FullReads

“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.”

I said, “Who–who, my friend?”

“They that builded the church,” he answered.

“Well,” I said. “It seems a certain foolishness to set the edifice so close to the margin.”

Again he chuckled.

“It was close, close, as you say; yet none so close as you might think nowadays. Time hath gnawed here like a rat on a cheese. But the foolishness appeared in setting the brave mansion between the winds and its own graveyard. Let the dead lie seawards, one had thought, and the church inland where we stand. So had the bell rung to this day; and only the charnel bones flaked piecemeal into the sea.”