Michaels Crag | Page 2

from his South American railway-laying, and with
the luxuriant vegetation of the Argentine still fresh in his mind, was
forced to admit, as he looked about him, that the position of his friend's
house on that rolling brown moor was far from a smiling one.
"You used to come here when you were a boy, though," he objected,
after a pause, with a glance at the great breakers that curled in upon the
cove; "and you must surely have found it pleasant enough then, what
with the bathing and the fishing and the shooting and the boating, and
all the delights of the sea and the country."
Walter Tyrrel nodded his head. It was clear the subject was extremely
distasteful to him.
"Yes--till I was twelve or thirteen," he said, slowly, as one who grudges
assent, "in my uncle's time, I liked it well enough, no doubt. Boys don't
realize the full terror of sea or cliff, you know, and are perfectly happy
swimming and climbing. I used to be amphibious in those days, like a
seal or an otter--in the water half my time; and I scrambled over the
rocks--great heavens, it makes me giddy now just to THINK where I
scrambled. But when I was about thirteen years old"--his face grew
graver still--"a change seemed to come over me, and I began . . . well, I

began to hate Penmorgan. I've hated it ever since. I shall always hate it.
I learned what it all meant, I suppose--rocks, wrecks, and accidents. I
saw how dull and gloomy it was, and I couldn't bear coming down here.
I came as seldom as I dared, till my uncle died last year and left it to me.
And then there was no help for it. I HAD to come down. It's a
landlord's business, I consider, to live among his tenants and look after
the welfare of the soil, committed to his charge by his queen and
country. He holds it in trust, strictly speaking, for the nation. So I felt I
must come and live here. But I hate it, all the same. I hate it! I hate it!"
He said it so energetically, and with such strange earnestness in his
voice, that Eustace Le Neve, scanning his face as he spoke, felt sure
there must be some good reason for his friend's dislike of his ancestral
home, and forebore (like a man) to question him further. Perhaps, he
thought, it was connected in Tyrrel's mind with some painful memory,
some episode in his history he would gladly forget; though, to be sure,
when one comes to think of it, at thirteen such episodes are rare and
improbable. A man doesn't, as a rule, get crossed in love at that early
age; nor does he generally form lasting and abiding antipathies. And
indeed, for the matter of that, Penmorgan was quite gloomy enough in
itself, in all conscience, to account for his dislike--a lonely and
gaunt-looking granite-built house, standing bare and square on the edge
of a black moor, under shelter of a rocky dip, in a treeless country. It
must have been a terrible change for a bachelor about town, like Walter
Tyrrel, to come down at twenty-eight from his luxurious club and his
snug chambers in St. James' to the isolation and desolation of that wild
Cornish manor-house. But the Tyrrels, he knew, were all built like that;
Le Neve had been with three of the family at Rugby; and conscience
was their stumbling- block. When once a Tyrrel was convinced his duty
lay anywhere, no consideration on earth would keep him from doing it.
"Let's take a stroll down by the shore," Le Neve suggested, carelessly,
after a short pause, slipping his arm through his friend's.
"Your cliffs, at least, must be fine; they look grand and massive; and
after three years of broiling on a South American line, this fresh
sou'wester's just the thing, to my mind, to blow the cobwebs out of

one."
He was a breezy-looking young man, this new-comer from beyond the
sea --a son of the Vikings, Tyrrel's contemporary in age, but very
unlike him in form and features; for Eustace Le Neve was fair and
big-built, a florid young giant, with tawny beard, mustache, and
whiskers, which he cut in a becoming Vandyke point of artistic
carelessness. There was more of the artist than of the engineer, indeed,
about his frank and engaging English face--a face which made one like
him as soon as one looked at him. It was impossible to do otherwise.
Exuberant vitality was the keynote of the man's being. And he was
candidly open, too. He impressed one at first sight, by some nameless
instinct, with a certain well-founded friendly confidence. A lovable
soul, if ever there was