Spring was abroad indeed these days. Garth village, good to see even
in grey winter-time, grew to the likeness of a well-kept garden. The
winding street--white at one time, then glistening-grey when the sun
shone on it through April rain--moved lazily between the cottages
and the yeomen’s square, substantial houses. And always, between
the house-front and the highway, there was a garden, big or little.
Sometimes--when the cottage was so small in itself that there seemed no
room for a garden-space--there would be a strip, no more than two feet
wide, fenced round to guard it from the wandering ducks and geese and
dogs of Garth. Sometimes a bigger house would shrink, with disdainful
pride, from too close a rubbing of shoulders with the street; and
its garden would be wide and guarded by a grey stone wall, with a
white-painted gate in the middle of the wall.
But always, right and left of the good street of Garth, there were
gardens, and, whatever their size or shape might be, the same flowers
bloomed in all. Crocuses still glowed yellow when the sun came out to
waken them; but these were of the older generation, and daffodils were
nodding already high above them with the effrontery of youth. Auriculas
were showing the white miller’s-dust about their buds; the ladslove
bushes pushed out green, fragrant spikes into this unexpected weather;
primroses caught the laughter of the spring, and celandines looked
humbly at the sunlight.
Priscilla of the Good Intent, as she came down the street, was no way
out of keeping--so the kindly gossips said, standing each at her sunlit
door--with the gardens and the weather. For it was true that not men
only, but women, were reminded always of a flower when their eyes fell
on Priscilla; and each was apt to choose his own favourite flower as
Cilla’s namesake.
The village parliament, made up of men and women both, is seldom wrong
when it passes judgment on a neighbour; and there was none in Garth
who would deny off-hand that Priscilla of the Good Intent was rightly
named, thanks to the title of the farm on which her father, and his
fathers before him, had laboured thankfully.
“There goes slim Miss Good Intent,” said one cottager to another,
across the quickset hedge that parted them.
“Ay! Sunshine all along the street,” the other answered. “Trust she’ll
fall into a good man’s hands; for into some hands she’ll fall soon, or
else a lad will just reach up and pluck her.”
Priscilla had smiled and nodded to them as she passed--nodded and
smiled, indeed, the length of Garth Street, as if she were the lady
of the village. She was no less, indeed, for she had that simple
pride which knows its station and disdains no greeting on life’s
highroad. Unspoiled as a primrose, opening to the warmth of spring, was
Priscilla; and it seemed the pity of life that she should ever have to
meet contrary winds.
Billy the Fool, at the extreme end of Garth, was passing the time of
day with David the Smith, as his wont was; for the two were rather like
an elder and a younger brother, and sought each other out by instinct.
It was two weeks and a day since Billy had dropped his victim into a
bed of growing nettles, and neither he nor David had spoken of the
matter since--the blacksmith, because he was too fastidious, in a rough
fashion, when a rival was in case; the natural, because he forgot such
trifles until the season for remembrance came. Reuben Gaunt, for his
part, had kept silence, and had thanked heaven, in his own random way,
that the jest of his sitting down among the nettles was not common
gossip now in Garth. For Reuben hated to be laughed at, as the half
and between men of this world always shrink from the laughter of their
neighbours.
“The birds are all a-mating and a-building, David the Smith,” said
Billy. “Cannot ye hear the throstles calling to the hen-birds?”
“Ay,” growled David, a sudden anger coming to him; “but ye and me are
no way mated, Billy the Fool. What ails us, lad?”
“Life ails us,” said Billy unexpectedly. “We’re over slow and
overpleasant, David. Chase ’em and have ’em, David the Smith--that’s
how I’ve seen the bird-folk go a-wooing. Te-he, there’s Miss
Priscilla!” he broke off, and seemed about to run and greet her, in his
friendly, dog-like way, when a second figure came into the street from
the bridle-track that led to Thorlburn.
