CHAPTER XXI
NEITHER Gaunt nor Widow Mathewson was prepared for the quiet and temperate beauty that crept into their waiting-time at Ghyll. If Gaunt had neglected his farm work in old days, it was through idleness, not from lack of knowledge. Acquaintance with all details of field and stable had been bred in him, and the widow watched him go about the usual round of work with growing wonder.
“A hired man would have done half as much i’ the day, and done it badly,” she said, finding him milking the cows one evening.
“Oh, ’tis only the old proverb, mother, the master-man always works the better if he has the will. ’Tis not often that he has the will, ye see.”
She watched him persuade the last of the cows to be friendly with the milking pail, listened awhile to the pleasant splash-splash of the milk. “Reuben,” she said, with a touch of jealousy, “yond’s the sauciest beast o’ them all, and ye seem to have her at a word. She wouldn’t let any but me milk her—not even Peggy, though she’d deft hands at the udders. And, Reuben, ye’re doing too much. Leave some bit o’ work for me to do, lest I get thinking o’ what’s past and done with.”
“We’ll share and share alike,” said Gaunt, looking over shoulder from his seat on the milking-stool.
“Some folk have queer notions o’ sharing. I tell ye, I’ve not been so idle o’ my hands sin’ I war a girl.”
“All the better, mother. You’ve earned a rest by this time, while I—perhaps I’ve earned a spell of work,” he broke off, with something of the widow’s own grim humour.
The busy needs of the farm were already helping these two to forget their burden. To Gaunt it seemed strange, profane almost, that sorrow for the dead should give place to workaday anxieties; to the widow, who was older in experience, it was plain that such work brought with it the gift of healing.
All the routine at Ghyll was interrupted. It had thrived on its trade in milk, and cheeses, and butter. Now Widow Mathewson, and Gaunt, and the three pigs fattening in the stye at the far side of the mistal, were left to drink what they could of milk that once had supplied half Garth’s needs; the rest, save what was needed for their own week’s butter-making, had to be poured out into the parched and thirsty croft.
“It seems a waste,” said Gaunt at night, after they had filled the bowl in the dairy, and fed the pigs, and stood watching the rest of the milk run down the croft in a narrow stream.
“That’s the good farmer cropping out again in ye, Reuben. Of course ’tis wasteful, but there’s a deal of waste i’ life, as I’ve found it. ’Tis one o’ the things we hev to put up with, like. Was never good at a riddle, I; parson down yonder, maybe, could tell us why bairns are crying out i’ Garth for this milk we’re spilling—milk their mothers willun’t fetch, or send for, though I’d no way risk letting them have it, if they came.”
Reuben watched the streamlet die down, a dirty white across the sun-scorched brown of the grass. Then he linked his arm in hers, and drew her toward the farm, andset her down in the hooded chair by the hearth while he found her pipe for her.
“Good sakes!” said the widow softly. “To be waited on at my time o’ life, and by ye of all men, Reuben.”
“That’s the queerness of things again,” he answered, lighting his own pipe.
In other days there had been between them the silence of would-be enmity; now there was that lack of speech which friends use when they wish to talk together. Once Gaunt stirred the peats with his foot, and glanced at the widow’s face when the fire-glow lit it.
“Seeking for signs o’ fever, Reuben?” she asked drily, turning her sharp old eyes to his.
“Well, yes, I was, as you’ve caught me at it. I should miss you, if—if aught happened, mother.”
“Naught happens to me, Reuben lad, save wear and tear. Would ye say that again—that ye’d miss me, if I went out along Peggy’s road?”
“There’s none else to care for me since Peggy died. I’d had little care, and little love, i’ my short life, mother; that’s why they call me ‘running-water’ maybe.”
Her memory went back to the days when she had been housekeeper to Reuben’s father. She recalled the hard-riding, hard-drinking master who had reared his son to the like gospel. She remembered the night when Billy the Fool was brought to Marshlands, and was afterwards turned out into the cold to answer for the sins of other folk. Many a bygone incident of Reuben’s boyhood stole out from those corners of the mind, which hide things half forgotten. And again she told herself, as she had told Priscilla on a day of April snow, that Reuben Gaunt had his father to thank for Marshlands and the money, but for no other chance in life.
