Early next morning, while the finch still dreamed its heavy dream and the mice were still motionless balls, Hazel was awakened by a knock at the massive oak door. She ran across and opened it a crack, peering out from amid her hair like a squirrel from autumn leaves.
Vessons stood there with a pint mug of beer, which he proffered. ButHazel had a woman's craving for tea.
'If so be the kettle's boiling,' she said apologetically.
'Tay!' said Vessons. 'Laws! how furiously the women do rage after tay!I s'pose it's me as is to make it?'
'If kettle's boiling.'
'Kettle! O' course kettle's boiling this hour past. Or how would the ca'ves get their meal?'
'Well, you needna shout. You'll wake 'im.'
Fright was in her eyes, strong and inexplicable to herself.
'I mun go!' she whispered.
'Ah! You go,' said Vessons, glad that for once duty and inclination went hand in hand.
'I'll send you,' he added. 'Where d'yer live?'
She hesitated.
'You needna be frit to tellme,' said Vessons. 'I'm six-and-sixty, and you're no more to me'—he surveyed her flushing face contemplatively—'than the wold useless cat,' he concluded.
Hazel frowned; but she wanted a promise from Vessons, so she made no retort.
'You wunna tell 'im?' she pleaded.
''Im? Never will I! Wild 'orses shanna drag it from me, nor yet blood 'orses, nor 'unters, nor cart-'orses, nor Suffolk punches!' Vessons waxed eloquent, for again righteousness and desire coincided. He did not want a woman at Undern.
'Well,' said Hazel, whispering through the crack, 'I lives at theCallow.'
'What! that lost and forgotten place t'other side the Mountain?'
'Ah! But it inna lost and forgotten; it's better'n this. We've got bees.'
'So've I got bees.'
'And a music.'
'Music? What's a music? You canna eat it.'
'And my dad makes coffins.'
'Does 'e, now?' said Vessons, interested at last. Then he bethought him of the credit of Undern. 'But you anna got a mulberry-tree,' he said triumphantly. 'Now then!I'ave!'
He creaked downstairs.
In a few moments Hazel also went down, and drank her tea by the red fire in the kitchen, watching the frost-flowers being softly effaced from the window as if someone rubbed them away with a sponge. Snow like sifted sugar was heaped on the sill, and the yard and outbuildings and fields, the pools and the ricks, all had the dim radiance of antimony.
'Where be the road?' asked Hazel, standing on the door-step and feeling rather lost. 'How'll I find it?'
'You wunna find it.'
'Oh, but I mun!'
'D'you think Andrew Vessons'll let an 'ooman trapse in the snow when he's got good horses in stable?' queried Vessons grandly. 'I'll drive yer.'
'I'm much obleeged, I'm sure,' said Hazel. 'But wunna he know?'
'He'll sleep till noon if I let 'im,' said Andrew.
They drove off in silence, the snow muffling the plunging hoofs. Hazel looked back as the sky crimsoned for dawn. The house fronted her with a look of power and patience. She felt that it had not yet done with her. She wondered how she would feel if Reddin suddenly appeared at his window. And a tiny traitorous wish slipped up from somewhere in her heart. She watched the windows till a turn hid the house, and then she sighed. Almost she wished that Reddin had awakened.
But she soon forgot everything in delight; for the snow shone, the long slots of the rabbits and hares, the birds' tracks in orderly rows, the deep footprints of sheep, all made her laugh by their vagaries, for they ran in loops and in circles, and appeared like the crazy steps of a sleep-walker to those who had not the key of their activity. Hazel's own doings were like that; everyone's doings are like it, if one sees the doings without the motive.
Plovers wheeled and cried desolately, seeing the soft relentless snow between themselves and their green meadows, sad as those that see fate drawing thick veils between themselves and the meadows of their hope and joy.
At the foot of the Callow Hazel got out.
'Never tell him,' she said, looking up.
'Never in life,' said Vessons.
Hazel hesitated.
'Never tell him,' she added, 'unless he asks a deal and canna rest.'
'He may ask till Doomsday,' said Vessons, 'and he may be restless as the ten thousand ghosses that trapse round Undern when the moon's low, but I'll ne'er tell 'im.'
Hazel sighed, and turned to climb the hill.
'A missus at Undern!' said Andrew to the cob's ears as they trotted home. 'No, never will I!'
A magpie rose from a wood near the road, jibing at him. He looked round almost as if it had been someone laughing at his resolve, and repeated, 'Never will I!'
'Where's Hazel?' asked Reddin.
'Neither wild 'orses, nor blood 'orses, nor race 'orses nor cart 'orses, nor Suffolk punches—' began Vessons whose style was cumulative, and who, when he had made a good phrase, was apt to work it to death like any other artist. 'Oh, you're drunk, Vessons!' said his master.
'Shall drag it from me,' finished Vessons.
Reddin knew this was true, and felt rather hopeless. Still, he determined not to give up the search until he had found Hazel.
He inquired at the Hunter's Arms, but Vessons had been there before him, and he was met by pleasant stupidity.
Vessons was of the people, Reddin of the aristocracy, so the frequenters of the Hunter's Arms sided as one man against Reddin.
'You'll not get another bite of that apple,' said Vessons with satisfaction, when his master returned with downcast face.
'I can't stand your manners much longer, Vessons,' said he irritably.
'Gie me notice, then,' said Vessons, falling back on the well-worn formula, and scoring his usual triumph.
Reddin had the faults of his class, but turning an old servant adrift was not one of them. Vessons traded on this, and invariably said and did exactly what he liked.
When Hazel got in, her father had finished his breakfast and was busy at work.
'Brought the wreath-frames?' he asked, without looking up.
'Ah.'
'He's jead at last. At the turn of the night. They came after the coffin but now. I'll be able to get them there new section crates I wanted. He's doing more for me, wanting a coffin, and him stiff and cold, than what he did in the heat of life.'
'Many folks be like that,' said Hazel out of her new wisdom. Neither of them reflected that Abel had always been like that towards Hazel, that she was becoming more like it to him every year.
Abel made no remark at all about Hazel's adventures, and she preserved a discreet silence.
'That little vixen's took a chicken,' said Abel, after a time; 'that's the second.'
'She only does it when I'm away, being clemmed,' said Hazel pleadingly.
'Well, if she does it again,' Abel announced, 'it's the water and a stone round her neck. So now you know.'
'You durstn't.'
'We'll see if I durst.'
Hazel fled in tears to the unrepentant and dignified Foxy. Some of us find it hard enough to be dignified when we have done right; but Foxy could be dignified when she had done wrong, and the more wrong, the more dignity.
