"Your HENRIETTA.
"A kiss to the sister. It is owing to her."
Carinthia kissed the letter on that last line. It seemed to her to end in a celestial shower.
She was oppressed by wonder of the writer who could run like the rill of the mountains in written speech; and her recollection of the contents perpetually hurried to the close, which was more in her way of writing, for there the brief sentences had a throb beneath them.
She did not speak of the letter to her brother when she returned it. A night in the carriage, against his shoulder, was her happy prospect, in the thought that she would be with her dearest all night, touching him asleep, and in the sweet sense of being near to the beloved of the fairest angel of her s.e.x. They pursued their journey soon after Anton was dismissed with warm shakes of the hand and appointments for a possible year in the future.
The blast of the postillion"s horn on the dark highway moved Chillon to say: "This is what they call posting, my dear."
She replied: "Tell me, brother: I do not understand, "Let none these marks efface," at the commencement, after most "picturesque of Castles":--that is you."
"They are quoted from the verses of a lord who was a poet, addressed to the castle on Lake Leman. She will read them to you."
"Will she?"
The mention of the lord set Carinthia thinking of the lord whom that beautiful SHE pitied because she was forced to wound him and he was very sensitive. Wrapped in Henrietta, she slept through the joltings of the carriage, the grinding of the wheels, the blowing of the horn, the flashes of the late moonlight and the kindling of dawn.
CHAPTER VIII. OF THE ENCOUNTER OF TWO STRANGE YOUNG MEN AND THEIR CONSORTING: IN WHICH THE MALE READER IS REQUESTED TO BEAR IN MIND WHAT WILD CREATURE HE WAS IN HIS YOUTH, WHILE THE FEMALE SHOULD MARVEL CREDULOUSLY.
The young man who fancied he had robed himself in the plain homespun of a natural philosopher at the age of twenty-three journeyed limping leisurely in the mountain maid Carinthia"s footsteps, thankful to the Fates for having seen her; and reproving the remainder of superst.i.tion within him, which would lay him open to smarts of evil fortune if he, encouraged a senseless grat.i.tude for good; seeing that we are simply to take what happens to us. The little inn of the village on the perch furnished him a night"s lodging and a laugh of satisfaction to hear of a young lady and gentleman, and their guide, who had devoured everything eatable half a day in advance of him, all save the bread and b.u.t.ter, and a few sc.r.a.ps of meat, apologetically spread for his repast by the maid of the inn: not enough for, a bantam c.o.c.k, she said, promising eggs for breakfast. He vowed with an honest heart, that it was more than enough, and he was nourished by sympathy with the appet.i.tes of his precursors and the maid"s description of their deeds. That name, Carinthia, went a good way to fill him.
Farther on he had plenty, but less contentment. He was compelled to acknowledge that he had expected to meet Carinthia again at the Baths.
Her absence dealt a violent shock to the aerial structure he dwelt in; for though his ardour for the life of the solitudes was unfeigned, as was his calm overlooking of social distinctions, the self-indulgent dreamer became troubled with an alarming sentience, that for him to share the pa.s.sions of the world of men was to risk the falling lower than most. Women are a cause of dreams, but they are dreaded enemies of his kind of dream, deadly enemies of the immaterial dreamers; and should one of them be taken on board a vessel of the vapourish texture young Woodseer sailed in above the clouds lightly while he was in it alone, questions of past, future, and present, the three weights upon humanity, bear it down, and she must go, or the vessel sinks. And cast out of it, what was he? The asking exposed him to the steadiest wind the civilized world is known to blow. From merely thinking upon one of the daughters of earth, he was made to feel his position in that world, though he refused to understand it, and a.s.sisted by two days of hard walking he reduced Carinthia to an abstract enthusiasm, no very serious burden. His note-book sustained it easily. He wrote her name in simple fondness of the name; a verse, and hints for more, and some sentences, which he thought profound. They were composed as he sat by the roadway, on the top of hills, and in a boat crossing a dark green lake deep under wooded mountain walls: things of priceless value.
