life, the only Guide able to lead him aright.  I mean his Mother Church.  No man who turns his back upon her can be either virtuous or happy.  I mourned his defection from our choir some years ago.  You see I forget nobody.  My eyes are everywhere, as they ought to be.  Would that he could be whipped back to the House of God—­with scorpions, if necessary!  There is a cowardice, a lack of sportsmanlike feeling, if I may so express it, in these fallings away from the Church of our fathers.  It denotes a failing of intellect amid the centres of human activity.  There is a blight of unbelief abroad—­a nebulous, pestilential rationalism.  Acquaint him with these facts; they may serve to re-establish one whose temperament must be regarded as abnormal in the light of his great eccentricity of action.  Now farewell, and God be with you.”

The rotund, grey-whiskered clergyman waved his hand; Miller Lyddon and his daughter left the vicarage; while both heard, as it seemed, his studied phrases and sonorous voice rolling after them all the way home.  But poor Phoebe felt that the main issues as to conscience were now only too clear; her last anchor was wrenched from its hold, and that night, through a mist of unhappy tears, she succumbed, promised to marry John Grimbal and be queen of the red castle now rising under Cranbrook’s distant heights.

That we have dealt too scantily with her tragic experiences may be suspected; but the sequel will serve to show how these circumstances demand no greater elaboration than has been accorded to them.

CHAPTER VII

LIBATION TO POMONA

A winter moon threw black shadows from stock and stone, tree and cot in the valley of the Teign.  Heavy snow had fallen, and moor-men, coming down from the highlands, declared it to lie three feet deep in the drifts.  Now fine, sharp weather had succeeded the storm, and hard frost held both hill and vale.

On Old Christmas Eve a party numbering some five-and-twenty persons assembled in the farmyard of Monks Barton, and Billy Blee, as master of the pending ceremonies, made them welcome.  Some among them were aged, others youthful; indeed the company consisted mostly of old men and boys, a circumstance very easily understood when the nature of their enterprise is considered.  The ancients were about to celebrate a venerable rite and sacrifice to a superstition, active in their boyhood, moribund at the date with which we are concerned, and to-day probably dead altogether.  The sweet poet[2] of Dean Prior mentions this quaint, old-time custom of “christening” or “wassailing” the fruit-trees among Christmas-Eve ceremonies; and doubtless when he dwelt in Devon the use was gloriously maintained; but an adult generation in the years of this narrative had certainly refused it much support.  It was left to their grandfathers and their sons; and thus senility and youth preponderated in the present company.  For the boys, this midnight fun with lantern and fowling-piece was good Christmas sport, and they came readily enough; to the old men their ceremonial possessed solid value, and from the musty storehouse of his memory every venerable soul amongst them could cite instances of the sovereign virtue hid in such a procedure.