I hardly know what the girl did to offend them. There was certainly no
beauty about her to make the others envious; she was the plainest woman
in the house, with the additional misfortune of having one shoulder
bigger than the other. What the servants chiefly resented, I think, was
her silent tongue and her solitary ways. She read or worked in leisure
hours when the rest gossiped. And when it came to her turn to go out,
nine times out of ten she quietly put on her bonnet, and had her turn by
herself. She never quarrelled, she never took offence; she only kept a
certain distance, obstinately and civilly, between the rest of them and
herself. Add to this that, plain as she was, there was just a dash of
something that wasn't like a housemaid, and that WAS like a lady, about
her. It might have been in her voice, or it might have been in her face.
All I can say is, that the other women pounced on it like lightning the
first day she came into the house, and said (which was most unjust) that
Rosanna Spearman gave herself airs.
Having now told the story of Rosanna, I have only to notice one of the
many queer ways of this strange girl to get on next to the story of the
sands.
Our house is high up on the Yorkshire coast, and close by the sea. We
have got beautiful walks all round us, in every direction but one. That
one I acknowledge to be a horrid walk. It leads, for a quarter of
a mile, through a melancholy plantation of firs, and brings you out
between low cliffs on the loneliest and ugliest little bay on all our
coast.
The sand-hills here run down to the sea, and end in two spits of rock
jutting out opposite each other, till you lose sight of them in the
water. One is called the North Spit, and one the South. Between the two,
shifting backwards and forwards at certain seasons of the year, lies the
most horrible quicksand on the shores of Yorkshire. At the turn of the
tide, something goes on in the unknown deeps below, which sets the
whole face of the quicksand shivering and trembling in a manner most
remarkable to see, and which has given to it, among the people in our
parts, the name of the Shivering Sand. A great bank, half a mile out,
nigh the mouth of the bay, breaks the force of the main ocean coming
in from the offing. Winter and summer, when the tide flows over the
quicksand, the sea seems to leave the waves behind it on the bank,
and rolls its waters in smoothly with a heave, and covers the sand in
silence. A lonesome and a horrid retreat, I can tell you! No boat ever
ventures into this bay. No children from our fishing-village, called
Cobb's Hole, ever come here to play. The very birds of the air, as it
seems to me, give the Shivering Sand a wide berth. That a young woman,
with dozens of nice walks to choose from, and company to go with her, if
she only said "Come!" should prefer this place, and should sit and work
or read in it, all alone, when it's her turn out, I grant you, passes
belief. It's true, nevertheless, account for it as you may, that this
was Rosanna Spearman's favourite walk, except when she went once
or twice to Cobb's Hole, to see the only friend she had in our
neighbourhood, of whom more anon. It's also true that I was now setting
out for this same place, to fetch the girl in to dinner, which brings us
round happily to our former point, and starts us fair again on our way
to the sands.