Читать книгу: «The Making of William Edwards; or, The Story of the Bridge of Beauty»

CHAPTER I.
A THUNDERSTORM

It was a sad day for Mrs. Edwards, of Eglwysilan,¹ when her well-loved husband, on his return from Llantrissant market one sultry Friday in the autumn of 1721, in attempting to cross the River Taff, failed to observe its rising waters, missed the ford, and was carried down the stream, a drowning man.

Only that morning he had driven a goat and a score of sheep across in safety, the sheep following their agile and sure-footed leader, as he sprang from one to another of the out-cropping masses of rock, which, scattered in mid-stream, served alike as stepping-stones and as indications when the river was fordable, as it generally was in a dry summer.

But the Taff, born in a marsh, and running through a deep vale, is given to rise as swiftly as the traditional Welshman's temper. Many are its seen and unseen feeders among the mountain steeps; and, although there had been but a light passing shower in sheltered hill-side Llantrissant that day, farther north a heavy thunderstorm had burst in a deluge over bogs and hills; and down from countless rills and rivulets the waters had come flashing in leaps and bounds, to swell the tribute brooks and rivers alike bore to the Taff as vassals to a sovereign.

William Edwards was as steady a man as any farmer in Glamorganshire, but whenever a group of them got together, at fair or market, there great pitchers of cwrw da² were certain to be also, either to cement friendship or to clinch a bargain, and the beverage was uncommonly heady.

Now bargaining was a long and thirsty process, and, although he was thrifty and the ale was dear, when Edwards had completed the sale of goat and sheep to his satisfaction, he had imbibed a fair share of the common beverage; not, however, so much as to prevent other huckstering and bargaining on account of his wife. The stockings knitted on the farm had to be sold, or bartered for needles, pins, tapes, or shoe-latchets; he had to purchase a sieve, a supply of soap and candles, a pair of Sunday shoes for his little girl, and a couple of tin cans.

By the time these were thrust into his saddle-bags, the sieve and tinware secured to the pommel of his saddle so as to balance each other above the bags, and a final draught of cwrw swallowed as a refresher for his journey, the afternoon had slipped nearly away, and with it one or two impatient neighbours on whom he had depended for company on the rough, circuitous road over the mountain ridge to the fords.

Rough road indeed it was, little better than a beaten track worn by men and beasts constrained to pass that way; a road unsought except in dry weather, a rugged descent from Llantrissant to the ford of the Rhonda, and then up and down again, with stones and tree-roots lying in wait to trip unwary feet; for at that period the picturesque Vale of Taff was thickly wooded and scantily populated, and the roads were little better than deep gullies or natural stairways.

His sturdy Welsh pony, however, was a thorough mountaineer, and, left to himself, jogged along without stumbling or straying, whatever the hour or the road. He took to the water and crossed the ford of the swollen Rhonda safely enough, although twilight was falling; but the evening shadows had deepened with every mile they trod, and grew heavier as they descended towards the larger river, with darkening woods on either hand, for there they rode through a veil of blinding mist.

The mist had been gathering and the water rising rapidly, when Owen Griffith, one of his neighbours, who had prudently quitted the market three-quarters of an hour earlier than Edwards, finding the river evidently on the rise, had deemed it only wise to trust his pony's sagacity to find a trustworthy ford rather than depend on his own eyesight.

It was quite a matter for after conjecture, but it was always supposed that the sagacious animal Edwards bestrode had grown restive and refused to take the unsafe crossing, and that he, – a man doggedly obstinate and wise in his own conceit, – unable to discern a reason for his faithful beast's rebellion, had forcibly compelled the reluctant animal to attempt the ford in spite of its resistance, as shown by hoof-marks beaten in upon the bank.

Be that as it may, the riderless horse found its way home to the woodside farm on Eglwysilan Mountain, wet, foaming, and panting; the saddle and saddle-bags, drenched with discoloured water, telling all too surely that the uneasily watching wife was a widow, her four children fatherless. In such moments the mind always grasps at the worst suggestion.

The distracted woman rushed shrieking to her nearest neighbour. Her awakened boys called after her, but she heard them not.

The alarm spread. In an incredibly short space of time, considering how far apart lay the farms, and how few were the cottage homes, a score or two of half-dressed men and barefooted women were running or riding to the rescue, if such were possible. And wherever was practicable path or foothold, lanthorns were flashing along the steep and densely wooded banks upon the swiftly running river; but though it was seen where the poor horse had contrived to scramble up the bank, there was no sign of him they sought so anxiously.

The more fortunate beast had had a narrow escape.