The natural stopped, suddenly as if he had been indeed a dog and his
master had whistled him down.
“Garth Street is not what it used to be, David,” he observed,
dispassionately. “More muckiness about the roads, though why I know
not, seeing they’re smooth and silver at this moment.”
David said nothing for awhile; but he saw Reuben Gaunt lift his cap
to Priscilla, with that indescribable air of overdoing the matter
which roused the blacksmith’s temper. He saw, too, that they stayed
and chatted--Priscilla laughing--and afterwards went up the Thorlburn
bridle-way, which led to a field-track winding at long last to Good
Intent.
“Come in, Billy,” said the smith--his voice came suddenly, and was
half-brother to a sob--“come away in and play at blowing the bellows,
while I fire the ends of those posts that Farmer Hirst is wanting.”
“What does he want ’em for, like?” asked the natural, curious at all
times.
“To make a pen for yon rambling turkeys. The hens will go wandering
after the cock-bird, and they’re laying in the hedge-bottoms, and over
t’ other side the beck, and Lord knows where. ’Tisn’t the hens I blame,
Billy; ’tis the ruffling master-bird, with his tail spread like a silly
peacock’s. Pen him in we will, Billy--and, if he breaks his neck in the
wire-netting, so much the better for all sides.”
It was rarely that David allowed himself so stormy an outbreak.
Had he taken his wooing in this fashion two weeks and a day ago
in the farmyard of Good Intent, breaking down the barriers of
diffidence--Priscilla’s and his own--there might have been a different
life-tale for David the Smith.
“Te-he!” chuckled Billy the Fool, shambling toward the smithy. “’Twould
be a rare game to pen in the turkey-cock. _Gobble-gobble di-gobble_,
he goes, whenever he comes across the likes o’ me, and his wattle goes
red as the floor, David, when a man’s been killing a cow. Ay, I’ll blow
the bellows for ye, if so ye’re going to prison up yond old, prideful
devil.”
“Soothes a body’s temper,” muttered David, after he had been at
work for half an hour--thrusting the pine-posts into the blaze,
turning them about, taking them away when the pointed ends were
charred sufficiently, while Billy played contentedly and hard with
the bellows. “God knows I’d like to see Priscilla happy, with me or
another man; but Reuben Gaunt sticks in my gizzard like a fish-bone.”
He laughed quietly, for he always sought from humour an antidote
against the storm-winds of life. “Suits me, seemingly,” he said to
himself, “to be fair mad with a man; for work takes the tetchy humours
out of ye, and work pays ye afterwards.”
Could David have left his forge more often, in order to seek
Priscilla’s company--and he was well-found already in the bread and
cheese of life, and knew that there were savings of the years behind
him--could David have understood that a maid, if you love her and
she chances to love you, needs wooing with a desperate seriousness
and a desperate gaiety--he would have been less interested to-day in
the making of charred posts wherewith to furnish forth John Hirst’s
turkey-pen.
Priscilla, meanwhile, was wandering up the bridle-track with Reuben
Gaunt, and the little, plain-featured man with the wild eyes was
talking to her--talk being his prime work in life--and telling her of
the countries he had seen, the busy streets, the things remote from
Garth’s quiet highroad, and Garth’s quiet hill-slopes where the work of
farming life was done.
Like cloud-land drifting before a merry wind, the old life went
receding from Priscilla of the Good Intent. The street of Garth grew
dull; the singing of a farm-hand, as he strode up the hilly field
in front of them, was so much noise in a rustic bauble-shop. Reuben
Gaunt’s plain face, his little body, receded too, and only his wild
eyes were left--the eyes that looked into hers and reflected, so she
thought, the world beyond Garth village.
Billy the Fool, had he been in this quiet lane, would have been finding
the first wild-strawberry bloom, or another blackbird’s nest; but
Priscilla, who had loved such things aforetime, was looking far beyond
them now.
