第7章

"A completeness without a clue, and a stealthy silence as of a neatly executed crime, characterise this murderous disaster, which, as you may remem-ber, had its gruesome celebrity. The wind would have prevented the loudest outcries from reaching the shore; there had been evidently no time for sig-nals of distress. It was death without any sort of fuss. The Hamburg ship, filling all at once, cap-sized as she sank, and at daylight there was not even the end of a spar to be seen above water. She was missed, of course, and at first the Coastguard-men surmised that she had either dragged her an-chor or parted her cable some time during the night, and had been blown out to sea. Then, after the tide turned, the wreck must have shifted a little and released some of the bodies, because a child --a little fair-haired child in a red frock--came ashore abreast of the Martello tower. By the afternoon you could see along three miles of beach dark figures with bare legs dashing in and out of the tumbling foam, and rough-look-ing men, women with hard faces, children, mostly fair-haired, were being carried, stiff and dripping, on stretchers, on wattles, on ladders, in a long procession past the door of the 'Ship Inn,' to be laid out in a row under the north wall of the Brenzett Church.

"Officially, the body of the little girl in the red frock is the first thing that came ashore from that ship. But I have patients amongst the seafaring population of West Colebrook, and, unofficially, Iam informed that very early that morning two brothers, who went down to look after their cobble hauled up on the beach, found, a good way from Brenzett, an ordinary ship's hencoop lying high and dry on the shore, with eleven drowned ducks inside. Their families ate the birds, and the hen-coop was split into firewood with a hatchet. It is possible that a man (supposing he happened to be on deck at the time of the accident) might have floated ashore on that hencoop. He might. I ad-mit it is improbable, but there was the man--and for days, nay, for weeks--it didn't enter our heads that we had amongst us the only living soul that had escaped from that disaster. The man himself, even when he learned to speak intelligibly, could tell us very little. He remembered he had felt bet-ter (after the ship had anchored, I suppose), and that the darkness, the wind, and the rain took his breath away. This looks as if he had been on deck some time during that night. But we mustn't forget he had been taken out of his knowledge, that he had been sea-sick and battened down below for four days, that he had no general notion of a ship or of the sea, and therefore could have no definite idea of what was happening to him. The rain, the wind, the darkness he knew; he understood the bleating of the sheep, and he remembered the pain of his wretchedness and misery, his heartbroken as-tonishment that it was neither seen nor understood, his dismay at finding all the men angry and all the women fierce. He had approached them as a beg-gar, it is true, he said; but in his country, even if they gave nothing, they spoke gently to beggars.

The children in his country were not taught to throw stones at those who asked for compassion.

Smith's strategy overcame him completely. The wood-lodge presented the horrible aspect of a dun-geon. What would be done to him next? . . .

No wonder that Amy Foster appeared to his eyes with the aureole of an angel of light. The girl had not been able to sleep for thinking of the poor man, and in the morning, before the Smiths were up, she slipped out across the back yard. Holding the door of the wood-lodge ajar, she looked in and extended to him half a loaf of white bread--'such bread as the rich eat in my country,' he used to say.

"At this he got up slowly from amongst all sorts of rubbish, stiff, hungry, trembling, miserable, and doubtful. 'Can you eat this?' she asked in her soft and timid voice. He must have taken her for a 'gracious lady.' He devoured ferociously, and tears were falling on the crust. Suddenly he dropped the bread, seized her wrist, and im-printed a kiss on her hand. She was not fright-ened. Through his forlorn condition she had observed that he was good-looking. She shut the door and walked back slowly to the kitchen.

Much later on, she told Mrs. Smith, who shud-dered at the bare idea of being touched by that creature.

"Through this act of impulsive pity he was brought back again within the pale of human rela-tions with his new surroundings. He never forgot it--never.

"That very same morning old Mr. Swaffer (Smith's nearest neighbour) came over to give his advice, and ended by carrying him off. He stood, unsteady on his legs, meek, and caked over in half-dried mud, while the two men talked around him in an incomprehensible tongue. Mrs. Smith had re-fused to come downstairs till the madman was off the premises; Amy Foster, far from within the dark kitchen, watched through the open back door; and he obeyed the signs that were made to him to the best of his ability. But Smith was full of mistrust.

'Mind, sir! It may be all his cunning,' he cried repeatedly in a tone of warning. When Mr.

Swaffer started the mare, the deplorable being sit-ting humbly by his side, through weakness, nearly fell out over the back of the high two-wheeled cart.

Swaffer took him straight home. And it is then that I come upon the scene.

"I was called in by the simple process of the old man beckoning to me with his forefinger over the gate of his house as I happened to be driving past.

I got down, of course.

"'I've got something here,' he mumbled, lead-ing the way to an outhouse at a little distance from his other farm-buildings.