Mockery Gap Read Online Free PDF Page A

to come,’ said Mr. Roddy, when that gentleman at last seated himself beside the driver.
    ‘That’s because he’s so clever‚’ whispered Miss Ogle to Mr. Gollop.
    The car started, and the blind cow out at sea saw the hill bare again.

Chapter 4
A W ARNING
    T HE hill, or Mockery cliff as it was usually called by those who lived near, might have smiled, could a hill smile, at the fine visitors who had peopled it and then departed, leaving only their wheel-marks, and a scented handkerchief dropped by Miss Ogle, behind them.
    Mockery lay below, and showed from this point of vantage, if carefully looked down upon—for one often misses a building or two when the land and the cottages grow into one another—a farmhouse, a smaller one, a white lane and a green, fields that almost touch the sea, and here and there the glitter of a tiny stream, and also a pleasant wood. The vicarage and church had settled meekly in the folds of the valley as hardly to be noticed, and even when seen they only appeared to point to Mr. Pink’s stone house that stood by the church lane, and to say that ‘it shouldn’t have been there.’
    Mockery cliff must have found the noise of the waves tiresome in past years, and so moved itself complacently backwards little by little, allowing the pretty meadows to be formed, proud of their cowslips; and the lanes and houses; and of course man.
    In its backward proceeding the cliff had risen to a fine height, so that John Wesley,who found the people hereabouts as gentle as lambs, called it a mountain. It may have been—in this matter of moving mountains—the faith of Mr. Gulliver’s great-grandfather, who always said that the small-holding of the family should be larger, which it now was.
    For if it is easy by faith to cast a mountain into the sea, it should be just as easy, and better for the sheep—and the movement wasn’t expected to happen in one second of human time, but rather in one of God’s moments—to get the mountain, or any mountain, out of the sea and to push it by faith inland.
    The mere daytime of prettiness departed with the town visitors, and now that they were gone the true look of the land, that had been hidden from them, came forth again to be seen by those who have eyes to see. The blind-cow rock, that alone of all natural objects had never been beguiled by the sunbeams into looking pretty, now took upon it as the sun declined, giving the true bass note to the colours of the evening, the blackness of despair. The blind cow now began to spread out her influence further than herself, the waves that struck the rock became intense and living. Its dead state, as the abodes of the dead will sometimes do, reached out hands to form, to grave, and to portray, and to cast over Mockery the feelings and the fears of the night.
    Clouds that earlier in the day had been but shining vapour, now became real and yet more real and grew sensibly darker. The cliff, the fields below, the church that waited for the night, even the tiny shining of the little water-brooks , were beginning to express the supreme loveliness of lonely silence—of the beauty that dies.
    Shadows, born of the shadow of the blind cow, began to creep here and there like monstrous toads and thick vipers. The shadows became more and more monstrous as the sun dropped, while some amongst them now showed a likeness to him that is called Man, a dweller upon the earth.
    And now the sea, more than any other emanation of eternal truth, changed its face. The sea darkened, the dainty spaces above the waters where the light was began to take up the shadows of the deep and to wear them as a garment, while the tumulus upon the cliff watched as if glad that the evening was come.
    This green mound, about which the spirit of an ancient and buried king still hovered, was the same from whence, when the company were departed, Miss Ogle had addressed the seagulls. It was also the grave within which, as Mr. Tarr had informed the Mockery farmer,