Southcliff was a very dull little place, especially so in winter, of course. In fine weather there is always a charm about the seaside, even on the barest and least picturesque coast. There are the endless varieties of sky panorama—the wonderful sunsets, if you are lucky enough to face seawards to the west; the constantly changing effects of light and colour reflected in the water itself. And on a wild or rugged coast, winter and stormy weather bring of course their own grand though terrible displays.
But Southcliff, despite its promising name, was tame in the extreme. The 'cliff' was so meagre and unimposing as to suggest the suspicion of being only an artificial or semi-artificial erection; the shore had no excitement about it, not even that of quicksands. It was the 'safest' spot all along the coast; even the most suicidally disposed of small boys could scarcely come to mischief there. The tides went out and came in with an almost bourgeois regularity and respectability; there was no possibility of being 'surprised' by the waves; no lifeboat, because within the memory of man no vessel of any description whatever had been wrecked there; no lighthouse, no smugglers' caves of ancient fame, no possibility of adventure of any kind—'no nothing,' Bessie Harper was once heard to say, when she was very little, ''cept the sea and the sky.'
A grand exception those, however, as we have said. And dull though it was, there were some people who loved the little place as their home, and were most ready to be happy in it.
It had some few distinct advantages. It was very healthy, and for these days very cheap. There was a good church, venerable and well cared for; the few, very few residents were all estimable and some interesting. Such as it was, take it all in all, it had seemed a very haven of refuge to Captain Harper and his wife when, some eight or ten years ago, they had pitched their tent there, after the last hopes of recovering any of Mrs Harper's lost money—hopes which for long had every now and then buoyed them up only to prove again delusive—had finally deserted them.
'At anyrate,' the wife, with her irrepressibly sanguine nature, had said, 'we have the comfort of now knowing the worst. And Colin and Bertram are started. What a good thing the boys were the eldest! There is only Fitz to think about, and we'll manage him somehow. For of course the three girls will turn out well. Look at Camilla already.'
Fitz was then about five—the youngest son, the youngest of the family excepting delicate little Margaret. He was 'managed,' and not badly, though a public school was an impossibility; his destination proved to be the navy, and thither at the proper age he made his way in orthodox fashion. The girls, helped by their mother, and by their father too, did their best, and it was far from a bad best. They were naturally intelligent; intensely anxious to seize all opportunities of learning, so that a stray chance of half a dozen lessons in music or French did more for them than as many years will do for most ordinary girls; they were, the two elder ones at least, wonderfully healthy in mind and body, bright-tempered, faithful, unselfish, inheriting from their father the noble characteristics which in some mysterious way had in him so flourished as to oust all the reckless and contemptible qualities of the Bernard Harper who had half-broken his sister's heart, and brought down in sorrow to the grave his gray-haired father.
But alas! they had not known the worst, as the loving, brave-spirited wife and mother had believed. In some sense, it is true, they had not known the best, for the years had brought many satisfactions, many unlooked-for, though unimportant, mitigations of the poverty so hard to bear cheerfully—people had been 'very kind.' But the poverty itself had increased. There were literally unavoidable expenses for 'the boys,' if they were not to be stranded in their careers; there was an unexpected rising of the rent owing to their good landlord's sudden death by accident; there was, worst of all, the terrible strain of Captain Harper's ill-health. In itself this was sad enough for the wife and daughters who adored him: it became almost an agony when, joined to the knowledge that more money, and not so very much more, might both relieve his suffering and hold out a reasonable prospect of comparative restoration.
One operation—now some years ago—had succeeded for the time; but not being followed by the treatment at home and residence abroad prescribed, the improvement had not been lasting. Then it was that Mrs Lyle had written to her aunt, with the result that we know. Her letter was returned unopened.
Then there came a period of comparative comfort, and for two or three years the family at Hedge End (such was the not very euphonious name of the Harpers' house) took heart again, and began to be sure 'father was going to get well all of himself, after all.' And during this time some other cheering things came to pass. An old acquaintance of long-ago days between Mrs Harper and the Misses Scarlett was renewed by the ladies of Ivy Lodge coming to Southcliff one Midsummer holiday-time for sea-air, and this resulted in their offering to take Camilla, then almost grown-up, and later her younger sisters, on exceptionally moderate terms. The news from and of the far-away 'boys' was regular and good. The parents began to breathe freely, and to dare to hope that they had passed the worst of their troubles.
But alas! it was only an interlude. Scarcely had Bessie and Margaret been settled at Ivy Lodge when there came anxiety about Colin—tidings of his prostration by a bad attack of fever; then, when he was able to write of his recovery, little Fitz broke his leg, and had to be brought home at the cost of much expense as well as distress to be nursed well again. And worst of all, through these many weeks a terrible suspicion was dawning on poor Captain Harper—a suspicion all too soon to be changed into a certainty—that he himself was falling back again, that the very symptoms he had been warned of were reappearing, and that unless something were done he might find himself a hopeless and complete cripple.