Domestic fiction; Family -- England -- Midlands -- Fiction; Midlands (England) -- Fiction
Will Brangwen rose uncertainly. He had golden-brown, quick, steady
eyes, like a bird’s, like a hawk’s, which cannot look afraid.
“Your Cousin Will ’ll come with you,” said the father.
Anna glanced at the strange youth again. She felt him waiting there for
her to notice him. He was hovering on the edge of her consciousness,
ready to come in. She did not want to look at him. She was antagonistic
to him.
She waited without speaking. Her cousin took his hat and joined her. It
was summer outside. Her brother Fred was plucking a sprig of flowery
currant to put in his coat, from the bush at the angle of the house.
She took no notice. Her cousin followed just behind her.
They were on the high road. She was aware of a strangeness in her
being. It made her uncertain. She caught sight of the flowering currant
in her brother’s buttonhole.
“Oh, our Fred,” she cried. “Don’t wear that stuff to go to church.”
Fred looked down protectively at the pink adornment on his breast.
“Why, I like it,” he said.
“Then you’re the only one who does, I’m sure,” she said.
And she turned to her cousin.
“Do _you_ like the smell of it?” she asked.
He was there beside her, tall and uncouth and yet self-possessed. It
excited her.
“I can’t say whether I do or not,” he replied.
“Give it here, Fred, don’t have it smelling in church,” she said to the
little boy, her page.
Her fair, small brother handed her the flower dutifully. She sniffed it
and gave it without a word to her cousin, for his judgment. He smelled
the dangling flower curiously.
“It’s a funny smell,” he said.
And suddenly she laughed, and a quick light came on all their faces,
there was a blithe trip in the small boy’s walk.
The bells were ringing, they were going up the summery hill in their
Sunday clothes. Anna was very fine in a silk frock of brown and white
stripes, tight along the arms and the body, bunched up very elegantly
behind the skirt. There was something of the cavalier about Will
Brangwen, and he was well dressed.
He walked along with the sprig of currant-blossom dangling between his
fingers, and none of them spoke. The sun shone brightly on little
showers of buttercup down the bank, in the fields the fool’s-parsley
was foamy, held very high and proud above a number of flowers that
flitted in the greenish twilight of the mowing-grass below.
They reached the church. Fred led the way to the pew, followed by the
cousin, then Anna. She felt very conspicuous and important. Somehow,
this young man gave her away to other people. He stood aside and let
her pass to her place, then sat next to her. It was a curious
sensation, to sit next to him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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