it turned out not so badly, yet pretty badly. uncle jenico took cheap lodgings for us in the town, and for two or three months was busy flitting between ipswich and london winding up my father’s estate. at the end, when the value of every lot, stick, and warrant had been realised, and the creditors satisfied, a sum representing perhaps £150 a year was secured to us, and with this, and the despatch-box, we committed ourselves to the future.
it appeared that my uncle jenico’s inventions had always been more creditable than profitable to him, and this for the reason that unattainable capital was necessary to their working. given a few hundreds, he was confident that he could make thousands out of any one of them. it was hard, for the lack of a little fuel, so to speak, to have so much power spoiling on one’s hands. i would have had him, when once i understood, invest our own capital in some of them; but, though i could see he loved me for the suggestion, he had the better strength of affection to keep loyal to his trust, which he administered scrupulously according to the law. afterwards, when i came to know him better, i could not but be thankful that he had shown this superior genius for honesty; for his faith in his own concerns was so complete, and at the same time so naïve, that he might otherwise have lacked nothing but the guilt to be a defaulter.
as to the patents themselves, they represented a hundred phases of craft, every one of which delighted and convinced me by its originality. there was a design amongst them for an automatic dairy-maid, a machine which, by exhausting the air in a number of flexible tubes, could milk twenty cows at once. there was a design for making little pearls large, by inserting them like setons in the shells of living oysters. there was a plan for a ship to be driven by a portable windmill, which set a turbine spinning under the stern. uncle jenico’s contrivances were mostly on an heroic scale, and covered every form of enterprise—from the pill which was to eliminate dyspepsia from the land, to a scheme for liquidating the national debt by pawning all england for a term of years to an international trust. at the same time, there was no human need too mean for his consideration. he was for ever striving to economise labour for the betterment of his poorer fellow-creatures. his inventiveness was a great charity, which did not even begin at home. his patents, from being designed to improve any condition but his own, suffered the neglect of a world to which selfishness is the first principle of business competence. his “napina,” a liquid composition from which old clothes, after having been dipped therein, re-emerged as new, could find no market. his “labour-of-love spit,” which was turned by a rocking-chair moving a treadle, like that on a knife-grinder’s machine, so that the cook could roast her joint in great comfort while dozing over her paper, could make no headway against the more impersonal clock-work affair. and so it was with most of his designs, but a few of which had been actually tested before being condemned on insufficient evidence. what more ridiculous, for instance, than to denounce his “burglar’s trap” on the score that one single idiot of a householder had blundered into his own snare and been kept there while the robbers were rifling his premises? what more scandalous than to convict his fire-derrick—a noble invention, like a crane dangling a little cabin, for saving life at conflagrations—because the first time it was tested the box would not descend, but kept the insurance gentlemen swinging in the air for an hour or two; or his infallible lifebelt, which turned upside-down in the water for the single reason that they tried it on a revenue officer who had lost his legs in an explosion? no practical innovation was surely ever started without a stumble. but uncle jenico had no luck. he sunk all his capital in his own patents without convincing a soul, or—and this is the notable thing—losing his temper. that one only of his possessions remained to him, fresh and sound as when, as a little boy, he had invented a flying top, which broke his grandmother’s windows. no neglect had impaired it, nor adversity ruffled for more than a moment. if he had patented it and nothing else, he could have made his fortune, i am certain.
still, when we came to be comrades—or partners, as he loved to call us—his restless brain was busy as ever with ideas. nothing was too large or small for him to touch. he showed me, on an early occasion, how his hat—not the black one he had worn at the funeral, but the big beaver article that came over his eyes—explained its own proportions in a number of little cupboards or compartments in the lining, which were designed to carry one’s soap, toothbrush, razor, etc., when on a short visit. he had the most delightful affection for his own ingenuities, and the worldliest axioms for explaining the secret of their success. on the afternoon when mr. quayle, after the kindest of partings with me, had left us, and while he was yet on the stairs, uncle jenico had bent to me and whispered: “make it a business principle, my boy, never to confess to insolvency. you heard the way i assured the gentleman? well, richard, we may have in our despatch-box there all ophir lying fallow for the lack of a little cash to work it; but we mustn’t tell our commercial friends so—no, no. we must let them believe it is their privilege to back us. necessity is a bad recommendation.”
it may be. but i was not a commercial gent; and uncle jenico had all my faith, and should have had all my capital if it had rested with me to dispose of it as i liked.
during the time my uncle was engaged in london, george, good man, remained at ipswich to look after me, though we were forced reluctantly to dismiss him as soon as things were settled. it was impossible, however, on a hundred and fifty pounds a year to keep a man-servant; and so presently he went, and with him my last connection with the old life. not more of the past than the clothes i stood in now remained to me. it was as if i had been shipwrecked and adopted by a stranger. but the final severance seemed a relief to uncle jenico, who, when it was accomplished, drew a long breath, and adjusted his glasses and looked at me rosily.
