"I'd not go higher, sir," said my landlady's father. I made out his
warning through the shrill piping of the wind; and stopped and took in
the plunging seascape from where I stood. The boom of the waves came up
from a vast distance beneath; sky and the horizon of running water seemed
hurrying upon us over the lip of the rearing cliff.
"It crumbles!" he cried. "It crumbles near the edge like as frosted
mortar. I've seen a noble sheep, sir, eighty pound of mutton, browsing
here one moment, and seen it go down the next in a puff of white dust.
Hark to that! Do you hear it?"
Through the tumult of the wind in that high place came a liquid vibrant
sound, like the muffled stroke of iron on an anvil. I thought it the
gobble of water in clanging caves deep down below.
"It might be a bell," I said.
The old man chuckled joyously. He was my cicerone for the nonce; had
come out of his chair by the ingle-nook to taste a little the salt of
life. The north-easter flashed in the white cataracts of his eyes and
woke a feeble activity in his scrannel limbs. When the wind blew loud,
his daughter had told me, he was always restless, like an imprisoned
sea-gull. He would be up and out. He would rise and flap his old draggled
pinions, as if the great air fanned an expiring spark into flame.
"It is a bell!" he cried--"the bell of old St. Dunstan's, that was
swallowed by the waters in the dark times."
"Ah," I said. "That is the legend hereabouts."
"No legend, sir--no legend. Where be the tombstones of drownded mariners
to prove it such? Not one to forty that they has in other sea-board
parishes. For why? Dunstan bell sounds its warning, and not a craft will
put out."
"There is the storm cone," I suggested.
He did not hear me. He was punching with his staff at one of a number of
little green mounds that lay about us.
"I could tell you a story of these," he said. "Do you know where we
stand?"
"On the site of the old churchyard?"
"Ay, sir; though it still bore the name of the new yard in my first
memory of it."
"Is that so? And what is the story?"
He dwelt a minute, dense with introspection. Suddenly he sat himself down
upon a mossy bulge in the turf, and waved me imperiously to a place
beside him.
"The old order changeth," he said. "The only lasting foundations of men's
works shall be godliness and law-biding. Long ago they builded a new
church--here, high up on the cliffs, where the waters could not reach;
and, lo! the waters wrought beneath and sapped the foundations, and the
church fell into the sea."
"So I understand," I said.
"The godless are fools," he chattered knowingly. "Look here at these
bents--thirty of 'em, may be. Tombstones, sir; perished like man his
works, and the decayed stumps of them coated with salt grass."
He pointed to the ragged edge of the cliff a score paces away.
"They raised it out there," he said, "and further--a temple of bonded
stone. They thought to bribe the Lord to a partnership in their
corruption, and He answered by casting down the fair mansion into the
waves."