Chapter 32

When I thought of Winifred lying at the bottom of some chasm in Snowdon, my grief was very great, as these pages show. Yet it was not intolerable; it did not threaten to unseat my reason, for even then, when I knew so little of the magic of y Wyddfa, I felt how close was the connection between my darling and the hills that knew her and loved her. But during the time that her death, amidst surroundings too appalling to contemplate, hung before my eyes in a dreadful picture--during the time when it seemed certain that her death in a garret, her burial in a pauper pit six coffins deep, was a hideous truth and no fancy, all the beauty with which Nature seemed at one time clothed was wiped away as by a sponge. The earth was nothing more than a charnel-house, the skies above it were the roof of the Palace of Nin-ki-gal. But now that Snowdon had spoken to me, the old life which had formerly made the world so beautiful and so beloved came back.

All nature seemed rich and glowing with the deep expectance of my heart. The sunrise and the sunset seemed conscious of Winnie, and the very birds seemed to be warbling at times 'She's alive.'

I think, indeed, that I had passed into that sufistic ecstasy expressed by a writer often quoted by my father, an Oriental writer, Ferridoddin--

With love I burn: the centre is within me; While in a circle everywhere around me Its Wonder lies--

that exalted mood, I mean, described in the great chapter on the Renascence of Wonder which forms the very core and heart-thought of the strange book so strangely destined to govern the entire drama of my life, _The Veiled Queen_.

The very words of the opening of that chapter came to me:

'The omnipotence of love--its power of knitting together the entire universe--is, of course, best understood by the Oriental mind. Just after the loss of my dear wife I wrote the following poem called "The Bedouin Child," dealing with the strange feeling among the Bedouins about girl children, and I translated it into Arabic. Among these Bedouins a father in enumerating his children never counts his daughters, because a daughter is considered a disgrace.

'Ilyàs the prophet, lingering 'neath the moon, Heard from a tent a child's heart-withering wail, Mixt with the message of the nightingale, And, entering, found, sunk in mysterious swoon, A little maiden dreaming there alone. She babbled of her father sitting pale 'Neath wings of Death--'mid sights of sorrow and bale, And pleaded for his life in piteous tone.

'"Poor child, plead on," the succouring prophet saith, While she, with eager lips, like one who tries To kiss a dream, stretches her arms and cries To Heaven for help--"Plead on; such pure love-breath, Beaching the Throne, might stay the wings of Death That, in the Desert, fan thy father's eyes."

'The drouth-slain camels lie on every hand; Seven sons await the morning vultures' claws; 'Mid empty water-skins and camel maws The father sits, the last of all the band. He mutters, drowsing o'er the moonlit sand, "Sleep fans my brow: sleep makes us all pashas; Or, if the wings are Death's, why Azraeel draws A childless father from an empty land."

'"Nay," saith a Voice, "the wind of Azraeel's wings A child's sweet breath has stilled: so God decrees:" A camel's bell comes tinkling on the breeze. Filling the Bedouin's brain with bubble of springs And scent of flowers and shadow of wavering trees, Where, from a tent, a little maiden sings.

'Between this reading of Nature, which makes her but "the superficial film" of the immensity of God, and that which finds a mystic heart of love and beauty beating within the bosom of Nature herself, I know no real difference. Sufism, in some form or another, could not possibly be confined to Asia. The Greeks, though strangers to the mystic element of that Beauty-worship which in Asia became afterwards sufism, could not have exhibited a passion for concrete beauty such as theirs without feeling that, deeper than Tartarus, stronger than Destiny and Death, the great heart of Nature is beating to the tune of universal love and beauty.'

This was followed by a still more mystical poem called 'The Persian Slave Girl's Progress to Paradise,' showing the Omnipotence of Love. [Footnote]

[Footnote: This poem of Philip Aylwin's appears now in the present writer's volume, _The Coming of Love_.]

XIV

SINFI'S COUP DE THÉÂTRE

I

Weeks passed by. I visited all the scenes that were in the least degree associated with Winnie.

