Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/556

 nervous savage anger; he challenged the stupid silence to speak to him of his friend. Some of these places had evidently not been open for months. The silence everywhere was horrible; it mocked at his impatience, it was charged with cruelty and danger. In the midst of it, at the door of one of the cabins, quite alone, sat a hideous crétin who grinned at him over a vast goitre when, hardly knowing what he did, he put vain questions. This creature's family was scattered on the mountain; he could give no help toward finding them. Rowland climbed into the awkward places Roderick loved; he looked down into ugly chasms from narrow steep-dropping ledges; and he was to consider afterwards, uneasily, how little he had heeded his foothold. But the sun, as I have said, was everywhere; it illumined the depths and heights in presence of which, not knowing where to turn next, he halted and lingered, and showed him nothing but the stony Alpine void — nothing so human even as a catastrophe or a trace. At noon he paused in his quest and sat down on a stone; the conviction pressed him hard that the worst now conceivable was true. He stopped looking; he was afraid to go on. He sat there for an hour, sick to his innermost soul. Without his knowing why, several things, chiefly trivial, that had happened during the last two years and that he had quite forgotten, lived again before him and breathed their mortal chill into his face. He was roused at last by the sound of a stone dislodged near by, which rattled down the mountain. In a moment, on a rough slope opposite, he beheld a figure cautiously 522