Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Charles Franks and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team
MICHAEL'S CRAG
BY
GRANT ALLEN
AUTHOR OF "WHAT'S BRED IN THE BONE," "TENTS OP SHEM," "IN ALL SHADES,"
ETC.
With over Three Hundred and Fifty Illustrations In Silhouette
BY
FRANCIS CARRUTHERS GOULD
AND
ALEC CARRUTHERS GOULD
CHICAGO AND NEW YORK:
1893
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER.
I. A CORNISH LANDLORD
II. TREVENNACK
III. FACE TO FACE
IV. TYRREL'S REMORSE
V. A STRANGE DELUSION VI. PURE ACCIDENT
VII. PERIL BY LAND
VIII. SAFE AT LAST
IX. MEDICAL OPINION
X. A BOLD ATTEMPT
XI. BUSINESS IS BUSINESS
XII. A HARD BARGAIN
XIII. ANGEL AND DEVIL
XIV. AT ARM'S LENGTH
XV. ST. MICHAEL DOES BATTLE
CHAPTER I.
A CORNISH LANDLORD.
"Then you don't care for the place yourself, Tyrrel?" Eustace Le Neve
said, musingly, as he gazed in front of him with a comprehensive glance
at the long gray moor and the wide expanse of black and stormy water.
"It's bleak, of course; bleak and cold, I grant you; all this upland
plateau about the Lizard promontory seems bleak and cold everywhere;
but to my mind it has a certain wild and weird picturesqueness of its
own for all that. It aims at gloominess. I confess in its own way I
don't dislike it."
"For my part," Tyrrel answered, clinching his hand hard as he spoke,
and knitting his brow despondently, "I simply hate it. If I wasn't the
landlord here, to be perfectly frank with you, I'd never come near
Penmorgan. I do it for conscience' sake, to be among my own people.
That's my only reason. I disapprove of absenteeism; and now the land's
mine, why, I must put up with it, I suppose, and live upon it in spite
of myself. But I do it against the grain. The whole place, if I tell
you the truth, is simply detestable to me."
He leaned on his stick as he spoke, and looked down gloomily at the
heather. A handsome young man, Walter Tyrrel, of the true Cornish
type--tall, dark, poetical-looking, with pensive eyes and a thick black
mustache, which gave dignity and character to his otherwise almost too
delicately feminine features. And he stood on the open moor just a
hundred yards outside his own front door at Penmorgan, on the Lizard
peninsula, looking westward down a great wedge-shaped gap in the solid
serpentine rock to a broad belt of sea beyond without a ship or a sail
on it. The view was indeed, as Eustace Le Neve admitted, a somewhat
bleak and dreary one. For miles, as far as the eye could reach, on
either side, nothing was to be seen but one vast heather-clad upland,
just varied at the dip by bare ledges of dark rock and a single gray
glimpse of tossing sea between them. A little farther on, to be sure,
winding round the cliff path, one could open up a glorious prospect on
either hand over the rocky islets of Kynance and Mullion Cove, with
Mounts Bay and Penzance and the Land's End in the distance. That was a
magnificent site--if only his ancestors had had the sense to see it.
But Penmorgan House, like most other Cornish landlords' houses, had
been carefully placed--for shelter's sake, no doubt--in a seaward
hollow where the view was most restricted; and the outlook one got from
it, over black moor and blacker rocks, was certainly by no means of a
cheerful character. Eustace Le Neve himself, most cheery and sanguine
of men, just home from his South American railway-laying, and with the
luxuriant vegetation of the Argentine still fresh in his mind, was
forced to admit, as he looked about him, that the position of his
friend's house on that rolling brown moor was far from a smiling one.
"You used to come here when you were a boy, though," he objected, after
a pause, with a glance at the great breakers that curled in upon the
cove; "and you must surely have found it pleasant enough then, what
with the bathing and the fishing and the shooting and the boating, and
all the delights of the sea and the country."
Walter Tyrrel nodded his head. It was clear the subject was extremely
distasteful to him.
"Yes--till I was twelve or thirteen," he said, slowly, as one who
grudges assent, "in my uncle's time, I liked it well enough, no doubt.
Boys don't realize the full terror of sea or cliff, you know, and are
perfectly happy swimming and climbing. I used to be amphibious in those
days, like a seal or an otter--in the water half my time; and I
scrambled over the rocks--great heavens, it makes me giddy now just to
THINK where I scrambled. But when I was about thirteen years old"--his
face grew graver still--"a change seemed to come over me, and I began
... well, I began to hate Penmorgan. I've hated it ever since. I shall
always hate it. I learned what it all meant, I suppose--rocks, wrecks,
and accidents. I saw how dull and gloomy it was, and I couldn't bear
coming down here. I came as seldom as I dared, till my uncle died last
year and left it to me. And then there was no help for it. I HAD to
come down. It's a landlord's business, I consider, to live among his
tenants and look after the welfare of the soil, committed to his charge
by his queen and country. He holds it in trust, strictly speaking, for
the nation. So I felt I must come and live here. But I hate it, all the
same. I hate it! I hate it!"
