THE RUNNING SANDS.
He awoke to find the sun shining in at his window. At first he
wondered what had happened. The window seemed to be in the ceiling,
and the ceiling sloped down to the walls, and all the furniture had
gone astray into wrong positions. Then he remembered, jumped out of
bed, and drew the blind.
He saw a blue line of sea, so clearly drawn that the horizon might
have been a string stretched from the corner eaves to the snow-white
light-house standing on the farthest spit of land; blue sea and
yellow sand curving round it, with a white edge of breakers; inshore,
the sand rising to a cliff ridged with grassy hummocks; farther
inshore, the hummocks united and rolling away up to inland downs, but
broken here and there on their way with scars of sand; over all,
white gulls wheeling. He could hear the nearest ones mewing as they
sailed over the house.
Taffy had seen the sea once before, at Dawlish, on the journey to
Tewkesbury; and again on the way home. But here it was bluer
altogether, and the sands were yellower. Only he felt disappointed
that no ship was in sight, nor any dwelling nearer than the
light-house and the two or three white cottages behind it.
He dressed in a hurry and said his prayers, repeating at the close,
as he had been taught to do, the first and last verses of the Morning
Hymn:
“Awake, my soul, and with the sun
Thy daily stage of duty run;
Shake off dull sloth, and joyful rise
To pay thy morning sacrifice.
“Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host,
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”
He ran downstairs. In this queer house the stairs led right down
into the kitchen. The front door, too, opened into the kitchen,
which was really a slate-paved hall, with a long table set between
the doorway and the big open hearth. The floor was always strewn
with sand; there was no trouble about this, for the wind blew plenty
under the door.
Taffy found the table laid, and his mother busily slicing bread for
his bread and milk. He begged for a hot cake from the hearth, and
ran out of doors to eat it. Humility lifted the latch for him, for
the cake was so hot that he had to pass it from hand to hand.
Outside, the wind came upon him with a clap on the shoulder, quite
as if it had been a comrade waiting.
Taffy ran down the path and out upon the sandy hummocks, setting his
face to the wind and the roar of the sea, keeping his head low, and
still shifting the cake from hand to hand. By-and-by he fumbled and
dropped it; stooped to pick it up, but saw something which made him
kneel and peer into the ground.
The whole of the sand was moving; not by fits and starts, but
constantly; the tiny particles running over each other and drifting
in and out of the rushes, like little creatures in a dream. While he
looked, they piled an embankment against the edge of his cake.
He picked it up, ran forward a few yards, and peered again.
Yes, here too; here and yonder, and over every inch of that long
shore.
He ate his cake and climbed to the beach, and ran along it, watching
the sandhoppers that skipped from under his boots at every step, and
were lost on the instant. The beach here was moist and firm.
He pulled off his boots and stockings, and ran on, conning his
footprints and the driblets of sand split ahead from his bare toes.
By-and-by he came to the edge of the surf. The strand here was
glassy wet, and each curving wave sent a shadow flying over it, and
came after the shadow, thundering and hissing, and chased it up the
shore, and fell back, leaving for a second or two an edge of delicate
froth which reminded the boy of his mother’s lace-work.
He began a sort of game with the waves, choosing one station after
another, and challenging them to catch him there. If the edge of
froth failed to reach his toes, he won. But once or twice the water
caught him fairly, and ran rippling over his instep and about his
ankles.
He was deep in this game when he heard a horn blown somewhere high on
the towans behind him.
He turned. No one was in sight. The house lay behind the
sand-banks, the first ridge hiding even its chimney-smoke. He gazed
along the beach, where the perpetual haze of spray seemed to have
removed the light-house to a vast distance. A sense of desolation
came over him with a rush, and with something between a gasp and a
sob he turned his back to the sea and ran, his boots dangling from
his shoulders by their knotted laces.
He pounded up the first slope and looked for the cottage. No sign of
it! An insane fancy seized him. These silent moving sands were
after _him_.
