Chapter 30

'These marginalia are written for the eyes of my dear son, into whose hands this copy of my book will come. Until he gave me his promise to bury the amulet with me, I felt alone in the world. But even he failed to understand what he called "my superstition." He did not know that by perpetually feeling on my bosom the facets of the beloved jewel which had long lain warm upon hers--the cross which had received the last kiss from her lips--I had been able to focus all the scattered rays of thought--I had been able to vitalise memory till it became an actual presence. He did not know that out of my sorrow had been born at last a strange kind of happiness--the happiness that springs from loving a memory--living with a memory--till it becomes a presence--an objective reality. He did not know that, by holding her continually in my thoughts, by means of the amulet, I achieved at last the miracle described by the Hindoo poets--the miracle of reshaping from the undulations of "the three regions of the universe the remembered object by the all-creative magic of love!"'

Then followed some translations from the Kumara-sambhava and other Sanscrit poems, and then the well-known passage in Lucretius about dreams, and then a pathetic account of the visions called up within him by the sensation caused by the lacerations of the facets of the cherished amulet upon his bosom--visions something akin, as I imagine, to those experienced by _convulsionnaires_. And then after all this learning came references to poor ignorant Fenella Stanley's letters and extracts from them.

In one of these extracts I was startled to come upon the now familiar word 'crwth.'

'De Welch fok ses as de livin mullos only follow the crwth on Snowdon wen it is playde by a Welch Chavi, but dat is all a lie. Dey follows the crwth when a Romany Chi plays it as I nows very wel, but de chavi wot play on the crwth, shee must love the living mullo she want for to come, and de living mullo must love her.'

And then followed my father's comments on the extract.

'_N.B._--To see and hear a crwth, if possible, and ascertain the true nature of the vibrations. But there are said to be only a few crwths in existence; and very likely there is no musician who could play upon them.'

Then followed a few sentences written at a later date.

'The crwth is now becoming obsolete; on inquiry I learn that it is a stringed instrument played with a bow like a violin; but as one of the feet of the bridge passes through one of the sound-holes and rests on the inside of the back, the vibrations must be quite unique, if we remember how important a part is played by the back in all instruments of the violin kind. It must be far more subtle than the vibrations of the Welsh harp, and even more subtle (if also more nasal) than those of the violin.

'The reason why music has in all ages been called in to aid in evoking the spirits, the reason why it is as potent now as ever it was in aiding the spirits to manifest themselves, is simple enough: the rhythmic vibrations of music set in active motion the magnetic waves through whose means alone the two worlds, spiritual and material, can hold communication. The quality and the value of these vibrations depend mainly, no doubt, upon the magnetic power, conscious or other, of the musician, but partly also upon the kind of instrument used. The vibrations awakened by stringed instruments have been long known to be more subtle than any others: instruments of the violin kind are of course the most subtle of all. Doubtless this is why among the Welsh hills the old saying used to be "The spirits follow the crwth."'

'Which folly is the more besotted,' I said, as I read and re-read the marginalia--'that of the scholar with his scientific nonsense about vibrations, or that of the ignorant Gypsy with her living mullos drawn through the air by music and love?'

But now my eyes fell upon a very different kind of marginal note which ran thus:--

'The one important fact of the twentieth century will be the growth and development of that great Renascence of Wonder which set in in Europe at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth.

'The warring of the two impulses governing man (and probably not man only, but the entire world of conscious life)--the impulse of acceptance, the impulse to take unchallenged and for granted all the phenomena of the outer world as they are, and the impulse to confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder--will occupy all the energies of the next century.

'The old impulse of wonder which came to the human race in its infancy has to come back--has to triumph--before the morning of the final emancipation of man can dawn.

'But the wonder will be exercised in very different fields from those in which it was exercised in the past. The materialism which at this moment seems to most thinkers inseparable from the idea of evolution will go. Against their own intentions certain scientists are showing that the spiritual force called life is the maker and not the creature of organism--is a something outside the material world, a something which uses the material world as a means of phenomenal expression.

