its character. It was at that time given to the Carmelite nuns, who now
inhabit it, by Lord Arundel. The sisterhood was originally settled in
France, and was removed thence to Antwerp, at the outbreak of the first
French Revolution. Shortly afterwards, when the affairs of the Continent
began to assume a threatening and troubled aspect, the nuns again
migrated, and sought in England, at Lanhearne House, the last asylum
which they still occupy.
The strictness of their order is preserved with a severity of discipline
which is probably without parallel anywhere else in Europe. It is on our
free English ground, in one of our simplest and prettiest English
villages, that the austerities of a Carmelite convent are now most
resolutely practised, and the seclusion of a Carmelite convent most
vigilantly preserved, by the nuns of Mawgan! They are at present twenty
in number: two of them are Frenchwomen, the rest are all English. They
are of every age, from the very young to the very old. The eldest of the
sisterhood has long passed the ordinary limits of human life--she has
attained ninety-five years.
The nuns never leave the convent, and no one even sees them in it. Women
even are not admitted to visit them: the domestic servants, who have
been employed in the house for years, have never seen their faces, have
never heard them speak. It is only in cases of severe and dangerous
illness, when their own skill and their own medicines do not avail them,
that they admit, from sheer necessity, the only stranger who ever
approaches them--the doctor; and on these occasions, whenever it is
possible, the face of the patient is concealed from the medical man.
The nuns occupy the modern part of the house, which is entirely built
off, inside, from the ancient. Their only place for exercise is a garden
of two acres, enclosed by lofty walls, and surrounded by trees. Their
food and other necessaries are conveyed to them through a turning door;
all personal communition with the servants' offices being carried on
through the medium of lay sisters. The nuns have a private way, known
only to themselves, to the chapel choir, which is constructed in the
form of a gallery, boarded in at the sides and concealed by a curtain
and close grating in front. The chapel itself is in the old part of the
house, and occupies what was formerly the servants' hall. The
officiating priest who undertakes the duties here, lives in this portion
of the building, and leads a life of complete solitude, until he is
relieved by a successor. He never sees the face of one of the nuns; he
cannot even ask one of his own profession to dine with him, without
first of all obtaining (by letter) the express permission of the Abbess;
and when his visitor is at length admitted, it is impossible to gain for
him--let him be who he may--the additional indulgence of being allowed
to sleep in the house.[5]
The chapel is the only part of the whole interior of the building to
which strangers can be admitted: those who desire to do so can attend
mass there on Sundays. The casual visitor, when permitted to enter it,
is not allowed to pass beyond the pillars which support the gallery of
the choir above him; for if he advanced farther, the nuns who might
then be occupying it, might see him while they were engaged at their
devotions. The chapel exhibits nothing in the way of ornament, beyond
the altar furniture and a few copies from pictures on sacred subjects by
the old masters. Some of the more valuable objects devoted to its
service are not shown. These consist of the sacred vestments and the
sacramental plate, which are said to be of extraordinary beauty and
value, and are preserved in the keeping of the Abbess. The worth of one
of the jewelled chalices alone has been estimated at a thousand pounds.
Much of the land in the neighbourhood belongs to the convent, which has
been enriched by many valuable gifts. The nuns make a good use of their
wealth. Neither the austerities and mortifications to which their lives
are devoted, nor their rigid and terrible self-exclusion from all
intercourse with their fellow-beings in the world around them, have
diminished their sympathy for affliction, or their readiness in
ministering to the wants of the poor. Any assistance of any kind that
they can render, is always at the service of those who require it,
without distinction of rank or religion. No wandering beggar who rings
at the convent bell, ever leaves the door without a penny and a piece of
bread to help him on his way.
