The heat-glimmer is still quivering on the sand, and over the vast mud-flats, bared by the retreating tide, a soft haze hangs. Yet the sun, sinking slowly through a cloudless sky, reddens as it nears the low horizon, and the grey grass of the old sea wall is brightening in the glow of sunset. Over the long curve of the sand-hills shows a wide sweep of plain, whose level meadows, freshened by the welcome rain, are still a very blaze of gold. Against the sky, where, at the far limit of the bay, the ragged hillocks die away into the shore, stands the white shaft of a lighthouse. Farther still, across the hazy mud-flats, rise the faint shapes of shadowy hills. The tide is out. A sea of boulders, shaggy with dark weed, look like a herd of strange monsters come ashore to bask upon the sand. There is no sign of human presence anywhere, save a house roof just showing here and there above the sand-hills, the distant hamlets scattered at far intervals over the moor, and the black stakes of fishing nets that stand out on the grey mud like webs of giant spiders. There is no figure on the shore, no stranded boat, no idle sail. Nor is there sound, save the low monotonous murmur of the sea. But here and there over the desolate expanse dark shapes of birds are moving. Now and then a troop of dunlins careers along the sand. Surely they are soon back after their brief northern summer. One can hardly think that they and the brown whimbrels whose musical trill at times falls softly on the ear can have been away at all. Now a party of gulls get up with wild stormy crying, and wheel and eddy in the air, now light, now dark on the grey sky of the horizon. All the while to the cliff ledges overhead clamorous daws are drifting, passing to their nests, or settling on storm-worn pinnacles of rock. That shrill pipe was the cry of a kestrel. Two rock doves hurrying homeward, cliff-dwellers like the rest, pay no heed. They know him well, too well to fear at any time his beak or claw. Here he comes, wheeling round the headland. With wings and tail spread wide, he pauses a moment to hover in the air; then sails slowly by. No shrill clamour from the cliff answers his challenge. No fierce young eyases yet are on the watch for his return. He alights on a ledge far overhead, where his mate no doubt is brooding on her rich brown eggs. Over the sea, trembling in the sinking sun, lies a gleam as of frosted silver. Suddenly, far out on the grey level, breaks a line of light. A faint sound falls on the ear—the low roar of the returning sea, the first wave of the rising tide. Now troops of daws, rising from the fields along the shore, fly homeward—a gathering cloud of dusky figures sweeping towards the cliff, that echoes with their musical clamour.
Right overhead they go, clustering like bees on ledges and pinnacles and grassy slopes, and settle down to gossip over the experiences of the day. Again they rise into the air, and wheel over the sea, and again turn homeward, darkening the cliff as with innumerable points of shadow. Once more they rise in eddying crowd. The troop divides. With sharp chorus of farewell one party flies straight over the hill. Their resting-place is farther on. They are not dwellers in the cliff. They are making for the low hills to the northward, a ridge of limestone dwindling into such another rocky headland. There, in the shelter of the hills, stand the ruins of a priory, in the niches of whose crumbling tower, or on the dusty floor of its neglected belfry, their sires and they have built for generations their untidy nests. It is an ancient pile. Founded now nearly seven centuries ago, its grey walls harboured for three hundred years a handful of monks, black-stoled, black-hooded, darker even than these daws. It has long been an article of faith in the countryside that the old tower was
". . . . . . . . . built
To purge de Traci's soul from guilt,
Of Becket foully slain."
But in the original letter, still to be read in the Cottonian library, in which William de Curtenai, grandson of Traci, made known to the Bishop of the diocese his intention of founding a "monastic house of the order of monks of St. Augustine," there is no hint at all of expiation. Nor, indeed, have we any evidence that the guilt of murder ever did lie heavy on de Traci's soul: though there is an old tradition that, after a brief reappearance at Court, he spent the remainder of his stormy life in seclusion on his manor near Morthoe, where in the old churchyard by the sea
"Lie all the Tracies, with the wind in their faces."
The founder of the priory seems to have had no other object in view than "the welfare of the soul of Robert de Curtenai, my father, … and of my mother and myself; also of my wife, my ancestors and descendants." For rather more than three centuries the "Worspryng" canons, never probably more than ten in number, lived and died in this grey old house by the sea. We know little of their story; but the document is still in existence to which the last of their priors set his name in acknowledgment that the Pope was a usurper, and that King Henry alone was true head of the Church. Two years later all the minor monasteries were forfeited to the Crown—"forasmoche as manifest synne, vicious, carnall and abomynable lyving is dayly used and comitted amonges the lytell Abbeys and Pryories." This was one of the "lytell Pryories." Its revenues from all sources, whether from rents that were reckoned in horseshoes, or from "arable at ivd.," or from "wode and waste at jd. the acre," amounted to rather under a hundred a year.
When the little party of friars turned their backs upon their home, they appear to have carried with them what was probably the most sacred of their relics: one of those small wooden cups which, filled with "Canterbury Water"—that is, with water containing a minute quantity of the martyr's blood—were sold to visitors at Becket's shrine. Marvellous are the tales related by the chroniclers of the time as to the virtue of this wonderful water. By its use sight, hearing, speech, reason, and even life were restored.