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

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.


Chapter 22

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 there _be_ somebody 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.


Chapter 23

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