CHAPTER XI
PRISCILLA of the Good Intent had been restless when she bade good night to David the Smith and provoked from him a discourteous farewell. She was more restless still when the birds awoke her soon after dawn of the next day and would not let her get to sleep again. So she got up, and lingered often at the open window, listening to the bird-calls and all the fret of newly-wakened life about the fields, while she washed, and dressed herself, and went through the simple rites that accompanied the beginning of the day in Garth.
She wondered if Reuben would like the blue print gown better than the lilac one. Her head a little on one side, a shy, quick splash of colour in her cheeks, she looked from one dress to the other, and could not make her choice. Cilla of the Good Intent was a changed lassie since that glamoured walk across the fields with Reuben; wearing-gear had troubled her little until yesterday, and she had chosen her gowns by instinct, without conscious thought about the matter.
“I was wearing the lilac one when he liked me first,” she said, with a low, happy laugh. “Perhaps, when he comes to-day, he will like to see me wearing it.”
Beyond the open window, where the fields sloped in green hollows to the edge of Garth village, the birds could not be quiet. Ousel-cocks were calling to their mates. Throstles were whistling, piping, singing, the full floodof their melody let loose; and, like practised singers, they could afford to play strange antics with their voices. Up and down the scale the speckled songsters ran; and now they whistled “come out”; and again they called, with pretence of great sobriety, “There’s love a-waiting, love’s a-waiting; love and his lile lass.” On the roof-tops starlings cheeped, until they could bear the thrushes’ rivalry no longer, and began to mimic them in cracked and foolish notes.
First love was harbouring with Priscilla. She was in tune with the birds and the leafing land, and she had to put a hand on the bosom of her lilac gown, because the gladness of the day went almost beyond bearing.
For once, she was earlier abroad than her father, who had allowed himself another hour of bed after yesterday’s hardship in the fields. Before it was time to set his breakfast on the board and pour out his tea for him, she had done a score of little things about the house, and in the dairy, and in the croft above the house where the fowls were up betimes.
“Am going up the fields, father,” she said, as she cleared the table after breakfast.
“Right, lile lass! Maids must saunter time and time i’ spring. Wholesome, too, I say—and I warrant ye’ve your day’s work trimly in your hands already.”
“Was down an hour before you, father,” she put in playfully.
“Ay, old bones are lazy bones. Shame on me, Cilla, lass, to break my fast at half after seven in the morning. Ye’ll not tell David?” he added, with the boisterous slyness that his daughter understood so well.
“I’m not likely to,” she said demurely, and went up-stairs to doff her apron and to don a hat.
Here, again, the earlier trouble beset her. What head-gearshould she choose? To be sure, she did not look to meet Reuben in the fields; but he might ride in for a talk with her father—might be in the croft among the hens and turkeys, or in the paddock, or in the house-place when she returned. She wanted Reuben to approve her when they met.
She made her choice at last, and Yeoman Hirst, just going out to see that his men were at their work, turned for a look at her as she came down the stair.
“Bless me, ye grow bonnier, Cilla!” he cried, with a muffled roar of true affection. “Tuts! ’Twill be a blithe lad that tempts ye to share house with him.”
Cilla answered nothing, but nodded gravely at Yeoman Hirst and went out by the door that opened on the garden. Up the young, green pastures she went, carrying first love with her. All things to-day were big with self-importance; and she, who had thought but little of herself till now, wondered if she would be always fair in Reuben’s eyes. She trusted so; for Gaunt seemed worth the best that she could bring him.
One deep regret she had, to temper the new gladness. She was holding a secret from her father, and the knowledge, just as it had done last night, brought a sense of shame to her from time to time. In the background, too, was another shadow—that of David the Smith, with his abiding care for her. But the day was not one for shadow except such as the sun and the breeze between them chased across the pastures. The world would not let Priscilla be out of mood with it; the reek of the drying grass, on which late dewdrops lingered still, the clamour of the birds, the restless pushing up toward the light of winter’s hidden shoots—all was a conspiracy against repinings or backward glances.
By the mossy lane past Brow-Top Ings she went, andwild-strawberry blooms, white and starry, peeped out at her from hidden nooks. Sometimes loitering, sometimes moving quickly, as if her thoughts outpaced her, she found the highest fields at last and saw the dark face of the moor above her. Not caring where she went, and obeying any whim, she climbed a fence or two and was free of the open heath. Here, too, spring’s advance was plainly marked, though it needs a subtler study to perceive it here than in the lower lands.
