“Ay, getting th’ poor lass ready.” The widow’s lips trembled. She reached out for Gaunt’s hand impulsively. “I should have been readying her for her wedding instead, Reuben! Oh, my lad, ’tis a queer make o’ business, this o’ living and dying—but ’specially the living.”
Gaunt knew that he was needed, and answered the call. “There, mother, you’re not left alone.”
The words were few, but the tone of them gave new strength to Mrs. Mathewson. “You can call me mother often—never too often; it’s only fro’ your lips I shall iver hear the name again.”
Throughout the watch which these two had shared, no moment had been so full of unexpected tenderness. The widow was leaning on Reuben as on a trusted son, and he was standing to her—not in promise, but in deed—as a stay-by in her latter years. The grip of his hands helped her to face what had to come; the steady ring of his voice relieved a solitude whose silence might otherwise have broken down her spirit.
“I must get word down to the coffiner at Garth,” said Reuben, knowing how the thought of work to be done would steady Mrs. Mathewson. “I’ll look for a farm-lad to pass up the fields, and shout to him.”
“Nay, but ye willun’t! I’ve planned it all out i’ my mind these last two hours. Nathan, the coffiner, wouldn’t come within a mile o’ Ghyll; I know Nathan, an’ he’s frightened o’ smaller things nor fever. See ye, Reuben! She was always full o’ fancies, an’ often she’d say to me, sitting beside the hearth o’ nights, ‘Mother,’ she’d say, ‘if ever I happen to die, like, I’d like to be buried clean i’ the peat, not down i’ a wet churchyard.’ She lived lonely, ye see, like myseln, an’ I fancy she’d no liking for many neighbours, even i’ th’ kirkyard.”
Reuben was ill at ease. He had made no pretence of godliness in years past, but at a time such as this old memories revived.
“Mother, you’d have the parson—you’ll laugh at me, maybe—but surely you’d have the parson say a prayer above her?”
Widow Mathewson had always been fearless in her outlook, whether it were true or false, and she did not yield. “I don’t laugh at ye, lad, but such softnesses were never meant for Peggy and me. ’Tis all very weel i’ the tamer lands, but not up here. She lived as she lived, an’ she died as she died, and naught alters that. God rest her soul, say I—but that’s as she made her bed i’ this life. Reuben,” she went on, abandoning all her hardness again, “I’ve done a deal o’ thinking about religion i’ my time, an’ never come much nearer aught. Ye might tell me that Peggy did as weel i’ this life as could be expected of a body? Now, there, I’m growing old, or I’d not give way to whimsies. Reach down my pipe for me, Reuben; ’baccy alwus helps me to get right sides up wi’ the world again.”
Gaunt, the ne’er-do-weel, felt an odd thrill of comfort in ministering to this hard-faced woman who depended on him. He filled her pipe for her, and he lit a spill at the fire.