‘LOVE IS NOT OLD, AS WHAN THAT IT IS NEW.’
Sir Vernon’s party had sailed over the smiling waters of Thun, with its
villa-dotted shores, and its low amphitheatre of pastoral hills which
form the foreground to the sublimer mountain-land. They and all their
belongings had been carried into Interlaken by the funny little railway
across the Bodelei, that fertile garden-ground between two lakes, which
has such an obvious air of having begun life under water. They had seen
the long rank of prosperous-looking omnibuses waiting for travellers,
and in one of those vehicles they had been carried away from the
walnut-tree boulevard, and all the gaiety and fashion of Interlaken,
to a rustic road ascending the hill towards the pine-woods, and the
mountain peaks far away beyond them, piled up against the sky.
Here at the Jungfraublich they found a charming suite of rooms prepared
for them; rooms not gorgeously furnished or richly ornamented, but
with long French windows which looked upon as fair a landscape as the
eye of man could desire to behold. There rose the Jungfrau in her
sublime beauty, above the fertile valley with its lakes and meadows,
its _châlets_ and gardens, orchards and _bosquets_; all the simplicity
and prettiness of Nature on a small scale lying at the feet of the
immensities.
It was twilight when they arrived, and the first star of evening, a
faint luminous spot in the blue gray, hovered over the snowy pinnacle
of the mountain.
‘Oh, you dear!’ cried Daphne, to the mountain and not to the star;
‘you will be a part of my life from this night. How shall I ever live
without you when I go back to Warwickshire?’
‘You will have to console yourself with an occasional glimpse of the
Wrekin or the Cotswolds,’ said Madoline, laughing.
‘I am almost sorry I ever came to Switzerland,’ murmured Daphne,
turning away from the open window with a sigh, when she had gazed, and
gazed, as if she would fain have made herself a part of the thing she
looked at.
‘Why, dearest?’ asked Lina.
‘Because I shall be always longing to come back here. I shall never be
able to tolerate the eternal flatness of home—mole-hills instead of
mountains.’
‘Hawksyard is rather flat, I admit,’ said Edgar, apologetically;
‘but it is remarkably well drained. There isn’t a healthier house in
England.’
‘Will not all their modern aestheticism—their Queen Anne worship; their
straight garden walks, and straight-backed chairs; their everlasting
tea-trays, and Japanese screens, and sunflowers, and dadoes—sicken
you after this mountain-land?’ cried Daphne. ‘Such a narrow, petty,
childish idea of beauty! Have these perpendicular people ever seen the
Jungfrau, do you suppose?’
‘Seen her, and outlived her, and ascended to a higher empyrean of art,’
answered Gerald. ‘You poor child, do you know that you are going into
raptures about things which a well-bred person would hardly deign to
mention, any more than a Pytchley man would stoop to talk about the
Brighton Harriers? This is cockney Switzerland, as cockney as the
Trossachs, or Killarney, as Ramsgate and Margate. Everybody knows the
Jungfrau, at least by sight; everybody has been at Interlaken. It is
the chief rendezvous of the travellers who come in flocks, and are
driven from pillar to post like sheep, with an intelligent interpreter
playing the part of sheep-dog. I hope you will do the Matterhorn and
Monte Rosa before you go home; and then you will be acquainted with a
brace of mountains which may be spoken about in polite society.’
‘The Jungfrau is good enough for me,’ answered Daphne; ‘I shall never
behold anything more beautiful. Manfred loved her.’
‘I beg your pardon, that amiable gentleman did not love anything. “And
you, ye mountains,” he exclaims, “why are ye beautiful? I cannot
love ye.” He does not care for the sun, nor for his fellow-men, nor
for his own life. He has all the misanthropy of Hamlet, without
Hamlet’s unselfish reasons for being misanthropic. However, I suppose
to young ladies in their teens he will always appear an interesting
character. No doubt you will be starting with your alpenstock at
daybreak to-morrow in search of the Witch of the Alps. You will most
likely discover her by one of the bridges on the road to Grindelwald,
offering dirty bunches of edelweiss, or indifferently fresh milk, to
the passers-by.’
