He had not at first seen that black dress. Sharpe"s old cottage was never locked, and he had walked straight in, had put down his little dressing-bag, and had begun to empty his pockets, setting his flask, his fly-book, his store of tobacco and certain provisions on the little deal table under the single window. At a first glance there was nothing to show that the place had been entered since he had last been there. The mattress of Sharpe"s narrow pallet had been rolled up at the bed-head and a patchwork quilt spread over it; the two windsor chairs stood in their accustomed places; and the rods in their brown canvas covers stood as usual in the corner. Only Sharpe"s photographs had gone from the walls, leaving the little black heads of nails and tacks, each over its slightly paler oblong of plain deal boarding.
Had not John Willie thought that he had better drag the bedding on which he was to sleep out into the sun at once, he would not have found the frock. It had been thrown across the roll of mattress and covered with that old piece of patchwork. Nor, since it was folded in a square, did he even then recognise the thing for a frock. Only when he had picked it up and it had revealed itself had he stood, suddenly arrested, alternately gazing at it and then looking obliquely at the floor. Then, as he had slowly put it down again, at its full length this time, there had peeped at him from half under the roll of mattress, first a white linen collar with one of the little sham pearl studs that are given away with such things still in one of its b.u.t.ton-holes, and next a pair of tiny cylindrical cuffs....
Perhaps already, deep within himself, he had known that she was not far away....
Then, slowly and methodically, he had begun to search the hut. His search had been productive of the following discoveries:-- Thrust under the bed: A newish oval brown tin box (which he had not opened), and a pair of black shoes.
On the lower shelf of Sharpe"s little provision-cupboard: a round narrow-brimmed black hat.
On the upper shelf, among cups, plates, and other odds and ends: A seven-pound paper bag half full of flour, and a mug with some still fresh milk in it--he tasted it.
Outside the hut: A stone or two in a little clearing in the fern, a stick-heap, the ashes of a recent fire, and a frying-pan.
Then he had re-entered the hut. He had sat down in one of the windsor chairs. He had been filling his third or perhaps his fourth pipe when she herself had appeared in the doorway.
All this had been the day before.
As he now walked up that one-in-seven slope under the firs he remembered again, for the fiftieth time in twenty hours, her appearance as she had stood there. She had worn an old red blouse which she had not troubled to tuck in at the waist, a petticoat of faded greenish-blue (no gypsophylla there), and her legs and feet had been bare. And at first he had thought she was going to run away. But she had only recoiled as a cat recoils, yielding ground without abandoning it. He himself had not moved. Move, and she might still be off as suddenly as a hare; sit still and say "Hallo, Ynys, not much in the chair-mending line up here, is there?" and she might stay.... And now, as he trudged up under the firs, he blamed Llanyglo that he had not heard that her mother was dead. Had Llanyglo remained a hamlet, or had it grown merely reasonably and within measure, the death even of Belle Lovell would have been an event; now, with towns in Lancashire half-emptied (he had seen it that morning, Llanyglo black and boiling like a cauldron of pitch with the people of the Wakes)--now such simple happenings pa.s.sed unnoticed. Belle had died a year before, but that was not the reason Ynys wore black. She wore black because black was the livery of Philip Lacey"s Liverpool flower-shop girls. Black showed up the flowers to better advantage. Ynys, after months of lonely wanderings and getting of her bread as best she could, had remembered Philip Lacey"s promise when she had cut her foot that morning on the sh.o.r.e, had tramped to Liverpool, had asked for Philip at his princ.i.p.al establishment in Lord Street, and now sold stately blooms the poor hedgerow cousins of which she had formerly given away, pattering bare-foot after pedestrians on the road with them in her hand. She had been given a fortnight"s holiday, and had come to Llanyglo to spend it.
As the path under the firs grew steeper still, John Willie wondered whether she would have kept her word to him. He had made her welcome to the cottage of which she had already made free, but that, he knew, did not mean that she might not have packed up and fled the moment he had turned his back--no, not even though she had promised not to do so. He had seen enough of her yesterday to guess that her word given would be an empty and artificial thing the moment her inclination changed; nay, she might have given it with no intention whatever of keeping it, just to gain a little time. Even should he find her frock and her oval tin box still there, that would not necessarily mean that she would return. A box of matches was her luggage. Except as a depository for these things she had not used the hut. She had cooked her meals outside, and had slept on a litter of bracken.
