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

I'll go under the trees and holla.'

Reddin was startled when he saw Hazel, who had out-distanced Edward, making straight for his hiding-place. She came running between the boles with an easy grace, an independence that drove him frantic. A pretty woman should not have that easy grace; she should have exchanged it for a matronly bearing by this time, and independence should have yielded to subservience--to the male, to him. With her vivid hair and eyes and her swift slenderness, Hazel had a fawn-like air as she traversed the wavering shadows. She passed his tree without seeing him, and stood listening. Then she began to plead with the truant. 'What for did you run away, Foxy, my dear? Where be you? Come back along with me, dear 'eart, for it draws to night!'

Reddin stepped from his tree and spoke to her.

With a stifled scream she turned to run away, but he intercepted her.

'No. I've waited long enough for this. So you're married to the parson, after all?'

'Ah.'

'You'll be sorry.'

'What for do you come tormenting of me, Mr. Reddin?'

'You were meant for me. You're mine.'

'Folk allus says I'm theirs. I'd liefer be mine.'

'As you wouldn't marry me, Hazel, the least you can do is to come and talk to me sometimes.'

'Oh, I canna!'

'You must. Any spare time come to this tree. I shall generally be here.'

'But why ever? And you a squire with a big place and fine ladies after you!'

'Because I choose.'

'Leave me be, Mr. Reddin. I be comforble, and Foxy be, and they're all settling so nice. The bird's sung.'

'The parson, too, no doubt. If you don't come often enough, I shall walk past the house and look in. If you go on not coming, I shall tell the parson you stayed the night with me, and he'll turn you out.'

'He wouldna! You wouldna!'

'Yes, I would. He would, too. A parson doesn't want a wife that isn't respectable. So as you've got to'--he dropped his harshness and became persuasive--'you may as well come with a good grace.'

'But it wunna my fault as I stayed the night over. It was aunt Prowde's. What for should folk chide me and not auntie?'

'Lord, I don't know! Because you're pretty.'

'Be I?'

'Hasn't that fellow told you so?'

'No. He dunna say much.'

'You could make such a good chap of me if you liked, Hazel.'

'How ever?'

'I'd give up the drink.' 'And fox-hunting?'

'Well, I might give up even that--for you. Be my friend, Hazel.'

He spoke with an indefinable charm inherited from some courtly ancestor. Hazel was fascinated.

'But you've got blood on you!' she protested.

'So have you!' he retorted unexpectedly. 'You say you kill flies, so you're as bad as I am, Hazel. So be my friend.'

'I mun go!'

'Say you'll come tomorrow.'

'Not but for a minute, then.'

Edward's voice came from the house.

'I've found her!'

Hazel ran home. But as she left the wood she turned and looked down the shadowy steeps of green at Reddin as he strode homewards. She watched him until he passed out of sight; then, sighing, she went home.


Chapter 19

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 met Reddin 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 to Reddin.

'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 that _is_ a 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.


Chapter 20

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