CHAPTER V. A MOUNTAIN WALK IN MIST AND SUNSHINE

Chillon was right in his forecast of the mists. An over-moistened earth

steaming to the sun obscured it before the two had finished breakfast,

which was a finish to everything eatable in the ravaged dwelling, with

the exception of a sly store for the midday meal, that old Mariandl

had stuffed into Chillon’s leather sack--the fruit of secret begging on

their behalf about the neighbourhood. He found the sack heavy and bulky

as he slung it over his shoulders; but she bade him make nothing of such

a trifle till he had it inside him. ‘And you that love tea so, my pretty

one, so that you always laughed and sang after drinking a cup with your

mother,’ she said to Carinthia, ‘you will find one pinch of it in your

bag at the end of the left-foot slipper, to remember your home by when

you are out in the world.’

She crossed the strap of the bag on her mistress’s bosom, and was

embraced by Carinthia and Chillon in turns, Carinthia telling her to dry

her eyes, for that she would certainly come back and perhaps occupy the

house one day or other. The old soul moaned of eyes that would not be

awake to behold her; she begged a visit at her grave, though it was to

be in a Catholic burial-place and the priests had used her dear master

and mistress ill, not allowing them to lie in consecrated ground;

affection made her a champion of religious tolerance and a little afraid

of retribution. Carinthia soothed her, kissed her, gave the promise, and

the parting was over.

She and Chillon had on the previous day accomplished a pilgrimage to

the resting-place of their father and mother among humble Protestants,

iron-smelters, in a valley out of the way of their present line of march

to the glacier of the great snow-mountain marking the junction of three

Alpine provinces of Austria. Josef, the cart-driver with the boxes, who

was to pass the valley, vowed of his own accord to hang a fresh day’s

wreath on the rails. He would not hear of money for the purchase, and

they humoured him. The family had been beloved. There was an offer of

a home for Carinthia in the castle of Count Lebern, a friend of her

parents, much taken with her, and she would have accepted it had not

Chillon overruled her choice, determined that, as she was English, she

must come to England and live under the guardianship of her uncle, Lord

Levellier, of whose character he did not speak.

The girl’s cheeks were drawn thin and her lips shut as they departed;

she was tearless. A phantom ring of mist accompanied her from her

first footing outside the house. She did not look back. The house came

swimming and plunging after her, like a spectral ship on big seas, and

her father and mother lived and died in her breast; and now they were

strong, consulting, chatting, laughing, caressing; now still and white,

caught by a vapour that dived away with them either to right or left,

but always with the same suddenness, leaving her to question herself

whether she existed, for more of life seemed to be with their mystery

than with her speculations. The phantom ring of mist enclosing for miles

the invariable low-sweeping dark spruce-fir kept her thoughts on them

as close as the shroud. She walked fast, but scarcely felt that she

was moving. Near midday the haunted circle widened; rocks were loosely

folded in it, and heads of trees, whose round intervolving roots grasped

the yellow roadside soil; the mists shook like a curtain, and partly

opened and displayed a tapestry-landscape, roughly worked, of woollen

crag and castle and suggested glen, threaded waters, very prominent

foreground, Autumn flowers on banks; a predominant atmospheric greyness.

The sun threw a shaft, liquid instead of burning, as we see his beams

beneath a wave; and then the mists narrowed again, boiled up the valleys

and streams above the mountain, curled and flew, and were Python coils

pierced by brighter arrows of the sun. A spot of blue signalled his

victory above.

To look at it was to fancy they had been walking under water and had

now risen to the surface. Carinthia’s mind stepped out of the chamber

of death. The different air and scene breathed into her a timid warmth

toward the future, and between her naming of the lesser mountains on

their side of the pass, she asked questions relating to England,

and especially the ladies she was to see at the Baths beyond the

glacier-pass. She had heard of a party of his friends awaiting him

there, without much encouragement from him to ask particulars of them,

and she had hitherto abstained, as she was rather shy of meeting her

countrywomen. The ladies, Chillon said, were cousins; one was a young

widow, the Countess of Fleetwood, and the other was Miss Fakenham, a

younger lady.

