I did not tell her, but went to my room, which now was on the ground floor, and sat watching the rooks sailing home in the sunset till the last one had gone, and the voices of the blackbirds grew less clamorous, and the trees began to look larger and larger in the dusk.
The next day I was again at Wynne's cottage, and the next, and the next. We two, Winifred and I, used to stroll out together through the narrow green lanes, and over the happy fields, and about the Wilderness and the wood, and along the cliffs, and then down the gangway at Flinty Point (the only gangway that was firm enough to support my crutches, Winifred aiding me with the skill of a woman and the agility of a child), and then along the flints below Flinty Point. She rapidly fell into my habits. She was an adept in finding birds' nests and wild honey; and though she would not consent to my taking the eggs, she had not the same compunction about the honey, and she only regretted with me that we could not be exactly like St. John, as Graylingham Wilderness yielded no locusts to eat with the honey. Winifred, though the most healthy of children, had a passion for the deserted church on the cliffs, and for the desolate churchyard.
It was one of those flint and freestone churches that are sprinkled along the coast. Situated as it was at the back of a curve cut by the water into the end of a peninsula running far into the sea, the tower looked in the distance like a lighthouse. I observed after the first day of our meeting that Winifred never would mount the tower steps again. And I knew why. So delicate were her feelings, so acute did her kind little heart make her, that she would not mount steps which I could never mount.
Not that Winifred looked upon me as her little lover. There was not much of the sentimental in her. Once when I asked her on the sands if I might be her lover, she took an entirely practical view of the question, and promptly replied 'certumly,' adding, however, like the wise little woman I always found her, that she 'wasn'tquitesure she knew what a lover was, but if it was anythingverynice she should certumly likemeto be it.'
It was the child's originality of manner that people found so captivating. One of her many little tricks and ways of an original quaintness was her habit of speaking of herself in the third person, like the merest baby. 'Winifred likes this,' 'Winifred doesn't like that,' were phrases that had an irresistible fascination for me.
Another fascinating characteristic of hers was connected with her superstitions. Whenever on parting with her I exclaimed, as I often did. 'Oh, what a lovely day we have had, Winifred!' she would look expectantly in my eyes, murmuring, 'And—and—' This meant that I was to say. 'And shall have many more such days,' as though there were a prophetic power in words.
She talked with entire seriousness of having seen in a place called Fairy Glen in Wales the Tylwyth Teg. And when I told her of Oberon and Titania, andA Midsummer Night's Dream, whose acquaintance I had made through Lamb'sTales from Shakespeare, she said that one bright moonlight night she, in the company of two of her Gypsy playmates, Rhona Boswell and a girl called Sinfi, had visited this same Fairy Glen, when they saw the Fairy Queen alone on a ledge of rock, dressed in a green kirtle with a wreath of golden leaves about her head.
Another subject upon which I loved to hear her talk was that of the 'Knockers' of Snowdon, the guardians of undiscovered copper mines, who sometimes by knocking on the rocks gave notice to individuals they favoured of undiscovered copper, but these favoured ones were mostly children who chanced to wander up Snowdon by themselves. She had, she said, not only heard but seen these Knockers. They were thick-set dwarfs, as broad as they were long. One Knocker, an elderly female, had often played with her on the hills. Knockers' Llyn, indeed, was very much on Winifred's mind. When a golden cloud, like the one on which she was singing her song at the time I first saw her, shone over a person's head at Knockers' Llyn, it was a sign of good fortune. She was sure that it was so, because the Welsh people believed it, and so did the Gypsies.
Not a field or a hedgerow was unfamiliar to us. We were most learned in the structure of birds' nests, in the various colours of birds' eggs, and in insect architecture. In all the habits or the wild animals of the meadows we were most profound little naturalists.
Winifred could in the morning, after the dews were gone, tell by the look of a buttercup or a daisy what kind of weather was at hand, when the most cunning peasant was deceived by the hieroglyphics of the sky, and the most knowing seaman could 'make nothing of the wind.'
Her life, in fact, had been spent in the open air.
There were people staying at the Hall, and they and Frank engrossed all my mother's attention. At least, she did not appear to notice my absence from home.
My brother Frank, however, was not so unobservant (he was two years older than myself). Early one morning, before breakfast, curiosity led him to follow me, and he came upon us in Graylingham Wood as we were sitting under a tree close to the cliff, eating the wild honey we had found in the Wilderness.
He stood there swinging a ground-ash cane, and looking at her in a lordly, patronising way, the very personification no doubt of boyish beauty. I became troubled to see him look so handsome. The contrast between him and a cripple was not fair, I thought, as I observed an expression of passing admiration on little Winifred's face. Yet I thought there was not the pleased smile with which she had first greeted me, and a weight of anxiety was partially removed, for it had now become quite evident to me that I was as much in love as any swain of eighteen—it had become quite evident that without Winifred the poor little shattered sea-gull must perish altogether. She was literally my world.
Frank came and sat down with us, and made himself as agreeable as possible. He tried to enter into our play, but we were too slow for him; he soon became restless and impatient. 'Oh bother!' he said, and got up and left us.
I drew a sigh of relief when he was gone.
'Do you like my brother, Winifred?' I said.
'Yes.' she said.
'Why?'
'Because he is so pretty and so nimble. I believe he could run up—' and then she stopped; but I knew what the complete sentence would have been. She was going to say: 'I believe he could run up the gangways without stopping to take breath.'
Here was a stab; but she did not notice the effect of her unfinished sentence. Then a question came from me involuntarily.
'Winifred,' I said, 'do you like him as well as you like me?'
'Oh no,' she said, in a tone of wonderment that such a question should be asked.
'ButIam not pretty and—'
'Oh, but youare!' she said eagerly, interrupting me.
'But,' I said, with a choking sensation in my voice, 'I am lame.' andI looked at the crutches lying among the ferns beside me.
'Ah, but I like you all the better for being lame,' she said, nestling up to me.
'But you like nimble boys,' I said, 'such as Frank.'
She looked puzzled. The anomaly of liking nimble boys and crippled boys at the same time seemed to strike her. Yet she felt itwasso, though it was difficult to explain it.
