air without sight of any human
countenance excepting those of her own people, since now strange faces
had become hateful to her. Then, again, she loved riding, and just
outside of her gates was the great green expanse of the Downs, where she
could spend hours on horseback without meeting or seeing a human figure
except occasionally a solitary shepherd guarding his flock. So great was
the attraction the Downs had for her she herself marvelled at it. It was
not merely the sense of power and freedom the rider feels on a horse
with the exhilarating effect of swift motion and a wide horizon. Here
she had got out of the old and into a new world better suited to her
changed spirit. For in that world of men and women in which she had
lived until now all nature had become interfused with her own and other
people's lives--passions and hopes and fears and dreams and ambitions.
Now it was as if an obscuring purple mist had been blown away, leaving
the prospect sharp and clear to her sight as it had never appeared
before. A wide prospect, whose grateful silence was only broken by the
cry or song of some wild bird. Great thickets of dwarf thorn tree and
brambles and gorse, aflame with yellow flowers or dark to blackness by
contrast with the pale verdure of the earth. And open reaches of elastic
turf, its green suffused or sprinkled with red or blue or yellow,
according to the kind of flowers proper to the season and place. The
sight, too, of wild creatures: fallow deer, looking yellow in the
distance when seen amid the black gorse; a flock of bustards taking to
flight on her approach would rush away, their spread wings flashing
silver-white in the brilliant sunshine. She was like them on her horse,
borne swiftly as on wings above the earth, but always near it. Then,
casting her eyes up, she would watch the soarers, the buzzards, or
harriers and others, circling up from earth on broad motionless wings,
bird above bird, ever rising and diminishing to fade away at last into
the universal blue. Then, as if aspiring too, she would seek the highest
point on some high down, and sitting on her horse survey the prospect
before her--the sea of rounded hills, hills beyond hills, stretching
away to the dim horizon, and over it all the vast blue dome of heaven.
Sky and earth, with thorny brakes and grass and flowers and wild
creatures, with birds that flew low and others soaring up into
heaven--what was the secret meaning it had for her? She was li