'Ah! Will your mother be angry?'
'I haven't one.'
'Father?'
'No.'
'Who be there, then?'
'Only Vessons and me.'
'Who's Vessons?'
'My servant.'
'Be you a gentleman, then?'
Reddin hesitated slightly. She said it with such reverence and made it seem so great a thing.
'Yes,' he said at last. 'Yes, that's what I am—a gentleman.' He was conscious of bravado.
'Will there be supper, fire-hot?'
'Yes, if Vessons is in a good temper.'
'Where you bin?' she asked next.
'Market.'
'You've had about as much as is good for you,' she remarked, as if thinking aloud.
He certainly smelt strongly of whisky.
'You've got a cheek!' said he. 'Let's look at you.'
He stared into her tired but vivid eyes for a long time, and the trap careered from side to side.
'My word!' he said, 'I'm in luck to-night!'
'What for be you?'
'Meeting a girl like you.'
'Do I draw men's eyes?'
'Eh?' He was startled. Then he guffawed. 'Yes,' he replied.
'She said so,' Hazel murmured. 'And she said I'd get spoke to, and she said I'd get puck up. I'm main glad of it, too. She's a witch.'
'She said you'd get picked up, did she?'
'Ah.'
Reddin put his arm round her.
'You're so pretty! That's why.'
'Dunna maul me!'
'You might be civil. I'm doing you a kindness.'
They went on in that fashion, his arm about her, each wondering what manner of companion the other was.
When they neared Undern there were gates to open, and he admired her litheness as she jumped in and out.
In his pastures, where the deeply rutted track was already white with snow, two foals stood sadly by their mothers, gazing at the cold world with their peculiarly disconsolate eyes.
'Eh! look's the abron un! Abron, like me!' cried Hazel.
Reddin suddenly gripped the long coils that were loose on her shoulders, twisted them in a rope round his neck, and kissed her. She was enmeshed, and could not avoid his kisses.
The cob took this opportunity—one long desired—to rear, and Reddin flogged him the rest of the way. So they arrived with a clatter, and were met at the door by Andrew Vessons—knowing of eye as a blackbird, straw in mouth, the poison of asps on his tongue.
Chapter 3
Undern Hall, with its many small-paned windows, faced the north sullenly. It was a place of which the influence and magic were not good. Even in May, when the lilacs frothed into purple, paved the lawn with shadows, steeped the air with scent; when soft leaves lipped each other consolingly; when blackbirds sang, fell in their effortless way from the green height to the green depth, and sang again—still, something that haunted the place set the heart fluttering. No place is its own, and that which is most stained with old tumults has the strongest fascination.
So at Undern, whatever had happened there went on still; someone who had been there was there still. The lawns under the trees were mournful with old pain, or with vanished joys more pathetic than pain in their fleeting mimicry of immortality.
It was only at midsummer that the windows were coloured by dawn and sunset; then they had a sanguinary aspect, staring into the delicate skyey dramas like blind, bloodshot eyes. Secretly, under the heavy rhododendron leaves and in the furtive sunlight beneath the yew-trees, gnats danced. Their faint motions made the garden stiller; their smallness made it oppressive; their momentary life made it infinitely old. Then Undern Pool was full of leaf shadows like multitudinous lolling tongues, and the smell of the mud tainted the air—half sickly, half sweet. The clipped bushes and the twisted chimneys made inky shadows like steeples on the grass, and great trees of roses, beautiful in desolation, dripped with red and white and elbowed the guelder roses and the elders set with white patens. Cherries fell in the orchard with the same rich monotony, the same fatality, as drops of blood. They lay under the fungus-riven trees till the hens ate them, pecking gingerly and enjoyably at their lustrous beauty as the world does at a poet's heart. In the kitchen-garden also the hens took their ease, banqueting sparely beneath the straggling black boughs of a red-currant grove. In the sandstone walls of this garden hornets built undisturbed, and the thyme and lavender borders had grown into forests and obliterated the path. The cattle drowsed in the meadows, birds in the heavy trees; the golden day-lilies drooped like the daughters of pleasure; the very principle of life seemed to slumber. It was then, when the scent of elder blossom, decaying fruit, mud and hot yew brooded there, that the place attained one of its most individual moods—narcotic, aphrodisiac.
In winter the yews and firs were like waving funeral plumes and mantled, headless goddesses; then the giant beeches would lash themselves to frenzy, and, stooping, would scourge the ice on Undern Pool and the cracked walls of the house, like beings drunken with the passion of cruelty. This was the second mood of Undern—brutality. Then those within were, it seemed, already in the grave, heavily covered with the prison of frost and snow, or shouted into silence by the wind. On a January night the house seemed to lie outside time and space; slow, ominous movement began beyond the blind windows, and the inflexible softness of snow, blurred on the vast background of night, buried summer ever deeper with invincible, caressing threats.
The front door was half glass, so that a wandering candle within could be seen from outside, and it looked inexpressibly forlorn, like a glow-worm seeking escape from a chloroform-box or mankind looking for the way to heaven. Only four windows were ever lit, and of these two at a time. They were Jack Reddin's parlour, Andrew Vessons' kitchen, and their respective bedrooms.
Reddin of Undern cared as little for the graciousness of life as he did for its pitiful rhapsodies, its purple-mantled tragedies. He had no time for such trivialities. Fox-hunting, horse-breeding, and kennel lore were his vocation. He rode straight, lived hard, exercised such creative faculties as he had on his work, and found it very good. Three times a year he stated in the Undern pew at Wolfbatch that he intended to continue leading a godly, righteous, and sober life. At these times, with amber lights from the windows playing over his well-shaped head, his rather heavy face looked, as the Miss Clombers from Wolfbatch Hall said, 'so chivalrous, so uplifted.' The Miss Clombers purred when they talked, like cats with a mouse. The younger still hunted, painfully compressing an overfed body into a riding-habit of some forgotten cut, and riding with so grim a mouth and such a bloodthirsty expression that she might have had a blood-feud with all foxes. Perhaps, when she rode down the anxious red-brown streak, she thought she was riding down a cruel fate that had somehow left her life vacant of joy; perhaps, when the little creature was torn piece-meal, she imagined herself tearing so the frail unconquerable powers of love and beauty. Anyway, she never missed a meet, and she and her sister never ceased their long silent battle for Reddin, who remained as unconscious of them as if they were his aunts. He was, of course, beneath them, very much beneath them—hardly more than a farmer, but still—a man.
Reddin went on his dubious and discreditable way, and the woman Sally Haggard, of the cottage in the hollow, gained by virtue of a certain harsh beauty what the ladies Clomber would have given all their wealth for.
The other inhabitant