Set in Silver Part 25

The Tyndals paid Sir Lionel compliments, and seemed to be delighted to meet him, evidently regarding him as a great celebrity, which, I suppose, he really is. Then, when they had made him sufficiently uncomfortable (compliments are to him what a sudden plague of locusts would be to most men), they turned to me.

"Surely we have met before, Miss Lethbridge?" remarked Mrs. Tyndal. And you ought to have seen how Mrs. Senter's features sharpened, as she waited for me to stammer or blush.

As far as the blush was concerned, she had her money's worth; and I only didn't stammer because I was obliged to stop and think before replying.

I almost wors.h.i.+pped Sir Lionel when he answered for me, in a quick, positive way he has, which there seems no gainsaying. I suppose men who live in the East cultivate that, as it keeps natives from arguing and answering back.

"Impossible," said he, "unless it was at Versailles, where my ward has been at school since she was a very small child, with no holidays except at St. Cloud."

"Mightn't it have been at Paris?" obligingly suggested Mrs. Senter, determined I shouldn't be let off, if conviction of any sort were possible.

"No, I don't think it was at Paris," murmured Mrs. Tyndal, reflectively, eyeing me in the sunset light, which was turning to pure amethyst. "Now, where _could_ it have been? I seem to a.s.sociate your face with--with Italy."

Oh, my goodness! She _was_ getting "warm" in our game of "hide the handkerchief."

"She has never been to Italy," said Sir Lionel, beginning to look rather cross, as if Mrs. Tyndal were taking liberties with his belongings--of which, you see, he thinks me one.

"Not even--Venice?" she persisted. "Oh, yes, _that_ is it! Now I know where I seem to have seen you--at Venice. You remember, don't you, George?"

By this time sparks had lighted up in Sir Lionel's eyes, as if he were a Turk, and one of the ladies of his harem were unjustly suspected.

"It is impossible for Mr. Tyndal to remember what didn't happen," he said, dropping a lump of ice into his voice. "You saw someone who looked like her in Venice, perhaps, but not my ward."

I was almost sorry for the poor Tyndals, who meant no harm, though they had the air of being so frightfully rich and prosperous that it seemed ridiculous to pity them.

"Of course, it could only have been a resemblance," said Mr. Tyndal, with that snubby glare at Mrs. Tyndal which husbands and wives keep for each other.

"It must have been," she responded, taking up her cue; for naturally they didn't want to begin their acquaintance with a distinguished person by offending him.

These signs of docility caused Sir Lionel to relent and come down off his high horse. Whenever he has been at all haughty or impatient with his sister (whose denseness would sometimes try a saint) he is sorry in a minute, and tries to be extra nice. It was the same now in the case of the poor Tyndals, whose Etonian cousin had all the time been gazing up at him with awed adoration, as of a hero on a pedestal; and suddenly a quaint thought struck me. I remembered about the Bengalese Sir Lionel was supposed to have executed for some offence or other, and I could see him being sorry immediately afterward, tearing around trying to stick their heads on again, and saying pleasant words.

Well, he stuck the Tyndals' heads on very kindly, so that they almost forgot they'd ever been slashed off; and when Mrs. Norton came out, which she did in a few minutes, looking as if she'd washed the dust off her face with kitchen soap, we all strolled up and down together, till it was time for dinner.

Mrs. Tyndal walked with me, but not a word did she say about Venice.

That subject was to be tabooed, but I'm far from sure she was convinced of her mistake, and she couldn't overcome her intense interest in my features. However, she seems good-natured, as if even to please Mrs.

Senter she wouldn't care to do me a bad turn. Only, I don't think people do things from motives as a rule, do you? They just suddenly find they want to do them, and presto, the things are done! That's why the world's so exciting.

We chatted non-committally of cabbages and kings and automobiles; and I recalled tracing pneu-tracks like illusive lights and shadows before us on the damp road, as we spun into Tintagel. No doubt they were the pneus of the Tyndals.

