Hazel ran home through the dew, swift as a hare to her form. Mrs.
Marston, communing with a small wood fire and a large Bible, looked
over her spectacles as Hazel came in, and said:
'Draw your stockinged foot along the boards, my dear. Yes, I thought
so, damp.'
Hazel changed her stockings by the fire, and felt very cared for and
very grand. A fire to change in the parlour! And several pairs of new
stockings! She had never had more than one pair before, and those with
'ladders' in them. 'These here be proper stockings,' she said
complacently--'these with holes in 'em as Edward bought me. Holes as
_ought_ to be there, I mane. They show my legs mother-naked, and
they look right nice.'
'Don't say that word, dear.'
'What 'un?'
Mrs. Marston was silent for a moment. 'The sixth from the end,' she
said; 'it's not nice for a minister's wife.'
'What mun I say?'
Mrs. Marston was in a difficulty. 'Well,' she said at last, 'Edward
should not have given you any cause to say anything.'
Hazel blazed into loyalty.
'I'm sure I'm very much obleeged to Ed'ard,' she said, 'and I like 'em
better for showing my legs. Oh, here _be_ Ed'ard! Ed'ard, these be
proper stockings, inna they?'
Edward glanced at them, and said indifferently that they were. As he
did so, a line that had lately appeared on his forehead became very
apparent.
In her room upstairs, papered with buttercups and daisies by Edward
himself, and scented by a bunch of roses he had given her, Hazel
thought about Hunter's Spinney. Edward would not like her to go, and
Edward had been kind--kinder than anyone had ever been. He had extended
his kindness to Foxy also. 'I'm sure Foxy's much obleeged,' she
thought. 'No, she could never tell Edward about Hunter's Spinney. If he
questioned her, she knew that she would lie. He would certainly not be
pleased. He might be very angry. Mrs. Marston would not like it at all;
she would talk about a minister's wife. Reddin had said she must go,
but she must not.' She smelt the roses.
'No,' she said, 'I must ne'er go to the Hunter's Spinney--not till doom
breaks!' She said her prayers under the shelter of that resolve, with a
supplementary one written out very neatly in gold ink by Edward, who
wrote, as his mother said, 'a parchment script.'
But when she lay down she could not keep her mind clear of Reddin;
during each meeting with him she had been more perturbed. His
personality dragged at hers. Already he was stronger than her fugitive
impulses, her wilding reserve. He was like a hand tearing open a
triplet of sorrel leaves folded for rain, so strong in their impulse
for self-protection that they could only be conquered by destruction.
She was afraid of him, yet days without him were saltless food. There
was a ruthlessness about him--the male instinct unaccompanied by
humility, the patrician instinct unaccompanied by sympathy, the
sportsman's instinct unaccompanied by pity. Whatever he began he would
finish. What had he now begun?
Innocence and instinct, ignorance and curiosity, struggled in her mind.
The attitude of civilization and the Churches towards sex is not one to
help a girl in such an hour. For while approving of, and even insisting
on, children, they treat with a secrecy that implies disapproval the
necessary physical factors that result in children. Tacitly, though not
openly, they consider sex disgraceful. Though Hazel had come in contact
with the facts of life less than most cottage girls, she was not
completely ignorant. But the least ignorant woman knows nothing at all
about sex until she has experienced it. So Hazel was dependent on
intuition. Intuition told her that if the peaceful life at the
parsonage was to continue, she must keep away from Hunter's Spinney.
But she could not keep away. It was as if someone had spun invisible
threads between her and Reddin, and was slowly tightening them.
Long after Edward had locked the house up and shut his door, after the
ticking of the clock had ceased to be incidental and become portentous,
Hazel lay and tried to think. But she only heard two voices in endless
contradiction, 'I munna go. I mun go.' At last she got up and fetched
the book of charms, written in a childish, illiterate hand, and nearly
black with use.
'I'll try a midsummer 'un, for it's Midsummer Eve come Saturday,' she
thought.
She searched the book and found a page headed 'The Flowering of the
Brake.' That one she decided to work on Saturday.
'And to-morrow the Harpers, and Friday the Holy Sign,' she said. 'And
if they say go, I'll go, and if they say stay, I'll stay.'
She fell asleep, feeling that she had shifted the responsibility.
Her mother had said that before any undertaking you should work the
Harper charm. The book directed that on a lonely hill, you must listen
with your eyes shut for the fairy playing. If the undertaking was good
you would hear, coming from very far away, a sound of harping. Silver
folk with golden harps, so the book said, keep on a purple hill
somewhere beyond seeing, and there they play the moon up and the moon
down. And at sun-up they cry for those that have not heard them. If you
hear them ever so faintly, you can go on to the end of your
undertaking, and there'll be no tears in it. But you must never tire of
waiting, nor tell anyone what you have heard.
