CHAPTER II

CHAPTER II

“THAT’S a pleasant sort of welcome, eh?” said Reuben Gaunt, as he watched David’s broad back disappear round the corner of the stables.

Priscilla’s interest was awakened already, and the smith had done an ill turn to his own cause by arousing her sympathy as well.

“You’ll find pleasanter welcomes here in Garth,” the girl answered, with that candour of thought and expression which in itself was dignity. “It was stupid of me to forget you, Mr. Gaunt, but I was so little, when you used to play big brother to me and show me all the wonders of the Dene.”

“I think it must not be Mr. Gaunt. The folk who like me call me Reuben, as you did once.”

Priscilla was vaguely disturbed. Softness of speech and manner she understood, for she had ever been a favourite with the landed gentlefolk of Strathgarth; and, because she understood them, she detected the false note in Gaunt’s would-be correctness. Yet she pushed the distrust aside; for this man had been away from Garth for five long years, had seen the mysteries hidden in the beyond, and doubtless he could tell her of them.

“We are older now,” she answered, a little smile belying her rebuke. “It must be Mr. Gaunt, or naught at all.”

“Well, then, it must be Miss Priscilla, too?”

“’Twould be fitting, I think. Five years are not bridged in a moment, and father tells me I’m a woman grown, though I feel a child when the spring comes in as it is coming now.”

An older and more constant playmate than Gaunt of Marshlands sang to her—sang blithe and high—through the mistal-door; but she scarcely heard the throstle, for Gaunt brought news from the beyond.

“Where have you been these years past?” she asked, moving restlessly from foot to foot.

“Everywhere, I fancy,” laughed the other. “I’ve seen the world, as I always meant to do; and a queer world I’ve found it.”

As a child wipes the school-day’s sums from its slate, Priscilla lost the record of her working and her playtime hours. The grey serenity of Garth, the sweetness of its roadside gardens, the slow, rich gossip of its folk—these things went by her. She forgot the low, musical humming of the churn, the look of the butter as it lay, round and golden as a kingcup, on the stone tables of the dairy. She heard no longer the splash of milk into the foamy pail, the lowing of the kine as they gave their evensong of praise.

Not restless now, she leaned against the stall, her eyes wandering now and then to Gaunt’s, then returning to the mistal-yard and the croft beyond. She was listening to this man who had spent five years beyond the limits of Garth village, and his tales enthralled her. In an absent way she wondered that those well-known fields, the familiar yard, had never seemed so small as now.

Reuben Gaunt was talking well. The picture of the girl, her lissome outline framed by the oaken stall, her hands clasped above her head, the lights and shadows of the mistal playing constantly about her eager eyes—thesemight well have moved a duller wit than Gaunt’s to make the most of itself. And, when he stopped, Priscilla was silent, her head thrown further back and her glance going out and out, over the grey field-walls of Strathgarth, over its dingles and its hills—out to the borderland, and across into the unknown.

“You have come back suddenly,” she said at last. “None knew in Garth that you were coming home, or we must have heard of it.”

“I chose to return unawares, and see what sort of welcome Garth would give me without preparation.—And, gad, I learned from David Blake quite soon enough,” he finished, with an easy laugh.

“And shall you stay among us?”

He had been watching her during that long silence. Faults in plenty the man had, but in his way he could understand the finer lines of beauty; and now, as he met Priscilla’s eyes, he found her exquisite—something as faultless, and yet as natural, as a harebell swaying to the wind.

“Yes, I shall stay,” he answered.

Her eyes fell, in answer, not to the words, but to the tone. And, because she had been wont to look all folk bravely in the eyes, she grew impatient of her shame-facedness.

“I cannot idle all the morning through,” she said. “I’ll give you good day, Mr. Gaunt, and get to my housework.”

David Blake, meanwhile, had turned aside before he reached his smithy, and had crossed, by the stile at the road-corner, into the field where Farmer Hirst was busy hedge-cutting with his men.

“Hallo, David! Followed me up, like, have ye?” roared Hirst, as he chanced to turn his head while the smith was still half a field away.

“Ay, I like the sound and the look of cutting a thorn-hedge,” answered David, as he drew nearer. “Thought I’d come and set ye straight if ye were showing faulty hedge-craft.”

The two farm-men turned with their bill-hooks in their hands. They nodded at David and grinned at his simple pleasantry. Lithe, clean-built fellows they were, both of them, such as they breed within the boundaries of Strathgarth, and they were friends and, save in the matter of wage-earning, they were roughly the equals of their master.

