Chapter Eight.An Inopportune Reminder.Life at a mountain hotel affected by our compatriots is very much like life on board a passenger ship, with the difference and manifest advantages that the Johnsonian definition of the latter does not apply to the former, and you can generally steer clear of a bore—unless he, or she, should happen to be too near you at table, that is. But life on the whole is a free and easy unconventional thing, and as a rule everybody knows everybody, and people who as neighbours at home would take about two years to get beyond the rigid afternoon call, and cup-of-weak-tea stage of social intercourse, here become as “thick as thieves” in the same number of days. A chance walk does it, or a seat in proximity attable d’hôte; peradventure the fact that both venerate the same star Boanerges at home, or are alike enthusiastic believers in “General” Booth’s scheme; or it may be that both hold in common a choice bit of scandal concerning some other person or persons in the house. And then, as our said compatriots are nothing if not clique-ish, coteries will abound wherever these may be gathered together. There will be the chaplain’s clique and the worldly clique; the clique that won’t tolerate bores at any price, and that in which they reign paramount, and so on, and so on. But with all these dubious elements of weak humanity in active operation, life at such an hotel is rather a pleasant thing than otherwise, and to him who can derive diversion from the study of a heterogeneous crowd of his compatriots off their guard, vastly amusing.Now with a gathering of this sort, three-fourths of it composed of the other sex, such a fellow as Philip Orlebar was pretty sure to be in general request; and within forty-eight hours of his arrival he was on good terms with very nearly everybody in the house. In fact, he was in danger of becoming “the rage”; for, apart from his good looks and rather taking manners, the superior sex was almost entirely represented by two or three quiet university men, a sprinkling of parsons, and a few contemporaries of General Wyatt. So, as was his wont, he threw himself with zest into the thing, determined to get all the fun out of it he could; and, truth to tell, he managed to get a good deal.When Fordham, on the day of their arrival, predicted for himself a series of solitary undertakings, as far as his friend’s company was concerned, he was foretelling no more than the truth. For an expeditionà deux, he, Fordham, being the second, Philip was never available. The Misses This wanted to be taken up the Cape-au-Moîne, or the Misses That had organised a picnic to the Folli or the Crêt de Molard; but why the deuce couldn’t Fordham shake himself together and be sociable, and come too? To which the latter would tranquilly reply that therôleof universal flunkey was not congenial to his temperament.Of late, however, Master Phil’s popularity had been on the wane. While he was an open question, each and all the damsels up there “on spec,” with but few exceptions, vied with each other to make things pleasant for him, and their mammas showed unimpeachable dentist’s fronts in beaming approval of their efforts. But when he devoted himself to one, and one only, manifestly and exclusively, then it became surprising how suddenly all these little attentions cooled down; how the dimpling smile became an acidulated sneer, and the bell-like voice rang a hard note; how the mammas aforesaid awoke to the fact that he seldom went to church, and when he did it was only to sit near that Miss Wyatt.“That Miss Wyatt,” however, must be held to constitute pre-eminently one of the few exceptions referred to above. If Philip Orlebar had concentrated all his attentions upon her with that blundering suddenness men will be guilty of under such circumstances, she certainly had not given him a lead; in fact, he was wont to complain bitterly to himself—and sometimes to Fordham—that she treated him rather too calmly, might give him a few more opportunities. But Alma Wyatt was not the sort of girl who gives “opportunities.”Fordham’s comment was characteristic.“Oh! the divinity has a fault, then? See here, Phil. Supposing she had never come here, you would have cut out one of those other girls as your divinity,pro tem, and have planted her on a pedestal in the usual way. Now you see what sort of a crowd they are. Why do you think the other one more endowed with god-like attributes than they? I tell you all women are deadly alike, in spite of the spurious philosophical cant which affects to stamp them as an unknown quantity, inscrutable, mysterious, and so forth. The fact being that there is nothing incomprehensible about them or their ways except to such of ourselves who are greater fools than they. Now to me it is a perfectly safe conjecture how any given woman will act under any given circumstances.”“How do you get at it?”“By starting on the sure basis that she will act with cussedness, either overt or concealed, be it remembered. But what I want you to see is, that as long as you go on setting up these clay idolspro tem, it’s all right. Only don’t come to me and ask me to help you to hang one of them round your neck for life. You’ll find it a lumping heavy burden, my boy, I don’t care who it is, even if it doesn’t throttle you at the start.”Two days after the boating incident Philip was strolling in the garden of the hotel with Alma and her aunt. It was Sunday, and they had just returned from the little tabernacle where, during his month of office, the irrepressible Scott dispensed spiritual nourishment to his flock—or was supposed to—and whither it is to be feared that one of the trio had betaken himself in obedience to the vitiated motives ascribed to him by sundry disappointed mammas above mentioned.“What do you think I heard some of them saying as we came out of church?” said Mrs Wyatt, with an amused smile. “That Mr Scott’s sermon about the storm on Gennesaret was the finest ever preached.”“Ha-ha! So it was, in one sense,” said Philip. “I know I was divided between an impulse to hurl a book at his head and to roar out laughing. You should have seen the fellow grovelling at the bottom of the boat and screaming—Wasn’t he, Miss Wyatt?”“The poor man was rather frightened, certainly,” replied Alma. “But I never for a moment expected we should live through it. In fact, I was horribly frightened myself—quite shaken all day yesterday.”“You!” cried Philip, in a blending of admiration and tenderness and incredulity. “I never heard such a libel in my life. But for your splendid nerve we should all have gone to the bottom, to a dead certainty. Even old Fordham admitted that much.”“No—no?” expostulated Alma, a tinge of colour suffusing her face. “Please don’t try and make a heroine of me. And, talking of Mr Fordham, you know I told you the other day I didn’t like him, and you were very much offended with me.”“I might have been with any one else,” he replied, meaningly.“Well, now,” she went on rather shyly, “I want to retract what I said then. I never saw a man behave so splendidly in an emergency as he did.”We dare not swear that the suspicion of a jealous pang did not shoot through Phil’s loyal heart at this warmly-spoken eulogy. But if so, he did manful penance by promptly informing his friend. Fordham gave vent to a sardonic chuckle.“That’s a woman all over. She allows her deliberately-formed judgment to be clean overthrown by a mere fortuitous circumstance. From looking upon me with aversion and distrust the pendulum now swings the other way, and she invests me with heroic virtues because on one occasion I happen to demonstrate the possession of a negative quality—that ofnotbeing afraid, or seeming not to be. Faugh! that’s a woman all over! All impulse and featherhead.”Which was all poor Alma’s warm-hearted little retraction gained from this armour-plated cynic; but she had the negative consolation of never knowing it.“It isn’t the first time I’ve seen him all there at a pinch; in fact, he got me out of a queer corner once when we were in China. I shouldn’t be here or any where to-day, but for him. But it was a horrid business, and I can’t tell you how he did it; in fact, I hardly like to think of it myself.”The look of vivid interest which had come over Alma’s face faded away in disappointment.“Have you been roaming the world long together?” she said.“Perhaps a couple of years, on and off. We ran against each other first in the course of knocking about. It was at a bull-fight in Barcelona. We had adjoining seats and got into conversation, and, as Britishers are few in the Peninsula, we soon became thick. But, you know, although he’s the best fellow in the world once you know him, old Fordham has his cranks. For instance, he’s a most thorough and confirmed woman-hater.”“I suppose he was badly treated once,” said Mrs Wyatt. “Still, it strikes me as a foolish thing, and perhaps a little childish, that a man should judge all of us by the measure of one.”“I don’t know, aunt,” said Alma. “It may be foolish from a certain point of view, morbid perhaps; but I think it shows character. Not many men, I should imagine, except in books, think any of us worth grieving over for long; and the fact that one affair turning out disastrously should stamp its mark on a man’s whole life shows that man to be endowed with a powerful capacity for feeling.”“Perhaps so,” assented the old lady. “But, Alma, I don’t know what Mr Orlebar will think of us taking his friend to pieces in this free-and-easy fashion.”“My dear Mrs Wyatt, there is really nothing to be uneasy about on that score,” cried Philip. “We are not abusing him, you know, or running him down. And by the way, queer as it may seem, I know absolutely no more of Fordham’s earlier life than you do. He may have had an ‘affair,’ or he may not. He has never let drop any clue to the mystery—if mystery there is.”“You see, auntie, how different men are to us poor girls,” said Alma, with a queer little smile. “They know how to keep their own counsel. No such thing as pouring out confidences, even to their closest friends!”There was a vague something about her tone and look which struck Philip uncomfortably. He could not for the life of him have told why, yet the feeling was there. Not for the first time either. More than once had Alma shown indications of a very keen tendency to satire underlying her normal openness of ideas and the fascination of her utterly unaffected manner. For a few moments he walked by her side in silence.It was a lovely day. The air was heavy with the scent of narcissus and roses; languid and glowing with the rich warmth of early summer. Great bees drowsily boomed from flower to flower, dipping into the purple pansies, hovering round a carnation, and now and again unwarily venturing within the spray of the sparkling fountain. A swallow-tail butterfly on its broad embroidered wings fluttered about their faces so tamely, that by stretching out a hand they could almost have caught it. Cliff and abrupt slope, green pastureland and sombre pine forest, showed soft and slumbrous in the mellow glow; while overhead, her burnished plumage shining in the sun, floated a great eagle, the rush of whose pinions was almost audible in the noontide stillness as the noble bird described her airy circles in free and majestic sweep. An idyllic day and an idyllic scene, thought Philip, with more than one furtive glance at the beautiful face by his side.Then, as usual at such moments, in came the prose of life in the shape of the post. A green-aproned porter, a sheaf of letters in his hand, drew near.“Pour vous, Monsieur!” he said, handing one to Philip.When a man starts, or describes a ridiculouspirouetteat a street crossing because a hansom cabman utters a war-whoop in his ear, it is safe to assume that man’s nerves to be—well, not in the state they should be. But the war-whoop of the hansom cab fiend athirst for—bones, is nothing in the way of a test compared with the wholly unexpected receipt of an objectionable and unwelcome letter. When Philip took the missive from the porter’s hand, a glance at the superscription was enough. A very dismayed look came over his countenance. He held the obnoxious envelope as though it might sting him, then crushed it hurriedly into his pocket. But not before he, and peradventure his companion, had seen that it was directed in a very slanting, pointed, and insignificant feminine hand.Then the luncheon bell rang.
