‘I MEANE WELL, BY GOD THAT SIT ABOVE.’
It was pleasant to drink tea at a little table in the garden of the
inn, with the white mountain world spread before them in all its glory,
flushed with the golden lights of afternoon. Edgar looked ineffably
happy as he sat sipping his tea and watching Daphne eat bread and
honey, which seemed her chief nutriment in this part of the world; for
Swiss poultry and Swiss veal, for all the varieties of _vol-au-vent_,
_fricandeau_, _ris de veau_, and _fricassée_, under which the
inevitable calf disguised himself, she showed herself absolutely
indifferent; but she had an infinite capacity for Swiss rolls and Swiss
honey.
While they were sitting at tea, resting before they began the downward
walk, Mr. Turchill produced a letter which that morning’s post had
brought him from his mother: one of those worthy commonplace letters
which set one’s teeth on edge when read aloud amidst the loftiest
aspects of nature. But Edgar saw nothing beyond the love and the
kindness in his mother’s epistle, and would have read it on the summit
of Caucasus, yea, on that topmost untrodden snow-peak which the
Persians call the Holy Mountain, and would have perceived no discord
between the letter and the scene.
‘The dear mother’s letter is full of you, Daphne,’ he said; ‘would it
bore you and Mr. Goring if I were to read a little of it, Lina?’
Mr. Goring protested, with a stifled yawn, that he would be delighted.
‘There is nothing,’ he asserted, ‘more interesting than domestic
correspondence. Look at the Paston letters, for instance. And I
could fancy your mother writing quite in the Paston style,’ he added
graciously.
Edgar unfolded the thin, closely written sheet, written in those neat,
sloping characters which had been drilled into all the young ladies
at Miss Tompion’s academy, and crossed—for the habit of crossing a
letter had obtained in Mrs. Turchill’s youth, and she returned to
it instinctively under stress of foreign postage, albeit twopence
halfpenny is not a ruinous amount to pay for a letter.
‘“I am pleased to hear that Daphne is enjoying herself, and that she
is so enthusiastic about the scenery. I remember, when I learned
drawing at Miss Tompion’s, doing a very pretty sketch of Chamounix,
with Mont Blanc in the background, in black and white chalks on tinted
paper. I believe some of the snow was scratched in with a penknife
by Signor Pasticcio, but all the rest was my very own, and papa gave
me a sovereign when the drawing was sent home. It used to hang in
your father’s dressing-room, but one of the housemaids contrived to
break the glass one day with her broom-handle, and I did not care
to go to the expense of having it reglazed: Gilbert is so dear for
all jobs of that kind. I have always understood that the Jungfrau is
very inferior to Mont Blanc; but as you say Byron admired it I have
no doubt it is very beautiful, though, of course, in a minor degree.
Every geography will tell you that Mont Blanc is the higher. I hope you
are careful to avoid wet feet”—hum—hum—hum,’ mumbled Edgar, skipping
the tender mother’s injunctions about his care of his health, and
hurrying on to that part of the letter which related to Daphne. ‘Oh,
here it is. “Tell Daphne, with my love, that I am going carefully over
all the house-linen—weeding out all the sheets that are weak in the
middle”—dear old mother! she always will go into details—“and making a
large addition to the table-linen. I have also had a new inventory made
in duplicate. I know that the modern idea is for the bride to provide
the house-linen. That is all very well when the husband is a young
man who has his own way to make in the world, but not for my boy, who
has a home of his own—a fine old house which his ancestors have lived
in, and spent their money upon, from generation to generation. I hope
Daphne will be as fond of the old Hawksyard glass and china—which, as
she knows, is the collection of more than a century—as she is of the
mountains; but I’m afraid the romantic kind of temperament which goes
into raptures with mountains is hardly the disposition which could take
delight in housekeeping, and the many details of home-life.”’
* * * * *
‘I hope you won’t be angry with her for saying that,’ added Edgar
apologetically, as he hastily folded the letter, feeling that he had
read too much. ‘You know she means it kindly.’
‘I know she has been ever so much more indulgent than I deserve,’
answered Daphne gaily; ‘I mean to be a most dutiful daughter-in-law,
and to learn everything your mother will deign to teach me in the way
of housekeeping, from hemming tea-cloths to making mincemeat. One ought
to make one’s own mincemeat, ought one not, Edgar? Do you and I belong
to the class who make their own mincemeat?’
