Now it was mysterious, crammed with hidden life of its own, the most dramatic point in the whole landscape. What had they done, that family that was so terrible? What was there about those four boys that he had never seen in any boys before? He longed to know them with a burning, desperate longing. Nevertheless a whole week passed without any contact.
Once Jeremy saw, against the sky-line on the hill behind the church, a trail of four, single file, silhouetted black. They passed steadily, secretly, bent on their own mysterious purposes. The sky, when their figures had left it, was painted with drama.
Once Mary reported that, wandering along the beach, a wild figure, almost naked, had started from behind a rock and shouted at her. She ran, of course, and behind her there echoed a dreadful laugh. But the best story of all was from Helen, who, passing the graveyard, had seen go down the road a most beautiful lady, most beautifully dressed. According to Helen, she was the most lovely lady ever seen, with jewels hanging from her ears, pearls round her neck, and her clothes a bright orange. She had walked up the road and gone through the gate into the farm.
The mystery would have excited them all even more than, in fact, it did had Caerlyon itself been less entrancing. But what Caerlyon turned out to be no words can describe! Those were the days, of course, before golf-links in Glebeshire, and although no one who has ever played on the Caerlyon links will ever wish them away (they, the handsomest, kindest, most fantastic sea links in all England), yet I will not pretend that those same green slopes, sliding so softly down to the sea-shore, bending back so gently to the wild mysteries of the Poonderry Moor, had not then a virgin charm that now they have lost! Who can decide?
But, for children thirty years ago, what a kingdom! Glittering with colour, they had the softness of a loving mother, the sudden, tumbled romance of an adventurous elder brother; they caught all the colours of the floating sky in their laps and the shadows flew like birds from shoulder to shoulder, and then suddenly the hills would shake their sides, and all those shadows would slide down to the yellow beach and lie there like purple carpets. You could race and race and never grow tired, lie on your back and stare into the fathomless sky, roll over for ever and come to no harm, wander and never be lost. The first gate of the kingdom and the last—the little golden square underneath the tower where the green witch has her stall of treasures that she never sells. . . .