"Melldith Duw ar Maesyfelin
Ar bob carreg, dan bob gwreiddyn,
Am daflu blodeu tref Llandyfri
Ar ei ben i Deifi i foddi."
Tradition asserts that Samuel Pritchard met his death in some brawl arising from the discovery of his persistence in some prohibited love affair; but the whole story rests on the most slender evidence, and beyond the fact that he lost his life by violence, somewhere between Lampeter and Llandovery, there is nothing to prove that the family of Maesyfelin had any share at all in the dark deed. However, not many generations passed before it seemed as if the Vicar's words had indeed taken effect, for after Sir Marmaduke's death, the estate of Maesyfelin was gradually weakened by the extravagance of his descendants, and finally what was left of the land passed through marriage into the possession of the Lloyds of Peterwell in the year 1750. Maesyfelin Hall was left empty, and time and neglect have most literally fulfilled to the letter the curse pronounced by Vicar Pritchard nearly three hundred years ago. Not an unusual history, and one that might probably be true of many an old and extinct family in Great Britain. But in Cardiganshire the reverses and final extinction of the Lloyds of Maesyfelin were always ascribed to the effect of the pious Vicar's malison. Oddly enough, that curse seemed to follow the name of Lloyd, for the family of Peterwell had no better luck with the Maesyfelin estates than the original owners. At the death of John Lloyd of Peterwell, his great property, including Maesyfelin, went to his brother Herbert, who was made a baronet in 1763, and sat in Parliament for seven years. He was a man of extravagant tastes and imperious temper, and seems to have ruled like a dictator in his own neighbourhood. Many and interesting are the tales still told of him and his ways, and the manner of his death and burial were as sensational as his career through life might lead one to expect. But all that is "another story," and here it is sufficient to say that, Sir Herbert Lloyd dying deeply in debt and without descendants, his heavily mortgaged lands passed to strangers and were divided, while his great house of Peterwell, with its "four gilded domes," became, like Maesyfelin, a ruin, of which only the broken walls remain to tell of former splendours. And the famous curse, having fulfilled its end, is now forgotten, or remembered in the district only as an interesting tradition.
A Scotch friend once told me of a curse that had been laid upon her own family by three Highlanders. These men were implicated in the '45 Rebellion, and were handed over to the Duke of Cumberland by an ancestor of my friend, a man whose sympathies were Hanoverian, and the owner of considerable property. The Highlanders were duly condemned and executed, but before they died they solemnly cursed their enemy, prophesying that his descendants in the third generation should not possess an acre of land. This prophecy was fulfilled to the letter; and my friend tells me that a relation of hers has talked with a very old woman who came from the same part of the country, and who spoke of the curse and its origin as well-known facts.
Connected with this subject of family curses is a story I heard not long ago, of a certain country house in one of the Eastern Counties. On the landing of the principal staircase of this house there might be seen, a few years since, a glass case covered by a curtain, which, if drawn, revealed the waxen effigy of a child, terribly wasted and emaciated, lying on her side as if asleep. It was described to me as so realistic as to be quite horrible, and it is apparent that some very strong reason must have existed for keeping so unpleasant an object in such a thoroughfare of the house. Its history is this. Some generations ago, the wife of the owner of the place died, leaving motherless a little girl. The father soon married again, giving his child a cruel stepmother, who, in her husband's absence from home, so ill-treated and starved the poor little girl that very soon after her father's return she died. It is said that the facts of his wife's cruelty reached the father's ears, and in order that he might punish her with perpetual remorse, he had a wax model made of his child exactly as she appeared in death, and placed it conspicuously on the staircase landing, where his wife must see it whenever she went up or down stairs. He further directed in his will that the model should never be removed from its place, adding that if it were, a curse should fall on house and family. So, covered in later years by a curtain, the effigy remained until a day arrived in quite recent times, when the family then in possession were giving a dance, and for some reason had the case containing the wax-work carried downstairs and put in an outhouse. But mark what happened. That very night occurred a shock of earthquake violent enough to cause part of the house to fall down! Very likely mere coincidence; but as it might have been the working of the curse consequent on the removal of the case, it was thought advisable to restore the grisly relic to its former position, where, as far as my informant knew, it may be seen to this day.
CHAPTER IX
ODD NOTES
"Plain and more plain, the unsubstantial Sprite
To his astonish'd gaze each moment grew;
Ghastly and gaunt, it reared its shadowy height,
Of more than mortal seeming to the view,
And round its long, thin, bony fingers drew
A tatter'd winding-sheet, of course all white."
In that very interesting book, "John Silence," Mr. Algernon Blackwood remarks that cats seem to possess a peculiar affinity for the Unknown, and that while dogs are invariably terrified by anything in the nature of occult phenomena, cats, on the contrary, are soothed and pleased.