III
WINIFRED'S DUKKERIPEN
I
I need not describe my journey to North Wales. On reaching Bettws y Coed I turned into the hotel there—'The Royal Oak'—famished; for, as fast as trains could carry me, I had travelled right across England, leaving rest and meals to chance. I found the hotel full of English painters, whom the fine summer had attracted thither as usual. The landlord got me a bed in the village. A six-o'clock table d'hôte was going on when I arrived, and I joined it. Save myself, the guests were, I think, landscape painters to a man. They had been sketching in the neighbourhood. I thought I had never met so genial and good-natured a set of men, and I have since often wondered what they thought of me, who met such courteous and friendly advances as they made towards me in a temper that must have seemed to them morose or churlish and stupid. Before the dinner was over another tourist entered—a fresh-complexioned young Englishman in spectacles, who, sitting next to me, did at length, by force of sheer good-humour, contrive to get into a desultory kind of conversation with me, and, as far as I remember, he talked well. He was not an artist, I found, but an amateur geologist and antiquary. His hobby was not like that fatal antiquarianism of my father's, which had worked so much mischief, but the harmless quest of flint implements. His talk about his collection of flints, however, sent my mind off to Flinty Point and the never-to-be-forgotten flint-built walls of Raxton church. After dinner, coffee, liquors, and tobacco being introduced into the dining-room, I got up, intending to roam about outside the hotel till bedtime; but the rain, I found, was falling in torrents. I was compelled to return to my friend of the 'flints.' At that moment one of the artists plunged into a comic song, and by the ecstatic look of the company I knew that a purgatorial time was before me. I resigned myself to my fate. Song followed song, until at last even my friend of the flints struck up the ballad of Little Billee, whose lugubrious refrain seemed to 'set the table in a roar'; but to me it will always be associated with sickening heartache.
As soon as the rain ceased I left the hotel and went to the room in the little town the landlord had engaged for me. There, with the roar in my ears of the mountain streams (swollen by the rains), I went to bed and, strange to say, slept.
Next morning I rose early, breakfasted at 'The Royal Oak' as soon as I could get attended to, and proceeded in the direction in which, according to what I had gathered from various sources, Mrs. Davies had lived. This led me through a valley and by the side of a stream, whose cascades I succeeded, after many efforts, in crossing. After a while, however, I found that I had taken a wrong track, and was soon walking in the contrary direction. I will not describe that long dreary walk in a drenching rain, with nothing but the base of the mountain visible, all else being lost in clouds and mist.
After blundering through marshy and boggy hillocks for miles, I found myself at last in the locality indicated to me. Arriving at a roadside public-house, I entered it, and on inquiry was vexed to find that I had again been misdirected. I slept there, and in the morning started again on my quest. I was now a long way off my destination, but had at least the satisfaction of knowing that I was on the right road at last. In the afternoon I reached another wayside inn, very similar to that in which I had slept. I walked up at once to the landlord (a fat little Englishman who looked like a Welshman, with black eyes and a head of hair like a black door-mat), and asked him if he had known Mrs. Davies. He said he had, but seemed anxious to assure me that he was a Chester man and 'not a Taffy.' She had died, he told me, not long since. But he had known more of her niece, Winifred Wynne (or, as most people called her, Winifred Davies); for, said he, 'she was a queer kind of outdoor creature that everybody knew.—as fond of the rain and mist as sensible folk are fond of sunshine.'
'Where did she live?' I inquired.
'You must have passed the very door,' said the man. And then he indicated a pretty little cottage by the roadside which I had passed, not far from the lake. Mrs. Davies (he told me) had lived there with her niece till the aunt died.
'Then you knew Winifred Wynne?' I said. There was to me a romantic kind of interest about a man who had seen Winifred in Wales.