‘One has no wish to be interested in anything that is not pure and beautiful and good,’ announced Gundred, with an air of virtuous finality.
‘Oh, well, we’ll go there, anyhow,’ answered Kingston, shying away from the imminent argument, ‘and have no end of a mystic splendid time. We’ll sit about all day, and forget the world, and read novels to each other.’
‘Not novels, dear,’ said Gundred gently; ‘sensible books—yes?’
Kingston shrugged his shoulders. Clearly the conversation had run into one of its frequent culs-de-sac, and there was no continuing it. Gundred was impregnable to all assaults of the picturesque, and adamant to all new opinions or suggestions. Over Kingston was coming that bruised and daunted feeling to which, sooner or later, his meetings with her seemed invariably to lead. She held him at arm’s length, baffled him, rebuffed him, deliberately kept herself a stranger from his ardours, his intimacy. Each dialogue of theirs seemed to resolve itself inevitably into a futile if friendly discussion of topics indifferent. Of course this offered all the richer promise for the long years of coming matrimony, but meanwhile Gundred’s maidenly reserve turned the preliminary canter of courtship into a jog over rather arid and sterile ground. When Lady Adela tardily returned to the room, in the wake of tea, she found the lovers canvassing the Academy. Gundred, however, was so perfectly certain that her choice was sound and holy that the conversation was unfruitful if amiable. Lady Adela joined it, and it easily admitted a third voice.
CHAPTER V
Brakelond had the impassive mouldering grandeur of a great house that has outlived the troubled hours of its glory, and settled into a lethargic contemplation of its past. From very far away its castellated mass could be seen dominating the country from the steep wooded hill on which it perched. On three sides the forest flowed down in ample splendid folds, a cloak of emerald in spring, and, in autumn, cloth of gold. And along the fourth side the crag dropped away sheer into the western sea. Seen from afar, the Castle on its pinnacle had a remote and fairy-like effect, as if, indeed, the scene had been of Camelot or Broceliaunde. Into the clear blue of the sky pricked the soft sapphire masses of the Castle, the looming great Drum Tower, and the smaller, indistinguishable turrets; while, below, fell smooth and swift the dim violet of the woodland, like a misty drapery of colour. Over the country ran other lesser ranges, clothed in younger, neater woodlands; but the great building on its eminence ruled supreme, and the forest round the skirts of its hill was the very fairy-haunted forest of old romance. Among those gnarled trunks, in those green eternal twilights of the thicket, might Merlin still lie sleeping, or King Mark, a-hunting, yet hap on Tristram of Lyonesse. And far overhead, the crown of the country, rose the mystic walls of a Castle that might have held the fair Iseult or Morgan the Sorceress, a great drowsy splendour of stone, willingly cut off from the rush and turmoil of to-day, dreaming for ever, in complacent calm, of that hot and glorious life that it had long ceased to live.
As an old illustrious man or woman carries always the consciousness and the glamour of his achievement, no matter into what feebleness or decrepitude old age may have brought him, so buildings that are not of yesterday carry always the haunting sense of their past, and achieve a tranquil pride in desolation and the world’s oblivion, for ever beyond the reach of any smug, inglorious new country-house, all red-brick and sham Elizabethan gables.
The country-house has telephones and electric light and all the latest devices of luxury; the old castle has matted corridors and inadequate lamps, and a general air of shabbiness. But that shabbiness is more beautiful and well-bred than all the clamorous elegancies of the other; the comparison is between some old and splendid lady, poor, dowdy, and forgotten in the clacking crowd of tongues, but serene in her impregnable charm, the incarnation of all that is finest in the traditions of a thousand years—and some scented, powdered woman of to-day, frilled, curled, decorated with all the lavish and assertive ornaments by which novelty seeks uneasily to impose its fancied supremacy over antiquity—a woman of loud tones, loud colours, loud movements, in her own person a great braying band of jingles from the latest edition of that comic opera which is such a creature’s London life.
Only the self-sufficient—in fact, only those who are perfectly calm and indifferent to the general suffrage, secure in their unalterable, unselfconscious certainty of breeding—can afford to ignore the tricks and trappings on which the less fortunate have to rely for notice. Only the well-bred can afford to be dowdy; only the well-bred can afford to ignore the Peau d’Espagne or the Violette des Bois which may happen to be in fashion, and trust for their triumph only to the faint, unanalyzed fragrance of beauty and nobility that accompanies them inseparably from birth to death, without effort or expense of theirs. And as a modern building, decked out in modern old oak, and fussy with stolen ornaments from bygone times, must always base its claim to admiration on the self-advertisement of its luxuries, so some old collapsing turret, the haunt of dead Queens, the chosen home of sad beautiful memories, needs no adornment, no advertisement to reinforce its calm and unconscious right to our worship. Brakelond, old, gorgeous, forgotten Brakelond, was too proud to trick itself out for popular applause, too quiet in its self-centred pride to allure the vulgar; it challenged reverence by right divine, and held the attention without desire to do so.