FACE TO FACE.
When Eustace Le Neve returned to lunch at Penmorgan that day he was
silent to his host about Trevennack of Trevennack. To say the truth, he
was so much attracted by Miss Cleer's appearance that he didn't feel
inclined to mention having met her. But he wanted to meet her again for
all that, and hoped he would do so. Perhaps Tyrrel might know the
family, and ask them round to dine some night. At any rate, society is
rare at the Lizard. Sooner or later, he felt sure, he'd knock up
against the mysterious stranger somewhere. And that involved the
probability of knocking up against the mysterious stranger's beautiful
daughter.
Next morning after breakfast, however, he made a vigorous effort to
induce Walter Tyrrel to mount the cliff and look at the view from
Penmorgan Point toward the Rill and Kynance. It was absurd, he said
truly, for the proprietor of such an estate never to have seen the most
beautiful spot in it. But Tyrrel was obdurate. On the point of actually
mounting the cliff itself he wouldn't yield one jot or tittle. Only,
after much persuasion, he consented at last to cross the headland by
the fields at the back and come out at the tor above St. Michael's
Crag, provided always Eustace would promise he'd neither go near the
edge himself nor try to induce his friend to approach it.
Satisfied with this lame compromise--for he really wished his host to
enjoy that glorious view--Eustace Le Neve turned up the valley behind
the house, with Walter Tyrrel by his side, and after traversing several
fields, through gaps in the stone walls, led out his companion at last
to the tor on the headland.
As they approached it from behind, the engineer observed, not without a
faint thrill of pleasure, that Trevennack's stately figure stood
upright as before upon the wind-swept pile of fissured rocks, and that
Cleer sat reading under its shelter to leeward. But by her side this
morning sat also an elder lady, whom Eustace instinctively recognized
as her mother--a graceful, dignified lady, with silvery white hair and
black Cornish eyes, and features not untinged by the mellowing,
hallowing air of a great sorrow.
Le Neve raised his hat as they drew near, with a pleased smile of
welcome, and Trevennack and his daughter both bowed in return. "A
glorious morning!" the engineer said, drinking in to the full the
lovely golden haze that flooded and half-obscured the Land's End
district; and Trevennack assented gravely. "The crag stands up well in
this sunshine against the dark water behind," he said, waving one
gracious hand toward the island at his foot, and poising lighter than
ever.
"Oh, take care!" Walter Tyrrel cried, looking up at him, on
tenterhooks. "It's so dangerous up there! You might tumble any minute."
"_I_ never tumble," Trevennack made answer with solemn gravity,
spreading one hand on either side as if to balance himself like an
acrobat. But he descended as he spoke and took his place beside them.
Tyrrel looked at the view and looked at the pretty girl. It was evident
he was quite as much struck by the one as by the other. Indeed, of the
two, Cleer seemed to attract the larger share of his attention. For
some minutes they stood and talked, all five of them together, without
further introduction than their common admiration for that exquisite
bay, in which Trevennack appeared to take an almost proprietary
interest. It gratified him, obviously, a Cornish man, that these
strangers (as he thought them) should be so favorably impressed by his
native county. But Tyrrel all the while looked ill at ease, though he
sidled away as far as possible from the edge of the cliff, and sat down
near Cleer at a safe distance from the precipice. He was silent and
preoccupied. That mattered but little, however, as the rest did all the
talking, especially Trevennack, who turned out to be indeed a perfect
treasure-house of Cornish antiquities and Cornish folk-lore.
"I generally stand below, on top of Michael's Crag," he said to
Eustace, pointing it out, "when the tide allows it; but when it's high,
as it is now, such a roaring and seething scour sets through the
channel between the rock and the mainland that no swimmer could stem
it; and then I come up here, and look down from above upon it. It's the
finest point on all our Cornish coast, this point we stand on. It has
the widest view, the purest air, the hardest rock, the highest and most
fantastic tor of any of them."
"My husband's quite an enthusiast for this particular place," Mrs.
Trevennack interposed, watching his face as she spoke with a certain
anxious and ill-disguised wifely solicitude.
"He's come here for years. It has many associations for us."
"Some painful and some happy," Cleer added, half aloud; and Tyrrel,
nodding assent, looked at her as if expecting some marked recognition.
