Gone to Earth - Mary Webb (easy books to read in english .TXT) 📗

o'er the pastures yonder; they'm abroad, surely.'

She hurried Foxy into the cottage and bolted the door.

'There!' she said. 'Now you lie good and quiet in the corner, and the death pack shanna get you.'

It was said that the death pack, phantom hounds of a bad squire, whose gross body had been long since put to sweeter uses than any he put it to in life--changed into the clear-eyed daisy and the ardent pimpernel--scoured the country on dark stormy nights. Harm was for the house past which it streamed, death for those that heard it give tongue.

This was the legend, and Hazel believed it implicitly. When she had found Foxy half dead outside her deserted earth, she had been quite sure that it was the death pack that had made away with Foxy's mother. She connected it also with her own mother's death. Hounds symbolized everything she hated, everything that was not young, wild and happy. She identified herself with Foxy, and so with all things hunted and snared and destroyed.

Night, shadow, loud winds, winter--these were inimical; with these came the death pack, stealthy and untiring, following for ever the trail of the defenceless. Sunlight, soft airs, bright colours, kindness--these were beneficent havens to flee into. Such was the essence of her creed, the only creed she held, and it lay darkly in her heart, never expressed even to herself. But when she ran into the night to comfort the little fox, she was living up to her faith as few do; when she gathered flowers and lay in the sun, she was dwelling in a mystical atmosphere as vivid as that of the saints; when she recoiled from cruelty, she was trampling evil underfoot, perhaps more surely than those great divines who destroyed one another in their zeal for their Maker.


Chapter 2

At six the next morning they had breakfast. Abel was busy making a hive for the next summer's swarm. When he made a coffin, he always used up the bits thus. A large coffin did not leave very much; but sometimes there were small ones, and then he made splendid hives. The white township on the south side of the lilac hedge increased as slowly and unceasingly as the green township around the distant churchyard. In summer the garden was loud with bees, and the cottage was full of them at swarming-time. Later it was littered with honey-sections; honey dripped from the table, and pieces of broken comb lay on the floor and were contentedly eaten by Foxy.

Whenever an order for a coffin came, Hazel went to tell the bees who was dead. Her father thought this unnecessary. It was only for folks that died in the house, he said. But he had himself told the bees when his wife died. He had gone out on that vivid June morning to his hives, and had stood watching the lines of bees fetching water, their shadows going and coming on the clean white boards. Then he had stooped and said with a curious confidential indifference, 'Maray's jead.' He had put his ear to the hive and listened to the deep, solemn murmur within; but it was the murmur of the future, and not of the past, the preoccupation with life, not with death, that filled the pale galleries within. Today the eighteen hives lay under their winter covering, and the eager creatures within slept. Only one or two strayed sometimes to the early arabis, desultory and sad, driven home again by the frosty air to await the purple times of honey. The happiest days of Abel's life were those when he sat like a bard before the seething hives and harped to the muffled roar of sound that came from within.

All his means of livelihood were joys to him. He had the art of perpetual happiness in this, that he could earn as much as he needed by doing the work he loved. He played at flower shows and country dances, revivals and weddings. He sold his honey, and sometimes his bees. He delighted in wreath-making, gardening, and carpentering, and always in the background was his music--some new air to try on the gilded harp, some new chord or turn to master. The garden was almost big enough, and quite beautiful enough, for that of a mansion. In the summer white lilies haunted it, standing out in the dusk with their demure cajolery, looking, as Hazel said, like ghosses. Goldenrod foamed round the cottage, deeply embowering it, and lavender made a grey mist beside the red quarries of the path. Then Hazel sat like a queen in a regalia of flowers, eating the piece of bread and honey that made her dinner, and covering her face with lily pollen.

Now, there were no flowers in the garden; only the yew-tree by the gate that hung her waxen blossom along the undersides of the branches. Hazel hated the look of the frozen garden; she had an almost unnaturally intense craving for everything rich, vivid, and vital. She was all these things herself, as she communed with Foxy before starting. She had wound her hair round her head in a large plait and her old black hat made the colour richer.

'You'm nigh on thirty miles to go there and back, unless you get a lift,' said Abel.

'A lift? I dunna want never no lifts!' said Hazel scornfully.

'You'm as good a walker as John of No Man's Parish,' replied Abel, 'and he walks for ever, so they do say.'

As Hazel set forth in the sharp, fresh morning, the Callow shone with radiant brown and silver, and no presage moved within it of the snow that would hurtle upon it from mountains of cloud all night.

When Hazel had chosen her dress--a peacock blue serge--and had put it on there and then in the back of the shop, curtained off for this purpose, she went to her aunt's.

Her cousin Albert regarded her with a startled look. He was in a margarine shop, and spent his days explaining that Margarine was as good as butter. But, looking at Hazel, he felt that here _was_ butter--something that needed no apology, and created its own demand. The bright blue made her so radiant that her aunt shook her head.

