In dread, in danger, and alone,
Famished and chilled, through ways unknown,
Tangled and steep, he journeyed on.--_Lady of the Lake_.
Whoever, journeying southward from Coire, passes through the Via Mala,
thence through the village of Andeer, and thence turns to the left,
following a mountain path up the torrent of the Aversa, will soon lose
himself in the solitudes of the savage valley of Ferrera. Thither
Morton made his way; but not by so smooth an access. Ignorant of the
country, and guided chiefly by the sun, he had pushed blindly forward
by paths best known to the chamois and those who chase them.
His best hope had been to meet some of his travelling countrymen, from
whom he could gain help. To this end he had once and again approached
the highways, and as often some real or seeming danger had driven him
back to the mountains. For a day or more, the food he had taken from
the inn served to support him. He had flung away Max's pistol, but
still had his own. It served him to kindle a fire; and by loading it
with gravel, in place of shot, he contrived to kill thrushes and other
small birds. Their nests, too, full at this time of eggs and young,
supplied a meagre resource; and once, being hard pressed, he made a
Gallic banquet on a party of serenaders who were croaking and trilling
their evening concert about the edge of a shallow pool. Frogs have
found warm eulogists; but never did the art of Paris or Bologna
transmute those delectable reptiles into so savory a repast as did the
famine-sharpened appetite of Morton.
Upon fare like this, he wandered on, till he stumbled upon the valley
of Ferrera.
He had found at last an asylum wild enough to content the most pious
of eremites, or the most desperate of bandits. Below he saw the raging
water foaming along the depths of its black ravine; above--the
stupendous ramparts that walled the valley in--cliffs, along whose
giddy verge the firs were dwindled to feathers. Cascades spouted from
their tops, scattering to mist and nothingness long before their
measureless leap was done. The tribute drawn from the clouds the
lavish mountain flung back to the clouds again. Rocks were piled on
rocks, ruin on ruin, and, high over all, the glaciers of the Splugen
shone like cliffs of silver.
Take a savage from his woods or his prairies, and, school him as you
will, the ingrained savage will still declare itself. Take the most
polished of mankind, turn him into the wilderness, and forthwith the
dormant savage begins to appear. Hunt him with enemies, gnaw him with
hunger, beat him with wind and rain, and observe the result; how the
delicate tissues of civilization are blown away, how rude passions
start into life, how his bodily cravings grow clamorous and
importunate, how he grows reckless of his own blood and the blood of
others. "Men are as the times." Young Lovelace of the hussars singing
a duet at Lady Belgrave's _soiree_, would hardly know himself, hewing
down Russian artillerymen at Balaklava.
Had Meredith met his old comrade as he was making his slow way among
the rocks and ravines, in dress no better than the meanest peasant,
his face moustached and bearded, and thin and dark with hardship, he
would have needed the eyes of a lynx to detect Morton the millionaire.
The mind of the latter shared, in some sort, the changes of his outer
man. Proscribed and hunted, starved into fierceness, his best friend
murdered at his side, his mood was, to say the least, none of the most
benign. But, as he toiled on his way, he turned aside to rest in a
sunny nook, deep sheltered among rocks. Here, where the fresh grass
tempted him, and where, from a jutting crag, the water, trickling from
some hidden spring, fell in rapid drops, tinkling into a pool below,
and, as they fell, flashing in the sun like a string of
diamonds,--here, in this quiet nook, he sat down; and, as he did so,
he saw by his side, close nestled in the young grass, a little family
of white and purple blossoms. They were blossoms of the crocus, a
native of these valleys.
Morton bent over them, and put aside the grass from the delicate
petals. A flower will now and then find a voice, and that not a weak
one. As he looked, there came in upon him such a surge of
recollection, such a memory of New England gardens, such a vision of
loved faces, and, chief before them all, the face he best loved, such
an awakening of every tender thought that had once possessed him, and
all in such overpowering contrast with his present misery, that the
famished outlaw burst into a flood of tears.