CHAPTER XXIII
WIDOW MATHEWSON, up at Ghyll Farm, was prepared to find Reuben’s visits grow fewer and fewer, until they ceased altogether.
“Stands to reason,” she told herself, with her half grim, half humorous outlook upon life, “stands to reason he’ll slacken now, when there’s no Peggy to ’tice him up the moor. ’Tis no way likely he’ll come for th’ pleasure of seeing my wry face.”
Her judgment was wrong for once. Through the gold September days and the russet glory of October, Reuben snatched every opportunity to ride or walk to Ghyll. He persuaded Mrs. Mathewson to replace his own farm-hind lent to her, and sorely needed now in the busy life at Marshlands, with a steady, hard-working man-of-all-jobs of his own choosing. He helped her with the in-gathering of the bracken. He took pains to set the new man in his place at once; to teach him that his work here was to save the mistress every trouble. All this Gaunt did, and more, though he could ill spare the time; and in between he would steal to the little glen and the rowan-tree that sheltered the stream and Peggy’s grave of peat.
The widow could not read his motive in all this, and he himself at no time halted to probe into his methods. Remorse for his light playing with the love that Peggy had given him, pity for her end, self-condemnation because he missed her so little, however hard he tried to feel the decencyof grief, all played their part in urging him to come often up to Ghyll. But there was more than this. Those weeks of heat and fever had taught him to see life with clearer eyes, to understand the worth of the affection shown him, in a grim, half ashamed fashion, by the lonely woman who had nothing else except her farm to love.
“Seems I’ve gotten a son in my old age,” she said drily, when Gaunt had taken some special pains on her behalf one morning of November.
“Shouldn’t wonder, mother,” he answered cheerily.
“Well, now, there’s a daft thing for a tough old woman to be doing. Seems scarce modest, Reuben—almost flighty-like—”
She broke off with a laugh. Her dear, brave eyes were twinkling with mischief, with a spice of that wholesome devilry which no healthy woman loses till her death.
“How does your man-of-all-jobs frame?” asked Gaunt.
“Oh, as well as men ever do—naught to boast of at the best.”
“Then I’ll give him a piece of my mind before I ride down.”
“Nay, that you won’t! The lad’s well enough, Reuben. His big fault, if I must own to ’t, is that he willun’t let me do my share o’ the work. ’Tis all the grand lady he’s making me, and I was never reared to idleness. Shall be furnishing a parlour, I, if all this mak o’ nonsense goes on, and sitting wi’ a bit of fancy-work i’ my lazy lap, and thinking how many ailments I’ve gotten, like Widow Lister down at Garth.”
Gaunt rode home that day, as on many others, with a pleasant memory of Mrs. Mathewson’s laughter, the smoothing of the deeper lines about her face, the power he had of drawing her mind away from griefs buried long ago.
This luxury of bringing comfort to other folk was growingdearer to him. It had been left to him to find out, unaided, that he had the gift; he had had no help when first he blundered into the knowledge. He was the stronger now for this lack of aid, and a quiet, yet buoyant confidence was replacing his old, haphazard jauntiness.
He was often at Good Intent, when work about the farm was done and he had leisure to stroll down for a pipe with Yeoman Hirst. Cilla would move about the house at these times, doing little, needless work of setting things to rights against the morrow; or she would sit beside the hearth, and intercept grave glances from Reuben—glances which she answered with the same look of question and of hope. It was their waiting-time, just as it was waiting-time for the frozen pastures; spring would have to step in before they found the answer to their riddle.
“Gaunt grows shapelier,” the yeoman would say, after one of these fireside evenings.
And Cilla would laugh. “He was always shapely enough,” she would reply demurely.
“Oh, ay! I was not thinking o’ come-kiss-me-quick shapeliness, and all that light make o’ moonshine. He’s showing his true breed at last, and I’m glad. His father—well, he’s under sod, and I oughtn’t to say it, but he was as near the devil’s likeness as I’ve seen yet. ’Twas a pity, lile Cilla, for the Gaunts go back to Norman William or thereabouts, and there have been few black sheep i’ the flock. Now, get to bed wi’ your fancies, lass. I’ve said as much as a cautious man ever dare say i’ praise o’ Wastrel Reuben; but I’ve seen your daft looks—yours and his across the hearth, all as if there’s never been a couple wanted to wed before—and you must gang your own gait, for Lord help the man who tries to stop ye, slim as ye are.”
