“So it ever vanishes,” he muttered, with a stark and melancholy frown. “From Dungeness to Spurn Head it is always the same. The past breaks away and falls into the sea as I approach. The ghosts lead, the mirage beckons me; and, behold! the precipice and the boom of waters where I had thought a treasure house!”
He gave a sigh that was nothing less than heart-rending. A certain awe and discomfort kept us mute. Here was some tragedy beyond our guessing, but to which we were guiltily conscious that our secretiveness contributed. Then in a moment he turned upon us with a laugh in which there was not even a tinge of mirth.
“If there is any land too much in the world,” said he, “put me to walk upon its shore, and it will vanish before me yard by yard. My breath is blasting powder; my feet are earthquakes. I must drown if I live long enough.”
He walked off towards the cliff, and paused at its edge, looking down gloomily on the leaning shaft of the well.
“He is thinking of Abel and his book,” I whispered to Harry as we followed.
Suddenly he turned to me, and put his arm through mine with an air emotional and apologetic.
“Dear lad,” he said, “you mustn’t consider my moods. I talk to myself, Richard—the bad habit of a lonely man. What is that thing, now? I have wondered before this.”
I told him.
“Ah!” he said, with a bleak jocosity: “let well be. It should have confronted me six years ago; and I see it only now, the moral of all my wanderings. Yet in a good hour is it spoken, Richard, since chance has brought me to your company again. Or is it destiny, which leading me to neglect this scrap of shore hitherto, points its lesson at the end with the broken shaft yonder? Let well be. I am hungry.”
So we sat down then and there and got out our provisions. They put astonishing comfort into us, and we two boys, at least, grew hilarious. Sound-livered and hardened, we took no thought of chill; and indeed the weather for the time of year was balm. A light glistening fog still slept over everything; there was no breath of wind, and the whisper of the surf came up to us drowsily.