“We retired into the rain.”
Bettwys-y-Coed was twelve miles away, or even more, as the landlady warned us with what we hope was disinterested zeal for our welfare; but even twelve miles in the rain seemed preferable to the ladies’ drawing-room with the photograph-books and the view into the first floor above the opposite shop, where the hat-trimming department, unoccupied as ourselves, sat conversationally in the windows, “nor deemed the pastime slow.”
Draped in horse-sheets to keep the saddles dry, the Tommies presently stood at the door; and swaddled, like cabmen, in comforters and capes, we came forth and mounted. During the process of sorting the reins, the umbrellas, and the tips for the two ostlers, we could not but be aware of the guileless enjoyment of the hat department opposite, and the more critical but equally unaffected interest of the circus ladies and gentlemen at the window of a ground-floor sitting-room. As we unfurled the pink parasol and the tent-like gingham and went down the street like a pair of fungi on four legs, the chorus that broke from the ground-floor window was acutely audible:—
“Oo’re ye goin’ to meet, Bill?
’Ave ye bought the street, Bill?
Lorf?—why, I thought I should’a died——”
Our riding-canes were in the hold-alls, but we kicked the Tommies to a trot and fled. The temperance hotels and the villas faded into the mist behind, and we were alone.
In the partial shelter of a soaked sycamore the usual, the inevitable, process of altering the girths was carried out, while the drips flopped suddenly on our noses or the backs of our necks, with an untiring sense of humour, and the tips to the ostlers were repented of with more than usual fervour.
To visit the Pass of Llanberis in such weather was an act as unworthy as calling on a stranger during a spring cleaning. Its mountains were dressing-gowned in ragged cloud, its lake turned to a slab of slate, its vista bleared by the cold, thick rain; but it had still a murky nobility, and streams, long silent, cast themselves from its parapets, and gauged with white streaks the depth of precipice and jutting crag. Upwards in streaming gradients rose the road, along the slanting floor of the valley—if indeed the name of valley is not too tender for that rent in the dark heart of the mountain, with its sides strewn with wreckage of boulders, and its black walls towering implacably, untouched by summer. Upwards also, in exaggerated dolour, crept the Tommies, as well aware as we that the hold-alls, in which were our riding-canes, were following by coach. The stick of the gingham was indeed a formidable club, but being swathed in voluminous folds of material, a blow from it amounted to no more than a cumbrous caress, and the application of handle, spikes, or ferrule proved equally ineffective.
Bare green hills followed on Llanberis Pass. We were high among them in a strong wind that sang in our teeth, and brought the hard rain slanting against us. We looked neither before nor after, and barely spared a sidelong eye for such things as appeared on either hand. They were not many. The lonely inn of Pen-y-Gwrd, where a glimpse was caught of tourists thronging in a window to snatch this sovereign incident of a day that might otherwise have ended in a strait-waist-coat; a herd of pony-mothers with their foals; a plover wheeling and whistling in the belief that she was leading astray our search for her nest; then Capel Curig, a scattered village, lying pleasantly and beautifully on the shoulder of a lake-filled valley. Through the windows of a big hotel we saw luncheon lie even more beautifully, but it could not be thought of. Six miles of mountain rain had not been thrown away upon us; our clothes had admitted it at all possible crevices; the red comforters were inscribing equally red stripes upon our necks with their wet, harsh folds; the gingham looked like a widowed vulture, weeping tears of gluey ink upon all things in its vast circumference. Better to accumulate all possible wetness, and spread ourselves irrevocably to dry at Bettwys-y-Coed.
The road was suddenly lovely at Capel Curig, and thereafter to Bettwys. Trees shaded it, deep glens beside it hid their rivers and waterfalls under the locked branches of beech and oak, and the rain dropped more kindly in the still shelter. We were on the great Holyhead and London coach-road, along which previous generations had driven with what cheer they might, after a day or so spent in sailing from Kingstown to Holyhead. Many an Irish member thrilled here with inward rehearsal of the peroration that should shake Westminster; many a grudging rebel eye looked for the first time at the roadside life of a country whose beauty would put Ireland on her mettle to excel, whose careful tending showed national pride in a form which probably had not before presented itself to the rebel mind. Patriot or undergraduate, genius or duellist, the best that Ireland had to give swung along this road towards London to the tune of sixteen hoofs; the people of no account stayed at home in those days, and when genius travels nowadays, third class in the North Wall train, it could wish that they still did so.