I
Weeks passed by. I visited all the scenes that were in the least
degree associated with Winnie.
The two places nearest to me--Fairy Glen and the Swallow Falls--which
I had always hitherto avoided on account of their being the
favourite haunts of tourists--I left to the last, because I
specially desired to see them by moonlight. With regard to Fairy
Glen, I had often heard Winnie say how she used to go there by
moonlight and imagine the Tylwyth Teg or the fairy scenes of the
_Midsummer Night's Dream_ which I had told her of long ago--imagine
them so vividly that she could actually see, on a certain projecting
rock in the cliffs that enclose the dell, the figure of Titania
dressed in green, with a wreath of leaves round her head. And with
regard to the Swallow Falls, I remembered only too well her telling
me, on the night of the landslip, the Welsh legend of Sir John Wynn,
who died in the seventeenth century, and whose ghost, imprisoned at
the bottom of the Falls on account of his ill deeds in the flesh, was
heard to shriek amid the din of the waters. On that fatal night she
told me that on certain rare occasions, when the moon shines straight
down the chasm, the wail will become an agonised shriek. I had often
wondered what natural sound this was which could afford such pabulum
to my old foe, Superstition. So one night, when the moon was shining
brilliantly--so brilliantly that the light seemed very little
feebler than that of day--I walked in the direction of the Swallow
Falls.
Being afraid that I should not get much privacy at the Falls, I
started late. But I came upon only three or four people on the road.
I had forgotten that my own passion for moonlight was entirely a
Romany inheritance. I had forgotten that a family of English
tourists will carefully pull down the blinds and close the shutters,
in order to enjoy the luxury of candlelight, lamp-light, or gas,
when a Romany will throw wide open the tent's mouth to enjoy the
light he loves most of all--'chonesko dood,' as he calls the
moonlight. As I approached the Swallow Falls Hotel, I lingered to
let my fancy feast in anticipation on the lovely spectacle that
awaited me. When I turned into the wood I encountered only one
person, a lady, and she hurried back to the hotel as soon as I
approached the river.
Following the slippery path as far as it led down the dell, I
stopped at the brink of a pool about a dozen yards, apparently,
from the bottom, and looked up at the water. Bursting like a vast
belt of molten silver out of an eerie wilderness of rocks and trees,
the stream, as it tumbled down between high walls of cliff to the
platform of projecting rocks around the pool at the edge of which I
stood, divided into three torrents, which themselves were again
divided and scattered by projecting boulders into cascades before
they fell into the gulf below. The whole seemed one wide cataract of
living moonlight that made the eyes ache with beauty.
Amid the din of the water I listened for the wail which had so deeply
impressed Winifred, and certainly there was what may be described as
a sound within a sound, which ears so attuned to every note of
Superstition's gamut as Winifred's might easily accept as the wail of
Sir John Wynn's ghost.
There was no footpath down to the bottom, but I descended without any
great difficulty, though I was now soaked in spray. Here the
mysterious human sound seemed to be less perceptible amid the din of
the torrent than from the platform where I had stayed to listen to
it. But when I climbed up again to the spot by the mid-pool where I
had originally stood, a strange sensation came to me. My recollection
of Winnie's words on the night of the landslip came upon me with such
overmastering power that the noise of the cataract seemed changed to
the sound of billows tumbling on Raxton sands, and the 'wail' of Sir
John Wynn seemed changed to that shriek from Raxton cliff which
appalled Winnie as it appalled me.
The following night I passed into a moonlight as bright as that which
had played me such fantastic tricks at the Swallow Falls.
It was not until I had crossed the bridge over the Conway, and was
turning to the right in the direction of Fairy Glen, that I fully
realised how romantic the moonlight was. Every wooded hill and every
precipice, whether craggy and bald or feathered with pines, was
bathed in light that would have made an Irish bog, or an Essex marsh,
or an Isle of Ely fen, a land of poetry.
When I reached Pont Llyn-yr-Afange (Beaver Pool Bridge) I lingered to
look down the lovely lane on the left, through which I was to pass in
order to reach the rocky dell of Fairy Glen, for it was perfumed, not
with the breath of the flowers now asleep, but with the perfume I
love most of all, the night's floating memory of the flowery breath
of day.
Suddenly I felt some one touching my elbow. I turned round. It was
Rhona Boswell. I was amazed to see her, for I thought that all my
Gypsy friends, Boswells, Lovells, and the rest, were still attending
the horse-fairs in the Midlands and Eastern Counties.
'We've only just got here,' said Rhona; 'wussur luck that we got here
at all. I wants to get back to dear Gypsy Dell and Rington Wood;
that's what I wants to do.'
'Where is the camp?' I asked.
'Same place, twix Bettws and Capel Curig.'
She had been to the bungalow, she told me, with a message from Sinfi.
This message was that she particularly wished to meet me at Mrs.
Davies's cottage--'not at the bungalow'--on the following night.
'She'll go there to-morrow mornin',' said Rhona, 'and make things
tidy for you; but she won't expect you till night, same time as she
met you there fust. She's got a key o' the door, she says, wot you
gev her.'
I was not so surprised at Sinfi's proposed place of meeting as I
should have been had I not remembered her resolution not to return
to the bungalow, and not to let me return to the camp.
