Mount Royal Volume I Part 4

"Of course, you must see Tintagel," she said; "everybody who comes to this part of the world is in a tremendous hurry to see King Arthur's castle. I have known people set out in the middle of the night."

"And have you ever known any one of them who was not just a little disappointed with that stupendous monument of traditional royalty?"

asked Miss Bridgeman, with her most prosaic air. "They expect so much--halls, and towers, and keep, and chapel--and find only ruined walls, and the faint indication of a grave-yard. King Arthur is a name to conjure with, and Tintagel is like Mont Blanc or the Pyramids. It can never be so grand as the vision its very name has evoked."

"I blush to say that I have thought very little about Tintagel hitherto," said Mr. Hamleigh; "it has not been an integral part of my existence; so my expectations are more reasonable than those of the enthusiastic tourist. I promise to be delighted with your ruins."

"Oh, but you will pretend," said Christabel, "and that will be hateful!

I would rather have to deal with one of those provoking people who look about them blankly, and exclaim, 'Is this all?' and who stand in the very centre of Arthur's Hall, and ask, 'And, pray, where is Tintagel?--when are we to see the castle?' No! give me the man who can take in the grandeur of that wild height at a glance, and whose fancy can build up those ruined walls, re-create those vanished towers, fill the halls with knights in s.h.i.+ning armour, and lovely ladies--see Guinevere herself upon her throne--clothed in white samite--mystic, wonderful!"

"And with Lancelot in the background," said Mr. Hamleigh. "I think the less we say about Guinevere the better, and your snaky Vivien, and your senile Merlin, your prying Modred. What a disreputable set these Round Table people seem to have been altogether--they need have been dead thirteen hundred years for us to admire them!"

They were driving along the avenue by this time, the stout chestnut cob going gaily in the fresh morning air--Mr. Hamleigh sitting face to face with Christabel as she drove. What a fair face it was in the clear light of day! How pure and delicate every tone, from the whiteness of the lily to the bloom of the wild rose! How innocent the expression of the large liquid eyes, which seemed to smile at him as he talked! He had known so many pretty women--his memory was like a gallery of beautiful faces; but he could recall no face so completely innocent, so divinely young. "It is the youthfulness of an unsullied mind," he said to himself; "I have known plenty of girls as young in years, but not one perfectly pure from the taint of worldliness and vanity. The trail of the serpent was over them all!"

They drove down hill into Boscastle, and then straightway began to ascend still steeper hills upon the other side of the harbour.

"You ought to throw a viaduct across the valley," said Mr.

Hamleigh--"something like Brunel's bridge at Saltash; but perhaps you have hardly traffic enough to make it pay."

They went winding up the new road to Trevena, avoiding the village street, and leaving the Church of the Silent Tower on its windy height on their right hand. The wide Atlantic lay far below them on the other side of those green fields which bordered the road; the air they breathed was keen with the soft breath of the sea. But autumn had hardly plucked a leaf from the low storm-beaten trees, or a flower from the tall hedgerows, where the red blossom of the Ragged Robin mixed with the pale gold of the hawk-weed, and the fainter yellow of the wild cistus. The ferns had hardly begun to wither, and Angus Hamleigh, whose last experiences had been among the stone walls of Aberdeens.h.i.+re, wondered at the luxuriance of this western world, where the banks were built up and fortified with boulders of marble-veined spar.

They drove through the village of Trevalga, in which there is never an inn or public-house of any kind--not even a cottage licensed for the sale of beer. There was the wheelwright, carpenter, builder, Jack-of-all-trades, with his shed and his yard--the blacksmith, with his forge going merrily--village school--steam thres.h.i.+ng-machine at work--church--chapel; but never a drop of beer--and yet the people at Trevalga are healthy, and industrious, and decently clad, and altogether comfortable looking.

"Some day we will take you to call at the Rectory," said Christabel, pointing skywards with her whip.

"Do you mean that the Rector has gone to Heaven?" asked Angus, looking up into the distant blue; "or is there any earthly habitation higher than the road on which we are driving."

"Didn't you see the end of the lane, just now?" asked Christabel, laughing; "it is rather steep--an uphill walk all the way; but the views are lovely."

