Chapter 11

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.

But to Michael Trevennack it was life, health, vigor. He hated London.
He hated officialdom. He hated the bonds of red tape that enveloped
him. It's hard to know yourself an archangel--

"One of the seven who nearest to the throne
Stand ready at command, and are as eyes
That run through all the heavens, or down to the earth,"

and yet to have to sit at a desk all day long, with a pen in your
hand, in obedience to the orders of the First Lord of the Admiralty!
It's hard to know you can

"Bear swift errands over moist and dry,
O'er sea and land,"

as his laureate Milton puts it, and yet be doomed to keep still hour
after hour in a stuffy office, or to haggle over details of pork and
cheese in a malodorous victualing yard. Trevennack knew his "Paradise
Lost" by heart--it was there, indeed, that he had formed his main
ideas of the archangelic character; and he repeated the sonorous lines
to himself, over and over again, in a ringing, loud voice, as he
roamed the free moor or poised light on the craggy pinnacles. This was
the world that he loved, these wild rolling uplands, these tall peaks
of rock, these great granite boulders; he had loved them always, from
the very beginning of things; had he not poised so of old, ages and
ages gone by, on