—One; and after we had been there, we felt sure he never went again!
There were two roads, we learnt, to that immortal town; one very good, but dull; the other bad—and beautiful. We chose the latter, and never repented.
Nor, in passing through Penzance, did we repent not having taken up our quarters there. It was pretty, but so terribly "genteel," so extremely civilised. Glancing up at the grand hotel, we thought with pleasure of our old-fashioned inn at Marazion, where the benign waiter took quite a fatherly interest in our proceedings, even to giving us for dinner our very own blackberries, gathered yesterday on the road, and politely hindering another guest from helping himself to half a dishful, as "they belonged to the young ladies." Truly, there are better things in life than fashionable hotels.
But the neighbourhood of Penzance is lovely. Shrubs and flowers such as one sees on the shores of the Mediterranean grew and flourished in cottage-gardens, and the forest trees we drove under, whole avenues of them, were very fine; gentlemen's seats appeared here and there, surrounded with the richest vegetation, and commanding lovely views. As the road gradually mounted upwards, we saw, clear as in a panorama, the whole coast from the Lizard Point to the Land's End,—which we should behold to-morrow.
For, hearing that every week-day about a hundred tourists in carriages, carts, and omnibuses, usually flocked thither, we decided that the desire of our lives, the goal of our pilgrimage, should be visited by us on a Sunday. We thought that to drive us thither in solitary Sabbatic peace would be fully as good for Charles's mind and morals as to hang all day idle about Marazion; and he seemed to think so himself. Therefore, in prospect of to-morrow, he dealt very tenderly with his horse to-day, and turned us out to walk up the heaviest hills, of which there were several, between Penzance and Castle-an-Dinas.
"There it is," he said at last, stopping in the midst of a wide moor and pointing to a small building, sharp against the sky. "The carriage can't get further, but you can go on, ladies, and I'll stop and gather some blackberries for you."
For brambles, gorse bushes, and clumps of fading heather, with one or two small stunted trees, were now the only curiosities of this, King Arthur's famed hunting castle, and hunting ground, which spread before us for miles and miles. Passing a small farm-house, we made our way to the building Charles pointed out, standing on the highest ridge of the promontory, whose furthest point is the Land's End. Standing there, we could see—or could have seen but that the afternoon had turned grey and slightly misty—the ocean on both sides. Inland, the view seemed endless. Roughtor and Brown Willy, two Dartmoor hills, are said to be visible sometimes. Nearer, little white dots of houses show the mining districts of Redruth and Camborne.
But here, all was desolate solitude. A single wayfarer, looking like a working man in his Sunday best going to visit friends, but evidently tired, as if he had walked for miles, just glanced at us, and passed on. We stood, all alone, on the very spot where many a time must have stood King Arthur, Queen Guinevere, Sir Launcelot, and the other knights—or the real human beings, whether barbarian or not, who formed the originals of those mythical personages.
All had vanished now. Nothing was left but a common-place little tower, built up of the fragments of the old castle, and a wide, pathless moor, over which the wind sighed, and the mist crept. No memorial whatever of King Arthur, except the tradition—which time and change have been powerless to annihilate—that such a man once existed. The long vitality which the legend keeps proves that he must have been a remarkable man in his day. Romance itself cannot exist without a foundation in reality.