The black Flemings

THE BLACK FLEMINGS
BY KATHLEEN NORRIS
PALO ALTO EDITION
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, DORAN & COMPANY, INC. 1929
COPYRIGHT, 1924, 1925, 1926, BY KATHLEEN NORRIS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
THE BLACK FLEMINGS
THE BLACK FLEMINGS
Once through the dark old iron gates, he seemed to have left the warm and friendly autumn day, the warm and friendly world, behind him.
David Fleming laughed half aloud at the fancy and stepped back into the rambling country road, where wheel tracks were so quickly obliterated in the loose-drifting sand, to contrast once more, for his own amusement, the peaceful dreaming landscape in the afternoon sunlight and the sinister shadows of Wastewater.
Five miles away along the rugged coast lay Crowchester, the little fishing village whose activities tinged the fresh salty air, even here, with the odour of salted fish. Between Crowchester and Wastewater, beside whose forbidding great gates he stood, ran the irregular road, rising through dunes, skirting wind-twisted groves of pine and fir, disappearing into ragged hollows to emerge again on turfy bluffs, and finally winding in here toward the old brick house that lay hidden behind these high walls.
On his right lay the shore, rocky, steep, rough, with pebbles complaining as the tide dragged them to and fro, surf hammering restlessly among the rocks or brimming and ebbing with tireless regularity over the scooped stone of the pools. No two inches of it, no two drops of its immensity ever the same; it held him now, as it had held him for so many hours in his very babyhood, in a sort of tranced contemplation.
The sun was setting in angry red beyond the forest behind him, but a hard and brilliant light still lay on the water, and the waves were sculptured harshly in silver-tipped steel. Where the old brick wall of Wastewater descended to the shore enough sand had been stored in the lee of the wall to form a triangular strip of beach, and here scurfy suds were eddying lazily, hemmed back from the tide by a great jammed log and only stirred now and then by a fringe of the surf, which formed new bubbles even while it pricked the old.