CHAPTER XII. CAERPHILLY CASTLE.
A country vicar in the last century bore little or no resemblance to a clergyman of any status in this. He was a much more homely and patriarchal character, especially among the Welsh mountains.
Whatever his learning or his eloquence, he did not hesitate to till his own glebe-lands, or to perform offices from which the pastor of to-day would shrink as derogatory to his cloth. As a rule, his stipend was small, and necessity compelled him so to labour. He came, however, nearer to his flock in consequence.
When Mrs. Edwards, the Sunday following William's escapade, besought the Rev. John Smith to admonish her refractory son, who perversely and sullenly refused obedience to his eldest brother, idling and playing with stones when he should be at work on the farm, and wandering no one knew whither when reproved, she was surprised to hear him say—
'Um, ah, yes, I wanted to have a word with that boy of yours. But which am I to admonish, the eldest, who should set an example of brotherly love and consideration, or the youngest, who resents what he regards as petty persecution and overbearing assumption?'
''Deed, sir, Rhys has only set a good example to the rest. He do work hard upon the farm all day, and teach them to read at night; and he do have a right to expect them to look up to him, and do what he tells them; for you see, sir, he do be grown quite a young man, and a good farmer too, look you.'
'Um, ah, yes, yes. I see. I understand all about it, Mrs. Edwards,' was the vicar's running comment; 'I'll admonish the offender,' the twinkle in his genial blue eyes, as he turned to accost another parishioner, puzzling her greatly.
However, as there was peace between the brothers for a considerable time, the widow congratulated herself on bespeaking the good vicar's interference.
She was not aware, for Rhys did not think proper to say, that, after asking him confidentially if the gossip he had heard about himself and William was true, and what were the rights of the case, the vicar, out of his own mouth, had convicted him of a want of brotherly kindness and forbearance, and had 'admonished' him to remember what a lazy lad he had been prior to his father's death, and had asked how he would have liked an elder brother to come hectoring over him in those days? In short, he read Rhys an informal homily on arrogant assumption, and the need to exercise a degree of lenity towards a brother so much younger, who was in all probability no worse than he had been himself. It was something like a pinprick to an inflated balloon.
Rhys did not hold his head quite so high as usual when he joined Cate and her father at the churchyard stile; and was so quiet during the walk homeward that Cate tossed her hat-crowned red head about in offended pettishness, and Owen looked at him askance, wondering what the good vicar had said to take all the brightness out of him.
William was no less reticent. But, child though he was, he lived in a dream-world of his own, and had ceased to reveal his inner self on the domestic hearth, scared by the loud laughter and mockery that greeted his curious inquiries and precocious remarks.
In his silence, therefore, there was nothing to surprise his mother, who had fallen in with the general opinion that he was sullen. She had seen the vicar lead him aside, and took the reprimand for granted.
The opening words of his conversation with the nine years boy did not seem much like a reprimand.
'So, William, I hear you are going to be a great builder? And Mr. Morris tells me you want to know all about the Tower of Babel and Solomon's Temple, the Druidical temples, and St. Helen's Church here, with bridges and I do not know what beside. Now which of all these are we to talk about first?'
He had unlocked the boy's heart as with a magic key. Here was some one else who did not laugh at him. Their conversation lasted little over a quarter of an hour, and William was frequently the catechist, but it broke off like a serial story, 'to be continued.' And though it had been chiefly about building and builders, the vicar had not let the boy go away without a few words of gentle advice on his duty to himself and others—a lesson referred back to the two tablets of stone delivered to Moses amid the fiery terrors of Sinai.
After that there was generally a Sunday morning chat in the churchyard, and on one occasion the vicar took the boy home with him to dinner, a distinction that puzzled Mrs. Edwards exceedingly, and made Rhys no less jealous.
The vicar, a small man surmounted by a big clerical wig, had simply shown the boy a few architectural pictures in illustrated books, with a brief description of his own, the letterpress being English, and the boy's education stopping short at Welsh.
There was a water-colour drawing upon the parlour wall of a ruined castle with a tower that had been rent from battlement to base, and appeared in the act of falling. It was too remarkable to escape William's observation. He eyed it intently for some minutes. At length he asked, 'What place is that, sir?'
