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Gone to Earth

by Mary Webb · English · Gutenberg #7055 · 475,817 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Gone to Earth

Author: Mary Webb


        
Release date: December 1, 2004 [eBook #7055]
                Most recently updated: December 30, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7055

Credits: This eBook was produced by Suzanne L. Shell, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GONE TO EARTH ***




This eBook was produced by Suzanne L. Shell, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team





GONE TO EARTH




by Mary Webb

1917





[Dedication]
_To him whose presence is home._




Chapter 1


Small feckless clouds were hurried across the vast untroubled
sky--shepherdless, futile, imponderable--and were torn to fragments
on the fangs of the mountains, so ending their ephemeral adventures
with nothing of their fugitive existence left but a few tears.

It was cold in the Callow--a spinney of silver birches and larches that
topped a round hill. A purple mist hinted of buds in the tree-tops, and
a fainter purple haunted the vistas between the silver and brown boles.

Only the crudeness of youth was here as yet, and not its triumph--only
the sharp calyx-point, the pricking tip of the bud, like spears, and
not the paten of the leaf, the chalice of the flower.

For as yet spring had no flight, no song, but went like a half-fledged
bird, hopping tentatively through the undergrowth. The bright springing
mercury that carpeted the open spaces had only just hung out its pale
flowers, and honeysuckle leaves were still tongues of green fire.
Between the larch boles and under the thickets of honeysuckle and
blackberry came a tawny silent form, wearing with the calm dignity of
woodland creatures a beauty of eye and limb, a brilliance of tint, that
few-women could have worn without self-consciousness. Clear-eyed,
lithe, it stood for a moment in the full sunlight--a year-old fox,
round-headed and velvet-footed. Then it slid into the shadows. A shrill
whistle came from the interior of the wood, and the fox bounded towards
it.

'Where you bin? You'm stray and lose yourself, certain sure!' said a
girl's voice, chidingly motherly. 'And if you'm alost, I'm alost; so
come you whome. The sun's undering, and there's bones for supper!'

With that she took to her heels, the little fox after her, racing down
the Callow in the cold level light till they came to the Woodus's
cottage.

Hazel Woodus, to whom the fox belonged, had always lived at the Callow.
There her mother, a Welsh gipsy, had born her in bitter rebellion,
hating marriage and a settled life and Abel Woodus as a wild cat hates
a cage. She was a rover, born for the artist's joy and sorrow, and her
spirit found no relief for its emotions; for it was dumb. To the linnet
its flight, to the thrush its song; but she had neither flight nor
song. Yet the tongueless thrush is a thrush still, and has golden music
in its heart. The caged linnet may sit moping, but her soul knows the
dip and rise of flight on an everlasting May morning.

All the things she felt and could not say, all the stored honey, the
black hatred, the wistful homesickness for the unfenced wild--all that
other women would have put into their prayers, she gave to Hazel. The
whole force of her wayward heart flowed into the softly beating heart
of her baby. It was as if she passionately flung the life she did not
value into the arms of her child.

When Hazel was fourteen she died, leaving her treasure--an old, dirty,
partially illegible manuscript-book of spells and charms and other
gipsy lore--to her daughter.

Her one request was that she might be buried in the Callow under the
yellow larch needles, and not in a churchyard. Abel Woodus did as she
asked, and was regarded askance by most of the community for not
burying her in Chrissen-ground. But this did not trouble him. He had
his harp still, and while he had that he needed no other friend. It had
been his absorption in his music that had prevented him understanding
his wife, and in the early days of their marriage she had been wildly
jealous of the tall gilt harp with its faded felt cover that stood in
the corner of the living-room. Then her jealousy changed to love of it,
and her one desire was to be able to draw music from its plaintive
strings. She could never master even the rudiments of music, but she
would sit on rainy evenings when Abel was away and run her thin hands
over the strings with a despairing passion of grieving love. Yet she
could not bear to hear Abel play. Just as some childless women with all
their accumulated stores of love cannot bear to see a mother with her
child, so Maray Woodus, with her sealed genius, her incapacity for
expression, could not bear to hear the easy self-expression of another.
For Abel was in his way a master of his art; he had dark places in his
soul, and that is the very core of art and its substance. He had the
lissom hands and cheerful self-absorption that bring success.

He had met Maray at an Eisteddfod that had been held in days gone by on
a hill five miles from the Callow, called God's Little Mountain, and
crowned by a chapel. She had listened, swaying and weeping to the surge
and lament of his harp, and when he won the harper's prize and laid it
in her lap she had consented to be married in the chapel at the end of
the Eisteddfod week. That was nineteen years ago, and she was fled like
the leaves and the birds of departed summers; but God's Little Mountain
still towered as darkly to the eastward; the wind still leapt sheer
from the chapel to the young larches of the Callow; nothing had changed
at all; only one more young, anxious, eager creature had come into the
towering, subluminous scheme of things. Hazel had her mother's eyes,
strange, fawn-coloured eyes like water, and in the large clear irises
were tawny flecks. In their shy honesty they were akin to the little
fox's. Her hair, too, of a richer colour than her father's, was tawny
and foxlike, and her ways were graceful and covert as a wild
creature's.

She stood in the lane above the cottage, which nestled below with its
roof on a level with the hedge-roots, and watched the sun dip. The red
light from the west stained her torn old dress, her thin face, her
eyes, till she seemed to be dipped in blood. The fox, wistfulness in
her expression and the consciousness of coming supper in her mind,
gazed obediently where her mistress gazed, and was touched with the
same fierce beauty. They stood there fronting the crimson pools over
the far hills, two small sentient things facing destiny with pathetic
courage; they had, in the chill evening on the lonely hill, a look as
of those predestined to grief, almost an air of martyrdom.

The small clouds that went westward took each in its turn the
prevailing colour, and vanished, dipped in blood.

From the cottage, as Hazel went down the path, came the faint thrumming
of the harp, changing as she reached the door to the air of 'The Ash
Grove.' The cottage was very low, one-storied, and roofed with red
corrugated iron. The three small windows had frames coloured with
washing-blue and frills of crimson cotton within. There seemed scarcely
room for even Hazel's small figure. The house was little larger than a
good pigsty, and only the trail of smoke from its squat chimney showed
that humanity dwelt there.

Hazel gave Foxy her supper and put her to bed in the old washtub where
she slept. Then she went into the cottage with an armful of logs from
the wood heap. She threw them on the open fire.

'I'm a-cold,' she said; 'the rain's cleared, and there'll be a duck's
frost to-night.'

Abel looked up absently, humming the air he intended to play next.

'I bin in the Callow, and I've gotten a primmyrose,' continued Hazel,
accustomed to his ways, and not discouraged. 'And I got a bit of
blackthorn, white as a lady.'

Abel was well on in 'Ap Jenkyn' by now.

Hazel moved about, seeing to supper, for she was as hungry as Foxy,
talking all the time in her rather shrilly sweet voice, while she
dumped the cracked cups and the loaf and margarine on the bare table.
The kettle was not boiling, so she threw some bacon-grease on the fire,
and a great tongue of flame sprang out and licked at Abel's beard. He
raised a hand to it, continuing to play with the other.

Hazel laughed.

'You be fair comic-struck,' she said.

She always spoke in this tone of easy comradeship; they got on very
well; they were so entirely indifferent to each other. There was
nothing filial about her or parental about him. Neither did they ever
evince the least affection for each other.

He struck up 'It's a fine hunting day.'

'Oh! shut thy row with that drodsome thing!' said Hazel with sudden
passion. 'Look'ee! I unna bide in if you go on.'

'Ur?' queried Abel dreamily.

'Play summat else!' said Hazel, 'not that; I dunna like it.'

'You be a queer girl, 'Azel,' said Abel, coming out of his abstraction.
'But I dunna mind playing "Why do the People?" instead; it's just as
heartening.'

'Canna you stop meddling wi' the music and come to supper?' asked
Hazel. The harp was always called 'the music,' just as Abel's
mouth-organ was 'the little music.'

She reached down the flitch to cut some bacon off, and her dress,
already torn, ripped from shoulder to waist.

'If you dunna take needle to that, you'll be mother-naked afore a
week's out,' said Abel indifferently.

'I mun get a new un,' said Hazel. 'It unna mend. I'll go to town
to-morrow.'

'Shall you bide with yer auntie the night over?'

'Ah.'

'I shanna look for your face till I see your shadow, then. You can
bring a tuthree wreath-frames. There's old Samson at the Yeath unna
last long; they'll want a wreath made.'

Hazel sat and considered her new dress. She never had a new one till
the old one fell off her back, and then she usually got a second-hand
one, as a shilling or two would buy only material if new, but would
stretch to a ready-made if second-hand.

'Foxy'd like me to get a green velvet,' said Hazel. She always
expressed her intense desires, which were few, in this formula. It was
her unconscious protest against the lovelessness of her life. She put
the blackthorn in water and contemplated its whiteness with delight;
but it had not occurred to her that she might herself, with a little
trouble, be as sweet and fresh as its blossom. The spiritualization of
sex would be needed before such things would occur to her. At present
she was sexless as a leaf. They sat by the fire till it went out; then
they went to bed, not troubling to say good-night.

In the middle of the night Foxy woke. The moon filled her kennel-mouth
like a door, and the light shone in her eyes. This frightened her--so
large a lantern in an unseen hand, held so purposefully before the tiny
home of one defenceless little creature. She barked sharply. Hazel
awoke promptly, as a mother at her child's cry. She ran straight out
with her bare feet into the fierce moonlight.

'What ails you?' she whispered. 'What ails you, little un?'

The wind stalked through the Callow, and the Callow moaned. A moan came
also from the plain, and black shapes moved there as the clouds drove
onwards.

'Maybe they're out,' muttered Hazel. 'Maybe the black meet's set for
to-night and she's scented the jeath pack.' She looked about nervously.
'I can see summat driving dark o'er the pastures yonder; they'm abroad,
surely.'

She hurried Foxy into the cottage and bolted the door.

'There!' she said. 'Now you lie good and quiet in the corner, and the
death pack shanna get you.'

It was said that the death pack, phantom hounds of a bad squire,
whose gross body had been long since put to sweeter uses than any
he put it to in life--changed into the clear-eyed daisy and the ardent
pimpernel--scoured the country on dark stormy nights. Harm was for the
house past which it streamed, death for those that heard it give tongue.

This was the legend, and Hazel believed it implicitly. When she had
found Foxy half dead outside her deserted earth, she had been quite
sure that it was the death pack that had made away with Foxy's mother.
She connected it also with her own mother's death. Hounds symbolized
everything she hated, everything that was not young, wild and happy.
She identified herself with Foxy, and so with all things hunted and
snared and destroyed.

Night, shadow, loud winds, winter--these were inimical; with these came
the death pack, stealthy and untiring, following for ever the trail of
the defenceless. Sunlight, soft airs, bright colours, kindness--these
were beneficent havens to flee into. Such was the essence of her creed,
the only creed she held, and it lay darkly in her heart, never
expressed even to herself. But when she ran into the night to comfort
the little fox, she was living up to her faith as few do; when she
gathered flowers and lay in the sun, she was dwelling in a mystical
atmosphere as vivid as that of the saints; when she recoiled from
cruelty, she was trampling evil underfoot, perhaps more surely than
those great divines who destroyed one another in their zeal for their
Maker.




Chapter 2


At six the next morning they had breakfast. Abel was busy making a hive
for the next summer's swarm. When he made a coffin, he always used up
the bits thus. A large coffin did not leave very much; but sometimes
there were small ones, and then he made splendid hives. The white
township on the south side of the lilac hedge increased as slowly and
unceasingly as the green township around the distant churchyard. In
summer the garden was loud with bees, and the cottage was full of them
at swarming-time. Later it was littered with honey-sections; honey
dripped from the table, and pieces of broken comb lay on the floor and
were contentedly eaten by Foxy.

Whenever an order for a coffin came, Hazel went to tell the bees who
was dead. Her father thought this unnecessary. It was only for folks
that died in the house, he said. But he had himself told the bees when
his wife died. He had gone out on that vivid June morning to his hives,
and had stood watching the lines of bees fetching water, their shadows
going and coming on the clean white boards. Then he had stooped and
said with a curious confidential indifference, 'Maray's jead.' He had
put his ear to the hive and listened to the deep, solemn murmur within;
but it was the murmur of the future, and not of the past, the
preoccupation with life, not with death, that filled the pale galleries
within. Today the eighteen hives lay under their winter covering, and
the eager creatures within slept. Only one or two strayed sometimes to
the early arabis, desultory and sad, driven home again by the frosty
air to await the purple times of honey. The happiest days of Abel's
life were those when he sat like a bard before the seething hives and
harped to the muffled roar of sound that came from within.

All his means of livelihood were joys to him. He had the art of
perpetual happiness in this, that he could earn as much as he needed by
doing the work he loved. He played at flower shows and country dances,
revivals and weddings. He sold his honey, and sometimes his bees. He
delighted in wreath-making, gardening, and carpentering, and always in
the background was his music--some new air to try on the gilded harp,
some new chord or turn to master. The garden was almost big enough, and
quite beautiful enough, for that of a mansion. In the summer white
lilies haunted it, standing out in the dusk with their demure cajolery,
looking, as Hazel said, like ghosses. Goldenrod foamed round the
cottage, deeply embowering it, and lavender made a grey mist beside the
red quarries of the path. Then Hazel sat like a queen in a regalia of
flowers, eating the piece of bread and honey that made her dinner, and
covering her face with lily pollen.

Now, there were no flowers in the garden; only the yew-tree by the gate
that hung her waxen blossom along the undersides of the branches. Hazel
hated the look of the frozen garden; she had an almost unnaturally
intense craving for everything rich, vivid, and vital. She was all
these things herself, as she communed with Foxy before starting. She
had wound her hair round her head in a large plait and her old black
hat made the colour richer.

'You'm nigh on thirty miles to go there and back, unless you get a
lift,' said Abel.

'A lift? I dunna want never no lifts!' said Hazel scornfully.

'You'm as good a walker as John of No Man's Parish,' replied Abel, 'and
he walks for ever, so they do say.'

As Hazel set forth in the sharp, fresh morning, the Callow shone with
radiant brown and silver, and no presage moved within it of the snow
that would hurtle upon it from mountains of cloud all night.

When Hazel had chosen her dress--a peacock blue serge--and had put it
on there and then in the back of the shop, curtained off for this
purpose, she went to her aunt's.

Her cousin Albert regarded her with a startled look. He was in a
margarine shop, and spent his days explaining that Margarine was as
good as butter. But, looking at Hazel, he felt that here _was_
butter--something that needed no apology, and created its own demand.
The bright blue made her so radiant that her aunt shook her head.

'You take after your ma, 'Azel,' she said. Her tone was irritated.

'I be glad.'

Her aunt sniffed.

'You ought to be as glad to take after one parent as another, if you
were jutiful,' she said.

'I dunna want to take after anybody but myself.' Hazel flushed
indignantly.

'Well! we _are_ conceited!' exclaimed her aunt. 'Albert, don't
give 'Azel all the liver and bacon. I s'pose your mother can eat as
well as schoolgirls?'

Albert was gazing at Hazel so animatedly, so obviously approving of all
she said, that her aunt was very much ruffled.

'No wonder you only want to be like yourself,' he said. 'Jam! my word,
Hazel, you're jam!'

'Albert!' cried his mother raspingly, with a pathetic note of pleading,
'haven't I always taught you to say preserve?' She was not pleading
against the inelegant word, but against Hazel.

When Albert went back to the shop, Hazel helped her aunt to wash up.
All the time she was doing this, with unusual care, and cleaning the
knives--a thing she hated--she was waiting anxiously for the expected
invitation to stay the night. She longed for it as the righteous long
for the damnation of their enemies. She never paid a visit except here,
and to her it was a wild excitement. The gas-stove, the pretty china,
the rose-patterned wall-paper, were all strange and marvellous as a
fairy-tale. At home there was no paper, no lath and plaster, only the
bare bricks, and the ceiling was of bulging sailcloth hung under the
rafters.

Now to all these was added the new delight of Albert's admiring gaze--an
alert, live gaze, a thing hitherto unknown to Albert. Perhaps, if she
stayed, Albert would take her out for the evening. She would see the
streets of the town in the magic of lights. She would walk out in her
new dress with a real young man--a young man who possessed a gilt
watch-chain. The suspense, as the wintry afternoon drew in, became
almost intolerable. Still her aunt did not speak. The sitting-room
looked so cosy when tea was laid; the firelight played over the cups;
her aunt drew the curtains. On one side there was joy, warmth--all that
she could desire; on the other, a forlorn walk in the dark. She had
left it until so late that her heart shook at the idea of the many
miles she must cover alone if her aunt did not ask her.

Her aunt knew what was going on in Hazel's mind, and smiled grimly at
Hazel's unusual meekness. She took the opportunity of administering a
few hometruths.

'You look like an actress,' she said.

'Do I, auntie?'

'Yes. It's a disgrace, the way you look. You quite draw men's eyes.'

'It's nice to draw men's eyes, inna it, auntie?'

'Nice! Hazel, I should like to box your ears! You naughty girl! You'll
go wrong one of these days.'

'What for will I, auntie?'

'Some day you'll get spoke to!' She said the last words in a hollow
whisper. 'And after that, as you won't say and do what a good girl
would, you'll get picked up.'

'I'd like to see anyone pick me up!' said Hazel indignantly. 'I'd
kick!'

'Oh! how unladylike! I didn't mean really picked up! I meant
allegorically--like in the Bible.'

'Oh! only like in the Bible,' said Hazel disappointedly. 'I thought you
meant summat _real_.'

'Oh! You'll bring down my grey hairs,' wailed Mrs. Prowde.

An actress was bad, but an infidel! 'That I should live to hear it--in
my own villa, with my own soda cake on the cake-dish--and my own son,'
she added dramatically, as Albert entered, 'coming in to have his
God-fearing heart broken!'

This embarrassed Albert, for it was true, though the cause assigned was
not.

'What's Hazel been up to?' he queried.

The affection beneath his heavy pleasantry strengthened his mother in
her resolve that Hazel should not stay the night.

'There's a magic-lantern lecture on tonight, Hazel,' he said. 'Like to
come?'

'Ah! I should that.'

'You can't walk home at that time of night,' said Mrs. Prowde. 'In
fact, you ought to start now.'

'But Hazel's staying the night, mother, surely?'

'Hazel must get back to her father.'

'But, mother, there's the spare-room.'

'The spare-room's being spring-cleaned.'

Albert plunged; he was desperate and forgetful of propriety.

'I can sleep on this sofa,' he said. 'She can have my room.'

'Hazel can't have your room. It's not suitable.'

'Well, let her share yours, then.'

Mrs. Prowde played her trump-card. 'Little I thought,' she said, 'when
your dear father went, that before three years had passed you'd be so
forgetful of my comfort (and his memory) as to suggest such a thing. As
long as I live, my room's mine. When I'm gone,' she concluded, knocking
down her adversary with her superior weight of years--'when I'm gone
(and the sooner the better for you, no doubt), you can put her in my
room and yourself, too.'

When she had said this she was horrified at herself. What an improper
thing to say! Even anger and jealousy did not excuse impropriety,
though they excused any amount of unkindness.

But at this Hazel cried out in her turn:

'That he never will!' The fierce egoism of the consciously weak flamed
up in her. 'I keep myself to myself,' she finished.

'If such things come to pass, mother,' Albert said, and his eyes looked
suddenly vivid, so that Hazel clapped her hands and said, 'Yer lamps
are lit! Yer lamps are lit!' and broke into peals of laughter. 'If such
a thing comes to pass,' laboured Albert, 'they'll come decent, that is,
they won't be spoken of.'

He voiced his own and his mother's creed.

At this point the argument ended, because Albert had to go back after
tea to finish some work. As he stamped innumerable swans on the
yielding material, he never doubted that his mother had also yielded.
He forgot that life had to be shaped with an axe till the chips fly.

As soon as he had gone, Mrs. Prowde shut the door on Hazel hastily, for
fear the weather might bring relenting. She had other views for Albert.
In after years, when the consequences of her action had become things
of the past, she always spoke of how she had done her best with Hazel.
She never dreamed that she, by her selfishness that night, had herself
set Hazel's feet in the dark and winding path that she must tread from
that night onward to its hidden, shadowy ending. Mrs. Prowde, through
her many contented years, blamed in turn Hazel, Abel, Albert, the
devil, and (only tacitly and, as it were, in secret from herself) God.
If there is any purgatorial fire of remorse for the hard and selfish
natures that crucify love, it must burn elsewhere. It does not touch
them in this world. They go as the three children went, in their coats,
their hosen, and their hats all complete, nor does the smell of fire
pass over them.

Hazel felt that heaven was closed--locked and barred. She could see the
golden light stream through its gates. She could hear the songs of
joy--joy unattained and therefore immortal; she could see the bright
figures of her dreams go to and fro. But heaven was shut.

The wind ran up and down the narrow streets like a lost dog, whimpering.
Hazel hurried on, for it was already twilight, and though she was not
afraid of the Callow and the fields at night, she was afraid of the
high roads. For the Callow was home, but the roads were the wide world.
On the fringe of the town she saw lights in the bedroom windows of
prosperous houses.

'My! they go to their beds early,' she thought, not having heard of
dressing for dinner. It made her feel more lonely that people should
be going to bed. From other houses music floated, or the savoury smell
of dinner. As she passed the last lamp-post she began to cry, feeling
like a lost and helpless little animal. Her new dress was forgotten;
the wreath-frames would not fit under her arm, and caused a continual
minor discomfort, and the Callow seemed to be half across the country.
She heard a trapped rabbit screaming somewhere, a thin anguished cry
that she could not ignore. This delayed her a good deal, and in letting
it out she got a large bloodstain on her dress. She cried again at this.
The pain of a blister, unnoticed in the morning journey, now made itself
felt; she tried walking without her boots, but the ground was cold and
hard.

The icy, driving wind leapt across the plain like a horseman with a
long sword, and stealthily in its track came the melancholy whisper of
snow.

