Chapter Eleven.Peril.It had stolen upon them like an enemy unawares.A moment ago they were in a full blaze of noonday radiance, revelling in its golden, undimmed splendour; now this had, as by the wave of a magic wand, given place to a semi-gloom, chill and depressing in its misty suddenness. A moment ago a panorama as of half a continent lay spread around them, now an object the size of a human being was invisible at twelve yards. Creeping up, swift, stealthy, and ghost-like, the cloud curtain was wreathing its dank and shadowy folds round the pinnacle-like cone of the Cape au Moine, and already imparting a rimy slipperiness to the rocks and grass.“We had better go down,” Wentworth had said, unconcernedly. Heartily now he wished they had done so half an hour earlier, for he, in common with the rest of them, was sensible of a sudden rising of the wind, which, taken with the fact that, so far from dispelling the cloud, it only seemed to be rolling it up thicker, pointed to the possibility of a gusty squall, the extent and suddenness of whose force it was impossible to predict.The very features of the mountain seemed to have changed. As they got off the grassy cone on to the firstarête, the summit, dimly visible as they looked back, seemed to tower up at least four times its actual height, and the vertical line of the great precipice which forms its eastern face stood forth black and forbidding against the opaque background of vapour. A pair of crows flapped forth from some rocky recess and, uttering a raucous croak, soared away into the misty space. The straight, narrow edge of their dizzy path disappeared in the cloud not a dozen yards in front.No one knew better than Wentworth the utterly disconcerting effect of this sort of phenomenon upon even the most skilled mountaineer. Every well-known feature or landmark assumes a puzzling unfamiliarity—in fact, a complete metamorphosis of the whole scene appears to have taken place. So, with a dubious glance to windward, he remarked—“It might be our best plan not to attempt thearêtesat present. We can get back on to the cone and wait until this blows over, in perfect safety. What do you think, Miss Wyatt?”“Oh, let’s try it, if it can be done,” she exclaimed, eagerly. “My uncle will be so dreadfully frightened if we wait here. Only think of it. He will certainly imagine we have come to grief. No, let’s go on; I am not in the least afraid.”Wentworth made no further objection, and they resumed their now perilous way. For the wind had gained in strength and volume with alarming rapidity, and, balanced there on that knife-like ridge, those three adventurous ones were exposed to its full force and fury. More than once they were obliged to take refuge on their hands and knees, and indeed were finally reduced to crawling ignominiously thereon. The shrill whistle of the blast tore past their ears, singing through the weather-beaten herbage which straggled upon the side of thearête. The mist swirled over the crest of the ridge in rimy puffs, and below, whenever they snatched half a glance from their precarious progress, the climbers could note a seething, whirling chaos of vapour filling up the great hollow whose bottom lay at a dizzy depth beneath.“Not much further to go, is there?” said Philip, anxiously, as they stood resting beneath the rocks at the end of the secondarêtefrom the summit. It had devolved upon Wentworth as guide to help Alma down the steeper and more dangerous places, even to the placing of her feet; but this Philip had quite ceased to secretly resent. He himself was as bewildered as a child in this unaccustomed cloud-land.“Not so very much,” answered Wentworth, ambiguously and in fact somewhat absently, for often as he had been there before, the cloud had disconcerted him more than he chose to admit, and he was thinking whether it would not really be rank lunacy to resume their attempt. But a slight shiver of cold on Alma’s part decided him.“Had enough rest, Miss Wyatt?” he said. “Come along, then. We must not lose any time.”He stepped forth from their resting-place. The shrieking fury of the wind had become almost a gale. Thisarêtewas the worst of all, for whereas the path on the others ran here and there along the face of the slope, thus partially shielding them from the full force of the blast, here they would have to crawl along the very crest itself.“It seems to be blowing harder than ever!” said Wentworth, imprudently standing upright upon the sharp ridge.A perfect roar drowned his words. As though struck by some unseen power he staggered, made a frantic attempt to regain a recumbent posture, then clutching wildly at the ground he disappeared into space; while the horrified spectators who had not yet left their shelter, blown flat against the rock by the incredible force of the sudden gust, realised that but for this providential rampart they too would have met with the same fate.For many minutes they gazed at each other in silence, too unnerved, too horror-stricken to speak. And that they were so is little to be wondered at. They had just seen their companion blown into the abyss within a few paces of them. At that very moment they pictured him lying far, far down where the boiling vapours swirled blackly through space—lying in scattered, mangled fragments, poor relics of the strong, cool-headed man who but a moment ago was guiding them with such skill and judgment. And their own position was sufficiently alarming. Here they were, up in the clouds, exposed to the force and fury of a mountain storm whose duration it was impossible to pre-estimate.“How awful?” gasped Alma, at length, during a lull in the bellowing of the gale. “How truly awful! Is—is there no chance for him?”Philip shook his head gloomily, and there was a shudder in his voice. “Not a shadow of a chance, I’m afraid. You saw, as we came along, the sort of drop there is on that side. But—try not to think of it.”