Reveries of a Bachelor; or, A Book of the Heart

by Donald Grant Mitchell

—“Yer honor may well be proud; for not a prettier face, or a kinder heart, has been in Devon since Mistress Carry left us.”

But pleasant as are the old woods, full of memories, and pleasant as are the twilight evenings upon the terrace—we must pass over to the mountains of Switzerland. There we are to meet Laurence.

Carry has never seen the magnificence of the Juras; and as we journey over the hills between Dole and the border line, looking upon the rolling heights shrouded with pine trees, and down thousands of feet, at the very roadside, upon the cottage roofs and emerald valleys, where the dun herds are feeding quietly, she is lost in admiration. At length we come to that point above the little town of Gex, from which you see spread out before you the meadows that skirt Geneva, the placid surface of Lake Leman, and the rough, shaggy mountains of Savoy—and far behind them, breaking the horizon with snowy cap, and with dark pinnacles—Mont Blanc, and the Needles of Chamouni.

I point out to her in the valley below the little town of Ferney, where stands the deserted château of Voltaire; and beyond, upon the shores of the lake, the old home of De Staël; and across, with its white walls reflected upon the bosom of the water, the house where Byron wrote The Prisoner of Chillon. Among the grouping roofs of Geneva we trace the dark cathedral and the tall hotels shining on the edge of the lake. And I tell of the time when I tramped down through yonder valley, with my future all visionary and broken, and drank the splendor of the scene, only as a quick relief to the monotony of my solitary life.

—“And now, Carry, with your hand locked in mine, and your heart mine—yonder lake sleeping in the sun, and the snowy mountains with their rosy hue seem like the smile of nature, bidding us be glad!”

Laurence is at Geneva; he welcomes Carry, as he would welcome a sister. He is a noble fellow, and tells me much of his sweet Italian wife; and presents me to the smiling, blushing—Enrica! She has learned English now; she has found, she says, a better teacher, than ever I was. Yet she welcomes me warmly, as a sister might; and we talk of those old evenings by the blazing fire, and of the one-eyed maestro, as children long separated might talk of their school tasks and of their teachers. She can not tell me enough of her praises of Laurence, and of his noble heart. “You were good,” she says, “but Laurence is better.”

Carry admires her soft brown hair, and her deep liquid eye, and wonders how I could ever have left Rome?

—Do you indeed wonder—Carry?

And together we go down into Savoy, to that marvelous valley, which lies under the shoulder of Mont Blanc; and we wander over the Mer De Glace, and pick alpine roses from the edge of the frowning glacier. We toil at nightfall up to the monastery of the Great St. Bernard, where the new forming ice crackles in the narrow foot-way, and the cold moon glistens over wastes of snow, and upon the windows of the dark Hospice. Again, we are among the granite heights, whose ledges are filled with ice, upon the Grimsel. The pond is dark and cold; the paths are slippery; the great glacier of the Aar sends down icy breezes, and the echoes ring from rock to rock, as if the ice-god answered. And yet we neither suffer nor fear.

In the sweet valley of Meyringen, we part from Laurence: he goes northward, by Grindenwald, and Thun—thence to journey westward, and to make for the Roman girl a home beyond the ocean. Enrica bids me go on to Rome: she knows that Carry will love its soft warm air, its ruins, its pictures and temples, better than these cold valleys of Switzerland. And she gives me kind messages for her mother, and for Cesare; and should we be in Rome at the Easter season, she bids us remember her, when we listen to the Miserere, and when we see the great Chiesa on fire, and when we saunter upon the Pincian hill—and remember, that it is her home.