Vessons took up the pose of one seeing a new patient.
'This young lady's lost her way,' Reddin remarked.
'She 'as, God's truth! But you'll find it forra I make no doubt, sir.
"There's a way"' (he looked ironically at the poultry-basket behind the
trap, from which peered anxious, beaky faces)--'"a way as no fowl
knoweth, the way of a man with a maid."'
'Fetch the brood mares in from the lower pasture. They should have been
in this hour.'
'And late love's worse than lad's love, so they do say,' concluded
Vessons.
'There's nothing of love between us,' Reddin snapped.
'I dunna wonder at it!' Andrew cast an appraising look at his master's
flushed face and at Hazel's tousled hair, and withdrew.
Hazel went into the elaborately carved porch. She looked round the
brown hall where deep shadows lurked. Oak chests and carved chairs, all
more or less dusty, stood about, looking as if disorderly feasters had
just left them. In one corner was an inlaid sideboard piano.
Hazel did not notice the grey dust and the hearth full of matches and
cigarette ends. She only saw what seemed to her fabulous splendour. A
foxhound rose from the moth-eaten leopard-skin by the hearth as they
came in. Hazel stiffened.
'I canna-d-abear the hound-dogs,' she said. 'Nasty snabbing things.'
'Best dogs going.'
'No, they kills the poor foxes.'
'Vermin.'
Hazel's face became tense. She clenched her hands and advanced a
determined chin.
'Keep yer tongue off our Foxy, or I unna stay!' she said.
'Who's Foxy?'
'My little small cub as I took and reared.'
'Oh! you reared it, did you?'
'Ah. She didna like having no mam. I'm her mam now.'
Reddin had been looking at her as thoughtfully as his rather maudlin
state allowed.
He had decided that she should stay at Undern and be his mistress.
'You'll be wanting something better than foxes to be mothering one of
these days,' he remarked to the fire, with a half embarrassed, half
jocose air, and a hand on the poker.
'Eh?' said Hazel, who was wondering how long it would take her to learn
to play the music in the corner.
Reddin was annoyed. When one made these arch speeches at such cost of
imagination, they should be received properly.
He got up and went across to Hazel, who had played three consecutive
notes, and was gleeful. He put his hand on hers heavily, and a discord
was wrung from the soft-toned notes that had perhaps known other such
discords long ago.
'Laws! what a din!' said Hazel. 'What for d'you do that, Mr. Reddin?'
Reddin found it harder than ever to repeat his remark, and dropped it.
'What's that brown on your dress?' he asked instead.
'That? Oh, that's from a rabbit as I loosed out'n a trap. It bled
awful.'
'Little sneak, to let it out.'
'Sneak's trick to catchen un, so tiny and all,' replied Hazel
composedly.
'Well, you'd better change your dress; it's very wet, and there's
plenty here,' said he, going to a chest and pulling out an armful of
old-fashioned gowns. 'If you lived at Undern you could wear them every
day.'
'If ifs were beans and bacon, there's few'd go clemmed,' said Hazel.
'That green un's proper, like when the leaves come new, and little
small roses and all.'
Put it on while I see what Vessons is doing.'
'He's grumbling in the kitchen, seemingly,' said Hazel.
Vessons always grumbled. His mood could be judged only by the
_piano_ or _forte_ effects.
Hazel heard him reply to Reddin.
'No. Supper binna ready; I've only just put 'im on.'
He always spoke of all phases of his day's work in the masculine
gender.
Hazel stopped buttoning her dress to hear what Reddin was saying.
'Have you some hot water for the lady?' ('The lady! That's me!' she
thought.)
'No, sir, I anna. Nor yet I anna got no myrrh, aloes, nor cassher.
There's nought in my kitchen but a wold useless cat and an o'erdruv man
of six-and-sixty, a pot of victuals not yet simmering, and a gentleman
as ought to know better than to bring a girl to Undern and ruin her--a
poor innocent little creature.'
'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.