'That? Oh, that is Caerphilly Castle, the oldest fortress in Cambria. Do you not know it?'
'No, but I mean to go there when the tailor comes to make me some proper clothes. The packman let me have the cloth for the stockings I have knitted, look you.'
'Um, ah. So you are in a hurry to discard the ancient Cymric kilt are you?'
'They make one look so like a girl,' was William's shamefaced answer.
'Yet there are grown men both in Wales and in Scotland who still cling to the kilt, and are proud of it. You will be for casting off the old Saxon smock-frock next.'
''Deed no, sir. Men wear smock-frocks, women don't. Rhys wears one and Evan too.'
But, ancient or modern, no sooner had William a chance of an exchange for a short-tailed coat and a pair of knee-breeches than he felt he had made a step towards manhood, much as Davy had done before him—Davy, who went plodding along from day to day and from week to week, with scarcely a thought that did not centre in the farm, and who never troubled himself about 'whys' or 'wherefores.'
'William is not at church to-day. How is that?' remarked the vicar to Mrs. Edwards on the Whitsunday, as he took his customary stroll among his parishioners in all the importance of his wig and three-cornered hat, noting each newly flower-decked grave as he went, and perhaps making a kindly remark in passing.
''Deed, sir, I thought he would be here. He was dressed before any of us. Ales said he was proud as a peony of his new clothes, and had gone off first to show himself. He do be a strange boy.'
'Did Rhys say anything to him about them?'
'Yes, sure, he told him that now he was being dressed like a man he hoped he would cease to be playing with stones like a baby.'
'Um, ah, yes, yes. I thought as much. You need not be alarmed if William is not home until late. I can partly guess where he has gone. He is not doing any harm, my good friend. He is in much less danger than Rhys, I can assure you.'
Mrs. Edwards looked up in the vicar's expressive face, and following the glance of his pleasantly twinkling eye, her own rested on her eldest son, carefully handing Cate Griffith over the tall stile.
She knew nothing of electricity, but certainly something like an electric shock passed through her, with its instantaneous enlightenment. A moment she stood dazed, then turned to address the vicar, but he was gone, and talking with a grey-haired old couple of a son who had been lost at sea, who had no grave to be dressed with flowers that Whitsuntide.
William was forgotten in the newer care. There was no mistaking the attitude, the tender expression in the face of Rhys, or the coquettish aspect of the ruddy maiden as she placed her plump brown hand in his.
'Sure,' said the widow to herself, 'Cate could get over a stile without help. I've seen her climb a tree or get over a wall before now. That's why Mrs. Griffith's been so ready to let Cate come to the farm to help at harvest-time, or whenever we were pushed. I see it all now, and the fear lest she should go home by herself after dark, as if the road did not be straight enough. And him a boy, not twenty yet. What do the woman be thinking of? Do she be thinking I would let Cate come on the farm as Rhys' wife, when Ales and Evan get married? Oh, Rhys, Rhys, and me a widow with three younger ones to rear, look you!'
Jonet and Davy, standing close beside her, during her brief colloquy with the vicar, had no clue to the significance of his hint or his glance; but they could read the trouble on their mother's puckering brow, without suspicion of its cause.
'What be the matter, mother?' asked Jonet anxiously, sidling up to her and slipping a small palm into the larger one. 'Do you be uneasy about Willem?'
''Deed, Willem's all right. The vicar said so. You need not fret over him,' said Davy placidly. 'He will be gone to show Robert Jones his new clothes.'
'Yes, yes, sure, that will be it,' assented the widow, smoothing her ruffled countenance with an effort, unwilling to share her discovery with either Davy or Jonet, although the former was by this time quite as old as Rhys had been when he felt himself entitled to assume a general protectorate of the family.
Taking Jonet by the hand, she made her way across the churchyard more hastily than usual, barely nodding in recognition of an acquaintance who advanced a step or so in expectation of a chat. Her desire was to keep Rhys and Cate in sight, and so confirm or dispel her newly-aroused suspicions.
