RHYS[1]
IT was the day after Christmas. The frost and snow, supposed to be
suitable to the time, had held off from the West country and were
waiting ready to pounce upon the world with a new year. The evenings
had been damp and chilly of late, with not a breath of wind stirring
to lift the fog which hung over the Black Mountain and pressed like a
heavy, dead hand right into Crishowell village.
On the green track which led along the plateau at the foot of the
Twmpa the air to-night lay still and thick. Noises made by the animal
world were carried a long distance by the moist atmosphere, and sounds
were audible to people who had learned to keep their ears open for
which they might have listened in vain at ordinary times. The water,
running through wet places, could be heard distinctly trickling among
roots and coarse grasses and patches of rush, as well as the quick
cropping of sheep and occasional scuttering of their feet over muddy
bits of path; and along the track from the direction of Llangarth came
the dull thud of a horse's advancing hoofs and the constant sneezing
of the animal as he tried in vain to blow the clinging damp from his
nostrils. As they loomed out of the fog which gave to both horse and
man an almost gigantic appearance, the rider, without waiting to pull
up, slipped his leg over the pommel of the saddle and slid to his
feet, the horse stopping of his own accord as he did so.
It was almost too thick to see more than a yard in front of one's
face, and Rhys Walters stood a moment peering before him with narrowed
eyes into what looked like a dead wall of motionless steam. Then he
bent down to examine the spongy ground. It oozed and sucked at his
boots when he moved about, and he frowned impatiently as he knelt to
lay his ear against it. While he listened, a sound of distant running
water made itself faintly heard through the windless evening, and his
horse pricked his ears and turned his head towards it. The young man
remounted and rode abruptly to the left, in the direction of the
Boiling Wells.
As he went along with the rein lying loose on the bay horse's withers,
the animal made a sudden plunge and swerved violently aside as a sheep
appeared out of the mist and ran startled across the path under his
very nose. But Rhys seemed hardly to notice the occurrence, except by
a stronger pressure of his knees against the saddle, for he was
thinking intently and the expression on his hard countenance showed
that he was occupied with some affair much more difficult than
horsemanship, which had been a simple matter to him from his very
earliest youth.
He was a man to whom one physical exercise was as natural as another,
his firmly-knit frame being equally adapted to everything; and, though
rather over middle-height than under it, he conveyed the impression of
being very tall, more by his leanness and somewhat high shoulders than
by actual inches. His hands and feet were well-shaped, though the
latter fact was not apparent, on account of the stout leather leggings
and clumsy boots which he wore, and every movement of his spare figure
had the attraction of perfect balance and unconsciousness of effort.
His long face was one which few persons of any discernment would have
passed without a second glance; fewer still could have determined what
it actually expressed. He had eyebrows of the real Welsh type coming
down low towards the nose, the eyes underneath being set near together
and looking either brown or grey according to the light in which they
were seen. They were usually called brown, to match the tanned
complexion and dark hair to which they belonged. His cheekbones were
high, his nose long and pointed, though the refinement which it might
appear to indicate found its unexpected contradiction in a straight
and unsensitive nostril.
When he spoke, Rhys used much less gesticulation than was common to
his countrymen (for he was three-parts a Welshman), but his thin lips
moved a great deal and the quick turns of his close-cropped head--he
kept his hair short when it was the fashion among men to wear it
rather long--showed that he did not by any means possess the true
phlegmatic temperament. Above all, he looked entirely at one with the
natural and animal creation around him. Had he been a poorer man, he
might easily have been taken for a poacher, had he been a richer one,
for a country gentleman of active and sporting tastes; as a matter of
fact, he was neither of these, being a farmer and the son of a farmer.
His earlier childhood had been spent in what one might almost call
savagery, and the rest of his youth in Hereford Grammar School, where,
except for a far more polished speech and accent than was natural to
his position, he had learnt but a certain amount of what his parents
wished him to acquire. He had also learned much of which they, in
their greater simplicity, had never dreamed.