“You had seen so many countries, and there were more to see. Yet you
return to Garth,” said Priscilla suddenly.
They had halted at the gate that opened on the field-track to Good
Intent, and the girl was leaning with her arms upon the topmost bar.
The long and quiet glance she gave her companion was childish in its
wonderment.
“Yes--to stay, I doubt. ’Tis free and pleasant to go roaming; but a man
grows tired of earning his bread as best he can. I’ve been a jockey,
a trainer, a gold-miner--a publican, Lord help me, for one whole
year--and all seemed to leave me as poor as it found me, Priscilla.”
It was a little sign of the new days, but a clear one, that the girl’s
pride was content with his half-tender, half-easy use of her name. She
did not call him Mr. Gaunt, but avoided any name when speaking to him.
“But you had the life--the life.” Her voice was almost passionate. “You
did not see the same hills every day, and churn the butter whenever
Thursday came, and milk the cattle o’ nights and mornings, from
spring’s beginning to winter’s end.”
“No, Cilla--yet, somehow, when the old folk died and left me
Marshlands, and word came to me that the snug property was mine, I
longed for the home-fields--longed to settle down.”
Reuben was sincere in this, so far as his way of life allowed him to
be sincere in anything. He was glad to be home again, glad to revisit
nooks and corners which he had known in boyhood. Even the wanderers
need their rest sometimes, and this man with the queer, wild eyes was
fonder of Garth village than he had ever known.
“I must take a wife, Priscilla, now that I have something to keep her
on,” he went on, leaning against the gate-post and stroking his upper
lip. “Marshlands will never thrive unless it has a mistress.”
Priscilla looked straight in front of her, with a heedlessness that
angered Gaunt. Keen-witted as he was, he should have known that Yeoman
Hirst’s daughter was not one to be wooed at the end of two weeks and a
day.
“Yes, ’twill need a mistress,” she said, indifferently.
Her thoughts were all of the new lands that Gaunt had opened to her
fancy, and she would have answered, had she been asked the reason of
her interest in Reuben, that he was the bringer of stirring news, and
heartsome news, into the round of her life at Garth.
Gaunt was silent for awhile; wooing had sped so easily with him in
times past that contempt or opposition ruffled him.
“Suppose you choose my wife for me, Cilla?” he said at last, with
would-be playfulness. “Fair or dark is she, and can she manage a dairy
and a roomy house?”
“I had not thought of it,” said Priscilla, turning her candid eyes
on him again. “’Tis for you to settle such grave questions, I should
think.”
Her laughter hurt him afresh; and, while he was seeking for a way to
meet rebuffs he little liked, John Hirst came up the road. Hirst was
not one to scowl at any time; but his thick brows came together when he
reached the top of the rise and saw these two together.
“Crossing homeward by the fields, Priscilla?” he cried, in a voice that
startled them like thunder out of a tranquil sky. “Well, so am I, and
we’ll just gang together, lassie.”
“Morning, Mr. Hirst,” said Gaunt, soon as he had recovered from his
surprise.
“Morning, Mr. Gaunt,” answered the other gruffly, opening the gate.
“Come, Priscilla--we’ll go arm in arm, as your mother came from kirk
with me more years ago than I remember.”
Priscilla felt a big hand grasp her arm, and found herself, with no
time for a good-by to Reuben, moving quickly up the field-path at her
father’s side.
“Well?” said the farmer, presently.
Priscilla did not answer, but released her arm, and set a little
distance between them as they crossed the fields. She was angered that
her father had shown discourtesy--a thing uncommon with him--to the man
who had laid strange, vivid colours on the palette of her fancy.
“Oh, you’re out of temper with your dad,” said Hirst, a big laugh
forcing its way, willy-nilly, through all his disquiet. “So was your
mother, over and over again, before I brought her safely to kirk.
Hearken to me, little lass. Oldish men are foolish men, they say, and
forget their youth; but Billy the Fool talks wonderful sense, just time
and time, so I may do it with safety, eh?”
