Mountain-wild Snowdon for me!
Sweet silence there for the harp,
Where loiter the ewes and the lambs
In the moss and the rushes,
Where one's song goes sounding up!
And the rocks re-echo it higher and higher
In the height where the eagles live.
In this manner about six weeks slid away, and Winnie's visit to her
father came to an end. I ask, how can people laugh at the sorrows of
childhood? The bitterness of my misery as I sat with that child on
the eve of her departure for Wales (which to me seemed at the extreme
end of the earth) was almost on a par with anything I have since
suffered, and that is indeed saying a great deal. It was in Wynne's
cottage, and I sat on the floor with her wet cheeks close to mine,
saying, 'She leaves me alone.' Tom tried to console me by telling me
that Winifred would soon come back.
'But when?' I said.
'Next year,' said Tom.
He might as well have said next century, for any consolation it gave
me. The idea of a year without her was altogether beyond my grasp. It
seemed infinite.
Week after week passed, and month after month, and little Winifred
was always in my thoughts. Wynne's cottage was a sacred spot to me,
and the organist the most interesting man in the world. I never tired
of asking him questions about her, though he, as I soon found, knew
scarcely anything concerning her and what she was doing, and cared
less; for love of drink had got thoroughly hold of him.
Letters were scarce visitants to him, and I believe he never used to
hear from Wales at all.
V
At the end of the year she came again, and I had about a year of
happiness. I was with her every day, and every day she grew more
necessary to my existence.
It was at this time that I made the acquaintance of Winnie's friend
Rhona Boswell, a charming little Gypsy girl. Graylingham Wood and
Rington Wood, like the entire neighbourhood, were favourite haunts of
a superior kind of Gypsies called Griengroes, that is to say,
horse-dealers. Their business was to buy ponies in Wales and sell
them in the Eastern Counties and the East Midlands. Thus it was that
Winnie had known many of the East Midland Gypsies in Wales. Compared
with Rhona Boswell, who was more like a fairy than a child, Winnie
seemed quite a grave little person. Rhona's limbs were always on the
move, and the movement sprang always from her emotions. Her laugh
seemed to ring through the woods like silver bells, a sound that it
was impossible to mistake for any other. The laughter of most Gypsy
girls is full of music and of charm, and yet Rhona's laughter was a
sound by itself, and it was no doubt this which afterwards when she
grew up attracted my kinsman, Percy Aylwin, towards her. It seemed to
emanate not from her throat merely, but from her entire frame. If one
could imagine a strain of merriment and fun blending with the
ecstatic notes of a skylark soaring and singing, one might form some
idea of the laugh of Rhona Boswell. Ah, what days they were! Rhona
would come from Gypsy Dell, a romantic place in Rington Manor some
miles off, especially to show us some newly devised coronet of
flowers that she had been weaving for herself. This induced Winnie to
weave for herself a coronet of sea-weeds, and an entire morning was
passed in grave discussion as to which coronet excelled the other.
A year had made a great difference in Winnie, a much greater
difference than it had made in me. Her aunt, who was no doubt a
well-informed woman, had been attending to her education. In a single
year she had taught her French so thoroughly that Winnie was in the
midst of Dumas' _Monte Cristo_. And apart from education in the
ordinary acceptation of the word, the expansion of her mind had been
rapid and great.
Her English vocabulary was now far above mine, far above that of most
children of her age. This I discovered was owing to the fact that a
literary English lady of delicate health, Miss Dalrymple, whose
slender means obliged her to leave the Capel Curig Hotel, had been
staying at the cottage as a lodger. She had taken I the greatest
delight in educating Winnie. Of course Winnie lost as well as gained
by this change. She was a little Welsh rustic no longer, but a little
lady unusually well equipped, as far as education went, for taking
her place in the world.
She understood fully now what I meant when I told her that we were
betrothed, and again showed that mingling of child-wisdom and poetry
which characterised her by suggesting that we should be married on
Snowdon, and that her wedding-dress should be the green kirtle and
wreath of the fairies, and that her bridesmaids should be her Gypsy
friends, Sinfi Lovell and Rhona Boswell. This I acceded to with
alacrity.
It was now that I fully realised for the first time her extraordinary
gift of observation and her power of describing what she had observed
in the graphic language that can never be taught save by the teacher
Nature herself. In a dozen picturesque words she would flash upon my
very senses the scene that she was describing. So vividly did she
bring before my eyes the scenery of North Wales, that when at last I
went there it seemed quite familiar to me. And so in describing
individuals, her pictures of them were like photographs.
Graylingham Wood was our favourite haunt. This place and the
adjoining piece of waste land, called the Wilderness, had for us all
the charms of a primeval forest. Here in the early spring we used to
come and watch the first violet uplifting its head from the dark green
leaves behind the mossy boles, and listen for the first note of the
blackcap, the nightingale's herald, and the first coo of the
wood-pigeons among the bare and newly-budding trees. And here, in the
summer, we used to come as soon as breakfast was over with as many
story-books as we could carry, and sit on the grass and revel in the
wonders of the _Arabian Nights_. the _Tales of the Genii_, and the
_Seven Champions of Christendom_, till all the leafy alleys of the
wood were glittering with armed knights and Sinbads and Aladdins. The
story of Camaralzaman and Badoura was, I think, Winnie's chief
favourite. She could repeat it almost word for word. The idea of the
two lovers being carried to each other by genii through the air and
over the mountain tops had an especial fascination for her. I was
Camaralzaman and she Badoura, and the genii would carry me to her as
she sat by Knockers' Llyn, or, as she called it, Llyn Coblynau, on
the lower slopes of Snowdon.
But above all, there was the sea on the other side of the wood, of
the presence of which we were always conscious--the sea, of which we
could often catch glimpses between the trees, lending a sense of
freedom and wonder and romance such as no landscape can lend. Our
great difficulty of course was in connection with my lameness. Few
children would have tried to convey a pair of crutches and a lame leg
down the cliff to the long level brown sands that lay, farther than
the eye could reach, stretched beneath miles on miles of brown
crumbling cliffs, whose jagged points and indentations had the kind
of spectral look peculiar to that coast. For, alas! the holy water
Winifred brought did not 'cure the crutches.' Yet we used to master
the difficulty, always selecting the firmer gangway at Flinty Point,
and always waiting, before making the attempt, until there was no one
near to see us toiling down. Once down on the hard sands just below
the Point, we were happy, paddling and enjoying ourselves till the
sunset told us that we must begin our herculean labour of hoisting
the leg and crutches up the gangway back to the wood. I have
performed many athletic feats since my cure, but nothing comparable
to the feat of climbing with crutches up those paths of yielding
sand. Once we found on the sand a newly shot gull. She took it in her
lap and mourned over it. I guessed who was the poor bird's
murderer--her father!
We knew Nature in all her moods. In every aspect we found the sea,
the wood, and the meadows happy and beautiful--in winter as in
summer, in storm as in sunshine. In the foggy days of November, in
the sharp winds of March, in the snows and sleet and rain of
February, we used to hear other people complain of the bad weather;
we used to hear them fret for change. But we despised them for their
ignorance where we were so learned. There was no bad weather for us.
In March, what so delicious as breasting together the brave wind, and
feeling it tingle our cheeks and beat our ears till we laughed at
each other with joy? In rain, what so delicious as to stand under a
tree or behind a hedge and listen to the drops pattering overhead
among the leaves, and see the fields steaming up to meet them? Then
again the soft falling of snow upon the lonely fields, while the very
sheep looked brown against the whiteness gathering round them. All
beautiful to us two, and beloved!