p. iiiPREFACE

Several of the following sketches have appeared already in the Cambridge Review and the Cantab. Perhaps the friends who welcomed them then may welcome them now, on their reappearance in another and more permanent form.

The story of “Our Rector” has been received in episcopal quarters with polite incredulity. It may be that episcopal supervision was less far-reaching in those days than now. At any rate, the things I have narrated, and things stranger still, did occur in our village, and in all essential details, including the postprandial cigar, the story of “Our Rector” is a literal “study from life.”

I would forget, if I could, that the “Cruel, Crawling Foam” is also a record of fact.

A. P.

Cambridge,

May, 1899.

p. vTo Mrs. Thomas Hardy who suggested and encouraged the writing of these tales

p. viiCONTENTS

PAGE

Ronald and I:

Broadwater: a Shadow from the Past

1

On the Race Course at Bayview

25

On the Sands

31

Our Rector

41

Echoes from an Organ Loft

55

Fighting the Cholera

67

Ronald’s Courtship

79

Judy, or Retrieved

99

The Professor

117

The Cruel, Crawling Foam

133

Our Queen

143

Bindo: a Sketch

155

‘Declined with Thanks’: a Postscript

181

p. ixRonald and I

p. 1Broadwater A SHADOW FROM THE PAST

I

Turn your steps westward, and about four miles beyond Bayview you will come to a rising ground where three ways meet.

One—the road to the right—trends northward, following with occasional deviations the coast line of Dead Man’s Bay, a replica in miniature of the Bay of Biscay, and one which claims, almost as regularly, its tithe of life and wreckage.

The path on the left hand enters a lodge gate, and begins to fall gently but without intermission towards the sea. A curious impression that you are reaching the end of all things is followed by the feeling that your next step will be planted in the sea—and then you come to Broadwater.

p. 2The huge square-set building stands on a level plateau, guarded by a semicircle of hills from every wind that blows, excepting the south-west. The architecture is neither impressive in itself nor characteristic of any particular period. Yet, looking down upon it from the hills above, the eye will find ample satisfaction in the colouring of the roof, for lichens have painted the crumbling tiles with every conceivable hue of vermilion and gold.

A stranger, journeying for the first time along the road, would complain of the lack of trees. And trees in the open there are none. Nothing less cringing than gorse and heather can show front against the brine-laden winds of the Atlantic. The south-west wind is jealous of its prerogatives, and denudes a neighbourhood of isolated growth almost as surely as does the poison-steeped atmosphere of the midlands.

Yet, if you trouble to make nearer acquaintance with Broadwater, you will find that every ravine and gully is crowded with trees—“groves” the villagers call them—whose tops lie level with the ground on either side, so that a slight divergence from p. 3the recognised track might land the unwary traveller among their foliage, almost without a change in his plane of elevation.

The grand old house stands, as I have said, on a plateau, protected from the north and east by the hills, down which the road winds in and out like a white ribbon. On the west it faces the Atlantic, and the lawn, merging in the park, falls rapidly seawards till it meets the natural barrier of the beach. As a rule the barrier stands well; yet times there are when the sea will no longer “harrow the valleys, or be bound with a band in the furrow,” but, laughing at the puny obstruction, lays its tribute of drift and wreckage and human life almost on the very door-step of the house.

Whether you love the scene or not, will depend on your age and temperament, and something, too, on the circumstances under which you view it. Steeped in the quiet twilight of an autumn evening, its perfect stillness and repose appeal irresistibly to a heart that yearns for rest, and many such have coveted it. But let a Londoner come upon it when a furious south-wester is raging, and the double windows are veiled with an p. 4impermeable film of brine, and you can feel the chimneys rocking overhead—and the chances are he will hurry from it as from the abomination of desolation.

