The Black Diamond

by Francis Brett Young

A light breeze moved above him, and as in the distance he heard a sound like that of a gentle shower falling on leaves in June: a sound that meant something to his memory. He became suddenly aware that he was standing at that moment on the outskirts of Mainstone village, immediately beneath a big poplar tree. A dozen times he had stood there in the shadow waiting for the light to go out in the windows of the Pound House, for the steps of Bastard to pass him, for the moment when he might safely steal across to Susie’s door.

His pulse quickened. Some hidden instinct must have made him stop there. No light could be seen, but there, in the darkness, was a woman whom he could have for the asking. He pulled himself together, and a moment later was standing by the outhouse door. He threw a clod at her window-pane. She had better not try putting him off to-night! If he had to climb in at her window she must come to him. He fretted with impatience.

But he had not long to wait. In a few minutes she had opened the back door. He heard the door scrape, but it was so dark that he could not see her. He put out his hands, groping in the darkness, and found her, warm and breathing.

‘I thought you were never coming again,’ she whispered.

He took her in his arms and clothed her in kisses. She clung to him, breathing softly, while his kisses enveloped her. His misery left him, vanished miraculously in the darkness. In the black confusion of his thoughts it seemed to him as if he were kissing Mary Malpas.

The Twentieth Chapter

A strange fate awaited this renewal of passion. Over the border in Wales, where many dark and violent things are born, a sultry flame had been kindled about this time in the heart of a Wesleyan local preacher named Evan Hughes. He was a Montgomery peasant, a carpenter by trade, on whom, brooding over the historical sanctity of his calling, an inspiration had fallen. He preached in the chapel Bethesda, in the hamlet Llandewi Waterdine. He spoke in the dialect of his fellow-workmen; his words were ludicrous and pathetic; but the fire that scorched his heart was in them, so that men and women rode over the mountains on their ponies to hear him and many professed themselves converted. Why, or to what they were converted it would be hard to say, unless it were that the isolation of their lives laid them open to long broodings on sin and on salvation, and that knowing, as all men know, that they were sinful, they could not be happy in solitude till they were saved.

The unconverted said maliciously that Evan Hughes had been shocked into sanctity by proceedings of affiliation and a maintenance order. However this may have been, his preaching was on chastity of the body, and more particularly of the bodies of women, a doctrine that was acceptable, for the most obvious reasons, to married men with wives younger than themselves, and on sentimental grounds to young unmarried girls. The flame spread quickly through these green shoots, and the dry, withered twigs went up with a crackle. Women of sixty years and older stood up on the chapel floor and prayed God to grant them continence. Evan Hughes, with a singular lack of humour, hailed them as souls plucked from hell and greeted them as sisters. Thus, having cleansed the Kerry Hills and the borders of Clun, he set his eyes, like any spiritual freebooter, on the English border, cursing the fatness and laxness of the Teme valley so violently and with such free quotations from the prophet Jeremiah, that the local circuit invited him to conduct a revival from their pulpits.

First he came to Chapel Green, and naturally enough converted old Mrs Malpas, who was always on the side of the angels. She sat under him with tears streaming from her eyes for the sins of her friends, and afterward had the honour of putting him up at the Buffalo in spite of his prejudices against the licensed trade. On this, the first Sunday of the revival, the Chapel Green Methodists achieved the authentic shiver, and the vicar of Mainstone, who had heard all about it, made a reconnaissance of his parish, shaking his head and warning his people against the influence of unhealthy fanatics.

‘It’s a crime,’ he said, ‘putting such ideas into young people’s minds. We don’t want that sort of thing in the country. Mainstone is a clean parish. Apart from that unfortunate young Mrs Malpas at Wolfpits there is scarcely an . . . unsavoury household in it.’