“Sathanas.”
“This place is too thinly populated, my friend. Come, what of this ancient hold? Bring on your heroes and cravens, your demigods and dastards.”
“Gwrn darw—the pile of contention,” muttered Maryvale, and he launched on the story.
I had expected another farrago of myth and tradition, perhaps larded with the same episodes that Hughes had spellbound us with in the dinner-room yesterday morning. Instead it was a fairly plausible story from some wholly different source, this account of the first historical building in Aidenn Vale. I enjoyed listening to the narrative; Maryvale enjoyed telling it. Gusto was the keynote of his voice, with its rapid utterance and changes of inflection. He made drama of it, and a valiant man of Sir Pharamond.
“Why, Maryvale, where did you learn all this?”
“This is history,” he affirmed solemnly.
Moreover, he was beginning to peer about again, turning more than once in his speech to stare beneath the branches of the trees. That feeling of repugnance to Maryvale which I had before experienced returned hazily, and of a sudden I realized how lonely this place was, how close to us the hills were, and how dark and steep. I might instantly have urged our return had not my own roving glance caught a black object protruding from a bush inside the wall.
I broke in. “Look! Here’s evidence the world’s a madhouse!”
Down inside the wall I slipped, crossed to the bush, and triumphantly held high the black umbrella.
“He was real, Maryvale! He was no nightmare!”