CHAPTER II
THE GATES OF THE MORNING
Dawn had woven her own texture of pearl into the fabric of the Moor, and the sun, like a great lamp, hung low upon the shoulder of the eastern hills. Silence brooded, save for the murmur of water, and all things were still but the stream, upon whose restless currents morning wrote in letters of pale gold. The world glimmered under sparkling moisture born of a starry night, and every blade of grass and frond of fern lifted its proper jewel to the sun. Peace held the waking hour a while, and living man still slept as soundly as the old stone heroes in their forgotten graves beneath the heather. Then newborn things began to suck the udder, or open little bills for food. Parent birds and beasts were busy tending upon their young. The plovers mewed far off, and swooped and tumbled; curlews cried; herons took the morning upon their wings and swept low and heavily to their hunting grounds.
Young dawn danced golden-footed over the stony hills, fired the greater gorse, lighted each granite pinnacle like a torch, flooded the world with radiance, and drank the dew of the morning. Earth also awoke, and her sleeping garb of pearly mist, still spread upon the river valleys, at length dwindled, and glowed, and burnt away into the ardent air. Then incense of peat-smoke ascended in a transparent veil of blue above Ruddyford, while from the cot hard by came forth a woman.
Sarah Jane had been at her new life a week, and began to know the cows and their characters. They waited for her now, and soon the milk purred into her glittering pails. First the note of the can was sharp and thin; then, as the precious fluid spirted, now right, now left, from the teats under Sarah's firm fingers, the vessel uttered a milder harmony and finally gave out only a dull thud with each addition. The cows waited their turns patiently, licked one another's necks and lowed; as yet no man moved, and the milker amused herself by talking to the kine. She sat with her cheek pressed to a great red flank, and her hair shone cowslip-colour against the russet hide of the beast. Her splendid arms were bare to the elbow. Already something of the past had vanished from her, and in her eyes new thought was added to the old frankness. She thought upon motherhood as she milked these placid mothers; she perceived that the summer world was full of mothers wheeling the air and walking on earth. Wifehood was good to her, and very dearly she loved the man who had led her into it.
Sarah Jane whistled sometimes when she felt unusually cheerful. She whistled now, and her red lips creased up till they resembled the breaking bud of a flower. The sounds she uttered were deep and full, like a blackbird's song, and they made no set tune, but rippled in harmonious, sweet, irregular notes, as an accompaniment to kindred thoughts.
Suddenly feet fell on the stone pavement outside the cow-byres, and a man approached where she sat and milked the last cow. The others, each in turn, her store yielded, had passed through an open gate into the Moor, there to browse and repose and chew the cud until another evening.
Sarah Jane glanced up and saw Hilary Woodrow standing and looking at her. As yet she had but seen him once upon a formal introduction; now he stopped and spoke to her.
"Good morning, Mrs. Brendon. I hope your house is comfortable, and that you are settling down. Let Tabitha know if she can do anything for you."
"Good-morning, sir, and thank you. 'Tis a very snug li'l house, and nothing could be nicer."
He nodded. Then the last cow went off, and Sarah Jane rose, patted it on the flank and stretched her arms. He remarked her height and splendid figure.