There were other servants in the house, but only Lisa knew anything of English, and Squib’s fluency in the odd vernacular of the district was very useful. He had made firm friends with everybody on the place before the first evening had passed, and when they sat down at last to the nondescript travellers’ meal that was like dinner and tea rolled into one, Colonel Rutland looked across at his wife, who, tired, but smiling, was seated at the head of the table and doing the honours of the simple repast, and said, —
“I think I did well to bring Squib along with us.”
“He is very useful, a capital little interpreter,” answered Lady Mary with a smile. “I was horrified once at the frightful jargon Lisa was teaching the child to talk, and almost sent her away for it, fearing that it would be the ruin both of his English and of his German, but it has come in wonderfully useful now. They do not understand my German half so well as his patois. And Lisa’s English has got very rusty.”
It was very exhilarating to Squib to feel himself of use, and there was nothing which he more desired than to win the approval of his beautiful mother. Lady Mary was not one of those mothers who are always caressing and fondling their children, and yet they loved her with an almost adoring love, and desired her approval above everything in the world. As she bent a soft, smiling glance on Squib when she spoke, he felt his heart give a great bound, and slipping round the table till he reached her side, he put his small hand gently upon hers.
“I shall have to take care of you when father and Uncle Ronald go to climb the mountains with Mr. Lorimer, shan’t I, mother? You see I can take care of you now, don’t you? I can be useful, and there will always be Czar to keep away anybody who would frighten you. But I don’t think there will be anybody to do that in our valley. I think the mountains keep watch over it, as Lisa says, and keep the evil spirits out!”
The mother, who understood the child’s mind best, smiled and kissed him as she dismissed him to bed, for the time was getting on now, and the long daylight fading. The gentlemen laughed and teased him a little about his “queer fancies,” but Squib did not think them queer at all, he was so sure that there was something personal and protective about those white watchers opposite; and when he knelt to say his prayers that night, he knelt where he had them full in view all the time.
“They have been there always,” he said to himself, with a sensation akin to awe, “just as they are now, with nothing between them and God. I think He must have made them so grand and white and beautiful because He liked to look at them, and if He likes to look down at them, why, it must make them good!”
There was something very grand and wonderful in the way those white peaks stood out against the darkening sky in that clear transparent air. A short time ago they had been dyed a wonderful rose pink, as they caught the reflected glory of the setting sun; now they were rather grey than red, with a look of almost awful aloofness and grandeur as they stood up in their spotless whiteness and purity.
And then as the child watched this change with a strange sense of fascination, the great round moon rose slowly above the ridge, and at once new beauty and grandeur were thrown over the whole world. Great towering shadows seemed to be cast athwart the valley, and then the snow-slopes began to glimmer and shine with a new and almost unearthly radiance. Squib held his breath as he watched the moon rise over the snow-covered ridge, and the transformation of those rugged peaks and fissures into a new world of ebony and silver.
How long he would have watched it, forgetting all besides, may well be questioned, but he was quickly disturbed by an anxious voice, —
“Liebchen! – Liebchen! – what art thou doing? Thou wilt catch thy death of cold up here in the nipping mountain air!”
And Squib was quickly caught up in a pair of strong arms and hustled with ignominious rapidity into the queer little bed which seemed a necessary part of Swiss life.
But he was altogether too happy to be seriously ruffled by any such summary proceeding; and all he did by way of retaliation was to keep fast hold of Lisa’s hand and refuse to let her go till she had talked him to sleep with the most entrancing of her stories of the mountains.
CHAPTER IV.
THE LITTLE GOAT-HERD
Surely never had boy been so happy before as was little Squib in his mountain home!
He had perfect liberty to rove where he would, so long as he went nowhere that Czar could not follow him. This stipulation, as Colonel Rutland observed, would keep him from any precipitous ascents or descents, and restrict his wanderings to safe paths; and the fidelity and sagacity of the dog were quite to be trusted should the child lose his way. Czar would be certain to bring him safe home again; but, indeed, there was not much fear that Squib would lose his way. He had a decided “bump of locality,” as Uncle Ronald called it, and the green valley with its many attractions was a safe place for the boy to wander in.
For the first fortnight of his residence at the chalet, Squib had no disposition to stray very far away. There were so many attractions close at hand that it was needless to go far afield for his pleasures. Why, just by climbing up through the meadows and wood behind the house you could find more flowers than could be properly pressed and arranged in many days – gentians, small and large, the delicate little soldanella with its cyclamen leaf, the tiny and exquisite pinguicula with its fairy-like white bloom, and the yellow anemones which made quite a carpet in one little glade, hemmed in between the spurs of a dim fir wood. Then down by the bed of the little brawling torrent, which was always racing and tumbling down the hillside to join the wider river below, grew in obscure and shady corners the golden auriculas with their graceful bells and silvery leaves. As to the lower-lying meadows, they were glorious with their wealth of many-hued flowers, the blue salvia, purple crane’s-bill, yellow clover, the wild salsafy with its golden bloom, that Squib believed to be a rudbeckia until somebody told him to the contrary, and warned him against including it in his collection, as it was a tiresome thing to have in the garden, and grew rampant and masterful beyond bearing. The delicate Alpine roses, too, with their white and yellow clusters of blossom, were a perfect delight to the little botanist, and he hardly knew where to begin or where to stop in digging up roots to be kept in his garden behind the chalet, ready for final transportation to England.
His mother took great interest in his flowers and plants, and Mrs. Lorimer knew the names of almost all the Alpine plants, and whereabout they grew, whilst Lisa was able to give him practical help in digging and delving, and told him all sorts of stories about the different properties of the herbs he sometimes brought home, and how they could be distilled into Enzian-schnapps as she called it, though what sort of stuff that might be Squib could never make out.
And then there were all Lisa’s stories to be listened to again, with even a greater sense of fascination here amongst the mountains themselves than in the nursery at home. Why, the little men of the mountains – the Bergmännlein, as Lisa called them – might have their caves in the sides of any of these hills; and it always seemed as if everybody who once strayed in there came out a hundred years older at the end of what had seemed to him a very short time. Squib sometimes wondered with awe if he would ever find his way accidentally into one of these caves one day, and come back to find the chalet in ruins, the saplings grown to monster forest trees, and the glacier rolled farther down into the valley; for Lisa declared that it was always moving on – on – on-although Squib found it hard to believe.
Talking of the glacier always made Lisa speak of the Seligen Fräulein as she called them – the ice-maidens, who loved to woo to sleep the unwary travellers who trusted to their soft guiding voices, and let themselves be lured from the path and down – down – down into some cold dim crevasse or grotto whence no return could be made. Squib listened with a strange sense of fascination as Lisa told him of these snow-white maidens with shining eyes, and hair like powdered crystal, and how they sang to sleep the victims they had lured to destruction, and how that sleep lasted for years and years, and how the sleeper was found at last, still smiling in his dreams, when, after many generations had passed away, the ice-maidens would yield up their prey at a certain icy portal where the river came rushing and sweeping out of a great green ice grotto, in which the Seligen Fräulein were said to hold high revel.
“And