Deadham Hard | Page 2

the
three-mile distant market town of Marychurch.

Standing on a piece of rough land--bare, save for a few stunted
Weymouth pines, and a fringe of tamarisk along the broken
sea-wall--Tandy's, at the date in question, boasted a couple of bowed
sash-windows on either side the front and back doors; and a range of
five other windows set flat in the wall on the first floor. There was no
second storey. The slate roofs were mean, low-pitched, without any
grace of overshadowing eaves. At either end, a tall chimney-stack rose
like the long ears of some startled, vacant-faced small animal. Behind
the house, a thick plantation of beech and sycamore served to make its
square blank whiteness visible for a quite considerable distance out to
sea. Built upon the site of some older and larger structure, it was
blessed--or otherwise--with a system of vaults and cellars wholly
disproportionate to its existing size. One of these, by means of a
roughly ceiled and flagged passage, gave access to a heavy door in the
sea-wall opening directly on to the river foreshore.
Hence the unsavoury reputation of the place. For not only did it supply
a convenient receiving house for smuggled goods, but a convenient
rendezvous for the more lawless characters of the neighbourhood--a
back-of-beyond and No Man's Land where the devil could, with
impunity, have things very much his own way. In the intervals of more
serious business, the vaults and cellars of Tandy's frequently resounded
to the agonies and brutal hilarities of cock-fights, dog-fights, and other
repulsive sports and pastimes common to the English--both gentle and
simple--of that virile but singularly gross and callous age. Nevertheless
to Thomas Clarkson Verity, man of peace and of ideas, Tandy's
represented--and continued to represent through over half a
century--rescue, security, an awakening in something little short of
paradise from a long-drawn nightmare of hell. He paid an extortionate
price for the property at the outset, and spent a small fortune on the
enlargement of the house and improvement of the grounds, yet never
regretted his bargain.
For, in good truth, when, in the spring of 1794, the soft, nimble,
round-bodied, very polite, learned and loquacious little gentleman first
set eyes upon its mean roofs, prick ears and vacant whitewashed
countenance, he had been horribly shocked, horribly scared--for all the

inherited valour of his good breeding--and, above all, most horribly
disappointed. History had played very dirty pranks with him, which he
found it impossible as yet to forgive.
Five years earlier, fired, like many another generous spirit, by
extravagant hope of the coming regeneration of mankind, he hurried off
to Paris after the opening of the National Assembly and fall of the
Bastille. With the overture to the millennium in full blast, must he not
be there to hear and see? Associating himself with the Girondist party
he assisted, busily enthusiastic, at the march of tremendous events,
until the evil hour in which friend began to denounce friend, and heads,
quite other than aristocratic--those of men and women but yesterday the
idols and chosen leaders of the people--went daily to the filling of la
veuve Guillotine's unspeakable market-basket. The spectacle proved too
upsetting both to Mr. Verity's amiable mind and rather queasy stomach.
Faith failed; while even the millennium seemed hardly worth
purchasing at so detestable a cost. He stood altogether too close to the
terrible drama, in its later stages, to distinguish the true import or
progression of it. Too close to understand that, however blood-stained
its cradle, the goodly child Democracy was veritably, here and now, in
the act of being born among men. Rather did he question whether his
own fat little neck was not in lively danger of being severed; and his
own head--so full of ingenious thoughts and lively curiosity--of being
sent flying to join those of Brissot and Verginaud, of wayward
explosive Camille and sweet Lucile Desmoulins, in that same
unspeakable basket.
And to what end? For could he suppose the human race would be
nearer, by the veriest fraction of a millimetre, to universal liberty,
equality, and prosperity, through his insignificant death? Modesty, and
a natural instinct of self-preservation alike answered, "never a jot."
Whereupon with pertinacious, if furtive, activity he sought means of
escape. And, at length, after months of hiding and anxious flitting,
found them in the shape of a doubtfully seaworthy, and undoubtedly
filthy, fishing-smack bound from Le Havre to whatever port it could
make on the English south coast. The two days' voyage was rough, the
accommodation and company to match. Mr. Verity spent a disgusting

and disgusted forty-eight hours, to be eventually put ashore, a woefully
bedraggled and depleted figure, in the primrose, carmine, and
dove-grey of a tender April morning on the wet sand just below the
sea-wall of Tandy's Castle.
Never was Briton more