A Story from Real Life
by the Author of "Real Mountain Decameron" [Joseph Downes].
Originally published in Bentley's Miscellany (Richard Bentley).
The interest of the following narrative (if interest it possess) is founded on the parental affection. To many the degree of it therein portrayed may appear morbid; but to those I would submit a few remarks on children considered as a great class of society, not as embryo elements of it—mere things of promise and present pastime. In pleasantry we may designate them as a happy little people, who have no need of laws, pains, and punishments, among them; but when we seriously reflect on the corrupting and hardening effect on our hearts of worldly pursuits and collision with our fellow-men, and then turn to these innocent beings, happy by unerring instinct only, not through false views, or vicious aims, or the sufferings of others—when we grasp the little hand put artlessly into ours, when we look into the fair countenance, and say, "Here is the hand that never did offence, the eye that never looked it, the mind that never thought less innocently than the spirits of heaven!"—I say, when wearied with our worldly conflict, we turn into our domestic circle, and thus muse over these, its purest ornaments, are we not justified in regarding children as a most important body? as a sort of link between our polluted degenerate selves, and that primeval innocence, of which we have on earth no representative or image left, but "little children?" Surely it is something to enjoy daily so beautiful, so pure a spectacle, as a multitude of creatures of our own nature, without a speck of that defilement incident to all adult nature; creatures which realize all the ideas we can form of life in heaven,—of the society of angels.
I cannot but think that this constant presence of human nature, pure and happy, of simple and innocent enjoyment, exerts a great, though little noticed influence on this whole great fighting family of man; and that each member of it forgoes somewhat of his selfishness, abates something of his fury, after every such contemplation of something happier than himself, which never yet regarded self, never was infuriated by passions. No wonder that the greatest of men have mostly evinced a passionate fondness for children; neither is it surprising that in some persons, not otherwise of weak character, such fondness should even rise to excess. In our mourning over a lost child the very sources of our comfort bear in them an embittering venom for our grief. The same purity of soul which assures us of its acceptance into the bosom of God, also renders the memory of its vanished prettiness and graces more intolerable by the exemption of every, even the least drawback on our love, from failings or offence. To the busy world what, indeed, is the death of a child? It forwarded—it retarded no human aim; it stood an insignificant little alien by the side of the mighty and dusty arena of life. Not so to the parent:—to him its smile and play were the invigorating spirit that nerved him in the conflict; and the very apathy of the whole world beside, its utter want of sympathy with him in his (to their feeling) trifling loss, becomes itself an added source of poignant, lonely, heart-consuming misery.
I was requested by a middle-aged farmer to visit his only son, and set out with him on a ride of nine miles to his mountain home. As a specimen of a numerous class of the aborigines of Wales, and the most estimable class—the secluded breeders of sheep and cattle—I must briefly sketch my fellow-traveller. His manner was so reserved as to border on sullenness, until intercourse had dispelled its coldness. He wore a grey coat (of home-dressed wool) of a coarse texture, and a shapeless straw hat; there was an air of negligence about his personal appearance, which betokened habits of solitary life; the moss from the bark of trees had greened his dress in many places; but, being a man of tall and fine person, and his behaviour indicating education above that of a labouring rustic, his whole appearance was not without a homely dignity, primitive, though rather grotesque. There is a pensiveness of look and tone in the more secluded Welsh farmers, almost touching, produced, no doubt, by the solitude in which much of their lives is spent, as well as by the character of their native land. Many of the sequestered Welsh homes have something of the solemnity of a church in their grey antiquity, bowered by huge trees, in the depths of dingles, shut up by mountains so nearly meeting as to almost bulge over the roof of deep thatch. Owls hooting by night from one wild barrier ridge to the other, across these ravines roaring with waterfalls at a little distance, among huge misshapen rocks; and the plover (the bird of ill omen to the Welsh) shrieking from the fern in the still noon, and the kite from the hills' stony tops; the mournful morass, with its black bogs and ever-whistling wind, which beyond those tops cuts off communication with the world to all but resolute hill climbers;—all these cannot fail, while thus surrounding the native almost from birth to burial, to exert a plastic influence on the mind and character of man.
