.. -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 54463
   :PG.Title: John Herring, Volume 1 (of 3)
   :PG.Released: 2017-03-31
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: Sabine Baring-Gould
   :DC.Title: John Herring, Volume 1 (of 3)
              A West of England Romance
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1883
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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JOHN HERRING, VOLUME 1 (OF 3)
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      JOHN HERRING

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      *A WEST OF ENGLAND ROMANCE*

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      BY SABINE BARING-GOULD

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      AUTHOR OF 'MEHALAH'

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      IN THREE VOLUMES

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      VOL. \I.

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      LONDON
      SMITH, ELDER, & CO, 15 WATERLOO PLACE
      1883

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      [All rights reserved]

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   PREFACE.

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   (*ADDRESSED TO THOSE WHO ARE NOT OF
   THE WEST COUNTRY.*)

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In a tale of the West of England in which
are introduced some of the lowest types of
rustic humanity to be found there, it is
impossible to avoid the use of the local dialect.
This dialect has, however, been modified, as
much as possible to render it intelligible
without transforming it into the language of the
schools.  The vulgar dialect is regardless of
gender and reckless in the use of cases.  A cow
is he, and a tom-cat wags her tail.  At a trial
in Exeter, at the Assizes, a man was charged
with the murder of his wife, a woman with
an aggravating tongue.  The jury found a
verdict of 'Not Guilty' against the clearest
evidence, and, when the Judge expressed his
surprise, 'Ah, your lordship,' said the
foreman in explanation, 'us ain't a-going to
hang he for the likes of she.'  It is perhaps
necessary to explain that 'the Cobbledicks'
are no creation of the imagination—the clan
has only been dispersed of recent years; the
old man who lived in a cyder-cask is dead,
but he was alive ten years ago.  The clan
was literally one of half-naked savages.

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   CONTENTS

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   OF

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   THE FIRST VOLUME

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   CHAPTER

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I.  `The Cobbledicks`_
II.  `What the Cask Did`_
III.  `West Wyke`_
IV.  `Mirelle`_
V.  `The Owl's Nest`_
VI.  `That Old Tramplara`_
VII.  `That Young Tramplara`_
VIII.  `Cicely`_
IX.  `Dolbeare`_
X.  `A Musical Walking-Stick`_
XI.  `The Giant's Table`_
XII.  `Ophir`_
XIII.  `Captain Trecarrel`_
XIV.  `Under The Hearth`_
XV.  `Eheu, Bubones!`_
XVI.  `Trustee not Executor`_
XVII.  `In the Summer-House`_
XVIII.  `Salting a Mine`_
XIX.  `Two Strings to one Bow`_
XX.  `Grinding Gold`_





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.. _`THE COBBLEDICKS`:

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   JOHN HERRING.

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   CHAPTER I.

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   THE COBBLEDICKS.

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'Log!' said the voice of Cobbledick the Old
from a cyder cask.

'I be a logging like the blue blazes,'
answered Cobbledick the younger.

Then a dry and dirty hand emerged from
the cask, and with a gorse bush struck at the
girl—that is, at Cobbledick the younger.  She
evaded the blow.

'Be quiet, vaither, or I won't log no more!'

'You won't?' with a horrible curse; 'then
I'll make you, if I whacks and whacks till you
be all over blood and prickles.  There, I will,
I swear.  Glory rallaluley!'

On a spur of Dartmoor that struck out
into the proximity of cultivated land, stood a
cromlech or dolmen—a rude monument of a
lost race, reared of granite slabs.  This spur
of moor was a continuation or buttress of
Gosdon Beacon, which, next to Yestor, is the
highest point attained by Dartmoor, and is
indeed the second highest mountain in the south
of England.

The dolmen was composed of four great
slabs of granite set on edge, two parallel to
the other two, with a fifth stone closing one
end.  The whole five supported an enormous
quoit or block, plain on the nether surface,
but unshaped above.  Local antiquaries,
pretending to knowledge, but actually ignorant,
called this erection a Druid altar, and pointed
to a sort of basin on the top formed by the
weather, with a channel from it to the edge,
and this they asserted was a receptacle for the
blood of human victims, and a means of
lustration for those who stood below.  Other
antiquaries, knowing a great deal, and not ashamed
to confess ignorance where knowledge ended
and guesswork began, said simply that the
monument belonged to prehistoric times, and
that they neither knew who had built it, nor
for what purpose it was raised.  The country
folk called it the 'Giant's Table.'

On the lee side of this cromlech was a
cyder cask, tethered to the cromlech by a
piece of cord passed through the bung-hole,
and attached to a stout stick within the
monument, entering between the interstices of the
blocks.

In this cask lived an old man, named
Grizzly Cobbledick by his neighbours.  He
had lived in the cask many years.

Some miles away, to the north, in another
parish, that of Nymet, lived the parent stock
from which he sprung, in an old tumble-down
cottage, sans windows, sans doors, sans
chimney, sans floors, sans everything save the
'cob'—that is, mud walls—and the ragged
roof of thatch.

This hovel was what the Germans would
call the 'Stamm-burg' of the Cobbledicks.
That is to say, it was the ancestral cradle of
the race; it was also the hive in which they
continued to dwell.  They lived there, apart
from their fellows, with whom they held no
communication, never entering a village nor
dealing at any shop, never seen at market or
merry-making, least of all at church.

Their unsociable habits went further.  They
allowed no one to invade their hovel and pry
into their mode of living.  If any of them saw
a person stand still near the house to
observe it, or to watch a Cobbledick at his
work or his play, a yelp called the whole clan
together, and with howls and curses they set on
the inquisitive visitor, pelting him with stones,
and flinging sticks at his head, so that he was
glad to beat a retreat.

The Cobbledicks were half-naked savages.
They wore, for warmth not for decency, some
wretched rags.  When the scanty supply of
garments failed entirely, then the whole crew
dispersed over the country, hunting by moonlight
for a fresh supply; they stole whatever
came in their way that could be converted
into covering to clothe their nakedness.
Anything served—a potato-sack or a flour-bag.
One or other would change into coat
or gown by making in it slits for head and arms.

Once a farmer lost an oilcloth stack-covering.
It was deliberately taken off his stack
one rainy night before he had thatched his
wheat.  He recognised it torn up and utilised
as curtains to the open holes that served as
windows to Cobbledick Castle.  The farmer
prosecuted, but first a rick and then a stack
was burned, and he was glad to stay proceedings
and suffer the savages to keep his oilcloth,
fearing for the thatch of his farmhouse,
and himself, his wife and babes beneath it.

When the neighbourhood was aware that
the Cobbledicks ran short of raiment, old
worn garments were purposely left out at
night on hedges for their use.

The migration of Grizzly Cobbledick to
the parish of South Tawton took place in this
wise.  It marked an epoch in the history of
the race.  The Cobbledicks had not arrived
at that stage of civilisation in which property
becomes personal.  Their views as to property
were undeveloped.  The world belonged in
part to the Cobbledicks, and the rest did not.
What belonged to the Cobbledicks belonged
to the family, not to any individual in the
family.  They owned land, reclaimed from the
waste long ago, clay land overgrown with
rushes, partly bog; but this land was not the
property of this Cobbledick or that, male or
female, old or young, it belonged to all, on
the principle of the Russian mir.  Not only
so, but the utensils of the house and of the
farm were common, so also were the garments.
The pipkin cooked for the whole family, and
the hoe raised the potatoes for all to eat.  The
pipkin was not private property when Poll
stirred it, the hoe was not private property
when Dick worked with it, and the potato-sack
was not owned by him or by her who
wore it.  If, by any chance, it were taken off,
it thereby fell back into the common store.

The Cobbledicks never had been civilised.
They were autochthones.  The oldest inhabitant
of Nymet remembered them.  They did
not increase much, but they did not die out.
Their congeners, named the Gubbins, lived in
the Lydford glens in Charles the First's reign,
when a poet thus described them:—

   |  And near hereto's the Gubbins' cave,
   |  A people that no knowledge have
   |      Of law of God or men;
   |  Whom Cæsar never yet subdued,
   |  Who've lawless lived, of manners rude,
   |      All savage in their den.

   |  By whom, if any pass that way,
   |  He dares not the least time to stay,
   |      For presently they howl;
   |  Upon which signal they do muster
   |  Their naked forces in a cluster,
   |      Led forth by Roger Howle.
   |

One night a star fell from heaven and
descended into the hovel of the Cobbledicks
through the hole in the roof which allowed
the smoke of the communal fire to ascend;
and this spark sank into the heart of Old
Grizzly—he was not Old Grizzly then.  What
his name was then in the clan never transpired.

That divine spark conveyed to this particular
Cobbledick the idea of personal property.
This idea, once conceived, becomes to the
social body what a backbone is to the physical
organism.  There is all the difference in social
conditions between those who have accepted
personal property and those who have not
arrived at it, that exists between vertebrate
animals and invertebrate polypi.

Cobbledick rose from his lair by the fire
where he had been snoring, caught up a female
for whom he had long been sighing, stuffed a
wisp of hay into her mouth to prevent her
from alarming the sleepers, threw her over his
shoulder, and strode out of the Cobbledick
hovel.

The dispersion at Babel was caused by the
discovery of the possessive pronouns.

After having carried his burden beyond
earshot, Cobbledick set her down, pulled the
plug out of her mouth, and said, 'If you
holler, I'll smash your head.  So hold thee
gab and come along of I.'

The female was overawed into submission,
and she paddled along at his side.

When day broke they found themselves on
a shoulder of down in close proximity to
Cosdon.  Rambling over the moor, the woman
hopping and squealing as she touched the
gorse with her bare legs, they lighted on the
grey cromlech, and the male, curling his
tongue in his mouth, produced a loud cluck.
The female, as an imitative animal, clucked
responsive.  'Bags!' said Cobbledick male,
and by this simple formula he had claimed
the cromlech as personal property to himself,
his heirs and assigns.

The idea of property had swelled to large
dimensions in his heart since he had first
admitted it.  The tract of moor was at that
time—we are speaking of seventy years
ago—wholly uninclosed.  Since that date many
encroachments have been made, and much of
the furzy waste placed under cultivation.

Xenophon opens his 'Anabasis' with the
words, 'The Greeks began it.'  In the record
of the conquest and reclamation of the moor
it stands written, 'The Cobbledicks began it.'

First they filled up the interstices between
the blocks of granite of the dolmen with turf
and moss, then they strewed the floor with
bracken, and made bed and seat of heather.
Then they marked out a portion of the
moor, collected stones from off the surface
with infinite labour, and fenced it round with
these stones set as a dry wall.  This they
tilled, and, their appetite for property growing,
they inclosed more.  The tillage was rude,
but then it was the beginning of tillage to
the whole Cobbledick race.  It took that race
six thousand years to arrive at a crooked stick
with Mrs. Grizzly dragging it, and Mr. Grizzly
driving with a switch, and his weight resting
on the tail of the simple plough.  When he
took his weight off, to quicken the motions of
Mrs. Grizzly with the switch, the plough levered
out of the ground, she fell, and he also was
thrown forward on his nose.  When Grizzly
left the ancestral seat, he carried with him,
in addition to a woman, two ferrets in a bag,
and a sharp flintstone.  With the ferrets he
caught rabbits, and with the stone he flayed
them.  Grizzly was a neolithic man.

On their first taking possession of the
cromlech, Grizzly fought his wife for the sack
she wore.  He wanted to utilise it as a screen
for the entrance.  The door was to the south,
but the south wind is a rainy wind and must
be shut out.

Mrs. Grizzly resisted, for the same heavenly
spark that had brought to him the idea of
appropriating one woman as wife, had carried
to her also the idea of keeping as her own, her
very own, the one potato-sack in which she
walked and worked and slept.

This resistance on her part stimulated
invention on his.  He devised a screen of wattles
and heather for the door, and this proved a
better shelter than any sack could have made.
Thus we see how the sense of property quickens
invention.  The heavenly spark never expired
in the breasts of the Cobbledicks; they felt no
desire, like the Apostles of old and reformers
of the present day, to revert to the conditions
from which they had escaped.  The spark
burned brighter, it demanded fuel.  They
proceeded to obtain a cow.  How they
procured it nobody knew, though all suspected.
The Cobbledicks disappeared from Tawton
parish for several days.  When they reappeared
they were driving a cow before them down
the flanks of Cosdon.  Had they fished her
out of the swamps round Cranmere pool? or
had they gone far, far beyond, and acquired
her in the South Hams, and driven her across
the moor, leaving no traces in the spongy soil
and on the blooming heather whereby they
might be traced, in the event of those from
whom she had been acquired disputing their
right to make off with her?

But if this latter were the case, what labour
and perseverance it must have cost them to
convey a cow across brawling torrents, over
granite-strewn mountains, and through
treacherous bogs!

This was the way of the Cobbledicks.
When they wanted anything, they went
after it over the moor.  Beyond was El
Dorado, between the pathless waste, a barrier
forbidding pursuit.  They never robbed their
neighbours of anything beyond turnips and
field potatoes.  They had made sufficient
advance along the path of social culture to
recognise a sort of fellowship with their
neighbours, and to respect the property of near
neighbours.  But this sense of fellowship did
not extend beyond the moor.  On the other
side was a sea full of fish, into which whoever
would might dip his net.

One day the female Cobbledick became
a mother, and Grizzly a father.

Soon after this the wife died.  Grizzly dug
a hole in the floor of the cromlech, just under
where the fire burned, and laid her there.

She was pleased, when alive, to sit over
the red ashes, spreading out her toes, and
laughing at the yellow flames.  Under the
hearthstone she should lie, with her face to
the ashes, and her toes turned to the blaze.
The Cobbledick ideas were growing.  The
first dawn of that sentiment which in another
generation might flower into poetry had
appeared in Grizzly's mind.

But the experiment was not happy.  At
night, as Grizzly slept, he thought he saw
the old woman working her way up out of
the ground, throwing the earth forth like a
mole, and then peering at him from a corner.
After that she dived again and disappeared.
Presently he felt her heave the earth under
him where he lay, and roll him over, so that
he could not sleep.  He was very angry, and
he got a great piece of granite and beat the
floor hard with it.  But this was of no avail.
Next night the old woman was heard scratching
with her nails at the bases of the granite
slabs.  Once she had been given a hunch of
saffron cake by a farmer's wife, and she had
picked all the currants out and eaten them,
before attacking the substance.  She was now
at work on the granite, picking out the hornblend,
mistaking the black grains for currants.
'Her'll do with these great stones as her did
with the cake,' said Grizzly; 'her got that
all crumbled with hunting the currants, and
her'll treat the stones same way, and bring
the table down on our heads.'

After that he disappeared for three days,
and when he returned he was rolling a
cyder-cask before him down Cosdon.  This cask he
brought alongside of the cromlech, and
attached it to the old house in the manner
described.  He lined it with fern, and retired
into it, along with the child, at night.  He
would no longer sleep in the stone mansion
that was being undermined by the dead wife.
He did not object to occupy it by day; and
when he ate, he always threw some crumbs or
bits of meat into the fire, to satisfy the
cravings of the old woman.  He supposed that she
picked at the stones because she was hungry.

The child slept with him in the cyder-cask
till she grew too big, and made it uncomfortable
for her father.  One night he had
cramp in his leg, and kicked out, and kicked
her forth, head over heels; then he bade her
go for the future to the old house, and sleep
there and be darned, glory rallaluley.
Occasionally, in spring, when all is waxing and
wanton, the Methodists held revival meetings
on the down, and Old Grizzly was accustomed
then to prowl about the outskirts of the assembly,
listening to the preachers, and to the hymns
and rhapsodical outcries of the converted.
These camp meetings reminded him in some
particulars of the ways of the primitive Cobbledicks.
The new feature, unfamiliar to him, was
the association of religion with these orgies.

From such meetings Grizzly had picked
up a few cant expressions which he used for
rounding his sentences without in the least
understanding their import.  If he began a
sentence with a curse, he finished it with a
hallelujah, much as a grocer, having put an
iron weight into one scale, heaps the other
with sugar till the balance is complete.

Cobbledick father and daughter were not
in the unseemly condition of nudity affected
by their relatives at Nymet.  These latter so
far resembled Adam and Eve in the period of
man's innocency that they were naked and were
not ashamed, but with the sense of personal
property came the sense also of self-respect.
The land on which Grizzly and his wife
squatted belonged to the manor of West Wyke,
of which the Battishills were lords, and the
Squire took care that his tenants should not go
unprovided with old clothes.  The Battishills
were very poor, and wore their garments till
the last moment consonant with respectability;
then they passed them on to the squatters,
whom they made, if not respectable, at least
decent.

'Log!' screamed the old man from the cask.

'I be a logging[1] like the blue blazes,'
answered the girl, and she spoke the truth.

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[1] To '*log*' is to rock.  Thus a logan stone
is a rocking stone,
and a woman logs her baby in its cradle.

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She was seated with her back to one of the
great stones of the 'Giant's Table,' with a bare
foot resting on the cask on each side of the
restraining rope.  She worked her feet
alternately, so as to produce a vibratory motion
in the barrel from left to right.  The old man
liked being rocked to sleep; he exacted the
task of his daughter: and only when he began
to snore and ceased to swear, dare Joyce
Cobbledick desist from logging and retire to her
own lair.

The evening had fallen.  The sun was set,
but a haze of light hung like a warm hoar frost
over the head of Cosdon, though darkness had
settled down in the valleys, and the village of
Zeal began to twinkle out of all its windows.

The air was still.  The rush of the stream
over the granite masses that choked its course
was the only sound audible, save the fretting
of the cask on the turf in its oscillations.

The girl was tired, and one of her feet
was bleeding.  She had cut it with a sharp
stone that day.

Joyce Cobbledick was aged eighteen.  She
was a tall, well-built girl, with bright colour,
a low forehead, and dark eyes.  Her hair was
as uncombed and uncared for as the mane of
a moorland pony.  It was dark brown.  Her
jaws were heavy and her cheek-bones high,
like those of her ancestry.  There was some
beauty about her—the beauty of a fine animal;
she was perfectly supple in every limb,
admirably proportioned, easy and even graceful
in her movements, unrestrained by shoes and
cumbrous clothing.  Her face was even fine,
but there was nothing like intelligence
illumining her dark eyes.

She wore a thin print gown, and that
was in tatters from her knees by scrambling
through hedges to steal turnips, and brushing
through gorse brakes after rabbits.

Presently the girl intermitted her trampling
movement, believing the old man to be
asleep.

The stars were coming out.  The one street
of Zeal, lying between rich meadows and
wood, was like a necklace of diamonds
embedded in black velvet.

Joyce leaned forwards to listen if her
father were snoring.  All was still in the
cask, preternaturally still.

She bent her head lower.  Then, suddenly,
with a roar, 'Darn your eyes, glory
rallaluley!' an old grey, frowzy head and face
shot out of the barrel, and with it a long arm.
A heavy blow of the furze bush fell across
the girl's head and cheek, making her cry out
with pain.

She recovered her position in a moment,
and dashed her feet together savagely at the
cask.  The violence of the action was more
than the cord could endure, already fretted
against the rugged edges of the granite blocks.
It snapped, and in a moment the cask was
driven forward by the impetus of Joyce's
angry kick.  It rolled over and over, ran
down a bank, then along an incline of smooth
turf, dashed against a stone which somewhat
diverted its course, bounded into the high
road, where it shot forth its tenant, and
continued its course in rapid revolutions down
the road that here ascended from the valley.
Joyce uttered a cry, sprang to her feet, and
ran after the rolling barrel towards the highway,
and there saw her father lying stretched
across the road, stunned and speechless.





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.. _`WHAT THE CASK DID`:

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   CHAPTER II.


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   WHAT THE CASK DID.

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As Joyce stood on the bank about to leap
down into the road to her father's assistance,
she was arrested by a sight calculated to fill
her with dismay.  A chaise drawn by a pair
of horses was approaching from the direction
of Okehampton at a brisk pace.  The cask
was in full career down the road, gaining
velocity as it rolled.  A curve hid it from the
postillion, and Joyce stood breathless, powerless
to warn the post-boy or arrest the cask,
watching for the result.

The boy was in spirits; he cracked his
whip, and stimulated the horses—fresh from
the stable at Okehampton—to take the hill in
style.  The cask was whirling on.  Then it
reached the sweep in the road, and it went
direct against the bank, danced light-heartedly
up it, reeled back, swung itself round and shot
straight down the road at the horses.  In
another moment it was on them, leaping
at them like a tiger at the throat of his prey.

What followed was so sudden, and the
light was so imperfect, that Joyce could not
quite make out what she saw.  She heard a
loud cry from the post-boy, who was thrown.
Whether one of the horses went down and
floundered to his feet again she was not sure;
she believed it was so.  Next moment the
chaise was off the road, the two frightened
animals tearing away with it over the
common.  Forgetful of her father in the excitement
of the spectacle and in dread of the final
catastrophe, Joyce ran after the carriage, which
she saw bounding over heaps of peat that had
been cut and laid to dry, lurching into
hollows, jolting over tufts of gorse, and jarring
against stones.

Then she saw against the light of the
horizon the figure of a man emerging from
the window of the chaise, trying to open the
door.  Almost simultaneously the wheel of
the carriage struck a huge block of granite,
and in an instant the chaise was thrown on
one side, the horses were kicking furiously,
and the whole converted into a wreck of living
beasts and struggling men and splintered
fragments of carriage.

'Ho, heigh! stay them osses,' yelled the
post-boy, who had picked himself up and was
running over the down.  'Sit on their necks;
kip 'em down.'

Joyce ran also, and reached the spot soon
after him.

The postillion went straight at the horses,
regardless of everything else, and cut their
traces; whereupon they ran off, and he
careered in full pursuit after them.

'Leave the beasts alone, boy,' shouted a
young man who had disengaged himself from
the shattered carriage, and was helping out a
young lady.  'Leave the beasts and come here.'

'No, no, sir!  The osses fust.  Them's
my concern.'  And away went the boy.

'Here, girl,' said the same young man to
Joyce, as she came up; 'help me.'  He signed
to her what to do, to raise a man who was
lying motionless among the fragments of the
carriage, to carry him a little distance, and
lay him on the turf at full length.

'Stay by him whilst I go for the young lady.'

Joyce nodded.

The young lady was seated on the rock
that had upset the carriage.

'What frightened the horses?' she asked.

'I do not know.  Are you hurt?'

'My foot is sprained.  I cannot walk; but
no bones are broken, of that I have satisfied
myself.  How goes my father?'

'He is seriously injured.'

'He did wrong to try and open the door.
The carriage must have fallen over on him.'

'Will you remain here whilst I go back to him?

'Certainly.  The moss is soft as a cushion
on this stone.'

'Your father, I fear, is seriously hurt.  As
you say, he was leaning out of the window
when the coach turned over, and it went down
on the side where he was.'

'Bring me my cloak from the chaise.  It
is chilly, and the spot is desolate.  Il me
donne les frissons.'  She spoke with
wonderful composure.  She might have been on a
picnic, and the dish with the chicken pie
broken; yet she had narrowly escaped death
herself, and her father was lying dead a few
feet from her.  The young man looked at her
face, a little surprised at her perfect coolness.
The face was wax-like, of transparent
whiteness; there was no colour in it.  But then
she was cold and possibly frightened, though
betraying no fear in her manner.  Her features
were regular and of extraordinary beauty.
Her eyes were large and the lashes long; her
hair abundant and black.  Of emotion in her
face there was none.

'I remember my father said he had suffered
from the rheumatism.  Pray take him
from off the grass.'  The young man thought to
himself, 'He will never suffer from that more;'
but he made no answer.  He went back to the
man lying on the turf, knelt over him, and
examined him.  Joyce stood by with arms
folded.

'Is there any house near to which this
gentleman could be removed?  he asked.

'West Wyke,' answered Joyce.

'Where is that?'

She made a motion with her chin,
indicating the direction.

'And is there a gate to be had on which I
can lay him?'

She jerked her chin again.

'Now, sir,' said the post-boy, coming up,
'I've got the osses quiet, what can I do for
you?'

'This gentleman must be removed at once
on a hurdle or gate.  Run and bring me one.'

'Be he hurted cruel bad?' asked the boy.

'He is dead.'

'Deary me!' exclaimed the post-boy.
'What a mussy it weren't one of the osses.
Make us truly thankful.  I'll get you a gate.'

'I'll help you,' said Joyce.  'You don't
look a sort to carry a gate.  Do you call
yourself a man or a rat?'

Presently the two returned with a hurdle;
that is to say, Joyce was carrying one on her
head, casting occasionally a contemptuous
glance at the dapper little fellow at her side.

'Is my father able to speak yet?' asked
the lady.

'No,' answered the young man.  'Do not
be alarmed.  We must carry him to a house,
where he can be put to bed, and then we will
return for you.  Do you mind being left
alone, or can you walk as far as to the house?'

'I have already told you that I cannot
walk.  You are forgetful, monsieur.'

'Then this girl will remain with you till
we return.'

'Very well.  If she likes to remain she
may remain.  It is her affair.'

The young lady spoke with a foreign—a
French accent, which was pretty.  Indeed,
there was a foreign grace in her attitudes, and
taste in her dress, which showed that, if an
Englishwoman, she must have lived a great
deal in France.

The gentleman returned to Joyce; he was
a tall and fine young man, with dark hair and
moustache and frank blue eyes.

'Will you remain here with the lady while
we go on to the house?'

Joyce nodded and went over to the rock
on which the young lady was seated.  She
planted herself before her.

'The 'ouse to which we must carry the
gent be yonder,' said the post-boy.  'I seed
him as I went for the gate.'

'Do not be alarmed if we carry your father.'

'I shall not be alarmed.'

Then the post-boy going before and the
young gentleman following, they proceeded
very gently to carry the motionless form in
the direction of West Wyke.

Joyce remained with the young lady; she
studied her with great attention from head to
foot.  The sky was clear, and there was still
much light entangled in the upper atmosphere.
The whole of the north was full of silvery
twilight.

'I niver seed a born leddy afore so close,'
said Joyce.

'I am a born lady,' replied the other,
haughtily.

'Did I say you wasn't?  Have you any
other rags on but what I sees?'

'Rags!' indignantly.  'What do you mean, girl?'

'Look here,' said Joyce, 'I hasn't.  Fust
comes the gown, and then comes I.  Down in
the good land to Zeal and Tawton, where the
lanes be cut deep, I seed there be nethermost
hard rock, then over that comes shellat, then
a sort of gravelly trade (stuff), then a top o'
that meat airth; and over all, like the gown,
the waving green grass.  Up here on the
moor t'ain't so.  There's the granite and then
the moss, and if you scrats through the moss
you comes right on and on to the stone.  That
be like us as lives up here, vaither and I, but
wi' the quality it be different, as lives in lew
(sheltered) places; they has more coverings
nor us, night and day, I reckon.'

'You have no more clothes on you than
that thin gown?'

'No, us be like moor rock, fust the moss,
then the stone.'

'Are you begging?'

'I never axes for naught; what I wants I takes.'

The lady shivered and drew back on her
seat.  She was disgusted with the appearance,
and offended at the rudeness of the girl.

'Why don't clothes grow on our backs,
thick and warm as the wool on sheep, the fur on
rabbits, and the moss on moorstones?'Twould
come handier,' observed Joyce Cobbledick.

The lady made no reply.

'Wot's that man, that young man as spoke
to you and I?' asked Joyce.

'I do not know his name.'

'He don't belong to you?'

'Most certainly not,' with a contemptuous shrug.

'Where did you get mun?'

'He is travelling with us—that is all.
He joined my father in taking a chaise from
Launceston.'

'Why didn't y' travel by the mail-coach?
Her goes by ivery day.'

'The coach had left Launceston when
we arrived there from Falmouth, so we
engaged a chaise.  My father was in haste to
reach Exeter, and that person joined us.  I
do not know his name, neither do I care.
My father satisfied himself, I presume, of his
respectability.  That is all.'

'Where do'y come from, mistress?  Over
t'other side of the moor I reckon.'

'I come from France.'

Joyce was puzzled.  Her geographical
knowledge was too limited for her to know of
France.

'I reckon that be a long way off, t'other
side o' Prince's Town and the prisons, surely.
Be there savages in them parts?'

'Savages! certainly not.'

'There be here.  I be one.  I be a Cobbledick,
and the Cobbledicks be all savages.
But vaither and I be better nor the rest out
Nymet.  They be savages and no mistake.'

'I have no doubt of it.'

'I say, young lady, is that man as they
carried on the gate to West Wyke your
vaither?'

'He is my father.'

'Did he bang you about much?  Did he
whack you often wi' a bunch of vuzz?  Not
but you'd mind over much wi' all them pack
o' clothes to your back.'

'Certainly not.'

'Did you have to rock him to sleep o'
nights in a barril?'

'No.'

'Mebbe you niver had much dodging out
of the way of the stones he throwed at your head.'

'Of course not.'

'My old vaither doth all these to me.
He whacks me wi' brimmles and vuzz, and
he throws turves and stones at me, and I has
to rock mun every night or he wouldn't sleep
a wink.  Of all the proper blaggards in the
world there ain't an ekal to vaither.  But I
reckon vaithers is vaithers all the world over.
They be all like oaksticks, some crookeder
nor others, but none straight.  You don't
mind over much what has happened to yours?'

The young lady only imperfectly understood
the girl, owing to the rudeness of her
speech and her strong provincial brogue.

'There be my old vaither rolled out of
his barril right across the high road, and I
don't know if he've a broke his neck or no;
and I don't kear hover much, no more nor
you does because your vaither ha' gone and
done the same.'

'What do you mean, girl?'

'I mean what I sez.  I know what broke
necks mean.  I ha' broke the necks o' rabbits
scores and scores o' times.  Him's just the
same, ivery bit and croome.'

The young lady shuddered.  She did not
cry, but her breath caught in her throat.

'Mon Dieu!  Ce n'est pas vrai!  Comme
cette fille me fait peur!'

'What be that jabber about?  You oughtn't
to mind.'

'For the love of God, girl, do not frighten
me.  It is wicked—it is cruel.  It is not true.'

'Not true!' echoed Joyce; 'I knows it
be.  I knows a broke neck in a man as in a
rabbit.'

'Be quiet.  If you want money, *en voilà*,
take and leave me tranquil.'

Joyce struck her hand aside.

'What'll you do wi' he now?  Mother
be poked under the hearthstone, where the
fire can warm her.  But when Old Grizzly
goes, I shan't put he along o' mother.  He
can't sleep under the table now, and her'll
lead'n a life of it, if he be put under the
hearthstone along of she.  Her niver worrits
me, but her don't leave old vaither alone not
one minnit of nights.  Her does it because he
knacked her, and beat her scores and scores o'
times when her were alive.  Now her thinks
her turn be come.  But her's got no vice in
her.  It be all play, only vaither be that
crabbed he don't put up wi' it.  When Old
Grizzly goes, I'll up wi' his heels and send
him into a bog once for all.  He'll be wet
and cold there I reckon, and the moss grows
so thick over them quaking bogs, that once in
there be no getting out, no more than when
you're gone under the ice on Rayborough
Pool.  Then he'll leave me in peace I reckon.'

'You will do that, you long cripple
(viper), you!' screamed the old man, who
had overheard the arrangements planned for
his interment, and disapproved of them.
'You will do that!'  He rushed on Joyce
from behind, raining furious blows on her
with his fists.  'You will stog me in a bog,
will'y?  I'll put you in fust, curs'd
ever-lasting rallaluley if I don't.' The old man
yelled with fury.  He stepped backwards and
leaped at Joyce, and beat and swore.

The young lady was frightened, and cried
out for help.  The horrible old man seemed
to her to be some superhuman apparition
rising out of the moor soil—a vampyre, a
ghoul from a cairn, come to destroy the
wretched girl before her.

'You chuck down thicky (that) stone,
vaither?' cried Joyce, as he stooped and took
up a piece of granite in both hands.

'I won't, I won't.  I'll mash you first,
you unnat'ral varmint!  You nigh upon
killed me by rolling me over and over in the
cask, and shan't I nigh upon do the same by
you?  Glory rallaluley, blast me blue!'

Joyce was unquestionably stronger than
old Cobbledick, and might have disarmed
him, but the divine spark had been
communicated to her; it flickered faintly in her
dim soul, and a dumb instinct forbade her
raising her hand against her father.  She had
borne his brutality for many a year, and had
not resented it.  She was his child, for him
to deal with as he thought best.  The sense
of property had become strongly rooted in
the minds of this branch of the Cobble dicks,
and as forces are correlated, and heat, and
light, and electricity, and sound are but the
same force acting in different ways, so was it
with the sense of possession.  In the breast
of Joyce it had transformed itself into a
consciousness of filial duty.

Joyce put up her hand to ward off the blow.

Then the young man who had carried the
injured gentleman away arrived, running up,
summoned by the cries, and with one stroke
of the stick he held in his hand, he made the
old man drop the stone.

'In another moment he would have beaten
out your brains,' said he, panting.

'I reckon he would,' observed Joyce.

The old man howled with pain, dancing
about holding his arm where struck.

'Who are you?  What are you doing
here?' asked the gentleman.

'Never you heed he,' said Joyce.  'Hers
old vaither.'

'Help me away from this horrible place,'
entreated the lady: 'I have fallen among
savages in a dreadful wilderness.  Am I in
England, in Europe—or is this the wilds of
Northern Canada?'

'She is lame,' said the young man to
Joyce.  'Assist me in conveying her to the
house yonder.'

Joyce put herself submissively on one side.

'How is my father?' asked the young lady.

'No better,' he replied.

'This strange girl tells me he has broken
his neck.'

He was silent.  He could not tell her the
truth.  It must be broken gently to her.

'I should wish to know if it be so.'

'Let us hope for the best.  I have sent
the post-boy to Okehampton for a doctor.
He will know better than I what is the matter,
and what must be done.'

'But you can surely tell me whether he
be alive or dead.'

'He is still unconscious.'

'I know he be dead,' said Joyce roughly.
'What's a broke is a broke, and his neck be
broke as sure as a bit o' cloam.  I told her so.'

'Is he dead?' again asked the young lady.

She was now being carried to the house.
There was no tremor in the arms that rested
on the shoulders of her bearers.

'I asked you a simple question.  It is
unmannerly to refuse an answer.'

'I believe he is dead,' said he with an effort.

'I am very sorry,' was her calm reply.

The young man stopped; the girl Joyce
stopped also.  The twilight from the north-west
was full on the white lovely face; there
was no expression of distress on it, none of
grief—not a trace of a tear in her large dark
eyes.

'Why do you not go on?  I said I am very
sorry, naturally.  He was my father.  What
else should I say?'





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.. _`WEST WYKE`:

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   CHAPTER III.


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   WEST WYKE.

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The young man and Joyce conveyed the lady
between them under a low embattled gateway
into a small yard or garden—it was too
dark to distinguish which—and halted in the
porch of a house.

Joyce said: 'Stay, I go no vurder.  I niver
ha' been inside a house and under hellens
(slates) afore, and I bain't a going now.'

The door opened, and a blaze of ruddy
light fell on them.  A young lady had opened
to admit them.

'There be Miss Cicely Battishill,' said
Joyce.  'Sure her will take my place once
for all.'

'Another step more, girl,' said the young
man to Joyce, 'and our burden is in a chair.'

'Why do'y call me a gurl?' asked Joyce.
'I bain't a gurl, I be a maiden.  There be
maidens in these parts and no gurls.  I
dunnow, but the leddy I been a helping may
be a girl; hers different from I, I be a
maiden.'

'Never mind distinctions,' said the young
man, impatiently.  'Go on another step.'

'No, I'll put my head under no hellens.
I be a savage,' said Joyce, obstinately.  'You
go on yourself, and get Miss Cicely to help.'

'I will take your place, Joyce,' said the
young lady at the door; and she assisted the
strange pale girl to come in.

The young man looked back over his
shoulder, and said, 'Thanks for your help as
far as it went, maiden.'

Joyce stood without, the red light on her,
with the dark garden, the moor, and the
night sky behind, her strange face appearing
even handsome in the glow, and the flicker
reflected in her dull eyes.

The figure struck the young man with an
evanescent sense of pity.  She seemed an
outcast—desolate, friendless.

Then the door closed, and the light was
cut off.  But Joyce did not leave.  She stood
in the porch with her arms folded looking
over the black garden wall at the wild, blacker
moor beyond, over which the wind was soughing.
She was lost in a day-dream unintelligible
to herself.

