“Well, yes. I mostly do, save when I’ve wares to sell; and business, Mr. Gaunt, is another basket of eggs, as the saying goes.”
“I’ve laughed at the fever-dread till now,” he said, after a troubled silence. “For myself, I take chances of that sort of thing as they come; but ’tis different when there’s a doubt that Peggy may have caught it. Surely you’ve to come closer to it, and stay longer with it, than we did that day at Linsall?”
“What, for harm to come on’t? Nay! I’ve seen plenty o’ fever i’ my time, an’ I tell ye that kerchief ye bought for Peggy o’ Mathewson’s was enough in itself to gi’e it to her. Poor Peggy! They allus said—those ’at were jealous—that her liking for bright colours would bring her to grief one day.”
Mother Lambert nodded sagely after Gaunt had left her. She had lived a hard, roving life, had long since learned to look at her neighbours with eyes unclouded by overmuch feeling; and she told herself now, with a quiet, impersonal wonder, that there was a real change in the man.
“Did ye see Reuben Gaunt go down street just now?” she asked a crony, who came from a neighbouring stall for gossip.
“Ay. Straight-set-up, as usual, and a bonnie lile figure to catch a lass’s fancy. There’s never much change in Gaunt.”
“Well, now, there is a change, and that’s th’ odd part on’t. He’s learned to think for another first, ’stead of himself, and that means a deal. Eh, but men are bothersome cattle! Ye think ye know ’em, right to th’ back o’ their minds, an’ all of a sudden they turn just contrary-like.”
Gaunt bought the mare for Peggy, and gave orders that it should be sent that day to Marshlands; but he had little heart either in the bargaining or the purchase. As he walked up the High Street toward the inn again, a hearse was moving slowly to the churchyard which fronted and looked down upon the road. They told him that only one day of the last fifteen had passed without a burial, and some days there had been three or four. It was brought home to him at last that the Black Fever was no boggart invented by mothers to frighten wayward bairns; he saw the scourge now as it really was, as a pestilence unlike all others, save the plague which many hundred years ago, folk said, had destroyed whole villages, and had made thriving townships into wasted hamlets.
Indeed, the fever, in a less degree, had that power to weaken men by terror which the plague had had long since. It was market-day, and a busy day, along the High Street; but uneasiness and gloom showed plainly on all but the most reckless faces, and farmer-men, ashamed of a weakness they could not control, would glance at farmer-men, seeking for the telltale patches of mulberry-red which spelled infection.
Gaunt opened his lungs to the breeze when he was clear of Shepston. He knew that there was danger to himself, but had dismissed the thought; his cowardice was all for Peggy. He was glad to be out among clean fields again, with the open road in front of him, and none to talk of the fever.