It happened, that midway on the lake he perceived his boatman about to prime a pistol to murder the mild-eyed stillness, and he called to the man in his best German to desist. During the altercation, there pa.s.sed a countryman of his in another of the punts, who said gravely: "I thank you for that." It was early morning, and they had the lake to themselves, each deeming the other an intruder; for the courtship of solitude wanes when we are haunted by a second person in pursuit of it; he is discolouring matter in our pure crystal cup. Such is the worship of the picturesque; and it would appear to say, that the spirit of man finds itself yet in the society of barbarians. The case admits of good pleading either way, even upon the issue whether the exclusive or the vulgar be the more barbarous. But in those days the solicitation of the picturesque had been revived by a poet of some impa.s.sioned rhetoric, and two devotees could hardly meet, as the two met here, and not be mutually obscurants.
They stepped ash.o.r.e in turn on the same small shoot of land where a farm-house near a chapel in the shadow of cliffs did occasional service for an inn. Each had intended to pa.s.s a day and a night in this lonely dwelling-place by the lake, but a rival was less to be tolerated there than in love, and each awaited the other"s departure, with an air that said: "You are in my sunlight"; and going deeper, more sternly: "Sir, you are an offence to Nature"s pudency!"
Woodseer was the more placable of the two; he had taken possession of the bench outside, and he had his note-book and much profundity to haul up with it while fish were frying. His countryman had rushed inside to avoid him, and remained there pacing the chamber like a lion newly caged. Their boatmen were brotherly in the antic.i.p.ation of provision and payment.
After eating his fish, Woodseer decided abruptly, that as he could not have the spot to himself, memorable as it would have been to intermarry with Nature in so sacred a welldepth of the mountains, he had better be walking and climbing. Another boat paddling up the lake had been spied: solitude was not merely shared with a rival, but violated by numbers.
In the first case, we detest the man; in the second, we fly from an outraged scene. He wrote a line or so in his book, hurriedly paid his bill, and started, full of the matter he had briefly committed to his pages.
At noon, sitting beside the beck that runs from the lake, he was overtaken by the gentleman he had left behind, and accosted in the informal English style, with all the politeness possible to a nervously blunt manner: "This book is yours,--I have no doubt it is yours; I am glad to be able to restore it; I should be glad to be the owner-writer of the contents, I mean. I have to beg your excuse; I found it lying open; I looked at the page, I looked through the whole; I am quite at your mercy."
Woodseer jumped at the sight of his note-book, felt for the emptiness of his pocket, and replied: "Thank you, thank you. It"s of use to me, though to no one else."
"You pardon me?"
"Certainly. I should have done it myself."
"I cannot offer you my apologies as a stranger." Lord Fleetwood was the name given.
Woodseer"s plebeian was exchanged for it, and he stood up.
The young lord had fair, straight, thin features, with large restless eyes that lighted quickly, and a mouth that was winning in his present colloquial mood.
"You could have done the same? I should find it hard to forgive the man who pried into my secret thoughts," he remarked.
"There they are. If one puts them to paper!..." Woodseer shrugged.
"Yes, yes. They never last long enough with me. So far I"m safe.
One page led to another. You can meditate. I noticed some remarks on Religions. You think deeply."
Woodseer was of that opinion, but modesty urged him to reply with a small flourish. "Just a few heads of ideas. When the wind puffs down a sooty chimney the air is filled with little blacks that settle pretty much like the notes in this book of mine. There they wait for another puff, or my fingers to stamp them."
"I could tell you were the owner of that book," said Lord Fleetwood.
He swept his forehead feverishly. "What a power it is to relieve one"s brain by writing! May I ask you, which one of the Universities...?"
The burden of this question had a ring of irony to one whom it taught to feel rather defiantly, that he carried the blazon of a reeking tramp.
"My University," Woodseer replied, "was a merchant"s office in Bremen for some months. I learnt more Greek and Latin in Bremen than business.
I was invalided home, and then tried a merchant"s office in London. I put on my hat one day, and walked into the country. My College fellows were hawkers, tinkers, tramps and ploughmen, choughs and crows. A volume of our Poets and a History of Philosophy composed my library. I had scarce any money, so I learnt how to idle inexpensively--a good first lesson. We"re at the bottom of the world when we take to the road; we see men as they were in the beginning--not so eager for harness till they get acquainted with hunger, as I did, and studied in myself the old animal having his head pushed into the collar to earn a feed of corn."
Woodseer laughed, adding, that he had been of a serious mind in those days of the alternation of smooth indifference and sharp necessity, and he had plucked a flower from them.