Of these two, Eli Walters and his wife, only Mrs. Walters was alive,
and she lived with Rhys at Great Masterhouse, a farm standing high in
Crishowell parish on the skirts of the mountain land. It was a long
and ancient stone house which had consisted of one storey until Eli
had added an upper floor to suit his more modern ideas of convenience,
and, as this outcome of his full purse and soaring mind extended but
half the length of the dwelling-house, it gave the approaching
stranger a notion that it might be some kind of religious building
with a squat tower at one end. Owing to the impossibility of
dovetailing a proper staircase in, the upper rooms were reached from
outside by a ladder with a weather-beaten railing running up it. To
this protection Eli, who occupied a room at the top, had often had
reason to be grateful, for the excellent beer produced in Hereford
town had played a larger part in his latter years than was altogether
decorous; many a time, on winter nights, Mrs. Walters, sitting below
in the kitchen, had listened sternly to his uneven footstep in its
spasmodic descent to earth.
Great Masterhouse looked towards the Twmpa, and, from the kitchen
window, the view presented to the eye a strip of turf forming a
parade-ground for troops of cocks and hens. This sloped to a tortuous
little stream, upon which the ducks, having picked up everything worth
having near home, might cruise down to a pool in search of more
alluring gluttonies. At the south side of the house lay the strip of
garden that was all of which the farm could boast. It was used for
vegetable-growing alone, and wore a dreary aspect all the year round,
enlivened only for a short time in spring, when a pear-tree, trained
up the dead wall of the additional storey, broke out into a green and
white cloud. Old Walters, it is true, had taken some interest in the
few yards of flower-bed it had contained in his lifetime. He had
planted sweet-williams, peonies and such like, for he was a man who
loved beauty in any form, though, unfortunately, he had been as apt to
see it in the bottom of a beer-jug as in any other more desirable
place.
His wife cared for none of these things, for she regarded the culture
of what merely pleased the eye as a wanton throwing away of time. It
seemed to her to be people's duty to make themselves as uncomfortable
as possible in this world by way of suitable preparation for the next.
So, after Eli had finished alike his drinks and his gardenings and
been carried down the hill to Crishowell churchyard, the flowers
disappeared from the poor little garden, and rows of sensible cabbages
and onions raised their aggressive heads from the places they had left
empty.
At the back was a great yard surrounded by outbuildings, and this
place gave to Great Masterhouse the only picturesqueness it possessed.
From it one looked at the curious old back-door which opened on a
stone passage to the kitchen, and might admire the solid oak and
heavily-moulded lintel. Inside there was a niche in the wall into
which a strong wooden beam could be shot, while above it a porch
projected bearing the date 1685. Patches of golden-brown stonecrop
sprawled over this, and a heap of dried bracken which lay upon the
doorstep for all who entered to clean their boots upon, added to the
antiquated effect. Such had been Rhys' home during his twenty-seven
years of life.
At his father's death, when Great Masterhouse with the good slice of
land belonging to it passed into his hands, he was fully prepared to
do his duty by his inheritance, and in this he was supported by his
mother, who was a practical woman, as well as by his own dislike of
being bested in the affairs of life, a failing to profit in any way by
his advantages. In other words, he hated to be done, and she, like
many other worthy persons whose minds are professedly set above this
froward world, hated it too.
Mrs. Walters had been right in many deeds of her married life, though
she had not, perhaps, made her sterling virtues very attractive to her
husband and son. Those inclined to blame her for this were too quick
in forgetting that her life had been no bed of roses, and that to one
of her type, daily contact with a weak, idle nature like that of Eli
was a perpetual martyrdom. She was an utterly humourless woman, and
her want of humour, which is really no less than the want of a sense
of proportion, added a thousand-fold to her trials.
She took everything too hard, giving to each untoward trifle which
crossed her path the value of a calamity, with the result that the
mountain she had created fell and crushed her. She was truthful and
upright in the highest degree, and though her hardness and pride
repelled her husband and her want of elasticity wearied him to the
verge of madness, her integrity was a matter of admiration to him. His
weaker spirit might have been dominated by hers, but for that touch of
originality in him which forbade his being entirely swayed by another.
He was a man addicted to cheerful company, joviality and
good-fellowship; in conversation he was a desperate liar, which made
him none the less amusing to his friends on market-days, and they
rallied round him with unfailing constancy, receiving his sprightly
ideas with guffaws of laughter, slapping their own legs, or other
people's backs--whichever chanced to be handiest--as his wit struck
them in assailable places.
