They found the summer sun had been at work for some hours on the
storm-drenched world ere they woke to the lowing roar of the heifer
from the neighbouring cow-house. Motherhood had evidently come to her
at dawn, bringing its wider outlook, its larger self; and sure enough,
when they scrambled down from the loft, they found at the foot of the
ladder, penned in by an old door, a big, black bull-calf lustily
answering anxiety by assertion.
The cottage over against them, however,--it formed part of a long
range of farm-steadings, which stretched right away to the stream they
had crossed the night before--showed no sign of life. The door was
closed, the window-blinds down; the inmates were most likely sleeping
sound after their broken rest.
So, their clothes being still damp, the two young men went up stream
to a long, deep pool, and spreading them out to dry in the hot
sunshine, had a morning bath, thereinafter drying themselves in the
same fashion on a grassy bank, whence, looking up the valley, they
could see the mountains closing in on the narrow strip of level
pasture. Behind them, the downward view was absolutely shut out by the
farm-buildings, above which showed a yew tree, and by a dense clump of
rhododendrons, which trended away until it met the other wooded
hillside of the little glen.
"I believe we are really on an island," remarked Ted, critically
appraising the values of some willows and elders which, higher up
beyond the pasture fields, seemed to betoken another channel of water.
"A desert island," said Ned, busy over the intricacies of cold water
and a razor from his, shoulder-wallet. "We are reduced to the
makeshifts of primitive manhood. What more do we want?--and all
without that hundred pounds! I never slept better than I did in that
hay."
"Small blame to you with feather pillows and best Whitney blankets!
And as for money--we shall have to tip these people. I suppose
half-a-crown will do----"
"Ahem," replied Ned somewhat doubtfully; "but it was beastly late, you
know."
"Very; but that wasn't our doing: they were up with the 'hi'fer.'
However, let's put it at three shillings."
"But, my dear fellow, consider the beefsteak pie--it was simply the
best pie----"
"Charge it to appetite," said Ted, rising ready dressed, supple,
clean, and strong. "Three shillings is ample. Come along if you're
ready, and let us get off. I'm keen to start."
He looked it; but the starting was not so easy, for though on trial
the door of the cottage was found to be on the latch only, no one
could be made to hear.
"Let's leave the tip on the table," suggested Ted impatiently.
"My dear fellow," replied Ned, "I won't go without seeing the
'General,' and thanking her for that excellent pie. Besides--think how
she simply scooped us up last night like half-drowned kittens and set
us going again! I tell you, sir, that if--it being Saturday night--she
had suggested washing my head, I'd have submitted meekly, as I used
with old nurse. Why! I dreamt about frilled drawers all last night!"
Ted was irresponsive; a word had arrested his attention. "Saturday!"
he echoed thoughtfully, "then to-day is Sunday!"
"First Sunday after Whitsun--No! Trinity Sunday, of course, the
shortest night in the year and Midsummer Night's Dream all combined.
How time flies...."
"What luck!" gloomed Ted. "I shouldn't wonder if the smith were to
refuse us our cycles--they are like that in these wild parts--what
beastly bad luck!"
Here Ned, who had been prospecting at the back of the passage, opened
a door, suspecting it to be possibly a coal-cellar; but he fell back
from the sudden blaze of almost blinding sunlight which poured in from
a long, low, absolutely empty room, which stretched away on either
side over boards scrubbed to whiteness to a wide oriel window.
At that on the left-hand side stood a parrot-perch, beside which was a
tall girl in blue engaged in making a white cockatoo with a yellow
crest talk.
"Gimme a sixpence," it muttered hurriedly as the bit of banana turned
away with the girl at the interruption.
So for a second or two they stood; the two young men smitten helpless
by the extreme beauty of that girlish figure, framed as it was by the
great sprays of white June clematis and great trusses of scarlet ivy
geranium from the garden beyond the window.
"Gimme a sixpence, gimme a sixpence," reiterated the cockatoo in
guttural allurement. Then the girl smiled.
"You must have been very wet last night, I'm afraid," she said in an
absolutely perfect voice, true, pure, sweet; the real voice of the
siren, which none who hear forget.
