initial commit of ebook 5869HEADmain

1 files changed, 4038 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/old/mchcr10.txt b/old/mchcr10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ec6accf
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/mchcr10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,4038 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Michael's Crag, by Grant Allen
+#7 in our series by Grant Allen
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
+Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
+header without written permission.
+
+Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
+eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
+important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
+how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
+donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: Michael's Crag
+
+Author: Grant Allen
+
+Release Date: June, 2004 [EBook #5869]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on September 15, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MICHAEL'S CRAG ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+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 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 one, equally liked at once by men and women.
+
+"Our cliffs are fine," Walter Tyrrel answered, grudgingly, in the tone
+of one who, against his will, admits an adverse point he sees no
+chance of gainsaying. "They're black, and repellant, and iron-bound,
+and dangerous, but they're certainly magnificent. I don't deny it.
+Come and see them, by all means. They're the only lions we have to
+show a stranger in this part of Cornwall, so you'd better make the
+most of them."
+
+And he took, as if mechanically, the winding path that led down the
+gap toward the frowning cove in the wall of cliff before them.
+
+Eustace Le Neve was a little surprised at this unexpected course, for
+he himself would naturally have made rather for the top of the
+promontory, whence they were certain to obtain a much finer and more
+extensive view; but he had only arrived at Penmorgan the evening
+before, so he bowed at once to his companion's more mature experience
+of Cornish scenery. They threaded their way through the gully, for it
+was little more--a great water-worn rent in the dark serpentine rocks,
+with the sea at its lower end--picking their path as they went along
+huge granite boulders or across fallen stones, till they reached a
+small beach of firm white sand, on whose even floor the waves were
+rolling in and curling over magnificently. It was a curious place,
+Eustace thought, rather dreary than beautiful. On either side rose
+black cliffs, towering sheer into the air, and shutting out overhead
+all but a narrow cleft of murky sky. Around, the sea dashed itself in
+angry white foam against broken stacks and tiny weed-clad skerries. At
+the end of the first point a solitary islet, just separated from the
+mainland by a channel of seething water, jutted above into the waves,
+with hanging tresses of blue and yellow seaweed. Tyrrel pointed to it
+with one hand. "That's Michael's Crag," he said, laconically. "You've
+seen it before, no doubt, in half a dozen pictures. It's shaped
+exactly like St. Michael's Mount in miniature. A marine painter fellow
+down here's forever taking its portrait."
+
+Le Neve gazed around him with a certain slight shudder of unspoken
+disapprobation. This place didn't suit his sunny nature. It was even
+blacker and more dismal than the brown moorland above it. Tyrrel
+caught the dissatisfaction in his companion's eye before Le Neve had
+time to frame it in words.
+
+"Well, you don't think much of it?" he said, inquiringly.
+
+"I can't say I do," Le Neve answered, with apologetic frankness. "I
+suppose South America has spoilt me for this sort of thing. But it's
+not to my taste. I call it gloomy, without being even impressive."
+
+"Gloomy," Tyrrel answered; "oh, yes, gloomy, certainly. But
+impressive; well, yes. For myself, I think so. To me, it's all
+terribly, unspeakably, ineffably impressive. I come here every day,
+and sit close on the sands, and look out upon the sea by the edge of
+the breakers. It's the only place on this awful coast one feels
+perfectly safe in. You can't tumble over here, or...roll anything down
+to do harm to anybody."
+
+A steep cliff path led up the sheer face of the rock to southward. It
+was a difficult path, a mere foothold on the ledges; but its
+difficulty at once attracted the engineer's attention. "Let's go up
+that way!" he said, waving his hand toward it carelessly. "The view
+from on top there must be infinitely finer."
+
+"I believe it is," Tyrrel replied, in an unconcerned voice, like one
+who retails vague hearsay evidence. "I haven't seen it myself since I
+was a boy of thirteen. I never go along the top of the cliffs on any
+account."
+
+Le Neve gazed down on him, astonished. "You BELIEVE it is!" he
+exclaimed, unable to conceal his surprise and wonder. "You never go up
+there! Why, Walter, how odd of you! I was reading up the Guidebook
+this morning before breakfast, and it says the walk from this point on
+the Penmorgan estate to Kynance Cove is the most magnificent bit of
+wild cliff scenery anywhere in Cornwall."
+
+"So I'm told," Tyrrel answered, unmoved. "And I remember, as a boy, I
+thought it very fine. But that was long since. I never go by it."
+
+"Why not?" Le Neve cried.
+
+Tyrrel shrugged his shoulders and shook himself impatiently. "I don't
+know." he answered, in a testy sort of voice. "I don't like the cliff
+top... It's so dangerous, don't you know? So unsafe. So unstable. The
+rocks go off so sheer, and stones topple over so easily."
+
+Le Neve laughed a little laugh of half-disguised contempt. He was
+moving over toward the path up the cliff side as they spoke. "Why, you
+used to be a first-class climber at school," he said, attempting it,
+"especially when you were a little chap. I remember you could scramble
+up trees like a monkey. What fun we had once in the doctor's orchard!
+And as to the cliffs, you needn't go so near you have to tumble over
+them. It seems ridiculous for a landowner not to know a bit of scenery
+on his own estate that's celebrated and talked about all over
+England."
+
+"I'm not afraid of tumbling over, for myself," Tyrrel answered, a
+little nettled by his friend's frank tone of amusement. "I don't feel
+myself so useful to my queen and country that I rate my own life at
+too high a figure. It's the people below I'm chiefly concerned about.
+There's always someone wandering and scrambling about these cliffs,
+don't you see?--fishermen, tourists, geologists. If you let a loose
+stone go, it may fall upon them and crush them."
+
+The engineer looked back upon him with a somewhat puzzled expression.
+"Well, that's carrying conscience a point too far," he said, with one
+strong hand on the rock and one sure foot in the first convenient
+cranny. "If we're not to climb cliffs for fear of showering down
+stones on those who stand below, we won't dare to walk or ride or
+drive or put to sea for fear of running over or colliding against
+somebody. We shall have to stop all our trains and keep all our
+steamers in harbor. There's nothing in this world quite free from
+risk. We've got to take it and lump it. You know the old joke about
+those dangerous beds--so many people die in them. Won't you break your
+rule just for once, and come up on top here to see the view with me?"
+
+Tyrrel shook his head firmly. "Not to-day," he answered, with a quiet
+smile. "Not by that path, at any rate. It's too risky for my taste.
+The stones are so loose. And it overhangs the road the quarrymen go to
+the cave by."
+
+Le Neve had now made good his foothold up the first four or five
+steps. "Well, you've no objection to my going, at any rate?" he said,
+with a wave of one hand, in his cheerful good-humor. "You don't put a
+veto on your friends here, do you?"
+
+"Oh, not the least objection," Tyrrel answered, hurriedly, watching
+him climb, none the less, with nervous interest. "It's...it's a purely
+personal and individual feeling. Besides," he added, after a pause," I
+can stop below here, if need be, and warn the quarrymen."
+
+"I'll be back in ten minutes," Le Neve shouted from the cliff.
+
+"No, don't hurry," his host shouted back. "Take your own time, it's
+safest. Once you get to the top you'd better walk along the whole
+cliff path to Kynance. They tell me its splendid; the view's so wide;
+and you can easily get back across the moor by lunch-time. Only, mind
+about the edge, and whatever you do, let no stones roll over."
+
+"All right," Le Neve made answer, clinging close to a point of rock.
+"I'll do no damage. It's opening out beautifully on every side now. I
+can see round the corner to St. Michael's Mount; and the point at the
+end there must be Tol-Pedn-Penwith."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+TREVENNACK.
+
+
+It was a stiff, hot climb to the top of the cliff; but as soon as he
+reached it, Eustace Le Neve gazed about him, enchanted at the outlook.
+He was not in love with Cornwall, as far as he'd seen it yet; and to
+say the truth, except in a few broken seaward glens, that high and
+barren inland plateau has little in it to attract or interest anyone,
+least of all a traveler fresh from the rich luxuriance of South
+American vegetation. But the view that burst suddenly upon Eustace Le
+Neve's eye as he gained the summit of that precipitous serpentine
+bluff fairly took his breath away. It was a rich and varied one. To
+the north and west loomed headland after headland, walled in by steep
+crags, and stretching away in purple perspective toward Marazion, St.
+Michael's Mount, and the Penzance district. To the south and east huge
+masses of fallen rock lay tossed in wild confusion over Kynance Cove
+and the neighboring bays, with the bare boss of the Rill and the
+Rearing Horse in the foreground. Le Neve stood and looked with open
+eyes of delight. It was the first beautiful view he had seen since he
+came to Cornwall; but this at least was beautiful, almost enough so to
+compensate for his first acute disappointment at the barrenness and
+gloom of the Lizard scenery.
+
+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
+                                           'The fable of Bellerus old,
+    Where the Great Vision of the guarded mount
+    Looks towards Namancos and Bayona's hold;
+    Look homeward, angel, now, and melt with ruth.'"
+
+"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."
+
+"And do they live here?" Le Neve asked, much interested in the
+intelligent local tone of the man's conversation.
+
+"Lord bless you, no, sir. They don't live nowhere. They're in the
+service, don't you see. They lives in Malta or Gibraltar, or wherever
+the Admiralty sends him. He's an Admiralty man, he is, connected with
+the Vittling Yard. I was in the navy myself, on the good old Billy
+Ruffun, afore I was put in the Coastguards, and I knowed him well when
+we was both together on the Mediterranean Station. Always the same
+grand old Cornish gentleman, with them gracious manners, so haughty
+like, an' yet so condescending, wherever they put him. A gentleman
+born. No gentleman on earth more THE gentleman all round than
+Trevennack of Trevennack."
+
+"Then he's staying down here on a visit?" Le Neve went on, curiously,
+peering over the edge of the cliffs, as he spoke, to observe the
+cormorants.
+
+"Don't you go too nigh, sir," the coastguard put in, warningly. "She's
+slippery just there. Yes, they're staying down in Oliver's lodgings at
+Gunwalloe. He's on leave, that's where it is. Every three or four
+years he gets leave from the Vittling and comes home to England; and
+then he always ups and runs down to the Lizard, and wanders about on
+the cliffs by himself like this, with Miss Cleer to keep him company.
+He's a chip of the old rock, he is--Cornish granite to the core, as
+the saying goes; and he can't be happy away from it. You'll see him
+any day standing like that on the very edge of the cliff, looking
+across over the water, as if he was a coastguard hisself, and always
+sort o' perched on the highest bit of rock he can come nigh anywhere."
+
+"He looks an able man," Le Neve went on, still regarding the stranger,
+poised now as before on the very summit of the tor, with his cloak
+wrapped around him.
+
+"Able? I believe you! Why, he's the very heart and soul, the brains
+and senses of the Vittling Department. The navy'd starve if it wasn't
+for him. He's a Companion of St. Michael and St. George, Mr.
+Trevennack is. 'Tain't every one as is a Companion of St. Michael and
+St. George. The queen made him that herself for his management of the
+Vittling." "It's a strange place for a man in his position to spend
+his holiday," Le Neve went on, reflectively. "You'd think, coming back
+so seldom, he'd want to see something of London, Brighton,
+Scarborough, Scotland."
+
+The coastguard looked up, and held his brush idle in one hand with a
+mysterious air. "Not when you come to know his history," he answered,
+gazing hard at him.
+
+"Oh, there's a history to him, is there?" Le Neve answered, not
+surprised. "Well, he certainly has the look of it."
+
+The coastguard nodded his head and dropped his voice still lower.
+"Yes, there's a history to him," he replied. "And that's why you'll
+always see Trevennack of Trevennack on the top of the cliff, and never
+at the bottom.--Thank'ee very kindly, sir; it ain't often we gets a
+chance of a good cigar at Kynance.--Well, it must be fifteen year now
+--or maybe sixteen--I don't mind the right time--Trevennack came down
+in old Squire Tyrrel's days, him as is buried at Mullion Church town,
+and stopped at Gunwalloe, same as he might be stopping there in his
+lodgings nowadays. He had his only son with him, too, a fine-looking
+young gentleman, they say, for his age, for I wasn't here then--I was
+serving my time under Admiral De Horsey on the good old Billy Ruffun--
+the very picture of Miss Cleer, and twelve year old or thereabouts;
+and they called him Master Michael, the same as they always call the
+eldest boy of the Trevennacks of Trevennack. Aye, and one day they
+two, father and son, were a-strolling on the beach under the cliffs by
+Penmorgan--mind them stones on the edge, sir; they're powerful loose--
+don't you drop none over--when, just as you might loosen them pebbles
+there with your foot, over came a shower o' small bits from the cliff
+on top, and as sure as you're livin', hit the two on 'em right so,
+sir. Mr. Trevennack himself, he wasn't much hurt--just bruised a bit
+on the forehead, for he was wearing a Scotch cap; but Master Michael,
+well, it caught him right on the top of the head, and afore they
+knowed what it was, it smashed his skull in. Aye, that it did, sir,
+just so; it smashed the boy's skull in. They carried him home, and cut
+the bone out, and trepanned him; but bless you, it wa'n't no good; he
+lingered on for a night, and then, afore morning, he died,
+insensible."
+
+"What a terrible story!" Le Neve exclaimed, with a face of horror,
+recoiling instinctively from the edge of the cliff that had wrought
+this evil. "Aye, you may well say so. It was rough on him," the
+coastguard went on, with the calm criticism of his kind. "His only
+son--and all in a minute like, as you may term it--such a promising
+young gentleman! It was rough, terrible rough on him. So from that day
+to this, whenever Trevennack has a holiday, down he comes here to
+Gunwalloe, and walks about the cliffs, and looks across upon the rocks
+by Penmorgan Point, or stands on the top of Michael's Crag, just over
+against the spot where his boy was hurted. An' he never wants to go
+nowhere else in all England, but just to stand like that on the very
+edge of the cliff, and look over from atop, and brood, and think about
+it."
+
+As the man spoke, it flashed across Le Neve's mind at once that
+Trevennack's voice had quivered with a strange thrill of emotion as he
+uttered that line, no doubt pregnant with meaning for him. "Look
+homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth." He was thinking of his own
+boy, most likely, not of the poet's feigned Lycidas.
+
+"He'll stand like that for hours," the coastguard went on
+confidentially, "musing like to himself, with Miss Cleer by his side,
+reading in her book or doing her knitting or something. But you
+couldn't get him, for love or money, to go BELOW the cliffs, no, not
+if you was to kill him. He's AFRAID of going below--that's where it
+is; he always thinks something's sure to tumble from the top on him.
+Natural enough, too, after all that's been. He likes to get as high as
+ever he can in the air, where he can see all around him, and be
+certain there ain't anyone above to let anything drop as might hurt
+him. Michael's Crag's where he likes best to stand, on the top there
+by the Horse; he always chooses them spots. In Malta it was San
+Mickayly; and in Gibraltar it was the summit of Europa Point, by the
+edge of the Twelve Apostles' battery."
+
+"How curious!" Le Neve exclaimed. "It's just the other way on now,
+with my friend Mr. Tyrrel. I'm stopping at Penmorgan, but Mr. Tyrrel
+won't go on TOP of the cliffs for anything. He says he's afraid he
+might let something drop by accident on the people below him."
+
+The coastguard grew suddenly graver. "Like enough," he said, stroking
+his chin. "Like enough; and right, too, for him, sir. You see, he's a
+Tyrrel, and he's bound to be cautious.'
+
+"Why so?" Le Neve asked, somewhat puzzled. "Why a Tyrrel more than the
+rest of us?"
+
+The man hesitated and stared hard at him.
+
+"Well, it's like this, sir," he answered at last, with the shamefaced
+air of the intelligent laboring man who confesses to a superstition.
+"We Cornish are old-fashioned, and we has our ideas. The Tyrrels are
+new people like, in Cornwall, as we say; they came in only with
+Cromwell's folk, when he fought the Grenvilles; but it's well beknown
+in the county bad luck goes with them. You see, they're descended from
+that Sir Walter Tyrrel you'll read about in the history books, him as
+killed King William Rufious in the New Forest. You'll hear all about
+it at Rufious' Stone, where the king was killed; Sir Walter, he drew,
+and he aimed at a deer, and the king was standing by; and the bullet,
+it glanced aside--or maybe it was afore bullets, and then it'd be an
+arrow; but anyhow, one or t'other, it hit the king, and he fell, and
+died there. The stone's standing to this day on the place where he
+fell, and I've seen it, and read of it when I was in hospital at
+Netley. But Sir Walter, he got clear away, and ran across to France;
+and ever since that time they've called the eldest son of the Tyrrels
+Walter, same as they've called the eldest son of the Trevennacks
+Michael. But they say every Walter Tyrrel that's born into the world
+is bound, sooner or later, to kill his man unintentional. So he do
+right to avoid going too near the cliffs, I say. We shouldn't tempt
+Providence. And the Tyrrels is all a conscientious people."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+FACE TO FACE.
+
+
+When Eustace Le Neve returned to lunch at Penmorgan that day he was
+silent to his host about Trevennack of Trevennack. To say the truth,
+he was so much attracted by Miss Cleer's appearance that he didn't
+feel inclined to mention having met her. But he wanted to meet her
+again for all that, and hoped he would do so. Perhaps Tyrrel might
+know the family, and ask them round to dine some night. At any rate,
+society is rare at the Lizard. Sooner or later, he felt sure, he'd
+knock up against the mysterious stranger somewhere. And that involved
+the probability of knocking up against the mysterious stranger's
+beautiful daughter.
+
+Next morning after breakfast, however, he made a vigorous effort to
+induce Walter Tyrrel to mount the cliff and look at the view from
+Penmorgan Point toward the Rill and Kynance. It was absurd, he said
+truly, for the proprietor of such an estate never to have seen the
+most beautiful spot in it. But Tyrrel was obdurate. On the point of
+actually mounting the cliff itself he wouldn't yield one jot or
+tittle. Only, after much persuasion, he consented at last to cross the
+headland by the fields at the back and come out at the tor above St.
+Michael's Crag, provided always Eustace would promise he'd neither go
+near the edge himself nor try to induce his friend to approach it.
+
+Satisfied with this lame compromise--for he really wished his host to
+enjoy that glorious view--Eustace Le Neve turned up the valley behind
+the house, with Walter Tyrrel by his side, and after traversing
+several fields, through gaps in the stone walls, led out his companion
+at last to the tor on the headland.
+
+As they approached it from behind, the engineer observed, not without
+a faint thrill of pleasure, that Trevennack's stately figure stood
+upright as before upon the wind-swept pile of fissured rocks, and that
+Cleer sat reading under its shelter to leeward. But by her side this
+morning sat also an elder lady, whom Eustace instinctively recognized
+as her mother--a graceful, dignified lady, with silvery white hair and
+black Cornish eyes, and features not untinged by the mellowing,
+hallowing air of a great sorrow.
+
+Le Neve raised his hat as they drew near, with a pleased smile of
+welcome, and Trevennack and his daughter both bowed in return. "A
+glorious morning!" the engineer said, drinking in to the full the
+lovely golden haze that flooded and half-obscured the Land's End
+district; and Trevennack assented gravely. "The crag stands up well in
+this sunshine against the dark water behind," he said, waving one
+gracious hand toward the island at his foot, and poising lighter than
+ever.
+
+"Oh, take care!" Walter Tyrrel cried, looking up at him, on
+tenterhooks. It's so dangerous up there! You might tumble any minute."
+
+"_I_ never tumble," Trevennack made answer with solemn gravity,
+spreading one hand on either side as if to balance himself like an
+acrobat. But he descended as he spoke and took his place beside them.
+
+Tyrrel looked at the view and looked at the pretty girl. It was
+evident he was quite as much struck by the one as by the other.
+Indeed, of the two, Cleer seemed to attract the larger share of his
+attention. For some minutes they stood and talked, all five of them
+together, without further introduction than their common admiration
+for that exquisite bay, in which Trevennack appeared to take an almost
+proprietary interest. It gratified him, obviously, a Cornish man, that
+these strangers (as he thought them) should be so favorably impressed
+by his native county. But Tyrrel all the while looked ill at ease,
+though he sidled away as far as possible from the edge of the cliff,
+and sat down near Cleer at a safe distance from the precipice. He was
+silent and preoccupied. That mattered but little, however, as the rest
+did all the talking, especially Trevennack, who turned out to be
+indeed a perfect treasure-house of Cornish antiquities and Cornish
+folk-lore.
