Chapter 1

A CORNISH LANDLORD.

"Then you don't care for the place yourself, Tyrrel?" Eustace Le Neve
said, musingly, as he gazed in front of him with a comprehensive
glance at the long gray moor and the wide expanse of black and stormy
water.

"It's bleak, of course; bleak and cold, I grant you; all this upland
plateau about the Lizard promontory seems bleak and cold everywhere;
but to my mind it has a certain wild and weird picturesqueness of its
own for all that. It aims at gloominess. I confess in its own way I
don't dislike it."

"For my part," Tyrrel answered, clinching his hand hard as he spoke,
and knitting his brow despondently, "I simply hate it. If I wasn't the
landlord here, to be perfectly frank with you, I'd never come near
Penmorgan. I do it for conscience' sake, to be among my own people.
That's my only reason. I disapprove of absenteeism; and now the land's
mine, why, I must put up with it, I suppose, and live upon it in spite
of myself. But I do it against the grain. The whole place, if I tell
you the truth, is simply detestable to me."

He leaned on his stick as he spoke, and looked down gloomily at the
heather. A handsome young man, Walter Tyrrel, of the true Cornish
type--tall, dark, poetical-looking, with pensive eyes and a thick
black mustache, which gave dignity and character to his otherwise
almost too delicately feminine features. And he stood on the open moor
just a hundred yards outside his own front door at Penmorgan, on the
Lizard peninsula, looking westward down a great wedge-shaped gap in
the solid serpentine rock to a broad belt of sea beyond without a ship
or a sail on it. The view was indeed, as Eustace Le Neve admitted, a
somewhat bleak and dreary one. For miles, as far as the eye could
reach, on either side, nothing was to be seen but one vast heather-
clad upland, just varied at the dip by bare ledges of dark rock and a
single gray glimpse of tossing sea between them. A little farther on,
to be sure, winding round the cliff path, one could open up a glorious
prospect on either hand over the rocky islets of Kynance and Mullion
Cove, with Mounts Bay and Penzance and the Land's End in the distance.
That was a magnificent site--if only his ancestors had had the sense
to see it. But Penmorgan House, like most other Cornish landlords'
houses, had been carefully placed--for shelter's sake, no doubt--in a
seaward hollow where the view was most restricted; and the outlook one
got from it, over black moor and blacker rocks, was certainly by no
means of a cheerful character. Eustace Le Neve himself, most cheery
and sanguine of men, just home from his South American railway-laying,
and with the luxuriant vegetation of the Argentine