England -- Fiction; Honeymoons -- Fiction; Love stories; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Voyages and travels -- Fiction
Here the two tried to take up again the life of ordered ease that had
been theirs at Caernarvon, the little life they had prized and cherished
till the governor of Caernarvon prison had thrown a stone into their
magic pool, shattering all its mirrored beauty. They spent long mornings
on the hillside, cushioned by the heather; long evenings by the
lakeside, always careful to choose their resting-place so that they need
not see the scars where the waste slate is tipped into the lake, slowly
overlaying the green and graceful margin with which Nature, if you let
her alone, frames all water mirrors. And once they went as far as the
mysterious Round Tower, which stands alone, with no entrance but the
doorway high above your head.
"What a place to keep your enemy in," he said, "or your friend! Suppose
the tower had been my stronghold, in the old days. I could have brought
my princess here, and snapped my fingers at her relations drawn round
the tower in a ring, shaking their fists at me from their coal-black
steeds, and vowing vengeance when the tower should yield--which, of
course, it never would."
"Your princess would have starved," she said, "and you with her."
"Not at all," he assured her; "you underrate the resources of round
towers. To say nothing of the goats and sheep which we should drive in
and lower to the basement when our scout brought news that your kinsmen
were sending out the fiery cross or the blood eagle, or whatever it was
that they did send out; and there's an inexhaustible well inside the
tower, and of course we should have sacks of meal and casks of mead."
"But the enemy--her relations, I mean--would have all the sheep on the
mountains and all the flour in the mills. You'd have to give in, in the
end."
"You forget the underground passage. When we were tired of mocking your
uncles and cousins through the arrow-slits of our tower we'd quietly
creep away to our great castle--it's at Caernarvon, you know--and call
together all my uncles and cousins and sally out and have a great
battle, and the sound of our blows on their helmets would be heard on
the far side of Anglesea, and down to the very southernmost marches of
Merioneth."
"But suppose her relations won the battle and shut you up in a dungeon
and put her into a convent?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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