the mystery of the sea

CHAPTER I

SECOND SIGHT

I

THE MYSTERY OF THE SEA

CHAPTER I

SECOND SIGHT

HAD just arrived at Cruden Bay on my annual visit, and after a late breakfast was sitting on

the low wall which was a continuation of the escarpment of the bridge over the Water of

Cruden. Opposite to me, across the road and standing under the only little clump of trees in

the place was a tall, gaunt old woman, who kept looking at me intently. As I sat, a little group,

consisting of a man and two women, went by. I found my eyes follow them, for it seemed to me

after they had passed me that the two women walked together and the man alone in front

carrying on his shoulder a little black box—a coffin. I shuddered as I thought, but a moment later

I saw all three abreast just as they had been. The old woman was now looking at me with eyes

that blazed. She came across the road and said to me without preface:

"What saw ye then, that yer e'en looked so awed?" I did not like to tell her so I did not

answer. Her great eyes were fixed keenly upon me, seeming to look me through and through. I

felt that I grew quite red, whereupon she said, apparently to herself: "I thocht so! Even I did not

see that which he saw."

"How do you mean?" I queried. She answered ambiguously: "Wait! Ye shall perhaps know

before this hour to-morrow!"

Her answer interested me and I tried to get her to say more; but she would not. She moved

away with a grand stately movement that seemed to become her great gaunt form.

After dinner whilst I was sitting in front of the hotel, there was a great commotion in the

village; much running to and fro of men and women with sad mien. On questioning them I found

that a child had been drowned in the little harbour below. Just then a woman and a man, the

same that had passed the bridge earlier in the day, ran by with wild looks. One of the bystanders

looked after them pityingly as he said:

"Puir souls. It's a sad home-comin' for them the nicht."

"Who are they?" I asked. The man took off his cap reverently as he answered:

"The father and mother of the child that was drowned!" As he spoke I looked round as though

some one had called me.

There stood the gaunt woman with a look of triumph on her face.

*****

The curved shore of Cruden Bay, Aberdeenshire, is backed by a waste of sandhills in whose

hollows seagrass and moss and wild violets, together with the pretty "grass of Parnassus" form a

green carpet. The surface of the hills is held together by bent-grass and is eternally shifting as the

wind takes the fine sand and drifts it to and fro. All behind is green, from the meadows that mark

the southern edge of the bay to the swelling uplands that stretch away and away far in thedistance, till the blue mist of the mountains at Braemar sets a kind of barrier. In the centre of the

bay the highest point of the land that runs downward to the sea looks like a miniature hill known

as the Hawklaw; from this point onward to the extreme south, the land runs high with a gentle

trend downwards.

Cruden sands are wide and firm and the sea runs out a considerable distance. When there is a

storm with the wind on shore the whole bay is a mass of leaping waves and broken water that

threatens every instant to annihilate the stake-nets which stretch out here and there along the

shore. More than a few vessels have been lost on these wide stretching sands, and it was perhaps

the roaring of the shallow seas and the terror which they inspired which sent the crews to the

spirit room and the bodies of those of them which came to shore later on, to the churchyard on

the hill.

If Cruden Bay is to be taken figuratively as a mouth, with the sand hills for soft palate, and the

green Hawklaw as the tongue, the rocks which work the extremities are its teeth. To the north the

rocks of red granite rise jagged and broken. To the south, a mile and a half away as the crow

flies, Nature seems to have manifested its wildest forces. It is here, where the little promontory

called Whinnyfold juts out, that the two great geological features of the Aberdeen coast meet.

The red sienite of the north joins the black gneiss of the south. That union must have been

originally a wild one; there are evidences of an upheaval which must have shaken the earth to its

centre. Here and there are great masses of either species of rock hurled upwards in every

conceivable variety of form, sometimes fused or pressed together so that it is impossible to say

exactly where gneiss ends or sienite begins; but broadly speaking here is an irregular line of

separation. This line runs seawards to the east and its strength is shown in its outcrop. For half a

mile or more the rocks rise through the sea singly or in broken masses ending in a dangerous

cluster known as "The Skares" and which has had for centuries its full toll of wreck and disaster.

Did the sea hold its dead where they fell, its floor around the Skares would be whitened with

their bones, and new islands could build themselves with the piling wreckage. At times one may

see here the ocean in her fiercest mood; for it is when the tempest drives from the south-east that

the sea is fretted amongst the rugged rocks and sends its spume landwards. The rocks that at

calmer times rise dark from the briny deep are lost to sight for moments in the grand onrush of

the waves. The seagulls which usually whiten them, now flutter around screaming, and the sound

of their shrieks comes in on the gale almost in a continuous note, for the single cries are merged

in the multitudinous roar of sea and air.

The village, squatted beside the emboucher of the Water of Cruden at the northern side of the

bay is simple enough; a few rows of fishermen's cottages, two or three great red-tiled drying-

sheds nestled in the sand-heap behind the fishers' houses. For the rest of the place as it was when

first I saw it, a little lookout beside a tall flagstaff on the northern cliff, a few scattered farms

over the inland prospect, one little hotel down on the western bank of the Water of Cruden with a

fringe of willows protecting its sunk garden which was always full of fruits and flowers.

From the most southern part of the beach of Cruden Bay to Whinnyfold village the distance is

but a few hundred yards; first a steep pull up the face of the rock; and then an even way, beside

part of which runs a tiny stream. To the left of this path, going towards Whinnyfold, the ground

rises in a bold slope and then falls again all round, forming a sort of wide miniature hill of some

eighteen or twenty acres. Of this the southern side is sheer, the black rock dipping into the waters

of the little bay of Whinnyfold, in the centre of which is a picturesque island of rock shelving

steeply from the water on the northern side, as is the tendency of all the gneiss and granite in this

part. But to east and north there are irregular bays or openings, so that the furthest points of the

promontory stretch out like fingers. At the tips of these are reefs of sunken rock falling down to

deep water and whose existence can only be suspected in bad weather when the rush of the

current beneath sends up swirling eddies or curling masses of foam. These little bays are mostly

curved and are green where falling earth or drifting sand have hidden the outmost side of the

rocks and given a foothold to the seagrass and clover. Here have been at some time or other great

caves, now either fallen in or silted up with sand, or obliterated with the earth brought down in

the rush of surface-water in times of long rain. In one of these bays, Broad Haven, facing rightout to the Skares, stands an isolated pillar of rock called locally the "Puir mon" through whose

base, time and weather have worn a hole through which one may walk dryshod.

Through the masses of rocks that run down to the sea from the sides and shores of all these

bays are here and there natural channels with straight edges as though cut on purpose for the

taking in of the cobbles belonging to the fisher folk of Whinnyfold.

When first I saw the place I fell in love with it. Had it been possible I should have spent my

summer there, in a house of my own, but the want of any place in which to live forbade such an

opportunity. So I stayed in the little hotel, the Kilmarnock Arms.

The next year I came again, and the next, and the next. And then I arranged to take a feu at

Whinnyfold and to build a house overlooking the Skares for myself. The details of this kept me

constantly going to Whinnyfold, and my house to be was always in my thoughts.

Hitherto my life had been an uneventful one. At school I was, though secretly ambitious, dull

as to results. At College I was better off, for my big body and athletic powers gave me a certain

position in which I had to overcome my natural shyness. When I was about eight and twenty I

found myself nominally a barrister, with no knowledge whatever of the practice of law and but

little less of the theory, and with a commission in the Devil's Own—the irreverent name given to

the Inns of Court Volunteers. I had few relatives, but a comfortable, though not great, fortune;

and I had been round the world, dilettante fashion.