They got down at the squat, quiet toll-bar, with its windows fronting, like a bee’s eyes, on all sides of its face. They went through the gate together, and Will the Driver watched them for a moment as they turned into the path that followed the slight stream’s course.
“See her parcels safely ’livered at Good Intent?” he said to himself. “Would do more for the lile lass, I. Pity she seems so friendly-like with Mr. Gaunt. Should keep to dogs and horses, Mr. Gaunt—he understands ’em. Now, Captain, will you know I’m late on the road, and trust to you to make the whole team work?”
CHAPTER VII
THEY followed the winding stream-track, Gaunt and Cilla of the Good Intent. And now it was that the day, receding in the west, grew beautiful as it had never been at height of noon. Strange purples shadowed all the distant fells, while near at hand the pasture-fields moved in green, tranquil softness to the heath above.
“You are quiet, Cilla,” said the other by and by.
“Quiet? I was listening to the curlews.”
Not the words, but the girl’s low, passionate voice told what the curlews meant to her. Now, when the silences crept, dumb of feet, all down the furrows of the land, it was the curlews only that were loud. Wide about Sharprise Hill they called, and along the raking backs of Hilda Fell, and across and over the ordered lines of grey walls, green fields, and scanty woods that were Garth Valley. They would not let folks rest, but went crying, crying, fretting, fretting, while Sharprise wore his ruddy sunset-mantle, and Garth Crag, away to the east, was donning her grey night-cap.
Garth folk, when they are compelled to be far away from home, remember always how the curlews fret and cry about the fells. The sob in the bird’s call—the sadness that begins so quietly, and afterwards goes shuddering out across the gloaming’s stillness—they are the interpreters of music, sad enough, but understood and loved. In the daytime, complaining of the sheep; near dusk, the curlew’s melancholy; folk who have known and heard these things will lie o’ nights amid the welter of the tropics, and call the clear sounds back to mind. Reuben Gaunt, random as he was, had done the same, and Cilla’s earnestness came home to him to-night.
“They’re sad birds, though, when all is said,” he answered.
“Sad? Ay, and so is life, or was meant to be, if we could only see it so.”