CHAPTER VI

IN THE CHÂLET OF THE ROCKS

When Honor opened her eyes, it was to look round her in amazement. Where was she? Certainly not at home in the Maison Madeleine. This bed, with its fragrant sheets of coarse heavy linen and its wonderful quilt, was not her own, nor was the little room with its bare white walls and dormer windows.

A quaint little room, homely, yet friendly. Along one wall ran a shelf, on which were many pieces of wood-carving, some of exquisite delicacy. Honor’s still-bewildered eyes rested with delight on a miniature châlet, with tiny cattle and goats, half the length of her little finger, browsing round it, with a fairy sennerin smiling in the doorway. A wonderful piece of work it seemed to her. There must be a very skilful carver here. The wooden bedstead on which she lay was carved too, and its four tall posts were surmounted by four heads, with smiling, friendly faces. What a curious, delightful place!

“Where am I?” said Honor.

Soeur Séraphine was bending over her, her face full of tender anxiety.

“Thank God!” she said. “My little one, you are yourself again, is it not so? But no!” she added, as Honor tried to rise, and sank back with a little moan. “It is to lie quite still, my child! You have sprained your ankle, and must remain tranquil till it restores itself. Our Gretli will care for you, as tenderly as we ourselves could do. A few days only; then Atli will fashion a carrying chair and bring you down the mountain and home to us. Madame left her fondest love for you; she was forced to go, you understand, and now I must follow, lest the boat depart without me. My child, with no one save Gretli and Atli could we possibly have left thee, thou knowest that. The ankle is well bandaged, and Gretli is a skilful nurse; adieu, my little Honor! Thou wilt be good and not unhappy? Adieu!”

The Sister’s kind blue eyes were full of tears as she kissed Honor’s forehead and hurried away. A few moments after, Gretli appeared, and sat down by the bedside with an air of business-like cheerfulness.

“_Voilà!_” she said. “I have seen her well started, the holy Sister. My faith, she is a good mountaineer; she leaps like a goat. She will soon overtake Madame, who, being of a certain age, must proceed more cautiously. And how does mademoiselle find herself? Not too ill, I hope?”

Honor was still looking about her in a bewildered fashion. “I am all right,” she said, “only my head aches, and my ankle hurts when I try to move. What happened, Gretli? Did somebody knock me down? Why?”

“That,” said Gretli, “is a thing known only to the good God, who created goats. With sorrow and shame I avow it, Mademoiselle Honor; Bimbo, that child of Satan, attacked Mademoiselle Stephanie, from the rear, you understand, with a violence not to be credited had one not seen it. She was flung forward upon you, who stood before her; a loose stone, it would appear, turned under your foot. You fell to the ground, striking your head on another stone. I ran to raise you; you swooned in my arms, poor child. Ah! what confusion! Mademoiselle Stephanie shrieking to the skies that she was killed; Zitli belaboring the misguided beast with his crutch; the _demoiselles_ clustering together in affright; my Ladies full of anxiety and distress. What would you? It was the hour of departure; there is no other boat to-day, and though all would be more than welcome to the Châlet, they could not pass the night in comfort.

“They proposed to carry you between them, these benevolent ladies; I respectfully begged them to reconsider. ‘Leave the little one’--I demand pardon, mademoiselle; it is only yesterday, it appears, that I carry you in my arms!--‘leave her with us!’ I said. ‘My faith, I am well used to the care of sprains; she will be safe as in Ste. Gêneviève’s pocket. I will give her soup of cream and onion with cheese, a restorative not worse than another; for her amusement Zitli will tell stories--but, _par example!_ he is a story-teller, that little one! The creatures will all be at her feet, except that ruffian Bimbo, who will not be suffered to approach her. By and by, when all is well, Atli will carry her down the mountain like an egg of glass, will deposit her by your side. _Et voilà!_’ My Ladies perceived the reasonableness of the idea. They wept, but finally consented to leave their cherished pupil to make a good and beautiful recovery in the _Châlet des Rochers_. Finally, mademoiselle, behold us here, three of us--four, when Atli returns to-morrow from the higher Alp. We shall do well, is it not so? And now, to prepare the soup! It will be good, I promise you!”

Left alone, Honor looked round her, and tried to take in the situation. She remembered the sudden impact of some soft body--that was poor Stephanie, of course; then--_crash!_ a sharp blow from something hard--that was the stone!--a shower of stars, red, blue, green,--then darkness. That was all, till this wonderful awakening to find herself in the châlet of her dreams, among the great mountains themselves. Ah! there they were; close, it seemed, outside the little window. Without moving her head, she saw a green giant towering, and behind him, looking over his shoulder, a white one.

“The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts!”

Certainly Honor’s thoughts were long to-day. Lying there in the narrow bed, they floated back to the wonderful day--was it a week ago, or a month?--when she had, as she solemnly declared to herself, “discovered the mountains.”

It all came, curiously enough, from English Literature. The mountains had always been there, but somehow she had taken them for granted, while the four walls of her room held the thrilling drama she enacted with Angélique and Fiordispina. She could recall the very day when she first came to her mountain world. She was in the garden, studying her English Literature. Soeur Séraphine was a great lover of English poetry, and the pupils, French and Anglo-Saxon, must, she maintained, be thoroughly grounded in the language of “_le grand Shekspire et le sublime Meel-ton_.” This was hard on Stephanie, to whom English was, as she expressed it, like throwing all the fire-irons downstairs together. Patricia Desmond, who had a keen sense of the ludicrous, had difficulty sometimes in keeping the twinkle out of her beautiful eyes and the smile from the corners of her perfect mouth, when dear Soeur Séraphine, erect as a little gray marionette on the estrade, recited, for example, the “Ancient Mariner”:

“Eet ees un ancien marinère, And ’e stopess von of sree; ‘By zy longré birrd and gleetring eye, No verefore stopp’st zou me?’”