“Reuben,” she said, blowing quiet puffs of smokeacross the hearth, “have ye no thought for yourself these days? Naught matters much for me either way, but fear o’ death comes natural to younger folk.”
“There’s you and the farm to think of, mother. That’s enough to carry me forward.”
Then he led her on to talk of olden times, for he had learned already that this was her surest road to peace. He mixed her rum and milk, and set it down on the ledge at the right hand of the hooded chair, and coaxed a smile from her and a crisp assurance, that “living wi’ ne’er-do-weels was sure to bring ye into loosish ways.” She talked of Peggy’s childhood, recounted a score of escapades, with a mother’s pitiful and tender regard for detail. She spoke of her husband, and laughed slily at his weaknesses. It is in this way that bereaved folk find shelter sometimes, for their little hour, from the bleak face of death.
“Mathewson war as he war made,” she finished, “an’ I munnot say naught agen them as has gone—but he war shammocky, Reuben. If it war no bigger job than sticking a row o’ peas, he war shammocky still. He’d start th’ job after breakfast, and put in happen a dozen sticks; then he’s sit on th’ wall, an’ light his pipe, an’ look at what he’d done till I came out, an’ flicked him off o’ th’ wall-top; and somewhere about nightfall, if I war lucky and could get away fro’ my work often enough to stir him up, he’d have finished yond row o’ peas. Then he’d step indoors, an’ draw hisseln a mug of ale, an’ say he’d allus known there was naught like good, honest work for making a body enjoy his sup o’ beer. Poor Mathewson! He war made as he war made, an’ he niver varied mich. Now, Peggy was a different breed—”
And Gaunt listened to her praise of Peggy, putting in a word here, or a question there, till it was bedtime. The widow rose at last, and took a rush candle from the mantel.
“Well, we’d best be getting to sleep, Reuben. Ye’ll lig on th’ settle, as on other nights? I’ve had many a watch-dog i’ my time, lad, but ye’re th’ best o’ th’ lot, I fancy. I sleep sounder when I know that you’re below stairs.”
There was affection in the glance she gave him; and Reuben, when he lay down to sleep an hour later, found no ill dreams to trouble him.
Yet these two had not been open the one with the other. The widow had concealed her visit to the grave, three nights ago. Gaunt had concealed the dread that beset him through the daytime.
The dread awoke with him the next morning, and dogged his footsteps as he went across the croft. It kept close beside him until noon, when he came home across the burned-up fields in search of dinner. He had known no fear until Peggy died. There had been the hope that she would recover, the need of constant listening for a call to the bedside. Hope and the urgent need were gone, and life for its own sake was sweet again to Gaunt. Fever, and the all but certain death, had grown to the shape of Barguest, the brown dog.
He halted now at the gate where Peggy had kissed him for the last time. He looked at the sun, set high in a sky of blue that had no soul behind it—a sky as hard as beaten metal that seemed to press upon the earth and keep in the suffocating heat. If ever a man prayed for rain, Gaunt prayed for it now with a whole heart. He sought for one wisp of cloud to break the fierce monotony of blue; there was none. Each undulation of the hill-tops showed strangely clear, as if cut by a keen-edged knife. The silence was unbearable.
Gaunt’s courage, when he chose to enter Ghyll and share its dangers, was child’s play to the pluck that now was asked of him. There was no longer any warmth ofimpulse, of zest in sacrifice for its own fine sake; fear had reached him, and the shelterless heat weakened every effort at resistance, till there were times when dread merged into outright panic and set him trembling like a child. He would recover, win back his manhood with the dogged perseverance that had won him the fell-race; then, and not before, he would seek out the widow, and day by day she found him stronger, more considerate, more bent on naming her “mother” and on proving himself a real son.
This morning, as he leaned over the gate and searched for rain-clouds, he went through one of these battles with despair. When it was nearly ended, and the colour was returning to his face, the doctor’s big, fiddle-head nag came up the slope, and Gaunt started when the rider’s voice broke the silence.
“What news, Mr. Gaunt?” he asked, reining in and giving Reuben a quick, professional glance.
“No news,” Gaunt answered, with a touch of dry humour. “We’re penned like birds in a cage, doctor, and have nothing to listen to, save this cursed stillness. If you could give us a promise of rain, now—”
“Well, I can help you there,” put in the other briskly. “I ought to have learned something from the weather by this time, for I’ve been plagued enough by it. The hot spell is nearly done with; and now you may call me a fool for prophesying in face of such a sky as that.”
