CHAPTER XXXIII

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THE WEDDING-DAY.

"My rose, I gather for the breast of God." --ROBERT BROWNING.

"I go to prove my soul I see my prey as birds their trackless way: I shall arrive! What time, what circuit first I ask not; but unless God send his hail, Or blinding fireballs, sleet or stifling snow, In some time, His good time, I shall arrive; He guides me and the bird. In His good time!" --ROBERT BROWNING.

While Shanno was led by her mother to that first interview with the earl as her acknowledged father, to which she had so long looked forward in the bright days first following her knowledge of her own new position, but during the last sad weeks had dreaded with pain and shrinking not less than her former joy, Percival Vere, ere proceeding to the house of Master Rhys, where he had promised to spend the night, and to unfold to himself and to Jack the boatman the melancholy tale of his own and Shanno's unlooked-for sufferings, found his way to the laboratory, dreading, yet craving to see the physician, whose sympathies would, he well knew, have been strongly excited by the events of the last few weeks.

No answer being vouchsafed to his knock, he gently opened the door and entered the apartment, whence he had not long since gone forth strong in his new-found confidence of joy and hope. Before the portrait of the lovely, ill-starred Lady Gwendolen, Rhiwallon lay, prostrate and motionless, one hand still holding the stem of the phial in which he had triumphantly shown to Percival his precious elixir at their last interview in the laboratory, while around him lay the fragments of the phial itself, broken to shivers, its contents in a pool upon the floor.

The chaplain gently knelt down beside him and spoke his name, and as he did so he saw, crushed within the thin fingers of his other hand, the letter he had but just received from Lady Bryn Afon, acquainting him with those circumstances which had followed his own return from Glyn Melen to the castle, of her sad discovery and irrevocable vow.

The earl, too greatly overwhelmed on the previous evening by the perusal of his own letter and its wholly-unexpected contents, had forgotten to deliver the missive enclosed under the same cover to the physician, and having all through the day refused admission even to his faithful attendant, it had lain unnoticed till an hour before the expected arrival of his wife and child, when he had suddenly and without a word placed it in Rhiwallon's hand, bidding him read it alone. The shock of finding that his discovery had after all been unavailing, that not only must the fair young girl, exact counterpart of that beautiful victim of the curse whose memory he yet faithfully worshipped, suffer the same unalterable doom as that of her ancestors, but that by his own advice and unhesitating assurance the young chaplain, whom he dearly loved, had gladly taken to his lips the cup of joy which had been since in a moment dashed from them ere fully tasted, had been too great a blow to the failing strength of the once stalwart Black Horseman, and he lay so long in a deathlike swoon that Percival became alarmed. However, the remedies applied by the young man at length took effect, and Rhiwallon rose slowly to his feet, and tottered to his chair. "My years have been spent in vain, Percival," he groaned, "and given to a phantom which has but mocked me, and made me the wretched instrument of destroying your fairest hopes! I have lived but to deceive you, Percival,--you whom I had learned to love as a dear son, and whose happiness I believed in my deluded folly I had secured! Who was I that I should undo the curse of generations! Yet fain would I have freed yon fair child, image of yourself, my beautiful Gwendolen, my lost love, whom my wisdom came too late to free! Methought, as I toiled, you oft smiled upon my labours, and blessed that discovery for whose tardiness I cursed myself in vain! Methought, had I saved yon sweet Primrose, your heart would have thanked me and your spirit rejoiced in glad freedom! But alas, what have availed these long years of study, and sleepless nights of vain research and mad experiment! Nought, Percival, nought--and yet methought the victory won! Save in some few moments of dim misgiving from which I have fled as from some evil shadow, I have never doubted my final triumph, nor repented me of the blind confidence in which I bade you go forth merrily to your bridal. Yet there have been those rare moments of strange misgiving which do verily now haunt me with miserable reproach! Speak aloud your own reproaches, Percival! Upbraid me for thus falsely alluring you into paths of pleasantness, which are now so cruelly strewn with thorns, and spare me not!"

"Nay, dear friend," said the chaplain gently; "I have no need to reproach you. You have done me no ill-will, but rather striven for my good, and that of her who is dearer to me than life! The hand of God has gone forth against us both, and strewn our path with what do verily appear to our eyes as sharpest thorns; but e'en so shall we not bravely and gladly tread under foot those bitter pricks which crowned our Master's bleeding brow, and murmur not. I am but a sharer in your own past woe, Rhiwallon, a drinker of that cup whose bitter dregs you have long since drained, and I thank you from my heart for every moment you have nobly spent in seeking to avert it from my lips, and those of her you have loved from childhood. Prithee count not one of those precious moments as lost, for assuredly every moment spent in striving to save one pang to a fellow-creature shall not be spent in vain!"

