The Knights of the Round Table. Frost William Henry
to me in one little thing. For you said that you would give me all that you got by staying in the castle, yet you did not give me the girdle of green lace. It was I who sent that to you by my daughter, too. But you kept it only to save your life, and so I forgive you, and to show you that I forgive you, you may keep it now always.'
"But Gawain tore off the girdle and threw it at the feet of the Knight of the Green Chapel. 'Take it back!' he cried, 'I do not deserve ever to be called an honorable knight again! I came here for the honor of the Round Table, and then I broke my promise to you. Tell me why you came to our court and why you brought me to this shame, and then I will go back to King Arthur and tell him that I am not worthy any longer to be one of his knights. He will ask me why you did this, so tell me and let me go away, for now I have lied to you and I cannot look you in the face.'
"'I did it,' said the Knight of the Green Chapel, 'because the great enchantress, Queen Morgan-le-Fay, King Arthur's sister, who hates him, told me that all his knights were cowards. She said that all who praised them lied or were themselves deceived and that some good knight ought to go and prove them to be the cowards that they were. So I went to try whether they were brave or not, and it was by the magic of Queen Morgan-le-Fay that I was not killed when you cut off my head. But now I see that what I did was wrong. It was Morgan-le-Fay, I see now, who hoped to bring shame on King Arthur's court, because she hated him. And you have shown me that Arthur's knights are brave and true, for you took my challenge and came up here into the North to find me and to let me kill you. Now come back with me to my castle and help us to keep the festival of the New Year. Take up your girdle and come.'
"But Gawain was still filled with shame and horror at what he had done. 'I will not go back with you,' he said, 'but I will keep the girdle to remind me of this time. If I ever feel that I am doing better things and if I ever begin to grow proud of them, I will look at this girdle and it will make me remember how I broke my word.'
"And Gawain would not listen to anything more that the knight said, but he mounted his horse and turned him toward the south and rode away. Gawain never knew what happened to him on that journey back to Camelot. Perhaps the nights were as cold and the ways as rough as they had been before. Perhaps the wild beasts came against him again. Perhaps the storms still drove the snow and the sleet against him, so that they cut him in the face and froze into his armor. He cared for none of these things and he remembered none of them afterwards. His one thought was to get back to Camelot and tell the King that he was no longer worthy to be his knight, and then to go where no one who had known him should ever see him again.
"And so he rode on, as fast as he could, for he did not know how many days, and at last, in the early winter evening, he saw the glow in the windows of the castle at Camelot. Once more he hurried his horse till he reached the gate. He threw himself down from the saddle and hastened to the hall, where a great shout went up: 'Gawain is alive and he has come back!' and the knights and the ladies crowded around him to ask him where he had been and what he had seen and done. He pushed his way through them all and threw himself down upon the floor before the King. He told all of his story, how he had gone out for the honor of the Round Table and how he had broken his word and been shamed, and at the end he held up the girdle of green lace and said: 'My lord, I shall leave you now and I shall never see you again, for I am not worthy to be your knight, but I shall carry this with me, and shall always wear it, so that I never can forget my shame."
"And the King answered: 'Gawain, you are still among the best of my knights. You failed a little at last, but it was no coward and no false knight who went up there to seek his death and to keep a promise that he need not have kept. Wear your girdle, but it shall be no shame to you. And that it may be none all my knights shall wear girdles of green lace like it.
"So the story says that all of King Arthur's knights wore green lace girdles in honor of Gawain. I don't know what became of the girdles afterwards, but they cannot have worn them always, or at least Gawain cannot have worn his. For you know he could never be wounded while he had it on, and he certainly was wounded afterwards. But I will tell you about that when I get to it."
About the time that we got to the end of this story we came to a place which the driver said was as far from Glastonbury as he had ever been in this direction. We stopped at a little inn by the road, and the driver asked the way to Queen Camel. We also asked the man who told him if he had ever heard of a hill or of any sort of place about here called Camelot, but he never had. So we went on to find it for ourselves. After more riding and more asking of the way and more showers, we came to Queen Camel. It was past luncheon-time then, and, what was more to the point, it was past the horse's luncheon-time. So we decided that we would not go any farther till we had all had something to eat.
The Bell looked like the best hotel in the place, so we went there and astonished the proprietor and all the servants by asking for something to eat. But we got it, and while we were at luncheon the driver put the horse in the stable and then talked with the proprietor, to find out whether he knew anything about Camelot. Now the keeper of this bit of an hotel must have been a remarkably intelligent man, for he really did know something about it. He came in to see us and he said that he thought that it must be Cadbury Castle that we were looking for. Then a great light shone upon me and I remembered what I ought to have remembered before, that one of my books at home had said that it was called Cadbury Castle now. "But do they not call it Camelot too?" I asked him. I did not like to give up that name.
"Oh, yes, sir," he said, "they call it Camelot too."
"And do they say that King Arthur lived there?"
"No, sir, he didn't live there; he placed his army there."
Then the landlord went away and came back with a big book, a history of Somersetshire, or something of that sort, to show us what it had to say about Cadbury Castle. It did not say much that I did not know before, but it said enough to prove what I wanted to know most of all. And that was that this Cadbury Castle was without any doubt the place that we were looking for. We finished our luncheon, the landlord showed us our way, and we went on again.
It was only a little way now. We were to find a steep road that led up the side of the hill to Cadbury Castle. It was too steep, we were told, to take our carriage up, and we should have to leave it at the bottom and walk. And so it proved. We found the hill and the steep little track up its side. We got down from the carriage, and, while we waited for the driver to find a safe place to leave the horse, we gazed up the hill, along the rough little road, and knew that at last we were before the gates of Camelot.
CHAPTER III
We walked up the steep road, and just before we came to the top of the hill the rain began again. There was one little house near the top and we decided to let Camelot wait for a few minutes longer and go into the house and stay till the rain stopped.
The woman of the house seemed to be glad to see us, and she asked us to write our names in her visitors' book. The names and the dates in the book showed that Camelot had some six or eight visitors a year. Of course we tried to get the woman to tell us something about the place, and of course we failed. She knew that it was called Cadbury Castle and sometimes Camelot and sometimes the Camp. She knew that the well close by her house was called King Arthur's Well, but she did not know why. The water in it was not good to drink, and in dry times they could not get water from it at all. She got drinking-water and in dry times all the water that she used from St. Anne's Wishing Well, a quarter of a mile around the hill. She did not know what that name meant either. She used to have a book that told all about the place, but she couldn't show it to us, because it had been lent to somebody and had never been returned. The vicar had studied a good deal about the place too, and he knew all about it. Could we find the vicar and get him to tell us about it? Oh, no, it wasn't the present vicar, it was the old vicar, and he was dead.
So we gave up learning anything and waited for the rain to stop, and then went out to see as much as we could for ourselves. The hilltop was broad and level. I can't tell just how broad, because I am no judge of acres, but I believe it was several. It had a low wall of earth around it, covered with grass, of course, like all the rest of the place. When we stood on the top of this wall and looked down, we saw that the ground sloped away from us till it made a sort of ditch, and then rose again and made another earth wall, a little way down the hillside.