He halted to stroke the flanks of the roan cow which David had lately
saved, then stole a look at his daughter’s face, and found rebellion
there.
“’Tis as old as the hills, lass, this tale of what to do, and what not
to do,” he went on, his voice quite gentle on the sudden. “Two folk
leaning over a gate--a lad and a lass--and no harm done, maybe. Did it
myself, when your mother was slim as you and I was courting her. But
ye want the right lad and the right lass, Priscilla, for that sort of
gate-over-leaning.”
Priscilla was no want wit, and the years had taught her that Yeoman
Hirst could never so subdue his voice unless he were deeply moved.
“Father, ’tis so perplexing,” she said, taking his arm again in
obedience to a friendship that was like no other in Garth village, save
that between the blacksmith and his crony. “I do not like to see you
disdain Reuben Gaunt.”
“And why, if I might ask?”
“Because there’s something bigger than Garth and its grey street.”
“Something lesser, too, I reckon. Go on, lassie. I felt the same myself
once, and tried t’ other thing, and came back in great content to
Garth. I once--”
“The world beyond, father!” she broke in, with one of those passionate
gusts that were apt to surprise folk who thought her even-tempered and
reserved.
“Ay--a small world, Priscilla,” chuckled John Hirst.
“Yet _you_ longed for it once--father, you know how we have sat on
Sabbath evenings in the brink-fields, and watched the sun go down, and
played at seeing lakes and rivers and steep mountains in the clouds.
’Tis the same with me now. Reuben Gaunt has talked of strange cities,
strange countries, lying out beyond the cloud-line yonder--and, oh, I
want to get to them!”
“Reuben Gaunt _would_ talk that sort of trash!” said Hirst, the
strength and the stubbornness of the man showing plainly. “A here
to-day and gone to-morrow man, is Reuben, lass, whether ye like to
hear me say it or no. Cities and countries are there, over beyond
where Sharprise cuts the sky? Well, then, they’re men and women in
them, and men and women have been much the same since Adam’s time, I
take it, save for tricks of speech and wearing-gear. You’d find naught
different to Garth, Priscilla--but ye’d miss the homely hills, and the
clover-fields, and the look of Eller Brook when spring is painting both
banks yellow.”
Priscilla, because in her heart of hearts she was disposed to think her
father right, was bent all the more, in her present mood, on being out
of sympathy with him.
“I should like to see them--should like to judge for myself, father, as
you and Reuben Gaunt have done.”
John Hirst had had his say, and now was minded to smooth the rough
edges, as good-tempered men are apt to be when they have hurt a woman.
“And shall do, then,” he said, drawing her to him. “Only choose a
likelier comrade for the journey, lass, when the time comes for leaving
Good Intent.”
They had reached the hedge which Hirst and his men had been laying on
the morning when Reuben Gaunt had come afresh into Priscilla’s life.
Trim and low it stretched, the strokes of the bill-hook showing yellow
between the green, primal budding of the thorns.
“Good work, yond, though I say it myself,” muttered Farmer Hirst.
“Yes, good work, father,” the girl answered absently.
She was not thinking of the thorn-hedge. Her father’s “Choose a
likelier comrade for the journey,” meant in all kindliness and desire
to warn her, had cleared her outlook suddenly. Reuben Gaunt had looked
love enough in these two weeks to have lasted another man a year,
but she had disdained to acknowledge the meaning of his glances.
Priscilla--even to herself--seldom lost that habit of drawing maiden
skirts away from men when they showed a disposition to intrude; but
this morning she was forced to see the matter in its true perspective.
Words dropped by Reuben, as if haphazard, recurred to her. He was no
longer the scarcely-seen interpreter of worlds beyond her reach; he
grew on the sudden to be the man who had seen these lands beyond, and
she wondered if that wild look in his eyes were the mirror of something
gallant and good to look upon.
