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 atUndern. 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.
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 theBlack 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.'
'Iswore!' 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, marryme,Hazel! Marryme!'
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 byReddin'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.'
'HowcanHazel 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.'
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.
The stately May morning, caparisoned in diamonds, full of the solemnity that perfect beauty wears, had come out of the purple mist and shamed the hovel where Hazel dressed for her bridal. The cottage had sunk almost out of recognition in the foam of spring. Ancient lilacs stood about it and nodded purple-coroneted heads across its one chimney. Their scent bore down all other scents like a strong personality and there was no choice but to think the thoughts of the lilac. Two laburnums, forked and huge of trunk, fingered the roof with their lower branches and dripped gold on it. The upper branches sprang far into the blue.
The may-tree by the gate knew its perfect moment, covered with crystal buds that shone like rain among the bright green leaves. From every pear-tree—full-blossomed, dropping petals—and from every shell-pink apple-tree came the roar of the bees.
Abel rose very early, for he considered it the proper thing to make a wreath for Hazel, being an artist in such matters. The lilies-of-the-valley-were almost out; he had put some in warm water overnight, and now he sat beneath the horse-chestnut and worked at the wreath. The shadows of the leaves rippled over him like water, and often he looked up at the white spires of bloom with a proprietary eye, for his bees were working there with a ferocity of industry.
He was moody and miserable, for he thought of the township of hives that Hazel might have won for him. He comforted himself with the thought that there would be something saved on her keep. It never occurred to him to be sorry to lose her; in fact, there was little reason why he should be. Each had lived a lonely, self-sufficing life; they were entirely unsuitable companions for each other.
He wove the wet lilies, rather limp from the hot water, on to a piece of wire taken from one of his wreath-frames.
So Hazel went to her bridal in a funeral wreath.
She awoke very tired from the crisis yesterday, but happy. She and Foxy and the one-eyed cat, her rabbit, and the blackbird, were going to a country far from troublous things, to the peace of Edward's love on the slope of God's Little Mountain.
The difficulties of the new life were forgotten. Only its joys were visible to-day. Mrs. Marston seemed to smile and smile in an eternal loving-kindness, and Martha's heavy face wore an air of good-fellowship. The loud winds, lulled and bearing each its gift of balm, would blow softly round Edward's house. Frost, she thought, would not come to God's Little Mountain as to the cold Callow.
She had not seen Reddin's rimy shoulders, nor the cold glitter of the tombs.
She sang as she dressed with the shrill sweetness of a robin. She had never seen such garments; she hardly knew how to put some of them on. She brushed her hair till it shone like a tiger-lily, and piled it on her small head in great plaits. When her white muslin frock was on, she drew a long breath, seeing herself in bits in the small glass.
'I be like a picture!' she gasped. Round her slim sun-burnt neck was a small gold chain holding a topaz pendant, which matched her eyes.
When she came forth like a lily from the mould, Abel staggered backwards, partly in clownish mirth, partly in astonishment. He was so impressed that he got breakfast himself, and afterwards went and sandpapered his hands until they were sore. Hazel, enthroned in one of the broken chairs, fastened on Foxy's wedding-collar, made of blue forget-me-not.
Foxy, immensely dignified, sat on her haunches, her chin tucked into the forget-me-nots, immovably bland. She was evidently competent for her new role; she might have been ecclesiastically connected all her life. The one-eyed cat was beside her, blue-ribboned, purring her best, which was like a broken bagpipe on account of her stormy youth.
'Ah! you'd best purr!' said Hazel. 'Sitting on cushions by the fireside all your life long you'll be, and Foxy with a brand new tub!'
Not many brides think so little of themselves, so much of small pensioners, as Hazel did this morning. Breakfast was a sociable meal, for Abel made several remarks. Now and then he looked at Hazel and said, 'Laws!' Hazel laughed gleefully. When she stood by the gate watching for the neighbour's cart that was to take them, she looked as full of white budding promise as the may-tree above her.
She did not think very much about Edward, except as a protecting presence. Reddin's face, full of strong, mysterious misery; the feel of Reddin's arm as they danced; his hand, hot and muscular, on hers—these claimed her thoughts. She fought them down, conscious that they were not suitable in Edward's bride.
At last the cart appeared, coming up the hill with the peculiar lurching deportment of market carts. The pony had a bunch of marigolds on each ear, and there was lilac on the whip. They packed the animals in—the cat giving ventriloquial mews from her basket, the rabbit in its hutch, the bird in its wooden cage, and Foxy sitting up in front of Hazel. The harp completed the load. They drove off amid the cheers of the next-door children, and took their leisurely way through the resinous fragrance of larch-woods.
