The Amazing Marriage, v1

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She looked above, then below on the slim and straightgrown flocks of
naked purple crocuses in bud and blow abounding over the meadow that
rolled to the level of the house, and two of these she gathered.

CHAPTER V

A MOUNTAIN WALK IN MIST AND SUNSHINE

Chillon was right in his forecast of the mists. An over-moistened earth
steaming to the sun obscured it before the two had finished breakfast,
which was a finish to everything eatable in the ravaged dwelling, with
the exception of a sly store for the midday meal, that old Mariandl had
stuffed into Chillon's leather sack--the fruit of secret begging on their
behalf about the neighbourhood. He found the sack heavy and bulky as he
slung it over his shoulders; but she bade him make nothing of such a
trifle till he had it inside him. 'And you that love tea so, my pretty
one, so that you always laughed and sang after drinking a cup with your
mother,' she said to Carinthia, 'you will find one pinch of it in your
bag at the end of the left-foot slipper, to remember your home by when
you are out in the world.'

She crossed the strap of the bag on her mistress's bosom, and was
embraced by Carinthia and Chillon in turns, Carinthia telling her to dry
her eyes, for that she would certainly come back and perhaps occupy the
house one day or other. The old soul moaned of eyes that would not be
awake to behold her; she begged a visit at her grave, though it was to be
in a Catholic burial-place and the priests had used her dear master and
mistress ill, not allowing them to lie in consecrated ground; affection
made her a champion of religious tolerance and a little afraid of
retribution. Carinthia soothed her, kissed her, gave the promise, and
the parting was over.

She and Chillon had on the previous day accomplished a pilgrimage to the
resting-place of their father and mother among humble Protestants, iron-
smelters, in a valley out of the way of their present line of march to
the glacier of the great snow-mountain marking the junction of three
Alpine provinces of Austria. Josef, the cart-driver with the boxes, who
was to pass the valley, vowed of his own accord to hang a fresh day's
wreath on the rails. He would not hear of money for the purchase, and
they humoured him. The family had been beloved. There was an offer of a
home for Carinthia in the castle of Count Lebern, a friend of her
parents, much taken with her, and she would have accepted it had not
Chillon overruled her choice, determined that, as she was English, she
must come to England and live under the guardianship of her uncle, Lord
Levellier, of whose character he did not speak.

The girl's cheeks were drawn thin and her lips shut as they departed;
she was tearless. A phantom ring of mist accompanied her from her first
footing outside the house. She did not look back. The house came
swimming and plunging after her, like a spectral ship on big seas, and
her father and mother lived and died in her breast; and now they were
strong, consulting, chatting, laughing, caressing; now still and white,
caught by a vapour that dived away with them either to right or left, but
always with the same suddenness, leaving her to question herself whether
she existed, for more of life seemed to be with their mystery than with
her speculations. The phantom ring of mist enclosing for miles the
invariable low-sweeping dark spruce-fir kept her thoughts on them as
close as the shroud. She walked fast, but scarcely felt that she was
moving. Near midday the haunted circle widened; rocks were loosely
folded in it, and heads of trees, whose round intervolving roots grasped
the yellow roadside soil; the mists shook like a curtain, and partly
opened and displayed a tapestry-landscape, roughly worked, of woollen
crag and castle and suggested glen, threaded waters, very prominent
foreground, Autumn flowers on banks; a predominant atmospheric greyness.
The sun threw a shaft, liquid instead of burning, as we see his beams
beneath a wave; and then the mists narrowed again, boiled up the valleys
and streams above the mountain, curled and flew, and were Python coils
pierced by brighter arrows of the sun. A spot of blue signalled his
victory above.

To look at it was to fancy they had been walking under water and had now
risen to the surface. Carinthia's mind stepped out of the chamber of
death. The different air and scene breathed into her a timid warmth
toward the future, and between her naming of the lesser mountains on
their side of the pass, she asked questions relating to England, and
especially the ladies she was to see at the Baths beyond the glacier-
pass. She had heard of a party of his friends awaiting him there,
without much encouragement from him to ask particulars of them,
and she had hitherto abstained, as she was rather shy of meeting her
countrywomen. The ladies, Chillon said, were cousins; one was a young
widow, the Countess of Fleetwood, and the other was Miss Fakenham, a
younger lady.

Carinthia murmured in German: 'Poor soul!' Which one was she pitying?
The widow, she said, in the tone implying, naturally.

Her brother assured her the widow was used to it, for this was her second
widowhood.

'She marries again!' exclaimed the girl.

