"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.