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

him but as passionless.

'To-night,' he said, and tenderness crept back into his voice, 'is my bridal. There is no saving for me now in denial, only in fulfilment. I can forgive much, Hazel, for I love much. But I can't renounce any more.'

Hazel had heard nothing of what he said since the words, 'when you give me a son.'

They rang in her brain. She felt dazed. At last she looked up affrightedly.

'But,' she said, 'when I have the baby, it unna be yours, but his'n.'

'What?'

'It--it'll be his'n.'

'What?'

He questioned foolishly, like a child. He could not understand.

'It's gone four month since midsummer,' she said, 'and Sally said I was wi' child of--of--'

'You need not go on, Hazel.'

Edward's face looked pinched. The passion had gone, and a deathly look replaced it. He was robbed, utterly and cruelly. He could no longer believe in a God, or how could such things be? Manhood was denied him. The last torture was not denied him--namely, that he saw the full satire of his position, saw that it was his own love that had destroyed them both. Out of his complete ruin he arose joyless, hopeless, but great in a tenderness so vast and selfless that it almost took the place of what he had lost.

Hazel was again his inspiration, not as an ideal, but as a waif. In his passion of pity for her he forgot everything. He had something to live for again.

'Poor child!' he said. 'Come home. I will take care of you.'

'But--the old lady?'

'You are first.'

She caught his hands; she flung herself upon his shoulder in a rush of tears. If this was his tragic moment, it was also hers.

'Oh, Ed'ard, Ed'ard!' she cried, 'it's you as I'd lief have for my lover! It's you as I'm for, body and soul, if I'm for a mortal man! It's your baby as I want, Ed'ard, and I wouldna be feared o' the pain as Sally told of if it was yours. What for didna you tell me in the spring o' the year, Ed'ard? It be winter now, and late and cold.'

'There, there! you don't know what you're saying. Come home!'

Edward did not listen to her, she knew. And, indeed, his brain was weary, and could take in no more. He only knew he must care for Hazel as Christ cared for the lambs of His fold. And darkly on his dark mind loomed his new and bitter creed, 'There is no Christ.'


Chapter 35

Martha met them on the doorstep, crying, hiccoughing, and enraged.

'Why, Martha!' Edward looked at her in astonishment. It is usually the supers, and not the principals, that raise lamentation in the midst of tragedy--'why, Martha, have you lost someone dear to you?'

He knew all about that loss.

'I've lost nought, sir; thank God my good name's my own, and not gone like some folk's; but I'm bound to give notice, sir, not having fault to find, being as good a master as ever stepped. But seeing the missus is going--'

'The missus?'

'Ah. The mother as God give you, sir, the very next time the trailer goes by, and the letter wrote and all. And when she goes, I go. For I've kep' myself respectable, and I'll serve no light woman, nor yet live in a house give over to sin.'

Edward saw Martha in a new light, as he now saw all things.

'What a filthy mind you have, Martha!' he said in a strange, weary voice. 'The minds of all respectable people are obscene. You are a bad woman!'

But Martha, setting up a shriek, had fled from the house. She told her brother that the master was mad, bewitched. She never entered the house again.

Edward found his mother in the kitchen.

'Mother, you are not really going?'

'Yes, Edward, unless'--a flicker of hope lit her eyes--'unless you have sent her away.'

'Let me explain, mother. It is not as it seems in the world's eyes.'

'She is an adulteress. And you--oh, Edward, I thought you were a good man, like your father! Not even the common decency to wait till the other man's child is born. Why, the merest ploughman would do that!'

If any face could have expressed despair, torture and horror, Edward's face did now. He looked at her for a long while, until she said:

'Don't fix your eyes so, Edward! What are you looking at?'

'The world. So that is what you think of me?'

'What else can I think? Why do you say "The world" so strangely?'

'The world!' he said again. 'A place of black mud and spawning creatures. No soul, no God, no grace. Nothing but lust and foul breath and evil thoughts.'

'I will not hear such talk. I will keep my room till I go.' Mrs. Marston rose and went upstairs. She would not have his arm. And though for the next two days he waited on her with his old tenderness, she barely spoke, and there was between them an estrangement wider than death. She prayed for him night and day, but not as one that had much hope.

Meanwhile, Hazel managed the house. She put all her worship of Edward into it, all her passion of tenderness. And she, who had hitherto spoilt all the food she touched, now cooked almost with genius. She found an apron of Martha's and washed it; she read Mrs. Marston's receipts till her head ached; she walked over God's Little Mountain each day to buy dainties. When she asked Edward for money, he gave her the keys of his desk. Four times a day appetizing meals went up to Mrs. Marston, and were brought down again barely touched. Hazel ate them, for the urgent necessity of coming maternity was on her, and she would not waste Edward's money. Four times a day Edward's favourite dishes were set in the parlour by a bright hearth. Edward, as soon as Hazel had returned to the kitchen, threw them into the fire.