'The materialist, with his primitive and confiding belief in the testimony of the senses, is beginning to be left out in the cold, when men like Sir W. R. Grove turn round on him and tell him that "the principle of all certitude" is not and cannot be the testimony of his own senses; that these senses, indeed, are no absolute tests of phenomena at all; that probably man is surrounded by beings he can neither see, feel, hear, nor smell; and that, notwithstanding the excellence of his own eyes, ears, and nose, the universe the materialist is mapping out so deftly is, and must be, monophysical, lightless, colourless, soundless--a phantasmagoric show--a deceptive series of undulations, which become colour, or sound, or what not, according to the organism upon which they fall.'

These words were followed by a sequence of mystical sonnets about "the Omnipotence of Love," which showed, beyond doubt, that if my father was not a scientific thinker, he was, at least, a very original poet. And this made me perplexed as to what could have drawn Wilderspin, who scorned the art of poetry, into the meshes of _The Veiled Queen_. Perhaps, however, it was because Wilderspin's ancestry was, notwithstanding his English name, largely, if not wholly, Welsh, as I learnt from Cyril. Welshmen, whether sensitive or not to the rhythmic expression of the English language, are almost all, I believe, of the poetic temperament.

But from this moment my mind began to run upon the picture of Fenella Stanley, surrounded by those Snowdonian spirits which her music was supposed to have evoked from the mountain air of the morning.

XIII

THE MAGIC OF SNOWDON

I

In a few days I left London and went to North Wales.

Opposite to me in the railway carriage sat an elderly lady, into whose face I occasionally felt myself to be staring in an unconscious way. But I was merely communing with myself: I was saying to myself, 'My love of North Wales, and especially of Snowdon, is certainly very strong; but it is easily accounted for--it is a matter of temperament. Even had Wales not been associated with Winnie, I still must have dearly loved it. Much has been said about the effect of scenery upon the minds and temperaments of those who are native to it. But temperament is a matter of ancestral conditions: the place of one's birth is an accident. As some, like my cousin Percy, for instance are born with a passion for the sea, and some with a passion for forests, some with a passion for mountains, and some with a passion for rolling plains. The landscape amid which I was born had, no doubt, a charm for me, and could bring to me that nature-ecstacy which I inherited from Fenella Stanley. But with Wales I actually fell in love the moment I set foot in the country. This is why I am hurrying there now.'

And I laughed at myself, and evidently frightened the old lady very much. She did not know that underneath the soul's direst struggle--the struggle of personality with the tyranny of the ancestral blood--there is an awful sense of humour--a laughter (unconquerable, and yet intolerable) at the deepest of all incongruities, the incongruity of Fate's game with man. I apologised to her, and told her that I had been absorbed in reading a droll story, in which a man believed that the Angel of Memory had refashioned for him his dead wife out of his own sorrow and unquenchable fountain of tears.

'What an extraordinary idea!' said the old lady, in the conciliatory tone she would have adopted towards a madman whom she found alone with her in a railway carriage. 'I mean he was very eccentric, wasn't he?'

'Who shall say, madam? "Bold is the donkey-driver and bold the ka'dee who dares say what he will believe, what disbelieve, not knowing in any wise the mind of Allah, not knowing in any wise his own heart and what it shall some day suffer."'

At the next station the old lady left the carriage and entered another, and I was left alone.

My intention was to take up my residence at the cottage where Winifred had lived with her aunt. Indeed, for a few days I did this, taking with me one of the Welsh peasants with whom I had previously made friends. But of course a lengthened stay in such a house was impossible. More than ever now I needed attendance, and good attendance, for I had passed into a strange state of irritability--I had no command over my nerves, which were jarred by the most trifling thing. I went to the hotel at Peri y Gwryd, but there tourists and visitors made life more intolerable still to a man in my condition.

At first I thought of building a house as near to the cottage as possible; but this would take time, and I could not rest out of Wales. I decided at last to have a wooden bungalow built. By telling the builders that time was the first consideration with me, the cost a secondary one, I got a bungalow built in a few weeks. By the tradesmen of Chester I got it fitted up and furnished to my taste with equal rapidity. Attending to this business gave real relief.