'You don't like that idea?' said he.

Carinthia betrayed a delicate shudder.

Her brother laughed to himself at her expressive present tense. 'And
marries again!' he said. 'There will certainly be a third.'

'Husband?' said she, as at the incredible.

'Husband, let's hope,' he answered.

She dropped from her contemplation of the lady, and her look at her
brother signified: It will not be you!

Chillon was engaged in spying for a place where he could spread out the
contents of his bag. Sharp hunger beset them both at the mention of
eating. A bank of sloping green shaded by a chestnut proposed the seat,
and here he relieved the bag of a bottle of wine, slices of, meat, bread,
hard eggs, and lettuce, a chipped cup to fling away after drinking the
wine, and a supply of small butler-cakes known to be favourites with
Carinthia. She reversed the order of the feast by commencing upon one of
the cakes, to do honour to Mariandl's thoughtfulness. As at their
breakfast, they shared the last morsel.

'But we would have made it enough for our dear old dog Pluto as well, if
he had lived,' said Carinthia, sighing with her thankfulness and
compassionate regrets, a mixture often inspiring a tender babbling
melancholy. 'Dogs' eyes have such a sick look of love. He might have
lived longer, though he was very old, only he could not survive the loss
of father. I know the finding of the body broke his heart. He sprang
forward, he stopped and threw up his head. It was human language to hear
him, Chillon. He lay in the yard, trying to lift his eyes when I came to
him, they were so heavy; and he had not strength to move his poor old
tail more than once. He died with his head on my lap. He seemed to beg
me, and I took him, and he breathed twice, and that was his end. Pluto!
old dog! Well, for you or for me, brother, we could not have a better
wish. As for me, death! . . . When we know we are to die! Only let
my darling live! that is my prayer, and that we two may not be separated
till I am taken to their grave. Father bought ground for four--his wife
and himself and his two children. It does not oblige us to be buried
there, but could we have any other desire?'

She stretched her hand to her brother. He kissed it spiritedly.

'Look ahead, my dear girl. Help me to finish this wine. There 's
nothing like good hard walking to give common wine of the country a
flavour--and out of broken crockery.'

'I think it so good,' Carinthia replied, after drinking from the cup.
'In England they, do not grow wine. Are the people there kind?'

'They're civilized people, of course.'

'Kind--warm to you, Chillon?'

'Some of them, when you know them. "Warm," is hardly the word. Winter's
warm on skates. You must do a great deal for yourself. They don't boil
over. By the way, don't expect much of your uncle.'

'Will he not love me?'

'He gives you a lodging in his house, and food enough, we'll hope. You
won't see company or much of him.'

'I cannot exist without being loved. I do not care for company. He must
love me a little.'

'He is one of the warm-hearted race--he's mother's brother; but where his
heart is, I 've not discovered.

Bear with him just for the present, my dear, till I am able to support
you.'

'I will,' she said.

The dreary vision of a home with an unloving uncle was not brightened by
the alternative of her brother's having to support her. She spoke of
money. 'Have we none, Chillon?'

'We have no debts,' he answered. 'We have a claim on the Government here
for indemnification for property taken to build a fortress upon one of
the passes into Italy. Father bought the land, thinking there would be a
yield of ore thereabout; and they have seized it, rightly enough, but
they dispute our claim for the valuation we put on it. A small sum they
would consent to pay. It would be a very small sum, and I 'm father's
son, I will have justice.'

'Yes!' Carthinia joined with him to show the same stout nature.

'We have nothing else except a bit to toss up for luck.'

'And how can I help being a burden on my brother?' she inquired, in
distress.

'Marry, and be a blessing to a husband,' he said lightly.

They performed a sacrifice of the empty bottle and cracked cup on the
site of their meal, as if it had been a ceremony demanded from
travellers, and leaving them in fragments, proceeded on their journey
refreshed.

Walking was now high enjoyment, notwithstanding the force of the sun, for
they were a hardy couple, requiring no more than sufficient nourishment
to combat the elements with an exulting blood. Besides they loved
mountain air and scenery, and each step to the ridge of the pass they
climbed was an advance in splendour. Peaks of ashen hue and pale dry red
and pale sulphur pushed up, straight, forked, twisted, naked, striking
their minds with an indeterminate ghostliness of Indian, so strange they
were in shape and colouring. These sharp points were the first to greet
them between the blue and green. A depression of the pass to the left
gave sight of the points of black fir forest below, round the girths of
the barren shafts. Mountain blocks appeared pushing up in front, and a
mountain wall and woods on it, and mountains in the distance, and cliffs
riven with falls of water that were silver skeins, down lower to meadows,
villages and spires, and lower finally to the whole valley of the foaming
river, field and river seeming in imagination rolled out from the hand of
the heading mountain.

