Miss Jones, the landlady’s daughter, interpreted these things to us, and we recognised compassion in her eye as she did so. Our craven hearts sank low; but we realised that, as Mark Twain has sufficingly expressed, we must “crowd through or bust.”
CHAPTER VII.
The ascent of Snowdon began as seductively, as gently, as the first step towards a great crime. A grassy cart-track curved idly through pastures that had just a perceptible heavenward tendency, enough to stimulate the traveller and flatter his vigour and prowess. The air was bland and sweet, and the clouds that had been solemnly seated on the mountain began to move away in vagrant wisps and shreds, baring the ponderous side and shoulder and the white track that climbed them at what we considered an absurdly easy gradient.
Griffith Roberts had allotted us but brief time for rest or refreshment at the Quellyn Arms. As the clock struck seven he had tapped fatefully at the parlour window, and we had followed him as unresistingly as the rats followed the Pied Piper. There are, however, rare occasions when it is agreeable to be coerced into doing what is right. As, at a steady three and a half miles an hour, we strode after Griffith Roberts, we began to be conscious of restored enthusiasm and intelligence, and, impartially, it seemed to us that we should be delightful charges for him—so affable, so active, so anxious for information. Griffith Roberts’s back had, however, not quite so social an aspect as might have been expected, and he maintained his lead of five yards with uncommunicative firmness. Miss O’Flannigan and I called on each other for a spurt, and for two or three minutes walked at the rate of four miles an hour without any appreciable result. It became clear that Griffith Roberts moved, planet-like, in a certain fixed relation to his satellites, and that his lead of five yards was an institution not easily to be set aside. All that we had effected was the raising of the pace from three and a half miles to four, and the discovery that the grasshopper, or its equivalent, the hand-satchel, had become a burden. Griffith Roberts might scorn us as companions, but he should not ignore his duties as a hireling. We hailed him, and having bestowed the satchel upon him, Miss O’Flannigan made a determined plunge into conversation.
“I suppose you have often been up Snowdon?” she began, in the strong, loud voice which is believed to force comprehension on the foreigner.
She had to say it thrice, and Griffith Roberts finally replied, “Oh yess, one time.”
This was a confession of startling frankness; and Miss O’Flannigan and I, recalling in a lightning-flash the Mahntooroch tourist’s tales of incompetent guides, and of a clergyman whose bones had been picked clean by Snowdon wild cats, regretted that our five-shilling fee had been squandered upon an amateur.
“And yesterday,” continued Griffith Roberts, after a pause, during which I suppose he was mustering his English vocabulary, “it wass two times also I wass on taap.”
“He means he’s been up once already to-day!” expounded Miss O’Flannigan in a whisper, whose breathlessness was doubtless caused by her surprise. Griffith Roberts must himself be kin to the wild cats if he could go up Snowdon twice in the day at a speed of four miles an hour, and I began to admit to myself that a guide of this description might perhaps be thrown away upon us. Something infirm, with asthma, we would gladly have put up with; we should even have overlooked a club-foot. At about this period the cart-track began to show symptoms of having had enough, and of wanting to turn back. Fadingly it led us to a wall and a wicket-gate, such as occurs in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ and it and its grassy ruts were seen no more.
That which replaced it was a simple adaptation of the bed of a stream to the uses of a road. Dry it certainly was, but whether the bed of a stream be wet or dry, it is not easy to walk upon. We followed the example of Griffith Roberts, whose regard for his boots seemed his one human weakness, and climbed after him through the heather tussocks along the bank. Single file and silence prevailed severely, and my heart began to beat in unusual places, such as my throat and ears. What Miss O’Flannigan’s heart did I could not tell, but each time that I caught from behind a glimpse of her cheek, it seemed to glow in more royal contrast to the dull background of the mountain-side. Another wall and wicket-gate were arrived at; our guide looked round at us with an eye of cynical expectancy, and hesitated. It was an intimation that we might rest,—a compassionless concession to the inadequacy whose extent he knew by experience, and not by sympathy. But sympathy was not what we craved for. I sat down on a rock, and Miss O’Flannigan extended herself at full length on some contiguous boulders, and the ‘Arabian Nights’ could not have provided us with any more satiating form of enjoyment.