CHAPTER XI.

Hitherto farewell had been slightly said, with a few backward looks of good feeling, a few civil wishes for an indefinite return. But at Bettwys, for the first time, and perhaps also because it was--of this vagrant expedition--so near the last, parting gave pain. Turning on the face of a hill we looked back over the valley and across the flitting showers to the peaks of Snowdon and Moel Siabod, a retrospect to be remembered and thirstily to be desired in other summers. Darkly and greenly the woods sank into every cleft, or rose with the piled-up landscape till the cold breast of Snowdon was half hidden behind them. A river, whose name is quite immaterial, plunged uproariously down to the five crooked arches of Pont-y-Pair bridge in Bettwys, then, finding itself suddenly in good society, pulled itself together and swam tense and flat round a curve to present itself decorously to what I think we are safe in asserting to be the river Conway. It was true that half-pay generals and forlorn honeymoon couples haunted the bridge and hung round the post-office, that “well-appointed conveyances” were daily braying forth with horns the multitudinous entry of the tourist, also that the glass was falling; none the less we should thankfully have turned the Tommies down the hill again and remained without purpose or limit at Bettwys. Then, indeed, might many periods have been instructively framed around the names of the Miner’s Bridge, the Swallow Falls, and Dolwyddelan Castle, all of which the guide-book assured us with chaste esteem were “well worthy of a visit.” All that now remained was to turn away from the parapet of the wooded precipice, from whose edge we were looking back, and pace lingering forth towards Corwen.

A stertorous sound began presently to be distinguishable from the hoarse note of rushing water in the deep places of the glen: then followed a tremor of the ground, lastly a traction-engine, advancing upon us like Behemoth throned on mill-wheels, opulent of smoke, with a clanging retinue of trucks. I felt in anticipation the mud ooze again through the seams of my gloves, as it had oozed last night, but the gate of a villa was suddenly and miraculously raised up on our left hand. Miss O’Flannigan was off, and had opened one-half with a celerity which suggested long practice in the hunting-field, and we burst through into the shadow of tall evergreens, tearing out a hold-all buckle in an encounter with the gate-post. We were startlingly confronted inside by an old lady in a mushroom hat, carrying a spud and garden-basket, and wearing an expression of complete and unaffected amazement, which, considering all things, and especially the fact that Miss O’Flannigan and I had fallen into maniac laughter, was a pardonable lapse of good breeding. Pointing to the traction-engine, we endeavoured to explain ourselves; but the chilly calm with which the Tommies regarded it, as it lumbered past the gate, was so painfully at variance with our representations, that it seemed better to retire, waving hysterical apologies. The old lady stirred neither hand nor foot throughout the occurrence, and for all we know may have been a rustic detail added, in wax, by a proprietor of a realistic turn.

After this the road was quiet in the balmy quietness of summer, that is so living a thing compared with the soulless grip of the air in winter silences. By the dignified gradients of the coach-road we mounted slowly through woods and glens, and then, with no less dignity and almost equal slowness, downwards into open country, clear and kindly, with pasture, and level roads, and a wide eastward horizon melting into blue. Behind us the Snowdon range stood mightily on the high pedestal of Carnarvonshire: it had never showed itself so great as now, viewed from these Denbigh meadow-lands, while we rode to the east, with faces turning always back to the splendid barrier across the west. It was a lonely road, with scarcely a mark to ruffle its white dust except the ribbed footprint of the traction-engine, that stretched like an illimitable ladder in front of us. We met no one save two tramps who eyed us curiously, as members of the fraternity who ought to be able to impart useful facts about the temper of the nearest farmer’s wife, or the quality of the skilly at the Llanberis workhouse; a little farther on, on a long reach of road, quite remote, as it seemed, from human habitation, we met three tall women, dressed alike in widows’ weeds, and each pressing a pocket-handkerchief with a wide black border to the point of a pink nose. Their eyes turned at us above these emblems of woe with something of interest, but they did not pause, and went on, three black blots on the white road between the glowing hedgerows; and we marvelled if some Welsh Mormon elder had lived and died, unknown, but obviously lamented, in these sunny solitudes.

Pentre Voelas and Cernioge came in their turn, with mild episode of farmhouse and wayside inn, and manifold iterance of Rehoboths and Salems. Cernioge, as we discovered in the buying of a post-card, is pronounced Kernoggy. This eccentricity was, so far as we could see, its sole claim to distinction. From the first the Tommies had established a rule to demand nourishment at every inn they passed, and after twelve miles studded with--for them--disappointments, we yielded to their importunities, and paused at the glowing sign of the Saracen’s Head, Cerrig-y-Druidion.