‘Daphne is going nowhere without me,’ said Lina, laying her hand
caressingly upon her sister’s shoulder. ‘She is too enthusiastic to be
trusted in strange places. You will not go anywhere alone, will you,
darling?’
‘I will do nothing in this world to vex you,’ answered Daphne
earnestly, with the straightest, clearest look in her lovely eyes.
Gerald Goring heard her tone, and saw that direct and truthful gaze.
He knew well how much that little speech meant; how grave and complete
was the promise in those few words. Yes, she would be true, she would
be faithful: were it at the cost of two broken hearts. He began to
perceive that he had underrated the moral force of this seemingly
volatile creature; physically so fragile, so made up of whims and
fancies, yet, where honour and affection were concerned, so staunch.
Later in the evening, after they had dined, and Sir Vernon had retired
for the night, Mr. Goring loitered alone in the terraced garden of the
hotel. The mountain, faintly touched with silvery light from a young
moon, rose in front of him, and below glimmered those earthlier lights
which told of human life—yellow candle-light in wooden _châlets_; the
flare of the gas yonder, faint in the distance, where the walnut-tree
walk was all alive with the light of its hotels and its modest Kursaal.
A fitful gust of music from the band came floating up the valley.
Behind him the hotel stood out whitely against a background of dark
pine-woods; lights in many windows. Those ten lighted windows in a row
on the first storey belonged to Sir Vernon’s apartments. He looked
up, vaguely wondering which was Daphne’s window. That one, at the end
of the range, most likely—the casement wide open to the night and the
mystic mountain-land. While he was deciding this a white-robed figure
stepped lightly out upon the balcony, and stood there, gazing at the
far-away peaks faintly outlined against a purple sky.
There were three or four other loungers upon the terrace, each with
his cigar, the luminous point of which gleamed here and there among
the bushes like a glowworm. There was no reason why Daphne should
distinguish Gerald Goring from the rest, as he sat in an angle of the
stone balustrade, half hidden in the shadow of an acacia, lonely,
dissatisfied; yet it was painful to him, in his egotism, to see her
standing there, immovable, a lovely statuesque form, with upturned face
and clasped hands, worshipping the blind, dumb, unresponsive goddess
Nature, and all unconscious that he, her lover, with a human heart to
feel and to suffer, was looking up at her with passionate yearning from
the dewy darkness below.
‘She does not care a jot for me; she is harder than the nether
millstone,’ he said to himself savagely. ‘Yet I once thought her the
softest, most yielding thing in creation—a being so impressionable that
she might be moulded by a thought of mine. I feared the touching of our
spirits, as if I were flame and she tinder. Yet our souls have touched,
and kindled, and burst into a blaze; and she has strength of mind to
pluck herself away unscathed, not a feather of her purity scorched,
from that fiery contact.’
He sat in his shadowy corner, lazily finishing his cigar, and looking
up at the figure in the balcony till it slowly melted from his gaze,
and a muslin curtain was dropped across the open window. Then he left
the garden and wandered away up the wooded hillside, by narrow winding
paths, which seemed to have no particular direction, but to have been
worn by the footprints of other idlers as purposeless—it might be as
unhappy—as he. He stayed in the shadowy wood for a long time, smoking a
second cigar, and preferring that perfumed solitude, and his own gloomy
thoughts to any diversion which the little lighted town down in the
green hollow yonder could have furnished him. And then, at last, on the
verge of midnight, when all the lighted windows of the Jungfraublich
had gone out one after another, and the big white barrack looked blank
and bare, he turned and groped his way back to it through the sinuous
woodland paths, and was admitted by a sleepy porter, who was mildly
reproachful at having been kept up so long.
A grand excursion had been planned for the next day, Sir Vernon
approving the scheme, and politely requesting to be left out of it.
‘You wouldn’t know what to do with me,’ he said. ‘I should be a burden
to you, and I should be terribly tiresome to myself. I have letters to
write which will occupy me all the morning, and in the afternoon I can
stroll down to the Kursaal, or sit in the garden here, or take a little
walk in the wood. You will be back before nine o’clock, I daresay.’
Madoline was loth to leave her father for so long a day. He was an
invalid, and required a good deal of attention, she reminded him.
