THE DWELLING OF A NIGHT
John Willie began to spend his days up Delyn and his nights elsewhere than at Llanyglo. He too passed them under the night-lights of the stars—for if she could go to bed by those candles, so could he. On the first night on which he did not return to Llanyglo they peeped down on him where he lay, gazing at them, a mile and more over the head of Delyn, to the summit of which he had reascended after bidding her "Nos da" in the Glyn. On the second night he put another mile between herself and him, bathing in the morning in a brook the chilliness of which only a little refreshed him after his night's tossing; he slept for three hours that afternoon, with her keeping watch by his side. And on the third night he lay among the fern, in her own old place behind Sharpe's hut. She did not know that he did not return each night to that dusty town by the sea.
And now once again he was muttering to himself, fiercely and frequently, "No—no——"
June's stay began to draw to a close. Minetta suspected her of moping for John Willie, and told her that he often disappeared for days at a time like that. Sometimes, she added, he called it fishing.
"But he'd be fearfully annoyed if we went to look for him," she said; and she turned away and smiled.
She smiled again when one morning June had a letter from Wygelia, with a postscript for herself. "A bit of gossip for Minetta," the postscript ran. "Ask her if she remembers a girl from Llanyglo father took into one of his shops. He's thinking of sending out search-parties for her. She went off for a holiday, and hasn't turned up again——" etc., etc., etc.
And so it was that John Willie, filled now with one thought only, came to miss quite a number of things that went down into the history of Llanyglo. He missed, for example, those first days of Revival in which the town, self-accused of sin, strove to purify itself. He missed that storm of impassioned evangelicalism in which Eesaac Oliver, walking one day on the Porth Neigr road, stopped at the foot of the lane that led to the quarries, suddenly threw up his hands, broke forth, and presently had the occupants of a dozen brakes and wagonettes listening to him in the great echoing excavation of the quarry itself. He missed, too, an odd little by-product of that gale of spiritual awakening—the black-faced group that one morning made its appearance on the beach, and resembled a troupe of ordinary seaside niggers until it broke, not into Plantation Melodies, but into hymns, one of which had a catchy pattering chorus that told over the names of the blest ones the redeemed would meet in Heaven:
"There'll be Timothy, Philip and Andrew,
Peter, Paul and Barnabas,
James the Great, James the Less
And Bar-tholo-mew——"
He missed that other great storm of groans and fervour, when the pale young regenerator, mounting the railway embankment from a low-lying meadow near Porth Neigr, began to preach before sunset, preached until the stars came out, and then sent hysterical young women and overstrung young men home in couples along the benighted lanes together, to comfort and enhearten and uplift one another as they went.... And he missed, among these and a multitude of other things, a certain rather famous exploit of his compatriot, Tommy Kerr.
He knew how Tommy had flouted and insulted Llanyglo, and how Llanyglo in return had long been looking for signs that Tommy was drinking himself to death. But neither John Willie Garden nor anybody else had thought of the alternative solution of the inconvenience of Tommy's presence in Llanyglo. This was, not that Tommy himself should fall one night and break his neck, but that something should happen to the house that, having been put up by the four brothers in a single night, was enjoyable by them as long as they or any of them should remain alive.