CHAPTER I.
CHESIL.
The storm was no less severe on land than on sea. The same wildenfranchisement of the elements had taken place around the abandonedchild. The weak and innocent become their sport in the expenditure ofthe unreasoning rage of their blind forces. Shadows discern not, andthings inanimate have not the clemency they are supposed to possess.
On the land there was but little wind. There was an inexplicabledumbness in the cold. There was no hail. The thickness of the fallingsnow was fearful.
Hailstones strike, harass, bruise, stun, crush. Snowflakes do worse:soft and inexorable, the snowflake does its work in silence; touch it,and it melts. It is pure, even as the hypocrite is candid. It is bywhite particles slowly heaped upon each other that the flake becomes anavalanche and the knave a criminal.
The child continued to advance into the mist. The fog presents but asoft obstacle; hence its danger. It yields, and yet persists. Mist, likesnow, is full of treachery. The child, strange wrestler at war with allthese risks, had succeeded in reaching the bottom of the descent, andhad gained Chesil. Without knowing it he was on an isthmus, with theocean on each side; so that he could not lose his way in the fog, in thesnow, or in the darkness, without falling into the deep waters of thegulf on the right hand, or into the raging billows of the high sea onthe left. He was travelling on, in ignorance, between these two abysses.
The Isthmus of Portland was at this period singularly sharp and rugged.Nothing remains at this date of its past configuration. Since the ideaof manufacturing Portland stone into Roman cement was first seized, thewhole rock has been subjected to an alteration which has completelychanged its original appearance. Calcareous lias, slate, and trap arestill to be found there, rising from layers of conglomerate, like teethfrom a gum; but the pickaxe has broken up and levelled those bristling,rugged peaks which were once the fearful perches of the ossifrage. Thesummits exist no longer where the labbes and the skua gulls used toflock together, soaring, like the envious, to sully high places. In vainmight you seek the tall monolith called Godolphin, an old British word,signifying "white eagle." In summer you may still gather on thosesurfaces, pierced and perforated like a sponge, rosemary, pennyroyal,wild hyssop, and sea-fennel which when infused makes a good cordial, andthat herb full of knots, which grows in the sand and from which theymake matting; but you no longer find gray amber, or black tin, or thattriple species of slate--one sort green, one blue, and the third thecolour of sage-leaves. The foxes, the badgers, the otters, and themartens have taken themselves off; on the cliffs of Portland, as well asat the extremity of Cornwall, where there were at one time chamois, noneremain. They still fish in some inlets for plaice and pilchards; but thescared salmon no longer ascend the Wey, between Michaelmas andChristmas, to spawn. No more are seen there, as during the reign ofElizabeth, those old unknown birds as large as hawks, who could cut anapple in two, but ate only the pips. You never meet those crows withyellow beaks, called Cornish choughs in English, _pyrrocorax_ in Latin,who, in their mischief, would drop burning twigs on thatched roofs. Northat magic bird, the fulmar, a wanderer from the Scottish archipelago,dropping from his bill an oil which the islanders used to burn in theirlamps. Nor do you ever find in the evening, in the plash of the ebbingtide, that ancient, legendary neitse, with the feet of a hog and thebleat of a calf. The tide no longer throws up the whiskered seal, withits curled ears and sharp jaws, dragging itself along on its naillesspaws. On that Portland--nowadays so changed as scarcely to berecognized--the absence of forests precluded nightingales; but now thefalcon, the swan, and the wild goose have fled. The sheep of Portland,nowadays, are fat and have fine wool; the few scattered ewes, whichnibbled the salt grass there two centuries ago, were small and tough andcoarse in the fleece, as became Celtic flocks brought there bygarlic-eating shepherds, who lived to a hundred, and who, at thedistance of half a mile, could pierce a cuirass with their yard-longarrows. Uncultivated land makes coarse wool. The Chesil of to-dayresembles in no particular the Chesil of the past, so much has it beendisturbed by man and by those furious winds which gnaw the very stones.
At present this tongue of land bears a railway, terminating in a prettysquare of houses, called Chesilton, and there is a Portland station.Railway carriages roll where seals used to crawl.
The Isthmus of Portland two hundred years ago was a back of sand, with avertebral spine of rock.
