Notwithstanding this rough reception of her generous advisers, and reporters of the world’s slanders, others came, almost daily, buzzing still the same tale, till at length tired and wore down in spirits, she consented to send away her deliverer and friend, as she called him, from the protection of her roof. Our hero, however, could never be brought to distinguish between her real kind feelings towards him, and the constrained appearance which her altered conduct made in his sight. Free as the air, as he felt himself, he could not understand why a great and wealthy lady could not at least be equally unshackled and independent. Explanations and excuses were entirely thrown away upon him, as he could not, or would not, understand aught so opposed to his happiness and preconceived notions. When at length it was made known to him that the separation was inevitable, and the season of it arrived, he received the astounding intelligence like a severe blow of fortune, that struck him at once both sorrowful and meditative. Pride and resentment, from a sense of injury, at last supplanted every other feeling; and, starting up with a frenzied effort, he ordered his horse to be got ready, and gave directions for his things to be forwarded to Llandovery; after which he wrote a note, and sent it to the lady’s room, requesting a momentary interview with her alone, before he took his departure. She came down with a slow languid step, and met him in the parlour. Her eyes were red with weeping; and before she could utter a syllable, our hero’s much altered looks affected her so much, that she burst out into heavy sobbing. “Do not think hardly—do not feel unkindly towards me, Jones,” were her first words; “I entreat you to give me the credit due to my sincerity, when I assure you that the sacrifice I made on consenting to part with you, was—yes! although I have buried two husbands who loved me tenderly, it was the heaviest of my life.” Twm replied in a tone and manner that evinced both his pride and sufferings: “I have but few words, madam, and they shall not long intrude upon your leisure. I came here a stranger, and had some trifling claims, perhaps, on your attention.—Those claims have been more than satisfied—noble has been your remuneration of my humble services, your beneficence generous and princely. A change took place in your destiny; you honoured me beyond my merits, and bade me stand to the world in a new character. You called me friend, your sole true friend in a faithless world.—Nay, lady, your lover. I loved, and love you, with a pure but unconquerable flame. Blame me not if I am presumptuous—it was your own condescension, your own encouragement, that made me so, and elevated me to a stand of equality with yourself. You gave me hopes to be the future, the only husband of your choice. You stretched forth your hand to aid my efforts, as I eagerly climbed towards the darling object of my aim; but before I attained the summit, you, madam, in a spirit of caprice or treachery, dashed me headlong downward, to perish in despair. Your great and wealthy friends will praise you for this, while mincing madams and insipid misses shall learn a noble lesson by your conduct, and emulating you, become in their day as arrant coquettes and tramplers on manly hearts, as their more limited powers and vanity will permit. But enough! you shall have your generous triumph,—and from this hour I tread the world without an aim, a wanderer in a wilderness, reckless of all that can either better or worsen my state in life. Advancement, estimation, the pride of generous and applauded deeds, I here abjure; nor from this hour would I raise my hand to save from annihilation the being I am—for life is henceforth hateful to me. Lady, farewell—never will I cross your path; but you may hear of my wayward steps,—and if in me you are told of a wretched idiot, a being whose mind had perished while his frame was strong, let it strike strongly to your heart that it was yourself that wrought that mental desolation. Or if they name me as a lawless being, plunged headlong into deeds of guilt and madness, remember it is you, you, madam! you are the authoress of my crimes and sorrows, and may be, of an ignominious death to follow my career of guilt. And now madam, farewell indeed!” On which he darted out, mounted his horse, and rode off; while the unhappy lady of Ystrad Fîn, whose agitation choked the utterance of replies, caught a last glimpse of him, and fell on the parlour floor in a swoon.
CHAP. XXIV.
Twm’s eccentricities. His rural adventures with the two sheep, the white ox, and the grey horse. Teaches the farmer how to pound the squire’s trespassing pigeons.
