"Where are you going to, then?" asked the younger
brother.
"I'm going down to Wirksworth."
"You've got friends down there, I'm told."
"Yes."
"I s'll have to be lookin' in when I'm down that road."
"You please yourself."
Tom Brangwen was so curious about the woman that the next
time he was in Wirksworth he asked for her house.
He found a beautiful cottage on the steep side of a hill,
looking clean over the town, that lay in the bottom of the
basin, and away at the old quarries on the opposite side of the
space. Mrs. Forbes was in the garden. She was a tall woman with
white hair. She came up the path taking off her thick gloves,
laying down her shears. It was autumn. She wore a wide-brimmed
hat.
Brangwen blushed to the roots of his hair, and did not know
what to say.
"I thought I might look in," he said, "knowing you were
friends of my brother's. I had to come to Wirksworth."
She saw at once that he was a Brangwen.
"Will you come in?" she said. "My father is lying down."
She took him into a drawing-room, full of books, with a piano
and a violin-stand. And they talked, she simply and easily. She
was full of dignity. The room was of a kind Brangwen had never
known; the atmosphere seemed open and spacious, like a
mountain-top to him.
"Does my brother like reading?" he asked.
"Some things. He has been reading Herbert Spencer. And we
read Browning sometimes."
Brangwen was full of admiration, deep thrilling, almost
reverential admiration. He looked at her with lit-up eyes when
she said, "we read". At last he burst out, looking round the
room: "I didn't know our Alfred was this way inclined."
"He is quite an unusual man."
He looked at her in amazement. She evidently had a new idea
of his brother: she evidently appreciated him. He looked again
at the woman. She was about forty, straight, rather hard, a
curious, separate creature. Himself, he was not in love with
her, there was something chilling about her. But he was filled
with boundless admiration.
At tea-time he was introduced to her father, an invalid who
had to be helped about, but who was ruddy and well-favoured,
with snowy hair and watery blue eyes, and a courtly naive manner
that again was new and strange to Brangwen, so suave, so merry,
so innocent.
His brother was this woman's lover! It was too amazing.
Brangwen went home despising himself for his own poor way of
life. He was a clod-hopper and a boor, dull, stuck in the mud.
More than ever he wanted to clamber out, to this visionary
polite world.
He was well off. He was as well off as Alfred, who could not
have above six hundred a year, all told. He himself made about
four hundred, and could make more. His investments got better
every day. Why did he not do something? His wife was a lady
also.