“Why to Linsall?” she asked, with a longing glance at the moor. “Oh, ay, ’tis Fair-day. I’ve nigh forgotten fairs, and ribbons, and sich-like idleness, since you came home again. What wi’ work, an’ what wi’ trying to keep up wi’ your cantrips, Reuben, I’m a busy lass.”
He only laughed and switched his leggings with the riding-crop, which from sheer habit he was carrying. The girl’s tongue might be bitter, but her eyes told another tale. “Let’s away, Peggy. A scamper always does you good. As for the baking—”
“It’s finished,” she broke in, setting down the last batch of loaves from the oven; “and if it weren’t—why, I fancy I shouldn’t heed.”
The old recklessness was in her voice, the old longing for light-heartedness, though under it all she knew that there was grief and heaviness. She went up-stairs and was down again before Gaunt had time to grow impatient.
“Shall I shame ye at the Fair?” she demanded, standing frankly for his inspection, her colour heightened, her hands resting on her hips.
Reuben noted the red scarf, the touches of colour which she had added deftly here and there to a dress which had seen many fairs and many weathers. No other lass could have worn such colours. They were gypsyish, bold, reckless, like Peggy herself, and they seemed to add to her beauty and her self-assurance.
“Shame me?” laughed Reuben. “There’ll be eyes for none but ye at Linsall!”
She closed the porch-door behind her and stepped out into the sunlight. “’Twill be enough for me if I keep your eyes fro’ roaming for a whole day at a stretch. Eh, well, I’m a fool to go wi’ ye, and mother ’ull wonder what’s getten me when she comes back fro’ selling eggs i’ Garth. But then she’s used to wondering, is mother,” the girl added, with a sudden, hard wistfulness in her voice; “it seems to come natural to us Mathewsons.”
As they breasted the moor, however, Peggy’s spirits rose. She had a day’s freedom before her—and Reuben’s company—and there was no need to vex herself with the question why he, and he alone, had power to take her natural good sense away.
They followed one of those winding moor-roads, set between low banks of bilberry and ling and wild thyme, which seem ever to hide some swift adventure at the next turning. Peggy, bred in the midst of these wide, sweeping uplands, had found all her childish fairy-tales, all her make-believe of battle and romance, among the moors. The gypsy wildness in her needed colour, warmth, the speed of strange adventures; as a child, and later as a woman, she had peopled the heath with voices other than the curlew’s and the plover’s. The countless hollows, bottomed by rank mosses and deep bracken, hid ambushed men; behind each hillock that concealed the track from her, she would look for some figure to come riding down to meet her, and no toil about the farm, no harshness of the workaday life which hemmed her in at Ghyll, had killed this glamour of the heath. It was this need of glamour, maybe, which had bidden her long ago to set her heart on Gaunt; the man’s queer eyes, with the look in them of devilry and yet of boyish surprise at life, his irresolution, the very uncertainty from one day to the next whether he would come tame to her hand, or would be wooing elsewhere, all enticed Peggy, as the winding hill-tracks did, that promised some gallant meeting at the next corner—always at the next corner.