Ashe turned back to the carriage, bidding a silent farewell to a country he did not love—­a country mainly significant to him of memories which rose like a harsh barrier between his present self and a time when he, too, fleeted life carelessly, like other men, and found every hour delightful.  Never, as long as he lived, should he come willingly to Italy.  But his mother this year had fallen into such an exhaustion of body and mind, caused by his father’s long agony, that he had persuaded her to let him carry her over the Alps to Stresa—­a place she had known as a girl and of which she often spoke—­for a Whitsuntide holiday.  He himself was no longer in office.  A coalition between the Tories and certain dissident Liberals had turned out Lord Parham’s government in the course of a stormy autumn session, some eight months before.  It had been succeeded by a weak administration, resting on two or three loosely knit groups—­with Ashe as leader of the Opposition.  Hence his comparative freedom, and the chance to be his mother’s escort.

But at Stresa he had been overtaken by some startling political news—­news which seemed to foreshadow an almost immediate change of ministry; and urgent telegrams bade him return at once.  The coalition on which the government relied had broken down; the resignation of its chief, a “transient and embarrassed phantom,” was imminent; and it was practically certain, in the singular dearth of older men on his own side, since the retirement of Lord Parham, that within a few weeks, if not days, Ashe would be called upon to form an administration....

The carriage was soon on its way again, and presently, in the darkness of the superb ravine that stretches west and north from Gondo, the tumult of wind and water was such that even Ashe’s slackened pulses felt the excitement of it.  He left the carriage, and, wrapped in a waterproof cape, breasted the wind along the water’s edge.  Wordsworth’s magnificent lines in the “Prelude,” dedicated to this very spot, came back to him, as to one who in these later months had been able to renew some of the literary habits and recollections of earlier years

     “—­Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light!”

But here on this wild night were only tumult and darkness; and if Nature in this aspect were still to be held, as Wordsworth makes her, the Voice and Apocalypse of God, she breathed a power pitiless and terrible to man.  The fierce stream below, the tiny speck made by the carriage and horses straining against the hurricane of wind, the forests on the farther bank climbing to endless heights of rain, the flowers in the rock crannies lashed and torn, the gloom and chill which had thus blotted out a June evening:  all these impressions were impressions of war, of struggle and attack, of forces unfriendly and overwhelming.

A certain restless and melancholy joy in the challenge of the storm, indeed, Ashe felt, as many another strong man has felt before him, in a similar emptiness of heart.  But it was because of the mere provocation of physical energy which it involved; not, as it would have been with him in youth, because of the infinitude and vastness of nature, breathing power and expectation into man: