CHAPTER III.

THE ALARM BELL.

The season was autumn now, and on the succeeding day--the last he meant to spend at Rhoscadzhel for some time at least--Richard Trevelyan appeared in the breakfast parlour again in shooting costume, with a scarlet shirt having an open collar, and with a brown leather shot-belt over his shoulder; while his uncle, who, even when at his slender morning repast, in his elaborately flowered dressing-gown, wore accurately fitting pale kid gloves on his shrivelled hands, for such things were a necessity of the old lord's existence; thus he glanced again with an air of annoyance at the dress worn by his eldest nephew, as he considered it a solecism, decidedly in bad taste, and that something more was due to his own presence.

Downie's costume, a fashionable morning coat came more near his lordship's ideas of propriety.

Mr. Jasper Funnel, in accurate black, was at the side-table, to slice down the cold meat, pour out the coffee from its silver urn into the beautiful Wedgewood cups, and to carve the grouse and other pies; for Cornwall is peculiarly the land of that species of viand, as there the denizens make pies of everything eatable, squab-pies, pilchard-pies, muggetty-pies, and so forth.

"I heard last evening the new chime of bells you have put up in Lamorna Church," said Richard, as he seated himself and attacked a plate of grouse, the recent spoil of his own gun; "how pleasantly they sound. Who rings them?"

"I cannot say--never inquired," replied the old peer, testily; "I can only tell you one thing, Richard."

"And that is----"

"They were wrung out of my pocket by the vestry."

At this little quip, Downie obsequiously and applaudingly laughed as loudly as he was ever known to do, and just as if he had never heard it before.

"However, I need not grudge the poor people their chime of bells; I am rich enough to afford them more than that, and occupying as we do a good slice of this _Land of Tin_, for so the Phoenicians named this Cornish peninsula of ours as early as the days of Solomon, we have its credit to maintain; but bring us home a well-born and handsome bird, Dick, and I shall have the bells rung till they fly to pieces--by Jove I will! Only, as I hinted last night, let her be worthy to represent those who lie under their marble tombs in that old church of Lamorna; for there are bones there that would shrink in their leaden coffins if aught plebeian were laid beside them."

Richard shrugged his shoulders, and glanced round him with impatience.

"Let us look forward, my dear uncle," said he; "in this age of progress all men do; and of what account or avail can a dead ancestry be?"

Downie smiled faintly, and Lord Lamorna frowned in the act of decapitating an egg, for to his ears this sounded as rank heresy or treason against the state.

"By heavens! nephew Richard, you talk like a Red Republican. With these socialistic views of equality, and so forth, I fear you will never shine in the Upper House."

"I have no desire to do so; you see how simple my tastes are----"

"In dress decidedly too much so."

"And how happy and content I am to lead the life of a quiet country gentleman; and have done so ever since I left the Cornish Light Infantry."

"Your demands upon my pocket are certainly so moderate, that I cannot think you are playing me false, Dick," said the peer, with a pleasant smile; "egad, if I thought you were doing so, I'd have you before the Mayor of Halgaver, as our Cornish folks say!"

"Trust me, my good uncle," replied Richard Trevelyan, with a glistening eye, and laying a hand caressingly on the old man's shoulder, as he rose and adjusted his shot-belt; "and now I go to have a farewell shot on the moors."

"Why a farewell shot? you have been here barely a fortnight."

"Nevertheless, I must leave Rhoscadzhel tomorrow."

"Positively?"

"Yes, uncle."

"Pardon me," continued Lamorna, drily; "but may we inquire for where?"

"Oxford--and then town after, perhaps."

"Oxford--and town too," replied his uncle, testily; "the last time you left this for London, if General Trecarrel was right, you were seen for a month after in his neighbourhood; and, if his story were true--and I dare not doubt it--you did not get beyond the border of Cornwall--and were certainly not so far as Devonshire."

"Trecarrel was, I hope, mistaken," urged Richard.

"I hope so, too."

