Well-a-day!
For the cry of damnéd Love
All her beauty doth disprove,
And her heart it is a stone above his grave.
Mr. Tuke had not a good voice. The chords of vibration were beyond his control. But his breast was lined with romance, and this led him to give some melodious effect to the sentiment of words that did not seem, it must be admitted, appropriate to his rather riotous character.
He left the old city and took the Stockbridge road; and presently, entering between country hedgerows, looped his reins slackly and let his horse amble fairly as he listed.
The sunshine in his soul was constitutional, inextinguishable, and not reflected from his surroundings; for the day was bitter for the time of year, and the wind stuck as rigidly in the northeast as if the stiff-pointing weathercocks had nailed it there. The greyness, however, emphasized the sparkle of hip and holly and all red berries; for every dull mood of Nature has its compensations to shame us out of peevishness. A squirrel ran from branch to root of a beech-tree like a stain of rust; a cloud of fieldfares went down the sky and wheeled, disintegrated, as if they were so much blown powder; the ruddocks twinkled in the hedges like dead leaves flicked by the wind.
The horseman had an eye and a heart for all. He was of good, lovable material, whatever the hitherto courses of his bad days and worser nights.
By and by he came out upon country very wild and barren. The road heaved and dropped by way of grim and treeless downs, through whose cropped surface-grass the white chalk smote upwards like death in a sick man’s face. For leagues the sterile slopes seemed stretching onwards; and no sign of life was on them all, but here and there a flapping crow—no music of it, but, in some more sheltered hollow, the sweet lark’s broken ground-song.
And the further he rode, the more confirmed in desolation grew the scenery. There was a wild forlorn beauty about it all, nevertheless—a clean-blown freshness that seemed to set the hillsides pulsing with opal tints, like near-extinguished ashes breathed upon.