The light from the window streaked the
garden and fell on an orange lily that stood
out luminous and fiery against the inky
background of foliage and wall.  The stars were
coming out in the sky.  Joyce remained
motionless, with her eyes on the fiery flower.

In the meantime the pale young lady was
conveyed to a seat by the fire.  The porch
door opened immediately into the hall or
parlour.  This was a small low room,
irregularly built, with a bay in which was the
window.  It was so small that with twenty
people within it would be crowded
inconveniently; it was so low that a tall man could
touch the ceiling.

The hall was panelled throughout, very
unpretentiously, with plain black oak; there
was no carving except over the great fireplace,
where was a coat of arms, once heraldically
emblazoned, but now obscured by smoke.
The coat was curious.  Azure, a cross crosslet
in saltire, between four owls argent, beaked
and legged or.

On the walls were hung a few old portraits
in tarnished oval frames.  The paint was
cracked and peeling off.

The ceiling was crossed by moulded oak
beams of great size, black with age and smoke.

A tall, very thin gentleman, Mr. Battishill,
the owner of the house, and squire of West
Wyke and lord of the manor, had been seated
in a high-backed leather-covered chair beside
the fire.  He started up and offered it to the
young lady with many rather uncouth bows.
This gentleman was old; he still wore his hair
tied back by a black riband, though the
fashion had gone out.  His suit was rusty,
his boots were split in the upperleather, and
the elbows of his long coat were patched.
His face was peculiar.  The nose was pointed
and aquiline, and, as forehead and chin
receded, it gave his head the appearance of that
of a bird.  The eyes were very wide open,
prominent, and of the palest grey.  His hair
was frosted with age.

The expression of his eyes was one of
eager inquiry.  His mouth was weak, and
the lips were incessantly quivering.  There
was a kindly look about the feeble mouth
which assured those who studied the face that
a kind heart was lodged within, and showed
them that the qualities of this organ were
superior to those of the head.

Mr. Battishill's daughter Cicely was a fine
girl, about the same age as Joyce—eighteen.
She was somewhat stoutly built, with hair of
a glowing auburn, almost red, but not harshly
red, rather of the richest, sunniest chestnut.
Her complexion was of that quality, seen
nowhere but in Devon; transparent, delicate,
white, with the brightest, healthiest, purest
colour conceivable; a face in which the
mounting of a blush had all the beauty and
splendour of a sunrise.  Her eyes were hazel,
dancing with life and intelligence.  There
was buoyant good nature in every line of her
face.  At the present moment her expression
was that of distressed sympathy with the
lovely girl just introduced into her father's
house.

The contrast between the two was striking.
The new comer was absolutely colourless.
Her hair was dark, almost if not wholly
black.  She was very slenderly built, her
hands were long, and the fingers fine and
tapering.  The hands indicate culture and
purity of race; those at which Cicely now
looked were hands belonging to a lady of high
nervous sensibility and perfect breeding.  Her
features were regular, and singularly delicately
and beautifully cut.  The eyes, when raised,
sent a tremor to the heart of him on whom
they rested; they were deep, full, and
mysterious.  A soul lay in those unfathomed pools,
but of what sort none might guess.  There
was nothing in the expression of the face to
assist in the inquiry.  And yet the face was
not a blank page and therefore uninviting.
The expression that sat on it was one of
reserve, and therefore as provoking as those
wonderful eyes.

Cicely was frank and impulsive; her heart
was visible to all the world, she had no
reserve whatever, what she thought she said;
and her heart spoke through her eyes, a genial,
affectionate heart, fresh and simple.

The pale young lady was evidently relieved
by being placed in a chair by the fire.
Her foot had pained her; it was now rested
on a footstool.

'I beg your pardon,' said Mr. Battishill,
'I did not catch the name.  It is such a
pleasure to me to know to whom I am able to
offer hospitality.  It places persons on a
footing of friendship at once when they are able
to address each other by name.'

'My name is Mirelle,' said the young lady,
without raising her eyes from the fire or
moving a muscle of her face.  'My mother
was the Countess Garcia.  She married my
father, a Mr. Strange.  It is not necessary in
Spain to take the paternal name; I prefer to
be called Mirelle Garcia de Cantalejo.
Cantalejo is territorial.'

Mr. Battishill listened with open mouth
and staring eyes, and drew himself up.  A
distinguished guest this.

'And Canta——'

'Cantalejo,' interrupted Mirelle, 'is in
Segovia—in Old Castile of course.  We
belong to the purest of the ancient Castilian
nobility.  Cantalejo belonged to the family
from the earliest period; it is even said
that when Saint Jacques came to Spain he
was the guest of my ancestor, and that
is why we bear an escallop on our coat.
Cantalejo belonged to us till the sixteenth
century.'

'And now?'

'It has ceased to belong to us for three
hundred years.  But before that we exercised
sovereign powers in the country, we coined
our own money, and hung malefactors on our
own gallows.'

'Your poor father,' began Mr. Battishill,
his nervous mouth working and his eager
eyes staring, 'that is, Mr. Strange—I think
you said Strange—'

Mirelle bowed an affirmative.

'Your poor father, Mr. Strange, lies, I
fear, in a very sad and precarious state.  He
has been placed in the spare bedroom upstairs,
and the doctor has been sent for, but cannot
well be here for an hour.'

'I am told that my lather is dead,' said
the young lady composedly.  'I am very
sorry.  And what increases my desolation is
that he was a heretic.'

'You love him,' whispered Cicely, looking
pained and puzzled.

'I have always prayed for him, and I will
pray for him still,' said Mirelle.  'He did not
know the truth, so his invincible ignorance
may save him.'

'You would hardly like to see him now,'
suggested Cicely.

'No, perhaps to-morrow.'

'You love him,' persisted Cicely.

'Of course,' answered Mirelle.  'It is my
duty.  But you must understand that I have
not known him except by name till last
fortnight.  I had not seen him at all till a
fortnight ago, when he came to Paris to take me
away from the Sacré Coeur.'

The young man had been watching her
face intently.  He had seemed more pained
than Cicely at her want of feeling.  Now he
drew a long breath, a sigh of relief; these
words of Mirelle explained her coldness.

'I am sorry that he is dead,' she went on,
'but he ought not to have married my mother.'

'We cannot regret that,' said Mr. Battishill
with awkward gallantry, 'since to that
we are indebted for the pleasure of making
your acquaintance.'

Mirelle considered for a moment, then she
said simply, 'You mean that I should not
have existed.  True; I did not think of this.'

Mr. Battishill and the young man were
unable to repress a smile.  She was a curious
mixture of simplicity, reserve, and frankness.
The reserve was exercised over her feelings, but
she was perfectly frank about her thoughts.

'Have you ever been to Cantal——?  I
have not quite caught the name.'

'I have never been in Spain at all,'
answered Mirelle.

'Where, then, have you lived?'

'In Paris.  Where else should I live?
One lives in Paris, one exists elsewhere.'

'But your father?'

'Mr. Strange was a Brazilian diamond
merchant.  I mean a merchant of diamonds
living in Brazil.  My mother married him
there.  It was very good of my mother, but
she was an angel.  He was rich—*comme ça,
mais bourgeois*.  When I was born, my mother
came to Paris to have me properly educated,
and I lived there till the good God took her.
I have been at school with the English sisters
of the Sacré Coeur.  When my father came
to Paris he took me away, to bring me to his
home in England.'

'Where is his home?'

'He has none; he would make one.  He
has retired from his business.'

'What relations has he?  They should be
communicated with.'

'I do not know that he has any.  My
mother never spoke of my father's relations.
She knew nothing of them; she did not
want to know them.  In this world everything
is on shelves, and the things on each
shelf are kept to themselves.  Where they
get mixed there is inextricable confusion.
Above, angels; then kings, nobles, bourgeois,
peasants, monkeys, and so down to the lowest
form of life—those laid on the floor.  My
father's relatives were not noble.'  Then
suddenly, 'Are you noble, sir?'

Mr. Battishill threw up his head proudly.
'My family is gentle, and of ancient degree,'
he said.  'We appeared in the Heralds'
Visitation of 1620 in four descents, but I have
title-deeds that show we were lords of the
manor of West Wyke from the time of Edward
the Third.'

'Those are your arms?' asked Mirelle,
looking at the chimney-piece.  'What birds
are those?'

'Owls,' answered Mr. Battishill, proudly;
'owls argent, beaked and clawed or.'

Mirelle contemplated the owls, then looked
at the gentleman, with his blank eyes, beak-like
nose, and grey hair.  Her lips twitched
slightly, but she was too well bred to smile.

'The bird is dedicated to Minerva.  It is
the symbol of wisdom,' she said.

'The Battishills were ever owls,' said he,
proudly.  Then he asked, glancing at the
young man, 'Is this gentleman your brother?'

Mirelle looked up full for the first time
into the young stranger's face.

'He is no relative of mine.  I do not even
know his name.'

'My name,' said he, stepping forward, 'is
John Herring.'  He was interrupted by a
laugh from Mirelle.

'Herring!' she exclaimed, 'Quel drôle de
nom!  That is a fish they split and pickle,
and pack in barrels, is it not?'  The young
man coloured.

'The name is bourgeois—Herring!'

The young gentleman drew back, wounded.
He said nothing more about himself, but
asked Mr. Battishill in a low voice for a
lantern.

'The trunks and portmanteaus are lying
with the broken chaise, and I must see to
their being placed under shelter and in
security.  Are there men about the premises
who can assist me?'

'There will be some difficulty about
finding a man,' answered Mr. Battishill.  'We
do not keep one in the house, and the
cottages are at a distance.  You will not find
your way to them by night.  Do not trouble
about the trunks; leave them till morning.
No one will touch them.'

'I prefer removing them.  When the post-boy
returns from Okehampton with the doctor,
I will secure his assistance.'

Cicely had lighted a lantern whilst her
father was speaking.  She offered it to John
Herring.  'I will go for you to the cottages,'
she said; 'I will send some men to help you.'  She
accompanied him to the door.  'It is
quite right that the things should not be left
out all night on the moor.  There are tramps
on the Exeter road, and the Cobbledicks are
close by.'  She opened the door, and the light
fell on Joyce.

'Why, Joyce, you here still?  I thought
you had gone back to the Giant's Table.'

'If I were to go back to vaither, he'd kill
me.  I ha' lost he his old barril, and him
won't sleep under the table a'cos mother be
there wi' her playful ways, tormenting of he.'

'What do you mean, Joyce?'

'I means this, miss.  His barril be rolled
away down hill, and I dunnow where her be
rolled to.  Where be vaither to sleep?'

'Under the Giant's Table.'

'That won't do, 'cos o' mother.  Her be
lively o' nights when vaither be there.  'Tain't
wickedness, it be her playful ways.  Her
leaves me alone right enough.  But vaither
won't go there.  Now if he might sleep i'
one o' your linnies,[1] he'd be right vast enough
as a nail in a door.'

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[1] Lean-to sheds.

.. vspace:: 2

'By all means let him sleep there, Joyce,
at least for a while, till you can recover the
cask.'

'Then I can go back to he.  If I hadn't
that to say, he'd ha' killed me.  Now he'll go
snuggle into the straw like a heckamall[2] in a
rick.  That's beautiful!'

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[2] A heckamall or heckanoddy is a tomtit.

.. vspace:: 2

'Joyce,' said Cicely, 'this gentleman is
going to the broken carriage.  Perhaps you
can assist him to remove some of the trunks.
They must not be left out where they are.'

'There be some scatt right abroad,'[3]
answered Joyce; 'I seed mun, and the things
be coming out like.'

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[3] Broken to pieces.

.. vspace:: 2

'More the reason why they should be
collected and brought under cover.'

'I'll go right on end,' said Joyce.  'And
vaither may sleep in the linney?'

'Yes, he may.'

'Oh, rallaluley, he'll be glad!'

So Joyce led the way, followed by Herring,
and Miss Cicely Battishill went in quest
of assistance.

When Herring and Joyce reached the
scene of the accident, they discovered Old
Grizzly hopping about amidst the wreck,
pulling the pieces of the broken carriage apart.
He had made some clearance in the confusion,
but not from disinterested motives.  Everything
in the shape of cushion and cloak had
disappeared, and the old wrecker was engaged
in collecting chips of the broken wood for
firing.

John Herring did not notice particularly
what he was about; it was too dark to
distinguish much.  He went directly to the
boxes.

Of his own goods there was little to take
care of save one valise, and that was safe.
The rest of the trunks and portmanteaus
belonged to Mr. Strange and his daughter.  The
trunks lay, some still corded, on the top of
the chaise; others thrown off, one with its
lock sprung.  This box had either been very
much shaken by the fall, or Grizzly's arm had
been turning it over, for the lid would no
longer close over the confused and
overflowing contents.

Grizzly Cobbledick decamped when he saw
the lantern brought to bear on the wreck.
Joyce called after him, but he made no reply.
Then she went in pursuit to announce to him
the glad news that he was to sleep in the
straw of the calves' linney at West Wyke.

'I wonder,' mused John Herring, 'whether
that old rascal can have stolen anything of
value.  If he has, there is no one to bring
him to book.  The owner is dead, and the
daughter probably knows nothing of the
contents of the boxes.'

If he had known!





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`MIRELLE`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER IV.


.. class:: center medium bold

   MIRELLE.

.. vspace:: 2

It is aggravating to the reader to be asked to
move backwards when he has been well started
in a story.  He resents it, as he resents the
backing of a train when he has left the station
where he took his ticket, and is impatient
to reach his destination.

The author is aware that he is trying the
patience of the reader when he asks him to
turn into a side alley which bends in the same
direction as his starting point.  He would
avoid asking him to turn if it were possible to
do so.  But it is not always possible.  To a
drama, to the farce of half an hour, is prefixed
the list of characters.  In taking up one of
Lacy's acting copies, the reader learns at a
glance that Box is a journeyman printer,
and Cox a journeyman hatter, and that
Mrs. Bouncer is a lodging-house keeper.  He learns
a great deal about them before he comes to a
word of dialogue.  He is informed that Box
wears 'small swallow-tailed black coat, short
buff waistcoat, light drab trousers (short,
turned up at the bottom), black stockings,
white canvas boots with black tips, cotton
neckcloth, and shabby black hat;' further,
that Cox is apparelled in 'brown Newmarket
coat, long white waistcoat, black plaid trousers,
boots, white hat, black stock;' that
Mrs. Bouncer is costumed in 'coloured cotton
gown, apron, cap, &c.'  He feels at once that
he knows all about these characters.  He
reads their past in their costume, they wear
their souls on their limbs.  Note that 'turned
up at the bottom'—the words illumine the
abysses of the character of Box, and make
them clear to us.

But the novelist is debarred what is
allowed the dramatist.  He must haul up his
curtain on a situation without an introductory
word, and then, when the reader is
puzzled as to the characters, antecedents, and
purposes of the *dramatis personæ*, he is obliged
to step forward, stick in hand, as in a
wax-work, point out the several personages and
describe them.  This is the way of novelists.
It is a bad way, it is inartistic, but it is
exacted by the reader.

Now, in describing the characters of a
novel it is not sufficient to give minute
accounts of the costume—in the case of the
Cobbledicks this is done in a word; the author
is required to give his readers a key to the
inner mechanism of his puppets, to show
why they walk or pirouette, and what may be
expected to be the limits of their powers.
He can rarely do this without retrogression.

That Mirelle may be understood and not
be judged with undue severity, we must step
back to a period before her birth; but we
shall be as rapid in our survey as we can, and
shall resume the thread of our story after a
very short divagation.

The Countess Garcia de Cantalejo was a
poor Spanish lady sent out to Brazil by her
relatives, who were by no means near, to be
got rid of by marriage, malaria, or mosquitoes,
as might be, but anyhow to be got rid of.

She was handsome, but, like the milkmaid
in the ballad, 'her face was her fortune.'  Now
in Spain pretty women abound, and
ugly women are exceptional.  Marriageable
men look out more for money, which is scarce,
than for beauty, which is a drug.  Money,
moreover, they know, in prudent hands will
wax; beauty they know, however well
conserved, will wane.

In Brazil she was seen and admired by
Mr. Strange, a diamond merchant, and she
consented to give him her cold hand, intending at
the earliest opportunity to supplement it with
the cold shoulder.  She married him because
no one else would have her, and because he
was well off.  She was proud of her family,
and it was a condescension on her part—like
that of the sun which stoops to kiss the
puddle—for her to link the proud name of
Garcia with that of Strange, and Cantalejo—which
was territorial, with a blank, for the
Stranges had never owned any more ground
than the six foot allotted them as graves,
and that only till they had mouldered.  They
had made, but not coined, their money, certainly
never had hung men on their own gallows.

Mr. Strange, and the Countess Garcia de
Cantalejo lived together for a few years like
oil and water.  At length the Countess
became the mother of a daughter, who was
baptized Mirelle at the font in the Cathedral
of Bahia, by the Cardinal Archbishop himself.
After this Donna Garcia informed her husband
that their separation was inevitable.  The
child could not be decently suckled, weaned,
and educated in a colony, certainly not in a
city so mean as Bahia.  The child, the heiress
of the coronet and of the name with its
territorial tail, must go to Europe.

The Countess did not purpose returning to
Spain; there were circumstances attending
her departure from her native country which
had embittered her against her relatives
there.  No!  she would go to Paris, the centre
of the civilised world.

Mr. Strange raised no objections.  He
was weary of association with a woman full
of caprice, of fading charms, and of intolerable
pride.  He was a reserved and a disappointed
man.  To every bird comes its time of song;
to the swan only at death, to the nightingale
in balmy spring while mating; it is only the
chatterers that chatter ever.  The song time,
the flowering time, the moment when the
dullest life breaks into poetry, is the moment
of love.  Mr. Strange had gone through this
and had been disenchanted, and thenceforth
his life became dull, prosaic, without melody
and colour, unimpassioned.  His heart had
flamed, and his wife had extinguished its fires
with ice.

Mr. Strange had no love for babies.
Babies are to men objects as offensive as
naked infant rabbits.  A doe eats her young
rather than expose them to the strange eye
before their fur is grown.  If women were as
wise as does they would never exhibit the
contents of their nursery till the children
could talk and run about.

Mr. Strange heard a squalling in the
house; the object his wife had produced was
thrust under his eyes and nose with indecent
haste.  It dribbled when teething, erupted
with the thrush, and had a difficulty in
keeping down its milk.  Consequently, when
the Countess proposed to remove the babe to
Paris, Mr. Strange gave a cheerful consent,
and this consent was made doubly cheerful
by the certainty that the mother would
accompany her child.

If Mr. Strange acted in a somewhat callous
manner in granting this separation between
himself and his wife and child, he was in
other particulars generous.  He made the
Countess an allowance which, for his
circumstances, was handsome, and as the child grew,
and greater demands were made on his purse,
he met these demands without remonstrance.

Arrived in Paris, the Countess Garcia had
not long to swim before her feet touched
ground.  She had a perfectly legitimate right
to her title, her pedigree was unassailable,
her manners were polished.  She appeared at
the balls of the Spanish ambassador, and
associated with the best French and Spanish
families belonging to the old noblesse.  It
was well known that she had married a
moneyed Englishman, of no birth, nor station,
nor religion.  It was known that she had
married for money.  No one spoke of
Mr. Strange.  The great people among whom she
moved would as soon have inquired about a
boil that troubled her as about the husband
whom 'for her sins' she had saddled on her.
No persons of breeding invite their friends to
introduce them to the family skeleton.

Mirelle was brought up by the Countess
to think of her father as a man who had taken
a mean advantage of her mother's poverty.
He was her father by sufferance; *de facto*,
alas, not *de jure*.  She had inherited her
mother's complexion, eyes, and hair; the blood
in her veins was her mother's, Spanish and
aristocratic; her sentiments were her mother's,
as also her prejudices and her faith.  It was
hard to say what she derived from her father
except her living and schooling for which he
paid.  For that she owed him nothing.  He
was fulfilling his duty, and a privilege he
ought to value.  What was he, to be the
husband of a Garcia and the father of a
Garcia?  He was English, he was a heretic,
worst of all he was bourgeois.

The Countess bought herself silks with
Mr. Strange's money, wore the diamonds he
sent her, hired good rooms in an aristocratic
quarter, and paid for them from his
remittances.  She had nothing whatever of her
own.  She owed him everything, to her
handkerchiefs and her shoestrings.  She knew
this perfectly, and writhed under the
knowledge.  The greater the debt she owed him,
the deeper the detestation with which she
regarded him.  Each present he sent her
was repaid by instilling a drop of bitterness
into the heart of his child towards him.

One stipulation with regard to his
daughter's education Mr. Strange had made.
He insisted that she should have an English
nurse, and that when she grew older she
should have English playmates and English
governesses.  When old enough to go to
school her mother sent her to English nuns,
because Mr. Strange refused to allow her to
go to any other convent than one of English
sisters.  Thus it was that Mirelle grew up
to speak English fluently and well, and to
thoroughly understand the tongue.  But of
English ways of thinking and of feeling she
had not the faintest conception.  Proud, cold,
selfish, and bigoted her mother had been, and
the ambition of Mirelle was to model herself
on her mother.  Thus she, too, became proud,
cold, selfish, and bigoted.  It was not her
fault—the fault lay in her training.

The Countess was a woman of the world,
who combined religious zeal with worldly
self-seeking.  She was a vain woman, and
though she did her utmost to conserve her
beauty it withered, and the child blooming
into lovely maidenhood at her side made the
contrast distressing, because noticeable.  This
was the reason why she placed Mirelle in a
convent in her fourteenth year.  She saw the
girl often, but never, if she could help it, was
seen in her company.

This separation from her mother was of
advantage to Mirelle.  It preserved her
simplicity.  There was no craft in her; she was
absolutely guileless, distressingly frank, and
innocent of the trickery as well as of the
wickedness of the social world.  She was cold,
because the spring had not yet come to her
frozen heart.  She loved her mother, but
without passion, for her mother was too selfish
to awaken passionate love.  Her nurses and
governesses had changed so often that she
could not count them.  Among the cold
sisters, lilies of virtue, the exhibition of
emotion was, if not sinful, yet smacking of
imperfection.  Natural affections were weaknesses
of the moral spine, to be conquered by wearing
a perpetual back-board.

Suddenly the Countess died—died in her
chair before the looking-glass, reciting the
Litany of Loreto, whilst her face was being
enamelled.  The beautifier entreated Madame
la Comtesse not to draw her mouth down on
one side, it was cracking the enamel before it
was dry—-just when she had arrived at the
'tower of ivory.'  Then Madame la Comtesse
gave a gasp and the enamel came off, washed
away from her brow by the sweat of death,
and running in a milky river down her nose
and cheeks, and dripping on the peignoir under
her chin.  The beautifier rang the bell, and
said, 'Sacré mille diables!  To whom shall I
send in the bill?  Madame is no more in
condition to pay.'

When Mr. Strange heard of his wife's
death, he settled his affairs in Brazil.  He was
a strictly conscientious man, and he felt that
now it was his duty to look after the child.
He had no idea that the child had sprung up
into maidenhood, and was a tall, lovely girl,
lovelier than her mother had ever been.  His
wife had not taken the trouble to send him a
miniature of his daughter.  Miniatures are
expensive, and the Countess wanted all the
money she received for herself.  She did,
indeed, once send him a bit of her hair, tied
with blue silk; but then, that cost nothing.
Mr. Strange thought of his child as a limp
piece of mortality in a long white garment,
with a frill round the red head like that put
round a ham-bone—a thing of squeals, that in
its squealing showed a pair of toothless gums,
a quivering red tongue, and a crinkled white
palate.  He could hardly believe his eyes
when introduced to his daughter.  She
received him with perfect self-possession,
without raising her eyes from the ground to look
at him, for the sisters had taught her the
custody of the eyes.  According to S. Paul,
there is but one Man of Sin, and he is in
the future; to the religious all men are men
of sin, and in the present.

Mirelle curtsied gracefully.  She spoke
the best copy-book sentiments of filial respect,
and assured him (out of the Catechism) of
the obligation to filial duty under which she lay.

Then he took her away from the nuns of
the Sacred Heart, and carried her about Paris,
sight-seeing, in the hope of making her unbend.

The decorator sent in a bill for two
thousand francs, his charge for beautifying
madame, hoping to get fifty, and ready to
accept five.  Mr. Strange tore the bill, and lit
his cigar with it.

An old woman who had laid madame out
asked five francs for her pains.  Then timidly
produced a lock of hair she had cut off madame's
head as she laid her in the coffin.  The hair
was beautiful still! and, oh! madame had
looked so sweet, so peaceful, like a holy angel,
actually young again.  Then Mr. Strange
took the lock reverently, turned his face
away, and did not speak.  Something in his
throat troubled him.  He thought of twenty
years ago—of the time when his heart bounded,
of the singing of the nightingale, of the
flowering of the wheat, of the short dream of poetry.
Then he recovered himself, and put something
in the old woman's hand.  The old woman
went chuckling away.  When she reached the
street she said, 'That was a brave invention.
Madame's complexion was that of a toad's
belly.  She was hideous as a monkey.  I
could not pick the paint off her skin.  Some
adhered, the rest flaked away.  That lock of
hair was part of her false front.  Mon Dieu! how
soft men's hearts are!'  Mr. Strange
speedily discovered that he and his daughter
had about as many subjects in common as an
Esquimaux has with a native of equatorial
Africa.  She was above all things a Catholic,
he a Protestant.  She was religious, and,
because religious, somewhat conscientious.  He
conscientious, and, because conscientious,
somewhat religious.  His religion was to his life
what stockings are to a traveller's portmanteau,
something to fill corners with where
nothing else will go.  With Mirelle religion
was the chief packing of her life, and this was
a condition incomprehensible to her father.
She had artistic instincts; she loved pictures
and music.  Now, pictures and music happen
to be two things not to be got in Brazil,
except in such an execrable state of degradation
as to be unendurable.  But he liked the
theatre, and to attend the theatre Mirelle
considered wicked.  Mirelle had learned history
from the sisters of the Sacré Coeur—that is,
she had learned that every modern political
idea is positively evil, that absolutism is ideal
perfection, that the mediæval times were the
only times in which it was worth living, for
then the popes gave and withdrew crowns,
kings kissed their feet, and emperors held
their stirrups.  She had been taught
geography out of French manuals, and had learned
that France is to the rest of the European
powers as the sun to the planets; from it
they derive their light, and about it they
rotate.

Mirelle had her acquaintances, the Princess
L'Amoureuse, Prince Punchkin, Countesses,
Baronesses by the score, the mothers and
aunts of her schoolfellows and friends of her
mother.  Not one of these was known to
Mr. Strange even by name, and when she spoke of
them she might have been, for aught he cared,
reciting the list of European lepidoptera.

Even in their eating their tastes were
opposed.  Mr. Strange was fond of pickles,
Mirelle loved sweets.  Chillies tickled his
palate, chocolate soothed hers; crystallised
angelica carried her into heaven, and plunged
him into purgatory, for he had a hollow tooth.
Mr. Strange endeavoured to talk to Mirelle of
her mother.  Now that the Countess was dead
some of the old romance that had surrounded
his wooing reappeared, and his heart softened
to the memory of the woman.  Mirelle was
ready enough to speak of her, but she had
nothing to say that vibrated a chord in his
heart.  She spoke of her mother as a fashionable
lady, living in society, dressing for balls,
driving in the Bois de Boulogne, or holding a
plate at the door of the Madeleine—not of her
as a woman feeling, loving, suffering.

This condition of affairs was becoming
intolerable.  How was Mr. Strange to live
with a young lady with whom he was utterly
out of sympathy, whose head was where his
feet stood, and her feet at his head?  They
saw different worlds, they breathed different
air.

The first thing to be done was to get her
away from France.  That was a plain necessity.
On English soil common interests might
spring up.

Mr. Strange had a friend of former times
living at Avranches, a friend of whom he had
lost sight for many years.  He knew his
address, and he knew also that he was married
to a French lady.

Mr. Strange's nearest relative, a cousin,
had lived formerly at Falmouth, and, he
supposed, lived there still.  Mr. Strange resolved
to visit his old friend at Avranches, and go
on in the packet from St. Malo to Falmouth.
He would consult both on what was to be
done with Mirelle.  He had other reasons,
which will appear in the sequel.

So he hurried away from Paris, and went
to Avranches.  His old friend was delighted
to see him, shook hands—both hands, with
the utmost cordiality, asked half a dozen times
after his wife and children, and forgot as
frequently when told that his wife was dead,
and that there was but one child, a daughter.
He insisted on carrying his dear friend
Strange with him to the café, and on his
drinking with him a glass of *eau sucrée*
flavoured with syrup of orange, and eating
with him sponge biscuits.  Would he further,
in recollection of old times, favour him with a
game of dominoes?  The Frenchified Englishman
did not introduce Mr. Strange to his
wife, or ask him to bring Mirelle from the
hotel to his house, and finally, looking at his
watch, remembered he was due to take his
wife a drive, shook hands with his dear old
friend with effusion, and begged, if he were
again passing through Avranches on his way
to or from Brazil, not to omit to call and
drink again with him sugar and water and
eat a sponge cake.

Mr. Strange departed, his grave face looking
graver.  After a rough passage, in which
Mirelle suffered extremely, and her father
smoked and looked at the waves unconcernedly,
they arrived at Falmouth.  Cato,
when at sea, jumped overboard, saying he
would rather die than endure another
half-hour of sickness.  Cato was a stoic
philosopher, Mirelle was neither a philosopher
nor a stoic.  She was profoundly wretched,
and looked ghastly when she landed in a
drizzle at Falmouth.  Thus her first arrival
in England was not encouraging.  Mr. Strange
inquired for his cousin, and learned that he
was no longer at Falmouth; he had removed
to Launceston.  Mr. Strange heard such an
unsatisfactory account of his cousin that he
was greatly disconcerted.  His cousin's name
was Trampleasure.  He found a universal
consensus of opinion at Falmouth that
Mr. Trampleasure was a man unprincipled and
unscrupulous, and that he had moved to
Launceston only because he had made
Falmouth too hot for him.

Mr. Strange remained a couple of nights
at Falmouth, and then took coach to Launceston.
There he neither called on his cousin
nor stayed.  He found at the inn a young
gentleman equally anxious with himself to
push on to Exeter, and he offered him a seat
in the chaise he had hired.  Thus it was that
Mr. John Herring was with him and his
daughter when the accident occurred.  Before
leaving Brazil Mr. Strange had made his will,
bequeathing everything he possessed to his
cousin, Mr. Sampson Trampleasure, and to
his Avranches friend, in trust for his daughter,
and had constituted them her guardians.
This will was in his desk.  He did not
unpack his desk at Falmouth and cancel his
will; there was time enough to do that on
his arrival at Exeter.  Man proposes: God
disposes.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE OWL'S NEST`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER V.


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE OWLS' NEST.

.. vspace:: 2

West Wyke is a perfect specimen of a small
country gentleman's house of the sixteenth
century.  Two or three hundred years ago
every parish in the West of England
contained several gentle families, not acred up
to their lips, but with moderate possessions.
These small squires farmed a large part of
their own estates themselves, gave moderate
portions to their daughters, who were not
ashamed to marry yeomen and even tradesmen,
and their younger sons went to sea,
or were apprenticed to merchants in the
towns.[1]

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[1] Thus, in the Visitation of Devon of 1620, a Cholmondeley
enters his brothers as 'silkman on London Bridge,' and 'prentice
in London,' and a Wolston registers his sisters as married
respectively to a 'labourer' and a 'clothier'; a daughter of
Glanville married a blacksmith of Tavistock.

.. vspace:: 2

When the heralds came round to hold
their courts and examine into the claims of
gentility and right to
rode to court with their title-deeds in their
saddle-bags and their signet rings on their
hands, and showed convincingly that they
had held their acres for many generations
and had borne coat armour.  Hard drinking,
gambling, an extravagant style of living, have
destroyed these little gentry, and the same
causes have effected the extermination of the
yeomanry.

In the parish of South Tawton two hundred
years ago there were seven families of
gentle blood—the Weekes of North Wyke,
the Burgoynes of Zeal, the Northmores of
Will, the Oxenhams of Oxenham, the
Battishills of West Wyke, the Mylfords, and the
Fursdons.  All have gone; their place is only
known by the old houses they have left
behind, and a few tombstones with their heraldic
bearings on them in the church.  The grand
old mansion of the Weekes is now parted in
twain, one half a farmhouse, the other a
labourer's cottage.  The park is cut down, the
ceilings are falling, the panelling is decaying.
The house of the Burgoynes is now a village
tavern; Will, a cottage, its grand old gateway
levelled with the dust; West Wyke is a farmhouse.

If we would know how our gentle
ancestors lived, let us look closely at West
Wyke—it deserves a visit and a description.

The house stands on the moor, in the midst
of a little patch of reclaimed land.  The
situation is too lofty and exposed to allow of trees
to flourish.  A few ash stems attempt to
live there, and they are twisted from the
south-west.  A few feet below the surface
the roots reach the rock, and when the
taproot touches stone the doom of the tree is
sealed.

West Wyke House was built in 1583—the
date is on it—by William Battishill.  It is a
house which a substantial farmer nowadays
would scorn to inhabit.  It consists, on the
basement, of one hall, a ladies' bower, a
kitchen, and a large dairy—that is all.  And
that is the basement plan of many hundreds
of similar mansions in the West, once tenanted
by proud squires and their ladies, well born,
well bred, and well attired.  Look at their
portraits—they were gentlemen of breed and
honour, they carry it in their faces; they
were ladies of pure and noble souls, refined
in mind, simple in life.  It is written on their
brows.

In 1656 Roger Battishill, the reigning
lord of the manor, walled in a garden in front
of the house, and at the side built an
embattled gateway, only twelve feet high to the
crown of the battlements; a gateway of shaped
granite blocks and carved granite mouldings;
and over the centre, proudly also sculptured
in granite, the arms of Battishill, the cross
crosslet in sal tire between four great owls.
He planted the garden with lilies, white and
orange, with honesty, golden-rod, and white
rocket.  These flourished here, sheltered from
the winds by the inclosing walls; and a
monthly rose ran up the side of the house,
about the hall window, and bloomed up to
New Year's day.

No road led to the embattled gateway.
No carriages were used in those days, and for
the horses' hoofs there was the spongy turf.
When a rough track had been trampled
through the moor grass, and made black with
oozing peat water, the riders rode afield and
made another way till the first had grassed
itself over again.

Observe the date on the embattled gateway.
Charles I. was executed in 1649, Cromwell
had issued his edict in 1655 for exacting
the tenth penny from the Cavaliers, in order,
as he pretended, to make them pay the
expenses to which their mutinous disposition
exposed the nation.  To raise this impost,
which passed by the name of the decimation,
the Protector appointed major-generals, and
divided the kingdom into military jurisdictions
under them.  These men had power to
subject whom they would to decimation, and to
imprison any person who should be exposed
to their jealousy or suspicion.  Now Roger
Battishill had been a Royalist, but his twin
brother Richard had been a Roundhead.  There
were two other brothers, Robert and Ralph.
Now, when the commissioner came to
Okehampton to levy decimation, he summoned
Squire Battishill before him; whereupon the
four brothers, all habited in grey, with very
erect hair, protruding ears, and staring eyes,
and a general puzzle-headed expression in
their faces, appeared before him, and so
bewildered the commissioner with their Roger
and Richard, and Robert and Ralph, and
their extraordinary likeness to each other,
and their profound puzzle-headedness, which
made it impossible for Roger to speak without
involving Richard and Robert and Ralph, and
so through the rest—that he dismissed them
undecimated, fully impressed that the Royalist
was Ralph, who, being only just of age, could
not have been in the past a dangerous
recusant.  Thereupon the four brothers rode
home to West Wyke, hooting with joy, and
in commemoration of this achievement set up
the embattled gateway, to shut themselves in
and the world and politics out for ever.  Over
the gateway they carved the four owls, their
arms, said Roger and Richard, and Robert
and Ralph—their own portraits said the
malicious world of South Tawton.

Some account of the hall has been already
given.  In our day the oak panelling has
disappeared as fuel for the great hearth, but in the
granite mullioned window is still preserved in
stained glass the cognizance of the Battishills,
the four owls impaled with, azure, three towers
argent, on which are squatted three white
birds.

A gentleman of the present day, if not
exacting, might possibly accommodate
himself in the lower part of the house, but
would hardly acquiesce in the upstairs
arrangements, for there all the bedrooms were
*en suite*.  In the centre slept the squire and
his lady, when he had one; on the right
were rooms for the men; in the furthest
slept the apprentices, in the nearest the
sons and brothers of the family.  On the
left were three rooms all in communication.
The first was the state guest room, the next
that allotted to the young ladies; beyond
that, over the cow-shed, the room for the
servant maids.