But there were others before her at the stile, a father and mother, with three or four young children, to be helped up the steps on one side and down the other, and by the time her turn came, Rhys and the Griffiths were well in advance, and lost to sight by a bend in the road.
Davy was always inclined to saunter along, and Jonet, however brisk at starting, began to drag heavily after the first mile on the return, encumbered by her Sunday shoes.
For all that neither William nor Rhys were at home when they got there, and the rare Sunday's dinner of boiled meat and potatoes was on the table, with buttermilk to wash it down, before the latter came hurrying in, his cheeks aglow.
The uneasy look on Mrs. Edwards' face had not been set aside with her hat and cloak—worn in all seasons on account of uncertain skies—nor had she found it as easy to conceal her displeasure with a smile, as it was to cover her best linsey-woolsey skirt with a fair linen apron.
'Has not Willem come in?' asked Rhys, glancing round the kitchen.
'No!' said his mother curtly, 'and you have not been hurrying yourself.'
'Owen Griffith kept me talking about the success of his new crop of potatoes. He says that his brothers, and Roberts, and Lloyd are all for trying them next year.'
'Potatoes, indeed!' his mother jerked out, and he looked up at her. But he set her evident ill-humour down to the absence of William, as did both Evan and Ales.
And where was William rambling that bright Whitsunday morning, when he should have been helping his mother to dress his father's grave with flowers?
Had he gone, as suggested, to parade his manly suit before his friend Robert Jones?
Not he; that would hardly have accounted for his absence from church, since the turf-cutter's cottage was on the direct road-side.
No. When the vicar was giving out his text, William Edwards was studying a 'sermon in stones,' his text being Caerphilly Castle, and he standing in blank awe and amazement beneath the barbican towers of the only drawbridge time has spared out of the original thirteen, much as he had stood in infancy overpowered by the comparative vastness of Eglwysilan's church when he was first brought face to face with it.
And now it was but a dumpy boy of nine who stood transfixed by that approach to a stronghold, 'of which the very ruins are stupendous,' a boy unread in history, who knew nothing of the Romans, or of Beli Gwar, or of Robert Fitzhamon, or of any of the conjectural first-founders, or of Edward the First who added so largely to its strength and size. He could see that it stood encircled by water in a wide plain surrounded by dark and barren mountains, but had any one informed him that it occupied an area equal to Windsor Castle he would have been no wiser, never having seen a castle before, or heard of any Windsor except the lord of the soil around his home.
With mountains he was familiar. Their grandeur did not oppress him. They were the work of the infinite God who made the whole world, who set the sun and the moon and stars high in the heavens to give us light. The creation of the universe by the Almighty hand was no new idea in the boy's mind. But that men, only men, should have put that vast pile together, its towers, its massive walls that had outlasted hundreds of years, was suggestive of possibilities and capabilities that took his breath away.
He stood there long, not so much because he was tired with his five-miles' rough walk that hot morning, but to overcome his first sensations of awe. Then he passed between the two great towers, and traversed courts and alleys, citadel, hall, chapel, whatever the pillared areas, the vast walls and arched windows, may suggest to antiquaries. To the boy they suggested only a marvellous enigma it was his fixed determination to solve some day.
In his explorations he had to scramble over the fragmentary ruins of a second drawbridge between flanking towers, over which the friendly ivy had thrown an evergreen mantle. Here he stood gazing astonished at the mass of solid masonry which had walled the castle in, and at a great arched gateway under which he passed. He groped his way down to an underground chamber where had been a smelting furnace and a mint; and from that wonder of wonders, a staircase to the turret-top.
But nothing held him so spellbound as the leaning tower, which, with chambers and passages complete, and outer walls full ten feet thick, overhung its base nearly four yards, a threatening mass that so had hung in mid air since the convulsion that had rent the tower in twain centuries before, yet held aloft as surely as the tower of Bologna or of Pisa.
Nothing knew William of these, or of battles or sieges, or of the force of water let in on molten metal; but he could wonder how the stones held together, and he could argue with himself that what had been done might be done.
Aladdin's enchanted garden of precious stones was nothing to what Caerphilly Castle was to the boy William Edwards.