Part 5

One morning Mr. Mills appeared in lavender small-clothes, a black frock coat, white waistcoat, straw-coloured kid gloves, and a silk hat that shone as if it had been oiled. In his button-hole he wore a stephanotis. His face was twinkling with smiles.

He appeared before me flourishing a Malacca cane.

“Why—Brother Augustine! what are you about?” I exclaimed.

“I have walked through the village,” he replied, “and I want to go into Thirsk.”

“What for?”

“Only to get a rise out of the Daltonians. You should have seen the round eyes they made as I walked past their houses. And I have just been into the school to show myself to the mistress and the children. I really am curious to know to whom they will have married me—for they will all jump to the conclusion that I have gone into Thirsk to be married.”

My predecessor had been accustomed to have the chorister boys go to the parsonage after the Litany, which was sung in the afternoon, and have tea there, and hang about the garden till evensong at half-past six. I found this a burden more than I could bear, and I announced that I was regretfully obliged to discontinue the usage.

After having made the announcement, I was breathing free, when Mills came to me with a blank face.

“They have struck,” he said.

“Struck what?—struck you?” I asked.

“They will not put on their cassocks and surplices and go into the choir this evening.”

“Well, Mr. Mills, then we will manage without them.”

So we did. One, faithful among the faithless found, did put on his surplice. A little fellow who could not read. However, we sang the whole service, psalms, responses, _Magnificat_, _Nunc Dimittis_, hymns, just as though we had a full choir. I do not think there was any musician in the congregation that evening, for I do not recall any one being carried out fainting.

There was one peculiarity about Mills that I could not break him of. He had learned the Apostles’ Creed in the Roman version, which differed slightly from our form, and he would always bray forth that “form of sound words” which he had acquired in his childhood.

In 1868 there was about to be a change in my domestic arrangements—in fact, I was about to be married—consequently I was forced, much to my regret, to get rid of Mills.

After a little inquiry and some letter-writing, it was settled that he should go to Christ Church and become valet to Dr. Pusey, at that time getting old and infirm.

In the event of sickness, I knew that no one could be a more tender and devoted nurse than Brother Augustine. There was something feminine in his delicacy of touch and in his sweetness of manner. And he would give up his time in the most unselfish manner possible to the doctor. Of that I was quite confident.

So Brother Augustine departed, with tears in his eyes, and there was not a person in the parish who was not sorry to lose him. For although they had laughed at him, all appreciated his goodness and his kindness; and I am not sure but that what they laughed at most was his absolute guilelessness, his utter unworldliness, and that, to a Yorkshireman, is indeed astonishing. I heard next of him as installed at Christ Church, where he figured in the quad in just the same extraordinary costume as he had worn with me; and his funny ways, his old-fashioned politeness, and his simplicity vastly tickled the young students. I believe sundry tricks were played on him, but I never heard any particulars.

That he was very happy I did learn from himself.

He was given a room near Dr. Pusey’s quarters in Christ Church, that adjoined or was under another in which one of the men of the college was lodged.

Now, Brother Augustine had the way of singing the psalms in his discordant bray every night, and one evening the young fellow who was near him, unable to endure the noise, went to his door, knocked, and Brother Augustine appeared at his door half-undressed for bed. The Christ Church man complained—really he could not work—he was going in for his examination, and with that singing—he—he was distracted.

“I beg your pardon humbly! I really am most sorry,” said the poor brother, covered with confusion. “I had no idea—certainly, certainly—you shall not be troubled again.”

So with a bow he saw his visitor depart, shut his door, and with his psalm unfinished went to bed.

He was found next morning dead. He had died apparently painlessly—of heart complaint—gone off in his sleep, to finish his psalm where his voice would give no offence.

HAROUN THE CARPENTER

HAROUN THE CARPENTER

Haroun, _bien entendu_, was not his name, but it was that by which some called him among themselves. The reason will appear in the sequel. He lived in a low house of one storey, with a door in the middle, and a window on each side, a typical Welsh cottage, with a thatched roof, and the roof drawn down over the gables, also in a peculiarly Welsh style.

