Poor Bevan had been taken by surprise in this sudden execution, put in by his treacherous supplanter, Lewis Lewis. But what most excited the anger of his old attached neighbours, was the fact that many of these goods were bought by an agent of Lewis, to finish furnishing his own newly repaired house by the old park wall. Winifred learned that her parents had removed to a friendly neighbour's, at some distance, but suspected the worst—his removal to jail.
Not now the weakness of woman prevailed over her presence of mind, as we have lately seen it do in her interview with a beloved object. She commanded her agitation, so far as to bid for her father's old chair, but in vain; for her timid bidding, faltered from behind a crowd, failed to catch the ear of the jocular auctioneer, (who, in Wales, must always be somewhat of a mountebank,) and the favourite chair was gone at once, after the wheel, and the many old familiar chattels which she saw standing, now the property of strangers.
Events crowded fast on each other, hurrying on that terrible hour in which a revolting act of self-devotion was to render even this domestic horror of little injury to her parents. "I will buy 'daddy' a better chair, or he shall have enough to buy a better, when I am gone," she murmured to herself. For now the rumour grew rife, that Mr Fitzarthur had actually landed, was daily expected; and, in confirmation, she received through a neighbour present, a letter left for her by her father, stating that he had now actually received, under the Nabob's own hand, a proposal of marriage, which the generous old man (who well knew her engagements to another) solemnly charged her to reject, at all hazards to himself. He further begged her to come quickly to the temporary place of refuge he and her mother had found under the roof of a hill cottage, just now tenantless through the death of a relative. Thither, with heavy heart, Winifred hastened by the first light of morning.
"The hill," an expression much in the mouths of Welsh rural people, signifies not any particular one, as it would in England, but the whole desolate regions of the mountain heights; the homeless place of ever-whistling winds, and low bellowing clouds, mingling with the mist of the mountain, into one black smoke-like rolling volume—the place of dismal pools and screaming kites, full of bogs, concealed by a sickly yellowish herbage in the midst of the russet waste, boundlessly wearying the eye with its sober monotony of tint. If a pool or lake relieve it by reflecting the sky, on approach it is found choked all round by high rushes, and shadowed by low strangely-shaped rocks, tinted by mosses of dingy hue; the water that glistened pleasantly in the distance, shrinks now to a mere pond, (the middle space, too deep for bullrushes and other weeds to take root.) The deep stillness, or the unintermitted hollow blowing of the wind (according to the weather) are equally mournful. The rotten soil is cleft and torn into gulleys and small channels, in which the mahogany-coloured rivulets, springing from the peat morass, straggle silently with a sluggish motion in harmony with the lifeless scene. There, if a weedy-roofed hut do appear, (detected by its thin feeble smoke column) or the shepherd who tenants it should show his solitary figure in the distance, the only upright object where is not one tree-trunk, neither the home of man nor man's appearance lessens the sense of almost savage solitude; the one so lonely, not a smoke-wreath being visible all round, beside; the other, as he loiters by, watching some sheep on some distant bank, so shy and wild-looking, and, to appearance, so melancholy, so forlorn. Meanwhile, as we "plod our weary way," some dip in the wavy round of olive-hued lumpish mountains, or an abrupt huge chasm of awful rocks, each side being almost perpendicular, startles the traveller with a far-down prospect of some sunshiny, rich, leafy, valley region, at once showing at what a bleak elevation he has been roaming so long, and tantalizing him with the contrast of that far, far off, low, luring landscape, rendering more irksome than before the dead, heathery desert, interminably undulating before, behind, and all round him.
The little farm whither old Bevan had retired, stood high in such a desert as this, on the very verge of such a mountain-portal, (a bwlch, pronounced boolch, the Welsh call it,) an antique stone cottage, hanging like a nest on one of the side banks, dismal itself, but all that under world of pastoral pleasantness below, in full though dim perspective. A premature decay is always visible on these kind of wild, weather-beaten homes, in the torn thatch; the walls tinged with green, and generally propped to resist the effects of the powerful winds. If white-washed, which they really are, broad streaks of green are visible, from the frequent heavy rains, tinged by the mosses and weeds of the roof. The clouds, attracted by the heights, career on the strong blast, so low and close, as often to shut up the dingy human nest in a dreary day of its own, while all below is blue serene.
