David Blake did not belie his reputation when, after following the wood-path through the Ghyll, they came to Good Intent—a grey and well-found homestead—and sought the mistals. What with surgeon’s skill and the skill that comes from utter friendship with all cattle, he did what neither Priscilla nor her father could have done.
“Give you thanks, David,” said Farmer Hirst, a broad, well-timbered man, with a voice like thunder on the distant hills. “She’s the pick of the lot, this roan ye’ve saved, and saving’s saving, whether it is your child or your cow that’s ailing.”
“Ah, now!” murmured the blacksmith, “there’s joy in saving beasties, and no thanks needed.”
“Well, thanks are waiting for ye when ye care to pick ’em up—which ye seldom do, David—and meanwhile I’ve to see if my men are cutting the thorn-hedge to my liking. Priscilla, there’s cake and ale within doors; there’s one in Garth can look better to David’s needs than ever I could do.”
Now David’s laugh was hearty; but it was a child’s whisper when compared with Farmer Hirst’s, especially when the older man fancied that he was using rare diplomacy. A true yeoman of the north was this master of Good Intent—owned his own house and land, his own quiet, wholesome pride, his line of goodly forbears. And so, because he had learned to know a man when he saw him, he had long ago chosen David as the favoured suitor.
“Lasses must wed, leaving their fathers lonely,” the farmer would say to himself as he sat o’ nights—Priscilla gone to bed—and drank his nightcap of hot rum. “I’d have felt less lonesome-like if Priscilla’s mother wasn’t lying green under sod, and me alone save for Cilla. But lasses must wed, and I’ve seen o’ late the mating look in Priscilla’s face. Well, her mother wore that look, once on a day, and I’ve seen no better in my long life, and never shall. It must be David—oh, ay, it must be David!”
So he left them together this morning, and his big voice seemed to echo up and down the grey, stone hills long after he had left.
Farmer Hirst had given the blacksmith many chances of this kind; and always it had been, as now, the signal for David to grow tongue-tied, for Priscilla to show the wild-rose flag of maidenly rebellion in her cheeks.
“’Tis kindly, this smell of a mistal,” ventured David by and by. “Sweet o’ the kine, I call it—’tis so lusty and so big to smell.”
Priscilla answered nothing. There’s something in the fragrance at a cattle-byre that makes for wooing, no man can tell you why; and the lass was young and was feeling two spring seasons meet in her—spring of her untried youth, and spring of the tried old world that knows its faith.