by Ouida
When the pine-woods ceased, and there was only around him mere naked rock, with a little moss growing on it here and there, Bela knew that he had come very high indeed. And he had his wish: he was quite alone. There was nothing to be seen here except the dusky forest, shelving downward, and vast slopes of naked grey stone, with large loose rocks scattered over them, as if giants had been playing there at pitch-and-toss. There was too much mist in the north and west, which faced him, for the opposite mountains to be seen, for it was still early in the day. He did not now feel the joy and excitement he had expected. He had climbed to the glacier region indeed, but the scene around was dreary, and the vast expanse of vapour surrounding him looked chill and melancholy.
In the excitement and exultation of his thoughts he had forgotten many things which he knew very well, trained to the hills as he was; he had forgotten that it might rain or snow before he reached any halting-place, that fogs came on at that season with fatal suddenness, that if the sun were obscured the cold would soon become great, that if a mist came down he would be unable to find any road, and that men had been often killed on those heights who had known every inch of the hills.
Something of his buoyancy and certainty of success began to pale and grow dull as the isolation lost its sense of novelty, and that intense silence of the glacier world, which is at all times so solemn, began to strike awe into his intrepid soul. He had often been as high, but there had been always on his ear his brother’s voice, and his guide’s laugh, and the merry sounds of the men chattering together as they climbed. Now there was no sound anywhere, save now and then a splitting cracking noise, which he knew was ice giving way under the noon-day heat of the sun. ‘It must be just as still as this in the grave,’ he thought, with a chill in his warm eager leaping young blood. A little tuft of edelweiss growing in a crevice, and an alpenlerche winging its way through the blue air, seemed to him like friends.
He wished now that Gela were with him.
‘But it would have been of no use to ask him,’ he thought sadly. ‘He never will disobey, even to make good come of it.’
A white mist had settled over all the lower world, one of the autumn fogs which come from the lower clouds enwrapped all the lakes and pastures and forests of Hohenszalras. Nothing could better baffle and distract his pursuers; perplexed and blinded, they would be wholly at a loss to trace his steps. It did not occur to him that the fog on the lower lands might mean also storm and snow, and the darkness and dampness of ice-cold vapours, in the upper air where he was.
It had become rough, hard, toilsome work; he was bruised, and almost lame, and very tired. But the spirit in him was not crushed; he kept always thinking: ‘If it did not hurt, it would be nothing to do it.’
He had now got above all grass; the ground was loose shingle where it was not bare granite, limestone, or marble, on all of which it was difficult to keep a hold. There was snow not very far above him. The air here was intensely cold. He had not thought to bring any furs with him. His limbs were sorely cramped, his feet began to feel numb, his fingers were so chilled he could hardly grip his alpenstock; the hard slopes gave scarcely any footing to his climbing-irons; there were clouds about him enveloping him, freezing him in their icy mist. He began to think piteously of his brother, of his home, and of the warm-cushioned nooks by the study fire, but he would not give in; he toiled on, cutting and hurting his hands and knees as he groped on his upward way. He reminded himself of Wratislaw, of Cassabianca, and all the boy-heroes he had ever read of; he would not yield in endurance to any one of them.
But, looking up, he knew by the colour of the sky that it was about to snow; the heavens were of a leaden uniform grey, and seemed to meet and touch the mountain. Then Bela knew that in all likelihood he would never see Gela or his home again.
He choked down the sob that rose in his throat, and tried to think what he could do to save himself. The ascent was now so steep that he could make no upward way, and could barely keep himself from sliding downwards. He caught at a projecting boulder and pulled himself with great effort up on to it; there he could sit in a cramped position and take breath. When he looked down he saw no forests, no land, no rocks, nothing but a sea of fog, which had gathered thick and grey beneath him. In autumn and spring the mountain weather changes in ten minutes from fair to foul.
