I saw her underlip push, and I turned away in haste, for I did not care whether she cried or not. In that long voyage, and in my illness at Venice, she had become too near and dear to me, my tender love, my dear darling soul; and I said in my heart: “I will be a decent being: I will turn out trumps.”
Under this castle is a sort of dungeon, not narrow, nor very dark, in which are seven stout dark-grey pillars, and an eighth, half-built into the wall; and one of them which has an iron ring, as well as the ground around it, is all worn away by some prisoner or prisoners once chained there; and in the pillar the word “Byron” engraved. This made me remember that a poet of that name had written something about this place, and two days afterwards I actually came upon three volumes of the poet in a room containing a great number of books, many of them English, near the Grand Bailli’s bureau: and in one I read the poem, which is called “The Prisoner of Chillon.” I found it very affecting, and the description good, only I saw no seven rings, and where he speaks of the “pale and livid light,” he should speak rather of the dun and brownish gloom, for the word “light” disconcerts the fancy, and of either pallor or blue there is there no sign. However, I was so struck by the horror of man’s cruelty to man, as depicted in this poem, that I determined that she should see it; went up straight to her rooms with the book, and, she being away, ferreted among her things to see what she was doing, finding all very neat, except in one room where were a number of prints called La Mode, and debris of snipped cloth, and medley. When, after two hours, she came in, and I suddenly presented myself, “Oh!” she let slip, and then fell to cooing her laugh; and I took her down through a big room stacked with every kind of rifle, with revolvers, cartridges, powder, swords, bayonets—evidently some official or cantonal magazine—and then showed her the worn stone in the dungeon, the ring, the narrow deep slits in the wall, and I told the tale of cruelty, while the splashing of the lake upon the rock outside was heard with a strange and tragic sound, and her mobile face was all one sorrow.
“How cruel they must have been!” cries she with tremulous lip, her face at the same time reddened with indignation.
“They were mere beastly monsters,” said I: “it is nothing surprising if monsters were cruel.”
And in the short time while I said that, she was looking up with a newborn smile.
“Some others came and set the plisoner flee!” cries she.
“Yes,” said I, “they did, but—”
“That was good of them,” says she.
“Yes,” said I, “that was all right, so far as it went.”
“And it was a time when men had al-leady become cluel,” says she: “if those who set him flee were so good when all the lest were cluel, what would they have been at a time when all the lest were kind? They would have been just like Angels. … !”
At this place fishing, and long rambles, were the order of the day, both for her and for me, especially fishing, though a week rarely passed which did not find me at Bouveret, St. Gingolph, Yvoire, Messery, Nyon, Ouchy, Vevay, Montreux, Geneva, or one of the two dozen villages, townlets, or towns, that crowd the shores, all very pretty places, each with its charm, and mostly I went on foot, though the railway runs right round the forty odd miles of the lake’s length. One noonday I was walking through the main-street of Vevay going on to the Cully-road when I had a fearful shock, for in a shop just in front of me to the right I heard a sound—an unmistakable indication of life—as of clattering metals shaken together. My heart leapt into my mouth, I was conscious of becoming bloodlessly pale, and on tiptoe of exquisite caution I stole up to the open door—peeped in—and it was she standing on the counter of a jeweller’s shop, her back turned to me, with head bent low over a tray of jewels in her hands, which she was rummaging for something. I went “Hoh!” for I could not help it, and all that day, till sunset, we were very dear friends, for I could not part from her, we walking together by vor-alpen, wood, and shore all the way to Ouchy, she just like a creature crazy that day with the bliss of living, rolling in grasses and perilous flowery declines, stamping her foot defiantly at me, arrogant queen that she is, and then running like mad for me to catch her, with laughter, abandon, carolling railleries, and the levity of the wild ass’s colt on the hills, entangling her loose-flung hair with Bacchic tendril and blossom, and drinking, in the passage through Cully, more wine, I thought, than was good: and the flaming darts of lightning that shot and shocked me that day, and the inner secret gleams and revelations of Beauty which I had, and the pangs of white-hot honey that tortured my soul and body, and were too much for me, and made me sick, oh Heaven, what tongue could express all that deep world of things? And at Ouchy with a backward wave of my arm I silently motioned her from me, for I was dumb, and weak, and I left her there: and all that long night her power
