'That's true enough, though she's a wunner at a lie: that's true enough.'
But as I spoke I heard a noise like the laugh or the shriek of a maniac. It seemed to come from upstairs.
'She's a-larfin' ag'in,' said the girl. 'It's a very wicked larf, sir, ain't it? But there's wuss uns nor Meg Gudgeon for all 'er wicked larf, as I knows. Many a time she's kep' me from starvin'. I mus' run up an' see 'er. She'll kill herself a-larfin' yit.'
The girl hurried upstairs and I followed her, leaving Sinfi below. I re-entered the bedroom. There was the woman, her face buried in the pillow, rocking and rolling her body half round with the regularity of a pendulum. Between the peals of half-smothered hysterical laughter that came from her, I could hear her say:
'Dear Lord Jesus, don't forget to love dear Henry who can't git up the gangways without me.'
The words seemed to fall upon my heart like a rain of molten metal dropping from the merciless and mocking skies. But I had ceased to wonder at the cruelty of Fate. The girl went to her and shook her angrily. This seemed to allay her hysterics, for she rolled round upon her back and stared at us. Then she looked at the envelope clutched in her hand, and read out the address,
'Henry, Henry, Henry Halywin, Eskeuer! An' I tookt 'im for a copper in plain clothes all the while! Henry, Henry, Henry Halywin, Eskeuer! I shall die a-larfin', I know I shall! I shall die a-larfin', I know I shall! Poll! don't you mind me a-tellin' you about my pore darter Winifred—for my darter shewas, as I'll swear afore all the beaks in London—don't you mind me a-sayin' that if she wouldn't talk when she wur awake, she could mag away fast enough when she wur asleep; an' it were allus the same mag about dear little Henry, an' dear Henry Halywin as couldn't git up the gangways without 'er. Well, pore dear Henry was 'er sweet'airt, an' this is the chap, an' if my eyes ain't stun blind, the werry chap out o' the cussed studeros as killed 'er, pore dear, an' as is a-skearin' me away from my beautiful 'um in Primrose Court; an' 'ere wur I a-talkin' to 'im all of a muck sweat, thinkin' he wur a copper in plain clothes!'
At this moment Sinfi entered the room. She came up to me, and laying her hand upon my shoulder she said: 'Come away, brother, this is cruel hard for you to bear. It's our poor sister Winifred as is dead, and it ain't nobody else.'
The effect of Sinfi's appearance and of her words upon the woman was like that of an electric shock. She sat up in her bed open-mouthed, staring from Sinfi to me, and from me to Sinfi.
'So my darter Winifred's yoursisternow, is she?' (turning to me). 'A few minutes ago she was your sweet'airt: an' now she seems to ha' bin your sister. An' she wasyoursister, too, was she?' (turning to Sinfi). 'Well, all I know is, that she was my darter, Winifred Gudgeon, as is dead, an' buried in the New North Cemetery, pore dear; an' yet she was sister to both on ye!'
She then buried her face again in the pillows and resumed the rocking movement, shrieking between her peals of laughter: 'Well, if I'm the mother of a six-fut Gypsy gal an' a black-eyed chap as seems jest atween a Gypsy and a Christian, I never knowedthatafore. No, I never knowedthatafore! I allus said I should die a-larfin', an' so I shall; I'm a-dyin' now—ha! ha! ha!'
She fell back upon the pillow, exhausted by her own cruel merriment.
'She always said she'd die a-larfin', an' she will, too—more nor I shall ever do,' said the girl, after we had gone downstairs.
'Did you notice what she said about Winnie a-callin' her Knocker?' said Sinfi.
'Yes, and couldn't understand it.'
'Iknow what it meant. Winnie knowed all about the Knockers of Snowdon, the dwarfs o' the copper mine, and this woman, bein' so thick and short, must look ezackly like a Knocker, I should say, if you could see one.'
I said to the girl, 'Was she really kind to—to—'
'To her you were asking about,—the Essex Street Beauty? I should think she just was. She's a drinker, is poor Meg, and drinking in Primrose Court means starvation. Meg and the Beauty were often short enough of grub, but, drunk or sober, Meg would never touch a mouthful till the Beauty had had her fill. I noticed it many a time—not a mouthful. When Meg was obliged to send her into the streets to sell things she was always afraid that the Beauty might come to harm through the toffs and the chaps. The toffs were the worst looking after her—as they mostly are—so I was always watching her in the day-time, and at night Meg was always watching her, and that was what made me know your face, as soon as ever I clapt eyes on it.'
'Why, what do you mean?'
'Well, one rainy night when I was standing by the theatre door, I heard a toff ask a policeman about the Essex Street Beauty, and I thought I knew what that meant very well. So I ran off to find Meg. I had seen her watching the Beauty all the time. But lo and behold! Meg was gone and the Beauty too. So I run across here, and found Meg and the Beauty getting their supper as quiet as possible. Meg had heard the toff talking to the policeman—though I didn't know she was standing so near—and whisked her off and away as quick as lightning.'
'That was I,' I said. 'God! God! If I had only known!'
'There's the same look now on your face as there was then, and I should know it among ten thousand.'
'Polly Onion,' I said, 'there is my address, and if ever you want a friend, and if you are in trouble, you will know where to find assistance,' and I gave her another sovereign.
'You're a good sort,' said she, 'and no mistake.'
'Good-bye,' I said, shaking her hand. 'See well after Mrs. Gudgeon.'
'All right,' said she, and a smile broke over her face. 'I think I ought to tell you now,' she continued, 'that Meg's no more ill of dropsy than I am; she could walk twenty miles off the reel; there ain't a bullock in England half as strong as Meg; she's shamming.'
'Shamming, but why?'
'Well, she ain't drunk; ever since the Beauty died she's never touched a drop o' gin. But she's turned quite cranky. She's got it into her head that the relations of the Beauty are going to send her to prison for kidnapping; and she thinks that every one that comes near her is a policeman in plain clothes. She's just lying in bed to keep herself out of the way till she starts.'
'Where's she going, then?'
'She talks about going to see after her son Bob in the country; her husband is a Welshman. He's over the water.'
'Did you say she had given up drinking?' I asked.
'Yes; she seemed to dote on the Beauty, and when the Beauty died she said, "My darter went wrong through me drinkin', and my son Bob went wrong through me drinkin'; and I feel somehow that it was through my drinkin' that I lost the Beauty; and never will you find me touch another drop o' gin, Poll. Beer I ain't fond on, and it 'ud take a rare swill o' beer to get up as far as Meg Gudgeon's head."'
'There ain't much fault to be found with a woman like Meg Gudgeon,' said Sinfi. 'Was the Beauty fond o' her? She ought to ha' bin.'
'She used to call her Knocker,' said the girl. 'She seemed very fond of her when they were together, but seemed to forget her as soon as they were apart.'
Sinfi and I then left the house.
In Great Queen Street she took my hand as if to bid me good-bye. But she stood and gazed at me wistfully, and I gazed at her. At last she said,
'An' now, brother, we'll jist go across to Kingston Vale, an' see my daddy, an' set your livin'-waggin to rights.'
