There was a rather uneasy friendship between him and one of
the young Hardys at the Hall. The two households were different,
yet the young men met on shy terms of equality.
It was young Tom Brangwen, with his dark lashes and beautiful
colouring, his soft, inscrutable nature, his strange repose and
his informed air, added to his position in London, who seemed to
emphasize the superior foreign element in the Marsh. When he
appeared, perfectly dressed, as if soft and affable, and yet
quite removed from everybody, he created an uneasiness in
people, he was reserved in the minds of the Cossethay and
Ilkeston acquaintances to a different, remote world.
He and his mother had a kind of affinity. The affection
between them was of a mute, distant character, but radical. His
father was always uneasy and slightly deferential to his eldest
son. Tom also formed the link that kept the Marsh in real
connection with the Skrebenskys, now quite important people in
their own district.
So a change in tone came over the Marsh. Tom Brangwen the
father, as he grew older, seemed to mature into a
gentleman-farmer. His figure lent itself: burly and handsome.
His face remained fresh and his blue eyes as full of light, his
thick hair and beard had turned gradually to a silky whiteness.
It was his custom to laugh a great deal, in his acquiescent,
wilful manner. Things had puzzled him very much, so he had taken
the line of easy, good-humoured acceptance. He was not
responsible for the frame of things. Yet he was afraid of the
unknown in life.
He was fairly well-off. His wife was there with him, a
different being from himself, yet somewhere vitally connected
with him:--who was he to understand where and how? His two
sons were gentlemen. They were men distinct from himself, they
had separate beings of their own, yet they were connected with
himself. It was all adventurous and puzzling. Yet one remained
vital within one's own existence, whatever the off-shoots.
So, handsome and puzzled, he laughed and stuck to himself as
the only thing he could stick to. His youngness and the wonder
remained almost the same in him. He became indolent, he
developed a luxuriant ease. Fred did most of the farm-work, the
father saw to the more important transactions. He drove a good
mare, and sometimes he rode his cob. He drank in the hotels and
the inns with better-class farmers and proprietors, he had
well-to-do acquaintances among men. But one class suited him no
better than another.
His wife, as ever, had no acquaintances. Her hair was
threaded now with grey, her face grew older in form without
changing in expression. She seemed the same as when she had come
to the Marsh twenty-five years ago, save that her health was
more fragile. She seemed always to haunt the Marsh rather than
to live there. She was never part of the life. Something she
represented was alien there, she remained a stranger within the
gates, in some ways fixed and impervious, in some ways curiously
refining. She caused the separateness and individuality of all
the Marsh inmates, the friability of the household.