When this began, Hazel was in the open, half-way to Wolfbatch. She sat
down on the step of a stile, and sighed with relief at the ease it gave
her foot. Then, far off she heard the sharp miniature sound, very neat
and staccato, of a horse galloping. She held her breath to hear if it
would turn down a by-road, but it came on. It came on, and grew in
volume and in meaning, became almost ominous in the frozen silence.
Hazel rose and stood in the fitful moonlight. She felt that the
approaching hoof-beats were for her. They were the one sound in a dead
world, and she nearly cried out at the thought of their dying in the
distance. They must not; they should not.

'Maybe it's a farmer and his missus as have drove a good bargain, and
the girl told to get supper fire-hot agen they come. Maybe they'll give
me a lift! Maybe they'll say "Bide the night over?"'

She knew it was only a foolish dream; nevertheless, she stood well in
the light, a slim, brow-beaten figure, the colour of her dress wan in
the grey world.

A trap came swaying round the corner. Hazel cried out beseechingly, and
the driver pulled the horse up short.

'I must be blind drunk,' he soliloquized, 'seeing ghosts!'

'Oh, please sir!' Hazel could say no more, for the tears that
companionship unfroze.

The man peered at her.

'What in hell are you doing here?' he asked.

'Walking home-along. She wouldna let me bide the night over. And my
foot's blistered in a balloon and blood on my dress.' She choked with
sobs.

'What's your name?'

'Hazel.'

'What else?'

With an instinct of self-protection she refused to tell her surname.

'Well, mine's Reddin,' he said crossly; 'and why you're so dark about
yours I don't know, but up you get, anyway.'

The sun came out in Hazel's face. He helped her up, she was so stiff
with cold.

'Your arm,' she said in a low tremulous voice, when he had put the rug
round her--'your arm pulling me in be like the Sunday-school tale of
Jesus Christ and Peter on the wild sea--me being Peter.'

Reddin looked at her sideways to see if she was in earnest. Seeing that
she was, he changed the subject.

'Far to go?' he asked.

'Ah! miles on miles.'

'Like to stop the night over?'

At last, late certainly, but no matter, at last the invitation had
come, not from her aunt, but from a stranger. That made it more
exciting.

'I'm much obleeged,' he said. 'Where at?'

'D'you know Undern?'

'I've heard tell on it.'

'Well, it's two miles from here. Like to come?'

'Ah! Will your mother be angry?'

'I haven't one.'

'Father?'

'No.'

'Who be there, then?'

'Only Vessons and me.'

'Who's Vessons?'

'My servant.'

'Be you a gentleman, then?'

Reddin hesitated slightly. She said it with such reverence and made it
seem so great a thing.

'Yes,' he said at last. 'Yes, that's what I am--a gentleman.' He was
conscious of bravado.

'Will there be supper, fire-hot?'

'Yes, if Vessons is in a good temper.'

'Where you bin?' she asked next.

'Market.'

'You've had about as much as is good for you,' she remarked, as if
thinking aloud.

He certainly smelt strongly of whisky.

'You've got a cheek!' said he. 'Let's look at you.'

He stared into her tired but vivid eyes for a long time, and the trap
careered from side to side.

'My word!' he said, 'I'm in luck to-night!'

'What for be you?'

'Meeting a girl like you.'

'Do I draw men's eyes?'

'Eh?' He was startled. Then he guffawed. 'Yes,' he replied.

'_She_ said so,' Hazel murmured. 'And she said I'd get spoke to,
and she said I'd get puck up. I'm main glad of it, too. She's a witch.'

'She said you'd get picked up, did she?'

'Ah.'

Reddin put his arm round her.

'You're so pretty! That's why.'

'Dunna maul me!'

'You might be civil. I'm doing you a kindness.'

They went on in that fashion, his arm about her, each wondering what
manner of companion the other was.

When they neared Undern there were gates to open, and he admired her
litheness as she jumped in and out.

In his pastures, where the deeply rutted track was already white with
snow, two foals stood sadly by their mothers, gazing at the cold world
with their peculiarly disconsolate eyes.

'Eh! look's the abron un! Abron, like me!' cried Hazel.

Reddin suddenly gripped the long coils that were loose on her
shoulders, twisted them in a rope round his neck, and kissed her. She
was enmeshed, and could not avoid his kisses.

The cob took this opportunity--one long desired--to rear, and Reddin
flogged him the rest of the way. So they arrived with a clatter, and
were met at the door by Andrew Vessons--knowing of eye as a blackbird,
straw in mouth, the poison of asps on his tongue.




Chapter 3


Undern Hall, with its many small-paned windows, faced the north
sullenly. It was a place of which the influence and magic were not
good. Even in May, when the lilacs frothed into purple, paved the lawn
with shadows, steeped the air with scent; when soft leaves lipped each
other consolingly; when blackbirds sang, fell in their effortless way
from the green height to the green depth, and sang again--still,
something that haunted the place set the heart fluttering. No place is
its own, and that which is most stained with old tumults has the
strongest fascination.

So at Undern, whatever had happened there went on still; someone who
had been there was there still. The lawns under the trees were mournful
with old pain, or with vanished joys more pathetic than pain in their
fleeting mimicry of immortality.

It was only at midsummer that the windows were coloured by dawn and
sunset; then they had a sanguinary aspect, staring into the delicate
skyey dramas like blind, bloodshot eyes. Secretly, under the heavy
rhododendron leaves and in the furtive sunlight beneath the yew-trees,
gnats danced. Their faint motions made the garden stiller; their
smallness made it oppressive; their momentary life made it infinitely
old. Then Undern Pool was full of leaf shadows like multitudinous
lolling tongues, and the smell of the mud tainted the air--half sickly,
half sweet. The clipped bushes and the twisted chimneys made inky
shadows like steeples on the grass, and great trees of roses, beautiful
in desolation, dripped with red and white and elbowed the guelder roses
and the elders set with white patens. Cherries fell in the orchard with
the same rich monotony, the same fatality, as drops of blood. They lay
under the fungus-riven trees till the hens ate them, pecking gingerly
and enjoyably at their lustrous beauty as the world does at a poet's
heart. In the kitchen-garden also the hens took their ease, banqueting
sparely beneath the straggling black boughs of a red-currant grove. In
the sandstone walls of this garden hornets built undisturbed, and the
thyme and lavender borders had grown into forests and obliterated the
path. The cattle drowsed in the meadows, birds in the heavy trees; the
golden day-lilies drooped like the daughters of pleasure; the very
principle of life seemed to slumber. It was then, when the scent of
elder blossom, decaying fruit, mud and hot yew brooded there, that the
place attained one of its most individual moods--narcotic, aphrodisiac.

In winter the yews and firs were like waving funeral plumes and
mantled, headless goddesses; then the giant beeches would lash
themselves to frenzy, and, stooping, would scourge the ice on Undern
Pool and the cracked walls of the house, like beings drunken with the
passion of cruelty. This was the second mood of Undern--brutality. Then
those within were, it seemed, already in the grave, heavily covered
with the prison of frost and snow, or shouted into silence by the wind.
On a January night the house seemed to lie outside time and space;
slow, ominous movement began beyond the blind windows, and the
inflexible softness of snow, blurred on the vast background of night,
buried summer ever deeper with invincible, caressing threats.

The front door was half glass, so that a wandering candle within
could be seen from outside, and it looked inexpressibly forlorn, like
a glow-worm seeking escape from a chloroform-box or mankind looking
for the way to heaven. Only four windows were ever lit, and of these
two at a time. They were Jack Reddin's parlour, Andrew Vessons' kitchen,
and their respective bedrooms.

Reddin of Undern cared as little for the graciousness of life as he did
for its pitiful rhapsodies, its purple-mantled tragedies. He had no
time for such trivialities. Fox-hunting, horse-breeding, and kennel
lore were his vocation. He rode straight, lived hard, exercised such
creative faculties as he had on his work, and found it very good. Three
times a year he stated in the Undern pew at Wolfbatch that he intended
to continue leading a godly, righteous, and sober life. At these times,
with amber lights from the windows playing over his well-shaped head,
his rather heavy face looked, as the Miss Clombers from Wolfbatch Hall
said, 'so chivalrous, so uplifted.' The Miss Clombers purred when they
talked, like cats with a mouse. The younger still hunted, painfully
compressing an overfed body into a riding-habit of some forgotten cut,
and riding with so grim a mouth and such a bloodthirsty expression that
she might have had a blood-feud with all foxes. Perhaps, when she rode
down the anxious red-brown streak, she thought she was riding down a
cruel fate that had somehow left her life vacant of joy; perhaps, when
the little creature was torn piece-meal, she imagined herself tearing
so the frail unconquerable powers of love and beauty. Anyway, she never
missed a meet, and she and her sister never ceased their long silent
battle for Reddin, who remained as unconscious of them as if they
were his aunts. He was, of course, beneath them, very much beneath
them--hardly more than a farmer, but still--a man.

Reddin went on his dubious and discreditable way, and the woman Sally
Haggard, of the cottage in the hollow, gained by virtue of a certain
harsh beauty what the ladies Clomber would have given all their wealth
for.

The other inhabitant of Undern, Andrew, revolved in his own orbit, and
was entirely unknown to his master. He cut the yews--the peacocks and
the clipped round trees and the ones like tables--twice a year. He was
creating a swan. He had spent twenty years on it, and hoped to complete
it in a few more, when the twigs that were to be the beak had grown
sufficiently. It never occurred to him that the place was not his, that
he might have to leave it. He had his spring work and his autumn work;
in the winter he ordained various small indoor jobs for himself; and in
the summer, in common with the rest of the place, he grew somnolent. He
sat by the hacked and stained kitchen-table (which he seldom scrubbed,
and on which he tried his knife, sawed bones, and chopped meat) and
slept the afternoons away in the ceaseless drone of flies.

When Reddin called him he rarely answered, and only deigned to go to
him when he felt sure that his order was going to be reasonable.

Everything he said was non-committal, every movement was expostulatory.
Reddin never noticed. Vessons suited his needs, and he always had such
meals as he liked. Vessons was a bachelor. Monasticism had found, in a
countryside teeming with sex, one silent but rabid disciple. If Vessons
ever felt the irony of his own presence in a breeding stable, he never
said so. He went about his work with tight disapproving lips, as if he
thought that Nature owed him a debt of gratitude for his tolerance of
her ways. Ruminative and critical, he went to and fro in the darkly
lovely domain, with pig buckets or ash buckets or barrows full of
manure. The lines of his face were always etched in dirt, and he always
had a bit of rag tied round some cut or blister. He was a lonely soul,
as he once said himself when unusually mellow at the Hunter's Arms; he
was 'wi'out mother, wi'out father, wi'out descent.' He preferred it to
the ties of family. He liked living with Reddin because they never
spoke except of necessity, and because he was quite indifferent to
Reddin's welfare and Reddin to his.

But to Undern itself he was not indifferent. Ties deep as the tangled
roots of the bindweed, strong as the great hawsers of the beeches that
reached below the mud of Undern Pool, held him to it, the bondslave of
a beauty he could not understand, a terror he could not express. When
he trudged the muddy paths, 'setting taters' or earthing up; when he
scythed the lawn, looking, with a rose in his hat, weirder and more
ridiculous than ever; and when he shook the apples down with a kind of
sour humour, as if to say, 'There! that's what you trees get by having
apples!'--at all these times he seemed less an individual than a blind
force. For though his personality was strong, that of the place was
stronger. Half out of the soil, minded like the dormouse and the
beetle, he was, by virtue of his unspoken passion, the protoplasm of a
poet.




Chapter 4


Vessons took up the pose of one seeing a new patient.

'This young lady's lost her way,' Reddin remarked.

'She 'as, God's truth! But you'll find it forra I make no doubt, sir.
"There's a way"' (he looked ironically at the poultry-basket behind the
trap, from which peered anxious, beaky faces)--'"a way as no fowl
knoweth, the way of a man with a maid."'

'Fetch the brood mares in from the lower pasture. They should have been
in this hour.'

'And late love's worse than lad's love, so they do say,' concluded
Vessons.

'There's nothing of love between us,' Reddin snapped.

'I dunna wonder at it!' Andrew cast an appraising look at his master's
flushed face and at Hazel's tousled hair, and withdrew.

Hazel went into the elaborately carved porch. She looked round the
brown hall where deep shadows lurked. Oak chests and carved chairs, all
more or less dusty, stood about, looking as if disorderly feasters had
just left them. In one corner was an inlaid sideboard piano.

Hazel did not notice the grey dust and the hearth full of matches and
cigarette ends. She only saw what seemed to her fabulous splendour. A
foxhound rose from the moth-eaten leopard-skin by the hearth as they
came in. Hazel stiffened.

'I canna-d-abear the hound-dogs,' she said. 'Nasty snabbing things.'

'Best dogs going.'

'No, they kills the poor foxes.'

'Vermin.'

Hazel's face became tense. She clenched her hands and advanced a
determined chin.

'Keep yer tongue off our Foxy, or I unna stay!' she said.

'Who's Foxy?'

'My little small cub as I took and reared.'

'Oh! you reared it, did you?'

'Ah. She didna like having no mam. I'm her mam now.'

Reddin had been looking at her as thoughtfully as his rather maudlin
state allowed.

He had decided that she should stay at Undern and be his mistress.

'You'll be wanting something better than foxes to be mothering one of
these days,' he remarked to the fire, with a half embarrassed, half
jocose air, and a hand on the poker.

'Eh?' said Hazel, who was wondering how long it would take her to learn
to play the music in the corner.

Reddin was annoyed. When one made these arch speeches at such cost of
imagination, they should be received properly.

He got up and went across to Hazel, who had played three consecutive
notes, and was gleeful. He put his hand on hers heavily, and a discord
was wrung from the soft-toned notes that had perhaps known other such
discords long ago.

'Laws! what a din!' said Hazel. 'What for d'you do that, Mr. Reddin?'

Reddin found it harder than ever to repeat his remark, and dropped it.

'What's that brown on your dress?' he asked instead.

'That? Oh, that's from a rabbit as I loosed out'n a trap. It bled
awful.'

'Little sneak, to let it out.'

'Sneak's trick to catchen un, so tiny and all,' replied Hazel
composedly.

'Well, you'd better change your dress; it's very wet, and there's
plenty here,' said he, going to a chest and pulling out an armful of
old-fashioned gowns. 'If you lived at Undern you could wear them every
day.'

'If ifs were beans and bacon, there's few'd go clemmed,' said Hazel.
'That green un's proper, like when the leaves come new, and little
small roses and all.'

Put it on while I see what Vessons is doing.'

'He's grumbling in the kitchen, seemingly,' said Hazel.

Vessons always grumbled. His mood could be judged only by the
_piano_ or _forte_ effects.

Hazel heard him reply to Reddin.

'No. Supper binna ready; I've only just put 'im on.'

He always spoke of all phases of his day's work in the masculine
gender.

Hazel stopped buttoning her dress to hear what Reddin was saying.

'Have you some hot water for the lady?' ('The lady! That's me!' she
thought.)

'No, sir, I anna. Nor yet I anna got no myrrh, aloes, nor cassher.
There's nought in my kitchen but a wold useless cat and an o'erdruv man
of six-and-sixty, a pot of victuals not yet simmering, and a gentleman
as ought to know better than to bring a girl to Undern and ruin her--a
poor innocent little creature.'

'Me again,' said Hazel. She pondered on the remark and flushed. 'Maybe
I'd best go,' she thought. Yet only vague instinct stirred her to this,
and all her soul was set on staying.

'Never shall it be said'--Andrew's voice rose like a preacher's--'never
shall it be said as a young female found no friend in Andrew Vessons;
never shall it be said'--his voice soared over various annoyed
exclamations of Reddin's--'as a female went from this 'all different
from what she came.'

'Shut up, Vessons!'

But Vessons was, as he would have phrased it himself, 'in full
honey-flow,' and not to be silenced.

'Single she be, and single she'd ought to stay. This 'ere rubbitch of
kissing and clipping!'

'But, Vessons, if there were no children gotten, the world'd be empty.'

'Let 'un be. 'Im above'll get a bit of rest, nights, from their sins.'

'Eh, I like that old chap,' thought Hazel.

The wrangle continued. It was the deathless quarrel of the world and
the monastery--natural man and the hermit. Finally Vessons concluded on
a top note.

'Well, if you take this girl's good name off'n her--'

Suddenly something happened in Hazel's brain. It was the realization of
life in relation to self. It marks the end of childhood. She no more
saw herself throned above life and fate, as a child does. She saw that
she was a part of it all; she was mutable and mortal.

She had seen life go on, had heard of funerals, courtings, confinements
and weddings in their conventional order--or reversed--and she had
remained, as it were, intact. She had starved and slaved and woven
superstitions, loved Foxy, and tolerated her father.

Girl friends had hinted of a wild revelry that went on somewhere--
everywhere--calling like a hidden merry-go-round to any who cared to
hear. But she had not heard. They had let fall such sentences as 'He
got the better of me,' 'I cried out, and he thought someone was coming,
and he let me go.' Later, she heard, 'And I thought I'd ne'er get
through it when baby came.'

She felt vaguely sorry for these girls; but she realized nothing of
their life. Nor did she associate funerals and illness with herself.

As the convolvulus stands in apparent changelessness in a silent
rose-and-white eternity, so she seemed to herself a stationary being.
But the convolvulus has budded and bloomed and closed again while you
thought her still, and she dies--the rayed and rosy cup so full of airy
sweetness--she dies in a day.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hazel got up from her chair by the fire and went restlessly, with a
rustle as of innumerable autumn leaves, to the hall door. She gazed
through the glass, and saw the sad feather-flights of snow wandering
and hesitating, and finally coming to earth. They held to their
individuality as flakes as long as they could, it seemed; but the end
came to all, and they were merged in earth and their own multitudes.

Hazel opened the door and stood on the threshold, so that snow-flakes
flattened themselves on the yellow roses of her dress. Outside there
was no world, only a waste of grey and white. Like leaves on a dead
bird, the wrappings of white grew deeper over Undern. Hazel shivered in
the cold wind off the hill, and saw Undern Pool curdling and thickening
in the frost. No sound came across the outspread country. There were no
roads near Undern except its own cart track; there were no railways
within miles. Nothing moved except the snow-flakes, fulfilling their
relentless destiny of negation. She saw them only, and heard only the
raised voices in the house arguing about herself.

'I mun go,' she said, strong in her spirit of freedom, remote and
withdrawn.

'I mun stay,' she amended, weak in her undefended smallness, and very
tired. She turned back to the fire. But the instinct that had awakened
as childhood died clamoured within her and would not let her rest.

She softly took off the silk dress, and put on her own.

She picked up the wreath-frames with a sigh and opened the door again.
She would have a long, wild walk home, but she could creep in through
her bedroom window, which would not latch, and she could make a great
fire of dry broom and brew some tea.

'And I'll let Foxy in and eat a loaf, I will, for I'm clemmed!' she
said.

She slipped out through the door that had seen so many human lives come
and go. Even as she went, the door betrayed her, for Reddin, coming
from the kitchen, saw her through the upper panes.




Chapter 5


'I be going home-along,' she said, but he pulled her in and shut the
door.

'Why did you want to go?'

'I'm alost in this grand place.'

'Your hair's grander than anything in the place. And your eyes are like
sherry.'

'Truth on your life?'

'Yes. Now you'd better change your dress again.'

He reached down an old silver candlestick, very tarnished.

'You can go upstairs. There's a glass in the first room you come to.
Then we'll have supper.'

'Sitting at the supper in a grand shining gown wi' roses on it,' said
Hazel ecstatically, her voice rising to a kind of chant, 'with a white
cloth on table like school-treat, and the old servant hopping to and
agen like thrussels after worms.'

'Thrussel yourself!' muttered Andrew, peering in at the door. He
retired again, remarking to the cat in a sour lugubrious voice, as he
always did when ruffled: 'There's no cats i' the Bible.' He began to
sing 'By the waters of Babylon.'

Upstairs Hazel coiled her hair, running her fingers through its bright
lengths, as she had no comb, and turning in her underbodice to make it
suit the low dress. Outside, his rough hair wet with snow, stood
Reddin, watching her from the vantage-ground of the darkness! He saw
her stand with head erect and bare white shoulders, smiling at herself
in the glass. He saw her slip into the rich gown and pose delightedly,
mincing to and fro like a wagtail. He noted her lissom figure and
shining coils of hair.

'She'll do,' he said, and did not wonder whether he would do himself.
Then he gave a smothered exclamation. She had opened the window,
pushing the snowy ivy aside, and she leant out, her breast under its
folds of silk resting on the snow.

She looked over his head into the immensity of night.

'Dunna let 'un take my good name, for the old feller says I'd ought to
keep it,' she said. 'And let me get back to Foxy quick in the morning
light, and no harm come to us for ever and ever.'

The night received her prayer in silence. Whether or not any heard but
Reddin none could say.

Reddin tiptoed into the house, rather downcast. This was a strange
creature that he had caught.

Vessons was still at the waters of Babylon when Hazel came down.

'Why canna he get beyond them five words?' asked Hazel. 'He allus stops
and goes back like a dog on a chain.' She sang it through in her high
clear voice. There was silence in the kitchen.

Reddin stared at Hazel.

'Who taught you to sing?' he asked.

'Father. He's wonderful with the music, is father.' Hazel found that in
the presence of strangers her feeling for her father was almost warm.
'Playing the harp nights, he makes your flesh creep; ah! and he makes
the place all on a charm, like the spinneys in May month. And he says,
"Sing!" says he, and I ups and sings, and whiles I don't never know
what I bin singing.'

'That I can well believe,' said Vessons.

Reddin swung round.

'What the devil are you doing here?' he asked.

'I've come to say'--Vessons' tone was dry--'as supper's burnt.'

'Burnt?'

'Ah, to a cinder.'

'How did you do that, you fool?'

'Harkening at the lady teaching me to sing.'

Reddin was furious. He knew why supper was burnt.

'Get out!' he said. 'Get out into the stable and stay there. I'll get
supper myself.'

Vessons withdrew composedly. Since Hazel had offended him, he had
decided that she must take care of herself.

'Couldna he bide in the house?' asked Hazel uneasily.

'No.'

They fetched in bread and beer and cold meat. Her host was jubilant,
and during supper, quite deferential. He had been awed by Hazel's
request to the night and by her beauty. But when his hunger was
satisfied, his voice grew louder and his eyes sultry.