The girl was so silent and so grave that her father twitted her
good-naturedly. “Day-dreams, eh, lassie? They come in spring, I’ve
noticed--ay, even to grizzled elders like myself.”
“Day-dreams, or day-realities--I scarce know which, father,” she
answered.
Reuben Gaunt, meanwhile, was smarting under a sense of foolishness.
Priscilla had laughed at him. The farmer had sent him about his
business as if he were a hind.
“I get queer welcomes in this Garth,” he said, watching father and
daughter move up the fields. “’Twould seem it’s naught at all to own
Garth’s biggest house and richest lands. Garth is a bit like Billy the
Fool--likes or dislikes at sight, and always did, however good a man’s
coat is.”
Reuben was admitting unconsciously that his experience of the bigger
world had led him to expect a welcome according to his station. He
turned fretfully to return across the fields--in all his movements
and his way of taking life he suggested something of a child’s
perverseness, as if his body had aged and left his soul behind in the
race of life.
He halted when he came to the first stile. His pride was smarting;
his love for Priscilla--which touched already the random good in
him--was rendered barren for the moment by that one girl’s laugh of
hers. Small wonder that this man--who, after all, was as God made
him, and therefore to be pitied somewhat--had never caught the fancy
of the forthright villagers of Garth. He was too big in his own eyes,
too eager to see insult where only friendly raillery was meant; too
heedless of the truth that the right word at the one right moment is
more than lands and raiment. Reuben could not stand against a real
insult, such as Farmer Hirst had given him just now; and he sat on the
stile and nursed his wrath, and, like his namesake, he was unstable as
the wind.
He watched the patient fields, where the sunlight glistened on the
clean, new blades of grass. Far up the pastures, a glint of limestone
caught the sun and showed a track which, years ago, before he left
Garth village, had been a wooing-trail for him.
“I’ll go and see Ghyll Farm again,” he said, getting down from the
stile.
It was one of the big moments of Gaunt’s life, had he but known it. Yet
he seemed to guess as little of it as the wind which, like himself, was
turned by any hill that met it in its passage. He crossed the highroad,
and climbed the further stile, and went up the track that led him to
Ghyll Farm; and he whistled as he went, and moved with an eager step
which folk, less versed in the ways of Reuben than the villagers of
Garth, would have thought full of purpose.
The farm stood high up on the rise where the pasture-fields ran into
the moor and lost themselves, and Reuben, seeing the rough, black
outline of it a half-mile ahead, began to think of other days.
As if in answer to his thoughts, a big, strapping lass came up from
the shallow dingle that cut the moor in two. She carried a basket of
eggs on her arm, and she moved with a lithe, free swing that was almost
insolent in its strength.
Gaunt forgot Priscilla, forgot her father’s insult. The worse man in
him stepped forth, triumphant and uncaring as the girl who came to meet
him.
“Why, ’tis you, Peggy?” said Gaunt, touching his cap, but not lifting
it with the flourish which exasperated David the Smith.
“Seems so, Reuben,” she answered, setting down her basket and standing
with a hand on either shapely hip.
It was not easy to read the look in Peggy’s face. There was derision,
and rosy pleasure at the meeting, and defiance; and Reuben was daunted
a little, for he liked women to go easily upon the rein.
“I’m home again, you see,” he said, awkwardly.
“Seems so. I heard you were back two weeks ago, and fancied you were
overproud these days to visit Peggy Mathewson. Got a fine house of your
own, and what not, now your folk are dead?”
“I used not to be overproud to visit you,” said Reuben, his eyes
catching fire at hers.
“Well, no. But that was years ago, and you were always light to come
and go, Reuben. D’ye remember that you left without a good-by said?”
she went on, the grievance of five years coming out with sudden
bitterness. “Mother talked to ye, Reuben Gaunt--would have thrashed
you, I believe, but for your luck--mother is strong as a man to this
day, and that’s more than you will ever be.”