Their table was next ours in the dining room, so close that motor-chat was tossed back and forth, and it appeared that Mr. Tyndal was as proud of his car as a cat of its mouse. Mrs. Tyndal's mice are her jewels, and she has droves of them, which she displayed at dinner. Afterward she did lace-work, which made her rings gleam beautifully, and she said she didn't particularly like doing it, but it was something to "kill time."

How awful! But I suppose frightfully rich people are like that. They sometimes get fatty degeneration of the soul.

Well, nothing more happened that evening, except that the Tyndal boy and I made great friends--quite a nice boy, pining for some mischief that idle hands might do; and his cousins said that, as we were going to stop several days at Tintagel, "making it a centre," they would stop, too.

Sir Lionel didn't appear overjoyed at the decision, but Mrs. Senter seemed glad. She and her sister, Mrs. Burden, have known the Tyndals for years, and are by way of being friends, yet she works off her little firework epigrams against them when their backs are turned, as she does on everybody. According to her, their princ.i.p.al charm for society in London is their cook; and she says the art treasures in their house are all illegitimate; near-Gobelin, not-quite-Raphaels, and so on. She makes Sir Lionel smile; but I wonder if she'd adopt this cheap method if he'd ever mentioned to her (as he has to me) that of all meannesses he despises disloyalty?

The Tyndal boy went up to bed before the rest of us, and when Sir Lionel and Mrs. Norton had been forced to play bridge with Mrs. Senter and Mr.

Tyndal, I slipped away, too.

We'd lived in the hotel such a short time, and it's so big, that I counted on recognizing my room by the boots which I put outside the door when I went down to sunset and dinner. Of course, I'd forgotten my number, as I always do. I wouldn't consider myself a normal girl if I didn't.

There were the boots, not taken away yet--looking abject, as boots do in such situations--but I was pleased to see that they compared favourably in size with the gray alligator-skin and patent leather eccentricities of Mrs. Senter, reposing on an adjacent doormat. With this frivolous reflection in my mind, it didn't occur to me, as I turned the handle of the door marked by my brown footgear, that the room now appeared farther to the left, along the pa.s.sage, than I had the impression of its being.

I opened the door, which was not locked, walked in, felt about for the electric light, switched it on, and had sauntered over to a table in the centre of the room before I noticed anything strange. Then, to my startled vision appeared unfamiliar brushes and combs on a chest of drawers; beautiful, but manly looking silver-backed ones; and along the wall was a row of flat tweed legs, on stretchers.

For an instant I stood still, bewildered, as if I'd walked into a dream, beguiled by a false clue of boots; and during my few seconds of temporary aberration my dazed eyes fell upon a book which lay on the table. It was Sir Lionel's "Morte d'Arthur" (second volume; he's lent me the first), and in it for a marker was a _glove of mine_. I'd lost it at Torquay, after we had our dear, good talk, and he knew I was looking for it, all about the sitting room we had at the hotel there, yet he never said a word.

Oh, dear little French mother, you can't think what an odd feeling it gave me to see he had kept my glove, and had put it in his book! Yes, I believe you _can_ think, too, because probably you've felt just like that yourself when you were a girl, only you never thought it _convenable_ to describe your symptoms for your daughter's benefit. I know it was perfectly schoolgirlish of me, and I ought to have outgrown such sentimentality with my teens; but if you could see Sir Lionel, and understand the sort of man he is, you wouldn't think me so outrageous.

That he--he, of all men--should care to keep anything which would remind him of an insignificant child like me! I'm afraid there came a p.r.i.c.kly feeling in my eyelids, and I had the most idiotic desire to kiss the book, which I knew would have a nice smell of his cigarettes, because my borrowed volume has. Of course, I wouldn't have done it for anything, though, so don't think I'm worse than I am. And really, really, I don't believe I'm exactly in love. I hope I'm not so foolish. It's just a kind of infatuated fascination of a moth--not for a candle, but for a great, brilliant motor lamp. I've seen them at night das.h.i.+ng themselves against the gla.s.s of our Bleriots once or twice when we've been out late, and I know how hopelessly they smash their soft, silly wings. I should have been like them if I'd kissed the book; but instead, after that one look which told me the glove really was _my_ glove, I bounced out of the room, s.n.a.t.c.hing my boots up as I dashed across the threshold.

b.u.mp! as I did so I almost telescoped with Sir Lionel who had retrieved his boots, probably from my doormat. And at the same moment came a boyish yelp from somewhere, followed by the smart slap of a door shutting. I wished it had been a smart slap of my hand on the Tyndal boy's ear, for of course the boot-changing was that little fiend's work, I guessed in a second.