Life at a mountain hotel affected by our compatriots is very much like life on board a passenger ship, with the difference and manifest advantages that the Johnsonian definition of the latter does not apply to the former, and you can generally steer clear of a bore—unless he, or she, should happen to be too near you at table, that is. But life on the whole is a free and easy unconventional thing, and as a rule everybody knows everybody, and people who as neighbours at home would take about two years to get beyond the rigid afternoon call, and cup-of-weak-tea stage of social intercourse, here become as “thick as thieves” in the same number of days. A chance walk does it, or a seat in proximity attable d’hôte; peradventure the fact that both venerate the same star Boanerges at home, or are alike enthusiastic believers in “General” Booth’s scheme; or it may be that both hold in common a choice bit of scandal concerning some other person or persons in the house. And then, as our said compatriots are nothing if not clique-ish, coteries will abound wherever these may be gathered together. There will be the chaplain’s clique and the worldly clique; the clique that won’t tolerate bores at any price, and that in which they reign paramount, and so on, and so on. But with all these dubious elements of weak humanity in active operation, life at such an hotel is rather a pleasant thing than otherwise, and to him who can derive diversion from the study of a heterogeneous crowd of his compatriots off their guard, vastly amusing.
Now with a gathering of this sort, three-fourths of it composed of the other sex, such a fellow as Philip Orlebar was pretty sure to be in general request; and within forty-eight hours of his arrival he was on good terms with very nearly everybody in the house. In fact, he was in danger of becoming “the rage”; for, apart from his good looks and rather taking manners, the superior sex was almost entirely represented by two or three quiet university men, a sprinkling of parsons, and a few contemporaries of General Wyatt. So, as was his wont, he threw himself with zest into the thing, determined to get all the fun out of it he could; and, truth to tell, he managed to get a good deal.
When Fordham, on the day of their arrival, predicted for himself a series of solitary undertakings, as far as his friend’s company was concerned, he was foretelling no more than the truth. For an expeditionà deux, he, Fordham, being the second, Philip was never available. The Misses This wanted to be taken up the Cape-au-Moîne, or the Misses That had organised a picnic to the Folli or the Crêt de Molard; but why the deuce couldn’t Fordham shake himself together and be sociable, and come too? To which the latter would tranquilly reply that therôleof universal flunkey was not congenial to his temperament.
Of late, however, Master Phil’s popularity had been on the wane. While he was an open question, each and all the damsels up there “on spec,” with but few exceptions, vied with each other to make things pleasant for him, and their mammas showed unimpeachable dentist’s fronts in beaming approval of their efforts. But when he devoted himself to one, and one only, manifestly and exclusively, then it became surprising how suddenly all these little attentions cooled down; how the dimpling smile became an acidulated sneer, and the bell-like voice rang a hard note; how the mammas aforesaid awoke to the fact that he seldom went to church, and when he did it was only to sit near that Miss Wyatt.
“That Miss Wyatt,” however, must be held to constitute pre-eminently one of the few exceptions referred to above. If Philip Orlebar had concentrated all his attentions upon her with that blundering suddenness men will be guilty of under such circumstances, she certainly had not given him a lead; in fact, he was wont to complain bitterly to himself—and sometimes to Fordham—that she treated him rather too calmly, might give him a few more opportunities. But Alma Wyatt was not the sort of girl who gives “opportunities.”
Fordham’s comment was characteristic.
“Oh! the divinity has a fault, then? See here, Phil. Supposing she had never come here, you would have cut out one of those other girls as your divinity,pro tem, and have planted her on a pedestal in the usual way. Now you see what sort of a crowd they are. Why do you think the other one more endowed with god-like attributes than they? I tell you all women are deadly alike, in spite of the spurious philosophical cant which affects to stamp them as an unknown quantity, inscrutable, mysterious, and so forth. The fact being that there is nothing incomprehensible about them or their ways except to such of ourselves who are greater fools than they. Now to me it is a perfectly safe conjecture how any given woman will act under any given circumstances.”
“How do you get at it?”
“By starting on the sure basis that she will act with cussedness, either overt or concealed, be it remembered. But what I want you to see is, that as long as you go on setting up these clay idolspro tem, it’s all right. Only don’t come to me and ask me to help you to hang one of them round your neck for life. You’ll find it a lumping heavy burden, my boy, I don’t care who it is, even if it doesn’t throttle you at the start.”
Two days after the boating incident Philip was strolling in the garden of the hotel with Alma and her aunt. It was Sunday, and they had just returned from the little tabernacle where, during his month of office, the irrepressible Scott dispensed spiritual nourishment to his flock—or was supposed to—and whither it is to be feared that one of the trio had betaken himself in obedience to the vitiated motives ascribed to him by sundry disappointed mammas above mentioned.
“What do you think I heard some of them saying as we came out of church?” said Mrs Wyatt, with an amused smile. “That Mr Scott’s sermon about the storm on Gennesaret was the finest ever preached.”
“Ha-ha! So it was, in one sense,” said Philip. “I know I was divided between an impulse to hurl a book at his head and to roar out laughing. You should have seen the fellow grovelling at the bottom of the boat and screaming—Wasn’t he, Miss Wyatt?”
“The poor man was rather frightened, certainly,” replied Alma. “But I never for a moment expected we should live through it. In fact, I was horribly frightened myself—quite shaken all day yesterday.”
“You!” cried Philip, in a blending of admiration and tenderness and incredulity. “I never heard such a libel in my life. But for your splendid nerve we should all have gone to the bottom, to a dead certainty. Even old Fordham admitted that much.”
“No—no?” expostulated Alma, a tinge of colour suffusing her face. “Please don’t try and make a heroine of me. And, talking of Mr Fordham, you know I told you the other day I didn’t like him, and you were very much offended with me.”
“I might have been with any one else,” he replied, meaningly.
“Well, now,” she went on rather shyly, “I want to retract what I said then. I never saw a man behave so splendidly in an emergency as he did.”
We dare not swear that the suspicion of a jealous pang did not shoot through Phil’s loyal heart at this warmly-spoken eulogy. But if so, he did manful penance by promptly informing his friend. Fordham gave vent to a sardonic chuckle.
“That’s a woman all over. She allows her deliberately-formed judgment to be clean overthrown by a mere fortuitous circumstance. From looking upon me with aversion and distrust the pendulum now swings the other way, and she invests me with heroic virtues because on one occasion I happen to demonstrate the possession of a negative quality—that ofnotbeing afraid, or seeming not to be. Faugh! that’s a woman all over! All impulse and featherhead.”
Which was all poor Alma’s warm-hearted little retraction gained from this armour-plated cynic; but she had the negative consolation of never knowing it.
“It isn’t the first time I’ve seen him all there at a pinch; in fact, he got me out of a queer corner once when we were in China. I shouldn’t be here or any where to-day, but for him. But it was a horrid business, and I can’t tell you how he did it; in fact, I hardly like to think of it myself.”
The look of vivid interest which had come over Alma’s face faded away in disappointment.
“Have you been roaming the world long together?” she said.
“Perhaps a couple of years, on and off. We ran against each other first in the course of knocking about. It was at a bull-fight in Barcelona. We had adjoining seats and got into conversation, and, as Britishers are few in the Peninsula, we soon became thick. But, you know, although he’s the best fellow in the world once you know him, old Fordham has his cranks. For instance, he’s a most thorough and confirmed woman-hater.”
“I suppose he was badly treated once,” said Mrs Wyatt. “Still, it strikes me as a foolish thing, and perhaps a little childish, that a man should judge all of us by the measure of one.”
“I don’t know, aunt,” said Alma. “It may be foolish from a certain point of view, morbid perhaps; but I think it shows character. Not many men, I should imagine, except in books, think any of us worth grieving over for long; and the fact that one affair turning out disastrously should stamp its mark on a man’s whole life shows that man to be endowed with a powerful capacity for feeling.”
“Perhaps so,” assented the old lady. “But, Alma, I don’t know what Mr Orlebar will think of us taking his friend to pieces in this free-and-easy fashion.”
“My dear Mrs Wyatt, there is really nothing to be uneasy about on that score,” cried Philip. “We are not abusing him, you know, or running him down. And by the way, queer as it may seem, I know absolutely no more of Fordham’s earlier life than you do. He may have had an ‘affair,’ or he may not. He has never let drop any clue to the mystery—if mystery there is.”
“You see, auntie, how different men are to us poor girls,” said Alma, with a queer little smile. “They know how to keep their own counsel. No such thing as pouring out confidences, even to their closest friends!”
There was a vague something about her tone and look which struck Philip uncomfortably. He could not for the life of him have told why, yet the feeling was there. Not for the first time either. More than once had Alma shown indications of a very keen tendency to satire underlying her normal openness of ideas and the fascination of her utterly unaffected manner. For a few moments he walked by her side in silence.