She was very bland, and there was a look of deep content—digestive content, a state bordering on the mystic's trance—in her affectionate topaz eyes.
It had been a tender and nourishing chicken; the hours she had spent in gnawing through her rope had been well repaid.
'Oh! you darlin' wicked little thing!' wailed Hazel. 'You munna do it,Foxy, or he'll drown you dead. What for did you do it, Foxy, my dear?'
Foxy's eyes became more eloquent and more liquid.
'You gallus little blessed!' said Hazel again. 'Eh! I wish you and me could live all alone by our lonesome where there was no men and women.'
Foxy shut her eyes and yawned, evidently feeling doubtful if such a halcyon place existed in the world.
Hazel sat on her heels and thought. It was flight or Foxy. She knew that if she did not take Foxy away, her renewed naughtiness was as certain as sunset.
'You was made bad,' she said sadly but sympathetically. 'Leastways, you wasn't made like watch-dogs and house-cats and cows. You was made a fox, and you be a fox, and its queer-like to me, Foxy, as folk canna see that. They expect you to be what you wanna made to be. You'm made to be a fox; and when you'm busy being a fox they say you'm a sinner!'
Having wrestled with philosophy until Foxy yawned again, Hazel went in to try her proposition on Abel. But Abel met it as the world in general usually meets a new truth.
'She took the chick,' he said. 'Now, would a tarrier do that—a well-trained tarrier? I says 'e wouldnot'
'But it inna fair to make the same law for foxes and terriers.'
'I make what laws suit me,' said Abel. 'And what goes agen me—gets drownded.'
'But it inna all for you!' cried Hazel.
'Eh?'
'The world wunna made in seven days only for Abel Woodus,' said Hazel daringly.
'You've come back very peart from Silverton,' said Abel reflectively— 'very peart, you 'ave. How many young fellers told you your 'air was abron this time? That fool Albert said so last time, and you were neither to hold nor to bind. Abron! Carrots!'
But it was not, as he thought, this climax that silenced Hazel. It was the lucky hit about the young fellows and the reminiscence called up by the word 'abron.' He continued his advantage, mollified by victory.
'Tell you what it is, 'Azel; it's time you was married. You're too uppish.'
'I shall ne'er get married.'
'Words! words! You'll take the first as comes—if there's ever such a fool.'
Hazel wished she could tell him that one had asked her, and that no labouring man. But discretion triumphed.
'Maybe,' she said tossing her head, 'Iwillmarry, to get away from the Callow.'
'Well, well, things couldna be dirtier; maybe they'll be cleaner when you'm gone. Look's the floor!'
Hazel fell into a rage. He was always saying things about the floor.She hated the floor.
'I swear I'll wed the first as comes!' she cried—'the very first!'
'And last,' put in Abel. 'What'll you swear by?'
'By God's Little Mountain.'
'Well,' said Abel contentedly, 'now you've swornthatoath, you're bound to keep it, and so now I know that if ever an 'usbanddoescome forrard you canna play the fool.'
Hazel was too wrathful for consideration.
'You look right tidy in that gownd,' Abel said. 'I 'spose you'll be wearing it to the meeting up at the Mountain?'
'What meeting?'
'Didna I tell you I'd promised you for it—to sing? They'm after me to take the music and play.'
Hazel forgot everything in delight.
'Be we going for certain sure?' she asked.
'Ah! Next Monday three weeks.'
'We mun practise.'
'They say that minister's a great one for the music. One of them sort as is that musical he canna play. There'll be a tea.'
'Eh!' said Hazel, 'it'll be grand to be in a gentleman's house agen!'
'When've you bin in a gentleman's house?'
Hazel was taken aback.
'Yesterday!' she flashed. 'If Albert inna a gent I dunno who is, for he's got a watch-chain brass-mockin'-gold all across his wescoat.'
Abel roared. Then he fell to in earnest on the coffin, whistling like a blackbird. Hazel sat down and watched him, resting her cheek on her hand. The cold snowlight struck on her face wanly.
'Dunna you ever think, making coffins for poor souls to rest in as inna tired, as there's a tree growing somewhere for yours?' she asked.
'Laws! What's took you? Measles? What for should I think of me coffin? That's about the only thing as I'll ne'er be bound to pay for.' He laughed. 'What ails you?'
'Nought. Only last night it came o'er me as I'll die as well as others.'
'Well, have you only just found that out? Laws! what a queen of fools you be!'
Hazel looked at the narrow box, and thought of the active, angular old man for whom it was now considered an ample house.
'It seems like the world's a big spring-trap, and us in it,' she said slowly. Then she sprang up feverishly. 'Let's practise till we're as hoarse as a young rook!' she cried.
So amid the hammering their voices sprang up, like two keen flames. Then Abel threw away the hammer and began to harp madly, till the little shanty throbbed with the sound of the wires and the lament of the voices that rose and fell with artless cunning. The cottage was like a tree full of thrushes.
After their twelve o'clock dinner, Abel cut holly for the wreaths, and Hazel began to make them. For the first time home seemed dull. She thought wistfully of the green silk dress and the supper in the old, stately room. She thought of Vessons, and of Reddin's eyes as he pulled her back from the door. She thought of Undern as a refuge for Foxy.
'Maybe sometime I'll go and see 'em,' she thought.
She went to the door and looked out. Frost tingled in the air; icicles had formed round the water-butt; the strange humming stillness of intense cold was about her. It froze her desire for adventure.
'I'll stay as I be,' she thought. 'I wunna be his'n.'
To her, Reddin was a terror and a fascination. She returned to the prickly wreath, sewing on the variegated holly-leaves one by one, with clusters of berries at intervals.
'What good'll it do 'im?' she asked; 'he canna see it.'
'Who wants him to see it?' Abel was amused. 'When his father died he 'ad his enjoyment—proud as proud was Samson, for there were seven wreaths, no less.'
Hazel's thoughts returned to the coming festivity. Her hair and her peacock-blue dress would be admired. To be admired was a wonderful new sensation. She fetched a cloth and rubbed at the brown mark. It would not come out. As long as she wore the dress it would be there, like the stigma of pain that all creatures bear as long as they wear the garment of the flesh.
At last she burst into tears.
'I want another dress with no blood on it!' she wailed. And so wailing she voiced the deep lament, old as the moan of forests and falling water, that goes up through the centuries to the aloof and silent sky, and remains, as ever, unassuaged.