Restraint fell between them. Looking at his face, Hazel again had an
impulse for flight. When he said, 'I want to stroke that silk dress,'
and came towards her, knocking the candle over as if by accident, she
edged away, saying sharply:

'Dunna maul me!'

He paid no attention.

'I'll do right by you,' he said; 'I swear I will. I'll--yes, I'll even
marry you to-morrow. But to-night's mine.'

It was not a question of marrying or not marrying in Hazel's eyes. It
was a matter of primitive instinct. She would be her own.

He had pulled the low dress off one shoulder. She twitched it out of
his hand and slipped from his grasp like a fish from a net. He was too
surprised to follow at once.

'Old feller!' she called, running into the yard, 'quick! quick!' A
rough grey head appeared.

'What? after the old 'un?'

'I wunna stay along of him!'

Vessons looked at her interestedly. Apparently she also was a devotee
of his religion--celibacy; one who dared to go against the explicit
decrees of nature.

'I think the better of you,' he said. 'So he's had his trouble for
nothing,' he chuckled. 'You can have my room. You shanna say Andrew
Vessons inna a man of charitable nature. Never shall you! There's a key
to it.'

He led the way to his room through the back door and up the kitchen
stairs.

Most people would have suffered anything rather than sleep in the room
he revealed when he proudly flung the door open. He had the recluse's
love of little possessions and daily comforts.

On an upturned box by the bed were his clay pipe, matches, a treacle-tin
containing whisky, and some chicken-bones. He usually kept a few bones
to pick at his ease. A goldfinch with a harassed air occupied a wooden
cage in the window, and the mantelpiece was fitted up with white mice in
home-made cages. It seemed quite a pleasant room to Hazel.

'Mind as you're very careful of all my things,' said Vessons wistfully.
'I hanna slep away from this room for nigh twenty year. That bird's
ne'er slep without me. He'll miss me. He unna sing for anybody else.'
He always asserted this, and the bird always belied it by singing to
Reddin and any chance visitor. But Vessons continued to believe it.
There are some things that it is necessary to believe; doubt of them
means despair.

Vessons was conscious that he was being generous.

'You can drink a sup of whisky if you like,' he said. 'Now I'm going,
afore that bird notices, or I shall never get away.'

The bird sat in preoccupied silence. He was probably thinking of the
woods and seeded dandelions. He was of the fellowship to which comfort
means little and freedom much. So was Hazel.

'Lock the door!' Vessons said in a sepulchral whisper from the stairs.

Hazel did so, and curled up to sleep in the creaking house, thoughtless
as the white mice, defenceless as they, as little grateful to Vessons
for his protection, and in as deep an ignorance of what the world could
do to her if it chose.




Chapter 6


Early next morning, while the finch still dreamed its heavy dream and
the mice were still motionless balls, Hazel was awakened by a knock at
the massive oak door. She ran across and opened it a crack, peering out
from amid her hair like a squirrel from autumn leaves.

Vessons stood there with a pint mug of beer, which he proffered. But
Hazel had a woman's craving for tea.

'If so be the kettle's boiling,' she said apologetically.

'Tay!' said Vessons. 'Laws! how furiously the women do rage after tay!
I s'pose it's me as is to make it?'

'If kettle's boiling.'

'Kettle! O' course kettle's boiling this hour past. Or how would the
ca'ves get their meal?'

'Well, you needna shout. You'll wake 'im.'

Fright was in her eyes, strong and inexplicable to herself.

'I mun go!' she whispered.

'Ah! You go,' said Vessons, glad that for once duty and inclination
went hand in hand.

'I'll send you,' he added. 'Where d'yer live?'

She hesitated.

'You needna be frit to tell _me,_' said Vessons. 'I'm
six-and-sixty, and you're no more to me'--he surveyed her flushing
face contemplatively--'than the wold useless cat,' he concluded.

Hazel frowned; but she wanted a promise from Vessons, so she made no
retort.

'You wunna tell 'im?' she pleaded.

''Im? Never will I! Wild 'orses shanna drag it from me, nor yet blood
'orses, nor 'unters, nor cart-'orses, nor Suffolk punches!' Vessons
waxed eloquent, for again righteousness and desire coincided. He did
not want a woman at Undern.

'Well,' said Hazel, whispering through the crack, 'I lives at the
Callow.'

'What! that lost and forgotten place t'other side the Mountain?'

'Ah! But it inna lost and forgotten; it's better'n this. We've got
bees.'

'So've I got bees.'

'And a music.'

'Music? What's a music? You canna eat it.'

'And my dad makes coffins.'

'Does 'e, now?' said Vessons, interested at last. Then he bethought him
of the credit of Undern. 'But you anna got a mulberry-tree,' he said
triumphantly. 'Now then! _I_ 'ave!'

He creaked downstairs.

In a few moments Hazel also went down, and drank her tea by the red
fire in the kitchen, watching the frost-flowers being softly effaced
from the window as if someone rubbed them away with a sponge. Snow like
sifted sugar was heaped on the sill, and the yard and outbuildings and
fields, the pools and the ricks, all had the dim radiance of antimony.

'Where be the road?' asked Hazel, standing on the door-step and feeling
rather lost. 'How'll I find it?'

'You wunna find it.'

'Oh, but I mun!'

'D'you think Andrew Vessons'll let an 'ooman trapse in the snow when
he's got good horses in stable?' queried Vessons grandly. 'I'll drive
yer.'

'I'm much obleeged, I'm sure,' said Hazel. 'But wunna he know?'

'He'll sleep till noon if I let 'im,' said Andrew.

They drove off in silence, the snow muffling the plunging hoofs. Hazel
looked back as the sky crimsoned for dawn. The house fronted her with a
look of power and patience. She felt that it had not yet done with her.
She wondered how she would feel if Reddin suddenly appeared at his
window. And a tiny traitorous wish slipped up from somewhere in her
heart. She watched the windows till a turn hid the house, and then she
sighed. Almost she wished that Reddin had awakened.

But she soon forgot everything in delight; for the snow shone, the long
slots of the rabbits and hares, the birds' tracks in orderly rows, the
deep footprints of sheep, all made her laugh by their vagaries, for
they ran in loops and in circles, and appeared like the crazy steps of
a sleep-walker to those who had not the key of their activity. Hazel's
own doings were like that; everyone's doings are like it, if one sees
the doings without the motive.

Plovers wheeled and cried desolately, seeing the soft relentless snow
between themselves and their green meadows, sad as those that see fate
drawing thick veils between themselves and the meadows of their hope
and joy.

At the foot of the Callow Hazel got out.

'Never tell him,' she said, looking up.

'Never in life,' said Vessons.

Hazel hesitated.

'Never tell him,' she added, 'unless he asks a deal and canna rest.'

'He may ask till Doomsday,' said Vessons, 'and he may be restless as
the ten thousand ghosses that trapse round Undern when the moon's low,
but I'll ne'er tell 'im.'

Hazel sighed, and turned to climb the hill.

'A missus at Undern!' said Andrew to the cob's ears as they trotted
home. 'No, never will I!'

A magpie rose from a wood near the road, jibing at him. He looked round
almost as if it had been someone laughing at his resolve, and repeated,
'Never will I!'

'Where's Hazel?' asked Reddin.

'Neither wild 'orses, nor blood 'orses, nor race 'orses nor cart
'orses, nor Suffolk punches--' began Vessons whose style was
cumulative, and who, when he had made a good phrase, was apt to work it
to death like any other artist. 'Oh, you're drunk, Vessons!' said his
master.

'Shall drag it from me,' finished Vessons.

Reddin knew this was true, and felt rather hopeless. Still, he
determined not to give up the search until he had found Hazel.

He inquired at the Hunter's Arms, but Vessons had been there before
him, and he was met by pleasant stupidity.

Vessons was of the people, Reddin of the aristocracy, so the
frequenters of the Hunter's Arms sided as one man against Reddin.

'You'll not get another bite of that apple,' said Vessons with
satisfaction, when his master returned with downcast face.

'I can't stand your manners much longer, Vessons,' said he irritably.

'Gie me notice, then,' said Vessons, falling back on the well-worn
formula, and scoring his usual triumph.

Reddin had the faults of his class, but turning an old servant adrift
was not one of them. Vessons traded on this, and invariably said and
did exactly what he liked.




Chapter 7


When Hazel got in, her father had finished his breakfast and was busy
at work.

'Brought the wreath-frames?' he asked, without looking up.

'Ah.'

'He's jead at last. At the turn of the night. They came after the
coffin but now. I'll be able to get them there new section crates I
wanted. He's doing more for me, wanting a coffin, and him stiff and
cold, than what he did in the heat of life.'

'Many folks be like that,' said Hazel out of her new wisdom. Neither of
them reflected that Abel had always been like that towards Hazel, that
she was becoming more like it to him every year.

Abel made no remark at all about Hazel's adventures, and she preserved
a discreet silence.

'That little vixen's took a chicken,' said Abel, after a time; 'that's
the second.'

'She only does it when I'm away, being clemmed,' said Hazel pleadingly.

'Well, if she does it again,' Abel announced, 'it's the water and a
stone round her neck. So now you know.'

'You durstn't.'

'We'll see if I durst.'

Hazel fled in tears to the unrepentant and dignified Foxy. Some of us
find it hard enough to be dignified when we have done right; but Foxy
could be dignified when she had done wrong, and the more wrong, the
more dignity.

She was very bland, and there was a look of deep content--digestive
content, a state bordering on the mystic's trance--in her affectionate
topaz eyes.

It had been a tender and nourishing chicken; the hours she had spent in
gnawing through her rope had been well repaid.

'Oh! you darlin' wicked little thing!' wailed Hazel. 'You munna do it,
Foxy, or he'll drown you dead. What for did you do it, Foxy, my dear?'

Foxy's eyes became more eloquent and more liquid.

'You gallus little blessed!' said Hazel again. 'Eh! I wish you and me
could live all alone by our lonesome where there was no men and women.'

Foxy shut her eyes and yawned, evidently feeling doubtful if such a
halcyon place existed in the world.

Hazel sat on her heels and thought. It was flight or Foxy. She knew
that if she did not take Foxy away, her renewed naughtiness was as
certain as sunset.

'You was made bad,' she said sadly but sympathetically. 'Leastways, you
wasn't made like watch-dogs and house-cats and cows. You was made a
fox, and you be a fox, and its queer-like to me, Foxy, as folk canna
see that. They expect you to be what you wanna made to be. You'm made
to be a fox; and when you'm busy being a fox they say you'm a sinner!'

Having wrestled with philosophy until Foxy yawned again, Hazel went in
to try her proposition on Abel. But Abel met it as the world in general
usually meets a new truth.

'She took the chick,' he said. 'Now, would a tarrier do that--a
well-trained tarrier? I says 'e would _not_'

'But it inna fair to make the same law for foxes and terriers.'

'I make what laws suit me,' said Abel. 'And what goes agen me--gets
drownded.'

'But it inna all for you!' cried Hazel.

'Eh?'

'The world wunna made in seven days only for Abel Woodus,' said Hazel
daringly.

'You've come back very peart from Silverton,' said Abel reflectively--
'very peart, you 'ave. How many young fellers told you your 'air was
abron this time? That fool Albert said so last time, and you were
neither to hold nor to bind. Abron! Carrots!'

But it was not, as he thought, this climax that silenced Hazel. It was
the lucky hit about the young fellows and the reminiscence called up by
the word 'abron.' He continued his advantage, mollified by victory.

'Tell you what it is, 'Azel; it's time you was married. You're too
uppish.'

'I shall ne'er get married.'

'Words! words! You'll take the first as comes--if there's ever such a
fool.'

Hazel wished she could tell him that one had asked her, and that no
labouring man. But discretion triumphed.

'Maybe,' she said tossing her head, 'I _will_ marry, to get away
from the Callow.'

'Well, well, things couldna be dirtier; maybe they'll be cleaner when
you'm gone. Look's the floor!'

Hazel fell into a rage. He was always saying things about the floor.
She hated the floor.

'I swear I'll wed the first as comes!' she cried--'the very first!'

'And last,' put in Abel. 'What'll you swear by?'

'By God's Little Mountain.'

'Well,' said Abel contentedly, 'now you've sworn _that_ oath,
you're bound to keep it, and so now I know that if ever an 'usband
_does_ come forrard you canna play the fool.'

Hazel was too wrathful for consideration.

'You look right tidy in that gownd,' Abel said. 'I 'spose you'll be
wearing it to the meeting up at the Mountain?'

'What meeting?'

'Didna I tell you I'd promised you for it--to sing? They'm after me to
take the music and play.'

Hazel forgot everything in delight.

'Be we going for certain sure?' she asked.

'Ah! Next Monday three weeks.'

'We mun practise.'

'They say that minister's a great one for the music. One of them sort
as is that musical he canna play. There'll be a tea.'

'Eh!' said Hazel, 'it'll be grand to be in a gentleman's house agen!'

'When've you bin in a gentleman's house?'

Hazel was taken aback.

'Yesterday!' she flashed. 'If Albert inna a gent I dunno who is, for
he's got a watch-chain brass-mockin'-gold all across his wescoat.'

Abel roared. Then he fell to in earnest on the coffin, whistling like a
blackbird. Hazel sat down and watched him, resting her cheek on her
hand. The cold snowlight struck on her face wanly.

'Dunna you ever think, making coffins for poor souls to rest in as inna
tired, as there's a tree growing somewhere for yours?' she asked.

'Laws! What's took you? Measles? What for should I think of me coffin?
That's about the only thing as I'll ne'er be bound to pay for.' He
laughed. 'What ails you?'

'Nought. Only last night it came o'er me as I'll die as well as
others.'

'Well, have you only just found that out? Laws! what a queen of fools
you be!'

Hazel looked at the narrow box, and thought of the active, angular old
man for whom it was now considered an ample house.

'It seems like the world's a big spring-trap, and us in it,' she said
slowly. Then she sprang up feverishly. 'Let's practise till we're as
hoarse as a young rook!' she cried.

So amid the hammering their voices sprang up, like two keen flames.
Then Abel threw away the hammer and began to harp madly, till the
little shanty throbbed with the sound of the wires and the lament of
the voices that rose and fell with artless cunning. The cottage was
like a tree full of thrushes.

After their twelve o'clock dinner, Abel cut holly for the wreaths, and
Hazel began to make them. For the first time home seemed dull. She
thought wistfully of the green silk dress and the supper in the old,
stately room. She thought of Vessons, and of Reddin's eyes as he pulled
her back from the door. She thought of Undern as a refuge for Foxy.

'Maybe sometime I'll go and see 'em,' she thought.

She went to the door and looked out. Frost tingled in the air; icicles
had formed round the water-butt; the strange humming stillness of
intense cold was about her. It froze her desire for adventure.

'I'll stay as I be,' she thought. 'I wunna be his'n.'

To her, Reddin was a terror and a fascination. She returned to the
prickly wreath, sewing on the variegated holly-leaves one by one, with
clusters of berries at intervals.

'What good'll it do 'im?' she asked; 'he canna see it.'

'Who wants him to see it?' Abel was amused. 'When his father died he
'ad his enjoyment--proud as proud was Samson, for there were seven
wreaths, no less.'

Hazel's thoughts returned to the coming festivity. Her hair and her
peacock-blue dress would be admired. To be admired was a wonderful new
sensation. She fetched a cloth and rubbed at the brown mark. It would
not come out. As long as she wore the dress it would be there, like the
stigma of pain that all creatures bear as long as they wear the garment
of the flesh.

At last she burst into tears.

'I want another dress with no blood on it!' she wailed. And so wailing
she voiced the deep lament, old as the moan of forests and falling
water, that goes up through the centuries to the aloof and silent sky,
and remains, as ever, unassuaged.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hazel hated a burying, for then she had to go with Abel to help in
carrying the coffin to the house of mourning. They set out on the
second day after her return. The steep road down to the plain--called
the Monkey's Ladder--was a river, for a thaw had set in. But Hazel did
not mind that, though her boots let in the water, as she minded the
atmosphere of gloom at old Samson's blind house. She would never, as
Abel always did, 'view the corpse,' and this was always taken as an
insult. So she waited in the road, half snow and half water, and
thought with regret of Undern and its great fire of logs, and the green
rich dress, and Reddin with his force and virility, loud voice, and
strong teeth. He was so very much alive in a world where old men would
keep dying.

Abel came out at last, very gay, for he had been given, over and above
the usual payment, glove-money and a glass of beer.

'Us'll get a drop at the public,' he said.

So they turned in there. Hazel thought the red-curtained, firelit room,
with its crudely coloured jugs and mugs, a most wonderful place. She
sat in a corner of the settle and watched her boots steam, growing very
sleepy. But suddenly there was a great clatter outside, the sound of a
horse, pulled up sharply, slipping on the cobbles, and a shout for the
landlord.

'Oh, my mortal life!' said Hazel, 'it met be the Black Huntsman
himself.'

'No, I won't come in,' said the rider, 'a glass out here.'

Hazel knew who it was.

'Can you tell me,' he went on, 'if there's any young lady about here
with auburn hair? Father plays the fiddle.'

'He's got it wrong,' thought Hazel.

'Young lady!' repeated the landlord. 'Hawburn? No, there's no lady of
that colour hereabouts. And what ladies there be are weathered and
case-hardened.'

'The one I'm looking for's young--young as a kitten, and as
troublesome.'

Hazel clapped her hands to her mouth.

'There's no fiddler chap hereabouts, then?'

Abel rose and went to the door.

'If it's music you want, I know better music than fiddles, and
that's harps,' he said. 'Saw! saw! The only time as ever I liked
a fiddle was when the fellow snabbed at the strings with his ten
fingers--despert-like.'

'Oh, damn you!' said Reddin. 'I didn't come to hear about harps.'

'If it's funerals or a forester's supper, a concert or a wedding,' Abel
went on, quite undaunted, 'I'm your man.'

Reddin laughed.

'It might be the last,' he said.

'Wedding or bedding, either or both, I suppose,' said the publican, who
was counted a wit.

Reddin gave a great roar of laughter.

'Both!' he said.

'Neither!' whispered Hazel, who had been poised indecisively, as if
half prepared to go to the door. She sat further into the shadow. In
another moment he was gone.

'Whoever she be,' said the publican, nodding his large head wisely,
'have her he will, for certain sure!'

All through the night, murmurous with little rivulets of snow-water,
the gurgling of full troughing, and the patter of rain on the iron roof
of the house and the miniature roofs of the beehives, Hazel, waking
from uneasy slumber, heard those words and muttered them.

In her frightened dreams she reached out to something that she felt
must be beyond the pleasant sound of falling water, so small and
transitory; beyond the drip and patter of human destinies--something
vast, solitary, and silent. How should she find that which none has
ever named or known? Men only stammer of it in such words as Eternity,
Fate, God. All the outcries of all creatures, living and dying, sink in
its depth as in an unsounded ocean. Whether this listening silence,
incurious, yet hearing all, is benignant or malevolent, who can say?
The wistful dreams of men haunt this theme for ever; the creeds of men
are so many keys that do not fit the lock. We ponder it in our hearts,
and some find peace, and some find terror. The silence presses upon us
ever more heavily until Death comes with his cajoling voice and
promises us the key. Then we run after him into the stillness, and are
heard no more.

Hazel and her father practised hard through the dark, wet evenings. She
was to sing 'Harps in Heaven,' a song her mother had taught her. He was
to accompany the choir, or glee-party, that met together at different
places, coming from the villages and hillsides of a wide stretch of
country.

'Well,' said Abel on the morning of their final rehearsal, 'it's a
miserable bit of a silly song, but you mun make the best of it. Give it
voice, girl! Dunna go to sing it like a mouse in milk!'

His musical taste was offended by Hazel's way of being more dramatic
than musical. She would sink her voice in the sad parts almost to a
whisper, and then rise to a kind of keen.

'You'm like nought but Owen's old sheep-dog,' he said, 'wowing the
moon!'

But Hazel's idea of music continued to be that of a bird. She was a
wild thing, and she sang according to instinct, and not by rule, though
her good ear kept her notes true.

They set out early, for they had a good walk in front of them, and the
April sun was hot. Hazel, under the pale green larch-trees, in her
bright dress, with her crown of tawny hair, seemed to be an incarnation
of the secret woods.

Abel strode ahead in his black cut-away coat, snuff-coloured trousers,
and high-crowned felt hat with its ornamental band. This receded to the
back of his head as he grew hotter. The harp was slung from his
shoulder, the gilding looking tawdry in the open day. Twice during the
walk, once in a round clearing fringed with birches, and once in a
pine-glade, he stopped, put the harp down and played, sitting on a
felled tree. Hazel, quite intoxicated with excitement, danced between
the slender boles till her hair fell down and the long plait swung
against her shoulder.

'If folks came by, maybe they'd think I was a fairy!' she cried.

'Dunna kick about so!' said Abel, emerging from his abstraction. 'It
inna decent, now you're an 'ooman growd.'

'I'm not an 'ooman growd!' cried Hazel shrilly. 'I dunna want to be,
and I won't never be.'

The pine-tops bent in the wind like attentive heads, as gods, sitting
stately above, might nod thoughtfully over a human destiny. Someone, it
almost seemed, had heard and registered Hazel's cry, 'I'll never be an
'ooman,' assenting, sardonic.

They came to the quarry at the mountain; the deserted mounds and chasms
looked more desolate than ever in the spring world. Here and there the
leaves of a young tree lipped the grey-white steeps, as if wistfully
trying to love them, as a child tries to caress a forbidding parent.

They climbed round the larger heaps and skirted a precipitous place.

'I canna bear this place,' said Hazel; 'it's so drodsome.'

'Awhile since, afore you were born, a cow fell down that there place,
hundreds of feet.'

'Did they save her?'

'Laws, no! She was all of a jelly.'

Hazel broke out with sudden passionate crying. 'Oh, dunna, dunna!' she
sobbed. So she did always at any mention of helpless suffering,
flinging herself down in wild rebellion and abandonment so that
epilepsy had been suspected. But it was not epilepsy. It was pity. She,
in her inexpressive, childish way, shared with the love-martyr of
Galilee the heartrending capacity for imaginative sympathy. In common
with Him and others of her kind, she was not only acquainted with
grief, but reviled and rejected. In her schooldays boys brought maimed
frogs and threw them in her lap, to watch, from a safe distance, her
almost crazy grief and rage.

