“The life’s well enough for those it suits, but it’s over-young for me.” David picked up a straw and chewed it with a pleasant sense of leisure. “’Tis this way, if I can get my tongue round a plain meaning. I’m ready to do a day’s work with any man; but, when it’s done, I like old things about me, th’ old grindstone at the corner, Widow Lister’s bit of a garden-front, with its daisies, and London pride, and lile clumps o’ primroses. I want to be near all that my father loved, and his father afore him and back to Flodden Field, or near thereby. Out yonder ’tis naught but looking forrard and hurrying. They’ll come to our way o’ thinking by and by, when their roots have taken deeper hold; and they’ll do more work i’ the year, though they tell ye otherwise.”
This was the David who had left the homeland. Unwavering in his love for Strathgarth, quick to realize a new phase of life, yet slow to accept it, he returned unspoiled, a little surer of his faith, if that could be, in the righteousness of older lands and older way.
“Your aunt Joanna didn’t treat ye very well,” said Hirst, after one of the pleasant silences that long ago had helped to make the two men friends. “It puzzles me that ye bear no malice, like.”
“She’s as God made her, like all of us. There’s lile use in going against handiwork o’ that sort. She asked me to go, and I went; and, when she hadn’t a use for me, I came back.” He stooped to pick a fresh straw, and again laughed gently. “’Tis as simple as falling out of a tree, and no back reckonings either way, now I’m free to live i’ Garth again.”
Hirst was not given to intuition. He thanked his Maker every Sabbath for the past week’s mercies, and tended his flocks with cheery zeal throughout the next six days; but insight into the hidden workings of a man’s character was rare with him.
He looked at David now—David, whose eyes were blue and honest as the sky that roved over the sloping fields, the rounded hills—and was compelled to understand his comrade. He knew now why Cilla had liked David well, but could not marry him. The “far” look in David’s eyes was that which nature’s priests wear—the look that Billy the Fool carried when he watched a pair of nesting throstles—the look of the folk who are content to watch life’s business, and to help it forward whenever a chance for kindliness meets them at the road corner.
Again the friendly silence fell between them. David returned to mother earth again, and his voice had a wholesome snap in it. “What is Gaunt o’ Marshlands doing these days? Running still to waste like water?”
“Well, no. He’s found running water has its uses in a thin-soil country, and is tilling his lands with it instead.”
“Gaunt tilling his lands? Cuckoo’s eggs will be hatching throstles next.”
“I thought you said folk were as God made ’em,” said Hirst, with a touch of sharpness.