They went gallantly, if slowly, on through narrow ways, lit on either
side by the breath-taking freshness of new hawthorn leaves. Primroses,
wet and tall, crisply pink of stalk and huge of leaf, eyed them, as
Madonnas might, from niches in the isles of grass and weed.
Carts had to back into gates to let them go by, and when they came into
the main road horses reared and had to be led past. Hazel found it all
delightful. She liked, when the driver pulled up outside little wayside
inns, to peer into the brown gloom where pewter pots and rows of china
jugs shone, and from which, over newly washed floors of red tiles,
landlords advanced with foaming mugs.
Mrs. Marston strongly disapproved of these proceedings, but did not
think it polite to expostulate, as she was receiving a favour.
In Silverton Mrs. Marston lingered a long while before any shop where
sacred pictures were displayed. The ones she looked at longest were
those of that peculiarly seedy and emasculated type which modern
religion seems to produce. Hazel, all in a fidget to go and buy her
clothes, looked at them, and wondered what they had to do with her.
There was one of an untidy woman sitting in a garden of lilies--evidently
forced--talking to an anaemic-looking man with uncut hair and a
phosphorescent head. Hazel did not know about phosphorus or haloes,
but she remembered how she had gone into the kitchen one night in the
dark and screamed at sight of a sheep's head on the table, shining with
a strange greenish light. This picture reminded her of it. She hastily
looked at the others. She liked the one with sheep in it best, only the
artist had made them like bolsters, and given the shepherd saucer eyes.
Then she came to one of the Crucifixion, a subject on which the artist
had lavished all the slumbering instincts of torture that are in so
many people.
'Oh! what a drodsome un! I dunna like this shop,' said Hazel tearfully.
'What'm they doing to 'im? Oh, they'm great beasts!'
Perhaps she had seen in her dim and childish way the everlasting
tyranny of the material over the abstract; of bluster over nerves;
strength over beauty; States over individuals; churches over souls; and
fox-hunting squires over the creatures they honour with their
attention.
'What is it, my dear?' Mrs. Marston looked over her spectacles, and her
eyes were like half moons peering over full moons.
'That there picture! They'm hurting Him so cruel. And Him fast and
all.'
'Oh!' said Mrs. Marston wonderingly, 'that's nothing to get vexed
about. Why, don't you know that's Jesus Christ dying for us?'
'Not for me!' flashed Hazel.
'My dear!'
'No, what for should He? There shall none die along of me, much less be
tormented.'
'Needs be that one man die for the people,' quoted Mrs. Marston easily.
'Only through blood can sin be washed white.'
'Blood makes things raddled, not white; and if so be any's got to die;
I'll die for myself.'
The old gabled houses, dark and solemn with heavy carved oak, the smart
plate-glass windows of the modern shops, the square dogmatic church
towers and the pointed insinuating spires--all seemed to listen in
surprise to this being who was not content to let another suffer for
her. For civilization as it now stands is based solely on this one
thing--vicarious suffering. From the central doctrine of its chief
creed to the system of its trade; from the vivisection-table to the
consumptive genius dying so that crowds of fat folk may get his soul in
a cheap form, it is all built up on sacrifice of other creatures.
'What'd you say if Ed'ard died for yer?' queried Hazel crudely.
'My dear! How unseemly! In the street!'
'And what'd I do if Foxy died for me?'
'Well, well, Foxy's only an animal.'
'So're you and me animals!' said Hazel so loudly that poor Mrs. Marston
flushed all over her gentle old face.
'So indecent!' she murmured. 'My dear,' she said, when she had steered
Hazel past the shop, 'you want a nice cup of tea. And I do hope,' she
went on softly, putting a great deal of cream in Hazel's cup as she
would have put lubricating oil on a stiff sewing-machine--'I do hope,
my dear, you'll become more Christian as time goes on.'
'If Foxy died along of me,' said Hazel stubbornly--for, although
grateful for the festive meal, she could not let her basic rule of life
slip--'if Foxy died along of me, I'd die too. I couldna do aught else.'
'Things are very different,' said Mrs. Marston, flustered, flushed and
helpless--'very different from what they used to be.'
'What for are they, Mrs. Marston?'
But that question Mrs. Marston was quite unable to answer. If she had
known the answer--that the change was in herself, and that the world
was not different, but still kept up its ancient war between love and
respectability, beauty and mass--she would not have liked it, and so
she would not have believed it.
It was seven o'clock when they were put down, tired and laden with
parcels, at the quarry half-way up God's Little Mountain. Edward had
been there for more than an hour, tormented with fears for Hazel's
safety, angry with himself for letting her go. All afternoon he had
fidgeted, worried Martha with suggestions about tea, finally gone to
the shop several miles away for some of Hazel's favourite cake, quite
forgetting that he ought to be in the house breathing. It all resulted
in a most beautiful tea, as Hazel thought when they had pushed and
pulled Mrs. Marston home.
What with the joy of staying the night and the wonder of her new
clothes, Hazel was as radiant and talked so fast that Edward could do
nothing but watch her.
In her short life there had not been many moments of such rose and
gold. It was the happiest hour of Edward's life also; for she looked to
him as flowers to warm heaven, as winter birds to a fruited tree. As he
watched her opening parcel after parcel with frank innocence and little
bird-like cries of rapture, he knew the intolerable sweetness of
bestowing delight on the beloved--a sweetness only equalled by the
intolerable agony of seeing helpless and incurable pain on the loved
face.