‘I think it’s rather a question of inclination than of rank, love.
But I’d rather you left the pies and puddings to the cook. I’d rather
have you riding across the Vale of the Red Horse with me than stoning
raisins or chopping suet in the still-room.’
‘And I would rather, too.’
‘Do you know that there is a great deal of quiet sagacity in your
mother’s gentle depreciation of Daphne’s passion for mountain scenery?’
said Gerald, his face lighting up with something of the old mischievous
spirit, something of that gaiety of heart with which he had teased
Daphne in the days when she was Poppæa and he was Nero! ‘This frantic
admiration of snow-peaks is only a modern feeling, a mere fashion
and fad of the moment, like the worship of Chippendale furniture and
Adam chimney-pieces. The old Greeks knew nothing of it. The ancients
never raved about their mountains. They valued them only because their
tops touched the blue ether, the world peopled by the gods. Even your
Shakespeare, the man of universal mind, had no passion for mountain
lands.’
‘Because he had never seen anything higher than the Wrekin, poor
darling!’ said Daphne, with delicious compassion; as if she were
speaking of a London Arab who had never seen a buttercup.
‘Ruskin thinks it was good for his genius to have seen so little.
“No mountain passions were to be allowed to Shakespeare,” he says;
“Shakespeare could be allowed no mountains—not even any supreme natural
beauty. He had to be left with his kingcups and clover, pansies, the
passing clouds, the Avon’s flow, and the undulating hills and woods of
Warwickshire, lest it should make him in the least overrate their power
on the strong, full-fledged minds of men.”’
‘That is remarkably clever,’ said Daphne; ‘but there is a tone of
calm superiority about it which makes my blood boil. Why will all the
critics insist upon patronising Shakespeare, as if they knew so much
more about him than ever be know about himself? Talk of vivisection
indeed, vivisection is not half so atrocious as the way Shakespeare has
been treated by modern criticism!’
And now, when all the valley below them lay steeped in golden light,
when the northward-facing mountains were beginning to take the chill
cold gray of evening, and the western pinnacles were flushed with rose
and purple, they began their descent of the narrow winding way, gaily,
to all seeming, for they talked a good deal, and Daphne lingered on her
way to gather the wild flowers that grew on the thymy banks—harebells,
and clover, gentian, and the Alpine rose, a white starry flower with
a long fragile stem, and delicate ferns, and here and there a handful
of wild strawberries. Gerald had more than once to insist upon her
hastening her footsteps, lest night should overtake them on the steep
mountain path.
‘If you loiter so much I will put you into a wooden sledge when we get
to the half-way house, and run you down the mountain,’ he threatened.
Lovelier and yet more lovely looked the pine-woods, the green slopes,
the fertile valley, the far-away white peaks, so shadowy, so awful in
the changing lights of evening. Half the sky was ablaze with crimson
and orange, fading off into tender opalescent greens and purples, the
indescribable hues of rare jasper and rarer jade, as they neared the
Staubach. They had loitered as long as it was safe to loiter. The lamps
were lighted at the inn, and their coachman was watching for their
return. They drove home through the gray twilight, which was fast
deepening into night, and through a landscape of deepest gloom—a narrow
region, walled in by dark hills; dim lights, dotted here and there
amidst the darkness, ever so far apart, telling of lonely lives, of
humble peasant homes where pleasure and variety were unknown, a life of
monotonous labour, hidden from the world.
‘Have you enjoyed your day, Daphne?’ asked Lina, as they drove home,
the rapid river flowing noisily beside them, the white foam on the
waters flashing through the gloom.
‘Enjoyed it? There is no word big enough to say how delightful it has
been! It is a day that will stand apart in the history of my life,’
answered Daphne, slipping her hand lovingly through her sister’s arm.
‘What a privileged nature to be so easily made happy!’ said Gerald,
with a palpable sneer.
People are apt to let slip society’s mask in such a moment, on a dark
road shut in by mountain and wood, after a long and thoughtful silence,
forgetting that feeling is audible in the darkness, though faces are
hidden, and the clouded brow or the quiver of the lip is invisible.
