The Spinners Part 16

"Never was such a brave one, I'm sure," she said, conscious of their secret.

"If you haven't got nerve, you're no good," summed up the young man; "and if you have got nerve, then use it and break out of the beaten track and welcome your luck and court a few adventures for your soul's sake."

"All very well for you men," said Mrs. Northover. "You can have adventures and no great harm done; but us women, if we try for adventures, we come to a bad end."

"n.o.body's more adventurous than you," answered Raymond. "Look at your gardens and your teas for a bob ahead. Wasn't that an adventure--to give a better tea than anybody in Bridport?"

"I believe women have quite as many adventures as men," declared Sarah Northover, who was waiting for her aunt, "only we're quieter about 'em."

"We've got to be," answered Mrs. Northover. "Now come on to your mother's, Sarah. There's Mr. Roberts waiting for us outside."

In the silent and empty mill Raymond dawdled for a few minutes with Sabina, talked love and won a caress. Then she put on her sunbonnet and he walked with her to the door of her home, left her at 'The Magnolias'

and went his way with Estelle's fruit basket.

A great expedition had been planned by the lovers for a forthcoming public holiday. They were going to rise in the dawn, before the rest of the world was awake, and tramp out through West Haven to Golden Cap--the supreme eminence of the south coast, that towers with bright, sponge-coloured precipices above the sea, nigh Lyme.

CHAPTER XI

THE OLD STORE-HOUSE

Through a misty morning, made silver bright by the risen sun, Sabina and Raymond started for their August holiday. They left Bridetown, pa.s.sed through a white fog on the water-meadows and presently climbed to the cliffs and pursued their way westward. Now the sun was over the sea and the Channel gleamed and flashed under a wakening, westerly breeze.

To West Haven they came, where the cliffs break and the rivers from Bridport flow through sluices into the little harbour.

Among the ancient, weather-worn buildings standing here with their feet in the sand drifts, was one specially picturesque. A long and lofty ma.s.s it presented, and a hundred years of storm and salt-laden winds had toned it to rich colour and fretted its roof and walls with countless stains. It was a store, three stories high, used of old time for merchandise, but now sunk to rougher uses. In its great open court, facing north, were piled thousands of tons of winnowed sand; its vaults were barred and empty; its gla.s.s windows were shattered; rust had eaten away its metal work and rot reduced its doors and sashes to powder. Rich red and auburn was its face, with worn courses of brickwork like wounds gashed upon it. A staircase of stone rose against one outer wall, and aloft, in the chambers approached thereby, was laid up a load of sweet smelling, deal planks brought by a Norway schooner. Here too, were all manner of strange little chambers, some full of old nettings, others littered with the marine stores of the fishermen, who used the ruin for their gear. The place was rat-haunted and full of strange holes and corners. Even by day, with the frank suns.h.i.+ne breaking through boarded windows and broken roof, it spoke of incident and adventure; by night it was eloquent of the past--of smugglers, of lawless deeds, of Napoleonic spies.

Raymond and Sabina stood and admired the old store. To her it was something new, for her activities never brought her to West Haven; but he had been familiar with it from childhood, when, with his brother, he had spent school holidays at West Haven, caught prawns from the pier, gone sailing with the fisher folk, and spent many a wet day in the old store-house.

He smiled upon it now, told her of his childish adventures and took her in to see an ancient chamber where he and Daniel had often played their games.

"Our nurse used to call it a 'cubby hole,'" he said. "And she was always; jolly thankful when she could pilot us in here from the dangers of the cliffs and the old pier, or the boats in the harbour. The place is just the same--only shrunk. The plaster from the walls is all mouldering away, or you might see the pictures we used to draw upon them with paint from the fishermen's paint pots. Down below they bring the sand and grade it for the builders. They've carted away millions of tons of sand from the foresh.o.r.e in the last fifty years and will cart away millions more, no doubt, for the sea always renews it."

She wandered with him and listened half-dreaming. The air for them was electric with their love and they yearned for each other.

"I wish we could spend the whole blessed day in this little den together," he said suddenly putting his arms round her; and that brought her to some sense of reality, but none of danger. Not a tremor of peril in his company had she ever felt, for did not perfect love cast out fear, and why should a woman hesitate to trust herself with one, to her, the most precious in the world?

He suggested dawdling awhile; but she would not.

"We are to eat our breakfast at Eype Beach," she reminded him, "and that's a mile or two yet."

