The Rainbow

"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.