Carinthia murmured in German: ‘Poor soul!’ Which one was she pitying?

The widow, she said, in the tone implying, naturally.

Her brother assured her the widow was used to it, for this was her

second widowhood.

‘She marries again!’ exclaimed the girl.

‘You don’t like that idea?’ said he.

Carinthia betrayed a delicate shudder.

Her brother laughed to himself at her expressive present tense. ‘And

marries again!’ he said. ‘There will certainly be a third.’

‘Husband?’ said she, as at the incredible.

‘Husband, let’s hope,’ he answered.

She dropped from her contemplation of the lady, and her look at her

brother signified: It will not be you!

Chillon was engaged in spying for a place where he could spread out

the contents of his bag. Sharp hunger beset them both at the mention of

eating. A bank of sloping green shaded by a chestnut proposed the seat,

and here he relieved the bag of a bottle of wine, slices of, meat,

bread, hard eggs, and lettuce, a chipped cup to fling away after

drinking the wine, and a supply of small butler-cakes known to be

favourites with Carinthia. She reversed the order of the feast

by commencing upon one of the cakes, to do honour to Mariandl’s

thoughtfulness. As at their breakfast, they shared the last morsel.

‘But we would have made it enough for our dear old dog Pluto as well,

if he had lived,’ said Carinthia, sighing with her thankfulness and

compassionate regrets, a mixture often inspiring a tender babbling

melancholy. ‘Dogs’ eyes have such a sick look of love. He might have

lived longer, though he was very old, only he could not survive the loss

of father. I know the finding of the body broke his heart. He sprang

forward, he stopped and threw up his head. It was human language to hear

him, Chillon. He lay in the yard, trying to lift his eyes when I came

to him, they were so heavy; and he had not strength to move his poor old

tail more than once. He died with his head on my lap. He seemed to beg

me, and I took him, and he breathed twice, and that was his end. Pluto!

old dog! Well, for you or for me, brother, we could not have a better

wish. As for me, death!... When we know we are to die! Only let my

darling live! that is my prayer, and that we two may not be separated

till I am taken to their grave. Father bought ground for four--his wife

and himself and his two children. It does not oblige us to be buried

there, but could we have any other desire?’

She stretched her hand to her brother. He kissed it spiritedly.

‘Look ahead, my dear girl. Help me to finish this wine. There ‘s nothing

like good hard walking to give common wine of the country a flavour--and

out of broken crockery.’

‘I think it so good,’ Carinthia replied, after drinking from the cup.

‘In England they, do not grow wine. Are the people there kind?’

‘They’re civilized people, of course.’

‘Kind--warm to you, Chillon?’

‘Some of them, when you know them. “Warm,” is hardly the word. Winter’s

warm on skates. You must do a great deal for yourself. They don’t boil

over. By the way, don’t expect much of your uncle.’

‘Will he not love me?’

‘He gives you a lodging in his house, and food enough, we’ll hope. You

won’t see company or much of him.’

‘I cannot exist without being loved. I do not care for company. He must

love me a little.’

‘He is one of the warm-hearted race--he’s mother’s brother; but where

his heart is, I ‘ve not discovered.

Bear with him just for the present, my dear, till I am able to support

you.’

‘I will,’ she said.

The dreary vision of a home with an unloving uncle was not brightened

by the alternative of her brother’s having to support her. She spoke of

money. ‘Have we none, Chillon?’

‘We have no debts,’ he answered. ‘We have a claim on the Government here

for indemnification for property taken to build a fortress upon one of

the passes into Italy. Father bought the land, thinking there would be

a yield of ore thereabout; and they have seized it, rightly enough, but

they dispute our claim for the valuation we put on it. A small sum they

would consent to pay. It would be a very small sum, and I ‘m father’s

son, I will have justice.’

