The river Colne, once upon a time, was seized with the desire of being a second Nile. We are speaking of course of that præhistoric age in which imagination runs riot, and sets down all its fancies as facts. The Nile brings down mud which it deposits over the surface of Egypt, and fertilizes it. Mud! thought the Colne, I can do a neat thing in mud. I can beat the Nile in the amount of slimy material I can bring on my waters and cast down where my waters reach. But it was not in mud that the Nile was to be equalled and excelled. A delta! thought the Colne. I can delticulate—a præhistoric verb and passable—into any number of mouths. Then the Colne proceeded near its embouchure to ramify in various directions, like a fan. But the attempt proved a failure, and in the end the Colne was forced to find her way to the sea through a single channel out of the many abortive ones she had run, leaving these latter some longer, some shorter, all smothering themselves in mud, and annually contracting. The Colne in the world of rivers is an instance of the great pretence and poor execution, and has its counterpart in the world of men.
Crafty millers have cast their eyes on these channels, and have run dams across their extremities with sluices in them, and when the tide flows into the creeks and flushes them full, it pours up through the sluice gate and brims the basin beyond; but when the water tries to return with the ebb, No, no, says the miller, you come as you will, you go as I choose! The trap is shut, and the water is caught and allowed to run away as the miller orders, and is made to turn a wheel and grind corn before it goes.
That water, as it trickles down the empty channel blushing brown with humiliation, finds that channel which erewhile was an arm of green and glittering water, deteriorated into a gulf of ill-savoured ooze, alive with gulls chattering, leaping, fluttering, arguing, gobbling.
At the mouth of the Colne, and yet not on it, nor on the sea, but lost and entangled among the creeks that end in mud-smother, lies the port of Brightlingsea. The name it takes from its first settler, Brit-helm, the Dane with the bright helmet by which he was known, who ran his boat across an arm of the sea, and squatted on what was then an island. It was Brithelm’s Isle; but now it is no more an island. One long creek runs past it for several miles eastward to St Osyth’s Priory, and almost reaches the ocean, perhaps at one day it may have done so. Another, in an opposite direction, cuts across the land to the Maldon river, and actually reaches the great bay of the Blackwater, so that in its mid channel the tides meet, and strike each other in their wavelets angrily. And again, another above Brightlingsea runs behind the little port and tries to reach the sea, and did reach it in historic times, but is now stopped by a causeway and a miller’s dam. That road marks the spot where Brithelm’s boat crossed in ancient days. In later times a causeway was carried over on piles driven into the ooze, and then the sea began to choke itself at the extremity, and to deposit banks of mud behind the cause way, which finally became dry land, and so Brithelm’s Isle ceased to be an Isle.
Nowadays, it is along this road that the Brightlingsea people have to go when they drive or walk to the market town of Colchester, and a very long détour it obliges them to make. When a railway was run by a private company up the river, it was carried across the mouth of this creek three miles down over a timber bridge, but as boats were accustomed to enter the channel and run up to the quay by the mill, the bridge was fashioned so as to open and allow a small craft to pass through. Then, to make sure that the bridge was complete for the train to pass across it, a guard or pointsman was stationed in a wooden hut near the end of the bridge, whose duty it was to let the boats through, and also to close the bridge again for the passage of the train.
Conceive of an express rushing along the bridge whilst a schooner was in the act of passing, and consider to which would the encounter be the most unpleasant. The object in life set before the pilot of the bridge over Gull-Fleet was to prevent such encounters.
That railway from Brightlingsea up the Colne went no further than the next village, Wyvenhoe, where it touched the G.E.R., but was there ever, among coy railways such a coquette as this little affair? It sidled up to the burly, stately G.E.R. and said, ‘Take me on,’ and ‘Let us love one another,’ and then, when the G.E.R. grunted, and puffed, and said, ‘I don’t particularly like you, I don’t—to be plain—see much good in you,’ then this little pouting Mignon went into sulks, and turned her back on the G.E.R. and said, ‘You nasty, ugly monster, I hate you! I can have my own puff-puffs! I will have my own dear little cosy station, and my own servants—officials in my own livery.’ So the little coquette set up her private establishment, and got to spending money lavishly, and, it was whispered, but the whisper may have been wicked scandal—got dipped. So then she set up a little scream from the whistles of one of her little engines, and drew a long puff, and cast two piteous little lines of rail towards the G.E.R., and said, not in words, but by gestures, ‘I have been naughty, take me on, on your own terms.’ Then the G.E.R. grandly put out his hand to her and took her. Now, at the time when our story moves its course, this little absurd, coy little railway was not married to G.E.R., but was only coughing to draw attention to her, and making signals that meant, if they meant anything, ‘Come to my help, dear duck of a G.E.R.’ But G.E.R. was looking another way, to Walton, and had shut his ears and would not hear the appeals. And the little B. and W.R. was unhappy, and a little careless about the times it kept, and the charges it made, and did capricious things which old and well-conducted railways would never think of doing. But B. and W.R. was in a sulky mood, and didn’t care what it did, didn’t care what folks said, didn’t care to do its duty, and seemed to have lost all moral discrimination between right and wrong.
But there was one point on which the B. and W.R. did not fail, and that was in the maintenance of the pilot at Gull-Fleet Bridge. It let the paint come off its wood-work, and the waiting-rooms be without fire, and diminished its staff to a sort of maid-of-all-work, who sold tickets, stationmastered, stoked and poked, and acted as guard—but it never gave notice to quit to the pilot, Shamgar Tapp.
On the marsh in the sun on a blazing summer day, lay the daughter of the said Shamgar Tapp, a tall handsome girl—tall when standing up, handsome always—playing with a tame gull.
The marsh was now dry and hard. It is a tract of turf with veins and arteries ramifying through it, that flush with water at high tide, the refluence of the Colne river rolled back by the invading sea. But the turf itself is not overflowed except at neap tides. Now it was baked to the consistency of brick, and the thrift that grew over it was in flower, from white to pink in satiny shades that flickered and shifted with every breath of air over the water. The girl’s name was Jael, and she came by it in this way: When Mrs Tapp presented her husband with a daughter, ‘The finest and biggest she-baby as ever was or ought to be,’ said her intimate friend, Mrs Bagg, who nursed her. Mrs Tapp thought she had done enough for Shamgar and the world, and shrank from the rearing of the finest and biggest she-baby into a big and masculine girl, so she gave her husband and baby and nurse the slip, and left them to make the best of life without her.
‘And now,’ said Shamgar, ‘what the dooce am I to do with this wopping baby? I wish it had pleased the Lord to leave Clementina’ (that was his wife) ‘and take the baby.’ He looked at the creature then smacking its lips. ‘What in the world shall I do with it? If it were oyster-spat I’d know what to do with it. I’d put it on a light gravelly bottom, and see it didn’t get choked with mud, and may be, now and again, feed it with barley-meal. But a real live rampaging and roaring female baby, and so big too! What ever shall I do? And as to naming it. It don’t look a Clementina, there is black hair on its thing of a head; and my Clementina had fair hair, a sort of a parsnip, and pale eyes, and this thing has eyes that look about to be as dark as mine. It don’t seem to me to have any elements of a name ending in ina about it. I know what I’ll do. I’ll go to Scripture. I’ll see in the book of Judges whether Shamgar the son of Anath, the which slew of the Philistines six hundred men with an ox-goad. What was I saying? oh!—whether my Scriptural ancestor, or what ever he was, had a daughter, and if he had, what was her name?’
Then he pulled down his Bible, not a book much read, as might be seem by the cleanness of the edges and the dustiness of the cover.
‘I can’t see that he had,’ mused Shamgar, studying the book, with his dark, bushy brows contracted. ‘In the days of Shamgar, the son of Anath, in the days of Jael, the highways were unoccupied. What was the relation in which they stood to one another is not particularised; but as Jael became the wife of Heber, and struck a tent-peg through the temples of Sisera long after Shamgar was gone to glory, I guess she was his daughter. Therefore, and so because—you darned blustering, howling babe—Jael shall you be. Amen.’