* * * * *
Hazel hated a burying, for then she had to go with Abel to help in carrying the coffin to the house of mourning. They set out on the second day after her return. The steep road down to the plain—called the Monkey's Ladder—was a river, for a thaw had set in. But Hazel did not mind that, though her boots let in the water, as she minded the atmosphere of gloom at old Samson's blind house. She would never, as Abel always did, 'view the corpse,' and this was always taken as an insult. So she waited in the road, half snow and half water, and thought with regret of Undern and its great fire of logs, and the green rich dress, and Reddin with his force and virility, loud voice, and strong teeth. He was so very much alive in a world where old men would keep dying.
Abel came out at last, very gay, for he had been given, over and above the usual payment, glove-money and a glass of beer.
'Us'll get a drop at the public,' he said.
So they turned in there. Hazel thought the red-curtained, firelit room, with its crudely coloured jugs and mugs, a most wonderful place. She sat in a corner of the settle and watched her boots steam, growing very sleepy. But suddenly there was a great clatter outside, the sound of a horse, pulled up sharply, slipping on the cobbles, and a shout for the landlord.
'Oh, my mortal life!' said Hazel, 'it met be the Black Huntsman himself.'
'No, I won't come in,' said the rider, 'a glass out here.'
Hazel knew who it was.
'Can you tell me,' he went on, 'if there's any young lady about here with auburn hair? Father plays the fiddle.'
'He's got it wrong,' thought Hazel.
'Young lady!' repeated the landlord. 'Hawburn? No, there's no lady of that colour hereabouts. And what ladies there be are weathered and case-hardened.'
'The one I'm looking for's young—young as a kitten, and as troublesome.'
Hazel clapped her hands to her mouth.
'There's no fiddler chap hereabouts, then?'
Abel rose and went to the door.
'If it's music you want, I know better music than fiddles, and that's harps,' he said. 'Saw! saw! The only time as ever I liked a fiddle was when the fellow snabbed at the strings with his ten fingers—despert-like.'
'Oh, damn you!' said Reddin. 'I didn't come to hear about harps.'
'If it's funerals or a forester's supper, a concert or a wedding,' Abel went on, quite undaunted, 'I'm your man.'
Reddin laughed.
'It might be the last,' he said.
'Wedding or bedding, either or both, I suppose,' said the publican, who was counted a wit.
Reddin gave a great roar of laughter.
'Both!' he said.
'Neither!' whispered Hazel, who had been poised indecisively, as if half prepared to go to the door. She sat further into the shadow. In another moment he was gone.
'Whoever she be,' said the publican, nodding his large head wisely, 'have her he will, for certain sure!'
All through the night, murmurous with little rivulets of snow-water, the gurgling of full troughing, and the patter of rain on the iron roof of the house and the miniature roofs of the beehives, Hazel, waking from uneasy slumber, heard those words and muttered them.
In her frightened dreams she reached out to something that she felt must be beyond the pleasant sound of falling water, so small and transitory; beyond the drip and patter of human destinies—something vast, solitary, and silent. How should she find that which none has ever named or known? Men only stammer of it in such words as Eternity, Fate, God. All the outcries of all creatures, living and dying, sink in its depth as in an unsounded ocean. Whether this listening silence, incurious, yet hearing all, is benignant or malevolent, who can say? The wistful dreams of men haunt this theme for ever; the creeds of men are so many keys that do not fit the lock. We ponder it in our hearts, and some find peace, and some find terror. The silence presses upon us ever more heavily until Death comes with his cajoling voice and promises us the key. Then we run after him into the stillness, and are heard no more.
Hazel and her father practised hard through the dark, wet evenings. She was to sing 'Harps in Heaven,' a song her mother had taught her. He was to accompany the choir, or glee-party, that met together at different places, coming from the villages and hillsides of a wide stretch of country.
'Well,' said Abel on the morning of their final rehearsal, 'it's a miserable bit of a silly song, but you mun make the best of it. Give it voice, girl! Dunna go to sing it like a mouse in milk!'
His musical taste was offended by Hazel's way of being more dramatic than musical. She would sink her voice in the sad parts almost to a whisper, and then rise to a kind of keen.
'You'm like nought but Owen's old sheep-dog,' he said, 'wowing the moon!'
But Hazel's idea of music continued to be that of a bird. She was a wild thing, and she sang according to instinct, and not by rule, though her good ear kept her notes true.
They set out early, for they had a good walk in front of them, and the April sun was hot. Hazel, under the pale green larch-trees, in her bright dress, with her crown of tawny hair, seemed to be an incarnation of the secret woods.
Abel strode ahead in his black cut-away coat, snuff-coloured trousers, and high-crowned felt hat with its ornamental band. This receded to the back of his head as he grew hotter. The harp was slung from his shoulder, the gilding looking tawdry in the open day. Twice during the walk, once in a round clearing fringed with birches, and once in a pine-glade, he stopped, put the harp down and played, sitting on a felled tree. Hazel, quite intoxicated with excitement, danced between the slender boles till her hair fell down and the long plait swung against her shoulder.
'If folks came by, maybe they'd think I was a fairy!' she cried.
'Dunna kick about so!' said Abel, emerging from his abstraction. 'It inna decent, now you're an 'ooman growd.'
'I'm not an 'ooman growd!' cried Hazel shrilly. 'I dunna want to be, and I won't never be.'
The pine-tops bent in the wind like attentive heads, as gods, sitting stately above, might nod thoughtfully over a human destiny. Someone, it almost seemed, had heard and registered Hazel's cry, 'I'll never be an 'ooman,' assenting, sardonic.
They came to the quarry at the mountain; the deserted mounds and chasms looked more desolate than ever in the spring world. Here and there the leaves of a young tree lipped the grey-white steeps, as if wistfully trying to love them, as a child tries to caress a forbidding parent.
They climbed round the larger heaps and skirted a precipitous place.
'I canna bear this place,' said Hazel; 'it's so drodsome.'
'Awhile since, afore you were born, a cow fell down that there place, hundreds of feet.'
'Did they save her?'
'Laws, no! She was all of a jelly.'
Hazel broke out with sudden passionate crying. 'Oh, dunna, dunna!' she sobbed. So she did always at any mention of helpless suffering, flinging herself down in wild rebellion and abandonment so that epilepsy had been suspected. But it was not epilepsy. It was pity. She, in her inexpressive, childish way, shared with the love-martyr of Galilee the heartrending capacity for imaginative sympathy. In common with Him and others of her kind, she was not only acquainted with grief, but reviled and rejected. In her schooldays boys brought maimed frogs and threw them in her lap, to watch, from a safe distance, her almost crazy grief and rage.
'Whatever's come o'er ye?' said her father now. 'You're too nesh, that's what you be, nesh-spirited.'
He could not understand; for the art in him was not that warm, suffering thing, creation, but hard, brightly polished talent.