Priscilla had no thought of foreign countries now. Garth, whose face she knew—Garth, the familiar and well-tried—was full of mysteries, delights, surprises. Could she have ever thought, she wondered, that Reuben Gaunt had painted fairer lands for her than this in which she lived?
She lifted her head on the sudden, hearing a pad of hoofs across the peaty ground. Gaunt’s horse, weary of his freedom already and finding himself lost on the edge of an alien moor, was searching for his master. Cilla was the first human being he had seen since Widow Mathewson loosed his bridle and sent him wide across the heath; so now he came, with mincing steps across the broken ground, and laid his muzzle in her hand, and asked for guidance.
Cilla knew the horse; it was the best in Garth, indeed, and known to folk less interested than she in Reuben. Out from the blue sky and the sunshine fear came suddenly to Priscilla of the Good Intent. Apart from love of his master, there is always something of portent and foreboding when a riderless horse comes fawning at one’s hand.
“Where is the master?” cried Priscilla, soothing his muzzle with a hand that trembled.
The cob tossed his head. That was the question hehad brought to Cilla, trusting that in her wisdom she would give him a plain answer. She had none, it seemed, and presently, growing restless again, he shook his head free and cantered off.
Cilla watched him take wide circuits, slacken to a trot, then to a walk. He was snuffing the ground like a hound on trail, and last of all he seemed to find a clue, for he turned down the moor along a narrow track, found the gate open at the bottom and trotted out of sight. The girl turned, and wandered as aimlessly about the moor as the horse had done; she was sure that Reuben was lying somewhere in the heather, thrown and badly hurt, and unable to help himself.
What had she said to her father not long ago? That snow might follow all this April weather. And now she recalled the words, recalled the cold sense of foreboding that had accompanied them.
Tired and out of breath she halted to look about her. Again, like the horse, she sought for help—sought dumbly for it—when her own instincts were at fault.
“Good day to ye now. Te-he! Rare weather for the time o’ year,” came a voice at her elbow.
“Why, Billy, Billy, you startled me!”
“Wouldn’t do that—nay, not for a pipeful o’ baccy,” said Billy the Fool. “’Tis this way, as a body’s body might strive to put that same into plainish speech. I’d been peeping into a nest here, and a lile nest there, right up the pastures; and Fool Billy got to the moor, he did, and fancied he’d see if the peewits were a-laying on yond ancient ground o’ theirs up by Butter-grass Bogs. Then I sees ye—and, durn th’ odd button that’s left on my coat, Miss Priscilla, if I thought twice again o’ the peewits.”
Billy was always the courtier with Miss Good Intent;but she was too tired, too anxious, to give him more than a wan smile.
“Help me to find Mr. Gaunt,” she said. “His horse came to me just now, Billy, with no one in the saddle. He’s lying somewhere on the moor, and I cannot find him. You’re quick to find missing folk, they say, when they’re four-footed—well, find Mr. Gaunt for me.”
Cilla did not know her own voice; it was so eager, so impetuous. And she relied—and knew it, she who had been self-dependent until now—upon Billy the Fool.
The lad’s face altered. Across the plump and childish flesh stray wrinkles crept, as circles widen on a pool when a stone is thrown into its waters. But Cilla, though she looked at him with frank, steadfast gaze, could not guess what was passing through his mind. So it would be with Billy until the mould lay heavy on his coffin; a love greater than Yeoman Hirst’s he had for Cilla, a love greater than David the Smith’s; but his thoughts were prisoned up in an unwieldy bulk of flesh, and to the end he would be Billy the Fool, Billy the Well-Beloved, just as the moor about Cilla and himself to-day would always be the moor, telling her secrets to none.
“Well, now,” said Billy patiently, “I can find Mr. Reuben Gaunt for ye.”
“Is he—is he hurt?”
“Sound as ye or me. Hurt? Not the sort o’ man, he, to get into hurt. Slips through and about matters that might hurt him, like a snod trout when ye’re a-tickling of his underward parts in Eller Beck.”
Cilla did not heed the lad’s veiled dislike of Gaunt. She was too glad to know that he was safe to care for aught else.
“Tell me where to find him,” she said impatiently.
