Aylwin Part 20

'Thankee for the money, Mister Hal, anyhow,' said the old creature.

'You was allus a liberal 'un, you was. But as to what Tom could 'a dun with the carpus, I'm allus heer'd that you may dew anythink _with_ any-think, if you on'y send it carriage-paid to Lunnon,'

I left the house in anger and disgust. No tidings could I get of Winifred in Raxton or Graylingham.

By this time I was thoroughly worn out, and obliged to go home. My anxiety had become nearly insupportable. All night I walked up and down my bedroom, like a caged animal, cursing Superst.i.tion, cursing Convention, and all the other follies that had combined to destroy her. It was not till the next day that the true state of the case was made known to me in the following manner: At the end of the town lived the widow of Shales, the tailor. Winifred and I had often, in our childish days, stood and watched old Shales, sitting cross-legged on a board in the window, at his work, when Winifred would whisper to me, 'How nice it must be to be a tailor!'

As I pa.s.sed this shop I now saw that on the same board was sitting a person in whom Winifred had taken still stronger interest. This was a diminutive imitation of the deceased, in the person of his hump-backed son, a little man of about twenty-four, who might, as far as appearance went, have been any age from twenty to eighty, with a pale anxious face like his mother's. He was st.i.tching at a coat with, apparently, the same pair of scissors by his side that used to delight us two children. Standing by the side of the board, and looking on with a skilled intelligence shining from her pale eyes, was Mrs. Shales, with an infant in her arms--a wasted little grandchild wrapt in a plaid shawl, apparently smoking a chibouque, but in reality sucking vigorously at the mouthpiece of a baby's bottle, which it was clasping deftly with its pink little fingers.

Mrs. Shales beckoned me mysteriously into her shop, and then into the little parlour behind it, where she used to sit and watch the customers through the green muslin blind of the gla.s.s door, like a spider in its web. Young Shales, who left his board, followed us, and they then gave me some news that at once decided my course of action.

They told me that one morning, after her frightful shock, Winifred had encountered Shales, who was taking, a holiday, and employing it in catching young crabs among the stones. Winifred, who had a great liking for the hump-backed tailor, had come up to him and talked in a dazed way. Shales, pitying her condition, had induced her to go home with him; and then it had occurred to him to go and inquire at the Hall what suggestion could be made concerning her at a house where her father had been so well known. He could not see me; I was ill in bed. He saw my mother, who at once suggested that Winifred should be taken to Wales, to an aunt with whom, according to Wynne, she had been living. (No one but myself knew anything of Wynne's affairs, and my mother, though she had heard of the aunt, had not, as I then believed, heard of her death.) She proposed that Shales himself should contrive to take Winifred to Wales. 'She had reasons,' she said, 'for wishing that Winifred should not be handed over to the local parish officer.' She offered to pay Shales liberally for going.

_I_, however, was to know nothing of this. Her object, of course, was to get Winifred out of my way. The aunt's address was furnished by a Mr. Lacon of Dullingham, an old friend of Wynne's, who also, it seems, was ignorant of the aunt's death. This aunt, a sister of Winifred's mother, named Davies, the widow of a sea captain who had once known better days, resided in an old cottage between Bettws y Coed and Capel Curig. Shales had found no difficulty in persuading Winifred to go with him, for she had now sunk into a condition of dazed stupor, and was very docile.

They started on their long journey across England by rail, and everything went well till they got into Wales, when Winifred's stupor seemed to be broken into by the familiar scenery; her wits became alive again. Then an idea seemed to seize her that she was pursued by me, as the messenger bearing my dead father's curse. The appearance of any young man bearing the remotest resemblance to me frightened her. At last, before they reached Bettws y Coed, she had escaped, and was lost among the woods. Shales had made every effort to find her, but without avail, and was compelled at last, by the demands of his business, to give up the quest. He had returned on the previous evening, and my mother had enjoined him not to tell me what had been done, though she seemed much distressed at hearing that Winnie was lost, and was about to send others into Wales in order to find her, if possible. Shales, however, had determined to tell me, as the matter, he said, lay upon his conscience.

