Winefred: A Story of the Chalk Cliffs

by S. Baring-Gould

So he walked back to the ferryman's cottage, and, avoiding conversation with Olver, threw himself on his bed. Dench had, indeed, sought to detain him by asking questions as to where he had been, whether he had obtained employment, and what he proposed for the morrow, but the boy answered that he was wearied and indisposed to talk.

'He will be brought to it yet,' said the ferryman to himself. 'Those Beer fellows, and, above all, David Nutall, are a bit shy of me and suspect something. But if I have this greenhorn here, and can thrust him in among them, I shall know all their movements, and can sell them in a lump when I have a mind to.'

Since the disposal of the house that had belonged to his father, Jack had not been up to it; he had avoided it. But on the morrow, after another day of ineffectual search after employment, towards evening he walked over the down at the head of the cliffs and descended to the undercliff where the cottage stood.

It had been renovated, and in part remodelled since its purchase. The walls had been whitewashed and the roof repaired. The fence before the house had been put to rights, and the little garden had been dug up. Brambles that had straggled across the path leading to it, and overswaying boughs, had been pruned back.

Jack looked at the house. It was certainly a pleasanter dwelling now than in his father's time. A house in which a woman is at once assumes a neatness and a charm which one occupied by man only does not and cannot possess.

A light sprang up in a window. Some one was within, and he saw the shadow of an arm upon the pane that was raised to draw a curtain. He beat a hasty retreat. He recalled how that on the preceding night Winefred had accused him of running after her. He was fearful of being seen near the house by some one either coming out of the door or approaching from the down. It would not be easy for him to account for his presence there. Winefred would be strengthened in her persuasion that he spied on her actions. Then the blood rushed to his temples. She might even conceivably suppose that he had taken a fancy for her, and that it was her charms that drew him to the house.

He!—he take a fancy to her!

He hurried away, not by the path, lest he should encounter the girl or her mother, but through the bushes, and he stumbled over stones, and caught his foot in briars. He came upon the open space which he had been wont to regard as his garden, and where he had had a brush with Winefred. He stood still there and shook himself, but he could not shake off the thoughts of that girl. The air there was charged with the smell of decayed leaves and mouldering twigs. Every step was upon dead vegetation, and every tread brought out an exhalation of death.

In vain did he force his mind to other matters; it would turn with perverse persistency to Winefred, and he saw her in his fancy pursue him with an angry light in her eyes, and every branch that smote him seemed to him to be struck by her hand.