We have a great deal to learn from our
ancestors, and we are learning much.  We
copy their architecture, we reproduce their
dyes, we affect their costume, but we do not
go back to their sleeping arrangements.

Some days passed.  Mirelle remained at
West Wyke; John Herring was lodged in
the inn at Zeal, not far distant in the valley.
He devoted himself to the affairs of Mirelle.
Mr. Battishill was most kind, but quite
unable to be of real use.  He was prepared to
discuss with Herring what must be done, and
he would undertake to do what he thought
desirable, but he never did anything.  The
dead man might have lain a month, three
months, a year upstairs, before Mr. Battishill
took steps for his interment.  He had a
theory of his own relative to the disposal of the
dead.  He believed that elm was an unsuitable
wood for the making of coffins.  Alder
was the proper timber, because alder grew in
swamps, and was presumably damp-resisting.
It was in vain that Herring explained to him
that alders did not attain a sufficient size to
be sawn into planks.  That was because alders
were not suffered to grow; they were treated
as weeds and cut down.  'Grow them,' said
Mr. Battishill; 'give them time and see for
yourself.'  He would have allowed the dead
man to occupy the spare room till the alders
were grown.

Then, again, he had a theory that coffins
ought to be filled with that powerful
antiseptic, brown Norwegian pitch, pitch from the
pine, none of your villainous coal tar, but
brown pitch like old treacle.  And so on,
from coffins to alders, and to Norway tar, and
the dead man waiting for the alders to grow
and the pitch to be extracted.  John Herring
was obliged to see to everything, to arrange
with the undertaker, and to fix the funeral.
Then, again, Mirelle might have remained on
till she married or died for all that Mr. Battishill
would have done to discover her relations;
perhaps it would have been better had
it been so.  We take infinite pains to do what
is just and kind, and find afterwards that
everything would have been better had we
put our hands in our pockets.  We give in
charity and pauperise; we effect reforms
which bring in a state of affairs worse than
existed before.  There is more mischief
wrought by doing good than by doing nothing.

Before the funeral, Herring discovered that
the deceased had an account with an Exeter
bank.  He found this through a letter in the
pocket-book of the deceased addressed to
him in Paris from Exeter, acknowledging the
receipt of several thousand pounds, transferred
by a Brazilian bank, and notifying the
opening of an account in Mr. Strange's name.

Herring communicated with this bank,
stated what had taken place, and the banker
allowed him to draw a limited sum for funeral
expenses.  The young man requested, even
insisted, on Mr. Battishill being present when
he examined the dead man's pocket-book and
purse, and he required him to sign a
statement of the amount of money found on him.

Mirelle remained perfectly passive; she
took her residence with the Battishills as a
matter of course.  The accident had happened
near their house, on their land; it was only
proper that they should shelter her.  If she
gave the matter a thought, this is the result of
her cogitation, but actually it did not trouble
her.  She had always been provided for, and
had never had to consider how she was to be
provided for.  She did not excuse herself for
taking advantage of the hospitality of strangers,
for it did not occur to her that such an
excuse was necessary.  Herring was obliged
to take on himself what Mirelle omitted.  He
apologised for her.  A strange chance had
constituted him her guardian, at least for a
while.  She allowed him to arrange everything.
If he asked her to advise him as to
her wishes, she replied that she was without
any; he must act as he thought proper.  She
knew nothing of the ways of England; he
must do whatever was conventional.

It did not enter her head that his journey
was interrupted on her account, and that he
was put to very serious inconvenience by his
difficulty in leaving her without a protector.
To trust Mr. Battishill to do what was requisite
was to trust a piece of bread and butter
not to fall butter downwards.

Mirelle took it for granted that Herring
was doing his duty or following his pleasure.
She accepted his services as she accepted those
of the girl who blacked her boots.  Each
fulfilled a function for which they were called
into existence.  She neither thanked him nor
rewarded him with a look.  What he was like
she did not know, neither did she care.  He
wore very big and shapeless boots, but that was
proper; boots like these became a bumpkin.

At the funeral he wore black, and gave
her his arm.  He and she were the sole
mourners.  She did not wish to attend.  She
supposed that only men attended the funerals
of males; but when it was explained to her
that this was not the custom in England, she
submitted.

Mr. Battishill did not follow the coffin.
There was a difficulty with him about black
clothes.  He had one best suit, but that was
dark blue with brass buttons.  He was not
provided with ready money, and a new suit
of clothes would cripple him for some years,
as it would have to be paid for in instalments,
a leg and an arm at intervals of a quarter;
the coat-tails at equal and similar intervals.
Mr. Battishill did not like to admit this, so he
was prostrated with a convenient attack of the
gout the day before the funeral, and sat in his
chair with the lame foot swaddled on a stool
before him.  We laugh at the shifts of the
gentle poor, and label them meannesses,
whereas they are necessities.  Cicely
remained at home.  There was but one servant
kept at West Wyke, a cook, housemaid,
parlour maid, kitchen maid, laundress, condensed
into one, and Cicely had sufficient to do to
keep the house in order.  A funeral, moreover,
entails extra work—eating, drinking, and
doleful making merry.

Herring gave her some money from Mr. Strange's
purse, telling her that it was to be
spent on things necessary, and would be
accounted for to the executors.  It was not
right nor reasonable, it was not in the least
necessary, that the Battishills should be put
to expense by reason of the funeral of a man
who was an entire stranger.  The deceased
was well off, and the small expenses of his
funeral would be nothing deducted from the
six thousand pounds which they knew was at
the bank, and would go to his daughter.

Cicely frankly accepted the money, and
made greater preparations than she could
otherwise have made.  She put more saffron
and currants in the cakes, and with these
necessary condiments the luxury of candied
peel.  Instead of providing cyder she put
sherry on the table, and gave the bearers and
undertaker cold round of beef instead of squab pie.

As Herring and Mirelle left the churchyard
after the funeral, she took her hand off
his arm, and in their walk back to West Wyke
she was interested in the ferns and mosses of
the banks.  Herring spoke to her occasionally,
trying to begin a conversation; but she
answered shortly, and either dropped behind
to examine a fern or was arrested by the view
through a gate, plainly showing him that she
declined to converse.

When they were on the moor, John Herring
suddenly stopped and picked a tuft of
white heath.  He offered it to Mirelle, and
she accepted it indifferently.

'Although this be a day of sadness,
Countess, yet here is an omen that some
brightness is in store for you.  It is said in
the West that the white heath brings good
luck to the person that secures it.'

'You found it, monsieur, not I.'

'But I pass on my luck to you.  Keep it;
I hope it may always spring up in your path
as it has this day.'

She made no reply, but gathered a sprig of
pink heath.

On reaching the gate of West Wyke Cicely
met them; she had been looking out for their
return.

'Voyez!' said Mirelle, 'I have picked a
lovely bouquet of ferns and moss and wild
flowers on my way.  We have no ferns in
France, at least I have never seen such.  In
this one particular you surpass us.'

She showed her bunch.  The white heath
was not there.

'Oh!' exclaimed Herring, incautiously,
'the best flower of all has fallen—the white
heath.'

'So it is,' said Mirelle.  'I am sorry; my
hand was full.'

'Shall I go back for it?'

'No, it has fallen in the mire, and is
trodden under foot.  I shall doubtless find
my own good luck some day myself.'





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.. _`THAT OLD TRAMPLARA`:

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   CHAPTER VI.


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   THAT OLD TRAMPLARA.

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As they entered the garden, Mirelle was
about to take Cicely's arm, and walk round
it with her, looking at the flowers, when John
Herring stayed her—

'Excuse me, Countess, I must trouble you
one moment.  I think it time that we should
make an attempt to find out your father's
relatives or connections in England.'

'I do not suppose that he had any.'

'Why not?'

'He did not speak to me of any.  Besides,
these people do not hang together like persons
who have pedigrees.'

'But something must be done.  Whither
are you to go?  What is to become of you?'

'Comme le bon Dieu veut!'

'You cannot remain here till some one
turns up to claim you.'

'Why not?'

Mr. Herring was staggered.  He could
not reply, and say that she was trespassing
on the hospitality of entire strangers.  She
turned to continue her walk.

'That is a fine orange lily,' she said to
Cicely.

'You must really allow me to detain you,'
pursued Herring.  'All I ask now is, may
Mr. Battishill and I look through your father's
desk that is in his trunk?  His bunch of keys
has been given to you.  Will you open the
desk, or shall we do it with your sanction?'

'Do what you like, Mr. Fish.'

Cicely looked reprovingly at Mirelle, and
ventured on a correction.  'Mr. Herring, you
mean.'

Mirelle's cheek tinged faintly.

'I beg your pardon, sir.  Your name had
escaped me.  I am not yet familiar with
English names, which seem to me harsh or
grotesque.  I remembered that you belonged
to the fishes, but to which particular family
of fish I did not recall.'

Herring bit his lip, then said quietly,
'Would you prefer opening your father's desk
yourself, Countess?'

'Mon Dieu, non!'

'Then will you give me the key, and
allow us to examine the contents of the desk?'

'Certainly.  But I do not know which is
the key.  Here, take the bunch, and do as
you will.'  Then she turned impatiently
round, and walked away.

When Herring had entered the house,
Cicely said gently, 'I think, Mirelle, you are
bound to try and remember poor Mr. Herring's
name.'

'Why should I?  It in no way concerns me.'

'But you hurt his feelings.  I saw he was
pained.'

'Oh, but no! that is not possible.  He
cannot care about such a droll name.
Herring!—red herring—pickled herring!—the
thing is ridiculous.  When the name is
historical, then—c'est bien autre chose.  But
when it is ignoble, and, in addition, is
ridiculous, what is there to be proud of?  If
there be no pride, there can be no wound.
These people, moreover, have not the feelings
that we have—I mean about their names.
I should resent it were I called anything but
what I am.  But then the Garcias fought the
Moors.  Don Luis de Garcia with one blow
cleft a Saracen through his turban, 'twixt his
eyes, to the very saddle, and the saddle itself
was cloven.  We had the saddle and the
sword in our armoury three hundred years
ago.  We held the county of Cantalejo, we
coined our own money, and hung on our own
gallows.  But the Herrings! they swim in
the vast sea along with the sprats and the
congers, the common plaice and the little
dabs.  They have no history.  They spawn
ten thousand at a time; they are the bread
of the nobler fish.  No—a Herring has no
cause to be offended if his name be forgotten.
There,' Mirelle laughed, 'I have said my say.'

'He is a gentleman,' said Cicely, with
some warmth; 'I know nothing of his family,
but I judge by his manners and appearance.'

'I have noticed neither.  I do not
consider those who in no way concern me.  I
cannot describe to you the colour of the eyes
and hair of the postillion who upset us, and I
know and care as little about the nobody who
had the bad fortune to be upset with us.  Il
m'ennuie, c'est tout dire.'

'He has been very considerate towards
you.  He has done a great deal for you
deserving of gratitude.'

'For what else did the good God create
men but to be useful—to assist the ladies?
He made the dog the servant of man, and
man the dog of the woman.  The man does
not thank or consider the dog that fetches
him a stick out of the water, and the woman
has no occasion to pat and praise the man
who executes foolish trifles for her.  If the
dog shakes himself near his master, when
emerging from the water, then the stick he
brought is applied to his sides, and when the
man makes himself over officious, woman
turns her back on him.'

'You have an odd idea of the reason why
men are placed in the world.'

'I have a perfectly just idea.  At the
convent of the Sacré Coeur the good sisters
kept several tame men.  There was old Jean
who sawed the firewood for them, and ancient
Jacques who gardened.  There was even a
devout sweep who cleaned their chimneys,
and though his face was black, his soul was
white.  There was a venerable chaplain who
heard confessions, and there was a domesticated
notary who did their legal business.
The sisters worried these men a great deal,
especially the notary and the confessor; the
latter made a good end in a lunatic asylum.
They all took it in good part.  Their backs
were made to bear their burden.'

'You will not forget his name again?'

'Whose name?  What! ce bon Poisson!
I will remember for your sake.'

John Herring brought down the dead
man's desk into the hall, that Mr. Battishill
and he might examine its contents together.
Mr. Battishill hastily put his leg up as Herring
entered.

'Sorry that I could not attend the funeral,'
said the old gentleman, 'but the sins of the
fathers are visited on their children.  I endure
the gout because my father and grandfather
tippled port.  Sit down, Herring, and I will tell
you a good story.  In the grand old days when
there were many squires about here, and the
Knapmans were at Wansdon, and the Whiddons
at Whiddon, the old Squire Knapman
was getting into a bad way financially, like
me.  He was invited to dinner at Whiddon,
and drove there in his great coach.  After
dinner, Squire Whiddon saw him into his
overcoat in the hall, and was about to
accompany him to the door when old Knapman
said, "No, no! you will catch cold; keep in,
man."  But the squire was too hospitable for
that, and he attended Knapman to the coach.
"Don't come out, for heaven's sake, you will
get your death of cold," said Knapman.
"Why!" exclaimed Whiddon, "what is the
meaning of this, Knapman?  Going to ride
on the box instead of inside, a night like
this?"  "I prefer it," answered Squire Knapman,
proceeding to ascend to the box.  But Whiddon
would not allow it; he went to the coach-door
and opened it—when, lo! he found it full of
hay.'

'How came that?' asked Herring.

'Why, do you not see?  Old Knapman was
badly off for hay for his horse, and when he
went out anywhere to dinner he told his
coachman to fill the carriage with hay from
his host's rick, and himself went home on the
box.'

'A good story, sir; but I think we had
better examine the contents of this desk
before we tell any more.'

'Sit down, sit down, man.  Do not drive
the willing horse, and let an old man give you
a piece of advice.  Let well alone, and do not
precipitate yourself, as Orlando says, "from
the smoke into the smother."'

'But you forget, sir, this that you advise
me to leave alone is not well at all.  The
young lady is an orphan, and we know
nothing of her relatives.'

'Go on, then!  How full of briars is this
working-day world!  What do you propose
to do with the lady?'

'I cannot tell till I have ascertained
whether she has relatives in England.'

'If she has not, she must be made a ward
in Chancery, or you must marry her, and so
take her affairs into your own hands.'

'Mr. Battishill!'  John Herring flushed
to his temples and looked down.

'I am putting an alternative case.  Now,
to make her a ward in Chancery is to put a
fly into a cobweb.  Her few thousand pounds
will be bled away.  By-the-by, talking of
thousands, do you know any one inclined to
speculate in silver lead?  I have a rare lode
on my property, but I have not the means to
work it.  I have set three men on the shode,
and they have been engaged there for several
days.  There is no mistaking that grey-blue
stuff that comes up.  But I cannot go on myself.
If I could, the property would be cleared
in no time.  As it is, I am crushed by that
damned old Tramplara.  Do you remember
how Sinbad had to carry the Old Man of the
Sea on his shoulders who picked all the apples
and ate them himself, whilst Sinbad perished
of hunger?  Do what he would, Sinbad was
powerless to dislodge the horrible creature
astride on his back.'

'Yes, I remember,'

'Well, I am in the same predicament; I
have got that old Tramplara on my back.'

'Who is Tramplara, sir?'

'Tramplara!  Not know Tramplara?  I
thought every one knew and had felt him.  He
is a Cornish lawyer, who lived at Falmouth, till
Falmouth passed him on to Launceston, having
had enough of him.  He has lent me money.
He knew that I wanted to improve my
property; I was hot on draining at one time,
and thought if I drained my marshes I should
fill my purse.  But, Herring, draining does
not pay in all lands.  It don't pay in clay at
all.  The only thing I drained effectually was
my pocket.  Then I was drawn on to speculate
in Cornish mines that old Tramplara whispered
great things of to me.  As a particular favour
he put me up to splendid investments before
they were opened to the public.  By all the
saints in Cornwall—and they are more
numerous than those in Paradise—that mining did
for me completely.'  The old man stamped
his gouty foot on the ground.  'It was a
swindle.  And now I am entangled in the
toils of old Tramplara, and cannot get out.
Ah!  Herring, if I could but work the lead
mine myself, I should clear myself of
Tramplara.  But I cannot do it; the cursed rascal
robs me of all my rents, and I am unable to
nurse the mine until it can run on its own
legs.  I must call in strangers to form a
company, and that means they are to swallow the
cup and give me the dregs.  Moreover, I am
afraid of Tramplara finding it out.  If he
does; if he suspects what a lode there is at
Upaver, he will foreclose, take the property,
and work the mine himself.'

'I have no capital at my disposal,' said
Herring.

'I do not suppose you have.  But only
think!  Supposing that Mr. Strange had come
here alone, to recover of his fall, and that I
could have induced him to sink some of his
thousands here!  Come along with me; I will
take you to Upaver and you shall judge for
yourself.'  The old man jumped up, and
walked across the hall to his hat.

'Your gout, sir!'

'Oh, that is all right now.  A walk will
do it good.'

'Another time, Mr. Battishill.  Just at
present we must examine the desk, and see if
we can find any clue to the family of Mr. Strange.'

'To be sure, to be sure,' said Mr. Battishill,
returning to his chair.  'You drew me
off our business.  Open the box and get the
matter over.'

Herring was trying the keys.  Before
he had found the right key, Mr. Battishill
put his hand on the bunch and said, 'By
the way, before we go on with our inquiry,
tell me, do you belong to the Herrings of
Codrington?'

'I did not know there were Herrings there.'

'No; I do not mean now.  In 1620 Hugh
Manning, of Newton Bushell, married Elizabeth,
daughter of John Herring, of Codrington,
in Devon; so it stands in the Visitation, under
the Manning pedigree.  I do not think much
of your family not appearing in that Visitation,
as some good Devon families just emerging
from the yeoman class, or not caring to appear
at the court of the heralds, are left unregistered.
It was so in this parish.  Neither the
Oxenhams nor the Northmores appeared, and yet
they held lands here from time immemorial.'

'Had we not better seek out the Strange
family, instead of exploring the past of the
Herrings?  The latter will keep.'

'You are right, quite right, my young
friend.  Good Lord, what pertinacity you have.
It is like that of a ferret hanging on to a rat.
Open the desk.'

The desk contained a considerable number
of papers, almost all connected with business,
and in a foreign language—Portuguese—which
Herring could not read.

Mr. Battishill leaned back in his chair and
looked before him out of the hall window, lost
in his meditations.  He muttered something
impatiently.

'I beg your pardon,' said Herring, looking
up.  'Did you address me?'

'I?—no,' answered Mr. Battishill.  'I
merely said, Damn old Tramplara!'

Herring resumed his examination.

'The scoundrel has his claws in my neck,
and the mischief is he is dragging more than
myself down.  There is poor Cicely as well.'

'Can you decipher these letters?' asked
Herring, holding out a couple of papers to the
old gentleman; 'they are written either in
Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese.'

'I cannot say.  My knowledge is limited.
"Ignorance is the curse of God, knowledge
the wing whereby we fly to heaven."  I once
read Latin, but that was long ago.  I may
remember a few words of French.  "Dieu et
mon droit," that means "God and my right."  "Honi
soit qui mal y pense," that means
something about the Duchess of Gloucester's
garter.  No, this is Chinese to me.  "There
is no darkness but ignorance."'

'Hold!' exclaimed Herring; 'here is his
will.  Shall we look at it?'

'By all means.  No other document is so
likely to help you to what you want to
discover.  Give it to me.'

The will was very short.  Mr. Strange had
drawn it up himself before sailing for Europe.
The substance has been already given.
Mr. Strange left everything he possessed to
Mr. Eustace Smith, of Avranches, gentleman, and
Mr. Sampson Trampleasure, of Falmouth, solicitor,
in trust for his daughter, Mirelle, till
she attained the age of twenty-three, and
empowering them to expend from it such moneys
as were needed for her entertainment and
education.  They were constituted sole
guardians, trustees, and executors.

Mr. Battishill uttered a groan.

'That scoundrel again!'

'But, sir, this is Trampleasure, not Tramplara.'

'It is the same.  He writes himself Trampleasure,
but nobody dreams of calling him
anything but Tramplara.'

'He is constituted her guardian.'

'Yes; but associated, fortunately, with
another, Mr. Eustace Smith.'

'But should he renounce?'

'Then good-bye to Mirelle's six thousand
pounds.  It will go down Wheal Polpluggan.'

'Wheal what?'

'Wheal Polpluggan, that engulfed my money, and me.'





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.. _`THAT YOUNG TRAMPLARA`:

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   CHAPTER VII.


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   THAT YOUNG TRAMPLARA.

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'What is to be done?' asked Herring.  There
was a small black square ruler on the table,
belonging to Mr. Strange's desk.  He took it
up and played with it, now balancing it across
his finger, then standing it up on the table,
with the end in his palm.

'Let things take their course,' answered
Mr. Battishill.  'I advise with Gloucester,
"Thy greatest help is quiet."'

'I will write to Mr. Eustace Smith at once.'

'Do so.  If he renounces, mark my words,
Polpluggan swallows the young lady's fortune.
Friend Herring, I have the eyes of my heraldic
cognizance, and can see in the dark.  A
wonderful mine, Polpluggan.  The amount of capital
sunk in it must have constituted a silver lode
somewhere.'

'When I have heard from Mr. Eustace
Smith I will communicate with Mr. Trampleasure—not
before.  I suppose I am justified
in doing this?'

'Justified!  Certainly.  I have never seen
Polpluggan myself.  It is situated in the Scilly
Isles.  Of these there be forty; but I have
been unable myself to make out in which
Polpluggan lies, whether in Presher, or Bryher,
or Annette, or Tean, or Great Gannilly, or
Little Gannilly, or Gweal, or Withial, or
Ganniornich, or——'

'I beg your pardon.  May I borrow some
notepaper?'

'By all means.  There is some.  The beauty,
or the mischief of the matter is, that the lode
of tin is in the granite and under the sea.
Mining in granite is costly, and the proximity
to the sea dangerous, entailing extraordinary
precautions.  The water gets in.  Now when
this takes place there follows a call on the
shareholders for pumping it out.  Every great
storm drowns the mine and fills the shareholders
with despair; the pump goes down
into their pockets.  Then the tin vein does
not yield as at first.  Once there were bunches
like those of Eshcol, the dividends were seven,
seven-and-a-half, eight, eight-and-a-quarter,
going, going, going up, and then, slow but
sure, as the miners sank their shaft so did the
shares sink, and the dividends with them, till
they reached zero.  After that, a rapidly
swelling minus quantity.'

'I have written the letter.  Have you sealing-wax?'

'There it is.  Now the beauty, or the mischief
is—beauty from the Tramplara, mischief
from the Battishill point of view—that old
rascal so fired my imagination, and was so
accommodating, that I borrowed the money of
him to sink in Polpluggan.  If I had speculated
with my own little savings—but no!  I
had no savings—that would have been bad
enough, but to speculate on borrowed capital
is ruinous.  That rascally old Tramplara led
me on till he led me into his trap, and then
snap, the door shut behind me, and I am fast.
Poor West Wyke!  Poor Cicely!  Poor—'
he looked at the stained coat in the window,
'poor ancestral owls!'

A shadow fell across the table from some
one passing the window.

'Good God!' exclaimed Mr. Batishill;
'here comes that young Tramplara.'

A rap with the handle of a riding-whip
on the hall door, and, without waiting for a
response, Tramplara entered.  He was a young
man, good looking, with dark hair and eyes,
and a dark moustache.  His cheeks were florid.
He had been drinking, and that gave a gloss
to his face and an uncertainty to his eye.  He
came in with his hat on.  He wore a short
coat, knee breeches, and tall boots.

'I say,' he began roughly, 'what is the
meaning of this?  There have been those—with
an oath—Cobbledicks inclosing a fresh
piece of the down.  I won't have it.  They
will establish rights, and it will be hard to
displace them.  Their fences must be tore
down.'  His pronunciation was West country,
his grammar occasionally so.

'Have you observed that Mr. Battishill is
in the room?' asked Herring, quietly.  He
had just sealed the Avranches letter.

'I see him right enough.  I was addressing
him, not you.'

Herring looked at the old gentleman; he
had become limp.  His jaw had fallen, and
his hands trembled as he laid them on the
arms of his chair.

'Then perhaps you will remove your hat,
Mr. Tramplara.'

'I object to be so called,' answered the
young man sharply.  'My name, sir, is
Trampleasure, and only those who can't spell call
me otherwise.'

'Very well, Mr. Trampleasure; will you
remove your hat?'

'Who are you?  I don't know you.  Never
had the pleasure of seeing your face that I am
aware of.  What may your d—d name be, hey?'

'Sir,' said Herring, rising, 'I will stand
no insolence.  When you ask my name properly,
you shall have it.'

'O Lord! who cares a brass button what
you be called?  Keep your name to yourself
if you like.'

Herring walked straight up to him,
composedly and firmly, looked him full in the
eyes, and said, 'You have been drinking.
Remove your hat, or I will knock it off.'

Tramplara took off his beaver and put it
testily on the table.

'I am not a bad fellow,' he said, 'when
asked a civil question, but I object to be
bullied.'

Then he seated himself near the table,
looking sulky.

'I am Mr. Sampson Trampleasure, junior,
gentleman,' he said.  'Now perhaps you will
tell me your name.'

Herring gave him in return his sur and
Christian names.

'Never heard of you,' said Tramplara.
'What are you doing here?'

Herring made no reply to his impertinence.

'I say,' began the young man again, in a
loud tone, 'I won't have those Cobbledicks
encroaching.  I saw that old Bufflehead,
Grizzly, but could not make him understand,
or leastways he wouldn't understand.'

Mr. Battishill bridled up feebly.  'You
are premature, Mr. Sampson; West Wyke is
my property, and I have the right to settle on
it whom I choose.'

'Oh, ah! that's good,' said young Tramplara.
'Yours on sufferance.  You know
well enough that my governor has his foot
under your chair, and can kick you over any
day he has a mind to.'

'When he does that he can deal with the
Cobbledicks as well.  Naked came we into
the world, and naked we shall go out,
Battishills and Cobbledicks together.'

'That'll soon take place unless you shell
out.  You know what I have come about.'

Mr. Battishill's brief indignation and
assumption of dignity expired.  He put his
hand into his pocket, and drew forth his
handkerchief, and wiped his lips.

'You have come on an unfortunate day,
Mr. Sampson.  We have had a death in the
house.'

'I don't care whether there be a death or
a birth,' answered the young man rudely.  'I
know one thing, if I do not go back with the
interest due last Lady in my pocket, there'll
be pretty summary dealings in a place and
with persons not the other side of London,
nor in China, nor New Zealand, nor Bra——!
Why! how in the name of Ginger came this
into your hands?'

His eye was resting on the will that lay
open as John Herring had left it when
extracting from it the address of Mr. Eustace
Smith.  He put out the crook of his whip
and drew it over to him.  'Ten thousand
crocodiles!  There is my name in it.
Sampson Trampleasure, of Falmouth, Solicitor.
No! that is my father.  Last will and
testament of James Strange, of Bahia, Brazil!
Why, that's a kinsman of ours.  My grandmother
was a Strange.  How the devil came
this into your hands?'

Mr. Battishill looked at Herring.  Herring
was disconcerted.  The surprise and indignation
caused by the intrusion and insolence
of the young man had prevented him from
recollecting to fold up and put away the
document.

'Writing to one trustee,' said young Tramplara,
taking up the letter, 'and in duty bound
about to write to the other when interrupted
by me.  I will save you the trouble.  But how
came this into your hands?  Will you answer
me that?'

'I have already told you, Mr. Sampson,
that there has been a death in the house.  An
unfortunate and melancholy accident took
place last Friday, a carriage was upset near
this house, and a strange gentleman killed.
He was brought here, and has been buried
to-day.'

'That was Mr. James Strange?'

'It was.  He was a gentleman who, according
to his daughter's account, had lived
many years in Brazil as a diamond merchant.'

'I know that.  He was my father's first
cousin; consequently he was—blowed if I
know—but cousin of some sort, and about
the only relative on that side I had.  What
did he die worth?'

'That will be for your father to ascertain,'
said Herring.

'It seems to me a most extraordinary
thing to find a will of one not even remotely
belonging to you lying on your table where
it might be torn to light pipes with.'

'The reason is very simple,' said Herring.
'Mr. Battishill and I knew nothing about
Mr. Strange, and his daughter seemed to be equally
in the dark about his relatives.'

'What, is that pretty girl in the garden
along of Miss Cicely his daughter?'

'That young lady is his daughter.
Mr. Battishill and I examined the papers of the
deceased.  Most were in Portuguese, which
we were unable to read.  From the will we
gathered who were the trustees and guardians
of the lady.  That was what we sought, and
that was what we have ascertained.'

'Well, this is a rise,' said young Tramplara.
'This is like going out after a partridge
and starting a pheasant.  But never mind.  I
keep my game in my eye.  You will have to
unburthen your pockets, Battishill, old boy!'

'Has the sea broken in on Polpluggan?'
asked Mr. Battishill dolefully.  He knew well
enough that the visit did not relate to
Polpluggan, but he tried to put off the worst.

'Polpluggan,' said the young man, with a
touch of melancholy in his voice; 'Polpluggan
is swamped outright.  The mighty Atlantic
has got on top of him, and is pouring
himself down his throat.  There ain't no more
pumping to be done there, more's the pity.'

'No more calls, then, on the shareholders?'

'No.'

'Nor dividends either?'

'Oh dear no.  What's lost is lost.  Polpluggan
was a very pretty thing; but there—his
day is over, more's the pity.'  He sighed.
'He was as fine a fellow in the way of tin as
you might wish to look on.  But with the
best intentions you can't go after a lode into
the bowels of the stormy deep.  The public
don't like it; and when you call on them
every month to pump out the ocean, they
turn unpleasant, and apply live coals to your
tail and make you squeak.  No—Polpluggan
is no more.'  Then with a boisterous laugh
and a slap on the table, 'Never mind the
death of Polpluggan, old chap.  We aren't
seen the end of Cornish mining yet.  There are
many more, bigger nor Polpluggan, looming in
the future.  But that's neither here nor there.
What I've come about is the interest that
ought to have been paid last Lady.'

'It has been a bad time, Mr. Sampson.
The sheep have been cawed, and I have done
all I could to save them.  It was the rain last
fall and all the winter that did it.  I kept
them off the clay land, and I tried every
remedy I could think of.  The last, and that
which promised best, was bruised box leaves.
We cut off all our box borders in the garden,
used every green sprout and leaf, but it was
not sufficient.  The poor beasts picked up a
little on it, but no lasting cure was effected,
and they just rotted away.'

'Oh, blow the sheep!' said young Tramplara,
coarsely.  'It ain't them I want, but
the money.'

'But I have not got the money,' sighed
Mr. Battishill.  'If I could have sold my
sheep I could have paid.  But not only so.
The farmer at Upaver has lost his sheep as
well, and several bullocks to boot, so that he
has fallen behind with his rent.  It is a very
extraordinary thing that my sheep should get
cawed, for I have never known such a thing
happen before in this high land.  Down in
the valley on the clay is another matter.
But you never saw any of that blue grass on
my upland, which is the signal Nature throws
out that no sheep are to draw nigh.  It has
always been said that peat——'

'Faith! it is only a matter of time.  A
year or two don't matter particularly,' said
Sampson Tramplara, 'sooner or later scatt
you go.  If you chose to speculate you must
look out for the consequences.  You ought to
know what mining means at your age.  You
don't think to walk over a bog, and not get
stogged.'

'Your own father urged me on.  But for
him I would have had nothing to do with
Polpluggan.'

'Nor with draining either?'

'That was my blunder.  Polpluggan was
the pit down which I fell hopelessly, and your
father led me to the brink and pushed me over.'

'There are plenty to keep you company,
if that be a consolation,' said young Sampson.
'Now it has just come to this.  You don't
suppose my father hasn't lost also in
Polpluggan, do y'.  I can tell you he has—a
brave bit of money too.  He wants his money
as much as you do; and he will have it too.'

'You must have patience; all seasons are
not bad.'

'But if you nip your fingers you squeak.
My father is nipped pretty tight, all along of
Polpluggan.  You see he has another mine
in view, and it wants capital to get that
floated.'

'Look here,' said Mr. Battishill, desperately.
'If it comes to that, and he wants
another mine to start upon, let him come to
me.  I will put him upon a lode, a real lode,
and I stake my life there is silver lead, and
plenty of it, at Upaver.'

'That won't do,' said Tramplara.  'It
isn't what comes out of a mine that makes
it pay, but what is put into it.  You don't
understand these things, or you would never
have gone head over heels down Polpluggan.
There is nothing to be had from you, so I
don't mind saying it.  And you are an old
friend, and are sucked dry, and about to be
turned inside out.

'There is no water that can drown my mine.'

'More is the pity.  It is just the water
that makes it pay.  But come!  It is too late
for you to learn the alphabet of mining.'

The bottle of sherry that had been purchased
for the funeral was on the table, along
with some glasses.  Without invitation the
young man poured out and drank.

'There's twenty pounds goes home in my
pocket, or it don't.  And if it don't, worse
luck for you.'  He put his hand to the bottle.
Herring drew the decanter from his reach.

'What do you mean?' asked Tramplara.
'Give me the sherry this moment.'

'You have been drinking before coming
here,' said Herring, 'and you shall not further
insult Mr. Battishill by becoming drunk in
his presence.'

'What is that?' shouted young Sampson.
'Hey! what a moral man we have here.  All
for total abstinence, I presume.'

He jumped up, whip in hand, and switched
the whip two or three times before him; then,
looking Herring full in the face, with an
insolent smirk on his lips, clapped his hat on one
side of his head, and planted himself before
him with legs astride, his left hand on his hip,
and the right hand brandishing the whip.

Instantly Herring twisted the whip out of
his hand, and knocked his hat off his head
with it, across the hall.  Then he handed him
the whip again, coolly, in a manner that
meant.  'Touch me with it, if you dare.'

Tramplara's face became mottled.

'Thank you, Mr. Herring, thank you.'
said Cicely, who entered at that moment with
Mirelle.  Her cheeks were prettily dimpled,
the brightest colour glowed in her face, and
her eyes danced with delight.

Tramplara drew back, grasping the whip
by the middle, clenching his teeth, and looking
quickly from one to another in the group.

'Come into the little drawing-room,' said
Mirelle, composedly.  'I dislike being present
at vulgar brawls.  These two young men
have forgotten themselves: perhaps next they
will proceed to box, which is a disgusting
sight.'

'Stay one moment,' said young Sampson.
'Ladies, you must hear the truth at once.
Miss Strange is my cousin.  My father is her
guardian.  She shall not remain in this house
any longer.  I will take her away with me to
Launceston, where my mother and sister will
receive her.  I have just read her father's
will.  It is all right, ain't it, Mr. Battishill?
Besides, this house is not likely to be able to
afford her hospitality and shelter any more.
Is it not so, Mr. Battishill?  So pack up your
duds, missie, and be ready to start to-morrow.
I will bring a chaise out of Okehampton.'

'I am not going with you,' answered
Mirelle, coldly, and without looking at him.

'Oh, ain't you, though?  I am your
cousin, Miss Strange, and am come to fetch
you away.'

'I know nothing about you,' said Mirelle
with perfect composure.  'You are not my
cousin.  I am not Miss Strange.  I am the
Countess Mirelle Garcia de Cantalejo.'

'You have had your answer,' said Herring
to the young man.  Then, turning to the
ladies, 'Now, Countess, and you, Miss Battishill,
I must ask to withdraw.  I want a word
myself with this—person.'

Cicely smiled at him, and drew Mirelle away.

Herring watched them depart, but his
eyes were upon Mirelle, not Cicely.

Then, going to the table, he drew a cheque
book from his pocket, and wrote on it an order
for sixty pounds, payable to Mr. Battishill.

'Will you kindly endorse this, sir?' he
asked of the old gentleman.

Mr. Battishill, hardly comprehending his
purpose, complied.

'Now,' said Herring to young Sampson
Tramplara, 'take this, and write out at once a
receipt to Mr. Battishill.'

'I refuse it,' said Sampson, sullenly.
'How am I to know that you have so much
money in the bank, and how do I know that
your cheque will not be dishonoured?'

Herring pointed to the little black ruler.

'You will sign the receipt at once, or I
will break this ruler across your head.'

Tramplara made no further remonstrance.
With a hand that shook partly with anger
and partly with fear, he complied.

'Very well,' said Herring, 'now go.  Pick
up your hat, it is in the corner, and take
yourself off.'