Exhausted by his eloquence, Hirst would reach out for his mug of ale, and Cilla would go softly up the stair, with shame in her cheeks and peace at her heart. She would lean at the open window, not knowing that the night wind blew cold, and would see new beauties in the moonlit street, the moonlit, hazy fields beyond.
It was to be the bitterest winter known for fifty years in Strathgarth. Yet, when December came, and the frost strengthened its grip, and all the land began to wear a pinched and sullen look, Gaunt felt the warmth of life increase. He lost his dogged recollection of former slights when meeting his neighbours at market or along the highways, just as they had long been willing to admit that their settled judgment of a man might, for once, be wrong. They heard his laugh less often now, but it was heartier when it came, and one they liked to hear. By gradual stages he was settling into his true position as master of the biggest and the oldest farm in Garth.
Hard work was asked of him that winter. Before Christmas there was a three days’ snow that drifted over every sheep ungathered from the higher lands. When his own ewes were recovered—and he took more than his share of a labour asking great patience and endurance—he made his way as best he could to Ghyll Farm, getting along by the wall-tops mostly, to see how Widow Mathewson was faring.
He found her helping the man to clear the last fall of snow away from the space between the house-front and the well; her cheeks were ruddy, and her voice rang crisp and almost merry, when she saw Reuben struggling through the croft.
“Bless me, but this has been what parson would call a visitation!” she cried. “’Tis sweeping we’ve been, an’ sweeping all ower again an hour or two after; we’d havelost our way to the well-spring if we hadn’t. It was kind o’ ye to come, Reuben. You’d no easy journey, I reckon, up th’ moor. It must hev been like climbing a feather-bed set on end.”
“So it was, mother, when the walls didn’t help me; but I’d a fancy you might need me.”
“Now had ye?” said the widow crisply. She was always apt to lose ten years of her sorrow when fighting one day’s inclement weather. “Because o’ my sheep all overblown up the moor? Ye should never waste pity, Reuben; there’s little enough about, and ’tis precious, like.”
“You have them safe, then?”
“Safe? I learned farming while ye were i’ your cradle, and that means I learned weather, too. We’d a lile soft spell o’ warmth last week? And ye never dreamed it meant snow to come?”
“I didn’t,” Gaunt admitted. “I fancied an open spell was coming.”
“And you bred i’ Strathgarth, and to know so little of her whimsies! That’s how she fools ye every winter—a bout o’ cold that starves the marrow i’ your bones, and then a week o’ softness just to ’tice ye on. Oh, I’m old to Strathgarth, lad; and soon as ever the warm snap came, I says to lad Michael here: ‘Michael,’ I says, ‘we’ll gather the ewes under shelter.’ And Michael, being young and a man, and a bit daft, says ‘no.’ And I says ‘yes,’ and had to threaten to clout his lugs before he found persuasion. A few folk find religion, Reuben; but ’tis persuasion finds the many.”
Michael, the man-of-all-jobs, had been standing discreetly in the rear. The bravest folk had a trick of standing out of the widow’s reach. And suddenly he gave a great, loutish laugh.
“’Tis this way, Mr. Gaunt,” he explained, with some show of haste. “Couldn’t help laughing, I. You told me, first you found me a job here, I was to look after missus. Well, durned if I haven’t a fancy, like, that the boot’s on t’ other leg.She’s looking after me, and I can’t help myseln. But she’s good at the weather, she is, I own,” he added reflectively. “She’s saved me a lot o’ trouble, all through in-gathering them ewes afore she’d right or sense in thinking it war going to snow.”
“There’s the shippon to be cleared, soon as ye’ve done idling wi’ your broom, Michael,” said the widow. “Ye’ll take cold, in this weather, lad, if ye don’t bustle about a bit.”
