"Yourself," he laughed, as he started up the scaur.
Betty Cam's chair lay at the top; a huge slab of gneiss with another
forming the back, bearing no particular resemblance to a chair at all.
Still there it was that Betty Cam, the witch, used to sit, and, after
lighting her false fire, fling her arms about and mutter incantations
till deadly storms arose.
Many are such stories, current on the wild west coast, and still
firmly believed of the people; none perhaps better authenticated than
this, that on the nights of fierce sou'westers a glow of light could
still be seen at Betty Cam's chair, and that more than once the ghost
of the ghostly Indiaman which, with all sails set, had sailed one
awful winter's night straight up the bay, straight over the cliff,
nipped up Betty Cam, and sailed away with her right over far
Darty-moor to Hell, had been seen pursuing the same extraordinary
course.
Ned felt as if he could have put other folk aboard for that trip, as,
cresting the hill-top, he came full in sight of the Sea-view Hotel.
He sat down promptly on the chair, and gave a low whistle of dismay.
Cam's point, as he had known it, that gorse-covered promontory sheer
down in purpling cliff to the blue-green sea, was gone. In its place
was an ineffectual attempt at a--at a tea-garden! Winding walks here,
winding walks there, meandering toward aimless summer-houses, kiosks,
bandstands, which were recklessly scattered about the bare soil. For
it was bare. Gorse would grow there, or scented purple thyme, or any
of the innumerable small aromatic herbs which the south-west wind
loves, but grass and most garden flowers were helpless before the
constant breeze, which, instant in season and out of season, swept
over the point laden with salt, and even in this flat, calm, June
weather making the steel guy-ropes of the flag-staff hum like a hive
of swarming bees.
As for the Sea--view--ye gods! the pestilential obviousness of that
name!--Hotel, if it also were not guyed by ropes it looked as if it
would be the better of it. What was it, standing on the very edge of
the cliff--Italian--Greek--Gothic--or a Swiss chalet? There were
reminiscences of all in its medley of inconsequent towers, gables,
battlements, balconies. A lunatic asylum built by the patients!
Utterly irrational, utterly out of touch with its surroundings of
earth, and sea, and sky. Yes! quite antagonistic to the little fishing
village in the bay below, to the supreme fairness of the coast
trending away westward in headland after headland. Above all,
absolutely unfit to face that wide waste of water, so smooth, so
silent on the far horizon, so restless, so clamorous in its assault on
the near cliffs. You could hear the angry roar of the waves on the
rocks, see the weather--stains on those thin walls.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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