The House on the Beach | Page 5

image, together, it must be confessed, with a
degree of nervousness that invested common events with some of the
terrors of the Last Trump, when one night, just upon the passing of the
vernal equinox, something happened.
CHAPTER II
A carriage Stopped short in the ray of candlelight that was fitfully and
feebly capering on the windy blackness outside the open workshop of
Crickledon, the carpenter, fronting the sea-beach. Mr. Tinnnan's house
was inquired for. Crickledon left off planing; at half-sprawl over the
board, he bawled out, "Turn to the right; right ahead; can't mistake it."
He nodded to one of the cronies intent on watching his labours: "Not
unless they mean to be bait for whiting-pout. Who's that for Tinman, I
wonder?" The speculations of Crickledon's friends were lost in the
scream of the plane.
One cast an eye through the door and observed that the carriage was
there still. "Gentleman's got out and walked," said Crickledon. He was
informed that somebody was visible inside. "Gentleman's wife,
mayhap," he said. His friends indulged in their privilege of thinking
what they liked, and there was the usual silence of tongues in the shop.
He furnished them sound and motion for their amusement, and now and
then a scrap of conversation; and the sedater spirits dwelling in his
immediate neighbourhood were accustomed to step in and see him
work up to supper- time, instead of resorting to the more turbid and
costly excitement of the public-house.
Crickledon looked up from the measurement of a thumb-line. In the
doorway stood a bearded gentleman, who announced himself with the
startling exclamation, "Here's a pretty pickle!" and bustled to make way
for a man well known to them as Ned Crummins, the upholsterer's man,
on whose back hung an article of furniture, the condition of which, with
a condensed brevity of humour worthy of literary admiration, he
displayed by mutely turning himself about as he entered.

"Smashed!" was the general outcry.
"I ran slap into him," said the gentleman. "Who the deuce!--no bones
broken, that's one thing. The fellow--there, look at him: he's like a glass
tortoise."
"It's a chiwal glass," Crickledon remarked, and laid finger on the star in
the centre.
"Gentleman ran slap into me," said Crummins, depositing the frame on
the floor of the shop.
"Never had such a shock in my life," continued the gentleman. "Upon
my soul, I took him for a door: I did indeed. A kind of light flashed
from one of your houses here, and in the pitch dark I thought I was at
the door of old Mart Tinman's house, and dash me if I did n't go
in--crash! But what the deuce do you do, carrying that great big
looking-glass at night, man? And, look here tell me; how was it you
happened to be going glass foremost when you'd got the glass on your
back?"
"Well, 't ain't my fault, I knows that," rejoined Crummins. "I came
along as careful as a man could. I was just going to bawl out to Master
Tinman, 'I knows the way, never fear me'; for I thinks I hears him call
from his house, 'Do ye see the way?' and into me this gentleman runs
all his might, and smash goes the glass. I was just ten steps from Master
Tinman's gate, and that careful, I reckoned every foot I put down, that I
was; I knows I did, though."
"Why, it was me calling, 'I'm sure I can't see the way.'
"You heard me, you donkey!" retorted the bearded gentleman. "What
was the good of your turning that glass against me in the very nick
when I dashed on you?"
"Well, 't ain't my fault, I swear," said Crummins. "The wind catches
voices so on a pitch dark night, you never can tell whether they be on
one shoulder or the other. And if I'm to go and lose my place through

no fault of mine----"
"Have n't I told you, sir, I'm going to pay the damage? Here," said the
gentleman, fumbling at his waistcoat, "here, take this card. Read it."
For the first time during the scene in the carpenter's shop, a certain
pomposity swelled the gentleman's tone. His delivery of the card
appeared to act on him like the flourish of a trumpet before great men.
"Van Diemen Smith," he proclaimed himself for the assistance of Ned
Crummins in his task; the latter's look of sad concern on receiving the
card seeming to declare an unscholarly conscience.
An anxious feminine voice was heard close beside Mr. Van Diemen
Smith.
"Oh, papa, has there been an accident? Are you hurt?"
"Not a bit, Netty; not a bit. Walked into a big looking-glass in the dark,
that's all. A matter of eight or ten pound, and