Not forty yards ahead the chafing Rhonda came leaping and foaming to the deathly embrace of the Taff, and in the swirl of the confluent waters all hope was lost.

Yet still the despairing widow urged the wearied explorers on; and moved by her piteous entreaties, Owen Griffith, their near neighbour, declared he would not give up the search until the farmer was found, dead or alive, if he had to go as far as Cardiff to find him. The man was ill at ease, feeling as if a little more urgency on his part might have drawn Edwards away from the market in time for safety.

His determination arrested the steps of several others who were on the point of turning back, and they joined him readily, but only on the condition that Mrs. Edwards should return home with the rest of the women, and leave the search to them. 'You will be best at home, look you! Women have no business here!' said they, unnerved by her white face and stifled sobbing.

'Yes, yes, Jane,' urged the women. 'Think you of your children, do; and come back. It's crying in the dark, and all alone they will be, yes indeed!'

And moved by the picture of her desolate children in their affright and grief, the sorrowing and agitated mother was drawn homewards, by the strong cords of maternal affection, to clasp them in her arms, and stifle her own anguish in attempts to impart the comfort she could not yet take to her own stricken heart.

She was a religious woman, with a simple, unquestioning faith in the wisdom and love of her Heavenly Father; and who shall say the effort held for her no healing balm?

If she wept, she also prayed; and although two of her children, William, not yet a three years boy, and Jonet, a girl of four, were too young to enter into the depths of her grief, or comprehend her prayers, David and Rhys,³ respectively nine and twelve, were old enough to understand, and to feel how disastrous a calamity had fallen upon them unawares.

Before midnight the three youngest had cried themselves to sleep. Only Rhys remained, with his arms around his mother's neck, to share her terrible night-watch, and wait for what day might bring; his overflowing young heart swelling with unexpressed resolves to be her shield and protector when he should grow a man.

In the grey of the morning Owen Griffith and his helpers came upon what they sought a few miles below Treforest, on the eastern bank of the river, flung ashore like a weed by the inflowing current of the Rhonda, and left there by the rapid subsidence of the temporary spate. Soberly and reverently they laid it on an extemporised litter of boughs and reeds, covering the face with Owen's coat, and slowly re-trod the miles to lay the disfigured dead down on the bed from which a hearty man had risen the preceding morn.

There is no antidote to inconsolable grief like active employment, work which exercises hand and brain and cannot be set aside. Such is the daily work on a farm; and though kindly neighbours had taken care of the poor horse and its burden, had dressed the younger children, and volunteered assistance in other small household matters, neither the cows nor the goats would submit to be milked by strange hands.

Mrs. Edwards had, fortunately, no time to indulge in grief. She was a woman of determined energy and practical piety; and after the first overwhelming outburst of natural emotion, turned to her ordinary duties as if awakened to the consciousness that all the care and responsibility of farm and family rested on her individual shoulders.

Dashing the tears from her eyes, she snatched up a milking-stool and pail, and was off up the hill-side, Rhys darting after her with a smaller stool and pail to milk the she-goats, not for the first time, but for the first time voluntarily. His initiatory lessons had been taken that summer, with his father standing over him to keep the refractory in order, whether biped or quadruped.

He had not taken kindly to the task at the time, having all a boy's fondness for play, and would rather have gone bird-nesting than goat-milking. But now that his father was gone – so suddenly taken from them – he, too, seemed to feel as if new duties devolved on him, and that, boy though he was, he must aim at the work of a man, and spare his widowed mother all he could.

The idea was scarcely spontaneous. He had overheard a knot of gossips lamenting that Farmer Edwards had not left a son old enough to take his place on the farm, and help his mother to rear the younger ones as in duty bound. And he had straightway resolved to prove the gossips in the wrong.

'If I am not old enough to take my father's place, I am old enough to do my duty, and I shall get older and stronger every year. They shall see what I can do to help mother; and as for my brothers and sister, am I not the eldest, and ten whole years older than William? Sure I can take care of them – at least I can try.'

If this was not absolutely the boy's colloquy, it comes near enough to its spirit. There was something of the father's masterfulness in Rhys, and, directed to noble purposes, it might serve the widow in good stead. And noble purpose may be shown in small things as in great; indeed, is stronger in the lesser, where it makes no show, than in great deeds, which make a parade and attract applause. The only danger with Rhys was that, self-inflated, he might develop an obtrusively dominant will that should override his better qualities. At present his sole desire was to relieve his overburdened mother, and protect his sister and brothers – a worthy and noble aim for a boy of his age.

