CHAPTER IV. MORNING AND FAREWELL TO AN OLD HOME

Brother and sister were about to leave the mountainland for England.

They had not gone to bed overnight, and from the windows of their

deserted home, a little before dawn, they saw the dwindled moon, a late

riser, break through droves of hunted cloud, directly topping their

ancient guardian height, the triple peak and giant of the range,

friendlier in his name than in aspect for the two young people clinging

to the scene they were to quit. His name recalled old-days: the

apparition of his head among the heavens drummed on their sense of

banishment.

To the girl, this was a division of her life, and the dawn held the

sword. She felt herself midswing across a gulf that was the grave of one

half, without a light of promise for the other. Her passionate excess of

attachment to her buried home robbed the future of any colours it might

have worn to bid a young heart quicken. And England, though she was of

British blood, was a foreign place to her, not alluring: her brother

had twice come out of England reserved in speech; her mother’s talk of

England had been unhappy; her father had suffered ill-treatment there

from a brutal institution termed the Admiralty, and had never regretted

the not seeing England again. The thought that she was bound thitherward

enfolded her like a frosty mist. But these bare walls, these loud

floors, chill rooms, dull windows, and the vault-sounding of the ghostly

house, everywhere the absence of the faces in the house told her she had

no choice, she must go. The appearance of her old friend the towering

mountain-height, up a blue night-sky, compelled her swift mind to see

herself far away, yearning to him out of exile, an exile that had no

local features; she would not imagine them to give a centre of warmth,

her wilful grief preferred the blank. It resembled death in seeming some

hollowness behind a shroud, which we shudder at.

The room was lighted by a stable-lantern on a kitchen-table. Their seat

near the window was a rickety garden-bench rejected in the headlong sale

of the furniture; and when she rose, unable to continue motionless while

the hosts of illuminated cloud flew fast, she had to warn her brother to

preserve his balance. He tacitly did so, aware of the necessity.

She walked up and down the long seven-windowed saloon, haunted by her

footfall, trying to think, chafing at his quietness and acknowledging

that he did well to be quiet. They had finished their packing of boxes

and of wearing-apparel for the journey. There was nothing to think of,

nothing further to talk of, nothing for her to do save to sit and look,

and deaden her throbs by counting them. She soon returned to her seat

beside her brother, with the marvel in her breast that the house she

desired so much to love should be cold and repel her now it was a vacant

shell. Her memories could not hang within it anywhere. She shut her

eyes to be with the images of the dead, conceiving the method as her

brother’s happy secret, and imitated his posture, elbows propped on

knees to support the chin. His quietness breathed of a deeper love than

her own.

Meanwhile the high wind had sunk; the moon, after pushing her withered

half to the zenith, was climbing the dusky edge, revealed fitfully;

threads and wisps of thin vapour travelled along a falling gale, and

branched from the dome of the sky in migratory broken lines, like wild

birds shifting the order of flight, north and east, where the dawn sat

in a web, but as yet had done no more than shoot up a glow along the

central heavens, in amid the waves of deepened aloud: a mirror for night

to see her dark self in her own hue. A shiver between the silent couple

pricked their wits, and she said:

‘Chillon, shall we run out and call the morning?’

It was an old game of theirs, encouraged by their hearty father, to be

out in the early hour on a rise of ground near the house and ‘call the

morning.’ Her brother was glad of the challenge, and upon one of the

yawns following a sleepless night, replied with a return to boyishness:

‘Yes, if you like. It’s the last time we shall do her the service here.

Let’s go.’

They sprang up together and the bench fell behind them. Swinging the

lantern he carried inconsiderately, the ring of it was left on his

finger, and the end of candle rolled out of the crazy frame to the floor

and was extinguished. Chillon had no match-box. He said to her:

‘What do you think of the window?--we’ve done it before, Carin. Better

than groping down stairs and passages blocked with lumber.’

‘I’m ready,’ she said, and caught at her skirts by instinct to prove her

readiness on the spot.

A drop of a dozen feet or so from the French window to a flower--bed was

not very difficult. Her father had taught her how to jump, besides

the how of many other practical things. She leaped as lightly as her

brother, never touching earth with her hands; and rising from the proper

contraction of the legs in taking the descent, she quoted her father:

‘Mean it when you’re doing it.’

‘For no enemy’s shot is equal to a weak heart in the act,’

Chillon pursued the quotation, laying his hand on her shoulder for a

sign of approval. She looked up at him.

