CHAPTER XIII
PRISCILLA was not apt to lie awake nights for long. The keen air of the fells, the round of her daily work about the farm, forbade it. Yet, after she had talked with David Blake in the moon-dusk of Garth Street, had talked with her father afterwards beside the hearth, she could not sleep, for shame of the kiss that she had given to Reuben Gaunt, as they walked through fairy-land last night—bitter shame of the scene that Billy the Fool had shown her between the parted twigs of a bush wherein a nesting blackbird sat. She felt a great loneliness, an impulsive longing for the hand of David; she seemed to stand in a wood where all the trees were thick and heavy, and all the wonted tracks were lost.
When at last she fell to sleep, dreams chased her. First David was laughing at her as he said farewell, and got aboard a ship with big, white sails. Then Reuben Gaunt was sinking in a moorland bog, and lifted his two hands in appeal to her, and she was crossing some stubborn waste of ling to reach him. Cilla of the Good Intent was little used to nightmares, and she was glad when at last the dawn stepped boldly into her room and roused her. Her first thought was of the farm, her second of the silence that lay about the house. The light which came through the casement seemed brighter, colder than a usual April dawn. There was no early challenge of the throstle, no sleepy call of a linnet, and such soundsof human life as came from the roadway were strangely muffled.
With a sense of trouble and foreboding Priscilla went to the window, which she had left open to the soft night wind not many hours ago. The low sill was an inch deep in snow. She looked out, and in the white, strong dawn-light saw nothing but whitened branches, whitened mistal-roofs, and flakes that fell persistently. She stood there awhile, watching the storm increase, listening to the wind which, quiet till now, began to whisper round the gables overhead. It was no playful shower, such as often came in late April, waiting only for the midday sun to banish it; yet, knowing the signs of weather as she did, hearing that note in the rising wind whose meaning was plain enough to all country folk, Priscilla felt no surprise. It was fitting. Spring, with its make-believe of primrose banks, and birds that litanied the sunshine, was a dream she had dreamed in company with Reuben Gaunt. That had passed, and hard winter had set in again. She was glad that it was so. Winter was a time of stress and hardship, that left no leisure for dreams. Better the snow than the soft air of an April gloaming, when all the tribes of furred and feathered things went wooing and set the like key-note for more sober human-folk.
Priscilla turned to the ewer, with quick change of mood. She blamed herself for those few moments at the window. There would be real work ready to her hand below stairs before this storm was ended. The chill of the water heartened her, and afterwards she did not halt to choose between the blue gown and the lilac. She donned instead a rough, short-skirted gown of homespun, and went down to the house-place. Her father was standing in front of the fire, which Susan, the farmmaid, had newly lit, and the yeoman’s face was grave.
“Thought thou wert never coming, lass,” he growled, trying to find his usual good temper. “You know there’s a lamb-storm blowing up behind all this bonnie snow?”
“Yes, father—yes, I know, I’m ready.”
“Ay, but is breakfast? Susan is young, and late—and you are young and late, lile Cilla—you’d do without your breakfasts, both of you, but old folk don’t start the day on an empty stomach, lass.”
Susan came in at the moment with a dish of steaming bacon, set round about with eggs, and the farmer sat down to it with the impatience of a man who is thinking only of his work and of the need to find sustenance for the day’s battle. Cilla poured out the tea for him, brought it to his elbow, ruffled her hand across his thick, grey hair.
“The lambs are needing you, father. Let me come up with you into the fields.”
“You? You’ve work enough, lile lass, when we bring the lamblings down into the fold.”
“But not till then, father. Let me go with you. I shall be restless, else.”
Hirst had all but finished half the dish of bacon, and three eggs to go with it. He felt ready for the day’s work, and, as the way of a true man is, his temper gained in cheeriness.