'Yes, Idolike nimble boys,' she said at last, plucking with her fingers at a blade of grass she held between her teeth. 'But I think I like lame boys better, that is if they are—if they are—you.'
I gave an exclamation of delight. But she was two years younger thanI, and scarcely, I suppose, understood it.
'He is very pretty,' she said meditatively, 'but he has not got love-eyes like you and Snap, and I don't think I could love any little boy so very,verymuch now who wasn't lame.'
She loved me in spite of my lameness; she loved me because I was lame, so that if I had not fallen from the cliffs, if I had sustained my glorious position among the boys of Raxton and Graylingham as 'Fighting Hal.' I might never have won little Winifred's love. Here was a revelation of the mingled yarn of life, that I remember struck me even at that childish age.
I began to think I might, in spite of the undoubted crutches, resume my old place as the luckiest boy along the sands. She loved me because I was lame! Those who say that physical infirmity does not feminise the character have not had my experience. No more talk for me that morning. In such a mood as that there can be no talk. I sat in a silent dream, save when a sweet sob of delight would come up like a bubble from the heaving waters of my soul. I had passed into that rare and high mood when life's afflictions are turned by love to life's deepest, holiest joys. I had begun early to learn and know the gamut of the affections.
'When, you leave me here and go home to Wales you will never forget me. Winnie?'
'Never, never!' she said, as she helped me from the ferns which were still as wet with dew as though it had been raining. 'I will think of you every night before I go to sleep, and always end my prayers as I did that first night after I saw you so lonely in the churchyard.'
'And how is that, Winnie?' I said, as she adjusted my crutches for me.
'After I've said "Amen," I always say, "And, dear Lord Jesus, don't forget to love dear Henry, who can't get up the gangways without me," and I will say that every night as long as I live.'
From that morning I considered her altogether mine. Her speaking of me as the 'dear little English boy,' however, as she did, marred the delight her words gave me. I had from the first observed that the child's strongest passion was a patriotism of a somewhat fiery kind. The word English in her mouth seemed some-times a word of reproach: it was the name of the race that in the past had invaded her sacred Snowdonia.
I afterwards learnt that her aunt was answerable for this senseless prejudice.
'Winnie,' I said, 'don't you wish I was a Welsh boy?'
'Oh yes,' she said.'Don't you?' I made no answer.
She looked into my face and said, 'And yet I don't think I could love a Welsh boy as I love you.'
She then repeated to me a verse of a Welsh song, which of course I did not understand a word of until she told me what it meant in English.
It was an address to Snowdon, and ran something like this—
Mountain-wild Snowdon for me!Sweet silence there for the harp,Where loiter the ewes and the lambsIn the moss and the rushes,Where one's song goes sounding up!And the rocks re-echo it higher and higherIn 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.
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 theArabian Nights. theTales of the Genii, and theSeven 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!
'But where was this little boy's mother all this time?' you naturally ask; 'where was his father? In a word, who was he? and what were his surroundings?'
I will answer these queries in as brief a fashion as possible.
My father, Philip Aylwin, belonged to a branch of an ancient family which had been satirically named by another branch of the same family 'The Proud Aylwins.'
It is a singular thing that it was the proud Aylwins who had a considerable strain of Gypsy blood in their veins. My great-grandfather had married Fenella Stanley, the famous Gypsy beauty, about whom so much was written in the newspapers and magazines of that period. She had previously when a girl of sixteen married a Lovell who died and left a child. Fenella's portrait in the character of the Sibyl of Snowdon was painted by the great portrait painter of that time.
This picture still hangs in the portrait gallery of Raxton Hall.
As a child it had an immense attraction for me, and no wonder, for it was original to actual eccentricity. It depicted a dark young woman of dazzling beauty standing at break of day among mountain scenery, holding a musical instrument of the guitar kind, but shaped like a violin, upon the lower strings of which she was playing with the thumb of the left hand.
Through the misty air were seen all kinds of shadowy shapes, whose eyes were fixed on the player. I used to stand and look at this picture by the hour together, fascinated by the strange beauty of the singer's face and the mysterious, prophetic expression in the eyes.
And I used to try to imagine what tune it was that could call from the mountain air the 'flower sprites' and 'sunshine elves' of morning on the mountain.
Fenella Stanley seems in her later life to have set up as a positive seeress, and I infer from certain family papers and diaries in my possession that she was the very embodiment of the wildest Romany beliefs and superstitions.
I first became conscious of the mysterious links which, bound me to my Gypsy ancestress by reading one of her letters to my great-grandfather, who had taught her to write: nothing apparently could have taught her to spell. It was written during a short stay she was making away from him in North Wales. It described in the simplest (and often the most uncouth) words that Nature-ecstasy which the Romanies seem to feel in the woodlands. It came upon me like a revelation, for it was the first time I had ever seen embodied in words the sensations which used to come to me in Graylingham Wood or on the river that ran through it. After long basking among the cowslips, or beneath the whispering branches of an elm, whose shade I was robbing from the staring cows around, or lying on my hack in a boat on the river, listening to the birds and the insect hum and all the magic music of summer in the woodlands, I used all at once to feel as though the hand of a great enchantress were being waved before me and around me. The wheels of thought would stop; all the senses would melt into one, and I would float on a tide of unspeakable joy, a tide whose waves were waves neither of colour, nor perfume, nor melody, but new waters born of the mixing of these; and through a language deeper than words and deeper than thoughts, I would seem carried at last close to an actual consciousness—a consciousness which, to my childish dreams, seemed drawing me close to the bosom of a mother whose face would brighten into that of Feuella.
My father lived upon moderate means in the little seaside town of Raxton. My mother was his second wife, a distant cousin of the same name. She was not one of the 'Proud Aylwins,' and yet she must have had more pride in her heart than all the 'Proud Aylwins' put together. Her feeling in relation to the strain of Gypsy blood in the family into which she had married was that of positive terror. She associated the word 'Gypsy' with everything that is wild, passionate, and lawless.
One great cause undoubtedly of her partiality for Frank and her dislike of me was that Frank's blue-eyed Saxon face showed no sign whatever of the Romany strain, while my swarthy face did.
