Читать книгу: «The Making of William Edwards; or, The Story of the Bridge of Beauty», страница 6

CHAPTER XI.
A MEMORABLE ENCOUNTER

William's rebellion had begun to show itself in sullen disregard of his brother's orders. He was always active and willing when his mother or Evan called him – Davy might convey a message, but never had an independent order to give – he was Jonet's obedient bondslave, but when Rhys demanded his services or attention he generally turned a deaf ear. For this, Rhys – who considered his ten years' seniority quite a warranty for control as his mother's deputy and his dead father's representative – took him to task imperiously, not with any desire to be knowingly overbearing, but from a stern sense of his own duty to a lazy lad.

At length, one bright day in early spring, when William was little more than nine years of age, he stood lingering after the midday meal close beside the stone gate-posts of a field where Davy and Jonet were already busy weeding a freshly springing crop of corn. His arms rested upon the coping of the wall with his chin upon them, whilst he, looking down into the fertile vale below – where glimpses of the shining river were discernible like twinkling stars, through the tender green shoots which veiled the swaying boughs on its densely-wooded banks – seemed lost in a dreamy mist of speculative thought. The boy's reverie was rudely broken.

'Now then, lazyback! What do you be doing there?' called out Rhys, who carried a spade on one shoulder and a wicker basket in his hand, which he tossed down at his brother's feet. No answer coming, he called out again, 'What do you be doing there?'

'I do be thinking,' came composedly from William.

'Thinking, indeed! I wish you would be thinking about your work. What can you have to think about, whatever?'

''Deed, nobody knows my thinks,' replied the boy, without turning round.

'You will very soon know my thinks,' retorted Rhys, 'if you do not pick up your basket, and get to your weeding. You are one of the "late and lazy who will never be rich." Come, stir you.' And, as if to enforce obedience, Rhys raised his disengaged hand and struck the other a sharp blow across the shoulders.

At once William turned round, his cheeks and eyes aflame. Rhys thought he was about to strike him back again.

Instead, he gave the empty basket a kick that sent it flying over the ridges, and was out at the narrow gateway in an instant, with a defiant air that seemed to dare Rhys to lay hands upon him again, or attempt to draw him back.

That day he was seen no more upon the farm until nightfall, when he was sent to bed supperless as a punishment.

He was up betimes in the morning, and had the fire alight before any one else was astir. He was having a wash at the spring when Ales came into the farmyard.

'Name o' goodness!' exclaimed she, 'what's got you out of bed so soon? Want your breakfast, I suppose?'

William nodded in assent, on his way to the common towel.

'Do you think you be deserving any?'

'Does Rhys be deserving any?'

Ales had a proverb ready, 'Who does well, deserves well.'

'Is it doing well to call names and be striking his brother?'

Ales had no direct answer to that. 'Rhys says you are idle and should be made to work. You do be playing with stones when you should be weeding or knitting. He does always be working hard,' she replied evasively.

Prompt was the retort, 'A big man should work, I will do better work than Rhys when I am as big. 'Deed I will.'

This conversation had taken place during the hasty ablutions of Ales, who had latterly grown uncommonly anxious to present 'a shining morning face' to Evan when he appeared. As she combed out her hair at the diminutive looking-glass he had bought her, as a hint, and which hung beside the storehouse door, she began in an insinuating tone —

'And where did you be going yesterday, Willem? Did you be with Robert Jones?'

'Never be you minding,' said the boy, walking past with a pitcher of water for the porridge. And no further information could she or any one else extract from him.

After that, whenever Rhys and he came into collision he disappeared, and none could say whither he went or with whom. Cate or Owen Griffith might see him pass the cottage door, and exchange a 'good-day' greeting, but beyond that his wanderings were unknown.

In a mountainous parish like Eglwysilan, where was no village community, where farms and cottages were mostly solitary and far apart, there was little chance of encountering many strollers out of the main highway, except on market-days.

Wandering aimlessly in his blind passion, on the day when Rhys had struck him, hardly noting the way he went, he found himself all on a sudden on what appeared to be a short, grass-grown roadway, bordered on both sides by upright blocks of stone, more stunted and less shapely than the slabs in the churchyard, but planted there with so much method in their irregular intervals, they might indeed have been dwarf guards to some great giant turned suddenly to stone by the magic art of a still greater necromancer of the olden time, as he had heard.

