"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 constituency 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 grassy 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 Cæsars."
"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 Glastonbury."