'Whatever's come o'er ye?' said her father now. 'You're too nesh,
that's what you be, nesh-spirited.'

He could not understand; for the art in him was not that warm,
suffering thing, creation, but hard, brightly polished talent.

Hazel stood at the edge of the steep grey cliff, her hands folded, a
curious fatalism in her eyes.

'There'll be summat bad'll come to me hereabouts,' she said--'summat
bad and awful.'

The dark shadows lying so still on the dirty white mounds had a
stealthy, crouching look, and the large soft leaves of a plane-tree
flapped helplessly against the shale with the air of important people
who whisper 'Alas!'

Abel was on ahead. Suddenly he turned round, excited as a boy.

'They've started!' he cried. 'Hark at the music! They allus begin with
the organ.'

Hazel followed him, eager for joy, running obedient and hopeful at the
heels of life as a young lamb runs with its mother. She forgot her dark
intuitions; she only remembered that she wanted to enjoy herself, and
that if she was a good girl, surely, surely God would let her.




Chapter 8


The chapel and minister's house at God's Little Mountain were all in
one--a long, low building of grey stone surrounded by the graveyard,
where stones, flat, erect, and askew, took the place of a flower-garden.
Away to the left, just over a rise, the hill was gashed by the grey
steeps of the quarries. In front rose another curve covered with thick
woods. To the right was the batch, down which a road--in winter a
water-course--led into the valley. Behind the house God's Little
Mountain sloped softly up and away apparently to its possessor.

Not the least of the mysteries of the place, and it was tense with
mystery, was the Sunday congregation, which appeared to spring up
miraculously from the rocks, woods and graves.

When the present minister, Edward Marston, came there with his mother
he detested it; but after a time it insinuated itself into his heart,
and gave a stronger character to his religion. He had always been
naturally religious, taking on trust what he was taught; and he had an
instinctive pleasure in clean and healthy things. But on winter nights
at the mountain, when the tingling stars sprang in and out of their
black ambush and frost cracked the tombstones; in summer, when
lightning crackled in the woods and ripped along the hillside like a
thousand devils, the need of a God grew ever more urgent. He spoke of
this to his mother.

'No, dear, I can't say I have more need of our Lord here than in
Crigton,' she said. 'In Crigton there was the bus to be afraid of, and
bicycles. Here I just cover my ears for wind, put on an extra flannel
petticoat for frost, and sit in the coal-house for thunder. Not that
I'm forgetting God. God with us, of course, coal-house or elsewhere.'

'But don't you feel something ominous about the place, mother? I feel
as if something awful would happen here, don't you?'

'No, dear. Nor will you when you've had some magnesia. Martha!' (Martha
was the general who came in by the day from the first cottage in the
batch)--'Martha, put on an extra chop for the master. You aren't in
love, are you, my dear?'

'Gracious, no! Who should I be in love with, mother?'

'Quite right, dear. There is no one about here with more looks than a
brussels sprout. Not that I say anything against sprouts. Martha, just
go and see if there are any sprouts left. We'll have them for dinner.'
Edward looked at the woods across the batch, and wondered why the young
fresh green of the larches and the elm samaras was so sad, and why the
cry of a sheep from an upper slope was so forlorn.

'I hope, Edward,' said Mrs. Marston, 'that it won't be serious music. I
think serious music interferes with the digestion. Your poor father and
I went to the "Creation" on our honeymoon, and thought little of it;
then we went to the "Crucifixion," and though it was very pleasant, I
couldn't digest the oysters afterwards. And then, again, these clever
musicians allow themselves to become so passionate, one almost thinks
they are inebriated. Not flutes and cornets, they have to think of
their breath, but fiddlers can wreak their feelings on the instrument
without suffering for it.'

Edward laughed.

'I hope the gentleman that's coming to-day is a nice quiet one,' she
went on, as if Abel were a pony. 'And I hope the lady singer is not a
contralto. Contralto, to my mind,' she went on placidly, stirring her
porter in preparation for a draught, 'is only another name for roaring,
which is unseemly.' She drank her porter gratefully, keeping the spoon
in place with one finger.

If she could have seen father and daughter as they set forth,
hilarious, to superimpose tumult on the peace of God's Little Mountain,
she would have been a good deal less placid.

It was restful to sit and look at her kind old face, soft and round
beneath her lace cap, steeped in a peace deeper than lethargy. She was
one of nature's opiates, and she administered herself unconsciously to
everyone who saw much of her. Edward's father, having had an overdose,
had not survived. Mrs. Marston always spoke of him as 'my poor husband
who fell asleep,' as if he had dozed in a sermon. Sleep was her fetish,
panacea and art. Her strongest condemnation was to call a person 'a
stirring body.' She sat to-day, while preparations raged in the
kitchen, placidly knitting. She always knitted--socks for Edward and
shawls for herself. She had made so many shawls, and she so felt the
cold, that she wore them in layers--pink, grey, white, heather mixture,
and a purple cross-over.

When Martha and the friend who had come to help quarrelled shrilly, she
murmured, 'Poor things! putting themselves in such a pother!' When,
after a crash, Martha was heard to say, 'There's the cream-jug now!
Well, break one, break three!' she only shook her head, and murmured
that servants were not what they used to be. When Martha's friend's
little boy dropped the urn--presented to the late Mr. Marston by a
grateful congregation, and as large as a watering-can--and Martha's
friend shouted, 'I'll warm your buttons!' and proceeded to do so, Mrs.
Marston remained self-poised as a sun.

At last supper was set out, the cloths going in terraces according to
the various heights of the tables; the tea-sets--willow and Coalport,
the feather pattern, and the seaweed--looking like a china-shop; the
urn, now rakishly dinted, presiding. People paid for their supper on
these occasions, and expected to have as much as they could eat. Mrs.
Marston had rashly told Martha that she could have what was left as a
perquisite, which resulted later in stormy happenings.

       *       *       *       *       *

From the nook on the hillside where the chapel stood, as Abel ran
hastily down the slope--the harp jogging on his shoulders and looking
like some weird demon that clung round his neck and possessed him--came
a roar of sound. The brass band from Black Mountain was in possession
of the platform. The golden windows shone comfortably in the cold
spring evening, and Hazel ran towards them as she would have run
towards the wide-flung onyx doors of faery.

They arrived breathless and panting in the graveyard, where the
tombstones seemed to elbow each other outside the shining windows,
looking into this cave of saffron light and rosy joy as sardonically as
if they knew that those within its shelter would soon be without,
shelterless in the storm of death; that those who came in so gaily by
twos and threes would go out one by one without a word. Hazel peered
in.

'Fine raps they're having!' she whispered. 'All the band's there,
purple with pleasure, and sweating with the music like chaps haying.'

Abel looked in.

'Eh, dear,' he said, 'they're settled there for the neet. We'll ne'er
get a squeak in. There's nought for Black Mountain Band'll stop at
when they're elbow to elbow; they eggs each other on cruel, so they
do! Your ears may be dinned and deafened for life, and you lost to the
bee-keeping (for hear you must, or you'm done, with bees), but the band
dunna care! There! Now they've got a hencore--that's to say, do it
agen; and every time they get one of them it goes to their yeads, and
they play louder.'

'Ah, but you play better,' said Hazel comfortingly; for Abel's voice
had trembled, and Hazel must comfort grief wherever she found it, for
grief implied weakness.

'I know I do,' he assented; 'but what can I do agen ten strong men?'

At the mountain, as in the world of art and letters, it seemed that the
artist must elbow and push, and that if he did not often stop his
honeyed utterances to shout his wares he would not be heard at all.

'Dunna they look funny!' said Hazel with a giggle. 'All sleepy and
quiet, like smoked bees. Is that the Minister? Him by the old sleepy
lady--she's had more smoke than most!'

'Where?'

'There. He's got a black coat on and a kind face, sad-like.'

'Maybe if you took an axed him, he'd marry you--when the moon falls
down the chapel chimney and rabbits chase the bobtailed sheep-dog!'

'I'm not for marrying anybody. Let's go in,' said Hazel.

She took off her hat and coat, to enter more splendidly. On her head,
resting softly among the coils of ruddy hair, she put a wreath of
violets, which grew everywhere at the Callow; a big bunch of them was
at her throat like a cameo brooch.

When she entered the band faltered, and the cornet, a fiery young man
whom none could tire, wavered into silence. Edward, turning to find out
what had caused this most desirable event, saw her coming up the room
with the radiant fatefulness of a fairy in a dream. His heart went out
to her, not only for her morning air, her vivid eyes, her coronet of
youth's rare violets, but for the wistfulness that was not only in her
face, but in her poise and in every movement. He felt as he would to a
small bright bird that had come, greatly daring, in at his window on a
stormy night. She had entered the empty room of his heart, and from
this night onwards his only thought was how to keep her there.

When she went up to sing, his eyes dwelt on her. She was the most vital
thing he had ever seen. The tendrils of burnished hair about her
forehead and ears curled and shone with life; her eyes danced with
life; her body was taut as a slim arrow ready to fly from life's bow.

Abel sat down in the middle of the platform and began to play, quite
regardless of Hazel, who had to start when she could.

   'Harps in heaven played for you;
   Played for Christ with his eyes so blue;
   Played for Peter and for Paul,
   But never played for me at all!

   Harps in heaven, made all of glass,
   Greener than the rainy grass.
   Ne'er a one but is bespoken,
   And mine is broken--mine is broken!

   Harps in heaven play high, play low;
   In the cold, rainy wind I go
   To find my harp, as green as spring--
   My splintered harp without a string!'

She sang with passion. The wail of the lost was in her voice. She had
not the slightest idea what the words meant (probably they meant
nothing), but the sad cadence suited her emotional tone, and the ideas
of loss and exile expressed her vague mistrust of the world. Edward
imagined her in her blue-green dress and violet crown playing on a
large glass harp in a company of angels.

'Poor child!' he thought. 'Is it mystical longing or a sense of sin
that cries out in her voice?'

It was neither of those things; it was nothing that Edward could have
understood at that time, though later he did. It was the grief of rainy
forests, and the moan of stormy water; the muffled complaint of driven
leaves; the keening--wild and universal--of life for the perishing
matter that it inhabits.

Hazel expressed things that she knew nothing of, as a blackbird does.
For, though she was young and fresh, she had her origin in the old,
dark heart of earth, full of innumerable agonies, and in that heart she
dwelt, and ever would, singing from its gloom as a bird sings in a
yew-tree. Her being was more full of echoes than the hearts of those that
live further from the soil; and we are all as full of echoes as a rocky
wood--echoes of the past, reflex echoes of the future, and echoes of
the soil (these last reverberating through our filmiest dreams, like
the sound of thunder in a blossoming orchard). The echoes are in us of
great voices long gone hence, the unknown cries of huge beasts on the
mountains; the sullen aims of creatures in the slime; the love-call of
the bittern. We know, too, echoes of things outside our ken--the
thought that shapes itself in the bee's brain and becomes a waxen box
of sweets; the tyranny of youth stirring in the womb; the crazy terror
of small slaughtered beasts; the upward push of folded grass, and how
the leaf feels in all its veins the cold rain; the ceremonial that
passes yearly in the emerald temples of bud and calyx--we have walked
those temples; we are the sacrifice on those altars. And the future
floats on the current of our blood like a secret argosy. We hear the
ideals of our descendants, like songs in the night, long before our
firstborn is begotten. We, in whom the pollen and the dust, sprouting
grain and falling berry, the dark past and the dark future, cry and
call--we ask, Who is this Singer that sends his voice through the dark
forest, and inhabits us with ageless and immortal music, and sets the
long echoes rolling for evermore?

The audience, however, did not notice that there were echoes in Hazel,
and would have gaped if you had proclaimed God in her voice. They
looked at her with critical eyes that were perfectly blind to her real
self. Mrs. Marston thought what a pity it was that she looked so wild;
Martha thought it a pity that she did not wear a chenille net over her
hair to keep it neat; and Abel, peering up at her through the strings
of the harp and looking--with his face framed in wild red hair--like a
peculiarly intelligent animal in a cage, did not think of her at all.

But Edward made up for them, because he thought of her all the time.
Before the end of the concert he had got as far as to be sure she was
the only girl he would ever want to marry. His ministerial self put in
a faint proviso, 'If she is a good girl'; but it was instantly shouted
down by his other self, who asserted that as she was so beautiful she
must be good.

During the last items on the programme--two vociferous glees rendered
by a stage-full of people packed so tightly that it was marvellous how
they expanded their diaphragms--Edward was in anguish of mind lest the
cornet should monopolize Hazel at supper. The said cornet had become
several shades more purple each time Hazel sang, so Edward was prepared
for the worst. He was determined to make a struggle for it, and felt
that though his position denied him the privilege of scuffling, he
might at least use finesse--that has never been denied to any Church.

'My dear,' whispered Mrs. Marston, 'have you an unwelcome guest?'

This was her polite way of indicating a flea.

'No, mother.'

'Well, dear, there must be something preying on your mind; you have
kept up such a feeling of uneasiness that I have hardly had any nap at
all.'

'What do you think of her, mother?'

'Who, dear?'

'The beautiful girl.'

'A pretty tune, the first she sang,' said Mrs. Marston, not having
heard the others. 'But such wild manners and such hair! Like pussy
stroked the wrong way. And there is something a little peculiar about
her, for when she sings about heaven it seems somehow improper, and
that,' she added drowsily, 'heaven hardly _should_ do.'

Edward understood what she meant. He had been conscious himself of
something desperately exciting in the bearing of Hazel Woodus--something
that penetrated the underworld which lay like a covered well within him,
and, like a ray of light, set all kinds of unsuspected life moving and
developing there.

As supper went on Edward kept more and more of Hazel's attention, and
the quiet grey eyes met the restless amber ones more often.

'If I came some day--soon--to your home, would you sing to me?' he
asked.

'I couldna. I'm promised for the bark-stripping.'

'What's that?'

Hazel looked at him pityingly.

'Dunna you know what that is?'

'I'm afraid not.'

'It's fetching the bark off'n the failed trees ready for lugging.'

'Where are the felled trees?'

'Hunter's Spinney.'

'That's close here.'

'Ah.'

Edward was deep in thought. The cornet whispered to Hazel:

'Making up next Sunday's sermon!'

But Edward turned round disconcertingly.

'As it's on your way, why not come to tea with mother? I might be out,
but you wouldn't mind that?'

'Eh, but I should! I dunna want to talk to an old lady!'

'I'll stop at home,' then, he replied, very much amused, and with a
look of quiet triumph at the cornet. 'Which day?'

'Wednesday week's the first.'

'Come Wednesday, then.'

'What'll the old sleepy lady say?'

'My mother,' he said with dignity, 'will approve of anything I think
right.'

But his heart misgave. So far he had only 'thought right' what her
conventions approved. He had seldom acted on his own initiative. She
therefore had a phrase, 'Dear Edward is always right.' It was possible
that when he left off his unquestioning concordance with her, she would
leave off saying 'Dear Edward is always right.' So far he had not
wanted anything particularly, and as it was as difficult to quarrel
with Mrs. Marston as to strike a match on a damp box, there had never
been any friction. She liked things, as she said, 'nice and pleasant.'
To do Providence justice, everything always had been. Even when her
husband died it had been, in a crape-clad way, nice and pleasant, for
he died after the testimonial and the urn, and not before, as a less
considerate man would have done. He died on a Sunday, which was 'so
suitable,' and at dawn, which was 'so beautiful'; also (in the phrase
used for criminals and the dying) 'he went quietly.' Not that Mrs.
Marston did not feel it. She did, as deeply as her nature could. But
she felt it, as a well-padded boy feels a whacking, through layers of
convention. Now, at her age, to find out that life was not so pleasant
as she thought would be little short of tragedy.

'Ah, I'll come, and I'm much obleeged,' said Hazel.

'I'll meet you at Hunter's Spinney and see you home.' Edward decided.

To this also Hazel assented so delightedly that the cornet pushed back
his chair and went to another table with a sardonic laugh. But his
remarks were drowned by a voice which proclaimed:

'All the years I've bin to suppers I've 'ad tartlets! To-night they
wunna go round. I've paid the same as others. Tartlets I'll 'ave!'

'But the plate's empty,' said Martha, flushed and determined.

'I've had no finger in the emptying of it. More must be fetched.' Other
voices joined in, and Mrs. Marston was heard to murmur, 'Unpleasant.'

Edward was oblivious to it all.

'Shall you,' he asked earnestly, 'like me to come to the Spinney?'

'Ah, I shall that!' said Hazel, who already felt an aura of protection
about him. 'It'll be so safe--like when I was little, and was used to
pick daisies round grandad.'

Edward knew more definitely than before the relation in which he wished
to stand towards Hazel. It was not that of grandad.

Any reply he might have made was drowned by the uproar that broke forth
at the cry, 'She's hidden 'em! Look in the kitchen!'

Martha's cousin--in his spare time policeman of a distant village--felt
that if Martha was detected in fraud it would not look well, and
therefore put his sinewy person in the kitchen doorway. Edward seized
the moment, when there was a hush of surprise, to say grace, during
which the invincible voice murmured:

'I've not received tartlets. I'm not thankful.'

'Mother,' Edward said, when the last unruly guest had disappeared in
the wild April night, and Hazel's vivid presence and violet fragrance
and young laughter had been taken by the darkness, 'I've asked Hazel
Woodus to tea on Wednesday.'

'She is not of your class, Edward.'

'What does class matter?'

'Martha's brother calls you "sir," and Martha looks down on this young
person.'

'Don't call her "young person," mother.'

'Whether it is mistaken kindness, dear, or a silly flirtation, it will
only do you harm with the congregation.'

'Young men and women,' soliloquized Mrs. Marston as she hoisted herself
upstairs with the candlestick very much aslant in a torpid hand, 'are
not what they used to be.'




Chapter 9


Hunter's Spinney, a conical hill nearly as high as God's Little
Mountain, lay between that range and Undern. It was deeply wooded; only
its top was bare and caught the light redly. It was a silent and
deserted place, cowled in ancient legends. Here the Black Huntsman
stalled his steed, and the death-pack coming to its precincts, ceased
into the hill. Here, in November twilights, when the dumb birds cowered
in the dark pines, you might hear from the summit a horn blown-very
clearly, with tuneful devilry, and a scattered sound of deep barking
like the noise of sawing timber, and then the blood-curdling tumult of
the pack at feeding time.

To-day, as Hazel began her work, the radiant woods were full of pale
colour, so delicate and lucent that Beauty seemed a fugitive presence
from some other world trapped and panting to be free. The small patens
of the beeches shone like green glass, and the pale spired chestnuts
were candelabras on either side of the steep path. In the bright
breathless glades of larches the willow-wrens sang softly, but with
boundless vitality. On sunny slopes the hyacinths pushed out
close-packed buds between their covering leaves; soon they would
spread their grave blue like a prayer-carpet. Hazel, stooping in her
old multi-coloured pinafore, her bare arms gleaming like the stripped
trees, seemed to Edward as he came up the shady path to be the spirit
of beauty. He quite realized that her occupation was not suited to a
minister's future wife. 'But she may never be that,' he thought
despairingly.

'Have you ever thought, Hazel,' he said later, sitting down on a
log--'have you ever thought of the question of marriage?'

'I ne'er did till Foxy took the chicks.' Edward looked dazed. 'It's
like this,' Hazel went on. 'Father (he's a rum 'un, is father!), he
says he'll drown Foxy if she takes another.'

'Who is Foxy?'

'Oh! Fancy you not knowing Foxy! Her's my little cub. Pretty! you ne'er
saw anything so pretty.'

Edward thought he had.

'But she canna get used to folks' ways.' (This was a new point of view
to Edward.) 'She'm a fox, and she can't be no other. And I'd liefer
she'd _be_ a fox.'

'Foxes are very mischievous,' Edward said mildly.

'Mischievous!' Hazel flamed on him like a little thunderstorm.
'Mischievous! And who made 'em mischievous, I'd like to know? They
didna make theirselves.'

'God made them,' Edward said simply.

'What for did He, if He didna like 'em when they were done?'

'We can't know all His reasons; He walks in darkness.'

'Well, that's no manner of use to me and Foxy,' said Hazel practically.
'So all as I can see to do is to get married and take Foxy where
there's no chicks.'

'So you think of marrying?'

'Ah! And I told father I'd marry the first as come. I swore it by the
Mountain.'

'And who came?' Edward had a kind of faintness in his heart.

'Never a one.'

'Nobody at all?'

'Never a one.'

'And if anyone came and asked for you, you'd take him?'

'Well, I'm bound to, seemingly. But it dunna matter. None'll ever come.
What for should they?'

She herself answered her own question fully as she stood aureoled in
dusky light. His eyes were eloquent, but she was too busy to notice
them.

'And should you like to be married?' he asked gently.

He expected a shy affirmative. He received a flat negative.

'My mam didna like it. And she said it'd be the end of going in the
woods and all my gamesome days. And she said tears and torment, tears
and torment was the married lot. And she said, "Keep yourself to
yourself. You wunna made for marrying any more than me. Eat in company,
but sleep alone"--that's what she said, Mr. Marston.'

Edward was so startled at this unhesitating frankness that he said
nothing. But he silently buried several sweet hopes that had been
pushing up like folded hyacinths for a week. The old madness was upon
him, but it was a larger, more spiritual madness than Reddin's, as the
sky is larger and more ethereal than the clouds that obscure it. He was
always accustomed to think more of giving than receiving, so now he
concentrated himself on what he could do for Hazel. He felt that her
beauty would be an ample return for anything he could do as her husband
to make her happy. If she would confide in him, demands on his time,
run to him for refuge, he felt that he could ask no more of life. The
strength of the ancient laws of earth was as yet hidden from him. He
did not know the fierceness of the conflict in which he was engaging
for Hazel's sake--the world-old conflict between sex and altruism.

If he had known, he would still not have hesitated.

Suddenly Hazel looked round with an affrighted air.

'It's late to be here,' she said.

'Why?'

'There's harm here if you bide late. The jeath pack's about here in the
twilight, so they do say.'

They looked up into the dark steeps, and the future seemed to lower on
them.

'Maybe summat bad'll come to us in this spinney,' she whispered.