Seventeen years had passed, and Jael, from being a big babe, had grown into a big girl strong, finely built, who strode about the marshes, leaped the tidal runs, shouted to the gulls and skuas and the kittiwakes that flew about the flats, and had a face a nutty brown, and black, thick hair, cut short like a boy’s, and lips red as ‘butter-haves’ Do you know what butter-haves are? They are the rose hips in the hedges. That is their Essex name.
An idle girl was Jael, brought up to no particular work. She did, indeed, in a fashion, manage her father’s house, but that house was very small, and his demands not great. The major portion of her day was spent racing over the marshes, playing with the gull, sometimes bathing in the ‘fleet,’ where there was a ‘hard’ or gravelly bed, sometimes rowing, and when at home sometimes quarrelling with her father.
He was a headstrong man, and she was a headstrong girl. He a man full of passion and will; and—she one could see it in the swelling dark veins, in the sharp-cut, contracting nostrils, in the flashing eyes—a very little was needed, a few years, maybe only a few months, a hard opposition to her will, a great wrong, and the girl would flare and rage as her father flared and raged.
If one could have stood over her now, like the sun, and looked down into her face, one would not have been surprised at the sun looking so long and ardently at it. The brow was broad and low, but the curling, glossy dark hair over it made it look lower than it really was. The dark eyebrows were arched and the lashes long. Under them were splendid, eager, brown eyes, set within these long lashes. The lower part of the face was oval. Those red, merry lips were, when smiling, accompanied by deep, satellite dimples in the gold-brown cheeks.
As she lay on the marsh turf, with her knees up, she held her hands above her face, not to screen the sun from it, but to serve as a perch for the gull, and a protection to her eyes from his beak.
‘Again,’ she said, ‘come, Jack, again! You missed last time,’ and she put a piece of bread between her lips and threw the bird into the air.
It fluttered about her, using its wings without confidence, for a couple of pin-feathers had been clipped in one, and yet not enough to prevent it from rising and taking a short flight. The white bird hovered, lurched, wheeled over her, casting shadows across her face, and then made a sudden drop and drive at her lips. Instantly, she struck and sent the bird back into the air, and, as the gull screamed with mortification, she laughed joyously. As she laughed the bit of bread fell out of her mouth.
‘Here!’ she called, ‘Jack, here is another. Come, boy, don’t be beaten. Try again. What! Skulking? No, no, Jack! Once more. Ha-hah, old fellow! Supposing some other, and bigger Jacks, some day make a dash at my lips! Sha’n’t I only beat them away? Ay, old bird, with a much rougher stroke than I give you. Psha! I’ve hit away some of your breast feathers, and they are falling about me like snow! Ah—’ she made a stroke with both hands now, and started up—‘you mean, cowardly creature! That was a peck at my eyes! Jack, you might have blinded me! Jack, that was not fair! You do not understand fun. You lose your temper. I had not put the bread between my lips, and was unprepared for you, and down you dive at my eyes. Spite, old bird! Wicked bird! Spite, that! You shall not do that again.’
She sprang to her feet.
‘Now—you rascal, you!’ she exclaimed, threatening the gull, which had settled at her feet on the ground. ‘I shall not forget and forgive that. I hate meanness. I hate cowardice, and it was cowardly of you to strike at my eyes when I was not expecting you. Come, Jack, hop on my hand, and now, fair play. I will put the bread in my lips, and you shall peck and try to take it—without flying, and I without striking. I will hold my other hand behind my back. No! Tired of playing? Very well. I bear no malice; let us kiss and be chums.’ She had put her right hand behind her, and had raised the left, on the wrist of which sat the gull, expanding and closing its wings, balancing itself as she changed her position. All at once Jael’s right hand was caught, a hand was thrust under her chin, her face was turned up, and a kiss pressed on her lips.
Then a laugh and she was let go. ‘Pecked and got my ripe fruit, and made friends,’ was shouted in her ear. She turned, flaming with anger and shame to the roots of her hair, and saw before her a young man in a blue jersey, and dark blue breeches, and a straw hat on his head.