As I write this, she lives before me with more vividness than my father, for the reason that her character during my childhood, before I came to know my father thoroughly—before I came to know what a marvellous man he was—seemed to be a thousand times more vivid than his. With her bright grey eyes, her patrician features, I shall see her while memory lasts. The only differences that ever arose between my father and my other were connected with the fact that my father had a former wife. Now and then (not often) my mother would lose her stoical self-command, and there would come from her an explosion of jealous anger, stormy and terrible. This was on occasions when she perceived bat my father's memory retained too vividly the impression left on it of his love for the wife who was dead—dead, but a rival still. My father lived in mortal fear of this jealousy. Yet my mother was a devoted and a fond wife. I remember in especial the flash that would come from her eyes, the fiery flush that would overspread her face, whenever she saw my father open certain antique silver casket which he kept in his escritoire when at home, and carried about with him when travelling. The casket (I soon learned) contained momentos of his first wife, between whom and himself there seems to have been a deep natural sympathy such did not exist between my mother and him. This first wife he had lost under peculiarly painful circum-stances, which it is necessary that I should briefly narrate. She had been drowned before his very eyes that cove beneath the church which I have already described.
This semicircular indentation at the end of the peninsula or headland on which the church stood was specially dangerous in two ways. It was a fatal spot where sea and land were equally treacherous. On the sands the tide, and on the cliffs the landslip, imperilled the lives of the unwary. Half, at least, of the churchyard had been condemned as 'dangerous,' and this very same spot was the only one on the coast where the pedestrian along the sands ran any serious risk of being entrapped by the tide; for the peninsula on which the church stood jutted out for a considerable distance into the sea, and then was scooped out in the form of a boot-jack, and so caught the full force of the waves. One corner, as already mentioned, was called Flinty Point, the other Needle Point, and between these two points there was no gangway within the semicircle up the wall of cliff. Indeed, within the cove the cliff was perpendicular, or rather overhanging, as far as such crumbling earth would admit of its overhanging. To reach a gangway, a person inside the cove would have to leave the cliff wall for the open sands, and pass round either Needle Point or Flinty Point. Hence the cove was sometimes called Mousetrap Cove, because when the tide reached so high as to touch these two points, a person on the sands within the cove was caught as in a mousetrap, and the only means of extrication was by boat from the sea. It was the irresistible action of the sea upon the peninsula (called Church Headland) that had doomed church and churchyard to certain destruction.
Dangerous as was this cove, there was something peculiarly fascinating about it. The black, smooth, undulating boulders that dotted the sand here and there formed the most delightful seats upon which to meditate or read. It was a favourite spot with my father's first wife, who had been a Swiss governess. She was a great reader and student, but it was not till after her death that my father became one. The poor lady was fond of bringing her books to the cove, and pursuing her studies or meditations with the sound of the sea's chime in her ears. My father, at that time I believe a simple, happy country squire, but showing strong signs of his Romany ancestry, had often warned her of the risk she ran, and one day he had the agony of seeing her from the cliff locked in the cove, and drowning before his eyes ere a boat could be got, while he and the coastguard stood powerless to reach her.
The effect of this shock demented my father for a time. How it was that he came to marry again I could never understand. During my childhood he had, as far as I could see, no real sympathy with anything save his own dreams. In after years I came to know the truth. He was kind enough in disposition, but he looked upon us, his children, as his second wife's property, his dreams as his own. Once every year he used to go to Switzerland and stay there for several weeks; and, as the object of these journeys was evidently to revisit the old spots made sacred to him by reminiscences of his romantic love for his first wife, it may he readily imagined that they were not looked upon with any favour by my mother. She never accompanied him on these occasions, nor would she let Frank do so—another proof of the early partiality she showed for my brother. As I was of less importance, my father (previous to my accident) used to take me, to my intense delight and enjoyment; but during the period of my lameness he went to Switzerland alone.
It was during one of my childish visits to Switzerland that I learnt an important fact in connection with my father and his first wife—the fact that since her death he had become a mystic and had joined a certain sect of mystics founded by Lavater.
This is how I came to know it. My attention had been arrested by a book lying on my father's writing-table—a large book called 'The Veiled Queen, by Philip Aylwin'—and I began to read it. The statements therein were of an astounding kind, and the idea of a beautiful woman behind a veil completely fascinated my childish mind. And the book was full of the most amazing stories collected from all kinds of outlandish sources. One story, called 'The Flying Donkey of the Ruby Hills,' riveted my attention so much that it possessed me, and even now I feel that I can repeat every word of it. It was a story of a donkey-driver, who, having lost his wife Alawiyah, went and lived alone in the ruby hills of Badakhshan, where the Angel of Memory fashioned for him out of his own sorrow and tears an image of his wife. This image was mistaken by a townsman named Hasan for his own wife, and Ja'afar was summoned before the Ka'dee. Afterwards, whenThe Veiled Queencame into my possession, I noticed that this story was quoted for motto on the title-page:
'Then quoth the Ka'dee, laughing until his grinders appeared: "Rather, by Allah, would I take all the punishment thou dreadest, thou most false donkey-driver of the Ruby Hills, than believe this story of thine—this mad, mad story, that she with whom thou wast seen was not the living wife of Hasan here (as these four legal witnesses have sworn), but thine own dead spouse, Alawiyah, refashioned for thee by the Angel of Memory out of thine own sorrow and unquenchable fountain of tears."
'Quoth Ja'afar, bowing low his head: "Bold is the donkey-driver, O Ka'dee! and bold the Ka'dee who dares say what he will believe, what disbelieve—not knowing in any wise the mind of Allah—not knowing in any wise his own heart and what it shall some day suffer."'
This story so absorbed me that when my father re-entered the house I was perfectly unconscious of his presence. He took the book from me, saying that it was not a book for children. It possessed my mind for some days. What I had read in it threw light upon certain conversations in French and German which I had heard between my father and his Swiss friends, and the fact gradually dawned upon me that he believed himself to be in direct communication with the spirit of his dead wife. This so acted upon my imagination that I began to feel that she was actually alive, though invisible. I told Frank when I got home that we had another mother in Switzerland, and that I our father went to Switzerland to see her.
Having at that time a passionate love for my mother (a love none the less passionate because somewhat coldly returned), I felt great anger against this resuscitated rival; but Frank only laughed and called me a stupid little fool.