Reuben’s face was like a dog’s when he has done amiss, and knows
it, and tries to make you understand that he is innocent. Of all
the welcomes he had found in Garth, this was the sharpest and most
tantalizing.
“Had my folk to think of, Peggy. ’Twould have broken father’s heart--”
“Oh, ay!” The girl was fine in the strength with which she treated
Reuben Gaunt. “You always had somebody’s heart to think of, Reuben,
when you wanted to run wide and free from trouble. What of me, lad,
left here to think of things?”
“You’re looking bonnier for the trouble, Peggy, left here or not.”
“Old trick o’ yours, Reuben. Your arm was ever lithe to slip about a
lass’s waist, and your tongue to grasp a lie.”
They looked at each other, and Priscilla of the Good Intent was far
away from Reuben.
“Could slip an arm about your waist this minute, Peggy.”
“Doubtless--if I’d let you.”
She stood away from him, alert, secure, yet with a careless touch of
invitation in her glance.
“What is your errand, Peggy?” he asked after a pause.
“I’m taking a sitting of eggs to Hill End Farm. Folk fight rather shy
of mother and me, Reuben, but they seem to know where to come when they
want a clutch of Black Minorca eggs.”
He fell into step beside her, and Peggy only shrugged her shoulders. It
was natural, and like old times, that Gaunt should ask no leave.
“Carrying my eggs all in one basket,” she said, by and by, after he
had helped her over a clumsy stile. “Always did, Reuben, if ye call to
mind. ’Tis a failing of the Mathewsons, I’ve heard tell. They don’t
look to see if the basket is strong and well-found--they just take a
daft fancy to the look on’t, and pop the whole clutch in.”
“I’m here in Garth to be sneered at,” said Gaunt, with sudden passion.
“I knew it after the first day or two, Peggy, but I’d looked for
something different from you.”
“You’re always like yourself, Reuben.” The girl looked at him with a
quiet, impersonal surprise that was almost pity. “You’d pour honey into
one ear and trust it to run out safely at the other. I’m the only lass
in the world to ye, eh? Those will-o’-wispish eyes of yours are saying
it. Yet honey stays sometimes; and a lass goes on eating it, and finds
the taste on’t sweet.”
Reuben Gaunt took the basket from her arm and set it down; and then he
grasped her hands and stood facing her. There was a suddenness and fire
about him that the girl liked to see--as she would have liked to find
the withes of her egg-basket not quite so slender as they seemed.
“Peggy, I’d thought to find a welcome here at Garth. There’s a damned
conspiracy against me, and yet I came home again with soft and quiet
thoughts enough, God knows. You’ve failed me, too.”
“You did not seek me out, Reuben, till you were tired of better folk.”
“More fool I, then, Peggy.”
“It takes you a fortnight to tire, I remember, and two weeks chasing
other game, and then you’re back again.”
The girl laughed suddenly. To know a man to the core of him and find
him wanting, and yet to be weak in his hands when he returns--it is a
plight which brings women to the borderland where tears meet laughter.
And tears are apt to conquer in such a case, though laughter is the
safe, abiding road.
Across the ages came the call to the girl’s heart--“As a hen gathers
her chickens under her wing.” She heard the voice. She was stronger
than Reuben Gaunt, and knew it, and her pity lay about him like a
mother-wing.
“Come close and hither, Reuben. There’s naught else will do for ye,
’twould seem,” she said.
“’Tis five years since I kissed ye, Peggy,” he said by and by.
“Ay,” she answered, with a weariness that shamed her big, straight
body. “Ay, Reuben. We’re as we are made, I reckon, and ye and me are
equal fools, each in our own way.”
She picked up her basket, and they went along the quiet fields
together. The grass was growing under their feet, and a lark was
singing to the sun. There was no hint, from lark or greening pastures,
that this narrow sheep-track which they followed was leading two folk
into idleness.