A Maid of the Silver Sea | Page 7

where ormers and limpets and
vraie might be found. But to little Nance the rabbits were playfellows
whose sudden deaths she lamented and resented; the cliff-sides were
glorious gardens thick with sweet-scented yellow gorse and
honeysuckle and wild roses, carpeted with primroses and bluebells; and,

in their season, rich and juicy with blackberries beyond the possibilities
of picking.
She was on closest visiting terms with innumerable broods of
newly-hatched birdlings--knew them, indeed, while they were still but
eggs--delighted in them when they were as yet but skin and
mouth--rejoiced in their featherings and flyings. Even baby cuckoos
were a joy to her, though, on their foster-mothers' accounts she resented
the thriftlessness of their parents, and grew tired each year of their
monotonous call which ceased not day or night. But of the larks never,
for their songs seemed to her of heaven, while the cuckoos were of
earth. The gulls, too, were somewhat difficult from the friendly point of
view, but she lay for hours overlooking their domestic arrangements
and envying the wonders of their matchless flight.
And down below the cliffs what marvels she discovered!--marvels
which in many cases the Vicar was fain to content himself with at
second hand, since closer acquaintance seemed to him to involve
undoubted risk to limb if not to life. Little Nance, indeed, hopped down
the seamed cliffs like a rock pipit, with never a thought of the dangers
of the passage, and he would stand and watch her with his heart in his
mouth, and only shake his grey head at her encouraging assertions that
it was truly truly as easy as easy. For he felt certain that even if he got
down he would never get up again. And so, when the triumphant shout
from below told him she was safely landed, he would wave a grateful
hand and get back from the edge and seat himself securely on a rock,
till the rosy face came laughing up between him and the shimmering
sea, with trophy of weed or shell or crystal quartz, and he would tell her
all he knew about them, and she would try to tell him of all he had
missed by not coming down.
There were wonderful great basins down there, all lined with pink and
green corallines, and full of the loveliest weeds and anemones and
other sea-flowers, and the rivulets that flowed from them to the sea
were lined pink and green, too. And this that she had brought him was
the flaming sea-weed, though truly it did not look it now, but in the
water it was, she assured him, of the loveliest, and there were great

bunches there so that the dark holes under the rocks were all alight with
it.
She coaxed him doubtfully to the descent of the rounded headland
facing L'Etat, picking out an easy circuitous way for him, and so got
him safely down to her own special pool, hollowed out of the solid
granite by centuries of patient grinding on the part of the great boulders
within.
It was there, peering down at the fishes below, that she expressed a
wish to imitate them; and he agreeing, she ran up to the farm for a bit
of rope and was back before he had half comprehended all the beauties
of the pool. And he had no sooner explained the necessary movements
to her and she had tried them, than she cast off the rope, shouting, "I
can swim! I can swim!" and to his amazement swam across the pool
and back--a good fifty feet each way--chirping with delight in this
new-found faculty and the tonic kiss of the finest water in the world.
But after all it was not so very amazing, for she was absolutely without
fear, and in that water it is difficult to sink.
They were often down there together after that, for close alongside
were wonderful channels and basins whorled out of the rock in the
most fantastic ways, and to sit and watch the tide rush up them was a
never-failing entertainment.
And not far away was a blow-hole of the most extraordinary which shot
its spray a hundred feet into the air, and if you didn't mind getting wet
you could sit quite alongside it, so close that you could put your hand
into it as it came rocketing out of the hole, and then, if the sun was right,
you sat in the midst of rainbows--a thing Nance had always longed to
do since she clapped her baby hands at her first one. But the Vicar
never did that.
And once, in quest of the how and the why, Nance swam into the
blow-hole's cave at a very low tide, and its size and the dome of its roof,
compared with the