"You should see it in the pilchard season," her father went on, turning
suddenly to Eustace with much animation in his voice. "That's the time
for Cornwall--a month or so later than now--you should see it then, for
picturesqueness and variety. 'When the corn is in the shock,' says our
Cornish rhyme, 'Then the fish are off the rock'--and the rock's St.
Michael's. The HUER, as we call him, for he gives the hue and cry from
the hill-top lookout when the fish are coming, he stands on Michael's
Crag just below there, as I stand myself so often, and when he sights
the shoals by the ripple on the water, he motions to the boats which
way to go for the pilchards. Then the rowers in the lurkers, as we call
our seine-boats, surround the shoal with a tuck-net, or drag the seine
into Mullion Cove, all alive with a mass of shimmering silver. The
jowsters come down with their carts on to the beach, and hawk them
about round the neighborhood--I've seen them twelve a penny; while in
the curing-houses they're bulking them and pressing them as if for dear
life, to send away to Genoa, Leghorn, and Naples. That's where all our
fish go--to the Catholic south. 'The Pope and the Pilchards,' says our
Cornish toast; for it's the Friday fast that makes our only market."
"You can see them on St. George's Island in Looe Harbor," Cleer put in
quite innocently. "They're like a sea of silver there--on St. George's
Island."
"My dear," her father corrected with that grave, old-fashioned courtesy
which the coast-guard had noted and described as at once so haughty and
yet so condescending, "how often I've begged of you NOT to call it St.
George's Island! It's St. Nicholas' and St. Michael's--one may as well
be correct--and till a very recent date a chapel to St. Michael
actually stood there upon the rocky top; it was only destroyed, you
remember, at the time of the Reformation."
"Everybody CALLS it St. George's now," Cleer answered, with girlish
persistence. And her father looked round at her sharply, with an
impatient snap of the fingers, while Mrs. Trevennack's eye was fixed on
him now more carefully and more earnestly, Tyrrel observed, than ever.
"I wonder why it is," Eustace Le Neve interposed, to spare Cleer's
feelings, "that so many high places, tops of mountains and so forth,
seem always to be dedicated to St. Michael in particular? He seems to
love such airy sites. There's St. Michael's Mount here, you know, and
Mont St. Michel in Normandy; and at Le Puy, in Auvergne, there's a St.
Michael's Rock, and at ever so many other places I can't remember this
minute."
Trevennack was in his element. The question just suited him. He smiled
a curious smile of superior knowledge. "You've come to the right place
for information," he said, blandly, turning round to the engineer. "I'm
a Companion of St. Michael and St. George myself, and my family, as I
told you, once owned St. Michael's Mount; so, for that and various
other reasons, I've made a special study of St. Michael the Archangel,
and all that pertains to him." And then he went on to give a long and
learned disquisition, which Le Neve and Walter Tyrrel only partially
followed, about the connection between St. Michael and the Celtic race,
as well as about the archangel's peculiar love for high and airy
situations. Most of the time, indeed, Le Neve was more concerned in
watching Cleer Trevennack's eyes, as her father spoke, than in
listening to the civil servant's profound dissertation. He gathered,
however, from the part he caught, that St. Michael the Archangel had
been from early days a very important and powerful Cornish personage,
and that he clung to high places on the tors and rocks because he had
to fight and subdue the Prince of the Air, whom he always destroyed at
last on some pointed pinnacle. And now that he came to think of it,
Eustace vaguely recollected he had always seen St. Michael, in pictures
or stained glass windows, delineated just so--with drawn sword and
warrior's mien--in the act of triumphing over his dragon-like enemy on
the airy summit of some tall jagged crag or rock-bound precipice.
As for Mrs. Trevennack, she watched her husband every moment he spoke
with a close and watchful care, which Le Neve hardly noticed, but which
didn't for a minute escape Walter Tyrrel's more piercing and observant
scrutiny.
At last, as the amateur lecturer was beginning to grow somewhat prolix,
a cormorant below created a slight diversion for awhile by settling in
his flight on the very highest point of Michael's Crag, and proceeding
to preen his glittering feathers in the full golden flood of that
bright August sunlight.