“I’ll take ye straight to where he is,” answered Billy promptly, and set off down the slope.
He led her into the fields below, then to a little dingle, all wooded in with thorns and slim, low hazel-shrubs. Not a word would he speak, though Priscilla asked him many questions by the way.
Gaunt might be safe; but to the girl there was something uncanny in the natural’s silence. The wrinkles were graven deeper now in his face, and Cilla, glancing at him now and then, was awed by the look—fixed, inscrutable—in the lad’s eyes.
“Chanced on him through coming to see a blackbird’s nest o’ mine,” he said at last, when they were nearing the dingle. “Had just pushed the twigs from together, and peered in, to find the hen-bird off her nest—and I happened, as Billy the Fool might say, to look beyond that same old tree o’ thorn, and down below I saw—”
“Yes?” asked the girl, fretting under all this needless mystery.
“What I’ll show ye, if so Mr. Reuben Gaunt be still there or thereabouts. Now, step ye pratly, Miss Priscilla, and keep your voice as low as any sparrow chirp; for the mother-bird may well be sitting again, and ’tis ill disturbing mated folk.”
Whether it were guile or instinct on Billy’s part, none would ever know. He might have taken Cilla to twenty equal vantage grounds from which to look into the hollow; but he made for the thorn-bush, saw the bright eyes of the bird watching him, took infinite pains to part the branches a little to the right without disturbing her, then turned to Cilla.
The girl, humouring what she fancied now must be some delusion of the lad’s, crept under his outstretched arm and looked down. A strip of broken turf, charredwith primroses, sloped to the bubbling stream, and at the water’s edge, Peggy was sitting with Gaunt’s arm about her waist.
Priscilla gave no cry. The stream, the two figures sitting by its rim, quivered and rocked, then circled round about her. The primroses made thin, waving lines of yellow across this evil, daytime vision. Then all was clear again—mercilessly clear—and Gaunt’s head was near to Peggy Mathewson’s, as last night it had been near to Cilla’s.
Priscilla of the Good Intent stepped back. She was pale, but willowy and upright still; out of the generations of the Hirsts that had fathered her, help came to her in the hour of need.
She walked slowly back into the field, Billy following close behind her. Whatever the natural had hoped to do by this exploit, it was plain that, to his own thinking, he had failed. He kept trying to find words, and, finding none, reached out his hands toward Priscilla, with a gesture piteous and helpless.
“Billy, I am troubled,” said Cilla, halting suddenly. “No, you are not to come with me this once! I am troubled—and, Billy, I must be alone.”
Grave and sweet her voice was, sweet and grave her consideration for the poor fool’s feelings when she had need to think only of her own.
The natural watched her cross the pastures; then his face twitched, and the lines came out on it afresh; and, after that, he threw himself on the ground and dug his fingers deep into the turf and cried like a three-year babe. Afterwards he sat up, his face vacant as of old.
“Seems as if Billy the Fool were shut up tight in a prison,” he muttered. “Wears what ye might call a band of iron all round his head-piece, like, and he thinks,and he thinks, and naught comes on’t. Miss Good Intent’s going to cry—and ’tis Fool Billy made her.”
Down yonder in the little dingle, Gaunt and Peggy Mathewson were saying good-by. For an hour they had sat by the stream, helpless in each other’s hands, as they had always been. Gaunt had once more told her frankly—he had found courage for that—that at all hazards he meant to wed Priscilla.
“Suppose I went and told her what ye’d said to me, and what ye’d looked at me, and all the sorry tale?” cried Peggy, roused from her desperate acquiescence in the gospel that what would be, would be. “Would you fare well, Reuben, with lile Miss Good Intent?”
“Well or ill, I should let you go with your tale. I’ll not stand between Priscilla and the truth, if she must have it—but I’ll not tell her it myself.”
“There again, you’re a puzzle, just a puzzle,” she said, with a quick return to her old manner. “Spoke like a man just then, ye. Other times ye’ll be half a man, or none at all. I’ve asked ye fifty times, Reuben, but could find myself no nearer an answer yet—what was left out of ye at birth?”
“Seems power to guide myself was left out of me,” he answered sharply. “Listen to me, Peggy! I’ve nothing much behind me to boast of—but I love Hirst’s lile lass.”