"We will walk to the Rectory to-morrow," said Miss Bridgeman; "this lazy mode of transit must not be tolerated after to-day."

Even the drive to Trevena was not all idleness; for after they had pa.s.sed the entrance to the path leading to the beautiful waterfall of St. Nectan's Kieve, hard by St. Piran's chapel and well--the former degraded to a barn, and the latter, once of holy repute, now chiefly useful as a cool repository for b.u.t.ter from the neighbouring dairy of Trethevy Farm--they came to a hill, which had to be walked down; to the lowest depth of the Rocky Valley, where a stone bridge spans the rapid brawling stream that leaps as a waterfall into the gorge at St. Nectan's Kieve, about a mile higher up the valley. And then they came to a corresponding hill, which had to be walked up--because in either case it was bad for the cob to have a weight behind him. Indeed, the cob was so accustomed to consideration in this matter, that he made a point of stopping politely for his people to alight at either end of anything exceptional in the way of a hill.

"I'm afraid you spoil your pony," said Mr. Hamleigh, throwing the reins over his arm, and resigning himself to a duty which made him feel very much like a sea-side flyman, earning his day's wages toilsomely, and saving his horse with a view to future fares.

"Better that than to spoil you," answered Miss Bridgeman, as she and Christabel walked briskly beside him. "But if you fasten the reins to the dashboard, you may trust Felix."

"Won't he run away?"

"Not he," answered Christabel. "He knows that he would never be so happy with anybody else as he is with us."

"But mightn't he take a fancy for a short run; just far enough to allow of his reducing that dainty little carriage to match-wood? A well-fed underworked pony so thoroughly enjoys that kind of thing."

"Felix has no such diabolical suggestions. He is a conscientious person, and knows his duty. Besides, he is not underworked. There is hardly a day that he does not carry us somewhere."

Mr. Hamleigh surrendered the reins, and Felix showed himself worthy of his mistress's confidence, following at her heels like a dog, with his honest brown eyes fixed on the slim tall figure, as if it had been his guiding star.

"I want you to admire the landscape," said Christabel, when they were on the crest of the last hill; "is not that a lovely valley?"

Mr. Hamleigh willingly admitted the fact. The beauty of a pastoral landscape, with just enough of rugged wildness for the picturesque, could go no further.

"Creswick has immortalized yonder valley by his famous picture of the mill," said Miss Bridgeman, "but the romantic old mill of the picture has lately been replaced by that large ungainly building, quite out of keeping with its surroundings."

"Have you ever been in Switzerland?" asked Angus of Christabel, when they had stood for some moments in silent contemplation of the landscape.

"Never."

"Nor in Italy?"

"No. I have never been out of England. Since I was five years old I have hardly spent a year of my life out of Cornwall."

"Happy Cornwall, which can show so fair a product of its soil! Well, Miss Courtenay, I know Italy and Switzerland by heart, and I like this Cornish landscape better than either. It is not so beautiful--it would not do as well for a painter or a poet; but it comes nearer an Englishman's heart. What can one have better than the hills and the sea?

Switzerland can show you bigger hills, ghostly snow-shrouded pinnacles that mock the eye, following each other like a line of phantoms, losing themselves in the infinite; but Switzerland cannot show you that."

He pointed to the Atlantic: the long undulating line of the coast, rocky, rugged, yet verdant, with many a curve and promontory, many a dip and rise.

"It is the most everlasting kind of beauty, is it not?" asked Christabel, delighted at this little gush of warm feeling in one whose usual manner was so equable. "One could never tire of the sea. And I am always proud to remember that our sea is so big--stretching away and away to the New World. I should have liked it still better before the days of Columbus, when it led to the unknown!"

"Ah!" sighed Angus, "youth always yearns for the undiscovered. Middle age knows that there is nothing worth discovering!"

On the top of the hill they paused for a minute or so to contemplate the ancient Borough of Bossiney, which, until disfranchised in 1832, returned two members to Parliament, with a const.i.tuency of little more than a dozen, and which once had Sir Francis Drake for its representative. Here Mr. Hamleigh beheld that modest mound called the Castle Hill, on the top of which it was customary to read the writs before the elections.