The two at the door, who stood bare-headed, almost doubting the
evidence of their own eyes, gave an audible sigh of relief. This was
no vision then, this beauty of womanhood pure, and simple, with softly
smiling eyes.
And yet? They glanced at each other doubtfully, and the three
shillings in Ted's palm seemed suddenly to become hot and scorch him.
Impossible to offer three shillings to perfection!
"Thank you, yes--I mean no--I mean that we were wet, quite wet--but
now thanks to the kindness of your----" Ned paused. Much as he admired
"the General," he could not affiliate to her this radiant creature.
Ted, becoming conscious vaguely that here was something new to him,
something which held possible danger to his outlook in life,
remembered his hurry and came to the point.
"We are very much obliged, and so, if you please, as we are about to
start, we should like--I mean if you----"
Here absolute terror lest Ted should really offer those three
shillings to the glorious creature in the first flush of a womanhood
which seemed to Ned to be worth the whole world, made him step
forward, holding out a shining sovereign.
"We've really been most awfully comfortable," he said apologetically,
"and if you--if you wouldn't mind giving this----"
"Why!" she exclaimed, all eagerness, snatching at the coin, "I believe
it's a sovereign! Fancy that! A whole sovereign!"
Ned felt outraged at her indecent haste; and at the back of Ted's
brain lay an instant regret concerning the three shillings; he would
then only have been responsible for one and sixpence instead of ten
shillings.
Suddenly she held the coin up to the window, laughed--a rippling laugh
like running water--and handed it back again. "Thanks for letting me
see it; I hadn't seen one before, but, as grandfather says, it blocks
the sunlight just like a penny!"
"You--you hadn't seen a sovereign!" said Ned feebly.
She shook her head. "We don't have money in this house. Grandfather
doesn't hold with it."
"Not hold with it!" echoed Ted argumentatively. "But you must--you
must pay your debts; and we want to pay ours."
Her face grew serious. "Ah! you want to pay something. That's Martha's
business. Here! Martha! These gentlemen want to pay you a sovereign."
At an inner door the figure of "the General" appeared with floury arms
and her prim bob curtsey.
"Hope the hi'fer didn't disturb of you, gentlemen," she said
cheerfully; "but really there ain't nothing owin', let alone a
sovereign's worth."
"But there must be something; and we tried to find you before, but you
were asleep," protested Ned in an aggrieved tone.
"Asleep! Lord save us!" laughed Martha. "Why! Adam bein' that sound
after the calvin', I was over to the loft myself three times afore I
come in to my stove. But there ain't nothin'. The yay was 'ome grown,
and welcome, seeing 'twas but beddin' stuff at best, and none spoilt
for use by humans sleepin' on it." A faint chuckle showed her sense of
superiority.
"But there was the beefsteak pie," began Ned.
Martha's giggle increased. "'Twouldn't never 'ave kep' sweet over
Sunday, sir, so the pigs 'ud 'ave 'ad it if you gentlemen 'adn't."
That was an unanswerable argument.
"Will you please take it back," said the girl imperiously, holding the
gold out in the easy clasp of her finger and thumb.
"But there was the tea--and the pillows and the blankets," protested
Ted severely.
She turned on him swiftly. "Don't you hear Martha doesn't want it, and
I don't want it. So if you don't want it also, we'd better give it to
Cockatua, for I'm tired of holding it. Here, Cockatua, is a golden
sovereign for you."
The bird's great yellow crest rose with greed as it grabbed at the
prize, but fell again at its first hasty bite. The beady black eyes
showed distrust; it turned the coin round, and bit at it again; then
again. Finally, with a guttural murmur of "Gimme a sixpence," it
dropped the sovereign deliberately into its bread and milk tin.
Every one laughed, Martha, however, checking herself with a hasty
"Drat them scones; they'll be burnt as black as the back o' the
grate," and disappearing whence she came, her voice calling back in
warning to Miss Aura, not to forget the master's message.
"Aura?" questioned Ned quickly. "That's not a very appropriate----"
"My name is Aurelia," she said quite frankly, "and the message is that
grandfather would like you to breakfast with him. I think you had
better," she added still more frankly, "for you mightn't get anything
in the village. It's Sunday, you know."