The two places nearest to me--Fairy Glen and the Swallow Falls--which I had always hitherto avoided on account of their being the favourite haunts of tourists--I left to the last, because I specially desired to see them by moonlight. With regard to Fairy Glen, I had often heard Winnie say how she used to go there by moonlight and imagine the Tylwyth Teg or the fairy scenes of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ which I had told her of long ago--imagine them so vividly that she could actually see, on a certain projecting rock in the cliffs that enclose the dell, the figure of Titania dressed in green, with a wreath of leaves round her head. And with regard to the Swallow Falls, I remembered only too well her telling me, on the night of the landslip, the Welsh legend of Sir John Wynn, who died in the seventeenth century, and whose ghost, imprisoned at the bottom of the Falls on account of his ill deeds in the flesh, was heard to shriek amid the din of the waters. On that fatal night she told me that on certain rare occasions, when the moon shines straight down the chasm, the wail will become an agonised shriek. I had often wondered what natural sound this was which could afford such pabulum to my old foe, Superstition. So one night, when the moon was shining brilliantly--so brilliantly that the light seemed very little feebler than that of day--I walked in the direction of the Swallow Falls.

Being afraid that I should not get much privacy at the Falls, I started late. But I came upon only three or four people on the road. I had forgotten that my own passion for moonlight was entirely a Romany inheritance. I had forgotten that a family of English tourists will carefully pull down the blinds and close the shutters, in order to enjoy the luxury of candlelight, lamp-light, or gas, when a Romany will throw wide open the tent's mouth to enjoy the light he loves most of all--'chonesko dood,' as he calls the moonlight. As I approached the Swallow Falls Hotel, I lingered to let my fancy feast in anticipation on the lovely spectacle that awaited me. When I turned into the wood I encountered only one person, a lady, and she hurried back to the hotel as soon as I approached the river.

Following the slippery path as far as it led down the dell, I stopped at the brink of a pool about a dozen yards, apparently, from the bottom, and looked up at the water. Bursting like a vast belt of molten silver out of an eerie wilderness of rocks and trees, the stream, as it tumbled down between high walls of cliff to the platform of projecting rocks around the pool at the edge of which I stood, divided into three torrents, which themselves were again divided and scattered by projecting boulders into cascades before they fell into the gulf below. The whole seemed one wide cataract of living moonlight that made the eyes ache with beauty.

Amid the din of the water I listened for the wail which had so deeply impressed Winifred, and certainly there was what may be described as a sound within a sound, which ears so attuned to every note of Superstition's gamut as Winifred's might easily accept as the wail of Sir John Wynn's ghost.

There was no footpath down to the bottom, but I descended without any great difficulty, though I was now soaked in spray. Here the mysterious human sound seemed to be less perceptible amid the din of the torrent than from the platform where I had stayed to listen to it. But when I climbed up again to the spot by the mid-pool where I had originally stood, a strange sensation came to me. My recollection of Winnie's words on the night of the landslip came upon me with such overmastering power that the noise of the cataract seemed changed to the sound of billows tumbling on Raxton sands, and the 'wail' of Sir John Wynn seemed changed to that shriek from Raxton cliff which appalled Winnie as it appalled me.

The following night I passed into a moonlight as bright as that which had played me such fantastic tricks at the Swallow Falls.

It was not until I had crossed the bridge over the Conway, and was turning to the right in the direction of Fairy Glen, that I fully realised how romantic the moonlight was. Every wooded hill and every precipice, whether craggy and bald or feathered with pines, was bathed in light that would have made an Irish bog, or an Essex marsh, or an Isle of Ely fen, a land of poetry.

When I reached Pont Llyn-yr-Afange (Beaver Pool Bridge) I lingered to look down the lovely lane on the left, through which I was to pass in order to reach the rocky dell of Fairy Glen, for it was perfumed, not with the breath of the flowers now asleep, but with the perfume I love most of all, the night's floating memory of the flowery breath of day.

Suddenly I felt some one touching my elbow. I turned round. It was Rhona Boswell. I was amazed to see her, for I thought that all my Gypsy friends, Boswells, Lovells, and the rest, were still attending the horse-fairs in the Midlands and Eastern Counties.