It was to such a home that my master-shepherd, as I shall call him, at last introduced me, after a long descent down a watercourse, called by courtesy a road. The short dialogue which passed between us prior to our arrival, may serve to bring the reader acquainted with David Beynon, the hereditary owner of Llandefelach.
"You are a widower, I believe, David?" I remarked. (In rural Wales we exclude the "sir," and the surname, and the "mister," so frequent in Saxon usage.)
"Why, no; but much the same thing. My wife is alive; but her brother and I were on bad terms before our marriage, and worse after; this led to quarrels, which always made things worse, so we parted. Then we had a great dispute about which should have my little Peter. We could not both have him, and I could not part with him, and would not. I have no relations left, she has many; so I thought she could better spare him than I could. So I have been both father and mother to him; always in my lap, in my arms, and in my bed; abroad with me up the hill with the sheep, and in the snow he would toddle after me."
"Is your wife still desirous to have him with her?" I inquired.
"Furious about him still, I hear. I should be sorry for her, but I do hear that she finds a comforter in a fellow who courted her before we were married. I've had thoughts of our coming together again, for little Peter's sake, in case I should die, that he might not have in a mother a stranger to go to; but, since I heard that, I've done with her."
On reaching the antique home I found a very sweet little boy, sensible, pale, patient, stretched on what appeared—from the dangerous state of typhus-fever under which he was suffering—too likely to prove his death-bed.
Of terrible and overwhelming evils the mind does not readily admit the probability; but, when this happy incredulity is once overcome by evidence, the transition to absolute despair is rapid, and equally unreasonable with the previous obstinacy of hope. Hence it was that, no sooner had I signified to David that his child was in great danger, than his eyes rolled and dilated as if under some astonishing news, and a wild dismay marked his whole countenance. He stood a minute statue-like; asked again if I meant that his child was actually likely to die, and, without waiting reply, burst forth, "O my God! my God! what shall I do?"—then ran to his child as if he had but a minute more to see him alive, hung over him in dumb agony, and at last vented his agony in a womanlike flood of tears.
Afraid to flatter him with hope, I said something commonplace of his having surely known that his child was mortal.
"Mortal!" he exclaimed; "why, ay; and so am I too, thanks to God! for how could I bear to live without him now? A patient sensible boy! a good boy and a fond! So fond of me, a rough man,—just as if I had been his own soft mother! Oh! sir, what avails it now? Now I wish to God he had been less good, less fond.—I wish I could remember one fault he had; for now every pretty look of his up into my face, and all his pretty ways, do every one come back like a knife at my heart, now that I think I shall never see 'em more. Oh! doctor, bear with me; I am a lone man, and there's no one in my house that is a father but I! No one to feel with me, or for me!"
On my second visit, delirium had supervened in my little patient. The first indication of wandering intellect in a beloved object is, to even the best-regulated mind, dreadful; but to our extravagant recluse it was a gorgon that almost produced a kindred reeling of the mind to that visible in the object he so doated on.
The boy fancied himself on the hill side with the sheep, and the affrighted father tried almost angrily to convince him of the delusion, as if he would steady and hold back by force that reason which he saw departing—that mind of precocious power of which he had been so proud, now wandering and groping in the shadows of a night too likely to prove eternal. A pretty, but vacant smile only answered to the agonised and eager words of the parent thus striving against nature: but once his hollow horror of voice and accent seemed to rouse the sufferer; for he feebly tried to raise his arm as if to wipe away the tears he saw streaming from his father's eyes, and by that pathetic and pretty action brought many more.
Day after day did this impassioned parent sit sleepless, wan, and without food, holding that small hand, and counting the beats of that frightful pulse, watching every turn of those half-extinguished eyes, whose light had been the very light of life to him.
