Wanda, Vol. 3 (of 3)

by Ouida

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.