Hazel stood at the edge of the steep grey cliff, her hands folded, a curious fatalism in her eyes.
'There'll be summat bad'll come to me hereabouts,' she said—'summat bad and awful.'
The dark shadows lying so still on the dirty white mounds had a stealthy, crouching look, and the large soft leaves of a plane-tree flapped helplessly against the shale with the air of important people who whisper 'Alas!'
Abel was on ahead. Suddenly he turned round, excited as a boy.
'They've started!' he cried. 'Hark at the music! They allus begin with the organ.'
Hazel followed him, eager for joy, running obedient and hopeful at the heels of life as a young lamb runs with its mother. She forgot her dark intuitions; she only remembered that she wanted to enjoy herself, and that if she was a good girl, surely, surely God would let her.
The chapel and minister's house at God's Little Mountain were all in one—a long, low building of grey stone surrounded by the graveyard, where stones, flat, erect, and askew, took the place of a flower-garden. Away to the left, just over a rise, the hill was gashed by the grey steeps of the quarries. In front rose another curve covered with thick woods. To the right was the batch, down which a road—in winter a water-course—led into the valley. Behind the house God's Little Mountain sloped softly up and away apparently to its possessor.
Not the least of the mysteries of the place, and it was tense with mystery, was the Sunday congregation, which appeared to spring up miraculously from the rocks, woods and graves.
When the present minister, Edward Marston, came there with his mother he detested it; but after a time it insinuated itself into his heart, and gave a stronger character to his religion. He had always been naturally religious, taking on trust what he was taught; and he had an instinctive pleasure in clean and healthy things. But on winter nights at the mountain, when the tingling stars sprang in and out of their black ambush and frost cracked the tombstones; in summer, when lightning crackled in the woods and ripped along the hillside like a thousand devils, the need of a God grew ever more urgent. He spoke of this to his mother.
'No, dear, I can't say I have more need of our Lord here than in Crigton,' she said. 'In Crigton there was the bus to be afraid of, and bicycles. Here I just cover my ears for wind, put on an extra flannel petticoat for frost, and sit in the coal-house for thunder. Not that I'm forgetting God. God with us, of course, coal-house or elsewhere.'
'But don't you feel something ominous about the place, mother? I feel as if something awful would happen here, don't you?'
'No, dear. Nor will you when you've had some magnesia. Martha!' (Martha was the general who came in by the day from the first cottage in the batch)—'Martha, put on an extra chop for the master. You aren't in love, are you, my dear?'
'Gracious, no! Who should I be in love with, mother?'
'Quite right, dear. There is no one about here with more looks than a brussels sprout. Not that I say anything against sprouts. Martha, just go and see if there are any sprouts left. We'll have them for dinner.' Edward looked at the woods across the batch, and wondered why the young fresh green of the larches and the elm samaras was so sad, and why the cry of a sheep from an upper slope was so forlorn.
'I hope, Edward,' said Mrs. Marston, 'that it won't be serious music. I think serious music interferes with the digestion. Your poor father and I went to the "Creation" on our honeymoon, and thought little of it; then we went to the "Crucifixion," and though it was very pleasant, I couldn't digest the oysters afterwards. And then, again, these clever musicians allow themselves to become so passionate, one almost thinks they are inebriated. Not flutes and cornets, they have to think of their breath, but fiddlers can wreak their feelings on the instrument without suffering for it.'
Edward laughed.
'I hope the gentleman that's coming to-day is a nice quiet one,' she went on, as if Abel were a pony. 'And I hope the lady singer is not a contralto. Contralto, to my mind,' she went on placidly, stirring her porter in preparation for a draught, 'is only another name for roaring, which is unseemly.' She drank her porter gratefully, keeping the spoon in place with one finger.
If she could have seen father and daughter as they set forth, hilarious, to superimpose tumult on the peace of God's Little Mountain, she would have been a good deal less placid.
It was restful to sit and look at her kind old face, soft and round beneath her lace cap, steeped in a peace deeper than lethargy. She was one of nature's opiates, and she administered herself unconsciously to everyone who saw much of her. Edward's father, having had an overdose, had not survived. Mrs. Marston always spoke of him as 'my poor husband who fell asleep,' as if he had dozed in a sermon. Sleep was her fetish, panacea and art. Her strongest condemnation was to call a person 'a stirring body.' She sat to-day, while preparations raged in the kitchen, placidly knitting. She always knitted—socks for Edward and shawls for herself. She had made so many shawls, and she so felt the cold, that she wore them in layers—pink, grey, white, heather mixture, and a purple cross-over.
When Martha and the friend who had come to help quarrelled shrilly, she murmured, 'Poor things! putting themselves in such a pother!' When, after a crash, Martha was heard to say, 'There's the cream-jug now! Well, break one, break three!' she only shook her head, and murmured that servants were not what they used to be. When Martha's friend's little boy dropped the urn—presented to the late Mr. Marston by a grateful congregation, and as large as a watering-can—and Martha's friend shouted, 'I'll warm your buttons!' and proceeded to do so, Mrs. Marston remained self-poised as a sun.
At last supper was set out, the cloths going in terraces according to the various heights of the tables; the tea-sets—willow and Coalport, the feather pattern, and the seaweed—looking like a china-shop; the urn, now rakishly dinted, presiding. People paid for their supper on these occasions, and expected to have as much as they could eat. Mrs. Marston had rashly told Martha that she could have what was left as a perquisite, which resulted later in stormy happenings.
* * * * *
From the nook on the hillside where the chapel stood, as Abel ran hastily down the slope—the harp jogging on his shoulders and looking like some weird demon that clung round his neck and possessed him—came a roar of sound. The brass band from Black Mountain was in possession of the platform. The golden windows shone comfortably in the cold spring evening, and Hazel ran towards them as she would have run towards the wide-flung onyx doors of faery.
They arrived breathless and panting in the graveyard, where the tombstones seemed to elbow each other outside the shining windows, looking into this cave of saffron light and rosy joy as sardonically as if they knew that those within its shelter would soon be without, shelterless in the storm of death; that those who came in so gaily by twos and threes would go out one by one without a word. Hazel peered in.
'Fine raps they're having!' she whispered. 'All the band's there, purple with pleasure, and sweating with the music like chaps haying.'
Abel looked in.
'Eh, dear,' he said, 'they're settled there for the neet. We'll ne'er get a squeak in. There's nought for Black Mountain Band'll stop at when they're elbow to elbow; they eggs each other on cruel, so they do! Your ears may be dinned and deafened for life, and you lost to the bee-keeping (for hear you must, or you'm done, with bees), but the band dunna care! There! Now they've got a hencore—that's to say, do it agen; and every time they get one of them it goes to their yeads, and they play louder.'
