Thel 
 First 
 Novel 
 Library 
 
A CHILD OF 
 THE ALPS 
 
 Terroce)vK. 
 
THE FIRST NOVEL LIBRARY 
 
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 Vol. XXX. A CHILD OF THE ALPS. B 3 
 
 MARGARET SYMONDS. 
 
 LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD. 
 
UNWIN'S 
 "FIRST NOVEL" LIBRARY 
 
 New volumes to be issued in the 
 Spring of 7920 
 
 MADELINE OF THE DESERT 
 
 By ARTHUR WEIGALL 
 
 SECOND LOVE 
 
 By ELLEN M. FOWKES 
 
 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 By MARGARET SYMONDS 
 
 THE IVORY FAN 
 
 By ADRIAN HEARD 
 
 T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD., LONDON 
 
A CHILD OF 
 THE ALPS 
 
 By MARGARET SYMONDS 
 
 T. FISHER UNWIN LTD. 
 
 LONDON : ADELPHI TERRACE 
 
I I S 
 
 QUOS AMAVI ET PERDIDI 
 QUOS AMO 
 AMANT 
 
 . . . Carry me out 
 
 Into the wind and into the sunshine, 
 
 Into the beautiful World. . . ." 
 
 W. E. HENLEY. 
 
 First Published in 1920 
 (All rights reserved) 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PART I 
 THE POWER OF ENVIRONMENT 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. THE BELOVED PHYSICIAN - - 13 
 
 II. THE DEATH OF MABY - 34 
 
 III. A CHILD OF THE ALPS - 44 
 
 IV. SEBASTIAN - - 64 
 V. IN THE VILLAGE OF TBINS - -72 
 
 VI. ON THE ALP - 88 
 
 VII. SHADES OF THE PEISON HOUSE - 102 
 
 VIII. THE LITTLE WHITE PILLAB ,- 122 
 
 IX. CONEYHUBST - - 130 
 
 PART II 
 THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHILD TO WOMANHOOD 
 
 X. THE BACKFISCH - 140 
 
 XI. COMING HOME - 148 
 
 XII. THE DANCE - - 157 
 
 XIII. THE GATES OF ITALY ' * - 167 
 
 XIV. AWAKENED - 176 
 XV. THE GIBL'S BBOKEN MIBBOB > 187 
 
 XVI. THE VILLA AT PLUBS - 192 
 
 XVII. VENICE - ' .' - 209 
 
 XVIII. SEHNSUCHT > 218 
 
 11 
 
 ^49038 
 
ONTENTS 
 
 PART III 
 
 THE MAIDEN'S BLOOD 
 
 CHAPTER pAOK 
 
 xix. THE MAIDEN'S BLOOD . 230 
 
 XX. CARD IN ALE - - ... 247 
 
 XXI. THE SUNDIAL . 255 
 
 XXII. THE DANCING BEARS AND THE ENGLISHMAN - 269 
 
 XXIII. THE PICTUEE OF ENDYMION - 275 
 
 XXIV. FIRST LOVES . 286 
 XXV. THE WISDOM OF SEBASTIAN - - 292 
 
 XXVI. IN THE GARDEN OF LOVE - 305 
 
 XXVII. AFTERTHOUGHTS - . 3Q9 
 
 XXVIII. THE SORROW OF LOVE . 321 
 
 XXIX. THE HOME OF SEBASTIAN - - . 331 
 
 XXX. " LONG AGO " . 344. 
 
 AFTER FIVE YEARS - - . 355 
 
In order to facilitate other Sufasmbers getting.: ; / 
 this Book without undue delay, it is respectfully 
 requested that it may be returned to the Library as 
 soon as read. 
 
 THE POWEE OF ENVIKONMES 
 CHAPTEE I 
 
 THE BELOVED PHYSICIAN 
 
 THE little town of Ilanz has a long and an illustrious his- 
 tory. It stands with all its wooden towers and bridges on 
 the banks of the Upper Ehine. It has fine houses, nobly 
 planned and painted ; old churches, too, and many treasured 
 archives. It has valuable orchards where some of the 
 finest fruit of all the Alps is ripened, and where the sweetest 
 honey is gathered by the bees. Also, like many other little 
 hidden cities, Ilanz is pleased with her own life and doings ; 
 and her people are a proud people, well-informed, and given 
 to foreign commerce. 
 
 But the party of English travellers who, late one summer 
 evening, came hurrying back across the Alps from Italy, and 
 who found themselves stranded here, so much against their 
 wills and calculations, knew nothing of all these matters. 
 
 They came themselves from crowded English cities ; 
 Ilanz was to them at best a pretty hamlet a thing to make 
 a pencil sketch of. Yet here Fate brought and left them on 
 that August evening of the year 1870. The party consisted 
 of an elderly gentleman, his son Sebastian, his two daugh- 
 ters, their courier and lady's maid. The elder daughter was 
 married, and her husband travelled with them. The 
 
 13 
 
12 
 
 [(^^HH^^M^BBBIMP 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 XIX. THE MAI 
 
 XX. CARDIN, 
 
 XXI. THE SU1 
 
 XXII. THE DAJ 
 
 XXIII. THE PI( 
 
 XXIV. FIRST LOVES 
 
 XXV. THE WISDOM OF SEBASTIAN 
 
 XXVI. IN THE GARDEN OF LOVE - 
 
 XXVII. AFTERTHOUGHTS - 
 
 XXVIII. THE SORROW OF LOVE 
 
 XXIX. THE HOME OF SEBASTIAN - 
 
 XXX. "LONG AGO" 
 
 286 
 292 
 305 
 309 
 321 
 331 
 344 
 
 AFTER FIVE YEARS 
 
 - 356 
 
A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 PART I 
 THE POWER OF ENVIRONMENT 
 
 CHAPTEE I 
 
 THE BELOVED PHYSICIAN 
 
 THE little town of Ilanz has a long and an illustrious his- 
 tory. It stands with all its wooden towers and bridges on 
 the banks of the Upper Ehine. It has fine houses, nobly 
 planned and painted ; old churches, too, and many treasured 
 archives. It has valuable orchards where some of the 
 finest fruit of all the Alps is ripened, and where the sweetest 
 honey is gathered by the bees. Also, like many other little 
 hidden cities, Ilanz is pleased with her own life and doings ; 
 and her people are a proud people, well-informed, and given 
 to foreign commerce. 
 
 But the party of English travellers who, late one summer 
 evening, came hurrying back across the Alps from Italy, and 
 who found themselves stranded here, so much against their 
 wills and calculations, knew nothing of all these matters. 
 
 They came themselves from crowded English cities; 
 Ilanz was to them at best a pretty hamlet a thing to make 
 a pencil sketch of. Yet here Fate brought and left them on 
 that August evening of the year 1870. The party consisted 
 of an elderly gentleman, his son Sebastian, his two daugh- 
 ters, their courier and lady's maid. The elder daughter was 
 married, and her husband travelled with them. The 
 
 13 
 
l/<DgKLp OF THE ALPS 
 
 $iigtttfer, Mtfry, "was a girl of nineteen summers. 
 Tne : sbn;"whb Wa'iTnow* an undergraduate at Magdalen, 
 had caught some violent chill a few days earlier in Italy, 
 and this chill had not been lessened by driving over the 
 St. Gothard in a heavy rainstorm. At Andermatt he 
 became much worse, but his father, anxious to carry out 
 the carefully prepared scheme of his driving journey, and 
 knowing that they would join the railway if only they 
 could push on as far as Chur that night, started at dawn 
 across the Oberalp. 
 
 The family travelled in style, as families of their social 
 standing often did in those times. They drove in an 
 immense barouche which they chartered on the other side 
 of the Alps, with a courier who smoothed down all the 
 rubs for Mr. Crane, and with a lady's maid who kept the 
 long skirts of his daughters duly dusted. They had quan- 
 tities of veils, air-cushions, and white umbrellas ; but no 
 amount of luxury could lessen the ache in the young man's 
 head as they wound down the pass in the late afternoon, 
 and Sebastian declared he could go no farther. 
 
 Upon consulting with his courier, Mr. Crane found that 
 although the inn at Ilanz was by no means of a first-class 
 order, it yet could contain their party for a night or two 
 with tolerable, if not luxurious, comfort ; and to this inn 
 they accordingly went. An hour later they were estab- 
 lished there Sebastian in a dark, cool room with very 
 little furniture, and only fresh linen and bare parquet floor 
 to recommend it ; Mr. Crane and Mr. and Mrs. James in 
 the panelled sitting-room ; and Mary sitting silent at the 
 table near her brother's bed. 
 
 Mary was a sweet-faced English girl. In physique she 
 was slight, dark and delicate, like her brother ; in mind she 
 was more orthodox. Indeed, she had a very rigid code of 
 morals for one so young ; and her religion was almost that 
 of a Christian saint some hundreds of years ago. Her 
 convictions of redemption and of grace were strong and 
 
THE BELOVED PHYSICIAN 15 
 
 sure ; her conscience would have been wellnigh morbid but 
 for the depth of human love which governed all her 
 thoughts and actions. Combining with this purely Chris- 
 tian faith, but never for one moment clashing with it, was 
 a strong love of art, of nature, and of merely sensuous 
 beauty in all things natural and human. In fact, Mary 
 Crane was both an artist and a poet in that peculiar way 
 in which so many women are artists and poets. But the 
 fact of this rather antagonistic vein never rose sufficiently 
 near to the surface to obstruct her prim outward life ; it 
 was tucked well away in some corner of her inward con- 
 sciousness. Mary was very glad and proud to be accepted 
 as the mistress of her father's respectable mansion at an 
 early age ; and before she really had " grown up," before 
 she had left the rigid discipline of the schoolroom and of 
 her excellent Swiss governess, she had already, in her 
 quiet, modest fashion, attempted to fill the place which 
 her dead mother had, with such spasmodic grace, filled 
 there before her. The large establishment of servants, 
 which Mr. Crane felt fitting for himself and for his 
 children, acquiesced with signal satisfaction in this new 
 regime; for Mary's rule was mild and sweet, and never 
 for one instant did any spark of revolution on her part 
 obtrude itself upon the even surface of that late Victorian 
 home. All the same, the seeds of revolution were there; 
 and Mary's calm concealed a fire of smouldering logs within. 
 The elder sister, Mrs. James, was completely different 
 to Mary. She was the pride and joy of all her aunts. She 
 possessed a Distinctly normal, if a little freakish, form of 
 mind; but her "eccentricities," for so she herself had 
 always termed her whims, were really perfectly conven- 
 tional. She had many admirers, and at the age of twenty- 
 two she married the only one of them for whom she had ever 
 felt even a spark of energetic affection. The marriage gave 
 the most general satisfaction, for it had everything to 
 recommend it : Mr. James was rich and prosperous, a hard- 
 working business man likely to be proud of any family 
 
16 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 which he, combining with his wife, produced. Mr. 
 James's forbears had long been the possessors of land in a 
 beautiful part of Southern Wales, where a huge family 
 mansion had grown up in the late Georgian days on the 
 site of a former manor house. He spent a certain period 
 of his life in this great and rather pompous house, but the 
 
 bulk of his time was passed in the town of E , where 
 
 Mr. Crane himself had always lived. 
 
 The Jameses had three children ; two girls and a boy. 
 Could they but have produced one other son their happiness 
 would have been complete. But the family ceased at that 
 point, and perhaps this produced just a little peevishness 
 in the mother, and a touch of resentment in the father ; 
 but this was nothing at all to signify, for all things else 
 went well with them. 
 
 " They have sold their souls to the Commonplace, and 
 they batten in the purple of Bourgeoisie," Sebastian had 
 once rather flippantly explained, when asked by a friend to 
 describe the household of his elder sister. 
 
 But Mary, as I have said, was different. She loved her 
 brother, who was also different, with a love that amounted 
 to passion ; and it was his influence which drove her into 
 the study of books beyond her power to comprehend, and 
 into a love of beauty in art which was inclined to clash with 
 her religious sentiments. It was Sebastian, I may add, 
 who often saved her from becoming a possible prig at a 
 very early age. 
 
 Mary's father, himself a busy man in his day, though 
 having for some years retired from active work, found all 
 his "relaxation" in those things which, if regarded as 
 merely a diversion to himself, had become the very soul's 
 food of his two younger children. Mr. Crane was rich, 
 and he was popular ; in his day it was a virtue and not a 
 vice to exert all sorts of harmless patronage ; so he was 
 much adored by various paupers and all the " charitable 
 institutions" in the town. He and his family led an 
 admirably well-regulated, if unexciting, existence. But 
 
THE BELOVED PHYSICIAN 17 
 
 they were stifled rather than stimulated by all their pos- 
 sessions, and this was the unconscious root of Mary's 
 trouble. 
 
 Foreign travel was in the days of Mr. Crane a very 
 different thing indeed from what it was even some ten years 
 later. The very name they gave to it : "A tour on the 
 Continent " will explain what I mean. The Alps may 
 have been the "Playground of Europe" then, but the 
 clothes of the ladies and gentlemen who arrived to ' ' play ' ' 
 there would be reckoned as almost grotesque and intensely 
 unsuitable by the people of an equal social standing who, 
 twenty or thirty years later, poured into the beautiful and 
 holy places for purposes which they described as sport- 
 ing. When Mr. Crane reached a foreign city, he took 
 a suitable carriage, and he visited first every object of art 
 which the city contained, and then the shops which sold 
 reproductions of this art, specimens of which he purchased 
 with a taste considered good in its day, but which would 
 be labelled as rococo in ours. In this fashion his English 
 home had become a sort of museum of bronzes, pictures, 
 cabinets, mosaic tables, marbles, and such solid things as 
 the modern traveller has neither cash nor inclination to 
 secure. We may laugh a little at the incongruity of such 
 a museum nowadays, but there is still much to be said for 
 the effect of comfort and dignity which it was able to 
 produce. 
 
 Mr. Crane greatly enjoyed his journeys, but Sebastian 
 kept but a very mixed remembrance of their pleasures, for 
 he suffered from a bodily fatigue such as his father, who 
 himself possessed an almost metallic physique, could not 
 conceive of ; and the long diaries which he compelled him- 
 self to keep, exhausted and forced into further expression 
 a brain already overstrained. Mary, on the other hand, 
 enjoyed every hour of her travels. She was older than her 
 brother ; her brain was emptier and her heart fuller. Her 
 religion, too, was more convincing. 
 
 2 
 
18 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 One year they went to Chamouni and to the Bernese 
 Oberland, returning home by the Lake of Geneva. It was 
 a sort of a chromo-lithograph Switzerland which they 
 visited, and of which they really got no true impression. 
 But Mary loved it ; and on her mantelpiece at home she 
 kept an exquisite copy of a Swiss chalet not a thing which 
 peasants are born and die in, but an ideal image of this 
 thing, and Mary loved ideals. She also treasured a finely 
 carved chamois on a little oaken pedestal ; a goat , a marmot , 
 too; and when she thought about the Alps she seemed 
 to hear the alpenhorn ; and she could see small children 
 running out to meet her with long baskets full of straw- 
 berries. And there was always an afterglow on the Jung- 
 frau, when Mary remembered Interlaken. 
 
 This, then, being the mode of travelling in Mr. Crane's 
 family, it may well be imagined with what consternation a 
 stay of some days in a very small Swiss town would fill 
 their orderly minds. But Sebastian had fever, it was 
 unwise, it would indeed have been impossible, for them 
 to push on to Chur ; and so they settled down in the not 
 very clean and decidedly dreary inn, prepared to make the 
 best of a rather bad matter. They spread themselves over 
 the empty rooms, and although it was August, they lighted 
 a fire in the stove of the sitting-room : " To air it , you 
 know," said Mrs. James, ignorant as she mercifully was 
 of a procession of commercial travellers who had imme- 
 diately preceded her on the spot. The courier brought up 
 their book-box from the hall, and covered the table with 
 books and with papers. Somehow the pretty English 
 things, notably Mrs. James's embroidery frame, looked a 
 little incongruous amongst the stuffed marmots and the 
 chamois on the walls of the inn. But Mr. Crane got out a 
 local guide-book, and he found that the Komanish language 
 was still spoken and even preached in the neighbourhood of 
 Ilanz. He discovered other facts, too, about the flora and 
 geology of the district; and, in the character of a good 
 
THE BELOVED PHYSICIAN 19 
 
 traveller, he managed to whip up some small form of 
 interest in his unwelcome surroundings. 
 
 Then the doctor was announced. He was a young man, 
 tall, and with a singularly grave and calm expression. His 
 clothes were those almost of a peasant, but there was a 
 dignity and a reserve about him which astonished the 
 English family. He did not speak to Mrs. James, but 
 he bowed to Mr. Crane, and asked to see his patient. 
 Having heard what he wanted to know, he went upstairs 
 without waiting for anyone to go with him. 
 
 Mary heard a step on the stairs, and she got up and 
 went to the door. The light of the afternoon sun came in 
 through a window on the landing and fell upon her pale 
 and rather nervous face. She was exquisitely dressed in 
 the full fashion of her day. A light grey silk with a little 
 lilac sprig fell full from her waist to the floor, and at her 
 neck she wore a small amethyst cross on a heavy golden 
 chain. Her hair was parted, and brushed very smoothly 
 back over large pads from her temples. Her whole out- 
 ward being was marked by a sort of exquisite refine- 
 ment. The peasant doctor stopped at the head of the 
 stairs ; perhaps the pallor of the young girl struck him. 
 
 " Are you the one who is ill?" he asked her in almost 
 perfect English, but yet almost unconscious he had spoken. 
 
 More than that he did not say, but he fell in love with 
 Mary Crane. He fell in love with her, suddenly, pro- 
 foundly, and quite irrevocably, as a man of only his 
 character can and will do. 
 
 "No," said Mary very simply. " It is my brother who 
 is ill; he is, I think, in very great pain. I am glad you 
 should have come so soon." 
 
 Then the doctor passed by her and into Sebastian's room. 
 Once he turned to Mary : 
 
 " Are you going to nurse your brother?" he asked ; and 
 Mary said she hoped he soon would be quite well again. 
 
 "Your brother is ill he may be very ill indeed," said 
 
20 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 the young doctor. He had all the calm and candour of 
 his race, for the people with whom he lived and dealt never 
 attempted to hide or to ignore their ills. 
 
 Then Mary started forward to meet her father, who had 
 also come into the room : 
 
 "Hush, my dear!" he said, as she began to speak. 
 ' ' Just stay with your brother whilst we go down to talk 
 together." 
 
 In spite of the shock which the doctor's words had given 
 to Mary, a strange sense of comfort and of confidence had 
 also come to her since first she saw him. She smoothed 
 out Sebastian's sheet, and took the book and began again 
 to read to him. 
 
 Sebastian's illness was not mortal. There was high 
 fever and a touch of pneumonia , but these passed ; the 
 village doctor was wise, and the case was taken in time. 
 All the same, the English family and their elaborate 
 paraphernalia remained for over a month in the inn at 
 Ilanz. It was gorgeous summer weather, and every day 
 the valley, and the mountains up above it, blazed and 
 glowed. The fruit ripened in the orchards, the yellow 
 berries turned orange on the banks of the Ehine. The 
 little town was rather quiet, because the cows were away 
 on the higher pastures, and many of the inhabitants had 
 gone with them. The days were hot, but there was always 
 a cold breath from the river which flowed under the covered 
 wooden bridge outside the inn; and at night a faint, 
 delicious scent came up from the fields, and down from 
 the pastures on the distant mountain-sides, to freshen, as 
 it were, the burning valleys. 
 
 Mary Crane was happy she was happier than she had 
 ever been before. It was as though unconsciously some 
 hitherto unnoticed manuscript had been unrolled from her 
 inmost soul and shown to her outward eyes. On its pages, 
 as she read, new truths, which did not clash with the old 
 ones she had known in youth, came up and dazzled her. 
 
THE BELOVED PHYSICIAN 21 
 
 Mechanically she read, and gradually it dawned on her 
 that " abroad " was a very different place to the false 
 chromo-lithograph which she had printed of it in her early 
 journeys. She saw that Switzerland was not a land of 
 alpenhorns and afterglows, but a place where men and 
 women struggled, loved, hated, and suffered, very much as 
 they did elsewhere, but perhaps more silently and fiercely. 
 Mary no longer bought the Alpine strawberries from little 
 dressed-up children, but she went to the damp woods in 
 the afternoon, when Sebastian was sleeping, and she found 
 them growing amongst the granite boulders, or the trunks 
 of old dead trees in hidden forests. 
 
 Then, one day, she realized that the model chalet upon 
 her chimneypiece at home was but a very poor affair, and 
 not at all the house which peasants live, and work, and 
 die in. 
 
 It was a Saturday morning. Sebastian was better, and 
 lay on the sofa ; on Monday they all were expecting 
 to leave and to go back to England. Mary sat at the 
 table sewing. Mr. Crane had got out his Tennyson, and 
 was reading the " Palace of Art " aloud to his two children. 
 This poem had always appealed to Sebastian, but to-day it 
 appeared that Mary, too, had got a new light upon it. 
 Sebastian, who was sensitive, was fully alive to the whole 
 situation : " The floodgates of Mary's revolutionary tem- 
 perament are about to burst through their dams," he had 
 said to himself that morning, and, because he was young, 
 and, like other young people, just perhaps a little bit cruel 
 when unduly excited, he awaited events with an eager 
 interest. 
 
 There was a step on the stairs and the doctor came into 
 the room. He looked rather pale, but he was so naturally 
 strong, and his skin so burned by the weather, that only 
 a very near friend would have noticed the change about 
 him. Having spoken to Sebastian, the young man turned 
 to Mary. 
 
22 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 ' ' You said the other day you would like to go into a 
 peasant's house," he said slowly and very directly. " My 
 house is, I think, the typical home of a peasant. My 
 mother would be pleased if you or any of you" he 
 turned to Mr. Crane "would visit us there to-day. I 
 have my carriage, and I could take you there and drive 
 you back in the cool of the evening." 
 
 Mary had coloured deeply with the repetition of the 
 word " peasant." She blushed, indeed, so painfully that 
 she arose to hide her confusion. She could almost have 
 cried, but she knew not what it was she wished to cry 
 about. Sebastian knew, but Mr. Crane had noticed 
 nothing, and he hastened to accept an invitation which 
 attracted him merely by its novelty. He was acquainted 
 with many doctors in his own country doctors with 
 grand town houses and country doctors, too men both 
 good and bad. This young man, who was not in the very 
 least like any one of them, had pleased and attracted him 
 from the first by a certain surprising simplicity, courtesy, 
 and practical directness which, as he now knew well, were 
 combined with a deep medical skill. 
 
 They started at two o'clock in a small country chaise, 
 which shook and jolted over the cobble-stones in the street. 
 The doctor sat on the box and drove, answering thence, 
 as best he could, the elaborate questions of Mr. Crane. 
 Mary sat perfectly still and silent. She wore a large Leg- 
 horn hat with a white velvet ribbon, and a white muslin 
 gown ; her skin was flushed by the hot summer air ; she 
 was radiantly lovely. 
 
 When they reached the village of Trins the doctor drew 
 up in front of a large house, built partly of stone and partly 
 of wood, on the outskirts of the village and opposite the 
 church. He handed Mary down from the carriage, and 
 they all went up the steps and into the sitting-room. 
 
 The doctor's house was a peasant's house ; his people 
 were peasants, but they had their pedigrees and their 
 
THE BELOVED PHYSICIAN 23 
 
 coat-armour like other peasants of the Grisons, and their 
 lives, though excessively simple, were governed by a sort 
 of grim courtesy common to all old breeding. The 
 doctor's mother received them a reserved old woman in 
 a stiff homespun gown, and a black lace cap or bonnet ; 
 she told them to be seated in the panelled room. An 
 exquisite linen cloth, with a fringe of the finest lace like 
 that of the sheets upstairs, was spread upon the table ; 
 some finely painted china cups, a glass dish full of honey 
 and another of raspberry jelly were set out upon it. They 
 did not talk very much because Mary was shy of speaking 
 in German, and the doctor always spoke in English, but she 
 smiled a great deal at the old peasant-woman. She went 
 round the room and looked at the pretty carved cupboards, 
 the chairs, the serpentine stove, the polished pewter cans 
 and dishes. 
 
 ''It's all so beautiful," she said to the doctor. But 
 the young man only bowed a little stiffly. 
 
 "It is perfectly simple," he said. " We have nothing 
 that we do not need, and that we cannot use." 
 
 And as he spoke Mary remembered the great drawing- 
 rooms in her own home the heavy pieces of furniture, the 
 mirrors, chandeliers, and velvet cushions. She had a 
 vision of the splendid busts and pictures ; the great port- 
 folios, too; and, above all, of the endless books things 
 which, if useful (and she formerly had believed them to 
 be so), were only useful to the mind of a man, and not to 
 his outward life. 
 
 A question arose in her breast : it stifled Mary Crane. 
 
 And as she thought about these things, the peasant 
 doctor thought about them too. He had been in England 
 and had seen rich, overladen houses ; he did not care about 
 them, but neither did he condemn them. A pain, a 
 struggle, came into his heart, for he saw the sorrow in the 
 young girl's eyes, and he paused to show her something 
 which might please her. He took from the shelf his 
 mother's work-box. 
 
24 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 " You may like to look at this," he said, " for it is a 
 beautiful piece of work. My father carved it for my 
 mother when they were betrothed." The box was made 
 of larch-wood ; it had a wreath of inlaid flowers round 
 about it ; and in the lid, as you opened it, was seen a 
 little bit of looking-glass, and two hearts joined by a 
 delicate arrow with the initials of the man and the woman 
 he loved carved underneath it. 
 
 " My father was a very good carpenter," said the young 
 man quietly. " Do you like this thing?" 
 
 "Like it!" said Mary, and that was all. She had 
 suddenly grown afraid of the doctor. He saw this and 
 felt pained. 
 
 " Is there anything else you would care to see?" he 
 asked her gently. 
 
 "Nothing no, nothing, thank you," said Mary. 
 
 The tears came into her eyes, she did not try to hide them. 
 She stood quite still in the middle of the room, and some- 
 thing in the quiet shade of its woodwork seemed to 
 heighten the tone of her exquisite beauty. 
 
 The doctor looked at her and turned away. 
 
 But Mr. Crane saw none of these things ; he was busily 
 engaged in examining a print on the wall, the only decora- 
 tion of the peasant sitting-room. The print was not a very 
 good one some travesty of bible history but Mr. Crane 
 was glad to talk about it, for he and his hostess had very 
 little else in common. 
 
 Then Christina, the doctor's sister, came in with the 
 coffee which she had made herself. The sun was setting 
 behind the mountains ; they opened the shutters, and all 
 sat round the table in the window in the delicious cool 
 of evening. Mary began to feel herself again. She was 
 sitting on a wooden bench by the window, and she could 
 look down into the garden and the fruit-trees, to the 
 church and the mountains beyond. " You have roses in 
 your garden," she said timidly in German to Christina, 
 and the peasant-girl smiled kindly. 
 
THE BELOVED PHYSICIAN 25 
 
 " Shall we go and pick some roses?" she suggested. 
 And the two girls went together out by the street and into 
 the tiny garden. There were many flowers in Christina's 
 garden, and she picked a great many for her guest, and 
 tied them in a stiff little bunch, with a fringe of southern- 
 wood, lavender, and other herbs around it. 
 
 The doctor sat by the window and watched the girls, 
 and the more he watched the paler and the sadder did he 
 seem to grow. 
 
 When the time came for going the doctor explained that 
 he could not accompany them someone was ill in the vil- 
 lage, he said, and he must go there ;he had ordered a carriage 
 from the inn to take them back to Ilanz. He helped 
 Mary into the carriage; she had got her bunch of herbs 
 and flowers pressed tight against her breast. Her father 
 made some kind but rather courtly speeches. 
 
 " Till to-morrow then," he said, and explained to Mary 
 that the doctor had promised to take them on Sunday to 
 hear his cousin preach in a little Lutheran church near 
 Ilanz. 
 
 Then Mary smiled again. 
 
 When they reached the inn it was dark, and a great 
 planet was shining above the Ehine and reflected in one 
 of its pools. Sebastian was reading in his room ; he 
 looked up suddenly and stared at Mary. Mary was very 
 pale ; she scarcely seemed to see him. 
 
 "It's done," said her brother to himself " it's done, 
 and she'll marry the vet!" His eyes had a kindly light 
 in them. By the people of his native town he had always 
 been considered a "very peculiar young man." 
 
 Sunday morning dawned, hot and splendid. Mary got 
 up from her bed of dreams, and, dreaming still, she dressed 
 and went down to breakfast. Very soon after a carriage 
 arrived at the inn. The doctor came up the stairs to 
 fetch them, and they all drove away up the valley. The 
 silence was deep like the silence of any Sunday in any 
 
26 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 land. They arrived rather late at the church, which was 
 crowded. But the people made room, and Mary was 
 given a seat away from the rest of the party, and far up 
 the aisle, amongst the schoolchildren. She knelt for a 
 while quiet at her prayers, and then sat back on the rough 
 log of wood which served as a bench to the children of 
 Trins. There was quite a crowd of men in the congrega- 
 tion, which proved the fame of the preacher. The morn- 
 ing was very hot, and the doors of the tiny church stood 
 open wide. A belated bird was singing of love in the big 
 pear-tree outside the churchyard gate; the air seemed to 
 seethe in the sunlight, and the scent of roses and of pinks, 
 which grew on the graves outside, crept round the shadows 
 of the church in puffs of heated air. 
 
 Then a stir in the congregation announced the approach 
 of the preacher, and a huge man entered with the sunlight 
 and strode up the narrow aisle. His head was thrown 
 back, and the sun behind him made a glory of his hair. 
 He was magnificent in all the strength of his manhood. 
 In the whole personality of the village preacher there was 
 not one vestige of that emaciation connected with Christian 
 saints. But Pfarrer Caflisch was indeed no saint, and 
 his beauty was markedly that of the perfect human 
 animal. Under one arm he carried his book, the other 
 hung at his side, the fist tight closed. His thick black 
 Lutheran gown flowed back from his shoulders, display- 
 ing to the full his tall athletic figure. With the stride of 
 an unconquerable athlete he went straight up the pulpit 
 stairs, then stood there awhile gazing with a gaze of 
 defiant love upon the assembled people. 
 
 Mary Crane watched with a mixture of wonder, of joy, 
 and of awed surprise, the face of the preacher ; for at that 
 moment in her life it seemed to explain and to pardon 
 the trouble in her own soul. He, too, looked suddenly at 
 her, and then in a voice of thunder he said, " Let us sing," 
 and he gave the first line of the hymn which began with : 
 
 " I am a guest on earth." 
 
THE BELOVED PHYSICIAN 27 
 
 The service then went on the prayer, for which the 
 people stood, the hymn, which they sang sitting. There 
 was a lengthy pause in which the preacher seemed to be 
 searching every face in the whole congregation. His final 
 gaze rested on Mary Crane, and he gave out the text of his 
 sermon : 
 
 " 'God is a spirit, and they who worship Him must wor- 
 ship Him in Spirit and in TRUTH,' " he read. 
 
 The preacher's voice was clear and thrilling, full and 
 very deep, too. It struck some chord in the hearts of men 
 rather than in their souls. Mary listened intently, almost 
 breathlessly. She was pained, and yet she felt pacified ; 
 her conscience was hurt, and yet she rejoiced. She realized 
 that the religion of the preacher was not her own religion ; 
 it was not that of her father, nor indeed of anything which 
 she herself had hitherto held dear. Yet it answered a 
 thing in her own soul which before had only pained her 
 in her dreams a thing which she connected with Sebas- 
 tian, and with the new learned freedom of the mountains 
 a thing . . . 
 
 She leaned forward earnestly ; she almost rose to catch 
 the last few words. The preacher was quoting a German 
 poet : 
 
 " * Der Mensch ist frei geschaffen ist frei, 
 Und war er in Ketten geboren,' "* 
 
 he said. 
 
 Then there was silence, a prayer, the last verse of the 
 hymn, and Mary rose to go. Someone was standing 
 beside her in the aisle amongst the children. "Der 
 Mensch ist frei ist frei and thou too thou too," the 
 preacher muttered. Mary dropped her eyes as they met 
 the gaze of this powerful man. She hurried to the door, 
 and out to the air and her people. 
 
 Her father was waiting for her ; he looked rather pale 
 
 * Man is created free he is free 
 And even were he born in chains. 
 
28 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 and tired. " Come," he said, " we have certainly heard 
 a new sort of teaching. We will take some coffee in the 
 inn before we leave." 
 
 " Ah," said his daughter, scarcely breathing, and pay- 
 ing no attention to his first remark, " then we may stay a 
 little longer here we need not hurry away just now?" 
 She stooped to gather a bit of periwinkle by the graves, 
 and nervously pulled it to pieces. "Papa," she said as 
 they walked down the road, " what did you think of the 
 sermon?" 
 
 "Interesting, remarkably interesting," said her father 
 rather dryly. " I am afraid the young man will get him- 
 self into trouble with doctrines such as these." 
 
 "Did you not like what he said?" Mary hazarded. 
 
 "No, my dear. We need a more firm and a more ideal 
 creed than his, as far as I can judge, to live by." 
 
 " I liked it," said Mary very low. " I should like to 
 tell him so." 
 
 Her father hardly heard her, and hurried her on to the 
 inn, where his eldest daughter and her husband were 
 already seated in the parlour before some cakes and coffee. 
 The sermon could scarcely be discussed there, for Mr. 
 James understood not one word of German, and his wife 
 was no scholar and certainly no theologian. She con- 
 tented herself by saying that the preacher was " a very 
 quaint young man." 
 
 Mary sat down at the table, but her heart and soul were 
 elsewhere. 
 
 " For what time did you order the carriage?" she asked. 
 
 " I tojd them to come in half an hour." 
 
 " It is very hot in this room," said Mary. She rose and 
 went out on the balcony. She stood a minute wondering 
 to herself. The doctor followed her. There was a strange, 
 calm look in his face a sort of determined sadness. 
 
 " I think," he said, " that you would like to know my 
 cousin, and to talk to him about his preaching." 
 
 Mary looked up at him, but she only said " Thank you." 
 
THE BELOVED PHYSICIAN 29 
 
 Then the doctor went back to the room and asked Mr. 
 Crane if he might take Mary down to the Pfarrhaus. 
 
 Mary gathered up the dainty skirts of her muslin gown. 
 They neither of them spoke. They walked very quietly 
 down the village street. Some young men were playing 
 at skittles by the inn, a cart rattled over the cobble-stones, 
 and the water fell in splashes from the pump in the square. 
 The air was very hot, and dry, and still ; the unripe fruit 
 showed pale and crude against the green on the pear-trees. 
 
 How deep how strangely deep did all these then half- 
 noticed details engrave themselves upon the mind of Mary 
 Crane ! 
 
 They went through the open door of the Pfarrhaus, and 
 they passed through the courtyard into the garden. The 
 preacher was sitting on a bench in the shadow of a pear- 
 tree, and his bees were humming around him. He wore 
 no hat , there was something of open air and a large human 
 kindness in his face. He did not get up from the bench, 
 but he looked at his cousin the doctor, and then at the 
 English girl, and he turned the pages of his book, and, 
 taking his pencil, marked a text. 
 
 Mary came near him : "I wanted to tell you, before I 
 went away, that I liked your sermon," she began with a 
 faint hesitation. " I liked it, I think, because it was like 
 something I have sometimes thought about and have not 
 dared to dream of." She blushed. "At least," she 
 added, " I have always lived in England and gone to the 
 same church, and you did not say things in the way that I 
 have always heard them in my English church." 
 
 Her words were lame enough, but the two men under- 
 stood her. The doctor had sat himself down on the bench. 
 He did not look at Mary. He was young, but he seemed 
 to be growing suddenly old. He had clasped his hands 
 between his knees, and, leaning forward, he looked with 
 a sort of dumb anguish into the leaves of the pear-tree. 
 
 "I wanted to ask you " Mary went on. "Oh, 
 
30 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 there are so many things that I should like to know 
 about!" 
 
 The preacher arose. He took Mary's hand and looked 
 into her eyes. "My child," he said, "I know what 
 it is that you want to know about ; but it is not what 
 you think. It has nothing to do with the so-called religion 
 that we preach about in churches. You yourself are your 
 religion I see it in your eyes. You want to know a thing 
 of life. Ask him there ask my cousin." The clergyman 
 dropped her hand. "Bead what I have marked in this 
 book," he said ; " and now may God Almighty bless you." 
 
 He left them and hurried away to the house. 
 ***** 
 
 Then the doctor got up and he came and he stood before 
 Mary. He took off his hat and he bowed his head 
 before her. 
 
 " Forgive me," he said very simply, " but I love you. 
 I had thought I would never tell you this, but now it is not 
 possible for me. I shall always love you, but do not let 
 this trouble you. Forgive me I think I pain you." He 
 put out his hand, as though he were about to say good-bye 
 to Mary, but she did not take it. She picked up the book 
 that the preacher had left on the grass. It was a copy of 
 the New Testament printed in the Komanish language. 
 
 "What does this sentence mean that he marked?" she 
 asked him tremulously. The doctor took the book from 
 her hand. In a low voice which he could barely master he 
 read aloud : 
 
 ' For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, 
 and shall cleave to his wife, and they twain shall be one 
 flesh." 
 
 Late that evening the doctor drove back to Ilanz. He 
 went straight to Mr. Crane and he told him that he loved 
 his daughter Mary. Mr. Crane was confounded; indeed, 
 considering how true and sensible a man he was, he may 
 be said to have been inordinately displeased. 
 
THE BELOVED PHYSICIAN 31 
 
 " Have you spoken to my daughter?" he asked. 
 
 " I told her that I loved her," the young man answered 
 simply ; ' ' I was driven to do this by the impulse of a 
 minute. I should not have done so had I not lost control 
 of myself." 
 
 " And my daughter?" 
 
 " Said nothing," answered the doctor. " I have come 
 to-night," he continued resolutely, " to tell you this, and 
 to say good-bye to your daughter. You imagine, and 
 perhaps naturally, that my social position is unworthy of 
 you ; I am poor in your eyes ; in those of my people and in 
 my own path of life I am not poor. I have enough to 
 live with on my own land, enough for a wife of my own 
 sort." 
 
 He paused : though his words were cold, his heart seemed 
 stiffening with its own heavy pain* 
 
 "My daughter, ..." began Mr. Crane. 
 
 " Forgive me," interrupted the doctor. " I fancy that 
 I love your daughter deeply enough to understand her. 
 Perhaps I have wronged her. I saw at once that in her 
 nature there was a thirst for the very things you dread for 
 her for a natural life, for the life of a woman like the 
 women of these mountains. I saw in her the seeds of a 
 revolt from the life of culture and of comfort she had been 
 brought up in, and " 
 
 Again Mr. Crane was about to interrupt, but the doctor 
 made a sign and continued : ' ' I invited her to my home. 
 I knew that it would please her. It did. In spite of all 
 these things I love her well enough to leave her. It is 
 no wish of mine to injure her by the rough contact of a 
 life so different." 
 
 Then the doctor sat down, and for an instant his face 
 went into his hands. When he looked up it was pale and 
 drawn. 
 
 "May I see her?" he apked. 
 
 Mr. Crane hesitated. ~^ jt? 
 
 " Oh, do not be afraii^' said the doctor. " I have no 
 
32 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 single thing to say to her that you may not hear, or that 
 could hurt her." 
 
 The following morning the Crane family left Ilanz ; and 
 one year later Mary married the peasant doctor. 
 
 "Poor Mary's neuropathy took the form of marriage," 
 Sebastian said. He was the only person who showed some 
 hopefulness and kindness in the matter. 
 
 Mary married her husband against her father's advice, 
 against her sister's and her aunt's almost against her own 
 most certain faiths. The simple force of the young man's 
 passion ; the, to her, aesthetic charm of his surroundings 
 and his people, combined to play on some painfully 
 emotional chord inherent in her nature. She, the gentle 
 English girl, brought up in all the cotton-wool of well- 
 bred comforts and refinement, took upon herself to go into 
 the ' ' wilderness ' ' ; not into that old-fashioned tourist 
 Switzerland of the afterglow and the alpenhorn, but into 
 the life of a woman with a man in a remote and unknown 
 region of the Alps. 
 
 Once again during the short days of their last courtship 
 the doctor drew himself together and urged the possible 
 pain of her new life with him upon the English girl. It 
 was a Sunday evening in July ; they were sitting on the 
 terrace in Mary's old home. She had on the muslin gown 
 she had worn in the Lutheran church that other Sunday 
 morning, but there was a bunch of English jasmine in her 
 breast. 
 
 "Think," he said, "think while yet there is time. 
 How will you dare such things for me? How will you 
 marry me?" 
 
 Mary gave him her hand. 
 
 " I will do it," she answered, "just as I always have, 
 and always will, believe in God." 
 
 She went to her room ; the Kaphael Madonna hung 
 over her bed and the model chalet stood on the chimney- 
 
THE BELOVED PHYSICIAN 33 
 
 piece. Down in the town the bells were ringing for even- 
 ing service ; Mary had loved the Sunday bells in other 
 times, this night she shut the window that she might not 
 hear them they belonged so absolutely to something of 
 prehistoric drowsy peace in her past life, something which 
 clashed and clanged with the novel creed of love and free- 
 dom that possessed her now. 
 
 Yet the mind of the man she was going to marry was the 
 purest, holiest thing she ever knew. 
 
 So Mary and the doctor went to learn life together in the 
 peasant house at Trins, and there, as Sebastian rightly or 
 wrongly said, his sister "died of the experiment." The 
 year was like a dream to Mary, an awakening to things she 
 barely understood, a realization of a life in nature, a 
 pageant of snowstorms, of spring and of blossom, of sum- 
 mer in the Alpine meadows, and of a strong and good man's 
 love. Before she died she wrote in her bible : " To my 
 child," and under it the text from Bevel ations, " To him 
 that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life which 
 is in the midst of the paradise of God." 
 
 Did Mary foresee the struggle in the life of her unborn 
 child? 
 
CHAPTEK II 
 
 THE DEATH OF MAEY 
 
 " Les fleurs se melent a toutes les catastrophes de la vie. . . . 
 
 " II y avait une ironie atroce centre le deuil de ce moment, 
 dans la serenite du ciel, 1'eclat du jour, le vert lumineux des 
 arbres, les sourires des fleurs, le chant des oiseaux. Souvent la 
 nature refuse de s'associer aux douleurs humaines, parceque 
 souvent ces douleurs sont une ingratitude envers sa bonte. Elle 
 cree les merveilles du ciel pour nous rendre heureux, nous 
 evoquons les secrets de 1'enfer pour briiler nos corps et nos ames. 
 La nature a raison de verser tant de raillerie sur nos volontaires 
 douleurs." From "La Croix de Berny." 
 
 IT was snowing hard, yet this was almost a summer's day. 
 The snow fell fast and thick in great watery flakes which 
 melted as they touched the ground, but which, after the 
 storm had lasted for an hour, grew firm and formed into an 
 icy substance binding and bending the flowers and the moun- 
 tain ashes, heavy as they were with summer leaf, more 
 cruelly than the thickest snows of winter ever can do. It 
 was just in the first week of September, and the garden 
 where the flowers grew was full of radiant marigolds, 
 pansies, and sweet bergamot such things as can with- 
 stand the austerities of Alpine winters. The doctor's 
 house was built of stone, roughly plastered, and painted 
 beneath its overhanging eaves with little scrolls and bible 
 texts ; its roof was made of tiny planks, placed one above 
 another, and these were secured against the winter hurri- 
 cane by large stones set at equal distances. Small orange 
 lichens and brilliant mosses had crept around the stones, 
 and to these the snow clung lovingly, although it melted 
 on the wooden planks, and ran in rivers through the crazy 
 
 34 
 
THE DEATH OF MARY 35 
 
 dragon's heads which served for water-spouts, and splashed 
 to the street below. The house was eminently a friendly 
 one, large and spacious. At its back a big barn spread to 
 the hillside, and thence in all this snowstorm a strong 
 delicious scent of grass and withered salvias came out in 
 heated whiffs to meet the frozen air. The bench by the 
 front door was painted green ; above it ran a little balcony, 
 and here on all fine summer days there was always a 
 splendid show of beautiful carnation flowers, falling in pink 
 and crimson cascades from their wooden tubs. On cold 
 days these plants were taken in ; but now, in all the fullest 
 glory of their bloom, they had been forgotten, and the 
 snow fell thick and like a mask of death above their heavy 
 flower heads. 
 
 11 Ah, see !" said a peasant-girl who passed that moment 
 up the street. " They have left the carnations out in all 
 this weather ! She must be very ill indeed, or they would 
 never have forgotten the flowers." 
 
 'Yes," muttered her companion, sighing heavily as 
 peasants often do rather than pass unnecessary comments. 
 
 He followed the girl, as if by instinct, into the house and 
 up the steps which led to the balcony of the barn, and he 
 helped to carry in the big round wooden tubs, and to put 
 them carefully, side by side, on a chest in the hayloft. 
 Then, standing by the ladder which led to the hay, whilst 
 the girl almost reverently dusted the last of the snow from 
 the carnations, he ventured on a statement. 
 ' They say she'll likely die," he volunteered. 
 
 "It's very likely," said the girl. She was not unkind, 
 she was, indeed, very fond of the mistress of the house; 
 but she had the calm of her country and its full power of 
 resignation. 
 
 " What will the doctor do if that is so?" suggested the 
 young man after another pause. 
 
 The girl was picking some dead heads off the cloves, 
 She appeared not to hear his question, or anyhow she did 
 not answer it. 
 
36 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 " There's the post !" she said. 
 
 " The post !" repeated her companion. And the word 
 seemed to contain for him some form of magic, as no 
 doubt it does for the inhabitants of every lonely village in 
 any rather isolated valley. 
 
 " There's another carriage," said the young man. 
 
 "And luggage strangers' luggage," added the girl. 
 They had gone to the side of the barn, and they were 
 looking out between the chinks in the log wall at the back. 
 They must both have had the sight of young hawks, for the 
 carriage road winds along the side of the hill some forty 
 feet or more from the doctor's house at Trins, the snow 
 was falling thicker than ever, and an inexperienced person 
 could not possibly distinguish between a diligence and a 
 landau, still less between the ordinary parcels and 
 strangers' luggage, on that dim afternoon. 
 
 " I'll be going on to see who's in the post-carriage," said 
 the young man. " How it snows ! This will harm the 
 second hay crop. It's good the cows are down from the 
 Alp. If it clears she may get better. She " 
 
 " She's a good lady," interrupted the girl, "but she 
 never was strong enough. She's not made as we are. 
 She tried, but " 
 
 The girl never finished her sentence. A long low wail- 
 ing cry, like the sound of some weak thing in pain, broke 
 through the stillness of the snowy air. 
 
 "Ah! Mother of Pity!" murmured the girl, and 
 covered her eyes. But the man went out and on up the 
 
 street. 
 
 ***** 
 
 The clouds parted suddenly and a great glory of sun- 
 light flashed forth on that white world. Into this pure 
 light, through the narrow window of the doctor's house, 
 one of the strongest, and yet most sweet, of modern souls 
 passed forth to the unknown; and, watching it go, her 
 husband stood, strong, calm, and vigorous, but silent with 
 the silent strength of Death. 
 
THE DEATH OF MARY 37 
 
 A little old peasant-woman was sitting by the stove 
 where she had sat for three days off and on. She was 
 swaddling and caressing a tiny human being, whose big 
 eyes blinked in the dazzling light, and whose expression 
 was one of even more painful and preternatural knowledge 
 than is common to all babies at their birth. 
 
 Between the man and the little old woman and the 
 baby, there lay on the great carved bed the figure of a very 
 young woman. She was dead. Death is ever a great 
 healer, but around her mouth and on her forehead there 
 lingered still the faintest of those lines which tell of 
 mental struggle. Her eyes were closed in death, the lids 
 were full and heavy ; it needed not her husband's hand 
 to close them, she being very weary. She was singularly 
 beautiful; dark; and, to use the word in its best sense, 
 romantic. Her lips, still slightly parted in a smile of 
 vision, had, whilst life was in them, asked innumerable 
 questions, the small hands had never lain so listless as they 
 lay this evening under the sheet. 
 
 " Dead," said the doctor, speaking to himself. " Dead," 
 he repeated. 
 
 His lips were white, and in his strength he trembled. 
 He did not look back to the bed for a moment. For a 
 little moment yet he shrank away from the anguish which 
 he knew was coming on him. 
 
 " To see thee laugh," he said very quietly, " thou little 
 fool of mine. To have thee for mine own my very 
 own and then ..." 
 
 He turned. With a calm which only the tortured know, 
 he pushed the shutters of the window open wide, so that 
 all the glow and the glare of the sunshine came in with a 
 rush and flooded the panelled room. Then he went back 
 to the bed, and sat beside her. He lifted the stiffening 
 hands of his dead wife, and, bending down across her 
 breast, he looked long and uninterruptedly upon her quiet 
 face. He looked so long he seemed to dream, and the old 
 village woman gathered up the child she had just swaddled 
 
38 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 and went down quietly to meet the other women gathered 
 in the sitting-room. 
 
 Then the young man's head went down on the breast of 
 the woman he had loved with all the passion of his life, 
 and his sobbing shook the room. 
 
 * * * * * 
 
 In the meantime the diligence had drawn up before the 
 village inn, and Mr. Crane and Sebastian stepped out into 
 the slush of the street. 
 
 "The pity is, of course, that Mary has had such a 
 struggle with her temperament in the past. And she 
 had only just come into her real kingdom," Sebastian said, 
 as though in continuation of some conversation he had been 
 having with his father before their carriage stopped. 
 
 An expression of deeper pain came over Mr. Crane's 
 face. He had the weary look of one to whom life's secrets 
 have been laid bare by force of temperament rather than by 
 merely painful circumstances. 
 
 "Forgive me," he said, addressing the landlord of the 
 inn, who had come forward to welcome them, " but per- 
 haps you can tell me of Frau Caflisch she is my daughter, 
 you know." 
 
 The man's face changed. "Yes, yes," he answered, 
 hesitating. " She is very ill. It is but an hour since 
 they told me she was dying." 
 
 'The doctor's wife is dead," said a woman who came 
 up the street at that moment. 
 
 Mr. Crane and Sebastian turned in silence. 
 
 " My poor boy !" said the father, taking his son's arm. 
 
 This will be a great grief your first great grief. For 
 her husband I dare not even think ; for myself. . . . But 
 come, let us go to them." 
 
 Sebastian had turned white. He unconsciously took off 
 his hat, and pushing his hair from his forehead, he walked 
 bareheaded down the street. Young as he was, he was 
 already a little bent about the shoulders, thin to emacia- 
 tion, nervous in every limb and movement ; and it was 
 
THE DEATH OF MARY 39 
 
 evident that thought had hitherto played a much larger 
 part than action in his life. Occasionally he coughed a 
 hard, nervous cough. When he spoke, he rather 
 emphasized his words, choosing them with care and curious 
 discrimination. His clothes had an old-world look about 
 them, and hung rather than fitted to his boyish form. 
 
 Somehow every detail in the appearance of these two 
 men clashed with the things around them. The snow was 
 melting fast, and their more elaborate clothes gave them 
 a peculiarly chilled and graceful look such as was wholly 
 lacking in the peasant people round them ; but the vil- 
 lagers, knowing beforehand of their trouble, lifted their 
 hats, as though by some unconscious instinct, as they 
 passed. 
 
 Mr. Crane paused before passing up the steps of the 
 doctor's house. He, too, had uncovered his head, and it 
 was easy to see he was praying. His son had not forgotten 
 his grief, but, though he too paused, it was not to pray, but 
 to read the motto which is painted under the roof of every 
 good Swiss homestead : 
 
 " ' Ich leb ' weiss nicht wie lang 
 ' Ich sterb,' und weiss nicht warm 
 Ich fahr weiss nicht wohin 
 Mich wundert dass ich so frohlich bin." 
 
 These were the words which were painted here. The 
 young man repeated them in English, and then followed 
 his father into the passage and up the stairs. 
 
 Christina met them on the landing ; she was dressed in 
 her stiff grey homespun , with a blue apron ; her handker- 
 chief had fallen from her head and lay knotted carelessly 
 around her neck. She had been crying, but her face was 
 calm, her voice was quite composed, it did not shake, nor 
 did her hand falter as she came forward to meet the 
 two men. 
 
 "My brother is in there now," she said, " but I think 
 it may help him to speak to you. Mary died but a little 
 while since. She suffered very much; it could not have 
 
40 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 happened otherwise, so we ought not perhaps to wish 
 it. The baby is strong enough just three day sold. Mary 
 never really saw it ; she was so weak she could not 
 realize." 
 
 Christina was barely eighteen, yet she spoke in this calm, 
 deliberate fashion about a tragedy not one hour old which 
 she herself had lived through. 
 
 Mr. Crane held the banisters tightly. It was evident 
 that he himself suffered a sort of torture ; but he gathered 
 himself together and spoke very gently to the peasant girl. 
 
 " Thank you, my poor child," he said. " And do not 
 trouble for us. I see that you yourself are very tired. 
 Will you not go and rest a little?" 
 
 "No, not now," the girl said very simply. " There's 
 plenty to do still. . . . But come!" 
 
 She opened a door quietly, and the sound of a strong 
 man sobbing came out into the passage where they stood. 
 She went to the bed, and leaning down to her brother who 
 knelt there, she whispered something in his ear. Whereat 
 he stood up straight and turned towards the door. 
 
 The last rays of the September sun fell on the face of 
 the small dead woman, and, through the window, all the 
 glittering world of snow laughed as it were in delight. 
 
 Sebastian, with the unconscious eye of an artist, noted 
 at once the harmony of the scene. He noticed his 
 exquisite sister lying, still in death, upon the peasant bed ; 
 he noticed her husband, the simple and the noble moun- 
 tain man, rugged, but tender too; he noticed his father, 
 that creature of refinement and of culture, bending as 
 though to comfort him ; he noticed the passive peasant- 
 girl as she reverently straightened the sheet. 
 
 And as he stood, a strange and novel feeling which he 
 had not suspected, but which never again in all his life 
 forsook him, rose up from some deep sources in his soul 
 to strengthen his weak faith. Unconsciously the words he 
 had always repeated for their harmony crept to his lips : 
 
THE DEATH OF MARY 41 
 
 " For Thou sparest all, for they are Thine, Lord! Thou 
 lover of souls." Very gently he, too, went to the bed and 
 gazed on the quiet face, and kissed the small cold forehead. 
 A faint sound of wailing came up through the boards 
 from the room below. It was the cry of the little human 
 being who had brought these men to sob and pray beside 
 the mother. And yet her early loss most certainly fell 
 heaviest upon this child itself? 
 
 So the doctor's house was full of pain ; but beyond it, in 
 the garden, the snow was melting fast away, and one by 
 one, with quivering shocks and a sort of tremulous delight, 
 the flowers were shaking themselves free from the frozen 
 bondage of an hour. Pink sodden roses, and bergamot, 
 rosemary, and Indian marigolds, sweet-scented mignonette, 
 and purple pansies, stood free from their cold covering and 
 turned to meet the sunset. 
 
 Then the mists arose from the valleys, too; they caught 
 and uncurled in the forests as they passed to the tops of 
 the mountains, they lingered round the highest of the 
 peaks, then shook themselves finally free in flakes of gold 
 as they vanished in thinnest air. 
 
 Once more the whole amazing Alpine world shone calm 
 and free of tempest, and a young moon, following the 
 wake of the sunset, touched with her thin horn the ridges 
 of Calanda. 
 
 The first to turn away from the room was the youngest 
 of the watchers. He went rather solemnly down the stairs 
 and, guided by the baby's cries, he entered the lower living 
 room. 
 
 " Is this the child?" he asked rather awkwardly. 
 
 Christina had followed him instinctively ; she lifted a 
 stiff little bundle of pink cotton out of its cradle and took 
 it to the window. The wailing ceased, the tiny hands 
 clutched angrily. 
 
 "It's a fine baby, a splendid little girl," remarked the 
 old midwife from her seat beside the stove. 
 
42 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 " Yes," said the young man, " yes." He thought how 
 red and ugly his small niece looked, but he did not say so. 
 In a rather nervous way he looked once more ; and a sense 
 of piercing pity entered his heart, he scarce knew why. 
 He never attempted to touch or to kiss the child ; and very 
 soon he left the room. As he passed through the door he 
 met a little peasant-boy carrying a large bunch of roses and 
 white sword-grass. " These are for the Frau Doktor," 
 explained the child ; ' ' my mother sent them to her ; but I 
 picked them. See, this grass has cut my finger." A little 
 blood had stained the white edges of the sword-grass. 
 Then the peasant-boy went into the room, and looked for 
 a while at the baby ; he had little sisters of his own, and 
 he seemed rather interested, for he stood very still with his 
 legs apart, and smiled as though he were pleased, and 
 poked with his hard fingers the tiny crumpled hand. 
 
 "Give the baby your roses, Basil," said one of the 
 women ; and the small boy paused a moment. 
 
 "No," he said, "they are for the Frau Doktor; my 
 mother told me so." 
 
 "The dead need fewer flowers than the living," said 
 a sententious old woman who had just come in. 
 
 For a long moment the peasant-child stood thinkirfg. 
 Then he threw the roses into the baby's cradle, rather 
 grudgingly, and stumped out into the street. 
 
 Sebastian had gone down the steps and pushed in 
 through the garden gate. He knew the garden of old ; he 
 was very fond of flowers, and he began to free some mari- 
 golds in a sheltered corner from their remaining cloak of 
 snow, and to poke at the drowsy bumble-bee who had gone 
 to sleep there. Then, as though he were suddenly 
 exhausted, he sank on a bench in the summer-house, pulled 
 from his pocket a little volume of Greek poetry, and began 
 to read it earnestly. 
 
 ***** 
 
 Two days later Mary, the doctor's wife, was buried. 
 The village choir sang around her grave ; they sang a 
 
THE DEATH OF MAEY 43 
 
 German and a Komanisch hymn in splendid well-trained 
 voices. There was scarcely a breath of air, and not one 
 single cloud in the September sky. The snow had van- 
 ished utterly, the valleys and the mountains teemed with 
 a tender warmth. Far above on the mountain-sides an 
 early frost had touched the bilberries ; they ran like streams 
 of blood between the scattered cembra pines. 
 
 " I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence 
 cometh my help," read the Pfarrer, who spoke through 
 his sobbing at the head of the grave. Then all the people 
 went away, leaving the doctor standing alone, sad and 
 stiff and quiet, in the evening sunlight. His father-in-law 
 went back a little later and laid his hand upon his arm. 
 
 "Remember, my poor boy," he said, "that it is a 
 higher Power than any we can understand which brings 
 to us our joys and takes them from us remember Him 
 who suffered." 
 
 The doctor turned very swift and sudden. " I only 
 remember her," he said. "What have I to do with this, 
 your Man of Sorrows?" 
 
 " God help you may God in His mercy help us all !" 
 said the elder man, a little awed and pained. 
 
 " Of God we have yet very much to learn," the doctor 
 answered slowly and with deliberation ; but he had never 
 in the whole of his life been rebellious before. 
 
 "One thing more," urged the Englishman. 'You 
 have your child. Through that small soul your joy may 
 yet return to you?" 
 
 Then in silence he bowed his head to the grave, and 
 went through the churchyard gate and on up the street. 
 His child, he knew, lay dead behind him. An hour later 
 he and his son were off on their way to England. And, as 
 the months went by and the village life closed in again, 
 the people forgot that men of such a different type had 
 shared in their life that day. 
 
CHAPTEK III 
 
 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 THE doctor never recovered the death of his wife, but con- 
 trary to what might have been imagined from the words 
 spoken by her grave, he soon outlived his resentment at 
 her loss, and in his wise, calm soul a feeling grew and 
 strengthened concerning the ultimate blessing to himself 
 of the one short year of married life. He never spoke 
 about it, but it was always present with him, pacifying 
 and purifying his already pure and peaceful nature. Con- 
 cerning the child born of that marriage, the doctor's feel- 
 ings were more mixed ; but any doubts he may have enter- 
 tained were not permitted to escape his inward conscious- 
 ness, or to affect her natural childish growth in any way. 
 After the death of Mary, life fell very much into the old 
 routine at the doctor's house a routine only broken at 
 rare intervals when any of the dead wife's family arrived 
 to look at her child. Before the birth of her baby, and, 
 indeed, during the whole of her short married life, Mary 
 had written home to her people with an almost punctilious 
 regularity, giving the minutest details of a life so amaz- 
 ingly novel to her. The letters were full of deep affection, 
 but a half perceptible melancholy crept at times between 
 the glowing description of the artist and of the young 
 wife combined ; and , towards the end , an almost pas- 
 sionate appeal was made that any child of hers should 
 learn to live in, and to love, an English life; the appeal 
 was coupled with the assurance that her husband felt as 
 she did. Mary was a rich woman in her own right, for she 
 had inherited wealth from her mother's side of the family ; 
 
 44 
 
A CHILD OF THE ALPS 45 
 
 to these more eccentric persons something rare and unlike 
 the Cranes in Mary's temperament, made singular appeal. 
 This wealth descended to Linda, and of it Sebastian and 
 the doctor were made the sole trustees. It was, therefore, 
 in Sebastian's home, wherever that might be, that the little 
 Swiss girl was to ' ' learn " her English life. 
 
 In the meantime the offspring of this curious union 
 lived happily in her Alpine home. She was a very attrac- 
 tive baby, with a great shock of dark hair and large dark 
 eyes, and she grew into an equally attractive child, who 
 appeared to accumulate, even as she unconsciously to her- 
 self demanded, all the flowers of life rather than its grasses. 
 She was always small and slight, and she grew slowly. She 
 was much absorbed in herself and her own immediate sur- 
 roundings, and even at the early age of three years, she 
 appeared to realize what a good world it was in which she 
 had arrived to live. No one contradicted her much in this 
 assumption, and as the grim looks and the whispered sor- 
 rows of her elders only struck her as passing shadows, she 
 continued to exist and to flourish in her own world of un- 
 clouded contentment. She was never lonely, yet many 
 children in her position might have been lonely. She was 
 never for one moment either discontented or jealous. 
 When, in later life, these two terrible qualities were forced 
 upon her mind by others, they struck her down like physi- 
 cal illnesses. The essence of her whole existence appeared 
 to be some form of self-sufficiency, of acceptance of good 
 and happy and beautiful impulses, ignorant of all the 
 things which go to counteract these in our misguided 
 human world ; and thus she confirmed to herself the belief 
 of happiness in her own surroundings, and, being very 
 young, she entirely overcame all adverse testimony. She 
 sometimes flew into tempers, but she very rarely cried, and 
 never expressed resentment in those early days. She saw 
 very few strangers ; when they came her way she would 
 gaze at them with a curious happy stare, and then break 
 
46 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 out into a smile which, if they were genial people, made 
 them catch her up and kiss her. Linda loved her father 
 with a touch of awe, and she was never naughty with him ; 
 from him she had inherited her own strong faith in life 
 though a faith of a very different quality. They were friends 
 at an early age; but there the matter ended; there was 
 nothing at all exciting in their relationship, and Linda, 
 unknown to herself, desired excitement. The doctor 
 would never really understand that painfully intellectual 
 nature which was so strong at the back of her being, and 
 which only on very rare occasions in her early infancy took 
 the form of irritable indignation at dull forms of opposition. 
 One strong influence in the child's life was that of her 
 father's cousin, Pfarrer Caflisch, who lived in a neighbour- 
 ing village, and continued to propound his free and very 
 unorthodox doctrines even as he had done that day when 
 Mary and her people visited his church. Pfarrer Caflisch 
 was a very remarkable man. How he ever missed the 
 stage and became a clergyman it is difficult to guess, 
 although these professions are sometimes curiously allied. 
 There is a great deal of freedom in the Lutheran Church, 
 and very little of the strict following of creeds which afflicts 
 one often in more outwardly elaborate forms of Church 
 doctrine. Pfarrer Caflisch was essentially a vigorous and 
 life-loving human being ; he sought to fathom the hearts 
 of his parishioners in their homes, in the Wirthschaft, 
 and at the dance, rather than in the church. With 
 their souls he only dealt on Sundays, and on those 
 occasions, so great was the power of his eloquence, that he 
 was able to overcome any unfavourable opinion his singular 
 freedom of speech and behaviour might have made on 
 them during the week. He had been known to say on 
 Saturday night, when sitting rather late over a pack of 
 cards and reproved by an older man, "What does it 
 matter, my friend? I will set all your women a-weeping 
 to-morrow as soon as I enter the pulpit." And he suc- 
 ceeded in doing so. 
 
A CHILD OF THE ALPS 47 
 
 Pfarrer Caflisch had the charm of a boundless and almost 
 magnetic human sympathy ; but he loved life and love 
 better than he loved renunciation and religious devotion. 
 His enemies interpreted this by saying that he loved 
 ' ' women and good living ' ' better than the spiritual tend- 
 ing of his flock. Be that as it may, there was one thing 
 certain about him namely, the power of unfathomable 
 kindness. The next most remarkable thing about him 
 was the student. He was a real student, and when 
 engaged in a study he worked like a demon to unravel 
 thought. But he was not a literary man, and he was cer- 
 tainly no artist. Above his writing-table he had hung an 
 immense picture of the head of Christ. It was a terrible 
 and hideous, an intensely painful portrait of a good man 
 who was dead a thing painted by a young Swiss artist 
 who died unknown in a Swiss town, leaving this dreary 
 work to the friend and inspirer of his college days. The 
 picture was powerful in the extreme, but Pfarrer Caflisch 
 never shrank from it ; the bare-faced anguish of the drawn 
 mouth and eyelids almost pleased him. They represented 
 the truth to him and to him the Beal was Truth. The 
 terms on which he accepted the Christian religion and the 
 manner in which he preached it may therefore be easily 
 understood. It was scarcely to be wondered at if such a 
 mind, living in a narrow and obscure Swiss village, should 
 sometimes wander from the given paths of a clergyman's 
 existence. 
 
 With scarcely any exception, the life led in the doctor's 
 house was that of any other peasant household. Mary's 
 money had never come into it. At Mary's own insistent 
 desire the quiet old house with all its simple wooden fittings 
 had been left precisely as she found it. Her money was 
 entailed on her child as I have said, but the income went 
 to her husband. He, however, would have put it to any 
 other use than that of household luxuries ; and so it lay in 
 the bank at Chur, and there accumulated as the years 
 
48 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 passed by. Doctor Caflisch went on living with his old 
 mother and his sister, Christina. They had one little 
 maid, just as well born as themselves, who came from her 
 own home in another village to live with them and to share 
 in all their household work more as a friend than as a 
 servant. Otherwise the old peasant-woman and her daugh- 
 ter did all those things which Mary's people at home were 
 accustomed to leave to their helots. 
 
 Christina was a quiet peasant-girl, reserved and almost 
 haughty to strangers, but possessing to a remarkable 
 degree the dignity and intelligence of her race. She had 
 a beautiful well-trained voice, and she sang with perfect 
 harmony in the village choir of men and girls. Both she 
 and her mother were good spinners. They grew their 
 own flax in a little field down the valley, and some of the 
 finest linen on Mary's big carved bed was not only woven 
 by their fingers, but had been tended and grown and picked 
 in their own fields. The doctor's old mother was a great 
 knitter, too, and she was always knitting or weaving. 
 She spoke very little, she rarely mentioned, and she prac- 
 tically never criticized, her neighbours. 
 
 Linda therefore grew up with absolutely no knowledge 
 at all of ordinary human ' ' gossip. ' ' When in later life she 
 became aware of this chatter, it always seemed to her like 
 a desecration of personality. 
 
 It would have been difficult to discover in what light 
 exactly the old peasant-lady regarded the marriage of her 
 son with an English girl, for she had spoken very few 
 words on the subject and had not withheld her blessing. 
 She was a wise and far-seeing old woman, and could not 
 really have approved it ; but it is probable that she disliked, 
 not the actual union of two such good, pure-souled persons, 
 as the situation which it inevitably involved when giving 
 promise of a child. Frau Caflisch had loved the young 
 English lady well enough in her own grim fashion. She 
 would go once a year to the room where she died, and 
 shake out the pretty frocks of the young wife, and stick a 
 
A CHILD OF THE ALPS 49 
 
 spray of rosemary amongst the dainty linen. When Mr. 
 Crane arrived to stay from England, she would rise from 
 her seat and show him his chair a thing which she did for 
 very few people. She could appreciate what was good and 
 even noble in this man, and she dumbly acknowledged his 
 right to a certain faint resentment in his sorrow. Mr. Crane 
 returned this show of courtesy, and they formed a curious 
 couple sitting there together. Mr. Crane had never for- 
 bidden his daughter's marriage, but he had disliked it; 
 after her death he took a real, if a rather precise, interest 
 in her child, urging the father, with what tact he might, 
 to entrust the small creature entirely to his own care. 
 Doctor Caflisch acknowledged the English rights in one 
 sense he agreed to let Linda visit England as soon as she 
 could unde,c$and it, and should require, possibly, a wider 
 education than her good Swiss school could give her ; but 
 for the time he kept his child at home. 
 
 And so it came about that Linda grew up as a peasant. 
 It is a free but yet a well-ordered life a life of open air 
 and hard work, too ; a life where class distinctions have no 
 part, and breeding counts for more than birth. In it there 
 was neither room nor reason for delicate frocks or expen- 
 sive toys, still less for the distinction of nursery and of 
 kitchen company. Linda had only to go into the village 
 street to find companions as self-sufficient, and with as 
 great a natural dignity as she herself possessed. 
 
 Summer is the golden season for the children of the 
 Alps. They take their holidays in a lump they have 
 three months of perfect holiday in summer-time, and find 
 a thousand homely labours ready to their hand in which 
 they are taught to play their part. There is hay-making 
 in the valleys, there is hay-making upon the higher Alps ; 
 and the tending of the flocks of cows and goats by little 
 boys and girls, through long ecstatic days on lonely hill- 
 sides, leaves on the minds of grown-up men and women a 
 memorable and strengthening heritage. The winter days 
 
 4 
 
50 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 are short and full of school work ; and Linda went to 
 school when she was six years old. She dawdled down 
 the village street with her companions, and a pack for her 
 copybooks made out of a marmot's skin was strapped to 
 her small back. Linda liked school, not because she at 
 all liked study, but because the atmosphere was social. 
 She did not learn very easily, and in after life the very 
 last thing she remembered of those days was what she 
 had been forced to write in her copybooks. The masters 
 all loved Linda, she was intelligent and obedient and 
 very amusing ; and they spoilt her in that grim and 
 rather grudging fashion peculiar to the mountain man. 
 
 But added to natural environment come the advantages 
 of natural living. Children in a place like Trins are never 
 torn between home and boarding-school life, and the chil- 
 dren of the rich are treated precisely as the children of the 
 poor. In Linda's village all went to the single day-school ; 
 all learned from the same masters. Added to this, the educa- 
 tion was sound and good, and the masters were themselves 
 as much a part of the village community as the children 
 whom they taught. Education itself was communal. It 
 was a part of life not a hateful division from life and , in 
 a sense, it was very much diluted with life. Eor the vil- 
 lage school was only open for half the year from October 
 till Easter, that is to say. The other half was devoted, 
 both by masters and pupils, to all the hard learning and 
 work of actual living. From the clothes on their backs to 
 the smallest detail of their daily food, everything was 
 understood as a hard-earned result by the small Alpine 
 child. Everything except coffee and sugar and salt could 
 be made rather than bought made by effort, it is certain, 
 but with accompanying joys and even excitements. School 
 taught about foreign countries great seas, strange cities; 
 and there were terrible sums just as there were in other 
 schools ; but there was more order, I think, than in many 
 schools, more methodical attempt to teach, and far less 
 
A CHILD OF THE ALPS 51 
 
 trouble concerning such bewildering interruptions as games 
 and runs. The Swiss child is " disciplined " from its 
 cradle it is swaddled an hour after birth ! It is not told 
 to be good so much as it is expected to be, from the very 
 start, " in earnest with existence." After all, why should 
 one not be in earnest with one's existence? Human exist- 
 ence is a grim fact enough, even in the brightest and most 
 glittering of artificial settings. 
 
 ***** 
 
 At Christmas a big pine-tree was brought down from the 
 forest and placed in the chancel of the church ; it was 
 lighted with a rather frugal display of candles, but Linda 
 used to think that the tree had fallen from heaven. The 
 smell of the warm wax candles almost intoxicated her ; 
 something primitive in the proceedings for the tree is a 
 pagan rite and not a Christian one appealed beyond 
 measure to a nature at that time a little starved aestheti- 
 cally. The children gathered round the tree, the little 
 girls in black alpaca aprons, their hair very smoothly 
 brushed and tightly plaited ; and they sang the solemn 
 Christmas hymns, and were given little cards with gold- 
 lace paper rims, and apples, and pieces of chocolate which 
 melted soon in their hot fingers. 
 
 On New Year's Eve Silvester Abend if Linda could 
 only manage to keep herself awake she knew that 
 she would see most curious and unusual doings. Once, 
 when she was only six years old, she was taken by 
 her aunt to pay a round of visits to their friends 
 quite late into the night. They ate sweet cakes 
 and drank hot wine which flew to her head and first 
 excited her, then sent her fast asleep through half the 
 festival. When they got home it was nearly midnight, 
 and the bells in the little old tower across the street were 
 tolling slow and solemn. Christina seemed much excited, 
 and for once she forgot her usual duties to Linda, who 
 crawled up on to the top of the stove in the sitting-room, 
 and soon fell fast asleep behind the cotton curtain and 
 
52 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 amongst the clothes which were put to dry there. When 
 she woke again the bells had finished tolling ; they were 
 ringing madly now, clashing and clanging together, for a 
 new year had come. In spite of all their noise and din, 
 Linda could detect another sound that of a ladder being 
 set on the wall outsideand there were young men's 
 muffled voices, and laughing and scuffling. The room 
 within was dark, but the moon outside was shining full, 
 and Linda could see that the table was spread with cakes 
 and hot sweet wine, such as she had tasted in the other 
 people's houses ; and she saw the top of the ladder against 
 the window outside with snow on the ends, and a young 
 man's head behind it. Then her Aunt Christina came 
 into the room with a candle ; she opened the window, and 
 three young men came up the ladder laughing and singing. 
 Her friend the schoolmaster took the lead. They sang 
 and clinked their glasses and said " Prosit." Christina 
 was sitting by the schoolmaster; she looked very happy. 
 The bells came clanging across the street, and small frost 
 crystals like little stilettos shot into the room through the 
 chinks of the window. Christina's mother was sitting by 
 the stove, and for once she was not knitting. She nodded 
 her head and looked quite happy, and when the young men 
 had gone down the ladder she helped Christina to clear 
 away the supper things ; and Linda crawled down from her 
 seat on the stove and crept away to her own wooden bed. 
 
 This scene she never forgot. It was one of the earliest 
 and the most vivid of all her childhood's memories. It 
 impressed her as old pagan rites impressed the small 
 Greek boy. 
 
 Every year at Christmas the children of Trins have a 
 sledging party, when the little girls of the village are pulled 
 up and down the street on their tiny sledges by their boy 
 friends. 
 
 On these occasions Linda invariably rode on the sledge 
 of her friend Basil Castille, who was five years older than 
 herself, but to whom she was much devoted. 
 
A CHILD OF THE ALPS 53 
 
 Basil was the son of the richest peasant in Trins. The 
 peasants are roughly divided into two classes in most 
 Swiss villages, the Kleinbauer and the Grossbauer. 
 Basil's father was the head of the Grossbauer faction 
 indeed, he went by the name of the " Emperor " with his 
 fellow-citizens. He was rather a crafty old peasant, with 
 a very good eye to profit and some slight turn towards 
 speculation. He read his paper regularly, and he had 
 acquired in the neighbourhood a reputation for great 
 worldly wisdom, as well as for considerable wealth. The 
 wealth of the Emperor was all in kind the bank claimed 
 little of it, and at the very outside he may be said to have 
 drawn an income of 150 a year, and this capital was 
 mainly owing to his traffic in milk and honey during the 
 summer tourist season, when Sommerfrischler or littU 
 bourgeois from the lowlands installed themselves in the 
 village inn and elsewhere. Then the Emperor got out a 
 light cart , and sent either his son or his Knecht round once 
 a day with his superfluous milk the bulk of it he kept for 
 cheesemaking, which was a more generally profitable 
 investment, through the year. This sporting but perfectly 
 natural proceeding greatly astounded his neighbours, to 
 whom it was novel and wholly unprecedented. 
 
 The Emperor had one son, Basil ; he also had two little 
 girls, and he worked them to the bone at a very early stage 
 in their existence. He had thirty cows, four pigs, six 
 goats, thirty-five sheep, and two horses, and his wife kept 
 a quantity of hens and yellow pigeons. The Castilles had 
 always been very good farmers ; they had luck with their 
 land, they had luck with their stock. Their cows calved 
 regularly ; their sheep gave heavy wool ; their horses, too, 
 were never lamed. Somehow the hawks seemed to fly 
 away from their hen-coops, and never to touch the Cas- 
 tille chickens but, then, the Emperor's scarecrow was a 
 monument of art ! It was even an extravagant scarecrow, 
 for the Emperor had not quite worn out the hat it wore, 
 so it really looked like a man. Their meadows were 
 
54 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 smooth and green in autumn when those of their neigh- 
 bours were scarred by the ravages of field-mice. Their 
 barns never lacked hay. 
 
