Next day Hazel did not go into the woods. In the evening, sitting in the quiet parlour while Edward read aloud and Mrs. Marston knitted, she felt afraid as she remembered it. Yet she had been still more afraid at the idea of going.
She had helped Mrs. Marston to cover rhubarb jam in the dim store-room while Edward visited a sick man at some distance. It had been delightful, gumming on the clean tops, and then writing on them. She had dipped freely into the biscuit-box. Then Edward had returned, and they had gardened again. Now they were settled for the evening, and she was learning to knit, twisting obdurate wool round anarchic needles, while Mrs. Marston—the pink shawl top—chanted: 'Knit, purl! Knit, purl!'
'Will it come to aught ever?' queried Hazel. 'It's nought but a tail o' string now!'
'It will come to anything you like to make, dear,' said the old lady.
'Is knitting so like life, mother?' Edward spoke amusedly.
'But it wunna,' said Hazel. 'It'll only come a tanglement,'
Edward suggested that he should help; there was great laughter over this interlude, while Mrs. Marston still chanted, 'Knit, purl!'
Reddin walked lingeringly past the house in the dark, heard it, and was very angry and miserable.
Hazel heard his step on the rough stones, and was alarmedly sure that it was he. She was terribly afraid he would tell Edward. Then a new idea occurred to her. Should she tell Edward herself?
She sat in the firelight with her head bent, and turned this new thought about in her brain as incompetently as she twisted the blue wool round the needles. And from the silent shadows, as she played with the thread of destiny, two presences eyed each other across her bright head—one armed, the other bearing roses. Neither Mrs. Marston, with her antiphonal 'Double knit, double purl!' nor Edward, reading in his pleasant voice—he rather fancied his reading, and tried not to—saw those impalpable figures, each with a possessive hand outstretched to Hazel pending her decision.
'Why shouldna I say? There was no harm!' she thought. Then she remembered that there had been something—a queer feeling—that had sent her out of the glass door into the snow.
She had never wanted to tell anyone of the episode.
She glanced at Edward through her lashes—a look that always made him think of the pool above the parsonage, where lucent brown water shone through rushes. He saw the look, for he always glanced round as he read, having gathered from his book on elocution that this was correct. He smiled across at her, and went on reading.
The book was one of those affected by Mrs. Marston and her kind. It had no relation whatever to life. Its ideals, characters, ethics and crises made up an unearthly whole, which, being entirely useless as a tonic or as a balm, was so much poison. It was impossible to imagine its heroine facing any of the facts of life, or engaging in any of those physical acts to which all humanity is bound, and which need more than resignation—namely, open-eyed honesty—to raise them from a humiliation to a glory. It was impossible to imagine also how the child, which appeared discreetly and punctually on the last page, could have come by its existence, since it certainly, with such unexceptional parents, could not have been begotten.
Hazel listened anxiously to hear if the heroine ever drove on a winter night with a man who stared at her out of bold blue eyes, and whether she got frightened and took refuge in a bedroom full of white mice. But there were no mice, nor dark roads, nor bold men in all its pages. By the time the reading came to an end, Hazel had quite made up her mind that she could not possibly tell Edward. The blue wool was inextricably tangled, and one of the shadowy presences had vanished.
Followed what Mrs. Marston called 'a little chat'; the evening tray, containing cake and cocoa, was brought from its side-table; the kettle was put on, and soon the candles were lit.
The presence that remained was with Hazel as she went up to her little room, as she undressed, and when she lay down to sleep. From the mantlepiece in the faint moonlight shone the white background of the text, 'Not a hair of thy head shall perish.'
But the promising words were obliterated by night.
Next morning, and some time during every subsequent day, Hazel metReddin under the dark yew-tree.
'You're very fond of the woods, my dear,' said Mrs. Marston one morning. 'It must be very nice and pleasant there just now.'
'No, it inna, Mrs. Marston. It's drodsome.'
'If I could start very early,' Mrs. Marston went on, 'please God I'd go with you. For you always go while Edward is visiting, and it's lonely for you.'
Hazel fled down the batch that morning, and back up a shadowed ride toReddin.
'You munna come never no more, Mr. Reddin!' she cried. 'The old lady's coming to-morrow-day, her says.'
Reddin swore. He was getting on so nicely. Already Hazel went red and white at his pleasure, and though he had not attempted to kiss her, he had gained a hold on her imagination.
Whenever he saw himself as others would see him if they knew, he hastily said, 'All's fair in love,' and shut his eyes. Also, he felt that he was doing evil in order to bring Hazel good.
'For how a girl can live in that stuffy hole with that old woman and that die-away fellow, Lord only knows!' he thought. 'She'll be twice the girl she is when she lives with a man thatisa man, and she can do as she likes with Undern so long as she's not stand-off with me. No, by—! I'll have no nonsense after this! Here I am, sitting under a tree like a dog with a treed cat!'
So now he was very angry. His look was like a lash as he said: 'You made that up to get rid of me.'
'I didna!' cried Hazel, trembling. 'But oh! Mr. Reddin canna you leave me be? There's Ed'ard reading the many mansions bit to old Solomon Bache, as good as gold, and you'd ought to let me bide along of the old lady and knit.'
'I'll give you something better to do than knit soon.'
'What for will you?'
'Oh! you women! Are you a little innocent, Hazel? Or are you a d—d clever woman?'
'I dunno. But I canna come no more.'
'Won't, you mean. Very well.'
'What'n you mean, saying "very well" so choppy?'
'I mean that if a man chooses to see a woman, see her he will. It's his place to find ways. It's her privilege to hide if she likes, or do any d—d thing she likes. That only makes it more exciting. Now go back to your knitting. Fff! knitting!'
The startled pigeons fled up with a steely clatter of wings at his sudden laughter.
'Oh! hushee! They'll hear and come out.'
'I don't care. If the dead heard and came out and stood between us, I shouldn't care! What are you whispering?'
Hazel had said, 'Whoever she be, have her he will, for certain sure.'
She would not repeat it, and he turned sharply away in a huff.
