His companion was still silent, and at last it struck Will that something was amiss. He turned his head, and checked his flow of gossip suddenly; he had not seen steady David in this mood before.
A half-mile out from Garth, the smith had opened his right hand, had glanced eagerly to see what parting gift Cilla had left there when she said good-by. He found a sprig of rosemary, and, because he had held it so long in his hot palm, half fearing to look at it, the scent of the herb stole up to him.
It was the scent that drove David’s wits astray, that rendered him deaf to Will’s chatter, blind to the garish road in front of him. It meant so much, now that Garth was left behind; it brought each corner of the old, grey street to mind. He could scent again the wood-reek curling sleepily from chimney-stacks of twenty shapes and sizes, the wallflowers blooming in Widow Lister’s strip of garden, the strong, lusty smell of the forge when his hammer rang on red-hot iron. A sickness to return laid hold of him; the rosemary had given its message, and David was fighting with his impulse to get down from the coach and tramp home again to Garth.
Then another thought came to him. Who did not know that rosemary stood for remembrance? There was not a child in Garth but could have told him what the herb’s meaning was. In some special way, rosemary had been, time out of mind, the guardian herb of Garth; it grew in every garden; it grew along the street front, wherever a strip of soil had been rescued from the highway. Without rosemary, the village would not know its own face; and Garth folk, when they wished to praise Cilla overmuch behind her back, said that she was just like rosemary.
Did she wish him to return? Had she chosen this maidenly token of a change of mind? Little wonder that David could find no answer; for Cilla herself, in these days of trouble and indecision, could have given him none. Will had talked of the widow, of the fever, and what not; but David had sat with folded arms, watching the road slip by and trying to grasp his purpose, one way or the other.
It was the turning-point of Cilla’s life and his; and once again modesty played him an ill turn. He was a big fool, he told himself, to go thinking Cilla would marry a dull, workaday fellow; she was made for daintier wooing than he could give. Oh, ay, to be sure she liked him well enough, and remembrance meant just that—no more.
“Seems to me ye’re in t’ middle of a day-dream, David,” said the driver, after a long look at him.
David pulled himself together, and his slow, patient smile broke across the firmness of his lips. “I was,” he answered. “And now I’m out o’ the dream, Will. They want no wool-gatherers out in Canada yonder, so they tell me.”
“And ye never heard a word o’ what I said about the Black Fever? ’Tis all varry weel for ye who’re leaving it, but I tell ye I’m glad to get out o’ Shepston every morn, and see the fells looking clean and wholesome-like—though, bless me, I’ve nigh begun to look at their faces, too, to see if there be any mulberry patches on ’em. Mulberry patches, David—Shepston folk won’t let ye forget the fever-signs. Gee-up, mare Polly! We’re late, and the Queen’s waiting for us.”
“As for me,” said David, “I look on the fever this way. Ye get it, an’ ye die, or ye don’t get it, and ye live; either way, what’s bound to happen is going to come, and crying won’t mend it.”