ges--thirty in all,
perhaps--huddle in a semicircle of the hills about a spring of clear
water, which overflows and leaps as from a platform into the hollow
coombe, its conduit down to the sands. But Langona Church stands out
more boldly, on a high grassy meadow thrust forward like a bastion over
the stream's right flank. It has no tree, no habitation between it and
the ocean: it breaks the northerly gales for the cottages behind and
under its lee, and these gales have given its tamarisk hedge and even
its gravestones so noticeable a slant inland that, by a trick of
eyesight, the church itself seems tilted perilously forward.

Forward, in fact--that is to say, seaward--the tower does lean; though
but by a foot or so, and now not perilously; the salt winds, impotent
against its masonry, having bitten with more effect into the earth
around its base. But the church has been restored, the mischief
arrested, and the danger no longer haunts its vicar as it haunted the
Rev. John Flood on a bright September morning in 1885.

He sat on a thyme-covered hummock by the valley stream, with knees drawn
up and palms pressed against his aching head: sat as he had been sitting
for half an hour past, a shovel beside him and an empty sack, which he
had brought down to fill with clean river-sand. A chaffinch, fresh from
his bath, flitted incessantly between the rail of the footbridge, a
dozen yards below, and the boughs of a tamarisk beside it. He paid no
attention to Parson Jack. Few living creatures ever did.

Even his parishioners--those who knew of it--felt no great concern that
Parson Jack had been drunk again last night. There was no harm in the
man. "He had this failing, to be sure: with a little liquor he talked
silly, though not so silly as you might suppose. Let him alone, and
he'll find his way home somehow. Scandalous? Oh, no doubt! But you
might easily go farther and find a worse parson than Flood."

It never occurred to them that he felt any special remorse. His agonies
were private, and his chance of redemption lay in this, that they
neither ceased nor eased with time; perhaps in this, too, that he wasted
no breath in apologetics or self-pity, but blamed himself squarely like
a man.

Yet a sentimentalist in his place might have run up a long and tearful
account against Providence, fate, circumstances--whatever
sentimentalists choose to arraign rather than themselves.
Five-and-twenty years before, Jack Flood