'Ah, but you play better,' said Hazel comfortingly; for Abel's voice had trembled, and Hazel must comfort grief wherever she found it, for grief implied weakness.
'I know I do,' he assented; 'but what can I do agen ten strong men?'
At the mountain, as in the world of art and letters, it seemed that the artist must elbow and push, and that if he did not often stop his honeyed utterances to shout his wares he would not be heard at all.
'Dunna they look funny!' said Hazel with a giggle. 'All sleepy and quiet, like smoked bees. Is that the Minister? Him by the old sleepy lady—she's had more smoke than most!'
'Where?'
'There. He's got a black coat on and a kind face, sad-like.'
'Maybe if you took an axed him, he'd marry you—when the moon falls down the chapel chimney and rabbits chase the bobtailed sheep-dog!'
'I'm not for marrying anybody. Let's go in,' said Hazel.
She took off her hat and coat, to enter more splendidly. On her head, resting softly among the coils of ruddy hair, she put a wreath of violets, which grew everywhere at the Callow; a big bunch of them was at her throat like a cameo brooch.
When she entered the band faltered, and the cornet, a fiery young man whom none could tire, wavered into silence. Edward, turning to find out what had caused this most desirable event, saw her coming up the room with the radiant fatefulness of a fairy in a dream. His heart went out to her, not only for her morning air, her vivid eyes, her coronet of youth's rare violets, but for the wistfulness that was not only in her face, but in her poise and in every movement. He felt as he would to a small bright bird that had come, greatly daring, in at his window on a stormy night. She had entered the empty room of his heart, and from this night onwards his only thought was how to keep her there.
When she went up to sing, his eyes dwelt on her. She was the most vital thing he had ever seen. The tendrils of burnished hair about her forehead and ears curled and shone with life; her eyes danced with life; her body was taut as a slim arrow ready to fly from life's bow.
Abel sat down in the middle of the platform and began to play, quite regardless of Hazel, who had to start when she could.
'Harps in heaven played for you;Played for Christ with his eyes so blue;Played for Peter and for Paul,But never played for me at all!
Harps in heaven, made all of glass,Greener than the rainy grass.Ne'er a one but is bespoken,And mine is broken—mine is broken!
Harps in heaven play high, play low;In the cold, rainy wind I goTo find my harp, as green as spring—My splintered harp without a string!'
She sang with passion. The wail of the lost was in her voice. She had not the slightest idea what the words meant (probably they meant nothing), but the sad cadence suited her emotional tone, and the ideas of loss and exile expressed her vague mistrust of the world. Edward imagined her in her blue-green dress and violet crown playing on a large glass harp in a company of angels.
'Poor child!' he thought. 'Is it mystical longing or a sense of sin that cries out in her voice?'
It was neither of those things; it was nothing that Edward could have understood at that time, though later he did. It was the grief of rainy forests, and the moan of stormy water; the muffled complaint of driven leaves; the keening—wild and universal—of life for the perishing matter that it inhabits.
Hazel expressed things that she knew nothing of, as a blackbird does. For, though she was young and fresh, she had her origin in the old, dark heart of earth, full of innumerable agonies, and in that heart she dwelt, and ever would, singing from its gloom as a bird sings in a yew-tree. Her being was more full of echoes than the hearts of those that live further from the soil; and we are all as full of echoes as a rocky wood—echoes of the past, reflex echoes of the future, and echoes of the soil (these last reverberating through our filmiest dreams, like the sound of thunder in a blossoming orchard). The echoes are in us of great voices long gone hence, the unknown cries of huge beasts on the mountains; the sullen aims of creatures in the slime; the love-call of the bittern. We know, too, echoes of things outside our ken—the thought that shapes itself in the bee's brain and becomes a waxen box of sweets; the tyranny of youth stirring in the womb; the crazy terror of small slaughtered beasts; the upward push of folded grass, and how the leaf feels in all its veins the cold rain; the ceremonial that passes yearly in the emerald temples of bud and calyx—we have walked those temples; we are the sacrifice on those altars. And the future floats on the current of our blood like a secret argosy. We hear the ideals of our descendants, like songs in the night, long before our firstborn is begotten. We, in whom the pollen and the dust, sprouting grain and falling berry, the dark past and the dark future, cry and call—we ask, Who is this Singer that sends his voice through the dark forest, and inhabits us with ageless and immortal music, and sets the long echoes rolling for evermore?
The audience, however, did not notice that there were echoes in Hazel, and would have gaped if you had proclaimed God in her voice. They looked at her with critical eyes that were perfectly blind to her real self. Mrs. Marston thought what a pity it was that she looked so wild; Martha thought it a pity that she did not wear a chenille net over her hair to keep it neat; and Abel, peering up at her through the strings of the harp and looking—with his face framed in wild red hair—like a peculiarly intelligent animal in a cage, did not think of her at all.
But Edward made up for them, because he thought of her all the time. Before the end of the concert he had got as far as to be sure she was the only girl he would ever want to marry. His ministerial self put in a faint proviso, 'If she is a good girl'; but it was instantly shouted down by his other self, who asserted that as she was so beautiful she must be good.
During the last items on the programme—two vociferous glees rendered by a stage-full of people packed so tightly that it was marvellous how they expanded their diaphragms—Edward was in anguish of mind lest the cornet should monopolize Hazel at supper. The said cornet had become several shades more purple each time Hazel sang, so Edward was prepared for the worst. He was determined to make a struggle for it, and felt that though his position denied him the privilege of scuffling, he might at least use finesse—that has never been denied to any Church.
'My dear,' whispered Mrs. Marston, 'have you an unwelcome guest?'
This was her polite way of indicating a flea.
'No, mother.'
'Well, dear, there must be something preying on your mind; you have kept up such a feeling of uneasiness that I have hardly had any nap at all.'
'What do you think of her, mother?'
'Who, dear?'
'The beautiful girl.'
'A pretty tune, the first she sang,' said Mrs. Marston, not having heard the others. 'But such wild manners and such hair! Like pussy stroked the wrong way. And there is something a little peculiar about her, for when she sings about heaven it seems somehow improper, and that,' she added drowsily, 'heaven hardlyshoulddo.'
Edward understood what she meant. He had been conscious himself of something desperately exciting in the bearing of Hazel Woodus—something that penetrated the underworld which lay like a covered well within him, and, like a ray of light, set all kinds of unsuspected life moving and developing there.
As supper went on Edward kept more and more of Hazel's attention, and the quiet grey eyes met the restless amber ones more often.
'If I came some day—soon—to your home, would you sing to me?' he asked.
'I couldna. I'm promised for the bark-stripping.'