In the best parlour sat in perfect silence a tradesman and his wife, middle-aged, serious, and too entirely respectable to be aware that they were bored almost to madness. They were out on their holiday, therefore they were enjoying themselves--and therefore the tradesman read a month-old copy of the ‘Cyclist,’ and his wife studied the ‘Farmers’ Gazette,’ and both eyed us with ravenous, but decently furtive, interest. For half an hour we and our safety-skirts were vouchsafed to them, while the familiar tea, with home-made gooseberry-jam and salt butter, was vouchsafed to us; and then the Tommies, having polished their mangers with their usual precision, were led forth again.

It was not a good ten miles that we rode from there to Corwen, except in the sense of good, full, statute measure. Disaster fell upon us like a net, tangling our endeavours with inexhaustible mesh. A “dee” of my saddle broke; consequently I had to carry the hold-all across my lap, like a baby of monstrous size and implacable pig-headedness. Tom the elder developed a new and much enlarged edition of his ancient girth-gall, and in the attempt to cope with this by re-saddling, a cushion of swelling was disclosed along his back. Miss O’Flannigan then said she would lead him the rest of the way, and did so, until the next milestone announced that it was four miles to Corwen, which at once degraded the project from the sublime to the ridiculous. Not all the Humane Society, in one throbbing merciful mass, could be absurd enough to expect any one to walk four miles in a riding-habit, and cloth gaiters, and the dog-days.

The cool of the evening was upon us before we at length sighted Corwen across the pastures, and a pale after-glow, pale as the points of gaslight that were starting up about the railway station, gleamed on the long curve of the river Dee as we crawled across the bridge outside the town. Corwen is a dingy, mean town, in spite of the wooded cliff at its back, and the river at its foot, and the river meadows with their tranquil sweetness; but on that Saturday night neither we nor the Tommies complained of its dinginess. It had a chemist, who kept sulphate of zinc and iodoform, and lead lotion, with which to anoint the invalid; and it had a sedate and venerable hotel, the Owen Glendwr, in which instantly to go to bed. Having risen thus to the occasion, Corwen may be assured that it has not lived in vain.

Carriages, with Sunday bonnets in them, began to pass next morning, while yet we were taking in the delicate antique absurdity of the pair of spinets in the drawing-room, the charms of the brass finger-plates and door-handles, the impressiveness of the low-ceiled, spotless kitchen, with the vast fireplace, and all the strong and sound old age of a house that has been a notable inn since the fifteenth century. Finding that the church was immediately behind the hotel, and, furthermore, that the service was in Welsh, we lingered a little in the tour of brew-house and still-room, until the Venite, clear and harmonious, came across the graves to the wide kitchen window that leaned its sill on the churchyard grass.

Presently, when seated in the porch of the church itself, we heard again the rich accord of Welsh voices, with all their grave and fearless certainty, their peasant simplicity, their unblemished nationality. Would that many Irish and English congregations, shrieking in hideous rivalry half a bar behind the organ, could comprehend the reticence of strength, the indwelling instinct of time, and the sense of harmony, manifested at a Welsh country service, where the children lisp in altos, and the farm-hand and the butcher’s boy add their tenor or bass with modest assurance. The preacher’s voice was a fine one, and rung and swung in that strange metrical wail of Welsh that we had heard before in the church of Mallwydd, but it lacked something of the melancholy passion given to that first voice by the touch of age in the tone, the inference of sadness and misgiving. Owen Glendwr had a pew in this very church; probably was churchwarden, and sanctified while he indulged his predatory instincts by going round with the plate. There seemed something significant in the fact that his dagger is carved on a stone just outside the church: did he, we wondered, employ it as a discourager of threepenny-bits and a stimulator to half-crowns. At all events, he is now the next thing to a saint in Corwen, and his works any inhabitant can tell with chapter and verse in a manner which it is not our intention to vie with.

Among other chief tenets of Corwen morality is the necessity of seeing Llangollen. We had, indeed, been ourselves something fired by quotations from Wordsworth and other competent judges in the guide-book, and yielding to the serious representations of the landlady on the subject, we ordered a small trap in which we might thither drive ourselves and the drab Tommy. As we sat in the embrasure of the coffee-room window, waiting for the entrapped Tommy, we perceived a vehicle resembling a mammoth governess-cart at the hotel door, with an old man, dressed in what we had learned to regard as the height of Welsh religious fashion, standing by it. His beard was long and white, his face was cross, with a crossness that momentarily deepened as he glanced at the hotel. We studied him with the refined observation of idleness.