Richard's face was pale, and to conceal his emotion, he stooped and caressed his favourite pointer, which had bounded in when the butler opened the door; and soon recovering from his little agitation--whatever its secret source might be--he politely and affectionately bade his uncle "good-bye for the present," nodded to the silent and observant Downie, took a double-barrelled breech-loader from the gun-room and sallied forth, unattended by game-keepers, desiring quite as much to indulge in reverie and enjoy a solitary ramble, as to have a shot at a passing bird.

To Richard it seemed that he had read a strangely keen, weird and unfathomable expression in his uncle's eyes, as they followed his departing steps on this particular morning--an expression which, somehow, haunted him.

The season, we have said, was now autumn, and a tender, mellow tone rested over all the landscape; Richard Trevelyan was fond of the strange, wild district--the land of old tradition, of bold and varied scenery--amid which his youth and so much of his manhood had been passed, and he looked around him from time to time with admiring eyes and an enthusiastic heart.

A soft warm shower had fallen that morning early, refreshing the fading September leaves in the belts of coppice that girt the upland slopes, and in the orchards, where the ripe golden apples were dropping amid the thick sward below. Above the purple, and often desolate moors which are so characteristic of Cornish scenery, and where the small breed of horses, the little black cattle and sharp-nosed sheep of the province were grazing, the wooded _tors_ or hills stood boldly up in the distance, their foliage in most instances presenting many varied tints. There were the brown madder, the crisped chesnut, and the fading beech, the more faded green of the old Cornish elm, and the russet fern below, from amid which at every step he took the birds whirred up in coveys; while Richard, lost in reverie--the result of his uncle's remarks of late--never emptied a barrel at them, but walked slowly on looking round him from time to time, and filled with thoughts that were all his own as yet.

The place where he loitered was very lonely: here and there a gray lichen-spotted druidical monolith stood grimly up amid the silent waste; in the distance might be seen the gray expanse of the ocean, or some bleak looking houses slated with blue, as they usually are in Devon and Cornwall, or perhaps some of those poorer huts, which, like wigwams, have cob-walls; _i.e._ are built of earth, mud, and straw, beaten and pounded together, just as they might have been in the days of Bran the son of Llyr, or when Arthur dwelt in Tintagel.

Richard Trevelyan threw himself upon a grassy bank, and his pointer, doubtless surprised by his neglect of all sport, lay beside him with eyes of wonder and tongue out-lolled. In the distance, about a mile or so away, Trevelyan could see Rhoscadzhel House shining in the morning sunlight; and again, as on the preceding evening, he looked around with a bitter smile upon tor and moorland, and on the wondrous druid monoliths that stand up here and there on the bleak hill sides, each and all of them having their own quaint name and grim old legend.

How came each to be there? "Without patent rollers; nay, without the simplest mechanical contrivances of modern times, how was so huge a mass transported to yonder desolate and wind-swept height? How many yoke of oxen, how many straining scores of men must it have taken to erect the least of them! What submission to authority, what servile or superstitious fear must have animated the workers! No drover's whip would have urged to such a task; no richest guerdon could have repaid the toil; yet there the wonder stands!"

And some such thoughts as these floated through the mind of Richard, as his eyes wandered from a cromlech or slab that rested on three great stones, to a vast _maen_ or rock-pillar, that might be coeval with the days when Jacob set up such a stone to witness his covenant with Laban.

"Shall I ever wander here with Constance--and if so, when," thought he; "assuredly not while my uncle lives; but his death--how can I contemplate it, when he is so good, so kind, so tender, and so true to me? Oh, let me not anticipate that."

How often in autumn, in the gloomy mornings of November, had he pursued the fox over these desolate moors, often breakfasting by candle-light in his red coat on a hunting morning, to the great boredom of old Jasper Funnel?