“I cannot help thinking of it. Oh, it is too frightful!” and, thoroughly unnerved, she burst into a wild storm of tears.It was too much for Philip. Not there on that lonely mountain height, enveloped in the black darkness of the cloud, witnessing her distress, her only protector, could he any longer restrain the tenderness which took possession of him with every glance from her eyes, every tone of her voice.“Alma—darling”—he broke forth—“think only of yourself now. Keep up your spirits like your own brave self. Look. It may not last long, and once the wind drops we shall have no difficulty in finding the way.”His words of consolation—no less than those of love which had been drawn from him involuntarily as it were—seemed to fall on deaf ears. The shock of the horrible fate which had overtaken poor Wentworth before their very eyes was too overwhelming, and she continued to weep unrestrainedly, almost hysterically. The black peaty turf of the narrow space where they rested had grown wet and slippery, for it was beginning to rain, and overhead the grey crags loomed athwart the flying misty scud, breaking it up into long fantastic wreaths and streamers, where it swirled past the cloven and jagged facets of the rock.“What are you doing?—No; I will not have that!” said Alma presently, resisting an attempt on his part to button around her shoulders his coat, which he had taken off for the purpose.“You must have it. I saw you shiver,” he answered decisively, at the same time holding the garment around her in such wise as to make the very most of its warming powers.“I will not. I am more warmly clad than you are. You will catch your death of cold yourself.”“Now, it’s of no use arguing—you must have it. I have a will of my own sometimes, and I’ll fling the coat over the cliff rather than wear it myself. It is cold, as you say,” he added, with a violent shiver, “but I’m not made of sugar.”It was cold indeed. The wind blew chill and piercing, and the rain, which was driving in upon them in a sleety penetrating shower, began to render things more and more uncomfortable for poor Phil in his shirtsleeves. And yet amid the cold and the wet, weatherbound up there in that weird noonday night, with the horror of a comrade’s fate still upon him—fear, uncertainty, and danger around them, Philip Orlebar was, strange to say, uncontrollably, blissfully happy. Stranger still, it might be that the day would come when he should look back to that period of doubt and horror spent in the semi-darkness of the mountain storm, and the fury of its icy blasts around their shelterless heads, with the same sad, aching hopelessness wherewith a lost soul might look upon the paradise it has forfeited by its own act.The time went by—he standing before her in order that she might benefit by even that slight barrier from the force of the wind—talking ever, in order to keep up her spirits, to keep her mind from dwelling upon the horror they had both witnessed; but for which event, indeed, it is probable that he would have spoken all that was on his mind there and then. Even he, however, recognised that this was no time for anything of the kind; and indeed, in the fearless protectiveness of his demeanour, the tact and fixity of purpose wherewith he strove to take her out of herself, no one would have recognised the thoughtless, devil-may-care, and, truth to tell, somewhat selfish temperament of Philip Orlebar. His whole nature seemed transformed. He seemed a dozen years older. But the love tremor in his voice spoke the high pressure of restraint he had put upon himself. Did Alma detect it? We cannot say.A faint halloo came through the opaque folds of the mist—then another much nearer. At the same time they realised that the force of the wind had materially abated; moreover it seemed to be getting much lighter.“That’s Fordham,” said Philip, with a start. Then he answered the shout.“Is Miss Wyatt all right?” sung out Fordham.“Safe as a church,” roared Philip, and the welcome news was passed on to those waiting further back.A ray of sunlight shot through the gloom, and lo, as if by magic, the opaque inky wall thus breached began to fall asunder, yielding before each successive piercing ray, and the patch of blue sky thus opened spread wider and wider till the whole of thearêtelay revealed, wet and glistening in the sunshine, and beyond the gleaming crags the cloudcap around the apex of the cone grew smaller and beautifully less until it was whirled away altogether.“Where’s Wentworth?” was Fordham’s first query on joining them. Philip looked very blank.“Come this way, Fordham,” he said, leading the other to the spot, not many paces distant, where the unfortunate man had disappeared. “Look at that. What sort of a chance would a fellow have who went over there?”Fordham looked at the speaker with a start of dismay, then at the line where the abrupt slope of the ridge broke into sheer precipice half a dozen yards below.“I’m afraid he wouldn’t have the ghost of a shadow of a chance,” he muttered. “But—how was it?”“Blown over,” answered Philip.“The devil!”Both men stood gazing down in gloomy silence. The strength of the wind was still a trifle too powerful to be pleasant up there on thearête; but below, sheltered from its force, the whole vast depth of the valley was filled with a sea of snowy vapour, slowly heaving itself up into round billowy humps.“By Jove! Did you hear that?” suddenly exclaimed Philip, with a start that nearly sent him to share the fate of the luckless Wentworth.“Yes, I did,” was the hardly less eager reply. “But—it isn’t possible. Wait—now—listen again!”A faint and far-away shout from below now rose distinctly to their ears. Both listened with an intensity of eagerness that was painful.“Only some native, herding cattle down there!” said Philip, despondently.“Shut up, man, and listen again. Cattle-herds in this canton don’t as a rule talk good English,” interrupted Fordham. “Ah! I thought so,” he added, as this time the voice was distinctly audible—articulating, though somewhat feebly—“Any one up there?”“Yes. Where are you?”“About forty feet down. Get a rope quick. I can’t hold on for ever.”