 The Castilles loved their land, and there lay the secret 
 of this land's prosperity. They had loved it through gen- 
 erations ; the land was their temple, the animals were their 
 idols. 
 
 " Take a Castille," was the prudent advice of elderly 
 peasant ladies with a marriageable son or daughter. 
 "They've good strong blood in their veins." This was 
 certainly true, but in doubtful proposals the Castilles, too, 
 had something to say in the matter of marriages, for they 
 were nothing if not shrewd themselves. 
 
 The church, and the gravestones in the ground of the 
 church ; the windows in the Eathaus of Ilanz ; and the 
 doors of many of the finest houses of the Upper Khine 
 valley, were loaded with the Emperor's family arms ; and 
 the chronicles and the archives of Chur abounded with 
 their countless achievements. It was, therefore, no 
 wonder at all if Basil held his head a little high. But as 
 a matter of sober fact he held it so, not because his great- 
 grandfather had been an ambassador to the courts of 
 Venice and of Spain, but rather because his father's cows 
 gave the best milk, his fields the richest hay crop in all 
 the surrounding valleys. 
 
 The Emperor's house stood quite alone on a broad 
 plateau of meadow-land below the rest of the village. It 
 was a large and comfortable Bouse painted with white 
 plaster, and with many barns and stables all around it. 
 Summer and winter, even in the slush of spring when the 
 snows were melting and everything appeared degraded and 
 dilapidated, the Emperor's house seemed always warm and 
 prosperous. There appeared to be a more abundant store 
 of firewood stacked round its windows, bigger beams to 
 support the roof, thicker walls and whiter whitewash, than 
 those belonging to other houses of the village. There 
 were taller bushes of elder growing to the porch by the 
 
A CHILD OF THE ALPS 55 
 
 door, and higher plants of golden celery leaned over the 
 garden wall. There were also maiden-blush roses and red 
 roses, too, and a plant of lilac in the garden. But the 
 flowers were kept in check, vegetables being so much more 
 profitable. Whereas the other inhabitants of Trins kept 
 two rows of beehives, the Emperor had six ; and his cab- 
 bages and lettuce seemed to assume a quite fabulous form 
 of growth. A flock of yellow hens with tufts of feathers 
 on their feet and heads grubbed amongst the dust-heaps 
 of the Emperor's back premises, where fat seeds seemed 
 for ever sown and fatter grubs and maggots ; and quite a 
 troop of yellow pigeons lived in the unused attic. 
 
 A wonderful square wall, like a thing in some old fairy 
 tale, enclosed the whole of the Emperor's garden ; it was 
 massively built with blocks of shiny granite, and at its 
 four corners there were four little turrets, roofed with 
 shingle, and each of which served as a tiny gazebo. This 
 beautiful wall had been built quite a hundred years ago 
 and long before the Emperor's day, and he often went 
 round it in scorn and disgust, remembering how wild an 
 extravagance had been committed by his wealthy ancestor. 
 All the same, the little turrets were useful to him ; he 
 stored his beans, his maize and hemp upon their sunny 
 floors. 
 
 The builder of the wall was a certain Basil Castille who 
 had served in foreign armies, and who, at the age of sixty, 
 had returned to his native village of Trins with a consider- 
 able fortune and a large idea of his family magnificence. 
 This Basil did much to better and beautify the solid old 
 peasant house of his forefathers. He was one of three 
 brothers, all of them distinguished in their way. The 
 eldest had taken to diplomacy, the youngest had been left 
 with the farm, which he managed exceptionally well; 
 Basil was the middle one, and neither he nor his elder 
 brother ever married. The farmer married early and had 
 a large family, the eldest of whom became the father of 
 the Emperor. Pie died early, and his young family grew 
 
56 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 up under the occasional supervision of the two uncles. 
 During their travels these two old bachelors had not only 
 had their own portraits painted by the best artists of their 
 day, but they had managed to collect other portraits and 
 trophies of their distinguished Castille relations in foreign 
 places ; and in the large and now but little used dining- 
 hall of the Emperor's house, these portraits still were to 
 be seen the calm eyes of the proud old gentlemen and 
 ladies, in their big ruffs and their furs and fine court 
 clothes, looking down with some approval and some disdain 
 on the homelier prosperity of the present generation. 
 
 Perhaps in no other country do the tastes and the habits 
 of the peasant and the aristocrat find such a blending as in 
 that of the Swiss Kepublic. The Emperor and his family 
 in the nineteenth century were for the moment peasants 
 peasants outwardly and nothing more. To them these 
 travelled and mercenary ancestors had been but freaks 
 in a good old stock which had returned to its proper 
 breeding-grounds. The Emperor expressed an occasional 
 mild interest, but no sort of outward pride in their achieve- 
 ments or then* portraits ; he simply accepted them as a part 
 of the furniture of the past ; in the present performance 
 they played no sort of part. They were not useful to him, 
 and he was fond of things of use. The time of embassies 
 and of foreign service was passed ; it was done with ; and 
 the Basil Castille of the nineteenth century was, accord- 
 ing to the decision of his stern father, to seek his profit 
 purely in the produce of his land; and Basil's children, 
 the Emperor fully hoped, would do the same. 
 
 As for Basil himself and his own inclinations? Basil 
 was at heart a creature of the soil ; not a serf, but a hero 
 of the soil, shall we say. The love of the soil beat in his 
 pulses as a baby, and now, as a growing boy too, it literally 
 throbbed through his heart. Basil was without any shred 
 of ambition for foreign travel or adventure ; he was as pure 
 a Tory in character as he was republican in politics. At 
 the age of fourteen, if Basil made castles in the air at all 
 
A CHILD OF THE ALPS 57 
 
 about his worldly goods and achievements, they were 
 simply castles built round himself as the future Emperor 
 of Trins, with perhaps five horses instead of two, and 
 fifty cows instead of thirty. Dimly, too, he may have 
 added to this goodly heritage the Castille properties in Italy 
 and in the Engadine, both of which were momentarily 
 ruled over by old bachelors. 
 
 Basil's mother was a slender, dark-haired woman. At 
 the age of forty-five she had still a heavy coronet of plaited 
 hair round her head, black and smooth ; it had always been 
 her beauty, and the Emperor had confessed his pride in it 
 upon her bridal day. Frau Castille spoke very little, and 
 worked very hard. Sne was essentially a wife and a 
 mother. Basil was not in the habit of idealizing anybody 
 or anything, but he felt in his heart that his mother was 
 a good, a beautiful, and able woman ; and as such he loved 
 and revered her. He loved his friend, the doctor's little 
 daughter, he even respected her, for she was self-contained ; 
 but sometimes he dimly, or perhaps unconsciously to him- 
 self, wished that Linda's mother had been as his mother, 
 and not a foreign woman. 
 
 Linda went to the Emperor's house as often as she 
 could or dared to do. In the childhood of every one of 
 us, even in that of the least impressionable, and Linda was 
 very impressionable indeed, there exists some corner of the 
 place we live in which excites and thrills our fancy, and 
 which causes us a sort of incommunicable joy. Such a 
 place, and such a corner, was the Emperor's home to 
 Linda. Sometimes she went and played there all alone, 
 sitting on the floor in the summer-house, and turning about 
 the maize and the purple beans. If the Emperor appeared 
 at any point she would hurry away and hide, and her wild 
 heart would beat up fast and quick, for she feared the 
 canny old man, and he was one of the only persons who 
 never for a moment spoiled her. This fact, however, only 
 added to the fascination of the summer-house, for we need 
 
58 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 a dragon to make our paradise complete. Linda came 
 sometimes to meals with the Castille children, and sat at 
 the great round table with a slate let into the middle, and 
 ate her soup with a wooden spoon, dipping into the dish 
 which served them all. The Emperor's little girls were 
 very slow and solemn in their movements, and Linda never 
 grew really fond of them. At the age of six or seven they 
 already seemed burdened and oppressed by the responsi- 
 bilities of life upon this planet ; whilst the mere fact of 
 being alive was to Linda herself, a delight and even an 
 intoxication. All the same, she liked to be with the Cas- 
 tilles, even with the solemn little girls, for Linda had an 
 ingrained love of good society and of good living, and the 
 Castille family was nobly born. 
 
 Linda was not a snob- that is quite a different matter, 
 for snobbery is vulgarity she merely liked good-breeding 
 and well-kept houses, and the repulsion she experienced for 
 squalid houses and mean minds was almost a physical 
 matter with her. As a child, unconscious of cause and of 
 effect , she made no attempt to dissect this feeling ; in after 
 life it became, perhaps, her deadliest bane and trial. 
 
 Doctor Caflisch was wholly unconscious of these 
 instincts in his small daughter ; indeed, he was so entirely 
 without such morbid susceptibility himself that he would 
 cause his child hours of almost untold anguish by his quite 
 natural actions. There were certain memories in Linda's 
 childhood which made her shudder to the end of her life. 
 There were scenes, smells, little homely details, which 
 caused her literal anguish. 
 
 One day her father drove her in a hurry to a certain 
 mean and sordid little house, the outside of which had 
 long made her shiver, and which in her most horrible 
 dreams she could never have imagined herself entering 
 under the present circumstances. It was a bitterly cold 
 winter morning, and the sun had no power to pierce 
 through the frozen clouds. The walls of the house were 
 of a dirty grey stucco; in parts the stucco was pealing off, 
 and grey soiled icicles had formed on the stone beneath. 
 
A CHILD OF THE ALPS 59 
 
 The doctor went into the house, and took Linda with him. 
 The passage was coated with ice which looked almost like 
 growing funguses ; some shavings and sawdust were strewn 
 in the doorway. As they entered the passage, Linda's 
 quick ear could detect a strange, abnormal rattling sound, 
 which greatly harassed her. There was a heavy steam in 
 the living-room where the stove, now almost red-hot, was 
 not often lighted ; and a woman of the sort for whom 
 Linda felt the greatest natural repulsion was doing some- 
 thing by a table in the middle of the room. Her father 
 went up to the table, and lifted the sheet with which it 
 was covered, and whence the rattling noise was coming, 
 and she saw that it was a man who was lying there. His 
 face was blue and wet, and the eyes were staring. The 
 woman came and uncovered him further, and showed 
 her father the man's arms, which were covered with white 
 plaster, for he had had some horrible accident. Linda 
 saw that the bones in his side were moving up and down, 
 and she heard her father murmur that the plaster would 
 do no good there. Then she ran out of the room, and 
 stood in the snow by the roadside; she was deadly faint, 
 and she thought she was going to die. Her father presently 
 came out to find her, and wrapped her up and put her in 
 the sledge ; he looked terribly troubled, and he did not 
 notice how pale the child was. The next morning he 
 went back to the same house, taking her with him. All 
 the way Linda felt sick, but she dared not say so. Her 
 father said as they stopped at the door : ' ' That poor man 
 whom we saw yesterday is dead, Linda. I want you to 
 see how good it can be even to die." 
 
 The house was very quiet now. It was cold still, but 
 the floor was clean, the doorstep scrubbed, and the sun 
 was shining in. The man was lying on a bed in pure 
 white linen ; his face was white and beautiful ; and there 
 was a smile upon his lips. Basil and his mother had come 
 to see him and brought a tiny wreath of rosemary and 
 myrtle, which they placed upon his breast, and just above 
 his white clasped hands. They all drove home in the sun- 
 
60 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 shine together, talking normally and happily; and, after 
 that day, Death to Linda was classed amongst the things 
 which are not sordid and which heal ; it was classed, in 
 fact, amongst the clean and pleasant things of earth. This 
 may but have been the effect of contrast, yet it was last- 
 ing she never forgot it, and it stayed her through many 
 hours of later anguish. Linda often saw dead people 
 dead children, dead women for children in primitive 
 societies, such as these Alpine villages, are spared no 
 details of the human tragedy ; but she never shuddered at 
 death, she was never hurt and wounded by it in the 
 manner in which she was hurt by a million sickly, squalid, 
 or pretentious details of our misdirected human lives ; still 
 less had it power to wound her, as cruel talk or rudeness 
 
 could and often did do. 
 
 ***** 
 
 Linda's early life was essentially a life with and for 
 nature, a life in which man living so near to natural things 
 and depending on them for his sustenance makes less of 
 words and of human possession than we who live in cities 
 or near to cities do. In Linda's own home there were 
 only very few sights which really distressed her. The 
 rank weeds, like nettles and coarse grasses, which flourish 
 round the dust-heaps of man distressed her ; the scars 
 which tramps and tourists leave behind them on the road- 
 side, these things hurt her sensibility. But all the 
 intimate details of village life these meant use and 
 necessity to her they had nothing to disturb her artistic 
 serenity. 
 
 The scent of the meadows before the hay was cut was 
 dear to her. She would plunge waist-high amongst the 
 feathery pinks and ox-eye daisies just before the scythe. 
 She loved the smell of the cool black earth under damp 
 moss in the forests : it seemed like a sort of ether to her, 
 she would put down her face and sniff it up till half intoxi- 
 cated. But, best of all, she loved the higher pastures 
 where, even in summer, the snows of winter lingered ; 
 where sulphur anemones and all the loveliest and the best 
 
A CHILD OF THE ALPS 61 
 
 of the flowers grew and flourished. And in winter she 
 loved the falling of the snows ; she knew quite well, and 
 merely by the sound of it, what sort of snow was falling 
 in the night whether soft or hard, and whether it would 
 lie long. She loved the snow which fell in powder ; in 
 small sharp flakes which crackled together and blew hither 
 and thither, and gathered into mighty drifts for days in 
 the arms of the North wind. She loved, and understood 
 in babyhood, those million miracles of our natural world 
 which the children of cities can never understand, even if 
 they journey far in after life to seek them. 
 
 To sum it up, there was breadth in Linda's upbringing ; 
 breadth in the minds of the people about her ; breadth in 
 the nature and clean, clear air; breadth, above all, in the 
 small child's heart and soul. She accepted things as they 
 came by ; they were not explained to her, or interfered 
 with ; they were merely put before her in the plain and 
 rather large-lined letters which she could understand. She 
 only asked for one thing, and that one thing was " More " : 
 more hours in which to enjoy the day ; more hours to sleep 
 at night in ; more friends to love and to be loved by ; more 
 room, more space for pure and innocent enjoyment. 
 
 Linda wore stiff peasant frocks made of the wool which 
 her grandmother spun and wove herself. She was always 
 scrupulously neat and precise in her personal attire. She 
 had hard little boots with iron points ; her hair was tightly 
 plaited in two plaits; and hats were little known to her 
 except on feast days or on journeys. 
 
 When she was five years old she went to England. Of 
 this visit she remembered extremely little just a few of 
 those strange, insignificant details which somehow or other 
 are stamped on our brains in childhood. 
 
 She remembered wearing a hat and cotton gloves. She 
 could dimly remember her grandfather's study, for there she 
 realized a new repulsion, akin to that which she had felt 
 for sordid scenes and people. It was a repulsion for ugly, 
 expensive things which have no beauty in themselves for 
 dark, dreary, heavy magnificence. From that date a per- 
 
62 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 feet horror of large, leather, revolving chairs, and of 
 Axminster carpets possessed her, but she never talked 
 about it. Her grandfather gave her a very elegant peram- 
 bulator for her doll which she did not like, for she never 
 was fond of dolls ; she could see him wheeling this perambu- 
 lator before him along his well-rolled garden paths, and she 
 had a sort of sense she would herself have to wheel it always, 
 which was agony to her. Her grandfather was thin and 
 tall and always dressed in black, and he had a habit of 
 watching her sternly, yet tenderly, in a manner which 
 made her very uncomfortable. She remembered an old 
 uncle, a doctor. He was rather amusing and attractive : 
 the butler said something about him and a rake, but she 
 could not piece it together. He had come to see her : "to 
 have a good look at the child," was the expression. She 
 was taken down to the study by a nurse who always 
 attended her in England. The nurse took off her frock, 
 and Linda was made to walk across the terrible Axminster 
 carpet, chasing between the shafts of sunlight which 
 seemed to her full of dust and of insects, whilst her uncle 
 and her grandfather talked together in low mysterious 
 voices. They said she was an absolutely perfect child, 
 but " of a nervous temperament." 
 
 She remembered her uncle Sebastian ; he attracted her 
 irresistibly he seemed like a brother to her. He drew 
 a picture of Polyphemus for her, and in spite of her nurse, he 
 rolled her about on the lawns and tumbled her frocks. Then 
 the nurse scolded her, and gave her a little shake, because 
 her frock was tumbled. He told her the story of Pegasus. 
 Linda wept long and bitterly over the horse whose wings 
 were torn by its mortal labours and mortal degradations. 
 
 She remembered a dreadful church, horrible to her 
 because of its combination of her two worst bugbears 
 squalor and pretension. It had walls of wood round the 
 place where she sat, and when she poked the hassock a 
 dreadful smell of a horrible " long-ago," mixing with that 
 of her nurse's boots, came out and stifled her. She remem- 
 bered long hot drives in a large carriage, sitting up stiff 
 
A CHILD OF THE ALPS 63 
 
 with her back to the horses ; and how the coachman who 
 laughed in the stable with her nurse sat up so straight like 
 a poker on his box, and never smiled or spoke to anyone. 
 She remembered her cousins, the three James children ; of 
 these Dudley was the vividest memory an enchanting 
 English boy who rode on a pony and seemed to her like 
 a god. 
 
 On the whole, perhaps, she was happy in England, but 
 she was very much happier when she came back home. She 
 was emotional ; she conceived violent attachments to per- 
 sons and places in those days, and although she disliked 
 ugly or pretentious furniture, she had an ingrained love 
 for luxurious living, and the large houses of her English 
 relations satisfied this, and filled her heart with a certain 
 pride of possession. But she never forgot the loss, which 
 these things somehow involved, of her homelier comfort 
 and freedom when in the Alps. 
 
 She was imperious, and had no illusions whatever about 
 what is really "breeding" and what is not. She could 
 give an order to a butler, if she wanted anything, in a voice 
 to surprise and even quell this British functionary, who had 
 been perhaps inclined to laugh at the " little foreigner." 
 
 So when the next year her father told her that her grand- 
 father was dead, she but barely grasped the news, or why 
 they gave it to her. Mr. Crane died on an August day. 
 Linda heard of his death one morning, but in the after- 
 noon she hurried to the Alp where Basil was keeping his 
 cows ; and she at once forgot all about it. 
 
 She stayed on the Alp for many days ; she went out 
 early up the mountain-side behind the goats, and in 
 the night she made herself a hole in the hay, where Basil 
 and some other children also slept. 
 
 Those were golden days the happiest of all her child- 
 hood. The charm of the calm nights as she slept in the 
 fresh warm hay was a thing which lived with her until she 
 died, strengthening her love of a life with Nature, and 
 hardening her horror of all the small and fussy things in 
 our human, or at least in our "respectable " domesticity. 
 
CHAPTEE IV 
 
 SEBASTIAN 
 
 " Lo, gods, two worlds immense, 
 
 Of spirit and of sense, 
 Wed in this narrow bed." 
 
 FRANCIS THOMPSON : Any Saint. 
 
 " If anyone wishes to imagine a genius of culture, what would 
 it be like? It handles as its tools falsehood, force, and thoughtless 
 selfishness, so surely that it could only be called an evil, demoniacal 
 being ; but its aims, which are occasionally transparent, are great 
 and good. It is a centaur, half-beast, half-man, and in addition 
 has angel's wings upon its head. . . ." NIETZSCHE. 
 
 Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, 
 Und griin des Lebens goldner Baum. 
 
 GOETHE'S Faust. 
 
 SEBASTIAN was an only son, and at the death of Mr. Crane 
 he inherited the property. In order to understand Linda's 
 story better it will be necessary to give a rather detailed 
 account of her English surroundings, and of her uncle 
 Sebastian in particular. 
 
 To begin with the young man's Christian name, for it 
 was certainly a strange one : he owed this to his mother. 
 His mother was considered a rather eccentric young lady 
 in her day. She was an heiress, and came of a family 
 where eccentricity amounted at times to actual insanity. 
 She was high-spirited, beautiful, and gifted; her temper 
 was uncertain ; domestic life oppressed her, for she had a 
 strong Bohemian tendency which suited very ill with the 
 daily round of society and small duties required by Mr. 
 Crane's position in the town. The happiest weeks of her 
 short married life were those she spent on hurried 
 journeys with her husband in Italy. She was an excel- 
 
 64 
 
SEBASTIAN 65 
 
 lent artist and sketched persistently. She returned to her 
 home, and to a depth of ennui which her strong sense of 
 the ridiculous alone saved her from developing into melan- 
 cholia. 
 
 In the spring, before the birth of her third child, Mrs. 
 Crane went for the last time with her husband to Italy. 
 Passing through Milan, they spent an hour in the Brera 
 Gallery, and there, amongst other wonderful paintings, 
 the young woman's quick taste discovered Sodoma's 
 St. Sebastian a picture passionate and almost modern in 
 its tendency. Mrs. Crane sat down in front of this picture, 
 whilst her husband examined a Domenichino in the next 
 room. Before they left the gallery she asked her husband 
 to call her son, if she ever had one, Sebastian. She caught 
 a cold and an attack of fever that same day in the Duomo. 
 Three months after their return to England her child was 
 born, when she was in a low state of health ; and shortly 
 after his birth she died. 
 
 The boy was called Sebastian. He was such a fragile, 
 sickly baby that no one thought he would survive his 
 mother long. His father, who had had one of those 
 romantic devotions for his wife which men of his peculiar 
 culture and refinement sometimes have for the woman to 
 whom they unite their lives, transferred this love to his 
 son. The small boy's childhood was outwardly a happy 
 one, for he had a singularly sweet and lively spirit. His 
 sisters, his aunts, and all their lady friends worshipped and 
 adored him ; but, unsuspected by them, and for many years 
 unacknowledged even by himself, a strange warfare of the 
 spirit raged between his heart and soul a warfare which 
 his natural generosity, combining with a spirit of mockery 
 and pride, compelled him to conceal from others. 
 
 Sebastian grew up in surroundings as artificial as his 
 small niece Linda's were natural. But the same pagan 
 spirit was in them both. 
 
 Some six years after the marriage of Mary and Doctor 
 Caflisch, Mr. Crane himself passed suddenly away. By 
 
 5 
 
66 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 the death of his father Sebastian lost a purely spiritual and 
 moral influence, a thing which had forced his outward man 
 to become what it was, but which had very little to do 
 with the emotional and lyrical soul within. Sebastian had 
 a very clear judgment; he saw very distinctly the debt 
 which he owed to his father. He loved and deeply rever- 
 enced this courtly English gentleman ; their devoted and 
 affectionate relationship meant very much to him ; but he 
 regarded, as a sort of curse, the points in which they 
 differed. However, to the day of his father's death he 
 suppressed his inward antagonism. Mr. Crane, although 
 realizing his son's physical weakness and inaptitude for 
 bodily exertion, perhaps a little over-proud of his singular 
 intellect, had early forced the boy's mind into literary and 
 artistic channels, into a world of art and culture which feed 
 the mind but estrange it from humanity and human needs. 
 Sebastian was very human, he had something which 
 throbbed and panted under the touch of human loves and 
 pains, which almost burst at the sight of human beauty 
 combining with human imperfections. Art could not 
 satisfy him ; yet to art he seemed inextricably tied. 
 
 Now the art admired by Sebastian's father had been all 
 in the line of Corregio and Guido Keni. Impressionism 
 was not in the time of Mr. Crane, and Euskin was very 
 remote and only half a prophet to him. Mr. Crane loved 
 and knew the writings of the Greeks and early Eomans. 
 In modern literature he loved the purely ' ' classic ' ' ; the 
 masterpieces of the greatest writers, Shakespeare and 
 Milton, were very familiar to him ; Scott and Byron, too ; 
 but Heine and Shelley and Keats, though he did not blame 
 them, failed to interest him. He worshipped the poet of 
 his own period, Tennyson, and read him aloud by the hour 
 to his children. 
 
 Sebastian, therefore, was brought up to love and to appre- 
 ciate only one side of the Beautiful namely, a rather 
 artificial one. He was educated to it by the contents of a 
 hundred big portfolios, by the casts and bronzes and copies 
 
SEBASTIAN 67 
 
 carefully collected on Italian travels; by deep reading of 
 the classics, and above all by his father's own strong per- 
 sonality. Up to the age of nineteen, when his sister Mary 
 married, Sebastian silently accepted this education and its 
 creeds. After that day a sort of inward revolution declared 
 itself ; a belief in something wider and more satisfying, to 
 be found rather in the way of Beauty than that of Art a 
 thirst for beautiful humanity, and not painted or even 
 sculptured carcasses of Beauty, as shown in books and pic- 
 ture galleries. 
 
 Sebastian became restless ; he could not explain what he 
 wanted, he simply felt it ; and when, during the short spell 
 of Mary's married life, he went to stay with her, and saw 
 the young men of the village hauling their hay or sitting 
 silent after their day's work the sunset on their strong 
 limbs, the love-light in their eyes the craving for his ideal 
 became a literal anguish which stifled him. He went on 
 putting it by. He worked, he ground on in the old 
 lines and the old beliefs. He acquired vast stores of 
 knowledge, and at the back of his mind he felt that he 
 and they were vanity. His university career, hampered 
 by ill-health and the conflict of 'the soul, was still a 
 brilliant one, and a joy to his father. He had gained a 
 Baliol Scholarship at Harrow, he left Oxford the fellow of 
 one of her greatest colleges. Yet these honours were as 
 dust to Sebastian that is to say, to the most vital part 
 of the young man's soul. 
 
 At this period of his life Sebastian made friendships of 
 the mind, friendships with young men of distinction and 
 culture like himself, but not real friendships of the heart 
 or the emotions. These friends, in later life, passed into 
 the atmosphere of mosaic tables and Guido Reni photo- 
 graphs which he and his father had collected on their 
 foreign travels. They influenced and purified his mind, 
 but they had no connection with the more ardent side of 
 his nature. He collected the photographs of these so-called 
 friends and he stuck them in a large morocco album. In 
 
68 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 after years he liked to turn the pages of this book, and to 
 remember that the owners of the calm, distinguished 
 faces very old for their years we should have thought 
 them nowadays had been about him as he passed through 
 the valleys of a mortal anguish. But all these men had 
 dropped behind him, or had gone before him, treading 
 their own paths. Sebastian's path was not their path, 
 neither was it ever known to any but a very few of them. 
 Some became good lawyers, some clergymen, some politi- 
 cians. The few exceptions, who had gone upon Sebastian's 
 way, had failed and had disappeared. It was a way beset 
 with thorns. As near as he could Sebastian reached his 
 goal ; but his breast was pierced with arrows like the breast 
 of the saint from whom he took his name, and the light 
 came early on his years. 
 
 Sebastian inherited all his father's property, with the 
 exception of a good deal of money which Mr. Crane had 
 bequeathed to the children of his two married daughters. 
 Sebastian loved his old home as we only can and do love 
 the places where we have suffered all our youthful pains 
 and known our joys ; where we have striven with ourselves 
 and found ourselves. It was a big stone house, built in 
 the early English-Italian style dreary and a little pre- 
 tentious outside, if filled with beautiful things within. 
 
 The house stood in a big garden outside the city of E ; 
 
 it was one of those things which inspire a sense of 
 reverence rather than of admiration. The butlers and 
 housekeepers of those days admired it very much indeed. 
 It was, in fact, largely planned for their convenience, and 
 would have been ill-fitted to the more stormy domestic 
 times in which we ourselves are fated to live. Its great 
 beauty and to the eye even of a fastidious artist this was 
 a true beauty lay in a long terrace which commanded the 
 garden on the south side, and which was decorated with 
 stone flower-stands and approached from the house by a 
 long flight of steps, such as one may see in many Lombard 
 villas. There were beautiful lawns and tall tulip-trees in 
 
SEBASTIAN 69 
 
 the garden ; but the soot of the town settled over the grass 
 and the leaves, and gave to the whole a certain funereal and 
 dismal splendour which not even the freshest rains of 
 March could ever wash away. 
 
 The house was much too large for a single man, and 
 Sebastian, in spite of his strange temperament, was essen- 
 tially a social being. Therefore it came about that, 
 rather than live alone in this great house, Sebastian 
 suggested to his sister, Mrs. James, that she and her hus- 
 band and children should share it with him after his 
 father's death. Sebastian, like many other highly educated 
 people (though the world rarely credits the fact), had a 
 good business head ; and his very love for his old home 
 made him wish to see it warm and comfortable. The offer 
 was made and accepted on a perfectly businesslike basis. 
 
 Sebastian was not particularly attached to his brother- 
 in-law, and the sprightly mannerisms of his sister often 
 annoyed him. But he cared very much for their youngest 
 daughter. Their friends, their social arrangements, their 
 servants, their governesses and parties amused and dis- 
 tracted him. 
 
 The arrangement was certain to clash at some given 
 point ; but it held for a surprising number of years with 
 Sebastian and the James family. Mr. James had a sort of 
 precise, dried-up code which was carefully expounded and 
 expressed by him at the start, and agreed to by Sebastian ; 
 and Sebastian himself only insisted on one or two condi- 
 tions, the first of these being that he should reserve for 
 himself his own old rooms, keep his own servant and horse, 
 and go his own way. Secondly, that when his niece Linda 
 came, as she some day would, to live with them, he should 
 have a voice in her management and education. 
 
 And thus it came about that, at the age of twenty-three, 
 Sebastian Crane settled back into his own home, without his 
 father, but with his sister's family. He found a hundred out- 
 side interests and claims to engross an active brain indeed, 
 it was strange to see what an interest the fragile, spritelike 
 
70 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 creature took in many dreary matters of the town. In 
 some ways he was like a woman, and the fine perceptive 
 powers of his brain made him what in older days would 
 have been termed "an agreeable gossip." He loved old 
 ladies, he teased them yet caressed them ; he was kind to 
 all sorts of old personal servants and wearisome people. 
 He never cared for young ladies ; perhaps their follies were 
 the only form of human folly that he could not forgive, still 
 less forget. He dressed with an easy grace, and he ordered 
 his part of the household with a punctiliousness that quite 
 surprised his sister. 
 
 But in spite of all these things he was lonely, lonely as 
 all abnormal lovers of the Ideal are lonely. He worked 
 ardently and intensely. He was sure of only one thing in 
 his studies namely, that he was seeking knowledge ; he 
 had only one creed namely, that he must follow good, and 
 thus attain as near as possible to God. He travelled much, 
 for his health was bad, and the English air soon choked 
 him. When at home, he read and wrote in a sort of attic- 
 room hung round with photographs of Michael Angelo and 
 the young Antinous. He kept a horse and took long rides 
 across the country, sometimes with a friend, often as not 
 alone. He returned late on winter afternoons or in the 
 dusk of summer evenings. He was a quick and almost 
 tireless walker, in spite of his delicate physique. He loved 
 to jump low gates, vaulting them with his hand on the top, 
 and taking great runs over open country. He knew the 
 planets and the constellations, but loved them mostly for 
 their splendid names. In this way, too, he loved the 
 flowers, and would often stay in hedgerows to gather spikes 
 of yellow agrimony, merely for the flower's pleasing title, 
 whilst he ignored the lovelier growths smothering the 
 hedges up above him. After his walks and rides he had 
 dinner with the family, smoked on the terrace in summer- 
 time, and then went back to his study room and worked 
 and read till midnight, often till dawn. 
 
 What was he working at, what was he reading? 
 
SEBASTIAN 71 
 
 Classics relics of the life, the joys, the loves, the passions, 
 follies and creations of the past? Sometimes he took a 
 picture down and saw young men and women wreathed 
 with lotus-flowers, with love within their eyes a glorious 
 race ! The poor boy put the picture by and covered his 
 face with his hands and moaned. His sister asked him 
 the next morning whether he had had a toothache in the 
 night, for she had heard him groaning. He only looked 
 at her, and then he smiled an odd, half cynical smile ; 
 her very commonplaceness sometimes soothed him. The 
 one person Sebastian really loved in the house was his 
 niece Joan. His nephew Dudley amused and interested 
 him as much as any other young barbarian, but Joan 
 was different. With Susan he was out of sympathy. 
 
 And so the years passed by, and the time had come 
 again for the small ' ' Swiss niece ' ' to have some English 
 education. Sebastian shrugged his shoulders, but he said 
 that he wanted a little change, so he put some books into 
 his big travelling box, and a great many flannel shirts and 
 boots, and a string of Indian beads, and he went off to 
 Switzerland in advance of the rest of his family to prepare 
 the way for "that unfortunate child," as he was accus- 
 tomed to call her. 
 
CHAPTEK V 
 
 IN THE VILLAGE OF TEINS 
 Mein Kind, wir waren Kinder." 
 
 HEINE. 
 
 IT was in the first week of July, and exactly eight years 
 since the day when Sebastian and his father got out 
 of the post-carriage in a snowstorm and went to the doc- 
 tor's house, to find that the doctor's wife had died. Once 
 again Sebastian got out of the diligence, but there was no 
 sign of snow this time. The day was hot and cloudless. 
 The afternoon shadows were lengthening, the valley 
 seemed very calm and still, for most of its inhabitants 
 were up with the cows and the hay on the higher pas- 
 tures, and only some of the women, the young children, 
 and the older men were left below in the villages. Where 
 the post-carriages had passed a long cloud of dust lingered 
 above the road. The passengers and the luggage, the 
 horses and postillion were white with dust ; but the 
 valley was green, and the houses were smothered in the 
 summer foliage of their fruit-trees. Sebastian jumped 
 down from the coupe and up the steps of the inn. In 
 outward appearance he had altered very slightly in the 
 past eight years. He wore a loose grey coat, and his 
 large straw hat, with the Magdalen lilies on it, looked some- 
 how strangely out of place on the small head with its 
 thick crop of hair. His face was white and smooth, 
 the eyes heavy, the brow was deeply furrowed, but with- 
 out lines. An extraordinary mixture of youth and of 
 fatigue was the thing which struck one most about the 
 young man, a mixture of much physical weakness clashing 
 
 72 
 
IN THE VILLAGE OF TEINS 73 
 
 with a brave show of moral courage and some unwonted 
 force of brain. Till he spoke one would have taken him 
 for a mere boy. Sebastian went straight up to his cool 
 little room to rest awhile. He was exhausted, for the day 
 was hot and he had been up since dawn, so he closed his 
 shutters, lay down on the sofa, and soon he fell asleep. At 
 five o'clock his servant brought him tea; then he got up 
 and went down the street. 
 
 Already the hush and the cool of evening was creeping 
 into the valley. A delicious scent of new-mown hay 
 came out through the open doors of every barn and filled 
 the quiet air ; the water trickled through the wooden pump 
 in the square ; some hens crooned in the gutter ; and very 
 far away one heard the rumble of the hidden Khine. 
 The scene was one of the profoundest peace. It touched 
 some chord in the young man's heart, for he clasped his 
 hands behind him and walked humming down the street. 
 The doctor's house looked quite deserted when he reached 
 it, but Sebastian went up the steps and through the open 
 door. 
 
 Christina and her mother were sitting by a table 
 in the hall and stoning cherries. They had a large pile 
 of stones in front of them, and the fruit they put into a 
 big stone jar which stood on a chair between them. If 
 the street felt cool and peaceful, this long low hall where 
 the sun never entered even on a summer's day seemed 
 almost more like the vault of a cathedral. Christina had 
 a white handkerchief over her head. She did not seem 
 surprised to see Sebastian. She merely got up and gave 
 him her hand, and offered him a chair by her mother. 
 Sebastian had a profound admiration for the old peasant- 
 woman, but he was pompous and pedantic enough at that 
 age to be surprised rather than touched by the courteous 
 manner and apparent indifference to his arrival shown to 
 him by these two peasant- women. He had always been 
 rather afraid of Christina. She could not come into his 
 
74 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 category of "young ladies." She was young and good- 
 looking, but painfully out of his circle of thought and of 
 friendship, and he felt a little nervous when he spoke to 
 her ; she was so calm and sustained, and she did all the dull 
 and uneventful things which servants did for him at home 
 with a peculiar grace and apparent indifference. 
 
 Almost mechanically, Sebastian sat down between the 
 two women and began to pull the stones out of the 
 cherries ; but he did it badly, and the old woman patted 
 him with her sticky ringers and advised him to leave off. 
 Sebastian winced, and then felt ashamed of himself. He 
 got up and he looked out of the door. Then he came 
 back to the table. 
 
 "Is Linda out?" he asked. 
 
 " I think she is playing in the orchards," said Christina. 
 " Shall I fetch her? you will want to see her." 
 
 " Oh, please do not hurry," said Sebastian. ' You 
 will have heard that my sister and her husband are coming 
 in a few days to fetch Linda," he continued. 
 
 The old woman sighed, but her daughter answered : 
 
 1 ' We think it is a pity that Poppeli should leave her 
 home now. The child is strong and happy. What can 
 she gain by going to England?" 
 
 "Nothing absolutely nothing," said Sebastian. It 
 was rather an effort for him to speak German, yet he was 
 a good German scholar and he could read the language 
 easily. When it came, however, to speaking, he usually 
 chose his words with a sort of pedantry which confused 
 his listeners. 
 
 Christina went on stoning her cherries. Peasant thought 
 works slowly. Presently she spoke again. 
 
 "Poppeli is a good child," she said, "but she is not 
 always like us, sometimes she is more like her mother. 
 But that does not make it any better. She will have to 
 suffer all the same if she goes to live in England." 
 
 "Yes, yes Poppeli will have to suffer," repeated the 
 old peasant-woman, and rattled the stones on the plate. 
 
IN THE VILLAGE OF THINS 75 
 
 Christina went on : " Poppeli has been free. She is 
 wild and happy. The restraint of your English ways will 
 hurt her." 
 
 There was a long pause. Sebastian was making an 
 epigram, but he found it difficult to put it into German. 
 "I understand you perfectly," he said at last. "My 
 family is, unfortunately perhaps, entirely unlike your 
 family. In many ways it is narrower and more common- 
 place. Poppeli will suffer when she comes to live with it. 
 But her pain will only be a form of moral vaccination. 
 An evil injected so early into healthy blood will merely 
 leave a faint scar, the scar of a scratch, and in most 
 healthy human beings this vaccination will have the 
 desired effect. It may complicate life, but it will also 
 mitigate its dangers." 
 
 Christina had stopped stoning her cherries. She fixed 
 her clear and rather solemn eyes on the young English- 
 man, and a strange enigmatical smile crept over her lips. 
 But the old woman asked him to repeat his words, and 
 then she nodded her head. 
 
 'Yes, yes," she said, "you are not a fool, young 
 man." And Sebastian bowed. He was flattered. 
 
 There was a noise in the street, and Linda, hot and 
 breathless, came running up the steps and into the hall, 
 and when she came a wave of heat and open air seemed 
 to come with her. She was dazzled in the darkness and 
 she did not notice Sebastian. 
 
 " Aunt Christina, Aunt Christina," she called in a 
 shrill, piping voice which clashed with the silence around 
 her, " there will be a rat at the root of the big cherry- 
 tree the fruit is sour, and scarce, and dry, and the Em- 
 peror says we may eat it, because it won't do for cooking ; 
 and Basil says that if it won't do for cooking, it won't do 
 for eating neither." 
 
 The child stopped speaking from very breathlessness. 
 It was evident that she had accepted the Emperor's advice 
 
76 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 rather than that of his son, for her face was stained with 
 cherry juice. This, however, did not by any means alter 
 the charm of her appearance, which was one of singular 
 beauty. She had all the refined essence of childhood's 
 beauty a flush of health rather than of redness in her 
 cheeks, a palpitating joy in her large brown eyes, an 
 intoxication of vigour everywhere. 
 
 Sebastian got up from his chair and Linda saw him. 
 
 "Who's the man?" she asked eagerly, and staring 
 fixedly at him. 
 
 "Don't you remember me?" said Sebastian. 
 
 "No," said Linda. " And yes, too. But 
 
 "But what?" 
 
 "Hike thee " 
 
 " Then kiss me," said Sebastian. 
 
 And Linda threw her arms around his neck and kissed 
 him. Sebastian pulled the string of Indian beads from 
 his pocket and tied them round the little girl's neck. 
 
 " I'm your Uncle Sebastian," he said. 
 
 " Of course you are," said Linda, highly delighted with 
 her present, and always impulsive in her statements. 
 
 Then Christina sent Linda to wash her face. When 
 the child came back they talked a little about her coming 
 journey, and later on Christina put away the cherries and 
 cleared the table. 
 
 "You would like to come into the churchyard," she 
 said very simply, and they went down the steps and across 
 the street, Linda following behind them. 
 
 The sun had set. The wooden door of the churchyard 
 stood open wide, and you could see the snowy ridges of 
 the opposite mountains shining through their natural 
 frame. There is a great peace about the graves of Trins. 
 A black cross, or a tiny rough-hewn stone, stand as sole 
 landmarks for the departed souls of its villagers, and 
 tufted pinks and sword-grass run riot over the gentle 
 mounds of earth where periwinkles form a living wreath. 
 
IN THE VILLAGE OF TEINS 77 
 
 In a bit of open ground, looking right away across the 
 valley, there was a solitary grave with a white stone cross 
 upon it. Tall spikes of withered lilies, and a bush of 
 maiden-blush roses, grew from its soil. Christina stopped 
 beside the grave, and Linda knelt down mechanically, as 
 though performing some accustomed duty, clasped her 
 small brown hands together, and hurried through a prayer. 
 Then she got up and rubbed the gravel from her knees. 
 Her aunt took her hand : 
 
 " Eead us what is written on the stone," she said. 
 
 " I cannot read," answered the child, " Aunt Christina, 
 thou knowest very well I cannot read." 
 
 " I know that thou wilt not, Poppeli." 
 
 "Well," volunteered the child, "but I can tell you. 
 It is written that Mary Crane Gaflisch lies under the earth 
 there ; and that she will see God because her soul was 
 clean. Also I know that she was my mother. But I 
 do not worry about it, because I never saw her." 
 
 Christina made no remark, but she dropped Linda's 
 hand and began to knit, and Linda ran off across the grass 
 to meet a boy who was coming up the path from the fields 
 below. The boy was Basil. 
 
 Basil was fourteen. He may be said to have attained 
 the very zenith of the hobbledehoy period. But this fact 
 seemed somehow to have doubled the charm of his pure 
 personality, for a great dignity and self-respect covers 
 even that most uncomfortable of ages in the boyhood of 
 the mountain man. Though Basil's trousers were much 
 too short for him, and had the appearance of being carved 
 from a block of granite, they did not fail to impress one 
 favourably towards their wearer there was nothing un- 
 suitable in their strict economy. The boy wore no coat. 
 His grey waistcoat was closed by a small button across 
 his grey shirt. He had a nickel watch-chain, and wore 
 his watch in a large horn cover. His forehead was rather 
 wrinkled and puckered ; his hair, massive in its abundance, 
 hung in great tufts across his eyebrows. His eyes were 
 
78 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 dark and keen, and he could see for a very long way with 
 them. He moved slowly, and he spoke slowly, deliber- 
 ately, and very rarely. Basil was, in fact, the result of 
 long generations of sober, well-educated, unexcitable men 
 and women. He was the result of a race of men who had 
 always lived among high mountains and under narrow 
 skies, the former of which facts simplifies and sobers the 
 life of a man, whilst the latter prevents the vague desires 
 and daydreams of the mind. The love of the impossible, 
 the egotism of cities had not entered his large, contented 
 soul ; the artificiality of modern requirements would never 
 tempt nor hybridize the steady straightness of his course 
 in life. 
 
 Linda ran fast towards Basil, but the enthusiasm which 
 marked her movements seemed to receive an accustomed 
 check as she neared her friend. 
 
 "Basil," she said solemnly, "it is settled, and I am 
 going to England. I am going to live with Uncle Sebas- 
 tian, and I shall see Dudley and the very small horse." 
 
 " England is a very long way off," said Basil ponder- 
 ously. And silence ensued ; for Linda was thinking of 
 the journey, and Basil was thinking but perhaps it would 
 be vain to say what Basil was thinking about. 
 
 "My Uncle Sebastian has come to see me," Linda 
 hazarded presently. "He brought me this bead neck- 
 lace." 
 
 Basil scarcely looked at the necklace, but he frowned : 
 " It's an ugly thing," he said. " Where is your uncle?" 
 
 The young Englishman had gone into the church, and 
 had sat himself down on a bench in front of some tablets, 
 with armorial bearings, let into the wall. Sebastian was 
 fond of heraldry ; he drew out a notebook and copied the 
 Castille coat and some of the dates and inscriptions. The 
 children came in and stood beside him. 
 
 "You are drawing, Uncle Sebastian," said Linda. 
 "Here's Basil come to see you." Sebastian offered his 
 hand to the boy, but Basil did not seem to see it. 
 
IN THE VILLAGE OF TEINS 79 
 
 " I am drawing your arms, Basil," he said. " You are 
 a proud person to quarter Planta, Sprecher, and even 
 Metternich." 
 
 "I don't understand you," said Basil. 
 
 Sebastian put down his notebook and, clasping his hands 
 behind his back, he leaned against the wall and fixed his 
 eyes on the peasant-boy : 
 
 " On one of these stones you quarter Caflisch," he said, 
 and then his pupils dilated, for he was looking into the 
 past and into the present. He was very pale and thin 
 and rather haggard ; something in his exquisite refinement 
 touched the children, or excited their interest. Basil 
 came forward and picked up the book and looked at it : 
 
 " The Caflisch arms are poor ones," he volunteered. 
 
 "Do you care for heraldry?" asked Sebastian, and 
 Basil said : " No, it's no sort of use." 
 
 Then a strange and painful expression crept into the 
 Englishman's eyes: "No use none," he repeated to 
 himself, and got up and pushed his hair off his forehead. 
 
 " What do you do with yourself all day?" he asked the 
 boy. 
 
 "Many things," Basil answered. 
 
 " But tell me a few of them " 
 
 1 ' In summer-time I am mostly on the Alp with the 
 cows. Some weeks I bring the milk down in the morn- 
 ing, like this morning." 
 
 " And in winter?" 
 
 " I go to school, and help a bit with the wood hauling." 
 
 " And do you read?" 
 
 " Sometimes." 
 
 "And do you think?" 
 
 "Not much." 
 
 " Thank you," said Sebastian. " You have told me a 
 great many things I wanted to know." 
 
 Linda, who had fixed her eyes during this catechism on 
 her uncle's face, now interrupted. "And what do you 
 do, Uncle Sebastian?" she asked. 
 
80 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 " I dream bad dreams, little woman," he said, and they 
 walked out into the street. 
 
 ***** 
 
 The place seemed deserted still, for the heart of the 
 village life was throbbing higher on the mountain-side. 
 Basil's work was done for the day, his companions had 
 no work. They wandered on past the last houses of the 
 village till they came to the foot of Canaschal, which small 
 hill stands above the town of Trins. 
 
 " Let's go up and see if the tiger-lilies are in flower," 
 said Sebastian, who never forgot the places where he had 
 picked some rare or lovely plant. 
 
 They went through a thin grove of larches. The resin 
 crept out of the twigs and ran down into the pale yellow 
 cones. They soon left the wood and came out into a clear 
 space on the hillside, with the ruins of a castle on it. 
 
 "As for the tiger-lilies," said Basil, who had not 
 spoken since he left the church, " they have been over for 
 a long while since." 
 
 And then there was a silence again, for the coming on 
 of twilight, with its calm, is infectious even to young 
 children, and Sebastian felt it profoundly. In the silence 
 an odd rumble or murmur came up from the valley, but 
 you could not see the Khine. Sebastian heard it. 
 
 " Am Rhein, im schonen Strome 
 Da spiegelt sich in den Wellen 
 Mit seinem grossen Dome 
 Das grosse heilige Koln. . . ." 
 
 he repeated to himself, remembering the cities and the 
 people through which the mighty river had before long to 
 roll and swirl. His companions caught another sound, 
 for a cowherd was yodelling on an Alp above them. His 
 voice was so full and strong, the air so clear and still, that 
 it was easy to catch the melody. Basil took it up and 
 began to. sing, at first very low to himself, then loud and 
 strong, and Linda joined in as she strayed among the 
 meadow flowers. Presently she called her uncle. 
 
IN THE VILLAGE OF TEINS 81 
 
 ''Come here, come here," she said, "and look at the 
 butterflies. They have all gone to sleep here." 
 
 Sebastian joined the child in a patch of ox-eye daisies. 
 Linda had spoken the truth. A whole army of Apollo 
 butterflies had settled for the night on the daisy stalks; 
 they flapped their big wings lazily, showing the crimson 
 spots, as the little girl disturbed them. 
 
 Sebastian knelt down beside his niece and examined the 
 sleepy butterflies. Then a strange and sudden light came 
 into his tired eyes. He looked at the child, and then he 
 looked out through the flowers and the grasses away to 
 the woods in the valley, and beyond to the higher ranges 
 of the mountains, where a pink glow fell upon the rocks 
 and snow. He drew a long, deep breath. 
 
 " My God !" he murmured, " why not this this, and 
 only this and the rest nothing? Oh, Linda dear, what 
 
 will they give you at home in exchange for this But 
 
 ni comme ceci, ni comme cela ni meme autrement." 
 
 "What's that you're saying?" asked Basil, who had 
 joined them. " You speak bad German. I cannot under- 
 stand you." 
 
 " That's exactly what makes you so distinguished," 
 said Sebastian, and soon they all went down the hill and 
 entered the village street again. 
 
 The thin chill breeze of night had arisen and blew over 
 the mountains and down the valley, but when they came 
 into the doctor's house they found it warm and quiet, and 
 full of the sunlight of the vanished day. The windows 
 of the sitting-room stood open wide, the air was full of a 
 sweet aromatic scent which came from the currant-bushes 
 down by the garden wall. The room was clean and bare, 
 yet very homely ; the ceiling and walls were panelled with 
 cembra-wood. A solid table, with a slate let into its 
 centre, stood in a corner by the window. Some stiff 
 wooden chairs, with heart-shaped backs and long thin legs, 
 stood against the wall, and a narrow bench or couch ran 
 
 round two sides of the room. 
 
 6 
 
82 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 On that same seat, barely nine years earlier, Mary had 
 sat on a summer ' day and had given her soul to these 
 same stiff surroundings and their owners. 
 
 A beautiful inlaid cupboard, with painted plates upon 
 the dresser, stood by the door, and a pewter dolphin 
 and a copper pail for the family to wash its hands 
 at was let into one corner of the cupboard. There was 
 little or no attempt at superfluous decoration in this purely 
 peasant room, yet the whole was very decorative. Mary 
 Crane had lived before the days of fashionable photo- 
 graphs. There was a portrait of her and her husband 
 taken by a passing journeyman, a little grey plate in a 
 gilded frame. It was the picture of a very young woman in 
 a big crinoline with smooth hair parted on her forehead and 
 large dark eyes. Her husband, the doctor, was standing 
 beside her, and both, as it seemed, were carved out of 
 ebony. This picture hung on the wall beneath a small 
 bookcase. The books were mostly very old : a Bible and 
 some few medical tracts. But there was a beautiful 
 edition of the ' ' Imitation of Christ," which Mary had given 
 to her husband on their marriage-day ; and some early 
 poems of Heine and of Shelley, which Sebastian gave 
 at the same time to Mary. These things were the only 
 outward signs of the doctor's English bride. 
 
 Sebastian sat down on the wooden bench. Something 
 in the simplicity of the room pleased and soothed his 
 aesthetic taste, just as it had done his sister's before him. 
 Indeed, all the scenes of village life through which he had 
 been passing with such apparent negligence and ease 
 stirred and attracted him forcibly. He seemed to dream 
 a pleasant dream. Vague lines of sonnets, never to be 
 written, rose in his brain and soothed him. Phantoms 
 of a life which was far away from all the tedium of his 
 study and his culture swam to his vision. He pushed back 
 his hair and, resting his chin on his hand, he looked out 
 and away through the open window. 
 
 There was a rattle of wheels in the street: "It's 
 
IN THE VILLAGE OF TRINS 83 
 
 cousin Theodore," cried Linda in the doorway, and the 
 clergyman of Trins came into the room. He shook back 
 his mane of now half-grizzled hair and tossed his hat 
 upon the table. 
 
 "So!" he cried, extending both hands to Sebastian, 
 ' ' so, my young friend ! Have you come to pay us a 
 visit? Sit down, sit down." 
 
 Sebastian had shaken himself from his dreams. He 
 did not feel really in sympathy with this member of his 
 brother-in-law's family, but liking the scholar in him, 
 he was forced to accept the man. They began to talk 
 about Linda and her plans. When Mary's name was 
 mentioned the clergyman's manner changed to that of a 
 child. Large tears rolled down his cheeks, he showed 
 them to Sebastian : 
 
 " See," he said, "my flesh weeps for your sister, but 
 her immortal part lives in my spirit." 
 
 ' We have no equivalent for ' Geist ' in English," said 
 Sebastian, who disliked this theatrical attitude. 
 
 The Pfarrer, too, changed the subject. 
 
 " I like to see you here," he said, " you are so modern ; 
 but I know that you like our ways, and our homes. You 
 are attracted by the simple life as your sister was before 
 you you do well." 
 
 ; * Yes," said Sebastian, fidgeting with his pencil-case, 
 ' ' it is the quality of simplicity which has made me admire 
 the people of Greece and of Israel." 
 
 " Admire," repeated the clergyman, and laughed a little 
 harshly. * ' Love, you mean fall in love with them. Ah, 
 here comes Christina." 
 
 Sebastian looked annoyed, but the clergyman put his 
 great strong arm around his neck, which embarrassed him 
 still further, and then he looked him full in his eyes : 
 
 ' You are killing yourself by study," he said. " Listen 
 to me. Live, love, drink, get full of life we live but 
 once. . . . Ah, and here's Basil ! And here's our young 
 friend, Heinrich von Herder." 
 
84 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 Heinrich von Herder was a penniless young Austrian 
 count, a medical student, who had been spending that 
 summer with his books in the village inn at Trins, and had 
 made some friendship with the doctor and his family. He 
 was a very odd and a very wild young man. He was the 
 poorest member of a noble family, but he had early cast 
 off all its shackles, determined to run some headlong, 
 individual course in life. In many ways a strange like- 
 ness existed between him and Sebastian Crane. They 
 were both infected with the disease of their age, and of all 
 over-civilized ages. But whereas Count von Herder had 
 early put conscience aside, and had declared in his sisters' 
 schoolroom, where he made love to all their governesses in 
 succession, that he was going to "go the whole hog " in 
 life, Sebastian had sought an outlet to his nervous energies 
 in the purely mental work of study, and was constantly 
 wounding himself by the scourgings of his own conscience. 
 
 The two young men looked at each other. Perhaps they 
 recognized something of themselves in one another. 
 Then, involuntarily, they turned and looked at Basil, 
 who, absolutely indifferent to both of them, was sitting 
 on the ladder which led from the stove to the trap-door 
 in the bedroom above, and carving something out of the 
 half of a cherry-stone. Above him on the top of the 
 ladder sat Linda. She had taken her favourite seat, and 
 from that high perch the little girl half watched, half 
 dreamed, the doings and the sayings of her elders in 
 the room below. Nothing ever surprised her, and the 
 strange mixture of men in her father's house that even- 
 ing did not strike her as unusual. She drew up her 
 knees and rested her chin upon them. Her thick plaits 
 of hair and her large restless eyes were the only things 
 which marked the human being from the bundle. Some- 
 times she put out her foot and kicked the head of the boy 
 below her, but he did not turn or look at her. 
 
 Sebastian got up from the table and came across to the 
 
IN THE VILLAGE OF TRINS 85 
 
 children. The clergyman and the Austrian student had 
 entered on a discussion of ' ' Hamlet ' ' ; both had been 
 reading the play that summer, but neither knew much 
 about Shakespeare. Their wild discourse clashed with 
 Sebastian's mood as a thing from the region of art and 
 artificiality which he so much longed to escape from. 
 He tried to make Basil talk with him, but the boy was 
 haughty or taciturn, and Sebastian was glad when at 
 last the door opened again, and he saw the face of the 
 doctor. 
 
 Doctor Caflisch came quietly up to Sebastian. He 
 shook his hand without speaking. He was always 
 touched by his wife's young brother and very sincerely 
 attached to him. He insisted that Sebastian should be his 
 guest that night. At the entrance of the doctor, Pfarrer 
 Caflisch and Count von Herder lowered their voices a 
 little. The doctor asked them to stay to supper, but 
 they declined ; they had settled, they said, to taste a cer- 
 tain vintage in the village inn that evening ; and so they 
 said good-bye, and Sebastian sat down with the doctor. 
 
 The peace of the place came back to him. He was 
 very tired ; he leant back on the wooden bench, and 
 watched Christina lay the cloth and bring in supper. 
 There was some dried meat and poached eggs, a big 
 slice of cheese, and a dish of the doctor's honey. Sebas- 
 tian went to the inn for his bag, and as he passed up the 
 street he heard the sound of singing. In the dim summer 
 twilight he saw a group of village girls sitting outside 
 the Rathaus. Christina sat among them. The girls 
 were singing in parts ; their voices rose up and passed 
 through the silence, measured, slow, and unimpassioned. 
 Sebastian stopped in the shade of the street and listened. 
 His restless, driven, modern soul seemed calmed by the 
 mere simplicity of the songs they sang. He sank on a 
 bench, and a sort of hopeless Sehnsucht came over 
 him. As he sat there he saw von Herder come out of 
 
86 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 the inn and join the girls. The student seemed at home 
 with them. He had a fine falsetto voice, and he joined 
 their songs as though by instinct. Then Sebastian drew 
 himself together again, got up and went to the inn, and, 
 bidding his servant bring his bag, he returned to the 
 doctor's house. 
 
 The only spare room in Mary's home was a sort of 
 large attic where the weaving-loom was kept, and 
 where old Frau Caflisch was accustomed to store her 
 hemp, her disused spinning-wheels, and other wooden 
 lumber. The room was panelled from ceiling to floor 
 it was, indeed, a box of cembra-wood filled with the 
 weaving-loom, the corn-bins, and the wooden bed. There 
 were no blankets on the bed, only the beautiful linen 
 sheets with their fringe of old lace, and a red cotton 
 feather-bed to keep the sleeper warm. The moon came 
 up above the mountains. It was a large waning moon, 
 and it cast a pure white light upon the marvellous fittings 
 of the attic. Sebastian could not sleep. He got out a 
 little volume of Shakespeare's sonnets and read them as 
 he lay in the light of the moon. The summer night wore 
 on. From where the young man lay he could see the 
 valley bathed in the whitest light, and one or two pale 
 planets in the quivering blues and greens of the sky. 
 
 Basil got up at dawn. He had slept eight hours of 
 heavy, dreamless sleep. He rolled from his bed in the 
 Emperor's house, ate some cheese, and washed his face ; 
 then he fetched his milk-can and his stick and started up 
 the road towards the Alp. As he passed the doctor's 
 house Sebastian looked out of the window. Sebastian 
 was pale, his hair dishevelled. He gazed at the splendid 
 boy before him, and the sight seemed to fill him with 
 longing and amaze. He leant over the window and his 
 white face shone in the dawn. 
 
 "Ah, Basil! Basil!" he called, "where are you 
 going to?" 
 
IN THE VILLAGE OF THINS 87 
 
 "To the Alp," said Basil stolidly. He put down his 
 milk-pail : " Go back to bed," he said. "It's much too 
 early for you and your sort to be moving." 
 
 Then the humour of the situation conquered its pathos : 
 "Yes," said Sebastian, "I will get back to bed. I am 
 but a very poor creature. Adorable Basil, good-bye !" 
 
 So at dawn the creature of culture fell asleep, and the 
 mountain boy went on up the Alp to meet the rising sun. 
 
CHAPTEK VI 
 
 ON THE ALP 
 
 "Konig ist der Hirtenknabe 
 
 Griiner Hiigel ist sein Thron ; 
 
 Tiber seinem Haupt die Sonne 
 
 Ist die grosse goldne Kron. 
 * * * * * 
 
 " Und das klingt und singt so lieblich, 
 
 Und so lieblich rauschen drein 
 
 Wasserfall und Tannenbaume 
 
 Und der Konig schlummert ein." 
 
 PERHAPS the best and most happy point in the life of 
 mountain children is their yearly visit to the Alp. The 
 word Alp to most people conveys a vision of snow and 
 rock and ice and lofty summits ; but to the peasant the 
 name has a very different meaning. " Alps " to them are 
 the small oases of meadow-land which, in cultivated 
 mountain valleys, you will always notice above the level 
 of the forest, and even higher on the mountain-sides. 
 When the winter snows have melted and the heat of 
 summer is felt within the valleys, the cows and the goats, 
 and even the pigs, come forth from the stuffy stables of 
 the villages, where they have been penned in narrow 
 stalls through many weary months of frost and snow, and, 
 forming into a procession, they ascend through forest 
 paths till they reach the little worlds of greenery and 
 sweetest grasses which lie above the level of the forest, 
 and glitter in the early morning sunlight, and cling to 
 the last rays of the sun at eventide. With the cows go 
 the Senns and Sennerins, and some of the small boys and 
 girls of the village, and the big copper cauldron for boil- 
 
 88 
 
ON THE ALP 89 
 
 ing the milk, and the pans for the cream and the churns 
 for the cheese. The men and the women of this happy 
 procession open the doors of the small wooden huts, they 
 shake up the straw on the beds, they clean out the stables, 
 and in a very short time the Alp is alive with living 
 sounds, and a wild untrammelled life of work and dreams 
 begins, and lasts till the first snows of autumn fall. And 
 when this happens, the procession forms once more, and 
 the cows come down to the valleys again. For days and 
 weeks the tolling of their bells disturbs the air, and the 
 whole tenure of the village life is altered and re-made. 
 
 Oh, they are singularly pleasing and idyllic, those little 
 green meadows up on the mountains. They are like 
 small bright jewels set in an iron crown, the gentle 
 women of a race of warriors, and I know no single thing 
 more tender, more profoundly peaceful, than the peasants 
 huts which sleep untroubled through the many months 
 of winter, and which awake and open their doors on a 
 summer's day to the cows, the children, the young men 
 and the women from the valley. Up there a life is led 
 as near to Arcady as anything that this tired world may 
 dare to dream of. 
 
 A visit to the Arora Alp above Trins was a great adven- 
 ture to Linda. Her father, being a doctor, kept but 
 very few animals, although he had quite a tidy property 
 in land. He had only one cow and two goats. The 
 cow went up with the Emperor's cows, and paid a trifle 
 for its board and lodging. But sometimes Linda had 
 gone to the Alp in the company of her peasant-friends, 
 and had slept in the hay with Basil and his sisters. She 
 never forgot those days they were the most exquisite 
 form of gaiety she ever knew. On the day that Sebastian 
 visited Trins, Linda had already laid a plan with the 
 Emperor's sister a maiden lady to whom the child was 
 much attached, and who, like Linda's father, kept one 
 cow, which she sent to the Alp with her brother's cows 
 
90 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 in summer-time, and sometimes visited. Linda had 
 arranged to go with this rather grim old spinster lady and 
 to spend a night upon the Alp. 
 
 Soon after six o'clock Linda woke up. She dressed 
 and went down to her father's study. She found him 
 sitting at his work. Linda usually knew exactly what 
 she wanted, and she was quite accustomed to get it : 
 
 "Father," she said, standing quite stiff in front of 
 him, " I want to go up to the Alp to-day ; I want to go 
 to Arora. I want to sleep in the hay, and to come back 
 to-morrow. Aunt Elizabeth is going to stay there, but I 
 can come back with Basil when he brings the milk." 
 
 The doctor stopped writing, and pulled his little girl on 
 to his knees and looked long and earnestly into her face : 
 
 "Go, my child," he said, "but make Basil cover you 
 up in the hay. The nights are cold, remember. And 
 come back to-morrow don't forget that." 
 
 Linda slid down from his knees. She loved her father, 
 but she was anxious to be off. She fetched her little 
 bundle and drank her coffee, and soon after seven her old 
 friend came by to fetch her, and they started off along the 
 post-road for some little distance. They walked very 
 slowly, for the day was hot. Presently they left the road, 
 turned aside, and came out upon a small lake half hidden 
 in meadows in the middle of a forest ; here they sat down. 
 
 The sky was a deep blue a blue so deep you could 
 look into it and know a little of infinity, its colour seemed 
 so endless. White clouds were passing across it ; they 
 looked as though they had been combed out of a heap of 
 the finest lamb's-wool with a large and even comb. 
 
 The sun was on the mountains, but they seemed dark 
 and shadowy against the radiant morning sky. Their 
 rocks and trees, their bushes of turf and bilberries, melted 
 together into soft blue haze which seemed like a shadow 
 in the seething air from which the dew had barely 
 vanished. Bows of feathery larches stood on the lower 
 hills about the margin of the lake; the green of their 
 
ON THE ALP 91 
 
 needles was fresh and tender still, but even these melted 
 into the general haze of the mountain-side. 
 
 The meadows alone were full of light. The butter- 
 cups, the hemlock, and red campion flowers shone and 
 glowed together like sheets of molten gold. There were 
 more buttercups than any other flowers so many that 
 they almost dazzled one. The meadows were like the 
 glory of unlasting Youth ; the mountains were Age and 
 Knowledge; but the sky was Eternity and it was far 
 away. 
 
 All along the shores of the lake -there were boulders 
 fallen from the hills above. The water rose between the 
 stones, and formed into little pools where crowds of tad- 
 poles wrestled for existence. Dwarf rushes and a cloud 
 of buck-bean grew to the water's edge ; and all along the 
 clear, cold stream which left the lake and ran into the 
 valley, pale forget-me-nots grew in the moss, and tufts of 
 gentians so deep in colour that they seemed to throb 
 and shimmer. It was an enchanting boggy place. Tufts 
 of crimson rushes broke the surface of the sphagnum 
 moss, showing where the sun-dew grew ; and here and 
 there, where the peat was cut, one saw a plant of pale 
 andromeda. Linda picked it eagerly, tearing the fragile 
 stems as children do, and shaking the pale petals down, 
 which falling, looked like opals in the moss about her 
 feet. Then she ran down to the water's edge. A dragon- 
 fly had split from its shell on the other bank, and now 
 came flying across the lake, all a-glitter and a-quiver in 
 the sunlight. It settled on the flowers in Linda's hand. 
 Its eyes were large and green, its body shone like an 
 emerald, and was so slender, so elastic, that the heavy head 
 seemed quite to overpower it. The child trembled with 
 delight to find the pretty thing so near her hand ; but 
 her companion called her, and they went upon their way. 
 
 They went up the path, and into the wood. The grass 
 was full of big blue gentians in the outskirts of the forest, 
 but as they plunged deeper among the trees they left all 
 
92 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 coloured things behind them, and found themselves in a 
 green and silent shade. Here was a different world 
 indeed a world of moss : mountains and valleys, plains 
 and hills, of soft, slow-growing, fragrant, tender moss. 
 
 Hundreds of years ago there had been a landslip in this 
 place, and a large slice of the granite on the mountain 
 above had slipped down to the valley, making a sort of 
 second mountain, over which their path now led. And 
 up over this mountain the forest had grown ; and under 
 the forest the moss. A pine-tree will take nearly ten 
 centuries to grow to its full height in the Alps, and many 
 of the trees in this forest were already full-grown upon 
 the skeleton remains of their ancestors. 
 
 The Emperor's sister sat down to rest again, but Linda 
 took no rest; she had but little weight to carry, and she 
 ran on deeper into the heart of the forest. She loved the 
 forest. She could not realize its wonders or its age, but 
 a child's soul is near to nature, and something almost 
 holy in the seclusion of this place impressed her deeply. 
 She turned aside and walked on deeper and still 
 deeper into the wood. Her small feet pressed the moss 
 so lightly that it seemed she stepped on springs, and 
 she wandered on over the boulders, plunging now 
 between the high walls formed by the falling rocks, 
 and now emerging from their depths to climb their moss- 
 grown tops. At last she sank down into a hollow between 
 two rocks, and sighed and drew in her breath the place 
 was so soft, so cushioned, and so cool. A big tree rose 
 at her back, and there were trees all round her. Through 
 a parting of the trees you could just see the sky. The 
 mountains on the opposite side of the valley reared them- 
 selves against it, and the snow lay dazzling white upon 
 their breasts. So white was the snow, and so profoundly 
 blue the sky, that the nearer pine-trees looked quite black 
 and hard against them. Long trails of Linnsea borealis 
 crept over the rotten tree-trunks and up the sunny sides 
 of boulders ; and flowers of wood-sorrel stood in rows, like 
 
ON THE ALP 93 
 
 little girls dressed out in white to take their first com- 
 munion. In a deep cleft between some boulders a wet 
 moss grew, which seemed like crystals; it caught the 
 icy drops of moisture in the hollow of its leaves, and shone 
 like chrysoprase and beryl in the darkness of the cave. 
 The whole light of the cave was green ; a cool and earthy 
 scent came from its depths, and fanned the forehead of 
 the child as she stooped to peer within. 
 
 Even on this hot July day the sun barely penetrated 
 the heart of the forest at midday, and it held all the 
 dampness of the summer night within its breasts. Linda 
 felt the cold caress even through her woollen gown, but 
 she sat very still. Everything was still around her, 
 intensely still. You could listen for hours and hear no 
 sound beyond the roar of the river, which came in gasps 
 from far away in the valley, and the singing of larks in 
 its meadows. Otherwise there was not a sound of bird 
 or insect moving. If a needle fell from the fir-trees, if a 
 twig broke, the sound was smothered instantly by the 
 softness of the moss. Circles of round- winged gnats 
 whirled slowly through the sunbeams, but they neither 
 sang nor stung. 
 
 Children tire of stillness, and Linda at last was glad 
 when the old lady called her, and she hurried back to the 
 path and her companion. They walked some distance 
 more through the deep forest ; then suddenly, and as 
 though by magic, they emerged into all the blaze of 
 unchecked sunlight on the Arora Alp. 
 
 The grass stood high inside the wooden palings. Pan- 
 sies, red campions, and forget-me-nots shone brilliant in 
 the sunlight. Hundreds of grasses and bright flowers 
 seethed in the heat ; and some birds flew out of the bil- 
 berry-bushes with shrill, sharp cries. They were moun- 
 tain larks who had built among the stones, and dreaded 
 lest this child who, wild with joy, ran singing down the 
 pathway, should touch or harm their young. But Linda 
 
94 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 was not thinking of the birds. She had a much more 
 engaging pursuit in her mind, and she hurried on through 
 the meadows and past the huts, and over the hill, till she 
 came to the lake. It was a very small lake indeed, clear, 
 clean, and shallow, but it reflected an immensity of sky 
 and the tops of mountains which rose at least two thousand 
 feet above it, and Linda pulled off her stockings and 
 picked her way over the grass, and then she stepped into 
 the waters of the lake. The water was so icy that it 
 struck a chill all through her. The grass on its bank had 
 been hot, and the contrast and discomfort between it and 
 this icy water delighted the child as such things do in 
 youth. The sun poured over her head. The circles and 
 waves, which she made as she splashed in the water, 
 swept quickly over the surface of the lake and reflected 
 themselves on the sand of its basin. The child could 
 scarcely hold her skirts for joy. She danced back on to 
 the grass and into the stream which ran down the valley, 
 through the wood, to a string of smaller lakes on another 
 plateau. Linda followed the course of the stream through 
 the sunlight and the shade. The sharp stones cut her 
 skin, and the smooth ones made her slip; when she tried 
 the turf, the heath and needles pricked her, but these 
 pains are all wild pleasures in our youth. Sometimes 
 Linda trod on the great blue gentian flowers, they were 
 cooler than the grass, and they rattled beneath her feet. 
 The cows were high upon the hillside still, for it 
 was early in the afternoon, and the Hirt was singing 
 ceaselessly. His long, monotonous yodel came down in 
 gasps through the hot and quiet air. Basil was the Hirt, 
 and Linda laughed to think that perhaps her boy-friend 
 would not see her; she kept as near as she could to the 
 trees and the boulders, as she continued her course bare- 
 footed down the stream. Sometimes she trod on sphag- 
 num moss, warm cushions full of sun and comfort, which 
 gave to her tread, like cushions of down, letting the water 
 up between her footprints ; and then she plunged back into 
 
ON THE ALP 95 
 
 the icy stream, and came at last to the shores of a little lake, 
 which lay in a cup of green grass ground as smooth almost 
 as an English lawn. There were islands with dwarf larch- 
 trees round its shores, and lots of rotten tree-trunks in the 
 water. Linda sat down on a knoll of grass, and let her 
 feet hang motionless in the clear waters underneath. 
 
 Away, away, away, ever so far away, was the world and 
 the people. Quite near, the sky, with a brown hawk 
 circling round the rocks, and the alpenrose growing all up 
 the hillside full of the scent of resin. Linda's cheeks were 
 flushed with air and the freedom. Her hair curled in little 
 tight rings above her temples, and stood up, ruffled, round 
 the parting. She took out her hairpins, for her head was 
 hot, and the heavy plaits rolled down her shoulders till 
 their ends dipped into the water and floated out above her 
 naked feet. Then she drew out her feet and dried them 
 in the sun. So she sat for a long time very still, and then 
 she fell asleep. 
 
 Basil was coming down the mountain-side behind his 
 cows. He was singing still, but more cheerfully, and there 
 was almost a swagger in his slouching walk. As he went 
 he made a nosegay of the rhododendron-buds. He stopped 
 to wash his face and hands at a small spring while his cattle 
 drank. The water ran through his splendid dusty hair, 
 making it more than ever crisp and mat-like, though he 
 tried to smooth it. Then he hastened his cows a little, and 
 pulled on his coat. And as he walked he watched the 
 island by the lake and the figure of a very small girl who 
 had fallen asleep in the shade of a rock. The boy did not 
 smile, but he was happy ; he stopped singing. When he 
 came to a boulder at the end of the lake, he climbed to the 
 top of it, he drew in his breath and he gave a great call. 
 His voice rang full and clear, some might think almost 
 harsh, across the mountains. The rocks, as though they 
 loved such boyish freshness and such breathing life, caught 
 up the echoing notes and held them long within their frozen 
 bosoms. 
 
96 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 Linda woke with a start. She was rather angry to have 
 been asleep, and she did not look at Basil just at first ; but 
 her face grew red, and her long plaits dipped again into the 
 water. 
 
 " Oh, it's thee, is it?" she said at last, for she could not 
 long keep quiet. Basil had come to the opposite side of 
 the lake, and stood there, kicking the stones about : 
 
 "Yes, and that's thee. Thou stupid fool, didst think 
 I hadn't seen thee ? Didst think thy hair was thick enough 
 to hide thee ? Why , right away , and hours ago , I saw thee. 
 I saw thee down at the Schwarzsee. I can see a weasel 
 move from up above." 
 
 " I'm no weasel." 
 
 There was a pause. 
 
 " Here is something for thee," said the boy, and threw 
 his bunch of alpenrose across the water. The stiff bunch 
 rested on Linda's knee. But she got up. She was half 
 asleep still, and the flowers fell into the lake. 
 
 " Poppeli," said the boy suddenly, " why did you throw 
 my bunch away. I picked it for you with pains." 
 
 The child huffed : " It's all buds," she said. 
 
 " I know it's buds," answered the boy. " But the buds 
 come out in water, and the fuller flowers die in a week." 
 
 "I don't want them weeks," said the child rather 
 petulantly. 
 
 Basil said no more. He took his stick and he followed 
 his cows, calling them together with notes and whistling 
 sounds, and slowly bringing them towards the huts up on 
 the Alp. As he went he stayed a while to gather the largest 
 and most blown of the rhododendron flowers ; he bound 
 them into a careful bunch, as he had bound the buds. He 
 put them on a stick and left them by his door, and then 
 he went into the stables. The Senn had brought his stool 
 and was milking the cows. You could hear the thin splash, 
 splash of the milk upon the pail, and the low mooing of the 
 other cows, and the stamping of their feet. The stables 
 were stuffy, the animals a little hot and tired. When the 
 
ON THE ALP 97 
 
 milking was done Basil left them, and went out across the 
 meadow path to the house. He took the key from under 
 the cover of the pig's trough, where he hid it every morning ; 
 he went in through the low wooden door and fetched his 
 cans from the cellar, and took them out to the pump to 
 rinse them with fresh water. Then he washed his hands, 
 drew on his coat, and sat down quietly outside the stable 
 door. 
 
 His work was done ; he stretched his feet apart, and left 
 his big hands, hanging idly clasped, between his knees. He 
 was a small boy to have so much of work and duty for a 
 creed. But he asked no questions of his life, and in a quiet 
 way he loved it. 
 
 The sun had set in the valley ; the Alp, too, was in shade. 
 There were patches of misty light upon the higher pas- 
 tures and the crags. Already the dew was rising to sap 
 the warm , delicious scent of sunlight in the flowers and the 
 woods. The beams of the chalet at his back gave out the 
 heat in pants. There was in everything that silence which 
 is full of sound ; for in the hush one heard larks singing their 
 last evening psalm, the Senn hummed at his milking-stool, 
 the cows murmured in their stalls. 
 
