He was not even very much surprised. He held her in his arms,
and his bones melted. He leaned back against the wall. The door
of the loft was open. Outside, the rain slanted by in fine,
steely, mysterious haste, emerging out of the gulf of darkness.
He held her in his arms, and he and she together seemed to be
swinging in big, swooping oscillations, the two of them clasped
together up in the darkness. Outside the open door of the loft
in which they stood, beyond them and below them, was darkness,
with a travelling veil of rain.
"I love you, Will, I love you," she moaned, "I love you,
Will."
He held her as thought they were one, and was silent.
In the house, Tom Brangwen waited a while. Then he got up and
went out. He went down the yard. He saw the curious misty shaft
coming from the loft door. He scarcely knew it was the light in
the rain. He went on till the illumination fell on him dimly.
Then looking up, through the blurr, he saw the youth and the
girl together, the youth with his back against the wall, his
head sunk over the head of the girl. The elder man saw them,
blurred through the rain, but lit up. They thought themselves so
buried in the night. He even saw the lighted dryness of the loft
behind, and shadows and bunches of roosting fowls, up in the
night, strange shadows cast from the lantern on the floor.
And a black gloom of anger, and a tenderness of
self-effacement, fought in his heart. She did not understand
what she was doing. She betrayed herself. She was a child, a
mere child. She did not know how much of herself she was
squandering. And he was blackly and furiously miserable. Was he
then an old man, that he should be giving her away in marriage?
Was he old? He was not old. He was younger than that young
thoughtless fellow in whose arms she lay. Who knew her--he
or that blind-headed youth? To whom did she belong, if not to
himself?
He thought again of the child he had carried out at night
into the barn, whilst his wife was in labour with the young Tom.
He remembered the soft, warm weight of the little girl on his
arm, round his neck. Now she would say he was finished. She was
going away, to deny him, to leave an unendurable emptiness in
him, a void that he could not bear. Almost he hated her. How
dared she say he was old. He walked on in the rain, sweating
with pain, with the horror of being old, with the agony of
having to relinquish what was life to him.
Will Brangwen went home without having seen his uncle. He
held his hot face to the rain, and walked on in a trance. "I
love you, Will, I love you." The words repeated themselves
endlessly. The veils had ripped and issued him naked into the
endless space, and he shuddered. The walls had thrust him out
and given him a vast space to walk in. Whither, through this
darkness of infinite space, was he walking blindly? Where, at
the end of all the darkness, was God the Almighty still darkly,
seated, thrusting him on? "I love you, Will, I love you." He
trembled with fear as the words beat in his heart again. And he
dared not think of her face, of her eyes which shone, and of her
strange, transfigured face. The hand of the Hidden Almighty,
burning bright, had thrust out of the darkness and gripped him.
He went on subject and in fear, his heart gripped and burning
from the touch.