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Updated: June 11, 2025
Outside the house, on the other side of the highway, a mass of dark heath-land rose sullenly upward to its not easily accessible interior, a ravined plateau, whereon jutted into the sky, at the distance of a couple of miles, the fir-woods of Mistover backed by the Yalbury coppices a place of Dantesque gloom at this hour, which would have afforded secure hiding for a battery of artillery, much less a man and a child.
Then came a stile which could be easily climbed over, and then a piece of unknown heath-land, on which he had never yet been. But there was nothing dangerous here, either. The heath glittered in the sun, the withered hawkweed crackled at his feet, a warm wind blew softly towards him. He tried to whistle, but still he had to draw in the air to produce any sound.
Above all, he loved to converse with her upon Warlock, its remains of ancient magnificence, the green banks of the placid river that enriched its domains, and the summer pomp of wood and heath-land, amidst which his noonday visions had been nursed.
My Janet's readiness to meet calamity was shown ere we reached home upon an evening of the late autumn, and set eye on a scene, for her the very saddest that could have been devised to test her spirit of endurance, when, driving up the higher heath-land, we saw the dark sky ominously reddened over Riversley, and, mounting the ridge, had the funeral flames of the old Grange dashed in our faces.
He had intended to drive back the next day, when the domestic storm would be over, and take the chances of her coming. It seemed now a piece of duty to return at night, a traverse of twenty rough up and down miles from Itchenford to the heath-land rolling on the chalk wave of the Surrey borders, easily done after the remonstrances of his host were stopped.
It happened that the squire came across us as we were rounding the slope of larch and fir plantation near a part of the Riversley hollows, leading to the upper heath-land, where, behind a semicircle of birches, Bulsted lay. He was on horseback, and called hoarsely to the captain's coachman, who was driving us, to pull up.
He must have been out of his wits, for he never tried to bury himself in the darker parts of the woods, but he flew on from glade to glade, until he came to the heath-land which leads up to the great Fontainebleau quarry. There I had him in full sight, and knew that he could not escape me. He ran well, it is true ran as a coward runs when his life is the stake.
Julia stood a moment by the gate. Before her lay the road to Halgrave; her father might have gone down it a little way; but if he had he must have turned off and sought concealment somewhere for she had seen no sign of any one when she came home. To the left stretched the heath-land, brown and bare, to the belt of wildly tossing pines; it was hard to imagine her father choosing that way.
To be so familiar as the people were with the peculiarities of the valley, to appreciate the usefulness of the wide heath-land, to value the weather, to comprehend at a glance the doings of the neighbours, and to have fellow-feeling with their motives and hopes and disappointments, was to be at home most intimately, most safely. But all this is a thing of the past.
Indeed it presented the appearance of the dry bed of a mountain torrent, and in wet weather a torrent this lane became, so I was informed by Jim. It was very rugged and dangerous, and here we dismounted, the groom leading the horses. Then we were upon a well-laid main road, and along this we trotted on to a tempting stretch of heath-land.
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