Major Hockin brought the only fly as yet to be found in Bruntsea, to meet me at Newport, where the railway ended at present, for want of further encouragement.
“Very soon you go,” he cried out to the bulkheads, or buffers, or whatever are the things that close the career of a land-engine. “Station-master, you are very wise in putting in your very best cabbage plants there. You understand your own company. Well done! If I were to offer you a shilling apiece for those young early Yorks, what would you say, now?”
“Weel, a think I should say nah, Sir,” the Scotch station-master made answer, with a grin, while he pulled off his cap of office and put on a dissolute Glengary. “They are a veery fine young kail, that always pays for planting.”
“The villain!” said the Major, as I jumped into the fly. “However, I suppose he does quite right. Set a thief to watch a thief. The company are big rogues, and he tries to be a bigger. We shall cut through his garden in about three months, just when his cabbages are getting firm, and their value will exceed that of pine-apples. The surveyor will come down and certify, and the ‘damage to crops’ will be at least five pounds, when they have no right to sow even mustard and cress, and a saucepan would hold all the victuals on the land.”
From this I perceived that my host was as full of his speculative schemes as ever; and soon he made the driver of the one-horse fly turn aside from the unfenced road and take the turf. “Coachman,” he cried, “just drive along the railway; you won’t have the chance much longer.”
There was no sod turned yet and no rod set up; but the driver seemed to know what was meant, and took us over the springy turf where once had run the river. And the salt breath of the sea came over the pebble ridge, full of appetite and briskness, after so much London.
“It is one of the saddest things I ever heard of,” Major Hockin began to say to me. “Poor Shovelin! poor Shovelin! A man of large capital — the very thing we want. It might have been the making of this place. I have very little doubt that I must have brought him to see our great natural advantages — the beauty of the situation, the salubrity of the air, the absence of all clay, or marsh, or noxious deposit, the bright crisp turf, and the noble underlay of chalk, which (if you perceive my meaning) can not retain any damp, but transmits it into sweet natural wells. Why, driver, where the devil are you driving us?”
“No fear, your honor. I know every trick of it. It won’t come over the wheels, I do believe, and it does all the good in the world to his sand-cracks. Whoa-ho, my boy, then! And the young lady’s feet might go up upon the cushion, if her boots is thin, Sir; and Mr. Rasper will excuse of it.”
“What the”— something hot —“do you mean, Sir?” the Major roared over the water, which seemed to be deepening as we went on. “Pull out this instant; pull out, I tell you, or you shall have three months’ hard labor. May I be d —— d now — my dear, I beg your pardon for speaking with such sincerity — I simply mean, may I go straightway to the devil, if I don’t put this fellow on the tread-mill. Oh, you can pull out now, then, can you?”
“If your honor pleases, I never did pull in,” the poor driver answered, being frightened at the excitement of the lord of the manor. “My orders was, miss, to drive along the line coming on now just to Bruntsea, and keep in the middle of that same I did, and this here little wet is a haxident — a haxident of the full moon, I do assure you, and the wind coming over the sea, as you might say. These pebbles is too round, miss, to stick to one another; you couldn’t expect it of them; and sometimes the water here and there comes a-leaking like through the bottom. I have seed it so, ever since I can remember.”
“I don’t believe a word of it,” the Major said, as we waited a little for the vehicle to drain, and I made a nosegay of the bright sea flowers. “Tell me no lies, Sir; you belong to the West Bruntseyans, and you have driven us into a vile bog to scare me. They have bribed you. I see the whole of it. Tell me the truth, and you shall have five shillings.”
The driver looked over the marshes as if he had never received such an offer before. Five shillings for a falsehood would have seemed the proper thing, and have called for a balance of considerations, and made a demand upon his energies. But to earn five shillings by the truth had never fallen to his luck before; and he turned to me, because I smiled, and he said, “Will you taste the water, miss?”
“Bless me!” cried the Major, “now I never thought of that. Common people have such ways about things they are used to! I might have stood here for a month, and never have thought of that way to settle it. Ridiculously simple. Give me a taste, Erema. Ah, that is the real beauty of our coast, my dear! The strongest proportion of the saline element — I should know the taste of it any where. No sea-weed, no fishy particles, no sludge, no beards of oysters. The pure, uncontaminated, perfect brine, that sets every male and female on his legs, varicose, orthopedic — I forget their scientifics, but I know the smack of it.”
“Certainly,” I said, “it is beautifully salt. It will give you an appetite for dinner, Major Hockin. I could drink a pint of it, after all that smoke. But don’t you think it is a serious thing for the sea itself to come pouring through the bottom of this pebble bank in this way?”
“Not at all. No, I rather like it. It opens up many strictly practical ideas. It adds very much to the value of the land. For instance, a ‘salt-lick,’ as your sweet Yankees call it — and set up an infirmary for foot and mouth disease. And better still, the baths, the baths, my dear. No expense for piping, or pumping, or any thing. Only place your marble at the proper level, and twice a day you have the grand salubrious sparkling influx of ocean’s self, self-filtered, and by its own operation permeated with a fine siliceous element. What foreign mud could compete with such a bath?”
“But supposing there should come too much of it,” I said, “and wash both the baths and the bathers away?”
“Such an idea is ridiculous. It can be adjusted to a nicety. I am very glad I happened to observe this thing, this — this noble phenomenon. I shall speak to Montague about it at once, before I am half an hour older. My dear, you have made a conquest; I quite forgot to tell you; but never mind that for the present. Driver, here is half a crown for you. Your master will put down the fly to my account. He owes me a heriot. I shall claim his best beast, the moment he gets one without a broken wind.”
As the Major spoke, he got out at his own door with all his wonted alacrity; but instead of offering me his hand, as he always had done in London, he skipped up his nine steps, on purpose (as I saw) that somebody else might come down for me. And this was Sir Montague Hockin, as I feared was only too likely from what had been said. If I had even suspected that this gentleman was at Bruntlands, I would have done my utmost to stay where I was, in spite of all absence of money. Betsy would gladly have allowed me to remain, without paying even a farthing, u............