Next morning Vessons went off in high feather; Hazel was so safely
disposed of. Reddin left at the same time, and all the long May day
Undern was deserted, and lay still and silent as if pondering on its
loneliness. Reddin did not return until after night-fall.
He spent the day in a curious manner for a man of his position, under a
yew-tree, riven of trunk, gigantic, black, commanding Edward's house.
He leant against the trunk that had seen so many generations, shadowed
so many fox-earths, groaned in so many tempests.
Above his tent sailed those hill-wanderers, the white clouds of May.
They were as fiercely pure, as apparently imperishable, as a great
ideal. With lingering majesty they marched across the sky, first over
the parsonage, then over Reddin, laying upon each in turn a hyacinth
shadow.
Reddin watched the house indifferently, while Martha went to and fro
cleaning the chapel after the wedding.
Then Mrs. Marston came to the front door and shut it.
After that, for a long time, nothing moved but the slow shadows of the
gravestones, shortening with the climbing sun. The laburnum waved
softly, and flung its lacy shadow on the grave where the grass was long
and daisied.
A wood-pigeon began in its deep and golden voice a low soliloquy
recollected as a saint's, rich as a lover's. Reddin stirred
disconsolately, trampling the thin leaves and delicate flowers of the
sorrel.
At last the door opened, and Edward came out carrying a spade.
Hazel followed. They went round to the side of the house away from the
graveyard, and Edward began to dig, Hazel sitting on the grass and
evidently making suggestions. With the quickness of jealousy, Reddin
knew that Edward was making a garden for Hazel. It enraged him.
'I could have made her a garden, and a deal better than that!' he
thought. 'She could have had half an acre of the garden at Undern; I
could have it made in no time.'
He uttered an exclamation of contempt. 'The way he fools with that
spade! He's never dug in his life.'
Before long Hazel brought out the bird-cage and hung it in the sun. And
surprisingly, almost alarmingly, the ancient bird began to sing. It was
like hearing an old man sing a love-song. The bird sat there, rough and
purblind, and chanted youth with the magic of a master.
Hazel and Edward stood still to hear it, holding each other's hands.
'He's ne'er said a word afore,' breathed Hazel. 'Eh! but he likes the
Mountain!'
In the little warm garden with Hazel, among the thick daisies, with the
mirth of the once desolate ringing in his ears, Edward knew perfect
happiness.
He stood looking at Hazel, his eyes dark with love. She seemed to
blossom in the quiet day. He stooped and kissed her hand.
To Reddin in his deep shadow every action was clear, for they stood in
the sunlight. He ground the sorrel into the earth. After a time Martha
rang the dinner-bell, not because she could not both see and hear her
master, but because it was the usual thing. To Reddin the bell's rather
cracked note was sardonic, for it was summoning another man to eat and
drink with Hazel. He ate his sandwiches, not being so much in love that
he lost his appetite. Then he sat down and read the racing news. There
was no danger of anyone seeing him, for the place was entirely solitary
with the double loneliness of hill and woodland. There were no children
in the batch except Martha's friend's little boy, and he was timid and
never went bird's-nesting. The only sound except the intermittent song
of birds, was the far-away noise of a woodman's axe, like the deep
scattered barking of hungry hounds. Nothing else stirred under the
complex arches of the trees except the sunlight, moving like a ghost.
These thick woods, remote on their ridges, were to the watchful eye
rich with a half-revealed secret, to the attentive ear full of urgent
voices. The solving of all life's riddles might come to one here at any
moment. In this hour or in the next, from a grey ash-bole or a blood-red
pine-trunk, might come the naked spirit of life with a face fierce
or lovely. Coiled in the twist of long honeysuckle ropes that fell
from the dead yews; curled in a last year's leaf; embattled in a mailed
fir-cone, or resting starrily in the green moss, it seemed that God
slumbered. At any moment He might wake, to bless or curse.
