and Reymund, the first two riding, Reymund and the guide on foot. The
air was so clear that it seemed like living in the inside of a crystal;
everything stood with sharp outlines, as if drawn with a burin upon the
deep substance of the blue: far away tender gauzes took up the distance,
but that was merely on the outside edges of the world. After they had
exhausted the view from the wide-reaching summit, where the eye seemed
to wrest from the Creator more than had ever been given to it, they went
below into the shelter of the great rocks and lunched. It was late in
the afternoon ere they remounted and sought their way down the long
descent. The path which had been slight with difficulties in climbing
was now full of downward terrors. Orient bent far back in her seat,
unable to see where her horse would plant his feet. It seemed to her
that he was stepping over sheer abysses, and just as she herself went
sliding and slipping forward over his head and down, a strong arm from
an unseen form behind the cliff, round which she had just wound, would
grasp her, and Reymund would hold her firm till the beast stood
four-square again. It was to her a thing like the arm of Providence made
visible to faith. Suddenly the girth broke, and but for that strong arm
on the instant outstretched, Providence itself alone knows what would
have become of her. Reymund caught her then as she reeled from the
saddle, and placed her on the ground. The horse, startled by the
unexpectedness of the affair, fled forward; the guide left the bridle he
had held behind and pursued him. Catching the rein with a jerk and oath,
he dealt such a blow with his boot that the animal lost his balance and
fell, and would have rolled over the precipice but for a prostrate tree.
In a moment what Reymund had wanted to see was granted him. Orient
sprang forward, her face aflame, her eyes like balefires. The guide,
amazed, as one might be at the sight of an avenger in his path, obeyed
her single word, her vehement gesture, and plunged down the way and left
them.
“Orient! what have you done?” cried her mother.
“Well, well, mamma,” answered the suddenly convicted and penitent one,
“we can follow his red cap.”
But the guide, twice too cunning, hid himself in underhung paths that he
knew, and they had not a sign or signal for aid.
Nevertheless, Reymund gladly accepted this fate because of the thing
that brought it, and at which another man would have looked askance.
This thing, this little temper, had proved to him that Orient was
human,--and, therefore, to be won. He raised the pony, remounted Orient,
and did his best in place of their faithless leader, trusting more to
the instincts of the animals themselves than to any mountain-craft of
his own.
The sharp outlines of distant peaks began to burn and blacken, those of
the nearer rock and stunted shrub to grow diffuse; the air was keen and
chill, a reddening sunset smouldered in clouds below them and shut out
the world, a cold, wet mist below threatened to come creeping up around
them. The horses neighed to each other, grew jaded and uncertain,
stopped. Masses of impassable rock closed them in on every side, save
the narrow defile through which they came and the precipice below; the
atmosphere was purple with shade and clung to them in dew; already one
star hung out its blue lamp.
“We can go no farther,” said Reymund. “This spot is more sheltered than
any we are likely to find. Let us do what we can for comfort, and wait
for the morning.”
The mother bewailed herself; but Orient made cheer, and while Reymund
corralled the horses, she was busy collecting twigs and splinters and
bits of wood and dry moss in a pile. “Light them with your matches,
Reymund,” she said. “A cigar will keep you warm, but we need a bit of
blaze, perhaps.”
“When it is darker,” he replied; “you will need it more a little nearer
to the witching time.”
“Do you imagine we shall see witches?”
“Take care, or you will see stars.”
“He rode alone through the silent night,
She swam like a star to his left and right,”
sang Orient. “After all, it is not the Walpurgis Night.”
“If we could only have a cup of tea!” sighed the mamma, at a loss for
her luxuries in the wilderness.
“It will be so much more refreshing to-morrow,” said Orient. “And
seasoned with romance,--a dash of danger,--your first adventure, little
mother!”
But the little mother had no fancy for adventures; and while her
daughter lost all her serenity and was crazy with delight at the wild
beauty of the thing, she grew more and more lachrymose, and afforded at
last a good background of shower for all Orient’s rainbows. Thereon
Orient, sitting down, put her arms round her and comforted her, till the
mother became herself somewhat alive to the circumstance that one seldom
saw such a scene twice in a lifetime.
