Wilfrid Cumbermede, George MacDonald [essential reading .txt] 📗

the little red flower called the Shepherd's Hour-Glass opens when the cloud withdraws. It is a terrible thing when the father is the cloud, and not the sun, of his child's life. If Charley had been like the greater number of boys I have known, all this would only have hardened his mental and moral skin by the natural process of accommodation. But his skin would not harden, and the evil wrought the deeper. From his father he had inherited a conscience of abnormal sensibility; but he could not inherit the religious dogmas by means of which his father had partly deadened, partly distorted his; and constant pressure and irritation had already generated a great soreness of surface.

When he began to open up, it was after a sad fashion at first. To resume my simile of the pimpernel-it was to disclose a heart in which the glowing purple was blanched to a sickly violet. What happiness he had, came in fits and bursts, and passed as quickly, leaving him depressed and miserable. He was always either wishing to be happy, or trying to be sure of the grounds of the brief happiness he had. He allowed the natural blessedness of his years hardly a chance: the moment its lobes appeared above ground, he was handling them, examining them, and trying to pull them open. No wonder they crept underground again! It may seem hardly credible that such should be the case with a boy of fifteen, but I am not mistaken in my diagnosis. I will go a little further. Gifted with the keenest perceptions, and a nature unusually responsive to the feelings of others, he was born to be an artist. But he was content neither with his own suggestions, nor with understanding those of another; he must, by the force of his own will, generate his friend's feeling in himself, not perceiving the thing impossible. This was one point at which we touched, and which went far to enable me to understand him. The original in him was thus constantly repressed, and he suffered from the natural consequences of repression. He suffered also on the physical side from a tendency to disease of the lungs inherited from his mother.

Mr Forest's house stood high on the Grindelwald side of the Wengern Alp, under a bare grassy height full of pasture both Summer and Winter. In front was a great space, half meadow, half common, rather poorly covered with hill-grasses. The rock was near the surface, and in places came through, when the grass was changed for lichens and mosses. Through this rocky meadow now roamed, now rushed, now tumbled one of those Alpine streams the very thought of whose ice-born plenitude makes me happy yet. Its banks were not abrupt, but rounded gently in, and grassy down to the water's brink. The larger torrents of Winter wore the channel wide, and the sinking of the water in Summer let the grass grow within it. But peaceful as the place was, and merry with the constant rush of this busy stream, it had, even in the hottest Summer day, a memory of the Winter about it, a look of suppressed desolation; for the only trees upon it were a score of straggling pines-all dead, as if blasted by lightning, or smothered by snow. Perhaps they were the last of the forest in that part, and their roots had reached a stratum where they could not live. All I know is that there they stood, blasted and dead every one of them.

Charley could never bear them, and even disliked the place because of them. His father was one whom a mote in his brother's eye repelled. The son suffered for this in twenty ways-one of which was that a single spot in the landscape was to him enough to destroy the loveliness of exquisite surroundings.

A good way below lay the valley of the Grindelwald. The Eiger and the Matterhorn were both within sight. If a man has any sense of the infinite, he cannot fail to be rendered capable of higher things by such embodiments of the high. Otherwise, they are heaps of dirt, to be scrambled up and conquered, for scrambling and conquering's sake. They are but warts, Pelion and Ossa and all of them. They seemed to oppress Charley at first.

'Oh, Willie,' he said to me one day, 'if I could but believe in those mountains, how happy I should be! But I doubt, I doubt they are but rocks and snow.'

I only half understood him. I am afraid I never did understand him more than half. Later I came to the conclusion that this was not the fit place for him, and that if his father had understood him, he would never have sent him there.

It was some time before Mr Forest would take us any mountain ramble. He said we must first get accustomed to the air of the place, else the precipices would turn our brains. He allowed us, however, to range within certain bounds.

One day soon after our arrival, we accompanied one of our schoolfellows down to the valley of the Grindelwald, specially to see the head of the snake-glacier, which having crept thither can creep no further. Somebody had even then hollowed out a cave in it. We crossed a little brook which issued from it constantly, and entered. Charley uttered a cry of dismay, but I was too much delighted at the moment to heed him. For the whole of the white cavern was filled with blue air, so blue that I saw the air which filled it. Perfectly transparent, it had no substance, only blueness, which deepened and deepened as I went further in. All down the smooth white walls evermore was stealing a thin veil of dissolution; while here and there little runnels of the purest water were tumbling in tiny cataracts from top to bottom. It was one of the thousand birthplaces of streams, ever creeping into the day of vision from the unlike and the unknown, unrolling themselves like the fronds of a fern out of the infinite of God. Ice was all around, hard and cold and dead and white; but out of it and away went the water babbling and singing in the sunlight.

