Aylwin | Page 9

voice singing.
Was, then, the mighty ocean writing symbols for an unhappy child to
read? My father, from whose book, _The Veiled Queen_, the extract
with which this chapter opens is taken, would, unhesitatingly, have
answered 'Yes.'
'Destiny, no doubt, in the Greek drama concerns itself only with the
great,' says he, in that wonderful book of his. 'But who are the great?

With the unseen powers, mysterious and imperious, who govern while
they seem not to govern all that is seen, who are the great? In a world
where man's loftiest ambitions are to higher intelligences childish
dreams, where his highest knowledge is ignorance, where his strongest
strength is to heaven a derision--who are the great? Are they not the
few men and women and children on the earth who greatly love?'
II
So sweet a sound as that childish voice I had never heard before. I held
my breath and listened.
Into my very being that child-voice passed, and it was a new music and
a new joy. I can give the reader no notion of it, because there is not in
nature anything with which I can compare it. The blackcap has a
climacteric note, just before his song collapses and dies, so full of
pathos and tenderness that often, when I had been sitting on a gate in
Wilderness Road, it had affected me more deeply than any human
words. But here was a note sweet and soft as that, and yet charged with
a richness no blackcap's song had ever borne, because no blackcap has
ever felt the joys and sorrows of a young human soul.
The voice was singing in a language which seemed strange to me then,
but has been familiar enough since:
Bore o'r cymwl aur, Eryri oedd dy gaer. Bren o wyllt a gwar, Gwawr
ysbrydau.[Footnote]
[Footnote: Morning of the golden cloud, Eryrl was thy castle, King of
the wild and tame, Glory of the spirits of air!]
[Eryri--the Place of Eagles, i.e. Snowdon.]
Intense curiosity now made me suddenly forget my troubles. I
scrambled back through the trees not tar from that spot and looked
around. There, sitting upon a grassy grave, beneath one of the windows
of the church, was a little girl, somewhat younger than myself
apparently. With her head bent back she was gazing up at the sky and
singing, while one of her little hands was pointing to a tiny cloud that
hovered like a golden feather over her head. The sun, which had
suddenly become very bright, shining on her glossy hair (for she was
bare-headed) gave it a metallic lustre, and it was difficult to say what
was the colour, dark bronze or black. So completely absorbed was she
in watching the cloud to which her strange song or incantation seemed
addressed, that she did not observe me when I rose and went towards

her. Over her head, high up in the blue, a lark that was soaring towards
the same gauzy cloud was singing, as if in rivalry. As I slowly
approached the child, I could see by her forehead (which in the
sunshine gleamed like a globe of pearl), and especially by her
complexion, that she was uncommonly lovely, and I was afraid lest she
should look down before I got close to her, and so see my crutches
before her eyes encountered my face. She did not, however, seem to
hear me coming along the grass (so intent was she with her singing)
until I was close to her, and throwing my shadow over her. Then she
suddenly lowered her head and looked at me in surprise. I stood
transfixed at her astonishing beauty. No other picture has ever taken
such possession of me. In its every detail it lives before me now. Her
eyes (which at one moment seemed blue grey, at another violet) were
shaded by long black lashes, curving backward in a most peculiar way,
and these matched in hue her eyebrows, and the tresses that were tossed
about her tender throat and were quivering in the sunlight.
All this picture I did not take in at once; for at first I could see nothing
but those quivering, glittering, changeful eyes turned up into my face.
Gradually the other features (especially the sensitive full-lipped mouth)
grew upon me as I stood silently gazing. Here seemed to me a more
perfect beauty than had ever come to me in my loveliest dreams of
beauty beneath the sea. Yet it was not her beauty perhaps, so much as
the look she gave me, that fascinated me, melted me.
As she gazed in my face there came over hers a look of pleased surprise,
and then, as her eyes passed rapidly down my limbs and up again, her
face was not overshadowed with