But a boy reared on a small farm in those primitive days was not the helpless creature progress and modern manners have manufactured between them. Very primitive indeed was Welsh farming in the last century, primitive as the farms themselves. But no child of seven or eight was too young for work of some kind or other, whether reared in the labourer's windowless hut or on the farmer's own wide hearth. If only stone-picking, weeding, or rook-scaring, there was always something to be done, something to keep active and restless boys and girls out of mischief before they were old enough to drive the cows to pasture, or assist shepherd and husbandman.

Of school-going there was little enough; even dame-schools were as scarce in wild Wales as in rural England; but there was generally a substitute by the fireside, and the man who could not read was far less common in the little Principality than in the larger kingdom.

Still more scarce was the woman or man who could not knit. When a child was six years old, it was time to put knitting-pins into the little fingers to learn the simple stitch. And wander where you would, over the mountains or along the rough roads, you were sure to meet man or maid, on horseback or on foot, stocking-knitting with mechanical precision.

In the long winter evenings, when the only illumination was from the culm fire, the solitary candle, or homemade rushlight, knitting and spinning filled up usefully the darkened hours. And perchance then the big Welsh Bible Dr. Parry had provided for his countrymen a century before would be brought out and laid on the table close to the solitary candle, to be read aloud or spelled out by the growing boy or girl, under paternal instruction. On the Sabbath this was surely so.

Under such training it was clear that Rhys at twelve years of age would be more capable and practically helpful to his mother than a modern farmer's son, who sees the farm only in the holidays, or out of school hours, who handles tennis or cricket bat instead of spade and pitchfork, and never did a day's hard work in his young life.

When Rhys bravely resolved to work like a man, he knew what lay before him to do and to learn. Farming on a thin, unproductive stratum of soil in a mountain land is no child's play.

CHAPTER II.
WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

Is there any record of a catastrophe so great or appalling that it could not possibly have been worse?

In the first hours of her sudden bereavement, Mrs. Edwards felt as if an overwhelming flood of desolation had swept over her, and left her and her orphans helpless and hopeless. Not that her husband had been the most active spirit on the farm, but she was in no condition to reason or to weigh probabilities. She had not been wont to rely on him for advice or action, but in losing him she felt as if all was lost.

An apparently small matter roused her to the consciousness that there were depths of misery into which she had not been plunged, and that even out of her affliction she had cause to thank God for sparing a double blow.

When the drowned man had been discovered, he had been bruised and beaten against rocks and stones until his grey frieze coat was torn into shreds and tatters. But it was afterwards found that the old stocking-foot he carried as a money bag had been securely buttoned up in his breeches pocket, and the produce of his sales at the Friday's market was there intact in hard coin.

In the extremity of her grief for her one great loss she had overlooked the probability of the smaller. Not till the saturated bag was handed to her unopened did she realise what might have been.

As she poured the gold and silver out on her lap, she clasped her hands and fervently thanked God that in His wrath He had remembered mercy.

'I had forgotten that the sheep and goat had been sold to make up the half-year's rent. Yes, indeed I had. And what would become of the farm and the poor children if the rent could not be paid? Pryse, the agent, would turn us out for a better tenant than a poor widow, look you! But he shall see what a woman can do. The good God has not quite forsaken us.'

She wept again at the thought, and little William and Jonet having drawn close to her side questioning her with innocent eyes and tongues, she clasped them both in a close embrace, and, without trusting herself to answer, rose from her wooden stool and carried the recovered coin to a safe hiding-place in the big chest, her sad heart much lightened of its load.

Barefooted David, who was still petticoated – his nine years bringing no title to the dignity of week-day shoes or breeches, – ran with all speed in search of Rhys, to carry the news that a bag of money had been found in his father's pocket, and that his mother was crying over it.

Rhys was just then feeding the pigs in a stone trough, placed where they were walled in like sheep in a fold. He almost dropped the pail he was emptying, he turned round so sharply.

'Crying? What for?'

''Deed, I think it was about being turned out of the farm,' answered Davy, who had caught the words imperfectly, as he hurried out at the doorway.

Rhys looked aghast. What became of his heroic resolution to work for his brothers and sister if they left the farm?

'Turned out of the farm?' he echoed incredulously. Had not his father and grandfather been born upon it? It would be like tearing up an oak tree by the roots.

''Deed, and she said it,' replied David, as if injured by the doubt.

Down went the empty pail on the stones, and into the house strode Rhys, alternately red and white with excitement.

He could scarcely get the words out, they seemed to choke him. 'Davy says,' he began with a gasp, 'that we are to leave the farm' – he could not bring himself to say 'be turned out.'

