The Adventures And Vagaries Of Twm Shon Catti Part 8

Once when they met on the Teivy's banks, Canopied o'er by the wild wood, Mid fragrance of flowers that graced the shade, The youth sung this song, of true lovers betrayed, An ominous song-that drew tears from the maid, For her heart was as simple as childhood.

"'Oh come to the banks of the Teivy with me, To the deep woodland glade, 'neath the shady green tree, Fearless of foemen, of guile, or of might, In the face of the day and the bright eye of light, That G.o.d and his angels may witness our troth, That G.o.d and his angels may favor us both.'

"'I'll go to the green-wood,' the lady replied, 'Fore G.o.d and his angels be fairly affied, Fearless of foemen, of guile, or of might, In the face of the day and the bright eye of light; That G.o.d and his angels may witness our troth, That G.o.d and his angels may favor us both.'

"So sung a young chief to his dear lady love, At the base of her tower-she answered above- Vile va.s.sals espied them, and flew to their lord, The lady's true lover soon fell 'neath his sword: She threw herself headlong, fulfilling her troth, And Death was the priest that united them both."

PART II.

Over the hill of Pen-garreg, the road Is seen that leads from Llandovery, Maes-y-velin's green hill is opposite, The mansion below-oft on either height The lovers are making discovery.-

But envious eyes were on the watch, And the genius of evil hover'd; The brothers, who wish'd their sister unmatch'd, For any approach of a lover watch'd, At length their two flags discover'd.

They have hatch'd a scheme to enmesh the youth, And see him at length on the mountain; His flag they answer-he runs down the hill- Now forth rush the wretches resolved to kill, And waste his young heart's warm fountain.

Like prey-beasts they hide on the Teivy's banks In the covert of thick-leaved bushes; The youth, he dashes across the river, And ardent to meet his fond receiver He seeks her fair form in the rushes.-

He deems she plays him at hide and seek, Her heart he knew was gayful- "Oh come from thy covert my Ellen dear!

Oh come forth and meet thy lover here!"

He cries in soft accents playful.

No Ellen appears-rustling steps he hears- Perhaps some perfidious stranger;- He stops in the rushes, and steals to a copse, But there not an instant for breathing stops Peril's presentiment suddenly drops, And he flies for his life from danger.

He knew not his foes, up the hill he goes, With the speed of a hart that's hunted; The brothers pursue, till fatigued they grew, To Maes-y-velin his course they knew, And eager revenge is blunted.-

They saw him enter-"the foe is snared!"

Exclaim'd then the elder brother; "To kill him surely be firmly prepared Accurst be the arm by which he is spared!

Let's stab him, or drown, or smother."

"Let's do him dead and no matter how, And our sister's fortune is ours; No brats of her's shall supplant our hope: Prepare we a dagger, a sack, and rope, For brief are the stripling's hours."

Now rush'd the youth through the mansion door.

And fell at the feet of Ellen; Ere he could speak the brothers appear, The maiden shrieks with terrific fear, The heiress of Maes-y-velin.-

She fell in a swoon, the brothers soon Gag his mouth and proceed to bind him, His hands they fasten'd behind his back, And over his head they drew a sack, They jump on his body-his rib bones crack, Till a corse on the ground they find him.

Oh G.o.d! 'twas a barbarous b.l.o.o.d.y deed; 'Twas piteous to hear his groaning: A demon's heart might relent to hear The sobs of death and convulsions drear- Oh Christ! is no merciful angel near, Call'd down by this woeful moaning?-

Oh murderous fiends! the eye of G.o.d Hath flamed on this heartless murther!

They grasp at his throat to check his breath- With knees on his breast-oh merciful death!

Thou sav'st him from anguish further.

And dead in the sack his body they bore, And sunk in a pool of Teivy; After many days when the body was found, No tongue could tell was he smother'd or drown'd, Or crush'd by men's buffets heavy.

Thus fell in his bloom the blameless youth;- Insanity seized on poor Ellen, The lovely maniac! with bosom bare, And eyes of wildness, and streaming hair, Roved frantic o'er Maes-y-velin.

She said he was thrown in the Teivy's stream, The Flower of fair Llandovery; She cross'd o'er the hills to his father's town, And he bless'd the maid like a child of his own; But Ellen was past recovery.

Rhys Prichard wept long o'er his murder'd son, And buried the hapless Ellen; He cursed her brothers-the land of their birth He cursed their mansion, its hall and hearth, And the curse is on Maes-y-velin.

