The Making of William Edwards Part 14

Mrs. Edwards looked up in the vicar's expressive face, and following the glance of his pleasantly twinkling eye, her own rested on her eldest son, carefully handing Cate Griffith over the tall stile.

She knew nothing of electricity, but certainly something like an electric shock pa.s.sed through her, with its instantaneous enlightenment.

A moment she stood dazed, then turned to address the vicar, but he was gone, and talking with a grey-haired old couple of a son who had been lost at sea, who had no grave to be dressed with flowers that Whitsuntide.

William was forgotten in the newer care. There was no mistaking the att.i.tude, the tender expression in the face of Rhys, or the coquettish aspect of the ruddy maiden as she placed her plump brown hand in his.

'Sure,' said the widow to herself, 'Cate could get over a stile without help. I've seen her climb a tree or get over a wall before now. _That's_ why Mrs. Griffith's been so ready to let Cate come to the farm to help at harvest-time, or whenever we were pushed. I see it all now, and the fear lest she should go home by herself after dark, as if the road did not be straight enough. And him a boy, not twenty yet. What do the woman be thinking of? Do she be thinking I would let Cate come on the farm as Rhys' wife, when Ales and Evan get married? Oh, Rhys, Rhys, and me a widow with three younger ones to rear, look you!'

Jonet and Davy, standing close beside her, during her brief colloquy with the vicar, had no clue to the significance of his hint or his glance; but they could read the trouble on their mother's puckering brow, without suspicion of its cause.

'What be the matter, mother?' asked Jonet anxiously, sidling up to her and slipping a small palm into the larger one. 'Do you be uneasy about Willem?'

"Deed, Willem's all right. The vicar said so. You need not fret over him,' said Davy placidly. 'He will be gone to show Robert Jones his new clothes.'

'Yes, yes, sure, that will be it,' a.s.sented the widow, smoothing her ruffled countenance with an effort, unwilling to share her discovery with either Davy or Jonet, although the former was by this time quite as old as Rhys had been when he felt himself ent.i.tled to a.s.sume a general protectorate of the family.

Taking Jonet by the hand, she made her way across the churchyard more hastily than usual, barely nodding in recognition of an acquaintance who advanced a step or so in expectation of a chat. Her desire was to keep Rhys and Cate in sight, and so confirm or dispel her newly-aroused suspicions.

But there were others before her at the stile, a father and mother, with three or four young children, to be helped up the steps on one side and down the other, and by the time her turn came, Rhys and the Griffiths were well in advance, and lost to sight by a bend in the road.

Davy was always inclined to saunter along, and Jonet, however brisk at starting, began to drag heavily after the first mile on the return, enc.u.mbered by her Sunday shoes.

For all that neither William nor Rhys were at home when they got there, and the rare Sunday's dinner of boiled meat and potatoes was on the table, with b.u.t.termilk to wash it down, before the latter came hurrying in, his cheeks aglow.

The uneasy look on Mrs. Edwards' face had not been set aside with her hat and cloak--worn in all seasons on account of uncertain skies--nor had she found it as easy to conceal her displeasure with a smile, as it was to cover her best linsey-woolsey skirt with a fair linen ap.r.o.n.

'Has not Willem come in?' asked Rhys, glancing round the kitchen.

'No!' said his mother curtly, 'and _you_ have not been hurrying yourself.'

'Owen Griffith kept me talking about the success of his new crop of potatoes. He says that his brothers, and Roberts, and Lloyd are all for trying them next year.'

'Potatoes, indeed!' his mother jerked out, and he looked up at her. But he set her evident ill-humour down to the absence of William, as did both Evan and Ales.

And where was William rambling that bright Whitsunday morning, when he should have been helping his mother to dress his father's grave with flowers?

Had he gone, as suggested, to parade his manly suit before his friend Robert Jones?

Not he; that would hardly have accounted for his absence from church, since the turf-cutter's cottage was on the direct road-side.

No. When the vicar was giving out his text, William Edwards was studying a 'sermon in stones,' his text being Caerphilly Castle, and he standing in blank awe and amazement beneath the barbican towers of the only drawbridge time has spared out of the original thirteen, much as he had stood in infancy overpowered by the comparative vastness of Eglwysilan's church when he was first brought face to face with it.

And now it was but a dumpy boy of nine who stood transfixed by that approach to a stronghold, 'of which the very ruins are stupendous,' a boy unread in history, who knew nothing of the Romans, or of Beli Gwar, or of Robert Fitzhamon, or of any of the conjectural first-founders, or of Edward the First who added so largely to its strength and size. He could see that it stood encircled by water in a wide plain surrounded by dark and barren mountains, but had any one informed him that it occupied an area equal to Windsor Castle he would have been no wiser, never having seen a castle before, or heard of any Windsor except the lord of the soil around his home.