“Ay, so ye said,” put in the other drily. “It scarce helps me, Reuben, to hear it twice. For there’s my own life, as it happens, as well as yours to reckon with.”
Gaunt felt like a man whose feet are caught by the bog. The clean, dry land was near to him; but his feet were chained, and it was hard to pluck them out.
As for Peggy, she was ready to drift into any mood, and past days returned to her with sudden clearness.
“Do ye mind the day we went to Linsall Fair? ’Twas years ago, Reuben, but I mind it still. You bought a ring off a pedlar, and you set it on my finger. Lord, how it all comes back!” she broke off, looking softly at him, so that her likeness to her mother was altogether lost. “There was a young moon over the fell-top, and folk were dancing on the green; and you put the ring on my finger, and my heart went all soft and shameless. Reuben, you told me—”
“Told you we were wedded; and we laughed. Ay, I remember, Peggy!”
And so they fell to quiet talk of bygone times. Peggy wondered at her weakness, and Gaunt could not fathom the meaning of his newly-wakened liking to be with this lass when he should have been at Good Intent.
It was then that Billy the Fool guided Cilla to the thorn-bush where the mother-blackbird sat upon her nest; but neither Gaunt nor Peggy saw the stricken face that watched them for a moment between the twigs, then disappeared.
“Fine-weather days don’t last, somehow,” went on the girl. “We thought the world held no two folk, Reuben, save ye and me? Well, we were fools for our pains.”
“They’re good to look back on now and then, all the same, those days.”
“Oh, where’s the use in your looking back? You feel no warmer in winter-time by thinking of last summer’s heat.Good to look back on?’Tis easy for ye to talk, Reuben!”
Gaunt got to his feet, and helped her up. “Time we were moving, Peggy,” he said curtly—for he was fearing the girl’s despair and tenderness. “Yond horse of mine will be tearing the reins to bits, for I’ve kept him longer tied to a gate-post than he ever was before.”
“So ’tis good-by?” she said, moving beside him up the stream.
“Ay, for it must be. Bygones are bygones, Peggy.”
“True—if ye let ’em be. Never fear, Reuben! I’m as proud as Miss Good Intent, or maybe more so, and I’ll not trouble ye. Begin with your good life, lad, and see if ye can carry it! And for all reward I’ll ask to see Miss Priscilla’s face when a year’s gone by and the first bairn has come.”
Reuben winced. None in Garth would have given him credit for it; but, weak of purpose as he was, his love for Cilla touched clean, wholesome thoughts that had been stifled long ago. He resented Peggy’s easy speech touching his marriage and what might, or might not, come afterwards. The girl knew what was passing in his mind, and laughed—not carelessly, but with the sadness that was rooted deep in all her moods.
“Sorry to hurt ye, Reuben,” she said. “You’re a delicate sort o’ plant, and need a wall ’twixt ye and the wind.”
They were silent until Intake Farm was well in sight. Peggy halted in the dip of the fields where the ragged thorn-trees grew. She looked long and hard at Gaunt, and again there was a strange beauty in her face.
“Was going to ask ye for a last kiss, but I’m past that, Reuben. Lad, I wonder will ye ever know the kisses we might have had! I think ye’ll waken sometimes in the night, and hunger for what’s past your getting any longer. Fratch as we may, we were made each for the other, if your een were open wide enough to see it.”
“Peggy, lass,” he began, moving nearer to her.
“Nay, Reuben! Over and done with, like a last year’s nest. Yond’s your way; I’m going wide into the moor, to cool a touch of some daft fever that’s come over me.”
Irresolute, and glancing backward often, Reuben went up toward Ghyll Farm. Life, that had seemed so plain last night upon the Garth highroad, was tangled now. The fierce, low passion of the girl—her certainty of heart-break, with little complaining—a shrewd guess that she was right in saying he would wake at night and think of her—these were out of keeping with the primrose lanes of yesterday.
“’Tis hard to go straight,” said Gaunt at last, with a shrug of his shoulders, as he reached the paddock of Ghyll Farm.
No horse was tethered to the gate; but over the top bar leaned Widow Mathewson, her brown arms naked to the sunlight and a look of grim derision on her face.
“Seeking a horse, Mr. Gaunt?” she asked, with studied courtesy.
“Yes, I tethered him to the gate here.”
“Oh, ’twill be the one I loosened an hour or so agone. Found him here, when I came from driving sheep across the moorland; and I hadn’t a use for him myself.”
