Part 3

[30] Richard Cann, who died February 15, 1842. Compare Hawker’s head-note to the poem in “Cornish Ballads,” where it is called “The Dirge.”

[31] It may be said that the first editions of some of Hawker’s poems are on the grave-stones in Morwenstow churchyard. Other verses of this kind are those “On the Grave of a Child,” and some of the prose inscriptions bear traces of the same authorship.

THE FIRST CORNISH MOLE[32]

A MORALITY FROM THE ROCKY LAND

A lonely life for the dark and silent mole! Day is to her night. She glides along her narrow vaults, unconscious of the glad and glorious scenes of earth and air and sea. She was born, as it were, in a grave; and in one long, living sepulchre she dwells and dies. Is not existence to her a kind of doom? Wherefore is she thus a dark, sad exile from the blessed light of day? Hearken!

Here, in our bleak old Cornwall, the first mole was once a lady of the land. Her abode was in the far west, among the hills of Morwenna, beside the Severn Sea. She was the daughter of a lordly race, the only child of her mother; and the father of the house was dead: her name was Alice of the Combe. Fair was she and comely, tender and tall; and she stood upon the threshold of her youth. But most of all did men marvel at the glory of her large blue eyes. They were, to look upon, like the summer waters, when the sea is soft with light. They were to her mother a joy, and to the maiden herself, ah! _benedicite_, a pride. She trusted in the loveliness of those eyes, and in her face and features and form; and so it was that the damsel was wont to pass the whole summer day in the choice of rich apparel and precious stones and gold. Howbeit this was one of the ancient and common usages of those old departed days. Now, in the fashion of her stateliness and in the hue and texture of her garments, there was none among the maidens of old Cornwall like Alice of the Combe. Men sought her far and near, but she was to them all, like a form of graven stone, careless and cold. Her soul was set upon a Granville’s love, fair Sir Beville of Stowe--the flower of the Cornish chivalry--that noble gentleman! That valorous knight! he was her star. And well might she wait upon his eyes; for he was the garland of the west. The loyal soldier of a Stuart king--he was that stately Granville who lived a hero’s life and died a warrior’s death! He was her star. Now there was signal made of banquet in the halls of Stowe, of wassail and dance. The messenger had sped, and Alice of the Combe would be there. Robes, precious and many, were unfolded from their rest, and the casket poured forth jewel and gem, that the maiden might stand before the knight victorious. It was the day--the hour--the time--her mother sate at her wheel by the hearth--the page waited in the hall--she came down in her loveliness, into the old oak room, and stood before the mirrored glass--her robe was of woven velvet, rich and glossy and soft; jewels shone like stars in the midnight of her raven hair, and on her hand there gleamed afar off a bright and glorious ring! She stood--she gazed upon her own fair countenance and form, and worshipped! “Now all good angels succour thee, my Alice, and bend Sir Beville’s soul! Fain am I to greet thee wedded wife before I die! I do yearn to hold thy children on my knee! Often shall I pray to-night that the Granville heart may yield! Ay, thy victory shall be thy mother’s prayer.” “Prayer!” was the haughty answer: “now, with the eyes that I see in that glass, and with this vesture meet for a queen, I lack no trusting prayer!”[33] Saint Juliot shield us! Ah! words of fatal sound--there was a sudden shriek, a sob, a cry, and where was Alice of the Combe? Vanished, silent, gone! They had heard wild tones of mystic music in the air, there was a rush, a beam of light, and she was gone, and that for ever! East sought they her, and west, in northern paths and south; but she was never more seen in the lands. Her mother wept till she had not a tear left; none sought to comfort her, for it was vain. Moons waxed and waned, and the crones by the cottage hearth had whiled away many a shadowy night with tales of Alice of the Combe. But at the last, as the gardener in the pleasaunce[34] leaned one day on his spade, he saw among the roses a small round hillock of earth, such as he had never seen before, and upon it something which shone. It was her ring! It was the very jewel she had worn the day she vanished out of sight! They looked earnestly upon it, and they saw within the border, for it was wide, the tracery of certain small fine runes in the ancient Cornish tongue, which said--

“Beryan erde Oyn und perde!”

