He looked at his watch. Yes! it was time he was off. He would walk down the coast road to Pot-afon; thence take the cargo steamer to Liverpool. All roads meet there. He would go off to the wilds somewhere, and after a year if--if nothing changed--he could easily fabricate his own death, and let the heir come into what he did not want.
He set off for his night walk cheerfully enough. The glamour of that past day was upon him still, he seemed to hear her voice saying for him "It has been quite perfect." In reality those had been her last words, since the cry "the child! the child!" had been wrung from her by chance--by one of the unhappy chances and changes of this most unhappy world.
"It has been quite perfect." Ay! perhaps, but in the past tense. What of the present?
He paused at the bridge below the village where the mountain stream joined the river Afon, to look down to the still pool below the arch.
In the moonlight it looked very quiet. One might sleep there without dreams if people would only leave one alone, but they would not. He leant over the parapet and smiled at the oddness of one hive of swarming atoms, objecting to another hive of atoms choosing the hollow of a pool wherein to rest, interfering to fish it up and put it somewhere else in order to disintegrate into atoms again.
And after the atoms? There lay the question. The atom and the human consciousness? Were not both an equal mystery born of the unity beyond?
As he stood there absorbed in thought the sound of rapid footsteps echoed down the steep road from Dinas and, not wishing to be seen, he stepped back at once into the shadow of a tree that overhung the bridge. Looking up the roadway he saw a woman's figure. She was running swiftly with a curious unevenness, a curious uncertainty, yet evidently with some set purpose. As she passed him he caught a glimpse of her face, and--mere hive of atoms though he was--he started after her in a second.
None too soon either! He had just had hold of her in time, as she wavered for an instant on the parapet.
"You young fool!" he said roughly. "What's the matter? What are you doing that for?"
The girl--she did not look more than twenty--stared at him vacantly as if she did not understand what he meant, then with a little cry of horror apparently at herself, covered her face with her hands, and crouched down beneath his touch in a perfect storm of sobs.
"Don't cry!" he said more kindly, "What is it all about? What were you going to do?"
"I--I don't know," she wept. "It--it came upon me suddenly that it was the only way--it swept me off my feet--oh! wicked, wicked girl that I am--if--if it hadn't been for you--Oh! what shall I do? What shall I do?"
"What's wrong?" he asked, impatient at her helpless emotion. "Anything I can help? Come! it's no use crying. Of course you're a wicked girl, but as you evidently don't really want to kill yourself you'll have to live. So you had better make a clean breast of it. I daresay I can help--if it isn't----" Her face looked innocent and pure, still one never could tell. "Come--out with it"--he went on--"If it's anything about money----"
She caught at the word. "Money! Oh! if I could only get the money,"
she wailed.
"Come!" he said with a smile, "if it is only money----"
So by degrees she told him her name was Alicia Edwards. She was the happiest, luckiest girl in the world, who was to be married in two days to the man she loved--to a saint upon earth. And she bore an unblemished character. And her father was also a saint upon earth. But that very evening by the post had come--not a bolt from the blue--for she had had an awful prescience that it would come, though who would have thought that Myfanwy would be so cruel, and she just married to the man she loved! Oh! it was wicked! A bill, and such a bill too! A hundred and three pounds; and if it was not paid for at once it would be sent. Oh! she would go mad with shame.
"What was it for?" asked Ned, wearily good-natured.
"That is it," wailed poor Alicia, "it is for hats and dresses. And I ought to have paid. And what am I, a minister's wife, to ask him to pay such bills. And my father will not. What am I to do? If I was a bad girl it would be nothing; but I am good, so very good! I cannot face them saying I am bad."
"They would have said you were mad, I suppose, if you had jumped from the bridge just now," said Ned grimly.
Alicia looked at him furtively and wept again.
What a world it was, thought Ned bitterly. Here was a well-educated, deeply-religious girl occupied entirely in thinking what her neighbours would say of her; those neighbours who, in a way, were as responsible as she. For was not humanity, as a whole, responsible for all the deeds of humanity. Was he not, in a way, responsible for his own birth, being as he was, but the outcome of his forefathers? Virtue and vice, honour and dishonour, were they not all hidden in that first Step of dancing Prakrit? So there came to him for once a great humility, a patient acceptance of all the evil in the world as being part of himself.
