'Me again,' said Hazel. She pondered on the remark and flushed. 'Maybe I'd best go,' she thought. Yet only vague instinct stirred her to this, and all her soul was set on staying.
'Never shall it be said'—Andrew's voice rose like a preacher's—'never shall it be said as a young female found no friend in Andrew Vessons; never shall it be said'—his voice soared over various annoyed exclamations of Reddin's—'as a female went from this 'all different from what she came.'
'Shut up, Vessons!'
But Vessons was, as he would have phrased it himself, 'in full honey-flow,' and not to be silenced.
'Single she be, and single she'd ought to stay. This 'ere rubbitch of kissing and clipping!'
'But, Vessons, if there were no children gotten, the world'd be empty.'
'Let 'un be. 'Im above'll get a bit of rest, nights, from their sins.'
'Eh, I like that old chap,' thought Hazel.
The wrangle continued. It was the deathless quarrel of the world and the monastery—natural man and the hermit. Finally Vessons concluded on a top note.
'Well, if you take this girl's good name off'n her—'
Suddenly something happened in Hazel's brain. It was the realization of life in relation to self. It marks the end of childhood. She no more saw herself throned above life and fate, as a child does. She saw that she was a part of it all; she was mutable and mortal.
She had seen life go on, had heard of funerals, courtings, confinements and weddings in their conventional order—or reversed—and she had remained, as it were, intact. She had starved and slaved and woven superstitions, loved Foxy, and tolerated her father.
Girl friends had hinted of a wild revelry that went on somewhere—everywhere—calling like a hidden merry-go-round to any who cared to hear. But she had not heard. They had let fall such sentences as 'He got the better of me,' 'I cried out, and he thought someone was coming, and he let me go.' Later, she heard, 'And I thought I'd ne'er get through it when baby came.'
She felt vaguely sorry for these girls; but she realized nothing of their life. Nor did she associate funerals and illness with herself.
As the convolvulus stands in apparent changelessness in a silent rose-and-white eternity, so she seemed to herself a stationary being. But the convolvulus has budded and bloomed and closed again while you thought her still, and she dies—the rayed and rosy cup so full of airy sweetness—she dies in a day.
* * * * *
Hazel got up from her chair by the fire and went restlessly, with a rustle as of innumerable autumn leaves, to the hall door. She gazed through the glass, and saw the sad feather-flights of snow wandering and hesitating, and finally coming to earth. They held to their individuality as flakes as long as they could, it seemed; but the end came to all, and they were merged in earth and their own multitudes.
Hazel opened the door and stood on the threshold, so that snow-flakes flattened themselves on the yellow roses of her dress. Outside there was no world, only a waste of grey and white. Like leaves on a dead bird, the wrappings of white grew deeper over Undern. Hazel shivered in the cold wind off the hill, and saw Undern Pool curdling and thickening in the frost. No sound came across the outspread country. There were no roads near Undern except its own cart track; there were no railways within miles. Nothing moved except the snow-flakes, fulfilling their relentless destiny of negation. She saw them only, and heard only the raised voices in the house arguing about herself.
'I mun go,' she said, strong in her spirit of freedom, remote and withdrawn.
'I mun stay,' she amended, weak in her undefended smallness, and very tired. She turned back to the fire. But the instinct that had awakened as childhood died clamoured within her and would not let her rest.
She softly took off the silk dress, and put on her own.
She picked up the wreath-frames with a sigh and opened the door again. She would have a long, wild walk home, but she could creep in through her bedroom window, which would not latch, and she could make a great fire of dry broom and brew some tea.
'And I'll let Foxy in and eat a loaf, I will, for I'm clemmed!' she said.
She slipped out through the door that had seen so many human lives come and go. Even as she went, the door betrayed her, for Reddin, coming from the kitchen, saw her through the upper panes.
Chapter 5
'I be going home-along,' she said, but he pulled her in and shut the door.
'Why did you want to go?'
'I'm alost in this grand place.'
'Your hair's grander than anything in the place. And your eyes are like sherry.'
'Truth on your life?'
'Yes. Now you'd better change your dress again.'
He reached down an old silver candlestick, very tarnished.
'You can go upstairs. There's a glass in the first room you come to.
Then we'll have supper.'
'Sitting at the supper in a grand shining gown wi' roses on it,' said Hazel ecstatically, her voice rising to a kind of chant, 'with a white cloth on table like school-treat, and the old servant hopping to and agen like thrussels after worms.'
'Thrussel yourself!' muttered Andrew, peering in at the door. He retired again, remarking to the cat in a sour lugubrious voice, as he always did when ruffled: 'There's no cats i' the Bible.' He began to sing 'By the waters of Babylon.'
Upstairs Hazel coiled her hair, running her fingers through its bright lengths, as she had no comb, and turning in her underbodice to make it suit the low dress. Outside, his rough hair wet with snow, stood Reddin, watching her from the vantage-ground of the darkness! He saw her stand with head erect and bare white shoulders, smiling at herself in the glass. He saw her slip into the rich gown and pose delightedly, mincing to and fro like a wagtail. He noted her lissom figure and shining coils of hair.
'She'll do,' he said, and did not wonder whether he would do himself. Then he gave a smothered exclamation. She had opened the window, pushing the snowy ivy aside, and she leant out, her breast under its folds of silk resting on the snow.
She looked over his head into the immensity of night.
'Dunna let 'un take my good name, for the old feller says I'd ought to keep it,' she said. 'And let me get back to Foxy quick in the morning light, and no harm come to us for ever and ever.'
The night received her prayer in silence. Whether or not any heard but
Reddin none could say.
Reddin tiptoed into the house, rather downcast. This was a strange creature that he had caught.
Vessons was still at the waters of Babylon when Hazel came down.
'Why canna he get beyond them five words?' asked Hazel. 'He allus stops and goes back like a dog on a chain.' She sang it through in her high clear voice. There was silence in the kitchen.
Reddin stared at Hazel.
'Who taught you to sing?' he asked.
'Father. He's wonderful with the music, is father.' Hazel found that in the presence of strangers her feeling for her father was almost warm. 'Playing the harp nights, he makes your flesh creep; ah! and he makes the place all on a charm, like the spinneys in May month. And he says, "Sing!"