'Then, Sinfi,' I said, 'you and I are once more—'
I stopped and looked at her. The fearless young Amazon and seeress, who kept a large family of the Kaulo Camloes in awe, was supposed to have nearly conquered the feminine weakness of tears; but she had not. There was a chink in the Amazon's armour, and I had found it.
'Yis,' said she, nodding her head and smiling. 'You an' me's right pals ag'in.'
As we were going I told her how I had replaced the jewel in the tomb.
'I know'd you would do it. Yis, I heer'd you telling the gravedigger the same thing.'
'And yet,' said I bitterly, 'in spite of that and in spite of theGolden Hand, she is dead.'
Sinfi stood silently looking at me now. Even her prodigious faith seemed conquered.
For a few days I paced with Sinfi over Wimbledon Common and RichmondPark, The weather was now unusually brilliant for the time of year.Sinfi would walk silently by my side.
But I could not rest with the Gypsies. I must be alone. Soon I left the camp and returned to London, where I took a suite of rooms in a house not far from Eaton Square—though to me London was a huge meaningless maze of houses clustered around Primrose Court—that horrid, fascinating, intolerable core of pain. Into my lungs poured the hateful atmosphere of the city where Winifred had perished; poured hot and stifling as sand-blasts of the desert. Impossible to stay there!—for the pavement seemed actually to scorch my feet, like the floor of a fiery furnace. To me the sun above was but the hideous eye of Circumstance which had stared down pitilessly on that bare head of hers, and blistered those feet.
The lamps at night seemed twinkling, blinking in a callous consciousness of my tragedy—my monstrous tragedy of real life, the like of which no poet dare imagine. But what aroused my wrath to an unbearable pitch—what determined me to leave London at once—was the sight of the unsympathetic faces in the streets. Though sympathy could have given me no comfort, the myriad unsympathetic eyes of London infuriated me.
'Died in beggar's rags—died in a hovel!' I muttered with rage as the equipages and coarse splendours of the West End rolled insolently by. 'Died in a hovel!—and this London, this vast, ridiculous, swarming human ant-hill, whose millions of paltry humdrum lives were not worth one breath from those lips—this London spurned her, left her to perish alone in her squalor and misery.'
Cyril and Wilderspin had returned to the Continent. D'Arcy was still away.
I made application to the Home Secretary to have the pauper grave opened. On the ground that I was 'not a relative of the deceased,' the officials refused to institute even preliminary inquiries.
During this time no news of Mrs. Gudgeon had come to me through Polly Onion, and I determined to go to Primrose Court and see what had become of her.
When I reached Primrose Court I found that the shutters of the house were up. Knocking and getting no response, I ascertained from a pot-boy who was passing the corner of the court that Mrs. Gudgeon had decamped. Neither the pot-boy nor any one in the court could tell me whither she was gone.
'But where is Polly Onion?' I asked anxiously; for I was beginning to blame myself bitterly for having neglected them.
'I can tell you where poor Polly is,' said the pot-boy. 'She's in theNew North Cemetery. She fell downstairs and broke her neck.'
'Why, she lived downstairs,' I said.
'That's true; you seem to be well up in the family, sir. But Poll couldn't pay her rent, so old Meg took her in. And on the very morning when Meg and Poll were a-startin' off together into the country—it was quite early and dark—Poll stumbles over three young flower-gals as 'ad crep' in the front door in the night time and was makin' the stairs their bed. Gals as hadn't made enough to pay for their night's lodgin' often used to sleep on Meg's stairs. Poll was picked up as nigh dead as a toucher, and she died at the 'ospital.'
Toiling in the revolving cage of Circumstance, I strove in vain against that most appalling form of envy—the envy of one's fellow creatures that they should live and breathe while there is no breath of life for theone.
My uncle Cecil's death had made me a rich man; but what was wealth to me if it could not buy me respite from the vision haunting me day and night—the vision of the attic, the mattress, and the woman?
And as I thought of the powerlessness of wealth to give me one crumb of comfort, and remembered Winnie's sermon about wealth, I would look at myself in the mirror above my mantelpiece and smile bitterly at the sight of the hollow cheeks, furrowed brow, and melancholy eyes, and recall her words about her hovering near me after she was dead.
The thought of my wealth and the squalor in which she had died was, I think, the most maddening thought of all. I had now become the possessor of Wilderspin's picture 'Faith and Love,' having bought it of the Bond Street dealer to whom it belonged; and also of the 'Christabel' picture, and these I was constantly looking at as they hung up on the walls of my room. After a while, however, I destroyed the 'Christabel' picture, it was too painful. Though I would not see such friends as I had, I read their letters; indeed, it was these same letters which alone could draw from me a grim smile now and then.
Almost every letter ended by urging me, in order to flee from my sorrows, to travel! With the typical John Bull travelling seems to be always the panacea. In sorrow, John's herald of peace is Baedeker: the dispenser of John's true nepenthe is Mr. Murray. Pity and love for Winifred pursued me, tortured me nigh unto death, and therefore did these friends of mine seem to suppose that I wanted to flee from my pity and sorrow! Why, to flee from my sorrow, to get free of my pity, to flee from the agonies that went nigh to tearing soul from body, would have been to flee from all that I had left of life—memory.
Did I want to flee from Winnie? Why, memory was Winnie now; and did I want to flee fromher? And yet it was memory that was goading me on to the verge of madness. No doubt the reader thinks me a weak creature for allowing the passion of pity to sap my manhood in this fashion. But it was not so much her death as the manner of her death that withered my heart and darkened my soul. The calamities which fell upon her, grievous beyond measure, unparalleled, not to be thought of save with a pallor of cheek and a shudder of the flesh, were ever before me, mocking me—maddening me.
'Died in a hovel!' As I gave voice to this impeachment of Heaven, night after night, wandering up and down the streets, my brain was being scorched and withered by those same thoughts of anger against destiny and most awful revolt which had appalled me when first I saw how the curse of Heaven or the whim of Circumstance had been fulfilled.
Then came that passionate yearning for death, which grief such as mine must needs bring. But if what Materialism teaches were true, suicide would rob me even of my memory of her. If, on the other hand, what I had been taught by the supernaturalism of my ancestors were true, to commit suicide might be but to play finally into the hands of that same unknown pitiless power with whom my love had all along been striving.
'Suicide might sever my soul from hers for ever.' I said, and then the tragedy would seem too monstrously unjust to be true, and I said: 'It cannot be—such things cannot be: it is a hideous dream. She is not dead! She is in Wales with friends at Carnarvon, and I shall awake and laugh at all this imaginary woe!'
And what were now my feelings towards the memory of my father? Can a man cherish in his heart at one and the same moment scorn of another man for believing in the efficacy of a curse, and bitter anger against him for having left a curse behind him? He can! On my return to London after my illness I had sent back to Wilderspin the copy ofThe Veiled Queenhe had lent me. But from the library of Raxton Hall I brought my father's own copy, elaborately bound in the tooled black calf my father affected. The very sight of that black binding now irritated me; never did I pass it without experiencing a sensation that seemed a blending of scorn and fear: scorn of the ancestral superstitions the book gave voice to: fear of them.
