A Prince of Cornwall | Page 3

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 timber sleds make, climbing until I was on the crest, and there I began to wander as the tracks of rabbit and squirrel led me on. Sometimes I was set aside from the path by deep drifts that had gathered in its hollows with the wind of yesterday, and so I left it altogether in time. Overhead the sky was bright and clear as the low sun of the month after Yule, the wolf month, can make it. I wandered on for an