Gone to Earth, Mary Webb [fiction novels to read txt] 📗

beech assenting to the wind's will.

Abel watched her with pride. She was turning out a credit to him, after all. It was astonishing.

'It's worth playing for our 'Azel's feet. The others just stomps,' he thought. 'Who's the fellow she's along with? I'd best keep an eye. A bargain's a bargain.'

'You'm kept your word,' said Hazel suddenly to Reddin.

'H'm?'

'Tired me out.'

'Come outside, then, and I'll get you a cup of tea.'

He fetched it and sat down by her on an orange-box.

'Now look here,' he said, 'fair and square, will you marry me?'

He was surprised at himself.

Andrew Vessons, who had tiptoed after them from the tent, spread out his hands and gazed at heaven with a look of supreme despair, all the more intense because he could not speak. He returned desolately to the tent, where he stood with a cynical smile, leaning a little forward with his arms behind him, watching the dancing, an apotheosis of sex, to him not only silly and pitiful, but disgusting. Now and then he shook his head, went to the door to see if his master was coming, and shook it again. A friend came up.

'Why did the gaffer muck up the race?' he asked.

'Why,' asked Vessons, with a far-off gaze, 'did 'Im as made the 'orld put women in?'

Outside things were going more to his liking than he knew.

'What's the good of keeping on, Mr. Reddin? I told 'ee I was promised to Ed'ard.'

'But you like me a bit? Better than the parson?'

'I dunno.'

'Come off with me now. I swear I'll play fair.'

'_I_ swore!' she cried. 'I swore by the Mountains, and that can ne'er be broke.'

'What did you swear?'

'To marry the first as come. That's Ed'ard. If I broke that oath, when I was jead, my cold soul 'ud wander and find ne'er a bit of rest, crying about the Mountains and about, nights, and Ed'ard thinking it was the wind.

'If you chuck him, he'll soon get over it; if you chuck me, I shan't. He's never gone after the drink and women.'

It was a curious plea for a lover.

'Miss Clomber said you wunna a good man.'

'Well, I'm blowed! But look here. If he loses you, he'll be off his feed for a bit; but if I lose you, there'll be the devil to pay. Has he kissed you?'

'Time and agen.'

'I won't have it!'

''Azel!' called her father.

'You won't go?'

'I mun. It's father.'

'And I shan't see you again-till you're married? Oh, marry _me_, Hazel! Marry _me_!'

His voice shook. At the mysterious grief in his face--a grief that was half rage, and the more pitiful for that--she began to sob. Abel came up.

'A mourning-party, seemingly,' he said, holding his lantern so as to light each face in turn.

'I want to marry your daughter.'

Abel roared.

'Another? First 'er bags a parson and next a squire!'

'Farmer.'

'It'll be the king on his throne next. Laws, girl! you're like beer and treacle.'

'You've not answered me,' said Reddin.

'She's set.'

'Eh?'

'Set. Bespoke. Let.'

'She's a right to change her mind.'

'Nay! A bargain's a bargain. Why, they've bought the clothes, mister, and the furniture and the cake!'

'If she comes with me, you'll go home with a cheque for fifty pounds, and that's all I've got,' said Reddin naively.

'I tell you, sir, she's let,' Abel repeated. 'A bargain's a bargain!'

It occurred to him that the Callow garden might, with fifty pounds, be filled with beehives from end to end.

'Mister,' he said, almost in tears, 'you didn't ought to go for to 'tice me! Eh! dear 'eart, the wood I could buy, and the white paint and a separator and queens from foreign parts!' He made a gesture of despair and his face worked.

'You could have a new harp if you wanted one.' Reddin suggested.

Abel gulped.

'A bargain's a bargain!' he repeated. 'And I promised the parson.' He turned away.

''Azel,' he said over his shoulder, 'you munna go along of this gent. Many's the time,' he added turning round and surveying her moodily, 'as you've gone agen me and done what I gainsayed.'

With a long imploring look he hitched the harp on his back and trudged away.

Hazel followed. But Reddin stepped in front of her.

'Look here, Hazel! You say you don't like hurting things. You're hurting me!'

Looking at his haggard face, she knew it was true.

She wiped her tears away with her sleeve.

'It inna my fault. I'm allus hurting things. I canna set foot in the garden nor cook a cabbage but I kill a lot of little pretty flies and things. And when we take honey there's allus bees hurted. I'm bound to go agen you or Ed'ard, and I canna go agen Ed'ard; he sets store by me, does Ed'ard. You should 'a seen the primmyroses he put in my room last night; I slep' at the parsonage along of us being late.'

Reddin frowned as if in physical pain.

'And he bought me stockings, all thin, and a sky-blue petticoat.'

Reddin looked round. He would have picked her up then and there and taken her to Undern, but the road was full of people.

'I couldna go agen Ed'ard! He'm that kind. Foxy likes him, too; she'd ne'er growl at 'im.'

