CHAPTER XXVI

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THE "LILY" AND THE "PRIMROSE."

"He shall only well known be By the holy harmony That his coming makes in thee." --ANON.

It was in the dim twilight silence reigning about the mysterious dark pools below the Craig Aran Peak, whither Percival Vere had followed Primrose with eager feet to her well-known haunt, and on the brink of the black lake round which he had first watched the slow-moving footsteps of the immortal maiden, that on the evening of the day of his conversation with Lady Bryn Afon he poured out his tale of love, and heard from her sweet lips such shyly-answered confession, as made the dying evening sunlight suddenly illume the landscape, to the eyes of his dazzled vision, with all the golden glories of heaven. And when, after much sweet converse in that vast solitude, and a solemn mutual commending of themselves and their new-found joy into the hands of God, they descended the steep hillside to Glyn Melen hand in hand, their feet seemed to tread upon air for very lightness of heart, and Primrose, creeping into her mother's arms in speechless happiness, after they had together received her blessing, felt that for her the world had verily been created anew, and that all dark shadows had for ever rolled away from her long-dreaded future, in the deep, abiding sense of joy and peace with which the knowledge of Percival's love had filled her heart. Each day of the blissful weeks that followed seemed only more happy than the last, as the souls of the lovers grew more firmly knit together in a bond of love which, like the rainbow to which Percival one day pointed on the mountain-top, rested but one foot on earth, and hid the other in heaven. Each day Shanno found in her Sir Galahad more of those virtues and beautiful traits of character with which she had ever clothed her ideal knight, and each day likewise he found her more richly endowed with those tender graces and that innocence and purity of heart which had so surely been revealed to him in that sweet, haunting face of his midnight vision. Lady Bryn Afon, rejoicing greatly in their happiness and in her own newly-found joy of reconciliation with her father, who still remained with her, seemed to grow younger and more beautiful day by day, and to renew her failing health marvellously in the exhilarating air of the mountains, and in the new sense of peace which filled her heart. And who so radiant as old Jack the boatman, again restored to the love of one whom he had so long mourned as dead, and looking forward when the present short season of bliss should be ended, to having once more the charge of his loved granddaughter during some portion of the ensuing months? For Lady Bryn Afon must shortly rejoin her husband in town, and the chaplain must resume his duties in the earl's household, until, on the resignation of good old Master Rhys in the following year, he should succeed, by Lord Bryn Afon's express desire, to the living of Cwmfelin, the earl vowing that while in town the guardianship of the faithful Rhiwallon was enough for him, and that he had resolved henceforth, for the sake of his wife, to spend a great part of his time in his old Welsh castle in spite of the malediction upon its walls, during which seasons Percival should continue to act as his chaplain in addition to his new duties. Such plans for the future had the earl determined, bent upon the union of his beloved chaplain with the Fair Maid of Gwynnon, and knowing well Percival's secret desire to make the Gwynnon Vale some day the starting-point of his own unwearied labours in the cause of temperance and sobriety. And, all unaware the while of the strange events which had lately come to pass within his own household, his own ideas curiously furthered the development of those of his wife and of the lovers themselves.

It was Lady Bryn Afon's desire, after much cogitation on the matter and consultation with Rhiwallon previously held, that upon Percival's appointment to Cwmfelin in the ensuing year, the earl should be informed of his daughter's existence, and his consent obtained, as a father, to her marriage with his chaplain, which he had so long desired while ignorant of her birth, and to which his wife assured the lovers he would raise no objection after the true state of the case was made known to him. Her wish, further, was that the marriage should then take place without delay, her express desire being that, owing to the circumstances of the case, her daughter should be spared the necessity or probability of spending any time beneath her father's roof, which he would surely desire her to do, were any interval permitted to elapse between the event of her being made known to him as his daughter and her marriage.