Had David been less beloved by his farm-servants every duty would have been neglected by them, as was every avocation by himself, but that of a nurse; for, taking no longer interest in anything beyond that little bed, he was grown impatient of their attention to even the most needful calls of daily duty. He seemed to fancy that the aid of every hand and every mind was demanded, in that fearful crisis, on which depended his own future doom of deadly sorrow or restoration to happiness; he was enraged by the presence of mind in others which could any longer recollect milking-time and folding-time, could still hear the cows lowing to be milked at the door, the sheep needing penning down in the valley of the brook; it almost seemed a slight and a cruelty to his darling, to attend to these things, to regard the future or the present, or anything but the moaning and the tossing of that dear sufferer—for any eye, or heart, or hand, to watch, and tend, and tremble, and ache, with a less fearful anxiety than his own.
After all this storm of distress in the house of Llandefelach, and the quiet cwm of the Glasnaut, I had the great pleasure of seeing the restored child and father lying on the sunny sod slanting down to the foamy little brook, fringed with cowslips and harebells; the former nearly well and quite happy, surrounded with almost a toy-shop: the various toys procured from a distant town, the promised rewards of good conduct in taking the requisite remedies.
Again I visited that valley and spot. I saw the father with folded arms walking thoughtfully, rather sullenly on by himself, and little Peter calling after him to stop for him, he being still too feeble to hasten much. The father stopped at last; but rather, I thought, as if ashamed that I should see his inattention to the boy, than moved by his eager and half-reproachful call. Never shall I forget the then inexplicable fall and change of that man's countenance as it met mine, as he paused, perplexed between reluctance to indulge his child with the usual "jump" as he begged to be "carried," and his shame under my observation of his altered manner toward him—how altered!—and the child more beautiful than ever! for the paleness left by illness harmonised with a certain amiability and gentleness, the fruits, perhaps, of a half-developed superior mind, which my small patient exhibited.
"What has my little friend here done, David?" I inquired. "Nothing very bad, I am sure,"—and the blue and speaking eyes of Peter, suffused each with a tear, seconded my question, earnestly gazing up at the rather stern and deeply sorrowful face of the father.
"Done? God bless thee, boy, nothing—nothing! He has done nothing, sir,—as good a child as ever—" The child, delighted, mounted a little bank of wild thyme, ready for a spring into his arms, of which the unaccountable man, after half-extending his arms to his pretty supplicant, disappointed him, letting them slowly fall to his sides, and muttering, "Poor little fellow!—poor little—wretch!" Then he seated himself on the ground in strange absence of mind, as if forgetting me, his child, everything.
"I should have thought, David, your heart would have bled to draw tears from those beautiful eyes," and I tried to console him by my kiss and a present, for the want of his father's.
Suddenly the latter sprang up out of his disconsolate rêverie, and he broke forth in a hollow voice of frightful energy.
"Does not my heart bleed then? Have I shed no tears? Sir, for every tear that my cruelty draws from his, mine shed hundreds—in the night, sir,—in the dead of night,—lonely—long and lonely nights! He is no longer my little bedfellow now; oh! no more now—never more! If ever agony did force blood from a wretch's eyes, I have wept blood!"
While he raved thus, his large melancholy eyes were fixed on the brook; he seemed to be rather in a passionate soliloquy than addressing me, although answering me; and, after a pause, he wept and trembled like an infant, adding in a quieter tone:—"Would to God we had again one bed, even this earth! one grave, one death-hour, to lie shroud by shroud, as hand in hand we used to sleep sweetly! O my boy!—my boy! I had been happy to see you die a few short weeks ago, to suck in death from thy poor black lips, and lay me down for ever by thy side—oh! yes, then, while I could have said, 'Farewell my boy!' But now—oh! now—" He broke off there, and fixed a stern, yet, I thought, a sort of shamefaced look on me, and recalled by my presence, as it seemed, to more self-recollection, he started, and exclaimed—" How I have been talking to you, a stranger!"
But, lest this change in our master-shepherd should be as bewildering to the reader as it then was to me, let me briefly supply the explanation.
