The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion,
The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty,
That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and watery depths--all these have vanished.
They live no longer in the faith of reason.
Coleridge. _Piccolomini._
The hamlet of Trevethlan nestled snugly under the slope, at the summit
of which stood the castle, and was screened by the rising ground from
the sea breezes. It surrounded a green of limited extent, which was only
separated from the base-court by the gate Michael Sinson opened for Mrs.
Pendarrel's carriage, when that lady was returning from her frustrated
attack. On the right, a small wicket led into the churchyard, so full of
trees that, except at the present season, the church itself could
scarcely be seen. This was a plain edifice, with no pretensions to
beauty, deriving all its picturesqueness from the ivy with which it was
overgrown. Opposite to it, across the green, a beam projecting from the
front of an old-fashioned house, supported the escutcheon of the lords
of the village, and, by its inscription, promised good entertainment to
man and beast. But the inn had shared the fortunes of the castle: the
windows of the wings, which advanced with scalloped gables beyond the
centre, were blocked up with boards, and the middle part only appeared
to be now occupied. But Dame Miniver, the hostess, had inherited the
savings of more prosperous days. She was a trim, bustling widow woman,
tidy and rosy, notable and talkative, whose only sighs were divided
between the good-man who slept on the other side of the green, and the
splendour which had departed from the castle on the cliff. She never
fretted because her stables now held none but a few farm horses, nor
because there were no longer any swaggering lackeys to come and crack a
bottle of the port, some of which might still be slumbering in her
cellars. She would hardly have been a Cornish woman if she did not know
how to exchange a wink with the good fellow who had a keg of hollands or
brandy to dispose of; and it pleased her mightily to treat a revenue man
with a drop of the spirits that had been run under his very nose.
The other habitations surrounding the green were of various sizes, some
with small gardens in front, some neat, and some neglected,--almost all
thatched and whitewashed. A sleepy, listless air hung about the place. A
stranger wandering accidentally into it, would feel at once that it had
known better days; the children might seem to play with less liveliness
than usual, and the very geese to waddle over the grass with a lazy
gait. He would fancy the gossips at the cottage doors to be inanimate in
their chat, and might himself be yielding to a sense of drowsiness, when
the sight of Dame Miniver, in her neat brown silk gown, and snow-white
apron, looking complacently at the visitor, with an inviting smile that
was irresistible, would recall his fleeting spirits, and guide his steps
to the friendly shelter of the Trevethlan Arms.
The late owner of the castle, it has already been said, was extremely
unpopular with his tenantry, for some time both before and after his
marriage. Proud themselves of the family upon which they had depended
beyond the memory of man, they hated to see it stripped, acre by acre,
of its broad lands, and so impoverished as to be unable to afford them
the old advantages. Remembering the current prophecy, they loathed a
match which seemed to harbinger its fulfilment, and at the same time
rendered it next to impossible for Pendarrel to come to Trevethlan,
although the reverse might happen on several contingencies. But after
the death of poor Margaret, and when an infant son and daughter stood in
the way of any such consummation, and their lord came often among them,
haughty indeed, but not unkind; poor, but still generous; and they could
not avoid seeing the melancholy written in his face, and recollected his
reported courtship, years before, of Esther Pendarrel, and thought of
the kinsman who had sold his name; their animosity gradually melted into
compassion, and a deep and sullen hatred grew up among them against the
house of Pendarrel and everything connected with it.
The discontent now pervading the country had not spared Trevethlan. It
was true, that if the sentiment--war to the mansions--were diffused at
all in the village, it had no reference to the castle. There was not a
man on the estate but was ready to die in defence of the towers on the
cliff. But other feelings might be entertained towards some of their
neighbours. Hitherto they had exhausted their animosity in conflicts
arising at wrestling-matches and country fairs, but now there were
symptoms discoverable of more dangerous hostilities.
And the movement was encouraged by the absence of the young master. The
villagers regretted, without blaming, a departure which was intended,
they hoped, in some way or other, to restore prosperity to the family.
But it removed a check which might have soothed their exasperation. And
in like manner the return of the orphans would probably turn aside any
ideas of immediate violence, if such had really gained any footing in
the hamlet.
