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Michael's Crag By: Grant Allen (1848-1899) |
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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 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... Continue reading book >>
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