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Mr. Jussuks had, however, outlived his sense of the injurious appellation; had outlived much prejudice, the wear of poverty, his memory of many things, and, very early, his scorn of the plebeian processes that to the impecunious are a condition of living at all. He was certainly a man of courageous independence, inasmuch as from the hour of his setting foot in England–and that was at the outset of the century–he had controlled his own little fortunes without a hand to help him over the deep places.

Of his first struggles little is known but this–that for years, turning to account some small knowledge of draughtsmanship he had acquired, he found employment in ladies’ academies, of which there was a plenitude at that date in King’s Cobb.

That, however, which brought him eventually into a modest prominence–not only in that same beautiful but indifferently known watering-place (upon which he had happened, it would appear, fortuitously), but elsewhere and amongst men of a certain mark–was a discovery–or the practical application of one–which in its result procured him a definite object in life, together with the means to pursue it.

Ammonites, and such small geological fry, were to be found by the thousand in the petrified mud beds of the Cobb region; but it was left to the ingenuity, aided by good fortune, of the foreigner to unearth from the flaking and perishing cliffs of lias some of the earliest and finest specimens of the ichthyo- and plesio-saurus that a past world has yielded to the naturalists.

Out of these the emigre made money, and so was enabled to pursue and enlarge upon his researches. Presently he prospered into a competence, married (poor Mademoiselle Belleville, of the Silver Street Academy, who died of typhoid at the end of a couple of summers), and so grew into the kindly old age of the absorbed and gentle naturalist, with his Plancine budding at his side.

What in all these fifty years had he forgotten? His name, his rank, his very origin? Much, no doubt. But that there was one haunting memory that had dwelt with him throughout, his child and her lover were to learn–one memory, and that dreadful recurring illusion of the guillotine.

“When Black Venn slips his apron, I shall be in a position to consider your suit.”

Surely that was an odd and enigmatical condition, entirely remote from the subject at issue? Yet from the moment of the first impassioned pleadings of the stricken George, De Jussac had insisted upon it as one from which there should be no appeal.

Now the Black Venn referred to was a great mound of lias that rolled up and inland, in the far sweep of the bay, from the giddy margin of the lower ruin of cliffs. These–mere compressed mountains of mud, blown by the winds and battered by the sea–were in a constant state of yawn and collapse. Yard by yard they yielded to the scourge of Time, and landslides were of common occurrence.

All along the middle slope of Black Venn itself, a wide, deep fissure, dark and impenetrable, had stretched from ages unrecorded. But the eventual opening-out of this crevasse, and the consequent subsidence of the incline, or apron, below it, had been foretold by Mr. De Jussac; and this, in fact, was the condition to which he had alluded.

III

“Mr. De Jussac! do you hear me?”

“I am coming, my friend.”

The light shining steadily through a front window of the cottage flickered and shifted. The young man in the rain and storm outside danced with impatience.

Suddenly the door opened, and Plancine’s father stood there, candle in hand.

“What is it, my George?”

“The hill, sir–the hill! It’s fallen! You were right. You must stand by your word. Black Venn has slipped his apron!”

“My God, no!”

There were despair and exultation in his voice.

“My God, no!” he whispered again, and dived into a cupboard under the stair.

Thence he reappeared with a horn lantern and his old blue cloak.