Rebecca could not be done with handling them—took up an apron here, a piece of lace-work there, all as if her youth returned.
“I’m too old for such-like trash, pedlar, though God knows I like the feel of it.”
“Too old? I shouldn’t have guessed it,” purred Donald. “You’ve no mirror in the house, maybe, to cure you of that fancy.”
He put a mob-cap into her hands—a cunning thing of lavender, simple enough till a woman’s eye appraised all the little by-ways of its blandishment. Against her will, the years fell away from Rebecca. She hid her grey, scanty locks beneath the cap—donned a lavender apron to match it—and was away in dreamland, a lass of twenty waiting for her man.
It was a good dream while it lasted; but she wearied of it, and searched restlessly among the strewn litter of the pack till she chanced on odds and ends of baby-wear—a pair of shoes, the two of them small as the hollow of a man’s hand, and the little intricate clothes, with daft blue ribands, threaded in and out about them. All they meant crept round her, and tears unshed too long found outlet. Donald heard the great broken heart of life find voice. He was himself a broken man, and knew. Rebecca came out of that weakness with a temper raw as a file. “Pedlars are seldom fools,” she snapped, “but you’re the primest that ever stepped into Logie-side.”
“What have I done?” asked Donald.
“You’ve bared sorrow to the bone, when I thought I’d done with grief!”
Causleen, looking on, felt once again that the end of an old life, the beginning of a new, had come to them—to tired Donald, and herself. The moonlight, racing between dappled clouds, shone free above the beeches on Rebecca—on Hardcastle, grim and silent. From under Logie Bridge, far below them, Wharfe River sang her slumber-song as she swept between her high, grey arches. Roy, the old retriever that had snarled at them, was fidgetting about the Master, and whined as if he scented peril. All was stealthy trouble, though owls were hooting tranquilly across the woods, and rooks cawed fitfully through the soft storm of leaves that was baring their spring nests to sight.
“That’s the best cure,” said the pedlar gently—“the best for any sort of wound. Let fresh air into it, though the knife grits down to the bone.”
Rebecca stood there, tall and lean. In her eyes was a smouldering fire that Causleen and the pedlar understood.