She also turned away with a sigh of relief, but almost immediately looked back, and watched his retreating figure until it was lost in the trees.
On Lord's Day more than on any other at the mountain Hazel was like a small derelict boat beached on a peaceful shore. There was a hypnotic quiet about the place, with no sound of Martha's scrubbing, no smell of cooking. There was always cold meat on Lord's Day, with pickled cabbage, that concomitant of mysterious Sabbath blessedness. A subdued excitement prevailed about service-time, and sank again afterwards like a wind in the tree-tops.
Hazel felt very proud of Edward in chapel, and a little awed at his bearing and his abstracted air. She came near to loving him on the lilac-scented Sundays when he read those old fragrant love-stories that he had dreaded. His voice was pleasant and deep.
'"And he took unto him his wife, and she bare him a son."'
It may have been that the modulations of Edward's voice spoke as eloquently as words to her, or that Reddin had destroyed her childish detachment, but she began to bring these old tales into touch with her own life. She envied these glamorous women of the ancient world. They were so tall, so richly clad, dwelling under their golden-fruited trees beneath skies for ever blue. It was all so simple for them. There were no Reddins, no old ladies.
Their stories went smoothly with unravelled thread, not like her knitting. She began to long to be one of that dark-eyed company, clear and changeless as polished ivory, moving with a slow and gliding stateliness across the rose-coloured dawn, bearing on their heads with effortless grace beautiful pitchers of water for a thirsty world.
Edward had shown her just such a picture in his mother's illustrated Bible. Instinctively she fell back on the one link between herself and them.
'Ed'ard's tookmeto wife,' she thought. The sweetest of vague new ideas stirred in her mind like leaf-buds within the bark of a spring tree. They brought a new expression to her face.
Edward's eyes strayed continually to the bar of dusty sunlight where she sat, her down-bent face as mysterious as all vitality is when seen in a new aspect. The demure look she wore in chapel was contradicted by a nascent wildness hovering about her lips.
Edward tried to keep his attention on the prayers, and wished he was an Episcopalian, and had his prayers ready-made for him. He once mentioned this to his mother, who was much shocked. She said home-made prayers and home-made bread and home-made jam were the best.
'As for manufactured jam, it's a sloven's refuge, and no more to be said. And prayer's the same. The best printed prayer's no better than bought mixed at four-pence the pound, and a bit gone from keeping.'
Edward stumbled on, as Mr. James said afterwards, 'like my old mare Betsy, a step and a stumble, a nod and a flop, and home in the Lord's own time—that's to say, the small hours.'
The chapel was still hot, though cool green evening brooded without and the birds had emerged from their day-long coma. Wood-pigeons spoke in their deep voices from the dark pines across the batch a language older than the oldest script of man. Cuckoos shouted in the wind-riven larches, green beyond imagining, at the back of the chapel. A blackbird meditated aloud in high rhapsody, very leisured, but very tireless, on matters deeper than the Coppice Pool far below, deep as the mystery of the chipped, freckled eggs in his nest in the thorn. In and out of the yellow broom-coverts woodlarks played, made their small flights, and sang their small songs. Bright orange wild bees and black bumblebees floated in through the open windows. Mrs. Marston's black and white hens and the minorca cockerel pecked about the open door and came in inquiringly, upon which Martha, who sat near the door for that purpose, swept them softly out with the clothes-prop, which she manipulated in a masterly manner.
Mrs. Marston, eyeing Hazel at all the 'Amens,' when, as she always said, oneoughtto look up, like fowls after a drink, thought it was a pity. What was a pity she did not divulge to herself. She concluded with, 'Well, well, the childless father no sinners,' and hastily shut her eyes, realizing that another 'Amen' had nearly come. Edward's voice had taken a tone of relief which meant the end of a prayer.
Mrs. Marston glanced up at him, and decided to put some aniseed in his tea. 'High thinking's as bad as an embolus,' she thought. But Edward was not thinking. He was doing a much more strenuous thing—feeling. Hazel wondered at the vividness of his eyes when he rose from his knees.
'I'm glad I'm Ed'ard's missus, and not Mr. Reddin's,' she thought.
She had not seen Reddin for a week, having, since their last meeting in the wood, been so much afraid of encountering him that she had scarcely left the house.
The days were rather dull without her visits to the woods, but they were safe.
Edward gave out his text:
'Of those that Thou hast given me have I lost none.'
All his tenderness for Hazel and her following crept into his sermon. He spoke of the power of protection as almost the greatest good in life, the finest work. He said it was the inevitable reward of self-sacrifice, and that, if one were ready for self-denial, one could protect the beloved from all harm.
There was a crunching of gravel outside, and Reddin walked in. He sat down just behind Hazel. Edward glanced up, pleased to have so important an addition to the congregation, and continued his sermon. Hazel, red and white by turns, was in such a state of miserable embarrassment that Reddin was almost sorry for her. But he did not move his gaze from her profile.
At last Mrs. Marston, ever watchful for physical symptoms, whispered,'Are you finding it oppressive? Would you like to go out?'
Hazel went out with awkward haste, and Mrs. Marston followed, having mouthed incomprehensible comfort to Edward.
He went on stumblingly with the service.
Reddin, realizing that he had been femininely outwitted, smiled. Edward wondered who this distinguished-looking man with the merciless mouth might be. He thought the smile was one of amusement at his expense. But Reddin was summing him up with a good deal of respect.
Here was a man who would need reckoning with.
'The parson's got a temper,' he reflected, looking at him keenly, 'and, by the Lord, I'm going to rouse it!'
He smiled again as he always did when breaking horses.
He got up suddenly and went out. Mrs. Marston, administering raspberry cordial in the parlour, heard him knock, and went to the front door.
'Can I help?' he asked in his pleasantest manner. 'A doctor or anything?'
Mrs. Marston laughed softly. She liked young men, and thought Reddin 'a nice lad,' for all his forty years. She liked his air of breeding as he stood cap in hand awaiting orders. Above all, she was curious.