Gerald Goring had been thinking deeply during the hillside walk and
the homeward drive, touched inexpressibly by Madoline’s affection, and
trying as honestly as was possible to a character which was not given
to mental or moral effort—trying to face a future clouded over with
fears. Could he ever be again as he had been, Madoline’s true lover?
This was the question which he asked himself, coming down the hill in
the glory of the evening light, a little aloof from the other three.
His honour and reverence for her were in nowise lessened by that fatal
passion which had changed the current of his life. He knew that of
all women he had ever met she was the noblest and the best; that, with
her, life would be lifted above the sordid, vulgar level of selfish
pleasures and sensual indulgences; that, as her husband, he could not
fail to become in somewise useful to his species, to win some measure
of renown, and to leave a name behind him that would sound sweet in the
ears of generations to come. He could imagine her in the riper beauty
of matronhood, the mother of his children, training up his sons to
tread the loftier paths of life, rearing his daughters in an atmosphere
of purity and love. He pictured her at the head of his household; he
told himself that with such a wife he must be an idiot if he missed
happiness. And then he looked with gloomy despairing eyes at the other
side of the question, and tried to realise what his life would be with
the butterfly being who had crept into his heart and made herself its
empress.
As well as he knew Lina’s perfection did he know Daphne’s faultiness.
She was frivolous, selfish, shallow, capricious, vehement. Yes, but
he loved her. She had no higher idea of this world than as a place
made exquisitely beautiful in order that she might be happy in it;
nor of her fellow-creatures than as persons provided to minister to
her pleasures; nor of the future beyond life than as a vague misty
something which had better not be thought about; nor of duty, but
as a word found in the Church Catechism, and which one might banish
from one’s mind after one’s confirmation. Yes, but he loved her.
Her faultiness did not lessen his love by the weight of a grain of
thistledown. He yearned to take her to his heart, faulty as she was,
and cherish her there for ever. He longed to spend the rest of his days
with her, and it seemed to him that life would be worthless without
her. She might prove a silly wife, a careless mother. Yes, but he loved
her. For him she was just the one most exquisite thing in creation, the
one supreme necessity of his soul.
‘“_Animæ dimidium meæ._” Yes, that is what she is,’ he said to himself
as he sat in the summer darkness, with dreamy eyes looking upward to
the lonely melancholy hills, where huge arollas of a thousand years’
growth spread their black branches against the snow-line just above
them. What a desolate world it looked in the gathering gloom!—only a
few solitary stars gleaming in the infinite remoteness of the sky, the
moon not yet risen above yonder snowy battlements.
It was past nine o’clock when they drove into the shrubberied approach
to the Jungfraublich. The hotel looked dazzling after the obscurity of
the valley. Daphne would have liked to dash into the billiard-room and
challenge her lover to a game; but, since it was impossible for a young
lady to play at a public table, she went upstairs to the sitting-room
on the first floor, where Sir Vernon was waiting for them, and where
there was a table spread with tea, cold chickens, and rolls and honey.
Lina sat by her father, telling him the history of their day, and
hearing all he had to say about his letters and papers. Edgar was
in tremendous spirits, and inclined to make fun of the queer little
village on the edge of everlasting snows; Daphne was talkative; Sir
Vernon was gracious. It was only Gerald Goring who bore no part in
the conversation. He looked worn and wearied with the day’s work, and
yet it had been nothing for an Alpine climber; a mere constitutional
walk, barely enough to keep a man in training. When tea was over he
retired to the balcony, and sat there, smoking cigarettes and watching
the moon climb the dark slopes of heaven; while the others looked over
newly-arrived papers and periodicals, and discussed to-morrow’s trip to
Grindelwald and the glaciers.
The morning came, as fair and fresh a dawn as ever peeped shyly
across the edge of the Alps, but Gerald, watching the slow kindling
of that rosy glow after a sleepless night, greeted the new day with
no thanksgiving. To him, in his present frame of mind, it would have
seemed a good thing if that day had never dawned; if this planet
Earth had dropped out of its place in the starry procession, and gone
down to darkness and chaos, like a torch burnt out. He rose with that
inexorable sun, which pursues his course with so little regard for the
griefs and perplexities of humanity, and was out in the dewy woods
above the hotel before civilised people were stirring. Anything was
better than to lie on a sleepless couch staring at the light. Here,
moving about among the dark pine-stems, treading the narrow tracks,
shifting his point of view at every turn in the path, life was less
intolerable. He could think better—his brain was clearer—his pulse less
feverish.
