THE FOX-HUNT
BEYOND the memory of Dick Hal, who remembered the home-bringing of two
wounded “Church-Town” men after Waterloo, the hounds had met on Feast
Days at the Castle. The grounds with their stately terraces and relics
of feudal dignity were thrown open for the meet, the protests of old
Jenny at the park gate notwithstanding.
Long before the hour appointed a little crowd assembled outside the
lodge. Fishermen in blue guernseys were there, miners in their workaday
clothes, and a strong force of villagers. It is noteworthy what a motley
crowd, from squire to ploughboy, from vigorous youth to crippled old
age, will congregate to witness a day’s fox-hunting.
And surely the sight of twenty couple of hounds drawing a patch of gorse
in an open and wild country, the suspense that follows the first
whimper, the find, the thrilling tally-ho, and the hurry and scurry of
the field, is a spectacle as pleasant as it is exhilarating.
Looking out of an upper window of one of the little towers that flanked
the gateway was old Jenny Trewheela, blind of one eye, whose sharp
tongue was more effective than a fifteen-pounder in defence of her
charge. Villagers averred that “her main suction ware vinegar,” and a
candid friend had told her so. As the hour approached the crowd began to
press too close to the lodge to please her vigilant eye. “Werta shovin’
to? Thee shussen wan of ee come inside the gates till th’ ’ounds ’a gone
through. They be Sir Bevil’s orders.”
“Sober, mawther,” said a keen-eyed poacher, “we be all afeeard of ee,
and thee dost knaw it; but hows’ever we doan’t want none o’ your
winegar. Custna haand round a bit o’ crowse and a drop o’ somethin’ to
drink? ’Tes a dry East wind and bra’ an cold.”
“Sauce and imprence! I do knaw thee and the crooked ways of ee, though
thee dost skulk behind a honest man,” and with that she banged-to the
window.
A few minutes before the village clock chimed the hour, the huntsman,
hounds, and whippers-in passed through the gate and along the approach
to the inner court, and drew up on the far side of the keep near the old
culverin. By ones and twos, gentlemen from the country round, tenant
farmers and crofters, rode up to the Castle.
This venerable building in the hundred of Penwith in the parish of
Madron had been the seat of the Tresillians from the time of Henry the
Second. The Castle is quaintly described in an old survey of Cornwall as
“very ancient, strong and fayre and appurtenanced with the necessaries
of wood, water, parkes, moors, with the devotion of a rich-furnished
chapelle and charitie of almshouses.”
The terrace is still haunted by the squire who fell on the memorable day
when the place was held for the King against the Roundheads. The
painting in the hall shows the assault on the outer wall, where a lurid
glare lights up helm and pike at the narrow breach; for above battlement
and turret, clearly outlined, leap tongues of fire from the beacon on
the Cairn.
Dents in the granite walls still mark where the cannon-balls struck the
building; and it was at that time—I know there are some who dispute the
date—that one of the quarterings of the family arms above the entrance
was effaced.
Sir Bevil and Lady Tresillian, who were standing on the steps below,
gave their guests a hearty welcome. Breakfast was laid in the
wainscotted hall, bright with log fires.
Cornish worthies in their gold frames wink at the merry gathering round
the table.
Sir Bevil, despite his grey hairs, looks young for his sixty years.
Life’s work is stamped on his high-bred features. He looks every inch a
soldier. The tanned face and parched skin suggest frontier fighting: the
scar on the brow confirms it.
Facing the mullioned window, on Sir Bevil’s right is Squire Tremenheere
of Lanover, the hardest rider of the hunt; next him is the Major of the
C.C. battery, whose neighbour is the popular member for the Land’s End
Division; next him is a shipowner whose vessels are on every sea; the
veteran with silvery hair and twinkling eyes has been purser of a
tin-mine for nearly half a century; the man with the long black beard is
the village doctor, and a kind friend to the poor; below him sit half a
score farmers, and a good time they are having.
“This be a good drop o’ zider,” says the weather-beaten crofter who sits
facing a portrait of Sir Richard Grenville. “Gos’t home,” said the
eldest tenant on the estate, “Tedden no zider: but caal ’en what you
like, ’tes a drop of the raal auld stingo.”
