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.
When the service was over, he walked in the way of another existence out of the church. As he went down the churchpath with his sister, behind the woman and child, the little girl suddenly broke from her mother’s hand, and slipped back with quick, almost invisible movement, and was picking at something almost under Brangwen’s feet. Her tiny fingers were fine and quick, but they missed the red button.
“Have you found something?” said Brangwen to her.
And he also stooped for the button. But she had got it, and she stood back with it pressed against her little coat, her black eyes flaring at him, as if to forbid him to notice her. Then, having silenced him, she turned with a swift “Mother-,” and was gone down the path.
The mother had stood watching impassive, looking not at the child, but at Brangwen. He became aware of the woman looking at him, standing there isolated yet for him dominant in her foreign existence.
He did not know what to do, and turned to his sister. But the wide grey eyes, almost vacant yet so moving, held him beyond himself.
“Mother, I may have it, mayn’t I?” came the child’s proud, silvery tones. “Mother”-she seemed always to be calling her mother to remember her-“mother”-and she had nothing to continue now her mother had replied “Yes, my child.” But, with ready invention, the child stumbled and ran on, “What are those people’s names?”
Brangwen heard the abstract:
“I don’t know, dear.”
He went on down the road as if he were not living inside himself, but somewhere outside.
“Who was that person?” his sister Effie asked.
“I couldn’t tell you,” he answered unknowing.
“She’s somebody very funny,” said Effie, almost in condemnation. “That child’s like one bewitched.”
“Bewitched-how bewitched?” he repeated.
“You can see for yourself. The mother’s plain, I must say-but the child is like a changeling. She’d be about thirty-five.”
But he took no notice. His sister talked on.
“There’s your woman for you,” she continued. “You’d better marry her.” But still he took no notice. Things were as they were.
Another day, at tea-time, as he sat alone at table, there came a knock at the front door. It startled him like a portent. No one ever knocked at the front door. He rose and began slotting back the bolts, turning the big key. When he had opened the door, the strange woman stood on the threshold.
“Can you give me a pound of butter?” she asked, in a curious detached way of one speaking a foreign language.
He tried to attend to her question. She was looking at him questioningly. But underneath the question, what was there, in her very standing motionless, which affected him?
He stepped aside and she at once entered the house, as if the door had been opened to admit her. That startled him. It was the custom for everybody to wait on the doorstep till asked inside. He went into the kitchen and she followed.
His tea-things were spread on the scrubbed deal table, a big fire was burning, a dog rose from the hearth and went to her. She stood motionless just inside the kitchen.
“Tilly,” he called loudly, “have we got any butter?”
The stranger stood there like a silence in her black cloak.
“Eh?” came the shrill cry from the distance.
He shouted his question again.
“We’ve got what’s on t’ table,” answered Tilly’s shrill voice out of the dairy.
Brangwen looked at the table. There was a large pat of butter on a plate, almost a pound. It was round, and stamped with acorns and oak-leaves.
“Can’t you come when you’re wanted?” he shouted.
“Why, what d’you want?” Tilly protested, as she came peeking inquisitively through the other door.
She saw the strange woman, stared at her with cross-eyes, but said nothing.
“Haven’t we any butter?” asked Brangwen again, impatiently, as if he could command some by his question.
“I tell you there’s what’s on t’ table,” said Tilly, impatient that she was unable to create any to his demand. “We haven’t a morsel besides.”
There was a moment’s silence.
The stranger spoke, in her curiously distinct, detached manner of one who must think her speech first.
“Oh, then thank you very much. I am sorry that I have come to trouble you.”
She could not understand the entire lack of manners, was slightly puzzled. Any politeness would have made the situation quite impersonal. But here it was a case of wills in confusion. Brangwen flushed at her polite speech. Still he did not let her go.
“Get summat an’ wrap that up for her,” he said to Tilly, looking at the butter on the table.
And taking a clean knife, he cut off that side of the butter where it was touched.
His speech, the “for her”, penetrated slowly into the foreign woman and angered Tilly.
“Vicar has his butter fra Brown’s by rights,” said the insuppressible servant-woman. “We s’ll be churnin’ to-morrow mornin’ first thing.”
“Yes”-the long-drawn foreign