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The household went to bed, and a silence fell upon the dwelling, broken only by the occasional skirr of a halter in Melbury's stables. Despite her father's advice Grace still waited up. But nobody came. It was a critical time in Grace's emotional life that night. She thought of her husband a good deal, and for the nonce forgot Winterborne.
A pretty business this, it seemed to him: twenty miles back of beyond; horses sent on at random ahead; a gang of murderers in hiding above Matthews walked boldly along the precipice trail, saw the eagle below circling, still circling; heard a hawk skirr and scold from a dead branch Then, he deliberately pointed his voice to the rock wall of the echo across the gorge and let out a yell that split the welkin A thousand ten thousand multitudinous eldritch laughing echoes came jibbering and mumbling and giggling and shrilling back from the rock, filling the Pass with chattering, knocking sounds that skipped from stone to stone.
Tartar, and Spaehi, and Turcoman, Strike your tents and throng to the van; Mount ye, spur ye, skirr the plain, That the fugitive may flee in vain When he breaks from the town; and none escape, Aged or young, in the Christian shape; While your fellows on foot, in a fiery mass, Bloodstain the breach through which they pass.
The air is filled with odours sweet as the perfumes of Araby or Ind. Myriads of insects flap their gay wings: flowers of themselves. The bee-birds skirr around, glancing like stray sunbeams; or, poised on whirring wings, drink from the nectared cups; and the wild bee, with laden limbs, clings among the honeyed pistils, or leaves for his far hive with a song of joy. Who planted these flowers?
These, with the constant skirr of the ground-crickets and the prolonged whine of the coyote, are the only sounds that salute them as they glide on none of which are of a kind to cause alarm. There appears no great reason for making haste now. They have all the night before them, and, ere daylight can discover them, they will be sure to find some place of concealment.
At last they reached the edge of the wood, into which Dick dashed with a leap and a bound, running his nose down amongst the dead leaves, and smelling an enemy in every bush, and at last giving chase to a squirrel which ran across the open to a great beech-tree, up which it scampered until it reached the forked boughs, where it sat with its tail curled up, looking tormentingly down upon his pursuer Dick, who rushed headlong at the tree, scrambled up a couple of feet, and then came down flop upon his back, without the squirrel of course; but he made up for it by running round and round the trunk, barking, baying, and snapping in impotent rage, while little nut-nibbler gave a sort of "skirr," and then ran up the tree, leaped to the next, and the next, and disappeared in his hole far up the trunk of a great elm.
She was thinking even in the overmastering presence of this hero whom she worshipped, and to whose side she clung, of that moonlit evening on the veranda, of the hiss and skirr of the deadly rattler, of the peril that had menaced and the quick wit and nerve of him who had saved her, this very plain, sun-bleached, seasoned young knight, who seemed quite ready to risk life or limb in her defence, and who, said Willett, had lost most of his heart.
The deadly rifle leaned against the tree, the sabre depended from its boughs. Steeds were browsing in the shade, with loosened bits, but saddled, ready at the first sound of the bugle to skirr through brake and thicket.