He gave a last look at the evening hills, the evening fields, behind him; and for the first time he wondered if Priscilla’s refusal of his suit were final. Greatly brave in speculation was David to-night, and the mere hope that Cilla might find second thoughts—a hope slender as a reed, but real for all that—set a new light in his eyes and a brisker movement in his feet as he stepped out toward Good Intent.
He went on the high ground overlooking Willow Beck, and as he walked he kept looking constantly into the valley. So gently the gloaming filtered down the valley’s length like a wide stream of silver-grey—so prayerful and so still the evening was—that a man of harder heart than David might well have found his eyes go seeking peace and finding it.
“She’s bonnie, when all’s said, is Garth Valley,” was his thought; “and here am I, all late for Farmer Hirst.”
Suddenly he halted, though wishing to get forward. Through the silver-grey of Garth Valley two figures came; as yet they were no more than outlined against the grey, but David was held by some unhappy intuition, and he needs must stay and watch them at a nearer distance.
Slow, but pitiably sure for David, their progress was; and soon, though it was too far to know their faces, he knew them by their carriage and their walk. Spring was over in a moment for David, but boyhood was not altogether past, it seemed, for he felt his throat grow big, and his eyes were smarting.
Once, as he watched them, they stopped, came closer still together, and went on again; and over David—whom folk thought slow and cheery, not given to feeling overmuch—there passed the bitterness of death.
It was no selfish love he had for Cilla. To see any man so close to the lile lass, whom he had watched over so long, would have been a grief, because he frankly sought her for himself these days; but had the man been honest, clean of his hands, David would have felt no bitterness, only a self-sorrow that he would not have nursed for long, because such sickliness was foreign to him.
“If’t had been any one but Gaunt,” he said, “any one in all Garth village save Reuben Gaunt! Lord knows I hate the willowy slim way of the man, and he’ll send Priscilla’s happiness abroad—ay, will he, like any ladkin blowing bubbles for a frolic on his mother’s doorstep.”
He turned away, and he thought that he could not bear to go to Good Intent to-night. Yet he had promised, and David’s word, till now, had been good as Queen’s coin in Garth village.
Up and down the fields he wandered. If Cilla were not sure to meet him at Good Intent, he could have gone at once, and covered up his bitterness from Farmer Hirst as best he might; but it was nearing dark, and he knew that she would return before the last of nightfall came.