'What's that?'
Hazel looked at him pityingly.
'Dunna you know what that is?'
'I'm afraid not.'
'It's fetching the bark off'n the failed trees ready for lugging.'
'Where are the felled trees?'
'Hunter's Spinney.'
'That's close here.'
'Ah.'
Edward was deep in thought. The cornet whispered to Hazel:
'Making up next Sunday's sermon!'
But Edward turned round disconcertingly.
'As it's on your way, why not come to tea with mother? I might be out, but you wouldn't mind that?'
'Eh, but I should! I dunna want to talk to an old lady!'
'I'll stop at home,' then, he replied, very much amused, and with a look of quiet triumph at the cornet. 'Which day?'
'Wednesday week's the first.'
'Come Wednesday, then.'
'What'll the old sleepy lady say?'
'My mother,' he said with dignity, 'will approve of anything I think right.'
But his heart misgave. So far he had only 'thought right' what her conventions approved. He had seldom acted on his own initiative. She therefore had a phrase, 'Dear Edward is always right.' It was possible that when he left off his unquestioning concordance with her, she would leave off saying 'Dear Edward is always right.' So far he had not wanted anything particularly, and as it was as difficult to quarrel with Mrs. Marston as to strike a match on a damp box, there had never been any friction. She liked things, as she said, 'nice and pleasant.' To do Providence justice, everything always had been. Even when her husband died it had been, in a crape-clad way, nice and pleasant, for he died after the testimonial and the urn, and not before, as a less considerate man would have done. He died on a Sunday, which was 'so suitable,' and at dawn, which was 'so beautiful'; also (in the phrase used for criminals and the dying) 'he went quietly.' Not that Mrs. Marston did not feel it. She did, as deeply as her nature could. But she felt it, as a well-padded boy feels a whacking, through layers of convention. Now, at her age, to find out that life was not so pleasant as she thought would be little short of tragedy.
'Ah, I'll come, and I'm much obleeged,' said Hazel.
'I'll meet you at Hunter's Spinney and see you home.' Edward decided.
To this also Hazel assented so delightedly that the cornet pushed back his chair and went to another table with a sardonic laugh. But his remarks were drowned by a voice which proclaimed:
'All the years I've bin to suppers I've 'ad tartlets! To-night they wunna go round. I've paid the same as others. Tartlets I'll 'ave!'
'But the plate's empty,' said Martha, flushed and determined.
'I've had no finger in the emptying of it. More must be fetched.' Other voices joined in, and Mrs. Marston was heard to murmur, 'Unpleasant.'
Edward was oblivious to it all.
'Shall you,' he asked earnestly, 'like me to come to the Spinney?'
'Ah, I shall that!' said Hazel, who already felt an aura of protection about him. 'It'll be so safe—like when I was little, and was used to pick daisies round grandad.'
Edward knew more definitely than before the relation in which he wished to stand towards Hazel. It was not that of grandad.
Any reply he might have made was drowned by the uproar that broke forth at the cry, 'She's hidden 'em! Look in the kitchen!'
Martha's cousin—in his spare time policeman of a distant village—felt that if Martha was detected in fraud it would not look well, and therefore put his sinewy person in the kitchen doorway. Edward seized the moment, when there was a hush of surprise, to say grace, during which the invincible voice murmured:
'I've not received tartlets. I'm not thankful.'
'Mother,' Edward said, when the last unruly guest had disappeared in the wild April night, and Hazel's vivid presence and violet fragrance and young laughter had been taken by the darkness, 'I've asked Hazel Woodus to tea on Wednesday.'
'She is not of your class, Edward.'
'What does class matter?'
'Martha's brother calls you "sir," and Martha looks down on this young person.'
'Don't call her "young person," mother.'
'Whether it is mistaken kindness, dear, or a silly flirtation, it will only do you harm with the congregation.'
'Young men and women,' soliloquized Mrs. Marston as she hoisted herself upstairs with the candlestick very much aslant in a torpid hand, 'are not what they used to be.'
Hunter's Spinney, a conical hill nearly as high as God's Little Mountain, lay between that range and Undern. It was deeply wooded; only its top was bare and caught the light redly. It was a silent and deserted place, cowled in ancient legends. Here the Black Huntsman stalled his steed, and the death-pack coming to its precincts, ceased into the hill. Here, in November twilights, when the dumb birds cowered in the dark pines, you might hear from the summit a horn blown-very clearly, with tuneful devilry, and a scattered sound of deep barking like the noise of sawing timber, and then the blood-curdling tumult of the pack at feeding time.
To-day, as Hazel began her work, the radiant woods were full of pale colour, so delicate and lucent that Beauty seemed a fugitive presence from some other world trapped and panting to be free. The small patens of the beeches shone like green glass, and the pale spired chestnuts were candelabras on either side of the steep path. In the bright breathless glades of larches the willow-wrens sang softly, but with boundless vitality. On sunny slopes the hyacinths pushed out close-packed buds between their covering leaves; soon they would spread their grave blue like a prayer-carpet. Hazel, stooping in her old multi-coloured pinafore, her bare arms gleaming like the stripped trees, seemed to Edward as he came up the shady path to be the spirit of beauty. He quite realized that her occupation was not suited to a minister's future wife. 'But she may never be that,' he thought despairingly.
'Have you ever thought, Hazel,' he said later, sitting down on a log—'have you ever thought of the question of marriage?'
'I ne'er did till Foxy took the chicks.' Edward looked dazed. 'It's like this,' Hazel went on. 'Father (he's a rum 'un, is father!), he says he'll drown Foxy if she takes another.'
'Who is Foxy?'
'Oh! Fancy you not knowing Foxy! Her's my little cub. Pretty! you ne'er saw anything so pretty.'
Edward thought he had.
'But she canna get used to folks' ways.' (This was a new point of view to Edward.) 'She'm a fox, and she can't be no other. And I'd liefer she'dbea fox.'
'Foxes are very mischievous,' Edward said mildly.
'Mischievous!' Hazel flamed on him like a little thunderstorm. 'Mischievous! And who made 'em mischievous, I'd like to know? They didna make theirselves.'
'God made them,' Edward said simply.
'What for did He, if He didna like 'em when they were done?'
'We can't know all His reasons; He walks in darkness.'
'Well, that's no manner of use to me and Foxy,' said Hazel practically. 'So all as I can see to do is to get married and take Foxy where there's no chicks.'
'So you think of marrying?'
'Ah! And I told father I'd marry the first as come. I swore it by theMountain.'
'And who came?' Edward had a kind of faintness in his heart.
'Never a one.'
'Nobody at all?'
'Never a one.'