'We've only just got here,' said Rhona; 'wussur luck that we got here at all. I wants to get back to dear Gypsy Dell and Rington Wood; that's what I wants to do.'

'Where is the camp?' I asked.

'Same place, twix Bettws and Capel Curig.'

She had been to the bungalow, she told me, with a message from Sinfi. This message was that she particularly wished to meet me at Mrs. Davies's cottage--'not at the bungalow'--on the following night.

'She'll go there to-morrow mornin',' said Rhona, 'and make things tidy for you; but she won't expect you till night, same time as she met you there fust. She's got a key o' the door, she says, wot you gev her.'

I was not so surprised at Sinfi's proposed place of meeting as I should have been had I not remembered her resolution not to return to the bungalow, and not to let me return to the camp.

'You must be sure to go to meet her at the cottage to-morrow night, else you'll be too late.'

'Why too late?' I asked.

'Well,' said Rhona, 'I can't say as I knows why ezackly. But I know she's bin' an' bought beautiful dresses at Chester, or somewheres,--an' I think she's goin' to be married the day arter to-morrow.'

'Married to whom?'

'Well, I can't say as I rightly knows,' said Rhona.

'Do you know whether Mr. Cyril is in Wales?' I asked.

'Yes,' said Rhona, 'him and the funny un are not far from Capel Curig. Now I come to think on't, it's mose likely Mr. Cyril as she's a-goin' to marry, for I know it ain't no Romany chal. It _can't_ be the funny un,' added she, laughing.

'But where's the wedding to take place?'

'I can't say as I knows ezackly,' said Rhona; 'but I thinks it's by Knockers' Llyn if it ain't on the top o' Snowdon.'

'Good heavens, girl!' I said. 'What on earth makes you think that? That pretty little head of yours is stuffed with the wildest nonsense. I ran make nothing out of you, so good-night. Tell her I'll be there.'

And I was leaving her to walk down the lane when I turned back and said, 'How long has Sinfi been at the camp?'

'On'y jist come. She's bin away from us for a long while,' said Rhona.

And then she looked as if she was tempted to reveal some secret that she was bound not to tell.

'Sinfi's been very bad,' she went on, 'but she's better now. Her daddy says she's under a cuss. She's been a-wastin' away like, but she's better now.'

'So it's Sinfi who is under a curse now,' I said to myself. 'I suppose Superstition has at last turned her brain. This perhaps explains Rhona's mad story.'

'Does anybody but you think she's going to be married?' I asked her. 'Does her father think so?'

'Her daddy says it ain't Sinfi as is goin' to be married; but I think it's Sinfi! An' you'll know all about it the day arter to-morrow.' And she tripped away in the direction of the camp.

Lost in a whirl of thoughts and speculations, I turned into Fairy Glen. And now, below me, lay the rocky dell so dearly beloved by Winnie; and there I walked in such a magic web of light and shade as can only be seen in that glen when the moon hangs over it in a certain position.

I descended the steps to the stream and sat down for a time on one of the great boulders and asked myself if this was the very boulder on which Winnie used to sit when she conjured up her childish visions of fairyland. And by that sweet thought the beauty of the scene became intensified. There, while the unbroken torrent of the Conway--glittering along the narrow gorge of the glen between silvered walls of rock as upright as the turreted bastions of a castle--seemed to flash a kind of phosphorescent light of its own upon the flowers and plants and sparsely scattered trees along the sides, I sat and passed into Winifred's own dream, and the Tylwyth Teg, which to Winnie represented Oberon and Titania and the whole group of fairies, swept before me.

Awaking from this dream, I looked up the wall of the cliff to enjoy one more sight of the magical beauty, when there fell upon my eyes, or seemed to fall, a sight that, though I felt it must be a delusion, took away my breath. Standing on a piece of rock that was flush with one of the steps by which I had descended was a slender girlish figure, so lissom that it might have been the famous 'Queen of the Fair People.'

'Never,' I said to myself, 'was there an optical illusion so perfect. I can see the moonlight playing upon her hair. But the hair is not golden, as the hair of the Queen of the Tylwyth Teg should be; it is dark as Winnie's own.'