So did Sir Lionel, and we both laughed--at ourselves, at each other, and everything. It seems that the Youthful Horror had changed every pair of boots along the corridor, and made the most weird combinations. I don't suppose Sir Lionel thought about the glove in the book, anyway at the time, and luckily there was nothing tell-tale in my room, in case he strayed in, except your photograph in the silver frame you gave me on my last birthday. And of course he could make nothing of that.

He had got out of playing bridge, because when Mrs. Tyndal saw he wasn't keen, she offered to take a hand, and he said he did want to write to a man in Bengal, his best friend.

We talked to each other only a few minutes, after the boot-puzzle had been put right; but would you believe it, up came Mrs. Senter, while Sir Lionel and I were bidding each other good night in front of my door? She looked as stiff and wicked as a frozen snake for an instant; then she smiled too sweetly, and said she'd come for her Spanish lace mantilla.

But I almost know she had fancied that Sir Lionel might have made an excuse to get a word with me, and had flown up to find out for herself.

You can imagine, dear, that I didn't feel much like going to bed when I'd finished saying good-night, and shut my door upon the world. It seemed to me that this birthplace of Sir Lionel's ancestor, King Arthur Pendragon, was too romantic and wonderful to go tamely to sleep in. And what was my covered balcony for, if not to dream dreams and think thoughts, by moonlight?

So I switched off the electricity in my room, and went out to find that the moon (which is big and grand now) had come out, too, tearing apart a great black cloud in order to look down on Arthur-land, and see if she had any adorers. Anyway, she must have seen me, for she turned the night into silver dawn, so clear and bright that she couldn't have missed me if she tried.

I did wish for you to be with me then, and I'm ashamed to confess I wouldn't have minded Sir Lionel as a companion, because Tintagel seems so much more his than mine.

Never did I hear the sea talk poetry and legend as it does round those dark rocks of old "Dundagel." I thought as I leaned out from my balcony, a lonely, unappreciated Juliet--that the sound was like the chanting voice of an ancient bard, telling stories of the golden days to himself or to all who might care to listen. I fancied I could hear the words:

They found a naked child upon the sands Of dark Dundagel by the Cornish sea.

I could see the ruined castle, on its twin cliffs, below the hotel-castle cliff and between me and the sea; and the very meagreness of what remains seemed to increase the interest and mystery by stimulating the imagination, forcing it to create its own pictures. I "reconstructed" the castle, building it of the same stone they use now at Tintagel, and have used for the last thousand years or so; a dark stone, singularly rich with colour--pansy and wallflower colour, with splashes of green flung on to dead gray, like bright autumn leaves stirred into a heap of other leaves dim and dead. And the mortar for my masonry was the moonlight which flooded the sea and those wide downs whose divisions into fields turned them into enormous maps.

I worked myself up into such a romantic mood that I almost cried in the joy and pain of living, and expected to look back upon myself with the "utmost spurn" when I should come back to real life after a good sleep in the morning. But I didn't,--perhaps because, instead of encouraging the good sleep, I lay and listened to the wild song of the Cornish wind.

I waked early, feeling exactly the same, if not more so, and could hardly wait to get down into the ruins of the old castle. I splashed about in a cold bath, dressed as quickly as a well-groomed girl can, and then--I committed what might seem an indiscreet act if the last of the Pendragons and I did not stand toward each other in the place of guardian and ward. "Nothing is, but thinking makes it so." And Sir Lionel certainly does think we're in those positions; therefore it was all right for me to knock at his door, and ask through the keyhole if he would very, very much mind taking me to the castle?

