Aylwin eBook

Theodore Watts-Dunton
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 645 pages of information about Aylwin.

Aylwin eBook

Theodore Watts-Dunton
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 645 pages of information about Aylwin.

Amid the din of the water I listened for the wail which had so deeply impressed Winifred, and certainly there was what may be described as a sound within a sound, which ears so attuned to every note of Superstition’s gamut as Winifred’s might easily accept as the wail of Sir John Wynn’s ghost.

There was no footpath down to the bottom, but I descended without any great difficulty, though I was now soaked in spray.  Here the mysterious human sound seemed to be less perceptible amid the din of the torrent than from the platform where I had stayed to listen to it.  But when I climbed up again to the spot by the mid-pool where I had originally stood, a strange sensation came to me.  My recollection of Winnie’s words on the night of the landslip came upon me with such overmastering power that the noise of the cataract seemed changed to the sound of billows tumbling on Raxton sands, and the ‘wail’ of Sir John Wynn seemed changed to that shriek from Raxton cliff which appalled Winnie as it appalled me.

The following night I passed into a moonlight as bright as that which had played me such fantastic tricks at the Swallow Falls.

It was not until I had crossed the bridge over the Conway, and was turning to the right in the direction of Fairy Glen, that I fully realised how romantic the moonlight was.  Every wooded hill and every precipice, whether craggy and bald or feathered with pines, was bathed in light that would have made an Irish bog, or an Essex marsh, or an Isle of Ely fen, a land of poetry.

When I reached Pont Llyn-yr-Afange (Beaver Pool Bridge) I lingered to look down the lovely lane on the left, through which I was to pass in order to reach the rocky dell of Fairy Glen, for it was perfumed, not with the breath of the flowers now asleep, but with the perfume I love most of all, the night’s floating memory of the flowery breath of day.

Suddenly I felt some one touching my elbow.  I turned round.  It was Rhona Boswell.  I was amazed to see her, for I thought that all my Gypsy friends, Boswells, Lovells, and the rest, were still attending the horse-fairs in the Midlands and Eastern Counties.

‘We’ve only just got here,’ said Rhona; ’wussur luck that we got here at all.  I wants to get back to dear Gypsy Dell and Rington Wood; that’s what I wants to do.’

‘Where is the camp?’ I asked.

‘Same place, twix Bettws and Capel Curig.’

She had been to the bungalow, she told me, with a message from Sinfi.  This message was that she particularly wished to meet me at Mrs. Davies’s cottage—­’not at the bungalow’—­on the following night.

‘She’ll go there to-morrow mornin’,’ said Rhona, ’and make things tidy for you; but she won’t expect you till night, same time as she met you there fust.  She’s got a key o’ the door, she says, wot you gev her.’

I was not so surprised at Sinfi’s proposed place of meeting as I should have been had I not remembered her resolution not to return to the bungalow, and not to let me return to the camp.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Aylwin from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.