Aylwin Part 60

'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 Superst.i.tion 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 phosph.o.r.escent light of its own upon the flowers and plants and spa.r.s.ely scattered trees along the sides, I sat and pa.s.sed into Winifred's own dream, and the Tylwyth Teg, which to Winnie represented Oberon and t.i.tania 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 repet.i.tion of what had met my eyes when for the first time I pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 pa.s.sed. She recognised me, and at once the old brave smile I knew so well pa.s.sed 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.

'My girl, my brave girl,' I said, 'have you, then, felt our sorrow so deeply? Have you so fully shared poor Winnie's pain that your nerves have given way at last? You are suffering through sympathy, Sinfi; you are suffering poor Winnie's great martyrdom.'

'Oh, it ain't that!' she said, 'but how I must have skeared you!'

She got up and sat upon the chair in a much more vigorous way than I could have expected after such a seizure.

'I am so sorry,' she said. 'It was the sudden feel o' your hand on my shoulder that done it. It seemed to burn me like, and then it made my blood seem scaldin' hot. If I'd only 'a' seed you come through the door I shouldn't have had the fit. The doctor told me the fits wur all gone now, and I feel sure as this is the last on 'em. You must go to Knockers' Llyn with me to-morrow mornin' early. I want you to go at the same time that we started when we tried that mornin' to find Winnie.'

'Then Rhona's story is true,' I thought. 'Her delusion is that she is going to Knockers' Llyn to be married.'

'The weather's goin' to be just the same as it was then,' she said, 'and when we get to Knockers' Llyn where you two breakfasted together, I want to play the crwth and sing the song just as I did then.'

She made no allusion to a wedding. Getting up and pouring the boiling water from the kettle into the teapot, 'Something tells me,' she went on, 'that when I touch my crwth to-morrow, and when I sing them words by the side of Knockers' Llyn, you'll see the picture you want to see, the livin' mullo o' Winnie.'

'Still no allusion to a wedding, but no doubt that will soon come,' I murmured.

'I want to go the same way we went that day, and I want for you and me to see everythink as we seed it then from fust to last.'

I was haunted by Rhona Boswell's words, and wondered when she would begin talking about the wedding at Knockers' Llyn.

She never once alluded to it; but at intervals when the talk between us flagged I could hear her muttering, 'He must see everythink just as he seed it then from fust to last, and then it's good-bye for ever.'

At last she said, 'I've had both the rooms upstairs made tidy to sleep in--one for you and one for me. I'll call you in the mornin' at the proper time. Goodnight.'

I was not sorry to get this summary dismissal and be alone with my thoughts. When I got to bed I was kept awake by recalling the sight I saw on entering the cottage. There seemed no other explanation of it than this, the tragedy of Winifred had touched Sinfi's sympathetic soul too deeply. Her imagination had seized upon the spectacle of Winifred in one of her fits, and had caused so serious a disturbance of her nervous system that through sheer fascination of repulsion her face mimicked it exactly as Winifred's face had mimicked the original spectacle of horror on the sands.

III

It was not yet dawn when I was aroused from the fitful slumber into which I had at last fallen by a sharp knocking at the door. When I answered the summons by 'All right, Sinfi,' and heard her footsteps descend the stairs, the words of Rhona Boswell again came to me.

I found that I must return to the bungalow to get my bath.

The startled servant who let me in asked if there was anything the matter. I explained my early rising by telling him that I was merely going to Knockers' Llyn to see the sunrise. He gave me a letter which had come on the previous evening, and had been addressed by mistake to Carnarvon. As the handwriting was new to me, I felt sure that it was only an unimportant missive from some stranger, and I put it into my pocket without opening it.

On my return I found Sinfi in the little room where we had supped. I guessed that an essential part of her crazy project was that we should breakfast at the llyn.