It was curious to see how eagerly Reuben caught at the hope. This conspiracy of sun and stark, blue sky against him had grown to be in sober fact a menace; a few more days of the strain, and fear might give an easy inroad to the fever.
“There’s not a sign of it,” he said, anxious to have his word disproved.
“Wait till you’ve had twenty years more of this queer climate, Mr. Gaunt, and then you may be just beginning to know it. I’ve seen a dozen little signs of rain as I came up the moor, but I trust more to what old Lamach of High Farm calls a feeling in his bones.”
Gaunt remembered the doctor’s reputation as a weather seer. “I hope to God you’re in the right, doctor.”
“Of course I’m in the right! ’Tis a habit of mine. Only a fool puts himself in the wrong. I’m right, too—under Providence, of course, d’ye understand—in saying that you and the widow will win through. Tough, both of you—not cowards—plenty of fresh air inside your bodies. Oh, ye’ll weather it. Well, good day, Mr. Gaunt. I’ve a long round before me.”
Gaunt would not let him go just yet. It was a relief to exchange any sort of talk with another man. “We’ve noticed that you ride past the gate once every day, doctor, since you knew fever had come.”
“What of that?” said the other testily.
“Only that ’tis kindly of you. We’re a bit lonesome, I own, though we make the best of it.”
“Never heard such nonsense! Doctoring is my trade, Mr. Gaunt, not riding up and down the country doing good works. I leave those and the credit of ’em to the Parson. I’m no poacher. I’ve a bothersome case two miles further on, and this is my shortest cut.”
Gaunt knew that there was no short cut in this direction, except to the empty moor. He knew that the doctor lengthened his round each day to halt for a word at the gate, and to learn if his services were needed. “Which farm are you bound for, then?” he asked, with gentle banter.
“Which farm? Good day, Mr. Gaunt, good day. I’m too busy a man to answer idle questions.”
Gaunt went slowly up to the house, feeling more at peace with this world of heat and toil, and martyrdom. The doctor’s boast had not been idly made, for instinct was apt to lead him right. He had been right in thinking that they needed physic here at Ghyll. It was no physic carried in his pocket, to be taken three times a day and put on the shelf after a dose or two had been swallowed; it was the medicine carried by all men who have faced life in the open, that of forward hope and a call to look up to the hill-tops rather than down to the misty valleys.
“The doctor has ridden by again,” said Reuben, as he stepped into the living-room to find dinner waiting for him. “I had a talk with him.”
“Ay, ’tis his way,” answered the widow. “If aught happens, like to ye or me, he’ll not ride by. He’ll walk in, Reuben, same as ye did when Peggy war ta’en wi’ th’ fever. Men are terrible folk for pranks, an’ so I allus said. Now, ye’ll sit down, an’ eat what I set before ye. A roast o’ mutton, Reuben, done to a turn. It’s fool’s policy to keep your body underfed at these times.”
Of all the details that hampered Widow Mathewson and Gaunt, none pressed on them more heavily than this need to sit at meat together. The reek of the hot joint, the loss of appetite engendered by the long, persistent drought, made such a meal seem loathsome. Each ate for the other’s sake, and maybe the meat, for that reason, helped them to go forward.
“Niver smoked so mich i’ my life,” said the widow, reaching up for her pipe after dinner. “I’ve no knowledge o’ the lad that first brought ’baccy into Garth, but he did a service to us weak, human-folk. Fill up your mug, Reuben, and come and sit i’ th’ front o’ th’ fire,an’ talk to a body, like. I’m fair clemmed wi’ weariness.”
At dusk of the same day the doctor finished his round and rode into Garth. It happened, as it had happened for three days past, that Priscilla was loitering in the roadway fronting Good Intent; it was a habit of hers, and the doctor guessed her motive, and responded to it, with the quiet, charitable humour that marked all his dealings with the dales-folk.
“I’m in rare good humour, Miss Cilla,” he said, drawing rein. “D’ye see those bits of fleecy clouds coming up across the moon?”
“I had not looked at the sky,” she answered absently. “It is ever the same these days, and one grows tired of it.”
