Michaels Crag

Michael's Crag

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Title: Michael's Crag
Author: Grant Allen
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MICHAEL'S CRAG
BY
GRANT ALLEN
AUTHOR OF "WHAT'S BRED IN THE BONE," "TENTS OP
SHEM," "IN ALL SHADES," ETC.
With over Three Hundred and Fifty Illustrations In Silhouette
BY
FRANCIS CARRUTHERS GOULD
AND
ALEC CARRUTHERS GOULD

CHICAGO AND NEW YORK:
1893

CONTENTS.
CHAPTER.
I. A CORNISH LANDLORD
II. TREVENNACK
III. FACE TO FACE
IV. TYRREL'S REMORSE
V. A STRANGE DELUSION VI. PURE ACCIDENT
VII. PERIL BY LAND
VIII. SAFE AT LAST
IX. MEDICAL OPINION
X. A BOLD ATTEMPT

XI. BUSINESS IS BUSINESS
XII. A HARD BARGAIN
XIII. ANGEL AND DEVIL
XIV. AT ARM'S LENGTH
XV. ST. MICHAEL DOES BATTLE

CHAPTER I.
A CORNISH LANDLORD.
"Then you don't care for the place yourself, Tyrrel?" Eustace Le Neve
said, musingly, as he gazed in front of him with a comprehensive
glance at the long gray moor and the wide expanse of black and stormy
water.
"It's bleak, of course; bleak and cold, I grant you; all this upland plateau
about the Lizard promontory seems bleak and cold everywhere; but to
my mind it has a certain wild and weird picturesqueness of its own for
all that. It aims at gloominess. I confess in its own way I don't dislike
it."
"For my part," Tyrrel answered, clinching his hand hard as he spoke,
and knitting his brow despondently, "I simply hate it. If I wasn't the
landlord here, to be perfectly frank with you, I'd never come near
Penmorgan. I do it for conscience' sake, to be among my own people.
That's my only reason. I disapprove of absenteeism; and now the land's
mine, why, I must put up with it, I suppose, and live upon it in spite of
myself. But I do it against the grain. The whole place, if I tell you the
truth, is simply detestable to me."
He leaned on his stick as he spoke, and looked down gloomily at the
heather. A handsome young man, Walter Tyrrel, of the true Cornish
type--tall, dark, poetical-looking, with pensive eyes and a thick black
mustache, which gave dignity and character to his otherwise almost too
delicately feminine features. And he stood on the open moor just a
hundred yards outside his own front door at Penmorgan, on the Lizard
peninsula, looking westward down a great wedge-shaped gap in the

solid serpentine rock to a broad belt of sea beyond without a ship or a
sail on it. The view was indeed, as Eustace Le Neve admitted, a
somewhat bleak and dreary one. For miles, as far as the eye could reach,
on either side, nothing was to be seen but one vast heather- clad upland,
just varied at the dip by bare ledges of dark rock and a single gray
glimpse of tossing sea between them. A little farther on, to be sure,
winding round the cliff path, one could open up a glorious prospect on
either hand over the rocky islets of Kynance and Mullion Cove, with
Mounts Bay and Penzance and the Land's End in the distance. That was
a magnificent site--if only his ancestors had had the sense to see it. But
Penmorgan House, like most other Cornish landlords' houses, had been
carefully placed--for shelter's sake, no doubt--in a seaward hollow
where the view was most restricted; and the outlook one got from it,
over black moor and blacker rocks, was certainly by no means of a
cheerful character. Eustace Le Neve himself, most cheery and sanguine
of men, just home