Aylwin | Page 8

some day I should fall

from top to bottom--fall and break my neck. A laugh was my sole
answer to these warnings; for, with the possession of perfect health, I
had inherited that instinctive belief in good luck which perfect health
will often engender.
However, my punishment came at last. The coast, which is yielding
gradually to the sea, is famous for sudden and gigantic landslips. These
landslips are sometimes followed, at the return of the tide, by a further
fall, called a 'settlement.' The word 'settlement' explains itself, perhaps.
No matter how smooth the sea, the return of the tide seems on that
coast to have a strange magnetic power upon the land, and the debris of
a landslip will sometimes, though not always, respond to it by again
falling and settling into new and permanent shapes.
Now, on the morning after a great landslip, when the coastguard,
returning on his beat, found a cove where, half-an-hour before, he had
left his own cabbages growing, I, in spite of all warnings, had climbed
the heap of _débris_ from the sands, and while I was hallooing
triumphantly to two companions below--the two most
impudent-looking urchins, bare-footed and unkempt, that ever a
gentleman's son forgathered with--a great mass of loose earth settled,
carrying me with it in its fall. I was taken up for dead.
It was, however, only a matter of broken ribs and a damaged leg. And
there is no doubt that if the local surgeon had not been allowed to have
his own way, I should soon have been cured. As it was I became a
cripple. The great central fact--the very pivot upon which all the wheels
of my life have since been turning--is that for two years during the
impressionable period of childhood I walked with crutches.
It must not be supposed that my tears--the tears which at this moment
were blotting out the light and glory of the North Sea in the sun--came
from the pain I was suffering. They came from certain terrible news,
which even my brother Frank had been careful to keep from me, but
which had fallen from the lips of my father--the news that I was not
unlikely to be a cripple for life. From that moment I had become a
changed being, solitary and sometimes morose. I would come and sit
staring at the ocean, meditating on tilings in general, but chiefly on
things connected with cripples, asking myself, as now, whether life
would be bearable on crutches.
At my heart were misery and anger and such revolt as is, I hope, rarely

found in the heart of a child. I had sat down outside the rails at this
most dangerous point along the cliff, wondering whether or not it
would crumble beneath me. For this lameness coming to me, who had
been so active, who had been, indeed, the little athlete and pugilist of
the sands, seemed to have isolated me from my fellow-creatures to a
degree that is inconceivable to me now. A stubborn will and masterful
pride made me refuse to accept a disaster such as many a nobler soul
than mine has, I am conscious, borne with patience. My nature became
soured by asking in vain for sympathy at home; my loneliness drove
me--silent, haughty, and aggressive--to haunt the churchyard, and sit at
the edge of the cliff, gazing wistfully at the sea and the sands which
could not be reached on crutches. Like a wounded sea-gull, I retired
and took my trouble alone.
How could I help taking it alone when none would sympathise with me?
My brother Frank called me 'The Black Savage,' and I half began to
suspect myself of secret impulses of a savage kind. Once I heard my
mother murmur, as she stroked Frank's rosy cheeks and golden curls,
'My poor Henry is a strange, proud boy!' Then, looking from my
crutches to Frank's beautiful limbs, she said, 'How providential that it
was not the elder! Providence is kind.' She meant kind to the House of
Aylwin. I often wonder whether she guessed that I heard her. I often
wonder whether she knew how I had loved her.
This is how matters stood with me on that summer afternoon, when I
sat on the edge of the cliff in a kind of dull, miserable dream. Suddenly,
at the moment when the huge mass of clouds had covered the entire
surface of the water between Flinty Point and Needle Point with their
rich purple shadow, it seemed to me that the waves began to sparkle
and laugh in a joyful radiance which they were making for themselves.
And at that same moment an unwonted sound struck my ear from the
churchyard behind me--a strange sound indeed in that deserted
place--that of a childish