“Ay, but ’twill not be the same when you wake to-morrow. I was up at Ghyll this morning—”
“Yes,” put in Cilla, with sudden interest.
“And I pitted my weather lore against Gaunt’s. He said it couldn’t rain if it tried, and I said it was bound to.”
He saw Cilla’s hand go to her heart for a moment, saw the brightness creep into her face. He had known all along that she needed to be told that Gaunt, so far, was well, and it had pleased him to wrap up the news in this talk about the weather.
“They—they are both well at Ghyll?” she asked.
“As sound as can be. I’ve an interest in those two, Miss Cilla. They deserve to come through it all, and somehow I fancy that they will.”
“They say the chances are against it—”
“Oh, they say a good deal of nonsense, time and time. There’s naught like pluck for winning a fight. Good night to ye, and pray that I miss Widow Lister as I ride by. Three days ago she was afraid of fever; this morningshe caught me on the outward journey and, ‘Doctor,’ she said, ‘I’ve caught a chill that may well bring me to my grave.’ I laughed—as I do, Miss Cilla, in season or out, and ‘you’re lucky,’ I said. ‘If I could find a touch o’ chill under this brazen sky, I’d be glad of the relief, and so would my sweating horse.’ Good night again, little Cilla. Gaunt’s not going to die just yet, and I begin to think he might be worth your taking one day.”
Cilla listened to the pitapat of hoofs as it grew fainter and fainter down the dusty road. The doctor had earned his right-of-way to folk’s hearts after many an up-hill climb, and his power to help his neighbours was not limited to their bodies’ needs. Whenever he felt that death was certain, he told his patient bluntly that the next world, not this, was his concern. While there was doubt, he thrust down his throat, willy-nilly, the physic of hope and sweetened the draught, so far as he could, with some racy, village jest.
“There’s a good man goes down Garth Street,” thought Cilla, following the other’s sturdy figure as it disappeared among the shadows.
The moon lay young, slender as a sickle, over the parched lands of Garth. Cilla herself, as she stood in the roadway, looked cool and slender, too, in her white gown, though she was full of strange disquiet. Her modesty had taken fright. It was well enough to be anxious for Reuben’s safety, well enough to seek news of him as often as she could; but she knew that it was more than friendship, this restless eagerness for news. And Peggy o’ Mathewson’s should have been a bride by now; and the peat was scarcely smoothed above her grave.
Cilla, for all her daintiness, her love of clean thinking and clean doing, was human as her neighbours, and subject to those gusts of warm and reckless feeling which areapt to scatter the habits of a lifetime. If she had been told of another who waited, as she had done, for news of a bridegroom widowed before his wedding-day, she would have thought lightly of her. Yet she could only picture Reuben up at the lonely, hill-top farm; could only pray for his safety and know that her prayers came from a warmer heart than she ought to carry.
She turned instinctively to Good Intent. Her father would be sitting by the hearth, big of his body, big in charity. She would step in, and have a talk with him.
The yeoman was sitting in his chair, as she had pictured him. But his pipe lay cold in his hand, and he motioned her to a seat in the settle-corner opposite.
“Cilla, I’ve had a talk or two with the doctor,” he began.
She waited, suppressing a quiet laugh that he, too, had gone out for stolen interviews with the lay priest at Garth.
“It seems Gaunt chose to go in to Ghyll Farm and to stay there. He knew what it meant before he crossed the door-stone. I wouldn’t believe it, until the doctor told me it was so.”
“Yes, father.”
“Well, be durned if I’d have done it.”
“Oh, yes; oh, indeed, you would have done it, father; ’tis the sort of call you’d have answered, but it was not asked of you.”
“Fiddle-de-dee,” said the yeoman. “Black Fever would always scare me. Give me a runaway horse, and I’ll handle the reins—but the fever—’tis a waiting game, lile Cilla, and I could never play such. I’ve a sort of envy, like, for men who can.”
Priscilla lit a spill for his pipe. She filled his glass for him, and set it by his side. And then she waited.
“Seems I’ve treated Gaunt amiss,” said her father by and by.
“All folk do in Garth.”
“Ay, they did; but I was down i’ Shepston to-day, and they had the news, and folk were puzzled. They fancied that Gaunt was better nor like—in fact, Cilla, they seemed minded to turn their faces about and overdo their praising of him.”
