“That’s better,” she said, drawing long puffs of smoke. “There’s a deal to be done, and there was never use i’ blinking work. For myseln, it matters naught either way; but for ye, Reuben—well, ’tis best to get fever out of a house as quick as may be. It wouldn’t help a living soul if silly Nathan stepped up and caught th’ fever, or if parson came, and he’s one o’ the few i’ Garth who would. Parson is staunch, for all he thinks me heathenish. Ye’ve faced a good deal, Reuben; surely, ye’ll help me to keep fever out o’ Garth?”
Gaunt moved uneasily about the room. He would have had another kind of burial, but there was no gainsaying the other’s wisdom. The village, so far, had escaped contagion; his own feelings must stand aside, surely, when measured by the terrible price which Garth might have to pay for them.
“We have no right to do aught else,” he said, turning to meet the widow’s glance. “See, mother, she always had a liking for the spot where the rowan hangs over the stream. I’ve been thinking she might wish to be laid there.”
The widow nodded. “Get to your work, Reuben,” was all she said. “It doesn’t do to sit idle at such-like times.”
Something near to peace came to Gaunt when he reached the little ghyll and stood watching the stream, all but dry now, trickle down the rocky slope under the rowan. It seemed that, after all, Peggy would sleep more soundly in her own homeland than in another place.
The peat lay soft and deep almost down to the edge of the stream, and there was little trouble in the digging. With a touch of that fugitive poetry which was part of the man, he conquered his horror of the work. He told himself that she would like to have the stream-song close beside her, day and night. Death would not be a sleep and a forgetting, but a sleep that remembered all the pleasant moorland haunts. And the rowan-leaves would shelter her from heat in summer, and in winter-time the peat would lie between Peggy and the wildest storms that blew.
Fancies crowded round Reuben, as he worked in the pitiless heat. It was well that they came to his relief, for stauncher men than he might have yielded, without shame, to the misery of this task.
He looked up at last, and dashed the sweat from his eyes. The grave was ready. The heat-waves, running from end to end of the open moor, danced giddily before him; he felt the body-sickness which had caught him at the end of the fell-race which had ended with an over-moor walk home, and a halt under the rowan here while Peggy and he talked of their coming marriage.
When he recovered, and could see the moor again in proper outline, he saw Billy the Fool standing on the spur of rising ground behind. Billy’s face showed no trace of feeling; he stood motionless as some stone landmark reared to guide travellers across the heath.
“Digging a grave, Mr. Gaunt?” he said quietly.