He was quiet for awhile. Then suddenly his eyes caught fire at hers. “Oh, come away to the fields,” he said. “We could aye talk better out o’ doors, Peggy.”
An hour later Mrs. Mathewson returned, driving her sheep, and found Gaunt’s horse tethered to the gateway. The house was empty.
“I’ll thole a lot,” she muttered, “but I’m no way going to let Reuben Gaunt stable his horse in my paddock while he goes knocking nails in Peggy’s coffin.”
She unfastened the cob’s bridle, opened the gate, and sent him up in the moor. But first she took the bit from his mouth, and laid it with the reins upon the ground; for she had no wish to let the beast break his knees through getting the reins across his legs. The horse, glad of his freedom, turned his head once or twice in search of Reuben, then galloped off. And Widow Mathewson, who seldom smiled, laughed grimly as she saw him breast the moor-top, then disappear.
“Gaunt has galloped as free in his time,” she thought. “Let him find his horse if he can, and catch it.”
CHAPTER XI
PRISCILLA of the Good Intent had been restless when she bade good night to David the Smith and provoked from him a discourteous farewell. She was more restless still when the birds awoke her soon after dawn of the next day and would not let her get to sleep again. So she got up, and lingered often at the open window, listening to the bird-calls and all the fret of newly-wakened life about the fields, while she washed, and dressed herself, and went through the simple rites that accompanied the beginning of the day in Garth.
She wondered if Reuben would like the blue print gown better than the lilac one. Her head a little on one side, a shy, quick splash of colour in her cheeks, she looked from one dress to the other, and could not make her choice. Cilla of the Good Intent was a changed lassie since that glamoured walk across the fields with Reuben; wearing-gear had troubled her little until yesterday, and she had chosen her gowns by instinct, without conscious thought about the matter.
“I was wearing the lilac one when he liked me first,” she said, with a low, happy laugh. “Perhaps, when he comes to-day, he will like to see me wearing it.”
Beyond the open window, where the fields sloped in green hollows to the edge of Garth village, the birds could not be quiet. Ousel-cocks were calling to their mates. Throstles were whistling, piping, singing, the full flood of their melody let loose; and, like practised singers, they could afford to play strange antics with their voices. Up and down the scale the speckled songsters ran; and now they whistled “come out”; and again they called, with pretence of great sobriety, “There’s love a-waiting, love’s a-waiting; love and his lile lass.” On the roof-tops starlings cheeped, until they could bear the thrushes’ rivalry no longer, and began to mimic them in cracked and foolish notes.