Long before I heard this story I knew three of the characters in it.
Just within the harbour beside which I am writing this--on your left as
you enter it from the sea--a little creek runs up past Battery Point to
a stout sea-wall with a turfed garden behind it and a low cottage, and
behind these a steep-sided valley, down which a stream tumbles to a
granite conduit. It chokes and overflows the conduit, is caught again
into a granite-covered gutter by the door of the cottage, and emerges
beyond it in a small cascade upon the beach. At spring tides the sea
climbs to the foot of this cascade, and great then is the splashing.
The land-birds, tits and warblers, come down to the very edge to drink;
but none of them--unless it be the wagtail--will trespass on the beach
below. The rooks and gulls, on their side, never forage above the
cascade, but when the ploughing calls them inland, mount and cross the
frontier-line high overhead. All day long in summer the windows of the
cottage stand open, and its rooms are filled with song; and night and
day, summer and winter, the inmates move and talk, wake and sleep, to
the contending music of the waters.
It had lain tenantless for two years, when one spring morning Miss Bracy
and Mr. Frank Bracy arrived and took possession. They came (for aught
we knew) out of nowhere; but they brought a good many boxes, six cats,
and a complete set of new muslin blinds. On their way they purchased a
quart of fresh milk, and Mr. Frank fed the cats while Miss Bracy put up
the blinds. In the afternoon a long van arrived with a load of
furniture; and we children who had gathered to watch were rewarded by a
sensation when the van started by disgorging an artist's lay-figure,
followed by a suit of armour. From these to a mahogany chest of drawers
with brass handles was a sad drop, and we never regained the high
romance of those first few minutes; but the furniture was undeniably
handsome, and when Miss Bracy stepped out and offered us sixpence apiece
to go and annoy somebody else, we came away convinced that our visitors
were persons of exceptionally high rank. It puzzled us afterwards that,
though a bargain is a bargain, not one of us had stayed to claim his
sixpence.
The newcomers brought no servants; but after a week there arrived (also
out of nowhere) an elderly and taciturn cook. Also, Miss Bracy on the
third morning walked up to the farm at the head of the valley and hired
down the hind's second daughter for a "help." We knew this girl, Lizzie
Truscott, and waylaid her on her homeward road that evening for
information. She told us that Miss Bracy's cats had a cradle apiece
lined with muslin over pink calico; that the window curtains inside
reached from the ceilings to the floors; that the number of knives and
forks was something cruel--one kind for fish, another for meat, and a
third for fruit; that in one of the looking-glasses a body could see
herself at one time from head to feet, though why you should want a
looking-glass to see your feet in when you could see them without was
more than she knew; and, finally, that Miss Bracy had strictly forbidden
her to carry tales--a behest which, convinced that Miss Bracy had
dealings with the Evil One, she meant to observe. The elderly cook when
she arrived warned us away from the door with a dialect we did not
recognise. Her name (Lizzie reported) was Deborah, and in our haste we
set her down for a Jewess; but I seem to have detected her accent since,
and a few of her pet phrases, in the pages of Scottish fiction.
This is all I can tell--so fitful are childish memories--of the coming
of Miss Bracy and Mr. Frank. I cannot say, for instance, what gossip it
bred, or how soon they wore down the edge of it and became, with their
eccentricities, an accepted feature of the spot they had made their
home. They made no friends, no acquaintances: everyone knew of Miss
Bracy's cats, but few had seen them. Miss Bracy herself was on view in
church every Sunday morning, when Mr. Frank walked with her as far as
the porch. He never entered the building, but took a country walk
during service, returning in time to meet her at the porch and escort
her home. His other walks he took alone, and almost always at night.
The policeman tramping towards Four Turnings after midnight to report to
the country patrol would meet him and pause for a minute's chat.
Night-wandering beasts--foxes and owls and hedgehogs--knew his footstep
and unlearned their first fear of it. Sometimes, but not often, you
might surprise him of an afternoon seated before an easel in some
out-of-the-way corner of the cliffs; but if you paused then to look, he
too paused and seemed inclined to smudge out his work. The Vicar put it
about that Mr. Frank had formerly been a painter of fame, and (being an
astute man) one day decoyed him into his library, where hung an
engraving of a picture "Amos Barton" by one F. Bracy. It had made a
small sensation at Burlington House a dozen years before; and the Vicar
liked it for the pathos of its subject--an elderly clergyman beside his
wife's deathbed. To him the picture itself could have told little more
than this engraving, which utterly failed to suggest the wonderful
colour and careful work the artist (a young man with a theory and
enthusiasm to back it) had lavished on the worn carpet and valances of
the bed, as well as on the chestnut hair of the dying woman glorified in
the red light of sunset.
Mr. Frank glanced up at the engraving and turned his face away.
It was the face of a man taken at unawares, embarrassed, almost afraid.
The Vicar, who had been watching him, intending some pleasant remark
about the picture, saw at once that something was wrong, and with great
tact kept the talk upon some petty act of charity in which he sought to
enlist his visitor's help. Mr. Frank listened, gave his promise
hurriedly and made his escape. He never entered the Vicarage again.