It was a lovely day. The air was heavy with the scent of narcissus and roses; languid and glowing with the rich warmth of early summer. Great bees drowsily boomed from flower to flower, dipping into the purple pansies, hovering round a carnation, and now and again unwarily venturing within the spray of the sparkling fountain. A swallow-tail butterfly on its broad embroidered wings fluttered about their faces so tamely, that by stretching out a hand they could almost have caught it. Cliff and abrupt slope, green pastureland and sombre pine forest, showed soft and slumbrous in the mellow glow; while overhead, her burnished plumage shining in the sun, floated a great eagle, the rush of whose pinions was almost audible in the noontide stillness as the noble bird described her airy circles in free and majestic sweep. An idyllic day and an idyllic scene, thought Philip, with more than one furtive glance at the beautiful face by his side.
Then, as usual at such moments, in came the prose of life in the shape of the post. A green-aproned porter, a sheaf of letters in his hand, drew near.
“Pour vous, Monsieur!” he said, handing one to Philip.
When a man starts, or describes a ridiculouspirouetteat a street crossing because a hansom cabman utters a war-whoop in his ear, it is safe to assume that man’s nerves to be—well, not in the state they should be. But the war-whoop of the hansom cab fiend athirst for—bones, is nothing in the way of a test compared with the wholly unexpected receipt of an objectionable and unwelcome letter. When Philip took the missive from the porter’s hand, a glance at the superscription was enough. A very dismayed look came over his countenance. He held the obnoxious envelope as though it might sting him, then crushed it hurriedly into his pocket. But not before he, and peradventure his companion, had seen that it was directed in a very slanting, pointed, and insignificant feminine hand.
Then the luncheon bell rang.
Chapter Nine.“Best to be off with the Old Love, Before...”Philip was not up to his usual form during luncheon. Any one in the secret would have said that that letter was burning a hole in his pocket. It seemed to affect his appetite; it certainly affected his conversational powers. More than once he answered at random; more than once he relapsed into a spell of silence, almost of gloom, wholly foreign to his breezy and light-hearted temperament. Yet he was still in ignorance of its contents. He might have mastered them when he went up to his room at the ringing of the bell, yet he did not. Now, however, he wished that he had.Fordham, glancing sharply at him across the table, more than three parts made up his mind as to the cause of this abnormal gravity and abstraction on the part of his volatile friend. He knew he had been wandering about with Alma Wyatt—the old lady had not been with them all the time—and was inclined to believe that the impulsive Phil had, contrary to his own advice, both hinted and outspoken, committed himself. At the same time he recognised that if that was so the answer had not been altogether satisfactory. In short, he decided that Master Phil had received a “facer,” and chuckled internally thereat.The lunch at last over, Philip gained his room. The first thing he did was to lock the door. Then, drawing the obnoxious missive from his pocket, he tore it open, with something that sounded very like a “cussword,” and spread the sheet out on the table before him. The sheet? There were seven of them, all of the flimsiest paper, all closely written over on every side, in that thin, pointed, ill-formed hand. Well, he had got to go through them, so with a sort of effort he began.“My own dear, dear old darling Phil,—It is just ages, months, years, centuries, since poor little I heard from you, you dreadfully awfully naughty, naughty boy!”“Oh, Lord!” he ejaculated, turning the sheets over, in a kind of despair, as if to see how much more of this sort of thing was coming. But he derived no modicum of solace from his investigation, for there was a great deal more of it coming—in fact, the whole seven sheets full. Seven sheets of the sort of stuff that sets the court in a roar, and melts the collective heart of the dozen empanelled grocers and ironmongers gathered there to mulct the unwary of the substantial salve which should heal the wounds of the lovely and disconsolate—if slightly intriguing—plaintiff. And, as he read, an uncomfortable misgiving that it might ultimately come to this, invaded his mind more than once.With a sigh of relief he turned the last page, but the feeling was promptly nipped in the bud as he read:—“I’ve been at Pa again and again to take us abroad this year; how jolly it would be if we were to meet again in that love of a Switzerland, wouldn’t it, dear boy? But no such luck, he won’t, and we are going to St. Swithins instead, and it’s the next best thing, and I doloveSt. Swithins, and I shall think the blue sea is the Lake of Geneva and you are there. But we will go all over it together soon, you and I alone, won’t we, Phil, darling, you and your little Edie.” Then followed half a dozen lines of appropriate drivel, and a postscript:—“Be sure you send me a big bunch of adleweis from the top of the Matterhorn.”If ever a man felt nauseated with himself and all the world, assuredly that man was Philip Orlebar, as he sat staring at this effusion. Its fearful style—or rather utter lack of it—its redundancy of conjunctions, its far from infrequent mis-spellings, its middle-class vulgarity of gush, would at any other time have been amusing, if painfully so; now it was all absolutely revolting. He took it up again. “‘Adleweis!’ (why couldn’t the girl borrow a dictionary), and ‘from thetopof the Matterhorn’ (ugh!) And St. Swithins, staring, cockneyfied, yahoo-ridden St. Swithins, with its blazer-clad ’Arries and shrimp-devouring ’Arriets, its nigger minstrels and beach conjurers! (faugh!) What sort of a mind—what sort of ideas had the girl got? Then again, ‘dear boy’! Fancy Alma—” and at this suggestion he dropped the missive, and, starting up, began to pace the room.“‘We will go all over it together soon!’ Will we, though!” he muttered bitterly. And then, with a savageness begotten of a feeling of being cornered, trapped, run to earth, he began to wonder whether he should suffer himself to be taken possession of in this slap-dash fashion. Had he really given himself away beyond recall! Old Glover entertained splendidly, and the sparkling burgundy was more than first-rate. What a fool he had been. Still it seemed impossible that Edith should have taken seriously all he said—impossible and preposterous! Yes, preposterous—if all that a man said while sitting out with a pretty girl, in a deliciously cool and secluded corner of the conservatory—after that first-rate sparkling burgundy too—was to be twisted into a downright proposal—an engagement. By Jove, it was—preposterous!But through all his self-evolved indignation Philip could not disguise from himself that he had acted like a lunatic, had, in fact, given himself away. Between his susceptibility to feminine admiration and hislaisser fairedisposition, he had allowed his relations with Edith Glover to attain that stage where the boundary between the ordinary flirtatious society acquaintance and the affianced lover has touched vanishing point. The girl was pretty, and adored his noble self. Old Glover, who was a merchant-prince of some sort or other and rolling in money, would be sure to “come down” liberally. On the whole he might do worse. So he had reasoned. But now?Throughout his perusal of that trying effusion his mind’s eye had been more than half absorbed in a vision of Alma Wyatt—Alma as he had last seen her—the sweet, patrician face, the grey earnest eyes, the exquisite tastefulness of her cool white apparel, the grace and poetry of her every movement, the modulated music of her voice. It seemed a profanation to contrast her—to place her on the same level with this other girl—this girl with her middle-class ideas, vile orthography, and exuberant gush.What was he to do? that was the thing. Should he send a reply—one so chilling and decisive as to leave room for no further misapprehension? That would never do, he decided. The Glovers were just the sort of people to come straight over there and raise such a clamour about his ears that he might safely wish himself in a hornets’ nest by contrast. This they might do, and welcome, were it not for Alma. But then, were it not for Alma it is probable to the last degree that he would have drifted on, contented enough with the existing state of things.“Heavens and earth, I believe old Fordham is right after all?” he ejaculated at last. “Women are the devil—the very devil, one and all of them. I’ll adopt his theory. Shot if I don’t!”But profession and faith are not necessarily a synonym. Between our would-be misogynist and the proposed mental transformation stood that bright and wholly alluring potentiality whose name was Alma Wyatt.With an effort he locked away the obnoxious missive, wishing to Heaven he could lock up the dilemma he was in as easily and indefinitely. Should he consult Fordham? No, that wouldn’t help matters; besides, he shrank from having to own that he had made a consummate ass of himself, nor did he feel disposed just then to open his heart even to Fordham. How beastly hot it had become! He would stay up in his room and take it easy—have a read and a smoke. Hang everybody! And with a growl he kicked off his boots, and, picking up a Tauchnitz novel, flung himself on the bed and lighted his pipe.Rat-tat-tat-tat! Then a voice. “You there, Phil? The first dinner-bell has gone!”He started up. The knock and the voice were Fordham’s. It was a quarter-past six, and he had been asleep just three hours.“We were afraid you had heard bad news, Mr Orlebar,” said Mrs Wyatt, as he slid into his seat a quarter of an hour late. “You haven’t, have you?”“Oh, no,” he answered, with splendid mendacity. “I’ve been feeling a little pulled down to-day, and dropped off to sleep without knowing it.”“The thunder in the air, I suppose,” said Alma, with a bright, mischievous glance. “We had such a nice walk up to the Cubly, when it began to get cool.”“The Cubly?”“Yes. Uncle was looking for you everywhere, but, as it happens, it was lucky we didn’t disturb you. Besides, we feared you might have had bad news.”This was what he had missed then—all through that infernal letter too. He felt more savage than ever. Bad news? Yes he had, and no mistake. But the next moment he was destined to hear worse.“I’m sorry to say we are obliged to cut short our stay here,” General Wyatt was saying to Fordham. “Some friends whom we had arranged to meet have wired us to join them at the Grindelwald—an old brother officer and his family. They have turned up sooner than we expected, and, reckoning on our promise to join them, have already engaged our rooms. In fact they could not have got them otherwise, for the hotel is filling up rapidly.”“Sorry to hear that, General—very sorry. When do you leave?”“Not later than Tuesday, I’m afraid. That’ll give this young person a day clear for a final walk or climb.”Here was a bolt from the blue with a vengeance, thought Philip.“I don’t want to go in the least,” said Alma. “Don’t you think,” she added, with a flash of merriment, “it’s hateful to leave a place just as you have become fond of it?”“Hateful isn’t the word for it,” replied Philip, with savage vehemence.“But don’t you think you may become just as fond of where you’re going?” struck in the eternal female opposite.“I’m perfectly sure you won’t in this case,” said Fordham, speaking to, and answering for, the Wyatts at the same time. “The Grindelwald is about the most noisy, crowded, and cheap-tripper-ridden resort in the Alps. A chronic dust cloud overhangs the whole Lütschinen Thal by reason of a perennial string of vehicles ascending from and descending to Interlaken with scarce a break of fifty yards. You can’t go on a glacier without paying gate-money—a franc a head. Fancy that! Fancy reducing a glacier to the level of a cockney tea-garden! Then between the village and either of the said glaciers is an ever-moving stream of the personally conducted, mostly mounted on mules and holding umbrellas aloft.”“But don’t you think you are painting poor Grindelwald in very unattractive colours?” expostulated the Infliction.“Think? No, I’m sure of it,” was the short reply. “And I haven’t done yet. The place swarms with beggars and cadgers. Go where you will, you are beset by small ragamuffins pestering you to purchase evil-looking edelweiss blossoms or mobbing your heels to be allowed to show you the way, which you know a vast deal better than they do. Every fifty yards or so you come upon the Alpine horn fiend, prepared to make hideous melody for a consideration; or wherever a rock occurs which can by any chance produce an echo, there lurks a vagabond ready to explode a howitzer upon receipt of a franc. No. Taking it all in all, I don’t think one is far out in defining Grindelwald as the Rosherville of Switzerland.”“That sounds truly dreadful,” said Alma. “But were it the reverse I should still be sorry to leave here—very sorry.”“We must get up a jolly long walk to-morrow,” said Philip, eagerly. “It’ll be the last time, and we ought to have a good one. Let’s go up the Cape au Moine.”“But isn’t that a very dangerous climb?” objected Mrs Wyatt.“Oh, no. At least, I believe not. Wentworth, who has been up ever so many times, says it’s awfully over-rated. But we’ll get him to come along and to show us the way.”Fordham looked quickly up, intending to throw cold water on the whole scheme. But Philip’s boot coming in violent and significant contact with a rather troublesome corn, stifled in a vehement scowl the remark he was about to make, as his friend intended it should.“That’ll be delightful,” assented Alma, gleefully. “Now who shall we ask to go? Mr Wentworth, the two Ottleys—they are sure to ask Mr Scott.”“Should have thought that boat experience would have chokedhimoff any further enterprise,” grunted Fordham.“That’ll be four,” went on Alma, not heeding the interruption. “Then you two, uncle and myself—eight altogether. We ought to be roped. It’s a real climb, isn’t it?”“Oh, very,” said Fordham. “So real that not half of us will reach the top.”“Well, I mean to for one,” declared Alma. “And oh, I do hope it’ll be fine.”