With mountains he was familiar. Their grandeur did not oppress him. They were the work of the infinite G.o.d who made the whole world, who set the sun and the moon and stars high in the heavens to give us light. The creation of the universe by the Almighty hand was no new idea in the boy's mind. But that men, only _men_, should have put that vast pile together, its towers, its ma.s.sive walls that had outlasted hundreds of years, was suggestive of possibilities and capabilities that took his breath away.

He stood there long, not so much because he was tired with his five-miles' rough walk that hot morning, but to overcome his first sensations of awe. Then he pa.s.sed between the two great towers, and traversed courts and alleys, citadel, hall, chapel, whatever the pillared areas, the vast walls and arched windows, may suggest to antiquaries. To the boy they suggested only a marvellous enigma it was his fixed determination to solve _some_ day.

In his explorations he had to scramble over the fragmentary ruins of a second drawbridge between flanking towers, over which the friendly ivy had thrown an evergreen mantle. Here he stood gazing astonished at the ma.s.s of solid masonry which had walled the castle in, and at a great arched gateway under which he pa.s.sed. He groped his way down to an underground chamber where had been a smelting furnace and a mint; and from that wonder of wonders, a staircase to the turret-top.

But nothing held him so spellbound as the leaning tower, which, with chambers and pa.s.sages complete, and outer walls full ten feet thick, overhung its base nearly four yards, a threatening ma.s.s that so had hung in mid air since the convulsion that had rent the tower in twain centuries before, yet held aloft as surely as the tower of Bologna or of Pisa.

Nothing knew William of these, or of battles or sieges, or of the force of water let in on molten metal; but he could wonder how the stones held together, and he could argue with himself that what had been done might be done.

Aladdin's enchanted garden of precious stones was nothing to what Caerphilly Castle was to the boy William Edwards.

CHAPTER XIII.

MAN PROPOSES.

Although, being warned by previous experience, William had stuffed his new pockets with bread before leaving home in the morning, he found that was a sorry subst.i.tute for a hearty dinner, and when he limped home in the waning light of the long summer evening, supper at the farm was over and cleared away. It was a doleful prospect, for there was an aching void in his interior that all the wonders of Caerphilly Castle had not served to fill.

He had left home jauntily enough in the morning, but give any lad of his years a ten-miles' walk on a hot summer day, on a rough road up hill and down dale, and add a couple more miles of scrambling over ruins, and I venture to say all the jauntiness would be taken out of him. He would look as dusty and limp and jaded as did William Edwards, and his secret enthusiasm would not prevent a wistful look at the table, bare of all save crumbs and milky rings where mugs had been.

Rhys had stood propping up the door-post as he ascended the stony lane, and entered the enclosure in front of the house by the stile.

'What do you mean by coming home at this time of night?' he cried sharply, catching his brother by the shoulder. 'Where have you been all day, you vagabond, wearing the shoes off your feet?'

'I've not been after Cate Griffith,' was flung back in retort, and, as if a stone had struck him, the grip of Rhys on the shoulder relaxed, to let the 'vagabond' pa.s.s in.

The empty table was not more expressive to him than was the averted countenance of his mother, who sat on the high-backed settle, her brow clouded, her unseeing eyes steadfastly gazing at the low hearth where the embers were smouldering into white ashes. Probably she did not see him as he dropped wearily down on a three-legged stool opposite.

Davy sat at the table, half asleep, his face hidden on his folded arms.

Evan was busy in the farmyard. He could hear his wooden shoes clattering over the stones. Ales was going in and out.

Jonet, who had been watching for William's return, with her light-brown head and half her body stretched out of the bedroom window, came noiselessly across the wide kitchen. Her arm stole lovingly around his neck. 'You are tired, Willem; do you be hungry?'

He gave her hand a squeeze and nodded. Her bare feet were off towards the dairy.

There was a whispering in the pa.s.sage. In a few minutes Ales brought in a mug of b.u.t.termilk and a great hunch of brown bread.

'Here,' she cried, 'eat that; though you don't deserve it, going off no one knows where.'

He thanked her for the unhoped-for supper, but he did not tell her where he had been, though he knew she had an old mother living somewhere in Caerphilly. Whereabouts he did not know, and, having no news of the poor rheumatic old woman, he munched his bread in silence.

His mother never raised her head. If she saw him she made no sign. Rhys had been away all the afternoon. That lay heavier on her heart than any wanderings of William, though _he_ thought otherwise. There was no red-headed Cate lying in wait for her youngest born--no one seeking to steal his heart away from her. She was hesitating whether to take Rhys to task, or, as Ales suggested, to 'wait and let the waters pa.s.s.'

But Jane Edwards had not a pa.s.sive nature. She was more inclined to be up and doing than to wait. 'Yes,' she communed with herself, 'the waters may pa.s.s, but they may carry my Rhys with them. I want no Cate ordering about here; the artful jade!'

As if the very thought had been a stimulus, she rose abruptly, and, pa.s.sing out into the moonlight, joined her son, who was bending over the low stone wall, looking intently down the rugged slope.

'What are you looking for, Rhys?'

He gave a sudden start as she went on, 'Do you be watching the moonlight on the river, and thinking how different was the night that took your father from us?'