The odd stupor that comes from long exposure at a great altitude in cold and vapour was stealing over him. Strange noises sounded in his ears, and his feet and hands tingled. He began to fear that he should get no further on his way, and he had not listened so often to the tales told by huntsmen without knowing clearly enough the dangers which await those who are out on the mountain side in bad weather when daylight goes.
As he sat there, gazing dizzily into the ocean of vapour below him, and upward to the huge walls of granite and of snow, he saw coming and descending towards him from out the clouds a huge dark bird; the immense wings seemed wide as heaven itself as it circled and swept the air.
Bela’s heart stood still: it was a male eagle, a golden eagle, and he knew it.
The child’s aching eyes watched the monarch of the upper air with a horrible fascination. It looked black as night against the steely sky, the snow-covered peaks.
He sat erect, and cried aloud to it in half delirious indignant reproof. ‘Oh, you great bird! you are treacherous, you are thankless! We have spared you and yours always, and now you will kill me! Oh, do you not hear? The Szalras have always spared you! Do you not hear?’ But the shouts of his young voice died away against the granite walls around him, and the king-bird paused not, but came nearer, and nearer, and nearer.
It circled round and round, and each circle narrowed, till it was poised immediately above his head, motionless, balancing itself upon its outstretched pinions. He could see its eyes bent on him, see the giant claws drawn up against its belly, see the hooked yellow beak. The eagle was lord of the air, and he had intruded on its royalty: in another moment he felt that it would descend on him and bear him off in its talons or batter him to death with the blows of its wings. He drew his little sword and waited for it; his eyes did not shrink, his body did not cower; he looked upward with his toy-blade drawn in as true a courage as that of Leonidas.
‘If only I could take him home once — once — I would not mind dying here afterwards,’ he thought, in his dreamy exultation; ‘Gott und mein Schwert!’ he muttered, and waited still, calmly. Yet to die with his errand undone — that seemed cruel.
The huge dark mass balanced itself one moment, more, then measuring its prey rushed through the air towards him. But, ere it had seized him, a shot flashed through the shadows, and rang through the silence; the bird dropped dead in a ring of blood on the naked stone of the mountain side.
Bela sprang up, and tottering on the slippery shelving rock threw his arms outward with a loud cry.
‘I came to find you!’ he shouted, in his rapturous joy; then cold and fatigue and past terror conquered him. He swooned at his father’s feet.
Sabran had not known that it was his son whom he saved. He had seen a child menaced by a bird of prey, and so had fired. When the boy staggered to him with that cry of welcome, he was for the moment stunned with amazement and gratitude and inexpressible emotion; the next he raised the little brave body in his arms.
‘Oh! tell me where your mother kissed you last, that I may set my lips there!’ he murmured to the child: but Bela heard not.
He was cold, inanimate, and senseless. He had gained his goal, but he had no sight or sense to know it. His father looked around him with terror for his sake. The snow had begun to fall, the darkness was deepening, the mists were creeping upward; he, who for three years had dwelt a mountaineer amidst these mountains, knew the danger of being belated amidst them in autumn, when, at a stroke, autumn became winter; sometimes in a single night. He himself had his dwelling far from there upon the Isel water, under the Umbal glacier. If he had to carry the boy it would be useless to dream of reaching the rude pl
ace which he had made his home: the weight of a tall child of ten years old is no light burden, and he knew that even if Bela regained his consciousness he would be incapable of exertion in the cold, which would intensify with every hour. But he wasted no moments in hesitation. He knew what the white fall of those softly-descending feathers from above, what the darkness and wetness of the dense fog down below, meant, out on the spurs of Glöckner after sunset. Lives were lost here every year; herds that had stayed on the Alps too late were surprised and destroyed by early snow-storms; pedlars and carriers were belated, and sent to a last sleep by that sudden plunge of autumn into frost. He knew his way inch by inch, and he knew that there was, some mile or so beyond him, the Wandahutte, erected in a dangerous pass by his wife, as a thanksgiving in the first months of their marriage. There he would find a rude bed, food, wine, and shelter for the night. He set himself to reach it.
