“Lord, child! they are but nasty clammy things, only nice when they are cooked,” said his nurse; and his grandmamma said to him, “Dear, they were made to live in the sea, just as the birds are made to fly in the air.” And this did not satisfy the little man at all; but he could get no more information, for the doctor, who could have told him a good deal, was under the thumb of his stately mistress, and Lady Avillion had said very sternly that the boy was not to be encouraged in his nonsense: what he must be taught were the duties of his position and all he owed to the country,—the poor little Earl!
He was a very small, slender, pale-cheeked lord indeed, with his golden hair hanging over his puzzled forehead, that used to ache sometimes with carrying Xenophon and Livy, and underneath the hair two great wondering blue eyes, of a blue so dark that they were like wet violets. His hands were tiny and thin, and his legs, clad in their red-silk stockings and black-velvet breeches, were like two sticks: people who saw him go by whispered about him and said all the poor little fellow’s rank and riches would not keep him long in the land of the living. Once the little Earl heard that said, and understood what it meant, and thought to himself, “I shouldn’t mind dying if I could take Ralph: perhaps there would be somebody to play with there.”
It was May, and there were not many folks at Shanklin: still, there were two or three children he might have played with, but his grandmamma thought them vulgar children, not fit playmates for him; and so the poor little Earl, with the burden of his greatness, had to walk soberly and sadly past them, with his little tired red-stockinged legs, while the little girls said to each other, in a whisper, “There’s a little lord!” and the boys hallooed out, “He’s the swell that owns the schooner.” Bertie would sigh, as he heard: what was the use of owning the schooner, when you had no one to play with on it, and never could do what you liked?
You have never seen Shanklin, for you have never been in England; and if you do go now, you will never see it as it was when Bertie walked there, when it was the prettiest and most primitive little place in England; now, they tell me, it has been made into a watering-place, with a pier and an esplanade.
Shanklin used to be a little green mossy village covered up in honeysuckle and hawthorn; low long houses, green too with ivy and creepers, hid themselves away in sweet-smelling old-fashioned gardens; yellow roads ran between high banks and hedges out to the green down or downward to the ripple of the sea; and the cool brown sands, glistening and firm, twice a day felt the kiss of the tide. The cliffs were brown too, for the most part; some were white; the gray sea stretched in front; and the glory of the place was its leafy chine and ravine that severed the rocks and was full of foliage and of the sound of birds. It used to be all so quiet there; now and then there passed in the offing a brig or a yacht or a man-of-war; now and then farmers’ carts came in from the downs by Appuldurcombe or the farms beyond the Undercliff; there were some fishing-cabins by the beach, and one old inn with a long grassy garden, where the coaches used to stop that ran through the quiet country from Ryde to Ventnor. It was so green, so still, so friendly, so fresh when I think of it I hear the swish of its lazy waves and I smell the smell of its eglantine hedges, and I see the big brown eyes of my gallant dog as he came breathless up from the sea.
Alas! you will never see it so. The hedges are down, they tell me, and the grand dog is dead, and the hateful engine tears through the fields, and the sands are beaten to make an esplanade, and the beach is noisy and hideous with the bray of bands and the laughter of fools.
What will the world be like when you are twenty? Very frightful, I fear. This is progress, they say?
But what of the little Earl? you ask.
Well, the little Earl knew Shanklin as I knew it,—when the blackbirds and thrushes sang in the quiet chine, and the sense of an infinite peace dwelt on its simple shores. His grandmamma had taken for the summer the house that stands in its woods at the head of the chine and looks straight down that rift of greenery to the gray sea. I know not what that house is now; then it was charming, chalet-like, yet spacious.
Here the little Earl was set free of his studies and kept out in the air when it was fine, and when it rained was sent, not to his books, but to his toys. Yet it did not seem to him any great change; for when he rode, James was with him; and when he walked, Deborah was with him; and when he bathed, William was with him; and when he was only in the garden, there was grandmamma.