They glanced at each other mechanically, though each had decided to
accept the invitation. So she led them through the kitchen, where
Martha was bustling about over her stove, into a hall. This further
house had evidently been joined on to the back of the cottage by the
long room in which the cockatoo lived.
"We breakfast in the verandah," said Aurelia, turning to the left into
a large low-roofed room, lined from floor to ceiling with books, but
containing no other furniture save a chair and a writing-table.
The glimpse afforded by the open hall-door showed them that Ted's
surmise had been correct. They were on an island, for to the right of
the garden a stream, after dashing over some rocks, disappeared behind
the high wall enclosing the orchard which filled up the end of the
valley, while, as they passed on through the book room, a lawn lay
before them sloping down to a deep, still pool, a pool shadowed by
surely the biggest yew-tree they had ever seen. Its great arms spread
themselves out, and, bowed to earth by their own weight, found a fresh
foothold for another upward spring, until the one tree seemed a grove.
Here in a sunny square formed by the joining of house and steading
walls, they found a breakfast-table, and beside it, in an arm-chair,
an old man with a thin face and Florentine-cut, silver-white hair.
"Excuse my rising, gentlemen," he said in a high, suave voice, his
nervous hands gripping the chair-arms in rather a helpless fashion,
"but I am somewhat--more or less--of a cripple at times--I suffer from
rheumatism, and last night's rain----"
"Might have made us rheumatic also but for your kindness," began Ned
politely.
"Not at all! Not at all--Martha does all that sort of thing well--an
excellent creature--really an excellent creature, but alas! quite
devoid of intelligence," said their host, and his large, restless,
pale blue eyes which, from the smallness of his other features,
dominated his face, took on a remonstrant expression that was
curiously obstinate yet weak. "Yes!" he continued, "absolutely devoid
of brains. One of those hewers of wood and drawers of water by desire
and determination who stand so--so infernally--in the way of true
socialistic development. But, by the way I am forgetting to introduce
myself. I am Sylvanus Smith, President--but stay----! Aurelia, my child,
fetch the Syllabus of the Socialistic Congress from my writing-table;
that will be the best introduction. And here comes Martha with, I
presume, breakfast. We generally have a parlourmaid, but"--the
remonstrant expression came to his face again--"Martha is somewhat hard
on maids. She--she doesn't believe in perfect freedom of soul and body,
so the last left yesterday in--in a flame of fire! The young men of the
village----"
Ned laughed. "We know about that, sir; we were taken last night for
'lazy good-for-nothin' Welsh libertynes.'"
Mr. Sylvanus Smith appeared shocked. "I really must speak to Martha,"
he said in an undertone, adding aloud, "Well, Martha, what have you
there?"
The question was provoked by the setting down of a silver dish among
the fruits, nuts, and other vegetarian diets on the table, and there
was a certain tremulous authority in it.
The subservience of Martha's bob was phenomenal.
"Bacin an' eggs, sir, an' there's more ter follow if required."
The authority dissolved into an ill--assured cough.
"As a rule," remarked Mr. Smith helplessly, "we do not allow meat----"
"But lor! sir," put in Martha, beaming, "wasn't it jest a Providence
as me and Adam had left that bit o' beefsteak pie, seeing that
strawberries an' sech like are but cold comforts to stummicks as has
bin drenched through by storm."
There could be no reply but acquiescence to this proposition, so the
strangers began on the bacon and eggs. Mr. Sylvanus Smith breakfasted
off some patent food, and Aurelia ate strawberries and brown bread,
and drank milk; they seemed to have got into her complexion and
hair--at least so thought Ned.
The clematis wreaths, the great bosses of the scarlet geraniums hung
round them, the great yew-tree shot out fingers of shadow claiming the
lawn and actually touching one of the jewelled flower-beds, while
behind these, tall larkspurs and lychnis, their feet hidden in a
wilderness of bright blossom, rose up against the rows of peas and
raspberries in the kitchen garden, and the green of young apples in
the orchard.
Against this paradise of flower and fruit they saw Aurelia, like any
Eve, beautiful, healthful, gracious, smiling; and they lost both their
hearts and their heads promptly--for the time being, at any rate.
