CHAPTER XXVII.—AT THE STANNARIES.

‘We shall have a delightful day,’ said young Lady Alice joyously, as the sweet scent of the bruised heather and the steam of the wet earth came floating on the breeze, and the clouds rolled off majestically seawards, leaving the broad surface of Dartmoor, like a purple robe dashed with green, flecked and dappled by the dancing sunbeams. ‘A delightful day for our peep at the old Stannaries,’ repeated the girl. ‘The air will be all the fresher and the weather steadier, for the heavy shower of this morning.’

Lady Alice, the youngest and, some said, the cleverest of the Earl’s daughters, was an indulged child, and there was a carriage at High Tor which she regarded as her very own. This was a low wagonette, built of light osier-work, lined with dark blue, and drawn by a hairy-heeled pony, quite as shaggy as a bear, and not much bigger than a Newfoundland dog. The villagers for miles around were tolerably familiar with the jingle of the bells that were attached to the pony’s collar; but on the present occasion the boy in livery who held the reins had been bidden to strike into one of the rugged roads that led into the moor itself, where hamlets were scarce, and even isolated dwellings few and far between.

‘It would be a thousand pities,’ said Lady Alice presently, turning towards Ethel, who sat beside her in the wagonette, ‘not to shew you the Stannaries—which are among our principal lions hereabouts—before the winter-storms set in. It is not always pleasant or quite safe to go so far into the moor after apple-harvest.’

‘But you forget,’ said Ethel, smiling, ‘that I, in my ignorance, have not the very faintest idea as to what Stannaries may be.’

‘Is it possible!’ exclaimed the child, turning upon her governess a glance of that pitying wonder with which the very young receive a confession of deficient information on the part of their elders. ‘Did you really never hear, Miss Gray, of our Cornish and Devon tin-mines?—we call them Stannaries because stannum is the Latin word for tin, you know—which were worked, ever so many hundreds and thousands of years ago, by Phoenicians and Carthaginians and Jews I believe, and Romans I am sure. Very ancient they are at anyrate, and very curious; and I want to shew you ours, the only ones in this part of Dartmoor, with the stone huts of the miners still standing, although no tin has been taken out of the lodes for many a long year.’

Ethel laughed good-humouredly at her own scanty stock of local lore.

‘I have read,’ she said gently, ‘of tin mines in Cornwall, and of that place with the odd name Marazion, which made people fancy the Lost Tribes were to be looked for somewhere near the Land’s End, and how the Phoenicians came of old in ships to fetch the tin away. But I did not know they came to Devon too.’

‘O yes; they did,’ persisted Lady Alice, eager for the credit of her county. ‘Our workings are quite as ancient as the great Cornish mines, though not so big. And there was once a Mayor of Halgaver, and a sort of diggers’ law on the moor, as there is among the gold-seekers in Australia now. I have heard Papa speak of it. But there is the farmhouse’—pointing to a dwelling, screened by black firs from the cold north-east winds, which crowned a swelling ridge of high ground—‘our explorings. You are a capital walker, and so am I; and the way to enjoy the moor and understand it is to cross it on foot.’

The pony, wagonette, and lad in livery being duly left at the farm, the two girls set off together to traverse the distance that intervened between the ridge on which the house was built and a bleak table-land from which cropped up, like fossil mushrooms, many gray stones of various shapes.

‘Those are the Circles—the Rounds as the poor people call them,’ said Lady Alice in her character of cicerone. ‘Nobody in these parts cares to be near them after dark. They are said to be haunted, but that is all nonsense of course.’

‘They look cold and ghostly enough even in broad daylight,’ said Ethel, as they pushed on along a broad smooth track of emerald green, one of several green belts that varied the dull purple of the sea of heather. Overhead, on tireless wing, the hawk wheeled. The lapwing, with complaining note, skirred the plain, striving with world-old artifice of drooping wing and broken flight, to lure away the human intruders from her flat nest, full of speckled eggs. The moorland hare, dark-furred and long-limbed, broke abruptly from her seat and galloped off unpursued. The Circles were reached at last, and proved to be quaint rings of dilapidated buildings, all of unhewn stone and of the rudest construction. Here and there the huts, roof and walls alike composed of rough slabs, were intact. Nothing could be more desolate than the appearance of these bare, gaunt hovels, reared by the hands of the long dead, standing solitary in the midst of a desert.