"I will give you the money, child," he said; "you shall marry the saint and be a saint yourself--why not?"
"I can't--I can't take it," she muttered, for all that holding fast to the purse he gave her; "I can't take it from a stranger."
"A stranger?" he echoed. "Bah! In the beginning, little girl, you and I were one. Remember that in all your little life. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end--Amen!"
He stooped and kissed her as he left her at her father's door, and she stood looking after him, wondering if he were indeed a man or a vision. But the money was there. A hundred pounds in notes and three sovereigns. She would send them by the morning's post to Myfanwy Pugh, and then----
Alicia Edwards fell on her knees beside her bed and thanked God for the money.
Meanwhile Ned Blackborough had paused to re-make his plans in his new condition of pennilessness; for he had but a few shillings left for the immediate present. Afterwards there was money and to spare awaiting him at various points on the route which he had carefully prepared for flight. Still he must first get to a point.
Then the remembrance of the hundred pounds he had hidden away in the cleft of the rock up on the hills came to him, making him laugh; because there was no question now as to who needed it. He came back to it a beggar; beggared, indeed, of all save life. Yet life was all. The words of the Indian sage came back to him:--
"Indestructible the life is, spreading life thro' all.
I say to Thee weapons reach not the life.
Flame burns it not, waters cannot overwhelm Nor dry winds wither it. Impenetrable, Unentered, unassailed, unharmed, untouched, Immortal, all arriving, stable, sure, Thus is the Life declared."
Vaguely he felt comforted. The sense of Unity lay around him in the air. He saw the Golden Gateway. He knew that its Door was open. But his love kept him from entering. He could yield himself without one sigh to the Beginning that was the End, but he could not yield her, for he had not yet realised that she also was the Beginning, the End.
The dawn was just breaking as he reached the gap, and searching in the cleft found nothing.
Was he glad, or was he sorry? He was not sure. In a way he felt more free, since he need now have no plans for the future. He could sit down and watch the sun rise. After that he could walk over Llwydd-y-Bryd to the coastline by the country town, and so--anywhere!
This was sufficient, surely, for the moment.
The sun rose in a panoply of purple and red with, low down above the hills, a band or two of torquoise blue to hint of the vast fields of calm ether beyond the storm clouds of the world.
"Aura! Aura! Aura!"
Even there, to the far, unending depths, the cry echoed. A cry apart, poignant with individual anguish.
He started up and moved on. The staghorn moss trailed clinging to the soil beneath his feet, a hawk hovering in the air was held to its place also by the same force which sent the world on which he stood, spinning on its way. But still that love, that grief of his, would not be made one with Nature.
"Aura! Aura! Aura!"
He stood on the summit of Llydd-y-Bryd once more. Even the "gingerbeer" had gone from the shieling now; but it would not be long before humanity returned once more with placard and paste-pot to appropriate the spot to base uses.
Down in the blue hollow yonder lay Cwmfaernog, and in Cwmfaernog lay--no! not Aura! Aura was of the woods and hills. He could feel her in them separate, distinct from himself. He would not give her up; he could not. He would give one more look at the peaceful little valley from the crag yonder, and then take her with him; something he would not yield, not even to the Force which held the round world sure.
The round world perhaps--but--ye Gods!
His foot slipped, he caught at a root to save himself, it gave way--he fell.
The hot noon-tide sun was beating down on him when he woke to consciousness again. He tried to move, and could not. After a time his mind returned clearly; he pinched himself upon the thigh and felt nothing. That, then, was the reason why he felt no pain, for one of his legs was evidently broken. He had injured his spine, and it was paralysed below the waist. This, then, was the end.
"Aura! Aura!"
His heart leapt up in him. It could not be long now.
He was lying in the corrie into which he and Ted had vainly tried to get that first night of the storm, and as he lay he could watch the sun tilt from its high glory in the heavens, to touch the world in the west then disappear. It would be a beautiful sunset. How many more would he see, he wondered. How long would it last? Some days perhaps.
How idle all things--money, happiness, even love itself seemed beside this certainty of leaving them all. The only thing that money had brought to him was the death of a wild animal--thank God!--alone!
Except for Aura.