“Strange? There’s naught stranger than life, Reuben—than life, and what we’ve put to bed under th’ rowan-tree. Folk get mazed wi’ chatter, seems to me, down i’ the valleys; they fancy life’s made up o’ gossip, an’ borrowing tin kettles one fro’ t’ other, an’ quarrelling when one here an’ there has burned th’ bottom through.”
The curlew drew nearer to them, wheeled above their heads. Its cry was Ishmael’s, and the undernote of it was loneliness.
“Yond’s Peggy’s mate,” said the widow. “She was allus a wild bird, she, and she never would have settled down at Marshlands. Reuben, lad, cannot ye comfort yourself wi’ that thought?”
He smiled gravely. “Had I no wildness, then?” he asked. “That used to be your trouble, surely, in the old days.”
“Ay, but ’twas a different sort o’ wildness. See yond curlew. ’Twill go down to th’ lowlands to feed, Reuben, an’ to have a frolic, like; but tell it that it’s got to bide there for life, and ’twould die o’ homesickness. Oh, it’s hard to say it, an’ harder to believe it, but maybe all’s for the best.”
She turned for a last look at the grave; then, with a firmer tread than Gaunt’s, she moved down the moor. As they reached the croft, they saw a burly horseman unfastening the gate with his crop.
“Nay, doctor, if ye please!” cried the widow, lifting a warning hand.
“Oh, I know you’ve fever in the house,” he said impatiently. “That’s why I came. I only heard of it an hour since, as I passed through Garth. How’s the patient?”
“Past your caring for—but thank ye all th’ same, doctor.”
“Oh, bless me—Peggy dead? I can’t believe it. Mrs. Mathewson, I wish to God I’d heard the news sooner. I might have saved her.”