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

looked idly from the window.

Suddenly she cried out. Edward was alert in a moment.

'What is it, dear?'

Hazel had sunk back on the ottoman, pale and speechless; but she realized that she must pull herself together.

'I stuck a pin in me,' she said.

Tins in a wedding-dress? Oh, fie!' said Mrs. Marston. Tricked at your wedding, pricked for aye.'

'Oh, dear, dearie me!' cried Hazel, bursting into tears, and flinging herself at Edward's feet.

Wondering, he comforted her.

Mrs. Marston called for the lamp; the blinds were drawn, and all was saffron peace.

Outside, in the same attitude as before, bowed, and motionless, stood Reddin. He saw Hazel, watched her withdraw, and knew that she had seen him. When the window suddenly shone like daffodils, he recoiled as if at a lash, and, turning, went heavily down the batch. He turned into the woods, and made his way back till he was opposite the house. Thence he watched the guests depart, and later saw Martha go to her cottage. The lights wavered and wandered. He saw one go up the stairs.

Inside the house Mrs. Marston confronted with a bridal which she did not quite know how to regard, very tactfully said good night, and left them together in the parlour. They sat there for a time and Edward tried not to realize how much he was missing. He got up at last and lit Hazel's candle. At her door he said good night hastily. Hazel took the arrangements for granted, partly because she had slept in this same room two nights ago, partly because Edward had never shown her a hint of passion.

The higher the nature, the more its greatness is taken for granted. Edward turned and went to his room.

Reddin, under his black roof of pines, counted the lights, and seeing that there were three, turned homewards with a sigh of relief. But as he went through the fields he remembered how Hazel had looked last night; how she had danced like a leaf; how slender and young she was. He was a man everlastingly maddened by slightness and weakness. As a boy, when his father and mother still kept up their position a little, he had broken a priceless Venetian glass simply because he could not resist the temptation to close his hand on it. His father had flogged him, being of the stupid kind who believe that corporal punishment can influence the soul. And Reddin had done the same thing next day with a bit of egg-shell china.

So now, as he thought of Hazel's lissom waist, her large eyes, rather scared, her slender wrists he cursed until the peewits arose mewing all about him. In the thick darkness of the lonely fields he might have been some hero of the dead, mouthing a satanic recitative amid a chorus of lost souls.

The long search for Hazel, begun in a whim, had ended in passion. If he had never looked for her, never felt the nettled sense of being foiled, or if he had found her at once, he would never have desired her so fiercely. Now, for the first time in his life impassioned, he felt something mysterious and unwelcome to him begin to mingle with his desire. Above all, life without her meant dullness, lack of vitality, the swift onset of middle-age. He saw this with shrinking. He walked wearily, looking older than he was in the pathos of loss.

Life with her meant an indefinitely prolonged youth, an ecstasy he had not dreamt of, the well-being of his whole nature. He walked along moodily, thinking how he would have started afresh, smartened up Undern, worked hard, given his children--his and Hazel's--a good education, become more sober.

But he had been a fortnight too late. A miserable fortnight! He, who had raved over the countryside, had missed her. Marston, who had simply remained on his mountain, had won her.

'It's damned unfair!' he said, and pathos faded from him in his rage. All the vague thoughts, dark and turgid, of the last two nights took shape slowly.

He neither cursed nor brooded any more. He thought keenly as he walked. His face took a more powerful cast--it had never been a weak face at the worst--and he looked a man that it would not be easy to combat. Bitter hatred of Edward possessed him, silent fury against fate, relentless determination to get Hazel whether she would or not. He had a purpose in life now. Vessons was surprised at his quick, authoritative manner.

'Make me some sandwiches early to-morrow,' he said, 'and you'll have to go to the auction. I shan't go myself.'

''Ow can I go now? Who's to do the cheeses?'

'Give 'em to the pigs.'

'Who's to meet the groom from Farnley? Never will I go!'

'If you're so damned impudent, you'll have to leave.'

'Who's to meet the groom?' Vessons spoke with surly, astonished meekness.

'Groom? Groom be hanged! Wire to him.'

'It'll take me the best part of two hour to go and telegrapht. And it cosses money. And dinner at the auction cosses money.'

'Oh!' cried Reddin with intense irritation, 'take this, you fool!'

He flung his purse at Vessons.

'Well, well,' thought Vessons, 'I mun yumour 'im. He's fretched along of her marrying the minister. "Long live the minister!" says Andrew.'


Chapter 18

Next morning Vessons went off in high feather; Hazel was so safely disposed of. Reddin left at the same time, and all the long May day Undern was deserted, and lay still and silent as if pondering on its loneliness. Reddin did not return until after night-fall.