Tramplara sulkily obeyed.  When he
reached the door he turned, his face white,
his hands quivering with passion.

'The time will come, Mr. Herring, when
it will be in my power to repay you this, and
then, by God, I swear——'

'What do you swear?'  Herring held up
the black ruler.

Tramplara shut the door, and was gone.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CICELY`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VIII.


.. class:: center medium bold

   CICELY.

.. vspace:: 2

When John Herring turned to look at
Mr. Battishill, he found the old gentleman fallen
back in his chair, his face distorted, and
scarcely conscious.  He saw at once what had
happened.  The excitement had brought on a
stroke.

Herring went into the kitchen and called
the maid.

'Make no noise; help me.'  She assisted
him to remove the master upstairs.  He sent
her for the doctor, and then tapped at the
door of the parlour that he might break the
news to Cicely.

Two days later, Mr. Battishill was sitting
up in his own room, decidedly on the mend.
The attack had been slight, nevertheless it
was a seizure, a first—and such are warnings
of others in store.  Cicely came down into
the hall to meet Herring, who had walked
up to West Wyke from Zeal, where he was
staying.  She went up to him, and he noticed
that there were tears in her eyes.

'Mr. Herring,' she said, 'my father is
better.  I am glad to have a moment in which
I can leave him and speak with you alone.'

'I am entirely at your service,' he said.

She looked into his eyes with her frank,
bright smile—a luminous smile that flickered
through a veil of tears.

'I know that perfectly, Mr. Herring, and
have no scruple in making use of you.  Here
you have remained in our neighbourhood,
instead of going on your way about your own
concerns; you have spent the greater part of
every day with us, instead of seeking to
amuse yourself—all because you knew that
your assistance was needed.  That is not the
way with many young men.  Another in your
place would have taken his valise and gone
by the next coach after the accident, and left
Mirelle to shift for herself.  You have been
everything that is kind and considerate to
Mirelle—I beg her pardon—the Countess
Garcia.'  A smile twinkled in her pleasant
face.  'And this emboldens me to appeal to
you in my trouble.'

Herring was about to protest his own
readiness, but she put up her hand to stop
him, and went on:—

'You have been foolishly generous, Mr. Herring.
You have advanced sixty pounds
to my father, to stave off the ruin that is
impending.  It is of no use.  Do not venture
to do this again.  You ought not to have
done it even once.  However, let me clear
off the debt in part immediately.  I have
butter money—not the entire sum, not even
a half.'

'Dear Miss Battishill, I will not take it.'

'Let us understand each other,' she said;
'do not interrupt me.  I have had a little
battle with myself upstairs before I could
nerve myself to meet you.  I do not know
why it is that gentlefolks shrink from
speaking of money matters one with another.  Now
I am wound up, and can go on ticking, but if
you say a word, it is like putting a feather
among the wheels, it arrests the movements,
and the clock ceases.  What I have to say
must be said.  Mr. Herring, it will not do to
lend us money, we are hopelessly involved to
the Trampleasures.  Nothing that you can
do will save us, without involving you in our
disasters.  My dear father has relied on the
hereditary wisdom of the Battishills,' she
looked up at the stained glass in the window,
and the pretty dimple came in her rosy cheek.
'Those heraldic owls have done us harm.
They have bred in our hearts the belief that
Wisdom went with the cognizances, and had
set up her temple at West Wyke.  My dear
father always supposed that he was about to
make his fortune by the application of the
hereditary wisdom to the development of the
resources of the property, or else in
speculations in mines.  Alas! an owl can see in the
dark, but not even one of our owls in the
darkness that envelops Cornish mining.  My
father was led on by Mr. Trampleasure, who
flattered him by appealing to his judgment
in various matters, and now we are clipped
past recovery.  The Tramplaras will take
from us everything—the dear old house, our
moors, our little farms.  I have foreseen this
for some time, and I have known that it is
inevitable.  Sooner or later the crash must
come, and it is better that it should come
now, rather than later when my father will be
less able to bear it.'

Herring made another effort to interrupt.

'No,' she said again, with a faint smile,
'let me go on ticking.  You have advanced
my father sixty pounds.  Next Michaelmas
he will have to meet another demand for a
larger amount.  There are thousands of pounds
owing to Mr. Trampleasure, of which this is
the interest.  He may call in that debt at
any time, and then—how are we to meet it?
All the money my father borrowed is gone
without having been of the smallest advantage
to us—gone in unfortunate ventures which
have engulfed everything.  The dear old man
would do the same thing to-morrow if he
were able.  He is now full of the notion that
he has discovered a silver lead mine at
Upaver, and he may try to persuade you to
embark in it.  Do not be persuaded.  Do not
listen to him.  Nothing that my father touches
ever succeeds.  As long as I can remember
he has been on the point of making a fortune,
but has invariably missed the point, and
fallen after each venture into deeper disaster.'

'I have been to Upaver.  I walked there
yesterday, and saw what had been brought
up.  There is silver lead there, of that I am
certain.'

'Have nothing to do with it,' said Cicely.
'Fortune's wheel has been on the turn for
the Battishills for some time, and always
downwards.  Promise me to banish Upaver
from your mind.  Promise me not to put
your money into it.'

'I have no money to put in.'

'And never, never again lend my father
money—or me, however earnestly I may beg
for it.  It is of no good; we must go down,
down, down.  Most of us small Devon gentry
are like buoys moored to a sandbank.  Every
wave goes over our heads, We are never
wholly above water.  After a while the canker
gets into our hearts; we break away from our
sandbank, and drift away—away into the vast
unknown.  We Battishills are about to drift;
decay has set in.  Nothing but a miracle can
save us, and the age of miracles is over.
There, take my butter-money, it consists of
eighteen pounds, no more; I shall, however,
be able to pay you two pounds in a fortnight,
and you shall have the rest, if I can possibly
manage it, next year.  I cannot promise an
earlier payment.  Take it.'

Herring drew back his hand.

'Take it,' said Cicely.  'It is stocking
money.  An old stocking is the surest of
banks; it never breaks.'

'No,' said Herring, 'you want the money.
I am not a rich man, by any means, but I am
not so hard pinched that I cannot lend a
trifle.  You will hurt me if you refuse the
loan.'

'I said to myself when I came down that
we should fight,' said Cicely; 'but I will not
suffer you to conquer me.  Do you not
understand that I have pride, and that it is the
part of a gallant gentleman to humour it?'

'Give me the money,' said Herring.  'One
thing, however, I will not promise.  You
asked me never to listen to you again if you
begged a loan.  This money and more will
always be at your service on an emergency.'

'That is settled,' said Cicely with a sigh
of relief.

'Now we come to a second matter; again
I appeal to your good nature.  Look at this
letter.  My father has received it from
Mr. Trampleasure, requesting him immediately to
bring his ward—Miss Strange as he calls her—to
Launceston, along with her boxes and her
father's papers.  The will must be proved and
an inventory of goods taken for probate.
Mr. Trampleasure does not offer to come for Mirelle
himself, he expects my father to conduct her
to Launceston; he knows that the demands
he makes on my father must be complied with.
Now it is out of the question that the dear old
man should take this journey in his present
condition of health, and I dare not leave him.
There is no one we can trust except yourself.
It is true I might write and say that my father
is ill and unable to travel; then Mr. Trampleasure
would be forced to come himself, but
I dread an interview between my father and
the man who has ruined him.  In his present
weak state and partial convalescence, it would
not be wise.  The doctor says he must be kept
from everything liable to excite him.  So I
fall back on you.  I told you that I knew you
were ready to do whatever is kind, and because
I know this, I make no scruple in using you.
Was I not right?'

'I will do what you wish—gladly.'

'And,' said Cicely, hesitating and colouring,
'as you return on your way to Exeter, you
will call on us again?  You cheer my father,
who quite counts on your visits, and, I am not
ashamed to confess it, I want advice.  There
is no one in this neighbourhood I can speak
with on these matters.  Accident or Providence—I
believe the latter—has brought you here,
and made you a welcome guest, and has
constituted you almost the confessor and adviser
of the house.'

'I will certainly see you again.'

'By the time you return an answer will
have arrived from Avranches, and we shall
then know whether Mirelle will have another
protector, or must be left to the uncontrolled
disposal of the Tramplaras.'

'Yes,' said Herring impetuously, 'if only
for that I must return.  It is too dreadful to
think that she who has been accustomed to the
purest and most refined surroundings should
be thrust into association with persons like
Mr. Tramplara and his son, and that her property
should be intrusted to a man who plays ducks
and drakes with all the money that he gets a
chance of fingering.'

'I am glad you feel warmly in this matter,'
said Cicely, laying a slight touch of sarcasm
on the words 'feel warmly.'  'Mirelle will
apparently need protector, confessor, and
adviser as much as we, if not more so.'

'She is so helpless, so solitary,' explained
Herring.

'By the way, chivalrous defender of
unprotected maidens,' said Cicely, brightening
up, 'you come to us like the mysterious
knight in a romance, we know not whence,
nor whither you go.  It shows how utterly
selfish we have been, how centred in our own
troubles, that no one has cared to inquire
whether you too have troubles, and whether
you are alone in the world.'

Herring smiled.  'There is no mystery
about me; I am plain John Herring, nothing
more.  I eat, I grow, I sleep, I talk.
Troubles!—no, I have none.  Alone!—well, yes, that
I am.  You and the Countess I find acting
in tragedies, but my part hitherto has been in
a farce?'

'And you so little regard your good luck
that you offer it to the first girl you meet.'

'What do you mean?'

'Only the sprig of white heath,' said Cicely,
laughing.

Next day Mirelle left West Wyke in company
with John Herring in an open caleche.
Cicely parted with her in a friendly manner,
but without great cordiality.  The coldness and
pride of Mirelle repelled her, and she did not
like her contemptuous treatment of Herring.
Yet—strange mystery that the female heart
is—she would have liked it quite as little had
Mirelle gratefully accepted his services.

She resented also her want of tenderness
towards her father.  Cicely could not
understand it.  But then she had been brought up
with her father, knew him, respected even his
weaknesses, and loved his many virtues.  She
was unable to understand that a like great love
could not grow out of the acquaintanceship of
ten days, passed in coaches, steam-packet, and
hotels.  She judged Mirelle more harshly than
justly.  That is, she judged her as one woman
judges another.  As Mirelle was driven away
Cicely turned back towards the house, saying,
'She is an icicle; she freezes my blood.'

Herring turned to Mirelle and said, 'How
kind, and good, and simple Miss Battishill is.'

'I have never before seen such red cheeks,'
answered Mirelle.  'Do you think she paints?'





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.. _`DOLBEARE`:

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   CHAPTER IX.


.. class:: center medium bold

   DOLBEARE.

.. vspace:: 2

A bright day, with a few fleecy clouds drifting
before a west wind.  A sky bright as that
which overarches a young heart.  The
prospect as smiling as that which opens before
youth.  Barriers bathed in sunlight and
indistinct in haze.  Clouds without threat of rain
casting cobalt-blue shadows.

The wild range of Dartmoor rose into
peaks, with gullies seaming their sides, down
which the Taw and the Ockments rushed
foaming from their cradles.  A glorious scene
inviting exploration, an enchanted land calling
the traveller to enter its seclusion and dispel
its mysteries.  Bathed in sunlight, enveloped
in that finest haze that pervades the air on
the brightest day in the West Country, who
would suppose that all he saw was barrenness
and naked desolation?

'Do you see that castle rising out of the
woods?' asked Herring, pointing to some
ruins of a keep on a hill to the left of the road,
after they had passed Okehampton.  'That
castle belonged to the Courtneys.  There is
a story of a certain Lady Howard who lived
there in the reign of James I.'

'I have not heard of him.  Was he an
English king?'

'He was king of England.  He was the
father of the ill-fated Charles I.'

'I have heard of him.  He married a
French princess, so he comes into history.'

'Lady Howard was married four times;
she had one daughter by her first husband,
whom she hated.'

'Perhaps she only despised him because
he was not noble, and had taken advantage of
her poverty to marry her.'

'On the contrary, she was rich, an heiress,
and her first husband was a son of the
Earl of Northumberland.'

'Then I understand nothing about it,' said
Mirelle, leaning back in the carriage as if the
story had ceased to interest her.

'When she was married to her second
husband she refused to see her daughter.  The
poor girl came here to Okehampton; some
relations sought to effect a reconciliation.  She
was introduced to her mother under a feigned
name—here, in this castle, and Lady Howard
did not know her.  But when the daughter
fell on her knees to her mother and entreated
recognition, Lady Howard started to her feet
with an exclamation of aversion, and
attempted to leave the room.  The girl clung
to her, entreating her love, as the unnatural
mother was escaping through the door.  But
Lady Howard flung together the oak valves
as she escaped, and they caught the daughter's
arm between them and broke it.'

'She was a bad woman; but she is expiating
her crime in purgatory.'

'Her purgatory is a strange one,' said
Herring.  'Every night she drives along this
road from Okehampton Castle to Launceston
Castle in her great coach drawn by four headless
horses, with a skeleton driver on the box,
and her favourite bloodhound runs beside the
coach.  When they arrive at Launceston the
dog plucks a blade of grass from the mound
on which the keep stands, and then they
return in the same way to Okehampton, which
they reach before break of day.  And she is
condemned to do this nightly, till every blade
of grass has been plucked off Launceston Castle
hill; and that will not be till the end of the
world, for the grass grows faster than the
hound can pluck it.'

'Have you ever seen the carriage with the
lady in it?'

'No.  During the war French prisoners
have been confined in the dismantled castle,
parts of which have been converted into prisons
for them, and several who have died in
confinement are buried in Okehampton churchyard.'

Mirelle shivered.

'I would not, I could not lie here.  I
should be wet under this dripping sky.  Poor
men!  Why did you not tell me this before,
and I would have visited their graves and
prayed over them in their native tongue?  It
contracts my heart to think of them, lying
here, away from la belle France, and the
golden sun, and the vineyards, and the waving
corn, and the scent of incense, and the shadow
of the cross.'

'The sun shines here.  It is shining now.'

'*It*,' said Mirelle.  'You are right when
you say *it*, not *he*.  In France he shines, he
laughs, he illumines, he warms and even burns.
He is always in the sky.  Here you have a
phantasm of the sun, without power and blaze
and fire.  I do not call that the sun; it is a
make-believe, a constitutional monarch allowed
to peep out between the clouds now and then,
not reigning by right divine, dispelling the
clouds.'

Herring looked round at the girl in
astonishment.  She was echoing sentiments she
had heard in the convent and among her
mother's aristocratic acquaintance.  'And,'
she went on, 'your church is the same—a
phantasm, a mock sun.  When the servants
of Saul came to seek David, Michal, his wife,
took a log of wood and put on it a bit of goat's
skin, and threw over it the bedclothes.  Then
the servants said, It is David asleep.  And
that was what your Reformation consisted of.
You substituted a log for the living body.
But why should I speak to you of all this?
You and I use the same names for expressing
different ideas.  You have never eaten grapes
off a vine, nor figs warm with the kiss of the
sun on their cheeks; and by grapes you mean
raisins brown and dried, and by figs withered
fruit packed in wooden boxes.  When I speak
of the sun, I mean something indescribably
glorious; you, a round tuft of cotton wool up
in the clouds, that you can see sometimes
when supremely lucky.  So in other things;
what you mean by a king and a church are
altogether different; pale ghosts of what I
mean by the same words.'

Herring was amused, and not a little
perplexed.  She put him down with an air of
superiority, as a schoolmistress would put
down a boy in her class who had made a
stupid blunder, which merited a whipping,
but was let off with degradation.

After some pause in the conversation he
ventured to remark, 'You will not deny that
this scenery is lovely.'

'It is beautiful in feature, but wanting in
colour.  I could cry out for my paint-box,
and spill the colours over the scene to make it
perfect.  My master taught me, when I learned
to paint, that shadows were to be made of
carmine and ultramarine.  There are no such
colours here.  Shadows must be put in with
Indian ink.  I could copy all the tints with a
child's fifty-sous box of paints, warranted free
from poisonous matter, as also from all real
colour.  Besides,' she added, 'Venus when
she rose from the sea must have been intolerable
till dried.  Your land is fair, but
ever-lastingly dripping.'

She spoke without a smile.  Herring
turned his head aside to laugh.

So they went on; he telling her traditions
to while away the journey, she setting him
down.

At length they arrived at Launceston.

The town is curious, perched on a height,
rising precipitously out of the valley of the
Kensey, and culminating in a rock that has
been shaped by the hands of men, and crowned
by a circular keep of concentric rings of
masonry.

The main street of Launceston is entered
under an ancient gateway.  Scarcely another
English town has such a picturesque and
continental appearance.

On the steep slope of the hill, clinging to
its side, was the quaintest conceivable house—a
long narrow range of gables, roof and
walls encased in small slate-like mail armour.
In front of the house is a narrow terrace,
with, at one end, a sort of summer-house,
furnished with fireplace and chimney.
Below this terrace the rock falls abruptly to the
valley.  The foundations of the houses in the
street above are higher than the tops of the
chimneys of 'Dolbeare,' as this picturesque
old house was called.

In Dolbeare lived the Trampleasures, as
they called themselves; Tramplaras, as the
world called them.  Herring knew little of
Launceston, and he had some difficulty in
finding the house.

The door opened to them, and they were
introduced into a hall, with stairs branching
off on either side.  Then a stout red-faced
man, with perfectly white hair, burst out of
the adjoining room, with a noisy shout of 'Oh,
here you are at last!  Come to my arms,
Cousin Strange.'

Mirelle drew back before the coarse man.

'I say,' pursued he with effusion, 'what's
your pet name, darling?  Let's be cosy and
familiar at starting.  What are you?  Mirrie?
Rellie?'

Mirelle turned to ice.  'You have mistaken
the person,' she said.  'I am no cousin.
I have no other name than that of Countess
Mirelle Garcia de Cantalejo.  I have come here
till my affairs are settled, and then I shall go
elsewhere.  I pray let this be understood from
the outset.  I am not a Strange, and we are
not relations.'

The old man stood open-eyed and
open-mouthed without speaking, and then burst
into a roar of laughter, which made his face
blaze a fierce red, horrible against the snow of
his hair and whiskers.  His eyes were black,
with a cunning twinkle in them.  His hands
were large, the fingers short and fat, the palms
very wide.  Altogether a repulsive old man.
to whom the hoar head was no crown of glory,
but he a dishonour to hoar hairs.

Mirelle contemplated him with undisguised
aversion.  Then she turned to Herring and
said, 'I cannot lodge with this person.  Take
me back to the Battishills.'

Herring did not know what answer to make.

'Pray, who are you?' asked the old man.
'Brother or lover of the lady?  Perhaps a
cousin whom she does condescend to recognise;
a Parley-vous Mossou, hey?'

'My name is Herring,' said the young
man, gravely.  'Mr. Battishill is ill, and Miss
Battishill cannot leave her father.  Consequently
they asked me to escort the Countess
to Launceston.'

'The Countess!' exclaimed Mr. Tramplara.
'Oh, Ginger! a live Countess in the
house.  Lord! the little rooms won't contain
her.  We must throw out bow windows.
Come here, Orange, come here, Polly, and see
a live Countess.'

As he called, a feeble old woman, in a big
cap with lilac ribands and a pink bow under
her chin, appeared at a side door, and with
her the daughter whom he called Orange.
The latter entered the hall.

'Father,' said Miss Orange Trampleasure,
reproachfully, 'you are too boisterous with
the young lady.  Do you not see?  She is
tired with her journey, and your noise
frightens her.'

'Frightens me!' repeated Mirelle, with
perfect composure.  'Non, il ne me fait
paspeur—il me revolte.'

'Come with me, cousin,' said Orange.
'Let me take off your things, and show you
your room.'

Mirelle hesitated.

'My dear,' Orange went on, 'there is no
help for it.  Whether you like it or not, here
you must stay; you cannot go back to the
Battishills.  It is unreasonable to expect them
to take charge of you.  Besides, your father
committed you to us.'

'My father has left a gentleman in France
my guardian equally with this person here.'

'Then you must stay with us till he
has been communicated with,' said Orange.
'Come with me.'

Mirelle allowed herself to be conducted
upstairs.

Old Tramplara went into a muffled
convulsion of laughter.  He winked at Herring
and said, 'She's a queer piece of flesh, ain't
she—full of French hoity-toity?  We must
take all that out of her, and make good
English homespun take the place of mouslin-de-laine,
parley-vous, bong-soir, mossou!'  Then
the old man curtsied and grimaced, and went
into attitudes.  'So,' said he, 'you be the gent
that has escorted my Lady High and Mighty
here!  My son said something about you.
You gave him a rap over the knuckles, hey?
Serve the beggar right.  He had been drinking,
I'll swear.  He said he had come across
a temperance fellow who had insulted him.
And you also, I suppose, are the party that
have been paying sixty pounds for old
Battishill; lending him the money—making him a
present of it, I should rather say—for he who
lends to him don't hear the chink of his coin
again.  I suppose you have plenty of brass to
throw away.  Well, there be better investments
than West Wyke, I can tell'y.  I wish
I had been by to have tipped you a hint.
Herring is your name!  I wonder whether
you are any relation to old Jago Herring, of
Welltown?'

The young man did not enlighten him.

'Look here,' said Mr. Trampleasure.  'Stay
and pick a bone of mutton with us at supper.
Don't be shy about meeting Sampson.  He
ain't here, now at least—and what's more, he's
not the fellow to bear malice.  Lord bless
you! if he were a bit rampageous, it was
because he had been drinking; and as Moses
who was the meekest of men said, when the
liquor is in the manners is out.  But the
contrary is also true—and I Sampson
Trampleasure say it—when the liquor is out the
manners return.  And, though I ain't a Moses,
and a prophet, and all that sort of thing, yet
I've a pretty shrewd head of my own, and what
I say is worth attending to.  Come along,
Herring, and have a bite with us all, and see
the young lady nestle into the bosom of the
family.  By Grogs!  I've lost my manners
though.  Here's Mrs. Trampleasure, and I've
never introduced you to her.  Mr. Herring,
Mrs. Tram, the flame of my youth, the solace
of my age—eh, old woman?'

'Have done wi' your funning, Tram,' said
the old lady, giggling feebly.  'Will you step
in, sir?  It gets chilly of an evening, and a
fire is agreeable, sir, especially when one is
troubled with a cold in the head.'

'Look here, Herring,' said Trampleasure,
familiarly.  'You are not returning to West
Wyke to-night.  That is impossible.  You are
going to sleep at the White Hart or the King's
Arms, that is certain.  Well, it ain't always
lively of an evening at an inn.  You can plead
no engagement, and therefore I will take no
excuse.  You stay with us and save your
pocket the cost of supper.  If you are fond
of music, we'll give you some.  "Music hath
charms to soothe the savage breast," you
remember the text—in Malachi I believe, and
he was the last of the prophets.  If that was the
last thing he ever said it was the truest.  Is her
Serene Highness at all in the tum-tum way?'

'I really cannot say.'

'Because, if she is, she's where her talent
will be drawn out.  I play the bass violin,
Sampson is a Boanerges on the flute, and
Orange can do pretty well on the harpsichord.
But there she comes herself, all along of her
Ladyship.  Come in, Herring, this is Liberty
Hall, with no more forms and ceremonies in
it than in the Tabernacle in the Wilderness.'

He drew the young man into the sitting-room.
'There's another musician in the house,'
he said, 'but of him, mum.  He don't let
himself be heard often, thanks be.'

Herring reluctantly submitted.  He was
repelled by the old man, but he was concerned
for Mirelle.  Could she endure this association?
Was the daughter, Orange, better than
her father, or was she equally vulgar?  The
mother was feeble and commonplace, not
obtrusively offensive.  He would like to be
satisfied that in Orange poor Mirelle would
find a refuge and a support against the coarse
father and from the brutal son.

He could learn this only by staying, and
he therefore accepted the invitation, though
not with the best grace.

The table in the little dining-room was
laid with a white cloth, and there was a dish
with a cold leg of boiled mutton on it at the
head.  Cheese, butter, and bread were dispersed,
not arranged, on the surface of the table.  In
the centre stood a plated cruet-stand with old
mustard turned brown in a pot, and a bottle
of sauce down whose sides the sauce had
trickled and caked.

Mirelle entered with Orange, pale, her
long dark lashes drooping on her cheek.  She
was ashamed, perhaps afraid, to look up.
Herring thought he saw something on the
lash.  A tear?—hardly a whole tear.  A
brilliant, not a diamond.

The room was comfortable.  It was
panelled with painted wood of Queen Anne's
period, the mouldings heavy and the panels
large.  The room was low.  A fire burnt in
the grate.

Orange Tramplara came up to Herring.

'You have had a long journey—tedious
also,' she said.

'Not tedious by any means.  That was
impossible in such company.'

'Well, long.  I wish we had known for
certain that my cousin would be here to-night,
then we would have had a warm supper ready.'

'Don't bother with excuses,' burst in old
Tramplara.  'Men do not heed what they eat,
but what they drink.  Cold mutton is a very
good thing, especially with a glass of hot grog
on the top.'

Herring looked steadily at Orange.  She
was a tall, stoutly built, handsome girl, with
black hair, florid complexion, and very
beautiful dark eyes.  Her lips were crimson, ripe
and sensuous.  She had a fine throat and a
swelling bust.  Herring could make out nothing
more.  Men cannot read women's characters
from their faces.  It is well that they are
denied this faculty, or the race would become
extinct.  Marriages, says a proverb, are made
in heaven.  No—marriages are made in
Paradise—the paradise of fools.

Whilst Herring studied Orange ineffectually,
she was making her own comments on
him.  She read more of his character than he
had been able to decipher of hers.  But he
had deciphered nothing.  She saw that he
was good-looking, honest, and amiable, and
that he did not lack ability.  She read
good-nature in every curve, and turned
contemptuously away.  Good-nature is weakness.

'Come along.' said Mr. Tramplara, 'the
travellers want to peck.  Sit you all down.
"For what we are going to receive."  Under-done,
missie? or tasting of the butcher's
fingers, eh?'





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A MUSICAL WALKING-STICK`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER X.


.. class:: center medium bold

   A MUSICAL WALKING-STICK.

.. vspace:: 2

As Herring sat at table, he noticed opposite
him, hung against the wall, a large pastille
portrait of a gentleman in a red coat, with
powdered hair.  The face was refined.

By way of conversation, Herring asked
Orange, who sat next him, whether this were
a family picture.

'What—this, this?' said Tramplara, taking
the answer out of his daughter's mouth.
'Nobody knows who the red man is.'

'An ancestor, however, I presume,' said
Herring.

'Lord bless you! no; he don't look like
an ancestor of our family.  No flesh and blood
and muscle and go-ahead there; all thinness
and fine bone and whimsy, very well for show,
but no use for work.  Though I do not know
who the party was, yet I do know something
queer about the picture.  This house don't
belong to me, I rent it; and in the lease that
picture goes with the house, and so does a
bundle of old walking-sticks that we keep in
the attic.  Now ain't that curious?  I reckon
the sticks belonged to that old fellow in the
red coat, but I can't say.  He and the house
and the sticks go together.  You can't rent
the house without the sticks and the picture.
The sticks are not worth much; they would
not fetch half a crown, the whole lot of them,
at a sale.  There is one with a head I thought
was silver gilt, but it is no such thing, it is
gilded copper; there is a second, mottled with
things like trees on it; and there is one, and
that the queerest of all, has an ivory handle
with holes in it, like a flute, but with tongues
to them like those in an accordion, so that
any one up to that sort of thing might play a
tune on it.  Sampson could do it if he tried,
but there is a reason why he don't try.  It is
all cursed superstition, but still it won't do to
tempt Providence; that's my doctrine, and I
challenge Scripture to make better.  What—no
appetite?' he asked, when Mirelle declined
a slab of cold mutton placed before her.  'Come,
come, we must get hearty to our meat in Old
England, and have no pecking of crumbs and
nibbling of salads here, like birds and rabbits.'  He
ate himself and said, 'Missie! you don't
get mutton like this in France.  I've been in
Paris, and I ought to know.  I dined in the
Palley-royal, and I said to the garçon—garçon!
By the way, missie! what is the name
you call yourself by?  Garçon, garçon?'

'Garcia,' answered Mirelle, haughtily.

'Garcia, is it.  Well, garçon means waiter,
so I take it Garcia means bar-maid, eh?  Why,
there are the boys.  I hear them in the hall.
Excuse me a moment, I want a word with
Sampson.'  Down went his knife and fork,
and the great fellow dashed noisily out of the
room.

The situation for Herring was not
pleasant, but young Tramplara relieved him of
his embarrassment the moment he entered by
going directly to him with extended hand:
'Very sorry I wasn't polite t'other day; but
there, forgive and forget, as the foot-pad said
to the traveller when he relieved him of his
purse.'

'No, no, Sampy,' put in his father; 'you
are out there, my boy.  Verify your quotations,
say I.  That same sentiment proceeds
from Shakespeare—one of the writers of the
Apocrypha,' he added, in explanation to
Mirelle; 'not quite a prophet, but tinged
with the prophetic fire.'

Herring frankly accepted the apology.
Young Tramplara was followed into the room
by a gentleman, tall, with light hair and very
light moustache, a military air, and a
handsome face and figure.

'Miss Strange,' said old Tramplara, 'let
me introduce my friend, Captain Trecarrel.
Captain Trecarrel, Miss Strange, *alias* the
Countess Garcia de Something-or-other-unpronounceable.
Same, Mr. Herring.  Take a
chair, Trecarrel, and try your teeth on the
mutton.  Miss Strange is the daughter of my
first cousin, Jimmy Strange.  "Though lost to
sight, to memory dear," as the sacred penman
has it.  The young lady don't fancy her name
somehow, it isn't high-flavoured enough for
her foreign ideas; however, she is a Strange,
so sure as lamb is young mutton.'

Captain Trecarrel declined.

'What—no meat!  Oh, a Friday.  You
Catholics——'

'Vous êtes Catholique, monsieur?' asked
Mirelle, suddenly waking into interest.

'Si, mademoiselle.'

'Et vous parlez Français?'

'Assez bien.'

'Tenez.  Quand on sait penser en Français,
on n'est plus bête, et quand on est
Catholique, voilà l'âme qui vit.'

Herring noticed the look of surprised
admiration with which Captain Trecarrel
contemplated the wax-like face before him.  He
saw also the smile that leaped into her eyes
when the Captain confessed his religion and
spoke in French.  She had accorded *him* no
smile.  Orange also noticed the admiration
awakened in the Captain, and the encouragement
given him by Mirelle.  Her cheek darkened
and she bit her lip.

'No parley-vous here, please!' said old
Trampleasure.  'No one any more mutton?
Well, a merciful man is merciful to his beast,
says Holy Writ, and so say I.  Bella, take out
the meat for your own supper.'  When the
red-haired servant, who walked from her
shoulders, had cleared the table, and had put
another log on the fire, and impregnated the
atmosphere of the room with a scent of yellow
soap, Tramplara said: 'Now for some music.
Do you tum-tum, missie?'

Mirelle did not notice the question.

'Beg pardon, Countess Garcia de Candelstickio.
If you don't play yourself, perhaps
you will enjoy good music when you hear it?
Now then, Orange, sit you down.  Sampson,
get out your flute, and here is my bass viol,
big and burly, and sound in the wind as jolly
old Trampleasure himself.'

'Do you play at all, Countess?' asked Herring.

'Occasionally; according to where I am.
I am not Orphée.  I do not pretend to tame
the beasts.'

'Come along, Captain, you must not absent
yourself from the concerto.  Can you manage
any other music than blowing your own
trumpet?'

'If Miss Orange will supply me with a
comb and some silver paper, I can give you a
rude imitation of the pan-pipes.'

Orange became grave at once.  'Do not
jest on that subject, Captain Trecarrel.'

'No, no,' threw in Trampleasure, 'it is all
cursed superstition, but still, "Let sleeping
dogs lay," as Chalker observes in the "Canterbury
Tales."

'What do you mean?'

'You have heard of the old gentleman in
red who is said to walk here,' answered
Orange, in a subdued tone.  'The tenants
who had Dolbeare before us let the walking-sticks
lie at the agent's, and they were fairly
routed out of the house by the noises.'

'It was rats,' said Trampleasure; 'women
are cowards about noises.'

'What has this to do with my impromptu
musical instrument?' asked Captain
Trecarrel.

'This,' answered Orange; 'whenever there
is any great misfortune about to befall those
in the house, a sound is heard going through
it such as that you proposed to make.  What
is singular is that one of the walking-sticks
that goes with the house has some such a
musical instrument in the handle.'

'Who is supposed to walk and pipe woe to
the house?' asked the Captain.

'That red man hanging on the wall behind you.'

Every one turned to look at the picture.

'He appears harmless enough,' said Trecarrel.

'Has any one heard his music?'

'None of us have,' answered Orange; 'but
it has been heard by others before we came
here.'

'It is a strange story,' said Trecarrel.  'It
reminds me of the tenure of Tresmarro, not
far from here.  There the house is let with a
human skull.  The farmer there, not liking
the object, buried it; but noises of all sorts,
voices, knockings, tramplings, heard at night,
made the place unbearable, so he dug up the
skull and restored it to its niche in the apple
chamber, where it stands now, and then the
disturbance ceased.'

'Come, never mind about the ghosts,'
shouted old Tramplara, 'we want music;' and
he drew his bow across the bass viol, making
the room resound.

Captain Trecarrei drew his chair beside
Mirelle.  Orange saw this, and said, 'Captain,
to your post of duty.  I want you to turn
over the leaves whilst I play.'

A look of annoyance came over his face;
he rose, and took his place by the piano.

The concert began.  The flute was out of
tune, the bass viol roared and drowned the
piano.  Mirelle shuddered, and drew back
against the wall.

'Are you fond of music?' asked Herring,
during a pause.

'Of music, yes.  Of noise, no.'

'Countess,' said he in an undertone,
'before I leave allow me to ask of you a favour.
I go to-morrow, and perhaps shall not see you
again.

'Most probably not.'

'It pains me to see you thus left with
uncongenial surroundings.  Your position here
may become unendurable.  Should you, at any
time, need help, and you think I can give you
assistance, do not fail to summon me.'

'You are very good to make me the offer,
but I am hardly likely to make use of it.  I
shall not remain in this house a moment longer
than I am obliged.  I have another guardian
living at Avranches.  As we passed through
the place, on our way to England, my father
called on him.  When he is ready to receive
me I will go to him, and leave England for ever.'

'But suppose he declines to act.'

'He cannot decline.  My father saw him
at Avranches.'

'We will hope for the best.  But on the
chance of your desiring independent advice,
will you take and keep my card?  My address
is on it—that is, the address from which
letters will be forwarded to me.'

'I thank you.  I will preserve it,' said
Mirelle, stiffly.  'For myself it will be
needless, but I will recommend your firm to
my acquaintances, and I hope obtain some
orders.'

Herring looked puzzled.  Mirelle took the
card and twirled it in her fingers without
glancing at it.  She was annoyed with what
she regarded as an impertinence.

With a crash on the piano, a shriek from
the flute, and a bellow from the bass viol, the
symphony concluded.

John Herring rose to depart.  The musicians
were engaged on their instruments.
Captain Trecarrei was leaning over the piano,
talking to Orange.  As Herring rose, Mirelle
rose also.  She knew he was going to depart,
and that, perhaps, for ever.

She was relieved to think so.

He ventured to hold out his hand.  Purposely
she avoided seeing it, but, raising her
eyes, she looked him in the face.  Wondrous,
mysterious eyes they were.  They dazzled
Herring.  This was the second time only that
he had met her look.

'I am very anxious about your future, Countess.'

'I pray you give it no thought.  My
future is in my own hands alone; it cannot
concern you.'  She slightly curtseyed.

Then there came a faint musical strain as
on some reedy instrument stealing through
the house.  It was heard outside the door, in
the hall, then it passed round the room and
went on into Mr. Trampleasure's office beyond;
a strange music, distant yet near, so distant
that the ear was sensible of an effort to hear
it, yet so near that the vibration could be
felt.  The air played was familiar; a solemn,
quaint old melody, associated with these
words:—

   |  Since first I saw your face, I resolv'd
   |    To honour and renown you;
   |  If now I be disdain'd, I wish
   |    My heart had never known you.
   |

Orange turned pale.  Old Tramplara was
startled.  Mirelle and Herring did not at first
realise that this was the music that had been
alluded to at table.  Some moments elapsed
before those in the room had recovered from
their surprise sufficiently to speak, and then
only Orange had the courage to refer to it.
She turned sharply, almost fiercely, on Mirelle,
and said, 'It is you—you! who have brought
this on us.'

