It was the sweet season of spring, and the flowers of balmy April were in all their bloom; the young and fragrant buds were bursting in the woods of Rhoscadzhel, and the willows that gave a name to the long narrow glen, forming the avenue to Porthellick, were as green, as leafy, and as graceful in their droop, as when Constance, dark-eyed and pale-faced, sat at the windows of the pretty white villa, watching for her husband, Richard, cantering his horse to the little portico, where Derrick Braddon awaited him; Denzil going forth to whip the trouting-stream, or Sybil sitting, sketch-book in hand, under a tree, to shade her from the sunshine.
The Trevanion Arms, over which creaked and swung a signboard decorated with the arms of that old surname, a fesse between two chevrons, with three escallops (for old Jack, like every Cornishman, had a pedigree), is a picturesque little old-fashioned house, partly built of granite and partly of straw and mud beaten into a consistency that is pretty enduring. Four boulders that had lain for ages on the promontory where it stands, had been improvised as corner-stones by the first builders of the edifice, and then the erection proved easy enough. It is square, with a trellised porch, which is always a mass of flowers and leaves; two windows are on each side of this, and five above, while there are other little quaint dormers that abut from the roof, which is conical, or pavilion-shaped, to write more correctly: and the edifice was then, from its foundation to its apex, chimneys included, literally a mass of clematis, dark green ivy, jasmine and sweet briar, so matted and interwoven as completely to conceal where the wall ended and the roof began; and in the pairing season the snug recesses of this leafy covering were all alive with teeming nests and twittering birds, whose gaping bills and glittering eyes peeped forth at times when a frocked waggoner or dusky-visaged miner drew up at the door for a pot of creamy ale, or a quart of sharp, foaming Devonshire cider.
Though April, the night on which we visit this place is bleak; the rain is swooping in torrents on the drenched land, and tossing sea; black clouds envelop all the Bristol Channel, the wild waves of which were rolling in snowy foam against the bluffs of Tintagel, along Trebarreth Strand, and all that iron shore from thence, perhaps, to Cape Cornwall, for it was just such a night of storm as the old Cornish wreckers would have loved, and hung their lanterns on the cliffs to mislead doomed ships at sea.
Seated alone, gazing intently into the sea-coal fire that burned low in the grate of the humble tavern parlour, smoking a short pipe, and taking occasional sips from a tankard of ale, was a somewhat tattered, but well-bearded, grizzled, and weather-beaten man, about sixty years of age. His features were rather Cornish or Celtic in type; the nose and cheek bones high, the eyes keen and glittering, when the firelight shone on them; his sturdy figure and well-embrowned hands showed that his life had been one of hard work, and, by the peculiar mode in which he carried his head, it was easy to see that he had been drilled as a soldier in the ranks.
Intently thinking, he sighed deeply once or twice, and, looking round the room as a gust of the storm without roused him from reverie, he said aloud,—
"So here you are at last, after all that has come and gone—here at last, and for what, Derrick Braddon?"
For Derrick Braddon he was—Derrick, the faithful attendant and follower of the late Richard Pencarrow Trevelyan—Lord Lamorna! His fate and adventures had been strange; for since the steamer Admiral, of Montreal, had perished at sea, Braddon had seen more of the world than he ever expected to behold again, and been so circumstanced, that he could never communicate with England, even in this age of ease and appliances; or his letters had miscarried; and now when he found himself once more at home—but, as it eventually proved, a home filled with strangers—his heart grew soft, and his eyes suffused, albeit that he was somewhat unused to the melting mood.
The purple moorlands, the great grey standing stones, the mines teeming with men and lights, and strange sounds, their giant works and grimy gearing; the granite carns and the dark oak woodlands had all spoken of home and his boyhood to the returned wanderer, the faithful old soldier, and caused him to be doubly sad; nature was the same, but many a voice was hushed, and many a familiar face was gone for ever.
The Trevanion tavern was unchanged even to the leafy tendrils that clambered over it, shrouding every inch of wall and roof, and hiding more than the half of each window; but his old comrade, Jack Trevanion, whilom drum-major of the Cornish Light Infantry, who had left a leg in the Punjaub, and with whom he had smoked many a pipe, by that same hearth (where he now sat alone), talking of old times, and of the old regiment, where even their names were forgotten, was gone to his last home by Lanteglos church (the burial place of the Trecarrels, too), and another host occupied Jack's place in the bar-parlour.
Old Mike Treherne and Winny Braddon had quitted their native place, and gone to Plymouth, from whence Derrick had travelled thus far on a pilgrimage to Rhoscadzhel, when his heart began utterly to fail him.