He was dressed, and opened the door instantly. It was the one thing he would have liked to propose, said he, only he had been afraid of disturbing me so early. Wasn't that kind of him? I remembered the glove, and the thought of it was more delicious than a breakfast of Cornish cream and honey; although, of course, lurking in the background of my mind was the horrid idea that he might have accidentally picked the thing up to use as a bookmark. And another idea, gloomier even, though not so horrid, was that, even if he does like me well enough to keep things of mine, he must soon grow to hate me when he knows who I am.

He suggested coffee, but I wouldn't have it, because I was afraid Mrs.

Senter might appear and want to go to the castle too. I had visions of her, hearing our voices in the corridor, and das.h.i.+ng out of bed to fling on her clothes; but even if she did overhear the whole conversation, I don't think she's the kind who looks her best before breakfast, if she has dressed in a hurry; and anyway, we were spared the apparition.

It was a fine scramble getting to the ruins, and when Sir Lionel had opened a door (with a key you get from a cottage close by the sea) it was quite as if he were my host, entertaining me in his ancestral home.

I told him that it felt twice as interesting to be there with a true Pendragon, than with a mere king or anybody like that, and he seemed pleased.

"I _hope_ I am a 'true' Pendragon," he said, rather thoughtfully. "One must try to be--always." He looked at me very, very kindly, as if he would have liked to say something more; but he didn't speak, and turned away his eyes to look far over the sea. It was only for a little while, though, that he was absent-minded. Sitting there on the rough, wind-blown gra.s.s which is the floor of the castle now, he told me things about the place and its history. How Dundagel meant the "Safe Castle,"

and how the "Arthurian believers" say it was built by the Britons in earliest Roman days; how David Bruce of Wales was entertained by the Earl of Cornwall on the very spot where we were sitting, and how the great hall, once famous, was destroyed as long ago as when Chaucer was a baby. And as he talked, the rising wind wailed and sobbed like old, old witches crying over the evil fallen on Arthur and his castle. Such an old, wise-sounding wind it was, old enough to have been blowing when Arthur was a baby, drowning the lullabies sung by his mother Igerna, "that greatest beauty in Britain."

We forgot breakfast, and stopped in the ruins a long time, until suddenly we both realized that we were desperately hungry. But instead of going up to our own hotel, we walked into the quaint village (whose real name is Trevena, though n.o.body calls it that) and had something to eat at a hotel where Sir Lionel used to stop occasionally when he was a boy. Afterward, we went to see the village schoolmaster, whom he knew; such a nice man, who paints pictures as well as teaches the children--and I felt guilty at being introduced as Sir Lionel's "ward."

I think my conscience is like a bruised peach, pinched by many fingers to see if it's ripe, I have that guilty feeling so often! When we spoke of the schoolmaster's versatility, he laughed and said it was "nothing to his predecessor's," who used to cut the children's hair, clip horses, measure land, act as parish clerk as well as teacher, pull teeth, and beat such transgressors as had to be punished in a way less serious than prison. Doesn't that take one back to long ago? But so does everything in Tintagel--and all over Cornwall, Sir Lionel says. They have such nice old-fas.h.i.+oned words here! Isn't "jingle" good? It's some kind of a conveyance, exactly the opposite of a motor-car, I fancy, from the description. And I like the word "huer," too. It means a man who gives the hue and cry when the pilchards are coming in, and all the fishermen must run to the sea.

I should like to know everything about Cornwall, from the smugglers, and the famous wrestlers, to the witches--the last of whom lives near Boscastle still. But the little that travellers in motors can learn about places steeped in history, is like trying to know all about a beautiful great tree by one leaf of flying gold which falls into the automobile as it sweeps by, along the road. Still, the little one does learn is unforgettable, impressed upon the mind in a different way from the mere _learning_. And I suppose few people know everything about every place, even in their own countries. If they did, I'm sure they'd be prigs, and no one would want to know _them_!

When we got back to our hotel castle on the cliff, the Tyndals' motor was at the door, a huge, gorgeous chariot, and nothing would do but we must "try the car." Mrs. Senter had promised to go, and was putting on her hat.