Aylwin Part 59

'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 pa.s.sed 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.

'Ilyas 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sion 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 THeaTRE

I

Weeks pa.s.sed by. I visited all the scenes that were in the least degree a.s.sociated with Winnie.

The two places nearest to me--Fairy Glen and the Swallow Falls--which I had always. .h.i.therto 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 t.i.tania 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, Superst.i.tion. 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 pa.s.sion 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 Superst.i.tion'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 pa.s.sed 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 Ess.e.x 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 pa.s.s 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.'