Chapter 16

But how could I rest? Though Hope herself was laughing my hopes to scorn, how could I rest? How could I cease to search?

Bitter as it was to wander about the hills teasing my soul by delusions which other people must fain smile at, it would have been more bitter still to accept for certainty the intolerable truth that Winifred had died famished, or that her beloved body was a mangled corpse at the bottom of a cliff. If the reader does not understand this, it is because he finds it impossible to understand a sorrow like mine. I refused to return to Raxton, and took Mrs. Davies's cottage, which was unoccupied, and lived there throughout the autumn. Every day, wet or dry, I used to sally out on the Snowdonian range, just as though she had been lost but yesterday, making inquiries, bribing the good-natured Welsh people (who needed no bribing) to aid me in a search which to them must have seemed monomaniacal.

The peasants and farmers all knew me. 'Sut mae dy galon? (How is thy heart?)' they would say in the beautiful Welsh phrase as I met them. 'How is my heart, indeed!' I would sigh as I went on my way.

Before I went to Wales in search of Winifred I had never set foot in the Principality. Before I left it there was scarcely a Welshman who knew more familiarly than I every mile of the Snowdonian country. Never a trace of Winifred could I find.

At the end of the autumn I left the cottage and removed to Pen y Gwryd, as a comparatively easy point from which I could reach the mountain llyn where I had breakfasted with Winifred on that morning. Afterwards I took up my abode at a fishing-inn, and here I stayed the winter through--scarcely hoping to find her now, yet chained to Snowdon. After my labours during the day, scrambling among slippery boulders and rugged rocks, crossing swollen torrent-beds, amid rain and ice and snow and mist such as frightened away the Welsh themselves--after thus wandering, because I could not leave the region, it was a comfort to me to turn into the low, black-beamed room of the fishing-inn, with drying hams, flitches of bacon, and fishing-rods for decorations, and hear the simple-hearted Cymric folk talking, sometimes in Welsh, sometimes in English, but always with that kindness and that courtesy which go to make the poetry of Welsh common life.

Meantime, I had, as I need scarcely say, spared neither trouble nor expense in advertising for information about Winifred in the Welsh and the West of England newspapers. I offered rewards for her discovery, and the result was merely that I was pestered by letters from people (some of them tourists of education) suggesting traces and clues of so wild, and often of so fantastic a kind, that I arrived at the conviction that of all man's faculties his imagination is the most lawless, and at the same time the most powerful. It was perfectly inconceivable to me that the writers of some of these letters were not themselves demented, so wild or so fanciful were the clues they suggested. Yet. when I came to meet them and talk with them (as I sometimes did), I found these correspondents to be of the ordinary prosaic British type. All my efforts were to no purpose.

Among my longer journeys from the fishing-inn, the most frequent were those to Holywell, near Flint, to the Well of St. Winifred--the reader need not be told why. He will recollect how little Winnie, while plying me with strawberries, had sagely recommended the holy water of this famous well as a 'cure for crutches.' She had actually brought me some of it in a lemonade bottle when she returned to Raxton after her first absence, and had insisted on rubbing my ankle with it. She had, as I afterwards learnt from her father, importuned and at last induced her aunt (evidently a good-natured and worthy soul) to take her to visit a friend at Holywell, a journey of many miles, for the purpose of bringing home with her a bottle of the holy water. Whenever any ascent of the gangways had proved to be more successful than usual, Winifred had attributed the good luck to the virtues contained in her lemonade bottle. Ah! superstition seemed pretty enough then.

At first in the forlorn hope that memory might have attracted her thither, and afterwards because there was a fascination for me in the well on account of its association with her, my pilgrimages to Holywell were as frequent as those of any of the afflicted devotees of the olden time, whose crutches left behind testified to the genuineness of the Saint's pretensions. Into that well Winnie's innocent young eyes had gazed--gazed in the full belief that the holy water would cure me--gazed in the full belief that the crimson stains made by the _byssus_ on the stones were stains left by her martyr-namesake's blood. Where had she stood when she came and looked into the well and the rivulet? On what exact spot had rested her feet--those little rosy feet that on the sea-sands used to flash through the receding foam as she chased the ebbing billows to amuse me, while I sat between my crutches in the cove looking on? It was, I found, possible to gaze in that water till it seemed alive with her--seemed to hold the reflection of the little face which years ago peered anxiously into it for the behoof of the crippled child-lover pining for her at Raxton, and unable to 'get up or down the gangways without her.'