Then came the priest of the place of Morwenna, a grey and silent man! He had served long years at his lonely altar, a worn and solitary form. But he had been wise in language in his youth, and men said that he heard and understood voices in the air when spirits speak and glide. He read and he interpreted thus the legend on the ring,--

“The earth must hide, Both eyes and Pride!”

Now as on a day he uttered these words, in the pleasaunce, by the mound, on a sudden there was among the grass a low faint cry. They beheld, and oh, wondrous and strange! There was a small dark creature, clothed in a soft velvet skin in texture and in hue like the Lady Alice her robe, and they saw, as it groped into the earth, that it moved along without eyes, in everlasting night! Then the ancient man wept, for he called to mind many things and saw what they meant; and he showed them how that this was the maiden, who had been visited with a doom for her Pride! Therefore her rich array had been changed into the skin of a creeping thing; and her large proud eyes were sealed up, and she herself had become

THE FIRST MOLE OF THE HILLOCKS OF CORNWALL!

Ah, woe is me and well-a-day! that damsel so stately and fair, sweet Lady Alice of the Combe, should become, for a judgment, the dark mother of the Moles! Now take ye good heed, Cornish maidens, how ye put on vain apparel to win love! And cast down your eyes, all ye damsels of the west, and look meekly on the ground! Be ye ever good and gentle, tender and true; and when ye see your own image in the glass, and ye begin to be lifted up with the loveliness of that shadowy thing, call to mind the maiden of the vale of Morwenna, her noble eyes and comely countenance, her vesture of price, and the glittering ring! Set ye by the wheel as of old they sate, and when ye draw forth the lengthening wool, sing ye evermore and say--

“Beryan erde Oyn und perde!”

FOOTNOTES:

[32] From _Notes & Queries_, 1st ser., vol. ii. p. 225. 1850. See Appen. B.

[33] Compare “The Silent Tower of Bottreaux.”

“Thank God, thou whining knave! on land, But thank, at sea, the steersman’s hand.”

[34] The scene of this legend is pointed out in the garden at Tonacombe Manor.

THE GAUGER’S POCKET[35]

Poor old Tristram Pentire! How he comes up before me as I pronounce his name! That light, active, half-stooping form, bent as though he had a brace of kegs upon his shoulders still; those thin, grey, rusty locks that fell upon a forehead seamed with the wrinkles of threescore years and five; the cunning glance that questioned in his eye, and that nose carried always at half-cock, with a red blaze along its ridge, scorched by the departing footstep of the fierce fiend Alcohol, when he fled before the reinforcements of the coast-guard.

He was the last of the smugglers; and when I took possession of my glebe, I hired him as my servant-of-all-work, or rather no-work, about the house, and there he rollicked away the last few years of his careless existence, in all the pomp and idleness of “The parson’s man.” He had taken a bold part in every landing on the coast, man and boy, full forty years; throughout which time all kinds of men had largely trusted him with their brandy and their lives, and true and faithful had he been to them, as sheath to steel.

Gradually he grew attached to me, and I could but take an interest in him. I endeavoured to work some softening change in him, and to awaken a certain sense of the errors of his former life. Sometimes, as a sort of condescension on his part, he brought himself to concede and to acknowledge, in his own quaint, rambling way--

“Well, sir, I do think, when I come to look back, and to consider what lives we used to live,--drunk all night and idle abed all day, cursing, swearing, fighting, gambling, lying, and always prepared to shet [shoot] the gauger,--I do really believe, sir, we surely was in sin!”

But, whatever contrite admissions to this extent were extorted from old Tristram by misty glimpses of a moral sense and by his desire to gratify his master, there were two points on which he was inexorably firm. The one was, that it was a very guilty practice in the authorities to demand taxes for what he called run goods; and the other settled dogma of his creed was, that it never could be a sin to make away with an exciseman. Battles between Tristram and myself on these themes were frequent and fierce; but I am bound to confess that he always managed, somehow or other, to remain master of the field. Indeed, what Chancellor of the Exchequer could be prepared to encounter the triumphant demand with which Tristram smashed to atoms my suggestions of morality, political economy, and finance? He would listen with apparent patience to all my solemn and secular pleas for the revenue, and then down he came upon me with the unanswerable argument--

“But why should the king tax good liquor? If they _must_ have taxes, why can’t they tax something else?”