Reddin, not having a watchful eye or an attentive ear for such things,
was not conscious of anything but a sense of loneliness. He read the
paper indefatigably. In an hour or so Edward and Hazel came out again,
she in her new white hat. They went up God's Little Mountain where it
sloped away in pale green illuminated vistas till it reached the dark
blue sky. They disappeared on the skyline, and Reddin impatiently
composed himself for more waiting. Was he never to get a chance of
seeing Hazel alone?
'That fellow dogs her steps,' he said.
The transfigured slopes of the mountain were, it seemed to Edward, a
suitable place for a thing he wished to tell Hazel.
'Hazel,' he said, 'if you ever feel that you would rather have a
husband than a brother, you have only to say so.'
Hazel flushed. Although it was such a muted passion that sounded in his
voice, it stirred her. Since she had known Reddin, her ignorance had
come to recognize the sound of it, and she had also begun to flush
easily.
If Edward had understood women better, he would have seen that this
speech of his was a mistake; for even if a woman knows whether she
wishes for a husband, she will never tell him so.
They turned home in a constrained silence. Foxy, frightened by a covey
of partridges, created a diversion by pulling her cord from Hazel's
inattentive hand and setting off for the parsonage.
'Oh! she'll be bound to go to the woods!' cried Hazel, beginning to
run. 'Do 'ee see if she's in tub, Ed'ard, and I'll go under the trees
and holla.'
Reddin was startled when he saw Hazel, who had out-distanced Edward,
making straight for his hiding-place. She came running between the
boles with an easy grace, an independence that drove him frantic. A
pretty woman should not have that easy grace; she should have exchanged
it for a matronly bearing by this time, and independence should have
yielded to subservience--to the male, to him. With her vivid hair and
eyes and her swift slenderness, Hazel had a fawn-like air as she
traversed the wavering shadows. She passed his tree without seeing him,
and stood listening. Then she began to plead with the truant. 'What for
did you run away, Foxy, my dear? Where be you? Come back along with me,
dear 'eart, for it draws to night!'
Reddin stepped from his tree and spoke to her.
With a stifled scream she turned to run away, but he intercepted her.
'No. I've waited long enough for this. So you're married to the parson,
after all?'
'Ah.'
'You'll be sorry.'
'What for do you come tormenting of me, Mr. Reddin?'
'You were meant for me. You're mine.'
'Folk allus says I'm theirs. I'd liefer be mine.'
'As you wouldn't marry me, Hazel, the least you can do is to come and
talk to me sometimes.'
'Oh, I canna!'
'You must. Any spare time come to this tree. I shall generally be
here.'
'But why ever? And you a squire with a big place and fine ladies after
you!'
'Because I choose.'
'Leave me be, Mr. Reddin. I be comforble, and Foxy be, and they're all
settling so nice. The bird's sung.'
'The parson, too, no doubt. If you don't come often enough, I shall
walk past the house and look in. If you go on not coming, I shall tell
the parson you stayed the night with me, and he'll turn you out.'
'He wouldna! You wouldna!'
'Yes, I would. He would, too. A parson doesn't want a wife that isn't
respectable. So as you've got to'--he dropped his harshness and became
persuasive--'you may as well come with a good grace.'
'But it wunna my fault as I stayed the night over. It was aunt
Prowde's. What for should folk chide me and not auntie?'
'Lord, I don't know! Because you're pretty.'
'Be I?'
'Hasn't that fellow told you so?'
'No. He dunna say much.'
'You could make such a good chap of me if you liked, Hazel.'
'How ever?'
'I'd give up the drink.'
'And fox-hunting?'
'Well, I might give up even that--for you. Be my friend, Hazel.'
He spoke with an indefinable charm inherited from some courtly
ancestor. Hazel was fascinated.
'But you've got blood on you!' she protested.
'So have you!' he retorted unexpectedly. 'You say you kill flies, so
you're as bad as I am, Hazel. So be my friend.'
'I mun go!'
'Say you'll come tomorrow.'
'Not but for a minute, then.'
Edward's voice came from the house.
'I've found her!'
Hazel ran home. But as she left the wood she turned and looked down the
shadowy steeps of green at Reddin as he strode homewards. She watched
him until he passed out of sight; then, sighing, she went home.