Crotchet Castle

“The people in London said very unkind things of you: they hurt me very much at the time; but now I am out of their way, I do not seem to think their opinion of much consequence.  I am sure, when I recollect, at leisure, everything I have seen and heard among them, I cannot make out what they do that is so virtuous, as to set them up for judges of morals.  And I am sure they never speak the truth about anything, and there is no sincerity in either their love or their friendship.  An old Welsh bard here, who wears a waistcoat embroidered with leeks, and is called the Green Bard of Cadeir Idris, says the Scotch would be the best people in the world, if there was nobody but themselves to give them a character: and so I think would the Londoners.  I hate the very thought of them, for I do believe they would have broken my heart, if I had not got out of their way.  Now I shall write you another letter very soon, and describe to you the country, and the people, and the children, and how I amuse myself, and everything that I think you will like to hear about: and when I seal this letter, I shall drop a kiss on the cover.

“Your loving daughter,“Susannah Touchandgo.

“P.S.—Tell Mr. Robthetill I will write to him in a day or two.  This is the little song I spoke of:

“Beyond the sea, beyond the sea,My heart is gone, far, far from me;And ever on its track will fleeMy thoughts, my dreams, beyond the sea.“Beyond the sea, beyond the sea,The swallow wanders fast and free;Oh, happy bird! were I like thee,I, too, would fly beyond the sea.“Beyond the sea, beyond the sea,Are kindly hearts and social glee:But here for me they may not be;My heart is gone beyond the sea.”

CHAPTER XII

THE MOUNTAIN INN

‘Ως ἡδὺ τῴ μισοῦτι τοὺς φαύλους πρόπους’Ερημία.How sweet to minds that love not sordid waysIs solitude!—Menander.

The Captain wandered despondingly up and down hill for several days, passing many hours of each in sitting on rocks; making, almost mechanically, sketches of waterfalls, and mountain pools; taking care, nevertheless, to be always before nightfall in a comfortable inn, where, being a temperate man, he whiled away the evening with making a bottle of sherry into negus.  His rambles brought him at length into the interior of Merionethshire, the land of all that is beautiful in nature, and all that is lovely in woman.

Here, in a secluded village, he found a little inn, of small pretension and much comfort.  He felt so satisfied with his quarters, and discovered every day so much variety in the scenes of the surrounding mountains, that his inclination to proceed farther diminished progressively.

It is one thing to follow the high road through a country, with every principally remarkable object carefully noted down in a book, taking, as therein directed, a guide, at particular points, to the more recondite sights: it is another to sit down on one chosen spot, especially when the choice is unpremeditated, and from thence, by a series of explorations, to come day by day on unanticipated scenes.  The latter process has many advantages over the former; it is free from the disappointment which attends excited expectation, when imagination has outstripped reality, and from the accidents that mar the scheme of the tourist’s single day, when the valleys may be drenched with rain, or the mountains shrouded with mist.

The Captain was one morning preparing to sally forth on his usual exploration, when he heard a voice without, inquiring for a guide to the ruined castle.  The voice seemed familiar to him, and going forth into the gateway, he recognised Mr. Chainmail.  After greetings and inquiries for the absent: “You vanished very abruptly, Captain,” said Mr. Chainmail, “from our party on the canal.”

Captain Fitzchrome.—To tell you the truth, I had a particular reason for trying the effect of absence from a part of that party.

Mr. Chainmail.—I surmised as much: at the same time, the unusual melancholy of an in general most vivacious young lady made me wonder at your having acted so precipitately.  The lady’s heart is yours, if there be truth in signs.

Captain Fitzchrome.—Hearts are not now what they were in the days of the old song: “Will love be controlled by advice?”

Mr. Chainmail.—Very true; hearts, heads, and arms have all degenerated, most sadly.  We can no more feel the high impassioned love of the ages, which some people have the impudence to call dark, than we can wield King Richard’s battleaxe, bend Robin Hood’s bow, or flourish the oaken graft of the Pindar of Wakefield.  Still we have our tastes and feelings, though they deserve not the name of passions; and some of us may pluck up spirit to try to carry a point, when we reflect that we have to contend with men no better than ourselves.