They passed down the garden and a sloping meadow to a brook swollen by

heavy rains; over the brook on a narrow plank, and up a steep and stony

pathway, almost a watercourse, between rocks, to another meadow, level

with the house, that led ascending through a firwood; and there the

change to thicker darkness told them light was abroad, though whether

of the clouded moon or of the first grey of the quiet revolution was

uncertain. Metallic light of a subterranean realm, it might have been

thought.

‘You remember everything of father,’ Carinthia said. ‘We both do,’ said

Chillon.

She pressed her brother’s arm. ‘We will. We will never forget anything.’

Beyond the firwood light was visibly the dawn’s. Half-way down the

ravines it resembled the light cast off a torrent water. It lay on the

grass like a sheet of unreflecting steel, and was a face without a smile

above. Their childhood ran along the tracks to the forest by the light,

which was neither dim nor cold, but grave; presenting tree and shrub and

dwarf growth and grass austerely, not deepening or confusing them. They

wound their way by borders of crag, seeing in a dell below the mouth

of the idle mine begirt with weedy and shrub-hung rock, a dripping

semi-circle. Farther up they came on the flat juniper and crossed a wet

ground-thicket of whortleberry: their feet were in the moist moss among

sprigs of heath; and a great fir-tree stretched his length, a peeled

multitude of his dead fellows leaned and stood upright in the midst of

scattered fire-stained members, and through their skeleton limbs the

sheer precipice of slate-rock of the bulk across the chasm, nursery of

hawk and eagle; wore a thin blue tinge, the sign of warmer light abroad.

‘This way, my brother!’ cried Carinthia, shuddering at a path he was

about to follow.

Dawn in the mountain-land is a meeting of many friends. The pinnacle,

the forest-head, the latschen-tufted mound, rock-bastion and defiant

cliff and giant of the triple peak, were in view, clearly lined for a

common recognition, but all were figures of solid gloom, unfeatured and

bloomless. Another minute and they had flung off their mail, and changed

to various, indented, intricate, succinct in ridge, scar and channel;

and they had all a look of watchfulness that made them one company. The

smell of rock-waters and roots of herb and moss grew keen; air became

a wine that raised the breast high to breathe it; an uplifting coolness

pervaded the heights. What wonder that the mountain-bred girl should let

fly her voice. The natural carol woke an echo. She did not repeat it.

‘And we will not forget our home, Chillon,’ she said, touching him

gently to comfort some saddened feeling.

The plumes of cloud now slowly entered into the lofty arch of dawn and

melted from brown to purpleblack. The upper sky swam with violet; and

in a moment each stray cloud-feather was edged with rose, and

then suffused. It seemed that the heights fronted East to eye the

interflooding of colours, and it was imaginable that all turned to the

giant whose forehead first kindled to the sun: a greeting of god and

king.

On the morning of a farewell we fluctuate sharply between the very

distant and the close and homely: and even in memory the fluctuation

occurs, the grander scene casting us back on the modestly nestling, and

that, when it has refreshed us, conjuring imagination to embrace the

splendour and wonder. But the wrench of an immediate division from what

we love makes the things within us reach the dearest, we put out our

hands for them, as violently-parted lovers do, though the soul in days

to come would know a craving, and imagination flap a leaden wing, if we

had not looked beyond them.

‘Shall we go down?’ said Carinthia, for she knew a little cascade near

the house, showering on rock and fern, and longed to have it round her.

They descended, Chillon saying that they would soon have the mists

rising, and must not delay to start on their journey.

The armies of the young sunrise in mountain-lands neighbouring the

plains, vast shadows, were marching over woods and meads, black against

the edge of golden; and great heights were cut with them, and bounding

waters took the leap in a silvery radiance to gloom; the bright and

dark-banded valleys were like night and morning taking hands down the

sweep of their rivers. Immense was the range of vision scudding the

peaks and over the illimitable Eastward plains flat to the very East and

sources of the sun.

Carinthia said: ‘When I marry I shall come here to live and die.’

Her brother glanced at her. He was fond of her, and personally he liked

her face; but such a confident anticipation of marriage on the part of a

portionless girl set him thinking of the character of her charms and the

attraction they would present to the world of men. They were expressive

enough; at times he had thought them marvellous in their clear cut of

the animating mind.--No one could fancy her handsome; and just now her

hair was in some disorder, a night without sleep had an effect on her

complexion.

‘It’s not usually the wife who decides where to live,’ said he.

