'Well, you take orders from me; that's all that matters. I'm master here.'

The tones of his ancestry were in his voice--an ancestry that ruled over and profited by men and women as good as themselves, or better.

'So we'll say no more about it,' he finished, with the frank and winning smile that was one of his few charms.

Vessons stared at him for some time, and, as he stared, an idea occurred to him. It was, he felt, a good idea. It would enable him to keep his swan and his self-respect and to get rid of Hazel. As he pondered it, his face slowly creased into smiles. He touched his forelock--a thing only done on pay-days--and withdrew, murmuring, 'Notice is took back.'

They saw him go past the window with the steps and the shears, evidently to attend to the swan.

Reddin thought how easy it was to manage these underlings--a little authority, a little tact. He turned to Hazel, crying in the high armchair of black oak with its faded rose-coloured cushions. She was crying not only because Vessons had come off victorious, but because her position was now defined, and was not what she would have liked, but also because Reddin's manner to her jarred after last night.

Last night, in the comfortless darkness of Hunter's Spinney, he had seemed for a little while to be a fellow-fugitive of hers, one of the defenceless, fleeing from the vague, unknown power that she feared.

Then she had pitied him--self-forgetfully, fiercely--gathered his head to her breast as she so often gathered Foxy's. But now he seemed to have forgotten--seemed once more to be of the swift and strong ones that rode down small creatures.

She sobbed afresh.

'Look here, Hazel,' said he, in a tone that he intended to be kind but firm--'look here: I'm not angry with you, only you must leave Vessons alone, you know.'

'You want that old fellow more than you want me!'

'Don't be silly! He has his uses; you have yours.'

He spoke with a quite unconscious brutality; he voiced the theory of his class and his political party, which tacitly or openly asserted that woman, servants, and animals were in the world for their benefit.

'I'm not grass to be trod on,' said Hazel, 'and if you canna be civil-spoken, I'll go.'

'You can't,' he replied, 'not now.'

She knew it was true, and the knowledge that her own physical nature had proved traitorous to her freedom enraged her the more.

'You can't go,' he went on, coming towards her chair to caress her.

'Shall I tell you why?'

Hazel sat up and looked at him, her eyes gloomy, her forehead red with crying. He thought she was awaiting for his answer; but Hazel seldom did or said what he expected. She let him kneel by her chair on one knee; then, frowning, asked: 'Who cried in Hunter's Spinney?' He jumped up as if he had knelt on a pin. He had been trying to forget the incident, and hoped that she had. He was bitterly ashamed of that really fine moment of his life.

'Don't Hazel!' he said.

He felt quite frightened when he remembered how he had behaved. A strange doubt of himself, born that night, stirred again. Was he all he had thought? Was the world what he had thought? Misgivings seized him.

Perhaps he ought not to have brought Hazel here or to the Spinney. An older code than those of Church and State began to flame before him, condemning him.

Suddenly he wanted reassurance. 'You did want to come, didn't you? I didn't take advantage of you very much, did I?' he asked. 'You want to stay?'

'No, I didna want to come till you made me. You got the better of me.

But maybe you couldna help it. Maybe you were druv to it.'

'Who by?' he asked, with an attempt at flippancy.

Hazel's eyes were dark and haunted.

'Summat strong and drodsome, as drives us all,' she said.

She had a vision of all the world racing madly round and round, like the exhausted and terrified horse Reddin had that morning lunged. But what power it was that stood in the centre, breaking without an effort the spirit of the mad, fleeing, tethered creature, she could not tell.

Reddin sat brooding until Hazel, recovering first in her mercurial way, said:

'Now I've come, I mun bide. D'you think the old fellow'd let me cook summat for supper? It's been pig-food for us to-day.'

But when they went to investigate, they found Vessons preparing a tremendous meal, hot and savoury as a victorious and penitent old man could make it. He showed in his manner that bygones were to be bygones, and night came down in peace on Undern. But it was a curious, torrid peace, like the hush before thunder.

Chapter 28

It was the Friday after Hazel's coming, and Reddin was away, much against his will, at a horse fair. He was quite surprised at the hurt it gave him to be away from Hazel. So far he had never been, in the smallest sense, any woman's lover. He had taken what he wanted of them in a kind of animal semi-consciousness that amounted to a stark innocence. Virility, he felt, was not of his seeking. There it was, and it must be satisfied. Now he was annoyed to find that he felt guilty when he remembered these women, and that he wanted Hazel, not, as with them, occasionally, but all the time. He had been accustomed to say at farmers' dinners, after indulging pretty freely:

'Oh, damn it! what d'you want with women between sun-up and sun-down?'