Luckily Frank forgot my story in a minute, and it never reached my mother's ears.
I Some years after this an odd incident occurred. The I idea of a veiled lady had, as I say, fascinated me. One Raxton fair-day I induced Winnie to be photographed on the sands, wearing a crown of sea-flowers in imitation of Rhona Boswell's famous wild-flower coronet, and a necklace of seaweed, with Frank and another boy lifting from her head a long white veil of my mother's. My father accidentally saw this photograph, and was so taken with it that he adorned the title-page of the third edition ofThe Veiled Queenwith a small woodcut of it.
These vagaries of my father's had an influence upon my destiny of the most tragic, yet of the most fantastic kind.
He had the reputation, I believe, of being one of the most learned mystics of his time. He was a fair Hebrew scholar, and also had a knowledge of Sanscrit, Arabic, and Persian. His passion for philology was deep-rooted. He was a no less ardent numismatist. Moreover, he was deeply versed in amulet-lore. He wrote a treatise upon 'amulets' and their inscriptions. All this was after the death of his first wife. He had a large collection of amulets, Gnostic gems, and abraxas stones. That he really believed in the virtue of amulets will be pretty clearly seen as my narrative proceeds. Indeed, the subject of amulets and love-tokens became a mania with him. After his death it was said that his collection of amulets, Egyptian, Gnostic, and other, was rarer, and his collection of St. Helena coins larger, than any other collection in England.
Though my mother did not know of the spiritualistic orgies in Switzerland, she knew that my father was a spiritualist. And this vexed her, not only because she conceived it to be visionary folly, but because it was 'low.' She knew that it led him to join a newly-formed band of Latter-Day mystics which had been organised at Raxton, but luckily she did not know that through them he believed himself to be holding communication with his first wife. The members of this body were tradespeople of the town, and I quite think that in my mother's eyes all tradespeople were low.
As to her indifference towards me,—that is easily explained. I was an incorrigible little bohemian by nature. She despaired of ever changing me. During several years this indifference distressed me, though it in no way diminished my affection for her. At last, however, I got accustomed to it and accepted it as inevitable. But the remarkable thing was that Frank's affection for his mother was of the most languid kind. He was an open-hearted boy, and never took advantage of my mother's favouritism. Thus I was left entirely to my own resources. My little love-idyl with Winifred was for a long time unknown to my mother, and no amount of ocular demonstration could have made it known (in such a dream was he) to my father.
On one occasion, however, my mother, having been struck by her beauty at church, told Wynne to bring her to the house, little thinking what she was doing. Accordingly, Winifred came one evening and charmed my mother, charmed the entire household, by her grace of manner. My mother, upon whom what she called 'style' made a far greater impression than anything else, pronounced her to be a perfect little lady, and I heard her remark that she wondered how the child of such a scapegrace as Wynne could have been so reared.
Unfortunately I was not old enough to disguise the transports of delight that set my heart beating and my crippled limbs trembling as I saw Winifred gliding like a fairy about the house and gardens, and petted even by my proud and awful mother. My mother did not fail to notice this, and before long she had got from Frank the history of our little loves, and even of the 'cripple water' from St. Winifred's Well. I partly heard what Frank was telling her, and I was the only one to notice the expression of displeasure that overspread her features. She did not, however, show it to the child, but she never invited her there again, and from that evening was much more vigilant over my movements, lest I should go to Wynne's cottage. I still, however, continued to meet Winifred in Graylingham Wood during her stay with her father; and at last, when she again left me, I felt desolate indeed.
I wrote her a letter, and took it to him to address. He was very fond of showing his penmanship, which was remarkably good. He had indeed been well educated, though from his beer-house associations he had entirely caught the rustic accent. I saw him address it, and took it myself to the post-office at Rington, where I was not so well known as at Raxton, but I never got any reply.
And who was Tom Wynne? Though the organist of the new church at Raxton, and custodian of the old deserted church on the cliffs, he was the local ne'er-do-well, drunkard, and scapegrace. He was, however, a well-connected man, reduced to his present position by drink. He had lived in Raxton until he returned to Wales, which was his birthplace—having obtained there some appointment the nature of which I never could understand. In Wales he had got married; and there his wife had died shortly after the birth of Winnie. It was no doubt through his intemperate habits that he lost his post in Wales. It was then that he again came to Raxton, leaving the child with his sister-in-law.
Raxton stands on that part of the coast where the land-springs most persistently disintegrate the hills and render them helpless against the ravages of the sea. Perhaps even within the last few centuries the spot called Mousetrap Cove, scooped out of the peninsula on which the old church stands, was dry land. The old Raxton church at the end of this peninsula had, not many years since, to be deserted for a new one, lest it should some day carry its congregation with it when it slides, as it soon will slide, into the sea. But as none had dared to pull down the old church, a custodian had to be found who for a pittance would take charge of it and of the important monuments it contains. Such a custodian was found in Wynne, who lived in the cottage already described on the Wilderness Road. Along this road (which passed both the new church and the old) I was frequently journeying, and Wynne's tall burly form and ruddy face were, even before I knew Winnie, a certain comfort to me.
He was said to be the last remnant of an old family that once owned much land in the neighbourhood, and he was still the recipient of a small pension. My father used to say that Wynne's family was even exceptionally good, that it laid claim to being descended from a still older Welsh family. But my mother scorned the idea, and always treated the organist as belonging to the lower classes. It was Wynne who had taught me swimming. It was really he, and not my groom, who had taught me how to ride a horse along the low-tide sands so as not to distress him or damage his feet.
It was about this time that my uncle Aylwin of Alvanley, my mother's brother, who had quarrelled with her, became reconciled to her, and came to Raxton. He at once recommended that a friend of his, a famous London surgeon, should he consulted about my lameness. I accordingly went with him to London to be placed under the treatment of the eminent man. Had this been done earlier, what a world of suffering might have been spared me! The man of science pronounced my ailment to be quite curable.
He performed an operation upon the leg, and after a long and careful course of treatment in town, advised that I should go to Margate for a long stay, and avail myself of that change of air. I went, accompanied by my mother and brother, and stayed there several months. My father used to come to see us once a month or so, stay for a week, and then go back.
