The fish-shops, the green-grocer’s shops, the second-hand book-shops, and most of all, those delicious repositories of sea-treasures—foreign importations all glittering with mother-of-pearl, dried sea-horses, sea-sponges, sea-coral, and wonderful little boxes all pasted over with shimmering shells—filled him with a delight as vivid and new as when he had first encountered them in remote infancy.
This first drifting down to the sea’s edge, after emerging from the train, always seemed to Luke the very supremacy of human happiness. The bare legs of the children, little and big, who ran laughing or crying past him and the tangled curls of the elder damsels, tossed so coquettishly back from their sun-burnt faces, the general feeling of irresponsibility in the air, the tang of adventure in it all, of the unexpected, the chance-born, always wrapped him about in an epicurean dream of pleasure.
That monotonous splash of the waves against the pebbles,—how he associated it with endless exquisite flirtations,—flirtations conducted with adorable shamelessness between the blue sky and the blue sea! The memory of these, the vague memory of enchanting forms prone or supine upon the glittering sands, with the passing and re-passing of the same plump bathing-woman,—he had known her since his childhood!—and the same donkeys with their laughing burdens, and the same sweet-sellers with their trays, almost made him cry aloud with delight, as emerging at length upon the Front, and overtaking his friends at the Jubilee Clock-Tower, he saw the curved expanse of the bay lying magically spread out before him. How well he knew it all, and how inexpressibly he loved it!
The tide was on its outward ebb when the four happy companions jumped down, hand in hand, from the esplanade to the shingle. The long dark windrow of broken shells and sea-weed drew a pleasant dividing line between the dry and the wet sand. Luke always associated the stranded star-fish and jelly-fish and bits of scattered drift-wood which that windrow offered, with those other casually tossed-up treasures with which an apparently pagan-minded providence had bestrewn his way!
Once well out upon the sands, and while the girls, with little shrieks and bursts of merriment, were pushing one another into the reach of the tide, Luke turned to survey with a deep sigh of satisfaction, the general appearance of the animated scene.
The incomparable watering-place,—with its charming “after-glow,” as Mr. Hardy so beautifully puts it, “of Georgian gaiety,”—had never looked so fascinating as it looked this August afternoon.
The queer old-fashioned bathing-machines, one of them still actually carrying the Lion and Unicorn upon its pointed roof, glittered in the sunshine with an air of welcoming encouragement. The noble sweep of the houses behind the crescent-shaped esplanade, with the names of their terraces—Brunswick, Regent, Gloucester, Adelaide—so suggestive of the same historic epoch, gleamed with reciprocal hospitality; nor did the tall spire of St. John’s Church, a landmark for miles round, detract from the harmony of the picture.
On Luke’s left, as he turned once more and faced the sea, the vibrating summer air, free at present from any trace of mist, permitted a wide and lovely view of the distant cliffs enclosing the bay. The great White Horse, traced upon the chalk hills, seemed within an hour’s walk of where he stood, and the majestic promontory of the White Nore drew the eye onward to where, at the end of the visible coast-line, St. Alban’s Head sank into the sea.