"Well, it's like this, sir," he answered at last, with the shamefaced
air of the intelligent laboring man who confesses to a superstition.
"We Cornish are old-fashioned, and we has our ideas. The Tyrrels are
new people like, in Cornwall, as we say; they came in only with
Cromwell's folk, when he fought the Grenvilles; but it's well beknown
in the county bad luck goes with them. You see, they're descended from
that Sir Walter Tyrrel you'll read about in the history books, him as
killed King William Rufious in the New Forest. You'll hear all about it
at Rufious' Stone, where the king was killed; Sir Walter, he drew, and
he aimed at a deer, and the king was standing by; and the bullet, it
glanced aside--or maybe it was afore bullets, and then it'd be an
arrow; but anyhow, one or t'other, it hit the king, and he fell, and
died there. The stone's standing to this day on the place where he
fell, and I've seen it, and read of it when I was in hospital at
Netley. But Sir Walter, he got clear away, and ran across to France;
and ever since that time they've called the eldest son of the Tyrrels
Walter, same as they've called the eldest son of the Trevennacks
Michael. But they say every Walter Tyrrel that's born into the world is
bound, sooner or later, to kill his man unintentional. So he do right
to avoid going too near the cliffs, I say. We shouldn't tempt
Providence. And the Tyrrels is all a conscientious people."
CHAPTER III.
FACE TO FACE.
When Eustace Le Neve returned to lunch at Penmorgan that day he was
silent to his host about Trevennack of Trevennack. To say the truth, he
was so much attracted by Miss Cleer's appearance that he didn't feel
inclined to mention having met her. But he wanted to meet her again for
all that, and hoped he would do so. Perhaps Tyrrel might know the
family, and ask them round to dine some night. At any rate, society is
rare at the Lizard. Sooner or later, he felt sure, he'd knock up
against the mysterious stranger somewhere. And that involved the
probability of knocking up against the mysterious stranger's beautiful
daughter.
Next morning after breakfast, however, he made a vigorous effort to
induce Walter Tyrrel to mount the cliff and look at the view from
Penmorgan Point toward the Rill and Kynance. It was absurd, he said
truly, for the proprietor of such an estate never to have seen the most
beautiful spot in it. But Tyrrel was obdurate. On the point of actually
mounting the cliff itself he wouldn't yield one jot or tittle. Only,
after much persuasion, he consented at last to cross the headland by
the fields at the back and come out at the tor above St. Michael's
Crag, provided always Eustace would promise he'd neither go near the
edge himself nor try to induce his friend to approach it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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