"Yes! He understood, and you don"t. I tell you, Wales is the most Rip-van-winkleish place in the world. You can go to sleep in a fifteenth-century farm and wake up the day after to-morrow in an Intermediate School. I"ve been in India, and it reminds me awfully of the National Congress. But I like it, though it is fatiguing to any one with a hankering after fact. Still, if there was a little more water--there is none in summer time, you know--and a little less rain, a little more right, and a trifle less righteousness it would do very well."
"Righteousness!" echoed Ted, "there"s enough of that, anyhow.
Two, four, six, eight, eight belfries to how many souls in the village?--four hundred all told?"
"That"s only four chapels; the others are Sunday schools, I"ll bet--"the Macleods must have a boat o" their ain." Then there"s the church--that ruin up yonder--it"ll have a school too----"
But Ted"s attention was diverted. "I say," he remarked, "that"s a ripping girl!"
She had come out of a cottage a little way from the inn to intercept Morris Pugh and was engaging him in a lively conversation, despite his hurry. She was tall, dressed in black that glinted, and the fact that her hair was in curling pins did not interfere with her very _voyante_ good looks.
"H"m!" remarked Ned, coming over to see, "reminds me of last Monday--I mean Bank Holiday! Doesn"t she?"
The sarcasm was just, but it brought a faintly-annoyed flush to his companion"s face. He knew himself to be a lower bred man, and the other Edward Cruttenden had a trick of reminding him of this and of certain other facts which, given fair choice, he would probably have forgotten.
So the village was left to its own devices till tea was over, when he took his pipe to the window again.
"Barring the prices, which whip an International Exhibition," he remarked, "this would be a jolly headquarters spot. That big hill--"Eye of the World," the parson called it, didn"t he?--is ripping!"
This time the word lost its inherent triviality before the dignity of those receding curves of sunshine shown by shadow, which swept up to the light-smitten crest of the great mountain.
"Personally," remarked Ned drily, "I find the view of the smithy more--Now, don"t!--It isn"t the least good fussing--it"s the village tea-time, and not all the king"s horses----"
But Ted and his bad words were off hammering at the closed doors, and finally running the smith to earth, having tea comfortably on an oak dresser hung with l.u.s.tre jugs. It was a very small, but highly decorated cottage, this of the smith, showing uneducated artistic cravings in many things, in a harmonium, endless cheap photograph frames, china enormities, a few glazed certificates in Welsh to one "Myfanwy Jones," and here and there a priceless bit of Staffordshire ware.
Then ensued a deadlock. For the smith, scenting coercion, flared up instantly in Welsh, and Ted, conscious of breach of contract, grew abusive in English, till suddenly from above, came a full, high voice.
"I will come down when I have finished dressing. Pray, sir, accommodate yourself with a cup of tea."
Then followed shrill Welsh exordiums to the smith, which resulted in a cheerful smile as he reached down another cup.
Ted took it, also a piece of bread and b.u.t.ter, feeling he could do nothing else, and as he sat waiting, the feminine voice continued upstairs a conversation which apparently had been going on when he had burst into the cottage, though he had been too ill-used to notice it.
"If you do not want the hat, Alicia Edwards, you can oblige by replacing in the box; but you will be dowdy beside the other girls at choir holiday, and Mervyn will not look at you twice. No, indeed! And it is but one-and-twenty shillings. Dirt cheap! Be wise and buy. See, you shall have it for a pound, and you can pay when you marry Mervyn."
"Mary!" choked a softer, more emotional voice. "Ah! I only want him to look at me. Ah, Myfanwy I Do you think he could----"
"If you do not care for the height in front you can wear it hindside before. It is even just so fashionable," went on the first voice, regardless of sentiment. "Put it on, child, and don"t be so foolish.
What is a pound, and you a pupil teacher? There! You look beautiful.
Now, give me my hat pins, I must go to that man downstairs."
A _frou-frou_ of silk petticoats on the ladder stairs which led up from a corner of the living room made Ted look round.
He saw, first, a pair of many-strapped, beaded black shoes with superlatively high heels, next, an interval of trim, black openwork stockings, finally, in a _tourbillon_ of laced silk flouncings, over which it let down a trailing black satin dress, a vision, in which Ted at once recognised the girl in curling pins; or rather her apotheosis, for she was now glorious both within and without.
Her beautiful figure was literally cased in a tight bodice, which looked as if she must have been melted and run into it ere it could be so guiltless of wrinkles. The heavy lace yoke with which it was made showed the whiteness of her skin beneath it; a whiteness which held its own against the double row of false pearls about her neck. For the rest she was planned, laid out, developed in exact accordance with a Paris model in a shop.
In one hand she held a most irresponsible creation, which Ted almost diagnosed as a hat, though it had neither crown nor brim, and in the other, a perfect sheaf of long, black-headed pins.
She smiled at him with frank favour and, saying carelessly, "The smith, my father, will attend to you, sir, when he has had tea,"
pa.s.sed on to a little mirror on the wall, placed the irresponsible creation on her tumultuous yet disciplined waves of hair in the very last position of which any sane creature would have dreamt, and proceeded, apparently, to stick the long pins through her head.
Seeing, however, in the gla.s.s Ted"s face of angry consternation, she flashed round on him tartly yet condescendingly.
"It is no use trying to hurry Dinas. They are country people, not like London or Blackborough. This is not Williams and Edwards, or such like place, I can tell you."
The name of the biggest drapery firm in Blackborough gave Ted a clue to some of his perplexity.