Such legends were common on the domestic hearth. So that, although it was a bright spring afternoon, an eerie feeling crept over the passionate boy, especially when he found himself within a wide circle of such stones, surrounding, in double file, a huge angular mass of like stone, narrowing downwards from a flat top, capped by a second stone, and delicately poised on the rounded point of a small conical base in a hollowed depression of the natural rock, and in some sort bearing out the simile of the petrified giant's throne.

As William looked upon this unshapely mass, some dreamy recollection floated through his mind of having visited the spot before, when the stones had seemed alive, and making mouths at him. Without nearing the central stone, but keeping his eye upon it, he walked slowly round within the inner circle, and, as he went discovered a second path (leading north) corresponding with the one by which he had entered from the south.

Then it dawned upon him this must indeed be the spot where he had lain down faint and tired, when he was, oh, such a little boy, and had been so frightened by the grim aspect of the stones, as the dark night had come on, and he could not rise to get away.

Soon he ventured to touch the large central stone that had terrified him before by giving way on the pressure of his tiny hand. It swayed and rocked to and fro, and he drew back instinctively, but it did not fall. And now he knew it surely for the great rocking-stone, and no longer feared that it would fall and crush him so long as he was good and true, for so the legend ran.

But now other doubts and fears oppressed him. These would be the very Druid-stones Owen Griffith had named, and Robert Jones had warned him not to seek, lest some great harm should come to him.

Was it true there were once men called Druids, and did they come to life at midnight and nod to the moon, and to the big nodding-stones? Robert Jones and Ales both said they did, though they had never ventured there at midnight to see. They only looked like ill-shaped stones, too little for men. But had they not made faces at him when he was a bit of a baby crying there in the dark?

The boy's heart sank. He was not proof against the grim and weird recollection. He took to his heels and ran out of the memory-haunted circle by the stone-guarded avenue next to him, nor stopped until he had left the desolate and barren spot far behind.

But where was he? That was not the way towards home. He stood on a wild heath, high above the valley of the Taff, with the mountain rising and stretching far away on his right hand, with here and there labourers tilling the red-brown upland fields, and children at work beside them, as he should have been working 'but for Rhys,' he told himself.

He did not know, and could not see it, but the Merthyr Tydvil road, such as it was, lay sunk between the heath and the receding mountain. He had only to gain that, and turn completely round, to find his way homeward.

He looked to the wooded declivity on his left, where birds were calling to their mates under the swelling pinky buds or pale-green opening fans, and the odour of wood violets came sweetly fresh in every breath he drew. A rabbit rose and scuttered past him, and made for the underwood, where the golden crosiers of trooping ferns were uncurling in their beauty. The river ran far below, ran with an inviting rush. One moment, and the boy had plunged into the wood. 'He would not hurry home to be struck by Rhys.'

He could easily find his way back with the river to guide him.

So, now slipping, now catching at the trunk of a tree to maintain a foothold, he scrambled nearer to the river's brink, where was no more perceptible path than what had been made by intruders like himself. Once there he fancied the water was more than commonly disturbed; it was here and there flecked with foam and swirled in eddies. 'Surely the river must be in flood,' he said to himself.

A little way off a well-dressed young man was seated on a stone, fishing with rod and line.

William had no shyness. 'Why does the water make such a noise to-day, and be so rough?' he asked.

'Don't you know? It is from the falls. The river is always noisy here. It is louder higher up the stream.'

'Oh,' said William; 'what are the falls?'

'Indeed you had better go on a bit farther and see for yourself, my lad. But be careful how you go.'

The spirit of adventure was on the boy. He thanked the man and did 'go on,' until he stood still with amazement, for there the full river came leaping down, in broken falls, from rock to intercepting rock, some fifteen feet in all; but they might have been fifty for what the home-kept boy knew.

Strange is the fascination of living, leaping water. He stood there gazing spellbound, lost in admiration, listening to the tumultuous uproar, as the swift waters came rushing and flashing downwards, striking themselves against the rocks into angry foam that William mentally compared to suds when Ales was washing, only he never had seen washing on so large a scale. If there were finer cascades in the world he had not seen them. He was fascinated by what he did see, and lingered long.

