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The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts!
Certainly Honors 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:
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 childs 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 dOche 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 Princes 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.