All night the wind raged though the rain finally ceased. It seemed as though the reputed witches of Jersey were holding high carnival with the unloosed elements of air and water. Day broke, still without rain, but the violence of the wind was not lessened. Roger ran out to the end of the terrace and came hurrying back.
"Come out, everybody, and look," he shouted above the uproar. "The waves are coming over the breakwater. There isn't one inch of beach to be seen."
Roger's report was literally true. Though the sea wall protecting the town of St. Helier's rose twenty-five feet above the sands, the rollers were breaking beyond the wall on the esplanade itself, the white foam even running up some of the side streets. Only an inky howling mass of white-capped water stretched between the town and Elizabeth Castle.
Win, who had managed to make slow progress to a point of vantage, stood fascinated by the wild whirl of wind and water. The tide was at the flood and the spectacle at its finest. Just a few moments sufficed to lessen its grandeur as the waves, yielding to the law of their being, were dragged away from the land. Presently, instead of dashing over the wall, they broke against it, and then came a scene of different interest. The water, forcibly striking the masonry, was flung back on the next incoming roller, with a collision that sent spray forty feet into the air from the violence of the shock. This phenomenon was repeated as the rollers crashed down the curve of the wall, continuing for its full length, the flying spray looking like consecutive puffs of steam from a locomotive.
"Look, there comes the train from St. Helier's!" exclaimed Roger, dancing excitedly about. "Doesn't it look as though the ocean was trying to catch it?"
The little train had prudently delayed its starting until after the turn of the tide. As it crept slowly around the curve of the breakwater, great white tongues of foam constantly shot over the wall like fingers frantically trying to seize and draw it into the sea. But always the hands fell back baffled, to the accompaniment of a roar that sounded almost like human disappointment. The train reached St. Aubin's dripping with salt water.
"Five stones are torn out of the coping in the wall," reported Roger, coming back from his inspection of the adventurous little engine. "The guard says they are sweeping pebbles and stones by the ton out of the streets beyond the esplanade. And coming down here, he twice had a barrel of water slapped right at him. He is as wet as a drowned rat."
"The surf must be wonderful at Corbiére," said Estelle. "They say there is an undertow off that point which produces something this effect of the water flung back by the wall."
"Why, here's Miss Connie!" exclaimed Frances in excitement. Max and
Constance on horseback were coming down the terrace.
"We've been half round the island," Connie announced after her first greetings. Well prepared for wind as they were, both looked disheveled. Connie's hair was braided in a thick club down her back, evidently the only way she could keep it under control; Max's was plastered back by wind and spray, for he had lost his hat, and their horses were blown and spattered with salt brine.