Chapter XVIII: Introduction: To the Snowdon Edition of 1901 (15)

'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? Why _you_, 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) _looked_ as 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 designated Videy the 'back-bred un, that took a'ter Shuri's blazin' ole dad!' When sober his views of heredity changed; the 'back-bred un' was Sinfi.

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 to Chester, for she could both soothe and amuse me.

III

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 the _London Satirist_ appeared 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 of _The 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 do _you_ think, 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.

IV

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, 'where Winnie 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."'

V

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.'

VI

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 up
And the rocks re-echo it higher and higher
In 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 face
They 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 me
Its 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.

'"Poor child, plead on," the succouring prophet saith,
While she, with eager lips, like one who tries
To kiss a dream, stretches her arms and cries
To Heaven for help--"Plead on; such pure love-breath,
Beaching the Throne, might stay the wings of Death
That, in the Desert, fan thy father's eyes."

'The drouth-slain camels lie on every hand;
Seven sons await the morning vultures' claws;
'Mid empty water-skins and camel maws
The father sits, the last of all the band.
He mutters, drowsing o'er the moonlit sand,
"Sleep fans my brow: sleep makes us all pashas;
Or, if the wings are Death's, why Azraeel draws
A childless father from an empty land."

'"Nay," saith a Voice, "the wind of Azraeel's wings
A child's sweet breath has stilled: so God decrees:"
A camel's bell comes tinkling on the breeze.
Filling the Bedouin's brain with bubble of springs
And scent of flowers and shadow of wavering trees,
Where, from a tent, a little maiden sings.

'Between this reading of Nature, which makes her but "the superficial film" of the immensity of God, and that which finds a mystic heart of love and beauty beating within the bosom of Nature herself, I know no real difference. Sufism, in some form or another, could not possibly be confined to Asia. The Greeks, though strangers to the mystic element of that Beauty-worship which in Asia became afterwards sufism, could not have exhibited a passion for concrete beauty such as theirs without feeling that, deeper than Tartarus, stronger than Destiny and Death, the great heart of Nature is beating to the tune of universal love and beauty.'

This was followed by a still more mystical poem called 'The Persian Slave Girl's Progress to Paradise,' showing the Omnipotence of Love. [Footnote]

[Footnote: This poem of Philip Aylwin's appears now in the present writer's volume, _The Coming of Love_.]

XIV

SINFI'S COUP DE THÉÂTRE

I

Weeks passed by. I visited all the scenes that were in the least degree associated with Winnie.

The two places nearest to me--Fairy Glen and the Swallow Falls--which I had always hitherto avoided on account of their being the favourite haunts of tourists--I left to the last, because I specially desired to see them by moonlight. With regard to Fairy Glen, I had often heard Winnie say how she used to go there by moonlight and imagine the Tylwyth Teg or the fairy scenes of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ which I had told her of long ago--imagine them so vividly that she could actually see, on a certain projecting rock in the cliffs that enclose the dell, the figure of Titania dressed in green, with a wreath of leaves round her head. And with regard to the Swallow Falls, I remembered only too well her telling me, on the night of the landslip, the Welsh legend of Sir John Wynn, who died in the seventeenth century, and whose ghost, imprisoned at the bottom of the Falls on account of his ill deeds in the flesh, was heard to shriek amid the din of the waters. On that fatal night she told me that on certain rare occasions, when the moon shines straight down the chasm, the wail will become an agonised shriek. I had often wondered what natural sound this was which could afford such pabulum to my old foe, Superstition. So one night, when the moon was shining brilliantly--so brilliantly that the light seemed very little feebler than that of day--I walked in the direction of the Swallow Falls.

Being afraid that I should not get much privacy at the Falls, I started late. But I came upon only three or four people on the road. I had forgotten that my own passion for moonlight was entirely a Romany inheritance. I had forgotten that a family of English tourists will carefully pull down the blinds and close the shutters, in order to enjoy the luxury of candlelight, lamp-light, or gas, when a Romany will throw wide open the tent's mouth to enjoy the light he loves most of all--'chonesko dood,' as he calls the moonlight. As I approached the Swallow Falls Hotel, I lingered to let my fancy feast in anticipation on the lovely spectacle that awaited me. When I turned into the wood I encountered only one person, a lady, and she hurried back to the hotel as soon as I approached the river.

Following the slippery path as far as it led down the dell, I stopped at the brink of a pool about a dozen yards, apparently, from the bottom, and looked up at the water. Bursting like a vast belt of molten silver out of an eerie wilderness of rocks and trees, the stream, as it tumbled down between high walls of cliff to the platform of projecting rocks around the pool at the edge of which I stood, divided into three torrents, which themselves were again divided and scattered by projecting boulders into cascades before they fell into the gulf below. The whole seemed one wide cataract of living moonlight that made the eyes ache with beauty.