When the bungalow was finished I removed into it the picture 'Faith and Love.' I also got in as much painting material as I might want and began to make sketches in the neighbourhood.

Time went on, and there I remained. In a great degree, however, the habit of grieving was conquered by my application to work. My moroseness of temper gradually left me.

Beautiful memories began to take the place of hideous ones--the picture of the mattress and the squalor gave place to pictures of Winifred on the sands of Raxton or on Snowdon. Yet so much of habit is there in grief that even at this time I was subject to recurrent waves of the old pain--waves which were sometimes as overmastering as ever.

I did not neglect the cottage, which was now my property, but kept it in exactly the same state as that in which it had been put by Sinfi after Winnie had wandered back to Wales.

By isolating myself from all society, by surrounding myself with mementos of Winifred, memory really did at last seem to be working a miracle such as was worked for the widowed Ja'afar.

Yet not entirely had memory passed into an objective presence. I seemed to feel Winnie near me; but that was all. I felt that more necessary than anything else in perfecting the atmosphere of memory in which I would live was the society of her in whom alone I had found sympathy--Sinfi Lovell. Did I also remember the wild theories of my father and Fenella Stanley about the crwth? To obtain the company of Sinfi had now become very difficult--her attitude towards me had so changed. When she allowed me to rejoin the Lovells at Kingston Vale she did so under the compulsion of my distress. But my leaving the Gypsies of my own accord left her free from this compulsion. She felt that she had now at last bidden me farewell for ever.

Still, opportunities of seeing her occasionally would, I knew, present themselves, and I now determined to avail myself of these. Panuel Lovell and some of the Boswells were not unfrequently in the neighbourhood, and they were always accompanied by Sinfi and Videy.

II

On a certain occasion, when I learnt that the Lovells were in the neighbourhood, I sought them out. Sinfi at first was extremely shy, or distant, or proud, or scared, and it was not till after one or two interviews that she relaxed. She still was overshadowed by some mysterious feeling towards me that seemed at one moment anger, at another dread. However, I succeeded at last. I persuaded Panuel and his daughters to leave their friends at 'the Place,' and spend a few days with me at the bungalow. Great was the gaping and wide the grinning among the tourists to see me inarching along the Capel Curig road with three Gypsies. But to all human opinion I had become as indifferent as Wilderspin himself.

As we walked along the road, Sinfi slowly warmed into her old self, but Videy, as usual, was silent, preoccupied, and meditative. When we got within sight of the bungalow, however, the lights flashing from the windows made the long low building look very imposing. Pharaoh, the bantam cock which Sinfi was carrying, began to crow, but silence again fell upon Sinfi.

Panuel, when we entered the bungalow, said he was very tired and would like to go to bed. I had perceived by the glossy appearance of his skin (which was of the colour of beeswaxed mahogany) and the benevolent dimple in his check that, although far from being intoxicated, he was 'market-merry'; and as the two sisters also seemed tired, I took the party at once to their bedrooms.

'Dordi! what a gran' room,' said Sinfi, in a hushed voice, as I opened the door of the one allotted to her. 'Don't you mind, Videy, when you an' me fust slep' like two kairengros?' [Footnote]

[Footnote: House-dwellers.]

'No, I don't,' said Videy sharply.

'It was at Llangollen Fair,' continued Sinfi, her frank face beaming like a great child's; 'two little chavies we was then. An' don't you mind, Videy, how we both on us cried when they put us to bed, 'cause we was afeard the ceilin' would fall down on us?'

Videy made no answer, but tossed up her head and looked around to see whether there was a grinning servant within earshot.

'Good-night, Sinfi,' I said, shaking her hand; 'and now, Videy, I will show you your room.'

'Oh, but Videy an' me sleeps togither, don't we?'

'Certainly, if you wish it,' I replied.

