Captain Mugford | Page 2

I thrust my head far out of the chaise to look well at my first live hero. That sight was romance enough for an hour. Then the first glimpse of the top of the high cape, and my father's telling me that where I saw the haze beyond was the ocean, were sources of further reverie and mystery, dispelled, however, very suddenly when directly afterwards a wheel came off the chaise and pitched me into the road, with my father's small valise on my stomach. I remember the walk to the nearest house, which happened to be an inn, and how my father took off a large tumbler of ale, and gave me some biscuits and a glass of water. It occurred to me, I recollect, whether, when I became a man, I should be able to drink a full glass of ale and not be a drunkard, and whether my son would take biscuits and water and I not be conscious that he wanted to taste the ale. A thousand things more I remember--mere trifles in reality, but abounding in great interest to me on my first journey, which really then seemed of as much importance as Captain Cook's voyage around the world or Mungo Park's travels in Africa. It was a delightful day, the most interesting chapter in my life up to that time--brimful of novelty, thought, and excitement--but I shall not write its events in detail. What I have already mentioned will do as a sample. Late in the afternoon--it was the afternoon of a September day, the first fine one after a three days' storm--we reached the cape, just as the short sombre twilight of an autumn day settled down on land and sea. As the horse trudged laboriously along through the heavy piece of sand connecting the cape and the mainland, I was almost terrified by the great sound of waves, whose spray tossed up in vast spouts from every rocky head before us. The rush of waters, the rumbling of great stones receding with the current, the booming as of ships' broadsides--all these united to awe a little boy making his first acquaintance with the ocean.
When we drove up to the house, which was the only habitation on the point, not a light was to be seen, and the dark stone walls were blacker than the night that had settled down so quickly on the land. My father said there was no use to knock, for that old Juno lived in the back part of the house and was too deaf to hear us. So he led the horse round, and we went to the back windows. Through them we saw our old black castellan nodding, pipe in mouth, over the fireplace. She had not heard the noise of our wheels, and it required a vigorous pounding on the heavy back-door before old Juno, in much trembling, opened it to us.
"Oh my, Massa Tregellins, is dat you dis dark night! And Clump, de ole nigger, gone to willage. Lor, massa, how you did frighten me--and, oh my! thar's young Massa Bob!"
Juno had often come up to Bristol to see us, and felt an engrossing interest in all of the family. She now led me into the house, and went as briskly to work as her rheumatic old limbs would allow, to make a good fire--piling on logs, blowing with the bellows, and talking all the while with the volubility of a kind old soul of fully sixty years of age. My father had gone to tie up the horse under the shed until Clump should return and take care of him. Clump was Juno's husband, and her senior by many years. The exact age of negroes is always of unreliable tradition. The two had charge of the house, and were, indeed, rulers of the entire cape. Clump cultivated vegetables sufficient for his wife and himself, and was also a skilful fisherman. His duties were to look after the copses and fences and gates, and to tend the numerous sheep that found a living on the cape; in which tasks Juno helped him, besides keeping the old house free from ghosts and desolation--indeed, a model of neatness and coziness.
I must now pause for a minute and describe how it happened that the two old negroes were living on that out-of-the-way farm in Cornwall. My father had been a West Indian proprietor, and had resided out in the West Indies for many years. It was in the days when Wilberforce and true and noble philanthropists who fought the battle of emancipation with him first began to promulgate their doctrines. My father, like most other proprietors, was at first very indignant at hearing of proceedings which were considered to interfere with their rights and privileges, and he