“Come ye, then,” chuckled the farmer. “See what we’ve done a’ready, David! See how trim and snug the whole line lies of it! Nay, not that way, lad!” he broke off, as one of the hands began to lay a stout hawthorn stem, sawn half-way through, all out of line with its fellow on the left.

He bent the branch as he would have it lie, then stepped aside—for a heavy man, Hirst was oddly active in his movements—and set to work to pluck a root of dog-briar from its deep bed. Twist and turn the root in his hands as he might, it would not budge.

“’Tis all these durned leather gloves,” he said, throwing his gauntlets off. “They keep the prickles out, David—or reckon to—but when a body wants his naked hands—well, let him wear them naked.”

Again he tugged, but the old root would not give; so David grasped Priscilla’s father by the middle, and “Yoick!” he cried, and they pulled together. The root left its hold, more suddenly than they had counted on, and David, being the hinder of the two, bore the full brunt of the farmer’s fall.

David got to his feet by and by, and coaxed the wind back into his lungs. Farmer Hirst was laughing till thetears ran down his ruddy face; the men were laughing, too; so David, soon as he found breath, fetched out that slow, deep body-merriment of his.

“We got him out o’ground! Oh, ay, we daunted yond old briar-root!” said he.

Whereat the four laughed so heartily that a pair of curlews—just returned, like Reuben Gaunt, from sojourning God knew where—got up from the further side of the fence, and went crying toward the moor.

“Briar-roots are the devil and all,” said Hirst, “when ye come to clean a hedge-bottom.”

“Bear bonnie roses all the same, when June comes in,” ventured the blacksmith, not telling Hirst that wild roses reminded him, too often for his peace of mind, of Priscilla. “Pity to stump ’em up, say I, and pity came of my lending my hand to the job just now.”

He made pretence to rub himself, as if the farmer’s bulk had raised painful sores on him. It is easy to laugh when the spring’s a-coming in, and the four workers startled a black-faced ewe that was near to her first lambing season.

“Get away wi’ your jests, David,” answered Farmer Hirst. “D’ye think I want to have my lambs dropped hasty-like in the ditch down yonder?”

Yet by and by, when they had worked their fill at the hedge-cutting, and it was dinner-time, David drew the farmer aside. He had not known till now what had brought him to the fields here, instead of to the smithy where he had urgent work to do. For the blacksmith’s brain was like an eight-day clock that stands in the kitchen corner; it moved slowly—tick-tack, tick-tack, with sober repetition—but, when the moment came to strike the hour, there was never any doubt as to the time he had in mind.

“John Hirst,” he said, “ne’er mind your dinner yetawhile. I’ve somewhat lies on my chest, as a body might say.”

“Well, I lay there not a long while since, a trifle sudden and a trifle hard,” laughed Hirst.

“Ah, now, will ye be quiet? I’m like Fool Billy, as Priscilla said just now, and ye think I’m jesting when I’m trying to talk sober sense.”

“Dinner-time is sober sense, David, judging by my itch to get at cheese and bread and good brown ale. What then, lad? What ails ye?”

“I’m slow of speech, unlike my smithy-bellows,” went on the other doggedly. “I find the right word always the day after to-morrow, instead of the day’s minute that I want it.”

“I’ve a trick of the same kind myself, David. What then? Speech is speech, but trimming a thorn-hedge, or ploughing for your turnip-crop, is a sight better than hunting words. Tuts, David! Ye’re yellow about the gills, and some trouble’s sitting on ye, by that token.”

“Ay, some trouble is,” said David.

“Priscilla gave ye cake and ale?” put in the other anxiously.

“She forgot to offer it, and I forgot to lack it.” David’s eyes followed the neat line of the hedge, and he nodded gravely at it. “Wish men were more like thorn-bushes, John—wish you could lop their unruliness, and twist their ill-grown branches into shape, and make a clean, useful hedge at the end of all.”

Farmer Hirst was thinking of his dinner with gaining tenderness. “What is in your mind, David, lad?” he asked. “’Tis like watching the kettle boil, this getting at your meaning.”

“Reuben Gaunt is back again in Garth,” the smith blurted out. “That’s my meaning, John, and I tell youwe could well have let him stay t’ other side of the world, and ne’er have missed him.”

The farmer’s face clouded for a moment. “We could have spared him—ay. But what of it? Because a fool chooses to come home again, are we to go pulling fiddle-faces on a blithesome day like this? Hark ye, David, I’ll not bide a minute longer; there’s cheese and ale all waiting in the hedge-bottom yonder, and you’re going to share it with us.”

