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Six to Sixteen: A Story for Girls, a novel by Juliana Horatia Ewing |
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Chapter 19. Northwards... |
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_ CHAPTER XIX. NORTHWARDS--THE BLACK COUNTRY--THE STONE COUNTRY We had a very noisy, happy journey to London. We chattered, and laughed, and hopped about like a lot of birds turned out of a cage. Emma sat by the window, and made a running commentary upon everybody and everything we passed in a strain of what seemed to us irresistible wit and humour. I fear that our conduct was not very decorous, but in the circumstances we were to be excused. The reaction was overwhelming. Eleanor and I sobered down after we parted from the other girls, and thus became sensible of some fatigue and faintness. We had been too much excited to eat any of the bread-and-butter prepared for our early breakfast at Bush House. We had run up and down and stood on our feet about three times as much as need was; we had talked and laughed and shaken ourselves incessantly; we had put out our heads in the wind and sun as the train flew on; we had tried to waltz between the seats, and had eaten two ounces of "mixed sweets" given us by the housemaid, and deluged each other with some very heavy-scented perfume belonging to one of us. After all this, Eleanor and I felt tired before our journey had begun. We felt faint, sick, anything but hungry, and should probably have travelled north in rather a pitiful plight, had not a motherly-looking lady, who sat in the waiting-room reading a very dirty book of tracts--and who had witnessed both our noisy parting from our companions and the subsequent collapse--advised us to go to the refreshment-room and get some breakfast. We yielded at last, out of complaisance towards her, and were rewarded by feeling wonderfully refreshed by a solid meal. We laid in a stock of buns and chocolate lozenges for future consumption, and--thanks to Eleanor's presence of mind and experience--we got our luggage together, and started in the north train in a carriage by ourselves. We talked very little now. Eleanor gazed out of her window, and I out of mine, in silence. As we got farther north, Eleanor's eyes dilated with a curious glow of pride and satisfaction. I had then no special attachment to one part of England more than another, but I had never seen so much of the country before, and it was a treat which did not lose by comparison with the limited range of our view at Bush House. As we ran on, the bright, pretty, sociable-looking suburbs of London gave way to real country--beautiful, cared-for, garden-like, with grand timber, big houses, and grey churches, supported by the obvious parsonage and school; and deep shady lanes, with some little cart trotting quaintly towards the railway bridge over which we rushed, or boys in smock-frocks sitting on a gate, and shouting friendly salutations (as it seemed) to Eleanor and myself. Then came broad, fair pastures of fairy green, and slow winding rivers that we overtook almost before we had seen them, with ghostly grey pollard willows in formal mystical borders, contrasting with such tints of pale yellow and gay greens, which in their turn shone against low distances of soft blue and purple, that the sense of colour which my great-grandfather had roused in me made me almost tremble with a never-to-be-forgotten pleasure. From this flat but most fair country, the grey towers of Peterborough Cathedral stood up in ancient dignity; and then we ran on again. After a while the country became less rich in colour, and grander in form. No longer stretching flatly to low-lying distances of ethereal hue, it was broken into wooded hills, which folded one over the other with ever-increasing boldness of outline. Now and then the line ran through woods of young oak, with male ferns and bracken at their feet, where the wild hyacinths, which lie there like a blue mist in May, must for some weeks past have made way for the present carpet of pink campion. And now the distance was no longer azure. Over the horizon and the lower part of the sky a thin grey veil had come--a veil of smoke. We were approaching the manufacturing districts. Grander and grander grew the country, less and less pure the colouring. The vegetation was rich almost to rankness; the well-wooded distances were heavily grey. Then tall chimneys poured smoke over the landscape and eclipsed the sun; and through strangely shaped furnaces and chimneys of many forms, which here poured fire from their throats like dragons, and there might have been the huge retorts and chemical apparatus of some giant alchemist, we ran into the station of a manufacturing town. I gazed at the high blackened warehouses, chimneys, and furnaces, which loomed out of the stifling smoke and clanging noises, with horror and wonder. "What a dreadful place!" I exclaimed. "Look at those dreadful things with flames coming out; and oh, Eleanor! there's fire coming out of the ground there. And look at that man opening that great oven door! Oh, what