Things had a promising look on my
arrival my modest glass of milk would perhaps expand to a
sumptuous five-o'clock tea and my short rest to a long and
pleasant one.
The house I found on coming nearer was small and mean-looking
and very old; the farm buildings in a dilapidated condition,
the thatch rotten and riddled with holes in which many
starlings and sparrows had their nests. Gates and fences were
broken down, and the ground was everywhere overgrown with
weeds and encumbered with old broken and rusty implements, and
littered with rubbish. No person could I see about the place,
but knew it was inhabited as there were some fowls walking
about, and some calves shut in a pen in one of the numerous
buildings were dolefully calling - calling to be fed. Seeing a
door half open at one end of the house I went to it and rapped
on the warped paintless wood with my stick, and after about a
minute a young woman came from an inner room and asked me what
I wanted. She was not disturbed or surprised at my sudden
appearance there: her face was impassive, and her eyes when
they met mine appeared to look not at me but at something
distant, and her words were spoken mechanically.
I said that I was hot and thirsty and tired and would be glad
of a glass of milk.
Without a word she turned and left me standing there, and
presently returned with a tumbler of milk which she placed on
a deal table standing near me. To my remarks she replied in
monosyllables, and stood impassively, her hands at her side,
her eyes cast down, waiting for me to drink the milk and go.
And when I had finished it and set the glass down and thanked
her, she turned in silence and went back to that inner room
from which she first came. And hot and tired as I had felt a
few moments before, and desirous of an interval of rest in the
cool shade, I was glad to be out in the burning sun once more,
for the sight of that young woman had chilled my blood and
made the heat out-of-doors seem grateful to me.
The sight of such a face in the midst of such surroundings had
produced a shock of surprise, for it was noble in shape, the
features all fine and the mouth most delicately chiselled, the
eyes dark and beautiful, and the hair of a raven blackness.
But it was a colourless face, and even the lips were pale.
Strongest of all was the expression, which had frozen there,
and was like the look of one on whom some unimaginable
disaster or some hateful disillusionment had come, not to
subdue nor soften, but to change all its sweet to sour, and
its natural warmth to icy cold.
Chapter Eighteen: Branscombe
Health and pleasure resorts and all parasitic towns in fact,
inland or on the sea, have no attractions for me and I was
more than satisfied with a day or two of Sidmouth. Then one
evening I heard for the first time of a place called
Branscomb - a village near the sea, over by Beer and Seaton,
near the mouth of the Axe, and the account my old host gave me
seemed so attractive that on the following day I set out to
find it. Further information about the unknown village came
to me in a very agreeable way in the course of my tramp. A
hotter walk I never walked - no, not even when travelling
across a flat sunburnt treeless plain, nearer than Devon by
many degrees to the equator. One wonders why that part of
Devon which lies between the Exe and the Axe seems actually
hotter than other regions which undoubtedly have a higher
temperature. After some hours of walking with not a little of
uphill and downhill, I began to find the heat well-nigh
intolerable. I was on a hard dusty glaring road, shut in by
dusty hedges on either side. Not a breath of air was
stirring; not a bird sang; on the vast sky not a cloud
appeared. If the vertical sun had poured down water instead
of light and heat on me my clothing could not have clung to me
more uncomfortably. Coming at length to a group of two or
three small cottages at the roadside, I went into one and
asked for something to quench my thirst - cider or milk. There
was only water to be had, but it was good to drink, and the
woman of the cottage was so pretty and pleasant that I was
glad to rest an hour and talk with her in her cool kitchen.
There are English counties where it would perhaps be said of
such a woman that she was one in a thousand; but the Devonians
are a comely race. In that blessed county the prettiest
peasants are not all diligently gathered with the dew on them
and sent away to supply the London flower-market. Among the
best-looking women of the peasant class there are two distinct
types - the rich in colour and the colourless. A majority are
perhaps intermediate, but the two extreme types may be found
in any village or hamlet; and when seen side by side - the lily
and the rose, not to say the peony - they offer a strange and
beautiful contrast.
This woman, in spite of the burning climate, was white as any
pale town lady; and although she was the mother of several
children, the face was extremely youthful in appearance; it
seemed indeed almost girlish in its delicacy and innocent
expression when she looked up at me with her blue eyes shaded
by her white sun-bonnet.