Captain Fitzchrome.—We do not now break lances for ladies.

Mr. Chainmail.—No; nor even bulrushes.  We jingle purses for them, flourish paper-money banners, and tilt with scrolls of parchment.

Captain Fitzchrome.—In which sort of tilting I have been thrown from the saddle.  I presume it was not love that led you from the flotilla?

Mr. Chainmail.—By no means.  I was tempted by the sight of an old tower, not to leave this land of ruined castles, without having collected a few hints for the adornment of my baronial hall.

Captain Fitzchrome.—I understand you live en famille with your domestics.  You will have more difficulty in finding a lady who would adopt your fashion of living, than one who would prefer you to a richer man.

Mr. Chainmail.—Very true.  I have tried the experiment on several as guests; but once was enough for them: so, I suppose, I shall die a bachelor.

Captain Fitzchrome.—I see, like some others of my friends, you will give up anything except your hobby.

Mr. Chainmail.—I will give up anything but my baronial hall.

Captain Fitzchrome.—You will never find a wife for your purpose, unless in the daughter of some old-fashioned farmer.

Mr. Chainmail.—No, I thank you.  I must have a lady of gentle blood; I shall not marry below my own condition: I am too much of a herald; I have too much of the twelfth century in me for that.

Captain Fitzchrome.—Why, then your chance is not much better than mine.  A well-born beauty would scarcely be better pleased with your baronial hall than with my more humble offer of love in a cottage.  She must have a town-house, and an opera-box, and roll about the streets in a carriage; especially if her father has a rotten borough, for the sake of which he sells his daughter, that he may continue to sell his country.  But you were inquiring for a guide to the ruined castle in this vicinity; I know the way and will conduct you.

The proposal pleased Mr. Chainmail, and they set forth on their expedition.

CHAPTER XIII

THE LAKE—THE RUIN

Or vieni, Amore, e quà meco t’assetta.Orlando Innamorato.

Mr. Chainmail.—Would it not be a fine thing, Captain, you being picturesque, and I poetical; you being for the lights and shadows of the present, and I for those of the past; if we were to go together over the ground which was travelled in the twelfth century by Giraldus de Barri, when he accompanied Archbishop Baldwin to preach the crusade?

Captain Fitzchrome.—Nothing, in my present frame of mind, could be more agreeable to me.

Mr. Chainmail.—We would provide ourselves with his Itinerarium; compare what has been, with what is; contemplate in their decay the castles and abbeys, which he saw in their strength and splendour; and, while you were sketching their remains, I would dispassionately inquire what has been gained by the change.

Captain Fitzchrome.—Be it so.

But the scheme was no sooner arranged, than the Captain was summoned to London by a letter on business, which he did not expect to detain him long.  Mr. Chainmail, who, like the Captain, was fascinated with the inn and the scenery, determined to await his companion’s return; and, having furnished him with a list of books, which he was to bring with him from London, took leave of him, and began to pass his days like the heroes of Ariosto, who

—tutto il giorno, al bel oprar intenti,Saliron balze, e traversar torrenti.

One day Mr. Chainmail traced upwards the course of a mountain stream to a spot where a small waterfall threw itself over a slab of perpendicular rock, which seemed to bar his farther progress.  On a nearer view, he discovered a flight of steps, roughly hewn in the rock, on one side of the fall.  Ascending these steps, he entered a narrow winding pass, between high and naked rocks, that afforded only space for a rough footpath, carved on one side, at some height above the torrent.

The pass opened on a lake, from which the stream issued, and which lay like a dark mirror, set in a gigantic frame of mountain precipices.  Fragments of rock lay scattered on the edge of the lake, some half-buried in the water: Mr. Chainmail scrambled some way over these fragments, till the base of a rock sinking abruptly in the water, effectually barred his progress.  He sat down on a large smooth stone; the faint murmur of the stream he had quitted, the occasional flapping of the wings of the heron, and at long intervals, the solitary springing of a trout, were the only sounds that came to his ear.  The sun shone brightly half-way down the opposite rocks, presenting, on their irregular faces, strong masses of light and shade.  Suddenly he heard the dash of a paddle, and, turning his eyes, saw a solitary and beautiful girl gliding over the lake in a coracle: she was proceeding from the vicinity of the point he had quitted, towards the upper end of the lake.  Her apparel was rustic, but there was in its style something more recherchée, in its arrangement something more of elegance and precision, than was common to the mountain peasant girl.  It had more of the contadina of the opera, than of the genuine mountaineer; so at least thought Mr. Chainmail; but she passed so rapidly, and took him so much by surprise, that he had little opportunity for accurate observation.  He saw her land, at the farther extremity, and disappear among the rocks: he rose from his seat, returned to the mouth of the pass, stepped from stone to stone across the stream, and attempted to pass round by the other side of the lake; but there again the abruptly sinking precipice closed his way.

