W.H.G. Kingston
"Captain Mugford"
Chapter One.
Introductory.
We belong to a Cornish family of the greatest respectability and high antiquity—so say the county records, in which we have every reason to place the most unbounded confidence. The Tregellins have possessed the same estate for I do not know exactly how long; only I suppose it must have been some time after Noah disembarked from the ark, and, at all events, for a very long time. The estate of which I speak was in a wild part of the country, and not at that time very productive; but I believe that my father would not have parted with it for ten times its market value. It contained between four and five hundred acres of hill and dale, and rock and copse, and wood; its chief feature a lofty cape, which ran out for a considerable distance into the sea. On one side it was exposed to the almost unbroken sweep of the Atlantic Ocean; on the other it was washed by the tranquil waters of a deep bay, which formed a safe and picturesque harbour for numerous small craft which frequently took shelter there from press of weather when running up channel.
That headland, where the happiest half-year of all my boyhood’s days was passed, is now dotted with several pleasant summer residences; its acres are marked off by fences and walls, and variegated with the diverse crops of well-tilled fields, and on its bay-side are occasional small wharves for pleasure-boats. Fifty years ago it was very different, and, (though, perhaps, I may be an old fogey and have that grey-hair fashion of thinking, with an expressive shrug, “Ah, things are not as they were when I was a boy!”) I must say, far more beautiful to my eyes than it is now. You have seen a bold, handsome-bearded, athletic sailor-fellow, with a manner combining the sunniness of calms, the dash of storms, and the romance of many strange lands about him. Now, if our admired hero should abandon his adventurous profession, and settle down quietly into the civilised career of an innkeeper, or village constable, or shopman, or sedate church clerk, and we chanced to meet him years after his “life on the ocean wave,” it would probably be to find a sober-faced gentleman, with forehead a little bald, with somewhat of a paunch, with sturdy legs and gaiters, perhaps with a stiff stock and dignified white collar—altogether a very respectable, useful citizen. But the eye and the heart could not find in our excellent acquaintance the fascination which so charmed us in our friend the brave sailor. So with our cape: fifty years ago, in all its natural wildness; in the beauty of its lonely beaches strewn with pieces of shivered waterlogged spars and great rusty remnants of ship-knees and keels; in the melancholy of those strips of short brown heath on the seaside, disappearing in the white sand; in the frowning outlines of the determined rocks that like fortresses defied their enemy the ocean; in the roll of crisp pasturage that in unbroken swells covered the long backbone of the cape; in the few giant old trees, and, more than all, in its character of freedom, loneliness, and isolation, there was a savage charm and dignity that the thrift and cultivation, the usefulness and comfort of civilisation’s beauty can never equal.
My first sight of the old cape was when I was about nine years of age. My father took me with him in a chaise from Bristol—two days’ journey in those times; and I do not think now that my year’s tour of Europe, fifteen years after, was half as full of incident and delight as that my first expedition of a few hours. I can recall how the man at the toll-gate hobbled to us on his crutch; how my father chatted with him for a few moments; how, as we drove off, the man straightened himself on his crutch and touched the brim of his hat with the back of his hand. How well I remember the amazement with which I then heard my father say, “Robert, that man lost his leg while fighting under the great Duke in the Peninsula.” I thrust my head far out of the chaise to look well at my first live hero. That sight was romance enough for an hour. Then the first glimpse of the top of the high cape, and my father’s telling me that where I saw the haze beyond was the ocean, were sources of further reverie and mystery, dispelled, however, very suddenly when directly afterwards a wheel came off the chaise and pitched me into the road, with my father’s small valise on my stomach. I remember the walk to the nearest house, which happened to be an inn, and how my father took off a large tumbler of ale, and gave me some biscuits and a glass of water. It occurred to me, I recollect, whether, when I became a man, I should be able to drink a full glass of ale and not be a drunkard, and whether my son would take biscuits and water and I not be conscious that he wanted to taste the ale. A thousand things more I remember—mere trifles in reality, but abounding in great interest to me on my first journey, which really then seemed of as much importance as Captain Cook’s voyage around the world or Mungo Park’s travels in Africa. It was a delightful day, the most interesting chapter in my life up to that time—brimful of novelty, thought, and excitement—but I shall not write its events in detail. What I have already mentioned will do as a sample. Late in the afternoon—it was the afternoon of a September day, the first fine one after a three days’ storm—we reached the cape, just as the short sombre twilight of an autumn day settled down on land and sea. As the horse trudged laboriously along through the heavy piece of sand connecting the cape and the mainland, I was almost terrified by the great sound of waves, whose spray tossed up in vast spouts from every rocky head before us. The rush of waters, the rumbling of great stones receding with the current, the booming as of ships’ broadsides—all these united to awe a little boy making his first acquaintance with the ocean.
When we drove up to the house, which was the only habitation on the point, not a light was to be seen, and the dark stone walls were blacker than the night that had settled down so quickly on the land. My father said there was no use to knock, for that old Juno lived in the back part of the house and was too deaf to hear us. So he led the horse round, and we went to the back windows. Through them we saw our old black castellan nodding, pipe in mouth, over the fireplace. She had not heard the noise of our wheels, and it required a vigorous pounding on the heavy back-door before old Juno, in much trembling, opened it to us.