Through Welsh Doorways

by Jeannette Augustus Marks

But Catrin Griffiths never got any further, for with a leap Pedr was upon her.

“Out of my shop, girl, out!” and she was bundled through the door and the door slammed behind her and locked.

Pedr’s feeling of passionate anger against himself as well as against Catrin gradually settled. He must try to think. He would see no one else to-night and turned out the lamps. For a minute the wicks flickered, puffing odd jets of shadow on the raftered ceiling. There was an instant of wavering flame, then darkness, and only the silvered window-panes looking into the obscure room like big shining eyes. Pedr sat still, thinking, sighing and sighing. There were vague rustling noises in the shop; every time he sighed it seemed as if the noises quivered together like dry leaves. What would it ever matter to him now what happened? Without warning he had been robbed of his happiness; even time never could have proved such a thief, for time was no common plunderer,—if it took away, often it put something far more precious in its place. Pedr had always liked to think what time meant to anything lastingly beautiful; he loved the houses better when they were old, the thought that they had been attractive to others, had held many joys and even sorrows, made them beautiful to him; he liked the lines in an old face, somehow they made it merrier, made it sweeter; even the yellowing of a photograph, for Pedr was limited in his subjects from which to draw illustrations, pleased him with some added softening of tone. Life with Nelw, as it wound towards the end of the road, would be, he had thought, ever more and more enchanting, for just where the road dipped over into space there was the sky. Even Death confirmed love. That last blessing it had to give—the greatest blessing of all. But now his mind must be forever like the track of the snail in the dust. It was no matter to him now what lay upon the hillsides or within the valleys; the heavy-domed shadows of foliage trees, the shadow of ripple upon ripple where the water wrinkles, were alike of little account. He sighed again, and there was the same succession of small sounds, for he was not alone in the room. Hidden away in all the corners and nooks of the darkened shop were scores of little beings, once his comrades. Now they hid and trembled in their dark places, shrinking from Pedr from whom it had been their wont to take what the all-powerful hand offered. They well knew what tragedy might be coming to them, for of their race more had died in one age than of the race of man in all ages. But like the children of men, till the moment of danger they had counted themselves secure, and now when Pedr sighed it was as if the sea went over them. They had always been so well off; but they had seen the fate of their kin, the wide reachless waters that had unexpectedly surrounded them, the boiling of the waves, the calm, and the bodies floating on the surface, their wee diaphanous hands empty of the hearts that had once beat through them, their faces looking with closed eyes up into the everlasting day. As Pedr sighed again and again, they shook now, their hands over their ears, in the dusty holes of the shop. At last Pedr sighed a mighty sigh, and it was like the shaking of the wind in a great tree. Although it was a mighty sigh, the little beings uncovered their ears, and, with a new expression on their faces, leaned forward to hear it repeated. It came once more. Then they crept softly out of their nooks and small recesses and dusty corners, and stood tiptoe waiting for the next sigh. It came, and the wind seemed to shake down lightly through the great tree with the most dulcet notes in all the world; whisperings and tremolos and flutings and pipings. At that, the little beings ran from every part of the shop, and Pedr heard them coming; they clambered about his knees, they climbed into his lap, and Pedr gathered them all into his arms—that is as many as he could hold, and the rest seemed happy enough without being there.

If the truth must be told, Pedr slept soundly that night, just like the most fortunate of lovers. And the next morning, after he had found fault with his breakfast and scolded Betsan for her late rising, he betook himself, with a far more cheerful heart than he had known in many hours, to Nelw’s. Pedr in the darkened shop had learned a lesson which he would not have exchanged for any pure unmixed joy upon earth. And he knew even now, with the sun upon him and a strange yearning within him, that it mattered very little what Nelw had done or was hiding from him, for despite every dreadful possibility he loved her with a feeling that mastered fear.

When Nelw opened the door for him she shrank away.

“Och, Pedr,” she said, “so early!”

“Well, indeed, so early,” he replied, with an attempt at gaiety.

“So now I must be tellin’ you,” she whispered, hanging her head, and looking, with her white face, ready to sink to the floor.

“Indeed, dearie, you’ll not be tellin’ me, whatever,” he declared hotly.