CHAPTER I

TELLING HOW, UNDER STRESS OF CIRCUMSTANCE, A HUMANIST TURNED HERMIT


A peculiar magic resides in running water, as every student of earth-lore
knows. There is high magic, too, in the marriage of rivers, so that the
spot where two mingle their streams is sacred, endowed with strange
properties of evocation and of purification. Such spots go to the making
of history and ruling of individual lives; but whether their influence is
not more often malign than beneficent may be, perhaps, open to doubt.

Certain it is, however, that no doubts of this description troubled the
mind of Thomas Clarkson Verity, when, in the closing decade of the
eighteenth century, he purchased the house at Deadham Hard, known as
Tandy's Castle, overlooking the deep and comparatively narrow channel by
which the Rivers Arne and Wilner, after crossing the tide-flats and
salt-marsh of Marychurch Haven, make their swift united exit into
Marychurch Bay. Neither was he troubled by the fact that Tandy's
Castle--or more briefly and familiarly Tandy's--for all its commonplace
outward decency of aspect did not enjoy an unblemished moral or social
reputation. The house--a whitewashed, featureless erection--was planted
at right angles to the deep sandy lane leading up from the shore, through
the scattered village of Deadham, to 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