It was Hazel who packed Mrs. Marston's boxes while the old lady slept, and made up the fire in her room in the middle of the night.

Then, closing her own door, she would fling herself on her bed in passionate weeping as she thought what might have been if, when Edward had said, 'To-night is my bridal,' she had had a different reply to make.

She knew that nothing except what she had said would have made any impression on Edward; she knew he would not have listened to her. She was glad to know this. The momentary fear of him was gone. All was right that he said and did. The whole love of her being was his now. He had filled the place of nature and joy and childish pleasures. She was not meant for human love. But through her grief she loved better than those that were meant for it.

All the sweet instincts of love and wifehood; the beauty of passion; the pride of surrender; the forgetfulness of self that creates self; the crying of the spirit from its delicate marble minaret to the flesh in its grassy covert, and the wistful, ascending answer of flesh to spirit--all these were hers. And as she lay and wept, and remembered how many a time Edward had stood on her threshold and hastily, though gently, shut her door upon her, she realized what Edward meant to her, and what he was. Then she would rise and stand at her window, fingered and shaken by the autumn winds, and look up at the hard-eyed stars.

'If there's anybody there,' she would say, 'please let the time go quickly till the baby comes, and let Ed'ard have his bridal like he said, and see his little uns running up and down the batch.'

And, looking round the room at all the signs of his love, she would suddenly find unbearable the innocent stare of the buttercups and daisies on the walls, and would bury her face, flushed red with fluttering possibilities of unearthly rapture. Then she would sleep and dream that once more Edward stood upon the threshold and kissed her and turned to his cold room; but she--she had made a noble fire in her little grate; and the room was full of primroses, red and white and lilac; and the wall-clock chimed instead of striking--an intoxicating fairy chime; and there were clear sheets as of old. She forgot her shyness; she forgot to be afraid of his criticism; she caught his hands. He turned. And at the marvel of his face she woke, trembling and happy.

Mrs. Marston went without any farewell to Hazel. Edward carried her box down the quarry and helped her into the trailer. He stood and watched it bump away round the corner, Mrs. Marston sitting, as she had done on that bright May morning, majestic in her grape-trimmed hat and the mantle with the bugles. Her face and her attitude expressed the deep though unformulated conviction that God was 'not what He was.'

Then he turned and went home, numb, without vitality or hope.

A new Hazel met him on the threshold, no longer timorous, deprecating, awkward, but gravely and sweetly maternal. She led him in. Tea was laid with the meticulous reverence of a sacrament.

'Now draw your stockinged foot along the floor!' Hazel commanded.

At this remembrance of his mother and at Hazel's careful love, he broke down and wept, his face in her lap.

'Now see!' she whispered. 'She'll come back, Ed'ard, when the anger's overpast.'

'The anger of good people is never overpast, Hazel.'

'See, I'll write her a letter, Ed'ard, and I'll say I'm a wicked girl, and she's to teach me better ways. She'll come like Foxy for bones, Ed'ard.'

Comfort stole into Edward's heart.

'And see, my dear, I'll send his baby to him, and maybe, after--' She stumbled into silence.

'What, Hazel?'

'Maybe, Ed'ard, after--a long and long while after--' She began to cry, covering her face. 'Oh, what for canna you see, my soul,' she whispered, 'as I love you true?'

Edward looked into her eyes, and he did see. Strangely as an old forgotten tale, there came to him the frail hope of the possibility of joy. And with it some faith, storm-tossed and faint, but still living, in Hazel's ultimate beauty and truth. He did not know this could be. He only knew it was so. He did not know how it was that she, whom all reviled, was pure and shining to him again, while the world grovelled in slime. But so it was.

'Harkee, Ed'ard!' she said; 'I'm agoing to mother you till she comes back. And some day, when you've bin so kind as to forgive me, maybe I unna be mother to you, but--anything you want me to be. And, maybe, there'll be a--a--bridal for you yet, my soul, and your little uns running down the batch.'

'Yes, maybe. But don't let's talk of such things yet, not for many years. They are so vile.'

She was cut to the heart, but she only said softly:

'Not for many years, my soul! I'm mothering of you now!'

'That's what I want,' he said, and fell asleep while she stroked' his tired head.

Peace settled again on the chapel and parsonage, and a muted happiness. Summer weather had returned for a fleeting interval. The wild bees