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There, except for their host and hostess, they would be alone and Edwardes might have a breathing space before his battle. There they tramped together on snowshoes over white-mantled hills and forgot that any shadow threatened their happiness.
Between a white-mantled mountain range on the left and the dark-striped lofty range on the right I could see far down into a gulf, a hazy void, a vast stark valley that seemed streaked and ridged and canyoned, an abyss into which veils of rain were dropping and over which broken clouds hung, pierced by red and gold rays. Death Valley! Far down and far away still, yet confounding at first sight!
For they stood in one of the famous wood and common lands of Southern England great beeches towering overhead glades opening to right and left ferny paths over green turf-tracks, and avenues of immemorial age, the highways of a vanished life old earth-works, overgrown lanes deep-sunk in the chalk where the pack-horses once made their way gnarled thorns, bent with years, yet still white-mantled in the spring: a wild, enchanted no-man's country, owned it seemed by rabbits and birds, solitary, lovely, and barren yet from its furthest edge, the high spectator, looking eastward, on a clear night, might see on the horizon the dim flare of London.
Wonderfully the two eagles circled round one another in mighty, still-winged glidings, effortless, majestic, masterly, sometimes together, sometimes apart, drawing ever away northward with scarcely a wing-flap, without, it seemed, any visible force to drive them, till they swam, like specks on the eye-ball, miles away and upwards round the white-mantled peaks.
Upon the folds of the rolling prairie, upon the round tops of the hills, upon the broad valleys, and upon the far-away peaks in the west the white light lay thick and soft like a mantle. Above the white-mantled world the concave of the sky hung blue and deep and pricked out with pale star points.
So did Cob, who laughed again, hoarsely and as one appreciating a joke, while he wheeled and wheeled over the following waves, seeing all things and never appearing to see anything. Then at last, when the king of all the birds had sunk, like a speck of floating burnt paper, away over the far, white-mantled hills, the ravens suddenly evaporated into nowhere.
Though five miles away, every house, every telegraph pole, even the thin lines of the railroad rails appeared through the dry clear air as distinct as a miniature painting. Miles beyond, on the far side of the valley, uprose the huge bulk of Split Peak, with its white-mantled shoulders and craggy twin peaks. But neither Ashton nor Isobel exclaimed on this magnificent view of valley and peak.
But when large bodies of the white-mantled Welshmen were permitted without interruption to take such order on the plain as their habits of fighting recommended, the monk's countenance, though he still endeavoured to speak encouragement to the terrified Eveline, assumed a different and an anxious expression; and his acquired habits of resignation contended strenuously with his ancient military ardour.
Even now, when I doze in my arm-chair, I can see those great warriors stream before me the green-jacketed chasseurs, the giant cuirassiers, Poniatowsky's lancers, the white-mantled dragoons, the nodding bearskins of the horse grenadiers.
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