All this of Brakelond far away, throned on the undulating horizon of misty woodland. It was a sapphire crown on a pinnacle of the world’s rim. It did not flop and flounder along its hill, like Windsor; rather, it held itself bravely, concisely, on its seat, with something of Belvoir’s distant majesty. But Belvoir is as generous as it is beautiful, offering itself to the world’s admiration; Brakelond, on the contrary, was governed by a grimly selfish passion of seclusion, severe and rigid. It kept aloof as if it had indeed been some magic Castle of Lyonesse, and none was permitted to approach beyond the outermost borders of the forest precincts. Lonely, menacing, fearful, Brakelond frowned away the approach of all new-comers. The spirit of its owner haunted it, insisted on inviolable privacy.
For, from the great dominating Drum Tower flew perpetually the flag that told of an old man, brainless, dribbling, dreadful, dying for ever by slow inches in his high, drug-scented rooms. Around him ceaselessly screeched the parrots whose bright colours were the one consciousness of his life, whose poignant yellings made the one music capable of penetrating to his ears. Their clamour drove his attendants frantic, but the old Duke, immobile, log-like, gave no sign of discomfort, gave no sign at all of life or its energies. He seemed dead, had seemed dead for many years; his existence tottered on a breathless poise that a hair’s touch might send swinging over the border-line of death; but that poise was firm and even; nothing shook it; nothing, in the cool unbroken lethargy of his days, could agitate the balance that rested so unwaveringly on such a razor’s edge of insecurity. So the parrots daily rent heaven with their screams, and amid the infernal din the aged wizard of the fairy castle, shut away from all the world by a barrier of stout walls and locked gates and impassable centuries, lay and awaited his end, a creature long since wiped out of life, having no part in to-day or to-morrow, but already one with the innumerable yesterdays of the dead.
Into this haunt of sad mystery did Gundred bring her husband for their honeymoon. So stern and tragic a setting for the bright, modern drama of their lives had something stimulating about the abruptness of its contrast. Happiness, after all, could build beneath the eaves of that immemorial tragedy, and the flower of joy spring gaily from the crevices of that citadel whose mortar was tears and blood and the bones of innumerable generations, crushed and mangled. Kingston and Gundred took their pleasure lightly amid the surrounding atmosphere, and, in the labyrinthine vastness of the building soon lost all consciousness of that secluded presence, high up in the remote wing where the parrots made their song in the undiscerning ears of the dead that could not die.
The main bulk of the Castle was old—some of it very old. On one projecting spur of rock that overhung the sea a hundred feet and more below, stood the most ancient relic of all—a suite of little wooden-panelled rooms, low, many-cornered, slippery-floored, with strange turns and steps between them. This wing was cut off from the rest of the Castle, which towered over it from behind like a crouched monster. It was connected only by one small corridor, and held a rough primeval chapel which dated from days before any other stone of Brakelond, and was given by tradition as a place of assignation between Tristram and Iseult. This fragment of myth made visible seemed to be no part of the building, but a precious jewel of the past extruded from its enormous fabric.
The body of the building, too, contained ancient, history-haunted corners. A series of rooms was credited to the design and the occupation of Queen Isabel. Here the She-Wolf of France, old Queen Jezebel, had dwelt with the lover whom she nearly seated on the throne of England. A traditional portrait of her still gazed out across the rooms she had owned, a stiff daub on a wooden panel, giving the fierce, tight-lipped stare of the adventuress, high-boned, pink-cheeked, archaic in drawing, angular, convincing in its very primitiveness of workmanship—jewelled and furred there and here in dimmed patches of colour that had once been crudely brilliant. Brakelond had been the scene of Queen Isabel’s highest fortunes. Her ghost still seemed to hold the high halls of her prosperity, her pitiless spirit dominated that wing which owed its life to her. This was her true burial-place—rather than Castle Rising, where at last, after all the changes of her eventful life, she died, old, fat, monstrous, honoured in dishonour, incredibly wealthy, the first millionaire of Europe.
Dark and dusty were the windings of the Castle corridors—dark and dusty as the winding paths of Mortimer and Isabel. The building had been put together from time to time, added to, built on to, with no thought of conformity, of harmony, of convenience. It was rather a congeries of Castles than one unanimous edifice. From far off it was seen as a single fabric; within its walls the daunted visitor could gain comfort from noticing its many discordancies, the innumerable violent breaks in the continuity of its development. There was no complete rhythm in the building’s design; part clashed with part, and in the jarring conflict of tastes and periods the enchantment which distance had lent was shattered by the sudden onslaughts of criticism. Here jutted out a Georgian wing, solid and stiff, but ill-attuned to the austere majesty of the great Drum Tower. There, a Duke of the eighteenth century, a friend of Pope and Lady Mary, had erected a Chinese pagoda, that perked impertinently up with its fantastic, saucy eaves among the stalwart turrets that had frowned on Edward of York, and given vain shelter to Marguerite of Anjou. Then, again, another Duke, contemporary of George the Glorious, had appended to the Elizabethan front of the Castle a small but accurate copy of the Brighton Pavilion. Its wriggling cupolas, its fluted minarets, shone white with plaster, and its main plantation of bulbs, like gigantic onions, bulged and swelled beneath an oriel whence the Virgin Queen had watched a masque.
Each inhabited portion of the Castle, too, was of a style violently and even deliberately discordant with the severe and uninhabitable splendours of the Drum Tower and the old Keep. These contained huge, gloomy rooms, with infinitesimal windows, that looked out, for the most part, on sunless little courtyards, mere wells of darkness, made by the addition of new buildings to the old. Here, in these big, stark halls, were mouldering arrangements of armour, or acres of dingy pictures, bloated Flemish boors, dubious angular Madonnas, riotous female nudities, all hidden from the world by a merciful veil of dirt. The stone floors were inadequately disguised with worn matting, and at night one feeble, smoky lamp was allotted for the illumination of each apartment. A proud neglect, an almost arrogant ostentation of poverty and discomfort, reigned supreme.
The inhabited wings of the Castle were different in effect, though similar in scheme. Rows of bare barrack-like rooms lined the corridors—hung with glaring chintzes, and furnished with chairs of rep and horsehair. Their ornaments were meagre as their blankets, and their large windows threw a merciless glare of daylight on their serviceable sterling ugliness. Each had a square of carpet from which the pattern had long been trodden out and through in patches; each had cupboards and washstand of light grained wood; each was coldly spacious, airy, cheerless, and inhospitable. Most loud of all the discords that many generations of bad architects had contributed to the original of Queen Isabel’s castle was the high white wing where the old Duke lay dying. An Early Victorian Duchess had made this addition; it was big and bald and bare, faced with white stucco and adorned with modern-Gothic pinnacles. It grew out like a monstrous polyp from the side of a gracious little Jacobean pavilion, and dominated the main entrance with its stalwart blatancy. To crown all, the same Duchess had built on to the great Drum Tower a porte-cochère on the model of the Erechtheion, and had holystoned the Drum Tower itself of a pale and repellent buttermilk blue.
Of all this accumulated history Gundred was, as it were, the sum and incarnation. The Castle, village of unconnected houses though it was in reality, yet had a collective personality of its own, even as a crowd of unrelated human beings has a collective personality beyond and above that of a mere aggregation of units. And she, its daughter and heiress, was also its result. It is written that neither man nor woman can ever escape from his or her traditions. The traditions are the character, and we are the reincarnated spirits of very many dead ages. As sunlight brings out all manner of unguessed possibilities from the innocent blank photographic plate, so the influence of Brakelond on the last child of its history must bring out in her nature new moods and unguessed colours of mind that had lain dormant in the undistinguishing atmosphere of London. And thus Brakelond could not but set a distinction between Kingston and Gundred. Between the flaming memories of Brakelond and the long, quiet, eventless story of Darnley-on-Downe there must always be a great and significant difference. Gundred, gentle, unimpassioned, mild and calm, was yet the daughter of fighting centuries, of men and women who had lived, suffered, loved and died magnificently, flamboyantly, full in the eye of the world. She was the daughter of a ruling race.
And he, emotional, energetic, ambitious, was sprung from an interminable line of sterling, honest mediocrities. Great glories, great sorrows had avoided Darnley-on-Downe; the crashing crises in the House of Mortimer had no parallel in the long unchronicled history of the Dadds. No more than his wife could he escape from his traditions. And those traditions, well-bred, decent, honest though they were, yet were not the traditions of a ruling race. Inconspicuousness was their keynote. And Kingston found himself an alien in the citadel of the dead Mortimers. Their ghosts, insolent, gorgeous, tyrannous, looked down with contempt on the colourless shadows of all the sober Dadds. Those ghosts had ruled, in their great day, over counties of Dadds, over legions of good honest gentlemen of coat-armour who had been glad and proud to take service under the banner of the Mortimers. The House of March, perpetually struggling for sovereignty, had drawn to its service squires and knights innumerable from all the counties that it ruled. And the sense of feudal over-lordship was strong in the inherited blood of the Mortimers, even to the uttermost generation. Those others, those lesser people, noble and gentle, were but small and insignificant in the eyes of men and women who had violently swayed the destinies of England. They were loyal subjects, those others, perhaps, but equals and allies never. And now a man of the obscure order was lawful possessor of the last Mortimer. Queens and the sons of Kings had been, in old days, the mates of Brakelond; and the Castle seemed as if it could never accustom itself to the formal ownership, even to the presence, of one who might in former years have been squire or feudatory, indeed, to some Lord or Lady of March, but who could never, in the wildest upheaval of King Henry’s time, have hoped to become the master of a Mortimer.