+
+"I generally stand below, on top of Michael's Crag," he said to
+Eustace, pointing it out, "when the tide allows it; but when it's
+high, as it is now, such a roaring and seething scour sets through the
+channel between the rock and the mainland that no swimmer could stem
+it; and then I come up here, and look down from above upon it. It's
+the finest point on all our Cornish coast, this point we stand on. It
+has the widest view, the purest air, the hardest rock, the highest and
+most fantastic tor of any of them."
+
+"My husband's quite an enthusiast for this particular place," Mrs.
+Trevennack interposed, watching his face as she spoke with a certain
+anxious and ill-disguised wifely solicitude.
+
+"He's come here for years. It has many associations for us."
+
+"Some painful and some happy," Cleer added, half aloud; and Tyrrel,
+nodding assent, looked at her as if expecting some marked recognition.
+
+"You should see it in the pilchard season," her father went on,
+turning suddenly to Eustace with much animation in his voice. "That's
+the time for Cornwall--a month or so later than now--you should see it
+then, for picturesqueness and variety. 'When the corn is in the
+shock,' says our Cornish rhyme, 'Then the fish are off the rock'--and
+the rock's St. Michael's. The HUER, as we call him, for he gives the
+hue and cry from the hill-top lookout when the fish are coming, he
+stands on Michael's Crag just below there, as I stand myself so often,
+and when he sights the shoals by the ripple on the water, he motions
+to the boats which way to go for the pilchards. Then the rowers in the
+lurkers, as we call our seine-boats, surround the shoal with a tuck-
+net, or drag the seine into Mullion Cove, all alive with a mass of
+shimmering silver. The jowsters come down with their carts on to the
+beach, and hawk them about round the neighborhood--I've seen them
+twelve a penny; while in the curing-houses they're bulking them and
+pressing them as if for dear life, to send away to Genoa, Leghorn, and
+Naples. That's where all our fish go--to the Catholic south. 'The Pope
+and the Pilchards,' says our Cornish toast; for it's the Friday fast
+that makes our only market."
+
+"You can see them on St. George's Island in Looe Harbor," Cleer put in
+quite innocently. "They're like a sea of silver there--on St. George's
+Island."
+
+"My dear," her father corrected with that grave, old-fashioned
+courtesy which the coast-guard had noted and described as at once so
+haughty and yet so condescending, "how often I've begged of you NOT to
+call it St. George's Island! It's St. Nicholas' and St. Michael's--one
+may as well be correct--and till a very recent date a chapel to St.
+Michael actually stood there upon the rocky top; it was only
+destroyed, you remember, at the time of the Reformation."
+
+"Everybody CALLS it St. George's now," Cleer answered, with girlish
+persistence. And her father looked round at her sharply, with an
+impatient snap of the fingers, while Mrs. Trevennack's eye was fixed
+on him now more carefully and more earnestly, Tyrrel observed, than
+ever.
+
+"I wonder why it is," Eustace Le Neve interposed, to spare Cleer's
+feelings, "that so many high places, tops of mountains and so forth,
+seem always to be dedicated to St. Michael in particular? He seems to
+love such airy sites. There's St. Michael's Mount here, you know, and
+Mont St. Michel in Normandy; and at Le Puy, in Auvergne, there's a St.
+Michael's Rock, and at ever so many other places I can't remember this
+minute."
+
+Trevennack was in his element. The question just suited him. He smiled
+a curious smile of superior knowledge. "You've come to the right place
+for information," he said, blandly, turning round to the engineer.
+"I'm a Companion of St. Michael and St. George myself, and my family,
+as I told you, once owned St. Michael's Mount; so, for that and
+various other reasons, I've made a special study of St. Michael the
+Archangel, and all that pertains to him." And then he went on to give
+a long and learned disquisition, which Le Neve and Walter Tyrrel only
+partially followed, about the connection between St. Michael and the
+Celtic race, as well as about the archangel's peculiar love for high
+and airy situations. Most of the time, indeed, Le Neve was more
+concerned in watching Cleer Trevennack's eyes, as her father spoke,
+than in listening to the civil servant's profound dissertation. He
+gathered, however, from the part he caught, that St. Michael the
+Archangel had been from early days a very important and powerful
+Cornish personage, and that he clung to high places on the tors and
+rocks because he had to fight and subdue the Prince of the Air, whom
+he always destroyed at last on some pointed pinnacle. And now that he
+came to think of it, Eustace vaguely recollected he had always seen
+St. Michael, in pictures or stained glass windows, delineated just so
+--with drawn sword and warrior's mien--in the act of triumphing over
+his dragon-like enemy on the airy summit of some tall jagged crag or
+rock-bound precipice.
+
+As for Mrs. Trevennack, she watched her husband every moment he spoke
+with a close and watchful care, which Le Neve hardly noticed, but
+which didn't for a minute escape Walter Tyrrel's more piercing and
+observant scrutiny.
+
+At last, as the amateur lecturer was beginning to grow somewhat
+prolix, a cormorant below created a slight diversion for awhile by
+settling in his flight on the very highest point of Michael's Crag,
+and proceeding to preen his glittering feathers in the full golden
+flood of that bright August sunlight.
+
+With irrepressible boyish instinct Le Neve took up a stone, and was
+just on the point of aiming it (quite without reason) at the bird on
+the pinnacle.
+
+But before he could let it go, the two other men, moved as if by a
+single impulse, had sprung forward with a bound, and in the self-same
+tone and in the self-same words cried out with one accord, in a wildly
+excited voice, "For God's sake, don't throw! You don't know how
+dangerous it is!"
+
+Le Neve let his hand drop flat, and allowed the stone to fall from it.
+As he did so the two others stood back a pace, as if guarding him, but
+kept their hands still ready to seize the engineer's arm if he made
+the slightest attempt at motion. Eustace felt they were watching him
+as one might watch a madman. For a moment they were silent. Trevennack
+was the first to speak. His voice had an earnest and solemn ring in
+it, like a reproving angel's. "How can you tell what precious life may
+be passing below?" he said, with stern emphasis, fixing Le Neve with
+his reproachful eye. "The stone might fall short. It might drop out of
+sight. You might kill whomsoever it struck, unseen. And then"--he
+drank in a deep breath, gasping--"you would know you were a murderer."
+
+Walter Tyrrel drew himself up at the words like one stung. "No, no!
+not a murderer!" he cried; "not quite as bad as a murderer! It
+wouldn't be murder, surely. It would be accidental homicide--
+unintentional, unwilled--a terrible result of most culpable
+carelessness, of course; but it wouldn't be quite murder; don't call
+it murder. I can't allow that. Not that name by any means. . . .Though
+to the end of your life, Eustace, if you were to kill a man so, you'd
+never cease to regret it and mourn over it daily; you'd never cease to
+repent your guilty carelessness in sackcloth and ashes."
+
+He spoke so seriously, so earnestly, with such depth of personal
+feeling, that Trevennack, starting back, stood and gazed at him slowly
+with those terrible eyes, like one who awakens by degrees from a
+painful dream to some awful reality. Tyrrel winced before his
+scrutiny. For a moment the elder man just looked at him and stared.
+Then he took one step forward. "Sir," he said, in a very low voice,
+half broken with emotion, "I had a dear son of my own once; a very
+dear, dear son. He was killed by such an ACCIDENT on this very spot.
+No wonder I remember it."
+
+Mrs. Trevennack and Cleer both gave a start of surprise. The man's
+words astonished them; for never before, during fifteen long years,
+had that unhappy father alluded in any way in overt words to his son's
+tragic end. He had brooded and mused over it in his crushed and
+wounded spirit; he had revisited the scene of his loss whenever
+opportunity permitted him; he had made of his sorrow a cherished and
+petted daily companion; but he had stored it up deep in his own inmost
+heart, never uttering a word of it even to his wife or daughter. The
+two women knew Michael Trevennack must be profoundly moved, indeed, so
+to tear open the half-healed wound in his tortured bosom before two
+casual strangers.
+
+But Tyrrel, too, gave a start as he spoke, and looked hard at the
+careworn face of that unhappy man. "Then you're Mr. Trevennack!" he
+exclaimed, all aghast. "Mr. Trevennack of the Admiralty!"
+
+And the dignified stranger answered, bowing his head very low, "Yes,
+you've guessed me right. I'm Michael Trevennack."
+
+With scarcely a word of reply Walter Tyrrel turned and strode away
+from the spot. "I must go now," he muttered faintly, looking at his
+watch with some feigned surprise, as a feeble excuse. "I've an
+appointment at home." He hadn't the courage to stay. His heart misgave
+him. Once fairly round the corner he fled like a wounded creature, too
+deeply hurt even to cry. Eustace Le Neve, raising his hat, hastened
+after him, all mute wonder. For several hundred yards they walked on
+side by side across the open heathy moor. Then, as they passed the
+first wall, Tyrrel paused for a moment and spoke. "NOT a murderer!" he
+cried in his anguish; "oh, no, not quite as bad as a murderer, surely,
+Eustace; but still, a culpable homicide. Oh, God, how terrible."
+
+And even as he disappeared across the moor to eastward, Trevennack,
+far behind, seized his wife's arm spasmodically, and clutching it
+tight in his iron grip, murmured low in a voice of supreme conviction,
+"Do you see what that means, Lucy? I can read it all now. It was HE
+who rolled down that cursed stone. It was HE who killed our boy. And I
+can guess who he is. He must be Tyrrel of Penmorgan."
+
+Cleer didn't hear the words. She was below, gazing after them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+TYRREL'S REMORSE.
+
+
+The two young men walked back, without interchanging another word, to
+the gate of the manor-house. Tyrrel opened it with a swing. Then, once
+within his own grounds, and free from prying eyes, he sat down
+forthwith upon a little craggy cliff that overhung the carriage-drive,
+buried his face in his hands, and, to Le Neve's intense astonishment,
+cried long and silently. He let himself go with a rush; that's the
+Cornish nature. Eustace Le Neve sat by his side, not daring to speak,
+but in mute sympathy with his sorrow. For many minutes neither uttered
+a sound. At last Tyrrel looked up, and in an agony of remorse, turned
+round to his companion. "Of course you understand," he said.
+
+And Eustace answered reverently, "Yes, I think I understand. Having
+come so near doing the same thing myself, I sympathize with you."
+
+Tyrrel paused a moment again. His face was like marble. Then he added,
+in a tone of the profoundest anguish, "Till this minute, Eustace, I've
+never told anybody. And if it hadn't been forced out of me by that
+poor man's tortured and broken-hearted face, I wouldn't have told you
+now. But could I look at him to-day and not break down before him?"
+
+"How did it all happen?" Le Neve asked, leaning forward and clasping
+his friend's arm with a brotherly gesture.
+
+Tyrrel answered with a deep sigh, "Like this. I'll make a clean breast
+of it all at last. I've bottled it up too long. I'll tell you now,
+Eustace.
+
+"Nearly sixteen years ago I was staying down here at Penmorgan with my
+uncle. The Trevennacks, as I learned afterward, were in lodgings at
+Gunwalloe. But, so far as I can remember at present, I never even saw
+them. To the best of my belief I never set eyes on Michael Trevennack
+himself before this very morning. If I'd known who he was, you may be
+pretty sure I'd have cut off my right hand before I'd allowed myself
+to speak to him.
+
+"Well, one day that year I was strolling along the top of the cliff by
+Michael's Crag, with my uncle beside me, who owned Penmorgan. I was
+but a boy then, and I walked by the edge more than once, very
+carelessly. My uncle knew the cliffs, though, and how dangerous they
+were; he knew men might any time be walking below, digging launces in
+the sand, or getting lobworms for their lines, or hunting serpentine
+to polish, or looking for sea-bird's eggs among the half-way ledges.
+Time after time he called out to me, 'Walter, my boy, take care; don't
+go so near the edge, you'll tumble over presently.' And time after
+time I answered him back, like a boy that I was, 'Oh, I'm all right,
+uncle. No fear about me. I can take care of myself. These cliffs don't
+crumble. They're a deal too solid.'
+
+"At last, when he saw it was no good warning me that way any longer,
+he turned round to me rather sharply--he was a Tyrrel, you see, and
+conscientious, as we all of us are--it runs in the blood somehow--'If
+you don't mind for yourself, at least mind for others. Who can say who
+may be walking underneath those rocks? If you let a loose stone fall
+you may commit manslaughter.'
+
+"I laughed, and thought ill of him. He was such a fidget! I was only a
+boy. I considered him absurdly and unnecessarily particular. He had
+stalked on a yard or two in front. I loitered behind, and out of pure
+boyish deviltry, as I was just above Michael's Crag, I loosened some
+stones with my foot and showered them over deliberately. Oh, heavens,
+I feel it yet; how they rattled and rumbled!
+
+"My uncle wasn't looking. He walked on and left me behind. He didn't
+see me push them. He didn't see them fall. He didn't hear them rattle.
+But as they reached the bottom I heard myself--or thought I heard--a
+vague cry below. A cry as of some one wounded. I was frightened at
+that; I didn't dare to look down, but ran on to my uncle. Not till
+some hours after did I know the whole truth, for we walked along the
+cliffs all the way to Kynance, and then returned inland by the road to
+the Lizard.
+
+"That afternoon, late, there was commotion at Penmorgan. The servants
+brought us word how a bit of the cliff near Michael's Crag had
+foundered unawares, and struck two people who were walking below--a
+Mr. Trevennack, in lodgings at Gunwalloe, and his boy Michael. The
+father wasn't much hurt, they said; but the son--oh, Eustace! the son
+was dangerously wounded. ... I listened in terror.... He lived out the
+night, and died next morning."
+
+Tyrrel leaned back in agony as he spoke, and looked utterly crushed.
+It was an awful memory. Le Neve hardly knew what to say, the man's
+remorse was so poignant. After all those years the boy's thoughtless
+act seemed to weigh like a millstone round the grown man's neck.
+Eustace held his peace, and felt for him. By and by Tyrrel went on
+again, rocking himself to and fro on his rough seat as he spoke. "For
+fifteen years," he said, piteously, "I've borne this burden in my
+heart, and never told anybody. I tell it now first of all men to you.
+You're the only soul on earth who shares my secret."
+
+"Then your uncle didn't suspect it?" Eustace asked, all breathless.
+
+Walter Tyrrel shook his head. "On the contrary," he answered, "he said
+to me next day, 'How glad I am Walter, my boy, I called you away from
+the cliff that moment! It was quite providential. For if you'd
+loosened a stone, and then this thing had happened, we'd both of us
+have believed it was YOU that did it?' I was too frightened and
+appalled to tell him it WAS I. I thought they'd hang me. But from that
+day to this--Eustace, Eustace, believe me--I've never ceased to think
+of it! I've never forgiven myself!"
+
+"Yet it was an accident after all," Le Neve said, trying to comfort
+him.
+
+"No, no; not quite. I should have been warned in time. I should have
+obeyed my uncle. But what would you have? It's the luck of the
+Tyrrels."
+
+He spoke plaintively. Le Neve pulled a piece of grass and began biting
+it to hide his confusion. How near he might have come to doing the
+same thing himself. He thanked his stars it wasn't he. He thanked his
+stars he hadn't let that stone drop from the cliff that morning.
+
+Tyrrel was the first to break the solemn silence. "You can understand
+now," he said, with an impatient gesture, "why I hate Penmorgan. I've
+hated it ever since. I shall always hate it. It seems like a mute
+reminder of that awful day. In my uncle's time I never came near it.
+But as soon as it was my own I felt I must live upon it; and now, this
+terror of meeting Trevennack some day has made life one long burden to
+me. Sooner or later I felt sure I should run against him. They told me
+how he came down here from time to time to see where his son died, and
+I knew I should meet him. Now you can understand, too, why I hate the
+top of the cliffs so much, and WILL walk at the bottom. I had two good
+reasons for that. One I've told you already; the other was the fear of
+coming across Trevennack."
+
+Le Neve turned to him compassionately. "My dear fellow," he said, "you
+take it too much to heart. It was so long ago, and you were only a
+child. The... the accident might happen to any boy any day."
+
+"Yes, yes," Tyrrel answered, passionately. I know all that. I try, so,
+to console myself. But then I've wrecked that unhappy man's life for
+him."
+
+"He has his daughter still," Le Neve put in, vaguely. It was all he
+could think of to say by way of consolation; and to him, Cleer
+Trevennack would have made up for anything.
+
+A strange shade passed over Tyrrel's face. Eustace noted it
+instinctively. Something within seemed to move that Cornish heart.
+"Yes, he has his daughter still," the Squire of Penmorgan answered,
+with a vacant air. "But for me, that only makes things still worse
+than before.... How can she pardon my act? What can she ever think of
+me?"
+
+Le Neve turned sharply round upon him. There was some undercurrent in
+the tone in which he spoke that suggested far more than the mere words
+themselves might perhaps have conveyed to him. "What do you mean?" he
+asked, all eager, in a quick, low voice. "You've met Miss Trevennack
+before? You've seen her? You've spoken to her?"
+
+For a second Tyrrel hesitated; then, with a burst, he spoke out. "I
+may as well tell you all," he cried, "now I've told you so much. Yes,
+I've met her before, I've seen her, I've spoken to her."
+
+"But she didn't seem to recognize you," Le Neve objected, taken aback.
+
+Tyrrel shook his head despondently. "That's the worst of it all," he
+answered, with a very sad sigh. "She didn't even remember me.... She
+was so much to me; and to her--why, to HER, Eustace--I was less than
+nothing."
+
+"And you knew who she was when you saw her just now?" Le Neve asked,
+greatly puzzled.
+
+"Yes and no. Not exactly. I knew she was the person I'd seen and
+talked with, but I'd never heard her name, nor connected her in any
+way with Michael Trevennack. If I had, things would be different. It's
+a terrible Nemesis. I'll tell you how it happened. I may as well tell
+all. But the worst point of the whole to me in this crushing blow is
+to learn that that girl is Michael Trevennack's daughter."
+
+"Where and when did you meet her then?" Le Neve asked, growing
+curious.
+
+"Quite casually, once only, some time since, in a railway carnage. It
+must be two years ago now, and I was going from Bath to Bournemouth.
+She traveled with me in the same compartment as far as Temple Combe,
+and I talked all the way with her; I can remember every word of it....
+Eustace, it's foolish of me to acknowledge it, perhaps, but in those
+two short hours I fell madly in love with her. Her face has lived with
+me ever since; I've longed to meet her, But I was stupidly afraid to
+ask her name before she got out of the train; and I had no clue at all
+to her home or her relations. Yet, a thousand times since I've said to
+myself, 'If ever I marry I'll marry that girl who went in the carriage
+from Bath to Temple Combe with me.' I've cherished her memory from
+that day to this. You mayn't believe, I dare say, in love at first
+sight; but this I can swear to you was a genuine case of it."
+
+"I can believe in it very well," Le Neve answered, most truthfully,
+"now I've seen Miss Trevennack."
+
+Tyrrel looked at him, and smiled sadly. "Well, when I saw her again
+this morning," he went on, after a short pause, "my heart came up into
+my mouth. I said to myself, with a bound, 'It's she! It's she! At last
+I've found her.' And it dashed my best hopes to the ground at once to
+see she didn't even remember having met me."
+
+Le Neve looked at him shyly. "Walter," he said, after a short
+struggle, "I'm not surprised you fell in love with her. And shall I
+tell you why? I fell in love with her myself, too, the moment I saw
+her."
+
+Tyrrel turned to him without one word of reproach. "Well, we're no
+rivals now," he answered, generously. "Even if she would have me--even
+if she loved me well--how could I ask her to take--her brother's
+murderer?"
+
+Le Neve drew a long breath. He hadn't thought of that before. But had
+it been other wise, he couldn't help feeling that the master of
+Penmorgan would have been a formidable rival for a penniless engineer
+just home from South America.
+
+For already Eustace Le Neve was dimly aware, in his own sanguine mind,
+that he meant to woo and win that beautiful Cleer Trevennack.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+A STRANGE DELUSION.
+
+
+Trevennack and his wife sat alone that night in their bare rooms at
+Gunwalloe. Cleer had gone out to see some girls of her acquaintance
+who were lodging close by in a fisherman's house; and the husband and
+wife were left for a few hours by themselves together.
+
+"Michael," Mrs. Trevennack began, as soon as they were alone, rising
+up from her chair and coming over toward him tenderly, "I was horribly
+afraid you were going to break out before those two young men on the
+cliff to-day. I saw you were just on the very brink of it. But you
+resisted bravely. Thank you so much for that. You're a dear good
+fellow. I was so pleased with you and so proud of you."
+
+"Break out about our poor boy?" Trevennack asked, with a dreamy air,
+passing his bronzed hand wearily across his high white forehead.