One day I took the book from the shelves and then hurled it across the room. Stumbling over it some days after this, a spasm of ungovernable rage came upon me, for terribly was my blood struggling with Fenella Stanley and Philip Aylwin, and thousands of ancestors, Romany and Gorgio, who for ages upon ages had been shaping my destiny. I began to tear out the leaves and throw them on the fire. But suddenly I perceived the leaves to be covered with marginalia in my father's manuscript, and with references to Fenella Stanley's letters—letters which my father seemed to have studied as deeply as though they were the writings of a great philosopher instead of the scribblings of an ignorant Gypsy. My eye had caught certain written words which caused me to clutch at the sheets still burning on the fire. Too late!—I grasped nothing save a little paper-ash. Then I turned to the pages still left in my hand, and read these words of my father's:
'These marginalia are written for the eyes of my dear son, into whose hands this copy of my book will come. Until he gave me his promise to bury the amulet with me, I felt alone in the world. But even he failed to understand what he called "my superstition." He did not know that by perpetually feeling on my bosom the facets of the beloved jewel which had long lain warm upon hers—the cross which had received the last kiss from her lips—I had been able to focus all the scattered rays of thought—I had been able to vitalise memory till it became an actual presence. He did not know that out of my sorrow had been born at last a strange kind of happiness—the happiness that springs from loving a memory—living with a memory—till it becomes a presence—an objective reality. He did not know that, by holding her continually in my thoughts, by means of the amulet, I achieved at last the miracle described by the Hindoo poets—the miracle of reshaping from the undulations of "the three regions of the universe the remembered object by the all-creative magic of love!"'
Then followed some translations from the Kumara-sambhava and other Sanscrit poems, and then the well-known passage in Lucretius about dreams, and then a pathetic account of the visions called up within him by the sensation caused by the lacerations of the facets of the cherished amulet upon his bosom—visions something akin, as I imagine, to those experienced byconvulsionnaires. And then after all this learning came references to poor ignorant Fenella Stanley's letters and extracts from them.
In one of these extracts I was startled to come upon the now familiar word 'crwth.'
'De Welch fok ses as de livin mullos only follow the crwth on Snowdon wen it is playde by a Welch Chavi, but dat is all a lie. Dey follows the crwth when a Romany Chi plays it as I nows very wel, but de chavi wot play on the crwth, shee must love the living mullo she want for to come, and de living mullo must love her.'
And then followed my father's comments on the extract.
'N.B.—To see and hear a crwth, if possible, and ascertain the true nature of the vibrations. But there are said to be only a few crwths in existence; and very likely there is no musician who could play upon them.'
Then followed a few sentences written at a later date.
'The crwth is now becoming obsolete; on inquiry I learn that it is a stringed instrument played with a bow like a violin; but as one of the feet of the bridge passes through one of the sound-holes and rests on the inside of the back, the vibrations must be quite unique, if we remember how important a part is played by the back in all instruments of the violin kind. It must be far more subtle than the vibrations of the Welsh harp, and even more subtle (if also more nasal) than those of the violin.
'The reason why music has in all ages been called in to aid in evoking the spirits, the reason why it is as potent now as ever it was in aiding the spirits to manifest themselves, is simple enough: the rhythmic vibrations of music set in active motion the magnetic waves through whose means alone the two worlds, spiritual and material, can hold communication. The quality and the value of these vibrations depend mainly, no doubt, upon the magnetic power, conscious or other, of the musician, but partly also upon the kind of instrument used. The vibrations awakened by stringed instruments have been long known to be more subtle than any others: instruments of the violin kind are of course the most subtle of all. Doubtless this is why among the Welsh hills the old saying used to be "The spirits follow the crwth."'
'Which folly is the more besotted,' I said, as I read and re-read the marginalia—'that of the scholar with his scientific nonsense about vibrations, or that of the ignorant Gypsy with her living mullos drawn through the air by music and love?'
But now my eyes fell upon a very different kind of marginal note which ran thus:—
'The one important fact of the twentieth century will be the growth and development of that great Renascence of Wonder which set in in Europe at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth.
'The warring of the two impulses governing man (and probably not man only, but the entire world of conscious life)—the impulse of acceptance, the impulse to take unchallenged and for granted all the phenomena of the outer world as they are, and the impulse to confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder—will occupy all the energies of the next century.
'The old impulse of wonder which came to the human race in its infancy has to come back—has to triumph—before the morning of the final emancipation of man can dawn.
'But the wonder will be exercised in very different fields from those in which it was exercised in the past. The materialism which at this moment seems to most thinkers inseparable from the idea of evolution will go. Against their own intentions certain scientists are showing that the spiritual force called life is the maker and not the creature of organism—is a something outside the material world, a something which uses the material world as a means of phenomenal expression.
'The materialist, with his primitive and confiding belief in the testimony of the senses, is beginning to be left out in the cold, when men like Sir W. R. Grove turn round on him and tell him that "the principle of all certitude" is not and cannot be the testimony of his own senses; that these senses, indeed, are no absolute tests of phenomena at all; that probably man is surrounded by beings he can neither see, feel, hear, nor smell; and that, notwithstanding the excellence of his own eyes, ears, and nose, the universe the materialist is mapping out so deftly is, and must be, monophysical, lightless, colourless, soundless—a phantasmagoric show—a deceptive series of undulations, which become colour, or sound, or what not, according to the organism upon which they fall.'
These words were followed by a sequence of mystical sonnets about "the Omnipotence of Love," which showed, beyond doubt, that if my father was not a scientific thinker, he was, at least, a very original poet. And this made me perplexed as to what could have drawn Wilderspin, who scorned the art of poetry, into the meshes ofThe Veiled Queen. Perhaps, however, it was because Wilderspin's ancestry was, notwithstanding his English name, largely, if not wholly, Welsh, as I learnt from Cyril. Welshmen, whether sensitive or not to the rhythmic expression of the English language, are almost all, I believe, of the poetic temperament.
But from this moment my mind began to run upon the picture of Fenella Stanley, surrounded by those Snowdonian spirits which her music was supposed to have evoked from the mountain air of the morning.
In a few days I left London and went to North Wales.
Opposite to me in the railway carriage sat an elderly lady, into whose face I occasionally felt myself to be staring in an unconscious way. But I was merely communing with myself: I was saying to myself, 'My love of North Wales, and especially of Snowdon, is certainly very strong; but it is easily accounted for—it is a matter of temperament. Even had Wales not been associated with Winnie, I still must have dearly loved it. Much has been said about the effect of scenery upon the minds and temperaments of those who are native to it. But temperament is a matter of ancestral conditions: the place of one's birth is an accident. As some, like my cousin Percy, for instance are born with a passion for the sea, and some with a passion for forests, some with a passion for mountains, and some with a passion for rolling plains. The landscape amid which I was born had, no doubt, a charm for me, and could bring to me that nature-ecstacy which I inherited from Fenella Stanley. But with Wales I actually fell in love the moment I set foot in the country. This is why I am hurrying there now.'
And I laughed at myself, and evidently frightened the old lady very much. She did not know that underneath the soul's direst struggle—the struggle of personality with the tyranny of the ancestral blood—there is an awful sense of humour—a laughter (unconquerable, and yet intolerable) at the deepest of all incongruities, the incongruity of Fate's game with man. I apologised to her, and told her that I had been absorbed in reading a droll story, in which a man believed that the Angel of Memory had refashioned for him his dead wife out of his own sorrow and unquenchable fountain of tears.
