Reuben Gaunt, meanwhile, was smarting under a sense of foolishness. Priscilla had laughed at him. The farmer had sent him about his business as if he were a hind.
“I get queer welcomes in this Garth,” he said, watching father and daughter move up the fields. “’Twould seem it’s naught at all to own Garth’s biggest house and richest lands. Garth is a bit like Billy the Fool—likes or dislikes at sight, and always did, however good a man’s coat is.”
Reuben was admitting unconsciously that his experience of the bigger world had led him to expect a welcome according to his station. He turned fretfully to return across the fields—in all his movements and his way of taking life he suggested something of a child’s perverseness, as if his body had aged and left his soul behind in the race of life.
He halted when he came to the first stile. His pride was smarting; his love for Priscilla—which touched already the random good in him—was rendered barren for the moment by that one girl’s laugh of hers. Small wonder that this man—who, after all, was as God made him, and therefore to be pitied somewhat—had never caught the fancy of the forthright villagers of Garth. He was too big in his own eyes, too eager to see insult where only friendly raillery was meant; too heedless of the truth that the right word at the one right moment is more than lands and raiment. Reuben could not stand against a real insult, such as Farmer Hirst had given him just now; and he sat on the stile and nursed his wrath, and, like his namesake, he was unstable as the wind.
He watched the patient fields, where the sunlight glistened on the clean, new blades of grass. Far up the pastures, a glint of limestone caught the sun and showed a track which, years ago, before he left Garth village, had been a wooing-trail for him.
“I’ll go and see Ghyll Farm again,” he said, getting down from the stile.
It was one of the big moments of Gaunt’s life, had he but known it. Yet he seemed to guess as little of it as the wind which, like himself, was turned by any hill that met it in its passage. He crossed the highroad, and climbed the further stile, and went up the track that led him to Ghyll Farm; and he whistled as he went, and moved with an eager step which folk, less versed in the ways of Reuben than the villagers of Garth, would have thought full of purpose.
The farm stood high up on the rise where the pasture-fields ran into the moor and lost themselves, and Reuben, seeing the rough, black outline of it a half-mile ahead, began to think of other days.
As if in answer to his thoughts, a big, strapping lass came up from the shallow dingle that cut the moor in two. She carried a basket of eggs on her arm, and she moved with a lithe, free swing that was almost insolent in its strength.
Gaunt forgot Priscilla, forgot her father’s insult. The worse man in him stepped forth, triumphant and uncaring as the girl who came to meet him.