The next night Hazel stole out in the heavy dew to a hummock of the
mountain, and sat down there to wait for moonrise. But when the moon
came--the thinnest of silver half-hoops, very faint in the reflected
rose from the west--there was no sound except the song of the wood-larks.
They persevered, although the sun was gone. Soon they, too, were hushed,
and Hazel was folded in silence.
She waited a long while. The chapel and the minister's house sank into
the deepening night as into water. The longer the omen tarried, the
more she wanted it to come. Then fatalism reasserted itself, and she
relapsed into her usual state of mind.
'I dunna care,' she said. 'It inna no use to tarry. They unna play.
I'll bide along of Ed'ard at chapel on Sunday, and sing higher than
last time.' She turned home.
At that moment a note of music, strayed, it seemed, out of space,
wandered across the hill-top. Then a few more, thin and silvery, ran
down the silence like a spray of water. The air was lost in distance,
but the notes were undoubtedly those of a harp.
'It's them!' whispered Hazel. 'I'm bound to go.' Then she remembered
her mother's injunctions, and took to her heels. At home in her quiet
room, she thought of the strange shining folk playing on their purple
mountain.
She never knew that the harper was her father returning by devious
roads from one of the many festivals at which he played in summer-time,
and having frequent rests by the way, owing to the good ale he had
drunk. Her bright galaxy of faery was only a drunken man. Her fate had
been settled by a passing whim of his, but so had been her coming into
the world.
When she went in, Edward was sitting up for her, anxious, but trying to
reason himself into calm, as Hazel was given to roaming.
'Where have you been?' he asked rather sternly, for he had suffered
many things from anxiety and from his mother.
'Only up to'erts the pool, Ed'ard.'
'Don't go there again.'
'Canna I go walking on the green hill by my lonesome?'
'No. You can go in the woods. They're safe enough.'
'Foxy's a bad dog!' came Mrs. Marston's voice from upstairs. 'She bit
the rope and took the mutton!'
'Eh, I'm main sorry!' cried Hazel. 'But she inna a bad dog, Mrs.
Marston; she's a good fox.'
'According to natural history she may be, but in my sight she's a bad
dog.' She shut her door with an air of finality.
'The old lady canna'd abear Foxy,' said Hazel. 'Nobody likes Foxy.'
She was stubbornly determined that the world bore her a grudge because
she loved Foxy. Perhaps she had discovered that the world has a sharp
sword for the vulnerable, and that love is easily wounded.
'Don't call mother the old lady, dear.'
'Well, she is. And she says animals has got no souls. She'm only got a
little small 'un herself.'
'Hazel!'
'Well, it's God's truth.'
'Why?'
'If she'd got a nice tidy bit herself, she'd know Foxy'd got one, too.
Now I've got a shimmy with lace on, I know lots of other girls sure to
have 'em. Afore I couldna have believed it.'
Edward could find no reply to this.
'Are you happy here, Hazel?' he asked.
'Ah! I be.'
'You don't miss--'
'Father? Not likely!' She looked up with her clear golden eyes. 'You'm
mother and father both!'
'Only that, dear?'
'Brother.'
'You've forgotten one, Hazel--husband.' His eyes were wistful. 'And
lover, perhaps, some day,' he added. 'Good night, dear.'
She lifted a childish mouth, grateful and ready to be affectionate. Too
ready, he thought. He looked so eagerly for shyness--a flicker of the
eyelids, a mounting flush. He was no fool, nor was he in the least
ascetic. In his dreamy life before Hazel came, he had thought of a sane
and manly and normal future when he thought of it at all. Now he found
that the reality was not like his dreams. The saneness and manliness
were still needed, but the joy had gone, or at least was veiled.
'It will come all right,' he told himself, and waited. His face took
an expression of suspense. He was like one that watches, rapt, for
the sunrise. Only the sun stayed beneath the horizon. He called
Hazel in his mind by the country name for wood-sorrel--the Sleeping
Beauty. He left her to sleep as long as she would. He kept a hand
on himself, and never tried to waken her by easier ways than through
the spirit--through the senses, or vanity, or by taking advantages
of his superior intellect.