“Thank you,” said Reuben, falling in with the widow’s own quiet tone. “Sensible thing, Mrs. Mathewson, to loose a cob whenever ye find him tied to a gate-post by the bridle.”
“So I thought myself—and, by that token, I slipped the bridle from his mouth and laid it under the wall here. Will ye take it with ye, Mr. Gaunt, or shall Peggy bring it over to Marshlands? We’re simple, and ye’re reckoning to be one o’ the gentry-born nowadays; so I fancy ye’d think it ill demeaned ye, like, to go carrying a horse’s bridle in your hands.”
Gaunt took the bridle, keeping his temper as best he could. Quiet or stormy, Widow Mathewson always cut like hail against his face.
“Perhaps you’ll tell me where the cob went, the last you saw of him?”
“Up the moor, and seemed to relish his liberty. He may be at Linsall by this time—though I doubt the marshes on that side o’ the heather would stop him—or happen he’s taken t’ other road, and got to Keta’s Well—or—”
“Then where the devil am I to look for him?” snapped Reuben.
“God knows—which, as I’ve seen life, means always that human-folk can’t guess. Where are Peggy’s wits, Mr. Gaunt? God knows again—for bless me if her mother does.”
Reuben went off, the bridle dangling from his arm; and Widow Mathewson turned across the paddock.
“Reckon he’ll have a longish walk before him, any way,” she said. “Beggars don’t ride most times—and neither does Reuben Gaunt to-day.”
Gaunt himself abandoned all thought of seeking the cob. It would reach home, or he would hear of its whereabouts to-morrow. Meanwhile, he was glad of this further respite from his talk with Yeoman Hirst.
“It would be too late, by the time I walked to Good Intent,” he thought. “I’ll ride up about supper-time, and catch John Hirst in his ripe, evening humour.”
When he reached home, his cob was waiting for him on his own lawn. It had jumped the round, grey wall that guarded the highroad, and now, after a morning’s tribulation, was seeking for grass-stalks on the shaven lawn.
Horses and dogs were no harsh judges of Reuben Gaunt; and now, as the cob came whinnying to him, he said to himself with a laugh that it was the first friendly welcome he had had since riding up to Ghyll.
Priscilla had gone across the fields, carrying first disillusionment now in place of first love—the love that she had buried yonder in the wooded dingle. She felt no anger toward Reuben; it was as if she had seen him die suddenly and without warning, had seen him pass into a dim land of which she had no ken; and the stupor of her grief for him was on her.
For herself, the silver thread was loosened that had bound her to the spring. Sunlight and shadow on the pastures, the rising skynote of the lark, the fretting of the curlews and the plover; she saw and heard them, but could no longer understand their beauty. Between herself and life there was a dead, grey wall; and cowslips nodded vainly to her as she passed, and, when the lambs came frisking toward her, she did not heed them.
She was glad, on reaching Good Intent, to find that her father had finished his early dinner and was out in the fields. Mechanically she set about her duties, forgetting to take food herself; and, like David, she found a certain ease, a certain deadening of pain, in moving forward with her work. When Hirst came in about half after four, she was pale, and her eyes were listless, but she was mistress of herself and ready with a greeting.
“Thou’st overtired thyself, lile lass,” said the farmer, patting her shoulder as he crossed to the big hearth-chair. “Eh, well! Maids will roam i’ the spring, and forget their victuals; and maybe, after all, it does them no great harm.”
A gleam of comfort came to Cilla. She had no secret now from this big-voiced, big-hearted father, who looked for each passing change across her face as a lover might have done. Sad she might be, but she could look at Yeoman Hirst again and feel no shame.
“The spring tires one, father,” she answered quietly.
“Should think it did!” cried the other, settling himself with a pleasant uproar into his chair. “Blanketed in snow one week, and blanketed the next in sunshine. Ne’er heed, lassie; I’m no way for quarrelling myself with all this warmth that’s bringing up the clover fair like a fairy’s trick. Cilla, there’s David coming at five of the clock to help wi’ yond durned turkey-pen. I’m dry, lass, and I won’t deny a measure of ale would hearten up my innards. Let it be the light ale, though; light ale, light hearts, they say in Garth—and, bless me, ye need a lightish heart and a clearish head when it comes to netting off a pen.”