+
+His wife seated herself sideways upon the arm of his chair, and bent
+over him as he sat, with wifely confidence. "No, no, dear," she said,
+taking his hand in hers and soothing it with her soft palm. "About--
+YOU know--well, of course, that other thing."
+
+At the mere hint, Trevennack leaned back and drew himself up proudly
+to his full height, like a soldier. He looked majestic as he sat
+there--every inch a St. Michael. "Well, it's hard to keep such a
+secret," he answered, laying his free hand on his breast, "hard to
+keep such a secret; and I own, when they were talking about it, I
+longed to tell them. But for Cleer's sake I refrained, Lucy. For
+Cleer's sake I always refrain. You're quite right about that. I know,
+of course, for Cleer's sake I must keep it locked up in my own heart
+forever."
+
+The silver-haired lady bent over him again, both caressingly and
+proudly. "Michael, dear Michael," she said, with a soft thrill in her
+voice, "I love you and honor you for it. I can FEEL what it costs you.
+My darling, I know how hard you have to fight against it. I could see
+you fighting against it to-day; and I was proud of the way you
+struggled with it, single-handed, till you gained the victory."
+
+Trevennack drew himself up still more haughtily than before. "And who
+should struggle against the devil," he said, "single-handed as you
+say, and gain the victory at last, if not I, myself, Lucy?"
+
+He said it like some great one. His wife soothed his hand again and
+repressed a sigh. She was a great-hearted lady, that brave wife and
+mother, who bore her own trouble without a word spoken to anyone; but
+she must sigh, at least, sometimes; it was such a relief to her pent-
+up feelings. "Who indeed?" she said, acquiescent. "Who indeed, if not
+you? And I love you best when you conquer so, Michael."
+
+Trevennack looked down upon her with a strange tender look on his
+face, in which gentleness and condescension were curiously mingled.
+"Yes," he answered, musing; "for dear Cleer's sake I will always keep
+my peace about it. I'll say not a word. I'll never tell anybody. And
+yet it's hard to keep it in; very hard, indeed. I have to bind myself
+round, as it were, with bonds of iron. The secret will almost out of
+itself at times. As this morning, for example, when that young fellow
+wanted to know why St. Michael always clung to such airy pinnacles.
+How jauntily he talked about it, as if the reason for the selection
+were a matter of no moment! How little he seemed to think of the
+Prince of the Archangels!"
+
+"But for Cleer's sake, darling, you kept it in," Mrs. Trevennack said,
+coaxingly; "and for Cleer's sake you'll keep it in still--I know you
+will; now won't you?"
+
+Trevennack looked the picture of embodied self-restraint. His back was
+rigid. "For Cleer's sake I'll keep it in," he said, firmly. "I know
+how important it is for her. Never in this world have I breathed a
+word of it to any living soul but you; and never in this world I will.
+The rest wouldn't understand. They'd say it was madness."
+
+"They would," his wife assented very gravely and earnestly. "And that
+would be so bad for Cleer's future prospects. People would think you
+were out of your mind; and you know how chary young men are nowadays
+of marrying a girl when they believe or even suspect there's insanity
+in the family. You can talk of it as much and as often as you like to
+ME, dear Michael. I think that does you good. It acts as a safety-
+valve. It keeps you from bottling your secret up in your own heart too
+long, and brooding over it, and worrying yourself. I like you to talk
+to ME of it whenever you feel inclined. But for heaven's sake,
+darling, to nobody else. Not a hint of it for worlds. The consequences
+might be terrible."
+
+Trevennack rose and stood at his full height, with his heels on the
+edge of the low cottage fender. "You can trust me, Lucy," he said, in
+a very soft tone, with grave and conscious dignity. "You can trust me
+to hold my tongue. I know how much depends upon it."
+
+The beautiful lady with the silvery hair sat and gazed on him
+admiringly. She knew she could trust him; she knew he would keep it
+in. But she knew at the same time how desperate a struggle the effort
+cost him; and visionary though he was, she loved and admired him for
+it.
+
+There was an eloquent silence. Then, after a while, Trevennack spoke
+again, more tenderly and regretfully. "That man did it!" he said, with
+slow emphasis. "I saw by his face at once he did it. He killed our
+poor boy. I could read it in his look. I'm sure it was he. And
+besides, I have news of it, certain news--from elsewhere," and he
+looked up significantly.
+
+"Michael!" Mrs. Trevennack said, drawing close to him with an
+appealing gesture, and gazing hard into his eyes; "it's a long time
+since. He was a boy at the time. He did it carelessly, no doubt; but
+not guiltily, culpably. For Cleer's sake, there, too--oh, forgive him,
+forgive him!" She clasped her hands tight; she looked up at him
+tearfully.
+
+"It was the devil's work," her husband answered, with a faint frown on
+his high forehead, "and my task in life, Lucy, is to fight down the
+devil."
+
+"Fight him down in your own heart, then, dear," Mrs. Trevennack said,
+gently. "Remember, we all may fall. Lucifer did--and he was once an
+archangel. Fight him down in your own heart when he suggests hateful
+thoughts to you. For I know what you felt when it came over you
+instinctively that that young man had done it. You wanted to fly
+straight at his throat, dear Michael--you wanted to fly at his throat,
+and fling him over the precipice."
+
+"I did," Trevennack answered, making no pretense of denial. "But for
+Cleer's sake I refrained. And for Cleer's sake, if you wish it, I'll
+try to forgive him."
+
+Mrs. Trevennack pressed his hand. Tears stood in her dim eyes. She,
+too, had a terrible battle to fight all the days of her life, and she
+fought it valiantly. "Michael," she said, with an effort, "try to
+avoid that young man. Try to avoid him, I implore you. Don't go near
+him in the future. If you see him too often, I'm afraid what the
+result for you both may be. You control yourself wonderfully, dear;
+you control yourself, I know; and I'm grateful to you for it. But if
+you see too much of him, I dread an outbreak. It may get the better of
+you. And then--think of Cleer! Avoid him! Avoid him!"
+
+For only that silver-headed woman of all people on earth knew the
+terrible truth, that Michael Trevennack's was a hopeless case of
+suppressed insanity. Well suppressed, indeed, and kept firmly in check
+for his daughter's sake, and by his brave wife's aid; but insanity,
+none the less, of the profoundest monomaniacal pattern, for all that.
+All day long, and every day, in his dealings with the outer world, he
+kept down his monomania. An able and trusted government servant, he
+never allowed it for one moment to interfere with his public duties.
+To his wife alone he let out what he thought the inmost and deepest
+secret of his real existence--that he was the Archangel Michael. To no
+one else did he ever allow a glimpse of the truth, as he thought it,
+to appear. He knew the world would call it madness; and he didn't wish
+the stigma of inherited insanity to cling to his Cleer.
+
+Not even Cleer herself for a moment suspected it.
+
+Trevennack was wise enough and cunning enough, as madmen often are, to
+keep his own counsel, for good and sufficient reason.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+PURE ACCIDENT.
+
+
+During the next week or so, as chance would have it, Cleer Trevennack
+fell in more than once on her walks with Eustace Le Neve and Walter
+Tyrrel. They had picked up acquaintance in an irregular way, to be
+sure; but Cleer hadn't happened to be close by when her father uttered
+those strange words to his wife, "It was he who did it; it was he who
+killed our boy"; nor did she notice particularly the marked abruptness
+of Tyrrel's departure on that unfortunate occasion. So she had no such
+objection to meeting the two young men as Trevennack himself not
+unnaturally displayed; she regarded his evident avoidance of Walter
+Tyrrel as merely one of "Papa's fancies." To Cleer, Papa's fancies
+were mysterious but very familiar entities; and Tyrrel and Le Neve
+were simply two interesting and intelligent young men--the squire of
+the village and a friend on a visit to him. Indeed, to be quite
+confidential, it was the visitor who occupied the larger share of
+Cleer's attention. He was so good-looking and so nice. His open face
+and pink and white complexion had attracted her fancy from the very
+first; and the more she saw of him the more she liked him.
+
+They met often--quite by accident, of course--on the moor and
+elsewhere. Tyrrel, for his part, shrank somewhat timidly from the
+sister of the boy, for his share in whose death he so bitterly
+reproached himself; yet he couldn't quite drag himself off whenever he
+found himself in Cleer's presence. She bound him as by a spell. He was
+profoundly attracted to her. There was something about the pretty
+Cornish girl so frank, so confiding, in one word, so magnetic, that
+when once he came near her he couldn't tear himself away as he felt he
+ought to. Yet he could see very well, none the less, it was for
+Eustace Le Neve that she watched most eagerly, with the natural
+interest of a budding girl in the man who takes her pure maiden fancy.
+Tyrrel allowed with a sigh that this was well indeed; for how could he
+ever dream, now he knew who she was, of marrying young Michael
+Trevennack's sister?
+
+One afternoon the two friends were returning from a long ramble across
+the open moor, when, near a little knoll of bare and weathered rock
+that rose from a circling belt of Cornish heath, they saw Cleer by
+herself, propped against the huge boulders, with her eyes fixed
+intently on a paper-covered novel. She looked up and smiled as they
+approached; and the young men, turning aside from their ill-marked
+path, came over and stood by her. They talked for awhile about the
+ordinary nothings of society small-talk, till by degrees Cleer chanced
+accidentally to bring the conversation round to something that had
+happened to her mother and herself a year or two since in Malta. Le
+Neve snatched at the word; for he was eager to learn all he could
+about the Trevennacks' movements, so deeply had Cleer already
+impressed her image on his susceptible nature.
+
+"And when do you go back there?" he asked, somewhat anxiously. "I
+suppose your father's leave is for a week or two only."
+
+"Oh, dear, no; we don't go back at all, thank heaven," Cleer answered,
+with a sunny smile. "I can't bear exile, Mr. Le Neve, and I never
+cared one bit for living in Malta. But this year, fortunately, papa's
+going to be transferred for a permanence to England; he's to have
+charge of a department that has something or other to do with
+provisioning the Channel Squadron; I don't quite understand what; but
+anyhow, he'll have to be running about between Portsmouth and
+Plymouth, and I don't know where else; and mamma and I will have to
+take a house for ourselves in London."
+
+Le Neve's face showed his pleasure. "That's well," he answered,
+briskly. "Then you won't be quite lost! I mean, there'll be some
+chance at least when you go away from here of one's seeing you
+sometimes."
+
+A bright red spot rose deep on Cleer's cheek through the dark olive-
+brown skin. "How kind of you to say so," she answered, looking down.
+"I'm sure mamma'll be very pleased, indeed, if you'll take the trouble
+to call." Then, to hide her confusion, she went on hastily, "And are
+YOU going to be in England, too? I thought I understood the other day
+from your friend you had something to do with a railway in South
+America."
+
+"Oh, that's all over now," Le Neve answered, with a wave, well pleased
+she should ask him about his whereabouts so cordially. "I was only
+employed in the construction of the line, you know; I've nothing at
+all to do with its maintenance and working, and now the track's laid,
+my work there's finished. But as to stopping in England,--ah--that's
+quite another thing. An engineer's, you know, is a roving life. He's
+here to-day and there to-morrow. I must go, I suppose, wherever work
+may take me. And there isn't much stirring in the markets just now in
+the way of engineering."
+
+"I hope you'll get something at home," Cleer said, simply, with a
+blush, and then blamed herself for saying it. She blushed again at the
+thought. She looked prettiest when she blushed. Walter Tyrrel, a
+little behind, stood and admired her all the while. But Eustace was
+flattered she should think of wanting him to remain in England.
+
+"Thank you," he said, somewhat timidly, for her bashfulness made him a
+trifle bashful in return. "I should like to very much--for more
+reasons than one;" and he looked at her meaningly. "I'm getting tired,
+in some ways, of life abroad. I'd much prefer to come back now and
+settle down in England."
+
+Cleer rose as he spoke. His frank admiration made her feel self-
+conscious. She thought this conversation had gone quite far enough for
+them both for the present. After all, she knew so little of him,
+though he was really very nice, and he looked at her so kindly! But
+perhaps it would be better to go and hunt up papa. "I think I ought to
+be moving now," she said, with a delicious little flush on her smooth,
+dark cheek. "My father'll be waiting for me." And she set her face
+across the moor in the opposite direction from the gate of Penmorgan.
+
+"We may come with you, mayn't we?" Eustace asked, with just an
+undertone of wistfulness.
+
+But Tyrrel darted a warning glance at him. He, at least, couldn't go
+to confront once more that poor dead boy's father.
+
+"I must hurry home," he said, feebly, consulting his watch with an
+abstracted air. "It's getting so late. But don't let me prevent YOU
+from accompanying Miss Trevennack."
+
+Cleer shrank away, a little alarmed. She wasn't quite sure whether it
+would be perfectly right for her to walk about alone on the moorland
+with only ONE young man, though she wouldn't have minded the two, for
+there is safety in numbers. "Oh, no," she said, half frightened, in
+that composite tone which is at once an entreaty and a positive
+command. "Don't mind me, Mr. Le Neve. I'm quite accustomed to
+strolling by myself round the cliff. I wouldn't make you miss your
+dinner for worlds. And besides, papa's not far off. He went away from
+me, rambling."
+
+The two young men, accepting their dismissal in the sense in which it
+was intended, saluted her deferentially, and turned away on their own
+road. But Cleer took the path to Michael's Crag, by the gully.
+
+From the foot of the crag you can't see the summit. Its own shoulders
+and the loose rocks of the foreground hide it. But Cleer was pretty
+certain her father must be there; for he was mostly to be found, when
+tide permitted it, perched up on the highest pinnacle of his namesake
+skerry, looking out upon the waters with a pre-occupied glance from
+that airy citadel. The waves in the narrow channel that separate the
+crag from the opposite mainland were running high and boisterous, but
+Cleer had a sure foot, and could leap, light as a gazelle, from rock
+to rock. Not for nothing was she Michael Trevennack's daughter, well
+trained from her babyhood to high and airy climbs. She chose an easy
+spot where it was possible to spring across by a series of boulders,
+arranged accidentally like stepping-stones; and in a minute she was
+standing on the main crag itself, a huge beetling mass of detached
+serpentine pushed boldly out as the advance-guard of the land into the
+assailing waves, and tapering at its top into a pyramidal steeple.
+
+The face of the crag was wet with spray in places; but Cleer didn't
+mind spray; she was accustomed to the sea in all its moods and
+tempers. She clambered up the steep side--a sheer wall of bare rock,
+lightly clad here and there with sparse drapery of green sapphire, or
+clumps of purple sea-aster, rooted firm in the crannies. Its front was
+yellow with great patches of lichen, and on the peaks, overhead, the
+gulls perched, chattering, or launched themselves in long curves upon
+the evening air. Cleer paused half way up to draw breath and admire
+the familiar scene. Often as she had gone there before, she could
+never help gazing with enchanted eyes on those brilliantly colored
+pinnacles, on that deep green sea, on those angry white breakers that
+dashed in ceaseless assault against the solid black wall of rock all
+round her. Then she started once more on her climb up the uncertain
+path, a mere foothold in the crannies, clinging close with her tiny
+hands as she went to every jutting corner or weather-worn rock, and
+every woody stem of weather-beaten sea plants.
+
+At last, panting and hot, she reached the sharp top, expecting to find
+Trevennack at his accustomed post on the very tallest pinnacle of the
+craggy little islet. But, to her immense surprise, her father wasn't
+there. His absence disquieted her. Cleer stood up on the fissured mass
+of orange-lichened rock that crowned the very summit, dispossessing
+the gulls who flapped round her as she mounted it; then, shading her
+eyes with her hand, she looked down in every direction to see if she
+could descry that missing figure in some nook of the crag. He was
+nowhere visible. "Father!" she cried aloud, at the top of her voice;
+"father! father! father!" But the only answer to her cry was the sound
+of the sea on the base, and the loud noise of the gulls, as they
+screamed and fluttered in angry surprise over their accustomed
+breeding-grounds.
+
+Alarmed and irresolute, Cleer sat down on the rock, and facing
+landwards for awhile, waved her handkerchief to and fro to attract, if
+possible, her father's attention. Then she scanned the opposite
+cliffs, beyond the gap or chasm that separated her from the mainland;
+but she could nowhere see him. He must have forgotten her and gone
+home to dinner alone, she fancied now, for it was nearly seven
+o'clock. Nothing remained but to climb down again and follow him. It
+was getting full late to be out by herself on the island. And tide was
+coming in, and the surf was getting strong--Atlantic swell from the
+gale at sea yesterday.
+
+Painfully and toilsomely she clambered down the steep path, making her
+foothold good, step by step, in the slippery crannies, rendered still
+more dangerous in places by the sticky spray and the brine that dashed
+over them from the seething channel. It was harder coming down, a good
+deal, than going up, and she was accustomed to her father's hand to
+guide her--to fit her light foot on the little ledges by the way, or
+to lift her down over the steepest bits with unfailing tenderness. So
+she found it rather difficult to descend by herself--both difficult
+and tedious. At last, however, after one or two nasty slips, and a
+false step or so on the way that ended in her grazing the tender skin
+on those white little fingers, Cleer reached the base of the crag, and
+stood face to face with the final problem of crossing the chasm that
+divided the islet from the opposite mainland.
+
+Then for the first time the truth was borne in upon her with a sudden
+rush that she couldn't get back--she was imprisoned on the island. She
+had crossed over at almost the last moment possible. The sea now quite
+covered two or three of her stepping-stones; fierce surf broke over
+the rest with each advancing billow, and rendered the task of jumping
+from one to the other impracticable even for a strong and sure-footed
+man, far more for a slight girl of Cleer's height and figure.
+
+In a moment the little prisoner took in the full horror of the
+situation. It was now about half tide, and seven o'clock in the
+evening. High water would therefore fall between ten and eleven; and
+it must be nearly two in the morning, she calculated hastily, before
+the sea had gone down enough to let her cross over in safety. Even
+then, in the dark, she dared hardly face those treacherous stepping-
+stones. She must stop there till day broke, if she meant to get ashore
+again without unnecessary hazard.
+
+Cleer was a Trevennack, and therefore brave; but the notion of
+stopping alone on that desolate island, thronged with gulls and
+cormorants, in the open air, through all those long dark hours till
+morning dawned, fairly frightened and appalled her. For a minute or
+two she crouched and cowered in silence. Then, overcome by terror, she
+climbed up once more to the first platform of rock, above the reach of
+the spray, and shouted with all her might, "Father! father! father!"
+
+But 'tis a lonely coast, that wild stretch by the Lizard. Not a soul
+was within earshot. Cleer sat there still, or stood on top of the
+crag, for many minutes together, shouting and waving her handkerchief
+for dear life itself; but not a soul heard her. She might have died
+there unnoticed; not a creature came near to help or deliver her. The
+gulls and the cormorants alone stared at her and wondered.
+
+Meanwhile, tide kept flowing with incredible rapidity. The gale in the
+Atlantic had raised an unwonted swell; and though there was now little
+wind, the breakers kept thundering in upon the firm, sandy beach with
+a deafening roar that drowned Cleer's poor voice completely. To add to
+her misfortunes, fog began to drift slowly with the breeze from
+seaward. It was getting dark too, and the rocks were damp. Overhead
+the gulls screamed loud as they flapped and circled above her.
+
+In an agony of despair, Cleer sat down all unnerved on the topmost
+crag. She began to cry to herself. It was all up now. She knew she
+must stop there alone till morning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+PERIL BY LAND.
+
+
+The Trevennacks dined in their lodgings at Gunwalloe at half-past
+seven. But in the rough open-air life of summer visitors on the
+Cornish coast, meals as a rule are very movable feasts; and Michael
+Trevennack wasn't particularly alarmed when he reached home that
+evening to find Cleer hadn't returned before him. They had missed one
+another, somehow, among the tangled paths that led down the gully; an
+easy enough thing to do between those big boulders and bramble-bushes;
+and it was a quarter to eight before Trevennack began to feel alarmed
+at Cleer's prolonged absence. By that time, however, he grew
+thoroughly frightened; and, reproaching himself bitterly for having
+let his daughter stray out of his sight in the first place, he hurried
+back, with his wife, at the top of his speed along the cliff path to
+the Penmorgan headland.
+
+It's half an hour's walk from Gunwalloe to Michael's Crag; and by the
+time Trevennack reached the mouth of the gully the sands were almost
+covered; so for the first time in fifteen years he was forced to take
+the path right under the cliff to the now comparatively distant
+island, round whose base a whole waste of angry sea surged sullenly.
