Broadwater
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.
The 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 the 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
impermeable 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 it 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.
But 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: it’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 heard, 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 to 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.”