'But see this in winter, as I did with father, Chillon!' said Carinthia.

She said it upon love's instinct to halo the scene with something beyond
present vision, and to sanctify it for her brother, so that this walk of
theirs together should never be forgotten.

A smooth fold of cloud, moveless along one of the upper pastures, and
still dense enough to be luminous in sunlight, was the last of the mist.

They watched it lying in the form of a fish, leviathan diminished, as
they descended their path; and the head was lost, the tail spread
peacockwise, and evaporated slowly in that likeness; and soft to a breath
of air as gossamer down, the body became a ball, a cock, a little lizard,
nothingness.

The bluest bright day of the year was shining. Chillon led the descent.
With his trim and handsome figure before her, Carinthia remembered the
current saying, that he should have been the girl and she the boy. That
was because he resembled their mother in face. But the build of his
limbs and shoulders was not feminine.

To her admiring eyes, he had a look superior to simple strength and
grace; the look of a great sky-bird about to mount, a fountain-like
energy of stature, delightful to her contemplation. And he had the mouth
women put faith in for decision and fixedness. She did, most fully; and
reflecting how entirely she did so, the thought assailed her: some one
must be loving him!

She allowed it to surprise her, not choosing to revert to an uneasy
sensation of the morning.

That some one, her process of reasoning informed her, was necessarily an
English young lady. She reserved her questions till they should cease
this hopping and heeling down the zigzag of the slippery path-track.
When children they had been collectors of beetles and butterflies, and
the flying by of a 'royal-mantle,' the purple butterfly grandly fringed,
could still remind Carinthia of the event it was of old to spy and chase
one. Chillon himself was not above the sentiment of their "very early
days"; he stopped to ask if she had been that lustrous blue-wing, a rarer
species, prized by youngsters, shoot through the chestnut trees: and they
both paused for a moment, gazing into the fairyland of infancy, she
seeing with her brother's eyes, this prince of the realm having escaped
her. He owned he might have been mistaken, as the brilliant fellow flew
swift and high between leaves, like an ordinary fritillary. Not the less
did they get their glimpse of the wonders in the sunny eternity of a
child's afternoon.

'An Auerhahn, Chillon!' she said, picturing the maturer day when she had
scaled perilous heights with him at night to stalk the blackcock in the
prime of the morning. She wished they could have had another such
adventure to stamp the old home on his heart freshly, to tile exclusion
of beautiful English faces.

On the level of the valley, where they met the torrent-river, walking
side by side with him, she ventured an inquiry: 'English girls are fair
girls, are they not?'

'There are some dark also,' he replied.

'But the best-looking are fair?'

'Perhaps they are, with us.'

'Mother was fair.'

'She was.'

'I have only seen a few of them, once at Vies and at Venice, and those
Baths we are going to; and at Meran, I think.'

'You considered them charming?'

'Not all.'

It was touching that she should be such a stranger to her countrywomen!
He drew a portrait-case from his breast-pocket, pressing the spring,
and handed it to her, saying: 'There is one.' He spoke indifferently,
but as soon as she had seen the face inside it, with a look at him and a
deep breath; she understood that he was an altered brother, and that they
were three instead of two.

She handed it back to him, saying hushedly and only 'Yes.'

He did not ask an opinion upon the beauty she had seen. His pace
increased, and she hastened her steps beside him. She had not much to
learn when some minutes later she said; 'Shall I see her, Chillon?'

'She is one of the ladies we are to meet.'

'What a pity!' Carinthia stepped faster, enlightened as to his wish to
get to the Baths without delay; and her heart softened in reflecting how
readily he had yielded to her silly preference for going on foot.

Her cry of regret was equivocal; it produced no impression on him. They
reached a village where her leader deemed it adviseable to drive for the
remainder of the distance up the valley to the barrier snow-mountain.
She assented instantly, she had no longer any active wishes of her own,
save to make amends to her brother, who was and would ever be her
brother: she could not be robbed of their relationship.

Something undefined in her feeling of possession she had been robbed of,
she knew it by her spiritlessness; and she would fain have attributed it
to the idle motion of the car, now and them stupidly jolting her on,
after the valiant exercise of her limbs. They were in a land of
waterfalls and busy mills, a narrowing vale where the runs of grass grew
short and wild, and the glacier-river roared for the leap, more foam than
water, and the savagery, naturally exciting to her, breathed of its lair
among the rocks and ice-fields.