“Now, Phil,” said Fordham, quickly, “you’re younger than I am, and you’ve got longer legs. So just cut away down to the Chalet Soladier, that one we passed coming up, and levy upon them for all the ropes on the premises. Wait—be careful though,” he added, as the other was already starting. “Don’t hurry too much until you’re clear of thearêtes, or you may miss your own footing. After that, as hard as you like.”Away went Philip; Alma, her nerves in a state of the wildest excitement, dividing her attention between following with her eyes his dangerous course along the knife-like ridges, and listening to the dialogue between Fordham and Wentworth. The latter’s fall, it transpired, had fortunately been arrested by a growth of rhododendron bushes, anchored in the very face of the cliff. He had no footing to speak of, he said, and dared not even trust all his weight upon so precarious a hold as the roots of a bush or two, especially where there could be but the most insignificant depth of soil. He was distributing his weight as much as possible, upon such slight slope as this bushy projection afforded; indeed, so constrained was his position that he could not even give free play to his voice, hence the faint and far-away sound of his first hail. He hoped the rope would not be long coming, he added, for the bushes might give way at any moment; moreover he himself was becoming somewhat played out.Alma felt every drop of blood curdle within her as she listened to this voice out of the abyss, and pictured to herself its owner hanging there by a few twigs, with hardly a foothold, however slight, between himself and hundreds of feet of grisly death. Even Fordham felt sick at heart as he realised the frightful suspense of the situation.“Keep up your nerve, Wentworth,” he shouted. “Phil has nearly reached thechâletnow. They can be here in half an hour.”“He is there now,” said Alma, who was watching every step of his progress through his own glasses which he had left up there. “And the man is all ready for him—and—yes—he is meeting him with ropes. Now they are starting. Thank Heaven for that!”Fortunate indeed was it for Wentworth that thechâletwas inhabited at that time of year, and that its occupier happened to be there that day. The latter, who had watched the ascent, and had seen some of the party on the cone just before the cloud had hidden everything, was a trifle uneasy himself. But the sight of a tall athletic young Englishman tearing down the slope in his shirtsleeves confirmed his fears. He put two and two together, and, being a quick-witted fellow, had started to meet Philip with all the ropes his establishment could muster.All this was shouted down to Wentworth for the encouragement of the latter. And the excitement of those on thearête, no less than that of the party left behind on the highcol, became more and more intense as they watched the distance diminish between them and the bearers of the needful ropes, upon which depended a fellow-creature’s life. Minutes seemed hours. But what must they have seemed to the man who hung there over that dizzy height—his strength ebbing fast—counting the very seconds to the time his rescue should begin!By the time Philip and the cowherd had joined him, together with Gedge, who had come to render what help he could, Fordham’s plan was laid. They could not all stand on the narrowarêtein such wise as to obtain anything like the requisite purchase on the rope. But on the other side of the ridge a precipitous fall of rock, some ten or twelve feet, ended in an abrupt grass slope. Here two of them could stand, holding the end of the rope, while two more on the apex of the ridge could direct the ascent of the rescued man as well as assist in hauling.“Now, Phil,” he said, “if you’ve quite got back your wind”—for the two men were somewhat out of breath with their rapid climb—“get away down there with Gedge, and hold on like grim death. No, Miss Wyatt, not you,” in response to an appeal on Alma’s part to be allowed to help. “Four of us will be enough. We can manage easily.”There were two good lengths of rope, each about forty feet—for the peasants in mountain localities frequently adopt the precaution of tying themselves together when mowing the grass on some of the more dangerous and precipitous slopes. These were securely knotted together and manned as aforesaid.“I don’t like knots,” muttered Fordham, as he let down the end, having first tied his flask to the same with a bit of twine the stopper being loosened so as to render the contents accessible without an effort—“I don’t like knots, but there’s no help for it. Now, Wentworth,” he shouted, “is that right?”“Little more to the left—about a yard and a half. There—so. All right. I’ve got it. Pay out a little more line.”“Take a pull at the flask, and then sing out when you’re quite ready,” bawled Fordham.There was silence for a few minutes, then:“Ready. Haul away,” cried Wentworth.And they did haul away—those on thearêteflat on their faces, carefully watching the ascent of the rope lest it should be worn through by any friction. In a very short time Wentworth appeared in sight where the line of the slope broke into the precipice; a moment more and he was beside them in safety.Then what a stentorian cheer split the echoes of those craggy heights, conveying to the rest of the party, waiting in anxious, breathless suspense below, that the rescue had been safely effected. Wentworth himself seemed rather dazed, and said but little; nor did it add to his composure when he found Alma Wyatt wringing both his hands, and ejaculating, “Oh, I am so glad—I am so glad!” preparatory to breaking forth into a perfect paroxysm of unnerved crying.“You’ve had a narrow squeak, old chap!” said Philip.“Hurt at all?” asked the more practical Fordham.“No. Don’t seem like it. Scratched a bit—nothing more.”His face was badly scratched and covered with blood. One sleeve of his coat was nearly torn from the shoulder, and he had lost his watch.“Vous vous y-êtes joliment tiré—Nom de nom!” said the cowherd oracularly. “Remplacer une montre c’est plus simple que de remplacer ses membres broyés—allez!”
It had stolen upon them like an enemy unawares.