I now wrote another letter to Winifred, and after a long delay, got a reply, but it consisted mainly of descriptions of the way in which she paddled in the Welsh brooks and of lessons in the shawl-dance which she was taking from Shuri Lovell, the mother of her Gypsy friend. So vividly did she describe these lessons that her pictures haunted me. I wrote in reply to this a letter burning with my ever-growing love, but to this I got no reply.
As the surgeon had prophesied, I made such advance that I was after a while able to walk with tolerable ease without my crutches, by the aid of a walking-stick; and as time went on, the tonic effect of Margate air, aiding the remedies prescribed by the surgeon, worked such a change in me that I was pronounced well, and the doctor said I might return home. I returned to Raxton a cripple no longer.
I returned cured. I say. But how entangled is this web of our life! How almost impossible is it that good should come unmixed with evil, or evil unmixed with good! At Margate, where the bracing air did more, I doubt not, towards my restoration to health than all the medicines,—at Margate my brother drank in his death-poison.
During the very last days of our stay he caught scarlet fever. In a fortnight he was dead. The shock to me was very severe. It laid my mother prostrate for months.
I was now by the death of Frank the representative of our branch of the family, and a little fellow of uncomfortable importance. My uncle Aylwin of Alvanley. being childless, was certain to leave me his large estates, for he had dropped entirely away from the Aylwins of Rington Manor, and also from the branch of the Aylwin family represented by my kinsman Cyril.
My mother had some prejudice against a public school, and I was sent to a large and important private one at Cambridge.
And go, with Winifred on my mind, I went one damp winter's morning toDullingham, our nearest railway station, on my way to Cambridge.
As concerns my school-days, I feel that all that will interest the reader is this: as I rode through mile upon mile of the flat, wide-stretching country, I made to myself a vow in connection with Winifred,—a vow that when I left school I would do a certain thing in relation to her, though Fate itself should say, 'This thing shall not be done.' I did not know then, as I know now, how weak is human will enmeshed in that web of Circumstance that has been a-weaving since the beginning of the world.
I left school without the slightest notion as to what my future course in life was to be. I was to take my rich uncle's property. That was understood now. And although my mother never talked of the matter, I could see in the pensive gaze she bent on me an ever-present consciousness of a future for me more golden still.
But now I formed a new intimacy, and one of a very singular kind—an intimacy with my father, who suddenly woke up to the fact that I was no longer a child. It occurred on my making some pertinent inquiries about a certain Gnostic amulet representing the Gorgon's head, a prize of which he had lately become the happy possessor. On his telling me that the Arabic word for amulet washamalet, and that the word meant 'that which is suspended,' I said in a perfectly thoughtless way that very likely one of the learned societies to which he belonged might be able to trace some connection between 'hamalet' and the 'Hamlet' of Shakespeare. These idle and ignorant words of mine fell, as I found, upon a mind ripe to receive them. He looked straight before him at the bust of Shakespeare on the bookshelves as he always looked when his rudderless imagination was once well launched, and I heard him mutter, 'Hamlet—the Amleth of Saxo-Grammaticus,—hamalet, "that which is suspended." The world, to Hamlet's metaphysical mind,was"suspended" in the wide region of Nowhere—in an infinite ocean of Nothing. Why did I not think of this before? Strange that this child should hit upon it.' Then looking at me as though he had just seen me for the first time in his life, he said. 'How old are you, child?' 'Eighteen, father, I said. 'Eighteenyears?' he asked. 'Yes, father,' I said with some pique. 'Did you suppose I meant eighteen months?' 'Only eighteen years,' he muttered, 'a mere baby, in short; and yet he has hit upon what we Shakespearians have been boggling over for many year?—the symbolical meaning involved in Hamlet's name. Henry, I prophesy great things for you.'
An intimacy was cemented between us at once. One of the results of this conversation was my father's elaborate paper, read before one of his societies, in which he maintained that Shakespeare'sHamletwas a metaphysical poem, the great central idea of which was involved in the name Hamlet, Amleth, or Hamalet—the idea that the universe, suspended in the wide region of Nowhere, lies, an amulet, upon the breast of the Great Latona,—a paper that was the basis of his reputation in 'the higher criticism.'
Shortly after this my father and I spent the autumn in various parts of Switzerland. One night, when we were sitting outside the chalet in the full light of the moon, I was the witness of a display of passion on the part of one whom I had always considered to be a dreamy book-worm—a passionless, eccentric mystic—that simply amazed me. A flickering tongue from the central fires suddenly breaking up through the soil of an English vegetable garden could hardly have been a more unexpected phenomenon to me than what occurred on that memorable night.
The incident I am going to relate showed me how rash it is to suppose that you have really fathomed the personality of any human creature. The mementos of his first wife, which accompanied him whithersoever he went, absorbed his attention in Switzerland, and especially in the little place where she was born, far more than they had done at home. He was for ever peeping furtively into his escritoire to enjoy the sight of them, and then looking over his shoulder to see if he was being watched by my mother, though she was far away in Raxton Hall. On the night in question he showed me the silver casket containing certain of these mementos—mementos which I felt to be almost too intimate to be shown even to his son.
'And now, Henry,' said he, 'I am going to show you something that no one else has ever seen since she died—the most sacred possession I have upon this earth.' He then opened his shirt and his vest, and showed me lying upon his naked bosom a beautiful jewelled cross of a considerable size. 'This,' said he, lifting it up, 'is an ancient Gnostic amulet. It is called the "Moonlight Cross" of the Gnostics. I gave it to her on the night of our betrothal. She was a Roman Catholic. It is made of precious stones cut in facets, with rubies and diamonds and beryls so cunningly set that, when the moonlight falls on them, the cross flashes almost as brilliantly as when the sunlight falls on them and is kindled into living fire. These deep-coloured crimson rubies—almost as clear as diamonds—are not of the ordinary kind. They are true "Oriental rubies," and the jewellers would tell you that the mine which produced them has been lost during several centuries. But look here when I lift it up; the most wonderful feature of the jewel is the skill with which the diamonds are cut. The only shapes generally known are what are called the "brilliant" and the "rose," but here the facets are arranged in an entirely different way, and evidently with the view of throwing light into the very hearts of the rubies, and producing this peculiar radiance.'