+On the way they met a few workmen who, in answer to their inquiries,
+could give them no news, but who turned back to aid in the search for
+the missing young lady. When they got opposite Michael's Crag, a wide
+belt of black water, all encumbered with broken masses of sharp rock,
+some above and some below the surface, now separated them by fifty
+yards or more from the island. It was growing dark fast, for these
+were the closing days of August twilight; and dense fog had drifted
+in, half obliterating everything. They could barely descry the dim
+outline of the pyramidal rock in its lower half; its upper part was
+wholly shrouded in thick mist and drizzle.
+
+With a wild cry of despair, Trevennack raised his voice, and shouted
+aloud, "Cleer, Cleer! where are you?"
+
+That clarion voice, as of his namesake angel, though raised against
+the wind, could be heard above even the thud of the fierce breakers
+that pounded the sand. On the highest peak above, where she sat, cold
+and shivering, Cleer heard it, and jumped up. "Here! here! father!"
+she cried out, with a terrible effort, descending at the same time
+down the sheer face of the cliff as far as the dashing spray and
+fierce wild waves would allow her.
+
+No other ear caught the sound of that answering cry; but Trevennack's
+keen senses, preternaturally awakened by the gravity of the crisis,
+detected the faint ring of her girlish voice through the thunder of
+the surf. "She's there!" he cried, frantically, waving his hands above
+his head. "She's there! She's there! We must get across and save her."
+
+For a second Mrs. Trevennack doubted whether he was really right, or
+whether this was only one of poor Michael's hallucinations. But the
+next moment, with another cry, Cleer waved her handkerchief in return,
+and let it fall from her hand. It came, carried on the light breeze,
+and dropped in the water before their very eyes, half way across the
+channel.
+
+Frenzied at the sight, Trevennack tore off his coat, and would have
+plunged into the sea, then and there, to rescue her. But the workmen
+held him back. "No, no, sir; you mustn't," they said. "No harm can't
+come to the young lady if she stops there. She've only got to sit on
+them rocks there till morning, and the tide'll leave her high and dry
+right enough, as it always do. But nobody couldn't live in such a sea
+as that--not Tim o' Truro. The waves 'u'd dash him up afore he knowed
+where he was, and smash him all to pieces on the side o' the island."
+
+Trevennack tried to break from them, but the men held him hard. Their
+resistance angered him. He chafed under their restraint. How dare
+these rough fellows lay hands like that on the Prince of the
+Archangels and a superior officer in Her Majesty's Civil Service? But
+with the self-restraint that was habitual to him, he managed to
+refrain, even so, from disclosing his identity. He only struggled
+ineffectually, instead of blasting them with his hot breath, or
+clutching his strong arms round their bare throats and choking them.
+As he stood there and hesitated, half undecided how to act, of a
+sudden a sharp cry arose from behind. Trevennack turned and looked.
+Through the dark and the fog he could just dimly descry two men
+hurrying up, with ropes and life buoys. As they neared him, he started
+in unspeakable horror. For one of them, indeed, was only Eustace Le
+Neve; but the other--the other was that devil Walter Tyrrel, who, he
+felt sure in his own heart, had killed their dear Michael. And it was
+his task in life to fight and conquer devils.
+
+For a minute he longed to leap upon him and trample him under foot, as
+long ago he had trampled his old enemy, Satan. What was the fellow
+doing here now? What business had he with Cleer? Was he always to be
+in at the death of a Trevennack?
+
+But true to her trust, the silver-haired lady clutched his arm with
+tender watchfulness. "For Cleer's sake, dear Michael!" she whispered
+low in his ear; "for Cleer's sake--say nothing; don't speak to him,
+don't notice him!"
+
+The distracted father drew back a step, out of reach of the spray.
+"But Lucy," he cried low to her, "only think! only remember! If I
+cared to go on the cliff and just spread my wings, I could fly across
+and save her--so instantly, so easily!"
+
+His wife held his hand hard. That touch always soothed him. "If you
+did, Michael," she said gently, with her feminine tact, "they'd all
+declare you were mad, and had no wings to fly with. And Cleer's in no
+immediate danger just now, I feel sure. Don't try, there's a dear man.
+That's right! Oh, thank you."
+
+Reassured by her calm confidence, Trevennack fell back yet another
+step on the sands, and watched the men aloof. Walter Tyrrel turned to
+him. His heart was in his mouth. He spoke in short, sharp sentences.
+"The coastguard's wife told us," he said. "We've come down to get her
+off. I've sent word direct to the Lizard lifeboat. But I'm afraid it
+won't come. They daren't venture out. Sea runs too high, and these
+rocks are too dangerous."
+
+As he spoke, he tore off his coat, tied a rope round his waist, flung
+his boots on the sand, and girded himself rapidly with an inflated
+life-buoy. Then, before the men could seize him or prevent the rash
+attempt, he had dashed into the great waves that curled and thundered
+on the beach, and was struggling hard with the sea in a life and death
+contest. Eustace Le Neve held the rope, and tried to aid him in his
+endeavors. He had meant to plunge in himself, but Walter Tyrrel was
+beforehand with him. He was no match in a race against time for the
+fiery and impetuous Cornish temperament. It wasn't long, however,
+before the breakers proved themselves more than equal foes for Walter
+Tyrrel. In another minute he was pounded and pummeled on the unseen
+rocks under water by the great curling billows. They seized him
+resistlessly on their crests, tumbled him over like a child, and
+dashed him, bruised and bleeding, one limp bundle of flesh, against
+the jagged and pointed summits of the submerged boulders.
+
+With all his might, Eustace Le Neve held on to the rope; then, in coat
+and boots as he stood, he plunged into the waves and lifted Walter
+Tyrrel in his strong arms landward. He was a bigger built and more
+powerful man than his host, and his huge limbs battled harder with the
+gigantic waves. But even so, in that swirling flood, it was touch and
+go with him. The breakers lifted him off his feet, tossed him to and
+fro in their trough, flung him down again forcibly against the sharp-
+edged rocks, and tried to float off his half unconscious burden. But
+Le Neve persevered in spite of them, scrambling and tottering as he
+went, over wet and slippery reefs, with Tyrrel still clasped in his
+arms, and pressed tight to his breast, till he landed him safe at last
+on the firm sand beside him.
+
+The squire was far too beaten and bruised by the rocks to make a
+second attempt against those resistless breakers. Indeed, Le Neve
+brought him ashore more dead than alive, bleeding from a dozen wounds
+on the face and hands, and with the breath almost failing in his
+battered body. They laid him down on the beach, while the fishermen
+crowded round him, admiring his pluck, though they deprecated his
+foolhardiness, for they "knowed the squire couldn't never live ag'in
+it." But Le Neve, still full of the reckless courage of youth, and
+health, and strength, and manhood, keenly alive now to the peril of
+Cleer's lonely situation, never heeded their forebodings. He dashed in
+once more, just as he stood, clothes and all, in the wild and
+desperate attempt to stem that fierce flood and swim across to the
+island.
+
+In such a sea as then raged, indeed, and among such broken rocks,
+swimming, in the strict sense, was utterly impossible. By some mere
+miracle of dashing about, however--here, battered against the sharp
+rocks; there, flung over them by the breakers; and yonder, again,
+sucked down, like a straw in an eddy, by the fierce strength of the
+undertow--Eustace found himself at last, half unconscious and half
+choked, carried round by the swirling scour that set through the
+channel to the south front of the island. Next instant he felt he was
+cast against the dead wall of rock like an india rubber ball. He
+rebounded into the trough. The sea caught him a second time, and flung
+him once more, helpless, against the dripping precipice. With what
+life was left in him, he clutched with both hands the bare serpentine
+edge. Good luck befriended him. The great wave had lifted him up on
+its towering crest to the level of vegetation, beyond the debatable
+zone. He clung to the hard root of woody sea-aster in the clefts. The
+waves dashed back in tumultuous little cataracts, and left him there
+hanging.
+
+Like a mountain goat, Eustace clambered up the side, on hands, knees,
+feet, elbows, glad to escape with his life from that irresistible
+turmoil. The treacherous herbs on the slope of the crag were kind to
+him. He scrambled ahead, like some mad, wild thing. He went onward,
+upward, cutting his hands at each stage, tearing the skin from his
+fingers. It was impossible; but he did it. Next minute he found
+himself high and dry on the island.
+
+His clothes were clinging wet, of course, and his limbs bruised and
+battered. But he was safe on the firm plateau of the rock at last; and
+he had rescued Cleer Trevennack!
+
+In the first joy and excitement of the moment he forgot altogether the
+cramping conventionalities of our every-day life; and, repeating the
+cry he had heard Michael Trevennack raise from the beach below, he
+shouted aloud, at the top of his voice, "Cleer! Cleer! Where are you?"
+
+"Here!" came an answering voice from the depths of the gloom overhead.
+And following the direction whence the sound seemed to come, Eustace
+Le Neve clambered up to her.
+
+As he seized her hand and wrung it, Cleer crying the while with
+delight and relief, it struck him all at once, for the very first
+time, he had done no good by coming, save to give her companionship.
+It would be hopeless to try carrying her through those intricate rock-
+channels and that implacable surf, whence he himself had emerged,
+alone and unburdened, only by a miracle. They two must stop alone
+there on the rock till morning.
+
+As for Cleer, too innocent and too much of a mere woman in her deadly
+peril to think of anything but the delightful sense of confidence in a
+strong man at her side to guard and protect her, she sat and held his
+hand still, in a perfect transport of gratitude. "Oh, how good of you
+to come!" she cried again and again, bending over it in her relief,
+and half tempted to kiss it. "How good of you to come across like that
+to save me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+SAFE AT LAST.
+
+
+The night was long. The night was dark. Slowly the fog closed them in.
+It grew rainier and more dismal. But on the summit of the crag Eustace
+Le Neve stood aloft, and waved his arms, and shouted. He lit a match
+and shaded it. The dull glare of it through the mist just faintly
+reached the eyes of the anxious watchers on the beach below. From a
+dozen lips there rose an answering shout. The pair on the crag half
+heard its last echoes. Eustace put his hands to his mouth and cried
+aloud once more, in stentorian tones, "All right. Cleer's here. We can
+hold out till morning."
+
+Trevennack alone heard the words. But he repeated them so instantly
+that his wife felt sure it was true hearing, not insane hallucination.
+The sea was gaining on them now. It had risen almost up to the face of
+the cliffs. Reluctantly they turned along the path by the gully, and
+mounting the precipice waited and watched till morning on the tor that
+overlooks Michael's Crag from the Penmorgan headland.
+
+Every now and again, through that livelong night, Trevennack whispered
+in his wife's ear, "If only I chose to spread my wings, and launch
+myself, I could fly across and carry her." And each time that brave
+woman, holding his hand in her own and smoothing it gently, answered
+in her soft voice, "But then the secret would be out, and Cleer's life
+would be spoiled, and they'd call you a madman. Wait till morning,
+dear Michael; do, do, wait till morning."
+
+And Trevennack, struggling hard with the mad impulse in his heart,
+replied with all his soul, "I will; I will; for Cleer's sake and
+yours, I'll try to keep it down. I'll not be mad. I'll be strong and
+restrain it."
+
+For he knew he was insane, in his inmost soul, almost as well as he
+knew his name was Michael the Archangel.
+
+On the island, meanwhile, Eustace Le Neve and Cleer Trevennack sat
+watching out the weary night, and longing for the dawn to make the way
+back possible. At least, Cleer did, for as to Eustace, in spite of
+rain and fog and cold and darkness, he was by no means insensible to
+the unwonted pleasure of so long a tete-a-tete, in such romantic
+circumstances, with the beautiful Cornish girl. To be sure the waves
+roared, and the drizzle dripped, and the seabirds flapped all round
+them. But many waters will not quench love. Cleer was by his side,
+holding his hand in hers in the dark for pure company's sake, because
+she was so frightened; and as the night wore on they talked at last of
+many things. They were prisoners there for five mortal hours or so,
+alone, together; and they might as well make the best of it by being
+sociable with one another.
+
+There could be no denying, however, that it was cold and damp and dark
+and uncomfortable. The rain came beating down upon them, as they sat
+there side by side on that exposed rock. The spray from the breakers
+blew in with the night wind; the light breeze struck chill on their
+wet clothes and faces. After awhile Eustace began a slow tour of
+inspection over the crag, seeking some cave or rock shelter, some
+projecting ledge of stone on the leeward side that might screen their
+backs at least from the driving showers. Cleer couldn't be left alone;
+she clung to his hand as he felt his way about the islet, with
+uncertain steps, through the gloom and fog. Once he steadied himself
+on a jutting piece of the rock as he supposed, when to his immense
+surprise--wh'r'r'r--it rose from under his hand, with a shrill cry of
+alarm, and fluttered wildly seaward. It was some sleeping gull, no
+doubt, disturbed unexpectedly in its accustomed resting-place. Eustace
+staggered and almost fell. Cleer supported him with her arm. He
+accepted her aid gratefully. They stumbled on in the dark once more,
+lighting now and again for a minute or two one of his six precious
+matches--he had no more in his case--and exploring as well as they
+might the whole broken surface of that fissured pinnacle. "I'm so glad
+you smoke, Mr. Le Neve," Cleer said, simply, as he lit one. "For if
+you didn't, you know, we'd have been left here all night in utter
+darkness."
+
+At last, in a nook formed by the weathered joints, Eustace found a
+rugged niche, somewhat dryer than the rest, and laid Cleer gently down
+in it, on a natural spring seat of tufted rock-plants. Then he settled
+down beside her, with what cheerfulness he could muster up, and taking
+off his wet coat, spread it on top across the cleft, like a tent roof,
+to shelter them. It was no time, indeed, to stand upon ceremony. Cleer
+recognized as much, and nestled close to his side, like a sensible
+girl as she was, so as to keep warm by mere company; while Eustace,
+still holding her hand, just to assure her of his presence, placed
+himself in such an attitude, leaning before her and above her, as to
+protect her as far as possible from the drizzling rainfall through the
+gap in front of them. There they sat till morning, talking gradually
+of many things, and growing more and more confidential, in spite of
+cold and wet, as they learnt more and more, with each passing hour, of
+each other's standpoint. There are some situations where you get to
+know people better in a few half-hours together than you could get to
+know them in months upon months of mere drawing-room acquaintance. And
+this was one of them. Before morning dawned, Eustace Le Neve and Cleer
+Trevennack felt just as if they had known one another quite well for
+years. They were old and trusted friends already. Old friends--and
+even something more than that. Though no word of love was spoken
+between them, each knew of what the other was thinking. Eustace felt
+Cleer loved him; Cleer felt Eustace loved her. And in spite of rain
+and cold and fog and darkness they were almost happy--before dawn came
+to interrupt their strange tete-a-tete on the islet.
+
+As soon as day broke Eustace looked out from their eyrie on the
+fissured peak, and down upon the troubled belt of water below. The sea
+was now ebbing, and the passage between the rock and the mainland
+though still full (for it was never dry even at spring-tide low water)
+was fairly passable by this time over the natural bridge of stepping-
+stones. He clambered down the side, giving his hand to Cleer from
+ledge to ledge as he went. The fog had lifted a little, and on the
+opposite headland they could just dimly descry the weary watchers
+looking eagerly out for them. Eustace put his hands to his mouth, and
+gave a loud halloo. The sound of the breakers was less deafening now;
+his voice carried to the mainland. Trevennack, who had sat under a
+tarpaulin through the livelong night, watching and waiting with
+anxious heart for the morning, raised an answering shout, and waved
+his hat in his hand frantically. St. Michael's Crag had not betrayed
+its trust. That was the motto of the Trevennacks--"Stand fast, St.
+Michael's!"--under the crest of the rocky islet, castled and mured,
+flamboyant. Eustace reached the bottom of the rock, and, wading in the
+water himself, or jumping into the deepest parts, helped Cleer across
+the stepping-stones. Meanwhile, the party on the cliff had hurried
+down by the gully path; and a minute later Cleer was in her mother's
+arms, while Trevennack held her hand, inarticulate with joy, and bent
+over her eagerly.
+
+"Oh, mother," Cleer cried, in her simple girlish naivete, "Mr. Le
+Neve's been so kind to me! I don't know how I should ever have got
+through the night without him. It was so good of him to come. He's
+been SUCH a help to me."
+
+The father and mother both looked into her eyes--a single searching
+glance--and understood perfectly. They grasped Le Neve's hand. Tears
+rolled down their cheeks. Not a word was spoken, but in a certain
+silent way all four understood one another.
+
+"Where's Tyrrel?" Eustace asked.
+
+And Mrs. Trevennack answered, "Carried home, severely hurt. He was
+bruised on the rocks. But we hope not dangerously. The doctor's been
+to see him, we hear, and finds no bones broken. Still, he's terribly
+battered about, in those fearful waves, and it must be weeks, they
+tell us, before he can quite recover."
+
+But Cleer, as was natural, thought more of the man who had struggled
+through and reached her than of the man who had failed in the attempt,
+though he suffered all the more for it. This is a world of the
+successful. In it, as in most other planets I have visited, people
+make a deal more fuss over the smallest success than over the noblest
+failure.
+
+It was no moment for delay. Eustace turned on his way at once, and ran
+up to Penmorgan. And the Trevennacks returned, very wet and cold, in
+the dim gray dawn to their rooms at Gunwalloe.
+
+As soon as they were alone--Cleer put safely to bed--Trevennack looked
+at his wife. "Lucy," he said, slowly, in a disappointed tone, "after
+this, of course, come what may, they must marry."
+
+"They must," his wife answered. "There's no other way left. And
+fortunately, dear, I could see from the very first, Cleer likes him,
+and he likes her."
+
+The father paused a moment. It wasn't quite the match he had hoped for
+a Trevennack of Trevennack. Then he added, very fervently, "Thank God
+it was HIM--not that other man, Tyrrel! Thank God, the first one fell
+in the water and was hurt. What should we ever have done--oh, what
+should we have done, Lucy, if she'd been cut off all night long on
+that lonely crag face to face with the man who murdered our dear boy
+Michael?"
+
+Mrs. Trevennack drew a long breath. Then she spoke earnestly once
+more. "Dear heart," she said, looking deep into his clear brown eyes,
+"now remember, more than ever, Cleer's future is at stake. For Cleer's
+sake, more than ever, keep a guard on yourself, Michael; watch word
+and deed, do nothing foolish."
+
+"You can trust me!" Trevennack answered, drawing himself up to his
+full height, and looking proudly before him. "Cleer's future is at
+stake. Cleer has a lover now. Till Cleer is married, I'll give you my
+sacred promise no living soul shall ever know in any way she's an
+archangel's daughter."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+MEDICAL OPINION.
+
+
+From that day forth, by some unspoken compact, it was "Eustace" and
+"Cleer," wherever they met, between them. Le Neve began it, by coming
+round in the afternoon of that self-same day, as soon as he'd slept
+off the first effects of his fatigue and chill, to inquire of Mrs.
+Trevennack "how Cleer was getting on" after her night's exposure. And
+Mrs. Trevennack accepted the frank usurpation in very good part, as
+indeed was no wonder, for Cleer had wanted to know half an hour before
+whether "Eustace" had yet been round to ask after her. The form of
+speech told all. There was no formal engagement, and none of the party
+knew exactly how or when they began to take it for granted; but from
+that evening on Michael's Crag it was a tacitly accepted fact between
+Le Neve and the Trevennacks that Eustace was to marry Cleer as soon as
+he could get a permanent appointment anywhere.
+
+Engineering, however, is an overstocked profession. In that particular
+it closely resembles most other callings.
+
+The holidays passed away, and Walter Tyrrel recovered, and the
+Trevennacks returned to town for the head of the house to take up his
+new position in the Admiralty service; but Eustace Le Neve heard of no
+opening anywhere for an energetic young man with South American
+experience. Those three years he had passed out of England, indeed,
+had made him lose touch with other members of his craft. People
+shrugged their shoulders when they heard of him, and opined, with a
+chilly smile, he was the sort of young man who ought to go to the
+colonies. That's the easiest way of shelving all similar questions.
+The colonies are popularly regarded in England as the predestined
+dumping-ground for all the fools and failures of the mother-country.
+So Eustace settled down in lodgings in London, not far from the
+Trevennacks, and spent more of his time, it must be confessed, in
+going round to see Cleer than in perfecting himself in the knowledge
+of his chosen art. Not that he failed to try every chance that lay
+open to him--he had far too much energy to sit idle in his chair and
+let the stream of promotion flow by unattempted; but chances were few
+and applicants were many, and month after month passed away to his
+chagrin without the clever young engineer finding an appointment
+anywhere. Meanwhile, his little nest-egg of South-American savings was
+rapidly disappearing; and though Tyrrel, who had influence with
+railway men, exerted himself to the utmost on his friend's behalf--
+partly for Cleer's sake, and partly for Eustace's own--Le Neve saw his
+balance growing daily smaller, and began to be seriously alarmed at
+last, not merely for his future prospects of employment and marriage,
+but even for his immediate chance of a modest livelihood.