‘There is Jinman, my dear; he can do all I want. Of course it is much
pleasanter for me to be waited on by you; but Jinman is very handy, and
will serve on a pinch.’
‘But all those letters, dear father,’ urged Lina, looking at an
alarming bundle of businesslike documents. ‘Could I not help you with
those? Could not the greater part of them stand over till we are at
Montreux?’
‘Some of them might, perhaps; but some must be answered to-day. Don’t
worry yourself about me, Lina; I know you have set your heart upon
going up to Müren with Daphne.’
‘I should like to show her the scenery which delighted me so years
ago,’ answered Lina; ‘but I can’t bear the idea of leaving you for so
long.’
‘My dear child, you are talking nonsense,’ said Sir Vernon testily. ‘In
October you are going to leave me altogether.’
‘Yes; but I shall not be leaving you in a strange hotel; and I shall be
so near, at your beck and call, always.’
Sir Vernon, having made up his mind to the sacrifice, carried it out
with consistent fortitude. He himself ordered the carriage which was
to carry off his beloved daughter, with those other three who were
comparatively indifferent to him.
They drove away from the hotel immediately after a seven o’clock
breakfast, in the clear light of morning, while the fields and hedges
were still dewy, and the earth wore her fairest freshest colours and
breathed out her sweetest odours. Soon after they left the village they
came to the road beside the deep and rapid Lutschine, which cleaves the
heart of the valley. On either side rose a lofty wall of hills, slope
above slope, climbing up to heaven, clothed to the very summit with
tall feathery firs, some of stupendous size, the sombre tints of these
patriarchs relieved by the tender green of the young larches; the White
Lutschine rushing on all the while, a wild romantic stream, tumbling
and seething over masses of stone. Here by the river bank they stopped
to see the murder-stone, an inscription cut on the face of the rock,
which tells how at this spot a brother slew his brother.
It is a lovely drive, so lovely that it is hardly possible for the
mind to be distracted from its fairness by any other thought. Daphne
sat silent in her corner of the carriage, drinking in the beauty of
the scene, her gaze wandering upward and upward to those mighty hills,
those forests upon the edge of heaven, so remote, so inaccessible in
their loveliness, the greenery pierced every here and there by narrow
streamlets that came trickling down like wandering flashes of silvery
light. Solitude and silence were the prevailing expression of that
exquisite scene. The cattle had all been removed to the upper regions,
to remote pastures on the borderland of the everlasting snow-fields; of
human life there were few signs; only a distant _châlet_ showing here
and there, perched on some ledge of the green hills. The voice of the
river was the one sound that broke the summer stillness.
There was a pleasant contrast to this solemn loneliness, this silent
loveliness of Nature without humanity, when the carriage drove
jingling up to the inn at Lauterbrunnen, where there was all the life
and bustle of a country inn at fair-time or market. Many vehicles
and horses in the open space in front of the house; a long verandah,
under which travellers were sitting resting after an early morning
tramp from Mürren or Grindelwald; guides, with swarthy sunburnt faces,
homely, good-natured, unintelligent, sitting at ease upon a long stone
parapet, waiting their chances; a great fuss and noise of taking
horses in and bringing horses out; a call for hay and water; a few
people strolling down the road to look at the Staubach, and telling
each other admiringly, inspired by the prophet Baedeker, that it is
the highest unbroken fall in the world. It was very glorious in the
morning sunshine, a dim rainbow-tinted arc of spray; and Daphne thought
of the Witch of the Alps, and how she had worn this cloudlike fall as
a garment, when she showed herself to Manfred. There was no inn there
in those far-away romantic days—no odour of bad brandy and worse wine;
no tourists; no cockneyism of any kind—only the sweet pastoral valley
in its lonely beauty, and the solemn regions of mountain and snow
rising whitely above its placid greenery, and walling it in from the
commonplace earth.