'I wonder if Rhys or Davy ever saw these falls?' he said to himself; 'they never told me. They tell me nothing. But I will find out things for myself.'

The fisherman was rising from his stone when William again drew near. He had his rod and basket in hand prepared to go.

'Well, what do you think of the falls?'

'Oh, 'deed, and they was wonderful – and terrible. I was thinking how soon they would drown a man.'

'Yes, or a boy either. Which way are you going?'

'By the riverside, through the wood as far as the ford.'

'That will not be safe at this hour. You might slip into the stream. You had best go back the way you came.'

'I – I dare not,' stammered William.

'Dare not? Yet you are not afraid to go through these pathless woods by the riverside at dusk, though a false step might be fatal. Come along with me; I'll see you on a safe road.'

William followed through the ascending wood cautiously as before, ready to brave anything with such a companion.

The sun had not set when they stood upon the heath above, and then the stranger inquired —

'Well, my boy, of what are you afraid?'

'Of going past the Druids' stones, sir.'

'So you are superstitious? What harm can a few old stones do to a stout boy like you?' was asked with a broad smile.

William felt half-ashamed of the confession, how he had been lost when quite little, and had seen the stones make faces at him, adding the current stories he had heard, and his fright that afternoon.

By this time they were descending a slope from the barren heath to the Merthyr Tydvil highway, thus avoiding close proximity to the dreaded circle, although the roadway passed on a lower level. As they went, the stranger did his best to disabuse the boy's mind of his foolish terrors, and gave him to understand that long before there were any Christian churches in the land, or any Christian clergymen, the Druids were the priests, the priests of Baal, and set up those stones for their temples. Yet he said nothing of their horrid rites or human sacrifices, lest he should confirm the boy's dread of the stones.

William listened with wide-open ears, putting in a question here and there, as was his wont, and, to his delight, receiving intelligent replies adapted to the capacity of a thinking child. He was very anxious to know something more about the priests of Baal, but, after a brief identification of them with the idolatrous worshippers of the sun, the stranger, having ascertained that he could read, referred him to the Bible for further information.

They had reached the well-trodden turning to the ford. The sun had by this time set, and twilight was closing in.

'I presume our ways part here,' observed the tall stranger. 'Good-bye. Do not forget what I have told you. Brave boys who fear God, and do their duty to their fellows, do not dread the aspect of a few grey old stones.'

'I'm not afraid of stones, sir. I've got a heap, and I build with them. But Rhys kicks them over and says I waste my time.'

'So you build with stones, do you? And, pray, what do you build?' asked the gentleman, with a comical smile, unseen in the twilight. 'Do you think you could build a bridge over this treacherous river? You would do good service if you could,' he added, sotto voce.

William felt abashed. He had an uncomfortable suspicion he was being laughed at.

'I am only a boy, sir. I can only try to build. But when I am a man, Rhys shall see!'

'And who is Rhys?' put the other, resuming his walk when he found the boy did not turn towards the cottage by the ford.

'Rhys is my big brother. But, if you please, sir, what do be a bridge?'

Without evincing any surprise at the ignorance of a boy of his class and age, who could not have travelled far from home, the other answered promptly, 'A bridge is a roadway built over a river so that people may walk or ride across without wetting their feet. Bridges are sometimes built of wood, sometimes of stone or brick. A bridge is sadly wanted hereabouts, my boy. I narrowly escaped being swept away at the ford this morning.'

William drew in his breath. 'Oh-h-h! Would a bridge have saved my father from being drowned?'

'It would preserve any one who had occasion to cross.'

'Then I'll build one when I'm a man, 'deed I will,' came promptly.

The stranger, amused by William's earnestness, put some few questions, in his turn, respecting his father's death, his name, and occupation, ascertained whence arose his peculiar fancy for building, and suggested that if the church had attracted him so much he should contrive to visit the ruins of Caerphilly Castle, which he would find much more wonderful as a building; adding that he would have to cross a drawbridge to get into the castle.

'Why, mother and Rhys go to Caerphilly market every week. They never told me of the wonderful castle, whatever! But I'll go myself,' cried William, his imagination fired, and his indignation rising under the supposition that he had been kept wilfully in the dark. It did not occur to him that familiarity had taken the wonder out of the ancient pile for his elders.

