Children of the Mist | Page 2

rainfall; then the huddled heap, in which they had combined to withstand the weather and show tail to the western storm, began to scatter. With coughs and sneezes the beasts wandered forward again, and pursued their business of grazing.
Steadily the promises of the sky multiplied and Phoebe's impatience increased. Her position did not, however, depend for comfort upon the return of sunshine, for she stood out of the weather, where sundry giant rocks to the number of five arose in a fantastic pile. Nature's primal architects were responsible for the Pixies' Parlour, and upon the awful morning of Dartmoor's creation these enormous masses had first been hurled to their present position--outposts of the eternal granite, though themselves widely removed from the central waste of the Moor. This particular and gigantic monument of the past stands with its feet in land long cultivated. Plough and harrow yearly skirt the Pixies' Parlour; it rises to-day above yellow corn, to-morrow amid ripening roots; it crowns the succeeding generations of man's industry, and watches a ceaseless cycle of human toil. The rocks of which it is composed form a sort of rude chamber, sacred to fairy folk since a time before the memory of the living; briars and ivy-tods conceal a part of the fabric; a blackthorn, brushed at this season with purple fruit, rises above it; one shadowed ledge reveals the nightly roosting place of hawk or raven; and marks of steel on the stone show clearly where some great or small fragment of granite has been blasted from the parent pile for the need of man. Multi-coloured, massive, and picturesque, the Parlour, upon Phoebe Lyddon's visit to it, stood forth against the red bosom of naked land; for a fierce summer had early ripened the vanished harvest, and now its place was already ploughed again, while ashes of dead fire scattered upon the earth showed where weed and waste had been consumed after ingathering of the grain.
Patches of August blue now lightened the aerial grey; then sunshine set a million gems twinkling on the great bejewelled bosom of the valley. Under this magic heat an almost instantaneous shadowy ghost of fresh vapour rose upon the riparian meadows, and out of it, swinging along with the energy of youth and high spirits, came a lad. Phoebe smiled and twinkled a white handkerchief to him, and he waved his hat and bettered his pace for answer.
Soon Will Blanchard reached his sweetheart, and showed himself a brown, straight youngster, with curly hair, pugnacious nose, good shoulders, and a figure so well put together that his height was not apparent until he stood alongside another man. Will's eyes were grey as Phoebe's, but of a different expression; soft and unsettled, cloudy as the recent weather, full of the alternate mist and flash of a precious stone, one moment all a-dreaming, the next aglow. His natural look was at first sight a little stern until a man came to know it, then this impression waned and left a critic puzzled. The square cut of his face and abrupt angle of his jaw did not indeed belie Will Blanchard, but the man's smile magically dissipated this austerity of aspect, and no sudden sunshine ever brightened a dark day quicker than pleasure made bright his features. It was a sulky, sleepy, sweet, changeable face--very fascinating in the eyes of women. His musical laugh once fluttered sundry young bosoms, brightened many pretty eyes and cheeks, but Will's heart was Phoebe Lyddon's now--had been for six full months--and albeit a mere country boy in knowledge of the world, younger far than his one-and-twenty years of life, and wholly unskilled in those arts whose practice enables men to dwell together with friendship and harmony, yet Will Blanchard was quite old enough and wise enough and rich enough to wed, and make a husband of more than common quality at that--in his own opinion.
Fortified by this conviction, and determined to wait no longer, he now came to see Phoebe. Within the sheltering arms of the Pixies' Parlour he kissed her, pressed her against his wet velveteen jacket, then sat down under the rocks beside her.
"You 'm comed wi' the sun, dear Will."
"Ay--the weather breaks. I hope theer'll be a drop more water down the river bimebye. You got my letter all right?"
"Ess fay, else I shouldn't be here. And this tremendous matter in hand?"
"I thought you'd guess what 't was. I be weary o' waitin' for 'e. An' as I comed of age last month, I'm a man in law so well as larnin', and I'm gwaine to speak to Miller Lyddon this very night."
Phoebe looked blank. There was a moment's silence while Will picked and ate the wood-strawberries in his sweetheart's dress.
"Caan't 'e think o' nothin' wiser than to see faither?" she