The sleeping fields, like grey cloths, stretched on every side of them and the white road cut into the heart of the distance. It was a quarter to eight and a blue dusk. The driver tilted the top hat over one ear and they were off.
“I know this road as yer might say back'ards. Ask any one down along Treliss way. Zachy Jackson they'll say—which is my name, sir, if yer requirin' a good 'orse any time o' day. Zachy Jackson! which there ain't no man,—tarkin' of 'orses, fit to touch 'im, they'll tell yer and not far wrong either.”
But now with every stumbling step of that bony horse Peter was being shaken into a more active consciousness, consciousness not of the past, very slightly of the present, but rather of an eager, excited anticipation of events shortly to befall him, of the acute sense—the first that had, as yet, come to him—that, very shortly, he was to plunge himself into an absolute abandonment of all the restraints and discipline that had hitherto held him. He did not know, he could not analyse to himself—for what purpose those restraints had been formerly enforced upon his life. Only now—at this moment, his body was being flooded with a warm, riotous satisfaction at the thought of the indulgences that were to be his.
Still this fortress of his house was bare and desolated, but now in some of the rooms there were lights, fire, whispers, half-hidden faces, eyes behind curtains.
The wind struck him in the face. “Enough of this—you're done for—you're beaten—you're broken... you're going back to your hovel. You're creeping home—don't make a fine thing of it—” the wind said.
The top of the hill rolled up to them and suddenly with the gust that came from every quarter there was borne some sound. It was very delicate, very mysterious—the sound, one might fancy, that the earth would make if all spring flowers were to pierce the soil at one common instant—so fugitive a whisper.
“That's the sea,” said Mr. Jackson, waving his whip in the air, “down to Dunotter Cove. There's a wind to-night. It'll blow rough presently.”
Now from their hilltop in the light of a baby moon puddles of water shone like silk, hedges were bending lines of listeners, far on the horizon a black wood, there in one of those precipitous valleys cottages cowering, overhead the blue night sky suddenly chequered with solemn pompous slowly moving clouds. But here on the hilltop at any rate, a bustle of wind—such a noise amongst the hedges and the pools instantly ruffled and then quiet again; and so precipitous a darkness when a cloud swallowed the moon. In the daylight that landscape, to any who loved not Cornwall, would seem ugly indeed, with a grey cottage stuck here and there naked upon the moor, with a bare deserted engine house upon the horizon, with trees, deep in the little valley, but scant and staggering upon the hill—ugly by day but now packed with a mystery that contains everything that human language has no name for, there is nothing to do, on beholding it, but to kneel down and worship God. Mr. Jackson had seen it often before and he went twice to chapel every Sunday, so he just whipped up his horse and they stumbled down the road.
“Dirty weather coming,” he said.
Peter was disturbed. That whispering noise that had crept across the country frightened him. If it went on much longer it would make him remember—he must not remember.