'What an extraordinary idea!' said the old lady, in the conciliatory tone she would have adopted towards a madman whom she found alone with her in a railway carriage. 'I mean he was very eccentric, wasn't he?'
'Who shall say, madam? "Bold is the donkey-driver 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."'
At the next station the old lady left the carriage and entered another, and I was left alone.
My intention was to take up my residence at the cottage where Winifred had lived with her aunt. Indeed, for a few days I did this, taking with me one of the Welsh peasants with whom I had previously made friends. But of course a lengthened stay in such a house was impossible. More than ever now I needed attendance, and good attendance, for I had passed into a strange state of irritability—I had no command over my nerves, which were jarred by the most trifling thing. I went to the hotel at Peri y Gwryd, but there tourists and visitors made life more intolerable still to a man in my condition.
At first I thought of building a house as near to the cottage as possible; but this would take time, and I could not rest out of Wales. I decided at last to have a wooden bungalow built. By telling the builders that time was the first consideration with me, the cost a secondary one, I got a bungalow built in a few weeks. By the tradesmen of Chester I got it fitted up and furnished to my taste with equal rapidity. Attending to this business gave real relief.
When the bungalow was finished I removed into it the picture 'Faith and Love.' I also got in as much painting material as I might want and began to make sketches in the neighbourhood.
Time went on, and there I remained. In a great degree, however, the habit of grieving was conquered by my application to work. My moroseness of temper gradually left me.
Beautiful memories began to take the place of hideous ones—the picture of the mattress and the squalor gave place to pictures of Winifred on the sands of Raxton or on Snowdon. Yet so much of habit is there in grief that even at this time I was subject to recurrent waves of the old pain—waves which were sometimes as overmastering as ever.
I did not neglect the cottage, which was now my property, but kept it in exactly the same state as that in which it had been put by Sinfi after Winnie had wandered back to Wales.
By isolating myself from all society, by surrounding myself with mementos of Winifred, memory really did at last seem to be working a miracle such as was worked for the widowed Ja'afar.
Yet not entirely had memory passed into an objective presence. I seemed to feel Winnie near me; but that was all. I felt that more necessary than anything else in perfecting the atmosphere of memory in which I would live was the society of her in whom alone I had found sympathy—Sinfi Lovell. Did I also remember the wild theories of my father and Fenella Stanley about the crwth? To obtain the company of Sinfi had now become very difficult—her attitude towards me had so changed. When she allowed me to rejoin the Lovells at Kingston Vale she did so under the compulsion of my distress. But my leaving the Gypsies of my own accord left her free from this compulsion. She felt that she had now at last bidden me farewell for ever.
Still, opportunities of seeing her occasionally would, I knew, present themselves, and I now determined to avail myself of these. Panuel Lovell and some of the Boswells were not unfrequently in the neighbourhood, and they were always accompanied by Sinfi and Videy.
On a certain occasion, when I learnt that the Lovells were in the neighbourhood, I sought them out. Sinfi at first was extremely shy, or distant, or proud, or scared, and it was not till after one or two interviews that she relaxed. She still was overshadowed by some mysterious feeling towards me that seemed at one moment anger, at another dread. However, I succeeded at last. I persuaded Panuel and his daughters to leave their friends at 'the Place,' and spend a few days with me at the bungalow. Great was the gaping and wide the grinning among the tourists to see me inarching along the Capel Curig road with three Gypsies. But to all human opinion I had become as indifferent as Wilderspin himself.
As we walked along the road, Sinfi slowly warmed into her old self, but Videy, as usual, was silent, preoccupied, and meditative. When we got within sight of the bungalow, however, the lights flashing from the windows made the long low building look very imposing. Pharaoh, the bantam cock which Sinfi was carrying, began to crow, but silence again fell upon Sinfi.
Panuel, when we entered the bungalow, said he was very tired and would like to go to bed. I had perceived by the glossy appearance of his skin (which was of the colour of beeswaxed mahogany) and the benevolent dimple in his check that, although far from being intoxicated, he was 'market-merry'; and as the two sisters also seemed tired, I took the party at once to their bedrooms.
'Dordi! what a gran' room,' said Sinfi, in a hushed voice, as I opened the door of the one allotted to her. 'Don't you mind, Videy, when you an' me fust slep' like two kairengros?' [Footnote]
[Footnote: House-dwellers.]
'No, I don't,' said Videy sharply.
'It was at Llangollen Fair,' continued Sinfi, her frank face beaming like a great child's; 'two little chavies we was then. An' don't you mind, Videy, how we both on us cried when they put us to bed, 'cause we was afeard the ceilin' would fall down on us?'
Videy made no answer, but tossed up her head and looked around to see whether there was a grinning servant within earshot.
'Good-night, Sinfi,' I said, shaking her hand; 'and now, Videy, I will show you your room.'
'Oh, but Videy an' me sleeps togither, don't we?'
'Certainly, if you wish it,' I replied.
'She's afeard o' the "mullos,"' said Videy scornfully, as she went and stood before an old engraved Venetian mirror I had picked up at Chester, admiring her own perfect little figure reflected therein. 'Ever since she's know'd you she's bin afeard o' mullos, and keeps Pharaoh with her o' nights; the mullos never come where there's a crowin' cock.'
I did not look at Sinfi, but bent my eyes upon the mirror, where, several inches above the reflex of Videy's sarcastic face, shone the features of Sinfi, perfectly cut as those of a Greek statue.
'It's the dukkerin' dook [Footnote] as she's afeard on,' said Videy, smiling in the glass till her face seemed one wicked glitter of scarlet lips and pearly teeth. 'An' yit there ain't no dukkerin' dook, an' there ain't no mullos.'
[Footnote: The prophesying ghost.]
Among the elaborately-engraved flowers and stars at the top of the mirror was the representation of an angel grasping a musical instrument.
'Look, look!' said Sinfi, 'I never know'd afore that angels played the crwth. I wonder whether they can draw a livin' mullo up to the clouds, same as my crwth can draw one to Snowdon?'
I bade them good-night, and joined Panuel at the door.
I was conducting him along the corridor to his room when the door was reopened and Sinfi's head appeared, as bright as ever, and then a beckoning hand.
'Reia,' said she, when I had returned to the door, 'I want to whisper a word in your ear'; and she pulled my head towards the door and whispered, 'Don't tell nobody about that 'ere jewelled trúshul in the church vaults at Raxton. We shall be going down there at the fair time, so don't tell nobody.'
'But you surely are not afraid of your father,' I whispered in reply.
'No, no,' said she, bringing her lips so close to my face that I felt the breath steaming round my ear. 'Not daddy—Videy!—Daddy can't keep a secret for five minutes. It's her I'm afeared on.'
I had scarcely left the door two yards behind me when I heard the voices of the sisters in loud altercation. I heard Sinfi exclaim, 'I sha'n't tell you what I said to him, so now! It was somethin' atween him an' me.'
'There they are ag'in,' said Panuel, bending his head sagely round and pointing with his thumb over his shoulder to the door; 'at it ag'in! Them two chavies o' mine are allus a-quarrellin' now, an' it's allus about the same thing. 'Tain't the quarrellin' as I mind so much,—women an' sparrows, they say, must cherrup an' quarrel,—but they needn't allus keep a-nag-naggin' about the same thing.'