But the charities of the nuns of Mawgan do not stop short at the first
good work of succouring the afflicted; they extend also to a generous
sympathy for those human weaknesses of impatience and irresolution in
others, which they have surmounted, but not forgotten themselves. Rather
more than twelve years since, a young girl of eighteen applied to be
admitted to share the dreary life-in-death existence of the Carmelite
sisterhood. She was received for her year of probation: it expired, and
she still held firmly to her first determination. But the nuns, in pity
to her youth, and perhaps mournfully remembering, even in their
life-long seclusion of mind and body, how strong are the ties which bind
together the beings of this world and the things of this world, gave her
more time yet to search her own motives, to look back on what she was
abandoning, to look forward on what she desired to obtain. Mercifully
refusing to grant her her own wishes, they forebore the performance of
the fatal ceremony which irrevocably took her from earth to give her up
only to Heaven, until she had undergone an additional year of
probation. This last solemn period of delay which Christian charity and
sisterly love had piously granted, expired, and found her still
determined to adhere to her resolution. She took the veil; and the
dreary gates of Lanhearne have closed on all that is mortal of her for
ever!
The convent has two burial places. The first is in an ancient recess
within the village church, and was given to the nuns with the
manor-house. Those among them who first expired on English ground, lie
buried here--the Catholic dead have returned to the once Catholic
edifice, where the Protestant living now worship! When the Carmelite
funeral procession entered this place, it entered at the dead of night,
to avoid the chance of any intrusion. But as the nuns have no private
entrance to their burial-vault, and have been by law prohibited from
making one; as they are obliged to pass through the public door of the
church and walk up the nave, they are at the mercy of any stranger who
can gain admittance to the building, and who may be led by idle
curiosity to watch the ceremonies which accompany their midnight service
for the dead. Feeling this, they have of late years abandoned their
burial place, after first carefully boarding it off from all
observation. No inquisitive eyes can now behold, no intruding footsteps
can now approach, the tombs of the nuns of Mawgan.
The second cemetery, which they use at present, is situated in one of
the convent-gardens, and can therefore be secured, whenever they please,
from all observation. A wooden door at one corner of the ancient portion
of the manor-house leads into it. The place is merely a small, square
plot of ground, damp, shady, and overgrown with long grass. An old and
elaborately carved stone cross stands in it; and about this appear the
graves of the nuns, marked by plain slate tablets. But even here, the
mystery which hangs darkly over the Carmelite household does not
clear--the seclusion that has hidden the living in the Convent, is but
the forerunner of the secrecy that veils from us on the tombstone the
history of the dead. The saint's name once assumed by the nun, and the
short yet beautiful supplication of the Roman Church for the repose of
the soul of the departed, form the only inscriptions that appear over
the graves.
This is all--all of the lives, all of the deaths of the sisterhood at
Lanhearne that we can ever know! The remainder must be conjecture. We
have but the bare stern outline that has been already drawn--who shall
venture, even in imagination, to colour and complete the picture which
it darkly, yet plainly, indicates?
Even if we only endeavour to image to ourselves the externals of the
life which those massy walls keep secret, what have we to speculate on?
Nothing but the day that in winter and summer, in sunshine and in storm,
brings with it year after year, to young and to old alike, the same
monotony of action and the same monotony of repose--the turning door in
the wall (sole indication to those within, that there is a world
without), moved in silence, ever at the same stated hour, by invisible
hands--the prayer and penance in the chapel choir, always a solitude to
its occupants, however many of their fellow-creatures may be standing
beneath it--the short hours of exercise amid high garden walls, which
shut out everything but the distant sky. Beyond this, what remains but
that utter vacancy where even thought ends; that utter gloom in which
the brightest fancy must cease to shine?