David the Smith, punctual to five—by his favourite clock, the sun—was waiting in the croft when Hirst came out.
“’Evening, David!”
“’Evening, Farmer! And as likely a one as we’ll see this side o’ Michaelmas.”
“Ay—oh, ay. Wind a thought shrewder than it was but nought to matter.”
David pointed to the upper corner of the croft. “Thought ye told me all my stakes were lying where I laid ’em? Why, they’re tight in their places, Farmer, and the skirting-boards all nailed trim and level.”
The other scratched his shaven chin and laughed. “Between you and me, David,” he said, lowering his voice to a confidential bellow, “I didn’t speak quite the truth. Can drive a stake as true as any man, and can nail the boards on trim enough; but, when it comes to netting, my men and me are done, and ’twas that we wanted ye for to-day. It all comes o’ listening to new-fangled notions.”
“Well, now, as for that, I know naught o’ netting myself,” said David, glancing at the plump, white rolls ofwire. “Always fenced the run with boarding, I. Who brought the notion into Garth?”
“Reuben Gaunt, I fancy; though, if I’d known at first that the notion came from that quarter, there’s never a yard o’ netting would have come into my lile croft. Well, we’ve got the job on hand, David, and here my two men are, and we’d best get agate with it, liking it or no.”
The farm-hands nodded cheerily to David. “Rum goings on i’ Garth,” said one. “Would as soon handle a bunch o’ thorn-prickles as yond lump o’ wire. But Farmer Hirst knows best—oh, ay, he’s for knowing what is best.”
“And if he doesn’t, ye’ve got to think so,” put in the farmer drily. “Here, lads, buckle to.”
The men handled the wire gingerly at first, then with the carelessness begotten of a great despair. The uprights—seven feet high—were standing like so many fingers, pointing to the dappled sky; and, because the ground rose sharply toward the further limit of the pen, the upper poles looked down upon their neighbours in the valley.
“We’ll begin on the level, like,” said Hirst, setting a box of nails on the turf at his feet, and holding his hammer, so David said, “as if he were going to fell a bullock.”
The beginning of the work was simple. The three unrolled the wire and got one end of it into its place, while Hirst nailed it fast against the upright. Then they stretched it to the next upright, and so went forward blithely.
“There’s naught so much to be feared, after all,” cried John Hirst, his voice rousing a sentry-rook that was watching them from the elm tree in the corner.
“Naught, save sore hands,” assented David. “Though I’ll own, Farmer, I never met stuff so maidish, and socrinkly-like to handle, as this same netting. Now, stretch it, lads! There, ’tis all in place for ye, Farmer.”
They finished netting the low end of the pen, and turned the corner; but soon the level of the ground grew higher, and, though the poles about them were stationed true in height, the netting would go lower and lower, till it threatened to be merged altogether in the rising ground above. They twisted it, and pulled it out of shape, and talked to it as if it were a bairn to be coaxed into a good temper. Naught served; the upper line of the wire descended constantly, and the look of this late-builded turkey-pen was a thing for the soberest man to laugh at.
John Hirst threw down his hammer at last, and kicked the box of nails against the wall, and stood off from his handiwork and looked at it.
“I’m not one to swear at any time,” he said, slowly, “butdangyond netting. Dang Reuben Gaunt, moreover, who brought new-fangled notions into Garth.”
The four men retreated to the wall, and sat thereon, glowering at the turkey-pen.
“Daren’t trust myself with speech, I,” said David. “Should say terrible things o’ yond wire-stuff, once I gave leave to my tongue.”
“I tell ye what,” said Hirst—his farm-men laughed to see his temper go by the board for once—“I tell ye what, David. We’ll rive the whole lot down, and build up the pen with good, honest lathes like your father did, and mine. And if any man speaks o’ wire-netting in my hearing for a year to come—why, I’ll ding him on the lugs.”
“Garth’s right, after all,” murmured one farm-man to the other behind his hand. “Them turkeys will be penned afore, or a lile while after, the next breeding-time.”
“What’s that ye’re saying?” roared Hirst, turning on the whispering pair.
“Nay, naught—just naught at all.”
“Well, ye’d better not say it just now, all the same. David, I fair hate to be beaten by a job! Let’s rive it down, and bundle it into a corner, and have done wi’ it. Garth notions will be good enough for me in future, I warrant ye.”
