The difference between a full-face portrait and a profile is not so great as the different aspect the same individual may present to different people. To his noble employer, Mr. Pryse was the very beau-ideal of a shrewd business man,—clear-headed, active, and indefatigable in his interests and that of the large estate under his control,—a man on whom he could rely, for dealing conscientiously alike with himself and his tenants, in his absence.
Those tenants saw only a hard, grasping, unscrupulous agent, who extorted high rents, made no allowance for bad seasons or failing crops, and who stifled complaints with an extra turn of the screw. They knew that all repairs and improvements, made at their own cost, would be wrested to the advantage of the noble landowner in the long-run, and were disheartened. There was an unwhisperable suspicion afloat that these said repairs went down as deductions from rents in the accounts submitted to his lord; but who ever had a chance of overhauling those accounts, or questioning crafty Mr. Pryse's unimpeachable integrity?
And about the time when William Edwards first found his way to Caerphilly Castle, which was in the year after George II. ascended the throne, the first faint breaths of a graver suspicion were wafted northwards, from Cardiff, in unaccountable and mysterious undertones.
Cardiff, now a flourishing and busy seaport, was then, in spite of its great castle, but a small, mean, and unimportant town, hardly to be called a port, its ancient prestige having fallen away like its gates and walls.
But about this period Mr. Pryse ceased to collect his lord's rents regularly at Caerphilly, and required that they should be brought to his office in Cardiff. This was a woful grievance to the bulk of the tenants, especially to elderly or infirm persons, or others remote from the county town. Had his lordship been at the Castle, no doubt his irate tenants would have sought his presence in a body, and made common cause against the common oppressor; but no such opportunity occurred.
Neighbours who dreaded the toil of a nineteen or twenty miles' journey along bad roads in bad weather, with Mr. Pryse at the end, and as wearisome a return, would meet and agree to trust the bravest of the party with the separate rents of two or three, having no fear of robbery by the way, whilst so many other travellers would be fallen in with, all bent on the same errand.
Some of these adventurous wights, who had never been so far as Cardiff in their lives before, brought back the news, either gathered on the spot or on the road, that a strange craft had begun to frequent the river, and to anchor off the old sea-wall. It was said that the vessel had been a privateer during the wars of the previous reign, and that although she came thither ostensibly for coal from his lordship's collieries, and Mr. Pryse was in close communication with the captain, there was something rather mysterious about her cargo.
THERE WAS SOMETHING RATHER MYSTERIOUS ABOUT HER CARGO.
—See page 164.