'And what's that one?' he asked, like a mother helping in a child's
game. He pointed to a parcel which contained chemises and nightdresses.
'That,' said Mrs. Marston, frowning portentously at Hazel, who was
tearing it open--'that is other useful garments.'
'What for canna I show 'em Ed'ard? I want to show all. The money was
his'n.'
It was a tribute to Edward's self-control that she was so entirely
lacking in shyness towards him.
'My dear! A young man!' whispered Mrs. Marston.
Suddenly, by some strange necromancy, there was conjured in Hazel's
mind a picture of Reddin--flushed, hard-eyed, with an expression
that aroused in her misgiving and even terror. So she had seen him
just before she fled to Vessons. At the remembrance she flushed so
deeply that Mrs. Marston congratulated herself on the fact that her
daughter-in-law had _some_ modesty and right feeling.
If she had known who caused the flush, who it was that had awakened the
love of pretty clothes which Edward was satisfying, she would have
thought very different thoughts, and would have been utterly miserable.
For her love for Edward was deep enough to make her wish him to have
what he wanted, and not what she thought he ought to want, as long as
he did not clash with her religion. For Edward to know it, though so
early in his love for Hazel, would have meant a rocking of heaven and
earth around him. Even she, with her childish egotism like a shell
about her, realized that this was a thing that could not be.
'But it be all right,' she thought, as she curled up luxuriously in the
strangely clean and comfortable bed, 'it'll be all right. Him above'll
see as Mr. Reddin ne'er shows his face here; for the old lady said Him
above looked after good folks, and Ed'ard's good. But I wish some un
'ud look after the bad uns,' she thought, looking across the room to
the north where Undern lay.
* * * * *
'My dear, wait a moment!' said Mrs. Marston to Edward downstairs, as he
was lighting her candle. I have something to tell you. I fear you must
brace yourself.'
'Well, mother?' Edward smiled.
'Hazel's not a Christian!' She spoke in a sepulchral whisper, and
looked at him afterwards, as if to say, 'There, now, I _have_
surprised you!'
'And how do you make that out, mother?'
Edward found in his heart this fact, that it made no difference to his
love whether Hazel were a Christian or not; this troubled him.
'No. She's not a Christian, my dear,' said Mrs. Marston in a kind of
gasp; 'she refuses to be died for!'
Upstairs, Hazel was saying her orisons at the window.
'If there's anybody there,' she murmured, staring out into the
consuming darkness that had absorbed every colour, every form,
except the looming outline of God's Little Mountain against a watery
moon-rise--'if there's anybody there, I'd be obleeged if you'd give
an eye to our Foxy, as is lonesome in tub. It dunna matter about me,
being under Ed'ard's roof.'
Hazel had never felt so like a child in its mother's lap. Her own
mother had not made her feel so. She had been a vague, abstracted woman
with an air of bepuzzlement and lostness. She looked so long out of the
door--never shut, except when Abel insisted on it--that there was no
time for Hazel. Only occasionally she would catch her by the shoulders
and look into her eyes and tell her strange news of faery. But now she
felt cared for as she looked round the low room with its chair-bed and
little dressing-table hung with pink glazed calico. There was a text
over the fireplace:
'"Not a hair of thy head shall perish."'
It seemed particularly reassuring to Hazel as she brushed her long
shining coils before the hanging mirror. There was a bowl of double
primroses--red, mauve and white--on the window-sill, and a card 'with
Edward's love.'
Flowers in a bedroom were something very new. To her, as to so many
poor people, a bedroom was a stuffy place to crawl into at night and
get out of as quickly as possible in the morning.
'Eh! it'll be grand to live here,' she thought drowsily, as she lay
down in the cool clean sheets and heard the large clock on the wall of
the landing ticking slumbrously in a measured activity that deepened
the peace. She heard Mrs. Marston slide past in her soft slippers with
her characteristic walk, rather like skating. Then Edward came up
(evidently in stockinged feet, for he was only heralded by creakings).
Hazel never dreamt that he had taken his shoes off for her sake.
The moon, riding clear of cloud, flung the shadow of Edward's primroses
on the bed--a large round posy like a Christmas-pudding with
outstanding leaves and flowers clearly defined, all very black on the
counterpane.
Undern seemed very far off.
'I like this better'n that old dark place, green dress or no green
dress,' she thought, 'and I'll ne'er go back there. It inna true what
he said, "Have her he will for certain sure," for I'm going to live
along of Ed'ard, and the old sleepy lady'll learn me to make batter for
ever and ever. Batter's a well-beaten mixture of eggs and summat.'
She fell asleep.
* * * * *
In his room Edward walked up and down, too happy to go to bed.
'My little one! my little one!' he whispered. And he prayed that Hazel
might have rosy and immortal happiness, guarded by strong angels along
a path of flowers all her life long, and at last running in through the
celestial gates as a child runs home.
The spring wind, rainy and mournful, came groping out of the waste
places and cried about the house like a man mourning for his love. The
cavern of night, impenetrable and vast, was full of echoes, as if some
voice, terrible and violent, had shouted there a long while since, and
might, even before the age-long reverberations had died away, be
uplifted again, if it was the will of the Power (invisible but so
immanent that it pressed upon the brain) that inhabited the obscure,
star-dripping cavern.