He dared scarcely think of the woman. He was afraid. Only all
the time he was aware of her presence not far off, he lived in
her. But he dared not know her, even acquaint himself with her
by thinking of her.
One day he met her walking along the road with her little
girl. It was a child with a face like a bud of apple-blossom,
and glistening fair hair like thistle-down sticking out in
straight, wild, flamy pieces, and very dark eyes. The child
clung jealously to her mother's side when he looked at her,
staring with resentful black eyes. But the mother glanced at him
again, almost vacantly. And the very vacancy of her look
inflamed him. She had wide grey-brown eyes with very dark,
fathomless pupils. He felt the fine flame running under his
skin, as if all his veins had caught fire on the surface. And he
went on walking without knowledge.
It was coming, he knew, his fate. The world was submitting to
its transformation. He made no move: it would come, what would
come.
When his sister Effie came to the Marsh for a week, he went
with her for once to church. In the tiny place, with its mere
dozen pews, he sat not far from the stranger. There was a
fineness about her, a poignancy about the way she sat and held
her head lifted. She was strange, from far off, yet so intimate.
She was from far away, a presence, so close to his soul. She was
not really there, sitting in Cossethay church beside her little
girl. She was not living the apparent life of her days. She
belonged to somewhere else. He felt it poignantly, as something
real and natural. But a pang of fear for his own concrete life,
that was only Cossethay, hurt him, and gave him misgiving.
Her thick dark brows almost met above her irregular nose, she
had a wide, rather thick mouth. But her face was lifted to
another world of life: not to heaven or death: but to some place
where she still lived, in spite of her body's absence.
The child beside her watched everything with wide, black
eyes. She had an odd little defiant look, her little red mouth
was pinched shut. She seemed to be jealously guarding something,
to be always on the alert for defence. She met Brangwen's near,
vacant, intimate gaze, and a palpitating hostility, almost like
a flame of pain, came into the wide, over-conscious dark
eyes.
The old clergyman droned on, Cossethay sat unmoved as usual.
And there was the foreign woman with a foreign air about her,
inviolate, and the strange child, also foreign, jealously
guarding something.