The Wooden Horse

by Hugh Walpole

On one of his solitary afternoon walks he suddenly came upon her. He had gone, as he so often did, over the moor to the Four Stones; he chose that place partly because of the Stones themselves and partly because of the wonderful view. It seemed to him that the whole heart of Cornwall—its mystery, its eternal sameness, its rejection of everything that was modern and ephemeral, the pathos of old deserted altars and past gods searching for their old-time worshippers—was centred there.

The Stones themselves stood on the hill, against the sky, gaunt, grey, menacing, a landmark for all the country-side. The moor ran here into a valley between two lines of hill, a cup bounded on three sides by the hills and on the fourth by the sea. In the spring it flamed, a bowl of fire, with the gorse; now it stood grim and naked to all the winds, blue in the distant hills, a deep red to the right, where the plough had been, brown and grey on the moor itself running down to the sea.

It was full of deserted things, as is ever the way with the true Cornwall. On the hill were the Stones sharp against the sky-line; lower down, in a bend of the valley, stood the ruins of a mine, the shaft and chimney, desolately solitary, looking like the pillars of some ancient temple that had been fashioned by uncouth worshippers. In the valley itself stood the stones of what was once a chapel—built, perhaps, for the men of the desolate mine, inhabited now by rabbits and birds, its windows spaces where the winds that swept the moor could play their eternal, restless games.

On a day of clouds there was no colour on the moor, but when the sun was out great bands of light swept its surface, playing on the Stones and changing them to marble, striking colour from the mine and filling the chapel with gold. But the sun did not reach that valley on many days when the rest of the world was alight—it was as if it respected the loneliness of its monuments and the pathos of them.

Harry sat on the side of the hill, below the Stones, and watched the sea. At times a mist came and hid it; on sunny days, when the sky was intensely blue, there hung a dazzling haze like a golden veil and he could only tell that the sea was there by the sudden gleam of tiny white horses, flashing for a moment on the mirror of blue and shining through the haze; sometimes a gull swerved through the air above his head as though a wave had lost its bounds and, for sheer joy of the beautiful day, had flung itself tossing and wheeling into the air.

But to-day was a day of wind and rapidly sailing clouds, and myriads of white horses curved and tossed and vanished over the shifting colours of the sea; there were wonderful shadows of dark blue and purple and green of such depth that they seemed unfathomable.

Suddenly he saw Mary coming towards him. A scarf—green like the green of the sea—was tied round her hat and under her chin and floated behind her. Her dress was blown against her body, and she walked as though she loved the battling with the wind. Her face was flushed with the struggle, and she had come up to him before she saw that he was there.

"Now, that's luck," she said, laughing, as she sat down beside him; "I've been wanting to see you ever since yesterday afternoon, but you seemed to have hidden yourself. It doesn't sound a very long time, does it? But I've something to tell you—rather important."

"What?" He looked at her and suddenly laughed. "What a splendid place for us to meet—its solitude is almost unreal."

"As to solitude," she said calmly, pointing down the valley. "There's Tracy Corridor; it will be all over the Club to-night—he's been watching us for some time"; a long thin youth, his head turned in their direction, had passed down the footpath towards its ruined chapel, and was rapidly vanishing in the direction of Pendragon.