line from chalk-ridge to sand, where he
had a pleasant footing in familiar country, under beeches that browned
the ways, along beside a meadowbrook fed by the heights, through pines
and across deep sand-ruts to full view of weald and Downs. Diana had been
with him here in her maiden days. The coloured back of a coach put an end
to that dream. He lightened his pocket, surveying the land as he munched.
A favourable land for rails: and she had looked over it: and he was now
becoming a wealthy man: and she was a married woman straining the leash.
His errand would not bear examination, it seemed such a desperate long
shot. He shut his inner vision on it, and pricked forward. When the
burning sunset shot waves above the juniper and yews behind him, he was
far on the weald, trotting down an interminable road. That the people
opposing railways were not people of business, was his reflection, and it
returned persistently: for practical men, even the most devoted among
them, will think for themselves; their army, which is the rational, calls
them to its banners, in opposition to the sentimental; and Redworth
joined it in the abstract, summoning the horrible state of the roads to
testify against an enemy wanting almost in common humaneness. A slip of
his excellent stepper in one of the half-frozen pits of the highway was
the principal cause of his confusion of logic; she was half on her knees.
Beyond the market town the roads were so bad that he quitted them, and
with the indifference of an engineer, struck a line of his own
Southeastward over fields and ditches, favoured by a round horizon moon
on his left. So for a couple of hours he went ahead over rolling fallow
land to the meadow-flats and a pale shining of freshets; then hit on a
lane skirting the water, and reached an amphibious village; five miles
from Storling, he was informed, and a clear traverse of lanes, not to be
mistaken, 'if he kept a sharp eye open.' The sharpness of his eyes was
divided between the sword-belt of the starry Hunter and the shifting
lanes that zig-tagged his course below. The Downs were softly illumined;
still it amazed him to think of a woman like Diana Warwick having an
attachment to this district, so hard of yield, mucky, featureless, fit
but for the rails she sided with her friend in detesting. Reasonable
women, too! The moon, stood high on her march as he entered Storling. He
led his good beast to the stables of The Three Ravens, thanking her and