“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