In the best parlour sat in perfect silence a tradesman and his wife, middle-aged, serious, and too entirely respectable to be aware that they were bored almost to madness. They were out on their holiday, therefore they were enjoying themselves—and therefore the tradesman read a month-old copy of the ‘Cyclist,’ and his wife studied the ‘Farmers’ Gazette,’ and both eyed us with ravenous, but decently furtive, interest. For half an hour we and our safety-skirts were vouchsafed to them, while the familiar tea, with home-made gooseberry-jam and salt butter, was vouchsafed to us; and then the Tommies, having polished their mangers with their usual precision, were led forth again.
It was not a good ten miles that we rode from there to Corwen, except in the sense of good, full, statute measure. Disaster fell upon us like a net, tangling our endeavours with inexhaustible mesh. A “dee” of my saddle broke; consequently I had to carry the hold-all across my lap, like a baby of monstrous size and implacable pig-headedness. Tom the elder developed a new and much enlarged edition of his ancient girth-gall, and in the attempt to cope with this by re-saddling, a cushion of swelling was disclosed along his back. Miss O’Flannigan then said she would lead him the rest of the way, and did so, until the next milestone announced that it was four miles to Corwen, which at once degraded the project from the sublime to the ridiculous. Not all the Humane Society, in one throbbing merciful mass, could be absurd enough to expect any one to walk four miles in a riding-habit, and cloth gaiters, and the dog-days.
The cool of the evening was upon us before we at length sighted Corwen across the pastures, and a pale after-glow, pale as the points of gaslight that were starting up about the railway station, gleamed on the long curve of the river Dee as we crawled across the bridge outside the town. Corwen is a dingy, mean town, in spite of the wooded cliff at its back, and the river at its foot, and the river meadows with their tranquil sweetness; but on that Saturday night neither we nor the Tommies complained of its dinginess. It had a chemist, who kept sulphate of zinc and iodoform, and lead lotion, with which to anoint the invalid; and it had a sedate and venerable hotel, the Owen Glendwr, in which instantly to go to bed. Having risen thus to the occasion, Corwen may be assured that it has not lived in vain.
Carriages, with Sunday bonnets in them, began to pass next morning, while yet we were taking in the delicate antique absurdity of the pair of spinets in the drawing-room, the charms of the brass finger-plates and door-handles, the impressiveness of the low-ceiled, spotless kitchen, with the vast fireplace, and all the strong and sound old age of a house that has been a notable inn since the fifteenth century. Finding that the church was immediately behind the hotel, and, furthermore, that the service was in Welsh, we lingered a little in the tour of brew-house and still-room, until the Venite, clear and harmonious, came across the graves to the wide kitchen window that leaned its sill on the churchyard grass.
Presently, when seated in the porch of the church itself, we heard again the rich accord of Welsh voices, with all their grave and fearless certainty, their peasant simplicity, their unblemished nationality. Would that many Irish and English congregations, shrieking in hideous rivalry half a bar behind the organ, could comprehend the reticence of strength, the indwelling instinct of time, and the sense of harmony, manifested at a Welsh country service, where the children lisp in altos, and the farm-hand and the butcher’s boy add their tenor or bass with modest assurance. The preacher’s voice was a fine one, and rung and swung in that strange metrical wail of Welsh that we had heard before in the church of Mallwydd, but it lacked something of the melancholy passion given to that first voice by the touch of age in the tone, the inference of sadness and misgiving. Owen Glendwr had a pew in this very church; probably was churchwarden, and sanctified while he indulged his predatory instincts by going round with the plate. There seemed something significant in the fact that his dagger is carved on a stone just outside the church: did he, we wondered, employ it as a discourager of threepenny-bits and a stimulator to half-crowns. At all events, he is now the next thing to a saint in Corwen, and his works any inhabitant can tell with chapter and verse in a manner which it is not our intention to vie with.
Among other chief tenets of Corwen morality is the necessity of seeing Llangollen. We had, indeed, been ourselves something fired by quotations from Wordsworth and other competent judges in the guide-book, and yielding to the serious representations of the landlady on the subject, we ordered a small trap in which we might thither drive ourselves and the drab Tommy. As we sat in the embrasure of the coffee-room window, waiting for the entrapped Tommy, we perceived a vehicle resembling a mammoth governess-cart at the hotel door, with an old man, dressed in what we had learned to regard as the height of Welsh religious fashion, standing by it. His beard was long and white, his face was cross, with a crossness that momentarily deepened as he glanced at the hotel. We studied him with the refined observation of idleness.
“An Arch-Druid, evoluted into an elder of the straitest of the Rehoboths,” remarked Miss O’Flannigan, easily; “his wives and daughters had better not keep him waiting much longer, there is the flame of human sacrifice in his eye, pleasantly blended with the confidence of their eternal——”
At this juncture, Ellen, the coffee-room-maid, came into the room.
“If you please, ladies, the driver is waiting, and wants to know when you will be ready.”
So we were his wives and daughters! We went forth anxiously to accept the situation, too depressed even to wrangle as to which was which.