'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 gra.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sed, 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.

V

At the end of the year she came again, and I had about a year of happiness. I was with her every day, and every day she grew more necessary to my existence.

It was at this time that I made the acquaintance of Winnie's friend Rhona Boswell, a charming little Gypsy girl. Graylingham Wood and Rington Wood, like the entire neighbourhood, were favourite haunts of a superior kind of Gypsies called Griengroes, that is to say, horse-dealers. Their business was to buy ponies in Wales and sell them in the Eastern Counties and the East Midlands. Thus it was that Winnie had known many of the East Midland Gypsies in Wales. Compared with Rhona Boswell, who was more like a fairy than a child, Winnie seemed quite a grave little person. Rhona's limbs were always on the move, and the movement sprang always from her emotions. Her laugh seemed to ring through the woods like silver bells, a sound that it was impossible to mistake for any other. The laughter of most Gypsy girls is full of music and of charm, and yet Rhona's laughter was a sound by itself, and it was no doubt this which afterwards when she grew up attracted my kinsman, Percy Aylwin, towards her. It seemed to emanate not from her throat merely, but from her entire frame. If one could imagine a strain of merriment and fun blending with the ecstatic notes of a skylark soaring and singing, one might form some idea of the laugh of Rhona Boswell. Ah, what days they were! Rhona would come from Gypsy Dell, a romantic place in Rington Manor some miles off, especially to show us some newly devised coronet of flowers that she had been weaving for herself. This induced Winnie to weave for herself a coronet of sea-weeds, and an entire morning was pa.s.sed in grave discussion as to which coronet excelled the other.

A year had made a great difference in Winnie, a much greater difference than it had made in me. Her aunt, who was no doubt a well-informed woman, had been attending to her education. In a single year she had taught her French so thoroughly that Winnie was in the midst of Dumas' _Monte Cristo_. And apart from education in the ordinary acceptation of the word, the expansion of her mind had been rapid and great.

Her English vocabulary was now far above mine, far above that of most children of her age. This I discovered was owing to the fact that a literary English lady of delicate health, Miss Dalrymple, whose slender means obliged her to leave the Capel Curig Hotel, had been staying at the cottage as a lodger. She had taken I the greatest delight in educating Winnie. Of course Winnie lost as well as gained by this change. She was a little Welsh rustic no longer, but a little lady unusually well equipped, as far as education went, for taking her place in the world.

She understood fully now what I meant when I told her that we were betrothed, and again showed that mingling of child-wisdom and poetry which characterised her by suggesting that we should be married on Snowdon, and that her wedding-dress should be the green kirtle and wreath of the fairies, and that her bridesmaids should be her Gypsy friends, Sinfi Lovell and Rhona Boswell. This I acceded to with alacrity.

It was now that I fully realised for the first time her extraordinary gift of observation and her power of describing what she had observed in the graphic language that can never be taught save by the teacher Nature herself. In a dozen picturesque words she would flash upon my very senses the scene that she was describing. So vividly did she bring before my eyes the scenery of North Wales, that when at last I went there it seemed quite familiar to me. And so in describing individuals, her pictures of them were like photographs.

Graylingham Wood was our favourite haunt. This place and the adjoining piece of waste land, called the Wilderness, had for us all the charms of a primeval forest. Here in the early spring we used to come and watch the first violet uplifting its head from the dark green leaves behind the mossy boles, and listen for the first note of the blackcap, the nightingale's herald, and the first coo of the wood-pigeons among the bare and newly-budding trees. And here, in the summer, we used to come as soon as breakfast was over with as many story-books as we could carry, and sit on the gra.s.s and revel in the wonders of the _Arabian Nights_. the _Tales of the Genii_, and the _Seven Champions of Christendom_, till all the leafy alleys of the wood were glittering with armed knights and Sinbads and Aladdins. The story of Camaralzaman and Badoura was, I think, Winnie's chief favourite. She could repeat it almost word for word. The idea of the two lovers being carried to each other by genii through the air and over the mountain tops had an especial fascination for her. I was Camaralzaman and she Badoura, and the genii would carry me to her as she sat by Knockers' Llyn, or, as she called it, Llyn Coblynau, on the lower slopes of Snowdon.

But above all, there was the sea on the other side of the wood, of the presence of which we were always conscious--the sea, of which we could often catch glimpses between the trees, lending a sense of freedom and wonder and romance such as no landscape can lend. Our great difficulty of course was in connection with my lameness. Few children would have tried to convey a pair of crutches and a lame leg down the cliff to the long level brown sands that lay, farther than the eye could reach, stretched beneath miles on miles of brown crumbling cliffs, whose jagged points and indentations had the kind of spectral look peculiar to that coast. For, alas! the holy water Winifred brought did not 'cure the crutches.' Yet we used to master the difficulty, always selecting the firmer gangway at Flinty Point, and always waiting, before making the attempt, until there was no one near to see us toiling down. Once down on the hard sands just below the Point, we were happy, paddling and enjoying ourselves till the sunset told us that we must begin our herculean labour of hoisting the leg and crutches up the gangway back to the wood. I have performed many athletic feats since my cure, but nothing comparable to the feat of climbing with crutches up those paths of yielding sand. Once we found on the sand a newly shot gull. She took it in her lap and mourned over it. I guessed who was the poor bird's murderer--her father!

We knew Nature in all her moods. In every aspect we found the sea, the wood, and the meadows happy and beautiful--in winter as in summer, in storm as in sunshine. In the foggy days of November, in the sharp winds of March, in the snows and sleet and rain of February, we used to hear other people complain of the bad weather; we used to hear them fret for change. But we despised them for their ignorance where we were so learned. There was no bad weather for us.

In March, what so delicious as breasting together the brave wind, and feeling it tingle our cheeks and beat our ears till we laughed at each other with joy? In rain, what so delicious as to stand under a tree or behind a hedge and listen to the drops pattering overhead among the leaves, and see the fields steaming up to meet them? Then again the soft falling of snow upon the lonely fields, while the very sheep looked brown against the whiteness gathering round them. All beautiful to us two, and beloved!

VI

'But where was this little boy's mother all this time?' you naturally ask; 'where was his father? In a word, who was he? and what were his surroundings?'

I will answer these queries in as brief a fashion as possible.

My father, Philip Aylwin, belonged to a branch of an ancient family which had been satirically named by another branch of the same family 'The Proud Aylwins.'

It is a singular thing that it was the proud Aylwins who had a considerable strain of Gypsy blood in their veins. My great-grandfather had married Fenella Stanley, the famous Gypsy beauty, about whom so much was written in the newspapers and magazines of that period. She had previously when a girl of sixteen married a Lovell who died and left a child. Fenella's portrait in the character of the Sibyl of Snowdon was painted by the great portrait painter of that time.