A moment ago they were in a full blaze of noonday radiance, revelling in its golden, undimmed splendour; now this had, as by the wave of a magic wand, given place to a semi-gloom, chill and depressing in its misty suddenness. A moment ago a panorama as of half a continent lay spread around them, now an object the size of a human being was invisible at twelve yards. Creeping up, swift, stealthy, and ghost-like, the cloud curtain was wreathing its dank and shadowy folds round the pinnacle-like cone of the Cape au Moine, and already imparting a rimy slipperiness to the rocks and grass.
“We had better go down,” Wentworth had said, unconcernedly. Heartily now he wished they had done so half an hour earlier, for he, in common with the rest of them, was sensible of a sudden rising of the wind, which, taken with the fact that, so far from dispelling the cloud, it only seemed to be rolling it up thicker, pointed to the possibility of a gusty squall, the extent and suddenness of whose force it was impossible to predict.
The very features of the mountain seemed to have changed. As they got off the grassy cone on to the firstarête, the summit, dimly visible as they looked back, seemed to tower up at least four times its actual height, and the vertical line of the great precipice which forms its eastern face stood forth black and forbidding against the opaque background of vapour. A pair of crows flapped forth from some rocky recess and, uttering a raucous croak, soared away into the misty space. The straight, narrow edge of their dizzy path disappeared in the cloud not a dozen yards in front.
No one knew better than Wentworth the utterly disconcerting effect of this sort of phenomenon upon even the most skilled mountaineer. Every well-known feature or landmark assumes a puzzling unfamiliarity—in fact, a complete metamorphosis of the whole scene appears to have taken place. So, with a dubious glance to windward, he remarked—
“It might be our best plan not to attempt thearêtesat present. We can get back on to the cone and wait until this blows over, in perfect safety. What do you think, Miss Wyatt?”
“Oh, let’s try it, if it can be done,” she exclaimed, eagerly. “My uncle will be so dreadfully frightened if we wait here. Only think of it. He will certainly imagine we have come to grief. No, let’s go on; I am not in the least afraid.”
Wentworth made no further objection, and they resumed their now perilous way. For the wind had gained in strength and volume with alarming rapidity, and, balanced there on that knife-like ridge, those three adventurous ones were exposed to its full force and fury. More than once they were obliged to take refuge on their hands and knees, and indeed were finally reduced to crawling ignominiously thereon. The shrill whistle of the blast tore past their ears, singing through the weather-beaten herbage which straggled upon the side of thearête. The mist swirled over the crest of the ridge in rimy puffs, and below, whenever they snatched half a glance from their precarious progress, the climbers could note a seething, whirling chaos of vapour filling up the great hollow whose bottom lay at a dizzy depth beneath.
“Not much further to go, is there?” said Philip, anxiously, as they stood resting beneath the rocks at the end of the secondarêtefrom the summit. It had devolved upon Wentworth as guide to help Alma down the steeper and more dangerous places, even to the placing of her feet; but this Philip had quite ceased to secretly resent. He himself was as bewildered as a child in this unaccustomed cloud-land.
“Not so very much,” answered Wentworth, ambiguously and in fact somewhat absently, for often as he had been there before, the cloud had disconcerted him more than he chose to admit, and he was thinking whether it would not really be rank lunacy to resume their attempt. But a slight shiver of cold on Alma’s part decided him.
“Had enough rest, Miss Wyatt?” he said. “Come along, then. We must not lose any time.”
He stepped forth from their resting-place. The shrieking fury of the wind had become almost a gale. Thisarêtewas the worst of all, for whereas the path on the others ran here and there along the face of the slope, thus partially shielding them from the full force of the blast, here they would have to crawl along the very crest itself.
“It seems to be blowing harder than ever!” said Wentworth, imprudently standing upright upon the sharp ridge.
A perfect roar drowned his words. As though struck by some unseen power he staggered, made a frantic attempt to regain a recumbent posture, then clutching wildly at the ground he disappeared into space; while the horrified spectators who had not yet left their shelter, blown flat against the rock by the incredible force of the sudden gust, realised that but for this providential rampart they too would have met with the same fate.
For many minutes they gazed at each other in silence, too unnerved, too horror-stricken to speak. And that they were so is little to be wondered at. They had just seen their companion blown into the abyss within a few paces of them. At that very moment they pictured him lying far, far down where the boiling vapours swirled blackly through space—lying in scattered, mangled fragments, poor relics of the strong, cool-headed man who but a moment ago was guiding them with such skill and judgment. And their own position was sufficiently alarming. Here they were, up in the clouds, exposed to the force and fury of a mountain storm whose duration it was impossible to pre-estimate.
“How awful?” gasped Alma, at length, during a lull in the bellowing of the gale. “How truly awful! Is—is there no chance for him?”
Philip shook his head gloomily, and there was a shudder in his voice. “Not a shadow of a chance, I’m afraid. You saw, as we came along, the sort of drop there is on that side. But—try not to think of it.”
“I cannot help thinking of it. Oh, it is too frightful!” and, thoroughly unnerved, she burst into a wild storm of tears.
It was too much for Philip. Not there on that lonely mountain height, enveloped in the black darkness of the cloud, witnessing her distress, her only protector, could he any longer restrain the tenderness which took possession of him with every glance from her eyes, every tone of her voice.
“Alma—darling”—he broke forth—“think only of yourself now. Keep up your spirits like your own brave self. Look. It may not last long, and once the wind drops we shall have no difficulty in finding the way.”
