So then he told her—the sun lay low down to Windover Crag by this time—that Pedlar Joe had the fever on him when he sold the kerchief; and again she laughed.
“Is that all, Reuben? I thought ’twas worse.” She looked down the moor, and into his face again; and her voice was soft with trouble. “Reuben, ’tis ill when ye doubt the man ye care for. I never cared, save for you; but you—”
Gaunt forgot the scarf, forgot the sickness and the hearse and the great distrust that had peopled the High Street at Shepston.
“Well?” he asked. “What is amiss, then, if we’re both of the same mind? Peggy, I’ve been fearing for you all the way home from market; I ought to take shame that a parcel of Shepston folk can scare me.”
Down below in Garth, Billy had done with his day’s play at the forge, and had wandered out into what he named his green-field’s bed. He made up the pastures and out into the open moor; and here, in a little hollow deep with heather, he lay down, turned twice or thrice till he had made a lair for himself, and breathed a sigh of sheer content.
“’Tis a right queer matter to be born daft-witted,” he said to himself. “There’s folk sleeping in Garth yonder at this minute ’twixt four hot walls, and no breath o’ air to help them. Only Fool Billy knows, ’twould seem, what a terrible soft bed a body’s body can find right up at the top o’ the world.”
He lay there on his back, and watched the stars, the waning moon whose colour was ivory tinged with saffron, the quiet blue of the sky. The wise folk spoke of the moor as a lonely place, where none could sleep without fear of the ghosts that were known to haunt it. To Billy it was home. If grouse were lying near him in the heather, they were friends; if the old dog-fox from Sharprise Wood chose this track for purposes connected with his larder, Billy was well acquainted with him; as for ghosts, there was only one that troubled him, and this had no dwelling among the marshes and the ling.
CHAPTER XVIII
PEGGY’S high spirits did not forsake her as the time for her wedding drew near. Gaunt was eager, with a dash of haste and recklessness about the matter that appealed to her gipsy temper.
She knew that poor fools down in the valley were sick with the heat and the fever-dread; for herself, she lived on the cooler moor, and a glance at its clean acres, a touch of its heather-wind, were enough to banish all thought of fever like an unclean ghost that had no place here on the hill-tops. She did not know that a part at least of Gaunt’s haste was due to Priscilla of the Good Intent. Since the day when Cilla had met him on the Shepston Road, Reuben had found the old disquiet return. Like his father before him, he had an instinct toward a wife who was comely of speech and manner; he needed, as Mrs. Mathewson had said bitterly in time of April snow, “a ladyish mistress for Marshlands.” Do as he would these days, Gaunt saw constantly the picture of Cilla in her lilac frock. She would fit the old house as the well-ordered ivy which grew along its front. Her voice would sound cool and low under the dark rafter-beams. There would be flowers about the house again, and the spinet would awaken to life under Cilla’s fingers.