'No thank you,' she said. 'But come in, all the same. It's very kind of you. And such a hot day! But it's very pleasant in the parlour. And you'll have a drink of something cool. Now what shall it be?'
'Sherry,' he said, with his eyes on Hazel's.
'I misdoubt if there's any of the Christmas-pudding bottle left, but I'll go and see,' she said, all in a flutter. How tragic a thing for her, who prided herself on her housewifery, to have no sherry when it was asked for!
Her steps died away down the cellar stairs.
'So you thought you'd outwitted me?' he said. 'Now you know I've not tamed horses all my life for nothing.'
'Leave me be.'
'You don't want me to.'
'Ah! I do.'
'After I've come all these miles and miles to see you, day after day?'
'I dunna care how many miles you've acome,' said Hazel passionately; 'what for do you do it? Go back to the dark house where you come from, and leave me be!'
Reddin dropped his pathos.
She was sitting on the horsehair sofa, he in an armchair at its head. He flung out one arm and pulled her back so that her head struck the mahogany frame of the sofa.
'None of that!' he said.
He kissed her wildly, and in the kisses repaid himself for all his waiting in the past few weeks. She was crying from the pain of the bump; his kisses hurt her; his shoulder was hard against her breast. She was shaken by strange tremors. She struck him with her clenched hand. He laughed.
'Will you behave yourself? Will you do what I tell you?' he asked.
'I'd be much obleeged,' she said faintly, 'if you'd draw your shoulder off a bit.'
Something in the request touched him. He sat quite silent for a time in Edward's armchair and they looked at one another in a haunted immobility. Reddin was sorry for his violence, but would not say so.
Then they heard Mrs. Marston's slide, and she entered with a large decanter.
'This is some of the sparkling gooseberry,' she said, 'by Susan Waine's recipe, poor thing! Own cousin to my husband she was, and a good kind body. Never a thing awry in her house, and twelve children had Susan. I remember as clear as clear how the carpet (it was green jute, reversible) was rucked up at her funeral by the bearers' feet. And George Waine said, "That'll worry Susan," and then he remembered, and burst out crying, poor man! And he cried till the party was quite spoilt, and our spirits so low. Where was I? Oh yes, It's quite up, you see, and four years old this next midsummer. But I'm sure I'm quite put out at having no sherry, on account of Martha thinking to return the bottle and finishing the dregs. And there, you asked for sherry!'
'Did I? Oh, well, I like this just as much, thanks.'
He felt uncomfortable at this drinking of wine in Marston's house. It seemed unsportsmanlike to hoodwink this old lady. He had no qualms about Hazel. He was going, if Hazel would be sensible, to give her a life she would like, and things her instincts cried out for. Possibly he was right in imagining that her instincts were traitors to her personality. For Nature—that sardonic mother—while she cries with the silver cadence of ten thousand nightingales, 'Take what you want, my children,' sees to it, in the dark of her sorcery-chamber, that her children want what she intends.
'Is it to your liking, Mr.—? I didn't quite catch your name,' saidMrs. Marston.
'Reddin, ma'am. Jack Reddin of Undern.'
The name rang in the quiet room with a startling sound, like a gunshot in a wood at night when the birds are roosting.
At that moment Edward came in, not having waited till Mr. James had affectionately counted the collection.
'Is Hazel all right, mother?' he called when he got to the front door.
'Oh yes, my dear. It was but the heat. And here's a gentleman to see you. Mr. Reddin of Undern.'
Edward came forward with his hand out, and Reddin took it. Their eyes met; a curious hush fell on the room; Hazel sighed tremulously.
'Pleased to see you at our little service, Mr. Reddin,' Edward said heartily.
Reddin smiled and said, 'Thanks.'
'Glad there's anything in our simplicity to attract you,' Edward went on, wondering if his sermons were really not so bad, after all.
Reddin laughed again shortly. Edward put this down to shyness.
'I hope we shall often have you with us again.'
Reddin's eyes narrowed slightly. 'Yes, thanks. I shall be with you again.'
'You'll stay and have some supper?'
'Thanks.'
He had left off feeling unsportsmanlike. He had no compunction towards Edward. It was man to man, and the woman to the winner. This was the code avowed by his ancestors openly, and by himself and his contemporaries tacitly. He began to be as excited as he was in a steeplechase.
Edward went and sat down by Hazel, asking softly: 'And how is my little girl?'
She looked up at him, quiescent, and smiled. Reddin eyed them for a moment, construing their attitudes in his own way. To the unclean mind all frankness of word or action is suspect. Then he turned sharply to Mrs. Marston.
'I can't stay, after all,' he said; 'I've just remembered—something.Thanks very much'—he looked reflectively at Hazel—for the sherry.'
He was gone. 'My dear'—Mrs. Marston spoke triumphantly—'didn't I always say that gooseberry wine of Susan Waine's recipe was as good as champagne? Now you see I'm right. For Mr. Reddin of Undern—and a nice pleasant young man he is, too, though a little set about the mouth—and I remember when I was a girl there was a man with just such a mouth came to the May fair with a magic wheel, and it was a curious thing that the wheel never stopped opposite one of the prizes except when he turned it himself; and there! I did so want the green and yellow tab cat—real china—and I spent every penny, but the wheel went on.'
'Poor mother!'
'Yes, my dear, I cried buckets. And I've never trusted that mouth since. But, of course, Mr. Reddin's not that kind at all, and quite above fairs and such things.'
'I don't care for him much,' Edward said.
'No more do I,' said Hazel in a heartfelt tone.
Hazel was up early next morning. She could not sleep, and thought she would go down into the valley and look for spring mushrooms.
She crept out of the house, still as death, except for Mrs. Marston's soft yet all-pervading snores. Out in the graveyard, where as yet no bird sang, it was as if the dead had arisen in the stark hours between twelve and two, and were waiting unobtrusively, majestically, each by his own bed, to go down and break their long fast with the bee and the grass-snake in refectories too minute and too immortal to be known by the living. The tombstones seemed taller, seemed to have a presence behind them; the lush grass, lying grey and heavy with dew, seemed to have been swept by silent passing crowds. A dank smell came up, and the place had at once the unkempt look worn by the scene of some past revelry and the expectant air of a stage prepared for a coming drama.