David, too, was nettled, for it was seldom he went wrong in anything concerned with handicraft. “Comes o’ bringing foreign truck into Garth Valley,” he growled. “Why ye and me should take to handling such outlandish stuff at our time o’ life, Farmer, is more than I can tell.”
The gate of the croft was opened quietly, and Billy the Fool sauntered idly towards them. The natural gave no hint, in look or bearing, of the woful trouble he had caused himself and Cilla up yonder on the brink of the wooded hollow.
“Now, good day, misters all!” was his greeting, as he slouched up, his hands thrust listlessly into the pockets of his ancient trousers. “’Tis what Billy the Fool would call a fine evening for the time o’ year; and yet there’s somewhat cold, and wet, and sharp, blowing up from Easterby Hill.”
“Tuts!” said Yeoman Hirst. “Ye’re as wise as a fox when it’s scenting a hen-house, Billy; but this weather is nailed to the sky, I tell ye, and won’t shift for a brace o’ weeks.”
“Te-he,” answered Billy amicably. “I’m just telling ye what I think myself—what I smell i’ my nostrils, like—but I was never one to guess what my betters were thinking. Now, masters. I’ve been wondering.”
“Tell us, then,” said Hirst.
It was odd that he and David—the two most good-humouredmen in Garth—had lost their tempers utterly to-night, and that it needed Billy’s advent to show them the droll side of life again.
“I’m wondering if there is a fill o’ baccy among the four o’ ye—and maybe a match to kindle a light with. Have been in terrible lonesome parts all day, and nigh forgotten what a pipeful tastes like.”
The sun was getting down toward Sharprise Hill now, and the smoke of Billy’s pipe rose so that the slanting sunbeams caught it tranquilly, and the gnats, playing in this warmth of spring new-found after the long winter, drifted away in cloudy streams from a scent which they abhorred.
“Ye look terrible low in spirits, all of ye,” said Billy, after he was sure that his pipe was drawing well. “I fancied, when I came by just now, I’d never seen four men sitting on a fence and looking so empty, like, of what they lacked.”
He had not seemed to look at them until he neared the fence; yet twenty yards away he had known what their mood was.
“Did ye ever handle wire-netting, Billy?” asked Hirst.
“Nay, not that I can call to mind.”
“Well, go up to yond turkey-pen, and see the way the netting runs into the hillock, choose what a body does with it; and, if ye can tell us wise folk how to set the durned thing straight, there’s another fill o’ baccy for you, Billy, and a fill of ale, and another match to light your pipe with.”
Billy strolled up to the pen—the rents in his breeches showed the brown flesh through—and seemed not to look at it at all. Then he came back.
“Misters, might a Fool Billy say somewhat to wise folk?” he asked.
“Say on, Billy, lad! Say on.”
“Well, now, if Fool Billy were going to climb a hill, like, after what ye might call a stretch o’ level walking, he’d sit him down first, would Billy, at th’ hill-foot, and think a deal about it.”
“Ay, warrant he would!” chuckled David.
“Then he’d start fair again for yond up-hill climb. Do the like wi’ your netting, misters? Cut ’un off, says Billy, where he begins to go up-hill—cut ’un off as clean as a whistle, and start him fair again.”
David’s practical mind grasped at once that this was the right solution of the difficulty, and he laughed nearly as loud as Yeoman Hirst.
“Seems there’s only one wise man in Garth! To think of us, Farmer, fuming and fretting, and wasting our time; and Billy strolls up, and looks about him, and sets us straight in a minute. How d’ye do it, Billy, lad?”
“Nay, I do naught. I’d be feared to, David! A fearsome thing ’twould be if I’d to work like other-some of ye.”
Like a great general Billy stood by, and watched the progress of the work, when the four men set about their task again. His advice proved sound, and the netting began to climb the hill in an orderly, straight line.
As they worked—the sun lying now, a ball of softened fire, upon the edge of Sharprise Hill—the gate of the croft was opened again, impatiently this time, and Reuben Gaunt came through on horseback. Billy had seen and heard him long before the others had; but he was the only one who did not turn his head about as Gaunt approached.
“Good day, Mr. Hirst,” said Reuben, not pleased to find David and Billy here, yet striving to cover up his uneasiness.
“Good day, Mr. Gaunt,” answered Hirst, his facegrown hard as a bit of limestone grit. “I’ll thank ye to close that gate behind ye.”