Cilla spread her hands to the peat-glow, and her face was full of tenderness. “I told you so i’ the spring, father, but you would not listen.”
The yeoman was uneasy. Praise was due to Gaunt, and yet he distrusted the man. “He comes of a bad breed, Cilla, and I’m farmer enough to know that ye don’t rear good stock from such.”
Cilla was quiet, but eager. “We all know his father’s story—but what of his mother? Has she no say in the matter?”
“Why, yes, she was well enough, and a long way too good for old Gaunt; but she died when Reuben was a bairn. She never had a chance to better his wild upbringing.”
And then, at last, after an uneasy silence, the yeoman got to the heart of the matter. His fondness for Cilla was embarrassing at times; it gave him too keen an insight into any change of mood in her, and he had guessed the secret of this restlessness which had fallen on her since the news of fever came from Ghyll.
“Lile lass,” he said, “I’ve been thinking a deal to-night, and I wish more than ever that ye’d persuaded David the Smith to stay on i’ Garth. Whether ye wouldn’t have him, or whether his big hulking shyness stood up between the two o’ ye and wouldn’t let him ask ye, ’tis not for me to say; but I’m more than ever sorry, lass, as things have turned out.”
“Why, father?” A delicate colour had crept into Cilla’s face, but there was that steady light in her eyes which the yeoman feared.
“Well, Reuben is free to go wandering again—”
“No, no!” Her treason to the dead seemed baser than it had in the silence of the road outside. This outspoken hint of it from another showed all its meanness to the girl’s sensitive fancy. “No, father! We must not talk of such—of such foolishness. Reuben may be dead before the month is out.”
“Well, yes,” said Hirst, soberly. “Maybe I spoke out o’ season, Cilla. There, lass! Gaunt has done what I dursn’t, and I’m shamed to own to it, and I’m hoping he’ll come through it, as he deserves.”
So then Cilla came and sat at his knee, for the intimacy between these two was full of understanding. Her father was quick to blame himself for the few ungenerous thoughts that came his way, and she knew how hard it was for him at any time to speak well of Reuben Gaunt.
“And not only that,” she went on. “Reuben may be this or that, father—but he has seen Peggy o’ Mathewson’s die, and he has helped to bury her, so the doctor tells me, and—and, father, I think we ought to leave him with his thoughts; they’ll be sad ones.”
Cilla was diffident, as a good woman is when she must run counter to a well-loved father. The yeoman looked at her for a moment, then laid down his pipe and lifted her to the arm of his big chair.
“Seems to me I’m a child i’ your hands at times, Cilla. Oh, ye’re right, lile lass. There were better and bigger men than Gaunt i’ Shepston to-day, but not one o’ them has done what he did—not to my knowledge.”
The sickle moon climbed up that night till it lay over Ghyll Farm, that sheltered tired folk who slept. It lay,too, over the rowan that sheltered one whose weariness was over and done with. On the moor, where the thin stream trickled down, whispering a prayer of peace to Peggy as it passed her grave, there was the keen breath of life again. First, the moon was shrouded; then clouds as grey and slight as gossamer came drifting up the breeze; and after that a little wind got up, piping thin and high like a plover tired with the long day’s flight.
It was very still on the moor, save for the soft, insistent crying of the wind. A wayfarer, had he been crossing the untilled acres, might have heard God walking in this sweet and untamed wilderness. The wind, slight as it was, was full of perseverance, and it began now to shepherd running vanguards of the mist across the heath.
At three of the morning there was neither moon nor sky to be seen. A wide sheet of mist, wet to the touch, hid every landmark of the moor, which, until an hour ago, had shown plainly all its jagged hillocks, its raking hill-top lines. And dawn, when it came, could do no more than thread the mist-banks through with tints of silver-grey.
Gaunt, soon after daybreak, woke from his sleep on the long settle, with instinctive knowledge that another day’s glare had to be faced, and crossed to the window. At first he thought himself mistaken in the hour, so dark the room was. Then he unbarred the door, and went out into the mist. He felt its fingers wet about his face and hands; he drew deep breaths of it as men drink in the first spring warmth after a hard winter. Then he laughed, not knowing why, and leaned against the house-wall, and was glad to rest awhile, with this sense of peace and freedom sheltering him closely as the mist itself.
