The unfortunate man, forgetting, in his excitement, the existence of the other quarry, the nameless one; forgetting in fact that Claudy’s Leap was a razor’s edge between two precipices, had stepped heedlessly backwards, after his final appeal to Heaven, and fallen, without a cry, straight into the gulf.
The height of his fall would, in any case, have probably killed him, but as it was “he dashed his head,” in the language of the Bible, “against a stone”; and in less than a second after his last cry, his soul, to use the expression of a more pagan scripture, “was driven, murmuring, into the Shades.”
It fell to the lot, therefore, not of Luke, who did not return from Weymouth till late that evening, but of a motley band of holiday-makers from the hill-top Inn, to discover the madman’s fate. Arriving at the spot almost immediately after the girls’ departure, these honest revellers — strangers to the locality — had quickly found the explanation of the unearthly cries they had heard.
The eve of the baptism of Mr. Romer’s daughter was celebrated, therefore, by the baptism of the nameless quarry. Henceforth, in the neighbourhood of Nevilton, the place was never known by any other appellation than that of “Jimmy’s Drop”; and by that name any future visitors, curious to observe the site of so singular an occurrence, will have to enquire for it, as they drink their pint of cider in the Half-Moon Tavern.
CHAPTER XXII A ROYAL WATERING-PLACE
LUKE ANDERSEN’S trip to Weymouth proved most charming and eventful. He had scarcely-emerged from the crowded station, with its row of antique omnibuses and its lethargic phalanx of expectant out-porters and bath-chair men, — each one of whom was a crusted epitome of ingrained quaintness, — when he caught sight of Phyllis Santon and Annie Bristow strolling laughingly towards the sea-front. They must have walked to Yeoborough and entered the train there, for he had seen nothing of them at Nevilton Station.
The vivacious Polly, a lively little curly-haired child, of some seventeen summers, was far too happy and thrilled by the adventure of the excursion and the holiday air of the sea-side, to indulge in any jealous fits. She was the first of the two, indeed, to greet the elder girls, both of them quite well known to her, running rapidly after them, in her white stiffly-starched print frock, and hailing them with a shout of joyous recognition.
The girls turned quickly and they all three awaited, in perfect good temper, the stone-carver’s deliberate approach. Never had the spirits of this latter been higher, or his surroundings more congenial to his mood.
Anxious not to lose any single one of the exquisite sounds, sights, smells, and intimations, which came pouring in upon him, as he leisurely drifted out upon the sunny street, he let his little companion run after is two friends as fast as she wished, and watched with serene satisfaction the airy flight of her light figure, with the deep blue patch of sea-line at the end of the street as its welcome background.
The smell of sea-weed, the sound of the waves on the beach, the cries of the fish-mongers, and the coming and going of the whole heterogeneous crowd, filled Luke’s senses with the same familiar thrill of indescribable pleasure as he had known, on such an occasion, from his earliest childhood. The gayly piled fruit heaped up on the open stalls, the little tobacco-shops with their windows full of half-sentimental half-vulgar picture-cards, the weather-worn fronts of the numerous public-houses, the wood-work of whose hospitable doors always seemed to him endowed with a peculiar mellowness of their own, — all these things, as they struck his attentive senses, revived the most deeply-felt stirrings of old associations.
Especially did he love the sun-bathed atmosphere, so languid with holiday ease, which seemed to float in and out of the open lodging-house entrances, where hung those sun-dried sea-weeds and wooden spades and buckets, which ever-fresh installments of bare-legged children carried off and replaced. Luke always maintained that of all mortal odours he loved best the indescribable smell of the hall-way of a sea-side lodging-house, where the very oil-cloth on the floor, and the dead bull-rushes in the corner, seemed impregnanted with long seasons of salt-burdened sun-filled air.
The fish-shops, the green-grocer’s shops, the secondhand book-shops, and most of all, those delicious repositories of sea-treasures — foreign importations all glittering with mother-of-pearl, dried sea-horses, sea-sponges, sea-coral, and wonderful little boxes all pasted over with shimmering shells — filled him with a delight as vivid and new as when he had first encountered them in remote infancy.
This first drifting down to the sea’s edge, after emerging from the train, always seemed to Luke the very supremacy of human happiness. The bare legs of the children, little and big, who ran laughing or crying past him and the tangled curls of the elder damsels, tossed so coquettishly back from their sun-burnt faces, the general feeling of irresponsibility in the air, the tang of adventure in it all, of the unexpected, the chance-born, always wrapped him about in an epicurean dream of pleasure.
That monotonous splash of the waves against the pebbles, — how he associated it with endless exquisite flirtations, — flirtations conducted with adorable shamelessness between the blue sky and the blue sea! The memory of these, the vague memory of enchanting forms prone or supine upon the glittering sands, with the passing and re-passing of the same plump bathing-woman, — he had known her since his childhood! — and the same donkeys with their laughing burdens, and the same sweet-sellers with their trays, almost made him cry aloud with delight, as emerging at length upon the Front, and overtaking his friends at the Jubilee Clock-Tower, he saw the curved expanse of the bay lying magically spread out before him. How well he knew it all, and how inexpressibly he loved it!
The tide was on its outward ebb when the four happy companions jumped down, hand in hand, from the esplanade to the shingle. The long dark windrow of broken shells and seaweed drew a pleasant dividing line between the dry and the wet sand. Luke always associated the stranded star-fish and jelly-fish and bits of scattered drift-wood which that windrow offered, with those other casually tossed-up treasures with which an apparently pagan-minded providence had bestrewn his way!
Once well out upon the sands, and while the girls, with little shrieks and bursts of merriment, were pushing one another into the reach of the tide, Luke turned to survey with a deep sigh of satisfaction, the general appearance of the animated scene.
The incomparable watering-place, — with its charming “after-glow,” as Mr. Hardy so beautifully puts it, “of Georgian gaiety,”—had never looked so fascinating as it looked this August afternoon.
The queer old-fashioned bathing-machines, one of them still actually carrying the Lion and Unicorn upon its pointed roof, glittered in the sunshine with an air of welcoming encouragement. The noble sweep of the houses behind the crescent-shaped esplanade, with the names of their terraces — Brunswick, Regent, Gloucester, Adelaide — so suggestive of the same historic epoch, gleamed with reciprocal hospitality; nor did the tall spire of St. John’s Church, a landmark for miles round, detract from the harmony of the picture.
On Luke’s left, as he turned once more and faced the sea, the vibrating summer air, free at present from any trace of mist, permitted a wide and lovely view of the distant cliffs enclosing the bay. The great White Horse, traced upon the chalk hills, seemed within an hour’s walk of where he stood, and the majestic promontory of the White Nore drew the eye onward to where, at the end of the visible coast-line, St. Alban’s Head sank into the sea.