There are only three gates to Wales: Gloucester, Chester and Shrewsbury, and it was at Shrewsbury that the two men crossed the Severn on their hasty journey north, and entered a new spiritual atmosphere. From time to time they passed the ruined walls of castles designed to keep the Kelt to his mountains, and presently the road began to wind up the narrow, wooded valleys that lead into the heart of the Snowdon range.
Twilight fell swiftly among the woods, and Murchison switched on the powerful headlights. There was a sense of primitive wildness in the air, and he had a curious feeling that they had left civilisation behind.
They stopped to ask the way at a fork in the roads, and a black-eyed, sharp-featured man answered in a sing-song, lilting voice, obviously struggling with an unfamiliar language. Murchison had never realized before that one could leave England behind inside the British Isles.
They were following the windings of a river mile after mile, and presently Brangwyn said, ‘You had better get into second, Murchison, it is steeper than you think.’
Presently the trees gave out, and heathery hillsides lay dappled in the fight of the newly risen moon. On and on they went, and the wind grew very cold. The engine was labouring in good earnest now, and Murchison changed down without waiting to be told. Then the valley narrowed and granite walls closed in on them, with snow lying in the gullies, and a plume of steam began to rise from the radiator.
And still they climbed. Then suddenly Murchison found his headlights ranging into empty space.
‘This is the top,’ said Brangwyn. ‘Ease her over gently. It's like the side of a house, going down the other slope.’
Murchison eased her over as bidden, and saw what looked like the starry heavens upside down under his front wheels, as the opening pass yielded a glimpse of the plain below, with all the scattered lights a twinkle.
‘Steady on the bend,’ said Brangwyn, ‘we turn off just here.’
‘Right or left?’ said Murchison.
‘Left man, left. Good God, don't turn right! It's a one hundred foot drop!’
The headlights revealed a gap in the dry stone walling that flanked the road, and Murchison swung the car into it.
‘Get into bottom gear,’ said Brangwyn. ‘This is where she sits on her tail.’
They were bumping over a rough cart-track that wound up a narrow gulch into the very heart of the range. The rock walls closed in behind them, and they might have been among the mountains of the moon. The headlights made the road as bright as day in that confined space, and some very worried mountain sheep ran panic-stricken ahead of them, baaing piteously. A sheepdog came cantering out of the shadows, told the car what he thought of it in a few eloquent barks and then turned his charges neatly on to the grass at the roadside, showing more sense than most drovers. Another sheepdog answered him from near at hand, and then they heard the cry of new-born lambs and smelt the acrid odour of penned sheep. Then lights appeared round a corner of rock and a hurricane of barks saluted them. Murchison saw why it was that no one but a rock-climber could come upon Ursula Brangwyn unawares. The wavering light of a lantern came bobbing towards them, and he stopped the car.
‘Why, surely to goodness now, it iss Mr. Brangwyn!’ exclaimed a high-pitched, staccato voice.
‘Good evening, Mrs Davies, and who did you think it was? Good Lord, woman, what are you doing with that gun?’
Murchison saw a tall, gaunt woman step into the glare of the headlights, with an old-fashioned, single-barrelled shot-gun in the crook of her arm and a perfect pack of hounds at her heels.
‘Well, now, I did not know who it wass. Mr. Davies, he hass gone to send you a telegraph. We haf had trouble here.’
Murchison felt a horrible coldness close about his heart, and sat as if turned to stone in his seat.
‘What's the matter, Mrs Davies?’ he heard Brangwyn say in a very quiet voice.
‘Oh, it iss not too bad, Mr. Brangwyn, it iss not too bad. Miss Ursula she hass been frightened, but she iss not hurt. Gwennie took care of her. She wass fetching the sheep from the high hill, and she saw Miss Ursula wass being frightened, and she came down, and she tore the trousers off him, Mr. Brangwyn. Yess, Gwennie bach, you did well.’
Murchison looked round to see who the termagant was who had performed this feat, and a little black collie with a pretty white waistcoat ran up and stood with her tongue out, looking self-conscious.
‘She iss a little lion, iss Gwennie, and so wise. You haf no dogs in England like her, Mr. Brangwyn.’
Murchison looked at the high, domed forehead and wide-set eyes, so different to the torpedo-heads of the prize collies on the show bench.
‘I am very grateful to Gwennie,’ said Brangwyn. ‘She is a fine little lass.’
‘Ah, Mr. Brangwyn, she does not speak English.’ Some rapid gutterals translated the compliment into Welsh, and Gwennie acknowledged it with a wave of her tall and disappeared into the darkness.
‘Is my sister up at the cottage, Mrs Davies?’
‘Yess, she iss at the cottage. She would not come down to the farm, and I could not make her. But do you not go up there, but wait here. I will go up and tell her who it iss. She may be frightened, as I wass. She may think it iss that man come back if you drive up in the dark.’
Mrs Davies disappeared into the darkness, followed by the dogs.
‘Well, Murchison, you're less confiding than I am. What do you make of her? Would you trust her?’
