er reproached him, writing:
"Sad I drop into the Pool as old Abel Tybach, and not as Lloyd Deinol."
Catherine harassed him to recover her house and chattels. To these
complainings he was deaf. He married the daughter of a wealthy
Englishman, who set him up in a large house in the midst of a pleasure
garden; and of the fatness and redness of his wife he was sickened
before he was wedded to her.
By studying diligently, the English language became as familiar to him
as the Welsh language. He bound himself to Welsh politicians and engaged
himself in public affairs, and soon he was as an idol to a multitude of
people, who were sensible only to his well-sung words, and who did not
know that his utterances veiled his own avarice and that of his masters.
All that he did was for profit, and yet he could not win enough.
Men and women, soothed into false ease and quickened into counterfeit
wrath, commended him, crying: "Thank God for Ben Lloyd." Such praise
puffed him up, and howsoever mighty he was in the view of fools, he was
mightier in his own view.
"At the next election I'll be in Parliament," he boasted in his vanity.
"The basis of my solidity--strength--is as immovable--is as impregnable
as Birds' Rock in Morfa."
Though the grandson of Simon Idiot and Dull Anna prophesied great things
for himself, it was evil that came to him.
He trembled from head to foot to ravish every comely woman on whom his
ogling eyes dwelt. His greed made him faithless to those whom he
professed to serve: in his eagerness to lift himself he planned,
plotted, and trafficked with the foes of his officers. Hearing that an
account of his misdeeds was spoken abroad, he called the high London
Welshmen into a room, and he said to them:
"These cruel slanderers have all but broken my spirit. They are the
wicked inventions of fiends incarnate. It is not my fall that is
required--if that were so I would gladly make the sacrifise--the zupreme
sacrifise, if wanted--but it is the fall of the Party that these men are
after. He who repeats one foul thing is doing his level best to destroy
the fabric of this magnificent organisation that has been reared by your
brains. It has no walls of stone and mortar, yet it is a sity builded by
men. We must have no more bickerings. We have work to do. The seeds are
springing forth, and a goodly harvest is promised: let us sharpen our
blades and clear our barn floors. Cymru fydd--Wales for the Welsh--is
here. At hom
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