Set in Silver
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 principal 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 passage, 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 prickly
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 dashing themselves against
the glass 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, snatching my boots up as I dashed across the threshold.
Bump! 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 dashing 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 grass 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 nobody calls it that) and had something to
eat at a hotel where Sir Lionel used to stop occasionally when he was a