base, where long black tongues of slate-rubble pouring into the grass, like shore-waves that have spent their burden, seem about to draw back to bring the mountain down. Thence to the level pasture was but a few skips performed sliding.
‘Well, now,’ said Chillon, ‘you can stand?’
‘Pretty well, I think.’ He tried his foot on the ground, and then stretched his length, saying that it only wanted rest. Anton pressed a hand at his ankle and made him wince, but the bones were sound, leg and hip not worse than badly bruised. He was advised by Anton to plant his foot in the first running water he came to, and he was considerate enough to say to Chillon:
‘Now you can leave me; and let me thank you. Half an hour will set me right. My name is Woodseer, if ever we meet again.’
Chillon nodded a hurried good-bye, without a thought of giving his name in return. But Carinthia had thrown herself on the grass. Her brother asked her in dismay if she was tired. She murmured to him: ‘I should like to hear more English.’
‘My dear girl, you’ll have enough of it in two or three weeks.’
‘Should we leave a good deed half done, Chillon?’
‘He shall have our guide.’
‘He may not be rich.’
‘I’ll pay Anton to stick to him.’
‘Brother, he has an objection to guides.’
Chillon cast hungry eyes on his watch: ‘Five minutes, then.’ He addressed Mr. Woodseer, who was reposing, indifferent to time, hard-by: ‘Your objection to guides might have taught you a sharp lesson. It ‘s like declining to have a master in studying a science—trusting to instinct for your knowledge of a bargain. One might as well refuse an oar to row in a boat.’
‘I ‘d rather risk it,’ the young man replied. ‘These guides kick the soul out of scenery. I came for that and not for them.’
‘You might easily have been a disagreeable part of the scene.’
‘Why not here as well as elsewhere?’
‘You don’t care for your life?’
‘I try not to care for it a fraction more than Destiny does.’
‘Fatalism. I suppose you care for something?’
‘Besides I’ve a slack purse, and shun guides and inns when I can. I care for open air, colour, flowers, weeds, birds, insects, mountains. There’s a world behind the mask. I call this life; and the town’s a boiling pot, intolerably stuffy. My one ambition is to be out of it. I thank heaven I have not another on earth. Yes, I care for my note-book, because it’s of no use to a human being except me. I slept beside a spring last night, and I never shall like a bedroom so well. I think I have discovered the great secret: I may be wrong, of course.’ And if so, he had his philosophy, the admission was meant to say.
Carinthia expected the revelation of a notable secret, but none came; or if it did it eluded her grasp:—he was praising contemplation, he was praising tobacco. He talked of the charm of poverty upon a settled income of a very small sum of money, the fruit of a compact he would execute with the town to agree to his perpetual exclusion from it, and to retain his identity, and not be the composite which every townsman was. He talked of Buddha. He said: ‘Here the brook’s the brook, the mountain’s the mountain: they are as they always were.’
‘You’d have men be the same,’ Chillon remarked as to a nursling prattler, and he rejoined: ‘They’ve lost more than they’ve gained; though, he admitted, ‘there has been some gain, in a certain way.’
Fortunately for them, young men have not the habit of reflecting upon the indigestion of ideas they receive from members of their community, sometimes upon exchange. They compare a view of life with their own view, to condemn it summarily; and he was a curious object to Chillon as the perfect opposite of himself.
‘I would advise you,’ Chillon said, ‘to get a pair of Styrian boots, if you intend to stay in the Alps. Those boots of yours are London make.’
‘They ‘re my father’s make,’ said Mr. Woodseer.
Chillon drew out his watch. ‘Come, Carinthia, we must be off.’ He proposed his guide, and, as Anton was rejected, he pointed the route over the head of the valley, stated the distance to an inn that way, saluted and strode.
Mr. Woodseer, partly rising, presumed, in raising his hat and thanking Carinthia, to touch her fingers. She smiled on him, frankly extending her open hand, and pointing the route again, counselling him to rest at the inn, even saying: ‘You have not yet your strength to come on with us?’
He thought he would stay some time longer: he had a disposition to smoke.
She tripped away to her brother and was watched through the whiffs of a pipe far up the valley, guiltless of any consciousness of producing an impression. But her mind was with the stranger sufficiently to cause her to say to Chillon, at the close of a dispute between him and Anton on the interesting subject of the growth of the horns of chamois: ‘Have we been quite kind to that gentleman?’
Chillon looked over his shoulder. ‘He’s there still; he’s fond of solitude. And, Carin, my dear, don’t give your hand when you are meeting or parting with people it’s not done.’
His uninstructed sister said: ‘Did you not like him?’
She was answered with an ‘Oh,’ the tone of which balanced lightly on the neutral line. ‘Some of the ideas he has are Lord Fleetwood’s, I hear, and one can understand them in a man of enormous wealth, who doesn’t know what to do with himself and is dead-sick of flattery; though it seems odd for an English nobleman to be raving about Nature. Perhaps it’s because none else of them does.’
‘Lord Fleetwood loves our mountains, Chillon?’
‘But a fellow who probably has to make his way in the world!—and he despises ambition!’… Chillon dropped him. He was antipathetic to eccentrics, and his soldierly and social training opposed the profession of heterodox ideas: to have listened seriously to them coming from the mouth of an unambitious bootmaker’s son involved him in the absurdity. He considered that there was no harm in the lad, rather a commendable sort of courage and some notion of manners; allowing for his ignorance of the convenable in putting out his hand to take a young lady’s, with the plea of thanking her. He hoped she would be more on her guard.
Carinthia was sure she had the name of the nobleman wishing to bestow his title upon the beautiful Henrietta. Lord Fleetwood! That slender thread given her of the character of her brother’s rival who loved the mountains was woven in her mind with her passing experience of the youth they had left behind them, until the two became one, a highly transfigured one, and the mountain scenery made him very threatening to her brother. A silky haired youth, brown-eyed, unconquerable in adversity, immensely rich, fond of solitude, curled, decorated, bejewelled by all the elves and gnomes of inmost solitude, must have marvellous attractions, she feared. She thought of him so much, that her humble spirit conceived the stricken soul of the woman as of necessity the pursuer; as shamelessly, though timidly, as she herself pursued in imagination the enchanted secret of the mountain-land. She hoped her brother would not supplicate, for it struck her that the lover who besieged the lady would forfeit her roaming and hunting fancy.
‘I wonder what that gentleman is doing now,’ she said to Chillon.
He grimaced slightly,