 Near where Basil sat a large patch of snow the remains 
 of a March avalanche lingered in the meadow ; and a thing 
 like a saint's halo had grown round its retreating skirts 
 thousands of tiny crocus-flowers, purple and white, fringed 
 soldanellas, anemones, and little pale-faced primulas, a 
 phantom of the spring-world fallen on summer days. 
 
 Linda had come up from the lake, she had discovered the 
 patch of snow, and was sliding on it with extreme delight. 
 Basil smiled as he watched her. He had been angry about 
 her reception of his alpenrose, but he knew a lot about 
 Linda; he was not, anyhow, resentful by nature, and he 
 was conscious of his greater years and strength. 
 
 Presently the child looked up and saw him watching her. 
 She ran towards him and reached him out of breath. 
 
 7 
 
98 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 "I was sorry I did not take thy flowers," she said, " I 
 wanted to get them afterwards, but they floated away in the 
 water." 
 
 " Here are more," said Basil, and stretched out his arm 
 for the second bunch. Some of the blossoms were fading 
 already, others were bruised. Linda looked at them. 
 
 "Oh, I don't want them" she said decidedly, "they 
 are dead." 
 
 " You chose such," said the boy. 
 
 " I don't want any very much," said the child. 
 
 Basil made no answer. He began to sing. The child 
 climbed up beside him on the bench and watched him 
 earnestly with her large brown eyes. She was very fond of 
 Basil: 
 
 " I like that," she said when he stopped, and when he 
 began again she joined in with a shrill piping voice. 
 
 "I'd like to sing and sing, and then to be always living 
 on the Alp," she said when they paused again. 
 
 " But thou hast only a little voice, and that is very high," 
 said the truthful boy, "and thou 'It live but little on the 
 Alp thou wilt go to England." 
 
 " Yes," said Linda, " but not yet, and then I'll like that, 
 too, you see." She had been pulling on her shoes and 
 stockings with her back turned to Basil, and she had not 
 heard his comment on her voice, or she would certainly have 
 resented it. She now turned and looked earnestly and pro- 
 foundly into her companion's face ; then in an oracular 
 voice she said : "I'll come back, and I'll marry thee, and 
 we'll live always for ever on the Alp." She paused, 
 and her mind turned quickly to other things. "Dost 
 read?" she asked. 
 
 " Yes," answered Basil, " I read." 
 
 "What sort of books?" 
 
 "It's nothing very interesting that the Pfarrer gave me 
 this summer to read," said the boy critically. "It's not 
 stories just true things about people like us." 
 
 " Bead," said Linda imperatively. But at that minute 
 
ON THE ALP 99 
 
 the Sennerin called them in to supper. They had each a 
 large brown bowl of thin soup with crusts in it, and they 
 were so hungry that they ate in absolute silence. When 
 they had finished Basil got on to the straw bed and took 
 down a book from the shelf, and they went back to their 
 bench outside the door. The book was called " Wald- 
 heimath." In a slow, businesslike way he opened it at the 
 first page, and spelt out slowly those wonderfully pathetic 
 lines in which Kosegger sums up the lost joys of his child- 
 hood and the influence of a mountain life upon his soul's 
 development : 
 
 " That is a wonderful life for the soul the life lived under the 
 shade of the fir-trees, in the dewy meadows of the valleys, and 
 in the quiet Alps above the forest. What was my inward passion 
 there for God high in His Heaven for all that is secret, and for 
 all that is inscrutable ! And how I must have thirsted for adven- 
 ture, since, as I might not fly forth into the greater world, 
 I so could build for myself a little world within me. And thus it 
 followed on the real things became a game, and what had been 
 a game became in its time life. And to every single thing which 
 happened, and to every human being that I knew, some fragment 
 of my childish heart still clung. And when at length these years 
 came by, in which the higher fires begin to glow, my restlessness 
 grew greater still. So, too, it will happen to others. For a long 
 while yet I did as other people do, and then at length I broke 
 from out the circle. Shouting, I flew into the world, full of that 
 exaltation which to-day has drawn me back again into the woods." 
 
 "I don't like it," said Linda, "but I didn't listen 
 much there's no story." 
 
 "No story," repeated the boy to himself after a very 
 long pause, in which his brain was working. " I expect 
 it's true enough, though. Look here, Poppeli," he said, 
 ' ' you will do what the man who made the book did you 
 will go away, and you will spoil." 
 
 Linda began to grow very drowsy as she sat with Basil 
 by the table. He, too, was quiet. He had worked all day 
 and all the week ; to-morrow at dawn he would be working 
 just as hard again. He liked to rest and to have Linda 
 near him on the bench outside the door. The sky was 
 
100 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 green and yellow in the west, and the snow ridges stood 
 out white against it. In the north a large round purple 
 shadow crept across the dying light of day. 
 
 Then a miracle appeared in the green. A dropping star, 
 and then another and another, till the whole sky seemed 
 full. 
 
 "Look," said Basil, starting from his lethargy and 
 shaking Linda by the arm, " look, for the stars are falling, 
 Poppeli!" 
 
 The child had fallen asleep again. She stood up stiff and 
 stupid. 
 
 " The stars aren't falling," she said. "It's something 
 else. I think I'll go to sleep again. I'm tired." 
 
 "No," said Basil sternly, "best see the sky to-night. 
 Thou 'It never see another such." 
 
 The Senn and the girls from other huts came running 
 down the path. 
 
 " Look," they cried, " the stars are falling." And soon 
 the sky was full of meteorites which shot through the pallid 
 air and disappeared behind the margins of the mountains. 
 Amongst these dying sparks the great stars and the planets 
 one by one emerged, and kept their steadfast course 
 immovable. 
 
 Linda was wide awake now. She danced for joy : 
 
 "Oh, if only the big ones don't fall, too," said the 
 Sennerin. "I've seen them always all my life. Yet 
 surely the dear God won't let them fall from out His sky?" 
 
 " Why do they fall?" asked Linda. 
 
 ' When stars fall, men die," said the Hirt lugubriously. 
 He was a silly old man, and fancied many fables. 
 
 ; ' Die?" said Linda curiously. 
 
 " They die," repeated the Hirt. 
 
 " And the babies are born," said Basil, turning on his 
 heel. 
 
 By ten o'clock the sky was calm again, and the stillness 
 of a summer night had spread across the Alp. Not a sound 
 
ON THE ALP. 101 
 
 was heard. Linda, Basil, and two -biker ^jldrepj were 
 sleeping soundly in the hay, for the night waa hot, and the 
 
 ' ' 
 
 living-house was low and airless. ' Taere was -' ik ,m 
 barn, and a litter of new-mown hay. The small stream 
 trickled down the meadow and gurgled as it passed the 
 dock-leaves. Once or twice, in the dead calm and hush, 
 an owl fluttered out of the pine-wood, and round the fields 
 and back again, but no one heard it. A fox glided over the 
 threshold of the chalet, trailing his brush in silence across 
 the wooden steps. The cows turned in their sleep with a 
 muffled lowing, and Basil rustled the hay in dreams. 
 
 The night wore on. Linda had often slept like this in 
 the hay, for we do not grumble at our beds as children. 
 Once she woke up. The chill of the Alpine night crept 
 over her forehead and fanned her vagrant curls. Half 
 dreaming, she looked round her. She saw large stars 
 through the beams of the hay-loft they shone like moons 
 on the bosom of the sky. They seemed very near to her 
 very round and still. She crept to her knees and looked out 
 into the world of Night . The valley was full of milky mists , 
 which glimmered faintly under the stars ; one single light 
 was burning in a chalet. Linda saw these things as 
 children see them. In themselves they were absolutely 
 natural, but to the child all nature is a miracle, and every 
 object covered by a halo which older eyes may seek in vain 
 to see. She crept back to her hole in the hay, and burrowed 
 deeper into her bed. All the heat of the summer sun which 
 had called this hay-bed into being rose up in the night, and 
 with warm delicious scents and quiet airs it lulled her 
 into dreamless sleep once more. 
 
CHAPTEE VII 
 
 SHADES OF THE PRISON HOUSE 
 
 " Each outcry of the hunted hare 
 A fibre from the brain does tear; 
 A skylark wounded in the wing, 
 A cherubim does cease to sing. 
 * * * * * 
 
 " He who mocks the infant's faith 
 Shall be mocked in age and death. 
 He who shall teach the child to doubt, 
 The rotting grain shall ne'er get out 
 ***** 
 
 " He who respects the infant's faith 
 Triumphs over hell and death." 
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE. 
 
 BASIL got up before the dawn and began to open -the door 
 of the barn. He did not rustle the hay about ; he was calm 
 and quiet in his movements. But before he passed out into 
 the starlight he paused a minute to look at Linda, who was 
 still sleeping, deeply buried in the hay. One small brown 
 hand was round her chin, a cool and dimpled thing which 
 seemed to hold some hidden force, even in her dreams. 
 Almost unconsciously the boy bent down and touched it 
 with his finger-tips, and he felt the sweet slow breath of 
 the little girl upon his cheek. She did not move or sigh ; 
 she slept on quietly, and the boy went into the meadows 
 and the dew, closing the door behind him. 
 
 Basil went into the starlight, but he saw that the dawn 
 had already come and was creeping up through the dark- 
 ness just a faint tinge of white in the eastern blackness, 
 a thing as slight as the pallor on a young girl's cheeks when 
 first her lover kisses her. The boy put on his boots and 
 
 102 
 
SHADES OF THE PRISON HOUSE 103 
 
 lighted his lanthorn ; then he went over the fields and into 
 the cowshed. The Senn was up and moving about the 
 milking pails. He was a middle-aged man, and he looked 
 like a battered mummy, for the dawn does not become old 
 faces, and it is only the bloom of youth which can endure its 
 bruises. The Senn grunted when Basil came in, and the 
 boy took one of the clean pails and went across to the 
 stables. 
 
 Already in this short time the dawn had spread, and had 
 caressed with rosy fingers some filmy haze which clung 
 about the ridges of the western mountains. Basil went into 
 the stables. The air inside was thick and heavy, and full of 
 the breath of the cows. But the dawn outside was chill, and 
 Basil snuffed the heated atmosphere with a peculiar sense of 
 pleasure. He kicked the first cow, calling her by her name, 
 Brunhilda, and the big beast threw up her haunches and 
 arose from her knees ; then Basil put down his lanthorn , 
 and taking a stool, he began to milk her. When he had 
 finished, he untied the string which hung from the ceiling 
 and was bound about her tail, and he turned her into the 
 open air. Then he went back to milk the other cows. 
 Brunhilda stood for a minute as though benumbed by the 
 freshness of the morning, then she kicked out clumsily, 
 and went off down the narrow footpath to the lake. She 
 stayed to rub her nose amongst the grass and nettles which 
 were bowed with dew against the fence, and then she joined 
 some cows who were coming from another stable farther 
 up the Alp, and they went together to drink at the wooden 
 trough. Some small boys, a flock of goats, and more cows 
 joined the procession, and slowly they wound together up 
 the mountain-side. 
 
 The dawn again had spread. The sky and the earth 
 were flooded with cold light. Linda awoke from dreams 
 and came out into the sunrise a warm, delicious ball of 
 hair, and hay, and homespun, tumbling, half-awakened, 
 into the morning dews. She ran along the path in the 
 fields, brushing the heavy dew from the meadow-flowers, 
 
104 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 and slipping on the soaking sods of the earth. The world 
 was quite a different world from that of yesterday ; the birds 
 were no longer afraid of her, and the coloured flowers were 
 dead asleep and barely visible. 
 
 " What are the white flowers?" she said to the Hirt as 
 she passed him. 
 
 " There are more white flowers at dawn than at any 
 other time," said the silly old man: "I have often re- 
 marked it." In one way he was right, for the flowers of 
 the bladder campion and of the ox-eye daisy shine with a 
 wonderful and almost phosphorescent clearness in the dawn. 
 
 Linda went into the chalet where Basil's aunt was cook- 
 ing the breakfast. "Aunt Elizabeth," she cried, "they 
 are all white flowers outside." 
 
 The old lady was not in a very good humour. ' ' There is 
 no time to waste on flowers," she said. She pulled down 
 Linda's hair and began to comb it with a large coarse comb 
 belonging to the house. She plaited it into two tight 
 plaits, pinned them in a crown round the little girl's head, 
 and, giving her a towel, told her to go to the lake and to 
 wash her face. So Linda went down to the lake, and 
 dipped her face and hands in the freezing water ; she played 
 a little with the crisp sand about its margin ; then she came 
 back to the meadows and entered the stables. She was 
 cool and damp ; her eyes were dancing with their usual joy 
 in life, yet it was barely five o'clock. 
 
 Basil watched her as he milked his cows. He was young 
 himself, and a little proud of the responsibilities of life. 
 
 " So it's you !" he said. 
 
 "Yes," answered the child. "It's me." This was 
 their usual form of greeting a sort of opening challenge. 
 
 Linda went on : "I woke up in the night and you didn't. 
 I saw you asleep. I got up and I looked at the sky ; and 
 the stars were as big as the moon." She stood in the door- 
 way, kicking the step with the iron point of her boot. She 
 would never have confessed it, but the smell of the stables 
 choked her. 
 
SHADES OF THE PEISON HOUSE 105 
 
 " Have some milk," said Basil. 
 
 Then the child went to him, and put her lips to the 
 wooden bowl from which he blew aside the froth. The 
 milk was warm and very sweet, and Basil gave her a crust 
 of bread " to help it down," he said. Basil himself did 
 not drink milk indeed, he rather despised it, apart from 
 its purely mercantile properties. He milked the last cow, 
 and stood in the doorway to watch her join her comrades 
 on the path. The boy looked hot and dusty, his thick hair 
 fell in tufts across his heavy brows, his hands were cold 
 and clammy with the milking, and he went to the lake to 
 wash his face. When he came back he, too, was clean and 
 cool. His brown skin had a soft red flush, and he had 
 stuck a bunch of flowers in his hat. 
 
 They all sat down to coffee in the living-room. The sun 
 had touched the mountain-tops and was slowly spreading 
 down their sides to fill the valleys ; the larches on the Alp 
 shone like a shimmer of spun glass. The first rays fell 
 upon the campion-flowers in the meadow ; already they 
 looked less white. 
 
 "Come," said Basil, "it's time to be going." He 
 strapped the heavy pail of milk across his back, took his 
 stick, and went along the path which led to the valley, 
 Linda running beside him. 
 
 Linda did not look back to the Alp. She felt so sure 
 that she would come again, for children have unbounded 
 faith in the continuance of joy a faith so large they 
 rarely stop to think about it. The valley was still in 
 shadow, but the sun was full on the meadow where they 
 walked, and the flowers were shaking off the dew and filling 
 the air with the scent of all their pent-up honey-bags. 
 
 They passed through the fields and into the pine-woods 
 where the gentians grew, and then they came into the 
 valley and joined the post-road. 
 
 By nine o'clock they were back in the village street. 
 
 As the children passed the door of the inn a party of 
 
106 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 English people came out and followed them talking. They 
 were Linda's relations, but she did not recognize them. 
 Mrs. James was there, and her husband, and her eldest 
 daughter and son. Mrs. James was congratulating herself 
 upon being up so early in the morning. " But, of course," 
 she added brightly, " it is so easy to be called early abroad ; 
 the breakfast is so small, 'the servants have so little to 
 prepare." 
 
 " Yes," said her husband, " a cup of caf noir, a roll, 
 some honey." 
 
 "I don't like abroad," said the boy. "Such rotten 
 beds as they give one. What weird children, too," he 
 added " just look at them." 
 
 Susan looked. " They are only poor people's children," 
 she said, by way of explanation. 
 
 Susan had pale straw-coloured hair plaited low on her 
 neck. She wore a skirt and a coat, and a small sailor hat 
 cocked over her sunless eyes. Hers was a common type, 
 one which is usually clean and dull and rather faultless, but 
 closed to impressions, uninterested and uninteresting. 
 
 As the party walked over the cobble-stones of the village 
 street the dust seemed to fly away from them, for they 
 themselves were so very clean and polished. 
 
 But the peasant-children went their way covered with 
 little bits of hay, and the pollen of the flowers powdered 
 their hair and deepened the tan on their sunburned cheeks. 
 
 Christina looked up from her sewing as Linda entered 
 the room. 
 
 " Ah, Poppeli, I am glad you have come back," she said, 
 " we were afraid you might forget and stay up on the Alp." 
 
 Linda had climbed to her seat on the ladder. ' ' What 
 are the clothes?" she inquired, and pointed to a pile of 
 linen which lay on the floor beside an open trunk. 
 
 " They are your clothes, Poppeli. Have you forgotten 
 that you are going to England?" 
 
 There was a pause. Then Linda got down from the 
 
SHADES OF THE PRISON HOUSE 107 
 
 ladder and stood in the middle of 'the floor. " I have not 
 forgotten," she said in an impressive voice, "but I have 
 decided that I will not go to England. Basil says that 
 it's a bad place to go to, and so I will stay in Trins. I 
 will stay with thee, little aunt," she added more mildly, but 
 not less firmly. 
 
 Some shadows crossed the sunlight by the window, and 
 some low English voices sounded at the door. 
 
 "Who are the people?" asked Linda. 
 
 " Your people," answered Christina, and she got up and 
 went to open the door. 
 
 Then a strange dumb sorrow crept into the heart of the 
 child, for even babies have wide and terrible perceptions, 
 and one had dawned on her. She went back to her ladder ; 
 she climbed to the topmost rung, and there she perched 
 herself, all stiff and quiet, like a little owl at bay. 
 
 Her English relations came into the room and looked at 
 her very kindly. 
 
 "Poppeli," said her Aunt Christina, "Poppeli, dear, 
 come down. Your aunt is here, and your cousins and your 
 uncle. Won't you speak to them?" 
 
 But Linda said nothing. Her eyes were open wide 
 she had settled not to cry. 
 
 " Poor little girl !" said Mrs. James. " We must have 
 frightened her. We are dressed, you see, so very differ- 
 ently from her people," she added gently, turning to her 
 husband. 
 
 Mr. James was tall and handsome. He had a dark skin 
 and dark, smooth hair. It was very well brushed, and it 
 gave him that air of superior cleanliness and distinction 
 peculiar to Englishmen of a certain breeding. 
 
 ' Yes, my dear," he said in a quiet voice, " I understand. 
 In the meantime, as Linda is coming to live with us, she 
 had better begin to obey us," and he approached the ladder 
 in order to lift the child down. He took her in his arms, 
 not at all unkindly, and he put her on the floor beside his 
 wife. Linda had allowed herself to be lifted in that stiff, 
 
108 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 imperturbable way which children sometimes do affect. 
 She now uncurled herself mechanically, and mechanically 
 she returned to her ladder. At that minute Basil came 
 into the room. Instinctively he realized the situation, and 
 he went up the ladder. 
 
 " Linda," he said severely, and Linda looked up. The 
 familiar voice seemed to melt her, and she began to sob. 
 
 "Don't," suggested the hobbledehoy, "it's no use to 
 cry. When you are a woman, it will not matter a bit. 
 People like this don't signify they come and they go." 
 He spoke in the broadest dialect, and it was not possible 
 for Linda ' s relations to understand him . But Linda under- 
 stood him. 
 
 "I'll not go away with them," she burst out passion- 
 ately, "I think I hate them. They are so clean, and they 
 stare . . . and, oh ! I don't want them, and I can't go 
 with them. I hate them," she repeated, " they are all of 
 them ugly." Her uncle caught the last words, which 
 Linda, from pure wilfulness, had spoken in English, and 
 he understood them. 
 
 " Hate is rather a strong word," he said severely, and 
 Linda was frightened by him, and for the time subdued. 
 
 An hour later she took her aunt's hand and led her round 
 the house and through the village. As she passed her 
 peasant friends they stared at her ; some of them smiled. 
 
 It is sad that even little children should be oppressed by 
 " position." Child as Linda was, she realized the incon- 
 gruous, and it hurt her genial spirit. She went to her 
 aunt's fine rooms in the inn, and she ate some lunch there. 
 Her cousins said that her fingers were thumbs, but her 
 knowledge of their language was limited, and she was too 
 simple to realize their foolish idioms. She sat on a velvet 
 chair, very stiff and hot, and oppressed by the July after- 
 noon, the heat of which all her new relations deplored. 
 Linda had never minded the heat of summer afternoons 
 before, she had never thought of them in the village of 
 Trins, and already the aspect of her life seemed changed. 
 
SHADES OF THE PRISON HOUSE 109 
 
 But youth is elastic. The ways of her English relations 
 were novel, likewise their dresses, their meals, and their 
 half-packed belongings ; the lady's maid called her " little 
 miss," the courier lifted her into a higher seat, and her 
 uncle gave her chocolates and pulled at her long pigtails. 
 There was all that atmosphere of ease and riches which 
 surrounds the possessors of a certain number of thousands a 
 year, and Linda, as I have said before, was rather fond of 
 ease and riches and magnificence of every kind. 
 
 " I expect I'll go home," she said at three o'clock, " I 
 promised to go to coffee with Basil, and Father will be 
 coming home soon after." 
 
 ' ' Coffee ! ' ' said her aunt in astonishment , "I should 
 have thought milk would be nicer for you, darling. Well, 
 dear, Shrew can take you down the street." 
 
 The child looked up at the agreeable lady with a round- 
 eyed wonder. 
 
 " Down the street?" she repeated. 
 
 " My dear little girl, you mustn't run about alone." 
 
 " Mustn't?" said Linda. " Oh, I I do as I like all 
 things which I like and which don't harm, I do," and 
 she proceeded with determination towards the door. 
 
 " Linda," said her aunt severely, " little girls have to 
 learn to do not as they like, but what they are told to do by 
 others." 
 
 A strange puzzled look crept into the eyes of the child. 
 Her lips quivered and she dropped the handle of the door. 
 " Oh," she said, "I didn't do no harm." 
 
 Then her cousin Dudley looked up from a book he had 
 been reading. " Shrew's an ass," he said, "but I'll go 
 with you. Such a fuss!" he exclaimed good-naturedly, 
 pushing her before him into the passage. 
 
 Once in the street, Linda began to run, and she never 
 stopped running till she got to Basil's home. The English 
 boy naturally did not follow her. He whistled, and then 
 he sauntered away in the heated air up the village street. 
 
 If Susan was a typical English girl of the uninteresting 
 
110 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 sort, Dudley was a 'typical English boy of the best and nicest 
 sort. There was something honest, frank, and upright 
 about him. He was just in his teens a stripling with a 
 fair clear skin which flushed and freckled easily. He had 
 charming blue eyes, and that engaging, guileless expres- 
 sion which is really a mask, and defies the analysis of the 
 schoolmaster. At school he carried most things before 
 him that is to say, most sports, for he had a very healthy 
 objection to books, and fought shy of the bookworms in his 
 house. Dudley looked glorious in the cricket-field, his 
 thick yellow hair cropped tight to his bullet-like head ; and 
 he looked angelic in his evening clothes at a party at home. 
 He was bored by his elder sister, and yet he never went fur- 
 ther than to patronize her. As I have said before, he was 
 one of the only things -that Linda remembered from her 
 last English visit ; and on this trying day he was again the 
 one and only golden spot to the imaginative child. Natur- 
 ally enough Dudley James considered the whole Swiss 
 alliance a " rum arrangement," but it was not in his nature 
 to dissect events, or to bother his head about unnecessary 
 enigmas. 
 
 He watched Linda run down the street ; then he turned 
 on his heel and went back to the inn and his people. 
 
 Linda stood breathless in the doorway of the Emperor's 
 house : 
 
 "Basil! Basil!" she called, but no one answered. So 
 she crossed the passage and entered the big room. Basil 
 was there, lying on his back along the bench by the stove ; 
 one of his small sisters sat bolt upright between his legs, 
 the other pretended his head was a cat and stroked his 
 abundant hair. Linda said nothing ; she was horribly out 
 of spirits. She crept up on to his knees, but being heavier 
 than the small child she displaced, she oppressed the over- 
 worked Basil. 
 
 " What do you want?" he asked, getting up. 
 
 " I don't know," she said drearily. 
 
HADES OF THE PRISON HOUSE 111 
 
 ' ' You had better know," answered the boy in an oracular 
 tone of voice. 
 
 " I don't want to go," she said. 
 
 " I can't help thee stay," he answered. 
 
 Linda jumped to the floor in a sudden passion. " And 
 if thou couldst, thou'dst not do it. And if thou didst, I'd 
 go." She flashed her eyes upon him, standing stiff and 
 furious upon the floor. Then she ran out of the room. 
 
 As soon as she was gone Basil got up from his bench 
 by the stove, for he himself felt hot and discontented. A 
 doubt and a trouble had clouded his eyes, and he looked 
 at the world with a feeling which was almost approaching 
 to envy. He did not hurry himself, however, he was much 
 too well accustomed to his game for that, but he went to 
 the porch and walked down slowly into the garden. Some- 
 thing was moving under the currant-bushes ; a long plait 
 of hair had caught in the stems. 
 
 " I don't care, and I don't care," said Linda, pulling the 
 plait with rage and defiance. Tears were in her eyes, but 
 her lips were stained with currants. "I'll go, but I'll 
 never come back. I'll have other berries when I get 
 there big red berries, soft ones. Thy berries are sour I 
 hate them!" 
 
 " But you eat them," said Basil heavily ; and his father, 
 the Emperor, who was working in the garden, smiled in a 
 sinister manner, for he was a sly old man, and had long 
 looked into the future of this little hybrid girl. 
 
 Late that evening the doctor came back from a visit he 
 had had to pay in a neighbouring village. He called at 
 the inn and spoke to his English relations. It was night 
 when he reached his own home, and his little girl had gone 
 to bed. The doctor's heart was heavy. In many ways he 
 felt uncertain about the step he now was taking, but he 
 remembered his dead wife's wishes, and that this English 
 visit was only an experiment ; and then he went up to 
 Linda's room and, taking her out of her bed, he held her on 
 
112 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 his knees and spoke to her seriously. Linda hated a scene ; 
 she dreaded tears or sorrow, or pain of any description ; and 
 she saw that her father was in pain she saw he had been 
 weeping. 
 
 " I want you to try and listen to me," said the doctor. 
 "I want you to remember what I tell you to-night. You 
 are going a long way from me. When you are away you 
 must be just as good as you can be, and just as kind, and 
 just as happy. Listen to what your Uncle Sebastian says 
 to you. He is a good man. But do not forget your home. 
 My child, remember that your old home is better than any 
 new home can ever be, and that the people in it love you 
 best. Come back to your old home gladly. Your mother 
 loved it too. It is the best." 
 
 Then the doctor, who was outwardly an unemotional and 
 unromantic man, took his child to the open window and 
 showed her the stars which shone in the summer sky. 
 
 " Look, Linda," he said gently, "the Universe is 
 immense. It all belongs to God, and so do you. Remember 
 that, and try to be happy and to be good. God bless you." 
 He kissed her long and reverently. Then he went down to 
 his study and buried his head in his hands ; a little later his 
 old mother brought her knitting and came and sat by her 
 son in utter silence ; and as she sat, the tears rolled slowly 
 over her hard old face, for she knew that the doctor's pain 
 was pain of the future, and that coming pains are worse to 
 bear than present or than past ones. 
 
 Early next morning that is to say, at eight o'clock 
 the James family began to get itself into motion. English 
 families of this type in those now distant days were not 
 rapid in their movements. They carried abroad with them 
 many things they did not want, and of which they never 
 ceased to lament that they had not brought even more with 
 them. Even their courier, who one would imagine would 
 have been likely to assist them in the one thing he was paid 
 to perform, failed at the outset ; for the courier was 
 
SHADES OF THE PRISON HOUSE 113 
 
 " foreign," and 'the Englishman despises foreigners. The 
 bags, the boxes, the bills, the arrival of letters and the 
 papers those thousand and one things which have nothing 
 to do with what the traveller had professedly come to see, 
 made his travels a disillusion rather than a pleasure to him. 
 
 Linda, whose modest trunk had long been packed and 
 who was accustomed to far earlier hours, stood in the street 
 with her father and her aunt, and looked upon all these 
 preparations with a feeling which almost amounted to awe , 
 for she herself was so small, so tight, and so composed a part 
 of the huge stage scenery of the mountains, rather than of 
 the puppets who were playing in the theatre of Trins that 
 July morning. A magnificent picture-book, some choco- 
 lates, and a beautiful new cloak had done much to dissipate 
 her horror of the coming change in her surroundings. 
 Childlike, she was preparing to be happy with her novel 
 life and people; and so, when the time came to leave, she 
 clambered into her seat in the big post-carriage with fewer 
 tears and regrets than might have been expected or wished 
 from her. She was determined not to cry if she could 
 possibly avoid so doing. 
 
 Basil had been picking cherries in his father's orchard 
 over the way. He wrapped some of the fruit in a dockleaf 
 and brought them to Linda. She threw up her head, bit 
 her lip, and looked her boy-friend full in the face. Her 
 father and Christina made way for Basil ; there was some- 
 thing dignified and impressive about the peasant-boy. He 
 paid not the slightest attention to it is doubtful whether he 
 even noticed the rest of the party. These English people 
 were infinitely insignificant to-the son of the Emperor. 
 
 " Does he ever brush his hair?" said Susan, moving 
 aside impatiently. 
 
 "I don't think he can very often, dear," answered her 
 mother more kindly. 
 
 Basil did not hear them : " Good-bye, Poppeli," he said. 
 " Come back soon," and he dropped her hand and turned 
 away with that look of puzzled melancholy which may 
 
 8 
 
114 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 almost be taken for divination on the brow of growing 
 children. 
 
 Dudley in the meantime had climbed to the box of the 
 carriage. He was bored by the fuss of his family by a 
 fuss of preparations which some twenty years hence he 
 would himself be the first to inaugurate. Dudley wore a 
 Norfolk jacket, a straw hat, and long grey flannel trousers. 
 He had a strong silver watch and chain and several knives 
 in his pocket ; also a spare cartridge or two, for those made 
 him feel especially comfortable. He was very well dis- 
 ciplined by his home-life ; but , as I have said , he was 
 bored, and so he took the postilion's whip and began to 
 flick the horses ; but seeing that they were Swiss horses, 
 stolid and sleek and unemotional, he tried flicking some- 
 thing else the weeds in the gutter, the wall of the nearest 
 house and, as ill-luck would have it, the lash found its 
 way to Basil's cheek. The Swiss boy turned. 
 
 "A curse on thee!" he said roughly, and making a 
 sudden move towards the box of the carriage. But the 
 natural slowness of action, perhaps the remembrance of 
 the wide contempt in which he held these English people, 
 checked him. He merely turned to Linda. 
 
 " Take care of that boy, Poppeli," he said, "it's likely 
 that he may some day harm thee." 
 
 Then Basil returned to the cherry-tree, and the big car- 
 riage seemed to heave itself up, to sway a little to one side, 
 and to start at last on the road to Keichenau. As it moved 
 off, Count von Herder came down the steps of the inn with 
 a knapsack on his back ; he was humming a song. The 
 young man's clothes were in rags and he looked a little 
 dissipated, but he knew very well how to travel, and he went 
 from place to place on foot. He said good-bye to his friend 
 the doctor, and something kind about Linda ; and then he 
 sauntered up the village street in the dust of the travelling 
 carriage. 
 
 As the carriage rolled past the Emperor's orchard, a 
 cluster of white heart cherries fell into Linda's lap from a 
 
SHADES OF THE PEISON HOUSE 115 
 
 tree where Basil was sitting, and after them followed an 
 unripe pear w r hich just grazed the cheek of the boy on 
 the box. 
 
 "Shameless boy!" yelled Linda, jumping from her 
 cushion and trampling on her uncle's feet triumphantly. 
 
 Dudley caught the pear and passed it on to Linda. " I 
 suppose your friend there meant this for you," he said. 
 
 "It's likely!" exclaimed Linda, snorting with scorn. 
 "No, Basil doesn't give me sour pears. He sent it at you 
 because he doesn't like you, and because you knocked him 
 with your whip." 
 
 A look of bewilderment rather than of anger came over 
 Dudley's face, but he said nothing more, and the pear went 
 into the side of the hedge. 
 
 Linda's uncle laid a firm hand on her shoulder. 
 
 ' ' Sit down," he said slowly. The language of the child, 
 the general uncontrolled, yet collected manner which she 
 assumed distressed him. He took out his Baedeker and 
 began to study "routes." 
 
 " You had better put on your gloves, and rest," said 
 Linda's aunt, attempting to assume the reins of control. 
 "Do not eat those cherries. They are not ripe." 
 
 Susan took away the dockleaf from the child's lap, and 
 put it in a certain string-bag which she habitually carried 
 for reasons best known to her Creator. 
 
 " Oh ! Oh ! Oh !" said the little Swiss girl, and the car- 
 riage sent the dust up into her large inquiring eyes, which 
 now were filled with tears. 
 
 The sun shone fiercely. There was no single cloud in all 
 the sky, but Poppeli saw no light. Surely, surely, this was 
 not the road to Reichenau? Yet she thought she knew it 
 all by heart ! All through the summer months she had 
 driven up and down it with her father ; sitting by him on 
 his ragged little gig, she could count the convolvulus and 
 spot the lizards in the hedgerow ; and in winter she went 
 with the schoolchildren up and down it with her sledge, 
 
116 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 the keen air whistling through her hair, the whole world, 
 the entire sky, her own. 
 
 A pair of spun silk gloves, the presence of a Baedeker, 
 an expensive coach, a courier and maid what trifles these 
 things are which change for us, in childhood, the aspect of 
 the Universe ! 
 
 At Keichenau they stayed to lunch. The garden repre- 
 sented fairyland to Linda. Her uncle said it was not at all 
 " badly laid out," but the lawn was a " disgrace." Linda 
 had thought the Keichenau lawn to be like the paths of 
 heaven. She knew the landlady the impassive Pallas 
 Athene whom many tourists must have admired. Linda 
 worshipped the splendid, queen-like woman, and shyly 
 climbed up on to her lap when she grew tried of sitting with 
 her new relations at the table. 
 
 " Get down," said Susan as she might have said to her 
 brother's terrier. " How can you allow her to sit on the 
 landlady's lap?" she asked her mother. 
 
 Pallas Athene was wiser than Susan. She gently kissed 
 the puzzled child, and putting her away from her, she left 
 the room. 
 
 Towards four in the afternoon the family drove into Chur. 
 They had calculated with great nicety the hour of their tea. 
 The cool shades of evening crept over the valley of the 
 Ehine, and Todi and the mountains of the Oberland shone 
 like Olympus at a later hour. 
 
 " What a quaint little place it is !" said Linda's aunt. 
 " So nice and simple. One does not want any history in it. 
 The Swiss are so uneventful," and the little lady smiled at 
 her wit, forgetting, or more probably never having heard, 
 that very few cities, great or small, have had a longer or a 
 more tempestuous history than this little old town of Chur, 
 so peacefully snuggled nowadays beneath its hills and vine- 
 yards. 
 
 Linda's eyes were dilating at the sight of the shops, the 
 
SHADES OF THE PEISON HOUSE 117 
 
 bridges, and the people. For, after all, things are only big 
 and interesting by comparison ; and this was her father's 
 and her own particular metropolis. They came down some- 
 times for the day, and for weeks afterwards the child would 
 describe and be dazzled by all she had seen and done there. 
 
 Tea came in at five o'clock. Linda had found a seat on 
 the balcony of the hotel, and had been sitting there a long 
 time quite contentedly, rubbing her lips up and down the 
 cool black railing as she watched the carriages, the post, the 
 tourists, come and go below her in the street. When tea 
 was over she returned to her seat ; she was so dignified, so 
 much her own mistress, that for the minute they did not 
 attempt to interfere with her proceedings. She saw her 
 uncle and her cousin go out of the inn and cross the road. 
 Dudley looked to her better than the other tourists like 
 a beautiful god-like human being and Linda wished they 
 had taken her with them. 
 
 The days are very long in July, but even in long July 
 days Linda was accustomed to see something of the night. 
 Indeed, she had no particular bedtime ; the seasons and her 
 inclinations ruled her surplus hours. Great was her sur- 
 prise, therefore, at six o'clock, to hear her aunt calling her 
 into the room again to bid her " good-night," and to find 
 herself consigned to the care of Mrs. Shrew, who took her 
 hand to lead her from the room. 
 
 ' Where are we going?" she asked in the doorway. 
 
 "To bed, miss," said the shrivelled Englishwoman. 
 
 " To bed?" repeated the child ; then she ran back into 
 the room. "It's the time I go walking with father," she 
 said, standing straight by her aunt's chair. And then the 
 tears came into her eyes and slowly, slowly they ran down 
 her cheeks, and there was a pain in her throat more painful 
 than any pain she had ever felt in all her life before. But 
 her aunt only looked a little annoyed and astonished. 
 
 " Linda," she said, " when you are told to go to bed, you 
 must go. When you are a big girl you may sit up later. 
 You are tired after the journey, and to-morrow is Sunday. 
 
118 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 Go, dear." And she gave her a kiss and took up the piece 
 of embroidery which was lying on the table beside her. 
 
 Through the whole of her future life Linda remembered 
 that moment, that kiss, that work. There are minutes in 
 all our lives which are like great glittering seas of revela- 
 tions, and, strange as it is, these minutes are oftenest the 
 minutes of disillusionment, and not of anguish, of passion, 
 or of joy. Linda was disillusioned disillusioned in she 
 knew not what, but we who look on at her, we, I think, can 
 understand. 
 
 Mechanically the child put out her hand and touched her 
 aunt's work. It was a bit of thick white satin. There 
 were stiff salmon-coloured roses with golden thorns em- 
 broidered round the initials of Christ, and the initials were 
 set in hard gold rays. 
 
 "It's very ugly," said Linda, " and the roses are dead 
 roses." 
 
 Those were the very early " artistic " days, and we know 
 better now, and do much better, too ; but in spite of Linda 
 the effort at beauty was in a right direction. Linda saw 
 very well that her aunt's embroidery represented roses ; but 
 how should she see that to be what is falsely called 
 ' ' artistic ' ' was to kill the glowing glories of Nature ; and 
 that to work a red rose with salmon and livid threads was 
 thought to be an art more perfect than that of simply 
 imitating the joyous colour of the flower ? 
 
 The pretty lady gasped : "Linda," she said as severely 
 as she could, " I told you you were to go to bed." 
 
 ' What are the letters?" persisted the child, pointing to 
 the initials ; and a dim recollection of something on the 
 pulpit at home rose up before her eyes. Her aunt gathered 
 her work together : 
 
 " Shrew," she said, " I told you to take Miss Linda to 
 bed. I will come in half an hour and hear her say her 
 prayers." 
 
 Then a sense of the irrevocable came into Linda's soul 
 
SHADES OF THE PEISON HOUSE 119 
 
 and grew there. Silently she put her hand into Mrs. 
 Shrew's, and they went together out of the room and up 
 the stairs. As she walked, the tears rolled on unheeded 
 down her cheeks, and she trod once or twice on her long 
 stiff peasant's frock. 
 
 " Poor little girl !" said the waiter to the chambermaid, 
 and the chambermaid stooped and gave her a kiss ; but Mrs. 
 Shrew went on. 
 
 They went into a room at the top of the house. The 
 window was open wide, and the noise of the river which 
 swirls just under the walls of the Hotel Steinbock came up 
 and echoed against the ceiling. The room felt cool, for 
 it was on the east side of the house. The parquet floor 
 was freshly oiled, the iron bedsteads very smart ; their 
 linen and their coverlets were very much finer than any 
 Linda could remember. The English maid, with the con- 
 servative customs peculiar to her nation, had drawn a table 
 near the window. She had even arranged a mirror there 
 to block the view. 
 
 " Take off your frock, my dear," she said, and whilst the 
 child obeyed her, she went to the window and shut it ; then 
 she drew the muslin curtain tight across it. What, after 
 all, did Mrs. Shrew care for the after-glow on Calanda? 
 She had unpacked Linda's trunk, and taken out the comb 
 and bristle brush. She now rubbed them with a clean 
 towel, and told the child to sit down by the table. The 
 English maid gave a little snort as she pulled out the coarse 
 steel pins which bound the child's magnificent hair, and 
 unknotted the rough braid which held the plaits together. 
 Then she undid the plaits and began to brush and comb it. 
 Linda said nothing all the time. She hated to have her hair 
 brushed. At home they brushed it thoroughly once a 
 week but, then, between home and Mrs. Shrew there was 
 a great gulf fixed ! 
 
 As Mrs. Shrew brushed her face softened : " You've a 
 fine head of hair, miss," she said. At that minute a knock 
 came at the door, and the courier entered with a message. 
 
120 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 He gazed with unfeigned admiration at the little figure in 
 the maid's room ; and indeed it was a pretty picture, for the 
 splendid brown hair fell down in a great mass from her head 
 almost to the floor, and her little brown neck and arms 
 showed round and smooth against her coarse white shift. 
 The courier came forward. 
 
 " Will you give me a bit of your hair, miss?" he said to 
 tease her. She was very tired ; the man spoke a foreign 
 English worse than her own, and she did not understand 
 him ; but she put up her face and let him kiss her, and at 
 that instant her cousin Susan came into the room : 
 
 " Linda," she said, " how can you !" and her face was 
 so dead, so sour, that the courier beat a hasty retreat, and 
 Linda began to cry again unconsciously, hopelessly, for it 
 is very hard for babies to learn a new code of morals. 
 
 " Mamma cannot come to hear you say your prayers," 
 the young lady continued in her passionless voice, " You 
 must say them to me." 
 
 Linda had only one prayer the Lord's Prayer and she 
 said it in German. When her hair was plaited up, she ran 
 to the bedside and knelt there. 
 
 ' You are to say your prayers to me," said Susan. 
 
 " It's God I say it to," said Linda. 
 
 " I told you to say them to me," repeated her cousin. 
 
 Then the child got up. She was tired now, but she 
 stopped to stretch her toes on the cool parquet floor, before 
 she knelt down by Susan and hurried through the well- 
 known words. 
 
 "Go on," said Susan. 
 
 "Where?" said the child. 
 
 " I told you to say your prayers." 
 
 " I did," said Linda. 
 
 ' You must not tell lies ; you said one prayer." 
 
 " It's enough. Father told me it was enough. He said 
 that it was the only one Jesus told them to pray." And 
 here the strain of the day bore down upon her, and Linda 
 lifted her voice and howled one of those long, low howls 
 
SHADES OF THE PEISON HOUSE 121 
 
 which lonely puppies howl when they have been taken from 
 their mothers and locked the first night in some unknown, 
 unloved barn. Susan was disconcerted ; she was not accus- 
 tomed to children, and she had not intended to be unkind. 
 But Mrs. Shrew gathered the poor brown baby in her arms, 
 sat down in the velvet chair, and cuddled her and tried to 
 calm her. 
 
 " Oh, I want to get home, I want to get home," gasped 
 the child. "I didn't mean no harm. It was father's 
 prayer ; he taught it me. I want home." And instead of 
 growing smaller, the pain increased. She felt like dying 
 she hoped to die. Presently Mrs. Shrew disengaged her- 
 self. She drew a clean white nightgown over the little 
 quivering body, and then she put it into one of the soft 
 white beds, and in a cracked and ugly voice she sang the 
 best lullaby she knew one of those dreary servants' hall 
 songs, called " Jo and his Dinah." And down below the 
 window the familiar stream went swirling by, till the child's 
 brain throbbed itself at last into an unquiet and unhomely 
 sleep. 
 
 Once she woke up ; that was when Shrew came up from 
 her dinner. Mrs. Shrew had brought some raisins and a 
 gingerbread from the table, and she put them by the child's 
 side and smoothed her ruffled hair. The moonlight was 
 pouring in across the floor, and the music of the river 
 sounded soft through the closed window. Linda turned 
 over to the other side, and soon her breath came soft and 
 regular as she went into the land which it is given us to 
 enter only fully in our childhood the land of dreamless and 
 untroubled sleep. 
 
CHAPTEK VIII 
 
 THE LITTLE WHITE PILLAR 
 
 WHEN Linda woke up she was frightened to see the sun 
 already shining full upon her bed. She was accustomed 
 to rise soon after daylight at home, and even then she 
 always found that her aunt was working in the kitchen, 
 and her father often at his books or starting down the road 
 to Reichenau. She began to pull on her stockings, and 
 as she did so she watched with a sort of dumb triumph and 
 revolt the sleeping figure of her companion. Mrs. Shrew 
 was lying on her back ; some strings of grizzled hair had 
 strayed across her forehead ; she looked like a thing which 
 was done with " finished up " somehow, and very stupid, 
 too. The small child did not like her, but some instinct 
 warned her not to wake her, and so she dressed in silence. 
 She put on her frock, but her boots had gone to be cleaned, 
 so she simply pulled off her stockings again ; for she loved to 
 walk out barefoot. Then she found that her hair was all 
 unplaited, and at home it was always comparatively tidy 
 in the morning when she chose to rise and go abroad, for 
 people do not unplait their hair at night in good old peasant 
 homes. Linda was too young to know how to plait it her- 
 self, but she took a hairpin or two and managed to roll it 
 under her hat on the top of her head. Then she walked 
 into the passage. As it happened, the place was almost 
 deserted, for it was barely six o'clock. A porter was brush- 
 ing the steps. He wondered at the strange little figure 
 which passed him into the street with a shy Swiss greeting, 
 but he made no attempt to stop her, for she seemed to 
 belong to her surroundings. Linda was not sure what she 
 
 122 
 
THE LITTLE WHITE PILLAR 123 
 
 should do, now that she found herself out of doors in a 
 strange place, but it did not occur to her that there was any 
 sort of harm in being there. The air was fresh and cool, 
 the sunlight shone across the hills, and the river went 
 rushing splendidly under the bridge by the roadside. Then 
 Linda remembered the big church upon the hill which she 
 had sometimes visited with her father. Turning round, 
 she saw it right above her, and determined at once to go 
 there. She started running, and as she ran her hair came 
 down and her hat came off, so she slung it over her arm. 
 She felt very happy and rather excited. She shook her 
 head, and when she got out of breath she ran more 
 slowly ; but a vague idea that something would interrupt 
 this wonderful escapade decided her to keep on running. 
 She went through the market-place, and up the streets 
 under the town wall, and under the turrets, and suddenly 
 she found herself face to face with the stately pile of the 
 Chur Cathedral. There was something forbidding and 
 immense about it ; she felt a little frightened as she looked, 
 then she began to wonder how she would get inside and be 
 able to see the painted screen with the saints upon it. The 
 bell was ringing, a few people were passing in at the door, 
 and some small boys were rubbing their hands up and down 
 the faces of the Lombard lions which guard it. 
 
 At that minute a shadow came up behind her, and a 
 kind voice in her ear said, laughing : 
 
 " So you've escaped, have you?" 
 
 When Linda looked round, she recognized the figure of 
 Count von Herder, who had left Trins the same morning 
 as herself. Linda was rather afraid of the wild young man , 
 but she liked him, and he used often to come to see her 
 father in the evening, for he was out of health. He drank 
 a great deal of beer and sang wild songs. Christina often 
 left the room when he came, and the village girls whispered 
 as he passed them at their work ; sometimes he kissed them 
 if he could manage it. He used to play on the violin, and 
 then even Christina came in to listen, because the music 
 
124 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 which he made was often sad or purely gay, like the 
 voices of little children who cry and laugh. It was not 
 wild or curious, like his talk. 
 
 ' Yes, it's me," answered Linda. 
 
 " Hurry up, hurry up," said the student, taking her hand 
 and running across the square, " you and I must be quick 
 if we want to say our prayers before our English uncle 
 catches us!" And he laughed, a little oddly the child 
 thought ; but she laughed, too, because she was glad to 
 have found some person to talk to. 
 
 When they came into the cathedral the student pushed 
 back his old straw hat, and then he winced, for the choir 
 was singing all out of tune. Linda's eyes were beginning 
 to blaze as they opened on the strange half-heathenish archi- 
 tecture around her. There were some frescoes of hell near 
 where she stood , with a big devil swallowing a little child ; 
 the student passed this picture by, but he stopped to look 
 at a small painting in a wooden panel a little further on, 
 and there was a quiet, almost a humbled look in his blue 
 eyes as they wandered around the dignified old building. 
 
 " Not bad, not bad," he murmured to himself. Then, 
 "Hurry, hurry !" he said to Linda, who wanted to see a 
 hundred things ; and he dragged her on and down to the 
 crypt, reading in his guide-book as he went. At the foot 
 of the steps he stopped , and as he bent forward to examine 
 a small white pillar, a delighted look came into his eyes. 
 There was a garland round the top of this pillar with the 
 heads of oxen at each corner. 
 
 " Here's the beginning of the farce," said the student, 
 " and that picture up above, which you liked so much, my 
 dear, that picture of hell, is the end, as far as we've got to 
 in our limited book of religion." 
 
 His voice was hard. He pulled Linda's small warm 
 hand almost roughly, and pressed it against the pillar in the 
 crypt. 
 
 " Listen <to me," he said, " and never forget what I tell 
 you. This pillar is a pagan pillar a pagan relic do you 
 
THE LITTLE WHITE PILLAB 125 
 
 hear me ? The church is built over it , but the pillar is here , 
 and the pagans are not so very far behind us not so very 
 far in front of us, either. Another picture will be painted, 
 another pillar carved on the top of your picture of hell, but 
 this is primitive and merely human." He took her hand, 
 which now was cooled by contact with the stone, and he 
 pressed it against her forehead. " Do not forget the word," 
 he said, "it may help you. You and I may meet again 
 some day, and then you will remember. Pagan, remem- 
 ber." Then he drew his eager fingers lovingly over the 
 delicate traceries of the marble, he bent his head, and closed 
 his eyes a second. Linda shivered, for the air of the crypt 
 was damp and cold ; and the student was a medical student, 
 and ought to have known better than to keep her there, 
 only he had his reasons. He now hurried her back into 
 the church. 
 
 "Pray," he said, and he put her down on a wooden 
 bench ; she knelt accordingly, but she did not pray. She 
 looked at all the beautiful things on the altar at the saints 
 in their gilded frames, at the strange white steps, and the 
 beautiful vestments of the priests ; and then her eyes rested 
 on a great figure of the crucified Christ, white and terrible 
 and full of wounds, and she remembered the little white 
 pillar, and she wished she were out in some hot hayfield, 
 playing with her village friends, and her feet all smothered 
 in the meadow-flowers. Then she looked at the student ; 
 he had knelt down beside her, his eyes were open, and an 
 expression of indefinable pain, of desire, of restless ennui, 
 was shown there. 
 
 Neither in this place nor yet at Jerusalem . . . " he 
 murmured under his breath, as the priests went out of the 
 choir and into the vestry. " Come, little heart, come," he 
 said. And very gladly, with an intense relief, the child got 
 up and followed him down the church and out through 
 the gate. 
 
 As Count von Herder and the child passed up the street 
 the people turned to stare at them. The young man was 
 
126 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 tall and slender, his hair was almost flaxen, and there was 
 a half-nervous, half-daring look in his blue eyes his eyes 
 were quite peculiarly blue. The top of his face was hand- 
 some, the expression of the eyes reckless; but a keen 
 observer would have told you that there was something 
 wrong about the mouth, and the weakness showed itself 
 distinctly even under the thick beard that he wore at the 
 early age of twenty-two. Whatever his character, how- 
 ever, he knew how to take all animals, and a half-tamed 
 creature like Linda, by storm. He whistled gaily as 
 he strode up the street in the sunlight. 
 
 " Where are we going?" asked Linda. 
 
 " We are going to the one church that never changes," 
 laughed the student, and he pushed open the half-closed 
 gate of the churchyard. Then, as he entered, he took off 
 his hat, which he had not done when he entered the 
 cathedral. 
 
 "I like this," said Linda. 
 
 The student had thrown himself down full length on a 
 patch of green grass by the graves : 
 
 " Of course," he said, " some day you will like it even 
 better. Some day you will see that it is the thing you like 
 best in all the world. It is the stopping of a weary ques- 
 tion for at least a time you will see that, and you will 
 remember me." 
 
 " Why?" said the child, opening her eyes. 
 
 " Because you are you," answered the student, and he 
 looked at her intently an instant as she stood beside him on 
 the grass. " Who gave you those brown eyes?" he asked 
 abruptly. 
 
 "God," she answered, without the smallest hesitation. 
 
 "Take care, take care what you do with your brown 
 eyes," he said. "And now, look at me." He pushed 
 back her splendid uncombed hair, and with something of 
 infinite pain and tenderness he searched the details of her 
 face. "What did I say the pillar was called? the little 
 white pillar down in the church ?' ' 
 
THE LITTLE WHITE PILLAE 127 
 
 " Pagan," she answered, for the word had impressed her. 
 
 ' ' That's right," he said. ' ' Did you ever hear about the 
 nymphs about the hamadryads and fauns and satyrs?" 
 
 "Yes," she said. " But tell me a story." 
 
 She sat down beside him on the grass. Just at her back 
 was a narrow grave wholly choked up with clumps of gor- 
 geous tiger-lilies in full bloom. On a little old grey stone 
 was written this inscription no text, no date, and nothing 
 else to mark it : " Dieser Stein deckt ein edles Herz einen 
 Kopf voll Geist und Heiterkeit." There were flowers on 
 all the graves pinks and blush-roses, sword-grass and sweet 
 williams a brilliant sight of colours. And below the 
 churchyard stood the stately pile of the cathedral ; beyond 
 it, again, the glittering tops of snow-mountains ; and at its 
 feet the sleepy town with the sunlight blazing hotly on its 
 roofs. 
 
 " I can't tell stories," said von Herder, but he took from 
 his pocket a little book it was a copy of ' ' Theocritus ' ' 
 and he slowly translated the idyll of the Cyclops and the 
 fair-haired Galatea. 
 
 " Poor Cyclops !" half sobbed the child when he finished, 
 stuttering over the new word. She was very emotional 
 and easily cried at stories. Then the student began to 
 laugh. "There are other and fairer Galateas," he 
 repeated ; and from his voice it seemed that he knew a very 
 great deal about them. 
 
 The cathedral clock struck nine. 
 
 " I expect your aunt has stirred in her bed," said the 
 student, " and the maid, and the courier, and . . . oh ! my 
 shoes ! what a caravan you form part of, my poor little 
 woman ! ' ' 
 
 And then to Linda it seemed as though a dark cloud 
 had crept over the sun. The tiger-lilies turned to the colour 
 of lemons, the grass and all the flowers drooped. 
 
 "I'll not go back to the clean room," she said, "I'll 
 stay here with thee. They won't mind if I'm with thee ?' ' 
 
128 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 The half-remembered misery of the day before came into 
 her mind and stayed there. 
 
 Once more the student opened his book. 
 
 " Would that my father had taught me the craft of a keeper of 
 
 sheep, 
 For so in the shade of the elm-tree, or under the rocks on 
 
 the steep, 
 Piping on reeds I had sat, and had lulled my sorrow to sleep," 
 
 he read. 
 
 Then he took Linda up on his knees. 
 
 " The brown eyes are brave," he said. His own were 
 full of tears. 
 
 He put her down and led her out of the churchyard , and 
 down the road, through the old streets to the inn. 
 
 Linda's uncle was standing on the doorstep with an 
 anxious look on his face. The look changed to one of annoy- 
 ance when he saw the pair advancing and recognized his 
 niece. 
 
 " Linda," he said very gravely, coming forward to meet 
 her, "do you know that vou have done a very naughty 
 thing?" 
 
 And somehow Linda seemed then to know it well, 
 although before she had not so much as considered the 
 matter. Her uncle turned to the student, and rather stiffly 
 and very curtly, in extremely poor French, he thanked him 
 for the trouble he had taken in bringing back the child. 
 
 "No trouble, no trouble, I assure you," answered the 
 Count in French as pure as the Englishman's was faulty. 
 1 ' Your niece and I have had a most excellent time 
 together," and he turned to go. 
 
 But first he stooped to kiss the now disconsolate Linda. 
 "Do you remember what I told you?" he asked in her ear, 
 and the child said she did ; but her mind was already 
 muddled, and her heart confused by a dead, dumb sense of 
 being in the wrong. 
 
 Linda was sorry to part from her interesting friend, but 
 
THE LITTLE WHITE PILLAR 129 
 
 she was very young, and it never entered her head that they 
 might not meet again. 
 
 As it turned out, they did meet some years later, when 
 love and life had burnt deep and irrevocable brands upon 
 the heart of the one, and when that of the other was just 
 awakening. But for the time they parted somewhat sadly. 
 
 Later in the day Linda, with her hair brushed into glossy 
 waves, came down the stairs with the well-groomed mem- 
 bers of the "caravan." There was to be an English 
 service in the small saloon of the Hotel Steinbock, and 
 fashionable people on their way to the Engadine came 
 stalking in to pray beside their velvet chairs. There was 
 an ugly green-baize table at the end of the room, an im- 
 provised reading desk, and a small harmonium. It was all 
 very middle-class and deadly in its ugliness. Unconsciously 
 Linda looked at the tawdry curtains across the windows, 
 and wondered whether God would ever get through them, 
 or whether, if He did, He would understand the hurried 
 nasal enunciations of the little clergyman or the prescribed 
 prayers of the over-dressed ladies. The day was very hot. 
 Linda had been up a long time, and presently she began to 
 doze, and dozing, she remembered a little white pillar, and 
 she saw a Cyclops sitting in a cave and saying to a nymph 
 some words which the student had said in the cathedral : 
 " Neither in this place nor yet at Jerusalem." She awoke 
 with a start, to find the congregation rising from their 
 chairs. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 CONEYHUEST 
 
 THEEE days later the James family arrived in their own 
 country house of Coney hurst. They always spent three 
 months of the year in this immense and beautiful home. 
 They came to shoot birds there and to eat them ; they came 
 to perambulate garden-paths and vast tracts of greenhouse 
 and of lawn, over which they themselves had really no 
 control. The rest of the year they lived in Sebastian's 
 
 house in the town of B . 
 
 Coneyhurst was in South Wales, but it was a typical 
 English home a house such as Americans and colonists 
 long for in their dreams. The property of Mr. James 
 covered about three thousand acres. The country was 
 barely populated ; rare snug cottages lay smothered here 
 and there, in silent sunny banks of grass and fern. The 
 village of Coneyhurst was just a double row of small stone 
 houses, the church was grey and singularly perfect in its 
 outline, and big dreamy yew-trees smothered the scattereH 
 graves in the churchyard, for people appeared to die but 
 rarely in the quiet life of Coneyhurst. Orchards of old 
 and crooked apple-trees spread over the fields behind the 
 house, and beyond there were copses and hills quite low 
 hills covered with bracken and heather. As the James 
 party drove through the village and entered the gates of 
 the lodge, the sun was setting and a soft yellow haze crept 
 over the hill in its wake. Linda was staring about her ; 
 she was much impressed by the big iron gates, by the lodge 
 and the banks of laurel and of bay. Her uncle's elegant 
 
 130 
 
CONEYHURST 131 
 
 landau seemed hardly to move as the horses trotted rapidly 
 over the fine-spread gravel of the park, and the little girl 
 rocked up and down, and felt rather sick, on the well-hung 
 springs. There was a sense of living in a wound-up clock, 
 a sense of the throttling of Nature's pulses, as soon as the 
 gates of the park were closed behind the carriage. The 
 approach to the manor house was long, leading through 
 fields and scattered oak-trees with a view of the house 
 at the end. Coneyhurst was not precisely a beautiful 
 building, neither was it old. It was a rather large, 
 florid Georgian building, which had been much added 
 to about fifty years ago. Its great stucco front with 
 the Corinthian columns seemed only half to harmonize 
 with all the green around it. It stood on a long 
 and partly artificial terrace, above some equally artificial 
 walks and lakes ; but such are the soothing properties of the 
 air in Southern Wales that every sense of novelty and every 
 scar of building had very soon worn away, and the terraces 
 and the ponds had joined themselves on to the rest of the 
 quiet, gently modulated scenery. A little valley or glen 
 ran away at the back, buried in orchards and deep oak- 
 woods ; and immediately behind this were-the moors, up to 
 one ' s knees in bracken . The flower-gardens were separated 
 from the house by a large bowling-green, and both of 'these 
 were greatly disfigured by the vineries that useless and 
 ugly expanse of glass, which the indomitable islander gives 
 to himself because he cannot be contented with apples or 
 pears, strawberries or plums, and you cannot grow any 
 grapes without glass. The house was very large. Tall 
 stacks of chimneys rose above its roof ; great square win- 
 dows, bare of creepers, looked over the park to the sea. 
 
 With a sort of muffled precision the carriage of Mr, James 
 drew up before his splendid portico, and the party passed 
 into the hall. The family felt itself at home perhaps 
 every member of it, in its own individual way, felt for one 
 instant satisfied and freed from its otherwise prevailing 
 sense of boredom. Mrs. James hurried to her drawing- 
 
132 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 room, her daughter to her bedroom, and Dudley made a cut 
 to the stables. In the pleasure of the minute Linda was 
 forgotten. This did not at all displease her, and, indeed, 
 for the minute she was confused by the novelty of her sur- 
 roundings, a little puffed up by her travels, tired by a night 
 in town. She was indeed altogether out of her bearings, 
 but dumbly happy. Feeling hot and in need of fresh air, 
 she therefore left the hall and made for the garden. She 
 stood on the front-door steps as little girls will often stand 
 stiffly, stolidly, with their clothes bunched up in front of 
 them and she looked with no small intelligence upon the 
 scene around her. 
 
 Her uncle had entered the study with his agent. Linda 
 could see him through the window tossing over a pile of cir- 
 culars and correspondence. Superfluous young gentlemen 
 in very white shirt-sleeves were carrying the luggage out 
 of a cart and up through various side-doors. Some house- 
 maids in stiff print frocks looked through an upper win- 
 dow, and there was a confused yelping of big dogs and a 
 tramping of horses in the stable-yard. Nobody seemed to 
 be thinking of Linda ; nobody came to fetch her. Gradually 
 an odd, lonely, weary sense crept into the small child's 
 heart, and she sank down on the nearest and most con- 
 venient object she could find a scraper. You might not 
 have thought that anything so cheap and ordinary as a 
 scraper would be found in such a splendid pageant, but all 
 the same, it just happened to be there, and because it was 
 homely Linda sat down on it. 
 
 She did not cry or shut her eyes, but she went on look- 
 ing with a sort of dumb and savage wonder at the scene 
 before her. 
 
 It was, as I have said, a beautiful summer evening, calm 
 and still and green ; and that strange pervasive sense of rest 
 which haunts an English park at any time seemed on this 
 serene July night to rise and muffle every sign of life 
 and every bleating sheep and quivering leaf. The silence 
 
CONEYHUEST 133 
 
 was profound, but there was nothing awful in it nothing, 
 if I may say it, of the sublime. Passion was as surely 
 excluded from the park railings of Mr. James as the pos- 
 sible escape of his beautiful speckled deer. A few pale 
 clouds clung to the pale blue sky ; a little haze of gnats 
 swooned round the leaves of the oak-trees. Bed cows with 
 short white horns stood in the square-cut fields, their 
 udders full of milk, and sheep with heavy fleece gathered in 
 groups by the hedgerow. Nothing seemed to be alive or 
 moving save the rooks, and they cawed harshly as 'they 
 passed across the valley to their roosting-places. On the 
 moor above the house the heather, not yet in flower, made 
 a dark and rather sombre outline over the horizon. Now 
 and then a pheasant disturbed the stillness with a sort of 
 chuckling, screaming call. The deer came creeping down 
 the hill through the apple-trees in the orchard. Now and 
 again they started aside with a little low wail and a click 
 of their horns. In the big calm ponds a trout rose now and 
 then. All the beasts and the birds, even the fish, in this 
 fat English landscape seemed like its men disciplined, 
 well-fed, 'well domesticated dull. And it was just the 
 same with the trees and the garden-flowers. They were 
 beautiful, well cared for, at home with man rather than 
 with Nature they had man's submission, but they were 
 shorn of his passion. To one who had lived in and who 
 had loved the "wilderness," they were full of a sort of 
 accepted sadness rather than of repose. They stifled, they 
 did not exalt one, or delight. 
 
 Little girls of eight years old cannot be expected to 
 receive any very vivid impressions on the psychology of 
 landscape, but all the same they are attracted or repelled 
 by novelty ; and as Linda looked at the scene around her, a 
 thing which was painful, because incomprehensible, entered 
 her baby mind a revolt from this placid Nature, a loathing 
 of its smooth and green content. Her eyes filled with 
 tears, her lips quivered, her hands fell apart from her 
 
134 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 humped-up knees, and with a sort of wail she ran down 
 the terrace and made for the woods as a fawn might do or 
 a baby hamadryad. 
 
 But she was soon arrested. 
 
 "Hullo, Linda, where are you off to?" said a soothing 
 voice in her ear, and turning round, the child met the gaze 
 of her cousin Dudley. Then her sobs subsided into smiles, 
 for the child had an almost passionate love for the handsome 
 English boy. 
 
 ' ' I don ' t know , " she said . "I suppose I forgot . ' ' 
 
 The boy, who saw her tears, bent down and put her hat 
 straight with a grim but signal kindness. 
 
 "There now," he said, "you stupid girl. Don't cry. 
 If you're lonely and being with Susan is enough to make 
 a dog lonely you had better make up to Joan. We will 
 go and look for Joan." 
 
 Dudley was in a radiant humour. He was not a snob, 
 but he literally gloried in his father's possessions. He was 
 like a young cock on his own dung-hill. He hated 
 " abroad," as he said very candidly, and this return to 
 England and to his English home with all its charms, 
 conveniences, and beauties, served as a sort of nectar to 
 him. He suited himself, however, to Linda's paces not at 
 all ungently, and suggested that Joan should " wait," and 
 that he himself would do honour to* Linda by showing her 
 part of the garden and grounds. 
 
 It may perhaps be imagined that such an arrangement 
 between two people of such different moods and education 
 boded no good, as indeed it proved ; but they started away 
 on confident terms, Dudley with his hands thrust into the 
 pockets of his Norfolk jacket and Linda stumping beside 
 him. They passed along the terraces, over the smooth 
 lawns and the bowling-green, till they came to the flower- 
 garden. The walls were covered with fruit with beau- 
 tiful peaches and nectarines tied up in muslin bags. 
 
 "It's a good sort of place," said Dudley, " and Papa 
 spends pots of money on it. Of course he might do more. 
 
CONEYHUKST 135 
 
 The glass, I see, is getting into an awful state," and he 
 scraped some mould from one of the houses. 
 
 Linda listened in silence. She understood English 
 pretty thoroughly, but she did not understand this sort of 
 English. She had an uncomfortable sense that her idol 
 was boasting ; but she loved him, and she had no wish to see 
 him fall. She wished very much he would give her a 
 flower, but she did not like to say so. 
 
 "There are fourteen men in the gardens, I think, not 
 counting the head gardener," Dudley continued a little 
 haughtily. ' ' The weekly wage bill is simply awful ! Now 
 you people in Switzerland live in quite a different way. I 
 suppose you can hardly understand." 
 
 " Yes," interrupted Linda, who certainly did not under- 
 stand. " We don't have a servant. Aunt Christina cooks 
 the meals, and cousin Marie only comes in sometimes to 
 help clean the floors and the stables. Aunt Christina told 
 me she did not think highly of rich English people ; she 
 said money often made people bad. She said it was a pity 
 I should have to come and live with rich people." 
 
 ' ' Aunt Christina knows uncommonly little of the world," 
 said the young heir to riches very huffily ; ' ' she has stuffed 
 you with idiotic ideas. And what a name she has got, 
 too Christina ! Whoever heard of such a thing ? But 
 come along," and Dudley proceeded back to the terrace. 
 
 " Oh, but she never said you were rich," urged Linda, 
 feeling that she had given some offence. 
 
 :< Then she's an owl," growled the handsome boy. 
 
 " That's odd, cousin Dudley," said the child, entangling 
 herself still further. "Aunt Christina used to say that 
 she thought you were rather like a quite young owl." 
 
 ' ' Confound the woman ! ' ' said Dudley with unfeigned 
 disgust ; for though he was usually kind and delightful, he 
 had his vanities and his weaknesses. He was rather slow- 
 witted, too, and he had failed to understand that this small 
 child was anything beyond a poor Swiss cousin, a little 
 foreigner whose mother had, perhaps unfortunately, been 
 
136 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 his own mother's sister. It was startling, therefore, to 
 discover that this same little girl was far from being im- 
 pressed by his position, and to be told by her, in the midst 
 of his own broad lands, not only that he had the merit of 
 being poor, but also that he resembled a very young owl. 
 
 Dudley assumed a different manner. 
 
 "Now, child," he said, "you had better run into the 
 house and ask the maid to wash you." 
 
 " To wash me?" repeated Linda, and quick hot passion 
 came into her eyes. 
 
 Linda was no ordinary child. Her free village life, her 
 intercourse with simple souls on equal terms, mixing with 
 the refined qualities of her English blood, had combined to 
 produce an inharmonious but a striking and rare hybrid. 
 If an artist had seen her at that minute he would have said 
 she had the makings of an endless beauty in her. To the 
 orthodox eye of her cousin she merely looked odd and a little 
 untidy. She wore a long stiff gown of peasant cloth, it was 
 her Sunday gown, and, to mark it as such, it had three 
 rows of black velvet sewn round the bottom of the skirt. 
 Her legs were encased in a pair of purple cotton stockings, 
 her heavy leather shoes were full of nails. Her round 
 straw hat, bought at the autumn fair, had a bunch of imita- 
 tion forget-me-nots in it, and this hat was the only untidy 
 thing about her, for Linda disliked wearing hats ; her hair 
 was so thick, so curly, that it seemed to rebel against the 
 elastic, and to set the straw erection all awry. Her hair 
 was of a dark russet brown, and broke into lots of little 
 crimpy curls wherever it escaped from the two tight plaits. 
 Her skin was white by nature, but the sun had turned it 
 almost chestnut. Her eyes were large and dark, and full 
 of a hundred questions. 
 
 " Ask the maid to wash me!" the child repeated once 
 again, and then with a sudden instinct she burst into Ger- 
 man. " Stupid creature !" she said, and stamped with her 
 foot. " Didst think I'd do as thou told'st me. Didst 
 think I'd listen to the likes of thee? No, I like thee, but 
 
CONEYHUEST 137 
 
 I'd die sooner than obey thee when thou art only poking 
 fun at me." 
 
 ''Is that double Dutch?" asked Dudley, and Linda 
 began to sob. She sobbed with passion and rage and real 
 fatigue. She sobbed so hard she did not hear a running 
 step upon the gravel path. 
 
 Joan James stood up in front of her brother : 
 
 "Dudley," she said, "how dare you! How did you 
 dare to bully a girl ! ' ' 
 
 Joan's face was crimson. Her eyes seemed suddenly 
 bloodshot, her pale face flushed to the roots of her hair. 
 
 Joan had that minute come in from riding. She held her 
 habit high to her knees. Her hair was loose and fell around 
 her in a red-gold cloud. She was barely fifteen, but a little 
 sad for her age, and her figure was round and moulded like 
 a woman's. When she was quiet and alone, her eyes had 
 a wistful look in them. Joan was one of those rare human 
 beings who seem to come out from the very breast of God, 
 and go back thither early, wearied by all man's meanness. 
 
 There were only two things which excited the passionate 
 rebellion of Joan. One was insincerity, the other unkind- 
 ness. She had been delayed on her afternoon ride, and 
 had arrived at the station too late to meet her people as she 
 had wished. She had then ridden rapidly home, full of the 
 joy and excitement she felt in seeing them all again. Her 
 greatest joy was always to see her brother Dudley, and she 
 had hurried into the garden to find him. Coming by a 
 side-path, she had been able to catch the last words of the 
 previous colloquy, and her heart revolted from her brother's 
 lack of kindliness and courtesy. Dearly as she loved him, 
 she felt nothing but contempt for him now. 
 
 Dudley muttered some explanation. He had a great 
 respect for Joan : 
 
 " No," said Joan. " You were cowardly. Go in." 
 
 Then Joan came up to Linda and took off her ugly hat 
 and tried to wipe her tears. A little later they went indoors. 
 
138 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 Linda was still sobbing in a sort of hysterical way. The 
 beautiful, gentle kindness of her cousin seemed to make 
 the outer world more, rather than less, lonely, and Joan 
 said something to her which she never forgot. 
 
 " I am not always happy myself," she said when she saw 
 that she could not comfort the little girl. " I once was in 
 Switzerland, and I loved your people better than I can 
 love my own try to think what that means, Linda ! But 
 we must only try to go on being good even if it does not 
 seem any use. If you will try to be good, Linda, I shall 
 be happier." And Linda saw that Joan was crying. 
 
 And at whatever period throughout her future life Linda 
 felt angry or cruel, she remembered her cousin Joan 
 James, for exquisite human souls are rare, and children, 
 whose little fibres are as perfect , acknowledge the influence 
 of their contact when they meet them. 
 
PART II 
 THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHILD TO WOMANHOOD 
 
 " Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie 
 
 Thy soul's immensity j 
 Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep 
 Thy heritage, thou eye among the blind, 
 That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, 
 Haunted forever by the eternal Mind, 
 
 Mighty Prophet! Seer blest! 
 
 On whom those truths do rest 
 Which we are toiling all our lives to find, 
 In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave; 
 Thou, over whom thy Immortality 
 Broods like the day, a master o'er a slave, 
 A Presence which is not to be put by; 
 Thou little child, yet glorious in the might 
 Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height, 
 Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke 
 The years to bring the inevitable yoke, 
 Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife? 
 Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight, 
 And custom lie upon thee with a weight 
 Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life." 
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. 
 
 139 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE BACKFISCH 
 
 TEN years passed by, and Linda was just eighteen. She 
 was almost a woman. In some ways she had developed 
 prematurely, yet there were certain childish things to which 
 she clung with curious pertinacity. Her outward manner 
 was that of a child. She was very fresh in her enjoyment 
 of the mere daily details of living, and yet she was strangely 
 indifferent to all worldly gaieties, or rather to those more 
 formal forms of social meeting which a perhaps mistaken 
 generation prepared for its young women in the Western 
 world in the later years of the last century. 
 
 At the very outset of her life in England the experiment 
 seemed to fail. Linda fell ill ; and before six months were 
 out she returned to her mountain home with the curls of 
 her thick hair rather straightened, a little dry cough, and a 
 restless, hunted look in her large eyes. This look was only 
 a shadow of something much more sad and permanent in 
 her future; but it frightened her Uncle Sebastian, and it 
 was he himself, and not the English aunts, who hurried 
 her back into "the bosom of her godly ancestry," as he 
 chose to describe her Alpine belongings. 
 
 The doctor looked at his daughter. 
 
 " Did you like England?" he asked, and Linda said : 
 
 " No, and I won't go back there !" 
 
 He made no answer, but he turned from his child a 
 moment and looked through the window where the snow 
 was falling white, silent, fluffy flakes, pure as the air they 
 fell through. 
 
 140 
 
THE BACKFISCH 141 
 
 Presently the doctor turned again. In the room it was 
 dark, and the child could not note his expression ; also she 
 was feverish, and saw only moving mental objects with 
 yellow lights around them. 
 
 " Did it ever snow in England, Linda?" 
 
 " Yes," the child answered, " it snowed the day we were 
 leaving ; but then it was black snow. When we stayed in 
 London I sat at the window and looked out, and the snow 
 came down in black pieces, and when it touched the win- 
 dows it was only water and all quite black, and the horses 
 fell down in the streets. I saw a man pushing a woman 
 under the window ; and she fell down in the black snow, 
 and when the policeman picked her up she was dirty. She 
 was not white like I am white when I fall into the snow 
 at home." 
 
 Then a small dry sob or groan escaped the lips of Doctor 
 Caflisch : "My darling," he said, "you are home again 
 with me now. Try to forget you will easily forget the 
 town and the people. The snow is white at home, Poppeli 
 just look at it here for a moment." He put his hand out 
 on the windowsill, and gathered some of the light and lovely 
 substance from the beams of the roof outside. It fell away 
 in fluff upon the floor ; and the tired child looked up and 
 smiled. 
 
 "I'll not go back," she said bravely. "I'll stay with 
 thee, little father. Where's Basil?" 
 
 Basil had been waiting in the living-room. He came 
 upstairs and stamped in his heavy boots across the room, 
 and stood up stolid and critical beside the bed. 
 
 " So it's thee," he said. And for the moment the posi- 
 tion of the children seemed somehow changed, and the 
 challenge of the talk came from the boy instead of from 
 the girl. He put his hand in the pocket of his coat, and he 
 picked out thence some heads of clove carnations which he 
 had taken from his mother's plants in her cellar. He shook 
 off the dust and the snow which had collected on the flowers 
 in his pocket, and he laid them on the sheet beside Linda. 
 
142 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 " They are prettier than thee," he volunteered, perhaps 
 in chaff, but also in some rude earnest. " Thou, Linda, 
 art grown thin and ugly over there in England." 
 
