As Griff swung over the rise, past the rubble heaps thrown out by the quarries; as he saw the well-remembered undulations of heather and marsh-land and peat, he knew that he was taken home again. The old swift thrill ran through him: strength restrained, pathos that scorned to voice itself, roughness that hid a mighty, yearning tenderness—he understood it all, felt it all, as he had done in the days of his freedom.
No words can touch this feeling a moor man has for his country; it is a religion he never seeks to express—a vitality that helps him to do his work in the world.
Up against the furthest sky-line, showing gallows-black athwart the sunset, stood the threefold timbers of a rotting crane, dismantled long ago when the quarry ceased working. Perhaps no other details of the landscape seem more to express the whole than these gaunt creatures of wood: wherever a Marshcotes man sets eye on a quarry-crane climbing into the sky, he thinks of the Marshcotes moor and the soughing of wind through the heather.
A fat old grouse got up as Lomax approached, and winged its way towards the sunset. Griff, wondering if he had forgotten his ancient cunning, dropped into a clump of crowberry bushes and imitated the call of the hen. Soon a second cock grouse came whirring across the moor—but towards him this time, not away from him—and responded in a hoarse bass. Griff tried his voice at all the signals—warning and invitation, desperate love and the preliminaries of a mere flirtation; and the cock bird was taken in by them all.
Griff laughed, in a round, wholesome way, as he rose to his feet again. It was only the London life that had passed away. He stood for a long while gazing into the wonderful sunset flames: from south to north the sweep of colour stretched itself, and a little north of west the half of a ruddy sun was taking its farewell of the heath. He watched till the red sun-rim had altogether gone, till the orange had faded to yellow, and the yellow to grey; till the dips in the moor plateau were filled with a mystical gloom which seemed to well upward from the peat, rather than downward from the sky; till the rotting crane, that stood on the verge of the under-world, grew ghostlike and dim as the twilight deepened to the hue of its own black timbers.
And still the old love was the new. Still the moor reached out a lover's arms to Griff, and held him close to her breast. He was a moor man again.