“Did not you say,” persisted the young lady, “when you first saw him, that he was a very ill-looking man?”
“Yes; so I did. So he is. He looks sanctimonious and roguish, and that white eye makes his face — I hope it is not very uncharitable to say so — almost villanous. I think him a very ill-looking man, and if I thought he was following us, I should speak to the police, and then set out for my humble home without losing an hour.”
“And you don’t think he is following us?” said the young lady.
“If he is travelling to collect subscriptions he may very well have come here about his business, and to Penmaen Mawr, and to Chester. I don’t see why he must necessarily be following us. And Conway, too, he would have stopped at naturally. It does not follow at all that he is in pursuit of us because he happens to come to the same place.
The king himself has followed her
When she has gone before.
We are not worth robbing, my dear, and we look it. You must not be so easily frightened.”
“Frightened! I’m not the least frightened,” said the young lady, spiritedly. “I’m not what is termed a nervous young lady. You have no right to think that. But I don’t believe he has any other business but tracking us from place to place. What other business on earth could he have had — getting out at Abber, for instance? I forgot to mention Abber. It is very odd, you must allow. Let us walk on.” She had picked up her colour-box and her block. “Very odd that he should get out of the train wherever we stop, always about business, we are to suppose, that has no connexion with us; that he should follow us, by the same odd accident, where there is no rail, and where we can only get by a fly; that he should get always into the same quiet little inns, though, of course, he would like much better to be in noisier places, where he would meet people like himself; and that he should turn up, this evening, so near our poor little lodgings, and go by that path which brings him there. What on earth can he want in that direction?”
“Yes, I do think it’s odd, my dear; and, I say, I think he does look very villanous. But what can he possibly want?” said the old lady. “Why should he follow us? How are we to account for it?”
“I don’t pretend to account for it,” said the girl, as they trudged on side by side; “but it is just possible that he may be a detective, who mistakes us for some people he is in pursuit of. I only know that he is spoiling my poor little holiday, and I do wish I were a man, that I might give him a sound drubbing.”
The old lady laughed, for the girl spoke threateningly, with a flash from her splendid eyes, and for a moment clenched the tiniest little fist you can fancy.
“And you think he’s gone before us to Pritchard’s farmhouse?” said the old lady, glancing over her shoulder in that direction, above which a mass of thundrous cloud was rising. “Dear me! how like thunder that is.”
“Awfully!” said the young lady. “Stop a moment — I thought I heard distant thunder. Listen!”
They both paused, looking toward those ominous piles of cloud, black against the now fast-fading sky.
CHAPTER II.
A GUIDE.
“Hush!” said the young lady, laying her fingers on her companion’s arm.
They listened for a minute or more.
“There it is!” exclaimed the girl, as a faint rumble spread slowly along and among the mountains.
They remained silent for a minute after it had passed away.
“Yes, that certainly was thunder,” said the elder lady; “and it is growing so dark; it would not do to be caught in the storm, and to meet our one-eyed persecutor, perhaps, and we have fully a mile to go still. Come, we must walk a little faster.”
“I hope it will be a good thunderstorm,” said the young lady watching the sky, as they hurried on. “It frightens me more than it does you, but I think I like it better.”
“You may easily do that, dear; and like our farmhouse better than I do, also.”
“We are frightfully uncomfortable, I agree. Let us leave it tomorrow,” said the young lady.
“And where shall we go next?” inquired her companion.
“To Llanberris, if I’m to decide,” said the girl. “But first we must look over the castle at Cardyllion, and there are one or two old houses I should like to sketch — only roughly.”
“You are making too great a labour of your holiday: you sketch too much.”
“Well, we leave tomorrow, and the day after is Sunday, and then — on Monday — my holiday ends, and my slavery begins,” said the young lady, vehemently.
“You certainly do use strong language,” said the elder lady, a little testily. “Why don’t you try to be contented? Dear me! How much nearer the thunder is!”
“It will soon be darker, and then we shall see the lightning splendidly,” said the young lady.
“Don’t stop, darling, let us get on. I was going to say, you must study to be content — remember your catechism. The Queen, I dare say, has things to complain of; and Farmer Pritchard’s daughter, who has, as you fancy, a life of so much liberty, will tell you she is something of a slave, and can’t do, by any means, quite as she likes. I only hope, dear Maud, we have money enough to bring us home.”
“We can eke it out with my drawings. We shan’t starve. We can have the ruins of Carnarvon Castle for breakfast, and eat Snowdon for dinner, and turn the Menai into tea. It is a comfort to know I can live by my handiwork. I don’t think, cousin, I have a shilling I can call my own. If I could earn enough by my drawing to live on, I think I should prefer it to any other way of living I can imagine.”
“You used to think a farmer’s life the happiest on earth,” said the old lady, trudging along. “There’s Richard Pritchard, why not marry him?”
“I might do worse; but there are half a dozen conclusive reasons against it. In the first place, I don’t think Richard Pritchard would marry me; and, next, I know I wouldn’t marry Richard Pritchard; and, thirdly, and seriously, I shall never marry at all, never, and for the reasons I have told you often; and those reasons can never change.”
