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

her crimson shawl with the ball fringe, 'here's a to-do! A minister of grace with a pocket-handkerchief round his head coming to his house in the dead of night with a wild old man. What's happened? Oh, my dear, is it your arteries? We wondered where you were, Hazel Marston!'

'I'm very shivery, mother,' Edward said.

'Something hot and sweet!' She bustled off. They were alone for the first time.

'Hazel, why didn't you tell me about this man? It was not kind or right of you.'

'There was nought to tell.' She fidgeted.

'But he must have seen you several times.'

'I was near telling you, but I thought you'd be angered.'

'Angry! With you! Oh, to think of you in such danger!'

'What danger?'

'Of things that, thank God, you never dream of. He forged that letter, I suppose? Or did he frighten you into writing it?'

'Ah.'

'But why did you ever go?'

'He pulled me up on the horse and took me.'

'The man's a savage.'

Hazel checked a hasty denial that was on her lips.

'What a pity you happened to meet him!' Edward said.

'Ah!'

'But why didn't you want to come at once when I came to fetch you? Were you so afraid of him as that?'

'Ah!'

'Well, it's over now. He won't show his face here again; we've done with him.'

Hazel sighed. But whether it was her spiritual self sighing with relief at being with Edward, or her physical self longing for Reddin, she could not have said.

'Only you could come through such an experience unchanged, my sweet,' Edward said.

'I mun go to Foxy!' she cried desperately. 'Foxy wants me.'

'Foxy wants a good beating,' said Mrs. Marston benignly, looking mercifully over her spectacles. Her wrath was generally like the one drop of acid in a dell of honey, smothered in loving-kindness and _embonpoint_.

When Hazel had gone, she said:

'You will send her away from here, of course?'

Edward went out into the graveyard without a word. He sat on one of the coffin-shaped stones.

'God send me some quiet!' he said.

Mrs. Marston came and draped her shawl round him. He got up, despairing of peace, and said he would go to bed.

'There's a good boy! So will I. You'll be as bright as ever in the morning.' Then she whispered: 'You won't keep her here?'

'Keep her! Who? Hazel? Of course Hazel will stay here.'

'It's hardly right.'

'Pleasant, you mean, mother. You never liked her. You want to be rid of her. But how you can so misjudge a beautiful soul I cannot think. I tell you she's as pure as a daisy. Why, she could not even bear, in her maidenly reserve, the idea of marriage. It is sheer blasphemy to say such things.'

'Blasphemy, my dear, is not a thing you can do against people. It is disagreeing with the Lord that is blasphemy.'

'I must ask you, anyway, never to mention Hazel's name to me until you can think of her differently.'

When, after saying good night to Hazel and Foxy, Edward had gone to bed, Mrs. Marston shook her head.

'Edward,' she said, 'is not what he was.' She waited till Hazel came in.

'You're no wife for my son,' she said, 'you've sinned with another man.'

'I hanna done nought nor said nought; it's all other folk's doing and saying, so I dunna see as I've sinned. And I never could abear 'ee,' Hazel cried; 'I'd as lief you was dead as quick!'

She rushed up to her room and flung herself on her bed sobbing. She felt dazed, like a child taken into a big toy-shop and told to choose quickly. Life had been too hasty with her. There were things, she knew, that she would have liked; but she had so far not had time to find out what they were.

She wished she could tell Edward all about it. But how could she explain that strange inner power that had driven her to Hunter's Spinney? How could she make him understand that she did not want to go, and was yet obliged to go? She could not tell him that. Although she was furious with Reddin on his behalf, although she hated Reddin for the coarseness and cruelty in him, yet parting with him had hurt her.

How could this be? She did not know. She only knew that as she lay in her little bed she wanted Reddin, his bodily presence, his kisses or his blows. He had betrayed her utterly, bringing to his aid forces he could not gauge or understand. His crime was that he had made of a woman who could not be his spiritual bride (since her spirit was unawakened, and his was to seek) his body's bride. All the divine paradoxes of sex--the mastery of the lover and his deep humility, his idealization of his bride and her absolute surrender--these he had dragged in the mud. So instead of the mysterious, transcendant illumination that passion brings to a woman, she had only confusion, darkness, and a sense of something dragging at the roots of her being in the darkness.

Her eyes needed his eyes to stare them down. The bruises on her arms ached for his hard hands. Her very tears desired his roughness to set them flowing.

'Oh, Jack Reddin! Jack Reddin! You've put a spell on me!' she moaned. 'I want to be along of Ed'ard, and you've bound me to be along of you. I dunna like you, but I canna think of ought else!'