When he first married, Eli was very much in love with his unsuitable
companion, but the day soon came when he grew tired of her. He wearied
of her dark, hawk-faced beauty, and her narrowness of mind oppressed
him; his want of seriousness also bred a contempt in her heart which
she allowed him to feel plainly. It was not long before this led to
quarrels--of a mild kind, it is true--but enough to make husband and
wife see the mistake they had committed; and when their first child, a
boy, arrived, Anne Walters wrapped herself up in her baby's existence,
finding in it an outlet for the intense feeling which had all her life
been dormant, and was now awake in her for the first time. At Rhys'
birth, some two years later, she had little to bestow on him but a
well-meaning interest, for her whole soul was occupied with her eldest
born; so Eli, longing for companionship of some kind, took possession
of him and proceeded to alternately spoil and neglect him.
Between the two, as the child grew older, there existed a curious
relationship, more like a defensive alliance between two small powers
against a greater one than anything else, tacit, unspoken, and,
strange to say, better understood by the boy than by the man.
Eli stood in awe of his wife, and young Rhys knew it; he was not
afraid of her himself, for fear was a sensation he was physically
incapable of feeling, but he saw in his father's society a road of
escape from Anne, whose unsympathetic attitude towards his youthful
errors was at once dull and inconvenient. A worse education for a
little boy could hardly be imagined, and Rhys' shrewdness was perhaps
a source of greater danger to his character than any quality he
possessed; he was too acute to be deceived in Eli, and he knew
perfectly the worth of an affection which, though genuine of its kind,
would not hesitate to neglect him if it grew tired of him, or to
sacrifice him if he stood in the way.
The one great good which he got out of his profitless childhood was an
intense familiarity with outdoor life. The sky was his ceiling, the
earth his carpet, and he wandered about the pastures around, the
mountain above, and the valley below, with the same assurance that
other little boys of his age felt in wandering about their nurseries.
He knew the habits of every living creature and every nesting-place
for miles; he could climb like a mountain-sheep or run like a hare,
and his observation of Nature became so highly developed as to make
him, in some respects, very like an animal. He knew the meaning of
every sound, distant or near, and the whole world teemed with voices
for him which it generally keeps for birds and beasts alone.
It was only natural that he should be attracted by the delights of
poaching, and an inveterate poacher he became; he set nets for
partridges and laid night-lines in the trout-streams of the valley,
and no outdoor rascality entered his head which he did not immediately
attempt. On the few occasions on which he was caught, Mrs. Walters,
after rebuking him severely, took him to his father and insisted on
his being thrashed, and when this happened, Rhys knew that there was
no escape; so he took his punishment with as much equanimity as he
could, merely resolving to work his next escapade on more careful
lines.
When he was five years old his brother died; had he lived to be older
he might have done something to humanize the selfish and uncivilized
little boy, and his death, which was the blackest grief that Anne had
ever known, seemed to turn the poor woman's already hard heart into
stone. With her elder child she lost the one real interest she had
contrived to glean from her narrow life, and when the funeral was over
and there was nothing left but an aching blank, she turned further
from her husband and the boy, shutting herself round with a wall of
indifference. Rhys was absolutely nothing to her. She was glad that he
was so strong and healthy, and sorry that he was so disobedient;
beyond that she hardly gave him a thought. He was a sealed book to
her--a sealed book with a binding which offended her and which it did
not occur to her to open.
It was just at this time that an earnest preacher, a light in his sect
and a man of extraordinary personal influence, came to hold meetings
among the Methodists of the mountain district, and Anne went to hear
him speak. With her grief, her silent bitterness, and her unsatisfied
life, she was an ideal subject upon which this man's zeal could act.
Before he had well begun what he called his "struggle for her soul,"
the work was half done and the issue decided; the hard doctrines and
straitened ideas which he preached appealed to her in a way that
nothing else could; the wholesale condemnation of sinners which he
announced was entirely in accordance with a type of mind that had ever
hated the Devil more than it had loved God, and she threw herself
wholly into the sea of his relentless Christianity, for there were no
half-measures with her.
Eli looked on at the spectacle with apprehension, quailing as he
thought of her possible attempts at his own conversion to the paths of
the more active and elaborate righteousness. But as time went on, and
he found that his personal salvation formed no part of his wife's
plans, he was a good deal relieved and felt very grateful to the
preacher, welcoming anything which helped to keep them separate and
divert her attention from his comfortable habits of life. He never
interfered with her in any way, though he would sometimes stroll into
the kitchen when a meeting was being held there, loitering about and
pretending that he was not quite sober, while he internally enjoyed
the agonies she suffered from fear that her decorous guests should
suspect what she perceived with horror. Thus did the malicious old
farmer gratify his sense of humour.