The aristocratic old gentleman, tête-à-tête with Lady Elizabeth, is Sir
Lopes Carminowe, who knows every gate, gap and fox-earth in Penwith.
Need it be said that the little wizened-face man with laughing eyes,
whose wit is as dry as the champagne, is the legal adviser of those whom
he is tickling with forensic anecdotes? The parson is the recipient of
much chaff and banter; but with eyes sparkling under his shaggy brows
and in the best of humour he is cutting about him with his sharp-edged
tongue to the discomfiture of his assailants. Says Sir Bevil, “The
parson reminds me of the Cavalier in the picture who has brought down
half a dozen of the enemy and is looking round for more.”
Breakfast over, the gay company passed out of the Castle, mounted their
restive horses and rode away to the covert by the lake. The Cairn that
overlooked it was covered with pedestrians who, like spectators in a
theatre, were waiting for the play to begin. Does any one doubt that the
sporting instinct is strong in Englishmen? Observe that poor old man in
clean smock-frock and white beaver. This is Dick Hal. He can’t see very
well, but he would like to hear the cry of the hounds once more. He
began earthstopping the year Bonaparte died at St Helena, and this
morning a little child has led him to the Cairn that he might perchance
hear the music he loved so well. And it seemed probable, so rarely had
the brake been found tenantless, that he and the rest, younger and
noisier in their expectation of sport, would not be disappointed.
The cry of the huntsman in the bottoms at once hushes the hum of the
crowd. Ears strain to catch the first whimper, and eager eyes search
every yard of open ground to view the stealthy movements of a fox. Under
the shelter of a boulder, apart from the crowd, sits Jim Roscruge, the
old mining pioneer, and near him a man in velveteen coat and sealskin
cap who looks the incarnation of vigilance.
Surely we have seen that cheery face before—it’s Andrew the
Earthstopper, looking little the worse for his night’s adventures. The
leading hounds had come through the brake. “Saams to me,” says Roscruge,
“that Nute drawed a bit too quick like. A fox’ll sometimes lie as close
as a sittin’ perthridge.” “May be you’re right: but Joe Nute do knaw ’es
work, and, lor’, what moosic’s in the voice of un! Harkee! . . . Grand,
edna you? Saam time I niver seed the brake drawed blank but wance
afore.”
The field began to move slowly to the next cover whilst the hounds ran
through some crofts where the furze was thin.
“Wild country this, Tresillian,” said the Major of Sir Bevil’s old
battery as they rode along side by side.
“Yes, it’s more or less like this all the way to Dartmoor, heather and
gorse on the surface, tin and copper underground. It’s the backbone of
the county in more sense than one.”
“And Lyonnesse must be somewhere near?”
“That,” said Sir Bevil, smiling, “is the submerged land between the
Land’s End and the Scillies. Scientists, confound ’em, are trying to
prove that the sea has covered it since the Creation. What right have
they got to meddle with our traditions? They’ll be saying next that the
letters[1] on the Men Scryfa—it’s in a croft over that ridge facing
us—have been cut out by the action of the weather on the granite.”
“Well, Andrew,” said Sir Bevil as he rode up, “where do you think we may
find to-day?”
“I caan’t hardly tell, sir,” said he, keeping pace with the horse; “but
at daybreak this morning I balled a fox”—at this Sir Bevil pulled up
his horse,—“on that bit o’ soft ground under Ding Dong on the Quoit
side, and seys I to missel, me shaver es moast likely kennelled in that
bit o’ snug fuzze to the lew side of the stennack.”
“Very well, we will draw that next and drop back to Boswortha if we do
not find,” added Sir Bevil as he rode away to give instructions to the
huntsman.
“Come ust on, Jim, best foot foremost, or the draw’ll be over afore we
get theere.” They gained the crest of a rise overlooking the cover just
as the huntsman, who was now afoot with the hounds around him, was about
to draw it.
“Wheere ded ee light on they theere prents of the fox, An’rew?”
“Do ee saa thet big bunch o’ rooshes anigh the pool, away ahead of the
rock touchin’ the Squire?”
“Iss sure.”
“Well, they’re close handy to un, laystwise I reckin so: ’twas by the
furst glim o’ day I seed ’em.”