“I’m like a lover to your whims, lile Cilla. If you’re set on coming—well, I’ve a sort o’ fondness for the tread o’ your heels beside me. Hark ye! The wind’s rising fast, and there’s a snarl at the tail on’t. ’Tis a bitterish end to spring warmth, this. Don your high boots, lass, and don ’em quickly.”
Cilla went, with the pleasant, quiet obedience which smoothed many a rough road for Yeoman Hirst. She was back again before he had time to grow impatient.
“Now, though I say it, Cilla, ye look workmanlike and trim,” roared her father. And he laughed, as good fathers will, with some surprise that he should have reared a bairn so full of comeliness.
“Father, there’s work up yonder in the snow,” she answered, with a gentle laugh. “You can praise me afterwards.”
“That’s true,” said Hirst soberly. “Praise can always bide like money in a safe-sure bank. Work willun’t bide; it never did and it never will, lile Cilla.”
The road in front of Good Intent was thick with snow when they went out, for the wind was harrying it as farm dogs chase the roving sheep. Hirst’s own dogs, when he whistled them from their shelter under the windward side of a mistal, came trudging to him through a lake of velvety, soft stuff that hindered them.
They went up into the pastures, father and daughter, and it was hard to tell where the ewes lay with their lambs, or where the white hummocks of the snow were lifted by the wind. Hirst’s farm-hands, cursing the weather as they followed him, were puzzled to know snow from fleece, and the dogs were full of petulance. The snow came down in wet, big flakes. The wind sobbed and wailed, and rose now and then in sudden gusts, driving the snow-dust savagely across their eyes. And through the wind-gusts, and the sharp, impatient barking of the dogs, there came the wild crying of the sheep, the pitiful and weakling cry of lambs half frozen.
One by one they found the ewes, and it was odd to see how the mothers, not valiant at usual times, daft-witsbleating to the empty sky for wits denied them—grew brave and full of strange resource.
If a farm-lad gathered a couple of lambs into his arms—twins, which Farmer Hirst had boasted of last night—the mother would grow manlike for the moment, would seek for a point of vantage and charge him down. When Priscilla—loved by all four-footed folk, and by most of the two-footed kind—when Priscilla gathered a lamb into her arms, to carry it down to the fold, it was the same. There was panic among these bleak-witted ewes; and, like all dreads, it brought out some hidden source of courage.
David the Smith, scenting trouble, came trudging through the snow to help his neighbour. He passed Cilla with a quiet greeting—thinking overmuch of last night’s farewell to her in Garth Street—and busied himself at once with rescue of the flock. Simple of mind, strong of body, he set to his task at once, shouldered a ewe that was sick with the cold, and carried her down the pastures and along Garth Street, until he came to the turn of the road that led up to Good Intent. Widow Lister was at her door, as usual, walking up and down in front of her garden-strip, her feet protected from the snow by huge pattens, her eyes opened wide for any chance of gossip. She set her arms akimbo on seeing David, and her tongue was stilled for a moment. Indeed, David, swinging steadily forward under the burden that hung limp across his shoulders, his face full of great purpose and the tranquillity of strength, seemed to fill the snow-set canvas of Garth village.
“Why, David,” said the widow, in an awed voice, “you’re marrow to yond print o’ the Good Shepherd that’s hanging ower my chimbley-piece.”
David halted. The roots of his religion lay deep, andmaybe for that reason he seldom spoke of it. “Oh, whisht, woman!” he said, with a shy, odd air of rebuke. “I’m a plain man o’ my hands, with a day’s work to do. I’ll thank ye not to name me in company with my betters.”
“There, now!” put in the widow plaintively. “You’re the first man I’ve come across who fought shy o’ praise. Youarelike, David, all the same—the ninety-and-nine you’ve left to bring the lost odd ’un in, just the same as in the pictur.”
“Ay,” answered David, as he moved forward, “but some o’ the ninety-and-nine are needing me, too, soon as I’ve gotten this lile ewe into shelter.”
The widow let him make ten paces forward; then, heedless as a child that every halt was so much added to the dead weight on his shoulders, she tripped after him, her pattens moving nimbly through the snow.
