"Can't it?" she said coldly; "but I try to forget its existence--it gets on my nerves."
"Apparently," he said quietly.
"And so it would on yours," she retorted, "if you lived within hail of it, and nothing else was talked about day and night. But there--let's leave it alone! You can see it on your way to the 'Crooked Ewe.' We shall expect you to lunch, of course."
"Thanks," he replied; "and--and I think you'll like the Scotch doctor--he is so awfully keen. So full too of his work at Blackborough. He is house-surgeon, I think, to some hospital there."
Her face, a moment before, almost sullen in its obstinate objection, lit up at once. "Not St. Peter's!" she cried. "How interesting---- Why! it is the best, they say, in the kingdom; and I mean to have my training in the children's ward there."
"You look rather as if you ought to go there as a patient, Nell," he replied, shaking his head; "and you are a perfect child still. I wonder if you will ever learn----"
"What?" she asked quickly.
"Yourself," he laughed, as he started up the scaur.
Betty Cam's chair lay at the top; a huge slab of gneiss with another forming the back, bearing no particular resemblance to a chair at all.
Still there it was that Betty Cam, the witch, used to sit, and, after lighting her false fire, fling her arms about and mutter incantations till deadly storms arose.
Many are such stories, current on the wild west coast, and still firmly believed of the people; none perhaps better authenticated than this, that on the nights of fierce sou'westers a glow of light could still be seen at Betty Cam's chair, and that more than once the ghost of the ghostly Indiaman which, with all sails set, had sailed one awful winter's night straight up the bay, straight over the cliff, nipped up Betty Cam, and sailed away with her right over far Darty-moor to Hell, had been seen pursuing the same extraordinary course.
Ned felt as if he could have put other folk aboard for that trip, as, cresting the hill-top, he came full in sight of the Sea-view Hotel.
He sat down promptly on the chair, and gave a low whistle of dismay.
Cam's point, as he had known it, that gorse-covered promontory sheer down in purpling cliff to the blue-green sea, was gone. In its place was an ineffectual attempt at a--at a tea-garden! Winding walks here, winding walks there, meandering toward aimless summer-houses, kiosks, bandstands, which were recklessly scattered about the bare soil. For it was bare. Gorse would grow there, or scented purple thyme, or any of the innumerable small aromatic herbs which the south-west wind loves, but grass and most garden flowers were helpless before the constant breeze, which, instant in season and out of season, swept over the point laden with salt, and even in this flat, calm, June weather making the steel guy-ropes of the flag-staff hum like a hive of swarming bees.
As for the Sea--view--ye gods! the pestilential obviousness of that name!--Hotel, if it also were not guyed by ropes it looked as if it would be the better of it. What was it, standing on the very edge of the cliff--Italian--Greek--Gothic--or a Swiss chalet? There were reminiscences of all in its medley of inconsequent towers, gables, battlements, balconies. A lunatic asylum built by the patients!
Utterly irrational, utterly out of touch with its surroundings of earth, and sea, and sky. Yes! quite antagonistic to the little fishing village in the bay below, to the supreme fairness of the coast trending away westward in headland after headland. Above all, absolutely unfit to face that wide waste of water, so smooth, so silent on the far horizon, so restless, so clamorous in its assault on the near cliffs. You could hear the angry roar of the waves on the rocks, see the weather--stains on those thin walls.
And as he watched a strange thing came about. In every wide window of the huge facade a blaze of light showed, and round the arches hung with lamps in the tea-garden, a multi-coloured flash shone for a second, and then went out again.
They must be trying the electric light. Then he laughed suddenly. It tickled his fancy--apt to be vagrant--to think how this gigantic modern sham, full of false civilisation, full of lifts, lounges, bars, winter-gardens, a real up-to-date, twentieth-century substitute for a home, engineered on the latest American lines, must look to any home-bound ship passing up channel. A beacon distinctly; but a beacon warning the world against what?
"Trinity House and Betty Cam had better settle it between them," he muttered to himself, as, turning at right angles, he set off over the moorland to the "Crooked Ewe," where Peter Ramsay and Ted Cruttenden were awaiting him.
He had picked up the former crossing over from Cardiff to Ilfracombe, and finding he had a few days to spare before taking up his new appointment, Ned had asked him to come on with him and see the prettiest part of Cornwall, and perhaps stop a night with his uncle Sir Geoffrey Pentreath--if there was room.
He wondered rather how Helen had found this room, as he looked round the long lunch table; but, as his uncle confided to him, half of the guests belonged to the hotel. There had been a committee of ways and means, and several people--notably Mr. Robert Jenkin, who was sitting next Helen--were over from Wellhampton for the day. Yes! that was Mr.
Hirsch at her other side, a most able man, but rather too near his _bete noire_, Mr. Jenkin, to show to advantage.
As a matter of fact, Mr. Hirsch was making himself extremely disagreeable to his enemy by insisting on keeping the conversation at a much higher level of culture than any to which Mr. Jenkin could aspire, for he had begun and gone on with life for a considerable time as a local ironmonger. Then fortune had favoured him, and he became the local millionaire, remaining still, however, so Mr. Hirsch declared, "the petty tradesman."
The latter was a very clever, very dapper little German Jew, with nothing to show his ancestry and his age, except a slight foreign lisp, and a still more slight tendency to size below the last button of his waistcoat, a tendency which gave him more concern than it need have done, since it really only showed in profile. For the rest, he was inscrutably good-natured. Money stuck to him, and his many kindnesses never interfered with his keen eye for business--or beauty.