Holywell grew to have a fascination for me, and in the following spring I left the fishing-inn beneath Snowdon, and took rooms in this interesting old town.

VIII

One day, near the rivulet that runs from St. Winifred's Well, I suddenly encountered Sinfi Lovell.

'Sinfi,' I said, 'she's dead, she's surely dead.'

'I tell ye, brother, she ain't got to die!' said Sinfi, as she came and stood beside me. 'Winnie Wynne's on'y got to beg her bread. She's alive.'

'Where is she?' I cried. 'Oh, Sinfi, I shall go mad!'

'There you're too fast for me, brother,' said she, 'when you ask me _where_ she is; but she's alive, and I ain't come quite emp'y-handed of news about her, brother.'

'Oh, tell me!' said I.

'Well,' said Sinfi, 'I've just met one of our people, Euri Lovell, as says that, the very mornin' after we seed her on the hills, he met her close to Carnarvon at break of day.'

'Then she _did_ go to Carnarvon,' I said. 'What a distance for those dear feet!'

'Euri knowed her by sight,' said Sinfi, 'but didn't know about her bein' under the cuss, so he jist let her pass, sayin' to hisself, "She looks jist like a crazy wench this mornin', does Winnie Wynne." Euri was a-goin' through Carnarvon to Bangor, on to Conway and Chester, and never heerd a word about her bein' lost till he got back, six weeks ago.'

'I must go to Carnarvon at once,' said I.

'No use, brother,' said Sinfi. 'If _I_ han't pretty well worked Carnarvon, it's a pity. I've bin there the last three weeks on the patrin-chase, and not a patrin could I find. It's my belief as she never went into Carnarvon town at all, but turned off and went into Llanbeblig churchyard.'

'Why do you think so, Sinfi?'

''Cause her aunt, bein' a Carnarvon woman, was buried among her own kin in Llanbeblig churchyard.

Leastwise, you won't find a ghose of a trace on her at Carnarvon, and it'll be a long kind of a wild-goose chase from here; but if you will go, go you must.'

She could not dissuade me from starting for Carnarvon at once; and, as I would go, she seemed to take it as a matter of course that she must accompany me. Our journey was partly by coach and partly afoot.

My first impulse on nearing Carnarvon was to go--I could not have said why--to Llanbeblig churchyard.

Among a group of graves of the Davieses we easily found that of Winifred's aunt, beneath a newly-planted arbutus tree. After looking at the modest mound for some time, and wondering where Winifred had stood when the coffin was lowered--as I had wondered where she had stood at St. Winifred's Well--I roamed about the churchyard with Sinfi in silence for a time.

At last she said, 'I mind comin' here wonst with Winnie, and I mind her sayin': "There's no place I should so much like to be buried in as Llanbeblig churchyard. The graves of them as die unmarried do look so beautiful."'

'How did she know the graves of those who die unmarried?'

Sinfi looked over the churchyard and waved her hand.

'Wherever you see them beautiful primroses, and them shinin' snowdrops, and them sweet-smellin' vi'lets, that's allus the grave of a child or else of a young Gorgie as died a maid; and wherever you see them laurel trees, and box trees, and 'butus trees, that's the grave of a pusson as ain't nuther child nor maid, an' the Welsh folk think nobody else on'y child'n an' maids ain't quite good enough to be turned into the blessed flowers o' spring.'

'Next to the sea,' I said, 'she loved the flowers of spring.'

'And _I_ should like to be buried here too, brother,' said Sinfi, as we left the churchyard.

'But a fine strong girl like you, Sinfi, is not very likely to die unmarried while there are Romany bachelors about.'

'There ain't a-many Romany chals,' she said, 'as du'st marry Sinfi Lovell, even supposing as Sinfi Lovell 'ud marry _them_, an' a Gorgio she'll never marry--an' never can marry. And to lay here aneath the flowers o 'spring, wi' the Welsh sun a-shinin' on 'em as it's a-shinin' now, that must be a sweet kind of bed, brother, and for anythink as I knows on, a Romany chi 'ud make as sweet a bed o' vi'lets as the beautifullest Gorgie-wench as wur ever bred in Carnarvon, an' as shinin' a bunch o' snowdrops as ever the Welsh spring knows how to grow.'

