THE ALARM BELL.
The season was autumn now, and on the succeeding day--the last he
meant to spend at Rhoscadzhel for some time at least--Richard
Trevelyan appeared in the breakfast parlour again in shooting
costume, with a scarlet shirt having an open collar, and with a brown
leather shot-belt over his shoulder; while his uncle, who, even when
at his slender morning repast, in his elaborately flowered
dressing-gown, wore accurately fitting pale kid gloves on his
shrivelled hands, for such things were a necessity of the old lord's
existence; thus he glanced again with an air of annoyance at the
dress worn by his eldest nephew, as he considered it a solecism,
decidedly in bad taste, and that something more was due to his own
presence.
Downie's costume, a fashionable morning coat came more near his
lordship's ideas of propriety.
Mr. Jasper Funnel, in accurate black, was at the side-table, to slice
down the cold meat, pour out the coffee from its silver urn into the
beautiful Wedgewood cups, and to carve the grouse and other pies; for
Cornwall is peculiarly the land of that species of viand, as there
the denizens make pies of everything eatable, squab-pies,
pilchard-pies, muggetty-pies, and so forth.
"I heard last evening the new chime of bells you have put up in
Lamorna Church," said Richard, as he seated himself and attacked a
plate of grouse, the recent spoil of his own gun; "how pleasantly
they sound. Who rings them?"
"I cannot say--never inquired," replied the old peer, testily; "I can
only tell you one thing, Richard."
"And that is----"
"They were wrung out of my pocket by the vestry."
At this little quip, Downie obsequiously and applaudingly laughed as
loudly as he was ever known to do, and just as if he had never heard
it before.
"However, I need not grudge the poor people their chime of bells; I
am rich enough to afford them more than that, and occupying as we do
a good slice of this _Land of Tin_, for so the Phoenicians named this
Cornish peninsula of ours as early as the days of Solomon, we have
its credit to maintain; but bring us home a well-born and handsome
bird, Dick, and I shall have the bells rung till they fly to
pieces--by Jove I will! Only, as I hinted last night, let her be
worthy to represent those who lie under their marble tombs in that
old church of Lamorna; for there are bones there that would shrink in
their leaden coffins if aught plebeian were laid beside them."
Richard shrugged his shoulders, and glanced round him with impatience.
"Let us look forward, my dear uncle," said he; "in this age of
progress all men do; and of what account or avail can a dead ancestry
be?"
Downie smiled faintly, and Lord Lamorna frowned in the act of
decapitating an egg, for to his ears this sounded as rank heresy or
treason against the state.
"By heavens! nephew Richard, you talk like a Red Republican. With
these socialistic views of equality, and so forth, I fear you will
never shine in the Upper House."
"I have no desire to do so; you see how simple my tastes are----"
"In dress decidedly too much so."
"And how happy and content I am to lead the life of a quiet country
gentleman; and have done so ever since I left the Cornish Light
Infantry."
"Your demands upon my pocket are certainly so moderate, that I cannot
think you are playing me false, Dick," said the peer, with a pleasant
smile; "egad, if I thought you were doing so, I'd have you before the
Mayor of Halgaver, as our Cornish folks say!"
"Trust me, my good uncle," replied Richard Trevelyan, with a
glistening eye, and laying a hand caressingly on the old man's
shoulder, as he rose and adjusted his shot-belt; "and now I go to
have a farewell shot on the moors."
"Why a farewell shot? you have been here barely a fortnight."
"Nevertheless, I must leave Rhoscadzhel tomorrow."
"Positively?"
"Yes, uncle."
"Pardon me," continued Lamorna, drily; "but may we inquire for where?"
"Oxford--and then town after, perhaps."
"Oxford--and town too," replied his uncle, testily; "the last time
you left this for London, if General Trecarrel was right, you were
seen for a month after in his neighbourhood; and, if his story were
true--and I dare not doubt it--you did not get beyond the border of
Cornwall--and were certainly not so far as Devonshire."
"Trecarrel was, I hope, mistaken," urged Richard.
"I hope so, too."
