All this was not the growth of a year or two. Eight full years was William Edwards working for Mr. Morris, and, whether consciously or not, for the advancement and prosperity of his country. Not alone was he occupied in erecting furnaces. Fresh workmen and their families required fresh homes, and who but William Edwards had the building? And for the period they were models. His name and fame as a builder travelled farther than his own feet.
Yet it is not to be supposed that he stood still to let the stream of progress pass him by, now that he had opened the floodgates wide.
Relays of men fed and tended the glowing furnaces night and day. The proud young architect and his contingent did their masonry in daylight hours.
That did not mean inert repose or dissipation for him. He made holiday when his trial furnace was complete, to visit his mother and brothers and take part in his sister Jonet's wedding; but his brain was actively at work the whole time, and it was even on that busy occasion he set the bridegroom's mechanical brains at work also for mutual benefit.
And whenever there was an interval between one great piece of work and another, he hired a horse and went home for a day or two, never without some useful or rare gifts for one and all, and never without calling on his old friends Robert Jones and Evan Evans by the way.
Those were his only respites from work. His manual labour—for he worked alongside his men, and allowed no scamping or shirking—was over at dusk. But no sooner had he laid aside his tools, and washed away the tokens of his occupation, than he had a book in his hand—generally an English book, which he was doing his best to decipher unaided at his meals, as a preparation for private lessons, which the blind man gave to him by the household hearth, or in his bakehouse, or along with the adult class assembling twice a week in his upstairs parlour for English reading.
In the bakehouse Rosser kept an alphabet, the separate letters of which were shaped and baked out of ordinary dough. And when the eager student had mastered the English pronunciation of these, which the blind man could distinguish by the touch, he traced syllables and words in his plastic medium, until ere long a well-known and well-thumbed book was put into the learner's hands to be spelt out, or read aloud, as he progressed.
The blind baker was proud of his pupil.
'You are the most promising scholar I ever took in hand,' said he; 'but your diligence is unremitting, and failure is impossible.'
Yes, so diligent was he that in consequence of his absorption in his new study, Elaine Parry's shyness in his presence gradually wore away, and when she heard him stumbling over a word, she would pronounce it for him involuntarily, without so much as looking up from her sewing or knitting.