On the evening of their arrival, some of the notables met to discuss
things in general, around the fire in Dame Miniver's hall. There were
farmer Colan, and Germoe the tailor of the hamlet, and Breage whose wife
kept the shop where everything was sold, and, among divers others,
Edward Owen, Sinson's unsuccessful rival for the affections of pretty
Mercy Page. Owen, formerly one of the best-conducted men in the hamlet,
was now sulky and perverse, and Mercy had obtained no slight odium by
her too great fidelity to one who was regarded as a deserter. She little
thought her old lover had been lately in the neighbourhood, and she was
even now meditating an excursion to inquire after him, in one of those
mysterious modes, which were yet resorted to occasionally by the lovers
of the far-west.
"A health to our squire!" cried Colan, filling a cup of cyder, "and to
our bonny young lady, and welcome back to Trevethlan."
"Faith," said Owen, "they're not come back to do much good to
Trevethlan, I reckon. There's none of the fortune come with 'em as folks
used to talk about, or they'd never ha' gone through the town with a
rubbishy old chay from Helston."
"Small blame to Squire Randolph," observed Germoe, "that he don't throw
away the little he's left, like our poor master before him. And, for my
part, I'd rather have him among us, poor though he may be, than away
nobody knows where.
'The place is bare, when the lord's not there.'
There'll be more smiles in Trevethlan than there's been this many a
day."
"Then there's not much to smile about," Owen replied; "and the best
maybe the squire could do, were to take back some of that's been stolen
from him. There's many a lad ready to strike a blow for Trevethlan."
"Wild talk, Edward," said Breage; "wild talk, and nothing but it. We
live by the law now-a-days."
"And there's a pleasanter way," observed Dame Miniver. "Miss Mildred of
Pendar'l 's as pretty a lady as ever stepped, and she might bring the
squire all his land again, and fulfil the saying quite agreeable,
'Pendar'l and Trevethlan will own one name.'"
"There's too much ill blood atween the houses," Colan said. "A deal too
much. Didn't the lady of Pendar'l turn the late squire away? And didn't
our young master send her back from his gate with a flea in her ear?
Don't ye recollect how Jeffrey chuckled about it? The young folks have
ne'er seen one another, Mrs. Miniver."
"How d'ye know?" the hostess asked. "And trust me, if meet they did,
there'd meet a couple predestinated to fall in love. In all the old
tales that ever I read, the true gentleman falls in love with the wrong
lady. But, of course, they must meet, or they haven't the chance, and
somehow they always do meet."
"Well," said Germoe, "I'll wager the day ne'er dawns that sees that
match. The saying'll not hold good in our time--mark my words."
"There's a deal of wisdom in those old sayings," quoth Mistress Miniver.
"Ay, and in others too. Mind ye not how old Maud Basset foretold a
fortune for her child, and the gipsy crossed it, and both came out as
true as gospel? Those sayings are not to be looked down upon, Master
Germoe."
"If ever that saying comes true in my time," muttered Owen, "and not on
our side, there'll be a tale told of Pendar'l--that's all I know."
But the remark excited no attention, and from such predictions the
company slid by degrees into the kindred and fascinating subject of
preternatural visitations, a wide field in that remote district of the
west; and they drew their seats closer round the fire, and dropped their
voices, until they almost frightened one another into a reluctance to
separate on their different ways homeward.
They would, perhaps, have expressed themselves in a more discontented
manner, if they had known the intention with which Randolph sought the
home of his fathers: he has himself obscurely intimated it, in his
soliloquy by the sea. To persuade his sister to remain in those old
halls, under the guardianship of Polydore Riches; to return himself to
London, to obtain, in spite of all obstacles, an interview with Mildred
Pendarrel; to extract from her the confession which he was convinced she
was ready to make; to exchange mutual vows; to look round the world for
the path which he might cut to honour and fortune; to return and claim
his bride, who by that time would be her own mistress--such was the
scheme upon which he was at present resolved. It was a wild outline, and
he did not trouble himself to fill up the details. Young and ardent, he
looked straight to the summit of his ambition, and recked nothing of the
ravines which separated the various intervening ridges.
But with all his determination he hesitated to disclose his idea to
Helen. He felt that to her he was everything. Until quite recently they
had always shared one another's thoughts. He trembled at the anguish he
should inflict by such a separation. And so he deferred the confidence
from time to time, persuading himself that it would best be made on the
very eve of his departure, until this was indefinitely postponed by
intelligence that Pendarrel Hall was being prepared for the immediate
reception of its mistress.
In the meanwhile his sister and he renewed their former acquaintance
with the good folks of the hamlet, and to external appearance resumed
the way in which they had lived before the late Mr. Trevethlan's death.