‘Yes!’ Carthinia joined with him to show the same stout nature.

‘We have nothing else except a bit to toss up for luck.’

‘And how can I help being a burden on my brother?’ she inquired, in

distress.

‘Marry, and be a blessing to a husband,’ he said lightly.

They performed a sacrifice of the empty bottle and cracked cup on

the site of their meal, as if it had been a ceremony demanded from

travellers, and leaving them in fragments, proceeded on their journey

refreshed.

Walking was now high enjoyment, notwithstanding the force of the

sun, for they were a hardy couple, requiring no more than sufficient

nourishment to combat the elements with an exulting blood. Besides they

loved mountain air and scenery, and each step to the ridge of the pass

they climbed was an advance in splendour. Peaks of ashen hue and pale

dry red and pale sulphur pushed up, straight, forked, twisted, naked,

striking their minds with an indeterminate ghostliness of Indian, so

strange they were in shape and colouring. These sharp points were the

first to greet them between the blue and green. A depression of the pass

to the left gave sight of the points of black fir forest below, round

the girths of the barren shafts. Mountain blocks appeared pushing up

in front, and a mountain wall and woods on it, and mountains in the

distance, and cliffs riven with falls of water that were silver skeins,

down lower to meadows, villages and spires, and lower finally to

the whole valley of the foaming river, field and river seeming in

imagination rolled out from the hand of the heading mountain.

‘But see this in winter, as I did with father, Chillon!’ said Carinthia.

She said it upon love’s instinct to halo the scene with something beyond

present vision, and to sanctify it for her brother, so that this walk of

theirs together should never be forgotten.

A smooth fold of cloud, moveless along one of the upper pastures, and

still dense enough to be luminous in sunlight, was the last of the mist.

They watched it lying in the form of a fish, leviathan diminished,

as they descended their path; and the head was lost, the tail spread

peacockwise, and evaporated slowly in that likeness; and soft to a

breath of air as gossamer down, the body became a ball, a cock, a little

lizard, nothingness.

The bluest bright day of the year was shining. Chillon led the descent.

With his trim and handsome figure before her, Carinthia remembered the

current saying, that he should have been the girl and she the boy. That

was because he resembled their mother in face. But the build of his

limbs and shoulders was not feminine.

To her admiring eyes, he had a look superior to simple strength and

grace; the look of a great sky-bird about to mount, a fountain-like

energy of stature, delightful to her contemplation. And he had the mouth

women put faith in for decision and fixedness. She did, most fully; and

reflecting how entirely she did so, the thought assailed her: some one

must be loving him!

She allowed it to surprise her, not choosing to revert to an uneasy

sensation of the morning.

That some one, her process of reasoning informed her, was necessarily

an English young lady. She reserved her questions till they should cease

this hopping and heeling down the zigzag of the slippery path-track.

When children they had been collectors of beetles and butterflies, and

the flying by of a ‘royal-mantle,’ the purple butterfly grandly fringed,

could still remind Carinthia of the event it was of old to spy and chase

one. Chillon himself was not above the sentiment of their “very early

days”; he stopped to ask if she had been that lustrous blue-wing, a

rarer species, prized by youngsters, shoot through the chestnut trees:

and they both paused for a moment, gazing into the fairyland of infancy,

she seeing with her brother’s eyes, this prince of the realm having

escaped her. He owned he might have been mistaken, as the brilliant

fellow flew swift and high between leaves, like an ordinary fritillary.

Not the less did they get their glimpse of the wonders in the sunny

eternity of a child’s afternoon.

‘An Auerhahn, Chillon!’ she said, picturing the maturer day when she had

scaled perilous heights with him at night to stalk the blackcock in

the prime of the morning. She wished they could have had another such

adventure to stamp the old home on his heart freshly, to the exclusion

of beautiful English faces.

On the level of the valley, where they met the torrent-river, walking

side by side with him, she ventured an inquiry: ‘English girls are fair

girls, are they not?’

