sang Orient. “After all, it is not the Walpurgis Night.”
“If we could only have a cup of tea!” sighed the mamma, at a loss for her luxuries in the wilderness.
“It will be so much more refreshing to-morrow,” said Orient. “And seasoned with romance,—a dash of danger,—your first adventure, little mother!”
But the little mother had no fancy for adventures; and while her daughter lost all her serenity and was crazy with delight at the wild beauty of the thing, she grew more and more lachrymose, and afforded at last a good background of shower for all Orient’s rainbows. Thereon Orient, sitting down, put her arms round her and comforted her, till the mother became herself somewhat alive to the circumstance that one seldom saw such a scene twice in a lifetime.
They had remained on the rocky platform where they paused, a shelf that after a few yards ended in an abrupt fall that led away by a course of stark precipices into the great valley beneath. This valley, filled with rolling vapor, whose volumes, smitten by sunset, were fused in splendid color, made a pavilion of cloud beneath them where billows of fleecy crimson and shining scarlet curdled together into creamy crests, here seeming to lash in feather-white foam against the base of some crag, and there letting a late sunbeam plough through spaces of a violet-dark drift till they were all inwrought with gold. Above them the cold and mighty heaven was already faintly but thickly strewn with stars.
“Into what awful and glorious region are we translated!” cried Orient. “We are above the world and the people of the world. Are we flesh and blood?”
“The free spirits of the air ‘have no such liberty’ as this of ours,” said Reymund.
“It is just as if we were dead!” shivered the mamma. “And I’m sure it’s cold enough for that!”
Orient wrapped the shawls about the doleful little woman, while Reymund opened his knapsack for any remnants of lunch that might afford them consolation. He kindled the fire, too, for the colors were fading away beneath, and the sky was getting gloomy overhead; and, warmed and enlivened in the genial light of the briefly crackling blaze, they forgot that they were lost upon the mountain, and all the possible horrors of their fate. But to Reymund there were few horrors in it, for if he died of exposure and starvation there on the bald, pitiless mountain, it would be with Orient in his arms at last.
While the fire crackled, Reymund found in his breast-pocket a tiny flask of cordial which he divided into three portions. “Drink it,” he said to them, “and make it take the place of the tea. It is Chartreuse—oily sunshine—distilled from the cones of some old fir-tree. First cousin to the cedars of Lebanon, for all I know. Mark how you taste hemlock in it. Socrates poisoned with hemlock? No, no; he drank himself to death on Chartreuse.”