The physical relief, the sense of damp and freshness after long heat, were part only of a deeper change. Hisfever-dread had left him; he no longer felt the wearing need to hold his courage tightly, step by step through the day’s up-hill climb, lest it fail him at the pinch.
“Oh, God be thanked,” he murmured, and went indoors, and called up the stone stairway: “Mother, I’ve news for you!”
The widow had slept later than her wont, but she was awake in a moment. “What is it, Reuben?” she answered, fearing disaster always when an urgent summons came.
“The blessed rain is coming. We’ll have cloudy skies again.”
“Now, there’s a ha-porth o’ nonsense to fetch a body out of her bed with,” grumbled the other. “’Tisn’t dawn, Reuben, surely; winter-dark, I call it.”
“Come down and see, mother.”
She was soon at the porch-door beside him, and Gaunt, watching her face, could see the lines of strain grow softer, as if the moist air had filled their hollows in with kindly fingers. They stood there, the two of them, as if they could never have too much of the grey, cool air; and the heat of the past weeks, as they looked back upon it from this sanctuary, seemed like that of the burning, fiery furnace which both remembered from teachings of a far-off childhood.
There was nothing fanciful about this change of theirs from fear to strength. Bred in a country which knows more of cloudy skies than blue, they needed rain after long abstention from it; and the mist was a sure herald of grace to come.
“’Tis queer how the weather has ye at a word, Reuben,” said the widow presently. “I’m keen-set already for my breakfast, an’ that’s more nor I could say honestly for a week o’ days.”
She would not have the door closed while they fried the rashers and the eggs, though the mist stole in and lay like smoke about the room.
“Now, don’t ye go shutting the door against a friend,” she said, when Reuben made a movement to close it. “I’m only too thankful, lad, to have the right smell o’ food i’ my nostrils once again.”
Later that day—a little past noon—the mist found its proper shape and fell in drops as quiet and as persistent as the breeze that pushed it forward. By sundown it was raining steadily, and, for the first time since their watch began, these two slept with no dreams to trouble them.
When Gaunt woke late the next morning, the rain was lapping at the windows still, with a gentle, greedy patience that promised more to come. The clouds were lifting when he went out into the croft, and there was a blur of sunshine through the rain. The thirsty ground sucked in the moisture, and asked for more, and still showed riven cracks as dry as the molten heaven of two days ago; and from the pastures a ground-mist rose, as thick and smoky as the reek from the smithy down at Garth when Fool Billy’s fire was being coaxed into a blaze.
Out of the rain, and the under moisture that reached up above his horse’s hocks, the doctor came to Ghyll.
“All well, Mr. Gaunt?” he asked, with a note of strict routine in his voice.
“Better for this God-sent weather, doctor.”
“Oh, that’s your view, is it? I’m wet to the skin, and am like to be wetter before I’ve done. This quiet sort of rain goes deeper than your quick-come, quick-go storms. Still, it will clear the air, maybe, and you’ll remember that I prophesied it? Mr. Gaunt,” he broke off, with one of his sudden glances, as if he were probinga patient with the knife, “d’ye feel any lassitude; well, to put it plainly, d’ye feel the world is slipping from under you, like a crazy, limestone wall when you try to climb it?”
“Well, no,” said Gaunt, the new hope and the fresh colour showing in his cheeks. “I did, till the rain came; and I was as near to fright as ever I’ve been in my life; but that’s all gone. Mrs. Mathewson has taken heart, too.”
The doctor looked him over once more. “I’m not here to play Providence,” he said, with an air of quiet relief. “This horse of mine, with his fiddle-head, could never carry so heavy a burden as Providence; but I think, Mr. Gaunt, you may let me take word to Marshlands that they can begin to get ready for you, air the sheets and dust the rooms, and all the nonsense women like.”
“I shall be needed here for awhile,” said Reuben.
“That’s as you please.”
The two men stood looking at each other with great friendliness, though in years past their intercourse, on the doctor’s side at least, had had more than a touch of chill in it. Gaunt had not given that side of the matter a thought; yet these weeks at Ghyll had divided, like a deep gulf, the old days and the new; whatever lightness he showed in future, his neighbours would look behind it, and would see a stricken farmstead instead, and a man entering it of his own free will to succour others. The folk of Garth were slow, maybe, to form new opinions of men, or crops, or weather; but in the long run they were just, and they did not forget.