Her ideas were anywhere but with the dream of a husband. ‘Could we stay

on another day?--’

‘My dear girl! Another night on that crazy stool! ‘Besides, Mariandl is

bound to go to-day to her new place, and who’s to cook for us? Do you

propose fasting as well as watching?’

‘Could I cook?’ she asked him humbly.

‘No, you couldn’t; not for a starving regiment! Your accomplishments are

of a different sort. No, it’s better to get over the pain at once, if we

can’t escape it.

‘That I think too,’ said she, ‘and we should have to buy provisions.

Then, brother, instantly after breakfast. Only, let us walk it. I know

the whole way, and it is not more than a two days’ walk for you and

me. Consent. Driving would be like going gladly. I could never bear to

remember that I was driven away.

And walking will save money; we are not rich, you tell me, brother.’

‘A few florins more or less!’ he rejoined, rather frowning. ‘You have

good Styrian boots, I see. But I want to be over at the Baths there

soon; not later than to-morrow.’

‘But, brother, if they know we are coming they will wait for us. And we

can be there to-morrow night or the next morning!’

He considered it. He wanted exercise and loved this mountain-land; his

inclinations melted into hers; though he had reasons for hesitating.

‘Well, we’ll send on my portmanteau and your boxes in the cart; we’ll

walk it. You’re a capital walker, you’re a gallant comrade; I wouldn’t

wish for a better.’ He wondered, as he spoke, whether any true-hearted

gentleman besides himself would ever think the same of this lonely girl.

Her eyes looked a delighted ‘No-really?’ for the sweetest on earth to

her was to be prized by her brother.

She hastened forward. ‘We will go down and have our last meal at home,’

she said in the dialect of the country. ‘We have five eggs. No meat for

you, dear, but enough bread and butter, some honey left, and plenty of

coffee. I should like to have left old Mariandl more, but we are unable

to do very much for poor people now. Milk, I cannot say. She is just

the kind soul to be up and out to fetch us milk for an early first

breakfast; but she may have overslept herself.’

Chillon smiled. ‘You were right, Janet’, about not going to bed last

night; we might have missed the morning.’

‘I hate sleep: I hate anything that robs me of my will,’ she replied.

‘You’d be glad of your doses of sleep if you had to work and study.’

‘To fall down by the wayside tired out--yes, brother, a dead sleep is

good. Then you are in the hands of God. Father used to say, four hours

for a man, six for a woman.’

‘And four and twenty for a lord,’ added Chillon. ‘I remember.’

‘A lord of that Admiralty,’ she appealed to his closer recollection.

‘But I mean, brother, dreaming is what I detest so.’

‘Don’t be detesting, my dear; reserve your strength,’ said he. ‘I

suppose dreams are of some use, now and then.’

‘I shall never think them useful.’

‘When we can’t get what we want, my good Carin.’

‘Then we should not waste ourselves in dreams.’

‘They promise falsely sometimes. That’s no reason why we should reject

the consolation when we can’t get what we want, my little sister.’

‘I would not be denied.’

‘There’s the impossible.’

‘Not for you, brother.’

Perhaps a half-minute after she had spoken, he said, ‘pursuing a

dialogue within himself aloud rather than revealing a secret: ‘You don’t

know her position.’

Carinthia’s heart stopped beating. Who was this person suddenly conjured

up?

She fancied she might not have heard correctly; she feared to ask and

yet she perceived a novel softness in him that would have answered. Pain

of an unknown kind made her love of her brother conscious that if she

asked she would suffer greater pain.

The house was in sight, a long white building with blinds down at some

of the windows, and some wide open, some showing unclean glass: the

three aspects and signs of a house’s emptiness when they are seen

together.

Carinthia remarked on their having met nobody. It had a serious meaning

for them. Formerly they were proud of outstripping the busy population

of the mine, coming down on them with wild wavings and shouts of

sunrise. They felt the death again, a whole field laid low by one

stroke, and wintriness in the season of glad life. A wind had blown and

all had vanished.

The second green of the year shot lively sparkles off the meadows,

from a fringe of coloured glovelets to a warm silver lake of dews. The

firwood was already breathing rich and sweet in the sun. The half-moon

fell rayless and paler than the fan of fleeces pushed up Westward, high

overhead, themselves dispersing on the blue in downy feathers, like

the mottled grey of an eagle’s breast: the smaller of them bluish like

traces of the beaked wood-pigeon.

She looked above, then below on the slim and straightgrown flocks of

naked purple crocuses in bud and blow abounding over the meadow that

rolled to the level of the house, and two of these she gathered.