Sylvia's Lovers

The coast on that part of the island to which this story refers is

bordered by rocks and cliffs. The inland country immediately

adjacent to the coast is level, flat, and bleak; it is only where

the long stretch of dyke-enclosed fields terminates abruptly in a

sheer descent, and the stranger sees the ocean creeping up the sands

far below him, that he is aware on how great an elevation he has

been. Here and there, as I have said, a cleft in the level land

(thus running out into the sea in steep promontories) occurs--what

they would call a 'chine' in the Isle of Wight; but instead of the

soft south wind stealing up the woody ravine, as it does there, the

eastern breeze comes piping shrill and clear along these northern

chasms, keeping the trees that venture to grow on the sides down to

the mere height of scrubby brushwood. The descent to the shore

through these 'bottoms' is in most cases very abrupt, too much so

for a cartway, or even a bridle-path; but people can pass up and

down without difficulty, by the help of a few rude steps hewn here

and there out of the rock.

Sixty or seventy years ago (not to speak of much later times) the

farmers who owned or hired the land which lay directly on the summit

of these cliffs were smugglers to the extent of their power, only

partially checked by the coast-guard distributed, at pretty nearly

equal interspaces of eight miles, all along the north-eastern

seaboard. Still sea-wrack was a good manure, and there was no law

against carrying it up in great osier baskets for the purpose of

tillage, and many a secret thing was lodged in hidden crevices in

the rocks till the farmer sent trusty people down to the shore for a

good supply of sand and seaweed for his land.

One of the farms on the cliff had lately been taken by Sylvia's

father. He was a man who had roamed about a good deal--been sailor,

smuggler, horse-dealer, and farmer in turns; a sort of fellow

possessed by a spirit of adventure and love of change, which did him

and his own family more harm than anybody else. He was just the kind

of man that all his neighbours found fault with, and all his

neighbours liked. Late in life (for such an imprudent man as he, was

one of a class who generally wed, trusting to chance and luck for

the provision for a family), farmer Robson married a woman whose

only want of practical wisdom consisted in taking him for a husband.

She was Philip Hepburn's aunt, and had had the charge of him until

she married from her widowed brother's house. He it was who had let

her know when Haytersbank Farm had been to let; esteeming it a

likely piece of land for his uncle to settle down upon, after a

somewhat unprosperous career of horse-dealing. The farmhouse lay in

the shelter of a very slight green hollow scarcely scooped out of

the pasture field by which it was surrounded; the short crisp turf

came creeping up to the very door and windows, without any attempt

at a yard or garden, or any nearer enclosure of the buildings than

the stone dyke that formed the boundary of the field itself. The

buildings were long and low, in order to avoid the rough violence of

the winds that swept over that wild, bleak spot, both in winter and

summer. It was well for the inhabitants of that house that coal was

extremely cheap; otherwise a southerner might have imagined that

they could never have survived the cutting of the bitter gales that

piped all round, and seemed to seek out every crevice for admission

into the house.