for the dilapidations without feeling it. Old Janet had heard it among the rest, and was loud in her lamentation at the girl's follly. Celia's mother had been a youthful companion of Janet's; they had been playmates together; they had served the same master when they first went out to service, old Nat Snow at Letcombe, the father of Celia's lover. If anyone had a right to speak, to advise the wilful girl for her good, it was old Janet.

Celia tossed her head at the old woman's rebuke, and laughed softly. ' I daresay a Prince '11 come some day,' she said. • I don't see why he shouldn't come to Stoke. I hope you'll put on a clean apron when he comes, Janet, and pull down your sleeves ; you couldn't wait upon a Prince with your sleeves tucked up.'

Janet went away in a huff, and did not offer any more advice. Celia had touched her in a tender spot. It was one of her unconventional ways to serve her master's meals with her sleeves rolled up. She had served them so long in this fashion without remark, that when Celia returned from school — with the thin veneer of polish that a couple of years at a cheap boarding-school had given her — and ventured to remonstrate, the old woman had taken offence. She had threatened to leave if Celia referred to the subject again — and she had rolled up her sleeves an inch higher.

CHAPTER II MISS carmichael's wooer

• Ah, western winds and waters mild I '

It really seemed as if Celia's jesting words were prophetic. A Princess, if not a Prince, was really coming to Stoke.

A tenant had been found at last for Gallantry Bower ; and the tenant was a Princess. Gallantry Bower, a fine old country mansion overlooking the Severn Sea, some three miles down the Combe that bore its name, had been empty almost as long as Celia could remember. When the late owner died, the place had been shut up. He had lived a wild life and died in debt; and his successor, unable to keep up the place, had shut it up and gone abroad. It had been to let so many years, but no one had been found willing to take it. There was nothing but its lovely situation and its romantic name to recommend it. Hidden away among pine woods, on the slope of a steep, fern-clad hill, with the sea breaking below, and shut out three months in the year from the sight and warmth of the sun, it was not a cheerful residence. It was difficult, too, of approach ; ten miles from the nearest railway station, about the worst ten miles that could be found in Devon. It was no wonder it had remained empty so long.

But now a Princess was coming. Perhaps she desired 10

MISS CARMICIIAEL'S WOOER II solitude. There were all sorts of rumours rife in Stoke respecting the new tenant of Gallantry Bower. She was not an English Princess ; she bore a foreign name — the Princess Tortona Bordone. It was rumoured that the lady was young and beautiful, and of immense wealth, and that she was bringing a retinue of servants with her. But report was silent about the Prince.

Even the Rector of Stoke, who did not take much interest in the concerns of his parish, began to speculate about his new parishioner. The Princess Bordone was a parishioner, though the Bower was three miles away. The owner of the place was the Squire of Stoke Edith, and owned all the land about. There was a good deal of land — the bare, bleak hills above, and the wooded valleys sloping down to the sea, and the foreshore between the Foreland and Gallantry. Though the acreage was of considerable extent, the rental was small. So much of the land was unproductive — barren uplands yielding scanty harvest in return for daily toil, and pine woods, and coppice, and brake-clad hills, with steep, precipitous cliffs seaward, and a foreshore that cost more to keep in repair than the rights were worth.

It was a wild, pebbly foreshore, washed by the western tides. A landing-stage had been built here years ago, in the late Squire's time, for the convenience of reaching a yacht he kept in the shelter of the bay, but it had long since fallen to decay, and the yacht had gone to pieces on the rocks.

The cliffs rose steep and precipitous for miles along the coast, but a road had been cut in the cliff that led from the house down to the shore. In the late owner's time this path had been guarded by iron gates, which long ago had rusted off their hinges.

It was this private path to the sea that the people of Stoke Edith had used while the house was tenantless; it had superseded the old steep Hacketty way through "

the Combe. It was reached from the village above by a gently sloping road winding through the pine woods, and passing in front of the house itself. There had been no one to stop the people from using it ; they had used it so long they had begun to consider it a right.

The Rector was thinking of this when he talked the matter over with his churchwarden.

'What will they do, Nat, about the road through the Parks? I suppose it'll be closed now? The Princess would hardly like people passing through her grounds,' he remarked, when Celia's suitor, who was churchwarden of the parish, happened to look in on the day of the arrival of the new tenant of the Bower. Celia had come into the room while they were talking. She did not join in the conversation j she sat on the wide window seat, looking out of the open lattice. She had brought a book in her hand, but she was not reading. She was dying to hear about the newcomers. She would have gone out of the loom when she saw Nat Snow with her father if curiosity had not kept her back. She hated the big, burly, red-faced yeoman ; the sight of his black whiskers, and his great purple throat, always made her sick, she declared ; but she was dying to hear about the Prince.

' Ye-es,' he answered slowly, ' it's bound to be closed ; but I don't know that Stoke '11 be any the worse off. There are some hereabouts who are too fond of moonlighting in Gallantry woods. It's just as well that the road should be shut up before anything happens.'

He looked over at the girl on the window seat as he spoke, and the Rector frowned. He saw the look, and he mistook the meaning. He knew exactly what that allusion to moonlighting in Gallantry woods meant, and the nature of the evil that might be averted. The Stoke Edith men who were likely to suffer if their nocturnal rambles were interrupted were the kinsmen

MISS CARMICHAEL'S WOOER 1 3 of the girl in the window seat. His most troublesome parishioners were the members of his late wife's family. He could not ignore them. Everybody in the place knew that Tom Lake, the poaching vagabond who sat drinking all day in the village inn, and had more than once seen the inside of the county gaol, was Celia Carmichael's first cousin.

