“He did not become a rich man. Late one evening he entered a Cardiganshire public-house and found the landlord refusing to let a pedlar pay for his lodging in kind, though he was penniless. Iolo paid the necessary shilling for a bed and rated the landlord, but had to walk on to a distant friend because it was his last shilling. Yet he wrote for the Gentleman’s Magazine and corresponded with the Monthly and others, so that towards the end he was entitled to advances from the Literary Fund. An annual subscription was also raised for him in Neath and the neighbourhood. His last three years he spent at Flimstone, where he is buried. He was a cripple and confined to the house, until one day he rested his head on the side of his easy chair and told his daughter that he was free from pain and could sleep, and so he died.”
“I will certainly go to Craig-y-Dinas,” said Mr Stodham solemnly, “and to Penon, and to Cowbridge, and to Flimstone.”
“You will do well,” said Mr Morgan, shutting up Elijah Waring’s little book and getting out the map of Glamorgan.
CHAPTER XIV
THE CASTLE OF LEAVES AND THE BEGGAR WITH THE LONG WHITE BEARD
Ann was good to all beggars as well as to old Jack, the watercress man, and when I asked her about it once she told the story of the Castle of Leaves. This castle was a ruin above the sea near where she was born. So fragmentary and fallen was it that every November the oak leaves covered it up. As a little child, Ann was taken up there on a May day because the hawthorn growing there always blossomed in time, however backward the season. Sitting among the ruins was an old white-haired man playing on a harp, and for ever after she loved beggars, said Aurelius, as if they were all going to have harps and long white beards in due course. A white-haired beggar, according to tradition, was infallibly to be found by anyone who went up to the Castle of Leaves on May day, and the story which connects a beggar with the early days of the castle might of itself explain why Ann never denied a beggar. Both Mr Morgan and Ann knew the story, but Mr Morgan had found it written in a book, with the date 1399, while Ann told it without a date as she remembered it from the dark ages of her own childhood.
In those old days, if Ann was to be believed, there was nothing but war. The young men went out to battle and never came back except as spirits, or as old men, or as worse than either—some of them having no more legs or arms than a fish, some crawling on their bellies with their beards in the mud, or flapping along in the wind like a kind of bird, or as lean and scattered as crickets—so that the children laughed at them first and then ran away crying to their mothers because they had such fathers. The mothers did not laugh save those that went mad, and perhaps they were not the worst off. The women knew that these strange idols and images crawling and jiggering home were the same that had marched out to the war as if their sweethearts were in the far countries before them, instead of behind them at the turnings of the roads. They would not have loved them so much if they had not gone out like that. The glorious young men departed; the young women were no longer beautiful without them; the little children were blossoms of the grave. The world was full of old men, maimed men, and young men going to the wars, and of women crying because the soldiers had not come back, and children crying because they had. And many and many a one had no more tears left to cry with.
Beggars appeared and disappeared who looked like men, but spoke all manner of tongues and knew not where their fathers or mothers or children were, if they had any left, or if ever they had any, which was doubtful, for they were not as other men, but as if they had come thus into the astonished world, resembling carrion walking, or rotten trees by the roadside. Few could till the fields, and it was always a good summer for thistles, never for corn. The cattle died and there was nothing to eat the grass. Some said it was a judgment. But what had the poor cows and sheep done? What had the young men and women done? They were but mankind. Nor were the great ones the worse for it. They used to come back from the wars with gold and unicorns and black slaves carrying elephants’ tusks and monkeys. Whether or not it was a judgment, it was misery.
But one day there was a white ship in the harbour of Abercorran. A man named Ivor ap Cadogan had come back who had been away in Arabia, Cathay, and India, in Ophir and all the East, since he was a boy. No man knew his family. He was a tall man with yellow hair and a long beard of gold, and he was always singing to himself, and he was like a king who has thrown away his crown, nor had he soldiers with him, but only the dark foreign men who followed him from the ships. All day long, day after day, they were unlading and carrying up beautiful white stone from the ship to build a great shining castle above the sea. In a little while came another ship out of the east, and another, and another, like swans, coming in silent to the harbour. All were heavy laden with the white stone, and with precious woods, which men carried up into the hills above the shore. The sea forgot everything but calm all through that summer while they were unlading the ships and building.