So the years passed on until it occurred to the pair that Rhys'
education should be considered. He must go to school, and they
resolved to send him to the Grammar School at Hereford. The small
amount of pride that Eli had was centred in the pleasant thought that
he was, in his calling, a rich man. With all his laxity he had been
shrewd in business, and could look round on his possessions with the
knowledge that there was enough and to spare for his son and his son's
son after him. The boy should better himself in life, should have the
education which he had lacked, should spend his money with the best of
the gentlefolks' children with whom he would be brought into contact
at Hereford. The end of it was that Rhys, considerably interested in
his new position, found himself one morning on the top of the Hereford
coach with a Bible given him by Anne in one pocket and
half-a-sovereign given him by Eli in the other. He was very much
pleased with the half-sovereign.
His feelings as he rolled along were mixed. He could not but welcome
the prospect of the livelier interests and companionships before him,
but, at the same time, he knew very well that that freedom which had
been the breath of his nostrils would be his no longer; and, until he
saw how much he might be compensated for its loss in other ways, he
could not exactly rejoice. As regards any sentiment at leaving his
parents, he had not much.
He did not flatter himself that either would miss him to any
distressing degree, and though he felt a little lump in his throat as
he bade good-bye to his father, the sensation had passed almost as
soon as he was out of sight. No, a new world was opening, and he
prepared to plunge into it with a curiosity at once suspicious and
hopeful.
Education in those days was neither so cheap nor so general as it has
become now, and boys like himself, and even the children of much more
well-to-do farmers than was Eli Walters, had to content themselves
with what schooling could be got in their native villages. Hereford
Grammar School was chiefly attended by sons of professional men, and
many of the neighbouring squires were satisfied to let their boys pick
up all the learning they needed there. When Rhys, with his
uncultivated country speech, made his appearance, many were inclined
to despise him, holding aloof from him as from a being vastly inferior
to themselves; and, when they found out, as they soon did, that his
father was a common farmer who worked with his hands, some became
actively aggressive and began, after the manner of boys, to practise
small cruelties upon the new-comer.
But they had caught the wrong man, and it was not long before their
mistake was brought home to them. Rhys, with all his faults, was no
shivering milksop fresh from his mother's apron-strings, but a hard
and cautious young savage, with a heavier fist than most of his
oppressors could boast of, and a cheerful willingness in using it
freely.
So, though the bigger lads taught him the healthy lesson that there
were higher powers than himself, his contemporaries soon decided that
it was wiser to leave him alone. Besides, how was juvenile
snobbishness to resist the attractions of one who could make such
catapults and slings, knew things that only gipsies and poachers
understood, and was familiar with phases of outdoor life which they
had never so much as imagined? Though he made few friends during the
six years he spent at school, he had many admirers, and as, little by
little, his accent dropped from him and he adopted the manners of his
associates, he began to be looked upon as something of a personage,
and left school with a veneer of sophistication which hid from
ordinary view the fact that he had no more changed in character than a
man changes who accustoms himself to the perpetual wear of his Sunday
clothes.
When he returned to Great Masterhouse and settled down to help his
father on the farm, he was accepted by his kind as a much-travelled
and very fine young man. On market-days in Llangarth, Eli was not a
little proud of his tall son with his green tail-coat and superior
air, and he smiled complacently to see how the young fellows nudged
each other as he went down the street, and what admiring glances were
cast after him by the farmers' daughters. Among the latter he produced
the same effect as an eligible duke might in a community of society
young ladies. Poor old Eli, lying on his death-bed a few years later,
told himself that it would not be his fault should Rhys be
unsuccessful in life.
* * * * * *
Rhys Walters rode along the plateau until he passed the Boiling Wells.
There he turned again eastwards, going down an old grass-grown
watercourse, the bed of which had become something like a path. The
mist was not so thick, and a light showed through it a short way in
front, like a little staring eye with long shining eyelashes piercing
the damp. As he neared the house from which it proceeded, a door
opened, letting a luminous stream into the fog, and a head peered out.
"Be that Mr. Walters?" said a voice.
"Here I am," replied Rhys, slipping from his horse.
The man came out and led the animal away to the back of the house, and
Rhys entered, wiping the damp from his hair.
-----
[1] Pronounced "Reece."