‘Here they lived once upon a time, those old people, the heathen miners, whose bronze tools and lumps of ore and morsels of charred wood are even now sometimes picked up by boys who hunt for birds’ eggs on the moor. They worked near the surface, and never drove their galleries very deep into the earth. And then came Christian times, when these hovels were inhabited by very different dwellers, until at last the mines were given up as no longer worth the labour of winning the tin.’

Ethel looked around her with a kind of awe. She had imagination enough to enable her to realise the dim Past, when these deserted huts were peopled by inhabitants strange of garb and speech, gnomes of the mine utterly unlike to any who now tread English ground. In fancy she could behold the motley throng of Pagan toilers, whose bronze picks had once rung against gneiss and granite, mica and sandstone, on the now silent moor. There the Briton, his fair skin stained with woad, and the small and swarthy mountaineer whose forefathers had preceded the Celt in ownership of the land, had laboured side by side with Spaniard, Moor, and Goth, with Scythian, Arab, and Indian—slaves all, and mostly captives in war, whom the cruel policy of Rome consigned to far-off regions of the earth, much as our justice stocked Virginian plantations and Australian cattle-runs with the offscourings of ignorance and crime.

It was at the grave as it were of a dead industry that Ethel now stood. The ground, honeycombed by what resembled gigantic rabbit-burrows, was strewed here and there with dross and scoriÆ, and blackened by fire, wherever the remains of a rude kiln told of smelting carried on long ago.

‘I have all sorts of things to shew you,’ said Lady Alice impatiently. ‘Just look into one of the huts, and then wonder how human beings could ever have made a home of such a place. See! It is just like a stone bee-hive—no windows. That was for warmth, I suppose. The little light they wanted came in at the door, no doubt. And up above there, where you see the hole between the stones, the smoke must have found its way out, after it had half-choked the lungs and blinded the eyes of those inside the hut. They wanted a good peat-fire though, to keep them alive when the great snows of winter fell; and they had it too, for just see how hard and black the earthen floor has become in the course of years. Now then for the mine where the Roman sword was found, and then for the Pixies’ Well.’

The Pixies’ Well proved to be a curious natural depression in the rocky soil, thimble-shaped, and about twenty feet in depth, carpeted with moss of the brightest green from the brink to where the water glimmered starlike from amid rank weeds beneath.

‘They say the fairies used to dance round this well on Midsummer night and dip stolen children in the water, that they might never long to go back to earth again, but live contentedly in Elfland. Our Devonshire people believe all sorts of things still, you must know, though they are getting ashamed of talking about them before strangers.—Are you tired, Miss Gray?’

Miss Gray was not tired, and her mercurial pupil thereupon proposed a visit to a new attraction.

‘The idea of it came into my head while we were looking down into the well,’ explained Lady Alice; ‘and though the Hunger Hole is not one of the sights of the Stannaries, still if you are not afraid of a longer walk, we might visit it and yet be at home in good time. It is a mile or more from here.’

‘That is an odd name, the Hunger Hole,’ said Ethel. ‘I suppose there is some legend to account for so ominous a word?’

‘There is indeed,’ said the Earl’s youngest daughter as, by Ethel’s side, she left the ring of ruinous huts and passed along a strong causeway that led towards the west; ‘and moreover, in this case there can be no doubt about its being true. A young Jacobite—it was just after the Northern rising in 1715—fled to a country-house near here, Morford Place, where his mother’s family lived, hoping to be sheltered and enabled to embark secretly for France. There had been treachery at work, however, for the fugitive’s intentions were revealed to the authorities; and on the morning of the very day when he arrived in mean disguise, constables and soldiers had searched the mansion from garret to cellar.

‘That the poor refugee should be concealed at Morford seemed impossible, and yet as the roads were beset and the harbours watched, escape over sea was not for the moment to be thought of. The squire of Morford bethought him of the place that we are going to see, which was then known to very few, and where priests had often been hidden, when every Jesuit who came to England carried his life in his hand. So young Mr John Grahame—that was his name—was lodged in the grotto that we shall presently see, and sometimes one of the ladies of the family, his cousins, and sometimes a trusty servant, carried him food. But the poor young man had some secret enemy who could not rest until assured of his destruction, for just as the rigour of the pursuit seemed to be over, and it was arranged that the fugitive should be put on board a smuggling craft bound for the French coast, Morford Place was again searched, and a chain of sentries posted, with orders to shoot whoever tried to pass them by.

