CHAPTER IV.
A dark-faced Kelt in a blue suit was reading the First Lesson as we made our entry. Bearing in mind Miss O’Flannigan’s riding-habit, it required nerve to present ourselves to the Church of Mallwydd at this shelterless stage of the service, but the congregation appeared to be inured to tourists. They scarcely ceased in their attention to the reader, and to his serious and careful rendering of the Lesson in his native tongue. “Darkling we listened” until the twice repeated “Samooel, Samooel,” suddenly flung out from the dark stream of Welsh, apprised us that it was the call of Samuel and the humiliation of Eli with which his strong brows rose or bent in sympathy.
Behind the reader was a glimpse of a surpliced arm, and a pale and languid hand supporting a grey head with the air of melancholy befitting a pastor of the Church of Wales at the present crisis. The thought of coming disaster was inseparable from him and the venerable little church, while the service progressed through prayers and hymns with a fervour worthy of dissent; and when the grey head and the sad face were above us in the pulpit, and the text, “The violent take it by force,” was given out in Welsh and English, it was easy to imagine the drift of the sermon that followed, spoken, or rather sung, as the Welsh manner is, in the preacher’s native tongue. With the monotony of a mountain wind, with the swinging cadence of a belfry, the minor periods rose and died. It might have been the sombre prophesying of a Druid, chanted beneath the oaks in days prior to Gregorians; it seemed to have in it echoes from ages of forgotten persecution, to be passionate with the protest of a threatened faith. The modern respectability of the congregation was amazingly out of keeping with it, but many of the listening faces were keen with unmistakable response. We recognised in different parts of the church some of the denizens of the Griffith Arms with their offspring—being, in fact, privileged to sit behind certain of the latter, and to mark the methods by which they wiled away the duration of the state prayers and other unbearable disciplines. It was something of a shock to discover the chambermaid seated in amity and a chancel pew beside a venerable gentleman whose grey beard had an unstudied luxuriance about it that recalled the pebble-thrower at the bridge. He stared at us with an excitement that seemed to deepen into ferocity, and once, during the prayers, I am almost certain that I saw him—after a wary glance at the chambermaid—thrust out his tongue, apparently at us. What had he to do with the chambermaid, and why did he object to us? These things were hid from us.
Let no one ask from these historians the facts about the Behemoth skull and the Leviathan backbone which are disposed in the timbered arch above the porch-door of the church. There are theories and there are legends, all equally improbable, so we were informed by the grey-haired vicar, with a classic and tolerant weariness which may well have been caused by the heat, or the Suspensory Bill, or the fact that Miss O’Flannigan was perhaps the five thousandth tourist by whom he had been asked the same question.
That night the order went forth for a half-past six o’clock breakfast. If the heat was tropical, so should be our manner of life, and the ride over the mountains to Dolgelly should be in the dewy cool of the morning. Nothing could be more idyllic. This quality, however, was not so prominent next morning, when at 6.15 A.M. Miss