He spent the day in a curious manner for a man of his position, under a yew-tree, riven of trunk, gigantic, black, commanding Edward's house. He leant against the trunk that had seen so many generations, shadowed so many fox-earths, groaned in so many tempests.

Above his tent sailed those hill-wanderers, the white clouds of May. They were as fiercely pure, as apparently imperishable, as a great ideal. With lingering majesty they marched across the sky, first over the parsonage, then over Reddin, laying upon each in turn a hyacinth shadow.

Reddin watched the house indifferently, while Martha went to and fro cleaning the chapel after the wedding.

Then Mrs. Marston came to the front door and shut it.

After that, for a long time, nothing moved but the slow shadows of the gravestones, shortening with the climbing sun. The laburnum waved softly, and flung its lacy shadow on the grave where the grass was long and daisied.

A wood-pigeon began in its deep and golden voice a low soliloquy recollected as a saint's, rich as a lover's. Reddin stirred disconsolately, trampling the thin leaves and delicate flowers of the sorrel.

At last the door opened, and Edward came out carrying a spade.

Hazel followed. They went round to the side of the house away from the graveyard, and Edward began to dig, Hazel sitting on the grass and evidently making suggestions. With the quickness of jealousy, Reddin knew that Edward was making a garden for Hazel. It enraged him.

'I could have made her a garden, and a deal better than that!' he thought. 'She could have had half an acre of the garden at Undern; I could have it made in no time.'

He uttered an exclamation of contempt. 'The way he fools with that spade! He's never dug in his life.'

Before long Hazel brought out the bird-cage and hung it in the sun. And surprisingly, almost alarmingly, the ancient bird began to sing. It was like hearing an old man sing a love-song. The bird sat there, rough and purblind, and chanted youth with the magic of a master.

Hazel and Edward stood still to hear it, holding each other's hands.

'He's ne'er said a word afore,' breathed Hazel. 'Eh! but he likes the Mountain!'

In the little warm garden with Hazel, among the thick daisies, with the mirth of the once desolate ringing in his ears, Edward knew perfect happiness.

He stood looking at Hazel, his eyes dark with love. She seemed to blossom in the quiet day. He stooped and kissed her hand.

To Reddin in his deep shadow every action was clear, for they stood in the sunlight. He ground the sorrel into the earth. After a time Martha rang the dinner-bell, not because she could not both see and hear her master, but because it was the usual thing. To Reddin the bell's rather cracked note was sardonic, for it was summoning another man to eat and drink with Hazel. He ate his sandwiches, not being so much in love that he lost his appetite. Then he sat down and read the racing news. There was no danger of anyone seeing him, for the place was entirely solitary with the double loneliness of hill and woodland. There were no children in the batch except Martha's friend's little boy, and he was timid and never went bird's-nesting. The only sound except the intermittent song of birds, was the far-away noise of a woodman's axe, like the deep scattered barking of hungry hounds. Nothing else stirred under the complex arches of the trees except the sunlight, moving like a ghost.

These thick woods, remote on their ridges, were to the watchful eye rich with a half-revealed secret, to the attentive ear full of urgent voices. The solving of all life's riddles might come to one here at any moment. In this hour or in the next, from a grey ash-bole or a blood-red pine-trunk, might come the naked spirit of life with a face fierce or lovely. Coiled in the twist of long honeysuckle ropes that fell from the dead yews; curled in a last year's leaf; embattled in a mailed fir-cone, or resting starrily in the green moss, it seemed that God slumbered. At any moment He might wake, to bless or curse.

Reddin, not having a watchful eye or an attentive ear for such things, was not conscious of anything but a sense of loneliness. He read the paper indefatigably. In an hour or so Edward and Hazel came out again, she in her new white hat. They went up God's Little Mountain where it sloped away in pale green illuminated vistas till it reached the dark blue sky. They disappeared on the skyline, and Reddin impatiently composed himself for more waiting. Was he never to get a chance of seeing Hazel alone?

'That fellow dogs her steps,' he said.

The transfigured slopes of the mountain were, it seemed to Edward, a suitable place for a thing he wished to tell Hazel.

'Hazel,' he said, 'if you ever feel that you would rather have a husband than a brother, you have only to say so.'

Hazel flushed. Although it was such a muted passion that sounded in his voice, it stirred her. Since she had known Reddin, her ignorance had come to recognize the sound of it, and she had also begun to flush easily.

If Edward had understood women better, he would have seen that this speech of his was a mistake; for even if a woman knows whether she wishes for a husband, she will never tell him so.

They turned home in a constrained silence. Foxy, frightened by a covey of partridges, created a diversion by pulling her cord from Hazel's inattentive hand and setting off for the parsonage.

'Oh! she'll be bound to go to the woods!' cried Hazel, beginning to run. 'Do 'ee see if she's in tub, Ed'ard, and