During the boy's convalescence, David, in his fulness of joy, had invited the mother to visit their child. After a sort of reconciliation, the old source of contention (the question with which parent he should live) produced a fresh quarrel. It had happened that Peter was a seven months' child, without very manifest signs of such prematurity. The malignity of Mrs. Beynon's brother, a brutal sort of grazier and drover, had led him to goad his enemy, David, by taunts, at the expense of his sister's character; in short, he had insinuated that the real father of the child was the man who (as David Beynon told had wooed her prior to marriage. At this fatal interview, that unhappy mother, either wishing to estrange her husband from Peter, and so effect her object, or urged by mere fury of revenge, forgot decency and herself, and her son's welfare, so far as to avow the truth of this scandal raised by her brother. To prove to the selfish father, who had engrossed to himself their common object of love, that it was in fact hers, and hers only, so that he had been hugging to his heart his bane and his dishonour in what he deemed his pride and blessing. This was a tempting species of revenge, too sweet and keen in point for her mood of the moment to resist. David, breaking up the interview with terrible curses on her head, from that moment never looked into those sweet and innocent eyes, without seeing there the image of that man's countenance, who he believed had wronged him. Those pretty orbs, into which he had rarely looked without an impulse to implant kisses on both, were now become inhabited by a smiling devil—a face that seemed to leer upon him, as the fool and dotard who had fostered another's offspring for his own. That man's eyes, too, were blue; Peter's were of a lovely blue. The mother's eyes were, indeed, of that colour; but David could and would no longer see that mother's eyes in those; for, "Trifles light as air," &c.
The dreadful condition of feelings here depicted has never, that I am aware, filled a page in the biography of human hearts, prolific as is our age of all sorts of histories, real and fanciful, and far-fetched as are the sources of excitement in many of them. To those, then, who may regard in the light of incidents any new and strange harrowing terms of passion in the mind and heart, it may not be uninteresting to hear a few of the sentiments expressed by our humble hero in a cooler moment, when he had reposed his sad secret with me while we wandered together near the house.
"To find out that we have been cherishing a foul fallen thing, instead of the white blessing we fancied ours in a faithful wife, must be a great trial, but more bearable than mine. A childless man, who makes such a discovery, suffers a great shock, but not like mine! He, at least, knows the worst, and he sees the whole of his misery. It is no longer she, the pure and beautiful thing he loved, and he begins to loathe, to hate her, and that's his cure. But as for me, what cure is for me? How can I hate him, innocent soul! How look on his fair forehead, see his sweet smile, and hate? Sweet child! what has he done that I should hate him? And yet—yet," he added, in a hollow whisper, that had in it I know not what of piteous horror, "I feel I can—I feel—I—hate!"
The terrible conflict within of opposing feelings, here disfigured his face as with an ugly mask. I started at the transfiguration, and for the moment fancied I saw before me the loving murderer of a loving child; that child so recently the object of a love amounting almost to a frenzied passion!
"I feel I hate," he murmured on. "But is it a cure to me? No, no; but a very hell of pain! Even the man who has children does not suffer like me. He may be made a lone man of a sudden by a wife's crime, but his children—his undoubted own—are left him still. The children of his happy early days, when she was good and faithful, they are not altered by her fault. They are round his hearth still to soothe him for his loss; he sees nothing in their eyes but their mother as she looked before she sinned, such as she was when he led her home over his threshold, to live and die with him, as he hoped. But, what is left to me? What do I see when I look into that boy's eyes, where I turned for all my comfort, and all my joy? Oh, sir, what see I there?" And the father's features assumed an aspect of the intensest loathing and hate.
Argument, with so fatal an impression, was vain.
"Now, tell me, doctor, if you can," he resumed vehemently, "how is this to be borne, or what am I to do? You cured him once, can you cure me? All your art is for bodies; yet there are plagues, fevers, cancers of a man's mind more unbearable far then any the body suffers. To shun what I cannot live without; to drive him from me that I couldn't bear an hour from my sight; I say, who can bear this? Is it a state to be borne by a creature that the Almighty has gifted with the power to live or die—to die—or kill? No—no, you cannot tell me what to do,—how to bear it; not you, nor all mankind will ever find a cure for such a state of living damnation as this!"