He said it so energetically, and with such strange earnestness in his
voice, that Eustace Le Neve, scanning his face as he spoke, felt sure
there must be some good reason for his friend's dislike of his
ancestral home, and forebore (like a man) to question him further.
Perhaps, he thought, it was connected in Tyrrel's mind with some
painful memory, some episode in his history he would gladly forget;
though, to be sure, when one comes to think of it, at thirteen such
episodes are rare and improbable. A man doesn't, as a rule, get crossed
in love at that early age; nor does he generally form lasting and
abiding antipathies. And indeed, for the matter of that, Penmorgan was
quite gloomy enough in itself, in all conscience, to account for his
dislike--a lonely and gaunt-looking granite-built house, standing bare
and square on the edge of a black moor, under shelter of a rocky dip,
in a treeless country. It must have been a terrible change for a
bachelor about town, like Walter Tyrrel, to come down at twenty-eight
from his luxurious club and his snug chambers in St. James' to the
isolation and desolation of that wild Cornish manor-house. But the
Tyrrels, he knew, were all built like that; Le Neve had been with three
of the family at Rugby; and conscience was their stumbling-block. When
once a Tyrrel was convinced his duty lay anywhere, no consideration on
earth would keep him from doing it.
"Let's take a stroll down by the shore," Le Neve suggested, carelessly,
after a short pause, slipping his arm through his friend's.
"Your cliffs, at least, must be fine; they look grand and massive; and
after three years of broiling on a South American line, this fresh
sou'wester's just the thing, to my mind, to blow the cobwebs out of
one."
He was a breezy-looking young man, this new-comer from beyond the
sea--a son of the Vikings, Tyrrel's contemporary in age, but very
unlike him in form and features; for Eustace Le Neve was fair and
big-built, a florid young giant, with tawny beard, mustache, and
whiskers, which he cut in a becoming Vandyke point of artistic
carelessness. There was more of the artist than of the engineer,
indeed, about his frank and engaging English face--a face which made
one like him as soon as one looked at him. It was impossible to do
otherwise. Exuberant vitality was the keynote of the man's being. And
he was candidly open, too. He impressed one at first sight, by some
nameless instinct, with a certain well-founded friendly confidence. A
lovable soul, if ever there was one, equally liked at once by men and
women.
"Our cliffs are fine," Walter Tyrrel answered, grudgingly, in the tone
of one who, against his will, admits an adverse point he sees no chance
of gainsaying. "They're black, and repellant, and iron-bound, and
dangerous, but they're certainly magnificent. I don't deny it. Come and
see them, by all means. They're the only lions we have to show a
stranger in this part of Cornwall, so you'd better make the most of
them."
And he took, as if mechanically, the winding path that led down the gap
toward the frowning cove in the wall of cliff before them.
Eustace Le Neve was a little surprised at this unexpected course, for
he himself would naturally have made rather for the top of the
promontory, whence they were certain to obtain a much finer and more
extensive view; but he had only arrived at Penmorgan the evening
before, so he bowed at once to his companion's more mature experience
of Cornish scenery. They threaded their way through the gully, for it
was little more--a great water-worn rent in the dark serpentine rocks,
with the sea at its lower end--picking their path as they went along
huge granite boulders or across fallen stones, till they reached a
small beach of firm white sand, on whose even floor the waves were
rolling in and curling over magnificently. It was a curious place,
Eustace thought, rather dreary than beautiful. On either side rose
black cliffs, towering sheer into the air, and shutting out overhead
all but a narrow cleft of murky sky. Around, the sea dashed itself in
angry white foam against broken stacks and tiny weed-clad skerries. At
the end of the first point a solitary islet, just separated from the
mainland by a channel of seething water, jutted above into the waves,
with hanging tresses of blue and yellow seaweed. Tyrrel pointed to it
with one hand. "That's Michael's Crag," he said, laconically. "You've
seen it before, no doubt, in half a dozen pictures. It's shaped exactly
like St. Michael's Mount in miniature. A marine painter fellow down
here's forever taking its portrait."
Le Neve gazed around him with a certain slight shudder of unspoken
disapprobation. This place didn't suit his sunny nature. It was even
blacker and more dismal than the brown moorland above it. Tyrrel caught
the dissatisfaction in his companion's eye before Le Neve had time to
frame it in words.
