At eleven Martha appeared with cake and milk, and Edward returned from old Solomon's bedside. Then they went on picking, while Edward read them snatches of 'Natural Law.' Hazel was soothed by the reading, to the sense of which she paid no heed. It mingled with the drone of the hot bees falling in and out of the big red peonies, the far-off sound of grass-cutting, the grave, measured soliloquy of a blackbird hidden in the flame-flowered chestnut. Hazel felt that she would like to go on picking currants for ever, growing more and more like Mrs. Marston every day, and at least becoming (possibly through sheer benignity) a grandmother. There seemed no place in her life for Reddin, no time for Hunter's Spinney. She thought, 'I wunna go. I'll stay along of Ed'ard, and no harm'll come to me.' But a peremptory voice said that she must go, and once more her soul became the passive battleground of strange emotions of which she had never even dreamed. While they fought there like creatures in the dark, Hazel, sitting in the aromatic shadow of the currants, fell fast asleep; and as Mrs. Marston could never bring herself to wake anyone, she slept until Martha rang the dinner-bell. So the peaceful, golden day wore on to green evening. It was a day that Hazel always remembered.

When the shadows grew long and dew fell, and the daisies on the graves filled the house with their faint, innocent fragrance, and closed their pink-lined petals for the night, Hazel felt very miserable. This very night she was going to work the last charm—the charm of the bracken flower—and whoso she dreamed of with that flower beneath her pillow must be her lover. She felt traitorous to Edward in doing this. She and Edward were handfasted. How, then, could she have any lover but Edward? Why should she work the charm? She puzzled over this during prayers, but no answer came to her questioning. Life is a taciturn mother, and teaches not so much by instruction as by blows. Edward was reading the twenty-third Psalm, which always affected his mother to tears, and in reading which his voice was very tender, '... And lead thee forth beside the waters of comfort.'

The room was full of a deep exaltation, a passion of trustfulness.

'I went along by the water,' Hazel thought, 'and watched the piefinches and the canbottlins flying about. And I thought it was the waters of comfort. Only Mr. Reddin came and frit the birds and made the water muddy.' She did not feel as sure as the others did of the waters of comfort.

'So beautiful, dear,' murmured Mrs. Marston, 'so like your poor dear father.'

Edward's good night to Hazel was more curt than usual. She was looking so mysteriously lovely. Her stress of mind had given a touch of spirituality to her face, and there is nothing that stirs passion as spirituality does. She had on a print frock of a neat design reminiscent of old-fashioned china, and she had pinned a posy of daisies on her shoulder.

For one second, as she held up her cheek to be kissed, standing on the threshold of her moonlit room, Edward hesitated. Then he abruptly turned and shut his door.

His hour had struck. His hour had passed.

Hazel stood in the window reading the charm.

'On Midsummer Eve, when it wants a little of midnight, spread your smock where the bracken grows. For this is the night of the flowering of the brake, that beareth a blue flower on the stroke of midnight. But it is withered afore morning. Come you again about the time of the first bird-call. If aught is in the smock, take it; it is the dust of the flower. Sleep above it, and he you dream of is your lover. This is a sure charm, and cannot be broke.'

* * * * *

She took a clean chemise from the drawer, and when the landing clock struck the half-hour she slipped out on to the hillside and laid it under a clump of bracken. As she stooped to set it smooth and straight, the moon swam out of cloud and flung her shadow, black and gigantic, up the hillside. Frightened, she ran home, raked the fire together, and made herself a cup of tea to keep her awake.

Sipping it in the dim parlour, where familiar things looked eerie, she thought of Reddin and his strange doings since her wedding.

'Eh, but it ud anger Ed'ard sore if he came to know,' she thought. 'What for does Mr. Reddin come, when he can see I dunna want him?'

A slow flush crept over neck and temples as she half guessed the answer.

She waited in the dove-grey hour that precedes dawn—an hour pregnant with the future. It is full of hope; for what great deed may not be done, what ethereal idea caged in music or poetry or colour, what rare emotion struck out of pain in the coming day? It is full of grief; for how many beautiful things will be trampled, great dreams torn, sensitive spirits crucified in the time between dusk and dusk? For the death-pack hunts at all hours, light and dark; it is no pale phantom of dreams. It is made not of spirit hounds with fiery eyes—a ghastly 'Melody,' a grisly 'Music'—, but of our fellows, all that have strength without pity. Sometimes our kith and kin, our nearest intimates, are in the first flight; give a view-hallo as we slip hopefully under a covert; are in at the death. It is not the killing that gives horror to the death-pack so much as the lack of the impulse not to kill. One flicker of merciful intention amid relentless action would redeem it. For the world is founded and built up on death, and the reality of death is neither to be questioned nor feared. Death is a dark dream, but it is not a nightmare. It is mankind's lack of pity, mankind's fatal propensity for torture, that is the nightmare. When a man or woman, confronted by helpless terror, is without the impulse to save, the world becomes hell. It was this, dimly but passionately felt, that made Hazel shrink from Reddin. For unless Reddin was without this impulse to save, and had the mind of a fiend without pity, how could he in the mere pursuit of pleasure inflict wholly unnecessary torture, as in fox-hunting?

She watched Venus shrink from a silver pool to a silver point. She was full of trouble and unrest. Would she dream of Reddin? Would she go to sleep at all? Mrs. Marston's armchair loomed in the gathering light, and she felt guilty again.

The east quickened, as if someone had turned up a light there. She opened the window, and in rushed the inexpressible sweetness of dawn. The bush of syringa by the kitchen window swept in its whole fragrance, heady and sensuous. She took long breaths of it, and thought of Reddin's green dress, of the queer look in his eyes when he stared long at her. A curious passivity quite foreign to her came over her now at the thought of Reddin. What would he look like, what would he say, would he hold her roughly, if she went to Hunter's Spinney? An unwilling elation possessed her as she thought of it. It did not occur to her to wonder why Edward did not kiss her as Reddin did. She took him as much for granted as a child takes its parents.

Suddenly the first bird called silverly, startling the dusk. It was a woodlark, and its song seemed even more vacillating than usual in the vast hush. At the first note all Hazel's thoughts of Reddin fled. It seemed that clarity, freshness, and music were bound up in her mind with Edward. She thought only of him as she ran up the hill over the minute starry carpet of mountain bedstraw.

'Maybe there'll be no flower, and then the charm's broke,' she thought hopefully. 'If the charm's broke, I canna dream, and I shanna go.'

But when she came to the white garment lying wet and pale in the half-light she drew a sharp breath. There in the centre lay one minute blue petal. Its very smallness proved to her its magic. It was a faery flower. She took it up reverently and went home solemn as a child in church. When, with blue petal under her pillow, she lay down, she fell asleep in a moment. She dreamt of Reddin, for he had more control over her thoughts than Edward, who appealed to her emotions, while Reddin stirred her instincts. Waking at Martha's knock, she said to herself, with mingled heart-sickness and elation:

'The signs say go. I mun go. Foxy wants me to go.' She would not have believed that her third sign was no faery flower, but only a petal of blue milk-wort—little sister of the bracken—loosened by her own nervous hands the night before.



Chapter 25

On Sunday evening, as usual, the little bell began to sound plaintively in the soft air which was like a pale wild-rose. Mrs. Marston had betaken herself out of her own door into that of the chapel with a good many sighs at the disturbance of her nap, and with injunctions to Martha to put a bit of fire in the parlour. Edward had gone with his sermon to the back of the house where the tombstones were fewer and it was easier to walk while he read. Hazel ran up to her room and put on her white dress, which was considered by Mrs. Marston 'too flighty' for chapel. She leant out of her window and looked away up the purple hill. Then she gathered a bunch of the tea-roses that encircled it. They were deep cream flushed with rose. She pinned them into her breast, and they matched her flushed face. She was becoming almost dainty in her ways; this enormously increased her attraction for both men. She put on her broad white wedding-hat, and slipped downstairs and out by the kitchen door while Martha was in the parlour. She shut the door behind her like a vanished life. She felt, she did not know why, a sense of excitement, of some great happening, something impending, in her appointment with Reddin.