Michael slouched off shamefacedly; and Mrs. Mathewson, as she made Gaunt welcome in the living-room, surprised him by her cheeriness. It was only when he stood at the porch, to find his way down the moor again—through hazard of the snowdrifts, as he had come—that the widow reached out to him for help. She had gathered in her sheep; she was wise enough to know the look of the sky, and the way of a Strathgarth winter; but she was lonely and forlorn, for all that.
“Reuben,” she said, gently, “the snow’s three feet or more over Peggy’s grave. It has drifted into the little glen, and the rowan-tree’s half hidden. I can’t thole the thought o’ my lass lying up yonder i’ the cold.”
“Snow covers warm, mother, so they say.”
“Ay, so they say; but I can’t believe it, when I see th’ glen. I could bear it better when th’ days were soft and pleasant, and maybe a throstle whistling i’ the rowan, or a starling plucking at the berries just ower Peggy’s head; it seemed friendly-like—Reuben, I war never one for prayer,” she broke off, with sudden passion, “but I tell ye I’ve worn my knees raw wi’ asking God to gi’e me back mylass. There war no answer; stands to reason there couldn’t be. One silly old woman bleating like a ewe that’s lost her lamb, bleating right up into th’ big, empty sky, Reuben, and thinking she’d get an answer. ’Twould be enough to make me laugh, if I didn’t cry, instead.”
Gaunt was dismayed by this glimpse allowed him of the strong, tireless tragedy underlying the woman’s mask of tartness and half humorous self-control. And the widow, seeing his trouble, passed a hand across her eyes; her smile was like a break of sunlight, that can brighten the wintry fields but not thaw them.
“Though to be sure, ’tis outrageous for a tough old bit of bog-thorn like me to be reckoning to have feelings o’ my own. Why, ’tis near as foolish as to find a son i’ my old age—a son all ready-made, so to say, like Moses in the bulrushes. Ye’d best be getting down to the moor, for it wouldn’t do to let dark overtake ye. Good-by, Reuben; ye’re a good lad to me these days.”
She left him abruptly to have her cry out indoors and get done with it. Gaunt watched her out of sight, then turned the shoulder of the farmstead and made his way, not down but up the moor. The track to Peggy’s grave was marked plainly by Widow Mathewson’s big, manlike boots.
There was something strangely sad and lonely in this path of sorrow, in the look of the regular, deep footprints, limned sharply, even to the impress of the nails, by the bitter, east wind frost. There was something lonelier still in the look of the glen above, which now lay almost level with the moor. The upper branches of the rowan were all that broke the white, unending spaces, reaching out to a grey-black sky that showed dirty by contrast with the virgin white beneath.
Gaunt understood how hard it was to believe thecountry saying that “snow covers warm.” An incongruous memory came to him of the evening, little more than four months ago, when Peggy and he had crossed from Linsall Fair, and had been glad of the rowan’s shelter, the cool tinkle-tankle of the stream, after the parched heat of the uplands. He saw the girl’s look of splendid vigour and high spirits, the light in her eyes, as he stooped to kiss her and she reached up her lips with reckless zest in life and laughed: “Yes, Reuben, with a will and a half, if only because you won the fell-race to-day.” He could see the red scarf at her breast, setting off, as she knew well enough, her gipsy beauty. He could feel his heart beat with eagerness as he asked her to marry him, thinking, in the moment’s overmastering passion, that he could be faithful to any but Priscilla of the Good Intent.
And this was the end of it all. The stream frozen down to the pebbles that lined its bed; three feet of snow lay over the spot where they had kissed in the cool of a summer’s evening; and Peggy—Peggy, with her gipsy eyes, and her flaunting, crimson scarf and her wild, unstinting love for him—lay under a shroud of the moor’s making.
There comes an end to a man’s power to feel further grief, at these times of martyrdom self-imposed. The wise God has seen to that. Reuben turned at last, his shoulders bent, and went down the track which Peggy’s mother had made for him. Then he made his way home, as he had come, along the wall-tops, or across the higher spits of land which the wind had cleared, or by any way that served. His housekeeper, when he came into the house at dusk, said to herself that he looked like a broken man, and wondered at the cause.