It was a quiet, dreamy sort of life, of which a faint sketch was given
in the outset of this narrative. They were born in a land of romance;
the whole region was classic ground. From King Arthur's castle of
Tintagel in the north-east, to Merlin's stone in Mount's Bay, respecting
which an old prophecy--
"There shall land on the stone Merlyn
Those shall burn Paul's, Penzance, and Newlyn,"
was said to be fulfilled by some stragglers from the Spanish Armada,
every field might be supposed the scene of some chivalrous exploit, or
magical enchantment, or superstitious sacrifice. There dwelt the last of
the British druids: their strange monuments were still standing on the
wild moors and in the cultivated domains, on the desolate carns and
among the crags of the sea-shore. Such was the oracular stone at Castle
Trereen,--at that time not forced from its resting-place by sacrilegious
hands, and requiring no chain to keep it from _logging_ too far. Such
was Lanyon Quoit, a cromlech on the moorland beyond Madron, and not very
far from the battle-field, where the Saxon Athelstan finally defeated
the Britons, and drove them to perish of hunger in the caves of Pendeen.
The curious stranger still marks their strong fortresses, Castle Chun
and Castle Dinas, occupying the highest ground between Mount's Bay and
the Irish Sea; he may read the name of their chieftain, Rialobran, on
his tombstone, Men Skryfa, now prostrate among the herbage; and he may
note the sanguinary nature of the struggle, in the title which it gained
for the Land's End, of Penvonlas, or the Headland of Blood.
And, again, the customs of the country still kept alive some faint
memorials of those heathen times, and of the accommodating spirit of the
earliest Christian missionaries. To such an origin is ascribed the
salutation of the orchards at Christmas, already referred to: the
mistletoe of the apple was not so sacred as that of the oak, but neither
was it despicable. And the bonfires of St. John's Eve were said to tell
of the days when the cromlechs of Cam Brey were surrounded by a mystic
grove, and the officiating priests hurried their human victims through
purifying flames to the blood-stained altar.
Nor was the land less indebted for romantic associations to those
fabulous historians, who peopled Britain with royalty, beauty, chivalry,
and faery, and assigned to Cornwall the honour of producing the renowned
Sir Tristan. Not a few hours were whiled away at Trevethlan Castle in
discoursing of their marvellous adventures, their strange wandering
towns of Camelot and Caerleon, and the general phantasmagoric character
of their narratives. They plotted out the kingdom in an imaginary map,
and whatever scenery they required, they regarded as existing and well
known. Did they want a lake, from whence should issue a hand bearing a
magic sword, they troubled not themselves with any mention of its
landmarks: a forest perilous arose wherever they willed: a bridge to be
defended, and therefore a stream, was always ready in the champion's
path: you were introduced to a fountain as if you had drunk at it all
your life. Undoubting faith in their own story was one of their most
powerful fascinations: it transferred itself to their hearers, and a
tale, which modern exactness would make incoherent and incredible,
became credible from its very indistinctness. The Round Table romances
present us with a fantastic Britain, which we may conceive to be still
in being, like the paradise of Irem in the desert of Aden, and which the
second-sight of imagination may yet conjure up in all its pristine
glory.
Many of those old tomes, quartos and folios, whose florid binding
attested their high estimation by early possessors, enriched the shelves
of the castle library; and few of its proprietors were deterred from
exploring their contents, by the mystic black-letter and antiquated
French in which the stories were told. Under Polydore's guidance,
Randolph and Helen had become acquainted with much of this legendary
lore; and even their father sometimes deigned to take part in a
conversation arising out of it.
But it was in vain now that Helen, in the hope of chasing away the cloud
which hung continually upon her brother's brow, strove to recall his
attention to these studies of the old time. The down had been brushed
from the butterfly's wing. She strolled with him along the beach, and
she sat with him in Merlin's Cave, in spite of the wintry weather; but
it was impossible to bring back the mood in which he listened to
"Trevethlan's farewell," on the eve of their departure for London. He
was fond of roaming through the desolate state rooms, rapt in deep
meditation, and only roused when the wind, rushing through some crevice,
waved the tapestry of the walls with a rustling sound, and made the dim
figures portrayed upon it seem for a moment endued with life. Sometimes
he would be found in the picture-gallery, gazing earnestly on the
portrait of his father, and seeming, by the expression of his
countenance, eager to evoke from the mimic lips an answer to some
question which was struggling in his breast. His old teacher noted his
moodiness with anxiety, but in silence, and made no attempt to forestall
the explanation, which he felt sure must come of itself before long.