English fiction -- 19th century; Marriage -- Fiction
She handed it back to him, saying hushedly and only ‘Yes.’
He did not ask an opinion upon the beauty she had seen. His pace
increased, and she hastened her steps beside him. She had not much to
learn when some minutes later she said; ‘Shall I see her, Chillon?’
‘She is one of the ladies we are to meet.’
‘What a pity!’ Carinthia stepped faster, enlightened as to his wish to
get to the Baths without delay; and her heart softened in reflecting how
readily he had yielded to her silly preference for going on foot.
Her cry of regret was equivocal; it produced no impression on him. They
reached a village where her leader deemed it adviseable to drive for the
remainder of the distance up the valley to the barrier snow-mountain.
She assented instantly, she had no longer any active wishes of her
own, save to make amends to her brother, who was and would ever be her
brother: she could not be robbed of their relationship.
Something undefined in her feeling of possession she had been robbed of,
she knew it by her spiritlessness; and she would fain have attributed
it to the idle motion of the car, now and them stupidly jolting her
on, after the valiant exercise of her limbs. They were in a land of
waterfalls and busy mills, a narrowing vale where the runs of grass grew
short and wild, and the glacier-river roared for the leap, more foam
than water, and the savagery, naturally exciting to her, breathed of its
lair among the rocks and ice-fields.
Her brother said: ‘There he is.’ She saw the whitecrowned king of the
region, of whose near presence to her old home she had been accustomed
to think proudly, end she looked at him without springing to him,
and continued imaging her English home and her loveless uncle,
merely admiring the scene, as if the fire of her soul had been
extinguished.--‘Marry, and be a blessing to a husband.’ Chillon’s words
whispered of the means of escape from the den of her uncle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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