CHAPTER VI
NANCEPEAN
The Rhos or, as it is popularly written and pronounced, the Rose is a tract of land in the south-west of the Duchy of Cornwall, ten miles long and six at its greatest breadth, which on account of its remoteness from the railway, its unusual geological formation, and its peninsular shape possesses both in the character of its inhabitants and in the peculiar aspects of the natural scene all the limitations and advantages of an island. The main road running south to Rose Head from Rosemarket cuts the peninsula into two unequal portions, the eastern and by far the larger of which consists of a flat tableland two or three hundred feet above the sea covered with a bushy heath, which flourishes in the magnesian soil and which when in bloom is of such a clear rosy pink, with nothing to break the level monochrome except scattered drifts of cotton grass, pools of silver water and a few stunted pines, that ignorant observers have often supposed that the colour gave its name to the whole peninsula. The ancient town of Rosemarket, which serves as the only channel of communication with the rest of Cornwall, lies in the extreme north-west of the peninsula between a wide creek of the Roseford river and the Rose Pool, an irregular heart-shaped water about four miles in circumference which on the west is only separated from the Atlantic by a bar of fine shingle fifty yards across.
The parish of Nancepean, of which Mark's grandfather the Reverend Charles Elphinstone Trehawke had been vicar for nearly thirty years, ran southward from the Rose Pool between the main road and the sea for three miles. It was a country of green valleys unfolding to the ocean, and of small farms fertile enough when they were sheltered from the prevailing wind; but on the southern confines of the parish the soil became shallow and stony, the arable fields degenerated into a rough open pasturage full of gorse and foxgloves and gradually widening patches of heather, until finally the level monochrome of the Rhos absorbed the last vestiges of cultivation, and the parish came to an end.
The actual village of Nancepean, set in a hollow about a quarter of a mile from the sea, consisted of a smithy, a grocer's shop, a parish hall and some two dozen white cottages with steep thatched roofs lying in their own gardens on either side of the unfrequented road that branched from the main road to follow the line of the coast. Where this road made the turn south a track strewn with grey shingle ran down between the cliffs, at this point not much more than grassy hummocks, to Nancepean beach which extended northward in a wide curve until it disappeared two miles away in the wooded heights above the Rose Pool. The metalled coast road continued past the Hanover Inn, an isolated house standing at the head of a small cove, to make the long ascent of Pendhu Cliff three hundred and fifty feet high, from the brow of which it descended between banks of fern past St. Tugdual's Church to the sands of Church Cove, whence it emerged to climb in a steep zigzag the next headland, beyond which it turned inland again to Lanyon and rejoined the main road to Rose Head. The church itself had no architectural distinction; but the solitary position, the churchyard walls sometimes washed by high spring tides, the squat tower built into the rounded grassy cliff that protected it from the direct attack of the sea, and its impressive antiquity combined to give it more than the finest architecture could give. Nowhere in the surrounding landscape was there a sign of human habitation, neither on the road down from Pendhu nor on the road up toward Lanyon, not on the bare towans sweeping from the beach to the sky in undulating waves of sandy grass, nor in the valley between the towans and Pendhu, a wide green valley watered by a small stream that flowed into the cove, where it formed a miniature estuary, the configuration of whose effluence changed with every tide.
The Vicarage was not so far from the church as the church was from the village, but it was some way from both. It was reached from Nancepean by a road or rather by a gated cart-track down one of the numerous valleys of the parish, and it was reached from the church by another cart-track along the valley between Pendhu and the towans. Probably it was an ancient farmhouse, and it must have been a desolate and austere place until, as at the date when Mark first came there, it was graced by the perfume and gold of acacias, by wistaria and jasmine and honeysuckle, by the ivory goblets of magnolias, by crimson fuchsias, and where formerly its grey walls grew mossy north and east by pink and white camelias and the waxen bells of lapagerias. The garden was a wilderness of scarlet rhododendrons from the thickets of which innumerable blackbirds and thrushes preyed upon the peas. The lawns were like meadows; the lily ponds were marbled with weeds; the stables were hardly to be reached on account of the tangle of roses and briers that filled the abandoned yard. The front drive was bordered by evergreen oaks, underneath the shade of which blue hydrangeas flowered sparsely with a profusion of pale-green foliage and lanky stems.
Mark when he looked out of his window on the morning after his arrival thought that he was in fairyland. He looked at the rhododendrons; he looked at the raindrops of the night sparkling in the morning sun; he looked at the birds, and the blue sky, and across the valley to a hillside yellow with gorse. He hardly knew how to restrain himself from waking his mother with news of the wonderful sights and sounds of this first vision of the country; but when he saw a clump of daffodils nodding in the grass below, it was no longer possible to be considerate. Creeping to his mother's door, he gently opened it and listened. He meant only to whisper "Mother," but in his excitement he shouted, and she suddenly roused from sleep by his voice sat up in alarm.
"Mother, there are seven daffodils growing wild under my window."
"My darling, you frightened me so. I thought you'd hurt yourself."