An hour later they were eating their luncheon on that windy height where once stood the castle of the great king. To Christabel the whole story of Arthur and his knights was as real as if it had been a part of her own life. She had Tennyson's Arthur and Tennyson's Lancelot in her heart of hearts, and knew just enough of Sir Thomas Mallory's prose to give substance to the Laureate's poetic shadows. Angus amused himself a little at her expense, as they ate their chicken and salad on the gra.s.sy mounds which were supposed to be the graves of heroes who died before Athelstane drove the Cornish across the Tamar, and made his victorious progress through the country, even to the Scilly Isles, after defeating Howel, the last King of Cornwall.

"Do you really think that gentlemanly creature in the Laureate's epic--that most polished and perfect and most intensely modern English gentleman, self-contained, considerate of others, always the right man in the right place--is one whit like that half-naked sixth century savage--the real Arthur--whose Court costume was a coat of blue paint, and whose war-shriek was the yell of a Red Indian? What can be more futile than our setting up any one Arthur, and bowing the knee before him, in the face of the fact that Great Britain teems with monuments of Arthurs--Arthur's Seat in Scotland, Arthur's Castle in Wales, Arthur's Round Table here, there, and everywhere? Be sure that Arthur--Ardheer--the highest chief--was a generic name for the princes of those days, and that there were more Arthurs than ever there were Caesars."

"I don't believe one word you say," exclaimed Christabel, indignantly, "there was only one Arthur, the son of Uther and Ygerne, who was born in the castle that stood on this very cliff, on the first night of the year, and carried away in secret by Merlin, and reared in secret by Sir Anton's wife--the brave good Arthur--the Christian king--who was killed at the battle of Camlan, near Slaughter Bridge, and was buried at Glas...o...b..ry."

"And embalmed by Tennyson. The Laureate invented Arthur--he took out a patent for the Round Table, and his invention is only a little less popular than that other product of the age, the sewing-machine. How many among modern tourists would care about Tintagel if Tennyson had not revived the old legend?"

The butler had put up a bottle of champagne for Mr. Hamleigh--the two ladies drinking nothing but sparkling water--and in this beverage he drank hail to the spirit of the legendary prince.

"I am ready to believe anything now you have me up here," he said, "for I have a shrewd idea that without your help I should never be able to get down again. I should live and die on the top of this rocky promontory--sweltering in the summer sun--buffeted by the winter winds--an unwilling Simeon Stylites."

"Do you know that the very finest sheep in Cornwall are said to be grown on that island," said Miss Bridgeman gravely, pointing to the gra.s.sy top of the isolated crag in the foreground, whereon once stood the donjon keep. "I don't know why it should be so, but it is a tradition."

"Among butchers?" said Angus. "I suppose even butchers have their traditions. And the poor sheep who are condemned to exile on that lonely rock--the St. Helena of their woolly race--do they know that they are achieving a posthumous perfection--that they are straining towards the ideal in butcher's meat? There is room for much thought in the question."

"The tide is out," said Christabel, looking seaward; "I think we ought to do Trebarwith sands to-day."

"Is Trebarwith another of your lions?" asked Angus, placidly.

"Yes."

"Then, please save him for to-morrow. Let me drink the cup of pleasure to the dregs where we are. This champagne has a magical taste, like the philter which Tristan and Iseult were so foolish as to drink while they sailed across from Ireland to this Cornish sh.o.r.e. Don't be alarmed, Miss Bridgeman, I am not going to empty the bottle. I am not an educated tourist--have read neither Black nor Murray, and I am very slow about taking in ideas. Even after all you have told me, I am not clear in my mind as to which is the castle and which the chapel, and which the burial-ground. Let us finish the afternoon dawdling about Tintagel. Let us see the sun set from this spot, where Arthur must so often have watched it, if the men of thirteen hundred years ago ever cared to watch the sun setting, which I doubt. They belong to the night-time of the world, when civilization was dead in Southern Europe, and was yet unborn in the West. Let us dawdle about till it is time to drive back to Mount Royal, and then I shall carry away an impression. I am very slow at taking impressions."

"I think you want us to believe that you are stupid," said Christabel, laughing at the earnestness with which he pleaded.

"Believe me, no. I should like you to think me ever so much better than I am. Please, let us dawdle."