‘I'd trust her all right, sir. She's a first-class old dragon. I don't suppose Fouldes would have come on here after Gwennie'd eaten his pants, but if he had, she'd have blown his shirt-tails off as soon as look at him.’
A shrill cry and wavering of the lantern called them on, and Murchison drove the car across the little Alpine meadow in which the farmhouse stood, rounded a projecting rocky corner, and saw a low, whitewashed cottage with a grey slate roof in front of them. Flickering firelight shone from its windows, and the tall form of Mrs Davies stood in the open doorway, but there was no sign of Ursula Brangwyn.
Mrs Davies hastened to meet them as they climbed stiffly out of the car.
‘It iss well you haf come,’ she said. ‘I do not like the way she looks. No, not at all.’
They went up a narrow flagged pathway across the small forecourt surrounded by low whitewashed stone walls. The open door led straight into the single room that occupied the whole of the ground floor, save for a little lean-to at the back. The air struck warm and sweet as they entered, for a large fire of pine-wood burnt in the primitive grate at one end. A magnificent Welsh dresser, jet-black with generations of elbow-grease, occupied the best part of one wall, but its shelves held books instead of crockery. A couple of high-backed settles made an ingle-nook of the fireplace, and on them were piled bright-coloured cushions to relieve their hardness. Rugs covered the uneven flags of the floor.
The lamp was unlit, and it took a moment or two for Murchison's eyes to become accustomed to the flickering light. Then he saw that Ursula Brangwyn was sitting on a three-legged stool in front of the fire with her back to the room. She was dressed as for walking, save that her hat had been flung aside and her dark hair was dishevelled. There was mud on her shoes, and she looked as if she had returned to the house after her adventure, sat down by the fire, and had not moved since.
‘Hello, Ursula?’ said her brother.
‘Hello, Alick?’ said the girl, without turning her head.
Brangwyn crossed the room and sat down on the settle and studied her face. Murchison, embarrassed, hung back in the shadows by the door. No one spoke.
At length the girl broke the silence. ‘Did Mrs Davies tell you what happened?’
‘Yes,’ said Brangwyn.
There was silence again for a while. Then the girl spoke once more.
‘Alick,’ she said, ‘I'd have gone with him if the dog hadn't driven him off.’
‘I told you you would,’ said Brangwyn. Once again silence fell, and there was no sound in the room save the hissing of the sap in the pine-logs and the slow tick-tock of an old clock. Again the girl broke the silence.
‘I'll have to take Murchison, Alick, he's my only chance. What shall we do about it?’
‘Murchison is here, Ursula,’ said Brangwyn.
‘Oh!’ cried Ursula, and turned round so suddenly that she nearly over-balanced her three-legged stool.
Murchison came forward out of the shadows.
‘Good evening, Miss Brangwyn,’ he said.
He took off his old trench coat and sat down on the settle beside Brangwyn, and stared into the fire. These few revealing words of Ursula Brangwyn's had caught him like a blow in the face. Ever since that night when they had danced the dance of the earth in spring together he had felt an ever-strengthening bond with her; Astley's coarsely spoken words had confirmed his intuition, for Astley, foul brute though he was, was very far from a fool. Brangwyn's generous cheque had gone in new clothes as surely as ‘a livelier iris changes on the burnished dove,’ and it had seemed to him that he had shed his old, thwarted personality when he put off his garments of humiliation. But at Ursula Brangwyn's words something that had hitherto held firm in Murchison through all his difficulties gave way at last, and he was the same man who had once spent an evening discussing pros and cons with a friend of his who had turned motor-bandit. Brangwyn rose from the settle. ‘I'll go and put the car away,’ he said.
‘Let me do it for you, sir,’ cried Murchison, leaping to his feet, only too thankful for an excuse to make his escape.
‘No, my lad, sit down. You don't know where it goes. Besides, I want to have a word with old Davies he ought to be back by now.’ He wished to leave the two together to come to an understanding as best they might, on the same principle that small boys at public schools used to be taught to swim by throwing them into the water. He could not conceive of any other way in which Ursula could pick up the brick she had dropped. He went out; and Murchison had perforce to re-seat himself beside the silent girl, who stared at the fire without speaking.
Murchison could not make out how far Ursula Brangwyn was lost in her own thoughts, and how far she chose to ignore his presence. He slid himself into the corner of the settle that Brangwyn had vacated, so as to get some rest for his back, weary from the long drive, and before he knew where he was he had dropped off to sleep.
But Ursula Brangwyn was quite alive to his presence. Her silence and averted face were due to sheer embarrassment. It was beyond her power to break the silence. She had had three shocks that day; firstly, her stormy encounter with Fouldes; secondly, the realization of her appalling faux pas with Murchison; and, thirdly, the discovery that an entirely new individual had appeared when he peeled off his terrible trench coat and came forward into the firelight. Was it possible that tailoring could make such a difference to a man? Was this the same individual who had looked so ungainly in his soiled and shabby reach-me-downs? Ursula hated herself for being so sensitive to appearances. If Murchison had been dressed like this when she had first seen him, she would not have regarded him as a nauseating pill that she had to hold her nose and swallow. If one did not mind a certain ruggedness of feature, he might be considered a fine-looking man. Why, oh why, had she not been able to see beneath the rough exterior as her brother had done? She remembered Murchison's kindness, almost tenderness, when she had had her upheavals at the flat, and the infinite comfort of it. If only he would be like that again she would open her heart to him and tell him of the horrible panic-fear and helplessness that descended on her, and of her desperate need to hold on to him lest she be swept away and lost for ever.
She would tell him of the morbid fascination Fouldes had for her, and his horrible power over her, and how her bondage could only be broken in one way - by someone coming forward vicariously and stepping into Fouldes’ place; replacing his unclean, epicene magnetism with wholesome, normal, male magnetism, such as should flow naturally between a man and a woman, thus drawing her back to normal life in spite of herself.
If she told him all this, surely he would understand that her unlucky remark was not quite as bad as it sounded?
She would tell him that she felt quite differently about him now that she had seen him again. That the love-philtre so cunningly compounded by her brother was beginning to work in her veins, and her craving for Fouldes was fading. She would tell him that it was her wish now that the barriers between them should be thrown down, and that they should become one on the plane of earth, as they already were in the invisible kingdoms by virtue of what had been done in the rite of the earth in spring.
This rite, she knew, had really been a marriage rite - a marriage that depended entirely upon function for its validity. If no magnetic circuit sprang up between them when the power was invoked, no marriage took place; if magnetism began to flow from the one to the other, the marriage had actually come into being, and only needed to be ratified on the physical plane.
Her brother had assured her that if love were not possible between them, there would be no power in the rite, and nothing would happen; but that if power came down, she would know that a very wonderful mating was in store for her. She had trusted him, and had given herself up to the rite, body and soul, and let the tremendous forces it invoked and focused sweep through her. The rite had succeeded far beyond even her brother's expectations; she knew that, though he would not say very much; else why had he been so urgent that she must not come near Murchison again until he had had some training lest the forces that formed a circuit between them should become too strong for his control, and should ‘short’ in one of those psychic upheavals so dreaded by those who pursue strange arts?
But, although she now ardently wished that the barriers between them should be cast down, she could see that it was going to be easier said than done, especially since her luckless remark had twined them with barbed wire. But a start must be made, and she had nothing to thank but her own snobbishness that it was so difficult.
She raised her eyes from the fire and turned towards the silent man to speak to him, and discovered that he was sound asleep. A sudden wave of anger shot over her. So this was all the regard he had for her? Having come to her side in her time of greatest need, he had so little real concern for her that he had not even been able to keep awake! She had no realization of the effect of that hot, dimly-lit room on the exhausted man. Murchison had driven an unfamiliar car over two hundred miles at high speed, with no pause save for petrol, and if he had known that he would be shot at dawn for sleeping at his post it is doubtful if the result would have been any different. But Ursula Brangwyn had no realization of the stresses of life, and no mercy for those who succumbed to them. Her new-born feeling for Murchison died a sudden death and he became once again a nauseous pill, with the added bitterness of this injury to her scorned beauty.
The door opened, and Brangwyn entered the room. Hearing no sound of voices, he imagined his sister to be alone.
‘Hullo?’ he said. ‘What have you done with Murchison?’ wondering arduously what sort of a row the pair of them had had.
Ursula pointed silently to the heap on the settle.
‘Good Lord!’ exclaimed Brangwyn. ‘What's the matter with the fellow?’
‘Nothing, so far as I am aware,’ said Ursula. ‘He just went peacefully off to sleep.’ Brangwyn looked at him.
‘Dead beat,’ he said with a smile, greatly relieved.
‘Then in that case,’ said Ursula icily, ‘it would have been best if he had gone to bed.’
Brangwyn came and sat down beside her, and laid a hand over hers.
‘My child,’ he said, ‘we have done over two hundred miles in five hours, and Murchison has never driven my car before, which means that we have both risked our necks; you must not be too exacting.’
Ursula hung her head. Once again she was being made to feel ashamed where Murchison was concerned. It was as if yet another layer of his uncouth exterior had peeled off and she had had a glimpse of something fine that lay underneath. The furious drive from London was of the authentic tradition of knight-errantry. To average forty miles an hour, as he had done, over that long distance, including the passes, meant some very high speeds on the open road, and all this in an unfamiliar car. Murchison's falling asleep began to appear in a new light. It was, in fact, more of a tribute than an insult. He had run himself out for her, and here was the visible evidence of it. Her heart softened towards him once again. Brangwyn picked Murchison's feet up by the ankles and put him full length on the settle, from which he had looked in danger of sliding off. Murchison merely grunted. It was Ursula herself who went up to her room and brought down a rug and put it over him.
Then Mrs Davies came in with a large pot of savoury stew, and Ursula and her brother had their meal, leaving Murchison to have his sleep out on the settle.