'What's their subject, Panuel?' I asked.
'Subjick? Whyyou, in course. That's what the subjick is. When women quarrels you may allus be sure there's a chap somewheres about.'
By this time we had entered his bedroom: he went and sat upon the bed, and without looking round him began unlacing his 'highlows.' I had often on previous occasions remarked that Panuel, who, when sober, was as silent as Videy, and looked like her in the face, became, the moment that he passed into 'market-merriness,' as frank and communicative as Sinfi, and (what was more inexplicable)lookedas much like Sinfi as he had previously looked like Videy.
'How can I be the subject of their quarrels?' I said, listlessly enough, for I scarcely at first followed his words.
'How? Ain't you a chap?'
'Undoubtedly, Panuel, I am a chap.'
'When women quarrels there's allus a chap somewheres about, in course there is. But look ye here, Mr. Aylwin, the fault ain't Sinfi's, not a bit of it. It's Videy's, wi' her dog-in-the-manger ways. She's a back-bred un,' he said, giving me a knowing wink as he pulled off his calf-skin waistcoat and tossed it on to a chair at the further end of the room with a certainty of aim that would have been marvellous, even had he been entirely free from market-merriness.
I had before observed that Panuel when market-merry always designatedVidey the 'back-bred un, that took a'ter Shuri's blazin' ole dad!'When sober his views of heredity changed; the 'back-bred un' wasSinfi.
After breakfast next morning it was agreed that Panuel and Videy should walk to the Place to see that everything was going on well, while Sinfi and I should remain in the bungalow. I observed from the distance that Videy had loitered behind her father on the Capel Curig road. I saw a dark shadow of anger pass over Sinfi's face, and I soon understood what was causing it. The daughter of the well-to-do Panuel Lovell and my guest was accosting a tourist with, 'Let me tell you your fortune, my pretty gentleman. Give the poor Gypsy a sixpence for luck, my gentleman.'
The bungalow delighted Sinfi. 'It's just like a great livin'-waggin, only more comfortable,' said she.
We spent the entire morning and afternoon there, and much of the next two days. It certainly seemed to me that her mere presence was an immense stimulus to memory in vitalising its one image.
'What's the use o' us a-keepin' a-talkin' about Winnie?' Sinfi said to me one day. 'It on'y makes you fret. You skears me sometimes; for your eyes are a-gettin' jis' as sad-lookin' as Mr. D'Arcy's eyes, an' it's all along o' fret-tin'.'
I persuaded her to stay with me while Panuel and Videy went on toChester, for she could both soothe and amuse me.
Those who might suppose that Sinfi Lovell's lack of education would be a barrier against our sympathy, know little or nothing of real sorrow—little or nothing of the human heart—little or nothing of the stricken soul that looks out on man and his conventions through the light of an intolerable pain.
I now began to read and study as well as paint. But so absorbed was I in my struggle with Fenella Stanley and Romany superstitions, that the only subject which could distract me from memory was that of hereditary influence—prepotency of transmission in relation to races. Though Sinfi could neither read nor write, she loved to sit by my side and, caressing Pharaoh, to watch me as I read or wrote. To her there evidently seemed something mysterious and uncanny in writing, something like 'penning dukkering.' It seemed to her, I think, a much more remarkable accomplishment than that of painting. And as to reading, I am not sure that the satirical Videy was entirely wrong in saying that Sinfi believed that books 'could talk jis' like men and women.' Not a word would she speak, save when she now and then bent down her head to whisper to Pharaoh when that little warrior was inclined to give a disturbing chuckle, or to shake his wattles. And when at last she and Pharaoh got wearied by the prolonged silence, she would begin to murmur in a tone of playful satire to the restless bird, 'Mum, mum, Pharaoh. He's too hoot of a mush to rocker a choori chavi.' [Hush, hush, Pharaoh. He's too proud to speak to a poor child.]
Of course there was immense curiosity about my life at the bungalow, not only among the visitors at the Capel Curig Hotel, but among the Welsh residents; and rarely did the weekly papers come out without some paragraph about me. As a result of this, some of the London papers reproduced the paragraphs, and built upon their gossip columns of a positively offensive nature. In a paper which I will for convenience call theLondon Satiristappeared a paragraph which some one cut out of the columns of the paper and posted to me. It ran thus:
'THE ECCENTRIC AYLWINS.—The power of heredity, which has much exercised the mind of Balzac, has never been more strikingly exemplified than in the case of the great family of the Aylwins. It is matter of common knowledge that some generations ago one of the Aylwins married a Gypsy. This fact did not, however, prevent his branch from being respectable, and receiving the name of the proud Aylwins; and the Gypsy blood remained entirely in abeyance until the present generation. Mr. Percy Aylwin, it will be remembered, having been smitten by the charms of a certain Rhona Boswell, actually set up a tent with the Gypsies; and now Mr. Henry Aylwin, of Raxton Hall (who, by the bye, has never been seen in that neighbourhood since the great landslip), is said to be following a good example by living in Wales with a Gypsy wife, but whether the wedding took place at St. George's, Hanover Square, or in simpler fashion in an encampment of Little Egypt, we do not know.'
One day in the bungalow, when I was reading the copious marginalia with which my father had furnished his own copy ofThe Veiled Queen, I came upon a passage which so completely carried my mind back to the night of our betrothal that I heard as plainly as I had then heard Winnie's words at the door of her father's cottage:
'I should have to come in the winds and play around you in the woods. I should have to peep over the clouds and watch you. I should have to follow you about wherever you went. I should have to beset you till you said: "Bother Winnie, I wish she'd keep in heaven!"'
The written words of my father that had worked this magical effect upon me were these:
'But after months of these lonely wanderings in Graylingham Wood and along the sands, not even the reshaping power of memory would suffice to appease my longing; a new hope, wild as new, was breaking in upon my soul, dim and yet golden, like the sun struggling through a sea-fog. While wandering with me along the sands on the eve of that dreadful day when I lost her, she had declared that even in heaven she could not rest without me, nor did I understand how she could. For by this time my instincts had fully taught me that there is a kind of love so intense that no power in the universe—not death itself—is strong enough to sever it from its object. I knew that although true spiritual love, as thus understood, scarcely exists among Englishmen, and even among Englishwomen is so rare that the capacity for feeling it is a kind of genius, this genius was hers. Sooner or later I said to myself, "She will and must manifest herself!"'
I looked up from the book and saw both Sinfi and Pharaoh gazing at me.
'Sinfi,' I said, 'what were Winnie's favourite places among the hills? Where was she most in the habit of roaming when she stayed with your people?'
'If I ain't told you that often enough it's a pity, brother,' she said. 'What doyouthink, Pharaoh?'
Pharaoh expressed his acquiescence in the satire by clapping his wings and crowing at me contemptuously.
'The place I think she liked most of all wur that very pool where she and you breakfasted together on that morning.'
'Were there no other favourite places?'
