Edward laughed.
'I hope the gentleman that's coming to-day is a nice quiet one,' she went on, as if Abel were a pony. 'And I hope the lady singer is not a contralto. Contralto, to my mind,' she went on placidly, stirring her porter in preparation for a draught, 'is only another name for roaring, which is unseemly.' She drank her porter gratefully, keeping the spoon in place with one finger.
If she could have seen father and daughter as they set forth, hilarious, to superimpose tumult on the peace of God's Little Mountain, she would have been a good deal less placid.
It was restful to sit and look at her kind old face, soft and round beneath her lace cap, steeped in a peace deeper than lethargy. She was one of nature's opiates, and she administered herself unconsciously to everyone who saw much of her. Edward's father, having had an overdose, had not survived. Mrs. Marston always spoke of him as 'my poor husband who fell asleep,' as if he had dozed in a sermon. Sleep was her fetish, panacea and art. Her strongest condemnation was to call a person 'a stirring body.' She sat to-day, while preparations raged in the kitchen, placidly knitting. She always knitted—socks for Edward and shawls for herself. She had made so many shawls, and she so felt the cold, that she wore them in layers—pink, grey, white, heather mixture, and a purple cross-over.
When Martha and the friend who had come to help quarrelled shrilly, she murmured, 'Poor things! putting themselves in such a pother!' When, after a crash, Martha was heard to say, 'There's the cream-jug now! Well, break one, break three!' she only shook her head, and murmured that servants were not what they used to be. When Martha's friend's little boy dropped the urn—presented to the late Mr. Marston by a grateful congregation, and as large as a watering-can—and Martha's friend shouted, 'I'll warm your buttons!' and proceeded to do so, Mrs. Marston remained self-poised as a sun.
At last supper was set out, the cloths going in terraces according to the various heights of the tables; the tea-sets—willow and Coalport, the feather pattern, and the seaweed—looking like a china-shop; the urn, now rakishly dinted, presiding. People paid for their supper on these occasions, and expected to have as much as they could eat. Mrs. Marston had rashly told Martha that she could have what was left as a perquisite, which resulted later in stormy happenings.
* * * * *
From the nook on the hillside where the chapel stood, as Abel ran hastily down the slope—the harp jogging on his shoulders and looking like some weird demon that clung round his neck and possessed him—came a roar of sound. The brass band from Black Mountain was in possession of the platform. The golden windows shone comfortably in the cold spring evening, and Hazel ran towards them as she would have run towards the wide-flung onyx doors of faery.
They arrived breathless and panting in the graveyard, where the tombstones seemed to elbow each other outside the shining windows, looking into this cave of saffron light and rosy joy as sardonically as if they knew that those within its shelter would soon be without, shelterless in the storm of death; that those who came in so gaily by twos and threes would go out one by one without a word. Hazel peered in.
'Fine raps they're having!' she whispered. 'All the band's there, purple with pleasure, and sweating with the music like chaps haying.'
Abel looked in.
'Eh, dear,' he said, 'they're settled there for the neet. We'll ne'er get a squeak in. There's nought for Black Mountain Band'll stop at when they're elbow to elbow; they eggs each other on cruel, so they do! Your ears may be dinned and deafened for life, and you lost to the bee-keeping (for hear you must, or you'm done, with bees), but the band dunna care! There! Now they've got a hencore—that's to say, do it agen; and every time they get one of them it goes to their yeads, and they play louder.'
'Ah, but you play better,' said Hazel comfortingly; for Abel's voice had trembled, and Hazel must comfort grief wherever she found it, for grief implied weakness.
'I know I do,' he assented; 'but what can I do agen ten strong men?'
At the mountain, as in the world of art and letters, it seemed that the artist must elbow and push, and that if he did not often stop his honeyed utterances to shout his wares he would not be heard at all.
'Dunna they look funny!' said Hazel with a giggle. 'All sleepy and quiet, like smoked bees. Is that the Minister? Him by the old sleepy lady—she's had more smoke than most!'
'Where?'
'There. He's got a black coat on and a kind face, sad-like.'
'Maybe if you took an axed him, he'd marry you—when the moon falls down the chapel chimney and rabbits chase the bobtailed sheep-dog!'
'I'm not for marrying anybody. Let's go in,' said Hazel.
She took off her hat and coat, to enter more splendidly. On her head, resting softly among the coils of ruddy hair, she put a wreath of violets, which grew everywhere at the Callow; a big bunch of them was at her throat like a cameo brooch.
When she entered the band faltered, and the cornet, a fiery young man whom none could tire, wavered into silence. Edward, turning to find out what had caused this most desirable event, saw her coming up the room with the radiant fatefulness of a fairy in a dream. His heart went out to her, not only for her morning air, her vivid eyes, her coronet of youth's rare violets, but for the wistfulness that was not only in her face, but in her poise and in every movement. He felt as he would to a small bright bird that had come, greatly daring, in at his window on a stormy night. She had entered the empty room of his heart, and from this night onwards his only thought was how to keep her there.
When she went up to sing, his eyes dwelt on her. She was the most vital thing he had ever seen. The tendrils of burnished hair about her forehead and ears curled and shone with life; her eyes danced with life; her body was taut as a slim arrow ready to fly from life's bow.
Abel sat down in the middle of the platform and began to play, quite regardless of Hazel, who had to start when she could.
'Harps in heaven played for you;
Played for Christ with his eyes so blue;
Played for Peter and for Paul,
But never played for me at all!
Harps in heaven, made all of glass,
Greener than the rainy grass.
Ne'er a one but is bespoken,
And mine is broken—mine is broken!
Harps in heaven play high, play low;
In the cold, rainy wind I go
To find my harp, as green as spring—
My splintered harp without a string!'
She sang with passion. The wail of the lost was in her voice. She had not the slightest idea what the words meant (probably they meant nothing), but the sad cadence suited her emotional tone, and the ideas of loss and exile expressed her vague mistrust of the world. Edward imagined her in her blue-green dress and violet crown playing on a large glass harp in a company of angels.
'Poor child!' he thought. 'Is it mystical longing or a sense of sin that cries out in her voice?'
It was neither of those things; it was nothing that Edward could have understood at that time, though later he did. It was the grief of rainy forests, and the moan of stormy water; the muffled complaint of driven leaves; the keening—wild and universal—of life for the perishing matter that it inhabits.
Hazel expressed things that she knew nothing of, as a blackbird does. For, though she was young and fresh, she had her origin in the old, dark heart of earth, full of innumerable agonies, and in that heart she dwelt, and ever would, singing from its gloom as a bird sings in a yew-tree. Her being was more full of echoes than the hearts of those that live further from the soil; and we are all as full of echoes as a rocky wood—echoes of the past, reflex echoes