It lay blue and sparkling, flecked with a myriad moving specks of gold, as the sunshine fell on the dancing water. He had seen it at close quarters last night, from the little quay, seen it smooth and grey, its breast heaving now and then as if in gentle sleep. To-day it was awake, alive, and buoyant. He must get down to it again. It was inviting him, smiling, dimpling, alluring.
He made a quick but exceedingly careful toilet. Antony was fastidious to a degree in the matter of cleanliness. Earth dirt he had no objection to; slovenly dirt was as abhorrent to him as vice.
Josephus, who had slept in the parlour, accorded him a hearty welcome on his descent of the narrow steep little stairs, intimating that he was every whit as ready to be up and doing as was his master. The sunshine, the blithesomeness of the morning was infectious. You felt yourself smiling in accord with its smiles.
Antony flung wide the cottage door. A scent of rosemary, southernwood, and verbena was wafted to him from the little garden,—clean, old-fashioned scents, English in their very essence. Anon he had more commonplace scents mingling with them,—the appetizing smell of fried sausages, the aromatic odour of freshly made coffee. Josephus found himself in two minds as to the respective merits of the attractions without, and the alluring odours within. Finally, after one scamper round the garden, he compromised by seating himself on the doorstep, for the most part facing the sunshine, but now and again turning a wet black nose in the direction of the breakfast table and frying-pan.
An hour or so later he was giving himself wholeheartedly to the grassy and rabbitty scents dear to a doggy soul, as he scampered in the direction of Byestry with his master. Occasionally he made side tracks into hedges and down rabbit holes, whence at a whistle from Antony, he would emerge innocent in expression, but utterly condemned by traces of red earth on his black nose and white back.
There was a lazy Sundayish atmosphere about the village as Antony passed through it, with Josephus now at his heels. Men lounged by cottage doors, women gossiped across garden fences. The only beings with an object in view appeared to be children,—crimp-haired little girls, and stiffly-suited small boys, who walked in chattering groups in the direction of a building he rightly judged to be a Sunday-school.
A little farther on, a priest was standing by the door of a small barn-like-looking place with a cross at one end. Antony vaguely supposed it to be a church, and thought, also vaguely, that it was the oddest-looking one he had ever seen. He concluded that Byestry was too small to boast a larger edifice.
On reaching the quay he turned to the right, walking along a cobbled pavement, which presently sloped down to the beach and a narrow stretch of firm smooth sand, bordered by brown rocks and the sea on one side, and a towering cliff on the other. The tide was going down, leaving the brown rocks uncovered. Among them were small crystal pools, reflecting the blue of the sky as in a mirror. Sea spleenwort and masses of samphire grew on the cliffs to his right. No danger here to the would-be samphire gatherer; it could be plucked from the safety of solid earth, with as great ease as picking up shells from the beach.
After some half hour’s walking, Antony turned a corner, bringing him to a yet lonelier beach. Looking back, he found Byestry shut from his view,—the cliffs behind him, the sea before him, the sky above him, stretches of sand around him, and himself alone, save for Josephus, and sea-gulls which dipped to the water or circled in the blue, and jackdaws which cried harshly from the cliffs.
He sat down on the sand, and began to fill his pipe. It was extraordinarily lonely, extraordinarily peaceful. There was no sinister note in the loneliness such as he had experienced in the vast spaces of the African veldt, but a reposefulness, a quiet rest which appealed to him. The very blueness of the sky and sparkle of the sunshine was tender after the brazen glitter of the African sun. Turning to look behind him, he saw that here the cliff was grass-covered, sloping almost to the beach, and among the grass, hiding its green, were countless bluebells, a sheet of shimmering colour. Two lines of Tennyson’s came suddenly into his mind.