'Oh, Charley!' I exclaimed, looking round in my transport for sympathy. It was now my turn to cry out, for Charley's face was that of a corpse. The brilliant blue of the cave made us look to each other most ghastly and fearful.

'Do come out, Wilfrid,' he said; 'I cannot bear it.'

I put my arm in his, and we walked into the sunlight. He drew a deep breath of relief, and turned to me with an attempt at a smile, but his lip quivered.

'It's an awful place, Wilfrid. I don't like it. Don't go in again. I should stand waiting to see you come out in a winding-sheet. I think there's something wrong with my brain. That blue seems to have got into it. I see everything horribly dead.'

On the way back he started several times, and looked, round as if with involuntary apprehension, but mastered himself with an effort, and joined again in the conversation. Before we reached home he was much fatigued, and complaining of head-ache, went to bed immediately on our arrival.

We slept in the same room. When I went up at the usual hour, he was awake.

'Can't you sleep, Charley?' I said.

'I've been asleep several times,' he answered, 'but I've had such a horrible dream every time! We were all corpses that couldn't get to sleep, and went about pawing the slimy walls of our marble sepulchre-so cold and wet! It was that horrible ice-cave, I suppose. But then you know that's just what it is, Wilfrid.'

'I don't know what you mean,' I said, instinctively turning from the subject, for the glitter of his blue eyes looked bodeful. I did not know then how like he and I were, or how like my fate might have been to his, if, instead of finding at once a fit food for my fancy, and a safety-valve for its excess, in those old romances, I had had my regards turned inwards upon myself, before I could understand the phenomena there exhibited. Certainly I too should have been thus rendered miserable, and body and soul would have mutually preyed on each other.

I sought to change the subject. I could never talk to him about his father, but he had always been ready to speak of his mother and his sister. Now, however, I could not rouse him. 'Poor mamma!' was all the response he made to some admiring remark; and when I mentioned his sister Mary, he only said, 'She's a good girl, our Mary,' and turned uneasily towards the wall. I went to bed. He lay quiet, and I fell asleep.

When I woke in the morning, I found him very unwell. I suppose the illness had been coming on for some time. He was in a low fever. As the doctor declared it not infectious, I was allowed to nurse him. He was often delirious, and spoke the wildest things. Especially, he would converse with the Saviour after the strangest fashion.

He lay ill for some weeks. Mr Forest would not allow me to sit up with him at night, but I was always by his bedside early in the morning, and did what I could to amuse and comfort him through the day. When at length he began to grow better, he was more cheerful than I had known him hitherto; but he remained very weak for some time. He had grown a good deal during his illness, and indeed never looked a boy again.


CHAPTER XVII.


AMONG THE MOUNTAINS.

One summer morning we all got up very early, except Charley, who was unfit for the exertion, to have a ramble in the mountains, and see the sun rise. The fresh friendly air, full of promise, greeting us the moment we crossed the threshold; the calm light which, without visible source, lay dream-like on the hills; the brighter space in the sky whence ere long the spring of glory would burst forth triumphant; the dull white of the snow-peaks, dwelling so awful and lonely in the mid heavens, as if nothing should ever comfort them or make them acknowledge the valleys below; the sense of adventure with which we climbed the nearer heights as familiar to our feet on ordinary days as the stairs to our bedrooms; the gradual disappearance of the known regions behind us, and the dawning sense of the illimitable and awful, folding in its bosom the homely and familiar-combined to produce an impression which has never faded. The sun rose in splendour, as if nothing more should hide in the darkness for ever; and yet with the light came a fresh sense of mystery, for now that which had appeared smooth was all broken and mottled with shadows innumerable. Again and again I found myself standing still to gaze in a rapture of delight which I can only recall, not express; again and again was I roused by the voice of the master in front, shouting to me to come on, and warning me of the danger of losing sight of the rest of the company; and again and again I obeyed, but without any perception of the peril.

The intention was to cross the hills into the valley of the Lauterbrunnen, not, however, by the path now so well known, but by another way, hardly a path, with which the master and some of the boys were familiar enough. It was my first experience of anything like real climbing. As we passed