'Brought what?'

Orange was too agitated to explain.  'I
have told you what this means,' she said.

'What have we here on the floor?' asked
Tramplara, in a shaking voice.

'A card,' answered Mirelle.  'Mr. Herring's
address.' She raised it and read:—

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   'Lieut. Herring, 25th Reg.
       Welltown,
           N. Cornwall.'

.. vspace:: 1

'Why!' she exclaimed, supremely shocked,
'he is an officer in the army, and I thought
he was a *commis voyageur* for some grocery
or drapery business.  Where is he?'

John Herring was gone.  She had not
even thanked him for what he had done for
her, and he had done for her, and would
do for her, far more than she knew.  However
proudly she may have resolved to hold
her future in her own hands, that future was
in his.

'Herring!—Welltown!' echoed Mr. Trampleasure:
'why, he is the son of old Jago
Herring after all.'

'Twenty-fifth!' echoed Captain Trecarrel:
'why, he must have been at Waterloo.'

'Waterloo, by all the rules of military
science, ought to have been a victory to the
Emperor,' said Mirelle.  'Indeed, it was a
victory, but the arrival of the Prussians, and
thereby the preponderating numerical power
brought to bear against our troops when
exhausted, compelled them to retreat.'

'Sampy,' said Trampleasure, in an undertone
to his son, 'I had a peck or two at old
Jago, and there must be flesh on the bones of
the son.  The old fool has sent his son into
the army to make a gentleman of him.  Quick! run
after him, my lad, and beg him, whenever
he passes through Launceston, to give
us a call, and see how the Countess
Candelstickio is picking up her crumbs.'





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE GIANT'S TABLE`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XI.


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE GIANT'S TABLE.

.. vspace:: 2

Herring drove back next day to West Wyke.
He was not in good spirits; he had not slept
much the night before.  The thoughts of
Mirelle, of her isolation in the midst of coarse,
sordid natures, of her exposure to the
impertinence of Sampson, junior, and the vulgarity
of the elder Tramplara, had kept him awake.
His sole hope lay in Orange, that she might
prove a refuge and protection for Mirelle.
The Countess had repelled him.  She had not
even thanked him for what he had done for
her.  She had treated him as a travelling
bag-man, had absolutely declined his proffers of
friendship.  Was it likely that they would
meet again—that he should again look into
those dark, inscrutable eyes?  She filled all
his thoughts.  He could give attention to
nothing else.  Poor Mirelle!  Unsuited utterly
by her bringing up for battling with the
realities of life.  Reared in purest cloudland
she was translated to grossest proseland.
Nursed in a convent, she found herself
suddenly at its spiritual and moral antipodes.
She had spent her life hitherto secluded from
the rush and roar of life.  Now she was
plunged in the swirl of the current, and knew
not how to swim.  Poor Mirelle!  Herring
sighed.  He was thinking of her when he
reached West Wyke, and Cicely's cheerful
voice roused him from abstraction.

She met him in her frank and genial
manner, and showed how pleased she was to
see him.  What a contrast between his
reception to-day and his dismissal over night!
Then a frost had fallen on his heart, now a
sunbeam thawed it.  And yet he could not
avoid contrasting Cicely unfavourably with
Mirelle.  Cicely was eminently sober, sensible,
and practical; perfectly natural, entirely
without disguise.  Mirelle was dreamy, unreasonable,
unpractical; her nature altered by her
education, her character a riddle.  Cicely had
her congeners everywhere.  Herring had met
a thousand equally fresh and charming girls;
hers was the type found in every manor house
and parsonage of Old England.  These girls
are sweet, wholesome, but not piquant.  Every
one knows what they are; the sounding line
goes to the bottom of their souls at once, and
all the way through fresh and crystal waters.
But Mirelle was mysterious.  Herring had
never met with one like her.  He could not
fathom her; he dare not even cast the plumb.
That she had a shrewd spirit he saw; that
she had depth of character he suspected; that
she was good as an angel of God he was so
convinced that he would have died for his
faith.  He liked Cicely, he loved Mirelle.  He
could imagine nothing about Cicely; he knew
all.  He knew nothing about Mirelle; his
imagination could soar in contemplation of
her, and see her still above him.

Mr. Battishill was delighted to see Herring.
He took the young man's hand in his.
He would not let it go, but kept shaking it,
and repeating how pleased he was to see him.
Herring was touched.  There was something
in this reception like a coming home.  Then
they got to talking about Mirelle.  A letter
had come from Mr. Eustace Smith, a peppery,
indignant letter, refusing to have anything to
do with executorship to the deceased's will,
trusteeship of his property, and guardianship
of his child.  Consequently Mirelle was left
wholly at the mercy of Tramplara.  Nothing
further could be done by Mr. Battishill or by
John Herring.

'Do you understand Mirelle?' asked
Cicely of the young man.

'What do you mean by understand?  I
cannot answer you without a definition of
terms.'

'I mean——  What is your opinion of her?'

'I should like to know yours first, Miss
Battishill.'

'That is not fair.  However, you shall
have it.  I think Mirelle has no heart.  She
has been brought up by a selfish mother, and
by sisters who, in their religious way, are
selfish also.  She is one of those persons
whom it is impossible to love, for there is
nothing lovable in her.  But it is quite possible
to pity her, and pity her I do from the bottom
of my heart.  Her character is as cold and
colourless as her exterior.'

'You misread her,' said Herring, 'or I am
vastly mistaken.  She has a heart, a very
warm and tender heart, but it sleeps like a
flower-bed under the snow.  It is a heart full
of promise——'

'How can you say that?  Have you dug
through the snow to explore it?'

'I should say, full of possibilities.  She is
not really selfish—I mean, she is not naturally
selfish, but she has not been placed in a
position where she can attach herself to any
person.  She has been reared to love ideas,
not individuals—the Church and la belle
France, and to these ideas she has attached
herself warmly.  With us the object of education
is to enlarge the sympathies; with those
who have trained her it has been the object to
narrow them.  Each system has its advantages,
and each its defects.  If we enlarge the
sympathies they run shallow, if they be narrowed
they become intense; and the men and women
who make their mark, who influence the
destinies of their fellow-men, are those of one
idea and fiery prejudice.  Mirelle is
self-restrained without being reserved.  She is
frank as to her thoughts and impenetrable as
to her feelings.  What she believes to be true
she speaks with crudeness, because she is
unaware that the world will only accept the
truth cooked and sauced.  She is wholly
ignorant of life, more so than a child with us
of fourteen, because an English child lives in
its horae, with brothers and sisters, and its
associates are of every sort and degree.
Mirelle has had no home, all her associates
have been of one type, of one class, and of her
own sex.  She has never been brought into
contact with the poor, and has never associated
with men.  The defects you notice are
superficial, and will fade as she grows older and
gains experience.'

'You judge her more kindly than I,' said
Cicely.  'But that is like you.  You are always
generous.  Men see the good side of women,
and women only the worst side of their sisters.
Woman is to man like the moon, always showing
one face, and that serene and luminous.
That there is another, systematically turned
from him, passes his philosophy.'

'I grant the likeness,' said Herring
vehemently.  'But why should that other side be
dark and unsightly?  No; Paradise is on the
unseen face.'

'Omne ignotum pro magninco,' said
Mr. Battishill; 'I remember so much Latin.'

'You would like, Miss Battishill, to drag
the moon down out of the sky and turn her
round and show me a desert of lava.'

'I should like to see exactly what the
moon is made of.  I see volcanoes and
chasms on this face, I cannot suppose green
hills and flowery plains on the other.  She
naturally shows us the only decent face she has.'

'There we differ as the poles,' said Herring,
warmly.  'I prefer to see her far, far
above me, and I do not wish to bring her
down to my level.  I idealise her hidden side,
and believe I do not see it because of my own
unworthiness.'

'Let us change the topic,' said Cicely, 'or
we shall quarrel, and I cannot afford that.'

'By all means,' answered Herring, 'and
so, tell me, has anything been seen of that
strange girl who helped me to carry the
Countess to your door?'

'What!  Joyce?'

'Yes, I think that was the name you gave her.'

'No, I have been too occupied with my
father to think of her.  She is more than half
a savage, and lives with her old father in a
Druidical monument called the Giant's Table,
not far from here.'

'If I had not come to the rescue in
time, the wretched old man would have
killed her.  I am not altogether easy in my
mind.  The father was beside himself with
rage, though what had angered him did not
transpire.'

After he had eaten—for Cicely insisted he
should not go out till he had been given a
meal—Herring went in search of Joyce.  His
purpose was to give her a crown for her assistance;
he judged from her appearance that she
was wretchedly poor.  Moreover he was
desirous to see that the girl had not been
ill-treated by her father after his protection was
withdrawn.

The moor was ablaze with the gorse in
full flower.  The air that is wafted from the
Spice Islands cannot be more fragrant than
that which played over these masses of
growing gold.

Herring had no difficulty in finding the
Giant's Table.  The little clearing effected by
the Cobbledicks lay as an island in the moor.
Their rude stone fences walled out the gorse
gold and the rosy heather.  Adjoining this
inclosure was the grey mass of granite stones
set on edge, capped by an enormous block;
the interstices were filled in with moss.
Herring looked round.  Not a human being
was visible; no one worked in the clearing.
A faint sweet smoke hung about the mysterious
old monument, showing that a peat fire
burned within.

The young man walked round the cromlech
and discovered the entrance.  Within it
was dark.  His eyes were dazzled with the
gorse bloom.  He saw the smouldering embers
of a turf fire, and the smoke crept out at the
doorway, which served equally the purposes
of chimney, window, and door.  Then he
stooped and entered.

'Is any one here?'

'Here be I,' answered a voice from the
further end.

'Who?  Joyce?'

'Yes, sure.'

'Why, Joyce, what are you doing here?
What! lying down?  Are you ill?'

'I be broked all to pieces,' she answered;
'I be going to die.'  Her voice was hoarse.

'Good heavens, Joyce! how has this occurred?'

He went to the upper end of the cromlech,
and knelt by her.  Now he was able to see.
The girl lay on the cushions of the chaise, and
some of the rugs were thrown over her.

'How has this come about, Joyce?'

'I won't tell'y, unless you swears not to
let the constable know.  I don't want no hurt
to come to vaither of this.  Vaither were here
a minute agone, but I reckon he seed you
acoming, and so he sloked away.  Hers
afeared the constable'll be after'n all along o'
doing this.'

'But what has he done to you, child?'

'He's a'most scatted me to bits,' she said.
'Look'y here?'  She held out her arms.
Both were broken below the elbows, and the
hands hung limp and powerless.  'I'd angered
'n; and yet, t'warnt my fault neither.  The
coord snappt acause the coord were wore out.
But never heed that.  You won't tell o' he?
See now; say after me, "Blast me blue if I
does."'

'My poor girl, I will not tell.'

'Say what I sez: "Blast me blue, and
glory rallaluley!"'

'There is no necessity for that.  You may
trust my word.'

'He'd a right to do it,' argued Joyce.  'I
be his daughter, and a vaither may do what
he minds to wi' his child.  That's reason.'

'I dispute that.  He had no right whatever
to maltreat you.  But, tell me, have you
had no doctor to you?  Your bones must be set.'

'A doctor won't do me no good, maister.
I niver seed a animal as had been mashed that
hev come right again.  'Tain't in nature.  I
be going to die right on end, I be.  But I
don't wish vaither no hurt for it.  I be his
daughter, and he has a right to do as he
pleases.'

'Joyce, when was this done?'

'When were this done?  Why, that night
the carriage were overset and the man killed.'

'What! all that time ago, and nothing
done to your arms!  Did not your father put
splints on them?'

'What be they?  Vaither can't mend nothing.
He've abroked and tore down scores
and scores of things, but he've amended nothing.'

'And no one has been here to help you?'

'Nobody niver comes here.  My vaither
be a sight better now than he were.  I'll tell'y
how that comed about.  I'll tell'y the whole
tale right on end.  When I returned home
after I'd a' been to West Wyke wi' you, carrying
the lady wi' the white face, him were a'
lying in wait for I, and when I comed up, then
he set on me wi' a great stone, and he hurted
me all over, and broke what he could break.
You see I'd a angered 'n, and he forgot himself.
I've a forgot myself a times too.  After
that I crept in here, and laid me down, by the
turve fire.  But vaither, he wouldn't come in,
he stood and peeped in at the door.  I seed 'n
and I sed, "Vaither!  Miss Cicely sez you
may go and sleep in the calves' linny among
the straw, and it will be warm and comfortable
for'y, vaither, better nor the old barril
was.  So you go along, and let me bide quiet
and die in peace."  Then he went.  In the
night I were that burning hot I could not
sleep, and I opened my eyes, and there I seed
old mother wot be buried under the hearthstone;
her were a heaving up in the midst of
the fire.  I seed her head sticking straight
out of the burning turves, and her looked
hard at me; her face were red as live coals.
Then her went on heaving and pushing till
her'd a worked herself right out of the earth,
in the midst of the fire, and the burning
turves tumbled this way and that as her
comed out.  Then I seed that her old gown
were flickering wi' blue light, just as you've
seed old touchwood.  Her comed to me and
her kissed me, but sure her lips were like fire,
and they burned me.  Then her sed, "Joyce,
tell your vaither that I be acoming after 'n if
he does you any more harm.  I knows where
he be, in the linny, lying warm in the straw.
But I'll make 'll warmer.  I'll throw fiery
turves in among the straw, and he'll burn,
he'll burn, he'll burn!"  As her were a saying
of that her went backerds into the fire, and
down through the turves, and they closed
over she just as afore.  But I heard her still
a mumbling to herself under the hearth-stone,
"He'll burn, he'll burn, he'll burn!"'

'Oh, Joyce, you were fevered and wandering
in your mind,' said Herring, who belonged
to the nineteenth century after Christ.  The
condition of Joyce's mind was that of a savage
three centuries before Christ.

'After that,' she went on, 'I told vaither all,
and he hev come here and been very good to I.
You see he be mortal afeered o' being caught
asleep in the linny in the straw by mother wi'
a flaming turve in her hand.  He thinks her
won't make much worrit o' nights, becos of
disturbing me.  And then he laughs and sez,
"Mother be that pleased I hev a given her
summat to play with, and her be a playing
wi' that and won't trouble no more."

'Joyce, your father must be very sorry
for what he has done.'

'He is that for sartain.  All becos you
see he've a got to do everything himself now.
Afore, I did a deal of things.  I got up the
taties, and I baked 'em in the ashes, and I
milked the cow, and I did scores and scores
of things.  But now that I hev my arms a
broke it puts a deal o' work on vaither.  Her
hev to do everything from morning to night.
And vaither be getting an old man, and not
up to work as he were years by.  He feels it,
sure, very much, and wishes he hadn't a done
it now.  But wot's the good o' wishing.
Wishing won't mend broken bones.'

Herring was kneeling by her.  He could
not understand the girl.  Was she delirious,
or was this the outpour of her reasonable
soul?  He put his hand on her low forehead,
brushing up the shock of coarse hair.  He
wished to feel her pulse, but could not touch
the artery in the broken hand.  She lay very
still with her eyes fixed on him.

'You are feverish,' he said.  'I am going
to fetch a doctor.'

'I say,' exclaimed Joyce, vehemently,
'you've swore not to tell the constable of
vaither.  If you were to do that, I'd never
be friends wi' you more.'

Friends with him!  The poor savage and
the lieutenant in His Majesty's service!
Herring was unable to suppress a smile.

'Joyce,' he said gravely, 'you must have
those poor arms patched up.  The surgeon must
attend you.  I shall have you carried hence.
No doubt Miss Cicely will know of a cottage
where you can be received.'

'No,' she said hoarsely, even fiercely, 'I'll
go over no drexil (threshold).  Let me lie
here and die where I've a lived.'

'But I insist on a doctor attending you.'

'What can a doctor do for me?  It ain't
in nature.  What be broke be broke; be it a
leg, or a neck, or a arm, or a heart, it be all
one.  What be a broke be a broke for ever
and ever, Amen.'

After some difficulty he persuaded her to
consent.  Then he ran off to South Tawton
for a surgeon.  He returned with one rather
over an hour later.  Then he stood outside
whilst the medical man entered the den and
examined the patient.  Presently he was
called.

'She is severely bruised, but no other
bones are broken except those in her arms.
She is obstinate, and I cannot induce her to
allow me to put splints on and bandage the
arms.'

'Oh, Joyce! if you wish to be well you
will submit.'

'I don't care one way or other,' said the
girl sullenly.  'I wouldn't give the turn of a
turf whether I lived or whether I died.  Wot's
life to me?  It ain't anything I cares for.'

'But I do care very much about it, Joyce.
You must have your bones mended and get
well to make me happy.'

'You care, do'y?  Then I'll live.  There!'  She
held out her broken arms, but as suddenly
drew them back.  'I won't hev the doctor
touch me.  Blast me blue if I will.  If I be
to get well and live, then you must make me
well and live, and none else.  Take my hands
and do what you will.  You may cut 'em off
and I won't cry.  You may tie 'em up and
I'll say nort.'

The surgeon said to Herring, 'You had
better humour her.  She is not a rational
being.'

So Herring put the splints in place, and
bound the bandages tightly round them.

Joyce watched him with her large animal-like
eyes fixed on his face.  A feverish fire
was burning in them, giving them a factitious
light.  She did not withdraw them from him
for a moment.

'You're right for sartain,' she said.  'If
I'd ha' died, what 'ud vaither ha' done?  And
her be growing a brave age.'

Then, still kneeling by her, Herring spoke
with the surgeon about the girl, as to what
was to be done with her arms and what she
was to eat.  Suddenly he exclaimed with a
start and recoil, 'Good heavens, Joyce! what
are you doing?'

He looked at her.  A human soul was
struggling to emancipate itself from brute
instinct.  He saw it in her feverish eyes.  She
had them fixed on him as those of a dog look
at its master—and *she was licking his hand*.





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.. _`OPHIR`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XII.


.. class:: center medium bold

   OPHIR.

.. vspace:: 2

'Sampy, my boy,' said Tramplara the elder,
'improve each shining hour, says Paul,
afterwards called Saul, and he couldn't have given
a better piece of advice if he'd been paid to
do it.  Since Polpluggan has been blown I
have had nothing to do, and I want not only to
follow Paul's advice and improve the shining
hour, but do better, and improve the overcast
and rainy ones.  You and I, Sampy, are the
men to whom the future belongs, the
representatives of the age, and it will not do for
the likes of us to keep our light under a
bushel.  That ain't Scriptural, and it ain't
advantageous neither.'

'All right, gov'nor.  What is this the preface to?'

'Sampy,' said Tramplara, confidingly, 'we
must start another mine.'

'What—tin? lead? manganese? copper?'

'Better still, my gosling.'

'I don't know what you can have better
except coal, and coal don't luxuriate alongside
of granite.'

'Gold—the noblest of metals—gold.'

'Oh, ah! gov'nor, that won't do.  There's
no gold to be found here.'

'Why not?'

'Why not?  Because no folks are fools
enough to sink it in such a venture as gold
mining.'

'You are wrong.  There is one quality I
can always rely on—as the Apostle says, "Folly
never faileth, everything else may vanish
away."  If you appeal to men's reasons, it is
like looking for ghosts in haunted tenements;
they are supposed to be there, but never found
when wanted.  Human folly is like Dozmare
pool, it is unfathomable, though you let down
into it all the bell-ropes of Cornwall.  You
can set up windmills in Essex, for there the
wind always blows; and you can establish
water wheels in Cornwall, for the rain supply
is inexhaustible; and you can float speculations
where you will, and the fools will keep
them going.  In the story of the Fisherman in
the "Arabian Nights" the fish that have been
scraped and disembowelled and put in a frying-pan
over the coals stand up on their tails and
say, "We are doing our duty.  If you reckon
we reckon; if you fly we mount and are
content."  Now those fish we are told were men.
And men are just the same now.  They do
their duty in coming to be scraped and gutted
and roasted, and what you pipe they repeat;
they have no pleasure apart from yours, and
they rush into your hands to be cleaned out,
just as the martyrs asked to be tortured.'

Sampson junior nodded.

'What is it that Solomon said, "A fool
and his money are soon parted?"'

'I say, gov'nor, it is dry work listening.
Let us have in some grog.'

'Bring the spirits out of the cupboard and
ring for Bella to give us sugar and hot water.
Are you listening to me?  What I say is
important.  I am leading you after gold.'

'All right; but you were speaking of
human folly.'

'Human folly is the cable[1] that incloses
the ore.  It is not for nothing, Sampy, that I
have been regular at chapel and paid for my
pew at Salem.  Mr. Israel Flamank, the
minister, is a very good man; a sort of cedar
in Lebanon, always green, and he is as soft as
butter and as easy to make a pat out of with,
at pleasure, a crown or a goose at top.  There
are in the world good men of whom with
Scripture it may be said, "It were better that
a millstone had been hanged round their necks
than they should have learned to read and
write."  For, you see, Sampy, they read a
great deal without knowing the relative value
of what they read, and they write the first
craze that comes into their heads to set other
fools crazy after them.  When there is a
choice of herbs set before an ass, he prefers a
thistle, because, as Shakespeare sings, "It is
his nature to."  You may take my word for
it, gosling, there is a parcel of people in this
world with an exuberant fund of piety in their
constitutions, just as some children are born
with water on the brain.  And as these have
no definite belief, the pious element within
washes about, unable to settle.  When you
was a boy, Sampy, it was your delight to make
silver trees.  You had a fluid clear as crystal
in a bottle, and into it you introduced a scrap
of carpet thread, and all at once the metal
held in solution crystallised about the rubbish
you had inserted, and built round it a mass of
sparkling metal, hard as steel and shining as
silver.  It is the same with folk of the calibre
of Israel Flamank.  Their dilute piety is ready
to settle round any trashy notion that gets
into them, and rear about it a tree of fantastic
conviction.  Flamank has done a deal of
crystallising since I have known him, about
all sorts of odds and ends.  First he was a
total abstainer, then a vegetarian, then he
found the gospel in the pyramids, and now he
is all for the Phoenicians.'

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[1] The rock altered by the vein of ore it
surrounds is termed
by miners the cable.

.. vspace:: 2

'But, father, what does this concern us?'

'Everything, my son,' said old Tramplara,
with sunny self-complacency.  'Fill your
glass and listen.  Do you know what the
Phoenicians were?'

'I don't know, and don't care.'

'Then I'll tell you.  The Phoenicians were
next-door neighbours to the Jews, and, what
is a wonder, were on speaking terms, and did
each other little neighbourly acts, which shows
they lived in the Dark Ages.  You don't
happen to know anything about the Cassiterides,
do'y, Sampy?'

'Not a farthing.  Had they anything to
do with the Phoenicians?'

'Oh, what an ignorant boy you are!  You
are living in the midst of the Cassiterides, and
don't know it.  Cassiterides is the Phoenician
for Devon and Cornwall.  It means the place
whence the Phoenicians drew their tin; and
where the Phoenicians went the Jews went
also.  Marazion, as every fool knows, is called
also Market Jew, because the Jews came there
to buy metal for Solomon's temple.  You
haven't a Bible, have'y, Sampson junior, ready
to hand?'

'I doubt if there be such a thing in the
house.'

'There is, though, only I don't know where
it be stowed away this present moment.  I
bought one for taking the level of the
Phoenicians under the guidance of the Reverend
Flamank.  Now Solomon; you've heard of
Solomon?'

'Which, the pawnbroker?'

'No; Solomon the wisest of men, and because
the wisest the richest.  He sent a navy
of ships with his own men and Phoenicians to
get gold for the temple at Jerusalem and his
own house.  There is one thing strikes an
earnest inquirer like me about King Solomon,
and makes me admire the beauty of his
character greatly.  When he were building the
temple he built his own palace at the same
time, and didn't make of 'em separate accounts.
So the Jews gave profusely for the building
of their temple, and how much of that
subscription went to the King's house, I reckon
Solomon himself would have been pushed to
answer.  He was seven years building the
temple, and thirteen years over his own palace,
and when you know that, you can guess how
the material went.  But that is neither here
nor there.  I was just giving you a sample of
the wisdom of Solomon.  Well, the ships of
Solomon came for gold to Ophir, and fetched
thence four hundred and twenty talents of
gold-dust; that, Israel Flamank tells me, is
nigh on fifty-three thousand pounds weight.
Think of that!  Now where gold came from,
there gold is to be had.'

'But where did it come from?'

'From Ophir, to be sure.  We must find Ophir.'

'Governor, that won't do.  You and I are
not going to leave Old England gold prospecting.
You are too old, and I am disinclined.'

'Didn't I tell you we were in the Cassiterides?'

'Yes; but Cassiterides is not Ophir.'

'But Ophir may be in the Cassiterides.'

'Gold never was found in the West,' said
Sampson junior, shaking his head.

'There never was any tin in Wheal Polpluggan,'
said the old man, who turned blazing
red with suppressed laughter.  His sides
shook, his white hair gleamed ghastly against
his red skin.  Then he broke into a roar, and
slapping Sampson on the knee, he shouted, as
he waved his glass of grog over his head,
and spilled the contents on his silver hair
and gleaming cheeks, 'To the prosperity of
Ophir!  Drink, Sampy, drink! to Ophir, the
Ophir of Solomon in the West Country.'

'Polpluggan was tightly salted,' said young
Sampson, 'and salted only with tin.  Besides,
Polpluggan was in the Scilly Isles, some forty
or fifty miles from Penzance.  There were
many who would rather jeopardise their
money than risk their breakfast in a rough
passage.  But gold——' He shook his head.

'We'll salt Ophir when we have found the spot.'

'What! with gold dust?  You'll sink a
fortune in that, and the success is doubtful.'

'It is bound to succeed,' answered the
father.  'My boy, I've come to see that there
is a pan of cream has not been skimmed yet,
and I hope, if I live long enough, to skim it.
There is not much more to be done at those
pans we have gone over hitherto.  We must
try a fresh one.  I'll tell you what that big
rich pan is; it is the big rich pan of religious
fanaticism.  I'll take a lesson from the rats.
The rat when he has an eye on the cream sits
down with his back to it, and looking up at
the wall lets drop the end of his tail into the
cream; then he pulls it up with a shocked and
bashful air, sucks it, and lets it down again,
and in half an hour he has cleared the pan of
all but sky blue.'

'I don't see how it is to be done,' said
young Tramplara, meditatively.

'You are young and inexperienced,'
answered his father.  'You haven't sounded
the depths of human folly yet.  Lord bless
you!  I've been surprised myself at its
profundity.  And when we come to religious folly,
my private conviction is that it goes down
through the world and out at the other side.
It is like the well of Zem-zem, that has no
bottom.  I have not been an earnest inquirer at
the feet of the Reverend Israel Flamank for
nothing.  Whilst kneeling to him I have been
like a shoemaker taking the measure of his
foot.  I know the sort of gate he will clear,
and where the bellwether goes all the flock
will leap.  You listen to me and I will give
you a parable—a mighty comforting one.
There was an old manganese mine long disused,
and the adit ran level out into a meadow
where some bullocks were feeding.  One hot
day, when the flies were troublesome, one
bullock took refuge in the adit, and when the
others saw that in they walked after him, each
thrusting forward the fellow before him.
Presently they got frightened with being so
far from the light, so the foremost bellowed,
and the second bellowed, and this was
repeated to the last, who, in mighty alarm, dug
his horns into the hinder quarters of the
bullock in front, and he repeated the performance
on the one before him, and so on, driving one
another further and further into the heart of
the mine.  Well, they got so far that there
was no getting them out, and the owner had
to kill them where they were.  They were too
frightened to back, and to turn was impossible.
Sampy, that good foolish Israel Flamank is
just like the leading bullock.  He'll go into
Ophir eagerly, and all his congregation after
him, thrusting one another on, and we shall
have the slaughtering of them.  They will
be too compromised to back when they find
themselves in the wrong place.'

'But how about the salting?'

'There are various sorts of salting.  You
only know one sort.  You have seen
Polpluggan salted with tin ore brought from
elsewhere, and basketfuls drawn out of the
shaft that had been previously put in.  That
is one sort of salting, and I allow that with
gold this would come expensive.  I shall
have to manage more economically.  My dear
boy, when fools are hungering to be deceived,
they are not particular about the meat that
feeds their folly.  They don't inquire if the
mutton comes of rotten sheep.'

'How shall you float it?'

'Nothing easier.  Let us find Ophir, and
the Reverend Israel will do the rest.  He
conducts a religious paper, entitled "The
Western Cornucopia," much read by those of
his persuasion, and throughout the West of
England.  I like that word persuasion, Sampy.
When I hear a man talk of his persuasion, I
feel that he is persuadable to any sort of
suicide.  Now, let me get my truck on Israel's
rails, and it will run down by the law of
gravity.'

'But where will you light on Ophir?'

'I do not know yet.  I am an earnest
inquirer, and I have been sitting with the
Reverend Flamank many an hour, as solemn
as a Quaker, over our Bibles, making it out.
I'm hard to believe, he eager to convince.
He has no idea that I am leading him on; he
believes he is driving me.  Now and then, as
the light of nature prompts, I throw out a
suggestion, and he snaps at it enthusiastically,
appropriates it, and reproduces it as an
original inspiration.  Country folks will tell you
that every cloud brings with it wind.  That
is the reverse of the fact.  It is the wind that
brings the cloud.  So in this case there occurs
a little mistake as to which is the impelling
power.  The Reverend Israel has shown me
that the situation of Ophir is pretty accurately
indicated.  It is said in Scripture that Ophir
lies between Mesha and a mountain in the
East called Sephar.  Now, with my incenting,
the Reverend Flamank has arrived at this—that
Mesha is the village of Meshaw, near
South Molton, and that Sephar is Sheepstor,
which is a mountain due east of Launceston.'

'It is due south of Meshaw.'

'Yes, but it is due east of Salem Chapel.
People always reckon from where they are
themselves.  You see the line uniting them
passes through Crediton, South Tawton, Cosdon——'

'By the way, father, Squire Battishill
told me he had found a silver lead mine at
Upaver.'

'Upaver!—Upaver!—Ophir!  Ophir!
Sampy!  By the wisdom of Solomon, we
have spotted Ophir!'





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CAPTAIN TRECARREL`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XIII.


.. class:: center medium bold

   CAPTAIN TRECARREL.

.. vspace:: 2

Captain Trecarrel was Captain only in the
militia, yet he flourished his captaincy with
as much pride as if he were in the regulars.
He was Trecarrel of Trecarrel, the head of
one of the oldest families in Cornwall.  When
we say that, we mean that he was head in
the sense of a tadpole's head, which is head
and nothing else.  Trecarrel was head and
nothing else.  There was no tail of younger
brothers and sisters dependent on the
property.  But then the property barely
supported the head, and by no possibility could
have sustained the burden of a tail.

It was not always so.  At one time the
Trecarrels were the chief family in the
neighbourhood, and Sir Henry Trecarrel, Knight,
at his proper cost, to the glory of God, and in
honour of St. Mary Magdalen, rebuilt the
parish church of Launceston in the most
sumptuous manner he was able.  Not one
stone was set in the fabric that was not the
finest granite, and not one block was
unsquared and unsculptured; the sculpture was
as delicate as the grain of the granite would
allow, with trees distilling balsam, plumes
and palm-branches, with the arms of Trecarrel,
and with minstrels harping and playing the
rebeck, the tabor, and the bagpipe.  Under
the east window in a niche was sculptured
the recumbent effigy of that most yielding
of saints, the Magdalen, wrought in the most
obdurate of stones.  The pinnacles and
gurgoils were all cut out of the same material
with infinite labour, and at extraordinary
cost.

The church was not quite finished when
the Reformation came.  Then the King's
Commissioners paid a visit to Launceston and
swept from the church its valuables in silver
and gold, for the filling of the royal exchequer
and for the abolition of idolatry.  After the
Commissioners had departed, a rabble followed,
headed by one Bunface, a butcher, who
burst into the church and destroyed what the
King's Commissioners had spared.  They
smashed the stained glass in the windows,
and broke the legs of the Christ on the rood,
but left the thieves on either side unmolested.
They extinguished the perpetual lamp and
spilled the oil over the chancel floor.  They
threw down the altar, and, having broken open
the shrine, cast the sacrament under their
feet.  They knocked the heads off the apostles,
and lastly, with a lever, overthrew the font,
and in so doing exceeded the intentions of
the Reformers, who having destroyed five
sacraments, and reduced a sixth to a stump,
elected to maintain the seventh intact.  After
that the party rang a peal in the tower and
finished the evening by getting uproariously
drunk at the Pig and Whistle.

Bunface never again appeared in church,
for though the Government passed a law to
force the people to attend divine service and
receive the sacrament, under pains of fine and
imprisonment, just as children have to be
whipped to make them swallow medicine that
is necessary but nasty, yet Bunface could not
be induced to put in an appearance.  'Let me
burn the Bible, or break the Commandments,
or test my cleaver on the minister's head, but
if this be denied me, if there be no more
destroying to be done, then I'd rather pay my
fine than go.'

When Sir Henry Trecarrel refused to sit
in the church under the preacher, and take the
sacrament at the mean table under the pulpit,
the magistrates cautioned him, and when he
disregarded their monition they fined him,
and when he paid the fine and continued
recusant they threw him into the common gaol,
and there, after languishing two years, he died
of the gaol-fever.

Sir Harry Trecarrel was succeeded by his
son, who suffered also in purse and liberty for
his attachment to the old religion.  He was
convicted of harbouring a Popish priest, and
of hearing mass in his private chapel.  The
priest was hung, drawn, and quartered—that
is to say, he was cut down the instant after
he had been slung up, sliced open, and his
heart torn out of his breast whilst still
palpitating.  That was the way in which recusant
priests were dealt with by that bright
Occidental Star, good Queen Bess.  Mr. Henry
Trecarrel saved his neck only by the surrender
of one of his best manors.

In the civil wars Trecarrel made large
sacrifices for the King, and was accordingly
dealt with as a Malignant by the Protector.
Confiscation and fine diminished his estates
still further.  On the Restoration he went to
London, and laid the record of his services
and sufferings at the feet of Charles II.  The
King commended his loyalty, and promised
him, if he would take holy orders, that he
would recompense him with at least a canonry;
but as Trecarrel was unable to do this, being
a Papist, he was dismissed with, as his sole
reward, a portrait of the royal martyr, full
length, in which the lower limbs were so
adjusted that, had they been true to life, the
royal martyr could neither have walked nor
sat on his throne.  The Trecarrel of the reign
of George I. gambled away everything that
had been left except the house and home
barton of Trecarrel, which were inalienable.
This Captain Trecarrel had inherited from his
ancestors, together with the picture of Charles
I. with distorted limbs, the Catholic faith, and
the Trecarrel blue eyes and beauty—but chief
of all these things, in his estimation, were the
hereditary blue eyes and beauty.

Captain Trecarrel's income was small, so
small that he could not marry on it.  He was
obliged, therefore, to look out for a wife with
money.

Now, as has been said, nature and his
ancestors had bestowed on him aristocratic good
looks, and he was admitted by the ladies of
the neighbourhood to be the handsomest man
they knew.

He was aware of his beauty, he knew
precisely the effect he could produce on the
female heart by a look out of his blue eyes,
blue as the borage blossom.  There was not
a marriageable girl who would not have
abjured her faith, have adored Mumbo-Jumbo,
if required, to become Mrs. Trecarrel of
Trecarrel.  The Captain knew his value, and
was not impatient.  The young ladies of good
birth in the neighbourhood were neither
heiresses nor well dowered.  He looked further
afield, and was caught by the handsome face
of Orange Trampleasure, and by the handsome
fortune with which popular opinion endowed her.

Old Tramplara was thought to be enormously
rich, and to be eager to marry his
daughter well, and to be ready to pay for the
blood and position that would come to the
family through a good alliance.

Captain Trecarrel was not a man to feel
deeply.  He liked Orange, and that Orange
liked and admired him was obvious to his
blue eyes.  But then, he was accustomed to
be liked and admired, and he had only to
smile and look languishingly to draw to him
any amount of affection from any number of
marriageable girls.  He looked for something
more substantial than liking and admiration.

After much hesitation, Trecarrel proposed
to Orange Trampleasure and was accepted on
the spot.  But the proposal was only the first
scene in a long drama, and the second scene
did not pass with the same rapidity and
success.  Captain Trecarrel had no intention of
being married till he was quite satisfied as to
the sum of money Orange would bring with
her.  Old Tramplara spoke grandiloquently,
and made large promises of what he would
leave her when he was not himself in a
position to enjoy his money.  But this was not
what the Captain wanted—which was something
present, not prospective.  At last he did
get the old man to name a very liberal dowry,
and when he next asked in what shape this
dower would come, he discovered an eagerness
on the part of his prospective father-in-law to
pay it in Patagonian securities.  Now
Patagonian bonds were not at par.  They had been
declining very steadily in the money market,
and when the South American State deferred
meeting its coupons with punctuality, the drop
had been nearly to zero, for it was anticipated
that Patagonia was meditating repudiation.

Mr. Trampleasure supposed that the Captain
was unaware of this, but Trecarrel was
not as innocent as his blue eyes led people to
suppose.  He was one of those few men who
know exactly on which side their bread is
buttered; and Captain Trecarrel knew
further, what very few people do know, how to
eat bread and butter with most satisfaction to
himself.  An adult eats his slice with the
butter uppermost, but a child turns the
buttered side down.  By so doing he extracts
from it the utmost enjoyment it is capable of
giving, for by this expedient the tongue is
brought into immediate contact with the
butter.  Captain Trecarrel was not going to
eat his bread with thin Patagonian scrape
over it, instead of yellow English gold.  Those
innocent blue eyes of his could see as far
into a millstone as the keen sloes of
Mr. Trampleasure.  Consequently, till that
Patagonian business was satisfactorily settled,
Captain Trecarrel held aloof from hymeneal
felicity.

The arrival of Mirelle and her admission
into the family at Dolbeare were opportune.
Captain Trecarrel was struck with her beauty,
but then, he was struck with the beauty of
every girl whose looks were pleasing.  But
what struck the Captain far more than her
beauty was the opportunity this arrival
afforded him of rousing the apprehensions of
Orange and her father that he might slip
through the meshes of their net.

He resolved to pay his court to Mirelle,
to exhibit a lively interest in her, to wake up
a little convenient jealousy in the bosom of
Orange, and to give the father clearly to
understand that he himself repudiated Patagonia.

The curious mixture of simplicity and
shrewdness in Mirelle amused him.  It was a
real pleasure to him to converse with her, and
a particular pleasure to look into those deep
eyes and speculate what lay beneath.

Once a month a priest came to Trecarrel
on a circuit through the north of Cornwall,
and said mass in the chapel near the house.
On these occasions Mirelle walked over to
Trecarrel.  Trecarrel lies, like most old manor
houses, in a hollow.  A small stream dribbling
through the hollow constituted the only
attraction which could lead a gentleman to build
his stately mansion in such a spot.  A stately
mansion Trecarrel must have been in its
prime.  The great banqueting hall was of
hewn granite, with granite windows and
doorway and chimney-piece.  A little chapel stood
south of the hall, also of cut granite.  The
mansion-house itself is, at the present date,
reduced to a fragment of the great house that
once occupied three sides of a quadrangle.
At the time of which we are writing it was
more than dilapidated, it was falling into utter
ruin.  There was no glass in many of the
windows, and the roofs were breaking down.
Next to the hall the glory of Trecarrel was
the gatehouse of granite, with a richly
sculptured doorway of the same intractable
material, moulded deeply, with strawberry leaves
carved in the hollows of the mouldings.  The
Trecarrel who gambled pulled down the
gate-house because coaches could not pass beneath
the arch; but when he had pulled it down he
had not the power or the means to remove the
huge blocks, and so he left them encumbering
the ground where they had fallen, and there
at the present day they lie, rankly overgrown
with nettles.

Captain Trecarrel could not suffer Mirelle
to walk home unattended when she made her
monthly pilgrimages to his chapel.  She was
always pleased to see and converse with him.
He was her equal, a gentleman and a Catholic—the
two qualities which made them akin and
separated them from the ignoble and
unbelieving around.  In these walks the Captain
told Mirelle the story of Sir Henry Trecarrel
and the building of Launceston Church, and
the way in which the work was arrested.  He
told her what his ancestor had done and
suffered in the civil wars, and he showed her
one day in the hall the sole reward he had
received for his sacrifices.  Mirelle was able to
sympathise with the misfortunes of the house;
she also represented a generous race, that had
fought the Moors, had ruled a county, coined
its own money, and set up its own gallows.
In that last particular the Garcias and the
Trecarrels had differed.  The Garcias had
hung men, the Trecarrels had had much ado
to keep themselves from being hung.

The story of the self-sacrifice of the
Trecarrels for Church and King stirred the soul of
Mirelle, ready to warm to all that savoured of
heroism; and she looked on the Captain as
the noble representative of a glorious line of
confessors and martyrs.  She fondly deemed
him made of the same stuff, ready to lay
himself down on the altar if need be.  But no!
Trecarrel was wholly free from the spirit of
self-sacrifice.  He would not surrender his
independence for five thousand pounds in
Patagonian bonds.  During one of these walks the
Captain ascertained from Mirelle that her
father had left her six thousand pounds, not
in Patagonian bonds, but in hard cash.  Six
thousand pounds!  That was one thousand
above the sum that Orange was promised.  Six
thousand pounds in coined gold, with his
Majesty's head on each piece, God bless him!
Trecarrel's tone assumed more tenderness, a
softer light shone out of his celestial eyes, and
he slightly squeezed the arm that was on his
own under the big umbrella, as he paddled
with Mirelle to Launceston under a Cornish
drizzle and through West Country mud.

That night the Captain did not sleep.  He
tossed on his bed.  He sat up and hammered
the pillow into shape and put it under his
neck.  Then he got up and drank cold water.
Then he tried to count sheep going through a
gap in a hedge.  All was in vain.  He could
not sleep and he could not count the sheep,
because his mind was active.  He was stung
into wakefulness by the consideration whether
it would be possible for him to be off his
engagement to Orange, and on with one to
Mirelle.  It would not be consistent with his
honour as a gentleman and an officer (though
only in the militia) to become engaged to
Mirelle before breaking with Orange.  It would
also not be proper for him to break with
Orange; but it would be perfectly honourable
for him so to conduct himself as to force
her to break with him.  He made no doubt
that Mirelle would have him.  No woman
could refuse him, with his eyes and name, his
profile and his position.  Besides, Mirelle
manifestly liked him.  She made no secret of the
pleasure she took in his society.  Now the
only means of effecting a rupture with Orange
was for him to pay marked attentions to
Mirelle, and to wane in his attentions to herself.
Orange would then speak to her mother, and
the mother would communicate her daughter's
trouble to the father, and then a crisis would
be attained.  The father would either break
off the match, in which case he would be free
to address Mirelle, or, in his dread of losing
such a son-in-law, he would drop the
Patagonians and offer ready money.  Orange and
five thousand pounds; Mirelle with six!
There was no comparing the lots.

Captain Trecarrel turned the situation into
an equation.  As Mirelle is to Orange, so is
6,000*l*. to *x*.

::

   Mirelle x *x* = Orange x 6,000*l*.

      M
   or - = 6,000*l*.
       O

.. vspace:: 2

Now Orange was of an inferior social
grade, and this difference could not be
estimated under 1,000*l*.  Then Orange had
incumbrances, in the shape of very vulgar
parents and a cur of a brother.  This could
not figure at less than 1,000*l*.  Orange was
plump, and plump girls become obese women;
a serious detriment that could only be covered
with another 1,000*l*.  Mirelle was a Catholic,
and her faith was worth 1,000*l*.

The equation therefore stood thus:—

::

   Mirelle + 6,000*l*. = Orange + 10,000*l*.

.. vspace:: 2

'Hah!' said Captain Trecarrel, as he
hammered his pillow with both fists.  'I'll
not take Orange under ten thousand pounds,
I'm confounded if I will.'

It must not be supposed that Orange
Trampleasure was ignorant of the walks
taken by the Captain with Mirelle.  Captain
Trecarrel did not desire that she should
remain in ignorance of them, and when he
escorted Mirelle home he came on with her
to the house to pay his respects to
Mrs. Trampleasure, and inquire after her cold in
the head and her bronchial tubes.  He usually
remained on such occasions for the early
dinner, and spent the afternoon with the girls
in the garden-house when it rained, or strolling
with them in sunshine through the Castle
grounds.

At these times he was civil to Orange, and
even attentive, but he let her plainly see that
when engaged in conversation with her his
eyes and thoughts were roving, and roving in
the direction of Mirelle.  Orange would not
have been a woman, and a loving woman, if
she had not observed and been hurt by this.

Orange had set her heart on marrying
him, not only because she loved him, but also
because she was ambitious.  She had more
culture than her father and mother and
brother, and she felt their coarseness.  She
disliked their friends.  She was a proud
girl, and when the prospect opened before
her of becoming Mrs. Trecarrel, she resolved
to make this the means of shaking herself
free from the sordid society in which she had
been forced to move, and to take her place,
as of right, in a class above it in culture, in
traditions, and in aspirations.

Orange volunteered to walk to Trecarrel
with Mirelle on her monthly expeditions,
and the offer was frankly accepted.

Mirelle did not know that her cousin was
engaged to Trecarrel, she had not been let
into the secret; Orange was not of a
confiding nature, and the intercourse between
her and the Captain had of late been strained.
Mirelle regarded him as a friend of the family;
she rather wondered what he could find in
the Trampleasures to make him seek their
society, but she entertained no suspicions of
a nearer tie than friendship.

The jealousy of Orange was roused.  She
became less demonstrative in her affection
towards Mirelle, but she was not unkind.
She harboured bitterness in her heart, but it
was not suffered to brim over her lips.  The
only token she gave of wrath and jealousy
was a heightened colour and a dangerous
flicker in her eye, whenever subjected to one
of those slights which are only perceptible to
the eye of love.  Trecarrel noticed this, and
was content.  He would achieve his end by
means strictly honourable.  Mirelle was
unconscious and unsuspicious of what was going
on around her.  She liked the Captain, she
told Orange as much, without colour rising in
her transparent cheek or lowering her eye.
She liked Orange, who, if not cordial, was
kind, and who proved a very serviceable
screen against the brutality of her father and
brother.  That the Captain was playing her
off upon Orange for his own selfish purposes,
and that deadly jealousy and hate against her
were being kindled in the bosom of her
cousin—of this Mirelle was unsuspicious.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`UNDER THE HEARTH`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XIV.


.. class:: center medium bold

   UNDER THE HEARTH.

.. vspace:: 2

John Herring visited Joyce daily.  He had
no choice.  She would allow no one else to
touch her bandages.  He was impatient to
prosecute his journey, but was detained by
this poor savage, who refused doggedly to
allow the doctor or Cicely to touch her arms.
Herring remonstrated, and insisted that he
must go.  Cicely Battishill volunteered to
take his place.  Then Joyce became wild, she
tore at the rags with her teeth, and would
have ripped them off and relaxed the splints,
and undone all that had been done for her
broken bones, had not Herring hastily
promised to remain and attend to her daily, and
so with difficulty allayed her apprehension
and anger.  He was particularly anxious to
be in Exeter, but he could not risk the health
of Joyce by deserting her in this juncture.
He was held captive at West Wyke, held in
captivity by Joyce's broken hands.  The
reason why he was impatient to go forward
was that he had been summoned to Exeter to
rejoin his regiment, then quartered there.  The
morning following the accident he had applied
for an extension of leave, but no answer had
come to his application.  He knew that he
ought to be with his regiment.  He would
get into trouble for his absence, and yet—he
allowed himself to be detained.  The call of
humanity was one he was unable to resist.
He was good-natured, that is—weak.  The
strong men are the selfish men.  Herring's
simple and kindly heart was interested in
Joyce, but perplexed and pained.  He had no
experience of life, and no knowledge of its
problems.  He had never before been brought
in contact with a character utterly rude and
destitute of that elementary knowledge which
we take for granted is as universally diffused
as the atmosphere.  He sat under the Giant's
Table and talked to Joyce, asked her
questions, and endeavoured to draw out the
thoughts of her clouded brain.  But the
profound ignorance, the gross barbarism
of her mind and manner of thought amazed him.

He saw nothing of Old Grizzly, who, as
Joyce expressed it, 'sloked away' whenever
he came in sight.

'Joyce,' said Herring one day, as he knelt
by her, having just bandaged her arms, 'do
you know the difference between right and wrong?'

The question was called forth by some
words of the girl showing a startling ignorance
of the elements of morality.

'In coorse I do,' she answered; then
sitting up on her bed of heather, 'I'll tell'y
how I comed to know.  I were once in a
turnip-field fetching a turnip for our dinner.
There were a wooddoo (dove) running up
an oak hard by, and he sings out, "Tak'
two, Joyce, tak' two;" and in an old holm
tree sat a raven, and her shooked her head
and said, "Very wrong, Joyce, very wrong."  But
I minded more what the wooddoo sed,
and I took two.  Then as I were climbing
over the hedge, I dropped one turnip back in
the field whence I'd took 'n; and the
wooddoo called again "Tak' two, Joyce, tak'
two."  "So I will," sez I, and I pitches on my feet
again in the field where the turnip had fallen
to, and as I picked 'n up, in at the gate comed
Farmer Freeze, and he seed me and set his
dog Towzer on me, and my legs be scored
now where Towzer set his teeth in me.  After
this I knowed never to believe wooddoos no
more when they sez "Tak' two."  The raven
were right.  I shud ha' tooked one or three
or five.  I knows now that it be wrong to
take even numbers of aught, and right to take
odd.[1]  For you sees,' she continued earnestly,
'if I had taken only one turnip, I'd ha' been
over the hedge and away avore Farmer Freeze
comed in; but as I minded the wooddoo, and
waited to take two, I were tore cruel bad by
Towzer.'

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[1] This story was told the author by a poor Devonshire
labourer.  He believed he had understood
the language of the
birds.

.. vspace:: 2

Herring looked in her face with wonder.

'Joyce,' he said, 'is this possible?  Pray,
have you ever heard of God?'

'Who be he?'

'He is above the sky.'

'What, over the clouds, do'y mean?'

'Yes.'

'I've seed 'n scores and scores o' times.'  (Here
we must note that by this expression
Joyce meant 'any number of times.'  She
could not count above ten, the number of her
fingers, and a score was her highest
reckonable number, for that was the number of her
fingers and toes.)  'You mean the sun as
goes running everlasting after the moon; she
be his wife, I reckon.'

'Why so?' asked Herring, with a smile.

'Becos her be always a trying to get out
of his way.'

'Did your father ill-treat your mother?'
he asked.

'In coorse he did, though I can't remember
much about it.  Her was his wife, and he had
a right to.'

'Do you mean that he beat and kicked
her, as he has beaten and kicked you?'

'Kicked!' echoed Joyce.  'Who ever sed
as he kicked mother or I.  It be gentlefolks
and wrastlers as kick; us has nothing on our
toes, and so us don't kick for fear of hurting 'em.'

'Does your father often beat you?'

'As he likes, but that don't matter now.'

'Why not?'

'Becos I don't belong to 'n any more.'

'What! emancipated at last, Joyce?'

'I belongs to you.'

'To me!'  Herring drew back, staggered
by the thought.

'A coorse I do.  Vaither a'most broked
me to pieces, and I'd a died, but you mended
me up and made me to live again.  So it
stands to reason that I don't belong to vaither
no more, but belong to you.  'Tes clear as a
moor stream.  I can see the reason on it as
sartain as I can a trout in a brook.  I've been
a thinking it over and over, and I never could
reckon it right out.  Then, one night mother
began to grub her way up by thicky stone.
I seed her grey hairs coming out o' the
ground, and I thought 'twere moss; but after
some'ut white and round like a turnip comes,
and I sed to myself, "How ever comes a
turnip to be growing here, under the Giant's
Table?"  Presently I seed her eyes acoming
up, and then I knowed it were mother.  Then
I went over and I helped her wi' a rabbit's
legbone.  I scratched the earth away, so as
her could get her nose and mouth out of the
ground, and her were snuffling like a horned owl.'

'My dear Joyce, you were dreaming.'

'It were true—true as I see you here.'

'But, Joyce, how could you have helped
her out of the ground, as you say, with your
arms broken?'

Joyce was puzzled.  Like other savages,
she had not arrived at that point of enlightenment
in which dream and reality are distinguished.

'I don't know nothing about that,' said
Joyce, 'but it be true what I ses, I know
that very well.  Let me go on.  At last when
her could speak plain, her sed, "Joyce, you
belong no more to Grizzly, you belong to the
young maister."  So I sez to her, "How can
that be?"  Then her answers, "You mind
the old iron crock as were chucked away by
the Battishills.  They'd a broke 'n, and
wanted 'n no more.  Then your vaither
found 'n and mended 'n up somehow.  There
her hangs now wi' turnips and cabbidge a
stewing in her over the fire.  Do thicky crock
belong to the Battishills now any more?
No, her don't, they broke 'n and chucked 'n
away.  Her belongs to Old Grizzly for becos
he took 'n and patched 'n up.  That be
reason," sed my mother, "for sartain."  And
what her said be true and right.  So I belong
to you.'

'But I decline the honour, Joyce,' said
Herring, laughing.

'Will you beat and break me and cast me
away, like as did vaither?'

'I beat and hurt you!  God forbid, my
poor child.'

'Then till you does, I belongs to'y—that's
sartain!'

She laid herself down on the cushions
with the action and tone of voice that implied
the matter was concluded past contradiction.

Here was a state of affairs!  A state of
affairs sufficiently startling.  A few weeks
ago John Herring had been his own master,
with no one depending on him, and without
responsibility.  Now he was in a measure
responsible for three girls.  Mirelle, it is true,
had asserted her independence, but she had
nevertheless imposed on him obligations.
Cicely made no scruple of declaring that she
relied on him for direction, not to be got
from a father never very dependable, and
now enfeebled in mind and body.  Joyce now
informed him that she had transferred her
allegiance to him from her father, and he had
seen so far into her dark mind as to perceive
that what she said she meant, and what she
meant she acted on.

'Here,' said Joyce, 'you put your hand
on my elbow.'

'Why on your elbow?'

'I can feel there what I want to feel.  My
hands be as hard as my feet, and they don't
feel much.  When I wants to know if the
porridge be scalding, or whether I can eat 'n,
I don't put a finger in, I put my elbow.  Now
do as I ax'y.  Put your hand there.'

She made Herring place his hand above
the splints on the elbow.  Then she fixed her
eyes on him and asked, 'Wot's her name?'

'Whose name?'

'Her wi' the white face.'

'What—Mirelle!'  The name dropped
involuntarily from his lips.

'You may take your hand away,' she said,
'I know what I wanted to know.'

'What did you want to know, Joyce?—the name?'

'Ah!  I wanted to know more nor that;
and I've a learned all in a minute.'  She
paused, still intently watching him.  Presently
she asked, 'Where did you take her to?
Where do you live?  Did'y take her to your
own home?'

'No, Joyce, of course I did not.'

'Why of course?  You likes her more
than any other.'

'I—I—Joyce! are you daft?'

'I bain't daft,' answered the girl.  'What
I've a found out I know.  My elbow told me
the truth.  When you had your hand on my
arm one day I said to'y something about Miss
Cicely, and your hand were quiet as if I spoke
about a tatie to one wi' a full belly.  But
when I axed about the Whiteface—I cannot
mind her name—then you gave a start, and
your hand shocked.  We'm friends, you and
I, and you won't hide nothing from me.  Where
be Whiteface to now?'

'I took her to some relations—cousins of hers.'

'Ah! we've folks (kindred) too out to
Nymet, but ours be reg'lar savages.  We have
clothes to our backs, and taty ground, and a
new take.  I reckon Whiteface's folk be of
other sort.'

'Of course they are.  She is comfortable
and well cared for by them.'

'Why didn't they come and fetch her
away when her father broke his neck, instead
of leaving you to take care of her and take
her away?'

That was not a question Herring could
easily answer.

Joyce did not wait for a reply.  'No,' she
went on, ''twere you as cared for her and did
iverything for her, as you've a cared for and
done iverything for me.  But me you think
on just now and then, and her you'll be
thinking on night and day, I know that very
well.  It be natural, and I say nort against
it.  And how be't wi' her I wonder.  Did her
tell you afore her left how good you'd been,
and how her'd niver niver forget what you'd
a done for her?'

'No, Joyce.'

'Didn't her then look you in the face as I do
now, and if her didn't say it in words, let you
see in her eyes that her thought and felt it?'

'No, she did not look at me at all.'

'See there now!' exclaimed Joyce.  'I be
nort but a poor savage, but I be better nor her.
I know what be right and vitty (fitting)—and
her don't.'

'Of course you know what is right, with
the guidance of wooddoves.'

'It were the raven, not the wooddoo,' said
Joyce, eagerly.  'The wooddoo told me wrong.
The wooddoo sed "Tak two, Joyce, tak two."  But
that's no count.  It'll come right wi'
Whiteface and you in the end.  Her'll find
them folk of hers not like you, always a
thinking and caring for her, and then her'll
remember you and think on you, just as I do
lying here.  Be you a going?'

Herring had risen from his knee as if to
leave.

'Stay a bit longer,' pleaded Joyce.  'Do'y
know what it be after it hev been raining all
day, and cold and wisht, out comes the sun
afore he goes down, and the clouds roll away,
and Dartmoor seems to be all alight, and then
for the glory and the beauty and the warmth
you forget all the time o' cold and darkness
and rain?  It be so wi' me.  Here I lies and
I sees none but vaither, and her grumbles
becos I can't work, and when vaither bain't
here I sees nobody, and it be wisht, I reckon,
till you comes; and then I be that full o'
gladness and joy I remember no more the time o'
loneness and pain and trouble.  You'll bide a
bit longer, won't'y?'

'I really cannot stay, Joyce, with the best
will to pleasure you, I cannot.'  The
demonstrative admiration and affection of the poor
creature confounded and distressed him.

'I've more to tell'y,' Joyce continued.
'I've that to tell'y which be most partikler.
Do'y know what vaither did to make mother
lie quiet?  He gived her some'ut.  But her
bain't no more a child to be amused wi' toys
like them.  May be for a night or two her
sat and turned 'em over and was kept quiet
wi' looking at 'em.  But it bain't the likes o'
them as will make mother still and sleep o'
nights, instead of rooting about in the earth
under the table like a mole.'

'What does she want, Joyce?'

'Her wants you to do it.  You mun lift
the hearthstone and say glory rallaluley, and
Our Vaither—kinkum kum over her.  Her
told me so herself.  I cannot do it.  I don't
know the words.  I've just picked up a word
here and there when the Methodies ha' been
out on the down, singing and preaching, and
hugging and praying.  You can say kinkum
kum over mother and make her lie quiet and
sleep.'

Poor dark soul!  Joyce had no knowledge
of God, and very dim, perverted conceptions
of right and wrong.  Her only faith was in
troubled spirits, and that was no faith, but a
confusion of mind between death and life, and
dreaming visions and sight when waking.
Her sole idea of prayer was a spell to lay the
restless dead.  Herring's heart was softened
by compassion for the girl.  She watched the
expression of his face very intently,
somewhat mistrustfully, fearful of a refusal, and,
worse than all, of ridicule.  But though
Herring did meditate refusal, no thought of the
ludicrous in her request stirred a muscle of
his mouth.  He was grieved for her, and he
was touched by her ignorant simplicity.

'Poor Joyce!' he said, and knelt down
by her again.  'Poor Joyce!'

Then he tried to soothe her and turn her
thoughts into another channel.  She, however,
persisted in forcing the task on him of saying
sacred words over a dead and buried woman.
When Joyce had made up her mind to anything
she was inflexible.  Herring was being
forced into one position, then into another, for
which he was unsuited.  Joyce had made him
her doctor, her nurse, her guardian, and now
she made him her priest.  He was good-natured,
and good nature is weakness.

After holding back he at length, out of
pity, and to humour the headstrong girl, did
as she required.  She made him raise the
hearthstone, and trig it up with a piece of
granite.  He could not lift the stone out of
its place, though Old Grizzly had been
able-armed enough to do this unaided.  Then
Herring knelt and gravely said a prayer—the
prayer.

Joyce was satisfied.

'That be right,' she said.  'Now mother
don't want her toys no more.  There be a
stick wi' a crook to the end i' thicky corner.'

'I see there is.'

'Fetch 'n, and scrabble with 'n under the
hearthstone.'

'What for?'

'Do as I tell'y.  You'll see what for fast
enough.  Hav'y got the stick?  Now thrust
it well in, and poke about till you comes to
some'ut hard.

Herring groped as bidden, rather uneasy
in his mind at what he was doing, lest he
should rake out the bones of the dead woman.

'Do'y feel nort?'

'Yes; there is something there hard and heavy.'

'Vang 'n in to'y.'

Herring obeyed.  There certainly was
something there.  As the crook struck it, it
sounded like a metal box.  After some
working with the stick he managed to get it out.
It was a small box of japanned iron, which
had been locked, but had been battered till
the lock had given way.  The lid accordingly
was loose.

'Open it,' said Joyce.  'Vaither found 'n
the night o' the axidenk.  He found 'n in one
of the boxes that had gone scatt wi' falling
from the carriage.  He thought there might
be some'ut in him, and so he tooked 'n away
and brought 'n here, and wi' a bit of stone
knacked the lock all abroad.  I see 'n do it.
That were after he'd a broke me to pieces,
When I came by my wits I seed old vaither
sitting by the fire and working till he'd a got
the lid started, and then he looked in and seed
what were there, and he sed he'd give me
some if I'd take 'em.  But they wos no good
to me, and I couldn't a done nort wi' 'em with
both my arms broke.  I couldn't move my
fingers, and I were that deadly ill I didn't care
for nort but to lie quiet and die right on end.
So then, after a bit, vaither said he knowed
what he'd do wi' 'em as they were no good to
he.  He'd give 'n to mother, her'd play wi'
'em o' nights and be quiet.  So he heaved up
the hearthstone—vaither be a deal stronger
than you—and he shoved the box under, just
over where mother's heart be.  There, look'y
what brave fine things they be.'

Herring had opened the box.  He looked
in in speechless amazement.  Then he raised
a tray and looked further, and beneath the
tray was more still.

Presently he found his tongue, drew a
heavy breath, and said, 'Good heavens, Joyce,
these are diamonds.  There are thousands of
pounds worth of diamonds here.'

'They be brave shiney stones.'

'They are diamonds.'

'Well, you may take 'em.  They belongs
o' rights to the Whiteface.  You can take 'em
and give 'em to her or keep 'em yourself, just
as you likes.'





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.. _`EHEU, BUBONES!`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XV.


.. class:: center medium bold

   EHEU, BUBONES!

.. vspace:: 2

When Balboa, from a peak in Darien,
discovered an ocean untroubled by waves,
unstained by the shadow of a cloud, he named it
the Pacific.  John Herring's exploration of
life was the reverse of Balboa's course; he had
left behind him the Pacific Ocean, in which
he had hitherto sailed, and he had sighted
the sea of storms.  Balboa had little idea of
the extent of the watery tract he discovered,
and Herring had but a faint suspicion of the
nature and fretfulness of the sea on which he
was about to embark.  A few weeks ago the
problem of life had seemed to him a simple
addition sum; he was about to discover that
it consisted in the extraction of surds, which
when extracted prove dead and dry symbols.
'Vanity of vanities,' said the Preacher, after he
had worked at the sum all his days; the
conclusion of the whole matter is, 'all is vanity.'

With a sense of alarm Herring became
aware that Joyce had put into his hands more
destinies than her own.  Mirelle's future was
contained in a little casket of which the lock
was broken, and which was placed at his
unchallenged disposal.  The fortune that had
been confided to the trustee under the will
was certain to be engulfed as the ship that
strikes the Goodwins.  Here, however, was
the bulk of her property, providentially saved
from the grip of Tramplara, and lodged in
honest hands.  What was he to do with this?
Was he justified in retaining it till Mirelle
should need it, and then delivering it to her
untouched, or was he bound to deliver it to
him who was constituted legal trustee by the
will of her father?

The conflict stood between moral and legal
obligation.  It was a question whether, if he
acted in accordance with legal obligation, he
would not be morally guilty were Mirelle's
entire fortune made away with.

A week or two ago, had the question been
proposed, If you find a guinea, should you
return it immediately to the owner or keep
it till you think the owner needs it?  Herring
would have been ready with an answer that
cost him little consideration.  Now he was
not sure that the ready answer was the right
answer.  Life is not a simple matter; it is a
veritable problem.  The problem of life is the
Pons Asinorum.

He met Cicely at the gate of West Wyke.
She was looking distressed, and she touched
his arm.  'I want a word with you.  Look
here.'  She held out a letter.

'I have ventured to open it.  The letter
is addressed to my father, but as it has the
Launceston postmark, and I knew the
handwriting to be that of Mr. Tramplara, I did
not show it to my father.  I opened it.  Was
I right?  I feared it might contain something
to distress him, and I found the contents more
distasteful than I had anticipated.  I was
right, was I not, to open the letter?'

A week ago, if asked, Is any one justified
in opening another person's letter?  Herring
would have answered in the negative.  But
now, all the cut and dried precepts of
morality he had learned began to fail him.  They
did for copybook slips, not for rules of life.

'You have something in your hand, Mr. Herring,'
said Miss Battishill, observing the
iron box.  'Is that yours?'

He hesitated.  Is it justifiable ever to tell
a lie?  Is it justifiable to evade the truth, and
so deceive?  He had no doubts on this head
a week ago.  He doubted now, and did evade
giving a direct answer.

'The box is broken, and I am going to
have the lock mended.'

'But, Mr. Herring, you have just come
from the Cobbledicks.'

'Yes,' he answered, and then hesitated.
He was unaccustomed to fence with the truth.
'When the accident took place, the box was
lost somehow, and Joyce has found and
restored it me.'

'I hope you have lost nothing of value
from it.'

'I have lost nothing from it,' he replied.
'But never mind the box now, Miss Battishill.
Tell me what it is that now occasions
you trouble.'

'Old Mr. Tramplara has written a
peremptory letter to my father, calling up all
the money that he has advanced him on the
security of the property.'

'And your father is not in a position to pay?'

'I am sure he is not.  The letter must be
answered, and that speedily.  I need your
advice.  I dare not let my dear father see the
letter; the result might be fatal in his present
state.'

'No,' answered Herring, 'he must know
nothing of the demand.'

'But if we do not meet this call, and meet
it we cannot, Mr. Tramplara will turn us out
and sell the estate.'

'Is there no way of avoiding this?  Cannot
a portion be sold to clear the rest of
incumbrance?  What amount does your father owe?'

'I do not know.  Will you ascertain that
from him, and then consider with me what
must be done?  If we are forced to leave West
Wyke, it will kill papa.'  Then her tears
came.

'Miss Battishill,' said Herring, in great
distress—he was unaccustomed to woman's
tears, and therefore moved by them—'dear
Miss Battishill, do not give way.  We will
find some mode of escape.  I will do my
utmost for you; be very sure of that.'  He
took her hand and pressed it.  She returned
the pressure, and, looking up into his eyes
through her tears, said, 'You give me
confidence, you are so strong and sure.'

'I strong!  I sure!' exclaimed Herring.
At that moment he was feeling the weakness of
his principles and the uncertainty of his course.

'Go in, and talk to my father,' she said,
'whilst I try to forget my troubles among
my flowers.'  Then with a relapse, 'Oh,
Mr. Herring, I do so love this sunny south garden,
and the old house, and the heathy moors, and
Cosdon reigning like a king over all.  It will
go nigh, to break my heart as well as my
father's, if I am forced to leave West Wyke.'

'We must put faith in the future,' he said.

'I did believe in the future till of late, but
now my path lies under eclipse.'  She paused
and sighed.  'But after all, is it worth while
deferring to tell my father?  He must shortly
know the truth.  It is only a matter of
weeks.'  She made a little effort to control her
emotion.  'You decide whether he is to be
told or not.  I am not competent to form an
opinion.  I shrink from agitating papa, lest
it lead to another stroke; if however this
must be done——'  She turned sharply away,
and signed to him with her hand to leave her
and go indoors.

Herring entered the hall.

Mr. Battishill was in his arm-chair.  He
was much enfeebled by his seizure, but though
his utterance was not as clear as formerly,
his loquacity was undiminished.

'Mr. Herring,' he said somewhat peevishly,
'I have been left a long while alone, and yet
not altogether alone, I have had Shakespeare
and my own thoughts to company.  But alas! as
Lear says, "My wits begin to turn—I will
be a pattern of all patience, I will say
nothing."  Herring, sit down in that chair and have a
talk.  I wish you had known us in better
days, and when my wife was living.  We had
more of an establishment then.  Now there
is only a maid-of-all-work, then we had a cook
and housemaid, and a nurse for Cicely.  I do
not think we were the happier for having so
large an establishment.  I believe it killed my wife.'

'What, sir?'

'The servants killed her.  I have puzzled
my brain to know which were created first,
the beasts, or the parasites on their backs;
but, of course it was the beasts, for they could
do without the parasites, but not the parasites
without the beasts.  So I believe that the
common ruck of humanity was made to feed
on the noble specimens of the kind.  We, the
aristocracy, exist not for ourselves, to enjoy
our lives and follow our wills, but for our
servants, to support them and be subject to
their whims.  That which the palmer worm
hath left hath the locust eaten, and that which
the locust hath left hath the canker worm
eaten, and that which the canker worm hath
left hath the caterpillar eaten.  My dear
wife always insisted that this was an Oriental
and prophetical manner of describing the
servant nuisance.  That which the housemaid has
left the cook carries off, and what the cook
spares the kitchen-maid embezzles, and what
the kitchen-maid leaves the charwoman whips
off in her basket under her shawl.  My poor
dear wife fought a long battle to keep the
house up, but in vain.  The aristocracy I
explained to her are the pigs and poultry of
mankind, kept and fattened to be eaten.  She
succumbed at last, and when, dear soul, she
was dying, almost the last words she said
were, "Where I am going there will be no
servants."  In this hope she made a happy
end.'  The old man paused and wiped his eyes.
'When the first woe was ended, then came the
second.'

'What was that?' asked Herring.

'That was Tramplara, of course.  I was
pretty well in Tramplara's web before the first
woe was overpassed.'

'May I ask the amount of your indebtedness
to Mr. Train pleasure?'

'Lord bless you!—you ask me more than
I can answer.  I have borrowed so often, and
when I have not paid as I expected, I
contracted an additional loan,—like an owl that
I was.  Pace, Bubones!' the old man touched
his forehead as he looked at the heraldic glass.
'However, if it be an amusement to you I
give you full liberty to overhaul my desk.'

'It would be as well if I were to get your
indebtedness into shape,' said Herring.  'If
I can be of any help to you in this way,
command me.'

'I don't see that you can help me; I am
past that.'

'It struck me, sir, that by the sale of a
portion of your property you might be able
to wipe off some of the debt.'

'Wipe off the debt! as soon wipe a child's
nose dry.  I said to a little urchin one day,
"Blow your nose, and cease snuffling."  "Please,
Squire," he answered, "it ain't no
good, it won't bide blowed."  It is the same
with my accounts.  I have tried to wipe off
my debts several times, but the debtor side
keeps running.  Look at my books, you will
find the figures show as remarkable a
tendency to turn one way as do the heads of the
trees at this elevation.'

'You will then allow me to overhaul them.'

'Certainly, if it will give you pleasure.
There is no accounting for tastes.  There is
an old woman in one of my cottages who has
a bad leg, and insists on showing it me.  I
say to her, "Betty, keep that for the doctor,
it revolts me."  It is the same with a gentleman's
accounts.  They are his running sore.
But he is wiser than Betty, he covers it up.
If you are a doctor of sick ledgers, by all
means examine, and I wish you joy.'

Herring was now staying at West Wyke.
He went carefully over the accounts of
Mr. Battishill, and found them to be in utter
confusion.  The old man kept receipts
sometimes, but not invariably.  He received his
rent when he could get it, and by instalments;
his tenants were always behindhand because
punctuality of payment was not insisted on.
It took Herring some time to arrive at a just
idea of what the old gentleman owed, and he
was startled at the amount.  He also obtained
an approximate value of the estate.  It was
clearly impossible for him to meet his liabilities.

Herring saw no course open except the
disposal of the property, or of part of it.

The estate was small, it had been reduced,
and the land was of inferior quality.  It was
possible that the sale of Upaver alone might
suffice to clear off the mortgages, but then it
was doubtful whether Mr. Battishill and his
daughter could live on at West Wyke, farming
the barton, when Upaver was sold.  To
farm without capital, and without being able
to superintend the workmen, meant to sink
deeper into the bog after having been
extricated from it.  The wisest course for
Mr. Battishill would be to sell the entire estate,
and retire to a cottage on what remained of
the purchase-money, after all the liabilities he
had contracted had been discharged.  He was
reluctant to propose this, and yet it was the
proposal which would be most advantageous
to the old man.

'Well,' asked Mr. Battishill, a few days
later, 'my good friend, what has come of this
pondering over my papers?  You have grown
portentously dull, and left all the talking to me.'

'The case is hopeless,' said Herring, sadly.

'I knew it was,' said the old man, with a
look and air of discouragement.  In spite
of his words, he had nursed a hope that
Herring would by some feat of ingenuity find
a mode of relief, and would assure him that
the situation was not desperate.  '"I by
neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated to
closeness and the bettering of my mind
... by being so retired, in old Tramplara waked
an evil nature."  My situation is not unlike
that of Prospero—here I dwell with my
Miranda.  Well, well! what will be must
be—

   |  He that has and a little tiny wit,—
   |    With heigh, ho, the wind and the rain,—
   |  Must make content with his fortunes fit,
   |    Though the rain it raineth every day.'

The old man, though discouraged, did not
believe that the case was desperate.

'Never mind,' he said, 'the world of West
Wyke will hold out my time.  There is but
one thing that I ask of Providence, and that I
am sure Providence will not deny me.  I
desire nothing but to die here and be laid
with my ancestors.  Do you know what our
motto is?  You would never guess, "Eheu!
Eheu!  Eheu!"  I suppose that was given as
resembling the hoot cf an owl, but it was
ominous.  Poor Cicely! she will not be able to
carry the ancestral house with her when some
Ferdinand comes to carry her off.  She will
take with her nothing but the owls, and he
who marries her will bear those owls on an
escutcheon of pretence on his own coat.  So
at last, at last, it will come to this, that the
white owls who have nested here in honour
for so many centuries will spread their wings
and seek a perch elsewhere.  Eheu!  Eheu!
Eheu, Bubones!'





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`TRUSTEE NOT EXECUTOR`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XVI.


.. class:: center medium bold

   TRUSTEE NOT EXECUTOR.

.. vspace:: 2

Although John Herring had been devoting
his attention as closely as possible to the
affairs of Mr. Battishill, and had found them
an engrossing study from the confusion which
pervaded them, he had not been able to shake
off the sense of responsibility incurred by the
possession of Mirelle's diamonds.  Joyce had
constituted him trustee of the fortune of this
maiden.  Mirelle had two trustees now, as
her father had intended, but John was trustee
without the knowledge of the other, and over
a fortune of the existence of which that other
was happily ignorant.  Tramplara was trustee
by virtue of the testament of Mr. Strange,
John Herring by virtue of the caprice of Joyce.

Herring satisfied his conscience that he
was acting rightly in retaining the jewels.
He knew that they could not be safely
intrusted to Mr. Tramplara.  When he turned
the matter over in his mind, he thought he
could make out the course of events which had
influenced Mr. Strange.  This gentleman had
called at Avranches on Mr. Eustace Smith,
the co-trustee, but he had not called on
Mr. Trampleasure when he passed through
Launceston.  There must have been a reason
for this.  He had probably heard in Falmouth
sufficient as to the character of
Tramplara to determine him to cancel his name
from the will, as a person not to be trusted
with the fortune and destiny of his only child.
It was clear from Mr. Eustace Smith's letter
that he had not been consulted when
Mr. Strange saw him at Avranches.  The
deceased must, therefore, have determined, when
renewing his acquaintance with him, not to
trouble him with the executorship or guardianship
of his child.  Mr. Strange had, no doubt,
intended to draw up a fresh will when he
reached Exeter.  As we know, Herring's
conclusions were correct.  Cruel fate had cut
the father off before he could rectify the error
into which he had fallen.  Now a happy
accident had constituted Herring guardian
of the major portion of Mirelle's property.

John Herring had confidence in himself.
It was impossible for him to commit a
dishonourable action.  The diamonds were as
safe in his hands as in the strongest bank
cellar.  He believed the trust was given to
him by Providence.  He was a simple-hearted
young man, and believed in Providence.  He
recognised in this rescue of the jewels, and
their committal to his custody, an interposition
of Heaven in behalf of the orphan.
Whom could Providence have chosen more
trustworthy than himself, and more interested
in the welfare of Mirelle?  The more he
considered the situation the more convinced he
became that a finger out of heaven was pointing
to him a plain duty, and that he could
not shirk that duty justifiably.  But he had
no desire to shirk it.  He was anxious and
interested about Mirelle.  He was certain that
Tramplara would risk her fortune in some
rash venture.  He had heard of the man.
He now remembered that his father had lost
money by him.  Tramplara would take the
coin intrusted him, put it in a handkerchief
over the table before the eyes of his victim, and,
presto! it was gone, and the kerchief empty.
A clink under the table told that the coin had
fallen into the conjuror's pocket.  It was not
possible for John Herring, knowing the
character of Tramplara, and suspecting that the
deceased had desired to cancel his will, it was
impossible, morally, for John Herring to
surrender to him the trust now committed to him.
Of all men, he, John Herring, was the
most calculated to look after Mirelle's
interests, for he loved her better than any one
else in the world could love her.  John
Herring being, as has been said, very simple,
thought that duties rose to the surface like
earthworms to be taken by the crows.  Here
was an obvious duty which had worked up
under his eye, and he swooped down on it, and
made it his own immediately.

But if Mirelle was his first care, the
Battishills formed his second.  Without any
seeking on his part, they had thrown
themselves on him, and he could not without
cruelty withdraw his support.  He saw a
good and kind, if somewhat fantastical old
man and his sweet helpless daughter, menaced
with the greatest of evils—banishment from
their home, to become outcasts in the world,
with no income, or very little, to sustain
them; he struck down by sickness, and she
too ignorant of life to know how to meet it,
weighted with the burden of a paralysed
father.

What was he to do?

Then a bright idea struck him.  He would
try to help Mirelle and Cicely at once.  To
do this he must go to Launceston, and to go
to Launceston he must obtain leave of absence
from Joyce.

John Herring was now, for the first time,
opening his eyes to the fact that to be
good-natured and ready to oblige all those
appealing to him was to involve himself in many
difficulties.  Among swimmers they who are
drowning lay hold of him who maintains
himself above water; it is necessary, though
painful, to give each a kick in the face and send
him to the bottom, if the swimmer will reach
the shore himself alive.  It is only the selfish
man who can sing as he walks in the face of
the robber.  He has nothing to give, what he
has is too ingeniously stowed away to be
discoverable.  Life is a Hounslow Heath where
footpads beset every road, and, where they
leave a gap, beggars step in.  And these
demand and take from the traveller everything
he has, and kick him, when stripped,
off the heath, with a jeer, into the black
beyond.

A kind-hearted man such as John Herring
does good to others as he *would* be done
by.  Would is in the optative and ever
unfulfilled mood.  It is not the criminal who is
stung by remorse; the only crime that brings
self-reproach is generosity to a brother in need.
The glow that succeeds a good deed is the
sting of repentance for having done it.

Of all this Herring was ignorant.  Puppies
are born blind, but when thrown into the
water that is to drown them they open their
eyes.  Herring was beginning life.  He must
pay his footing.

If Herring had not been ridiculously
simple, he would not have gone to the Giant's
Table and explained to Joyce that he could
not attend to her arms for a couple of days.
Would young Sampson have done this, or
Captain Trecarrel?  They had their eyes
open, and allowed none to catch their ankles
as they swam.  Herring took pains to make
Joyce understand that she must be patient,
and not by impatience undo the good already
done her.

She was stubborn and despotic.

'Joyce,' said he, 'I am going to see
Mr. Trampleasure.  Do you know him?'

'I know'n,' she replied.  'He were here
yesterday along with vaither.  Vaither went
off with 'n up the Coomb by Rayborough.'

'Mr. Tramplara was here!'

'Yes, he were.  He came down on
vaither hard, and sed he were going to turn
us out of our land, and tear down the
Table, and send us out without home or ground
of our own.'

'This is strange.  He did not come near
West Wyke.'

'I reckon not.  He said as how he were
going to turn the Squire and the young lady
out as well.  He said we might give 'em
shelter under the Table for a bit till he
knocked that all abroad too.'

'Why did he go to Rayborough?'

'I reckon he were searching after some
mine.  But I don't know.  He scared vaither
pretty smart; but he got vaither at last as
meek he would do anything he were axed.
Then Tramplara made 'n come along of he
on to the moors, and I seed mun no more.'

'Joyce, I hope to save West Wyke for
Mr. Battishill, and that is why I am going to
Launceston.  If I succeed, then you also will
be safe from disturbance.  Your Table will
not then be thrown down.'

'Squire won't hurt of us—t' I know by;
he never did nobody harm, he.'

'Then, Joyce, you understand, I shall not
return till the day after to-morrow, and you
must let the doctor or Miss Battishill attend
to your arms.'

'I won't.'

'But you must.  I tell you I cannot be here.'

'You may go.'

'Thank you for giving me my furlough,'
he said with a smile.  'But, as you see, when
I am absent you will have to be attended by
some one else.'

'Neither vaither, nor doctor, nor Miss
Cicely shan't touch me, not by the blue
blazes.  I tell'y you may go, and my arms
shall bide as they be.  They won't take no
hurt, I shan't do nort to 'em till you comes
back.  There, that's settled.'

Herring informed Mr. Battishill and
Cicely of his meditated expedition to
Launceston to see Mr. Trampleasure.  He told
them that he was in hopes of bringing him to
another mind about the mortgages, but he did
not enter into the particulars of his scheme,
nor did he tell them what he had learned from
Joyce relative to Mr. Trampleasure's visit the
day before and exploration of Upaver.
Herring conjectured that the old man had seen
the ore brought up from the mine recently
opened, and was eager by foreclosing to
secure it for himself, having formed a high
opinion of its value.  Herring went again that
evening to Upaver and explored the workings,
taking with him one of the labourers
Mr. Battishill had employed on it.  The man
was familiar with mines, and was confident
that the lode was good.  The 'shode' had
led to as beautiful a 'bunch' as a man might
hope to see in a lifetime.  A fortune was to
be made at Upaver.

To his surprise, Herring learned from the
man that though Mr. Trampleasure had
passed the workings, he had not paid them
any attention, but had gone further up the
glen.  But then, as the miner said, with a
jerk of the chin, there was nothing lying
about which might lead any one to suspect
what was below.  All the samples were buried
or hidden in the gorse brakes.

Herring carried off with him some of the
best specimens of pure ore, and, on his return
to West Wyke, showed them to Mr. Battishill,
and told him his opinion of the mine.
He said that he was confident, if a respite
could be obtained from Tramplara, and a
company be formed to work the mine, that the
royalties on the lead extracted would speedily
clear the property of its burdens.

The old man was elated.  He talked over
the prospect, offering many suggestions, some
utterly unpractical, and his hollow cheek
flushed with excitement.

'Ah!' said he, 'if Tramplara knows
about that lead he'll not grant a respite, but
be down on me at once if he sees profit to
be got by it.

   |  I'll have my bond: I will not hear thee speak:
   |  I'll have my bond; and therefore speak no more.
   |  I'll not be made a soft and dull-eyed fool,
   |  To shake the head, relent, and sigh, and yield
   |  To Christian intercession.'
   |

The old man shook his head.  'No, Herring,
you will not prevail on him with prayers.
"It is the most impenetrable cur that ever
kept with men."  No, you must attack his
self-interest if you will bend him, and how
you will manage that passes my conception.'

'But suppose I say to Tramplara, Here is
the money.'

Cicely looked sharply up from her work.

'Mr. Herring, you made me a promise.'

'My dear,' said Mr. Battishill, 'you have
often let me see that you disapproved of my
speculations, as if I must be blind.  But see! here
at last, in Upaver, I have hit on one that
will succeed.'

'You have hit on it, father, for others to
make fortunes out of it.  You have hit on it
as West Wyke is slipping from us.'





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`IN THE SUMMER-HOUSE`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XVII.


.. class:: center medium bold

   IN THE SUMMER-HOUSE.

.. vspace:: 2

As John Herring entered the gates of
Dolbeare, he saw Mirelle go into the
summer-house.  This summer-house stood at the edge
of the terrace between the garden-gate and
the house.

He desired to see her alone, and therefore,
before going to the front door, he turned to
the garden lodge and stood in the doorway.

Mirelle saw him and bowed slightly.
Herring went in, and up to her.  Then, after
a moment's hesitation, she held out her hand.

He took it, but he might as well have
touched an icicle.  No token of pleasurable
recognition appeared in her face.

'You are surprised to see me,' said
Herring, 'I dare say.'

'Not at all,' she answered.  'Why should
I be?  I know nothing of your movements.
If you had told me you were going to
Moscow, and I had seen you start in that
direction, I should be surprised to see you
here now; but as I know neither where
you live nor what places you frequent, there
is nothing in your reappearance to justify
surprise.'

'I have come to-day from West Wyke.'

'Indeed!  I hope you left all well there.'

'Only fairly so.  You have not heard
what happened to poor Joyce.'

'I do not know who poor Joyce is.'

'Joyce is that wild girl who helped you
to West Wyke on the evening of the accident.'

'I remember an uncouth and unmannerly
*paysanne*.  Is her name Joyce?  I did not
know it.  If I had heard it, the name escaped
my memory.  Joyce! what is the derivation
of the name Joyce?[1]  Joieuse, I presume—a
singularly inappropriate name in this case.'

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[1] In the South Tawton Register
stands this entry under
Baptisms: 'Jocosa, anglicè Joyce,
daughter of ——,' &c.
It was formerly a common name in Devon.

.. vspace:: 2

'Very much so, poor child.  That brutal
father of hers broke her arms, and otherwise
seriously injured her.'

'Indeed!  These savages have their ways.'

Herring was shocked at her want of feeling.

'You do not seem to feel for her, and yet
she helped you, as you may remember.'

'Of course I am very sorry.  I am sorry
when I hear a mason has fallen off a scaffold,
or a child has tumbled into a well, or a horse
has broken his knees; I am sorry when a
donkey is roughly treated.  But unless I am
acquainted with the mason, and the child,
and the horse, and the ass, I do not feel more
than a transient pity.  You possibly have
seen sufficient of this wild girl to possess
some interest in her; I know absolutely
nothing of her.  How, then, can I feel for
her more than I do when I say I am sorry?'

'May I take a chair?'

'Certainly.  Sit down, and we will talk.
I have something I wish particularly to say
to you.  I am sorry that I let you go the
other time without thanking you formally
for having rescued me from the broken
carriage, for having seen to the funeral of
my poor father, and for having conveyed me
hither to the care of these people here.'

She spoke without any expression in her
tone, simply as though repeating a lesson
learned by rote.  When she had spoken, she
drew a long breath like a sigh of relief.  She
had discharged a duty.  It was off her mind,
and she was free.

'You see for yourself, Mr. Herring, that
the feelings of the heart are too sacred to be
dispersed over the earth, to be scattered like
coins amidst a crowd of beggars.  One meets
with some thousands of persons in the course
of existence, and cannot cut one's heart into
little bits and present each with a portion.
We must reserve it for true friends, and give it
them entire.  Those who pass us by, and whom
we see but for a while, are like the figures
of a mastic-lantern slide: they make us laugh,
or they interest us for the moment, and then
are forgotten.  When we hear that a slide is
broken, we ask, which?  The man driving
a wheelbarrow, or the old woman who desired
she were pope, or the cabbage that becomes a
tailor?  When we are informed, we do not
weep, we merely say, It can be replaced.'

'I hope you do not class the Battishills
among your magic-lantern slides.'

'No, I know them, and they have been
kind to me.  I even like Mr. Battishill.  He
has his ideas.'

'And Miss Cicely?'

'She is rustic and good-hearted.  But
she does not think.  She has no knowledge of
books.  She could be made passable if sent to
school, but must be recreated to be given
ideas.  Besides, I am not fond of the plump
and the *ingénue*.'

'You have not asked after Mr. Battishill.
If it be not too great an effort for your
memory, you will recall that he had a stroke
before you left West Wyke.'

'Do not be sarcastic.  I remember that
perfectly well.  If you will trouble your
memory, you will recall that I did, on first
learning you came from West Wyke, ask
after Mr. and Miss Battishill.  I remember
that he had a paralytic stroke, but I recall as
well that he showed good signs of recovery.'

'I am afraid, Countess, that he stands the
chance of another stroke; for he is menaced
with a great evil, and any profound agitation
is likely to bring on a second seizure.'

'I am very sorry to hear it.'

'His affairs are involved to such an extent
that it will be necessary for his property to be
sold, and he will have to leave West Wyke.'

'Then he can go and live in France;
anywhere must be better than that dismal
old house on a barren moor.  It is best that
it should be so.  He will escape from a
dungeon.'

'You do not understand that his heart is
bound up with West Wyke, and that to
transplant him from the home of his ancestors will
be to kill him.'

'He thinks West Wyke a Paradise only
because he has never crossed the Channel.
When he reaches a nook where the sun shines
and the flowers ever bloom, he will thank
Heaven for having released him from his
prison and exile in that wretched house and
on that howling waste.'

'Countess, you are young, and have no
conception of the power that association has
on the old.  You can begin life anywhere,
and everywhere hopes and interests start up.
To the old it is not so, they are without
hopes, and their only pleasure is in
recollection.  To the aged the looking back is
almost as sweet as the looking forward is to
the young.'

'Then let him sit down in an arbour of
roses, and dream of the past there; not in a
dingy old parlour with smoked ceiling, and
the rain pattering against the window.'

'I fear that he will be turned destitute
into the world, or, if not destitute, nearly so;
and to a broken and sick man that means
death.'

'He can hardly be worse off elsewhere
than he is now.'

'He will have to go into a new home and
accommodate himself to that, at a time of life
and in a condition of health unfitting him for
a change.  You are unfeeling, Countess.'

'Pardon me, I am not.  I know Mr. Battishill,
and I respect his many good
qualities, but I cannot put myself in his
frame of mind.  It seems to me that, were I
he, all thought of being allowed to leave such
a spot, with the world before me, would fill
me, if sick and dying, with new life.  I
would start up in my bed and cry out, Take
me to France; there I know I shall be well.'

'As he does not know France, he has no
such desire.  And he is too old to acquire
new tastes.  There comes a time when the
mind as well as the body is tired, and all
it asks is to be given rest.  New scenes, new
associates, new habits exact too much of the
exhausted spirit.  Have you not seen a
feeble flame extinguished by fresh fuel being
put round it with the hope of coaxing it into
a blaze?  This is not all; the rupture of old
associations is the rupture of the thousand
filaments the tree root has woven in the soil
about it.  Break these, and though the tree
be transplanted from cold clay to richest loam,
it will die.  Think of your own forefather
when he lost Cantalejo.  Think how his
heart ached, how he turned to take a last
look at the ancient walls, and could see
nothing, for, strong man as he was, his eyes
were full of tears.  He knew that with him
his entire posterity was banished for ever.'

'I can understand that,' said Mirelle,
sadly; 'never more able to coin his own
money, nor hang any one on his own gallows.'

'And your ancestor went forth hale and
able to meet the world, and conquer himself
a new place in it.'

'Yes,' said Mirelle, raising her head
proudly, 'he was a brave soldier.  He
fought, and was killed in the wars.'

'But this poor old man is broken with
years and infirmities.'

'It is the will of God.'

'He dies, and his daughter is cast adrift,
without means, and ignorant of the world.'

'Do not speak to me of her.  She is the
embodiment of prose—pleasing and entertaining,
but still prose.  The world is prosaic,
and she will always find a hole in it into
which she can fit.  It is those with ideas, the
originals and the poets, who are adrift and
homeless.  Every gate is closed to them.'

'Countess, think of that evening when the
accident took place, and your poor father was
killed.  You were left on the moor, knowing
nothing of the place where you were, or of the
people among whom your lot was to be cast.
What if, by an unlucky chance, I had not been
present to assist you, and the Battishills had
not been ready to receive you?  What would
you have done on that moor, alone, without
adviser, without home, and without money?
The savages would have fallen upon you—that
ruthless man who has smashed the bones
of his own daughter would not have spared you.'

Mirelle shivered.

'You may well shudder; I do not know
what would have become of you.  But a
merciful Providence interposed in your behalf,
and raised up to you friends who have cared
for you.'

'Yes,' she said, 'I see that.  I see that now.'

'Cicely Battishill is like to be placed in
a very similar position; to be left homeless
and friendless in the world, standing by a
father, who, if not dead, is as bad as dead for
all the help he can afford her.  She cannot
become a governess and earn her bread, she
has her father to nurse.  Now, Countess, when
you think of your own condition on that
eventful night, and of what might have become
of you unless the Battishills had thrown open
their door to you and cherished you, then,
perhaps, you will be able to realise the
condition of Miss Battishill, who, though she may
be prosaic, as you say, is a delicate maiden,
and has the nurture of a gentlewoman.'

'Mon Dieu! quo puis-je faire, moi!  You
speak to me as though I could save them.  I
can do nothing, with the best desire to help
them.  I cannot invite them to make this their
refuge.  This is not my home.  It is simply
a menagerie in which I am allowed a cage
among the bears.'

'I think it is your *duty* to do what you can
to assist the Battishills.'

'Show me the way, and I will not shrink
from performing any duty.  But you must
see I am unable to help these good people.'

'Not altogether unable, Countess.  Your
father has left you several thousand pounds,
which are in the hands of Mr. Trampleasure,
in trust.  He must invest them for you.  He
is also the man who has a hold on the estate
of the Battishills.  Get him to take your
money, or as much of it as is needed, in
payment of the sum owed him by Mr. Battishill.
and to transfer to you his claims on the
property.  That is, let him transfer the mortgage
on West Wyke from himself personally to
himself as trustee for you.  Then you will be
mistress over the estate of the Battishills, and
if you will not foreclose, I can promise you
that the interest shall be regularly and punctually
paid.  I am certain that the investment is
sound.  By this means you will be benefiting
the Battishills and yourself simultaneously.'

'I understand nothing about mortgages,
investments, or interest, I leave that to
others.  If this proposal of yours enable me
to wipe off an obligation I owe to those who
have been kind to me, I accept it gladly, and
if it be a duty I shall make it a matter of
conscience to fulfil it.'

'It is a duty.  At least I think it is.
Judge for yourself.  You see your benefactors
the Battishills in distress, and you have it in
your power to rescue them from ruin at no
cost to yourself.  It seems to me that no duty
could be put in a plainer form before you.'

'Mr. Trampleasure is in the house.  He
will have to be consulted.  We cannot act
without him.  Will you summon him hither,
and we will arrange the matter on the spot.
You will not find me one to shrink from the
discharge of a duty.'

John Herring left Mirelle, and did as she
desired.  He found Mr. Trampleasure at home,
as she had said.  He was engaged with his
son in the dining-room on some plans, and
they had a bottle of spirits and a jug of hot
water on the table at their elbows, though the
time was early in the afternoon.

Old Tramplara greeted Herring with
effusion, the young one sulkily.  Herring
told the father that the Countess wanted to
speak to him in the summer-house for a few
moments, if he would oblige her with his
presence.

'See what comes of having a live Countess
in the house,' said the old man, laughing; 'I
have to dance after her.  Now, if she had
been plain missie, she would have come here
to see me.'

Then he accompanied Herring to the
summer-house.  This house was, in fact, a
room of fair size, furnished with a fireplace
and carved mantelpiece, that contained a
quaint old painting on panel.  The windows
were large, and that to the south-east
overhung the precipice, and commanded a
magnificent view down the valley of the Tamar and
up that of the Lyd to the range of Dartmoor,
which rose as a wall against the horizon,
broken into many rocky peaks, a veritable
mountain chain.

Mirelle had a chair and table in this
window, and was engaged on the manufacture
of tinsel flowers for the chapel at Trecarrel.

The table was covered with scraps of foil
and bits of coloured silks; and the snippings
strewed the floor.

'Well, Serene Highness de Candlestickio!'
exclaimed the old man, noisily, as he came in,
with a burst of laughter; 'what does your
consequentialness desire?  Some wires to
stick them gewgaws on?'

Mirelle shrank before the uproarious old
man, and spoke in her coldest and most
reserved manner.

'I have sent for you, Mr. Trampleasure,
about my money which has been intrusted to
you.  Mr. Herring has been advising me how
to dispose of it.'

'Oh, indeed; very good of Mr. Lieutenant
Herring.'

'I do not myself understand these matters,
and so I have requested Mr. Herring to
explain my wishes to you.  It seems that
Mr. Battishill is in trouble, and owes you money!'

'That is true as gospel,' said Tramplara;
'he owes me an imperial bushel of it.  There
are some persons who have a liking for
borrowing, and much prefer that to paying.
Mr. Battishill is one of these, and I have been his
victim.  And although David does say,
"Blessed is he that borroweth and payeth not
again," yet that is one point on which David
and Sampson Trampleasure are at issue.'

'Mr. Battishill is prepared to pay regularly
the interest on the loans he has contracted,'
said Herring.

'But, my dear lieutenant,' said Tramplara,
'I happen at this moment to be in immediate
want of a very large sum of ready money.  I
call on Battishill to refund what he has
borrowed.  He can't do it, and I sell up.'

'You are very hard.  Are you aware that
he has had a seizure, and is ill?'

'Can't help that, lieutenant, I want money.
You saw sweet Sampy and me engaged on
some plans when you came into the room.
Well, we are in for a venture, and shall want
money to carry it out.'

'What the Countess proposes——'

'Oh, blow your Countesses,' said young
Tramplara, putting his head in, and then
following with his body.  'There are no
Countesses in this shop.  The lady yonder is Miss
Strange, only daughter and heiress to James
Strange, Esquire, of Bahia, Brazil.'

'Shut your trap, Sampy,' said his father.
'No impertinence here.  Manners before
ladies of the tip-top aristocracy, please.  What
do you say, sir, about the proposal of the
Countess?'

'I decline to discuss this matter before
your son,' said Herring, indignantly.  'It in
no way concerns him, and he was not invited
to be present.'

'The business is Trampleasure and Son,'
said young Sampson.  'The firm bears that
name throughout the county.'

'But the firm has nothing to do with the
affairs of the Countess Mirelle Garcia.'

'Oh!  I beg pardon,' said the young man.
'The trustees and guardians of her ladyship
are Trampleasure and Herring—more
correctly, Herring and Trampleasure.'

'I have no further right to interfere,' said
Herring, with difficulty retaining his
composure, 'than as spokesman for the Countess,
who has empowered me to act in her name.
Have I your authority for what I say and do,
Countess?'  He turned to Mirelle.

'My full authority,' she answered.  'I
have requested you to speak my wishes in
this matter to Mr. Trampleasure.  As for his
son, I must request him to efface himself, and
not to trouble his head with my affairs.'

'Go, Sampy,' said his father.  'Good
angels attend you.'  The young man withdrew
sullenly.  'Now then, Lieutenant Herring, I
am at your service.'

'The Countess wishes that her money, left
in your hands as trustee, may be invested in
the mortgages on the West Wyke estate.
These mortgages you hold.  Five thousand
pounds are owing to you, and you are in
immediate need of the money.  Take five
thousand of her money, and transfer to her
the claims on West Wyke.'

'Oh, ah!  When is she likely to get her
interest?  You had to help the Squire out of
one hobble, and he will be dropping into
another shortly.'

'I can answer for it that the interest will
be paid punctually and in full.'

'I don't approve of the investment.  I
don't regard it as sound.'

'I wish it,' said Mirelle.

'My dear pet and pearl of the aristocracy,'
said the old man, 'I am solely responsible
for what is done with the money.  I must
look after your interest in the matter.  Why,
if I yielded to your request, you would get
only four and a half for your money, and I
can assure you of seven.'

'She would prefer the smaller sum on
this security than the larger on one more
risky.'

'Risky, risky! what!—Ophir a risk!
My dear Herring, I know better than you
where security lies.  The young lady's money
will be invested in a gold mine—in the gold
of Ophir!  I said seven per cent., but I am
sanguine of a rise to ten, fifteen, twenty,
twenty-five.  What do you think of that, eh?'

'Mr. Trampleasure,' said Mirelle, 'if I
have any voice in this matter——'

'You have none—none whatever.'

'And if I particularly entreat you not to
run risks with my money in gold or other
mines, but to dispose of it for the relief of the
Battishills——'

'Then I shall turn a deaf ear to you.  I
am responsible to no one.  Your father has
left me supreme judge in the matter, and I
shall act as my own conscience and your
interest direct.'

'Surely, Mr. Trampleasure——'

'Surely you cry to a stone wall.  I shall
discharge the obligation your father laid on
me with strict fidelity.  I am a man of wide
experience, and I venture to think that
Mr. Herring's knowledge of money investments
is recent and partial.  I object to his
interference, and, but for the respect I owe to the
memory of his father, Jago Herring, I should
resent it.'

'I have no right, I admit,' said Herring,
'other than that I derive from an interest in
the welfare of both the Countess and the
Battishills, and from the request she has
made me to speak in her name and make a
proposal which will benefit both parties.'

'I refuse what is offered,' said Tramplara,
his natural insolence breaking through the
varnish of politeness he had assumed.  'I
refuse to be dictated to; and I shall act as I
choose with both missie's money and with
that owl of a Squire.'

'One moment,' said Herring, whose cheek
was flushed with anger.  'I ask one question
of the Countess.  Is it still your wish that
the Battishills be saved from ruin?'

'Certainly I wish it.'

'Allow me to ask further, supposing the
means of relieving them were at your disposal,
would you act in the way I have suggested?
That is, supposing you had money
independent of Mr. Trampleasure, would you
invest it in the West Wyke mortgages?'

'I would do so.'

'You are quite sure of your own mind?'

'I do not speak without meaning what I say.'

'Then, Mr. Trampleasure, you shall not
lay a finger on the estate.  It is safe.  The
money shall be forthcoming on the day you
name to receive it.'

'Are you going to find it?'

'That in no way concerns you.'

'If you are, you are softer than I supposed.'

'The money will be ready for you.'

Mirelle rose, and, stepping up to Herring,
held out her hand.  There was more feeling in
her voice and warmth in her hand than before.

'I thank you, Mr. Herring.  I am not ungrateful.'

'What for?' asked Tramplara, rudely.

'For crossing your plans,' she said, and
turned to look out of the window at the view.





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.. _`SALTING A MINE`:

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   CHAPTER XVIII.


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   SALTING A MINE.

.. vspace:: 2

Tramplara paid several visits to Upaver
without calling at West Wyke, sometimes
alone and sometimes along with his son.  He
did more than visit Upaver; he got some men
to break ground there and begin a mine,
without asking permission of the landlord,
Mr. Battishill, or letting him know what he
was about.  The farmer who rented Upaver
held his tongue.

One day, however, old Tramplara came to
West Wyke House, along with a person whose
looks betrayed what he was—a dissenting
minister; in fact, the Reverend Israel Flamank.

Mr. Battishill was by no means pleased to
receive Tramplara.  A mouse is not elated at
the sight of the cat.

Nothing, however, could be more friendly
than the manner of Tramplara.  He was
gushing and jovial.  He presented his friend
Mr. Flamank, under whom, he said, to his
soul's welfare he had sat, one whom he should
always regard as, under Providence, the man
who had brought him to realise the great
value of eternity and the infinite nothingness
of to-day.  Then followed a great deal of this
sort of unctuous flattery, 'laid on with a
trowel' and sticking wherever applied.
Mr. Battishill looked on with amused surprise to
see how readily Mr. Flamank accepted the
splashes, coarse and thick as they were.

Then Tramplara addressed himself directly
to the Squire.

'You must allow me, Battishill, to shake
your hand once more; you must indeed.  My
friend and shepherd, Flamank, has made a
discovery—a discovery of such moment that
I doubt not it will astonish you.  That it will
please you, I do not doubt either.  Flamank
is a divine who has made prophecy his special
study, and his knowledge of Bible history and
geography is simply surprising.  By the way,
before I tell you what his find is, will you
let me know whether you really propose to pay
me back in full what I advanced some years ago?'

'I shall not be able to do so,' answered
Mr. Battishill, 'but a friend has offered to
find the money, and to relieve you of the
mortgages.'

'You mean young Herring.'

Mr. Battishill nodded.

'But where the devil'—Mr. Flamank
started and looked remonstratingly at
Tramplara—'where in Deuteronomy—I said
Deuteronomy,—he can have come upon the
money, I can't think.  I did know something
about old Jago Herring, his father, and I
thought he had been a plate licked pretty
clean.  I did not suppose there was much fat
left sticking.  But I dare say the old woman
had money.'

'What old woman?'

'Mrs. Jago Herring, the lieutenant's
mother.  And as there was no daughter, her
money naturally came to him.  It is possible
that is how he must have come by it.  Where
is he now?'

'In London, I believe.  He left a week or
two ago.'

'I may take it for granted, I suppose, that
the money will be forthcoming?' asked
Mr. Trampleasure.

'I do not doubt it.  Mr. Herring is a man
of his word,' answered the old Squire.

'I congratulate you, Battishill.'  Mr. Battishill
winced each time he was addressed
with familiarity.  'I congratulate you.  It
would have gone hard with me to sell you up.
I would not have done it unless forced to do
so.  What drove me to threaten was need of
money, and the occasion of needing it I leave
to my reverend friend here to unfold.
Whether I am wise in trusting him, I cannot
say.  But what is a pastor for but to lead?
But I must open the case, he is too modest to
tell the tale, as it redounds to his honour and
is a brilliant example of sagacity.  I must tell
you, Battishill, that I have been privileged to
attend his Bible lectures, and he has deeply
impressed me with the greatness and
commercial enterprise of the Philistines.'

'Phoenicians, of course,' said Flamank.

'Phoenicians, of course—you see, Squire,
I'm not well up in the story.  I follow my
guide, but all this lore is puzzling to me.
Well, you know the Phoenicians came to
Cornwall to fetch tin and gold, and that
Solomon's servants came along with the
servants of Hiram for the purpose, and they
brought the tin and the gold to Jerusalem for
the temple.'

'Mr. Battishill must have heard of the
Phoenicians,' said Mr. Flamank, now on his
particular ground, and able to trot.  'From
them we derive clotted cream.  It is a singular
and significant fact that clotted cream is made
nowhere in the world except in Devon,
Cornwall, and Phoenicia.  That is a well-established
fact, and it speaks volumes in favour
of an early intercourse between the
Cassiterides and the natives of Tyre and Sidon.
The Cassiterides have been for some time
identified in the minds of antiquaries with
Devon and Cornwall.  The only difficulty
in the way is this.  The Cassiterides are
described by the ancient geographers as islands.
But the difficulty vanishes when closely
considered.  The Phoenicians ascended Brown
Willy and Cosdon, and from these heights
saw the sea on both sides, and, not supposing
they were in an isthmus, they hastily and
incorrectly concluded they were in an island.
But the fact of clotted cream being found only
in Phoenicia and the West of England is, to
my mind, absolutely conclusive.  A point not
considered by antiquaries has arrested my
attention.  The point is, that the Jews came
with the Phoenicians, and that they actually
formed permanent settlements in our West
Country.'

'Jews, Jews!' put in Tramplara: 'they
would go after tin anywhere.'

'Look at Marazion,' continued Mr. Flamank;
'the Bitter Waters of Zion.  The place
bears the stamp of its origin in its name.
There is Port Isaac, also, no doubt named
after the patriarch, and Jacobstow, and,
touching memorial, Davidstow, so called after
the sweet psalmist by the servants of his son
Solomon.  There is a hamlet of Herodsfoot,
and a village of Issey, that is, Isaiah, and
St. Sampson, after the strongest of men.  Still
more remarkable is the fact of the Israelitish
colonists founding a parish which they called
Temple, because they were at the time
engaged on building that wondrous structure in
Jerusalem.  Redruth derives its name from
the ancestress of David, and we still speak of
sending persons to Jericho, which is a farm
not far distant from Launceston.  A careful
study of the Scriptures led me some time
ago to this conclusion, that what the profane
writers call the Cassiterides are, in the sacred
page, called Ophir.'

'Ophir—"over the sea and far away!"
You recall the text, Squire,' interjected Tramplara.

'Our friend's familiarity with the Scriptures
is late, and not as accurate as might be
desired,' apologised Mr. Flamank, with a look
of pity cast at Tramplara.  'Suffice it that,
led by a delicate chain of evidence as clear
and unmistakable as that of clotted cream, I
was led to seek Ophir in these western
counties.  You will recall that the inspired
penman lays down the situation of Ophir with
great nicety.  It lies between Mesha and
Sephar.  Now Mesha is undeniably Meshaw
in North Devon, and Sephar is Sheepstor in
South Devon.  Draw a line between Meshaw
and Sheepstor, and it passes over Cosdon.'