It was hard to climb with the child, held by one arm, and thrown across one shoulder, as shepherds throw a disabled lamb. His other hand gripped his alpenstock; he had left his rifle under a ledge of rock, as a useless load. He had stripped off the hunter’s jacket that he wore, and wrapped it round Bela, whose body and limbs felt frozen. Down below in the valleys fruit trees had still their plums and pears, and asters and dahlias still flowered, but at this elevation the cold was piercing and the snow froze as it fell.
A high wind also had risen, as the day declined, and blew the white powder of the snow in whirling clouds: the terrible tourmente of the Alps which every traveller dreads. In the confusion of it he knew that he might walk round and round on the same road all night, making no progress. Soon it grew dark, though not quite four o’clock. He had no light with him, for he had not intended to be out at night; he had but come thither, as he often came, to see the distant gleam of the Szalrassee, the far-off outline of the Hohenszalrasburg. He had been reascending and returning when he had seen a child menaced by an eagle, and had fired. Had he been by himself he would have found the hut speedily, but weighted with the burden of Bela’s inert body he made little way, and staggered often on the slippery frozen steep. He had no hands free to wield his hatchet and cut his way by steps over the ice which had formed in all the fissures of the rocks.
The mountains had been his only friends in his exile. He had returned to them, he had dwelt amongst them, he had borne his sorrows through their help, and strengthened himself with their strength. But they menaced him sorely now. For himself he cared not, but his heart ached for the child, whose courage and affection had brought him thither to meet his death.
‘My poor Bela!’ he murmured, as the boy’s fair head hung over his shoulder, ‘why did you come to me? I give you nothing but evil. Safety, comfort, happiness, honour, all come from her.’
The whole heavens seemed to open, so dense a storm of snow now poured upon him. There were strange deep noises ever and again, as from the very bowels of the hills; a thousand times had he rejoiced to match his strength against the mountains and to conquer, but now they were his masters. All around him were the bastions and walls and domes of the great ice peaks; the huge glaciers hung above like frozen seas suspended; he could not behold them but he felt their presence and their awe.
‘The snow is in my blood and my blood is yours, and now it claims us,’ he muttered to the senseless ear of the child. He and the child had loved the snow, met it with welcome, sported with it in triumph; and now it killed them. They would lie down in it, and be one with it for ever.
But although these fancies drifted in his brain, he strove with all his might to keep in movement, to ascend ever in the easterly direction of the refuge which he sought to gain. So far as he could, weighted with his burden and blinded by the darkness, he continued to climb, gripping the hard slopes with his feet and his alpenstock. He had given his coat to the child; the cold made every vein in his own body numb; his limbs pricked and seemed to swell; he had only his woollen shirt, above his linen one, and his velvet breeches between him and the frozen air, that could slay a hundred sheep massed together in their warmth and wool. He knew that the hut was but a mile, or little more, from the place where he had shot the eagle; but half a mile in the snowstorm and the darkness was longer than forty miles in sunshine and fair weather. He could not be even sure that he went aright; he could see nothing; the sky was covered with the low dense clouds; he could only guess. All the slender signs and landmarks, that would even in mere twilight have served to guide his steps, were now hidden. A thick woolly impenetrable gloom enshrouded him; he felt as though he were muffled and suffocated by it, and the fatal drowsiness — the fatal desire to lie down and be at rest — with which frost kills, stole on him.
With all the manhood in him he resisted it for the child’s sake.
He had been climbing and wandering three short hours only, and he had believed that it was midnight at the least. Bela still hung like a lifeless thing over his shoulder, but he felt that his limbs were warmer, and his heart beat feebly, but with regularity.
‘God grant me power to save him, for his mother’s sake,’ thought Sabran; ‘then there may come what will.’
He struggled anew against the mortal sleepiness, the increasing numbness, that grew upon himself. Suddenly, as he turned, without knowing it, the corner of a wall of rock he saw a starry light. He knew that it was the lamp of the refuge which, by his wife’s command, was lit at twilight every evening the whole year round. It was now but a few roods off; he could see even the outline of the cabin itself, black against its background of snow. But he had taken the wrong path to it. Between him and it there yawned a wide crevasse in the glacier on which he now stood.