The doctor read a good deal in Reuben’s face just now. There was a light of happiness in it—unquestioning, childlike happiness, dimmed just a little by awe and some bewilderment. He had seen the look often when one or other of his patients had lain near to death and had livedon to watch another spring spread magic fingers over a world that now was doubly sweet to them.
“’Tis not so easy to die as I thought,” said Reuben, breaking the silence unexpectedly. “You never know how fond you are of being chained to this daft world, until—well, till you begin to listen for the snapping of the chains.”
“I’d be sorry to leave it myself,” said the doctor, with his big, heathen laugh. “They work me to death, and I’ve seldom an hour to call my own, and first I’m baked with sun-heat, and then I’m chilled by this mist-rain ye’re so fond of, till I scarce know whether I’m dead or alive, but, bless ye, Mr. Gaunt, there’s some queer sort of joy in life, after all. Besides,” he added, with his own grim pleasantry, “there’s a certain doubt as to what comes after.”
“There is,” murmured Gaunt, though he would have been slow to confess as much at another time. “I fancy ’twas the doubt troubled me, when I looked up at the sky, and felt the brazen heat.”
“Just my feeling,” said the other cheerily. “It might be hotter out Beyond—or again it might be damper—I never liked extremes.”
Again there fell a silence between them, and still the doctor lingered for the sake of lingering, and because he knew that Gaunt was weak after long strain and needed a man’s chatter in his ears.
“Undoubtedly I’m a lost soul,” he went on. “Widow Lister told me as much last night, when she caught me riding home, and got me to poultice a boil the size of a pin-head, and then gave me a sermon because I hadn’t the fear o’ the Lord in me. ‘If I’d as much fear of the Lord, Widow, as you have of your body,’ I said, ‘they’d count me righteous in Garth.’”
Reuben laughed. He knew Widow Lister, and the doctor’s racy tongue had brought the picture clearly to his mind. And somehow neither wished to get on with the business of the day, for each knew at last that, in their separate ways, they had faced adversity with some show of courage.
“I’ve a weakness for Widow Mathewson myself; I’d the same feeling for poor Peggy,” said the doctor presently. “I begin to have the like feeling for you, Mr. Gaunt.”
“What sort of feeling, doctor?”
“Well, a ‘birds-of-a-feather’ feeling. We’re up on the same moor-top, we. There’s little of the heathen in me, I’ve seen too much of human sorrow to feel aught but fear o’ God. But my God’s different—yours is, and the widow’s is, and poor Peggy’s was—and I catch a sight of Him when I’m riding over the moor, Mr. Gaunt, at the end of a long day’s work, and the hills get up in front of my fiddle-headed horse, and the wind blows low through the heather, and I listen to the fairies. Oh, we doctor-folk learn a thing or two, when we ride with tired bodies and clear eyes, over the moor-top home to supper.”
Gaunt had not been permitted to see this side of the man before; and his surprise showed in his face, perhaps, for the doctor gathered up his reins and laughed shamefacedly.
“No, no, Mr. Gaunt,” he said in his gruffest voice, “I’m not going to enter any ministry. Foolish thoughtswillslip out at times. Now, you mean to stay here awhile longer? I think I’ll ride home by way of Marshlands, all the same. Scared as they are, they’ll be glad of my news. I shall tell that hulking hind of yours, Peter Wood, to bring you up a change of clothes and linen. It was useless before, but now you can burn all you standup in, and put on something that doesn’t carry any memory of the fever with it. You’ve burned all the sick-room things, by the way—bedding, and hangings, and what not?”
Gaunt nodded. “And whitewashed every corner afterwards. Mrs. Mathewson would have it so.”
“Bless me, a couple of sensible folk seem to be living up at Ghyll Farm! All as practical and trim as if I’d had the overlooking of it myself.”
“Well, you see, doctor,” said the other, with a smile that had no mirth in it, “it was a big job we’d undertaken, and big jobs are worth doing thoroughly, once you take them up. There was no need for us to help Ghyll become a plague spot for the whole of Garth.”