“now, richard,” he said, “with nobody any longer to admonish us, comes the question of our home, and where to make it. have you any choice?”
dear me; what did i know of the world’s dwelling-places? i answered that i left it all to him.
“very well,” he said, with a happy sigh; “then i have an original plan. suppose we make it nowhere?”
he paused to note how the surprise struck home.
“you mean——” i began, hesitating.
“i mean,” said he, “supposing we have no fixed abode, but go from place to place as it suits us?”
what boy would not have jumped at the suggestion? i was in ecstasies.
“you see,” said uncle jenico, “moving about, i get ideas; and in ideas lies our future prosperity. let’s look at the map.”
it was a lovely proposal. to enter, in actual being, the mysterious regions of pictures-on-the-wall; to breathe the real atmosphere, so long felt in romance, of tinted lithographs and coloured prints; to find roads and commons and phantom distances, wistful, unattainable dreams hitherto, made suddenly accessible to me—it was thrilling, it was rapturous. my uncle humoured the thought so completely as to leave to me the fanciful choice of our first resting-place.
“only don’t let it be too far,” he said. “just at present we must go moderate, and until i can realise on the sale of a little patent, which i am on the point of parting with for an inadequate though considerable sum.”
i spent a delightful hour in poring over the county map. it was patched with verdant places—big farms and gentlemen’s estates—and reminded me somehow of those french green-frilled sugarplums which crunch liqueur and are shaped like little vegetables. one could feel the cosy shelter of the woods, marked in groves of things that looked like tiny cabbages, and gaze down in imagination from the hills meandering like furry caterpillars with a miniature windmill here and there to turn them from their course. the yellow roads were rich in suggestion of tootling coaches, and milestones, and inns revealing themselves round corners, with troughs in front and sign-boards, and perhaps a great elm shadowed with caves of leafiness at unattainable heights. but the red spit of railway which came up from the bottom of the picture as far as colchester, and was thence extended, in a dotted line only, to ipswich, gave me a thrill of memory half sad and half beautiful. for it was by that wonderful crimson track that my father and i had travelled our last road together as far as the old essex town, where, since it ended there for the time being, we had taken coach for suffolk.
“made up your mind?” asked uncle jenico, by-and-by, with a chuckle.
i flushed and wriggled, and came out with it.
“can’t we—mayn’t we go to the sea? i’ve never been there yet; and we’re so close; and papa promised.”
“the sea?” he echoed. “why, to be sure. i’ve long had an idea that seaweed might be used for water-proofing. it’s an inspiration, richard. we’ll beat mr. macintosh on his own ground. but whereabouts to the sea, now?”
i could not suggest a direction, however; so he borrowed for me a local guide-book, which dealt with places of interest round the coast, and left me to study it while he went out for a walk to get ideas.
i had no great education; but i could read glibly enough for my eight years. when uncle jenico returned in an hour or two, our choice, so far as i was concerned, was made. i brought the book, and, laying it before him, pointed to a certain description.
“dunberry,” he read, skipping, so as to take the gist of it—“the sitomagus of the roman occupation, and later the dunmoc of east anglia. population, 694. (h’m, h’m!) disfranchised by the reform act of ’32. (h’m!) formerly a place of importance, owning a seaport, fortifications, seven churches and an abbey. in the twelfth century the sand, silting up, destroyed its harbour and admitted the encroachments of the sea, from which date its prosperity was gradually withdrawn. (h’m, h’m!) since, century by century, made the devouring sport of the ocean, until, at the present date, but a few crumbling ruins, toppling towards their final extinction in the waves below, remain the sole sad relics of an ancient glory which once proudly dominated the element under which it was doomed later to lie ’whelmed.”
uncle jenico stopped reading, and looked up at me a little puzzled.
“there’s better to come,” i murmured, blushing.
he nodded, and went on—
“a hill, called the abbot’s mitre, as much from its associations, perhaps, as from its peculiar conformation, overlooks the modern village, and is crowned on its seaward edge by the remains of the ancient foundation from which it takes its name. some business is done in the catching and curing of sprats and herrings. there is an annual fair. morant states that after violent storms, when the shingle-drifts are overturned, bushels of coins, roman and other, and many of considerable value, may be picked up for the seeking.”
uncle jenico’s face came slowly round to stare into mine. his hair seemed risen; his jaw was a little dropped.
“richard!” he whispered, “our fortune is made.”