Day after day he haunted the spot, but never saw again either the damsel or the coracle.  At length, marvelling at himself for being so solicitous about the apparition of a peasant girl in a coracle, who could not, by any possibility, be anything to him, he resumed his explorations in another direction.

One day he wandered to the ruined castle, on the sea-shore, which was not very distant from his inn; and sitting on the rock, near the base of the ruin, was calling up the forms of past ages on the wall of an ivied tower, when on its summit appeared a female figure, whom he recognised in an instant for his nymph of the coracle.  The folds of the blue gown pressed by the sea-breeze against one of the most symmetrical of figures, the black feather of the black hat, and the ringleted hair beneath it fluttering in the wind; the apparent peril of her position, on the edge of the mouldering wall, from whose immediate base the rock went down perpendicularly to the sea, presented a singularly interesting combination to the eye of the young antiquary.

Mr. Chainmail had to pass half round the castle, on the land side, before he could reach the entrance: he coasted the dry and bramble-grown moat, crossed the unguarded bridge, passed the unportcullised arch of the gateway, entered the castle court, ascertained the tower, ascended the broken stairs, and stood on the ivied wall.  But the nymph of the place was gone.  He searched the ruins within and without, but he found not what he sought: he haunted the castle day after day, as he had done the lake, but the damsel appeared no more.

CHAPTER XIV

THE DINGLE

The stars of midnight shall be dearTo her, and she shall lean her earIn many a secret place,Where rivulets dance their wayward round,And beauty, born of murmuring sound,Shall pass into her face.—Wordsworth.

Miss Susannah Touchandgo had read the four great poets of Italy, and many of the best writers of France.  About the time of her father’s downfall, accident threw into her way Les Réveries du Promeneur Solitaire; and from the impression which these made on her, she carried with her into retirement all the works of Rousseau.  In the midst of that startling light, which the conduct of old friends on a sudden reverse of fortune throws on a young and inexperienced mind, the doctrines of the philosopher of Geneva struck with double force upon her sympathies: she imbibed the sweet poison, as somebody calls it, of his writings, even to a love of truth; which, every wise man knows, ought to be left to those who can get anything by it.  The society of children, the beauties of nature, the solitude of the mountains, became her consolation, and, by degrees, her delight.  The gay society from which she had been excluded, remained on her memory only as a disagreeable dream.  She imbibed her new monitor’s ideas of simplicity of dress, assimilating her own with that of the peasant-girls in the neighbourhood: the black hat, the blue gown, the black stockings, the shoes, tied on the instep.

Pride was, perhaps, at the bottom of the change: she was willing to impose in some measure on herself, by marking a contemptuous indifference to the characteristics of the class of society from which she had fallen.

And with the food of pride sustained her soulIn solitude.

It is true that she somewhat modified the forms of her rustic dress: to the black hat she added a black feather, to the blue gown she added a tippet, and a waistband fastened in front with a silver buckle; she wore her black stockings very smooth and tight on her ankles, and tied her shoes in tasteful bows, with the nicest possible ribbon.  In this apparel, to which, in winter, she added a scarlet cloak, she made dreadful havoc among the rustic mountaineers, many of whom proposed to “keep company” with her in the Cambrian fashion, an honour which, to their great surprise, she always declined.  Among these, Harry Ap-Heather, whose father rented an extensive sheepwalk, and had a thousand she-lambs wandering in the mountains, was the most strenuous in his suit, and the most pathetic in his lamentations for her cruelty.