The cream-coloured pony was lame, which gave the cart a peculiar roll, and she was tormented with hunger for the marigolds, which hung down near her nose and caused her to get her head into strange contortions in the effort to reach them. The wind sighed in the tall larches, and once again, as on the day of the concert, they bent attentive heads towards Hazel. In the glades the wide-spread hyacinths would soon be paling towards their euthanasia, knowing the art of dying as well as that of living, fortunate, as few sentient creatures are, in keeping their dignity in death.
When they drove through the quarry, where deep shadows lay, Hazel shivered suddenly.
'Somebody walking over your grave,' said Abel.
'Oh, dunna say that! It be unlucky on my wedding-day,' she cried. As they climbed the hill she leaned forward, as if straining upwards out of some deep horror.
When their extraordinary turn-out drew up at the gate, Abel boisterously flourishing his lilac-laden whip and shouting elaborate but incomprehensible witticisms, Edward came hastily from the house. His eyes rested on Hazel, and were so vivid, so brimful of tenderness, that Abel remained with a joke half expounded.
'My Hazel,' Edward said, standing by the cart and looking up, 'welcome home, and God bless you!'
'You canna say fairer nor that,' remarked Abel. 'Inna our 'Azel peart?Dressed up summat cruel inna she?'
Edward took no notice. He was looking at Hazel, searching hungrily for a hint of the same overwhelming passion that he felt. But he only found childlike joy, gratitude, affection, and a faint shadow for which he could not account, and from which he began to hope many things.
If in that silent room upstairs he had come to the opposite decision; if he had that very day told Hazel what his love meant, by the irony of things she would have loved him and spent on him the hidden passion of her nature.
But he had chosen the unselfish course.
'Well,' he said in a business-like tone, 'suppose we unpack the little creatures and Hazel first?'
Mrs. Marston appeared.
'Oh, are you going to a show, Mr. Woodus?' she asked Abel. 'It would have been so nice and pleasant if you would have played your instrument.'
'Yes, mum. That's what I've acome for. I inna going to no show. I've come to the wedding to get my belly-full.'
Mrs. Marston, very much flustered, asked what the animals were for.
'I think, mother, they're for you.' Edward smiled.
She surveyed Foxy, full of vitality after the drive; the bird, moping and rough; the rabbit, with one ear inside out, looking far from respectable. She heard the ventriloquistic mews.
'I don't want them, dear,' she said with great decision.
'It's a bit of a cats' 'ome you're starting, mum,' said Abel.
Mrs. Marston found no words for her emotions.
But while Edward and Abel bestowed the various animals, she said toMartha:
'Weddings are not what they were, Martha.'
'Bride to groom,' said Martha, who always read the local weddings: 'a one-eyed cat; a foolish rabbit as'd be better in a pie; an ill-contrived bird; and a filthy smelly fox!'
Mrs. Marston relaxed her dignity so far as to laugh softly. She decided to give Martha a rise next year.
Hazel sat on a large flat gravestone with Foxy beside her. They were like a sculpture in marble on some ancient tomb. Coming, so soon after her strange moment of terror in the quarry, to this place of the dead, she was smitten with formless fear. The crosses and stones had, on that storm-beleaguered hillside, an air of horrible bravado, as if they knew that although the winds were stronger than they, yet they were stronger than humanity; as if they knew that the whole world is the tomb of beauty, and has been made by man the torture-chamber of weakness.
She looked down at the lettering on the stone. It was a young girl's grave.
'Oh!' she muttered, looking up into the tremendous dome of blue, empty and adamantine—'oh! dunna let me go young! What for did she dee so young? Dunna let me! dunna!'
And the vast dome received her prayer, empty and adamantine.
She was suddenly panic-stricken; she ran away from the tombs callingEdward's name.
And Edward came on the instant. His hands were full of cabbage which he had been taking to the rabbit.
'What is it, little one?'
'These here!'
'The graves?'
'Ah. They'm so drodsome.'
Edward pointed to a laburnum-tree which had rent a tomb, and now waved above it.
'See,' he said. 'Out of the grave and gate of death—'
'Ah! But her as went in hanna come out. On'y a new tree. I'll be bound she wanted to come out.'
At this moment Edward's friend, who was to marry them, arrived.
