"On toward the gold and the purple in the west"
CHAPTER XIX
"REXQUE FUTURUS"
We were at sea on our way home. We had left Southampton, where Arthur embarked when he went to fight the Emperor of Rome, and all day we had made our swift way west through the British Channel. When we came up on deck after dinner we had just passed the Scilly Islands. Dark and rough and hard they stood up out of the sea behind us, and a pale mist was just beginning to wrap them around and hide them a little from sight. Before us all the air was clear. The sun was just setting and was filling the sky with a dozen lovely hues of rose and violet and turning the water into tossing and tumbling gold.
"See," I said, "there are the Scilly Islands. They are all that is left of that lost land of Lyonnesse, Tristram's country, that used to reach from here back to the Land's End. The rest of it is sunk deep down under the water. This is all of Lyonnesse that we can ever see."
Helen did not seem to care very greatly even for this. She was thinking of the last of our stories. "Was King Arthur really buried," she said, "there in the Abbey of Glastonbury?"
"It is not easy to answer that," I said. "It seems to me that I have read enough books about King Arthur to fill this ship, yet I never could see that the writers of them had settled among themselves whether he was buried there or not. If we care to believe that he was, I think we may as well believe it."
"But do you believe it?"
"Yes, I believe it."
"Then he never came back, the way he said he would, and the way the people believed he would?"