So David laid his trouble aside for the moment, and the four of them sat on the sunny hedge-bank, and said little until for the second or third time they took more cheese to help the butter out, or more bread to help the cheese out, or another pull of ale “to settle the lot trimly into place.”

“Wonderful March weather,” said the farmer, draining a last draught. “Near to April, and not a lamb-storm yet. ’Twill be twelve year since I remember such a spring.”

“Found a primrose fair in bloom this morn,” said one of the farm-men. “Wonderful weather, I’ll own, farmer—but what’s to come with April? Mistrust these easiful, quiet March-times myself.”

“Ah, get ye along!” cried Hirst. “Believe the best o’ the weather, I, and always did. They laugh at me in Shepston market—say I’m no true farmer, because I’ll not speak o’ the weather as if she were a jade for any man to mock at.”

There was a silence, while the men lay tranquilly against the bank and watched the blue sky trail her draperies of cool, white fleece across the west wind’s track.

“Reuben Gaunt is back, I’ve heard,” said one of the farm-hands presently. “Came last night, all unbeknownst-like, same fashion as he left, five years since.”

“There’ll be brisk times for the lasses, then,” put in his fellow drily.

Again the farmer’s face darkened for a moment. “’Tis work-time, lads, not gossip-time, and many a yard of hedge to fettle up before we get our suppers.”

“I’ll be getting to my own work, too,” said David, nodding his farewells and moving down the field.

At another time he would have put his own work off, would have taken a hand till nightfall with the hedge-trimmers, would have given them jest for jest and laugh for laugh, while he trimmed, and cut, and bent the hawthorn boughs into their place. But to-day he could not.

“There’ll be a brisk time for the lasses, then,” he muttered, echoing the farm-hand’s idle speech. “Ay, there’s always trouble o’ that sort when Reuben Gaunt’s at hand.”

Through the quiet fields he went, but they brought little benediction to him. He remembered Gaunt and all his ways, remembered how, when he left Garth, there had been no sadness in the men’s faces, but grief and bitterness in many women’s.

“What the dangment do they see in him, these lasses?” growled David, as he climbed the wall and dropped into the highroad. “Littlish in the build—face as good to look at as a mangold-wurzel’s—must be those devil’s eyes of his, that never lie still for a moment, but go hunting like a dog that sniffs a fresh scent every yard.”

David had summed up his man with unerring judgment in that last thought—so far, that is, as we can judge of any man. Had Gaunt been downright evil, it would have been easier for the men of Garth to have thrashed him long ago into a likelier and more wholesome habit. But even to-day, when he was in a mood that, for him, was bitter, the blacksmith knew that his enemy was neithergood nor bad, but purposeless. He had watched him grow from childhood; and year by year his name of Reuben seemed more and more a prophecy of days to come.

“Unstable as water—ay, just that,” thought David, as he reached the smithy.

Billy the Fool, after dusting the smithy fire with coke and smudge, had settled himself to sleep again; but he was awake on the instant when David’s footsteps sounded on the roadway. He rose, and shook himself with a big, heedless satisfaction.

“I’ve been a-dreaming, David,” was his greeting. “Dreamed I was wise, like ye are at most times—saving when Miss Priscilla comes.”

“Ay?” said the other, patting Billy on the shoulder.

“I didn’t like it, David! Glad to waken is Billy the Fool. There wasn’t no frolic in’t.”

“I can believe you, lad. What news, Billy, since I went up street?”

It was the habit in Garth village to ask Billy for news, however many times a day you met him, though none could say how the idle custom had first come into use.

“Ay, there’s news. I’ve been at my games again, David the Smith.” A smile broadened slowly across the placid face, while the blacksmith listened good-humouredly.

“Never met your like for games, Billy,” he said, fingering his tools after the fashion of a man who means to begin work by and by, but not just yet.

David, indeed, was thinking less of work, and less of Billy, than of the encounter in the mistal. Reuben Gaunt had come like a shadow between the springtime and himself, had blurred the sun for him: keen to foresee, as slow men often are, the blacksmith felt as if a blight had fallen on Garth village, checking the warmth, holding the green buds in their sheaths.

Yet Billy soon claimed his ear. “I’d looked to your fire,” went on the natural, “and stepped out into the road, to see what time o’ day it was. Perhaps a half-hour since it was—and what d’ye think, David?”

“Couldn’t guess, lad, couldn’t guess.”

“Well, there was a littlish man, all dressed up as if ’twere Sunday; and he came down the road, and I knew he’d been to Good Intent.”

David glanced sharply up. “How did you know that?”

