BOOK IV
TINTAGEL
I
The castle of Tintagel stood out above the sea on a headland that rose bluffly above the white foam that girdled it. The waves swinging in from the west seemed to lift ever a hoarse chant about the place with their perpetual grumbling against the cliff. Colour shifted upon the bosom of the sea. Blue, green, and grey it would sweep into the west, netted gold with the sun, banded with foam, or spread with purple beneath the drifting shadow of a cloud. Hills rose in the east. Between these crags and the sea rolled a wilderness cloven by green valleys and a casual stream. Tintagel seemed to crown a region grand and calamitous as the sea itself.
The sun was going down over the waters, watched by a flaxen-haired lad squatting on the wall of an outstanding turret. His legs dangled over the battlements, and his heels smote against the weathered stone. There was a premature look of age upon his face, a certain wistful wisdom as though he had completed his novitiate early in the world. His blue eyes, large and sensitive as a dog’s, stared away over the golden edge of the sea.
This was Jehan the bastard, a pathetic shred of humanity, thin and motherless, blessed with nothing save a dreamy nature that stood him in poor stead in such a hold as Tintagel. Like any mongrel owned of none, he was given over largely to the cuffs and curses of the community. Men called him a fool, and treated him accordingly. He was scullion, horse-boy, pot-bearer, by turns. The men of the garrison could make nothing of a lad who wept at a word, never showed fight, but crept away to mope and snivel in a corner. He had earned epithets enough, but little else; and the rude Philistines of the place, beings of beer and bone, knew little of those finer instincts with which Nature chooses on occasion to endow a soul.