'And if anyone came and asked for you, you'd take him?'
'Well, I'm bound to, seemingly. But it dunna matter. None'll ever come.What for should they?'
She herself answered her own question fully as she stood aureoled in dusky light. His eyes were eloquent, but she was too busy to notice them.
'And should you like to be married?' he asked gently.
He expected a shy affirmative. He received a flat negative.
'My mam didna like it. And she said it'd be the end of going in the woods and all my gamesome days. And she said tears and torment, tears and torment was the married lot. And she said, "Keep yourself to yourself. You wunna made for marrying any more than me. Eat in company, but sleep alone"—that's what she said, Mr. Marston.'
Edward was so startled at this unhesitating frankness that he said nothing. But he silently buried several sweet hopes that had been pushing up like folded hyacinths for a week. The old madness was upon him, but it was a larger, more spiritual madness than Reddin's, as the sky is larger and more ethereal than the clouds that obscure it. He was always accustomed to think more of giving than receiving, so now he concentrated himself on what he could do for Hazel. He felt that her beauty would be an ample return for anything he could do as her husband to make her happy. If she would confide in him, demands on his time, run to him for refuge, he felt that he could ask no more of life. The strength of the ancient laws of earth was as yet hidden from him. He did not know the fierceness of the conflict in which he was engaging for Hazel's sake—the world-old conflict between sex and altruism.
If he had known, he would still not have hesitated.
Suddenly Hazel looked round with an affrighted air.
'It's late to be here,' she said.
'Why?'
'There's harm here if you bide late. The jeath pack's about here in the twilight, so they do say.'
They looked up into the dark steeps, and the future seemed to lower on them.
'Maybe summat bad'll come to us in this spinney,' she whispered.
'Nothing bad can come to you when you are in God's keeping.'
There canna be many folk in His keeping, then.'
'Do you say your prayers, Hazel?' he asked rather sadly.
'Ah! I say:
"Keep me one year, keep me seven,Till the gold turns silver on my head;Bring me up to the hill o' heaven,And leave me die quiet in my bed."
That's what I allus say.'
'Who taught you?'
'My mam.'
'Ah, well, it must be a good prayer if she taught it you, mustn't it?' he said.
Suddenly Hazel clutched his arm affrightedly.
'Hark! Galloping up yonder! Run! run! It's the Black Huntsman!'
It was Reddin, skirting the wood on his way home from a search for Hazel. If he had come into the spinney he would have seen them, but he kept straight on.
'It's bringing harm!' cried Hazel, pulling at Edward's arm; 'see the shivers on me! It's somebody galloping o'er my grave!'
Edward resolved to combat these superstitions and replace them by a sane religion. He had not yet fathomed the ancient, cruel and mighty power of these exhalations of the soil. Nor did he see that Hazel was enchained by earth, prisoner to it only a little less than the beech and the hyacinth—bond-serf of the sod.
When Edward and Hazel burst into the parlour, like sunshine into an old garden, they were met by a powerful smell of burnt merino. Mrs. Marston had been for some hours as near Paradise as we poor mortals can hope to be. Her elastic-sided cloth boots rested on the fender, and her skirt, carefully turned up, revealed a grey stuff petticoat with a hint of white flannel beneath. The pink shawl was top, which meant optimism. With Mrs. Marston, optimism was the direct result of warmth. Her spectacles had crept up and round her head, and had a rakishly benign appearance. On her comfortable lap lay the missionaryWordand a large roll of brown knitting which was intended to imitate fur. Edward noted hopefully that the pink shawl was top.
'Here's Hazel come to see you, mother!'
Mrs. Marston straightened her spectacles, surveyed Hazel, and asked if she would like to do her hair. This ceremony over, they sat down to tea.
'And how many brothers and sisters have you, my dear?' asked the old lady.
'Never a one. Nobody but our Foxy.'
'Edward, too, has none. Who is Foxy?'
'My little cub.'
'You speak as if the animals were a relation, dear.'
'So all animals be my brothers and sisters.'
'I know, dear. Quite right. All animals in conversation should be so.But any single animal in reality is only an animal, and can't be.Animals have no souls.'
'Yes, they have, then! If they hanna;youhanna!'
Edward hastened to make peace.
'We don't know, do we, mother?' he said. 'And now suppose we have tea?'
Mrs. Marston looked at Hazel suspiciously over the rim of her glasses.
'My dear, don't have ideas,' she said.
'There, Hazel!' Edward smiled. 'What about your ideas in the spinney?'
'There's queer things doing in Hunter's Spinney, and what for shouldna you believe it?' said Hazel. 'Sometimes more than other times, and midsummer most of all.'
'What sort of queer things?' asked Edward, in order to be able to watch her as she answered.
Hazel shut her eyes and clasped her hands, speaking in a soft monotone as if repeating a lesson.
'In Hunter's Spinney on midsummer night there's things moving as move no other time; things free as was fast; things crying out as have been a long while hurted.' She suddenly opened her eyes and went on dramatically 'First comes the Black Huntsman, crouching low on his horse and the horse going belly to earth. And John Meares o' the public, he seed the red froth from his nostrils on the brakes one morning when he was ketching pheasants. And the jeath's with him, great hound-dogs, real as real, only no eyes, but sockets with a light behind 'em. Ne'er a one knows what they's after. If I seed 'em I'd die,' she finished hastily, taking a large bite of cake.
'Myths are interesting,' said Edward, 'especially nature myths.'
'What's a myth, Mr. Marston?'
'An untruth, my dear,' said Mrs. Marston.
'This inna one, then! I tell you John seed the blood!'
'Tell us more.' Edward would have drunk in nonsense rhymes from her lips.
'And there's never a one to gainsay 'em in all the dark 'oods,' Hazel went on, 'except on Midsummer Eve.'
'Midsummer!'—Mrs. Marston's tone was gently wistful—'is the only time I'm really warm. That is, if the weather's as it should be. But the weather's not what it was!'
'Tell us more, Hazel!' pleaded Edward.
'What for do you want to hear, my soul?'
Edward flushed at the caressing phrase, and Mrs. Marston looked as indignant as was possible to her physiognomy, until she realized that it was a mere form of speech.
'Because I love—old tales.'
'Well, if so be you go there, then'—Hazel leant forward, earnest and mysterious—'after the pack's gone you'll hear soft feet running, and you'll see faces look out and hands waving. And gangs of folks come galloping under the leaves, not seen clear, hastening above a bit. And others come quick after, all with trouble on 'em. And the place is full of whispering and rustling and voices calling a long way off. And my mam said the trees get free that night—or else folk of the trees—creeping and struggling out of the boles like a chicken from an egg—getting free like lads out of school; and they go after the jeath-pack like birds after a cuckoo. And last comes the lady of Undern Coppy, lagging and lonesome, riding in a troop of shadows, and sobbing, "Lost—lost! Oh, my green garden!" And they say the brake flowers on the eve of that night, and no bird sings and no star falls.'