Should we try to look deeper than the surface; to strip the inner life
of the convent of all its mysteries and coverings, and anatomising it
inch by inch, search it through down to the very heart? Should we pry
into the dread and secret processes by which, among these women, one
human emotion after another may be suffering, first ossification, then
death? No!--this is a task which is beyond our power; an investigation
which, of our own knowledge, we cannot be certain of pursuing aright. We
may imagine grief that does not exist, remorse that is not felt, error
that has not been committed. It is not for us to criticise the
catastrophe of the drama, when we have no acquaintance with the scenes
which have preceded it. It is not for us, guided by our own thoughts,
moved by the impulses of the world we live in, to decide upon the
measure of good or evil contained in an act of self-sacrifice at the
altar of religion, which is in its own motive and result so utterly
separated from all other motives and results, that we cannot at the
outset even so much as sympathise with it. The purpose of the convent
system is of those purposes which are conceived in this world, but which
appeal for justification or condemnation only to the next.
"Judge not, that ye be not judged!" Those words sink deep into our
hearts, as we look our last upon the convent walls, and leave the
living-dead at old Lanhearne.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] All the particulars here related of the convent discipline, were
communicated to me by the resident priest. This gentleman was certainly
not a prejudiced witness on the side of austerity--for he frankly
complained of the lonely life which the rules of the Sisterhood
inflicted on him, and unhesitatingly acknowledged that he was anxious
for the time when his clerical successor would come to relieve him.
XIII.
LEGENDS OF THE NORTHERN COAST.
From the time when we left St. Ives, we walked through the last part of
our journey much faster than we walked through the first; faster,
perhaps, than the reader may have perceived from these pages. When we
stopped at the town of St. Columb Major, to visit the neighbouring vale
of Mawgan, we had already advanced half way up the northern coast of
Cornwall. Throughout this part of the county the towns lay wide asunder;
and, as pedestrian tourists, we were obliged to lengthen our walks and
hasten our pace accordingly.
After we had quitted St. Columb Major, our rambles began to draw rapidly
to their close. Little more was now left for us to examine than the
different localities connected with certain interesting Cornish legends.
The places thus associated with the quaint fancies of the olden time,
were all situated close together, some fifteen or twenty miles farther
on, along the coast. The first among them that we reached was Tintagel
Castle, an ancient ruin magnificently situated on a precipice
overhanging the sea, and romantically, if not historically, reputed as
the birthplace of King Arthur.
The date of the Castle of Tintagel is as much a subject of perplexity
among modern antiquaries, as is the existence of King Arthur among
modern historians. We may still see some ruins of the Castle; but when
or by whom the building was erected which those ruins represent, we have
no means of discovering: we only know that, after the Conquest, it was
inhabited by some of our English princes, and that it was used as a
state prison so late as the reign of Elizabeth. The rest is, for the
most part, mere conjecture, raised upon the weak foundation of a few
mouldering fragments of walls which must soon crumble and disappear as
the rest of the Castle has crumbled and disappeared before them.
The position of the old fortress was, probably, almost impregnable in
the days of its strength and glory. The outer part of it was built on a
precipitous projection of cliff, three hundred feet high, which must
have been wrenched away from the mainland by some tremendous convulsion
of Nature. The inner part stood on the opposite side of the chasm formed
by this convulsion; and both divisions of the fortress were formerly
connected by a draw-bridge. The most interesting portion of the few
ruins now remaining, is that on the outermost promontory, which is
almost entirely surrounded by the sea. The way up to this cliff is by a
steep and somewhat perilous path; so narrow in certain places, where it
winds along the verge of the precipice, that a single false step would
be certain destruction. The difficulties of the ascent appear to have
impressed the old historian of Cornwall, Norden, so vividly that he
tries in his "Survey," to frighten all his readers from attempting it;
warning "unstable man," if he will try to mount the cliff, that "while
he respecteth his footinge he indaungers his head; and looking to save
the head, indaungers the footinge, accordinge to the old proverbe:
_Incidit in Scyllam qui vult vitare Charybdim_. He must have
eyes,"--ominously adds the worthy Norden--"that will scale Tintagel."
