The Making of William Edwards; or, The Story of the Bridge of Beauty. George David Banks
his forty pounds. It's poor land, so much rock and bog and wood, and he knows it, so much barren hill-side, scarcely fit to pasture the few sheep and goats. Yes, 'deed it will take hard work to make the farm pay now the husbandman is gone. Ah, yes, yes! We have had a terrible loss, Rhys, fach.'4
As she spoke the last words the poor widow's tears gushed forth again, and would not be restrained. The flowers she was strewing over the sheet-covered form of her dead fell to the floor, and she dropped on her knees beside the bed, where it was her mournful duty to watch, and hid her face with her hands as if to conceal the passion of grief she could no longer control.
Rhys was sobbing too, though he strove against it in his effort to be manly. His arm went round her heaving shoulders with an unstudied air of natural protection, and in a broken voice he begged her to be calm. Not that he was by any means calm himself, but he was feeling early the need for self-restraint.
'Don't, mother, don't,' he murmured; 'you will be making yourself ill, and then who will mind the farm or the children? I will be a good steady boy, and will work as hard almost as a man. You shall not miss father more than I can help, look you. And sure we have a terrible loss; but, mother dear, it might be worse if we did lose the farm and all, as Davy did say. You are a good farmer, so Owen Griffith do say, and you will be teaching me.'
'Yes, indeed, please God, and you shall be a good farmer too, Rhys,' sobbed she, drying her eyes on her long check apron, and giving him a look of profound trust and loving motherhood, whilst he drew himself up with a renewed sense of importance.
At that moment a figure darkened the bedroom doorway. In stepped a fresh-looking young woman with bare legs and feet, short petticoats of striped flannel, a dark blue woollen cloak, and a man's tall hat worn over a plain linen cap, white as a snowdrop, though the stray locks beneath it might have been more orderly had looking-glasses been more common. She had a bundle on her left arm, a stocking she was knitting in her hand, whilst little Willie held her fast by the other, and Jonet clung to her cloak.
'Ah, Ales,5 is that you?' burst from Mrs. Edwards with an evident gasp of relief. 'You was not expected back so soon. Had you heard of our loss? Is your poor mother well again?'
'Not quite well, but better, look you. She can sit up, and Mary may manage to do for her now, perhaps.' There was a dubious tone in the 'perhaps,' but she went on to say, 'Mother would not let me stay when she heard of your great trouble, after you was so kind as to let me go away to nurse her. It was not right I should stay at Caerphilly when you was being left all alone by yourself, with nobody to keep watch with you or to help at all;' and she passed into the kitchen as she spoke.
'Yes, I'm here, Ales,' thrust in Rhys, as he followed. 'I shall help mother now; yes, indeed!'
'You?' ejaculated Ales incredulously, whilst divesting herself of bundle, cloak, etc. 'Help's a little word and soon said, but it's not much more than the saying we will be getting from you, Rhys. You never was fond of work, whatever!'
Rhys pulled himself up as if insulted. 'You shall see,' he said loftily, and quitted the kitchen, where Mrs. Griffith was paring turnips for dinner, his chin in the air. And not another word did he vouchsafe to the young woman, his mother's hired servant. He might, by his manner, have expected her to understand his altered position and good resolution intuitively, but she only knew him as a lad with more liking for play than work, and expected no more from the present than from the past. Nay, perhaps less, now there was no father to drive him to his daily tasks and thrash him into industry.
It was a time of unusually painful bustle and excitement, yet there was no cheeriness about the daily tasks. Indoors there was a hush even in the scrubbing of benches, tables, and platters, almost in the dash of the churn, for was not the widow still keeping her watch by the dead – the dead who could not be buried on the third day, but must wait until coroner and jury could be called together to verify the cause of Mrs. Edwards' widowhood? Mrs. Griffith was there, alternately to help Ales with her work, and to relieve the mourner – a kind, motherly sort of woman, one to rely on in emergency.
Out of doors Rhys kept David well employed, telling him he would have to learn to be a man, directing him to do this or that with quite an elder-brotherly air of proprietorship, though not unkindly. Ales wondered what had come to him, he worked about the farm with so much more knowledge of the right thing to be done at the right time than she had given him credit for possessing.
As for poor little Jonet and William, they shrank whispering into corners out of everybody's way, or slunk out into the bit of ground that did duty for a garden, or strayed into the orchard, where they made themselves useful picking up windfall apples for the pony and the pigs, and did their best to make themselves ill by eating the unripe fruit at the same time; for although four years old Jonet was imitative in assuming a protectorate over her two years brother, she had not herself outlived a childish love for the crude and indigestible. They were, fortunately, too young to comprehend the mystery of the closed room, yet the general air of restraint affected even them, as they went about hand in hand.
The valley of the Taff has long been noted for its fertility. It was otherwise in the early years of the last century, when husbandry in Wales was so primitive that the spade did duty for the plough, and crops had to be wrung from exhausted soil wholly by hand-labour; ignorance, and old prejudice in favour of doing as their fathers had done before them, standing in the way of progress, equally with the paucity of good roads and bridges over which to convey produce.
In places the lowlands near the river were fertile; and where the stream was bordered by lofty slopes, and not hemmed in by precipitous limestone crags, they were clothed with dense woods of fir and mountain ash, oak and beech, with sallows by the water edge, all more esteemed by the sparse population for their timber than for their wondrously picturesque beauty. But at the top of the mountain range eastward of the vale, and on their upper slopes, much of the ground was sour and boggy, and called for more agricultural knowledge and appliances than had found their way thither, even when this century was born.
The farm of the Edwardses was so situated on the mountain-side, and certainly enjoyed a diversity of soil capable of development in capable hands. In Eglwysilan parish it was regarded as a fairly large farm, and the house was the envy of the neighbours, though my modern readers may think there was little to envy. It had not only three rooms besides the capacious kitchen, but that kitchen could boast two glazed windows, one on either side the entrance; a very rare distinction, except in good houses or towns, so rare that not even shutters closed the apertures through which air and light found their way to the two sleeping rooms or to the long apartment in the rear, which served a variety of purposes. These were the housing of general stores, household and farming implements, a passage being kept clear from the kitchen midway through to the back door and farmyard. And this was all the isolation considered necessary for the dairy and dairy utensils, notwithstanding the purpose to which the other half of its space was devoted.
All these separate rooms were upon the ground floor. Stairs were almost unknown conveniences in the cots and farms of wild Wales. Even in the villages few were the inhabitants privileged to look down upon poorer neighbours from upper windows. Lime, however, was plentiful in Glamorganshire, and though walls were put together of roughly hewn stone, they were whitewashed both inside and out with conscientious frequency.
In no place short of a mansion was much furniture to be found. And to say that Mrs. Edwards had a well-scrubbed dresser filled with wooden platters and with mugs of Staffordshire pottery; that she had not only a large oaken table, but a linen cloth to cover it on occasion, and that there was a chair near the chimney corner in addition to the high-backed bench, or settle, and the three-legged stools; that a spinning-wheel stood between the two bedroom doors opposite to the fireplace, and that a large oaken chest stood under one window containing the family stock of clothing, and of flannel the wheel had helped to spin, was to say that she was for her time and place a thrifty, well-to-do woman, somewhat in advance of her class.
However, the great feature of the kitchen was the expansive open fireplace, where the fire was made on a broad hearthstone, slightly raised, the inside of the chimney, which sloped upwards towards the top like a narrowing funnel, being set with stone seats for the elders of the family.
On
Ales, pronounced Alis; in English, Alice.