‘Day after day dragged on, and no food could be conveyed to the unfortunate occupant of the Hiding Hole—the Priest’s Hole, as they called it then—while the dragoons scoured the country, questioning the folks in every village if a stranger had been seen. No doubt it was hoped that famine would force the Jacobite to leave his retreat; but after a time the soldiers grew tired of waiting, or the authorities imagined they had been on a false scent. At anyrate the troops were withdrawn. But when some of the Morford family stole, trembling, to the unfrequented spot where their luckless kinsman lay hid, they stood aghast to see the raven and the carrion-crow flapping and screaming about the grotto—a sure sign that there was death within. True enough, poor young Grahame had perished of want, sooner than venture forth to be dragged to the jail and the gibbet; and ever since that day the place has borne the name of the Hunger Hole.’

By this time the stony causeway had given place to a narrow footway that led through one of those swamps that vary the undrained surface of Dartmoor. To left and right rose tall reeds, thick enough to simulate a tropical cane-brake, while wild flax, mallows, and stunted alder-bushes abounded. The moor-hen sprang from her nest among the bulrushes that bordered the sullen pools of discoloured water, and the snake crept hissing through the coarse grass, as if angry at the unwonted trespass on his haunts. The unstable ground, even at that dry season of the year, shook beneath the feet of the explorers; and it was easy for Ethel to give credence to her pupil’s statement that even the hardy moorman avoided Bitternley Swamp in winter.

‘The place took its name from the bitterns that used to abound here,’ said Lady Alice; ‘but there is no nook too lonely for the men whom the London bird-stuffers employ, and the last bittern was shot two years since. Soon there won’t be a feathered creature, except pheasants and partridges and perhaps the saucy sparrows, left alive.—But that’—as they passed a sheet of dark water, stained by the peat of the morass until it resembled ink in hue—‘is Blackpool; and yonder, among those rocks on the bank above, is the Hunger Hole. You cannot see the opening of the grotto from here—that is the beauty of it—but wait till we get quite close, and then you will understand how naturally the cave was made to hide in.’

Even when the two girls had got clear of the swamp and scrambled up the rude flight of steps, nearly effaced by time and rains, that facilitated the scaling of the precipitous bank, Ethel could see no signs of the grotto they sought, until her youthful companion pulled aside the hazel boughs, that grew between two angles of lichen-incrusted rock, and disclosed, about a yard above their heads, a narrow fissure, too low for a person of ordinary stature to enter without stooping, and even then half-hidden by grass and brambles.

‘That is the Hunger Hole,’ said Lady Alice triumphantly. ‘A fugitive may lie concealed here, I think, if the enemy were ranging all the moor to capture him. It is higher inside than at the mouth, and the bridge within gives access to the inner chamber. Come; we must be quick.—Ah! there is no danger,’ added the girl, mistaking the cause of her companion’s hesitation.

‘I am not afraid; I was merely thinking of the sad story of this place,’ said Ethel with a shudder that she could not repress. And passing over the boulders of loose rock, they entered Indian file into the Hunger Hole.

CHAPTER XXVIII.—THE HUNGER HOLE.

Ethel, on following her young pupil through the darkling portal of the cave, moved forward at first with extreme precaution; but gradually, as her eyes became accustomed to the dim mysterious light that reigned within, she could distinguish that the grotto really did increase in height within two paces of the entrance, and that it was quite possible to stand upright without inconvenience beneath the rocky roof. She saw that she was in a natural cavern of small dimensions, the irregular level of the floor being moistened by the water that oozed through a crevice between two mossy stones and trickled onwards until it fell, with a monotonous dripping sound, into a chasm some ten or eleven feet in breadth, over which a wooden bridge, the timbers of which were black with age and coated with colourless growths of fungi and mosses, afforded the means of passing.

‘They say the Hunger Hole was known and used from very early times,’ observed Lady Alice, stepping fearlessly upon the dilapidated bridge, of which the hand-rails, if such there had been, had long since rotted away. ‘But its very existence was kept secret by the Morfords of Morford and two or three other families of the neighbouring gentry and their trusty retainers, until after that sad tragedy of which I told you. You will find the inner chamber more comfortable than the outer cave, where the spring is.’