They looked at her by stealth in the long silences which were perforce
the fate of Mr. Sylvanus Smith's guests, for he could talk, and talk
as he wrote well, of the future of Socialism, and the happiness of the
many, oblivious altogether of the happiness or unhappiness, of the few
that was being worked out in his immediate neighbourhood. That did not
trouble him in the least.
Whether from happiness or unhappiness, past, present, or to come, the
two young men were singularly silent as, after being piloted by Adam
through the rhododendrons and across the drawbridge, they left the
island paradise behind them.
"That was a beautiful garden," said Ted.
"Very," remarked Ned.
Then they were silent again; but they thought persistently of Aurelia,
of her beauty, her unworldliness, her curious frank dignity, and the
shrewd common-sense she had shown in every word she uttered.
The road to the village led through a wood at first; a wood--as such
Welsh mountain woods are at Midsummer--all lush with fern and bramble
and great drifts of foxglove envious of each other's height, and
holding their heads higher upon the narrowing clefts, until some very
ordinary spike, gaining a vantage of rock, out-tops the rest, and so
lords it over all.
Then, after a while, the wooded slopes closed in to rock. Here the
divided streams rejoined each other with a quick babble of
recognition, and, as if out of sheer good spirits, gave a gladsome
leap or two ere settling down to race hand in hand through a ravine
but a few feet below the curving road.
Finally a precipitous bluff blocked the view, but round this at a
sharp turn Ted paused.
"Hullo!" he said. "Why, here we are again!"
They were at the bridge by the cross-roads where they had parted with
Dr. Ramsay the day before. On the bare hillside stood the school,
deserted this Sunday morning; below them lay the village. Over yonder
was hidden the hundred pounds of floating deposit--(Ted's eyes sought
this out immediately.) Over there, still shrugging that high shoulder
of his in the sunshine, was Llwggd-y-Brydd disclaiming--so Ned
thought--all responsibility for their last night's adventure. A real
Midsummer Eve's dream, indeed! And to-night?--Midsummer night--would
the adventure continue?
"It was two o'clock, was it, he said, for dinner?" asked Ted
irrelevantly. He knew the hour perfectly, but he wanted to discuss the
question.
"Two o'clock if the cycles couldn't be got," corrected Ned gravely.
"Of course," replied Ted impatiently, "and we will go and ask----"
Ned suddenly burst out laughing. "Why the deuce should we ask? You'd
rather dine and so would I. That's simplicity itself; besides, we can
go to church or chapel and confess the sin of omission meanwhile--if
you like."
Ted looked at him with gloomy virtue. "Of course we must ask--at any
rate I shall," he replied haughtily. He felt in his way exactly as his
companion did, that is, as if every atom of life in him had been
stirred to its depths; but conventional morality and solid fact meant
more to him than they did to Ned.
The smith, mercifully, was kind. It had been too late to finish
repairs on Saturday; they must wait over till Monday.
So, in a blissful state of relief, they sat on the bridge parapet
again and watched the country folk come in to chapel.
"The Calvinists take the cake in dress," remarked Ned. "Half the
big drapery shops in Blackborough belong to them, I'm told, and they
give a percentage to their assistants. So I expect Miss--what's her
name?--Jones is responsible for half the hats here. Ye gods! what a
superstructure for one soul!" As he spoke he watched a carrotty-haired
girl with a brick-red burnt face, who wore, both inside and outside a
leghorn hat, a wreath of crushed roses shaded from beetroot to
carrots.
"Myfanwy," said Ted lightly, "is equal to the burden. Here she comes
with the parson, and Miss Alicia has the beauty-boy Mervyn. How happy
could both be with either--I wonder how they grow those curls."
He spoke with lazy scorn; but by and by the sound of part-singing
instinct with swing and go roused him, for he had sung in a choir all
his life, and, after vainly trying to persuade Ned to accompany him,
he went off to listen, leaving the latter stretched out full length on
the parapet watching for invisible trout.
After a time, however, the old churchyard in its turn attracted Ned's
lazy interest, and he strolled off to examine the tombstones. They
stood cheek by jowl, and to judge by the dates on many, must represent
a perfect battlefield of dead, if all the parish came thither to rest.
Some lettering over a low round arch of a sunk door in the church
arrested him. Fourteen hundred and fifty-two! No wonder the place
looked ruinous, and that he had to step down into the porch! Here his
eye took in various framed regulations in red and black, signed
"Gawain Meredith, Rector." Evidently the Reverend Gawain was high. And
was that a smell of incense?
