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

Reddin. He was her sky, her cloak. The tense silence of the place was heavy on her.

Away at God's Little Mountain Edward preached his sermon on the power of prayer--how he could plant a hedge of prayer round the beloved to keep them from all harm.

The clock at Alderslea down the valley struck eight in muffled tones. They were burnt into Hazel's brain. The plovers wheeled and cried sadly like the spirits of creatures too greatly outnumbered.

Edward was a dream; God's Little Mountain was an old tale--something forgotten, mist-begirt.

Twilight thickened, and birds began to shrill in the dew. Voices came up from the farm. They were back from church. Hazel felt crushed, bruised, robbed.

'Now, up you get, Hazel!' said Reddin, who wanted his supper badly, and no longer wanted Hazel. 'Up you get and tidy yourself, and then home.' He felt rather sorry for her.

She made no comment, no demur. Instinctively she felt that she belonged to Reddin now, though spiritually she was still Edward's. She looked at Reddin, passive, doubtful; the past evening had become unreal to her.

So they regarded one another mistrustfully, like two creatures taken in a snare. They both felt as if they had been trapped by something vast and intangible. Reddin was dazed. For the first time in his life he had felt passion instead of mere lust. The same ideas that had striven within him on his way here uplifted their voices again.

Staring dully at Hazel, he felt a smarting at the back of his eyes and a choking in his throat.

'What ails you, catching your breath?' she asked.

He could not speak.

'You've got tears in your eyne.'

Reddin put his hand up.

'Tell us what ails you?'

He shook his head.

'What for not, my--what for not?'

She never called Reddin 'my soul.'

But he could not or would not speak.

Hazel's eyes were red also, with tears of pain. Now she wept again in sympathy with a grief she could not understand.

So they sat beneath the black, slow-waving branches under the threat of the oncoming night, weeping like children. They cowered, it seemed, beneath a hand raised to strike. All that they did was wrong; all that they did was inevitable. Two larches bent by the gales kept up a groaning as bole wore on bole, wounding each other every time they swayed. In the indifferent hauteur of the dark steeps, the secret arcades, the avenues leading nowhere, crouched these two incarnations of the troubled earth, sentient for a moment, capable of sadness, cruelty, terror and revolt, and then lapsed again into the earth.

Forebodings of that lapse--forebodings that follow the hour of climax as rooks follow the plough--haunted them now, though they found no words for what they felt, but only knew a sense of the pressure of night. It appeared to stoop nearer, blind, impassive, but intensely aware of them under their dark canopy of leaves. Some Being, it seemed, was listening there, and not only listening, but imposing in an effortless but inevitable way its veiled purpose. Hazel and Reddin--he no less than she--appeared to be deprived of identity, like hypnotic mediums. His hardness and strength took on a pitiful dolt-like air before this prescient power.

When he at last stopped choking and licking the tears away surreptitiously as they rolled down his cheeks, he was very angry--with himself for crying, with Hazel for witnessing his disgrace. That she should cry was nothing, he thought. Women always cried at these times. Nor did he distinguish between her tears of pain and of sympathy.

'You needn't stare,' he snapped. 'If I've got a cold, there's no reason to gape.'

'What for be you--'

'Shut up! I'm not.'

They climbed the crackling wood, ghastly with a sound as of feet passing tiptoe into silence--the multitudinous soft noises of a wood, cones falling, twigs snapping, the wind in old driven leaves, the subdued rustle of the trees. They passed the place where she had talked with Edward at the bark-stripping. The prostrate larches shone as whitely as her shoulder did through her torn gown. She remembered Edward's look, and wept again.

'What is it now?' he asked.

'I was i' this place afore the bluebells died, along with--Ed'ard.'

'Why d'you say the man's name like that? It's no better than other names.'

She had no reply for that, and they came in silence to the tormented may-tree where the horse was tied, his black mane and smooth back strown with faded, faintly coloured blossom.

Reddin lifted her on and swung into the saddle.

She leant against him, silent and passive, as with one arm round her he guided the horse down the difficult path.

A star shone through the trees, but it was not a friendly star. It was more like a stare than a tear.

When the rest of them sprang out like an army at the reveille, they were aloof and cold, and they rode above in an ironic disdain too terrible to be resented.

Reddin put the horse to a gallop. He wanted fierce motion to still the compunction that Hazel's quiet crying brought.

A sense of immanent grief was on her, grey loneliness and fear of the future. He tried to comfort her.

'Dunna say ought!' she sobbed. 'You canna run the words o'er your tongue comfortable like Ed'ard can!'

'What do you want me to say?'

'I dunno. I want our Foxy.'

'I'll fetch her in the morning.'

'No, you munna. She'm safe at Ed'ard's. Let her bide. I want to be at Ed'ard's, too.'

'Who comes wailing in the black o' night?' said the voice of Vessons as they neared the hall door. 'I thought it was the lady as no gold comforts--her as hollas "Lost! Alost!" in the Undern Coppy.'