They had reached the foot of the steep ascent to the farm, which William pointed out with some pride as his home, and there the stranger – who said he was on his way to the vicarage – took leave of him, saying that his name was Morris, and perhaps they might meet again some day, for he was interested in stone, but it was ironstone and not for building. However, before he went, he gave the boy a word or two of advice.

'Remember,' said he, 'you have a character to build before you think of building houses and churches, and a boy may begin to build that.'

'How?' was asked, William's grey eyes opening wide.

'By fearing God, and doing his duty. But there are bad characters as well as good ones, and every act of disobedience, of untruthfulness, of indolence, goes to build up the evil in place of the good.'

He had left William something to ponder. That was a memorable encounter.

CHAPTER XII.
CAERPHILLY CASTLE

A country vicar in the last century bore little or no resemblance to a clergyman of any status in this. He was a much more homely and patriarchal character, especially among the Welsh mountains.

Whatever his learning or his eloquence, he did not hesitate to till his own glebe-lands, or to perform offices from which the pastor of to-day would shrink as derogatory to his cloth. As a rule, his stipend was small, and necessity compelled him so to labour. He came, however, nearer to his flock in consequence.

When Mrs. Edwards, the Sunday following William's escapade, besought the Rev. John Smith to admonish her refractory son, who perversely and sullenly refused obedience to his eldest brother, idling and playing with stones when he should be at work on the farm, and wandering no one knew whither when reproved, she was surprised to hear him say —

'Um, ah, yes, I wanted to have a word with that boy of yours. But which am I to admonish, the eldest, who should set an example of brotherly love and consideration, or the youngest, who resents what he regards as petty persecution and overbearing assumption?'

''Deed, sir, Rhys has only set a good example to the rest. He do work hard upon the farm all day, and teach them to read at night; and he do have a right to expect them to look up to him, and do what he tells them; for you see, sir, he do be grown quite a young man, and a good farmer too, look you.'

'Um, ah, yes, yes. I see. I understand all about it, Mrs. Edwards,' was the vicar's running comment; 'I'll admonish the offender,' the twinkle in his genial blue eyes, as he turned to accost another parishioner, puzzling her greatly.

However, as there was peace between the brothers for a considerable time, the widow congratulated herself on bespeaking the good vicar's interference.

She was not aware, for Rhys did not think proper to say, that, after asking him confidentially if the gossip he had heard about himself and William was true, and what were the rights of the case, the vicar, out of his own mouth, had convicted him of a want of brotherly kindness and forbearance, and had 'admonished' him to remember what a lazy lad he had been prior to his father's death, and had asked how he would have liked an elder brother to come hectoring over him in those days? In short, he read Rhys an informal homily on arrogant assumption, and the need to exercise a degree of lenity towards a brother so much younger, who was in all probability no worse than he had been himself. It was something like a pinprick to an inflated balloon.

Rhys did not hold his head quite so high as usual when he joined Cate and her father at the churchyard stile; and was so quiet during the walk homeward that Cate tossed her hat-crowned red head about in offended pettishness, and Owen looked at him askance, wondering what the good vicar had said to take all the brightness out of him.

William was no less reticent. But, child though he was, he lived in a dream-world of his own, and had ceased to reveal his inner self on the domestic hearth, scared by the loud laughter and mockery that greeted his curious inquiries and precocious remarks.

In his silence, therefore, there was nothing to surprise his mother, who had fallen in with the general opinion that he was sullen. She had seen the vicar lead him aside, and took the reprimand for granted.

The opening words of his conversation with the nine years boy did not seem much like a reprimand.

'So, William, I hear you are going to be a great builder? And Mr. Morris tells me you want to know all about the Tower of Babel and Solomon's Temple, the Druidical temples, and St. Helen's Church here, with bridges and I do not know what beside. Now which of all these are we to talk about first?'

He had unlocked the boy's heart as with a magic key. Here was some one else who did not laugh at him. Their conversation lasted little over a quarter of an hour, and William was frequently the catechist, but it broke off like a serial story, 'to be continued.' And though it had been chiefly about building and builders, the vicar had not let the boy go away without a few words of gentle advice on his duty to himself and others – a lesson referred back to the two tablets of stone delivered to Moses amid the fiery terrors of Sinai.

After that there was generally a Sunday morning chat in the churchyard, and on one occasion the vicar took the boy home with him to dinner, a distinction that puzzled Mrs. Edwards exceedingly, and made Rhys no less jealous.

The vicar, a small man surmounted by a big clerical wig, had simply shown the boy a few architectural pictures in illustrated books, with a brief description of his own, the letterpress being English, and the boy's education stopping short at Welsh.

There was a water-colour drawing upon the parlour wall of a ruined castle with a tower that had been rent from battlement to base, and appeared in the act of falling. It was too remarkable to escape William's observation. He eyed it intently for some minutes. At length he asked, 'What place is that, sir?'

'That? Oh, that is Caerphilly Castle, the oldest fortress in Cambria. Do you not know it?'

'No, but I mean to go there when the tailor comes to make me some proper clothes. The packman let me have the cloth for the stockings I have knitted, look you.'

'Um, ah. So you are in a hurry to discard the ancient Cymric kilt are you?'

'They make one look so like a girl,' was William's shamefaced answer.

'Yet there are grown men both in Wales and in Scotland who still cling to the kilt, and are proud of it. You will be for casting off the old Saxon smock-frock next.'

''Deed no, sir. Men wear smock-frocks, women don't. Rhys wears one and Evan too.'

But, ancient or modern, no sooner had William a chance of an exchange for a short-tailed coat and a pair of knee-breeches than he felt he had made a step towards manhood, much as Davy had done before him – Davy, who went plodding along from day to day and from week to week, with scarcely a thought that did not centre in the farm, and who never troubled himself about 'whys' or 'wherefores.'

'William is not at church to-day. How is that?' remarked the vicar to Mrs. Edwards on the Whitsunday, as he took his customary stroll among his parishioners in all the importance of his wig and three-cornered hat, noting each newly flower-decked grave as he went, and perhaps making a kindly remark in passing.

''Deed, sir, I thought he would be here. He was dressed before any of us. Ales said he was proud as a peony of his new clothes, and had gone off first to show himself. He do be a strange boy.'

'Did Rhys say anything to him about them?'

'Yes, sure, he told him that now he was being dressed like a man he hoped he would cease to be playing with stones like a baby.'

'Um, ah, yes, yes. I thought as much. You need not be alarmed if William is not home until late. I can partly guess where he has gone. He is not doing any harm, my good friend. He is in much less danger than Rhys, I can assure you.'

Mrs. Edwards looked up in the vicar's expressive face, and following the glance of his pleasantly twinkling eye, her own rested on her eldest son, carefully handing Cate Griffith over the tall stile.

She knew nothing of electricity, but certainly something like an electric shock passed through her, with its instantaneous enlightenment. A moment she stood dazed, then turned to address the vicar, but he was gone, and talking with a grey-haired old couple of a son who had been lost at sea, who had no grave to be dressed with flowers that Whitsuntide.

William was forgotten in the newer care. There was no mistaking the attitude, the tender expression in the face of Rhys, or the coquettish aspect of the ruddy maiden as she placed her plump brown hand in his.

'Sure,' said the widow to herself, 'Cate could get over a stile without help. I've seen her climb a tree or get over a wall before now. That's why Mrs. Griffith's been so ready to let Cate come to the farm to help at harvest-time, or whenever we were pushed. I see it all now, and the fear lest she should go home by herself after dark, as if the road did not be straight enough. And him a boy, not twenty yet. What do the woman be thinking of? Do she be thinking I would let Cate come on the farm as Rhys' wife, when Ales and Evan get married? Oh, Rhys, Rhys, and me a widow with three younger ones to rear, look you!'

Jonet and Davy, standing close beside her, during her brief colloquy with the vicar, had no clue to the significance of his hint or his glance; but they could read the trouble on their mother's puckering brow, without suspicion of its cause.

'What be the matter, mother?' asked Jonet anxiously, sidling up to her and slipping a small palm into the larger one. 'Do you be uneasy about Willem?'

''Deed, Willem's all right. The vicar said so. You need not fret over him,' said Davy placidly. 'He will be gone to show Robert Jones his new clothes.'

'Yes, yes, sure, that will be it,' assented the widow, smoothing her ruffled countenance with an effort, unwilling to share her discovery with either Davy or Jonet, although the former was by this time quite as old as Rhys had been when he felt himself entitled to assume a general protectorate of the family.