“Oh, David! I knew there was summat on my mind.”
David turned with weary good nature. “Well, if ’tis as heavy as what I carry on my back, Widow, I’m sorry for ye. What is ’t?”
“Nay, ’tis nobbut a bit of a window-fastener that willun’t catch. ’Tis such a little job, like, I thought you could slip in, any odd moment you had to spare and mend it for a poor, lone body. When the wind rises o’ nights, David, it wakes me fro’ my sleep, rattling the window so.”
“You and your loneliness!” grumbled David. “Well, I may think of it by and by.”
“Oh, and, David—”
But the smith went forward, and laid the ewe in warm quarters, and struck up again into the snow by a track that avoided Widow Lister. Priscilla, meanwhile, had gone far up the brink-fields, in search of any roving sheep that might have been overblown before they could reachthe lower pastures. It was Cilla’s way to seek always after the folk who had strayed.
She found no sheep; but, at the top of the highest brink-field she halted for a moment to look out and up to the face of the bleak high moors. The snow came sparingly now, the wind was falling, and far behind Sharprise Hill a yellow light crept softly through the snow-clouds.
At the wall-corner where Priscilla stood, three long pasture-fields met at the common drinking-trough—a round, deep pool, fed by a spring which bubbled up from the limestone at the bottom. One field of the three was owned by Gaunt, and he, too, was seeking strayed ewes this morning. They met face to face, he on one side of the pool, Cilla on the other, and they were silent for awhile, embarrassed by their memories of yesterday.
“A fit ending, eh, to sunshine and spring weather?” said Gaunt at last, with bitterness and something near to self-contempt.
Cilla’s pride had come to her aid. The wild-rose colour was in her cheeks, but her head was held high, and there was delicate scorn in the frank glance with which she answered Reuben’s.
“You are not used to weather, as we stay-at-homes are. It is all in the year’s work, Mr. Gaunt. To-morrow, or the next day after, we shall have forgotten there was snow at all—unless we lose any of the lambs.”
Gaunt was not slow-witted, and he understood that Cilla had taken firmer ground than he, and meant to stand on it hereafter. There was to be no hint between them, such as he had implied just now, that they had shared a day whose magic both regretted. He began to wonder if her heart had been in the matter at all, and a wayward impulse came to him to piece their broken love-tale together all afresh. Billy the Fool came up thefield behind them. David, as he carried a couple of lambs to Good Intent, had met him in the roadway, and had suggested that there was rare play-work to be done in helping Farmer Hirst with the sheep.
“Never found such a game, I,” David had said, with his laugh that shook the hills, “as setting a daft ewe over your shoulders, or carrying a couple o’ lambkins i’ your arms. The sport might have been made for ye, lad Billy.”
So Billy had sought the pastures; and he chuckled soberly, as he scrunched through the snow, to think “what a terrible, queer notion David had for lighting on a bit of frolic.”
It was only when he topped the last rise of the field, and saw Gaunt talking to Priscilla across the pool, that his face changed. At times the clouds and the content that sheltered Billy from the realities of life were riven asunder, and it was always the one picture that he saw—a way-worn woman coming with her child to the gate of Marshlands, the harsh refusal at the door. Now, as he went up through the snow, he could recall the bitter cold of that long ago night when his mother and he had sought shelter in the porchway of a barn. Gaunt’s voice, which was his father’s over again, so Garth folk said, had recalled the past to Billy when earlier in the year he dropped Reuben into a bed of growing nettles. The sight of him now, his closeness to Priscilla, roused, not Billy’s strength, but his will to use it blindly. Before Cilla knew that he was near, he had passed her, had climbed the wall, had put his arms about Gaunt and carried him to the edge of the pool. Hirst himself, or big David, could not have resisted the village fool when his quietness turned to fury; and Gaunt was slight of build.
