The Gentleman A Romance of the Sea by Ollivant, Alfred, 1874-1927

Pah!--Were they men?--The beasts were purer.

The boy straight from his own white home and gayhearted mother sickened as he heard.

Hell?--What need of Hell hereafter for these men, when they had plunged into it on earth?

The words of a greater than Bunyan rang in his ears--

_Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin._

Servants! slaves rather; slaves of themselves.

From his perch in the high heavens the boy looked down on them as an angel may look down on souls in torment.

An aweful anger seized his heart. He longed to do God's work for Him-- to avenge.

"_Vengeance is mine_," came a voice. "_I will repay._"

He started back, amazed.

Had he spoken? had the Lord?

The lightning words flashed down out of the heavens on the self-damned below.

Dingy Joe flung up a ghastly face, screamed, and falling on his knees in the water, began to babble about his Redeemer.

Fat George took to his heels. Furiously he splashed along, yellow locks flopping. Kit could hear him snorting as he ran. All his life the fat man had been running away from God, the Great Enemy; and still He was there. Some day He would catch him--Fat George never doubted that ... some day ... but not while he had legs.

How should he know that as he ran, God ran with him?

The others huddled together like thunder-frightened cattle. Bandy Dick cocked a scared snook, while Red Beard was man enough to loose his musket at the zenith.

"_Not yet, Governor!_" he shouted with a roaring laugh--"_not yet!_"

Fools!--they were living in the Hell they feared. Their punishment was _now_. They had long been damned. While they lived God, the Avenger, would punish them inexorably. When they died, God, the merciful Saviour, would take them and make them clean.

Death, the death they feared and fled from, would be their Salvation, as it is every man's.

II

_I will yet go forward._ Kit turned to a reconsideration of his enterprise.

The top was far yet, but the cliff was no longer sheer; a precipitous slope rather, patched with grass.

On hands and knees he set out. The grass trickled down like a dark torrent from above, cutting as it were a channel between two bastions, sheer on either side of him, and naked as the moon.

Up that dark trickle he climbed, and the sun climbed with him.

The grass gave him hand-hold. The chalk was rough and shale-like. He dug knees and toes into it. There was a constant dribble of stuff away from beneath his feet, and once a little land-slide, slithering seaward.

Beneath was nothing but a shining waste, waiting for him. He rather felt than saw it: for he dared not look down. He must think of what lay above. Therein was his hope. He clung to it, as he clung to the cliff-face, desperately.

The sun blazed on his back. The sweat trickled down his face. He kept his mind to his work, and his nose to the cliff. A bee with an orange tail sucked at a purple thistle. Butterflies chased, loved, and sipped all round him. O for Gwen, and her killing-bottle!

Up and up; the sun fierce upon his back; the earth bulging beneath his nose, the splash and ripple of the sea growing fainter and more faint below.