 Perhaps the child was very ill, perhaps she was only 
 tired and excited, but she got under the bedclothes that she 
 might hide her tears. Her grandmother came upstairs and 
 patted and caressed her, her father gave her old-fashioned 
 syrups and possets, and her Aunt Christina sang a long, 
 low, curious hymn which the child was fond of, and with 
 which she had sung her to sleep in her cradle. 
 
 A month later Linda was herself again, trudging in a 
 homespun gown along the village street to school, playing 
 with the beans in the Emperor's barns, and preparing for 
 hay upon the Alp in summer-time. 
 
 After that first trial Doctor Caflisch and Sebastian deter- 
 mined definitely between themselves that the child of this 
 mixed marriage should at least spend the bulk of those 
 earlier and most impressionable years of childhood in her 
 Swiss home. Developments might follow with the dawn 
 of stronger intellectual needs, but at present the freedom 
 the healing of the Alps should be hers unchecked. 
 
 Now and again Linda did travel across the Channel and 
 spend some weeks with her English relations, but her stay 
 was always short and took the form of a few weeks' holiday. 
 As time went on, and as, to the outward eye, a great deal 
 of the elegance and grace of her English mother began to 
 show itself, she went oftener and stayed longer, and liked 
 her visits better ; and thus matters appeared to group them- 
 selves in a more or less satisfactory manner. 
 
 Linda's was not altogether a happy nature. Complicated 
 to begin with, the complication was naturally strengthened 
 by the contrasts of her surroundings and her own inclina- 
 tions. As a young child, the life of the vigorous animal, 
 the mere breathing in of sunlight and of cloud, sufficed, in 
 the company of her peasant friends and cousins. But as she 
 
THE BACKFISCH 143 
 
 grew older, the intellectual side of her nature began to 
 develop, and it inclined her, for the moment anyhow, to 
 the presence and talk of her Uncle Sebastian, and to the 
 big English house with its abundant books and pictures 
 perhaps, too, a little increasingly to the comforts and the 
 luxuries which went with both. Children are not able to 
 compare much or to dissect things, but this particular child, 
 full of curious intuitions, was dumbly conscious of some 
 strain and painful conflict in Eer inner nature a strain 
 nurtured and fully fostered by the contending opportunities 
 of her two environments. And thus it came about that at 
 a very early age she was already up in arms with her own 
 quivering soul, and those who loved her best were power- 
 less to help her. 
 
 Yet, taken as a whole, her childhood had been one of 
 quite exceptional happiness. Perhaps, indeed, it may have 
 been too happy, for the joys of a very joyful youth can 
 linger on through the pains of later life, and become a 
 tightening and even hindering restraint by contrast. Be 
 this as it may, Linda grew up to all outward appearances in 
 a manner to make most people love her. And if, perhaps, 
 she was a little fearful to prudes, she was the source of 
 general delight and encouragement to all honest and large- 
 hearted persons. 
 
 I need not here describe the fashion of her life, for I have 
 told it elsewhere, and age did not affect its outward condi- 
 tions. She was -the daughter of an educated father of old 
 peasant lineage. She lived in an old community, sur- 
 rounded by sometimes grim, but always real and splendid, 
 natural things. It may be said that homespun of a most 
 excellent quality, rather than any embroidery, had formed 
 the foundations of her mental and her moral equipment. 
 As far as money went she was a rich woman in her own 
 right, but she was quite indifferent to money. She knew 
 all her neighbours, and she took and shared the rough and 
 tumble of their children's lives. Perhaps unconsciously 
 she may have stood a little aloof from them, and she knew 
 
144 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 very little of ordinary chatter. Her connection with 
 Basil grew slenderer as Linda came into her teens. Basil 
 was five years older than she was, and so he left school 
 earlier, and went back to work on his father's farm. Also 
 he was sent for a year or two down into Italy, where the 
 Emperor had property which the boy would inherit and 
 must learn to understand. So Basil was busy, and although 
 he did not forget peasants do not forget he only caught 
 casual glimpses of his small girl friend ; and , as the years 
 passed on, he outwardly appeared to have forgotten her. 
 
 In England her cousin Dudley continued all the orthodox 
 life of an English boy. He had always decided to serve in 
 the Army, and upon leaving Eton he passed straight on into 
 Sandhurst, got his commission in an Indian regiment, and 
 very soon was sent abroad. So, as far as the mind of Linda 
 was concerned, the image of Dudley became but a flickering 
 if pleasing shadow on it ; and the photographs of a very 
 handsome young man, with a marked frown and a good 
 deal of braid and belting, set in a silver frame on Mrs. 
 James's mantelpiece, made no distinct appeal to a girl whose 
 attention was turned for the moment to a world of books, 
 and of French, German, English and Italian novelists and 
 poets. 
 
 Her first great sorrow came to Linda when she was 
 seventeen : Death, in the shape of a cruel personal loss, hit 
 her straight in the heart, for Joan, her English cousin, 
 died. 
 
 Joan had never been strong ; there was some fatal malady 
 hindering her flesh, and expanding her heart and mind too 
 early. She was born for death, and yet no heart or brain 
 were ever better fitted for a perfect life. I think, perhaps, 
 that, like many as brave and sweet as she was, Joan was 
 not sorry to be gone ; but to the outward eye her illness 
 seemed a sudden one. 
 
 ' ' So strange ! so strange ! ' ' her unhappy mother went on 
 repeating. "Joan was always so gay and so strong; and 
 I worried more over Susan and Dudley . . . !" 
 
THE BACKFISCH 145 
 
 Joan's death was the first acute emotional reality in 
 Linda's life. It happened in the spring-time, and perhaps 
 that is one of the reasons why she never could love the 
 spring. Joan was ill for several months, but she did not 
 appear to be mortally ill. About a month before she died, 
 Linda had been in England. She kissed Joan in the dawn 
 one winter morning. Joan was already very ill, but this 
 the young child could not see ; she turned her face to the 
 wall and said nothing. That was not Joan's way at all, 
 but she loved the little peasant-girl with all her wayward 
 oddities, and she could not bear to part with her, knowing 
 herself quite well that on this earth they would not meet 
 again. 
 
 When the telegram came to Trins, and when they read it 
 to Linda, she just looked out at the window, and she saw 
 how a clump of yellow crocuses were pushing through a 
 crust of snow in the churchyard. The sight became 
 branded on her brain she thought of that for a long time 
 after, more than she thought of the death of Joan. But 
 something in her nature was breaking. She never 
 recovered from the pain and 'the cutting feeling at her heart ; 
 nor for years could she bring herself to speak of it. 
 
 Joan was the first vision of human godliness which ever 
 vividly dawned on Linda's mind. It was a glimpse of that 
 divine fire which we all of us are once or twice allowed to 
 realize in the long tracts of our human experience. Un- 
 consciously Linda had lived for and had worshipped this 
 ideal, and all through her future she found herself seeking 
 it. How often how very often she sought for it in vain ! for 
 its semblances are very delusive, and even the best of people 
 are inclined to worship Duty rather than Vision, whereas 
 in Joan these two were combined. There was no human 
 being who knew about the right and the happy things as 
 Joan knew about them. There was nobody who laughed 
 like she did. There was no one who understood with 
 such a wide intelligence. Also, Joan was an artist. She 
 could paint and write if she wished it ; but she chose only 
 
 10 
 
146 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 to play, and everything that Linda ever knew about music 
 she learned from Joan. It was because of Joan's playing 
 of Beethoven's sonatas that the music of them would 
 ring on Linda's mental hearing throughout every great 
 emotional moment of her later life. When Linda did any- 
 thing really unselfish she thought of Joan. I do not think 
 that Linda ever did a mean thing, and I am certain she 
 never harboured a cruel thought, but had she done so it 
 would certainly have been Joan whose image would smite 
 her both in pain and derision afterwards. . . . 
 
 Well ! she had perished, and Linda was without her ! 
 
 At the end of her Alpine schooldays Linda started for 
 England, and she stayed there with very small interruptions 
 for two years, learning with her Uncle Sebastian and 
 various special teachers. She travelled a little in France 
 with her uncle and with Mrs. James, but the latter had 
 views on "finishing days," and her travels were somewhat 
 restricted. 
 
 At the age of eighteen, Linda was full of undigested 
 theories on the joy of living. She talked a good deal in 
 odd, hurried sentences, which were always a little confused, 
 and which only very partially expressed her real and better 
 feelings. Throughout a healthy childhood she had held in 
 great scorn every writing or discourse which bordered on 
 sentiment. She skipped the love scenes in novels; loving 
 poetry for itself, she read of passion for the sake of the 
 sound of the words in which it was described ; but she 
 neither appreciated nor even guessed at their meaning. 
 
 Linda's moral nature as shown outwardly in her sense 
 of duty, and inwardly by her recoil from mean or cruel 
 actions, and equally by any touch of slanderous talk was 
 singularly strong. She would never herself consciously do 
 wrong, but she would certainly suffer from the wrong of 
 others. To the end of her days she clung to a firm belief 
 in the power of Good over Evil ; but her religious faith was 
 
THE BACKFISCH 147 
 
 as yet quite unformed. She had vision, and much curious 
 mystical intuition, which, in later life, found expression in 
 the work of William Blake ; but she was not what is out- 
 wardly termed religious. Her moral courage never forsook 
 her it seemed, indeed, at times to break her down and to 
 fatigue her by its weight. It saved her, but at the expense 
 of a spiritual fatigue so great that, in the end, her early 
 and more faithful nature threatened to be dwarfed and 
 stunted. 
 
 Linda stood now on the threshold of life, full of the mis- 
 takes of youth : expectant, that is to say, of pleasure ; rebel- 
 lious, too, to pain. Perhaps by a very surfeit of what she 
 sought she was to learn the inevitable lesson of a struggling, 
 baffled, but onward-pressing humanity. 
 
 For a nature of a kind like Linda's will have to accept., 
 without understanding, the kicks of the world which come 
 to it disguised as kisses. It will have to forgive much, and 
 to pay for its smiles with often bitter tears, until it attain to 
 that acceptance and to that peace which all the pure desire, 
 and to that fulfilment which from first to last is the aim and 
 the object of all brave and lovable human souls. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 COMING HOME 
 
 THE snow was melting rapidly from the lower slopes of the 
 mountains, for April had come. The roads were bare in 
 the valleys, and the traffic running on wheels. The sun 
 burned fiercely on meadows and on hillsides, which glittered 
 like sheets of the finest spun glass. There was a great roar- 
 ing and swirling of waters ; and, although not a single cloud 
 appeared, a loud hot wind rushed through the tops of the 
 pine-trees, and hurried the heavy wreaths of snow from the 
 rocks and the ledges in sheltered gullies. 
 
 The mountain world was heavy with child. Spring is 
 not born easily in the higher regions of the Alps. It does 
 not creep forth from the womb of its mother with a sigh 
 and a smile, as in more temperate regions. But the babe 
 comes forth amidst shriekings and groans, and the rendings 
 of colossal fibres ; and tiny spring-flowers quiver, and often 
 perish, in the pitiless and the agonized rendings of the 
 snows. I think that the miracle of the resurrection is 
 better understood by a mountain peasant than it ever can 
 be by a preacher of the lowlands, and the joy of Easter Day 
 is intensified to him by the vision of the horror whence it 
 sprang. 
 
 The diligence came lumbering and lurching up the road 
 from Chur. The wheels made an unnatural noise as they 
 turned on the mud, for under the mud the ice of winter 
 lingered, and lots of little stones and pebbles fell from the 
 slopes above the road, making the horses stumble. It was 
 a bad time of year to travel, and Linda had the post-car- 
 riage all to herself. She was leaning her head out of the 
 
 148 
 
COMING HOME 149 
 
 window to get a first sight of her home. She had been 
 away for over a year, she felt excited and stimulated to be 
 coming back again. It is a long year between seventeen 
 and eighteen ; and although she could not realize her own 
 altered opinions, she nevertheless felt a strange blending of 
 pain and of pleasure in the sight of her old home and her 
 real fatherland. 
 
 Linda had always been good to look at, but at the age of 
 eighteen she was radiantly and arrestingly lovely, even as 
 youth, combining with mere physical health, occasionally 
 can be. Her eyes had a strange and passionate appeal in 
 them, her loose hair broke in curls across her forehead, 
 but was gathered into a heavy plait at the back of her head. 
 She was dressed, though very simply, with a distinct 
 elegance and care ; her figure seemed to throb against 
 the little grey gown as though it barely brooked so much 
 constraint as that afforded. There was a strange look of 
 race and distinction about her. As she leant out of the win- 
 dow of the coach the sun burnt full on her face and scorched 
 the tender skin until she flushed up crimson. She laughed 
 to herself unconsciously. Perhaps the strongest force of 
 her whole nature was a quite unconscious one namely, the 
 force of the untried powers of youth and of physical beauty. 
 
 Her father had come to meet her at the inn. As they 
 stood in the street waiting for the luggage, a cart came 
 rattling over the stones. A young man stood erect in the 
 cart. It was Basil. He was driving a wild young horse. 
 He had set his teeth and tightened all his muscles, and he 
 only swayed a little as the cart shook up and down. The 
 sun flashed full on his face and figure, and Linda and he 
 looked into each other's eyes. 
 
 Basil knew nothing of Linda's home-coming. A sort of 
 gulf had grown between them, but Basil was exactly what 
 he always had been a peasant a man of the fields and 
 woods, with a clear, sharp intellect and calm unruffled judg- 
 ment. Linda was not a snob, and she was certainly no 
 
150 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 prude. She loved the land, and she liked her friends. It 
 was life which had grown up between these two, not change 
 or affectation. 
 
 When Basil saw Linda he loosened his hold on the reins 
 and the cart swung sideways. But the young man did not 
 fall, he merely swerved, recovered himself, and lashing his 
 horse drove on up the valley. 
 
 A long while after, as he drove through the woods, a 
 burning blush crept up from his heart and almost 
 stifled him. 
 
 Neither he nor Linda had smiled at each other. She got 
 out her rugs and walked home with her father. She un- 
 packed her clothes and her books, and as she 'touched and 
 smelt the pretty English stuffs and papers, a vivid affection 
 for them possessed her, a sudden and horrible revolt from 
 she knew not what in her home and her future life there. 
 
 But the feeling passed, and late in the afternoon she went 
 up the valley. She walked quickly, picking her way 
 through the mud and the stones on the road, and she was 
 soon out of the village and passing up the meadow-lands. 
 Wherever the snow had left the fields, the grass was full 
 of crocuses. There were millions and millions of white and 
 lilac crocuses, and all the little streams were fringed with 
 soldanellas. Linda looked with a mixture of passionate 
 love and of growing sadness on these familiar flowers. She 
 knew in her soul that she understood them better far than 
 she ever could or would the bluebells in an English copse 
 in May, but still she felt confused and saddened by them. 
 The south wind played across her forehead. A Sehnsucht 
 for she knew not what possessed her. She sat down on 
 some logs by the roadside and rested her chin on her hands. 
 
 As the sap rises up in the tender trees in spring-time, so 
 does the blood in the veins of a human being. When we 
 are very young we do not understand the spring ; we think 
 that we ought to love it, we think it will bring us some- 
 thing that we too shall rush through the bushes like the 
 courting birds, and bend, as the flowers bend, with the 
 
COMING HOME 151 
 
 glowing weight of pollen. Later on we learn that because 
 of our greater intellect we have a greater need that the 
 lives of men are less complete than those of birds and 
 flowers, more exacting, less for a season, and fuller far of 
 intense responsibilities. And after we have realized this 
 the spring is painful to us. If we are unconscious 
 artists, we gather ourselves together when we feel it 
 coming as though we had <to face a terrible lowland 
 fever. The burden of the young earth's courtship bears 
 us down and tramples on us ; we faint as we see the 
 lovers in the lanes, and we marvel at their courage. We 
 sicken at 'the sound of the singing birds ; and the startled 
 eyes of the big brown thrush, who sits on her eggs in the 
 elder-bush, burn into our souls like a hot reproach, madden- 
 ing us by their maternal candour. As we grow old again 
 and as the passionate fires burn low, we return once more 
 to our love of the spring, and we warm our withering hands 
 before that blaze we may ourselves no longer help to kindle. 
 
 Linda neither knew nor cared for musings of this sort 
 about the spring. Her sadness was deeper, perhaps, 
 because it was unacknowledged. She sat by the roadside 
 pulling at her flowers. Presently she heard the sound of 
 wheels on the road above where she sat , and looking through 
 the trees, she saw a cart and Basil driving it ; and a sort 
 of unnatural fear came over her, but she sat quite still. 
 Basil drew up beside her ; he got down deliberately from 
 his seat, he drew his cart a little aside, and, holding the 
 reins, he stood on the bank beside Linda. He did not 
 speak. He only fixed his eyes on her, and she, too, looked 
 into his face. She saw that the colour of his eyes had 
 changed, or perhaps she had not really noticed them in 
 other days. 
 
 " You have got orange eyes," she said. 
 
 It was a strange remark wherewith to open conversation 
 after practically years of silence. But Basil paid no atten- 
 tion to it. It is doubtful whether he even heard her. He 
 
152 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 simply went on looking at her. For a moment or more 
 the sun flashed full on the faces of those two radiant human 
 beings, and then it dipped behind the mountain-side, and 
 as it did so the hot wind dropped and a chill grey light 
 crept over the fields. 
 
 " Where were you going?" said Basil. 
 
 "Home," said Linda. 
 
 "Get up with me." 
 
 Linda climbed into the cart. She knew not how it was, 
 but a feeling of excitement crept into her heart. Her 
 brain, however, was calm enough. She seemed with her 
 head <to be measuring things with a rod, whilst a halo rested 
 on her heart. In the whole of her future life she never 
 had looked as completely lovely as at that instant , and Basil 
 was the only man who saw her. He went to his horse's 
 head and he looked at the bit, then he pulled the knots in 
 its harness so tight they seemed like bursting. His teeth 
 were clenched in an unnatural manner ; the expression in 
 his eyes was like that of some splendid falcon. He got back 
 into the cart, took up his whip, and cracked it till the rocks 
 by the roadway echoed, and the little pebbles ran down the 
 water-courses. Then he stood up, quivering, and drove 
 down the valley. 
 
 Linda looked into his face. 
 
 " You drive too fast," she said. 
 
 Basil did not answer her. He opened his mouth and 
 shrieked aloud as peasants do. His soul, the entire strength 
 of the man, went into the cry. 
 
 " Basil is in love," said some peasant friends who passed 
 along the road. 
 
 Basil sat down by Linda. "Hold my arm," he said, 
 " the roads are rough in spring-time." 
 
 Presently they came to a hill and began to go slower. 
 Then Basil looked at her again. They were passing 
 through an alder-copse. He stretched to catch a branch, 
 twisted the twig in his teeth, then threw it at his horse's 
 tail. 
 
COMING HOME 153 
 
 " What's England like?" he said. 
 
 " England oh, it's very green." 
 
 " I've been learning English." 
 
 " Learning English you learning English !" 
 
 " Yes, I thought I might like to talk it if we ever went 
 there." 
 
 Then a sudden terror, a revulsion, came over Linda. 
 But rather than fathom the subject which disturbed her, 
 she evaded it altogether. 
 
 " Is this a very young horse?" she asked. 
 
 But Basil did not answer her ; he seemed to be smiling 
 to himself and very much at peace. 
 
 As they neared the village he drove slower, and always 
 slower. Now and then he looked at Linda, and then he 
 smiled again. 
 
 But when they came to her house Linda jumped down, 
 and ran to her room and locked and double-locked the door. 
 She was ill at ease. If this was love it had come too early 
 she did not want it, would not take it. Her heart went 
 out to infinite changes and not to a settling down. The 
 very elements in her nature, which were seething and boil- 
 ing in preparation for Life, subsided and became chilled 
 by this first contact with it. 
 
 A strange and terrible revulsion swept over the soul 
 of the child. All in a flash, as it were, a thousand 
 questions, a limitless host of vague desires sprang into 
 her heart and glittered and quivered before her eyes. 
 And the village life and her own place there seemed 
 as nothing as things belonging to some other person, to a 
 dead person who had died long ago. For the first time in 
 her life she felt frightened of she knew not what ; she even 
 felt seized with a haunting terror of her own small body 
 which trembled so across the bed. She got up hurriedly 
 and went downstairs. 
 
 It was twilight. Her grandmother was in the hall pull- 
 ing over some bundles of hemp. The old woman's cotton 
 handkerchief had fallen from her head, and her neck looked 
 
154 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 like the neck of some weather-beaten bird with the scant 
 hairs gathered in a tiny knot on the back of the head. The 
 sight of this very old woman seemed at that minute amaz- 
 ing to Linda. She passed her swiftly, and went down 
 the steps across the street to the garden. She pushed 
 through the gate, and as she did so she noticed that it was 
 rotting on its hinges, and that the withered leaves and 
 rubbish of the past summer were lying in flat brown heaps, 
 just as the snow had left them some fourteen days before. 
 Through the dust and the refuse of the beds, through the 
 sodden grass of the borders, a pale pink shoot of peony-leaf, 
 a bright green blade of grass, shot here and there ; but the 
 general view of things was brown and desolate enough. 
 Linda stood still in the middle of the garden, and a vision 
 of the one she had left but a couple of days ago came back 
 to her a vision of tidy beds stuffed full of golden crocuses 
 and primroses, of bushes bursting into bloom, and ivy green 
 upon the walls. She could not escape the vision. She 
 did not even try to ; she went on calling new ones up. 
 
 The sun had long since set. A bitter wind full of all the 
 ice of winter came wailing up the valley. The mountains 
 seemed very near, their aspect was melancholy indeed, half 
 brown, half white, half blue, like leprous men or things 
 diseased, for the weather was changing as well as the 
 season. The radiance of the afternoon had vanished 
 utterly. The atmosphere of the Alpine world had sud- 
 denly grown impenetrable inexorable and relentless as the 
 sword of Justice. It seemed to throttle the passionate 
 impulse of the girl's young soul. 
 
 Some peasant-girls passed up the street outside the gar- 
 den. They were typical daughters of the Alps weather- 
 beaten, graceless, withered in their prime ; they had been 
 manuring the fields in the lower part of the valley, their big 
 coarse boots were coated with mud. One of them stayed 
 to speak to the doctor's daughter. "Ah," she said, "so 
 you've come back home. You will have seen the spring in 
 England? Well, here you'll have to wait a bit before the 
 
COMING HOME 155 
 
 grass turns green again. The mists are more like autumn 
 mists," she added, " and yet we are into April." 
 
 The peasant-girl could scarcely have selected a more ill- 
 omened opening for conversation than this one. The words 
 brought a lurid vision of the length of an Alpine winter and 
 all its dreariness to the passionate mind of Linda. But the 
 girl went on : " You look very pale, Linda. You want a 
 bit of our mountain colour. There's Basil Castille who 
 will take you a ride in his cart on Sunday. See, here he 
 comes ! He's grown a fine young fellow these last years. 
 Don't you think so, Linda?" 
 
 But Linda never answered, and as Basil went stalking 
 up the street behind his cows she only noticed that his 
 brow, though perfect in outline, was already furrowed with 
 lines like that of a quite old man. She remembered that 
 mountain air furrows men's brows, and women's too ; and 
 deeper than ever grew her revolt, whilst the delicate flesh 
 of her English mother quivered within her. 
 
 But the better side of her nature revolted from her own 
 revolt: "I expect I am tired," she said to herself. It 
 was supper time, and she entered the house. Her father 
 scanned her narrowly. 
 
 "You got a lift home in Basil's cart," he said. 
 
 "Yes," answered Linda. Then almost unconsciously 
 she added : " Basil has grown very good-looking. His eyes 
 are quite orange. I had never noticed their colour before. ' ' 
 
 ' ' Basil's a fine fellow and he's a good fellow, too. He'll 
 wear well, like his father." 
 
 "He's rather gay," put in Christina. "And he's not 
 very careful. There's more than one girl in love with him 
 already." 
 
 As her aunt finished this sentence it seemed to Linda as 
 though a great weight had fallen from her mind, yet a little 
 point of pain like that of some tiny stiletto pierced of a 
 sudden to her heart. The last sensation vanished quickly, 
 the former stayed. She drew a long breath. " I must go 
 and see the Castilles all of them, to-morrow," she said. 
 
156 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 Again her father gave her a long and penetrating look. 
 Then he drew from his pocket a letter. " You may have 
 to give some time to your packing to-morrow," he said. 
 " What about a visit to Venice? I must go there myself 
 on Thursday, and I thought I might take you with me." 
 
 Great news brings silence even to the lightest^hearted, 
 and this was potent news to Linda. She had dreamed 
 dreams, even as a baby, of Italy. The very name sent a 
 tingle through her blood. 
 
 " Do you really mean it?" she said. 
 
 Her father passed her the letter. It was from his Cousin 
 Walpurga, who, living in Venice where her husband had his 
 business, was yet a familiar figure in Trins, as she always 
 returned to the home of her childhood in the haymaking 
 season. The letter contained full arrangements for the 
 stay of the doctor and of Linda in the Palazzo Molinaro. 
 There was, it is true, some mention of business, but to this 
 Linda, breathless and seeing only visions, paid no attention 
 at all. The stately figure of Walpurga the aroma of 
 southern splendour which surrounded it was one of the 
 heroic elements of her childhood. That she should sud- 
 denly be going on a visit to Venice as the guest of this 
 noble woman was almost too great a joy to contemplate. 
 
 "When?" she asked. 
 
 " The day after to-morrow," said her father. " Don't 
 crowd us with luggage. It is my holiday, remember, and 
 we will travel easy." 
 
CHAPTEE XII 
 
 THE DANCB 
 
 LINDA slept profoundly . She awoke refreshed and vigorous , 
 and the morning was spent in preparations for her 
 journey. Some impulse told her to have everything in 
 complete readiness by noon. A sort of sprite-like call 
 drove her to reserve the evening for her village friends 
 or rather for Basil, although she scarcely admitted this fact 
 to herself. She packed, she strapped her trunk, and left 
 her basket open for the night. She had lived quietly in 
 England, and had gone but to one or two large parties. Just 
 a week before she had ' ' come out " at a rather dull and 
 proper dance given in her honour by Mrs. James. It had 
 all been somewhat flat and disappointing, although, of 
 course, she had plenty of partners. She had worn a conven- 
 tional white muslin frock, and a very stiff and tightly boned 
 white satin bodice, in the fashion of 'those days. This 
 dress she had left in England ; but she folded, for her 
 Venetian journey, something far more fascinating a frock 
 of the purest crimson silk, curiously cut according to her 
 uncle's orders. Sebastian had brought her the silk from 
 Smyrna he said it was like, but better than, pome- 
 granates ; he said that young women who had dark hair and 
 oval faces like Linda had, must always be attired in silk, 
 the colour of pomegranate flowers. 
 
 " Going to Italy," Linda repeated. 
 
 In her heart was an ingrained love for the land so near 
 to all our dreams. This love was actually in her blood, for 
 all the inhabitants of these Alpine ranges which run down 
 to the Italian plains have got a something of Italian fire in 
 
 157 
 
158 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 them their skies are tinged with an Italian haze, they 
 drink the wine-juice of Italian valleys, they sing their songs, 
 they talk their language. There is scarcely a family in the 
 Canton of the Grisons which has not sent its sons and 
 daughters, too, down to the Italian cities for purposes of 
 education and of commerce. These young people often 
 choose their wives and husbands from Italian stock, some- 
 times they set up homes themselves in Italy, and live in 
 vaulted palaces instead of wooden homesteads. 
 
 But Linda's love was inherited from both sides of her 
 family, and it will be remembered how both Mary Crane, 
 and Mary's mother before her, had travelled in Italy and 
 had passionately loved Italian art and landscape. It would, 
 therefore, have been difficult to discover any young girl at 
 the dawn of her womanhood more steeped in a day-dream 
 of Italy than Linda was. 
 
 ' ' Going to Italy ! going to Venice ! ' ' she went on hum- 
 ming aloud to herself. But quite apart from this tangible 
 fact was a hidden and a no less potent one. Linda stood 
 tiptoe upon the threshold of her womanhood ; quite uncon- 
 sciously to herself she was straining to see, she was strain- 
 ing to possess, what women possess and what women see. 
 One of those almost uncontrollable instincts, which haunt 
 all emotional beings, told her that she was about to touch 
 on the very sources of human existence. 
 
 She went about her work with a quiet step and bearing, 
 but a fire shone in her eyes. Far, far back in some region 
 of her mind was a desire to see and to be seen by Basil . But 
 the desire was unacknowledged even to herself. It was set 
 aside and stifled as she packed her pretty clothes and papers. 
 
 The Fohn wind had ceased to blow. It had done its work 
 and melted the snows. Once again the rent clouds vanished 
 towards midday, and a beautiful warm sunshine flooded 
 the valleys. A sweet hot scent of earth and of growing 
 things rose up from the fields; and the small streams 
 trickled gaily through the meadows. 
 
 Linda went to her room towards the hour of coffee. She 
 
THE DANCE 159 
 
 brushed her hair, which was abundant as in her childhood, 
 and she knotted it with a curious easy grace, in the fashion 
 of her day, low down upon the neck. Then she put on 
 her prettiest morning gown of serge, the colour of a gen- 
 tian ; she hung round her slender throat the golden chain 
 which had belonged to her dead mother, and she went to 
 her little mirror. How fresh she looked how small and 
 tender ! Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were 
 dancing. 
 
 She went straight down to the Emperor's house, by a 
 path which led through the meadows. The small white 
 crocuses were opening in thousands ; the fields had a shim- 
 mer as of steel from all these flowers. And there were 
 little gentians blue as lapiz, too, amongst them. Linda 
 stooped down and gathered a bunch. She drew a thread 
 from her pocket, and she formed a wreath of the exquisite 
 blooms, which she pinned round her hair at the back of 
 her head. 
 
 It happened that the Emperor himself was standing in 
 the doorway of his house. He was no longer a young man, 
 but his eyes were sharp, and he had been watching Linda 
 for some years past. He watched her with mixed feelings. 
 There was a clash of opinions in the mind of the canny old 
 peasant, for to him the doctor's daughter was an unsatis- 
 factory hybrid as far as her parentage was concerned. He 
 was a Tory and he liked pure blood. Linda's could not be 
 described as pure. But, then, she was rich, and she was 
 not stupid ; and these two last points were worth reckoning 
 in her favour, though they were not enough. He stood 
 quite still in the open doorway of his house with his elbows 
 resting on the wooden balcony of the porch. The sunlight 
 passed over him and entered the passage behind him, it 
 fell quite full on one of the family pictures which hung by 
 the corn-bin. This picture was the portrait of a weird 
 little lady with yellow hair. She was a Venetian of good 
 birth, and she had married a Castille early in the century. 
 Her Castille husband kept a pastrycook's shop in a back 
 
160 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 street at Venice, and the lady and he had led a cat and 
 dog life together for many years ; but he had finally brought 
 her to live for her last days at Trins. This proceeding 
 hastened her death, for she died of the purest ennui. Un- 
 consciously the Emperor's gaze turned back to the hall as 
 Linda approached, and his eyes fell on the picture of the 
 foreign lady. But he seemed reassured, and he went half- 
 way to meet the coming guest. 
 
 Linda, as I have said before, was afraid of the Emperor. 
 She blushed up crimson to the roots of her hair when she 
 saw him. She would have taken the wreath of gentians 
 from her hair, but she had not time to do this. 
 
 " I have only just come back from England," she stam- 
 mered. 
 
 " England becomes you," said the Emperor with sudden 
 courtesy, for even this hard old man was struck and silenced 
 by the loveliness and freshness of the girl before him. And 
 Linda blushed again. Beauty certainly had never got 
 a tribute from a more surprising source. 
 
 "It's nice to be home again," she hazarded. 
 
 ' ' Are you sure of that ?" said the Emperor. He went up 
 the steps and she followed him. His wife had just brought 
 in the coffee. She kissed Linda a little sadly. Frau 
 Castille had grown very thin and pale during the past two 
 years ; she was dying of a terrible disease, but she did not 
 talk about it, either to her husband or her children. She 
 put on the same stiff gowns which hung like cardboard on 
 her withered figure, but she was always splendid in her 
 bearing, and her beautiful dark hair was plaited in the 
 usual faultless plaits above her brows. The Emperor cer- 
 tainly had a high standard in the choice of wives. 
 
 The Castille girls had grown tall and strong. Their 
 clothes were badly cut, and made them square and hard 
 about the breasts and shoulders. They wore heavy boots 
 and coarse purple stockings. Their hair was parted grimly 
 over their sunburned foreheads. Had they grown up in 
 surroundings less austere they might have been beauties, 
 
THE DANCE 161 
 
 like their Aunt Walpurga ; as it was, with every disadvan- 
 tage that rough weather, incessant work, scant joys, and 
 months of shut-up rooms, and snow could give them, they 
 yet retained a certain homely charm a dignity which 
 silenced adverse criticism. 
 
 Linda took her seat by the table. Frau Castille poured 
 out the coffee and Linda lifted the pretty painted cup and 
 looked at the flowers on its sides. 
 
 The sunlight came straight through the window at her 
 back ; her blue gown shimmered like silver, and her hair 
 seemed all on fire. 
 
 " Linda has grown very thin," said Christina Castille at 
 last. 
 
 " I wish I were," said Linda. "In England . . ."and 
 she paused. 
 
 "Are the girls in England thin?" half-sneered the 
 Emperor. 
 
 " Some of them at least, they want to be thin. They 
 play lots of games. It's easier if one is not so heavy." 
 
 " What sort of children can they bear?" said the 
 Emperor. 
 
 At this minute a heavy tread was heard on the steps out- 
 side. A shadow fell over the window and Basil came into 
 the room. He smiled when he saw Linda the sort of 
 smile of someone who sees the thing he has expected and 
 wished for. "I thought you'd be here," he said, and he 
 pushed past his mother and sisters and wedged himself in 
 on the bench by the window, very near Linda. A faint 
 smile covered the look of pain on Frau Castille's face. The 
 girls looked across at each other. But the Emperor spoke 
 out rudely to his son : 
 
 " You've done the work badly up in the wood," he said. 
 " You've left the best bark of the tree on the ground. I 
 was up there myself this morning. You had the horse and 
 the cart, and could easily have finished the work in an hour 
 or two. What brought you back so early in the evening?" 
 
 11 
 
162 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 Basil shrugged his shoulders. He pushed up his cup for 
 some coffee, and as he did so, he jostled Linda with his 
 arm. Instinctively she drew aside. He cut a hunch of 
 bread and ate it slowly ; now and then he turned and stared 
 at Linda. When he had finished his meal he let his hands 
 fall to his sides, and one rested full on her gown and she 
 moved it away, for his hand was heavy and seemed to 
 crush and crumple the delicate fabric. 
 
 " I expect I must go back home," said Linda. 
 
 " Oh, stay a bit," said one of the girls, " and we'll all 
 go up to the dance together." 
 
 " What dance?" she asked. 
 
 " We dance sometimes on Saturday nights at the inn. 
 It's a nice bit of floor ; you'll soon get partners." 
 
 Linda was young. Diversion of any kind attracted her, 
 and she listened to no warning voice. She forgot the thing 
 which had so frightened and displeased her in Basil's 
 manner towards her ; she forgot her intuitive sense that 
 the joys and the habits of her childhood were behind her 
 for the time at least. 
 
 An hour later she went up the fields with Basil and his 
 sisters. It was a beautiful spring evening, cold and still. 
 All -the gentians had closed in the meadows, but the grass 
 shone green in the twilight. The mountains had lost the 
 sordid look of the night before ; fresh clouds were rolling 
 over them, they seemed very far away and their outline 
 melted to the sky, where scattered stars appeared to 
 glimmer faintly. 
 
 "It will snow again to-night," said Basil to some young 
 men who had passed them on the path. But they did not 
 answer him. They stared at Linda as she came through 
 the grass, then they joined the Castille girls and the two 
 walked on alone. 
 
 ' ' Why do you wear those flowers in your hair ? They 
 are withered," said Basil. 
 
 Linda put up her hand and took off the wreath of 
 gentians. 
 
THE DANCE 163 
 
 " I don't like that sort of wreath," said Basil abruptly, 
 "I like the wax flowers that the girls wear here at 
 weddings." 
 
 "You like wax flowers better than real ones?" said 
 Linda impatiently. 
 
 But Basil was no great talker ; and he did not wish to 
 argue. He sighed peacefully, and they went in silence as 
 far as the doctor's house, where Linda stopped to tell her 
 father about the dance. She noticed that he smiled rather 
 grimly when she told him where she was going, and with 
 whom ; but he made no real objection, and she soon went 
 back into the street. She felt like a child, and even a 
 naughty child. The atmosphere of 'the village brought 
 back to her in a hundred ways the remembrance of her 
 happy wayward youth. 
 
 " You like wax flowers better than real ones," she 
 repeated. "Yes, I can remember quite well how you 
 always picked the alpenrose and edelweiss rather than the 
 really beautiful flowers in the meadows." 
 
 "Maybe," said Basil, and he looked down on the little 
 figure beside him with a sort of delighted forbearance. 
 " When the summer comes," he said, "I'll go to the Alps 
 and I'll get a bit of white alpenrose I know where it 
 grows, but no one else knows : I've been watching it a long 
 
 while keeping it ," he paused. "I'll maybe bring 
 
 the whole plant down," he said, " and you'll plant it in 
 the garden." 
 
 "Don't," said Linda. "It can only die, torn up like 
 that with all its flowers on it." 
 
 They had reached the inn by this time. From the upper 
 room came the sound of a crazy violin played by some 
 strolling player, and the heavy stamp of feet. At the sound 
 of the music Basil caught Linda's hand in his and ran with 
 her up the stairs, and they came to a low, hot room panelled 
 with cembra-pine. It was on the north side of the street 
 and dark already, although out of doors the twilight lingered 
 still. An oil-lamp hanging from the ceiling cast a rather 
 
164 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 lurid light upon the scene. Some two dozen men and girls 
 were there together, the girls sitting bolt upright against 
 the wall, and one or two couples turned slowly, almost 
 laboriously, in the centre of the floor. The spectacle was 
 scarcely a gay one the dancers looked sober, their limbs 
 were stiff and deadened by hard work ; but a sort of fierce 
 human love burned in one or two of the hearts, and hand 
 clasped hand with a touch which amounted to passion. 
 
 " Come," said Basil. He put his arm round Linda. He 
 clutched her small cool hand, and he danced with her round 
 the room. Always he seemed to be holding her tighter. 
 
 Her head swam : "I'm tired," she said. 
 
 "Tired," he repeated. "Why, the dance is only 
 beginning." 
 
 " Stop," she said, " I'm dizzy." 
 
 But Basil went on dancing. Then Linda broke from his 
 grasp with an effort. Something was singing in her head ; 
 something like a sob had stifled her. She was dizzy indeed. 
 
 " No," she said, " I shall not go on dancing with you. 
 The room is hot. Everything is heavy. If you want to 
 dance there are lots of partners. I shall look on." 
 
 She spoke in a hurry. She leant her head back against 
 the wall, her hands held firm to the side of the bench. The 
 lamp-light fell on her ruffied hair, on her small round figure 
 in the dark blue gown, and the wonderful amethyst cross. 
 
 Basil looked at her, then turned away. For an instant 
 he stood quite still, then once again he faced her. 
 
 " Linda," he said, " thou art but a fool." 
 
 His whole manner changed and he went across the room. 
 A girl with great dark eyes was sitting alone on a bench. 
 She wore a black velvet bodice, and there was something 
 rather coarse about her ; she was the child of some people 
 who had come from the lower valleys and taken a little 
 shop outside the village. Basil did not even ask this girl to 
 dance. He pulled her up from the bench with a laugh, 
 and they whirled and stamped round the room together. 
 Linda watched them as though she were hypnotized. 
 
THE DANCE 165 
 
 At last the tired fiddler dropped his bow. The dancers 
 went off to another room where wine was sold at a wooden 
 table ; Basil and his partner went too. 
 
 And Linda got up, and went down the stairs. She found 
 the front-door open, and she passed out into the street. The 
 place was dark ; it had begun to snow. Small flakes flut- 
 tered down through the still and quiet air. A strange 
 almost a deadly mist had fallen on the valleys. "It is 
 winter again," Linda murmured to herself. She felt so 
 strange, so giddy and bewildered, that she did not attempt 
 to walk back home ; she saw nothing, thought of nothing 
 distinctly. The fiddler went on playing in the room above, 
 and the feet thudded their heavy thudding accompaniment . 
 Above all these sounds, the girl became conscious of others 
 across the street. There was the wailing of a very young 
 child, and the voice of its mother, comforting it. In the 
 dull glimmer of the snow-storm Linda could distinguish the 
 feeble light of watchers in the windows, and she realized 
 that human life was struggling all about her. A sudden 
 curious longing to be in the opposite house, to be the 
 mother of the wailing child, swept over her, some prehis- 
 toric, almost animal craving entered her bewildered and 
 expanding soul. Her head went up : " Mother," she mur- 
 mured under her breath, "wife." Her eyes filled with a 
 sudden glory in the darkness. 
 
 " Linda, you here ! You out here in the dark and the 
 snow ! Didn't I tell thee thou wert but a fool?" 
 
 Basil had come down the stairs ; he held a lantern in hig 
 hand. There was a smouldering fire in his eyes. 
 
 Suddenly he sat down beside her: "Linda," he said, 
 "why dost thou act as a fool?" She heard him breathe. 
 The snow fell thicker. She jumped to her feet. 
 
 " Yes," she said, " I expect after all I am one. Any- 
 how, to-morrow I'm going to Italy, and now I'm going 
 home now this instant," she added, as she instinctively 
 
166 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 felt he had drawn nearer. To herself she murmured, ' ' No, 
 no, no never." The wail of the child had touched her 
 woman's heart, but the rude courtship of the mountain 
 man had terrified and repulsed her. 
 
 In silence, and perhaps in scorn, they passed down the 
 street and reached her father's door. There he paused, 
 and turned the light of the lantern full upon her face : 
 
 " Good-bye, Linda Caflisch," he said. " Thou 'It come 
 home. Thou 'It come home, right enough, and in thy 
 proper time," but a light flashed back from his eyes, and 
 Linda saw that something in his face had changed, and 
 that, though hard, the expression was almost pleading. 
 
 " Good-bye, Basil." Then impulsively and in spite of 
 herself she spoke her thoughts. "Oh, it is bare up here 
 in springtime, and the work is hard, and things and people 
 look often worn and as though they didn't know, or couldn't 
 care, for all the pretty things and the fresh things, or just 
 all those things which make life interesting. It cannot be 
 wrong to go right away or even to be thoroughly wicked 
 and happy for a little while?" 
 
 An odd expression supplanted the pleading in Basil's 
 eyes. 
 
 " Neither of those wilt thou ever be," he said. 
 
 And Linda said nothing. She gave him her hand and 
 she turned back into her father's house. 
 
CHAPTEK XIII 
 
 THE GATES OF ITALY 
 
 SOON after six the following morning they started away in 
 the diligence. The dawn was dark and sullen. As they 
 came into the broad valley of the Hinterhein it began to 
 rain, and it rained all the morning. They drove through 
 the dripping portals of the Via Mala, where the melting 
 snows from every peak sent down cascades of water which 
 coursed in jets and torrents over the perpendicular rocks 
 and ledges, and splashed in the roads and rushed to join the 
 Khine. But later in the afternoon, as they began the 
 ascent of the Splugen, the rain ceased ; <the clouds were 
 riven and lifted off the peaks ; the air turned icy-cold and 
 clear ; and when night had fallen there was no fleck of mist 
 in all the sky. 
 
 They stayed that night in the bleak old inn at Splugen. 
 The following morning they crossed the pass. The dawn 
 had been still and cloudless, and the sun burned fiercely on 
 the desolate rocks and moors as they passed the hospice. 
 Dr. Caflisch had taken seats in the coupe of 'the diligence, 
 and there sat Linda fresh and strong as they climbed the 
 last spiral curve of the wonderful Alpine road in the early 
 morning light. She felt like a person in a theatre : the 
 curtain, she knew, was about to go up on the play of her 
 vision of youth and of Italy. 
 
 Before she could well realize what had happened, they 
 had crossed the summit of the Splugen and were rattling 
 down over the dust and the stones of a genuine Italian high- 
 way. Huge granite boulders, hurled as it would seem by 
 
 167 
 
168 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 reckless Titan hands, now lay in magnificent abandonment 
 about the straggling valleys. Here and there, on an almost 
 perpendicular wall of rock, a slender campanile would 
 arise amidst the gorgeous havoc, backed by the white- 
 washed body of a church or chapel. Pines and larches sud- 
 denly gave way to chestnut-trees, and these spread their 
 imperial southern forms, differing so totally from the 
 formal lines of spruce that still guarded the higher slopes, 
 over the rocks, and the little scattered meadows. In these 
 meadows, where the short blades of the first spring grasses 
 shot up green as emeralds, there were sights which made 
 the heart of Linda bound against her side. There were 
 thousands of white and lilac crocuses ; there were deep blue 
 scilla flowers, shooting amidst the husks of last year's 
 chestnuts ; and there were snowflakes, lemon-yellow, and 
 short and firm upon their stems. There were millions of 
 all these exquisite flowers. 
 
 The lumbering carriage swung on down the road. Dry 
 dust flew up behind them. Here and there a torpid sulphur 
 butterfly flapped above the dead leaves sunning beneath 
 a wall. The valley widened, its lower skirts were fringed 
 with vineyards ; and they passed through cobbled village 
 streets where children scrambled barefoot in the gutters, 
 their brown limbs scarcely hidden by their crimson petti- 
 coats, their brilliant coloured handkerchiefs binding rebel- 
 lious curls. 
 
 Linda made no outward comments. The reality was 
 better than her childhood's vision. She felt half dazed, 
 half wild with joy, when, just as the midday hour was 
 tolling, they drew up in the Piazza of Chiavenna. 
 
 She followed her father and the landlord up the stairs. 
 They went through high vaulted passages for the inn was 
 really an old palace over the slippery scagliola floors, and 
 into the large cool shuttered bedrooms. One of the rooms 
 had a big stone balcony, and this one Linda chose for her 
 own. Her father was talking to the landlord. She heard 
 him mentioning trout and Asti wine ; and it struck her as 
 
THE GATES OF ITALY 169 
 
 quite incredible that anyone should dream of food when 
 reaching, as it were, the very gates of Paradise. She left 
 her hat, she dropped her cloak. She went out on the bal- 
 cony, closing the windows behind her. She sank her chin 
 upon her hands, and, leaning her elbows on the broad 
 palisade, she looked on the vision before her. 
 
 The sun had flooded the piazza at her feet with an intense 
 spring radiance. Just opposite the inn there stood the ruins 
 of the abandoned Salis palace. Above these rose the hill 
 called Paradiso, with its terraces, its vines, and pergolas. 
 Beyond and above this, tier on tier, first in vineyards, then 
 in cascades of mighty boulders, then in chestnut-trees and 
 pines, and last of all, in bleak brown slopes where the 
 snows of winter lingered still in patches, there rose the 
 barriers of the Alps. To the south again the sky was wider, 
 and against it rose the campanile of the church, slender 
 and tall, with that strange blend of strength and elegance 
 peculiar to all Italian church towers. On the right, across 
 the street, was a little old villa with wrought-iron gates, its 
 gardens crowned by cypress-trees and bays and flowering 
 bushes. Here on the steps of the villa a group of very old 
 men sat huddled. They looked like the husks of last year's 
 chestnuts, tumbled-down somehow because of the coming 
 of spring. A few workmen were resting there, after their 
 midday meal. 
 
 Ah ! this was a key to the vision of that land which has 
 called forth all the romantic enthusiasm of the North 
 throughout the pages of history. 
 
 Linda gazed on and on. She had stood up to her full 
 height now. In life she was actually seeing what her 
 fathers had seen before her, but what she herself had only 
 dreamed of. Her lips moved in inarticulate phrases. 
 
 And because she was in herself, for the moment, a vision, 
 the people in the piazza, quick to detect, had stopped to 
 look at her. A little courteous crowd had gathered below, 
 for Italians neither conceal nor obtrude their love of human 
 loveliness. 
 
170 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 A hunchback tailor, creeping out from his little cool shop 
 in a back-street to feel the warmth of the piazza, had been 
 the first to recognize the stranger ; dropping his tape, he 
 clasped his hands and gazed at the unconscious form of 
 Linda : 
 
 " Un baccio, poi morire," he murmured, half in jest and 
 half in hopeless earnest ; then looking back, he passed on 
 farther to crouch in the sunshine on the steps, and to watch, 
 unobserved, the wonderful face of this new Northern comer. 
 Some peasant- women , with high bell-shaped baskets on 
 their backs, coming from work in the vineyards, also 
 stopped. Still plying their needles, for they were knitting 
 strange magenta stockings as they walked, they stopped 
 below the windows of the inn. 
 
 " Ah Madonna !" one of them cried, " if our Lady had 
 conceived a daughter she would have had a face as sweet," 
 and they gave a little cry to turn the gaze of Linda, who, 
 dizzy with new sensations, never suspected 'their notice. 
 An old white-headed gentleman the owner of the villa 
 came out to see his crocuses and tulips, sunning in the 
 borders. Catching sight of Linda, he approached his iron 
 gates and watched her keenly for some moments, with the 
 penetrating, sympathetic gaze which old men give to girls. 
 
 Some young men, too, came out to stroll. 
 
 "Eyes!" said one, "eyes to turn one in and out of 
 heaven." 
 
 "Skin!" said another. "A skin like 'the bloom on 
 apricots in August ! Ahi ! ahi !" he sang. 
 
 The strange wailing call of the love-song made Linda 
 start, and her eyes fell full on the little group below her. 
 
 The very simplicity of their interest and admiration won 
 from her a like acceptance ; the blood rushed to her fore- 
 head. She never forgot that moment ; she stood up proudly 
 on the little balcony, and beamed on the people in the 
 square. The passionate love and admiration which she 
 had given at once to their country, came back to herself 
 from them again. And no young empress in all her 
 
THE GATES OF ITALY 171 
 
 diamonds of state, standing for the first time in the full light 
 of the opera-house to meet the wondering welcome of her 
 husband's people, had ever felt a thrill more exquisite. Her 
 heart was in her eyes. With her strange, half-pagan 
 nature, untortured by human pain, and totally untouched 
 by ennui, she had found perfection one absolutely perfect 
 spot on earth, with a people, not scattered individuals, 
 formed to fit it. There was no flaw within her crystal, as 
 for one perfect second she held it in her grasp. 
 
 An hour later she and her father went out on the moun- 
 tain-sides. 
 
 Linda, impatient for discoveries, led the way. They 
 crossed the piazza, and entered the vineyards at the bottom 
 of the mountains ; then they began to clamber up a winding 
 path amidst the boulders of the opposite hillside. Primulas 
 grew in crevices of the rock with heather, and here and 
 there a cowslip, and beautiful shining ferns with gold and 
 silver linings to their backs. 
 
 A splendid warmth, totally unlike the moist heat of an 
 English summer or the pitiless scorching heat of her own 
 mountains, poured upon the rocks and woods and vineyards 
 all about her. The sky, restrained as it were to the north 
 by the mountain ranges of Maloja and of Spliigen, yet 
 seemed illimitable, and of a blue bluer than any she had 
 ever dreamed of. Large white clouds passed lazily across 
 it, growing and shrinking and dispersing with a grand 
 inconsequence. In shady places the air was cold and 
 damp, not chill. The people who passed them on the road, 
 carrying heavy burdens on their backs and withered with 
 hard labour, in the excited eyes of Linda appeared to 
 walk as the gods. The children wore no shoes but pat- 
 tered by in silence, a very part of the nature they inhabited 
 brown curls, brown feet, brown fingers, and eyes which 
 laughed and glowed. 
 
 Presently they came out on a little pasture high above 
 the valleys. It was enclosed with a low crumbling wall of 
 round stones. A tiny stream ran through the meadow. It 
 
172 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 was fresh with melted snows from the mountain-tops above, 
 and it trickled in many little rills and natural runnels 
 through the brilliant grass of early spring. The grass was 
 enamelled with snowflakes, crocuses, and squills. The 
 flowers were fresh and strong. It seemed as though they 
 had been strewn there by the Alpine snow-winds, but that 
 their roots had drawn in all the warmth and strength of the 
 Italian summer sun, and thus they were as crisp and pure 
 as any flower of winter could ever be. 
 
 Linda darted in and out among the flowers, singing to 
 herself. Her father, sitting in the shade of a wall, watched 
 her in deep thought. And as he watched, the memory of 
 his dead wife returned to him, and it was with an almost 
 timorous interest that he followed the living relic of their 
 short span of married life, and contemplated the future of 
 such a blend of alien races. Dr. Caflisch was not an 
 imaginative man, but he dimly acknowledged the strain of 
 something like a ruffled poetry in his daughter's mind, and 
 it disturbed him. 
 
 Linda wore a thin grey flannel gown. She wore it as a 
 peasant man might wear his homespun, not as some 
 capricious fashion. Her whole pose was that of one whom 
 no shackles yet have bound, and who has obeyed the 
 promptings of her own nature whilst unconsciously rebel- 
 ling against the dictated rules of all our opposing creeds. 
 Yet she was at peace with herself and with the earth she 
 walked on, for she had never stayed to fathom the responsi- 
 bilities of our common existence. 
 
 The meadow path wound up a little farther, then passing 
 through another stone wall it entered a chestnut grove, 
 where trees, some of them of an immense age, stretched 
 their bare branches over boulders smothered in moss and 
 ferns. Here, beneath the shelter of a boulder which was 
 almost a mountain, a rude stone hut had been constructed. 
 The building fitted so well with its natural surroundings, 
 just as a bird's or wasp's nest fits, that at first Linda had 
 not recognized it as a human habitation. Then a small 
 
THE GATES OF ITALY 173 
 
 black dog, followed by its puppy, got up from the threshold 
 and barked at her, and she saw the house and its 
 inhabitants. A goat with her long-limbed kid stood graz- 
 ing on the roof, amidst the slates and tufted saxifrage. 
 Some tiny black hens with their broods of chickens crouched 
 in the dust by the threshold ; and on the doorstep itself sat 
 a young woman, suckling her child. All about and above 
 them the leaves and flowers of early April opened into 
 being ; the entire scene was one of peaceful maternity, at 
 home with its surroundings and with the budding spring. 
 
 Linda stood very still. An odd feeling like a tiny elec- 
 tric shock went to the fibres of her being. How quiet it all 
 was, and yet what a breathless pulsating form of peace ! 
 What fulfilment of real facts what exclusion of mere aim- 
 less wonderings and fancies. 
 
 The young woman nodded to her, and mechanically 
 Linda went towards her and sat beside her on the threshold. 
 ' You have a beautiful baby," she said, hardly knowing 
 why she said it, or even what it was that she was saying. 
 
 " The Madonna forgive me yes," said the mother, and 
 stooped to twist a little piece of red wool on the baby's 
 neck. The white kid and the puppy, too, had pieces of 
 red wool tied to their fleeces, for even here in this romantic 
 solitude the powers of evil, human and profane, might 
 penetrate to harm the lives of growing creatures. Linda, 
 however, was unconscious of the blasting properties of 
 praise. 
 
 'You live here this is your home?" she hazarded. 
 ' Yes," said the young woman. " This is my home." 
 
 "It is very beautiful." 
 
 " It is lonely. When I was a girl before I married I 
 lived in the city. I lived in Chiavenna. Our house was 
 one of the best in the piazza; then I married Giovanni. 
 Now I live here ; Giovanni is poor ; I only go down to the 
 town on feast days. But I have the babies." 
 
 " Oh yes," said Linda, " there are the babies. . . . Are 
 they enough? I mean, do they make up? ..." 
 
174 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 Girls marry young in the South this mother of babies 
 was but a year or two older than Linda ; but in her eyes 
 was gathered 'the wisdom of womanhood and much of its 
 ancient dignity. She bent over the bundle in her arms, 
 closed the bodice of her dress, and smiled the strange, half- 
 melancholy, yet satisfied smile of mothers, as she rocked 
 the child for a moment in her arms, then laid it back in 
 the cradle on the hearth within. 
 
 " And you?" she said, coming back to the threshold and 
 lifting a fold of Linda's gown as though to examine its 
 quality. " When will you, too, be a wife?" 
 
 A pain shot back to Linda's heart. She felt angry ; she 
 knew not why, for this young woman was beautiful and 
 she loved beauty ; she was kind, and Linda was ever sensi- 
 tive to kindness. She did not answer -the question. 
 
 " How many children have you got?" she asked. 
 
 "Two," said the woman. "It is but twenty months 
 ago since Giovanni and I were married." 
 
 " And where is Giovanni? What does he do?" 
 
 " He works. He is at work all day round about in the 
 fields here, and he has a vineyard lower in the valley. We 
 are not so very poor, though my people said it would be 
 hard for me. We have two cows as well as the goat, and 
 we have all these hens too." 
 
 Linda looked back through the meadow whence she had 
 come, away through the opening of the chestnut grove over 
 the meadows where the snowflakes grew, and down to the 
 valley and the plain. Italy was there, and art, and 
 churches, and romance. It was hidden, but to the intuitive 
 soul it was absolutely revealed. 
 
 Cows, goats, hens, and sheep. . . . She rebelled, she 
 knew not why. 
 
 " I think I must be going," she said. 
 
 The young woman laid her hand on Linda's arm, then 
 stretched and touched her hair, too. 
 
 " Ah," she said in a low, crooning "voice, and her dark 
 
THE GATES OF ITALY 175 
 
 eyes smiled. ' Your hair is thick and strong, your eyes 
 are clear and beautiful. Your heart and soul are faithful,, 
 too I know it. You, too, will find your Giovanni. But I 
 think ... I think it had better be with a house in the 
 piazza !" 
 
 Linda started to her feet. 
 
 ' Thank you," she said, " thank you very much. But 
 I am content content and very happy." 
 
 She went in and kissed the sleeping baby by the hearth, 
 and, looking behind her now and again, she passed through 
 the woods and back to the meadows. At the last turn of 
 the path she paused and waved her hand. But the woman 
 took up her knitting with a strange, restful look in her 
 eyes, and only nodded her head with a sort of ruminating 
 movement. 
 
CHAPTEB XIV 
 
 AWAKENED 
 
 " Que m'importe que tu sois sageP 
 Sois belle et sois triste." 
 
 BAUDELAIRE. 
 
 THAT afternoon in the chestnut-woods above Chiavenna was 
 perhaps the last pure hour of primitive and uncontaminated 
 joy in mere existence which Linda ever knew. This joy 
 which had possessed her through her childhood she now of 
 her own self though outwardly driven by an alien influ- 
 ence let slip for ever from her grasp. Other, and pos- 
 sibly deeper, joys would follow in her womanhood ; and the 
 shadow of this old ecstasy would often fall upon her altered 
 spirit. But as a permanent factor in her being it went 
 from her that day for ever, and from that day she no longer 
 trailed the more primitive " clouds of glory." 
 
 As Linda and her father passed in through the cool court- 
 yard of the inn, they heard the sound of a piano. In the 
 dim and quiet light of the sitting-room a man was seated 
 at the piano, playing. Piles of music lay about him on the 
 chairs and on the floor. The instrument was old and crazy, 
 its tones long battered away by the irreverent uses of suc- 
 cessive travellers ; but even had its qualities been of the 
 finest and most mellowed order, the sounds which it now 
 emitted must have proved at best but a series of broken and 
 distracted chords. From the whole attitude of the player, 
 and from the disorder he had created around him, it was 
 easy to divine that he was in search of some harmony, some 
 strain or motive, which in his present mood it was dis- 
 tinctly improbable he would ever arrive at. 
 
 176 
 
AWAKENED 177 
 
 " Is that gentleman staying here?" the doctor inquired 
 of his friend the landlord. 
 
 ' Yes, he has been with us for over a month." 
 
 " Does he play often?" 
 
 " Some days he goes on playing from morning till night. 
 He has his own piano, but he prefers this old one. He 
 says it gives him ' suggestions.' ' 
 
 The landlord was a plain man, but he could catch up and 
 repeat, without laying too great a stress on their absurdity, 
 the remarks and idiosyncrasies of his guests. 
 
 ' ' Some days he goes on playing from morning till night,' ' 
 he continued. " Once, for a week he did not play at all. 
 He is out of health, and he tells me he has come here to 
 rest. But Powers of Mercy ! in what form does he take 
 his rest ! When he is not playing, he is walking ; he goes 
 out walking with the dawn, and comes back like a tramp 
 in the late afternoons ; he brings all sorts of roots and plants 
 into his room, and old iron and drinking glasses. His dogs 
 sleep all about his room," added the landlord. 
 
 Linda had listened eagerly to the details of this descrip- 
 tion, spoken as they passed up the stairs. To her they 
 sounded romantic and extraordinarily attractive ; almost 
 unconsciously she had gone back to get another glimpse of 
 the player. The sunlight, coming in through the wide arch 
 of the courtyard, fell full on her eager face and figure ; her 
 hat had fallen back, disclosing her wide, questioning eyes, 
 and the sunburnt glowing tints of her skin ; her small grey 
 travelling gown seemed all a-shimmer against the darker 
 background of the passage. 
 
 The player paused a minute to watch her, then he began 
 to play again, and the music seemed like the echo of some 
 lost chord the faint fulfilment of some happy and yet 
 troublous dream. 
 
 Late that evening Linda went out into the garden of the 
 inn. Considering the general beauty of the surroundings, 
 and the rather grand style of the house itself, the garden 
 
 12 
 
178 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 was disappointing. It bore the stamp of a Swiss pro- 
 prietor, and, as far as it could, it shut out the romantic 
 elements of the landscape beyond it. But Linda was not 
 in any mood for criticism. She passed round the gravel 
 paths in the gathering shade of the spring night, brushing, 
 as she went, the bay-trees and the heavy scented shrubs 
 and bushes. She did not note the dullness of the ever- 
 greens, nor the tawdry shapes of the little iron chairs and 
 tables. The light was very dim, and the giant orange moon 
 just rising over the mountains but barely illumined the 
 outlines of the garden, and left the details hazy and 
 romantic. 
 
 Linda was not conscious of her state of mind, but it was 
 really like a blank sheet of paper which would take but 
 certain distinct impressions, and which must be written on 
 with the pencil of vague emotions only. 
 
 Presently a dog came pattering quietly over the gravel 
 path from the house. He was a beautiful German boar- 
 hound, with smooth blue coat and powerful jaws and feet. 
 He began to fawn on Linda, pawing her knees with first 
 one paw and then another, and rubbing his great head up 
 towards her face. Linda was quick to obey this silent invi- 
 tation to a game; she began to run, and the dog followed 
 her, barking and plunging against her side. She ran very 
 quickly, laughing aloud and encouraging the dog to further 
 antics. It was almost dark, and the lights appeared one 
 by one in the house. Presently their circles carried them 
 round the window of the dining-room, and Linda paused, 
 for she found herself suddenly confronted by the player of 
 the afternoon. She was dazed by the light ; she drew 
 herself up breathless, eager, and rather shy, and looked 
 straight into his face. She seemed to discover something 
 there which she had known or dreamed of many years ago. 
 The stranger himself bent forward, watching her intently : 
 
 " Tell me," he said abruptly and almost discourteously, 
 " who are you?" 
 
 " I," she said, " I am Linda Caflisch." 
 
AWAKENED 179 
 
 " Of course," he answered impatiently. " No, I did not 
 mean that. What I meant was, what are you?" 
 
 " I don't know what you meant," she replied, getting a 
 little angry and moving away. 
 
 "Don't go," said the stranger hurriedly. "Once ten 
 years ago But never mind. Listen. You did some- 
 thing for me to-day you gave me one minute of happiness I 
 You reminded me of something of someone who was 
 dear to me who ..." He turned abruptly, as though 
 impatient of himself. " You are a child," he said. ' ' Why 
 should I talk to you in this way ! ' ' 
 
 A day or two ago Linda would have been the first to 
 echo: "Why?" But now she found herself speechless. 
 She stood, half angry, half irresolute, in the middle of the 
 path, all the light from the lamp indoors falling upon 
 her eyes. 
 
 " Finish your game with my dog he likes you," sug- 
 gested the stranger. " God knows / play very few games 
 with the poor devil." 
 
 "How did you know that I was playing games?" said 
 Linda. 
 
 He did not answer her. He merely watched her cease- 
 lessly. 
 
 "Take the dog if you like him," he said. "I should 
 like to give you something that I thought you liked." 
 
 Then Linda felt roused: "But you can't give away 
 your dog like that," she said. " You must love him. Surely 
 you love a dog, if you take the trouble to keep one." 
 
 He did not answer her immediately. Then : "I have 
 been speaking to your father," he said. " I want to talk 
 with you now really to talk. Will you let me?" 
 
 " Oh yes why not?" said Linda rather ungraciously. 
 In her heart she was pleased, flattered, disturbed. 
 
 1 ' But it is chilly for you out here ; let me fetch you my 
 coat." 
 
 " Not your coat," said Linda. " Also, I am never cold." 
 
 They sat down on two of the little garden chairs. Von 
 
180 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 Herder put his elbows on his knees and rested his chin in 
 his hands, and he stared into Linda's eyes as though he 
 would read her soul there : 
 
 "How old are you?" he said at last. 
 
 "I am just eighteen," she answered. As von Herder 
 watched her a strange deceptive calm came seething up in 
 her brain perhaps a touch of something hypnotic. This 
 stranger, with his quick strange ways and sudden ques- 
 tions, did not surprise her. It seemed to her as though 
 she had always known that someone would come into her 
 life and speak to her just as he was speaking. She looked 
 at him calmly ; his eyes were quiet, like leaves which cease 
 even to quiver when a storm is brewing. 
 
 " Eighteen," he repeated. " Is it possible !" Then he 
 started. "Look at me," he said. "Look straight into 
 my eyes. You do not trust me. Why don't you trust me?" 
 
 " I had not been thinking about you," Linda answered 
 simply. 
 
 " Yes, you had. You thought about my dog. You told 
 me that I lied when I asked you to take him as a gift. . . . 
 And why should you trust me after all ! " he continued 
 pushing back his chair. Then suddenly he leant forward. 
 "One thing more," he said. "Why are you yourself?" 
 
 " Myself?" repeated Linda. 
 
 " Yes. Who made you so? What are you?" 
 
 She did not answer him this time, but a curious convic- 
 tion of her own identity throughout all time possessed her. 
 Where did you get the look in your eyes ? How did 
 the pain come there?" 
 
 " Pain?" she repeated, barely understanding him. 
 
 1 ' Yes, pain. You who are so well so happy what did 
 you see in your short life to give you the look of pain?" 
 
 Then Linda felt roused. But she was roused not from a 
 dream but to one. Suddenly she saw the things which 
 most had hurt her in her life. And these things were 
 nothing to do with the human heart ; they were all outside 
 
AWAKENED 181 
 
 impressions, they were ugly things, or they were dull things, 
 and they centred nearly entirely in England. She saw 
 rows of dingy houses, street-corners and suburban places ; 
 dreary people passed her some were overdressed, some 
 not dressed enough ; she saw things made wholly by men 
 without imagination, and without ideals; she saw dusty 
 streets at the end of long hot days ; she saw all the many 
 things by which a man may hide away his healing sense 
 of natural loveliness. 
 
 And, together with this vision, there came, thrust in 
 upon her inner consciousness, a vivid realization of self. 
 It seemed to her that she was not really human, as the 
 people she had known from her childhood were human. 
 She saw them pass before her : her father, her aunt, her 
 school-friends ; Dudley too, and her Uncle Sebastian but 
 he was different. She dimly felt that she loved none of 
 them with all her soul and all her heart as passionately as 
 on some not distant day she could and would love some- 
 one. So far the only human beings she had loved in any 
 strong enduring way were Joan and her Uncle Sebastian, 
 and her father because he belonged to her. 
 
 Yet there were thousands of natural things which some- 
 how powerfully moved her. She knew what a deep and 
 satisfying pleasure came to her in woods and in meadows, 
 and on winter nights in mountains. The light which 
 lingered there was more glorious far than any light on any 
 human face, for Linda had never known a mother, and I 
 think it is only in a mother's eyes that a young child reads 
 the depth and the protection of human affection. 
 
 As Linda suddenly thus began to think, there flashed to 
 her heart some crying need for human love for something 
 which would take and hold her, for something she, too, 
 could give back again. She, herself, had been much loved 
 in certain ways ; the power of love she knew was in her. 
 Basil? no, not that. This stranger? No no! . .A 
 
 She got up hurriedly from where she had been sitting. 
 
 " Put aside the pain," suggested the stranger. " There 
 
182 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 are plenty of excellent pagan persons who never even heard 
 of the doctrines of the Crucifixion. Also some people you 
 for one are far too lovely to be sad." 
 
 Linda went back into the house. She went straight to 
 her father's room. 
 
 "Father," she said, "who is that gentleman down- 
 stairs the one who was playing ? I don't like him at all. " 
 
 " Why, he's an old friend of yours," the doctor answered, 
 looking up from his writing. ' ' Don't you remember Count 
 von Herder?" 
 
 Linda had only been a very little girl when, in one of her 
 first rebellions against the shackles of civilized English life, 
 she had broken the bonds and wandered away through the 
 streets of Chur on that July morning to look at the little 
 white pillar in the crypt , and to hear the tales of the Cyclops, 
 so opposed to the spirit even of the rambling Catholic 
 cathedral. But even had she retained any distinct outline 
 of the rather unkempt Austrian student of those dim days, 
 she could not now reconcile the memory with the romantic 
 and weary being who had suddenly come into her life, 
 talked to her so intimately about herself, broken in five 
 minutes the barriers of mere acquaintance. She could not 
 get his image out of her head, do as she would ; and yet it 
 was late, she was physically tired , and anxious to sleep. She 
 saw von Herder nothing but von Herder. She saw his 
 tall thin figure with the stooping shoulders, his eager, rest- 
 less eyes, his mouth with the pain and the ennui in it ; and 
 she heard his hurrying and impatient voice. Every word 
 which he had spoken came back to her with poignant 
 memory. But if he had intended to impress his own un- 
 happy image on her brain or worse, upon her heart he 
 had failed in his purpose ; and had really only exposed to 
 view some hidden sources of unhappiness or failure in her 
 own soul. 
 
 As the former history of von Herder does not concern the 
 present events of my story, I need not tell it at any length. 
 
AWAKENED 183 
 
 It will be enough to say that, owing to a succession of 
 unexpected deaths and changes in his family, he had sud- 
 denly found himself in a manner absolutely unforeseen at 
 birth, the only surviving representative of an illustrious, if 
 somewhat dissolute, race. Count von Herder, from being 
 but a poor and very loose-living student, studying medi- 
 cine at a French University, had, but a year ago, 
 become the sole owner of a very large property, and 
 of its innumerable castles and possessions the accu- 
 mulated wealth of an ancient and not over scrupulous 
 race. The moment had come, and the full oppor- 
 tunity, to make a fresh start and to redress a vagrant 
 youth. For the time, however, he did none of these things. 
 He merely played ducks and drakes with his pounds as he 
 had done with his pence before them. But before he had 
 finally finished this career he paused, for he had entangled 
 himself in a false connection from which death that spring 
 had set him free. He had played with the hearts of many 
 women but it was something in the death of this one 
 woman, much more wicked and abandoned than himself, 
 which made him pause. At the death of this lady she 
 was a very great lady too von Herder told his servant to 
 pack up various possessions, for he was about to travel. 
 First he went to the Engadine; then he came over the 
 passes, and he found the fine old inn at Chiavenna, and 
 the complete solitude which for the time suited him. 
 
 At the moment when, flushed with all the living joy of 
 a natural world, so infinitely more beautiful than any she 
 had ever dreamed of, Linda went back to look at the un- 
 known musician, von Herder was engaged in seeking for 
 some lost chord which should express the only absolute 
 harmony which he himself had ever known namely, a 
 pure and genuine love for a very good woman in the days 
 of his youth. Just at that moment he turned, and was met 
 by the steady gaze of Linda. Her candour, her uncon- 
 scious beauty, answered the very thing he was seeking for ; 
 an almost ferocious purity in her expression, combining 
 
184 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 with a veiled prophecy of all the love of woman and all its 
 possibility of pain, stirred some old chord within him. 
 Without waiting to think of the pain that talk like his 
 might bring her, he embarked on that strained inter- 
 course. 
 
 Von Herder had not forgotten his summer at Trins. He 
 remembered quite well the home of Doctor Caflisch ; he 
 remembered the little daughter with her great questioning 
 brown eyes ; he remembered the incongruous English 
 family, and Sebastian, and all the general problems created 
 by an unusual social situation. He remembered Basil, too. 
 But much had crowded his life since those days. His 
 memories were disjointed, and scarcely tallied with the 
 calmer courses of reality. 
 
 No sooner had Linda left him than he momentarily 
 forgot her as an individual woman ; he called his dog, and 
 he went out into the sleepy streets to arrange with a cer- 
 tain postilion in the town about a carriage to meet the 
 steamer which was to take him on to Como in the morning. 
 
 With Linda the thing was very different. She had had 
 a long and tiring day, one in which the emotional or mystic 
 sense had been stirred to its very foundation. The sudden 
 descent from the decaying winter snows, the cataracts, and 
 pitiless desolation of the summits of the Alps, down into 
 all the luxurious loveliness of Italy, must excite and even 
 intoxicate minds far less impressionable than that of this 
 strange child. And Linda's mind had, up till now, been 
 impressionable in only one distinct direction namely, that 
 of natural beauty. On the top of this Italian pageant in 
 fact, in its very foreground had appeared this strong, this 
 almost poisonous human influence of Count von Herder. 
 His was a personality of a sort different, but somehow 
 peculiarly attractive, to her own, and it had been thrust at 
 a moment of almost mystical exaltation into direct com- 
 munication with hers. 
 
 Von Herder had been the human means of waking her 
 
AWAKENED 185 
 
 dormant woman's nature. Basil's passion had surprised, 
 it had not really awakened it. 
 
 It was an absolutely still spring night ; Linda went out 
 on to her balcony and looked into the darkness of the square. 
 The air was chill ; the top of the campanile stood out white, 
 and the tips of the distant mountain-sides were white, too. 
 The waning orange moon rode over the opposite hillside, 
 casting a mild weird radiance on the objects in the square. 
 They looked very cold and dead. The walls of the villa 
 stood out white behind the bays and cypress trees. There 
 was a light in one of its windows, otherwise the town 
 seemed all asleep. 
 
 Linda went in and looked at her watch. It was eleven 
 o'clock. She started. She was not usually a dreamer of 
 day-dreams indeed, her life was very calm and regular, 
 considering her temperament ; but to-night she could not 
 sleep. She took her Bible, but she could not read. She 
 knelt by her bed, she did not pray. A dread and a heavy 
 silent fear came over her ; she went again to the balcony. 
 
 Down in the square there was music. Someone was 
 standing in the shadow of the opposite wall playing on a 
 little twanging mandolin. The notes fell shrill, and a little 
 mechanically, upon the silence of the spring night ; the 
 voice which sang to the accompaniment, though low and 
 mellow, was passionate rather than tender. 
 
 " Era di Maggio," it sang. Then, leaving the more 
 modern and operatic music, it broke away into a wailing 
 Umbrian refrain. " Se siete buona, come siete bella. ..." 
 
 Fascinated by the novel sounds, by the romantic Southern 
 scene, and the plaintive voice of the invisible musician, 
 Linda crept back into the shadow of her room and listened. 
 
 "Era di Maggio." Yes, in May, with roses roses 
 everywhere upon the terraces within a woman's hair. 
 
 And then again : " Se siete buona come siete bella." 
 " Good beautiful young women beautiful and good, with 
 eyes which made their lovers fear. ..." 
 
186 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 Surely this was the better way of love? Surely there 
 was nothing here of cows and pigs, of the manuring of the 
 fields and the consequent gathering-in of crops and hay ? 
 
 The singer wanted that thing love of the woman he 
 loved ; he never seemed even to consider the existence of 
 the last. Linda could realize that, just as she could realize 
 outward beauty and even religious fervour ; she could realize 
 the outward ideals of human love ; the practice of the real 
 was abhorrent to her, and it was solely on the former train 
 of thought that, after her long and memorable day, she 
 finally fell asleep. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE GIRL'S BROKEN MIRROR 
 
 WHEN Linda awoke the sun was high. Her father, aston- 
 ished at her lateness, had come to her room at eight o'clock 
 and left her sleeping peacefully. 
 
 Linda had dreamed, as it seemed to her, an interminable 
 dream. She had passed through many towns in search of 
 things she could not find. She had never been able to 
 emerge into open country ; sometimes she had been in long 
 dark passages and dusky, empty streets ; at others in halls, 
 lighted by circular ceiling windows. At length she had 
 come into a little meadow high above the forests ; and there 
 a sudden light the sun upon her bed had wakened her. 
 Waking, she remembered the night. Her old heart that 
 of the rebellious child beat up strong within her breast ; 
 she dressed in haste ; she felt angered by her own vague 
 follies, and hurried down to find her father. 
 
 "You look rather pale," he said. "The sun and the 
 walk overtired you yesterday." 
 
 " No," said his daughter, "it is the sun I love. And I 
 want to walk still farther to-day." 
 