'Why, bless my heart,' exclaimed Mr. Battishill,
'you are not going to find Ophir here!'

'We have found it,' said the dissenting
minister, gleefully.  'The identification is
complete.  Do you happen to see my "Western
Cornucophir"?'

'Cornucophir, what is that?'

'My paper—a monthly originally entitled
the Cornucopia, because of the abundance of
good things it contained.  When this
surprising discovery dawned on me, I changed
the name to Cornucophir—Cornu, for
Cornubia, Cornwall, and Ophir, for the Land of
Gold.  The combination is happy.'

'But you are looking for Ophir in Devon,
not in Cornwall.'

'Devon was included in Cornwall till the
time of Athelstan, who drove the Britons
back over the Tamar, and restricted them to
Cornwall.  Tamar'—Mr. Flamank paused
and rubbed his hands—'there again, the river
called after the daughter of David and twin
sister of Absalom.  Having arrived at this
remarkable discovery by an exhaustive
process and irrefragable evidence, in which every
step is capable of being demonstrated with
mathematical certainty to Christian believers,
I begged Mr. Trampleasure, who has wide
experience in mines——'

'Polpluggan,' groaned Mr. Battishill.

'As in Polpluggan, as you rightly observe,
to examine the line between Meshaw and that
mountain in the east, Sheepstor.  Mr. Trampleasure
is not as sanguine in this matter as I
am.  He is hard to be convinced even now;
I am not sure that his faith is firm.  Whilst
we were discussing the nature of the land
between Meshaw and Sheepstor—he resolutely
refused to explore the red sandstone and clay
land, maintaining that gold is never found
except in the proximity of granite—he told me
of a farm of yours called Ophir.'

'Ophir!' exclaimed the old gentleman; 'I
have no such farm.'

'Excuse me,' said Mr. Flamank: 'you
have, and I have been over it myself,
exploring the ground for gold.'

'I believe you call the place Upaver,' said
Tramplara, with a twinkle in his eye, which
watched the Squire intently.

'Upaver!  You have not been hunting up
my silver lead mine, have you?'

'Silver lead, no!' answered the pastor;
'we have been hunting for gold.'

'But this is stark nonsense,' exclaimed
Mr. Battishill; 'the place never was called
Ophir.  It is, and always has been, Upaver.'

'Upaver and Ophir are all the same, just
as Sheepstor is the same as Sephar.  I asked
the farmer the name of the place, and without
hesitation he said that he minded in old times
it was called Ophir, but that the maps spell it
with an *U*.'

'He has not been fifteen years on the
farm, and I have been here seventy.'

'He has heard from the oldest inhabitant.'

'I am the oldest inhabitant,' protested
Mr. Battishill.  'I can show you, moreover,
leases of a hundred and two hundred years
ago, in which it is called Upaver.'

'The leases were drawn up by lawyers
ignorant of the pronunciation of the name.
What the farmer told me was confirmed by
another man, an old wild-looking creature,
almost a savage.  He also said the place wras
called Ophir, and he clenched his statement
with a dreadful imprecation on all those who
called it otherwise.  What is more, he showed
me a silver coin he had found, and I bought
it of him for five shillings.  If you will
examine it, you will see Hebrew characters
on it.  I have seen this coin figured in
Commentaries on the Bible; on the obverse a vase,
the pot of manna, I presume, on the reverse a
flower, Aaron's blooming rod.  It is a shekel.
Now I ask you, how came a shekel to be
found at Ophir unless the Israelites had been
there to drop it?'

Mr. Battishill took the coin, and turned it
over in his hand.  He was puzzled.

'That man you describe is old Grizzly
Cobbledick, who lives under the Giant's Table.'

'I have seen the Giant's Table.  It is an
Israelitish monument, a Gilgal.  There are
many such in Cornwall, as well as upright
stones—the same that Jacob set up and
anointed with oil.'

'There are plenty of these upright stones
on Dartmoor,' said Mr. Battishill.  'On the
side of Belstone Tor is a circle called the
Nine Maidens.  The story goes that they
were damsels so fond of dancing that they
would not desist on the Sunday, and in
consequence were turned to stone.  And it is
said that even now on Sunday at noon the
stones come to life and dance thrice round in
a circle.'

'I must make a note of this for my article
in the "Western Cornucophir."  I pray you to
observe the continuance of Sabbatical ideas,
an evidence of Jewish teaching; and of the
resistance to it on Belston Tor, a mountain
dedicated to Bel or Baal, the Sun God of the
Phoenicians.'

'But you are holding back from Mr. Battishill
the most important discovery of
all,' said Tramplara, who saw that the old
gentleman was not much impressed by the
biblical and antiquarian theories of his
visitor.

'At my request, and against his own
convictions,' continued Mr. Flamank, 'my
good friend Trampleasure searched Ophir for
gold.  A more qualified person could not have
been found, for he is thoroughly conversant
with the metals and their ores.  He brought
me one day some sand, granite washings, with
grains in it that certainly looked like gold.
We tested them with nitric acid, and, sure
enough, they proved to be gold.  I had no
rest in my mind till I had persuaded
Mr. Trampleasure to accompany me to Ophir, and
to assist me in the examination of the place.
He conducted me to the spot where he had
found the gravel, and there we searched and
I found this.'

He held out some shining yellow cubes.

'That is mundic,' said Mr. Battishill; 'it
looks like gold, but is worthless.'

'So Mr. Trampleasure said.  He laughed
at me for my mundic find, but I could hardly
be convinced that it was not gold.  However,
later, I found these grains.  Here they are
in my kerchief, with the quartz and mica as I
took them up.  I did not find much, but still,
enough to show that the metal is present.'

He spread out his handkerchief on the
table.  In the midst of the coarse white gravel
were certain yellow granules that looked like
gold.

'You found this in Upaver valley?' asked
Mr. Battishill, in great surprise.

'Yes, I was more successful than Trampleasure.
But then I worked in faith, and
he was dubious, so I dare say looked with
less eagerness.'

'This is very extraordinary,' said the
old gentleman.  'I never suspected the
existence of gold on my property.'

'Why not?' asked Trampleasure.  'Gold
is always found in connection with granite.'

'That is true; but none has been found
hitherto in Devon.'

'And yet the whole valley has been
streamed by miners in olden times.  Their
mounds of refuse are traceable all the way to
the source of the stream.  No gold has been
sought because none was expected to be
found.  The Bible has led me, by a course
of inductive evidence, to the identical spot
whence came the gold that overlaid the
temple, and that made the shields with which
Solomon adorned the walls of his palace.'

'Whence that gold was got, more gold
must be obtainable,' put in Tramplara;
'especially with our modern appliances.'

'It is most amazing,' said Mr. Battishill.
'Bless me!  I wish I were well enough to
get out; but I am stricken, and can only
creep about with the aid of a stick.  I should
like myself to examine the place where you
say you found the gold.'

'Surely you cannot doubt my word,' said
Mr. Flamank.  'I can give you the best
possible proof of my sincerity.  I am ready
to embark my little savings to the last penny
in the mines of Ophir, if you will consent to
their being worked.'

'I have no objection whatever, so long as
I am not asked to risk any money in them
myself.'

'Look you here, Squire,' said Tramplara;
'let us strike whilst the iron is hot.  I am
as anxious as the Reverend Flamank about
Ophir.  You can lose nothing, and may make
a pot of money.  I have brought with me a
lease; read it.  I will pay you a yearly
rental of a hundred pounds, and you shall
have the usual royalties on the gold raised,
Then I will undertake to form a company to
work the mines of Ophir.  Not one penny
can you lose by it.  If you choose to take
shares you may run some risk, not otherwise.
If the mine proves a success, your fortune will
be made, and so will mine, and those other
lucky devils——'

'Lucky what?' inquired the startled pastor.

'Lucky devotees, I said.  I said devotees
distinctly.  Those lucky devotees who took
shares in Ophir.  "Out of the hills ye shall
dig brass," said the great lawgiver, and his
prophecy will be fulfilled, for brass in
colloquial English means money.'

Tramplara took a lease out of his pocket
and opened it before Mr. Battishill.

'Read it—nothing can be fairer.'

'Father,' said Cicely, who had come in,
'please do nothing till Mr. Herring returns.
Take his advice before signing any document.'

'Nonsense, my dear; I can lose nothing.  I
shall not take a share, and I may gain
thousands of pounds.'

'If you will work the mine yourself, do
so,' said Tramplara: 'if not, let us work it.
The religious public is already screwed up
to a pitch of screaming excitement.  The
"Western Cornucopia"——'

'"Cornucophir," corrected the pastor.
'Besides, I object to the term screaming
excitement.'

'It is allegorical and Oriental—Phoenician,
in fact,' explained Tramplara.  'The
"Cornucophir" has been leading them on week
by week, expecting the discovery of Ophir.
Now all is ready for the announcement that
it has been found, and with that announcement
we must publish the prospectus of the
Ophir Gold Mining Company.  If you do not
accept my terms, all I can say is, the place
will be invaded by religious gold-diggers, who
will turn everything topsy-turvy and carry
off every particle of gold they find without
giving you any share in their spoil.'

'I will sign the lease; it is only for a
year,' said Mr. Battishill, eagerly; 'but I can
take no shares, I have not the money.'

'I will take as many as I can,' said the
minister.  'Ophir must succeed.'

'Now then!' shouted Tramplara, waving
the lease over his head.  'Now for the run of
gold.  Blow the trumpet in Zion; call the
solemn assembly of sharetakers together.  I
shall be ready for them with my crushing
machines.  Hoorah for the gold of Ophir,
and the fortunes that will be made out of it!'





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`TWO STRINGS TO ONE BOW`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XIX.


.. class:: center medium bold

   TWO STRINGS TO ONE BOW.

.. vspace:: 2

Captain Trecarrel had the good luck to
find Mirelle alone in the garden house,
engaged on her flowers.  She had not been
taught to do useful work.  She cut out lace
patterns in paper, and made imitation flowers.
She could play and sing, but there was no
piano in the garden house, and she spent
most of her time there, so as to be away from
the rooms frequented by Trampleasure senior
and junior.

Captain Trecarrel was playing his cards
very carefully.  He did not intend to be off
altogether with the old love till he was quite
sure that it was to his pecuniary advantage to
be on with the new.  He was curious to know
in what Mirelle's money had been invested.
This was not easy for him to find out.  He
could not inquire of old Tramplara.

After turning the matter over in his head,
the Captain resolved on trying to ascertain
what he desired to know through Mirelle
herself, who was too simple to suspect his
purpose.

He took a seat by her in the window.
She smiled at him, and made room beside her.

'I have been thinking a great deal about
you, Mirelle,' said he.  He had slipped into
calling her by her Christian name, and she did
not resent it.  'And the more I think of you,
the more I pity you.  Your poor dear father
made a sore mistake in confiding you to the
care of these Trampleasures.'

'They were his relations,' she said.

'True; but then you are so utterly out of
place among them.  You are unable to
sympathise with them——'

'Fortunately.'

'Fortunately, indeed, or you would not
be charming.  A grievous error has been
committed, I may even say that a great wrong
has been done you, unintentionally, and the
consequence is that you suffer.  I see it in
your face.'

'Captain Trecarrel,' said Mirelle, 'I once
thought to myself, suppose Heaven were to
rob me of all means, and I were obliged to be
a servant maid in the kitchen, then I thought
how utterly unable I should be to live in
such a place, not because it was a kitchen,
but because of those I should have to
associate with.  I and they would have no
interests, no pursuits, no ambitions, hardly a
thought in common.  To all intents I might
as well live in a stable with horses, or in a
fowlhouse surrounded by cackling pullets.  I
should not mind in the least shelling peas,
for I could think my own thoughts whilst so
engaged; but to be encompassed with others
who think no thoughts, who have no ideas
worth uttering, who live as to their outsides,
and have no inner life, that would be
unendurable.  I find myself now in such a
situation.  The Trampleasures and I do not see
the same sights nor hear the same sounds.
We have not even the sense of smell in
common, for Mr. Tramplara and young Sampson
like to sniff brandy and puff bad tobacco, and
I am convinced that Orange and her mother
do not dislike these, to me, intolerable odours.
In the garden is a sweet rose and a bed of
mignonette.  I have not once seen a
Trampleasure apply his nose to a flower.  We
have the same organic structure, and are
classed together in natural history as belonging
to the same genus, but there the similarity
ends.  The likeness is superficial, the
dissimilarity is radical.  The likeness is
physical, the dissimilarity psychical.  The
Trampleasures are animals made in the likeness of
man.  I am human, made in the likeness of
God.  I can see what is beautiful in nature
and art.  I can feel music in my soul, I have
aspirations beyond making money and getting
married.  I have interests beyond the claque
of Launceston gossip.  But these Trampleasures
have no sense of beauty, no poetical
instinct, no spiritual aspirations.  Orange is
the best of them, but in her I only think I
perceive a soul, I am not sure that it exists.
God took some of the beasts he had made and
bade them stand up on their hind legs, that
they might look at heaven instead of contemplating
earth.  But their souls did not stand
up also.  The result was the ape.  There are
men, likewise, not superior.  They walk on
two feet, but their souls run on all fours.'

'Poor Mirelle!' said Trecarrel, looking
tenderly at her out of the Trecarrel blue eyes.
'Yours is a cruel fate.'

'Yes, it is cruel, and, but for this summer-house
where I can be alone, would be insupportable.
Life to these Trampleasures, and
people cast in their mould, is a harpsichord on
which they drone a strain void of invention,
freshness, and thought.  When you have
heard their performance—it is the song of
life—you are aware that you have listened to a
succession of notes unworthy of being termed
a melody, in chords undeserving of being
designated harmony.  When one with higher
thoughts sits down to the same instrument
and plays a piece like a sonata of Beethoven,
they yawn and say, "Let us have something
out of the Beggars' Opera!"'

Little did Mirelle guess how mean and
commonplace was the barrel-organ tune that
Captain Trecarrel cared to play on his harpsichord
of life.  Because he was a gentleman by
birth, and a Catholic in faith, she supposed
that he stood, like Saul, a head and shoulders
higher than the vulgar beings that surrounded
him and her.  We shall see, in the sequel,
how egregiously Mirelle was mistaken.

'Is there no escape for you?' asked the Captain.

'I see none.  I should like to return to
Paris, to the convent where I was reared,
but Mr. Trampleasure will not hear of it.  I
should be quite content to be a nun.'

'A nun!' exclaimed Trecarrel.  'Oh no,
no! dear Mirelle, that must not be.  With
your gifts of mind and soul and person, you
are suited to live and shine in the world.'

'In what world?  This mean, dull English world?'

'Your place is here.  Your heart has not
yet spoken.  You are still young.  Some day
you will make a good man happy, and you
will find your proper sphere of usefulness,
with a congenial spirit at your side, not in
shelling peas, but in spreading enlightenment
among the dark and erring souls around
you.'  His voice shook.  He took her hand,
and he felt it tremble in his.

'No, Mirelle, you were not born to wither
in a convent unloved and unloving.  Excuse
me if I give you my opinion with great
plainness.  You are here without a guide.  These
Tramplaras cannot advise you, because they
cannot understand your position.  Trust me
as a brother.  Let us regard each other in
the affectionate and familiar light of brother
and sister—that is our relationship in the
faith.  Allow me to counsel you.  My heart
aches when I think of your loneliness.  I
place myself at your disposal: trust me, and
suffer me to be your adviser.'  He raised her
hand to his lips, and kissed it fervently.
The little hand shrank back, and when he
looked up he saw alarm in her dark eyes.

'A brotherly kiss,' he said, reassuringly,
'the seal of our bond, nothing more.  Shall it
be so?'

'The seal will not need renewal,' she answered.

He saw that her eyes were filling.  He
knew that she liked him; he was doing his
best to make her love him.  It would be easy
for him to advance from brotherly to lover-like
affection, and it was quite possible to
remain stationary on fraternal regard.  This
he thought to himself, and he said in his own
soul, 'Bravo, Trecarrel! you have not
compromised yourself by a word.'

'And now, dear sister Mirelle,' he said,
with his sweetest smile, 'the thing I desire to
know is, What has become of your father's
money?'

She was surprised.  He saw it; but he
went on quietly, 'You see in what a brotherly
and practical spirit I approach your affairs.
I want to know exactly how you stand,
for—between four eyes be it spoken—I am not
satisfied that a certain whitehaired person
who shall be nameless is the most prudent
man to be intrusted with money.  He sank a
large sum in Patagonians which might just
as well have been sunk in Cranmere pool.
If he made a fool of himself with his own
money, he may play the fool also with
yours.  For how long is he your trustee?'

'For five years.  I am eighteen, and I do
not come of age till I am twenty-three.'

'Unless you marry.'  Trecarrel sighed,
and looked hard at the distant peaks of Dartmoor.

'I do not think there is anything about
my marriage in the will, which I have read,
and I know the contents.'

'Oh!' said the Captain, and his mouth
went down at the corners.  'You do not come
into possession at marriage.'

'I believe not—not till I am three-and-twenty.'

The Captain released the tips of Mirelle's
fingers which he had seized when he put the
question.

'Then Tramplara has the entire and
uncontrolled disposal of the money for five years,
and if you were to marry now you would
still have to wait five years till you got
it—if you got it, in the end, at all.'

'I suppose so.'

'Do you happen to know what the old
fellow has invested your money in?  I ask
as a friend, because I wish to protect your
interests, and to advise you what you should do.'

'I have already had an adviser here—Mr. Herring:
he was anxious about the money.'

'He was, was he?'  Captain Trecarrel
drew nearer, with revived interest, and again
attempted to possess himself of the hand, but
failed.

'Yes, he appeared very anxious.'

'On what grounds?  What possible right
had he to inquire about it?'

'He expressed friendly regard for me.'

'A sort of brotherly interest?' inquired
the Captain.

'No,' answered Mirelle, curtly, and drew
herself up.  The Captain looked hard at her.

'Have you given him any encouragement?
Have you allowed him any right to
interfere?'

Mirelle's cheek coloured, and a haughty
flash came into her eye.

'Captain Trecarrel, I do not comprehend you.'

'My dear Mirelle,' he said in a gentle,
soothing tone, 'do not misunderstand me.
What I mean is harmless enough not to offend
you.  Did you ask his advice, and in your
first loneliness give him such occasion as to
suppose that he was necessary, that as a pert
and pushing cock-sparrow he has hopped in
where not wanted, since you have come under
the protection of others?'

'No,' answered Mirelle, 'I have always
kept him at a distance.  When he has
volunteered help it has been declined.  He came
here about the money not for my sake only,
but for the sake of some friends whom he
wanted to assist out of a difficulty.'

'Oh! he wanted to help friends to your
money!  How disinterested and how benevolent!'

'He wished to have my money invested
in mortgages on the estate of West Wyke.'

'What did Mr. Trampleasure say to that?'

'He absolutely refused.  He said he had
a better investment in view, one that would
render double.'

'What was that?—not Patagonia?'

'No; Ophir.'

'What!  The gold mines of Ophir?'

'Yes, my money is to be put into that.'

Captain Trecarrel vented a low whistle,
and stood up quickly.  'Dear Countess, always
command my services—as a friend,' he said.
'Excuse my flight, I must have a word with
Tramplara at once.'

He hurried from the summer-house, and
entered the front door of Dolbeare.  He was
so often there that he no longer went through
the formality of ringing.  It was Liberty Hall,
as Tramplara assured all his friends.

He tapped at the dining-room door and went in.

There he found Mr. Tramplara smoking
and working at accounts.  Orange sat near
the window; she had been speaking with her
father, and had been crying.  Both father and
daughter rose hastily as the Captain came in,
and Trecarrel had sufficient penetration to see
that he had been their topic.

'Halloo, Captain!' exclaimed the old man,
turning almost purple.  'Talk of the—hum,
and he is sure to appear, as the psalmist says.
The very man I wanted to see.  How are you?'

Orange slipped out of the room.

'Sit down, Captain, and let us have a
talk.  Fact is, I want particularly to have a
bone picked with you.  There is Orange, poor
girl, wasting to a shadow.  You are not
dealing fairly by her; you are engaged, and yet
you won't come to the scratch.  She says you
are tateytating with the other party on the
trotters, as Mirelle calls the pavement, and
give Orange the gutter to walk in.  That
won't do.'

'You entirely mistake me,' said Trecarrel,
his blue eye becoming cold; he drew himself
up, and began to point his moustache, whilst
he looked Trampleasure over contemptuously.
'Do you dare to insinuate that I—a gentleman,
a Trecarrel—am behaving otherwise than
honourably?  I love your daughter as much as
I loved her at first; but you and I are men
of the world, and we both know that love and
onions are poor commodities on which to keep
house.  You are well aware what my circumstances
are, for I have concealed nothing from
you; and you must therefore know that I
cannot, as a gentleman and a man of honour,
invite a lady to share my future with me
unless she be prepared to provide pepper and
salt with which to season the onions.'

'I know that.  Orange is not penniless.'

'No, but Patagonian bonds are not
flourishing, Mr. Trampleasure.'

'Who said that Orange would bring
nothing else with her?'

'You offered me five thousand pounds
with her in securities which are worthless.'

'I offered you those bonds before I knew
they would depreciate so greatly.  They may
recover any day.'

'I incline to wait for that day before
setting up house with Miss Orange.'

'Nonsense, Trecarrel.  If you won't take
these bonds, you shall have some sounder
stuff.  I am a man of my word.  I said I
would give Orange five thousand pounds, and
five thousand she shall have, the day she is
married.'

'In bonds?'

'In shares, if you like, in one of the most
promising of all ventures.'

'In Ophir—no, thank you.'

'You are a fool to refuse them.  Why,
man! have you read the "Cornucopia"?  Have
you seen the prospectus of the company?'

'Mr. Trampleasure, I will have no paper
at all.  Give me with Orange the sum of five
thousand down, and insure me five thousand
more when you are dead, and I will ask her
to name the day.'

'You are mercenary.'

'I am practical.  You know that Trecarrel
will support a bachelor—that is, keep
him in mutton chops and fried potatoes, and
a new coat twice a year.  I will give you a
sample of my penury.  Whenever I have
apple-tart for dinner, I think twice before I
indulge myself with clotted cream over it.
My circumstances will not allow me to
support a wife and family.  I am bound to look
ahead, and to consider my wife's interest as
well as my own.  I cannot offer her the
humiliations of poverty.'

'Well, well,' said Tramplara, 'you shall
have the money down.'

'Your word?'

Tramplara held out his hand, 'I give it you.'

'I should prefer it in black and white,'
said the Captain.

'You shall have it in yellow and white,'
said the old man.  'And now in return you
shall grant me a favour—your name as a
director of the Ophir Gold Mining Company.'

'My name is Trecarrel,' answered the
Captain, freezingly.

'I know that well enough—that is why I
want it.'

'And that is precisely why you shall not
have it.'

'You refuse me this favour?'

'Emphatically.  I do not believe in Ophir.'

The old man drummed with his fingers
on the table, and raised his eyes furtively to
the Captain, met his cold, supercilious stare,
and dropped them again.

'Well! go into the drawing-room, and
patch up the rent with Orange.'

Then, when the Captain was gone, Tramplara
laughed heartily.  'By Grogs!' he said,
'who would have thought the fellow so keen?
He don't look it.'

The Captain found Orange standing in
the drawing-room leaning against the mantel-piece,
tearing a white lily that she had plucked
out of a vase into many pieces.  Her fingers
were stained with the pollen.  Her cheeks
were flushed, and an angry glitter was in her
eyes, twinkling through tears of mortified
pride.

Trecarrel had not much difficulty in changing
the expression of that handsome face, and
before he left the reconciliation was
complete, sealed with a kiss, and the day was
named.





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.. _`GRINDING GOLD`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XX.


.. class:: center medium bold

   GRINDING GOLD.

.. vspace:: 2

In a remarkably short space of time two
'leats,' that is, channels of water, had been
brought from Rayborough Pool along the side
of the moor to the site of the gold mine.
Buildings had been erected, wooden sheds run
up and tarred, and a crushing machine was in
operation.  One stream of water was
conducted over a wheel, and the wheel set in
motion half a dozen hammers that pounded
the granite; then the granite thus pounded
was passed under an iron roller which
effectually reduced it to powder.  This powder
was made to slide through a trough into
water brought by the second leat, and the
water, as soon as it received the pounded
quartz, became milky.  The milky water
overflowed into a second tank, depositing in both
much that was held in solution, and then ran
away into the river, which it discoloured for
some distance down.

Old Tramplara looked regretfully at the
white water.  If Ophir had been nearer
Plymouth or Exeter, he might have sold it as milk.

The deposit in the tanks was subjected
to a second and, indeed, a third washing.
It was washed and rewashed till all the quartz
had been carried away and nothing remained
but glittering gold.

The excitement created by the discovery
of Ophir was prodigious.  The neighbourhood
came to see the works.  The miners extracted
granite, and placed the pieces under the
stampers, and then transferred the gravel into
which they had been pounded to the roller.
Any one might watch the process.  Everything
was above board; there was no
attempt at concealment.  Only, no one was
allowed to approach the precious deposit
unattended by the overseer.  Any respectable
person was allowed to follow the washing and
drying to the final process, where nothing
remained but the costly yellow grains.  All he
had to do was to write for permission to
Mr. Tramplara, or to send in his card at
the works, and leave to go over the entire
mine—without any reserve—was freely
accorded.  The number of crowns and guineas
pocketed by the very respectable overlooker
ripened the fruits of civilisation in him.  He
became courteous, eager to instruct, pious, and
sober.  Christian graces grew on golden roots.
There was a fixed time in the day when
visitors were given admission to the mine.

The limitation of time was rendered necessary
by reason of the crowd of visitors eager
to examine the works, and the consequent
interference with the working.  The regulation
was reasonable and unassailable.  Another
rule was made that no one was to be allowed
to go within arm's length of, nor to handle
the gold after final washing.  The overseer,
however, made exceptions in favour of every
respectable visitor, letting him understand
that the exception in his case was unique, and
only granted because of his—the visitor's—really
extraordinary respectability.  He was
allowed to gather up in his palm and turn
over with his finger the golden dust, and the
polite and pious overlooker always reaped
a rich harvest from this exceptional favour.

Readers of the 'Western Cornucophir'
came from all parts of Cornwall; serious men,
with heavy brows, big jaws, and firm lipless
mouths.  Women also—married women,
likewise serious, (unmarried women, speaking
broadly, are flighty,) in rich but sober dresses,
arrived in chaises, wearing spectacles and
false fronts, and having bibles in their pockets,
and vinegary attendants carrying shawls, and
guardians of their virtue.  There were many
Methodical Christian, and Unmethodical
Christian, and Primitive Christian, and Latter Day
Christian, and Universal Christian, and
Particular Christian, and Ne-plus-ultra Christian
ministers, all intensely interested in Ophir,
taking up the matter as one of *stantis vel
cadentis ecclesiæ*.  These were treated with
exceptional courtesy at the mine, by express
command of Mr. Tramplara.  They were
shown everything.  They were set to work
themselves in the adit.  They galled their
soft palms in picking at the gold vein, or
granite supposed to contain the vein of gold.
They carried the lumps of their own
extraction to the crusher.  They watched them
being pounded and rolled, not turning an eye
away the whole time.  They assisted at the
washing.  They picked out the gold
themselves from the pan, and were liberally
allowed to carry home with them each at
least a guinea's worth of the precious grains.
Thereupon each became in his special circle
an agent of the company.  And Methodical
Christian, and Unmethodical Christian, and
Primitive Christian, and Latter Day Christian,
and Universal Christian, and Particular Christian,
and Ne-plus-ultra Christian applications
for shares, poured in by every post.

But the greatest hit of all was the solemn
opening and dedication of Ophir.

A huge tent had been hired from Exeter,
capable of seating many hundred persons.
Bunting in profusion, of every colour, fluttered
from it.  Over the entrance rose a flagstaff
from which waved a gold-coloured banner
adorned with the Seal of Solomon.

A cannon had been brought from Exeter,
and it was discharged at intervals.  The
Okehampton band was engaged, and it played
out of tune alternately with a military band
from Exeter, which played in tune, and
rivalled it in the worthlessness of the music
performed.

The day was magnificent.  An autumn
day, with a glorious sun illumining the
moorland rosy with blooming heather, as though
raspberry cream had been spilt over the
hillsides.  The scarlet uniforms of the band, the
gay colours of the flags, the white tent, the
glitter of the falling water over the wheel,
combined to form a charming scene.  All
Okehampton, all North and South Tawton and
Chagford was there, and many also from
Tavistock, Launceston, Moreton Hampstead,
and Exeter.  The people were scattered over
the moor slopes, listening to the music which
was not worth listening to, in the way in
which English people do listen—that is,
talking the whole time; they raced and rolled
over on the short grass, and strewed the
hillsides with sandwich papers and empty
ginger-beer bottles.  Ginger-beer bottles! ay, and
bottles of cold tea.  For Ophir was a great
Temperance mine, and the dedication of Ophir
a Temperance demonstration, Ri-lid-de-riddle-roll!
Who cannot rollick on ginger-beer?
Who that is by nature inane can fail to make
an ass of himself when out on a holiday on
cold tea?

Ophir was a great Temperance mine.  All
the washers were sworn in as total abstainers.
As was stated on the prospectus, the
workings were to be carried on only with water.
'We may as well fish in two ponds, Sampy,'
said old Tramplara; 'let us angle for the
Temperites as well as for the Israelites.'

Thus the dedication of Ophir was not
only a grand religious demonstration for all
those who looked for Israel in England, but
also of those who have supplanted the Ten
Commandments by one, 'Thou shalt not
drink fermented liquor.'  Old Tramplara was
desirous to have the mines blessed by ministers
of all denominations—twelve, if possible,
to represent the twelve tribes.  He had
therefore applied to the bishop of the diocese, and
requested his presence for the opening of the
proceedings.  But the bishops of the
Anglican Church are not the tugs that lead, but
the boats that follow, popular opinion.  They
bless nothing till authorised to do so by the
daily papers, and as the daily papers had not
yet spoken on the subject of Ophir, the bishop
was in the bewildered condition of the priest
of Delphi when the oracle is silent.  If Ophir
were to prove a magnificent success, he would
never forgive himself for not having been
at the opening.  If it proved a disastrous
failure, he would never forgive himself for not
staying away.  So he temporised, after the
manner of weak men and weak classes of men;
he discovered that he was due at the opening
of a (barrel) organ at the Land's End on that
particular day, and he wrote a letter full of
apologies, expressive of his warmest interest
in the proceedings, promising his heartfelt
prayers, invoking the most solemn blessings
on the gathering, and then ate his breakfast,
devoured the 'Times,' and forgot everything
about Ophir and the barrel organ at the
Land's End.

But though the bishop of the diocese was
unavoidably absent, representative pastors of
all the Christian denominations in the West
were present, and prayed and harangued to
their hearts' content, and ate and drank to
their stomachs' content as well.

The tent was filled to overflowing.  Grace
was said simultaneously by twenty-nine
ministers to avoid giving offence by exalting one
above another.  A noble collation had been
provided.  Waiters dressed like clergymen
attended on the guests.  'Lemonade, sir?'
'Gooseberriade, ma'am?' as they uncorked
long-necked bottles with gold foil about the
throats, and poured the effervescing drink
into champagne glasses.  'Temperance cake,
miss?' with an offer of an inviting dish of
sponge-cake sopped in—well, non-alcoholic
brandy—and with flummery over it to hide
its blushes.

Reporters were present from every West
of England paper and several London journals
as well.  These gentlemen were supplied freely
with 'gooseberriade,' and grew cheery in spirit,
and red in face, and watery in eye, and
uncritical in disposition under its influence.  They
began to believe in Ophir as much as a
reporter can believe in anything.  And when,
on raising the napkins under their
finger-glasses, each found a ten-pound note, the
enthusiasm of the press for Ophir bordered on
fanaticism.  After lunch, the entire party
sought the mine, and those who could get in
hammered at the stone, and there was much
ado in wheeling to the stampers the 'gozzen'
that had been extracted.

Tramplara particularly urged on the
reporters to dig and wash for themselves, and
they complied with his request.  The prayers
and blessings of the pastors of discordant
Christianity had been of avail.  Never before
had the rock yielded so much gold.  There it
was—in glittering granules—strewing the
washing floor.  The rock had been quarried
by ten reporters, seven pastors, and one old
lady, with a grim face and severely plain,
untrimmed costume.  The stone had been
wheeled by them to the crushers, at that time
clear of every particle of stone.  The grim old
lady had not wheeled, but carried her specimens
in her gown, exposing thereby some
elaborate lace frills beneath it.  The entire
party saw the granite thus extracted washed
in several waters.  They washed it themselves,
no workman touched any part of the machinery,
or dipped a finger into the water, and
there—there was the gold—gold-dust in
abundance.  There could be no deception.
There was no room for deception.

John Herring was there also, looking on,
much puzzled.  He had not been at the lunch,
but had strolled to Ophir after it.  His lead
mine was not advanced.  No company was
formed to work it.  Who would look at lead
when gold was available?  He watched the
whole process critically, and was convinced
that there was no deception in what passed
under his eye.  There the gold was.  Every
one present was given a grain as a memorial
of that day.  The whole affair was marvellous.
The expense to which Tramplara had gone
was prodigious.  Would he have thrown his
gold away in shovelfuls unless he were sure of
getting gold out of the mine?  Herring was
young and simple.  He was right.  Tramplara
would not have gone to this lavish
expense unless he had made sure of getting gold
out of the mine?  But then, it did not follow
that he was going to extract it from the granite.
Some things are softer than granite, and the
gold may be got easily enough by those who
can touch the vein.

'What!  Lieutenant! you here?'
exclaimed Mr. Trampleasure, coming up to
Herring, looking flushed and glossy.  'Glorious
day, this.  Wonderful discovery, this Ophir.
"Thither the tribes go up!" said the prophet,
speaking of this day and the way in which
they went into the tent to their dinner.  Come
in and have a glass of wi—, of something
comforting but not exhilarating.  Come in, my
dear lieutenant; there is only the band there,
making clean the cup and the platter, when
their betters have done.'

'No, thank you,' answered Herring, 'I
have had an early dinner.  Besides, I must
trouble you no longer to style me lieutenant.'

'Why so?'

'Because I have sold out.'

'Sold out!  Become a civilian again!'

'Yes.  I have things to attend to which
demand my presence here.  I am going to
work the silver lead.'

'My dear fellow, don't throw money away
on that.  Take shares in gold.'

'I prefer lead.'

'Herring, is that why you are taking up
the mortgages on West Wyke?'

'Partly.'

'You'll never work the lead yourself?
You have no experience.  However, we will
talk of that another time.  Are you likely to
be in Launceston next week?'

'Yes.  I shall go there to pay you the
mortgage money.'

'Very well.  We are going to have a kick
about on Thursday—the first dance in the
season.  There is a reason: Orange is engaged
to Captain Trecarrel.  Will you come?'

Herring thought a while before answering.

'Look here!  I will tell that little bleached
puss of a missie to expect you, and put your
name down as her partner for the first caper.'

'I will come.'

All at once the Reverend Israel Flamank
was seen flying down the valley, with coat tails
expanded like wings, and his white tie loose
and flapping.  He was shouting and waving
his arms.

What was it?  Had he been bitten by a
serpent?  Had he found a nugget?

When he came up, he was breathless and
of inflamed countenance.  At length he
gasped—'I have been privileged to discover
it?'  Then he paused again.  A circle formed
round him.

'A do-deka-penta-hedron,' he said.  Then
seeing the reporters with their notebooks in
hand and pencils pausing in mid-air, and
fearing that their knowledge of Greek
surpassed his (he need have entertained no
apprehension), he added simply, 'Solomon's Seal
carved on a rock.'

The whole crowd went after him.  Here
was a wonderful coincidence!  Coincidence!
Avast!  Conclusive evidence that the servants
of Solomon had worked at this identical place.
The symbol of Solomon, the interlacing
triangles, cut in imperishable granite, was
there as an eternal witness to Ophir.

Herring did not follow the troop: he
turned to go back to West Wyke.  He was
not eager to inspect the 'Dodekapentahedron.'

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   END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

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   LONDON: PRINTED BY
   SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
   AND PARLIAMENT STREET

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