The child's danger changed its form. What he had had to fear in thedescent was falling to the bottom of the precipice; in the isthmus, itwas falling into the holes. After dealing with the precipice, he mustdeal with the pitfalls. Everything on the sea-shore is a trap--the rockis slippery, the strand is quicksand. Resting-places are but snares. Itis walking on ice which may suddenly crack and yawn with a fissure,through which you disappear. The ocean has false stages below, like awell-arranged theatre.
The long backbone of granite, from which fall away both slopes of theisthmus, is awkward of access. It is difficult to find there what, inscene-shifters' language, are termed _practicables_. Man has nohospitality to hope for from the ocean; from the rock no more than fromthe wave. The sea is provident for the bird and the fish alone.Isthmuses are especially naked and rugged; the wave, which wears andmines them on either side, reduces them to the simplest form. Everywherethere were sharp relief ridges, cuttings, frightful fragments of tornstone, yawning with many points, like the jaws of a shark; breaknecks ofwet moss, rapid slopes of rock ending in the sea. Whosoever undertakesto pass over an isthmus meets at every step misshapen blocks, as largeas houses, in the forms of shin-bones, shoulder-blades, andthigh-bones, the hideous anatomy of dismembered rocks. It is notwithout reason that these _striae_ of the sea-shore are called_cotes_.[9]
The wayfarer must get out as he best can from the confusion of theseruins. It is like journeying over the bones of an enormous skeleton.
Put a child to this labour of Hercules.
Broad daylight might have aided him. It was night. A guide wasnecessary. He was alone. All the vigour of manhood would not have beentoo much. He had but the feeble strength of a child. In default of aguide, a footpath might have aided him; there was none.
By instinct he avoided the sharp ridge of the rocks, and kept to thestrand as much as possible. It was there that he met with the pitfalls.They were multiplied before him under three forms: the pitfall of water,the pitfall of snow, and the pitfall of sand. This last is the mostdangerous of all, because the most illusory. To know the peril we faceis alarming; to be ignorant of it is terrible. The child was fightingagainst unknown dangers. He was groping his way through something whichmight, perhaps, be the grave.
He did not hesitate. He went round the rocks, avoided the crevices,guessed at the pitfalls, obeyed the twistings and turnings caused bysuch obstacles, yet he went on. Though unable to advance in a straightline, he walked with a firm step. When necessary, he drew back withenergy. He knew how to tear himself in time from the horrid bird-lime ofthe quicksands. He shook the snow from about him. He entered the watermore than once up to the knees. Directly that he left it, his wet kneeswere frozen by the intense cold of the night. He walked rapidly in hisstiffened garments; yet he took care to keep his sailor's coat dry andwarm on his chest. He was still tormented by hunger.
The chances of the abyss are illimitable. Everything is possible in it,even salvation. The issue may be found, though it be invisible. How thechild, wrapped in a smothering winding-sheet of snow, lost on a narrowelevation between two jaws of an abyss, managed to cross the isthmus iswhat he could not himself have explained. He had slipped, climbed,rolled, searched, walked, persevered, that is all. Such is the secret ofall triumphs. At the end of somewhat less than half an hour he feltthat the ground was rising. He had reached the other shore. LeavingChesil, he had gained terra firma.
The bridge which now unites Sandford Castle with Smallmouth Sands didnot then exist. It is probable that in his intelligent groping he hadreascended as far as Wyke Regis, where there was then a tongue of sand,a
natural road crossing East Fleet.
He was saved from the isthmus; but he found himself again face to facewith the tempest, with the cold, with the night.
Before him once more lay the plain, shapeless in the density ofimpenetrable shadow. He examined the ground, seeking a footpath.Suddenly he bent down. He had discovered, in the snow, something whichseemed to him a track.
It was indeed a track--the print of a foot. The print was cut outclearly in the whiteness of the snow, which rendered it distinctlyvisible. He examined it. It was a naked foot; too small for that of aman, too large for that of a child.
It was probably the foot of a woman. Beyond that mark was another, thenanother, then another. The footprints followed each other at thedistance of a step, and struck across the plain to the right. They werestill fresh, and slightly covered with little snow. A woman had justpassed that way.
This woman was walking in the direction in which the child had seen thesmoke. With his eyes fixed on the footprints, he set himself to followthem.