Honor was still looking about her in a bewildered fashion. “I am all right,” she said, “only my head aches, and my ankle hurts when I try to move. What happened, Gretli? Did somebody knock me down? Why?”
“That,” said Gretli, “is a thing known only to the good God, who created goats. With sorrow and shame I avow it, Mademoiselle Honor; Bimbo, that child of Satan, attacked Mademoiselle Stephanie, from the rear, you understand, with a violence not to be credited had one not seen it. She was flung forward upon you, who stood before her; a loose stone, it would appear, turned under your foot. You fell to the ground, striking your head on another stone. I ran to raise you; you swooned in my arms, poor child. Ah! what confusion! Mademoiselle Stephanie shrieking to the skies that she was killed; Zitli belaboring the misguided beast with his crutch; the demoiselles clustering together in affright; my Ladies full of anxiety and distress. What would you? It was the hour of departure; there is no other boat to-day, and though all would be more than welcome to the Châlet, they could not pass the night in comfort.
“They proposed to carry you between them, these benevolent ladies; I respectfully begged them to reconsider. ‘Leave the little one’—I demand pardon, mademoiselle; it is only yesterday, it appears, that I carry you in my arms!—‘leave her with us!’ I said. ‘My faith, I am well used to the care of sprains; she will be safe as in Ste. Gêneviève’s pocket. I will give her soup of cream and onion with cheese, a restorative not worse than another; for her amusement Zitli will tell stories—but, par example! he is a story-teller, that little one! The creatures will all be at her feet, except that ruffian Bimbo, who will not be suffered to approach her. By and by, when all is well, Atli will carry her down the mountain like an egg of glass, will deposit her by your side. Et voilà!’ My Ladies perceived the reasonableness of the idea. They wept, but finally consented to leave their cherished pupil to make a good and beautiful recovery in the Châlet des Rochers. Finally, mademoiselle, behold us here, three of us—four, when Atli returns to-morrow from the higher Alp. We shall do well, is it not so? And now, to prepare the soup! It will be good, I promise you!”
Left alone, Honor looked round her, and tried to take in the situation. She remembered the sudden impact of some soft body—that was poor Stephanie, of course; then—crash! a sharp blow from something hard—that was the stone!—a shower of stars, red, blue, green,—then darkness. That was all, till this wonderful awakening to find herself in the châlet of her dreams, among the great mountains themselves. Ah! there they were; close, it seemed, outside the little window. Without moving her head, she saw a green giant towering, and behind him, looking over his shoulder, a white one.
“The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts!”
Certainly Honor’s 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”:
“Eet ees un ancien marinère,
And ’e stopess von of sree;
‘By zy longré birrd and gleetring eye,