Chapter 44

THE WAY OF THE WORLD

Cliffs snow-mantled, and storm-ploughed sands, and dark gray billows frilled with white, rolling and roaring to the shrill east wind, made the bay of Bridlington a very different sight from the smooth fair scene of August. Scarcely could the staggering colliers, anchored under Flamborough Head (which they gladly would have rounded if they could), hold their own against wind and sea, although the outer spit of sand tempered as yet the full violence of waves.

But if everything looked cold and dreary, rough, and hard, and bare of beauty, the cottage of the late lieutenant, standing on the shallow bluff, beaten by the wind, and blinded of its windows from within, of all things looked the most forlorn, most desolate, and freezing. The windward side was piled with snow, on the crest of which foam pellets lay, looking yellow by comparison, and melting small holes with their brine. At the door no foot-mark broke the drift; and against the vaporous sky no warmer vapor tufted the chimney-pots.

"I am pretty nearly frozen again," said Mordacks; "but that place sends another shiver down my back. All the poor little devils must be icicles at least."

After peeping through a blind, he turned pale betwixt his blueness, and galloped to the public-house abutting on the quay. Here he marched into the parlor, and stamped about, till a merry-looking landlord came to him. "Have a glass of hot, sir; how blue your nose is!" the genial master said to him. The reply of the factor can not be written down in these days of noble language. Enough that it was a terse malediction of the landlord, the glass of hot, and even his own nose. Boniface was no Yorkshireman, else would he have given as much as he got, at least in lingual currency. As it was, he considered it no affair of his if a guest expressed his nationality. "You must have better orders than that to give, I hope, sir."

"Yes, sir, I have. And you have got the better of me; which has happened to me three times this day already, because of the freezing of my wits, young man. Now you go in to your best locker, and bring me your very best bottle of Cognac--none of your government stuff, you know, but a sample of your finest bit of smuggling. Why did I swear at a glass of hot? Why, because you are all such a set of scoundrels. I want a glass of hot as much as man ever did. But how can I drink it, when women and children are dying--perhaps dead, for all I know--for want of warmth and victuals? Your next-door neighbors almost, and a woman, whose husband has just been murdered! And here you are swizzling, and rattling your coppers. Good God, sir! The Almighty from heaven would send orders to have His own commandment broken."

Mr. Mordacks was excited, and the landlord saw no cause for it. "What makes you carry on like this?" he said; "it was only last night we was talking in