At length he came out upon the brow, Bronffin, and looked down into the broad basin of Caio. Below him was a fire. It had burned itself out, and lay a bed of glowing cinders, with smoke curling above it, lighted and turned red by the reflection of the fire below. Now and then a lambent flame sprang up, and then died away again.
The sound of voices came up from beneath: it was pleasant to Pabo to hear voices, but in his heart was unutterable pain. He looked down on the glowing ruins of his presbytery—where he had lived and been so happy.
Hour after hour he sat on the mountain-edge, watching the slowly contracting and fading glow, hearing the sounds of life gradually die away.
Then above the range to the left rose the moon, and silvered the white ribbon of the Sarn Helen, the paved road of the old Queen of British race who had married the Roman Emperor Maxentius, and illumined the haze that hung over the river-beds, and far away behind Pen-y-ddinas formed a cloud over the two tarns occupying the bottom of the valley.
But all the while Pabo looked only at one and then at another point—this, the fiery reek of his home, that a spot whence shone a small and feeble light—the house of Howel the Tall, beneath whose roof watched and wept his dearest treasure, Morwen. When midnight was overpassed, and none stirred, then did Pabo descend from the heights and approach the ashes of his home. At the glowing embers he dried the tinder. Then he caught up a smoldering brand, turned and reascended the mountain, with the fire from his ruined hearth wherewith to kindle that in his hovel of refuge.
CHAPTER XI
A MIRACLE
Had one been on Bronffin, the mountain-brow overhanging Caio, on the following morning, strange would have been the scene witnessed.
Those of the inhabitants who had not fled were engaged in the obsequies of the hermit who had been burned when the presbytery took fire, and whose charred remains had been extricated from the ruins.