His words of consolation—no less than those of love which had been drawn from him involuntarily as it were—seemed to fall on deaf ears. The shock of the horrible fate which had overtaken poor Wentworth before their very eyes was too overwhelming, and she continued to weep unrestrainedly, almost hysterically. The black peaty turf of the narrow space where they rested had grown wet and slippery, for it was beginning to rain, and overhead the grey crags loomed athwart the flying misty scud, breaking it up into long fantastic wreaths and streamers, where it swirled past the cloven and jagged facets of the rock.
“What are you doing?—No; I will not have that!” said Alma presently, resisting an attempt on his part to button around her shoulders his coat, which he had taken off for the purpose.
“You must have it. I saw you shiver,” he answered decisively, at the same time holding the garment around her in such wise as to make the very most of its warming powers.
“I will not. I am more warmly clad than you are. You will catch your death of cold yourself.”
“Now, it’s of no use arguing—you must have it. I have a will of my own sometimes, and I’ll fling the coat over the cliff rather than wear it myself. It is cold, as you say,” he added, with a violent shiver, “but I’m not made of sugar.”
It was cold indeed. The wind blew chill and piercing, and the rain, which was driving in upon them in a sleety penetrating shower, began to render things more and more uncomfortable for poor Phil in his shirtsleeves. And yet amid the cold and the wet, weatherbound up there in that weird noonday night, with the horror of a comrade’s fate still upon him—fear, uncertainty, and danger around them, Philip Orlebar was, strange to say, uncontrollably, blissfully happy. Stranger still, it might be that the day would come when he should look back to that period of doubt and horror spent in the semi-darkness of the mountain storm, and the fury of its icy blasts around their shelterless heads, with the same sad, aching hopelessness wherewith a lost soul might look upon the paradise it has forfeited by its own act.
The time went by—he standing before her in order that she might benefit by even that slight barrier from the force of the wind—talking ever, in order to keep up her spirits, to keep her mind from dwelling upon the horror they had both witnessed; but for which event, indeed, it is probable that he would have spoken all that was on his mind there and then. Even he, however, recognised that this was no time for anything of the kind; and indeed, in the fearless protectiveness of his demeanour, the tact and fixity of purpose wherewith he strove to take her out of herself, no one would have recognised the thoughtless, devil-may-care, and, truth to tell, somewhat selfish temperament of Philip Orlebar. His whole nature seemed transformed. He seemed a dozen years older. But the love tremor in his voice spoke the high pressure of restraint he had put upon himself. Did Alma detect it? We cannot say.
A faint halloo came through the opaque folds of the mist—then another much nearer. At the same time they realised that the force of the wind had materially abated; moreover it seemed to be getting much lighter.
“That’s Fordham,” said Philip, with a start. Then he answered the shout.
“Is Miss Wyatt all right?” sung out Fordham.
“Safe as a church,” roared Philip, and the welcome news was passed on to those waiting further back.
A ray of sunlight shot through the gloom, and lo, as if by magic, the opaque inky wall thus breached began to fall asunder, yielding before each successive piercing ray, and the patch of blue sky thus opened spread wider and wider till the whole of thearêtelay revealed, wet and glistening in the sunshine, and beyond the gleaming crags the cloudcap around the apex of the cone grew smaller and beautifully less until it was whirled away altogether.
“Where’s Wentworth?” was Fordham’s first query on joining them. Philip looked very blank.
“Come this way, Fordham,” he said, leading the other to the spot, not many paces distant, where the unfortunate man had disappeared. “Look at that. What sort of a chance would a fellow have who went over there?”
Fordham looked at the speaker with a start of dismay, then at the line where the abrupt slope of the ridge broke into sheer precipice half a dozen yards below.
“I’m afraid he wouldn’t have the ghost of a shadow of a chance,” he muttered. “But—how was it?”
“Blown over,” answered Philip.
“The devil!”
Both men stood gazing down in gloomy silence. The strength of the wind was still a trifle too powerful to be pleasant up there on thearête; but below, sheltered from its force, the whole vast depth of the valley was filled with a sea of snowy vapour, slowly heaving itself up into round billowy humps.
“By Jove! Did you hear that?” suddenly exclaimed Philip, with a start that nearly sent him to share the fate of the luckless Wentworth.
“Yes, I did,” was the hardly less eager reply. “But—it isn’t possible. Wait—now—listen again!”
A faint and far-away shout from below now rose distinctly to their ears. Both listened with an intensity of eagerness that was painful.
“Only some native, herding cattle down there!” said Philip, despondently.
“Shut up, man, and listen again. Cattle-herds in this canton don’t as a rule talk good English,” interrupted Fordham. “Ah! I thought so,” he added, as this time the voice was distinctly audible—articulating, though somewhat feebly—“Any one up there?”
“Yes. Where are you?”
“About forty feet down. Get a rope quick. I can’t hold on for ever.”
“Now, Phil,” said Fordham, quickly, “you’re younger than I am, and you’ve got longer legs. So just cut away down to the Chalet Soladier, that one we passed coming up, and levy upon them for all the ropes on the premises. Wait—be careful though,” he added, as the other was already starting. “Don’t hurry too much until you’re clear of thearêtes, or you may miss your own footing. After that, as hard as you like.”