'Perhaps,' Reddin said hoarsely, 'Foxy'd like me if I gave her bones.'

'She wouldna! You'm got blood on you.'

She drew away coldly at this remembrance, which had been obliterated by Reddin's grief.

'You'm got the blood of a many little foxes on you,' she said, and her voice cut him like sharp sleet--'little foxes as met have died quick and easy wi' a gunshot. And you've watched 'em minced alive.'

'I'll give it up if you'll chuck the parson.'

'I won'er you dunna see 'em, nights, watching you out of the black dark with their gold eyes, like kingcups, and the look in 'em of things dying hard. I won'er you dunna hear 'em screaming.'

His cause was lost, and he knew it, but he pleaded on.

'No. If I hadna swore by the Mountain I wouldna come,' she said. 'You've got blood on you.'

At that moment a neighbour passed and offered Hazel a lift. Now that she was marrying a minister, she had become a personality. Hazel climbed in and drove off, and Reddin's tragic moment died, as great fires die, into grey ash.

He went home heavily. His way lay past the parsonage where Edward and his mother slept peacefully. The white calm of unselfish love wrapped Edward, for he felt that he could make Hazel happy. As he fell asleep that night he thought:

'She was made for a minister's wife.'

Reddin, leaning heavily on the low wall, staring at the drunken tombstones and the quiet moon-silvered house, thought:

'She was made for me.'

Both men saw her as what they wanted her to be, not as she was.

Many thoughts darkened Reddin's face as he stood there hour after hour in the cold May night. The rime whitened his broad shoulders as he leaned on the wall, and in the moonlight the sprinkling of white hairs at his temples shone out from the black as if to mock this young passion that had possessed him.

God's Little Mountain lay shrugged in slumber; the woods crouched like beaten creatures under the night; the small soft leaves hung limply in the frost.

Still Reddin stood there, chilled through and through, brooding upon the house.

Not until dawn, like a knife, gashed the east with blood did he stir.

He sighed. 'Too late!' he said.

Then he laughed. 'Beaten by the parson!'

A demoniac rage surged in him. He picked up a piece of rock, and lifting it in both arms, flung it at the house. It smashed the kitchen window. But before Edward came to his window Reddin was out of sight in the batch.

'My dear,' said Mrs. Marston tremulously, 'I always feared disaster from this strange match.'

'How _can_ Hazel have anything to do with it, mother?'

'I think, dear, it is a sign from God. On your wedding-morning! Broken glass! Yes, it is a sign from God. I wish it need not have been quite so violent. But, of course, He knows best.'


Chapter 15

At the parsonage everything was ready early. Edward, restless after his rough awakening, had risen at three and finished his own preparations, being ready to help Mrs. Marston when she came down, still a good deal upset. Whenever she passed Hazel's room, or saw Edward take flowers there, she said, 'Oh, my dear!' and shook her head sadly. For the kind of life that seemed to be mapped out by Edward would, she feared, not include grandchildren. And grandchildren had acquired, through long cogitations, the glamour of the customary. She was also ruffled by Martha, who, unlike her own pastry, was 'short.' What with the two women, angry and grieved, and the fact that his wedding-day held only half the splendour that it should have held, Edward's spirits might have been expected to be low; but they were not. He ran up and down, joked with Martha, soothed his mother, and sang until Martha, who thought that a minister's deportment at a wedding should be only a little less grandiloquent than at a funeral, said:

'He'm less like a minister than a nest of birds.' She and Mrs. Marston were setting out the feather-cups in the best parlour.

At that moment Edward stood at the door of Hazel's room, and realized that he would enter it no more. He must not see the sweet disarray of her unpacking, nor rest night by night in the charmed circle of her presence. Almost he felt, in this agony of loss--loss of things never possessed, the most bitter loss of all--that, if he could have had these things, even the ruddy-haired, golden-eyed children of his dreams might go. He knelt by Hazel's bed and laid his dark head on the pillow, torn by physical and spiritual passion. His hair was clammy, and a new line marked his forehead from that day. Anyone seeing him would have thought that he was praying; he was so still. It was Edward's fate to be thought 'so quiet,' because the fires within him made no sound, burning at a still-white heat.

He was not praying. Prayer had receded to a far distance, like a signpost long passed. Perhaps he would come round to it again; but now he was in the trackless desert. It is only those that have suffered moderately that speak of prayer as the sufferer's refuge. By that you know them. Those that have been tortured remember that the worst part of the torture was the breaking of the prayer in their hands, piercing, and not upholding.

Edward knew, kneeling there with his eyes shut, how Hazel's hair would flow sweetly over the pillow; how her warm arm would feel about his neck; how wildly sweet it would be, in some dark hour, to allay dream-fears and hush her to sleep. Never before had the gracious intimacy of marriage so shone in his eyes. And he was going to have just the amount of intimacy