“Oh, they say a good deal of nonsense, time and time. There’s naught like pluck for winning a fight. Good night to ye, and pray that I miss Widow Lister as I ride by. Three days ago she was afraid of fever; this morning she caught me on the outward journey and, ‘Doctor,’ she said, ‘I’ve caught a chill that may well bring me to my grave.’ I laughed—as I do, Miss Cilla, in season or out, and ‘you’re lucky,’ I said. ‘If I could find a touch o’ chill under this brazen sky, I’d be glad of the relief, and so would my sweating horse.’ Good night again, little Cilla. Gaunt’s not going to die just yet, and I begin to think he might be worth your taking one day.”
Cilla listened to the pitapat of hoofs as it grew fainter and fainter down the dusty road. The doctor had earned his right-of-way to folk’s hearts after many an up-hill climb, and his power to help his neighbours was not limited to their bodies’ needs. Whenever he felt that death was certain, he told his patient bluntly that the next world, not this, was his concern. While there was doubt, he thrust down his throat, willy-nilly, the physic of hope and sweetened the draught, so far as he could, with some racy, village jest.
“There’s a good man goes down Garth Street,” thought Cilla, following the other’s sturdy figure as it disappeared among the shadows.
The moon lay young, slender as a sickle, over the parched lands of Garth. Cilla herself, as she stood in the roadway, looked cool and slender, too, in her white gown, though she was full of strange disquiet. Her modesty had taken fright. It was well enough to be anxious for Reuben’s safety, well enough to seek news of him as often as she could; but she knew that it was more than friendship, this restless eagerness for news. And Peggy o’ Mathewson’s should have been a bride by now; and the peat was scarcely smoothed above her grave.
Cilla, for all her daintiness, her love of clean thinking and clean doing, was human as her neighbours, and subject to those gusts of warm and reckless feeling which are apt to scatter the habits of a lifetime. If she had been told of another who waited, as she had done, for news of a bridegroom widowed before his wedding-day, she would have thought lightly of her. Yet she could only picture Reuben up at the lonely, hill-top farm; could only pray for his safety and know that her prayers came from a warmer heart than she ought to carry.
She turned instinctively to Good Intent. Her father would be sitting by the hearth, big of his body, big in charity. She would step in, and have a talk with him.
The yeoman was sitting in his chair, as she had pictured him. But his pipe lay cold in his hand, and he motioned her to a seat in the settle-corner opposite.
“Cilla, I’ve had a talk or two with the doctor,” he began.
She waited, suppressing a quiet laugh that he, too, had gone out for stolen interviews with the lay priest at Garth.
“It seems Gaunt chose to go in to Ghyll Farm and to stay there. He knew what it meant before he crossed the door-stone. I wouldn’t believe it, until the doctor told me it was so.”