+
+Nor was Mrs. Trevennack, for her part, entirely free from sundry
+qualms of conscience as to her husband's condition and the
+rightfulness of concealing it altogether from Cleer's accepted lover.
+Trevennack himself was so perfectly sane in every ordinary relation of
+life, so able a business head, so dignified and courtly an English
+gentleman, that Eustace never even for a moment suspected any
+undercurrent of madness in that sound practical intelligence. Indeed,
+no man could talk with more absolute common sense about his daughter's
+future, or the duties and functions of an Admiralty official, than
+Michael Trevennack. It was only to his wife in his most confidential
+moments that he ever admitted the truth as to his archangelic
+character; to all others whom he met he was simply a distinguished
+English civil servant of blameless life and very solid judgment. The
+heads of his department placed the most implicit trust in Trevennack's
+opinion; there was no man about the place who could decide a knotty
+point of detail off-hand like Michael Trevennack. What was his poor
+wife to do, then? Was it her place to warn Eustace that Cleer's father
+might at any moment unexpectedly develop symptoms of dangerous
+insanity? Was she bound thus to wreck her own daughter's happiness?
+Was she bound to speak out the very secret of her heart which she had
+spent her whole life in inducing Trevennack himself to bottle up with
+ceaseless care in his distracted bosom?
+
+And yet ... she saw the other point of view as well--alas, all too
+plainly. She was a martyr to conscience, like Walter Tyrrel himself;
+was it right of her, then, to tie Eustace for life to a girl who was
+really a madman's daughter? This hateful question was up before her
+often in the dead dark night, as she lay awake on her bed, tossing and
+turning feverishly; it tortured her in addition to her one lifelong
+trouble. For the silver-haired lady had borne the burden of that
+unknown sorrow locked up in her own bosom for fifteen years; and it
+had left on her face such a beauty of holiness as a great trouble
+often leaves indelibly stamped on women of the same brave, loving
+temperament.
+
+One day, about three months later, in their drawing-room at Bayswater,
+Eustace Le Neve happened to let drop a casual remark which cut poor
+Mrs. Trevennack to the quick, like a knife at her heart. He was
+talking of some friend of his who had lately got engaged. "It's a
+terrible thing," he said, seriously. "There's insanity in the family.
+I wouldn't marry into such a family as that--no, not if I loved a girl
+to distraction, Mrs. Trevennack. The father's in a mad-house, you
+know; and the girl's very nice now, but one never can tell when the
+tendency may break out. And then--just think! what an inheritance to
+hand on to one's innocent children!"
+
+Trevennack took no open notice of what he said. But Mrs. Trevennack
+winced, grew suddenly pale, and stammered out some conventional none-
+committing platitude. His words entered her very soul. They stung and
+galled her. That night she lay awake and thought more bitterly to
+herself about the matter than ever. Next morning early, as soon as
+Trevennack had set off to catch the fast train from Waterloo to
+Portsmouth direct (he was frequently down there on Admiralty
+business), she put on her cloak and bonnet, without a word to Cleer,
+and set out in a hansom all alone to Harley Street.
+
+The house to which she drove was serious-looking and professional--in
+point of fact, it was Dr. Yate-Westbury's, the well-known specialist
+on mental diseases. She sent up no card and gave no name. On the
+contrary, she kept her veil down--and it was a very thick one. But Dr.
+Yate-Westbury made no comment on this reticence; it was a familiar
+occurrence with him--people are often ashamed to have it known they
+consult a mad-doctor.
+
+"I want to ask you about my husband's case," Mrs. Trevennack began,
+trembling. And the great specialist, all attention, leaned forward and
+listened to her.
+
+Mrs. Trevennack summoned up courage, and started from the very
+beginning. She described how her husband, who was a government
+servant, had been walking below a cliff on the seashore with their
+only son, some fifteen years earlier, and how a shower of stones from
+the top had fallen on their heads and killed their poor boy, whose
+injuries were the more serious. She could mention it all now with
+comparatively little emotion; great sorrows since had half obliterated
+that first and greatest one. But she laid stress upon the point that
+her husband had been struck, too, and was very gravely hurt--so
+gravely, indeed, that it was weeks before he recovered physically.
+
+"On what part of the head?" Yate-Westbury asked, with quick medical
+insight.
+
+And Mrs. Trevennack answered, "Here," laying her small gloved hand on
+the center of the left temple.
+
+The great specialist nodded. "Go on," he said, quietly. "Fourth
+frontal convolution! And it was a month or two, I have no doubt,
+before you noticed any serious symptoms supervening?"
+
+"Exactly so," Mrs. Trevennack made answer, very much relieved. "It was
+all of a month or two. But from that day forth--from the very
+beginning, I mean--he had a natural horror of going BENEATH a cliff,
+and he liked to get as high up as he could, so as to be perfectly sure
+there was nobody at all anywhere above to hurt him." And then she went
+on to describe in short but graphic phrase how he loved to return to
+the place of his son's accident, and to stand for hours on lonely
+sites overlooking the spot, and especially on a crag which was
+dedicated to St. Michael.
+
+The specialist caught at what was coming with the quickness, she
+thought, of long experience. "Till he fancied himself the archangel?"
+he said, promptly and curiously.
+
+Mrs. Trevennack drew a deep breath of satisfaction and relief. "Yes,"
+she answered, flushing hot. "Till he fancied himself the archangel.
+There--there were extenuating circumstances, you see. His own name's
+Michael; and his family--well, his family have a special connection
+with St. Michael's Mount; their crest's a castled crag with 'Stand
+fast, St. Michael's!' and he knew he had to fight against this mad
+impulse of his own--which he felt was like a devil within him--for his
+daughter's sake; and he was always standing alone on these rocky high
+places, dedicated to St. Michael, till the fancy took full hold upon
+him; and now, though he knows in a sort of a way he's mad, he believes
+quite firmly he's St. Michael the Archangel."
+
+Yate-Westbury nodded once more. "Precisely the development I should
+expect to occur," he said, "after such an accident."
+
+Mrs. Trevennack almost bounded from her seat in her relief. "Then you
+attribute it to the accident first of all?" she asked, eagerly.
+
+"Not a doubt about it," the specialist answered. "The region you
+indicate is just the one where similar illusory ideas are apt to arise
+from external injuries. The bruise gave the cause, and circumstances
+the form. Besides, the case is normal--quite normal altogether. Does
+he have frequent outbreaks?"
+
+Mrs. Trevennack explained that he never had any. Except to herself,
+and that but seldom, he never alluded to the subject in any way.
+
+Yate-Westbury bit his lip. "He must have great self-control," he
+answered, less confidently. "In a case like that, I'm bound to admit,
+my prognosis--for the final result--would be most unfavorable. The
+longer he bottles it up the more terrible is the outburst likely to be
+when it arrives. You must expect that some day he will break out
+irrepressibly."
+
+Mrs. Trevennack bowed her head with the solemn placidity of despair.
+"I'm quite prepared for that," she said, quietly; "though I try hard
+to delay it, for a specific reason. That wasn't the question I came to
+consult you about to-day. I feel sure my poor husband's case is
+perfectly hopeless, as far as any possibility of cure is concerned;
+what I want to know is about another aspect of the case." She leaned
+forward appealingly. "Oh, doctor," she cried, clasping her hands, "I
+have a dear daughter at home--the one thing yet left me. She's engaged
+to be married to a young man whom she loves--a young man who loves
+her. Am I bound to tell him she's a madman's child? Is there any
+chance of its affecting her? Is the taint hereditary?"
+
+She spoke with deep earnestness. She rushed out with it without
+reserve. Yate-Westbury gazed at her compassionately. He was a kind-
+hearted man. "No; certainly not," he answered, with emphasis. "Not the
+very slightest reason in any way to fear it. The sanest man, coming
+from the very sanest and healthiest stock on earth, would almost
+certainly be subject to delusions under such circumstances. This is
+accident, not disease--circumstance, not temperament. The injury to
+the brain is the result of a special blow. Grief for the loss of his
+son, and brooding over the event, no doubt contributed to the
+particular shape the delusion has assumed. But the injury's the main
+thing. I don't doubt there's a clot of blood formed just here on the
+brain, obstructing its functions in part, and disturbing its due
+relations. In every other way, you say, he's a good man of business.
+The very apparent rationality of the delusion--the way it's been led
+up to by his habit of standing on cliffs, his name, his associations,
+his family, everything--is itself a good sign that the partial
+insanity is due to a local and purely accidental cause. It simulates
+reason as closely as possible. Dismiss the question altogether from
+your mind, as far as your daughter's future is concerned. Its no more
+likely to be inherited than a broken leg or an amputated arm is."
+
+Mrs. Trevennack burst into a flood of joyous tears. "Then all I have
+to do," she sobbed out, "is to keep him from an outbreak until after
+my daughter's married."
+
+Dr. Yate-Westbury nodded. "That's all you have to do," he answered,
+sympathetically. "And I'm sure Mrs. Trevennack---" he paused with a
+start and checked himself.
+
+"Why, how do you know my name?" the astonished mother cried, drawing
+back with a little shudder of half superstitious alarm at such
+surprising prescience.
+
+Dr. Yate-Westbury made a clean breast of it. "Well, to tell the
+truth," he said, "Mr. Trevennack himself called round here yesterday,
+in the afternoon, and stated the whole case to me from his own point
+of view, giving his name in full--as a man would naturally do--but
+never describing to me the nature of his delusion. He said it was too
+sacred a thing for him to so much as touch upon; that he knew he
+wasn't mad, but that the world would think him so; and he wanted to
+know, from something he'd heard said, whether madness caused by an
+injury of the sort would or would not be considered by medical men as
+inheritable. And I told him at once, as I've told you to-day, there was not
+the faintest danger of it. But I never made such a slip in my life before
+as blurting out the name. I could only have done it to you. Trust me,
+your secret is safe in my keeping. I have hundreds in my head." He
+took her hand in his own as he spoke. "Dear madam," he said, gently,"
+I understand; I feel for you."
+
+"Thank you," Mrs. Trevennack answered low, with tears standing in her
+eyes. "I'm--I'm so glad you've SEEN him. It makes your opinion so much
+more valuable to me. But you thought his delusion wholly due to the
+accident, then?"
+
+"Wholly due to the accident, dear lady. Yes, wholly, wholly due to it.
+You may go home quite relieved. Your doubts and fears are groundless.
+Miss Trevennack may marry with a clear conscience."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+A BOLD ATTEMPT.
+
+
+During the next ten or eleven months poor Mrs. Trevennack had but one
+abiding terror--that a sudden access of irrepressible insanity might
+attack her husband before Cleer and Eustace could manage to get
+married. Trevennack, however, with unvarying tenderness, did his best
+in every way to calm her fears. Though no word on the subject passed
+between them directly, he let her feel with singular tact that he
+meant to keep himself under proper control. Whenever a dangerous topic
+cropped up in conversation, he would look across at her
+affectionately, with a reassuring smile. "For Cleer's sake," he
+murmured often, if she was close by his side; "for Cleer's sake,
+dearest!" and his wife, mutely grateful, knew at once what he meant,
+and smiled approval sadly.
+
+Her heart was very full; her part was a hard one to play with fitting
+cheerfulness; but in his very madness itself she couldn't help loving,
+admiring, and respecting that strong, grave husband who fought so hard
+against his own profound convictions.
+
+Ten months passed away, however, and Eustace Le Neve didn't seem to
+get much nearer any permanent appointment than ever. He began to tire
+at last of applying unsuccessfully for every passing vacancy. Now and
+then he got odd jobs, to be sure; but odd jobs won't do for a man to
+marry upon; and serious work seemed always to elude him. Walter Tyrrel
+did his best, no doubt, to hunt up all the directors of all the
+companies he knew; but no posts fell vacant on any line they were
+connected with. It grieved Walter to the heart, for he had always had
+the sincerest friendship for Eustace Le Neve; and now that Eustace was
+going to marry Cleer Trevennack, Walter felt himself doubly bound in
+honor to assist him. It was HE who had ruined the Trevennacks' hopes
+in life by his unintentional injury to their only son; the least he
+could do in return, he thought, and felt, was to make things as easy
+as possible for their daughter and her intended husband.
+
+By July, however, things were looking so black for the engineer's
+prospects that Tyrrel made up his mind to run up to town and talk
+things over seriously with Eustace Le Neve himself in person. He hated
+going up there, for he hardly knew how he could see much of Eustace
+without running some risk of knocking up accidentally against Michael
+Trevennack; and there was nothing on earth that sensitive young squire
+dreaded so much as an unexpected meeting with the man he had so
+deeply, though no doubt so unintentionally and unwittingly, injured.
+But he went, all the same. He felt it was his duty. And duty to Walter
+Tyrrel spoke in an imperative mood which he dared not disobey, however
+much he might be minded to turn a deaf ear to it.
+
+Le Neve had little to suggest of any practical value. It wasn't his
+fault, Tyrrel knew; engineering was slack, and many good men were
+looking out for appointments. In these crowded days, it's a foolish
+mistake to suppose that energy, industry, ability, and integrity are
+necessarily successful. To insure success you must have influence,
+opportunity, and good luck as well, to back them. Without these, not
+even the invaluable quality of unscrupulousness itself is secure from
+failure.
+
+If only Walter Tyrrel could have got his friend to accept such terms,
+indeed, he would gladly, for Cleer's sake, have asked Le Neve to marry
+on an allowance of half the Penmorgan rent-roll. But in this
+commercial age, such quixotic arrangements are simply impossible. So
+Tyrrel set to work with fiery zeal to find out what openings were just
+then to be had; and first of all for that purpose he went to call on a
+parliamentary friend of his, Sir Edward Jones, the fat and good-
+natured chairman of the Great North Midland Railway. Tyrrel was a
+shareholder whose vote was worth considering, and he supported the
+Board with unwavering loyalty.
+
+Sir Edward was therefore all attention, and listened with sympathy to
+Tyrrel's glowing account of his friend's engineering energy and
+talent. When he'd finished his eulogy, however, the practical railway
+magnate crossed his fat hands and put in, with very common-sense
+dryness, "If he's so clever as all that, why doesn't he have a shot at
+this Wharfedale Viaduct?"
+
+Walter Tyrrel drew back a little surprised. The Wharfedale Viaduct was
+a question just then in everybody's mouth. But what a question! Why,
+it was one of the great engineering works of the age; and it was
+informally understood that the company were prepared to receive plans
+and designs from any competent person. There came the rub, though.
+Would Eustace have a chance in such a competition as that? Much as he
+believed in his old school-fellow, Tyrrel hesitated and reflected. "My
+friend's young, of course," he said, after a pause. "He's had very
+little experience--comparatively, I mean--to the greatness of the
+undertaking."
+
+Sir Edward pursed his fat lips. It's a trick with your railway kings.
+"Well, young men are often more inventive than old ones," he answered,
+slowly. "Youth has ideas; middle age has experience. In a matter like
+this, my own belief is, the ideas count for most. Yes, if I were you,
+Tyrrel, I'd ask your friend to consider it."
+
+"You would?" Walter cried, brightening up.
+
+"Aye, that I would," the great railway-man answered, still more
+confidently than before, rubbing his fat hands reflectively. "It's a
+capital opening. Erasmus Walker'll be in for it, of course; and
+Erasmus Walker'll get it. But don't you tell your fellow that. It'll
+only discourage him. You just send him down to Yorkshire to
+reconnoiter the ground; and if he's good for anything, when he's seen
+the spot he'll make a plan of his own, a great deal better than
+Walker's. Not that that'll matter, don't you know, as far as this
+viaduct goes. The company'll take Walker's, no matter how good any
+other fellow's may be, and how bad Walker's--because Walker has a
+great name, and because they think they can't go far wrong if they
+follow Walker. But still, if your friend's design is a good one, it'll
+attract attention--which is always something; and after they've
+accepted Walker's, and flaws begin to be found in it--as experts can
+always find flaws in anything, no matter how well planned--your friend
+can come forward and make a fuss in the papers (or what's better
+still, YOU can come forward and make it for him) to say these flaws
+were strikingly absent from HIS very superior and scientific
+conception. There'll be flaws in your friend's as well, of course, but
+they won't be the same ones, and nobody'll have the same interest in
+finding them out and exposing them. And that'll get your man talked
+about in the papers and the profession. It's better, anyhow, than
+wasting his time doing nothing in London here."
+
+"He shall do it!" Walter cried, all on fire. "I'll take care he shall
+do it. And Sir Edward, I tell you, I'd give five thousand pounds down
+if only he could get the job away from Walker."
+
+"Got a grudge against Walker, then?" Sir Edward cried quickly,
+puckering up his small eyes.
+
+"Oh, no," Tyrrel answered, smiling; that was not much in his line.
+"But I've got strong reasons of my own, on the other hand, for wishing
+to do a good turn to Le Neve in this business."
+
+And he went home, reflecting in his own soul on the way that many
+thousands would be as dross in the pan to him if only he could make
+Cleer Trevennack happy.
+
+But that very same evening Trevennack came home from the Admiralty in
+a most excited condition.
+
+"Lucy!" he cried to his wife, as soon as he was alone in the room with
+her, "who do you think I saw to-day--there, alive in the flesh,
+standing smiling on the steps of Sir Edward Jones' house?--that brute
+Walter Tyrrel, who killed our poor boy for us!" "Hush! hush, Michael!"
+his wife cried in answer. "It's so long ago now, and he was such a boy
+at the time; and he repents it bitterly--I'm sure he repents it. You
+promised you'd try to forgive him. For Cleer's sake, dear heart, you
+must keep your promise."
+
+Trevennack knit his brows. "What does he mean, then, by dogging my
+steps?" he cried. "What does he mean by coming after me up to London
+like this? What does he mean by tempting me? I can't stand the sight
+of him. I won't be challenged, Lucy; I don't know whether it's the
+devil or not, but when I saw the fellow to-day I had hard work to keep
+my hands off him. I wanted to spring at his throat. I would have liked
+to throttle him!"
+
+The silver-haired lady drew still closer to the excited creature, and
+held his hands with a gentle pressure. "Michael," she said, earnestly,
+"this IS the devil. This is the greatest temptation of all. This is
+what I dread most for you. Remember, it's Satan himself that suggests
+such thoughts to you. Fight the devil WITHIN, dearest. Fight him
+within, like a man. That's the surest place, after all, to conquer
+him."
+
+Trevennack drew himself up proudly, and held his peace for a time.
+Then he went on in another tone: "I shall get leave," said he quietly,
+becoming pure human once more. "I shall get leave of absence. I can't
+stop in town while this creature's about. I'd HAVE to spring at him if
+I saw him again. I can't keep my hands off him. I'll fly from
+temptation. I must go down into the country."
+
+"Not to Cornwall!" Mrs. Trevennack cried, in deep distress; for she
+dreaded the effect of those harrowing associations for him.
+
+Trevennack shook his head gravely. "No, not to Cornwall," he answered.
+"I've another plan this time. I want to go to Dartmoor. It's lonely
+enough there. Not a soul to distract me. You know, Lucy, when one
+means to fight the devil, there's nothing for it like the wilderness;
+and Dartmoor's wilderness enough for me. I shall go to Ivybridge, for
+the tors and the beacons."
+
+Mrs. Trevennack assented gladly. If he wanted to fight the devil, it
+was best at any rate he should be out of reach of Walter Tyrrel while
+he did it. And it was a good thing to get him away, too, from St.
+Michael's Mount, and St. Michael's Crag, and St. Michael's Chair, and
+all the other reminders of his archangelic dignity in the Penzance
+neighborhood. Why, she remembered with a wan smile--the dead ghost of
+a smile rather--he couldn't even pass the Angel Inn at Helston without
+explaining to his companions that the parish church was dedicated to
+St. Michael, and that the swinging sign of the old coaching house once
+bore a picture of the winged saint himself in mortal conflict with his
+Satanic enemy. It was something, at any rate, to get Trevennack away
+from a district so replete with memories of his past greatness, to say
+nothing of the spot where their poor boy had died. But Mrs. Trevennack
+didn't know that one thing which led her husband to select Dartmoor
+this time for his summer holiday was the existence, on the wild hills
+a little behind Ivybridge, of a clatter-crowned peak, known to all the
+country-side as St. Michael's Tor, and crowned in earlier days by a
+medieval chapel. It was on this sacred site of his antique cult that
+Trevennack wished to fight the internal devil. And he would fight it
+with a will, on that he was resolved; fight and, as became his angelic
+reputation, conquer.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+BUSINESS IS BUSINESS.