Philip was not up to his usual form during luncheon. Any one in the secret would have said that that letter was burning a hole in his pocket. It seemed to affect his appetite; it certainly affected his conversational powers. More than once he answered at random; more than once he relapsed into a spell of silence, almost of gloom, wholly foreign to his breezy and light-hearted temperament. Yet he was still in ignorance of its contents. He might have mastered them when he went up to his room at the ringing of the bell, yet he did not. Now, however, he wished that he had.
Fordham, glancing sharply at him across the table, more than three parts made up his mind as to the cause of this abnormal gravity and abstraction on the part of his volatile friend. He knew he had been wandering about with Alma Wyatt—the old lady had not been with them all the time—and was inclined to believe that the impulsive Phil had, contrary to his own advice, both hinted and outspoken, committed himself. At the same time he recognised that if that was so the answer had not been altogether satisfactory. In short, he decided that Master Phil had received a “facer,” and chuckled internally thereat.
The lunch at last over, Philip gained his room. The first thing he did was to lock the door. Then, drawing the obnoxious missive from his pocket, he tore it open, with something that sounded very like a “cussword,” and spread the sheet out on the table before him. The sheet? There were seven of them, all of the flimsiest paper, all closely written over on every side, in that thin, pointed, ill-formed hand. Well, he had got to go through them, so with a sort of effort he began.
“My own dear, dear old darling Phil,—It is just ages, months, years, centuries, since poor little I heard from you, you dreadfully awfully naughty, naughty boy!”
“Oh, Lord!” he ejaculated, turning the sheets over, in a kind of despair, as if to see how much more of this sort of thing was coming. But he derived no modicum of solace from his investigation, for there was a great deal more of it coming—in fact, the whole seven sheets full. Seven sheets of the sort of stuff that sets the court in a roar, and melts the collective heart of the dozen empanelled grocers and ironmongers gathered there to mulct the unwary of the substantial salve which should heal the wounds of the lovely and disconsolate—if slightly intriguing—plaintiff. And, as he read, an uncomfortable misgiving that it might ultimately come to this, invaded his mind more than once.
With a sigh of relief he turned the last page, but the feeling was promptly nipped in the bud as he read:—
“I’ve been at Pa again and again to take us abroad this year; how jolly it would be if we were to meet again in that love of a Switzerland, wouldn’t it, dear boy? But no such luck, he won’t, and we are going to St. Swithins instead, and it’s the next best thing, and I doloveSt. Swithins, and I shall think the blue sea is the Lake of Geneva and you are there. But we will go all over it together soon, you and I alone, won’t we, Phil, darling, you and your little Edie.” Then followed half a dozen lines of appropriate drivel, and a postscript:—“Be sure you send me a big bunch of adleweis from the top of the Matterhorn.”
If ever a man felt nauseated with himself and all the world, assuredly that man was Philip Orlebar, as he sat staring at this effusion. Its fearful style—or rather utter lack of it—its redundancy of conjunctions, its far from infrequent mis-spellings, its middle-class vulgarity of gush, would at any other time have been amusing, if painfully so; now it was all absolutely revolting. He took it up again. “‘Adleweis!’ (why couldn’t the girl borrow a dictionary), and ‘from thetopof the Matterhorn’ (ugh!) And St. Swithins, staring, cockneyfied, yahoo-ridden St. Swithins, with its blazer-clad ’Arries and shrimp-devouring ’Arriets, its nigger minstrels and beach conjurers! (faugh!) What sort of a mind—what sort of ideas had the girl got? Then again, ‘dear boy’! Fancy Alma—” and at this suggestion he dropped the missive, and, starting up, began to pace the room.
“‘We will go all over it together soon!’ Will we, though!” he muttered bitterly. And then, with a savageness begotten of a feeling of being cornered, trapped, run to earth, he began to wonder whether he should suffer himself to be taken possession of in this slap-dash fashion. Had he really given himself away beyond recall! Old Glover entertained splendidly, and the sparkling burgundy was more than first-rate. What a fool he had been. Still it seemed impossible that Edith should have taken seriously all he said—impossible and preposterous! Yes, preposterous—if all that a man said while sitting out with a pretty girl, in a deliciously cool and secluded corner of the conservatory—after that first-rate sparkling burgundy too—was to be twisted into a downright proposal—an engagement. By Jove, it was—preposterous!
But through all his self-evolved indignation Philip could not disguise from himself that he had acted like a lunatic, had, in fact, given himself away. Between his susceptibility to feminine admiration and hislaisser fairedisposition, he had allowed his relations with Edith Glover to attain that stage where the boundary between the ordinary flirtatious society acquaintance and the affianced lover has touched vanishing point. The girl was pretty, and adored his noble self. Old Glover, who was a merchant-prince of some sort or other and rolling in money, would be sure to “come down” liberally. On the whole he might do worse. So he had reasoned. But now?
Throughout his perusal of that trying effusion his mind’s eye had been more than half absorbed in a vision of Alma Wyatt—Alma as he had last seen her—the sweet, patrician face, the grey earnest eyes, the exquisite tastefulness of her cool white apparel, the grace and poetry of her every movement, the modulated music of her voice. It seemed a profanation to contrast her—to place her on the same level with this other girl—this girl with her middle-class ideas, vile orthography, and exuberant gush.
What was he to do? that was the thing. Should he send a reply—one so chilling and decisive as to leave room for no further misapprehension? That would never do, he decided. The Glovers were just the sort of people to come straight over there and raise such a clamour about his ears that he might safely wish himself in a hornets’ nest by contrast. This they might do, and welcome, were it not for Alma. But then, were it not for Alma it is probable to the last degree that he would have drifted on, contented enough with the existing state of things.
“Heavens and earth, I believe old Fordham is right after all?” he ejaculated at last. “Women are the devil—the very devil, one and all of them. I’ll adopt his theory. Shot if I don’t!”
But profession and faith are not necessarily a synonym. Between our would-be misogynist and the proposed mental transformation stood that bright and wholly alluring potentiality whose name was Alma Wyatt.
With an effort he locked away the obnoxious missive, wishing to Heaven he could lock up the dilemma he was in as easily and indefinitely. Should he consult Fordham? No, that wouldn’t help matters; besides, he shrank from having to own that he had made a consummate ass of himself, nor did he feel disposed just then to open his heart even to Fordham. How beastly hot it had become! He would stay up in his room and take it easy—have a read and a smoke. Hang everybody! And with a growl he kicked off his boots, and, picking up a Tauchnitz novel, flung himself on the bed and lighted his pipe.
Rat-tat-tat-tat! Then a voice. “You there, Phil? The first dinner-bell has gone!”
He started up. The knock and the voice were Fordham’s. It was a quarter-past six, and he had been asleep just three hours.
“We were afraid you had heard bad news, Mr Orlebar,” said Mrs Wyatt, as he slid into his seat a quarter of an hour late. “You haven’t, have you?”
“Oh, no,” he answered, with splendid mendacity. “I’ve been feeling a little pulled down to-day, and dropped off to sleep without knowing it.”