“We shall see,” said her companion, with a laugh and a little shake of her head. “Good Heavens!” exclaimed the old lady, as nearer thunder resounded over the landscape.
“Hush!” whispered the girl, as they both paused and listened, and when it had died away, “What a noble peal that was!” she exclaimed. And as they resumed their march she continued: “I shall never marry: and my resolution depends on my circumstances, and they, as you know, are never likely to alter — humanly speaking, they never can alter — and I have not courage enough to make myself happy; and, coward as I am, I shall break my own heart rather than break my chains. Where are we now?”
As she said this she came to a sudden halt at the edge of a deep channelled stream, whose banks just there stand steep and rugged as those of a ravine, crowned with straggling masses of thorn and briars. She gazed across, and up and down the stream, which was swollen just then by mountain rains of the night before.
“Can we have missed our way?” said the elder lady.
“What on earth has become of the wooden bridge?” exclaimed the younger one.
There was still quite light enough to discern objects; and Miss Max, catching her young companion by the hand, whispered:
“Good gracious, Maud! Is that the man?”
“What man?” she asked, startled.
“The blind man — the person who has been following us.”
Miss Maud — for such was the young lady’s name — said nothing in reply. The two ladies stood irresolute, side by side. Maud had seen the person who was approaching, once only in her life. It was two days before, as she and her cousin were getting out of their fly at the Verney Arms, in the pretty little town of Cardyllion. She was a proud young lady; it would have taken a good deal to make her avow, even to herself, the slightest interest in any such person. Nevertheless, she recognised him a good many seconds before good Miss Max had discovered her mistake.
She was standing beside that elderly lady. They were both looking across the stream; the young lady furthest from the stranger had turned a little away.
There is quite light enough to see faces still, but it will not last long. The young man is very handsome, and also tall. He has been fishing, and has on a pair of those gigantic jack-boots in which fishermen delight to walk the rivers. He wears a broadleafed hat, round which are wound his flies. A boy with his rod, net, and basket trudges behind.
The old lady speaks to him as he passes. He stops, lowers his cigar, and inclines to listen.
“I beg pardon,” she says. “Can you tell me? There was — I am sure it was on this very spot — a bridge of plank across this stream, and I can’t find it.”
“Oh! They were taking that away today, as I passed by. It had grown unsafe, and the — the —— Oh, yes; the new one is to be put up in the morning.”
The odd little hesitation I have recorded was caused by his seeing the young lady, on a sudden, in the midst of his sentence, and for the moment forgetting everything else. And well he might, for he had been dreaming of her for the last two days.
He dropped his cigar, became, all at once, much more deferential, and with his hat in his hand, said:
“Do you wish to cross the brook? Because if you do, I can show you to some stepping-stones about a quarter of a mile higher up, where you can get across very nicely.”
“Thanks. I should be so very much obliged,” said the old lady.
The gentleman was only too happy, and having sent the boy on to the Verney Arms, talked very agreeably as he accompanied and directed their march. He had come down there for a little fishing; he knew the Verneys a little, and old Lord Verney was such a very odd man! He told them stories of him, and very amusing some of them were, and his eye always glanced to see the effect of his anecdotes upon Miss Maud. Two or three times he ventured to speak to her. The young lady did not either encourage or discourage these little experiments, and answered very easily and carelessly, and, I am bound to say, very briefly too.
In the mean time, the thunder grew nearer and more frequent, and the wild reflection of the lightning flickered on trees and fields about them.
And now they had reached the thick clump of osiers, beneath which the stepping stones, of which they were in search, studded the stream. Only the summits of these stones were now above the water, and the light was nearly gone.
CHAPTER III.
PLAS YWLD.
“I have not courage for this,” said the old lady, aghast, eyeing the swift current and the uncertain footing to which, in the most deceptive possible twilight, she was invited to commit herself.
“But you know, darling, we must get across somehow,” urged the girl, cruelly. “It is quite easy; don’t fancy anything else.”
And she stepped lightly over.
“It is all very fine with your young feet and eyes,” she replied; “but for an old woman like me it is little better than the tight rope; and it would be death to me to take a roll in that river. What on earth is to be done?”
“It is really a great deal easier than you suppose,” said the obliging young gentleman, not sorry to find an opportunity of agreeing with Miss Maud, “and I think I can make it perfectly easy if you will just take my hand as you get across. I’ll walk in the stream beside you. It is quite shallow here, and these things make me absolutely impervious to the water. Pray, try. I undertake to get you across perfectly safely.”
So, supporting her across with his left hand, and walking beside her with his right, ready to assist her more effectually in case of a slip or stumble, he conducted her quite safely over.
When the lady had thanked him very earnestly, and he had laughingly disclaimed all right to her acknowledgments, another difficulty suddenly struck her.
“And now, how are we to find our farmhouse? I know the way to it perfectly from the wooden bridge; but from this, I really haven’t an idea.”
“I’ll make it out,” said the young lady, before their guide had time to speak. “I like exploring; and it can’t be far — a little in this direction. Thank you very much.”