+
+
+It reconciled Cleer to leaving London for awhile when she learnt that
+Eustace Le Neve was going north to Yorkshire, with Walter Tyrrel, to
+inspect the site of the proposed Wharfedale viaduct. Not that she ever
+mentioned his companion's name in her father's presence. Mrs.
+Trevennack had warned her many times over, with tears in her eyes, but
+without cause assigned, never to allude to Tyrrel's existence before
+her father's face; and Cleer, though she never for one moment
+suspected the need for such reticence, obeyed her mother's injunction
+with implicit honesty. So they parted two ways, Eustace and Tyrrel for
+the north, the Trevennacks for Devonshire. Cleer needed a change
+indeed; she'd spent the best part of a year in London. And for Cleer,
+that was a wild and delightful holiday. Though Eustace wasn't there,
+to be sure, he wrote hopefully from the north; he was maturing his
+ideas; he was evolving a plan; the sense of the magnitude of his stake
+in this attempt had given him an unwonted outburst of inspiration. As
+she wandered with her father among those boggy uplands, or stood on
+the rocky tors that so strangely crest the low flat hill-tops of the
+great Devonian moor. She felt a marvelous exhilaration stir her blood
+--the old Cornish freedom making itself felt through all the
+restrictions of our modern civilization. She was to the manner born,
+and she loved the Celtic West Country.
+
+But to Michael Trevennack it was life, health, vigor. He hated London.
+He hated officialdom. He hated the bonds of red tape that enveloped
+him. It's hard to know yourself an archangel--
+
+  "One of the seven who nearest to the throne
+   Stand ready at command, and are as eyes
+   That run through all the heavens, or down to the earth,"
+
+and yet to have to sit at a desk all day long, with a pen in your
+hand, in obedience to the orders of the First Lord of the Admiralty!
+It's hard to know you can
+
+  "Bear swift errands over moist and dry,
+   O'er sea and land,"
+
+as his laureate Milton puts it, and yet be doomed to keep still hour
+after hour in a stuffy office, or to haggle over details of pork and
+cheese in a malodorous victualing yard. Trevennack knew his "Paradise
+Lost" by heart--it was there, indeed, that he had formed his main
+ideas of the archangelic character; and he repeated the sonorous lines
+to himself, over and over again, in a ringing, loud voice, as he
+roamed the free moor or poised light on the craggy pinnacles. This was
+the world that he loved, these wild rolling uplands, these tall peaks
+of rock, these great granite boulders; he had loved them always, from
+the very beginning of things; had he not poised so of old, ages and
+ages gone by, on that famous crag
+
+  "Of alabaster, piled up to the clouds,
+   Conspicuous far, winding with one ascent
+   Accessible from earth, one entrance high;
+   The rest was craggy cliff that overhung
+   Still as it rose, impossible to climb."
+
+So he had poised in old days; so he poised himself now, with Cleer by
+his side, an angel confessed, on those high tors of Dartmoor.
+
+But amid all the undulations of that great stony ocean, one peak there
+was that delighted Trevennack's soul more than any of the rest--a bold
+russet crest, bursting suddenly through the heathery waste in abrupt
+ascent, and scarcely to be scaled, save on one difficult side, like
+its Miltonic prototype. Even Cleer, who accompanied her father
+everywhere on his rambles, clad in stout shoes and coarse blue serge
+gown--. for Dartmoor is by no means a place to be approached by those
+who, like Agag, "walk delicately"--even Cleer didn't know that this
+craggy peak, jagged and pointed like some Alpine or dolomitic
+aiguille, was known to all the neighboring shepherds around as St.
+Michael's Tor, from its now forgotten chapel. A few wild Moorland
+sheep grazed now and again on the short herbage at its base; but for
+the most part father and daughter found themselves alone amid that
+gorse-clad solitude. There Michael Trevennack would stand erect, with
+head bare and brows knit, in the full eye of the sun, for hour after
+hour at a time, fighting the devil within him. And when he came back
+at night, tired out with his long tramp across the moor and his
+internal struggle, he would murmur to his wife, "I've conquered him
+to-day. It was a hard, hard fight! But I conquered! I conquered him!"
+
+Up in the north, meanwhile, Eustace Le Neve worked away with a will at
+the idea for his viaduct. As he rightly wrote to Cleer, the need
+itself inspired him. Love is a great engineer, and Eustace learned
+fast from him. He was full of the fresh originality of youth; and the
+place took his fancy and impressed itself upon him. Gazing at it each
+day, there rose up slowly by degrees in his mind, like a dream, the
+picture of a great work on a new and startling principle--a
+modification of the cantilever to the necessities of the situation.
+Bit by bit he worked it out, and reduced his first floating conception
+to paper; then he explained it to Walter Tyrrel, who listened hard to
+his explanations, and tried his best to understand the force of the
+technical arguments. Enthusiasm is catching; and Le Neve was
+enthusiastic about his imaginary viaduct, till Walter Tyrrel in turn
+grew almost as enthusiastic as the designer himself over its beauty
+and utility. So charmed was he with the idea, indeed, that when Le
+Neve had at last committed it all to paper, he couldn't resist the
+temptation of asking leave to show it to Sir Edward Jones, whom he had
+already consulted as to Eustace's prospects.
+
+Eustace permitted him, somewhat reluctantly, to carry the design to
+the great railway king, and on the very first day of their return to
+London, in the beginning of October, Tyrrel took the papers round to
+Sir Edward's house in Onslow Gardens. The millionaire inspected it at
+first with cautious reserve. He was a good business man, and he hated
+enthusiasm--except in money matters. But gradually, as Walter Tyrrel
+explained to him the various points in favor of the design, Sir Edward
+thawed. He looked into it carefully. Then he went over the
+calculations of material and expense with a critical eye. At the end
+he leant back in his study chair, with one finger on the elevation and
+one eye on the figures, while he observed with slow emphasis: "This is
+a very good design. Why, man, its just about twenty times better than
+Erasmus Walker's."
+
+"Then you think it may succeed?" Tyrrel cried, with keen delight, as
+anxious for Cleer's sake as if the design were his own. "You think
+they may take it?"
+
+"Oh dear, no," Sir Edward answered, confidently, with a superior
+smile. "Not the slightest chance in the world of that. They'd never
+even dream of it. It's novel, you see, novel, while Walker's is
+conventional. And they'll take the conventional one. But its a first
+rate design for all that, I can tell you. I never saw a better one."
+
+"Well, but how do you know what Walker's is like?" Tyrrel asked,
+somewhat dismayed at the practical man's coolness.
+
+"Oh, he showed it me last night," Sir Edward answered, calmly. "A very
+decent design, on the familiar lines, but not fit to hold a candle to
+Le Neve's, of course; any journeyman could have drafted it. Still, it
+has Walker's name to it, don't you see--it has Walker's name to it;
+that means everything."
+
+"Is it cheaper than this would be," Tyrrel asked, for Le Neve had laid
+stress on the point that for economy of material, combined with
+strength of weight-resisting power, his own plan was remarkable.
+
+"Cheaper!" Sir Edward echoed. "Oh dear, no. By no means. Nothing could
+very well be cheaper than this. There's genius in its construction,
+don't you see? It's a new idea, intelligently applied to the
+peculiarities and difficulties of a very unusual position, taking
+advantage most ingeniously of the natural support afforded by the rock
+and the inequalities of the situation; I should say your friend is
+well within the mark in the estimate he gives." He drummed his finger
+and calculated mentally. "It'd save the company from a hundred and
+fifty to two hundred thousand pounds, I fancy," he said, ruminating,
+after a minute.
+
+"And do you mean to tell me," Tyrrel exclaimed, taken aback, "men of
+business like the directors of the Great North Midland will fling away
+two hundred thousand pounds of the shareholder's money as if it were
+dirt, by accepting Walker's plan when they might accept this one?"
+
+Sir Edward opened his palms, like a Frenchman, in front of him. It was
+a trick he had picked up on foreign bourses.
+
+"My dear fellow," he answered, compassionately, "directors are men,
+and to err is human. These great North Midland people are mere flesh
+and blood, and none of them very brilliant. They know Walker, and
+they'll be largely guided by Walker's advice in the matter. If he saw
+his way to make more out of contracting for carrying out somebody
+else's design, no doubt he'd do it. But failing that, he'll palm his
+own off upon them, and Stillingfleet'll accept it. You see with how
+little wisdom the railways of the world are governed! People think, if
+they get Walker to do a thing for them, they shift the responsibility
+upon Walker's shoulders. And knowing nothing themselves, they feel
+that's a great point; it saves them trouble and salves their
+consciences."
+
+A new idea seemed to cross Tyrrel's mind. He leant forward suddenly.
+
+"But as to safety," he asked, with some anxiety, "viewed as a matter
+of life and death, I mean? Which of these two viaducts is likely to
+last longest, to be freest from danger, to give rise in the end to
+least and fewest accidents?"
+
+"Why, your friend Le Neve's, of course," the millionaire answered,
+without a moment's hesitation.
+
+"You think so?"
+
+"I don't think so at all, my dear fellow, I know it. I'm sure of it.
+Look here," and he pulled out a design from a pigeon-hole in his desk;
+"this is in confidence, you understand. I oughtn't to show it to you;
+but I can trust your honor. Here's Walker's idea. It isn't an idea at
+all, in fact, it's just the ordinary old stone viaduct, with the
+ordinary dangers, and the ordinary iron girders--nothing in any way
+new or original. It's respectable mediocrity. On an affair like that,
+and with this awkward curve, too, just behind taking-off point, the
+liability to accident is considerably greater than in a construction
+like Le Neve's, where nothing's left to chance, and where every source
+of evil, such as land-springs, or freshets, or weakening, or
+concussion, is considered beforehand and successfully provided
+against. If a company only thought of the lives and limbs of its
+passengers--which it never does, of course--and had a head on its
+shoulders, which it seldom possesses, Le Neve's is undoubtedly the
+design it would adopt in the interests of security."
+
+Tyrrel drew a long breath. "And you know all this," he said, "and yet
+you won't say a word for Le Neve to the directors. A recommendation
+from YOU, you see--"
+
+Sir Edward shrugged his shoulders. "Impossible!" he answered, at once.
+"It would be a great breach of confidence. Remember, Walker showed me
+his design as a friend, and after having looked at it I couldn't go
+right off and say to Stillingfleet, 'I've seen Walker's plans, and
+also another fellow's, and I advise you, for my part, not to take my
+friend's.' It wouldn't be gentlemanly."
+
+Tyrrel paused and reflected. He saw the dilemma. And yet, what was the
+breach of confidence or of etiquette to the deadly peril to life and
+limb involved in choosing the worst design instead of the better one?
+It was a hard nut to crack. He could see no way out of it.
+
+"Besides," Sir Edward went on, musingly, "even if I told them they
+wouldn't believe me. Whatever Walker sends in they're sure to accept
+it. They've more confidence, I feel sure, in Walker than in anybody."
+
+A light broke in on Walter Tyrrel's mind.
+
+"Then the only way," he said, looking up, "would be ... to work upon
+Walker; induce him NOT to send in, if that can be managed."
+
+"But it can't be," Sir Edward answered, with brisk promptitude.
+"Walker's a money-grubbing chap. If he sees a chance of making a few
+thousands more anywhere, depend upon it he'll make 'em. He's a martyr
+to money, he is. He toils and slaves for L. s. d. {money} all his
+life. He has no other interests."
+
+"What can he want with it?" Tyrrel exclaimed. "He's a bachelor, isn't
+he, without wife or child? What can a man like that want to pile up
+filthy lucre for?"
+
+"Can't say, I'm sure," Sir Edward answered, good humoredly. "I have my
+quiver full of them myself, and every guinea I get I find three of my
+children are quarreling among themselves for ten and sixpence apiece
+of it. But what Walker can want with money heaven only knows. If _I_
+were a bachelor, now, and had an estate of my own in Cornwall, say, or
+Devonshire, I'm sure I don't know what I'd do with my income."
+
+Tyrrel rose abruptly. The chance words had put an idea into his head.
+
+"What's Walker's address?" he asked, in a very curt tone.
+
+Sir Edward gave it him.
+
+"You'll find him a tough nut, though," he added, with a smile, as he
+followed the enthusiastic young Cornishman to the door. "But I see
+you're in earnest. Good luck go with you!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+A HARD BARGAIN.
+
+
+Tyrrel took a hansom, and tore round in hot haste to Erasmus Walker's
+house. He sent in his card. The famous engineer was happily at home.
+Tyrrel, all on fire, found himself ushered into the great man's study.
+Mr. Walker sat writing at a luxurious desk in a most luxurious room--
+writing, as if for dear life, in breathless haste and eagerness. He
+simply paused for a second in the midst of a sentence, and looked up
+impatiently at the intruder on his desperate hurry. Then he motioned
+Tyrrel into a chair with an imperious wave of his ivory penholder.
+After that, he went on writing for some moments in solemn silence.
+Only the sound of his steel nib, traveling fast as it could go over
+the foolscap sheet, broke for several seconds the embarrassing
+stillness.
+
+Walter Tyrrel, therefore, had ample time meanwhile to consider his
+host and to take in his peculiarities before Walker had come to the
+end of his paragraph. The great engineer was a big-built, bull-necked,
+bullet-headed sort of person, with the self-satisfied air of monetary
+success, but with that ominous hardness about the corners of the mouth
+which constantly betrays the lucky man of business. His abundant long
+hair was iron-gray and wiry--Erasmus Walker had seldom time to waste
+in getting it cut--his eyes were small and shrewd; his hand was firm,
+and gripped the pen in its grasp like a ponderous crowbar. His
+writing, Tyrrel could see, was thick, black, and decisive. Altogether
+the kind of man on whose brow it was written in legible characters
+that it's dogged as does it. The delicately organized Cornishman felt
+an instinctive dislike at once for this great coarse mountain of a
+bullying Teuton. Yet for Cleer's sake he knew he mustn't rub him the
+wrong way. He must put up with Erasmus Walker and all his faults, and
+try to approach him by the most accessible side--if indeed any side
+were accessible at all, save the waistcoat pocket.
+
+At last, however, the engineer paused a moment in his headlong course
+through sentence after sentence, held his pen half irresolute over a
+new blank sheet, and turning round to Tyrrel, without one word of
+apology, said, in a quick, decisive voice, "This is business, I
+suppose, business? for if not, I've no time. I'm very pressed this
+morning. Very pressed, indeed. Very pressed and occupied."
+
+"Yes, it is business," Tyrrel answered, promptly, taking his cue with
+Celtic quickness. "Business that may be worth a good deal of money."
+Erasmus Walker pricked up his ears at that welcome sound, and let the
+pen drop quietly into the rack by his side. "Only I'm afraid I must
+ask for a quarter of an hour or so of your valuable time. You will not
+find it thrown away. You can name your own price for it."
+
+"My dear sir," the engineer replied, taking up his visitor's card
+again and gazing at it hard with a certain inquiring scrutiny, "if
+it's business, and business of an important character, of course I
+need hardly say I'm very glad to attend to you. There are so many
+people who come bothering me for nothing, don't you know--charitable
+appeals or what not--that I'm obliged to make a hard and fast rule
+about interviews. But if it's business you mean, I'm your man at once.
+I live for public works. Go ahead. I'm all attention."
+
+He wheeled round in his revolving chair, and faced Tyrrel in an
+attitude of sharp practical eagerness. His eye was all alert. It was
+clear, the man was keen on every passing chance of a stray hundred or
+two extra. His keenness disconcerted the conscientious and idealistic
+Cornishman. For a second or two Tyrrel debated how to open fire upon
+so unwonted an enemy. At last he began, stammering, "I've a friend who
+has made a design for the Wharfedale Viaduct."
+
+"Exactly," Erasmus Walker answered, pouncing down upon him like a
+hawk. "And I've made one too. And as mine's in the field, why, your
+friend's is waste paper."
+
+His sharpness half silenced Tyrrel. But with an effort the younger man
+went on, in spite of interruption. "That's precisely what I've come
+about," he said; "I know that already. If only you'll have patience
+and hear me out while I unfold my plan, you'll find what I have to
+propose is all to your own interest. I'm prepared to pay well for the
+arrangement I ask. Will you name your own price for half an hour's
+conversation, and then listen to me straight on and without further
+interruption?"
+
+Erasmus Walker glanced back at him with those keen ferret-like eyes of
+his. "Why, certainly," he answered; "I'll listen if you wish. We'll
+treat it as a consultation. My fees for consultation depend, of
+course, upon the nature of the subject on which advice is asked. But
+you'll pay well, you say, for the scheme you propose. Now, this is
+business. Therefore, we must be business-like. So first, what
+guarantee have I of your means and solvency? I don't deal with men of
+straw. Are you known in the City?" He jerked out his sentences as if
+words were extorted from him at so much per thousand.
+
+"I am not," Tyrrel answered, quietly; "but I gave you my card, and you
+can see from it who I am--Walter Tyrrel of Penmorgan Manor. I'm a
+landed proprietor, with a good estate in Cornwall. And I'm prepared to
+risk--well, a large part of my property in the business I propose to
+you, without any corresponding risk on your part. In plain words, I'm
+prepared to pay you money down, if you will accede to my wish, on a
+pure matter of sentiment."
+
+"Sentiment?" Mr. Walker replied, bringing his jaw down like a rat-
+trap, and gazing across at him, dubiously. "I don't deal in
+sentiment."
+
+"No; probably not," Tyrrel answered. "But I said sentiment, Mr.
+Walker, and I'm willing to pay for it. I know very well it's an
+article at a discount in the City. Still, to me, it means money's
+worth, and I'm prepared to give money down to a good tune to humor it.
+Let me explain the situation. I'll do so as briefly and as simply as I
+can, if only you'll listen to me. A friend of mine, as I said, one
+Eustace Le Neve, who has been constructing engineer of the Rosario and
+Santa Fe, in the Argentine Confederacy, has made a design for the
+Wharfedale Viaduct. It's a very good design, and a practical design;
+and Sir Edward Jones, who has seen it, entirely approves of it."
+
+"Jones is a good man," Mr. Walker murmured, nodding his head in
+acquiescence. "No dashed nonsense about Jones. Head screwed on the
+right way. Jones is a good man and knows what he's talking about."
+"Well, Jones says it's a good design," Tyrrel went on, breathing freer
+as he gauged his man more completely. "And the facts are just these:
+My friend's engaged to a young lady up in town here, in whom I take a
+deep interest--" Mr. Walker whistled low to himself, but didn't
+interrupt him--"a deep FRIENDLY interest," Tyrrel corrected, growing
+hot in the face at the man's evident insolent misconstruction of his
+motives; "and the long and the short of it is, his chance of marrying
+her depends very much upon whether or not he can get this design of
+his accepted by the directors."
+
+"He can't," Mr. Walker said, promptly, "unless he buys me out. That's
+pat and flat. He can't, for mine's in; and mine's sure to be taken."
+
+"So I understand," Tyrrel went on. "Your name, I'm told, carries
+everything before it. But what I want to suggest now is simply this--
+How much will you take, money down on the nail, this minute, to
+withdraw your own design from the informal competition?"
+
+Erasmus Walker gasped hard, drew a long breath, and stared at him.
+"How much will I take," he repeated, slowly; "how--much--will--I--
+take--to withdraw my design? Well, that IS remarkable!"
+
+"I mean it," Tyrrel repeated, with a very serious face. "This is to
+me, I will confess, a matter of life and death. I want to see my
+friend Le Neve in a good position in the world, such as his talents
+entitle him to. I don't care how much I spend in order to insure it.
+So what I want to know is just this and nothing else--how much will
+you take to withdraw from the competition?"
+
+Erasmus Walker laid his two hands on his fat knees, with his legs wide
+open, and stared long and hard at his incomprehensible visitor. So
+strange a request stunned for a moment even that sound business head.
+A minute or two he paused. Then, with a violent effort, he pulled
+himself together. "Come, come," he said, "Mr. Tyrrel; let's be
+practical and above-board. I don't want to rob you. I don't want to
+plunder you. I see you mean business. But how do you know, suppose
+even you buy me out, this young fellow's design has any chance of
+being accepted? What reason have you to think the Great North Midland
+people are likely to give such a job to an unknown beginner?"
+
+"Sir Edward Jones says it's admirable," Tyrrel ventured, dubiously.
