Sir Bevil and Lady Tresillian, who were standing on the steps below, gave their guests a hearty welcome. Breakfast was laid in the wainscotted hall, bright with log fires.
Cornish worthies in their gold frames wink at the merry gathering round the table.
Sir Bevil, despite his grey hairs, looks young for his sixty years. Life’s work is stamped on his high-bred features. He looks every inch a soldier. The tanned face and parched skin suggest frontier fighting: the scar on the brow confirms it.
Facing the mullioned window, on Sir Bevil’s right is Squire Tremenheere of Lanover, the hardest rider of the hunt; next him is the Major of the C.C. battery, whose neighbour is the popular member for the Land’s End Division; next him is a shipowner whose vessels are on every sea; the veteran with silvery hair and twinkling eyes has been purser of a tin-mine for nearly half a century; the man with the long black beard is the village doctor, and a kind friend to the poor; below him sit half a score farmers, and a good time they are having.
“This be a good drop o’ zider,” says the weather-beaten crofter who sits facing a portrait of Sir Richard Grenville. “Gos’t home,” said the eldest tenant on the estate, “Tedden no zider: but caal ’en what you like, ’tes a drop of the raal auld stingo.”
The aristocratic old gentleman, tête-à-tête with Lady Elizabeth, is Sir Lopes Carminowe, who knows every gate, gap and fox-earth in Penwith. Need it be said that the little wizened-face man with laughing eyes, whose wit is as dry as the champagne, is the legal adviser of those whom he is tickling with forensic anecdotes? The parson is the recipient of much chaff and banter; but with eyes sparkling under his shaggy brows and in the best of humour he is cutting about him with his sharp-edged tongue to the discomfiture of his assailants. Says Sir Bevil, “The parson reminds me of the Cavalier in the picture who has brought down half a dozen of the enemy and is looking round for more.”
Breakfast over, the gay company passed out of the Castle, mounted their restive horses and rode away to the covert by the lake. The Cairn that overlooked it was covered with pedestrians who, like spectators in a theatre, were waiting for the play to begin. Does any one doubt that the sporting instinct is strong in Englishmen? Observe that poor old man in clean smock-frock and white beaver. This is Dick Hal. He can’t see very well, but he would like to hear the cry of the hounds once more. He began earthstopping the year Bonaparte died at St Helena, and this morning a little child has led him to the Cairn that he might perchance hear the music he loved so well. And it seemed probable, so rarely had the brake been found tenantless, that he and the rest, younger and noisier in their expectation of sport, would not be disappointed.
The cry of the huntsman in the bottoms at once hushes the hum of the crowd. Ears strain to catch the first whimper, and eager eyes search every yard of open ground to view the stealthy movements of a fox. Under the shelter of a boulder, apart from the crowd, sits Jim Roscruge, the old mining pioneer, and near him a man in velveteen coat and sealskin cap who looks the incarnation of vigilance.
Surely we have seen that cheery face before—it’s Andrew the Earthstopper, looking little the worse for his night’s adventures. The leading hounds had come through the brake. “Saams to me,” says Roscruge, “that Nute drawed a bit too quick like. A fox’ll sometimes lie as close as a sittin’ perthridge.” “May be you’re right: but Joe Nute do knaw ’es work, and, lor’, what moosic’s in the voice of un! Harkee! . . . Grand, edna you? Saam time I niver seed the brake drawed blank but wance afore.”
The field began to move slowly to the next cover whilst the hounds ran through some crofts where the furze was thin.