Hazel was picking wimberry-flowers from their stalks. She sucked out
the drop of honey from each flower like a bee. The blossoms were like
small, rose-coloured tulips upside down, very magical and clear of
colour. The sky also was like a pink tulip veined and streaked with
purple and saffron. In its depth, like the honey in the flowers, it
held the low, golden sun. Evening stood tiptoe upon the windy hill-top.
Hazel had eaten quite a quantity of honey, and had made an appreciable
difference in the wimberry yield of half an acre, for she sipped
hastily like a honey-fly. She was one of those who are full of
impatience and haste through the sunny hours of day, clamorous for
joy, since the night cometh. Some prescience was with her. She snatched
what her eyes desired, and wept with disappointment. For it is the
calm natures, wrapt in timeless quiet, taking what comes and asking
nothing, that really enjoy. Hazel ate the fairy tulips as a pixie might,
sharp-toothed, often consuming them whole. So she partook of her
sacrament in both kinds, and she partook of it alone, taking her
wafers and her honeyed wine from hands she never saw, in a presence
she could not gauge. She did not even wonder whether it meant ill or
well by her. She was barely conscious of it. When she found an
unusually large globe of honey in a flower, she sang. Her song was
as inconsequent as those of the woodlarks, who, with their hurried
ripple of notes and their vacillating flights, were as eager and
as soon discouraged as she was herself. Her voice rang out over
the listening pastures, and the sheep looked up in a contemplative,
ancient way like old ladies at a concert with their knitting. Hazel
had fastened two foxgloves round her head in a wreath, and as she
went their deep and darkly spotted bells shook above her, and she
walked, like a jester in a grieving world, crowned with madness.
Suddenly a shout rang across the hill and silenced her and the
woodlarks. She saw against the full-blown flower of the west--black on
scarlet--Reddin on his tall black horse, galloping towards her. Clouds
were coming up for night. They raced with him. From one great round
rift the light poured on Hazel as it does from a burning-glass held
over a leaf. It burned steadily on her, and then was moved, as if by an
invisible hand. Reddin came on, and the thunder of his horse's hoofs
was in her ears. Hurtling thus over the pastures, breaking the year-long
hush, he was the embodiment of the destructive principle, of cruelty,
of the greater part of human society--voracious and carnivorous--with
its curious callousness towards the nerves of the rest of the world.
'I a'most thought it was the death-pack,' said Hazel, speaking first,
as the more nervous always does.
She stood uncomfortably looking up at him as a rabbit looks, surprised
half-way out of its burrow.
'Where be going?' she asked at last.
'Looking for you.'
Hazel could not enjoy the flattery of this; she was so perturbed by his
nearness.
'Where's your lord and master?'
'Ed'ard inna my master. None is.' A hot indignant flush surged over
her.
'Yes,' said he; 'I am.'
'That you're not, and never will be.'
Reddin said nothing. He sat looking down at her. In the large landscape
his figure was carved on the sky, slenderly minute; yet it was instinct
with forces enough to uproot a thousand trees and become, by virtue of
these, the centre of the picture. He looked at his best on horse-back,
where his hardness and roughness appeared as necessary qualities, and
his too great share of virility was used up in courage and will-power.
Hazel gazed defiantly back; but at last her eyelids flickered, and she
turned away.
'I am,' Reddin repeated softly.
He was as sure of her as he was of the rabbits and hares he caught in
spring-traps when hunger drove them counter to instinct. A power was on
Hazel now, driving her against the one instinct of her life hitherto--the
wild creature's instinct for flight and self-preservation. She said
nothing.
Reddin was filled with a tumultuous triumph that Sally Haggard had
never roused.
'I am,' he said again, and laughed as if he enjoyed the repetition.
'Come here!'
Hazel came slowly, looked up, and burst into tears.
'Hello! Tears already?' he said, concerned. 'Keep 'em till there's
something to cry for.'
He dismounted and slipped the rein over his arm.
'What's up, Hazel Woodus?' He put one arm round her.
The sheep looked more ancient than ever, less like old ladies at a
concert than old ladies looking over their prayer-books at a
blasphemer.
'My name inna Woodus. You'd ought to call me Mrs. Marston.'
For answer, he kissed her so that she cried out.
'That's to show if I'll call you Mrs. Marston.'
'I'd liefer be.'
'What?'
'Ed'ard's missus than yourn.'
He ground a foxglove underfoot.
'And there's Foxy in a grand new kennel, and me in a seat in chapel,
and a bush o' laylac give me for myself, and a garden and a root o'
virgin's pride.'
'I shall have that!' said Reddin, and stopped, having blundered into
symbolism, and not knowing where he was. Hazel was silent also, playing
with a foxglove flower.
'What are you up to?' he asked.
She was glad of something to talk about.
'Look! When you get 'un agen the light you can see two little green
things standing inside like people in a tent. They think they're safe
shut in!' She bent down and called: 'I see yer! I see yer!' laughing.
Reddin was bent on getting back to more satisfactory topics.
'They're just two, like us,' he said.
'Ah! We're like under a tent,' she answered, looking at the arching
sky.
'Only there's nobody looking at us.'
'How do you know?' she whispered, looking up gravely. 'I'm thinking
there _be_ somebody somewhere out t'other side of that there blue,
and looking through like us through this here flower. And if so be he
likes he can tear it right open, and get at us.'
Reddin looked round almost apprehensively. Then, as the best way of
putting a stop to superstition, he caught her to him and kissed her
again.
'That's what tents are for, and what you're for,' he said. But he felt
a chill in the place, and Hazel had frightened herself so much that she
could not be lured from her aloofness.
'I mun go home-along,' she said; 'the sun's undering.'
'Will you come to Hunter's Spinney on Sunday?'
'Why ever?'
'Because I say so.'
'But why so far, whatever?' she asked amazedly.
'Because I want you to.'
'But I mun go to chapel along of Ed'ard, and sing 'ymns proper wi' the
folks--and me singing higher nor any of them can go, for all I'm new to
it--and the old lady'--her face grew mischievous--'the old lady in a
shiny silk gownd as creaks and creaks when she stirs about!'
Reddin lost patience.
'You're to start as soon as they're in church, d'you see?'
'Maybe I 'unna come.'
'You've got to. Look here, Hazel, you like having a lover, don't you?'
'I dunno.'
'Hazel! I'll bring you a present.'
'I dunna want it. What is it?' she said in a breath.
'Something nice. Then you promise to come?'
There was a long silence.
Her eyes seemed to her to be caught by his. She could not look away.
And his eyes said strange, terrific things to her, things for which she
had no words, wakening vitality, flattering, commanding, stirring a new
curiosity, robbing her of breath.
They stood thus for a long time, as much alone under the flaming sky as
a man and woman of the stone age.
When at least he released her eyes, he swung silently into the saddle
and was gone.
When he got home, Vessons came shambling to the door.
'Supper and a tot of whisky!' ordered his master.
Vessons took no notice, but eyed the horse.
'You dunna mind how much work you give me at the day's end, do you?' he
inquired conversationally.
'Get on with your jobs!'
'Now, what wench'll cry for this night's work?' mused Vessons.