As for Reuben, he was no way broken. The fierce, cold wind of remorse and grief for others had bent him level with the ground, but could not break him; for a man’scharacter rides always high, as the stars do, above the moment’s weather. To-morrow he would take up his work, with a still firmer hand, maybe, than before; to-morrow he would find his way again to Ghyll, enticed there by a face not young at all, a face on which grief and weather between them had traced strange patterns. There was real tenderness at the heart of this man who had shown so many faces to the world, and Widow Mathewson had chosen a good son, after all, on whom to lean.
At dusk of the same day, as Gaunt was dragging his tired feet through the drift that lay between the road and his own garden fence, the evening mail came into Garth. Instead of three horses, there were four, and they were sending clouds of steam down the tracks of the frosty wind. Will the Driver pulled up at the cottage which served Garth as post-office and shop of all trades. His hands were chilled stiff as the beads of foam on the harness, but his laugh was warm as ever when Daniel, the postmaster, came out from selling a penn’orth of toffee to receive Her Majesty’s mail.
“Not snowed up yet?” asked Daniel, shivering a little in the wind.
“No. No, Daniel. Not just yet. You’re the ninety-and-ninth that has asked me that question along the road, and I’m fair tired of answering. We’ve kept a way open somehow, but durned if we can hold out against another fall. Gee-up, Captain! Your hoofs are balled under with snow, and my hands and feet are as cold as a jilted lass, but Her Majesty wouldn’t like us to be much later than we are already. Gee-up, Captain!”
His cattle were getting fairly under way by the time he reached Widow Lister’s door. He had hoped for once to escape the plump little woman whose only business in life was to stop busy men on the highway; yet he pulledup, with weary deference to habit, as he saw her lying in wait.
“So you’re not snowed in yet?” she asked.
Her slanting glance, over-coy for her years, the sleek, well-fed look of the woman, found the secret corner where Will kept his temper hidden. “You’re the hundredth,” he snapped, “and I knew I’d find the last straw nigh your door, or thereabouts. Seems to me you keep a stack of such-like straws. What is it, Widow? We’re late, and Captain is as cross as ever I saw a horse in my long time of driving.”
“Nay, ’tis the Captain’s master that’s cross. Shame on ye, Will, to be grumbling at such weather as God sends. Who are we to grumble?”
Will waited in exasperation. The widow was “nimble as a weathercock,” as he put it to himself, “and could always place a right-thinking man in the wrong.”
“What is it now?” he repeated.
“Oh, don’t be getting impatient. I only asked if ye were snowed up, or not. Surely a civil body can ask a civil question.”
“Well, I shouldn’t be here if I was, but to-morrow I may be,” he added, with cheerful malice. “I doubt, as it is, if I can get as far as Keta’s Well to-night. The drifts were six feet high up the road, so they tell me.”
“There now! If ever I want a thing, and must have it, there’s sure to be a cross. Ay, just another cross. Widows, living lonely like and helpless, were meant to bear ’em, I reckon. I was going to ask you to bring—”
For the first time in the history of Will, he did not wait for a wayside command. His feet and hands were half frozen; that mattered little; but his horses were in risk of catching a chill.
“Gee-up, Captain,” he said. “I’ll bring it, bird cage,or eight-day clock, or what not, Widow, when the weather’s a shade milder.”
Cilla heard the running shuffle of hoofs on frozen snow as the mail went past Good Intent. She was sitting in the firelight, and Hirst, just returned from bringing sheep down to the fold, was dozing by the hearth.
“There’s the mail, father. ’Tis time we had a letter between us, surely.”
“Eh, lile lass?” he asked, rousing himself, as he always did, at the sound of Cilla’s voice.
“The mail has just passed. I was thinking a letter of some kind would be welcome.”
“Were ye, now? I could have understood that better if—well, if somebody had been away fro’ Garth instead of biding at home.”