'What a pack of nonsense!' murmured Mrs. Marston drowsily.
'That it inna!' cried Hazel; 'it's the bloody truth!'
Mrs. Marston's drowsiness forsook her. Hazel became conscious for tension.
'Mother!'—Edward's voice shook with suppressed laughter, although he was indignant with Hazel's father for such a mistaken upbringing—'mother, would you give Hazel the receipt for this splendid cake?'
'And welcome, my dear.' The old lady was safely launched on her favourite topic. 'And if you'd like a seed-cake as well, you shall have it. Have you put down any butter yet?'
Hazel never put down or preserved or made anything. Her most ambitious cooking was a rasher and a saucepan of potatoes.
'I dunna know what you mean,' she said awkwardly.
Edward was disappointed. He had thought her such a paragon. 'Well, well, cooking was, after all, a secondary thing. Let it go.'
'You mean to say you don't know what putting down butter is, my poor child? But perhaps you go in for higher branches? Lemon-curd, now, and bottled fruit. I'm sure you can do those?'
Hazel felt blank. She thought it best to have things clear.
'I canna do naught,' she said defiantly.
'Now, mother'—Edward came to the rescue again—'see how right you arein saying that a girl's education is not what it used to be! See howHazel's has been neglected! Think what a lot you could teach her!Suppose you were to begin quite soon?'
'A batter,' began Mrs. Marston, with the eagerness of a philosopher expounding her theory, 'is a well-beaten mixture of eggs and flour. Repeat after me, my dear.'
'Eh, what's the use?Hedunna know what he eats no more than a pig! I shanna cook for 'im.'
'Who's that, dear?' Mrs. Marston inquired.
'My dad.'
Mrs. Marston held up her hands with the mock-fur knitting in them, and looked at Edward with round eyes.
'She says her father's a—a pig, my dear!'
'She doesn't mean it,' said he loyally, 'do you, Hazel?'
'Ah, and more!'
The host and hostess sighed.
Then Edward said: 'Yes, but you won't always be keeping house for your father, you know,' and found himself so confused that he had to go and fetch a pipe.
Afterwards he walked part way home with Hazel, and coming back under the driving sky—that seemed to move all in a piece like a sliding window, and showed the moon as a slim lady waiting for unlooked-for happenings—he could have wept at the crude sweetness of Hazel. She was of so ruthless an honesty towards herself as well as others; she had such strange lights and shadows in her eyes, her voice, her soul; she was so full of faults, and so brimming with fascination.
'Oh, God, if I may have her to keep and defend, to glow in my house like a rose, I'll ask no more,' he murmured.
The pine-tops bowed in as stately a manner as they had when Hazel cried, 'I'll never be a woman!' They listened like grown-ups to the prattle of a child. And the stars, like gods in silver armour sitting afar in halls of black marble, seemed to hear and disdain the little gnat-like voice, as they heard Vessons' defiant 'Never will I!' and Mrs. Marston's woolly prayers, and Reddin's hoof-beats. All man's desires—predatory, fugitive, or merely negative—wander away into those dark halls, and are heard no more. Among the pillars of the night is there One who listens and remembers, and judges the foolishness of man, not by effects, but by motives? And does that One, in the majesty of everlasting vitality and resistless peace, ever see how we run after the painted butterflies of our desires and fall down the dark precipice? And if He sees and hears the wavering, calamitous life of all creatures, and especially of the most beautiful and the most helpless, does He ever sigh and weep, as we do when we see a dead child or a moth's wing impaled on a thorn?
Our heavy burden is that we cannot know. For all our tears and prayers and weary dreaming, we cannot know.
Edward lay awake all night, and heard the first blackbird begin, tentatively, his clear song—a song to bring tears by its golden security of joy in a world where nothing is secure.
The old madness surged in upon Edward more strongly as the light grew, and he tried to read the Gospel of St. John (his favourite), but the words left no trace on his mind. Hazel was there, and like a scarlet-berried rowan on the sky she held the gaze by the perfection of the picture she made. The bent of Edward's mind and upbringing was set against the rush of his wishes and of circumstance. She had said, 'The first that came,' and he was sure that in her state of dark superstition she would hold by her vow. Suppose some other—some farm-hand, who would never see the real Hazel—should have been thinking over the matter, and should go to-day and should be the first? It was just how things happened. And then his flower would be gone, and the other man would never know it was a flower. He worked himself into such a fever that he could not rest, but got up and went out into the lively air, and saw the sun come lingeringly through aery meadows of pale green and primrose. He saw the ice slip from the bright pointed lilac buds, and sheep browsing the frosty grass, and going to and fro in the unreserved way that animals have in the early hours before the restraint of human society is imposed on them. He saw, yet noticed nothing, until a long scarlet bar of cloud reminded him of Hazel by its vividness, and he found a violet by the graveyard gate.
'Little Hazel!' he whispered. He pondered on the future, and tried to imagine such an early walk as this with Hazel by his side, and could not for the glory of it. Then he reasoned with himself. This wild haste was not right, perhaps. He ought to wait. But that vow! That foolish, childish vow!
'I could look after her. She could blossom here like a violet in a quiet garden.'
Giving was never too early.
'And I am asking nothing—not for years. She shall live her own life, and be mother's daughter and my little sister for as long as she likes. My little sister!' he repeated aloud, as if some voice had contradicted him. And, indeed, the whole wide morning seemed to contradict his scheme—the mating birds, the sheep suckling their lambs, the insistent neighing and bellowing that rose from the fields and farms, the very tombstones, with their legends of multitudinous families, and the voice that cried to man and woman, not in words, but in the zest of the earth and air, '"Beget, bring forth, and then depart, for I have done with you!"'
A sharp cold shower stung his cheeks, and he saw a slim rosebud beating itself helplessly against the wet earth, broken and muddy. He fetched a stake and tied it up. I think,' he said to himself, 'that I was put into the world to tie up broken roses, and one that is not broken yet, thank God! It is miraculous that she has never come to harm, for that great overgrown boy, her father, takes no care of her. Yes, I was meant for that. I can't preach.' He smiled ruefully as he remembered how steadfastly the congregation slept through his best sermons. 'I can't say the right things at the right time. I'm not clever. But I can take care of Hazel. And that is my life-work,' he added naively, 'perhaps I'd better begin at once, and go to see her to-day.'