He would win her fairly or not at all. So, though to glance into her
empty white room set him trembling, though the touch of her hand set
his pulses going, he never schemed to touch her, never made pretexts to
go into her room. A stormed citadel was in his eyes a thing spoilt in
the capturing. So he waited for the gates to open. The irony was that
if he had listened to sex--who spoke to him with her deep beguiling
voice, like a purple-robed Sibyl--if he had for once parted company
with his exacting spiritual self, Hazel would have loved him. We cannot
love that in which is nothing of ourselves, and there was no white fire
of spiritual exaltation in Hazel. The nearest she approached to that
was in her adoration of sensuous beauty, a green flame of passionless
devotion to loveliness as seen in inanimate things. But that there
should be anything between a man and a woman except an obvious
affection, a fraternal sort of thing, or an uncomfortable excitement
such as she felt with Reddin, was quite beyond her ideas. She did not
know that there could be a fervour of mind for mind, a clasp more
frantic than that of the arms, a continuous psychic state more
passionate than the great moments of physical passion. If Edward had
told her, she could not at this time have understood it. She would have
gazed up at him trustingly out of her autumn-tinted eyes; she would
have embodied all the spiritual glories of which he dreamed; and she
would have understood nothing. Once he tried to share with her a
passage in Drummond's 'Natural Law in the Spiritual World.' He was
reading it with young delight a good many years behind the times,
for books had usually grown very out of date before they percolated
through the country libraries to him. He had read it in his pleasant,
half-educated voice, dramatically and tenderly; his cheeks had flushed;
he had challenged her criticism with keen, attentive eyes. She had said:
'I wonder if that's our Foxy barking, or a strange 'un?'
Hazel looked long from her window that night.
'Oh, I canna go! I canna go! Ed'ard setting store by me and all!' she
said. 'Maybe the other signs wunna come.'
* * * * *
On Friday she waited until after the others had gone to bed, and then
slipped out. She went into the silent woods as the moths went,
purposeless, yet working out destiny. It was a very warm, wet evening,
and glow-worms shone incandescently in the long grass, each with her
round, wonderful, greenish lamp at its brightest. They beckoned on to
faery, though they glowed in perfect stillness. They spoke of
marvellous things, though they lit the night in silence. It was a very
grave, a very remote personality, surely, that lit those lamps. A more
intent eye, a more careful hand were needed, one thinks, to make these
than to make the planets, and a mind more vast, big enough to include
minuteness. But Hazel felt no awe of them; she was too bounded and
earthly a creature to be afraid of mystery. It is the spirit that
maketh afraid. She was sure that they were not the Holy Sign, for she
had seen them often. The Holy Sign was quite different.
'If I be to go to Hunter's Spinney,' she said, looking up through the
black branches and twigs that were like great fowling-nets spread over
her--'if I be to go, show me the Holy Sign.'
She wandered down the narrow paths. It was very dark and warm and damp.
Once the moon came out, and she saw a long pool startle the woods with
its brightness, like lightning on steel. The yellow irises that stood
about its marges held a pale radiance, and were like butterflies
enchanted into immobility. Huge toadstools, vividly tawny as leopards,
clumps of ladyfern not yet their full height and thick with curled
fronds, stood proudly on their mossy lawns.
But none of these was the Sign.
'If it dunna come soon I'll go home-along,' she said.
And then, round the next bend, she saw it. At first she thought it was
an angel just beginning to appear. The phantom was of a man's height,
and it shone as the glow-worms did, only its light would have been
enough to read by. It had a strange effect, standing there bathed
in its own light in the black unbroken silence. It had a look of
life--subdued, but passionate--as a spirit might have when it has just
reintegrated its body out of the air. Hazel was terrified. As a rule,
she was never afraid in the woods and fields, but only in the haunts of
men. But from this, after one paralysed moment, she fled in panic. So
she never knew that her second sign was only a rotten tree, shining
with the phosphorescence of corruption.
Next morning she asked Edward:
'Could folks see angels now?'
'Yes, if it was God's will.'
'If one came, would it be a sign?'
'I suppose so, dear.'
'What'd you do, Ed'ard, if you were bound to find out summat?'
Edward was thinking out heads of a discourse on the power of prayer.
'I should pray, dear,' he said absently.
'Who'd answer?'
'God.'
'Would you hear 'Im?'
'No, dear; of course not.'
He wanted quiet to finish his sermon, but he tried to be patient.
'You would know by intuition,' he said, 'little signs.'
'The Holy Sign!' murmured Hazel. 'I saw it yester-night--a burning
angel.' 'I'm afraid you are too superstitious,' Edward said, and
returned to his remarks on ejaculatory prayer.
Some people would have found it hard to decide which was the more
superstitious, the more pathetic.