'Nothing bad can come to you when you are in God's keeping.'

There canna be many folk in His keeping, then.'

'Do you say your prayers, Hazel?' he asked rather sadly.

'Ah! I say:

   "Keep me one year, keep me seven,
   Till the gold turns silver on my head;
   Bring me up to the hill o' heaven,
   And leave me die quiet in my bed."

That's what I allus say.'

'Who taught you?'

'My mam.'

'Ah, well, it must be a good prayer if she taught it you, mustn't it?'
he said.

Suddenly Hazel clutched his arm affrightedly.

'Hark! Galloping up yonder! Run! run! It's the Black Huntsman!'

It was Reddin, skirting the wood on his way home from a search for
Hazel. If he had come into the spinney he would have seen them, but he
kept straight on.

'It's bringing harm!' cried Hazel, pulling at Edward's arm; 'see the
shivers on me! It's somebody galloping o'er my grave!'

Edward resolved to combat these superstitions and replace them by a
sane religion. He had not yet fathomed the ancient, cruel and mighty
power of these exhalations of the soil. Nor did he see that Hazel was
enchained by earth, prisoner to it only a little less than the beech
and the hyacinth--bond-serf of the sod.

When Edward and Hazel burst into the parlour, like sunshine into an old
garden, they were met by a powerful smell of burnt merino. Mrs. Marston
had been for some hours as near Paradise as we poor mortals can hope to
be. Her elastic-sided cloth boots rested on the fender, and her skirt,
carefully turned up, revealed a grey stuff petticoat with a hint of
white flannel beneath. The pink shawl was top, which meant optimism.
With Mrs. Marston, optimism was the direct result of warmth. Her
spectacles had crept up and round her head, and had a rakishly benign
appearance. On her comfortable lap lay the missionary _Word_ and a
large roll of brown knitting which was intended to imitate fur. Edward
noted hopefully that the pink shawl was top.

'Here's Hazel come to see you, mother!'

Mrs. Marston straightened her spectacles, surveyed Hazel, and asked if
she would like to do her hair. This ceremony over, they sat down to
tea.

'And how many brothers and sisters have you, my dear?' asked the old
lady.

'Never a one. Nobody but our Foxy.'

'Edward, too, has none. Who is Foxy?'

'My little cub.'

'You speak as if the animals were a relation, dear.'

'So all animals be my brothers and sisters.'

'I know, dear. Quite right. All animals in conversation should be so.
But any single animal in reality is only an animal, and can't be.
Animals have no souls.'

'Yes, they have, then! If they hanna; _you_ hanna!'

Edward hastened to make peace.

'We don't know, do we, mother?' he said. 'And now suppose we have tea?'

Mrs. Marston looked at Hazel suspiciously over the rim of her glasses.

'My dear, don't have ideas,' she said.

'There, Hazel!' Edward smiled. 'What about your ideas in the spinney?'

'There's queer things doing in Hunter's Spinney, and what for shouldna
you believe it?' said Hazel. 'Sometimes more than other times, and
midsummer most of all.'

'What sort of queer things?' asked Edward, in order to be able to watch
her as she answered.

Hazel shut her eyes and clasped her hands, speaking in a soft monotone
as if repeating a lesson.

'In Hunter's Spinney on midsummer night there's things moving as move
no other time; things free as was fast; things crying out as have been
a long while hurted.' She suddenly opened her eyes and went on
dramatically 'First comes the Black Huntsman, crouching low on his
horse and the horse going belly to earth. And John Meares o' the
public, he seed the red froth from his nostrils on the brakes one
morning when he was ketching pheasants. And the jeath's with him, great
hound-dogs, real as real, only no eyes, but sockets with a light behind
'em. Ne'er a one knows what they's after. If I seed 'em I'd die,' she
finished hastily, taking a large bite of cake.

'Myths are interesting,' said Edward, 'especially nature myths.'

'What's a myth, Mr. Marston?'

'An untruth, my dear,' said Mrs. Marston.

'This inna one, then! I tell you John seed the blood!'

'Tell us more.' Edward would have drunk in nonsense rhymes from her
lips.

'And there's never a one to gainsay 'em in all the dark 'oods,' Hazel
went on, 'except on Midsummer Eve.'

'Midsummer!'--Mrs. Marston's tone was gently wistful--'is the only time
I'm really warm. That is, if the weather's as it should be. But the
weather's not what it was!'

'Tell us more, Hazel!' pleaded Edward.

'What for do you want to hear, my soul?'

Edward flushed at the caressing phrase, and Mrs. Marston looked as
indignant as was possible to her physiognomy, until she realized that
it was a mere form of speech.

'Because I love--old tales.'

'Well, if so be you go there, then'--Hazel leant forward, earnest and
mysterious--'after the pack's gone you'll hear soft feet running, and
you'll see faces look out and hands waving. And gangs of folks come
galloping under the leaves, not seen clear, hastening above a bit. And
others come quick after, all with trouble on 'em. And the place is full
of whispering and rustling and voices calling a long way off. And my mam
said the trees get free that night--or else folk of the trees--creeping
and struggling out of the boles like a chicken from an egg--getting free
like lads out of school; and they go after the jeath-pack like birds
after a cuckoo. And last comes the lady of Undern Coppy, lagging and
lonesome, riding in a troop of shadows, and sobbing, "Lost--lost! Oh, my
green garden!" And they say the brake flowers on the eve of that night,
and no bird sings and no star falls.'

'What a pack of nonsense!' murmured Mrs. Marston drowsily.

'That it inna!' cried Hazel; 'it's the bloody truth!'

Mrs. Marston's drowsiness forsook her. Hazel became conscious for
tension.

'Mother!'--Edward's voice shook with suppressed laughter, although he was
indignant with Hazel's father for such a mistaken upbringing--'mother,
would you give Hazel the receipt for this splendid cake?'

'And welcome, my dear.' The old lady was safely launched on her
favourite topic. 'And if you'd like a seed-cake as well, you shall have
it. Have you put down any butter yet?'

Hazel never put down or preserved or made anything. Her most ambitious
cooking was a rasher and a saucepan of potatoes.

'I dunna know what you mean,' she said awkwardly.

Edward was disappointed. He had thought her such a paragon. 'Well,
well, cooking was, after all, a secondary thing. Let it go.'

'You mean to say you don't know what putting down butter is, my poor
child? But perhaps you go in for higher branches? Lemon-curd, now, and
bottled fruit. I'm sure you can do those?'

Hazel felt blank. She thought it best to have things clear.

'I canna do naught,' she said defiantly.

'Now, mother'--Edward came to the rescue again--'see how right you are
in saying that a girl's education is not what it used to be! See how
Hazel's has been neglected! Think what a lot you could teach her!
Suppose you were to begin quite soon?'

'A batter,' began Mrs. Marston, with the eagerness of a philosopher
expounding her theory, 'is a well-beaten mixture of eggs and flour.
Repeat after me, my dear.'

'Eh, what's the use? _He_ dunna know what he eats no more than a
pig! I shanna cook for 'im.'

'Who's that, dear?' Mrs. Marston inquired.

'My dad.'

Mrs. Marston held up her hands with the mock-fur knitting in them, and
looked at Edward with round eyes.

'She says her father's a--a pig, my dear!'

'She doesn't mean it,' said he loyally, 'do you, Hazel?'

'Ah, and more!'

The host and hostess sighed.

Then Edward said: 'Yes, but you won't always be keeping house for your
father, you know,' and found himself so confused that he had to go and
fetch a pipe.

Afterwards he walked part way home with Hazel, and coming back under
the driving sky--that seemed to move all in a piece like a sliding
window, and showed the moon as a slim lady waiting for unlooked-for
happenings--he could have wept at the crude sweetness of Hazel. She was
of so ruthless an honesty towards herself as well as others; she had
such strange lights and shadows in her eyes, her voice, her soul; she
was so full of faults, and so brimming with fascination.

'Oh, God, if I may have her to keep and defend, to glow in my house
like a rose, I'll ask no more,' he murmured.

The pine-tops bowed in as stately a manner as they had when Hazel
cried, 'I'll never be a woman!' They listened like grown-ups to the
prattle of a child. And the stars, like gods in silver armour sitting
afar in halls of black marble, seemed to hear and disdain the little
gnat-like voice, as they heard Vessons' defiant 'Never will I!' and
Mrs. Marston's woolly prayers, and Reddin's hoof-beats. All man's
desires--predatory, fugitive, or merely negative--wander away into
those dark halls, and are heard no more. Among the pillars of the night
is there One who listens and remembers, and judges the foolishness of
man, not by effects, but by motives? And does that One, in the majesty
of everlasting vitality and resistless peace, ever see how we run after
the painted butterflies of our desires and fall down the dark
precipice? And if He sees and hears the wavering, calamitous life of
all creatures, and especially of the most beautiful and the most
helpless, does He ever sigh and weep, as we do when we see a dead child
or a moth's wing impaled on a thorn?

Our heavy burden is that we cannot know. For all our tears and prayers
and weary dreaming, we cannot know.

Edward lay awake all night, and heard the first blackbird begin,
tentatively, his clear song--a song to bring tears by its golden
security of joy in a world where nothing is secure.

The old madness surged in upon Edward more strongly as the light
grew, and he tried to read the Gospel of St. John (his favourite),
but the words left no trace on his mind. Hazel was there, and like
a scarlet-berried rowan on the sky she held the gaze by the perfection
of the picture she made. The bent of Edward's mind and upbringing was
set against the rush of his wishes and of circumstance. She had said,
'The first that came,' and he was sure that in her state of dark
superstition she would hold by her vow. Suppose some other--some
farm-hand, who would never see the real Hazel--should have been thinking
over the matter, and should go to-day and should be the first? It was
just how things happened. And then his flower would be gone, and the
other man would never know it was a flower. He worked himself into such
a fever that he could not rest, but got up and went out into the lively
air, and saw the sun come lingeringly through aery meadows of pale
green and primrose. He saw the ice slip from the bright pointed lilac
buds, and sheep browsing the frosty grass, and going to and fro in the
unreserved way that animals have in the early hours before the
restraint of human society is imposed on them. He saw, yet noticed
nothing, until a long scarlet bar of cloud reminded him of Hazel by its
vividness, and he found a violet by the graveyard gate.

'Little Hazel!' he whispered. He pondered on the future, and tried to
imagine such an early walk as this with Hazel by his side, and could
not for the glory of it. Then he reasoned with himself. This wild haste
was not right, perhaps. He ought to wait. But that vow! That foolish,
childish vow!

'I could look after her. She could blossom here like a violet in a
quiet garden.'

Giving was never too early.

'And I am asking nothing--not for years. She shall live her own life,
and be mother's daughter and my little sister for as long as she likes.
My little sister!' he repeated aloud, as if some voice had contradicted
him. And, indeed, the whole wide morning seemed to contradict his
scheme--the mating birds, the sheep suckling their lambs, the insistent
neighing and bellowing that rose from the fields and farms, the very
tombstones, with their legends of multitudinous families, and the voice
that cried to man and woman, not in words, but in the zest of the earth
and air, '"Beget, bring forth, and then depart, for I have done with
you!"'

A sharp cold shower stung his cheeks, and he saw a slim rosebud beating
itself helplessly against the wet earth, broken and muddy. He fetched a
stake and tied it up. I think,' he said to himself, 'that I was put
into the world to tie up broken roses, and one that is not broken yet,
thank God! It is miraculous that she has never come to harm, for that
great overgrown boy, her father, takes no care of her. Yes, I was meant
for that. I can't preach.' He smiled ruefully as he remembered how
steadfastly the congregation slept through his best sermons. 'I can't
say the right things at the right time. I'm not clever. But I can take
care of Hazel. And that is my life-work,' he added naively, 'perhaps
I'd better begin at once, and go to see her to-day.'

Ah! the gold and scarlet morning as he came home after finding that
resolve, which, as a matter of fact, he had taken with him! How the
roof of the parsonage shone like the New Jerusalem! And how the fantail
pigeons, very rotund denizens of that city, cooed as they walked
gingerly--tiles being cold to pink feet on a frosty morning--up and
down in the early sun!

Edward so much wanted to keep the violet he had found that he decided
he ought to give it to his mother. So he put it on her plate, and
looked for a suitable passage to read at prayers.

The Song of Solomon seemed the only thing really in tune with the
morning, but he decided rather sadly that 'something in Corinthians'
might please his mother better. So he read, 'The greatest of these is
love,' and his voice was so husky and so unmanageable that Mrs.
Marston, who did not notice the golden undertones that matched their
beauty with the blackbird's song, went straight from the chair she
knelt at in the prayers to her store-room, and produced lemon and
honey, which Edward loathed.

'You're very throaty, my dear, and you must take a level spoonful,' she
said.

It is only in poetry that all the world understands a lover. In real
life he is called throaty, and given a level spoonful of that nauseous
compound known as common sense.




Chapter 10


The garden at the Callow was full of old, sad-coloured flowers that had
lost all names but the country ones. Chief among them, by reason of its
hardihood, was a small plant called virgin's pride. Its ephemeral
petals, pale and bee-haunted, fluttered like banners of some lost,
forgotten cause. The garden was hazy with their demure, faintly scented
flowers, and the voices of the bees came up in a soft roar
triumphantly, as the voices of victors returning with hardwon spoil.

Abel had been putting some new sections on the hives, and, as usual,
after a long spell of listening to their low, changeless music, he
rushed in for his harp. He sat down under the hawthorn by the gate, and
looked like a patriarch beneath a pale green tint. As day declined the
music waxed; he played with a tenderness, a rage of delight, that did
not often come to him except on spring evenings. He almost touched
genius. Hazel came out, leaving the floor half scrubbed, and began to
dance on the potato flat.

'Dunna stomp the taters to jeath, 'Azel!' said he.

'They binna up!' she replied, continuing to dance.

He never wasted words. He continued the air with one hand and threw a
stone at her with the other. He hit her on the cheek.

'You wold beast!' she screamed.

'Gerroff taters!' He continued to play.

She went, hand to cheek, and frowning, off the potato patch. But she
did not stop dancing. Neither of them ever let such things as anger,
business, or cleanliness interfere with their pleasures. So Hazel
danced on, though on a smaller area among the virgin's pride.

The music, wild, crude and melancholy, floated on the soft air to
Edward as he approached. The sun slipped lower; leaf shadows began to
tremble on Hazel's pinafore, which, with its faded blue and its many
stains, was transmuted in the vivid light, and looked like the flowers
of virgin's pride.

'"The Ash Tree"!' said Abel, who always announced his tunes in this
way, as singers do at a choir supper.

The forlorn music met Edward at the gate. He stopped, startled at the
sight of Hazel dancing in the shadowy garden with her hair loose and
her abandon tempered by weariness. He stood behind the hedge until Abel
brought the tune to an early end with the laconic remark, 'Supper,' and
went indoors with his harp.

Edward opened the gate and went in.

'Eh, mister! what a start you give me!' said Hazel breathlessly.

'So this is your home?'

'Ah!'

Edward found her more disturbing to-night than at the concert; the gulf
between them was more obvious; she had been comparatively tidy before.
Now her disreputableness contrasted strongly with his correct black
coat and general air of civilized well-being.

Hazel came nearer.

'He inna bad to live along of,' she confided, with a nod towards the
cottage. 'O' course, he's crossways time and again, and a devil's
temper.'

'You mustn't speak of your father like that, Hazel.'

'What for not? He _be_ like that.'

'Are all these apple-trees yours?' he asked to change the subject.

'No, they'm father's. But I get the windfa'ls and the bruised 'uns. I
allus see'--she smiled winningly--'as there's plenty of them. Foxy
likes 'em. He found me at it once bruising of 'em. God a'mighty! what a
hiding he give me!'

Edward felt depressed. He could not harmonize Hazel's personality with
his mother's; he was shocked at her expressions; he was sufficiently
fastidious to recoil from dirt; the thought of Abel as a father-in-law
was little short of appalling. Yet, in spite of all these things, he
had felt such elation, such spring rapture when Hazel danced; the world
took on such strange new colours when she looked at him that he knew he
must love her for ever. He felt that as his emotions grew stronger--and
they were becoming more and more like a herd of young calves out at
grass--his ways of expression must increase in correctness.

'Hazel--' he began.

'I like the way you say it,' she interrupted. 'Ah! I like it right
well! Breathin' strong, like folk coming up the Monkey's Ladder.'

'Whatever's that?'

'Dunna you know Monkey's Ladder? It's that road there. Somebody's
coming up it now on a horse.'

They both looked down at Reddin climbing slowly and still some way off.
They did not know who it was, nor what destiny was pacing silently
towards them with his advancing figure, nor why he rode up and down
this road and other roads every day; but an inexplicable sense of
urgency came upon Edward. To his own surprise, he said suddenly:

'I came to ask if you'd marry me, Hazel Woodus?'

'Eh?' said she, dazed with surprise.

'Will you marry me, Hazel? I can give you a good home, and I will try
to be a good husband, and--and I love you, Hazel, dear.'

Hazel put her head on one side like a willow-wren singing. She liked to
be called dear.

'D'you like me as much as I like Foxy?'

'Far more.'

'You've bin very quick about it.'

'I'm afraid I have.'

'Will you buy me a green gown with yellow roses on?'

'If you like.' He spoke doubtfully, wondering what his mother would
think of it.

'And shall we sit down to our dinners at a table with a cloth on like
at--' She stopped. She could not tell him about Undern. 'Like the
gentry?' she finished.

'Yes, dear.'

'And will you tell that sleepy old lady as lives along, of you--'

('Oh, poor mother!' thought Edward.)

'--Not to stare and stare at me over the top of her spectacles like a
cow at a cornfield over the fence?'

'Yes--yes,' said Edward hastily, feeling that his mother must wait to
be reinstated until he had made sure of Hazel.

'All right, then; I'll come.'

Edward took her hand; then he kissed her cheek gently. She accepted the
kiss placidly. There was nothing in it to remind her of Reddin's.

'And you'll do always as you like,' Edward went on, 'and be my little
sister.' Then, to make matters clearer, he added: 'and you shall have a
room papered with buttercups and daisies for your very own.'

'Eh! how grand!'

'You'll like that?' His voice was wistful in its eagerness for a
denial.

'Ah! I shall like it right well.'

Edward made no reply. He was never any good at putting in a word for
himself. He was usually left out of things, and stood contentedly in
the background while inferior men pushed in front of him.

'And now,' he said, 'I'll give you a token till I can get you a ring.'
He picked a spray of the faint pink and blue flowers.

'What's its name?' he asked.

'Virgin's pride.'

Edward gave her a quick look. Then he realized that she was as innocent
as her little fox, and as free from artifice. That was its name, so she
told it to him.

'A very pretty little flower, and a very sweet name,' he said, 'And
now, where's your father?'

'Guzzling his supper.'

Edward frowned. Then the humour of the situation struck him, and he
laughed. Abel rose as they came to the door.

'Well, mister,' he inquired glumly, 'what'n you after? Money for them
missions to buy clothes for savages as 'd liefer go bare? Or money for
them poor clergy? I'm poorer nor the clergy.'

'I want to marry Hazel.'

Abel flung back his head and roared. Then he jerked his thumb over his
shoulder towards Hazel.

'What?--'er?' he queried in ecstasies of mirth. ''Er? Look at the
floor, man! Look at the apern she's got on! Laws, man! you surely dunna
want our 'Azel for your missus?'

'Yes.' Edward was nettled and embarrassed.

'Well, 'er's only eighteen.' He looked Hazel over appraisingly, as he
would have looked at a heifer. 'Still, I suppose she's an 'ooman
growed. Well, you can take her. I dunna mind. When d'you want her?'

I shall ask her when she will wish to marry me.'

Abel laughed again.

'Lord love us!' he said. 'You unna take and ax her? Tell her, that's
what! Just tell her what to do, and she'll do it if you give her one
for herself now and agen. So you mean marrying, do yer?'

Edward was angry. Abel's outlook and manner of expression rawed his
nerves.

'I leave all the arrangements to her,' he said stiffly.

'Then the devil aid you,' said Abel, 'for I canna!'

Hazel stood with downcast face, submissive, but ill at ease. She wanted
to spring at her father and scream, 'Ho'd yer row!' for she hated him
for talking so to Edward. Somehow it made her flushed and ashamed for
Edward to be told to 'give her one for herself.' She looked at him
under her lashes, and wondered if he would. There was something not
altogether unpleasant in the idea. She felt that to be ordered about by
young lips and struck by a young man's hand would be, as business men
say, 'quite in order.' She appraised Edward, and decided that he would
not. Had she been able to decide in the affirmative, she would probably
have fallen in love with him there and then.

Edward came over to her and took her hand.

'When will you be my wife, Hazel?' he said.

'I dunno. Not for above a bit.'

'Haw! haw!' laughed Abel. 'Hark at her! Throw summat at er', man!'

'I should prefer your absence,' said Edward, stung to expression at
last.

'Eh?'

'Go away!' said Edward rudely. He was surprised at himself afterwards.
Abel withdrew open-mouthed. Hazel laughed with delight.

'But why didna you hit 'un?' she asked wistfully.

'My dear girl! What a thing to say!'

'Be it?'

'Yes. But now, when shall we be married?'

'Not for years and years,' said Hazel, pleased at the dismay on his
face, and enjoying her new power. Then she reflected on the many
untried delights of the new life.

'Leastways, not for days an' days,' she amended.

'Will you gi' me pear-drops every day?'

'Pear-drops! My dear Hazel, you must think of better things than
pear-drops!'

'There's nought better,' she said, 'without it's bull's-eyes.'

'But, dear,' Edward reasoned gently, 'don't you want to think of
helping me, and going with me to chapel?'

Hazel considered.

'D'you preach long and solemn?' she asked.

'No,' said Edward rather curtly. 'But if I did, you ought to like it.'

Hazel took his measure again. Then she said naughtily:

'Tell you what I'll do if you preach long and solemn, mister. I'll put
me tongue out!'

Edward laughed in spite of himself, and thought for the twentieth time,
'Poor mother!' But that did not prevent his being anxious to have Hazel
safely at the Mountain. It seemed to him that every man in the county
must want to marry her.

'What would you say to May, Hazel, early May--lilac-time?'

'I'd like it right well.'

'And suppose we fix it the day after the spring flower-show at
Evenwood, and go to it together?'