Strong was the curse on the savage race, The murderers and their kindred; Their bosoms possess'd by the furies of h.e.l.l, Oft vented the scream, the curse, and the yell:- All men stood aloof and wonder'd.

They quarrell'd and stood forth in mortal strife, Each one opposed to the other; They never, oh never! are doom'd to agree, While dividing poor Ellen's property- Two murder their elder brother.

And yet the murderers still are foes, Furious and unrelenting; Each coveting all his sister's share: At length one falls in the other's snare, Ere yet of his crimes repenting.

Now lived the survivor, a man forbid, For murder his brow had branded- Shunn'd by all men, none bade him G.o.d speed, But solitude work'd wild remorse for his deed, In madness he seized on a poisonous weed, And a suicide's grave was commanded.

Maes-y-velin became a deserted spot, The roof of the mansion tumbled; The lawns and the gardens o'er-ran with weeds, And reptiles, vile emblems of h.e.l.lish deeds, Bred there-and the strong walls crumbled.-

They crumbled to dust, and fell to the earth, And strangers bought Maes-y-velin; Vain, it is said, their attempts to rebuild, Vain was their labour in garden or field, Snakes, toads, baneful weeds alone they yield, Not a stone to another adhering.

The possessors fled, and oft others came, But all their aims unavailing; The peasants protest that at midnight hour The spirit of Ellen is seen in her bower, While on Pen-garreg hill stands Llandovery's Flower, And shrieks burst from Maes-y-velin.

When Rhys had finished reading his ballad, Twm riveted his eyes on the ruins of Maes-y-velin, the two hills, the banks of the Teivy, and scenes now subordinate to the modern grandeur of the new college at Lampeter: and still remaining silent, seemed, by the force of his imagination, to bring before his eyes the whole action of this domestic tragedy. Rhys a.s.sured him that all the particulars of the murder, as narrated in the ballad, were well authenticated, both by the evidence of the unhappy young lady herself, and that of a countryman who beheld the murderers bearing the body by night, and who distinctly saw, as the moon shone upon them while in the act of casting their burthen into the river, the shining spurs of the murdered youth, projecting from the end of the sack which contained his body. But in so disordered a state was the country at the time, from the civil wars between the king and the parliament, that no cognizance was taken of the atrocious circ.u.mstance. The cursing of Maes-y-velin, and the perpetrators of the b.l.o.o.d.y deed, by the youth's father, he said was no fiction; it was set forth in a pathetic and nervous poem, in his volume of Divine Carols, ent.i.tled "Canwyll y Cymry, or the Welshman's Candle," one of the most popular books ever published in the Welsh language. With this explanation they both rose from their stony seats, and pursued their way to Llandovery.

CHAP. XIX.

A discourse on mountains. Turf-cutters, and Moor haymakers. Twm rescues the lady of Ystrad Ffin, and captures a highwayman, whom he brings in triumph to Llandovery.

HAVING travelled together a few miles further into the mountain, Twm expressed his wonder at seeing the turf-cutters and haymakers following their avocations almost side by side in this wild district. "Well,"

cried he, "I know that much has been said, sung, and written, in praise of mountain scenery; and where 'tis truly romantic as well as wild, I am a great lover of it myself; but this before us is my aversion. Here no sound salutes the ear but the lonely cry of a few melancholy kites, hungry enough to prey upon one another; and no objects strike the eye but the flat tame desert, and a few wretched cottages thinly scattered over this desolate region, whose inhabitants are miserably employed in scooping peat from the marsh for their fires, or cutting their bald thin crop of hay from the uninclosed mountain-_the gwair rhos cwtta_, or moor hay, which, dispensing with the inc.u.mbrance of a cart or sledge, the women carry home in their ap.r.o.ns, as the winter maintenance of a half-starved cow. Even the shepherds and their flocks are wise enough to keep from this gloomy seat of starvation; but the dull plodding turf-cutters are numerous enough. To me there is nothing that a.s.sociates more with squalid poverty than turf fires: the crackling f.a.ggot and the Christmas log, have their rustic characteristics; coal has its proud and solid warmth; the clay-and-culm fires of Cardigan and Pembrokeshire, formed of b.a.l.l.s, and fantastically arranged by the industrious hands of fair maidens, are bright and durable, revealing the gay faces of the cheerful semicircular group-and above all, the smokeless cleanly stone coal: but turf, smoky, ill-savored, ash creating, dusty turf-recals the marsh and moor, rain-loaded skies, and fern-thatched cottages, whose battered roofs swept by the blast, discover the rotten rafters grinning like the bare ribs of poverty; and worse than all, the joyless faces of the toil-bowed children of the desert. I heartily agree with the sentiment of the old Pennill {152a}

"How gay seems the valley with rich waving wheat, Fair lands and fair houses, with shelters so neat; While the whole feather'd choir to delight us conspires, There's nought on the mountain but turf and turf fires."

