44. CHAPTER XLIV.
In dread, in danger, and alone,
Famished and chilled, through ways unknown,
Tangled and steep, he journeyed on.
— Lady of the Lake.
Whoever, journeying southward from Coire, passes
through the Via Mala, thence through the village of Andeer,
and thence turns to the left, following a mountain path up
the torrent of the Aversa, will soon lose himself in the solitudes
of the savage valley of Ferrera. Thither Morton made
his way; but not by so smooth an access. Ignorant of the
country, and guided chiefly by the sun, he had pushed blindly
forward by paths best known to the chamois and those who
chase them.
His best hope had been to meet some of his travelling
countrymen, from whom he could gain help. To this end he
had once and again approached the highways, and as often
some real or seeming danger had driven him back to the
mountains. For a day or more, the food he had taken from
the inn served to support him. He had flung away Max's
pistol, but still had his own. It served him to kindle a fire;
and by loading it with gravel, in place of shot, he contrived
to kill thrushes and other small birds. Their nests, too, full
at this time of eggs and young, supplied a meagre resource;
and once, being hard pressed, he made a Gallic banquet on a
party of serenaders who were croaking and trilling their
evening concert about the edge of a shallow pool. Frogs
have found warm eulogists; but never did the art of Paris or
Bologna transmute those delectable reptiles into so savory a
repast as did the famine-sharpened appetite of Morton.
Upon fare like this, he wandered on, till he stumbled upon
the valley of Ferrera.
He had found at last an asylum wild enough to content
the most pious of eremites, or the most desperate of bandits.
Below he saw the raging water foaming along the depths of
its black ravine; above — the stupendous ramparts that
walled the valley in — cliffs, along whose giddy verge the
firs were dwindled to feathers. Cascades spouted from their
tops, scattering to mist and nothingness long before their
measureless leap was done. The tribute drawn from the
clouds the lavish mountain flung back to the clouds again.
Rocks were piled on rocks, ruin on ruin, and, high over all,
the glaciers of the Splugen shone like cliffs of silver.
Take a savage from his woods or his prairies, and, school
him as you will, the ingrained savage will still declare itself.
Take the most polished of mankind, turn him into the wilderness,
and forthwith the dormant savage begins to appear.
Hunt him with enemies, gnaw him with hunger, beat him
with wind and rain, and observe the result; how the delicate
tissues of civilization are blown away, how rude passions start
into life, how his bodily cravings grow clamorous and importunate,
how he grows reckless of his own blood and the
blood of others. “Men are as the times.” Young Lovelace
of the hussars singing a duet at Lady Belgrave's soirée,
would hardly know himself, hewing down Russian artillerymen
at Balaklava.
Had Meredith met his old comrade as he was making his
slow way among the rocks and ravines, in dress no better
than the meanest peasant, his face moustached and bearded,
and thin and dark with hardship, he would have needed the
eyes of a lynx to detect Morton the millionaire. The mind
of the latter shared, in some sort, the changes of his outer
man. Proscribed and hunted, starved into fierceness, his
best friend murdered at his side, his mood was, to say the
least, none of the most benign. But, as he toiled on his
way, he turned aside to rest in a sunny nook, deep sheltered
among rocks. Here, where the fresh grass tempted him, and
where, from a jutting crag, the water, trickling from some hidden
spring, fell in rapid drops, tinkling into a pool below,
and, as they fell, flashing in the sun like a string of diamonds,
— here, in this quiet nook, he sat down; and, as he did so,
he saw by his side, close nestled in the young grass, a little
family of white and purple blossoms. They were blossoms
of the crocus, a native of these valleys.
Morton bent over them, and put aside the grass from the
delicate petals. A flower will now and then find a voice,
and that not a weak one. As he looked, there came in upon
him such a surge of recollection, such a memory of New
England gardens, such a vision of loved faces, and, chief
before them all, the face he best loved, such an awakening of
every tender thought that had once possessed him, and all in
such overpowering contrast with his present misery, that the
famished outlaw burst into a flood of tears.