"So soon as you are safely wedded and in a home of your own, sweet one," she said to Primrose, "your relations with your father can become both easy and pleasant. He purposes in the future to dwell more than heretofore at Bryn Afon, and you will have frequent opportunities of pleasing him with your society, and gratifying your own filial affection, while at the same time such intercourse can be fully controlled at the discretion of your beloved husband and our faithful Rhiwallon. Your father will rejoice with all a fond parent's love and pride in the possession of so fair a daughter and in the knowledge of her happy settlement in life, and you will likewise give to him a love and reverence which--alas, that a mother should need utter such words to her child--you could scarce find so easy were you dwelling beneath his own roof, ever in his company. Seek not, sweet one, I pray you, to break this barrier, which a sad fate has set up betwixt yourself and him. Such dealings with you both seem hard and unnatural for a wife and mother to speak of thus coldly, but are more necessary than you can deem possible. Bid her, Percival, believe that her union with yourself will assuredly further her father's true happiness far more than any immediate knowledge of her relationship to himself could do, and she will rest content."

"Is it indeed so, Percival?" asked Primrose entreatingly. "May I truly, as a daughter who would fain render all loving and dutiful reverence to a father, thus contemplate my future happiness without sin, and, unknown to him, and with my dear mother's consent only, come to the very eve of my marriage, ere my existence may be revealed to him? Sweet mother, you bid me appeal to him whom above all the world I love and honour, and by his opinion I will be guided, nor fear any thought of ill, an his true heart can safely bid me trust in the hope you bid me cherish of my father's future consent to our union; for fain would I have his blessing ere I enter upon that new life, the thought of which at times o'erwhelms me in its promise of bliss!" And hiding her face on her lover's shoulder, Primrose clung to him, trembling.

"Believe me, sweetheart," he answered, "your mother's plan for us all is well. The knowledge I share with her of that which blights your father's life shows me clearly that were you now to share with him that life in the close relationship of father and daughter, even for the space of this one year only, which must needs elapse before our marriage, you would but subject yourself to the dread influences which your mother has given up her very life to avert from you, and this without power to avert them from him who has long since been their unhappy prey. Whereas by our marriage following immediately upon your being presented to him as his daughter, and by our beginning together that life in which I pray God I may have grace and strength from Him to shield you from all ill, and from aught in your intercourse with him which might prove harmful to you, your mother and I both trust that no breath of evil influence shall e'er ensue from those meetings with him from time to time, which it shall then ever be our joy to promote between you. You, sweetheart, I trow, will ever love me well enough to trust that I will never keep you from your father's side when I know it safe and well for you to be there? Already does the earl earnestly desire our union, in that warm affection for us both of which I myself feel at all times too unworthy; and I have but little doubt that were he at once to know the truth concerning you, he would equally wish this longed-for consummation of our love, to which he is pleased to accord so full a sympathy. And the special joy which, in God's good providence, we trust your father may live to see through this our marriage, is this--that, subject to your consent, I have faithfully promised your mother that in the glad event of our being blessed by God with a son, he shall take the name of Bryn Afon, and so, should our lives and his be spared, may hereafter, free from the curse of your forefathers, carry on under fairer conditions the once-honoured name so nearly brought to an untimely end, and build up the ancient house, now crumbling to dust beneath Ap Gryffyth's curse, to take its former place among the noble houses of our principality. So may I be enabled, God willing, to wipe off, as in childhood I vowed I would strain every nerve to do, that stain, which, through the malediction of my own ancestor, has clung to so many long generations of yours! Have I done right, sweet wife that is to be, to make such promise?"

"To me all that you do is right, my beloved," answered Primrose, her eyes filling with tears of rare love and devotion, "and it is a right noble promise you have made. Sweet mother, all shall be as you and my affianced husband desire and know to be wise and good for me; and since you do assure me I may look for my father's blessing on my marriage morning, I am well content, and will ask no more, nor ever seek to know the nature of this dread curse, which has caused you so sorely to suffer, in order that it might be averted from me, save at my husband's and your own bidding."

So, that sweet summer holiday ended, the lovers parted on the green banks of the softly murmuring Gwynnon, beneath the boatman's bridge, one sunny morning; and Lady Bryn Afon, commending her child for the first time with her own lips into her father's care, took her journey, in her chaplain's charge, to London, there to rejoin her husband, at length able, in the depths of her heart, to rejoice that her sufferings had surely not been in vain.