 In the afternoon the doctor and Linda wandered up 
 through the chestnut-woods to the spot where they had 
 stayed to rest the previous day. The doctor sat down to 
 rest by the wall, for he was a tired man, and every instant 
 of his holiday was precious to him. But Linda wandered 
 up and down the meadow. She was looking for the flowers 
 she had found the day before ; she did not seem to find them 
 now, or if she did, she did not want them for her own. The 
 day was not different from the day before. It had been hot 
 and glorious then, it was as glorious now. Yet for her it 
 
 187 
 
188 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 had changed ; things were much more beautiful, but they 
 were not complete. She saw little gold mists over Como 
 which she had not noticed yesterday, a thing like a halo 
 over the south, and an odd hard light towards Maloja a 
 light cold as the North from which she came, and shrank. 
 She saw a strange and tender bloom above the lower copses, 
 and in the flowers a certain fragile pleading which made 
 her stay her hand when just about to pick them ; she saw 
 how the crocuses and snowflakes stretched like a cloud, as 
 far as the eye could reach, in the chestnut-woods. But 
 none of these sights sufficed her; for an ache, a void, was 
 in her soul a desire to share a sense of the need of human 
 contact which never till now had she consciously 
 dreamed of. 
 
 She went softly to the gap in the wall whence she 
 could see the cottage of the young woman she had 
 been with yesterday. The door was closed, the white 
 goat tethered. It was evident that its inhabitants were 
 away. And Linda felt glad ; she had wished to see them, 
 and yet she was glad that they were away. 
 
 From all these things it might be supposed that Linda 
 had fallen in love. This was not at all the case. What 
 had happened to her was different. It must in any case 
 have happened sooner or later in one form or another, and 
 through the first purely intellectual and nervous medium 
 she encountered. Von Herder, in ten minutes' talk, had 
 exactly touched and played upon a string in Linda's nature 
 which had not been brought into use before, but which was 
 only waiting to give forth its sounds. His mere presence 
 had disarmed her previous self-assertion ; and, by a few idle 
 words and looks, he had opened the flood-gates of the nature 
 she inherited from her mother a nature sensitive, self- 
 condemnatory, vivid, and emotional. 
 
 From that day onward Linda ceased to be self-sufficient. 
 Her outward appearance altered, too ; and a wistful look 
 crept at times into her eyes. She listened more to other 
 people, studied her relation towards them more; became 
 
THE GIRL'S BROKEN MIRROR 189 
 
 aware of those thousands of little points of contact which 
 form our human lives. But at the same time she grew 
 doubly impatient of what was merely material. She was 
 often eager and intolerant ; but at the back of her mind 
 there was a constant irrepressible question. 
 
 The afternoon soon deepened into evening and then to 
 night. Linda went early to bed ; she slept profoundly and 
 woke in the morning fresh, and calm, and happy. It was 
 Sunday, and the bells of the church in the piazza were ring- 
 ing for early Mass. Linda got up quickly and dressed, and 
 she went out into the dew and the sunrise, and down the 
 street and through the cloisters into the church. The sun 
 struck full on the tower, and aslant again through the dew- 
 laden air into the side-chapels, where the skulls and cross- 
 bones of many long-forgotten men lay piled in fantastic 
 heaps and patterns behind their iron railings. Some old 
 women in checked cotton aprons were mumbling over their 
 beads as they tottered through the cloisters, and one or two 
 young women too, in black gowns with black mantillas over 
 their hair, went forward with quick graceful steps and 
 passed in under the heavy leathern curtain. Linda fol- 
 lowed them. Her soul seemed heavy with peace and 
 prayer. As she passed by the font an old man offered her 
 holy water with his palsied ringers. Almost unconsciously 
 she took it, crossing her breast as she did so. Then she 
 knelt down on one of the benches ; she seemed half hypno- 
 tized by some holy and remote influence ; she noticed the 
 crimson damask on the pillars, the crumpled stone pave- 
 ment, the old worm-eaten benches ; but the tawdry decora- 
 tion and false flowers escaped her notice, or at least 
 harmonized with the whole and with her mood. Long 
 after the priest and most of the people had left the church, 
 Linda lingered on. She had got her English version of the 
 " Imitation," and she opened on the words : "Keep pure 
 and free within, and entangle not thy heart with any 
 creature." 
 
 Towards eight o'clock she left the church, and came out 
 
190 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 into the warmed and sunlit world. In the garden of the 
 inn Count von Herder sat installed. 
 
 " Ah," he cried, rising to meet her, as she prepared -to 
 pass on up the stairs. " It seems an age since you and I 
 saw one another. Stay out here and talk a little. What 
 do you want in the house on a morning like this ? Such a 
 morning ! Only looked at it ! See, I will order your break- 
 fast with mine. It tastes divine on this tin table." 
 
 Linda hesitated. " Your father has had his breakfast," 
 von Herder explained. "He told me to tell you he had 
 gone out on business. So you have nothing to do but to 
 stay with me. You are not afraid of me, are you?" 
 
 Linda sat down in the shade of the lilac-trees. Von 
 Herder watched her. 
 
 " How can you wear such a terrible hat?" he asked. 
 ' ' One can't see you in it. Well, where have you been ?' ' 
 
 11 Where have you been?" asked Linda. 
 
 "My poor child," answered the exhausted man. "I 
 have been farther than was at all necessary." 
 
 " You look very tired," said Linda. "It's stupid to go 
 so far." 
 
 " Yes, but you who look so fresh and radiant, where have 
 you been?" 
 
 " To church," said Linda, and she lowered her voice 
 and wished she had not had to say this why she wished 
 this she did not know. 
 
 " To church," repeated von Herder, and then he bent 
 across the table and looked up under Linda's hat. " Do 
 you pray in church?" he asked. 
 
 ' Yes," she answered slowly. She felt that church and 
 prayers and Count von Herder were things very far apart. 
 
 "I won't ask you to pray for me," said von Herder, 
 " I should need too many of your prayers. But here's your 
 breakfast, and here's something I got for you in Milan," 
 he added, as his servant brought a magnificent bouquet of 
 white and of crimson camelias, and put it on the table 
 beside her. 
 
THE GIRL'S BROKEN MIRROR 191 
 
 " Oh, oh, oh !" said Linda, and she took up the flowers 
 and touched them with delight. For an instant she looked 
 like her little old self, like the peasant-child von Herder 
 had led through the streets of Chur. A painful sudden 
 pang went through his heart. He pushed his breakfast 
 from him and bent across the table. 
 
 " Listen," he said, " in case you see more of me. Try 
 to remember that I am a wrong-headed man. My soul is all 
 mixed up with mud, and your soul, if I put it beside my 
 own, is like the whitest of those white camelias which you 
 have got there in your hands. Your soul is like your own 
 deep winter snows, it is like the spray of your waterfalls in 
 your forests which no man sees." 
 
 Linda was drawing back from the table, frightened yefc 
 fascinated by von Herder's words. But he put his hand 
 on hers : 
 
 " Your soul is ill," he said very slowly. " Most people's 
 souls are ill. But yours is very ill. You will see this later 
 on in life. You do not know it now how should you?" 
 
 " I don't know what you mean, or what you are talking 
 about," said Linda hurriedly. She had never thought of 
 souls in this way. 
 
 'You have the strength to suffer," said von Herder; 
 and then he got up, for someone had called for him. 
 
CHAPTEK XVI 
 
 THE VILLA AT PLUBS 
 
 " And while the black night nothing said, 
 
 And till the cold morn came at last, 
 That old bed held the room in awe 
 With tales of its experience vast. 
 It thrilled the gloom, it told such tales 
 
 Of human sorrows and delights, 
 Of fever, moans, and infant wails, 
 
 Of births, and deaths, and bridal nights." 
 
 THOMPSON: In the Boom. 
 
 THE following day von Herder drove Linda up the Val 
 Bregaglia, her father having business in the town. Linda 
 was wild with pleasure at the prospect, for von Herder 
 spoke of a romantic villa in the chestnut-woods a little 
 earthly paradise which in some dim future he himself half 
 hoped to purchase and inhabit. 
 
 Driving with Count von Herder was not a humdrum 
 matter. He had hired a little baroccino from a friend in 
 Chiavenna, and in it he drove a very large and high-spirited 
 young chestnut, which, as Linda fully realized, chafed at 
 his impetuous hand. A large hamper, containing a very 
 luxurious meal of champagne and Milanese sweetmeats, 
 was packed behind. As they proceeded almost at a hand 
 gallop up the valley road, dust, hens, turkeys, beggars, dis- 
 persed with yells before them. It was remarkable that no 
 fatality occurred, but von Herder was a better whip than 
 he appeared to be. He wore a large straw hat like a 
 peasant's hat ; when he spoke to Linda he stooped a little 
 so that he might see her face ; and his words came jerking 
 
 192 
 
THE VILLA AT FLUES 193 
 
 out quickly and a little ill-judged, but always personal, for 
 they were made and meant only for the person he 
 addressed. They drove on and on up the marvellous moun- 
 tain valley. They crossed the Swiss frontier. Gradually 
 the chestnuts dwindled and gave place to larches, then 'to 
 pines. The sky was blue above them, not a cloud. 
 
 (< What is the matter?" said von Herder, peering into 
 his companion's face. A change had come there, a dis- 
 tinct shadow obscured her hitherto delighted eyes. At first 
 she did not answer, but her companion persisted ; then she 
 broke out : 
 
 "We are leaving it leaving it all already!" she ex- 
 claimed. " Oh, let us go back to the vines and chestnuts. 
 I see the pines, and the meadows are all brown. Look at 
 the people ! ' ' Two women of a distinctly Swiss type with 
 straight, uncompromising hair passed them at this moment. 
 " Let us go back," she repeated. " I have got to live in 
 this thing soon enough." 
 
 She spoke as though she had left the warm embraces of a 
 lover to come into the narrowing limits of a middle-class 
 and quite unbeautiful family circle. 
 
 'Yes, I see I understand you," von Herder suddenly 
 said. ' ' But you're a funny little woman all the same. ' ' 
 
 With a sudden most violent movement he turned his 
 horse's head, and this done he stopped and looked at his 
 companion narrowly. She was blushing like any spoilt 
 child might : 
 
 " You hate it you hate your home. It is not ugliness 
 you hate, it is familiarity it is 'every-day.' But listen 
 to me." Von Herder put his hand on hers almost rever- 
 ently. "Your heart is there, and you will come home. 
 You will weep more tears for the mountains than ever you 
 did for the plains, or for cities, or even for what you now 
 esteem as Beauty. Come," as he gathered up his reins, 
 "I, too, love Italy; with passion I love Beauty. Come. 
 It was, anyhow, time to be turning." 
 
 It was not till a sudden turn and a more rapid fall of the 
 
 13 
 
194 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 valley had brought them back into the first vineyards and 
 the chestnut-woods that Linda turned to look at the scene 
 they had so abruptly abandoned. She felt so gay, so 
 irresponsible, 'that it was as though she had actually left 
 her conscience along with the pines and the harder sky. 
 " You will come home," von Herder had said, and these 
 were the actual parting words of Basil ! Ah ! but the 
 future was a long way off ; the present was in her hands, 
 a source of glory. She sat up keen and strong in the car- 
 riage, looking ahead towards the plains. And what Basil 
 said did not, after all, much matter ; and what von Herder 
 said . . . Ah, he was wild and full of fancies. 
 
 They rattled back through the streets of Castasegna, and 
 at a wayside inn a little farther down the valley von Herder 
 put his horse up. " We will eat a great deal here," he 
 said , ' ' and after that I will show you something which I 
 quite believe will make you wretched it made me so when 
 first I saw it. I wanted it so much for myself. Now I 
 don't want anything for myself particularly ; I am too 
 unhappy do you understand me?" 
 
 He was pulling his elaborate luncheon-baskets out of the 
 baroccino, and he seemed more anxious about the state of 
 the cork of his champagne bottle than about that of his 
 soul which he so continuously described. Linda, how- 
 ever, herself vibrating to a million emotions, believed what 
 he had told her. 
 
 She was sitting by a wooden table, straining her eyes to 
 behold all, and more even, of the splendid pageant of rock 
 and meadow, boulders and stream, than they could rightly 
 compass. She dimly felt that Nature being so absolute 
 and so perfect, the soul of a grown man must needs be sick 
 and sorrowful ; yet her own soul was full of gaiety and ex- 
 citement. When their lunch was enfled von Herder started 
 hurriedly upon his walk. "I am going," he said, "to 
 show you the Ideal Home. But it is a home for lovers, 
 not for the marriage state. Never marry remember that ; 
 it would drive you mad and make you even madder than you 
 
THE VILLA AT PLURS 195 
 
 are. Be an old maid and live in the place we are coming to. 
 No, that wouldn't do either. The place wants life and 
 mandolins. English old maids living in Italian villas / . . . 
 Oh, Dio mio ! the dreariness of the whole thing ! They do 
 it, though, in shoals ! Don't do that. Live with plenty of 
 friends. And be sure to have plenty of money. Don't try 
 poverty it doesn't pay. What were we talking about? 
 Oh, I forgot ; I told you, to begin with, to forget what I 
 said to you." 
 
 Linda, as a matter of fact, had hardly caught the dis- 
 connected phrases of von Herder's talk. She followed him 
 lingeringly up one of those gentle mule-tracks, paved with 
 rounded cobble-stones and crossed at regular intervals by 
 straight stone bars, which lead so often through the 
 meadows and the chestnut-woods of Italian valleys up to 
 some pilgrimage church some shrine or villa. The light 
 of the spring afternoon was warm and quiet , sobered by the 
 power of its fecundity. When now and then they crossed 
 a stream, or the shadow cast by barn or boulder, a distinct 
 chill caught the air. It was a splendid chestnut-wood 
 through which they passed ; above it towered huge granite 
 crags, a part of which had fallen once upon the village of 
 Plurs, destroying it and leaving, as the only relics of thafc 
 beautiful and luxurious little city, the campanile of the 
 church and the splendid villa for which von Herder now 
 was bound. The path took a turn, and they stood between 
 high stone walls, the one the front of a curious rambling 
 house, the other of its garden over the way. Von Herder 
 rang the bell, and after a little time the door opened slowly, 
 pulled by some invisible hand within, and they saw into 
 the paved court and the sunny garden, and passed into the 
 cavernous entrance hall of the villa. 
 
 What had made men build such a palace so roomy, so 
 magnificent here on this forsaken mountain-side ? It was 
 no foolish " folly," but a sumptuous pleasure-house, perfect 
 in all its parts, such as one sees scattered about in all sorts 
 of remote Italian villages and cities. A large fountain, 
 
196 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 guarded by the figure of a triton , stood facing the entrance- 
 door, carved in the natural rock of the foundations, and 
 from thence the broad stone staircase led to the ban- 
 queting-rooms above. The walls of these rooms were 
 covered with frescoes, and in the seething light of the spring 
 afternoon the figures there depicted seemed to sway and 
 hum and live again. Huge, half-naked forms of warriors 
 with helmets and steel breast-plates ; ladies with full bare 
 bosoms forced up by gorgeous gold-brocaded bodices, sup- 
 ping the crimson wine at table, pushing aside, with rounded 
 elbows, the nuts, pomegranates, grapes, and apples, which 
 lay upon the gold and silver plates beside them. And 
 dwarfs and children leading dogs in leashes ; and boars' 
 heads, and dressed peacocks on the sideboard ! What a 
 rout ! What a vision of things which probably had never 
 been, all mocking the silence and the total remoteness of 
 the actual life about them ! Linda and von Herder passed 
 from room to room, and always the spring light followed 
 them. 
 
 The ceilings seemed to topple down upon them, so mas- 
 sive were their carvings. Great knobs and pineapples of 
 solid cembra, huge cherubs carved in a gnarled chestnut- 
 wood, splendid squares and mountainous circles, all worked 
 by hands long dead worked, perhaps, in a Milanese work- 
 shop over a busy street, and brought in carts by sleepy oxen 
 to this distant Alpine villa, to be put in place by the heavy 
 fingers of some Graubiinden carpenter. 
 
 They passed through the state bedrooms and 'the bed- 
 rooms of serving-maids, and they came at last to a little 
 bedroom all by itself on a hidden stair. The room, though 
 rather dark and smaller than the rest, was more perfectly 
 finished in all its parts than any of the others. Its walls 
 were panelled with a sombre wood, sombre were the 
 exquisite doors and ceiling and all the little window-ledges ; 
 they were carved with quite a different and more exquisite 
 art than that of the ones below. Everything in this room 
 suggested sleep. The bed stood on a wooden dais, with 
 
THE VILLA AT PLUES 197 
 
 gentle steps leading from the floor. It was hung with a 
 grey-green damask which made one think of myrtle-woods 
 in winter, and it was spread with a damask which seemed 
 like the mosses on their stems. Let into the panel of the 
 bed was the painted figure of a girl asleep beneath trees ; 
 exquisite were her supple limbs, the scarce-formed breasts, 
 the lips parted in sleep. Garlands of oaken poppies 
 encircled the bedposts, flopping their heavy heads with 
 curious suggestions of dreams. At the foot of the bed was 
 one high chair, deep-seated, as though perhaps an older 
 person would sit there watching the sleeper on the bed. 
 The window was barred with heavy iron grilles, and great 
 steel locks crossed and re-crossed the doors. 
 
 A curious feeling of intrusion came over Linda, but so 
 great was the fascination of this room that she could but 
 stand there watching it. A thousand suggestions, a thou- 
 sand hidden instincts surged to her heart dim feelings of 
 loves not sanctioned by God ; dim forebodings of human 
 passions leading to ultimate pain, but sweet, sweet, deadly 
 sweet, while they lasted. She crept up the quiet steps to 
 the bed ; she touched the cover with her finger-tips ; and as 
 she did so she glanced above. The roof of the bed was 
 made of cedar-wood, and was, unlike the rest of the wood- 
 work, absolutely plain. Only in one little circle inlaid in 
 the centre were written these words : ' ' Thou and I ' ' 
 " Tu ed io." Just over the words was the newly opened 
 husk of a chrysalis, and a tortoise-shell butterfly had that 
 moment emerged and was lazily closing and unclosing her 
 heavy wings, preparing to fly away. 
 
 ' Tu ed io." Linda started as though she had com- 
 mitted some treachery. Von Herder had left the room and 
 was sitting in the great banquet hall astride of one of the 
 large mosaic tables. He looked eager and interested, and 
 had pushed his hands through his hair : "It's the key of 
 the whole," he said, as she found him ; " now I understand 
 it. That's all it's all there it's as clear as the daylight." 
 
 " What?" said Linda. 
 
198 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 " Why, the room, of course it's the reason, the heart of 
 the whole of this curious place. Men don't build houses 
 like this for nothing ; they build them from some force of 
 inspiration, from their passions they build them for a 
 woman, not for God; or to amaze a tiresome neighbour. 
 This house was built by a rich man who had his home in 
 Milan, and who fell in love with a girl that thrilling little 
 creature over the bed. He built this house, he planned 
 every inch of its splendours, he made the Milanese work 
 for all they were worth, and he made your peasants here 
 work, too. He planned and he plotted and he made the 
 thing, splendid and gorgeous in all its parts, and he brought 
 her here that strip of a girl." 
 
 Von Herder stopped. Linda had gone to the window 
 and was looking out. 
 
 A curious shrivelled old gentleman with short white hair 
 and an immense straw hat , and Berlin slippers on his feet , 
 had come out into the sunlight with a bird-cage full of 
 canaries, and was cleaning out their water-pans and peeling 
 bits of groundsel for his pets-. " That's the present owner," 
 said von Herder. "Don't make yourself sick by watch- 
 ing anything as commonplace. We must talk to him 
 later. . . . But one 'thing you didn't notice in the room, 
 and that is the end of the history. Come back for a 
 moment." 
 
 Half reluctantly Linda followed him. He led her round 
 behind the door where there was a gap in the wall. A piece 
 of the panel which had probably served as a secret door 
 had lately fallen down, and behind it was a tiny altar. 
 Within a small wooden frame was a most exquisite piece 
 of embroidery representing the scourging of our Lord. The 
 features of the face were agonized. Huge disproportionate 
 drops of sweat and blood trickled down on the snow-white 
 tunic. In the background stood His mother, weeping ; and 
 in this woman's face was a curious painful look. Her 
 gown was sumptuous. It was evidently a portrait, possibly 
 that of the girl's own mother. 
 
THE VILLA AT PLURS 199 
 
 "The girl was an artist," said the Count, "the 
 fact is apparent. She embroidered this thing in the 
 days when her lover was away. He could not bear 
 to leave her in Milan. He wanted her all to him- 
 self and alone. The portrait of Mary is her mother, 
 the mother who missed her still, and she prayed to 
 this Christ with her whole soul. It was the end of every- 
 thing. It's the end of all great medieval passions, and of 
 every modern one. You can't get away from it. It's the 
 destruction of all merely worldly ideals. The Christian 
 instinct is absolutely and finally destructive of human 
 delights. . . . It's the old impossible story." 
 
 Linda went back to the bed. The tortoise-shell butterfly 
 had taken flight, and was beating against 'the dusty glass on 
 the window . The old ironwork tore at such a delicate fabric , 
 and one of the wings was already cruelly mangled, the other 
 covered with cobwebs. By a sudden chance it found its 
 way to a pane whence the glass had fallen ; and, wounded, 
 but living, it fluttered out into the sunlight. 
 
 " Come, let us go," said von Herder, hurrying off, but 
 Linda stayed an instant to put back the fallen panel. 
 
 ' ' Thou and I , " she repeated . Did she realize , even quite 
 dimly, that the Christian acceptance of these words would 
 eventually prove the stronger and the better? I cannot 
 tell you. " Come, let us go " that eternal refrain of our 
 elders, impatient of the lingering queries of youth, which so 
 disturbed them in their day, yet proved so fruitless of 
 replies. 
 
 For an instant she lingered on . Now that the panel was 
 shut on the image within, only the human and the pagan 
 spirit of the room remained : ' ' Thou and I ' ' 'the man and 
 the girl. 
 
 Suddenly the sun had set, gone down behind the mighty 
 crags of Castasegna. A curious chill, peculiar to spring, 
 shot through the valleys, and quickly it passed, even 
 through the windows of the villa, seeming to freeze the 
 
200 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 splendid decollates of the ladies in the frescoes. Von 
 Herder had hurried downstairs and was out on the terrace, 
 talking quickly and irritably to the master of the house. 
 
 ' ' So you continue to live in a house like this and to keep 
 birds feed canaries. Hens, even, would be more profit- 
 able !" he exclaimed with vehement rudeness. 
 
 " Excuse me," the old gentleman replied, " but you have 
 dust on the sleeve of your coat. Permit me to brush you 
 down. I am pleased to see you again in my poor house. 
 You will notice that 'the breed is improved. You will 
 observe that the cock bird, the grandson of the bird with 
 which you had the kindness to present me some two years 
 ago, bears plumage of a more tawny orange ; his lower notes, 
 too, are of a far fuller and more mellow quality. The hens, 
 on the other hand ' ' 
 
 Linda approached. She listened with a sort of surprised 
 repulsion to this talk of canaries from the owner of such a 
 spot. What ! with halls in which the very gods of the 
 woods might come <to sup, to live stuffed up in basement 
 rooms, wearing Berlin slippers, talking of hen-canaries ! 
 The thing was preposterous. 
 
 " Young lady, I am honoured," the old gentleman said, 
 perceiving her come. And his mild eyes, harmless as those 
 of a child, but equally comprehending, surveyed her for an 
 instant. " Ta, ra, ra. A little dance, a theatre, to drive 
 in. a pretty carriage carnations, roses for the evening 
 gown. Most girls like things like these best." He 
 looked at her shrewdly, then paused. " My hospitality 
 can be but poor. The maid is sowing our summer seeds . . . 
 But come indoors and see my home." 
 
 "No," said von Herder shortly. "We must go into 
 the garden and then start home ourselves." 
 
 "Indeed, I want to see this gentleman's rooms," said 
 Linda. 
 
 The old gentleman carefully dusted the big cage with the 
 canaries, using a large white handkerchief of spotless clean- 
 liness for his purpose. Then he lifted the cage and pre- 
 
THE VILLA AT PLUES 201 
 
 ceded her into <the house. They entered by a side-door 
 through a small square of garden, very neat and full of 
 commonplace evergreens and preparation for summer bed- 
 ding. A room, which must formerly have been a sort of 
 antechamber for servants and stray guests, was now adapted 
 to the needs of the master of the house. It was dark and 
 stuffy ; a peculiarly ugly paper of a beetly brown colour, 
 with small heraldic lions scattered upon its surface , covered 
 what evidently were wooden panels. Several large photo- 
 graphs of quite uninteresting middle-class men and women, 
 framed in those peculiar shining black oval frames which 
 tell us that the photographs are enlarged and the persons 
 represented have been thus enshrined after death, hung on 
 the walls . A huge chromo-lithograph of Pope Leo smiling , 
 keen, and impenetrable, as he has smiled in every Catholic 
 home for years and others of Victor Emanuel, Queen 
 Margareta clad in a glory of pearls, and some old prints 
 and ugly lithographs, filled up odd spaces. A little iron 
 stove, with a big rusty pipe extending far into the room 
 before it proceeded to the ceiling, stood in the centre of the 
 once splendid granite hearth. Everything which was 
 grand and sumptuous had been dwarfed and vulgarized. 
 Yet there was nothing mean about the appearance of the 
 old gentleman, and he bore an expression of placid benevo- 
 lence which the most critical could not resent. As he put 
 down his bird-cage in the window, he spoke lovingly to its 
 occupants, and they answered him back with chirps and 
 calls of pleasure. 
 
 "Ah, Carachuna Carachuna," he murmured. "Did 
 they take thee out into the chill spring evening air? Didst 
 thou ruffle out thy little feathers, heart of my heart, sweet 
 of my eyes ! Ah, little Carachuna, wilt take from my lips 
 this piece of thy loved hemp see, it is here thy master 
 gives it thee." The canary came sidling up to the bars 
 of the cage, took the hemp and gobbled it up. Then draw- 
 ing himself to his full height, till the bones on his thin 
 breast stood out through the tightened feathers, he broke 
 
202 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 into a shrieking, thrilling song which pierced the stuffy, 
 dingy room like a little sword. He shrieked, he sang, he 
 screamed, and all the other birds in all the cages began to 
 sing against him till the noise seemed well-nigh deafening. 
 " Ah ! hear him, hear him !" cried the old gentleman, 
 and rapturously he clapped his hands together. "Hear 
 him ! my golden bird, my heart of fire ! See, he is singing 
 he sings for me ! They are all singing. What a feast !" 
 
 The maid had come in from the kitchen bearing a beau- 
 tiful copper bowl full of red-hot cinders. She reached a 
 rqetal spoon from over the mantelpiece, and, giving the 
 c^als to Linda, began to stir them for her. Mechanically 
 Linda took the scaldino. The shadows of the spring even- 
 ing following the long hot day had chilled her. There were 
 no dreams in this ugly little modernized room, yet there 
 seemed to be delights almost as passionate as those of the 
 myrtle bed above. 
 
 What did it all mean ? The old gentleman, wrapt in the 
 screaming songs of his unimaginative birds, had apparently 
 quite forgotten her existence ; her memory ran back to the 
 splendid rooms above the great mosaic table, where 
 alabaster, porphyry, stalagmite, and gold-threaded lapis 
 lazuli, lay inlaid in sumptuous squares and arabesques, and 
 where the ceilings were weighted with garlands of fruits, 
 and the warriors and ladies stood painted on the walls. And 
 then the hidden bedroom the grey-green damask hang- 
 ings, the bed, the chair with the deep-cushioned seat, the 
 picture of the girl asleep below the lemon-trees. . . . 
 
 And then the result of it all the result as far as the 
 human side was concerned (for he was a descendant of those 
 exquisite Milanese lovers) this little old man in the dull 
 black coat, sitting under chromo-lithographs, enamoured of 
 a canary. 
 
 " Come, let us go," cried von Herder outside the win- 
 dow. Linda got up. Her host smiled faintly, but he did 
 not move to let her out. 
 
THE VILLA AT PLUES 203 
 
 " Hush !" he said, "for it is not every day he sings with 
 this extraordinary sweetness." 
 
 In the garden the shadows had been diluted by sudden 
 reflections of sunset in the sky, and the whole air seemed 
 gilded for the few more moments which heralded the 
 twilight. They passed under an archway into the long- 
 disused flower-garden or pleasaunce. First they came into 
 one great court where there had once been deep tanks full 
 of water, but the pipes which supplied these had probably 
 long been ruined by Alpine winters, and only the empty 
 cemented basins, flanked with marble seats and balustrades, 
 remained. Their crevices were full of ferns, and here and 
 there a fig-tree sprang towards the light from far below ; 
 the reflected glow of the sunset lingered on these marble 
 ledges, making them seem frail and quite transparent. 
 
 "The tanks, of course, were full of fish," said von 
 Herder, "and the lady could come to feed them, throw 
 them crumbs, tease them with flowers. On hot summer 
 nights she would bathe here, whiter than the marble itself 
 in the moonlight. That was before the days of the em- 
 broidery. She embroidered after the baby came. Babies 
 alter the whole situation that is to say, if the mother is 
 worth her salt, and most of them are more is the pity for 
 art and for lovers." 
 
 There was a gate in the wall of the first courtyard, of 
 beautiful wrought ironwork. One half of it had fallen 
 down and lay smothered in last year's leaves. Through it 
 they passed to the pleasure-garden. The southern wall was 
 flanked by the long line of the orangery, and the oranges 
 and lemons old, old trees, clinging to life by the simple 
 force of existence stood under a decaying cover of thatch. 
 They stood in splendid copper urns with heavy handles. 
 Time and weather had long since effaced all trace of the 
 original metal, and a deep emerald crust embossed the 
 exquisite line of their surface. All the glow of the sunset 
 had centred in a deep belt across the western sky, and was 
 
204 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 framed and concentrated in the great crag walls of the Val 
 Bregaglia. The ruddy light shone full on the green vases, 
 on the hedge of withered hydrangeas, and lastly on the little 
 cupid upholding the sundial in the centre of the box-lined 
 labyrinth. The place seemed dead, deader even than the 
 rooms in the villa beyond, and that inexpressible melancholy 
 which haunts a disused garden a melancholy far more pro- 
 found than that pervading a ruined house or church fell 
 upon Linda's soul. 
 
 " Once again let us be gone," said von Herder. But 
 Linda sat down on the bench by the wall. She had some- 
 thing to say ; von Herder was, perhaps, not precisely the 
 person to whom to say it, but youth has no choice, and scant 
 discernment, and even a world-worn man is probably a 
 more sagacious counsellor than a sentimental woman friend. 
 Also, when our emotions first blaze up in life it is possible 
 that austere suppression, such as that of a maiden aunt, 
 or even of a frightened mother, may serve as a further 
 stimulant rather than as a check, by contrast. And so 
 there is something to be said for the more brutal survey of 
 a worldly man. 
 
 'You know nothing of who lived in this house," she 
 blurted out. ' ' The young woman you have talked so much 
 about, and the man, and the whole story it is only, after 
 all, your invention. And people could live here, in a place 
 like this, and be happy and yet be ideal and also homely. 
 One needn't be dull like the old man, and keep canaries ; 
 one might one might marry and live here, and be good to 
 the peasants. ..." Child as she was she checked herself. 
 She felt she was uttering platitudes and quite inconsequent 
 phrases. 
 
 ' ' Good to the peasants ideal marry ! Separate every 
 one of those words from the very outset, if you have the 
 
 smallest hope of starting square with existence ' ' Von 
 
 Herder broke out harshly. " What did I tell you about 
 the picture in the panel ? Well! The show isn't finished 
 yet you have still to see the chapel." 
 
THE VILLA AT PLUBS 205 
 
 Linda stood up. She was facing the concentrated light 
 of the sunset. It played in her eyes and denned the 
 rounded, subtle lines of her figure. There was a curious 
 sadness in her eyes, and yet they asked questions. In 
 later life sad eyes are usually unexpectant. 
 
 "I think," she said, speaking half to herself, "that 
 things can and will be right at last , although they seem not 
 possible at the minute. I expect that perhaps the old 
 gentleman with the canaries is right I think that if one 
 loves very much if someone loves one very much. ..." 
 
 Looking so remotely into the south, into the seething 
 light which hid from her vision the lines of the plain and of 
 Italy, a sudden curious and painful memory flashed to her 
 brain. She was out in the snow-swept streets at Trins, 
 and the heavy touch of a peasant seemed suddenly to settle 
 on her fingers, whilst a baby wailed in the house beyond. 
 She started almost in anguish, for her mind was aflame to 
 new impressions. 
 
 "Well," she said, " what of the chapel?" 
 
 Count von Herder pushed through some bushes and 
 weeds to a hidden door in the northern wall, and they stood 
 facing the steps of a small chapel . At that moment a bell 
 began to ring, a shrill, discordant bell with a sort of tinkle 
 in the back of it. The chapel was built at a bad period, 
 later than the villa ; it had a great deal of over-ornate decora- 
 tion shells and florid scrolls above the arches of the win- 
 dows, and ugly cupids upholding the initials of Christ on the 
 entrance door. Two small candles were lighted on the 
 altar, and a priest had just come in and was hurrying into 
 his white cassock. The expression of his face was lowering 
 and unpleasant ; he began to repeat the benediction in a 
 quick irreverent voice, and as he did so his eyes wandered 
 round the chapel and lighted on the figures of the strangers. 
 Then he hurried less and began to enunciate with a sort of 
 animal guttural sound. Two or three women straggled in, 
 one, who was only a child herself, with a baby at her breast ; 
 another drew long sobbing breaths as though she had come 
 
206 , A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 away from some late anguished parting ; the others were 
 old, and seemed to be praying incessantly, out of a sort of 
 habit rather than a hope. In a corner of the chapel was a 
 huge crucifix with a great figure of Christ carved in wood 
 and crudely painted ; it was the figure of a crying human 
 agony. There was no hope in it only the consolation of 
 a despair greater perhaps than that in the hearts of a 
 peasant congregation, who brought to it their own great 
 burden of ignorance and woe. 
 
 'You see them," whispered von Herder; ''these- are 
 the peasants you propose to console by living in painted 
 halls and being yourself ideally happy." 
 
 Linda said nothing. There was nothing to be said. She 
 felt, she even knew, that von Herder was wrong, that the 
 priest was wrong, that the initials of Christ should never 
 have been emblazoned amongst these many decorative 
 scrolls. She glanced with a sort of hidden appeal to the 
 young woman rocking her baby as she prayed. There was 
 something real and right there, but it was not final, and also 
 the woman looked anxious and sad, and only the baby was 
 at peace, because sleeping. Then suddenly a fleeting vision 
 of an English Sunday came before her. She saw the entire 
 neatness of the pews, the peaceable prosperity of her uncle's 
 tenants, their wives and -their children. She smelt the 
 smell of the carefully kept hassocks, she noted the soulless- 
 ness of the faces in the stained-glass windows, the exquisite 
 order of the altar, the polish on the brass, the well-being 
 which amounted to apathy in the entire place and its con- 
 gregation. But that was wrong, too, and a thousand times 
 worse. For did not Christ say that he loved the tattered 
 raiment , and the agony of the human heart ? Where then 
 was God? And where did He enter ? What was His Home? 
 Not up there at the villa, perhaps ; not down here in this ill- 
 constructed chapel ; certainly not amongst the English 
 hassocks. . . . 
 
 Linda started from her reverie, von Herder was already 
 making for the door. He pushed aside the great leathern 
 
THE VILLA AT PLURS 207 
 
 curtain, waiting for Linda to follow him, but she paused 
 and he went without her. Linda went back quietly, pushed 
 by some prehistoric instinct for devotion, for she was in no 
 sense in a praying mood ; she went into one of the pews, 
 and kneeling down, she closed her eyes. At that moment 
 the organ suddenly commenced in a low, minor key. A 
 different player had entered the scene. Von Herder was 
 essentially an artist, and from the now crazy pipes and 
 pedals of what had once been a good instrument he could 
 draw forth an extraordinary volume of weird and capricious 
 harmonies. Suddenly, leaving the wailing minor key in 
 which he had commenced, he broke into an impassioned 
 rhapsody of chords, which shook the dust from the florid 
 angels and set the tinsel roses shaking on the altar. The 
 women rose from their knees ; an odd light, first of expecta- 
 tion, then of exaltation, came into their faces; the child 
 woke and gave a sort of crowing call. A queer smile crept 
 round the lips of the priest, as, with hands folded on his 
 breast, he went down the steps and entered the vestry. 
 
 The music died out as suddenly as it had begun, and 
 twilight and silence fell back on the chapel. Linda got up, 
 and, a little mystified, went to the door. Von Herder came 
 hurrying down from the organ loft to meet her. " Well," 
 he said, " that was more like it wasn't it?" 
 
 " More like what?" 
 
 " More like what, after all, most people are looking for." 
 
 "I don't know what you mean," said Linda. 
 
 1 We are all looking for emotions every man and 
 woman and child of us," said von Herder. "Even the 
 child was pleased did you hear it?" 
 
 ' The music woke it," said Linda, " and so of course it 
 cried." 
 
 " It heard what it was going to listen to, for the rest of 
 its poor little mortal life," said von Herder. "It did not 
 understand but nevertheless it heard, and responded As 
 for the women and the priest. ..." 
 
 " The women looked happier," said Linda. 
 
208 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 " They were happier, because they were deluded. Emo- 
 tions are merely delusions. But they are more real than 
 
 other ones Religion is, after all, merely a museum 
 
 where some of the greatest of human delusions are stored." 
 
 "I believe you are wrong," said Linda almost sternly, 
 and half to herself too. 
 
 " Well," said von Herder, looking at her for a moment 
 straight and full , and with something of painful and earnest 
 scrutiny, " you will soon be able to learn for yourself. For 
 the moment you are not awake, you are only learning to 
 wake up, almost like the baby and the supper," he added 
 in the same breath, " will be growing cold at Chiavenna." 
 
 "Yes all the same you are wrong," said Linda, and 
 they walked in silence down the path and back to the valley- 
 road. 
 
CHAPTEK XVII 
 
 VENICE 
 
 IT was a cold wet night when they reached Venice. The 
 wind came tearing in stormy gusts over the lagoon and up 
 through the streets, lashing the water in the narrow chan- 
 nels, catching the shawls of the girls as they hurried across 
 the bridges. The sky above, the water beneath, the doors 
 leading to the houses all were huddled in a sort of inky 
 mystery. There was no colour anywhere, and nothing to 
 mark the sense of glory connected with the very name of 
 Venice. Linda knew very little of Venice and very little, 
 too, of her actual history ; but in her English home she had 
 seen many prints, and copies of pictures and photographs, 
 which showed her seas and saints, houses, skies and boats, 
 bathed in an orange glow. This black night showed her 
 nothing but a certain grim and stony city, built long years 
 ago by man for man's abode. 
 
 Dr. Caflisch had business to attend to in Venice, where 
 he had inherited a certain amount of property. On his 
 rare visits he always stayed with his cousins the Castelbergs 
 of Ilanz. Herr Castelberg had started his own business 
 career more than thirty years ago in a Venetian back-street 
 with a little pastry-cook's shop. Step by step he had 
 improved his business, and he was now the most con- 
 spicuous confectioner in northern Italy. He had a splendid 
 restaurant on the Piazza of St. Mark, where every self- 
 respecting tourist tried to secure a little tin table on Sunday 
 afternoons when the band was playing, and where a curious 
 medley of Italians and other nationalities sipped ice-cream 
 and drank their benedictines and rosoglios between four 
 
 209 14 
 
210 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 of the clock and midnight. Added to this, he drove a 
 flourishing wine business in one of the back-streets, and had 
 several branch connections in Padua and Verona. He was 
 a substantial, wealthy man, respected and perhaps a little 
 feared, by the alien people amongst whom he lived. 
 
 But his wealth and his position had done nothing to alter 
 the inner man. He remained a mountaineer ; and his heart 
 clave to the grey crags and the wooden barns above his 
 home. At the age of thirty-five he returned to this home, 
 and there he sought out the woman of whom, as a boy, leav- 
 ing home, he had made a mental note for his future bride, 
 and whom he had left walking with her books to school, her 
 two long pig-tails tightly plaited and falling over the 
 leathern apron at her back. 
 
 Walpurga had grown tall and full in figure. Certain 
 passages there had been in her life of which, perhaps, her 
 husband never knew, but of which another in this story 
 was quite conscious. These had left her just a little cold. 
 But the two were married happily, and he brought her back 
 to live with him in Venice. Had Walpurga Castelberg 
 lived all her life in the home of her birth, she would most 
 probably have grown like her sister, the Emperor's wife, at 
 Trins worn and hard-featured before her prime. As it 
 was, the southern climate and easy indoor life had ripened 
 her beauty like that of some fine nectarine upon a sheltered 
 wall. She was now a magnificent type of womanhood, 
 deep-bosomed, and majestic both in face and figure. Her 
 skin, which was of a very pale olive, had occasionally a 
 ruddy glow ; her quite black hair, parted in the middle, was 
 plaited in a crown above her well-formed brows. * She 
 walked and spoke with a slow, almost a dragging intona- 
 tion ; her small hands were very white, and she wore a 
 curious Venetian ring with a Moor's head carved in onyx 
 on her finger. Bound her neck hung a heavy golden chain, 
 bought at a Florentine sale, of curious and splendid work- 
 manship ; this and the ring and the crown of hair were the 
 only adornment of this most noble looking woman. 
 
VENICE 211 
 
 Walpurga was very representative of nationality, and of 
 the curious influences of environment on a strong, endur- 
 ing character. The inner being remained unchanged, but 
 the outward form had gained and had been glorified by the 
 southern surroundings. 
 
 In spite of the adverse Venetian climate, Frau Castelberg 
 had succeeded in tending a number of fine carnations. 
 These flowers were her pride, and she kept them in big 
 wooden tubs, just as her own mother had kept them before 
 her on the wooden balcony at Ilanz. Walpurga was a 
 Roman Catholic, and was usually to be seen kneeling at 
 early Mass by the steps of a side-altar in the Frari Church. 
 When her morning's work was done she would take her 
 sewing usually some household linen, or one of the grey 
 woollen dresses which she always made herself and she 
 would sit in one of the windows of the great palace, which 
 commanded a view of the little arched bridge over which 
 the people passed and repassed one another, and away to 
 the little piazza, where all the play, and much of the busi- 
 ness, the scandal, and the love-making of the district con- 
 centrated. Here, in this seat, the beautiful woman had 
 gathered the materials for what philosophy of life she had 
 and it was profound within her calm, reflective brain. 
 Once, long ago, she had had some illusions, but they were 
 now eclipsed. She loved her husband, but she was much 
 alone. No children had ever come in the years of their 
 married life to climb upon the broad, strong knees which 
 would so well have sheltered them. Friends she had few, 
 lovers she disdained. It was something of a prison life, but 
 her thoughts were free, and they, I know, had travelled far. 
 
 Their house stood in a side canal at the back of the Frari. 
 It was a splendid building, though rather crowded and 
 obscured by meaner dwellings. The Castelbergs only in- 
 habited the mezzanino of this palace. The piano nobile was 
 kept spotlessly clean, its rooms were opened only occasion- 
 ally for their rare visitors. The best of these rooms had 
 been opened to-night for Linda. It was a spacious room ; the 
 
212 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 floor was paved with scagliola and very slippery ; sump- 
 tuous lemon-coloured curtains made of an ancient damask 
 covered the windows, the seats of the high-backed chairs, 
 the sofas, and the footstools; full-length mirrors, with 
 great gilded frames, were let into the walls, and being 
 very old, the glass within them had acquired ghost-like 
 shadows and strange green lights which seemed to reflect 
 the lagoon. In the centre of the floor was a long table 
 with a huge slab of Bussian malachite let into the top of 
 it, and gilded lions to serve as legs. But Frau Castelberg, 
 who was strangely uninfluenced by upholstery, had set her 
 own seal upon the table in the form of a little woollen mat, 
 with a tumbler full inside of rosemary and carnations. 
 
 The shutters were shut, the scattered candles only gave 
 sufficient light for the suggestion of further mysteries in 
 the vast apartment. 
 
 Linda was dazed and exhausted as she stumbled out of 
 the gondola, and up the steps, and into the cavernous halls 
 of this, her first Venetian palace. Sounds which seemed 
 but a series of discords jarred on ears prepared for melody. 
 The screaming voices of the gondoliers as they lashed their 
 boat to the palle, and began at once to dismantle it of all its 
 furniture for the night, seemed to her exaggerated and un- 
 necessary. Outside, the wind had screamed through the 
 canal ; but within the huge stone halls there was a sort of 
 stillness like that of some dead spirit, which greatly 
 oppressed her. Then a door opened of itself, as it seemed, 
 in the floor above, and Frau Castelberg appeared in the 
 shaft of the lamplight. 
 
 Linda had always been half afraid of Frau Castelberg ; 
 she had never dared, even as a little thing, to cling about 
 her skirts, and she was, perhaps unjustifiably, conscious of 
 a certain disdain in the eyes of the impassive, far-seeing 
 woman. Yet or perhaps just because of this she adored 
 her, and to-night, wearied with a host of curious new impres- 
 sions, she turned with a sort of frightened reverence to the 
 quiet presence. 
 
VENICE 213 
 
 Frau Castelberg took her hand and looked into her face. 
 
 " Linda grows tall," she said to her husband, "but I 
 think she is overtired." She led her into her bedroom : 
 " See," she said, " I have picked you a couple of Biindner 
 flowers to make you feel at home here." 
 
 Linda was taking off her hat , and Frau Castelberg could 
 not see how doubtful was the happiness produced by her 
 gift of memory. 
 
 " What a room, Cousin Walpurga ! What a splendid, 
 splendid room !" said Linda. " I would like to look out 
 of the window." 
 
 "It is stormy and damp," said Walpurga. But she 
 went to one of the windows, pushed back the curtains, and 
 began to unfasten the bolts. Linda then saw that there 
 were six tall windows to her room, and that she was about 
 to inhabit one of those many beautiful apartments with its 
 line of pointed Gothic traceries and its balcony guarded by 
 little white lions which the old builders made for all the 
 good Venetian palaces. She stepped out on to the bal- 
 cony ; the clouds had parted; a clear moon, white and 
 dazzling, cast its pure radiance over the fantastic scene. 
 
 Immediately opposite her balcony, and only separated by 
 a narrow canal, was a small piazza leading to one of those 
 many unfinished brick church-fronts familiar to everyone 
 in Italy vast spiritual designs where the flesh had proved 
 too weak. A little to the right stood <the campanile, its 
 bells standing out distinct against the sky of night. To 
 left and right again, houses gaunt stone fronts with heavy 
 wooden shutters, fronts which suggested barely anything 
 of the inner life they sheltered, and all surmounted by a 
 marvellous jumble of chimney-stacks and brown and purple 
 roofs. 
 
 A bridge, just below the balcony, joined the walls of Frau 
 Castelberg 's palace to the other houses of the piazza. A 
 man and a girl were leaning over the parapet of the bridge , 
 the girl huddled in her saffron shawl, the man in his mantle. 
 They talked together in low crooning voices, but otherwise 
 
214 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 there was little sign of life, for Venetians hate the cold, 
 and for them the spring had scarcely dawned. 
 
 " Do you hear the music?" said Frau Castelberg. 
 
 Far away, from the direction of the Grand Canal, came 
 a sweet, half plaintive melody of violins and voices, rising 
 and falling with the swaying of the waves. Linda listened 
 intently and her spirits rose once more. 
 
 " Oh ! it is lovely !" she said. 
 
 But Frau Castelberg shrugged her shoulders and gathered 
 her shawl about her. 
 
 " They are only singing for the! tourists," she said. 
 " They are all paid singers higher paid at -this time, for 
 they hate to sing in the open these cold nights ; but the 
 tourists expect it, because they come to Venice largely in 
 order to hear serenades. A great proportion of them are 
 brides and bridegrooms people with money, of course. 
 They are either in love with themselves or with love some- 
 times, perhaps, with one another. It comes very much to 
 the same and when one is in love, colds and fever do not 
 count, though a certain number die of it every season. They 
 call it the Italian fever when they get home, whereas it was 
 only rashness and folly Let us go in." 
 
 But Linda lingered on the balcony. Frau Castelberg 's 
 words were unpleasant to her ear ; had Count von Herder 
 said these things and strangely enough they were such 
 as von Herder might well have said she would have 
 treated them half as a jest. Coming from this majestic 
 woman, it was necessary to accept them as serious ; they 
 were therefore doubly distasteful. 
 
 Just at this moment a gondola came silently up the canal 
 below her. It was uncovered ; the two gondoliers, dressed 
 in a rather extravagant style, which any true Venetian 
 would have scorned, seemed scarcely to move their oars, yet 
 the boat was flying. An English man and girl were sitting 
 on the cushioned seat. The girl was typical of well-bred 
 England well-groomed, well-trained, like the thorough- 
 bred mares in her father's stables. Her heavy sables had 
 
VENICE 215 
 
 dropped a little from her shoulders, and the moonlight 
 caught the opal and diamond pendant on her throat. Her 
 hair was gathered back from her forehead and twisted into 
 a glossy coil upon her neck. The man wore no hat. His 
 coat was flung open and showed his evening dress. His 
 short hair, crisp and curly, was cropped very close to his 
 head. He had a small moustache, which he pulled as he 
 watched the girl beside him. 
 
 "Kipping?" he suggested. Short and ugly as was the 
 word, it was spoken with smothered emotion. 
 
 "Bather!" answered the girl. 
 
 The gondola shot under the shade of the bridge. 
 
 A feeling was it akin to envy? ran to Linda's heart ; 
 but Frau Castelberg had turned and was quietly drawing 
 her back to the room. 
 
 ' ' A bride and a bridegroom," she said in her curious drag- 
 ging voice " and likely to catch a fever. Let us come 
 down to supper." 
 
 Supper was spread in a small room at the back of the 
 house on the ground floor, which overlooked the garden. A 
 large dish of fried eggs, a bowl of soup, some Bologna 
 sausages, and a loaf of bread, stood on the table; some 
 bottles of very old wine, and a silver basket with exquisite 
 cakes and pastry, were on the sideboard. 
 
 "Oh! Walpurga is a thorough Biindnerin," said her 
 husband. "We might have been living in Ilanz all our 
 days." 
 
 "Good!" said Dr. Caflisch, and drew up his chair to 
 the table. 
 
 But Linda sat listlessly down. In a pause of the meal 
 she listened, and she heard far away the faint, clear sound 
 of voices and of violins, and she saw in her thoughts a 
 gondola under the bridge. People young people were 
 out on the water in boats ; and here sat this woman, more 
 beautiful than any of them, quietly eating her evening 
 soup and sausages, whilst she herself Linda with 
 
216 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 thoughts and questions seething in her heart in thousands, 
 thoughts enough to turn the whole world young again, must 
 follow the same routine. She joined the talk, but she 
 queried the minds of the speakers. 
 
 "Have you seen my brother, Sebastian?" said the doctor 
 at last. " He should be here in Venice now." 
 
 " Yes," said Walpurga. "He's been here a week ; he 
 was here this morning, asking for Linda. He said he 
 would come again to-night. I told him it was safer for him 
 indoors these cold spring nights, but he does not listen. 
 He neglects himself and commits all follies. He has taken 
 rooms on the Kiva, and the Venetians cheat him right and 
 left ; but he's a good man. I wish he would lead a less 
 hazardous life." 
 
 A knock sounded at this moment on the door, a sort of 
 impetuous hammering. 
 
 " El Signer el Signor !" screamed a raucous voice, and 
 when the door was opened a superb man stood on the thres- 
 hold. It was Sebastian's Italian servant, Giovanni, and 
 he had no intention of allowing either himself or his master 
 to creep in unannounced. Sebastian entered, smiling, 
 made a profound bow to his hostess, and gaily took a place 
 at the table, whilst Giovanni drew himself up, as an un- 
 invited sentinel, behind his chair. 
 
 Sebastian looked pale and thin and haggard ; life here 
 delighted, but did not agree with him. An almost ecstatic 
 smile lit up his face as one by one he observed the people 
 and the objects round about him. 
 
 " What a perfect table!" he exclaimed to his hostess. 
 "It is like Graubiinden and Tiepolo rolled in a ball 
 together." 
 
 Then Linda, who had so grudgingly noted the homely 
 food in contrast to the palatial hall, felt suddenly at peace 
 with her surroundings. Sebastian had " a way with him " ; 
 with all his passionate love of art, he could humanize social 
 intercourse. Class was nothing to Sebastian ; he loved a 
 peasant just as he loved an aristocrat. Pretensions were 
 
VENICE 217 
 
 what he abhorred, and every form of insincerity. Over and 
 through the trammels of civilized persons he, who was him- 
 self so deeply civilized, tripped lightly to and fro. He saw 
 and he noted what others perhaps saw but did not notice. 
 What puzzled Linda had long been outlived by her uncle, 
 in whose frail and battered body little of the mere animal 
 man was left. The spirit was paramount by that he was 
 guided. He was no saint, but it was impossible for him 
 to be a great sinner. By people in backwaters he might 
 have been considered a rather unsuitable mentor for develop- 
 ing womanhood, but taken all round he was most curiously 
 suited for this post. Linda's heart leapt to his encounter. 
 Her blood, which had been seeking new channels and was 
 almost going astray, seemed suddenly to concentrate ; and 
 as the evening wore away she became the wildest of the 
 group in that old Venetian palace. 
 
CHAPTEE XVIII 
 " SEHNSUCHT" 
 
 SEBASTIAN had rooms on a side canal by the corner of the 
 Giudecca, and here he had gathered about him as servants 
 a large part of the family of his gondolier. These people 
 adored him and served him with willingness, for Sebastian 
 entered with love, and an almost minute accuracy, into 
 the lives of the people about him, and the lives of the Vene- 
 tians made special appeal to him. 
 
 Sebastian had brought a large book-box from England. 
 Its contents lay stacked on the floor in his sitting-room. 
 He never bought bric-a-brac, but one exquisite and per- 
 fectly genuine bronze that of a small faun stood on the 
 table, and served as a letter-weight to his manuscripts. He 
 wrote a good deal, but rarely published. He was always 
 attempting to tear out the heart of things, apart from their 
 fictional attractiveness. For the moment he desired to 
 know how it could have come about that the spirit of Art, 
 which once had been the very heart of the Kepublic, should 
 so totally have died and given place to a sort of indifferent 
 materialism in the present inhabitants. Sebastian was in 
 advance of his times, for this spirit of research is better 
 understood nowadays. He was one who unconsciously 
 explored, and it was a matter of the most supreme indiffer- 
 ence to him what the world thought of his investigations. 
 He occasionally, almost in a spirit of fantastic antagonism, 
 hurled a pamphlet amongst the professors of Art ; but his 
 investigations and conclusion were for the most part kept to 
 himself, and to a circle of curious friends. Art interested, 
 
 218 
 
"SEHNSUCHT" 219 
 
 often delighted, but never sufficed him. His Italian wan- 
 derings and they were many revealed a million side- 
 lights on >the human situation, such as the ordinary artistic 
 traveller of that period ignored. 
 
 No guide more fascinating, and perhaps more funda- 
 mentally instructive, could have been discovered for an 
 intuitive character such as Linda's during its first artistic 
 pilgrimage ; and Seba&tian was fully prepared to put his 
 knowledge at her feet, for he loved his attractive niece, and 
 studied her development with joyous interest. Stuffed him- 
 self with that most doubtful blessing, " Culture," Sebastian 
 was careful not to put it before his own pupils as a creed. 
 Indeed, his doctrines were perhaps always a little para- 
 doxical and bewildering to the young mind, which has ever 
 a hankering for plain sailing ; but a prig he could never 
 breed, or be in any way responsible for. 
 
 Linda would spend whole mornings in the Scuola di 
 S. Eocco, imbibing no mean knowledge of the majestic and 
 tragic canvases which hang upon its walls, but her admira- 
 tion was wrung from her only after a series of harsh and 
 curious criticisms. All through her after life she held as 
 the most perfect conception of the Christ that solitary figure 
 standing white, and totally at war with the pomps of life 
 with which the artist so loved to crown his every other 
 conception. It held for her all of the Christian ideal and 
 just the more so because it alone of all the Venetian pictures 
 really did hold this spirit in her eyes. The pictures in the 
 Accademia troubled her. She could not fathom her own 
 feelings, but it was a sense of general irreverence and unfit- 
 ness which repelled her in all picture galleries. The fan- 
 tastic fairy tales of Carpaccio, which purport to represent 
 passages in the lives of saints, never got much hold of 
 her. Her soul was seeking for Ideals, and the golden 
 hair and exposed bosoms of the ladies, and all the gew- 
 gaws which surrounded them, rang false upon her senti- 
 ment. 
 
 Quite dimly, perhaps, she felt that all this splendour, all 
 
220 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 this art, this craving of master minds for surface beauty and 
 perfection, was only a phase a glorious phase, perhaps, 
 but one which had long since died. 
 
 Had her Venetian visit been wholly lived between the 
 house of her cousin Walpurga and that of her uncle, Linda 
 might have emerged from it with nothing but good, for 
 after all, a knowledge of what is really beautiful to the eye 
 must be some sort of gain, if not the highest, in youth. 
 But another element was added to it. Count von Herder 
 appeared upon the scene, and was soon on intimate terms 
 with Sebastian. Von Herder could be deeply and power- 
 fully interesting to men as well as to women. His nervous 
 vitality was refreshing to Sebastian, his eccentric and 
 capricious habits suited those of the more fastidious English- 
 man ; and Sebastian inquired of no man for his past, neither 
 was he himself affected by the moral tenets of his com- 
 panions. He had a pretty shrewd notion of what was fitting 
 for young women, and he more or less guarded Linda ; but 
 still, she was often thrown with von Herder, whose cynical 
 views necessarily affected, somewhat for evil and anyhow 
 as a saddening process, her quite untutored vision of reality. 
 But her moral and spiritual nature were too strong for any 
 surface sullying. 
 
 Doctor Caflisch, having finished his business, a little 
 reluctantly consented to leave his daughter for a few weeks 
 longer in Venice. He himself was forced to return to his 
 practice at Trins ; but he had a high esteem for Walpurga 
 and her household; he was fond of Sebastian, and things 
 seemed on the whole to promise not unsatisfactorily for his 
 child's happiness and improvement. The Swiss easily con- 
 fide their sons and daughters to foreign homes ; it may be 
 said that the mercenary element has never become extin- 
 guished, and he did not perhaps sufficiently calculate the 
 powers of environment on the child of his mixed marriage. 
 Linda was passing through a period of great emotional 
 stress, and Walpurga, powerful as was her personality, was 
 not perhaps the best woman to help her. Still, probably, 
 
"SEHNSUCHT 1 221 
 
 sooner or later, the elements of difficulty must have been 
 disclosed. 
 
 Walpurga seemed always to sit alone, and to be per- 
 petually not only in physical health, but at peace. She did 
 none of the things which most people consider necessary to 
 the health of the body. She took practically no exercise. 
 On Sunday she went to early vespers in the Frari Church, 
 which was but thirty paces from her own back-door, and in 
 the afternoon, if the season were settled, and fine and 
 warm, she and her husband would very occasionally take a 
 steamer to the Lido, and drink their coffee at a little 
 trattoria, near the landing-place. Walpurga was over forty, 
 yet she seemed to be at once at the beginning, and at the 
 end, of human experience. Walpurga was precisely every- 
 thing Linda was not, and never could be. Linda adored 
 her, with a curious, almost strained adoration, and the elder 
 woman returned the affection with a calm, undemonstra- 
 tive, yet pervading interest rather than with any sentiment 
 as warm as love. 
 
 ' Why do you perpetually refer yourself to your cousin 
 Walpurga," von Herder exclaimed irritably, as they sat 
 together in Sebastian's sitting-room. " She's just a log 
 a handsome one, I grant you, but a log." 
 
 "How can you say such a thing?" fired up Linda, 
 " when you know very well she is nearer the gods. And 
 you ?" 
 
 "Well I?" inquired von Herder, who always thirsted 
 for contest. 
 
 Sebastian was reading in the window. 
 
 " On Mount Vesuvius in April," he said, " thousands of 
 blue larkspurs flourish, together with millions of the fairest 
 flowers, and there is no wine better than that which comes 
 from the vintage of the dead lava fields." 
 
 Two days later Linda was sitting with her cousin waiting 
 for Sebastian to fetch her for a row. A boat drew up at the 
 landing, and Walpurga looked out of the window. " It is 
 
222 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 Count von Herder," she said rather coldly, coming back 
 into the room. " I have told him to wait. He says he is 
 come to fetch you for a row." 
 
 " I know," said the girl, without any show of interest. 
 
 There was a curious quiet light in Frau Castelberg's eyes. 
 She bent for a moment over her sewing ; then she looked 
 up, and her great eyes, like the quiet pools in a tempestuous 
 mountain torrent, lighted for a moment full into Linda's 
 soul. 
 
 "Linda," she said, "Count von Herder is no good 
 man." She paused. "Your Uncle Sebastian is not 
 always wise in his manner of life, but he is a very good 
 man." 
 
 ' ' I know,' ' said Linda, ' ' but what does it matter ? What 
 harm can Count von Herder do to me? It all depends on 
 oneself, after all. I am happy or unhappy, but it is no one 
 else's fault. And then, what you call 'bad' people are, 
 after all, very amusing." 
 
 " You are saying nothing which is in the least new," said 
 Walpurga. ' ' When you are old and wise, or sad, perhaps, 
 you may even say exactly the same, but now is not the 
 time. Bad people have this much harm in them they 
 take all, and they give one nothing back. Good people 
 make one sad even dull at the time ; but afterwards one 
 remembers one has gathered in strength like the harvest 
 from good seed." 
 
 " And you," said Linda, facing suddenly round, "you 
 seem to know neither the good nor the bad. You sit here 
 sewing these dull grey gowns, you are so much more won- 
 derful than any other woman. Oh ! You are splendid to 
 look at ; but you should dress in white satin, with one great 
 emerald necklace ! Indeed you should, Cousin Walpurga. 
 Instead, you just let life go by it just goes by you like a 
 stream you are only watching it all the time. I know it's 
 good of you, and perhaps better, and all that, but I I 
 want to live it." 
 
 " No one ' lives ' it in the sense you imagine," said Wai- 
 
"SEHNSUCHT" 223 
 
 purga. " That is the point. You either play at living it, 
 or you watch it, or you do actually live it. The people who 
 live it are the people whom you call ' dull . ' But it takes a 
 lifetime to find this out." 
 
 A loud knock came at the door, and Count von Herder, 
 without further ceremony, came into the room. It was a 
 hot Italian afternoon, but he wore his thick hunting coat, 
 and his big brown boots. He looked tired and distraught. 
 
 " Are you coming, or not?" he said. And, sitting down 
 with his hands clasped between his knees, he leaned for- 
 ward, looking first at Walpurga and then at Linda. His 
 eyes were restless and bloodshot, his whole manner feverish 
 and dissatisfied. 
 
 "Is she to come, or is she not?" he said again, rather 
 rudely. 
 
 " Linda is her own mistress," Frau Castelberg replied. 
 She had taken up her sewing again. 
 
 "Oh, we know what that means," said von Herder. 
 " It's such a hackneyed covering of disapproval. Come 
 along, Linda." Then he stood up. " Frau Castelberg 
 we understand one another. We have been through the 
 same mill, but are come out at different ends of the wheel." 
 Then hurriedly, and in a lower voice: "The child's a 
 child, and will remain one. She will probably be an un- 
 happy child but virtuous she is, and virtuous she will 
 remain. . . . Is it not so?" 
 
 Frau Castelberg said nothing, and Linda got up and went 
 to the window. She had heard her uncle's voice down in 
 the canal, and called to him delightedly ; then she faced 
 round. 
 
 ' ' See, Cousin Walpurga ! Now it will be all right to go, 
 for Uncle Sebastian is here." 
 
 ' With your uncle things are right," said Walpurga, and 
 soon Linda went to put on her hat. When she came back 
 she found that von Herder and her cousin were talking 
 together in rather excited voices. Walpurga's eternal sew- 
 
224 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 ing was laid aside ; she had stood up, and was pressing her 
 small firm finger tips on the cold marble of the centre table. 
 Her figure seemed to have shrunk a little. Her usually 
 impassive features were curiously strained, and her large 
 eyes full of an unwonted fire.- 
 
 " I have said I have spoken," she repeated, " and the 
 thing belongs to the past; it is finished done. I only 
 think for others." She faced round. Linda stood in the 
 doorway, turning to leave a scene where she felt herself to 
 be but an intruder. 
 
 " Come in, Linda, let me look at you." Almost impetu- 
 ously Walpurga drew the girl to her, took off her hat, pushed 
 back her hair, and gazed into her eyes. Then the unwonted 
 fire of her action seemed to die out ; and almost mournfully 
 she let her go. 
 
 ' ' Yes," she said, half to herself, and as though dreaming. 
 " There is not the depth. There is not so far to fall. To 
 
 suffer yes Go, Linda, to your uncle, and may God 
 
 keep you." 
 
 Von Herder was silent for an unusually long period after 
 they were settled in the boat, and indeed, not till they were 
 well out of the town and away on the lagoon, did he begin 
 to speak. Sebastian, unconscious of the preceding scene, 
 had established himself in the prow with a book, so Linda 
 and von Herder were thrown together, and she herself had 
 no wish to break the silence. At last, in his abrupt way, 
 he began to speak : 
 
 " Child," he said, " she called you a child ! You are not 
 a child. You think you are but you are past that age. 
 Soon enough you will come to the other. Once I had a 
 Greek dragoman. Whenever anything went wrong with 
 him or me he said, ' We sorfer.' Something is about to go 
 wrong with you you will ' sorfer.' You need not mind 
 me telling you this ; it is best to be prepared." 
 
 Linda was draggling her hand in the warm water of the 
 lagoon. The boat went swiftly over the ripples, the sun 
 
" SEHNSUCHT " 225 
 
 fell full in her eyes. She heard every word that von Herder 
 said , but she did not answer ; she heard it as one hears a 
 tale in dreams. 
 
 ' ' Have you walked through copses in autumn after the 
 leaves are off the bushes?" 
 
 " I suppose so." 
 
 " And what did you see there?" 
 
 " The twigs against the sky, of course." 
 
 Von Herder kicked his feet almost angrily against the 
 bottom of the boat. 
 
 " There were other things." 
 
 'What?" 
 
 " Skeletons of the past birds'-nests old nests, beau- 
 tifully built nests, horrible nests because disused." 
 
 "Well?;' 
 
 ' ' The time comes to all of us when we realize our own 
 lives, and those of the people round us, to be like those same 
 nests." 
 
 Linda took her hand out of the water. 
 
 " The spring comes again, and covers them." 
 
 " Covers them !" von Herder laughed. " And when the 
 spring goes they show again, and in another year the wind 
 and the rain destroys them utterly. No bird builds again in 
 the disused nests." 
 
 " I think I have always dreaded the spring," said Linda 
 slowly, and almost unconsciously, and von Herder started 
 from his seat. 
 
 ' ' You are too young to speak like that ; and as for me , I 
 was only a fool to talk as I did to you. Forget every word 
 I said to you. Think of me as a thing diseased, but be your- 
 self ; you are good and true, and you can't be otherwise. 
 Go back to your mountains. Marry your peasant lover." 
 Linda blushed angrily. " Oh, never mind. Be glad and 
 proud that you have such a thing." He pushed his hand 
 through his hair, his skin was hot and fevered. " There 
 are certain birds rooks -they call them which build year 
 after year in the same nests. These birds never build in 
 
 15 
 
226 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 the wilderness ; they live near men , they love the ways of 
 men, they like the smoke of chimneys to come up round 
 their trees in spring ; they caw the louder because the 
 children of men are tumbling in the dust around their roots. 
 You can still live like a rook go back and do it." 
 
 " Linda !" cried Sebastian a little harshly from the bows, 
 and Linda got up and went to her uncle. He did not speak 
 to her, but she saw he was angry with someone or some- 
 thing. She sat down near him, and her chin went into 
 her hands. 
 
 They went to the Lido and re-turned by the Giudecca. 
 Linda was only just eighteen ; she felt suddenly old and 
 sad, and out of the race of life. She went very slowly up 
 to her room. The halls of the palace which had charmed 
 her so intensely seemed for that moment to have grown 
 dank and dreary. But her own big room was hot from the 
 afternoon sunlight. The lilac was fading in the earthen- 
 ware pots on the shelf, and the roses von Herder had given 
 her were fallen in heaps of white and crimson petals to the 
 floor. Linda stooped down and picked up the petals of the 
 roses, and threw them into the canal. Then she threw 
 away the lilac, too, and the room looked bare ; she went to 
 the table, and with a strange reluctance took up a parcel 
 that had come to her by the post. It was a cardboard box, 
 and when she opened it she found it full of mountain 
 flowers. There were little woolly anemones which had 
 battled their way into life through the bitter frosts of an 
 Alpine spring small bits of grey fluff, with big bright 
 hearts of gold unseen inside them ; and battered gentian 
 cups, bluer than all the blue of the Adriatic ; and here and 
 there a primula and crocus. Linda spread them out upon 
 the table and went to fetch fresh water. It was Sunday 
 evening, and the bells in the Eosario began to clash and 
 clang together, with a sort of passionate primitive call to 
 prayer. Linda came back and looked at the flowers, and 
 began to put them all in water, and, as she did so, she saw 
 
" SEHNSUCHT " 227 
 
 a girl in a pure white gown dancing on the deck of a steamer. 
 They had passed her that evening as they came into Venice. 
 She thought how that girl knew nothing of the little lowly 
 flowers on the bare and almost barren Alps, and how she 
 would not take them as a gift , but would wear in her breast 
 that night some many-scented waxen flowers which her 
 partner would get for her in some rare hot-house. The 
 thought was indescribably painful to Linda. "No, no, 
 no !" she said to herself, and she went to the window and 
 knelt there, watching the people pass over the bridge. 
 The bells clashed on. They clanged and battered from 
 every campanile in Venice, and the swifts came out and 
 swirled and yelled through the heated, cloudless air. The 
 people went by to church the girls had their pale yellow 
 shawls thrown back off their heads, for the evening was still 
 and warm. They chattered as they shuffled along. Now 
 and then a young man walked beside them, chaffing them ; 
 now and then a woman and a man went by together, he 
 bending towards her as he moved, for a thing which was 
 love was between them. And Linda saw it ; she knew very 
 well when people loved ; indeed, she began to look out for 
 it. She acquired an extraordinary habit of seeing the fact 
 of lovers a wild and passionate sympathy for their joy and 
 for their pain. And there were women with children in 
 their arms and clinging to their skirts ; for the facts of the 
 pride of motherhood Linda acquired a miraculous insight 
 the insight, maybe, of envy, but the insight certainly of a 
 profound, deep-seated longing. 
 
 Presently Sebastian's cook came by on the bridge. " Ah, 
 Signorina," she called, " are you all alone?" 
 
 ' Yes, I'm alone. Are you going to church, Maria?" 
 
 "Marry your peasant lover, live like a rook," she 
 repeated to herself. 
 
 "It's the month of Mary a beautiful service with music 
 every evening." 
 
 " I should like to go with you," said the girl. She put 
 on her hat and ran down the stairs, and the mountain 
 flowers withered in the hot Venetian night air. 
 
PAET III 
 
 THE MAIDEN'S BLOOD 
 
 " Upon an evening in the month of May, 
 When from the heavens like a burning tear 
 
 The sun dropped down, 
 Then did the blood awaken in the veins 
 Of the young maiden wand'ring through the fields. 
 
 Then the blood cried to her, 
 
 And the blood burned in her } 
 And as it burned within her, thus it spake : 
 * What art thou making, maiden, of thy youth ? 
 
 What wilt thou make of me? 
 I tire of this light tripping to and fro, 
 This idle running through thy strong young frame. 
 Now would I fain stand still and do my work, 
 And mark, when thou shalt see 
 This work of thine old flesh, thy blood renewed, 
 Then shalt thou thank the blood that gave thee this.' 
 
 " So the blood burned within her, 
 And thus it cried to her. 
 And there beside the maize field, 
 The other one was waiting, 
 He the mysterious one. 
 
 " In the month of May, at even 
 The sun drops down from heaven 
 Heavily, like a tear." 
 
 From " The Bard of the Dimbovitza. 
 
 229 
 
CHAPTEE XIX 
 THE MAIDEN'S BLOOD 
 
 THE heat of summer burst upon Venice very suddenly. It 
 came with one of those swift, silent, burning waves which 
 seal the fact of summer. For spring in Europe, as, indeed, 
 probably everywhere else, is really not so much a season in 
 itself as a battle of summer with the winter which went 
 before it. And notably is this so in Italy, where the huge 
 barriers of the Alps, with all their limitless snowfields, 
 accentuate the sense of battle more than the coming of 
 summer in our more northern but less mountainous country 
 ever can do. But the sun had asserted his power at last 
 even over the northern winds and snowfields, and with a 
 sort of herculean splendour had pierced the lingering chills 
 of winter, and had ridden triumphant into the plains and 
 the cities of Italy. Venice lay panting and sparkling in the 
 warm and radiant air. 
 
 " All the same I cannot stand it," said Sebastian, whose 
 delicate fibres suffered from sudden changes of atmosphere. 
 " Let us get away from all this foetid glamour these sweat- 
 ing tourists and their guides and gondolas. . . . Let us 
 get to the hills and breathe again. Think, Linda dear, the 
 flowers will all be out there now, away on the mountain- 
 sides. Thousands of white acacias and fields full of poet's 
 narcissi ; and citus and thyme and pink fraxinella, up on 
 the hillsides and down in the meadows." 
 
 Linda was standing by the table arranging the books she 
 had been reading with Sebastian. Some words of Leo- 
 pardi were singing in her brain. The orange sails of the 
 
 230 
 
THE MAIDEN'S BLOOD 231 
 
 trebacoli were scarcely moving by the churches of the 
 Giudecca. 
 
 Sebastian's words did not attract her. "Going to the 
 hills," she repeated. " But what hills should you want to 
 go to, Uncle Sebastian?" 
 
 Linda was expanding in Venice. She inwardly dreaded 
 a change or a check. She was at large, and drinking in, 
 unconsciously, a host of strong impressions of mere beauty 
 which would accompany her to her grave, and tinge with 
 illusive halos the saddening cares of later life, and distract, 
 by memory's vision, the woeful ways of illness and of death. 
 
 It was certainly a life of dreams in which for the 
 moment this curious girl was living, and into it Sebastian's 
 words fell like the rather sudden shock of waking ; for it 
 seemed that he expected her to go with him when he spoke 
 of his own departure from Venice. He did not propose to 
 go back to England, or to the Alps he merely proposed to 
 go to some hills where flowers were growing ; there were 
 not enough flowers in Venice for Sebastian. Linda liked 
 changes, and she liked flowers, too, but this particular 
 change distressed her it roused her from what, perhaps, 
 was her first passionate dream. 
 
 Linda asked no more about the hills ; she put on her hat 
 and she went down the street. How hot it was in the street. 
 The women were fanning themselves with great paper fans, 
 and all the wooden shutters, even in the poorer quarters, 
 were closed. Linda came back to the Palazzo Molinaro. 
 It was nearly midday, and a maid had closed the shutters. 
 She had been washing the mosaic floors, and the rooms 
 smelt fresh and cool in the semi-darkness. Only through 
 chinks in the back of the house did the sun succeed in 
 piercing, here and there, and with the sunlight came a 
 heavy and a heavenly scent that of the wistaria flowers. 
 Linda went straight to the back of the house, which looked 
 over the quiet garden where the pine-tree grew. She put 
 her hand out of the window, and pulled up a long heavy 
 spray of the wistaria, which always stirred her senses more 
 
232 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 than any other flower. How warm, how pungently fragrant 
 the lilac blossom smelled. 
 
 Then she went back to her own great drawing-room, and 
 opened the shutters and stepped out on to the balcony. 
 The balcony was deep in shadow, but a band of sunlight 
 streamed through the opening formed by the calle to her 
 left, and it shone, full and seething, on the bridge, and 
 rested with quivering, scintillating ripples on the little 
 landing-place, and across the canal some ten feet from 
 Linda's windows. 
 
 Just at that moment a gondola came round the corner 
 from the sea, and stopped by the steps of the landing-place. 
 The gondoliers began to altercate in loud, excited voices, 
 and Linda caught the sound of her uncle's name : it seemed 
 there was some confusion of addresses. The gondola was 
 piled with luggage. It had come from the side of the port, 
 and not from the station ; the luggage looked like that of a 
 soldier ; and the servant of an English officer stood up by 
 the steps for his master to land. Linda heard a low voice 
 speaking in clear, insistent English to the Venetian gondo- 
 lier, who bowed and smiled, for he did not understand one 
 word of the language. Then she saw a figure emerging 
 from the cover of the gondola with a sort of impatience, as 
 though it despised the restraint of this foreign conveyance. 
 
 It was the figure of a young man, and he went up the 
 steps and stood for a moment looking about him. He 
 wore light, loose, grey clothes; he was extremely fair 
 indeed, his moustache and hair seemed nearly white 
 in the dazzling sunshine ; and the deep bronze of his skin 
 was evidently due to long exposure in Eastern climates. A 
 slightly haughty curve in his eyebrows told of a power, a 
 necessity for rule. His deep-set eyes were dark blue ; as 
 they met the sunlight, scarcely blinking, they seemed very 
 like the wistaria out in the garden at the back of the palace. 
 