Foxy barked sharply, urgently alive in the stronghold of the dead, and Hazel went to explain why she could not come. They held a long conversation, Hazel whispering. Foxy eloquent of eye. Foxy had a marked personality. Dignity never failed her, and she could be hilarious, loving, or clamorous for food without losing a jot of it. She was possessed of herself; the wild was her kingdom. If she was in a kennel—so her expression led you to understand—she was there incognito and of her own choice. Hazel, sitting at Edward's table, had the same look.
When the conversation was over, and Foxy had obediently curled herself to sleep with one swift motion like a line of poetry, Hazel went down the hill. She felt courageous; going to the valley was braving civilization. She had Mrs. Marston's skirt-fastener—the golden butterfly, complicated by various hooks—to keep her petticoats up later on. She also had the little bag in which Edward was accustomed to take the Lord's Supper to a distant chapel. To her, mushrooms were as clean as the Lord's Supper, no less mysterious, equally incidental to human needs. In her eyes nothing could be more magical and holy than silken, pink-lined mushrooms placed for her in the meadows overnight by the fairies, or by someone greater and more powerful called God.
As she went down the mountain it seemed that the whole country was snowed over. Mist—soft, woolly, and intensely white—lay across the far plain in drifts, filled the valley, and stood about the distant hills almost to their summits. The tops of Hunter's Spinney, God's Little Mountain, and the hill behind Undern stood out darkly green. The long rose-briars, set with pale coral buds, looked elvish against the wintry scene.
As Hazel descended the mist rose like a wall about her, shutting her off from Undern and the Mountain. She felt like a child out of school, free of everyone, her own for the pearly hours of morning. When she came to the meadows she gathered up her skirts well above her knees, took off her shoes and stockings, and pinned her sleeves to the shoulders. She ran like a tightly swathed nymph, small and slender, with her slim legs and arms shining in the fresh cold dew. She looked for nests and called 'Thuckoo!' to the cuckoos, and found a young one, savagely egotistic, not ready for flight physically, but ready for untold things psychically.
'You'm proud-stomached, you be!' said Hazel. 'You'd ought to be me, with an old sleepy lady drawing her mouth down whatever you do, and a young fellow—' She stopped. She could not even tell a bird about Reddin. She danced among the shut daisies, wild as a fairy, and when the sun rose her shadow mocked her with delicate foolery. In her hand, and in that of the shadow, bobbed the little black Lord's Supper bag.
She went on, regardless of direction. At last she found an old pasture where heavy farm-horses looked round at her over their polished flanks and a sad-eyed foal rose to greet her. There she found button mushrooms to her heart's content. Ancient hedges hung above the field and spoke to her in fragrant voices. The glory of the may was just giving place to the shell-tint of wild-roses. She reached up for some, and her hair fell down; she wisely put the remaining pins in the bag for the return journey. She was intensely happy, as a fish is when it plunges back into the water. For these things, and not the God-fearing comfort of the Mountain, nor the tarnished grandeur of Undern, were her life. She had so deep a kinship with the trees, so intuitive a sympathy with leaf and flower, that it seemed as if the blood in her veins was not slow-moving human blood, but volatile sap. She was of a race that will come in the far future, when we shall have outgrown our egoism—the brainless egoism of a little boy pulling off flies' wings. We shall attain philosophic detachment and emotional sympathy. We have even now far outgrown the age when a great genius like Shakespeare could be so clumsy in the interpretation of other than human life. We have left behind us the bloodshot centuries when killing was the only sport, and we have come to the slightly more reputable times when lovers of killing are conscious that a distinct effort is necessary in order to keep up 'the good old English sports.' Better things are in store for us. Even now, although the most expensively bound and the most plentiful books in the stationers' shops are those about killing and its thousand ramifications, nobody reads them. They are bought at Christmas for necessitous relations and little boys.
Hazel, in the fields and woods, enjoyed it all so much that she walked in a mystical exaltation.
Reddin in the fields and woods enjoyed himself only. For he took his own atmosphere with him wherever he went, and before his footsteps weakness fled and beauty folded.
The sky blossomed in parterres of roses, frailer and brighter than the rose of the briar, and melted beneath them into lagoons greener and paler than the veins of a young beech-leaf. The fairy hedges were so high, so flushed with beauty, the green airy waters ran so far back into mystery, that it seemed as if at any moment God might walk there as in a garden, delicate as a moth. Down by the stream Hazel found tall water-plantains, triune of cup, standing above the ooze like candelabras, and small rough-leaved forget-me-nots eyeing their liquid reflections with complaisance. She watched the birds bathe—bullfinches, smooth-coated and well-found; slim willow-wrens; thrushes, ermine-breasted; lusty blackbirds with beaks of crude yellow. They made neat little tracks over the soft mud, drank, bathed, preened, and made other neat little tracks. Then they 'took off,' as Hazel put it, from the top of the bank, and flew low across the painted meadow or high into the enamelled tree, and piped and fluted till the air was full of silver.
Hazel stood as Eve might have stood, hands clasped, eyes full of ecstasy, utterly self-forgetful, enchanted with these living toys.
'Eh, yon's a proper bird!' she exclaimed, as a big silken cuckoo alighted on the mud with a gobble, drank with dignity, and took its vacillating flight to a far ash-tree. 'Foxy ought to see that,' she added.
Silver-crested peewits circled and cried with their melancholy cadences, and a tawny pheasant led out her young. Now that the dew was gone, and cobwebs no longer canopied the field with silver, it was blue with germander speedwell—each flower painted with deepening colour, eyed with startling white, and carrying on slender stamens the round white pollen-balls—worlds of silent, lovely activity. Every flower-spike had its family of buds, blue jewels splashed with white, each close-folded on her mystery. To see the whole field not only bright with them, but brimming over, was like watching ten thousand saints rapt in ecstasy, ten thousand children dancing. Hazel knew nothing of saints. She had no words for the wonder in which she walked. But she felt it, she enjoyed it with a passion no words could express.
