SINFI’S COUP DE THEATRE

I

Weeks passed by.  I visited all the scenes that were in the least degree associated with Winnie.

The two places nearest to me—­Fairy Glen and the Swallow Falls—­which I had always hitherto avoided on account of their being the favourite haunts of tourists—­I left to the last, because I specially desired to see them by moonlight.  With regard to Fairy Glen, I had often heard Winnie say how she used to go there by moonlight and imagine the Tylwyth Teg or the fairy scenes of the Midsummer Night’s Dream which I had told her of long ago—­imagine them so vividly that she could actually see, on a certain projecting rock in the cliffs that enclose the dell, the figure of Titania dressed in green, with a wreath of leaves round her head.  And with regard to the Swallow Falls, I remembered only too well her telling me, on the night of the landslip, the Welsh legend of Sir John Wynn, who died in the seventeenth century, and whose ghost, imprisoned at the bottom of the Falls on account of his ill deeds in the flesh, was heard to shriek amid the din of the waters.  On that fatal night she told me that on certain rare occasions, when the moon shines straight down the chasm, the wail will become an agonised shriek.  I had often wondered what natural sound this was which could afford such pabulum to my old foe, Superstition.  So one night, when the moon was shining brilliantly—­so brilliantly that the light seemed very little feebler than that of day—­I walked in the direction of the Swallow Falls.

Being afraid that I should not get much privacy at the Falls, I started late.  But I came upon only three or four people on the road.  I had forgotten that my own passion for moonlight was entirely a Romany inheritance.  I had forgotten that a family of English tourists will carefully pull down the blinds and close the shutters, in order to enjoy the luxury of candlelight, lamp-light, or gas, when a Romany will throw wide open the tent’s mouth to enjoy the light he loves most of all—­’chonesko dood,’ as he calls the moonlight.  As I approached the Swallow Falls Hotel, I lingered to let my fancy feast in anticipation on the lovely spectacle that awaited me.  When I turned into the wood I encountered only one person, a lady, and she hurried back to the hotel as soon as I approached the river.

Following the slippery path as far as it led down the dell, I stopped at the brink of a pool about a dozen yards, apparently, from the bottom, and looked up at the water.  Bursting like a vast belt of molten silver out of an eerie wilderness of rocks and trees, the stream, as it tumbled down between high walls of cliff to the platform of projecting rocks around the pool at the edge of which I stood, divided into three torrents, which themselves were again divided and scattered by projecting boulders into cascades before they fell into the gulf below.  The whole seemed one wide cataract of living moonlight that made the eyes ache with beauty.