"Yet the curse remains!" said Rhiwallon, knitting his fierce brows in perplexed pain and baffled endeavour. "And you, too, brave youth, will waste a life-time over its removal! Ah, perchance, as Sir Galahad of old alone was accounted worthy to bear the Holy Grail, so shall you, God's pure priest and holy knight, alone be vouchsafed the blessing of wiping out the deadly stain so long polluting these crumbling walls! Perchance your God-given eloquence of speech and purity of life shall reap the reward for which the physician, skilled in mere earthly lore, has toiled in vain, and with your blessing invoked upon his head shall my poor master, now weeping in the arms of the last heir to his accursed house, pass hence, at the time appointed, to his final home, in such holy peace and quietness as my poor skill can ne'er hope to bring him. Let your voice ring loud and ceaselessly through this shining, careless valley, Percival, ay, and throughout the length and breadth of Wales and England, an you will, against this fearful evil of drink, which lays waste and brings to ruin the fairest heritage, and wipes out noble families from the face of the earth! Nor let your brave soul's endeavour cease till your own voice is indeed silent in the tomb, but its echo resounding for ever in the ears of the generations to come!"

"So help me God," said the chaplain earnestly. "Ay, the day will come, Rhiwallon, when the nation's voice will be bravely uplifted against this mighty evil, and England's arm not fear to strike the blow where yours and mine may long aim fruitlessly! If I may but sow here and there some scattered seed which shall hereafter choke with its mighty growth the cruel tares of intemperance and misery which bind our homes fast round with their unholy tendrils, and crush out from the hearts of our people their holiest hopes and affections--yea, their very life itself--I shall feel I have not lived in vain! Nor may you indeed so speak of yourself, Rhiwallon, for your wondrous discovery has verily wrought its meed of good, as the earl has often told me; and who shall say that but for your skill she whom I love might not ere now have shared the fate of yon fair lady of your own hapless love? The Lady Shanno, though she may never be wife of mine, has verily escaped already the worst ills of the unhappy curse, and but for its woful secret shadow would be wholly free. You have saved her, dear Rhiwallon; and although we may never wed, think you it is nothing to me that her fair life shall be surely untainted for the most part by her cruel heritage, and her last hours in the mercy of God hours of quietness and peace?"

"My drug has verily not been without its efficacy," said the physician, his face brightening a little; "but your prayers shall work doubtless greater miracles, Percival. I have laboured in the bitterness of an unchastened spirit, but you with heart and soul in God's keeping shall surely reach a further goal!"

"The bitterness of death is not yet past, Rhiwallon," answered the young man sadly; "and on the morrow I go hence, not yet seeing my goal nor any light to guide my wandering feet, save such distant gleams of dawn as fail yet to cheer me!--Hush, who knocks?"

It was Lady Shanno herself who entered, looking like some fragile flower in her white robes, her face etherealised by suffering to a shadow of her former girlish beauty, and her long golden hair floating over her slender form showing many a streak of white amid its glistening waves. She came to the Black Horseman's arms and embraced him silently; then taking Percival's hand, led them both to the earl's apartment. It was midnight ere the chaplain left the castle after the long interview over which we must draw a veil, and as Primrose stood with him one last moment upon the threshold and they gazed silently upon the dark valley at their feet, the castle clock solemnly tolled forth its twelve slow strokes upon the still night air. "Our wedding-day, sweetheart!" murmured Percival, and the girl's sweet upturned face looked into his sad eyes with love unspeakable as she clung yet closer to him.

"Methinks I hear the angels even now ringing our marriage-bells, Percival!" she said in a low voice, as of one fearing to disturb some holy sound. "Think you not that you too can catch their far-off chiming, borne down to us on the midnight breeze?" But Percival shivered as though an icy blast had cut through his heart, and tearing himself away from her clinging arms with a deep-drawn breath of pain, plunged into the deep shade of the mysterious avenue.

* * * * * * *

The early morning sunlight was bathing hill and valley in its tender glow, and shooting bright gleams into the little church on the quiet hillside, when, on the morrow, those who were most to have rejoiced in the marriage of the Fair Maid of Gwynnon met, rather as mourners over the funeral of her bright hopes, before the altar, to join together in prayer and Holy Sacrament ere they left the lovers to take alone within those sacred walls their last farewell to earthly joys. None in the village knew that this bright May morning had been the day appointed for the union of her they so dearly loved with their newly-appointed vicar, already scarce less beloved by many, and none knew of the quiet gathering on the hillside, else might it have been hardly so peaceful and uninterrupted. Only old Jack the boatman, Rhiwallon, the faithful physician, and Master Jeremy Taylor knelt beside the weeping parents of the lovers, and the service ended, they with good old Master Rhys stole gently homewards, and Percival and Primrose were left alone in the silent church. Long they knelt together before the altar in mutual agony of prayer and renunciation, and while the sunshine streamed in upon their bowed heads, and the birds sang in the green branches ever waving to and fro athwart the unpainted windows, they solemnly offered "themselves, their souls and bodies a living sacrifice" to Him who demanded from them this test of devotion to His service, and with pure hearts vowed to each other unalterable love and fidelity in this world, looking for an unending union in the world to come. And though no wedding-bells rang out through the smiling vale of Gwynnon to proclaim aloud this true marriage of holy souls, the angels heard them ring through the arches of heaven, and with gentle hands dried the tears from the lovers' faces, and bade the joy-bells ring sweet echoes in their hearts. And so the Maid of Gwynnon went forth to her new home in the doomed castle, and her true knight departed into the mountain solitudes to prove his own soul amid the awful silence of the everlasting hills, until, the victory won, he might return manfully to the solitary threshold of that home where now the walls should ne'er re-echo with the sweet names of wife and husband, but where evermore fair Shanno's spirit should hover lovingly.

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