With irrepressible boyish instinct Le Neve took up a stone, and was
just on the point of aiming it (quite without reason) at the bird on
the pinnacle.
But before he could let it go, the two other men, moved as if by a
single impulse, had sprung forward with a bound, and in the self-same
tone and in the self-same words cried out with one accord, in a wildly
excited voice, "For God's sake, don't throw! You don't know how
dangerous it is!"
Le Neve let his hand drop flat, and allowed the stone to fall from it.
As he did so the two others stood back a pace, as if guarding him, but
kept their hands still ready to seize the engineer's arm if he made the
slightest attempt at motion. Eustace felt they were watching him as one
might watch a madman. For a moment they were silent. Trevennack was the
first to speak. His voice had an earnest and solemn ring in it, like a
reproving angel's. "How can you tell what precious life may be passing
below?" he said, with stern emphasis, fixing Le Neve with his
reproachful eye. "The stone might fall short. It might drop out of
sight. You might kill whomsoever it struck, unseen. And then"--he drank
in a deep breath, gasping--"you would know you were a murderer."
Walter Tyrrel drew himself up at the words like one stung. "No, no! not
a murderer!" he cried; "not quite as bad as a murderer! It wouldn't be
murder, surely. It would be accidental homicide--unintentional,
unwilled--a terrible result of most culpable carelessness, of course;
but it wouldn't be quite murder; don't call it murder. I can't allow
that. Not that name by any means.... Though to the end of your life,
Eustace, if you were to kill a man so, you'd never cease to regret it
and mourn over it daily; you'd never cease to repent your guilty
carelessness in sackcloth and ashes."
He spoke so seriously, so earnestly, with such depth of personal
feeling, that Trevennack, starting back, stood and gazed at him slowly
with those terrible eyes, like one who awakens by degrees from a
painful dream to some awful reality. Tyrrel winced before his scrutiny.
For a moment the elder man just looked at him and stared. Then he took
one step forward. "Sir," he said, in a very low voice, half broken with
emotion, "I had a dear son of my own once; a very dear, dear son. He
was killed by such an ACCIDENT on this very spot. No wonder I remember
it."
Mrs. Trevennack and Cleer both gave a start of surprise. The man's
words astonished them; for never before, during fifteen long years, had
that unhappy father alluded in any way in overt words to his son's
tragic end. He had brooded and mused over it in his crushed and wounded
spirit; he had revisited the scene of his loss whenever opportunity
permitted him; he had made of his sorrow a cherished and petted daily
companion; but he had stored it up deep in his own inmost heart, never
uttering a word of it even to his wife or daughter. The two women knew
Michael Trevennack must be profoundly moved, indeed, so to tear open
the half-healed wound in his tortured bosom before two casual strangers.
But Tyrrel, too, gave a start as he spoke, and looked hard at the
careworn face of that unhappy man. "Then you're Mr. Trevennack!" he
exclaimed, all aghast. "Mr. Trevennack of the Admiralty!"
And the dignified stranger answered, bowing his head very low, "Yes,
you've guessed me right. I'm Michael Trevennack."
With scarcely a word of reply Walter Tyrrel turned and strode away from
the spot. "I must go now," he muttered faintly, looking at his watch
with some feigned surprise, as a feeble excuse. "I've an appointment at
home." He hadn't the courage to stay. His heart misgave him. Once
fairly round the corner he fled like a wounded creature, too deeply
hurt even to cry. Eustace Le Neve, raising his hat, hastened after him,
all mute wonder. For several hundred yards they walked on side by side
across the open heathy moor. Then, as they passed the first wall,
Tyrrel paused for a moment and spoke. "NOT a murderer!" he cried in his
anguish; "oh, no, not quite as bad as a murderer, surely, Eustace; but
still, a culpable homicide. Oh, God, how terrible."
And even as he disappeared across the moor to eastward, Trevennack, far
behind, seized his wife's arm spasmodically, and clutching it tight in
his iron grip, murmured low in a voice of supreme conviction, "Do you
see what that means, Lucy? I can read it all now. It was HE who rolled
down that cursed stone. It was HE who killed our boy. And I can guess
who he is. He must be Tyrrel of Penmorgan."
Cleer didn't hear the words. She was below, gazing after them.