There was a halt of half an hour or so at Lauterbrunnen, just long
enough to pay proper homage to the Staubach, and to explore the queer
little primitive village, and for Daphne to burden herself with a
number of souvenirs, all more or less of a staggy or goaty order,
bargaining sturdily for the same with the sunburnt proprietor of a
covered stall opposite the inn, whose honesty in no case demanded
more than thrice the amount he was prepared to accept. By the time
Daphne had concluded her transactions with this merchant of mountain
_bric-à-brac_, and had made herself spiky with paper-knives and
walking-sticks of the horny kind—which treasures she reluctantly
surrendered to the safe keeping of an inn servant, to be packed in the
carriage against her return—the steeds were ready to convey the two
ladies up the mountain-path, the gentlemen being bent upon going up on
foot. Daphne wanted to walk, and had just bought herself an alpenstock
with that view, but Lina would not let her undertake the journey; so
she handed Edgar her alpenstock, and allowed herself to be hoisted
into a queer kind of saddle, with a railing round it, and Lina being
similarly mounted, they began the ascent, going through more mud, just
at starting, than seemed compatible with such perfect summer weather.
‘I hope, Edgar,’ said Daphne gravely, ‘that you won’t take your idea of
my horsemanship from my performance on this animal, and in this saddle,
or else I am afraid you’ll never let me ride Black Pearl.’
Edgar laughingly assured her that her seat was perfection, even in the
railed-in saddle, and that she should have the best horse money could
buy, or judgment secure.
The two young men went on before them, leaping from stone to stone, and
making great play with their alpenstocks as they bounded across the
streamlets which frequently intersected their path. It was a narrow,
narrow way, winding up the shoulder of the hill, now in sunlight, now
in shade; the summer air sweetened with the scent of the pine-trees;
pine-clad slopes above, pine-clad slopes below, sometimes gently
slanting downward, a green hillside which little children might play
upon, sometimes a sheer descent, terrible to the eye; _châlets_ dotting
the meadows far below; villages spread out on the greensward of the
valley, and looking like clusters of toy houses; the road winding
through the valley like a silver ribbon; the awful Jungfrau range
facing them, as they ascended, in all its unspeakable majesty; grander,
and yet ever grander, as they came nearer to it.
Sometimes, as they rode through the pine-trees, they seemed to be
riding straight into the snowy mountains; they were so close, so close
to that white majesty. Then as they came suddenly into the open, those
airy peaks receded, remote as ever, melting farther and farther away as
one rode after them, like a never-to-be-reached fairyland.
‘I could almost cry with vexation,’ exclaimed Daphne after one of these
optical illusions. ‘I thought we were close to the Jungfrau, and there
she stands smiling down at me, with her pallid enigmatical smile, from
the very top of the world. Edgar, if you love me, you must take me up
that impertinent mountain before I am year older.’
‘You were talking yesterday of the Cordilleras.’
‘I know, but we must finish off the Alps first—Mont Blanc, and
the Jungfrau, the Schreckhorn, the Rothhorn, the Matterhorn, the
Finsteraarhorn, and all the rest of them. I cannot be defied by the
insolence of Nature. She has thrown her gauntlet, and I must positively
pick it up. If the mountain won’t come to Mahomet—and the general
experience seems to show that mountains are obstinate things—Mahomet
must go to the mountain. I mean to have it out with Mont Blanc before I
die.’
‘I don’t believe a lady has ever done the ascent,’ said Edgar, leading
his mistress’s meek and patient steed along a winding ledge. The animal
was a mere infant, rising three, but as free from skittishness as if he
had been rising three-and-twenty.
‘That shows how densely ignorant you must be of the age you live in,’
protested Daphne. ‘Be sure that there is nothing in this life which the
man of the present can do which the woman of the present won’t imitate;
and the more essentially masculine the thing is the more certain she is
to attempt it.’
‘But I hope you don’t rank yourself among masculine women, Daphne,’
murmured Edgar, drawing protectingly near her, as they turned a sharp
corner.
‘I don’t; but I mean to ascend Mont Blanc.’
They were approaching the village on the height. The Lauterbrunnen
valley was sinking deeper and deeper into remoteness, a mere green
cleft in the mountains. They had met and passed many people on
their way: ladies being carried down by sturdy natives in a kind of
sedan-chair, something of the palki species; voyagers struggling
upwards with their belongings, with a view to spending some days in the
quiet settlement among the snow-peaks; guides jogging by with somebody
else’s luggage; mules laden with provisions. The guides gave each
other a grinning good-day as they passed, and exchanged remarks in a
_patois_ not very easy to understand; remarks that had a suggestion of
being critical, and not altogether commendatory, of the clients at that
moment under escort.