She met no one as she ran down the batch, for the chapel-goers were all inside. The hedges were full of white 'archangel' and purple vetch. When she came to the beginning of Hunter's Spinney she felt frightened; the woods were so far-reaching, so deep with shadow; the trees made so sad a rumour, and swayed with such forlorn abandon. In the dusky places the hyacinths, broken but not yet faded, made a purple carpet, solemn as a pall. Woodruff shone whitely by the path and besieged her with scent. Early wild-roses stood here and there, weighed down with their own beauty, set with rare carmine and tints of shells and snow, too frail to face the thunderstorm that even now advanced with unhurrying pomp far away beyond the horizon. She hurried along, leaving the beaten track, creeping under the broad skirts of the beeches and over the white prostrate larch-boles where the resin ran slowly like the dark blood of creatures beautiful, defeated, dying. She began to climb, holding to the grey, shining boles of mountain ash-trees. The bracken, waist-high at first, was like small hoops at the top of the wood, where the tiny golden tormentil made a carpet and the yellow pimpernel was closing her eager eyes.

Hazel came out on the bare hill-top where gnarled may-trees, dropping spent blossom, were pink-tinted as if the colours of the sunsets they had known had run into their whiteness. Hazel sat down on the hilltop and saw the sleek farm-horses far below feeding with their shadows, swifts flying with their shadows, and hills eyeing theirs stilly. So with all life the shadow lingers—incurious, mute, yet in the end victorious, whelming all. As Hazel sat there her own shadow lay darkly behind her, growing larger than herself as the sun slipped lower.

Bleatings and lowings, the evening caw of the rooks ascended to her; a horse neighed, aggressively male. From some distance came the loud, crude voice of a man singing. He sang, not in worship, not for the sake of memory or melody or love, but for the same reason that people sing so loudly in church—in the urgent need of expending superabundant vitality. His voice rolled out under the purple sky as if he were the first man, but half emerged from brutishness, pursuing his mate in a world all fief to him, a world that revealed her as she fled through the door of morning and the door of evening, rolling its vaporous curtains back as she went through. It was Reddin, come forth from his dark house, as his foraging ancestors had done, to take his will of the weaponless and ride down the will of others. He did not confess even to himself why he had come. His thoughts on sex were so prurient that, in common with many people, he considered any frankness about it most indecent. Sex was to him a thing that made the ears red. It is hard for them that have breeding-stables to enter the kingdom of heaven. Too often the grave, the majestic significance of the meeting of the sexes—holding as it does the fate of the golden pageantry of life, sacrificially spending as it does the present for the future—is nothing to them. They see it only as a fillip to appetite. So Sally Haggard usually spent most of the money earned by Reddin's stallion, 'The Pride of Undern.'

He put the horse to a gallop as he came up Hunter's Spinney, to quench the voice that spoke within him, saying things he would not hear, that spoke of love, and the tenderness and humility of love, and of how these did not detract from the splendour of manhood, the fine rage of passion, but rather glorified them. Something in his feeling for Hazel answered that voice, and it worried him. By heredity and upbringing he had been taught to dislike and mistrust everything that savoured of emotion or ideas, to consider unmanly all that was of the spirit. Therefore he sang more loudly as he saw on the hill-top the flutter of Hazel's white dress, to quench the voice that steadfastly spoke of mutual love as the one reason, the one consecration of passion in man and woman. The hoof-beats thudded like a full pulse.

Hazel got up. Suddenly she was afraid of the place, more afraid than she had ever been of the death-pack, which, this evening, she had forgotten.

But before she could move away Reddin shouted to her and came up the bridle-path. Hazel hesitated, swayed like the needle of a compass, and finally stood still.

'What'n you wanting me for, Mr. Reddin?'

'Don't you know?'

'If I knew, I shouldna ask.'

'What do men generally want women for?'

'I'm not a woman. I dunna want to be. But what be it, anyway?'

He felt in his pocket and drew out a small parcel.

'There! Don't say the giving's all on your side,' he remarked.

She opened the parcel. It contained two heavy old-fashioned gold bracelets. Each was set with a large ruby that stared unwinkingly from its setting of pale gold.

'Eh! they'm like drops of blood!' said Hazel. 'Like when fayther starts a-killing the pig. He's a hard un, is fayther, hard as b'rytes. I'm much obleeged to you, Mr. Reddin, but I dunna want 'em. I canna'd abear the sight of blood.'

'Little fool!' said Reddin. 'They're worth pounds.'

He caught her wrists and fastened one bracelet on each. She struggled, but could not get free or undo the clasps.

She began to cry, loudly and easily, as she always did. All her emotions were sudden, transparent and violent. She also, since her upbringing had not been refined, began to swear.

'Damn your clumsy fists and your bloody bracelets!' she screamed. 'Take 'em off, too! I 'unna stay if you dunna!'

Reddin laughed, and in his eyes a glow began; nothing could have so suited his mood.

'You've got to wear 'em,' he said, 'to show you're mine.'

'I binna!'

'Yes.'

'I won't never be!'

'Yes, you will, now.'

She raved at him like a little wild-cat, pulling at the bracelets like a kitten at its neck ribbon.

He laughed again, stilly.

He knew there was not a soul near, for the people from the farm at the foot of the spinney had all gone to church.

'Look here, Hazel,' he said, not unkindly; 'you've got to give in, see?'

'I see nought.'

'You've got to come and live with me at Undern. You can wear those fine dresses.'

'I'm a-cold,' said Hazel; 'the sun's undering; I'd best go home-along.'

'Come on, then. Up you get. We'll be there in no time. You shall have some supper and—'

'What'n I want trapsing to Undern when I live at the Mountain?'

'You'll be asking to come soon,' he said, with the crude wisdom of his kind. 'You like me better than that soft parson even now.'

She shook her head.

'I'm a man, anyway.'

She looked him over, and owned he was. But she did not want him; she wanted freedom and time to find out how much she liked Edward.

'Well, good neet to you,' she said. 'I'm off.'

She ran downhill into the wood.

Reddin hitched the reins to a tree and followed. He caught her and flung her into the bracken, and suddenly it seemed to her that the whole world, the woods, herself, were all 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; Edward's absurd determination that she should have clean nails; the ever-renewed argument, 'Foxy's a bad dog!' 'She inna. She's a good fox.' 'In my sight she's a bad dog.'

Now she had floated free of all this. She was out of haven on the high seas. She felt very lonely—as the dead might feel, free of the shackles of life. It was certainly pleasant to wear the green dress. But she missed her little duties—clearing away the supper, Martha being gone; fetching the candles (Mrs. Marston always shook her head at the third, not from economy, but from vicarious philoprogenitiveness).

Edward's reading of the Book last thing had made her restless; she had thought it a bother. Now it seemed a privilege. To most girls, God's Little Mountain would have been purgatory. To her it was wonderful. It was the first time she had shared in the peculiar beauty of home, the daily sacrament of love. Edward never forgot to kiss them both when he came in; brought them flowers; was always carpentering at surprises for them. These last never turned out very well, his technical skill not keeping pace with his enthusiasm; but Hazel was not critical.

She, in common with the other little creatures, sat down in his shadow as in a city of refuge. Mrs. Marston shared this feeling. She always fell asleep at once when Edward was at home in the evening, ceasing to invent alarms about black men creeping through the kitchen window, Foxy getting into the larder, and a great tempest from the Lord blowing them all to perdition because Lord's Day was not kept as it used to be.

Into the parlour, at his own good time, Vessons brought the supper, and dumped it on the large round table, veneered like mahogany, heavily Victorian and ornamented with brass feet. There were bread and cheese, bacon, and a good deal of beer.

Hazel saw nothing amiss with it, for though she had begun to grow accustomed to respectable middle-class meals, life at the Callow still seemed the homelier. Reddin looked up from cutting bacon to say with unwonted thoughtfulness, 'Like some tea and toast?' He felt that toast was a triumph of imagination. He was rather dubious about asking Vessons to do it, so instead he repeated, 'You'll have some tea and toast?'

Vessons went into the kitchen and shut the door. They waited for some time, and Hazel, who, whatever her fate, her faults and sorrows, was always as hungry as Foxy, looked longingly at Reddin's cheese and beer. Physical exhaustion brought tears of appetite to her eyes. At last Reddin went to the kitchen door.