‘There are some dark also,’ he replied.

‘But the best-looking are fair?’

‘Perhaps they are, with us.’

‘Mother was fair.’

‘She was.’

‘I have only seen a few of them, once at Vies and at Venice, and those

Baths we are going to; and at Meran, I think.’

‘You considered them charming?’

‘Not all.’

It was touching that she should be such a stranger to her countrywomen!

He drew a portrait-case from his breast-pocket, pressing the spring, and

handed it to her, saying: ‘There is one.’ He spoke indifferently, but as

soon as she had seen the face inside it, with a look at him and a deep

breath; she understood that he was an altered brother, and that they

were three instead of two.

She handed it back to him, saying hushedly and only ‘Yes.’

He did not ask an opinion upon the beauty she had seen. His pace

increased, and she hastened her steps beside him. She had not much to

learn when some minutes later she said; ‘Shall I see her, Chillon?’

‘She is one of the ladies we are to meet.’

‘What a pity!’ Carinthia stepped faster, enlightened as to his wish to

get to the Baths without delay; and her heart softened in reflecting how

readily he had yielded to her silly preference for going on foot.

Her cry of regret was equivocal; it produced no impression on him. They

reached a village where her leader deemed it adviseable to drive for the

remainder of the distance up the valley to the barrier snow-mountain.

She assented instantly, she had no longer any active wishes of her

own, save to make amends to her brother, who was and would ever be her

brother: she could not be robbed of their relationship.

Something undefined in her feeling of possession she had been robbed of,

she knew it by her spiritlessness; and she would fain have attributed

it to the idle motion of the car, now and them stupidly jolting her

on, after the valiant exercise of her limbs. They were in a land of

waterfalls and busy mills, a narrowing vale where the runs of grass grew

short and wild, and the glacier-river roared for the leap, more foam

than water, and the savagery, naturally exciting to her, breathed of its

lair among the rocks and ice-fields.

Her brother said: ‘There he is.’ She saw the whitecrowned king of the

region, of whose near presence to her old home she had been accustomed

to think proudly, end she looked at him without springing to him,

and continued imaging her English home and her loveless uncle,

merely admiring the scene, as if the fire of her soul had been

extinguished.--‘Marry, and be a blessing to a husband.’ Chillon’s words

whispered of the means of escape from the den of her uncle.

But who would marry me! she thought. An unreproved sensation of melting

pervaded her; she knew her capacity for gratitude, and conjuring it up

in her ‘heart, there came with it the noble knightly gentleman who would

really stoop to take a plain girl by the hand, release her, and say: ‘Be

mine!’ His vizor was down, of course. She had no power of imagining the

lineaments of that prodigy. Or was he a dream? He came and went. Her

mother, not unkindly, sadly, had counted her poor girl’s chances of

winning attention and a husband. Her father had doated on her face; but,

as she argued, her father had been attracted by her mother, a

beautiful woman, and this was a circumstance that reflected the greater

hopelessness on her prospects. She bore a likeness to her father, little

to her mother, though he fancied the reverse and gave her the mother’s

lips and hair. Thinking of herself, however, was destructive to the form

of her mirror of knightliness: he wavered, he fled for good, as the rosy

vapour born of our sensibility must do when we relapse to coldness, and

the more completely when we try to command it. No, she thought, a plain

girl should think of work, to earn her independence.

‘Women are not permitted to follow armies, Chillon?’ she said.

He laughed out. ‘What ‘s in your head?’

The laugh abashed her; she murmured of women being good nurses for

wounded soldiers, if they were good walkers to march with the army; and,

as evidently it sounded witless to him, she added, to seem reasonable:

‘You have not told me the Christian names of those ladies.’

He made queer eyes over the puzzle to connect the foregoing and the

succeeding in her remarks, but answered straightforwardly: ‘Livia is

one, and Henrietta!

