Lady Good-for-Nothing | Page 2

great Whig families at home,
and sceptical as became a person of quality--was capable as any one of
relishing the comedy, had it been pointed out to him. With equal
readiness he would have scoffed at Man's pretensions in this world and
denied him any place at all in the next. Nevertheless on a planet the
folly of which might be taken for granted he claimed at least his share
of the reverence paid by fools to rank and wealth. He was travelling

this lonely coast on a tour of inspection, to visit and report upon a site
where His Majesty's advisers had some design to plant a fort; and a fine
ostentation coloured his progress here as through life. He had brought
his coach because it conveyed his claret and his batterie de cuisine (the
seaside inns were detestable); but being young and extravagantly
healthy and, with all his faults, very much of a man, he preferred to ride
ahead on his saddle-horse and let his pomp follow him.
Six horses drew the coach, and to each pair of leaders rode a postillion,
while a black coachman guided the wheelers from the box-seat; all
three men in the Collector's livery of white and scarlet. On a perch
behind the vehicle--which, despite its weight, left but the shallowest of
wheel-ruts on the hard sand--sat Manasseh, the Collector's cook and
body-servant; a huge negro, in livery of the same white and scarlet but
with heavy adornments of bullion, a cockade in his hat, and a loaded
blunderbuss laid across his thighs. Last and alone within the coach,
with a wine-case for footstool, sat a five-year-old boy.
Master Dicky Vyell--the Collector's only child, and motherless--sat and
gazed out of the windows in a delicious terror. For hours that morning
the travellers had ploughed their way over a plain of blown sand, dotted
with shrub-oaks, bay-berries, and clumps of Indian grass; then, at a
point where the tall cliffs began, had wound down to the sea between
low foothills and a sedge-covered marsh criss-crossed by watercourses
that spread out here and there into lagoons. At the head of this descent
the Atlantic had come into sight, and all the way down its echoes had
grown in the boy's ears, confusing themselves with a delicious odour
which came in fact from the fields of sedge, though he attributed it to
the ocean.
But the sound had amounted to a loud humming at most; and it was
with a leap and a shout, as they rounded the last foothill and saw the
vast empty beach running northward before them, league upon league,
that the thunder of the surf broke on them. For a while the boom and
crash of it fairly stunned the child. He caught at an arm-strap hanging
by the window and held on with all his small might, while the world he
knew with its familiar protective boundaries fell away, melted, left

him--a speck of life ringed about with intolerable roaring emptiness. To
a companion, had there been one in the coach, he must have clung in
sheer terror; yes, even to his father, to whom he had never clung and
could scarcely imagine himself clinging. But his father rode ahead,
carelessly erect on his blood-horse--horse and rider seen in a blur
through the salt-encrusted glass. Therefore Master Dicky held on as
best he might to the arm-strap.
By degrees his terror drained away, though its ebb left him shivering.
Child though he was, he could not remember when he had not been
curious about the sea. In a dazed fashion he stared out upon the
breakers. The wind had died down after the tempest, but the Atlantic
kept its agitation. Meeting the shore (which hereabouts ran shallow for
five or six hundred yards) it reared itself in ten-foot combers, rank
stampeding on rank, until the sixth or seventh hurled itself far up the
beach, spent itself in a long receding curve, and drained back to the
foaming forces behind. Their untiring onset fascinated Dicky; and now
and again he tasted renewal of his terror, as a wave, taller than the rest
or better timed, would come sweeping up to the coach itself, spreading
and rippling about the wheels and the horses' fetlocks. "Surely this one
would engulf them," thought the child, recalling Pharaoh and his
chariots; but always the furious charge spent itself in an edge of white
froth that faded to delicate salt filigree and so vanished. When this had
happened a dozen times or more, and still without disaster, he took
heart and began to turn it all into a game, choosing this or that breaker
and making imaginary wagers upon it; but yet the spectacle fascinated
him, and still at the back of his small brain lay wonder that all