 Suddenly he looked up at the balcony. Linda had not 
 moved she stood like one who is hypnotized. She was in 
 shadow herself ; but the reflected light of the piazza came 
 
THE MAIDEN'S BLOOD 233 
 
 up and played about her head and figure, and the ripples of 
 the water seemed to quiver over the plaits of her dark hair, 
 which were almost too heavy for her little girlish head. 
 
 The eyelids of the young man puckered like those of one 
 who sees, but does not recognize. He made a slight move- 
 ment forward. But Linda turned hurriedly and went into 
 the house, and shut the shutters behind her. 
 
 What was the matter ? What had happened ? She sat 
 on the edge of her bed absolutely still, as though something 
 had struck her. There was silence all about her in the big 
 silent house ; then came a sound of voices, and a banging 
 of boards in the cavernous halls of the old Venetian palace. 
 Still she made no movement. She heard the voice of her 
 uncle passing up the stairs. "Dudley!" it called. 
 " Dudley, you splendid creature !" 
 
 Then she heard an odd, low, happy laugh in answer, and 
 the sound of it almost hurt her. She heard steps going up 
 the stairs outside her door to the big salone overhead. There 
 was a discussion about the confusion of plans and addresses, 
 . . . 'those things which interrupt, but never signify. 
 
 A sense of some sudden necessity seized upon Linda, safe 
 as she was in her own apartments. She ran to her door and 
 she locked it tight. Then she went back to the bed where 
 she was sitting. She wanted to think. 
 
 ' ' Dudley?' ' But Dudley was a boy, a regular Philistine 
 English boy who had sometimes played with her, and often 
 teased her. He was her cousin Dudley was? He was a 
 person who was nice , but who understood nothing nothing 
 at all about the things which mattered. He shot birds and 
 he fished in the streams and he went to church against his 
 will on Sundays. He always wore nice loose country 
 clothes. Once he and Basil had quarrelled, she remem- 
 bered something about a pear or some cherries. . . . But 
 that was all finished and done with long and long ago. 
 There was nothing to do with herself in it all ... it was 
 all very far away and immaterial. 
 
234 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 But what was the matter? She felt she must escape ; 
 she must get away somewhere, somehow. ... If only 
 she could get away ! His face and the whole figure of that 
 young English officer down in the little piazza why, it 
 was splendid it was like a thing in dreams ! As she saw 
 him stand there, it had seemed to her that nothing in all 
 the whole world mattered outside it that everybody and 
 everything else had become as nothing at all to her. 
 
 Fresh sounds in the rooms above made her start again. 
 There was an absolute necessity to escape. She went to 
 her shelves ; she took out her shadiest hat ; noiselessly she 
 dressed and noiselessly unlocked her door. Just as she did 
 so, she heard her aunt calling for her, but she paid no heed, 
 and almost like a thief she hurried down the little back 
 staircase which led to the garden. She went through the 
 garden stealthily, hurriedly. The scent of the wistaria 
 seemed heavier than before, and it clung about her as 
 though to pull her back ; but a cone from the ragged Swiss 
 pine fell, as she ran by the fountain, and she nearly tripped 
 as she trod on it. For an instant she paused and looked up 
 at the pine-tree, and a thought of the Alps came to her mind 
 and passed again. She hurried through the door in the 
 garden wall , and was lost in the crowd and the sunlight of 
 the street. 
 
 Linda had been very much alone in her life, but never 
 before had she felt such an entire unit as at that moment ; 
 it was as though her own personality suddenly possessed 
 her to the exclusion of everything else as though it had 
 come to her rescue, closed round about her in order to pro- 
 tect her. She hurried past the familiar shops and through 
 the little market-place of the Frari, where she was accus- 
 tomed to come sometimes with Walpurga's maid to do the 
 daily marketing. She did not notice any of her friends 
 sitting outside their shop-fronts those settled, watchful 
 women of the people, deep-bosomed, passive, full of hidden 
 love and passion. She did not notice their children, one 
 
THE MAIDEN'S BLOOD 235 
 
 or two of whom straddled out into the narrow calle to catch 
 her hand. Her object seemed entirely one of unconscious 
 escape, or, anyhow, of escapade. Entering a side-street 
 she came across the old man who did small jobs about her 
 cousin's palace, and who kept the garden going. She 
 stopped without even considering her words. 
 
 " Giuseppe," she heard her own voice saying in clear, 
 decided accents, ' ' go on and tell my cousin I am not coming 
 in for 'the midday meal, I am going to the Lido. I shall 
 probably not be back till evening. I want to buy some 
 flowers." 
 
 " Your servant," said the old man quietly, and hobbled 
 down the calle. To very old men the whims and doings of 
 girls seem often silly and tiresome. 
 
 Going to the Lido ! ' ' But such a prospect had never 
 been formed in her head ; yet she found the way quickly to 
 the landing-place and, taking the first steamer, she steamed 
 out over the lagoon. It was a silent, blazing, midday heat ; 
 the steamer was practically empty. 
 
 The sun poured over Linda. She seemed to feel its 
 beams entering her pulses, and she yielded to all its powers. 
 On landing she took a lane which led rather inland than 
 straight to the sea-front ; she was accustomed to come here 
 with her uncle in order to buy certain parrot-tulips at a 
 market-gardener's. The garden had changed since last she 
 was here ; the parrot-tulips were going over, but there was a 
 blaze of crimson and of orange ranunculuses, like the tur- 
 baned heads of an army of Turks, in the narrow beds by the 
 canal, and overhead the acacia-trees were all in blossom ; 
 the scent of these flowers seemed almost more acute than 
 that of the wistaria in her cousin's garden. Linda sat 
 down in the cool shade of the grass ; she was a little tired 
 after her sudden rush from the house. The entire stillness 
 around her, the shimmer of summer lights, the sense of 
 man and of nature at rest, which is one of the good things 
 in southern existence, fell on her spirit like waves of 
 comfort. 
 
236 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 She seemed entirely to forget the cause of her curious 
 escape from Venice, and she began to wish to be back again. 
 She sat very still, wondering when the market gardener 
 would have finished his siesta ; she would then buy a bundle 
 of ranunculus flowers, and go home quickly the way she 
 had come. 
 
 But Dudley was in Venice. What had brought him to 
 Venice? Would he go to the hills, too? Again some fear 
 and revolt seized her ; she got up, and walking further, she 
 came at last to the open sands and the sea. Linda had 
 never liked the sea not in England, where she had been 
 taken to the " seaside," and had suffered in sordid lodgings 
 and on crowded and vulgar beaches ; not on the Lido where 
 fashionable persons walked up and down. It was not the 
 great, wholesome sea itself that Linda minded, it was the 
 people who compose the " seaside." 
 
 The afternoon boat had come in, and people were begin- 
 ning to arrive at the bathing-place. 
 
 This put an end to Linda's capricious mood, for the 
 commonplace has always power to calm us. She became 
 perfectly herself and sober again. She walked back quietly 
 to the market gardener ; the man was awake, and for a 
 franc he allowed her to pick as many of the ranunculus 
 flowers as her hands would hold. With these she went 
 back to the landing-place and took the first boat home 
 again. 
 
 As the steamer entered the Grand Canal a sandalo shot 
 close beneath her bows. In it were seated Sebastian and 
 the young officer who had stood in the sunlit piazza that 
 morning. Count von Herder and his gondolier were row- 
 ing. Linda's hat was over her eyes, and no one noticed 
 the small girlish figure sitting alone on the steamer. She 
 landed with other passengers, and hurried home the way 
 she had come only some four hours since ; she went up the 
 stairs and straight to her cousin's sitting-room. The room 
 was empty, the window was open, and the chair where her 
 cousin usually sat was set in its usual place, her work was 
 
THE MAIDEN'S BLOOD 237 
 
 neatly folded on the little stool where she always kept it, 
 and there was the usual bunch of clove carnations in a 
 tumbler on the window-ledge. The big portraits of Wal- 
 purga's grandparents and of Linda's great-grandparents 
 both of them long since dead looked down from their black 
 oval frames on the wall with a certain austere precision 
 which accentuated the already dignified austerity of the 
 whole room. The father, who had been pastor of Trins, had 
 his beard cut round his chin like a goat in the peculiar 
 fashion of the Lutheran clergy. The mother wore a black 
 lace cap, and every line in her face went the right way ; she 
 had been a truly beautiful woman and a distinguished one, 
 for she came of a grand old peasant stock. There were 
 various other portraits on the walls, all in black frames, all 
 of the same type severe, God-fearing men and women, 
 who if they harboured any emotions had certainly learned 
 to conceal them. But one portrait there was which, though 
 it somehow fitted with the rest for all good people have 
 affinity yet showed a perceptible difference. This was an 
 early photograph of Linda's English mother, for whom 
 Walpurga had felt, and expressed, a very sincere affection. 
 Mary was looking straight at the camera. It was what you 
 call a " speaking likeness." The great eyes had a search- 
 ing sweetness in them, but in the mouth there lay a curious 
 and almost painful restlessness. It was the face of a typical 
 English lady, but it lacked something of the race and breed- 
 ing of the hard-working men and women by which it was 
 surrounded. 
 
 Linda had unconsciously sat down in her cousin's seat 
 by the window ; dazzled by -the sunlight outside , she at 
 first scarcely noticed the room, and she was dimly relieved 
 not to find her cousin there. Booms never fail to hold the 
 presence of their owners, and Walpurga' s dignified presence 
 permeated this quiet place. Linda felt rested, and pre- 
 sently her eyes wandered round the walls, and unconsciously 
 she noted a blank in the pictures ; then she became aware 
 that for once a thing or two was out of place in Frau Castel- 
 
238 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 berg's room. A book had been taken from a shelf, and a 
 portrait down from the wall. Linda got up and looked at the 
 book. It seemed so unlike Walpurga to read, still less to 
 copy lyrics ; yet here was one of Heine's exquisite lyrics in 
 the full round hand of Walpurga' s earlier days, and the book 
 in which it was written was propped against a framed 
 photograph that of the Emperor of Trins, and his wife 
 and their first son, Basil. It was an almost painful group, 
 though it represented three practically perfect human speci- 
 mens. The young mother and father even the baby-boy 
 all three seemed burdened with the weight of human exist- 
 ence. Linda took it to the window and looked at it for a 
 long while ; then she put it back in its place and quietly 
 went upstairs to her own rooms. 
 
 An hour later, when she came back to sit with her cousin, 
 the book had gone back to its shelf, and the portrait was in 
 its old place on the wall. 
 
 y 
 
 Walpurga touched very lightly on Linda's excursion to 
 the Lido. She thanked her for the ranunculuses, though 
 they were flowers, she said, which she cared little for. 
 She had got her sewing as usual, and was stitching 
 quietly at one of her long grey skirts. Linda looked at it 
 curiously. 
 
 " I think, perhaps, I should like to dress like you, Cousin 
 Walpurga," she said. 
 
 " Oh no, not at all," said Walpurga, "at least not for 
 many and many years. You have far to travel before you 
 come to my homespuns." 
 
 "Far to travel?" 
 
 "Yes," said Walpurga. "Life is long in any case. 
 And if one sets out looking for things for lots of impos- 
 sible things which one never will find by any chance then 
 it is interminable." 
 
 ' ' Do you mean one ought just to sit down at the very 
 start?" said Linda rather fractiously. 
 
 " I mean nothing in particular," said Frau Castelberg. 
 
THE MAIDEN'S BLOOD 239 
 
 "It probably turns out just as we are made. . . . Your 
 uncle has gone to the Lido," she continued in the same 
 indifferent, low-toned voice. " They were looking for you, 
 but you were gone out. Your cousin, Captain James, 
 arrived very suddenly. Perhaps Maria told you about it 
 I left the message with her." 
 
 "Yes," said Linda, "Maria told me." The blood 
 rushed suddenly to her face ; she got up and went and 
 leaned far out of the window. 
 
 " Be careful," said Walpurga " one can sometimes 
 lean too far." 
 
 " I thought he was in India," said Linda. " Anyhow, 
 he went there years ago, and one hoped he might have 
 stayed there." She was scraping at the stucco under the 
 window-ledge, and dislodging the homes of some careful 
 mason bees. 
 
 "Well, whether one hoped or no, he is come back to 
 Europe," said Walpurga. "A fine young man but not like 
 your mother or your Uncle Sebastian. They were perhaps 
 a little unusual in a family of that sort." 
 
 The blush had gone from Linda's face ; she sat up on 
 the window-ledge with her back to the light. ' What has 
 he grown into?" she asked. 
 
 " He is very fair and he is a fine strong man," said Wal- 
 purga. " He will always be satisfied with his family, and 
 with the mode in which that family conducts its life. As he 
 grows older, he will become more and more what I believe 
 you call a ' county gentleman.' ' 
 
 " But he is in the Army," interrupted Linda. 
 ' Where we are is not the point. It is only what we are 
 which matters." 
 
 " But we can always become different to what we are," 
 said Linda inconsequently. "He used to wear sort of 
 stiff clothes and high stiff collars," she continued, uncon- 
 scious perhaps of a note of interrogation. " And well, 
 the servants and everybody of that sort, always thought 
 him wonderfully good-looking." 
 
240 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 ' ' He wears a quite ordinary collar like other young men 
 of his class," said Walpurga. " Maria seemed to think 
 St. Michael had stepped out of the picture in the Frari 
 when she saw him." 
 
 "He is not in the very least like St. Michael," said 
 Linda hurriedly. "An English soldier, and Titian's 
 St. Michael !" She twisted round angrily in her seat ; and 
 her cousin leant forward and moved the glass of carnations 
 away from the window-ledge, where Linda's jerky move- 
 ments seemed likely to upset it. 
 
 Walpurga was not at any time a great talker, but to-day 
 she seemed to be in a reminiscent mood. She began to 
 talk of the old days in Linda's Alpine house, and of the 
 times when Linda's English relations came to Trins and 
 stayed at the inn, with all the consequent social incon- 
 gruities. Linda felt a little embarrassed. 
 
 "It is all very odd and a long way away all that time 
 and all those things," she said. 
 
 ' Yes, you have plenty of new things," answered her 
 cousin. " To me the old seem best but we must all of us 
 judge for ourselves. Your mother's people, and your 
 father's people, they are very unlike. I have sometimes 
 thought that at root , when we begin to look back instead of 
 forward that is to say, when we are fully developed we 
 become what our mothers and not what our fathers made 
 us ; and very much more we revert to the scenes and habits 
 of our childhood. Yours was a happy childhood, in Trins, 
 and you had many friends there." 
 
 1 ' Why are you speaking of the past ?' ' said Linda. ' ' Why 
 do you talk as though everything were over, when really it 
 is all beginning?" 
 
 "For myself," said Walpurga, "I am not so certain 
 about ' beginnings.' It seems to me sometimes as though 
 everything were determined from the very outset. Put a 
 bird in a cage, it had best be quiet. Beating the bars won't 
 alter the case." 
 
 ' ' But we are not in cages ? We are entirely free. ' ' 
 
THE MAIDEN'S BLOOD 241 
 
 " So children think," said Walpurga. " At least, some 
 children not all of them." Unconsciously, perhaps, her 
 eyes wandered to the wall where the picture was hung 
 which a short time since Linda had found on the table; 
 and Linda, following her gaze, caught the almost weirdly 
 earnest eyes of the little Swiss boy, as with his elbows 
 stiffly propped upon his mother's knee, he stood looking 
 out into a world which already he had accepted rather than 
 hoped for. 
 
 At that instant a gondola came round the corner of the 
 canal below the window ; it was Count von Herder's gon- 
 dola, and Sebastian and Dudley were seated inside on the 
 gorgeous Eastern cushions which von Herder affected to 
 the disdain of the Venetians. They all three caught sight 
 of Linda in the window, and once again her eyes seemed 
 hypnotized by the sight of her English cousin. He smiled 
 at her in a sort of grim way, just as he might have smiled 
 at one of his polo ponies or any pretty child in the street. 
 She straightened herself up, and for an instant she looked 
 at him with a curious penetrating stare. 
 
 "We're not coming in," said Sebastian. "We came 
 to ask if you'd come to the opera to-night, Linda you and 
 Frau Castelberg. "It's 'Mephisto' they're giving, and 
 we have taken your tickets. ' ' 
 
 Linda stepped deliberately down from the window-ledge. 
 " I do not want to go, Cousin Walpurga," she said, and she 
 had never in the whole of her life, perhaps, spoken with 
 such intense insistence. " I do not mean to go." 
 
 " Go where?" said her cousin, who had gone to fetch 
 something in another part of the room, just as the boat 
 came into sight. 
 
 ' To the play with Uncle Sebastian and Count von 
 Herder and and I would far, far rather not go with 
 them." 
 
 " But it is simple enough to say so, Linda? No one 
 compels you to go to the play, and indeed it is far more 
 
 16 
 
242 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 suitable for you to have a quiet evening, you are very 
 much overtired already." 
 
 Linda went back to the window. 
 
 " I won't come to-night," she said. 
 
 Of the three men, the only one who seemed disappointed 
 was von Herder. He had come ; to regard Linda as a sort 
 of asset in his daily enjoyment. Her waywardness, her 
 earnestness, her general youth, to say nothing of her 
 beauty, were factors of refreshment in his life. Sebastian, 
 however, entered into a sort of playful altercation, to which 
 Linda responded with her usual naivete. Her cheeks were 
 flushed, her eyebrows curiously arched above her eyes. 
 Dudley glanced at her, but he did not look again, for it is 
 not the habit of Englishmen to stare, even at their cousins. 
 As the boat went off he lifted his hat. Linda the little 
 Swiss cousin had grown extraordinarily pretty, he 
 thought , but she still had a rather foreign look ; also she 
 seemed excitable. 
 
 Dudley went to his modest quarters in one of the smaller 
 hotels of the Grand Canal. The heir to great riches him- 
 self, he had early learned the parsimony which so often 
 accompanies these. He put on his evening clothes, and 
 one of those stiff high collars to which Linda had objected as 
 a child. Then he went rather solemnly down to the dining- 
 room, and took the seat which the waiter had assigned him. 
 As he sat at his little table, stiff in his bearing, immaculate 
 in his dress, he represented to the American ladies who 
 sat at another table not very far away the very emblem of 
 English manhood. Dudley had secured a copy of "The 
 Times," but he did not read it ; he thought it would be more 
 courteous not to do so, but he had not bowed to his neigh- 
 bours as he took his seat he did not appear so much as to 
 know of their existence ; that form of courtesy was not in 
 Dudley ' s line. He ate his dinner silently , frowning a little. 
 And outside the window where he sat, the last rays of the 
 sunset fell on the statues of Santa Maria della Salute, and 
 
THE MAIDEN'S BLOOD 243 
 
 all the manifold life of the curious sea-city passed over its 
 chief water-way unobserved, as it seemed, by the young 
 English officer. 
 
 ***** 
 
 Dudley was hungry and he liked his dinner, but all the 
 time he was thinking, and his thoughts were rather exhaust- 
 ing to him. What was he thinking of? Well, somehow or 
 other, and almost unknown to himself, Dudley was think- 
 ing of his family circumstances inasmuch as they concerned 
 his cousin Linda and of other matters incidentally. He 
 had never been in Venice, and as a sort of chance had 
 landed him there to-day, he thought that he would stay a 
 few days and " look up " the principal sights and pictures. 
 Dudley was more of a James than a Crane ; he was not 
 very fond of pictures, and a little surprised at statues. 
 Still, the right sort of people " looked " at these things, and 
 one might as well take advantage of such an opportunity. 
 Dudley had only heard of his leave a short time before he 
 started ; there was no time to get a letter from his people 
 in India, so he told his mother to send him a line to meet 
 him at Brindisi. Mrs. James had written to Brindisi. 
 She told him his Uncle Sebastian was in Venice, and that 
 she and her husband and Susan were also coming to Italy 
 soon, so they could all meet together in Venice, or in " some 
 nice little rustic place" which Sebastian had spoken of. 
 Mrs. James usually wrote in a hurry and gave wrong 
 addresses. This time she gave Frau Castelberg's address 
 instead of Sebastian's, but she quite forgot to mention that 
 Linda was staying with Frau Castelberg. Dudley thought 
 for a moment about his Uncle Sebastian ; he had never been 
 very much attached to his uncle there was something dis- 
 concerting about his way of life, something " artistic " or 
 ' ' peculiar ' ' a little disreputable in fact ; and Dudley liked 
 everything to be in proper social order. On the other hand, 
 Sebastian could tip schoolboys on a very liberal scale ; and 
 he could jump high gates and sit on a horse as well as any 
 man. But Dudley had one peculiarly unpleasant memory 
 
244 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 of his uncle. He remembered one evening when, as a boy 
 returning from Eton, he had run to his uncle's study and 
 had found him smoking a pipe over his fire in company with 
 a stonemason ! Well after all, he had probably changed 
 by this time. . . . 
 
 And then about Linda? As far as Dudley could recollect, 
 Linda herself was most uncomfortably tied up with a set of 
 Swiss relations peasants and artisans. But in spite of 
 this she had often been disconcerting more disconcerting 
 even than his uncle. She had far more spirit than most 
 of the other little girls with whom, in moments not to be 
 remembered without shuddering, Dudley had been obliged 
 to dance at Christmas parties in his mother's drawing-room. 
 Linda had always come to England looking like a rather 
 curious small farm-child ; but when they had put her 
 into white frocks and let down her splendid hair she had 
 had quite an odd effect on his youthful emotions. Indeed, 
 his cousin Linda conveyed to the sporting mind of Dudley 
 the impression which a well-bred pony might do. No one 
 had ever been known to take a second liberty with her, if, 
 indeed, they had been foolish enough to take a first one. . . . 
 
 Thus far Dudley had got with his thinking. He paused 
 because the waiter had brought him some beef. He was 
 very fond of beef, and for a moment -the current of his 
 thoughts was diverted by it. Then the thoughts came 
 pressing back again. He began to think of himself. . . . 
 It is true he was not clever, but he was not stupid either ; 
 hitherto life had been perfectly smooth for him, and he saw 
 no reason that it should not so continue. As far as worldly 
 position went, his own was entirely secure. His father, 
 it is true, was not an old man, but he had a large property 
 which was entailed on his only son. In the meantime 
 Dudley would remain in the service which, as quite a young 
 boy, he had always determined to enter, and to which he 
 was much attached. He had no great interests outside this 
 
THE MAIDEN'S BLOOD 245 
 
 service, and the pursuits of a country gentleman would keep 
 very well for later years. 
 
 * * * # # 
 
 A very foreign-looking sweet had been served, something 
 stuck all over with little almonds or pine-kernels, and look- 
 ing more like a porcupine 'than a decent pudding. Dudley 
 rejected it ... his thoughts went back to his family. . . . 
 He remembered that much the most disturbing element in 
 the placid flow of the Crane and James history had been 
 the perfectly unlooked-for, unheardof, and undesired love 
 episode in the life of one of its daughters. His dead aunt, 
 Mary Crane, hitherto gen tie and in every sense " ladylike," 
 had, without any precedent, become passionately and im- 
 moderately attached to the doctor in a small Swiss village. 
 Not only the surface, but the very pebbles at the base of 
 that well-ordered family pool, had been stirred by the facts 
 of this marriage. The man, it is true, was well enough in 
 his own way ; but his birth was perfectly obscure, his people 
 were practically unpresentable in the society which the 
 Cranes themselves frequented. All the same, Mary had 
 silently and obstinately stuck to her intention, and to the 
 ' ' discomfort ' ' to use a very mild expression of all her 
 reputable relations, she had plunged them into a most em- 
 barrassing connection. 
 
 Though this was more or less the sentiment left upon 
 minds powerless to express themselves very forcibly, and 
 still less able to expand into wider social standards than 
 their own, it is useless to deny that the dignity and aloof- 
 ness, not only of the doctor himself, but of his entire family, 
 combining with the general look of race and breeding in the 
 child born of the unwelcome marriage, had a trick of quite 
 disconcerting the angry feelings of the family. And, as it 
 is not only wiser, but also decidedly far easier, not to think 
 more than is necessary of any disagreeable family connec- 
 tion , Dudley in his well-ordered Indian life had allowed the 
 matter to pass from his mind during the last three years 
 or so. 
 
246 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 But here by some bounce in the walk of that hoyden 
 whom we call Fortune the whole situation was brought up 
 before him ! The beauty of natural environment has a far 
 less positive effect on some natures than it has on others, 
 and Dudley indeed was not conscious of its workings at all. 
 Still, the May sun in Venice can touch even hearts of wood, 
 and make the sluggard's blood to boil, and Dudley's was 
 neither of these. 
 
 He pushed aside his plate and he rose from the table. 
 Those had been his thoughts. How splendid and dis- 
 tinguished he looked. How gallantly he bore himself as 
 he passed down the narrow dining-room ! 
 
 About ten minutes later the porter in the hall announced 
 that two gentlemen were waiting for him in then: boat , and 
 Dudley went out of the hall and down the steps of the land- 
 ing. It was with a feeling of some disgust that he beheld 
 his companions for the opera house dressed in the same un- 
 conventional dress as they had worn during their afternoon 
 cruise. Certainly Count von Herder's heavy Tyrolean 
 boots did not suggest a box at the Fenice, or any other 
 opera house. Dudley in his immaculate evening clothes 
 joined them rather haughtily, and some Brazilian ladies who 
 had come on the balcony imagined that every one of the 
 three must be a ' ' lord ' ' the one because he was so fault- 
 less in, the other two because they so dared to disregard, the 
 conventions of personal attire. 
 
CHAPTEE XX 
 
 CAEDINALE 
 
 IT was not the habit of Sebastian to follow in the ordinary 
 footsteps of the tourist. He loved art, but he loved better 
 the country from which the people had sprung who pro- 
 duced this art, and he loved best of all the people them- 
 selves who still lived on and toiled there. When he said 
 that he would go to the hills, he had no intention of seek- 
 ing out some inn in which to stay ; he had determined to 
 find quarters in a romantic villa to which some chance had 
 led him in the previous autumn, and which he now heard 
 was to be let for the payment of a song. The villa was 
 large. It would hold not only Sebastian's party, but also 
 that of Mrs. James, who had long proposed an Italian visit 
 to her brother. 
 
 In England we hire, at enormous cost, some dingy lodg- 
 ing, where, in barbarous discomfort and humiliation of 
 every conceivable description, we lodge ourselves for some 
 uneaseful weeks of what we needs must term our ' ' holi- 
 days. ' ' In Italy we can, for one-tenth part of the sum , live 
 sumptuously, and like the ancient dukes, in almost any 
 town or village we may choose from. 
 
 Cardinale was the name of the small and scattered ham- 
 let one could barely call it a village which, hidden in a 
 fold of the Euganean Hills, is scarcely known 'to the outside 
 world. Yet there is a garden there which is one of the 
 loveliest things in Europe, and it was to this garden that 
 Sebastian's thoughts were turned. 
 
 The house to which the garden belongs is itself insignifi- 
 cant. Fire, or perhaps a period of ill-taste, has destroyed 
 
 247 
 
248 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 the original building, which must have dated, to judge by 
 the age of one of the avenues in the garden, to some time 
 about 1700. The new building is commonplace enough 
 a square, roomy house with one long loggia on the front, 
 and a flight of steps leading down to the pleasaunce. Still, 
 such as it was, and amidst such surroundings, even the 
 villa itself possessed a charm of its own on the hot May 
 afternoon when Sebastian and his party arrived at its 
 doors. Sebastian had sent his servants before him. These 
 consisted of the gondolier, his wife, and their eldest 
 children, all of whom were to do various odd jobs in the 
 easy-going household. And Count von Herder, thankful 
 for any opportunity of change, had also packed for\Car- 
 dinale, but had taken rooms in the village inn, as Wal- 
 purga, to whom the expedition had suggested difficulties, 
 had insisted that only under these conditions might Linda 
 accompany her uncle. 
 
 A blazing May day. Sebastian, Linda, and Count von 
 Herder left the tram at Abano, and embarked on the cranky 
 pea-green fly which was in waiting for them at the station. 
 How hot the air was the sky so blue it seemed almost to 
 be white at its edges. As they rattled and joggled along 
 over the great broad road built by the Emperor Napoleon 
 one hundred years ago, Linda drank in for the first time the 
 pleasure of the Italian plains. And the plain that day 
 was in its glory a perfect festival of May. On either side 
 of the road, which was raised some ten feet high above the 
 level ground, ran a broad ditch or dyke. The surface of 
 this water was densely covered with white and yellow 
 water-lilies ; pink flowering rush and a tangle of blue and 
 yellow vetches smothered the banks, with big moon daisies 
 and other common flowers. To right and left were the 
 fields of corn and maize, full grown now, and already 
 slightly changing from green to yellow under the burning 
 suns of May. Each field was guarded by its mulberry and 
 willow hedges, and these were festooned with garlands of 
 vine. 
 
CAEDINALE 249 
 
 Presently they left the great highroad, and took a turn- 
 ing to the left which led towards the hills. And as they 
 neared the hills a different atmosphere seemed to come out 
 to meet them. The heat came in puffs from the banks and 
 hedges. They left the open ditches and passed between 
 banks on which grew trees of white acacia. The blossoms 
 fell like snowy tassels against the blue sky overhead. 
 There was a seething and a humming of insects in the air. 
 Flocks of geese, turkeys, and guinea-fowl, driven by little 
 girls in thick pink cotton petticoats, flew off frightened by 
 the unfamiliar carriage. They also met women staggering 
 homewards, with huge baskets of mulberry-leaves to feed 
 their silkworms , bending their backs ; and as they passed 
 the scattered peasant homes, they could see, through the 
 open windows, the curious wooden frameworks which 
 looked like spinners' looms, but which were actually the 
 homes of the silkworms. As they passed the people stood 
 to stare strangers are rare in the Euganean Hills and 
 von Herder's great wolf-hound, panting in the dust behind 
 them, excited at once their terror and their admiration. 
 The carriage was loaded with a miscellaneous collection of 
 luggage, and von Herder's long legs straddled over the case 
 of his violoncello, whilst the portmanteaux and the book- 
 boxes of Sebastian threatened at every instant to fall from 
 the seat where they were piled. 
 
 But nothing of such merely material moment as this 
 affected Linda. Small and slight herself, she took but little 
 space in the clumsy carriage, and propped on a huge port- 
 manteau, she sat quite still, her large eyes full of dreams, 
 looking out through her pale oval face on to the new and 
 exquisite pageant through which they now were passing. 
 Sebastian, full of curious fads, had bought for her a long 
 green veil ; he said that ladies should wear green veils on 
 journeys. It formed a sort of mist around her white straw 
 hat , and hung out far behind , across the hold-alls and port- 
 manteaux. Her little holland frock hung loose about her 
 figure, for she had grown thin in Italy. Her brain was in a 
 
250 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 condition of passive, seething acceptance, and she seemed 
 with all her being to respond to the natural movement of 
 the life about her. 
 
 All this time, with her subconscious self, she was think- 
 ing of Dudley Crane. Dudley had stayed in Venice, and 
 they had come off to the hills. Why had they come to the 
 hills. To her it seemed waste and folly or, if they had 
 come, why had Dudley not come with them? Dudley in 
 the hills in the long May days? Oh! Oh! Oh! ... 
 
 There was a curious smell of peat about his clothes, yet 
 he had worn them in Indian forests ; and his deep blue 
 eyes looked straight at their object. Amidst the theories 
 of Sebastian and the paradoxes of von Herder, Dudley 
 seemed like a silent god of stone ; and the bewildered, pas- 
 sionate soul of the girl responded to his dumbness and his 
 strength, regardless of a certain shallowness and denseness 
 too which went along with it. Still, she had left the place 
 where Dudley was, and she had come to the hills. What to 
 do? What did people like her Uncle Sebastian actually 
 do? They seemed to do nothing but talk and walk, walk 
 and talk ; tear old things to pieces and not build 
 new ones up. Yet she loved her Uncle Sebastian. 
 He was certainly quite as worthy of love as many 
 more outwardly worthy and "busy" persons, and in a 
 sense his personality was the most dominant factor in her 
 life. Lots of people most people were doing things all 
 day long. And what about that, after all? The mere 
 doing ? Linda's father had gone back home ; in another 
 fortnight she would be following him. Dimly she felt that 
 the period of dreams was done or would, anyhow, then be 
 done; dimly she desired some sort of fulfilment of some- 
 thing first , something warm and strong ; final and perfect , 
 yet strange and fearful to the touch. She thought of her 
 mother there surely had been a romance? . . . What 
 was she dreaming of ? . . . 
 
 Her uncle and Count von Herder, who had been buried 
 
CARDINALE 251 
 
 in metaphysics for the last half-hour, had suddenly returned 
 to a discussion of realities. 
 
 " Is not your nephew coming to join us?" 
 " Yes, to-morrow, but only for a night or two. Dudley 
 in the Euganean Hills ! Poor innocent giant ! he is 
 grappling with Tintoretto at this very instant ! He said he 
 would try to ' do ' a little Venice, as he happened to be 
 there. We Cranes are hopelessly economical, you know 
 and we don't come to Italian cities every day of our 
 lives. . . ." 
 
 The carriage, which had been going along at a sort of 
 jog-trot, the animal between the shafts looking more dead 
 than alive, gave a sudden lurch forward, for they were 
 approaching a little village. The driver turned on his box. 
 ' ' Ecco ! Ecco Cardinale ! " he cried , with a sort of sump- 
 tuous pride, as though he had been heralding the sight of 
 Kome, and he whipped his horse to a gallop. 
 
 Linda stood up in the carriage. Just a broad dusty 
 road stretched bare to the burning midday sun, with a few 
 low cottages scattered to right and to left of it, some hens 
 crooning in the gutter, and one or two workmen asleep on 
 the shady side of the pavement ; to the right , a sort of barn- 
 like church , painted all over without and within with white- 
 wash ; and the campanile standing away at a little distance, 
 tall and slender, and with its big black bells against the 
 sky and a little tiled roof on the summit. On the other 
 side of the church was the house of the priest. 
 
 Don Pedro was standing in the garden, his arms resting 
 on the Wall and a blue cotton handkerchief hanging from 
 the corner of his big beaver hat. A curious smile crept 
 over his enigmatical eyes when he caught the first sight of 
 the carriage. He knew all about its inhabitants priests 
 know many things but he made no movement of welcome. 
 Sebastian, on the other hand, cried aloud with delight. 
 "Don Pedro ! Don Pedro !" he called, " we are come 
 see, we are here ! All of us are here. This is my niece, 
 
252 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 and this my friend. You will lunch with us, dine with us, 
 breakfast with us. And we will discourse upon heaven 
 and hell." 
 
 ' ' Madman ! Englishman ! ' ' muttered the priest , but 
 there was a sly benevolence in his wrinkled eyelids. He 
 did not look at von Herder or Sebastian ; he was watching 
 Linda possibly she pleased him. 
 
 " And you you little English miss what have you 
 come to try and to do here? what sort of fool are you 
 making of yourself?" 
 
 Linda had heard of Don Pedro. /'I am no greater fool 
 than others," she said a little hotly. 
 
 ' Yes, but you are just a little more and just a little 
 less. But you like blue birds do you hear mine singing ?" 
 ' Yes," said Linda, and she jumped from the carriage. 
 She had heard of all Don Pedro's birds before. 
 
 She went through the priest's garden and up into his 
 house. Although he had laughed at her, she instinctively 
 felt that he liked her. She went straight into the little 
 dark passage and then to the parlour. The house of Don 
 Pedro was cool and quiet. Old prints of unexpected per- 
 sons hung on the walls. There was Napoleon and Queen 
 Elizabeth on either side of Leo X. Pyramids of books and 
 of pamphlets which had overflowed from the bookshelves 
 littered the floor, the tables, the chairs. A great black 
 crucifix stood on the central table, but somehow it seemed 
 set there as a reminder, rather than as a general factor in 
 the life of the owner of the house. The shutters were 
 closed, but bars of light crept through the cracks and fell 
 through the bars of all the cages which hung from the 
 ceiling. Here was a whole citadel of singing birds lin- 
 nets, canaries, goldfinch, and nightingales and in a promi- 
 nent place one beautiful passero solitario, the bird Leopardi 
 loved. 
 
 " Oh, what a room !" said Linda delightedly. But the 
 birds were not accustomed to persons of her type. Her 
 hat and her green veil frightened them. They ceased to 
 
CARDINALE 253 
 
 sing and fluttered in the utmost agitation around their 
 cages, so Linda sat down on a chair for a moment. Don 
 Pedro was still leaning over the wall parrying thrusts with 
 the occupants of the carriage ; she could see him through a 
 chink of the window-shutters. A proof sheet of some title- 
 page had fluttered to the floor with the movement of the 
 birds, and as she picked it up she noticed the title : " On 
 Divorce." 
 
 So a priest in a remote Italian village, who might have 
 composed all the lyrics of Arcady or the devotional prayers 
 of an anchorite, was engaged on a work concerning 
 " divorce." In life it happens that we gather to ourselves 
 at various moments the type of thread with which our 
 moods are connected. Linda started painfully when she 
 realized the eccentric title of the book this isolated parish 
 priest was writing. She knew that he was a writer, she 
 knew he was a student and something of a cynic ; but that 
 the trend of his mind was in a direction of this sort she 
 certainly never suspected. She put the paper carefully 
 back in its place, and she sat for a moment quite still on 
 the big horsehair sofa which formed a prominent feature in 
 the room. Her head was a little heavy, her thoughts were 
 disconnected. Who shall say whether we who are 
 dreamers---and Linda was certainly a dreamer ever 
 actually connect our thoughts? Do they not come and go 
 at random old questionings of spirits which lived before 
 us, and will go on living after us? old dreams dreamt by 
 people of our own blood long and long ago. . . . 
 
 Why these weird and sudden contrasts, these intellectual 
 misfits and misfortunes, when the whole scheme of exist- 
 ence was really one of the binding together of body and of 
 soul? That was the question which haunted Linda. The 
 music was playing all around her out there in the fields and 
 the hedges. What millions of water-lilies there had been 
 in the ditches, their golden cups bent flat to the sun and 
 the insects. And here were three men of vastly different 
 types, all at war with the exquisite scheme of the Universe. 
 
254 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 Don Pedro had only one illuminated text hung up in his 
 room : " Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's." 
 Why that text of all others? And priests and monks, after 
 all? And a church? Why not be simply happy and good 
 and helpful? Why ever harm one another or inter- 
 fere? . . . 
 
 ***** 
 
 Don Pedro had turned from the carriage and was coming 
 towards the house, waving the blue cotton handkerchief 
 which he usually wore beneath his beaver hat, and which 
 he had removed in the shade of the garden. 
 
 "Give us your blessing," shouted von Herder. 
 
 " No," said Don Pedro, " you are heretics heretics ; and 
 one of you is even an Englishman?" 
 
 " Where is Linda, then? Tell her to come away from 
 the birds. We are waiting for our dinner." 
 
 Don Pedro gave a curious turn in his walk. 
 
 ''Miss Linda is still at the poste restante," he said. 
 " See that she stays there." 
 
 He entered the house, and came into the sitting-room. 
 He did not look at Linda or speak to her as she rose from 
 the sofa and came towards him. He took up his breviary, 
 reopened the page, and sitting himself down at the table 
 with a heavy sigh, he covered his forehead with one large 
 white hand the hand of a peasant who had never held a 
 spade and he began to read, repeating the words half aloud 
 to himself in the curious monotonous nasal intonation of 
 the priest. It was impossible for Linda to know whether 
 he noted her presence or not, and she went from the room, 
 closing the door behind her. 
 
CHAPTEK XXI 
 
 THE SUNDIAL 
 
 UP at the villa there were great preparations for a meal. 
 The shutters were closed, and a lovely fresh smell of newly 
 washed scagliola pervaded the whole of the dwelling. The 
 big villa was but barely furnished, and the round table 
 spread for the midday feast looked very small indeed in the 
 great sala di ballo : "Una vera miseria," explained the 
 extravagant gondolier, " but we have done our best with it ; 
 and the gardener has brought in these few flowers to please 
 the signorina." He waved his hands towards the walls. 
 
 If this were "misery," what indeed might be 
 described as comfort and luxurious living, Linda wondered. 
 She stood a moment alone in the splendid apartment, 
 before going into her own room to wash her hands and shake 
 away the dust of her long journey. 
 
 ' ' A few flowers ! ' ' The gardener at Cardinale had once 
 seen service with a great French lady, and gained from her 
 a sense of lavish decoration. Under each big mirror, 
 between the six long windows and the statues which divided 
 up the hall, there stood red marble tables, and on each of 
 these an enormous majolica flower-vase. These he had 
 filled with boughs of flowering shrubs white spirea, lilac, 
 wistaria, and yellow banksia roses. The room was indeed 
 a veritable bower, and the curious frescoes on its walls, of 
 blue sky, trellises, and little birds, in which Italians so 
 delight, harmonized perfectly with the natural flowers in 
 that dim and shuttered light. 
 
 Some ancestral love of sumptuous living came seething 
 
 255 
 
256 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 up in Linda's soul, for there was noble and also profligate 
 blood in her veins from her maternal grandmother. 
 
 "Dance!" said Count von Herder, who entered the 
 room at that moment. ' ' Here, of course, one must dance. ' ' 
 
 For some unaccountable reason von Herder had entirely 
 changed his wonted costume, and he stood by one of the 
 tall mirrors a thing transfigured in a pale grey suit and 
 the thinnest of shoes. The worldly restless expression had 
 not altered it was indeed accentuated ; but he looked the 
 man of breeding that he really was, and might well have 
 turned the head of a less impressionable girl. 
 
 In a minute Linda was dancing. A curious, a sort of pas- 
 sionate sensation of the rhythmic joy of movement came 
 over her. She became giddy, but she did not want to stop. 
 Round and round they valsed, down the whole length of 
 the hall and in and out and round the tables. If von 
 Herder could do nothing else he could dance ; there were 
 times, indeed, in his past life when he had almost danced 
 himself to death. 
 
 But, whereas his partner was wholly engrossed in her 
 sensations of movement, von Herder could note very 
 accurately what was happening in the room, and he saw 
 that the English cousin had arrived a day too early, and that 
 he was standing in the doorway watching this small bac- 
 chanalian revel. Then von Herder gradually slackened 
 his step. He had gathered the slim girlish figure close in 
 his arm, and, as though unwillingly, he allowed her to sink 
 on one of the two big sofas which stood just facing the door. 
 She was dazed by all the movement, and her hands rested 
 with the palms upward and the little brown fingers loosely 
 bent upon the yellow cushions beside her. She was rather 
 pale, her lips parted, and an odd, far-away look in her eyes 
 as of someone seen in a trance. The braids of her hair 
 were loosened and fell down in two great plaits upon her 
 shoulders. 
 
 Dudley had never in the whole of his existence seen any- 
 thing to compare with her for wild and attractive beauty, 
 
THE SUNDIAL 257 
 
 combining with something which somehow needed pro- 
 tection. His first instinct a sort of prehistoric impulse 
 arising from the sense of possession by race was to knock 
 von Herder down ; his next was to do what von Herder him- 
 self had done to dance in his turn with the beautiful girl . 
 The last, and the one which prevailed, because our outward 
 man which has been tutored is sure to prevail with the 
 normal social being, was to do the right thing to bid his 
 cousin and her friend good-day, and to inquire after his 
 Uncle Sebastian, to whom, after all, his visit was paid. 
 
 Then Linda sat up with a start. 
 
 " What on earth have you come for to-day?" she said ; 
 and a crimson blush, which might either have betokened 
 indignation or embarrassment, came over her face. She 
 gathered up the heavy plaits of her hair, and began to coil 
 them quickly round her head. 
 
 " I'm sorry to be here too soon," said Dudley, and some 
 natural courtesy bade 'him cover the situation with a 
 joke ..." but I should have missed the dance had I come 
 to-morrow. ' ' 
 
 " Well, there's nothing to prove that ! I dance, or I 
 don't dance. And anyhow, it's time to dress for lunch." 
 She picked up her hat, and her cloak, and the long green 
 veil, and she walked with a certain wayward dignity out 
 into the passage. Von Herder took up the paper, and 
 Dudley went out on the balcony. 
 
 Linda had gone to her bedroom , which was on the shady 
 side of the house. There was almost a winter chill about 
 it ; the great windows commanded a view of one of those 
 mad rococo rockeries dear to the heart of the domestic archi- 
 tect in Italy. An immense Neptune presided, in a certain 
 sumptuous and decaying mouldiness, over a tank of gold- 
 fish ; and the fronds of innumerable pale young ferns were 
 uncurling over the ruins of last year's leaves. 
 
 The room was one likely to produce on a sensitive spirit 
 a rather mournful and sobering effect. Linda, entering 
 from the heat and shimmer of the dining-hall, flushed as 
 
 17 
 
258 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 she was with the sudden irritation caused by the unexpected 
 arrival of Dudley, felt a curious check. She stood a second 
 in the middle of the chamber and became conscious of the 
 unearthly representation of herself in the three huge 
 mirrors, which, with the exception of the bed, two tall 
 chairs, and a table, formed the only other furniture of the 
 apartment. The mirrors were as mouldy as the rockery out- 
 side. Every object which they reflected took an uncanny 
 green and lurid hue, like the image on the mind of some 
 morbid and decadent poet. Linda's modest trunk had 
 been unpacked, and the gondolier's daughter had put out 
 a blue cotton frock, the colour of the Venetian sky, and laid 
 it on the bed. A single red rose lay on the dressing-table, 
 and the icy water had been poured from the curious little 
 ewer, for Italians love cold water to their cheeks. Linda 
 bathed her face. She got into the fresh print gown, but 
 she did not pin the rose in her breast and the mildewed 
 mirrors reflected something fresh and tidy rather than 
 poetic as she turned and went back to the dining-hall. 
 
 The meal had begun. A huge pile of macaroni steamed 
 in the centre of the table ; the gondolier had brought in the 
 wine in big white litre vases with blue scrolls painted on 
 them, and was pouring it into tall glass tumblers, so that 
 it frothed as though it were beer. 
 
 ;< Wine of Arqua, vintage of poets, io ti saluto!" cried 
 Sebastian, rising to his feet as he held the beautiful orange 
 draught high to the sunlight. Count von Herder rose, too, 
 and waved his glass towards Linda. ' ' Io ti saluto ! " he 
 cried. But Dudley stuck to his chair, and a sort of disdain- 
 ful smile crept round his handsome lips, and a slightly 
 deeper pucker crossed his forehead. He made room for 
 Linda beside him, and she took her seat grudgingly, as it 
 were, between him and von Herder at the round table. 
 Sebastian was busy ladling out the macaroni. 
 
 "Giuseppe, it's absurd! I can't grapple with this 
 thing! Come, help it yourself!" Giuseppe took the 
 steaming dish and served it round in true Italian fashion. 
 
THE SUNDIAL 259 
 
 Linda was hungry, and her spirits rose as the macaroni 
 vanished, and the polio, the asparagus, and the wonderful 
 frothing savognino succeeded it. 
 
 How warm it felt in that beautiful villa ! The men 
 lighted their cigarettes. Outside the fountains splashed, 
 and the fan tail pigeons cooed and curtsied in the sun. 
 Sebastian got up and went to the end of the room, and 
 looked, as an artist might, at the scene of the little lunch- 
 party : "You Linda," he said, "should be dressed in 
 brocade, and we men clothed in satin. We want an ape, 
 a peacock lots of hounds and dwarfs and manodolins. 
 What a scene ! Just look at it. A regular Veronese banquet , 
 and yet here we creatures of a sorry century sit in our 
 beastly tweeds and Linda, there, with some pretence to 
 looks, tricked out no better than a charity-school girl in 
 that old cotton gown." 
 
 Unconsciously, almost, the English officer glanced round 
 at the girl beside him : " Do you still like old clothes?" he 
 asked. " I remember the first old gown you wore when 
 you came to visit England." 
 
 " It had black velvet round the skirt," said Linda. " I 
 hated it really" . . . then she paused, "but I wasn't 
 going to tell you or Susan that." 
 
 " Why not?" asked Dudley. 
 
 The other two men had pushed their chairs away from 
 the table and taken them out on the sunny loggia. 
 
 ' ' Well, because I wasn't, I suppose. And, anyhow, this 
 is not an old dress. It's one that Uncle Sebastian chose 
 himself don't you like it?" she asked, with a sudden swift 
 impulse, looking straight at him. 
 
 " Oh, I don't know yes let's have a look at it it's a 
 sort of an Italian stuff, isn't it?" He leaned forward as 
 though to touch her skirt, but he did not do so. "It's not 
 a pretty stuff," he said. "But somehow I seem to like 
 it, taken all together." 
 
 "Taken all together?" repeated Linda. 
 
260 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 " Yes, with you in it I suppose that's about what one 
 meant. ' ' Dudley had a little stutter in his speech. Words 
 did not come easy 'to him. 
 
 " Do you like India very much?" said Linda. 
 
 " I hadn't thought about it particularly liking, or not 
 liking it, I mean. I live there I've got to like it. It's 
 my work." 
 
 "How dull !" said Linda. 
 
 "What's dull?" 
 
 " Why, not to know whether one likes or doesn't like a 
 place just simply to live there only to look at it as a 
 work."' 
 
 " But, after all, that's what it is, isn't it?" 
 
 " I don't know," said Linda, " I ..." 
 
 11 You?" 
 
 ' ' Oh I I think things are absolutely splendid too good 
 to be true. Venice and this place I can't even talk about 
 it. I feel it may stop if I do." 
 
 " But that's fudge," said Dudley. " Things don't stop 
 in that way." Again he looked at her straight. And he 
 saw what perhaps he had not noticed before so distinctly 
 he saw that his little Swiss cousin was a person to be very 
 much reckoned with. He saw how very much he liked to 
 look at her, and she was looking back at him. There was a 
 sort of blaze in her eyes : 
 
 ' ' How stupid you are ! ' ' she said . And , as she pushed 
 aside her plate and napkin, she upset a tall goblet of salt, 
 and it fell across the table. 
 
 " I've upset the salt !" she cried. 
 
 ' Well, that is no great loss." 
 
 'Yes, but the luck?" She hurriedly threw a pinch 
 across her shoulder. She wished terribly that the salt had 
 not been spilled. And yet, after all, what could it matter? 
 
 " Let's come out on the balcony," she said. 
 
 Dudley seemed loath to rise. " It's so hot outside," he 
 objected. 
 
 ' ' I love the sun. It goes right through me. It does me 
 good." 
 
THE SUNDIAL 261 
 
 " You look awfully well," he said. " What more good 
 do you want, Linda?" He seemed to alight on her name 
 quite unexpectedly, and then to linger there. He rose 
 hurriedly from his chair and went out into the sunlight to 
 join the other men on the loggia. 
 
 " The paper ! the paper !" cried Sebastian. " Where is 
 the Secolo ? Bring me the Secolo and coffee and coffee, 
 Giuseppe mio." 
 
 " And vermuth vermuth !" von Herder called. 
 
 "Nay," wailed Sebastian, "rosolio rosolio if you 
 love me ! ' ' 
 
 Linda began to think again : 
 
 How these men worried about their bodies' needs, whilst 
 before their very eyes lay the loveliest garden in all north 
 Italy perhaps ! How could they ever dream of news- 
 papers and vermuth and rosolio? Linda had drawn her 
 chair to the loggia edge. She rested her chin on the marble 
 balustrade. The sun fell straight on her uncovered head. 
 Where was her heart? what forces may unconsciously 
 have been stirring there? For the moment her eyes rested, 
 full of curious insight, on the scene before her. 
 
 It is perhaps in Italy alone that men can build gardens 
 which at once become nature and yet remain formal. Here 
 in these remote volcanic hills Nature had received into her 
 exquisite arms a deeply human plan. These -terraces, these 
 avenues, these statues, and these fountains, were as cer- 
 tainly a part of the surrounding nature as the wild and 
 tangled copses up above them sown by some fugitive 
 bird seeds blown by some lazy breeze. And yet in the 
 neglected garden, though man had now no real voice, he 
 seemed to clamour for speech and expression. 
 
 Sebastian had been watching his niece, with half an 
 eye, across his newspaper. 
 
 " Love is, after all, made in the garden, and not on the 
 hill-top," he suggested, cutting the sheets of his Secolo 
 with a great tortoise-shell paper-knife. 
 
262 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 "Apropos of what?" said von Herder, a little tartly. 
 The vermuth was of an inferior quality, and he was too 
 old to be watching the glow on a young girl's hair and neck. 
 
 " Apropos de bottes," said Sebastian. . . . " Ha ! he's 
 at it again." 
 
 "Yes," said von Herder, and he mentioned a name at 
 that minute much before the public. "A. has been making 
 an ass of himself again." 
 
 "I don't see that," interposed Dudley rather unex- 
 pectedly. He seemed to be suddenly awake to take a 
 well-kept weapon out of its sheath, which he presented all 
 glittering to an antagonist. 
 
 The three men then became suddenly serious, and their 
 attitude assumed a totally different aspect. They seemed 
 to be talking about something which mattered a thing 
 which counted in their varied existences. Yet what was it 
 all about, thought Linda these abstract doings of quite 
 intangible people, these indefinite disputes between 
 nations? Some little State about to go to war thousands 
 of miles away? On Linda, who at first had tried to listen, 
 a sense of ennui and of weariness gradually but firmly 
 spread. What, after all, could it signify what mattered 
 it, even in the most elementary way what a man in a 
 stuffy Parliament House was saying to, or about, another 
 man ? What had this to do with the human or the natural 
 situation ? How dull ! how dead ! how distant and for- 
 lorn the subject seemed ! as dull as the paragraphs of the 
 newspapers she never even glanced at ! 
 
 For to-day the sun and the garden ! She left her seat 
 and the group of talkers, and she went down the sunny 
 terraces and paths till she came to the ponds ; she sat on 
 the edge of one of the cool marble tanks beneath the ilex- 
 trees, and she began to throw in little pebbles to the fish. 
 They came and nibbled. How stupid they looked, the 
 little red fish, flapping their pale white fins and taking 
 aimless rushes in the water ! Wha.t a life what a dull 
 
THE SUNDIAL 263 
 
 life down in this tank, and all the world outside them. 
 All the world ! all the beautiful, wonderful world! 
 
 Unconsciously the girl's lips moved, and she repeated 
 * ' all the beautiful world ! ' ' Having done so once , she did 
 it again, louder and louder still. She did not notice foot- 
 steps on the grass behind her. They were firm, silent foot- 
 steps, those of the priest, Don Pedro. He was up quite 
 close beside her now. 
 
 " ' II mondo e rotondo/ " he said. What he meant by 
 quoting this Italian proverb at that particular moment it is 
 impossible, perhaps, to say ; but Linda never forgot it. 
 She found it fitting into her life at many odd points as she 
 grew older. 
 
 " I did not see you," she said, starting to her feet, and 
 holding out her hand. The priest clasped his own behind 
 his back, but he looked quite friendly, with the curious 
 enigmatic friendliness peculiar to his heavy and inscrutable 
 countenance. 
 
 " Have you seen the stables?" he said. 
 
 "No." 
 
 ' ' Have you seen the church ?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 " Have you seen Arqua?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 " Have you driven to Este?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 " No. You have seen nothing, nothing. You are an 
 ignorant almost an imbecile you are half an English- 
 woman, and I hate them. . . . Have you seen the sundial ?' ' 
 
 "No." 
 
 " Come, for the sundial !" He wheeled round ponder- 
 ously, and began walking much more quickly than one 
 would have expected, and Linda followed him. They went 
 away from the direction of the village, they crossed the 
 stream and came to a part of the grounds which Linda had 
 not discovered. Here they passed through a high wall of 
 trees, and came out unexpectedly on a big open space 
 
264 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 which seemed to be densely overgrown with yew countless 
 intersecting hedges of yew. 
 
 " ' II mondo e rotondo/ " said the priest. ' This is in 
 squares, but it is all the same. Have you seen the 
 labyrinth?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 " This is the labyrinth. Come, follow, follow !" 
 
 He plunged through an almost invisible opening in the 
 hedge and entered a narrow walk ; he looked over his 
 shoulder once to see if Linda was coming, and then he 
 walked, with his curious bear-like paces, forward and on 
 into the depths of the intricate maze. The place was 
 rather ill kept up ; it was evident that the gardener had 
 left it alone this season. Tracts of honeysuckle had crossed 
 in places from hedge to hedge, and pale grey toadstools 
 reared their heads along the paths, or fell in tattered slimy 
 groups about the gravel. 
 
 " The obstacles are small," said the priest. " See, one 
 breaks them so ! ' ' He spread his arms and precipitated 
 himself through a tangle of creepers. " On the mush- 
 rooms one treads thus!" and he planted his broad-toed 
 foot on a graceful fringe of fungi. 
 
 "And so we do with our own obstacles, heh?" he 
 inquired. 
 
 ' ' It seems a pity to break the beautiful things ! ' ' said 
 Linda. She herself stooped and avoided them when she 
 was able. " Obstacles must be overcome," said her com- 
 panion. " If we get round them, they engulf us even- 
 tually. ' II mondo e rotondo.' ' 
 
 After what seemed an almost interminable meandering, 
 they emerged suddenly on a little open plot of lawn. On a 
 stone pedestal, supported by a flight of low steps, stood an 
 old dial. 
 
 "Come, signorina," said the priest," and look what is 
 written here." Linda approached, and she stood on the 
 steps and deciphered, with some difficulty, the words on the 
 old copper plate. 
 
THE SUNDIAL 265 
 
 " Segno le ore si. Ma non piu quelle." 
 
 There was not a cloud in the splendid May sky. There 
 was only a thread of shadow on the dial. Linda was in 
 the perfect heyday of her youth and health, and her sur- 
 roundings were intensely congenial ; the presence of the 
 priest with all his abrupt discourtesy was welcome too; 
 yet, in spite of these things, perhaps just because of them, 
 a spasm of melancholy flashed across her spirit. What 
 hours why ? 
 
 " Segno le ore si. Ma non piu quelle." 
 
 She bent over the stone and began to push away tiny 
 fragments of moss which were creeping across the letters. 
 Some curious thoughts coursed through her head, and she 
 did not observe the departure of Don Pedro. Something 
 strange, I might say almost ecstatic, swelled from her heart 
 to her throat. Were these the hours? . . . The time flew 
 by ; she was anxious to clear the stone and to think about 
 something else. Presently she lifted her head and became 
 aware that she was alone, but it did not disturb her. Stand- 
 ing on tiptoe on the steps, she could see the villa far away 
 across the sunny garden through the trees. The men were 
 still on the balcony, but she could not hear them talking, for 
 they were just too far away. Presently she saw Don Pedro 
 walking up the avenue to join the group on the balcony, 
 and she saw them talk and altercate and call a servant. 
 Then she thought it was time to go back, and she turned 
 in a leisurely way to retrace her steps. Linda knew nothing 
 of mazes ; she remembered that the way had been more or 
 less long in coming, but now it seemed absolutely inter- 
 minable. The little path turned and twisted and diverged ; 
 it seemed to lead nowhere at all. She began to hurry. 
 Then she determined to retrace her steps, to find the 
 open space and the sundial. But no, it was impossible 
 she found herself nowhere again just turning and twist- 
 ing through a host of new paths. Soon she grew impatient , 
 then hot, and finally angry. " Obstacles must be over- 
 come," she found herself repeating, and she angrily bent 
 
266 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 some wayward briars which seemed only to tighten again 
 on her path. At last she gave a call. It seemed an 
 .indignity to call for help when lost in such a sorry space. 
 But she called to air^-no answer came to her beyond the 
 faint echo of her own voice from the hill above. She called 
 again again ; then a feeling almost like fear came over 
 her. Thus does the child, grown to a woman, feel often 
 lost in the mazes of her own tiny world. Again she began 
 to walk ; she walked more slowly, seeking this time a clue. 
 The yew hedges were just a foot taller than herself, so it 
 was not possible to get any clue of exit by leaning out to 
 look at the garden. Her only hope lay in the return of the 
 truant Don Pedro. But he did not come. At last she 
 thought she heard a step, and she lifted her voice implor- 
 ingly. An answer this time came, and in it she recognized 
 the stern and rather grudging accents of Dudley Crane, 
 evidently in altercation with some Italian, whose language 
 he could not understand. 
 
 " I am here I am here, Dudley !" she called. 
 
 She caught her breath ' * Dudley. ' ' What meant a little 
 word like that? As a child she had called it persistently, 
 and as often as not she had called it merely to tease. How 
 kind he had been to her taken all round the handsome 
 English boy ! Lost in the maze of the Italian garden, a 
 memory of him returned to her as she had seen him once, 
 coming back from shooting in the mellow autumn light : 
 the gold of the beechwoods framed him in ; he had his gun, 
 but his father's keepers were carrying the birds they had 
 shot, and she remembered how he had got between her and 
 the sight of the dead birds which he knew would hurt her, 
 and how he had given her a pretty tuft of black cock's 
 feathers, and when she refused them he had tickled her 
 cheek, thrown them away, and then gone after the 
 keepers. 
 
 But here Dudley was coming. His head looked over the 
 wall of yew, and his eyes were laughing a little : 
 
 "Come along," he said, "we've all been waiting." 
 
THE SUNDIAL 267 
 
 Angry explanations boiled within her, but she kept them 
 down, for Dudley was not alone. A labourer accompanied 
 him, to explain the intricacies of the maze. The young 
 man was a native of the spot, and worked in the garden 
 under the gardener ; his home was in the hills above ; in a 
 little cleared space among the woods his cottage stood, and 
 there his wife sat by the door and rocked their baby in its 
 wooden cradle. The young man had the lithe and easy 
 movements of a creature who had never known the tram- 
 mels of a city ; he smiled with a curious, graceful smile at 
 Linda. Her figure, in the perfectly simple blue print gown, 
 appealed to his exquisite sense of beauty and of fitness. 
 The stiff young Englishman did not strike him quite so 
 favourably. Linda began to talk to him in her quick, 
 incisive Italian, forgetting at once her fear and her sense 
 of despair and desertion. 
 
 "There is a wonderful sundial," she said over her 
 shoulder to Dudley. ; ' You ought perhaps to see it? We 
 might just look at it before we go," and she whirled round 
 suddenly with her new guide, who led them by a swift 
 turning straight to the open space and the sundial. 
 
 Dudley looked at the dial as he might look at any other 
 ordinary object, for the thing had no great interest in itself. 
 Dimly, too, he was wondering how his cousin, with her 
 extraordinary look of breeding, should be at once so per- 
 fectly at home with a rather ragged labourer. 
 
 ' ' There is such a curious inscription ," said Linda. ' ' You 
 ought just to look at it . " She climbed the steps, and Dudley 
 went with her. The inscription not only did not interest 
 him, but, as he knew no Italian, he could not decipher it. 
 Linda in the sunshine was quite another matter he hardly 
 liked to look at her. She turned abruptly. 
 
 "Of course," she said "you can't understand it." 
 Then she translated slowly : " I mark the hours thus but 
 those ones never more." She turned and looked right into 
 his eyes. The labourer had caught sight of his wife in the 
 cottage on the hill above, and was waving to her with a 
 sort of childish glee. 
 
268 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 " Never more," she repeated. And then, by a sort of 
 odd intuitive instinct, that feeling which had frightened her 
 so suddenly one morning in Venice only two days since 
 became reversed. She began to laugh. 
 
 " Come, let us go ; we are late," she said. " Eun, run, 
 run !" she cried to the labourer. He somehow caught her 
 sense of gaiety and caprice, and he ran delightedly round 
 on his paces and away through the paths of the maze. 
 Dudley had need to alter his habitual stiff stride, and the 
 three very soon emerged on the avenue which led straight 
 up to the villa. 
 
 Here their guide bowed low with his hand on his heart. 
 Italians are acutely sensitive, and Love was in the air. 
 
CHAPTEE XXII 
 
 THE DANCING BBAES AND THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 A CARRIAGE was drawn up by the front door, and on the 
 back seat, a blue cotton handkerchief tied over his beaver 
 hat, sat Don Pedro. There was no expression at all on his 
 face. He had assumed his priest-like mask ; his hands were 
 clasped across his waist, and he looked like a lizard sitting 
 quiet on a sunny wall, who yet at any moment might whisk 
 its tail and scurry off again. He appeared not even to notice 
 the hurried advent of Linda and her cousin ; but Sebastian, 
 on the other hand, began to upbraid them. 
 
 " Linda," he cried, " how can you keep one waiting so, 
 and now when we were all ready to start, and poor Piero 
 has been wasting his time this hour or more. Piero !" he 
 cried with a wailing intonation in his voice, as he took the 
 driver by the arm, " you must not be angry, and you must 
 always wear this particular shirt when you come to take 
 us for a drive. It is the colour of all the lagoons in May 
 or is it of a mountain lake? I never saw so beautiful a 
 blouse. Wear it wear it for my sake, Piero !" 
 
 Piero was a rather ordinary young country driver, with a 
 slow and melancholy expression on his face. He wore a 
 dusty grey coat and trousers, and under these a very blue 
 cotton shirt which certainly was uncommon and attractive. 
 Neither he nor his horse seemed to be in the smallest hurry. 
 The horse was sleek and evidently a pet ; some long 
 feathers, torn from the tail of a cock pheasant, adorned the 
 harness round his ears, and he had beautiful bells which 
 jingled as he jerked his head occasionally in distress at flies. 
 
 Linda had gone to her room to fetch a wrap. Dudley, 
 who was not particularly attracted by the company, sug- 
 
 269 
 
270 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 gested remaining at the villa, but Sebastian would not hear 
 of this. "No, no, no," he cried, "we must all of us sink 
 or rise together. Who knows what may not happen on 
 our expedition ! We are going to St. Elena to fetch sul- 
 phur-water to bathe in sulphur baths. We will make tea 
 in the carriage, or in some pleasant ditch. . . . Hurry, 
 Linda. Come along, Dudley." 
 
 " Tea in a pleasant ditch !" thought Dudley. And who 
 was to make it? how irresponsible they all looked, and 
 that brigand on the box, too ! At least the worst brigand, 
 the gondolier, was not to form one of the party. 
 
 "Very well," he said, and proceeded to take his seat by 
 the coachman. Von Herder came hurrying from another 
 quarter, and sat himself down beside Don Pedro. Linda 
 arrived, and the over-crowded vehicle moved off along the 
 even, sunlit road ; it moved with all the quickness peculiar 
 to hired Italian carriages. The horse seemed indifferent to 
 its load, and they had soon left the hills of Cardinale far 
 behind them, and were off upon the plains. 
 
 The heat of the day had passed. The sun was already 
 on the downward path, and there was a curious warm still- 
 ness in the hedges. The acacia-trees were beginning to 
 send forth' the heavier fragrance of the night. Linda sat 
 very quiet in her corner of the carriage. She was wearing 
 the fantastic green veil selected for her by her uncle, but 
 there was something of calm and placid enjoyment in her 
 expression which harmonized with that of the nature all 
 about them. Presently their carriage rattled over the 
 cobble-stones of a village street : " Battaglia," cried Piero, 
 and at that moment his horse gave a sudden leap and started 
 aside, nearly capsizing the overloaded vehicle. 
 
 " Misericordia ! " shouted Piero. "Animals wild 
 animals. Beasts of the accursed lands. Oh, Mother of 
 mercies, have pity upon us." 
 
 "Hold his tongue for him !" muttered Dudley, quietly 
 taking the reins and assuming command of the box. Von 
 Herder jumped into the street, Sebastian followed him, but 
 Don Pedro never altered his position. 
 
THE DANCING BEARS 271 
 
 ' ' Englishmen ! " he muttered. ' ' If one makes a voyage 
 with the men of Great Britain, what may one expect but 
 misery and scandal." He drew the blue cotton handker- 
 chief a little farther over his hat, and then he clasped his 
 hands upon his breast and closed his eyes. 
 
 Linda had darted up from her seat and was looking 
 eagerly to find out the cause of the tumult. 
 
 Their road had taken a sudden turn into the square of 
 the little town, and thus they had come full and unex- 
 pectedly upon a party of vagabonds. Two huge but 
 emaciated bears, standing on their hind-legs, were revolving 
 slowly, goaded by their keepers, in a small circle. They 
 were covered with dust after a long tramp, muzzled, and 
 confined by heavy ropes, and in every way pathetic ; yet 
 they had a sort of horrible and threatening appearance, 
 which would attract an ignorant multitude, and the people 
 of the sleepy little town had assembled in a crowd to behold 
 them. 
 
 "It is disgusting!" said Dudley from the box. Linda 
 was standing up beside him, a host of mixed feelings in her 
 eyes. 
 
 " Something must be done," she said. 
 
 " Done?" inquired Dudley, in grim surprise. 
 ' Yes they are hungry, they are thirsty, they are most 
 cruelly treated. They are dancing because they are goaded 
 to it ; they are wretched utterly wretched !" 
 
 Von Herder seemed to be " doing something." He had 
 entered into a lively talk with one of the keepers, and now 
 he came hurrying back to the carriage : 
 
 l< This is a treat," he cried "something quite new. 
 They refuse to sell me the bears as I wanted, but they 
 will come to-night to Cardinale ; we will have a perfect 
 festa. Think what a joy for the village ! We can buy a 
 lot of paper lanterns in St. Elena and illuminate the garden, 
 and then the bears will dance we will all of us dance a 
 regular show it will be in those villa gardens ! Something 
 entirely strange and new ! ' ' 
 
 Linda shot a look of horror and of scorn on the speaker. 
 
272 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 ' ' Make the bears dance ? but it is the most cruel and 
 horrible spectacle. I would sooner see them dead," she 
 exclaimed. 
 
 At this moment the bears, as though participating in her 
 sympathy, wheeled suddenly round and began advancing 
 towards the carriage. The crowd made way for them ; one 
 of them gave a long low wail or groan as he walked, and 
 his paws waved feebly as though weary and fevered. 
 
 Sebastian and von Herder had mingled with the crowd. 
 Don Pedro, with his back to the horse, had so completely 
 covered his face as to be unable, as it seemed, to notice 
 anything of the outer world. 
 
 ' The poor brutes !" said Dudley, with the pity and dis- 
 gust one might have expected from him. Linda was almost 
 crying by this time. ' ' Never mind, Linda, give 'em some- 
 thing to eat and then we'll be off." 
 
 Linda, indeed, had pulled out the tea-basket and 
 extracted a large panetone or Easter-cake. Although Don 
 Pedro seemed blind to events, he had fully grasped the 
 entire situation, and, noting her action, he suddenly roused 
 himself and spoke like an ordinary and angry man : ' ' What 
 are you doing," he cried, " disturbing our meal? Do you 
 propose to feed beasts bears, too with Easter-cake?" 
 
 ' ' Yes every bit of it I mean them to have ! ' ' said Linda, 
 hastily breaking the beautiful raisined loaf. 
 
 ' ' But you are mad ! ' ' 
 
 "It is you who are mad to think even of not feeding 
 them," she replied, and, a little afraid of the bears, she 
 threw a large slice towards them. 
 
 Don Pedro seemed thoroughly roused. "But they are 
 animals," he cried, " they are not Christians !" 
 
 Animals or Christians, the poor hungry creatures were 
 not to get their meal ; their keepers darted forward , seized 
 the cake, and almost ravenously began to devour it them- 
 selves, whilst they goaded their charges to further antics. 
 
 By this time Sebastian had returned to the carriage. 
 " Alas I alas !" he said, taking up his heavy volume, " here 
 
THE DANCING BEARS 273 
 
 is the whole spectacle of humanity in a nutshell : Man has 
 muzzled the beast which would kill him if for one instant he 
 relaxed his hold of him. It is all merely a matter of the 
 degree of tyranny. Sentiment that is you, Linda, or any 
 other woman interferes, helps nothing, but only reveals 
 fresh degradation; the artist," he signed to von Herder 
 who was still delightedly mixing with the crowd , ' ' looks on ; 
 the priest exhorts, but quite fruitlessly ; and the other speci- 
 men of modern civilization the Englishman of action 
 acts!" 
 
 Sebastian waved his hand to the bears, and there indeed 
 was Dudley, who, with a sort of silent disgust, had left the 
 box, joined the animals, and was quietly extracting from 
 the muzzle of the one who looked most exhausted a sharp 
 nail which, purposely, or otherwise, was inverted from the 
 leather and galling the tender skin between the eyes. He 
 did it with a total disregard of the people about him ; then 
 he put the nail, when extracted, into his pocket, came back 
 to the box, and motioned to Piero to drive quietly forward. 
 
 They had been too long delayed, so they never bathed in 
 the sulphur waters of St. Elena ; but they drove on out of 
 the town, and then they stopped and made their tea in a 
 ditch as Sebastian had promised, and it was a very good tea 
 and a lively one. Sebastian understood very well about 
 that sort of thing. Von Herder's mood was gay to extrava- 
 gance, and Linda was wild with a sudden pleasure. To 
 her every incident appeared a joke, and, as the evening 
 advanced, she felt almost hysterical. Her eyes shone, and 
 as the sun set lower on the horizon's line it seemed to 
 enter her very pupils and to fill her face with a radiant, 
 wilful glory. And as this happened Dudley became curi- 
 ously silent , almost moody ; he did not appear to be watch- 
 ing her, but all unconsciously his mind was absorbed in 
 her presence. Some seed, sown in his boyhood, came into 
 sudden life and shot up as miraculously and as imperiously 
 
 as did the waving corn about them . 
 
 18 
 
274 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 Once there was a little brown girl with great serious eyes 
 who had come into the midst of an ordinary public-school- 
 boy existence unbidden, not much noticed, but very much 
 alive and unconsciously attracting. All that was long ago. 
 A young man's life of a perfectly wholesome, entirely clean 
 and upright, but curiously unmarked and unemotional 
 order, lay between them. As Dudley sat on the bank with 
 his pipe in his mouth, little forgotten thoughts came forth 
 from some deep hidden portion of his nature; they con- 
 nected themselves, dissolved, and reappeared; they all 
 pointed to, they all spelled, one thing : a little brown girl ; 
 a radiant, mocking, yet all-appealing girl again; Linda, 
 this creature with a fantastic, unfashionable hat and veil 
 a creature with eyes which haunted one even when they 
 were not looking at one. . . . 
 
 "Art for art's sake !" said Sebastian. "What 
 
 cant. What folly ! . . . I tell you it would be practically 
 impossible to paint, and wholly impossible to wear, pre- 
 cisely that shade of blue in an English garden. Even if I 
 did ask Piero to give me the blouse, it would lose all quality 
 and all sense at Coneyhurst 
 
 Dudley only dimly heard the scattered words of his uncle 
 and his uncle's friend across the hedge. Blue shirts and 
 Coneyhurst, . . . why, it was a question of how the 
 pheasants had sat. . . . But there were times when this 
 same cousin came to Coneyhurst. She would be coming 
 
 there again soon.. And the pheasants His heart gave 
 
 a sudden thud. 
 
 " It's time to be off," said Sebastian. Linda came down 
 the bank. She took her seat ; the sun was at her back 
 now, and the light lay all on the green gauze veil. Dudley 
 shut the carriage door. " Haven't you got a wrap, Linda?" 
 he asked. His eyes were blue bluer than Giuseppe's 
 blouse. 
 
 " I never wrap myself up," she answered. 
 
 Bald indeed were the words but they were already those 
 of lovers. 
 
CHAPTEK XXIII 
 
 THE PICTURE OF ENDYMION 
 
 THE shadows were already closing in as the party trundled 
 slowly, for the horse was weary now, along the homeward 
 road. On the plain, thin, almost imperceptible mists 
 arose above the ditches. All around, for miles and miles, 
 the green tree-frogs began to croak, singly at first, and then 
 in fullest chorus. The leaves on the acacia-trees closed up 
 like small umbrellas; earth was preparing for the night. 
 The dew fell heavy, laying the dust on the roads. Sebas- 
 tian and von Herder ceased to talk. In Linda's eyes a 
 light of some new thing appeared to shine. She noted the 
 changes of the inanimate things around her with her out- 
 ward eyes, but her heart meanwhile was singing. Singing 
 of what? 
 
 The heart of the girl sang, it is certain, a song of no 
 settled ceremony, but of some ancient emotion of the first 
 woman in nature or also perhaps that of the flower which 
 opens its petals to the hot May morning sunlight. Every- 
 thing about her confirmed the pleasurable sensation, and 
 she allowed herself to follow it blindly ; she never attempted 
 so much as to check it. 
 
 A light was twinkling here and there in the village of 
 Cardinale. There was one in Don Pedro's house, too. 
 The carriage stopped, and with a groan and a scowl the 
 owner arose from his seat, turned to his companions with a 
 certain covert scorn, and passed in silence by the privet- 
 hedge, closing the door behind him. As the rest of the 
 party approached the villa they became aware of some 
 
 275 
 
276 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 unusual disturbance. There was a general bustle lights 
 were being carried from room to room, there was a good 
 deal of shouting, and a carriage and a cart piled with most 
 respectable luggage was drawn up by the steps on which 
 Giuseppe, in his shirt-sleeves, stood, frantically gesticu- 
 lating to the drivers. 
 
