Читать книгу Seven For A Secret - Mary Webb - Страница 5

CHAPTER TWO: Robert Rideout

A sharp young moon sidled up over the dark eastern shoulder of the moor, entangled herself in the black manes of the pines which swayed a little in the rising night wind, slipped through them like a fish through a torn net, and swam free in a large grey sky which was beginning to tingle, between the woolly clouds, with a phosphorescence of faint starlight. In the last meadow that sloped up, rough and tussocky, to the splendid curve of moorland, Robert found the sheep, uneasy beneath a dubious heaven. They lay with their dim raddled bodies outlined by crisp, frosty, faintly luminous grass. The presage of lambing-time was already in their eyes.

“Coom then!’ said Robert. “Coom then!’

They rose with a faery crackling of herbage, and prepared to go whither he should lead them. But as he turned towards home, a voice, sharp and silvery as the young moon, cutting the deep boding silence like a sickle, cried from the other side of the bare hazel hedge:

“Bide for me, ‘oot, Bob?’

He turned, unsurprised and unhurried.

“What ails you, Gillian, child, nutting in November? Dunna you know the owd rhyme?’

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