So he essayed to speak, but the power did not lie with him. It lay in the soft, almost unearthly, harmonies of Gwen's voice, and Mervyn's, and Alicia Edwards, followed by those of many a young man and maiden. Over and over again some wild Welsh chant pitted itself against prayer or preaching, or even the earnest confession of sin from some sinner, and always with the same result, a victory for the service of song. Against that soothing background even Time itself seemed lost. The evening drew in wet and stormy. The necessity for closing the chapel doors burdened the pent air still more with man's great need of forgiveness. The miserable ventilation, which sanitation allows to churches and forbids to theatres, made women faint and strong men turn sick, while every now and again a burst of unrestrained laughter or sobbing told of nerves strained to the breaking point.
It was nigh dawn when, by the light of a pale moon obscured by drifting storm-clouds, Morris Pugh turned the key in the chapel door with a trembling hand. The Reverend Hwfa Morgan and Isaac Edwards were waiting for him on the wet, glittering steps.
"That is over," he muttered slowly in Welsh.
"Over!" echoed his brother cleric. "If the Lord will, it has just begun: from it will spread a wave of revival. You and those sweet singers--!" His excitement was too much for him, he reverted to English, "Yes, indeed! We will have a collection----"
Isaac Edwards slapped his thigh with an inarticulate ejaculation.
"Morris Pugh," he said, his voice quivering with regret, "we have forgotten it. God forgive us, we have forgotten the money!"
[CHAPTER X]
"You might have known, if you hadn't been in a dream," muttered Mervyn Pugh as he sat, his face hidden in his hands. "Nothing can be done without money, nothing, and it wouldn't have mattered if it had not been for this cursed meeting--and--and the rector----"
"Don't curse him, Merve," broke in Morris Pugh, who stood, with the look of one newly awakened, near the window, gazing out vaguely at a rising star, which lay on the distant hilltop like a visitant from heaven. Even as he looked, his mind all confused and blurred, the novel thought came to him that with such high and holy messengers at His command, the Creator need not have condescended to send such farthing dips of wandering lights to mark His elect, as some which had been manifested during the revival.
For a month had passed since Gwen's singing of the hymn had electrified the little congregation at Dinas, a month during which----