Читать книгу Aylwin - Theodore Watts-Dunton - Страница 12

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The next day I was again at Wynne's cottage, and the next, and the next. We two, Winifred and I, used to stroll out together through the narrow green lanes, and over the happy fields, and about the Wilderness and the wood, and along the cliffs, and then down the gangway at Flinty Point (the only gangway that was firm enough to support my crutches, Winifred aiding me with the skill of a woman and the agility of a child), and then along the flints below Flinty Point. She rapidly fell into my habits. She was an adept in finding birds' nests and wild honey; and though she would not consent to my taking the eggs, she had not the same compunction about the honey, and she only regretted with me that we could not be exactly like St. John, as Graylingham Wilderness yielded no locusts to eat with the honey. Winifred, though the most healthy of children, had a passion for the deserted church on the cliffs, and for the desolate churchyard.

It was one of those flint and freestone churches that are sprinkled along the coast. Situated as it was at the back of a curve cut by the water into the end of a peninsula running far into the sea, the tower looked in the distance like a lighthouse. I observed after the first day of our meeting that Winifred never would mount the tower steps again. And I knew why. So delicate were her feelings, so acute did her kind little heart make her, that she would not mount steps which I could never mount.

Not that Winifred looked upon me as her little lover. There was not much of the sentimental in her. Once when I asked her on the sands if I might be her lover, she took an entirely practical view of the question, and promptly replied 'certumly,' adding, however, like the wise little woman I always found her, that she 'wasn't quite sure she knew what a lover was, but if it was anything very nice she should certumly like me to be it.'

It was the child's originality of manner that people found so captivating. One of her many little tricks and ways of an original quaintness was her habit of speaking of herself in the third person, like the merest baby. 'Winifred likes this,' 'Winifred doesn't like that,' were phrases that had an irresistible fascination for me.

Another fascinating characteristic of hers was connected with her superstitions. Whenever on parting with her I exclaimed, as I often did. 'Oh, what a lovely day we have had, Winifred!' she would look expectantly in my eyes, murmuring, 'And—and—' This meant that I was to say. 'And shall have many more such days,' as though there were a prophetic power in words.

She talked with entire seriousness of having seen in a place called Fairy Glen in Wales the Tylwyth Teg. And when I told her of Oberon and Titania, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, whose acquaintance I had made through Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, she said that one bright moonlight night she, in the company of two of her Gypsy playmates, Rhona Boswell and a girl called Sinfi, had visited this same Fairy Glen, when they saw the Fairy Queen alone on a ledge of rock, dressed in a green kirtle with a wreath of golden leaves about her head.

Another subject upon which I loved to hear her talk was that of the 'Knockers' of Snowdon, the guardians of undiscovered copper mines, who sometimes by knocking on the rocks gave notice to individuals they favoured of undiscovered copper, but these favoured ones were mostly children who chanced to wander up Snowdon by themselves. She had, she said, not only heard but seen these Knockers. They were thick-set dwarfs, as broad as they were long. One Knocker, an elderly female, had often played with her on the hills. Knockers' Llyn, indeed, was very much on Winifred's mind. When a golden cloud, like the one on which she was singing her song at the time I first saw her, shone over a person's head at Knockers' Llyn, it was a sign of good fortune. She was sure that it was so, because the Welsh people believed it, and so did the Gypsies.

Not a field or a hedgerow was unfamiliar to us. We were most learned in the structure of birds' nests, in the various colours of birds' eggs, and in insect architecture. In all the habits or the wild animals of the meadows we were most profound little naturalists.

Winifred could in the morning, after the dews were gone, tell by the look of a buttercup or a daisy what kind of weather was at hand, when the most cunning peasant was deceived by the hieroglyphics of the sky, and the most knowing seaman could 'make nothing of the wind.'

Her life, in fact, had been spent in the open air.

There were people staying at the Hall, and they and Frank engrossed all my mother's attention. At least, she did not appear to notice my absence from home.

My brother Frank, however, was not so unobservant (he was two years older than myself). Early one morning, before breakfast, curiosity led him to follow me, and he came upon us in Graylingham Wood as we were sitting under a tree close to the cliff, eating the wild honey we had found in the Wilderness.

He stood there swinging a ground-ash cane, and looking at her in a lordly, patronising way, the very personification no doubt of boyish beauty. I became troubled to see him look so handsome. The contrast between him and a cripple was not fair, I thought, as I observed an expression of passing admiration on little Winifred's face. Yet I thought there was not the pleased smile with which she had first greeted me, and a weight of anxiety was partially removed, for it had now become quite evident to me that I was as much in love as any swain of eighteen—it had become quite evident that without Winifred the poor little shattered sea-gull must perish altogether. She was literally my world.

Frank came and sat down with us, and made himself as agreeable as possible. He tried to enter into our play, but we were too slow for him; he soon became restless and impatient. 'Oh bother!' he said, and got up and left us.