Richard's face was pale, and to conceal his emotion, he stooped and
caressed his favourite pointer, which had bounded in when the butler
opened the door; and soon recovering from his little
agitation--whatever its secret source might be--he politely and
affectionately bade his uncle "good-bye for the present," nodded to
the silent and observant Downie, took a double-barrelled
breech-loader from the gun-room and sallied forth, unattended by
game-keepers, desiring quite as much to indulge in reverie and enjoy
a solitary ramble, as to have a shot at a passing bird.
To Richard it seemed that he had read a strangely keen, weird and
unfathomable expression in his uncle's eyes, as they followed his
departing steps on this particular morning--an expression which,
somehow, haunted him.
The season, we have said, was now autumn, and a tender, mellow tone
rested over all the landscape; Richard Trevelyan was fond of the
strange, wild district--the land of old tradition, of bold and varied
scenery--amid which his youth and so much of his manhood had been
passed, and he looked around him from time to time with admiring eyes
and an enthusiastic heart.
A soft warm shower had fallen that morning early, refreshing the
fading September leaves in the belts of coppice that girt the upland
slopes, and in the orchards, where the ripe golden apples were
dropping amid the thick sward below. Above the purple, and often
desolate moors which are so characteristic of Cornish scenery, and
where the small breed of horses, the little black cattle and
sharp-nosed sheep of the province were grazing, the wooded _tors_ or
hills stood boldly up in the distance, their foliage in most
instances presenting many varied tints. There were the brown madder,
the crisped chesnut, and the fading beech, the more faded green of
the old Cornish elm, and the russet fern below, from amid which at
every step he took the birds whirred up in coveys; while Richard,
lost in reverie--the result of his uncle's remarks of late--never
emptied a barrel at them, but walked slowly on looking round him from
time to time, and filled with thoughts that were all his own as yet.
The place where he loitered was very lonely: here and there a gray
lichen-spotted druidical monolith stood grimly up amid the silent
waste; in the distance might be seen the gray expanse of the ocean,
or some bleak looking houses slated with blue, as they usually are in
Devon and Cornwall, or perhaps some of those poorer huts, which, like
wigwams, have cob-walls; _i.e._ are built of earth, mud, and straw,
beaten and pounded together, just as they might have been in the days
of Bran the son of Llyr, or when Arthur dwelt in Tintagel.
Richard Trevelyan threw himself upon a grassy bank, and his pointer,
doubtless surprised by his neglect of all sport, lay beside him with
eyes of wonder and tongue out-lolled. In the distance, about a mile
or so away, Trevelyan could see Rhoscadzhel House shining in the
morning sunlight; and again, as on the preceding evening, he looked
around with a bitter smile upon tor and moorland, and on the wondrous
druid monoliths that stand up here and there on the bleak hill sides,
each and all of them having their own quaint name and grim old legend.
How came each to be there? "Without patent rollers; nay, without the
simplest mechanical contrivances of modern times, how was so huge a
mass transported to yonder desolate and wind-swept height? How many
yoke of oxen, how many straining scores of men must it have taken to
erect the least of them! What submission to authority, what servile
or superstitious fear must have animated the workers! No drover's
whip would have urged to such a task; no richest guerdon could have
repaid the toil; yet there the wonder stands!"
And some such thoughts as these floated through the mind of Richard,
as his eyes wandered from a cromlech or slab that rested on three
great stones, to a vast _maen_ or rock-pillar, that might be coeval
with the days when Jacob set up such a stone to witness his covenant
with Laban.
"Shall I ever wander here with Constance--and if so, when," thought
he; "assuredly not while my uncle lives; but his death--how can I
contemplate it, when he is so good, so kind, so tender, and so true
to me? Oh, let me not anticipate that."
How often in autumn, in the gloomy mornings of November, had he
pursued the fox over these desolate moors, often breakfasting by
candle-light in his red coat on a hunting morning, to the great
boredom of old Jasper Funnel?