"And let me add," cried Twm, with vivacity, "as indicative of my own taste on the subject, a Triban {152b} of my own composition.-

Three things-to my mind each with loveliness teems: A vale between mountains that's threaded by streams; A neat white-wall'd cottage mid gardens and trees; And a young married pair that appreciate these."

"The mountains, like the plains and vallies," replied Rhys, "have of course their rough and unsightly portions; but so very dear to me are the sensations connected with our _Mountain Land_, that I could kiss the sod of its dullest region, when I remember how it came the refuge of our war-worsted forefathers in the days of old, as the waned star of liberty seemed to have vanished forever from our sphere." Rhys's patriotic enthusiasm rose as he proceeded. "I could as soon twit my beloved mother with the furrows which time has ploughed on her brows, as censure the homeliest part of our dear mountains, hallowed of old by the tread of freemen, when the despot foreigner usurped the vallies.

"Freedom, amid a cloudy clime, Erects her mountain throne sublime, While natives of the vales and plains Are gall'd with yokes and slavish chains;- Then shrink we ne'er, unnerved as bann'd, In the cloudy clime of the Mountain Land.

Turban'd in her folds of mist Our Mountain Land the sky hath kiss'd While on her brow the native wreath Of yellow furze and purple heath; The rural reign her vales command, And the freemen's swords of the Mountain Land."

Twm felt the observations of the curate as a rebuke for his flippancies, and was about to clear himself from all suspicion of lack of nationality; but the latter at that moment looking up at the sun, declared the day so far advanced that he must of necessity instantly mount his horse and ride with speed, so as to meet the vicar of Llandovery at the place appointed; on which, directing Twm in the route he was to take, he rode off and left him to pursue his way at leisure.

After thus parting with Mr. Rhys, Twm made his way alone, wrapped in thought, and looking neither to the right or left, for several miles, but was at length brought to a stand by the discovery that the way he trod had ceased to be either a road or beaten path; and that he was actually pacing the trackless mountain, with the disagreeable conviction that he had gone wrong, without a clue to recover the right way.

Observing a _bwlch_, or gap, parting the mountains in the distance, where they rose to a considerable elevation, he naturally concluded that the road ran through it. Acting on this opinion, he hurried on, and was much gratified to find his conjecture realized, as a good beaten road presented itself to him. He entered it, and hastened on with the utmost alacrity, till he came to a cottage on the road side, opposite to which was an immense rick of turf, that at a distance looked like a long black barn. He called at the cottage, and asked if he was right in his route to Llandovery, "Right!" squeaked a thin old man who met him at the door, "G.o.d bless you young man, you could not be more wrong, as your back is to Llandovery, and you are making straight for Trecastle."

This was mortifying intelligence; and the old man seeing Twm's chagrin, asked him to walk in and rest himself, an invitation that he gladly accepted. "What, I suppose you thought to be at Llandovery to hear the great preaching there to day?" said the man's wife, a little fat woman who was carding wool by the fire. "No," replied Twm, "I never heard of any preaching that was to be there." "That's very odd," rejoined the old man, "as the whole country has been crowding there, to hear the good Rhys Prichard, the great vicar of Llandovery." "I have heard he is very popular," said Twm. "Popular!" screamed the weazon-faced old man, as if indignant of the coldness of our hero's eulogy, "he is the shining light of our times, and hardly less than a prophet; wisely has he called his divine book the _Welshman's Candle_, for it blazes with exceeding brightness, and men find their way by it from the darkness of perdition.

When it is known that his health permits him to preach, the country hereabouts is up in swarms, to the distance of two score miles and more.

Then, the farmer forsakes his corn-field, the chapman his shop, and every tradesman and artizan quits his calling, to listen to the music of his discourse. Infirmity alone has kept me from going to hear him to-day; but my wife is no better than an infidel, and would rather listen to a profane fidler, or a vagrant harper, than to the finest preacher that ever breathed out a pious discourse."