Hitherto farewell had been slightly said, with a few backward looks of good feeling, a few civil wishes for an indefinite return. But at Bettwys, for the first time, and perhaps also because it was—of this vagrant expedition—so near the last, parting gave pain. Turning on the face of a hill we looked back over the valley and across the flitting showers to the peaks of Snowdon and Moel Siabod, a retrospect to be remembered and thirstily to be desired in other summers. Darkly and greenly the woods sank into every cleft, or rose with the piled-up landscape till the cold breast of Snowdon was half hidden behind them. A river, whose name is quite immaterial, plunged uproariously down to the five crooked arches of Pont-y-Pair bridge in Bettwys, then, finding itself suddenly in good society, pulled itself together and swam tense and flat round a curve to present itself decorously to what I think we are safe in asserting to be the river Conway. It was true that half-pay generals and forlorn honeymoon couples haunted the bridge and hung round the post-office, that “well-appointed conveyances” were daily braying forth with horns the multitudinous entry of the tourist, also that the glass was falling; none the less we should thankfully have turned the Tommies down the hill again and remained without purpose or limit at Bettwys. Then, indeed, might many periods have been instructively framed around the names of the Miner’s Bridge, the Swallow Falls, and Dolwyddelan Castle, all of which the guide-book assured us with chaste esteem were “well worthy of a visit.” All that now remained was to turn away from the parapet of the wooded precipice, from whose edge we were looking back, and pace lingering forth towards Corwen.
“The parapet of the wooded precipice, from whose edge we were looking back.”
A stertorous sound began presently to be distinguishable from the hoarse note of rushing water in the deep places of the glen: then followed a tremor of the ground, lastly a traction-engine, advancing upon us like Behemoth throned on mill-wheels, opulent of smoke, with a clanging retinue of trucks. I felt in anticipation the mud ooze again through the seams of my gloves, as it had oozed last night, but the gate of a villa was suddenly and miraculously raised up on our left hand. Miss O’Flannigan was off, and had opened one-half with a celerity which suggested long practice in the hunting-field, and we burst through into the shadow of tall evergreens, tearing out a hold-all buckle in an encounter with the gate-post. We were startlingly confronted inside by an old lady in a mushroom hat, carrying a spud and garden-basket, and wearing an expression of complete and unaffected amazement, which, considering all things, and especially the fact that Miss O’Flannigan and I had fallen into maniac laughter, was a pardonable lapse of good breeding. Pointing to the traction-engine, we endeavoured to explain ourselves; but the chilly calm with which the Tommies regarded it, as it lumbered past the gate, was so painfully at variance with our representations, that it seemed better to retire, waving hysterical apologies. The old lady stirred neither hand nor foot throughout the occurrence, and for all we know may have been a rustic detail added, in wax, by a proprietor of a realistic turn.
After this the road was quiet in the balmy quietness of summer, that is so living a thing compared with the soulless grip of the air in winter silences. By the dignified gradients of the coach-road we mounted slowly through woods and glens, and then, with no less dignity and almost equal slowness, downwards into open country, clear and kindly, with pasture, and level roads, and a wide eastward horizon melting into blue. Behind us the Snowdon range stood mightily on the high pedestal of Carnarvonshire: it had never showed itself so great as now, viewed from these Denbigh meadow-lands, while we rode to the east, with faces turning always back to the splendid barrier across the west. It was a lonely road, with scarcely a mark to ruffle its white dust except the ribbed footprint of the traction-engine, that stretched like an illimitable ladder in front of us. We met no one save two tramps who eyed us curiously, as members of the fraternity who ought to be able to impart useful facts about the temper of the nearest farmer’s wife, or the quality of the skilly at the Llanberis workhouse; a little farther on, on a long reach of road, quite remote, as it seemed, from human habitation, we met three tall women, dressed alike in widows’ weeds, and each pressing a pocket-handkerchief with a wide black border to the point of a pink nose. Their eyes turned at us above these emblems of woe with something of interest, but they did not pause, and went on, three black blots on the white road between the glowing hedgerows; and we marvelled if some Welsh Mormon elder had lived and died, unknown, but obviously lamented, in these sunny solitudes.
“Three tall women, dressed alike in widows’ weeds.”
Pentre Voelas and Cernioge came in their turn, with mild episode of farmhouse and wayside inn, and manifold iterance of Rehoboths and Salems. Cernioge, as we discovered in the buying of a post-card, is pronounced Kernoggy. This eccentricity was, so far as we could see, its sole claim to distinction. From the first the Tommies had established a rule to demand nourishment at every inn they passed, and after twelve miles studded with—for them—disappointments, we yielded to their importunities, and paused at the glowing sign of the Saracen’s Head, Cerrig-y-Druidion.