'She is not of your class, Edward.'
'What does class matter?'
'Martha's brother calls you "sir," and Martha looks down on this young person.'
'Don't call her "young person," mother.'
'Whether it is mistaken kindness, dear, or a silly flirtation, it will only do you harm with the congregation.'
'Young men and women,' soliloquized Mrs. Marston as she hoisted herself upstairs with the candlestick very much aslant in a torpid hand, 'are not what they used to be.'
Chapter 9
Hunter's Spinney, a conical hill nearly as high as God's Little Mountain, lay between that range and Undern. It was deeply wooded; only its top was bare and caught the light redly. It was a silent and deserted place, cowled in ancient legends. Here the Black Huntsman stalled his steed, and the death-pack coming to its precincts, ceased into the hill. Here, in November twilights, when the dumb birds cowered in the dark pines, you might hear from the summit a horn blown-very clearly, with tuneful devilry, and a scattered sound of deep barking like the noise of sawing timber, and then the blood-curdling tumult of the pack at feeding time.
To-day, as Hazel began her work, the radiant woods were full of pale colour, so delicate and lucent that Beauty seemed a fugitive presence from some other world trapped and panting to be free. The small patens of the beeches shone like green glass, and the pale spired chestnuts were candelabras on either side of the steep path. In the bright breathless glades of larches the willow-wrens sang softly, but with boundless vitality. On sunny slopes the hyacinths pushed out close-packed buds between their covering leaves; soon they would spread their grave blue like a prayer-carpet. Hazel, stooping in her old multi-coloured pinafore, her bare arms gleaming like the stripped trees, seemed to Edward as he came up the shady path to be the spirit of beauty. He quite realized that her occupation was not suited to a minister's future wife. 'But she may never be that,' he thought despairingly.
'Have you ever thought, Hazel,' he said later, sitting down on a log—'have you ever thought of the question of marriage?'
'I ne'er did till Foxy took the chicks.' Edward looked dazed. 'It's like this,' Hazel went on. 'Father (he's a rum 'un, is father!), he says he'll drown Foxy if she takes another.'
'Who is Foxy?'
'Oh! Fancy you not knowing Foxy! Her's my little cub. Pretty! you ne'er saw anything so pretty.'
Edward thought he had.
'But she canna get used to folks' ways.' (This was a new point of view to Edward.) 'She'm a fox, and she can't be no other. And I'd liefer she'd be a fox.'
'Foxes are very mischievous,' Edward said mildly.
'Mischievous!' Hazel flamed on him like a little thunderstorm. 'Mischievous! And who made 'em mischievous, I'd like to know? They didna make theirselves.'
'God made them,' Edward said simply.
'What for did He, if He didna like 'em when they were done?'
'We can't know all His reasons; He walks in darkness.'
'Well, that's no manner of use to me and Foxy,' said Hazel practically. 'So all as I can see to do is to get married and take Foxy where there's no chicks.'
'So you think of marrying?'
'Ah! And I told father I'd marry the first as come. I swore it by the
Mountain.'
'And who came?' Edward had a kind of faintness in his heart.
'Never a one.'
'Nobody at all?'
'Never a one.'
'And if anyone came and asked for you, you'd take him?'
'Well, I'm bound to, seemingly. But it dunna matter. None'll ever come.
What for should they?'
She herself answered her own question fully as she stood aureoled in dusky light. His eyes were eloquent, but she was too busy to notice them.
'And should you like to be married?' he asked gently.
He expected a shy affirmative. He received a flat negative.
'My mam didna like it. And she said it'd be the end of going in the woods and all my gamesome days. And she said tears and torment, tears and torment was the married lot. And she said, "Keep yourself to yourself. You wunna made for marrying any more than me. Eat in company, but sleep alone"—that's what she said, Mr. Marston.'
Edward was so startled at this unhesitating frankness that he said nothing. But he silently buried several sweet hopes that had been pushing up like folded hyacinths for a week. The old madness was upon him, but it was a larger, more spiritual madness than Reddin's, as the sky is larger and more ethereal than the clouds that obscure it. He was always accustomed to think more of giving than receiving, so now he concentrated himself on what he could do for Hazel. He felt that her beauty would be an ample return for anything he could do as her husband to make her happy. If she would confide in him, demands on his time, run to him for refuge, he felt that he could ask no more of life. The strength of the ancient laws of earth was as yet hidden from him. He did not know the fierceness of the conflict in which he was engaging for Hazel's sake—the world-old conflict between sex and altruism.
If he had known, he would still not have hesitated.
Suddenly Hazel looked round with an affrighted air.
'It's late to be here,' she said.
'Why?'
'There's harm here if you bide late. The jeath pack's about here in the twilight, so they do say.'
They looked up into the dark steeps, and the future seemed to lower on them.
'Maybe summat bad'll come to us in this spinney,' she whispered.
'Nothing bad can come to you when you are in God's keeping.'
There canna be many folk in His keeping, then.'
'Do you say your prayers, Hazel?' he asked rather sadly.
'Ah! I say:
"Keep me one year, keep me seven,
Till the gold turns silver on my head;
Bring me up to the hill o' heaven,
And leave me die quiet in my bed."
That's what I allus say.'
'Who taught you?'
'My mam.'
'Ah, well, it must be a good prayer if she taught it you, mustn't it?' he said.
Suddenly Hazel clutched his arm affrightedly.
'Hark! Galloping up yonder! Run! run! It's the Black Huntsman!'
It was Reddin, skirting the wood on his way home from a search for Hazel. If he had come into the spinney he would have seen them, but he kept straight on.
'It's bringing harm!' cried Hazel, pulling at Edward's arm; 'see the shivers on me! It's somebody galloping o'er my grave!'
Edward resolved to combat these superstitions and replace them by a sane religion. He had not yet fathomed the ancient, cruel and mighty power of these exhalations of the soil. Nor did he see that Hazel was enchained by earth, prisoner to it only a little less than the beech and the hyacinth—bond-serf of the sod.
When Edward and Hazel burst into the parlour, like sunshine into an old garden, they were