From that day the wretched father, wandering and muttering to himself, absented himself almost wholly from home and Peter, hiding his misery in the deeper chasms of fractured rocks, by the high sources of the waterfalls, in solitudes and shadows, savage and solitary, and gloomy as his view of life or death to come. Whether it arose from some neglect to which the tenderly-reared but now deserted boy became exposed by this desertion, or that his sensitive nature, pining under the change in his father's feelings, and not yet wholly recovered from the effects of his illness, the fact was, from one of these two causes, a relapse took place, and my poor little patient was once more a prisoner of the sick chamber.
Meanwhile the wife, who had inflicted all this agony on the father, was suffering scarcely less. Even the fulness of revenge, indulged against those for whom love still lingers in the heart (and such was the case with Margaret Beynon) is like the recoil of a gun in an unskilful hand, which, bursting with its overcharge, proves more fatal to the party aiming to wound, than to the object aimed at. A terrible sort of compunction preyed on her mind from the moment of her fatal, self-criminating folly. As soon as news reached her (at the distance of some miles) of the new illness of the child (she being at the time herself dangerously ill), she despatched a most earnest request for an interview with her husband. He at last reluctantly assented, and they met.
Their meeting was solemn and affecting. She extended a thin and pallid hand toward her husband, while she sat propped in the bed for shortness of breath. He stopped, reluctant even to be near her. He was come a long way from his boy—his boy, as, melted by pity, he now, under his illness, could not bear but to call him. His heart was full of him, his thoughts were all on him,—the more so, that, being now out of sight, that fatal conceit of a likeness no longer could have the effect of chilling or enraging his heart. At home he had been agonised between his longing to act to him the part of a nurse, as before, and his half maniacal impression that every one knew the secret of the child's paternity, which forbade his manly and proud mind to become the apparent dupe of another, by thus cherishing another's offspring with a father's fondness. Thus tortured at home and abroad, David altered, haggard, unshorn, and stern, recoiled from that fatal woman. He stood aloof, and saw, unmoved, (if he saw at all,) the spectacle of a fearful hemorrhage in her who had been the wife of his choice; and neither extended his hand in return, nor could bear to speak to, or even look at her.
"Pray, come nearer," she said faintly; "I cannot lift up my voice, and I have much to say, and little time to—"
He advanced one step, no more.
Panting for breath, she needed a helping arm to upraise her in the bed, and looked imploringly toward his (that which for a brief space had enfolded, had upheld her, and tenderly too, and might still have embraced her, but for a vindictive brother); but he still withholding his help, she desperately, in a sort of angry despair, erected herself by one effort, and brushed away one tear from her eye, that he might not see it stand there. The exertion caused a fresh and more frightful effusion of the vital fluid. The husband, somewhat touched, perhaps, by her reproachful look and wild action, stooped to hand her the cup, already nearly filled with the crimson horror. Even this tardy and cold courtesy affected the unhappy wife; she wept bitterly.
"Once more, David, but once, support me upright. A little touch of your arm will lift me higher, or [ cannot say what I would not die without saying for all the world."
David felt once more the touch of that hand (in its unnatural bloodless white), which he had received before God at the altar, and all the past came over him like a dream just remembered. The wedded happiness of a year, the after solitude of years; the strange transfer of his whole soul's affection to an infantile object; his pensive sort of bliss in the few years passed with him; the recent shocking wrench from his heart of that last consolation. Her frailty and its consequence, more fatal than itself, was now forgotten in this retrospect of a moment, and he even returned that hand's pressure while awaiting the disclosure she had to make.
"Oh! husband, hear me with patience, while I confess—"
It was a luckless beginning.
"Heaven's curse on your confessings!" he broke forth. "I'll hear no more of them! Would to God I had never heard them! Such confessions as yours, after such treachery, are fitter for hell than heaven. Your confessions have made me childless, and your child fatherless; made me unnatural to him,—his beauty hateful to me! Having fooled me so long, you should have held your peace for ever, and died in the sin and secrecy of incontinence, as you lived in the shame of it! Truth from your lips is a crime now; it has wrought a more devilish mischief than the foulest lie ever did! Lie on, now, you wretched woman, and die in your perjury,—you'll be sooner pardoned by a pitying God than for these accursed confessions."