Mrs. Marston had said several times, 'I'm almost afraid Hazel is a great one for wasting her time.' But what is waste of time? Eating and sleeping; hearing grave, sedulous men read out of grave, sedulous book what we have heard a hundred times; besieging God (whom we end by imagining as a great ear) for material benefits; amassing property—these, the world says, are not waste of time. But to drink at the stoup of beauty; to lift the leafy coverlet of earth and seek the cradled God (since here, if anywhere, He dwells), this in the world's eye is waste of time. Oh, filthy, heavy-handed, blear-eyed world, when will you wash and be clean?
Hazel came to a place where the white water crossed the road in a glittering shallow ford. Here she stayed, leaning on the wooden bridge, hearing small pebbles grinding on one another; seeing jewel-flashes of ruby, sapphire and emerald struck from them by the low sunlight; smelling the scent that is better than all (except the scent of air on a barren mountain, or of snow)—the scent of running water. She watched the grey wagtails, neat and trim in person, but wild in bearing, racing across the wet gravel like intoxicated Sunday-school teachers. Then, in a huge silver-willow that brooded, dove-like, over the ford, a blackcap began to sing. The trills and gushes of perfect melody, the golden repetitions, the heart-lifting ascents and wistful falls drooping softly as a flower, seemed wonderful to her as an angel's song. She and the bird, sheltered under the grey-silver feathers of the trees, lived their great moments of creation and receptivity until suddenly there was a sharp noise of hoofs, the song snapped, the willow was untenanted, and Reddin's horse splashed through the ford.
'Oh!' cried Hazel, 'what for did you break the song? A sacred bird, it was. And now it's fled!'
He had been riding round the remnant of his estate, a bit of hill sheep-walk that faced the Mountain and overlooked the valley. He had seen Hazel wander down the road, white-limbed and veiled in tawny hair. He thought there must be something wrong with his sight. Bare legs! Bare arms! Hair all loose, and no hat! As a squire-farmer, he was very much shocked. As a man, he spurred downhill at the risk of a bad fall.
Hazel, unlike the women of civilization, who are pursued by looking-glasses, was apt to forget herself and her appearance. She had done so now. But something in Reddin's face recalled her. She hastily took the butterfly out of her skirt and put on her shoes and stockings.
'What song?' asked Reddin.
'A bird in the tree. What for did you fritten it?'
Reddin was indignant. Seeing Hazel wandering thus so near his own domain, he thought she had come in the hope of seeing him. He also thought that the strangeness of her dress was an effort to attract him.
To the pure all things are pure.
'But you surely wanted to see me? Wasn't that why you came?' he asked.
'No, it wasna. I came to pick the little musherooms as come wi' the warm rain, for there's none like spring musherooms. And I came to see the flowers, and hearken at the birds, and look the nesses.'
'You could have lots of flowers and birds at Undern.'
'There's plenty at the Mountain.'
'Then why did you come here?'
'To be by my lonesome.'
'Snub for me!' he smiled. He liked opposition. 'But look here, Hazel,' he reasoned. 'If you'd come to Undern, I'd make you enjoy life.'
'But I dunna want to. I be Ed'ard's missus.'
'Be missus!' At the phrase his weather-coarsened face grew redder. It intoxicated him.
He slipped off his horse and kissed her.
'I dunna want to be anybody's missus!' she cried vexedly. 'Not yourn nor Ed'ard's neither! But I Ed'ard's, and so I mun stay.' She turned away.
'Good morning to you,' she said in her old-fashioned little way. She trudged up the road. Reddin watched her, a forlorn, slight figure armed with the black bag, weary with the sense of reaction. Reddin was angry and depressed. The master of Undern had been for the second time refused.
'H'm,' he said, considering her departing figure, 'it won't be asking next time, my lady! And it won't be for you to refuse.'
He turned home, accompanied by that most depressing companion—the sense of his own meanness. He was unable to help knowing that the exercise of force against weakness is the most cur-like thing on earth.
Hazel was picking wimberry-flowers from their stalks. She sucked out the drop of honey from each flower like a bee. The blossoms were like small, rose-coloured tulips upside down, very magical and clear of colour. The sky also was like a pink tulip veined and streaked with purple and saffron. In its depth, like the honey in the flowers, it held the low, golden sun. Evening stood tiptoe upon the windy hill-top.
Hazel had eaten quite a quantity of honey, and had made an appreciable difference in the wimberry yield of half an acre, for she sipped hastily like a honey-fly. She was one of those who are full of impatience and haste through the sunny hours of day, clamorous for joy, since the night cometh. Some prescience was with her. She snatched what her eyes desired, and wept with disappointment. For it is the calm natures, wrapt in timeless quiet, taking what comes and asking nothing, that really enjoy. Hazel ate the fairy tulips as a pixie might, sharp-toothed, often consuming them whole. So she partook of her sacrament in both kinds, and she partook of it alone, taking her wafers and her honeyed wine from hands she never saw, in a presence she could not gauge. She did not even wonder whether it meant ill or well by her. She was barely conscious of it. When she found an unusually large globe of honey in a flower, she sang. Her song was as inconsequent as those of the woodlarks, who, with their hurried ripple of notes and their vacillating flights, were as eager and as soon discouraged as she was herself. Her voice rang out over the listening pastures, and the sheep looked up in a contemplative, ancient way like old ladies at a concert with their knitting. Hazel had fastened two foxgloves round her head in a wreath, and as she went their deep and darkly spotted bells shook above her, and she walked, like a jester in a grieving world, crowned with madness.
Suddenly a shout rang across the hill and silenced her and the woodlarks. She saw against the full-blown flower of the west—black on scarlet—Reddin on his tall black horse, galloping towards her. Clouds were coming up for night. They raced with him. From one great round rift the light poured on Hazel as it does from a burning-glass held over a leaf. It burned steadily on her, and then was moved, as if by an invisible hand. Reddin came on, and the thunder of his horse's hoofs was in her ears. Hurtling thus over the pastures, breaking the year-long hush, he was the embodiment of the destructive principle, of cruelty, of the greater part of human society—voracious and carnivorous—with its curious callousness towards the nerves of the rest of the world.