Cilla winced under her father’s jovial pleasantry. She knew that he referred to Gaunt, and during these days of waiting and uncertainty she was sensitive to the least hint that they were free to care for each other.
“Oh, it is only that news from outside is pleasant, father, when the snow shuts us in for so long together.”
“Well, ye’ve got your wish,” said Hirst, rising lazily as a knock sounded on the outer door of the porch. “That’s Harry the Post, if I know a knock when I hear it.”
Cilla waited with a pleasant feeling of expectancy, as her father opened the door.
“Evening!” came Postman Harry’s gruff voice. “Just a lile letter fro’ Canada. ’Twill be fro’ David, as I said to myseln soon as ever I saw the writing and the mark. I’ll step in, after my round’s finished, and hear what news he gi’es ye.”
This easy handling of the mail’s privacy, was one of Garth’s usual customs, and Hirst assented. “Ay, step in,Harry. News and a cup o’ summat warm—ye’ll need it, with all the snow ye’ve got to trudge through.”
“All i’ the year’s work! I’ll be glad to hear news o’ David, I own. Terrible pitiful thing, as I says to Daniel just now while sorting my mail—terrible daft thing to think of a steady, straight set-up Garth man choosing to waste his time i’ them furrin parts. Garth’s good enough for me, though plague take her weather. Well, I must be trudging.”
Cilla was standing at the table, a puzzled frown on her face. She scarcely heard Harry’s chatter. The wished-for letter had come; it happened to be from David; and her only feeling was one of indifference. It had been different not many months since in the early weeks of her shame and loneliness, after bidding Reuben keep faith with Peggy o’ Mathewson’s. She had welcomed the first letter from Canada, had read and reread it, had taken courage from the strength underlying David’s crude sentences and simple penmanship. She had needed him then. And now?
“Art in a day-dream, lass,” roared Hirst, tearing the letter open as he came in again. “Here’s news from an old friend o’ yours. Sit down by the hearth, Cilla, and let’s see what’s doing out i’ Canada.”
Hirst read the scrawled pages with some difficulty, laid them down on the settle, and glanced across at Cilla.
“There’s news with a vengeance. David’s coming home i’ the spring.”
“So soon?” asked Cilla, with sudden disquiet. “It seems a far journey for so short a stay.”
“So he thinks, too. He’s never what you would call bitter, isn’t lad David, but he comes near to ’t this time. His aunt Joanna, it seems, has found a man to her liking, and is going to be wed before long. She wants Davidabout her till the wedding-day—trust Joanna for that—but not a minute later. The only thing David finds pleasant in the business is his longing to be home in Garth again.”
Cilla’s interest was roused, as it always was by injustice. “But, father, she might have thought of that before sending in such haste for David. It was not as if she asked him to step across to the next parish. He left his work here, to—”
“But Joanna never did think, save for herself. Bless me, I can see her smile and her easeful way of asking other folk to do her work—just such another as Widow Lister. Ye can’t argue about such women, Cilla; ye can only laugh, as ye would at a babby. So David’s coming home! Well! ’tis good news, say I. What say ye, Cilla?” he added, with a shrewd glance across the hearth.
“Of course, father. Who would not be glad to see him again? He’s so kind, and steady, and ready to help everybody foolishly.”
“Just so,” said the yeoman, with a laugh that was half a sigh. “He’s all that never i’ this world could tempt a lass. Male birds should wear brighter colours, eh? Read what he says there,” he added, reaching out for the letter, and putting his finger on the scrawled postscript.
Cilla read the few words, then sat with the letter in her lap. The message was so brief, so clumsily put in its dumb appeal; yet it brought a sudden rush of tears to the girl’s eyes.
“Tell Cilla”—she could almost hear the man’s slow voice speaking to her from away in Canada—“tell Cilla I’ve seen a deal that she used to want to see, what she called ‘all beyond Garth hills.’ I can tell her about strange lands now, if I can bring my slow tongue to it.Maybe she’ll find me polished up a bit, not just so sleepy, like. And anyway, if she’s free, it stands to sense I haven’t changed, any more than I’ve altered i’ my wish to see Garth village again.”