Miss Susannah often wandered among the mountains alone, even to some distance from the farmhouse.  Sometimes she descended into the bottom of the dingles, to the black rocky beds of the torrents, and dreamed away hours at the feet of the cataracts.  One spot in particular, from which she had at first shrunk with terror, became by degrees her favourite haunt.  A path turning and returning at acute angles, led down a steep wood-covered slope to the edge of a chasm, where a pool, or resting-place of a torrent, lay far below.  A cataract fell in a single sheet into the pool; the pool boiled and bubbled at the base of the fall, but through the greater part of its extent, lay calm, deep, and black, as if the cataract had plunged through it to an unimaginable depth, without disturbing its eternal repose.  At the opposite extremity of the pool, the rocks almost met at their summits, the trees of the opposite banks intermingled their leaves, and another cataract plunged from the pool into a chasm, on which the sunbeams never gleamed.  High above, on both sides, the steep woody slopes of the dingle soared into the sky; and from a fissure in the rock, on which the little path terminated, a single gnarled and twisted oak stretched itself over the pool, forming a fork with its boughs at a short distance from the rock.  Miss Susannah often sat on the rock, with her feet resting on this tree; in time, she made her seat on the tree itself, with her feet hanging over the abyss; and at length, she accustomed herself to lie along upon its trunk, with her side on the mossy bole of the fork, and an arm round one of the branches.  From this position a portion of the sky and the woods was reflected in the pool, which, from its bank, was but a mass of darkness.  The first time she reclined in this manner, her heart beat audibly; in time she lay down as calmly as on the mountain heather; the perception of the sublime was probably heightened by an intermingled sense of danger; and perhaps that indifference to life, which early disappointment forces upon sensitive minds, was necessary to the first experiment.  There was, in the novelty and strangeness of the position, an excitement which never wholly passed away, but which became gradually subordinate to the influence, at once tranquillising and elevating, of the mingled eternity of motion, sound, and solitude.

One sultry noon, she descended into this retreat with a mind more than usually disturbed by reflections on the past.  She lay in her favourite position, sometimes gazing on the cataract; looking sometimes up the steep sylvan acclivities, into the narrow space of the cloudless ether; sometimes down into the abyss of the pool, and the deep bright-blue reflections that opened another immensity below her.  The distressing recollections of the morning, the world and all its littlenesses, faded from her thoughts like a dream; but her wounded and wearied spirit drank in too deeply the tranquillising power of the place, and she dropped asleep upon the tree like a ship-boy on the mast.

At this moment Mr. Chainmail emerged into daylight, on a projection of the opposite rock, having struck down through the woods in search of unsophisticated scenery.  The scene he discovered filled him with delight: he seated himself on the rock, and fell into one of his romantic reveries; when suddenly the semblance of a black hat and feather caught his eye among the foliage of the projecting oak.  He started up, shifted his position, and got a glimpse of a blue gown.  It was his lady of the lake, his enchantress of the ruined castle, divided from him by a barrier which, at a few yards below, he could almost overleap, yet unapproachable but by a circuit perhaps of many hours.  He watched with intense anxiety.  To listen if she breathed was out of the question: the noses of a dean and chapter would have been soundless in the roar of the torrent.  From her extreme stillness, she appeared to sleep: yet what creature, not desperate, would go wilfully to sleep in such a place?  Was she asleep, then?  Nay, was she alive?  She was as motionless as death.  Had she been murdered, thrown from above, and caught in the tree?  She lay too regularly and too composedly for such a supposition.  She was asleep, then, and, in all probability, her waking would be fatal.  He shifted his position.  Below the pool two beetle-browed rocks nearly overarched the chasm, leaving just such a space at the summit as was within the possibility of a leap; the torrent roared below in a fearful gulf.  He paused some time on the brink, measuring the practicability and the danger, and casting every now and then an anxious glance to his sleeping beauty.  In one of these glances he saw a slight movement of the blue gown, and, in a moment after, the black hat and feather dropped into the pool.  Reflection was lost for a moment, and, by a sudden impulse, he bounded over the chasm.