Below them lay a stretch of marshy ground fed by some bubbling springs.
Rills trickled along channels in the peaty ground, sparkling here and
there between tussocks of rush and withered grass, losing themselves in
a vivid green patch that fringed a chattering trout-stream. On the
higher side, nestling under shelter of a craggy ridge, was about an acre
of furze with a big dimple in it where yellow blooms lingered.
The scarlet coats of the riders gave a few dashes of warmth to the grey
expanse of boulder-strewn moor.
Sir Bevil watched the hounds as they drew up wind, the big chestnut with
its pricked ears seeming as intent as his rider. Their shadow lay almost
motionless aslant the lichen-covered rock. The working of the pack was
easily seen, save where the ground dipped around a pool or boggy growth
luxuriated. Flushed by hound or crack of whip, a woodcock rose and
dropped in some withes a furlong away. Still there was no sign of the
fox, no view holloa, not a whimper. The idler hounds lapped the tempting
water, seemingly heedless of the huntsman’s voice.
“I’m afeard o’ my saul ’tes blank, Jim; hounds don’t saam to maake
nawthin’ of un.”
“Nawthin’ at all, scent’s gone along wi’ the frost. But don’t ee go and
upset yoursel’ about et, ’tes noane of your fault.”
Amongst the members of the hunt, disposed in little groups behind Sir
Bevil, the green of the bog and the gleam of the rippling water showing
between them, expectation drooped, and the little cares of life that a
whimper would have kept to the crupper, seizing their opportunity, began
to steal back to their owners.
The doctor’s eyes wandered to the lonely cottage; the shipowner found
himself thinking of the fall in freights, the miner of the drop in tin;
and even the red-whiskered farmer was wondering whether the ten-score
pig hanging by the heels in his outhouse would fetch 4¾d. or 5d. a lb.
on the next market day.
Suddenly Troubadour, the most reliable hound of the pack, threw up his
nose as he whiffed the tainted air.
“He’s got un, Jim. See how eh crosses the line o’ scent see-saw like.
’Pend upon et, ’tes a find.”
The hound now left the edge of the cover near the bog and worked round
its upper side. Losing the scent he came back, recovered it, threw his
tongue and dashed into the brake.
“Thet’s what I do caal rason in a dog,” whispered Andrew, whilst his
restless eyes watched every point of escape for a view of the fox.
In a moment the pack rallied to the trusted voice of Troubadour, and the
furze was soon alive with waving sterns.
“What moosic, Jim! Look out, slyboots’ll be gone in a twinklin’.”
“Theere’s the fox staling away along by them theere brembles.”
“I caan’t see un,” said Roscruge. And truly none but a trained eye like
Andrew’s, which saw a suspicion of brown here and a tell-tale movement
of tangled growth beyond, could mark the course of the sly varmint. It
had eluded the gaze of the whippers-in. Grasping the situation, Andrew
ran to where he last saw the fox and gave a loud tally-ho.
Then all was stir: the field seemed electrified. Shipowner, miner,
farmer, ay and squire, parson, soldier and whipper-in, each forgot his
worries—for who has none?—and black care lay in the wake of the hunt.
“Lor’, how they do race,” said Andrew as the hounds, with a burst of
music, streamed across the heather. “The fox is maakin’ for cleff.
Desperate plaace thet; but as luck will have et the tide is out.” The
hunt was now lost to view, but with his hand raised to shade his eyes he
kept looking towards the Galver. . . .
“They’re crossin’ the sky line. Do ee see ’em, Jim?”
“Iss, and ef I baan’t mistaken, the white hoss es laast as usual.”
Tregellas had been busy in the cattle-shed since early morning, and now,
having put a double feed in the troughs and filled the racks with
sweet-smelling hay, was about to leave work and put on his Sunday-best,
after the custom of Feast Day, that his appearance might do credit to
his side of the parish when he sauntered past the critical eyes of the
girls of Churchtown.
Just then Driver, who had been curled up in the straw dreaming of summer
days amongst the moorland cattle, pricked his ears, rose to his feet,
jumped the half-door, and barked furiously.