He was panting along in real distress when he heard the baying of
dogs, and at the same instant from the top of a hummock caught sight
of a figure outlined against the sky, and barely a quarter of a mile
away; the figure of a girl on horseback--a small girl on a very tall
horse.
Just as Taffy recognised her, she turned her horse, walked him down
into the hollow beyond, and disappeared. Taffy ran towards the spot,
gained the ridge where she had been standing, and looked down.
In a hollow about twenty feet deep and perhaps a hundred wide were
gathered a dozen riders, with five or six couples of hounds and two
or three dirty terriers. Two of the men had dismounted. One of
these, stripped to his shirt and breeches, was leaning on a
long-handled spade and laughing. The other--a fellow in a shabby
scarlet coat--held up what Taffy guessed to be a fox, though it
seemed a very small one. It was bleeding. The hounds yapped and
leapt at it, and fell back a-top of each other snarling, while the
Whip grinned and kept them at bay. A knife lay between his
wide-planted feet, and a visgy[1] close behind him on a heap of
disturbed sand.
The boy came on them from the eastward, and his shadow fell across
the hollow.
“Hullo!” said one of the riders, looking up. It was Squire Moyle
himself. “Here’s the new Passon’s boy!”
All the riders looked up. The Whip looked up too, and turned to the
old Squire with a wider grin than before.
“Shall I christen en, maister?”
The Squire nodded. Before Taffy knew what it meant, the man was
climbing toward him with a grin, clutching the rush bents with one
hand, and holding out the blood-dabbled mask with the other.
The child turned to run, but a hand clutched his ankle. He saw the
man’s open mouth and yellow teeth; and, choking with disgust and
terror, slung his boots at them with all his small force. At the
same instant he was jerked off his feet, the edge of the bank
crumbled and broke, and the two went rolling down the sandy slope in
a heap. He heard shouts of laughter, caught a glimpse of blue sky,
felt a grip of fingers on his throat, and smelt the verminous odour
of the dead cub, as the Whip thrust the bloody mess against his face
and neck. Then the grip relaxed, and--it seemed to him, amid dead
silence--Taffy sprang to his feet, spitting sand and fury.
“You--you devils!” He caught up the visgy and stood, daring all to
come on. “You devils!” He tottered forward with the visgy lifted--it
was all he could manage--at Squire Moyle. The old man let out an
oath, and the curve of his whip-thong took the boy across the eyes
and blinded him for a moment, but did not stop him. The grey horse
swerved, and half-wheeled, exposing his flank. In another moment
there would have been mischief; but the Whip, as he stood wiping his
mouth, saw the danger and ran in. He struck the visgy out of the
child’s grasp, set his foot on it, and with an open-handed cuff sent
him floundering into a sand-heap.
“Nice boy, that!” said somebody, and the whole company laughed as
they walked their horses slowly out of the hollow.
They passed before Taffy in a blur of tears; and the last rider to go
was the small girl Honoria on her tall sorrel. She moved up the
broad shelving path, but reined up just within sight, turned her
horse, and came slowly back to him.
“If I were you, I’d go home.” She pointed in its direction.
Taffy brushed the back of his hand across his eyes. “Go away.
I hate you--I hate you all!”
She eyed him while she smoothed the sorrel’s mane with her
riding-switch.
“They did it to me three years ago, when I was six. Grandfather
called it ‘entering’ me.”
Taffy kept his eyes sullenly on the ground. Finding that he would
not answer, she turned her horse again and rode slowly after the
others. Taffy heard the soft footfalls die away, and when he looked
up she had vanished.
He picked up his boots and started in the direction to which she had
pointed. Every now and then a sob shook him. By-and-by the chimneys
of the house hove in sight among the ridges, and he ran toward it.
But within a gunshot of the white garden-wall his breast swelled
suddenly and he flung himself on the ground and let the big tears
run. They made little pits in the moving sand; and more sand drifted
up and covered them.
“Taffy! Taffy! Whatever has become of the child?”
His mother was standing by the gate in her print frock. He scrambled
up and ran toward her. She cried out at the sight of him, but he hid
his blood-smeared face against her skirts.
[1] Mattock.