 ' ' Porco della Madonna ! " he screamed when he noticed 
 his master. ' ' They have arrived. Your family is arrived, 
 and nothing, nothing at all is prepared for them no beds, 
 no supper, no fish, no eggs, no beef. No beef !" he wailed, 
 "and this great milord Inglese wanting his beef! Oh, 
 mother of misery ! how to deal with such an affair ! Che 
 disgrazia ! ' ' 
 
 Even Sebastian looked a little grave. " It's my sister," 
 
 he explained, "and to arrive without any warning 
 
 She has mistaken the week ; she always does. The thing 
 is incorrigible. Well, we must face it." He arose from 
 a pile of rugs and baskets, von Herder and Dudley followed, 
 but Linda sat still a moment in the dusk. 
 
 At that particular instant it seemed to her that no con- 
 ceivable disaster could possibly have been greater than that 
 which had befallen; for, to her mind, her aunt's family 
 represented everything which was cramping and conven- 
 tional, and beyond the range of all genuine, still less of all 
 artistic, emotion. Like a stiletto, the thought pierced to 
 her brain that he who had stood in the sunlight on the 
 piazza that May morning outside the wistaria curtain was 
 not any detached figure of manhood, but the son, the 
 nephew, the cousin, of cramping, rich, respectable 
 " county " people. What had such a formal tiresome life 
 to do with hers? What had she been dreaming about 
 these days and weeks in Italy? What was it which 
 somehow had filled her nature to the point of breaking? 
 Was it only a dream, and was she from some sheer neces- 
 sity to come back to all the other things, and were they 
 the realities? And then her aunt and her cousin Susan 
 they were all up there, they were actually swarming within, 
 
THE PICTURE OF ENDYMION 277 
 
 contaminating, with their dreary presence, the almost 
 sacred walls of this fantastic villa where she had hoped io 
 go on dreaming. 
 
 " Signorina," said the driver, touching her shoulder. 
 ' ' I must ask you to be cruel enough to dismount from my 
 carriage." 
 
 Linda shook herself together. She rose from her seat ; she 
 stumbled up the steps, and entered the great hall of the villa 
 where at midday, only eight hours since, she had waltzed 
 with Count von Herder. At first the light dazzled her; 
 for the gondoliers had lighted two tall paraffin lamps which 
 had no shades, and the whole place seemed to have altered. 
 Mrs. James was lying on the sofa ; her husband was open- 
 ing some letters by the table ; Susan and an English butler 
 were incongruously employed in searching the attics for 
 various necessities of existence, such as baths and screens. 
 
 " You won't find them, you won't find anything," called 
 Sebastian. ''You will just have to pack and to go away 
 again." 
 
 " So here is little Linda," said Mrs. James. ' What a 
 strange sort of hat, my dear ! I cannot see your face." 
 
 Linda took off the hat by some force of habit, and bent 
 to kiss her aunt's cheek. Mrs. James had always been 
 very kind to her. Mrs. James was a charming little lady, 
 and Linda was fond of her. 
 
 " Oh, you look just the same as ever," said Mrs. James. 
 " There, dear, I should like to be quite quiet, if you don't 
 mind, for just a little time before dinner, so run away 
 quickly. I shall see you at dinner-time, and remember to 
 put on a pretty frock for me you and I are fond of pretty 
 frocks?" 
 
 Linda's blood ran cold. "Just the same!" But she 
 felt fathoms and fathoms above the surface of her old self. 
 She felt like some wonderful plant, grown in the shade 
 and suddenly reaching the sunlight. She could hardly 
 remember her old personality that of the peasamVchild 
 who was to be " moulded into shape " in an English home ; 
 
278 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 and the recollection of an atmosphere which now was grown 
 repugnant returned and almost stifled her. 
 
 "A pretty frock." Somehow these words at the 
 moment appealed to her, but for reasons totally apart from 
 her aunt. She left the lighted room and passed up into her 
 own vast, mouldering bedroom. The maid had lighted two 
 candles in front of one of the huge phantasmal mirrors, and 
 had put out her one evening gown, made of the purest silk 
 and coloured like a bright pomegranate flower. The skin 
 of the young girl's throat looked dazzling as she put it on, 
 and she twisted the heavy plaits of her hair to an advantage 
 which she could never have dreamed of two weeks since. 
 The maid at that moment knocked at the door. 
 
 " See !" she cried. ''I have found the loveliest gem for 
 our signorina," and she put on the marble table beside her 
 a spray of the double pomegranate flower which had grown 
 in a sheltered frame of the orange-house. " Over your left 
 ear thus," said the maid, who had the inborn eye of the 
 artist. " Ah, Madonna ! what a lady ! what a sposa !" 
 she cried, stepping back and clasping her hands in 
 sheer delight at the sight of the beautiful girl. Linda 
 stood up to her fullest height. She looked at her face, she 
 looked over her shoulder into the opposite glass, and she 
 saw that she was curiously, almost fantastically beautiful. 
 There was something new about her beauty, something 
 noble, mysterious, queenly. Outside the window, all along 
 the great cypress avenue, the fireflies were coursing and 
 dancing in the shadow. She saw them, and she went and 
 leaned across the window-ledge. Everything that evening 
 seemed to be calling to her and to her only over and over 
 again. 
 
 Then she put out her light and went down the passage 
 into the hall. Only Dudley was standing there as she 
 entered. He had put on evening dress, and was feeling a 
 little bit cross ; but when Linda came into the light a 
 curious pang made him start something called in his 
 nature which had called whole centuries since when his 
 
THE PICTURE OF ENDYMION 279 
 
 ancestors lived in the caves of Great Britain, and combed 
 their hair on holidays with combs made out of elk-horn ; and 
 when men simply stretched out their hands and ' ' took ' ' 
 their women. 
 
 The man was here and the woman. 
 
 Dudley did not speak, but he went and turned down one 
 of the lamps which was smoking. Linda watched him. 
 
 " There are thousands and millions of fireflies," she said, 
 " out there outside up under the cypress avenue which 
 leads by the shrines and the chapel. And you hear the 
 frogs, of course? they are tree-frogs green ones, you 
 know ; they lie quite flat on the tree-trunks all the daytime, 
 but at night they sing in a chorus. I don't know some- 
 how it seems to me music," she said. 
 
 Dudley was looking at her with an odd, arrested look ; 
 there was a little frown on his forehead. His hands were 
 behind his back as though to warm at the wood fire, which, 
 in spite of the hot May night, had been lighted for Mrs. 
 James. 
 
 Von Herder did not come in to dinner, but Sebastian 
 was there in an old velvet coat. Mr. James looked very 
 much out of place, but the ripened beauty of his wife's 
 niece arrested his attention, and he even began to make 
 jokes with her, and to watch her with a sort of admiring 
 amusement. Susan wore her stiff white cotton travelling 
 blouse. ' ' To dress in a place of this sort would be absurd," 
 she said decisively, and glanced at her handsome brother 
 and at her bewildering cousin too with unveiled disapproval. 
 
 Dinner over, they left the hall and passed to the little- 
 used drawing-room. The floor was of scagliola. A set of 
 gilt chairs and sofas, covered with faded crimson satin, 
 stood at stated intervals. There were large and not ill- 
 painted canvases upon the walls, for here the loves of the 
 gods had been almost brutally depicted by some late disciple 
 of Veronese. Mrs. James had got hold of Linda by the 
 arm, and went flitting round the room with her. " I like 
 your frock, my dear," she said, " and I think you are look- 
 
280 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 ing very pretty. Do you know I am quite enjoying this 
 funny rustic life? Wasn't the dinner delicious? Don't 
 tell Susan, but I took another little piece of the cheese 
 and tomatoes ; I liked to ask that handsome Italian to give 
 it to me, but I am quite a little afraid of him. Don't you 
 think he might stick a knife into somebody, perhaps, some 
 day?" Mrs. James pulled her niece nearer to her and 
 shivered ; then she began to flit round the room again. 
 " Dear, dear," she said, " what pictures ! But, Linda 
 do you think they are really quite nice quite, quite what 
 they should be? The ladies have hardly any clothes on 
 at all and, oh dear me ! shan't we sit in the other room, 
 perhaps?" 
 
 They had come to a standstill in front of a large sprawl- 
 ing figure of Endyinion . The moon was very near him on 
 the bare hillside. Linda's mind was elsewhere. She saw 
 the curious and splendid limbs depicted on the walls, but 
 they did not really interest her. She heard her aunt's 
 childish prattle with a certain pleasure because the child 
 was present in it, and Love likes childish things. But 
 Linda was not thinking about her aunt. 
 
 The night was calling her all the seething, sounding, 
 pulsing night of May. The hills were there, outside the 
 window, with their amazing hidden magic. As if by 
 instinct she felt that the moon was up over the hornbeam 
 alley just for her sake just for her, too. She wanted to 
 run ; she wanted to run through the alleys away and alone. 
 She wanted to understand, to feel, to be . . . 
 
 "After all it is only a picture," her aunt prattled on; 
 " and do you know, of course you won't tell anybody, but I, 
 myself, always thought that the moon was a little flirt ! I 
 think I should have liked Endymion at once ; I should 
 never have left him wandering on that horrid cold hillside. 
 What do you think yourself, Linda what would you have 
 done?" 
 
 Unconsciously, almost, Linda turned, and she saw the 
 face of Endymion, and it reminded her forcibly of some- 
 
THE PICTURE OF ENDYMION 281 
 
 thing, of someone she had forgotten. Was Basil out on the 
 hills alone? She shuddered. " If you do not mind," she 
 said, " I think I should like to go out for a little while." 
 
 " Out !" cried her aunt, " but we are in Italy ; there is 
 fever one does not go out at night and ..." 
 
 Linda did not listen. She was away in the passage and 
 down the stairs. She had passed through the wooden door 
 at the back of the great courtyard ; she had gathered up her 
 red silk skirt, and she was running as fast as ever she could 
 up the hillside behind her. It was a steep, stone-paved 
 path which led between rows of cypress-trees to the little 
 pilgrim's shrine on the top of the hill. The moon was up 
 in all her splendour a large spring moon which cast white 
 lights over the plains behind, and down into the lawns and 
 courts and spaces of the garden. 
 
 Linda sat down a second , to breathe , on the ledge of one 
 of the flights of steps which led to a shrine. The moon fell 
 on her bare neck and arms, and lighted the crimson silk of 
 her dress, and caught at the pomegranate flowers in her 
 hair. The moonlight felt to her warm it penetrated her 
 skin. Fever, indeed no, we catch no fevers in moments 
 of exultation ! She clasped her hands and she gave herself 
 back to the glory of the night. She became a living part 
 of all the things about her, and she smiled. 
 
 She drew from her arm the long black scarf she had 
 taken up as she crossed through the hall. She put it round 
 her neck, stood up, and began to walk back very slowly 
 down the hill-path. 
 
 Presently she came out into the quieter spaces of the 
 moonlight, and passing round a bend of the villa, she 
 emerged once more by the ponds. Here, once again, was a 
 sumptuous scene of human luxury and ingenuity. Here 
 nature had been tamed, ennobled, and then passed back 
 into something even better and best of all a cultivated 
 abandonment. Linda paused by the ponds. The moon was 
 so clear; it was like, or better than, the daylight. She 
 leaned on the broad marble parapet and looked down into 
 
282 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 the depths of the quiet waters. She saw the reflection of her 
 naked neck, her rounded, delicate, girlish arms. Her eyes 
 looked cavernous, passionate, and immense, framed in the 
 clouds of her hair. 
 
 " Linda ! Linda !" called a voice from the villa. It was 
 the voice of Mrs. James: "Come in, darling; where are 
 you? Bemember the fever. Dudley , where is Linda ? Do 
 go out and look for her. Call her for me. Tell her it is 
 poison out in the garden at night , and in Italy ! ' ' 
 
 Dudley was out on the loggia ; he had been there all the 
 time. A stifling wish to follow Linda had long been over- 
 powering him, but with the restraint of the trained soldier 
 he had succeeded in smothering it. 
 
 "Oh, mother, don't worry," he answered. "She'll 
 come in right enough." 
 
 " But indeed she won't, Dudley. You know nothing at 
 all about Linda ! Poor Mary's child ! She's so very like 
 her mother, and her mother died greatly because of this 
 same sort of rashness and romance. You know how she 
 persisted in marrying the peasant? How can you know 
 anything at all about Linda ! I am sure it is very tiresome 
 for you, but just for my sake go and fetch the child." 
 
 Then Dudley got up. He felt at that moment that his 
 mother was utterly wrong. He felt that the one and only 
 thing on all the earth he knew about was Linda. From 
 his seat on the pergola he had watched her every movement 
 since she entered the garden . He went down the stairs very 
 slowly, he only asked to hurry down the stairs and to reach 
 her, but he did not hurry. He took from a peg in the hall 
 his own loose overcoat ; he crossed the garden and he went 
 to the ponds. 
 
 " Mother wants you to come in, Linda," he said ; and 
 he began to put the coat about her. "It's fever she's 
 afraid of," he said. 
 
 "What fever?" 
 
 "Oh, the Italian fever." 
 
 "I'm sick of the very sound of it," the girl replied. 
 
THE PICTUEE OF ENDYM1ON 283 
 
 ' ' There is no fever I mean , when one is happy and think- 
 ing of other things, then there's no fever !" 
 
 He did not answer. " Well, shall we come in?" he 
 said ; but it was impossible for him to conceal his reluc- 
 tance. 
 
 They had reached the pergola by now, which ran all the 
 length of the ground floor of the villa. Here the moon- 
 light entered only in flecks and patches, as the creepers 
 were already in leaf. 
 
 "We might stop a little here," said Dudley. "It's 
 stuffy in the house. Won't you put the coat right on?" 
 
 Linda slipped her arms into the coat. 
 
 ' ' How big you must be ! ' ' she said. ' ' I'm lost in it . " 
 
 " I think you look awfully jolly like that," he hazarded. 
 
 "What I really like," said Linda, "what I want to 
 see, is the open country here. Think of the ditches in the 
 early morning ! There are lots of lilies in them I saw 
 them as we drove along, I saw it all ; but we did not stop 
 to pick them. I'd like to pick and pick them. And then 
 there are the water-snakes. They swim. Nobody can 
 swim like a water-snake not even you. And frogs ; lots 
 of little tree-frogs. If you look on the trunks of the mul- 
 berries and willows you will see one sitting on almost every 
 trunk. And there's a bird with a voice like a circular saw 
 till he is really singing and after that it's music. Brown 
 and grey he is, that particular bird. They build in the 
 rushes. I would like to find their nest." 
 
 "I'd like to help you look," he interrupted. Her clear 
 and curious voice, harping on rather inconsequent things, 
 fascinated him. It seemed to mesmerize him. He wished 
 he had not spoken to interrupt her. 
 
 " No," she said, " no, they're happy I mean, the birds. 
 And why disturb them?" 
 
 'Why are you talking about the birds? They've 
 finished building," he said. 
 
 "I don't know," she said. She stood with her head 
 turned away from him. In all her life she had never felt 
 
284 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 like this, and yet she remembered her old self well. She 
 stood in the moonlight just a slip of a girl with no experi- 
 ence, no precise endeavour or discipline ; yet to him who 
 had always lived under a rather narrow training, her being 
 seemed at that moment vast, mysterious full of an endless 
 history. 
 
 He watched her, till she turned to him again. 
 
 "And besides all the things outside the garden, there 
 are other things quite as delightful in it, too. Don't you 
 smell the flowers of the vines? Their scent is almost 
 stifling." 
 
 " No," he said, " I had not noticed the vines." His head 
 was aching with the strong scent of the Italian night air, 
 but he had not considered the separate causes. 
 
 ' You don't notice much, then?" she said, returning to 
 the banter of their childhood. 
 
 " No," he said dully, " perhaps I don't. I think most 
 awfully slowly I'm not like you. . . . But why not tell 
 me some more, though," he said. 
 
 ''More what?" 
 
 "Oh, more about anything all the things you were 
 saying before : birds, and lilies, and the snakes in the 
 ditches. . . . Linda, you know yourself what you were 
 telling me." 
 
 " No," she said, " I don't think I do." 
 
 "Well, then," he said, "why not go together to the 
 ditches in the morning? I might be able to get you the 
 things to pull up the lilies to " 
 
 "Oh yes," she said to herself, "you might do many 
 things."* 
 
 She went to the marble pillar of the pergola and touched 
 it with her fingers. Her soul and body seemed suddenly 
 all aflame ; the little tendrils of the vine caught in her hair 
 and tired her. There was a warm, still heaviness about the 
 Italian night air, but no mist or sense of actual moisture. 
 The heavens were unclouded, the light of the moon had 
 hidden the stars, but in the borders and the alleys the 
 
THE PICTURE OF ENDYMION 285 
 
 fireflies flitted and flickered like living points of light. The 
 place seemed laden with the pantings of innumerable flower- 
 ing shrubs allspice, syringa, and Marechal Niel roses. In 
 the distant copses all up the hillside, nightingales were 
 singing in shrill piercing trills their songs of love and May. 
 
 Suddenly the girl felt chilled. Was she really a nun at 
 heart? Tears came to her eyes she had not really cried 
 before in Italy. The thing had come which she had 
 dreamed of all these weeks, and the thing was pain. 
 Wearily she turned towards the lights in the hall. 
 
 Susan was playing a song of Mendelssohn's up in the 
 bigger drawing-room, and Mrs. James had gone back to the 
 picture of Endymion. She darted towards the pair as they 
 entered. 
 
 " Ah, so you've brought back Linda ! So silly of you, 
 darling, to risk a fever and then there is just one more 
 thing I wanted to tell you about Endymion." 
 
 Dudley was left standing alone; his tall and splendid 
 figure seemed to stiffen. The picture was different, grown 
 browner. Linda went out on the balcony and picked a 
 flower of the vine and brought it back to Dudley. 
 
 ' ' I brought you the flower of the vine," she said. ' ' You 
 will see it is very sweet." 
 
 "Are you going to the ditches to-morrow?" he asked, 
 and his voice sounded husky and strained. 
 
 'Yes," she said, quite slowly, "I think we will go 
 whilst it's cool." 
 
 He turned to her suddenly to take the flower ; his fingers 
 touched her own. She prayed, she knew not why. 
 
CHAPTEK XXIV 
 
 FIRST LOVES 
 
 AT six o'clock the following morning Dudley stood on the 
 terrace. A second later Linda had joined him ; she had 
 tied her green veil in a rather curious knot below her hat 
 at the back of her neck ; she was fresh and cool, but he had 
 scarcely slept, and there was a new eagerness about his 
 face and manner. 
 
 11 Is it good for you to take a walk in all this heat?" he 
 asked abruptly. 
 
 11 Everything is good for me," she said " everything, I 
 mean, that I like to do," she added, and she looked up into 
 his face. 
 
 He was bending towards her, waiting and wishing for 
 the meeting of their eyes. A tiny tingling shiver quivered 
 for a second in her eyelids, contracted her nostrils, and 
 parted her lips, then passed through her finger-tips. She 
 stayed not to wonder, but acted on impulse, and spoke with 
 her usual precipitate candour : 
 
 " Dudley," she said, " how you have changed !" and she 
 watched the young man's handsome face as though afraid 
 to find a fault there. " I mean, you were just an ordinary 
 English schoolboy and now I could almost have thought 
 you were not the same person," she added. 
 
 " You're the same," he stammered, " at least, the same 
 and then something quite different as well." 
 
 "Oh, I don't know," she said. " I didn't think so. 
 Do you think so, really?" 
 
 " Yes well, it doesn't matter, anyway." 
 
 286 
 
FIEST LOVES 287 
 
 She turned her eyes with a sort of benign candour upon 
 him. " I am altogether different," she said. " I used to 
 despise and yet almost to adore you, too, when I was a child. 
 And, now, now. ..." She stopped, but there was all her 
 admiration in her eyes. 
 
 He looked back at her with a delighted amazement. The 
 vivacity of the little girl had always unconsciously held him 
 in boyhood ; the same thing, now that she was grown to 
 womanhood, heated and overwhelmed him. He flushed up 
 crimson. 
 
 ' Where are we going?" he asked. 
 
 ' To see about the birds and the lilies in the ditches." 
 
 Then they went from the garden, and out through the 
 deserted village street along the road. 
 
 " Look here," he said at last, " you didn't really mean 
 what you were saying just now. So why did you say it?" 
 
 "It's just that I do mean it," she replied; and at the 
 moment, somehow, her mind wandered freely to the lines 
 of willow-trees ahead, where she knew the desired flowers 
 were growing. She seemed as though she were two dis- 
 tinct people the one who talked and the one who saw. 
 " I used to wonder about you, Dudley. English boys and 
 Swiss boys you see, they are very different. But now I 
 don't wonder any more about it. I'm only glad you were 
 my friend when we were children, because now that I 
 know you now that I like you ..." 
 
 She broke off. A water-bird had started from the rushes 
 and flown across their path. 
 
 " Yes," he said, " yes?" But she had gone in pursuit 
 of the bird. 
 
 "Give me a flower," he said as she returned to him. 
 She went again to the water's edge and sought amongst 
 the grasses, but there was nothing which would do for the 
 finished simplicity of the young English officer. ' ' It won't 
 do," she said. " There's nothing here will do for you. 
 Count von Herder would love the nightshade," she added. 
 " But I I would not like you to wear it." 
 
288 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 "Is Count von Herder out of favour?" stammered 
 Dudley. 
 
 " Everybody everything," she said, and her face was 
 flooded with delight. She was in among the rushes now, 
 bending towards the water-lilies with which the ditch was 
 full. 
 
 "Linda," he said, "I don't understand you, perhaps! 
 
 But " He was silent ; and the sudden strangeness of 
 
 their contact filled with a wonderful contentment these 
 two so totally different beings. 
 
 They stretched for the lilies, sitting in the full May sun- 
 light side by side. 
 
 " And you've been in Italy all alone? I mean, before I 
 came?" 
 
 ' Yes," she said, " I was alone I mean in that way 
 but I was very happy." 
 
 It seemed to her she was happy now as though she had 
 never felt a moment's sadness or a thought of pain or of per- 
 plexity; as though the sunlight, which now encompassed 
 her mental as well as her physical being, had always sur- 
 rounded her ... as though Dudley had always been close 
 to her, and this joy in his presence were no new thing, but 
 just the accustomed possession. 
 
 He had taken her hand, and was looking at her slender, 
 sun-burned fingers. "Linda " he said. 
 
 A cart was coming along the road and in it was a priest's 
 black coat and a blue cotton handkerchief. Linda rose to 
 her feet. " It is time to be going," she said. She gathered 
 up her lilies. " Don Pedro might give us a lift," she said, 
 and her hand was free from Dudley and waving above to 
 the cart. But Don Pedro appeared unconscious of their 
 presence till the girl called shrilly to him. 
 
 "Room for one, room foi* one. Englishmen and dogs 
 walk in the sun," he murmured. " Get up, little miss 
 don't keep me waiting." So Linda got up and sat on the 
 
FIEST LOVES 289 
 
 seat by the priest, whilst Dudley walked home in the sun- 
 light. 
 
 The very same day Mr. and Mrs. James decided that life 
 in a partially-furnished Italian villa was quite impossible, 
 and they determined to move on the following day to 
 Venice. No one regretted the decision, except, perhaps, 
 Dudley and Linda. He knew that it would be expected of 
 him to join his parents, or even to accompany them, and 
 his position was rendered the more complicated because 
 Linda had openly avowed not only her intention, but her 
 right, to remain at the villa. Mrs. James kept Linda 
 close beside her all the day. She dimly detected something 
 a little " harum-scarum " in her niece's position ; but recog- 
 nizing parental authority at the back of it, she could only 
 advise and not interfere. The subject of Endymion 
 was dropped; that of "coming out," and the duties and 
 habits suitable to young ladies, was a good deal described ; 
 also a smattering of Venetian art, and the possible ran- 
 sacking of old furniture-shops in back-streets; and there 
 was a desperate question as to whether a call on Frau Castel- 
 berg would be " suitable," or the reverse. To all these 
 things Linda, who now was thoroughly in love and yet her- 
 self bewildered, lent a deaf ear. Sebastian avoided his 
 sister ; it was not to her judgment that he intended to con- 
 fide himself. 
 
 The day seemed interminable. Towards evening a 
 heavy storm gathered and broke, and a hot rain dripped 
 through the pergola ; so all question of being out of doors 
 soon vanished. The evening, too, was very constrained. 
 Whist was proposed, and Dudley was asked to join a rubber. 
 Von Herder, bored and appalled by his milieu, had vanished 
 early in -the afternoon ; Linda and Mrs. James were once 
 again thrown into each other's company, and they found 
 themselves sitting on the crimson silk cushions of the divan, 
 immediately under the fresco of Endymion. Something 
 deep down, pagan, and unsuspected in the exquisite little 
 lady again woke up to torment her. 
 
 19 
 
290 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 " You remember, dear Linda, what I said about Endy- 
 mion about Endymion and the moon? Well, do you 
 know, I sometimes think that nearly all women are little 
 flirts? I know that I flirted with your uncle once. And 
 then afterwards well sometimes it's all very, very, very 
 dull afterwards, I mean." 
 
 " I see," said Linda. But she was not really listening. 
 
 Dudley had played his ace to his partner's king ; his eyes 
 had fixed themselves on the silk divan. How unlike his 
 mother and his cousin were! Would he, too, be able to 
 find such silks for Linda to wear silk ' ' the colour of a 
 pomegranate flower," she had said it was. His mother's 
 dress w r as the colour of an exquisite shell, the inside ear 
 of an oyster. His mother knew all about life, and she had 
 long outlived the wild, fantastic tastes of her niece and 
 yet? Oh, but Linda, too, would age in time, and wear a 
 gown the colour of an oyster, and perhaps just a flower of 
 pomegranate to remind him of the past. 
 
 ' ' Dudley ! your ace to my king ! ' ' almost thundered the 
 astounded Mr. James. 
 
 "Forgive me," said his son. But almost within five 
 minutes he revoked. His father was stern ; the game was 
 up. The evening was generally admitted to have proved 
 a fiasco, and the parting the following morning constrained. 
 There was a sense of mischief in the air Bohemia invaded 
 and desecrated ; Philistia failing in its sense of a fitting 
 romance. 
 
 "Good-bye, Linda," said Dudley, standing bareheaded 
 and humble before her. " Mother wanted me in Venice, 
 you see; I haven't been with her for over two years. 
 But . . ." 
 
 Linda knew nothing at all of the world. She was sur- 
 prised, she was angry. She did not speak, and she held her 
 head up high. 
 
 "Linda, if you'll let me, I want to come back that's 
 what I mean may I come back?" 
 
FIEST LOVES 291 
 
 She did not answer. She was hurt at his going horri- 
 fied almost ; she never expected it. 
 
 " I've been looking up trains I can get here and back 
 quite easy even after lunch I mean if you'll let me?" 
 
 Again she did not answer. She was only a child, and 
 would have cried had she spoken. She kissed her aunt and 
 her uncle, and Susan, and long after the carriage had driven 
 away she stood on the doorstep watching the road. Then 
 she ran up to her bedroom and locked herself in. Was she 
 sad was she angry? Who shall say. 
 
 Her friends at the villa were men of tact ; they packed 
 up some lunch and they left her, for the day, alone. Linda 
 had often been alone. But she felt more absolutely and 
 completely alone she felt alone because she felt forsaken 
 than she had ever done in the whole of her existence 
 before. She cried at first angrily ; then she cried quietly ; 
 then she began to think. And her thoughts were perfectly 
 clear this time : she wanted Dudley. She wanted him with 
 the whole of her nature. She wanted him that moment 
 and for that moment ; she was not thinking of the future, 
 but of to-day to-day. Why was he gone, gone from 
 beside her, he who had only just come back to her? And 
 he needed her, too of that she was positive ! . . . This 
 thought came second and brought relief. He needed her, 
 too ; she ceased to sob ; she rose from her knees and she 
 opened the shutters. The air was fresh from the cool of 
 the night ; she bathed her eyes, she walked down the stairs, 
 and all through the rooms and out on the pergola. An old 
 leather pouch for tobacco lay on a table ; it belonged to 
 Dudley ; she touched it with her fingers and then she felt 
 better. He needed her, too. She fetched an envelope and 
 put the pouch inside it , then she directed it to the Venetian 
 address he had given her, and she went down the street and 
 posted it. She had not written, but he would see her 
 writing. Would he write, would he come? . . . 
 
CHAPTEK XXV 
 
 THE WISDOM OF SEBASTIAN 
 
 THE following day Sebastian determined to speak to his 
 niece. Sebastian had a genial custom of letting matters 
 slide till what he considered to be the proper psychological 
 moment. He now felt that it was time to act ; nothing had 
 escaped his notice, and he had accurately summed up the 
 whole situation. He knew quite well how many small and 
 inconsequent things combine to produce results in human 
 affairs, and perhaps he gauged his own comparative impo- 
 tence in this particular one, where the impulse of youth and 
 the onrush of the human heart, as things quite away from 
 the sterner realities of later life, were alone engaged. Still, 
 his own view of the situation was definite enough, for 
 which of us is not a match-maker? Long years ago 
 Sebastian had made a match for the niece he loved, and 
 this match seemed likely to vanish into thin air. 
 
 Soon after lunch he sent for Linda. He had selected for 
 his seat of judgment a large, almost barn-like room, in the 
 front of the house overlooking the garden. He sat in a 
 huge medieval chair, the possession of the cardinal who 
 long, long years ago had built the villa, leaving his worldly 
 track upon it. Sebastian twiddled the loose wooden rings, 
 so ingeniously encircling the arms on his chair that one 
 wondered how they ever had come there. Linda he had 
 begged to be seated just opposite him with her face in the 
 shade, for he wished not to see her suffer pain, and he knew 
 he was going to hurt her. His own face, white and 
 shadowed by the hundred conflicting emotions of one to 
 
 292 
 
THE WISDOM OF SEBASTIAN 293 
 
 whom life, by force of physical circumstances, was a 
 pageant rather than a living drama, caught the light full as 
 it fell through the half-open shutters from the garden 
 beyond. 
 
 " Listen, Linda," he said. " I want you to draw your- 
 self together. We must talk. A thing of this sort cannot 
 drift it's a real question a question of life and of death, 
 if you think of it. It is everything that ever was from the 
 very beginning, Linda." He leaned forward, and with his 
 thin nervous hands, which were usually hot and dry like 
 those of someone who is frail and ill, and yet of a curious 
 breadth and strength, he took her own, which seemed 'to 
 shiver away from their grasp. " Linda," he said, " a mar- 
 riage of this sort is really a sort of pit. It is not a ladder, 
 as some would suppose. You fall into it, you do not climb 
 up by it. You may find, perhaps, a beautiful place when 
 you reach the bottom, but it never is, it can never be, the 
 sky. What you are now vaguely allowing yourself to drift 
 into is, at best, but the gratification of some preconceived 
 emotion. It is not a necessity, it never could be a per- 
 manent reality." 
 
 " But " interposed Linda. 
 
 " There is no ' but.' You have fallen in love with your 
 cousin Dudley, and he has fallen in love with you. But man 
 and woman no, that you two could never be ; I mean, you 
 two could never, by the remotest possibility, succeed in 
 becoming man and wife in the highest ideal of those words. 
 Man and woman !" Sebastian paused, and he seemed to 
 draw in his breath and his pupils contracted, for he too had 
 dreamed his dreams. " Oh, Linda dear, that is glorious, 
 and has been known even upon this exhausted earth 
 though what has come of it Heaven only knows, for the 
 gods have never been born of mortals. But you, with your 
 wonderful past I mean, with your father's blood in your 
 veins ' ' 
 
 Linda shivered. Was even Sebastian, who did " under- 
 
294 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 stand " things, off himself on the old perpetual track and 
 story ! 
 
 " You, Linda, you cannot, not even by a million vagaries 
 of circumstances, and by whole decades of self-control, you 
 cannot become the woman who will sit by the side of 
 Dudley James until death take either you or him." 
 
 Linda was staring now. A little something in her mind 
 seemed to stir and to grow. 
 
 " Stop," she said, " don't talk to me like that. It is 
 wrong and then, I do want happiness." 
 
 "Happiness!" cried Sebastian. ''My child, who is 
 happy? Well, you yourself have the seeds in you of happi- 
 ness of a glorious fulfilment, that is to say. Listen, dear. 
 You have seemed to me during these weeks down in Italy 
 like a creature whom the gods might have chosen out to 
 love. Once or twice I almost held my breath as I watched 
 
 you. And then I planned for you But Dudley ! 
 
 Dudley is not a god ! He is beautiful to look at , but he is a 
 James. He has no imagination. He will never go fur- 
 ther. He's handsome and he's good, but he is bourgeois to 
 
 his finger-nails He might even be a cad and a bully 
 
 to his wife if ever she exposed him. I hurt you?" 
 
 Linda had started to her feet. A frightened look rather 
 than one of anger was in her eyes ; she stood with her hands 
 hanging by her sides, and unconsciously her eyes sought the 
 great mirror which hung over the entrance-door. Her back 
 was to the light. Her lithe little figure stood dark against 
 the outside sunshine in the garden; and she seemed like 
 something which belonged to woody places, and to rocks 
 where clear cold waters fall on the moss in summer days 
 and freeze again on Christmas nights. 
 
 " Dudley can do two things," Sebastian continued in a 
 slow, but even more penetrating voice ; " if he marries he 
 can go back to India and live the life of an English officer. 
 I do not know whether you have read any books about the 
 lives of English officers and their wives in India? No? 
 Well, don't attempt to do so, if you can possibly avoid the 
 
THE WISDOM OF SEBASTIAN 295 
 
 subject, for they are not particularly attractive reading. 
 Or and this is more probable (for he is eminently an 
 ' English gentleman,' and knows what is required of an 
 English gentleman, especially of one with a young family) 
 he will either leave the service and conduct a well-regulated, 
 but totally depressed life, in some small English house ; or 
 he will deposit his wife in a still smaller English house, 
 and himself go backwards and forward to India. But, in 
 any case , he never can or will or should do anything out of 
 the commonplace bourgeois life. Some men can, but 
 Dudley can't it is not in his nature. He is very good- 
 looking, and he has somehow fallen in love with you. But 
 he is a dull man, and a dull man he will remain to the very 
 end of his days nothing can alter him." 
 
 Again Linda made a movement of revolt and escape. But 
 Sebastian detained her. 
 
 ' ' No, Linda, you shall listen to me. There are women 
 many of them healthy, respectable, dreary young English- 
 women ; better set up in some ways, much more capable 
 and far more responsible than you are ; to whom this exist- 
 ence would be possible and even, perhaps, dimly pleasant, 
 because they are asleep, and will remain asleep till we have 
 shovelled the gravel into their graves. There are women, I 
 say , who could be the happy wives of Dudley James ; women 
 who, indeed, would consent to submit to him all their days. 
 But you, Linda, are not like one of these, you are not 
 asleep. You are only in a passing dream ; you would wake 
 up you would soon wake up, Linda." 
 
 Again there was almost an hysterical cry in the delicate 
 voice of Sebastian. Again he caught her hand as though 
 to draw her to him. "Marriage, Linda! Life in some 
 dreary English town or village with or without an English 
 husband ! But just try to think of it. . . . Eows and rows 
 of houses, separate and detached ; some with ivy over 
 them, some with Virginia creeper, some with neither 
 mostly all with bow- windows ; and your neighbours 
 respectable but inquisitive women women as hard and as 
 
296 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 inquisitive as peasant-women, but far more corrupt because 
 they are idle, looking in at your windows women with 
 housemaids and parlour-maids, and cooks, all stewing 
 together in what, after all, is the worst form of slavery and 
 of barbarism namely, a respectable mediocrity ; women 
 drinking tea, playing tennis. Those for your neighbours, 
 day and night, night and day. And pavements and 
 asphalt under your feet , and a walk to the butcher and the 
 baker and the fishmonger. And the squarings of your poor 
 little accounts, and the terror of a deficit, year in and year 
 out. . . . Linda are you listening?" 
 
 Linda was not listening. She had put a barrier between 
 herself and the speaker; the same barrier that she had 
 lately put between her own strong soul and her outward 
 being ; and she would not listen to Sebastian. But all the 
 same her soul within was listening ; and long years after- 
 wards not only the meaning of the words, but their very 
 syllables, came back 'to her, burning as only stings of truth 
 can burn. 
 
 And, as she stood there, looking in the mirror where the 
 whole of the garden outside was reflected, with its alleys, its 
 fountains, and its moss-grown statues, she even smiled. For 
 she was the centre of that gay and lovely pagan picture. 
 Her lithe body, keen as that of some young panther, stood 
 against the burning, teeming light of the Italian afternoon. 
 The tiny curls escaped around her temples and made a 
 crown about her head. 
 
 But that was not all that she saw in the mirror. She saw 
 a figure enter the garden. Dudley had come, as he said that 
 he would. Dudley was waiting downstairs in the garden. 
 He, 'too, could see Linda at the window. He wanted her 
 so. Why did she not come? What was she doing up 
 there with his unaccountable uncle ! He wanted her to 
 come and to sit beside him Linda, the little half-foreign 
 cousin the focus in his life which alone was perhaps un- 
 orderly ; he wanted to have her beside him , to give him 
 that something which he lacked, which his being somehow 
 
THE WISDOM OF SEBASTIAN 297 
 
 was awake to. He was in love with Linda, and he had 
 never been really in love in all his life before. 
 
 He kicked at the gravel. What was she doing, Linda, 
 all this time up there with his eccentric and impossible 
 uncle ? How uncertain they both of them were ! Why 
 didn't she come? She knew he was waiting. Why didn't 
 she come? His heart literally thumped. He was a very 
 strong, well-ordered, clean-living man ; he wanted Linda 
 more than he wanted to drive the ball between the goal- 
 posts in the last match of his last term at Eton when he 
 was captain of the school ; he wanted her, indeed, much 
 more than that, and this says much. He wanted her more 
 than anything he had ever wanted in the whole of his 
 previous existence. He had spoken no word of love to 
 her, but his passion was in his hand ; and he had taken her 
 hand the morning before away down by the ditches. And 
 her hand had stayed. How warm it was, how it seemed 
 to respond and to quiver, that small brown hand ! He 
 wanted it back. . . . 
 
 Down in the inn outside the villa gates Count von 
 Herder was playing on the piano what was more, he was 
 singing. Dudley, engrossed in his own cogitations, did not 
 at first notice the music. Also, the inn faced more to the 
 back of the house than that part of the garden where he 
 happened to be standing. But von Herder had a habit of 
 making himself heard ; like many egoists, he anxiously 
 desired to convey his own passions and emotions to others. 
 How often had he sung to tease some bewildered kitchen- 
 maid or scullion till the pans went flying, the menial not 
 knowing why. Von Herder was infected by the spring. 
 His spring-time long was over, but he narrowly, cynically, 
 with a sort of bacchanalian abandonment, desired to cement 
 its ravages for others. He was most keenly alive to the 
 situation between Linda and her cousin ; he felt no pleasure 
 in it he experienced, indeed, a sort of disdain ; yet by 
 every means in his fractious mind he determined to promote 
 
298 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 things. His humour for the moment was gay. From his 
 bedroom-window up under the eaves of the little ramshackle 
 inn, where one or two leaves of last year's vine still clung 
 about the green and woolly tufts of May, he could trace 
 what was happening in the villa. He could see Sebastian, 
 pale and eager, putting aside his own pleasure and studies 
 to talk common sense to his niece ; he watched every move- 
 ment in the big saloon ; he could almost invent the very 
 words of the speakers. He could see that Linda was 
 startled, but not convinced ; he could see that, though some- 
 thing in her soul was listening, her body and her mind were 
 elsewhere ; and then, just when an undesired crisis might 
 have come when she started to her feet disclaiming 
 then, at that vital point, to his inconsequent joy he noted 
 the advent of Dudley down in the garden ; and he could cal- 
 culate that, though the girl's back was to the window, the 
 figure of her lover was full on the mirror before her. 
 
 There was no time to spare. Seizing from his table a 
 little volume of Latin student songs, he bounded downstairs 
 to the hall of the inn, the doors of which stood open wide 
 to the street and -the villa outside it. Here stood a piano, 
 the pride of the village, lately acquired from a sale at Padua, 
 and by no means a bad instrument ; von Herder himself 
 had had it tuned. The moment was propitious. He set 
 the book up before him. He struck a few chords tenta- 
 tively and then he began to play. 
 
 All the trills and the quavers and the wayward frolic of 
 May was here. A storm and a torrent of chords, and then 
 a long low wailing note of demand, and of answer. All that 
 the birds had done for a month they were resting now- 
 all the cicala had sung in the hedge his young were 
 hatched, he was grown silent and the white acacia above 
 which had given out her heavy indolent perfume von 
 Herder had caught all this in his playing. He knew very 
 well what it all was about. Just once he glanced across to 
 the villa. Linda had left her uncle ; she had put on her 
 hat and come out into the courtyard, where the oleanders 
 
THE WISDOM OF SEBASTIAN 299 
 
 stood in tubs, ready to burst into bloom ; her hand was on 
 the latch of the outer door which led to the lane and thence 
 to the garden ; she was listening, though her eyes looked 
 far away. Then von Herder began to sing with a reckless 
 and a frantic gaiety. 
 
 " Spring is coming longed-for spring 
 
 Now his joy discloses; 
 
 On her fair brow in a ring 
 
 Bloom empurpled roses," 
 he sang. 
 
 " Now let young men gather flowers, 
 
 On their foreheads bind them ; 
 
 Maidens pluck them from the bowers, 
 
 Then, when they have twined them, 
 
 Breathe perfume from bud and bloom, 
 
 When young love reposes, 
 
 And into the meadow so 
 
 All together laughing go, 
 
 Crowned with ruddy roses. 
 
 "Cast aside dull books and thought; 
 Sweet is folly, sweet is play. 
 Take the pleasure Spring hath brought 
 In youth's opening holiday 1 
 Right it is old age should ponder 
 On grave matters fraught with care; 
 Tender youth is free to wander, 
 Free to frolic light as air. 
 Like a dream our prime is flown, 
 Prisoned in a study ; 
 Sport and folly are youth's own, 
 Tender youth and ruddy. 
 
 "Live we like the gods above: 
 This is wisdom, this is truth; 
 Chase the joys of tender love 
 In the leisure of our youth ! 
 Keep the vows we swore together, 
 Lads, obey that ordinance ; 
 Seek the fields in sunny weather 
 Where the laughing maidens dance. 
 Like a dream our youth is flown, 
 Prisoned in a study ; 
 Sport and folly are youth's own, 
 Tender youth and ruddy." 
 
300 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 Linda had opened the courtyard door ; she was out in the 
 sunlight, but looking back. Then von Herder made a 
 crash on the chords, and he turned to the song which 
 students sing when they have buried one of their com- 
 rades. Did he think that Linda was going to her death? 
 Aloes have strange ways of dying, and some have thought 
 it is actually so with human beings. 
 
 Once again his voice was raised, and the words went 
 shouting out to the sunlit street. 
 
 " Let us live, then, and be glad, 
 
 While young life's before us ! 
 After youthful pastime had, 
 After old age hard and sad, 
 
 Earth will slumber o'er us. 
 
 " Where are they who in this world 
 
 'Ere we kept were keeping? 
 Go you to the gods above; 
 Go to hell ; inquire thereof : 
 They are not they're sleeping. 
 
 " Perish cares that pale and pine I 
 
 Perish envious blamers ! 
 Die the Devil, thine and mine 1 
 Die the starch-necked Philistine 1 
 
 Scoffers and defamers I" 
 
 The piano-lid went down with a bang. Linda had passed 
 from the lane and up into the woods beyond ; Sebastian had 
 run down the steps to the inn half angry, half excited. 
 
 " They were quite different times altogether," he said 
 with emphasis. "They were wandering students, too, 
 not respectable Englishmen and women." 
 
 "They were gods for the moment," said von Herder, 
 " and if we are worth anything, you know very well, Crane, 
 that we all are gods once in our lives and once in the 
 spring-time." 
 
 "Pagan gods, you mean," said Sebastian. " I have not 
 been a god myself," he added curtly, but there was pain in 
 his eyes. " And then, too, those particular songs belong 
 to other times ; they need the Latin they were sung in." 
 
 "It's not a question of language. You know that as well 
 
THE WISDOM OF SEBASTIAN 301 
 
 as I. It's a thing of the blood. They were merely ex- 
 pressing some movement of the blood. It's purely and 
 simply a question of the amount of vitality." 
 
 " Well," said Sebastian, whose sympathies were always 
 with the healthy human animal. " In this case, on one 
 side, anyhow, the amount is limited by the strictest limits. 
 And that is the precise crux of the whole situation." 
 
 " ' There are other and fairer Galateas,' " von Herder 
 quoted lightly. " I mean, of course, to reverse the gender 
 in this particular instance." 
 
 " Yes there are other and fairer and nobler Gataleas," 
 almost wailed Sebastian. "But in any case Linda had 
 better go home to her father. I can't be any longer respon- 
 sible." He put on his large straw hat. He took his stick, 
 and he and von Herder started off by the street door, one of 
 them wholly unconscious of the second inmate of the gar- 
 den. They were, both of them, agile walkers. They had 
 taken a road which led to a little hamlet many miles away, 
 where a great poet had lived and died. They passed 
 through the copses of hazel, cool in the afternoon shadow, 
 and as they went, Sebastian took from his pocket a little 
 Apocrypha. He turned to some verses of the Song of 
 Solomon, and, standing still, he chanted those marvellous 
 stanzas of love written so many thousands of years ago by 
 a Jewish singer : 
 
 " ' Tell me, thou whom my soul loveth, where thou 
 feedest, where thou makest thy flock to rest at noon ! . . . 
 For why should I be as one that turneth aside by the flocks 
 of my companions? . . .' Ah, flocks and kings! Ye 
 gods ! . . . ' to follow in the footsteps of the flocks, and 
 feed the kids before the shepherds' tents ! ' This she should 
 do all this is before her. A man half a god with the 
 figure of a Greek inside his homespun. . . . And then this 
 alternative Dudley James, and an English dinner-table 
 with paper shades ! ' ' 
 
 " And a body as Greek as any peasant's in Europe ! 
 and without the homespun?" 
 
302 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 "I grant you the body. But all the rest! Oh, the 
 flocks ! and then the poor little crumpled hearts withering 
 and curling together like cataracts of dead leaves all over 
 the suburban districts, and the crowded streets of our 
 poor English cities. Even at this moment this very 
 moment, do you realize it, von Herder? in the height and 
 the glow of the May-time, behind their bow-windows and 
 their frightful upholstered drawing-rooms. ..." 
 
 " But your niece need not live in a suburb." 
 
 " My dear fellow, you know nothing at all about our 
 family, nor about what will happen to Linda, if this fatality 
 occurs. But you might at least have detected some of the 
 abysmal depths of my family's apathy. We literally smell 
 of the suburbs. We are tainted and dyed with them. We 
 may, as individuals, sit on Parnassus for a season, but we 
 return to our suburb. We have fine country houses, but 
 we carry the suburb into them. . . . Why ! Coneyhurst 
 is papered and upholstered from attic to cellar by suburban 
 shops. ... ' Stay me with flagons.' " he went on read- 
 ing, " ' comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love.' ' 
 
 They were high up among the brushwood now, on one of 
 the lower spurs of the Euganean hills. Beyond them lay 
 the plain, studded with white villas, villages, and scattered 
 hamlets. The lagoon they could not see, for the heat of the 
 glorious May-day, and of all the days which had gone before, 
 "like a vaporous amethyst or an air-dissolved star," had 
 filled the horizon with a seething, teeming haze, which 
 mixed together sky and land till it seemed like a long belt of 
 air-laden ocean. Already the crops had a shimmer of 
 yellow ; already on the very core of spring , autumn seemed 
 to cast her shadow. 
 
 " There is nothing on the whole face of the earth," said 
 Sebastian, " to compare for beauty with these points where 
 mountains meet the plain. It is what the barbarians saw 
 and coveted. Think of them coming down in their hordes, 
 apoplectic with all the meat they had steadily eaten through 
 countless generations, their brains sodden with fog and with 
 
THE WISDOM OF SEBASTIAN 303 
 
 food, their bodies hardened by the wearing of cow-hides 
 think of these people looking, suddenly, down on these sun- 
 laden visions ! Do you wonder they went almost mad with 
 desire ! They saw what they could not at all understand, 
 but what they felt they could take and have for their very 
 own. Think of some giant who had wallowed in a half- 
 frozen swamp all his boyhood, looking of a sudden on 
 this on this ! ' ' 
 
 Sebastian, excited by some half-chaotic vision, had 
 stretched himself full length on the turf which covered the 
 little hillock where they stood. The wild thyme scented 
 with aromatic intensity the air about him, exciting afresh 
 the visions which teemed within his fevered brain. The 
 transactions down in the villa had been to him harsh and 
 strained. No one saw better than he the force of both 
 sides of the case. No one loathed more deeply than he 
 the intrusive rending by our sorry selves of the ordered 
 plans of Nature ; and he recognized, as one of Nature's 
 forces, this falling in love of the cousins, and he loved such 
 love more perhaps than most men, just because he himself 
 was incapable of it. Still, he had been early tutored 
 in what he called the " high school of bourgeoisie." He 
 knew its abysmal depths of decaying dullness, he knew its 
 power to dwarf which is only another form of corruption ; 
 and he had made and would make again the effort to save 
 one whom he considered to be so far untainted by the stifling 
 caresses of this teaching. For the moment, however, his 
 duty was done, and he had returned whole-hearted to those 
 subjects in which he himself had found in his boyhood an 
 escape from his dreaded surroundings. 
 
 Count von Herder, on the other hand, who long had 
 escaped from everything, or who perhaps had never been 
 bound, was otherwise employed. He was standing on a 
 small hillock, from whence he commanded a wide view of 
 the panorama at their feet ; but the lagoons and the plains 
 with the former descent and doings of the barbarians had 
 no particular attractions for him. It was the immediate 
 
304 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 foreground which occupied his attention. So straight 
 before him, you could almost have dropped a pebble into 
 one of their fountains, lay the gardens of Cardinale. The 
 sun, which lay so warm on the hilltop still, had vanished 
 from the deep volcanic cup where the villa stood. The 
 tanks, the hornbeam avenues, the statues, and the mossy 
 seats, were all in shade. A profound, a melancholy peace 
 and stillness reigned over that romantic pleasaunce, wrap- 
 ping it round with an almost magnetic calm. On a little 
 stone bench by one of the tanks two figures were sitting. 
 They each held a corner of the bench, and they did not seem 
 to be speaking. There are few things to others more 
 frightening or forlorn than the sight of lovers in a huge 
 landscape when the sun is setting. 
 
 " Come, let us go that is what your niece complains to 
 me we elders are always saying," he cried to Sebastian, and 
 they rose and went on towards Arqua. 
 
CHAPTEK XXVI 
 
 IN THE GAEDEN OF LOVE 
 
 " I laid me down upon a bank 
 
 When Love lay sleeping; 
 I heard among the rushes dank, 
 Weeping, weeping. 
 
 " I went to the Garden of Love, 
 
 And saw what I never had seen : 
 A chapel was built in the midst 
 Where I used to play on the green. 
 
 " And the gates of the chapel were shut, 
 
 And ' Thou shalt not ' writ over the door ; 
 So I turned to the Garden of Love, 
 That so many sweet flowers bore. 
 
 " And I saw it was filled with graves 
 
 And tombstones where flowers should be ; 
 And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, 
 And binding with briars my joys and desires." 
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE. 
 
 LINDA went out by the gate in the courtyard and up by the 
 hill behind. She did not go straight to the garden. It is 
 rarely we go in quite a straight line to places where our 
 hearts have gone before us, for, whilst still uncertain of our 
 dreams, we are sure to delay about following them . And yet 
 there was little time to lose. Nature ' s promptings are sharp 
 enough in youth, and something strong in Linda's nature 
 told her very certainly that the moment was here, that no 
 other day would ever in the whole of her mortal existence 
 be as to-day. The words and the reasonings of Sebastian 
 could not be buried, and the stronger sides of her intricate 
 double nature would assert themselves later ; but for to-day 
 
 305 20 
 
306 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 she had smothered them. She paused, not irresolute, but 
 merely waiting. There was a peasant's house let into the 
 wall just above where she stood ; the shutters were open and 
 a woman was humming at her work within. A bird-cage 
 hung in the window, and a little blind linnet was singing its 
 heart out with a shower of treble notes against the bars. 
 Linda did not notice that the bird was blind, as she might 
 have done at any other moment. She merely heard the 
 delicious singing, and to this something akin within her 
 own breast responded. Beside the bird-cage stood a rude 
 earthenware pot with a clove carnation growing in it; 
 the plant was sickly enough, but it bore a couple of splendid 
 blooms which glowed a deep maroon in the light. Linda 
 glanced at the flower, and then a thing which was sudden, 
 impulsive, and altogether wayward in her nature seemed to 
 strike her. She opened a gate to the left which led back to 
 the villa garden, and she passed from the shade of the lane 
 into the glowing, teeming light within. She went very 
 quickly down a grassy alley. An instinct stronger than her 
 own soul seemed pushing and calling to her. The clove 
 carnations belonged to the Past, and Linda was about to 
 abandon her Past. 
 
 Just another walk or another talk, another clasping of 
 the hands together. A sensation, an unreality? Dreams 
 are unreal, yet our souls grow large in dreaming. No. 
 Once more once more ! She and he alone together, a little 
 frightened at each other's breathing, a little staggered by 
 the sound their footsteps made upon the dead leaves in the 
 grass. But the grass itself was green enough, and there 
 was much more of it than there was of last year's leaves. 
 Why listen to the rustle of things that) were dead. To the 
 carpings of Sebastian to the dictates of some prehistoric 
 conscience? All of these had seen and tasted life, and 
 having done so, all others had followed on and done the 
 same. Why not go out with the birds a-nesting? They 
 lived, they sang their songs ; in autumn they, like the leaves, 
 would cease to love and sing. In winter they would starve. 
 
IN THE GARDEN OF LOVE 307 
 
 But spring comes round again as certainly as death, and in 
 spring they would go courting as before. 
 ' : v:^--S':-- :: '' 
 
 Linda stopped in her walking. How dared she think like 
 this? She could not honestly love Dudley, or she would 
 never be reasoning in this fruitless fashion. She had come 
 to the head of the garden, to a spot where the mountain 
 stream is caught on its wayward courses and 'turned into 
 its first marble channel before it enters the great tanks 
 where the goldfish live beyond. The girl sat down on a 
 little stone bench let into the mossy bank above the stream. 
 On the opposite bank was a small stone figure of Cupid, 
 naked and erect, wantonly shooting at air. He had lost 
 his arrows and some of his curls, and there was a dissipated 
 look about the little boy which made him infinitely attrac- 
 tive. By some fatality, or was it, perhaps, by dire inten- 
 tion, at a time years since, when his own gay pedestal had 
 broken in a spring flood, a person uninfluenced by the periods 
 of art had replaced the rococo dolphin with a solid porphyry 
 plaque pulled from the gateway of a Venetian palace. On 
 this was carved in strong, enduring strokes the portrait of a 
 lion of St. Mark. The grim yet friendly beast, holding 
 with one solid paw the open book, looked blandly forth upon 
 the lovely pagan scene around him looked at the costly 
 hornbeam avenues, the terraced paths, the tanks and foun- 
 tains of this exquisite pleasaunce ; and as the young girl, to 
 whom such surroundings formed a sort of natural setting, 
 took her seat, he seemed to watch her with an amused, 
 benignant air, whilst the Cupid above him presented a feck- 
 less restlessness by contrast. 
 
 How extraordinarily do dumb, inanimate objects such as 
 these mingle with, and even influence, our lives ! Linda 
 knew, nay, cared very little, about the Venetian Ee- 
 public ; she was aware that gondolas were black, that once 
 they had been as sumptuously furnished as the ceilings in 
 the Ducal Palace ; but this was a mere coincidence, the 
 cause of it did not affect her, and yet, years afterwards, she 
 
308 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 remembered these points ; and the little feckless Cupid, the 
 stern Venetian lion, too, appeared almost in the light of a 
 prophecy. 
 
 The seat where she sat was warm with all the splendid 
 sun of May. There was a seething of millions of insects in 
 the air. Her lover was coming towards her, brushing the 
 leaves and the blossoms of the bay with his uncovered head. 
 All the light of the sun was in his eyes, and making, as it 
 were, a glory on his brow. She knew he was thinking of 
 her, for he smiled, and Dudley had frowned for the greater 
 part of his existence, just by habit, or perhaps because he 
 was at once conscientious and rather stupid. She sat very 
 still , she would not show him she was there ; she would not 
 rise to meet him. She saw the things which grew around 
 her in the grass ; with her feet she crushed the woodruff ; its 
 sweet cool scent rose up towards her forehead. Large 
 bushes of St. John's wort studded the ground around her. 
 The petals of their flowers were pressed back flat under the 
 abundance of their golden stamens. Small lizards ran out 
 from the shade of the leaves, and lay panting, as though 
 their sides must break, in the warm sunlight of the stone 
 gods. The periwinkles all were over, but one stray blossom 
 Linda saw, born out of season and very pale and fragile. 
 Mechanically she stooped to pick it, and then it was that 
 Dudley noticed her presence. 
 
 " So, you're here !" was all that he said. But he came 
 and sat down beside her. 
 
 For an hour or so the sun blazed on in the garden ; then 
 suddenly it sank behind the hill, and a shade like death fell 
 over the villa, and over the tanks and the trees and the 
 alleys. Linda got up with a shudder and a feeling of fear 
 in her throat ; but her lover, whose mind was finally fixed, 
 said he would fetch her a wrap. 
 
 That was all. 
 
CHAPTEE XXVII 
 
 AFTERTHOUGHTS 
 
 Two weeks later Linda went back to Venice. Two weeks 
 later the avalanche of family congratulations, and there 
 were scarcely any open criticisms, descended on her. Two 
 weeks later the glory and the dream had tarnished, if, 
 indeed, it had not wholly perished ; and, in the eyes of this 
 strange girl, the questions of the why and the wherefore, 
 the vision of the length and weariness of the final issue, 
 were already creeping like night on the dawn of her dreams. 
 Sebastian had been right. It was Love that Linda had 
 fallen in love with, it was not Dudley , or any other particular 
 person. Dudley had merely come into her life at a certain 
 psychological moment, when, like a flower in spring, the 
 chalice of her woman's nature was opened to receive new 
 life and love. At that particular moment it so happened 
 that she had been brought into special and direct contact 
 with men who lived more on their brains than on their 
 bodies ; with men of intellect already exhausted by life, and 
 to whom its early enthusiasms seemed grown into ' ' mis- 
 takes." Painfully as such men attracted the curious and 
 unusual girl, they by no means satisfied the more normal 
 sides of her complex nature ; and, in spite of her acceptance 
 of their ways and their words, she unconsciously was seek- 
 ing for something different. At that moment of her 
 destiny Dudley appeared, and it was surely natural that in 
 the awaking of the more sensuous elements of her pure, if 
 over-excitable nature, the heart of the girl should go forth 
 to this particular presence of manhood. There was a touch 
 
 of home about Dudley in the midst of an enchanting palace 
 
 809 
 
310 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 of dreams. His beauty, the very disdainfulness of his bear- 
 ing, made a most subtle appeal to her. Dudley embodied 
 something of strong and irrevocable manhood which con- 
 trasted very forcibly with that of the men about her . Dudley 
 was like Basil, but he was different to Basil ; in outward 
 polish, anyhow, he was very different to Basil, for he had 
 been whipped into shape, as it were, by public schools and 
 a military training and discipline. Dudley did not argue ; he 
 was healthy, direct, and simple; he had a power of sitting 
 for long periods perfectly still, and of looking very splendid 
 and clean and reliable. His stillness, which was, in fact, 
 only the outcome of physical health and of perfectly sub- 
 dued emotions, served as a sort of solid medium through 
 which Linda, her own brain teeming with a million visions 
 and dreams, could look forth upon the entrancing natural 
 scenes around her. 
 
 What days, what nights, were those at Cardinale. Earely 
 has any girl-lover lived so vitally, so completely, as Linda 
 did amongst the fountains and the hornbeam avenues of the 
 great Italian villa. At dawn they would sometimes climb 
 together to the hills above. How strange and how fan- 
 tastic seemed the young chestnut-copse with some rare shep- 
 herd calling to his flock upon a pipe or reeds, or battered 
 ocarina. And the tops of the volcanic hills, with sunrise 
 creeping over them ! What endless cushions of wild thyme 
 grew up there for lambs and lovers to rest upon. 
 
 Something of Linda's own half-pagan spirit, for the first 
 and for the last time, too, entered the heart of her English 
 lover in those strange mystic days of June. He became for 
 the moment a different man ; he was willing to "exist," 
 and not to lead and to manage ; he was willing to live for a 
 little while unconscious of our ordinary chains and shackles. 
 He quietly followed Linda's guiding, as he crossed the 
 threshold of that palace of primitive nature to which Linda 
 herself had always had the key, and which she so dearly 
 loved. 
 
AFTERTHOUGHTS 311 
 
 Sebastian who, from the first, had disapproved of the 
 sudden and ill-suited courtship, now realized that it was a 
 thing which must certainly be faced and probably even 
 accepted. He therefore proceeded to announce the news 
 to his sister. Dudley had already written a short and formal 
 announcement of it to his father. The letter of Dudley left 
 nothing between the lines. He merely stated that he had 
 fallen in love with his cousin, had proposed to her, and had 
 been accepted ; 'that he hoped his father and mother would 
 approve ; and that he should like the marriage to come off 
 as soon as matters connected with his regiment allowed of it. 
 He mentioned that he would have 'to return to India, and 
 there rejoin his regiment, before he could hope to marry, 
 but that he would probably return to Europe before, or any- 
 how immediately after, Christmas. 
 
 Linda herself had written somewhat more fully to her 
 father, but, much and dearly as she loved him, she knew 
 that there was no real emotional sympathy between her and 
 her home ; and her words and her letters were always 
 clouded with a certain reticence and restraint. It was her 
 Uncle Sebastian to whom Linda's inner nature really 
 responded, but between him and her an embarrassment had 
 lately arisen, which was trying and painful to both. 
 
 Frau Castelberg wrote a prim and guarded note of con- 
 gratulation, and a rather more marked postcript suggesting 
 that her cousin should return to the Palazzo Molinaro, 
 where her room was always ready for her, and where pos- 
 sibly life was more suitable for a young girl than that of 
 the villa at Cardinale. 
 
 June was fast waning into July, spring was over and 
 summer was here heavy and dull, like middle-age. And 
 so, on a day far hotter and more resplendent than that on 
 which they had arrived, the party packed its trunks, entered 
 the ramshackle carriage, and drove across the glittering sun- 
 baked plains to Padua. 
 
 Don Pedro came to the gate, his blue cotton handkerchief 
 
312 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 flapping across his enigmatic eyes. He held Linda's hand 
 in his for rather a long while, and he peered long and 
 curiously into her exquisite face ; next he looked up at 
 Dudley. " My salutes," he said, with some strange con- 
 cealed intention. Then, turning to Sebastian, in nasal 
 Latin as though he were chanting the Mass, he added : ' ' I 
 write no books on marriage. I only write upon divorce. 
 These two will not come again to Cardinale. Still, I am 
 always at home and your humble servant . ' ' 
 
 Linda knew no Latin, and Dudley had lost the little he 
 ever acquired. 
 
 In Venice the air was positively suffocating. The Vene- 
 tians were awake all night in the streets, singing, talking, 
 laughing, betting. All trace of winter damp had long since 
 left the Palazzo Molinaro ; a warm and seething air, like 
 the scent of flowers in a hidden forest permeated Walpurga's 
 home from cellar to attic-chamber. On Linda's table stood 
 the same glass tumbler, but no carnations were in it now 
 just a bunch of red geraniums such as one may see in any 
 English villa garden, but rarely in the Alps or Italy. 
 The geraniums clashed with the general atmosphere, and 
 the girl, who was breathing in the splendid, almost tropical 
 feeling of the palace, felt for a moment estranged, and 
 pushed the flowers from her. Letters lay on the table too ; 
 one from her father and one from her Aunt Christina, and 
 one or two from England ; her aunt, Mrs. James, her cousin 
 Susan. Linda had formed a notion that these last would 
 not be altogether smooth, and she was, therefore, much 
 surprised to find a long and an almost sentimental outpour- 
 ing from her English aunt. 
 
 " Do you know, Linda dear," the lady wrote, " do you know I 
 had really guessed it ! Yes, all that evening, when you and I were 
 peeping at the picture of Endymion, I felt that something was 
 going to ' happen.' And then I was a little afraid about other 
 people for you. I did not quite like that wicked German count 
 with the big dog. I thought him just a little like Mephistophek 
 
AFTERTHOUGHTS 313 
 
 what do you think of that? And then, a long time ago there was 
 a funny little Swiss boy, called Basil, or some such name ; a friend 
 of yours. . . . But that is all quite over now, darling, and you 
 will marry my Dudley and be my own little daughter after all. 
 We can do so many lovely embroideries together. I have just been 
 to Liberty's, and I have been very extravagant and bought several 
 new designs. There is one with roses which I think you will like. 
 But it has very, very large thorns on the stalk. I think they are 
 perhaps rather too large, but that is also perhaps a little like other 
 things in life thorns, I mean, on roses. I might make you a 
 nightdress-case with it; or I might make a picture framed as a 
 fire-screen. You will want a fire-screen for your little home with 
 Dudley. . . ." 
 
 The letter rambled on. At that particular moment it 
 was somehow terribly unwelcome and out of place. It con- 
 veyed the impression that a small and dexterous spider had 
 by some wayward chance caught in her net a rare and 
 exquisite butterfly. The spider did not propose to eat the 
 butterfly, but merely to embalm its brilliant plumage with 
 a hopeless series of tiny webs. Linda's heart sank within 
 her, and a horrible apparition of some little villa in a row 
 of other such villas arose before her : a home planned and 
 visited by her English relations. She turned to her father's 
 letter ; it was very short, and it was also sad, though there 
 was in it an attempt at cheerfulness and welcome. The 
 sudden news brought the past before the quiet doctor, and 
 it seemed a sort of reversal of his own love story ; as though 
 some passionate lyric on love had been twisted into a rather 
 dreary tract in prose. England was about to take from him 
 his daughter the people from whom he had gathered his 
 young wife demanded back her child. But there were 
 other objections at the back of his mind, and these he did 
 not try to dissect ; for his was not an introspective nature. 
 From the depths of his soul he desired the welfare of his 
 daughter ; he merely, he scarce knew why, desired that it 
 might have come to her in any other form or manner. A 
 short and formal note from the always impassive Susan was 
 quietly read and put aside, and also the letters of one or 
 two of her few friends who approved of what seemed to 
 
314 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 them to be, at least, an " adequate," if not an exciting, 
 marriage. 
 
 Then Linda went to the mirror and took off her hat . The 
 green gauze veil had been discarded. ' Wear it, of course, 
 if you like,' ' Dudley had said to her. ' ' But I can't pretend 
 to admire it. ... Only of course I do like anything which 
 you put on, you know," he had added, perceiving a shade on 
 her forehead. She had bought a long white gauze instead, 
 and under it her face looked small and chiselled, like some 
 curious Eenaissance gem. Expression had developed in 
 her eyes, for she had really been having her honeymoon in 
 advance. But the letters and the coming back to scenes 
 which belonged to that time of her life before Cardinale had 
 forced things into a new perspective. 
 
 Linda, with all the painful intuition which goes with a 
 certain sensitiveness, indeed, with a touch of genius for 
 ordinary life, sitting on the yellow divan of the Venetian 
 palace where first her passionate dream had germinated, 
 received that day a sudden flash of insight. The situation 
 rose before her : the dull round, the continuity of mar- 
 riage, all in an alien setting too. She shuddered and went 
 chill. The overpowering heat of the morning was turning 
 to thunder. Suddenly the sun disappeared, and darkness 
 fell on the roofs and the canals, whilst a low and distant 
 rumble portended a coming hurricane at sea. 
 
 Walpurga's welcome had been reserved, even a trifle 
 haughty. At this moment she entered the room with a 
 note. She looked a little anxiously at her cousin, but passed 
 no comment and went to close the window. Linda started 
 to her feet. 
 
 "Let me do that," she said, as though aroused from 
 dreams. " You always do everything yourself, Cousin 
 Walpurga. ' ' 
 
 " There are dreamers and doers , r ' answered Walpurga. 
 "Have you read your letter? The man is waiting for an 
 answer." 
 
AFTERTHOUGHTS 315 
 
 Linda opened the note, which came from her Uncle 
 Sebastian . 
 
 " I am settled into my rooms," ft said, "they are lovely 
 and cool and all in order. I've had nothing but asparagus 
 and red wine for lunch . It ' s simply splendid . But some bores 
 propose to come -to tea a Mrs. Crewe and her daughter, 
 May Morrison. The daughter is a wretch ; the mother is 
 more or less like her. But they've married between them 
 one of the nicest men in England. They want to have a 
 look at you, as you will be their neighbour at Coney hurst. 
 They are off to-morrow. Morrison probably won't come, 
 but it's him I would like you to see and hear. Can't you 
 bring Pallas Athene with you ? She would make them sit 
 up ! Her splendour would annihilate their flummery. Any- 
 how, five o'clock to-day, remember ; and there are letters 
 which you must read. Dudley will be coming, too." 
 
 ''I will come at five," wrote Linda. Her head was 
 heavy, but she caught at any exit from her thoughts. She 
 put on one of her simplest frocks a tussore one with 
 some fine Burano lace upon it. She put on, too, the old 
 gold chain which hung so heavy round her slender neck. 
 The plaits of her thick hair gave distinction to her simple 
 clothes ; and her general, unusual, half-shy, half-indifferent 
 bearing, as she walked very quietly into her uncle's room, 
 made an appeal to the fastidious social eyes, with Dudley 
 walking so stiffly beside her. 
 
 The two ladies on the sofa put up their glasses. They 
 each carried long tortoise-shell glasses which they used or 
 did not use, for they could perfectly see witEout them. 
 They were faultlessly rather than " over " dressed, in pale 
 mauves and soft shimmering black silk, and gossamer 
 ruffles high round their ears. The mother looked almost as 
 young as the daughter, only her skin was white like that of 
 skimmed milk, whereas that of the daughter was the cream. 
 They spoke in musical, inquiring voices, gently and con- 
 solingly, as one might speak to a child in a rage. They 
 asked Sebastian a great many questions about books and 
 
316 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 about art. They had been looking, they said, almost con- 
 tinuously at pictures in the mornings ; in the afternoons 
 they admitted that they did a little hunting up of people 
 "so many distinguished people," they explained, "in 
 various hotels and palaces." They were perfectly kind to 
 Linda, but infinitely remote, and she suddenly felt like a 
 rough piece of ore, and they, to her, appeared as valuable, 
 but undesirable, jewels set in fine glass cases, and not to 
 be touched or broken. The ladies had all the acquired habit 
 of life ; Linda had nothing but herself and her scattered 
 friends, her new love and her natural loveableness. Dudley 
 showed a sudden stiff shyness. Sebastian chaffed them 
 mercilessly, for he loathed the " culture " of the -type to 
 which these two pretended. 
 
 'Well," he cried rather harshly, facing round on the 
 younger lady as she described a picture by Carpaccio, that 
 man of fun and frolic, as "quite dear, but just a little 
 capricious." "Well! is your husband not coming to 
 fetch you?" 
 
 :< Who shall tell?" the lady answered. " He is always 
 working at his manuscripts. We only see him at meal 
 times!" 
 
 The party could not be precisely described as a success, 
 but Mr. Crane was one of the " distinguished persons who 
 had to be hunted up," and the ladies swallowed any crusts, 
 or even the crumbs, from their afternoon effort ; Linda, 
 too, was unusual and worthy of investigation. Presently 
 the ladies demanded their gondola, and with gracious smiles 
 they ruffled away to their hotel on the Eiva. 
 
 ' ' If only the divine Morrison had come himself and not 
 those horrid women," wailed Sebastian, after they had left 
 the room. 
 
 " They stared so," said Linda. 
 
 ' Yes, of course. They were taking you in. You may 
 be the ' lady of Coneyhurst ' some day. Only think of that, 
 my dear!" Sebastian noticed that Linda winced. He 
 had not intended to pain her. ' ' They recognized in you 
 
AFTEETHOUGHTS 317 
 
 something very unlike themselves," he added. "They 
 will go and write you down in their diaries ; they have 
 squared you up, but not unfavourably. They are bad 
 lots themselves ; but they can detect sincerity in others, and 
 they most certainly are not fools. They are thoroughly bad 
 lots," he continued, half to himself. " And Morrison tied 
 up with them for life it's positively revolting !" 
 
 ' Well ! but if you feel like that, why did you invite 
 them to tea with you?" said Linda with sudden emphasis. 
 Dudley had accompanied the ladies to their gondola, and 
 gone off himself to the poste restante to look for his letters 
 and papers. 
 
 " Do you want the truth?" said Sebastian with a sudden 
 rough tenderness. "Well, then, I invited them wholly 
 and entirely to shake you out of your coma ! ' ' 
 
 ' ' Coma ! ' ' queried Linda. 
 
 "Yes. Coma. In the life which is now before you, 
 you will have to encounter every sort and condition of social 
 being what is more, you will have to be polite to them no 
 more picking and choosing, remember !" 
 
 ' ' But I never meant to be impolite to these people. Only 
 they stared so, and they did not like me. They were 
 different, and they thought themselves very much better." 
 
 ! * They thought nothing of the kind ! Indeed, they were 
 rather jealous of you. And all women of their type stare. 
 And no one, mark my words, is a better target for stares of 
 that order than a rather unusual bride, with a combination 
 of beauty, humility, and defiance. Why ! you are simply 
 made to be stared at," said Sebastian, gazing upon her. 
 
 "How horrible !" said Linda. Distress, or rather con- 
 firmation of distress, was already creeping across her soul. 
 
 " No," said Sebastian quietly, " it is not really horrible ; 
 it is natural. Birds and animals are ten times harder in 
 their method of scrutiny -than even fashionable women. 
 Peasants, I suppose, are the hardest of all. ' Bough winds 
 do tear the tender buds of May,' he murmured. And 
 remember, too, you have elected to join what is pleased to 
 
318 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 call itself Society, and you must be prepared to pay the 
 penalties of society. You cannot remain pottering and 
 flower-gathering on the fringe of the forest you must get 
 inside and cut the wood." 
 
 There was a long pause, during which a succession of 
 scattered thoughts coursed through the mind of the awaken- 
 ing woman. She went to the window and looked to the 
 water. A heavy air, laden with scirocco, came puffing up 
 from the canal. Everything seemed dark and damp and 
 faded. 
 
 " I want to go away," she said, suddenly facing round 
 on Sebastian. 
 
 "To go away?" 
 
 "Yes, I want to leave Venice to get to the moun- 
 tains." 
 
 ' ' Well ! and what do you expect to do in the moun- 
 tains?" 
 
 " The flowers all are out there now. Things grow there. 
 There is nothing growing in Venice. It is dull ; it is dead. ' ' 
 
 " Is that all?" asked Sebastian. 
 
 ' ' That's not all," she said. " It's a lot of things as well 
 as that." 
 
 Sebastian had not altered his position ; he was lying on 
 the large divan and accurately cutting the leaves of a book 
 with one of his tortoise-shell paper-knives. Under his eye- 
 lids he glanced up quickly at his niece, who was sitting by 
 the window and looking out to the lagoon beyond it. 
 
 " Well !" he suggested. " Dudley will be gone in a day 
 or two. ' ' 
 
 "Oh yes, he's going," said the girl. Her face was 
 flushed. She paused. Then suddenly she spoke, with 
 sudden effort and determination. " Uncle Sebastian," she 
 said, getting down from her seat, "Dudley's mind is like 
 that; like that glass," she said, pulling towards her and 
 half upsetting a crystal bowl upon the table. ' ' I can see 
 in and in, and all through and all around it. It's perfectly 
 frightful I mean to say, I am frightened at it. The glass 
 at least reflects." 
 
AFTERTHOUGHTS 319 
 
 " And Dudley retains?" suggested Sebastian. 
 "Everything all things," gasped the girl passionately. 
 
 Away in an expensive sitting-room of the Hotel Danieli, 
 Morrison's mother-in-law was writing a letter to one of her 
 intimate friends to a lady who lived in a large country 
 house not very far from Coneyhurst. 
 
