George, Nell," he said, looking seawards, "it is good to be here. That's what one always says, isn't it, when the visible Body of the Lord is transfigured before one's eyes as it is now."
"You know, Ned, I do not agree with your Buddhistic notions," she said, a trifle severely.
"Beg pardon! They're not Buddhistic; but I'm always forgetting you don't like--though you will some day! Meanwhile I want to ask you a question: and as the butler told me you would be on the coast somewhere ... you've a most superior set of London servants just now, Nell----"
"To keep the chauffeurs company," she interrupted, shrugging her shoulders. "One must--but don't let's talk of it--it's sickening---- And so you came to the old place?"
"To the old place, Nell," he repeated, looking at her with criticising eyes of kind affection, and thinking she looked as though she stood in need of physical and moral backing; "I always think of you here, looking out to sea, just under Betty Cam's chair----" he nodded his head backwards to the scaur of tumbled rocks. "If you get looking so long, Nell, you will be seeing ghostly things--like she did. She was your ancestress, you know, and it isn't safe----"
He spoke tentatively, but she evaded him. "You said you had a question," she asked; "what is it?"
"Only if you have room at the Keep?"
She laid her hand on his in swift reproof--"Was there ever a time when there was not room?"
He smiled. "True; but unfortunately I've--I've a second self now."
"Ned!" She stared at him. "Oh Ned! How could you--without a word! Who is she?"
"It is a he, my dear. We collided together and found out our respective names were the same. But of that anon. And there is a Scotch doctor too--a rattling good fellow, one Peter Ramsay, whom we picked up--but of that also anon. Meanwhile these are at the 'Crooked Ewe' regaling themselves, and--well! I can't leave them, you see, for they're my guests, but--but we could dine with the chauffeurs, you know."
"Don't be silly, Ned! Of course you must come. There's still room in the ruins for the family--and you won't mind----"
She broke off suddenly, and looked out to sea.
"Tired, Nell?" he asked quietly. "How you fuss, my dear cousin!"
"Who could help fussing?" she said without looking at him. "We could live so comfortably, father and I, on what we have got, if it were not for this craze of his to make money for me. Ah, Ned! I wish you had never lent him that fifteen thousand."
It was nearer twenty-five thousand, but that fact lay lightly on Ned Blackborough's mind.
"I believe it to be an excellent investment," he remarked coolly, "though I own I didn't know what he wanted it for at the time."
"And you don't know now?" she broke in passionately. "There it stands--despicable utterly--facing the sea--that sea." She pointed to it appealingly.
Ned looked out to the clear horizon, so definite yet so undefined, where a liner, after taking its bearings from the lighthouse far away to the west, was steering straight up Channel. It seemed to glide evenly between sea and sky, and yet here the thunder of each wave filled the air with sound. Ay! a sea not to be safely faced by anything despicable.
"You are letting this beast of an hotel get on your mind, Nell," he said, after a pause. "After all, half the white and coloured cliffs of Old England are so desecrated----"
"Don't excuse it," she interrupted almost fiercely; "it's inexcusable. When I think what Jeff would have said--Jeff who loved every stone--dear old Jeff----" She broke off and hid her face in her hands.
"Curse South Africa!" said Ned under his breath.
She looked up after a while. "You see," she began more composedly, "what stings is that it is all done for me; and I--fifty pounds a year would keep me going as a hospital nurse; and I shall never be anything else, Ned, never! I lost everything for myself seven years ago, and what I have belongs to others. And there is so much in the past for which atonement should be made. You don't belong to the Pentreaths, you see; but they were a wild race--Betty Cam, as you reminded me! Think of her! Why, Ned, when I see at night that hateful place all lit up with electric light and shining far, far out to sea, I feel as if we were doing it all over again! Luring ships to the rocks!"
"My dear Nell, what an imagination you've got!" expostulated her cousin.
She pulled herself up. "Have I? But it is so useless. And it seems to get worse and worse since Mr. Hirsch came in. He is at the Keep now, arranging for a light railway. And oh, Ned! the place where we used to picnic as children--you remember, of course--is all placarded as 'eligible building-sites.'"
Ned whistled, and looked out to sea. As he had said, the white cliffs of Marine England were so disfigured everywhere; but that did not bring much consolation for the destruction of absolute beauty.
"Well," he said, "I only hope some one may think them so, and that the hotel is crowded up to the garrets. It's got to be; for the farmers and the little shopkeepers at Haverton, who put their piles into it--because my uncle did--will expect a dividend!"
"And the others too," she added bitterly. "You know Mr. Hirsch has floated it. It's quoted on the Stock Exchange now, and they are going to run up select jerry-built villas with the money they get on the new shares, as they ran up the jerry-built hotel----"
"With mine," laughed Ned, a trifle uneasily. "Well, my dear child, I hadn't any intention of building it--but it's there--and let us come and look at it. It can't help, can it, being in a lovely spot?"
"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
