What had happened?
Morris Pugh, looking at his brother, saw that past month as in a dream, indeed. He, as the preacher, forgetful of everything save his mission, and those four voices, Gwen's soprano, Alicia Edwards's contralto, Mervyn's tenor, and Hwfa Morgan's bass, blending into every message of penitence or peace which emotion could desire. So they had gone preaching and singing, rousing an almost frenzied response wherever they went. And all the while----
"I don't understand yet," he said slowly. "Why was all this money required?"
Mervyn echoed the "all" with half-pathetic scorn. "A hundred pounds doesn't go far in running a revival," he said savagely. "One must start the thing. Why, even before we left Dinas, Gwen and Alicia had to get their clothes, they couldn't go in what they had got, and there was music wanted. One had to get a chorus, and the men couldn't sit up all night and work all day. Morgan and I talked it all over, for some one must look after practical things, you know, and I said I would finance it till the subscriptions came in. It's no use your looking like that, Morris. Any fool would tell you money had to be got somehow for the time, and it would have been all right but for this row with the rector. That isn't my fault."
Morris Pugh started as if he had been stung. "No! it was mine," he said. "I am the elder. I ought to have considered."
Mervyn rose quickly, and, going over to his brother, laid a caressing hand on his shoulder.
"Now don't, Morris," he said, using a common Welsh endearment, "let us forget ourselves for a while. I suppose it was wrong, but--" here his lip quivered, "it musn't injure the work. My God! how awful that would be." He flung himself on the chair again and, stretching his arms out over the table, positively sobbed. He was a prey to every emotion, every feeling that in this moment of anxiety and bewilderment swept over him, for he and his brother had come home but half an hour ago full of elation from a successful meeting at the other end of the county, to find that the rector, ousted member of village boards and councils, had insisted on a scrutiny of the accounts ere making over office next day.
And Mervyn knew that the balance would be a hundred pounds short; the hundred pounds which had been paid over by the central fund for educational purposes, and which should have been deposited in the Post Office Bank when it had come in a month ago. He had not done so, however, because, on emergency, he had borrowed the loan of the use of it for something else.
To do him justice that was all he had meant. Once the revival was fairly started the monetary question could be allowed to crop up, but without money in the background to make it possible to pose as having no regard to money, how could the very committees which would work the business properly be called into existence? At the time he had thought of nothing but God's service, and even now he felt little remorse. His sense of conversion was too strong, and the whole month of incessant irritation of every possible religious emotion had left him a pulp so far as actual facts were concerned ... and as a rule the village accounts went on and on endlessly ...
He lifted up his hand and smote the table impotently. Great heavens! what was to be done? That hundred pounds must be replaced somehow.