They had remained on the rocky platform where they paused, a shelf that
after a few yards ended in an abrupt fall that led away by a course of
stark precipices into the great valley beneath. This valley, filled with
rolling vapor, whose volumes, smitten by sunset, were fused in splendid
color, made a pavilion of cloud beneath them where billows of fleecy
crimson and shining scarlet curdled together into creamy crests, here
seeming to lash in feather-white foam against the base of some crag, and
there letting a late sunbeam plough through spaces of a violet-dark
drift till they were all inwrought with gold. Above them the cold and
mighty heaven was already faintly but thickly strewn with stars.
“Into what awful and glorious region are we translated!” cried Orient.
“We are above the world and the people of the world. Are we flesh and
blood?”
“The free spirits of the air ‘have no such liberty’ as this of ours,”
said Reymund.
“It is just as if we were dead!” shivered the mamma. “And I’m sure it’s
cold enough for that!”
Orient wrapped the shawls about the doleful little woman, while Reymund
opened his knapsack for any remnants of lunch that might afford them
consolation. He kindled the fire, too, for the colors were fading away
beneath, and the sky was getting gloomy overhead; and, warmed and
enlivened in the genial light of the briefly crackling blaze, they
forgot that they were lost upon the mountain, and all the possible
horrors of their fate. But to Reymund there were few horrors in it, for
if he died of exposure and starvation there on the bald, pitiless
mountain, it would be with Orient in his arms at last.
While the fire crackled, Reymund found in his breast-pocket a tiny
flask of cordial which he divided into three portions. “Drink it,” he
said to them, “and make it take the place of the tea. It is
Chartreuse--oily sunshine--distilled from the cones of some old
fir-tree. First cousin to the cedars of Lebanon, for all I know. Mark
how you taste hemlock in it. Socrates poisoned with hemlock? No, no; he
drank himself to death on Chartreuse.”
Orient heard him indignantly. “I do not like it,” said she, when her
turn came, and left hers in the horn. Reymund laughed; he hesitated a
moment, then tossed it off himself.
The fire did not last them long, for all the twigs they could collect
were scanty; the blaze had heated the rock a little; they drew closer to
it, and the mother, curling up against it in her shawls, composed
herself as she could for slumber; the voices of Orient and Reymund, from
where they still sat and talked together, lulled her as the murmur of
the waterfall lulled Sleep himself. Orient was repeating Jean Ingelow’s
dream of her lover fallen and dead among the hills, with its vague and
awesome imagery. “I do not understand,” she said, as she ceased, “this
solicitude that my mother and so many others feel concerning their
burial-place. I love life, delicious life; but if we die and lie
unburied here forever among the lonely precipices, it will not matter
any more to us than it did to the youth.” And she repeated again:--
“The first hath no advantage,--it shall not soothe his slumber
That a lock of his brown hair his father aye shall keep;
For the last, he nothing grudgeth, it shall naught his quiet cumber
That in a golden mesh of _his_, callow eaglets sleep.”
Reymund quaked at the moment, as he thought of any lustrous lock of
Orient’s curling out of the fierce beak that should tear it away from
the white brow. Then he said: “Too philosophic by half. As for me, with
the first peep of day in this high meridian, I shall be up and doing,
and find a way to our level again or--perish in the attempt.”
“Resolved to perish, any way. Give you liberty or give you death. _I_ do
not feel in such a hurry to be gone. How silent and solemn it is,--what
a clear darkness,--listen a moment and catch the sough of that pine
forest far beneath, like the wings of some great spirit sifting the air.
I have never been so near heaven. I understand now why in the Bible they
so often withdrew into a high mountain.”
Reymund did not answer her. “Say your prayers, innocent one,” was what
he thought. “Wherever you are, there heaven is near.”
By and by Orient crept closer to her mother for mutual comfort, wound
her own cloak round her like a chrysalis, and drowsed and dreamed.
Reymund sat beside her, his knees drawn up, his hands clasped round
them. It was very cool; the air was so still that he wondered at the
absence of a stinging frost, and he hugged himself thus for warmth.
