The Making of William Edwards; or, The Story of the Bridge of Beauty

'Nay, nay,' interposed Griffith. 'Willem is sorry. He did not know he was doing wrong.'

'Then he will have to learn. It's quite time he made himself useful. Jonet did before she was his age. And so did I. We can have no idlers on our farm, whatever. Ah, Cate, is that you?' His voice had brought the girl to the open window. She leaned out, blushing like a peony. He joined her, and said something which made her giggle and provoked reply. Then ensued some whispering and laughter. Rhys apparently forgot all about William and his mother's anxiety whilst occupied so pleasantly, for there was no doubt Cate had more than a third-cousinly attraction for him, and chance opportunities for seeing her except on Sundays were not frequent.

When his errand recurred to him, William had disappeared, and notwithstanding Rhys' longer legs, the fatigue of the small ones, the gathering dusk, and the steepness of the ascending path to the farm, the truant crossed the threshold first.

At once uneasiness resolved itself into displeasure. He was scolded on all sides, and threatened with the loss of a supper if ever he ventured to give them such a fright again.

'I wanted Robert Jones,' was all the excuse he made. The scolding was received with stolid silence, which was called sullenness.

Yet he had not forgotten Owen's picture of his mother's distress, or his grave reproof for straying away, and had he been differently received, he might have been contrite and sued for pardon.

It is a difficult matter, even in these analytic days, to search out the inner workings of the child-mind, or to understand all that influences wayward moods. How were those rudely-cultivated farmers to penetrate beneath the surface, to see the undeveloped oak in the immature acorn?

'Robert Jones do be spoiling that boy,' said Mrs. Edwards, when the child was in bed. 'I wonder what he wanted with the man?'

'Wanted? Sure, he wanted to ask if stones do grow like trees,' said Rhys, in a tone of impatient scorn. 'It was only last week he did be asking me if the trees made the wind, because it was always windy when the trees tossed about.'

'Well, don't they?' queried stolid Davy, amidst a roar of laughter, in which even the mother joined.

'Now, don't you be as silly as Willem. I never before knew you ask such a foolish question,' said Rhys dogmatically.

'No, Davy,' explained his mother, without stopping her busy wheel, 'it is the wind that blows the trees about,' – an answer which sufficed for him. He was not curious to learn what caused the winds, or whence they came, as William had been. He accepted facts as they were, untroubled by vain speculations.

Undoubtedly William – the father's namesake, her youngest born – was the mother's darling, in spite of his odd ways. And however cross she might have been overnight, in the morning, when the others had dispersed, she took him to task for straying away without leave; not angrily, but sadly, showing him the trouble he was likely to cause, and the anxiety she had had, remembering the time when he was lost before.

It was a very effectual supplement to Owen Griffith's lecture; the sensitive boy's feelings were touched. He threw his arms around her neck, begged forgiveness, and promised the best of behaviour for the future.

Alas, for a child's promises! William went to work beside Jonet like a little man, helped in seed-time and harvest, and won commendations from Ales and Evan. But he had his dreamy hours; he continued to pile up stones in odd corners, and was alternately ridiculed and rebuked by Rhys, whose interference he resented.

This went on for about two years, trying the patience of both, and then came a more serious outbreak.

CHAPTER XI.

A MEMORABLE ENCOUNTER

William's rebellion had begun to show itself in sullen disregard of his brother's orders. He was always active and willing when his mother or Evan called him – Davy might convey a message, but never had an independent order to give – he was Jonet's obedient bondslave, but when Rhys demanded his services or attention he generally turned a deaf ear. For this, Rhys – who considered his ten years' seniority quite a warranty for control as his mother's deputy and his dead father's representative – took him to task imperiously, not with any desire to be knowingly overbearing, but from a stern sense of his own duty to a lazy lad.

At length, one bright day in early spring, when William was little more than nine years of age, he stood lingering after the midday meal close beside the stone gate-posts of a field where Davy and Jonet were already busy weeding a freshly springing crop of corn. His arms rested upon the coping of the wall with his chin upon them, whilst he, looking down into the fertile vale below – where glimpses of the shining river were discernible like twinkling stars, through the tender green shoots which veiled the swaying boughs on its densely-wooded banks – seemed lost in a dreamy mist of speculative thought. The boy's reverie was rudely broken.

'Now then, lazyback! What do you be doing there?' called out Rhys, who carried a spade on one shoulder and a wicker basket in his hand, which he tossed down at his brother's feet. No answer coming, he called out again, 'What do you be doing there?'

'I do be thinking,' came composedly from William.

'Thinking, indeed! I wish you would be thinking about your work. What can you have to think about, whatever?'