At any other time this extraordinary girl's talk would have interested me greatly; now, nothing had any interest for me that did not bear directly upon the fate of Winifred.

Little dreaming how this quiet churchyard had lately been one of the battle-grounds of that all-conquering power (Destiny, or Circumstance?) which had governed Winnie's life and mine, I went with Sinfi into Carnarvon, and made inquiry everywhere, but without the slightest result. This occupied several days, during which time Sinfi stayed with some acquaintances encamped near Carnarvon, while I lodged at a little hotel.

'You don't ask me how you happened to meet me at Holywell, brother,' said she to me, as we stood looking across the water at Carnarvon Castle, over whose mighty battlements the moon was fighting with an army of black, angry clouds, which a wild wind was leading furiously against her--'you don't ask me how you happened to meet me at Holywell, nor how long I've been back agin in dear old Wales, nor what I've been a-doin' on since we parted; but that's nuther here nor there. I'll tell you what I think about Winnie an' the chances o' findin' her, brother, and that'll intrust you more.'

'What is it, Sinfi?' I cried, waking up from the reminiscences, bitter and sweet, the bright moon had conjured up in my mind.

'Well, brother, Winnie, you see, was very fond o' me.'

'She was, and good reason for being fond of you she had.'

'Well, brother, bein' very fond o' me, _that_ made her very fond o' _all_ Romanies; and though she took agin me at fust, arter the cuss, as she took agin you because we was her closest friends (that's what Mr. Blyth said, you know, they allus do), she wouldn't take agin Romanies in general. No, she'd take to Romanies in general, and she'd go hangin' about the different camps, and she'd soon be snapped up, being so comely, and they'd make a lot o' money out on her jist havin' her with 'em for the "dukkerin'."'

'I don't understand you,' I said.

'Well, you know,' said Sinfi, 'anybody as is under the cuss is half with the sperrits and half with us, and so can tell the _real_ "dukkerin'." Only it's bad for a Romany to have another Romany in the "place" as is under the cuss; but it don't matter a bit about having a Gorgio among your breed as is under a cuss; for Gorgio cuss can't never touch Romany.'

'Then you feel quite sure she's not dead, Sinfi?'

'She's jist as live as you an' me somewheres, brother. There's two things as keeps _her_ alive: there's the cuss, as says she's got to beg her bread, and there's the dukkeripen o' the Golden Hand on Snowdon, as says she's got to marry you.'

'But, Sinfi, I mean that, apart from all this superstition of yours, you have reason to think she's alive? and you think she's with the Romanies?'

'I know she's alive, and I think she's with the Romanies. She _must_ be, brother, with the Shaws, or the Lees, or the Stanleys, or the Boswells, or some on 'em.'

'Then,' said I, 'I'll turn Gypsy; I'll be the second Aylwin to own allegiance to the blood of Fenella Stanley. I'll scour Great Britain till I find her.'

'You can jine _us_ if you like, brother. We're goin' all through the West of England with the gries. You're fond o' fishin' an' shootin', brother, an' though you're a Gorgio, you can't help bein' a Gorgio, and you ain't a mumply 'un, as I've said to Jim Burton many's the time; and if you can't give the left-hand body-blow like me, there ain't a-many Gorgios nor yit a-many Romanies as knows better nor you what their fistes wur made for, an' altogether, brother, Beng te tassa mandi if I shouldn't be right-on proud to see ye jine our breed. There's a coachmaker down in Chester, and he's got for sale the beautifullest livin'-waggin in all England. It's shiny orange-yellow with red window-blinds, an' if there's a colour in any rainbow as _can't_ be seed in the panels o' the front door, it's a kind o' rainbow I ain't never seed nowheres. He made it for Jericho Bozzell, the rich Griengro as so often stays at Raxton and at Gypsy Dell; but Rhona Bozzell hates a waggin and allus will sleep in a tent. They do say as the Prince o' Wales wants to buy that livin'-waggin, only he can't spare the balansers just now--his family bein' so big an' times bein' so bad. How much money ha' you got? Can you stan' a hundud an' fifty gold balansers for the waggin besides the fixins?

