Joan Haste

A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook Title: Joan Haste (1895)
Author: H. Rider Haggard eBook No.: 0500311.txt Edition: 1
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Date first posted: March 2005 Date most recently updated: March 2005
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Production notes: This text was prepared from a 1902 reissue of the
1897 edition, published by Longmans, Green, and Co., 89 Paternoster
Row, London and Bombay, as part of the Longmans' Colonial Library.
It was printed from American plates by Spottiswoode and Co.,
New-Street Square, London. Illustrations by F. S. Wilson.
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Title: Joan Haste (1895) Author: H. Rider Haggard

JOAN HASTE
BY

H. RIDER HAGGARD

'Il y a une page effrayante dans le livre des destinées humaines; on y lit
en tête ces motes--"les désirs accomplis"'--Georges Sand

DEDICATION
TO I. H.

PREPARER'S NOTE
This text was prepared from a 1902 reissue of the 1897 edition,
published by Longmans, Green, and Co., 89 Paternoster Row, London
and Bombay, as part of the Longmans' Colonial Library. It was printed
from American plates by Spottiswoode and Co., New-Street Square,
London. Illustrations by F. S. Wilson.

JOAN HASTE
CHAPTER I
JOAN HASTE
Alone and desolate, within hearing of the thunder of the waters of the
North Sea, but not upon them, stand the ruins of Ramborough Abbey.
Once there was a city at their feet, now the city has gone; nothing is left
of its greatness save the stone skeleton of the fabric of the Abbey above
and the skeletons of the men who built it mouldering in the earth below.
To the east, across a waste of uncultivated heath, lies the wide ocean;
and, following the trend of the coast northward, the eye falls upon the
red roofs of the fishing village of Bradmouth. When Ramborough was
a town, this village was a great port; but the sea, advancing

remorselessly, has choked its harbour and swallowed up the ancient
borough which to-day lies beneath the waters.
With that of Ramborough the glory of Bradmouth is departed, and of
its priory and churches there remains but one lovely and dilapidated
fane, the largest perhaps in the east of England--that of Yarmouth alone
excepted--and, as many think, the most beautiful. At the back of
Bradmouth church, which, standing upon a knoll at some distance from
the cliff, has escaped the fate of the city that once nestled beneath it,
stretch rich marsh meadows, ribbed with raised lines of roadway. But
these do not make up all the landscape, for between Bradmouth and the
ruins of Ramborough, following the indentations of the sea coast and
set back in a fold or depression of the ground, lie a chain of small and
melancholy meres, whose brackish waters, devoid of sparkle even on
the brightest day, are surrounded by coarse and worthless grass land,
the haunt of the shore-shooter, and a favourite feeding-place of curlews,
gulls, coots and other wild-fowl. Beyond these meres the ground rises
rapidly, and is clothed in gorse and bracken, interspersed with patches
of heather, till it culminates in the crest of a bank that marks doubtless
the boundary of some primeval fiord or lake, where, standing in a
ragged line, are groups of wind-torn Scotch fir trees, surrounding a grey
and solitary house known as Moor Farm.
The dwellers in these parts--that is, those of them who are alive to such
matters--think that there are few more beautiful spots than this slope of
barren land pitted with sullen meres and bordered by the sea. Indeed, it
has attractions in every season: even in winter, when the snow lies in
drifts upon the dead fern, and the frost-browned gorse shivers in the
east wind leaping on it from the ocean. It is always beautiful, and yet
there is truth in the old doggerel verse that is written in a quaint
Elizabethan hand upon the fly-lead of one of the Bradmouth parish
registers--
"Of Rambro', north and west and south, Man's eyes can never see
enough; Yet winter's gloom or summer's light, Wide England hath no
sadder sight."
And so it is; even in the