A Prince of Cornwall | Page 3

in the days when
the yet unforgotten hatred between our peoples was at its highest; and
so it was in truth, at first. Not so much so was it after the beginning,
however. It would be stranger yet if I were not at the very outset to own
all that is due from me to him. Lonely was I when he first came to me,
and lonely together, in a way, have he and I been for long years that for
me, at least, have had no unhappiness in them, for we have been all to
each other.
I have said that I was lonely when he first came to me, and I must tell
how that was. I suppose that the most lonesome place in the world is
the wide sea, and after that a bare hilltop; but next to these in loneliness
I would set the glades of a beech forest in midwinter silence, when the
snow lies deep on the ground under boughs that are too stiff to rustle in
the wind, and the birds are dumb, and the ice has stilled the brooks. Set
a lost child amid the bare grey tree trunks of such a winter forest, in the
dead silence of a great frost, with no track near him but that which his
own random feet have made across the snow, and I think that there can
be nought lonelier than he to be thought of: and in the depth of the
forest there is peril to the lonely.
I had no fear of the forest till that day when I was lost therein, for the
nearer glades round our village had been my playground ever since I
could remember, and before I knew that fear therein might be. That was
not so long a time, however, save that the years of a child are long
years; for at this time, when I first learned the full wildness of the
woods of the great Andredsweald and knew what loneliness was, I was
only ten years old. Since I could run alone my old nurse had tried to
fray me from wandering out of sight of those who tended me, with tales
of wolf and bear and pixy, lest I should stray and be lost, but I had not
heeded her much. Maybe I had proved so many of her tales to be but
pretence that, as I began to think for myself, I deemed them all to be so.
But now I was lost in the forest, and what had been a playground was
become a vast and desolate land for me, and all the things that I had
ever heard of what dangers lurked within it, came back to my mind. I

remembered that the grey wolf's skin on which I slept had come hence,
and I minded the calf that the pack had slain close to the village a year
ago, and I thought of the girl who went mazed and useless about the
place, having lost her wits through being pixy led, as they said, long
ago. The warnings seemed to me to be true enough, now that all the old
landmarks were lost to me, and all the tracks were buried under the
crisp snow. I did not know when I had left the road from the village to
the hilltop, or in which direction it lay.
It was very silent in the aisles of the great beech trunks, for the herds
were in shelter. There was no sound of the swineherds' horn, though the
evening was coming on, and but for the frost it was time for their
charges to be taken homeward, and the woodmen's axes were idle.
Even the scream of some hawk high overhead had been welcome to me,
and the harsh cry of a jay that I scared was like the voice of a friend.
It was the fault of none but myself that I was lost. I had planned to go
hunting alone in the woods while the old nurse, whose care I was far
beyond, slept after her midday meal before the fire. So, over my warm
woollen clothing I had donned the deerskin short cloak that was made
like my father's own hunting gear, and I had taken my bow and arrows,
and the little seax {i} that a thane's son may always wear, and had crept
away from the warm hall without a soul seeing me. I had thought
myself lucky in this, but by this time I began to change my mind in all
truth. Well it was for me that there was no wind, so that I was spared
the worst of the cold.
I went up the hill to the north of the village by the track which the