“The thunder in the air, I suppose,” said Alma, with a bright, mischievous glance. “We had such a nice walk up to the Cubly, when it began to get cool.”
“The Cubly?”
“Yes. Uncle was looking for you everywhere, but, as it happens, it was lucky we didn’t disturb you. Besides, we feared you might have had bad news.”
This was what he had missed then—all through that infernal letter too. He felt more savage than ever. Bad news? Yes he had, and no mistake. But the next moment he was destined to hear worse.
“I’m sorry to say we are obliged to cut short our stay here,” General Wyatt was saying to Fordham. “Some friends whom we had arranged to meet have wired us to join them at the Grindelwald—an old brother officer and his family. They have turned up sooner than we expected, and, reckoning on our promise to join them, have already engaged our rooms. In fact they could not have got them otherwise, for the hotel is filling up rapidly.”
“Sorry to hear that, General—very sorry. When do you leave?”
“Not later than Tuesday, I’m afraid. That’ll give this young person a day clear for a final walk or climb.”
Here was a bolt from the blue with a vengeance, thought Philip.
“I don’t want to go in the least,” said Alma. “Don’t you think,” she added, with a flash of merriment, “it’s hateful to leave a place just as you have become fond of it?”
“Hateful isn’t the word for it,” replied Philip, with savage vehemence.
“But don’t you think you may become just as fond of where you’re going?” struck in the eternal female opposite.
“I’m perfectly sure you won’t in this case,” said Fordham, speaking to, and answering for, the Wyatts at the same time. “The Grindelwald is about the most noisy, crowded, and cheap-tripper-ridden resort in the Alps. A chronic dust cloud overhangs the whole Lütschinen Thal by reason of a perennial string of vehicles ascending from and descending to Interlaken with scarce a break of fifty yards. You can’t go on a glacier without paying gate-money—a franc a head. Fancy that! Fancy reducing a glacier to the level of a cockney tea-garden! Then between the village and either of the said glaciers is an ever-moving stream of the personally conducted, mostly mounted on mules and holding umbrellas aloft.”
“But don’t you think you are painting poor Grindelwald in very unattractive colours?” expostulated the Infliction.
“Think? No, I’m sure of it,” was the short reply. “And I haven’t done yet. The place swarms with beggars and cadgers. Go where you will, you are beset by small ragamuffins pestering you to purchase evil-looking edelweiss blossoms or mobbing your heels to be allowed to show you the way, which you know a vast deal better than they do. Every fifty yards or so you come upon the Alpine horn fiend, prepared to make hideous melody for a consideration; or wherever a rock occurs which can by any chance produce an echo, there lurks a vagabond ready to explode a howitzer upon receipt of a franc. No. Taking it all in all, I don’t think one is far out in defining Grindelwald as the Rosherville of Switzerland.”
“That sounds truly dreadful,” said Alma. “But were it the reverse I should still be sorry to leave here—very sorry.”
“We must get up a jolly long walk to-morrow,” said Philip, eagerly. “It’ll be the last time, and we ought to have a good one. Let’s go up the Cape au Moine.”
“But isn’t that a very dangerous climb?” objected Mrs Wyatt.
“Oh, no. At least, I believe not. Wentworth, who has been up ever so many times, says it’s awfully over-rated. But we’ll get him to come along and to show us the way.”
Fordham looked quickly up, intending to throw cold water on the whole scheme. But Philip’s boot coming in violent and significant contact with a rather troublesome corn, stifled in a vehement scowl the remark he was about to make, as his friend intended it should.
“That’ll be delightful,” assented Alma, gleefully. “Now who shall we ask to go? Mr Wentworth, the two Ottleys—they are sure to ask Mr Scott.”
“Should have thought that boat experience would have chokedhimoff any further enterprise,” grunted Fordham.
“That’ll be four,” went on Alma, not heeding the interruption. “Then you two, uncle and myself—eight altogether. We ought to be roped. It’s a real climb, isn’t it?”
“Oh, very,” said Fordham. “So real that not half of us will reach the top.”
“Well, I mean to for one,” declared Alma. “And oh, I do hope it’ll be fine.”
Chapter Ten.On the Cape au Moine.Alma’s wish was destined to be fulfilled, for the morning broke clear and cloudless. Starting in the highest spirits, a couple of hours’ easy walking brought the party to the foot of the steep and grassy slope which leads right up to the leftarêteof the Cape au Moine.Though the morning was yet young it was uncomfortably warm. The mighty grass slopes of the Rochers des Verreaux, of which the Cape au Moine is the principal summit, stood forth with the distinctness of a steel engraving, so clear was the air. A suspicious clearness which, taken in conjunction with certain light cloud streamers flecking the sky, and the unwonted heat of that early hour, betokened to the practised eye an impending change of weather.“Wet jackets,” remarked Wentworth, laconically, with a glance at these signs.“Likely enough,” assented Fordham. “Hallo! what’s the row down there? They seem to be beginning already.”These two were leading the way up the steep, slippery path, and were a little distance ahead of the rest. The above remarks referred to a sudden halt at the tail of the party, caused by one of the Miss Ottleys finding her heart fail her: for the path at that point skirts the very brink of a precipice.“Only what I expected,” sneered Fordham. “Look at that, Wentworth. What sort of figure will all these women cut when we get them up on thearêteyonder, if they can’t stand an easy, beaten track up a grass slope? We shall have them squalling and hystericking and fainting, and perhaps taking a header over. Eh?”Wentworth merely shrugged his shoulders. “Who is that new specimen they’ve caught?” he said, as, the difficulty apparently overcome, the group behind was seen to resume its way.“That?” said Fordham, glancing at the person indicated, a tallish, loosely-hung youth in knickerbockers, who seemed to be dividing his time between squiring the Miss Ottleys and arguing with Scott, the parson. “Don’t know who he is—and don’t want to. Confound the fellow!—began ‘Fordham-ing’ me after barely a quarter of an hour’s talk. Name’s Gedge, I believe. I suppose some of the women cut him into this trip.”“Most probably,” replied Wentworth. “I haven’t exchanged any remarks with him myself. But he sits near me at table and talks nineteen to the dozen. It’s like having a full-sized cow-bell swinging in your ear just the time you are within his proximity.”“They say everything has its use,” returned Fordham, meditatively. “I own to having discovered a use for friend Gedge—viz, to demonstrate that there can actually exist a more thoroughly self-sufficient and aggressive bore than even that fellow Scott.”The other laughed. And by this time they had gained the dip where the path—a mere thread of a track—crosses the high ridge of the Chaîne des Verreaux at its extreme end, and sat down to await the arrival of the residue of the party.The latter, broken up into twos and threes, was straggling up the slope. The temporary impediment had apparently been successfully overcome, and the trepidation of the fearful fair one removed. Still, to those unaccustomed to heights it was nervous work, for the path was, as we have said, a mere thread, intersecting the long, slippery grass, more treacherous than ice, of the frightfully steep mountain-side—and lying below was more than one precipice, comparatively insignificant, but high enough to mean a broken limb if not a broken neck.“Well, Miss Wyatt, do you feel like going the whole way?” said Wentworth, as Alma, with her uncle and Philip Orlebar, gained the ridge where they were halted.“Of course I do,” she answered gaily. “I always said I would get to the top if I got the chance—and I will.”“There are fivearêtes—three of them like knife-blades,” pursued Wentworth, who rather shared Fordham’s opinions regarding the other sex. “What if you begin to feel giddy in the middle of one of them?”“But I’m not going to feel anything of the kind,” she answered, with defiant good-humour. “So don’t try and put me off, for it’s of no use.”“I say, Fordham,” sung out a sort of hail-the-maintop voice, the property of the youth referred to as Gedge, as its owner climbed puffing up to where they sat, followed by the rest of the party. “I don’t think overmuch of this Cape au Moine of yours. Why one can dance up it on one leg.”“And one can dance down it on one head—and that in a surprisingly short space of time—viz, a few seconds,” said Wentworth, tranquilly. “However, you’ll see directly.”“Well, who’s going up and who’s going to wait for us here?” said Philip, after a rest of ten minutes or so.“I don’t think we are,” said the elder Miss Ottley. “I more than half promised mamma we wouldn’t. And Monsieur Dufour says it’s such a dangerous mountain. We’ll stay here and take care of General Wyatt.”There was some demur to this on the part of the more inexperienced section of the males. The experienced ones said nothing.“You’d better stay with us, Alma,” said the General, with a shade of anxiety. “Remember there have been several people killed up there.”“Just why I particularly want to go, uncle. I want to be able to say I have been up a mountain on which several people have been killed.”“I think Miss Wyatt has a steady enough head, General,” said Wentworth, who was an experienced Alpine climber. “At least, judging from the way in which she stood looking over that precipice down yonder, I should say so. If she will allow me I will take care of her.”“I’ll be hanged if you will though!” said Phil to himself. And then they started.The mere climbing part of what followed was not hard. But what was apt to prove trying to the nerves of the uninitiated was when, after feeling their way carefully along the narrow ledge-like path which runs beneath the rocks near the crest of the ridge, they came right out upon the summit of thearêteitself. Here, indeed, it was a good deal like walking on the edge of a knife-blade even as Wentworth had defined it, and here it was that two, at any rate, of the party began to feel dubious. On the right was a precipitous fall of rocks, then the steep, slippery, grassy slope—broken here and there by a cliff—which constituted the whole of that side of the mountain; on the left an unbroken drop of seven or eight hundred feet. And on the apex of this rock ridge, in single file, poised, like Mohammed’s coffin, between the heavens and the earth, the aspiring party had to walk or crawl.“Well, Miss Wyatt, how do you feel now?” said Wentworth, who was leading the way. Alma was immediately behind him, then came Philip Orlebar, then Fordham, Scott and Gedge bringing up the rear. “Not giddy at all, I hope?”“Not in the very least,” said Alma, brightly. “Quite sure? I can give you a hand if you like.”“Not for the world. I assure you I’m thoroughly enjoying it. And what a view!”“Well, look carefully where you’re going,” continued Wentworth. “Leave the view to take care of itself until you get to the top. It won’t run away.”That the warning was by no means superfluous was shown by a sudden stagger on the part of Philip. He reeled for a moment, then, with a great effort, recovered his balance. He had been so absorbed in watching Alma’s progress in front, that he had quite neglected the attention due to his own footing. Now this cannot be done with impunity upon the edge of a knife-like ridge about one thousand feet in mid-air—as he learned when he found himself within an ace of plunging into space. Fordham, for a moment, thought he had gone.“You’ll add to the record of this much maligned climb, Phil, if you don’t mind,” he said. “What’s the row? Feel heady?”“Not a bit. Only made a slip. Sha’n’t do it again though. I say, Wentworth, how far would a fellow fall here—on this side?”“Oh, about eight hundred feet. Then he’d go footballing two or three hundred more,” was the nonchalant reply. “I wouldn’t try it, though, if I were you.”They were off thearêtenow, and paused to rest under the rocks to allow the others time to come up.“Hallo, Gedge!” continued Wentworth, as the addressed came crawling along on all-fours, and that very gingerly. “I thought you felt like doing this climb on one leg, and instead of that it seems to take you all four.”“You people go on at such a rate. Besides, I find I’m not up to much on a place like this. No, I’ll climb down from the ‘one-leg’ position, absolutely and unreservedly.”“There’s another man who isn’t up to much on a place like this,” said Fordham, with a dry chuckle.Scott, to whom this remark referred, had nearly reached the middle of thearête. He, too, was creeping on hands and knees. But suddenly his heart seemed to fail him, for there he sat, straddling the ridge, one leg on each side of the mountain, the very picture of wild panic. His hat had blown off, and hung by a string over his shoulder, and he dared not move a finger to replace it. His hands shook as he grasped the rock in a strained, terror-stricken grasp, and his eyes seemed to start from his deadly white face.“Oh, help me off!” he cried piteously. “For Heaven’s sake, some of you help me off!”In vain they called out to him that he was perfectly safe—that if Miss Wyatt could get along the place without any difficulty surely he could. The poor man’s reasoning faculties seemed to have deserted him altogether.“I suppose I must go back and salvage him!” said Wentworth, resignedly. “You had better wait here for me, though.” And in a moment he was beside the distressed chaplain.“Hang it all, Mr Scott!” he said in an undertone, “do remember what an exhibition you are making of yourself before Miss Wyatt, and pull yourself together. You’re quite safe, I tell you. Now, turn round—carefully as you like—and then crawl back again as you came.”When a man of Scott’s calibre is in a horrible funk, poised a thousand feet in mid-air, appeals to his reason or his sense of shame are apt to fall alike on deaf ears. To all Wentworth’s adjurations he only reiterated piteously, “I can’t move! What is to be done? I can’t move!”What, indeed, was to be done? It was a position in which if a man will not help himself nobody can help him. Wentworth was in despair. Suddenly a happy thought struck him. His flask!“Here, take a nip of this and pull yourself together. That’s right,” as Scott eagerly seized the proffered refreshment.And soon the effects were felt. A liberal gulp or two having infused into his system a faint modicum of that artificial courage libellously termed “Dutch,” the panic-stricken cleric managed to turn round upon his aërial perch, and began to crawl gingerly back in the same ignominious posture as that in which he had come, stipulating eagerly that his succourer should keep just behind him in order to grab hold of him if he should show the least sign of falling. Wentworth was glad to get rid of him on any terms, and, depositing him in safety under a rock, solemnly enjoined upon him not to move therefrom until they should return.“Well, Mr Fordham,” said Alma, wickedly, “we poor women are not always the ones who give the most trouble, you see.”“No, by Jove, you’re not, Miss Wyatt,” struck in Gedge, characteristically eager to answer for everybody. “What an awful fool I must have looked myself. I’ll do the nextarêteon my hind legs like the rest of you.” And he was as good as his word.Two more of these narrow rock-ridges, overhanging a dizzy height, then a particularly awkward “corner” where a very slight excrescence of the rock constituted the only foothold, and where Wentworth and Philip’s combined caution availed to render the danger for Alma practicallynil, and they began the steep but easy climb of the grassy cone itself. A few minutes later they stood on the summit.“Well, Miss Wyatt, I must in all due sincerity congratulate you,” said Wentworth, as they sat down to rest after their exertions. “No one could have got along better than you have done. And you have never climbed a mountain before?”“Never. Why, I’ve never even seen a mountain before I came to this country a couple of weeks ago,” answered Alma, with a gratified smile.“Wonderful I wonderful! Isn’t it, Fordham?”“Very,” replied that worthy, drily.“No chance of any one holding too good an opinion of herself when Mr Fordham is by,” said Alma, with mischievous emphasis on the “her.”“Which is to say that everything—everybody, rather—is of some use,” was the ready rejoinder.“I don’t see the point of that at all,” cried Phil, dimly conscious that his deity was being made the butt of his crusty friend’s satire. “No, I don’t. Come now, Fordham.”“I suppose not. There is another point you don’t see either, which is that when a man has taken the trouble to shin up the Cape au Moine on a particularly hot and surpassingly clear day, he prefers the enjoyment of the magnificent view which a bountiful Providence has spread around him to the labour of driving this or that ‘point’ into the somewhat opaque brain-box of Philip Orlebar, Esq.”“You had better take that as final, Mr Orlebar, ere worse befall you,” laughed! Alma, interrupting the derisive hoot wherewith her adorer had greeted the above contemptuous speech. “And Mr Fordham’s principle is a sound one in the main, for I never could have imagined the world could show anything so glorious, so perfectly heavenly as this view. Let us make the most of it.”Her enthusiasm was not feigned, and for it there was every justification. The atmosphere balmy and clear, the lofty elevation at which they found themselves—these alone were enough to engender an unbounded sense of exhilaration. But what a panorama! Range upon range of noble mountains, the dazzling snow-summits of the giants of the Oberland reaching in a stately line across the whole eastern background of the picture, from the cloud-like Wetterhorn to the massive rock rampart of the Diablerets. Mountains, mountains everywhere—one vast rolling sea of tossing peaks, rock-ridges, and smooth, hump-like backs; of bold and sweeping slopes, here black with pine forest, there vividly green in the full blaze of unclouded sunlight; and, cleaving the heart of the billowy expanse, such a maze of sequestered and peaceful valleys resonant with the far-away music of cow-bells, at eventide sweet with the melodiousjodelof theRanz des Vaches. In the distance the turbid Sarine winding its way by more than one cluster of red roofs grouping around a modest steeple on its banks. This on the one hand. On the other, the rolling, wooded champaign and rich pasture-lands of the plain of Switzerland stretching away to the lakes of Neuchatel and Bienne, and historic Morat; and below, like a huge turquoise, the blue Lake Léman in its mountain-girt setting, between the far-away line of the purple Jura and the great masses of the Savoy Alps rearing up opposite. What a panorama, beneath a sky of deep and unclouded blue, lighted by the golden radiance of a summer sun! It was indeed something to make the most of—to store up within the treasure-house of the memory.Seated upon the rank grass which carpeted the windswept summit of the narrow pinnacle, Alma was making Wentworth tell her the names of the sea of peaks, far and near, which lay around them. This he was well qualified to do, knowing them as he did by heart, and for nearly an hour the object lesson went on. Fordham lay on the grass, smoking a pipe, in an attitude of the most perfect repose, and the irrepressible Gedge was bearing his part in a bawled colloquy between himself and those they had left to await their return. Neither heard what the other said, but this was a secondary consideration. The great thing was to be saying something—anyhow as far as the volatile Gedge was concerned.“It isn’t the snow mountains that are responsible for the greatest number of smashes,” said Wentworth, having pointed out two or three peaks which, like the one they were on, were responsible for having killed somebody. “The grass peaks like this are far the worst. It’s this way. A fellow makes up his mind to do a regular climb—say the Matterhorn or the Jungfrau. All right. He makes up his mind that he’s going to do a big thing, and from start to finish he’s keenly on the look out. Besides, he has guides, who won’t allow him to take any risk. Now, on a thing like this, that you can just hop up and down again between the twotable d’hôtes, why he thinks he is going to do it on one leg, like friend Gedge there.”“Well, but—Wentworth—you don’t call this a small thing?” struck in he named. “The confounded—what d’you call ’em?—arêtesrequire a pretty strong head.”“Yes, that’s so. This is, perhaps, a little more difficult than some of the other climbs that break fellows’ necks. Take the old Jaman, for instance. You could almost ride a mule up and down it. Anyhow, the path, with ordinary care, is as safe as a church. But some day the know-everything Briton spots a rather fine gentian growing just off the path. Quite easy, of course. But he soon finds all the difference in the world between the path and the mountain-side. The grass is as slippery as ice, especially if it is a little wet. His feet slide from under him and away he goes. A toboggan’s nothing to it. He shoots down the grass slope like a streak of lightning, then over the inevitable cliff—and—a sack of bones is brought back to the hotel, and a paragraph goes the round of the English papers, headed ‘Another Alpine Accident.’ Thus a mountain gets the name of being a dangerous one, whereas really it is a mere idiot-trap, sensible people being perfectly safe on it—in ordinarily decent weather, that is.”“Horrible!” said Alma, with a little shiver. “And at this height it all seems to come home to one so.”“I say, Wentworth,” said Phil, “you’d better keep those bogey disquisitions of yours until we get down. You will spoil Miss Wyatt’s nerve for thearêtesgoing back.”“Not at all,” said Alma. “I am very much interested. Tell me, Mr Wentworth, don’t people often come to grief by climbing down places that look easier than they are?”“Of course they do. You notice, from below, a bit of rock that looks as if you could sit on it and then have your feet on the ground, but when you get to it it’s a cliff fifty or sixty feet high. But I’ve taken the trouble to go into the cases, and in nine instances out of ten it is the little grass fiend that does for its victim, not the eternal snow-capped giant.”“Ever come up here in the snow, Wentworth?” said Gedge.“Yes. It’s dangerous, though—very dangerous indeed. I don’t care about doing it again—in winter, I mean, not when there’s a mere temporary powdering of it. Of course, you understand, the whole aspect of the mountain is changed, every feature as unfamiliar as if it was a new thing. And snow is apt to slide away in great masses, taking you with it. It’s bad in wind, too. I’ve crossed thosearêteswhen I’ve had to lie flat and grab the rock rather harder than we saw friend Scott doing just now. You have no idea of the force of the wind on a place like that.”Fordham and Gedge now started to go down. Alma, however, begged for a little longer time. She might never see such a view again in her lifetime, she urged, and they had still the best part of the day before them. So Wentworth had yielded—that is to say, he had remained behind too, ignoring Philip Orlebar’s airy hint thatheneedn’t bother to wait if he would rather go, for that he—Phil—would undertake to bring Miss Wyatt down safely. But Wentworth, who was a good-natured fellow, and whose inclinations in nowise moved him to cut out Master Phil even temporarily, was impervious to the latter’s wishes now. He felt himself in a measure responsible, and Philip was comparatively inexperienced at mountain work.So they sat and talked on, till suddenly Alma exclaimed, with a shiver—“Why, the sun is going in. And look! we are almost in a cloud.”Wentworth, hitherto absorbed in a favourite topic, doubly attractive as shared by a new and interested listener, looked quickly round.“Yes,” he said, rising, “we had better go down.”
Alma’s wish was destined to be fulfilled, for the morning broke clear and cloudless. Starting in the highest spirits, a couple of hours’ easy walking brought the party to the foot of the steep and grassy slope which leads right up to the leftarêteof the Cape au Moine.
Though the morning was yet young it was uncomfortably warm. The mighty grass slopes of the Rochers des Verreaux, of which the Cape au Moine is the principal summit, stood forth with the distinctness of a steel engraving, so clear was the air. A suspicious clearness which, taken in conjunction with certain light cloud streamers flecking the sky, and the unwonted heat of that early hour, betokened to the practised eye an impending change of weather.
“Wet jackets,” remarked Wentworth, laconically, with a glance at these signs.
“Likely enough,” assented Fordham. “Hallo! what’s the row down there? They seem to be beginning already.”
These two were leading the way up the steep, slippery path, and were a little distance ahead of the rest. The above remarks referred to a sudden halt at the tail of the party, caused by one of the Miss Ottleys finding her heart fail her: for the path at that point skirts the very brink of a precipice.
“Only what I expected,” sneered Fordham. “Look at that, Wentworth. What sort of figure will all these women cut when we get them up on thearêteyonder, if they can’t stand an easy, beaten track up a grass slope? We shall have them squalling and hystericking and fainting, and perhaps taking a header over. Eh?”
Wentworth merely shrugged his shoulders. “Who is that new specimen they’ve caught?” he said, as, the difficulty apparently overcome, the group behind was seen to resume its way.
“That?” said Fordham, glancing at the person indicated, a tallish, loosely-hung youth in knickerbockers, who seemed to be dividing his time between squiring the Miss Ottleys and arguing with Scott, the parson. “Don’t know who he is—and don’t want to. Confound the fellow!—began ‘Fordham-ing’ me after barely a quarter of an hour’s talk. Name’s Gedge, I believe. I suppose some of the women cut him into this trip.”
“Most probably,” replied Wentworth. “I haven’t exchanged any remarks with him myself. But he sits near me at table and talks nineteen to the dozen. It’s like having a full-sized cow-bell swinging in your ear just the time you are within his proximity.”
“They say everything has its use,” returned Fordham, meditatively. “I own to having discovered a use for friend Gedge—viz, to demonstrate that there can actually exist a more thoroughly self-sufficient and aggressive bore than even that fellow Scott.”
The other laughed. And by this time they had gained the dip where the path—a mere thread of a track—crosses the high ridge of the Chaîne des Verreaux at its extreme end, and sat down to await the arrival of the residue of the party.
The latter, broken up into twos and threes, was straggling up the slope. The temporary impediment had apparently been successfully overcome, and the trepidation of the fearful fair one removed. Still, to those unaccustomed to heights it was nervous work, for the path was, as we have said, a mere thread, intersecting the long, slippery grass, more treacherous than ice, of the frightfully steep mountain-side—and lying below was more than one precipice, comparatively insignificant, but high enough to mean a broken limb if not a broken neck.
“Well, Miss Wyatt, do you feel like going the whole way?” said Wentworth, as Alma, with her uncle and Philip Orlebar, gained the ridge where they were halted.
“Of course I do,” she answered gaily. “I always said I would get to the top if I got the chance—and I will.”
“There are fivearêtes—three of them like knife-blades,” pursued Wentworth, who rather shared Fordham’s opinions regarding the other sex. “What if you begin to feel giddy in the middle of one of them?”
“But I’m not going to feel anything of the kind,” she answered, with defiant good-humour. “So don’t try and put me off, for it’s of no use.”
“I say, Fordham,” sung out a sort of hail-the-maintop voice, the property of the youth referred to as Gedge, as its owner climbed puffing up to where they sat, followed by the rest of the party. “I don’t think overmuch of this Cape au Moine of yours. Why one can dance up it on one leg.”
“And one can dance down it on one head—and that in a surprisingly short space of time—viz, a few seconds,” said Wentworth, tranquilly. “However, you’ll see directly.”
“Well, who’s going up and who’s going to wait for us here?” said Philip, after a rest of ten minutes or so.
“I don’t think we are,” said the elder Miss Ottley. “I more than half promised mamma we wouldn’t. And Monsieur Dufour says it’s such a dangerous mountain. We’ll stay here and take care of General Wyatt.”
There was some demur to this on the part of the more inexperienced section of the males. The experienced ones said nothing.
“You’d better stay with us, Alma,” said the General, with a shade of anxiety. “Remember there have been several people killed up there.”
“Just why I particularly want to go, uncle. I want to be able to say I have been up a mountain on which several people have been killed.”
“I think Miss Wyatt has a steady enough head, General,” said Wentworth, who was an experienced Alpine climber. “At least, judging from the way in which she stood looking over that precipice down yonder, I should say so. If she will allow me I will take care of her.”
“I’ll be hanged if you will though!” said Phil to himself. And then they started.
The mere climbing part of what followed was not hard. But what was apt to prove trying to the nerves of the uninitiated was when, after feeling their way carefully along the narrow ledge-like path which runs beneath the rocks near the crest of the ridge, they came right out upon the summit of thearêteitself. Here, indeed, it was a good deal like walking on the edge of a knife-blade even as Wentworth had defined it, and here it was that two, at any rate, of the party began to feel dubious. On the right was a precipitous fall of rocks, then the steep, slippery, grassy slope—broken here and there by a cliff—which constituted the whole of that side of the mountain; on the left an unbroken drop of seven or eight hundred feet. And on the apex of this rock ridge, in single file, poised, like Mohammed’s coffin, between the heavens and the earth, the aspiring party had to walk or crawl.
“Well, Miss Wyatt, how do you feel now?” said Wentworth, who was leading the way. Alma was immediately behind him, then came Philip Orlebar, then Fordham, Scott and Gedge bringing up the rear. “Not giddy at all, I hope?”
“Not in the very least,” said Alma, brightly. “Quite sure? I can give you a hand if you like.”
“Not for the world. I assure you I’m thoroughly enjoying it. And what a view!”
“Well, look carefully where you’re going,” continued Wentworth. “Leave the view to take care of itself until you get to the top. It won’t run away.”
That the warning was by no means superfluous was shown by a sudden stagger on the part of Philip. He reeled for a moment, then, with a great effort, recovered his balance. He had been so absorbed in watching Alma’s progress in front, that he had quite neglected the attention due to his own footing. Now this cannot be done with impunity upon the edge of a knife-like ridge about one thousand feet in mid-air—as he learned when he found himself within an ace of plunging into space. Fordham, for a moment, thought he had gone.
“You’ll add to the record of this much maligned climb, Phil, if you don’t mind,” he said. “What’s the row? Feel heady?”
“Not a bit. Only made a slip. Sha’n’t do it again though. I say, Wentworth, how far would a fellow fall here—on this side?”
“Oh, about eight hundred feet. Then he’d go footballing two or three hundred more,” was the nonchalant reply. “I wouldn’t try it, though, if I were you.”
They were off thearêtenow, and paused to rest under the rocks to allow the others time to come up.
“Hallo, Gedge!” continued Wentworth, as the addressed came crawling along on all-fours, and that very gingerly. “I thought you felt like doing this climb on one leg, and instead of that it seems to take you all four.”
“You people go on at such a rate. Besides, I find I’m not up to much on a place like this. No, I’ll climb down from the ‘one-leg’ position, absolutely and unreservedly.”
“There’s another man who isn’t up to much on a place like this,” said Fordham, with a dry chuckle.
Scott, to whom this remark referred, had nearly reached the middle of thearête. He, too, was creeping on hands and knees. But suddenly his heart seemed to fail him, for there he sat, straddling the ridge, one leg on each side of the mountain, the very picture of wild panic. His hat had blown off, and hung by a string over his shoulder, and he dared not move a finger to replace it. His hands shook as he grasped the rock in a strained, terror-stricken grasp, and his eyes seemed to start from his deadly white face.
“Oh, help me off!” he cried piteously. “For Heaven’s sake, some of you help me off!”
In vain they called out to him that he was perfectly safe—that if Miss Wyatt could get along the place without any difficulty surely he could. The poor man’s reasoning faculties seemed to have deserted him altogether.
“I suppose I must go back and salvage him!” said Wentworth, resignedly. “You had better wait here for me, though.” And in a moment he was beside the distressed chaplain.
“Hang it all, Mr Scott!” he said in an undertone, “do remember what an exhibition you are making of yourself before Miss Wyatt, and pull yourself together. You’re quite safe, I tell you. Now, turn round—carefully as you like—and then crawl back again as you came.”
When a man of Scott’s calibre is in a horrible funk, poised a thousand feet in mid-air, appeals to his reason or his sense of shame are apt to fall alike on deaf ears. To all Wentworth’s adjurations he only reiterated piteously, “I can’t move! What is to be done? I can’t move!”
What, indeed, was to be done? It was a position in which if a man will not help himself nobody can help him. Wentworth was in despair. Suddenly a happy thought struck him. His flask!
“Here, take a nip of this and pull yourself together. That’s right,” as Scott eagerly seized the proffered refreshment.
And soon the effects were felt. A liberal gulp or two having infused into his system a faint modicum of that artificial courage libellously termed “Dutch,” the panic-stricken cleric managed to turn round upon his aërial perch, and began to crawl gingerly back in the same ignominious posture as that in which he had come, stipulating eagerly that his succourer should keep just behind him in order to grab hold of him if he should show the least sign of falling. Wentworth was glad to get rid of him on any terms, and, depositing him in safety under a rock, solemnly enjoined upon him not to move therefrom until they should return.
“Well, Mr Fordham,” said Alma, wickedly, “we poor women are not always the ones who give the most trouble, you see.”
“No, by Jove, you’re not, Miss Wyatt,” struck in Gedge, characteristically eager to answer for everybody. “What an awful fool I must have looked myself. I’ll do the nextarêteon my hind legs like the rest of you.” And he was as good as his word.
Two more of these narrow rock-ridges, overhanging a dizzy height, then a particularly awkward “corner” where a very slight excrescence of the rock constituted the only foothold, and where Wentworth and Philip’s combined caution availed to render the danger for Alma practicallynil, and they began the steep but easy climb of the grassy cone itself. A few minutes later they stood on the summit.
“Well, Miss Wyatt, I must in all due sincerity congratulate you,” said Wentworth, as they sat down to rest after their exertions. “No one could have got along better than you have done. And you have never climbed a mountain before?”
“Never. Why, I’ve never even seen a mountain before I came to this country a couple of weeks ago,” answered Alma, with a gratified smile.
“Wonderful I wonderful! Isn’t it, Fordham?”
“Very,” replied that worthy, drily.
“No chance of any one holding too good an opinion of herself when Mr Fordham is by,” said Alma, with mischievous emphasis on the “her.”
“Which is to say that everything—everybody, rather—is of some use,” was the ready rejoinder.
“I don’t see the point of that at all,” cried Phil, dimly conscious that his deity was being made the butt of his crusty friend’s satire. “No, I don’t. Come now, Fordham.”
“I suppose not. There is another point you don’t see either, which is that when a man has taken the trouble to shin up the Cape au Moine on a particularly hot and surpassingly clear day, he prefers the enjoyment of the magnificent view which a bountiful Providence has spread around him to the labour of driving this or that ‘point’ into the somewhat opaque brain-box of Philip Orlebar, Esq.”
“You had better take that as final, Mr Orlebar, ere worse befall you,” laughed! Alma, interrupting the derisive hoot wherewith her adorer had greeted the above contemptuous speech. “And Mr Fordham’s principle is a sound one in the main, for I never could have imagined the world could show anything so glorious, so perfectly heavenly as this view. Let us make the most of it.”
Her enthusiasm was not feigned, and for it there was every justification. The atmosphere balmy and clear, the lofty elevation at which they found themselves—these alone were enough to engender an unbounded sense of exhilaration. But what a panorama! Range upon range of noble mountains, the dazzling snow-summits of the giants of the Oberland reaching in a stately line across the whole eastern background of the picture, from the cloud-like Wetterhorn to the massive rock rampart of the Diablerets. Mountains, mountains everywhere—one vast rolling sea of tossing peaks, rock-ridges, and smooth, hump-like backs; of bold and sweeping slopes, here black with pine forest, there vividly green in the full blaze of unclouded sunlight; and, cleaving the heart of the billowy expanse, such a maze of sequestered and peaceful valleys resonant with the far-away music of cow-bells, at eventide sweet with the melodiousjodelof theRanz des Vaches. In the distance the turbid Sarine winding its way by more than one cluster of red roofs grouping around a modest steeple on its banks. This on the one hand. On the other, the rolling, wooded champaign and rich pasture-lands of the plain of Switzerland stretching away to the lakes of Neuchatel and Bienne, and historic Morat; and below, like a huge turquoise, the blue Lake Léman in its mountain-girt setting, between the far-away line of the purple Jura and the great masses of the Savoy Alps rearing up opposite. What a panorama, beneath a sky of deep and unclouded blue, lighted by the golden radiance of a summer sun! It was indeed something to make the most of—to store up within the treasure-house of the memory.
Seated upon the rank grass which carpeted the windswept summit of the narrow pinnacle, Alma was making Wentworth tell her the names of the sea of peaks, far and near, which lay around them. This he was well qualified to do, knowing them as he did by heart, and for nearly an hour the object lesson went on. Fordham lay on the grass, smoking a pipe, in an attitude of the most perfect repose, and the irrepressible Gedge was bearing his part in a bawled colloquy between himself and those they had left to await their return. Neither heard what the other said, but this was a secondary consideration. The great thing was to be saying something—anyhow as far as the volatile Gedge was concerned.
“It isn’t the snow mountains that are responsible for the greatest number of smashes,” said Wentworth, having pointed out two or three peaks which, like the one they were on, were responsible for having killed somebody. “The grass peaks like this are far the worst. It’s this way. A fellow makes up his mind to do a regular climb—say the Matterhorn or the Jungfrau. All right. He makes up his mind that he’s going to do a big thing, and from start to finish he’s keenly on the look out. Besides, he has guides, who won’t allow him to take any risk. Now, on a thing like this, that you can just hop up and down again between the twotable d’hôtes, why he thinks he is going to do it on one leg, like friend Gedge there.”
“Well, but—Wentworth—you don’t call this a small thing?” struck in he named. “The confounded—what d’you call ’em?—arêtesrequire a pretty strong head.”
“Yes, that’s so. This is, perhaps, a little more difficult than some of the other climbs that break fellows’ necks. Take the old Jaman, for instance. You could almost ride a mule up and down it. Anyhow, the path, with ordinary care, is as safe as a church. But some day the know-everything Briton spots a rather fine gentian growing just off the path. Quite easy, of course. But he soon finds all the difference in the world between the path and the mountain-side. The grass is as slippery as ice, especially if it is a little wet. His feet slide from under him and away he goes. A toboggan’s nothing to it. He shoots down the grass slope like a streak of lightning, then over the inevitable cliff—and—a sack of bones is brought back to the hotel, and a paragraph goes the round of the English papers, headed ‘Another Alpine Accident.’ Thus a mountain gets the name of being a dangerous one, whereas really it is a mere idiot-trap, sensible people being perfectly safe on it—in ordinarily decent weather, that is.”
“Horrible!” said Alma, with a little shiver. “And at this height it all seems to come home to one so.”
“I say, Wentworth,” said Phil, “you’d better keep those bogey disquisitions of yours until we get down. You will spoil Miss Wyatt’s nerve for thearêtesgoing back.”
“Not at all,” said Alma. “I am very much interested. Tell me, Mr Wentworth, don’t people often come to grief by climbing down places that look easier than they are?”
“Of course they do. You notice, from below, a bit of rock that looks as if you could sit on it and then have your feet on the ground, but when you get to it it’s a cliff fifty or sixty feet high. But I’ve taken the trouble to go into the cases, and in nine instances out of ten it is the little grass fiend that does for its victim, not the eternal snow-capped giant.”
“Ever come up here in the snow, Wentworth?” said Gedge.
“Yes. It’s dangerous, though—very dangerous indeed. I don’t care about doing it again—in winter, I mean, not when there’s a mere temporary powdering of it. Of course, you understand, the whole aspect of the mountain is changed, every feature as unfamiliar as if it was a new thing. And snow is apt to slide away in great masses, taking you with it. It’s bad in wind, too. I’ve crossed thosearêteswhen I’ve had to lie flat and grab the rock rather harder than we saw friend Scott doing just now. You have no idea of the force of the wind on a place like that.”
Fordham and Gedge now started to go down. Alma, however, begged for a little longer time. She might never see such a view again in her lifetime, she urged, and they had still the best part of the day before them. So Wentworth had yielded—that is to say, he had remained behind too, ignoring Philip Orlebar’s airy hint thatheneedn’t bother to wait if he would rather go, for that he—Phil—would undertake to bring Miss Wyatt down safely. But Wentworth, who was a good-natured fellow, and whose inclinations in nowise moved him to cut out Master Phil even temporarily, was impervious to the latter’s wishes now. He felt himself in a measure responsible, and Philip was comparatively inexperienced at mountain work.
So they sat and talked on, till suddenly Alma exclaimed, with a shiver—
“Why, the sun is going in. And look! we are almost in a cloud.”
Wentworth, hitherto absorbed in a favourite topic, doubly attractive as shared by a new and interested listener, looked quickly round.
“Yes,” he said, rising, “we had better go down.”