What joy it would be to gallop over that breezy wind-swept moor, with Constance by his side! To walk with her through yonder dense old thicket, and tell her that every tree and twig therein were her own; to drive by yonder cliff, Tol Pedn Penwith, the western boundary of a beautiful bay, and where in the summer evening, the forty Isles of Scilly seemed to be cradled in the glory of the western sun; to show her all these places with which he was so familiar, and perhaps to tell their children in the years to come--for all Richard's habits and tastes were alike gentle and domestic--the old Cornish legends of Arthur's castle at Tintagel, of the magic well of St. Keyne, and of Tregeagle the giant--the bugbear of all Cornish little people; the melancholy monster or fiend, who according to traditions still believed in, haunts the Dozmare Pool, from whence he hurled the vast granite blocks, known as his "quoits," upon the coast westward of Penzance Head; the deep dark Pool, his dwelling place, is said to be unfathomable and the resort of other evil spirits.

Desolate and begirt by arid and dreary hills, it presents an aspect of gloomy horror; and then when the winter storms sweep the moorland wastes, and the miners at the Land's End, deep, deep down in mines below the sea, hear the enormous boulders dashed by it on the flinty shore overhead, above all can be heard the howling of Tregeagle! For ages he has been condemned to the task of emptying the Dozrnare Pool by a tiny limpet-shell, and his cries are uttered in despair of the hopelessness of the drudgery assigned him by the devil, who in moments of impatience, hunts him round the tarn, till he flies to the Roche Rocks fifteen miles distant, and finds respite by placing his hideous head through the painted window of a ruined chapel, as a bumpkin might through a horse-collar; for these, and a thousand such stories as these, are believed in Cornwall, nor can even the whistle of the railway from Plymouth to Penzance scare them away.

Richard Trevelyan was smiling when he remembered how often he and Downie, when loving little brothers and playfellows, had been scared in their cribs at night by stories of Tregeagle; and of that other mighty giant who lies buried beneath Carn Brea, where his clenched skeleton hand, now converted into a block of granite (having five distinct parts, like a thumb and fingers) protrudes through the turf.

He could recall the dark hours, when as fair-haired children, they had cowered together in one of the tapestried rooms of Rhoscadzhel, and clasped each other's hands and necks in fear of those hob-goblins, which people the very rock and cavern, and even the very air of Cornwall. Downie was a man now, legal in bearing, and cold-blooded in heart. Richard had painful doubts of him, and remembered, that, strangely enough his hand _alone_, had always failed to rock the logan-stone in the lawn before Rhoscadzhel, and such monuments of antiquity, have, according to Mason, the properties of an ordeal--the test of truth and probity:

"Behold yon huge And unhewn sphere of living adamant, Which, poised by magic, rests its central weight On yonder pointed rock: firm as it seems, Such is its strange and virtuous property, It moves obsequious to the gentlest touch Of him whose heart is pure; but to a traitor, Tho' e'en a giant's prowess nerv'd his arm, It stands as fixed as Snowdon!"

Even the childish hands of his little daughter Gartha, could rock the logan-stone, when Downie's failed to do so. Why was this? Was there indeed any truth in the ancient test of integrity and purity of heart; or was it but an engine of religious imposition? And now amid these unpleasant speculations, there came to the loiterer's ear, the tolling of a distant bell.

He started up, and listened.

It was, beyond a doubt, the house-bell of Rhoscadzhel, and was being rung violently and continuously, for the breeze brought the notes distinctly over the furzy waste.

What could have happened? Fire--or was he wanted in haste? Was his uncle indisposed; were his fears, his hopes and wishes, though blended with sorrow, to be realised at last?

His breath came thick and painfully, and he remembered with something of foreboding--for his Cornish breeding rendered him superstitious and impressionable--that as he had passed Larnorna church that morning, he had seen, on the rough lichstones at the entrance to the sequestered church-yard, a coffin rested prior to interment, while the soft sad psalmody of those who had borne it thither--a band of hardy miners--floated through the still and ambient air; for the custom of bearing the dead to their last resting place with holy songs--a usage in the East, as old as the fourth century--is still observed in Cornwall, that land of quaint traditions and picturesque old memories.

Springing to his feet, Richard Trevelyan discharged both barrels of his gun into the air, and hurried in the direction of the manor house.

As he drew nearer, the sonorous clangour of the great bell, which was now rung at intervals, but with great vigour, continued to increase, adding to the surprise and tumult of his heart, and the perturbation of his spirit.