CHAPTER V.
THE STORY OF THE EARTHQUAKE.
Providence, I cannot but believe, had all this time humoured us along a seeming “Road of Casualty,” which was, in truth, the direct path to its own wonderful ends. We talk of luck and accident and coincidence. They are, I am certain, but the veils with which It blinds us to Its inexorable conclusions. My chance selection of our destination, my uncle’s mishap—what were these but second and third acts in the strange drama which had begun in the law courts of Ipswich, where my father had given his life for a truth, which was to be here, thirty miles away, proven and consummated. The dénouement was distant yet, to be sure, for Providence, having all eternity to plot in, works deliberately. Nevertheless, It never loses sight, I think, of what we call the Unities of Art.
I awoke from a dreamless sleep, a restored and avid little giant. It was bright morning. A clock on the stairs cleared its throat and sang out six times. The house was still, save for a shuffling of drowsy maids at their dusting below. I lay quiet, conscious of the most unfamiliar atmosphere all about me—of whitewashed walls; of a smell between wood-smoke and seaweed and the faint sourness of beer; of cold boarded floors gritty with sand; of utter remoteness from the noise of traffic habitual to a young denizen of towns. This little gap of time had lifted me clean out of my accustomed conditions, and dumped me in an outpost of civilization, amongst uncouth allies, friendlies in name, but as foreign as foes to my experience.
I got up soon very softly, and washed and dressed and went out. I had to pass, on my way, through my uncle’s room; and it relieved me to see him slumbering peacefully on his pillow, though the white bandage across his forehead gave me a momentary shock.
I emerged upon a landing, on a wall of which, papered with varnished marble, hung a smoke-stained print of a hunt, with a case of stuffed water-birds on a table beneath. No one accosted me as I descended the little creaking flight of stairs. I passed out by the unlatched private door of the tavern, and found myself at the sea-end of the village street. It was a glowing morning. Not a soul appeared abroad, and I turned to the path by which we had come the night before, thrilling to possess the sea.
The ground went gently up by the way of a track that soon lost itself in the thin grass of the cliffs. Not till I reached the verge did I pause to reconnoitre, and then at once all was displayed about me. I drew one deep delighted breath, and turned as my foremost duty to examine the way I had come. The village, yawning from its chimneys little early draughts of smoke, ran straight from the sea, perhaps for a quarter of a mile, under the shelter of a low, long hill on which a few sheep were folded. Beyond this hill, southwards, and divided from it by a deepish gorge, whose end I could see like a cut trough in the cliff edge, bulged another, the Abbot’s, the contour which gave it its name but roughly distinguishable at these closer quarters. The ruins we had passed overnight crowned this second slope near its marge; and inland both hills dropped into pastures, whence the ground rose again towards a rampart of thick woods which screened all Dunberry from the world beyond.
It looked so endearing, such a happy valley of peace, one would scarcely have credited the picture with a single evil significance; yet—but I am not going to anticipate. Tingling with pleasure, I faced round to the sea.
It was withdrawn a distance away, creaming at the ebb. All beyond was a sheet of golden lustre fading into the bright mists of dawn. Right under the rising sun, like a bar beneath a crest, stretched the line of the Weary Sands, a perilous bank situate some five miles from shore; and between bank and coast rode a solitary little two-masted lugger, with shrouds of gossamer and hull of purple velvet, it seemed, in the soft glow. Even while I looked, this shook out sails like beetles’ wings, and, drawing away, revealed a tiny boat speeding shorewards. I bent and peered over. Ten fathoms beneath me the gully we had climbed in the dark discharged itself, a river of sand, upon the beach; and tumbled at its mouth, as it might be débris, lay a dozen pot-bellied fishing boats. Right and left the cliffs rose and dropped in fantastic conformations, until they sank either way into the horizon. It was a wonderful scene to the little town-bred boy.
Presently I looked for the rowing-boat again, and saw it close in shore. In a minute it grated on the shingle, and there heaved himself out of it the tall fisherman who had escorted us last night. I was sure of him, and he also, it appeared, of me; for after staring up some time, shading his eyes with his hand, he turned, as if convinced, to haul his craft into safety. I watched him awhile, and was then once more absorbed in the little vessel drawing seawards, when I started to hear his voice suddenly address me close by. He must have come up the gully as soft-footed as a cat.
His eyes were less like a marmoset’s by daylight; but they were still a strange feature in his gaunt forbidding face. I felt friendly towards every one; yet somehow this man’s expression chilled me, as he stood smiling down ingratiatory without another word.