Poor old horse, poor old horse.”
Terrible, noble old man! No doubt he expected me to speak as simply as that, so I slipped away from him and went to the next inn. A high, cloudy night hung over me, like a great yew tree in March, with stars instead of flowers. With those reticent, dark silences and spaces I tried to console myself.
CHAPTER XXXVII
THE MIRROR
There are a hundred little landscapes on the walls by the roadside—of grey or silver or golden stone, embossed and fretted and chequered by green and gold-pointed mosses, frosty lichens, pale round penny-wort leaves and the orange foliage of cranesbill. At their feet are the young leaves of the larger celandine and the lustrous blossoms of the lesser, still swaddled in dead leaves where mice and squirrels are questing. On top, thorns and ash trees trail horizontally in many dragon shapes, and purple brambles overhang. Or there are low thorns which make way at intervals for straight hollies, spared by the billhook, or even carved by it into pagoda-like shapes. Sometimes even a thorn has been thus spared and honoured, but here they are not each knotted into impenetrable globes of twigs or interlaced in pairs as elsewhere. What fantasy persuades men to make those little wayside and even railwayside suggestions of a mild tree worship surviving yet? In places the walls are interrupted and replaced by a smooth, blue sheet of natural rock based in grass and making a home for vertebrate ferns, and stamped by white and yellow and green algæ which look as if they were the stains of a sunshine too strong to be wiped out. Some of the ash tree boles are heavily draped in a fur woven inextricably of dark green and fine-leaved ivy, pale green moss over which hover pendulous drops of gold, silver lichen, and ferns green and amber. Out of rock or wall gushes bright, crystal water, losing itself in moss and herbage below, or received into small stone tanks, and turned into a darkly gleaming, golden creature that throbs under the rain.
Between such walls the road winds into many valleys and over many fells towards the mountains. On either hand rise and fall many hollowed tawny meadows, with boulders embedded in heather and flowering gorse, and over them the pewits plunge and soar and modulate their crying by their speed. Here and there a family of oak or beech stands up in the midst of the fields. Between the meadows there are copses of hazel and oak, and snowdrops underneath, or a crisp, untrodden carpet of old leaves of many dying golds and browns and reds; or an arable field intervenes. The plough climbs the hill, turning the dry, grey soil to purple and brown that is dappled by rooks and gulls. Some of the gulls slide overhead against the wind, inclining their wings this way and that, rising and descending slightly, as if they could by tacking and delaying avoid the streamy wind.
The steeper hills are the home of oak and ash and birch and larch. The grey larch woods waver in colour like a dying trout, as the wind and the sunshine pass over them. In a five-minute shower the rainbow sets her foot among the trees before she leaps across the sky, and while yet her colours are uncertain among the luminous branches makes a small, fairy, remote world that speaks to the eye like the young moon on a fair evening or Cassiopeia when it crowns a sapphire night.
In ten miles there is an inn. “Pretty Polly” and “Sceptre” are on the walls, with notices of sales and advertisements of spirits. The hostess sings the cosmic melody of “Blue Bell” as she goes about her work—that marvellous melody over which farmboys become romantic and even cheerful at four o’clock on wild and sleety mornings in January as they go about their work. But the host has good ale, and he can sing the Holm-bank Hunting Song:—
“One morning last winter to Holm-bank there came
A noble, brave sportsman, Squire Sandys was his name,