That was all; but the message brought many memories to Priscilla. It painted for her every joy, and heartache, each bewilderment, that had followed Reuben Gaunt’s return to Garth last spring. She remembered how Reuben had first caught her fancy by talk of “all beyond Garth hills”; she recalled David’s dogged persistence in his faith that the old homeland was better than the new countries he had never seen, his jealousy of Gaunt’s glib speech and wider experience. So much had been possible to David then, if only he had known it; he could have pitted his strength and sturdiness against the other’s debonair persuasiveness; he might have appealed to the trust and comradeship that had held between them since the days when she was a lass in pinafores, and David a hulking lad of twenty who had eyes for no one else.
Yet Cilla knew that it could never have been. In some instinctive way, without thinking it in so many words, she knew that David was not meant to have a wife of his own and—and all that followed, if God willed. Looking into the sleepy peat-glow, Cilla sat aloof for a moment from her own perplexities. She saw David clearly, as we seldom find opportunity or leisure to view our neighbours, saw him with the grey, soft light of renunciation about him. It was David who had made Billy the Fool a working member of the busy hive at Garth, simply by persuading him that work was play. It was David who had mended Widow Lister’s clocks, and bird cages, and window-fasteners, long after the patience of other men had been exhausted. It was David who lovedGarth, and all Garth’s ways, and all Garth’s frets and whimsies, who had gone overseas to help a kinswoman in fanciful distress.
Cilla turned to the letter, and read the postscript again; and she was surprised when her father, rising with great noise from the hooded chair opposite, told her she was crying. He patted her roughly on her head, as if she were a sheep-dog, and stamped up and down the room, and returned to ask her what was the matter.
“Nothing, father, nothing. I’m tired of this snow, maybe—”
“Well, then, I’ll just go and tell Garth folk that David’s coming back. They’ll like to hear it,” said Hirst, who, like all men, had a secret cupboard where he hid his one, favourite cowardice. “Could never abide tears myself, lile Cilla. Live and let live, I allus did say. Men were made for work, and they’d best leave women alone while tears are brewing up.”
Widow Lister was patrolling her door-front when he went by. “There’s luck for a body,” muttered Hirst, ruefully, as he caught sight of the plump little figure. “Enjoying a walk i’ the snow?” he asked, as he went by. “Well, I’ve had enough of it myself, trapesing all up and down the pastures since dawn.”
“A lone body must do something,” answered the widow plaintively. “I get weary-like o’ my thoughts, sitting wi’ the firelight only for company.”
“I dare say, I dare say,” assented Hirst, his big, foolish heart melted at once by this deftly suggested picture of the lonely hearth. “Cilla must come in oftener, to chat wi’ ye at nights.”
“Or perhaps ye’d find time now and then to step in yourself?” murmured the other, her eyes lifted “kitten-soft” to his in the moonlight. “There’s something inthe way a man sits in his chair an’ the smell of his pipe smoke that’s cheering to a body.”
Hirst was as free from vanity as most hearty, well-set-up men, but he had felt more than one doubt of the widow’s friendliness in years gone by; and to-night he took a hasty step or two away from her, like a bird that sees the snare being set. “Why, yes!” he roared. “To be sure, I’ll step in some night, and bring Cilla with me—and bring Cilla with me. Ye’ll have David back in Garth, too, in the spring.”
“I’m glad of that,” said the widow. “There’s that little job still waiting to be done, and it’s rankled a bit, as I told ye; and now I can give him a piece o’ my mind.”
“Humph,” growled Hirst, as he moved down the street. “Good night to ye. I’d thought ye might like to see David back for his own sake, not for what he can do for ye.”
As he neared the forge, a broad shaft of crimson lay across the blue-white, moonlit road, a vivid splash of colour that flickered in long, waving lines.
“So Billy’s at play. Never knew such a lad for playing early and playing late. He’ll be glad o’ my news, I reckon,” thought Hirst, as he moved to the smithy door and stood looking in.
