Two Sides of the Face

Two Sides of the Face
by Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

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Title: Two Sides of the Face Midwinter Tales
Author: Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
Release Date: August 1, 2007 [EBook #22198]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TWO
SIDES OF THE FACE ***

Produced by Lionel Sear

TWO SIDES OF THE FACE.
MIDWINTER TALES.

By
A.T. Quiller-Couch.
CONTENTS
Stephen of Steens.
The Horror on the Stair.
The Mazed Election (1768).
The Hotwells Duel.
Cleeve Court.
The Collaborators.
The Rider in the Dawn.
My Lady's Coach.

STEPHEN OF STEENS.
A Tale of Wild Justice.
I.
Beside a high-road in the extreme West of England stands a house
which you might pass many times without suspecting it of a dark
history or, indeed, any history worth mention. The country itself, which
here slopes westward from the Mining District to Mount's Bay, has
little beauty and--unless you happen to have studied it--little interest. It
is bare, and it comes near to be savage without attaining to the romantic.
It includes, to be sure, one or two spots of singular beauty; but they
hide themselves and are not discoverable from the road, which rewards
you only by its extravagant wealth of wild flowers, its clean sea-breeze,
and perhaps a sunset flaming across the low levels and silhouetting the

long shoulder of Godolphin Hill between you and the Atlantic, five
miles distant.
Noting, as you passed, the size of the house, its evident marks of age,
and the meanness of its more modern outbuildings, you would set it
down for the residence of an old yeoman family fallen on evil days.
And your second thought--if it suggested a second--might be that these
old yeomen, not content with a lonely dwelling in a lonely angle of the
land, had churlishly built themselves in and away from sight even of
the infrequent traveller; for a high wall enclosing a courtlage in front
screens all but the upper story with its slated roof, heavy chimneys and
narrow upper windows; and these again are half hidden by the boughs
of two ragged yew trees growing within the enclosure. Behind the
house, on a rising slope, tilled fields have invaded a plantation of noble
ash trees and cut it back to a thin and ugly quadrilateral. Ill-kept as they
are, and already dilapidated, the modern farm-buildings wear a
friendlier look than the old mansion, and by contrast a cheerful air, as
of inferiors out-at-elbows, indeed, but unashamed, having no lost
dignities to brood upon.
Yet it may happen that your driver--reading, as he thinks, some
curiosity in your glance at Steens (for so the house is called), or politely
anxious to beguile the way--pulls up his horse and with a jerk of his
whip draws your attention to certain pock-marks in the courtlage wall.
Or perhaps, finding you really curious but unable from your seat in the
vehicle to distinguish them, he dismounts and traces them out for you
with the butt of his whip-handle. They are bullet-marks, he says, and
there are plenty of others on the upper front of the house within--even
grooves cut by bullets in the woodwork of the windows. Then follows a
story which you will find some difficulty in swallowing. That in 1734,
when Walpole was keeping England at peace--that almost at the
moment when he boasted, "There are fifty thousand men slain this year
in Europe, and not one Englishman,"--an unmilitary pewterer was here
holding at bay the Sheriff, his posse and half a regiment of soldiers,
slaying seven and wounding many; and that for eight months he defied
the law and defended himself, until cannon had to be dragged over the
roads from Pendennis Castle to quell him--such a tale may well seem

incredible to you unless you can picture the isolation of Cornwall in
days when this highway was a quag through which, perhaps twice a
week, a train of pack-horses floundered. The man who brought Roger
Stephen to justice, though tardily and half against his sense of right,
was Sir John Piers, of Nansclowan, hard by. And when Sir John--"the
little baronet," as he was called, a Parliamentman, and the one whom
Walpole never could bribe--married pretty Mistress Catherine, the
heiress of Sherrington across Tamar, his lady's dowry was hauled down
through the Duchy to Nansclowan in waggons--a wonder to
behold--and stacked in Nansclowan cellars: ten thousand pounds, and
every doit of it in half-crowns. Eighty thousand half-crowns!
Be pleased