Below them the country fell away in rippled planes of colour, like a tapestry, russet, silver and blue. Alix seemed to see it threaded with ladies riding unicorns and wearing high white hennins. Fragments of song rang in her mind; the joyous melancholy of Les Filles de la Rochelle, the blissful sadness of L’Amour de moi. Riding brought such memories crowding to one’s mind. This was a better intoxication than the dancing mirage. It went deeper. It set the bells of all the buried Atlantises of the soul ringing.
“What are you thinking about now!” she heard Jerry ask. She had almost forgotten Jerry while she gazed and listened;—far away in France; in an old, old France. But it was part of the better happiness to find Jerry again and to feel herself again a child, with Jerry her comrade. Mrs. Hamble was as remote as a lady on a unicorn. The woman’s happiness of the night before, made up of power and conquest, faded before the child’s mere joyousness. Jerry made her think of the chestnut horse she rode, with his eager russet head.
“Oh, I do so like riding, Jerry!” she exclaimed.
“You’d soon be able to hunt, if you get on like this. How I wish I could take you out hunting!”
“I should not care to hunt,” said Alix. “This is what I like. Riding in a beautiful country with everything happy around one.”
“But everything is happy around you when you hunt,” said Jerry. “Hounds and horses and people. One is part of an immense shaded joy. And one never sees how beautiful a country is until one has ridden right across it and known that at every wall one might break one’s neck.”
“I like this better,” said Alix. “This is like riding with a flower in one’s hand, and that would be to ride with a knife between one’s teeth.—Though I understand the pleasure of the danger.—But the fox would spoil it all for me. He would not be part of the immense joy.”
“Oh, I assure you—he enjoys it, too, in his own sharp way. Imagine his joy when he outwits us.”
“A terrible joy,” said Alix. “There must always be terror in his blood. No; I could not bear to feel that he was there, with his straining heart, before us. I could never hunt. But I should like to ride for ever.”
When they got back they went to find Lady Mary in the morning-room.