Dan Foster’s lad was busy at the bellows, and Billy was standing at his anvil. He looked a huge, heroic figure as he brought the hammer down, his arms thick and brawny, his head throwing out a fantastic shadow of itself on the wall behind. A cheerful scent came from within the forge, an odour made up of red-hot iron, and fire heat, and hoof parings from recent shoeing. The yeoman would know that smell of Garth forge, bringing memories of other days with it, if you set him blindfold, after years of absence, at the door. The contrast, too,between the nipping frost one side the threshold, the royal warmth on the other, was pleasant, like a spring day found unexpectedly at Christmas time.
“Billy, my lad, David comes back with the spring,” said Hirst, his natural voice striking easily across the uproar of the bellows and the anvil.
Billy, as befitted one who was short of wit, went on with the work in hand and finished it before he turned about. He was none of your wise fellows who drop a tool at the first hint of gossip, and afterwards return reluctantly to the unfinished job.
“Te-he! There’ll be terrible pranksome doings when David comes back,” said Billy, leaning on his hammer. “He’s like the swallows in a manner of speaking, this same man David—off for the winter, and home when Garth has got nicely warmed up again. When will he be coming, like? The first swallow’s nest I mind last year began a-building when the ousel hatched out her clutch of five up in Winnybrook Wood. Seems a long while to wait,” he added, glancing at the ribbon of firelit snow across the highway.
“Oh, ’twill soon pass. Time does for busy folk,” said Hirst, warming his hands at the smithy fire and thinking, with some compunction, of the daughter he had left at Good Intent “to have her cry out, like.”
Billy was silent for awhile, his massiveness and air of detachment from the world suggesting some impersonal figure of destiny. Then suddenly, as his way was, he returned to extreme childishness.
“David will be bringing a lile pipeful o’ baccy; and, if he can no way find a match, I’ve got the fire to light it at right soon.”
The yeoman laughed, rattling the horseshoes on the walls, and handed his pouch to Billy. When the clay pipewas loaded, and the quiet puffs of smoke were going up to the blackened rafter-beams, Billy laughed foolishly.
“Seems I’m in a terrible puzzlement, like a hen with an addled egg.”
“Are ye, now, and why?”
“Well, soon as ever David comes back wi’ the swallows, blessed if he won’t want a daft body to go working all at bellows-blowing. Look at Dan Foster’s lad, and say by yond same token if bellows-blowing isn’t work.”
Foster’s lad was wiping the sweat from his forehead, and he grinned at them both with friendly acquiescence in Billy’s logic.
“That’s soon put right,” said Hirst “What’s work i’ winter, Billy, is play when spring comes in.”
The fool smoked the matter over with tranquil disregard of time. “I believe ye,” he said at last. “Have watched the birds to some purpose, I. They’ll be hopping i’ search o’ crumbs all winter-time, as lean as a bare-boughed tree; but see ’em in spring, wi’ the gloss on their wings, and their bonnie, bright eyes, and their calls when they’re all by way o’ mating, ye’d scarce know which was work, or which play, to these same scatter wits. So David’s coming swallow-fashion home, is he, to make me play at bellows’ blowing? I’ll be glad to see the man’s right, proper face again.”
Cilla was still sitting by the hearth at Good Intent, and was still thinking of David’s letter, of the postscript which she understood so well. She was aware of a childish wonder that the message should have reached her with all its freshness after so long a sea voyage. The man’s unswerving loyalty, his dumb acceptance of any treatment she might give him, brought a pang of real suffering. She had no weight of remorse to battle with, as Gaunt had when he thought of the moorland grave; and yet, in spiteof logic, she blamed herself. Overstrung as she was to-night, she could picture David’s return, the pathetic hopefulness that his new power of talking about foreign lands would bring him nearer to his desire, his ignorance that there was any bond between herself and Reuben Gaunt.
“But then, there is none,” she would finish weakly, and would find little comfort in the thought, and the tears would fill her eyes once more, because David was so constant, and she so weak to help him.
Cilla of the Good Intent stood in the middle of her own winter-tide, just as Garth village did; and the spring, as Billy had said, would seem long in coming.