'I'm going with father to sing.'

'Well, when you've sung, you can have tea with me.'

'Thank you kindly, Mr. Marston.'

'Edward.'

'Ed'ard.'

Abel came round the house.

'You can come and see the bees, if you've a mind,' he said forgivingly.
In his angers and his joys he was like a child. He was, in fact, what
he looked--a barbaric child, prematurely aged. He was aged and had
lines on his face because he enjoyed life so much, for joy bites as
deep as sickness or grief or any other physical strain. Hazel would age
soon, for she lived in an intenser world than most people, as if she
saw everything through magnifying glass and coloured glass.

Edward went to the bees as he would have gone to the dogs--sadly. He
disliked the bees even more than he disliked Abel, who in his expansive
mood was much less attractive than in his natural sulkiness. Abel did
not know how near he came once or twice to frustrating an end that he
thought very desirable. A less steadfast man than Edward, with a less
altruistic object in view, would have been frightened away from Hazel
by Abel's crudeness.

'What about the bitch?' he asked Edward when they had seen the bees.
'Will you take her, or shall I drown her?'

Rage flamed in Hazel's face--rage all the more destructive because
it was caused by pity. Her father's calm taking for granted that
Foxy's fate (and her own) depended on his whim and Edward's, the
picture of Foxy tied up in a bag to be drowned--Foxy, who had all
her love--infuriated her.

Edward was troubled at the look in her eyes. He had not yet had much
opportunity for seeing those wild red lights that burn in the eyes of
the hunter, and are reflected in those of the hunted, and make life a
lurid nightmare. The scene set his teeth on edge.

'Of course,' he said, and the recklessness of it was quite clear to him
when he thought of his mother--'of course, the little fox shall come.'

'And the one-eyed cat and the blind bird and the old ancient rabbit,
I'll wager!' queried Abel. 'Well, minister, you can set up a menagerie
and make money.'

'They could go in bits of holes and corners,' Hazel put in anxiously,
'and nobody'd ever know they were there! And the bird chirrups lovely,
fine days.'

Abel shouted with laughter.

'Tuthree feathers and a beak!' he said. 'And the rabbit'd be comforbler
a muff.'

Edward hastily ended the discussion.

'Of course, they shall all come,' he said.

Somehow, Hazel made the sheltering of these poor creatures a matter of
religion. He found himself connecting them with the great 'Inasmuch as
ye have done it unto these--' He had never seen the text in that light
before. But he was dubious about the possibility of making his mother
see it thus.

'They'll be much obleeged,' Hazel said. 'Come and see 'em.'

She spoke as one conferring the freedom of a city.

Foxy--very clean in her straw, smoothly white and brown, dignified, and
golden of eye--looked mistrustfully at Edward and showed her baby white
teeth.

'She'll liven the old lady up,' said Hazel.

'I'm afraid--' began Edward; and then--'she shows her teeth a good
deal.'

'Only along of being frit.'

'She needn't be frightened. I'll take care of her and of you, and see
that no harm comes to you.'

The statement was received by the night--critical, attent--in a silence
so deep that it seemed quizzical.

On his way home he felt rather dismayed at his task, because he saw
that in making Hazel happy he must make his mother unhappy.

'Ah, well, it'll all come right,' he thought, 'for He is love, and He
will help me.'

The sharp staccato sound of a horse cantering came up behind him. It
was Reddin returning from a wide detour. He pulled up short.

'Is there any fiddler in your parish, parson?' he inquired.

Edward considered.

'There is one man on the far side of the Mountain.'

'Pretty daughter?'

'No. He is only twenty.'

'Damn!'

He was gone.

Hazel, in the untidy room at the Callow, fed her pets and had supper in
a dream of coming peace for them all. She would not have been peaceful
if she had seen the meeting of the two men in the dusk, both wanting
her with a passion equal in suddenness and force, but different in
quality. She wanted neither. Her passion, no less intense, was for
freedom, for the wood-track, for green places where soft feet scudded
and eager eyes peered out and adventurous lives were lived up in the
tree-tops, down in the moss.

She was fascinated by Reddin; she was drawn to confide in Edward; but
she wanted neither of them. Whether or not in years to come she would
find room in her heart for human passion, she had no room for it now.
She had only room for the little creatures she befriended and for her
eager, quickly growing self. For, like her mother, she had the egoism
that is more selfless than most people's altruism--the divine egoism
that is genius.




Chapter 11


When Edward got home his mother was asleep in the armchair. Her whole
person rose and fell like a tropical sea. Her shut eyes were like those
of a statue, behind the lids of which one knows there are no pupils.
Her eyebrows were slightly raised, as if in expostulation at being
obliged to breathe. Her figure expressed the dignity of old age, which
may or may not be due to rheumatism.

Edward, as he looked at her, felt as one does who has been reading a
fairy-tale and is called to the family meal. All the things he had
meant to say, that had seemed so eloquent, now seemed foolish. He awoke
her hastily in case his courage should fail before that most adamantine
thing--an unsympathetic atmosphere.

'I've got some news for you, mother.'

'Nothing unpleasant, dear?'

'No, Pleasant. It makes me very happy.'

'The good are always happy,' replied Mrs. Marston securely.

Before the bland passivity of this remark it seemed that irony itself
must soften.

'I am engaged, mother.'

'What in, dear?'

'I am going to bring home a wife.'

She was deaf and very sleepy.

'What kind of a knife, dear?' she asked.

'I am going to marry Hazel Woodus.'

'You can't do that, dear,' She spoke with unruffled calm, as if Edward
were three years old.

'I can, and shall mother.'

'Ah, well, it won't be for a long, long time,' she said, thinking aloud
as she often did, and adding with the callousness that sometimes comes
with age--arising not from hardness, but from the atrophy of the
emotions--'and, of course, she may die before then.'

'Die!' Edward's voice surprised himself, and it made his mother jump.

'The young do die,' she went on; 'we all have to go. Your poor father
fell asleep. I shall fall asleep.'

She began to do so. But his next words made her wide awake again.

'I'm going to be married in May, next month.'

Her whole weight of passive resistance was set against his purpose.

'Such unseemly haste!' she murmured. 'So inordinate--such a hurried
marriage!'

But, Edward's motives being what they were, he was proof against this.

'What will the congregation think?'

'Bother the congregation!'

'That's the second time you've said that, Edward. I'm afraid you are
going from bad to worse.'

'No. Only going to be married mother.'

'But a year's engagement is the least, the very least I could
countenance,' she pleaded, 'and a year is so soon gone. One eats and
sleeps, and Lord's Day breaks the week, and time soon passes.'

'Oh, can't you understand, mother?' He tried illustration. 'Suppose you
saw a beautiful shawl out on a hedge in the rain, shouldn't you want to
bring it in?'

'Certainly not. It would be most unwise. Besides, I have seven.'

'Well, anyway, I can't put it off. Even now something may have happened
to her.'

He spoke with the sense of the inimical in life that all lovers feel.

'But things will have to be bought,' she said helplessly, 'and things
will have to be made.'

'There is plenty of time, several weeks yet. Won't you,' he suggested
tactfully, 'see after Hazel's clothes for her? She is too poor to buy
them herself. Won't you lay out a sum of money for me mother?'

'Yes, I think,' she said, beginning to recover her benignity--'I think
I could lay out a sum of money.'

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Marston had what she called 'not a wink of sleep'--that is to say,
she kept awake for half an hour after getting into bed. The idea of a
wedding, although it was offensive by reason of being different from
every day, was still quite pleasant. It would be an opportunity for
using the multitude of things that were stored in every cupboard and
never used, being thought too good for every day. Mrs. Marston was one
of those that, having great possessions, go sadly all their days. It is
strange how generation after generation spends its fleeting years in
this fetish-worship, never daring to make life beautiful by the daily
use of things lovely, but for ever being busy about them.

Mrs. Marston's china glowed so, and was so stainless and uncracked that
it seemed as if the lives of all the beautiful young women in her
family must have been sacrificed in its behalf.

They had all drunk of the cup of death long ago, and their beauty had
long ago been broken and defaced; but the beautiful old china remained.
There were still the two dozen cups and saucers, the cream jug, sugar
basin and large plates of the feather-cups, just as when they were
first bought. Their rich gilding, which completely covered them
outside, was hardly worn at all, nor were the bright birds' feathers
and raised pink flowers. It would be very pleasant, Mrs. Marston
reflected wistfully, to use it again. There were all the bottled
fruits, too, and lemon-curd and jellies; and a wedding would be a very
pleasant, suitable opportunity for making one of her famous layer cakes
and for wearing her purple silk dress. Mingled with these ideas was the
knowledge that Edward wanted it, would be 'vexed' if it had to be put
off. 'I have never known him to be so reckless,' she pondered. 'But
still, he'll settle down once he's married. And she'll sober down, too,
when the little ones come. It will be pleasant when they come. A
grandmother has all the pleasures of a mother and none of the pains.
And she will not want to manage anything. Edward said so. I should not
have liked a managing daughter-in-law. Edward was wise in his choice.
For, though noisy, she'll quiet down a little with each of the dear
babies, and there will be plenty of them, I think and hope.'

It was characteristic of Mrs. Marston's class and creed (united with
the fact that she was Edward's mother) that she did not consider Hazel
in the matter. Hazel's point of view, personality, hopes and fears were
non-existent to her. Hazel would be absorbed into the Marston family
like a new piece of furniture. She would be provided for without being
consulted; it would be seen to that she did her duty, also without
being consulted. She would become, as all the other women in this and
the other families of the world had, the servant of the china and the
electro-plate and the furniture, and she would be the means by which
Edward's children came into the world. She would, when not
incapacitated, fetch shawls. At all times she would say 'Yes, dear' or
'As you wish, Edward.' With all this before her, what did she want with
personality and points of view? Obviously nothing. If she brought all
the grandchildren safely into the world, with their due complement of
legs and arms and noses, she would be a satisfactory asset. But Mrs.
Marston forgot, in this summing up, to find out whether Hazel cared for
Edward more than she cared for freedom.

Mrs. Marston came down to breakfast with an air of resignation.

'I have decided to make the best of it, my dear Edward,' she said; 'of
course, I had hoped there would never be anyone. But it doesn't
signify. I will lay out the money and be as good a grandmother as I
can. And now, dear' (she spoke passively, shifting the responsibility
on to Edward's shoulders)--'and now, how will you get me to town?'

Here was a problem. The little country station was several miles away,
far beyond her walking limit, and no farmer in the neighbourhood had a
horse quiet enough to please her.

'In my day, dear, I can remember horses so quiet, so well-bred, so
beautifully trained, and, above all, so fat, that an accident was,
apart from God's will, impossible. Now, my dear father, in the days
when he travelled for Jeremy's green tea (and very good tea it was, and
a very fine flavour, and a picture of a black man on every canister).
Where was I? Oh yes; he always used to allow a day for a ten-mile
round. Very pleasant it was, but the horses are not--'

Here Edward cut in with a suggestion.

'Why shouldn't you go by the traction trailer? You enjoyed it that one
time?'

The traction engine, belonging to a stone quarry, passed two or three
times a week, and was never--the country being hilly--so full that it
could not accommodate a passenger.

It was therefore arranged that Edward should go and see the driver, and
afterwards see Hazel, and arrange for her to go to town also. He was to
stay at home. Mrs. Marston would never leave the house, as she said,
'without breath in it,' though she could give no reason for this idea,
and prided herself on having no superstitions. She would not trust
Martha by herself; so Edward was ruefully obliged to undertake the
office of 'breathing', like a living bellows to blow away harm.

It was settled that they were to go on the day before the flower-show,
and Hazel was to stay the night. It would be the last night but one
before the wedding.

Meanwhile, the bark-stripping continued, and fate went on leading Jack
Reddin's horse in every direction but the right one. Edward went to
Hunter's Spinney every day. He began to find a new world among the
budding hyacinths on the soft leafy soil, breaking up on every side
with the push of eager lives coming through, and full of those elusive,
stimulating scents that only spring knows.

       *       *       *       *       *

When the day came for going to Silverton, and Hazel arrived fresh and
rosy from her early walk, he felt very rebellious. Still, it was
ordained that someone must breathe, and only his mother could choose
the clothes.

It took Mrs. Marston several hours to get ready, and Edward and Martha
were kept busy running up and down. Not that Mrs. Marston's clothes had
to be hunted for or mended--far from it. But there were so many
cupboards to be locked, their keys hidden in drawers, the keys of
which, in their turn, went into more cupboards. When such an
inextricable tangle as no burglar could tackle had been woven, Mrs.
Marston always wanted something out of the first cupboard, and all had
to be done over again. But at last she was achieved. Edward and Martha
stood back and surveyed her with pride, and looked to Hazel for
admiration of their work; but Hazel was too young and too happy to see
either the pathos or the humour of old ladies.

She danced down the steep path with an armful of wraps, at the idea of
wearing which she had made faces.

The path led steeply in a zigzag down one side of the quarry cliff,
where Abel had told Hazel of the cow falling, and where she had felt
drodsome. Once more as she came down with a more and more lagging step,
the same horror came over her.

'I'm frit!' she cried; 'canna we be quick?'

But speed was not in Mrs. Marston. She came clinging to Edward's arm,
very cautiously, like a cat on ice.

Martha, her stout red arms bare, her blue gingham dress and white apron
flying in the wind, was directed to hold on to Mrs. Marston's mantle
behind--as one tightens the reins downhill--to keep her on her feet.
Edward was carrying a kitchen chair for his mother to sit on during the
journey.

Hazel felt that they were none of them any good; they none of them knew
what it was like to be frit. So she ran away, and left the hot,
secretive, omniscient place with its fierce white and its crafty
shadows.

She reached a tiny field that ran up to the woods, and there, among the
brilliantly varnished buttercups, the bees sounded like the tides
coming in on the coasts of faery. Hazel forgot her dread--an
inexplicable sickening dread of the quarry. She chased a fat bumble-bee
all across the golden floor--one eager, fluffy, shining head after the
other. They might have been, in the all-permeating glory on their hill
terrace, with the sapphire-circled plain around--they might have been
the two youngest citizens of Paradise, circled in for ever from bleak
honeyless winter, bleak honeyless hearts.

The slow cortege came down the path, Martha being obliged, as the
descent grew steeper, to fling herself back like a person in a
tug-of-war, for Mrs. Marston gathered way as she went, and uttered
little helpless cries.

'I'm going, Martha! I'm losing control! Not by the bugles, Martha! Not
by the braid!'

When they reached the road, the traction engine was not in sight, so
they sat in the bank and waited, Mrs. Marston regal in the chair; and
Hazel held a buttercup under Edward's chin to see if he liked butter.

'Very warm and pleasant,' murmured Mrs. Marston, and dropped into a
doze.

Edward listened to the thrushes; they were flinging their voices--as
jugglers fling golden balls--against the stark sides of the quarry. Up
went a rush of bright notes, pattered on the gloomy wall, and returned
again defeated.

To Edward, as he watched Hazel, they seemed like people thanking God
for blessings, and being heard and blessed again. To Hazel, they seemed
so many other Hazels singing because it was a festal day. To Mrs.
Marston they were 'noisy birds, and very disturbing.' Martha
crotcheted. She was making edging, hundreds of yards of it, for wedding
garments. This was all the more creditable, as it was an act of faith,
for no young man had as yet seemed at all desirous of Martha.

At last the traction engine appeared, and Mrs. Marston was hoisted into
the trailer--a large truck with scarlet-painted sides, and about half
full of stone. This had been shovelled away from the front to make room
for Mrs. Marston and Hazel. A flap in the scarlet side was let down,
and with the help of one of the traction men Edward and Martha got her
safely settled. She really was a very splendid old lady. Her hat, a
kind of spoon-shape, was trimmed lavishly with black glass grapes, that
clashed together softly when she moved. There was also a veil with
white chenille spots. The hat was tied under her chin with black
ribbons, and her kind old face, very pink and plump and charming,
looked out pleasantly upon, the world. She wore her best mantle,
heavily trimmed with jet bugles, and her alpaca skirt was looped up
uncompromisingly with an old-fashioned skirt-hook made like a
butterfly. Hung on one arm was her umbrella, and she carried her
reticule in both hands for safety. So, with all her accoutrements on,
she sat, pleasantly aware that she was at once self-respecting and
adventurous.

They started in a whirl of good-byes, shrieks of delight from Hazel,
and advice of Mrs. Marston to the driver to put the brake on and keep
it on. Hazel was perched on the side of the truck near her. They
rounded a turn with great dignity, the trailer, with Mrs. Marston
as its figure-head--wearing an expression of pride, fear, and
resignation--swinging along majestically.

'Please, Mrs. Marston, can I buy a green silk gown wi' yellow roses
on?'

'Certainly not, my dear. It would be most unsuitable. So very far from
quiet.'

'What's quiet matter?'

'Quietness is the secret of good manners. The quieter you are, the more
of a lady you'll be thought. All truly good people are quiet in
manners, dress, and speech, just as all the best horses are advertised
as quiet to ride and drive, but few are really so.'

'Han you got to be ever and ever so quiet to be a lady?'

'Yes.'

'What for have you?'

'Because, dear, it is the proper thing. Now my poor husband was quiet,
so quiet that you never knew if he was there or not. And Edward is
quiet too,--as quiet as--'

'Oh! dunna, dunna!' wailed Hazel.

'Is a pin sticking into you dear?'

'No. Dunna say Ed'ard's quiet!'

Mrs. Marston looked amicably over her spectacles.

'My dear, why not?' she asked.

'I dunna like that sort.'

'Could you explain a little, dear?'

'I dunna like quiet men--nor quiet horses. My mam was quiet when she
was dead. Everybody's quiet when they're dead.'

'Very, very quiet,' crooned Mrs. Marston. 'Yes, we all fall asleep in
our turn.'

'I like,' went on Hazel in her rather crude voice, harsh with youth
like a young blackbird's--'I like things as go quick and men as talk
loud and stare hard and drive like the devil!'

She broke off, flushing at Mrs. Marston's expression, and at the sudden
knowledge that she had been describing Reddin.

'It doesn't signify very much,' said Mrs. Marston (severely for her),
'what you like, dear. But I suppose'--she softened--'that you do really
like Edward, since he has chosen you and you are pledged?'

Hazel shook her shoulders as if she wanted to get rid of a yoke. They
fell into silence, and as Mrs. Marston dozed, Hazel was able to fulfil
her desire that had sprung into being at the moment of seeing Mrs.
Marston's hat--namely, to squash one of those very round and brittle
grapes.

Her quick little hand, gleaming in the sun, hovered momentarily above
the black hat like a darting dragon-fly, and the mischief was done--bland
respectability smashed and derided.




Chapter 12


They went gallantly, if slowly, on through narrow ways, lit on either
side by the breath-taking freshness of new hawthorn leaves. Primroses,
wet and tall, crisply pink of stalk and huge of leaf, eyed them, as
Madonnas might, from niches in the isles of grass and weed.

Carts had to back into gates to let them go by, and when they came into
the main road horses reared and had to be led past. Hazel found it all
delightful. She liked, when the driver pulled up outside little wayside
inns, to peer into the brown gloom where pewter pots and rows of china
jugs shone, and from which, over newly washed floors of red tiles,
landlords advanced with foaming mugs.

Mrs. Marston strongly disapproved of these proceedings, but did not
think it polite to expostulate, as she was receiving a favour.

In Silverton Mrs. Marston lingered a long while before any shop where
sacred pictures were displayed. The ones she looked at longest were
those of that peculiarly seedy and emasculated type which modern
religion seems to produce. Hazel, all in a fidget to go and buy her
clothes, looked at them, and wondered what they had to do with her.
There was one of an untidy woman sitting in a garden of lilies--evidently
forced--talking to an anaemic-looking man with uncut hair and a
phosphorescent head. Hazel did not know about phosphorus or haloes,
but she remembered how she had gone into the kitchen one night in the
dark and screamed at sight of a sheep's head on the table, shining with
a strange greenish light. This picture reminded her of it. She hastily
looked at the others. She liked the one with sheep in it best, only the
artist had made them like bolsters, and given the shepherd saucer eyes.
Then she came to one of the Crucifixion, a subject on which the artist
had lavished all the slumbering instincts of torture that are in so
many people.

'Oh! what a drodsome un! I dunna like this shop,' said Hazel tearfully.
'What'm they doing to 'im? Oh, they'm great beasts!'

Perhaps she had seen in her dim and childish way the everlasting
tyranny of the material over the abstract; of bluster over nerves;
strength over beauty; States over individuals; churches over souls; and
fox-hunting squires over the creatures they honour with their
attention.

'What is it, my dear?' Mrs. Marston looked over her spectacles, and her
eyes were like half moons peering over full moons.

'That there picture! They'm hurting Him so cruel. And Him fast and
all.'

'Oh!' said Mrs. Marston wonderingly, 'that's nothing to get vexed
about. Why, don't you know that's Jesus Christ dying for us?'

'Not for me!' flashed Hazel.

'My dear!'

'No, what for should He? There shall none die along of me, much less be
tormented.'

'Needs be that one man die for the people,' quoted Mrs. Marston easily.
'Only through blood can sin be washed white.'

'Blood makes things raddled, not white; and if so be any's got to die;
I'll die for myself.'

The old gabled houses, dark and solemn with heavy carved oak, the smart
plate-glass windows of the modern shops, the square dogmatic church
towers and the pointed insinuating spires--all seemed to listen in
surprise to this being who was not content to let another suffer for
her. For civilization as it now stands is based solely on this one
thing--vicarious suffering. From the central doctrine of its chief
creed to the system of its trade; from the vivisection-table to the
consumptive genius dying so that crowds of fat folk may get his soul in
a cheap form, it is all built up on sacrifice of other creatures.

'What'd you say if Ed'ard died for yer?' queried Hazel crudely.

'My dear! How unseemly! In the street!'

'And what'd I do if Foxy died for me?'

'Well, well, Foxy's only an animal.'

'So're you and me animals!' said Hazel so loudly that poor Mrs. Marston
flushed all over her gentle old face.

'So indecent!' she murmured. 'My dear,' she said, when she had steered
Hazel past the shop, 'you want a nice cup of tea. And I do hope,' she
went on softly, putting a great deal of cream in Hazel's cup as she
would have put lubricating oil on a stiff sewing-machine--'I do hope,
my dear, you'll become more Christian as time goes on.'