 Here is a portion of her letter : 
 
 " The father is only a little Swiss doctor, but the Swiss have 
 ' ancestors,' I believe, just as we have. Only they ignore them, 
 now that they are become a republic tuck them away in their 
 attics. You remember the girl's mother, Mary, a silly, neurotic 
 woman, but a beauty in her way, and with money, which this girl 
 inherits, of course. The girl herself is quite distinguished, but 
 she can't dress herself. I should like to have the dressing of her : 
 some sort of a white tunic, I think, made by Paquin a hamadryad, 
 a Bacchante, and her hair loose behind her ears. She wore it 
 plaited up in a tight coronet above her forehead. It would be 
 difficult to deal with her hair ; rather too much of it, and her head 
 very small and beautifully formed and set on her neck. She is 
 not happy, and she is only half in love with Dudley. H e, of course, 
 is quite squared up in his mind about her. His family don't 
 usually go back upon things, though there are exceptions like 
 that wild and rather disagreeable Mr. Sebastian. I think Dudley 
 will marry her he's perfectly obstinate and she isn't; but there 
 will be plenty of ' scenes ' before then. She looks very young and 
 also very old. Just for the moment she's mad about life Italy, 
 all that sort of thing; and she has got it mixed up with love and 
 with marriage; but one knows quite well that this won't last. It 
 can't last, for she is altogether unusual, and he is very much like all 
 other ' nice ' young men, though he happens to have fallen in love 
 with this particular woman. She is good quite pure and straight, 
 and she'll never do a wrong thing; she is tiresomely good, but she 
 is an untamed, and, what is more, an untameable piece of nature. 
 He has accepted discipline all his life, and will force it on others. 
 She is unfathomable and unteachable even to herself. Well, it's 
 all rather funny and interesting; but in a sense one can't help 
 envying our humdrum Dudley James his possession of a real, live 
 hamadryad. She's pure enough, as I said before, 7 ^ 
 
 add,ed the woman who, together with her objectionable 
 correspondent, was perfectly acquainted with girls of 
 another type 
 
 " she will only be miserable, but she will never be ' broken in.' 
 And what is quite certain is, she never can be the normal, orderly 
 
320 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 wife of a British officer or county squire or whatever Dudley ends 
 by being. And the other certainly is that Dudley will never, never, 
 NEVER be himself a Pan or a Satyr ! I am not sure that the girl 
 is quite human," 
 
 the letter rambled on, 
 
 " but men and virtuous women will always be fascinated by some- 
 thing hauntingly pathetic in her eyes. I quite hope, anyway, 
 Charles may not see her. He's another of those strange, virtuous, 
 inhuman creatures. Our May is growing heartily sick of him. 
 You see. . . ." 
 
 The letter continued in a vein which we have no desire to 
 preserve. 
 
 Morrison himself took it down to the post. As he passed 
 through the hall a German Backfisch, fanning herself with 
 her pocket-handkerchief, exclaimed: "What a noble 
 man ! ' ' But the young English gentleman with the 
 straight sad eyes neither saw nor heard her. 
 
CHAP TEE XXVIII 
 
 THE SORKOW OF LOVB 
 
 " The quarrel of the sparrows in the eaves, 
 The full round moon, and the star-laden sky, 
 And the loud song of the ever-singing leaves, 
 Had hid away earth's old and weary cry. 
 
 " And then you came, with those red, mournful lips. 
 And with you came the whole of this world's tears, 
 And all the trouble of her labouring ships, 
 And all the anguish of her myriad years. 
 
 " And now the sparrows warring in the eaves, 
 The cold, pale moon, the white stars in the sky, 
 And the loud chanting of the unquiet leaves, 
 Are shaken with earth'g old and weary cry." 
 
 W. B. YEATS. 
 
 LINDA slept but little that night. Sebastian's words about 
 11 society," about the irrevocableness of her entry there, 
 had somehow quieted her for the moment, for she was a 
 strange mixture of rebelliousness and of acceptance. The 
 fact, too, that Dudley was going a long way away from her 
 gave her a certain sense of delay and security. One whole 
 part of her nature demanded the contact with Dudley why 
 not cling to that part ? But first she must explain to Dudley 
 exactly how she felt. She was certain of that she must 
 be honest with her lover she must explain, and then, per- 
 haps, all would be well. Very early she sat up in bed and 
 she wrote her note. " I feel I must speak to you," she 
 said. "Come as early as you can. I must talk to you 
 here." 
 
 Just about the same hour Dudley had a letter from his 
 father. Mr. James did not oppose the marriage exactly, 
 
 321 21 
 
322 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 and he did not forbid it. Money played a rather important 
 part in all the calculations of Mr. James, and Linda cer- 
 tainly had money. But he said that he objected to the 
 marriage of cousins, that there were " peculiarities about 
 Swiss people " ; also, he said that " soldiers on foreign ser- 
 vice " should think very seriously before they involved a 
 wife in their "roving careers." 
 
 Dudley opened his father's letter after he had opened 
 Linda's, and he stuffed the latter into his pocket, for both 
 were inconvenient. He had been early to the Lido to 
 swim in the open sea ; he was fresh and in perfect physical 
 health ; he desired no questions or controversies ; he had 
 only one more day in Venice, and this he wished to enjoy. 
 He walked at once to the Palazzo Molinaro, where Linda 
 received him in her cousin's sitting-room. She had on a 
 white muslin dress with small black velvet bows ; she was 
 hot and flushed ; -the heat and excitement of all the days 
 before, combining with her sleepless night, had exhausted 
 her strength. She had fully prepared herself for this meet- 
 ing with Dudley, but when he was in front of her, and close 
 beside her, a little puzzled, a little pained, the old thrill of 
 joy in his presence went straight again to her girlish heart. 
 
 "It's just this, Dudley," she said, forcing herself to speak 
 to him. "It's somehow like this : I love all sorts of things 
 which you would scarcely know or think important. And 
 these things I shouldn't get in England or in India. And 
 then, you see, I might worry and want them I mean, I've 
 been thinking " 
 
 Dudley tried to understand. ' ' But these are all such little 
 things," he said at last. " I mean, if you really love me. 
 They're all only little things. And you said you loved me ?' ' 
 ' Yes, I do, I do love you. But I love all sorts of 
 other things as well. It's not people, it's things. I mean 
 now, for instance, when I'm not quite well " 
 
 " Not well?" said her lover, aghast and unquiet. 
 
 " Oh yes, I'm well, I'm all right really. But I'm tired. 
 And then, I was afraid that when you were gone. ..." 
 
THE SORROW OF LOVE 323 
 
 " But if that's all, come to England, too, Linda. Mother 
 would love to have you, and father, too." (Dudley tried 
 to forget the letter he had crushed in his pocket.) " Any- 
 how, you mustn't stay here in Venice. It's too hot. It 
 will hurt you. Come to England." 
 
 " No, it's home I want," almost sobbed the girl. " It's 
 the mountains. I seem to want the mountains. ' ' 
 
 " But sometimes you say that you hate the mountains, 
 and that you simply can't bear to live amongst them." 
 
 "Well, I don't want England," she said with abrupt 
 inconsequence. 
 
 He thought for a little while, his handsome head bent 
 down. Then : ' ' You are not quite well ," he said. ' Why 
 not have a rest?" 
 
 " But it's your last day in Venice, and we must be 
 together on your last day in Venice." 
 
 The next day Linda was in a high fever, but she struggled 
 to be up and to say good-bye to Dudley. He knew so little of 
 illness ; he saw she was hot, but he never guessed she was 
 really ill. He took her in his arms, for he loved and he 
 needed her with all the strength of a lover's heart, and she 
 let herself go once again to his love ; she was weary and 
 sick, she could not remonstrate, and she sobbed long after 
 he had left her. 
 
 Walpurga got the doctor and they put her to bed. For 
 days upon days she lay there tossing ; her nature seemed 
 stretched and she could not rest. The great cool room went 
 swaying and swinging up and round and about her head. 
 Everything that had ever happened in the world of people 
 seemed to her now but a spent, fantastic dream. Yet the 
 natural things were real enough. She saw how the gen- 
 tians grew in bright blue bunches along the Alpine bogs, 
 and the cotton grass and white pinguicula. She saw how 
 the raspberries ripened in shady places amongst the wild 
 cinerarias. She saw the lonely shepherd-boys high on the 
 Alps where the arnicas grow. But she did not see the 
 
324 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 cities or the palaces ; she did not dwell on Cardinale she 
 thought nothing at all about the books, or the pictures ; she 
 did not even want her Uncle Sebastian. 
 
 As she got a little better she began to read, and every- 
 thing she read seemed totally different from whafc it had 
 ever seemed before, longer, duller, less like life. She had 
 a thirst for snow, for the. little streams which run from the 
 glaciers down through the meadows where the marigolds 
 grow, and the pink polygonum and other freshening flowers. 
 The austere presence of her Cousin Walpurga alarmed her ; 
 the quiet Italian doctor, with clear grey eyes, which some- 
 times seemed to pierce beyond her heart, and even to reach 
 her soul, frightened and upset her; but she trusted the 
 doctor, for clever doctors know so much of mental suffering. 
 He scolded her gently for her illness, but said that fever 
 freed the blood, and that of course she must not hurry and 
 it was nothing serious a touch of the sun, a chill from the 
 hills where he heard she had walked too early and late. And 
 the lover had gone off to England ? Well I well ! Dio mio ! 
 She was young. Young plants must struggle till they meet 
 the light. He would bring his own little girl to see her. 
 
 Linda passionately loved young children ; perhaps they 
 were the only human things which really touched her 
 inward heart and shook it to its foundations. The beauti- 
 ful little girl with solemn Italian eyes came and sat on a 
 chair by her bed, and strung some blue Venetian beads, put- 
 ting them very deliberately, as well-trained children do, on 
 a table, according to their size. She was only eight years 
 old, but she was precise and self-possessed, and she had 
 been told not to talk very much to the pretty signorina. 
 Linda lay with her cheek on her hands and watched the 
 child, attempting not to weep. But the needs of all good 
 women swept across her tired heart. Her little note to 
 Dudley that night was longer than those which had gone 
 before, tenderer, too, and fuller. 
 
 Sebastian had left Venice. The heat was overmuch for 
 him, and he had returned to his English home. Thence 
 
THE SORROW OF LOVE 325 
 
 he attempted to bring reason to the heart of his niece, first 
 by kindness, during the worst part of her illness, and next 
 by a series of caustic sallies and rallyings. 
 
 " For God's sake pull yourself together, my dear," he pleaded in 
 one of his letters; "satiated and glutted by the contemplation of 
 your own small self, you will wither and die. Stand up. Do 
 something or other ! Settle to marry Dudley, or else chuck him 
 but do it definitely. Life, after all, is not very long, and when 
 even a quite young tree begins to rot at the root, it is soon choked 
 off by other trees, and withers and falls in a season. You are far 
 too good for that sort of thing you've a whole long life ahead 
 of you." 
 
 In another place he wrote : 
 
 " There is a dreadful dose of your maternal grandmother in you, 
 and a lot of your mother, too. These ladies were all brains and no 
 body. They at once undermined and ennobled our tiresome family 
 record. . . ." 
 
 And again : 
 
 " When you get better you must settle to something. You must 
 read, or you must work. Anyhow, you must do something. You 
 simply dare not drift you have too much energy and self-respect 
 for that sort of an idle game. There are two alternatives : you 
 must play hard at life and have all the background painted in for 
 you by underlings (this were a dull business, you must admit?), or 
 you must make yourself live life, conduct it down to its meanest 
 details. It's no use pretending that lots of life won't bore you; 
 it bores us all if we are only honest about it. Look at Labour ! 
 But we will not come to all that sorry quarrel yet. Boredom is 
 half of the job of life; even when we work, boredom is the other 
 half of all our portion. But with, or without, Dudley, it is entirely 
 certain that you must hammer out your own salvation, for you will 
 never be one to sit idly by. 
 
 " There is something else I wanted to say to you; it is this you 
 have got what is called the artistic temperament, and no one but 
 yourself can save you from the destructive forces of this thing. 
 Do you know what people mean when they talk of the ' artistic 
 temperament'? Most of them don't know themselves what they 
 mean, but I will tell you what it means. It means the case of a 
 noble and creative mind at war with the low ideals of everyday 
 existence. The prophets had the artistic temperament, the poets 
 have it; but these have the power of expression, through work, 
 and I doubt whether you have got this latter. You may have it for 
 the moment, but it often passes with the toils of marriage. No 
 
326 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 one can save you from its tempests but yourself; no one can row 
 you into the calm waters. But the harbour of refuge is there all 
 the same. 
 
 "Remember this, my child," added the man who was himself 
 enmeshed, "and remember, too, that I love you, and am always 
 your devoted uncle and friend, 
 
 " SEBASTIAN CRANE." 
 
 On the night that Sebastian posted that letter there was 
 a final scene with his most reputable brother-in-law, with 
 whom his relations had long been strained. But 'the 
 inquisitive butler who brought in their port could make 
 neither head nor tail of Mr. Sebastian's strange denuncia- 
 tion of the Crane pedigree. For it was generally under- 
 stood in the elegant summary of the servants' hall that 
 " poor Miss Mary had married beneath her." 
 
 " I tell you that you and I, we Cranes and James, are 
 mushrooms mushrooms of the eighteenth century!" 
 declared Sebastian. "Linda's paternal ancestry quarters 
 more nobility in one generation than ours have done , or are 
 likely to do, till death conceals us in the dust. My sister 
 Mary was lifted up, not downwards, by her marriage. If 
 your respectable son is not jilted by Linda Caflisch ; if that 
 priceless creature destroys her life by frittering it away on 
 our stupidities and inadequacies; then, indeed, there is 
 some chance of enlivening once again our torpid and our 
 tiresome blood ! ' ' 
 
 Mr. James made no reply, but he mentally noted that 
 the moment had arrived when it would be well for him and 
 his brother-in-law to sever their mutual household connec- 
 tion. So Mr. James kept on the big town house, and a few 
 months later Sebastian took up his permanent abode in the 
 little old Elizabethan manor house which was left to him 
 by his mother. 
 
 This delightful old building lay smothered away in a 
 drowsy portion of Somerset. It had a trout-stream running 
 lazily along the bottom of the quiet old park crowded with 
 ancient timber. Bee orchises grew on the downs beyond, 
 and there were foxgloves in the copses, and yellow cumfrey, 
 
THE SOKROW OF LOVE 3<27 
 
 and purple orchises with spotted leaves in all the woods and 
 water-meadows round. 
 
 " This house is my very own home, but it is your home, too, my 
 dear," Sebastian wrote to Linda. " Come to me here whenever 
 you can, or whenever you feel in the mood to. I shall leave it all 
 to you in my will, remember that, my dear; your mother loved it 
 when we were children, and when we got away together here she 
 was always more happy and always more her real and better self." 
 
 When this last letter came, Linda was stronger. The 
 fever had worked itself out of her system, leaving her white, 
 and limp, and thin ; she went down into the garden, and 
 she sat by the big stone table under the fir-tree and read for 
 a while profoundly. She was awake to human life again, 
 and in a way that she had never been before. 
 
 Sebastian had left her a selection of novels and of poetry. 
 She never cared much for history, it always failed to con- 
 vince her. Why should one country be different to another 
 country ? What was the use or the meaning of nationality ? 
 It was only the goodness of individuals which really mat- 
 tered, and their beauty, and the splendour of Nature. 
 
 Linda did not care for science. To her it seemed to rob 
 Nature of all romance. What could it matter that man 
 should find out a few more details? God, who had made 
 things, knew always so very much more. Let there be 
 mystery and Night stars whose distance from our tiny 
 planet need not be measured by our puny calculations. 
 And let the beautiful flowers grow without our cuttings and 
 dissections. Man could never make things better, only 
 worse in many ways. Linda's grandmother, of whom 
 Sebastian wrote so wittily, had once, to the horror of a large 
 family dinner-party, proclaimed her view that "Man was 
 simply the bad accident of Nature." And although Linda 
 knew very little about it, this, too, was her own unconscious 
 opinion . 
 
 In the house above, Walpurga was preparing for depar- 
 ture the linen was piled to the summit of every shelf in 
 
328 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 the great walnut linen-press, and packed with little bags of 
 bergamot and thyme. 
 
 In ten days more, on the first day of August, Linda and 
 her cousin were crossing the lagoons, and rumbling over 
 the great hot plains till they came to the Alps, which they 
 crossed at dawn. By the end of that second day they had 
 reached the upland valleys of their home. 
 
 How all had changed for Linda. She had left these 
 plains as a child ; she came back now a woman. 
 
 She walked to her own little room like one in dreams. It 
 was a very hot evening, but all within was fresh and clean 
 and homely, smelling of turpentine and clove carnations. 
 The panelled ceiling seemed to press down almost to the 
 top of the huge wooden bed by the window. A large white 
 quilt which her Aunt Christina had been knitting for years 
 was spread on the bed. Her English mother had died in 
 that bed, and she herself had first seen life there. Instinc- 
 tively Linda went to the wall where the photograph of a 
 family group was framed . It was the group taken at Coney- 
 hurst about ten years or so ago, when she was a little girl 
 of eight. She sat crouched up in the foreground looking 
 cross in a clean white frock, the heavy masses of her 
 hair let loose upon her shoulders by her English maid. 
 Dudley, in a Norfolk coat, and very stiff and cross himself, 
 was crouched beside her. At their back kneeled Joan, 
 earnest and cool, her clear face cut like a cameo or a rare 
 Greek gem. 
 
 Linda looked at the group and then she leaned out of the 
 window. A shimmering mist of heat rested on the distant 
 peaks and filled the valleys and the forests ; the village was 
 very quiet, for most of the inhabitants were up on the Alps, 
 and only the older people left behind to mind the houses in 
 the valleys. The water of the fountain splashed in the 
 wooden trough ; a woman was there with a copper pail 
 which clanked as she filled it ; some old men smoked on a 
 bench by the churchyard wall, and the hens went crooning 
 
THE SORROW OF LOVE 329 
 
 amongst the dust-heaps. Behind them all the great snow- 
 mountains shone, remote and solemn. It was a scene of 
 extraordinary peace, very unlike the Venetian street, very 
 unlike, indeed, to Cardinale. 
 
 Linda sat on in the window. Presently she took up her 
 letters which were lying on the table beside her. There 
 was a big envelope from Dudley, a new portrait of himself 
 done by a London photographer. "I knew you would 
 rather have that sort of thing," he wrote in his letter. " I 
 can't say I like it myself, indeed, it's pretty rotten, I 
 think, so I send you one of my older ones as well." The 
 older portrait was done in full regimentals. Dudley looked 
 his best in uniform to the eyes of all ordinary persons. But 
 the first portrait showed him in the old tweed suit which 
 he had worn when he came to Venice ; and the man's most 
 perfect beauty was revealed in it, for there was little of 
 the tailor to hamper or mar it. The fact that Dudley had 
 submitted to sit for such a portrait convinced the girl of 
 her cousin's love for her more than any other word or action 
 which he could ever have chosen. Instinctively she placed 
 the proof beside the first old group, and then she went to 
 her aunt in the hall. 
 
 Then an extraordinary peace, a calm contentment, 
 seemed for a while to come over Linda. Various causes 
 contributed to her present peace, and the biggest of these 
 was probably her temporary detachment. She was prac- 
 tically alone ; alone to live and enjoy the natural beauty 
 for which her inner being hungered. That bewildering 
 buzz of curious and highly developed men, which in Italy 
 had burst upon and had distracted all her youth, was for the 
 time removed. Basil was away in the Engadine ; Dudley 
 had started for India ; her father only came and went beset 
 with ordinary work and worries. There was no one to 
 absorb her reserve of vitality. In the little arbour of moun- 
 tain-ashes she sat very quiet through the morning with her 
 books. Often she went long walks through the woods and 
 
330 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 the valleys ; often she helped old friends with their work in 
 the fields and the gardens. The news of her engagement 
 was known in Trins, but there was something remote and 
 indefinite about it, and her old friends made small comment. 
 At night she lay on the great wooden bed pushed up to 
 the window the steady summer stars, the splendid moon 
 shining on her pillow, friendly but impassive ; the sounds 
 of the river below in the valley borne up to her in quiet 
 pantings. 
 
CHAPTEE XXIX 
 
 THE HOME OF SEBASTIAN 
 
 THE ALIEN 
 
 " I am come to lands where I have no concern, 
 
 Out of the proper places that were mine. 
 
 What should it be to me that the stars shine, 
 And fires of sunrise and of sunset burn ? 
 Your ways and woes I am not fain to learn. 
 
 O men that weep, that falter and repine, 
 
 O men that are drunk with longing or with wine, 
 That always pass me by, always, always return ! 
 
 " For you come back; and unessential stars 
 
 And crowds that have not where to lay their head, 
 And the white barques lift their returning spars 
 
 Upon the moonlight when the day lies dead. 
 That which was mine beyond the unseen bars 
 
 Comes not, but all vain things come back instead." 
 
 GOULD. 
 
 AT 'the end of September Linda left the mountains and 
 travelled to England. She had had invitations from all 
 sorts of people who were anxious to see her, and doors of 
 many different houses stood open wide to greet the rare and 
 curious bride of Dudley James. People of very varying 
 types had always been drawn towards Linda, and even as a 
 child in the decorous home of Mrs. James she had attracted 
 the attention of any kindly, and always of any eccentric, 
 guest, for she had an odd way of drifting into the lives of 
 other people. 
 
 Linda passionately loved human beauty ; it came only 
 second to natural beauty with her. No jealous thought had 
 ever entered her generous and gifted nature ; and though 
 
 331 
 
332 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 men were ready to love her, it was to women, and to beau- 
 tiful and distinguishd ones incapable of jealousy and petty 
 malice, that her own soul went forth. 
 
 The great homes of 'England had a strange attraction for 
 her. The studied silence of the immense lawns, the long 
 dim avenues of lime or oak, the splendid " neglect " of deer 
 parks, the Italian pictures hanging in great marble halls, 
 the curiously naked statues, dusted by an army of proper 
 British housemaids ; the books, the greenhouse and flowers ; 
 the ancient mirrors, and all the cared-for splendour of the 
 past which made so perfect, if so artificially studied, a back- 
 ground for the great English ladies and their prosperous 
 children these things made full appeal to the passionate 
 senses of the girl. These things drew forth a something 
 strong, if fleeting, in her nature. 
 
 But these were only a little portion. And there were 
 multitudes of different things from which her whole being 
 recoiled with terrified and shuddering horror when she com- 
 pared them with her mountain world, and with that other 
 Italian world on which she had entered only this last spring- 
 time. There were the seething seas of squalid dwellings, 
 with the cloak of darkness always over them. When Linda 
 looked down from an English train on these, she seemed as 
 though she beheld a nightmare ; as though the sun and the 
 stars, the rain and the blessed winter snow-storms never, 
 never would reach to the children playing in these mean 
 places. And there were dwellings almost more horrible 
 still , and those were the dwellings of ' ' respectable ' ' 
 suburbs; the rows upon rows of tiny houses, with little 
 smothered , mouldering , or frozen ' ' gardens. ' ' There were 
 horrible villas set amongst laurels, where people existed 
 and gossiped together. An endless, chaotic, passionless, 
 meaningless world it all appeared to her frightened and, 
 perhaps, untractable vision. 
 
 The happiest and least clouded of Linda's English days 
 
THE HOME OF SEBASTIAN 333 
 
 were those which she spent with Sebastian in his south 
 country home. There she felt herself and there she was 
 alive. 
 
 Regularly she wrote to Dudley, and regularly his answers 
 came back to her short and dry and rather dull, but quite 
 unruffled, and full of eventual plans for their mutual life 
 together. His regiment was to remain in India till well 
 into April, and it would be impossible for him to get away 
 till then, he said. He hoped she would ' ' understand,' ' and 
 that she would be "happy staying in England." It was 
 perfectly clear to Dudley that the more his future wife re- 
 mained in England, the better it would be for himself and 
 for her, and for all concerned in their future welfare. The 
 mental horizon of men of his nature covers but a very 
 limited area, and Dudley was a pasha at heart. He 
 would rope in his wife as soon as he possibly could manage 
 to do so. Dudley, of course, did not know it himself, but he 
 really admired the system of the harem as far as his own 
 women-folk were concerned. Life was flowing easily for 
 Linda now, he thought, and she herself made little resist- 
 ance to his plans ; she had no personal responsibilities in 
 England, so the actual toils of its life did not encumber or 
 distress her. She merely skimmed the cream of other 
 people's lives; and the natural setting, though she would 
 never have selected it, had no real horror for her as yet, 
 for she was still in a position to alter it, or to fly from it 
 at will. 
 
 And thus the splendid autumn days passed by and drew 
 into December ; and Linda had promised to spend Christ- 
 mas with her Uncle Sebastian. 
 
 Everything smelt good in Sebastian's manor house ; there 
 were Eastern rugs upon the polished floors, and big bear- 
 skins were stretched upon his hearth. He had a passion for 
 wax candles, and his sitting-rooms were lighted with these 
 in heavy branched candelabra. A demon of wholly pagan 
 frolic had possessed him, and he had determined to open 
 
334 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 his doors on Christmas Eve to all the children and the old 
 women of the village. Sebastian was fond of old women, 
 and he was a charming " gossip." A tree with a blaze of 
 candles on it had been prepared in the raftered hall. A 
 large quantity of Chinese lanterns had been hung and 
 lighted, as the night was still and frosty, all up the long 
 lime avenue which led from the lane to the front-door ; 
 and as some lanterns still remained they hung them on 
 various old thorn-trees and oaks scattered throughout the 
 park. 
 
 Inside the little old house so low, so moss-grown were 
 the old stones that they seemed a part of the very nature 
 about them inside, there were piles of apples and oranges 
 in silver baskets, and of crackers and raisins and lumps of 
 crystallized fruits ; and in an Italian brazier, sandalwood 
 and lavender smouldered on red-hot cinders. 
 
 The clergyman came and his sister, and a rather eccentric 
 aristocrat whom ' ' nobody called on," and one or two neigh- 
 bours; and all said, " How charming is Mr. Sebastian 
 when he chooses," and, " How dear is that niece with the 
 foreign name ! ' ' 
 
 A fiddler came from a neighbouring colliery, and the 
 children danced and ate their oranges. At the end of the 
 party Sebastian put on his big fur coat and stood on the 
 steps with Linda beside him, saying good-bye to their 
 guests. The stars shone very cold and still, with that half- 
 muffled light peculiar to the stars in southern England. 
 When the last small child had disappeared, and the last 
 old woman had made her curtsey, Sebastian and Linda, like 
 children themselves, went up the park and put out the 
 Chinese lanterns. The mistletoe hung in heavy branches 
 from the old apple-trees ; the grass below was stiffened a 
 little by hoar frost, but the ground itself was soft and moist 
 and still. It was a typical south country night of winter. 
 Peace immemorial breathed from the park with its trees 
 and silent ponds, and the little old manor within it, with 
 the light pouring forth from its threshold. Away in the 
 
THE HOME OF SEBASTIAN 335 
 
 village the clock struck ten ; and further away in some dis- 
 tant kennels the hounds began to bark, and an owl flew by 
 on silent wing. 
 
 Then the strange, incongruous pair of people, who seemed 
 somehow to fit, and yet to be foreign to, their surroundings, 
 came back from the outside nature, closing the door behind 
 them. Sebastian's Venetian servant came from the kitchen 
 and locked the house-door and drew the heavy crimson 
 damask over the mullioned windows. A bright fire burned 
 on the hearth, and Sebastian drew the cardinal's chair well 
 up to the blaze. The room was otherwise only lighted by 
 the candles in tall silver sconces ; one or two Italian pic- 
 tures, dark and old, hung on the walls. There was a mix- 
 ture of something early Victorian, yet very old indeed, and 
 essentially comfortable, in Sebastian's home; and Linda, 
 who loved luxurious ease, although she also loved the aus- 
 terity of mountains, felt at home and in warm and ques- 
 tioning vein that Christmas night. 
 
 "It's pagan, after all, isn't it?" she said, " pagan much 
 more than Christian?" 
 
 ' What is pagan?" asked Sebastian, lighting his pipe. 
 
 " Christmas is pagan. I mean the tree, and the lights 
 in the orchard all that is very pagan? How happy the 
 clergyman was," she went on. "He looked quite a 
 different man from what he looks in church on Sundays." 
 
 ' ' That is the whole point," said Sebastian. ' ' Christian 
 teachings, as we often enough teach them, clash with our 
 Western happiness they jar. He was merely natural 
 it's not natural for him to be truly Christian from an Eng- 
 lish point of view. He is a very nice man, but he is a 
 Western man, and yet he tries to be a Christian Church- 
 man. We are all of us quite nice people ; but we get wor- 
 ried and harassed ; we don't allow ourselves to grow up 
 normally. We hamper our growth with doctrines we can- 
 not assimilate, and which have been utterly twisted and dis- 
 torted by all our forbears for many centuries. We stifle 
 our lives with hide-bound prejudices and preconceptions of 
 
336 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 ' virtue ' and of ' social duty. ' Both are mistakes both are 
 unlike Christ " 
 
 " But Christ himself?" . . . hazarded Linda. 
 
 Sebastian took a book from the shelf beside him. It 
 was a beautiful hand-printed copy of St. John's Gospel, 
 bound in black morocco. He turned the pages till he came 
 to chapter four. Then he began to read aloud. He read 
 with a curious spiritual revelation as it were, and always 
 in later life these words came back as a help and a healing 
 to the heart of his listener. 
 
 He closed the book, and he put ifc by, and looked for a 
 long while into the fire . ' ' Christ chose his company well , ' ' 
 he said. " He supped with publicans, with strangers, and 
 with sinners. He often supped with rich men, too, for He 
 knew how much the so-called rich have got to suffer and 
 endure. But it is our stifling bourgeois ' comforts,' our 
 pretensions and our condemnations, which have no appeal 
 for such as He He would only have passed them by. He 
 loved good company and sensible living. He loved Life 
 in this life, and He loved to live it honestly and simply. 
 He would have loved our lanterns under the mistletoe, I'm 
 sure of that ; but to-morrow, in the church, when they are 
 singing the Hebrew chants and reading of some of the 
 cruel Hebrew doings which He expressly came here to con- 
 demn, I scarcely think He'd enter?" 
 
 There was a long pause. Then Linda knelt up reverently 
 before the fire, and, looking into it, she asked quite simply : 
 
 " What do you think He actually did for people like you 
 and me, Uncle Sebastian?" 
 
 Sebastian clasped his hands together. "I think," he 
 said after a long pause, " that He has taught true people 
 how to be more bravely truthful. He has made otherwise 
 comfortable people uncomfortable. He has comforted the 
 really poor and this includes the 'rich poor,' of whom 
 there is and has always been a multitude as great, perhaps, 
 as that of the poor in purse. He is a solace and a shelter 
 for all our struggles and our outward failures; yes, He 
 
THE HOME OF SEBASTIAN 337 
 
 understands and He even accepts and loves all those things 
 which the world denounces as our ' failures.' But I think 
 that His wide spirit is very much too big for most people 
 I think it has only permeated a very little way into the 
 actual heart of our material West. I think that the West 
 is really in the normal course of its daily business even in 
 its pursuit of ' Duty ' at daggers drawn with the actual 
 doctrines of Christ. Individuals in the West may, and do, 
 love Him ; but what of the nations as a whole ? We dress 
 Him up in a thousand incongruous dresses, but we don't 
 accept Him as He was and is, we don't really accept Him. 
 If we accepted Him we should not be so prosperous in the 
 security of our Island. We certainly don't love Him 
 how should there be war, for instance, and all the prepara- 
 tory, premeditated machinery of war, between nations if 
 really we did love Christ?" Sebastian paused again. 
 Then he went on : " How cruel what are called by the 
 Western world ' good people ' can be even to such as you 
 and me, Linda, . . . And yet, what about those so- 
 called good people with their hide-bound pursuit of duty 
 and of virtue? 5 ' Again he waited. Then he looked for a 
 little while across at Linda. "It is about you and your 
 marriage, Linda dear, that I cannot help thinking to-night, 
 and also because you asked me that question. You have 
 such a very strong spiritual and mystical leaning some- 
 where deep down in your nature. This, of course, will 
 grow with your years but how will it help you, ex- 
 cept to make you suffer? And are you strong enough 
 to survive such sufferings and such outward humiliation 
 and sense of failure as those which I foresee for you 
 if you carry through this thing which you propose? 
 Eemember, you propose to live henceforward with a 
 ' ' man of action ' ' a man who devotes himself to what 
 he has interpreted as his ' duty ' as to a sort of fetish, 
 but regardless quite of emotional persons like yourself. 
 Dudley certainly will not bring in any question of Christ's 
 real teaching in his controversies with you and your develop- 
 
 22 
 
338 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 ing ideals. His friends and his relations will do it even less 
 than Dudley himself. It would clash with their accepted 
 ideals of ' duty ' if they did so. It would clash with what 
 has made their Empire strong and triumphant over all 
 other states and empires. You have already lived with 
 a ' man of duty,' namely, with your own splendid father ; 
 you knew you loved our beloved Joan. But remember 
 that the humane ' duty ' of people like your father and 
 Joan is a thing as far removed from the ' vision ' of men 
 like Dudley as some little beautiful unseen moon of 
 Jupiter is to the burning of a gas-lamp. Englishmen 
 and they are strong and wonderful in their own fashion 
 really and finally appeal to their homes to their Empire 
 and not to their religion for a final approval. They are 
 strong, yes ; but are they really Christian? . . . Do you 
 know what Walt Whitman said about duty?" 
 
 " ' I give nothing as duties; 
 
 What others give as duties, I give as loving impulses. 
 Shall I give the heart's action as a Duty?' 
 
 " Do you know that wonderful poem of William Blake's, 
 called ' Mary ' ? Blake certainly was one of those who under- 
 stand. Some day you might read his ' Marriage of Heaven 
 and Hell ' however, don't hurry about this now. But 
 remember that it the ' duty-loving ' people who will tear 
 your erring heart in tatters, if they only can ; for you too 
 love Duty fiercely, but in a way different to theirs, and 
 they will certainly never forgive you if you are at once good 
 and yourself, and yet quite different to their ideal of good- 
 ness, and to themselves. . . . You asked me what I 
 thought that Christ had really done for us. I think 
 that He has left to us, one and all, the endless comfort of 
 feeling that there is someone who ultimately understands. 
 We feel certain that He at least will accept the better part 
 of our higher striving and following of Vision, whatever 
 form it happen to take and if only it is sincere. Jesus of 
 Nazareth was Himself, of course, the very summing-up of 
 genius. If we have the smallest spark of genius and you 
 
THE HOME OF SEBASTIAN 339 
 
 yourself have a touch of it this following of Vision is dif- 
 ferent to the following of the mass of the people , and there- 
 fore the mass will disdain it." 
 
 Sebastian went to his bedroom, and he brought back 
 with him the little battered copy of the Apocrypha which 
 had belonged to his own strange and sometimes unhappy 
 mother. He brought also her own New Testament, and 
 first he opened this at the seventh chapter of the Acts, and 
 read verses forty-seven to sixty. He paused, and then he 
 spoke again and almost to himself : " Gross men," he said, 
 " have stoned the prophets, the poets, and even the purest 
 women since time began. They do it still, here in 
 England, as they did it elsewhere." Then he opened his 
 Apocrypha and he began very quietly to read in the third 
 chapter of the Book of Wisdom. He read aloud the first 
 ten verses ; then he went on to chapter five and he read 
 to verse seventeen : 
 
 " *' ... Then shall the righteous man stand in great boldness 
 before the face of such as have afflicted him, and made no account 
 of his labours. When they see it, they shall be troubled with 
 terrible fear, and shall be amazed at the strangeness of his salva- 
 tion, so far beyond all that they looked for. And they, repenting 
 and groaning for anguish of spirit, shall say within themselves : 
 this was he whom we had sometime in derision, and a proverb of 
 reproach. We fools accounted his life madness, and his end to be 
 without honour. Now is he numbered among the children of God, 
 and his lot is among the saints. . . .' ' 
 
 Sebastian's voice had broken a little as he read these 
 wonderful words of consolation to those who on this earth 
 have seemed to fail, and who yet eventually have shone in 
 glory. But he seemed to put forth into peaceful waters as 
 he dwelt on the piece I have quoted above, and there 
 was a friendly, hopeful look in his usually rather tired eyes 
 as he went and put the book back on its shelf again. 
 
 It was long jfast midnight when they parted, but Linda's 
 mind seemed spiritually clearer, her heart and all her inward 
 being, larger and more fulfilled than it had been since child- 
 
340 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 hood, when Pfarrer Caflisch was preaching his powerful 
 sermons to the children's class in Trins. 
 
 On Christmas morning the village children walked primly 
 into the musty old church in their strange trimmed Sunday 
 hats, and Sebastian's views on the incongruities of East 
 and West were pretty well confirmed. These English 
 children sang the Christmas hymns in high shrill voices, 
 somehow conveying the impression that both the angels and 
 the shepherds who watched their flocks on the Syrian hills 
 that night such centuries ago, and such thousands of miles 
 away, were British-born ! Linda sat in the high-backed 
 pew behind the stone effigies of her remote maternal 
 ancestors, and she felt as though something in her heart 
 would burst at the familiar strains. The children 
 touched one another when they noticed her smiling on 
 them. Miss Linda Caflisch was all very well, they felt 
 indeed a fearful attraction towards her, but she bore a foreign 
 name, she had a " foreign way with her," and the elders of 
 that homely village distrusted all foreigners indeed, they 
 might unconsciously pray for them as ' ' foreigners and 
 sinners " in their litany. They had long made a tacit sort 
 of agreement in their own minds that the kings of the East 
 were real kings like their own English Kings ; just as so 
 many Christians do really think of St. Paul as a kind of 
 English don. 
 
 The service was rather a dead service, illumined by the 
 joy of the children, and the softening influences of memory 
 on uneventful lives. 
 
 On Christmas night a telegram came from Trins telling 
 Sebastian that Linda's father was dangerously ill with 
 sudden pneumonia ; it urged that she should start at once if 
 she would see him once again in life. The blow fell hard 
 and sudden, for there had been nothing to suggest illness in 
 the quiet and vigorous life of Doctor Caflisch, and Linda 
 felt stunned and staggered. She gathered together some 
 
THE HOME OF SEBASTIAN 341 
 
 small possessions, Sebastian himself packing her clothes 
 with feverish activity. He desired to go with her, but she 
 begged him not to ; he had got a chill from his Christmas 
 revel, and even from Sebastian, as from everything else, 
 her frightened soul desired escape. 
 
 It was pouring with rain as she drove away in a murky 
 dawn to the station. The trees which the Chinese lanterns 
 had so bravely lighted barely twenty-four hours since were 
 dripping now in the winter deluge ; the mud splashed up 
 from the wheels of her carriage, and things looked grim and 
 grey and void of any pagan splendour. Europe, too, looked 
 grey and dreary, the fields of France all sodden and black ; 
 but after Basle the rain was exchanged for a heavy pall of 
 snow ; the great snows had been delayed that winter and they 
 were falling now . Linda reached Chur late in the night , but 
 she pushed on toBeichenau by sledge ; there she took another 
 sledge, and began the final stage of her journey in the silent, 
 muffled cloak of the winter night. The man was unwilling 
 to start ; but realizing the necessity Doctor Caflisch was 
 dearly loved he consented at last. He harnessed two 
 strong horses to his little sledge, and they made what kind 
 of progress they might up the steep mountain roadway. 
 
 It had been snowing for forty-eight hours on end, and 
 every natural outline had been blurred and had disappeared 
 beneath one heavy shroud. The forests were gathered 
 together, the great boughs of the pines were joined into 
 single pyramids level with the ground. The houses, the 
 roads, the hedges and church-towers, all were huddled and 
 moulded together under this heavy winter fall. And still 
 the flakes came fluttering down in silent millions, down 
 and down ; and the lights on Linda's sledge showed only 
 a curious curtained world. In spite of her sorrow, this snow- 
 world soothed and even entranced her; and she lay back 
 under her rugs breathing it in with an almost hypnotic 
 sense of comfort and repose. 
 
 It was midnight when they drew into the village of Trins. 
 
342 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 The place seemed buried and dead ; but a man with a spade 
 and a lantern was in waiting by one of the first houses, 
 another by the village inn. The doctor was dearly loved ; 
 they were looking for his daughter to come to him. They 
 had cleared a narrow footpath to his house, and up this she 
 passed in a dazed and dazzled silence. She saw her home 
 with lights in the windows ; she went up the steps and into 
 the hall. A lamp was burning there, and one or two people 
 stood around the stove ; she asked no questions ; she went 
 up the stairs. 
 
 Her father was lying in her own room and on her mother's 
 bed ; her grandmother sat in the chair by his side , and 
 Christina stood by the foot of the bed. Death was at hand. 
 He was breathing painfully in hard, quick gasps, but he 
 was watching, too. His eyes turned to meet his daughter, 
 and she stood beside him perfectly still. She could not 
 speak ; she could not cry ; she wanted his message and she 
 knew he would give it. He had been the Truth to her all 
 her life, the human life, and now he spoke. 
 
 " Go on being good," he said. " Never give way. . . . 
 Be good like your mother. God will provide." 
 
 At this moment the door again opened, and Pfarrer 
 Caflisch came in. He turned to the window and threw it 
 farther open. 
 
 " Praise to God I" he cried with his wholesome, happy, 
 abundant vitality. " He is gone home, our brother ! Ah, 
 Linda, father is gone home !" 
 
 Then Linda got up from her knees and looked long down 
 on the dear, dead face. She turned to the door, and there 
 she saw the old coat hanging, worn and threadbare as he 
 had hung it up when he came in from working, with the 
 pleurisy upon him. And then, but not till then, she wept, 
 for it is ever the homely things which touch our human 
 hearts. The splendour of the spirit world, revealed by 
 death, had been an elevation too high for tears ; but the old 
 coat and Jth& story which it told her, tore at her woman's 
 
THE HOME OF SEBASTIAN 343 
 
 heart. Long and long she sat by the bed, pressing the poor 
 cold hands which had tended so many of the sorry wounds 
 of Earth and her misguided children. 
 
 The doctor's lips were tightly closed, as so often they had 
 been in life. In his death there was no going back and no 
 reluctance . 
 
 " God will provide." That was his message. 
 
CHAPTEE XXX 
 
 LONG AGO 
 
 < " Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow, 
 
 And faint the city gleams; 
 Rare the lone pastoral huts marvel not thou ! 
 The solemn peaks but to the stars are known, 
 But to the stars and the cold lunar beams; 
 Alone the sun arises, and alone 
 
 Spring the great streams." 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 So Linda had come back again, but to a homeless home. 
 Her childish heart, though faithful in so many things, had 
 been last spring estranged ; and now she felt uprooted, adrift 
 and rudderless upon the seas of life. 
 
 Two days later her father's body was laid in the earth. 
 Every cloud had left the sky ^ the day was still, the sun 
 shone quietly above the whitened world. The men of the 
 village had worked in gangs for hours to clear a space 
 in the churchyard big enough to hold a concourse of many 
 people. Mary's grave had been laid bare, and into it they 
 lowered now her husband's body. They sang the splendid 
 Lutheran hymn which nineteen years before they had sung 
 at Mary's burial ; the solemn voices of the men, some low, 
 some high, swelled forth in a kind of rugged comfort to the 
 valley and the mountains up above. Great walls of snow, 
 some four feet high, rose round the group beside the grave, 
 and Linda's figure, small and upright, seemed to stand 
 alone, and quite apart amidst the massive forms of the 
 peasant men, and of the old peasant women in their rusty 
 bonnets. 
 
 Some thoughtful hand had carefully laid the roots of the 
 
 blush-roses which Mary's mother had so loved, and which 
 
 344 
 
LONG AGO 345 
 
 her daughter had but carelessly tended as a child, in a little 
 heap by the side of the double grave. Later in the evening, 
 when the village was quiet and the sun had long since set, 
 Linda herself came back and, with her own hands, planted 
 the roses as best she could, covering them up with the frozen 
 sods. Then night closed in upon the quiet valley, a night 
 of stars and splendid planets, embosomed in a fathomless 
 depth of blue. Linda as a child had loved the night ; she 
 loved it still, but with a deeper passion ; for, young as she 
 was, she had already realized the tangle and the struggle in 
 which we somehow live, and from which there seems so 
 little means of any real escape. The night holds Peace. 
 
 It was bitterly cold, but Linda sat in her heavy cloak 
 on the bench by the doctor's door; she was thinking of 
 very many things, and her thoughts were strange for one 
 so young, so full of life and health, too. Why, she won- 
 dered, with so splendid a background to existence, should 
 man and woman suffer so, be so beset with care, so full of 
 strife and woe ? Peace and plenty were everywhere ; it 
 was only from man's heart that the sorrowful conflict, the 
 storms and the worries, came. From man did all ugliness, 
 distress, and jealousies arise and spread .for his own 
 destruction. 
 
 Here in the winter night, God's night, there was calm 
 profound ; and there was beauty, too. Oh, but beauty 
 beyond comparison ! 
 
 The fountain in the square trickled slowly over the 
 rounded cushions of solid grey ice ; now and again a cow 
 lowed in a neighbouring stall. Above the stars and the 
 planets shone like splendid jewels : Sirius and Orion and 
 the pale Pleides in all their glory ; whilst the great moun- 
 tains spread and reared their heads beneath those radiant 
 orbs. 
 
 " God will provide," the doctor had said. And God had 
 provided in noble measure for this one of His children and 
 yet ; and yet ... 
 
 In the weeks that followed, weeks of rearrangement and 
 
346 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 adjustment, Linda wrote various letters to Dudley. They 
 were sad or they were gay ; they were sometimes querulous ; 
 they were enough to puzzle any man, and certainly any 
 ordinary English lover. 'She told him of her father's death 
 and of the pain and loneliness it caused her ; she dwelt upon 
 the grandeur of her mountain home, and then she found 
 fault with the harsh and sometimes material minds of its 
 inhabitants. She told him of the doubts in her own mind, 
 and then she said how she needed strength and human love. 
 She wrote she was lonely, but also that she had "not 
 enough to do." As a matter of fact, she was really 
 exhausted by the strain of overmuch business coming so 
 quick on the top of new and strong emotions. Such pro- 
 perty as her father himself possessed was left entirely to 
 his child, and there was all her mother's money to be trans- 
 ferred and settled once again. 
 
 These letters naturally fretted Dudley, for he was an 
 Englishman and eminently consistent, whereas Linda was 
 partly " foreign," and, whatever her nationality, no power 
 could have made her consistent in his particular sense 
 of that word. 
 
 In January Christina was married to her old lover. The 
 marriage had long been arranged for that month, and there 
 was no sort of reason for altering the dates. Linda had 
 begged her grandmother to go on living in her first home, 
 but the old lady could not bring herself to inhabit so large a 
 house, and she had settled to join a brother and his wife 
 who lived in the neighbouring parish, to which Christina 
 had already migrated. 
 
 Thus, one by one, the links were broken which bound her 
 to her childhood's home ; and when her cousin, Pfarrer 
 Caflisch, was offered the living of Trins, she was glad to fall 
 in with his wishes and to accept his offer of renting her 
 house. She only reserved the right to keep for herself her 
 old room there. She then employed herself in sorting and 
 arranging the beautiful, but scanty, furniture, and in put- 
 
LONG AGO 347 
 
 ting things in order for the new owner. The answers from 
 Dudley to her own strange letters began to come in slowly ; 
 he grew rather sulky in his style, for he was naturally tired 
 of the girl's vagaries. He said he was sorry she should be 
 so unhappy, but really it was not his fault, and he could not 
 quite see why she clung so to Switzerland, for England 
 was "very jolly," and he had never himself cared for 
 " living abroad," and she herself " so often found fault 
 with her Alpine neighbours." 
 
 Thus January passed to February, February glided into 
 March. And one morning in early March something seemed 
 to stir in the world outside, and to call for Linda to come 
 out and join it. She put her papers carefully by, they were 
 mostly all in order now ; she told her maid she could go for 
 the day to see her friends in another village ; she shut the 
 door behind her and she went down the valley road. 
 
 The forest was calling her ; and the snows, which were 
 about to break and to melt, they too were calling. The 
 mountains were calling, and the lake and the forest, where 
 she knew that the men had been going for days to cut the 
 ice and carry it back to the village. She had put on her little 
 old peasant frock, and the sealskin coat and the round sea- 
 bird's cap which her mother had brought as a bride from 
 England. She felt curiously happy. She was rested now, 
 and although she was thinner, all her beauty had come back 
 to her with a redoubled charm. Some sort of strange ex- 
 citement stirred her blood as she left the village and passed 
 up the road to the forest. It was early in the afternoon ; 
 the snow on the higher plateaux of the mountains glistened 
 like silver or spun-glass ; the round white clouds of the low- 
 land spring came puffing and seething up from the unseen 
 plains of Italy. There was a glory of gold in the valleys, 
 with curious tints of pink and mauve, and faint opalescent 
 greens. Indeed, there was a sense of the languor of Italy 
 creeping, unseen, into the fastness of the Alps. But the 
 frost had by no means broken, the signs of spring were all 
 
348 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 on the surface ; the roads retained their winter coating, they 
 were hard and firm if full of ruts and runnels. The 
 snow lay thick over the summer hedgerows, and children 
 were walking back from school on little paths which stood 
 some five or six feet high above the natural surface of the 
 meadows. 
 
 Linda went down the track which leads from the high- 
 road through 'the forest to the lakes. As she passed 
 between the tall white walls of snow she seemed but a very 
 little figure indeed, yet there was so much dignity and 
 detachment about her, that no one could pass her by un- 
 noticed. She was young ; she held her head up very high, 
 and any expression of sadness was to-day overcome by the 
 sense of pleasure in her surroundings. 
 
 Linda did not know at all that Basil was back in Trins, 
 for no one had expected him ; but he had come the evening 
 before to his father's house, and the Emperor had at once 
 put him on to a job : a job for which Basil was famous, 
 namely that of the cutting of the ice on the lakes. His 
 work was finished for the day ; he had measured and cut 
 the last great block of cobalt ice, and had given directions 
 to his father's Knecht about the proper manner of packing- 
 it on the cart. He was now coming home on foot, to milk 
 the cows and give them hay. 
 
 Basil did not start , he did not exclaim when suddenly he 
 came on Linda. He just met her, watching her rather 
 curiously, and a smile came up and stayed on his lips. 
 
 " You've come to see us cut the ice?" he said. " I've 
 finished myself for to-day ; I'm going home now to milk 
 the cows." Then, as she did not speak, he added quietly : 
 "You may be well, but you are grown smaller and 
 thinner. Why not ride on my cart?" 
 
 "Yes," she said, "I'm grown smaller and thinner. 
 But I won't ride on the cart. I'll walk with you ; I want 
 to see you milking." 
 
 They walked together up through the forest and home 
 
LONG AGO 349 
 
 again by the road. They might have been utter strangers ; 
 they talked of quite small things. When they came to the 
 door of the stables Linda hesitated. 
 
 'You'd best go home," said Basil. "It's hot in the 
 stable, and you'd be chilled with the coming in and out 
 again." 
 
 " But I always stayed for the milking !" she protested. 
 
 " That was long ago, and people change," remarked the 
 peasant. 
 
 Linda felt a secret longing to go with Basil into the warm 
 stables to see him milk and tend his cows. The cows 
 loved Basil so, she could hear them lowing as he entered ; 
 the scent of the hay in the barn above came out and seemed 
 to soothe and call her. 
 
 But Basil had changed and life had changed things were 
 certainly " long ago." 
 
 Linda went round to the back of the stables and to the 
 wooden steps which led to the barn. The sun was already 
 setting in the valley, although it was barely three o'clock. 
 There was a light in the higher ranges, and the forests 
 seemed very near, so that each separate pine-tree stood out 
 black and clean on the snow-line. It was a wonderful, 
 perfect, clean white world. As far as the human eye could 
 travel there was nothing ugly, or dirty, or vulgar no dust 
 or brick, no soot, no squalor. 
 
 Linda sat down on the steps which led from the meadow 
 up to the back of the barn. The big doors of the barn were 
 closed behind her, but she could smell the scent of the hay 
 inside, and she knew exactly of what it was made the 
 arnicas, the vanilla orchises, and the white moon daisies, 
 which once had been so brilliant and which now were dry 
 and withered, but wholesome still and sweetly-scented. It 
 was a sheltered corner ; huge drifts throughout that heavy 
 winter had accumulated into natural walls some dozen feet 
 or so in height. Linda sat there thinking. It was evident 
 that Basil, the friend of her childhood, did not want her. 
 
350 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 Things were certainly long ago, and she herself had greatly 
 altered. She rose from her seat and gathered her thoughts 
 together. The valley was now in complete shadow, but 
 there was a glow on the sides of the hills, and the top- 
 most crags stood out in orange light on the pallid hazy 
 sky. A desire to shake off a growing torpor seized on 
 Linda's heart, and to bring her old self back again by revisit- 
 ing some haunt of her childhood , dim and far away as that 
 childhood now appeared. Therefore she struck away from 
 the village, and turned up a hay-track which led through 
 the forest along the mountain-side. 
 
 A little thin wind blew over the snow-fields, but there was 
 a glory of gold and of crimson on every mountain-peak far 
 as the eye could traverse, for the plateau to which she had 
 ascended projected high above the valley, and commanded 
 a singular view of the distant peaks of the Oberland. 
 
 Up on that plateau, where the snow had settled into 
 mighty drifts, there was a small wooden chalet belong- 
 ing to Basil's father, the Emperor. As children, she 
 and Basil had often been together there; she went 
 now gently, and almost fearfully, up to this chalet, and 
 she climbed to the top of a wooden ledge and searched 
 beneath the eaves. She remembered something ; she 
 felt sure that it must be here, and here in fact she 
 found it. On the rough surface of a sunbaked beam of 
 larch, two hearts had once been rudely carved. They w r ere 
 still visible, though burned by many summer suns to a deep 
 shade of brown. Ten summer suns, ten winter-moons, had 
 smiled or wept upon those faint, rude symbols of a boy's 
 romance . 
 
 Linda looked narrowly, then started back. The hearts 
 were there, but things were changed ; an arrow was struck 
 through one of them ; the other had been in part effaced. 
 These additions to the original design were not burnt brown, 
 but shone out pale and sickly, like unhealed scars on the 
 heart of the darker wood. 
 
 "Ah!" said the girl, "I see." She drew her fingers 
 
LONG AGO 351 
 
 across the silly wooden symbols, as though to test so crude 
 a demonstration of a peasant's broken love. Then she got 
 down and walked from the shelter of the barn and into the 
 winter world again. 
 
 A load seemed somehow lifted, and yet another load was 
 left behind, a human load. She ran along the plateau, 
 and as she ran she sang aloud, " Behut dich Gott " ; she 
 sang, " Es war zu schon gewesen. Behiit dich Gott, es hat 
 nicht sollen sein." 
 
 Twilight was creeping over the world, and with its shade 
 the feeble rays of a very young moon were faintly fighting. 
 The lights of evening were dissolving into an indefinite har- 
 mony of darkness, such a harmony as no painter could ever 
 paint or keep. A thin wind ran along the ground, hurry- 
 ing and sifting the sandy snow into the girl's light foot- 
 prints. She looked down the mountain-side up which she 
 first had climbed ; it was long and gently winding. She 
 went back to the chalet and found there a little sledge she 
 had often used as a child, and soon she was shooting 
 forward down the mountain-side some hundreds of feet 
 across the frozen surface. The cold air whizzed and 
 whistled behind her, the snows whirled up and almost 
 choked her. 
 
 No one saw her and no one cared ; the little brown girl 
 was back again in the heart of the strong unchanging 
 mountains ; she was free of all emotion she was free even 
 of herself. . . . 
 
 For just that moment peace and a sense of completed 
 joys enfolded her. 
 
 When at last she returned to the village, it was almost 
 dark. The place felt quiet and cold and sad beyond 
 memory. The peasant houses had grown grey, sordid, and 
 chilly, and the paths round the human habitations seemed 
 things more frozen and cruel than any ravine on the moun- 
 tains up above them. Scarcely a wreath of smoke arose 
 from the scattered chimneys. The village seemed dead, 
 
352 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 and grey, and bare, and Linda hurried in silence past the 
 silent houses; her face was flushed by the wind of the 
 heights, her hair had loosened in curls across her forehead. 
 
 As she came to her own door she saw a figure standing 
 waiting, and she knew quite well it was Basil. 
 
 "Oh, it's you," she said. 
 
 " Yes, it's me," he said, "but I'll not come in. ... 
 I've only come ; to say good-bye. I'm going again 
 to-morrow." 
 
 " To-morrow?" she said, " and where are you going?" 
 
 " I'm going to Naples," he answered. Then very sud- 
 denly, and with curious rude decision, he added : " You 
 don't know Ursula Plant a but I'll be marrying her this 
 summer-time." 
 
 He turned on his heel, and he left her. 
 
 Linda pushed open the door of her old home. It seemed 
 to fall back on its hinges with a lifeless swing, as though 
 the house had long been empty. No light was in the 
 passage, none in the room. There was a curious sense of 
 the spirits of the house having left it. Linda went up to 
 the table, struck a match and lighted the small oil-lamp. 
 Only one letter had come by the evening post a letter 
 from India. 
 
 She opened and read it, there where she stood. 
 
 " After all," wrote Dudley, " the regiment is ordered home, and 
 we shall have started before this reaches you. ... I am afraid 
 that I may have been cross in my last letters, but I couldn't under- 
 stand all your ups and your downs; I know you have had a lot 
 of worry, and perhaps I ought to have understood you better. 
 You mustn't stay on alone at Trins; you are not fit for it. And 
 then, of course, I want you very much. I can't give you up. I 
 dare say it's my fault, but I can't quite understand you. But I 
 love you, and I think you do love me? Isn't that enough? You 
 said that you loved me ; you never said you did not love me. I 
 don't really know what it was you said, because I could not follow 
 it very clearly. But it worried me, and at last you made me 
 angry, so that I dare say I wrote back something I need not have 
 done. But let me come back to look after you, and I won't 
 bother to understand. I will only just love you Tell 
 
LONG AGO 353 
 
 me to come straight to Trins and to fetch you. Just write 
 a line to meet me at our landing. ... I may have said some- 
 thing you did not like about your Swiss home and your father's 
 people. But just think of all the things you are always saying 
 about England ! And I never really got angry with you about 
 that did I ? Well, I can't say more than this except, I thought 
 I might as well tell you that, although we are ordered back now 
 to England, we shan't probably stay there long. We might even 
 go with the regiment to Egypt, or to some other place that you 
 would like lots better. But, anyhow, I don't want to have to go 
 away again without you. I am thinking about you all the time. 
 So do write to meet me when I land. It's Southampton, 
 remember, and don't put the wrong address." 
 
 Dudley had underlined the last sentence, taking a ruler 
 to make the line perfectly straight. (This deed was pro- 
 phetic, trifling as it seemed.) Dudley was a very illiterate 
 young man, but he could write a sort of a love-letter, for 
 the simple reason that he allowed his heart and thoughts, 
 such as they were, to speak up plainly. He was not hur- 
 ried about by any spark of outward emotion ; there was, for 
 the moment, one perfectly clear point in his manhood's 
 vision, and it was just this point which he expressed with 
 so much repetition in the letter. 
 
 Linda stood by the table thinking. . . . 
 
 How cold the room was ! How lonely everything seemed 
 to be. ... " Regiments !" life controlled by the move- 
 ments of an English regiment ! . . . Dudley was thinking 
 about her Dudley said he wanted her back. Basil was 
 going to Naples. . . . She felt pretty sure, by the way in 
 which Basil had watched her eyes, that he never would 
 marry Ursula Planta. Basil had been firm and cruel. But 
 that did not matter it was not to the point whether Basil 
 married or did not marry, that was not the question that 
 troubled her now. . .". 
 
 Dudley was "always thinking" about her. ... She 
 knew by now that men were thinking of women, and 
 women of men. But for a permanence? . . . for a thing 
 which must go on always? Some words which von Herder 
 loved to repeat came back on her ear about those ' ' other 
 
 23 
 
354 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 and fairer Galafceas." But still she was lonely, and Love 
 is warm. ... It is long to be lonely but Life is very 
 long too? 
 
 Linda went on thinking. She thought of many people, 
 but she thought much more of natural things of beautiful , 
 silent, glowing things which never can harm one, which 
 never can fit with the sometimes cruel endeavour of men 
 and of women ; and of " regiments " last of all with the 
 wrong of regiments and all that regiments stand for. . ,. . 
 She thought of the materially minded people talking, talk- 
 ing, very " busy " ; killing, too, and hurting by their too 
 much talk and " doing." . . . She thought of the beauti- 
 ful people with great suffering hearts who were hurt them- 
 selves, and who tried to help and to heal one. . . . She 
 thought of the trees up there on the frozen hillsides . . . 
 and of how they go on growing, for hundreds and hundreds 
 of years, up there on the frozen hillsides. She thought 
 of the stars. . . . There was one star shining at her 
 window now, just where the sunset had faded. Her 
 mother and her father had seen it through that same 
 window-pane. . . . How different her mother and her 
 father were to her? ... It had shone there thousands 
 and millions of years ago. . . . She thought of the places 
 which men and women did not disturb, . . . heavenly 
 places where the flowers grow and where the little fresh 
 waters trickle through the meadows. She thought of 
 cathedrals good men had built them. She thought of old 
 wooden inns and of barns alone alone. Oh ! the glory 
 and the peace of being alone. 
 
 But Love is warm ? She thought of the lovers on warm 
 June nights, of mothers and quite young children. She 
 thought of the fuss of emotions, and of death so quiet ; 
 and of life, so full and flurried. No wonder men needed 
 the Peace of religion, with life so full and flurried. . . . 
 
 She turned to the wall, and there she saw the portraits 
 hanging. How stiff and how tired the people looked ! . . . 
 
LONG AGO 355 
 
 She went to the shelf, and she took down her mother's 
 bible. She read a little French quotation which was 
 written at the end of her mother's bible : 
 
 " J'appris & esperer au lieu de regretter; a donner au lieu de 
 prendre; a aider au lieu de me plaindre. J'appris & regarder en 
 haut, non en bas, devant moi, non en arriere; aussi ma route fut 
 plus facile, et mes pieds moins las." 
 
 She turned the page. She read a verse from the 
 thirty-first psalm written in the cramped and hurried hand 
 of her own mother's mother : 
 
 " Thou shalt hide them privily by Thine own presence from the 
 provoking of all men. Thou shalt keep them secretly in Thy 
 tabernacle from the strife of tongues." 
 
 And then another piece in that same curious writing 
 taken from some old mystic : 
 
 " The Soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, 
 Lets in new Light through chinks which Time has made." 
 
 All these people through Love, through Experience, but 
 finally only through Suffering, had found their souls. 
 She put the book back on the shelf again. She took her 
 pen and a piece of paper, and very slowly and very 
 distinctly she wrote a letter to Dudley. 
 
 What was it that Linda had written? . ... 
 
 She sealed the letter with the seal of her mother who had 
 died. She left the room, she passed down the street, and 
 she dropped the letter into the post-box. She heard the 
 thud of the letter in the post-box, and then she looked up 
 at the sky again, and she noticed the splendid belt of Orion, 
 steadfast, immutable, indifferent to our human loves and 
 fates, yet somehow beckoning onward. 
 
AFTEE FIVE YEARS 
 
 "Bis die Bergen thun sich beugen, 
 
 Und die Hiigel senken sich : 
 Bis der Tod mir nimmt das Leben, 
 So lang will ich lieben dich." 
 
 From an Old Swiss Song. 
 
 THE slight and delicate figure of a woman was moving 
 up the path which leads to the Arora Alp. It was Linda, 
 but she had greatly altered. There was a new and strange 
 nobility about her. Her face was very pale indeed. It 
 was that of one to whom life's anguish, perhaps some sense 
 of human treachery, had been too early, too irrevocably, 
 revealed ever to be effaced. There was, indeed, a trace of 
 the old gladness in her mouth ; but her eyes were not the 
 old eyes one remembered ; they held an expression of re- 
 nunciation rather than of actual pain or struggle ; and this 
 expression, being so foreign to her nature, could only have 
 been wrung from her by some deep form of mental anguish. 
 
 Linda did not actually know it, but her struggle with 
 the question of Life was over. Whatever tears and sorrow 
 might yet be coming her way and by what sensitive 
 nature can these things be avoided? she, the woman, 
 had learned and overcome ; and through the patient en- 
 durance of a thing which must have been to her some 
 almost intolerable strain and even humiliation, she had 
 emerged and got away from her own old wayward egotisms. 
 Linda was out on the quiet seas at length ; the tempest of 
 queries and of discontent were buried away and behind 
 her. 
 
 She moved very slowly up the hill, partly because she 
 had been very ill, but also because there was no sort of 
 
 856 
 
AFTER FIVE YEARS 357 
 
 thing to make her hurry. To her it seemed that time it- 
 self was over. This was a long summer's day ; the nights 
 of winter were as long too. All were measured to her by 
 some great physical weariness. 
 
 As she passed through the wood she saw where the moss 
 and the linnsea borealis grew. And one by one she recog- 
 nized those lovely things which, as a child, she had so cared 
 for, but which to-day, because of her great listlessness, she 
 glanced at and passed by. 
 
 How many, many years ago it seemed since she, as a 
 very little child, had passed up this same woodland way 
 on that hot July morning with her aunt. She had lingered 
 then to play amongst the world of moss and boulders, and 
 after that she had gone on into the sunlight of the Alp and 
 had dabbled in the mountain lake, bare-legged, bare-headed, 
 in the splendid sunlight. Her long plaits had then be- 
 come unpinned and dipped into the sunny water. The air 
 had shimmered all around her with the shimmering delight 
 of summer and of youth ; and so it would shimmer still 
 to-day if only her heart were young. 
 
 Linda came up to the shepherds' huts, and she went 
 through the open door of the Emperor's chalet. Up on the 
 shelf above the table a little old book of folk-songs stood, the 
 leaf turned down as Basil surely turned it all those years 
 ago. 
 
 She went to the shelf and she took down the book. 
 
 " Ach war ich nur geblieben auf meinen Heiden ! 
 Da hatt ich nichts gewust von all den Leiden," 
 
 was what she read, for there the leaves fell easily apart. 
 
 She put down the book, and then she suddenly started. 
 She had left the front door open behind her. It was not 
 the poem that made her start, it was something very 
 different. 
 
 Basil was coming down the mountain-side and singing. 
 She heard his voice there was no other voice like Basil's. 
 
358 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 Unfamiliar as it had grown to her for many years, she 
 knew it well. Involuntarily she turned, and her pulses 
 throbbed; they had been so dead and quiet these last 
 months in Italy, and England. 
 
 Linda went out through the door and into the sunlight 
 of the little Alpine meadow. She wore a plain mourn- 
 ing gown ; but her long loose cloak, with all its heavy 
 folds, could not conceal the emaciation of her slender 
 figure. Round her neck was the golden chain and the 
 cross which Sebastian had given to her mother long 
 ago. She had taken off her hat, and the sun poured 
 full on her little head with all its heavy crown of hair. 
 Her face had grown so small and pale that only an artist 
 or a lover could detect its inextinguishable beauty now- 
 adays. 
 
 Linda did not know that she was waiting. She imagined 
 that she had ceased to wait for anything which could con- 
 cern herself. She did not wonder what had brought her 
 here, or why it was that she had come to these old haunts 
 at all. The place did not seem any longer hers. She loved 
 it well, but it, and her old, better self, had altered and 
 grown dim. She was living in a dream a dream such as 
 some dead man might draam were he himself quite con- 
 scious still, and yet his body lying there amongst the living 
 people. 
 
 Suddenly she looked up, for Basil was standing beside 
 her, gazing at her. 
 
 " You've come back," was all he said. 
 
 Again she started. Had he seemed surprised to see her, 
 had he turned away or hurt her by any ordinary greeting, 
 she might have gone on moving through her dreams. But 
 this old comment, this quiet statement, startled all her 
 being. 
 
 " Come back," she repeated. 
 
 Basil was the Emperor of Trins now, and a very great 
 man in the peasant world, for he had inherited large 
 properties both in Italy and the Engadine as well as that 
 
AFTER FIVE YEARS 359 
 
 of his father in Trins. He took his seat a little away from 
 her. He wore his old grey working clothes, the same thick 
 homespun coat, the flannel shirt,' the clumsy nickel watch- 
 chain. Little pieces of hay and moss clung 1 about him, for 
 he had been up on -the mountain-side nearly all this 
 summer's day. Basil had more than ever the look of be- 
 longing to the mountains. There was something like the 
 mountains themselves about him ; he was large and calm, 
 impenetrable and grand. His skin was one deep glowing 
 bronze, his hair rose dark and curling from his low and 
 quiet forehead. 
 
 Linda looked at him a little, but soon she turned away ; 
 and a grief which was almost unbearable shot to her heart. 
 
 "Do you remember?" she began, and hardly knowing 
 what she said. 
 
 "I don't remember many things," he answered, "but 
 there are some I don't forget." 
 
 " I was trying to remember," she said, " how I used to 
 come here when I was young." 
 
 ' When you were young," he repeated very slowly, and 
 he smiled. 
 
 " Yes," she said, " I remember only a very little about 
 when I was young." 
 
 " That I haven't forgotten," he said, and he still smiled. 
 "I've not had to remember it," he added in the strange, 
 enigmatical voice peculiar to peasants when they jest. 
 
 But she scarcely heard him, and she did not understand 
 him. An intense sadness was over all her spirit. She found 
 it difficult to speak. The sunlight dazzled her, for her 
 eyes were full of tears. She put up her hands and rested 
 her elbows on her knees; but the tears fell through her 
 fingers and he saw them. Again he smiled. Indeed, his 
 face grew suddenly radiant. When he had smiled before 
 there was a touch of bitterness about him ; now, nothing 
 but pure joy was in his eyes. He came a. little nearer her. 
 
 "I have never had to remember," he said, very slowly, 
 "because to me thou wast, and always wilt be, young 
 
360 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 young and the same. Things changed, and other people 
 tried to change thee. . . . But that which was between 
 thee and me that thing they never changed.'' 
 
 "Oh, Basil !" she said, starting to her feet, " Basil, be 
 still ! I have a hundred things to tell you all my life since 
 then and now. It's years, and years, and years, re- 
 member ! ' ' 
 
 As she spoke she caught her breath, and then she looked 
 up to the mountain-side, and back to the Alp, and down to 
 the valleys. This world with all its splendour dazzled her. 
 
 " Oh ! will you not listen to me, Basil?" she said. 
 
 " Listen to what?" he asked again. His face was calm 
 and radiant. 
 
 "To this, to this," she answered hurriedly, and gather- 
 ing as it were her thoughts together. ' ' We were children 
 together, you and I. You belong to all the best things that 
 I know. I loved them then I love them now. But still 
 I left them. You always told me I should be a fool to 
 leave them. But it seemed somehow as though I had to 
 go, and as though everything and everybody had to come 
 between us you and me. You were different, you stayed 
 on here ; you grew into your mountains. But I allowed my- 
 self to be torn up. I was torn up by other things and 
 people, and I went away. I did so many things. I saw 
 so many things and people. I came back once when my 
 father died. But then I went away again ; and I seemed 
 to forget the mountains, and how it was they who had 
 given me life, and not the things and not the people to 
 whom my soul seemed going out. Dudley died, you know, 
 in that campaign in India. He loved to rule ; it was his 
 nature. And other people came and went. Some of them 
 were kind and good and beautiful. Others oh, Basil dear ! 
 even the people whom this world calls ' good ' they, too, 
 can be very small, self-satisfied, and even cruel. And 
 one can be lonely amongst them, quite, quite alone, rather 
 than know and be injured by them. They take all they 
 give one nothing back . . . nothing. But how can I put 
 
AFTER FIVE YEARS 361 
 
 it all in words? So many things, so many people. . . . 
 I've had so many friends, and things, and people. And the 
 more I gave to all of these, the more I seemed to turn from 
 the old life and from the better things and people the 
 more ..." she broke off suddenly ; then : "I too love 
 goodness best," she said. "I've always only wanted to be 
 good ; but many did not understand they tried to teach 
 and force one. ... I seem to have forgotten how to 
 laugh," she said. 
 
 And then quite suddenly and strangely she smiled one 
 of the happy smiles she had so often smiled in childhood. 
 
 " Have you done?" he said, and he trembled as he looked 
 into her eyes. 
 
 Good men love noble women with ideals base men 
 deride, because they fear them. Basil was a good man. He 
 gazed on this most dear and saddened woman with passion- 
 ate intentness one long moment ; then he spoke again. And 
 every word came straight from that strong heart with which , 
 through all the moments of his mortal life, he had loved her. 
 
 ' ' I let thee know so long ago I loved thee. If that were 
 enough for thee, it is enough for me too." 
 
 And more than that he did not say, for the words were 
 the essence of his heart, his sure philosophy, and his life's 
 aims. 
 
 But she stood still, summoning all the forces of her soul. 
 " Basil," she said, and her voice was low and infinitely 
 tender, "Basil, knowing all these things about me, how 
 could you have gone on loving me?" 
 
 " Knowing what?" said Basil. 
 
 ' ' Why, all the things that I have told you surely I have 
 told you much?" 
 
 "No, Linda," he answered quietly, "you have not told 
 me very much, or if you have I did not understand you. 
 But I did not try to follow all you said." 
 
 His face had grown a little pale. He had the tired look 
 which people have when they attempt to follow thoughts 
 
362 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 which mean but little to themselves, but which are vital 
 to those who are dear to them. 
 
 And then a light came into Linda's eyes. 
 
 " Basil," she said, " listen again." 
 
 He got up and leant against the wooden paling. The 
 sun was setting full in his eyes. Tall plants of monks- 
 hood grew to his knees, and quantities of very blue forget- 
 me-nots were round his feet. His cows were coming up 
 the path ; one smelt their sweet warm breath. His hay 
 was standing high and full of blood-red sorrel flowers below 
 them in the meadows ; another week and they would cut 
 it. Far away, down in the valley, the shadows were grow- 
 ing longer ; one heard the horses' bells upon the road, a hum 
 of grasshoppers in every field. Somewhere in many dreary 
 English cities, there was dust of coal and hurry of crowded 
 feet. Somewhere respectable persons were drinking tea in 
 drawing-rooms. Here, in the mountain world, there was 
 peace a peace more certain and profound than that of 
 men in their tallest cathedrals. 
 
 Basil belonged to the mountains. The calmness of their 
 heights was his, the splendour of their summer nights, the 
 rigours of their winter snowstorms. An immense an 
 immovable strength was in his eyes. 
 
 "Linda," he said very slowly, " they taught thee foolish 
 things. They wished to make thee dull and hateful like 
 themselves. They made thee sad, but oh, I know they 
 could not make thee sinful. . . . They wanted thy mind, 
 they wanted thy money ; they nearly spoiled thy beauty. 
 But thy dear heart they never wanted, and thy dear soul 
 they gave thee back in tatters. They taught thee to think 
 when thou shouldst have been living ; they taught thee to 
 grow old before thy time, and tired. But they did not love 
 thee ; and I I love thee. It is thee I need, and not thy 
 thoughts and follies. It is thee as I used to know thee 
 that I have wanted all the years. " Linda," he said sud- 
 denly and with profound conviction. "It's me thou 
 needest too." 
 
AFTER FIVE YEARS 363 
 
 He drew a little nearer, but he did not touch her. He 
 did not even for that moment look into her eyes. He went 
 on gazing straight into the sunlight, and she saw how every 
 line upon his face was firm and healthful, and that there 
 was no contradiction, no mere compromising there. 
 
 " My father and my mother are dead," he said ; " they 
 left me a lot of land and cattle. My sisters both are 
 married. . . . There's little changed in our house," he 
 said, ' ' but I've got so many more cows and goats that I had 
 to build fresh stables. There are still the yellow hens 
 and pigeons, Linda," he went on " you always said you 
 loved the yellow pigeons. And I've bought another field 
 for flax you always liked fine linen. Then Uncle 
 Christopher died, you know, and he left me all his lands 
 in Italy. There's an old villa there, built long ago for one 
 of the Castile ladies. It's got a garden full of herbs and bay- 
 trees and old fountains. I know you'd love the garden, 
 Linda, and so would your Uncle Sebastian." 
 
 As Basil went on speaking, wonderful waves of a thing 
 which was neither joy nor passion, which was rather the 
 peace of a pure affection mixed with some mystical exalta- 
 tion, came into Linda's heart and stayed there. 
 
 Truly, this strong mountain man had understood her 
 pain and all her need and sense of failure more truly than 
 any of the clever doctors. With no soul dissection, with 
 few words and fearless truths, he had touched the tenderest 
 corners of her brain and healed her aching heart. She 
 listened to his quiet words, and long after he was silent she 
 Seemed to hear him still. And then dear visions rose before 
 her. She saw the little old villa down on the Lombard 
 plain, where the oleanders and pomegranates grew ; she saw 
 the gourds and the crimson capsicums hanging in thick 
 garlands round the eaves on late September evenings ; she 
 saw the great white oxen swinging slowly by. ... But 
 more than these, she saw the Emperor's house at Trins ; 
 she saw it as young women see their homes . . . she saw 
 
364 A CHILD OF THE ALPS 
 
 the flax on the spinning-wheel, and the cows within their 
 stables ; she saw the brown bowls standing full of cream. 
 She saw small children sleeping in the panelled rooms 
 when the great winter snows were falling on the mountains 
 all outside them. . . . 
 
 Her cloak had fallen from her shoulders to the ground, 
 and as Basil took her in his arms the sun went down in 
 glowing splendour, and cool calm shadows crept over the 
 mountain-sides. 
 
 A little later the snow-line glowed with a crimson glow, 
 and then came night, and stars ; and the unchanging 
 planets. 
 
 BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND 
 
YB 39961 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LIBRARY