RHOSCADZHEL.
On the smooth lawn his brother was walking to and fro, with a cigar
between his firm white teeth, with his heart a prey to bitter and
exciting thoughts; and though Richard Trevelyan is not, as we have
said, the hero of these pages, to the lawn we shall accompany him.
"What the deuce can be the secret spring of all this intrusive
solicitude upon my uncle's part about having me married, as if I were
a young girl in her third season?" he muttered; "I have often feared
that Downie suspected me--as a lawyer, it is natural he should
suspect every one of something more than he sees or knows; and yet--I
have been so wary, so careful! My poor Constance--still
concealment--still dissimulation for the present, and doubts of our
future! No hope for us, save in the death of that old man, ever so
good and kind to me. Did he really but know Constance, how sweet and
gentle she is! A curse be on this silly pride of birth and
fortuitous position which is our bane--this boasting of pedigree old
as the days of Bran ap Llyr, the ancestor of King Arthur. By Jove,
it is too absurd!" and he laughed angrily as he tossed away his cigar
and then sighed, as he surveyed the façade of the stately mansion,
and cast his eyes round the spacious lawn that stretched far away in
starlight and obscurity. "And yet must I stoop to this senile
folly," he added, half aloud; "for 'twere hard to see all these broad
acres go to Downie's boy, the Hussar, past me and mine!"
The seats of the Cornish aristocracy have usually little to boast of
in architecture; but the mansion of Rhoscadzhel* was an exception,
being a rare specimen of a fine old Tudor dwelling, which had
suffered more from the rude hand of civil war, than from "time's
effacing fingers," and was built, tradition avers, from the famous
quarry of Pencarrow, and of good Cornish freestone.
* Cadzhel, Cornish for castle.
A massive iron gate, between carved pillars, each surmounted by a
koithgath, or wild cat, rampant--a crest of which Lord Lamorna was as
vain as ever was old Bradwardine of his heraldic bears--gave access
to the avenue, a long and leafy tunnel that lay between the house and
the highway leading to the Land's End. The branches of the stately
old elms were interlaced overhead, like the groined arches of a
Gothic cathedral and a delightful promenade their shade afforded in
the hot days of summer, when only a patch of blue sky, or the golden
rays falling aslant, could be seen at times through their foliage.
Engrafted in the later Tudor times upon the ruins of Rhoscadzhel, of
which there is still remaining the fragment of a loopholed tower and
ponderous granite arch shrouded in ivy, with its modern
_porte-cochère_ and vestibule floored with marble, its mullioned
windows filled in with plate glass in lieu of little lozenge-panes,
its dining hall and drawing rooms lighted with gas when such was the
wish of its proprietor, the mansion, though retaining all the
characteristics of the days when Queen Bess held her court at
Greenwich and danced before the Scottish ambassador, had nevertheless
all the comforts, appliances and splendour, with which the taste and
wealth of the present age could invest it.
The great dining-hall had remained almost unchanged since the days of
the first Charles. Its vast chimney-piece, which rose nearly to the
ceiling, was covered with marvellous scrolls and legends, and
innumerable wild cats' heads among them, over all being the arms of
Trevelyan of Lamorna; _gules_, a demi-horse _argent_ issuing from the
sea, adapted from the circumstance of one of the family swimming on
horseback from the Seven Stones to the Land's End, when they were
suddenly separated from the continent by a terrible inundation of the
ocean, and as this dangerous reef is no less than nine miles from
Scilly, where a light-ship points it out to the mariner, the feat was
well worthy of being recorded, at least in heraldry.
The furniture here was quaint and old, massive and richly carved, and
though the vast stone-flagged chamber, where many a Cornish cavalier
has whilom drunk "confusion to Cromwell and the Rump," and where
still stands the great dining table with its daïs, where of old "the
carles of low degree" had sat below the salt, is sombre and gloomy,
somewhat of lightness is imparted by the splendid modern conservatory
that opens off it, with marble floor and shelves of iron fret-work
laden with rare and exotic plants.
It boasts of a chamber known as "the Queen's," wherein Henrietta
Maria had slept one night before she fled to France, and since then
no one has ever occupied the ancient bed that, like a huge
catafalque, stands upon three steps in the centre of the wainscoted
room which like several others in Rhoscadzhel, has hangings of faded
green tapestry, that are lifted to give entrance; and where the
hearths, intended for wood alone, have grotesque andirons in the form
of the inevitable koithgath on its hind legs. And on the walls of
these old chambers hung many a trophy of the past, and many a weapon
of the present day, from the great two-handed sword wielded by Henry
Lord Lamorna at the Battle of Pinkey down to the yeomanry sabre worn
by the present peer at the coronation of George IV., a peer of whose
effeminacy the said Lord Henry would have been sorely ashamed.
And many a Vandyke, Kneller, and Lely were there, with portraits of
the Trevelyans of past times, who now lay under their marble tombs in
yonder little church upon the hill, where among dust and cobwebs hung
their helmets, spurs, and gauntlets, and the iron mace of one
Launcelot Trevelyan, who was a man of vast stature; and it is as
great a source of wonder to the village children as the rickety ruin
of a gilded coach which at certain times is drawn forth to the lawn
and aired carefully, being that in which the grandfather of the
present peer brought home his bride in patches and powder, and it is
supposed to be the first vehicle of the kind ever seen in the duchy
of Cornwall. Thus, as Richard Pencarrow Trevelyan thought over all
these possessions with their traditional and family interests, of
which, by one ill-natured stroke of the pen, his proud uncle might
deprive him and his heirs for ever, a bitter sigh escaped him.
Beyond the quaint façade of the ancient house, from the mullioned
windows of which, half hidden by ivy and wild roses, there streamed
out many a light into the darkness, his eyes wandered to the fertile
fields, all bare stubble now, to the wide open moor overlooked by
many a wooded tor, and to the beautiful lawn, in the centre of which
stands one of those wonderful _logan-stones_, so peculiar to Cornwall
and Brittany, a ponderous, spheroidal mass of granite, so exquisitely
balanced that it may be oscillated by the touch even of a woman's
hand; and as he turned away to indulge in deeper reverie by the shore
of the adjacent sea, he raised his right hand and his glistening eyes
to the stars, as if some vow, as yet unuttered, was quivering on his
tongue.
"Yes?" he exclaimed, "please God and pray God, the time will come;
but not as my good uncle, and not, as the careful Downie, anticipate.
Marriage! how little do they know how, in the great lottery of life,
my kismet--as we used to say in India--has been fixed--irrevocably
fixed!"