Wandering Heath | Page 2

cracked brown varnish, I could
hardly trace a royal coat-of-arms, and a legend running--Per Mare per
Terram--the motto of the Marines. Its parchment, though coloured and
scented with wood-smoke, was limp and mildewed; and I began to
tighten up the straps--under which the drumsticks had been loosely
thrust--with the idle purpose of trying if some music might be got out
of the old drum yet.
But as I turned it on my knee, I found the drum attached to the
trumpet-sling by a curious barrel-shaped padlock, and paused to
examine this. The body of the lock was composed of half a dozen brass
rings, set accurately edge to edge; and, rubbing the brass with my
thumb, I saw that each of the six had a series of letters engraved around
it.
I knew the trick of it, I thought. Here was one of those word-padlocks,
once so common; only to be opened by getting the rings to spell a
certain word, which the dealer confides to you.
My host shut and barred the door, and came back to the hearth.

"'Twas just such a wind--east by south--that brought in what you've got
between your hands. Back in the year 'nine it was; my father has told
me the tale a score o' times. You're twisting round the rings, I see. But
you'll never guess the word. Parson Kendall, he made the word, and
locked down a couple o' ghosts in their graves with it; and when his
time came, he went to his own grave and took the word with him."
"Whose ghosts, Matthew?"
"You want the story, I see, sir. My father could tell it better than I can.
He was a young man in the year 'nine, unmarried at the time, and living
in this very cottage just as I be. That's how he came to get mixed up
with the tale."
He took a chair, lit a short pipe, and unfolded the story in a low musing
voice, with his eyes fixed on the dancing violet flames.
"Yes, he'd ha' been about thirty year old in January, of the year 'nine.
The storm got up in the night o' the twenty-first o' that month. My
father was dressed and out long before daylight; he never was one to
'bide in bed, let be that the gale by this time was pretty near lifting the
thatch over his head. Besides which, he'd fenced a small 'taty-patch that
winter, down by Lowland Point, and he wanted to see if it stood the
night's work. He took the path across Gunner's Meadow--where they
buried most of the bodies afterwards. The wind was right in his teeth at
the time, and once on the way (he's told me this often) a great strip of
ore-weed came flying through the darkness and fetched him a slap on
the cheek like a cold hand. But he made shift pretty well till he got to
Lowland, and then had to drop upon his hands and knees and crawl,
digging his fingers every now and then into the shingle to hold on, for
he declared to me that the stones, some of them as big as a man's head,
kept rolling and driving past till it seemed the whole foreshore was
moving westward under him. The fence was gone, of course; not a stick
left to show where it stood; so that, when first he came to the place, he
thought he must have missed his bearings. My father, sir, was a very
religious man; and if he reckoned the end of the world was at hand--
there in the great wind and night, among the moving stones--you may
believe he was certain of it when he heard a gun fired, and, with the

same, saw a flame shoot up out of the darkness to windward, making a
sudden fierce light in all the place about. All he could find to think or
say was, 'The Second Coming--The Second Coming! The Bridegroom
cometh, and the wicked He will toss like a ball into a large country!'
and being already upon his knees, he just bowed his head and 'bided,
saying this over and over.
"But by'm-by, between two squalls, he made bold to lift his head and
look, and then by the light--a bluish colour 'twas--he saw all the coast
clear away to Manacle Point, and off the Manacles, in the thick of the
weather, a sloop-of-war with top-gallants housed, driving stern
foremost towards the reef. It was she, of course, that was burning the
flare. My father could see the white streak and the ports of her quite
plain as she rose to it, a little outside the breakers, and he guessed easy
enough that her captain had just managed to wear ship, and was trying