The black Flemings

Once through the dark old iron gates, he seemed to have left the warm and friendly autumn day, the warm and friendly world, behind him.

David Fleming laughed half aloud at the fancy and stepped back into the rambling country road, where wheel tracks were so quickly obliterated in the loose-drifting sand, to contrast once more, for his own amusement, the peaceful dreaming landscape in the afternoon sunlight and the sinister shadows of Wastewater.

Five miles away along the rugged coast lay Crowchester, the little fishing village whose activities tinged the fresh salty air, even here, with the odour of salted fish. Between Crowchester and Wastewater, beside whose forbidding great gates he stood, ran the irregular road, rising through dunes, skirting wind-twisted groves of pine and fir, disappearing into ragged hollows to emerge again on turfy bluffs, and finally winding in here toward the old brick house that lay hidden behind these high walls.

On his right lay the shore, rocky, steep, rough, with pebbles complaining as the tide dragged them to and fro, surf hammering restlessly among the rocks or brimming and ebbing with tireless regularity over the scooped stone of the pools. No two inches of it, no two drops of its immensity ever the same; it held him now, as it had held him for so many hours in his very babyhood, in a sort of tranced contemplation.

The sun was setting in angry red beyond the forest behind him, but a hard and brilliant light still lay on the water, and the waves were sculptured harshly in silver-tipped steel. Where the old brick wall of Wastewater descended to the shore enough sand had been stored in the lee of the wall to form a triangular strip of beach, and here scurfy suds were eddying lazily, hemmed back from the tide by a great jammed log and only stirred now and then by a fringe of the surf, which formed new bubbles even while it pricked the old.

On the sharp irregular fall of the cliff, distorted, wind-blown pines and tight-woven mallows clung, with the hardy smaller growths of the seaside: blown blue lupin, coarse sedge and furzy grasses, yellow-topped odorous sage and dry fennel. About their exposed, tenaciously clinging roots was tangled all the litter of the sea: ropes, slender logs as white and bare as old bones, seaweeds, and cocoanut shells.

David breathed the salty, murmuring air, faintly scented with fish, looked back once more toward the shining roofs and the rising faint plumes of smoke above Crowchester, shrugged his shoulders with a philosophic laugh, and turned again toward Wastewater’s gates.

These were four: two great wrought-iron wings in the centre, where carriages had once entered and departed, and, designed ingeniously in the same enormous framework, two smaller gates, one on each side, for foot passengers.

The carriage gates had been closed for years and were bedded deep in dry grass and fallen leaves, and the right-hand smaller gate had perhaps not been opened three times in its more than one hundred years’ existence. But the left-hand gate stood slightly ajar, and beyond it ran a faintly outlined footpath into a deep old garden. The whole elaborate structure, met by the mossy brick wall on both sides, was thick with rust, its scrolls and twisted bars shone brick-red in the last of the sunlight.

David had walked briskly from the village and his blood was moving rapidly, but he shivered as the familiar atmosphere once more enveloped him. Once again the dilapidated, stately old garden with its bottle-edged flower beds, where the ragged rose bushes were already showing red and yellow hips, where the pines were shedding their slippery needles, and where the maples and elms looked tattered and forlorn.