Cornwall (England : County) -- Fiction; Fathers and sons -- Fiction
He passed down the avenue and out through the white stone gates as one
in a dream. Something was stirring within him. It was not that during
those years in New Zealand he had forgotten. He had longed again and
again with a passionate, burning longing for the grey cliffs and the
sea and the haunting loneliness of the moor; for the Cornwall that he
had loved from the moment of his birth--no, he had never forgotten.
But there was waking in him again that strange, half-inherited sense of
the eternal presence of ancient days and old heathen ceremonies, and
the manners of men who had lived in that place a thousand years before.
He had known it when he was a boy; when he had chased rabbits over the
moor, when he had seen the mist curling mysteriously from the sea and
wrapping land and sky in a blinding curtain of grey, when he had stood
on Trelennan's Jump and watched the white, savage tossing of the foam
hundreds of feet below; he had sometimes fancied that he saw them,
those wild bearded priests of cruelty, waiting smilingly on the silent
twilit moor for victims--they had always been cruel; something terrible
in the very vagueness of their outline.
Now the old thoughts came back to him, and he almost fancied that he
could see the strange faces in the shadows of the garden and feel their
hot breath upon his cheek.
His passage through the streets of Pendragon woke him from his dreams;
its almost startling modernity and obtrusive up-to-dateness laughed at
his fancies. It was very much changed since he had been there
before--like the garden, it was the very apotheosis of order and modern
methods. "The Pendragon Hotel" astonished him by its stone pillars,
its glimpse of a wonderful, cool, softly carpeted hall, its official in
gold buttons who stood solemnly magnificent on the steps, the
admiration of several small boys who looked up into his face with
wide-open eyes.
Harry remembered the old "Pendragon Hotel," a dirty, unmethodical
place, with beds that were never clean. It had been something of a
scandal, but its landlord had been an amusing fellow and a capital
teller of stories.
The shops dazzled him by their brilliance. The hairdresser's displayed
a wonderful assortment of wigs in the window; coloured bottles of every
size and hue glittered in the chemist's; diamonds flashed in the
jeweller's--the street seemed glorious to his colonial eyes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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