'Where's that tea?' he asked.

'Tay?'

'Yes, you fool!'

'I know nothing about no tay.'

'I said you were to make some.'

'Not to me.'

'And toast.'

'I've douted the fire.'

He had just done so.

'Look here, my man, there's a missus at Undern now. You please her or go. She tells me what she wants. I tell you. You do it.'

'I'll 'ave no woman over me!' said Vessons sullenly. 'Never will I! Never a missus did I take, not for all the pleasures of bed and board—no, ne'er a one I ever took. Maiden I am to my dying day.'

The coupling of the ideas of Vessons and maidenhood was so funny that Reddin burst out laughing and forgot his anger.

'Now, make that tea, Vessons.'

'She unna be here long?' asked Vessons craftily.

'Yes, for good.'

Hazel heard him.

'For good.' Did she want to be in this whispering house for good? Who did she want to be with for good? Not Reddin. Edward? But he had not the passion of the greenwood in him, the lust of the earth. He was not of the tremulously ecstatic company of wild, hunted creatures. If Reddin was definitely antagonistic, a hunter, Edward was neutral, a looker-on. They were not her comrades. They did not live her life. She had to live theirs. She wished she had never seen Reddin, never gone to Hunter's Spinney. Edward's house was at least peaceful.

'And what,' she heard Vessons say, 'will yer lordship's Sally Virtue say?'

She did not hear Reddin's reply; it was fierce and low. She wondered who Sally Virtue was, but she was too tired to think much about it. Afterwards Reddin had some whisky, and Vessons drank his health. Then Reddin picked out 'It's a Fine Hunting Day' on the old piano, and sang it in a rough tenor. Vessons joined in from the kitchen in a voice quite free from any music, and the roaring chorus echoed through the house.

'Eh, stop! I canna abide it!' cried Hazel; but they did not hear.

Vessons came and stood in the doorway with the teapot in one hand and the expression of acute agony he always wore when singing.

'All trouble and care Will be left far behind us at home!'

'Not for the little foxes!' cried Hazel, and she plucked the music from the piano and ran past Vessons, knocking the teapot out of his hand. She stuffed the music into the kitchen grate.

Vessons was petrified.

'Well,' he said, 'you've got the ways of wild-cats and spinsters the world over.' This was an unwilling compliment. 'And I'll say this for you, whatever else I canna say, you've got sperit enough for the eleven thousand virgins!'

Reddin felt that the scene was hardly festive enough. He wondered that he himself did not feel more jubilant; reaction had set in. He wished that all should be gay as for a bridal, for he felt that this was a bridal in all but the name.

But the old house, like a being lethargic after long revelry, clad in torn and stained garments, seemed unready for mirth. Andrew was highly antagonistic. The hound had bristled, growling, at the intruder; and Hazel—?

He looked at Hazel under half-closed lids. Did she know what had happened? He thought not. Perhaps intuition whispered to her. Certainly she avoided his eyes. She sat drinking the tea, which Reddin, with much exertion of authority, at last caused to appear. She was wan, and her face looked very thin. Panic lingered about her eyes, at the corner of her lips.

He realized that she was afraid of him—his look, his touch. Immediately he wanted to exercise his power. He went across and took her chin in his hand, laying the other on her shoulder.

Her eyelids trembled.

'What'n you after, mauling me?' she said.

Then a passion of tears shook her.

'Oh, I want Ed'ard and the old lady! I want to go back to the Mountain, I do! Ed'ard'll be looking me up and down the country.'

'Good Lord, so he will!' said Reddin, 'and rousing the whole place. You must write a letter, Hazel, to say you're safe and happy, and he's not to worry.'

'But I amna.'

Reddin frowned at the spontaneity of this. But he made her write the note.

'Saddle the mare, Vessons, and take this to the Mountain.'

'You dunna mind how much—' began Vessons. But Reddin cut him short.

'Get on,' he said, and Vessons knew by the tone that he had better. 'Push it under the parson's door, knock, and make yourself scarce, Vessons,' Reddin ordered.

'You can go up to bed if you like, Hazel.'

Left alone, he walked up and down the room, puzzled and uneasy.

According to his idea, he had done Hazel the greatest honour a man can pay to a woman. He could not see in what he had failed. He was irritated with his conscience for being troublesome. He had, as he put it, merely satisfied a need of his nature—a need simple and urgent as eating and drinking. He did not understand that in failing to find out whether it was also a need of Hazel's nature—and in nothing else at all—lay his unpardonable crime.

That he had offended against the views of his Church did not worry him. For, like many churchmen, he had the happy gift of keeping profession and practice, dogma and deeds, in airtight compartments. How many of the most fervent churchmen are not, or have not been at some period of their lives, exactly like Reddin?

'Of course, I've been a bit of a beast in the past,' he thought. 'But that's done with. Besides, she doesn't know.'

He reflected again.

'I suppose I was a bit rough, but she ought to have forgotten that by now. I do wish she wouldn't keep on so about the parson.'

He ran upstairs.

'Sorry I was rough, Hazel,' he said shamefacedly.

Hazel stood at the open window in a nightdress that she had found in one of the chests—a frail, yellowish thing with many frills of cobwebby lace made and worn by some dead woman on a forgotten bridal. It was symbolic of Hazel's whole life that she came in this way both to Undern and the Mountain—as bare of woman's regalia as a winter leaf is of substance.

Hazel was speaking when he entered. He stood still, astonished and suspicious.

'Who are you talking to?' he asked.

She turned. 'Him above,' she said. 'I was saying the prayer Ed'ard learnt me. I said it three times, it being Midsummer, and ghosses going to-and-agen and the death-pack about. He'll be bound to hearken to Ed'ard's prayer.'

She looked small and pitiful standing in the flickering candlelight. She turned again to the window, and Reddin went downstairs, quite overwhelmed and abashed.

The house seemed eerier than ever, full of subdued complaints and whisperings. The faces of the roses round the window were woe-begone in the lamplight. The rustle of the leaves had an expostulatory sound. The wan poplars down the meadow looked accusing. It was almost as if the freemasonry of the green world was up in arms for Hazel. She had its blood in her veins, and shared with it the silent worship of freedom and beauty, and had now been plunged so deeply into human life that she was lost to it. It was as if every incarnation of perfection that she had seen in leaf and flower (and she had seen much, though remaining without expression of it), every moment of deep comradeship with earthy, dewy things, every illumined memory of colours and lights that her vivid mind had gathered and cherished in its rage of love and rapture, had come now, pacing disdainfully through this old haunt of crude humanity; passing up the stairs; standing about the great four-poster where so many Reddins had died and been born; gazing upon this face that had known dreams (however childish) of their eternal magic; grieving as the tree for the leaf that has fallen. They grieved, but they did not forgive. For the spirits of beauty and magic are (as the bondsman of colour knows and the bondsman of poetry) inimical to the ordinary life and destiny of man. They break up homes. They lead a thousand wanderers into the unknown. They brook no half service.

It is only the rarest exception when a man loves a woman and yet excels in his art, and a woman must have an amazing genius if she is still a poet after childbirth.

But though sometimes these proud spirits will tolerate, will even be sworn companions of human love, it is only when it is a passion pure and burning that they know it for a sister spirit. In the sexual meeting of Hazel and Reddin there was nothing of this. Though it brought out the best in Reddin, the best was so very poor. And Hazel was merely passive.

So they stood and wept above her, and they foreswore her company for ever. She might regard the primrose eye to eye, but she would receive no dewy look of comprehension.

No lift of the heart would come with the lifting leaves, no pang of mysterious pain with bird-song, star-set, dewfall. Even her love of Foxy would become a groping thing, and not any longer would she know, when her blind bird made its tentative music, all it meant and all it dreamed. This very night she had forgotten to lean out and listen as of old to the soft voices of the trees. She had said her prayer, and then she had been so tired, and pains had shot through her, and her back had ached, and she had cried herself to sleep.

'What for did I go to the Hunter's Spinney?' she asked herself. But the answer was too deep for her, the traitorous impulse of her whole being too mysterious. She could not answer her question.