He had his yard and workshop behind the house. In front was a bit of garden, of which he took great care, and which was bright with flowers from earliest spring to latest fall.

“Aaron,” the squire’s wife would say, “how _do_ you manage to get your bulbs to bloom before mine?”

“My lady,” he would reply, “I hold they like the smell of the wood.”

Aaron was, in fact, his Christian name. The reason why, in the rectory and in the Hall, he was called Haroun was this:—

Aaron was a man of one book, and that book was the “Arabian Nights.”

Many years ago a copy was given to the lending library of the village, and was taken out by Aaron Price, the carpenter. He had not read three pages before his mind was in the grip of the narrator. He read, he did not sleep, he did not work, or worked badly, he went to church, but did not pray—his mind had been carried up and away from the present, away from the green Welsh valley in which he lived, away, over the russet mountains to the gorgeous East, and to the times when Jinns were all-powerful unless controlled by Solomon’s seal, and magicians were as common as blackberries and as mischievous as kittens.

Aaron very nearly fell into disrepute as a carpenter on account of that book, so badly was his work done when under the spell. But he rallied. He became active, industrious, skilful once more, yet never, thenceforth, was the witchery of the “Arabian Nights” off his mind. He had no rest to his soul till he had purchased a copy for himself, and from that precious volume he read daily. He never wearied of it; he never wanted another book.

“Lord, sir, it is meat and drink to me!” he said once when questioned about it. He was advised to give it up. “I couldn’t do it,” was his reply. “Beside—what would be the good? It’s in me, all over me, in every fibre. I know it from one cover to the other.”

“Then why not part with it—if so familiar?”

“Why don’t you part with your wife because you know her face and voice and thoughts? I couldn’t do it. I love the book because so familiar to me—every tale, every word.”

One day a note from the Hall told the rector that the squiress had got a real treat for Haroun. She was going to give him as a Christmas present “Tales of the Genii.”

The rector laid down his daily paper, took his hat and stick, and pushed down to the Hall at once.

“My dear lady! I implore you, do nothing of the kind. Give him a book on practical carpentering or a dictionary of gardening. But another book of Jinns and necromancers will turn poor Haroun mad altogether.”

Now and then, on a Sunday evening, the rector would say to his wife, “Look here, Rosie, I could read Haroun’s mind to-day as he sat under the pulpit, as though it were a book in large primer type, open before me. He was very attentive when I began my sermon, and he followed me some way, but by degrees his eye became vacant, abstracted, his expression of face altered, and I knew that he was away with the Three Calenders, hearing why Zobeide whipped the hounds.”

“Harry,” responded the rectoress, “you have only yourself to blame. Try to be more interesting when you preach.”

“My dear Rosie,” exclaimed the parson, “I do my level best, but what pulpit discourse could ever compete with ‘Sindbad’s Voyages’ or ‘The Hunchback’?”

The good lady sighed and said, “Whatever will Haroun do for a wife? We have no Fatimas and Zobeides in this village.”

“I wish with all my heart that Haroun would weave his own web of romance, fall in love, and—then he’d forget the ‘Arabian Nights.’”

“In time this infatuation will wear off.”

“I doubt it. This has now been going on for years, and that book only works its way deeper into his soul. Upon my word, Rosie, I believe the Bible interests him only because of the wonders that are in it.”

“Then, my dear, I am sure you judge him wrong. He is a good man, and God-fearing.”

“Yes—but oh! so fantastical.”

Aaron Price did not keep his treasury of stories bottled up in his own breast. He was great at retailing them, but he transferred the scenery to Wales, translated Camaralzaman and Badoura into David Jones and Sheena Williams, located every incident in some well-known spot, and thoroughly bewildered his hearers, who could not make out whether he were poking fun at them or narrating facts.

Perhaps the climax was reached when he converted Ganem the slave of Love, into the amiable, somewhat corpulent, and eminently respectable squire, Sir John Vaughan, at Llanselyf. The whole tale was told with so much circumstance and such actuality, that next Sunday, when the squire came to church, he found himself the object of intense interest, observation, and private whispered comment.

