The Brothers of Gwynedd (157 page)

  "And he so still!" I said, seeing him even then at the high table, inclining to right and to left and making civil reply, with the sweet veiled smile upon his face.

  "They are not the first," she said, "to be slain for offences we would have

compounded rather to heal. And not all in his cantrefs. There are many with the same burning grievance. And he, I doubt he has them all by heart." She watched him as I was watching him, with her great, iris-grey eyes that darkened so when most she was wrung. "Samson, he may speak out to you, who does so now to none of us. If you can bring him to confession, do it for his sake. Not that he needs absolution, God knows he's been out of all nature virtuous and forbearing. But he does greatly need to shed whatever this load is upon his heart."

  "Does he not confide in his wife?" I asked. And Cristin smiled her pardonable scorn for such a question.

  "He takes nothing to her but what is sweet, open and gay. He'd no more cast a shadow willingly upon her than he would upon his children. He may drag them all into the blackness of the pit with him yet, and they'd go, and never think twice. But that's another matter."

  I said that if he offered me any chance I would do what I could with him, but if he had it in mind to unburden himself to the prince, Llewelyn might well do more and better than I.

  Howbeit, David kept his counsel and his ominous calm all through the Christmas feast, awaiting his best occasion, for he did not speak until the day, well into January, when Llewelyn got word from Reginald de Grey in Chester of a sudden and fresh distraint upon his property, in satisfaction of Robert of Leicester's long-discredited claim for his goods lost by wreck. If Llewelyn blazed up at this letter, he did so but briefly and hotly, and then recorded the new offence grimly among those matters he had still to take up, not with Grey, but with Grey's master. David, instead, burned into a fierce and corrosive silence, and made occasion, after we left the hall that night, to shut himself in with Llewelyn and me in the prince's private audience chamber. He had found the moment he sought, I knew then that he had come to speak, not to keep silence.

  "This matter of your goods taken in Chester," said David, standing tall and stiff over the glowing brazier, and himself burning almost as fiercely, "is only the latest outrage of many, you know it as well as I. And do you believe Grey ever took up this persecution afresh, without direct orders from Edward? He would not dare, after such clear orders went to Chester earlier, to cease distraints and refer Robert to the Welsh court, where they admitted the case belonged. No, Edward has held this goad in abeyance for a while, until it suited him to use it again, and it is
his han
d that has acted against you now. And what will you do? How long will you go on enduring wrong after wrong? And watching us endure worse? You at least, within your own principality, are master of your own house, and cannot be arraigned or challenged, cannot see your rights and your lands taken from you, and your tenants robbed and ousted. They are not so lucky in the Middle Country. They have no such immunity in the south and in the west. We are worse treated than you, and we do nothing. Nothing!"

  "If what I enjoy is immunity," said Llewelyn drily, "it is the strangest immunity ever I heard of. True, no one has yet crossed my borders to meddle within, but enough mischief can be done from without. Still, I grant you I can no longer do anything to help those cantrefs that have passed out of my hands. They are no longer my men in the Middle Country, nor in the south, nor in Cardigan, and I am no longer their lord." He did not say that David, also, was no vassal of his, but David could not help but be reminded whose fault that was. "If you think I do not feel for those who used to be mine," said Llewelyn with warmth, "you are foolish and mistaken. But I have no right now to speak for them or act in their name. Those grievances you have you must take to your own liege lord. I cannot help you."

  "You could," said David, "if you would. Where else can they look for help? Where else can we, all of us, look for leadership, if not to you? I tell you, there is not a chieftain in the whole of Wales outside your realm who is not groaning and raging under his wrongs, and burning to rise and avenge them. They come to me now with their complaints, as I am coming to you. Day after day new outrages, new exactions, new offences against the law and custom and order of our lives. And the treaty promised us we should enjoy our own manner of life unmolested! Now it has gone beyond oppression. Men of mine, men I valued, have been done to death, who by Welsh law would have been alive this day."

  That story he told, and after it, his tongue loosed and his thoughts racing, many another such story from many another cantref. "I have been busy these last weeks," said David passionately, "putting together the grievances of all my own tenants and chiefs, yes, and all the men of Rhos and Tegaingl, too, who have no Welsh lord to whom they can go for help. And I've ridden the length and breadth of Wales and talked with the princes of Maelor and Cardigan, and our nephews in Iscennen. Do you want to hear what your sometime vassals cry against England?"

  "Go on," said Llewelyn. "I am listening."

  David drew breath and began. It was a long recital, man by man, lawsuit by lawsuit, distraint by distraint, delay upon delay, offence piled on offence against the laws and customs of Wales that had been guaranteed to us by treaty, and were safe now only within Llewelyn's domain. Old allies of his brother now spoke through David's mouth, their young nephews cried out in David's voice, while that voice grew steadily larger and calmer and more princely in authority. And Llewelyn watched and listened with a still face and patient eves as David spoke for the nation of Wales, he who had been a dangerous obstacle to achieving that nationhood. For it was a national cause he argued, and he knew it, and knew the irony of his pleading, before the brother whose life-work he had helped to frustrate. His face burned to the brow, as if he heard within his own mind all those words Llewelyn forbore from uttering. But he would not turn back.

  "And your wrongs," he said at the end, and his voice shook for a moment. "Those, too, I know. Do you need to be reminded?"

  "No," said Llewelyn, "I need no reminders."