Reddin, pacing the room downstairs, drinking whisky, and fuming at his own compunction, at last grew tired of his silent house.

'Damn it! Why shouldn't I go up?' he said.

He opened Hazel's door.

'Look here,' he said; 'the house is mine, and so are you. I'm coming to bed.' He was met by that most intimidating reply to all bluster—silence.

She was asleep; and all night long, while he snored, she tossed in her sleep and moaned.



Chapter 27

Early next morning Vessons was calling the cows in for milking. He leant over the lichen-green gate contemplatively.

All the colours were so bright that they were grotesque and startling. Above the violently green fields the sky shone like blue glass, and across the east were two long vermilion clouds. Behind the black hill the sun had shouldered up, molten, and the shadow of Vessons, standing monkey-like on the lowest bar of the gate, lay on the stretch of wet clover behind him—a purple, elfin creature, gifted with a prehensile dignity. The cows did not appear after his first call. He lifted his head and called again in a high plaintive tone, as one reasons with a fretful child. 'Come o-on, come o-on!' Then he sank into the landscape again. After an interval, a polished red and white cow appeared at a distance of five fields, coming serenely on at her own pace. A white one and a roan followed her at long distances. They advanced through the shadows, each going through the exact middle of the many gateways, always kept open like doors in a suite of rooms at a reception. Vessons waited patiently—more as a slave than a ruler—only uttering his plaintive 'Come o-on!' once, when the last cow dallied overlong with a tuft of lush grass in the hedge. This was the daily ritual. Every morning he appeared, neutral-tinted, from the house, and cried upon an apparently empty landscape; every morning they meandered through the seven gates from the secret leafy purlieus where they spent the night.

Mysterious of eye, leisured, vividly red and white, they followed the old man as queens might follow an usher.

Hazel was coming down the path from the house. With morning, her abundant vitality had returned. The outer world was new and bright, and she wanted, shyly, to be up and dressed before Reddin awoke.

She was full of merriment at the subservience of Vessons to the cows.

'D'you say "mum" to 'em?' she inquired.

Vessons looked her up and down. He was very angry, not only at her criticism, but at the difficulty of retort, since he supposed she was now 'missus.' His friendliness for her had entirely gone, not, as would have seemed natural, since her last night's instalment at Undern, but since her marriage with Edward. He felt that she had 'gone back on him.' He had taken her as a comrade, and now she had gone over to the enemy. He was also injured at having been kept up so late last night.

He chumbled his straw for some time, until the last cow had disappeared. Then he said: 'You'm up early for a married 'ooman, or whatever you be, missus.'

Hazel laughed. She had lived so completely outside the influence of the canons of society that the taunt had no sting.

'Ha! you're jealous!' she said.

Then, with a mercilessly accurate imitation of his voice and face, she added:

'A missus at Undern! Never will I!'

He quailed under her mocking amber eyes, her impish laughter. Then, looking from side to side with suppressed fury, he said: 'Them birds is after the cherries! I'll get a gun. I'll shoot 'em dead!'

'If you shoot a blackbird, the milk'll turn bloody,' said Hazel; but Vessons paid no heed.

All morning, at any spare moment, and after dinner (which he brought in in complete silence, and which was exceedingly unpalatable), he lurked behind trees and crept along hedges, shooting birds. Even Reddin felt awed and could not gather courage to expostulate with him. In and out of the stealthy afternoon shadows, black and solemn, went the shambling old figure with his relentless face and outraged heart. He shot thrushes as they fluted after a meal of wild raspberries; he shot tiny silky willow-wrens, robins, and swallows—their sacredness did not awe him—a pigeon on its nest, blackbirds, a dipper, a goldfinch, and a great many sparrows. The garden and fields were struck into silence because of him; only a flutter of terrified wings showed his whereabouts. He piled his trophies—all the delicate ruffled plumage of summer's prime—on the kitchen table, draggled and bloody.

Hazel and Reddin crept from window to window, silent, watching his movements. Undern grew ghostlier than ever, seeming, as the shots rang out startlingly loud in the quiet, like a moribund creature electrified by blows.

'He'd liefer it was me than the birds!' said Hazel. 'Wheresoever I go, folk kill things. What for do they?'

'Things must be killed.'

'It seems like the earth's all bloody,' said Hazel. 'And it's allus the little small uns. There! He's got a jenny-wren. Oh, dearie me! it's like I've killed 'em; it's all along of me coming to Undern.'

'Hush!' said Reddin sharply. 'What I'm afraid of is that he'll shoot himself, he's so damned queer.'

The last cow had sauntered to the gate before Vessons opened it and milked them that night. Afterwards he went in with the pails, set them on the parlour floor, and said with fury to Hazel: 'Bloody, is it?'

She owned, faintly, that it was not.

'And now,' said Vessons, turning on Reddin, 'it's notice. Notice has been give—one month—by Andrew Vessons to John Reddin, Esquire, of Undern.'

With tragic dignity he turned to go.

He saw neither Hazel nor Reddin, but only the swan, the yew-tree swan, his creation, now doomed to be for ever unfinished. The generations to come would look upon a beakless swan, and would think he had meant it so. Tears came into his eyes—smarting, difficult tears. The room was full of brooding misery. Reddin felt awkward and astounded.

'Why, Vessons?' he said in rather a sheepish tone.

Vessons did not turn. He fumbled with the door-handle. Reddin got up and went across to him.

'Why, Vessons?' he said again, with a hand on his shoulder. 'You and I can't part, you know.'

'We mun.'

'But why, man? What's up with you, Andrew?'

The rare Christian name softened Vessons. He deigned to explain. 'She is,' he said, with a sidelong nod at Hazel. 'She mocked me.'

'Did you, Hazel?'

'Now then, missus!' Vessons glared at her.

'I only said—'

'Her said, "Never will I!"' shouted Vessons. 'Ah, that's what her said—"Never will I!" That's what I say,' he added with the pride of a phrase-maker.

Reddin could make nothing of them, one so red and angry, the other in tears.

'I'll do no 'ooman's will!' said Vessons.

'Look here, Vessons! Be reasonable. Listen to me. I'm your master, aren't I?'

'Ah! Till a month.'

'Well, you take orders from me; that's all that matters. I'm master here.'

The tones of his ancestry were in his voice—an ancestry that ruled over and profited by men and women as good as themselves, or better.

'So we'll say no more about it,' he finished, with the frank and winning smile that was one of his few charms.

Vessons stared at him for some time, and, as he stared, an idea occurred to him. It was, he felt, a good idea. It would enable him to keep his swan and his self-respect and to get rid of Hazel. As he pondered it, his face slowly creased into smiles. He touched his forelock—a thing only done on pay-days—and withdrew, murmuring, 'Notice is took back.'

They saw him go past the window with the steps and the shears, evidently to attend to the swan.

Reddin thought how easy it was to manage these underlings—a little authority, a little tact. He turned to Hazel, crying in the high armchair of black oak with its faded rose-coloured cushions. She was crying not only because Vessons had come off victorious, but because her position was now defined, and was not what she would have liked, but also because Reddin's manner to her jarred after last night.

Last night, in the comfortless darkness of Hunter's Spinney, he had seemed for a little while to be a fellow-fugitive of hers, one of the defenceless, fleeing from the vague, unknown power that she feared. Then she had pitied him—self-forgetfully, fiercely—gathered his head to her breast as she so often gathered Foxy's. But now he seemed to have forgotten—seemed once more to be of the swift and strong ones that rode down small creatures.

She sobbed afresh.

'Look here, Hazel,' said he, in a tone that he intended to be kind but firm—'look here: I'm not angry with you, only you must leave Vessons alone, you know.'

'You want that old fellow more than you want me!'

'Don't be silly! He has his uses; you have yours.'

He spoke with a quite unconscious brutality; he voiced the theory of his class and his political party, which tacitly or openly asserted that woman, servants, and animals were in the world for their benefit.

'I'm not grass to be trod on,' said Hazel, 'and if you canna be civil-spoken, I'll go.'

'You can't,' he replied, 'not now.'

