Amid the din of the water I listened for the wail which had so deeply
impressed Winifred, and certainly there was what may be described as
a sound within a sound, which ears so attuned to every note of
Superstition's gamut as Winifred's might easily accept as the wail of
Sir John Wynn's ghost.
There was no footpath down to the bottom, but I descended without any
great difficulty, though I was now soaked in spray. Here the
mysterious human sound seemed to be less perceptible amid the din of
the torrent than from the platform where I had stayed to listen to
it. But when I climbed up again to the spot by the mid-pool where I
had originally stood, a strange sensation came to me. My recollection
of Winnie's words on the night of the landslip came upon me with such
overmastering power that the noise of the cataract seemed changed to
the sound of billows tumbling on Raxton sands, and the 'wail' of Sir
John Wynn seemed changed to that shriek from Raxton cliff which
appalled Winnie as it appalled me.
The following night I passed into a moonlight as bright as that which
had played me such fantastic tricks at the Swallow Falls.
It was not until I had crossed the bridge over the Conway, and was
turning to the right in the direction of Fairy Glen, that I fully
realised how romantic the moonlight was. Every wooded hill and every
precipice, whether craggy and bald or feathered with pines, was
bathed in light that would have made an Irish bog, or an Essex marsh,
or an Isle of Ely fen, a land of poetry.
When I reached Pont Llyn-yr-Afange (Beaver Pool Bridge) I lingered to
look down the lovely lane on the left, through which I was to pass in
order to reach the rocky dell of Fairy Glen, for it was perfumed, not
with the breath of the flowers now asleep, but with the perfume I
love most of all, the night's floating memory of the flowery breath
of day.
Suddenly I felt some one touching my elbow. I turned round. It was
Rhona Boswell. I was amazed to see her, for I thought that all my
Gypsy friends, Boswells, Lovells, and the rest, were still attending
the horse-fairs in the Midlands and Eastern Counties.
'We've only just got here,' said Rhona; 'wussur luck that we got here
at all. I wants to get back to dear Gypsy Dell and Rington Wood;
that's what I wants to do.'
'Where is the camp?' I asked.
'Same place, twix Bettws and Capel Curig.'
She had been to the bungalow, she told me, with a message from Sinfi.
This message was that she particularly wished to meet me at Mrs.
Davies's cottage--'not at the bungalow'--on the following night.
'She'll go there to-morrow mornin',' said Rhona, 'and make things
tidy for you; but she won't expect you till night, same time as she
met you there fust. She's got a key o' the door, she says, wot you
gev her.'
I was not so surprised at Sinfi's proposed place of meeting as I
should have been had I not remembered her resolution not to return
to the bungalow, and not to let me return to the camp.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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