He stood above the projecting oak; the unknown beauty lay like the nymph of the scene; her long black hair, which the fall of her hat had disengaged from its fastenings, drooping through the boughs: he saw that the first thing to be done, was to prevent her throwing her feet off the trunk, in the first movements of waking.  He sat down on the rock, and placed his feet on the stem, securing her ankles between his own: one of her arms was round a branch of the fork, the other lay loosely on her side.  The hand of this arm he endeavoured to reach, by leaning forward from his seat; he approximated, but could not touch it: after several tantalising efforts, he gave up the point in despair.  He did not attempt to wake her, because he feared it might have bad consequences, and he resigned himself to expect the moment of her natural waking, determined not to stir from his post, if she should sleep till midnight.

In this period of forced inaction, he could contemplate at leisure the features and form of his charmer.  She was not one of the slender beauties of romance; she was as plump as a partridge; her cheeks were two roses, not absolutely damask, yet verging thereupon; her lips twin-cherries, of equal size; her nose regular, and almost Grecian; her forehead high, and delicately fair; her eyebrows symmetrically arched; her eyelashes, long, black, and silky, fitly corresponding with the beautiful tresses that hung among the leaves of the oak, like clusters of wandering grapes.  Her eyes were yet to be seen; but how could he doubt that their opening would be the rising of the sun, when all that surrounded their fringy portals was radiant as “the forehead of the morning sky?”

CHAPTER XV

THE FARM

Da ydyw’r gwaith, rhaid d’we’yd y gwir,Ar fryniau Sir Meirionydd;Golwg oer o’r gwaela gawnMae hi etto yn llawn llawenydd.Though Meirion’s rocks, and hills of heath,   Repel the distant sight,Yet where, than those bleak hills beneath,   Is found more true delight?

At length the young lady awoke.  She was startled at the sudden sight of the stranger, and somewhat terrified at the first perception of her position.  But she soon recovered her self-possession, and, extending her hand to the offered hand of Mr. Chainmail, she raised herself up on the tree, and stepped on the rocky bank.

Mr. Chainmail solicited permission to attend her to her home, which the young lady graciously conceded.  They emerged from the woody dingle, traversed an open heath, wound along a mountain road by the shore of a lake, descended to the deep bed of another stream, crossed it by a series of stepping-stones, ascended to some height on the opposite side, and followed upwards the line of the stream, till the banks opened into a spacious amphitheatre, where stood, in its fields and meadows, the farmhouse of Ap-Llymry.

During this walk, they had kept up a pretty animated conversation.  The lady had lost her hat, and, as she turned towards Mr. Chainmail, in speaking to him, there was no envious projection of brim to intercept the beams of those radiant eyes he had been so anxious to see unclosed.  There was in them a mixture of softness and brilliancy, the perfection of the beauty of female eyes, such as some men have passed through life without seeing, and such as no man ever saw, in any pair of eyes, but once; such as can never be seen and forgotten.  Young Crotchet had seen it; he had not forgotten it; but he had trampled on its memory, as the renegade tramples on the emblems of a faith which his interest only, and not his heart or his reason, has rejected.

Her hair streamed over her shoulders; the loss of the black feather had left nothing but the rustic costume, the blue gown, the black stockings, and the ribbon-tied shoes.  Her voice had that full soft volume of melody which gives to common speech the fascination of music.  Mr. Chainmail could not reconcile the dress of the damsel with her conversation and manners.  He threw out a remote question or two, with the hope of solving the riddle, but, receiving no reply, he became satisfied that she was not disposed to be communicative respecting herself, and, fearing to offend her, fell upon other topics.  They talked of the scenes of the mountains, of the dingle, the ruined castle, the solitary lake.  She told him, that lake lay under the mountains behind her home, and the coracle and the pass at the extremity, saved a long circuit to the nearest village, whither she sometimes went to inquire for letters.

Mr. Chainmail felt curious to know from whom these letters might be; and he again threw out two or three fishing questions, to which, as before, he obtained no answer.

The only living biped they met in their walk was the unfortunate Harry Ap-Heather, with whom they fell in by the stepping-stones, who, seeing the girl of his heart hanging on another man’s arm, and, concluding at once that they were “keeping company,” fixed on her a mingled look of surprise, reproach, and tribulation; and, unable to control his feelings under the sudden shock, burst into a flood of tears, and blubbered till the rocks re-echoed.