'I a'most thought it was the death-pack,' said Hazel, speaking first, as the more nervous always does.
She stood uncomfortably looking up at him as a rabbit looks, surprised half-way out of its burrow.
'Where be going?' she asked at last.
'Looking for you.'
Hazel could not enjoy the flattery of this; she was so perturbed by his nearness.
'Where's your lord and master?'
'Ed'ard inna my master. None is.' A hot indignant flush surged over her.
'Yes,' said he; 'I am.'
'That you're not, and never will be.'
Reddin said nothing. He sat looking down at her. In the large landscape his figure was carved on the sky, slenderly minute; yet it was instinct with forces enough to uproot a thousand trees and become, by virtue of these, the centre of the picture. He looked at his best on horse-back, where his hardness and roughness appeared as necessary qualities, and his too great share of virility was used up in courage and will-power.
Hazel gazed defiantly back; but at last her eyelids flickered, and she turned away.
'I am,' Reddin repeated softly.
He was as sure of her as he was of the rabbits and hares he caught in spring-traps when hunger drove them counter to instinct. A power was on Hazel now, driving her against the one instinct of her life hitherto—the wild creature's instinct for flight and self-preservation. She said nothing.
Reddin was filled with a tumultuous triumph that Sally Haggard had never roused.
'I am,' he said again, and laughed as if he enjoyed the repetition.'Come here!'
Hazel came slowly, looked up, and burst into tears.
'Hello! Tears already?' he said, concerned. 'Keep 'em till there's something to cry for.'
He dismounted and slipped the rein over his arm.
'What's up, Hazel Woodus?' He put one arm round her.
The sheep looked more ancient than ever, less like old ladies at a concert than old ladies looking over their prayer-books at a blasphemer.
'My name inna Woodus. You'd ought to call me Mrs. Marston.'
For answer, he kissed her so that she cried out.
'That's to show if I'll call you Mrs. Marston.'
'I'd liefer be.'
'What?'
'Ed'ard's missus than yourn.'
He ground a foxglove underfoot.
'And there's Foxy in a grand new kennel, and me in a seat in chapel, and a bush o' laylac give me for myself, and a garden and a root o' virgin's pride.'
'I shall have that!' said Reddin, and stopped, having blundered into symbolism, and not knowing where he was. Hazel was silent also, playing with a foxglove flower.
'What are you up to?' he asked.
She was glad of something to talk about.
'Look! When you get 'un agen the light you can see two little green things standing inside like people in a tent. They think they're safe shut in!' She bent down and called: 'I see yer! I see yer!' laughing.
Reddin was bent on getting back to more satisfactory topics.
'They're just two, like us,' he said.
'Ah! We're like under a tent,' she answered, looking at the arching sky.
'Only there's nobody looking at us.'
'How do you know?' she whispered, looking up gravely. 'I'm thinking therebesomebody somewhere out t'other side of that there blue, and looking through like us through this here flower. And if so be he likes he can tear it right open, and get at us.'
Reddin looked round almost apprehensively. Then, as the best way of putting a stop to superstition, he caught her to him and kissed her again.
'That's what tents are for, and what you're for,' he said. But he felt a chill in the place, and Hazel had frightened herself so much that she could not be lured from her aloofness.
'I mun go home-along,' she said; 'the sun's undering.'
'Will you come to Hunter's Spinney on Sunday?'
'Why ever?'
'Because I say so.'
'But why so far, whatever?' she asked amazedly.
'Because I want you to.'
'But I mun go to chapel along of Ed'ard, and sing 'ymns proper wi' the folks—and me singing higher nor any of them can go, for all I'm new to it—and the old lady'—her face grew mischievous—'the old lady in a shiny silk gownd as creaks and creaks when she stirs about!'
Reddin lost patience.
'You're to start as soon as they're in church, d'you see?'
'Maybe I 'unna come.'
'You've got to. Look here, Hazel, you like having a lover, don't you?'
'I dunno.'
'Hazel! I'll bring you a present.'
'I dunna want it. What is it?' she said in a breath.
'Something nice. Then you promise to come?'
There was a long silence.
Her eyes seemed to her to be caught by his. She could not look away. And his eyes said strange, terrific things to her, things for which she had no words, wakening vitality, flattering, commanding, stirring a new curiosity, robbing her of breath.
They stood thus for a long time, as much alone under the flaming sky as a man and woman of the stone age.
When at least he released her eyes, he swung silently into the saddle and was gone.
When he got home, Vessons came shambling to the door.
'Supper and a tot of whisky!' ordered his master.
Vessons took no notice, but eyed the horse.
'You dunna mind how much work you give me at the day's end, do you?' he inquired conversationally.
'Get on with your jobs!'
'Now, what wench'll cry for this night's work?' mused Vessons.
Hazel ran home through the dew, swift as a hare to her form. Mrs. Marston, communing with a small wood fire and a large Bible, looked over her spectacles as Hazel came in, and said:
'Draw your stockinged foot along the boards, my dear. Yes, I thought so, damp.'
Hazel changed her stockings by the fire, and felt very cared for and very grand. A fire to change in the parlour! And several pairs of new stockings! She had never had more than one pair before, and those with 'ladders' in them. 'These here be proper stockings,' she said complacently—'these with holes in 'em as Edward bought me. Holes asoughtto be there, I mane. They show my legs mother-naked, and they look right nice.'
'Don't say that word, dear.'
'What 'un?'
Mrs. Marston was silent for a moment. 'The sixth from the end,' she said; 'it's not nice for a minister's wife.'
'What mun I say?'
Mrs. Marston was in a difficulty. 'Well,' she said at last, 'Edward should not have given you any cause to say anything.'
Hazel blazed into loyalty.
'I'm sure I'm very much obleeged to Ed'ard,' she said, 'and I like 'em better for showing my legs. Oh, herebeEd'ard! Ed'ard, these be proper stockings, inna they?'