It may be remembered that in the original tale Ganem was up a tree overhanging a cemetery when he saw some slaves bury a chest, at the dead of night, in the earth. When they were gone he descended from the tree, dug down to and opened the chest, when he found it contained a lady of incomparable beauty who “as soon as she was released from her confined situation, and exposed to the open air began to sneeze, and half-opening her eyes and rubbing them exclaimed, ‘Zohorob Bostan (Flower of the Garden), Schagrom Marglan (Branch of Coral), Cassabos Souccar (Sugar-cane), Nouronnihar (Light of Day), Nagmatos Sohi (Star of the Morning), Nouzhetos Zaman (Delight of the Season), speak, where are you?’”

This, as related by the carpenter, took a very local and personal complexion. The incident was transferred to the churchyard of his own parish, and to a certain elm tree that grew there; it was Sir John Vaughan who climbed the tree, and the lady when released from the box exclaimed, “Mary Jones, my housemaid, Flower of the Garden, and you, Susanna Rees, scullery-maid, Branch of Coral; and you also, Elizabeth Thomas, tweenie maid and Sugar-cane; and you, Margaret Cole, the lady’s-maid, Light of Day, and under housemaid Joan, Star of the Morning, and third housemaid Wilmot, Delight of the Season, speak, my dear tried servants, where are you?”

Now, on this particular Sunday morning, not only was Sir John an object of great interest, but so was Lady Vaughan, and when, during the service, she sneezed, it produced a general agitation; so also were the maid-servants of the family. On their arrival there were nudgings, “Here comes Branch of Coral, and there is Light of the Day. But where is Flower of the Garden?” To which an answer came in a whisper, “Got a bad cold in her head, and can’t come to church.”

Now, a remarkable occurrence in the parish took place. Aaron, _alias_ Haroun, fell in love, and took to courting Elizabeth Thomas, _alias_ Sugar-cane, _alias_ Cassabos Souccar, the tweenie maid. It took the whole parish by surprise, for Elizabeth was not beautiful; she had not the eyes or the frame, or the _svelte_ movements or the elastic tread of the light gazelle. She was a somewhat heavily formed, broad-shouldered, pudding-faced damsel, who could not cross a room without rattling all the chimney ornaments, and who had no more imagination and genius than has a duck. And in what did the attraction consist? Why had Aaron not become enamoured of the lady’s-maid, a most willowy person with a very sweet and refined face? Why not with the kitchen-maid, the Sprig of Coral, who had indeed coralline lips, and who in time would know how to boil a potato and do a chop so as not to be done to leather. But a tweenie! and such a tweenie! The whole parish discussed it for a month. It was most astounding that the man who romanced about every one and everything and every place, should make such dead prose of his own love affair. However, after this had been debated in the servants’ hall, at the forge, in the stable, at the tavern, each such debate ended with some one remarking sententiously, “After all, it is his affair and not mine.”

It is, however, a mistake to say that Aaron’s courtship was prosaic. That it was not so was proved by one of his letters to Elizabeth Thomas, which the girl carelessly left about; and it got read, copied, and distributed through the village, and excited much admiration at the splendour of the style, till some one detected the original, of which it was but a copy, in the story of Abdul Hassan and Schemselnihar. Here is the epistle—

“AARON PRICE, _carpenter_, to ELIZABETH THOMAS, _tweenie maid_.

“Deprived of your presence, I seek to continue the illusion, and converse with you by means of these ill-formed lines, which afford me some pleasure, while I am prevented the happiness of speaking to you.

“Patience, they say, is the remedy of all evils; yet those I suffer are increased instead of relieved by it. Although your image is indelibly engraven on my heart, my eyes nevertheless wish again to behold the original.

“These sentiments, which my fingers trace, and in expressing which I feel such inconceivable pleasure that I cannot repeat them too often, proceed from the bottom of my heart, from that incurable wound you have made in it; a wound which I bless a thousand times, notwithstanding the cruel sufferings I endure in your absence.