‘What was he to do?’ he asked himself helplessly. What did Wisdom
counsel? What did Honour urge? Surely about this latter voice there
could be no question. Honour would have him be true to Madoline, at
any sacrifice of his own feelings. Duty was plain enough here. He had
pledged himself to her by every bond which honest men hold sacred. He
must keep his word.
‘But if we are both miserable for life?’ he asked himself. ‘Can she be
happy if I am wretched? And what charm has existence for me without
Daphne?’
‘You must forget Daphne,’ urged Duty; ‘your first and nobler love must
obtain the mastery. You must pluck this idle weed, this mere caprice,
out of your heart.’
He told himself that the thing was to be done and he would try honestly
to do it. He would steel himself against Daphne’s wiles. Did not
Ulysses pluck himself away from the enchantress’s fatal island, wrench
himself out of her very web, and get home to Ithaca sound in body and
mind, and live happy ever afterwards with his faithful Penelope? Or at
least this is the popular idea of Ulysses, in spite of those breathings
of slander which make the Circe episode something more than Platonic.
What nobler image can life give than that of a faithful lover, a loyal
husband, tempted and yet true? Nor did poor little Daphne go out of
her way to exercise Circean arts. She charmed as the flowers charm,
innocently and unconsciously. She was no Becky Sharp, weaving a subtle
web out of people’s looks and smiles, drooping lashes, lifted eyelids,
the arrowy gleams of fatal green eyes. She wanted to be faithful to her
lover, and loyal to her sister. Her letter had been straight and true.
If he sinned, he sinned of his own accord, and had no such excuses as
Adam used against the partner God had given him.
He wandered about restlessly, in an utterly purposeless way, till it
was time to go back to the seven o’clock breakfast. He would have liked
to start alone for the shining slate mountain yonder, to spend the day
there in a sultry solitude, lying on his back and staring up at the
unfathomable blue, smoking a little, reading Heine a little—Heine’s
ballad-book had been his gospel of late—idling away the empty day,
and growing wiser and better in solitude. But he was pledged to go in
beaten tracks; to go and eat and drink at The Bear, and gaze at the
lower glacier, like a Cook’s tourist, and be faintly interested in the
coachman’s exposition of the view, and be blandly tolerant of girls
selling edelweiss, and boys waking the echoes with Alpine horns, and
all the conventional features of that exquisite drive from Interlaken
to Grindelwald.
However much he might affect to despise the familiar route, he could
not deny the beauty of the landscape by-and-by, when they were all
seated in the carriage and had crossed the Lutschine for the first
time, and were climbing slowly up the raised road above the river.
It was a brilliant morning, the wooded hills steeped in sunlight
and balmy summer air; the tender green of the young shoots showing
bright against the sombre darkness of the everlasting pines; water
rushing down the hillsides every here and there, sometimes a torrent,
sometimes a fine thread like spun glass, dropping from crag to crag.
The two young men got out of the carriage and walked up the hills; the
valley through which the road wound was exquisitely verdant—a scene of
pastoral beauty, fertile, richly wooded, but passing lonely. Daphne
sorely missed the dappled kine which relieve and animate a Warwickshire
landscape.
‘What in Heaven’s name has become of the cattle?’ she exclaimed.
‘Here are meadows, and homesteads, and gardens, and orchards, but
not a living object in the landscape. I thought Switzerland swarmed
with cows, and was musical with cowbells. And where is the chorus of
herdsmen singing the “_Ranz des Vaches_?”’
‘Perhaps there has been an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, and the
cows have all been condemned,’ speculated Edgar.
Gerald explained that the cattle and their keepers had all gone up into
the higher regions to crop the summer herbage.
‘And that accounts for this green and silent valley,’ said Daphne. ‘It
is rather a romantic idea; but I should have liked to see the cattle
all the same. I adore cows. I think a Jersey cow, with her stag-like
head and eyes, is almost the loveliest thing in creation.’
‘You shall have a herd of them at Hawksyard,’ exclaimed Edgar eagerly;
‘and I will build you a Swiss cowhouse at the end of the walnut walk.’
‘Thank you so much,’ said Daphne, with a faint smile, ‘but I was
thinking of them only in the abstract.’
