“An innocent life, yet far astray.”
Wordsworth’s Ruth.
PORT NASSAU.
THE BEACH.
A coach-and-six, as a rule, may be called an impressive
Object.
But something depends on where you see it.
Viewed from the tall cliffs—along the base
of which, on a strip of beach two hundred feet below,
it crawled between the American continent and the
Atlantic Ocean—Captain Oliver Vyell’s
coach-and-six resembled nothing so nearly as a black-beetle.
For that matter the cliffs themselves, swept by the
spray and humming with the roar of the beach—even
the bald headland towards which they curved as to
the visible bourne of all things terrestrial—shrank
in comparison with the waste void beyond, where sky
and ocean weltered together after the wrestle of a
two days’ storm; and in comparison with the
thought that this rolling sky and heaving water stretched
all the way to Europe. Not a sail showed, not
a wing anywhere under the leaden clouds that still
dropped their rain in patches, smurring out the horizon.
The wind had died down, but the ships kept their harbours
and the sea-birds their inland shelters. Alone
of animate things, Captain Vyell’s coach-and-six
crept forth and along the beach, as though tempted
by the promise of a wintry gleam to landward.
A god—if we may suppose one of the old
careless Olympians seated there on the cliff-top,
nursing his knees—must have enjoyed the
comedy of it, and laughed to think that this pert
beetle, edging its way along the sand amid the eternal
forces of nature, was here to take seizin of them—yes,
actually to take seizin and exact tribute. So
indomitable a fellow is Man, improbus Homo;
and among men in his generation Captain Oliver Vyell
was Collector of Customs for the Port of Boston, Massachusetts.
In fairness to Captain Vyell be it added that he—a
young English blood, bearing kinship with two or three
of the great Whig families at home, and sceptical
as became a person of quality—was capable
as any one of relishing the comedy, had it been pointed
out to him. With equal readiness he would have
scoffed at Man’s pretensions in this world and
denied him any place at all in the next. Nevertheless
on a planet the folly of which might be taken for
granted he claimed at least his share of the reverence
paid by fools to rank and wealth. He was travelling
this lonely coast on a tour of inspection, to visit
and report upon a site where His Majesty’s advisers
had some design to plant a fort; and a fine ostentation
coloured his progress here as through life. He
had brought his coach because it conveyed his claret
and his batterie de cuisine (the seaside inns
were detestable); but being young and extravagantly
healthy and, with all his faults, very much of a man,
he preferred to ride ahead on his saddle-horse and
let his pomp follow him.