Away went Philip; Alma, her nerves in a state of the wildest excitement, dividing her attention between following with her eyes his dangerous course along the knife-like ridges, and listening to the dialogue between Fordham and Wentworth. The latter’s fall, it transpired, had fortunately been arrested by a growth of rhododendron bushes, anchored in the very face of the cliff. He had no footing to speak of, he said, and dared not even trust all his weight upon so precarious a hold as the roots of a bush or two, especially where there could be but the most insignificant depth of soil. He was distributing his weight as much as possible, upon such slight slope as this bushy projection afforded; indeed, so constrained was his position that he could not even give free play to his voice, hence the faint and far-away sound of his first hail. He hoped the rope would not be long coming, he added, for the bushes might give way at any moment; moreover he himself was becoming somewhat played out.
Alma felt every drop of blood curdle within her as she listened to this voice out of the abyss, and pictured to herself its owner hanging there by a few twigs, with hardly a foothold, however slight, between himself and hundreds of feet of grisly death. Even Fordham felt sick at heart as he realised the frightful suspense of the situation.
“Keep up your nerve, Wentworth,” he shouted. “Phil has nearly reached thechâletnow. They can be here in half an hour.”
“He is there now,” said Alma, who was watching every step of his progress through his own glasses which he had left up there. “And the man is all ready for him—and—yes—he is meeting him with ropes. Now they are starting. Thank Heaven for that!”
Fortunate indeed was it for Wentworth that thechâletwas inhabited at that time of year, and that its occupier happened to be there that day. The latter, who had watched the ascent, and had seen some of the party on the cone just before the cloud had hidden everything, was a trifle uneasy himself. But the sight of a tall athletic young Englishman tearing down the slope in his shirtsleeves confirmed his fears. He put two and two together, and, being a quick-witted fellow, had started to meet Philip with all the ropes his establishment could muster.
All this was shouted down to Wentworth for the encouragement of the latter. And the excitement of those on thearête, no less than that of the party left behind on the highcol, became more and more intense as they watched the distance diminish between them and the bearers of the needful ropes, upon which depended a fellow-creature’s life. Minutes seemed hours. But what must they have seemed to the man who hung there over that dizzy height—his strength ebbing fast—counting the very seconds to the time his rescue should begin!
By the time Philip and the cowherd had joined him, together with Gedge, who had come to render what help he could, Fordham’s plan was laid. They could not all stand on the narrowarêtein such wise as to obtain anything like the requisite purchase on the rope. But on the other side of the ridge a precipitous fall of rock, some ten or twelve feet, ended in an abrupt grass slope. Here two of them could stand, holding the end of the rope, while two more on the apex of the ridge could direct the ascent of the rescued man as well as assist in hauling.
“Now, Phil,” he said, “if you’ve quite got back your wind”—for the two men were somewhat out of breath with their rapid climb—“get away down there with Gedge, and hold on like grim death. No, Miss Wyatt, not you,” in response to an appeal on Alma’s part to be allowed to help. “Four of us will be enough. We can manage easily.”
There were two good lengths of rope, each about forty feet—for the peasants in mountain localities frequently adopt the precaution of tying themselves together when mowing the grass on some of the more dangerous and precipitous slopes. These were securely knotted together and manned as aforesaid.
“I don’t like knots,” muttered Fordham, as he let down the end, having first tied his flask to the same with a bit of twine the stopper being loosened so as to render the contents accessible without an effort—“I don’t like knots, but there’s no help for it. Now, Wentworth,” he shouted, “is that right?”
“Little more to the left—about a yard and a half. There—so. All right. I’ve got it. Pay out a little more line.”
“Take a pull at the flask, and then sing out when you’re quite ready,” bawled Fordham.
There was silence for a few minutes, then:
“Ready. Haul away,” cried Wentworth.
And they did haul away—those on thearêteflat on their faces, carefully watching the ascent of the rope lest it should be worn through by any friction. In a very short time Wentworth appeared in sight where the line of the slope broke into the precipice; a moment more and he was beside them in safety.
Then what a stentorian cheer split the echoes of those craggy heights, conveying to the rest of the party, waiting in anxious, breathless suspense below, that the rescue had been safely effected. Wentworth himself seemed rather dazed, and said but little; nor did it add to his composure when he found Alma Wyatt wringing both his hands, and ejaculating, “Oh, I am so glad—I am so glad!” preparatory to breaking forth into a perfect paroxysm of unnerved crying.
“You’ve had a narrow squeak, old chap!” said Philip.
“Hurt at all?” asked the more practical Fordham.
“No. Don’t seem like it. Scratched a bit—nothing more.”
His face was badly scratched and covered with blood. One sleeve of his coat was nearly torn from the shoulder, and he had lost his watch.
“Vous vous y-êtes joliment tiré—Nom de nom!” said the cowherd oracularly. “Remplacer une montre c’est plus simple que de remplacer ses membres broyés—allez!”