It was Helen's handsome, melancholy face which had been the secret of his interest in Sir Geoffrey's venture; on the principle of opposites, it is to be supposed, since he was a frank pagan, a _bon viveur_ born.
So he talked lightly of Rome, and a few of the crowned heads of Europe with whom he had a bowing acquaintance; but finding this rather too interesting to Mr. Jenkin, he settled down on Bayreuth, and gossiped _Parsifal_, becoming after a time really engrossed, and saying almost with tears in his eyes, "Ah! my dear lady, how I should love to show you it."
He felt seriously sentimental; in truth, the remark was as near a proposal as he had gone for quite a number of years.
"We intend, Mrs. Tressilian," put in Mr. Jenkin, not to be outdone, "to get the Yaller Peking band down from the Halls durin' our season--July-August. It'll play durin' meals, an' after dinner in the Pirates' Pavilion. An' I'm sure, Mrs. Tressilian, the conductor--he ain't really a Chinaman, ma'am, the pig-tail bein' only a thing to catch on--ha! ha! ha! that ain't a bad joke, is it, Hirsch? Pig-tails a thing to catch on to--ha! ha! ha!"
Mr. Hirsch surveyed him with distasteful wonder.
"You don't wear one, do you, Mr. Jenkin?" he asked suavely, his foreign accent coming out, as it always did, when he was annoyed.
"No, sir, I don't," snapped his adversary; "but as I was sayin', ma'am, I'm sure if you had a hankerin' after any particular tune, he'd play it. I don't know about Percival, but his _repertoire_ of Cake Walk is the first, I'm told, in Europe."
Meanwhile Ned Blackborough was taking stock of the rest of the company. On the whole--queer! The Wrexhams he knew, of course. She went in for spiritualism and he for spirits; both good enough sorts even at that; but the bulk smelt distinctly of money.
And his uncle?
Ned had not seen him for over a year, and he was frankly taken aback by the change in him. His face, weakly handsome as ever, hale still in its thin ruddiness, had lost the cheery look which had survived even the death of his only son, who had "died as a Pentreath should." This and such vague comfortings regarding "rest," and being "with his mother," and of the youthful company whom "the gods love,"--comfortings with which humanity has always met bereavement, had not only been on his lips, but in his heart. He had always been an optimist--and now? Anxiety sat on every feature. The man was haggard.
And what was this grievance against Helen which made such sentences as "Mrs. Tressilian will have her own opinion, no doubt," or "You must ask my daughter; I cannot answer for her," quite noticeably frequent in his conversation.
As he sat listening while his next-door neighbour, a very talkative and a very deaf lady, assured him that her motor, which she had bought in Paris, was the only one of its kind in England, and that it was absolutely, entirely, shakeless and noiseless, Lord Blackborough had time for cogitation.
They were very smart people, and it was a very smart luncheon: champagne, _pate-de-foie en aspic_, liquers, and cigarettes on the lawn. A new _regime_ certainly for the kindly old Keep, where, as a boy, he had spent his holidays with his aunt, his mother's sister.
Yes! a new _regime_, especially if the _chauffeurs_ were being similarly regaled downstairs!
And what a fine old place it was! set so deep out of the way of the wind in a hollow of old pines and oaks, and yet so close to the sea that even now the hollow boom of the Atlantic waves sounded against the shrill voices of those smart women as a bassoon sounds against a violin. Ay! and in the winter sou'-westers, the rush and hush of the sea blent with the rush and hush of the leaves. He could imagine Betty Cam--h'm, that was Helen's fault for being so tragic! He looked round for her, and saw her talking to Dr. Ramsay. Ted also was well employed, hanging on Mr. Hirsch's lips as he spoke airily of bulls and bears. Ted, if he didn't take care, would become a zoologist also!
So thought Ned Blackborough as he wandered away from the lawns that were still kept smooth and green, towards the wilderness of garden beyond. And the thought of money bringing the thought of Aura, he smiled, lit a cigar, and went still further afield to find a certain peach tree that used to have peaches on it.
The others were happy, why should he not have his share of enjoyment?
As a matter of fact, however, Helen and Dr. Ramsay were not enjoying themselves; at least _she_ was not, for he had met her assertion that the one wish of her life ("since my husband's death seven years ago,"
being interpolated with the usual note of resigned reverence in her voice) had been to be a hospital nurse, with a dubious shake of the head.
"I wouldn't if I were you," he said slowly. "I rather doubt your being fit for it. One requires a lot of stamina."
She stared at him almost haughtily. "But I am very strong, I assure you," she replied, with a smile of great tolerance, "I daresay I look pale--for the Cornish coast; but, oh! I am very strong!"
"Physically, perhaps." His Scotch accent gave the qualification great precision.
"Then, mentally----" she almost gasped.
"Mentally, no," he replied quite calmly.
"Excuse me," she remarked, "but I really do not think you know me well enough."
"Do I not?" he remarked, his brown eyes smiling into hers; "you forget that I am a doctor, and, Mrs. Tressilian, your nervous system is at the present moment--mind you, it's no blame--in absolutely unstable equilibrium."
"Unstable equilibrium! Really, Dr. Ramsay"
"My dear lady," he said, "I have been thinking all lunchtime that if you would only allow yourself to be hypnotised, you would be clairvoyant. I shouldn't wonder if you would be able to project yourself! and think what that might mean! Why, you might give us a clue----" he paused quite excited.
"And what has that to do with nursing?" she asked coldly.