NEVER FORGOTTEN

         PART THE FIRST.
    CHAPTER 1. EASTPORT.

A FEW cottages—scattered like odd grains
of corn along a short strip of English coast—
after a rickety and precarious infancy, had grown
into a village. With such good nutriment as
fishing and smuggling, it became a strong child.
Later, in the war times, it was fancied by the
military authorities: a fort and large barracks
were built, and soldiers sent there. From that
moment it became respectable, ceased to be a city
Arab, and was called Eastport. In a short
time it had timidly advanced to the grade of
watering-place—a shy débutante—raised from
the ranks, and apparently as ill at ease in its
new finery of dotted villas and dampish plaster
terraces, as the sergeant who has been made
uncomfortable by a Commission. But, in ten
years more its patent would be regularly made
out; and it would be enrolled permanently among
the dignified watering-places. The threads of railway
would converge, and be gathered up there,
as into a hand. Beading after beading of snow-
white terraces would embroider the edges of the
cliffs. A monster hotel, as white and bright as
if it were every morning burnished by mammoth
housemaids, and teeming with life like a monster
warren, would have burst out on the hill, and
noble persons have poured in, and have been
cramped in tight drawing-rooms, scented with new
plaster, at twenty guineas a week. A glistening
strand reclaimed from savagery and ugly boulders,
would have burst into gay files of sentry-boxes on
wheels, travelling out in the sun to the deeper
waters, and have become an animated encampment,
where the splash and the plunge marked
time, and where countless novels and newspapers
would be read to the pleasant music of children's
prattle and young ladies' voices.

But the moment had not yet come. The fairy
queen of fashion, always fanciful and arbitrary,
had not yet let her robe fall upon this corner,
nor had she touched it with her golden wand.
She had not given the signal for the rush. So it lay
now in a state of comparative squalor, enjoying
a sort of vegetable life—just as its half-dozen
stranded fishing- boats lay over on their bulging
sides in a helpless and sluggish imbecility. A
little pier straggled out awkwardly and timorously
to sea: but by-and-by there would be a
vote in Parliament, and a new harbour, and fast
sailing-packets shooting across with Mails to the
Dutch and Belgian coasts opposite.

On the lowest tier, next the shore, were the
fishermen's huts. A couple of sloping roads ran
up the cliffs like ribbons, and became streets,
and on the top the bits of terraces and strips of
villas broke out in very spasmodic and disorderly
fashion. These were in such white patches,
with such sudden gaps—where an ambitious
speculator who had gone in for an entire terrace
and had been compelled to stop short
ingloriously at Number Three—that the whole cliff,
taken together, seemed like one gigantic jaw
smiling at the sky, with teeth knocked out here
and there. The barracks and fort were far away
to the right, on a cliff that looked as soft and
crumbly and friable as a crag of ripe old dinner-
cheese.

In this way the settlement gradually retreated
inland, and the sea colony was linked by a chain
of houses straggling like videttes towards a
genuine country town about a mile away. The
country town was proud of its watering-place,
and lived and had its being by two artificial stimulants
—one the presence of soldiery in a sort of
fort (a foot regiment and some artillerymen),
whose officers were precious to the neighbourhood;
the other a steeple-chase of some mark,
which annually brought down a strange miscellany,
who, for a couple of nights swarmed over
the little town, and utilised even its haylofts.
The whole district was cheap. As yet life was to
be enjoyed there with economy, and it was
therefore in esteem with many genteel families whose
means were not on the same high level as their
gentility. Life, too, was strongly savoured by
the presence of the officers, who became the
llamas of the territory. They were the salt
of that special earth, and the leaven of every
social meeting for miles about. With some
they were as the air we breathe, and by such
were inhaled in deep draughts. The warm
tint of their dress became necessary to the landscape,
as an agreeable patch of colour, and lit it
up as the late Mr. Turner did a dull sea-piece—
with a vermilion buoy.

In these barracks one night Captain Fermor
and a friend, who was called "Young Brett,"
were sitting at the fire. The feast was done,
and those who had feasted were scattered.