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Yann, the King's body-servant, ran at once to the stables and brought three horses one for Queen Niotte; one for her only child, the Princess Gwennolar; and for King Graul the red stallion, Rubh, swiftest and strongest in the royal stalls, one of the Five Wonders of Lyonnesse.
They pressed around him in a ring; and at first they were sad, since of what he sang they remembered the like in Lyonnesse plough and sickle and flail, nesting birds and harvest, flakes of ore in the river-beds, dinner in the shade, and the plain beyond winking in the noon-day heat.
Cecil roused himself and smiled at her; he had been by months together at Lyonnesse most years of the child's life, and had been gentle to her as he was to every living thing, though he had noticed her seldom. "Well, Petite Reine," he said kindly, bitter as his thoughts were; calling her by the name she generally bore. "All alone? Where are your playmates?"
.....the sunset bound of Lyonnesse, A land of old upheaven from the abyss By fire, to sink into the abyss again; Where fragments of forgotten people dwelt: it is not in this world; belongs not to this Fifth Race; but is more ancient, fantasmal, and portentous.
"What is your name?" she asked him curtly, in one of the pauses of the amorous and witty nonsense that circulated in the tent in which the officers of Chasseurs were entertaining him. "Well some call me Seraph." "Ah! you have petite names, then, in Albion? I should have though she was too somber and too stiff for them. Besides?" "Lyonnesse." "What a droll name! What are you?" "A soldier." "Good!
And yet in my wanderings along that coast I have come upon broken echoes, whispers, fragments of a tale, which now and again, as I tried to piece them together, wakened a suspicion that the derided philologer, with his false derivation, was yet "hot," as children say in the game of hide-and-seek. For the stretch of sea overlooked by Halzaphron covers the lost land of Lyonnesse.
Before him stood a dainty, delicate little form, all gay with white lace, and broideries, and rose ribbons, and floating hair fastened backward with a golden fillet; it was that of the little Lady Venetia, the only daughter of the House of Lyonnesse, by a late marriage of his Grace, the eight-year-old sister of the colossal Seraph; the plaything of a young and lovely mother, who had flirted in Belgravia with her future stepson before she fell sincerely and veritably in love with the gallant and still handsome Duke.
Tennyson caught the spirit of it in the grand moments of the Morte D'Arthur; and missed it by a thousand miles elsewhere in the Idylls. The spirit, the atmosphere, is that of a glory receding into the unknown and the West of Wonder; into Lyonnesse, into Avallon, into the Sunset Isles.
My work is done; yours, too, is nearly over. Farewell!" Then the barge moved slowly away, while those on board lamented. Sir Bedivere watched it till it disappeared amid the shadows over the lake. Then he rose slowly and wandered back to Lyonnesse. After a time he went to Camelot. There was a new king there, who was good, and new customs, also good.
But for the publicity of the entrance of the Badischer Hof the mighty right arm of the Guardsman might have terminated the interview then and there, in different fashion. Baroni had gained his point, and was ushered into the fine chambers set apart for the future Duke of Lyonnesse.
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