So they went on their way again, breasted the gra.s.sy cliffs westward of the haven, admired the fog bank touched with gold that hung over the river flats, praised Bridport wakening under its leafy woods, marked the herons on the river mud in the valley and the sparrow-hawk poised aloft above the downs. She took his arm up the hill and, like birds themselves, they went lightly together, strong, lissome, radiant in health and youth and the joy of a shared wors.h.i.+p that made all things sweet.

They talked of the great day when the world was to know their secret.

The secret itself proved so attractive to both that they agreed to keep it a little longer. Their shared knowledge proved amusing and each told the other of the warnings and advice and fears imparted by careful friends of both s.e.xes, who knew not the splendid truth.

How small the wisdom of the wise appeared--how peddling and foolish and mean--contrasted with their superb trust. How sordid were the ways of the world, its fears and suspicions, from the vantage point to which they had climbed. Material things even suggested this thought to Raymond, and when before noon, they stood on the green crown of Golden Cap, with the earth and sea spread out around them in mighty harmonies of blue and green, he told Sabina so.

"We ought to be perched on a place like this," he said, "because we are to the rest of the world, in mind and in happiness, as we are here in body too."

"Only the sea gulls can go higher, and I always feel they're more like spirits than birds," she answered.

"I've got no use for spirits," he told her. "The splendid thing about us is that we're flesh and blood and spirit too. That's the really magnificent combination for happy creatures. A spirit at best can only be an unfinished thing. People make such a fuss about escaping from the flesh. What the deuce do you want to escape from your flesh for, if it's healthy and tough and fine?"

"When they get old, they feel like that."

"Let the old comfort the old then," he said. "I'm proud of my flesh and bones, and so are you, and so we ought to be; and if I had to give them up and die, I should hate it. And if I found myself in another world, a poor s.h.i.+vering idea and nothing else, without flesh and bones to cover me, or clothes to cover them, I should feel ashamed of myself. And they might call it Paradise as much as they liked, but it would be Hades to me. Of course many of the ghosts would pretend that they liked it; but I bet none would really--so jolly undignified to be nothing but an idea."

She laughed.

"That's just what I feel too; and of course it's utterly wrong of us,"

she said. "It shows we have got a lot to learn. We only feel like this because we're young. Perhaps young ghosts begin like that; but I expect they soon get past it."

"I should never want to get past it," he said.

He rolled over on the gra.s.s and played with her hand.

"How could you love and cuddle a ghost?"

"No doubt you could love it. I don't suppose you could cuddle it. You wouldn't want to."

"No--that's true, Sabina. If this cliff carried away this moment, and we were both smashed to pulp and arrived together in another world without any clothes and both horribly down on our luck--but it's too ghastly a picture. I should howl all through eternity--to think what I'd missed."

They talked nonsense, played with their thoughts and came nearer and nearer together. One tremendous and masterful impulse drew them on--a raging hunger and thirst on his part and something not widely different on hers. Again and again they caught themselves in each other's arms, then broke off, grew serious and strove to steady the trend of their desires.

Golden Cap was a lonely spot and few visited it that day. Once a middle-aged man and woman surprised them where they sat behind a rock near the edge of the great precipices. The man had grown warm and mopped his face and let the wind cool it.

He was ugly, clumsily built, and displayed large calves in knickerbockers and a hot, bald head.

"How hideous human beings can be," said Raymond after they had gone.

"He wasn't hideous in his wife's eyes, I expect."

"Middle-age is mercifully blind no doubt to its own horrors," he said.

"You can respect and even admire old age, like other ruins, if it's picturesque, but middle-age is deadly always."

He smoked and they dawdled the hours away until Sabina declared it was tea time. Then they sought a little inn at Chidc.o.c.k and spent an hour there.

The weather changed as the sun went westerly; the wind sank to a sigh and brought with it rain clouds. But they were unconscious of such accidents. Sabina longed for the cliffs again, so they turned homeward by Seaton and Thorncombe Beacon and Eype Mouth. Their talk ran upon marriage and Raymond swore that he could not wait long, while she urged the importance to him of so doing.

"'Twould shake your brother badly if you wed yet awhile, be sure of that," she said. "He would say that you weren't thinking of the work, and it might tempt him to change his mind about making you a partner."

"Oh d.a.m.n him. Don't talk about him--or work either. I shall never want to work again, or think of work, or anything else on earth till--till--What does he matter anyway--or his ideas? It's a free country and a man has the right to plan his life his own way. If he wants to get the best out of me, he'd better give me five hundred a year to-morrow and tell me to marry you."

"We don't want five hundred. That's a fortune. I'm a good manager and know very well how far money can go. With your money and mine."