"I see," he said slowly, "that"s how you come to be--you are in the shop, of course, aren"t you?"
She was by this time dexterously rolling back her veil preparatory to tieing it behind, her chin held down to keep it in position. So her dark eyes had full play as she retorted that she was. Second, in fact, in the mantle department--because of her figure. She displayed it lavishly in manipulating her veil, smiling the while at her own consciousness of perfection.
Ted smiled also. The big, bold, beautiful animal was distinctly fetching. He said something to that effect which made her giggle.
"You should pa.s.s your time coming to choir practice," she said, challenging him again quite frankly, when, after much shrill Welsh with her father, the latter stuck to two hours as his shortest limit for repair. "I sing in chapel when I am on holiday still; my music-master was the great Taleisin--that is his bard"s name, of course--and Alicia Edwards, here, has won so many times in compet.i.tion."
The last sentence introduced a girl who had just come downstairs, with a display of white lace stockings and thereinafter a blue dress surmounted by an extremely smart hat, possibly the one over the purchase of which Myfanwy Jones had spent her eloquence. The girl was fair and pretty, but there was about her that marked lack of personal grip on her surroundings, which is so noticeably a result of eleven years and more of strict Board School life; for Alicia"s father had marked her out as a pupil teacher when she joined the infant cla.s.s at three. That had been her ambition till she secured the position at sixteen. Now, at seventeen? At seventeen she blushed and giggled when Myfanwy went on:
"She will sing with Mervyn Pugh, our minister"s brother. He is a very good looking young man--just so good looking as you."
To which obvious challenge Ted said something which changed the giggle to a t.i.tter; after which he left them, feeling a trifle uncertain as to the result of a reference to Ned.
He found him lying flat on his stomach on the bridge which spanned the stream again a little further down the village, watching, so he said, for even a shadow of a trout in the deep pool below it, a pool which after the long spring drought was only connected to the next one by a mere driblet of water.
"Do?" echoed Ned, looking up at Ted with a twinkle in his eyes.
"Excelsior, of course." He waved his pipe towards the "World"s Eye,"
still shrugging high shoulders in the sunshine, and away from Miss Myfanwy Jones, who was standing with Alicia Edwards at the gate of her father"s neglected cabbage-patch, b.u.t.toning her grey suede gloves with a hook from her silver chatelaine. Her face showed beautiful unconsciousness, though her eyes were on the alert.
Ted hesitated; then from a larger cottage emerged the Reverend Morris Pugh, very spick and span, accompanied by a younger man, evidently by his looks the handsome Mervyn. But the forehead fringe which, after the fashion of young Wales, he wore, was too much for Ted. It looked exactly as if it, also, had been in a curling pin, and feeling vaguely that he would rather not be seen by Ned in its company, he laughed, said "Excelsior, by all means," and led the way, taking off his hat to the charmer as he pa.s.sed.
Five minutes afterwards, pausing for breath, their first spurt upwards done, the village lay behind them, looking solitary in its close cohesion of cottages and trees.
But from the church, all ivy-mantled amid its wide graveyard, a bell was clanging, and across the gra.s.sy mounds dotted with stones, a tall figure in a black ca.s.sock and a biretta cap made its way to the vestry door.
"The voice of one crying in the wilderness," remarked Ned, "but he has the bell ringer for congregation, and even Miss Myfanwy Jones will come back to the old churchyard in the end, as her fathers have done, for a penny funeral." Then he laughed. "I shall never forget my Scotch groom-----" he paused. Ted eyed him curiously.
"Well?" he said.
"Oh, nothing! only his criticism on a Welsh funeral was scathing.
"There was no a drop o" whisky, an" they asket me tae pit inter the brod!" Insult on injury!"
So, laughing, they made their way upwards, through black land and bog, through thickets of unimaginably tall brake, and over spa.r.s.e close-bitten knolls, the sheep flying in disorder from them like a routed army, a stonechat starting from the gorse giving them a momentary thought of game--a thought, no more. And the sunshine mounted with them, chased by the shadow, so that it came upon them by surprise when they reached the summit to see the valley below them veiled in soft purple, and the sun itself not far from setting behind an ominous low level of cloud which lay far out to seaward.
"It has taken longer than I thought," said Ned, stretching himself flat on his stomach, "but there is plenty of time."
"Plenty," echoed Ted, cross-legged like a Turk as he knocked out the ashes of his pipe on a stone.
"We"ve done the ginger-beer woman, anyhow," remarked Ned after a pause. "She comes there," he pointed to a hovel of stones a few hundred yards further along the plateau, "from the Llangolley side; seven A.M. till seven P.M. during tourist time, the innkeeper said. I wonder how she spends her day?" Then, half to himself, he added, "As if this wasn"t meat and drink enough for any one."
It should have been. Far and near, cleft by the purpling shadow from below, the higher hill-tops dissociated themselves from the lower ones, shining rosy, resplendent, giving back the sun its parting gift royally, yet yielding bit by bit to the swift storming uprush of shadow. Another, and another picket of light stood, broke, fled from the foe to some higher refuge, until the last steadfast post of the "World"s Eye" remained alone above a world of shadow. Remained alone, a vantage-ground of clear vision, above the wide cup of amethyst hills in which the flood-tide of the sea lay prisoned. So still, so serene, so silvery, lulled to unresisting sleep, as a captive bride might be, by love for the surpa.s.sing beauty of those embracing arms. Beyond, over the broad belt of darkening ocean, the sun was just dipping into the bar of cloud, leaving a flame upon the sky.