“Do not imagine that my words convey more than I feel. Alas! whatever expressions I may use, I shall still think much more than I can ever say. My eyes, which never cease looking for you, and incessantly weep till they shall behold you again; my afflicted heart, which seeks but you; my sighs, which escape my lips whenever I think on you, and that is continually; my imagination which never reflects any object but my beloved prince tweenie-maid; the complaints I offer to heaven of the rigour of my fate; in short, my melancholy, my uneasiness, my sufferings, from which I have had no respite since I lost sight of you, are all-sufficient pledges of the truth of what I write. I pray that we may be granted an opportunity of telling each other, without restraint, the tender affection we feel, and that we will never cease to love. Farewell.

“I salute Lady Vaughan, to whom we each have so many obligations.”

Not to make too long a story of this. The course of true love ran smoothly enough. The adored tweenie took it all very calmly, very much as a matter of course, and in due time they were married.

No one supposed that they could be happy together, so opposite were they to each other. Yet never did the parish see a more affectionate and devoted couple. Aaron “yarned” to his Bessie, telling her his marvellous tales. She knitted or darned listening with a stolid face, and when he had done said, “Aaron, get along with your nonsense, I don’t believe in any of your marvels.”

He took her unbelief in good part. If she did not relish his tales, it was her misfortune and not her fault. He was soul, she was body, and each has its proper place in the economy of nature. He was everything that was imaginative, she was wholly commonplace, and the mixture in one household produced not ferment, but peace.

“I wish,” said Aaron, “I wish, Lizzie, I could see wonders. I read of them, I think of them, I tell of them, and yet I have never seen one.”

Suddenly, to the amazement of every one, Aaron died. He caught a chill that settled on his lungs, and he was dead in three days. His wife attended to him with devotion and unflagging solicitude. One night he turned his bright feverish eyes on her and said—

“Liz! kiss me. I’m going at last to see wonders, and you won’t say to me there, where I am going: ‘Get along with your nonsense.’”

He did not say another word, but passed in this eager, expectant attitude of soul into the World of Wonders.

Every one respected Haroun, though he had perplexed all, and all had laughed at him. His death was felt by all, and the entire parish attended his funeral. Sir John Vaughan forgave having been converted into Ganem, the slave of Love, and he was there.

And when Aaron was gone, all said—

“We can’t, for certain, have a more pleasant and romancing carpenter in his place, even if we get—which is doubtful—a better workman.”

And now I come to another singular fact, and fact it is. The widow, Bessie Price, that dull, inanimate, prosaic body—soul none thought to call her—moped and drooped after his death. Nothing roused her, nothing interested her, she seemed to have lost everything when the earth closed over the dear, rodomontading carpenter. Folk said at first, “Bless you, she’s not one to feel her loss. She has not the depth in her.”

But they were mistaken. She felt her loss so deeply, so intensely, that without any apparent malady, she drooped, faded, and from no perceptible physical cause sank, and within twelve months, this bit of putty or dough was laid by the quicksilver of her husband.

And so, even in this dull, heavy creature there was the poetry of love, the romance of a life devoted to one man. Where Love is—there is the Spirit of Poesy.

SHONE EVANS

SHONE EVANS

Shone, that is to say John, Evans was a miner in the Dulais Valley, in South Wales, and a man nearer forty than thirty.

The Dulais Valley had been solitary, with a brawling mountain stream flowing between great ridges of brown heathery moss-land, on which the sheep had browsed and shone white in the sun. But of late years there had come a transformation of the scene. Coalpits had been opened. Plain, ugly rows of houses had been run up. Tall chimneys had been erected, chapels and churches, public-houses, factories as well. What sheep still fed on the hilltops were grey, if not black, for the air was heavy with smoke, and the soot settled everywhere, and not the sweetest herb could avoid a flavour of soot, nor the fairest flower escape a film of “smuts.”

