Alice Lorraine: A Tale of the South Downs

								

he should have been under the counterpane.
This grew worse and worse, until towards the middle of the month
of June, A.D. 1611, his mind was altogether much above the proper
temperature. Great things were pending in the heavens, which might be
quoted as pious excuse for a little human restlessness. The prince,
with his implements always ready either in his lantern-chamber, or at
his favourite spot of the hills, according to the weather, grew more
and more impatient daily for the sun to be out of the way, and more
and more intolerant every night of any cloudiness. Self-perplexed,
downcast, and moody (except when for a few brief hours a brighter
canopy changed his gloom into a nervous rapture), he wasted and waned
away in body, as his mind grew brighter. After the hurried night, he
dragged his faint way home in the morning, and his face of exhausted
power struck awe into the household. No one dared to ask him what had
happened, or why he looked so; and he like a true philosopher kept all
explanations to himself. And then he started anew, and strode with his
Samian cloak around him, over the highest, darkest, and most lonesome
hill, out of people’s sight.
One place there was which beyond all others suited his purposes and
his mood. A well-known land-mark now, and the scene of many a merry
picnic, Chanctonbury Ring was then a lonely spot imbued with terror
of a wandering ghost,--an ancient ghost with a long white beard
walking even in the afternoon, with its head bowed down in search of
something--a vain search of centuries. This long-sought treasure has
now been found; not by the ghost, however, but a lucky stroke of the
ploughshare; and the spectral owner roves no more. He is supposed, with
all the assumption required to make a certainty, to have been a tenant
on Chancton Manor, under Earl Gurth, the brother of Harold, and being
slain at Hastings, to have forgotten where his treasure lay.
The Ring, as of old, is a height of vantage for searching all the
country round with a telescope on a breezy day. It is the salient
point and foreland of a long ridge of naked hills, crowned with darker
eminence by a circle of storm-huddled trees. But when the astrologer
Agasicles made his principal night-haunt here, the Ring was not
overhung with trees, but only outlined by them; and the rampart of the
British camp (if such it were) was more distinct, and uninvaded by
planters. So that here was the very place for a quiet sage to make his
home, sweeping a long horizon and secure from interruption. To such a
citadel of science, guarded by the fame of ghosts, even his daughter
Artemise, or his trusty servant Memel, would scarce dare to follow him;
much less any of the peasants, who, from the lowland, seeing a distant
light, crossed themselves; for that fine old custom flourished still
among them. Therefore, here his tent was pitched, and here he spent the
nights in gazing, and often the days in computation, not for himself,