Mrs. Trevennack assented gladly. If he wanted to fight the devil, it
was best at any rate he should be out of reach of Walter Tyrrel while
he did it. And it was a good thing to get him away, too, from St.
Michael's Mount, and St. Michael's Crag, and St. Michael's Chair, and
all the other reminders of his archangelic dignity in the Penzance
neighborhood. Why, she remembered with a wan smile--the dead ghost of a
smile rather--he couldn't even pass the Angel Inn at Helston without
explaining to his companions that the parish church was dedicated to
St. Michael, and that the swinging sign of the old coaching house once
bore a picture of the winged saint himself in mortal conflict with his
Satanic enemy. It was something, at any rate, to get Trevennack away
from a district so replete with memories of his past greatness, to say
nothing of the spot where their poor boy had died. But Mrs. Trevennack
didn't know that one thing which led her husband to select Dartmoor
this time for his summer holiday was the existence, on the wild hills a
little behind Ivybridge, of a clatter-crowned peak, known to all the
country-side as St. Michael's Tor, and crowned in earlier days by a
medieval chapel. It was on this sacred site of his antique cult that
Trevennack wished to fight the internal devil. And he would fight it
with a will, on that he was resolved; fight and, as became his angelic
reputation, conquer.
CHAPTER XI.
BUSINESS IS BUSINESS.
It reconciled Cleer to leaving London for awhile when she learnt that
Eustace Le Neve was going north to Yorkshire, with Walter Tyrrel, to
inspect the site of the proposed Wharfedale viaduct. Not that she ever
mentioned his companion's name in her father's presence. Mrs.
Trevennack had warned her many times over, with tears in her eyes, but
without cause assigned, never to allude to Tyrrel's existence before
her father's face; and Cleer, though she never for one moment suspected
the need for such reticence, obeyed her mother's injunction with
implicit honesty. So they parted two ways, Eustace and Tyrrel for the
north, the Trevennacks for Devonshire. Cleer needed a change indeed;
she'd spent the best part of a year in London. And for Cleer, that was
a wild and delightful holiday. Though Eustace wasn't there, to be sure,
he wrote hopefully from the north; he was maturing his ideas; he was
evolving a plan; the sense of the magnitude of his stake in this
attempt had given him an unwonted outburst of inspiration. As she
wandered with her father among those boggy uplands, or stood on the
rocky tors that so strangely crest the low flat hill-tops of the great
Devonian moor. She felt a marvelous exhilaration stir her blood--the
old Cornish freedom making itself felt through all the restrictions of
our modern civilization. She was to the manner born, and she loved the
Celtic West Country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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