She knew it was true, and the knowledge that her own physical nature had proved traitorous to her freedom enraged her the more.

'You can't go,' he went on, coming towards her chair to caress her. 'Shall I tell you why?'

Hazel sat up and looked at him, her eyes gloomy, her forehead red with crying. He thought she was awaiting for his answer; but Hazel seldom did or said what he expected. She let him kneel by her chair on one knee; then, frowning, asked: 'Who cried in Hunter's Spinney?' He jumped up as if he had knelt on a pin. He had been trying to forget the incident, and hoped that she had. He was bitterly ashamed of that really fine moment of his life.

'Don't Hazel!' he said.

He felt quite frightened when he remembered how he had behaved. A strange doubt of himself, born that night, stirred again. Was he all he had thought? Was the world what he had thought? Misgivings seized him. Perhaps he ought not to have brought Hazel here or to the Spinney. An older code than those of Church and State began to flame before him, condemning him.

Suddenly he wanted reassurance. 'You did want to come, didn't you? I didn't take advantage of you very much, did I?' he asked. 'You want to stay?'

'No, I didna want to come till you made me. You got the better of me. But maybe you couldna help it. Maybe you were druv to it.'

'Who by?' he asked, with an attempt at flippancy.

Hazel's eyes were dark and haunted.

'Summat strong and drodsome, as drives us all,' she said.

She had a vision of all the world racing madly round and round, like the exhausted and terrified horse Reddin had that morning lunged. But what power it was that stood in the centre, breaking without an effort the spirit of the mad, fleeing, tethered creature, she could not tell.

Reddin sat brooding until Hazel, recovering first in her mercurial way, said:

'Now I've come, I mun bide. D'you think the old fellow'd let me cook summat for supper? It's been pig-food for us to-day.'

But when they went to investigate, they found Vessons preparing a tremendous meal, hot and savoury as a victorious and penitent old man could make it. He showed in his manner that bygones were to be bygones, and night came down in peace on Undern. But it was a curious, torrid peace, like the hush before thunder.



Chapter 28

It was the Friday after Hazel's coming, and Reddin was away, much against his will, at a horse fair. He was quite surprised at the hurt it gave him to be away from Hazel. So far he had never been, in the smallest sense, any woman's lover. He had taken what he wanted of them in a kind of animal semi-consciousness that amounted to a stark innocence. Virility, he felt, was not of his seeking. There it was, and it must be satisfied. Now he was annoyed to find that he felt guilty when he remembered these women, and that he wanted Hazel, not, as with them, occasionally, but all the time. He had been accustomed to say at farmers' dinners, after indulging pretty freely:

'Oh, damn it! what d'you want with women between sun-up and sun-down?' His coarseness had been received with laughter and reproof. Now he felt that the reproof was juster than the laughter. It was curious, too, how dull things became when Hazel was not there. Hazel had something fresh to say about everything, and their quarrels were the most invigorating moments he had known. Hazel was primitive enough to be feminine, original enough to be boyish, and mysterious enough to be exciting. As Vessons remarked to the drake, 'Oh, maister! you ne'er saw the like. It's 'Azel, 'Azel, 'Azel the day long, and a good man spoilt as was only part spoilt afore.'

Vessons and Hazel were spending the afternoon quarrelling about the bees. When Reddin was away, Hazel put off her new dignity and was Vessons' equal, because it was so dull to be anything else. Vessons tolerated her presence for the sake of the subacid remarks it enabled him to make, but chiefly because of the sardonic pleasure it gave him to remember how soon his resolve would be put into action.

They were in the walled garden, and the bees were coming and going so fast that they made, when Hazel half closed her eyes, long black threads swaying between the hive doors and the distant fields and the hill-top. They hung in cones on the low front walls, and lumped on the hive-shelves in that apparently purposeless unrest that precedes creation. But whether they intended, any of them, to create a new city that day, none might know. Vessons said not. Hazel, always for adventure, said they would, and said also that she could hear the queen in one hive 'zeep-zeeping'—that strange music which, like the maddeningly soft skirl of bagpipes or the fiddling of Ned Pugh, has power to lure living creatures away from comfort and full hives into the unknown—so darkly sweet.

'I canna hear it,' said Vessons obstinately.

'Go on! You're deaf, Mr. Vessons.'

'Deaf, am I? Maybe I hear as much as I want to, and more. Ah! that I do!'

'Well, then, why canna you hear 'em? Listen at 'em now. D'you know the noise I mean?'

'Do I know the noise?' Vessons' voice grew almost tearful with rage. 'Do I know? Me! As can make a thousand bees go through the neck of a pint bottle each after other, like cows to the milking! Me! Maybe you'd like to learn me beekeeping?' he continued with salty humility. 'Maybe you would! Never will I!'

He began to tear off the tops of the hives.

'Oh, Mr. Vessons, dunna be so cross!' Hazel was afraid there would be another scene like Monday's. 'You take 'em off very neat,' she added, with a pathetic attempt to be tactful—'as neat as my dad.'

'I'd have you know,' said Vessons, 'as I take 'em off neater—ah! a deal neater. Bees and cows and yew-tree swans,' he went on reflectively, 'I can manage better than any married man. For what he puts into matrimony I put into my work. Now I ask you'—he fixed his eyes on her with the expression of a fanatic—'I ask you, was there ever a beekeeper or a general or a sea-captain as was anything to boast of, being married? Never! Marriage kills the mind! Why's bees clever? Why's the skip allus full of honey at summer's end? Because they're all old maids!'

'The queen inna. They all come from her.'

Vessons glared for a moment; then, realizing defeat, turned on his heel and went to feed the calves. He had an ingenious way of getting the calves in. He had no dog; it was one of his dreams to have one. But he managed very well. First he opened the calfskit door; then he loosed the pigs; then he fetched a bucket and went to the field where the calves were, followed by a turbulent, squealing, ferocious crowd of pigs. He walked round the calves, and the calves fled homewards, far more afraid of the pigs than of a dog. This piece of farm economy pleased Vessons, and, peace being restored, they laid tea amicably.

When Reddin came home to a pleasant scent of toast and the sight of Hazel's shining braids of hair, new brushed and piled high on her head, he felt very well pleased with himself. He stretched in the red armchair and flung an arm round her. His hard blue eyes, his hard mouth, smiled; he felt that he could make a success of marriage, though the parson (as he called Edward) could not. Women, he reflected, were quite easy to manage. 'Just show them who's master straight off, and all's well.' Here was Hazel, radiant, soft, submissive, all the rough prickly husk gone since Sunday. Why had he behaved so strangely in the Spinney?

Well, well, he must forget about that.

The hot tea ran very comfortably down his throat; the toast was pleasantly resistant to his strong teeth. He felt satisfied with life. Later on, no doubt, Hazel would have a child. That, too, would be a good thing. Two possessions are better than one, and he could well afford children. It never occurred to him to wonder whether Hazel would like it, or to be sorry for the pain in store for her. He felt very unselfish as he thought, 'When she can't go about, I'll sit with her now and again.' It really was a good deal for him to say. He had never taken the slightest notice of Sally Haggard at such times.

'Got something for you,' he said, pulling at his pocket.

'Oh! It's an urchin!' cried Hazel delightedly.

Reddin began bruising and pulling at its spines with his gloved hands.

'Dunna!' cried Hazel.

Reddin pulled and wrenched until at last the hedgehog screamed—a thin, piercing wail, most ghastly and pitiful and old, ancient as the cry of the death's-head moth, that faint ghostly shriek as of a tortured witch. Centuries of pain were in it, the age-long terror of weakness bound and helpless beneath the knife, and that something vindictive and terrifying that looks up at the hunter from the eyes of trapped animals and sends the cuckoo fleeing in panic before the onset of little birds. Hazel knew the sound well. It was the watchword of the little children of despair, the password of the freemasonry to which she belonged.

Before the cry had ceased to horrify the quiet room, she had flung herself at Reddin, a pattern of womanly obedience no longer, but a desperate creature fighting in that most intoxicating of all crusades, the succouring of weakness.

