TO BATH
How Jack Rattenbury came to Bath must now be told.
Jack had found work, or it had been found for him. Whilst Winefred had
been settling into new quarters at Bath he had been finding a temporary
home and occupation at Beer. It had come about in this way. He had gone
to Mrs. Jose, at Winefred's suggestion, and told her his difficulties,
and that kind-hearted woman had induced her brother, James Ford, or, as
he was locally termed, Captain Ford, to give him employment in the Beer
quarries.
These are excavations extending for a great distance underground in
a fine-grained stone composed of carbonate of lime, that cuts like
cheese, but hardens on exposure to the air.
The Beer quarries are no scar and disfigurement to the landscape. They
produce but little refuse, and that little is rapidly overrun with
grass.
In the face of a cliff of white rock gape square openings, and these
lead to a labyrinthine underground world, where piers of stone support
the upper beds, and every block that is extracted serves for building
purposes. The quarries have been worked during many centuries. From
them houses, cathedrals, have been built, and yet in outward appearance
they are insignificant.
Jack was not employed as a common quarryman, but was given a stool in
the office.
No sooner was it settled between him and Captain Ford that he was
engaged, than he started for Bindon, as in duty bound, to thank Mrs.
Jose for her intervention in his favour.
But as he passed out of the village of Axmouth he saw the farmer's
wife in a tax-cart driving down the road with Winefred at her side,
and behind was an arched trunk, covered with hair and traced with
brass-headed nails, attached to the back of the cart by ropes.
As Mrs. Jose approached he noticed how her fresh face beamed with
yellow soap and good-nature. She saw him at once, and drew up.
'Well, Jack, my boy!'
'I have come to thank you,' said he, patting the rough cob. 'You have
done me a real good turn, Mrs. Jose, and if your eyes could look down
into my heart as they can into sea-water, you would see true gratitude
at the bottom.'
'Like a sea-anemone, open and asking for more,' said Winefred.
'Not another word,' said the good woman, ignoring the girl's malicious
aside. 'I am putting both of you out in the world, both you and
Winefred. One is as much indebted as the other. Her I am taking to
Bath, you I have disposed of at Beer. Well, good luck attend you, my
boy; you have my best wishes――and luck will come to you if you are
steady. That is my doctrine. Gee-up, Robin!'
But he would not let go the cob. He held the rein whilst he renewed his
thanks. Then the jolly woman became impatient and cracked her whip.
'Have done,' said she. 'You cannot thank me better than by remaining
where you are and profiting by your position. Now, Jack, say good-bye
to Winefred and wish her luck, as she wishes it for you.'
Winefred looked at him without a word, and this paralysed his tongue.
Mrs. Jose waited for a moment, but as neither spoke she drove on with
an impatient lifting of the elbows.
Jack looked after the trap, but Winefred did not turn her head to give
him a parting salute and kindly look.
'She might have been more gracious,' he said, 'but one cannot gather
figs off thistles. She hates me, moreover, for all the contradictions
she has had to endure, and the sours she has been forced to swallow
because of that nonsense about my father's savings.'
He walked away, reached the ferry, and hailed Olver to take him across.
Dench was profuse in his expressions of regret at losing the society of
the young man. Jack said a word of civility in response. He disliked
and mistrusted the man, and was glad to be rid of his company.
Nevertheless, the fellow had been a comrade of his father, and Jack had
lived with him since the death of his father, and he accordingly did
feel some regret at parting with Olver, though it was a regret largely
qualified with relief.
'Come, lad!' said the ferryman. 'Let us go to the Lion. We will have a
glass to your good fortune.'
Jack could not refuse. He shouldered his bundle and accompanied
the elder man into the village of Seaton, and with him entered the
public-house kept by Mrs. Warne.
But when there, he was unable to talk, his heart was troubled, his mind
engaged. He was thinking of the girl Winefred and of her ill-humour,
rather than of his new start in life.
Happily for him there were others in the house at their beer, and with
them Dench fell into talk. Jack sipped at his glass, looking dreamily
before him.
'This is a poor beginning,' said Dench, presently noticing how absent
the lad was. 'It is not what the captain would have liked――ah! there
was a man if you will. He'd have said, "You were not chipped off the
old block, but whittled out of the soft wood of your mother." He would
have had you take to a more stirring life and one connected with the
salt water.'
'A man must take, in these times, whatsoever offers,' answered Jack.
'I have been sufficiently long out of work to take up any work with
relish.'
'But you need not have been without a job,' said Dench, with a wink to
his fellows at his table.
'I could get none that suited me.'