'Nay, Rhys, not now I have all the money for the rent, thank God! If that had been lost in the river, I cannot tell what might have happened. There would be no chance of selling cows or pigs, or the oats, or anything before the rent-day, and Mr. Pryse would not wait an hour. "Out you go!" would be his word. "There's a man will give ten guineas more rent for it, and keep the land in better condition." Yes, look you, he has been saying that these three years, and now it's he will be for saying a woman will not be able to keep the hundred acres and pay my lord his forty pounds. It's poor land, so much rock and bog and wood, and he knows it, so much barren hill-side, scarcely fit to pasture the few sheep and goats. Yes, 'deed it will take hard work to make the farm pay now the husbandman is gone. Ah, yes, yes! We have had a terrible loss, Rhys, fach.'⁴

As she spoke the last words the poor widow's tears gushed forth again, and would not be restrained. The flowers she was strewing over the sheet-covered form of her dead fell to the floor, and she dropped on her knees beside the bed, where it was her mournful duty to watch, and hid her face with her hands as if to conceal the passion of grief she could no longer control.

Rhys was sobbing too, though he strove against it in his effort to be manly. His arm went round her heaving shoulders with an unstudied air of natural protection, and in a broken voice he begged her to be calm. Not that he was by any means calm himself, but he was feeling early the need for self-restraint.

'Don't, mother, don't,' he murmured; 'you will be making yourself ill, and then who will mind the farm or the children? I will be a good steady boy, and will work as hard almost as a man. You shall not miss father more than I can help, look you. And sure we have a terrible loss; but, mother dear, it might be worse if we did lose the farm and all, as Davy did say. You are a good farmer, so Owen Griffith do say, and you will be teaching me.'

'Yes, indeed, please God, and you shall be a good farmer too, Rhys,' sobbed she, drying her eyes on her long check apron, and giving him a look of profound trust and loving motherhood, whilst he drew himself up with a renewed sense of importance.

At that moment a figure darkened the bedroom doorway. In stepped a fresh-looking young woman with bare legs and feet, short petticoats of striped flannel, a dark blue woollen cloak, and a man's tall hat worn over a plain linen cap, white as a snowdrop, though the stray locks beneath it might have been more orderly had looking-glasses been more common. She had a bundle on her left arm, a stocking she was knitting in her hand, whilst little Willie held her fast by the other, and Jonet clung to her cloak.

'Ah, Ales,⁵ is that you?' burst from Mrs. Edwards with an evident gasp of relief. 'You was not expected back so soon. Had you heard of our loss? Is your poor mother well again?'

'Not quite well, but better, look you. She can sit up, and Mary may manage to do for her now, perhaps.' There was a dubious tone in the 'perhaps,' but she went on to say, 'Mother would not let me stay when she heard of your great trouble, after you was so kind as to let me go away to nurse her. It was not right I should stay at Caerphilly when you was being left all alone by yourself, with nobody to keep watch with you or to help at all;' and she passed into the kitchen as she spoke.

'Yes, I'm here, Ales,' thrust in Rhys, as he followed. 'I shall help mother now; yes, indeed!'

'You?' ejaculated Ales incredulously, whilst divesting herself of bundle, cloak, etc. 'Help's a little word and soon said, but it's not much more than the saying we will be getting from you, Rhys. You never was fond of work, whatever!'

Rhys pulled himself up as if insulted. 'You shall see,' he said loftily, and quitted the kitchen, where Mrs. Griffith was paring turnips for dinner, his chin in the air. And not another word did he vouchsafe to the young woman, his mother's hired servant. He might, by his manner, have expected her to understand his altered position and good resolution intuitively, but she only knew him as a lad with more liking for play than work, and expected no more from the present than from the past. Nay, perhaps less, now there was no father to drive him to his daily tasks and thrash him into industry.

It was a time of unusually painful bustle and excitement, yet there was no cheeriness about the daily tasks. Indoors there was a hush even in the scrubbing of benches, tables, and platters, almost in the dash of the churn, for was not the widow still keeping her watch by the dead – the dead who could not be buried on the third day, but must wait until coroner and jury could be called together to verify the cause of Mrs. Edwards' widowhood? Mrs. Griffith was there, alternately to help Ales with her work, and to relieve the mourner – a kind, motherly sort of woman, one to rely on in emergency.

Out of doors Rhys kept David well employed, telling him he would have to learn to be a man, directing him to do this or that with quite an elder-brotherly air of proprietorship, though not unkindly. Ales wondered what had come to him, he worked about the farm with so much more knowledge of the right thing to be done at the right time than she had given him credit for possessing.