After our uncle’s death, Ronald, it was well known, was to reign in his stead—supplanting myself, albeit the son of an elder brother and the natural heir. But my father had been unlucky enough to marry the woman of old Heyward’s choice, and the sin of the father was to be visited upon the son. Our uncle (to do him justice) never made a pretence of equity in the matter. “I should turn in my grave,” he said, “if I thought that son of his was to follow in my room.” And there the matter ended. Short of this, he was fond of me in his own undemonstrative way. Only lately he had settled me at Bayview with a handsome allowance, where I was to make acquaintance with the rudiments of the law till it was time for me to enter at Cambridge.

Honestly I can say that I never grudged Ronald his inheritance. He and I were brothers rather than cousins, and I cannot remember the time when the sturdy little Viking was not dear to my heart. Perhaps p. 5it was I who gave the most, and he who took it. But that is only as it should be, provided he who gives and he who takes are equally nothing loth.

The house was an ideal home for us, so long as we shared it in common. When we were separated, it became unutterably dull for the one who was left companionless. Ghosts it must have had in plenty. There certainly was an “impluvium,” which in these days is rarer than a ghost. I mean that the whole centre of the house was open to the winds of heaven, for the purpose of collecting the rain water which fell into a huge reservoir at the basement.

The ghosts, if any, never showed themselves—frightened in all probability by the antagonism of Ronald’s temperament. But we discovered what was next best to the real article—the equipments and paraphernalia of one. In a disused coach-house we came one day on an old travelling carriage of the fashion in use sixty years ago, when paterfamilias took himself and his family for a progress round the country. Rumble it had, and imperial, and a chest of most unearthly pattern, accommodated to the space under the back seat.

p. 6But the glass was broken in the frames, and the hangings were mouldy. The very woodwork was so worm-eaten that at a touch you would expect it to crumble into dust, like one of the Pharaohs when he is disencumbered of his trappings. It was painted—or rather had been painted—a sable black, but the colour had deteriorated with time to the hue of rusty crêpe.

Our first impression suggested that it was some time-honoured memorial of the past—the carriage, it might be, in which a bride and bridegroom had made their home-coming under auspices of exceptional promise. But a second glance through the broken semicircular skylight told rather of intentional neglect or indifference. The plaster of the coach-house, where it still clung to the lath, had broken out into patches of mouldiness, defiant of the first principles of cleanliness, while an army of spiders, who must have worked unmolested for years, had tied the carriage to the walls and floor with a net-work of dirt-begrimed strands.

“What on earth is it? and why is it kept here?” asked Ronald of the groom. “I shall get the uncle to have it broken up and burned: p. 7it’s only filling the place with moths and insects.”

“Don’t you do nought of the kind, Master Ronald,” said the coachman, lowering his voice to a whisper. “That carriage has been driven up to these very doors by old Nick himself, or one or other of his coachmen. Aye, you may laugh. But it’s true enough, and not so long ago neither. They’d forgotten—had your aunt and uncle—that it was here in the stable at all: it must have been here years before they bought the place—till he came and drove it round to the front door one night, all mouldy and ramshackled just as you see it now.”

“Do tell us, Frampton, about it. I’ll promise not to laugh.”

“Well, ’twas the night before we were starting for the South of France, and I was going with them to look after the horses they were to hire in Paris. The house had been full of visitors for Christmas, but most of them had gone the day before, and the rest of them were to leave along with us.

“It was in the middle of the night, though they never noticed the true time, when they p. 8heard, both of them, a carriage drive up to the front door.

“They were fairly puzzled what it could mean, as they expected no visitors, least of all at that time of night. Your aunt got up first and then called your uncle. And there, full in the moonlight, stood that identical carriage, and the coachman was a skellington—dressed in black and weepers, for all the world like an undertaker at a funeral. He turned his eyes—or what should have been his eyes—full upon them both. And then your aunt went faint, and I believe your uncle did no better. Anyhow, when they came back to their senses, carriage and coachman were gone.”

“And what did it mean, Frampton?”

“Well, that’s more than I can tell you, Master Ronald. It’s fairly puzzled all of us. I’m sure I’ve bothered my head times over to try and piece it together, seeing it meant no harm to them, but only to a lot of folk they’d never seen or heard of.”

“How did that come about?”