‘Here we are, up in the skies at last,’ cried Daphne, as she sprang
lightly to the ground, spurning her lover’s proffered aid, and just
brushing against the eager arms held out to receive her; ‘and oh how
dreadfully far away the top of the Jungfrau still is, and how very
dirty she looks now we are on a level with her shoulder!’
‘It is too late in the year for you to see her in her virginal purity.
A good deal of the snow has melted,’ said Madoline apologetically.
‘But it ought not to melt. I thought I was coming to a region of
eternal snow. Why, the lower peaks are horribly streaky and brown.
Thank Heaven the Silberhorn still looks dazzlingly white. And is this
Mürren? A real mountain village? How I wish we were going to live here
for a month.’
‘I fancy you would get horribly tired of it,’ suggested Gerald Goring.
She did not stay to argue the point, but ordered Edgar to explore the
village with her immediately. The big wooden barrack of an hotel,
with its bright green blinds and pine balconies, looked down upon
her, the commonplace type of an advanced civilisation. Young men,
all affecting a more or less Alpine-Clubbish air, lounged about in
various easy attitudes; young women, in every variety of hat and gauze
veil, read Tauchnitz novels, or made believe to be sketching, under
artistic-looking umbrellas. Daphne made but a cursory survey of this
tourist population before she started off upon her voyage of discovery,
with Edgar in delighted attendance on her steps. Madoline and Gerald,
who both knew all that there was to be known about Mürren, were content
to loiter in the garden of the Hôtel des Alpes, dreamily contemplative
of the sublimities around and about them.
‘I give you half an hour for your explorations,’ said Gerald, as Daphne
and her swain departed; ‘if you are not back by that time, Lina and I
will eat all the luncheon. At this elevation luncheon is not a matter
to be trifled with. There are limits to the supplies.’
He went into the hotel to give his orders, while Lina walked slowly up
and down one of the terraced pathways, looking at the wild chaos of
glacier and rock before her, looking, yet seeing but little of that
chilly grandeur, caring but little for its origin or its history, with
sad eyes turned inward, vaguely contemplating a vague sorrow.
It was not a grief of yesterday’s date—it was a sorrow made up of
doubts and anxieties which had their beginning in Gerald Goring’s
letter telling her of his intended trip to Canada. From that hour to
this she had perceived a gradual change in him. His letters from the
Western world, kind and affectionate as they had been, were altogether
different from the letters he had written to her in former years. When
he came back the man himself seemed different. He was not less kind, or
less attentive, less eager to gratify and to anticipate her wishes. To
her, and in all his relations with her, he was faultless: but he was
changed. Something had gone out of him—life, spirit, soul, the flame
which makes the lamp glorious and beautiful; something was faded and
dead in him; leaving the man himself a gentlemanly piece of mechanism,
like one of those victims to anatomical experiment from whose living
body the brain, or some particular portion of the brain, has been
abstracted, and which mechanically performs and repeats the same
actions with a hideous soulless monotony. ‘Was it that he loved her
less? Was it that he had ceased to love her?’ she had asked herself,
recoiling with shuddering heart-sickness from the thought; as if she
had found herself suddenly on the verge of some horrible abyss, and
seen inevitable ruin and death below. No, she told herself, judging his
heart by her own. A love that had grown as theirs had grown, side by
side with the gradual growth of mind and body, a love interwoven with
every memory and every hope, was not of the kind to change unawares
to indifference. She was perfectly free from the taint of vanity;
but she knew that she was worthy of her lover’s love. She, who had
been her father’s idol, the object of respect and consideration from
all about her, was accustomed to the idea of being beloved. She had
been told too often of her beauty not to know that she was handsomer
than the majority of women. She knew that in mental power she was her
lover’s equal: by birth, by fortune, by every attribute and quality,
she was fitted to be his wife, to rule over his household, and to be a
purifying and elevating influence in his life. His mother had loved her
as warmly as it was possible for that languid nature to love anything.