There were times when any allusion to Hawksyard and the future
irritated her like the sting of a summer insect.
Children appeared at every turn of the circuitous road. Here a sickly,
large-eyed girl offered a handful of dingy edelweiss; there an unkempt
ill-fed boy ran beside the horses, flapping off the flies with a leafy
branch of ash or walnut; anon appeared the mountain musician playing
his plaintive strain upon the native horn, and waking melancholiest
echoes amid the solemn hills. The road crossed the river several times,
over covered bridges, wooden arcades, which made a picturesque bit in
the landscape, a pleasant lounging place too, on such a summer morning.
But there seemed to be nobody about save the fly-flapping boys, and
women and children offering new milk or the everlasting edelweiss.
It was the first time Daphne had seen the little velvety white flower,
and she was keenly interested in it.
‘Poor little colourless ice-blossom, so pale and dull-looking, like a
life without joy or variety!’ she said. ‘They say that it grows under
the snow. How nice it would be to go and hunt for it oneself! Please
give the children plenty of money, Edgar.’ And Mr. Turchill, whose
pockets were always full of loose Helvetian coins—leaden sous and
dingy-looking half-francs—scattered his largesse among the natives with
a liberality rare in modern excursionists.
Half-way up the hill they came to a rustic restaurant, where the horses
stopped to blow, and where the coachman invited the ladies to go and
see a tame chamois in a little shed at the back of the house.
‘He will be the first of his race I have seen,’ said Daphne, ‘though in
Manfred’s time this part of the country seems to have been overrun by
them.’
They went through the restaurant kitchen to the shed behind it, to
see the four-footed mountaineer. He was a melancholy little animal,
altogether a shabby specimen of the chamois tribe, and looked sadly
forlorn in his narrow den. One of his horns had been broken off,
perhaps in the struggles that attended his capture.
‘It is a painful sight,’ said Daphne, turning away with a sigh.
She would have given all her pocket-money to set the chamois free; but
he was one of the attractions of the house, and could not have been
easily ransomed.
And now again across the Black Lutschine, by another covered bridge,
and up the steep winding road through a narrow gorge in the hills,
until the cleft widens, and the Grindelwald valley opens before them in
all its glory, ringed round with mountains, the Great Eiger standing
boldly out in front of them, with broad patches of snow on his dark
stony front, behind a bold edge of pine-clad hill. There is unspeakable
grandeur in that bleak and rugged mountain rising above the verdure and
beauty of the nearer hills.
Daphne clasped her hands in unalloyed delight.
‘It would be worth while coming to Switzerland if it were only for
this,’ she exclaimed; ‘yet I am tortured by the idea of all the
mountain-passes, glaciers, and waterfalls that we are not going to see.
I have a great mind to throw away my Baedeker. He makes me positively
miserable with suggestions that I can’t carry out.’
‘You will be able to see all you care about next year,’ said Edgar,
‘when you and I are free to go where we like. I believe it will be
always where _you_ like.’
‘Next year seems half a century off,’ she answered carelessly.
Their journey was nearly done. The carriage went down into the valley,
then climbed another hill, and they had paused the outskirts of the
village of Grindelwald, and were drawing up in the garden in front of
the Bear Hotel. Very full of life and bustle was the inn garden on
this bright summer morning. Tourists without number standing about,
or sitting under the verandah, Americans, Germans, English, French,
all full of life and enjoyment; some starting with their alpenstocks,
intent on pedestrian excursions; ladies and sedentary middle-aged
gentlemen being hoisted on to mules; carriages driving in; horses being
fed and cleaned; a Babel of languages, a perpetual moving in and out.
Mr. Goring ordered a slight refection of wine and coffee, rolls and
honey, to be brought to a pleasant spot under the verandah, at a point
where the view across the deep valley to the hills beyond was widest
and grandest. Here they rested themselves a little before starting on
foot for the lower glacier. Both Madoline and Daphne were in favour of
walking.
‘I went on a mule when I was here with my father,’ said Lina, ‘and I
remember thinking how much I should have preferred being free to choose
my own path.’