On Reddin's head, a moment ago so smooth, on his face, a moment ago so bland, rained the blows of Hazel's hard little fists. Her blows were by no means so negligible as most women's, for her hands were muscular and strong from digging and climbing, and in her heart was the root of pity which nerves the most trembling hands to do mighty deeds.

'What the devil!' spluttered Reddin. 'Here, stop it, you little vixen!'

He caught one of her hands, but the other was too quick for him.

'Give over tormenting of it, then!'

The hedgehog rolled on the floor, and the foxhound came and sniffed it. Reddin had her other hand now.

'What d'you mean by it?' he asked, very angry, and tingling about the ears.

'Leave it be! It's done you no harm. Lookee! The hound-dog!' she cried. 'Drive him off!'

'I'm going to have some fun seeing the dog kill it.'

Hazel went quite white.

'You shanna! Not till I'm jead,' she said. 'It's come to me to be took care of, and took care of it shall be.' She reached a foot out and kicked the hound.

Reddin's mood changed. He burst out laughing.

'You're a sight more amusing than hedgehogs,' he said; 'the beast can go free, for all I care.'

He pulled her on to his knee and kissed her.

'Send the hound-dog out, then.'

When the hound had gone, resentfully, the hedgehog—a sphinx-like, protestant ball—enjoyed the peace, and Hazel became again (as Reddin thought) quite the right sort of girl to live with.

During the uproar they had not heard wheels in the drive, so they were startled by Vessons' intrigue insertion of himself into a small opening of the door, his firm shutting of it as if in face of a beleaguering host, and his stentorian whisper:

'Ere's Clombers now!' as if to say, 'When you let a woman in you never know what'll become of it.'

'Tell 'em I'm ill—dead!' said his master. 'Tell 'em I'm in the bath—anything, only send them away!'

They heard Vessons recitative.

'The master's very sorry, mum, but he's got the colic too bad to see you. It's heave, curse, heave, curse, till I pray for a good vomit!'

The Clombers, urgent upon his track, shouldered past and strode in.

'What the devil do they want?' muttered Reddin. He rose sulkily.

'I hear,' said the eldest Miss Clomber, who had read Bordello and was very clever, 'that young Lochinvar has taken to himself a bride.'

This was quite up to her usual standard, for not only had it the true literary flavour, but it was ironic, for she knew who Hazel was.

''Er?' queried Reddin, shaking hands in his rather race-course manner.

'Introduce me, Mr. Reddin!' simpered Amelia Clomber. It was painful when she simpered; her mouth was made for sterner uses.

They surveyed Hazel, who shrank from their gaze. Something in their eyes made her feel as if they were her judges, and as if they knew all about Hunter's Spinney.

They looked at her with detestation. They thought it was detestation for a sinner. Really, it was for the woman who had, in a few weeks after meeting him, found favour in Reddin's eyes, and attained that defeat which, to women even so desiccated as the Clombers, is the one desired victory.

They had come, as they told each other before and after their visit, to snatch a brand from the burning. What was in the heart of each—the frantic desire to be mistress of Undern—they did not mention.

Miss Clomber had taken exception to Amelia's tight dress. For Amelia had a figure, and Miss Clomber had not. She always flushed at the text, 'We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts.'

Amelia was aware of her advantage as she engaged Reddin in conversation. He fell in with the arrangement, for he detested her sister, who always prefaced every remark with 'Have you read—?'

As he never read anything, he thought she was making fun of him.

'And what,' asked Miss Clomber of Hazel, lowering her lids like blinds, 'was your maiden name?'

'Woodus.'

'Where were you married?'

'The Mountain.'

'Shawly there's no charch there?'

'Ah! Ed'ard's church.'

'Edward?'

'Ah! He's minister.'

'You mean the chapel. So that's your persuasion. Now Mr. Reddin is such a sta'nch Charchman.'

Reddin looked exceedingly discomfited.

'And when did this happy event take place?'

A cat with a mouse was nothing to Miss Clomber with a sinner.

At this point Reddin saw, as he put it, what she was driving at. He was very sleepy, having been out all day and eaten a large tea, and he never combated a physical desire. So he cut across a remark of Amelia's to the effect that marriage with the right woman so added to a man's comfort, and said:

'I'm not married if that's what you mean.'

'Then who—' said Miss Clomber, feeling that she had him now.

'My keep,' he said baldly. He thought they would go at that. But they sat tight. They had, as Miss Clomber said afterwards, a soul to save. They both realized how pleasant might be the earthly lot of one engaged in this heavenly occupation.

'Hah! You call a spade a spade, Mr. Reddin,' said Miss Clomber, with a frosty glance at Hazel; 'you are not, as our dear Browning has it, "mealy mouthed".'

'In the breast of a true woman,' said Amelia authoritatively, as a fishmonger might speak of fish, 'is no room for blame.'

'True woman be damned!'

Miss Clomber saw that for to-day the cause was lost.

At this point Miss Amelia uttered a piercing yell. The hedgehog, encouraged by being left to itself, and by the slight dusk that had begun to gather in the northerly rooms of Undern—where night came early—had begun to creep about. Surreptitiously guided by Hazel's foot, it had crept under Amelia's skirt and laid its cold inquiring head on her ankle, thinly clad for conquest.

Hazel went off into peals of laughter, and Miss Amelia hated her more than before.

Vessons, in the kitchen, shook his head.

'I never heerd the like of the noise there's been since that gel come. Never did I!' he said.

'Leave him!' said Miss Clomber to Hazel on the doorstep. She was going to add 'for my sake,' but substituted 'his.' 'You are causing him to sin,' she added.

'Be I?' Hazel felt that she was always causing something wrong. Then she sighed. 'I canna leave 'im.'

'Why not?'

'He wunna let me.'

With that phrase, all unconsciously, she took a most ample revenge on the Clombers; for it rang in their ears all night, and they knew it was true.



Chapter 29

On Sunday Vessons put his resolve—to go to the Mountain and reveal Hazel's whereabouts—into practice. If he had waited, gossip would have done it for him. He set out in the afternoon, having 'cleaned' himself and put on his pepper-and-salt suit, buff leggings, red waistcoat, and the jockey-like cap he affected. He arrived at the back door just as Martha was taking in supper.

'Well?' said Martha, who wanted to have her meal and go home.

'Well?' said Vessons.

'When I say "well," I mean what d'you want?'

'Allus say what you mean.'

'Who d'you want? Me?'

'The master.'

'The master's out.'

'I'll wait, then.'

He sat down by the fire, and looked so fixedly at Martha as she poured out her tea that she offered him some in self-defence. He drew up his chair. Now that he was receiving hospitality, he felt that he must be agreeable and complimentary.

'Single, I suppose?' he asked.

'Ah,' said Martha coyly, 'I'm single; but I've no objection to matrimony.'

'Oh!' Vessons spoke sourly, 'I'm sorry for you, then.'

'Maybe you're a married man yourself?'

'Never.'

'Better late than never!'

'If I've kep' out of it in the heat of youth, is it likely I'll go into it in the chilly times? Maiden I am to my dying day!'

'But if you was to meet a nice tidy woman as had a bit saved?' To Martha, a bridegroom of sixty-five seemed better than nothing.

'If I met a score nice tidy women, if I met a gross nice tidy women, it 'ud be no different.'

'Not if she could make strong ale?'

'I can make ale myself. No woman shall come into my kitchen for uncounted gold.'

Martha sighed as she changed the subject.

'What do you want the master for?'

'Never tell your tidings,' said Vessons, 'till you meet the king.'

'Martha!'

Mrs. Marston stood at the kitchen door in the most splendid of her caps—a pagoda of white lace—and her voice was, as she afterwards said, 'quite sharp,' its mellifluousness being very slightly reduced.

Vessons rose, touching his hair.

'What is it, my good man?'

'A bit of news, mum.'

'For my son?'

'Ah!'

'You may go, Martha,' said Mrs. Marston, and Martha went without alacrity.

'Now.' Mrs. Marston spoke encouragingly.

'It's for the master.'

'He cannot see you.'

The two old faces regarded each other with silent obstinacy, and Vessons recognized that, for all Mrs. Marston's soft outlines, she was as obstinate as he was. He cleared his throat several times.