The ruins on the summit of the promontory only consist of a few
straggling walls, loosely piled up, rather than built, with
dark-coloured stone. Some still remain entire enough to show the square
loopholes that were pierced in them for arrows; and, here and there,
fragments of rough irregular arches, which might have been either
doorways or windows, are still visible. Those parts of the building
which have fallen, are concealed by long, thickly growing grass--the
foot may sometimes strike against them, but the eye perceives them not.
These are all the vestiges which remain of the once mighty castle; all
the signs that are left to point out the site of the old halls, where
the bold knights of Arthur gathered for the feast or prepared for the
fight, at their royal master's command.
The Cornish legends tell us that the British hero held his last court,
solemnized his last feast, reviewed his last array of warriors, at
Tintagel, before he went out to the fatal battle-field of Camelford, to
combat his nephew Mordred, who had rebelled against his power. In the
morning, the martial assemblage marched out of the castle in triumph,
led by the king, with his death-dealing sword "Excalibur" slung at his
shoulder, and his magic lance "Rou," in his hand. In the evening the
warriors returned, fatally victorious, from the struggle. The rebel army
had been routed and the rebel chief slain; but they brought back with
them, their renowned leader--the favourite hero of martial adventure,
the conqueror of the Saxons in twelve battles--mortally wounded, from
the field which he had quitted a victor.
That night, the wise and valiant king died in the castle of his birth;
died among his followers who had feasted and sung around him at the
festal table but a few hours before. The deep-toned bells of Tintagel
rang his death peal; and the awe-stricken populace from the country
round, gathering together hurriedly before the fortress, heard
portentous wailings from supernatural voices, which mingled in ghostly
harmony with the moaning of the restless sea, the dirging of the dreary
wind, and the dull deep thunder of the funeral knell. About the heights
of the castle, and in the caverns beneath it, these sounds ceased not
night or day, until the corpse of the hero was conveyed to the ship
destined to bear it to its burial-place in Glastonbury Abbey. Then,
dirging winds, and moaning sea, and wailing voices, ceased; and in the
intervals between the slow pealing of the funeral bells, clear
child-like voices arose from the calmed waters, and told the mourning
people that Arthur was gone from them but for a little time, to be
healed of all his wounds in the Fairy Land; and that he would yet
return to lead and to govern them, as of old.
Such is the scene--strange compound of fiction and truth, of the typical
and the real--which legends teach us to imagine in the Tintagel Castle
of thirteen centuries ago! What is the scene that we look on now?--A
solitude where the decaying works of man, and the enduring works of
Nature appear mingled in beauty together. The grass grows high and
luxuriant, where the rushes were strewn over the floor of Arthur's
banqueting hall. Sheep are cropping the fresh pasture, within the walls
which once echoed to the sweetest songs, or rang to the clash of the
stoutest swords of ancient England! About the fortress nothing remains
unchanged, but the sun which at evening still brightens it in its weak
old age with the same glory that shone over its lusty youth; the sea
that rolls and dashes, as at first, against its foundation rocks; and
the wild Cornish country outspread on either side of it, as desolately
and as magnificently as ever.
The grandeur of the scenery at Tintagel, the romantic interest of the
old British traditions connected with the castle, might well have
delayed us many hours on these solitary heights; but we had other
places still to visit, other and far different legends still to gossip
over. Descending the cliff while the day gave us ample time to wander at
our will; we strolled away inland to track the scene of a new romance as
far as the waterfall called Nighton's Keive.
* * * * *
A walk of little more than half-a-mile brings us to the entrance of a
valley, bounded on either side by high, gently-sloping hills, with a
small stream running through its centre, fed by the waterfall of which
we are in search. We now follow a footpath a few hundred yards, pass by
a mill, and looking up the valley, see one compact mass of vegetation
entirely filling it to its remotest corners, and not leaving the
slightest vestige of a path, the merest patch of clear ground, visible
in any direction, far or near.
