Lady Good-for-Nothing | Page 3

this
terrifying fury and uproar should always be coming to nothing. God
must be out yonder (he thought) and engaged in some mysterious form
of play. He had heard a good deal about God from Miss Quiney, his
governess; but this playfulness, as an attribute of the Almighty, was
new to him and hitherto unsuspected.
The beach, with here and there a break, extended for close upon twenty
miles, still curving towards the headland; and the travellers covered
more than two-thirds of the distance without espying a single living
creature. As the afternoon wore on the weather improved. The sun,

soon to drop behind the cliff-summits on the left, asserted itself with a
last effort and shot a red gleam through a chink low in the cloud-wrack.
The shaft widened. The breakers--indigo-backed till now and turbid
with sand in solution--began to arch themselves in glass-green hollows,
with rainbows playing on the spray of their crests. And then--as though
the savage coast had become, at a touch of sunshine, habitable--our
travellers spied a man.
He came forth from a break in the cliffs half a mile ahead and slowly
crossed the sands to the edge of the surf, the line of which he began,
after a pause, to follow as slowly northwards. His back was turned thus
upon the Collector's equipage, to which in crossing the beach he had
given no attention, being old and purblind.
The coach rolled so smoothly, and the jingle of harness was so entirely
swallowed in the roar of the sea, that Captain Vyell, pushing ahead and
overtaking the old fellow, had to ride close up to his shoulder and shout.
It appeared then, for further explanation, that his hearing as well as his
eyesight was none of the best. He faced about in a puzzled fashion,
stared, and touched his hat--or rather lifted his hand a little way and
dropped it again.
"Your Honour will be the Collector," he said, and nodded many times,
at first as if proud of his sagacity, but afterwards dully--as though his
interest had died out and he would have ceased nodding but had
forgotten the way. "Yes; my gran'-darter told me. She's in service at the
Bowling Green, Port Nassau; but walks over on Lord's Days to cheer
up her mother and tell the news. They've been expectin' you at Port
Nassau any time this week."
The Collector asked where he lived, and the old man pointed to a gully
in the cliff and to something which, wedged in the gully, might at a first
glance be taken for a large and loosely-constructed bird's nest. The
Collector's keen eyes made it out to be a shanty of timber roofed with
shingles and barely overtopping a wood pile.
"Wreckwood, eh?"

"A good amount of it ought to be comin' in, after the gale."
"Then where's your hook?"--for the wreckwood gatherers along this
part of the coast carry long gaffs to hook the flotsam and drag it above
reach of the waves.
"Left it up the bank," said the old man shortly. After a moment he
pulled himself together for an explanation, hollowed his palms around
his mouth, and bawled above the boom of the surf. "I'm old. I don't
carry weight more'n I need to. When a log comes in, my darter spies it
an' tells me. She's mons'rous quick-sighted for wood an' such like--
though good for nothin' else." (A pause.) "No, I'm hard on her; she can
cook clams."
"You were looking for clams?" Captain Vyell scrutinised the man's
face. It was a patriarchal face, strikingly handsome and not much
wrinkled; the skin delicately tanned and extraordinarily transparent.
Somehow this transparency puzzled him. "Hungry?" he asked quickly;
and as quickly added, "Starving for food, that's what you are."
"It's the Lord's will," answered the old man.
The coach had come to a halt a dozen paces away. The child within it
could hear nothing of this conversation; but to the end of his life his
memory kept vivid the scene and the two figures in it--his father, in
close-fitting riding-coat of blue, with body braced, leaning sideways a
little against the wind, and a characteristic hint of the cavalryman about
the slope of the thigh; the old wreck-picker standing just forward of the
bay's shoulder and looking up, with blown hair and patient eyes.
Memory recalled even the long slant of the bay's shoulder--a perfectly
true detail, for the horse was of pure English race and bred by the
Collector himself.
After this, as he remembered, some command must have been given,
for Manasseh climbed down, opened the coach door and drew from
under the seat a box, of which he raised the lid, disclosing things good
to eat-- among them a pasty with a crisp brown crust.

The wreck-picker broke