When our hero arrived at Llandovery, his sorrows were augmented on learning that his faithful friend Rhys the curate was no longer to be his comforter, though much needed under his present mental depression; it was no small satisfaction to him, however, to be informed that he had been inducted into a good living in a distant part of the principality. The life he led at Llandovery, although lodging at an inn, was, for some days, that of a solitary; days! alas for the consistency of the lover,—days, we repeat, and not weeks or months, much less years, of seclusion from his kind. He soon illustrated the Shakspearian adage, “Men have died, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.” But by him every thing was to done by strokes of boldness; to banish his cares, he plunged at once into intemperance; and from merely tolerating a little cheerful company, he entered the society of the greatest topers and madcaps to be found, till he emulated and outdid the highest, and became the very prince of wags and practical jokers. He was, of course, recognized as the capturer of the tremendous highwayman Dio the Devil, and the acknowledged preserver of the lady of Ystrad Fîn, which, with his relations of many freaks and vagaries in England, together with the assured fact that he had been once in London, and spent a year there, gained him no inconsiderable share of celebrity. One day, while the landlord of the Owen Glendower inn was trumpeting forth the humorous fame of his lodger, among a parlour full of country squires, who were dining together, after the business of Quarter Sessions was over; a merry magistrate named Prothero said, that he was certain he had a servant, a shrewd fellow, whose wits never slumbered, whom he would back in a bet against the vaunted cleverness of Twm Shôn Catti, in any feat of dexterity that could be named. To come to the point, he said, he would lay a wager of five pounds that Twm could not steal a sheep from shrewd Roger, his ploughman, who the next morning should carry one to the village of Llangattock. Twm was sent for; and being invited to sit among these rural nobles, appeared as complete a high fellow as the best of them. Without the least hesitation, he accepted Mr. Prothero’s wager, and deposited five pounds with the landlord, as the merry magistrate had already done. Early the next morning shrewd Roger rose, and shouldered his sheep, vowing before his grinning fellow-servants, who grouped round to crack their jests on him, that the wild devil himself should not deprive him of his burthen. As he proceeded along a part of the high road, up a slight ascent, he discovered with surprise, a good leathern shoe lying in the mud. A shoe of leather, be it known, in a country where wooden clogs are generally worn, is no despicable prize. The shrewd servant looked at the object before him with a longing eye; but reflecting that one shoe, however good, was useless unmatched with a fellow, spared himself the trouble of stooping, for troublesome it would have been with such a weight on his shoulders, and passed on without lifting it. On walking a little further, and pursuing a bend in the road, great was his surprise on finding another shoe, a fellow to the former, lying in the sledge-mark, which, like the rut of a wheel, indented the mud with hollow stripes. In the height of his joy he laid down the sheep, with its legs tied, beside the shoe, and ran back for the other; when Twm Shôn Catti, watching his opportunity, sprang over the hedge, and seized his prize, which he bore off securely, won his bet, and ate his mutton undisturbed.
Prothero, although the most good-humoured of country gentlemen, was rather angry with shrewd Roger, whose shrewdness became rather questionable. It was admitted, in excuse, that the most cunning, at times, may be accidentally overreached by his inferior in wit: on this plea the merry magistrate was conciliated, and induced to enter into another wager, precisely like the former, when a similar sum, against our hero, and in favor of his servant was laid and accepted. The man of shrewdness, as before, determined to use the utmost vigilance and caution to preserve his charge and redeem his reputation. He grasped his load, which was a fine fat ewe, most manfully, and swore violent oaths in answer to his master’s exhortation to chariness, that human ingenuity should never trick him again; but
“Great protestations do make that doubted,
Which we would else right willingly believe.”
In his way to Llangattock, he had to pass partly through a wood, which he scarce entered when the bleating of a sheep attracted his attention, and he came to a dead stand, as he intently listened to what he conceived a well-known voice. “Baa!—baa!” again saluted his ear: a sudden conviction rushed across his mind that this was the very sheep he had before lost, which he imagined might have been concealed by Twm in the rocky recesses of that woody dingle. What a glorious chance, thought he, of recovering his lost credit with his master, and depriving his antagonist at the same time, of his hidden prey, and the laurels achieved in the winning of it. He instantly deposited his burthen beneath a tree; and eagerly forcing his way through the copse and bushes, he followed the bleating a considerable way down the wood, when to his great dismay it ceased altogether. A thought now struck him, though rather too late, that the bleating proceeded from no sheep, but a most subtle ram, in the person of Twm Shôn Catti: he hurried back in a grievous fright, and found his surmises but too true—the second sheep, and his high reputation for shrewdness, had both taken flight together.
On being confronted with shrewd Roger, in his master’s parlour, Twm recognized in him an old acquaintance, and no other than the clever youth with whom he had exchanged his feminine attire at Cardigan fair, and made off with his coat. On being reminded of that affair, and told by Twm that he was the fair ballad-singer with whom he was so deeply captivated, the poor fellow was absorbed in wonderment. He then related to his master the whole of that adventure, with the episode of the parson tossed in a blanket for a bum-bailiff, in such a manner as to excite the most immoderate laughter on the part of the jest-loving Prothero, who good-naturedly assured his man that he lost but little credit with the sheep, when it was considered that he stood opposed to an arch wag of so much celebrity.
Fortune was not so scurvy a stepmother to Twm as to confine him long to a diet of mere mutton, but took occasion to vary it very agreeably with a change of beef.
Determined to have more mirth with our hero, at the hazard of some loss, Prothero offered to oppose to his cunning, the collective vigilance of his husbandmen and maidens; laying a bet with him that he should not steal a white ox, which, with a black one, was to be yoked to the plough. The plough to be held by Roger and driven by another servant; while two girls, driving each a harrow, should also be on their guard to prevent his aim if possible.