It was high-tide below, and the calmest and softest of silver summer seas was breaking in the gentlest ripple on the beach, and against the base of the high chalk cliff whereon he lay. The entrance to the little bay was marked by a light line of foam-crested breakers, beyond which lay a broad stretch of heaving ocean; but the bay itself was "oily calm," its breast dotted here and there with fishing-luggers outward-bound for the night's service, their big tan sails gleaming lightly and picturesquely in the red beams of the setting sun. Faintly, very faintly, from below rose the cries of the boatmen--hoarse monotonous calls, which had accompanied such and such acts of labour for centuries, and had been taught by sire to son, and practised from time immemorial. But the silence around the man outstretched on the cliffs top was unbroken save by the occasional cry of the seafowl, wheeling round and round above his head, and swooping down into their habitation holes, with which the chalk-face was honeycombed. As he lay there idly watching, the sun, a great blood-red globe of fire, sank into the sea, leaving behind it a halo of light, in which the strips of puff-cloud hovering over the horizon--here light, thin, and vaporous, there heavy, dense, and opaque--assumed eccentric outlines, and deadened to one gorgeous depth of purple. There were very few men who would have been insensible to the loveliness of the surroundings--very few but would have been impressed under such circumstances with a sense of the beauty of Nature and the beneficence of Providence. Captain Derinzy was one of these few. He saw it all, marked it all, looked at it leisurely and critically through half-shut eyes, as though scanning some clever picture or some scene at the theatre. Then, quietly dropping his head back upon his hand, he gave a prolonged yawn, and said quietly to himself, "Oh, dam!"
"Oh, dam!" Sun and sea and sky, purple clouds, foam-crested breakwaters, tan sails sunset-gilded, yohoing boatmen, nest-seeking curlews, hoary cliff. "Oh, dam!" But that was not all. Lazily lying at full length, lazily picking blades of grass, lazily nibbling them, and lazily spitting them from his mouth, he said in a quaintly querulous tone:
"Beastly place! How I hate it! Beastly sea, and all that kind of thing; and those fellows going away in their beastly boats, smelling of fish and oil and grease, and beastliness, and wearing greasy woollen nightcaps, and smoking beastly strong tobacco in their foul pipes; and then people draw them, and write about them, and call them romantic, and all such cussed twaddle! Why the deuce ain't they clean and neat, and why don't they dance about, and sing like those fellows in Masaniello? And--Oh Lord! Masaniello! I didn't think I should even have remembered the name of anything decent in this infernal place! What's the time now?" looking at his watch. "Nearly eight. Gad! fancy having had a little dinner at the Windham, or, better still, at the Coventry, where they say that fellow--what's his name?--Francatelli, is so good, and then dropping down to the Opera to hear Cruvelli and Lablache, or the new house which Poyntz wrote me about--Covent Garden--where Grisi and Mario and the lot have gone! Fancy my never having seen the new house! Dammy! I shall become a regular fogey if I stop in this infernal hole much longer. And not as if I were stopping for myself either! If I'd been shaking a loose leg, and had outrun the constable, or anything of that sort, I can understand a fellow being compelled to pull up and live quiet for a bit; though there's Boulogne, which is much handier to town, and much jollier with the établissement, and plenty of écarté, and all that sort of thing, to go on with. But this! Pooh! that's the dam folly of a man's marrying what they call a superior woman! I suppose Gertrude's all right; I suppose it will come off all straight; but I don't see the particular pull for me when it does come off. Here am I wastin' the best years of my life--and just at a time when I haven't got too many of 'em to waste, by Jove!--just that another fellow may stand in for a good thing. To be sure, he's my son, and there's fatherly feelings, and all that sort of thing; but he's never done anything for me, and I think it's rather hard he don't come and take a little of this infernal dreariness on his own shoulders. I shall have to cut away--I know I shall; I can't stand it much longer. I shall have to tell Gertrude--and I never can do that, and I haven't got the pluck to cut away without telling her, and I know she won't even let me go to old Dingo's for the shooting in the autumn. What an ass I was ever to let myself be swindled into coming into this beastly place! and how confoundedly I hate it! Oh, dam! Oh, dam!"
As he concluded he raised himself lightly to his feet, and commenced his descent of the hill as easily and jauntily as he had ascended it. His lame leg troubled him a little, and once when he trod on a rolling stone and nearly fell, he stopped and smiled pleasantly at the erring foot, and shook his cane facetiously over it. As he entered the village, he muttered to himself: "Good heavens! du monde, how very interesting!" For the hours of toil were over, and the shopkeepers and the wives of the fishermen, and such of the fisher-boys as had not gone to sea that evening, were standing at their doors and gossiping, or playing in the street. The lace-making girls were there too--very pretty girls for the most part, with big black eyes and swarthy complexions and thick blue-black hair; their birthright these advantages, for in the old days one of the home-flying ships of the Spanish Armada had been wrecked on the Beachborough coast, and the saved mariners had intermarried with the village women, and transmitted their swarthy comeliness to their posterity. As the Captain passed by, hats were lifted and curtsies dropped, courtesy which he duly returned by touching his sombrero with his forefinger in the military style to the men, and by God-blessing the women and chin-chucking the girls with great heartiness.
So on till he arrived at his own house, where he opened the door from the outside, and entering the handsome old dining-room, was surprised to see the table laid for four persons.
"Hallo! what's this?" he said to a woman at the other end of the room with her back towards him. "Who is coming to dinner, Mrs. Stothard?"
"Have you forgotten?" said the woman addressed, without turning her head. "Dr. Wainwright."
"Oh, ah!" growled Captain Derinzy, in a subdued key. "Where's Annette?"
"In her own room."
"Why don't she come down?"