Priscilla was bewildered by the suddenness of theattack; but her habit was to meet emergencies—such as Reuben’s disloyalty and the change in April’s weather—with the reliance that came from clean living under the clean, steady hills. She saw that Billy was swinging his burden lightly over the pool; and in Billy’s face she saw a tumult.
“Billy,” she said quietly. “Billy, what are you doing?”
He turned as a dog does when his master whistles, and the evil left him—left him Fool Billy once again, with surprise in his helpless face that he should ever have done amiss. He set Gaunt gently down upon his feet, and Reuben, sick at heart, went through the snow, and round the bend of Little Beck Wood, and out of sight.
Billy climbed the wall, and stood a little behind Cilla, waiting for chastisement.
“What made you do it?” asked Cilla of the Good Intent.
“Well, now, I could no way rightly tell ye.” His blue eyes were fixed on hers, with the look which few who cared for dogs or horses could resist. “Seems a sort o’ blindness comes on a body when he sees Reuben Gaunt, and I put my head down like a bull and made for him. Terrible weak in the head Billy is.”
“But it was all—all so unlike you, Billy. What did you mean to do with—with the man you held in your arms?”
“Do?” he answered, with quiet surprise. “Why, drown him, Miss Cilla, as ye do wi’ kittens when they’re not wanted, like. Am fond o’ kittens, I, but they do get terrible cumbersome at times.”
“Oh, lad, go down to David at the forge,” said Cilla, with a sudden laugh that was made up of pity and of helplessness. “Go down to David, and tell him I sentyou to him for guidance. And, Billy, promise me that—lad Billy, for my sake, promise you’ll not play with life and death again.”
His muddled wits caught the one right appeal. “For your sake, eh?” he asked. There was surrender and question in his blue eyes.
“For my sake—yes, of course. Always for my sake, Billy.”
“Te-he!” chuckled Billy. “Will keep that notion right in the middle of my daft head-piece, so I will. Give ye good day, Miss Cilla.”
He turned and went down the slope with great cheeriness, taking a bee-line through the snow and breasting the drifts with the strong, unhurried ease that marked his days. Cilla did not know it, but her plea that he should do all things for her sake had made for Billy’s happiness. To please her was frolic of the sort he enjoyed at David’s forge, but a rarer and more pleasant frolic.
Mrs. Mathewson rented the third of the pastures that clustered round the drinking-pool, and she was leaning over her wall, a still, passionless figure. She had been a looker-on at the struggle between Gaunt and the fool; she was always a looker-on these days, grave, hard of face, a little disdainful of the tumults that beset younger folk. If swayed either way by feeling, she was pleased that Gaunt should be belittled in Priscilla’s eyes; in no case could it do him harm to meet with a tumble or two in his erratic course. And yet, in some odd way of her own, she “had a silly weakness, like” for this will-o’-the-wisp who had caused her heartache in the past, and would cause her heartache, doubtless, many times again.
“I’ve lost no lambs, Miss Priscilla,” said the widow, enjoying Cilla’s startled backward glance. “Hope ye’vehad the same good luck yourselves down at Good Intent. Oh, to be sure, there’s weather, and weather again, and naught but weather, up here on the heights. We’ve got to put up wi’ ’t, like ye put up wi’ a silly, daft bairn.”
“You startled me,” said Cilla, meeting Mrs. Mathewson’s quiet glance. “Yes—oh, yes, our lambs are all ingathered, or nearly all. I came up here to seek the last two that are missing.”
“And found Reuben Gaunt, instead, and a big lad holding him over the pool? Well, they’re neither on ’em lambs, an’ neither on ’em lions; but are just what ye might call a mixture ’twixt the two.”
Harsh this woman might be, but to Cilla she stood just now as something strong and honest, something that had suffered, and stood firm, and been beaten by the weather out of all comely shape.