"Well, you don't think much of it?" he said, inquiringly.
"I can't say I do," Le Neve answered, with apologetic frankness. "I
suppose South America has spoilt me for this sort of thing. But it's
not to my taste. I call it gloomy, without being even impressive."
"Gloomy," Tyrrel answered; "oh, yes, gloomy, certainly. But impressive;
well, yes. For myself, I think so. To me, it's all terribly,
unspeakably, ineffably impressive. I come here every day, and sit close
on the sands, and look out upon the sea by the edge of the breakers.
It's the only place on this awful coast one feels perfectly safe in.
You can't tumble over here, or...roll anything down to do harm to
anybody."
A steep cliff path led up the sheer face of the rock to southward. It
was a difficult path, a mere foothold on the ledges; but its difficulty
at once attracted the engineer's attention. "Let's go up that way!" he
said, waving his hand toward it carelessly. "The view from on top there
must be infinitely finer."
"I believe it is," Tyrrel replied, in an unconcerned voice, like one
who retails vague hearsay evidence. "I haven't seen it myself since I
was a boy of thirteen. I never go along the top of the cliffs on any
account."
Le Neve gazed down on him, astonished. "You BELIEVE it is!" he
exclaimed, unable to conceal his surprise and wonder. "You never go up
there! Why, Walter, how odd of you! I was reading up the Guidebook this
morning before breakfast, and it says the walk from this point on the
Penmorgan estate to Kynance Cove is the most magnificent bit of wild
cliff scenery anywhere in Cornwall."
"So I'm told," Tyrrel answered, unmoved. "And I remember, as a boy, I
thought it very fine. But that was long since. I never go by it."
"Why not?" Le Neve cried.
Tyrrel shrugged his shoulders and shook himself impatiently. "I don't
know." he answered, in a testy sort of voice. "I don't like the cliff
top... It's so dangerous, don't you know? So unsafe. So unstable. The
rocks go off so sheer, and stones topple over so easily."
Le Neve laughed a little laugh of half-disguised contempt. He was
moving over toward the path up the cliff side as they spoke. "Why, you
used to be a first-class climber at school," he said, attempting it,
"especially when you were a little chap. I remember you could scramble
up trees like a monkey. What fun we had once in the doctor's orchard!
And as to the cliffs, you needn't go so near you have to tumble over
them. It seems ridiculous for a landowner not to know a bit of scenery
on his own estate that's celebrated and talked about all over England."
"I'm not afraid of tumbling over, for myself," Tyrrel answered, a
little nettled by his friend's frank tone of amusement. "I don't feel
myself so useful to my queen and country that I rate my own life at too
high a figure. It's the people below I'm chiefly concerned about.
There's always someone wandering and scrambling about these cliffs,
don't you see?--fishermen, tourists, geologists. If you let a loose
stone go, it may fall upon them and crush them."
The engineer looked back upon him with a somewhat puzzled expression.
"Well, that's carrying conscience a point too far," he said, with one
strong hand on the rock and one sure foot in the first convenient
cranny. "If we're not to climb cliffs for fear of showering down stones
on those who stand below, we won't dare to walk or ride or drive or put
to sea for fear of running over or colliding against somebody. We shall
have to stop all our trains and keep all our steamers in harbor.
There's nothing in this world quite free from risk. We've got to take
it and lump it. You know the old joke about those dangerous beds--so
many people die in them. Won't you break your rule just for once, and
come up on top here to see the view with me?"
Tyrrel shook his head firmly. "Not to-day," he answered, with a quiet
smile. "Not by that path, at any rate. It's too risky for my taste. The
stones are so loose. And it overhangs the road the quarrymen go to the
cave by."
Le Neve had now made good his foothold up the first four or five steps.
"Well, you've no objection to my going, at any rate?" he said, with a
wave of one hand, in his cheerful good-humor. "You don't put a veto on
your friends here, do you?"
"Oh, not the least objection," Tyrrel answered, hurriedly, watching him
climb, none the less, with nervous interest. "It's...it's a purely
personal and individual feeling. Besides," he added, after a pause, "I
can stop below here, if need be, and warn the quarrymen."
"I'll be back in ten minutes," Le Neve shouted from the cliff.
"No, don't hurry," his host shouted back. "Take your own time, it's
safest. Once you get to the top you'd better walk along the whole cliff
path to Kynance. They tell me its splendid; the view's so wide; and you
can easily get back across the moor by lunch-time. Only, mind about the
edge, and whatever you do, let no stones roll over."
"All right," Le Neve made answer, clinging close to a point of rock.
"I'll do no damage. It's opening out beautifully on every side now. I
can see round the corner to St. Michael's Mount; and the point at the
end there must be Tol-Pedn-Penwith."