'Shift,' I said. 'I'm prepared to spend more than that in seeking Winnie.'

'Dordi, brother, you must be as rich as my dad, an' lie's the richest Griengro arter Jericho Bozzell. You an' me'll jist go down to Chester,' she continued, her eyes sparkling with delight at the prospect of bargaining for the waggon, 'an' we'll fix up sich a livin'-waggin as no Romany rei never had afore.'

'Agreed!' I said, wringing her hand.

'An' now you an' me's right pals,' said Sinfi.

We went to Chester, and I became owner of the famous 'livin'-waggin' coveted (according to Sinfi) by the great personage whom, on account of his name, she always spoke of as a rich, powerful, but mysterious and invisible Welshman. One of the monthly cheese-fairs was going on in the Linen Hall. Among the rows of Welsh carts standing in front of the 'Old Yacht Inn,' Sinfi introduced me to a 'Griengro' (one of the Gypsy Locks of Gloucestershire), of whom I bought a bay mare of extraordinary strength and endurance.

IX

It was, then, to find Winifred that I joined the Gypsies. And yet I will not deny that affinity with the kinsfolk of my ancestress Fenella Stanley must have had something to do with this passage in my eccentric life. That strain of Romany blood which, according to my mother's theory, had much to do with drawing Percy Aylwin and Rhona Boswell together, was alive and potent in my own veins.

But I must pause here to say a few words about Sinfi Lovell. Some of my readers must have already recognised her as a famous character in bohemian circles. Sinfi's father was a 'Griengro,' that is to say, a horse-dealer. She was, indeed, none other than that 'Fiddling Sinfi' who became famous in many parts of England and Wales as a violinist, and also as the only performer on the old Welsh stringed instrument called the 'crwth,' or cruth. Most Gypsies are musical, but Sinfi was a genuine musical genius. Having become, through the good-nature of Winifred's aunt Mrs. Davies, the possessor of a crwth, and having been taught by her the unique capabilities of that rarely seen instrument, she soon learnt the art of fascinating her Welsh patrons by the strange, wild strains she could draw from it. This obsolete six-stringed instrument (with two of the strings reaching beyond the key-board, used as drones and struck by the thumb, the bow only being used on the other four, and a bridge placed, not at right angles to the sides of the instrument, but in an oblique direction), though in some important respects inferior to the violin, is in other respects superior to it. Heard among the peaks of Snowdon, as I heard them during our search for Winifred, the notes of the crwth have a wonderful wildness and pathos. It is supposed to have the power of drawing the spirits when a maiden sings to its accompaniment a mysterious old Cymric song or incantation.

Among her own people it was as a seeress, as an adept in the real dukkering--the dukkering for the Romanies, as distinguished from the false dukkering, the dukkering for the Gorgios--that Sinfi's fame was great. She had travelled over nearly all England--wherever, in short, there were horse-fairs--and was familiar with London, where in the studios of artists she was in request as a face model of extraordinary value. Nor were these all the characteristics that distinguished her from the common herd of Romany chies: she was one of the few Gypsies of either sex who could speak with equal fluency both the English and Welsh Romanes, and she was in the habit sometimes of mixing the two dialects in a most singular way. Though she had lived much in Wales, and had a passionate love of Snowdon, she belonged to a famous branch of the Lovells whose haunt had for ages been in Wales and also the East Midlands, and she had caught entirely the accent of that district.

Among artists in London, as I afterwards learnt, she often went by the playful name of 'Lady Sinfi Lovell,' for the following reason:

She was extremely proud, and believed the 'Kaulo Camloes' to represent the aristocracy not only of the Gypsies, but of the world. Moreover, she had of late been brought into close contact with a certain travelling band of Hungarian Gypsy-musicians, who visited England some time ago. Intercourse with these had fostered her pride in a curious manner. The musicians are the most intelligent and most widely-travelled not only of the Hungarian Gypsies, but of all the Romany race. They are darker than the sátoros czijányok, or tented Gypsies. The Lovells being the darkest of all the Gypsies of Great Britain (and the most handsome, hence called Kaulo Camloes), it was easy to make out an affinity closer than common between the Lovells and the Hungarian musicians. Sinfi heard much talk among the Hungarians of the splendours of the early leaders of the continental Romanies. She was told of Romany kings, dukes, and counts. She accepted, with that entire faith which characterised her, the stories of the exploits of Duke Michael, Duke Andreas, Duke Panuel, and the rest. It only needed a hint from one of her continental friends, that her father, Panuel Lovell, was probably a descendant of Duke Panuel, for Sinfi to consider him a Duke. From that moment she felt as strongly as any Gorgie ever felt the fine sentiment expressed in the phrase, _noblesse oblige_; and to hear her say, 'I'm a duke's chavi [daughter], and mustn't do so and so,' was a delightful and refreshing experience to me. Poor Panuel groaned under these honours, for Sinfi insisted now on his dressing in a brown velveteen coat, scarlet waistcoat with gold coins for buttons, and the high-crowned, ribbon-bedizened hat which prosperous Gypsies once used to wear. She seemed to consider that her sister Videy (whose tastes were low for a Welsh Gypsy) did not belong to the high aristocracy, though born of the same father and mother. Moreover, 'dook' in Romanes means spirit, ghost, and very likely Sinfi found some power of association in this fact; for Videy was a born sceptic.

One of the special charms of Gypsy life is that a man fully admitted into the Romany brotherhood can be on terms of close intimacy with a Gypsy girl without awaking the smallest suspicion of love-making or flirtation; at least it was so in my time.

Under my father's will, a considerable legacy had come to me, and, after going to London to receive this, I made the circuit of the West of England with Sinfi's people. No sign whatever of Winifred did I find in any of the camps. I was for returning to Wales, where my thoughts always were; but I could not expect Sinfi to leave her family, so I started thither alone, leaving my waggon in their charge. Before I reached Wales, however, I met in the eastern part of Cheshire, not far from Moreton Hall, some English Lees, with whom I got into talk about the Hungarian musicians, who were here then on another flying visit to England. Something that dropped from one of the Lees as to the traditions and superstitions of the Hungarian Gypsies with regard to people suffering from dementia set me thinking; and at last I came to the conclusion that if I really believed Winifred to have taken shelter among the Romanies, it would be absurd not to follow up a band like these Hungarians. Accordingly I changed my course, and followed them up. On coming upon them in a famous English camping-place I found the Lovells and the Boswells. Rhona, dressed in gorgeous attire, evidently purchased at some second-hand shop, was rehearsing the shawl-dance for a great occasion at a neighbouring fair. But no Winifred.

My health was now much impaired by sleeplessness (the inevitable result of my anxiety), and by a narcotic, which from the commencement of my troubles I had been in the habit of taking in ever-increasing doses--a terrible narcotic, one of whose multitudinous effects is that of sending all the patient's thoughts circling around one central idea like planets round the sun. Painful and agonising as had been my suspense,--my oscillation between hope and dread,--during my wanderings with the Lovells, these wanderings had not been without their moments of comfort, for all of which I had been indebted to Sinfi. She would sit with me in an English lane, under a hedge or tree, on a balmy summer evening, or among the primroses, wild hyacinths, buttercups and daisies of the sweet meadows, chattering her reminiscences of Winifred. She would mostly end by saying: 'Winnie was very fond on ye, brother, and we shall find her yit. The Golden Hand on Snowdon wasn't there for nothink. The dukkeripen says you'll marry her yit; a love like yourn can follow the tryenest patrin as ever wur laid.' Then she would play on her crwth and say, 'Ah, brother, I shall be able to make this crwth bring ye a sight o' Winnie's livin' mullo if she's alive, and there ain't a sperrit of the hills as wouldn't answer to it.'

Of Gorgios generally, however, Sinfi had at heart a feeling somewhat akin to dread. I could not understand it.

'Why do you dislike the Gorgios, Sinfi?' I said to her one day on Lake Ogwen, after the return of the Lovells to Wales. We were trout-fishing from a boat anchored to a heavy block of granite which she had fastened to a rope and heaved overboard with a strength that would have surpassed that of most Englishwomen.

'That's nuther here nor there, brother,' she replied mysteriously. So months and months dragged by, and brought no trace of Winifred.

IV

THE LEADER OF THE AYLWINIANS

I

One day as Sinfi and I were strolling through the lovely glades between Capel Curig and Bettws y Coed, on our way to a fishing-place, we sat down by a stream to eat some bread and cheese we had brought with us.