Amid the din of the water I listened for the wail which had so deeply impressed Winifred, and certainly there was what may be described as a sound within a sound, which ears so attuned to every note of Superstition's gamut as Winifred's might easily accept as the wail of Sir John Wynn's ghost.

There was no footpath down to the bottom, but I descended without any great difficulty, though I was now soaked in spray. Here the mysterious human sound seemed to be less perceptible amid the din of the torrent than from the platform where I had stayed to listen to it. But when I climbed up again to the spot by the mid-pool where I had originally stood, a strange sensation came to me. My recollection of Winnie's words on the night of the landslip came upon me with such overmastering power that the noise of the cataract seemed changed to the sound of billows tumbling on Raxton sands, and the 'wail' of Sir John Wynn seemed changed to that shriek from Raxton cliff which appalled Winnie as it appalled me.

The following night I passed into a moonlight as bright as that which had played me such fantastic tricks at the Swallow Falls.

It was not until I had crossed the bridge over the Conway, and was turning to the right in the direction of Fairy Glen, that I fully realised how romantic the moonlight was. Every wooded hill and every precipice, whether craggy and bald or feathered with pines, was bathed in light that would have made an Irish bog, or an Essex marsh, or an Isle of Ely fen, a land of poetry.

When I reached Pont Llyn-yr-Afange (Beaver Pool Bridge) I lingered to look down the lovely lane on the left, through which I was to pass in order to reach the rocky dell of Fairy Glen, for it was perfumed, not with the breath of the flowers now asleep, but with the perfume I love most of all, the night's floating memory of the flowery breath of day.

Suddenly I felt some one touching my elbow. I turned round. It was Rhona Boswell. I was amazed to see her, for I thought that all my Gypsy friends, Boswells, Lovells, and the rest, were still attending the horse-fairs in the Midlands and Eastern Counties.

'We've only just got here,' said Rhona; 'wussur luck that we got here at all. I wants to get back to dear Gypsy Dell and Rington Wood; that's what I wants to do.'

'Where is the camp?' I asked.

'Same place, twix Bettws and Capel Curig.'

She had been to the bungalow, she told me, with a message from Sinfi. This message was that she particularly wished to meet me at Mrs. Davies's cottage--'not at the bungalow'--on the following night.

'She'll go there to-morrow mornin',' said Rhona, 'and make things tidy for you; but she won't expect you till night, same time as she met you there fust. She's got a key o' the door, she says, wot you gev her.'

I was not so surprised at Sinfi's proposed place of meeting as I should have been had I not remembered her resolution not to return to the bungalow, and not to let me return to the camp.

'You must be sure to go to meet her at the cottage to-morrow night, else you'll be too late.'

'Why too late?' I asked.

'Well,' said Rhona, 'I can't say as I knows why ezackly. But I know she's bin' an' bought beautiful dresses at Chester, or somewheres,--an' I think she's goin' to be married the day arter to-morrow.'

'Married to whom?'

'Well, I can't say as I rightly knows,' said Rhona.

'Do you know whether Mr. Cyril is in Wales?' I asked.

'Yes,' said Rhona, 'him and the funny un are not far from Capel Curig. Now I come to think on't, it's mose likely Mr. Cyril as she's a-goin' to marry, for I know it ain't no Romany chal. It _can't_ be the funny un,' added she, laughing.

'But where's the wedding to take place?'

'I can't say as I knows ezackly,' said Rhona; 'but I thinks it's by Knockers' Llyn if it ain't on the top o' Snowdon.'

'Good heavens, girl!' I said. 'What on earth makes you think that? That pretty little head of yours is stuffed with the wildest nonsense. I ran make nothing out of you, so good-night. Tell her I'll be there.'

And I was leaving her to walk down the lane when I turned back and said, 'How long has Sinfi been at the camp?'

'On'y jist come. She's bin away from us for a long while,' said Rhona.

And then she looked as if she was tempted to reveal some secret that she was bound not to tell.

'Sinfi's been very bad,' she went on, 'but she's better now. Her daddy says she's under a cuss. She's been a-wastin' away like, but she's better now.'

'So it's Sinfi who is under a curse now,' I said to myself. 'I suppose Superstition has at last turned her brain. This perhaps explains Rhona's mad story.'

'Does anybody but you think she's going to be married?' I asked her. 'Does her father think so?'

'Her daddy says it ain't Sinfi as is goin' to be married; but I think it's Sinfi! An' you'll know all about it the day arter to-morrow.' And she tripped away in the direction of the camp.

Lost in a whirl of thoughts and speculations, I turned into Fairy Glen. And now, below me, lay the rocky dell so dearly beloved by Winnie; and there I walked in such a magic web of light and shade as can only be seen in that glen when the moon hangs over it in a certain position.

