the broad riding that ran up an incline between the clean-whipped thickets
of the hazel. The wood was a remnant of the great forest where Robin Hood
hunted, and this riding was an old, old thoroughfare coming across country.
But now, of course, it was only a riding through the private wood. The road
from Mansfield swerved round to the north.
In the wood everything was motionless, the old leaves on the ground
keeping the frost on their underside. A jay called harshly, many little
birds fluttered. But there was no game; no pheasants. They had been killed
off during the war, and the wood had been left unprotected, till now
Clifford had got his game-keeper again.
Clifford loved the wood; he loved the old oak-trees. He felt they were
his own through generations. He wanted to protect them. He wanted this place
inviolate, shut off from the world.
The chair chuffed slowly up the incline, rocking and jolting on the
frozen clods. And suddenly, on the left, came a clearing where there was
nothing but a ravel of dead bracken, a thin and spindly sapling leaning here
and there, big sawn stumps, showing their tops and their grasping roots,
lifeless. And patches of blackness where the woodmen had burned the
brushwood and rubbish.
This was one of the places that Sir Geoffrey had cut during the war for
trench timber. The whole knoll, which rose softly on the right of the
riding, was denuded and strangely forlorn. On the crown of the knoll where
the oaks had stood, now was bareness; and from there you could look out over
the trees to the colliery railway, and the new works at Stacks Gate. Connie
had stood and looked, it was a breach in the pure seclusion of the wood. It
let in the world. But she didn't tell Clifford.
This denuded place always made Clifford curiously angry. He had been
through the war, had seen what it meant. But he didn't get really angry till
he saw this bare hill. He was having it replanted. But it made him hate Sir
Geoffrey.
Clifford sat with a fixed face as the chair slowly mounted. When they
came to the top of the rise he stopped; he would not risk the long and very
jolty down-slope. He sat looking at the greenish sweep of the riding
downwards, a clear way through the bracken and oaks. It swerved at the
bottom of the hill and disappeared; but it had such a lovely easy curve, of
knights riding and ladies on palfreys.
`I consider this is really the heart of England,' said Clifford to
<<BackPagesTo menuForward>>