''Deed, nobody knows my thinks,' replied the boy, without turning round.

'You will very soon know my thinks,' retorted Rhys, 'if you do not pick up your basket, and get to your weeding. You are one of the "late and lazy who will never be rich." Come, stir you.' And, as if to enforce obedience, Rhys raised his disengaged hand and struck the other a sharp blow across the shoulders.

At once William turned round, his cheeks and eyes aflame. Rhys thought he was about to strike him back again.

Instead, he gave the empty basket a kick that sent it flying over the ridges, and was out at the narrow gateway in an instant, with a defiant air that seemed to dare Rhys to lay hands upon him again, or attempt to draw him back.

That day he was seen no more upon the farm until nightfall, when he was sent to bed supperless as a punishment.

He was up betimes in the morning, and had the fire alight before any one else was astir. He was having a wash at the spring when Ales came into the farmyard.

'Name o' goodness!' exclaimed she, 'what's got you out of bed so soon? Want your breakfast, I suppose?'

William nodded in assent, on his way to the common towel.

'Do you think you be deserving any?'

'Does Rhys be deserving any?'

Ales had a proverb ready, 'Who does well, deserves well.'

'Is it doing well to call names and be striking his brother?'

Ales had no direct answer to that. 'Rhys says you are idle and should be made to work. You do be playing with stones when you should be weeding or knitting. He does always be working hard,' she replied evasively.

Prompt was the retort, 'A big man should work, I will do better work than Rhys when I am as big. 'Deed I will.'

This conversation had taken place during the hasty ablutions of Ales, who had latterly grown uncommonly anxious to present 'a shining morning face' to Evan when he appeared. As she combed out her hair at the diminutive looking-glass he had bought her, as a hint, and which hung beside the storehouse door, she began in an insinuating tone —

'And where did you be going yesterday, Willem? Did you be with Robert Jones?'

'Never be you minding,' said the boy, walking past with a pitcher of water for the porridge. And no further information could she or any one else extract from him.

After that, whenever Rhys and he came into collision he disappeared, and none could say whither he went or with whom. Cate or Owen Griffith might see him pass the cottage door, and exchange a 'good-day' greeting, but beyond that his wanderings were unknown.

In a mountainous parish like Eglwysilan, where was no village community, where farms and cottages were mostly solitary and far apart, there was little chance of encountering many strollers out of the main highway, except on market-days.

Wandering aimlessly in his blind passion, on the day when Rhys had struck him, hardly noting the way he went, he found himself all on a sudden on what appeared to be a short, grass-grown roadway, bordered on both sides by upright blocks of stone, more stunted and less shapely than the slabs in the churchyard, but planted there with so much method in their irregular intervals, they might indeed have been dwarf guards to some great giant turned suddenly to stone by the magic art of a still greater necromancer of the olden time, as he had heard.

Such legends were common on the domestic hearth. So that, although it was a bright spring afternoon, an eerie feeling crept over the passionate boy, especially when he found himself within a wide circle of such stones, surrounding, in double file, a huge angular mass of like stone, narrowing downwards from a flat top, capped by a second stone, and delicately poised on the rounded point of a small conical base in a hollowed depression of the natural rock, and in some sort bearing out the simile of the petrified giant's throne.

As William looked upon this unshapely mass, some dreamy recollection floated through his mind of having visited the spot before, when the stones had seemed alive, and making mouths at him. Without nearing the central stone, but keeping his eye upon it, he walked slowly round within the inner circle, and, as he went discovered a second path (leading north) corresponding with the one by which he had entered from the south.

Then it dawned upon him this must indeed be the spot where he had lain down faint and tired, when he was, oh, such a little boy, and had been so frightened by the grim aspect of the stones, as the dark night had come on, and he could not rise to get away.

Soon he ventured to touch the large central stone that had terrified him before by giving way on the pressure of his tiny hand. It swayed and rocked to and fro, and he drew back instinctively, but it did not fall. And now he knew it surely for the great rocking-stone, and no longer feared that it would fall and crush him so long as he was good and true, for so the legend ran.

But now other doubts and fears oppressed him. These would be the very Druid-stones Owen Griffith had named, and Robert Jones had warned him not to seek, lest some great harm should come to him.

Was it true there were once men called Druids, and did they come to life at midnight and nod to the moon, and to the big nodding-stones? Robert Jones and Ales both said they did, though they had never ventured there at midnight to see. They only looked like ill-shaped stones, too little for men. But had they not made faces at him when he was a bit of a baby crying there in the dark?

The boy's heart sank. He was not proof against the grim and weird recollection. He took to his heels and ran out of the memory-haunted circle by the stone-guarded avenue next to him, nor stopped until he had left the desolate and barren spot far behind.