“I’d be sorry to leave it myself,” said the doctor, with his big, heathen laugh. “They work me to death, and I’ve seldom an hour to call my own, and first I’m baked with sun-heat, and then I’m chilled by this mist-rain ye’re so fond of, till I scarce know whether I’m dead or alive, but, bless ye, Mr. Gaunt, there’s some queer sort of joy in life, after all. Besides,” he added, with his own grim pleasantry, “there’s a certain doubt as to what comes after.”
“There is,” murmured Gaunt, though he would have been slow to confess as much at another time. “I fancy ’twas the doubt troubled me, when I looked up at the sky, and felt the brazen heat.”
“Just my feeling,” said the other cheerily. “It might be hotter out Beyond—or again it might be damper—I never liked extremes.”
Again there fell a silence between them, and still the doctor lingered for the sake of lingering, and because he knew that Gaunt was weak after long strain and needed a man’s chatter in his ears.
“Undoubtedly I’m a lost soul,” he went on. “Widow Lister told me as much last night, when she caught me riding home, and got me to poultice a boil the size of a pin-head, and then gave me a sermon because I hadn’t the fear o’ the Lord in me. ‘If I’d as much fear of the Lord, Widow, as you have of your body,’ I said, ‘they’d count me righteous in Garth.’”
Reuben laughed. He knew Widow Lister, and the doctor’s racy tongue had brought the picture clearly to his mind. And somehow neither wished to get on with the business of the day, for each knew at last that, in their separate ways, they had faced adversity with some show of courage.
“I’ve a weakness for Widow Mathewson myself; I’d the same feeling for poor Peggy,” said the doctor presently. “I begin to have the like feeling for you, Mr. Gaunt.”
“What sort of feeling, doctor?”
“Well, a ‘birds-of-a-feather’ feeling. We’re up on the same moor-top, we. There’s little of the heathen in me, I’ve seen too much of human sorrow to feel aught but fear o’ God. But my God’s different—yours is, and the widow’s is, and poor Peggy’s was—and I catch a sight of Him when I’m riding over the moor, Mr. Gaunt, at the end of a long day’s work, and the hills get up in front of my fiddle-headed horse, and the wind blows low through the heather, and I listen to the fairies. Oh, we doctor-folk learn a thing or two, when we ride with tired bodies and clear eyes, over the moor-top home to supper.”
Gaunt had not been permitted to see this side of the man before; and his surprise showed in his face, perhaps, for the doctor gathered up his reins and laughed shamefacedly.