'She's afeard o' the "mullos,"' said Videy scornfully, as she went and stood before an old engraved Venetian mirror I had picked up at Chester, admiring her own perfect little figure reflected therein. 'Ever since she's know'd you she's bin afeard o' mullos, and keeps Pharaoh with her o' nights; the mullos never come where there's a crowin' cock.'

I did not look at Sinfi, but bent my eyes upon the mirror, where, several inches above the reflex of Videy's sarcastic face, shone the features of Sinfi, perfectly cut as those of a Greek statue.

'It's the dukkerin' dook [Footnote] as she's afeard on,' said Videy, smiling in the glass till her face seemed one wicked glitter of scarlet lips and pearly teeth. 'An' yit there ain't no dukkerin' dook, an' there ain't no mullos.'

[Footnote: The prophesying ghost.]

Among the elaborately-engraved flowers and stars at the top of the mirror was the representation of an angel grasping a musical instrument.

'Look, look!' said Sinfi, 'I never know'd afore that angels played the crwth. I wonder whether they can draw a livin' mullo up to the clouds, same as my crwth can draw one to Snowdon?'

I bade them good-night, and joined Panuel at the door.

I was conducting him along the corridor to his room when the door was reopened and Sinfi's head appeared, as bright as ever, and then a beckoning hand.

'Reia,' said she, when I had returned to the door, 'I want to whisper a word in your ear'; and she pulled my head towards the door and whispered, 'Don't tell nobody about that 'ere jewelled trúshul in the church vaults at Raxton. We shall be going down there at the fair time, so don't tell nobody.'

'But you surely are not afraid of your father,' I whispered in reply.

'No, no,' said she, bringing her lips so close to my face that I felt the breath steaming round my ear. 'Not daddy--Videy!--Daddy can't keep a secret for five minutes. It's her I'm afeared on.'

I had scarcely left the door two yards behind me when I heard the voices of the sisters in loud altercation. I heard Sinfi exclaim, 'I sha'n't tell you what I said to him, so now! It was somethin' atween him an' me.'

'There they are ag'in,' said Panuel, bending his head sagely round and pointing with his thumb over his shoulder to the door; 'at it ag'in! Them two chavies o' mine are allus a-quarrellin' now, an' it's allus about the same thing. 'Tain't the quarrellin' as I mind so much,--women an' sparrows, they say, must cherrup an' quarrel,--but they needn't allus keep a-nag-naggin' about the same thing.'

'What's their subject, Panuel?' I asked.

'Subjick? Why _you_, in course. That's what the subjick is. When women quarrels you may allus be sure there's a chap somewheres about.'

By this time we had entered his bedroom: he went and sat upon the bed, and without looking round him began unlacing his 'highlows.' I had often on previous occasions remarked that Panuel, who, when sober, was as silent as Videy, and looked like her in the face, became, the moment that he passed into 'market-merriness,' as frank and communicative as Sinfi, and (what was more inexplicable) _looked_ as much like Sinfi as he had previously looked like Videy.

'How can I be the subject of their quarrels?' I said, listlessly enough, for I scarcely at first followed his words.

'How? Ain't you a chap?'

'Undoubtedly, Panuel, I am a chap.'

'When women quarrels there's allus a chap somewheres about, in course there is. But look ye here, Mr. Aylwin, the fault ain't Sinfi's, not a bit of it. It's Videy's, wi' her dog-in-the-manger ways. She's a back-bred un,' he said, giving me a knowing wink as he pulled off his calf-skin waistcoat and tossed it on to a chair at the further end of the room with a certainty of aim that would have been marvellous, even had he been entirely free from market-merriness.

I had before observed that Panuel when market-merry always designated Videy the 'back-bred un, that took a'ter Shuri's blazin' ole dad!' When sober his views of heredity changed; the 'back-bred un' was Sinfi.

After breakfast next morning it was agreed that Panuel and Videy should walk to the Place to see that everything was going on well, while Sinfi and I should remain in the bungalow. I observed from the distance that Videy had loitered behind her father on the Capel Curig road. I saw a dark shadow of anger pass over Sinfi's face, and I soon understood what was causing it. The daughter of the well-to-do Panuel Lovell and my guest was accosting a tourist with, 'Let me tell you your fortune, my pretty gentleman. Give the poor Gypsy a sixpence for luck, my gentleman.'

