There came one day at about that time a Welsh gipsy fortune-teller to Llanyglo. Her name was Belle Lovell, she was a known character all over the countryside, and she was some sort of a connection of Dafydd Dafis's. There was always a packet of tobacco for her in the Squire's kitchen when she appeared, and her companion on her travels was her thirteen-years-old daughter Ynys.[1] Belle sold baskets and mended chairs, and Ynys drew the cart, which was no more than a large deal packing-case mounted on four perambulator wheels, and with two flat shafts roughly nailed to its sides. The mother's boots, which you might have hit with a hammer and not have dinted, resembled grey old wooden dug-outs; the child went barefooted and barelegged, and it would have been a stout thorn that could have pierced the calloused pads of her hardened soles.
These two appeared at Llanyglo at midday, ate their frugal meal on the doorstep of Dafydd's single-roomed cottage behind the Independent Chapel, and then, leaving the cart behind them, strolled down to have a look at that splendacious new caravan, Howell Gruffydd's shop. Belle, her greenish light brown eyes never for a moment still, gossiped with her old acquaintances; her daughter, whose head was as steadily held as if she balanced an invisible pitcher on it, stood looking at the green butterfly-nets and red-painted buckets, admiring, but no more desiring them than she would have desired anything else impossibly beyond her reach. Her mother joined a group about Mrs. Roberts's door; the visitors, who had lunched, began to descend to the beach again; and there approached down the path that led to the Hafod Unos Ned, the oldest of the Kerrs.
Now Ned had run across Belle on many alder-expeditions, and, while the invasion of "summer things" had not driven Ned into naturalisation as a Welshman, it had, by emphasising the distinction between the well-to-do and the poor of the world, shown him how to jog along in peace with his neighbours. He gave Belle an intelligent grin, and jerked his head in the direction of the bathing-tents.
"Well, mother," he said, "ye've dropped in at just about th' right time."
"There iss no wrong time for seeing friends," Belle replied, in an up-and-down and very musical Welsh accent.
"Nay, I wanna thinking-g o' that," Ned replied, strongly doubling the "g" that terminated the present participle. "I wor thinking-g of a bit o' fortune-telling. There's a lot ovver yonder wi' more brass nor sense, and it allus tickles 'em to talk about sweethearts an' sich."
"Indeed Llanyglo has become grea-a-at big place, whatever," the gipsy replied, and continued her conversation with Mrs. Roberts.
And presently, whether she took the hint or whether she had come precisely for that purpose, Belle's greenish-brown eyes roved again, she made a slight gesture to Ynys, who had turned from the butterfly-nets and was looking out to sea, and the pair of them made off along the beach in the direction of that bright plot of colour that made as it were a herbaceous border between the grey-green tussocks and the glittering sea.
For a hundred yards Belle's dug-outs left behind her a heavy shuffling track in the sand, parallel with the light kidney-shaped prints of the child who walked as if she carried an invisible pitcher on her head; and then, with the cluster of tents and parasols still far ahead, they stopped. John Willie Garden and Percy Briggs, with Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd ready to bear a hand if called upon to do so, but otherwise a little fearful of intruding, were victualling the blue-and-white collapsible boat for a cruise. But it was not in order to tell the fortunes of the three boys that Belle stopped. She stopped for the same reason that the street-seller pulls out his rattle or his conjuring trick, while his quick-silver eyes dart this way and that in search of his crowd. The only difference was that Belle was her own conjuring-trick. The gesture with which she performed it was superbly negligent. She had a wonderful old mignonette-coloured shawl, which, when she had talked with the group about Mrs. Roberts's doorstep, had been drawn up over her head; and suddenly she allowed it to fall to her shoulders. The effect might well have carried twice the distance it was intended to carry. Out of the folds of the shawl her neck rose as erect as the pistil of an arum lily. Against it gleamed her heavy gold earrings. Her cheekbones and the nodule of her high nose gleamed like bronze, and about the whorl of the springing of her hair at the back of her head the sunshine made as it were a sun-dog on the lustrous blackness. Her silver wedding-ring, an old tweed jacket that might have belonged to her kinsman Dafydd Dafis, and a patched old indigo petticoat, completed the legerdemain. Ynys, clad to all appearances in a single garment only, watched the boys exactly as she had watched the balls and butterfly-nets and buckets outside Howell Gruffydd's shop.
They too made a shining coup d'œil. There was just swell enough to set the long breakers hurdling in, and wind enough to take the tops off them in rattling showers of brilliant spray. Indeed it was so merry a sea that, not half an hour before, Mrs. Maynard had declared to John Willie that she had come within an ace of drowning during her bathe that morning, and had asked him whether, had he seen her in difficulties, he would have come to her rescue. "Mmmmm, John Willie?" she had asked, curling his hair with her perfumed fingers; but John Willie, seeing Percy Briggs approaching, had jerked away his head. This had not been because he had been afraid of being laughed at by Percy. For that matter, Percy had confided to John Willie only a week before that he "liked their Minetta," and so was in no position to jeer at the softer relations. No; it had merely been that, as Llanyglo's curtain had risen, suddenly revealing a soft and alluring group of Euonymas and Wygelias and Hildas, not to speak of Mrs. Maynard herself, all temptingly set out like fruit upon a stall, the curtain of John Willie Garden's peculiar privacy had come down with a run. Mrs. Maynard was always trying to peep behind it, but probably there was nothing behind. Probably that was the reason it had come so sharply and closely down. No boy wants to show that he has nothing to show.