“Te-he!” chuckled Billy. “Said they’d be done right fair in time, I did, and Billy keeps his word. Ye’d have nigh split your sides, Yeoman, to see Dan yonder a-blowing and a-blowing till I fancied he was going to burst his lile self and the bellows, too. You’re stepping up to Good Intent? Well, now, I’ll stretch my legs a bit, I will, after all this marlaking.”
He walked in silence beside Hirst, after accepting his customary match and pipeful of tobacco. It was not till they had reached Good Intent that the workings of the natural’s mind showed plainly.
“Dan tells me fever’s come to Ghyll,” he said, in the low, dispassionate voice which was always a sign, to those who knew him, of some troubled reaching-out to his blurred past.
“Ay, but don’t you go fearing it, lad Billy. ’Twould never hurt such as ye.”
“Was thinking of Mr. Gaunt, I. Dan says he’s up yonder. Now, ’twould be terrible pranksome if he happened to die on’t himself. There’d be such a clearing o’ the air, as a body might say.”
Hirst little as he cared for Reuben Gaunt was shocked by the quietness with which Billy uttered the wish. This lad, who was peaceable and kindly of face as Garth street itself, was asking a terrible punishment for his one enemy.
“Oh, tuts, lad!” said the yeoman, patting him roughly on the shoulder. “We don’t pray fever on any man, surely, whether we like him or no.”
“Well, now, I don’t pray fever. Couldn’t if I were minded to. I just think long o’ what I want—as hard as my daft-wits can be driven, Yeoman—and then I bide till it comes.”
Yeoman Hirst had no insight into the by-ways of prayer; he said his own on Sabbaths, while Billy was roaming wide across the moors, and he said them with the simple faith that was a part of his dealings with this and with the next world. He was non-plussed, for the natural at these times was self-possessed, and his quiet statements, as of fact, unsettled wiser men.
“Come in, lad,” said Hirst, pushing the other into the porchway. “I’ll tell Cilla to draw ye a sup of home-brewed ale, and we’ll talk o’ likelier things than fever.”