On getting this news I went straight home, ordered a portmanteau to be packed, and placed in it all my ready cash. Before starting I sat down to write a letter to my uncle. On hearing of my movements, my mother came to me in great agitation. In her eyes there was that haggard expression which I thought I understood. Already she had begun to feel that she and she alone was responsible for whatsoever calamities might fall upon the helpless deserted girl she had sent away. Already she had begun to feel the pangs of that remorse which afterwards stung her so cruelly that not all Winnie's woes, nor all mine, were so dire as hers. There are some natures that feel themselves responsible for all the unforeseen, as well as for all the foreseen, consequences of their acts. My mother was one of these. I rose as she entered, offered her a seat, and then sat down again.

She inquired whither I was going.

'To North Wales,' I said.

She stood aghast. But she now understood that grief had made me a man.

'You are going,' said she, 'after the daughter of the scoundrel who desecrated your father's tomb?'

'I am going after the young lady whom I intend to marry.'

'Wynne's daughter marry my only son! Never!'

I proceeded with my letter.

'I will write to your uncle Aylwin at once. I will tell him you are going to marry that miscreant's daughter, and he will disinherit you.'

'In that case, mother,' I said, rising from the table, 'I need not trouble myself to finish my letter; for I was writing to him, telling him the same thing. Still, perhaps I had better send mine too,' I continued. 'I should like at least to remain on friendly terms with him, he is so good to me'; and I resumed my seat at the writing-table.

'Henry,' said my mother, after a second or two, 'I think you had better _not_ write to your uncle; it might only make matters worse.

You had better leave it to me.'

'Thank you, mother, the letter is finished,' I replied as I sealed it up, 'and will be sent. Good-bye, dear,' I said, taking her hand and kissing it. 'You knew not what you did, and I know you did it for the best.'

'When do you return, Henry?' asked she, in a conquered and sad tone, that caused me many a pang to remember afterwards.

'That is altogether uncertain,' I answered. 'I go to follow Winifred.

If I find her alive I shall marry her, if she will marry me, unless permanent insanity prove a barrier. If she is dead'--(I restrained myself from saying aloud what I said to myself)--'I shall still follow her.'

'The daughter of the scoundrel!' she murmured, her lips grey with suppressed pa.s.sion.

'Mother,' I said, 'let us not part in anger. The sword of Fate is between us. When I was at school I made a certain vow. The vow was that I would woo and win but one woman upon earth--the daughter of the man who has since violated my father's tomb. I have lately made a second vow, that, until she is found, I shall devote my life to the quest of Winifred Wynne. If you think that I am likely to be deterred by fears of being disinherited by your family, open and read my letter to my uncle. I have there told him whom I intend to marry.'

'Mad, mad boy!' said my mother. 'Society will--'

'You have once or twice before mentioned society, mother. If I find Winifred Wynne, I shall a.s.suredly marry her, unless prevented by the one obstacle I have mentioned. If I marry her I shall, if it so please me and her, take her into society.'

'Into society!' she replied, with ineffable scorn.

'And I shall say to society, "Here is my wife.'"

'And when society asks, "Who _is_ your wife?'"

'I shall reply, "She is the daughter of the drunken organist who desecrated my father's tomb, though that concerns you not:--her own speciality, as you see, is that she is the flower of all girlhood."'

'And when society rejects this earthly paragon?'

'Then I shall reject society.'

'Reject society, boy!' said my mother. 'Why, Cyril Aylwin himself, the bohemian painter who has done his best to cheapen and vulgarise our name, is not a more reckless, lawless leveller than you. And, good heavens! to him, and perhaps afterwards to you, will come--the coronet.'

And she left the room.