My efforts, however, to soften and remove his doctrinal prejudice as to the unimportance, in a moral point of view, of putting the officers of his Majesty’s revenue to death, were equally unavailing. Indeed, to my infinite chagrin, I found that I had lowered myself exceedingly in his estimation by what he called standing up for the exciseman.

“There had been divers passons,” he assured me, “in his time in the parish, and very learned clergy they were, and some very strict; and some would preach one doctrine and some another; and there was one that had very mean notions about running goods, and said ’twas a wrong thing to do; but even he, and the rest, never took part with the gauger--never! And besides,” said old Trim, with another demolishing appeal, “wasn’t the exciseman always ready to put _us_ to death when he could?”

With such a theory it was not very astonishing--although it startled me at the time--that I was once suddenly assailed, in a pause of his spade, with the puzzling inquiry, “Can you tell me the reason, sir, that no grass will ever grow upon the grave of a man that is hanged unjustly?”

“No, indeed, Tristram. I never heard of the fact before.”

“Well, I thought every man know’d that from the Scripture: why, you can see it, sir, every Sabbath-day. That grave on the right hand of the path, as you go down to the porch-door, that heap of airth with no growth, not one blade of grass on it--that’s Will Pooly’s grave that was hanged unjustly.”

“Indeed! but how came such a shocking deed to be done?”

“Why, you see, sir, they got poor Will down to Bodmin, all among strangers, and there was bribery, and false swearing; and an unjust judge came down--and the jury all bad rascals, tin-and-copper-men--and so they all agreed together, and they hanged poor Will. But his friends begged the body and brought the corpse home here to his own parish; and they turfed the grave, and they sowed the grass twenty times over, but ’twas all no use, nothing would ever grow--he was hanged unjustly.”

“Well, but, Tristram, you have not told me all this while what this man Pooly was accused of: what had he done?”

“Done, sir! Done? Nothing whatever but killed the exciseman!”

The glee, the chuckle, the cunning glance, were inimitably characteristic of the hardened old smuggler; and then down went the spade with a plunge of defiance, and as I turned away, a snatch of his favourite song came carolling after me like the ballad of a victory:--

“On, through the ground-sea, shove! Light on the larboard bow! There’s a nine-knot breeze above, And a sucking tide below!

Hush! for the beacon fails: The skulking gauger’s by. Down with your studding-sails, Let jib and foresail fly!

Hurrah for the light once more! Point her for Shark’s-Nose Head; Our friends can keep the shore, Or the skulking gauger’s dead.

On, through the ground-sea, shove! Light on the larboard bow! There’s a nine-knot breeze above, And a sucking tide below!”

Among the “king’s men,” whose achievements haunted the old man’s memory with a sense of mingled terror and dislike, a certain Parminter and his dog occupied a principal place. This officer appeared to have been a kind of Frank Kennedy[36] in his way, and to have chosen for his watchword the old Irish signal, “Dare!”

“Sir,” said old Tristram once, with a burst of indignant wrath--“Sir, that villain Parminter and his dog murdered with their shetting-irons no less than seven of our people at divers times, and they peacefully at work in their calling all the while!”

I found on further inquiry that this man Parminter was a bold and determined officer, whom no threats could deter and no money bribe. He always went armed to the teeth, and was followed by a large, fierce, and dauntless dog, which he had thought fit to call Satan. This animal he had trained to carry in his mouth a carbine or a loaded club, which, at a signal from his master, Satan brought to the rescue. “Ay, they was bold audacious rascals--that Parminter and his dog--but he went rather too far one day, as I suppose,” was old Tristram’s chuckling remark, as he leaned on his spade, and I stood by.

“Did he, Trim; in what way?”

“Why, sir, the case was this. Our people had a landing down at Melhuach,[37] in Johnnie Mathey’s hole, and Parminter and his dog found it out. So they got into the cave at ebb tide, and laid in wait, and when the first boat-load came ashore, just as the keel took the ground, down storms Parminter, shouting for Satan to follow. The dog knew better, and held back, they said, for the first time in all his life: so in leaps Parminter smash into the boat alone, with his cutlass drawn; but” (with a kind of inward ecstasy) “he didn’t do much harm to the boat’s crew----”

“Because,” as I interposed, “they took him off to their ship?”

