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.