Down the great, white highway of the Rylvio Pass a bob-sleigh was
speeding in the early hours of a perfect morning. The incense of
dawn was in the air, and the magic of stupendous scenery uplifted the
souls of the two travellers. Fantastic peaks of incomparable beauty
rose up in majesty to meet the amazing turquoise of the heavens.
Sparkling cascades of dazzling whiteness hung in streams of frozen
foam from dun cliffs and larch-crowned boulders. The roadway down
which the sleigh was coursing with unchecked speed wound like a
silver ribbon at the edge of precipices, sometimes tunnelling through
an arch of brown rock, only to give again, after a moment's gloom, a
fresh expanse of argent domes and shimmering declivities. Perched
high on perilous crags were ancient castles of grim battlements and
enduring masonry, stubborn homes of a stubborn nobility that had
levied toll in olden times on all such as passed their inhospitable
walls. Below, in the still shadowed valley, were villages of tiny
houses, the toy campanili of Lilliputian churches, and a grey-green
river rushing over a stony bed to merge itself in the ampler flood of
the Danube.
"Oh, could anything be more perfect?" asked Gloria, who, as on the
previous night, was doing duty at the wheel. There was a flush on
her cheeks that was a tribute to the keen mountain air, and a sparkle
in her dark eyes that told of welling happiness and a splendid
conscious joy. Radiant as the morn, fragrant as the pine-laden air,
she seemed the embodiment of a hundred vitalities crowded into one
blithe being.
"We are on our honeymoon," returned Trafford, "and it would be a
cold, dank day that could depress my soaring spirits. As it is, the
impossible beauty of our surroundings is so intoxicating my
bewildered brain that I am neglecting my duties as brakesman in a
most alarming manner. We shall be over a precipice in a minute, if I
don't master my exaltation of spirits."
"Perfect love casteth out fear," laughed Gloria.
"Is it perfect?" he asked.
"Absolutely--now, dear," she replied. "From the first you captured
my fancy; that was why I did not lie to you in Herr Krantz's
wine-shop. Then, when I thought you had killed Karl in the Iron
Maiden, my heart grew sick and cold, for I believed you were, as the
others, without ruth or mercy. The news that you had saved his life
while pretending to take it, put new fire into my soul; but there was
ever a war in my breast between true tenderness and the lust of
power. I had inherited ambition from a long line of callous
ancestors; my whole life had been a tale of scheming, deadening
opportunism. And Bernhardt, as we know, with his great domineering
personality, was as death to sentiment. And then, last night, well,
you took the bit between your teeth and let yourself go. You
over-rode my will, you set at nought my interests: you were master,
and I handmaid, and my whole soul went out to you in admiration of
your strength, and love of the way you used it."
Trafford drank in the words as he drank in the clear, sweet air of
the mountain-side, and happiness--the heroic happiness that befel
poets and warriors in the days of the world's youth, when men were
demi-gods and gods were demi-mortals--took him with golden wings and
exalted him, so that the soaring mountain and the wheeling bird and
the forest and the crag and the river were as his brothers and
sisters, fellow members of the worshipful company of rejoicing
creation.
Onward and downward they flew, while the beams of the rising sun
climbed down the valley walls, ledge by ledge and rock by rock,
turning brown cliffs to gold, and snowy slopes to diamond and silver.
Already they were far below the supreme height of the Weissheim
plateau, and the air, dry though it was in reality, seemed almost
damp in comparison after the moistureless atmosphere of the lofty
tableland they had quitted. The snow held everywhere, but it was the
thin covering of an English hill-side in January, not the sumptuous
and universal mantle of frost-bound Weissheim. The larch and fir of
the uplands were giving gradual place to the stunted oak and the
starved chestnut. A thin hedge maintained a scrubby, struggling line
at the edge of the roadside, and on the southern slopes the fields
were furrowed in endless terraces for the vine.
"We shall reach the frontier in an hour," said Trafford.
"And then?"
"Then we must quit our faithful 'bob.' The road ceases to run
downhill at Morgenthal, and a bob-sleigh will not defy the laws of
gravity even for the happiest couple in Christendom."
"Then what are our plans?" asked Gloria.
"Plans!" he echoed; "we have no plans. The poor, the unhappy, and
the hungry have plans, for they must scheme to improve their
condition. But you and I are rich in every gift, and life will be
one delicious and unending bob-sleigh ride through gorgeous scenery
and vitalising air."