As for the sparkling, laughing Dulais, it had turned to a sullen, dirty stream, of which nothing was required but that it should carry off the scum and sewage of the dense population that clogged the valley and dug into the hills. In long-gone-by days the stream had acquired its name of Blackwater, for so Dulais may be interpreted, from the lyns and pools of bottle-green deeps, formed after its leaps over the barriers of rocks. Now it merited its name more truly, so sombre was it, in the midst of heaps of coal refuse, and so soiled were its waters with every sort of defilement.

“Man makes the town, God made the country,” is a saying; but it is only half true. God makes the town, for He it is who has laid the beds of coal, and run into the rock the veins of ore that draw men to excavate them, and without which men would hunger, and civilisation could not progress.

Beautiful on the hills of old were the harebells, beautiful in the evening the glory of light that lit up the russet hills—ugly, maybe, is now the mining settlement; and yet there is a loveliness above that of harebell and bracken and heather and foaming mountain rill in the lives of the men and women who have invaded and displaced the rude natural charms of the Dulais Valley. And I am going to tell you of one of these beauties, and thus I introduce you to Shone Evans.

The man himself was not comely. A broad-shouldered, plain man, with a stoop such as is often seen in colliers—a reserved, a serious man, and somewhat shy. Perhaps in this he was a typical Welshman—that he was full of tenderness of heart and deep feeling, but at the least token of ridicule or superciliousness, he closed like a flower against rain, brooded over any injury his feelings may have received, but he said nothing.

Centuries of isolation and of wrong done to the Welsh race have had this effect on them. They have been sneered at, swaggered over by domineering Saxons or tyrannical Normans, then exploited by speculative North-countrymen; they have been treated as men to be employed for the advantage of others, and when useless, to be cast aside as broken tools. Their idiosyncrasies have been the subject of joke and scoff; their language has been derided; their aspirations, national and individual, disregarded. This has bred in them a sensitiveness that is foreign to the coarser Saxon—a reserve that forms a crust about the manner that is repellent to the stranger, if in that stranger there be the smallest assumption of superiority. Yet underneath lies the richest, deepest, purest vein of golden love and goodwill that God, who formed the mountains and made man, ever buried in the human heart.

Shone had not married till he was some way past thirty, and then, perhaps, more for convenience than that passion which whirls most men into matrimony; and about a year after his marriage his wife gave him a little son, but did not recover the confinement, and died.

Shone was left alone in the cottage with a baby, and he had his daily work to accomplish in order that he and his baby might live. He could not neglect his work, and he would not neglect his baby. Some neighbours offered to relieve him of the child, but to this Shone was averse. The baby was his; it was almost the only living being that was absolutely, indisputably his own. And now it was that the fountains of love in that closed and sealed heart opened and gushed forth. He loved that child with a love such as only a mother, one might have supposed, could entertain for a poor little, feeble, wailing lump of flesh.

Shone considered what he should do. He would not commit the child to Martha Rees, who had volunteered to take it, for she was a slovenly person, and he could not be sure that she would keep the little creature clean. Nor to Rachel Price, for she was violent tempered when put out: she might lose patience if the child cried, and maltreat it, though usually she was a most good-natured woman. Nor to Alice Tooker, for she was an Englishwoman, and he would not have his child reared save to the sound of the Welsh tongue, and sung to sleep with Welsh lullabies.

Then Shone formed his resolve—and to this he adhered for many, many months.

One morning Shone appeared among the men of his shift, presenting an aspect so surprising, that at first his mates were silent with astonishment, and then broke into laughter.

Shone had taken a sheet, and had cast it over his left shoulder, then wound it round him, thrown it over the right shoulder, and bound it about his waist like a plaid, and between his shoulders, safely bedded in the wraps, was his babe.

“Why, Shone, what have you brought the little kid here for?” was the general exclamation.

“To make a collier of him,” answered Evans good-humouredly. He expected some chaff, and did not take it amiss—from his mates. But chaff would not deter him from carrying out his purpose.

And here it must be observed that throughout this story the conversation must be understood to be translated from the Welsh, and will be, accordingly, free from those colloquialisms or dialectic terms that would be natural had it been carried on by English speakers.

“Shone, you are not going to take the child down the pit, surely?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Then he must pay his footing!”