Orient stirred in her half-recumbent sleep, and her head fell on his
shoulder. After that the solid mountain was less immovable than he. He
let the beautiful head remain, watching it with downcast, sidelong gaze;
if he had longed with all his heart to smooth one tress, to put his arm
over her in a sheltering embrace, he dared not touch her. Something
said to him that she was of a grade above, as the disembodied is beyond
the clay; said, too, that whatever lovely or fine there might be in
himself, the thickness of the outer wrapping rendered it invisible to
her; that for Orient to read him right he must wait for another life. In
spite of all that, he hoped,--hoped madly and wildly, there in the chill
night, with the beautiful head fallen on his shoulder and the sweet,
warm breath stealing gently across his bending brow. He had a strange
fancy now and then that out of the encircling shadow a great face came
and looked,--whether that of some uncreated thing, some phantasm of his
brain, or that of some celestial being, some resident of vast spaces, or
only a wild beast, a big, brown bear, roving on their tracks and coming
to peer about their unprotected bivouac. Whatever it was, it retired as
often as it came, awed in its turn, he thought, by the sweet innocence
of that golden head. A late moon rose down over the low side of the
earth as he still sat there; he knew it by the strange coppery light
that began to glow through the vapors that yet filled the gulfs beneath,
and boil them to a scum of dark, dun gold; then at last a broad beam
parted the tumbling and sulphurous fogs, and the bright, thin crescent
of the waning moon cut itself out on a clear air behind the horn of the
hill, and, as if swinging from its sharp cusp, hung the watery diamond
of the morning star. Still Reymund did not lift the head from his
shoulder; he chose rather that the fair apparition of daybreak at this
height above the earth might happen to him, as if through the imposition
of that dear and tender touch. By and by she stirred restlessly,--the
spell of her slumber was breaking; he moved away gently and left her the
rock for a pillow. When the heavens were paling and retreating in a mist
of star-breath, and when all the world was whitening about her and the
great floor of cloud beneath was inwrought by dawn with sparks of fire,
so that they seemed wrapped in an atmosphere of flame and snow, Orient
awoke.
No hero in his self-restraint, in one wild, forgetful moment of that
morning, Reymund told Orient that he loved her.
She repulsed him so gently that it gave him reason to hope, yet so
firmly that he could do nothing but despair.
He urged that she was unconscious of herself, that she did not know her
own heart, nor what it wanted; that he had approached her inner life
more nearly than another might ever do; that, give him time and chance,
he could not fail to win her.
She only answered that she was not won.
Before, in their windings and wanderings, they had reached the foot of
the mountain that day, they met their recusant and repentant guide
coming up with others in search of them, and all their toil and trouble
were over.
Reymund’s holiday was over too. He was to return next day to his home,
to engagements previously formed and not to be disregarded.
“At least,” he said to Orient, not sadly, but with a certain vigor of
intention in his tone, “you will allow me to visit you at your mother’s
house?”
“You could not do a kinder thing,” answered Orient, feeling now the gap
that he would leave, and which nothing could quite fill, and willing to
grant him anything but what he most desired.
“Then you will see me on Saturdays.”
“Every Saturday!” she exclaimed, with a bright face that made his heart
bound. “That is too much to ask.”
“Of you, perhaps; not of me. Sunday is a spare day; if I use it for
God’s worship, it shall be at what shrine I please,--St. Orient’s or
another’s.”
“And it is such a long ride,” demurred she, remembering the miles on
miles of low sea-coast country threaded with rivers and inlaid with
marshes, that he must cross, all day flying along through their damp
breath and salt winds. “Nine hours; I am afraid I ought not to allow it.
And yet,--and yet, nine or nineteen, it shall make no difference.”
Orient had hesitated in her last sentence, wondering how she could deny
herself the sympathy in her little pursuits that through this time she
had received from Reymund. She had not encountered it before; it was
delightful to her; perhaps it only had not taught her love because she
did not know what love was. She had but little knowledge of human
nature, almost none at all of her own nature: she preferred natural
religion before theology, natural history, with its grandiose
revolutions, before the petty struggles of warriors and diplomatists
which her view was not broad enough to throw into epochs and revolutions
more grandiose yet: it was Reymund who had taught her to look with
kindly curiosity upon the lives of those about her, in hopes, it may be,
of teaching her at last to look in upon her own. Of that she was
unaware; but the interest in the flower never found before to-day, the
discovery of the bird whose note had ravished the ear last sunset, the
hunt up brookside and hill for a fragment of quartz that should have a
mountain range and outlying spurs of amethyst crystals, or one full of
imbedded beryls, the shining hexagons like drops of light filtered
through seawater, or any heap of blooded garnets, a blaze of concrete
color; the search into the age of the old pine-tree on the precipice;
into the mountain strata, and the wonderment concerning that day of the
earth’s date on which they were upheaved; the tracing out the path of
some glacier with all its ancient and icy terrors overgrown by the
verdant moss and turf of the moraine; the perpetual looking for the
Maker’s fingers in his work,--all this, and such as this, she would miss
and must resign if she forbade those recurring Saturdays. And then, on
the other hand, a friend to meet with the results of work, the choice
book, the week’s research, its thought, its fancy: she who had had no
intimates, few friends--
Reymund did not wait for her to balance her ideas.