And indeed Ethel found herself in a recess, somewhat smaller than the exterior portion of the cavern, but dry, and free alike from trickling moisture and the unwholesome growth of cryptogams, that carpeted the slimy floor of the antechamber through which they had passed. At one extremity of the chamber a sort of bench or bed-place had been cut, evidently by human agency, in the stony wall. Light came filtered down through boughs and creeping-plants from above the chasm, where a glimpse of the sky might be caught; while beneath, some subterranean pool or streamlet, to judge by the drip, drip, of the water that ran over the mossy lip of the fissure, certainly existed.

‘Life must have been very dreary here, spent in solitude, and with the haunting apprehension that at each instant the secret of the hiding-hole might be betrayed or discovered,’ said Ethel, again shivering, as though the air of the cave had been icy cold. ‘It would be almost better to face any danger than to linger’——

A sudden creaking and cracking, as of breaking wood-work, interrupted Ethel’s speech, and was instantly followed by a dull heavy plunge, and then a splashing sound, as though something weighty had fallen from a considerable height into water below.

‘Good heavens, the bridge—the bridge!’ Such were the words that rose simultaneously to the lips of both the girls, and by a common impulse pupil and governess hurried to the verge of the abyss. Their instinct of alarm had been but too accurate in divining what had occurred. The bridge—the rotten old timbers of which had for centuries been exposed to the corroding influence of time and decay—had disappeared into the depths below, and now an impassable chasm yawned between the young explorers of the cave and the doorway by which they had entered it. They fell back and looked at one another with white scared faces.

Ethel was the first to recover her self-command. ‘This is awkward,’ she said, trying to smile, ‘for we shall be late in reaching High Tor, and I am afraid the Countess will be anxious. Of course, as soon as it is known that we have not returned to the farm where the carriage and pony were left, search will be made.’

‘No one will think of looking here,’ returned young Lady Alice, with a disconsolate shake of the head. ‘We are fully two miles from the Stannaries, and everybody will suppose that we have returned thence by the footpath that crosses Bramberry Common, or the bridle-road that skirts Otter Pool and the Red Rock—short-cuts both of them, and favourite paths of mine, as is known. I am, unluckily, a wilful child, and have a sad character for roving over hill and dale, so that even Mamma will not be frightened at the first. And—and, another thing that is bad. Nobody will suspect us of crossing Bitternley Swamp, even in fine weather, without a gentleman or a man of some sort, to take care of us in case of need. The truth is, Miss Gray, it was a silly thing to do, a fool-hardy trick to play even on a day like this; for lives have been lost there often, as all on the moor know. We got across dry-footed or nearly so; but it might have been different. My brother said once, I was as bad to follow as a Will-o’-the-Wisp could be.’ The girl laughed, as though to reanimate her own drooping spirits, but the sullen echoes of the cave gave back the laughter hollowly.

‘Can we not make some signal—call aloud perhaps, to notify our plight to any who may be passing near?’ asked Ethel, after a moment’s consideration. But even as she spoke she felt the futility of the expedient she had suggested.

‘Nobody may pass this way for weeks to come,’ said Lady Alice despondently. ‘You don’t know, you can’t guess how very desolate Dartmoor is at most times. We might scream ourselves hoarse, without getting an answer from any voice but that of the peewit by day and the fern-owl by night. No; I was thinking I could perhaps get across.’

But a deliberate survey of the chasm proved the hopelessness of such an attempt. A trained gymnast with nerves exceptionally steady could readily have taken the leap, although to slip or stumble was to incur a certain and miserable death in the unseen waters below. But even the hardy maidens who tend their brass-belled kine among the Alpine pastures of Tyrol would have flinched from the effort to spring from one side of that yawning gulf to the other. Then for a time, a long time, there was silence, unbroken save by the regular plash and tinkle of the water, as it trickled over the floor of the outer cave and fell over into the black abyss below.

‘They must surely take the alarm at High Tor,’ said Ethel after a space. ‘There will be a hue-and-cry through all the neighbourhood. The worst that can happen will be that we may spend the night here, and be very cold and very hungry.’

‘Hungry! Yes, we are likely to be that, before we are found,’ half-petulantly interrupted Lady Alice. And then there was no more said for a longer time than before.