His coarseness had been received with laughter and reproof. Now he felt that the reproof was juster than the laughter. It was curious, too, how dull things became when Hazel was not there. Hazel had something fresh to say about everything, and their quarrels were the most invigorating moments he had known. Hazel was primitive enough to be feminine, original enough to be boyish, and mysterious enough to be exciting. As Vessons remarked to the drake, 'Oh, maister! you ne'er saw the like.

It's 'Azel, 'Azel, 'Azel the day long, and a good man spoilt as was only part spoilt afore.'

Vessons and Hazel were spending the afternoon quarrelling about the bees. When Reddin was away, Hazel put off her new dignity and was Vessons' equal, because it was so dull to be anything else. Vessons tolerated her presence for the sake of the subacid remarks it enabled him to make, but chiefly because of the sardonic pleasure it gave him to remember how soon his resolve would be put into action.

They were in the walled garden, and the bees were coming and going so fast that they made, when Hazel half closed her eyes, long black threads swaying between the hive doors and the distant fields and the hill-top. They hung in cones on the low front walls, and lumped on the hive-shelves in that apparently purposeless unrest that precedes creation. But whether they intended, any of them, to create a new city that day, none might know. Vessons said not. Hazel, always for adventure, said they would, and said also that she could hear the queen in one hive 'zeep-zeeping'--that strange music which, like the maddeningly soft skirl of bagpipes or the fiddling of Ned Pugh, has power to lure living creatures away from comfort and full hives into the unknown--so darkly sweet.

'I canna hear it,' said Vessons obstinately.

'Go on! You're deaf, Mr. Vessons.'

'Deaf, am I? Maybe I hear as much as I want to, and more. Ah! that I do!'

'Well, then, why canna you hear 'em? Listen at 'em now. D'you know the noise I mean?'

'Do I know the noise?' Vessons' voice grew almost tearful with rage.

'Do I know? Me! As can make a thousand bees go through the neck of a pint bottle each after other, like cows to the milking! Me! Maybe you'd like to learn me beekeeping?' he continued with salty humility. 'Maybe you would! Never will I!'

He began to tear off the tops of the hives.

'Oh, Mr. Vessons, dunna be so cross!' Hazel was afraid there would be another scene like Monday's. 'You take 'em off very neat,' she added, with a pathetic attempt to be tactful--'as neat as my dad.'

'I'd have you know,' said Vessons, 'as I take 'em off neater--ah! a deal neater. Bees and cows and yew-tree swans,' he went on reflectively, 'I can manage better than any married man. For what he puts into matrimony I put into my work. Now I ask you'--he fixed his eyes on her with the expression of a fanatic--'I ask you, was there ever a beekeeper or a general or a sea-captain as was anything to boast of, being married? Never! Marriage kills the mind! Why's bees clever?

Why's the skip allus full of honey at summer's end? Because they're all old maids!'

'The queen inna. They all come from her.'

Vessons glared for a moment; then, realizing defeat, turned on his heel and went to feed the calves. He had an ingenious way of getting the calves in. He had no dog; it was one of his dreams to have one. But he managed very well. First he opened the calfskit door; then he loosed the pigs; then he fetched a bucket and went to the field where the calves were, followed by a turbulent, squealing, ferocious crowd of pigs. He walked round the calves, and the calves fled homewards, far more afraid of the pigs than of a dog. This piece of farm economy pleased Vessons, and, peace being restored, they laid tea amicably.

When Reddin came home to a pleasant scent of toast and the sight of Hazel's shining braids of hair, new brushed and piled high on her head, he felt very well pleased with himself. He stretched in the red armchair and flung an arm round her. His hard blue eyes, his hard mouth, smiled; he felt that he could make a success of marriage, though the parson (as he called Edward) could not. Women, he reflected, were quite easy to manage. 'Just show them who's master straight off, and all's well.' Here was Hazel, radiant, soft, submissive, all the rough prickly husk gone since Sunday. Why had he behaved so strangely in the Spinney?