The carriage-road skirts the base of the mountain and offers numberless fine views of the cascade as you approach or leave it. It was directly in front of the fall, half a mile distant, though it did not look so far, that the driver, in obedience to previous instruction from Lynde, drew up the horses and halted. At that instant the sunshine slanted across the fall and dashed it with prismatic colors.
“It is almost too exquisite to look at,” said Mrs. Denham. “It makes one doubt one’s own eyes.”
“I saw it once,” Lynde said, “when I thought the effect even finer. I was induced by some pleasant English tourists to stop over night at Magland, and we walked up here in the moonrise. You can’t imagine anything so lovely as that long strip of gossamer unfolding itself to the moonlight. There was an English artist with us, who made a sketch of the fall; but he said a prettier thing about it than his picture.”
“What was that?” inquired Miss Ruth.
“He called it Penelope’s web, because it is always being unravelled and reknitted.”
“That artist mistook his profession.”
“Folks often do,” said Lynde. “I know painters who ought to be poets, and poets who ought to be bricklayers.”
“Why bricklayers?”
“Because I fancy that bricklaying makes as slight drain on the imagination as almost any pursuit in life. Speaking of poets and waterfalls, do you remember Byron’s daring simile in Manfred? He compares a certain waterfall at the foot of the Jungfrau to the tail of the pale horse ridden by Death in the Apocalypse. Mrs. Denham,” said Lynde abruptly, “the marquis tells me there’s a delightful short cut, through the rocks here, which strikes into the road a mile further on.”
“Let us take it then,” answered Mrs. Denham, settling herself comfortably in the cushions.
“It is a foot-path,” explained Lynde.
“Oh!”
“Our reputation as great American travellers will suffer, Mrs. Denham, if we fail to do a bit of Switzerland on foot. Rather than have that happen I would undertake the expedition alone. It would be mere martyrdom, though, without company.” As Lynde turned the handle of the carriage door and planted his foot on the first step, he ventured a glance at Miss Ruth, who was sitting there with a face as impenetrable as that of the Memphian Sphinx.
“Certainly, if our reputation is at stake,” exclaimed Mrs. Denham, rising with alacrity. Lynde could not help his clouded countenance. “No,” she added, slowly sinking back into the seat, “I’ve no ambition as an explorer. I really have not.”