He lifted the amulet again (which was suspended from his neck by a beautifully worked cord made of soft brown hair) into the rays from the moon. The light the jewel emitted was certainly of a strange and fascinating kind. The cross had been worn with the jewelled front upon his bosom instead of the smooth back, and the sharp facets of the cross had lacerated the scarred flesh underneath in a most cruel manner. He saw me shudder and understood why.
'Oh, I like that!' he said, with an ecstatic smile. 'I like to feel it constantly on my bosom. It cannot cut deep enough for me. This is her hair,' he said, taking the hair-cord between his fingers and kissing it.
'How do you manage to exist, father,' I said, 'with that heavy sharp-edged jewel on your breast? you who cannot bear the gout with patience?'
'Exist? I could not existwithoutit. The gout is pain—this is not pain; it is joy, bliss, heaven! When I am dead it must lie for ever on my breast as it lies now, or I shall never rest in my grave.' He had been talking about amulets in the most quiet and matter-of-fact way during that morning; but the I moment he produced this cross a strange change came over his face, something like the change that will come over a dull wood-fire when blown by the wind into a bright light of flame.
'Ha!' he muttered to himself, as his eyes widened and sparkled with a look of intense eagerness and his hand shook, sending the light of the beautiful jewel all about the room, 'it is a sad pity he was not her son. How I should have loved him then! I like him now very much; but how I should have loved him then, for he is a brave boy. Oh, if I had only been born brave like him!' Then, suddenly recollecting himself, he closed his vest, and said: 'Don't tell your mother, Hal; don't tell your mother that I have shown you this.' Then he took it out again. 'She who is dead cherished it,' he continued, half to himself—'she cherished it above all things. She died, boy, and I couldn't help her. She used to wear the cross in the bosom of her dress; and there she was in the cove kissing it when the tide swept over her. I ought to have jumped down and died with her.Youwould have done it, Hal; your eyes say so. Oh, to be an Aylwin without the Aylwin courage!'
After a little time he said: 'This has lain on her bosom, Hal, her bosom! It has been kissed by her, Hal, oh, a thousand thousand times! It had her last kiss. When I took it from the cold body which had been recovered, this cross seemed to be warm with her life and love.'
And then he wept, and his tears fell thick upon his bosom and upon the amulet. The truth was clear enough now. The appalling death of his first wife, his love for her, and his remorse for not having jumped down the cliff and died with her, had affected his brain. He was a monomaniac, and all his thoughts were in some way clustered round the dominant one. He had studied amulets because the 'Moonlight Cross' had been cherished by her; he came to Switzerland every year because it was associated with her; he had joined the spiritualist body in the mad hope that perhaps there might be something in it, perhaps there might be a power that could call her back to earth. Even the favourite occupation of his life, visiting cathedrals and churches and taking rubbings from monumental brasses, had begun after her death; it had come from the fact (as I soon learned) that she had taken interest in monumental brasses, and had begun the collection of rubbings.
And yet this martyr to a mighty passion bore the character of a dreamy student; and his calm, un-furrowed face, on common occasions, expressed nothing but a rather dull kind of content! Here was a revelation of what, afterwards, was often revealed to me, that human personality is the crowning wonder of this wonderful universe, and that the forces which turn fire-mist into stars are not more inscrutable than is human character. He lifted up his head and gazed at me through his tears.
'Hal,' he said, 'do you know why I have shown you this? Itmust, MUST be buried with me at my death; and there is no one upon whose energy, truth, courage, and strength of will I can rely as I can upon yours. You must give me your word, Hal, that you will see it and this casket containing her letters buried with me.'
I hesitated to become a party to such an undertaking as this. It savoured of superstition, I thought. Now, having at that very time abandoned all the superstitions and all the mystical readings of the universe which as a child I had inherited from ancestors, Romany and English, having at that very time begun to take a delight in the wonderful revelations of modern science, my attitude towards superstition—towards all super-naturalism—oscillated between anger and simple contempt.
'But,' I said, 'you surely will not have this beautiful old cross buried?' And as I looked at it, and the light fell upon it, there came from it strange flashes of fire, showing with what extraordinary skill the rubies and diamonds had been adjusted so that their facets should catch and concentrate the rays of the moon.
'Yes,' he said, taking the cross again in his hand and fondling it passionately, 'it must never be possessed by any one after me.'
'But it might be stolen, father—stolen from your coffin.'
'That would indeed he a disaster,' he said with a shudder. Then a look of deadly vengeance overspread his face and brought out all its Romany characteristics as he said: 'But with it there will be buried a curse written in Hebrew and English—a curse upon the despoiler, which will frighten off any thief who is in his senses.'
And he showed me a large parchment scroll, folded exactly like a title-deed, with the following curse and two verses from the 109th Psalm written upon it in Hebrew and English. The English version was carefully printed by himself in large letters:—
'He who shall violate this tomb.—he who shall steal this amulet,hallowed as a love-token between me and my dead wife,—he who shalldare to lay a sacrilegious hand upon this cross, stands cursed byGod. cursed by love, and cursed by me. Philip Aylwin, lying here.
"Let there be no man to pity him, nor to have compassion upon his fatherless children…. Let his children be vagabonds, and beg their bread; let them seek it also out of desolate places." Psalm cix. So saith the Lord. Amen.'
'I have printed the English version in large letters,' he said, 'so that any would-be despoiler must see it and read it at once by the dimmest lantern light.'
'But, father,' I said, 'is it possible that you, an educated man, really believe in the efficacy of a curse?'
'If the curse comes straight from the heart's core of a man, as this curse comes from mine, Hal, how can it fail to operate by the mere force of will? The curse of a man who loved as I love upon the wretch who should violate a love-token so sacred as this—why, the disembodied spirits of all who have loved and suffered would combine to execute it!'
'Spirits!' I said. 'Really, father, in times like these to talk of spirits!'
'Ah, Henry!' he replied, 'I was like you once. I could once be content with Materialism—I could find it supportable once; but, should you ever come to love as I have loved (and, for your own happiness, child, I hope you never may), you will And that Materialism is intolerable, is hell itself, to the heart that has known a passion like mine. You will And that it is madness, Hal, madness, to believe in the word "never"! you will And that youdarenot leave untried any creed, howsoever wild, that offers the heart a ray of hope. Every object she cherished has become spiritualised, sublimated, has become alive—alive as this amulet is alive. See, the lights are no natural lights.' And again he held it up.