Her brother said: 'There he is.' She saw the whitecrowned king of the
region, of whose near presence to her old home she had been accustomed to
think proudly, end she looked at him without springing to him, and
continued imaging her English home and her loveless uncle, merely
admiring the scene, as if the fire of her soul had been extinguished.--
'Marry, and be a blessing to a husband.' Chillon's words whispered of
the means of escape from the den of her uncle.

But who would marry me! she thought. An unreproved sensation of melting
pervaded her; she knew her capacity for gratitude, and conjuring it up in
her 'heart, there came with it the noble knightly gentleman who would
really stoop to take a plain girl by the hand, release her, and say: 'Be
mine!' His vizor was down, of course. She had no power of imagining the
lineaments of that prodigy. Or was he a dream? He came and went. Her
mother, not unkindly, sadly, had counted her poor girl's chances of
winning attention and a husband. Her father had doated on her face; but,
as she argued, her father had been attracted by her mother, a beautiful
woman, and this was a circumstance that reflected the greater
hopelessness on her prospects. She bore a likeness to her father,
little to her mother, though he fancied the reverse and gave her the
mother's lips and hair. Thinking of herself, however, was destructive
to the form of her mirror of knightliness: he wavered, he fled for good,
as the rosy vapour born of our sensibility must do when we relapse to
coldness, and the more completely when we try to command it. No, she
thought, a plain girl should think of work, to earn her independence.

'Women are not permitted to follow armies, Chillon?' she said.

He laughed out. 'What 's in your head?'

The laugh abashed her; she murmured of women being good nurses for
wounded soldiers, if they were good walkers to march with the army; and,
as evidently it sounded witless to him, she added, to seem reasonable:
'You have not told me the Christian names of those ladies.'

He made queer eyes over the puzzle to connect the foregoing and the
succeeding in her remarks, but answered straightforwardly: 'Livia is one,
and Henrietta!

Her ear seized on the stress of his voice. 'Henrietta!' She chose that
name for the name of the person disturbing her; it fused best, she
thought, with the new element she had been compelled to take into her
system, to absorb it if she could.

'You're not scheming to have them serve as army hospital nurses, my
dear?'

'No, Chillon.'

'You can't explain it, I suppose?'

'A sister could go too, when you go to war, Chillon.'

A sister could go, if it were permitted by the authorities, and be near
her brother to nurse him in case of wounds; others would be unable to
claim the privilege. That was her meaning, involved with the hazy
project of earning an independence; but she could not explain it, and
Chillon set her down for one of the inexplicable sex, which the simple
adventurous girl had not previously seemed to be.

She was inwardly warned of having talked foolishly, and she held her
tongue. Her humble and modest jealousy, scarce deserving the title,
passed with a sigh or two. It was her first taste of life in the world.

A fit of heavy-mindedness ensued, that heightened the contrast her recent
mood had bequeathed, between herself, ignorant as she was, and those
ladies. Their names, Livia and Henrietta, soared above her and sang the
music of the splendid spheres. Henrietta was closer to earth, for her
features had been revealed; she was therefore the dearer, and the richer
for him who loved her, being one of us, though an over-earthly one; and
Carinthia gave her to Chillon, reserving for herself a handmaiden's place
within the circle of their happiness.

This done, she sat straight in the car. It was toiling up the steep
ascent of a glen to the mountain village, the last of her native
province. Her proposal to walk was accepted, and the speeding of her
blood, now that she had mastered a new element in it, soon restored her
to her sisterly affinity with natural glories. The sunset was on yonder
side of the snows. Here there was a feast of variously-tinted sunset
shadows on snow, meadows, rock, river, serrated cliff. The peaked cap of
the rushing rock-dotted sweeps of upward snow caught a scarlet
illumination: one flank of the white in heaven was violetted wonderfully.

At nightfall, under a clear black sky, alive with wakeful fires round
head and breast of the great Alp, Chillon and Carinthia strolled out of
the village, and he told her some of his hopes. They referred to
inventions of destructive weapons, which were primarily to place his
country out of all danger from a world in arms; and also, it might be
mentioned, to bring him fortune. 'For I must have money!' he said,
sighing it out like a deliberate oath. He and his uncle were associated
in the inventions. They had an improved rocket that would force military
chiefs to change their tactics: they had a new powder, a rifle, a model
musket--the latter based on his own plans; and a scheme for fortress
artillery likely to turn the preponderance in favour of the defensive
once again. 'And that will be really doing good,' said Chillon, 'for
where it's with the offensive, there's everlasting bullying and
plundering.'