Chapter 26

Undern was in its June mood. Pinks frothed over the edges of the borders, and white bush-roses flung their arms high over the porch. All was heavily fragrant, close, muffling the senses. The trees brooded; the house brooded; the hill hung above, deeply recollected; the bats went with a lagging flight. It was like one of those spell-bound places built for an hour or an aeon or a moment on the borders of elfdom, full of charms and old wizardry, ready to fall inwards at a word, but invincible to all but that word. The hot scent of the trees and the garden mingled with the smell of manure, pigsties, cooking pig-wash and Vessons' 'Tom Moody' tobacco. It made Hazel feel faint--a strange sensation to her.

Vessons stood surveying them as he had done on the bleak night of Hazel's first coming.

'Where,' he said at last, the countless fine lines that covered his upper lip from nostril to mouth deepening--'where's the reverent?' Receiving no reply but a scowl from his master, he led the horse away.

Reddin, with a kind of gauche gentleness, said: 'I'll show you the house.'

They went through the echoing rooms, and looked out of the low, spider-hung casements, where young ivy-leaves, soft and vivid, had edged their way through the cracks. They stood under ceilings dark with the smoke of fires and lamps that had been lit unnumbered years ago for some old pathetic revelry. In cupboards left ajar by a hurried hand that had long been still, hung gowns with flower-stains or wine-stains on their faded folds. The doors creaked and sighed after them, the floors groaned, and all about the house, though the summer air was so light and low, there was a moaning of wind. It was as if all the storms that had blown round it, the terror that had been felt in it, the tears that had fallen in it, had crept like forgotten spirits into its innermost recesses and now made complaint there for ever. A lonely listener on a stormy night might hear strange voices uplifted--the sobbing of children; songs of feasters; cries of labouring women; young men's voices shouting in triumph; the long intonations of prayer; the death-rattle.

And as Reddin and Hazel--surely the most strangely met of all couples that had owned and been owned by this house--went through the darkening rooms, they were not, it seemed, alone. A sense of witnesses perturbed Hazel, a discomfort as from surveillance. A soft rumour, as of a mute but moving multitude crept along the passages in their wake.

'Be there ghosses?' she whispered. 'I'd liefer sleep under the blue roof-tree. I feel like corn under a millstone in this dark place.'

'It's said to be haunted, but I don't believe it.' He glanced over his shoulder.

'Who by?'

'People that failed. Weaklings. Men that lost their money or their women, and wives and daughters of the family that died young.'

'What for did they fail?'

'Silly ideas. Not knowing what they wanted.'

'Dear now! Foxy and me, we dunna allus know what we want.'

'You want me.'

'Maybe.'

'If you don't, you must learn to. And if you don't know what you want, you'll come to smash.'

'But when I do know, folk take it off me.'

A long, mournful cry came down the passages.

Hazel screamed.

'Be that the lady as no gold comforts?' she whispered.

'No, you silly girl. It's a barn owl. But she's said to cry in the coppy on Midsummer night.'

'Things crying out as have been a long while hurted,' murmured Hazel. 'To-night's Midsummer. Was she little, like me?'

'I don't know.'

'Did summat strong catch a holt of her?'

'A man did.' He laughed.

'Did she go young?'

'Yes, she died at nineteen.'

'And so'll it be with me!' she cried suddenly. 'So'll it be with me! Dark and strong in the full of life.'

She flung herself on a faded blue settee and wept.

The impression of companionship--of whisperers breaking out, hands stretched forth, the steady magnetism of countless unseen eyes--was so strong that Hazel could not bear it, and even Reddin was glad to follow her back to the inhabited part of the house.

'This is the bedroom,' Reddin said, opening the door of a big room papered in faded grey, and full of the smell of bygone days. The great four-poster, draped with a chintz of roses on a black ground, awed her. Reddin opened a chest and took out the green dress. He watched her with an air of proud proprietorship as she put it on. She went down the shallow stairs like a leaf loosened from the tree.

Vessons, a beer-bottle in either hand, was so aghast at the pale apparition that he nearly dropped them. 'I thought it was a ghost,' he said--'a comfortless ghost.'

'So I be comfortless,' Hazel said to Reddin when Vessons had retired. Her voice had a sound of tears in it, like a dark tide broken on rocks. 'And when I was comfortless at the Mountain Ed'ard was used to read "Comfort ye, my people," as nice as nice.'

'Are you fonder of Marston than of me?'

'I dunno.'

She sat down sadly in the home that was not home. She remembered the half-finished collar she was knitting for Foxy. Also, a custom had grown up that she sang hymns in the evenings to Edward's accompaniment. She missed these things. She missed the irritations of that peaceful life--Mrs. Marston's way of clearing her throat softly and pertinaciously; Martha's habit of tidying all her little treasures into the kitchen grate;