“The train arrives,” said he, “by five o’clock,--a little before. Every
Saturday, therefore, at five o’clock, I shall be in your drawing-room.”
The thing was settled, then, without her. She began all at once to fear
that, after all, it would not happen so; he would let other things creep
between; when he was fairly at a distance from her he would be angry
with her for having quite failed to feel that entire satisfaction in
him, to give him that love which, in a high ideal, she believed to be
due from every woman to her husband; a thousand things would hinder.
“I can hardly believe it,” she said.
“I am too happy when you doubt it,” he replied, half reading her
thoughts. “It gives me hope; for we can easily believe that to which we
are indifferent. How can I be hindered when I will it,--and when you
wish it?” The blush that streamed up her temples doubly pleased him. “Do
not doubt it!” he exclaimed, with more vivacity than so small a thing
appeared to demand. “For, see, I swear it! I will be with you on each
Saturday at five o’clock, with your permission, until the day I die!”
So, dropping her hand, he went down the lane to the coach. But, looking
back, he saw her still standing in the doorway, hung with such drooping
drapery of woodbine round her head, the sunlight lying in a glory on her
golden hair, the downy bloom upon her cheek as though it were a peach, a
smile upon her lip, and heaven’s own blue within her eye,--she seemed
the incarnation of a summer sunrise. He saw the riotous wind lift one
curl and twine it with the next, drop the petal of a rose upon her
mouth, kiss and kiss again her ivory forehead, free and welcome where he
dared not venture,--and the love in his heart made the blood boil hotly
up his veins to cheek and brow,--and for all testimony to his thrilling
passion, he only cried, “Every Saturday, at five o’clock!” and was away.
But before Reymund plunged afresh into the exterior world, which, for
these weeks, had been shut from his sight, he turned aside for one last
outlook upon pleasure. Thus it happened that he left the train at an
earlier station than the one near Orient’s home, partly to avoid
recognition in the future, partly for the sake of mounting and subduing
a spirited horse which had been brought up to tear himself into a foam
at sight of the engine. Reymund meant to gratify himself that day with a
stroll through Orient’s garden and among the haunts of her bright youth.
No one would have taken him for anything but an apparition, who saw him
galloping down the long country roads in a cloud of dust. When he had
conquered the angry temper of the beast he abated his gait and paced
slowly along the margin of the twice-mown meadows, splendid in noon
sunshine, over the shaven surfaces of rusty reds and browns, into which
they shaded all their gilded verdure. Now and then a bittern cried from
the bank of a tiny thread of the tide, other notes were hushed, there
was only to be heard through the wide midday air the unbroken treble of
the crickets, across which the rich horns of the locusts shrilled like
the elfin trumpets of a summer’s state. Reymund hitched his horse, found
a penetrable portion of the garden paling, and entered.
It was a large, old garden, laid out, fifty years ago, perhaps, in a
kind of pleasance; for in one place a slight hill rose above the rest,
while paths wandered round it into new and unsuspected regions; in
another a brook meandered and sang silverly over shining pebbles, and
among arrow-heads and lily-pods, and, dallying, went its way at last to
empty into some tide-streak and find the sounding sea that called to it
all night. Weeds, of course, had overgrown the beds, the untrained
grapes hung heavily from wall and trellis, wasps and blackbirds made
merry together with the nectar of ripening pears, plum and peach dropped
ungathered from the bough; vine and tendril, leaf and spray, and branch
and blossom, all wrought themselves to a delicious tangle of perfume and
rustle and color. Here, through the beautiful and envious weeds, a
gladiolus reared his flames, a larkspur absorbed the very blue, a
carnation scattered spice; here honeysuckles still blew out a perfect
fragrance, while mourning-brides and gillyflowers and spiked lavender
and pansies sowed the air with their old-fashioned sweetness. The soft,
lonely sky stretched away over the garden and the meadows to haze itself
round low and distant woods, and all the empty air seemed sad and
desolate between,--the fulness and richness of life at its high noon
touching close upon the anti-climax of desert solitude. Through the
place a light east-wind was blowing that had in it a tonic for the lungs
like the sparkle of champagne. And, somehow, through all the spaces of
the neglected garden the spell of Orient seemed complete. There Orient
must have stood to twine that white rose upon the porch; there her
fingers must have twinkled among the young vine-leaves; there, on that
bank of turf, she must many an afternoon have sat at work; there, in the
shallow crystal of the brook, she had waded with white feet to set the
water-plants. These lichen-covered apple-trees had shed, how many a
springtime, the rosy snow of their petals around her head; these gnarled
old bergamots had dropped their pulpy globes into her hands; this
nut-tree put out its leaves on the day when she was born; her little
feet had worn these paths. The garden was the shadow of Orient herself,
reduced to dumb and to material things. He wondered what it would be by
the magic of moonlight,--the whole place silvered over with tranquil
sheen, and raised from every day’s dull sight into the dreamy and
ideal,--full of cool dew, and silence, and holy hush, as if it waited on
her white sleep. Just under his feet, where the seed had been thrown in
handfuls, he traced, written out with blue forget-me-nots, the name of
Orient.