“Miss Priscilla lives there. All the younger men—and happen a few o’ the old uns too—will always be wending Good Intent way when the spring comes in. Habit o’ theirs, David—habit o’ theirs! I go that way myself sometimes.”

The blacksmith, not for the first time, was puzzled by Billy the Fool. The natural’s unerring instinct for all that made for the primitive in bird or beast or human-folk, when coupled with his child’s disdain of everyday good sense, would have troubled keener wits than David’s. He recognized Reuben Gaunt, moreover, from the other’s description, and he fingered his tools no longer, but followed Billy’s story.

“Came whistling down the road, did the littlish chap. I wondered, like, at what, for ye or me could have outsized him two or three times over.”

David laughed, though he was little in the mood for it. At every turn of his path to-day—whether he were talking to Priscilla, or dining in the hedge-bottom with Farmer Hirst, or talking to Billy—Gaunt’s shadow crossed his path. Yet he laughed, for he was simple, too, and big, and there was something that tickled his fancy in this quiet assumption that little men had little right to whistle on the Queen’s highway.

“Came whistling down, did he?” asked the blacksmith, strangely eager for the story.

“Ay, and stopped when he saw me. ‘Flick-a-moroo!’ says he, and twitched my chin, and seemed to think he’d played a jest on me.”

Again David chuckled; for there was none in the Dale of Strathgarth that could mimic a man as faithfully as Billy, and he had caught Gaunt’s mincing accent to the life.

“‘Flick-a-moroo,’ says I, easy as answering a blackbird when he calls. I didn’t like having my chin tickled, David, but I bided like, as one might say. And then he says—’tis queer and strange how little a grown man can be, yet can strut like a turkey-cock—‘Ye seem to know what’s the meaning offlick-a-moroo’ says he, ‘though it’s more than I do.’ ‘Ay, I know the meaning offlick-a-moroo,’ I says.”

“Well, lad?” asked David, waiting till he had finished a laugh that came before the end of the story.

“Ye see, David”—a happy, cunning look was in the natural’s face—“ye see, we were near t’ other side o’ the road yonder, and I minded there was a snug, far drop over th’ wall, and some young nettles growing soft as a feather-bed. So I says again, ‘Oh, ay,’ says I, ‘I know the meaning o’flick-a-moroo,’ says I; and I catches him, heels and head—’twould have made ye crack wi’ laughter, David, to see it—and I holds him over the wall awhile, and drops him soft as a babby into th’ nettles.”

Again David laughed. He could not help it. “And then, Fool Billy?” he asked.

“Why, I went and looked at him, and I says, ‘Oh, ay, I know what’s the meaning o’flick-a-moroo,’ says I—‘and so do ye, I’m thinking.’”

David felt a joy in this daft enterprise as keen as Billy’s.Was it not the expression of feelings which he had himself only checked with an effort up yonder in the mistal-yard?

“’Twas outrageous, and not like ye, Billy,” the smith observed, his whole face twinkling. “Should’st be more civil when strangers come to Garth.”

Billy looked apprehensive for a moment; of all things, after work, he hated the reproof of those whom, in his innocence, he fancied to be wiser than himself. A glance at David’s face, however, reassured him.

“Civil when strangers are civil, David,” he chuckled. For Billy, vague as his outlook upon morals was, showed himself persistently on the side of the Old Testament. “I’d bested him, ye see! Owned he didn’t know whatflick-a-moroomeant. Billy the Fool did.”

“We’ll have a change of play, Billy,” said the smith. “Just make the bonnie sparks go scummering up again, and I’ll to my work o’ making horseshoes.”

David stole many a look at the other’s face as they went forward with their labour. He was realizing that there were possibilities of tragedy about this lad with the big frame and the dangerous strength. It was a jest to drop a man gently into a bed of nettles—but what if Billy’s passion were roused in earnest? What if some one pierced through that slothful outer crust of his, and touched some deeper instinct in him?

“Might be a sort of earthquake hidden in poor Billy,” he muttered. “’Tis hard to guess what he’s thinking of, right at the beating heart of the chap.”

The smith would have been astonished, had he been able to sound these heart-beats of his comrade’s. It was Priscilla he was thinking of—Priscilla of the Good Intent—Priscilla, who brought the sunshine into Garth for one poor fool whenever she crossed his path.

“She’ll be fettling up the house-place now, I reckon,” said Billy suddenly.

“Who, lad?”

“Why, Miss Priscilla. ’Tis her time of day for doing on’t. Te-he, David! I hoicked yon chap fair grandly over th’ wall—Sunday clothes, andpritty-pratspeech, and all. Nettles don’t sting i’ March, they say—but I’ve known ’em do that same.”

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