  "It is not only Arwystli. It is not only these robberies in Chester, nor the crude devices to delay justice, nor the border raids that are still countenanced, when you have paid the money due from you promptly every year, to the last mark. No, it is the manner and insolence of Edward's usage in all things. He has his officers order your men to appear before them wherever they choose, instead of meeting on the borders as was always done aforetime. He makes use of the most detestable of his Welsh renegades to visit your court and conduct his minor matters of business with you. Oh, saving the arch-renegade of all," said David, turning crimson but with unflinching eyes, "David ap Griffith—who is no longer available.…"

  "Hush!" said Llewelyn, stung and reproachful. "This I will not hear!"

  "No, I pray you pardon me, I had no right. Such things I should say only to myself, never to you who never have said them to me, and never will say them. But I do not forget, and I can feel the keenest pain when such a man as Rhys ap Griffith is sent into your court at Aberffraw with the king's authority, and feels free to insult you in your own house -"

  "He paid for it," said Llewelyn equably. For that bout of insolence had cost Rhys a hundred pounds sterling to quit him of the prince's prison.

  "
He
paid," said David. "Edward has yet to pay. What manner of man would be so blockish and unfeeling as to send him to you? This is how he approaches us all. He tramples on every soreness and every bruise." He drew breath, wearied and drained, and flung himself down in his chair. "Well, I have done, I have told you."

  "And what," said Llewelyn, "do you want from me?"

  "You are the prince of Wales. Where else should we go with our wrongs? Knowing that you also have yours? I want you to tell us, all of us, what we are to do, and what you mean to do."

  "I mean," said Llewelyn, "to go on pressing every issue with the king, resisting every encroachment at law as best I can, and bearing what I have no choice but to bear. There are realities by which you are bound, as well as I. There is not one of us but must sleep in the bed he made. I am the prince of what is left of Wales. I was the prince of a greater Wales, but when the testing came I had not done my work well enough. I failed Wales, and Wales failed me. These men who come to you now with their complaints, and bid you carry them to me for remedy, how many of them fell away from me then, to keep their own little plots of land safe? How many were willing to sue for Edward's peace rather than lose their small inheritance to preserve Wales? How many betrayed Wales? Now, because they do not like the rule they were glad to accept then, they send you to urge on me an action that could only be a second and final ruin. What they want now is what they wanted then, to preserve their own small rights. David, never think this is a sudden, miraculous, united Wales you are offering me, the nation I wanted then and long for yet. These are still only a thousand little divided souls clinging desperately to their own privileges and their own lands, and seeing nothing beyond. As they turned from me to Edward, when he seemed best to promise them security, so now they will turn from Edward to me, now they are looking for another saviour. Oh, I do not hold them so much to blame. They are not yet ready to be a nation. But they are the reality with which we have to reckon. There is no salvation there. Not yet!"

  "Nor ever," said David, stiffening again in desperation, "unless we deserve and fight for it."

  "Not yet, believe me, however well we deserve, however valiantly we fight. We have seen what Edward can do, even if he beggars himself in doing it. The same he could do again, and more. Never think Edward does not learn from experience. If Welshmen took arms now, Wales would be lost for ever. He would not halt for awe of a winter campaign, next time, nor waste six months on calling out his feudal muster. He would hire and buy, and bring ships and men from France, and take in archers and lancers at his wages. Welsh archers among them," said Llewelyn, with sharp and sorrowful bitterness, and smiled ruefully at his brother, but David was mute. "What I want for Wales," said the prince, "goes far beyond anything that could be gained now. That was my failure, that I tried to go too fast. The time for my vision is not now—not yet."

  He waited, and David had nothing to say, but sat steadily gazing at his brother, and his face as withdrawn and resigned as his brother's.

  "But you are right," said Llewelyn, answering what had not been said, "that is not my reason for enduring still, and urging endurance upon you. All I have said is true, but as at this moment it is of small consequence. For the truth is, David, that this Wales that I long to see will never be won by my hand, unless time and God loose my hand. I am bound in honour and fealty to Edward, and to the terms of the treaty I made with him."

  "Which he has broken," blazed David, "by small means, like a mouse gnawing, a hundred times over, and laughs at you for keeping it."

  "No," said Llewelyn immovably, "for however I may overrate Edward, Edward knows and does not underrate me. If in the end I must despise him, as I pray God I never need, he will never be able to despise me. No, Edward may take every advantage, wring out every delay, he may well desire to laugh as he does it, smoothly parrying every letter I write to him, but he will not be able to enjoy his gains. He may discard his honour, if he so pleases. He will not be able to sever me from mine."

  "In the name of God!" said David, pale with passion but very still. "Knowing Edward as you now know him, this giant of meanness, this great prince utterly without greatness, this monster who knows only one loyalty, to Edward, and acknowledges only one treason, against Edward—dear God. have I not reason to know it, who took my treason into his arms twice, and found a welcome for it there?—knowing all this, you hold fast to your oath and seal for
his
sake?"

  "No," said Llewelyn gently and patiently. "No way for his sake. All for mine."

I went out with David when he left his brother that night, so softly, with such a chastened face and quiet voice, after such submissive avowals of his own dues owed to Edward, and such resigned acceptance at last of the rightness of Llewelyn's stand. I followed at his shoulder by night along the corridors of Aber, and waited for him to speak. And he had nothing to say. He was out of words, having spent so many. Also he was very weary, much of his own strength also spent in the struggle he had lost. Since he did not at once go in towards his own apartment, but turned along the stone passage and went out into the darkness of the inner ward, I went with him, and he did not send me away, but slowed to bring me abreast of him, and laid his arm about my shoulders as we came out under the stars. A night of clear frost it was, we could see the glitter of rime along the crest of the wall, and hear the steely ring of the watchman's heels on the guardwalk above the postern gate. The sound drew David's gaze, and in the faint starlight I saw his face again sharp with remembrance.