Grant Allen - Michael's Crag

For some minutes he could only stand with open eyes and gaze delighted at the glorious prospect. Cliffs, sea, and rocks all blended with one another in solemn harmony. Even the blackness of the great crags and the scorched air of the brown and water-logged moorland in the rear now ceased to oppress him. They fell into their proper place in one consistent and well-blended picture. But, after awhile, impelled by a desire to look down upon the next little bay beyond—for the coast is indented with endless coves and headlands—the engineer walked on along the top by a coastguard's path that threaded its way, marked by whitened stones, round the points and gullies. As he did so, he happened to notice on the very crest of the ridge that overlooked the rock they called St. Michael's Crag a tall figure of a man silhouetted in dark outline against the pale gray skyline. From the very first moment Eustace Le Neve set eyes upon that striking figure this man exerted upon him some nameless attraction. Even at this distance the engineer could see he had a certain indefinite air of dignity and distinction; and he poised himself lightly on the very edge of the cliff in a way that would no doubt have made Walter Tyrrel shudder with fear and alarm. Yet there was something about that poise quite unearthly and uncanny; the man stood so airily on his high rocky perch that he reminded Le Neve at once of nothing so much as of Giovanni da Bologna's Mercury in the Bargello at Florence; he seemed to spurn the earth as if about to spring from it with a bound; his feet were as if freed from the common bond of gravity.

It was a figure that belonged naturally to the Cornish moorland.

Le Neve advanced along the path till he nearly reached the summit where the man was standing. The point itself was a rugged tor, or little group of bare and weather-worn rocks, overlooking the sea and St. Michael's Crag below it. As the engineer drew near he saw the stranger was not alone. Under shelter of the rocks a girl lay stretched at length on a loose camel's-hair rug; her head was hatless; in her hand she held, half open, a volume of poetry. She looked up as Eustace passed, and he noted at a glance that she was dark and pretty. The Cornish type once more; bright black eyes, glossy brown hair, a rich complexion, a soft and rounded beauty.

"Cleer," the father said, warningly, in a modulated voice, as the young man approached, "don't let your hat blow away, dear; it's close by the path there."

The girl he called Cleer darted forward and picked it up, with a little blush of confusion. Eustace Le Neve raised his hat, by way of excuse for disturbing her, and was about to pass on, but the view down into the bay below, with the jagged and pointed crag islanded in white foam, held him spellbound for a moment. He paused and gazed at it. "This is a lovely lookout, sir," he said, after a second's silence, as if to apologize for his intrusion, turning round to the stranger, who still stood poised like a statue on the natural pedestal of lichen-covered rock beside him. "A lovely lookout and a wonderful bit of wild coast scenery."

"Yes," the stranger answered, in a voice as full of dignity as his presence and his mien. "It's the grandest spot along the Cornish coast. From here you can see in one view St. Michael's Mount, St. Michael's Crag, St. Michael's Church, and St. Michael's Promontory. The whole of this country, indeed, just teems with St. Michael."

"Which is St. Michael's Promontory?" the young man asked, with a side glance at Cleer, as they called the daughter. He wasn't sorry indeed for the chance of having a second look at her.

"Why Land's End, of course," the dignified stranger answered at once, descending from his perch as he spoke, with a light spring more like a boy's than a mature man's. "You must surely know those famous lines in 'Lycidas' about

"Yes, I KNOW them, of course," Eustace answered with ingenuous shyness; "but as so often happens with poetry, to say the truth, I'm afraid I attached no very definite idea to them. The music so easily obscures the sense; though the moment you suggest it, I see they can't possibly mean anyone but St. Michael."

"My father's very much interested in the antiquities of Cornwall," the girl Cleer put in, looking up at him somewhat timidly; "so he naturally knows all these things, and perhaps he expects others to know them unreasonably."

"We've every ground for knowing them," the father went on, glancing down at her with tender affection. "We're Cornish to the backbone—Cornish born and bred, if ever there were Cornishmen. Every man of my ancestors was a Tre, Pol, or Pen, to the tenth generation backward; and I'm descended from the Bassets, too—the Bassets of Tehidy. You must have heard of the Bassets in Cornish history. They owned St. Michael's Mount before these new-fangled St. Aubyn people."

"It's Lord St. Levan's now, isn't it?" Le Neve put in, anxious to show off his knowledge of the local aristocracy.

"Yes, they've made him Lord St. Levan," the dignified stranger answered, with an almost imperceptible curl of his delicate lower lip. "They've made him Lord St. Levan. The queen can make one anything. He was plain Sir John St. Aubyn before that, you know; his family bought the Mount from my ancestors—the Bassets of Tehidy. They're new people at Marazion—new people altogether. They've only been there since 1660."

Le Neve smiled a quiet smile. That seemed to him in his innocence a fairly decent antiquity as things go nowadays. But the dignified stranger appeared to think so little of it that his new acquaintance abstained from making note or comment on it. He waited half a moment to see whether Cleer would speak again; he wanted to hear that pleasant voice once more; but as she held her peace, he merely raised his hat, and accepting the dismissal, continued his walk round the cliffs alone. Yet, somehow, the rest of the way, the figure of that statuesque stranger haunted him. He looked back once or twice. The descendant of the Bassets of Tehidy had now resumed his high pedestal upon the airy tor, and was gazing away seaward, like the mystic Great Vision of his own Miltonic quotation, toward the Spanish coast, wrapped round in a loose cloak of most poetic dimensions. Le Neve wondered who he was, and what errand could have brought him there.

At the point called the Rill, he diverged from the path a bit, to get that beautiful glimpse down into the rock-strewn cove and smooth white sands at Kynance. A coastguard with brush and pail was busy as he passed by renewing the whitewash on the landmark boulders that point the path on dark nights to the stumbling wayfarer. Le Neve paused and spoke to him. "That's a fine-looking man, my friend, the gentleman on the tor there," he said, after a few commonplaces. "Do you happen to know his name? Is he spending the summer about here?"

The man stopped in his work and looked up. His eye lighted with pleasure on the dignified stranger. "Yes; he's one of the right sort, sir," he answered, with a sort of proprietary pride in the distinguished figure. "A real old Cornish gentleman of the good old days, he is, if ever you see one. That's Trevennack of Trevennack; and Miss Cleer's his daughter. Fine old crusted Cornish names, every one of them; I'm a Cornishman myself, and I know them well, the whole grand lot of them. The Trevennacks and the Bassets, they was all one, time gone by; they owned St. Michael's Mount, and Penzance, and Marazion, and Mullion here. They owned Penmorgan, too, afore the Tyrrels bought it up. Michael Basset Trevennack, that's the gentleman's full name; the eldest son of the eldest son is always a Michael, to keep up the memory of the times gone by, when they was Guardians of the Mount and St. Michael's Constables. And the lady's Miss Cleer, after St. Cleer of Cornwall—her that gives her name still to St. Cleer by Liskeard."