The very phrase Anne Valery had used! It made Nathanael's wife rather thoughtful. She wondered what was the feeling like, when people “belonged to one another.”
But she had no time for meditation; for now the great grey ruin loomed in sight, and everybody, including the shouting boys in the carriage behind, was eager to point it out, especially when Agatha made the lamentable confession that she had never seen a ruined castle in her life before.
“And you might go all over England and not find such another as this,” said Mr. Dugdale, riding up to her with a smile of great satisfaction. “Nobody thinks much of it in these parts, and few antiquarians ever come and poke about it. Perhaps it's as well. They couldn't find out more than we know already. But no!”—and his eye, taking in the noble old ruin arched over by the broad sky, assumed its peculiar dreamy expression—“We don't know anything. Nobody knows anything about this wonderful world!”
Agatha looked around. On the top of a smooth conical hill, each side of which was guarded by other two hills equally smooth and bare, rose the wreck of the magnificent fortress, enough of the walls remaining to show its extent and plan. Its destroyer had been—not Father Time, who does his work quietly and gracefully—but that worse spoiler, man. Huge masses of masonry, hurled from the summit, lay in the moat beneath, fixed as they had been for centuries, with vegetation growing over them. Some of the walls, undermined and shaken from their foundations, took strange, oblique angles, yet refused to fall. Marks of cannon-balls were indented on the stonework of the battered gateway, which still remained a gateway—probably the very same under which Queen Elfrida, “fair and false,” had offered to her son the stirrup-cup.
The general impression left on the mind was not that of natural decay, solemn and holy, but of sudden destruction, coming unawares, and struggled against, as a man in the flower of life struggles with mortality. There was something very melancholy about the ruined fortress left on the hill-top in sight of the little town close below, where its desolation was unheeded. Agatha, sensitive, enthusiastic, and easily impressed, grew silent, and wondered that her companions could laugh so carelessly, even when passing under the grey portal into the very precincts of the deserted castle.
“We shall not find a soul here,” said Harrie; “scarcely anybody ever comes at this season, except when our Kingcombe Oddfellows' Club have a picnic on this bowling-green; or schoolboys get together and climb up the ivy to frighten the jackdaws—my husband has done it many a time—haven't you, Duke?”
“I see mamma,” vaguely responded Duke, who was busy lifting his boys down from the carriage, with a paternal care and tenderness beautiful to see. He then, with one little fellow on his shoulder, another holding his hand, and a third clinging to his coat-tails, strode off up the green ascent, without paying the slightest attention to Mrs. Harper. Which dereliction from the rules of politeness it never once came into her mind to notice or to blame.
“There they go! Nobody minds me; it's all Pa!” said Mrs. Dugdale, with an assumption of wrath; a very miserable pretence, while her look was so happy and fond. “You see, Agatha, what you'll come to—after ten years' matrimony!”
Agatha's heart was so full, she could not laugh but sighed, yet it was not with unhappiness.
He and Harrie wandered over the castle together, for the two Miss Harpers did not approve of climbing. The little boys and “Pa” reappeared now and then at all sorts of improbable and terrifically dangerous corners, and occasionally Mrs. Dugdale made frantic darts after them. Especially when they were all seen standing on one of the topmost precipices, the father giving a practical scientific lesson on the momentum of falling bodies; in illustration of which Harrie declared he would certainly throw little Brian out of his arms, in a fit of absence of mind, thoroughly believing the child was a stone.