Mrs. Marston produced a lozenge, which he ate reluctantly, chumbling it with nervous haste. He was so afraid that she would give him another that he told her his news.

'Thank you,' she said, keeping her dignity in a marvellous manner. 'Mrs. Edward Marston, of course, wrote to the minister, but she forgot to give her address.'

'Accidents will 'appen,' Vessons remarked, as he went out.

It was some time before Edward came in. He had spent most of his time since last Sunday tramping the hillsides. It was not till he had finished his very cursory meal that his mother said calmly, looking over her spectacles:

'I know where Hazel is.'

'You know, mother? Why didn't you tell me?'

'I am telling you, dear. There's nothing to be in a taking about. You've had no supper yet. A little preserve?'

Edward, in a sudden passion that startled her, threw the jam-dish across the room. It made a red splash on the wall. Mrs. Marston stopped chumbling her toast, and remained with the rotary motions of her mouth in abeyance. Then she said slowly:

'Your poor father always said, dear, that you'd break out some day. And you have. The best dish! Of course the jam I say little about; jam is but jam, after all; but the cut-glass dish—!'

'Can't you go on with the tale, mother?'

'Yes, my dear, yes. But you fluster me like the Silverton Cheap-jack does; I never can buy the dish he holds up, for I get in such a fluster for fear he'll break it, and then he does. And now you have.'

Edward pushed back his chair in desperation.

'For pity's sake!' he said.

'I'm telling you. I never thought Hazel was steadfast, you know.'

'Where is she? Why will you torment me?'

'An old man came. A very untrustworthy old man, I fear. A defiant manner, and that is never pleasant. There he was in the kitchen with Martha! Age is no barrier to wrong, and Martha was very flushed. There was a deal of laughter, too.'

'Mother! If you keep on like this, I shall go mad.'

'Why, Edward, you are all in a fever. There, there! It's more peaceful without her, and I wish Mr. Reddin well of her.'

'Reddin? What Reddin?'

'Mr. Reddin of Undern. Who else?'

'Damn the fellow!'

'Edward! What words you take on your lips! And just think,' she went on sorrowfully, 'that he seemed such a nice man. He liked the gooseberry wine so much, and gave me a "ma'am," which is more than Martha does half her time. Where are you going?'

'To Undern.'

'What for?'

'Hazel.'

Mrs. Marston sat bolt upright.

'But, of course, she'll never darken the door again!'

'I shall bring her back to-night, of course.'

'But, my dear! You must divorce her, however unpleasant on account of the papers. Remember, she has been there a week.'

'What of that?'

'But a week, dear!'

'Mother, I did not think to hear the talk of the filthy world from you.'

Mrs. Marston quailed a little. There is nothing in the world so pure, so wonderful, so strong, as a young man's love can be—nothing so spiritual, nothing so brave.

Mrs. Marston, in her own words, 'shed tears.'

'Don't cry, mother, but help me,' Edward said. 'Be ready for her, love her. She is as pure as a dew-drop. I know it. And I want her more than life.'

'But if she doesn't want you, Edward, what more is to do?'

'To seek and to save,' snapped Edward, and he banged the door and went hatless down the path between the heavy-browed tombstones. But he came back to suggest that there should be some tea ready.

As he went down the batch, owls were shrieking in the woods, and the sky was pied with grey and crimson, like bloodstained marble. The cries of the owls were hard as marble also, and of a polished ferocity. They would have their prey.

He walked fast through the lonely fields where Hazel had passed on her mushrooming morning. The roses that had then been in the bud were falling.

At Alderslea people stared at him as he went by, flushed and hatless.

From Alderslea to Wolf batch was some miles; from there to Undern the way lay over Bitterly Hill, where he missed the path. So it was quite dark when he came past Undern Pool, lying black and ghastly in its ring of skeleton trees. The foxhound set up a loud baying within. Only one window was lit.

Edward hammered on the knocker, and the sound echoed in the hollow house.

There was a noise within of a door opening, and Hazel's voice cried: 'I wouldna go. It's a tramp, likely.'

Then Reddin laughed, and Edward clenched his hands in rage at the easy self-confidence of him. The bolt was drawn back, and Reddin stood in the doorway, outlined by pale light.

'Who is it?' he asked in rather a jovial tone. He felt at peace with the world now Hazel was here.

'Beast!' Edward said tersely.

'Just come in a minute, my lad, and let's have a look at you. People don't call me names twice.'

Hazel had heard Edward's voice.

She ran to the door, and the apple-green gown rustled about her.

'Ed'ard! Ed'ard! Dunna go for to miscall him! He'll hurt 'ee! He's stronger'n you. Do 'ee go back, Ed'ard!'

'Never! till you come, too.'

'I like that,' said Reddin. 'Can't you see she's got my gown on her back? She's mine. She was never yours.'

He looked meaningly and triumphantly at Edward.

'Oh, dunna, Jack! What for do you go to shame me?' said Hazel, twisting her hands.

Edward took no notice of her.

'I don't know what evil means you used, or how you brought the poor child here,' he said, controlling himself with an effort. 'But you have tried to rob me, and you have insulted her—'

'Oh, don't come here talking like an injured husband,' Reddin said; 'you know you aren't her husband.'

'Keep your foul mouth shut before innocence! To try and rob a poor child of her freedom, of her soul—'

Hazel wondered at him. His eyes darkened so upon Reddin, his face was so powerful, irradiated with love and anger.

'So young!' he went on—'so young, and as wild as a little bird. How could anyone help letting her take her own way? She wanted to go free in the woods. I let her; and there you were like a sneaking wolf.'

He threw a look at Hazel so full of wistful tenderness that she flung the green skirt over her head and sobbed.

'Stow it, can't you?' said Reddin. 'If you want a fight, say so; but don't preach all night.'

His tone was injured. He felt that he had been particularly considerate to Edward in sending him the letter. Also, he was convinced that he had only taken what Edward did not want. That Edward could love Hazel was beyond his comprehension. If a man loved a woman, he possessed her, took his pleasure of her. Love that was abnegation was to his idea impossible. So that, now, when Edward spoke of his love, Reddin simply thought he was posing.

'Why didn't you let her be?'

'Women don't want to be let be,' said Reddin with a very unpleasant laugh.

'Oh! stop talking about me as if I wunna here!' cried Hazel.

'If she loved you, I'd say nothing,' Edward went on, staring at Reddin fixedly. 'The fact that I'm her husband would not have counted with me, if you'd loved her and she you.'

'A fine pastor!'

'But you don't. You only wanted—Oh! you make me sick!'

'Indeed! Well, I'm man enough to take what I want; you're not.'

'You trapped her; you would have betrayed her. But, thank God! a young girl's innocence is a wonderful and powerful thing.'

Reddin was astounded. Could Marston really be such a fool as to believe in Hazel still?

'The innocent young girl—' he began, but Hazel struck him on the mouth.

'All right, spitfire!' he said; 'mum's the word.' He was surprisingly good-humoured.

'Well, Hazel'—Edward spoke in a matter-of-fact tone—'shall we go home now?'

'Dunnat ask me, Ed'ard! I mun bide.'

'Why?'

Hazel was silent. She could not explain the strange instinct, stronger than her wildness, that Reddin had awakened in her, and that chained her here with invisible chains.

'Come home, little Hazel!' he pleaded.

'I canna,' she whispered.

'Why? You can if you want to. Don't you want to?'

'Ah! I do that.'

She was torn between her longing to go and her powerlessness to leave Reddin.

The light went out of Edward's face.

'Do you love this man?' he asked.

'No.'

'Does it make you better to live with him?'

'No. It was living with you as did that.'

Reddin was so enraged that he struck her, and her expression of submission as she cowered under the blow was worse to Edward than the blow itself. He forgot his views about violence, and struck Reddin back.

'Come outside,' said Reddin in a tone of relief. The situation had now taken a comprehensible turn for him.

'If it's fighting you're after, I'm with you; that's settling it like gentlemen. What are you grinning at?' He spoke huffily.

'Dunna snab at each other! What for do you?' said Hazel.

'Because you're husband's jealous.'