a fire! And what's he poking in it for? And do look! all the men are black. And what a frightful noise everything makes!" Eleanor was looking all the time, but with a complacent expression. She only said, "It is a very busy place. I hear trade's good just now, too." And, "You should see the furnaces at night, Margery, lighting up all the hills. It's grand!" As she sniffed up the smoke with, I might almost say, relish, I felt that she did not sympathize with my disgust. But any discussion on the subject was stopped by our having to change carriages, and we had just settled ourselves comfortably once more, when I got a bit of iron "filings" into my eye. It gave me a good deal of pain and inconvenience, and by the time that I could look out of the window again, we had left the black town far behind. The hills were almost mountains now, and sloped away on all sides of us in bleak and awful grandeur. The woodlands were fewer; we were on the moors. Only a few hours back we had been amongst deep hedges and shady lanes, and now for hedges we had stone walls, and for deep embowered lanes we could trace the unsheltered roads, gleaming as they wound over miles of distant hills. Deep below us brawled a river, with here and there a gaunt mill or stone-built hamlet on its banks. I had never seen any country like this; and if I had been horrified by the black town, my delight with the noble scenery beyond it was in proportion. I stood at the open window, with the moor breeze blowing my hair into the wildest elf-locks, rapturously excited as the great hills unfolded themselves and the shifting clouds sent shifting purple shadows over them. Very dark and stern they looked in shade, and then, in a moment more, the cloud was past, and a broad smile of sunshine ran over their face, and showed where cultivation was creeping up the hillside and turning the heather into fields. Eleanor leaned out of the window also. Excitement, which set me chattering, always made her silent. But her parted lips, distended nostrils, and the light in her eyes bore witness to that strange power which hill country sways over hill-born people. To me it was beautiful, but to her it was home. I better understood now, too, her old complaints of the sheltered (she called it _stuffy_) lane in which we walked two and two when we "went into the country" at school. She used to rave against the park palings that hedged us in on either side, and declare her longing to tear them up and let a little air in, or at least to be herself somewhere where "one could see a few miles about one, and breathe some wind." As we stood now, drinking in the breeze, I think the same thought struck us both, and we exclaimed with one voice: "Poor Matilda! How she would have enjoyed this!" We next stopped at a rather dreary-looking station, where we got out, and Eleanor got our luggage together, aided by a porter who seemed to know her, and whom she seemed to understand, though his dialect was unintelligible to me. "I suppose we must have a cab," said Eleanor, at last. "They don't expect us." "_Tommusisinttarn_," said the porter suggestively; which, being interpreted, meant, "Thomas is in the town." "To be sure, for the meat," said Eleanor. "The dog-cart, I suppose?" "And t'owd mare," added the porter. "Well, the boxes must come by the carrier. Come along, Margery, if you don't mind a little bit of walking. We must find Thomas. We have to send down to the town for meat," she added. We found Thomas in the yard of a small inn. He was just about to start homewards. By Eleanor's order, Thomas lifted me into the dog-cart, and then, to my astonishment, asked "Miss Eleanor" if she would drive. Eleanor nodded, and, climbing on to the driver's seat, took the reins with reassuring calmness. Thomas balanced the meat-basket behind, and "t'owd mare" started at a good pace up a hill which would have reduced most south-country horses to crawl. "Father and Mother are away still," said Eleanor, after a pause. "So Thomas says. But they'll be back in a day or two." We were driving up a sandy road such as we had seen winding over the hills. To our left there was a precipitous descent to the vale of the river. To our right, flowers, and ferns, and heather climbed the steep hill, broken at every few yards by tiny torrents of mountain streams. The sun was setting over the distant Deadmanstone moors; little dropping wells tinkled by the roadside, where dozens of fat black snails were out for an evening stroll, and here and there a brimming stone trough reflected the rosy tints of the sky. It was grey and chilly when we drove into the village. A stone pack-horse track, which now served as footpath, had run by the road and lasted into the village. The cottages were of stone, the walls and outhouses were of stone, and the vista was closed by an old stone church, like a miniature cathedral. There was more stone than grass in the churchyard, and there were more loose stones than were pleasant on the steep hill, up which we scrambled before taking a sharp turn into the Vicarage grounds. _ |
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