“Why? There are no beasts in the croft.”
“I’m not here to argufy. When you find a gate shut, shut it behind ye—that’s what I was taught as a lad.”
It had been a day of insults for Gaunt, and he longed to snap some hasty answer out and ride away; but his errand robbed him of this slight consolation, and he made the best of an awkward matter.
“Billy, just run and shut that gate,” he said.
The natural turned at last, puffing gently at his pipe. “Would oblige ye, I, but ’tis one o’ my playtime-days, Mr. Reuben Gaunt. I’d have bad dreams to-night if I did any work.”
One of Hirst’s men ran to shut the gate, and Reuben looked the farmer in the eyes.
“I want a word with you.”
“Say it here, then, for I’m throng with work, and this job has to be finished off to-night.”
“It can’t be said here. ’Tis a matter of private business, Mr. Hirst.”
“Well, I can spare ten minutes. David, see that these idle rogues get forrard wi’ their work,” he added, nodding toward his farm-men as he moved off.
Gaunt dismounted and slipped the bridle through his arm, and the two were half across the croft before Billy found speech.
“Is yond turkey-cock o’ yours abroad yet, Farmer, as a body’s body might say?” he called.
“Ay,” answered Hirst, without turning his head.
“Well, pen the devil up, says Fool Billy. Pen ’un up, Farmer!”
When he had watched Hirst and Reuben Gaunt goslowly through the gate at the far end of the croft and up into the pastures, the natural relapsed into his former attitude. “Get forrard, ye three wise folk!” he said, with inscrutable gravity of mien. “We’ll have th’ old devil wired and boarded in, come to-morrow’s morn.”
Gaunt found no easy task before him, now that he was alone with Hirst in the upper field. The yeoman, hearty and courteous to gentle and simple alike, could rarely bring himself to be civil toward Reuben. As he put it to himself, John Hirst had a “feeling as if a rat was crawling over his chest when Gaunt of Marshlands was about.” The younger man’s courage was chilled, moreover, by the open insult Hirst had given him in face of the farm-men.
“Well?” said the farmer, after a long silence.
Reuben Gaunt took the fence, as he had taken many another on hunting-days. “Cilla has said she’ll marry me, and I rode down to tell you.”
Hirst gasped, then rubbed his eyes, as if he woke from an evil dream and strove to shake it off.
“Say that again,” he muttered.
“Cilla has promised to marry me, and I’m going to be better than the Reuben Gaunt you’ve known.”
It was seldom that the yeoman could find a low voice or a harsh one; but now he did, and his big, clean-cut face had in it the look of a man when he meets an enemy in righteous battle and lusts to kill him.
“You’re a liar, Gaunt of Marshlands,” he said quietly.
Gaunt flushed. “Will you come down to the house, then, and ask Cilla with me there, whether or no I’m a liar?”
“Ay, by God I will! Seems you’re a fool, as well as a liar, or you’d never put it to the test. What, my Cilla mate wi’ the likes o’ ye? Ye’ve been drinking overmuchat race-meetings, or somewhat of that sort, to fancy such outlandish nonsense.”
“Come to the house with me, and ask Cilla,” said the other, obstinately crushing down his spleen. “Is that fair, or isn’t it, Mr. Hirst?”
“Fair? There’s naught fair when you come by with your slippery ways. But I’ll take ye into my house, all the same—for the last time—and I’ll set ye face to face with my lass, and we’ll shame ye out of Garth, she and me between us.”
The wind, that had been quietly veering all day to north of west, blew shrewdly as they went across the croft, at the far end of which Billy was overlooking the work of his three comrades. Hirst did not heed the change of wind; he was warm with faith of his little lass, and hot with anger against Gaunt.
“Come ye in,” said Hirst, leading Reuben round to the front door, whereas he would have ushered David in with little ceremony through the outer kitchen. “Come ye in, Mr. Gaunt, and I shall offer ye neither bite nor sup, though that would seem a shameful thing for Good Intent.”
“Am needing none,” said Reuben. “Seems a queer thing, all the same, that when I come to you with a straight tale—”
“A straight tale?” snapped Hirst “What about my lass? Lad, ye’re crazy to think I don’t know your doings five years agone all up and down the countryside. Step in, however, and we’ll thrash this business out for good and all.”