Reuben found Widow Mathewson at the gate of the croft, as if she looked for him.
“I somehow fancied ye’d come, Reuben,” she said, with as pleasant a glance of trust and welcome as though she were forty years younger, and he a lover bustling up with spring glamour in his eyes.
“Well, it was this way, mother. You told me your man was to be off for a day’s holiday, and I thought there might be an odd job here and there—”
“Just so,” put in the other, with a quiet laugh of content. “That’s why I knew ye’d be stepping up the fields.”
There was a good deal to be done, as it chanced, and it was evening before all was finished. After they had supped together, Mrs. Mathewson led Reuben out into the croft and turned toward the moor.
“We might as well enjoy the cool o’ the day, now we’ve earned it,” she said.
Reuben glanced at her inquiringly. Her voice was gentler than he had known it; her shrewd grey eyes were soft and kindly as they met his own. It seemed that spring had touched her weather-beaten life with fingers light and tender.
She was taking the track to Peggy’s grave, for all that; and Gaunt wondered why she chose just this one way to-night.
“Oh, I laugh often at you folk who live smothered down in the valley yonder,” said the widow, turning for a glance at the dipping moor, the green pastures, the hills whose jagged tops were ruddy with the afterglow. “When ’tis cold, ye’re colder than us; when ’tis hot, ye’ve never a breath o’ clean moor-air to cool ye. I’d have died o’ my troubles long since, Reuben, if it hadn’t been for the moor.”
With curious tenderness, she pointed out to him the landmarks, and named them all. Behind that spur of hill lay Dene hamlet. Just under the pole-star, showing bright green-blue in a strip of sky, stood the little farm where she had lived as a lass when Mathewson came courting her. The points of the compass were so many guides to memory—to memory, which is all the old folk have to warm them when spring calls up the pastures and demands an answer to his insolent, young note.