It was rarely that David allowed himself so stormy an outbreak. Had he taken his wooing in this fashion two weeks and a day ago in the farmyard of Good Intent, breaking down the barriers of diffidence—Priscilla’s and his own—there might have been a different life-tale for David the Smith.
“Te-he!” chuckled Billy the Fool, shambling toward the smithy. “’Twould be a rare game to pen in the turkey-cock. Gobble-gobble di-gobble, he goes, whenever he comes across the likes o’ me, and his wattle goes red as the floor, David, when a man’s been killing a cow. Ay, I’ll blow the bellows for ye, if so ye’re going to prison up yond old, prideful devil.”
“Soothes a body’s temper,” muttered David, after he had been at work for half an hour—thrusting the pine-posts into the blaze, turning them about, taking them away when the pointed ends were charred sufficiently, while Billy played contentedly and hard with the bellows. “God knows I’d like to see Priscilla happy, with me or another man; but Reuben Gaunt sticks in my gizzard like a fish-bone.” He laughed quietly, for he always sought from humour an antidote against the storm-winds of life. “Suits me, seemingly,” he said to himself, “to be fair mad with a man; for work takes the tetchy humours out of ye, and work pays ye afterwards.”
Could David have left his forge more often, in order to seek Priscilla’s company—and he was well-found already in the bread and cheese of life, and knew that there were savings of the years behind him—could David have understood that a maid, if you love her and she chances to love you, needs wooing with a desperate seriousness and a desperate gaiety—he would have been less interested to-day in the making of charred posts wherewith to furnish forth John Hirst’s turkey-pen.
Priscilla, meanwhile, was wandering up the bridle-track with Reuben Gaunt, and the little, plain-featured man with the wild eyes was talking to her—talk being his prime work in life—and telling her of the countries he had seen, the busy streets, the things remote from Garth’s quiet highroad, and Garth’s quiet hill-slopes where the work of farming life was done.
Like cloud-land drifting before a merry wind, the old life went receding from Priscilla of the Good Intent. The street of Garth grew dull; the singing of a farm-hand, as he strode up the hilly field in front of them, was so much noise in a rustic bauble-shop. Reuben Gaunt’s plain face, his little body, receded too, and only his wild eyes were left—the eyes that looked into hers and reflected, so she thought, the world beyond Garth village.
Billy the Fool, had he been in this quiet lane, would have been finding the first wild-strawberry bloom, or another blackbird’s nest; but Priscilla, who had loved such things aforetime, was looking far beyond them now.
“You had seen so many countries, and there were more to see. Yet you return to Garth,” said Priscilla suddenly.
They had halted at the gate that opened on the field-track to Good Intent, and the girl was leaning with her arms upon the topmost bar. The long and quiet glance she gave her companion was childish in its wonderment.
“Yes—to stay, I doubt. ’Tis free and pleasant to go roaming; but a man grows tired of earning his bread as best he can. I’ve been a jockey, a trainer, a gold-miner—a publican, Lord help me, for one whole year—and all seemed to leave me as poor as it found me, Priscilla.”