To this melancholy abode, its few rustic chattels still standing there, left since the death of its tenant, Winifred toiled up by a steep, wild, but well-known track, but found not father, mother, or living thing, except one, so much in unison with the wild melancholy of the scene, as to exalt it almost to horror. This was a wretched idiot man, dressed in female attire, perfectly harmless, and kept, as a parish pauper, at an adjacent farm. He was noted for fidelity to any one who flattered him by some little commission. This ragged object presented to her the key of the padlock on the door, with the words "gone, gone, gone!" She entered, and found, to her surprise, excellent refreshment provided in the desolate house, evidently but lately deserted. But what riveted her eyes, was a letter to herself in the handwriting of David, but tremulously written, announcing his inability to keep an appointment, (one more!) which they had made, to part for ever—her terrible distress, it will be remembered, on the last occasion, deterring the young man from any further trial of her feelings. He further informed her that Mr Fitzarthur was certainly arrived, and had taken up his temporary abode at the pretty house by the park, designed by Lewis Lewis for his own residence. Moreover, she learned that her father and mother anxiously expected her at that house to which they had removed, but did not reveal that he had been removed in the care of two bailiffs, and the house named was but a resting place in his transit to jail.
When the mind is enfeebled by repeated blows, it often happens that some one, which to others may appear the slightest of all, produces the greatest effect, its pain being quite disproportioned to its real importance. Thus it happened, that, amidst all her trials, Winifred felt the loss of her father's favourite chair as a crowning misery, trivial as was that loss, when hope itself was lost. She had identified that very humble chattel with his figure almost her life long. She almost expected to see the two fair hands (for, truth to tell, the aged steward had never worked hard) on each side, and the venerable kind face projected forwards from its deep concave, arched over that white head, to smile welcome to her even as it stood out on the little green. The intrusion of boy clowns, one after another, into its seat seemed a grievous insult to the unhappy owner, though absent. Yet a sad comfort rose in the thought of her ability to reinstate her father in all his lost comforts, through this terrible marriage. Then she grew impatient in her longing to console him by assurance of this, notwithstanding his generous wish that her hand should go where he knew her heart had irretrievably been given. But these repeated disappointments in finding the parents she longed to fold to her bosom, postponing this little gratification, (the telling him she would repurchase the old family chair,) now quite overcame the fortitude she had till now exhibited. She sate down sick at heart—turned with aversion from the refreshment her fatigue required, and wept bitterly. Superstition, and two mysterious incidents, even while she remained on the hill, if indeed they were more than superstition's coinage, helped to depress her. Just before she reached this forlorn house with the haggard, aged, horrid-looking idiot prowling round it, with his rags fluttering in the wind, she thought that the figure of the hated steward and spy moved along a wild path on the opposite side of that great mountain cleft, traversed by a noisy torrent almost the depth of the whole hill, near the top of which this cottage was perched. His being there alone was nothing marvellous, but an ominous horror seemed, in her mind, to hover round that man, who (as if conscious of some deadly evil which was through him to overwhelm her some time) studiously avoided direct intercourse with his victim.
The second incident which might have sprung from the dwelling of her mind's eye on the absent features of him, who, it seemed, refused to meet her again, was an apparition, or what she deemed such, of her dear Night-harper! One of those dense flying clouds, so common even at moderate elevations when the mists roll down the hills, suddenly enveloping the lone lofty spot, left but a little area of a few yards for vision, a dungeon walled with fog, which kept circulating furiously on the blast like a great smoke, in continuous whirls. And through some momentary fissure in this white wall, she imagined the pallid and almost ghastly visage of her forsaken lover appeared intensely looking toward her, as she stood on the rude threshold, looking out on the temporary storm that had shut her up. Her vague apprehension of some evil arising to David, her mind's perpetual object, from the man she believed herself to have espied just before, was rarely absent from her thought. Combining the two appearances, she became more and more fancy-fraught, thus confined, as it were, in an elemental solitude of the mountain and the cloud, where, for the present, we leave her, to narrate the fate of her father.
The novel calamity of arrest for debt was borne by the respectable old man, John Bevan, with a patience and dignity that no study of philosophy could have inspired. Though somewhat inactive, he felt that, in the honest discharge of his duty, he stood acquitted in the sight of God, though not in the eye of the law, of all fault, at least of any one meriting the terrible punishment of imprisonment. It was near nightfall when two emissaries of the law appeared, announcing that horses waited at the neighbouring inn to convey him to jail with the first light of morning. The poor old dame, his wife, was not to be pacified by the efforts of the two bailiffs, who executed their commission with the utmost gentleness, by order, as it appeared, of the Nabob himself, notwithstanding that the old man's stern self-denying rejection of his overture for his daughter's hand had determined him to let his agent proceed to extremities. Soothing as well as he could both her grief and her rage—for the latter rose unreflectingly against the mere agents in this grievous infliction—old Bevan smoked his pipe as usual to the end, and then requested permission to take a little walk only to the church, which stood a short way from the solitary house where they surprised him.
"You see I cannot run, for I can hardly walk with these rheumatics, my friend," he observed; "but I have a fancy to visit the churchyard to-night, as it will be moonlight, and we shall be pretty busy in the morning. My dame is gone to bed with the good woman of this cottage, as I begged her to go; so pray let us walk—you shall see me all the while by the moon, without coming into the churchyard with me."