She fought a hard battle that night. The compulsion to get up and go straight to Undern was so strong that it could only be compared to the pull of matter on matter. She tried to call up Edward's voice--quiet, tender, almost religious in its tone to her. But she could only hear Reddin's voice, forceful and dictatorial, saying, 'I'm master here!' And every nerve assented, in defiance of her wistful spirit, that he _was_ master.

That, when morning came, she was still at the Mountain showed an extraordinary power of resistance, and was simply owing to the fact that Reddin had, in what he called 'giving the parson a good hiding,' opened her eyes very completely to his innate callousness, and to his temperamental and traditional hostility to her creed of love and pity. Soon, in the mysterious woods, the owls turned home--mysterious as the woods--strong creatures driven on to the perpetual destruction of the defenceless, destroyed in their turn and blown down the wind--a few torn feathers.


Chapter 31

Edward did not notice the strained relationship between Mrs. Marston and Hazel. He supposed that his mother's suspicions had faded before Hazel's frank presence.

Outwardly there was little change in the bearings of the two women; it was only in feminine pinpricks and things implied that Mrs. Marston showed her anger and Hazel her dislike, and it was when he was out that Martha spoke so repeatedly and emphatically of being respectable. His coming into the house brought an armoured peace, but no sooner was he outside the door than the guns were unmasked again.

Hazel wished more and more that she had stayed at Undern.

She found a man's roughness preferable to women's velvet slaps, his most masterful demands less wearing than their silent criticism. At Undern she could not call her physical self her own. Here, her heart and mind were attacked. She could not explain to Mrs. Marston that something had made her go. Mrs. Marston would simply have said 'Fiddlesticks!' She could not explain that Reddin's touch drugged her. If Mrs. Marston had ever been made to feel that madness of passivity-- which seemed impossible, so that Edward's existence was a paradox--she had long since forgotten it. Besides, Hazel had no words in which to express these things; she was not even clear about them herself.

She never tried to explain anything to Edward. She dreaded his anger, and she felt that only by complete silence could she keep the look of loving reverence in his eyes. She understood how very differently Reddin looked at her. It did not matter with him, but Edward--it was everything to her in Edward.

Only once there had been a keen look of criticism in Edward's eyes, and her heart had fluttered. Edward said:

'Why, when you were dragged to Undern against your will, did you wear the man's gown? It wasn't dignified. And why did you cry out on him not to shame you? He could not shame you. You had done nothing wrong.'

'He said such awful things, Ed'ard, and the dress--the dress was so pretty.'

'You poor child! you dear little one! So it was a pretty colour, was it?'

'Ah!'

'You shall have one like it.'

He went off whistling.

* * * * *

It was when she had been back nearly six weeks, and the August days were scorching the Mountain, that the strain became unbearable. She was not feeling well.

Reddin had made no sign. This had at first calmed her, then piqued her; now it hurt her. Mysteriously she felt that she must be with him.

'He'm that proud, he'd ne'er ask me to go back. And if I went, there'd be no peace. Oh, Jack Reddin, Jack Reddin! You've put a spell on me! There inna much peace, days, nor much rest, nights, in your dark house. And yet--'

Yet, whenever she went for a walk, she felt her feet taking her towards Undern.

Then, quite suddenly, one morning Reddin rode past the house. Mrs. Marston saw him.

'Edward must know of this,' she said, very much flustered. 'You ought to go away somewhere, Hazel.'

'Away? Why ever?'

'Out of temptation. Why not to your aunt's?'

'Aunt Prowde wouldna have me. And Ed'ard wouldna like me to go.'

'Edward, I am sure, thinks as I do.'

'Gospel?'

'Do not be irreverent.'

'I dunna think you know what Ed'ard thinks as well as me.'

'Don't say "dunna," Hazel. Of course, I know what Edward thinks a great deal better than you. I've known him all his life.'

Afterwards, when Mrs. Marston was not in the room, Martha said in her contemptuous tones:

'I s'pose you know, Mrs. Ed'ard, how he's going on?'

'Who?'

'Why, that Mr. Reddin.'

'What's he done?'

'Oh, I know! But I wouldn't soil me mouth, only I'm thinking you'd ought to know.'

She looked triumphant.

'He's after that there Sally something as lives nearby. They do say as all her brats be his.'

'Mr. Reddin's? Is he--like--married to her, Martha?'

'About as much as he was to you, I reckon!'

'And does she--live there now?'

'I dunno.'

'Is she pretty?'

'It inna allus the prettiest as get lovers.'

'But is she prettier than me?'

'I've heard she's bigger and finer.'

'But she hanna got abron hair?'

'How should I know?'

This was desolate news to Hazel; for Reddin, now that she was going to bear his child, had become necessary to her. She was unconscious of the reason of this need--not a spiritual one, but purely physiological. She did not hate him