“I care so little for gossip,” she began, moved by a sudden impulse to confide in this woman who was grey and hard as the wall on which she leaned. “Yet it seems to meet you at every turn, and leaves its mark like the fever. Mrs. Mathewson, why should Billy go past himself like this? He’s so quiet at usual times—and then he loses himself in fury at sight of Mr. Gaunt. They say, of course—”
“Oh, ay,” put in the widow drily; “and they say right once i’ a way. They’re half-brothers. I should know, for I kept house for Gaunt’s father before I was fool enough to marry Mathewson o’ Ghyll.”
Cilla did not wish to hear the tale, and yet she stood there, irresolute, her face half turned to Mrs. Mathewson’s.
“You heard tell o’ the night when a stranger-woman came knocking at the door o’ Marshlands?” The widow was still regarding Cilla with hard, keen eyes, andit seemed that she, who kept silence with her neighbours usually, had some purpose behind all this talk. “Well, I was cooking supper for Reuben Gaunt’s father at the time, and I mind saying to young Reuben, who was larking i’ the kitchen and nigh teasing the life out o’ me—he was fourteen or so then, was Reuben—I mind saying to him that it war a night ye couldn’t find heart to turn a dog out in. Th’ wind war blowing sleet an’ hail in sheets agen the window-panes, an’ it war crying down the chimbleys till ye could hardly see across th’ floor for peat-smoke.”
Cilla was listening. She had lost all desire to escape. The widow’s gaunt, tall figure, the impassive hardness of her voice as she brought the bygone scene before Priscilla’s eyes, were part of the snow and the white stone fences, part of the falling wind that sobbed through every cranny of the walls and ruffled the water of the drinking-pool that divided the two women.
“Th’ smoke was making me sneeze and cough, but it warn’t that made me so mad wi’ ’t. It war spoiling th’ master’s supper, an’ his temper war fearful when aught went wrang i’ th’ house. Well, I needn’t hev bothered my head about that, for at that minute there came a rapping at th’ front door, an’ I ran out into th’ hall to see who it war. There war a woman standing there, an’ th’ wind blew her fair indoors, without a by-your-leave, soon as I lifted th’ sneck. She war nigh as bonnie an’ slim as ye, Miss Cilla,” she went on, after a long glance at the other. “The master was a fairish judge o’ women i’ that way, I’ll own, like his son ’at followed him. She had a bairn wi’ her—may be four-year-old—an’ she wanted the master; so I called him, after shutting th’ door to keep all yond mak’ o’ wind out.”
She paused and looked across the shrouded fields, andshivered. Hard as she was, the misery of that night returned to her. Cilla stood waiting silently.
“The master came, an’ looked once at th’ stranger-woman, an’ a sort o’ devil came into his face. Then I knew that one of his black moods was on him; for I was used to the look o’ them. The woman was very pitiful to look at an’ to listen to, an’ she said she war his wife—married by stealth a year after the first mistress died. I believed her, for my part, an’ a woman can tell most times when another woman’s lying. She was plain of her speech, though, and Reuben’s father always had a queer mak o’ pride about him,—must have a ladyish wife at Marshlands, or else hide her i’ the haymow out o’ folk’s sight. That’s Reuben’s way, too.”
Priscilla wondered at the sudden bitterness in her voice, then remembered that this was Peggy’s mother; and the widow knew, it was plain, that she was her daughter’s rival. Tears of pride and humiliation started to the girl’s eyes. It was easier to conquer a secret trouble than an open one.
“Well, to shorten a sad tale,” went on the older woman, after seeing that her taunt had struck home, “Mr. Gaunt turned both mother an’ th’ little lad out into th’ cold; an’ I could have throttled him for ’t, if he’d been a thought less strong. The rest o’ the tale ye know, Miss Cilla. They found the mother dead on the door-stone, an’ Billy the Fool war strong enough to weather the cold—else he’d not have been here at the drinking-pool to-day.”
Cilla gathered her strength again. “Why do you tell me this?” she asked. “I say, with father, that one day’s trouble is enough as it comes, without going back to the old sorrows.”