+
+"Sir Edward Jones says it's admirable! Well, that's good, as far as it
+goes. Jones knows what he's talking about. Head's screwed on the right
+way. But has your friend any interest with the directors--that's the
+question? Have you reason to think, if he sends it in, and I hold back
+mine, his is the plan they'd be likely to pitch upon?"
+
+"I go upon its merits," Walter Tyrrel said, quietly.
+
+"The very worst thing on earth any man can ever possibly go upon," the
+man of business retorted, with cynical confidence. "If that's all
+you've got to say, my dear sir, it wouldn't be fair of me to make
+money terms with you. I won't discuss my price in the matter till I've
+some reason to believe this idea of yours is workable."
+
+"I have the designs here all ready," Walter Tyrrel replied, holding
+them out. "Plans, elevations, specifications, estimates, sections,
+figures, everything. Will you do me the favor to look at them? Then,
+perhaps, you'll be able to see whether or not the offer's genuine."
+
+The great engineer took the roll with a smile. He opened it hastily,
+in a most skeptical humor. Walter Tyrrel leant over him, and tried
+just at first to put in a word or two of explanation, such as Le Neve
+had made to himself; but an occasionally testy "Yes, yes; I see," was
+all the thanks he got for his pains and trouble. After a minute or two
+he found out it was better to let the engineer alone. That practiced
+eye picked out in a moment the strong and weak points of the whole
+conception. Gradually, however, as Walker went on, Walter Tyrrel could
+see he paid more and more attention to every tiny detail. His whole
+manner altered. The skeptical smile faded away, little by little, from
+those thick, sensuous lips, and a look of keen interest took its place
+by degrees on the man's eager features. "That's good!" he murmured
+more than once, as he examined more closely some section or
+enlargement. "That's good! very good! knows what he's about, this
+Eustace Le Neve man!" Now and again he turned back, to re-examine some
+special point. "Clever dodge!" he murmured, half to himself. "Clever
+dodge, undoubtedly. Make an engineer in time--no doubt at all about
+that--if only they'll give him his head, and not try to thwart him."
+
+Tyrrel waited till he'd finished. Then he leant forward once more.
+"Well, what do you think of it now?" he asked, flushing hot. "Is this
+business--or otherwise?"
+
+"Oh, business, business," the great engineer murmured, musically,
+regarding the papers before him with a certain professional affection.
+"It's a devilish clever plan--I won't deny that--and it's devilish
+well carried out in every detail."
+
+Tyrrel seized his opportunity. "And if you were to withdraw your own
+design," he asked, somewhat nervously, hardly knowing how best to
+frame his delicate question, "do you think ... the directors ... would
+be likely to accept this one?"
+
+Erasmus Walker hummed and hawed. He twirled his fat thumbs round one
+another in doubt. Then he answered oracularly, "They might, of course;
+and yet, again, they mightn't."
+
+"Upon whom would the decision rest?" Tyrrel inquired, looking hard at
+him.
+
+"Upon me, almost entirely," the great engineer responded at once, with
+cheerful frankness. "To say the plain truth, they've no minds of their
+own, these men. They'd ask my advice, and accept it implicitly."
+
+"So Jones told me," Tyrrel answered.
+
+"So Jones told you--quite right," the engineer echoed, with a
+complacent nod. "They've no minds of their own, you see. They'll do
+just as I tell them."
+
+"And you think this design of Le Neve's a good one, both mechanically
+and financially, and also exceptionally safe as regards the lives and
+limbs of passengers and employees?" Tyrrel inquired once more, with
+anxious particularity. His tender conscience made him afraid to do
+anything in the matter unless he was quite sure in his own mind he was
+doing no wrong in any way either to shareholders, competitors, or the
+public generally.
+
+"My dear sir," Mr. Walker replied, fingering the papers lovingly,
+"it's an admirable design--sound, cheap, and practical. It's as good
+as it can be. To tell you the truth, I admire it immensely."
+
+"Well, then," Tyrrel said at last, all his scruples removed--"let's
+come to business. I put it plainly. How much will you take to withdraw
+your own design, and to throw your weight into the scale in favor of
+my friend's here?"
+
+Erasmus Walker closed one eye, and rewarded his visitor fixedly out of
+the other for a minute or two in silence, as if taking his bearings.
+It was a trick he had acquired from frequent use of a theodolite. Then
+he answered at last, after a long, deep pause, "It's YOUR deal, Mr.
+Tyrrel. Make me an offer, won't you?"
+
+"Five thousand pounds?" tremblingly suggested Walter Tyrrel.
+
+Erasmus Walker opened his eye slowly, and never allowed his surprise
+to be visible on his face. Why, to him, a job like that, entailing
+loss of time in personal supervision, was hardly worth three. The
+plans were perfunctory, and as far as there was anything in them,
+could be used again elsewhere. He could employ his precious days
+meanwhile to better purpose in some more showy and profitable work
+than this half-hatched viaduct. But this was an upset price. "Not
+enough," he murmured, slowly, shaking his bullet head. "It's a fortune
+to the young man. You must make a better offer."
+
+Walter Tyrrel's lip quivered. "Six thousand," he said, promptly.
+
+The engineer judged from the promptitude of the reply that the Cornish
+landlord must still be well squeezable. He shook his head gain. "No,
+no; not enough," he answered short. "Not enough--by a long way."
+
+"Eight," Tyrrel suggested, drawing a deep breath of suspense. It was a
+big sum, indeed, for a modest estate like Penmorgan.
+
+The engineer shook his head once more. That rush up two thousand at
+once was a very good feature. The man who could mount by two thousand
+at a time might surely be squeezed to the even figure.
+
+"I'm afraid," Walter said, quivering, after a brief mental
+calculation--mortgage at four per cent--and agricultural depression
+running down the current value of land in the market--"I couldn't by
+any possibility go beyond ten thousand. But to save my friend--and to
+get the young lady married--I wouldn't mind going as far as that to
+meet you."
+
+The engineer saw at once, with true business instinct, his man had
+reached the end of his tether. He struck while the iron was hot and
+clinched the bargain. "Well,--as there's a lady in the case"--he said,
+gallantly,--"and to serve a young man of undoubted talent, who'll do
+honor to the profession, I don't mind closing with you. I'll take ten
+thousand, money down, to back out of it myself, and I'll say what I
+can--honestly--to the Midland Board in your friend's favor."
+
+"Very good," Tyrrel answered, drawing a deep breath of relief. "I ask
+no more than that. Say what you can honestly. The money shall be paid
+you before the end of a fortnight."
+
+"Only, mind," Mr. Walker added in an impressive afterthought, "I
+can't, of course, ENGAGE that the Great North Midland people will take
+my advice. You mustn't come down upon me for restitution and all that
+if your friend don't succeed and they take some other fellow. All I
+guarantee for certain is to withdraw my own plans--not to send in
+anything myself for the competition."
+
+"I fully understand," Tyrrel answered. "And I'm content to risk it.
+But, mind, if any other design is submitted of superior excellence to
+Le Neve's, I wouldn't wish you on any account to--to do or say
+anything that goes against your conscience."
+
+Erasmus Walker stared at him. "What--after paying ten thousand
+pounds?" he said, "to secure the job?"
+
+Tyrrel nodded a solemn nod. "Especially," he added, "if you think it
+safer to life and limb. I should never forgive myself if an accident
+were to occur on Eustace Le Neve's viaduct."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+ANGEL AND DEVIL.
+
+
+Tyrrel left Erasmus Walker's house that morning in a turmoil of
+mingled exultation and fear. At least he had done his best to atone
+for the awful results of his boyish act of criminal thoughtlessness.
+He had tried to make it possible for Cleer to marry Eustace, and
+thereby to render the Trevennacks happier in their sonless old age;
+and what was more satisfactory still, he had crippled himself in doing
+it. There was comfort even in that. Expiation, reparation! He wouldn't
+have cared for the sacrifice so much if it had cost him less. But it
+would cost him dear indeed. He must set to work at once now and raise
+the needful sum by mortgaging Penmorgan up to the hilt to do it.
+
+After all, of course, the directors might choose some other design
+than Eustace's. But he had done what he could. And he would hope for
+the best, at any rate. For Cleer's sake, if the worst came, he would
+have risked and lost much. While if Cleer's life was made happy, he
+would be happy in the thought of it.
+
+He hailed another hansom, and drove off, still on fire, to his
+lawyer's in Victoria Street. On the way, he had to go near Paddington
+Station. He didn't observe, as he did so, a four-wheel cab that passed
+him with luggage on top, from Ivybridge to London. It was the
+Trevennacks, just returned from their holiday on Dartmoor. But Michael
+Trevennack had seen him; and his brow grew suddenly dark. He pinched
+his nails into his palm at sight of that hateful creature, though not
+a sound escaped him; for Cleer was in the carriage, and the man was
+Eustace's friend. Trevennack accepted Eustace perforce, after that
+night on Michael's Crag; for he knew it was politic; and indeed, he
+liked the young man himself well enough--there was nothing against him
+after all, beyond his friendship with Tyrrel; but had it not been for
+the need for avoiding scandal after the adventure on the rock, he
+would never have allowed Cleer to speak one word to any friend or
+acquaintance of her brother's murderer.
+
+As it was, however, he never alluded to Tyrrel in any way before
+Cleer. He had learnt to hold his tongue. Madman though he was, he knew
+when to be silent.
+
+That evening at home, Cleer had a visit from Eustace, who came round
+to tell her how Tyrrel had been to see the great engineer, Erasmus
+Walker; and how it was all a mistake that Walker was going to send in
+plans for the Wharfedale Viaduct--nay, how the big man had approved of
+his own design, and promised to give it all the support in his power.
+For Tyrrel was really an awfully kind friend, who had pushed things
+for him like a brick, and deserved the very best they could both of
+them say about him.
+
+But of course Eustace hadn't the faintest idea himself by what manner
+of persuasion Walter Tyrrel had commended his friend's designs to
+Erasmus Walker. If he had, needless to say, he would never have
+accepted the strange arrangement.
+
+"And now, Cleer," Eustace cried, jubilant and radiant with the easy
+confidence of youth and love, "I do believe I shall carry the field at
+last, and spring at a bound into a first-rate position among engineers
+in England."
+
+"And then?" Cleer asked, nestling close to his side.
+
+"And then," Eustace went on, smiling tacitly at her native simplicity,
+"as it would mean permanent work in superintending and so forth, I see
+no reason why--we shouldn't get married immediately."
+
+They were alone in the breakfast room, where Mrs. Trevennack had left
+them. They were alone, like lovers. But in the drawing-room hard by,
+Trevennack himself was saying to his wife with a face of suppressed
+excitement, "I saw him again to-day, Lucy. I saw him again, that
+devil--in a hansom near Paddington. If he stops in town, I'm sure I
+don't know what I'm ever to do. I came back from Devonshire, having
+fought the devil hard, as I thought, and conquered him. I felt I'd got
+him under. I felt he was no match for me. But when I see that man's
+face the devil springs up at me again in full force, and grapples with
+me. Is he Satan himself? I believe he must be. For I feel I must rush
+at him and trample him under foot, as I trampled him long ago on the
+summit of Niphates."
+
+In a tremor of alarm Mrs. Trevennack held his hand. Oh, what would she
+ever do if the outbreak came ... before Cleer was married! She could
+see the constant strain of holding himself back was growing daily more
+and more difficult for her unhappy husband. Indeed, she couldn't bear
+it herself much longer. If Cleer didn't marry soon, Michael would
+break out openly--perhaps would try to murder that poor man Tyrrel--
+and then Eustace would be afraid, and all would be up with them.
+
+By and by, Eustace came in to tell them the good news. He said nothing
+about Tyrrel, at least by name, lest he should hurt Trevennack; he
+merely mentioned that a friend of his had seen Erasmus Walker that
+day, and that Walker had held out great hopes of success for him in
+this Wharfedale Viaduct business. Trevennack listened with a strange
+mixture of interest and contempt. He was glad the young man was likely
+to get on in his chosen profession--for Cleer's sake, if it would
+enable them to marry. But, oh, what a fuss it seemed to him to make
+about such a trifle as a mere bit of a valley that one could fly
+across in a second--to him who could become
+
+    ". . . to his proper shape returned
+     A seraph winged: six wings he wore, to shade
+     His lineaments divine; the pair that clad
+     Each shoulder broad, came mantling o'er his breast
+     With regal ornament; the middle pair
+     Girt like a starry zone his waist, and round
+     Skirted his loins and thighs, the third his feet
+     Shadowed from either heel with feathered mail."
+
+And then they talked to HIM about the difficulties of building a few
+hundred yards of iron bridge across a miserable valley! Why, was it
+not he and his kind of whom it was written that they came
+
+    "Gliding through the even
+     On a sunbeam, swift as a shooting star
+     In autumn thwarts the night?"
+
+A viaduct indeed! a paltry human viaduct! What need, with such as him,
+to talk of bridges or viaducts?
+
+As Eustace left that evening, Mrs. Trevennack followed him out, and
+beckoned him mysteriously into the dining-room at the side for a
+minute's conversation. The young man followed her, much wondering what
+this strange move could mean. Mrs. Trevennack fell back, half faint,
+into a chair, and gazed at him with a frightened look very rare on
+that brave face of hers. "Oh, Eustace," she said, hurriedly, "do you
+know what's happened? Mr. Tyrrel's in town. Michael saw him to-day. He
+was driving near Paddington. Now do you think... you could do anything
+to keep him out of Michael's way? I dread their meeting. I don't know
+whether you know it, but Michael has some grudge against him. For
+Cleer's sake and for yours, do keep them apart, I beg of you. If they
+meet, I can't answer for what harm may come of it."
+
+Eustace was taken aback at her unexpected words. Not even to Cleer had
+he ever hinted in any way at the strange disclosure Walter Tyrrel made
+to him that first day at Penmorgan. He hesitated how to answer her
+without betraying his friend's secret. At last he said, as calmly as
+he could, "I guessed, to tell you the truth, there was some cause of
+quarrel. I'll do my very best to keep Tyrrel out of the way, Mrs.
+Trevennack, as you wish it. But I'm afraid he won't be going down from
+town for some time to come, for he told me only to-day he had business
+at his lawyer's, in Victoria Street, Westminster, which might keep him
+here a fortnight. Indeed, I rather doubt whether he'll care to go down
+again until he knows for certain, one way or the other, about the
+Wharfedale Viaduct."
+
+Mrs. Trevennack sank back in her chair, very pale and wan. "Oh, what
+shall we do if they meet?" she cried, wringing her hands in despair.
+"What shall we do if they meet? This is more than I can endure.
+Eustace, Eustace, I shall break down. My burden's too heavy for me!"
+
+The young man leant over her like a son. "Mrs. Trevennack," he said,
+gently, smoothing her silvery white hair with sympathetic fingers, "I
+think I can keep them apart. I'll speak seriously to Tyrrel about it.
+He's a very good fellow, and he'll do anything I ask of him. I'm sure
+he'll try to avoid falling in with your husband. He's my kindest of
+friends; and he'd cut off his hand to serve me."
+
+One word of sympathy brought tears into Mrs. Trevennack's eyes. She
+looked up through them, and took the young man's hand in hers. "It was
+HE who spoke to Erasmus Walker, I suppose," she murmured, slowly.
+
+And Eustace, nodding assent, answered in a low voice, "It was he, Mrs.
+Trevennack. He's a dear good fellow."
+
+The orphaned mother clasped her hands. This was too, too much. And
+Michael, if the fit came upon him, would strangle that young man, who
+was doing his best after all for Cleer and Eustace!
+
+But that night in his bed Trevennack lay awake, chuckling grimly to
+himself in an access of mad triumph. He fancied he was fighting his
+familiar foe, on a tall Cornish peak, in archangelic fashion; and he
+had vanquished his enemy, and was trampling on him furiously. But the
+face of the fallen seraph was not the face of Michael Angelo's Satan,
+as he oftenest figured it--for Michael Angelo, his namesake, was one
+of Trevennack's very chiefest admirations;--it was the face of Walter
+Tyrrel, who killed his dear boy, writhing horribly in the dust, and
+crying for mercy beneath him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+AT ARM'S LENGTH.
+
+
+For three or four weeks Walter Tyrrel remained in town, awaiting the
+result of the Wharfedale Viaduct competition. With some difficulty he
+raised and paid over meanwhile to Erasmus Walker the ten thousand
+pounds of blackmail--for it was little else--agreed upon between them.
+The great engineer accepted the money with as little compunction as
+men who earn large incomes always display in taking payment for doing
+nothing. It is an enviable state of mind, unattainable by most of us
+who work hard for our living. He pocketed his check with a smile, as
+if it were quite in the nature of things that ten thousand pounds
+should drop upon him from the clouds without rhyme or reason. To
+Tyrrel, on the other hand, with his sensitive conscience, the man's
+greed and callousness seemed simply incomprehensible. He stood aghast
+at such sharp practice. But for Cleer's sake, and to ease his own
+soul, he paid it all over without a single murmur.
+
+And then the question came up in his mind, "Would it be effectual
+after all? Would Walker play him false? Would he throw the weight of
+his influence into somebody else's scale? Would the directors submit
+as tamely as he thought to his direction or dictation?" It would be
+hard on Tyrrel if, after his spending ten thousand pounds without
+security of any sort, Eustace were to miss the chance, and Cleer to go
+unmarried.
+
+At the end of a month, however, as Tyrrel sat one morning in his own
+room at the Metropole, which he mostly frequented, Eustace Le Neve
+rushed in, full of intense excitement. Tyrrel's heart rose in his
+mouth. He grew pale with agitation. The question had been decided one
+way or the other he saw.
+
+"Well; which is it?" he gasped out. "Hit or miss? Have you got it?"
+
+"Yes; I've got it!" Eustace answered, half beside himself with
+delight. "I've got it! I've got it! The chairman and Walker have just
+been round to call on me, and congratulate me on my success. Walker
+says my fortune's made. It's a magnificent design. And in any case
+it'll mean work for me for the next four years; after which I'll not
+want for occupation elsewhere. So now, of course, I can marry almost
+immediately."
+
+"Thank God!" Tyrrel murmured, falling back into his chair as he spoke,
+and turning deadly white.
+
+He was glad of it, oh, so glad; and yet, in his own heart, it would
+cost him many pangs to see Cleer really married in good earnest to
+Eustace.
+
+He had worked for it with all his might to be sure; he had worked for
+it and paid for it! and now he saw his wishes on the very eve of
+fulfillment, the natural man within him rose up in revolt against the
+complete success of his own unselfish action.
+
+As for Mrs. Trevennack, when she heard the good news, she almost
+fainted with joy. It might yet be in time. Cleer might be married now
+before poor Michael broke forth in that inevitable paroxysm.
+
+For inevitable she felt it was at last. As each day went by it grew
+harder and harder for the man to contain himself. Fighting desperately
+against it every hour, immersing himself as much as he could in the
+petty fiddling details of the office and the Victualing Yard so as to
+keep the fierce impulse under due control, Michael Trevennack yet
+found the mad mood within him more and more ungovernable with each
+week that went by. As he put it to his own mind he could feel his
+wings growing as if they must burst through the skin; he could feel it
+harder and ever harder as time went on to conceal the truth, to
+pretend he was a mere man, when he knew himself to be really the
+Prince of the Archangels, to busy himself about contracts for pork,
+and cheese, and biscuits, when he could wing his way n boldly over sea
+and land, or stand forth before the world in gorgeous gear, armed as
+of yore in the adamant and gold of his celestial panoply!
+
+So Michael Trevennack thought in his own seething soul. But that
+strong, brave woman, his wife, bearing her burden unaided, and
+watching him closely day and night with a keen eye of mingled love and
+fear, could see that the madness was gaining on him gradually. Oftener
+and oftener now did he lose himself in his imagined world; less and
+less did he tread the solid earth beneath us. Mrs. Trevennack had by
+this time but one anxious care left in life--to push on as fast as
+possible Cleer and Eustace's marriage.
+
+But difficulties intervened, as they always WILL intervene in this
+work-a-day world of ours. First of all there were formalities about
+the appointment itself. Then, even when all was arranged, Eustace
+found he had to go north in person, shortly after Christmas, and set
+to work with a will at putting his plan into practical shape for
+contractor and workmen. And as soon as he got there he saw at once he
+must stick at it for six months at least before he could venture to
+take a short holiday for the sake of getting married. Engineering is a
+very absorbing trade; it keeps a man day and night at the scene of his
+labors.
