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They would wait until the winter sunset kindled and they had to return home quickly, looking over their shoulders at its flames. Lovely it was to find that he liked all the things she did: loneliness and the sting of rain on the face and the cry of the redshanks; and lovely it was to find in watching his liking what a glorious being it was that she had borne.
Not only had he firmly established himself in the allegiance of his own tribe, but had found allies and assistants outside it. There had of late been a steady migration of Scotch islanders into the North of Ireland, "Redshanks" as they were familiarly called, and a body of these, got together by Shane and kept as a body-guard, enabled him to act with unusual rapidity and decision.
She wanted to start up and cry out to him and hail him noisily from his obsession; but something in the place, in the call of the redshanks, in the procession of the shadows, reminded her that when she had cried out before she had brought death upon her lover. This quietness was the safer way. She would wait patiently until he came to make his exorbitant demand.
The clouds declared themselves the inhabitants of the sky and not its stuff by casting separate shadows, and the space they moved in seemed a reservoir of salt light, of fluid silence, under which it was good to live. Yet it was not silence, for there came perpetually that leisurely, wet cry. "What are those birds? They make a lovely sound," asked Ellen, dancing. "Those are the redshanks.
"I'm Donald," she announced: and burst out with the song: "We're gayly yet, we're gayly yet; We're not very fou, but we're gayly yet: Then sit ye awhile, and tipple a bit; For we're not very fou, but we're gayly yet." She snatched up Carmina's medicine glass, and waved it over her head with a Bacchanalian screech. "Fill a brimmer, Tammie! Here's to Redshanks!"
"And well we know how to guard it, captin!" cried the same ominous voice; and there was a buzz from the length of the company. The captain and the two subs. came together behind the marching line. "They seem a bit out of hand," murmured the captain. "Bedad," said the Galway boy, "they mean to scoot like redshanks." "They nearly broke when the blacks showed on the hill," said Grice.
She had dragged herself up the hill to escape from the bickerings at Yaverland's End, and had been resting there, looking down on the peace of the marshes and listening to the unargumentative cry of the redshanks, and wishing that she might dwell during this time among such quiet things; and suddenly there came a wind from the sea, and it was as if a little naked child had been blown into her soul.
"And pray who is Redshanks?" asked a lady, standing in the doorway. Zo turned round and instantly collapsed. A terrible figure, associated with lessons and punishments, stood before her. The convivial friend of Donald, the established Missus of Lord Northlake, disappeared and a polite pupil took their place. "If you please, Miss Minerva, Redshanks is nickname for a Highlander."
She had turned and looked down, as she always did when human complexities made her seek reassurance as to the worth of this world, on the shiny mud-flats, blue-veined with the running tides, and green marshes where the redshanks choired.
They're wading-birds. When Richard comes he will take you on the sea-wall and show you the redshanks in the little streams among the mud. They are such queer streams. Up towards Canfleet there's a waterfall in the mud, with a fall of several feet. It looks queer. These marshes are queer. And they're so lonely. Nobody ever comes here now except the men to see to the cattle.
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