Edward glanced at them, and said indifferently that they were. As he did so, a line that had lately appeared on his forehead became very apparent.
In her room upstairs, papered with buttercups and daisies by Edward himself, and scented by a bunch of roses he had given her, Hazel thought about Hunter's Spinney. Edward would not like her to go, and Edward had been kind—kinder than anyone had ever been. He had extended his kindness to Foxy also. 'I'm sure Foxy's much obleeged,' she thought. 'No, she could never tell Edward about Hunter's Spinney. If he questioned her, she knew that she would lie. He would certainly not be pleased. He might be very angry. Mrs. Marston would not like it at all; she would talk about a minister's wife. Reddin had said she must go, but she must not.' She smelt the roses.
'No,' she said, 'I must ne'er go to the Hunter's Spinney—not till doom breaks!' She said her prayers under the shelter of that resolve, with a supplementary one written out very neatly in gold ink by Edward, who wrote, as his mother said, 'a parchment script.'
But when she lay down she could not keep her mind clear of Reddin; during each meeting with him she had been more perturbed. His personality dragged at hers. Already he was stronger than her fugitive impulses, her wilding reserve. He was like a hand tearing open a triplet of sorrel leaves folded for rain, so strong in their impulse for self-protection that they could only be conquered by destruction. She was afraid of him, yet days without him were saltless food. There was a ruthlessness about him—the male instinct unaccompanied by humility, the patrician instinct unaccompanied by sympathy, the sportsman's instinct unaccompanied by pity. Whatever he began he would finish. What had he now begun?
Innocence and instinct, ignorance and curiosity, struggled in her mind. The attitude of civilization and the Churches towards sex is not one to help a girl in such an hour. For while approving of, and even insisting on, children, they treat with a secrecy that implies disapproval the necessary physical factors that result in children. Tacitly, though not openly, they consider sex disgraceful. Though Hazel had come in contact with the facts of life less than most cottage girls, she was not completely ignorant. But the least ignorant woman knows nothing at all about sex until she has experienced it. So Hazel was dependent on intuition. Intuition told her that if the peaceful life at the parsonage was to continue, she must keep away from Hunter's Spinney. But she could not keep away. It was as if someone had spun invisible threads between her and Reddin, and was slowly tightening them.
Long after Edward had locked the house up and shut his door, after the ticking of the clock had ceased to be incidental and become portentous, Hazel lay and tried to think. But she only heard two voices in endless contradiction, 'I munna go. I mun go.' At last she got up and fetched the book of charms, written in a childish, illiterate hand, and nearly black with use.
'I'll try a midsummer 'un, for it's Midsummer Eve come Saturday,' she thought.
She searched the book and found a page headed 'The Flowering of theBrake.' That one she decided to work on Saturday.
'And to-morrow the Harpers, and Friday the Holy Sign,' she said. 'And if they say go, I'll go, and if they say stay, I'll stay.'
She fell asleep, feeling that she had shifted the responsibility.
Her mother had said that before any undertaking you should work the Harper charm. The book directed that on a lonely hill, you must listen with your eyes shut for the fairy playing. If the undertaking was good you would hear, coming from very far away, a sound of harping. Silver folk with golden harps, so the book said, keep on a purple hill somewhere beyond seeing, and there they play the moon up and the moon down. And at sun-up they cry for those that have not heard them. If you hear them ever so faintly, you can go on to the end of your undertaking, and there'll be no tears in it. But you must never tire of waiting, nor tell anyone what you have heard.
The next night Hazel stole out in the heavy dew to a hummock of the mountain, and sat down there to wait for moonrise. But when the moon came—the thinnest of silver half-hoops, very faint in the reflected rose from the west—there was no sound except the song of the wood-larks. They persevered, although the sun was gone. Soon they, too, were hushed, and Hazel was folded in silence.
She waited a long while. The chapel and the minister's house sank into the deepening night as into water. The longer the omen tarried, the more she wanted it to come. Then fatalism reasserted itself, and she relapsed into her usual state of mind.
'I dunna care,' she said. 'It inna no use to tarry. They unna play. I'll bide along of Ed'ard at chapel on Sunday, and sing higher than last time.' She turned home.
At that moment a note of music, strayed, it seemed, out of space, wandered across the hill-top. Then a few more, thin and silvery, ran down the silence like a spray of water. The air was lost in distance, but the notes were undoubtedly those of a harp.
'It's them!' whispered Hazel. 'I'm bound to go.' Then she remembered her mother's injunctions, and took to her heels. At home in her quiet room, she thought of the strange shining folk playing on their purple mountain.
She never knew that the harper was her father returning by devious roads from one of the many festivals at which he played in summer-time, and having frequent rests by the way, owing to the good ale he had drunk. Her bright galaxy of faery was only a drunken man. Her fate had been settled by a passing whim of his, but so had been her coming into the world.
When she went in, Edward was sitting up for her, anxious, but trying to reason himself into calm, as Hazel was given to roaming.
'Where have you been?' he asked rather sternly, for he had suffered many things from anxiety and from his mother.
'Only up to'erts the pool, Ed'ard.'
'Don't go there again.'
'Canna I go walking on the green hill by my lonesome?'
'No. You can go in the woods. They're safe enough.'
'Foxy's a bad dog!' came Mrs. Marston's voice from upstairs. 'She bit the rope and took the mutton!'
'Eh, I'm main sorry!' cried Hazel. 'But she inna a bad dog, Mrs.Marston; she's a good fox.'
'According to natural history she may be, but in my sight she's a bad dog.' She shut her door with an air of finality.
'The old lady canna'd abear Foxy,' said Hazel. 'Nobody likes Foxy.'
She was stubbornly determined that the world bore her a grudge because she loved Foxy. Perhaps she had discovered that the world has a sharp sword for the vulnerable, and that love is easily wounded.
'Don't call mother the old lady, dear.'
'Well, she is. And she says animals has got no souls. She'm only got a little small 'un herself.'
'Hazel!'