Their two lives were interwoven by the tenderest associations of
the past as well as by the solemn engagement which bound them in the
present. No, it was not possible for Madoline, seeing all things from
the standpoint of her own calm and evenly-balanced mind, to imagine
infidelity in a lover so long and so closely bound to her. Those sudden
aberrations of the human mind which wreck so many lives, for which no
looker-on can account, and which make men and women a world’s wonder,
had never come within the range of her experience.
Rejecting the idea of inconstancy, Madoline was compelled to find some
other reason for the indefinable change which had slowly been revealed
to her since Gerald’s last home-coming. What could it be except the
languor of ill-health, or, perhaps, the terrible satiety of a life
which had so few duties, and so many indulgences, a life that called
for no effort of mind, for not one act of self-denial?
‘Every man ought to have a career,’ she said to herself. ‘My poor
Gerald has none; no ambition; nothing to hope for, or work for,
or build upon. The new days of his life bring him nothing but old
pleasures. He is getting weary and worn out in the very morning of
existence. What will he be when the day begins to wane?’
She had been thinking of these things for a long time, and had
determined upon opening her mind to her lover, seriously, candidly,
without reserve, with all the outspoken freedom of one who deemed
herself a part of his life, his second self.
Here, in the face of these solemn heights, which seem ever typical of
the loftier aims of life—all the more so, perhaps, because of that air
of unattainableness which pervades them—she felt as if they were more
alone, farther from all the sordid considerations of worldly wisdom
than in the valley below. She could speak to him here from her heart of
hearts.
He was walking by her side along one of the narrow paths, just where a
rustic fence separated the grounds of the hotel from the steep mountain
side—walking somewhat listlessly, lost in a dreamy silence—when she put
her arm gently through his and drew a little nearer to him.
‘Gerald dearest, I want to talk to you—seriously.’
He turned suddenly, and looked at her, with more of alarm in his
countenance than she had anticipated.
‘Don’t be frightened,’ she said with a sweet smile. ‘I am not going to
be severe. I am only anxious.’
‘Anxious about what?’
‘About you, dear love; about your health, mental and physical. You
remember what you told me before you went to Canada.’
‘Yes.’
‘Your trip did you good, did it not?’
‘Worlds of good. I came home a whole man.’
‘But since you came home the old feeling of languor has returned, has
it not? You take so little interest in life; you look at everything
with such a weary indifferent air.’
‘My dearest, do you expect me to go into raptures with the beaten
tracks and cockney lions of Switzerland, as poor little Daphne does?
There is not a yard of the ground we have been passing over that I
do not know by heart—that I have not seen under every condition of
atmosphere, and in every variety of circumstances. You forget how
many months of my life I wasted in balancing myself upon razor-edged
_arrêtes_, and hewing my way up perpendicular peaks with an ice-axe. I
cannot gush about these dear old familiar mountains, or fall into an
ecstasy because the lakes are bluer and broader than our Avon.’
‘I don’t expect you to be ecstatic, dear; I only want to know that
you are happy, and that you take a healthy interest in life. I have
been thinking lately that a man in your position ought to have a
public career. Without public duties the life of a very rich man must
inevitably be idle, since all his private duties are done by other
people. And an idle life never yet was a happy one.’
‘Spoken like a copy-book, my dearest,’ answered Gerald lightly. ‘Well,
I own I have led an idle life hitherto, but some of it has been rather
laborious idleness; as when I accomplished the passage of the Roththal
Sattel and ascended yonder Jungfrau between sunrise and sundown; or
when I came as near death as a man can come, and yet escape it, while
climbing the Pointe des Ecrins, in the French Alps.’
‘I want you by-and-by to think of another kind of labour, Gerald,’
said Lina, with tender seriousness. ‘I want you to think of doing good
to your fellow-men—you, who are so gifted, and who have the means of
carrying out every benevolent intention. I want you to be useful in
your generation, and to win for yourself one of those great enduring
names which are only won by usefulness.’