'Now I shall go and wait for you to come,' Edward whispered.
Waiting in the dim chapel, with its whitewashed walls and few leaded windows half covered with ivy, his mind was clear of all thoughts but unselfish ones.
His mother, trailing purple, came in, and thought how like a sacred picture he looked; this, for her, was superlative praise. Martha's brother was there, ringing the one bell, which gave such a small fugitive sound that it made the white chapel seem like a tinkling bell-wether lost on the hills.
Mr. James was there, and several of the congregation, and Martha, with her best dress hastily donned over her print, and a hat of which her brother said 'it 'ud draw tears from an egg.'
Mr. James' daughter played a voluntary, in the midst of which an altercation was heard outside.
'Her'll be lonesome wi'out me!'
'They wunna like it. It's blasphemy.'
Then the door opened, and Abel, very perspiring, and conscious of the greatness of the occasion, led in Hazel in her wreath of drooping lilies. The green light touched her face with unnatural pallor, and her eyes, haunted by some old evil out of the darkness of life, looked towards Edward as to a saviour.
She might have been one of those brides from faery, who rose wraith-like out of a pool or river, and had some mysterious ichor in their veins, and slipped from the grasp of mortal lover, melting like snow at a touch. Edward, watching her, was seized with an inexplicable fear. He wished she had not been so strangely beautiful, that the scent of lilies had not brought so heavy a faintness, reminding him of death-chambers.
It was not till Hazel reached the top of the chapel that the congregation observed Foxy, a small red figure, trotting willingly in Hazel's wake—a loving though incompetent bridesmaid.
Mr. James arose and walked up the chapel.
'I will remove the animal' he said; then he saw that Hazel was leading Foxy. This insult was, then, deliberate. 'A hanimal,' he said, 'hasn't no business in a place o' worship.'
'What for not?' asked Hazel.
'Because—' Mr. James found himself unable to go on. 'Because not,' he finished blusterously. He laid his hand on the cord, but Foxy prepared for conflict.
Edward's colleague turned away, hand to mouth. He was obliged to contemplate the ivy outside the window while the altercation lasted.
'Whoever made you,' Hazel said, 'made Foxy. Where you can come, Foxy can come. You'm deacon, Foxy's bridesmaid!'
'That's heathen talk,' said Mr. James.
'How very naughty Hazel is!' thought poor Mrs. Marston. She felt that she could never hold up her head again. The congregation giggled. The black grapes and the chenille spots trembled. 'How very unpleasant!' thought the old lady.
Then Edward spoke, and his voice had an edge of masterfulness that astonished Mr. James.
'Let be,' he said. '"Other sheep I have which are not of this fold.Them also will I bring." She has the same master, James.'
Silence fell. The other minister turned round with a surprised, admiring glance at Edward, and the service began. It was short and simple, but it gathered an extraordinary pathos as it progressed.
The narcissi on the window-sills eyed Hazel in a white silence, and their dewy golden eyes seemed akin to Foxy's and her own. The fragrance of spring flowers filled the place with wistful sadness. There are no scents so tearful, so grievous, as the scents of valley-lilies and narcissi clustered ghostly by the dark garden hedge, and white lilac, freighted with old dreams, and pansies, faintly reminiscent of mysterious lost ecstasy.
Edward felt these things and was oppressed. A great pity for Hazel and her following of forlorn creatures surged over him. A kind of dread grew up in him that he might not be able to defend them as he would wish. It did seem that helplessness went to the wall. Since Hazel had come with her sad philosophy of experience, he had begun to notice facts.
He looked up towards the aloof sky as Hazel had done.
'He is love,' he said to himself.
The blue sky received his certainty, as it had received Hazel's questioning, in regardless silence.
Mrs. Marston observed Edward narrowly. Then she wrote in her hymn-book:'Mem: Maltine; Edward.'
The service was over. Edward smiled at her as he passed, and met Mr.James' frown with dignified good-humour.
Foxy, even more willing to go out than to come in, ran on in front, and as they entered the house they heard from the cupboard under the stairs the epithalamium of the one-eyed cat.
'Oh, dear heart!' said Hazel tremulously, looking at the cake, 'I ne'er saw the like!'
'Mother iced it, dear.'
Hazel ran to Mrs. Marston and put both her thin arms round her neck, kissing her in a storm of gratitude.
'There, there! quietly, my dear,' said Mrs. Marston. 'I'm glad it pleases.' She smoothed the purple silk smilingly. Hazel was forgiven.