'If Foxy died along of me,' said Hazel stubbornly--for, although
grateful for the festive meal, she could not let her basic rule of life
slip--'if Foxy died along of me, I'd die too. I couldna do aught else.'

'Things are very different,' said Mrs. Marston, flustered, flushed and
helpless--'very different from what they used to be.'

'What for are they, Mrs. Marston?'

But that question Mrs. Marston was quite unable to answer. If she had
known the answer--that the change was in herself, and that the world
was not different, but still kept up its ancient war between love and
respectability, beauty and mass--she would not have liked it, and so
she would not have believed it.

It was seven o'clock when they were put down, tired and laden with
parcels, at the quarry half-way up God's Little Mountain. Edward had
been there for more than an hour, tormented with fears for Hazel's
safety, angry with himself for letting her go. All afternoon he had
fidgeted, worried Martha with suggestions about tea, finally gone to
the shop several miles away for some of Hazel's favourite cake, quite
forgetting that he ought to be in the house breathing. It all resulted
in a most beautiful tea, as Hazel thought when they had pushed and
pulled Mrs. Marston home.

What with the joy of staying the night and the wonder of her new
clothes, Hazel was as radiant and talked so fast that Edward could do
nothing but watch her.

In her short life there had not been many moments of such rose and
gold. It was the happiest hour of Edward's life also; for she looked to
him as flowers to warm heaven, as winter birds to a fruited tree. As he
watched her opening parcel after parcel with frank innocence and little
bird-like cries of rapture, he knew the intolerable sweetness of
bestowing delight on the beloved--a sweetness only equalled by the
intolerable agony of seeing helpless and incurable pain on the loved
face.

'And what's that one?' he asked, like a mother helping in a child's
game. He pointed to a parcel which contained chemises and nightdresses.

'That,' said Mrs. Marston, frowning portentously at Hazel, who was
tearing it open--'that is other useful garments.'

'What for canna I show 'em Ed'ard? I want to show all. The money was
his'n.'

It was a tribute to Edward's self-control that she was so entirely
lacking in shyness towards him.

'My dear! A young man!' whispered Mrs. Marston.

Suddenly, by some strange necromancy, there was conjured in Hazel's
mind a picture of Reddin--flushed, hard-eyed, with an expression
that aroused in her misgiving and even terror. So she had seen him
just before she fled to Vessons. At the remembrance she flushed so
deeply that Mrs. Marston congratulated herself on the fact that her
daughter-in-law had _some_ modesty and right feeling.

If she had known who caused the flush, who it was that had awakened the
love of pretty clothes which Edward was satisfying, she would have
thought very different thoughts, and would have been utterly miserable.
For her love for Edward was deep enough to make her wish him to have
what he wanted, and not what she thought he ought to want, as long as
he did not clash with her religion. For Edward to know it, though so
early in his love for Hazel, would have meant a rocking of heaven and
earth around him. Even she, with her childish egotism like a shell
about her, realized that this was a thing that could not be.

'But it be all right,' she thought, as she curled up luxuriously in the
strangely clean and comfortable bed, 'it'll be all right. Him above'll
see as Mr. Reddin ne'er shows his face here; for the old lady said Him
above looked after good folks, and Ed'ard's good. But I wish some un
'ud look after the bad uns,' she thought, looking across the room to
the north where Undern lay.

       *       *       *       *       *

'My dear, wait a moment!' said Mrs. Marston to Edward downstairs, as he
was lighting her candle. I have something to tell you. I fear you must
brace yourself.'

'Well, mother?' Edward smiled.

'Hazel's not a Christian!' She spoke in a sepulchral whisper, and
looked at him afterwards, as if to say, 'There, now, I _have_
surprised you!'

'And how do you make that out, mother?'

Edward found in his heart this fact, that it made no difference to his
love whether Hazel were a Christian or not; this troubled him.

'No. She's not a Christian, my dear,' said Mrs. Marston in a kind of
gasp; 'she refuses to be died for!'

Upstairs, Hazel was saying her orisons at the window.

'If there's anybody there,' she murmured, staring out into the
consuming darkness that had absorbed every colour, every form,
except the looming outline of God's Little Mountain against a watery
moon-rise--'if there's anybody there, I'd be obleeged if you'd give
an eye to our Foxy, as is lonesome in tub. It dunna matter about me,
being under Ed'ard's roof.'

Hazel had never felt so like a child in its mother's lap. Her own
mother had not made her feel so. She had been a vague, abstracted woman
with an air of bepuzzlement and lostness. She looked so long out of the
door--never shut, except when Abel insisted on it--that there was no
time for Hazel. Only occasionally she would catch her by the shoulders
and look into her eyes and tell her strange news of faery. But now she
felt cared for as she looked round the low room with its chair-bed and
little dressing-table hung with pink glazed calico. There was a text
over the fireplace:

'"Not a hair of thy head shall perish."'

It seemed particularly reassuring to Hazel as she brushed her long
shining coils before the hanging mirror. There was a bowl of double
primroses--red, mauve and white--on the window-sill, and a card 'with
Edward's love.'

Flowers in a bedroom were something very new. To her, as to so many
poor people, a bedroom was a stuffy place to crawl into at night and
get out of as quickly as possible in the morning.

'Eh! it'll be grand to live here,' she thought drowsily, as she lay
down in the cool clean sheets and heard the large clock on the wall of
the landing ticking slumbrously in a measured activity that deepened
the peace. She heard Mrs. Marston slide past in her soft slippers with
her characteristic walk, rather like skating. Then Edward came up
(evidently in stockinged feet, for he was only heralded by creakings).
Hazel never dreamt that he had taken his shoes off for her sake.

The moon, riding clear of cloud, flung the shadow of Edward's primroses
on the bed--a large round posy like a Christmas-pudding with
outstanding leaves and flowers clearly defined, all very black on the
counterpane.

Undern seemed very far off.

'I like this better'n that old dark place, green dress or no green
dress,' she thought, 'and I'll ne'er go back there. It inna true what
he said, "Have her he will for certain sure," for I'm going to live
along of Ed'ard, and the old sleepy lady'll learn me to make batter for
ever and ever. Batter's a well-beaten mixture of eggs and summat.'

She fell asleep.

       *       *       *       *       *

In his room Edward walked up and down, too happy to go to bed.

'My little one! my little one!' he whispered. And he prayed that Hazel
might have rosy and immortal happiness, guarded by strong angels along
a path of flowers all her life long, and at last running in through the
celestial gates as a child runs home.

The spring wind, rainy and mournful, came groping out of the waste
places and cried about the house like a man mourning for his love. The
cavern of night, impenetrable and vast, was full of echoes, as if some
voice, terrible and violent, had shouted there a long while since, and
might, even before the age-long reverberations had died away, be
uplifted again, if it was the will of the Power (invisible but so
immanent that it pressed upon the brain) that inhabited the obscure,
star-dripping cavern.




Chapter 13


Next morning Mrs. Marston came in from the kitchen with the toast,
which she would not trust anyone but herself to make, with a face
portending great happenings.

'Mind you see that they are all properly placed, Edward; they should be
all together in one part of the room.'

'Who'd that be?' Hazel inquired.

'1906, plums; 1908, gooseberries; 1909, cherries, sugarless. The
sugared ones are older.' Mrs. Marston spoke so personally that Hazel
stared.

'It's mother's exhibits, Hazel,' explained Edward.

'Yes. They've been to shows year by year, and very well they've stood
it. I only hope the constant travelling won't set up fermentation. I
should like those Morellas to outlive me. A receipt I had of Jane
Thorn, and she died of dropsy, poor thing, and bottled to the end.'

'Dunna you ever eat 'em?' asked Hazel.

This was blasphemy. To eat 1909 Morellas! It was passed over in tense
silence, allowances being made for a prospective bride. 'Poor thing!
she's upset.'

The exhibits, packed in a great bed of the vivid star-moss that grew in
the secret recesses of the woods, were waiting on the front step in
their usual box. There were some wonderful new jellies that made Hazel
long to be Mrs. Marston and have control of the storeroom. This was a
dim place where ivy leaves scraped the cobwebby window, and tall green
canisters stood on shelves in company with glass jars, neatly labelled,
and barrels of home-made wine; where hams hung from the ceiling, and
herbs in bunches and on trays sent out a pungent sweetness. In there
the magic was now heightened by the presence--dignified even in
deshabille--of a wedding-cake which was being slowly but thoroughly
iced.

People often wondered how Mrs. Marston did it. No one ever saw her
hurried or busy, yet the proofs of her industry were here. She worked
like the coral insect, in the dark, as it were, of instinct unlit by
intellect, and, like the coral insect, she raised a monumental
structure that hemmed her in.

They had to start early, driven by Edward's one substantial
parishioner, who was principal judge, chief exhibitor, and organizer of
the show. The exhibits must be there by ten; but Edward did not care in
the least how many hours he spent there. The day was only darkened for
him by one thing.

When the trap came round, and Hazel climbed in joyously, Edward forgot
the exhibits. He would have gone off without them had not Martha come
flying down the path shouting:

'Mr. Ed'ard! Mr. Ed'ard! Nineteen six! Nineteen nine! Jam!'

'What for's Martha cursing?' asked Hazel.

Edward, looking round, saw his mother's face in the doorway, dismayed,
surprised, wounded. He jumped out and ran up the path.

'Oh, mother! How could I?' he said miserably.

Mrs. Marston looked up; her mouth, that had fallen in a little,
trembling pitifully, and her eyes smarting with the thick, painful
tears of age.

'It wasn't you, my dear,' she said; 'you never forget; it was--the
young woman.'

One's god must at all hazards go clear of blame.

Edward kissed her, but with reserve, and when he got into the trap he
put an arm protectingly round Hazel.

'What a fool I am!' he thought. 'Now everything's spoilt.'

In the silent store-room, hour by hour, Mrs. Marston propelled the
mixture of sugar and egg through her icing syringe, building complex
designs of frosty whiteness.

Her back ached, and it seemed a long way round the cake, but she went
on until Martha, with a note of sympathetic understanding in her voice,
announced:

'Yer dinner's in, mum, and a cup of tea along of it.'

Mrs. Marston sighed gratefully.

'How nice and pleasant!' she said; 'but not as nice and pleasant as it
was--before.'

'Not by a long mile!' said Martha heartily. For Hazel had 'taken the
eye' of all the eligibles at the concert, and was altogether
disturbing.

'Perhaps, Martha,' said Mrs. Marston wistfully, 'when she's been here a
long while, and we're used to her, and she's part of the house--perhaps
it'll be as nice and pleasant as before?'

'When the yeast's in,' said Martha pessimistically, 'the dough's
leavened!'

       *       *       *       *       *

As Edward and Hazel drew near the show-ground they passed people
walking and were overtaken by traps.

A man passed at full gallop, and Hazel was reminded of Reddin. Later,
she said:

'How'd you like it, Ed'ard, if somebody was after you, like a weasel
after a rabbit or a terrier at a fox-earth? What'd you do?'

'What morbid things you think of, dear!'

'What'd you do?'

'I don't know.'

'There's nought to do.'

Edward remembered his creed.

'I should pray, Hazel.'

'What good'd that do?'

'God answers prayers.'

'That He dunna! Or where'd the fox-hunting gents be, and who'd have
rabbit-pie? I dunna see as He _can_ answer 'em.'

'Little girls mustn't bother their pretty heads.'

'If you'd found as many creatures in traps as me, and loosened 'em, and
seed their broken legs, and eyes as if they'd seed ghosses, and onst a
dog caught by the tongue--eh! you'd bother! You would that! And feyther
killing the pigs Good Fridays.'

'Why Good Fridays, of all days?'

'That was the day. Ah! every Good Friday I was used to fight feyther!'

'My dear child!'

'You would if you'd seed the pig that comforble and contented, and
know'd what it'd look like in a minute. I'd a killed feyther if I
could.'

'But why? Surely it was worse of you to want to kill your father than
of him to want to kill the pig?'

'I dunno. But I couldn't abear it. I bit him awful one time, and he hit
me on the head with a rake, and I went to sleep.'

Edward's forehead was damp with sweat.

'Merciful God!' he thought, 'that such things should be!'

'And when I've heard things screaming and crying to be loosed, and them
in traps, and never a one coming to 'em but me, it's come o'er me to
won'er who'd loose _me_ out if I was in a trap.'

'God would.'

'I dunna think so. He ne'er lets the others out.'

Edward was silent. The radiant day had gone dark, and he groped in it.

'What for dunnot He, my soul? What for dun He give 'em mouths so's they
can holla, and not listen at 'em? I listen when Foxy shouts out.'

At this moment Edward saw Abel approaching, swaggering along with the
harp. He had never been glad to see him so far; now he was almost
affectionate.

'Laws, Ed'ard!' said Abel, straining the affection to breaking-point,
'you'm having a randy, and no mistake! Dancing and all, I s'pose?'

'No. I shall go before the dancing.'

'You won't get our 'Azel to go along of you, then. Dance her will, like
a leaf in the fall.'

'You'd rather come home with me on your wedding-eve, Hazel, wouldn't
you?'

Abel, seeing Hazel's dismayed face, laughed loudly. Edward hated him as
only sensitive temperaments can, and was conscience-stricken when he
realized the fact.

'Well, Hazel?' he asked gently, and created a situation.

'I dunno,' said Hazel, awkwardly. A depressed silence fell between
them; both were so bitterly disappointed. Abel, like an ancient
mischievous gnome, went off, calling to Hazel:

'Clear your throat agen the judgin's over!'

The judges were locked into the barn where the exhibits were. They took
a long while over the judging, presumably because they tasted
everything, even to the turnips (Mrs. James was partial to early
turnips). Edward and Hazel passed a window and looked in.

'Look at 'em longing after the old lady's jam!' said Hazel. 'It's a
mercy the covers are well stuck on or they'd be in like wasps! Look at
Mr. Frodley wi' the eggs! Dear now, he's sucking one like a lad at a
throstles' nest! Oh! Father'd ought to be there! He ne'er eats a cooked
egg. Allus raw. Oh! Mr. James has unscrewed a bottle of father's honey
and dipped! Look at 'im sucking his fingers!'

'Do people buy the remnants?' asked Edward, amused and disgusted.

'Ah! What for not?'

The judges are now making a hearty meal off some cheeses.

'I wonder whose cheeses they are?' Edward mused.

They were, in fact, Vessons'. He always insisted on making cheeses for
some obscure reason; possibly it was the pride of the old-fashioned
servant in being worth more than his wages. Vessons certainly was. He
made stacks of cheeses, and took them to fairs and shows without the
slightest encouragement from his master, who, when Vessons returned,
red with conflict, and said, planking down the money with intense
pride--''Ere it is! I 'ad to labour for thre'pences, though,' would
merely nod uninterestedly. But still the Undern cheeses went to shows
labelled 'John Reddin, Esquire, per A. Vessons.'

At last the judges came out. The mere judging did not take long, for
Mr. James usually considered his exhibit the best, and said so; the
others, being only small-holders, were generally too polite to gainsay
him.

Edward and Hazel went into the barn where the exhibits were set out
with stern simplicity, looking brave and beautiful with their earthly
glamour. There were rolls of golden butter, nut-brown eggs, snowy
bouquets of broccoli, daffodils with the sun striking through their
aery petals, masses of dark wallflower where a stray bee revelled.
There was Abel's honey, with a large placard drawn by himself
proclaiming in drunken capitals:

   ABEL WOODUS. BEE-MAN.
   COFFINS. HONEY. WREATHS.

   OPEN TO ENGAGEMENTS TO PLAY THE HARP AT
   WEDDINGS, WAKES AND CLUB-DAYS.

The golden jars shone; the sections in their lace-edged boxes, whitely
sealed, were as provocative as the reserve of a fair woman.

Edward bought one for Hazel. 'To open on your wedding-day,' he said.
But the symbolism, so apparent to him, was lost on Hazel.

Between the judging and the tea hour was a dull time. The races had not
begun, and though an ancient of benign aspect announced continually,
'I'll take two to one!' no one responded.

The people stood about, taking their pleasure like an anaesthetic, and
looking like drugged bees. Now and then an old man from a far hill-side
would meet another old man from a farther one, and there would be
handshaking lasting, perhaps, a quarter of an hour.

When Abel played, they remained stoical and silent, however madly or
mournfully the harp cried. They took good music as their right.

Then Hazel sang, gazing up at the purple ramparts of the hills that
hung above the show-ground, and Edward's eyes were full of tears.

A very old man, smooth-faced, and wondering as a baby, came, leaning on
his stick, and stood before Hazel, gazing into her mouth with the
steadfast curiosity of a dog at a gramophone. If she moved, he moved,
absorbed, his jaw dropped with interest. Hazel did not notice him. She
was free on the migratory wings of music. She did not see Vessons
looking across the crowd with dismay, nor know that he edged away,
muttering, 'That gel agen! Never will I!'

Edward was glad when the singing and collection were over, and he could
take Hazel into the shilling tent, where sat the elite, and give her
tea. People remained in a sessile state over tea for a long time
while the chief race of the afternoon was begun by the ringing of a
dinner-bell. The race took so long, the riders having to go round the
course so many times, that people went on complacently with their tea,
only looking out occasionally to see how things progressed, watching the
riders go by--one with bright red braces, one in a blue cotton coat,
two middle-aged men in their best bowlers, and one, obviously too well
mounted for the rest, in correct riding-dress. They came round each
time in the same order--the correct one, red braces, blue coat, and the
bowlers last. Evidently the foremost one knew he could easily win, and
the others had decided that 'it was to be.' In the machine-like
regularity of their advent, their unaltered positions, and leisured
pace, they were like hobby-horses.

'How many times have they bin round?' Hazel asked the waitress, who
poured tea and made conversation in a sociable manner.

'It'll be the seventh. They might as well give over. They're only
labouring to stay in the same place.'

'I want to see 'em come in,' said Hazel. They went out, but Abel
waylaid them, and took Edward off to show him a queen bee in a box
from Italy. Edward loathed bees in or out of boxes, but he was too
kind-hearted to refuse. Abel was so unperceptive that he touched pathos.

Hazel found a place some distance down the course where she could look
along the straight to the winning-post; she loved to hear them thunder
past. She leaned over the rail and watched them come, still fatalistic,
but gallant, bent on a dramatic finish, stooping and 'cutting' their
horses. The first man was on her side of the course. She stared at him
in amazed consternation as he came towards her. His strong blue eyes,
caught by the fixity of her glance or by her bright hair, saw her, and
became triumphant. He pulled the horse in sharply, and within a few
yards of the winning-post wheeled and went back, amid the jeers and
howls of the crowd, who thought he must be drunk.

'You've given me a long enough chase,' he said, leaning towards her.
'Where the devil _do_ you live?'

'Oh, dunna stop! He's coming.'

'Who?'

'Mr. Marston, the minister.'

'What do I care if he's a dozen ministers?'

'But he'll be angered.'

'I'll make his nose bleed if he's got such cheek.'

'Oh, he's coming, Mr. Reddin! I mun go.' She turned away. Reddin
followed.

'Why should he be angry?'

'Because we're going to be wed to-morrow'

Reddin whistled.

'And Foxy's coming, and all of 'em. And there's a clock as tick-tacks
ever so sleepy, and a sleepy old lady, and Ed'ard's bought me a box
full of clothes.'

'I gave you a box full too,' he said with a note of pleading. 'You
little runaway!'

Hazel was annoyed because he disturbed her so. She wanted to get rid of
him, and she desired to exercise her power. So she looked up and said
impishly:

'Yours were old 'uns. His be new--new as morning.'

He was too angry to swear.

'You've got to come and talk to me while they're dancing to-night,' he
said.

'I wunna.'

'You must. If you don't, I'll tell the parson you stopped the night at
Undern. Surely you know that he wouldn't marry you then?'

He was bluffing. He knew Vessons would tell Marston the truth if he
spoke. But it served his turn.

'You wouldna!' she pleaded.

He laughed.

'A'right, then,' she said, 'if you wunna tell 'un.'

'Will he stay for the dancing?'

'No. I mun go along of him.'

'You know better.'

He turned away sharply as Edward came up. He knew him for the minister
he had met near the Callow. Edward was tying up some daffodils for
Hazel, and did not see Reddin.

Scarlet braces, a fatalist no more, came trotting up.

'What went wrong?' he asked with thinly veiled triumph.

'Everything,' snapped Reddin, and calling Vessons, he went off to the
beer-tent to wait till the dancing began.

'These are for your room, Hazel,' Edward was saying, 'because the time
of the singing of birds is come.'

He was thinking that God was indeed leading him forth by the waters of
comfort.

Hazel said nothing. She was wondering what excuse she could make for
staying.

'Don't frown, little one. There are no more worries for you now.'

'Binna there?'

'No. You are coming to God's Little Mountain. What harm can come there?
Now look up and smile, Hazel.'

She met his grey eyes, very tender and thoughtful. What she saw,
however, were blue eyes, hard, and not at all thoughtful.




Chapter 14


Prize-giving time came, and the younger Miss Clomber, who was to
present them, tried to persuade Reddin to go up on the platform, a
lorry with chairs on it. There already were Mr. James and the
secretary, counting the prize-money. Below stood the winners, Vessons
conspicuous in his red waistcoat. Miss Clomber felt that she looked
well. She was dressed in tweeds to show that this was not an occasion
to her as to the country damsels.

'No. I shall stay here,' said Reddin, answering her stare, intended to
be inviting, with a harder stare of indifference.

'As the last representative of such an old family--'

'Oh, damn family' he said peevishly, having lost sight of Hazel.

As Miss Clomber still persisted, he quenched the argument.

'Young families are more in my line than old 'uns.'

She blushed unbecomingly, and hastily got on to the lorry.

Reddin went in search of Hazel, while Mr. James began to read the
names.

'Mr. Thomas. Mr. James. Mrs. Marston. Mr. James--'

He handed the pile of shillings to Miss Clomber, who presented them
with the usual fatuous remarks. When he had won the prize he received it
back from her with a bow, taking off his hat. As his own name occurred
more frequently than usual, he began to get rather self-conscious. He
looked round the ring of faces, and translated their stodginess as
self-consciousness dictated.