I descended the steps to the stream and sat down for a time on one of the great boulders and asked myself if this was the very boulder on which Winnie used to sit when she conjured up her childish visions of fairyland. And by that sweet thought the beauty of the scene became intensified. There, while the unbroken torrent of the Conway--glittering along the narrow gorge of the glen between silvered walls of rock as upright as the turreted bastions of a castle--seemed to flash a kind of phosphorescent light of its own upon the flowers and plants and sparsely scattered trees along the sides, I sat and passed into Winifred's own dream, and the Tylwyth Teg, which to Winnie represented Oberon and Titania and the whole group of fairies, swept before me.

Awaking from this dream, I looked up the wall of the cliff to enjoy one more sight of the magical beauty, when there fell upon my eyes, or seemed to fall, a sight that, though I felt it must be a delusion, took away my breath. Standing on a piece of rock that was flush with one of the steps by which I had descended was a slender girlish figure, so lissom that it might have been the famous 'Queen of the Fair People.'

'Never,' I said to myself, 'was there an optical illusion so perfect. I can see the moonlight playing upon her hair. But the hair is not golden, as the hair of the Queen of the Tylwyth Teg should be; it is dark as Winnie's own.'

Then the face turned and she looked at the river, and then I exclaimed 'Winifred!' And then Fairy Glen vanished and I was at Raxton standing by a cottage door in the moonlight. I was listening to a voice--that one voice to whose music every chord of life within me was set for ever, which said,

'I should have to come in the winds, and play around you on the sands. I should have to peep over the clouds and watch you. I should have to follow you about wherever you went.'

The sight vanished. Although I had no doubt that what I had seen was an hallucination, when I moved farther on and stood and gazed at the stream as it went winding round the mossy cliffs to join the Lledr, I felt that Winnie was by my side, her hand in mine, and that we were children together. And when I mounted the steps and strolled along the path that leads to the plantation where the moonlight, falling through the leaves, covered the ground with what seemed symbolical arabesques of silver and grey and purple, I felt the pressure of little fingers that seemed to express 'How beautiful!' And when I stood gazing through the opening in the landscape, and saw the rocks gleaming in the distance and the water down the Lledr valley, I saw the sweet young face gazing in mine with the smile of the delight that illumined it on the Wilderness Road when she discoursed of birds and the wind.

The vividness of the vision of Fairy Glen drove out for a time all other thoughts. The livelong night my brain seemed filled with it.

'My eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest,'

I said to myself as I lay awake. So full, indeed, was my mind of this one subject that even Rhona's strange message from Sinfi was only recalled at intervals. While I was breakfasting, however, this incident came fully back to me. Either Rhona's chatter about Sinfi's reason for wanting to see me was the nonsense that had floated into Rhona's own brain, the brain of a love-sick girl to whom everything spelt marriage--or else poor Sinfi's mind had become unhinged.

II

As I was to sleep at the cottage, and as I knew not what part I might have to play in Sinfi's wild frolic, I told the servants that any letters which might reach the bungalow next morning were to be sent at once to the cottage, should I not have returned thence.

At about the hour, as far as I could guess, when I had first knocked at the cottage door at the beginning of my search for Winnie, I stood there again. The door was on the latch. I pushed it open.

The scene I then saw was so exact a repetition of what had met my eyes when for the first time I passed under that roof, that it did not seem as though it could be real; it seemed as though it must be a freak of memory: the same long low room, the same heavy beams across the ceiling, the same three chairs, standing in the same places where they stood then, the same table, and upon it the crwth and bow. There was a brisk fire, and over it hung the kettle--the same kettle as then. There were on the walls the same pictures, with the ruddy fingers of the fire-gleam playing upon them and illuminating them in the same pathetic way, and in front of the fire sitting upon the same chair, was a youthful female figure--not Winnie's figure, taller than hers, and grander than hers--the figure of Sinfi, her elbows resting upon her knees, and her face sunk meditatively between her hands.

After standing for fully half a minute gazing at her, I went up to her, and laying my hand upon her shoulder, I said, 'This is a good sight for the Swimming Rei, Sinfi.'

At the touch of my hand a thrill seemed to dart through her frame; she leaped up and stared wildly in my face. Her features became contorted by terror--as horribly contorted as Winnie's had been in the same spot and under the same circumstances. Exactly the same terrible words fell upon my ear:--

'Let his children be vagabonds and beg their bread: let them seek it also out of desolate places. So saith the Lord. Amen.'

Then she fell on the floor insensible.

At first I was too astonished, awed, and bewildered to stir from the spot where I was standing. Then I knelt down, and raising her shoulders, placed her head on my knee. For a time the expression of horror on her pale features was fixed as though graven in marble. A jug of water, from which the kettle had been supplied, stood on the floor in the recess. I sprinkled some water over her face. The muscles relaxed, she opened her eyes; the seizure had passed. She recognised me, and at once the old brave smile I knew so well passed over her face. Rhona's words about the curse and the purchase of the dresses seemed explained now. Long brooding over Winnie's terrible fate had unhinged her mind.