“When we got to Paris, we put up at one of them big hotels—I forget the name of it. And one day he and she were going up p. 9to their rooms in the lift. Just as they were stepping aboard of it, they looked chanceways at the man who managed it, and I’m blessed if it wasn’t the same coachman as had driven that there carriage up to the door at Broadwater. They were that frightened that they stepped back, and the lift went up without them. And well it was they did so, for something or other went wrong with the hauling gear, and every soul on board of it was killed.

“And now you know, Master Ronald, why your uncle won’t have that carriage never touched. He’s got it into his head, and you won’t get it out again, that it was sent to save his life. All I can say is that, if that’s what it did mean, old Nick carries on his business in a queer, roundabout kind of way.”

II

Not many days after Frampton had imparted to us his sensational story, we were told to expect a visit from the family lawyer. Ronald and I always hailed his visits with delight. He was one of those cheery individuals p. 10whom boys can chum with. In age he must have been nearly seventy-five, but hale and hearty still: entering into our amusements, never minding our noise, and tipping us when he left with a liberality that appalled our uncle. Ronald and I would have put him down for fifty. But boys do not recognise the gradations of age. To them a man seems definitely old at fifty, and live as long as he may after that, years will add nothing to the mystery of his age, if only he keeps young in heart and interests. At sixty, seventy, or even eighty, he will in their eyes be fifty still.

As a matter of course Ronald and I were told to put in an appearance on the day of his arrival. The unvarying order of the programme was that, after he had had a few words with our uncle, we two should form his escort in a progress round the park and outlying farms.

“So your uncle still cherishes the old Crofton coach,” he said, as we passed the outhouse tenanted by the family ghost. “I wonder he cares to keep it,”—almost Ronald’s own words to Frampton, the coachman—from which it was clear he had never heard p. 11of our uncle’s visitant, nor did we venture to enlighten him.

“Do you know anything about it, Sir?” asked Ronald, in the eager tone of one who had by no means lost hope of solving the mystery.

“My boy, I’ve ridden in it.”

Ronald’s face was a study. “Ridden in it? actually ridden in that coach? And did you, Sir, did you see the devil?” he continued anxiously. “Frampton says he always drives it.”

“Not exactly, Ronald. And, by the way, my lad, I wouldn’t, if I were you, introduce his name quite so familiarly into your conversation. Frampton must be cautioned, Fred, as to what he tells the boy.”

“Well, he didn’t exactly say that, Sir,” continued Ronald, willing to justify his friend. “He called him old Nick.”

“That’s a trifle better. Anyhow, I didn’t see him, though I can’t say honestly that my ride was a pleasant one. I’d been staying here with old Crofton, just before he sold the place to your uncle, and I had business too to transact with Thorpe of Thorpe Hill. As luck would have it, all the carriages here p. 12were in use but this one. It wasn’t in the state it is now, but it was out of date and uncomfortable even then. However, it took me there all right. It was on the way back that I had my adventure.

“I had barely composed myself to sleep with the consciousness of having dined too well—Thorpe never stinted his guests—when I was roused by an uneasy feeling that I was not the sole occupant of the carriage. The interior was lit up by a weird, fantastic light that came and went, rose and fell, like the glow that throbs over a brick-kiln or a blast furnace. After all, it may have been only the reflection of my own cigar which I had instinctively kept alight during my short nap. From out the border-land which separates sleep from waking, I saw two figures on the opposite seat. For a time I studied them with hardly more interest than I should the figures in a pantomime, till it was forced upon me by their wild gesticulation that this was no pantomime enacting for my benefit, but a veritable tragedy of life and death. The one figure shrank cowering in a corner of the carriage; the other stood over it with uplifted hand. But no voice or sound proceeded p. 13from them. Only on the hand of one, the figure that crouched and trembled, I recognised the famous Thorpe emerald—as the

family lawyer I knew it well—while the other that stormed and threatened might have passed for old Crofton himself, in so far as youth of twenty can anticipate the form and lineaments of seventy-five.