I drew a sigh of relief when he was gone.

'Do you like my brother, Winifred?' I said.

'Yes.' she said.

'Why?'

'Because he is so pretty and so nimble. I believe he could run up—' and then she stopped; but I knew what the complete sentence would have been. She was going to say: 'I believe he could run up the gangways without stopping to take breath.'

Here was a stab; but she did not notice the effect of her unfinished sentence. Then a question came from me involuntarily.

'Winifred,' I said, 'do you like him as well as you like me?'

'Oh no,' she said, in a tone of wonderment that such a question should be asked.

'But I am not pretty and—'

'Oh, but you are!' she said eagerly, interrupting me.

'But,' I said, with a choking sensation in my voice, 'I am lame.' and

I looked at the crutches lying among the ferns beside me.

'Ah, but I like you all the better for being lame,' she said, nestling up to me.

'But you like nimble boys,' I said, 'such as Frank.'

She looked puzzled. The anomaly of liking nimble boys and crippled boys at the same time seemed to strike her. Yet she felt it was so, though it was difficult to explain it.

'Yes, I do like nimble boys,' she said at last, plucking with her fingers at a blade of grass she held between her teeth. 'But I think I like lame boys better, that is if they are—if they are—you.'

I gave an exclamation of delight. But she was two years younger than

I, and scarcely, I suppose, understood it.

'He is very pretty,' she said meditatively, 'but he has not got love-eyes like you and Snap, and I don't think I could love any little boy so very, very much now who wasn't lame.'

She loved me in spite of my lameness; she loved me because I was lame, so that if I had not fallen from the cliffs, if I had sustained my glorious position among the boys of Raxton and Graylingham as 'Fighting Hal.' I might never have won little Winifred's love. Here was a revelation of the mingled yarn of life, that I remember struck me even at that childish age.

I began to think I might, in spite of the undoubted crutches, resume my old place as the luckiest boy along the sands. She loved me because I was lame! Those who say that physical infirmity does not feminise the character have not had my experience. No more talk for me that morning. In such a mood as that there can be no talk. I sat in a silent dream, save when a sweet sob of delight would come up like a bubble from the heaving waters of my soul. I had passed into that rare and high mood when life's afflictions are turned by love to life's deepest, holiest joys. I had begun early to learn and know the gamut of the affections.

'When, you leave me here and go home to Wales you will never forget me. Winnie?'

'Never, never!' she said, as she helped me from the ferns which were still as wet with dew as though it had been raining. 'I will think of you every night before I go to sleep, and always end my prayers as I did that first night after I saw you so lonely in the churchyard.'

'And how is that, Winnie?' I said, as she adjusted my crutches for me.

'After I've said "Amen," I always say, "And, dear Lord Jesus, don't forget to love dear Henry, who can't get up the gangways without me," and I will say that every night as long as I live.'

From that morning I considered her altogether mine. Her speaking of me as the 'dear little English boy,' however, as she did, marred the delight her words gave me. I had from the first observed that the child's strongest passion was a patriotism of a somewhat fiery kind. The word English in her mouth seemed some-times a word of reproach: it was the name of the race that in the past had invaded her sacred Snowdonia.

I afterwards learnt that her aunt was answerable for this senseless prejudice.

'Winnie,' I said, 'don't you wish I was a Welsh boy?'

'Oh yes,' she said.'Don't you?' I made no answer.

She looked into my face and said, 'And yet I don't think I could love a Welsh boy as I love you.'

She then repeated to me a verse of a Welsh song, which of course I did not understand a word of until she told me what it meant in English.

It was an address to Snowdon, and ran something like this—

Mountain-wild Snowdon for me!

Sweet silence there for the harp,

Where loiter the ewes and the lambs

In the moss and the rushes,

Where one's song goes sounding up!

And the rocks re-echo it higher and higher

In the height where the eagles live.

In this manner about six weeks slid away, and Winnie's visit to her father came to an end. I ask, how can people laugh at the sorrows of childhood? The bitterness of my misery as I sat with that child on the eve of her departure for Wales (which to me seemed at the extreme end of the earth) was almost on a par with anything I have since suffered, and that is indeed saying a great deal. It was in Wynne's cottage, and I sat on the floor with her wet cheeks close to mine, saying, 'She leaves me alone.' Tom tried to console me by telling me that Winifred would soon come back.

'But when?' I said.

'Next year,' said Tom.

He might as well have said next century, for any consolation it gave me. The idea of a year without her was altogether beyond my grasp. It seemed infinite.

Week after week passed, and month after month, and little Winifred was always in my thoughts. Wynne's cottage was a sacred spot to me, and the organist the most interesting man in the world. I never tired of asking him questions about her, though he, as I soon found, knew scarcely anything concerning her and what she was doing, and cared less; for love of drink had got thoroughly hold of him.

Letters were scarce visitants to him, and I believe he never used to hear from Wales at all.