“An Arch-Druid, evoluted into an elder of the straitest of the Rehoboths,” remarked Miss O’Flannigan, easily; “his wives and daughters had better not keep him waiting much longer, there is the flame of human sacrifice in his eye, pleasantly blended with the confidence of their eternal----”

At this juncture, Ellen, the coffee-room-maid, came into the room.

“If you please, ladies, the driver is waiting, and wants to know when you will be ready.”

So we were his wives and daughters! We went forth anxiously to accept the situation, too depressed even to wrangle as to which was which.

That no trap was available for Tommy was, in some abstruse way, known to Ellen and explained by her at some length, the result of the day being Sunday, as was also the attendance of the Arch-Druid. We ventured a suggestion that we should forego the latter privilege and ourselves drive the stolid black mare, whose massive beam barely filled the shafts; but, with a contempt apparently too deep for words, the Arch-Druid mounted to the prow of the governess-cart as to a pulpit, and, manipulating the mouth of the black mare with the ceaseless, circular action of a hurdy-gurdy grinder, started at a round pace for Llangollen.

It was a nine-mile drive, and by the time the eighth milestone had been passed, we began to look for some startling development of the calmly pretty valley of the Dee, along which we had driven. Large, but by no means stupendous, hills swelled prosperous and green on either side of it, pine-woods thatched them warmly and liberally, the Dee was irreproachably devious in its advance and charming in its manners, but no climax was arrived at, nor yet was contrast lying in wait. If the poets had spared it their fine speeches, and their compliments fledged with suave metre, Llangollen could be appraised with a fresher eye and admired to the utmost of its mild deserving without antagonism and without disappointment. Also, if it is seen on the way into Wales instead of on the way out of it, it will occupy with fitting distinction its place in the crescendo of Welsh scenery, undiscounted by the coming fortissimo: to be one of the last notes in a diminuendo is quite a different thing.

Probably it was the two unparalleled persons known as the Ladies of Llangollen who did most for its fame. They ran away from their Irish homes to go and live there, which in itself, from our point of view, suggests eccentricity. Perhaps it was in lifelong penance for this act that ever after they wore riding-habits, summer and winter, indoors and out. After a fortnight spent in riding-habits we could appreciate such an expiation, even though the equipment we had dedicated to the Tommies did not include powdered hair and cartwheel felt hats. Pardonable curiosity might well have caused any traveller by the Holyhead coach who could scrape up an introduction to climb the hill to Plas Newydd; but it was not upon curiosity alone that the ladies relied for society. They had the agreeability that could at will turn the sightseer into an acquaintance, the means to weld with good dinners such acquaintanceships into permanence; and æsthetic taste, the best part of a century ahead of their time, that taught them to frame the grotesque romance of their lives and appearance in antique and splendid surroundings--the leisurely collection of many years--till the poets and other people of distinction turned, somewhat dazed, from the marvels of silver and brass and carved oak, and, looking over the pleasant vale of Llangollen from windows set deep in wood-carving, pronounced it to be unique.

The sun was very hot that afternoon as we climbed on foot the steep hill up to Plas Newydd, and it was difficult to receive with _sangfroid_, either moral or physical, the intelligence that visitors were not admitted on Sunday. All that remained was to sit exhausted on the grass, and stare with amazement at the lacework of black carved wood spread upon the white walls. Not a nook without a satyr head or a writhing animal, not a doorway without its bossy pent-house, not a window without its special pattern of lattice panes, each representing a special acquisition, and doubtless a vast wear and tear of riding-habit. Their work is respected, and the plain two-storey house still holds like a casket the treasures of their finding, and stands, crusted with ornament, as freshly white and black as when the ladies took tea in their porch with Wordsworth or Sir Walter Scott. We hung about the small pleasure-grounds for a little, among antique stone fonts and sundials, and tried to find it pleasant; but the exasperation induced by a narrow vision of strange and lovely things, half seen through a lancet-window, would not be denied, and we presently went sulkily back to the Grapes Hotel. The Arch-Druid was awaiting us: we saw from afar his white beard, throned high in the governess-cart, and felt its reproof and suitability for pulpit denunciation; his cough asserted his wrongs indignantly outside, during an otherwise unalloyed tea in the Grapes drawing-room; and his thoughts were, it was easy to suppose, back in the brave old Druidic days, when he would have driven forth to meet the tourist with scythes shining on the splinter-bar of the governess-cart, and discouraged his vicious trifling by utilising him as a burnt-offering.

He found, however, a poor nineteenth-century revenge in obliging the black mare to consume, at our expense, three feeds of corn. Such, at least, was the astonishing item in the bill; and, in a temporary lapse from the austerity of the sacerdotal mood, he stooped to a refection that called itself tea, and, judging by its price, must have been of considerable extent.