'I'd a brought the big saw if I'd 'a thought,' said Abel jocosely.
Only Mr. James was taciturn.
Foxy was allowed in, and perambulated the room, to Mrs. Marston's supreme discomfort; every time Foxy drew near she gave a smothered scream. In spite of these various disadvantages, it was a merry party, and did not break up till dusk.
After tea Abel played, Mr. James being very patronizing, saying at the end of each piece, 'Very good'; till Abel asked rudely, 'Can yer play yourself?'
Edward came to the rescue by offering Mr. James tobacco. They drew round the fire, for the dusk came coldly, only Abel remaining in his corner playing furiously. He considered it only honest, after such a tea, to play his loudest.
Hazel, happy but restless, played with Foxy beside the darkening window, low and many-paned and cumbered with bits of furniture dear to Mrs. Marston.
Edward was showing his friend a cycle map of the country.
Mrs. Marston was sleepily discussing hens—good layers, good sitters, good table-fowl—with Mr. James. Hazel, tired of playing with Foxy, knelt on the big round ottoman with its central peak of stuffed tapestry and looked idly from the window.
Suddenly she cried out. Edward was alert in a moment.
'What is it, dear?'
Hazel had sunk back on the ottoman, pale and speechless; but she realized that she must pull herself together.
'I stuck a pin in me,' she said.
Tins in a wedding-dress? Oh, fie!' said Mrs. Marston. Tricked at your wedding, pricked for aye.'
'Oh, dear, dearie me!' cried Hazel, bursting into tears, and flinging herself at Edward's feet.
Wondering, he comforted her.
Mrs. Marston called for the lamp; the blinds were drawn, and all was saffron peace.
Outside, in the same attitude as before, bowed, and motionless, stood Reddin. He saw Hazel, watched her withdraw, and knew that she had seen him. When the window suddenly shone like daffodils, he recoiled as if at a lash, and, turning, went heavily down the batch. He turned into the woods, and made his way back till he was opposite the house. Thence he watched the guests depart, and later saw Martha go to her cottage. The lights wavered and wandered. He saw one go up the stairs.
Inside the house Mrs. Marston confronted with a bridal which she did not quite know how to regard, very tactfully said good night, and left them together in the parlour. They sat there for a time and Edward tried not to realize how much he was missing. He got up at last and lit Hazel's candle. At her door he said good night hastily. Hazel took the arrangements for granted, partly because she had slept in this same room two nights ago, partly because Edward had never shown her a hint of passion.
The higher the nature, the more its greatness is taken for granted.Edward turned and went to his room.
Reddin, under his black roof of pines, counted the lights, and seeing that there were three, turned homewards with a sigh of relief. But as he went through the fields he remembered how Hazel had looked last night; how she had danced like a leaf; how slender and young she was. He was a man everlastingly maddened by slightness and weakness. As a boy, when his father and mother still kept up their position a little, he had broken a priceless Venetian glass simply because he could not resist the temptation to close his hand on it. His father had flogged him, being of the stupid kind who believe that corporal punishment can influence the soul. And Reddin had done the same thing next day with a bit of egg-shell china.
So now, as he thought of Hazel's lissom waist, her large eyes, rather scared, her slender wrists he cursed until the peewits arose mewing all about him. In the thick darkness of the lonely fields he might have been some hero of the dead, mouthing a satanic recitative amid a chorus of lost souls.
The long search for Hazel, begun in a whim, had ended in passion. If he had never looked for her, never felt the nettled sense of being foiled, or if he had found her at once, he would never have desired her so fiercely. Now, for the first time in his life impassioned, he felt something mysterious and unwelcome to him begin to mingle with his desire. Above all, life without her meant dullness, lack of vitality, the swift onset of middle-age. He saw this with shrinking. He walked wearily, looking older than he was in the pathos of loss.
Life with her meant an indefinitely prolonged youth, an ecstasy he had not dreamt of, the well-being of his whole nature. He walked along moodily, thinking how he would have started afresh, smartened up Undern, worked hard, given his children—his and Hazel's—a good education, become more sober.
But he had been a fortnight too late. A miserable fortnight! He, who had raved over the countryside, had missed her. Marston, who had simply remained on his mountain, had won her.
'It's damned unfair!' he said, and pathos faded from him in his rage. All the vague thoughts, dark and turgid, of the last two nights took shape slowly.