Chapter Twelve.Light.“Wentworth, old man, here’s to your lucky escape,” cried Gedge, with his usual effusiveness, flourishing a brimming bumper of Beaune.A roaring fire blazed in the wide chimney-place of the Châlet Soladier. The air was raw and chill, for another rain-gust had swept suddenly up; and seated around the cheerful glow our party was engaged in the comfortable and highly congenial occupation of assimilating the luncheon which had been brought along.“That’s a most appropriate toast, and one we ought all to join in,” said the old General, approvingly. “Here, Philip, give thechâletman a full bumper. He is entitled to join if any one is, and, Alma—explain to him what it is all about.”This was done, and the toast drunk with a hearty cheer. The recipient of the honour, however, was in no responsive mood. That he, of all people, should have been fool enough to miss his footing; he an experienced climber, and who, moreover, was in a way the leader of the expedition! It was intolerable. And this aspect of the situation tended far more towards the somewhat silent and subdued demeanour he had worn ever since, than any recollection of the ghastly peril from which he had been extricated, than even the thought of the grisly death from which he had been saved almost by a miracle. Yes, he felt small, and said so unreservedly.But Alma came to the rescue in no ambiguous fashion.“You are not fair to yourself, Mr Wentworth,” she declared. “The thing might have happened to anybody up there in that awful wind. Of course I don’t know anything about mountain climbing, but what strikes me is that if, as you say, you considered yourself in a way responsible for us, the fact that you incurred the danger, while we have all come down safe and sound—incurred it, too, out of care for our safety—is not a thing to feel small about, but very much the reverse.”“Hear, hear!” sung out Gedge, lustily, stamping with his feet in such wise as to upset a whole heap of sandwiches and the residue of Fordham’s beverage. But Wentworth shook his head.“It’s very kind of you to put it that way, Miss Wyatt. Still the fact remains that it oughtn’t to have happened; and perhaps the best side of the affair is that it happened to me after all, and not to one of yourselves. By Jove! though,” he added, with a laugh. “Friend Dufour will score off me now for all time. We are always having arguments about the Cape au Moine. I always say it is an over-rated climb, and for the matter of that I say so still.”“That may easily be,” struck in Philip. “I suppose any mountain is dangerous with a gale of five hundred hurricane power blowing.”“Of course. But where I blame myself, Orlebar, is in not starting to come down sooner. And I fancy that is the line Miss Wyatt’s advocacy will take when she finds herself laid up with a bad cold after getting wet through up there.”“It will take nothing of the kind, Mr Wentworth,” replied Alma, “for I am not going to be laid up with any cold at all. The walk down here almost dried my things, and this splendid fire has done the rest.”Luncheon over pipes were produced, indeed the suggestion to that effect originated with the representatives of the softer sex there present, who preferred the, at other times much-decried, narcotic to the somewhat rancid odour emanating from sundry tubs used in cheese-making, which stood in the corner of the room. The rain beat hard upon the roof without, but nothing could have been more snug than the interior of thechâletin its semi-darkness, the firelight dancing upon the beams and quaint appointments of this rough but picturesque habitation.“Now, Gedge, you’re by way of being a logician,” said Wentworth, blowing out a cloud of smoke. “Can you tell us why a man can’t keep his head just as well over a drop of a thousand feet as over one of six?”“Doyou mean when the wind is blowing,” answered Gedge, suspecting a “catch.”“No. I mean when there’s no apparent reason why he shouldn’t.”“Because he gets confoundedly dizzy, I suppose.”“But why should he? He has the same foothold. Take thatarêteup there. If the drop on each side were only six feet, no fellow would hesitate to run along it like a cat along a wall.”“Not even Scott,” muttered Fordham, in a tone just audible to Alma, who at the picture thus conjured up of the unfortunate chaplain straddling thearête, and screaming to be taken off, could hardly restrain herself from breaking forth into a peal of laughter.“It’s a clear case of the triumph of mind over matter, I take it,” answered Gedge. “What do you say, Scott?”“Oh, I’m no authority,” mumbled the latter hastily. “Don’t appeal to me. My head seems going round still.”“Scott is no authority on matters outside the smoking-room,” said Fordham, mercilessly—thereby nearly causing Alma to choke again, and begetting inextinguishable resentment in the breast of the youngest Miss Ottley, who had taken the parson under her own especial wing. “Within those sacred precincts we all bow to him as supreme.”“I don’t quite see where that comes in,” rejoined Wentworth, in answer to Gedge. “If anything it would be the other way about—triumph of matter over mind: the matter being represented by several hundred feet of perpendicularity, before, or rather above, which the ‘mind’ takes a back seat; or, in plainer English, gets in a funk.”“That very fact proves the mind to be paramount; proves its triumph, paradoxical as it may sound,” argued Gedge. “An idiot, for instance, wouldn’t care twopence whether the drop was six feet or six hundred. As long as there was firm ground under him, he’d shuffle along it gaily. Why? Because he is incapable of thought—deficient in mind.”“Upon that showing,” said General Wyatt, with a twinkle in his eye—“upon that showing, the Miss Ottleys and myself must be the most sensible people of the lot; for, unlike your hypothetical idiot, Gedge, we emphatically did care twopence whether the drop was six feet or six hundred. In other words, we funked it egregiously and stayed behind. Our minds, you see triumphed over matter in the most practical way of all.”