As for poor little Jonet and William, they shrank whispering into corners out of everybody's way, or slunk out into the bit of ground that did duty for a garden, or strayed into the orchard, where they made themselves useful picking up windfall apples for the pony and the pigs, and did their best to make themselves ill by eating the unripe fruit at the same time; for although four years old Jonet was imitative in assuming a protectorate over her two years brother, she had not herself outlived a childish love for the crude and indigestible. They were, fortunately, too young to comprehend the mystery of the closed room, yet the general air of restraint affected even them, as they went about hand in hand.

The valley of the Taff has long been noted for its fertility. It was otherwise in the early years of the last century, when husbandry in Wales was so primitive that the spade did duty for the plough, and crops had to be wrung from exhausted soil wholly by hand-labour; ignorance, and old prejudice in favour of doing as their fathers had done before them, standing in the way of progress, equally with the paucity of good roads and bridges over which to convey produce.

In places the lowlands near the river were fertile; and where the stream was bordered by lofty slopes, and not hemmed in by precipitous limestone crags, they were clothed with dense woods of fir and mountain ash, oak and beech, with sallows by the water edge, all more esteemed by the sparse population for their timber than for their wondrously picturesque beauty. But at the top of the mountain range eastward of the vale, and on their upper slopes, much of the ground was sour and boggy, and called for more agricultural knowledge and appliances than had found their way thither, even when this century was born.

The farm of the Edwardses was so situated on the mountain-side, and certainly enjoyed a diversity of soil capable of development in capable hands. In Eglwysilan parish it was regarded as a fairly large farm, and the house was the envy of the neighbours, though my modern readers may think there was little to envy. It had not only three rooms besides the capacious kitchen, but that kitchen could boast two glazed windows, one on either side the entrance; a very rare distinction, except in good houses or towns, so rare that not even shutters closed the apertures through which air and light found their way to the two sleeping rooms or to the long apartment in the rear, which served a variety of purposes. These were the housing of general stores, household and farming implements, a passage being kept clear from the kitchen midway through to the back door and farmyard. And this was all the isolation considered necessary for the dairy and dairy utensils, notwithstanding the purpose to which the other half of its space was devoted.

All these separate rooms were upon the ground floor. Stairs were almost unknown conveniences in the cots and farms of wild Wales. Even in the villages few were the inhabitants privileged to look down upon poorer neighbours from upper windows. Lime, however, was plentiful in Glamorganshire, and though walls were put together of roughly hewn stone, they were whitewashed both inside and out with conscientious frequency.

In no place short of a mansion was much furniture to be found. And to say that Mrs. Edwards had a well-scrubbed dresser filled with wooden platters and with mugs of Staffordshire pottery; that she had not only a large oaken table, but a linen cloth to cover it on occasion, and that there was a chair near the chimney corner in addition to the high-backed bench, or settle, and the three-legged stools; that a spinning-wheel stood between the two bedroom doors opposite to the fireplace, and that a large oaken chest stood under one window containing the family stock of clothing, and of flannel the wheel had helped to spin, was to say that she was for her time and place a thrifty, well-to-do woman, somewhat in advance of her class.

However, the great feature of the kitchen was the expansive open fireplace, where the fire was made on a broad hearthstone, slightly raised, the inside of the chimney, which sloped upwards towards the top like a narrowing funnel, being set with stone seats for the elders of the family.

On the Tuesday following the catastrophe which had made Mrs. Edwards a widow – although all the morning there had been the trampling through of coroner and jurymen – a fierce fire of peat and fire-balls filled the whole of the hearth, and two huge iron pots like witches' cauldrons hung suspended by chains above it, bubbling and steaming. At the same time, in the large oven built into the wall on the right of the fireplace, she and her helpers had been baking spiced cake and oaten bread the whole of the morning, as if providing for a regiment of soldiers.

It was a hot day and hot work, though casements and doors stood open to let out the vaporous fumes of cookery; and had not neighbourly Mrs. Griffith come with her young daughter Cate to the assistance of Ales and her troubled mistress, the former would have been unable to relieve Rhys of his voluntary but fatiguing duty at the remorseless churn, so great, if not unusual, were the preparations for the guests expected on the morrow.

Indeed, as Mrs. Edwards said, she did not know what she could possibly have done without Owen Griffith and his wife, they had been such zealous friends to her in her great affliction.

She was not aware how the man's tender conscience stung him for leaving Edwards to return home alone from Llantrissant. He was feeling himself in some sort responsible for her bereavement. At any rate, no brother could have served her in better stead had a brother been at hand.