It seems as if all the foliage which ought to have grown on the Cornish
moorlands, had been mischievously crammed into this place, within the
narrow limits of one Cornish valley. Weeds, ferns, brambles, bushes, and
young trees, are flourishing together here, thickly intertwined in every
possible position, in triumphant security from any invasion of bill-hook
or axe. You win every step of your way through this miniature forest of
vegetation, by the labour of your arms and the weight of your body.
Tangled branches and thorny bushes press against you in front and
behind, meet over your head, knock off your cap, flap in your face,
twist about your legs, and tear your coat skirts; so obstructing you in
every conceivable manner and in every conceivable direction, that they
seem possessed with a living power of opposition, and commissioned by
some evil genius of Fairy Mythology to prevent mortal footsteps from
intruding into the valley. Whether you try a zig-zag or a straight
course, whether you go up or down, it is the same thing--you must
squeeze, and push, and jostle your way through the crowd of bushes, just
as you would through a crowd of men--or else stand still, surrounded by
leaves, like "a Jack-in-the-Green," and wait for the very remote chance
of somebody coming to help you out.
Forcing our road incessantly through these obstructions, for a full
half-hour, and taking care to keep our only guide--the sound of the
running-water--always within hearing, we came at last to a little break
in the vegetation, crossed the stream at this place, and found, on the
opposite side of the bank, a faintly-marked track, which might have been
once a footpath. Following it as well as we could among the branches
and brambles, and now ascending steep ground, we soon heard the dash of
the waterfall. But to attempt to see it, was no easy undertaking. The
trees, the bushes, and the wild herbage grew here thicker than ever,
stretching in perfect canopies of leaves so closely across the
overhanging banks of the stream, as entirely to hide it from view. We
heard the monotonous, eternal splashing of the water, close at our ears,
and yet vainly tried to obtain even a glimpse of the fall. Adverse Fate
led us up and down, and round and round, and backwards and forwards,
amid a labyrinth of overgrown bushes which might have bewildered an
Australian settler; and still the nymph of the waterfall coyly hid
herself from our eyes. Our ears informed us that the invisible object of
which we were in search was of very inconsiderable height; our patience
was evaporating; our time was wasting away--in short, to confess the
truth here, as I have confessed it elsewhere in these pages, let me
acknowledge that we both concurred in a sound determination to consult
our own convenience, and give up the attempt to discover Nighton's
Keive!
Our wanderings, however, though useless enough in one direction,
procured us this compensating advantage in another: they led us
accidentally to the exact scene of the legend which we knew to be
connected with this part of the valley, and which had, indeed, first
induced us to visit it.
We found ourselves standing before the damp, dismantled stone walls of a
solitary cottage, placed on a plot of partially open ground, near the
outskirts of the wood. Long dark herbage grew about the inside of the
ruined little building; a toad was crawling where the leaves clustered
thickest, on what had once been the floor of a room; in every direction
corruption and decay were visibly battening on the lonesome place. Its
aspect would repel rather than allure curiosity, but for the mysterious
story associated with it, which gives it an attraction and an interest
that are not its own.
Years and years ago, when this desolate building was a neat comfortable
cottage, it was inhabited by two ladies, of whose histories, and even
names, all the people of the district were perfectly ignorant. One day
they were accidentally found living in their solitary abode, before any
one knew that they had so much as entered it, or that they existed at
all. Both appeared to be about the same age, and both were inflexibly
taciturn. One was never seen without the other; if they ever left the
house, they only left it to walk in the most unfrequented parts of the
wood; they kept no servant, and never had a visitor; no living souls but
themselves ever crossed the door of their cottage. They procured their
food and other necessaries from the people in the nearest village,
paying for everything they received when it was delivered, and neither
asking nor answering a single unnecessary question. Their manners were
gentle, but grave and sorrowful as well. The people who brought them
their household supplies, felt awed and uneasy, without knowing why, in
their presence; and were always relieved when they had dispatched their
errand and had got well away from the cottage and the wood.