‘I know it isn’t money that would tempt
you.’ He spoke in a very low voice, though
no one was within earshot. ’Don’t
think I make any mistake about that! But
I have to show you that there’s something in
me. I wouldn’t marry any woman that thought
I made love to her out of interest.’
Nancy began to draw on her gloves, and smiled, just
biting her lower lip.
’Will you give me a couple of years, from to-day?
I won’t bother you. It’s honour bright!’
‘I’ll think about it,’ Nancy repeated.
‘Whilst you’re away?’
‘Yes, whilst I’m away at Teignmouth.’
‘And tell me when you come back?’
‘Tell you—how long. Yes.’
And she rose.
From the mouth of Exe to the mouth of Teign the coast
is uninteresting. Such beauty as it once possessed
has been destroyed by the railway. Cliffs of
red sandstone drop to the narrow beach, warm between
the blue of sky and sea, but without grandeur, and
robbed of their native grace by navvy-hewing, which
for the most part makes of them a mere embankment:
their verdure stripped away, their juttings tunnelled,
along their base the steel parallels of smoky traffic.
Dawlish and Teignmouth have in themselves no charm;
hotel and lodging-house, shamed by the soft pure light
that falls about them, look blankly seaward, hiding
what remains of farm or cottage in the older parts.
Ebb-tide uncovers no fair stretch of sand, and at
flood the breakers are thwarted on a bulwark of piled
stone, which supports the railway, or protects a promenade.
But inland these discontents are soon forgotten; there
amid tilth and pasture, gentle hills and leafy hollows
of rural Devon, the eye rests and the mind is soothed.
By lanes innumerable, deep between banks of fern and
flower; by paths along the bramble-edge of scented
meadows; by the secret windings of copse and brake
and stream-worn valley—a way lies upward
to the long ridge of Haldon, where breezes sing among
the pines, or sweep rustling through gorse and bracken.
Mile after mile of rustic loveliness, ever and anon
the sea-limits blue beyond grassy slopes. White
farms dozing beneath their thatch in harvest sunshine;
hamlets forsaken save by women and children, by dogs
and cats and poultry, the labourers afield. Here
grow the tall foxgloves, bending a purple head in the
heat of noon; here the great bells of the convolvulus
hang thick from lofty hedges, massing their pink and
white against dark green leafage; here amid shadowed
undergrowth trail the long fronds of lustrous hartstongue;
wherever the eye falls, profusion of summer’s
glory. Here, in many a nook carpeted with softest
turf, canopied with tangle of leaf and bloom, solitude
is safe from all intrusion— unless it be
that of flitting bird, or of some timid wild thing
that rustles for a moment and is gone. From dawn
to midnight, as from midnight to dawn, one who would
be alone with nature might count upon the security
of these bosks and dells.