It would not do for him to stay much longer here; he should grow wild
with hopes and fancies, for all he knew, tread out that lovely name with
his heel. She must, she should be won! He clutched a cluster of the
forget-me-nots, quickly escaped the labyrinth, galloped back to the
station at a rate that streaked his chafing steed,--and so away from
dreams to life and real work.
Thus Reymund returned to his routine; bills and lawsuits and politics,
routes and rides; they were not calculated to lift him to any higher
level than the old one.
And Orient and her mother came home; the mother having made quite as
close acquaintance with the mountains as she cared to do.
Saturdays, now, surely as they came, brought Reymund under the same roof
with Orient. Perhaps in their brief indulgence he found pardon for all
the sins of the week,--for the week had its sins, its little trivial
condoning of misdemeanors as unimportant, matters which lower one as
steadily and certainly over the great pit, as block and tackle might do
over another. On Sunday nights, when he glided away in the outward
train, he felt as if it were an easy thing to maintain the height which,
by Orient’s side, he gained; but after a Monday morning on the exchange,
after a Tuesday night in the salon, after his evening gallop on the
horse possessed with the spirit of Satan, he said to himself, “It is of
no use. Nature is too crude in me, too gross a strain, too deep a dye. I
should be like Shelley’s rock in the black abyss, that
‘Has from unimaginable years
Sustained itself with terror and with toil
Over a gulf, and, with the agony
With which it clings, seems slowly coming down.’
The thing is to abandon.” Yet Saturday’s sunset shone for him again
always over Orient’s garden.
He had come one evening and found Orient among the grape-vines, playing
with a parcel of little children, as pretty, bright, and fresh as a
bunch of flowers. After the hubbub of business, the dust of travel, this
garden, in a far outlying city suburb stretching towards the sea, seemed
as pure and innocent as Eden. On Sunday morning, when the air soared
illumined with a stiller lustre, when the azure deepened as if
fresh-washed by sacred rains and dews, when the winds bore no murmur but
that of ripening leaf and floating petal, when the birds themselves
seemed to sing in the Sabbath, and all the wide world to be gladly and
tranquilly conscious of the day,--they went to church together. If
Orient was rapt in the worship, Reymund was at an exaltation as high for
him,--rapt in his worship of her. By times this very thing lifted him
into the upper region, his soul rose buoyant on the prayer and praise,
and floated forward like a waif on the full tide of the organ’s music.
When, afterward, he found himself and his sentience again, he said the
thing was in him,--could he but keep the pitch,--were Orient forever by
him to give him that key-note. But alone we come into this world, alone
we go out of it. Neither Orient nor another could, for all eternity,
give the tone to any soul; that discord or that harmony which one shall
make must be the result of one’s own being.
He sat with Orient, in the afternoon, on the bank of turf that sloped
down to the clear, brown brook, in whose bed many a diving and dipping
sunbeam wrought mosaics of light and shade with the shining pebbles. The
brook rustled and lilted on its way, a bird above it turned its burden
into melody, now and then a waft of wind rippled all its course till the
lily leaves shivered and turned up their crimson linings, soft clouds
chased one another across the sky,--everything around wore the bloom of
peace and pleasure.
“I often fear,” said Reymund, “that I must come here no more. The place
grows too dear for one that must some day leave it.”
Orient turned and looked at him. He saw her tremble. “Not come here any
more!” she said.
“Ah, Orient!” he cried, “once I declared to you the purpose of my life.
Sometimes--now--sometimes--it seems to me as if you were almost won.”
He bent above her, glowing and passionate and daring. She trembled
again, neither drew away, nor surrendered herself to the waiting grasp.