'Well, it's God's truth.'
'Why?'
'If she'd got a nice tidy bit herself, she'd know Foxy'd got one, too. Now I've got a shimmy with lace on, I know lots of other girls sure to have 'em. Afore I couldna have believed it.'
Edward could find no reply to this.
'Are you happy here, Hazel?' he asked.
'Ah! I be.'
'You don't miss—'
'Father? Not likely!' She looked up with her clear golden eyes. 'You'm mother and father both!'
'Only that, dear?'
'Brother.'
'You've forgotten one, Hazel—husband.' His eyes were wistful. 'And lover, perhaps, some day,' he added. 'Good night, dear.'
She lifted a childish mouth, grateful and ready to be affectionate. Too ready, he thought. He looked so eagerly for shyness—a flicker of the eyelids, a mounting flush. He was no fool, nor was he in the least ascetic. In his dreamy life before Hazel came, he had thought of a sane and manly and normal future when he thought of it at all. Now he found that the reality was not like his dreams. The saneness and manliness were still needed, but the joy had gone, or at least was veiled.
'It will come all right,' he told himself, and waited. His face took an expression of suspense. He was like one that watches, rapt, for the sunrise. Only the sun stayed beneath the horizon. He called Hazel in his mind by the country name for wood-sorrel—the Sleeping Beauty. He left her to sleep as long as she would. He kept a hand on himself, and never tried to waken her by easier ways than through the spirit—through the senses, or vanity, or by taking advantages of his superior intellect.
He would win her fairly or not at all. So, though to glance into her empty white room set him trembling, though the touch of her hand set his pulses going, he never schemed to touch her, never made pretexts to go into her room. A stormed citadel was in his eyes a thing spoilt in the capturing. So he waited for the gates to open. The irony was that if he had listened to sex—who spoke to him with her deep beguiling voice, like a purple-robed Sibyl—if he had for once parted company with his exacting spiritual self, Hazel would have loved him. We cannot love that in which is nothing of ourselves, and there was no white fire of spiritual exaltation in Hazel. The nearest she approached to that was in her adoration of sensuous beauty, a green flame of passionless devotion to loveliness as seen in inanimate things. But that there should be anything between a man and a woman except an obvious affection, a fraternal sort of thing, or an uncomfortable excitement such as she felt with Reddin, was quite beyond her ideas. She did not know that there could be a fervour of mind for mind, a clasp more frantic than that of the arms, a continuous psychic state more passionate than the great moments of physical passion. If Edward had told her, she could not at this time have understood it. She would have gazed up at him trustingly out of her autumn-tinted eyes; she would have embodied all the spiritual glories of which he dreamed; and she would have understood nothing. Once he tried to share with her a passage in Drummond's 'Natural Law in the Spiritual World.' He was reading it with young delight a good many years behind the times, for books had usually grown very out of date before they percolated through the country libraries to him. He had read it in his pleasant, half-educated voice, dramatically and tenderly; his cheeks had flushed; he had challenged her criticism with keen, attentive eyes. She had said: 'I wonder if that's our Foxy barking, or a strange 'un?'
Hazel looked long from her window that night.
'Oh, I canna go! I canna go! Ed'ard setting store by me and all!' she said. 'Maybe the other signs wunna come.'
* * * * *
On Friday she waited until after the others had gone to bed, and then slipped out. She went into the silent woods as the moths went, purposeless, yet working out destiny. It was a very warm, wet evening, and glow-worms shone incandescently in the long grass, each with her round, wonderful, greenish lamp at its brightest. They beckoned on to faery, though they glowed in perfect stillness. They spoke of marvellous things, though they lit the night in silence. It was a very grave, a very remote personality, surely, that lit those lamps. A more intent eye, a more careful hand were needed, one thinks, to make these than to make the planets, and a mind more vast, big enough to include minuteness. But Hazel felt no awe of them; she was too bounded and earthly a creature to be afraid of mystery. It is the spirit that maketh afraid. She was sure that they were not the Holy Sign, for she had seen them often. The Holy Sign was quite different.
'If I be to go to Hunter's Spinney,' she said, looking up through the black branches and twigs that were like great fowling-nets spread over her—'if I be to go, show me the Holy Sign.'
She wandered down the narrow paths. It was very dark and warm and damp. Once the moon came out, and she saw a long pool startle the woods with its brightness, like lightning on steel. The yellow irises that stood about its marges held a pale radiance, and were like butterflies enchanted into immobility. Huge toadstools, vividly tawny as leopards, clumps of ladyfern not yet their full height and thick with curled fronds, stood proudly on their mossy lawns.
But none of these was the Sign.
'If it dunna come soon I'll go home-along,' she said.
And then, round the next bend, she saw it. At first she thought it was an angel just beginning to appear. The phantom was of a man's height, and it shone as the glow-worms did, only its light would have been enough to read by. It had a strange effect, standing there bathed in its own light in the black unbroken silence. It had a look of life—subdued, but passionate—as a spirit might have when it has just reintegrated its body out of the air. Hazel was terrified. As a rule, she was never afraid in the woods and fields, but only in the haunts of men. But from this, after one paralysed moment, she fled in panic. So she never knew that her second sign was only a rotten tree, shining with the phosphorescence of corruption.
Next morning she asked Edward:
'Could folks see angels now?'
'Yes, if it was God's will.'
'If one came, would it be a sign?'
'I suppose so, dear.'
'What'd you do, Ed'ard, if you were bound to find out summat?'
Edward was thinking out heads of a discourse on the power of prayer.
'I should pray, dear,' he said absently.
'Who'd answer?'
'God.'
'Would you hear 'Im?'
'No, dear; of course not.'
He wanted quiet to finish his sermon, but he tried to be patient.
'You would know by intuition,' he said, 'little signs.'
'The Holy Sign!' murmured Hazel. 'I saw it yester-night—a burning angel.' 'I'm afraid you are too superstitious,' Edward said, and returned to his remarks on ejaculatory prayer.
Some people would have found it hard to decide which was the more superstitious, the more pathetic.