The last words were to the young man, whose huge boots were pouring down rivulets on the dry dust of the little pathway on which they were standing.
“If I am not too disagreeable a guide, in this fisherman’s plight,” he said, glancing, with a laugh, at his boots, “nothing would please me so much as being allowed to point out the way to you. I happen to know it perfectly, and it is by no means so easy as you may suppose, particularly by this light — one can hardly tell distances, ever so near.”
“Pray, don’t think of it,” said the girl, “I can make it out quite easily.”
“Nonsense, my dear Maud. You could never make it out; and besides,” she added, in an under tone, “how can you tell where that blind man may turn up, that follows us, as you say? We are very much obliged to you,” she said, turning to him, “and you are doing us really a great kindness. I only hope it won’t be bringing you too far out of your way?”
Very pleasantly, therefore, they went on. It became darker, rapidly, and though the thunder grew louder and more frequent, and the lightning gleamed more vividly across the landscape, the storm was still distant enough to enable Maud to enjoy its sights and sounds, without a sense of danger.
The thunderclouds are stealthily but swiftly ascending. These battlements of pandemonium, “like an exhalation,” screen the sky and stars with black, and from their field of darkness leaps now and then the throbbing blue, that leaves the eye dazzled, and lights rock and forest, hill and ruin, for a moment in its pale glare. Then she listens for the rumble that swells into long and loud-echoing reverberations. He stays his narrative, and all stop and listen. He smiles, as from under his long lashes he covertly watches the ecstasy of the beautiful girl. And then they set out again; the old lady vowing that she can’t think why she’s such a fool as to stop at such an hour, and tired to death as she is, to listen to thunder.
Farmer Pritchard, happily for wandering Tintos in that part of the world, is not one of those scientific agriculturists who cut down their hedgerows and square their fields. Our little party has now reached the stile which, under the shadow of some grand old elms, admits the rustics, who frequent Richard Pritchard, to his farmyard.
It is an old and a melancholy remark, that the picturesque and the comfortable are hardly compatible. Here, however, these antagonistic principles are as nearly as possible reconciled. The farmyard is fenced round with hawthorns and lime-trees, and the farmhouse is a composite building, of which the quarter in which the ladies were lodged had formed a bit of the old Tudor manorhouse of Plas Ylwd, which gave its name to the place.
A thatched porch, with worn stone pillars and steps, fronts the hatch; and from beside this, through a wide window of small panes, a cheerful light was scattered along the rough pavement, and more faintly on the hanging foliage of the tree opposite. “What a pretty old house!” the young fisherman exclaimed, looking up at the gables, and the lattices, and the chimneys that rose from the deep thatch of the cobbled old house.
“It may be prettier in this light, or rather darkness, than at noon,” said the old lady, with a shrug, and a little laugh.
“But it really is, in any light, an extremely pretty old house,” said the girl, taking up the cudgels for their habitation, “and everything is so beautifully neat. I think them such nice people.”
A few heavy rain-drops had fallen sullenly as they came, and now with the suddenness of such visitations, the thunder shower, all at once, began to descend.
“Come in, come in,” said the old lady, imperiously.
Very willingly the young gentleman stepped under the porch.
They all three stood there for a moment, looking out towards the point from which, hitherto, the lightning had been chiefly visible.
“Oh! But you must come in and take a cup of tea,” said the old lady, suddenly recollecting. “You must come in, reall
y.”
Their walk and little chat, and the climbing of stiles, and the rural simplicities that surrounded, had made her feel quite intimate. He glanced covertly at the young lady, but in her face he saw neither invitation nor prohibition; so he felt at liberty to choose, and he stepped, very gladly, into the house.
As you enter the old house you find yourself in a square vestibule, if I can call by so classic a name anything so rude. Straight before you yawns an arch that spans it from wall to wall, giving admission to the large kitchen of the farmhouse: at your right, under a corresponding moulded arch, opens the wide oak staircase of the manorhouse, with a broad banister, on the first huge stem of which, as on a vestal altar, is placed a burnished candlestick of brass, in which burns a candle to welcome the return of old Miss Max and young Miss Maud Guendoline.
The young lady steps in with the air, though she knows it not, of a princess into her palace.
As they enter, her ear is struck by an accent, not Welsh, and a voice the tones of which have something of a cold, bleating falsetto, which is intensely disagreeable, and looking quickly through the arched entrance to the kitchen, she sees there, taking his ease in an armchair by the fireplace, the long-visaged man with the white eye.
He is holding forth agreeably, with a smile on his skinny lips. He gesticulates with a long hand, the nails of which are black as ebony. The steam of the saintly man’s punch makes a halo round his head and his hard cheeks are flushed with the pink that tells of inward comfort. His one effective eye addresses itself, although he is haranguing Richard Pritchard’s wife, to Richard Pritchard’s daughter, who is very pretty, and leans, listening to the ugly stranger, with her bare arms rolled in her apron, on the high back of one of the oldfashioned oak chairs.
Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated) Page 567