Then the face turned and she looked at the river, and then I exclaimed 'Winifred!' And then Fairy Glen vanished and I was at Raxton standing by a cottage door in the moonlight. I was listening to a voice--that one voice to whose music every chord of life within me was set for ever, which said,

'I should have to come in the winds, and play around you on the sands. I should have to peep over the clouds and watch you. I should have to follow you about wherever you went.'

The sight vanished. Although I had no doubt that what I had seen was an hallucination, when I moved farther on and stood and gazed at the stream as it went winding round the mossy cliffs to join the Lledr, I felt that Winnie was by my side, her hand in mine, and that we were children together. And when I mounted the steps and strolled along the path that leads to the plantation where the moonlight, falling through the leaves, covered the ground with what seemed symbolical arabesques of silver and grey and purple, I felt the pressure of little fingers that seemed to express 'How beautiful!' And when I stood gazing through the opening in the landscape, and saw the rocks gleaming in the distance and the water down the Lledr valley, I saw the sweet young face gazing in mine with the smile of the delight that illumined it on the Wilderness Road when she discoursed of birds and the wind.

The vividness of the vision of Fairy Glen drove out for a time all other thoughts. The livelong night my brain seemed filled with it.

'My eyes are made the fools o' the other senses, Or else worth all the rest,'

I said to myself as I lay awake. So full, indeed, was my mind of this one subject that even Rhona's strange message from Sinfi was only recalled at intervals. While I was breakfasting, however, this incident came fully back to me. Either Rhona's chatter about Sinfi's reason for wanting to see me was the nonsense that had floated into Rhona's own brain, the brain of a love-sick girl to whom everything spelt marriage--or else poor Sinfi's mind had become unhinged.

II

As I was to sleep at the cottage, and as I knew not what part I might have to play in Sinfi's wild frolic, I told the servants that any letters which might reach the bungalow next morning were to be sent at once to the cottage, should I not have returned thence.

At about the hour, as far as I could guess, when I had first knocked at the cottage door at the beginning of my search for Winnie, I stood there again. The door was on the latch. I pushed it open.

The scene I then saw was so exact a repetition of what had met my eyes when for the first time I passed under that roof, that it did not seem as though it could be real; it seemed as though it must be a freak of memory: the same long low room, the same heavy beams across the ceiling, the same three chairs, standing in the same places where they stood then, the same table, and upon it the crwth and bow. There was a brisk fire, and over it hung the kettle--the same kettle as then. There were on the walls the same pictures, with the ruddy fingers of the fire-gleam playing upon them and illuminating them in the same pathetic way, and in front of the fire sitting upon the same chair, was a youthful female figure--not Winnie's figure, taller than hers, and grander than hers--the figure of Sinfi, her elbows resting upon her knees, and her face sunk meditatively between her hands.

After standing for fully half a minute gazing at her, I went up to her, and laying my hand upon her shoulder, I said, 'This is a good sight for the Swimming Rei, Sinfi.'

At the touch of my hand a thrill seemed to dart through her frame; she leaped up and stared wildly in my face. Her features became contorted by terror--as horribly contorted as Winnie's had been in the same spot and under the same circumstances. Exactly the same terrible words fell upon my ear:--

'Let his children be vagabonds and beg their bread: let them seek it also out of desolate places. So saith the Lord. Amen.'

Then she fell on the floor insensible.

At first I was too astonished, awed, and bewildered to stir from the spot where I was standing. Then I knelt down, and raising her shoulders, placed her head on my knee. For a time the expression of horror on her pale features was fixed as though graven in marble. A jug of water, from which the kettle had been supplied, stood on the floor in the recess. I sprinkled some water over her face. The muscles relaxed, she opened her eyes; the seizure had passed. She recognised me, and at once the old brave smile I knew so well passed over her face. Rhona's words about the curse and the purchase of the dresses seemed explained now. Long brooding over Winnie's terrible fate had unhinged her mind.

'My girl, my brave girl,' I said, 'have you, then, felt our sorrow so deeply? Have you so fully shared poor Winnie's pain that your nerves have given way at last? You are suffering through sympathy, Sinfi; you are suffering poor Winnie's great martyrdom.'

