Not much had figured to us, perhaps, during these five years except the shapes of romance with which strong young souls can always people a desert. We had put on mind and muscle. We could run, swim, fight, eat anything that was set before us, and want more. Our excursions were further afield; our walks more extended along the road to Parnassus. We were very fine fellows, no doubt, in our own opinions; and our voices were beginning to growl handsomely.
Harry had, for his part, developed into a shapely, fearless young figure, with a good manner of speech and a great attachment to my uncle. He had, moreover, developed a decided bent towards mechanics, and went now on two days in the week to a technical school in Yokestone, making the journey to and from on foot, and sleeping each night with a cousin of his mother’s, who owned a small foundry there, and who, since the boy’s proof of himself, had taken a practical interest in his welfare. The periodic partings were without savour to us, had it not been that to them the periodic reunions supplied the salt. But no doubt they were helpful in giving us opportunity for a more individually independent growth; and certainly during them “Coke upon Littleton” (for Mr. Sant was training me with an eye to the Law) secured my less divided attention.
As to Dunberry itself and its familiar figures, there was little change to be noted. On the one side there was the ripening of the young fruit towards maturity; on the other, a little whiter growth of lichen on the decaying branches. Uncle Jenico must count among the latter; though surely no tree past fruiting ever retained more unimpaired the sweetness of its sap. He had collected during this period enough antiquities to furnish out an old rag, bone, and iron shop; and, indeed, I am afraid the bulk of his stock was not suited to a much more exclusive repository. There was little which, provided it was gathered from the beach and had once been a part of something living or manufactured, he would not give a place in it. His veneration for rust was the most artless thing. An object had only to be corroded with it, to figure in his eyes for an assured antique. In this way he amassed great quantities of bolts, links, sheet-iron fragments, and other rarities, to most of which he assigned a use and period, which, I am convinced, had never been theirs. There was, for instance, a breastplate of the Renaissance era, which I do believe had never been anything but a dish-cover of our own. There was an iron skull-cap, or morion, of Edward the First’s time, which I will swear was nothing but a saucepan without its handle; the handle itself, indeed, being found near the same spot a few days later, and catalogued for the head of a boar spear. Part of a whale’s under jaw, much decayed, figured for the prow of a Viking ship; and divers teeth, mostly, I think, horses’, for the grinders of prehistoric monsters. There were some bronze coins certainly—none too many—whose value was conjectural, and whose legends were largely undecipherable. Uncle Jenico would never submit these, the cream of his collection, to expert criticism. He hugged them as a miser hugs his gold, but with a diviner intent. I alone was permitted to gloat with him over the hoard.
“There’s your jointure, Dicky,” he would say. “Look at it accumulating for you, without an effort of its own, at compound interest. There’s no trustee like a collector who knows his business. You may turn over current money to increase it; but the more you leave that alone the better you’ll realize on it some day. The antiquity market is always a rising one. Every year adds its interest to it. We won’t touch the principal yet—not till you come of age. Then we’ll put it up, my boy—then we’ll put it up; and you shall eat your dinners, and follow in your dear father’s footsteps, and have chambers in Fountain Court itself.”
Did he have a real faith in this picture? He had a faith in having a faith in it, anyhow. Yet sometimes I could not help thinking he shrunk from that same test of criticism; from the conceivable discovery that he had wasted all these years of his life on a fond chimera. I am glad that in the end the test was never forced; that circumstances came to lay for ever the necessity of it, and in a way than which none other could have delighted him better. For I believe a realization of the truth would have broken his kind, unselfish heart.
He had not during this time altogether eschewed his former habits and enthusiasms. Periodic inventions of purely local inspiration marked it. He designed a respirator to be lined with porous shavings of driftwood, so that the asthmatic merchant might inhale ozone in the thickest fogs of Lombard Street. He planned a boat to be steered from the front by means of a rudder which was merely a jointed elongation of the prow, or false beak hinging to the neck, like a fish’s head and gills: a splendid conception, seeing how the steersman would be also the look-out, and the crew aft suffer no more responsibility than passengers in a train.
Other happy notions of his were “the luminous angler,” a hook rubbed with phosphorus for night fishing; a scheme for pickling sandhoppers; and an uncapsizable boat, the buoyant principle whereof was an armour of light iron pipings, each tube of which was to be divided into a number of little water-tight compartments.
None of these was ever, to my knowledge, put to the actual test, so pledged is our conservatism to run in a circle. The old stern-steerer was good enough for our fathers, and were we to be more exacting than they, who stand to us for all holy prescription? No inspired inventor ever yet profited by his inspiration; nor did his descendants find that inspiration marketable until it was mellowed to a tradition. For which reason Uncle Jenico had to be content, like the magnanimous soul he was, with planting for the generations to come.
He never dreamt now, more than I, of leaving the village in which circumstance had laid us to take root. Aliens at first, we were become of the soil, and bound to it by many ties of interest and affection. As to the place itself, Mr. Sant’s hopes of seasonable visitors, of whom we had been welcomed for the pioneers, were doomed to non-fulfilment. Whether it was its isolation, its shocking primitiveness in those days of antimacassars and the social proprieties, or perhaps its rather forbidding reputation for inhospitality, which kept strangers away, I do not know; but in any case they came rarely, and then only as birds of passage. I think it, at least, quite likely that the third consideration was most operative. Dunberry, before the days of Mr. Sant, had borne, it must be confessed, a sinister notoriety—a name for determined and organized smuggling. Visitors then were neither desired nor welcomed, the whole native population, or at least with few exceptions, forming a lawless confederacy for the disposal of contraband. But after the earthquake (or what was generally cited for such, and by many, I am persuaded, who knew better, though it made no difference in the moral), things should have been otherwise, when the new rector, using its opportunity to reclaim his wayward flock to godliness, sought to compensate by legitimate trade for the lost wages of sin. But it is easier to cure the itch than to convince others of your patient’s recovered cleanness. And so Dunberry reformed had still to suffer the penalty of Dunberry unregenerate. Visitors came not to it, and it was in the position of having dropped the carnal substance for the moral shadow. And what made it worse was that the Excise, unpersuaded of its reclamation, chose this very penitential time to dump down a coastguard station on the cliffs a mile south, and so knocked on the head for ever any possibility of its relapse into the old prosperous condition.
The blow fell in the second year of our stay; and from it dated, I think, the final demoralisation of the ancient order, of which Rampick might be considered the prominent expression. This man deteriorated thenceforth year by year, recognizing, I suppose, the practical uselessness of his hypocrisy. His gradual self-revelation was a real grief to Mr. Sant, whose worldly common sense was not always proof against his missionary zeal. He had the pain to see this cherished convert of his sink into an idle, drunken loafer, with a heart poisoned with a shapeless black resentment against all whom he chose to consider were in any way responsible for his ruin; amongst whom he included, for some unaccountable reason, my uncle and me, and in only less degree, the dear clergyman himself. But bankruptcy knows no reason.