Priscilla of the Good Intent: A Romance of the Grey FellsSutcliffe, Halliwell
General
Priscilla of the Good Intent: A Romance of the Grey Fells
Sutcliffe, Halliwell
Country life -- Fiction; Courtship -- Fiction; England, Northern -- Fiction; Farm life -- Fiction; Mate selection -- Fiction
She had moved to his side, and in perplexity had laid both hands upon
his arm.
“You’ll not understand,” she went on hurriedly. “I shall miss you from
Garth. I shall look for you three times a day. The homeland will be
emptier, David.”
“Then, lass, why willun’t ye wed me?”
“I cannot tell. Only--women have no second love to give. Why it should
be so, God knows. But so it is, David. I could never feel for you--what
I felt for another when we walked by the field-ways home to Garth.”
It seemed strange to Cilla that she felt no shame in the confession.
She would have shrunk from it at another time; but now it was only of
David she thought--of David, who asked for more than she could give
him--of David, who asked for honesty, though she longed to keep him
here in Garth.
“That’s true,” he answered quietly. “Neither man nor woman has second
love to give. But there’s this to say, Cilla. Time and time, when
you’re alone on the moor-top, a will-o’-the-wisp comes ’ticing ye into
the marshes. True love is true love, lass, and ’tis steady-like; it
doesn’t dance like a light-heeled clown at the fair.”
Priscilla of the Good Intent was tired, and saw life hidden, as the
street of Garth was hidden by the sick, grey dust that cried to the
skies for wholesome rain.
“You’re thinking of Reuben Gaunt?” she asked wearily.
“Ay, just of Reuben Gaunt--no more, no less.” David was watching her
eagerly, not as a lover now, but with a dog’s look when he sees his
mistress running into danger.
Cilla thought again of that spring journey out to Keta’s Well and home
again. It called to her still, like the song of a laverock up above
the pastures when spring is wild about the land. Gaunt’s words were
in her ear. The kiss she had given him at the gate--the sweet of the
growing grass--the surrender, and the glamour of it, and the big lands
stretching out before her--Priscilla remembered every moment of that
day. She knew that David the Smith was right when he named the glamour
a will-o’-the-wisp; but she did not wish to know it; she resisted the
knowledge with a curious, headstrong passion that she rarely showed.
“We are to part friends?” she said, in a low, unsteady voice. “You
choose a queer way of saying good-by. There was no need to speak of Mr.
Gaunt at all, still less to speak ill of him.”
“That is not like you, Cilla,” David answered quietly.
She was repentant at once, as her way was always. “No, ’tis not like
me. You meant it well--but, David, you are clumsy.”
Again the longing came to her to keep him here in Garth. The shadow of
a great helplessness lay over her, and from one moment to the next she
did not know her mind.
“David,” she said, by and by, “do you guess what they will say if you
leave Garth now, with the fever all about us?”
“I never try to guess what they’ll say, lass. What I do is enough for
me.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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