It was only when he topped the last rise of the field, and saw Gaunt talking to Priscilla across the pool, that his face changed. At times the clouds and the content that sheltered Billy from the realities of life were riven asunder, and it was always the one picture that he saw—a way-worn woman coming with her child to the gate of Marshlands, the harsh refusal at the door. Now, as he went up through the snow, he could recall the bitter cold of that long ago night when his mother and he had sought shelter in the porchway of a barn. Gaunt’s voice, which was his father’s over again, so Garth folk said, had recalled the past to Billy when earlier in the year he dropped Reuben into a bed of growing nettles. The sight of him now, his closeness to Priscilla, roused, not Billy’s strength, but his will to use it blindly. Before Cilla knew that he was near, he had passed her, had climbed the wall, had put his arms about Gaunt and carried him to the edge of the pool. Hirst himself, or big David, could not have resisted the village fool when his quietness turned to fury; and Gaunt was slight of build.
Priscilla was bewildered by the suddenness of the attack; but her habit was to meet emergencies—such as Reuben’s disloyalty and the change in April’s weather—with the reliance that came from clean living under the clean, steady hills. She saw that Billy was swinging his burden lightly over the pool; and in Billy’s face she saw a tumult.
“Billy,” she said quietly. “Billy, what are you doing?”
He turned as a dog does when his master whistles, and the evil left him—left him Fool Billy once again, with surprise in his helpless face that he should ever have done amiss. He set Gaunt gently down upon his feet, and Reuben, sick at heart, went through the snow, and round the bend of Little Beck Wood, and out of sight.
Billy climbed the wall, and stood a little behind Cilla, waiting for chastisement.
“What made you do it?” asked Cilla of the Good Intent.
“Well, now, I could no way rightly tell ye.” His blue eyes were fixed on hers, with the look which few who cared for dogs or horses could resist. “Seems a sort o’ blindness comes on a body when he sees Reuben Gaunt, and I put my head down like a bull and made for him. Terrible weak in the head Billy is.”
“But it was all—all so unlike you, Billy. What did you mean to do with—with the man you held in your arms?”
“Do?” he answered, with quiet surprise. “Why, drown him, Miss Cilla, as ye do wi’ kittens when they’re not wanted, like. Am fond o’ kittens, I, but they do get terrible cumbersome at times.”
“Oh, lad, go down to David at the forge,” said Cilla, with a sudden laugh that was made up of pity and of helplessness. “Go down to David, and tell him I sent you to him for guidance. And, Billy, promise me that—lad Billy, for my sake, promise you’ll not play with life and death again.”