Perhaps it would be as well to carry it off as a jest? So his hat came
off with a flourish, and he said jocosely as he took the next heap,
'Keeping-apples, Mr. James. I'll put it in me pocket!'

This attitude wearing thin, he took refuge in that of unimpeachable
honesty. 'Fair and square! The best man wins!' This lasted for some
time, but was not proof against 'Swedes, Mr. James. Mangolds, Mr.
James. Stewing pears, Mr. James.' He began to get in a panic. His bow
was cursory. He pocketed the money furtively and read his name in a
low, apologetic tone. But this would never do! He must pull himself
together. He tried bravado.

'Mr. Vessons. Mr. James.'

Vessons stood immovable within arm's reach of Miss Clomber. When he got
a prize, which he did three times, no one else having sent any cheeses,
he extended his arm like one side of a pair of compasses, and
vouchsafed neither bow nor smile. He disliked Miss Clomber because he
knew that she meant to be mistress of Undern. Mr. James was getting on
well with the bravado.

'What do I care what people think? Dear me! All the world may see me
get my prize.'

Then he caught Abel's satiric eye, and went all to pieces. He clutched
at his first attitude--the business-like--and so began all over again,
and managed to get through by not looking in Abel's direction, being
upheld by the knowledge that his pockets were getting very full.

When he read out, 'Cherries, bottled. Mrs. Marston,' and Edward went to
receive the prize, Reddin shouldered up to Hazel and asked:

'What time's he going?'

'I dunno.'

'Don't forget, mind.'

'Oh, Mr. Reddin, I mun go! What for wunna you let me be?'

But Reddin, finding Miss Clomber's eye on him, was gone.

Mr. James had come to the end of the list. He read out Abel's name and
that of an old bent man with grey elf-locks, a famous bee-master. Mr.
James looked at Abel as much as to say, 'You've got your prize, you
see! It's quite fair.'

'Thank yer,' said Abel to Miss Clomber, and then to James with fine
irony: 'You dunna keep bees, do yer, Mr. James?'

       *       *       *       *       *

The hills loomed in the dusk over the show-ground. They were of a cold
and terrific colour, neither purple nor black nor grey, but partaking
of all. Kingly, mournful, threatening, they dominated the life below as
the race dominates the individual. Hazel gazed up at them. She stood in
the attitude of one listening, for in her ears was a voice that she had
never heard before, a deep inflexible voice that urged her to do--she
knew not what. She looked up at the round wooded hill that hid God's
Little Mountain--so high, so cold for a poor child to climb. She felt
that the life there would be too righteous, too well-mannered. The
thought of it suddenly made her homesick for dirt and the Callow.

She thought of Undern crouched under its hill like a toad. She
remembered its echoing rooms and the sound as of dresses rustling that
came along the passages while she put on the green gown. Undern made
her more homesick than the parsonage.

Edward had gone. She had said she wanted to stay with her father, and
Edward had thought her a sweet daughter and had acquiesced, though
sadly.

Now she was awaiting Reddin. The dancing had not begun, though the tent
was ready. Yellow light flowed from every gap in the canvas, and Hazel
felt very forlorn out in the dark; for light seemed her natural sphere.
As she stood there, looking very small and slight, she had a cowering
air. Always, when she stood under a tree or sheltered from the rain,
she had this look of a refugee, furtive and brow-beaten. When she ran
she seemed a fugitive, fleeing across the world with no city or refuge
to flee into.

Miss Clomber's approach made her start.

'A word with you!' said Miss Clomber in her brisk, unsympathetic voice.
'I saw you with Mr. Reddin twice. I just wanted to say in a sisterly
and Christian spirit'--she lowered her voice to a hollow whisper--'that
he is not a good man.'

'Well,' said Hazel, with a sigh of relief in the midst of her shyness
and her oppression about the mountain, 'that's summat, anyway!'

Miss Clomber, outraged and furious, strode away.

Hazel was again left to the hills. The taciturnity of winter was upon
them still, and in the sky beyond was the cynical aloofness that comes
with frost after sunset.

She turned from them to the lighted tent. The golden glow was like some
bright creature imprisoned. Abel had prorogued an interminable argument
with the old man with the elf-locks, and now began thrumming inside the
tent.

Young men and women converged upon it at the sound of the music, as
flies flock to the osier blossom. They went in, as the blessed to
Paradise. The canvas began to sway and billow in the wind of the
dancing. Hazel felt that life was going on gaily without her--she shut
away in the dark. Her feet began to dance.

'I'll go in!' she said defiantly. 'What for not?'

But just as she was lifting the flap she heard Reddin's voice at her
elbow.

'Hazel, why did you run away?'

'I dunno.'

'Why didn't you tell me your name? Here have I been going
hell-for-leather up and down the country.'

'Ah! That's gospel! That's righteous! I seed you.'

Reddin was speechless.

'Me and father was in the public, and you came. I thought it was the
Black Huntsman.'

'Thanks. Not a pin to choose, I suppose.'

'Not all that.'

'We're wasting time. What's all this about the parson?'

'I told 'ee.'

'But it isn't true. You and the parson!'

He laughed. Hazel looked at him with disfavour.

'You're like a hound-dog when you laugh like to that,' she said, 'and I
dunna like the hound-dogs.'

He stopped laughing.

Abel's harp beat upon them, and the soft thudding of feet on the turf,
like sheep stamping, had grown in volume as the shyest were gradually
drawn into the revelry.

A rainstorm, shaped like a pillar, walked slowly along the valley,
skirting the base of the hills. It was like a grey god with folded arms
and head aloof in the sky. As it drew slowly nearer to the two who
stood there like lovers and were not lovers, and as it lashed them
across the eyes, it might have been fate.

'Hazel, can't you see I'm in love with you?'

'What for are you?' There was a wailing note in Hazel's voice, and the
rain ran down her face like tears. 'There's you and there's Ed'ard Oh,
what for are you?'

Reddin looked at her in astonishment. A woman not to like a man to be
in love with her. It was uncanny. He stood square-set against the
darkening sky, his fine massive head slightly bent, looking down at
her.

'I never thought,' he said helplessly--'I never thought, when I had
come to forty years without the need of women' ('of love,' he corrected
himself), 'that I should be like this.'

He looked at Hazel accusingly; then he gazed up at the coming night as
a lion might at the sound of thunder.

'Be you forty?' Hazel's voice was on the top note of wonder. 'Laws!
what an age!'

'It's not really old,' he pleaded, very humbly for him.

She laughed.

'The parson, now, I suppose he's young?' His voice was wistful.

'He'm the right age.'

Reddin's temper flamed.

'I'll show you if I'm old! I'll show you who makes the best lover, me
or a silly lad!'

'Hands off, Mr. Reddin!'

But her words went down the lonely wind that had begun to drag at the
lighted tent.

'There' said Reddin, pleased with his kisses. 'Now come and dance, and
you'll see if a chap of forty can't tire you. Afterwards we'll settle
the parson's hash.'

He lifted the tent-flap, and they went in and were taken by the bright,
slow-whirling life.

Hazel was glad to dance with him or anyone, so that she might dance.
Reddin held his head high, for he was a lover to-night, and he had
never been that before in any of his amours.

He was angry and enthralled with Hazel, and the two emotions together
were intoxicating.

Hazel was a flower in a gale when she danced, a slim poplar tremulous
and swaying in the dawn, a young beech assenting to the wind's will.

Abel watched her with pride. She was turning out a credit to him, after
all. It was astonishing.

'It's worth playing for our 'Azel's feet. The others just stomps,' he
thought. 'Who's the fellow she's along with? I'd best keep an eye. A
bargain's a bargain.'

'You'm kept your word,' said Hazel suddenly to Reddin.

'H'm?'

'Tired me out.'

'Come outside, then, and I'll get you a cup of tea.'

He fetched it and sat down by her on an orange-box.

'Now look here,' he said, 'fair and square, will you marry me?'

He was surprised at himself.

Andrew Vessons, who had tiptoed after them from the tent, spread out
his hands and gazed at heaven with a look of supreme despair, all the
more intense because he could not speak. He returned desolately to the
tent, where he stood with a cynical smile, leaning a little forward
with his arms behind him, watching the dancing, an apotheosis of sex,
to him not only silly and pitiful, but disgusting. Now and then he
shook his head, went to the door to see if his master was coming, and
shook it again. A friend came up.

'Why did the gaffer muck up the race?' he asked.

'Why,' asked Vessons, with a far-off gaze, 'did 'Im as made the 'orld
put women in?'

Outside things were going more to his liking than he knew.

'What's the good of keeping on, Mr. Reddin? I told 'ee I was promised
to Ed'ard.'

'But you like me a bit? Better than the parson?'

'I dunno.'

'Come off with me now. I swear I'll play fair.'

'_I_ swore!' she cried. 'I swore by the Mountains, and that can
ne'er be broke.'

'What did you swear?'

'To marry the first as come. That's Ed'ard. If I broke that oath, when
I was jead, my cold soul 'ud wander and find ne'er a bit of rest,
crying about the Mountains and about, nights, and Ed'ard thinking it
was the wind.

'If you chuck him, he'll soon get over it; if you chuck me, I shan't.
He's never gone after the drink and women.'

It was a curious plea for a lover.

'Miss Clomber said you wunna a good man.'

'Well, I'm blowed! But look here. If he loses you, he'll be off his
feed for a bit; but if I lose you, there'll be the devil to pay. Has he
kissed you?'

'Time and agen.'

'I won't have it!'

''Azel!' called her father.

'You won't go?'

'I mun. It's father.'

'And I shan't see you again-till you're married? Oh, marry _me_,
Hazel! Marry _me_!'

His voice shook. At the mysterious grief in his face--a grief that was
half rage, and the more pitiful for that--she began to sob. Abel came
up.

'A mourning-party, seemingly,' he said, holding his lantern so as to
light each face in turn.

'I want to marry your daughter.'

Abel roared.

'Another? First 'er bags a parson and next a squire!'

'Farmer.'

'It'll be the king on his throne next. Laws, girl! you're like beer and
treacle.'

'You've not answered me,' said Reddin.

'She's set.'

'Eh?'

'Set. Bespoke. Let.'

'She's a right to change her mind.'

'Nay! A bargain's a bargain. Why, they've bought the clothes, mister,
and the furniture and the cake!'

'If she comes with me, you'll go home with a cheque for fifty pounds,
and that's all I've got,' said Reddin naively.

'I tell you, sir, she's let,' Abel repeated. 'A bargain's a bargain!'

It occurred to him that the Callow garden might, with fifty pounds, be
filled with beehives from end to end.

'Mister,' he said, almost in tears, 'you didn't ought to go for to
'tice me! Eh! dear 'eart, the wood I could buy, and the white paint and
a separator and queens from foreign parts!' He made a gesture of
despair and his face worked.

'You could have a new harp if you wanted one.' Reddin suggested.

Abel gulped.

'A bargain's a bargain!' he repeated. 'And I promised the parson.' He
turned away.

''Azel,' he said over his shoulder, 'you munna go along of this gent.
Many's the time,' he added turning round and surveying her moodily, 'as
you've gone agen me and done what I gainsayed.'

With a long imploring look he hitched the harp on his back and trudged
away.

Hazel followed. But Reddin stepped in front of her.

'Look here, Hazel! You say you don't like hurting things. You're
hurting me!'

Looking at his haggard face, she knew it was true.

She wiped her tears away with her sleeve.

'It inna my fault. I'm allus hurting things. I canna set foot in the
garden nor cook a cabbage but I kill a lot of little pretty flies and
things. And when we take honey there's allus bees hurted. I'm bound to
go agen you or Ed'ard, and I canna go agen Ed'ard; he sets store by me,
does Ed'ard. You should 'a seen the primmyroses he put in my room last
night; I slep' at the parsonage along of us being late.'

Reddin frowned as if in physical pain.

'And he bought me stockings, all thin, and a sky-blue petticoat.'

Reddin looked round. He would have picked her up then and there and
taken her to Undern, but the road was full of people.

'I couldna go agen Ed'ard! He'm that kind. Foxy likes him, too; she'd
ne'er growl at 'im.'

'Perhaps,' Reddin said hoarsely, 'Foxy'd like me if I gave her bones.'

'She wouldna! You'm got blood on you.'

She drew away coldly at this remembrance, which had been obliterated by
Reddin's grief.

'You'm got the blood of a many little foxes on you,' she said, and her
voice cut him like sharp sleet--'little foxes as met have died quick
and easy wi' a gunshot. And you've watched 'em minced alive.'

'I'll give it up if you'll chuck the parson.'

'I won'er you dunna see 'em, nights, watching you out of the black dark
with their gold eyes, like kingcups, and the look in 'em of things
dying hard. I won'er you dunna hear 'em screaming.'

His cause was lost, and he knew it, but he pleaded on.

'No. If I hadna swore by the Mountain I wouldna come,' she said.
'You've got blood on you.'

At that moment a neighbour passed and offered Hazel a lift. Now that
she was marrying a minister, she had become a personality. Hazel
climbed in and drove off, and Reddin's tragic moment died, as great
fires die, into grey ash.

He went home heavily. His way lay past the parsonage where Edward and
his mother slept peacefully. The white calm of unselfish love wrapped
Edward, for he felt that he could make Hazel happy. As he fell asleep
that night he thought:

'She was made for a minister's wife.'

Reddin, leaning heavily on the low wall, staring at the drunken
tombstones and the quiet moon-silvered house, thought:

'She was made for me.'

Both men saw her as what they wanted her to be, not as she was.

Many thoughts darkened Reddin's face as he stood there hour after hour
in the cold May night. The rime whitened his broad shoulders as he
leaned on the wall, and in the moonlight the sprinkling of white hairs
at his temples shone out from the black as if to mock this young
passion that had possessed him.

God's Little Mountain lay shrugged in slumber; the woods crouched like
beaten creatures under the night; the small soft leaves hung limply in
the frost.

Still Reddin stood there, chilled through and through, brooding upon
the house.

Not until dawn, like a knife, gashed the east with blood did he stir.

He sighed. 'Too late!' he said.

Then he laughed. 'Beaten by the parson!'

A demoniac rage surged in him. He picked up a piece of rock, and
lifting it in both arms, flung it at the house. It smashed the kitchen
window. But before Edward came to his window Reddin was out of sight in
the batch.

'My dear,' said Mrs. Marston tremulously, 'I always feared disaster
from this strange match.'

'How _can_ Hazel have anything to do with it, mother?'

'I think, dear, it is a sign from God. On your wedding-morning! Broken
glass! Yes, it is a sign from God. I wish it need not have been quite
so violent. But, of course, He knows best.'




Chapter 15


At the parsonage everything was ready early. Edward, restless after his
rough awakening, had risen at three and finished his own preparations,
being ready to help Mrs. Marston when she came down, still a good deal
upset. Whenever she passed Hazel's room, or saw Edward take flowers
there, she said, 'Oh, my dear!' and shook her head sadly. For the kind
of life that seemed to be mapped out by Edward would, she feared, not
include grandchildren. And grandchildren had acquired, through long
cogitations, the glamour of the customary. She was also ruffled by
Martha, who, unlike her own pastry, was 'short.' What with the two
women, angry and grieved, and the fact that his wedding-day held only
half the splendour that it should have held, Edward's spirits might
have been expected to be low; but they were not. He ran up and down,
joked with Martha, soothed his mother, and sang until Martha, who
thought that a minister's deportment at a wedding should be only a
little less grandiloquent than at a funeral, said:

'He'm less like a minister than a nest of birds.' She and Mrs. Marston
were setting out the feather-cups in the best parlour.

At that moment Edward stood at the door of Hazel's room, and realized
that he would enter it no more. He must not see the sweet disarray of
her unpacking, nor rest night by night in the charmed circle of her
presence. Almost he felt, in this agony of loss--loss of things never
possessed, the most bitter loss of all--that, if he could have had
these things, even the ruddy-haired, golden-eyed children of his dreams
might go. He knelt by Hazel's bed and laid his dark head on the pillow,
torn by physical and spiritual passion. His hair was clammy, and a new
line marked his forehead from that day. Anyone seeing him would have
thought that he was praying; he was so still. It was Edward's fate to
be thought 'so quiet,' because the fires within him made no sound,
burning at a still-white heat.

He was not praying. Prayer had receded to a far distance, like a
signpost long passed. Perhaps he would come round to it again; but now
he was in the trackless desert. It is only those that have suffered
moderately that speak of prayer as the sufferer's refuge. By that you
know them. Those that have been tortured remember that the worst part
of the torture was the breaking of the prayer in their hands, piercing,
and not upholding.

Edward knew, kneeling there with his eyes shut, how Hazel's hair would
flow sweetly over the pillow; how her warm arm would feel about his
neck; how wildly sweet it would be, in some dark hour, to allay
dream-fears and hush her to sleep. Never before had the gracious
intimacy of marriage so shone in his eyes. And he was going to have
just the amount of intimacy that his mother would have, perhaps rather
less. Every night he would stand on the threshold, kiss Hazel with a
brotherly kiss, and turn away. His life would be a cold threshold. Month
by month, year by year, he would read the sweet, frank love-stories of
the Bible--stories that would, if written by a novelist, be banned, so
true are they; year by year he would see nest and young creatures, and go
into cottages where babies in fluffy shawls gazed at him anciently and
caught his fingers in a grip of tyrannous weakness. And always there
would be Hazel, alluring him with an imperishable magic even stronger
than beauty, startling him from his hard-won calm by the turn of a
wrist, the curve of a waist-ribbon, a wave of her hair. And then the
stern hour of crisis rode him down, and a great voice cried, not with
the cunning that he would have expected of a temper, but with the
majesty of morning on the heights:

'Take her. She is yours.'

He knew that it was true. Who would gainsay him? She was his. In a few
hours she would be his wife, in his own house, giving him every law of
creed and race. In fact, by not pleasing himself he would be outraging
creed and race. The latch of her door was his to lift at any time. That
chamber of roses and gold, rainbows and silver cries like the dawn-notes
of birds, was there for him like the open rose for the bee. His mother,
too, would be pleased. She had expostulated gelatinously about 'this
marriage which was no marriage.' He would be that companionable and
inspiring thing--the norm. He would be one of the world-wide company
of men that work, marry, bring up children, maybe see their grandchildren,
and then, in the glory of fulfilment, lay their silver heads on the
pillow of sleep. He had always loved normal things. He was not one
of those who are set apart by the strange aloofness of genius, whose
souls burn with a wild light, instead of with the comfortable glow of
the hearth fire. He was an ordinary man, loved ordinary things. Neither
was he effeminate or a celibate by instinct, though he had not Reddin's
fury of masculinity. Sex would never have awakened in him but at the
touch of spiritual love. But the touch had come; it had awakened; it
threatened to master him.

Pictures came dimly and yet radiantly before him: Hazel as she would
stand to-night brushing out her hair; this room as it would be when
she had put the light out and only starlight illuminated it; the
flowery scent, the sound of her soft breathing; and then, in a
tempestuous rush, the emotions he would feel as he laid his hand on
the latch--love, triumph, intoxication.

How would she look? What would she say? She could not forbid him. She
would, perhaps, when she awoke to the sweetness of marriage, love him
as passionately as he loved her.

A wild mastery possessed him. He would have what he wanted of life.
What need was there to renounce? And then, like a minor chord, soft and
plaintive, he heard Hazel's voice in bewildered accents murmur:

'What for do you, my soul?' and, 'I'm much obleeged, I'm sure.'

What stood between him and his desire was Hazel's helplessness, her
personality, like a delicate glass that he would break if he stirred.
Creed and convention pushed him on. For Church and State are for
material righteousness, the letter of the law. Spiritual flowerings,
high motives clad in apparent lawlessness--these are hardly in their
province since they are for those who still need crude rules. To the
scribes, and still more to them that sold doves, Christ was a brawler.

Rather than break that glass he would not stir. What were the race and
public opinion to him compared with her spirit? His tenets must make an
exception for her. These things were negligible. All that mattered was
himself and Hazel; his passion, Hazel's freedom; his longing for
husbandhood and fatherhood, her elvish incapacity for wifehood and
motherhood. He suddenly detested himself for the rosy pictures he had
seen. He was utterly abased at the knowledge that he had really meant
at one moment to enforce his rights, to lift the latch. The selfish use
of strength always seemed to him a most despicable thing. From all
points he surveyed his crisis with shame. He had made his decision; but
he knew how easy it would have been to make the opposite one. How easy
and how sweet! He stayed where he was for a long time, too tired to get
up, weary with a conflict that was hardly yet begun. Then he heard his
mother calling, and got up, closing the door as one surrenders a dream.
He still held in one hand the bunch of rosy tulips he had bought for
Hazel at the show. They hung their heads.

'Oh, my dear boy,' said Mrs. Marston, 'I've called and better called,
and no answer! Where were you?'

Edward might have said with truth, 'In hell.' He only said: 'In a
valley of this restless mind.'

'What valley, dear? Oh, no valley, only a poem?' How very peculiar!
Dear, dear! she thought; I hope all this isn't turning his brain; it
seemed so like nonsense what he said. 'You look so pale, my dear, and
so distraught,' she went on; 'I think you want a--'

'No, mother. Thank you, I want nothing.'

He was half conscious of the bitter irony of it as he said it.

Mrs. Marston was looking at his knees.

'Oh, my dear, I know now,' she said; 'I beg your pardon for saying you
wanted a powder. You were with the Lord. You could not have been better
occupied on your wedding morning!'

She was very much touched. Edward flushed darkly, conscious of how he
had been occupied.

'There!' cried she; 'now you're as flushed as you were pale. It's the
fever. I'll mix you something that will soon put you all right.'

'I only wish you could,' he sighed.

'And what I wanted,' said she, catching at her previous thought in the
same blind way as she caught at her skirts on muddy days--'what I
wanted, dear, was--it's so heavy, the cake--'

'You want me to lift it, mother?'

'Yes, my dear. How well you know! And mind not to spoil the icing; it's
so hard not to, it being so white and brittle.'

'No, I won't spoil the white,' he said earnestly, 'however hard it is.'

She did not notice that the earnestness was unnatural; intense
earnestness in household matters was her normal state.




Chapter 16


The stately May morning, caparisoned in diamonds, full of the solemnity
tha

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