Vashti smiled, and again half sadly, for out of her own past this child confronted her. "That is brave, Annet; brave enough for the moment, though by and by we shall have to be braver. See how the sands shine below us! Shall we race for them and see who wins?"
She took Matthew Henry's small, unresisting hand, and the four pelted down the slope. Something in Vashti's eyes—it could not have been in the words of her last answer, for they were mysterious enough—had apparently reassured Annet, who cast away care and called back in triumph as she won the race down to the golden sands.
They were damp yet in patches, and these patches shone like metal reflecting the greenish-blue spaces that showed between the clouds in the heart of the gathering sunset. But along the fairway the sand lay firm to the tread, yet soft to the look as a stretch of amber-coloured velvet laid for their feet. Beyond rose Brefar, with its lower cliffs in twilight, its rounded upper slopes one shining green. Vashti had kilted her gown higher and helped the two girls to pin up their short skirts. All had taken off their shoes and stockings, for here and there a shallow channel must be waded.
They crossed without mishap, and, having shod themselves again, mounted the turfy slope where the larks flew up from their hiding-places among the stones. Vashti's talk was of the birds, for in all Brefar the spot best worth visiting is Merriman's Head, where the birds congregate in their thousands—cormorants, curlews, whimbrels, gulls and kittiwakes, oyster-catchers, sandpipers—these all the year round—and in early summer the razorbills and sea parrots. Zenobia, it appeared, knew not only Merriman's Head, but every rock, down to the smallest and farthest in the Off Islands, where these creatures nested. She spoke to them of the island from which Annet took her name—a low-lying ridge to the west of St. Ann's, curved like a snake, in nesting-time sheeted with pink thrift. There the sea-parrots breed, and so thickly that you can scarcely set foot ashore without plunging into their houses; but there is a mound near the western end where no sea-parrot may come, for the herring-gulls and the black-backs claim it for their own. She spoke of Great Rose, still further westward, where the gulls encamp among the ruined huts once used by the builders of the Monk Lighthouse; of Little Rose, where the great cormorant is at home; of Melligan and Carregan, the one favoured by shags, the other by razor-bills and guillemots. And so talking, while they wondered, she brought them across the hill to the great headland.
Merriman's Head, in truth, is itself an islet, being cut off from Brefar by a channel, scarcely eight feet wide, through which the seas rush darkly with horrible gurglings. The cleft goes down sheer, and was cut, they say, with one stroke of a giant's sword. Beyond it the headland rises grim and stark—a very Gibraltar of the birds, that roost in regiments on its giddy ledges.
As the children came down to the brink a flock of white gulls seemed to drop from the rock, hung in the air for a moment, and began wheeling overhead in wide circles, uttering their strange cries. A score of little oyster-catchers, too, tucked up their scarlet legs and skimmed off in flight. But the majority kept their posts and looked down almost disdainfully.
"They know we can't get to them," said Matthew Henry. "But wait till I am grown up! Then I'll come over to Brefar and build a bridge."
"You will not need a bridge when you are grown up," said Vashti. "See!" She stepped back a pace or two, and the children, before they guessed her purpose, saw her flash past them and leap. She cleared the chasm, easily alighted, and stood smiling back at them, while the birds poured out from their ledges, cloud upon cloud of them. Their wings darkened the air. Their uproar beat from cliff to cliff, and back again in broken echoes, like waves caught in a narrow cave and rebounding. Vashti looked up and laughed. Like a witch she stood, waving her arms to them.
"It is easy," she called back to the children; "easy enough, if you don't let the water frighten you. Why, Annet could jump it if she dared. Annet ... but no, child! go back!"
But Annet, with a quick glance at her, and another at the water swirling below, had set her teeth and stepped back half-a-dozen paces. She would follow this woman, witch or no witch.