Her ear seized on the stress of his voice. ‘Henrietta!’ She chose that

name for the name of the person disturbing her; it fused best, she

thought, with the new element she had been compelled to take into her

system, to absorb it if she could.

‘You’re not scheming to have them serve as army hospital nurses, my

dear?’

‘No, Chillon.’

‘You can’t explain it, I suppose?’

‘A sister could go too, when you go to war, Chillon.’

A sister could go, if it were permitted by the authorities, and be near

her brother to nurse him in case of wounds; others would be unable

to claim the privilege. That was her meaning, involved with the hazy

project of earning an independence; but she could not explain it, and

Chillon set her down for one of the inexplicable sex, which the simple

adventurous girl had not previously seemed to be.

She was inwardly warned of having talked foolishly, and she held her

tongue. Her humble and modest jealousy, scarce deserving the title,

passed with a sigh or two. It was her first taste of life in the world.

A fit of heavy-mindedness ensued, that heightened the contrast her

recent mood had bequeathed, between herself, ignorant as she was, and

those ladies. Their names, Livia and Henrietta, soared above her and

sang the music of the splendid spheres. Henrietta was closer to earth,

for her features had been revealed; she was therefore the dearer,

and the richer for him who loved her, being one of us, though an

over-earthly one; and Carinthia gave her to Chillon, reserving for

herself a handmaiden’s place within the circle of their happiness.

This done, she sat straight in the car. It was toiling up the steep

ascent of a glen to the mountain village, the last of her native

province. Her proposal to walk was accepted, and the speeding of her

blood, now that she had mastered a new element in it, soon restored her

to her sisterly affinity with natural glories. The sunset was on yonder

side of the snows. Here there was a feast of variously-tinted sunset

shadows on snow, meadows, rock, river, serrated cliff. The peaked cap

of the rushing rock-dotted sweeps of upward snow caught a scarlet

illumination: one flank of the white in heaven was violetted

wonderfully.

At nightfall, under a clear black sky, alive with wakeful fires round

head and breast of the great Alp, Chillon and Carinthia strolled out

of the village, and he told her some of his hopes. They referred to

inventions of destructive weapons, which were primarily to place his

country out of all danger from a world in arms; and also, it might

be mentioned, to bring him fortune. ‘For I must have money!’ he said,

sighing it out like a deliberate oath. He and his uncle were associated

in the inventions. They had an improved rocket that would force military

chiefs to change their tactics: they had a new powder, a rifle, a model

musket--the latter based on his own plans; and a scheme for fortress

artillery likely to turn the preponderance in favour of the defensive

once again. ‘And that will be really doing good,’ said Chillon,

‘for where it’s with the offensive, there’s everlasting bullying and

plundering.’

Carinthia warmly agreed with him, but begged him be sure his uncle

divided the profits equally. She discerned what his need of money

signified.

Tenderness urged her to say: ‘Henrietta! Chillon.’

‘Well?’ he answered quickly.

‘Will she wait?’

‘Can she, you should ask.’

‘Is she brave?’

‘Who can tell, till she has been tried?’

‘Is she quite free?’

‘She has not yet been captured.’

‘Brother, is there no one else...?’

‘There’s a nobleman anxious to bestow his titles on her.’

‘He is rich?’

‘The first or second wealthiest in Great Britain, they say.’

‘Is he young?’

‘About the same age as mine.’

‘Is he a handsome young man?’

‘Handsomer than your brother, my girl.’

‘No, no, no!’ said she. ‘And what if he is, and your Henrietta does not

choose him? Now let me think what I long to think. I have her close to

me.’

She rocked a roseate image on her heart and went to bed with it by

starlight.

By starlight they sprang to their feet and departed the next morning, in

the steps of a guide carrying, Chillon said, ‘a better lantern than we

left behind us at the smithy.’

‘Father!’ exclaimed Carinthia on her swift inward breath, for this one

of the names he had used to give to her old home revived him to her

thoughts and senses fervently.