Faint, and wringing her hands, she had not breath to interrupt him, except with a word or two.
"Oh, hear me! oh, I was false!"
"False to me! Don't I know it? Why again? Have you not said it already to kill all the father in my heart? Wretch! I tell you once again, you ought now to persuade me, were it possible, that you never had been false! Restore me my blessed ignorance, if you can; fool me again into the belief that he is my own; cheat me to take him back to my bosom and bed! Would you make your peace with God before you die?—die with that merciful lie upon your lips, crying 'He is your own,—he is your own!' but, no; it is too late."
With brilliant, yet ghastly smile, and her hectic blush now heightened to a burning crimson, Margaret sprang up of her own sudden strength, supplied by the violence of her emotion, and threw her arms round her husband's neck ere he was aware, and cried,
"And so he is! on the word and oath of a dying woman he is your own! I meant, that I confess a wicked lie told to you lately; I meant, that I was false when I joined my cruel brother in his wicked lie; but you stopped me short. And I was false when I accused myself,—on my life, and my soul's life, I was!" He shook his head as if incredulous. "You don't believe me, then?" said she, still wringing her hands. "Then it is indeed too late. My poor wronged little boy!"
"Foolish, miserable woman," he said mournfully, "did you think me earnest when I said you ought to deceive me? Are you obeying that foolish, wild injunction of mine? "T'was but my passion."
"Alas! what can I say?—how undo what I have done?—and my breath is spent. Oh, God of truth, speak for me! Some pitying mother, now a saint in heaven, witness for me; whisper to his heart, convince my husband, do my dear child right before I die!"
A dawn of comfort grew visible in the gloomy eyes of the father.
"Wife!" he said solemnly, "remember—this is perhaps your death-bed."
"I do—I do! I hope it is, for I have nothing to live for; and, revenging God so deal with me as I speak true or false when I say—He is your own! he is your own! And I too, I am—was—your own, ever yours; but that you regard not. I was true to you, David,—loved you—love you, David back! I came to your bosom even as I left my mother's at weaning time, pure as a child; and I go to my bed in the cold ground just as I left yours! Believe no other, David,—do me justice when I am there laid, husband dear! I feel we shall have no more dispute about the keeping of poor Peter. Death will soon settle that now —for ever."
David pored on her face as she spoke, as if to read her inmost soul. He was a suspicious man, and deep melancholy now made him slow to hope, and, therefore, to believe.
"Margaret!" he said tremulously, and held her hand, "I implore you not to deceive me in kindness! Truth—truth is what I pant for. Can you—dare you take an oath that that sweet and precious child is mine?"
"For God's sake bring me a Bible! There lies one—hand it me, quick!" she exclaimed, smiling brightly, though her agitation increased the frightful expectoration every moment. "Invent any form of oath the most dreadful," she continued. "On the soul's peril of a dying woman, one who knows herself dying, I kiss this word of God, and swear he is your child. Look! I have sealed it with my blood; the impression of a bloody lip is on the leaf! Yours, David, your own dear boy! Now shall I be believed? Now do you—can you forgive my foul—my unnatural lie? If you can indeed, kiss me once—once more in token of it, and that we part in—peace, in love—"
"A hundred, my own dear Margaret," he cried rapturously; "from my heart I forgive you—from my soul I believe you," and kissed her as rapturously, while the happiness of being at last believed lit up the careworn features of the wife with such a beauty from within, that every vestige of sickness and impending death flew before it.
"You have heaved a mountain from off my breast, my dear—dear Peggy. 'Twas I who wronged you, by separating you from our darling. But we shall have no more dispute; we shall all three be happy yet.
She shook her head, and wept, for her extreme exhaustion now admonished her against indulging that hope of life which this new incident prompted so powerfully.
