A moment later a woman, climbing the steep face of the Ghyll, showed her head above the ling. Gaunt had been too lost in his own dreams to hear the rattle of loose stones that witnessed to her climb, though his horse had not.
The woman’s face was beaten hard by toil and weather, yet she carried it straight on her broad shoulders.
“Ay, ye, Reuben Gaunt?” she said, without surprise.
Reuben, scarce recovered from the first shock of the cob’s uprearing, was met by a sharper one. Yet again he laughed, for the crisp of the morning’s vigour was in him, as in all things that moved on two legs or on four.
“Give you good day, Mrs. Mathewson! Scarce looked to see you here in these lone parts.”
“Same to ye! Least looked for, surest found, is Mr. Gaunt of Marshlands.” Her eyes—hazel and big and clear, the one youthful relic that Widow Mathewson possessed—rested quietly on Gaunt’s own until he flinched. She was so sure of his frailty; so acquiescent, in a bitter, stifled way, under the trouble he had caused her aforetime, and now was causing her; so sure of her own honesty, and of his lack of it. “As usual, ’twould seem, I am busy, and ye are idle.”
“’Tis a day to be idle on, if ever there was one.”
“Maybe, for those born to addle no bite and sup. For my part, I’ve been seeking strayed sheep all across the moor, and not found them yet.”
“Then ye’ve done no more work than I since sunrise,” said Gaunt.
Widow Mathewson rested both hands on her hips, and drew herself yet straighter. Standing there in the sunlight, framed by the swart moor and the dappled sky, she seemed to Gaunt like a carven likeness of her daughter Peggy—of Peggy, grown older, harder, disillusioned altogether. The straight glance that rested on him was Peggy’s, too, and the mouth curved into a disdain that despised itself; only the daughter’s comely youth was lacking, and the flood of passion in her cheeks.