‘Come now, my sweetest monitor, there you shoot beyond the mark. Surely
Virgil and Horace, Dante and Shakespeare, have won names of wider glory
than all the useful men who ever lived. That idea of usefulness has
never had much charm for me. I have not a practical mind. I take after
my mother, who was one of the lilies of the field, rather than after my
father, who belonged to the toilers and spinners. If I had discovered
in my nature any vein of the gold of poetry, I would have been willing
to dig hard for that immortal ore; but as I can’t be a poet, I don’t
care to be anything else.’
‘And with your talents and your wealth you con be content to be
nothing?’ exclaimed Lina, deeply shocked.
‘Nothing, except a tolerably indulgent landlord, a patron
of the fine arts, on a small scale, and by-and-by, if you
please—your—obedient—husband.’
The last words came somewhat slowly.
‘If you are happy, I am content,’ said Lina, with a sigh; ‘but it is
because I fancy you are not happy that I urge you to lead a more active
life, to give yourself greater variety of thought and occupation.’
‘And do you think that, if I were unhappy, the wear and fret of public
life, the dealing with workers whose chief object seems to be to
frustrate and stultify each other’s efforts; to be continually baulked
and disappointed; to have my most generous impulses ridiculed, my
loftiest hopes cried down as the dreams of a madman; perhaps, at the
close of my career, after I had given my days and nights, my brain
and body, to the public cause, to be denounced as an incendiary and a
lunatic—do you think a career of that kind would ensure happiness? No,
love, Providence, in its divine wisdom, has allowed me to belong to
the lotus-eating class. Let me nibble my lotus, and lie at ease in my
sunshiny valley, and be content to let others enjoy the rapture of the
fray.’
‘If I could be sure that you were happy,’ faltered Lina, feeling very
unhappy herself.
‘Ought I not to be happy, when you are so good to me?’ he asked, taking
her hand and pressing it tenderly, with very real affection, but an
affection chastened by remorse. ‘I am as happy as a man can be who has
inherited a natural bent to melancholy. My mother was not a cheerful
woman, as you know.’
This was an undeniable fact. Lady Geraldine, after having made what
some people called a splendid marriage, and others a _mésalliance_,
had gone through life with an air of subdued melancholy, an elegant
pensiveness which suited her languid beauty as well as the colours
she chose for her gowns, or the flowers she wore in her hair. She
had borne herself with infinite grace, as one whose cup of life was
tinctured with sorrow, beneath the snowy calm of whose bosom the slow
consuming fire of grief was working its gradual ravages. She died of an
altogether commonplace disease, but she contrived so to bear herself
in her decay, that when she was dead everybody was convinced she had
perished slowly of a broken heart, and that she had never smiled after
her marriage with Mr. Giles-Goring. This was society’s verdict upon a
woman who had lived an utterly selfish and self-indulgent life, and who
had spent fifteen hundred a-year upon her milliner.
Lina and Gerald strolled up and down for a little while, almost
in silence. She had said her say, and nothing had come of it. Her
disappointment was bitter; for she had fancied that it needed but a
few words from her to kindle the smouldering fires of ambition. She
had supposed that every man was ambitious, however he might allow his
aspirations to be choked by the thorns of this world: and here she had
found in the lover of her choice a man without the faintest desire
to achieve greatness, or to do good in his generation. Had he been
such a man as Edgar Turchill, she would have felt no surprise at his
indifference to the wider questions of life. Edgar was a man born to do
his duty in a narrow groove; a large-hearted, simple-minded creature,
but little removed from the peasant who tills the fields, and whose
desires and hopes are shut in by the narrow circle of village life. But
Gerald Goring—Gerald, whose ardent boyhood, whose passion for all the
loftier delights of life, had lifted him so high above the common ruck
of mankind—to find him at nine-and-twenty a languid pessimist, willing
to live a life as selfish and as useless as his mother had led before
him: this was indeed hard. And it was harder still for Madoline to
discover how much she had overrated her influence upon him. A few years
ago a word from her had been sufficient to urge him to any effort, to
give bent and purpose to his mind; but a few years ago he had been
still warm with the flush and fire of early youth.
Daphne and Edgar joined them presently, both warm and breathless after
a small experiment in the climbing way.
