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.
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.
Gundred had given her whole heart to her husband. But now, in the
shadow of all her ancient selves, something began to thrill in her
veins that was more than the mere pride of part-proprietorship in
a splendid and historic house. An old house, soaked in all the
personalities of a thousand bygone years, must needs retain the flavour
and fragrance of them; and on one who in his own person resumes the
lives of twenty generations, the compelling influence of his home, the
scene and material of all those lives that throb again in his, must
necessarily be so dominant that insensibly he takes the colour of the
past by which he is surrounded. If this was so in the case of Kingston,
hampered and controlled by all the decent ancestors that had lived
and died unnoticeably in Darnley-on-Downe, it was likely that the
effect would be far more obvious in the case of one whose own character
was so neutral as Gundred’s, and whose ancestors were so terrific
and blazing as the Mortimers. From every flagstone, from every wall,
pressed out upon Gundred the influence of some masterful forefather;
and in her quiet nature here and there a secret nerve or fibre, latent
hitherto, and unsuspected, recognised the call of the soul in which
it once had formed a part, and thrilled to life again. At Brakelond
Gundred insensibly took the lead. It was she that decided to settle
in the little ancient wooden wing that jutted away from the main mass
of the Castle out upon the spur of cliff by the Chapel of King Mark.
Her gentle manner grew more and more imbued with sovereignty, and her
husband found himself now amused and now rebuffed by Gundred’s obvious
sense of being at home. Away in London she might be anyone in general,
or no one in particular, concealed her family pride in the Mortimers,
was able to give her zeal for morality full sway in the condemnation
of Queen Isabel. But at Brakelond her own individuality was swamped.
Half reluctantly at first, but soon openly and even proudly, she began
to contemplate the career of the wicked Queen, and exalted her with
faint damnation that soon passed into positive sympathy. She spent her
days unfolding to her husband all the nooks and secrets of the Castle.
And, whereas normally she was a person of the most sensitive and
neat-minded righteousness, hating fierce crimes, frigidly abominating
love-intrigues, here in Brakelond her sense of right and wrong was
in abeyance, and at times she canvassed old bloodstained stories
with an unmoral calm, and a manner that admitted a not uncomplacent
participation in their horrors.
To Kingston it became a relief to hear her retailing the legends of
her house. The honeymoon, in its undiluted intimacy, may well become
a strain. However much two people may have to say to each other, the
knowledge that there is absolutely no one else at hand to speak to may
well impart that itch of rebellion which most people experience when
bowed under the yoke of necessity. Not to be able to do a thing often
brings the wish to do it; a wish which, without the prohibition, might
never have occurred. So an enforced duet may occasion faint hankerings
after an occasional trio.
In a honeymoon, too, after the first emotional stress and glory are
over, a revulsion well may threaten--a revulsion to which ardent
lovers are more liable than those couples who have married on lower
calmer levels, and who, having never risen to great ecstatic heights,
can never, therefore, fall to the emotionalist’s profound abysses
of languor and depression. And, if two people shut up together in
a lighthouse, with the hope of some day parting, develop insane,
irrelevant furies against each other’s ways, how much greater danger
of disillusionment must there be for a man and woman forced into
minute prolonged contemplation of one another, with no reasonable
hope of any release on this side of the grave. The most passionate
love leaps over crimes and vices in the loved object; but stumbles at
times over a personal habit, a veil ill-tied, a faulty taste in hats.
The Ideal is a high and holy empyrean where love can range unfettered
and unimperilled; the kingdom of daily life is a lumpy and uneven
territory where the winged feet of emotion are apt to trip over some
mean, unlooked-for obstacle. And the honeymoon is a time for complete
revelation of personal as well of spiritual peculiarities, in which
the veil of mystery is finally torn away from the nude reality of two
people’s lives.
Kingston and Gundred began insensibly to enter on that period of
prosaic exploration which lies between the mystic raptures of the
first hours and the later harmonies of settled married life. The
day of blind passion seemed over. Gundred found herself commenting
inwardly on Kingston’s habits; the smell of tobacco was no longer so
precious to her as in the days when it stood for part of an enthralling
enigma; his ways were untidy, he dropped the newspapers on the floor
and never picked them up, he wrote his letters at odd times instead
of setting aside a definite hour for correspondence; he was never in
really good time for meals. And then he had mannerisms which, in the
dual solitude, began to prey upon his wife. He sometimes walked up
and down the room like a bear in a cage, until she wanted to scream;
when he sat quiet, he occasionally kept up a maddening succession of
little rhythmical taps with his feet; and, above all, he was given
to whistling. Then in mind, though altogether precious, of course,
and adorable, he had certain flaws. His religious views were clearly
lax, his moral attitude was not strenuous, he was too eager, too
inquisitive, for Gundred’s intelligence, which preferred to hold on
firmly, with the unswerving trust of the dutiful pupil, to everything
it had received at second-hand. She took life for granted, considered
the scheme of things very admirable, and her own position in it more
admirable still. Nothing was to be questioned. Therefore Kingston’s
habit, divined or expressed, of accepting nothing without examination,
made his wife feel worried and restless, as if her mind had mated with
an earthquake. Finally, as the days went by, Kingston dissatisfied her
inmost desires by gradually relaxing the amorous enthusiasm of their
first married days. It is usually the man who first wearies of conjugal
outbursts--men having other business in life, and women, under the
old primeval dispensation, none. And Gundred’s discontent was the more
exasperating that she was secretly ashamed of it, and had far too much
personal pride, far too strong a sense of decorum, to express it. As
Kingston grew less and less demonstrative in his affection, Gundred
revenged herself at once on him and on her own feelings by stiffening
herself into an added primness of factitious maidenhood, by which she
had the power of holding herself aloof from her nearest and dearest,
as well as of repelling that very sense of intimacy that her own most
secret soul desired. Her soul was of those that render themselves to no
subduing warmth of love, but, whatever the fate of the body, must be
violated, if possible, and taken by assault.
Kingston, for his part, found that marriage had not dissipated or
broken the spiritual barrier between himself and Gundred. Her citadel
was still locked against him, inexpugnable, not to be captured by
any guile or violence. There were still great heavy gaps in their
conversation, great tracts of desert country across which their souls
were incapable of taking hands. The calm beatitude that Kingston
had foreseen began to reveal itself a state of something not unlike
sterility, diversified with moments of irritation when he skirmished
round the stone walls of Gundred’s guarded mind, and only succeeded in
bruising himself, no matter how furiously he attacked. She could not be
led, forced, cajoled, kissed, harried, or bullied into understanding. A
sense of hopelessness sometimes seized him before the sweet indomitable
obstinacy of her mind. It was at once so hard that no blow could make
an impression, and so soft that no blow could strike home. Unlike Anne
Elliot in all else, her manners--of mind and body alike--‘were as
consciously right as they were invariably gentle.’ That invariable,
gentle consciousness of rectitude was cruelly trying to the restless,
questioning, agile temper of her husband. He longed to stir up its
provoking serenity, to stick pins into its lethargic mass. But nothing,
no effort of his, could move it, shake it, upset that tranquil
self-complacence. It was like grappling with a phantom in a nightmare.
Neither men nor angels could ever turn Gundred Darnley from an opinion
or a habit. She knew that her outer and her inner woman alike were both
thoroughly, faultlessly dressed, in the best-fitting, most suitable
garments, and no jot or tittle would she alter of her physical or
mental trimmings. Neat, not gaudy, was her equipment, and, secure of
perfection, she could not conceive the possibility of any improvement.
That was another thing--her neatness was something inhuman, something
almost appalling. She always put everything back in its place, always
folded up the papers and laid them down tidily on the table when she
had finished them, always devoted the hour after breakfast and after
tea to the writing of letters, was always dressed and ready exactly a
minute before the gong sounded. Neat, neat, heartlessly neat, were all
her proceedings, from the way she docketed her ideas to the way she
buttoned her boots and did her hair. True it was, indeed, that the maid
was responsible for these details, but she, too, had evidently been
mastered by Gundred’s devastating tidiness. Never a thought mislaid,
never a curl misplaced, never too much or too little of anything, no
excess, no enthusiasm, no hot outbursts, nothing but a serenely equable
development, as cruel and crushing in its steady, remorseless movements
as the advance of a steam-roller. If she sat, she sat with perfect
correctness: feet in the proper position, hands folded in her lap,
or prettily occupied with some pretty piece of work. If she walked,
it was crisply, concisely, without softness or undulations, erect,
well-modulated, and poised in the certainty of faultlessness. And the
very qualities that had so appealed to Kingston’s fastidiousness a
month before, now became a terror when he contemplated a lifetime’s
endurance of them. To see Gundred ruffled, muddy, untidy, would have
been as great a joy to him as water in the wilderness; but no wind ever
tumbled the orderly daintiness of her hair, no gale ever pushed her hat
out of place, no mud ever dared adhere to her brilliant little boots.
Never tired, never angry, never out of looks, Gundred was also never
buoyant, never ecstatic, never radiant, and the bland sweet monotony of
her threatened to become as maddening to her husband as the incessant
repetition of one level, unvarying note.
One or two small habits she had, too, which exasperated him at times.
She was fond, for one thing among others, of talking about God in a
frequent, casual way that he found intolerable in its assumption of
intimacy, and in its cheapening of the soul’s most private thoughts.