Nevertheless, John Willie had left the cottage to her, and, for fear a stray shepherd might gossip, had himself returned home rather than sleep at the inn a few miles below.
He continued to climb, past rocks spotted with pennywort and trickling with rills, orange and whitey-green with lichen and tongued with polypodi, past crops of dead nettle and vistas of fronds, past dust of pine-needles and debris of cones. Now and then a flutter of wings broke the stillness of the aisles, but no song; and always he had the skyline almost overhead on his right, and on his left, beyond the little grid of reservoirs far below, the crisscrossing AAAA"s of a mountain-side of larches.
She had not taken advantage of his absence to fly. He saw her as he ceased to climb and gained the half-way fold that held Llyn Delyn in its crook. She was standing outside the hut, but she was not wearing the old unconfined red blouse of the day before now. The small spot he saw a quarter of a mile ahead was a black one. He waved his hand, but she did not respond. He saw her sit down with her back against the wall of the hut and cross her arms over her knees. Three minutes later he was standing beside her.
And now that he had come he was not very clear in his mind why he had come. True, he could have given a dozen reasons--the bursting over the town of that flood of operatives he had seen that morning, his desire to fish, his wish (as he now suddenly and rather startlingly knew) to escape further attendance on June, and so forth; and these reasons would have been precisely a dozen too many. Had all Lancashire been drubbing on the Pier and she standing under the crimson light watching that strange and dhowlike sail of the moon glaring orange over the water, John Willie would not have been up Delyn. He had intended to fish, but fishing was now far from his thoughts. And already he was aware of another thing, namely, that while June had been no trouble at all to talk to, talk with Ynys was a heavy business. Yesterday, every sentence he had attempted had been as difficult as if it had been the first. Only by a series of almost violent extractions had he learned that her mother was dead and that she sold flowers (curious that they should have been June"s father"s flowers!) in Liverpool. He supposed he must begin to talk again now. He could hardly be with her and not talk. Well, if he must talk, he would.
"I say, you"re well out of it all to-day!" he exclaimed, with apparent heartiness. "They began to come in at eleven last evening, and they"ve been coming in all night. Whew, but I ran, I can tell you!"
She had been looking in the direction of the lake, which, however, she could hardly have seen, so low did she sit; and he, as he stood, could see no more of her than the straight white parting of her hair and her tanned forearms and wrists about her knees. The black of her dress was a sooty black, but you would only have called her hair black because there was nothing else to call it. It was neither more nor less black than a bowl of black l.u.s.tre is black; it had a surface, but it had also depths where you saw the sun again, and the sky lurked, and the green of the ferns that grew about the hut. Had John Willie put his hand near it it might have been dimly reflected, as it would have been reflected in a peat pool.
The sound of his voice seemed almost to startle her, but she did not look up.
"Hwhat do you say?" she said. She slightly overstressed the internal "h"s," and her accent was Welsh, but uniquely soft. As she had not heard, he had to repeat his remark.
"I mean those Wakes people. There are thousands of them there now." He made a little motion of his head behind him. "It"s better up here." Then, as still she did not reply, he asked her a direct question. "You didn"t stay long in Llanyglo, did you?"
"I stay there one day," she answered. A scarcely perceptible movement of her forefinger accompanied the numeral.
"Oh, then of course that was the day I saw you. Did you see me?"
"No."
"You were standing at the pier-head, watching the moon rise."
Ynys did not deny this. Neither did she confirm it.
"Then you disappeared," John Willie continued, "and I couldn"t find you again."
To this she replied after a moment.--"I went back to the house, and paid the Englishwoman, and then I came away. In the morning I arrive here."
"Do you mean you walked all night?"
"There is lit-tle night this time of the year."
John Willie was silent. Only a week before he had left an evening party at the "Imperial" to find the sun already burning a hole in the edge of Mynedd Mawr.
"And how much longer holiday have you?" John Willie asked presently.
"Six days," answered the girl; and again the numeral was accompanied by a slight gesture of her fingers.
"And then you go back to Liverpool?"
Complete silence was all the answer he had to that question.
Then, suddenly, Ynys moved. She stood up. For the first time her seaweed-coloured eyes looked straight into John Willie"s.
"You left that place early. You will be hungry. I caught some fis-s--brithyll. I think she cooked now."
She disappeared round the corner of the hut.
John Willie would have liked to ask her why she had put on the black dress and the black shoes, but something seemed to whisper to him not to do so. No doubt she had caught the trout with her hand, in one of the pools of a stream that slid and chattered under fern down the side of Delyn, and he feared that did he approach her too suddenly even by words she might be off, even as those trout would have vanished in a flash at the least disturbance of the water by her hand. She had cooked them on the wood; she had also made a cake of flour and water and no salt; and she served the fish in a tin platter by the little clearing she had made for the hearth. He sat now, and she stood; she brought also a mug of milk, from the surface of which she took a tiny caterpillar with the tip of a frond; and when he had eaten she cleaned the platter by scouring it with a handful of fern-rot and then setting it in a little stream with a stone upon it. Then they stood before one another again, he with his back to the hut, she in front of him, her head always superbly erect, but slowly turning from time to time, while her eyes sought the lake, the line of bracken against the sky where the mountain dropped, and his own eyes, indifferently.
Then, unexpectedly, she asked a question.
"You come to fis-s?" she asked.
He said that he had thought of it.
"There is wa-ter in the boat, but indeed I not touch it. I go and empty it," she said.
But he stopped her.--"Oh, it"s no good now--too bright," he said. "Might try in the evening. Sit down, won"t you? I want to ask you some questions."
She curled herself up in the bracken, and he set his back against the wall of the hut and began to fill his pipe.
But instead of questioning her, John Willie had all the appearances of a man who was questioning himself. He sat a little behind Ynys, so that when she looked straight before her he lost her full profile; and he moved no more than she. He was suddenly thinking how thoroughly sick he was of Llanyglo.
For if he had helped to make Llanyglo, and knew its lighting and its watering, its building and its leases and its subsoil, Llanyglo had also helped to make him. The drub-drub on the Pier, the inanities of his friend Percy Briggs, evening parties that began at midnight and ended with the sun high in the sky, complaints from his sister that she saw him only in the short intervals between a coming home and a setting out again--this had been pretty much the reaction of Llanyglo on John Willie Garden. He was a very ordinary young man.--But here was a world peopled only by sheep, the myriad insects that hopped and wove and chirruped in the tall fern, the kites and curlews overhead, and the trout far below the surface of the lake. His lashes made rainbows before his half-closed eyes, and those eyes, opening again, could gaze at the tips of the sunny fern against the deeps of the sky until the difference between them became almost as intensified as the difference between dark and bright. Spiders no bigger than freckles seemed to be doing important things under their bright green roofs--for only the under sides of the fronds were green and translucent: the fern on which the sun beat directly was no more green than Ynys"s hair was black.... And the sunny parts of Ynys"s arms were of the colour of a hayfield with much sorrel, while the round beneath was as cool as the under curve of a boat on the water....
It would have been part of the peace of that hot midday could he have dozed with his head in the crook of that arm.
Of other desire to break its peace had he none.
And Ynys?
She had seen those fretted parasols of the fern, meshed and lacy and interpenetrating, a vast rug of whispering frondage--she had seen them, or their like, since they had been no more than tender, uncurling pastoral staffs, brown, with tiny inner crocketts not even green yet. She had watched them unfold their weak fingers--yes, from Lord Street, Liverpool, she had watched them unroll as a soft caterpillar unrolls. In a cool and darkened shop, with the floor always wet, she had seen, with those seaweed-coloured eyes, not the great queenly hydrangeas, nor the burning torches of the gladioli, nor the fat and scentless roses, nor the great half-pint pitchers of the arum lilies--she had seen, not these cold grandiflora, but the celandine and anemone of the hedge-bottoms, and the cool pennywort on the rocks, and the soft and imperceptible change, day by day, of those mountains many, many railway stations away. Those other great robed and wedding-dressed blooms? She had not considered them to be flowers. Flowers were the sappy bluebells she had pulled, white-stalked and squeaking, from the banks, receiving a penny for them--but not in exchange. She had sold the hydrangea-things without even seeing them. And her own weekly fifteen shillings of wages had not purchased a single glance of her eyes nor a single emotion of her heart.
And her eyes had not distinguished less between magnificent bloom and magnificent bloom than they had between this and the other collar, tie, and bowler hat who, his purchase made, had lingered, and had tried to talk to her, and had come again. Young women who can see Delyn from Liverpool can hardly be expected so to distinguish. These young men had not even been, as the b.a.l.l.s and buckets of Howell Gruffydd"s shop-window had been, beyond her reach, she below theirs. She and they might breathe the same air, but they extracted different elements from it.
Was that true also of herself and John Willie Garden, lying now among the fern of Delyn--John Willie, whose clothes (even) were what they were by a kind of artifice, and not, like Dafydd Dafis"s, as if the cropped gra.s.ses themselves had by some natural alchemy become wool, and the wool clothing, that would be worn out by labour not far from the gra.s.ses again?...
Because he did not know, John Willie lay there, and watched her cheek and arm, and forgot that he had said he was going to ask her questions.
The silence lasted for so long that, when at last he spoke, she might (he thought) have supposed that he had had a nap in the meantime. He hoisted himself to his feet, stretched himself, yawned "Ah, that"s better!" and then added, "I say, you might show me where you got those fish."
Instantly, a gillie incongruously in a flower-seller"s dress, she was on her feet and walking a little ahead. But he caught her up and kept abreast of her. They reached the boat, half in and half out of the gravelly shallow, but she went straight on across a swampy little stream that led to the upper margin of the lake. Presently it seemed to John Willie that they would have done better to take the boat, for they had to skirt a deep shaly spur the slope of which continued unbroken down under the water and gave under their feet the moment they tried to ascend it. At a point where she splashed a few yards ahead of him John Willie suggested that they should take their boots and stockings off, and he had a momentary fancy that the brown of her cheek deepened a little; but she made no reply, and they kept on. Then, after more hundreds of yards of walking and wading, they gained firm earth again. They were at the bottom of a V-shaped ravine into which all the trees and scrub of the mountain-sides seemed to have settled. It was known to a few shepherds as Glyn Iago, and the stream came down it over jagged stairs of purple slate and under dwarf-oak and birch, thorn and briar and mountain-ash.
Again it would have been better to wade through the noisy shallows and round the boulders spongy with drenched moss, and again he suggested it; but perhaps the deep gurgle of the fall they were approaching drowned his voice. He went ahead, putting aside the worst of the brambles, and he knew without telling when they reached the pool. It was long enough to have plunged into, too wide to have leapt across even had the rocks afforded any take-off, and it deepened gradually to blackness, and then boiled pale and tumultuous again under the plunge of a twelve-foot fall. Over the pool itself the sunlight glowed in spots only through the leaves, but on one bank there was a sunny clearing of a few yards square. Then the trees began again, up and up and up to the sky, a cliff of leaves that shut the mountains out and the stream in.
He let her sit down first. This she did where she could see the little plants and mosses at the water"s edge endlessly a-quiver with the tumult of the fall. Then, sitting down beside her, he again felt that he must begin talking to her all over again. His mouth flickered for a moment as he thought of Percy Briggs on the Pier, and then he spoke.
"If I were you I should move up here," he said.
She was picking up a snail-sh.e.l.l to throw into the water. She turned, extraordinarily quickly, and in the seaweed eyes there was a hard and defensive look, instant, yet old.
"It iss only my hat and my box," she said quickly.
"Eh? Oh!----" He laughed. "I only mean there"ll be brakes and wagonettes all over the place now, and anybody might come to the lake.--I say, you didn"t think I meant to chuck you out, did you?"
"I thought prapss you want to fiss," she replied, turning away and looking at the gasogene of black water again.
He laughed again.--"Oh, no. I mean you don"t sleep there, and n.o.body"d come here, and I could get you a lock and key so that your things would be safe. You could go there if it rained."
She tossed the snail-sh.e.l.l into the water, neither accepting his offer nor rejecting it.
"Besides," he went on, "I know that if anybody disturbed you you"d be off. Look here. I"ll get you that lock and key. I"m off back to-night, and I"ll bring "em up to-morrow.--But you will be here won"t you?"
Again--he could not be sure--he fancied her colour deepened.
"Hwhere should I go to?" she said over her shoulder.
"Well--anywhere--Liverpool--anywhere."
And again her reply was to gaze at the boiling of the air-bubbles at the foot of the fall.
But John Willie no longer wondered that he should struggle thus with a conversation when there were rills and rivulets of talk waiting for him at home at Llanyglo. She was not mute; there were a thousand communications wrapped up in her very presence. She ran over with unspoken meanings, babbled for all her silence. Her hair, nearly all cool green now, as the black water was cool green; that unlearned balance of her head; the curve of her cheek; those lovely, despotic forearms--whether that least member of her whole sweet parliament, her tongue, moved or was still, there was more of approach in all of these than in June"s "Fancy! Do tell me! And how"s So-and-So getting on?" These were the weeds, the dusty groundsel of words; Ynys was her own vocabulary, every part of her a part of speech....
And the theme? The theme that every corpuscle of her announced as she sat there, listlessly tossing snail-sh.e.l.ls and twigs and rolled-up leaves and blades of gra.s.s into the water?
John Willie was a very ordinary young man. In Liverpool, his eyes would have seen very little but Liverpool. Perhaps that was why, in Glyn Iago, he had not the perfect freedom of sun and air, of growing and dying things, and things growing again, of moving water, of that essential speech with this creature at his side that at the last has no need of words. For, for good and ill mingled, they make shames and fears in the Liverpools of the land, and codes, and suppressions, and the apparatus of Conscience, and it is too late for you, too late for me, too late for John Willie, to unmake them. John Willie had begun by questioning Ynys; now, far more searchingly, Ynys was questioning him.
And the end of her questioning of him was that he would have called himself a cur had he as much as thought of not doing "the decent thing...."
Indeed it was precisely because he thought so resolutely and intently of doing that thing that by and by he rose. It was only half-past four; he could be home in two, or two-and-a-half hours; and for that matter he was not in any hurry to get home. He was in a hurry now only because Ynys spoke too much. She gave him no rest from her close inquisition. He must answer those questions that she so pressed home or take himself quickly off, to add (as he knew) the fuel of thought to that flame with which he already burned.
Therefore, again standing by her, he asked her one more question only.
"You will be here to-morrow?" he said, his eyes anxiously on her face.
What his answer would have been had she said "No," or had he not believed that nod of her head, it is useless to ask.
He left her still tossing the debris into the water.
He began to be aware of the change the Wakes people had wrought in Llanyglo before the trap had carried him a mile along the road. Twice in that distance he had to whip up to get through the dust of vehicles ahead. He had been right in saying that the landaus and brakes and wagonettes would be all over the place now. They were taking the family parties back to dinner at the hotels.
Then, still five miles from Llanyglo, he began to allow the brakes and wagonettes to overtake him again. He had remembered that he was in no hurry. Hurry would only mean the crowd sooner, the noise sooner, and supper sooner, with the conversation of June and Minetta. At a place called Doll he turned aside into a narrow lane that would take him by a circuitous route into the Porth Neigr road near the stone quarries. Then, sitting sideways on the seat, with his head sunk and the whiplash trailing over the dashboard, he allowed the horse to take him at its own pace.
Of course, he could marry Ynys; there was nothing to be said against that except that hitherto he had not thought of marriage. Marriage, in John Willie"s observation of his married friends and acquaintances, was a quite definite and circ.u.mscribed thing, in which prospects played a part, and settlements, and houses of a certain kind, and certain well-marked changes in the bride"s demeanour towards her still unmarried friends, and a certain tendency to stoutness and baldness on the part of the groom. Moreover, behind every suggested marriage there lurked the question whether it "would do." His father and mother, when he came to speak of marriage, would want to know whether it would "do"; Minetta would have her opinion about whether it would "do"; and if it did not "do," all his friends and acquaintances would by and by shake their heads and say that it had been plain all along how that would turn out....
On the other hand, the case was complicated--not in principle (that was beastly clear)--but by allowances in practise. Llanyglo had for some time been far from exacting; it was now, in certain of its phases, at any rate, almost exacting in the opposite direction. As many social allowances were made for the young man who had something "on" as liberties were granted to properly affianced couples who had got their certificate that it would "do." Percy Briggs would have gone off alone, with his hat on the back of his head and cheerfully whistling, at the least hint that John Willie had something "on." ... But this that had come so suddenly and overmasteringly over John Willie was a different thing altogether. Here was not somebody who played a game of which the rules and forfeits were known. That game, under one veiling or another, might form the staple of the Lunas" Drawing-room Entertainment at the Palace, or of the songs of Miss Sal Volatile in the Pavilion on the Pier; but Ynys had not even known what she had turned her back on when she had stood under the raspberry-coloured light, looking out at the gathering darkness of sky and the still lingering gleam on the sea. Warned probably, not by hearing and sight, but by some apprehension more sensitive still, she had stayed to see that orange rising, and then, before it had become a setting again, had been far on the road to Delyn....
Suddenly John Willie sat up and shook the reins.
"No, d.a.m.n it," he said.
He began to bowl more briskly along the hilly lanes.
It was after eight o"clock when he reached the quarry, and then for a time he had to go carefully down the by-lane that the stone-carts had deeply scored. But on the Porth Neigr road he whipped up again. Hearing a sound behind him, he drew in; and when there had pa.s.sed him a great brake hung all over with Chinese lanterns and full of people singing, the spell of silence under which he had lain all day was broken. Thereafter sound merely succeeded sound. As he took the railway bridge, a "special" roared past below, carrying more people to Llanyglo; and before its red tail-lights had mingled with the other rubies and emeralds of the line he had come upon the first couple turning at the limit of their walk. Then came a large board with "Imperial Hotel" on it, then a new horse-trough; then benches, then walls with placards on them. A mile ahead lay the golden corona of the town. This began to break up into single lights and groups of lights, and then, at a turn, he saw the Wheel and the jewelled finger of the Pier. He could hear the noise, an indistinguishable something in the air that was not the wind and not the sound of the sea; and then at the first roadside lamp it seemed suddenly to become night. More slowly he rounded Pritchard"s Corner; at the tram terminus the belated shopkeepers made a press about the Promenade-Pontnewydd Street car; and from the open doors of the "Tudor Arms" was wafted the smell of beer.
Delyn and Glyn Iago were part of the night behind him.
He did not attempt to drive through the crowd that suddenly thickened about the middle of Pontnewydd Street, where half the road was being taken up. One of the "Imperial" ostlers took the horse"s head, said "All right, Mr. Garden," and John Willie descended and walked. On the balconies of the "Grand" and "Imperial," people stood and watched the stream that descended to the Front. From the Kursaal Gardens came a noise that presently the ear ceased to hear, so steady and monotonous was it. Then, walking in the wake of a tram that moved slowly forward among the street barriers with an incessant clanging of its bell, John Willie reached the Promenade.
It was thrice the width of Pontnewydd Street, and so there was more room; but for all that it was difficult to walk at more than the general pace. This, nevertheless, football-packs of young men attempted from time to time to do, breaking their way through. They played mouth-organs, and at moments, apparently without plan or premeditation, suddenly formed into rings, feet pattering in clog-steps, eyes fixedly on those same feet, their backs a fence to hold back the spectators, while in the middle a couple of young men or a young man and a young woman danced. Then, as suddenly as they had stopped, they were off again, arms linked in arms or locked about the waist in front, each figure a vertebra of a many-jointed onward-rushing snake. Under the Promenade lamps they advanced, everybody else yielding place as they came. The little rail-enclosed plots that lay between the pavements and the hotels were magpied with torn paper and strown with lying figures. They lay there, in meaningless embrace, moaning long harmonies in thirds, hats decorated with penny gauds, eating nuts and "rock" and chocolate, hardly moving when pa.s.sers-by all but strode over them. Probably they were discussing nothing more than "So I said to her, straight to her face----" or the conduct of the shed-overlooker where they worked throughout the year together and if the pa.s.sers-by almost trod on them, they, in return, half absently flirted the pa.s.sing ankles with whisks and penny canes.
But if these lay like bivalves, torpid and content, another and more active element had awoke in the throng. The Alsatians, had they required it, were put into countenance now. One felt that they veined and threaded the ma.s.s with something that worked as quietly and as rapidly as yeast. They fed on it, drawing from it at last an open and confirmed sanction for all those things they would not have dreamed of doing at home. One met them here and there in couples, or in couples of couples with the invisible link between each pair of couples drawing ever farther and farther out, the women with shawls and hoods and dominoes over their dinner attire, the men with restless eyes, quick to show by a touch of hand or elbow that avoidance was desirable or a glance of complicity no harm. Lamps showed these gestures of understanding between those who could not have sworn to one another"s names. Of the two solitudes, that of the mountain-top and that of this press where ribs could hardly lift, they sought and found the second. Perhaps--who knows?--they were even grateful to those others who moaned those gummy thirds stretched on the lamplit gra.s.s....
And scarce two hundred yards away, under the railings of the sea-wall, here and there a mask, with struggling breast and tightly shut eyes and writhing lips, prayed....
As John Willie pushed at the garden gate, the door at the other end of the path opened and closed again behind Minetta and June. He met them in the middle of the path and asked them where they were going. When they said they were only going for a stroll he ordered them back. Minetta"s "Oh--how you startled us!--why, we didn"t know you were coming back----" suggested that she thought her brother might have spoken in another tone; but John Willie was not thinking of tones. He was thinking that perhaps after all he had no business to be spending days up Delyn just at present. A stroll with him to take care of them--well and good; but not two girls alone.... He said so, rather curtly, in the dining-room as Minetta got him some supper; but Minetta made no reply. Again she was thinking that June was a very nice girl, but it was odd that she should twice have brought her brother back from his fishing like this.
John Willie, eating his supper almost savagely, had some ado to reply politely to June"s rills of pretty speech. He wondered now why she should talk when she had nothing whatever to say. Only her tongue wagged, and he hardly heard his own tongue wagging in reply. This was not speech; this was not language!... "Not if I know it," he found himself suddenly thinking, as June asked him whether the Water Scheme had spoiled Delyn much, and said that she would like to go and see. But Minetta said little. She only asked John Willie one direct question. This was, Whether he had come back for good now. He replied that he didn"t know, and added some futility about fishing-weather and the difference a night sometimes made.
Minetta thought that the only extraordinary thing about his reappearance was that he should have troubled to go away at all.
June had one piece of information to give him, however. It was two days old, she said, but there--if John Willie would take himself off on his unsociable excursions like this he must expect to be a bit out of things. But she would forgive him, and tell him.--Ned Kerr was dead. It seemed (June said) that he had once given somebody in Porth Neigr a canary, and reports had reached him that the canary was not doing very well--had the pip or the croup or whatever it was canaries did have. He had worried a lot about the canary (June said), and, a week before, had been to Porth Neigr to see it. He had had a cold or something himself, June didn"t know what; anyway, he had come back from seeing the canary and the next day hadn"t got up. So his brother had sent for a doctor, and of course had told the doctor all about it--Ned, the canary, and all the lot. The doctor had said that he could see nothing the matter with Ned (which was more than some of them admitted, going on sending bottles of coloured water and so on and then a bill coming in for pounds and pounds), but Ned hadn"t said anything at all--he"d just died at two o"clock in the morning. He might just as well have had something the matter with him, June said. And all about a stupid canary!---- Soon after that John Willie told them it was time they went to bed. He followed them upstairs himself a few minutes later.
But it was long before he slept. Perhaps he knew already in his heart that if he really meant that "d.a.m.n it, no" he might as well stay at home now instead of leaving June and Minetta alone in the house. And he had meant it. He vowed he meant it still. The rusty light on his ceiling, cast from the corona outside, did not prevent his seeing the hut again--Glyn Iago--the black-dressed gillie who had tossed the snail-sh.e.l.ls into the water; nor did the faint and harsh and ceaseless noise outside drown that powerful and wordless eloquence that he had heard with some faculty other than his bodily hearing.... Then the sounds grew thinner, yet louder also; fewer, but clearer in the growing silence of the night. He heard a long-drawn strain of tipsy song, the tinny thread of sound of a mouth-organ, and then a clock striking three....
But he must go up to Delyn on the morrow. It would be a rotten thing to tell a girl to be sure to be there and then not to turn up himself.
And he would take her that lock and key.