Winefred: A Story of the Chalk Cliffs

by S. Baring-Gould

And the men walked away.

Winefred heard no more, owing to the grinding of the pebbles under their feet, but she had heard sufficient.

It was as she had surmised. She had been employed to convey a message connected with a smuggling enterprise, and the secret had been betrayed by one of the confederates.

She was annoyed at having been involved by Rattenbury in a proceeding with which she had no sympathy; she was troubled at the danger that menaced him and his son Jack, who, she was confident, would not act upon the advice she had tendered. But, further, she saw that if the captain were taken, she and her mother would probably lose the home they had just got into.

Winefred had no decided opinions relative to the morality of smuggling. The atmosphere on that coast was charged with it. Her grandfather had been engaged in the contraband trade all his days, and her mother's brother had lost his life in an affray with the preventive men. On this account her sympathies were ranged with those who broke the law, and it was manifestly to her interest to exert herself to protect them in the danger that menaced. But she did not relish the trade that was being so largely carried on in the neighbourhood. It was surreptitious, it ranged with housebreaking and arson. And, as her mother held, it brought no luck on those engaged in it. She had been shown a pint mug with which the guineas had been measured out among the sharers in a successful run. They had not troubled to count the gold. Yet not one coin had remained with her grandfather, and he, to whom many of these pints of gold had been allotted, had died penniless. It was not from any deep moral principle that Winefred was opposed to smuggling, but partly because she thought no luck attached to it, and therefore it must be wrong, mainly because it was not an open and daylight profession, and she had a natural aversion from every thing that was not manifest and straightforward.

Winefred did not leave her hiding-place till she could do so unobserved; till one man had ascended the path to the station, and the other had taken the beach way to Lyme Regis.

Then she came from behind the rock.

She resolved not to mount the track that led up the slope, as it passed the cottages of the coastguard, and under the circumstances she deemed it advisable to give them a wide berth.

Her only other way of reaching the captain's cottage was circuitous. It lay along the beach, and she would have to double Haven Head and ascend the combe by which she and her mother had mounted on that eventful evening when they were first introduced to the reader.