Meanwhile Gwen, poor soul, was laid with much fervour beside her baby, the rector duly officiating; for the old shepherd and his wife, thinking of their own funerals to come, held fast to tradition. Whatever else you might be in life, death brought you back to the Church, back to the solemn old service in which dust is reverently committed to dust, ashes to ashes.
Nearly all the village attended, for, in a way, it was proud of Gwen. There was but one notable absence. Alicia Edwards was not there to take her part in singing "Day of Wrath" over her dead friend. She was in bed or at any rate confined to her room; for the dramatic death on New Year's morning had apparently been too much for her nerves.
The gossips of the village went in and out, condoling with her, and applauding her sensibility, and retailing to her all the affecting particulars of the funeral, the wreaths, the remembrances from souls saved by the dead girl's singing, the excellence of the mournings provided by Myfanwy Jones, and the apparently real grief of Mervyn Pugh, who went about looking like a lost soul himself.
Only over the latter statement did Alicia Edwards commit herself so far as to say with sphinxlike gravity, "I do not wonder. Mervyn and Gwen were always friends. Yes, indeed! even at school they were friends."
Looking back from her new knowledge concerning Gwen's past, Alicia's only wonder was, indeed, that no one had ever suspected Mervyn. And yet, who could suspect Mervyn? Mervyn, the pattern of the village; Mervyn, among whose perfections her own facile heart had been entangled these many years past. Nor was she alone. Half the village girls would have given their eyes to secure him for their own.
And now that he had fallen from his high pedestal, it seemed to her, woman-like, that she desired him more than ever. That desire, in truth, was the cause of her seclusion. She was not ill--simply she could not make up her mind what to do. One-half of her asserted that she ought to denounce Mervyn; that it was wrong for her to allow him thus to play the hypocrite, that it would be good for his soul's health to do penance in sackcloth and ashes; the other half found excuses for him beneath the cloak of consideration for the slur which would be cast by the unrighteous over the whole revival, could it be shown that one of the most prominent in starting it was--so to speak--an unrepentant castaway; for repentance in such a case as this meant the confession for which the elders of the congregation had clamoured, the lack of which had sent an unbaptized child to the happily infinite mercy--seat of God.
Alicia knew all this. She had been well brought up, well drilled by her father in the catechisms, and in her inmost soul--a very conventional, placid, harmless soul--she was quite shocked at Mervyn's stony-heartedness. For all that, she could not make up her mind to denounce him. She would give him time. He knew that she knew his secret, and that she was the only person in the world now who knew it--at least of this world; for the "wild girl of Cwmfairnog," as the village had dubbed Aura, had not even attended the inquest. Martha had given her evidence, and Martha had known nothing. So there was no likelihood of the truth coming out except through her, Alicia. Perhaps Mervyn, knowing this, would come to her and unburden his soul. Undoubtedly, if Providence had not intended her to denounce the sinner--and of this, as the days went on, she became more and more certain--it must have had some other purpose in making her the sole recipient of the terrible knowledge.
What purpose?
For to her, as to Morris Pugh, as to nearly all these traffickers in cheap marvels, the impulse to see some hidden meaning, some direct dealing of the Creator with His creature man, had become almost an obsession.
What purpose, then, could Providence have had in thus choosing Alicia Edwards out of all the village to be this sole recipient?