The bungalow delighted Sinfi. 'It's just like a great livin'-waggin, only more comfortable,' said she.

We spent the entire morning and afternoon there, and much of the next two days. It certainly seemed to me that her mere presence was an immense stimulus to memory in vitalising its one image.

'What's the use o' us a-keepin' a-talkin' about Winnie?' Sinfi said to me one day. 'It on'y makes you fret. You skears me sometimes; for your eyes are a-gettin' jis' as sad-lookin' as Mr. D'Arcy's eyes, an' it's all along o' fret-tin'.'

I persuaded her to stay with me while Panuel and Videy went on to Chester, for she could both soothe and amuse me.

III

Those who might suppose that Sinfi Lovell's lack of education would be a barrier against our sympathy, know little or nothing of real sorrow--little or nothing of the human heart--little or nothing of the stricken soul that looks out on man and his conventions through the light of an intolerable pain.

I now began to read and study as well as paint. But so absorbed was I in my struggle with Fenella Stanley and Romany superstitions, that the only subject which could distract me from memory was that of hereditary influence--prepotency of transmission in relation to races. Though Sinfi could neither read nor write, she loved to sit by my side and, caressing Pharaoh, to watch me as I read or wrote. To her there evidently seemed something mysterious and uncanny in writing, something like 'penning dukkering.' It seemed to her, I think, a much more remarkable accomplishment than that of painting. And as to reading, I am not sure that the satirical Videy was entirely wrong in saying that Sinfi believed that books 'could talk jis' like men and women.' Not a word would she speak, save when she now and then bent down her head to whisper to Pharaoh when that little warrior was inclined to give a disturbing chuckle, or to shake his wattles. And when at last she and Pharaoh got wearied by the prolonged silence, she would begin to murmur in a tone of playful satire to the restless bird, 'Mum, mum, Pharaoh. He's too hoot of a mush to rocker a choori chavi.' [Hush, hush, Pharaoh. He's too proud to speak to a poor child.]

Of course there was immense curiosity about my life at the bungalow, not only among the visitors at the Capel Curig Hotel, but among the Welsh residents; and rarely did the weekly papers come out without some paragraph about me. As a result of this, some of the London papers reproduced the paragraphs, and built upon their gossip columns of a positively offensive nature. In a paper which I will for convenience call the _London Satirist_ appeared a paragraph which some one cut out of the columns of the paper and posted to me. It ran thus:

'THE ECCENTRIC AYLWINS.--The power of heredity, which has much exercised the mind of Balzac, has never been more strikingly exemplified than in the case of the great family of the Aylwins. It is matter of common knowledge that some generations ago one of the Aylwins married a Gypsy. This fact did not, however, prevent his branch from being respectable, and receiving the name of the proud Aylwins; and the Gypsy blood remained entirely in abeyance until the present generation. Mr. Percy Aylwin, it will be remembered, having been smitten by the charms of a certain Rhona Boswell, actually set up a tent with the Gypsies; and now Mr. Henry Aylwin, of Raxton Hall (who, by the bye, has never been seen in that neighbourhood since the great landslip), is said to be following a good example by living in Wales with a Gypsy wife, but whether the wedding took place at St. George's, Hanover Square, or in simpler fashion in an encampment of Little Egypt, we do not know.'

One day in the bungalow, when I was reading the copious marginalia with which my father had furnished his own copy of _The Veiled Queen_, I came upon a passage which so completely carried my mind back to the night of our betrothal that I heard as plainly as I had then heard Winnie's words at the door of her father's cottage:

'I should have to come in the winds and play around you in the woods. I should have to peep over the clouds and watch you. I should have to follow you about wherever you went. I should have to beset you till you said: "Bother Winnie, I wish she'd keep in heaven!"'

The written words of my father that had worked this magical effect upon me were these: