England -- Fiction; Honeymoons -- Fiction; Love stories; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Voyages and travels -- Fiction
"I've always wanted to see Kenilworth," she told him, "almost more than
any place. Kenilworth and the Pyramids and Stonehenge and the Lost City
in India--you know the one that the very name of it is forgotten, and
they just found it by accident, all alone and beautiful, with panthers
in it instead of people, and trees growing out of the roofs of the
palaces, like Kipling's Cold Lairs."
"I get a sort of cold comfort from the thought of that city," he said.
"That and Babylon and Nineveh and the great cities in Egypt. When I go
through Manchester or New Cross or Sheffield I think, 'Some day grass
and trees will cover up all this ugliness and flowers will grow again in
the Old Kent Road.'"
"It is cold comfort," she said. "I wish flowers and grass could cover
the ugliness, but I should like them to be flowers planted by us living
people--not just wild flowers and the grass on graves."
The first sight of Kenilworth was naturally a great shock to her, as it
always is to those who know of it only from books and photographs and
engravings.
"Oh dear," she said, "how horrible! Why, it's pink!"
It is, bright pink, and to eyes accustomed to the dignified gray
monochrome of our South Country castles, Bodiam and Hever, Pevensey and
Arundel, Kenilworth at first seems like a bad joke, or an engraving
colored by a child who has used up most of the paints in its paint-box
and has had to make shift with Indian red and vermilion, the only two
tints surviving. But when you get nearer, when you get quite near, when
you look up at the great towers, when you walk between the great masses
of it, and see the tower that Elizabeth's Leicester built, and the walls
that Cromwell's soldiers battered down, you forgive Kenilworth for being
pink, and even begin to admit that pink is not such a bad color for
castles.
At Kenilworth you talk, of course, about Queen Elizabeth, and the one
who has read the guide-books tells the one who hasn't that when the
Queen visited Leicester he had a new bridge built over his lake so that
she might enter the castle by a way untrodden by any previous guest.
Also that during her visit the clock bell rang not a note and that the
clock stood still withal, the hands of it pointing ever to two o'clock,
the hour of banquet. Further, that during her visit of seventeen days
Kenilworth Castle managed to put away three hundred and twenty
hogsheads of beer.
"Those were great days," said Edward.
There are towers to climb at Kenilworth, as well as towers to gaze at,
and with that passion for ascending steps which marks the young the two
made their way to the top of one tower after another. It was as they
leaned on the parapet of the third and looked out over the green country
that Edward broke off in an unflattering anecdote of my Lord of
Leicester. He stiffened as a pointer stiffens when it sees a partridge.
"Look!" he said, "look!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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