His nature prompted him to speak of himself with simple candour, as he had done spontaneously to Chillon Kirby, yet he was now anxious to let his companion know at once the common stuff he was made of, together with the great stuff he contained. He grew conscious of an over-anxiety, and was uneasy, recollecting how he had just spoken about his naturalness, dimly if at all apprehending the cause of this disturbance within. What is a lord to a philosopher! But the world is around us as a cloak, if not a coat; in his ignorance he supposed it specially due to a lord seeking acquaintance with him, that he should expose his condition: doing the which appeared to subject him to parade his intellectual treasures and capacity for shaping sentences; and the effect upon Lord Fleetwood was an incentive to the display. Nevertheless he had a fretful desire to escape from the discomposing society of a lord; he fixed his knapsack and began to saunter.
The young lord was at his elbow. "I can"t part with you. Will you allow me?"
Woodseer was puzzled and had to say: "If you wish it."
"I do wish it: an hour"s walk with you. One does not meet a man like you every day. I have to join a circle of mine in Baden, but there"s no hurry; I could be disengaged for a week. And I have things to ask you, owing to my indiscretion--but you have excused it."
Woodseer turned for a farewell gaze at the great Watzmann, and saluted him.
"Splendid," said Lord Fleetwood; "but don"t clap names on the mountains.--I saw written in your book: "A text for Dada." You write: "A despotism would procure a perfect solitude, but kill the ghost." That was my thought at the place where we were at the lake. I had it. Tell me--though I could not have written it, and "ghost" is just the word, the exact word--tell me, are you of Welsh blood? "Dad" is good Welsh--p.r.o.nounce it hard."
Woodseer answered: "My mother was a Glamorganshire woman. My father, I know, walked up from Wales, mending boots on his road for a livelihood.
He is not a bad scholar, he knows Greek enough to like it. He is a Dissenting preacher. When I strike a truism, I "ve a habit of scoring it to give him a peg or tuning-fork for one of his discourses. He"s a man of talent; he taught himself, and he taught me more than I learnt at school. He is a thinker in his way. He loves Nature too. I rather envy him in some respects. He and I are hunters of Wisdom on different tracks; and he, as he says, "waits for me." He"s patient!"
Ah, and I wanted to ask you," Lord Fleetwood observed, bursting with it, "I was puzzled by a name you write here and there near the end, and permit me to ask, it: Carinthia! It cannot be the country? You write after, the name: "A beautiful Gorgon--a haggard Venus." It seized me.
I have had the face before my eyes ever since. You must mean a woman. I can"t be deceived in allusions to a woman: they have heart in them. You met her somewhere about Carinthia, and gave her the name? You write--may I refer to the book?"
He received the book and flew through the leaves:
"Here--"A panting look": you write again: "A look of beaten flame: a look of one who has run and at last beholds!" But that is a living face: I see her! Here again: "From minute to minute she is the rock that loses the sun at night and reddens in the morning." You could not create an idea of a woman to move you like that. No one could, I am certain of it, certain; if so, you "re a wizard--I swear you are. But that"s a face high over beauty. Just to know there is a woman like her, is an antidote. You compare her to a rock. Who would imagine a comparison of a woman to a rock! But rock is the very picture of beautiful Gorgon, haggard Venus. Tell me you met her, you saw her. I want only to hear she lives, she is in the world. Beautiful women compared to roses may whirl away with their handsome dragoons! A pang from them is a thing to be ashamed of. And there are men who trot about whining with it! But a Carinthia makes pain honourable. You have done what I thought impossible--fused a woman"s face and grand scenery, to make them inseparable. She might be wicked for me. I should see a bright rim round hatred of her!--the rock you describe. I could endure horrors and not annihilate her! I should think her sacred."
Woodseer turned about to have a look at the man who was even quicker than he at realizing a person from a hint of description, and almost insanely extravagant in the pitch of the things he uttered to a stranger. For himself, he was open with everybody, his philosophy not allowing that strangers existed on earth. But the presence of a lord brought the conventional world to his feelings, though at the same time the t.i.tle seemed to sanction the exceptional abruptness and wildness of this lord. As for suspecting him to be mad, it would have been a common idea: no stretching of speech or overstepping of social rules could waken a suspicion so spiritless in Woodseer.
He said: "I can tell you I met her and she lives. I could as soon swim in that torrent or leap the mountain as repeat what she spoke, or sketch a feature of her. She goes into the blood, she is a new idea of women.
She has the face that would tempt a gypsy to evil tellings. I could think of it as a history written in a line: Carinthia, Saint and Martyr!
As for comparisons, they are flowers thrown into the fire."