The Rainbow

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.