Taking Jonet by the hand, she made her way across the churchyard more hastily than usual, barely nodding in recognition of an acquaintance who advanced a step or so in expectation of a chat. Her desire was to keep Rhys and Cate in sight, and so confirm or dispel her newly-aroused suspicions.

But there were others before her at the stile, a father and mother, with three or four young children, to be helped up the steps on one side and down the other, and by the time her turn came, Rhys and the Griffiths were well in advance, and lost to sight by a bend in the road.

Davy was always inclined to saunter along, and Jonet, however brisk at starting, began to drag heavily after the first mile on the return, encumbered by her Sunday shoes.

For all that neither William nor Rhys were at home when they got there, and the rare Sunday's dinner of boiled meat and potatoes was on the table, with buttermilk to wash it down, before the latter came hurrying in, his cheeks aglow.

The uneasy look on Mrs. Edwards' face had not been set aside with her hat and cloak – worn in all seasons on account of uncertain skies – nor had she found it as easy to conceal her displeasure with a smile, as it was to cover her best linsey-woolsey skirt with a fair linen apron.

'Has not Willem come in?' asked Rhys, glancing round the kitchen.

'No!' said his mother curtly, 'and you have not been hurrying yourself.'

'Owen Griffith kept me talking about the success of his new crop of potatoes. He says that his brothers, and Roberts, and Lloyd are all for trying them next year.'

'Potatoes, indeed!' his mother jerked out, and he looked up at her. But he set her evident ill-humour down to the absence of William, as did both Evan and Ales.

And where was William rambling that bright Whitsunday morning, when he should have been helping his mother to dress his father's grave with flowers?

Had he gone, as suggested, to parade his manly suit before his friend Robert Jones?

Not he; that would hardly have accounted for his absence from church, since the turf-cutter's cottage was on the direct road-side.

No. When the vicar was giving out his text, William Edwards was studying a 'sermon in stones,' his text being Caerphilly Castle, and he standing in blank awe and amazement beneath the barbican towers of the only drawbridge time has spared out of the original thirteen, much as he had stood in infancy overpowered by the comparative vastness of Eglwysilan's church when he was first brought face to face with it.

And now it was but a dumpy boy of nine who stood transfixed by that approach to a stronghold, 'of which the very ruins are stupendous,' a boy unread in history, who knew nothing of the Romans, or of Beli Gwar, or of Robert Fitzhamon, or of any of the conjectural first-founders, or of Edward the First who added so largely to its strength and size. He could see that it stood encircled by water in a wide plain surrounded by dark and barren mountains, but had any one informed him that it occupied an area equal to Windsor Castle he would have been no wiser, never having seen a castle before, or heard of any Windsor except the lord of the soil around his home.

With mountains he was familiar. Their grandeur did not oppress him. They were the work of the infinite God who made the whole world, who set the sun and the moon and stars high in the heavens to give us light. The creation of the universe by the Almighty hand was no new idea in the boy's mind. But that men, only men, should have put that vast pile together, its towers, its massive walls that had outlasted hundreds of years, was suggestive of possibilities and capabilities that took his breath away.

He stood there long, not so much because he was tired with his five-miles' rough walk that hot morning, but to overcome his first sensations of awe. Then he passed between the two great towers, and traversed courts and alleys, citadel, hall, chapel, whatever the pillared areas, the vast walls and arched windows, may suggest to antiquaries. To the boy they suggested only a marvellous enigma it was his fixed determination to solve some day.

In his explorations he had to scramble over the fragmentary ruins of a second drawbridge between flanking towers, over which the friendly ivy had thrown an evergreen mantle. Here he stood gazing astonished at the mass of solid masonry which had walled the castle in, and at a great arched gateway under which he passed. He groped his way down to an underground chamber where had been a smelting furnace and a mint; and from that wonder of wonders, a staircase to the turret-top.

But nothing held him so spellbound as the leaning tower, which, with chambers and passages complete, and outer walls full ten feet thick, overhung its base nearly four yards, a threatening mass that so had hung in mid air since the convulsion that had rent the tower in twain centuries before, yet held aloft as surely as the tower of Bologna or of Pisa.