'Yes, there wur the Fairy Glen; she wur very fond of that. And there wur the Swallow Falls; she wur very fond of them. And there wur a place on the Beddgelert pathway, up from the Carnarvon road, about two miles from Beddgelert. There is a great bit of rock there where she used to love to sit and look across towards Anglesey. And talking about that place reminds me, brother, that our people and the Boswells and a lot more are camped on the Carnarvon road just where the pathway up Snowdon begins. And I wur told yesterday by a 'quaintance of mine as I seed outside the bungalow that daddy and Videy had joined them. Shouldn't we go and see 'em?'
This exactly fitted in with the thoughts and projects that had suddenly come to me, and it was arranged that we should start for the encampment next morning.
As we were leaving the bungalow the next day, I said to Sinfi, 'You are not taking your crwth.'
'Crwth! we sha'n't want that.'
'Your people are very fond of music, you know. Your father is very fond of a musical tea.'
'So he is. I'll take it,' said Sinfi.
When we reached the camping-place on the Carnarvon road we found a very jolly party. Panuel had had some very successful dealings, and he was slightly market-merry. He said to Videy, 'Make the tea, Vi, and let Sinfi hev' hern fust, so that she can play on the Welsh fiddle while the rest on us are getting ourn. It'll seem jist like Chester Fair with Jim Burton scrapin' in the dancin' booth to heel and toe.'
Sinfi soon finished her tea, and began to play some merry dancing airs, which set Rhona Boswell's limbs twittering till she spilt her tea in her lap. Then, laughing at the catastrophe, she sprang up saying, 'I'll dance myself dry,' and began dancing on the sward.
After tea was over the party got too boisterous for Sinfi's taste, and she said to me, 'Let's slip away, brother, and go up the pathway, and I'll show you Winnie's favourite place.'
This proposal met my wishes entirely, and under the pretence of going to look at something on the Carnarvon road we managed to escape from the party, Sinfi still carrying her crwth and bow. She then led the way up a slope green with grass and moss. We did not talk till we had passed the slate quarry.
The evening was so fine and the scene was so lovely that Sinfi's very body seemed to drink it in and become intoxicated with beauty. After we had left the slate quarries behind, the panorama became more entrancing at every yard we walked. Cwellyn Lake and Valley, Moel Hebog, y Garnedd, the glittering sea, Anglesey, Holyhead Hill, all seemed to be growing in gold and glory out of masses of sunset mist.
When at last we reached the edge of a steep cliff, with the rocky forehead of Snowdon in front, and the shining llyns of Cwm y Clogwyn below, Sinfi stopped.
'This is the place,' said she, sitting down on a mossy mound, 'whereWinnie loved to come and look down.'
After Sinfi and I had sat on this mound for a few minutes, I asked her to sing and play one or two Welsh airs which I knew to be especial favourites of hers, and then, with much hesitancy, I asked her to play and sing the same song or incantation which had become associated for ever with my first morning on the hills.
'You mean the Welsh dukkerin' gillie,' said Sinfi, looking, with an expression that might have been either alarm or suspicion, into my face.
'Yes.'
'You've been a-thinkin' all this while, brother, that I don't know why you asked me about Winnie's favourite places on Snowdon, and why you wanted me to take my crwth to the camp. But I've been a-thinkin' about it, and I know now why you did, and I know why you wants me to play the Welsh dukkerin' gillie here. It's because you heerd me say that if I were to play that dukkerin' gillie on Snowdon in the places she was fond on, I could tell for sartin whether Winnie wur alive or dead. If she wur alive her livin' mullo 'ud follow the crwth. But I ain't a-goin' to do it.'
'Why not, Sinfi?'
'Because my mammy used to say it ain't right to make use o' the real dukkerin' for Gorgios, and I've heerd her say that if them as had the real dukkerin'—the dukkerin' for the Romanies—used it for the Gorgios, or if they turned it into a sport and a plaything, it 'ud leave 'em altogether. And that ain't the wust on it, for when the real dukkerin' leaves you it turns into a kind of a cuss, and it brings on the bite of the Romany Sap. [Footnote] Even now, Hal, I sometimes o' nights feels the bite here of the Romany Sap,' pointing to her bosom, 'and it's all along o' you, Hal, it's all along o' you, because I seem to be breaking the promise about Gorgios I made to my poor mammy.'
[Footnote: The Romany serpent, Conscience.]
'The Romany Sap? You mean the Romany conscience, I suppose, Sinfi: you mean the trouble a Romany feels when he has broken the Romany laws, when he has done wrong according to the Romany notions of right and wrong. But you are innocent of all wrong-doing.'
'I don't know nothin' about conscience,' said she, 'I mean the Romany Sap. Don't you mind when we was a-goin' up Snowdon arter Winifred that mornin'? I told you as the rocks, an' the trees, an' the winds, an' the waters cuss us when we goes ag'in the Romany blood an' ag'in the dukkerin' dook. The cuss that the rocks, an' the trees, an' the winds, an' the waters makes, an' sends it out to bite the burk [Footnote] o' the Romany as does wrong—that's the Romany Sap.'
[Footnote: Breast.]
'You mean conscience, Sinfi.'
'No, I don't mean nothink o' the sort; the Romanies ain't got no conscience, an' if the Gorgios has, it's precious little good as it does 'em, as far as I can see. But the Romanies has got the Romany Sap. Everything wrong as you does, such as killin' a Romany, or cheatin' a Romany, or playin' the lubbany with a Gorgio, or breakin' your oath to your mammy as is dead, or goin' ag'in the dukkerin' dook, an' sich like, every one o' these things turns into the Romany Sap.'
'You're speaking of conscience, Sinfi.'
'Every one o' them wrong things as you does seems to make out o' the burk o' the airth a sap o' its own as has got its own pertickler stare, but allus it's a hungry sap, Hal, an' a sap wi' bloody fangs. An' it's a sap as follows the bad un's feet, Hal—follows the bad un's feet wheresomever they goes; it's a sap as goes slippin' thro' the dews o' the grass on the brightest mornin', an' dodges round the trees in the sweetest evenin', an' goes wriggle, wriggle across the brook jis' when you wants to enjoy yourself, jis' when you wants to stay a bit on the steppin'-stuns to enjoy the sight o' the dear little minnows a-shootin' atween the water-creases. That's what the Romany Sap is.'
'Don't talk like that, Sinfi,' I said; 'you make me feel the sap myself.'
'It's a sap, Hal, as follows you everywheres, everywheres, till you feel as you must stop an' face it whatever comes; an' stop you do at last, an' turn round you must, an' bare your burk you must to the sharp teeth o' that air wenemous sap.'
'Well, and what then, Sinfi?'
'Well then, when you ha' given up to the thing its fill o' your blood, then the trees, an' the rocks, an' the winds, an' the waters seem to know, for everythink seems to begin smilin' ag'in, an' you're let to go on your way till you do somethin' bad ag'in. That's the Romany Sap, Hal, an' I won't deny as I sometimes feel its bite pretty hard here' (pointing to her breast) 'when I thinks what I promised my poor mammy, an' how I kep' my word to her, when I let a Gorgio come under our tents.' [Footnote]
[Footnote: To prevent misconceptions, it may be well to say that the paraphrase of Sinfi's description of the 'Romany Sap,' which appeared in the writer's reminiscences of George Borrow, was written long after the main portion of the present narrative.]
'You don't mean,' I said, 'that it is a real flesh-and-blood sap, but a sap that you think you see and feel.'