'If on my death-bed,' he continued, 'I thought that this beloved cross and these sacred relics would ever get into other hands—would ever touch other flesh—than mine, I should die a maniac, Hal, and my spirit would never be released from the chains of earth.' It was the superstitious tone of his talk that irritated and hardened me. He saw it, and a piteous expression overspread his features.
'Don't desert your poor father,' he said. 'What I want is the word of an Aylwin that those beloved relics shall be buried with me. If I hadthat, I should be content to live, and content to die. Oh, Hal!'
He threw such an imploring gaze into my face as he said 'Oh, Hal!' that, reluctant as I was to be mixed up with superstition, I promised to execute his wishes; I promised also to keep the secret from all the world during his life, and after his death to share it with those two only from whom, for family reasons, it could not be kept—my uncle Aylwin of Alvanley and my mother. He then put away the amulet, and his face resumed the look of placid content it usually wore. He was feeling the facets of the mysterious 'Moonlight Cross'!
The most marvellous thing is this, however: his old relations towards me were at once resumed. He never alluded to the subject of his first wife again, and I soon found it difficult to believe that the conversation just recorded ever took place at all. Evidently his monomania only rose up to a passionate expression when fanned into sudden flame by talking about the cross. It was as though the shock of his first wife's death had severed his consciousness and his life in twain.
Naturally this visit to Switzerland cemented our intimacy, and it was on our return home that he suggested my accompanying him on one of his 'rubbing expeditions.'
'Henry,' he said, 'your mother has of late frequently discussed with me the question of your future calling in life. She suggests a Parliamentary career. I confess that I find questions about careers exceedingly disturbing.'
'There is only one profession I should like, father,' I said, 'and that is a painter's.' In fact, the passion for painting had come on me very strongly of late. My dreams had from the first been of wandering with Winnie in a paradise of colour, and these dreams had of late been more frequent: the paradise of colour had been growing richer and rarer.
He shook his head gravely and said, 'No, my dear; your mother would never allow it.'
'Why not?' I said; 'is painting low too?'
'Cyril Aylwin is low, at least so your mother and aunt say, especially your aunt. I have not perceived it myself, but then your mother's perceptive faculties are extraordinary—quite extraordinary.'
'Did the lowness come from his being a painter, father?' I asked.
'Really, child, you are puzzling me. But I have observed you now for some weeks, and I quite believe that you would make one of the best rubbers who ever held a ball. I am going to Salisbury next week, and you shall then make yourdébut.'
This was in the midst of a very severe winter we had some years ago, when all Europe was under a coating of ice.
'But, father,' I said, 'shan't we find it rather cold?'
'Well,' said my father, with a bland smile, 'I will not pretend that Salisbury Cathedral is particularly warm in this weather, but in winter I always rub in knee-caps and mittens. I will tell Hodder to knit you a full set at once.'
'But, father,' I said, 'Tom Wynne tells me that rubbing is the most painful of all occupations. He even goes so far sometimes as to say that it was the exhaustion of rubbing for you which turned him to drink.'
'Nothing of the kind,' said my father. 'All that Tom needed to make him a good rubber was enthusiasm. I am strongly of opinion that without enthusiasm rubbing is of all occupations the most irksome, except perhaps for the quadrumana (who seem more adapted for this exercise), the most painful for the spine, the most cramping for the thighs, the most numbing for the fingers. It is a profession, Henry, demanding, above every other, enthusiasm in the operator. Now Tom's enthusiasm for rubbing as an art was from the first exceedingly feeble.'
I was on the eve of revolting, but I remembered what there was lacerating his poor breast, and consented. And when I heard hints of our 'working the Welsh churches' my sudden enthusiasm for the rubber's art astonished even my father.
'My dear,' he said to my mother at dinner one day, 'what do you think? Henry has developed quite a sudden passion for rubbing.'
I saw an expression of perplexity and mystification overspread my mother's sagacious face.
'And in the spring,' continued my father, 'we are going into Wales to rub.'
'Into Wales, are you?' said my mother, in a tone of that soft voice whose meaning I knew so well.
My thoughts were continually upon Winifred, now that I was alone in the familiar spots. I had never seen her nor heard from her since we parted as children. She had only known me as a cripple. What would she think of me now? Did she ever think of me? She had not answered my childish letter, and this had caused me much sorrow and perplexity.
We did not go into Wales after all. But the result of this conversation took a shape that amazed me. I was sent to stay with my Aunt Prue in London in order that I might attend one of the Schools of Art. Yes, my mother thought it was better for me even to run the risk of becoming bohemianised like Cyril Aylwin, than to brood over Winnie or the scenes that were associated with our happy childhood.
In London I was an absolute stranger. We had no town house. On the few occasions when the family had gone to London, it was to stay in Belgrave Square with my Aunt Prue, who was an unmarried sister of my mother's.
'Since the death of the Prince Consort, to go no further back,' she used to say, 'a dreadful change has come over the tone of society; the love of bohemianism, the desire to take up any kind of people, if they are amusing, and still more if they are rich, is levelling everything. However, I'm nobody now; I say nothing.'
What wonder that from my very childhood my aunt took a prejudice against me, and predicted for me a career 'as deplorable as Cyril Aylwin's,' and sympathised with my mother in her terror of the Gypsy strain in my father's branch of the family?
Her tastes and instincts being intensely aristocratic, she suffered a martyrdom from her ever present consciousness of this disgrace. She had seen very much more of what is called Society than my mother had ever an opportunity of seeing. It was not, however, aristocracy, but Royalty that won the true worship of her soul.
Although she was immeasurably inferior to my mother in everything, her influence over her was great, and it was always for ill. I believe that even my mother's prejudice against Tom Wynne was largely owing to my aunt, who disliked my relations towards Wynne simply because he did not represent one of the great Wynne families. But the remarkable thing was that, although my mother thus yielded to my aunt's influence, she in her heart despised her sister's ignorance and her narrowness of mind. She often took a humorous pleasure in seeing my aunt's aristocratic proclivities baffled by some vexingcontretempsor by some slight passed upon her by people of superior rank, especially by those in the Royal circle.