“What’s thet?” said Tregellas as the music of the pack awoke the echoes
of the cliffs. “Why ’tes the hounds in full cry sure ’nuff.” Out of the
byre he rushed and climbed the turf rick near the pig’s crow, hoping to
get a view of the hunt. The passing chase was one of the few excitements
of his dull life; and next to a sly glance at the girl of his heart the
sight of a fox before hounds was what he loved most.
His eager eyes searched the rugged hillside and swept the open sward
lying between it and the cliff. A sea-gull skimming its pinnacled edge
drew his gaze that way. It was only for an instant; yet when he looked
round again, the fox with an easy stride was crossing the springy turf
where in summer thrift blooms, and discovering dips in the ground where
human eye found none, with lithe movement was making for his earth near
the foot of the cliffs. “Lor’, what a beety! how eh do move over the
ground that steelthy like! What a broosh! Wonder ef he’s the saame
varmint as killed the auld gander.”
Thrice before the fox had stood before hounds, and the last time he had
but narrowly escaped with his life. Less than a year ago, it was in the
month of March, they had found him on the sunny cliffs where Lamorna
overlooks the ocean, and the great run he gave that day from sea to sea
is still vivid in the memory of the hunt.
* * * * *
[Illustration: THE FOX. [_Face page 26._]
* * * * *
This morning dawn had surprised him miles away from his rocky
stronghold. For hours before daybreak he had lain in wait with glowing
eyes under the shelter of some rustling sedge that grew amidst the
waters of a pool, for wildfowl. His listening ears caught the swish of
their tantalising wingbeats as skein after skein circled above his
lurking-place, but he had awaited in vain the splash of widgeon or teal
on the lane of water he had opened in the thin ice as he swam to his
“islet” ambush. Hunger and expectation had kept him there too long and,
in the grey light that had quenched the green fires of his eyes, chilled
and famished he had stolen away to the near brake, and under its
thickest furze-bush shunned those hateful rays that jewelled the frosted
spines above his lair and gilded the crags between him and his earth.
Scarcely had he curled himself up before the tread of human steps made
him cock his ears, and when the Earthstopper bent over his clean-cut
footprints the ominous silence had brought him to his feet. But as the
footsteps died away he had settled himself down again, and it was out of
a deep sleep that the warning voice of Troubadour had roused him. Once
more, like an outlaw, he was driven forth under the eye of the wintry
sun with hue and cry behind him, conscious that his safety lay in his
own cunning and endurance and the stout heart that had carried him
through before.
As he crosses the sward there is nothing hurried in his stealthy
movements, despite the clamour in his ears. He is not sure that his
earth is open—more than once he had found it closed—so he is
husbanding his strength, and, if need be, every bit of it will be doled
out under the direction of his vulpine brain in the attempt to outwit
his enemies. Some fifteen feet from the cliff a slab of rock—outcrop of
the granite formation beneath—brings back to his memory a ruse that the
old vixen had taught him, when one August day at sundown she anxiously
led her playful litter up to the great world overlooking their rocky
nursery. This he at once decides to put into practice.
So to the amazement of the open-mouthed Tregellas he crosses and
recrosses the rock as he had seen her do, hoping thereby at least to
check his pursuers, if not to foil them altogether.
Leaving the tangled lines of scent for the hounds to unravel, he, by a
single leap, reaches the verge of the cliff and for an instant clings to
its dizzy edge as if to listen to the swelling cry, for his mask is
turned that way. Then, gathering himself for a spring, with a whisk of
his brush he is gone. This was too much for the spellbound Tregellas,
good Methodist though he was: “Well, I’m dommed, that taakes the
fuggan.”
The leading hounds were breaking through the furze at the foot of the
hill, their voices ringing like silver bells.
Flashing across the open they checked at the rock, but only for a
moment, and then, like an impetuous stream, poured down the cliff.
Thither Tregellas, loosing the dog he had been holding, ran at the top
of his speed and looked over. The scene below stirred his Celtic blood.
The pack, with the fox a furlong ahead, was racing along the narrow
beach, till, reaching a jutting point, pursued and pursuers took to the
water and, skirting the rocks, swam out of his sight.
Knowing the line the fox would probably take, Tregellas, with the fever
of the chase in his veins, climbed the steep hill leading to the Deadman
and, though he bruised his knees through his corduroys, gained at length
the topmost stone of the cairn that crowned it.