But the churchwarden was not thinking of Tom Lake the poacher; he was thinking of the girl herself. He was thinking deep down in his common-place heart that if Celia would look over his coarse face and his rough ways, he would spend his life in making her feappy. He would keep her as a lady, and give her the* best that money could buy.

To do him justice, he never once thought of her vagabond cousin. Nat Snow did not do himself justice in that mental summary of his demerits. His face was by no means coarse. It was reddened and tanned by sun and wind, and roughened by exposure to all sorts of weather, but it was a handsome face withal, wholesome and ruddy, with the strongly-marked features and dark hair and beard of the Stoke Edith folk — a well-set-up yeoman, with big broad shoulders and big muscular limbs — big everywhere ; a handsome, brawny giant in the prime of splendid manhood. Perhaps this was why Celia hated him— he was so horribly big.

'I don't see why the Gallantry path should be shut up,' Celia said warmly from her window seat. ' How are we to get to the shore if it is shut up ? '

'There's Hacketty way,' said the churchwarden, 'but I don't think it's quite the path for your tender feet, Miss Celia ; we must see about having it cleared.'

' My feet are not particularly tender,' said Celia, shortly, and she turned her head away and_ looked at the spreading landscape outside the lattice.

' I hear,' said the parson, filling up a pewter cup from a jug of ale on the table, and lifting it to his lips before he finished the sentence. He did not put it down again until it was empty; he could see when it was empty when he raised it to the light — the cup had a glass bottom ; it was an old college cup. ' I hear that the — ah — Princess is a Catholic, and that her household are all Catholics ; she won't have a Protestant about her.'

'She a furriner, I suppose,' said the other, following the parson's example, and tossing off his pewter. He glanced at the girl fn tfie window seat before he tossed it off; he made sure that she was looking the other way. ' I've no faith in they furriners.'

'SheVan Austrian, I believe,' said the parson. 'I looked out the name, Bordone. There's a place called Turaga Bordone. I daresay it's a little principality about half as big as one of our English counties. I don't think the title of a foreign Princess counts for much. I'd rather Geoffrey Bluett came back to his own.'

'I heard he was coming back if this foreign woman hadn't made an offer for the place, that all arrangements were made. It was time he came back; the whole place is falling to pieces. He has been away a dozen years, I should say.'

' He has not been away eleven years, not till August ; I remember his going away quite well,' said Celia from her window seat. She had been listening to the conversation, she had not lost one word of it ; and she had heard the clinking of the pewters. She had the sharp ears and the keen wits of the Stoke Edith folk, with all her Carmichael haughtiness.

'You have a good memory, Miss Celia. If I'm not making too bold, I'd like to know how you fix the date for August," said the churchwarden, emboldened by that cup of amber ale.

' Oh, that's easy enough to fix. Geoffrey Bluett gave

MISS CARMICHAEL'S WOOER 1 5

me a dog when he went away — his own little pet terrier ; and a week after — I only had it a week — it was killed. A horrid farm waggon went over it and killed it.'

A look of conscious guilt overspread the churchwarden's florid face. It was his waggon that had killed Celia's puppy.

'I'm very sorry,' he stammered. After the lapse of nearly a dozen years, he was still sorry for that sad day's work.

' Yes, of course you were sorry ! but that didn't bring poor Ponto back. I don't know what use it is people being sorry when a thing's done. I'm never sorry. I was sorry then ; I remember I cried for a week. I buried him in the churchyard, and put a stone over him. I scratched the date on the stone.'

' In the churchyard ? ' said the parson. He did not speak in a very shocked voice.

' Well, just outside ; you know where, papa, where the stones have fallen down. I'm sure I don't know whether it's in the yard or not.'

'And I'm sure / don't know !' said the parson, with a laugh, and he refilled his pewter. He did not add that he did not care ; but the churchwarden coughed, and the girl looked out of the window.

'Well, say it's eleven years,' said the farmer, breaking an awkward silence ; ' that's a pretty long time to let a place go. To my certain knowledge there's not been a thing done to it all the time, not a gate hung or a fence mended. It's been going to pieces year after year. I hear this — er — Princess has taken it on a lease, a repairing lease, and that an army of workpeople are coming down to put it in order. She'll have her work cut out when she once begins.'

' Serve her right ! What does she want coming down here upsetting everybody ? A papist, too ! I can't think what can have brought her here!' Celia said warmly.

i6

She had caught that remark about the Squire coming back.

' The hunting, I'm told ; she's brought down a dozen horses with her, all thoroughbreds. There has never been anything seen like them in these parts, from all accounts.'

' The hunting ! Why doesn't she hunt in her own country ? '

'Because she's a wise woman, my girl. She knows, or she's been told, there's no hunting in the world like stag hunting on Exmoor,' the Rector said thickly. •We'll show her ladyship some sport; a three-hour forest run, and a kill in the Oare Water '11 find out what her thoroughbreds are made of. I'd back my Damsel against 'em all ! I mind the time — '

But Celia did not stay to hear. Her father would go maundering on when he once got on his favourite topic; he would not know when to stop. He had twice filled that pewter, and his hand was straying over to the jug, that had just been refilled. Celia got up from the window seat with a swift glance of disgust at the table where the men were drinking, and passed out of the room.

She was sick and angry and impatient. She could not bear to see the old man drinking there; the spectacle filled her with shame and loathing. And she hated Nat Snow for encouraging him. He was his churchwarden; he ought to have kept him back; he ought not to sit there drinking with him.

Nat came out presently. He did not stay long with the parson when she had gone away. He left the old man to his cups, and he came out into the garden, where Celia was walking bareheaded among her roses. They were a poor sort of roses ; old-fashioned monthlies and common cabbage roses. A hardy 'glory' sprawled in a forlorn, neglected fashion over the garden wall,