'Well! There is no more understanding the fancies of boys than the
whimsies of girls. There is Winefred Marley, or as she is pleased to
call herself, Holwood, gone off to be a fine lady at Bath. We shall
hear next of her marrying some fine gentleman, and when he comes to
learn who and what she is, there will be the deuce to pay. However, she
has a tongue that can parry as well as lunge.'
Jack stood up.
'I cannot remain here,' he said. 'I have no stomach for ale; moreover,
Captain Ford expects me at Beer.'
'Well, go along with you, boy, and may you soon sicken of sawing stone
and take to cutting the waves.'
Beer village or hamlet was to be reached by one or two ways. There was
the road, which was the shortest, that ran along a dip in the land,
between green hedges; and there was the way by the White Cliff, that
was pleasantest but longest. Jack chose the latter, solely because
it was unfrequented, and in his then mood he was indisposed for
conversation.
What ailed him?
He had at length obtained that for which he had been in search, and
for which he had chafed: work, and work eminently suitable, work,
moreover, sufficiently well paid to support him. He was entering the
service of a master who, if he possessed a tithe of his sister's good
qualities, would be to him a friend and a father. He had accordingly
every reason to be elated. On the contrary he was depressed.
What ailed him?
Undoubtedly he felt his loneliness, yet he was not so lonely as he had
been, for Mrs. Jose had been a good friend to him, and had enlisted for
him the sympathies of her brother. There is such a sensation in a young
breast as home-sickness without a home for which to be sick; it is a
vague yearning and regret after something unknown, undefined.
The young spirit is like young wheat――it grows weak, watery, yellow,
there has been overmuch rain, overmuch cold. All it needs is the sun.
That which burrowed in his heart like a mole was the thought of
Winefred's treatment of him. He could understand that there was
occasion for it. On his account she and her mother had suffered great
annoyance, had undergone wounding suspicion. They had been sent to
Coventry by the neighbourhood. Winefred was sensitive to the slights
she had encountered, and held him to have been prime mover in the
combination against her mother and herself. It was natural that she
should regard him with resentment, and yet, that she should do so,
knowing as he did that he had personally done nothing to stir up the
hostile feeling against her and her mother, distressed him greatly.
Now that Winefred had departed he ought to have felt relieved. There
was no further chance of an encounter in which he always came off
worsted. Yet he was not so.
In all likelihood he would see Winefred no more. She had gone to Bath;
there she would make new friends, form new associations, and forget
Axmouth and its vexations together with those who had occasioned
them. This, again, should have relieved his mind; on the contrary, it
depressed it further.
Certainly he was unhappy, without being able to account for his
unhappiness. What was Winefred to him but one with whom he measured
swords whenever they met? What could Winefred be to him in the future?
A recollection, an unpleasant one, and nothing other. Why did he think
of her? Why did her angry eyes haunt his soul? Why did her stabbing
words still make his heart tingle?
He seated himself on the chalk cliff above the harbour of Beer, this
latter a snip taken by the sea out of the soft and crumbling rocks.
The choughs were flying beneath his feet, building in the crags that
overhung the beach.
Below was the pebble strand. Boats were drawn up on it. A thread of
weed marked the retreat of the tide from the shore, a fringe of foam on
the grey water a few yards from the land told also that the sea was in
ebb.
Gulls chattered and fluttered and dropped to secure some little fish
left stranded. The evening was closing in, and a pale light hung over
the sea, that looked dull as lead, but gave to the chalk cliffs a
moonlight whiteness.
At the flagstaff where the Beer streamlet trickled into the shingle
and lost itself were fisher lads congregated in idleness. When nothing
can be done at sea, none more listless, inert, pictures of _dolce far
niente_ than those who live by the harvest of the water. They will
occupy a bench by the harbour hour after hour, smoking, occasionally
talking, but doing absolutely nothing with hand or foot or brain.
These fisher lads, several hundred feet below where sat Jack, were
chattering, laughing, and sometimes singing.
Then a boy's clear voice sounded:
'I would I were a sparrow
To light on every tree;
At even, noon, and morning,
My love, I'd sing to thee.
And as the ship is sailing,
So lightly I would fly,
And perch upon the mainmast,
My own true love to spy.
'I would I were a goldfish
All in the sea to swim,
At even, noon, and morning
I'd follow after him,
And o'er the bulwark leaning,
He'd say, "What see I there,
That shines so gay and golden?
A lock of my love's hair."'
Then the boys burst out laughing, and there was a chatter as of birds,
so that the singer was not suffered to finish his ballad.
They all belonged to an age at which the emotions, the pangs of love,
were unfelt, and a song that expressed them touched no fibre in the
soul.
But it was other with Jack. He knew the song, and his lips moved as he
completed it, and his mind travelled away, not seaward but overland.