“Oh, the world’s standing on her head, Mr. Gaunt! The tough old doctor suspected of leanings towards the ministry, and you preaching thoroughness. There, there, I must have my jest. There’s no offence, I hope?”
With a cheery nod and a jerk of the reins, the doctor was trotting up the moor, leaving the wholesome crispness of a northwest wind behind him.
At ten of the next morning Reuben heard a shout as he crossed from the mistal-yard. Peter Wood, the hind at Marshlands, stood midway up the croft. He carried a bundle in his arms, and his knees were shaking.
“I dursn’t come no farther, sir, I dursn’t.” The big, ungainly lad was almost blubbering as he stood, a figure of woe, in the drenching sheets of rain. “Doctor said I’d to bring these, an’ I’ve brought ’em, but niver a stride nearer Ghyll will I come. Couldn’t, sir, if I tried; my feet willun’t let me.”
“Nobody asked you to. Set your bundle down, Peter, and I’ll fetch it when you’ve taken your precious body out of harm’s way. Is all right with the farm, Peter?”
“Ay, the farm’s all right, an’ th’ folk in it are all right so far; but—”
“Oh, knock all that nonsense out of your head, lad! You’ll not take fever, if that is what’s troubling you. Tell them I may be home in a week, to stir you all out o’ your laziness, or it may be a fortnight; it depends on whether I’m needed here.”
Peter’s wits were never overstrong, and terror had not sharpened them; yet even he was conscious of a new note in the master’s voice—a note less easy-going than of old, and fuller of authority. The lad glanced down the croft, then up at Reuben, but still held his ground; it was plain that he wished to get as far away from Ghyll as possible, and yet that he was held by some counter fear.
“Is’t true what they say, sir,” he blurted out, “that a body can catch th’ fever by looking at another body as has been nigh it?”
“No,” said Reuben, with a laugh that heartened Peter a little, “it’s a lie. Most fears are lies, my lad, and you can tell them so from me down at Marshlands yonder.”
“Thank ye, sir,” said Peter, laying down his bundle in the wet, and making off with a speed that recalled the haste of Dan Foster’s lad not long ago.
When Gaunt stepped into the farm, carrying his dripping bundle, Widow Mathewson looked up from her baking board.
“What have ye there, Reuben?”
“Clean linen and a change of clothes. It sounds naught much, mother, but, Lord, how I need to get into them! Seems the doctor knew how I’d needed them, for ’twas his thought to send them up.”
The widow laid down her rolling-pin, rubbed some of the flour from her arms, then looked at Gaunt with hersteady, hazel eyes. “That means ye’re ready for flitting. Well, I mustn’t grumble, though I’ll miss you sorely. Life’s made up of settlings in an’ flittings out, as the throstle said when she watched her fledged brood fly.”
“But I’m not flitting, mother, not for a week or two yet.” He was touched by the loneliness, the independence and the pride of her appeal. “I’m needed here, ye see—you alone in the house and farm work to be seen to—and, besides, they’d be scared to death at Marshlands if I gave them no time to get used to the notion of my coming back. They’d all be down with fever the next day, or think they were.”
“You’re a good lad, Reuben,” she said, after a pause. “Give me your bundle, and let me set your things to the fire. ’Twill be rheumatiz ye’ll catch if ye put them on as they are.”
In the afternoon the sun got out for an hour, for the rain was tired of its own vehemence. Gaunt put the clothes, warm and with the peat-smell of the fire on them, under his arm, and went up into the moor, past Peggy’s grave, past the little, grey bridge where the harebells were reviving from the drought. Just above the bridge was a loop known to him of old; it had dwindled during the hot months, and the rains had scarcely helped it yet. The land, for all the steady downpour, had not slaked its thirst; and had let only the shallowest of streamlets run off its surface to feed the larger brooks. For all that, the pool was deep enough for a bath, and Gaunt stripped, and plunged into the water.
The glare and misery of the past weeks seemed to yield to this gentle lapping of the peat-brown water. He had done his work rightly, for once in his heedless life, and knew it; and the way of Peggy’s death, the squalor and the terror of it, were washed clean by the stream thatsucked, and laughed, and gurgled round the edges of the pool.
A curlew came and looked at him, as he splashed in the brown water. A burn-trout finned its way upstream in fright when it found a four-limbed monster in its favourite pool. For the rest, he had no company and needed none.