“A hired man would have done half as much i’ the day, and done it badly,” she said, finding him milking the cows one evening.
“Oh, ’tis only the old proverb, mother, the master-man always works the better if he has the will. ’Tis not often that he has the will, ye see.”
She watched him persuade the last of the cows to be friendly with the milking pail, listened awhile to the pleasant splash-splash of the milk. “Reuben,” she said, with a touch of jealousy, “yond’s the sauciest beast o’ them all, and ye seem to have her at a word. She wouldn’t let any but me milk her—not even Peggy, though she’d deft hands at the udders. And, Reuben, ye’re doing too much. Leave some bit o’ work for me to do, lest I get thinking o’ what’s past and done with.”
“We’ll share and share alike,” said Gaunt, looking over shoulder from his seat on the milking-stool.
“Some folk have queer notions o’ sharing. I tell ye, I’ve not been so idle o’ my hands sin’ I war a girl.”
“All the better, mother. You’ve earned a rest by this time, while I—perhaps I’ve earned a spell of work,” he broke off, with something of the widow’s own grim humour.
The busy needs of the farm were already helping these two to forget their burden. To Gaunt it seemed strange, profane almost, that sorrow for the dead should give place to workaday anxieties; to the widow, who was older in experience, it was plain that such work brought with it the gift of healing.
All the routine at Ghyll was interrupted. It had thrived on its trade in milk, and cheeses, and butter. Now Widow Mathewson, and Gaunt, and the three pigs fattening in the stye at the far side of the mistal, were left to drink what they could of milk that once had supplied half Garth’s needs; the rest, save what was needed for their own week’s butter-making, had to be poured out into the parched and thirsty croft.
“It seems a waste,” said Gaunt at night, after they had filled the bowl in the dairy, and fed the pigs, and stood watching the rest of the milk run down the croft in a narrow stream.
“That’s the good farmer cropping out again in ye, Reuben. Of course ’tis wasteful, but there’s a deal of waste i’ life, as I’ve found it. ’Tis one o’ the things we hev to put up with, like. Was never good at a riddle, I; parson down yonder, maybe, could tell us why bairns are crying out i’ Garth for this milk we’re spilling—milk their mothers willun’t fetch, or send for, though I’d no way risk letting them have it, if they came.”