The Making of William Edwards Part 20

Whether he had forgotten, or did not choose to remember, he turned off with a light laugh, and the remark, 'I'm not doing my duty in idling here.'

But conscience is a mill that grinds at all hours, and unsought, and Robert Jones had set the wheels in motion.

'Willem,' said the peat-cutter to the depressed boy, just before he cracked his whip to set his unloaded team in motion downhill, 'if you build up your life as well as you have built up your garden wall, you'll do. It is firm and compact, and the stones are set evenly together. But strife between brothers is a bad foundation to build upon. And it is not for a lad of your age to be unruly, and oppose the brother who has so long been working for all of you. There is time enough before you to build walls or churches, or what you will; but you have none to lose if you would bind the bond of brotherhood around you, or lay the foundation of a Christian life, look you.'

William's eyes brightened, and his chest expanded under his Sat.u.r.day's sullied smock-frock, as his early friend commended his handiwork, for

'Praise is pleasanter than honey,'

and hitherto he had not been cloyed with the sweetmeat. But his aspect changed. He did not relish the bitter dose of advice mingled with the honey, for his whole soul was in rebellion.

Yet, swift and sharp as the man's whip crack, memory brought back those other words to the same purport the stranger, Mr. Morris, had spoken long ago, and every hoof-beat of mule or a.s.s seemed to hammer them into his brain.

Far down the steep hill were beasts and driver before William roused from his reverie, and rushed after them, shouting as he went. The man turned.

'What is it, Willem?'

'Can you teach me to count?'

'Yes, up to a hundred, in tens. That is the way I count my peat.'

'Oh, I can be counting that as I knit.'

'Ah, then, if you do be wanting to reckon properly, and do sums with figures, you had better be asking Owen Griffith; he do be clever at that. I will speak to him for you.'

"Deed, I would be so glad.'

Robert Jones was as good as his word. Owen's cottage was not on his direct road, but he did not mind going out of his way to do a kindness.

The weaver had just taken a finished web of blue flannel out of his loom, and sat smoking a long pipe on the bench outside.

After the first salutation, the turf-cutter began by saying, 'Have you seen the dry wall Willem Edwards have been building up so cleverly?'

'Sure to goodness, no. Yet he did always have a notion that way. I have heard Rhys and Cate be laughing over it many a time.'

"Deed, yes, Owen, but it's not to be laughed at. That boy have a head, look you. I've seen walls built and mended less securely by old hands before now.'

'Sure now! You don't say so? I wish he would come and repair mine. It's been tumbling down, stone by stone, waiting till Morgan the mason did be coming round.'

'Well, you ask Willem. And if you would be offering to teach him to reckon up with figures, he would be proud and pleased to build it up.

'Deed he would. He do just be asking me to teach him. But you go looking at that wall of his. Willem do want encouraging, not laughing at. He will build up more than a broken-down wall some day.--Shall you be wanting peat or lime next week?'

'Ah, yes; and if you think Willem can mend the wall you can bring a sled of stones as well.'

The next day, on the way from church, Owen Griffith got William by his side, and set him counting the trees by the wayside, and the sheep on the hills, as preliminary to lessons in arithmetic, but nothing said he of any broken walls.

He left that for the afternoon, when he and Cate walked up to the farm, ostensibly to learn what news Ales had brought from Cardiff.

Over all that he shook his head, uncertain what to make of it, though he said, 'It do look bad, it do.'

But there was nothing uncertain in his exclamation of surprise at the firmly repaired walls Mrs. Edwards showed so proudly as the work of her youngest son.

It led to the open proposal that William should restore his fences to condition in return for lessons in arithmetic, and to Mrs. Edwards'

consent to that use of his time.

Rhys had strolled away with Cate to talk over the deferred prospect of their marriage, and so did not hear of this arrangement until afterwards, when, for reasons of his own, he thought best to keep the peace.

It was the small beginning of greater things.

FOOTNOTE:

[12] G.o.d-penny--a deposit.

CHAPTER XVII.

PROPER TOOLS.

Ales had resumed her work on the farm, but not with the spirit and vivacity of old. She had been wont to sing over her work, and had a store of old Welsh ballads in her memory. But the song-bird mourned in silence for the mate torn away so ruthlessly, and, as weeks and months and years rolled on in the same drear monotony of hopelessness, her heart grew colder and heavier, and her prayers became as the very wailings of despair.

It cut her to the soul to hear Rhys grumbling, as he did, at the money filched from them to pay, not only the rent Evan should have paid, but the heavy costs of a seizure in addition; and she more than once resolved to quit the farm when the year expired.

Second thoughts, however, suggested that nothing would suit the young man better, and his very grumbling might have that end in view; for, once rid of her, he could seek the necessary consent to bring in a wife with a good grace.

He had not improved in temper, certainly. It had irritated him to hear William lauded for the very proclivities he had held of so small account, nay, turned into ridicule.

It was no satisfaction to have a brother so much younger competent to enlarge and raise the walls of the sheepfold, as he did, before a second winter set in. What though a mason's charges were saved, was not the saving at the greater cost of his own supremacy?

And in the long winter nights when he and Davy sorted fleeces or combed the wool, or tended the dye-pot on the fire; when Ales taught Jonet to twirl the flaxen thread drawn from the distaff, so as to set the spindle dancing on the floor to the tune of the mother's industrious spinning-wheel, how it tried his patience to see William making figures and calculations on a board, with chalk or ruddle by the light of the candle, whilst the knitting-pins, which should have been earning money, lay idle by his side.

There are men ready to perform generous acts, who are flagrantly unjust, but cannot see it. Robert Jones had urged Rhys Edwards to 'be just.' He should have said 'be generous,' and Rhys might have responded to the appeal. He resented the imputation of injustice.

Yet he denied to his brother the meed of praise his service merited; he begrudged him the time to acquire the common rules of simple arithmetic; perhaps because he felt it was a step to something beyond his own attainment. He counted not the money saved in masonry as money earned.

He might have been content had William been as pa.s.sively submissive as Davy and Jonet, but he found in him a spirit boldly daring to cope with his own, and it stung him to find the boy upheld in his resistance.

So years crept on. The third winter pa.s.sed, the snows melted, the roads were free for traffic, the river sang a paean to approaching spring, the pink and brown buds were bursting into green, song birds were flitting and fluttering about the eaves and boughs, all was life and activity upon the farm. The _Osprey_ had never again put into port at Cardiff, where Mr. Pryse bit his nails and snarled more cantankerously than ever, and nothing had been heard of Evan. Ales lost heart, she did not sing with the birds; but William, no longer snubbed, worked on the farm with the best, until another barrier rose between himself and Rhys, in the shape of another stone wall.

Hedges have now superseded walls in many parts of Glamorgans.h.i.+re; but at the date of this narrative, the fields and lanes were universally bounded by what are known as '_dry walls_,' and still they serve as fences on the uplands.

By 'dry walls' are to be understood walls built without mortar or cement, of irregular, unhewn flagstones, so put together, so wedged in one with another, as to stand firm where a cemented wall might give way exposed to the high winds of those elevated regions, the very crevices allowing the blasts to pa.s.s through, and so reduce the pressure on the ma.s.s. Such are the walls in Craven and other parts of northern England.

Yet it is no uncommon thing for the coping-stones to be hurled away in a fierce gale, or for large portions of such walls to be blown down, as came to pa.s.s on Brookside Farm that gusty spring.

Here was an opportunity for William to turn his talent to account and save his mother's pocket, as be sure he did.