'Hal,' said Sinfi, 'a Romany's feelin's ain't like a Gorgio's. A Romany can feel the bite of a sap whether it's made o' flesh an' blood or not, and the Romany Sap's all the wuss for not bein' a flesh-and-blood sap, for it's a cuss hatched in the airth; it's everythink a-cussin' on ye—the airth, an' the sky, an' the dukkerin' dook.'
Her manner was so solemn, her grand simplicity was so pathetic, that I felt I could not urge her to do what her conscience told her was wrong. But soon that which no persuasion of mine would have effected the grief and disappointment expressed by my face achieved.
'Hal,' she said, 'I sometimes feel as if I'd bear the bite o' all the Romany saps as ever wur hatched to give you a little comfort. Besides, it's for a true Romany arter all—it's for myself quite as much as for you that I'm a-goin' to see whether Winnie is alive or dead. If she's dead we sha'n't see nothink, and perhaps if she's in one o' them fits o' hern we sha'n't see nothink; but if she's alive and herself ag'in, I believe I shall see—p'raps we shall both see—her livin' mullo.'
She then drew the bow across the crwth. The instrument at first seemed to chatter with her agitation. I waited in breathless suspense. At last there came clearly from her crwth the wild air I had already heard on Snowdon. Then the sound of the instrument ceased save for the drone of the two bottom strings, and Sinfi's voice leapt out and I heard the words of what she called the Welsh dukkering gillie.
As I listened and looked over the wide-stretching panorama before me, I felt my very flesh answering to every vibration; and when the song stopped and I suddenly heard Sinfi call out, 'Look, brother!' I felt that my own being, physical and mental, had passed into a new phase, and that resistance to some mighty power governing my blood was impossible.
'Look straight afore you, brother, and you'll see Winnie's face. She's alive, brother, and the dukkeripen of the Golden Hand will come true, and mine will come true. Oh, mammy, mammy!'
At first I saw nothing, but after a while two blue eyes seemed gazing at me as through a veil of evening haze. They were looking straight at me, those beloved eyes—they were sparkling with childish happiness as they had sparkled through the vapours of the pool when she walked towards me that morning on the brink of Knockers' Llyn.
Starting up and throwing up my arms, I cried, 'My darling!' The vision vanished. Then turning round, I looked at Sinfi. She seemed listening to a voice I could not hear—her face was pale with emotion. I could hear her breath coming and going heavily; her bosom rose and fell, and the necklace of coral and gold coins around her throat trembled like a shuddering snake while she murmured, 'My dukkeripen! Yes, mammy, I've gone ag'in you and broke my promise, and this is the very Gorgio as you meant.'
'Call the vision back,' I said; 'play the air again, dear Sinfi.'
She sprang in front of me, and seizing one of my wrists, she gazed in my face, and said, 'Yes, it's "dear Sinfi"! You wants dear Sinfi to fiddle the Gorgie's livin' mullo back to you.'
I looked into the dark eyes, lately so kind. I did not know them. They were dilated and grown red-brown in hue, like the scorched colour of a North African lion's mane, and along the eyelashes a phosphorescent light seemed to play. What did it mean? Was it indeed Sinfi standing there, rigid as a column, with a clenched brown fist drawn up to the broad, heaving breast, till the knuckles shone white, as if about to strike me? What made her throw out her arms as if struggling desperately with the air, or with some unseen foe who was binding her with chains?
I stood astounded, watching her, as she gradually calmed down and became herself again; but I was deeply perplexed and deeply troubled.
After a while she said, 'Let's go back to "the Place,"' and without waiting for my acquiescence, she strode along down the path towards Beddgelert.
I was quickly by her side, but felt as little in the mood for talking as she did. Suddenly a small lizard glided from the grass.
'The Romany Sap!' cried Sinfi, and she—the fearless woman before whom the stoutest Gypsy men had quailed—sobbed wildly in terror. She soon recovered herself, and said: 'What a fool you must think me, Hal! It wur all through talkin' about the Romany Sap. At fust I thought it wur the Romany Sap itself, an' it wur only a poor little effet arter all. There ain't a-many things made o' flesh and blood as can make Sinfi Lovell show the white feather; but I know you'll think the wuss o' me arter this, Hal. But while the pictur were a-showin' I heard my dear mammy's whisper: "Little Sinfi, little Sinfi, beware o' Gorgios! This is the one."'
By the time we reached the encampment it was quite dark. Panuel, and indeed most of the Gypsies, had turned into the tents for the night; but both Videy Lovell and Rhona Boswell were moving about as briskly as though the time was early morning, one with guile expressed in every feature, the other shedding that aura of frankness and sweet winsomeness which enslaved Percy Aylwin, and no wonder.
Rhona was in a specially playful mood, and came dancing round us more like a child of six than a young woman with a Romany Rye for a lover.
But neither Sinfi nor I was in the mood for frolic. My living-waggon, which still went about wherever the Lovells went, had been carefully prepared for me by Rhona, and I at once went into it, not with the idea of getting much sleep, but in order to be alone with my thoughts. What was I to think of my experiences of that evening? Was I really to take the spectacle that had seemed to fall upon my eyes when listening to Sinfi's crwth, or rather when listening to her song, as evidence that Winifred was alive? Oh, if I could, if I could! Was I really to accept as true this fantastic superstition about the crwth and the spirits of Snowdon and the 'living mullo'? That was too monstrous a thought even for me to entertain. Notwithstanding all that had passed in the long and dire struggle between my reason and the mysticism inherited with the blood of two lines of superstitious ancestors, which circumstances had conspired to foster, my reason had only been baffled and thwarted; it had not really been slain.
What, then, could be the explanation of the spectacle that had seemed to fall upon my eyes? 'It is hallucination,' I said, 'and it is the result of two very powerful causes—my own strong imagination, excited to a state of feverish exaltation by the long strain of my suffering, and that power in Sinfi which D'Arcy had described as her "half-unconscious power as a mesmerist." At a moment when my will, weakened by sorrow and pain, lay prostrate beneath my own fevered imagination, Sinfi's voice, so full of intense belief in her own hallucination, had leapt, as it were, into my consciousness and enslaved my imagination, which in turn had enslaved my will and my senses.'
For hours I argued this point with myself, and I ended by coming to the conclusion that it was 'my mind's eye' alone that saw the picture of Winifred.
But there was also another question to confront. What was the cause of Sinfi's astonishing emotion after the vision vanished? Such a mingling of warring passions I had never seen before. I tried to account for it. I thought about it for hours, and finally fell asleep without finding any solution of the enigma.
I had no conversation of a private nature with Sinfi until the next evening, when the camp was on the move.
'You had no sleep last night, Sinfi; I can see it by the dark circles round your eyes.'
'That's nuther here nor there, brother,' she said.
I found to my surprise that the Gypsies were preparing to remove the camp to a place not far from Bettws y Coed. I suggested to Sinfi that we two should return to the bungalow. But she told me that her stay there had come to an end. The firmness with which she made this announcement made me sure that there was no appeal.
'Then,' said I, 'my living-waggon will come into use again. The camping place is near some of the best trout streams in the neighbourhood, and I sadly want some trout-fishing.'
'We part company to-day, brother,' she said. 'We can't be pals no more—never no more.'