III

WINIFRED'S DUKKERIPEN

I

I need not describe my journey to North Wales. On reaching Bettws y Coed I turned into the hotel there--'The Royal Oak'--famished; for, as fast as trains could carry me, I had travelled right across England, leaving rest and meals to chance. I found the hotel full of English painters, whom the fine summer had attracted thither as usual. The landlord got me a bed in the village. A six-o'clock _table d'hote_ was going on when I arrived, and I joined it. Save myself, the guests were, I think, landscape painters to a man. They had been sketching in the neighbourhood. I thought I had never met so genial and good-natured a set of men, and I have since often wondered what they thought of me, who met such courteous and friendly advances as they made towards me in a temper that must have seemed to them morose or churlish and stupid. Before the dinner was over another tourist entered--a fresh-complexioned young Englishman in spectacles, who, sitting next to me, did at length, by force of sheer good-humour, contrive to get into a desultory kind of conversation with me, and, as far as I remember, he talked well. He was not an artist, I found, but an amateur geologist and antiquary. His hobby was not like that fatal antiquarianism of my father's, which had worked so much mischief, but the harmless quest of flint implements. His talk about his collection of flints, however, sent my mind off to Flinty Point and the never-to-be-forgotten flint-built walls of Raxton church.

After dinner, coffee, liquors, and tobacco being introduced into the dining-room, I got up, intending to roam about outside the hotel till bedtime; but the rain, I found, was falling in torrents. I was compelled to return to my friend of the 'flints.' At that moment one of the artists plunged into a comic song, and by the ecstatic look of the company I knew that a purgatorial time was before me. I resigned myself to my fate. Song followed song, until at last even my friend of the flints struck up the ballad of _Little Billee_, whose lugubrious refrain seemed to 'set the table in a roar'; but to me it will always be a.s.sociated with sickening heartache.

As soon as the rain ceased I left the hotel and went to the room in the little town the landlord had engaged for me. There, with the roar in my ears of the mountain streams (swollen by the rains), I went to bed and, strange to say, slept.

Next morning I rose early, breakfasted at 'The Royal Oak' as soon as I could get attended to, and proceeded in the direction in which, according to what I had gathered from various sources, Mrs. Davies had lived. This led me through a valley and by the side of a stream, whose cascades I succeeded, after many efforts, in crossing. After a while, however, I found that I had taken a wrong track, and was soon walking in the contrary direction. I will not describe that long dreary walk in a drenching rain, with nothing but the base of the mountain visible, all else being lost in clouds and mist.

After blundering through marshy and boggy hillocks for miles, I found myself at last in the locality indicated to me. Arriving at a roadside public-house, I entered it, and on inquiry was vexed to find that I had again been misdirected. I slept there, and in the morning started again on my quest. I was now a long way off my destination, but had at least the satisfaction of knowing that I was on the right road at last. In the afternoon I reached another wayside inn, very similar to that in which I had slept. I walked up at once to the landlord (a fat little Englishman who looked like a Welshman, with black eyes and a head of hair like a black door-mat), and asked him if he had known Mrs. Davies. He said he had, but seemed anxious to a.s.sure me that he was a Chester man and 'not a Taffy.' She had died, he told me, not long since. But he had known more of her niece, Winifred Wynne (or, as most people called her, Winifred Davies); for, said he, 'she was a queer kind of outdoor creature that everybody knew.--as fond of the rain and mist as sensible folk are fond of sunshine.'

'Where did she live?' I inquired.

'You must have pa.s.sed the very door,' said the man. And then he indicated a pretty little cottage by the roadside which I had pa.s.sed, not far from the lake. Mrs. Davies (he told me) had lived there with her niece till the aunt died.

'Then you knew Winifred Wynne?' I said. There was to me a romantic kind of interest about a man who had seen Winifred in Wales.

'Knew her well,' said he. 'She was a Carnarvon gal--tremenjus fond o'

the sea--and a rare pretty gal she was.'

'Pretty gal she _is_, you might ha' said, Mr. Blyth,' a woman's voice exclaimed from the settle beneath the window. 'She's about in these parts at this very moment, though Jim Burton there says it's her ghose. But do ghoses eat and drink? that's what _I_ want to know.

Besides, if anybody's like to know the difference between Winnie Wynne and Winnie Wynne's ghose, I should say it's most likely me.'