He set aside the curtain, and stood under the organ-loft. Here
surprise held him motionless. Everything was so new, so gilded, so
flawless. There was a blaze of red and white on the altar, before
which a tall figure in red and white attended by two acolytes, knelt
reading the ante-communion service. From them, scattered sparsely over
regulation oak benches, was a surpliced choir, four boys on either
side coming down, as it were, to meet a huge brass lectern and a red
embroidered faldstool.
But the congregation? Six or seven may be in dark corners, or rather
since some one must play the organ, eight! No! for the celebrant,
after giving out a hymn, strode to a harmonium close to the pulpit,
and thereinafter, upborne by his strong baritone, a long-drawn
sacramental chant wavered in the aisles, and died away in the rafters
of the roof.
What then of the organ? Ned turned, crept up the stair without
waking an old man--the bell-ringer no doubt--who was asleep in his
long-accustomed seat beside the blow-handle, and found himself before
the usual red-curtain screen. Seating himself on the organ stool he
looked out, unseen, on the church below.
It was quaint. There was the Reverend Gawain in the pulpit giving out
his text, "There came a mighty rushing wind," and looking out over his
church as if it had been full instead of empty.
There were some, said the preacher, who expected signs and wonders
direct from the Almighty, but the great rushing mighty wind was the
teaching of the Church which had begun on Whit Sunday and would go on
throughout the year. It was a mighty voice, indeed, sounding in the
ears of all his parishioners, even those who were absent. And it spoke
through him, their priest, responsible to the Church for the soul of
every man, woman, and child, in the parish of Dinas. Seven minutes, by
Ned's watch, of unbounded authority, of absolute priesthood, of the
Middle Ages. Ned, watching the dignity of the Reverend Gawain
Meredith's denial of the passage of Time became admiring. And he was
such a fine figure of a man. The old type, chief, medicine man, Druid,
Archbishop--Archangel if you will--always the same, in all ages.
Ned wandered off into thoughts such as men of his type have had since
the beginning of time, and was roused from them by seeing the priest,
holding a huge sacrificial brass platter, awaiting the sheepish
sidesman at the chancel steps.
By all that was holy!--one penny--only one, the sidesman's own; but
its poverty was covered the next instant by the Rector's sovereign.
Well done to the Rector!
What an imagination, what a magnificent make-believe. Something in
Ned's innermost soul leapt up to meet this escape from deadly reality.
It deserved a recognition. Yes! as the man couldn't play himself out
of church, _he_ would--the organ was there!
In sudden impulse he laid an awakening hand on the drowsy sexton.
"Blow!" he whispered strenuously, "Blow, I tell you, for all you're
worth."
The man, half--asleep, obeyed; Ned opened the keyboard, and not
knowing his instrument put on full diapason. Thus, when the last Amen
had echoed out from the Rector, for the choir appeared to be dummies,
and the cope and the brass platter began to follow the little white
surplices, the whole procession paused in amazement, as, with many a
note dumb, many a dissonance overborne by the full burst of sound,
Handel's "Lift up your heads, oh! ye gates," crashed into every corner
of the old church. Crashed for the first two bars, then, the pressure
on leaky bellows yielding, wavered and sank.
Ned, realising his failure, was down the loft stairs, through the
graves, and over the back of the churchyard wall, where he lay
convulsed with inextinguishable laughter at his own mad prank, before
curiosity followed the amazement in the church as the last breath of
air escaped in a long-drawn pipe from a stuck note in the treble.
It was some time ere, seeing the chapel folk coming out, he made his
way round at the back of the Rectory wood and joined Ted, whom he
found enthusiastic about the singing, and glad to have heard the
Reverend Morris Pugh's "hwl," the bardic note. It was really rather
impressive, that constant iteration of the A-flat, and even to one
ignorant of Welsh gave a feeling of something being desperately wrong,
of something needing desperately to be set right.
But there had been no outpouring--nothing out of the common.
"You should have----" said Ned, and paused.
"What?" asked Ted.
"Nothing, except that it must be about time for us to be going
back--to Paradise!"