“Aal for nawthin’,” he gasped as he overlooked the stretch of silent
moor beneath him. The only sound of the hunt was the distant thud of
hoofs where the “field” galloped along the coast road. Yet with quick,
restless eyes he swept the waste as from that very eyry a sparrow-hawk
was wont to do, watchful for the slightest sign. The echo of the horn
had kept hope alive, faint though it was, but now he has seen something
which rivets his gaze.
He is looking towards the lower side of the moor, over the shoulder of
which lies the sea, fringed with surf where it frets the black precipice
of a headland. He is watching a bird that flies close to the stunted
furze. The white of its plumage gleams as the sun catches it. Threading
the sinuous lanes between the bushes, appearing at the distance almost
like the shadow of the overhanging magpie, is the hunted game; and
though Tregellas cannot hear the chattering of the bird, he knows that
it is mobbing the fox whose mask is set in the direction of Deadman. As
his form comes well in view Tregellas fancies that his stride is perhaps
not quite so easy as when he swung so lithely across the turf, and it
may be he was shaken by those terrible leaps adown the jagged rocks
where a whipper-in, a coastguard, and a truant schoolboy are at this
moment attending to two crippled hounds. “Es eh failin’ a bit, do ee
think, ’Gellas?” “Caan’t hardly tell,” said he, answering the question
put to himself. And then the hounds heave in view. At what a pace they
sweep over the waste, how silently they are running! With anxious eyes
he follows them as they cross the moor above. “Dear life, they’re niver
headin’ for Deadman, are ’em? Iss . . . iss . . . wonder ef An’rew
stopped the eearth. . . . Hooray!” for standing on tip-toe he saw the
blurred pack swerve near the heart of the haunted moor as though at that
point the fox had been headed.
“I knowed ee raather die in th’ open nor go to ground in that wisht auld
plaace.”
Then the field at full gallop passed before his gaze. “Lor’ a mercy,
passon’s bin and falled into the bog,” and he laughed as only a yokel
can laugh.
Tregellas lingered until the desolate waste swallowed up the hindmost of
the field; the circling flight of a snipe being the only sign that the
hunt had swept across the moor.
The stout fox held bravely on; but the pack, racing for blood, with
hardly a check, kept lessening his lead as moor and croft were left
behind.
With what a crash of music they dashed through the Forest Rocks and
through the belt of pines to the open heath beyond. Though death was
ringing in his ears there was the gallant fox struggling gamely forward.
Racing from scent to view they pulled him down on the dead bracken below
the now deserted cairn.
The huntsman, Squire Tremenheere and Sir Bevil close behind him,
galloped up in time to rescue the carcass from the ravenous pack. The
who-whoop was heard by the parson as he urged his grey mare, mud to the
girths, between the pine boles. To him, when he came up, Sir Bevil
handed the mask; the brush he had presented to the Squire.
Late the same night the parson sat in his study recording the incidents
of the chase and, despite the strains of “Trelawny” which reached his
ears from the “One and All” hard by, where Tregellas and his friends
were making merry, kept true to the line of the fox and with graphic
touches described the run.
Closing the book, he returned it to the shelf between the door and the
pegs, where his hunting-cap hung. Then for the first time that season he
took a map from its tin case and spread it on the table. It was a map of
West Penwith, and was crossed by lines in all directions, reminding one
of threads of dodder on a furze-bush. Those thin red lines represented
the best runs of the hounds during the five and thirty years he had
followed them. Having put on his spectacles, he dipped the fine-pointed
nib in the ink and, starting from near the pool under Ding Dong, traced
the run to the adit at the foot of the cliffs. Why did he pause there,
why not let the pen skirt the coast and the headland and cross the moor
to Deadman?
See! there is another red line—a line that starts at Lamorna
Cliffs—which ends at the adit, and as his eye wandered along the
converging tracks he was wondering whether the fox which gave that great
run from sea to sea was the one whose death he had just recorded. That
is why his hand dwelt and why he raised his questioning eyes to the wall
facing him.
He could not be sure, and the fixed grin on the fox’s mask hanging
between the cap and hunting-crop did not help him.
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[1] Riolabran Cunoval fil.