'Sister, I will not be parted from you: I shall follow you.'
'Reia—Hal Aylwin—you knows very well that any man, Gorgio or Romany, as followed Sinfi Lovell when she told him not, 'ud ketch a body-blow as wouldn't leave him three hull ribs, nor a ounce o' wind to bless hisself with.'
'But I am now one of the Lovells, and I shall go with you. I am a Romany myself—I mean I am becoming more and more of a Romany every day and every hour. The blood of Fenella Stanley is in us both.'
She looked at me, evidently astonished at the earnestness and the energy of my tone. Indeed at that moment I felt an alien among Gorgios.
'I am now one of the Lovells,' I said, 'and I shall go with you.'
'We part company to-night, brother, fare ye well,' she said.
As she stood delivering this speech—her head erect, her eyes flashing angrily at me, her brown fists tightly clenched, I knew that further resistance would be futile.
'But now I wants to be left alone,' she said.
She bent her head forward in a listening attitude, and I heard her murmur, 'I knowed it 'ud come ag'in. A Romany sperrit likes to come up in the evenin' and smell the heather an' see the shinin' stars come out.'
While she was speaking, she began to move off between the trees. But she turned, took hold of both my hands, and gazed into my eyes. Then she moved away again, and I was beginning to follow her. She turned and said: 'Don't follow me. There ain't no place for ye among the Romanies. Go the ways o' the Gorgios, Hal Aylwin, an' let Sinfi Lovell go hern.'
As I leaned against a tree and watched Sinfi striding through the grass till she passed out of sight, the entire panorama of my life passed before me.
'She has left me with a blessing after all,' I said; 'my poor Sinfi has taught me the lesson that he who would fain be cured of the disease of a wasting sorrow must burn to ashes Memory. He must flee Memory and never look back.'
And did I flee Memory? When I re-entered the bungalow next day it was my intention to leave it and Wales at once and for ever, and indeed to leave England at once—perhaps for ever, in order to escape from the unmanning effect of the sorrowful brooding which I knew had become a habit. 'I will now,' I said, 'try the nepenthe that all my friends in their letters are urging me to try—I will travel. Yes, I will go to Japan. My late experiences should teach me that Ja'afar's "Angel of Memory," who refashioned for him his dead wife out of his own sorrow and tears, did him an ill service. He who would fain be cured of the disease of a wasting sorrow should try to flee the "Angel of Memory," and never look back.'
And so fixed was my mind upon travelling that I wrote to several of my friends, and told them of my intention. But I need scarcely say that as I urged them to keep the matter secret it was talked about far and wide. Indeed, as I afterwards found to my cost, there were paragraphs in the newspapers stating that the eccentric amateur painter and heir of one branch of the Aylwins had at last gone to Japan, and that as his deep interest in a certain charming beauty of an un-English type was proverbial, it was expected that he would return with a Japanese, or perhaps a Chinese wife.
But I did not go to Japan; and what prevented me?
My reason told me that what I had just seen near Beddgelert was an optical illusion. I had become very learned on the subject of optical illusions ever since I had known Sinfi Lovell, and especially since I had seen that picture of Winnie in the water near Bettws y Coed, which I have described in an earlier chapter. Every book I could get upon optical illusions I had read, and I was astonished to find how many instances are on record of illusions of a much more powerful kind than mine.
And yet I could not leave Snowdon. The mountain's very breath grew sweeter and sweeter of Winnie's lips. As I walked about the hills I found myself repeating over and over again one of the verses which Winnie used to sing to me as a child at Raxton.
Eryri fynyddig i mi,Bro dawel y delyn yw,Lle mae'r defaid a'r wyn,Yn y mwswg a'r brwyn,Am cân inau'n esgyn i fyny,A'r gareg yn ateb i fyny, i fyny,O'r lle bu'r eryrod yn byw. [Footnote]
[Footnote:
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 upAnd the rocks re-echo it higher and higherIn the height where the eagles live.]
But then I felt that Sinfi was the mere instrument of the mysterious magic of y Wyddfa, that magic which no other mountain in Europe exercises. I knew that among all the Gypsies Sinfi was almost the only one who possessed that power which belonged once to her race, that power which is expressed in a Scottish word now universally misused, 'glamour,' the power which Johnnie Faa and his people brought into play when they abducted Lady Casilis.
Soon as they saw her well-faured faceThey cast the glamour oure her.
'Yes,' I said, 'I am convinced that my illusion is the result of two causes, my own brooding over Winnie's tragedy and the glamour that Sinfi sheds around her, either consciously or unconsciously; that imperious imagination of hers which projects her own visions upon the senses of another person either with or without an exercise of her own will. This is the explanation, I am convinced.'
Wheresoever I now went, Snowdon's message to my heart was, 'She lives,' and my heart accepted the message. And then the new blessed feeling that Winnie was not lying in a pauper grave had an effect upon me that a few who read these pages will understand—only a few. Perhaps, indeed, even those I am thinking of, those who, having lost the one being they loved, feel that the earth has lost all its beauty—perhaps even these may not be able to sympathise fully with me in this matter, never having had an experience remotely comparable with mine.
When I thought of Winifred lying at the bottom of some chasm in Snowdon, my grief was very great, as these pages show. Yet it was not intolerable; it did not threaten to unseat my reason, for even then, when I knew so little of the magic of y Wyddfa, I felt how close was the connection between my darling and the hills that knew her and loved her. But during the time that her death, amidst surroundings too appalling to contemplate, hung before my eyes in a dreadful picture—during the time when it seemed certain that her death in a garret, her burial in a pauper pit six coffins deep, was a hideous truth and no fancy, all the beauty with which Nature seemed at one time clothed was wiped away as by a sponge. The earth was nothing more than a charnel-house, the skies above it were the roof of the Palace of Nin-ki-gal. But now that Snowdon had spoken to me, the old life which had formerly made the world so beautiful and so beloved came back.
All nature seemed rich and glowing with the deep expectance of my heart. The sunrise and the sunset seemed conscious of Winnie, and the very birds seemed to be warbling at times 'She's alive.'
I think, indeed, that I had passed into that sufistic ecstasy expressed by a writer often quoted by my father, an Oriental writer, Ferridoddin—
With love I burn: the centre is within me;While in a circle everywhere around meIts Wonder lies—
that exalted mood, I mean, described in the great chapter on the Renascence of Wonder which forms the very core and heart-thought of the strange book so strangely destined to govern the entire drama of my life,The Veiled Queen.
The very words of the opening of that chapter came to me:
'The omnipotence of love—its power of knitting together the entire universe—is, of course, best understood by the Oriental mind. Just after the loss of my dear wife I wrote the following poem called "The Bedouin Child," dealing with the strange feeling among the Bedouins about girl children, and I translated it into Arabic. Among these Bedouins a father in enumerating his children never counts his daughters, because a daughter is considered a disgrace.
'Ilyàs the prophet, lingering 'neath the moon,Heard from a tent a child's heart-withering wail,Mixt with the message of the nightingale,And, entering, found, sunk in mysterious swoon,A little maiden dreaming there alone.She babbled of her father sitting pale'Neath wings of Death—'mid sights of sorrow and bale,And pleaded for his life in piteous tone.