He neither cursed nor brooded any more. He thought keenly as he walked. His face took a more powerful cast—it had never been a weak face at the worst—and he looked a man that it would not be easy to combat. Bitter hatred of Edward possessed him, silent fury against fate, relentless determination to get Hazel whether she would or not. He had a purpose in life now. Vessons was surprised at his quick, authoritative manner.
'Make me some sandwiches early to-morrow,' he said, 'and you'll have to go to the auction. I shan't go myself.'
''Ow can I go now? Who's to do the cheeses?'
'Give 'em to the pigs.'
'Who's to meet the groom from Farnley? Never will I go!'
'If you're so damned impudent, you'll have to leave.'
'Who's to meet the groom?' Vessons spoke with surly, astonished meekness.
'Groom? Groom be hanged! Wire to him.'
'It'll take me the best part of two hour to go and telegrapht. And it cosses money. And dinner at the auction cosses money.'
'Oh!' cried Reddin with intense irritation, 'take this, you fool!'
He flung his purse at Vessons.
'Well, well,' thought Vessons, 'I mun yumour 'im. He's fretched along of her marrying the minister. "Long live the minister!" says Andrew.'
Next morning Vessons went off in high feather; Hazel was so safely disposed of. Reddin left at the same time, and all the long May day Undern was deserted, and lay still and silent as if pondering on its loneliness. Reddin did not return until after night-fall.
He spent the day in a curious manner for a man of his position, under a yew-tree, riven of trunk, gigantic, black, commanding Edward's house. He leant against the trunk that had seen so many generations, shadowed so many fox-earths, groaned in so many tempests.
Above his tent sailed those hill-wanderers, the white clouds of May. They were as fiercely pure, as apparently imperishable, as a great ideal. With lingering majesty they marched across the sky, first over the parsonage, then over Reddin, laying upon each in turn a hyacinth shadow.
Reddin watched the house indifferently, while Martha went to and fro cleaning the chapel after the wedding.
Then Mrs. Marston came to the front door and shut it.
After that, for a long time, nothing moved but the slow shadows of the gravestones, shortening with the climbing sun. The laburnum waved softly, and flung its lacy shadow on the grave where the grass was long and daisied.
A wood-pigeon began in its deep and golden voice a low soliloquy recollected as a saint's, rich as a lover's. Reddin stirred disconsolately, trampling the thin leaves and delicate flowers of the sorrel.
At last the door opened, and Edward came out carrying a spade.
Hazel followed. They went round to the side of the house away from the graveyard, and Edward began to dig, Hazel sitting on the grass and evidently making suggestions. With the quickness of jealousy, Reddin knew that Edward was making a garden for Hazel. It enraged him.
'I could have made her a garden, and a deal better than that!' he thought. 'She could have had half an acre of the garden at Undern; I could have it made in no time.'
He uttered an exclamation of contempt. 'The way he fools with that spade! He's never dug in his life.'
Before long Hazel brought out the bird-cage and hung it in the sun. And surprisingly, almost alarmingly, the ancient bird began to sing. It was like hearing an old man sing a love-song. The bird sat there, rough and purblind, and chanted youth with the magic of a master.
Hazel and Edward stood still to hear it, holding each other's hands.
'He's ne'er said a word afore,' breathed Hazel. 'Eh! but he likes theMountain!'
In the little warm garden with Hazel, among the thick daisies, with the mirth of the once desolate ringing in his ears, Edward knew perfect happiness.
He stood looking at Hazel, his eyes dark with love. She seemed to blossom in the quiet day. He stooped and kissed her hand.
To Reddin in his deep shadow every action was clear, for they stood in the sunlight. He ground the sorrel into the earth. After a time Martha rang the dinner-bell, not because she could not both see and hear her master, but because it was the usual thing. To Reddin the bell's rather cracked note was sardonic, for it was summoning another man to eat and drink with Hazel. He ate his sandwiches, not being so much in love that he lost his appetite. Then he sat down and read the racing news. There was no danger of anyone seeing him, for the place was entirely solitary with the double loneliness of hill and woodland. There were no children in the batch except Martha's friend's little boy, and he was timid and never went bird's-nesting. The only sound except the intermittent song of birds, was the far-away noise of a woodman's axe, like the deep scattered barking of hungry hounds. Nothing else stirred under the complex arches of the trees except the sunlight, moving like a ghost.