He remained some time on the cliff, but finally shook himself, picked
up his bundle and descended into Beer.
He had taken lodgings with a widow at the higher end of the village, in
a picturesque cottage that leaned against the hill and faced every way
except into the rock against which it leaned.
This was near his work and away from the harbour, a double advantage,
as he was not favourably eyed by the boatmen, who regarded him as
a deserter from the cause of free trade, and as weak-spirited in
abandoning a life of adventure for an office stool. Not only could he
go to his work from the cottage without running the gauntlet of the
inhabitants of the village, but he was also able with the same immunity
to go to Seaton or ramble on the cliffs. Jack was not timid, but every
lad is thin-skinned and sensitive to ridicule, and when it was possible
to avoid unpleasantness he very judiciously did so.
He had been resident in Beer before; put there by his ambitious father
to be educated by the curate, so that he had many acquaintances in the
place, but in his then temper of mind he preferred solitude; and in
the evenings, when his work was over, in place of looking up friends
in their homes, at the harbour, or in the public-house, he preferred
to saunter alone on the downs. His friend and teacher, the curate, had
recently departed to another cure.
When he rambled on the headland he often stood looking south, where sea
and sky melted into each other in the evening haze, and his thoughts,
his desires were altogether as indefinite as was that horizon.
He was angry with himself for thinking of Winefred. The sense of his
folly in caring for her was as a hot coal in his heart that he laboured
to eject, but always ineffectually.
If he sat on the top of the White Cliff his eyes often turned in the
direction of Bindon Undercliff, though Winefred, as he knew well
enough, was not there; yet there were spots there associated with her
in his memory.
No single lad of Axmouth or Beer had any suspicion of what passed in
his mind. None would have credited it, had they been assured that he
who had been robbed by Winefred's mother had set his heart on the girl.
Moreover, in the opinion of these lads there was nothing to attract in
Miss Winefred, except her money, and that was ill-gotten. The rustic
youth has not a discriminating eye for beauty. He is blind to those
points and lines and colours which draw the admiration of the man with
the artistic faculty. In the country the ugly girl stands as good a
chance of securing a lover as does a beauty, if only she possess an
attractive character and pleasant ways. The shy mind of the peasant boy
starts back from the ready wit and the nimble tongue. That Winefred was
good-looking would have been admitted with listless indifference; that
she was a spiteful minx was a conclusion to which all would have leaped
and to which held. A bumpkin would handle the girl ready at repartee
with as great reluctance as a fisherman would handle an electric eel.
On Sunday Jack had an excuse for crossing the water. He must see Mrs.
Jose and report to her how he got on.
But when he was on the farther bank of the Axe, he bent his steps first
of all to the Undercliff, to the elder-bushes, where he had retained
Winefred from falling over the precipice, to the gate where she had
kept him at a distance with a twig of thorns, to the slit in the barn
wall through which he had watched her at the dance; and only finally
did he enter the farmhouse and present himself before Mrs. Jose.
She had much to relate about Bath, and its beauties, about the
splendours of the Tomkin-Jones mansion, about the cordiality of her
reception, and about the prospects that opened before Winefred.
Jack listened in silence. It pleased him to hear about Winefred, yet it
was a pleasure fraught with pain, for it riveted in him the conviction
that he and she were parted not so much by space as by the wider
separation of social standing.
And yet, what did he want with her?
Nothing could come of his fancy, even were Winefred to lay aside her
dislike for him. But he knew, too surely, that she hated him. When they
had met, they were like two goats on a plank, clashing horns.
* * * * *
A couple of weeks later Captain Ford said to Jack, 'My lad, I have an
errand for you. I can't go myself. You must do the job for me. Borrow
as many eyes as there are in a peacock's tail, and use every one. I
want you to go to Bath. They tell me that there they saw the stone. It
is harder than ours, but it is done, I believe, by water power. Make
pencil notes of all particulars, and if the outlay be not too great,
as it need not be if you bring every contrivance away with you in your
head or on paper, and we can rig up the concern with our own workmen,
we shall save a lot of cost and time.'
Jack flushed with delight, but that delight soon gave way to anxiety.
He might, indeed, see Winefred, but only to discover how much further
she was removed from him at Bath than she had been at Bindon. Then
only the Axe had flowed between, and a current of prejudice. He might
find that a mightier stream was parting them, and one that was to him
impossible to cross.
'I wish first to go to Bindon,' said Jack. 'Mrs. Jose may have some
message to her cousins at Bath.'
'Right,' said Captain Ford. 'I suppose you cannot see Mrs. Marley, and
learn if she has anything for her child?'
Jack shook his head.
'No,' said the captain, 'I reckon not. You ain't on speaking terms.
Communication made must be through Eliza Jose.'