“Why, lile baby? Because I’ve watched ye an’ Gaunt go lover-like along the pastures, afore this daft snow came.Because I want to warn ye that Gaunt comes of a bad breed, an’ never i’ this world could be aught but a will-o’-wispie. Oh, my lass, I’ve seen a few springs come—but I’ve seen the end o’ such-like nonsense, and I know.”
Cilla laughed, and Widow Mathewson, whose outlook on the world was impersonal and cold—save when human weakness broke down the barriers—approved this slim lass in her workaday dress of homespun.
“It was only yesterday that I bade Mr. Gaunt marry where his heart lay,” said the girl quietly. “If I had cared for him—after that fashion—should I have been glad when he told me he was marrying Peggy?”
“You were glad?” asked the widow, with suspicion.
“Why not? He is fond of Peggy, and I think that—that he will settle down, as a farmer should—”
“Ay, so I think, too,” broke in the widow with sudden feeling. “I made the worst o’ that bygone tale, I own, and never told ye that Reuben, on that night when he’d been plaguing me i’ the kitchen, crept round into t’ hall, listening to the stranger-woman’s tale and seeing her driven out into the wind. Well, he waited for his father to go, and then he crept to my side, did th’ lad, an’ we listened to her as she ligged, crying, just outside th’ door. Then he pulled up th’ sneck, an’ he war lifting her in when old Gaunt came, all thunder and lightning down th’ passage. Gaunt locked th’ stranger-woman and the lad out o’ doors; an’ he locked Reuben an’ me i’ th’ big, up-stairs room. ’Twas so we passed the night, Miss Cilla, but I’ve a soft spot i’ my heart for th’ lad ever since, spite of his cantrips.”
They looked across the pool at each other. They were set about by snow, and moaning of the wind, and white hills shrouded under mists that made their summits level with the sky.
“What chance had he?” said Cilla. “With such a father—oh, he did well that night! He did well.”
Widow Mathewson turned. “Seems I misjudged ye, Miss Cilla. I niver can trust a bonnie, lile face like yours these days. Oh, ay, he may do well enough for Peggy. Anyway, she’s set her heart on him.”
When Cilla got down to the croft, and reached the mistal, she found David sitting on an upturned box. He had a lamb on his knees, and he was feeding it with milk from a bottle. Billy was standing near, and his face was wide as a rift in the clouds when the sun breaks through.
“I’ve been laughing, Miss Good Intent,” said Billy. “Near cracked my sides, I have. Here’s strong David feeding a babby as if ’twere his own. Te-he! Ye’d never think he was strong at the forge.”
David was shy. This business of saving lambs from the snow had seemed natural and easy until Cilla came. Now he felt clumsy.
“Billy is right,” he said, as he handed the lamb and the bottle to Cilla. “’Tis a woman’s work, this. I was only waiting till ye came.”
Late that night when her work was done and the moon was up above the fells, Cilla unbarred the porch-door and went out into the raised path that protected the strip of garden from the highway. The wind had long since shifted to the south, and quiet Garth looked all like fairy-land. From the green, young twigs of the beeches, across the road, the soft snow fell away, showing leaves half-opened. There was everywhere the sound of gentle splashing—wet snow falling on wet snow—and the fells beyond were clear of mist. The air was full of warmth and scent of violets; for it was Garth’s way to remedy her spring storms with daintiest blandishments.
Cilla was full of her trouble still. It had been easyto give up her man in the heat of pride and sacrifice; but she was lonely now. She remembered, as lasses will when they have good fathers, how often Yeoman Hirst had cheered her in bad weather with a hearty, “Oh, ’twill lift, lass, by and by. Be sure ’twill lift. ’Tis only nature for the sun to pop out fro’ behind a cloud and take a body by surprise, like.”
“Why, yes,” she said, with a long glance at the hills. “Father is right. It always lifts—but the waiting-time is hard, just time and time.”