“yes,” i thrilled back, delighted. “that’s why i chose it. i thought you’d be pleased.”
he looked out the direction eagerly on the map. it was distant, by road, some twenty-five miles north-east by north from ipswich; by sea, perhaps ten miles further. but the weather was fine, and water-transport more suited to our finances. so two days later we had started for dunberry, in one of the little coasting ketches that ply between harwich and yarmouth carrying farm produce and such chance passengers as prefer paying cheap for a risk too dear for security.
it was lovely april weather, and a light wind blowing up the shores from the south-east bowled us gaily on our way. i never so much as thought of sickness, and if i had, uncle jenico, looking in his large panama hat like a benevolent planter, would have shamed me, with his rubicund serenity, back to confidence again. our sole property, for all contingencies, was contained in the despatch-box and a single carpet bag; and with no more sense of responsibility than these engendered, we were committing ourselves to a future of ravishing possibilities.
throughout the pleasant journey we hugged the coast, never being more than a mile or two distant from it, so that its features, wild or civilized, were always plain to us. it showed ever harsher and more desolate the farther we ran north, and the tearing and hollowing effect of waves upon its sandy cliffs more evident. all the way it was fretted, near and far, with towers—a land of churches. they stood grey in the gaps of hills; brown and gaunt on solitary headlands. sometimes they were dismantled; and once, on a deserted shore, we saw a belfry and part of a ruined chancel footing the tide itself. it was backed by a great heaped billow of sand, which—so our skipper told us—had stood between it and the sea till storms flung it all over and behind, leaving the walls it had protected exposed to destruction.
as evening came on i must confess my early jubilation waned somewhat. the thin, harsh air, the melancholy cry of the birds, the eternal desolation of the coast, chilled me with a creeping terror of our remoteness from all that friendly warmth and comfort we had rashly deserted. not a light greeted us from the shore but such as shone ghastly in the lifeless wastes of foam. the last coast town, miles behind, seemed to have passed us beyond the final bounds of civilization. so that it was with something like a whimper of joy that i welcomed the sudden picture of a hill notched oddly far ahead against the darkening sky. i ran hurriedly to uncle jenico.
“uncle!” i cried. “uncle, look! the abbot’s mitre!”
the skipper heard me, and answered.
“aye,” said he, “it’s the mitre, sure enow,” and spat over the taffrail.
there was something queer in his tone. he rolled his quid in his cheek.
“and like enow, by all they say,” he added, looking at uncle jenico, “to figure agen for godliness.”
“eh?” said my uncle; “i beg your pardon?”
“granted,” answered the skipper shortly; and that was all.
there was an uneasy atmosphere of enigma here. but we were abroad after adventure, when all was said, and had no cause to complain.
i stood holding my uncle’s hand, while we ran our last knot for home in the twilight. as we neared the hill its peculiar shape was gradually lost, and instead, looking up from below, we saw the cap of a broken tower showing over its swell. then hill and ruin dropped behind us, a shadowy bulk, and of a sudden we were come opposite a sandy cleft cutting up into the cliff, and below on the shingle a ghostly group of boats and shore-loafers, though still no light or sign of houses.
we brought to, the sails flapping, and the skipper sent a long melancholy boom sounding over the water from a horn. it awoke a stir on the beach, and presently we saw a boat put off, and come curtseying towards us. it was soon alongside, revealing three men, of whom the one who sat steering was a little remarkable. he was immensely tall and slouching, with a lank bristled jaw, a swarthy skin, and, in spectral contrast, eye-places of such an odd sick pallor as to give him the appearance, at least in this gloaming, of wearing huge spectacles. however, he was the authoritative one of the three, and welcomed us civilly enough for early visitors to dunberry, hoping we should favour the place.
“none so well as thee, jole, since thy convarsion,” bellowed the skipper, as we pushed off.
there followed a chuckle of laughter from the ketch, and i noticed even that the two men pulling us creased their cheeks. their companion, unmoving, clipped out something like an oath, which he gruffly and hastily coughed over.
“the lord in his wrath visit not the scoffer,” he said aloud, “nor waft him blindfold this night upon the weary sands!”
in a few minutes we slid up the beach on the comb of a breaker, and half a dozen arms were stretched to help us out. one seized the carpet-bag, another—our tall coxswain’s itself—the despatch-box; and thereby, by that lank arm, hangs this tale. for my uncle, who was jealous of nothing in the world but his box, in scrambling to resecure it from its ravisher, slipped on the wet thwarts, and, falling with his head against a corner of the article itself, rolled out bleeding and half-stunned upon the sand.
i was terribly frightened, and for a moment general consternation reigned. but my uncle was not long in recovering himself, though to such a dazed condition that a strong arm was needed in addition to his stick to help him towards the village. we started, a toilful procession, up the sandy gully (dunberry gap its name), i carrying the precious case, and presently, reaching the top, saw the village going in a long gentle sweep below us, the scoop of the land covering it seawards, which was the reason we had seen no lights.
it had been uncle jenico’s intention to look for reasonable lodgings; but this being from his injury impracticable, we let ourselves be conducted to the flask inn, the most important in the place, where we were no sooner arrived than he consented to be put to bed, with me in a little closet giving off his room. it was near dark by the time we were settled, and feeling forlorn and bewildered i was glad enough, after a hasty supper, to tuck my troubles between the sheets and forget everything in sleep. but how little i guessed, as i did so, that uncle jenico had, in falling, taken possession, like william the conqueror, of this new land of our adoption.
