PAGE | ||
Ronald and I: | ||
Broadwater: a Shadow from the Past | ||
On the Race Course at Bayview | ||
On the Sands | ||
Our Rector | ||
Echoes from an Organ Loft | ||
Fighting the Cholera | ||
Ronald’s Courtship | ||
Judy, or Retrieved | ||
The Professor | ||
The Cruel, Crawling Foam | ||
Our Queen | ||
Bindo: a Sketch | ||
‘Declined withThanks’: a Postscript | ||
Ronald and I
Broadwater
A SHADOW FROM THE PAST
I
Turn your steps westward, and about four miles beyond Bayview you will come to a rising ground where three ways meet.
One—the road to the right—trends northward, following with occasional deviations the coast line of Dead Man’s Bay, a replica in miniature of the Bay of Biscay, and one which claims, almost as regularly, its tithe of life and wreckage.
The path on the left hand enters a lodge gate, and begins to fall gently but without intermission towards the sea. A curious impression that you are reaching the end of all things is followed by the feeling that your next step will be planted in the sea—and then you come to Broadwater.
The huge square-set building stands on a level plateau, guarded by a semicircle of hills from every wind that blows, excepting the south-west. The architecture is neither impressive in itself nor characteristic of any particular period. Yet, looking down upon it from the hills above, the eye will find ample satisfaction in the colouring of the roof, for lichens have painted the crumbling tiles with every conceivable hue of vermilion and gold.
A stranger, journeying for the first time along the road, would complain of the lack of trees. And trees in the open there are none. Nothing less cringing than gorse and heather can show front against the brine-laden winds of the Atlantic. The south-west wind is jealous of its prerogatives, and denudes a neighbourhood of isolated growth almost as surely as does the poison-steeped atmosphere of the midlands.
Yet, if you trouble to make nearer acquaintance with Broadwater, you will find that every ravine and gully is crowded with trees—“groves” the villagers call them—whose tops lie level with the ground on either side, so that a slight divergence from the recognised track might land the unwary traveller among their foliage, almost without a change in his plane of elevation.