“No, not they; not a bit of it. Their blood was up, poor fellows; so they just pulled Parminter down in the boat, and chopped off his head on the gunwale!”

The exclamation of horror with which I received this recital elicited no kind of sympathy from Tristram. He went on quietly with his work, merely moralising thus--“Ay, better Parminter and his dog had gone now and then to the Gauger’s Pocket at Tidnacombe[38] Cross, and held their peace--better far.”

The term “The Gauger’s Pocket,” in old Tristram’s phraseology, had no kind of reference to any place of deposit in the apparel of the exciseman, but to a certain large grey rock, which stands upon a neighbouring moorland, not far from the cliffs which overhang the sea. It bears to this day, among the parish people, the name of the Witan-stone--that is to say, in the language of our forefathers, the Rock of Wisdom; because it was one of the places of usual assemblage for the Grey Eldermen of British or of Saxon times--a sort of speaker’s chair or woolsack in the local parliaments. It was, moreover, there is no doubt, one of the natural altars of the old religion; and, as such, it is greeted with a fond and legendary reverence still. Hither Trim guided me one day, to show, as he told me, “the great rock set up by the giants, so they said--long, long ago, before there was any bad laws such as they make now.” It was indeed a wild, strange, striking scene; and one to lift and fill, and, moreover, to subdue the thoughtful mind. Around was the wild, half-cultured moor; yonder, within reach of sight and ear, that boundless, breathing sea, with that shout of waters which came up ever and anon to recall the strong metre of the Greek[39]--

“Hark! how old ocean laughs with all his waves!”

And there, before me, stood the tall, vast, solemn stone: grey and awful with the myriad memorials of ancient ages, when the white fathers bowed around the rocks and worshipped!

“And now, sir,” clashed in a shrill, sharp voice, “let me show you the wonderfullest thing in all the place, and that is, the Gauger’s Pocket.”

Accordingly I followed my guide, for it seems “I had a dream that was not all a dream,” as he led the way to the back of the Witan-stone; and there, grown over with moss and lichen, with a movable slice of rock to conceal its mouth, old Tristram pointed out, triumphantly, a dry and secret crevice, almost an arm’s-length deep. “There, sir,” said he, with a joyous twinkle in his eye,--“there have I dropped a little bag of gold, many and many a time, when our people wanted to have the shore quiet and to keep the exciseman out of the way of trouble; and there he would go, if so be he was a reasonable officer, and the byword used to be, when ’twas all right, one of us would go and meet him, and then say, ‘Sir, your pocket is unbuttoned;’ and he would smile and answer, ‘Ay, ay! but never mind, my man, my money’s safe enough;’ and thereby we knew that he was a just man, and satisfied, and that the boats could take the roller in peace; and that was the very way, sir, it came to pass that this crack in the stone was called for evermore ‘The Gauger’s Pocket.’”

FOOTNOTES:

[35] From _Household Words_, vol. vi. pp. 515-517. 1853.

[36] A character in “Guy Mannering.”

[37] A cove some six miles S.W. of Bude. Hawker has a poem on the death of a noted smuggler, “Mawgan of Melhuach.”

[38] A mistaken spelling: see Appendix A.

[39] The allusion is to a passage in Æschylus, “Prom. Vinct.” 90.

ποντίων τε κυμάτων ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα.

It was a favourite metaphor of Hawker’s, and occurs over and over again in his poetry. The best instance is in “The Quest of the Sangraal,” where he apostrophises Cornwall.

“Thy streams that march in music to the sea, ’Mid Ocean’s merry noise, his billowy laugh.”

THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS[40]

The life and adventures of the Cornish clergy during the eighteenth century would form a graphic volume of ecclesiastical lore. Afar off from the din of the noisy world, almost unconscious of the badge-words High Church and Low Church, they dwelt in their quaint grey vicarages by the churchyard wall, the saddened and unsympathising witnesses of those wild, fierce usages of the west which they were utterly powerless to control. The glebe whereon I write has been the scene of many an unavailing contest in the cause of morality between the clergyman and his flock. One aged parishioner recalls and relates the run--that is, the rescue--of a cargo of kegs underneath the benches and in the tower-stairs of the church. “We bribed Tom Hockaday, the sexton,” so the legend ran, “and we had the goods safe in the seats by Saturday night. The parson did wonder at the large congregation, for divers of them were not regular church-goers at other times; and if he had known what was going on he could not have preached a more suitable discourse, for it was, ‘Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess.’ One of his best sermons; but there it did not touch us, you see, for we never tasted anything but brandy or gin. Ah! he was a dear old man our parson, mild as milk; nothing ever put him out. Once I mind, in the middle of morning prayer, there was a buzz down by the porch, and the folks began to get up and go out of church one by one. At last there was hardly three left. So the parson shut the book and took off his surplice, and he said to the clerk, ‘There is surely something amiss.’ And so there certainly was; for when we came out on the cliff there was a king’s cutter in chase of our vessel, the _Black Prince_, close under the land, and there was our departed congregation looking on. Well, at last Whorwell, who commanded our trader, ran for the Gullrock (where it was certain death for anything to follow him), and the revenue commander sheered away to save his ship. Then off went our hats, and we gave Whorwell three cheers. So, when there was a little peace, the parson said to us all, ‘And now, my friends, let us return and proceed with divine service.’ We did return; and it was surprising, after all that bustle and uproar, to hear how Parson Trenowth went on, just as nothing had come to pass: ‘Here beginneth the Second Lesson.’” But on another occasion, the equanimity and forbearance of the parson were sorely tired. He presided, as the custom was, at a parish feast, in cassock and bands, and had, with his white hair and venerable countenance, quite an apostolic aspect and mien. On a sudden, a busy whisper among the farmers at the lower end of the table attracted his notice, interspersed as it was by sundry nods and glances towards himself. At last one bolder than the rest addressed him, and said that they had a great wish to ask his reverence a question if he would kindly grant them a reply: it was on a religious subject that they had dispute, he said. The bland old man assured them of his readiness to yield them any information or answer in his power.

“But what was the point in debate?”

“Why, sir, we wish to be informed if there were not sins which God Almighty would never forgive?”

Surprised and somewhat shocked, he told them “that he trusted there were no transgressions, common to themselves, but, if repented of and abjured, they might clearly hope to be forgiven.” But, with a natural curiosity, he inquired what kind of iniquities they had discussed as too vile to look for pardon. “Why, sir,” replied their spokesman, “we thought that if a man should find out where run goods was deposited and should inform the gauger, that such a villain was too bad for mercy.”

How widely the doctrinal discussions of those days differed from our own! Let us not, however, suppose that all the clergy were as gentle and unobtrusive as Parson Trenowth. A tale is told of an adjacent parish, situate also on the sea-shore, of a more stirring kind. It was full sea in the evening of an autumn day when a traveller arrived where the road ran along by a sandy beach, just above high-water mark. The stranger, who was a native of some inland town, and utterly unacquainted with Cornwall and its ways, had reached the brink of the tide just as a “landing” was coming off. It was a scene not only to instruct a townsman but also to dazzle and surprise. At sea, just beyond the billows, lay the vessel well moored with anchors at stem and stern. Between the ship and the shore boats laden to the gunwale passed to and fro. Crowds assembled on the beach to help the cargo ashore. On the one hand a boisterous group surrounded a keg with the head knocked in, for simplicity of access to the good cognac, into which they dipped whatsoever vessel came first to hand: one man had filled his shoe. On the other side they fought and wrestled, cursed and swore. Horrified at what he saw, the stranger lost all self-command, and, oblivious of personal danger, he began to shout, “What a horrible sight! Have you no shame? Is there no magistrate at hand? Cannot any justice of the peace be found in this fearful country?”

“No--thanks be to God,” answered a hoarse, gruff voice; “none within eight miles.”

“Well, then,” screamed the stranger, “is there no clergyman hereabout? Does no minister of the parish live among you on this coast?”

“Ay! to be sure there is,” said the same deep voice.

“Well, how far off does he live? Where is he?”

“That’s he yonder, sir, with the lanthorn.” And sure enough there he stood, on a rock, and poured, with pastoral diligence, the light of other days on a busy congregation.

FOOTNOTE: