Lady Good-for-Nothing | Page 3

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 off a piece of the pasty and wrapped it in a handkerchief--and memory recalled, as with a small shock of surprise, that the handkerchief was clean. The old man, though ragged enough to scare the crows, was clean from his bare head to his bare sea-bleached feet. He munched the rest of the pasty, talking between mouthfuls. To his discourse Dicky paid no heed, but slipped away for a scamper on the sands.
As he came running back he saw the old man, in the act of wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, suddenly shoot out an arm and