His muddled wits caught the one right appeal. “For your sake, eh?” he asked. There was surrender and question in his blue eyes.
“For my sake—yes, of course. Always for my sake, Billy.”
“Te-he!” chuckled Billy. “Will keep that notion right in the middle of my daft head-piece, so I will. Give ye good day, Miss Cilla.”
He turned and went down the slope with great cheeriness, taking a bee-line through the snow and breasting the drifts with the strong, unhurried ease that marked his days. Cilla did not know it, but her plea that he should do all things for her sake had made for Billy’s happiness. To please her was frolic of the sort he enjoyed at David’s forge, but a rarer and more pleasant frolic.
Mrs. Mathewson rented the third of the pastures that clustered round the drinking-pool, and she was leaning over her wall, a still, passionless figure. She had been a looker-on at the struggle between Gaunt and the fool; she was always a looker-on these days, grave, hard of face, a little disdainful of the tumults that beset younger folk. If swayed either way by feeling, she was pleased that Gaunt should be belittled in Priscilla’s eyes; in no case could it do him harm to meet with a tumble or two in his erratic course. And yet, in some odd way of her own, she “had a silly weakness, like” for this will-o’-the-wisp who had caused her heartache in the past, and would cause her heartache, doubtless, many times again.
“I’ve lost no lambs, Miss Priscilla,” said the widow, enjoying Cilla’s startled backward glance. “Hope ye’ve had the same good luck yourselves down at Good Intent. Oh, to be sure, there’s weather, and weather again, and naught but weather, up here on the heights. We’ve got to put up wi’ ’t, like ye put up wi’ a silly, daft bairn.”
“You startled me,” said Cilla, meeting Mrs. Mathewson’s quiet glance. “Yes—oh, yes, our lambs are all ingathered, or nearly all. I came up here to seek the last two that are missing.”
“And found Reuben Gaunt, instead, and a big lad holding him over the pool? Well, they’re neither on ’em lambs, an’ neither on ’em lions; but are just what ye might call a mixture ’twixt the two.”
Harsh this woman might be, but to Cilla she stood just now as something strong and honest, something that had suffered, and stood firm, and been beaten by the weather out of all comely shape.
“I care so little for gossip,” she began, moved by a sudden impulse to confide in this woman who was grey and hard as the wall on which she leaned. “Yet it seems to meet you at every turn, and leaves its mark like the fever. Mrs. Mathewson, why should Billy go past himself like this? He’s so quiet at usual times—and then he loses himself in fury at sight of Mr. Gaunt. They say, of course—”