'Oh, it ain't that!' she said, 'but how I must have skeared you!'

She got up and sat upon the chair in a much more vigorous way than I could have expected after such a seizure.

'I am so sorry,' she said. 'It was the sudden feel o' your hand on my shoulder that done it. It seemed to burn me like, and then it made my blood seem scaldin' hot. If I'd only 'a' seed you come through the door I shouldn't have had the fit. The doctor told me the fits wur all gone now, and I feel sure as this is the last on 'em. You must go to Knockers' Llyn with me to-morrow mornin' early. I want you to go at the same time that we started when we tried that mornin' to find Winnie.'

'Then Rhona's story is true,' I thought. 'Her delusion is that she is going to Knockers' Llyn to be married.'

'The weather's goin' to be just the same as it was then,' she said, 'and when we get to Knockers' Llyn where you two breakfasted together, I want to play the crwth and sing the song just as I did then.'

She made no allusion to a wedding. Getting up and pouring the boiling water from the kettle into the teapot, 'Something tells me,' she went on, 'that when I touch my crwth to-morrow, and when I sing them words by the side of Knockers' Llyn, you'll see the picture you want to see, the livin' mullo o' Winnie.'

'Still no allusion to a wedding, but no doubt that will soon come,' I murmured.

'I want to go the same way we went that day, and I want for you and me to see everythink as we seed it then from fust to last.'

I was haunted by Rhona Boswell's words, and wondered when she would begin talking about the wedding at Knockers' Llyn.

She never once alluded to it; but at intervals when the talk between us flagged I could hear her muttering, 'He must see everythink just as he seed it then from fust to last, and then it's good-bye for ever.'

At last she said, 'I've had both the rooms upstairs made tidy to sleep in--one for you and one for me. I'll call you in the mornin' at the proper time. Goodnight.'

I was not sorry to get this summary dismissal and be alone with my thoughts. When I got to bed I was kept awake by recalling the sight I saw on entering the cottage. There seemed no other explanation of it than this, the tragedy of Winifred had touched Sinfi's sympathetic soul too deeply. Her imagination had seized upon the spectacle of Winifred in one of her fits, and had caused so serious a disturbance of her nervous system that through sheer fascination of repulsion her face mimicked it exactly as Winifred's face had mimicked the original spectacle of horror on the sands.

III

It was not yet dawn when I was aroused from the fitful slumber into which I had at last fallen by a sharp knocking at the door. When I answered the summons by 'All right, Sinfi,' and heard her footsteps descend the stairs, the words of Rhona Boswell again came to me.

I found that I must return to the bungalow to get my bath.

The startled servant who let me in asked if there was anything the matter. I explained my early rising by telling him that I was merely going to Knockers' Llyn to see the sunrise. He gave me a letter which had come on the previous evening, and had been addressed by mistake to Carnarvon. As the handwriting was new to me, I felt sure that it was only an unimportant missive from some stranger, and I put it into my pocket without opening it.

On my return I found Sinfi in the little room where we had supped. I guessed that an essential part of her crazy project was that we should breakfast at the llyn.

On the table was a basket filled with the materials for the breakfast.

Another breakfast was spread for us two on the table, and the teapot was steaming. Sinfi saw me look at the two breakfasts and smile.

'We've got a good way to walk before we get to the pool where we are goin' to breakfast,' she said, 'so I thought we'd take a snack before we start.'

As we went along I noticed that the air of Snowdon seemed to have its usual effect on Sinfi. In taking the path that led to Knockers' Llyn we saw before us Cwm-Dyli, the wildest of all the Snowdonian recesses, surrounded by frowning precipices of great height and steepness. We then walked briskly on towards our goal. When the three peaks that she knew so well--y Wyddfa, Lliwedd, and Crib Goch--stood out in the still grey light she stopped, set down her basket, clapped her hands, and said, 'Didn't I tell you the mornin' was a-goin' to be ezackly the same as then? No mists to-day. By the time we get to the llyn the colours o' the vapours, what they calls the Knockers' flags, will come out ezackly as they did that mornin' when you and me first went arter Winnie.'