God’s, to Gundred, was the biggest name on her visiting-list, and she
displayed it with a pride that people quite devoid of terrestrial
vulgarity sometimes think it allowable to display when talking of their
acquaintance in celestial circles. Her soul had a tinge of supramundane
snobbishness, and though, on earth, she would not have thanked a
Queen for a kiss, she took a gentle satisfaction in emphasizing her
possession of the Almighty’s approving friendship. She conceived heaven
as an enormously magnified and everlasting Court-concert, where only
the “nicest” people were admitted, and where she herself was not only
to have the entrée, but to be in the very heart of the royal set.
She had, besides, a way of appending an interrogative ‘yes’ to every
other sentence, which, by degrees, drove her husband to distraction. He
found himself looking ahead for it along the conversation as one looks
ahead for the next telegraph-pole on a slow journey. And as surely
as the telegraph-pole that ‘yes’ would come, maddening him with the
certainty of its reiteration.
Brakelond, accordingly, was a relief to both husband and wife--how
great a relief they neither of them knew. They could take refuge from
themselves among the ghosts of the dead Mortimers. Gundred almost grew
excited as she repeated the stories of her people, and the spirits of
the dead seemed to fill her veins with some of the blood she apparently
lacked. A stark thorny tree it was, to have borne, at the last, so
mild and white a bud as she. Always in opposition, always ambitious,
always unscrupulous, maniacs in persecution, in martyrdom, in love, the
Mortimers had risen and fallen, tempestuously fighting, up and down
the steps of the throne. Ruined with Queen Isabel, they had survived
only to fall again before the House of York. With the Tudors their
glory towered once more, until a characteristically ambitious attempt
to marry the Queen of Scots had destroyed the March of the time. Then,
after a few years of comparative quiet, they had risen conspicuous
as the only great house that had sided with the country against King
Charles. This unpopular piece of patriotism forced the Mortimers into
discreet seclusion through Restoration days, until a new opportunity of
manifesting it arrived with the Great Revolution. The House of March,
always especially patriotic when patriotism involved enmity to the
Crown, had had a narrow escape of ruin at the time of King Monmouth’s
disaster, and, for its safety, the Prince of Orange did not land a
day too soon. His coming, however, with the comparative loyalty
that followed, and its resultant dukedom, had established March and
Brakelond in that period of slow prosperity which had led on through
two centuries of gradual inanition to its present effete or atrophied
state. It seemed as if the furious old Castle and the furious old race
that owned it could not live fully nor thrive without that atmosphere
of violence in which they had so often gloried and agonized together.
Peace--slackening, corroding, monotonous--was fatal to the vitality of
the Mortimers.
But, despite the obvious influence exerted by the Castle on the
individuality of Gundred, Kingston could not but be struck again and
again by the contrast between his pin-neat, impeccable wife, orderly
in mind, body, desires, and the many riotous scarlet lives that she
summed up in her own neutral-tinted nature. Always turbulent, always
passionate, impatient of rule, loving and hating without limit or
bond of reason, breathing the air of battle from birth to death, and
flagging in the close air of peace, the Mortimers were a strange race
to end thus, in a woman to whom peace, order, reason, limit were the
very conditions of her being. As she talked to him of her people,
Kingston noticed the small, flickering flames of vitality that leapt
up in her nature out of the dead past. Here and there in her utterance
from time to time some bygone tyrant dictated an inflection, some dead
Queen contributed a thought. Kingston heard these voices so distinctly,
noticed so clearly the occurrence of each foreign thought that twanged
abruptly in the music of Gundred’s voice, like the sudden throb of a
harp across a piano’s level ripplings, that it seemed to him at last as
if, at moments, she were the mere mouthpiece of ghosts. For a vanishing
instant, now and then, her lips spoke what her mind had not conceived,
what her heart had not sanctioned. She was possessed by a fragment of
the life that had gone before. But was this all? Robbers and wantons
that they were in their lawless splendour, had the Mortimers given
their descendant nothing beyond these fragmentary reminiscences? Was
there in her, far down under the orderly, decorous placidity of her
surface, no stirring possibility of those old primitive passions, of
those fierce blood-lusts or those religious frenzies, that should have
come with the very fabric of her life out of the buried long-ago? The
question was strangely interesting, in the bizarre contrast between the
neat, methodical thing she was, and the wild daughter of the past that,
by some freak of fortune, she might perhaps again become. Kingston
watched her keenly, hoping that some day, sooner or later, might raise
again the hidden depths of her nature, and reveal, in a tempest of
passion, the frantic possibilities of the Mortimers. The idea was
inconceivable, monstrous, grotesque; but attractive as a romantic
paradox. As with most paradoxes, deep down in his heart he utterly
disbelieved it.