He looked out the direction eagerly on the map. It was distant, by road, some twenty-five miles north-east by north from Ipswich; by sea, perhaps ten miles further. But the weather was fine, and water-transport more suited to our finances. So two days later we had started for Dunberry, in one of the little coasting ketches that ply between Harwich and Yarmouth carrying farm produce and such chance passengers as prefer paying cheap for a risk too dear for security.
It was lovely April weather, and a light wind blowing up the shores from the south-east bowled us gaily on our way. I never so much as thought of sickness, and if I had, Uncle Jenico, looking in his large Panama hat like a benevolent planter, would have shamed me, with his rubicund serenity, back to confidence again. Our sole property, for all contingencies, was contained in the despatch-box and a single carpet bag; and with no more sense of responsibility than these engendered, we were committing ourselves to a future of ravishing possibilities.
Throughout the pleasant journey we hugged the coast, never being more than a mile or two distant from it, so that its features, wild or civilized, were always plain to us. It showed ever harsher and more desolate the farther we ran north, and the tearing and hollowing effect of waves upon its sandy cliffs more evident. All the way it was fretted, near and far, with towers—a land of churches. They stood grey in the gaps of hills; brown and gaunt on solitary headlands. Sometimes they were dismantled; and once, on a deserted shore, we saw a belfry and part of a ruined chancel footing the tide itself. It was backed by a great heaped billow of sand, which—so our skipper told us—had stood between it and the sea till storms flung it all over and behind, leaving the walls it had protected exposed to destruction.
As evening came on I must confess my early jubilation waned somewhat. The thin, harsh air, the melancholy cry of the birds, the eternal desolation of the coast, chilled me with a creeping terror of our remoteness from all that friendly warmth and comfort we had rashly deserted. Not a light greeted us from the shore but such as shone ghastly in the lifeless wastes of foam. The last coast town, miles behind, seemed to have passed us beyond the final bounds of civilization. So that it was with something like a whimper of joy that I welcomed the sudden picture of a hill notched oddly far ahead against the darkening sky. I ran hurriedly to Uncle Jenico.
“Uncle!” I cried. “Uncle, look! The Abbot’s Mitre!”
The skipper heard me, and answered.
“Aye,” said he, “it’s the Mitre, sure enow,” and spat over the taffrail.
There was something queer in his tone. He rolled his quid in his cheek.
“And like enow, by all they say,” he added, looking at Uncle Jenico, “to figure agen for godliness.”
“Eh?” said my uncle; “I beg your pardon?”