What joy it would be to gallop over that breezy wind-swept moor, with
Constance by his side! To walk with her through yonder dense old
thicket, and tell her that every tree and twig therein were her own;
to drive by yonder cliff, Tol Pedn Penwith, the western boundary of a
beautiful bay, and where in the summer evening, the forty Isles of
Scilly seemed to be cradled in the glory of the western sun; to show
her all these places with which he was so familiar, and perhaps to
tell their children in the years to come--for all Richard's habits
and tastes were alike gentle and domestic--the old Cornish legends of
Arthur's castle at Tintagel, of the magic well of St. Keyne, and of
Tregeagle the giant--the bugbear of all Cornish little people; the
melancholy monster or fiend, who according to traditions still
believed in, haunts the Dozmare Pool, from whence he hurled the vast
granite blocks, known as his "quoits," upon the coast westward of
Penzance Head; the deep dark Pool, his dwelling place, is said to be
unfathomable and the resort of other evil spirits.
Desolate and begirt by arid and dreary hills, it presents an aspect
of gloomy horror; and then when the winter storms sweep the moorland
wastes, and the miners at the Land's End, deep, deep down in mines
below the sea, hear the enormous boulders dashed by it on the flinty
shore overhead, above all can be heard the howling of Tregeagle! For
ages he has been condemned to the task of emptying the Dozrnare Pool
by a tiny limpet-shell, and his cries are uttered in despair of the
hopelessness of the drudgery assigned him by the devil, who in
moments of impatience, hunts him round the tarn, till he flies to the
Roche Rocks fifteen miles distant, and finds respite by placing his
hideous head through the painted window of a ruined chapel, as a
bumpkin might through a horse-collar; for these, and a thousand such
stories as these, are believed in Cornwall, nor can even the whistle
of the railway from Plymouth to Penzance scare them away.
Richard Trevelyan was smiling when he remembered how often he and
Downie, when loving little brothers and playfellows, had been scared
in their cribs at night by stories of Tregeagle; and of that other
mighty giant who lies buried beneath Carn Brea, where his clenched
skeleton hand, now converted into a block of granite (having five
distinct parts, like a thumb and fingers) protrudes through the turf.
He could recall the dark hours, when as fair-haired children, they
had cowered together in one of the tapestried rooms of Rhoscadzhel,
and clasped each other's hands and necks in fear of those
hob-goblins, which people the very rock and cavern, and even the very
air of Cornwall. Downie was a man now, legal in bearing, and
cold-blooded in heart. Richard had painful doubts of him, and
remembered, that, strangely enough his hand _alone_, had always
failed to rock the logan-stone in the lawn before Rhoscadzhel, and
such monuments of antiquity, have, according to Mason, the properties
of an ordeal--the test of truth and probity:
"Behold yon huge
And unhewn sphere of living adamant,
Which, poised by magic, rests its central weight
On yonder pointed rock: firm as it seems,
Such is its strange and virtuous property,
It moves obsequious to the gentlest touch
Of him whose heart is pure; but to a traitor,
Tho' e'en a giant's prowess nerv'd his arm,
It stands as fixed as Snowdon!"
Even the childish hands of his little daughter Gartha, could rock the
logan-stone, when Downie's failed to do so. Why was this? Was there
indeed any truth in the ancient test of integrity and purity of
heart; or was it but an engine of religious imposition? And now amid
these unpleasant speculations, there came to the loiterer's ear, the
tolling of a distant bell.
He started up, and listened.
It was, beyond a doubt, the house-bell of Rhoscadzhel, and was being
rung violently and continuously, for the breeze brought the notes
distinctly over the furzy waste.
What could have happened? Fire--or was he wanted in haste? Was his
uncle indisposed; were his fears, his hopes and wishes, though
blended with sorrow, to be realised at last?
His breath came thick and painfully, and he remembered with something
of foreboding--for his Cornish breeding rendered him superstitious
and impressionable--that as he had passed Larnorna church that
morning, he had seen, on the rough lichstones at the entrance to the
sequestered church-yard, a coffin rested prior to interment, while
the soft sad psalmody of those who had borne it thither--a band of
hardy miners--floated through the still and ambient air; for the
custom of bearing the dead to their last resting place with holy
songs--a usage in the East, as old as the fourth century--is still
observed in Cornwall, that land of quaint traditions and picturesque
old memories.
Springing to his feet, Richard Trevelyan discharged both barrels of
his gun into the air, and hurried in the direction of the manor house.
As he drew nearer, the sonorous clangour of the great bell, which was
now rung at intervals, but with great vigour, continued to increase,
adding to the surprise and tumult of his heart, and the perturbation
of his spirit.