+
+Storm or flood at any moment may ruin everything. It would be prudent
+too, Eustace thought, to have laid by a little more for household
+expenses, before plunging into the unknown sea of matrimony; and
+though Mrs. Trevennack, flying full in the face of all matronly
+respect for foresight in young people, urged him constantly to marry,
+money or no money, and never mind about a honeymoon, Eustace stuck to
+his point and determined to take no decisive step till he saw how the
+work was turning out in Wharfedale. It was thus full August of the
+succeeding year before he could fix a date definitely; and then, to
+Cleer's great joy, he named a day at last, about the beginning of
+September.
+
+It was an immense relief to Mrs. Trevennack's mind when, after one or
+two alterations, she knew the third was finally fixed upon. She had
+good reasons of her own for wishing it to be early; for the twenty-
+ninth is Michaelmas Day, and it was always with difficulty that her
+husband could be prevented from breaking out before the eyes of the
+world on that namesake feast of St. Michael and All Angels. For, on
+that sacred day, when in every Church in Christendom his importance as
+the generalissimo of the angelic host was remembered and commemorated,
+it seemed hard indeed to the seraph in disguise that he must still
+guard his incognito, still go on as usual with his petty higgling over
+corned beef and biscuits and the price of jute sacking. "There was war
+in heaven," said the gospel for the day--that sonorous gospel Mrs.
+Trevennack so cordially dreaded--for her husband would always go to
+church at morning service, and hold himself more erect than was his
+wont, to hear it--"There was war in heaven; Michael and his angels
+fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and
+prevailed not." And should he, who could thus battle against all the
+powers of evil, be held in check any longer, as with a leash of straw,
+by the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty? No, no, he would stand
+forth in his true angelic shape, and show these martinets what form
+they had ignorantly taken for mere Michael Trevennack of the
+Victualing Department!
+
+One thing alone eased Mrs. Trevennack's mind through all those weary
+months of waiting and watching: Walter Tyrrel had long since gone back
+again to Penmorgan. Her husband had been free from that greatest of
+all temptations, to a mad paroxysm of rage--the sight of the man who,
+as he truly believed, had killed their Michael. And now, if only
+Tyrrel would keep away from town till Cleer was married and all was
+settled--Mrs. Trevennack sighed deep--she would almost count herself a
+happy woman!
+
+On the day of Cleer's wedding, however, Walter Tyrrel came to town. He
+came on purpose. He couldn't resist the temptation of seeing with his
+own eyes the final success of his general plan, even though it cost
+him the pang of watching the marriage of the one girl he ever truly
+loved to another man by his own deliberate contrivance. But he didn't
+forget Eustace Le Neve's earnest warning, that he should keep out of
+the way of Michael Trevennack. Even without Eustace, his own
+conscience would have urged that upon him. The constant burden of his
+remorse for that boyish crime weighed hard upon him every hour of
+every day that he lived. He didn't dare on such a morning to face the
+father of the boy he had unwittingly and half-innocently murdered.
+
+So, very early, as soon as the church was opened, he stole in
+unobserved, and took a place by himself in the farthest corner of the
+gallery. A pillar concealed him from view; for further security he
+held his handkerchief constantly in front of his face, or shielded
+himself behind one of the big free-seat prayer-books. Cleer came in
+looking beautiful in her wedding dress; Mrs. Trevennack's pathetic
+face glowed radiant for once in this final realization of her dearest
+wishes. A single second only, near the end of the ceremony, Tyrrel
+leaned forward incautiously, anxious to see Cleer at an important
+point of the proceedings. At the very same instant Trevennack raised
+his face. Their eyes met in a flash. Tyrrel drew back, horrorstruck,
+and penitent at his own intrusion at such a critical moment. But,
+strange to say, Trevennack took no overt notice. Had his wife only
+known she would have sunk in her seat in her agony of fear. But
+happily she didn't know. Trevennack went through the ceremony, all
+outwardly calm; he gave no sign of what he had seen, even to his wife
+herself. He buried it deep in his own heart. That made it all the more
+dangerous.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+ST. MICHAEL DOES BATTLE.
+
+
+The wedding breakfast went off pleasantly, without a hitch of any
+sort. Trevennack, always dignified and always a grand seigneur, rose
+to the occasion with his happiest spirit. The silver-haired wife,
+gazing up at him, felt proud of him as of old, and was for once quite
+at her ease. For all was over now, thank heaven, and dear Cleer was
+married!
+
+That same afternoon the bride and bridegroom started off for their
+honeymoon to the Tyrol and Italy. When Mrs. Trevennack was left alone
+with her husband it was with a thankful heart. She turned to him,
+flowing over in soul with joy. "Oh, Michael," she cried, melting, "I'm
+so happy, so happy, so happy."
+
+Trevennack stooped down and kissed her forehead tenderly. He had
+always been a good husband, and he loved her with all his heart.
+"That's well, Lucy," he answered. "Thank God, it's all over. For I
+can't hold out much longer. The strain's too much for me." He paused a
+moment, and looked at her. "Lucy," he said, once more, clasping his
+forehead with one hand, "I've fought against it hard. I'm fighting
+against it still. But at times it almost gets the better of me. Do you
+know who I saw in the church this morning, skulking behind a pillar?--
+that man Walter Tyrrel."
+
+Mrs. Trevennack gazed at him all aghast. This was surely a delusion, a
+fixed idea, an insane hallucination. "Oh, no, dear," she cried, prying
+deep into his eyes. "It couldn't be he, it couldn't. You must be
+mistaken, Michael. I'm sure he's not in London."
+
+"No more mistaken than I am this minute," Trevennack answered, rushing
+over to the window, and pointing with one hand eagerly. "See, see!
+there he is, Lucy--the man that killed our poor, dear Michael!"
+
+Mrs. Trevennack uttered a little cry, half sob, half wail, as she
+looked out of the window and, under the gas-lamps opposite, recognized
+through the mist the form of Walter Tyrrel.
+
+But Trevennack didn't rush out at him as she feared and believed he
+would. He only stood still in his place and glared at his enemy. "Not
+now," he said, slowly; "not now, on Cleer's wedding day. But some
+other time--more suitable. I hear it in my ears; I hear the voice
+still ringing: 'Go, Michael, of celestial armies prince!' I can't
+disobey. I shall go in due time. I shall fight the enemy."
+
+And he sank back in his chair, with his eyes staring wildly.
+
+For the next week or two, while Cleer wrote home happy letters from
+Paris, Innsbruck, Milan, Venice, Florence, poor Mrs. Trevennack was
+tortured inwardly with another terrible doubt; had Michael's state
+become so dangerous at last that he must be put under restraint as a
+measure of public security? For Walter Tyrrel's sake, ought she to
+make his condition known to the world at large--and spoil Cleer's
+honeymoon? She shrank from that final necessity with a deadly
+shrinking. Day after day she put the discovery off, and solaced her
+soul with the best intentions--as what true woman would not?
+
+But we know where good intentions go. On the morning of the twenty-
+ninth, which is Michaelmas Day, the poor mother rose in fear and
+trembling. Michael, to all outward appearance, was as sane as usual.
+He breakfasted and went down to the office, as was his wont.
+
+When he arrived there, however, he found letters from Falmouth
+awaiting him with bad news. His presence was needed at once. He must
+miss his projected visit to St. Michael's, Cornhill. He must go down
+to Cornwall.
+
+Hailing a cab at the door he hastened back to Paddington just in time
+for the Cornish express. This was surely a call. The words rang in his
+ears louder and clearer than ever, "Go, Michael, of celestial armies
+prince!" He would go and obey them. He would trample under foot this
+foul fiend that masqueraded in human shape as his dear boy's murderer.
+He would wield once more that huge two-handed sword, brandished aloft,
+wide-wasting, in unearthly warfare. He would come out in his true
+shape before heaven and earth as the chief of the archangels.
+
+Stepping into a first-class compartment he found himself, unluckily
+for his present mood, alone. All the way down to Exeter the fit was on
+him. He stood up in the carriage, swaying his unseen blade, celestial
+temper fine, and rolling forth in a loud voice Miltonic verses of his
+old encounters in heaven with the powers of darkness.
+
+     "Now waved their fiery swords, and in the air
+      Made horrid circles; two broad suns their shields
+      Blazed opposite, while expectation stood
+      In horror."
+
+He mouthed out the lines in a perfect ecstasy of madness. It was
+delightful to be alone. He could give his soul full vent. He knew he
+was mad. He knew he was an archangel.
+
+And all the way down he repeated to himself, many times over, that he
+would trample under foot that base fiend Walter Tyrrel. Satan has many
+disguises; squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve, he sat in
+Paradise; for
+
+    "...spirits as they please
+     Can limb themselves, and color, or size assume
+     As likes them best, condense or rare."
+
+If he himself, Michael, prince of celestial hosts, could fit his
+angelic majesty to the likeness of a man, Trevennack--could not Satan
+meet him on his own ground, and try to thwart him as of old in the
+likeness of a man, Walter Tyrrel--his dear boy's murderer.
+
+As far as Exeter this was his one train of thought. But from there to
+Plymouth new passengers got in. They turned the current. Trevennack
+changed his mind rapidly. Another mood came over him. His wife's words
+struck him vaguely in some tenderer place. "Fight the devil WITHIN
+you, Michael. Fight him there, and conquer him." That surely was
+fitter far for an angelic nature. That foeman was worthier his
+celestial steel. "Turn homeward, angel, now, and melt with ruth!" Not
+his to do vengeance on the man Walter Tyrrel. Not his to play the
+divine part of vindicator. In his madness even Trevennack was
+magnanimous. Leave the creature to the torment of his own guilty soul.
+Do angels care for thrusts of such as he? Tantaene animis coelestibus
+irae?
+
+At Ivybridge station the train slowed, and then stopped. Trevennack,
+accustomed to the Cornish express, noted the stoppage with surprise.
+"We're not down to pull up here!" he said, quickly, to the guard.
+
+"No sir," the guard answered, touching his hat with marked respect,
+for he knew the Admiralty official well. "Signals are against us.
+Line's blocked as far as Plymouth."
+
+"I'll get out here, then," Trevennack said, in haste; and the guard
+opened the door. A new idea had rushed suddenly into the madman's
+head. This was St. Michael's Day--his own day; and there was St.
+Michael's Tor--his own tor--full in sight before him. He would go up
+there this very evening, and before the eyes of all the world, in his
+celestial armor, taking Lucy's advice, do battle with and quell this
+fierce devil within him.
+
+No sooner thought than done. Fiery hot within, he turned out of the
+gate, and as the shades of autumn evening began to fall, walked
+swiftly up the moor toward the tor and the uplands.
+
+As he walked his heart beat to a lilting rhythm within him. "Go,
+Michael, of celestial armies prince!--Go, Michael!--Go, Michael! Go,
+Michael, of celestial armies prince--Go, Michael!--Go, Michael!"
+
+The moor was draped in fog. It was a still, damp evening. Swirling
+clouds rose slowly up, and lifted at times and disclosed the peaty
+hollows, the high tors, the dusky heather. But Trevennack stumbled on,
+o'er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare, as chance
+might lead him, clambering ever toward his goal, now seen, now
+invisible--the great stack of wild rock that crowned the gray
+undulating moor to northward. Often he missed his way; often he
+floundered for awhile in deep ochreous bottoms, up to his knees in
+soft slush, but with some strange mad instinct he wandered on
+nevertheless, and slowly drew near the high point he was aiming at.
+
+By this time it was pitch dark. The sun had set and fog obscured the
+starlight. But Trevennack, all on fire, wandered madly forward and
+scaled the rocky tor by the well-known path, guided not by sight, but
+by pure instinctive groping. In his present exalted state, indeed, he
+had no need of eyes. What matters earthly darkness to angelic feet? He
+could pick his own way through the gloom, though all the fiends from
+hell in serried phalanx broke loose to thwart him. He would reach the
+top at last; reach the top; reach the top, and there fight that old
+serpent who lay in wait to destroy him. At last he gained the peak,
+and stood with feet firmly planted on the little rocky platform. Now,
+Satan, come on! Ha, traitor, come, if you dare! Your antagonist is
+ready for you!
+
+Cr'r'r'k! as he stood there, waiting, a terrible shock brought him to
+himself all at once with startling suddenness. Trevennack drew back
+aghast and appalled. Even in his mad exaltation this strange assault
+astonished him. He had expected a struggle, indeed; he had expected a
+conflict, but with a spiritual foe; to meet his adversary in so bodily
+a form as this, wholly startled and surprised him. For it was a fierce
+earthly shock he received upon his right leg as he mounted the rocky
+platform. Satan had been lying in wait for him then, expecting him,
+waylaying him, and in corporeal presence too. For this was a spear of
+good steel! This was a solid Thing that assaulted him as he rose--
+assaulted him with frantic rage and uncontrollable fury!
+
+For a moment Trevennack was stunned--the sharpness of the pain and the
+suddenness of the attack took both breath and sense away from him. He
+stood there one instant, irresolute, before he knew how to comport
+himself. But before he could make up his mind--cr'r'k, a second time--
+the Presence had assailed him again, fighting with deadly force, and
+in a white heat of frenzy. Trevennack had no leisure to think what
+this portent might mean. Man or fiend, it was a life-and-death
+struggle now between them. He stood face to face at last in mortal
+conflict with his materialized enemy. What form the Evil Thing had
+assumed to suit his present purpose Trevennack knew not, nor did he
+even care. Stung with pain and terror he rushed forward blindly upon
+his enraged assailant, and closed with him at once, tooth and nail, in
+a deadly grapple.
+
+A more terrible battle man and brute never fought. Trevennack had no
+sword, no celestial panoply. But he could wrestle like a Cornishman.
+He must trample his foe under foot, then, in this final struggle, by
+sheer force of strong thews and strained muscles alone. He fought the
+Creature as it stood, flinging his arms round it wildly. The Thing
+seemed to rear itself as if on cloven hoofs. Trevennack seized it
+round the waist, and grasping it hard in an iron grip, clung to it
+with all the wild energy of madness. Yield, Satan, yield! But still
+the Creature eluded him. Once more it drew back a pace--he felt its
+hot breath, he smelt its hateful smell--and prepared to rush again at
+him. Trevennack bent down to receive its attack, crouching. The
+Creature burst full tilt on him--it almost threw him over. Trevennack
+caught it in his horror and awe--caught it bodily by the horns--for
+horned it seemed to be, as well as cloven-footed--and by sheer force
+of arm held it off from him an elbow's length one minute. The Thing
+struggled and reared again. Yes, yes, it was Satan--he felt him all
+over now--a devil undisguised--but Satan rather in medieval than in
+Miltonic fashion. His skin was rough and hairy as a satyr's; his odor
+was foul; his feet were cleft; his horns sharp and terrible. He flung
+him from him horrified.
+
+Quick as lightning the demon rose again, and tilted fiercely at him
+once more. It was a death fight between those two for that rocky
+platform. Should Satan thus usurp St. Michael's Tor? Ten thousand
+times, no! Yield, yield! No surrender! Each knew the ground well, and
+even in the dark and in the mad heat of the conflict, each carefully
+avoided the steep edge of the precipice. But the fiend knew it best,
+apparently. He had been lying in a snug nook, under lee of a big rock,
+sharpening his sword on its side, before Trevennack came up there.
+Against this rock he took his stand, firm as a rock himself, and
+seemed to defy his enemy's arms to dislodge him from his position.
+
+Trevennack's hands and legs were streaming now with blood. His left
+arm was sorely wounded. His thumb hung useless. But with the strange
+energy of madness he continued the desperate conflict against his
+unseen foe. Never should Michael turn and yield to the deadly assaults
+of the Evil One! He rushed on blindly once more, and the Adversary
+stooped to oppose him. Again, a terrible shock, it almost broke both
+his knees; but by sheer strength of nerve he withstood it, still
+struggling. Then they closed in a final grapple. It was a tooth-and-
+nail conflict. They fought one another with every weapon they
+possessed; each hugged each in their fury; they tilted, and tore, and
+wrestled, and bit, and butted.
+
+Trevennack's coat was in ribbons, his arm was ripped and bleeding; but
+he grasped the Adversary still, he fought blindly to the end. Down,
+Satan, I defy thee!
+
+It was a long, fierce fight! At last, bit by bit, the Enemy began to
+yield. Trevennack had dashed him against the crag time after time like
+a log, till he too was torn and hurt and bleeding. His flesh was like
+pulp. He could endure the unequal fight no longer. He staggered and
+gave way. A great joy rose up tremulous in Trevennack's heart. Even
+without his celestial sword, then, he had vanquished his enemy. He
+seized the Creature round the middle, dragged it, a dead weight, in
+his weary arms, to the edge of the precipice, and dropped it, feebly
+resisting, on to the bare rock beneath him.
+
+Victory! Victory! Once more, a great victory!
+
+He stood on the brink of the tor, and poised himself, as if for
+flight, in his accustomed attitude. But he was faint from loss of
+blood, and his limbs shook under him.
+
+A light seemed to break before his blinded eyes. Victory! Victory! It
+was the light from heaven! He stared forward to welcome it. The brink
+of the precipice? What was THAT to such as he? He would spread his
+wings--for once--at last--thus! thus! and fly forward on full pinions
+to his expected triumph!
+
+He raised both arms above his head, and spread them out as if for
+flight. His knees trembled fearfully. His fingers quivered. Then he
+launched himself on the air and fell. His eyes closed half-way. He
+lost consciousness. He fainted. Before he had reached the bottom he
+was wholly insensible.
+
+Next day it was known before noon in London that a strange and
+inexplicable accident had befallen Mr. Michael Trevennack C.M.G., the
+well-known Admiralty official, on the moor near Ivybridge. Mr.
+Trevennack, it seemed, had started by the Cornish express for
+Falmouth, on official business; but the line being blocked between
+Ivybridge and Plymouth, he had changed his plans and set out to walk,
+as was conjectured, by a devious path across the moor to Tavistock.
+Deceased knew the neighborhood well, and was an enthusiastic admirer
+of its tors and uplands. But fog coming on, the unfortunate gentleman,
+it was believed, had lost his way, and tried to shelter himself for a
+time behind a tall peak of rock which he used frequently to visit
+during his summer holidays. There he was apparently attacked by a
+savage moorland ram--one of that wild breed of mountain sheep peculiar
+to Dartmoor, and famous for the strength and ferocity often displayed
+by the fathers of the flock. Mr. Trevennack was unarmed, and a
+terrible fight appeared to have taken place between these ill-matched
+antagonists on the summit of the rocks, full details of which, the
+Telegram said in its curt business-like way, were too ghastly for
+publication. After a long and exhausting struggle, however, the
+combatants must either have slipped on the wet surface and tumbled
+over the edge of the rocks together in a deadly grapple, or else, as
+seemed more probable from the positions in which the bodies were
+found, the unhappy gentleman had just succeeded in flinging his
+assailant over, and then, faint from loss of blood, had missed his
+footing and fallen beside his dead antagonist. At any rate, when the
+corpse was discovered life had been extinct for several hours; and it
+was the opinion of the medical authorities who conducted the post-
+mortem that death was due not so much to the injuries themselves as to
+asphyxiation in the act of falling.
+
+* * *
+
+The jury found it "Death from accidental circumstances." Cleer never
+knew more than that her father had met his end by walking over the
+edge of a cliff on Dartmoor.
+
+* * *
+
+But when the body came home for burial, Dr. Yate-Westbury looked in by
+Mrs. Trevennack's special request, and performed an informal and
+private examination of the brain and nervous system. At the close of
+the autopsy he came down to the drawing-room where the silver-haired
+lady sat pale and tearful, but courageous. "It is just as I thought,"
+he said; "a clot of blood, due to external injury, has pressed for
+years above the left frontal region, causing hallucinations and
+irregularities of a functional character only. You needn't have the
+slightest fear of its proving hereditary. It's as purely accidental as
+a sprain or a wound. Your daughter, Mrs. Le Neve, couldn't possibly
+suffer for it."
+
+And neither Cleer nor Le Neve nor anyone else ever shared that secret
+of Trevennack's delusions with his wife and the doctor.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Michael's Crag, by Grant Allen
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MICHAEL'S CRAG ***
+
+This file should be named mchcr10.txt or mchcr10.zip
+Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, mchcr11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, mchcr10a.txt
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our Web sites at:
+http://gutenberg.net or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03
+
+Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
+files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
+We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
+
+eBooks Year Month
+
+    1  1971 July
+   10  1991 January
+  100  1994 January
+ 1000  1997 August
+ 1500  1998 October
+ 2000  1999 December
+ 2500  2000 December
+ 3000  2001 November
+ 4000  2001 October/November
+ 6000  2002 December*
+ 9000  2003 November*
+10000  2004 January*
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
+Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
+Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
+Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
+Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
+Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Ave.
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information online at:
+
+http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
+when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
+Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
+used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
+they hardware or software or any other related product without
+express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*
+