When, on coming to rejoin us, Winnie learnt that Sinfi had left for
Capel Curig, she seemed at first somewhat disconcerted, I thought.
Her training, begun under her aunt, and finished under Miss
Dalrymple, had been such that she was by no means oblivious of Welsh
proprieties; and, though I myself was entirely unable to see in what
way it was more eccentric to be mountaineering with a lover than with
a Gypsy companion, she proposed that we should follow Sinfi.
'I have seen your famous living-waggon,' she said. 'It goes wherever
the Lovells go. Let us follow her. You can stay at Bettws or Capel
Curig, and I can stay with Sinfi.'
I told her how strong was Sinfi's wish that we should not do so.
Winnie soon yielded her point, and we began leisurely our descent
westward, along that same path which Sinfi and I had taken on that
other evening, which now seemed so far away, when we walked down to
Llanberis with the setting sun in our faces. If my misery could then
only find expression in sighs and occasional ejaculations of pain,
absolutely dumb was the bliss that came to me now, growing in power
with every moment, as the scepticism of my mind about the reality of
the new heaven before me gave way to the triumphant acceptance of it
by my senses and my soul.
The beauty of the scene--the touch of the summer breeze, soft as
velvet even when it grew boisterous, the perfume of the Snowdonian
flowerage that came up to meet us, seemed to pour in upon me through
the music of Winnie's voice which seemed to be fusing them all. That
beloved voice was making all my senses one.
'You leave all the talk to me,' she said. But as she looked in my
face her instinct told her why I could not talk. She knew that such
happiness and such bliss as mine carry the soul into a region where
spoken language is not.
Looking round me towards the left, where the mighty hollow of Cwm
Dyli was partly in sunshine and partly in shade, I startled Winnie by
suddenly calling out her name. My thoughts had left the happy dream
of Winifred's presence and were with Sinfi Lovell. As I looked at the
tall precipices rising from the chasm right up to the summit of
Snowdon, I recalled how Sinfi, notwithstanding her familiarity with
the scene, appeared to stand appalled as she gazed at the jagged
ridges of Crib-y-Ddysgyl, Crib Goch, Lliwedd, and the heights of Moel
Siabod beyond. I recalled how the expression of alarm upon Sinfi's
features had made me almost see in the distance a starving girl
wandering among the rocks, and this it was that made me now exclaim
'Winnie!' With this my lost power of speech returned.
We went to the ruined huts where Sinfi had on that memorable day
lingered by the spring, and Winnie began to scoop out the water with
her hand and drink it. She saw how I wanted to drink the water out of
the little palm, and she scooped some out for me, saying, 'It's the
purest, and sweetest, and best water on Snowdon.'
'Yes,' I said, 'the purest, and sweetest, and best water in the world
when drunk from such a cup.'
She drew her hand away and let the water drop through her fingers,
and turned round to look at the scene we had left, where the summit
of Snowdon was towering beyond a reach of rock, bathed in the rapidly
deepening light.
'No idle compliments between you and me, sir,' she said, with a
smile. 'Remember that I have still time and strength to go back to
the top and follow Sinfi down to the camp.'
And then we both laughed together, as we laughed that afternoon in
Wilderness Road when she enunciated her theories upon the voices of
men and the voices of birds. She then stood gazing abstractedly into
a pool of water, upon which the evening lights were now falling. As I
saw her reflected in the surface of the stream, which was as smooth
as a mirror--saw her reflected there sometimes on an almost
colourless surface, sometimes amid a procession in which every colour
of the rainbow took part, I sighed. 'Why do you sigh?' said she.
I could not tell her why, for I was recalling Wilderspin's words
about her matchless beauty and its inspiring effect upon the painter
who painted it. It would indeed, as Wilderspin had said, endow
mediocrity with genius.
'Why do you sigh?' she repeated.
'Oh, if I could paint that, Winnie, if I could paint that picture in
the water.'
'And why should you not?' she said, in a dreamy way. And then a
sudden thought seemed to strike her, and she said with much energy,
'Become a painter, Henry! Become a painter! No man ever yet satisfied
a true woman who did not work--work hard at something--anything--if
not in the active affairs of life, in the world of art. My love you
must always have now--you must always have it under any
circumstances. I could not help under any circumstances giving you
love. But I fear I could not give a rich, idle man--even if he were
Henry himself--enough love to satisfy a yearning like yours.'
She bent her face again over the water, and looked at the picture.
'You have often told me that my face is beautiful, Henry, and you
know you never could make me believe it. But suppose you should be
right after all, and suppose that you were a painter, and used it for
a picture of the Spirit of Snowdon, I should then thank God for
having given me a beautiful face, for it would enable you to win your
goal. And afterwards, when its beauty had passed away, as it soon
would, I should have no further need for beauty, for my
painter-husband would, partly through me, have won.'
As we walked along, she pointed to the tubular bridge over the Menai
Straits and to the coast of Anglesey. The panorama had that
fairy-like expression which belongs so peculiarly to Welsh scenery.
Other mountainous countries in Europe are beautiful, and since that
divine walk I have become intimately acquainted with them, but for
associations romantic and poetic, there is surely no land in the
world equal to North Wales.
'Do you remember, Winnie,' I murmured, 'when you so delighted me by
exclaiming, "What a beautiful world it is!"?'
'Ah, yes,' said Winnie, 'and how I should love to paint its beauty.
The only people I really envy are painters.'
We were now at the famous spot where the triple echo is best heard,
and we began to shout like two children in the direction of Llyn
Ddu'r Arddu. And then our talk naturally fell on Knockers' Llyn and
the echoes to be heard there. She then took me to another famous
sight on this side of Snowdon, the enormous stone, said to be five
thousand tons in weight, called the Knockers' Anvil. While we
lingered here Winnie gave me as many anecdotes and legends of this
stone as would fill a little volume. But suddenly she stopped.
'Look!' she said, pointing to the sunset. 'I have seen that sight
only once before. I was with Sinfi. She called it "the Dukkeripen
of the Trushul."'
The sun was now on the point of sinking, and his radiance, falling on
the cloud-pageantry of the zenith, fired the flakes and vapoury films
floating and trailing above, turning them at first into a
ruby-coloured mass, and then into an ocean of rosy fire. A horizontal
bar of cloud which, until the radiance of the sunset fell upon it,
had been dull and dark and grey, as though a long slip from the slate
quarries had been laid across the west, became for a moment a deep
lavender colour, and then purple, and then red-gold. But what Winnie
was pointing at was a dazzling shaft of quivering fire where the sun
had now sunk behind the horizon. Shooting up from the cliffs where
the sun had disappeared, this shaft intersected the bar of clouds and
seemed to make an irregular cross of deep rose.
When Winnie turned her eyes again to mine I was astonished to see
tears in them. I asked her what they meant. She said, 'While I was
looking at that cross of rose and gold in the clouds it seemed to me
that there came on the evening breeze the sound of a sob, and that it
was Sinfi's, my sister Sinfi's; but of course by this time Snowdon
stands between us and her.'