"Now, hear me swear, Margaret, solemnly swear, and believe me, you never had rival in my heart or bed, but that dear child—never ! You shall come to Llandefelach,—we will nurse him together,—we will—"
As he spoke, the chamber-door was thrown open in haste, and one of his shepherds entered, who had ridden after him in haste, to say that the "womankind" thought there was a "change" in little Peter, by which expression David too well knew that the Welsh attendants mean some indication of approaching death, although their observation is sometimes fallacious. To David the words struck dismay through his very soul, and a ghastliness like death's own overspread his face, while all the husband forsook his heart, and he once more saw only before him the woman who had estranged him from his child, who had caused him to be at this moment at a distance from him.
"And I must be here,—at this horrid distance! I must leave him among strangers in perhaps his last—" and he scowled a dumb curse of infuriated misery at his ill-fated wife, who once more seemed to him the murderess of his life's companion,—his life's darling.
Abruptly he broke from her. Not a kiss, or embrace, or word more did he vouchsafe, but almost while her face yet remained turned after him, he vanished through the door. She was shocked by the sound of his horse's hoof rattling with reckless and dangerous speed along the naked and rugged rock of the mountain track which gave access to the wild residence of a mountain farm which she had chosen. Her heart seemed to die within her, as the sound died away in the high distance of the declivity he was ascending.
Little did the impatient father see or heed of his road, except its dreadful length. An obstructed journey of many mountain miles was before him. He pictured to himself his darling turning his poor wan face incessantly to the door for him each time it opened; he heard him faintly asking for him; he imagined his life ebbing fast away, and only strangers round; and every craggy water-course, every broken gully, where the dingy peat-water formed a rivulet; every round of pale green verdure indicating the dangerous quagmire which he must avoid; the clogging soil of the mountain's base, spongy with springs: all these seemed to his sad eye and soul as so many inhuman foes deaf and blind to his agony, and groan, and sweat, rising up between him and that house, (that deathbed to his fancy,) wherein and by which he had already arrived in mind, and stood—a childless man. His soul, indeed, was there, but round him, eternally recalling it, was the same dismal far-stretching distance, the fading horizon of mountain rock (for it grew dark), while the only life near was that of creatures alien to the nature of man, and his strong sympathies—the kite, the fern-owl, and the dismal bittern of the dark-brown marsh. No severer trial of mortal patience can perhaps exist than that he was doomed to suffer; that constant conflict between the fond spirit stretching forward, and throwing behind all obstacles, and the hindering body, in its gradual tardy, laborious progress, impeded by every one, even the least.
This trial, however, like all human trials, had its end. He approached his house. And now every unkind look and tone of the few last dismal weeks, which he had been betrayed into toward his uncomplaining, unoffending boy, were to be atoned for in one delightful embrace. For David had made a helpmate—a companion of him, young as he was; and therefore felt no less compunction and real remorse toward him, although a child, than toward an adult. With beating heart he pulled the string of the door-latch, paused to listen, and had the joy to find all noiseless within, proving that at least the worst had not yet occurred,—that death was not in the house. It seemed that such an event must have caused something at least of confusion, akin to that tremendous commotion in his own nature which its mere conceit had been producing during the whole or his journey. He was already at his child's bedside ere any knew of his return. All was dim, by the light of the small rush taper. What was his sudden ease of heart to see one woman, only a nurse, tying on his darling's cap, in all tranquillity! The very suddenness of that ease, that stop of his heart's long palpitation was of itself a shock.
"Going to sleep, my precious? One kiss first, mine own darling,—mine own sweet boy! Forgive foolish father,—forgive him all his cruel—"
Bending over him in the dusk, he saw a pretty quiet smile on the wan little face, but it was not at him. The lips had a dreadful formality in their closure; it was the chin-band applied to the falling jaw which the woman was tying, and which he mistook for the cap. The truth flashed upon him just as he uttered the word father, and he knew that he was now, indeed, no father. The frightful appearance of two eyeholes instead of eyes (those beautiful eyes!) produced by two small coins, which the women had placed there, (according to idle custom,) confirmed the sad impression. He jerked back his head, in horror, for his own lips and those of clay, his eyes and those eye-sockets, had nearly met. He uttered one deep groan, expressive of combined agony and horror, and fell at full length on the floor. It was but a minute's respite. Again he was on his feet, standing at the bedfoot, like some effigy, with its stony eyes fixed on vacancy, gazing stupified on the sad object which the officious nurse had now covered with a sheet, so that he looked only on the ghastly outline of the small corpse, with projecting face and feet.