Edward was exasperated by the realization that his action in coming did look like that of the commonplace husband. But, after all, what did it matter? Nothing mattered but Hazel. He looked across at her crouched in the armchair sobbing. He went to her and patted her shoulder.

'No one's angry with you, dear,' he said. 'Afterwards, when we're home, you shall explain it all to me.'

'If you win!' put in Reddin.

Edward stooped and kissed Hazel's hand. The momentary doubt of her—cruel as hell—had gone. She was his lady, and he was going to fight for her. Hazel looked up at him, and in that instant she almost loved him.

They went out. It was a black moonless night. They stood near the lit window.

'Draw the blind up!' shouted Reddin.

Hazel drew it up. They faced each other in the square of light. They were both quite collected. It seemed difficult to begin. The humour of this struck Reddin, and he laughed.

Edward looked at him disgustedly. Reddin began to feel a fool.

'We must begin,' he said.

Seeing that Edward was waiting for him to strike the first blow, and not being angry enough to do so, Reddin said coarsely:

'No good fighting, parson! She's mine—from head to foot.'

He received as good a blow as Edward was capable of. They fought with hard-drawn breath, for they were neither of them in training. To Edward it seemed ridiculous to be fighting; to Reddin it seemed ridiculous to be fighting such an opponent.

They moved out of the light and back again in the tense silence of the night. A rat splashed in the pool, and silence fell again.

Edward could not do much more than defend himself, and Reddin's eyes shone triumphantly. Within, Hazel leaned against the glass faintly. It was as if evil and good, angels and devils, fought for her. And whichever won, she was equally forlorn. She did not want heaven; she wanted earth and the green ways of earth.

'Oh, he'll kill Ed'ard!' she moaned.

Edward staggered under a blow, and she hid her eyes. Suddenly she thought of Vessons. Where was he? She ran to the kitchen calling him. He was not there. She went to the stables. He was nowhere to be found. Drawn by an irresistible curiosity, she rushed back to the front of the house. Under the yew-tree she ran into Vessons.

'Sh!' he whispered. 'Say nought! I'll tell you what's a mortal good thing for a dog-fight—pepper!' He held up the kitchen pepper-pot. In the other hand he had the poker.

'Now I'll part 'em, missus, you see!'

'Quick, then!'

But as she spoke Reddin got in a blow on Edward's jaw, and he fell.

Hazel rushed forward.

'You murderer!'—she screamed, and she bit Reddin's hand as he stretched it out to catch her, and bent over Edward. The victor in the fight was fated to be the loser with Hazel, for she had a never-broken compact with all creatures defeated.

She ran to the pool for water.

'Catch a holt on him!' she cried to Vessons; 'he's a murderer!'

Reddin stood by, confused and mystified at Hazel's unlooked-for behaviour. Vessons bent over Edward. He struck a match and held it to the end of his nose, chuckling as Edward winced.

'I'll tell you summat as is mortal tough!' he remarked. 'A minister of the Lord! Will the gen'leman stay supper?' he inquired of Reddin.

'No!' said Hazel; 'Mr. Reddin'll take supper alone, for allus, to his dying day. Put the horse in, please, Mr. Vessons.'

'Right you are, missus.'

Reddin was so taken aback by the turn of events, and his head ached so much, that he had nothing to say. He watched Vessons bring the horse round, blinked at Hazel as she tore off the silk dress and borrowed Edward's coat instead, and glowered dumbly at Edward as he was helped into the trap. Hazel sat between the two men.

'Pluck up!' said Vessons to the cob unemotionally, and the trap jogged through the gate and out on to the open hill.

'And if it cosses me my place, I'll tell ye one thing!' Vessons said to himself: 'There's as good to be had, and better.'

'Well, I'm damned, said Reddin as they disappeared in the darkness. He went in and finished the whisky in a state of mystification that ended in sleep.



Chapter 30

As the horse trotted along the hard road, rabbits scuttled across in the momentary lamplight. Hazel tied her handkerchief round Edward's head.

All the windows were dark in Alderslea, except one faint dormer where an old woman was dying. They began to climb the lane that led up to the Mountain. Cattle looked over hedges, breathing hard with curiosity. In an upland field a flock of horned sheep were racing to and fro through a gap in the hedge, coughing and stamping at intervals, and looking, as the moon rose, like fantastic devils working sorcery with their own shadows.

The lamps dimmed in the moonlight and the world seemed to widen infinitely, like life at the coming of love. The country lay below like a vast white mere, and the hill sloped vaguely to a silver sky. Vessons walked up the batch to ease the cob, and Edward looked down at Hazel and murmured:

'My little child!'

'Dunna talk,' said Hazel quickly; 'it's bad for 'ee!' She was afraid to break the magical silence, afraid that the new peace that came with Marston's presence would vanish like the moon in driving cloud, and that she would feel the dragging chain that pulled her back to Reddin.

Edward was silent, puzzling over the question, Why had not Hazel asked for his help? Reddin must have seen her at least several times, must have persecuted her. He grew very uneasy. He must ask Hazel.

They drew up before the white-sentried graveyard. Vessons went up the path and knocked at the silent house. Then he threw handfuls of white spar off a grave at the windows. The Minorca cockerel crew reedily.

'That's unlucky,' said Hazel.

Mrs. Marston put her head out, very sleepy, and asked who it was.

'The conquering 'ero!' said Vessons, as Edward and Hazel came up the path, deeply shadowed. He got into the trap and drove off.

'Well, Undern'll be summat like itself again now,' he thought.

'It was a deal more peaceable without her, naughty girl!' thought Mrs. Marston as she sadly and lethargically put on her clothes.

'Well, Edward!' she exclaimed, when she came down in 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 for this news. Such hatred is abnormal. Nor did she love him. That would have been still more abnormal. But she must be in his house; she must sew for him, share his daily doings, sleep in the big four-poster, and not in the small virginal bed at the Mountain. It would be grievous to leave Edward. He was the shelter between her flickering spirit and the storms of life. She had hesitated, putting off the inevitable, feeling that Undern was always there, like an empty room, for her re-entry, so she had not hurried. Now the room was occupied, her place taken. Immediately she felt that she must go. Feverishly she decided to go this very night and peer in (no one but herself had ever drawn the blinds at Undern of late years) and see for herself. Mrs. Marston and Martha both seemed to be pushing her over the brink.

When, after tea, she crept from the house, she was crying—crying at leaving Edward, the master and the comrade of her unknown self. It was as if she gave up immortality. Yet she was relieved to be going—that is, if she could stay at Undern. Both her tears and her relief were natural. The pity was that body and soul had been put in opposition by belonging to different men.

She left a little blotted note for Edward.

'Dunna think too bad of me, Ed'ard. I be bound to go to Undern and live; I ud liefer bide along of you.'

She went through the shadow-sweet meadows where birds hopped out across green stretches in the cool, the high corn that had once been her comrade, the honeysuckle hedges that used to bring so childish a glee. They wore an air of things estranged and critical. All was so sad, like a dear friend with an altered countenance. She was an exile even in the seeing and hearing. It was strange to her as a town under the tides. There it was, clear and belfried as of old, but fathoms deep, and the bells had so faint a chime that Reddin's voice drowned them. She was turned out of the Eden of the past that she had known in wood and meadow. She was denied the Eden of the future that she might have had in Edward's love. She had the present—Reddin—unless the other woman had robbed her of him also.

She sat down in the heavy shadows of the trees at the far side of Undern Pool. The water looked cold and ghastly even on this golden day. She watched the wagtails strut magisterially, the moorhens with the worried air of overworked charwomen, all the mysterious evening life of a summer pool, but she had no smile for them to-day. The swallows slid and circled across the water; their silence was no longer intimate, but alien. She looked across at Undern. There were roses everywhere, but the house had so strong a faculty for imposing its personality that it gave to the red roses and the masses of traveller's joy that frothed over it a deep sadness, as if they had blown and dropped long since and were but memoried flowers. The shadows of swallows came and went on the white western wall, and smoke stood up blue and straight from Vessons' kitchen fire. She watched the cows go down the green lane, and the shadows go over the meadows in triumphal state. When all was shadow, and the sky was as suddenly vacant of swallows as at dawn it had been full of them, she went stealthily towards the house.