'You take after your ma, 'Azel,' she said. Her tone was irritated.

'I be glad.'

Her aunt sniffed.

'You ought to be as glad to take after one parent as another, if you were jutiful,' she said.

'I dunna want to take after anybody but myself.' Hazel flushed indignantly.

'Well! we _are_ conceited!' exclaimed her aunt. 'Albert, don't give 'Azel all the liver and bacon. I s'pose your mother can eat as well as schoolgirls?'

Albert was gazing at Hazel so animatedly, so obviously approving of all she said, that her aunt was very much ruffled.

'No wonder you only want to be like yourself,' he said. 'Jam! my word, Hazel, you're jam!'

'Albert!' cried his mother raspingly, with a pathetic note of pleading, 'haven't I always taught you to say preserve?' She was not pleading against the inelegant word, but against Hazel.

When Albert went back to the shop, Hazel helped her aunt to wash up. All the time she was doing this, with unusual care, and cleaning the knives--a thing she hated--she was waiting anxiously for the expected invitation to stay the night. She longed for it as the righteous long for the damnation of their enemies. She never paid a visit except here, and to her it was a wild excitement. The gas-stove, the pretty china, the rose-patterned wall-paper, were all strange and marvellous as a fairy-tale. At home there was no paper, no lath and plaster, only the bare bricks, and the ceiling was of bulging sailcloth hung under the rafters.

Now to all these was added the new delight of Albert's admiring gaze--an alert, live gaze, a thing hitherto unknown to Albert. Perhaps, if she stayed, Albert would take her out for the evening. She would see the streets of the town in the magic of lights. She would walk out in her new dress with a real young man--a young man who possessed a gilt watch-chain. The suspense, as the wintry afternoon drew in, became almost intolerable. Still her aunt did not speak. The sitting-room looked so cosy when tea was laid; the firelight played over the cups; her aunt drew the curtains. On one side there was joy, warmth--all that she could desire; on the other, a forlorn walk in the dark. She had left it until so late that her heart shook at the idea of the many miles she must cover alone if her aunt did not ask her.

Her aunt knew what was going on in Hazel's mind, and smiled grimly at Hazel's unusual meekness. She took the opportunity of administering a few hometruths.

'You look like an actress,' she said.

'Do I, auntie?'

'Yes. It's a disgrace, the way you look. You quite draw men's eyes.'

'It's nice to draw men's eyes, inna it, auntie?'

'Nice! Hazel, I should like to box your ears! You naughty girl! You'll go wrong one of these days.'

'What for will I, auntie?'

'Some day you'll get spoke to!' She said the last words in a hollow whisper. 'And after that, as you won't say and do what a good girl would, you'll get picked up.'

'I'd like to see anyone pick me up!' said Hazel indignantly. 'I'd kick!'

'Oh! how unladylike! I didn't mean really picked up! I meant allegorically--like in the Bible.'

'Oh! only like in the Bible,' said Hazel disappointedly. 'I thought you meant summat _real_.'

'Oh! You'll bring down my grey hairs,' wailed Mrs. Prowde.

An actress was bad, but an infidel! 'That I should live to hear it--in my own villa, with my own soda cake on the cake-dish--and my own son,' she added dramatically, as Albert entered, 'coming in to have his God-fearing heart broken!'

This embarrassed Albert, for it was true, though the cause assigned was not.

'What's Hazel been up to?' he queried.

The affection beneath his heavy pleasantry strengthened his mother in her resolve that Hazel should not stay the night.

'There's a magic-lantern lecture on tonight, Hazel,' he said. 'Like to come?'

'Ah! I should that.'

'You can't walk home at that time of night,' said Mrs. Prowde. 'In fact, you ought to start now.'

'But Hazel's staying the night, mother, surely?'

'Hazel must get back to her father.'

'But, mother, there's the spare-room.'

'The spare-room's being spring-cleaned.'

Albert plunged; he was desperate and forgetful of propriety.

'I can sleep on this sofa,' he said. 'She can have my room.'

'Hazel can't have your room. It's not suitable.'

'Well, let her share yours, then.'

Mrs. Prowde played her trump-card. 'Little I thought,' she said, 'when your dear father went, that before three years had passed you'd be so forgetful of my comfort (and his memory) as to suggest such a thing. As long as I live, my room's mine. When I'm gone,' she concluded, knocking down her adversary with her superior weight of years--'when I'm gone (and the sooner the better for you, no doubt), you can put her in my room and yourself, too.'

When she had said this she was horrified at herself. What an improper thing to say! Even anger and jealousy did not excuse impropriety, though they excused any amount of unkindness.

But at this Hazel cried out in her turn:

'That he never will!' The fierce egoism of the consciously weak