'You must be sure to go to meet her at the cottage to-morrow night,
else you'll be too late.'
'Why too late?' I asked.
'Well,' said Rhona, 'I can't say as I knows why ezackly. But
I know she's bin' an' bought beautiful dresses at Chester, or
somewheres,--an' I think she's goin' to be married the day arter
to-morrow.'
'Married to whom?'
'Well, I can't say as I rightly knows,' said Rhona.
'Do you know whether Mr. Cyril is in Wales?' I asked.
'Yes,' said Rhona, 'him and the funny un are not far from Capel
Curig. Now I come to think on't, it's mose likely Mr. Cyril as she's
a-goin' to marry, for I know it ain't no Romany chal. It _can't_ be
the funny un,' added she, laughing.
'But where's the wedding to take place?'
'I can't say as I knows ezackly,' said Rhona; 'but I thinks it's by
Knockers' Llyn if it ain't on the top o' Snowdon.'
'Good heavens, girl!' I said. 'What on earth makes you think that?
That pretty little head of yours is stuffed with the wildest
nonsense. I ran make nothing out of you, so good-night. Tell her I'll
be there.'
And I was leaving her to walk down the lane when I turned back and
said, 'How long has Sinfi been at the camp?'
'On'y jist come. She's bin away from us for a long while,' said
Rhona.
And then she looked as if she was tempted to reveal some secret that
she was bound not to tell.
'Sinfi's been very bad,' she went on, 'but she's better now. Her
daddy says she's under a cuss. She's been a-wastin' away like, but
she's better now.'
'So it's Sinfi who is under a curse now,' I said to myself. 'I
suppose Superstition has at last turned her brain. This perhaps
explains Rhona's mad story.'
'Does anybody but you think she's going to be married?' I asked her.
'Does her father think so?'
'Her daddy says it ain't Sinfi as is goin' to be married; but I think
it's Sinfi! An' you'll know all about it the day arter to-morrow.'
And she tripped away in the direction of the camp.
Lost in a whirl of thoughts and speculations, I turned into Fairy
Glen. And now, below me, lay the rocky dell so dearly beloved by
Winnie; and there I walked in such a magic web of light and shade as
can only be seen in that glen when the moon hangs over it in a
certain position.
I descended the steps to the stream and sat down for a time on one
of the great boulders and asked myself if this was the very boulder
on which Winnie used to sit when she conjured up her childish
visions of fairyland. And by that sweet thought the beauty of the
scene became intensified. There, while the unbroken torrent of
the Conway--glittering along the narrow gorge of the glen between
silvered walls of rock as upright as the turreted bastions of a
castle--seemed to flash a kind of phosphorescent light of its own
upon the flowers and plants and sparsely scattered trees along the
sides, I sat and passed into Winifred's own dream, and the Tylwyth
Teg, which to Winnie represented Oberon and Titania and the whole
group of fairies, swept before me.
Awaking from this dream, I looked up the wall of the cliff to enjoy
one more sight of the magical beauty, when there fell upon my eyes,
or seemed to fall, a sight that, though I felt it must be a delusion,
took away my breath. Standing on a piece of rock that was flush with
one of the steps by which I had descended was a slender girlish
figure, so lissom that it might have been the famous 'Queen of the
Fair People.'
'Never,' I said to myself, 'was there an optical illusion so perfect.
I can see the moonlight playing upon her hair. But the hair is not
golden, as the hair of the Queen of the Tylwyth Teg should be; it is
dark as Winnie's own.'
Then the face turned and she looked at the river, and then I
exclaimed 'Winifred!' And then Fairy Glen vanished and I was at
Raxton standing by a cottage door in the moonlight. I was listening
to a voice--that one voice to whose music every chord of life within
me was set for ever, which said,
'I should have to come in the winds, and play around you on the
sands. I should have to peep over the clouds and watch you. I should
have to follow you about wherever you went.'
The sight vanished. Although I had no doubt that what I had seen was
an hallucination, when I moved farther on and stood and gazed at the
stream as it went winding round the mossy cliffs to join the Lledr, I
felt that Winnie was by my side, her hand in mine, and that we were
children together. And when I mounted the steps and strolled along
the path that leads to the plantation where the moonlight, falling
through the leaves, covered the ground with what seemed symbolical
arabesques of silver and grey and purple, I felt the pressure of
little fingers that seemed to express 'How beautiful!' And when I
stood gazing through the opening in the landscape, and saw the rocks
gleaming in the distance and the water down the Lledr valley, I saw
the sweet young face gazing in mine with the smile of the delight
that illumined it on the Wilderness Road when she discoursed of birds
and the wind.
The vividness of the vision of Fairy Glen drove out for a time all
other thoughts. The livelong night my brain seemed filled with it.
'My eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest,'
I said to myself as I lay awake. So full, indeed, was my mind of this
one subject that even Rhona's strange message from Sinfi was only
recalled at intervals. While I was breakfasting, however, this
incident came fully back to me. Either Rhona's chatter about Sinfi's
reason for wanting to see me was the nonsense that had floated into
Rhona's own brain, the brain of a love-sick girl to whom everything
spelt marriage--or else poor Sinfi's mind had become unhinged.