Come with me this August Sunday through the wood from Glan-yr-Afon to Plas Berwyn—from Esther's home to Robert's. It is but a few hundred yards of shade and shine, a small, scarce trodden wood-path whose narrow, faint track the ripe grasses and the seeded ferns have wellnigh obliterated, flinging themselves across it in all the abandon of their unspeakable grace. The apples' round faces are reddening in the little Plas Berwyn orchard; the shorn fields slope barely, slantwise along the hill-side in their yellow stubble. For weeks and weeks the corn has been whitening under the sun's hard, veilless stare, and now at last it has fallen; the barley has bowed its bearded head beneath the sickle's stroke, and the oats their tremulous ringlets. They are all gathered in, and garnered in Mrs. Brandon's stout, well-thatched stacks; to thatch a stack is the one thing a Welshman can do.
It is an hour past noon, and the Reverend Evan Evans has released the bodies of his congregation from that white-washed, tumble-down old barn that he is pleased to call his church, and their minds from the tension necessary to take in the ill-strung-together, misapplied texts that he is pleased to call his sermon.
Plas Berwyn is a house of about the same size as Glan-yr-Afon, but the rooms do not look so large, they are so full of large things and large people. The dining-room is crowded up with a great mahogany table, a great mahogany sideboard, great mahogany chairs—inconvenient relics, fondly clung to by people who from a larger house have subsided into a smaller one—a sort of warranty of past respectability like the cottager's japanned tea-tray and brass candlesticks. There is an atmosphere of lumbersome age and gravity about the whole place; none of the fragrance and light and melody that youth, sheer youth, even divorced from any other attractive qualities, brings with it.
Of all the gods of the Greek mythology I will bring my votive crowns and my salt cakes to Bacchus. Not the bloated old gentleman striding drunk over a barrel, as we figure him, but Bacchus eternally young. What is there so worthy of adoration in this aging, wrinkling world as never ending youth?
Most people are cross and most people are unusually hungry on Sunday. I do not know why it is, but if you observe your acquaintance you will find it to be true. Hungry or not, the Brandons are at dinner, dining frugally and sparely on cold roast beef and cold apple tart. Nothing hot ever figures on the Brandons' Sabbath table, not even potatoes; indeed, unless they boiled themselves, and hopped out of the pot judiciously when they found themselves done, I do not see how they could, as on the Sabbath morn every living soul at Plas Berwyn, every reluctant scullion and recalcitrant housemaid, is trundled off to church, the house-door locked, and the key deposited in Mrs. Brandon's pocket.
All the Brandons hate dining in the middle of the day, consequently they always dine in the middle of the day on Sunday. Everybody knows that there are few things more distinctly unpleasant than to sit in the same room in which you have your meals; to live with the unending smell and steam of departed viands up your nose and eyes and ears: consequently the Brandons always sit in the dining-room on Sunday. Sunday is to them a sort of aggravated Ash Wednesday and Good Friday rolled into one. On Saturday night Miss Bessy Brandon swoops down upon all novels, travels, biographies, magazines, poetry books, that may be lying about, makes a clean sweep of them and consigns them to disgrace and a cupboard till the return of Monday releases them.
The Brandon family at the present moment have got their Sunday faces and their Sunday clothes on, and they misbecome most of them very sorely. Very few men look their best in their Go-to-Meeting clothes. For some unexplained reason, a black coat made by a country tailor shows its shortcomings more plainly than a coloured one. The garment that cases Bob's broad shoulders would draw tears from Mr. Poole's eyes, could he see it. As for Mrs. Brandon, she always has more or less of a Sunday face on—which I do not say in any dispraise, but merely to express a sober, steadfast face, unfurrowed by any violent gust of mirth or blast of anger. She is like Enid and her mother,
"clad all in faded silk,"
and on her breast she has a miniature of the departed Brandon, in Geneva gown and bands, about as big as a teacup, and with two small glutinous curls of the departed's hair at the back. It is so long ago since he died, that she must have forgotten all about him—what he was like, even; but she still wears his effigy, as an old inn continues to hang out the sign of the Saracen's Head, though it is centuries since ever a Saracen has been seen on the earth's face.
Opposite each other, like little bad mirrors of one another, sit the Misses Brandon, in melancholy little gowns of no particular stuff and no particular colour, and little wisps of thin, fine hair well down over their ears, and minute chignons on the napes of their necks—their little, bustless, waistless, hipless figures, long plaintive noses, and meek, dull eyes proclaiming them of that virgin band to whom St. Paul has awarded the palm of excellence. The Sunday literature is scattered about on the hard-bottomed chairs. "Stop the Leak" lies on the pit of its stomach, open at the spot where Miss Bessy abandoned it in favour of the cold beef; the "Saturday Night of the World," with its mouth open, and a paper-knife in it.
"Cut two or three good large slices, Bob, dear; they will be so nice for old John Owen," Mrs. Brandon is saying, in her benignant, cracked, old voice.
"We can leave them as we go by to church; Bob can carry them," says Miss Brandon, with authority.
Robert is silent.
"Bob does not like the idea of being seen carrying a basket; he thinks it would spoil his appearance."
"Hang the appearance!" says Bob, with an easy laugh. "If a man is a gentleman, it does not make him any the less a gentleman even if he were seen wheeling a perambulator down Regent Street; but, to tell the truth, I don't think I shall go to church this afternoon."
"Not go to church! Not go to church!! Not go to church!!!" in three different keys, rising from astonishment to horrified incredulity.
But seldom has Mr. Brandon missed attending divine service from the auspicious day, two and twenty years ago, when, at the tender age of three years, being, Eutychus-like, overcome with sleep, he fell down with much clamour from a high bench, and raised a mountainous red lump on his baby forehead, coming into contact with the hard pew floor:
"And his head, as he tumbled, went knicketty-knock,
Like a pebble in Carisbrook well."
Robert feels the weight of public opinion to be heavy, but he sticks like a man to what he said.
"Not to-day, mother, I think. Esther said she would be coming in by-and-by to say good-bye to you all, and, as it is her last day, I thought I might as well have as much as I could of her."
"What do you mean, Bob? Is the girl going to die to-night?" inquires Miss Brandon, perking up her little tow-coloured head sharply.
"God forbid!" he cries, with a hasty shudder; "don't suggest anything so frightful; but she is off to-morrow for a week or ten days on a visit to some friends."
"Going away without mentioning a word about it!"
"Going away now!"
These two sentences shoot out with simultaneous velocity from two mouths.
"Are you surprised at her not telling us where she is going? Does she ever tell us anything? Does she make us her confidants!" subjoins Miss Bessy, with mild spite.
Spite is permissible on the Sabbath, though hot potatoes and novels are not.
"She did not know herself till yesterday," says Bob, briefly, cutting away rather viciously at the beef.
"But who are these sudden friends that