Page 59 - lady-chatterlys-lover

and went trailing off over the little sky.
Connie opened the wood-gate, and Clifford puffed slow-
ly through into 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 Clif-
ford 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 jolt-
ing on the frozen clods. And suddenly, on the left, came a
clearing where there was nothing but a ravel of dead brack-
en, 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 dur-
ing the war for trench timber. The whole knoll, which rose
softly on the right of the riding, was denuded and strange-

Lady Chatterly’s Lover