himself to Jonathan, whose gentle nods seemed to be nods of approval and confirmation.
“I’m sorry I’ve had to trouble you like this. It’s my own fault—I oughtn’t to have tried walking over here, but I wanted to see the view from the top of the Horse.” He referred to the mountain known as the Horse of Gwyn ap Nudd, a humped peak that stood arrogantly above the surrounding hills and valleys. It was not a stiff climb, and an ardent hiker might have been pardoned for wanting a glimpse of the great white blanket over the countryside, bulging and wrinkled over Wales, then flattening out and lying smooth and dazzling upon Shropshire. The only false note was struck by the man himself: he was not in the least like a hiker. “I thought I could make it easily,” he said. “I wanted to have a look from the top, just so I could say I’d been, and then I was going to get down on to the main road near Plas Mawr.”
“The main road would not have been easy to find,” said Mr. Morris.
The stranger waved one stubby hand and grinned. He had a tooth missing from the front of his mouth. “That was just it,” he said. “I missed it altogether, and got mixed up with a lot of hills. As fast as I got up one, expecting to see a village of some sort, there was a slope downwards and then more hills. I knew the castle when I saw it, and I made for it, ’cos I knew once I was over, I could get down to Llanmadoc. But it was dark by the time I made it, and what with the snow and the darkness, I don’t think I could have got down to the village. It was lucky I saw your light.”
“Quite a walk you’ve had, Mr.—er—”
“Brennan.”
When he had spoken of the darkness, a sudden fantastic idea had come to Nora. She remembered, all too vividly, the vision that Jonathan had conjured up, and for one wild moment she wondered if he had also called up this man Brennan, a fiend in human shape. All the ghost stories she had ever read, the lurid films she had seen, and the more dubious illustrations in the books that stood in the parlour bookcase, all these came to the aid of her imagination, and she looked at the stranger with an indefinite but compelling dread.
Her fear died away. If this was a demon that Jonathan had summoned, it was an inoffensive demon. Brennan looked like a shopkeeper, with a worried, pimply little face and one ear that stuck out grotesquely, as though—Nora could have laughed now—as though weighed down by the weight of too many pencils resting on it. He would not look directly at anyone except, for brief spaces of time, at Jonathan, but sighed at intervals and fumbled with scraps of paper in the pockets of his jacket. Twice Nora caught those glances that he exchanged with Jonathan, like a nervous shop assistant who hopes he has not offended an influential customer.
“Perhaps,” he said, “if you would be good enough to lend me a light of some sort, I could try to reach the village.”
“Not safe,” said Mr. Morris sleepily, opening one eye. “Drifts there are that you would get caught in. The snow do give under you if you don’t know every little turn of the ground. Tomorrow, when you can see where you are going.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“For a lonely place,” said Nora ironically, “we get a lot of visitors.”
They all laughed, and for a while, in a babble of general, more or less lighthearted conversation, it appeared that the cloud of unrest that had clung to the house all day would be dispelled. But Jonathan and the newcomer, Brennan, were held together by some mysterious bond. Nora wondered whether anyone else sensed this as acutely as she did. There was something between the two men, and she could not believe that this meeting had been an accident. Come to that, she could not believe that any of today’s occurrences had been accidents: from the moment she awoke this morning she had been conscious of the existence of a certain fatalistic pattern into which the lives of all present had been woven. Things were moving towards a climax. These strange comings and goings—though so far, she thought, there had been a pronounced lack of goings—all meant something that would soon be revealed. She could not imagine where she had picked up these ideas, but they had in the last hour or so become an obsession. Now she was waiting. Waiting, not knowing what she was to expect.
Jonathan stood up, holding the book that had been lying open on his knee.
“Interesting,” he muttered, apparently referring to something he had read. “Would you mind if I went out for a stroll around the buildings?”
Brennan tensed. Nora, with her new, unaccountable sensitivity, felt this at once. So this whim of Jonathan’s—for such it seemed on the surface—was a part of whatever was being planned.
Her father said drowsily: “You could have come round the barn with me if you’d wanted a stroll, and done a bit of heaving on bolts, eh?” He snuffled spasmodically, and this time fell sound asleep.
“You’ll get wet, out in that,” said Mrs. Morris indignantly. “Better wait until you can see instead of splashing about this time of night. No sense in it.”
“I’ll be safe, I promise,” said Jonathan. “A little breath of night air—the raw wind of the great wild mountains, as it were.” He giggled excitedly. “Back in a minute—just steeping myself in the atmosphere, that’s all.”
Brennan watched him go.
Denis said scornfully: “Steeping himself in the atmosphere—that’s rich, if you like. Hope he gets well and truly steeped in it: soaked in it.” He picked up the book Jonathan had left on the chair. “‘The Gates of Fomoria’,” he quoted. “Where’s Fomoria?”
“Under the sea,” said Frank.
“What do you know about it?”
“I read about it once, somewhere, a long time ago. It’s the home of an evil race who came before there were any human beings—all the usual stuff, you know. The Fomorians were old gods who ruled a bleak, horrible world, until the powers of light came to overthrow them. I can’t remember the details—I expect there’ll be plenty in this book”—he tapped the black, wrinkled cover with one long, brown finger—“but I believe there was a colossal struggle, spiritual and physical, and the Fomorians were flung out of this world. Under the ocean, or something.” He grinned apologetically. “I’m not well up in my folklore, I’m afraid.”
“Better than we are,” said Denis. “It’s always the same: when I go to London and meet some pals, I have to show them—Londoners, mark you—where we can go to get a good meal.”
“As if you ever ate anywhere else but a canteen!”
“That’s enough, brother. Not anymore, anyway. We’re free now. And as I was about to say when I was so rudely interrupted, I never yet met a Welshman who knew any of his own fairy stories. I don’t myself: I used to like Hans Andersen.” He laughed immoderately, as though he had made a great joke.
“This is not exclusively a Welsh story,” said Brennan in a timid voice. “It’s ancient. The earliest Gaelic name for the gods who overthrew the dark rulers of the earth was Tuatha de Danann. But that’s only symbolical, really.”
He was silent again, unhappily withdrawn. Denis wagged his head. “How come that we get all this sort of talk? Last night Simon, today Jonathan—then you, Frank, and now you, Mr. Brennan. You make me feel bloomin’ ignorant.”
“It’s the weather,” said his mother calmly.
They marvelled at her.
“It’s
