“I learned young to keep the saddle, though I’m loth to disappoint you, Mrs. Mathewson,” said Gaunt, recovering his air of unconcern.
“Should have been glad, I, to see ye with your head smashed in,” went on the other dispassionately; “glad, too, to think ’twas I that started your horse. But it was not like to be; for ye always had the luck. Luck doesn’t run in my family, and never did.”
There was a silence between them, as they faced each other, the only human-folk in this lonely stretch of heath. In a place more busy, with others near at hand to temper the reality of what he saw in the woman’s face, of what he heard in her voice, Reuben Gaunt might have carried the matter off with more success; but they were alone with the rugged moor. He saw, during this time of silence, his past life stretching behind him like a miry, ill-found road. He knew himself dishonest, though he tried to find again his old, easy outlook upon life. A naked man, facing the naked truth, was Reuben Gaunt this once; and there was no Cilla here, sitting beside him as they travelled down the road to Garth and bringing to him thoughts of tranquil betterment.
“I’ll be going up the moor,” he said at last, fumbling with the reins.
“Ay, I would. Then turn to the right, and down to the right again—ye know your way to Peggy.”
There was something in the woman’s bitter jest that struck deeper than any curse would have done. Gaunt looked over his shoulder once, as he rode up the slope, and saw her standing, at once the victim of destiny and its symbol; and the breeze felt chilly to him on the sudden, as if there were snow behind it.
“’Twas she that put the notion into my head,” he thought. “Well, then, I’ll ride to Ghyll, as she bids me, and I’ll see Peggy for the last time. We should part friends, and last night’s parting was no friendly one.”
He came to the marshy flats on the moor-top where the stream had birth that ran through Water Ghyll. Wide to the north and south, wide to the east and west, swept the hills and moors and fields; here a broken ridge, and there a soft-descending, rolling spur of hills, showed like a rude girdle to the comely Vale of Garth. Beneath his horse’s feet the grouse got up and whirred, crying, crying over the desolate land; and the sky seemed near, as if a man, by reaching up, could touch it almost.
In amongst the marshes Gaunt saw the sheep which Widow Mathewson was seeking. They were feeding on the rich butter-grass that grew in treacherous places, and he knew them by the branded M, red-painted on their fleeces. Good-naturedly he turned shepherd for awhile, drew round them—the cob showing frankly his distaste for the wet ground—and, by dint of whistling, as if he had a farm-dog with him, and by skill of horsemanship, he gathered the ewes into a flock before him. And so he rode down the moor again, forgetting his mistrust of Widow Mathewson in the sly pleasure of succouring her at need.
She was standing where he left her, looking up the moor. Indeed, the big heath held only one figure and one thought for her; strong and weak herself, she loved the weakness and the strength of her daughter, the one link in her life that no storm had been powerful enough to break. She was past the stress of youth; but she remembered, and in her heart she was praying—she, who never went to kirk or chapel—that Reuben Gaunt might die.