VI
THE FOOT IN THE DOOR
IT was a Saturday, a day on which the school did not assemble, and the door of the schoolhouse was locked. Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd was sent off in haste for the key. They waited for him to come back, twenty of them, men and women, with others hurrying over the sandhills to join them. Eesaac Oliver ran panting up again, and they entered the schoolhouse. This was a large, yellow-washed room with beams making triangles overhead and hot-water pipes running round the walls below. A small squad of desks stood upright behind, and a number of smaller benches knelt, as it were, in front of them. These faced the raised desk of Miss Nancy Pritchard, the schoolmistress. A yellow chair or two, a couple of glass-fronted cupboards, a row of hooks for caps and cloaks at the back, and a harmonium, completed the furniture. A short covered way near Miss Pritchard's desk gave access to the adjoining Chapel. A door at the side of this led to the little stone outhouse where the water for the pipes both of school and Chapel was heated.
Their astonished exclamations had broken out now. As something legendary and dear and native to their land, it was in their hearts to defend the Hafod Unos; but for a stranger to set one up!
"Look you, it can-not be legal!" exclaimed Hugh Morgan, a little tubby man with semicircular brows and a round bald forehead. "It iss not even finiss; there iss holes in the walls so-a big I put my head through them! And that iss not a roof—it iss only rick-covers——"
"It is wonderful how they did it, whatever!" said little restless-eyed Mrs. Gruffydd. Those predatory eyes in Blodwen Gruffydd's pale face could see a sixpence a mile away, and, having seen it, would not leave it again until it had been safely dropped through the slot of the money-box into which the savings for Eesaac Oliver's education went. Eesaac Oliver was not to serve packets of tea and pennyworths of bicarbonate of soda over a grocer's counter. He was to go to Aberystwith College, and to become a preacher, and wear a black chip straw hat.
Howell Gruffydd, who had been as thunderstruck as the rest of them, now affected to take a jocular view of the matter.
"De-ar me, first Mr. Garden's house, and now Ty Kerr! Well, it make trade. Indeed, I need a bigger s'op presently—I think I start a Limited Company——"
But big consumptive John Pritchard spoke in deep tones. More vividly than any of them, John had seen, as if in a camera obscura, that vision of a Kerr blowing into the vent-hole of a barrel, while another Kerr anxiously watched the tap.—"We need a bigger public-house, I think," he said grimly.
"Indeed you are right, John Pritchard," Hugh Morgan struck eagerly in, the curves of his brows all marred with anxiety. "They sit in the Sta-tion Hotel Porth Neigr, and do noth-thing but drinking all day—it set a s'ock-king example, whatever."