“The details had hardly had time to shape themselves within my brain, when the light died out. I heard—or fancied I heard—a short, sharp gasp, an inarticulate cry for mercy, and the carriage drew up before the gate of Broadwater.”

That night after dinner we were subjected to a close cross-examination by our uncle.

“The boys have told me your surprising story, Mr. Roberts. May I ask how it is I never heard it from you before?”

“Why, to tell you the truth, Mr. Heyward, you wouldn’t have heard it now if my little friend Ronald hadn’t rushed me into telling it by his burst of eagerness. You might have said I’d been dining too well—as indeed I had—and that isn’t exactly the thing to recommend a family lawyer. So you’ve got my reputation at your mercy, young gentlemen. p. 14For, of course, it was the dinner—a nightmare of some kind, no doubt. Though I’m bound to say I never had a nightmare, either before or afterwards, that was half so vivid and real. It was quite the worst quarter of an hour I ever passed in my life.”

“Perhaps not so much of a nightmare as you suppose,” rejoined the uncle, and then proceeded to narrate his own experiences. I remember thinking how much better Frampton told the story than he did, in spite of his rather unorthodox language.

“Phew! that alters the whole question. Corroborative evidence with a vengeance—evidence that one might almost take into court. For even if you had been dining not wisely, your sister hadn’t, I know. Anyhow, we three staid gentlefolk could create a pretty sensation with our three independent testimonies. To think that a belief in ghosts should be forced upon me at my age! Why I shall be dragged next into believing the village legend.”

“What is it? I never even heard of it.”

“That Ronald’s old carriage is somehow mixed up with the quarrel between Thorpe and Broadwater—that it stands in the way p. 15of their family union. So you see, young gentlemen, where you’ve got to look for a wife as soon as the carriage is gone. But it doesn’t look like it yet. Old Thorpe’s dead, and the house shut up, and the only survivor of the family is on the point, they tell me, of marrying her cousin. Above all, you guard the old carriage, Heyward, as if it were a priceless heirloom. But perhaps you are right; it isn’t your business to get rid of it.”

III

So the old carriage mouldered on in the coach-house, and its net-work of cobwebs grew grimier each day.

How the spiders maintained themselves was a mystery, for no fly could have run the blockade of the window, even if the inducement had been greater. At last Ronald and I wove a legend around them in our turn, which terrified us more than did the carriage itself. We decided that, after long years of mutual slaughter, the victory had rested in the end with two or three hoary monsters, who had ensconced themselves within the p. 16framework of the ruined carriage, from which they looked out upon the solitude they were creating. Little by little the uncanny idea grew upon us till, regardless of all probability, we fancied we could see their eyes peering out of the darkness.

More than once we made illicit expeditions at midnight in the hope that we might find the ghostly coachman cleaning and repairing his equipage for another sortie. But we could see nothing. If either of us had gone alone, the result might have been different; we should have seen, or pretended to see, many matters of interest.

November was, as a rule, our month of storms at Broadwater, though February often ran it close; and, in the year that followed upon Frampton’s story, a gale broke upon us on the third of the month that beat the record of our times for violence. We had not been without warning of its coming. The sea had been “crying out” at intervals—sure token that the storm had paused to gather breath, bidding the sea take forward its message to the shore.

Not when the gale is at its height—at any rate along our coast—can you best realise p. 17the grandeur of the sea. Study it rather on one of these quiet days of warning, when you can trace a wave almost from its inception, till it curls over at your feet with a dull roar, regular as the boom of a minute gun, and audible for miles inland.

Lashed into foam, and its voice drowned by the wind, it parts with much of its majesty, and becomes merely a symbol of turmoil and unrest. What it gains in wildness, it loses in self-control, like the seething rapids of Niagara before they compose themselves into dignity prior to the final plunge.

Then came another and a final warning. It was one of those rare sunsets which leave an imprint on the memory for life. Not a sunset in which conflicting colours are fused into each other by soft and subtle gradations—these we see often and soon forget—but one of war and discord; when colours, the most antagonistic, meet without blending, and produce effects that would be called crude and coarse upon a painter’s canvas.