He shouted loud, but the wind was louder than his voice. The keeper in the refuge could not hear. He paused doubtfully. To retrace his steps and seek the right path would be certain destruction; it would take him many miles about, and there was no chance even in the darkness that he would ever find it; his strength, too, was failing him, and the child was still unconscious. There was but one way of escape, to leap the fissure. It was wider than any man could be sure to clear, and if he fell within it he would fall into jagged ice a thousand fathoms down. By daylight he had often looked down into its awful depths, blue in their darkness, set with jagged teeth of ice like a trap’s jaws.
The leap might be death or life.
He hesitated a few instants, then drew quite close to the edge, and cast aside his pole, for the chasm was too wide for that to help him, and he needed both hands free to hold the boy more firmly. The lamp from the hut shed light enough to guide him; the snow fell fast, the wind was violent. He paused another moment on the brink, drew the child closer to him and clasped him with both arms; then, gathering all his force into his limbs, he leaped.
He cleared the fissure, but staggered on the slippery ice beyond. He fell heavily, but still held his son so that Bela fell uppermost and dropped upon him.
Crushed by his weight, Sabran sank at full length on the white crystal ground; alone he would have leaped as surely as the chamois.
The shock awoke Bela from his trance; he opened his blue eyes giddily.
‘It is you!’ he murmured feebly, as he felt himself lying on his father’s breast.
‘It is I!’ said Sabran. ‘My child, if you can move, try and creep to that hut and call. I cannot.’
The child, without a sound, trembling sorely, and with a sense of confusion making his head dizzy, obeyed, drew himself slowly up, and dragged his tired, aching, cramped limbs over the snow.
‘You are brave,’ murmured his father, whose eyes followed him. ‘You are your mother’s son.’
Bela reached the door of the hut and beat on it with his little frozen hands, and then fell down against it.
‘It is I — Count Bela!’ he managed to cry aloud. ‘Come to my father; quick!’
The door was flung aside, and the keepers of the hut rushed out at the first cry. They had been asleep. They were old jägers, past the work of the forests, but still strong. Ha
ving lighted the beacon without, they had drunk a little wine, and chattered, and then dosed. Terrified at their own negligence and at the sight of their lady’s son, they staggered out into the night, and together they bore the body of Sabran into the refuge. He was unable to rise.
‘You cannot move!’ sobbed the child, raining kisses on his hands.
‘I am stiff from the cold; nothing more,’ said his father, faintly.
Then he looked at the men.
‘One of you, if it be possible, go to the Burg. Tell the Countess von Szalras that her son is safe. You need not speak of me. Bring the physician here when it is morning; but say nothing of me to-night. Give me a little of your wine — —’
His lips were blue, he felt faint; in his own heart he said to himself, ‘I am hurt unto death.’
Bela had thrown his arms about him, and, trembling like a leaf, clung there and sobbed aloud deliriously.
‘You are hurt, you are hurt, and all for me!’ he sobbed, as he saw his father placed on the truckle bed set aside for any belated wanderer on the hills.
Sabran smiled on him.
‘My child, do not grieve so; it is nothing; a mere momentary wrench; do not even think of it. No, no! I am not in pain.’
The wine revived him, and restored his strength, and he sought to conceal his injury for the boy’s sake.
‘Warm some of this wine and give it to my son,’ he said to the keeper of the hut; ‘then undress him, wrap him warmly, and make him sleep before the fire.’
‘You are hurt, you are ill!’ moaned Bela. ‘I came to find you to take you back. Our mother has never been the same; — she has never smiled — —’
‘Hush!’ said Sabran, almost sternly. ‘Do not speak of your mother before these men, her servants. You came to seek me, my poor little boy? That was good of you, and it was good to remember me. It is three years — —’
Bela clung to him and put his lips to his father’s ear, that the men might not hear.