It was a lovely walk, so soon as they were clear of the hotels and
boarding-houses, and the scattered wooden _châlets_ of the village,
just such a ramble as Daphne loved; a narrow footpath winding up and
down a verdant hillside—here a garden, and there an orchard—funny
little cottages and cottage-gardens perched anyhow on slopes and angles
of the road; a rustic bridge across the rocky bed of a river; and there
in front of them the glacier—a mass of corrugated ice lying on a steep
slope between two mountains—shining, beautiful, like a pale sapphire.
They loitered as much as they pleased by the wayside, Daphne straying
here and there as her fancy led her—a restless, birdlike creature,
almost seeming to have wings, so lightly did she flutter from hillock
to crag, so airy was the step with which she skimmed along the narrow
rocky pathway, beaten by the feet of so many travellers. They spent a
good deal of time in the immediate neighbourhood of the glacier, ‘doing
it thoroughly,’ as Edgar remarked afterwards, with a satisfied air; and
then they went quietly back to The Bear, and dined in a corner of the
big, barren dining-room, and drove back to Interlaken in the summer
dusk, Gerald almost as silent as he had been the night before during
the much shorter drive from Lauterbrunnen.
‘I’m afraid it bores you to go over the ground you know so well,’ said
Madoline, grieved at her lover’s silence, which looked like depression,
or mental weariness.
‘No; the country is too lovely, one could hardly tire of it,’ he
answered; ‘but don’t you think it intensely melancholy? There is
something in the silence and darkness of these hills which fills my
soul with gloom. Even the lights scattered about here and there are so
remote and so few that they only serve to intensify the solitude. So
long as sunlight and shadow give life and motion to the scene it is gay
enough; but with nightfall one finds out all at once how desolate it
is.’
There was more excursionising next day, and again on the next; then
came Sunday morning and church, and then a walk through the pine-woods
to see some athletic sports that were held in a green basin which made
a splendid amphitheatre, round whose grassy sides the audience sat
picturesquely grouped on the velvet sward. On this day the young women
came out in all the glory of their canton costume—snowy habit-shirts
and black velvet bodices, silver chains pendent from their shoulders,
silver daggers or arrows thrust through their plaited hair, long
silk aprons of brightest colours—a costume which gave new gaiety to
the landscape. Then in the evening there was a concert at the little
conversation-house in the walnut avenue, a concert so crowded by native
and foreigner that there was never an empty seat in the verandah, and
the waiters were at their wits’ ends to keep everyone supplied with tea
and coffee, lemonade and wine. After the concert there were fireworks,
coloured lights to glorify the fountains—almost the gayest, brightest
scene that Daphne’s eyes had ever looked upon. Then, when Bengal lights
and rockets had faded and vanished into the summer night, they walked
quietly back to the hotel under a starry sky.
‘I believe Daphne likes Bengal lights better than stars,’ said Gerald
mockingly, as he gave Madoline his arm, and went on with her in advance
of the others, across a field that lay on the other side of the walnut
walk.
‘You may believe anything you like of Daphne’s bad taste and general
idiocy,’ the girl retorted; and Lina was distressed at thinking how
disagreeable these two, whom she would have had so affectionately
attached, always were to each other.
And all the while Gerald Goring was wondering what he was to do with
his life—whether it were possible to break the chain which bound him,
that golden chain which had once been his chief glory—whether it were
possible to reconcile honour and love.
They left Interlaken next morning, and went straight through to the
little station at Montreux. Daphne, who had pored over her Baedeker
till she fancied that she knew every inch of Switzerland, was deeply
grieved at not being able to go on to Lucerne and the Rigi, Flüelen,
and all the Tell district; but Sir Vernon would go no farther than
Interlaken. He considered that he had made a sufficient sacrifice of
his own comfort already for his younger daughter’s pleasure.
‘I hate moving about, and I detest hotels,’ he said; ‘I am yearning for
the quiet of my own house.’
After this no more could be said. Daphne gave herself up to silent
contemplation of the Jungfrau range throughout the journey, by boat and
rail, hardly taking her eyes from those snowy peaks till they melted
from her view, fading ghostlike in the blue ether.
‘They seem to be a part of my life,’ she said, as she turned from the
carriage window with a regretful sigh; ‘I cannot bear to think that I
have seen the last of them.’
‘Only for this year,’ answered Edgar cheerily, not caring much for
mountains in the abstract, but ready to admire anything that Daphne
loved. ‘It is such an easy matter to come to Switzerland nowadays. The
Jungfrau is as accessible as Brighton Pier.’