Carinthia warmly agreed with him, but begged him be sure his uncle
divided the profits equally. She discerned what his need of money
signified.

Tenderness urged her to say: 'Henrietta! Chillon.'

'Well?' he answered quickly.

'Will she wait?'

'Can she, you should ask.'

'Is she brave?'

'Who can tell, till she has been tried?'

'Is she quite free?'

'She has not yet been captured.'

'Brother, is there no one else . . . ?'

'There's a nobleman anxious to bestow his titles on her.'

'He is rich?'

'The first or second wealthiest in Great Britain, they say.'

'Is he young?'

'About the same age as mine.'

'Is he a handsome young man?'

'Handsomer than your brother, my girl.'

'No, no, no !' said she. 'And what if he is, and your Henrietta does not
choose him? Now let me think what I long to think. I have her close to
me.'

She rocked a roseate image on her heart and went to bed with it by
starlight.

By starlight they sprang to their feet and departed the next morning, in
the steps of a guide carrying, Chillon said, 'a better lantern than we
left behind us at the smithy.'

'Father!' exclaimed Carinthia on her swift inward breath, for this one of
the names he had used to give to her old home revived him to her thoughts
and senses fervently.

CHAPTER VI

THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHER

Three parts down a swift decline of shattered slate, where travelling
stones loosened from rows of scree hurl away at a bound after one roll
over, there sat a youth dusty and torn, nursing a bruised leg, not in the
easiest of postures, on a sharp tooth of rock, that might at any moment
have broken from the slanting slab at the end of which it formed a stump,
and added him a second time to the general crumble of the mountain. He
had done a portion of the descent in excellent imitation of the detached
fragments, and had parted company with his alpenstock and plaid;
preserving his hat and his knapsack. He was alone, disabled, and
cheerful; in doubt of the arrival of succour before he could trust his
left leg to do him further service unaided; but it was morning still, the
sun was hot, the air was cool; just the tempering opposition to render
existence pleasant as a piece of vegetation, especially when there has
been a question of your ceasing to exist; and the view was of a
sustaining sublimity of desolateness: crag and snow overhead; a gloomy
vale below; no life either of bird or herd; a voiceless region where
there had once been roars at the bowling of a hill from a mountain to the
deep, and the third flank of the mountain spoke of it in the silence.

He would have enjoyed the scene unremittingly, like the philosopher he
pretended to be, in a disdain of civilization and the ambitions of men,
had not a contest with earth been forced on him from time to time to keep
the heel of his right foot, dug in shallow shale, fixed and supporting.
As long as it held he was happy and maintained the attitude of a guitar-
player, thrumming the calf of the useless leg to accompany tuneful
thoughts, but the inevitable lapse and slide of the foot recurred, and
the philosopher was exhibited as an infant learning to crawl. The seat,
moreover, not having been fashioned for him or for any soft purpose,
resisted his pressure and became a thing of violence, that required to be
humiliatingly coaxed. His last resource to propitiate it was counselled
by nature turned mathematician: tenacious extension solved the problem;
he lay back at his length, and with his hat over his eyes consented to
see nothing for the sake of comfort. Thus he was perfectly rational,
though when others beheld him he appeared the insanest of mortals.

A girl's voice gave out the mountain carol ringingly above. His heart
and all his fancies were in motion at the sound. He leaned on an elbow
to listen; the slide threatened him, and he resumed his full stretch,
determined to take her for a dream. He was of the class of youths who,
in apprehension that their bright season may not be permanent, choose to
fortify it by a systematic contempt of material realities unless they
come in the fairest of shapes, and as he was quite sincere in this
feeling and election of the right way to live, disappointment and
sullenness overcame him on hearing men's shouts and steps; despite his
helpless condition he refused to stir, for they had jarred on his dream.
Perhaps his temper, unknown to himself, had been a little injured by his
mishap, and he would not have been sorry to charge them with want of
common humanity in passing him; or he did not think his plight so bad,
else he would have bawled after them had they gone by: far the youths of
his description are fools only upon system,--however earnestly they
indulge the present self-punishing sentiment. The party did not pass;
they stopped short, they consulted, and a feminine tongue more urgent
than the others, and very musical, sweet to hear anywhere, put him in
tune. She said, 'Brother! brother!' in German. Our philosopher flung
off his hat.

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