“Here’s for your labour, lad.”
This made a difference in the young man’s estimate
of the position.
“Yes, Sir John. Thank ’ee.
Anything else I can do for ’ee, Sir John?”
“Tell ’em at hwome that I should like
for supper,—well, lamb’s fry if they
can get it; and if they can’t, black-pot; and
if they can’t get that, well chitterlings will
do.”
“Yes, Sir John.”
The boy took up the basket, and as he set out the
notes of a brass band were heard from the direction
of the village.
“What’s that?” said Durbeyfield.
“Not on account o’ I?”
“‘Tis the women’s club-walking,
Sir John. Why, your da’ter is one o’
the members.”
“To be sure—I’d quite forgot
it in my thoughts of greater things! Well, vamp
on to Marlott, will ye, and order that carriage, and
maybe I’ll drive round and inspect the club.”
The lad departed, and Durbeyfield lay waiting on the
grass and daisies in the evening sun. Not a
soul passed that way for a long while, and the faint
notes of the band were the only human sounds audible
within the rim of blue hills.
The village of Marlott lay amid the north-eastern
undulations of the beautiful Vale of Blakemore, or
Blackmoor, aforesaid, an engirdled and secluded region,
for the most part untrodden as yet by tourist or landscape-painter,
though within a four hours’ journey from London.
It is a vale whose acquaintance is best made by viewing
it from the summits of the hills that surround it—except
perhaps during the droughts of summer. An unguided
ramble into its recesses in bad weather is apt to
engender dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous,
and miry ways.
This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which
the fields are never brown and the springs never dry,
is bounded on the south by the bold chalk ridge that
embraces the prominences of Hambledon Hill, Bulbarrow,
Nettlecombe-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down.
The traveller from the coast, who, after plodding
northward for a score of miles over calcareous downs
and corn-lands, suddenly reaches the verge of one
of these escarpments, is surprised and delighted to
behold, extended like a map beneath him, a country
differing absolutely from that which he has passed
through. Behind him the hills are open, the
sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give an
unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are
white, the hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere
colourless. Here, in the valley, the world seems
to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate
scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that
from this height their hedgerows appear a network
of dark green threads overspreading the paler green
of the grass. The atmosphere beneath is languorous,
and is so tinged with azure that what artists call
the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while
the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine.
Arable lands are few and limited; with but slight
exceptions the prospect is a broad rich mass of grass
and trees, mantling minor hills and dales within the
major. Such is the Vale of Blackmoor.