Percival Vere, on rejoining Lord Bryn Afon in town, made him as soon as possible acquainted with his betrothal to the Fair Maid of Gwynnon, and the two frequently conversed together on the subject of her perfections, which topic offered a certain relief to her lover's loneliness of spirit in his absence from her, and was also to the earl, who had ever taken a lively interest in her fortunes, one of so much interest, that he bade his chaplain to make no doubt of his being himself present in person to witness the happy event whensoever it might come to pass.

"'Twas a strangely opportune decision I made to appoint you as successor to good old Master Rhys of Cwmfelin!" he remarked one day, as they were conversing together after the evening meal; "for such has long been my intention, so soon as our old friend should carry out his contemplated resignation, apart from my desire to see you happily wedded to her whom my mind had chosen as a fitting helpmeet for your labours. 'Tis rarely we find our dreams verified, but when I see you and your fair bride housed beneath the walls of yon ancient monastery, I shall feel a sense of gratification in having realised this one of my own! And as for you, can you but have free scope for your own wild imaginings as to the total abolition of strong beverages throughout the length and breadth of Wales, beginning, as you so eagerly desire, with my own poor village and ill-starred domains, you will, I doubt not, account yourself to be fulfilling a far higher destiny than were I to seek for you favour in high places and a pulpit here in our metropolis, whence you might enthral thousands with your eloquence! Come now, I have but to whisper in the king's ear, and your friend Jeremy in the ear of Archbishop Laud, and you shall have such a sphere appointed you, as I verily confess, would rather befit your learning and powers of oratory than yon tiny village amid the wild Welsh hills!"

"I have no such ambition, my lord," answered the young chaplain gravely. "My life is vowed to your service and to that country which, though but in part my own, is wholly yours. I have no better wish than to labour unknown among the wild Welsh hills, if in God's mercy, by so doing, I may seek to diminish the woes appertaining to your house. At Cwmfelin I can work not only to this immediate effect, being still your chaplain, but for the good of that whole neighbourhood wherein the rumour of the curse works mischievously, and where, as you must needs confess, there is field enough for those special preachings of mine, at which you are pleased to jest. An it were better that I should confine myself wholly to the duties of my chaplaincy, I am ready so to do, as you know, having so undertaken."

"Nay, that I will not," replied the earl; "for to hold a man of your gifts and learning ever tied to mine own apron-string were to my thinking an unpardonable selfishness. Yet such is the hold you have upon my affections, that, as you see, I do not urge you to more ambitious fields, but seek to hold you still by one end of the string, in thus giving you the spiritual charge of my own estate, and in placing you at my feet in the valley, so that, when, like all the Bryn Afons, I come to die within mine own accursed walls, it shall be your hands, and no stranger's, which shall minister to my dying wants. And my dying bed, I warrant you, Percival, will be no pleasant and peaceful scene, which you may bring your fair wife to witness! As my forefathers have died, so too must I, and that I bid you then not fail me is a sure proof of the trust I place in you, and of my belief in your strangely conceived affection for me. I too have a curious love for you, Percival, a love born out of pure contradiction! 'Tis passing strange that I, of all men, should so love you, with your everlasting hobby daily thrust down my unwilling throat, and your pure pale face warranting you well enough to be the 'lily-knight' they call you, ever stealing with haunting eyes between me and---- Ah well, when you are settled within the venerable walls of your parsonage, you will have opportunities for preaching your hobby, and can you but outlive good Master Jones of Puritanical repute, I doubt not you will have the whole country-side speedily imbued with your strange, new doctrine. 'Tis a pity Ap Gryffyth did not likewise hold such! He might surely then, if it were but 'on principle,' have spared me his imprecation! So the fair maid comes to town in the winter with our Lady Rosamond? Beware, lest betwixt that madcap's spoiling and the attentions of my infatuated wife, she is not spoiled for service as a good country parson's wife! Well, I give you both my blessing, such as it is worth--and there's my hand on it!"

"It is worth more than you think, my lord," answered his chaplain earnestly, and, grasping the carelessly-offered hand with a warmth which touched the heart of the impulsive, light-hearted earl with a keen sense of pleasure, he passed into his study.

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