There have been so many descriptions of art schools, from the famous 'Gandish's' down to the very moment at which I write, that I do not intend to describe mine.
It would be very far from my taste to use a narrative like this, a narrative made sacred by the spiritual love it records, as a means of advertising efforts of such modest pretensions as mine when placed in comparison with the work of the illustrious painters my friendship with whom has been the great honour of my life. And if I allude here to the fact of my being a painter, it is in order that I may not be mistaken for another Aylwin. my cousin Percy, who in some unpublished poems of his which I have seen has told how a sailor was turned into a poet by love—love of Rhona Boswell. In the same way, these pages are written to tell how I was made a painter by love of her whom I first saw in Raxton churchyard, her who filled my being as Beatrice filled the being of Dante when 'the spirit of life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that the least pulses of his body shook therewith.'
Time went by, and I returned to Raxton. Just when I had determined that, come what would, I would go into Wales, Wynne one day told me that Winnie was coming to live with him at Raxton, her aunt having lately died. 'The English lady,' said he, 'who lived with them so long and eddicated Winifred, has gone to live at Carnarvon to get the sea air.'
This news was at once a joy and a perplexity.
Wynne, though still the handsomest and finest man in Raxton, had sunk much lower in intemperance of late. He now generally wound up a conversation with me by a certain stereotyped allusion to the dryness of the weather, which I perfectly understood to mean that he felt thirsty, and that an offer of half-a-crown for beer would not be unacceptable. He was a proud man in everything except in reference to beer. But he seemed to think there was no degradation in asking for money to get drunk with, though to have asked for it to buy bread would, I suppose, have wounded his pride. I did not then see so clearly as I now do the wrong of giving him those half-crowns. His annuity he had long since sold.
Spite of all his delinquencies, however, my father liked him; so did my uncle Aylwin of Alvanley. But my mother seemed positively to hate him. It was the knowledge of this that caused my anxiety about Winifred's return. I felt that complications must arise.
At this time I used to go to Dullingham every day. The clergyman there was preparing me for college.
On the Sunday following the day when I got such momentous news from Wynne, I was met suddenly, as my mother and I were leaving the church after the service, by the gaze of a pair of blue eyes that arrested my steps as by magic, and caused the church and the churchgoers to vanish from my sight.
The picture of Winifred that had dwelt in my mind so long was that of a beautiful child. The radiant vision of the girl before me came on me by surprise and dazzled me. Tall and slim she was now, but the complexion had not altered at all; the eyes seemed young and childlike as ever.
When our eyes met she blushed, then turned pale, and took hold of the top of a seat near which she was standing. She came along the aisle close to us, gliding and slipping through the crowd, and passed out of the porch. My mother had seen my agitation, and had moved on in a state of haughty indignation. I had no room, however, at that moment for considerations of any person but one. I hurried out of the church, and, following Winifred, grasped her gloved hand.
'Winifred, you are come,' I said; 'I have been longing to see you.'
She again turned pale and then blushed scarlet. Next she looked down me as if she had expected to see something which she did not see, and when her eyes were upraised again something in them gave me a strange fancy that she was disappointed to miss my crutches.
'Why didn't you write to me from Wales, Winifred? Why didn't you answer my letter years ago?'
She hesitated, then said,
'My aunt wouldn't let me, sir.'
'Wouldn't let you answer it! and why?'
Again she hesitated—
'I—I don't know, sir.'
'Youdoknow, Winifred. I see that you know, and you shall tell me.Why didn't your aunt let you answer my letter?'
Winifred's eyes looked into mine beseechingly. Then that light of playful humour, which I remembered so well, shot like a sunbeam across and through them as she replied—
'My aunt said we must both forget our pretty dream.'
Almost before the words were out, however, the sunbeam fled from her eyes and was replaced by a look of terror. I now perceived that my mother, in passing to the carriage, had lingered on the gravel-path close to us, and had, of course, overheard the dialogue. She passed on with a look of hate. I thought it wise to bid Winifred good-bye and join my mother.
As I stepped into the carriage I turned round and saw that Winifred was again looking wistfully at some particular part of me—looking with exactly that simple, frank, 'objective' expression with which I was familiar.
'I knew it was the crutches she missed,' I said to myself as I sat down by my mother's side; 'she'll have to love me now because I amnotlame.'
I also knew something else: I must prepare for a conflict with my mother. My father, at this time in Switzerland, had written to say that he had been suffering acutely from an attack of what he called 'spasms.' He had 'been much subject to them of late, but no one considered them to be really dangerous.'
During luncheon I felt that my mother's eyes were on me. After it was over she went to her room to write in answer to my father's letter, and then later on she returned to me.
'Henry,' she said, 'my overhearing the dialogue in the churchyard between you and Wynne's daughter was, I need not pay, quite accidental, but it is perhaps fortunate that I did overhear it.'
'Why fortunate, mother? You simply heard her say that her aunt in Wales had forbidden her to answer a childish letter of mine written years ago.'
'In telling you which, the girl, I must say, proclaimed her aunt to be an exceedingly sensible and well-conducted woman,' said my mother.
'On that point, mother,' I said, 'you must allow me to hold a different opinion. I, for my part, should have said that Winifred's story proclaimed her aunt to be a worthy member of a flunkey society like this of ours—a society whose structure, political and moral and religious, is based on an adamantine rock of paltry snobbery.'
It was impossible to restrain my indignation.
'I am aware, Henry,' replied my mother calmly, 'that it is one of the fashions of the hour for young men of family to adopt the language of Radical newspapers. In a country like this the affectation does no great harm, I grant, and my only serious objection to it is that it implies in young men of one's own class a lack of originality which is a little humiliating. I am aware that your cousin, Percy Aylwin, of Rington Manor, used to talk in the same strain as this, and ended by joining the Gypsies. But I came to warn you, Henry, I came to urge you not to injure this poor girl's reputation by such scenes as that I witnessed this morning.'
I remained silent. The method of my mother's attack had taken me by surprise. Her sagacity was so much greater than mine, her power of fence was so much greater, her stroke was so much deadlier, that in all our encounters I had been conquered.