Up to the day of his child's burial David hardly left the fatal chamber, and moved about, looking a thousand dreadful emotions, but venting none in almost total dumbness. He would not look on that last frightful duty imposed by a foul and dire necessity for the sake of survivors, but mounting horse, rode off in the direction of Cwm Carneddan, his wife's residence. Whether revenge for the fatal lie which had desolated it was up and raging in his breaking heart, and hurried him toward that miserable mother, or that a reeling mind led to rush abroad without object, while a depth of earth was being interposed between that fair object, now becoming a horror and an offence, and the living, whom its beauty had so lately gratified—from one of these causes, David was absent till the middle of the second night. But of his return I shall speak in the conclusion.
I was summoned in haste soon after to Llandefelach. I was led up stairs, where I found the haggard form of the master, apparently searching everywhere for something lost, and followed mournfully by two of his shepherds. He turned his hollow eyes on me with a look of confused recollection, then giving up his search, said disconsolately. "He is not here: can you tell me where is Peter—my Peter? I look across the world, and he is not there. I look up to Heaven, and ask him of God, and God will not hear me—not answer me. [ listen for his little voice all night, and cannot hear it; yet I hear it calling in my heart for ever. I shall never see him more,—never hear it more!"
The unhappy man had, I learned, reached Carneddan, and found his wife in her coffin. The shock of his furious and abrupt parting had quickly overpowered her remains of life. Whether or no his intellects were at that time already gone, must for ever remain unknown, and unknown, therefore, what was the aim of his visit. On his return he was wild in his deportment and looks; he had lost his hat; he appeared to have been immersed in a bog; his horse was discovered loose on the hill, among the pits of black peat (or mawn), where, doubtless, his frenzied rider had passed one dismal night.
Some years after the death of the child I was entering a town at a little distance from Llandefelach, one fine summer's night, by a cloudless moon. A peal of bells (a rather rare accompaniment of our Welsh churches,) reached my ears, from the church seen dim on an eminence above the humble town, shrouded by venerable trees, from amidst which the mossy thatches of the houses, in their grey antiquity, peeped through thick foliage. Cows wandered about the rude streets of half green rock, steeply sloping down to a little river tumbling in a craggy channel, and keeping a perpetual gentle roar, which, deadened by the banks, produced an effect as lulling, if not as melancholy, as those distant bells. The voices of a few children, tempted out to play round a huge oak-tree, on a greensward in the middle of this lonely village town, alone broke the monotony of those mingled sounds, except when an owl was heard from a small ruin of a castle on a mound beyond that mountain brook.
Knowing this to be the native place of David Beynon, where his aged mother still resided, I thought of that unfortunate man, whom the last report I heard stated to be in the condition of raving insanity, in a receptacle for the mad. I thought of the time when he played like one of those little ones, round that tree, and obeyed the pretty summons, which I now heard from them, in English,
"Boys and girls come out to play,
Now the moon shines bright as day," &c.
On their chanting their song, I was startled by the sudden appearance of a tall old man, in tattered clothes, with long hair and beard quite white, who had been sitting at the foot of the tree, and who, on the children pulling him by the withered hands, laughed shrilly, and awkwardly joined in their wild dance, to their seeming great amusement. Nothing but his stature, and something mournful and infantile in his half hysterical laugh, distinguished his manners from those of the real children, whose companion rather than sport, he seemed to be.
It was not till I had inquired about this poor harmless being at the rustic inn, that I knew that this was David Beynon come home to his decrepit mother, to finish his mindless existence under the roof where it began.