Beyond the memory of Dick Hal, who remembered the home-bringing of two wounded “Church-Town” men after Waterloo, the hounds had met on Feast Days at the Castle. The grounds with their stately terraces and relics of feudal dignity were thrown open for the meet, the protests of old Jenny at the park gate notwithstanding.
Long before the hour appointed a little crowd assembled outside the lodge. Fishermen in blue guernseys were there, miners in their workaday clothes, and a strong force of villagers. It is noteworthy what a motley crowd, from squire to ploughboy, from vigorous youth to crippled old age, will congregate to witness a day’s fox-hunting.
And surely the sight of twenty couple of hounds drawing a patch of gorse in an open and wild country, the suspense that follows the first whimper, the find, the thrilling tally-ho, and the hurry and scurry of the field, is a spectacle as pleasant as it is exhilarating.
Looking out of an upper window of one of the little towers that flanked the gateway was old Jenny Trewheela, blind of one eye, whose sharp tongue was more effective than a fifteen-pounder in defence of her charge. Villagers averred that “her main suction ware vinegar,” and a candid friend had told her so. As the hour approached the crowd began to press too close to the lodge to please her vigilant eye. “Werta shovin’ to? Thee shussen wan of ee come inside the gates till th’ ’ounds ’a gone through. They be Sir Bevil’s orders.”
“Sober, mawther,” said a keen-eyed poacher, “we be all afeeard of ee, and thee dost knaw it; but hows’ever we doan’t want none o’ your winegar. Custna haand round a bit o’ crowse and a drop o’ somethin’ to drink? ’Tes a dry East wind and bra’ an cold.”
“Sauce and imprence! I do knaw thee and the crooked ways of ee, though thee dost skulk behind a honest man,” and with that she banged-to the window.
A few minutes before the village clock chimed the hour, the huntsman, hounds, and whippers-in passed through the gate and along the approach to the inner court, and drew up on the far side of the keep near the old culverin. By ones and twos, gentlemen from the country round, tenant farmers and crofters, rode up to the Castle.
This venerable building in the hundred of Penwith in the parish of Madron had been the seat of the Tresillians from the time of Henry the Second. The Castle is quaintly described in an old survey of Cornwall as “very ancient, strong and fayre and appurtenanced with the necessaries of wood, water, parkes, moors, with the devotion of a rich-furnished chapelle and charitie of almshouses.”
The terrace is still haunted by the squire who fell on the memorable day when the place was held for the King against the Roundheads. The painting in the hall shows the assault on the outer wall, where a lurid glare lights up helm and pike at the narrow breach; for above battlement and turret, clearly outlined, leap tongues of fire from the beacon on the Cairn.
Dents in the granite walls still mark where the cannon-balls struck the building; and it was at that time—I know there are some who dispute the date—that one of the quarterings of the family arms above the entrance was effaced.