‘We have seen everything, and we have been up a mountain,’ exclaimed
Daphne. ‘It is the funniest little village—a handful of wooden cottages
perched on a narrow track straggling along anyhow on the very edge of
the hill; a little new church that looks as if it had dropped from the
clouds; a morsel of a post-office; a stack of wood beside every house;
and a bundle of green vegetables hanging to dry in every porch and
balcony. Poor people, do they live upon dried vegetables, I wonder? We
found an English lady and her son sitting in the middle of the road—if
you can call it a road—sketching a native boy. He was a very handsome
boy, and sat as still as a statue. We stood ever so long and watched
the two artists; and then we had a climb; and Edgar says I am a good
climber. Do you think,’ coaxingly to Lina, ‘we might try the Silberhorn
after luncheon?’
They lunched in a sunny airy corner of the big bare _salle-à-manger_
merrily enough, or with that seeming gaiety of heart which brightens
so many a board, notwithstanding that the stream flows darkly enough
below the ripple and the gleam. Daphne had made it the business of her
life to seem happy and at ease ever since that fatal night at Fribourg.
She wanted Gerald Goring to believe that she was satisfied with her
lot—nay, even that she was honestly attached to her plighted husband,
and that her conduct that night had been but a truant impulse, a
momentary aberration from common sense and duty. She was fighting her
battle bravely, sometimes smiling with an aching heart, sometimes
really succeeding in being happy, with the inconsiderate unreasoning
happiness of youth and health, and the rapture of living in a world
where all was alike new and beautiful. After luncheon she went out with
Edgar for another ramble, until it should be time to begin the descent
to Lauterbrunnen. They had all agreed to walk down, in a leisurely
way, after tea; and the horses had already gone back with the two men
who had led them up. Daphne wanted to learn where and how she could
get nearest to the mountains. It seemed provoking to see them there,
so near, and yet as far beyond her reach as if she had been looking at
them from her window at Interlaken.
‘Would it really be too much for an afternoon walk?’ she asked, gazing
longingly at the Silberhorn.
Gerald explained the preparations and the assistance, and the length of
time which would be required for any attempt upon that snowy crest.
‘Please show me the very ledge where the child’s red frock used to be
seen,’ she asked, perusing the wilderness of crag and peak.
‘What child? what frock?’ asked Edgar.
‘Don’t you know that ever so many years ago a lammergeier carried
off a child from this village of Mürren, and alighted with it upon
an inaccessible shelf of rock on the side of the Jungfrau, and that
for years afterwards some red scraps, the remnants of the poor baby’s
clothes, were seen amongst the snow?’
‘A pitiful story, wherever you found it,’ said Gerald; ‘but I think the
baby’s frock would have been blown away or buried under the snow before
the vulture had forgotten the flavour of the baby.’
And then, seeing that Daphne hungered for any information about yonder
mountain, he condescended to tell her how he and a couple of friends,
allied by the climbing propensity rather than by ancient friendship,
had ascended the north face of the Silberhorn, with the idea of finding
a direct route over its summit to the top of the Jungfrau; how after
ten hours of very hard work they had planted their feet on the top of
the dazzling peak, only to find the snow falling thickly round them,
and the Jungfrau and the Giessen glacier already hidden behind a fleecy
cloud; how, after waiting in vain for the storm to pass, they had made
a perilous descent to the upper plateau of the Giessen glacier; and
how there, amidst thick clouds and driving snow, they groped their way
round the edges of huge crevasses before they hit on a practical path
descending the ice-fall; and how, finding the night closing in upon
them, they were fain to sit upon a ledge of rock under a sheltering
cliff till daybreak.
‘Poor things!’ exclaimed Daphne with infinite compassion; ‘and you
never reached the top of the Jungfrau after all.’
‘Not by that way. I have scaled her granite point from the Roththal
Sattel.’
‘And is it very lovely up there?’
‘_C’est selon._ When I mounted, the Maiden was wrapped in cloud, and
there was no distant view, nor could we spare more than a quarter of an
hour for rest on the summit; but we saw an avalanche or two on our way,
and altogether we had a very good time.’