Honor saw nothing funny in it; French-English was as natural to her as the Anglo-Saxon variety; she thrilled with Soeur Séraphine, her romantic little soul went forth with the Mariner over the perilous seas; for her as for him, the fair wind blew, the white foam flew, the furrow followed free.

“Ve vare ze foorst zat evare boorst--”

shrilled Soeur Séraphine-- “If necessary, Patricia, go, my child!”

For Patricia had flung up an imploring hand and burst into a fit of coughing; she now scuttled (her own word, not mine!) from the room, and gaining the shelter of her own, flung herself on the bed in paroxysms of laughter.

Honor did not stir; she was hardly conscious of the interruption. The “silent sea” absorbed her, soul and body.

The “Choix de Poésies Anglaises” contained two other poems by Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” and the “Hymn at Sunrise in the Valley of Chamounix.” Honor already knew the former by heart; she was learning the latter, and had permission to study in the garden. Sitting on the bench under the great pear-tree, she murmured the opening lines over and over, all unconsciously following the familiar pronunciation.

“Hast zou a sharm to stay ze morningstar In his stipp courrse?”

She lifted her eyes.

It was not Mont Blanc that towered in the distance across the blue lake, but the _Dent du Midi_, white and austere. It was not the morning star, but Hesperus, that glittered in the rosy sunset light: but these details did not matter. The spirit of the mountains seemed to pass into the child’s heart; it seemed to be herself, not the poet, who was chanting the great Hymn.

At first, it was as if she had never seen them before; she could only gaze and wonder. By and by they grew familiar again, but with a difference; they were her friends now, beloved and reverenced. Soon she began to weave webs of fancy about and about them, as was her way about everything.

The _Dent du Midi_ himself was a vast giant; like Atlas, only snow-white, instead of earth-brown as she had always pictured the latter. He was not a king, Mont Blanc was the king, as “Lor’ Birron” told her in the one specimen of his poetry enshrined in the _Choix_. “Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains: they crowned him long ago”; yes, doubtless. But the _Dent_ was one of the great princes of his court; held indeed a court of his own, with the _Dent d’Oche_ and the _Dent de Morche_ for his attendant dukes or marquises, and a host of other nobles who wore green robes under their white stoles. Some of these were lady-mountains, Honor loved to think; lovely maidens, with flashing jewels (those were the streams that danced and shone in the sunlight) and delicate trailing robes and veils of mist. They ministered to the Prince, singing to him with their musical voices--the streams again: it was quite simple to change them from jewels to voices--veiling and unveiling their beauty at his pleasure. But in the evening, the great star, Hesperus, who was Venus herself, Madame Madeleine said (which one did not understand, but that did not matter) rose out of the sunset over the Prince’s shoulder, kissed him, hovered radiant above him; and then the mountain maidens bowed their heads under their white veils and paid homage to their Queen.

All this Honor had dreamed, sitting there in the garden, when she ought to have been studying.

The dream came back to her to-night, with power; it seemed to fill the world. They were not, they could not be, mere masses of earth, these glorious forms towering into the sky. They surely were mighty beings, wrapped in their own deep thoughts, holding their own high converse one with another.

And now, she had come to the mountains. Not only were they her own, but she was theirs. Not a mountain child, like the mighty Twins, or even like Zitli--happy Zitli, who knew no other world than this glorious one; but an adopted child, say! She had come to visit them; they would be kind to her, would accept her love and reverence. It was very wonderful.

The châlet stood half way up one of the lesser Alps, on a ledge which jutted out from the green wooded slope. All around were other Alps, some green to the top, others capped or mantled with snow; others again, which seemed to scorn all covering, and towered gaunt and bare, their rocky sides seamed and scarred. These were dead giants, Honor thought. She did not love to look on them, they were too terrifying; she lifted her eyes to the loftiest summit of all, that of the _Dent du Midi_ himself, the mighty Prince of her dreams. How glorious he was; how noble!

As she lay watching, a glow stole over the brow of the white giant; the green of the nearer ones grew warmer; the sun was going down, and the world was turning to rose and gold. A level shaft flamed through the window and fell on Honor’s bed, lighting up the quilt. “Look!” it seemed to say. “This too is wonderful!”

It certainly was; heaviest linen, so covered with embroidery that the groundwork could hardly be seen. All in white; yet with a bewildering variety about it, somehow. Looking closer, Honor saw that it was divided into five compartments, a round one in the centre, the others fitting into it. The centre-piece displayed the sun, moon and stars, beautifully wrought in shining linen. In one of the others were delicate shapes of Alpine flowers, so lovely that one hardly missed the color. Another held ferns and mosses, while a third was covered with birds, in full flight or perched on twig and bough. The fourth--at first Honor thought it was entirely empty, but soon she spied in one corner a bit of work, evidently the beginning of a design. She was puzzling over it when a sudden whiff struck her nostrils, a pungent, aromatic whiff which made her exclaim unconsciously, “Oh, how hungry I am!”

“_A la bonne heure!_” Gretli stood beaming in the doorway, carrying a tray; on the tray was a blue bowl, steaming, fragrant. “Behold the soup of Mademoiselle! Our mountain air brings the appetite; cream and onions, with a little of our oldest cheese--behold!”

Standing on one side, arms akimbo, the benevolent giantess watched the consumption of the “restorative” soup, and which face was brighter, hers or the consumer’s, it would have been hard to say.