Ethel’s mind was busy as she sat side by side with her pupil on the rough-hewn bench of stone that had been the death-bed of the luckless Jacobite refugee. How little had she thought, when listening an hour or two ago, to the legend of John Grahame’s death, that she who told and she who hearkened to the tale would soon be shut up in that dismal lair, to suffer hardship, perhaps even to—— No, not to die, so near to home and friends; that was a supposition too wild to be harboured! They must be sought out, found, delivered from the prison to which accident had consigned them. Some one would pass. Some one might even then be within hearing, and be rambling on all-unconscious of the predicament of those within. So strongly did the idea that friendly ears might be near present itself to Ethel, that she started to her feet, calling aloud again and again for help. The hollow echoes of the cave returned the sound, as though in mockery, while Lady Alice sat mute and listless on the rocky bench. Presently she too sprang up. ‘I cannot bear it,’ cried the young girl, in her quick impetuous way. ‘I would sooner run the risk of fifty deaths than remain here, listening to the dreadful drip, drip, of the water as it falls into the pool or the brook beneath. We can’t, now the bridge is gone, cross the fissure. But perhaps, if you would help me, I might manage to scramble to the top of the rocks above here where the light comes down, and at any rate wave a handkerchief, or do something to attract attention if any one comes near.’

Ethel glanced up at the ragged rocks draped with weed and bramble, and then down at the gaping chasm, into which a false step would probably hurl any aspirant who should prove unequal to the attempt.

‘It is for me to try it, my dear, not you,’ she said quietly, but with a resolution that was not to be shaken. ‘I am taller and stronger; and besides, how could I meet the Countess again if I allowed you to run into a danger I shrank from?’ And without further prelude Ethel grasped a tough tendril of the ivy that hung within reach, and by clinging to every crevice or angle of the rock that could yield support to foot or hand, succeeded in gaining a ledge of stone, above which a tall slender hazel shot up into the free air. But to climb the few feet of bare stone above her was impossible. ‘It is idle; I cannot do it,’ she said sadly.

It did indeed begin to seem a hopeless case, that is supposing that young Lady Alice was correct in her estimate of the loneliness of the spot and of the unlikelihood of succour.

‘I cannot reach the top; the rock is as steep as a wall,’ said Ethel, again looking down from amidst the ferns and foxgloves, the ivy trails and ropes of bramble, that half-filled the aperture.

‘That tall nut-tree, it is close to your hand,’ cried the quick-witted young damsel below. ‘Could you not pull it towards you, tie your handkerchief to the topmost bough, and let it spring up again? That would give us a chance, should any one come near.’

With some difficulty Ethel succeeded in grasping the tough stem of the tall hazel, and bending it until she was able to make fast her handkerchief, as Alice had suggested, to the uppermost twigs. Up sprang the slender stem again the instant it was released, and the white pennon fluttered out, clear of the rocks, in the moorland breeze.

‘We have hoisted our flag,’ said Lady Alice blithely, ‘to let them know we are at home.’ But as hour after hour went by, and the longed-for help came not, and the increasing gloom of the faint cool light that filled the grotto told of the waning of the day, the spirits of Ethel’s young charge lost their buoyancy.

‘I wish at least,’ she said peevishly, ‘that tiresome dripping of the water would but stop. I feel as though it would drive me mad. Why not try the jump back over the chasm? Even if one fell in, it would be better so than to die by inches.’

Ethel did her best to impart comfort. But her pupil would not be comforted.

‘No, no!’ she said repeatedly; ‘they will not find us till—till it is too late. The last place where any one would dream of looking is the Hunger Hole. It is so far off that nobody will imagine we walked all the way; and then, as none know of the broken bridge, it will never occur to any one that we are shut up here. They will believe us to be drowned. It is not difficult to get smothered in a swamp hereabouts. And the pools will be dragged and the rivers examined, and still the riddle will remain unsolved.’

Presently the girl crept up to Ethel’s side and stole her hand into that of her governess. ‘I want you to forgive me, Miss Gray—Ethel dear,’ she said in a low voice. ‘It is my wilfulness that has been the cause of all.’

Ethel answered her soothingly; and with a great sob young Lady Alice, who was no coward, kept down her rising tears. For an hour or more they sat silent, hand in hand.

‘Do you remember,’ whispered Alice De Vere, after a time, ‘an old, old song, The Mistletoe Bough? Maud sings it. I am afraid it will come true for us, and the Hunger Hole will have a new story.’