Hazel and her father practised hard through the dark, wet evenings. She was to sing 'Harps in Heaven,' a song her mother had taught her. He was to accompany the choir, or glee-party, that met together at different places, coming from the villages and hillsides of a wide stretch of country.
'Well,' said Abel on the morning of their final rehearsal, 'it's a miserable bit of a silly song, but you mun make the best of it. Give it voice, girl! Dunna go to sing it like a mouse in milk!'
His musical taste was offended by Hazel's way of being more dramatic than musical. She would sink her voice in the sad parts almost to a whisper, and then rise to a kind of keen.
'You'm like nought but Owen's old sheep-dog,' he said, 'wowing the moon!'
But Hazel's idea of music continued to be that of a bird. She was a wild thing, and she sang according to instinct, and not by rule, though her good ear kept her notes true.
They set out early, for they had a good walk in front of them, and the April sun was hot. Hazel, under the pale green larch-trees, in her bright dress, with her crown of tawny hair, seemed to be an incarnation of the secret woods.
Abel strode ahead in his black cut-away coat, snuff-coloured trousers, and high-crowned felt hat with its ornamental band. This receded to the back of his head as he grew hotter. The harp was slung from his shoulder, the gilding looking tawdry in the open day. Twice during the walk, once in a round clearing fringed with birches, and once in a pine-glade, he stopped, put the harp down and played, sitting on a felled tree. Hazel, quite intoxicated with excitement, danced between the slender boles till her hair fell down and the long plait swung against her shoulder.
'If folks came by, maybe they'd think I was a fairy!' she cried.
'Dunna kick about so!' said Abel, emerging from his abstraction. 'It inna decent, now you're an 'ooman growd.'
'I'm not an 'ooman growd!' cried Hazel shrilly. 'I dunna want to be, and I won't never be.'
The pine-tops bent in the wind like attentive heads, as gods, sitting stately above, might nod thoughtfully over a human destiny. Someone, it almost seemed, had heard and registered Hazel's cry, 'I'll never be an 'ooman,' assenting, sardonic.
They came to the quarry at the mountain; the deserted mounds and chasms looked more desolate than ever in the spring world. Here and there the leaves of a young tree lipped the grey-white steeps, as if wistfully trying to love them, as a child tries to caress a forbidding parent.
They climbed round the larger heaps and skirted a precipitous place.
'I canna bear this place,' said Hazel; 'it's so drodsome.'
'Awhile since, afore you were born, a cow fell down that there place, hundreds of feet.'
'Did they save her?'
'Laws, no! She was all of a jelly.'
Hazel broke out with sudden passionate crying. 'Oh, dunna, dunna!' she sobbed. So she did always at any mention of helpless suffering, flinging herself down in wild rebellion and abandonment so that epilepsy had been suspected. But it was not epilepsy. It was pity. She, in her inexpressive, childish way, shared with the love-martyr of Galilee the heartrending capacity for imaginative sympathy. In common with Him and others of her kind, she was not only acquainted with grief, but reviled and rejected. In her schooldays boys brought maimed frogs and threw them in her lap, to watch, from a safe distance, her almost crazy grief and rage.
'Whatever's come o'er ye?' said her father now. 'You're too nesh, that's what you be, nesh-spirited.'
He could not understand; for the art in him was not that warm, suffering thing, creation, but hard, brightly polished talent.
Hazel stood at the edge of the steep grey cliff, her hands folded, a curious fatalism in her eyes.
'There'll be summat bad'll come to me hereabouts,' she said—'summat bad and awful.'
The dark shadows lying so still on the dirty white mounds had a stealthy, crouching look, and the large soft leaves of a plane-tree flapped helplessly against the shale with the air of important people who whisper 'Alas!'
Abel was on ahead. Suddenly he turned round, excited as a boy.
'They've started!' he cried. 'Hark at the music! They allus begin with the organ.'
Hazel followed him, eager for joy, running obedient and hopeful at the heels of life as a young lamb runs with its mother. She forgot her dark intuitions; she only remembered that she wanted to enjoy herself, and that if she was a good girl, surely, surely God would let her.
Chapter 8
The chapel and minister's house at God's Little Mountain were all in one—a long, low building of grey stone surrounded by the graveyard, where stones, flat, erect, and askew, took the place of a flower-garden. Away to the left, just over a rise, the hill was gashed by the grey steeps of the quarries. In front rose another curve covered with thick woods. To the right was the batch, down which a road—in winter a water-course—led into the valley. Behind the house God's Little Mountain sloped softly up and away apparently to its possessor.
Not the least of the mysteries of the place, and it was tense with mystery, was the Sunday congregation, which appeared to spring up miraculously from the rocks, woods and graves.
When the present minister, Edward Marston, came there with his mother he detested it; but after a time it insinuated itself into his heart, and gave a stronger character to his religion. He had always been naturally religious, taking on trust what he was taught; and he had an instinctive pleasure in clean and healthy things. But on winter nights at the mountain, when the tingling stars sprang in and out of their black ambush and frost cracked the tombstones; in summer, when lightning crackled in the woods and ripped along the hillside like a thousand devils, the need of a God grew ever more urgent. He spoke of this to his mother.
'No, dear, I can't say I have more need of our Lord here than in Crigton,' she said. 'In Crigton there was the bus to be afraid of, and bicycles. Here I just cover my ears for wind, put on an extra flannel petticoat for frost, and sit in the coal-house for thunder. Not that I'm forgetting God. God with us, of course, coal-house or elsewhere.'
'But don't you feel something ominous about the place, mother? I feel as if something awful would happen here, don't you?'
'No, dear. Nor will you when you've had some magnesia. Martha!' (Martha was the general who came in by the day from the first cottage in the batch)—'Martha, put on an extra chop for the master. You aren't in love, are you, my dear?'
'Gracious, no! Who should I be in love with, mother?'
'Quite right, dear. There is no one about here with more looks than a brussels sprout. Not that I say anything against sprouts. Martha, just go and see if there are any sprouts left. We'll have them for dinner.' Edward looked at the woods across the batch, and wondered why the young fresh green of the larches and the elm samaras was so sad, and why the cry of a sheep from an upper slope was so forlorn.
'I hope, Edward,' said Mrs. Marston, 'that it won't be serious music. I think serious music interferes with the digestion. Your poor father and I went to the "Creation" on our honeymoon, and thought little of it; then we went to the "Crucifixion," and though it was very pleasant, I couldn't digest the oysters afterwards. And then,