These thick woods, remote on their ridges, were to the watchful eye rich with a half-revealed secret, to the attentive ear full of urgent voices. The solving of all life's riddles might come to one here at any moment. In this hour or in the next, from a grey ash-bole or a blood-red pine-trunk, might come the naked spirit of life with a face fierce or lovely. Coiled in the twist of long honeysuckle ropes that fell from the dead yews; curled in a last year's leaf; embattled in a mailed fir-cone, or resting starrily in the green moss, it seemed that God slumbered. At any moment He might wake, to bless or curse.
Reddin, not having a watchful eye or an attentive ear for such things, was not conscious of anything but a sense of loneliness. He read the paper indefatigably. In an hour or so Edward and Hazel came out again, she in her new white hat. They went up God's Little Mountain where it sloped away in pale green illuminated vistas till it reached the dark blue sky. They disappeared on the skyline, and Reddin impatiently composed himself for more waiting. Was he never to get a chance of seeing Hazel alone?
'That fellow dogs her steps,' he said.
The transfigured slopes of the mountain were, it seemed to Edward, a suitable place for a thing he wished to tell Hazel.
'Hazel,' he said, 'if you ever feel that you would rather have a husband than a brother, you have only to say so.'
Hazel flushed. Although it was such a muted passion that sounded in his voice, it stirred her. Since she had known Reddin, her ignorance had come to recognize the sound of it, and she had also begun to flush easily.
If Edward had understood women better, he would have seen that this speech of his was a mistake; for even if a woman knows whether she wishes for a husband, she will never tell him so.
They turned home in a constrained silence. Foxy, frightened by a covey of partridges, created a diversion by pulling her cord from Hazel's inattentive hand and setting off for the parsonage.
'Oh! she'll be bound to go to the woods!' cried Hazel, beginning to run. 'Do 'ee see if she's in tub, Ed'ard, and I'll go under the trees and holla.'
Reddin was startled when he saw Hazel, who had out-distanced Edward, making straight for his hiding-place. She came running between the boles with an easy grace, an independence that drove him frantic. A pretty woman should not have that easy grace; she should have exchanged it for a matronly bearing by this time, and independence should have yielded to subservience—to the male, to him. With her vivid hair and eyes and her swift slenderness, Hazel had a fawn-like air as she traversed the wavering shadows. She passed his tree without seeing him, and stood listening. Then she began to plead with the truant. 'What for did you run away, Foxy, my dear? Where be you? Come back along with me, dear 'eart, for it draws to night!'
Reddin stepped from his tree and spoke to her.
With a stifled scream she turned to run away, but he intercepted her.
'No. I've waited long enough for this. So you're married to the parson, after all?'
'Ah.'
'You'll be sorry.'
'What for do you come tormenting of me, Mr. Reddin?'
'You were meant for me. You're mine.'
'Folk allus says I'm theirs. I'd liefer be mine.'
'As you wouldn't marry me, Hazel, the least you can do is to come and talk to me sometimes.'
'Oh, I canna!'
'You must. Any spare time come to this tree. I shall generally be here.'
'But why ever? And you a squire with a big place and fine ladies after you!'
'Because I choose.'
'Leave me be, Mr. Reddin. I be comforble, and Foxy be, and they're all settling so nice. The bird's sung.'
'The parson, too, no doubt. If you don't come often enough, I shall walk past the house and look in. If you go on not coming, I shall tell the parson you stayed the night with me, and he'll turn you out.'
'He wouldna! You wouldna!'
'Yes, I would. He would, too. A parson doesn't want a wife that isn't respectable. So as you've got to'—he dropped his harshness and became persuasive—'you may as well come with a good grace.'
'But it wunna my fault as I stayed the night over. It was auntProwde's. What for should folk chide me and not auntie?'
'Lord, I don't know! Because you're pretty.'
'Be I?'
'Hasn't that fellow told you so?'
'No. He dunna say much.'
'You could make such a good chap of me if you liked, Hazel.'
'How ever?'
'I'd give up the drink.'
'And fox-hunting?'
'Well, I might give up even that—for you. Be my friend, Hazel.'
He spoke with an indefinable charm inherited from some courtly ancestor. Hazel was fascinated.
'But you've got blood on you!' she protested.
'So have you!' he retorted unexpectedly. 'You say you kill flies, so you're as bad as I am, Hazel. So be my friend.'
'I mun go!'
'Say you'll come tomorrow.'
'Not but for a minute, then.'
Edward's voice came from the house.
'I've found her!'
Hazel ran home. But as she left the wood she turned and looked down the shadowy steeps of green at Reddin as he strode homewards. She watched him until he passed out of sight; then, sighing, she went home.