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Gone to Earth

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<h2 id="id01447" style="margin-top: 4em">Chapter 18</h2> 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. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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