"How kind to think of that! How good and generous of you to say it!"
The voice of him sent an emotion through Honor, and, according to her custom when moved beyond common, she fell back upon laughter.
"Why, we're getting quite confidential, you and I! But here's the Moor at last."
They stood upon Scor Hill and surveyed their subsequent way, where it passed on before. Beneath swelled and subtended a mighty valley in the lap of stone-crowned hills—a rare expanse of multitudinous browns. Through every tone of auburn and russet, sepia and cinnamon, tan and dark chocolate of the peat cuttings, these colour harmonies spread and undulated in many planes. From the warmth and richness of velvet under sunshine they passed into the chill of far-flung cloud-shadows, that painted the Moor with slowly-moving sobriety and robbed her bosom of its jewels, her streamlets of their silver. Teign wound below, entered the valley far away under little cliffs of yellow gravel, then, by sinuous courses, through a mosaic of dusky peat, ripe rushes, and green banks overlaid with heather, passed where steep medley and tanglement of motionless boulders awakened its volume to a wilder music. Here, above this chaos of huge and moss-grown rocks, scarlet harvests of rowan flung a flame along the gorges; grey granite swam into the grey-green of the sallows; luxuriant concourse of flowers and ferns rippled to the brown lips of the river; and terraces of tumbling water crowned all that unutterable opulence of summer-clad dingle with spouts, with threads, with broad, thundering cataracts of foaming light. Here Iris twinkled in a mist that steamed above the apron of mossy-margined falls; here tree shadows restrained the sunlight, yet suffered chance arrows of pure amber to pierce some tremulous pool.
Each kiss of the Mother wakened long miles of earth into some rare hue, where the Moor colours spread enormous in their breadth, clarity, and volume. They rolled and rippled together; they twined and intertwined and parted again; they limned new harmonies from the union of rush and heath and naked stone; they chimed into fresh combinations of earth and air and sunshine; they won something from the sky outspread above them, and wove the summer blue into their secret fabrics, even as the sea does. Between dispersed tracts of the brake fern and heather, and amid walls of piled stone, that stretched threadlike over the Moor, there lay dark or naked spaces brushed with green—theatres of past spring fires; rough cart roads sprawled to the right and left; sheep tracks and the courses of distant rivulets seamed the hills; while peat ridges streaked the valleys, together with evidences of those vanished generations who streamed for metal upon this spacious spot in the spacious times. Beyond, towards the heart of the Moor, there arose Sittaford's crown; to the west ranged Watern's castles; and northerly an enormous shoulder of Cosdon climbed heaven until the opaline hazes of that noontide hour softened its heroic outlines and something dimmed the mighty shadows cast upon its slopes. Light winds fanned the mane of Honor's pony and brought with them the woolly jangle of a sheep-bell, the bellow of distant kine, the little, long-drawn, lonely tinkle of a golden bird upon a golden furze.
"The Moor," said Honor; and as she spoke a shade lifted off the face of the man beside her, a trouble faded from his eyes.
"Yes, the Moor—the great, candid, undissembling home of sweet air, sweet water, sweet space."
"And death and desolation in winter, and hidden skeletons under the quaking bogs."
"It is an animate God to me notwithstanding."
She shivered slightly and set her pony in motion.