After losing Sinfi I hired some men to assist me in my search. Day after day did we continue the quest; but no trace of Winifred could be found. The universal opinion was that she had taken sudden alarm at something, lost her foothold, and fallen down a precipice, as so many unfortunate tourists had done in North Wales. One day I and one of my men met, on a spur of the Glyder, the tourist of the flint implements with whom I had conversed at Bettws y Coed. He was alone, geologising or else searching for flint implements on the hills. Evidently my haggard appearance startled him. But when he learnt what was my trouble he became deeply interested. He told me that one day after our meeting at 'The Royal Oak,' Bettws y Coed, he had met a wild-looking girl as he was using his geologist's hammer on the mountains. She was bareheaded, and had taken fright at him, and had run madly in the direction of the most dangerous chasm on the range; he had pursued her, hoping to save her from destruction, but lost sight of her close to the chasm's brink. The expression on his face told me what his thoughts were as to her fate. He accompanied me to the chasm. It was indeed a dreadful place. We got to the bottom by a winding path, and searched till dusk among the rocks and torrents, finding nothing. But I felt that in wild and ragged pits like those, covered here and there with rough and shaggy brushwood, and full of wild cascades and deep pools, a body might well be concealed till doomsday.
My kind-hearted companion accompanied me for some miles, and did his best to dispel my gloom by his lively and intelligent talk. We parted at Pen y Gwryd. I never saw him again. I never knew his name. Should these lines ever come beneath his eyes he will know that though the great ocean of human life rolls between his life-vessel and mine, I have not forgotten how and where once we touched.
But how could I rest? Though Hope herself was laughing my hopes to scorn, how could I rest? How could I cease to search?
Bitter as it was to wander about the hills teasing my soul by delusions which other people must fain smile at, it would have been more bitter still to accept for certainty the intolerable truth that Winifred had died famished, or that her beloved body was a mangled corpse at the bottom of a cliff. If the reader does not understand this, it is because he finds it impossible to understand a sorrow like mine. I refused to return to Raxton, and took Mrs. Davies's cottage, which was unoccupied, and lived there throughout the autumn. Every day, wet or dry, I used to sally out on the Snowdonian range, just as though she had been lost but yesterday, making inquiries, bribing the good-natured Welsh people (who needed no bribing) to aid me in a search which to them must have seemed monomaniacal.
The peasants and farmers all knew me. 'Sut mae dy galon? (How is thy heart?)' they would say in the beautiful Welsh phrase as I met them. 'How is my heart, indeed!' I would sigh as I went on my way.
Before I went to Wales in search of Winifred I had never set foot in the Principality. Before I left it there was scarcely a Welshman who knew more familiarly than I every mile of the Snowdonian country. Never a trace of Winifred could I find.
At the end of the autumn I left the cottage and removed to Pen y Gwryd, as a comparatively easy point from which I could reach the mountain llyn where I had breakfasted with Winifred on that morning. Afterwards I took up my abode at a fishing-inn, and here I stayed the winter through—scarcely hoping to find her now, yet chained to Snowdon. After my labours during the day, scrambling among slippery boulders and rugged rocks, crossing swollen torrent-beds, amid rain and ice and snow and mist such as frightened away the Welsh themselves—after thus wandering, because I could not leave the region, it was a comfort to me to turn into the low, black-beamed room of the fishing-inn, with drying hams, flitches of bacon, and fishing-rods for decorations, and hear the simple-hearted Cymric folk talking, sometimes in Welsh, sometimes in English, but always with that kindness and that courtesy which go to make the poetry of Welsh common life.
Meantime, I had, as I need scarcely say, spared neither trouble nor expense in advertising for information about Winifred in the Welsh and the West of England newspapers. I offered rewards for her discovery, and the result was merely that I was pestered by letters from people (some of them tourists of education) suggesting traces and clues of so wild, and often of so fantastic a kind, that I arrived at the conviction that of all man's faculties his imagination is the most lawless, and at the same time the most powerful. It was perfectly inconceivable to me that the writers of some of these letters were not themselves demented, so wild or so fanciful were the clues they suggested. Yet. when I came to meet them and talk with them (as I sometimes did), I found these correspondents to be of the ordinary prosaic British type. All my efforts were to no purpose.
Among my longer journeys from the fishing-inn, the most frequent were those to Holywell, near Flint, to the Well of St. Winifred—the reader need not be told why. He will recollect how little Winnie, while plying me with strawberries, had sagely recommended the holy water of this famous well as a 'cure for crutches.' She had actually brought me some of it in a lemonade bottle when she returned to Raxton after her first absence, and had insisted on rubbing my ankle with it. She had, as I afterwards learnt from her father, importuned and at last induced her aunt (evidently a good-natured and worthy soul) to take her to visit a friend at Holywell, a journey of many miles, for the purpose of bringing home with her a bottle of the holy water. Whenever any ascent of the gangways had proved to be more successful than usual, Winifred had attributed the good luck to the virtues contained in her lemonade bottle. Ah! superstition seemed pretty enough then.
At first in the forlorn hope that memory might have attracted her thither, and afterwards because there was a fascination for me in the well on account of its association with her, my pilgrimages to Holywell were as frequent as those of any of the afflicted devotees of the olden time, whose crutches left behind testified to the genuineness of the Saint's pretensions. Into that well Winnie's innocent young eyes had gazed—gazed in the full belief that the holy water would cure me—gazed in the full belief that the crimson stains made by the byssus on the stones were stains left by her martyr-namesake's blood. Where had she stood when she came and looked into the well and the rivulet? On what exact spot had rested her feet—those little rosy feet that on the sea-sands used to flash through the receding foam as she chased the ebbing billows to amuse me, while I sat between my crutches in the cove looking on? It was, I found, possible to gaze in that water till it seemed alive with her—seemed to hold the reflection of the little face which years ago peered anxiously into it for the behoof of the crippled child-lover pining for her at Raxton, and unable to 'get up or down the gangways without her.'