“I guess this argument’s going to end in a clean draw,” said Philip. “Hallo! the sun’s out again, and, by Jove, there isn’t a cloud in the sky,” he added, flinging the door open and going outside. “The day is young yet. How would it be to go over the Col de Falvay and work round home again by way of the Alliaz? It’s a lovely walk.”But this, after some discussion, was voted too large an undertaking. At Alma’s suggestion it was decided that the party should stroll over thecolinto the next valley and pick flowers.“It is our last day here, uncle,” she urged, in answer to the old General’s somewhat half-hearted objection that they would have had about enough walking by the time they reached home. “It is our last day, so we ought to make the most of it. And look how lovely it has turned out!”It had. No sign was left now of the dour mist curtain which had swept the heavens but a short while before. Wandering in the golden sunshine, among fragrant pine woods and pastures, knee-deep in narcissus, the party soon split up as such parties will. Fordham and the General took it very easily; strolling a little, sitting down a little, they chatted and smoked many pipes, and were happy. Scott and his fair admirer paired off in search of floral and botanical specimens, and were also happy. The residue of the crowd assimilated themselves in like harmonious fashion, or did not—as they chose. Two units of it at any rate did, for crafty Phil seized an early opportunity of carrying off Alma to a spot where he knew they would find lilies of the valley. As a matter of fact they did not find any, but this was of no consequence to him. What was of consequence was the blissful fact that he had got her all to himself for the afternoon. And this was her last afternoon, their last afternoon together. And in consideration of this, the light-hearted, easy-going Phil became seized with an abnormal melancholy.“You are a rank deceiver,” said Alma, some three hours later, as, in obedience to a shout of recall, they turned to rejoin the rest of the party now taking the homeward way, but as yet some distance off. “You told me you knew we should find the lilies there—youknew, mind, not youthought. Then when we found none at the first place, you knew we should at another; and you dragged me from place to place, but yet I haven’t found one. And now I must be content with the bundle of bell-gentians I gathered this morning. Poor things! how they have faded,” she added, undoing a corner of the handkerchief containing them. “Ah! here is some water. I must freshen them up a bit.”“What a day this has been,” said Philip, regretfully, as Alma stooped down to freshen the gentians with water from the tiny runnel which, dripping from the mossy undergrowth beneath the shadowy pines, sped at their feet with a bell-like tinkle. There was a moist fragrance as of crushed blossoms in the air, and the unearthly glow of a cloudless evening was upon the sunlit slopes, and the grey solemn faces of the cliffs across the valley.“Yes, indeed,” she answered, her wet, tapering hands plunged lightly among the rich blue blossoms of the bell-gentians.“And it is your last!”“Unfortunately it is. But—who would have thought, to look around now—who would have believed the awful time we went through up there only this morning! When Mr Wentworth was drawn up again safe and unhurt, I could not help crying for joy. Poor fellow! What must he have gone through all that time, with nothing but a rhododendron bush between him and a frightful death!”“I reverse the usual order and begin to think I’d rather it was me than him,” said Philip, gruffly. “May I ask whether, in that case, you would have manifested the same delight?”There was a flash of mischievous mirth in Alma’s great grey eyes as she looked up at him.“You foolish boy! I sha’n’t answer that question. But, if you had been down there, how could you have taken such splendid care of me?”“Oh, I did take care of you then?” he said quickly. “You did, indeed.”“Let me take care of you for life then, Alma.” Just those few words, curt even to lameness. But there was a very volume of pent-up feeling in their tone as he stood there, his face a trifle paler, his fine frame outlined against the black background of the pines, his eyes dilated and fixed upon hers, as though to read there his answer.She started. Her face flushed, then grew pale again. Released by the tremor of her hand, another corner of the handkerchief fell, and the bell-gentians poured down into her lap and on the ground. She did not answer immediately, and a troubled look came over her face. Yet the question could not have been such a surprising one. Reading every changing expression of the lovely face eagerly, hungrily, Philip continued, and there was a quaver of forestalled despair in his voice.“Not to be—is it?” with a ghastly attempt at a laugh. “I’m a presumptuous idiot, and had better go my way rejoicing—especially rejoicing. Isn’t that it?”But a radiantly killing smile was the answer now, scattering his despondency as the sun-ray had dispelled the dark storm-cloud which had overshadowed them up there on thearête.“You are in a great hurry to answer your own question,” she said. “Doesn’t it strike you that I am the right person to do that—Phil?”The very tone was a caress. The half-timid, half-mischievous way in which his Christian name—abbreviated too—escaped her was maddening, entrancing. Hardly knowing what he said in his incoherent transport of delight, he cast himself upon the bank beside her, regardless of bristling pine needles and the outpost prowlers of a large nest of red ants hard by. But Alma was not yet prepared to allow herself to be taken by storm in any such impetuous fashion.“Now wait a minute, you supremely foolish creature,” holding up a hand warningly as he flung himself at her side—and her face flushed again; but there was a sunny light in her eyes, and a very sweet smile playing around her lips. “What I was going to say is this. You can’t decide any important question out of hand. It requires talking over—and—thinking over.”“You darling! you tantalising enchantress!” he cried passionately. “Let us talk over it then, as much as you like. As for thinking over it—why, we’ve done enough of that already.”“Youhave, you mean,” she corrected, archly. “Never mind. But—now listen, Phil. You think you are very, very fond of my unworthy self. Wait—don’t interrupt,” as the expression “you think” brought to his lips an indignant protest. “Yet you hardly know me.”“I know you to be perfection,” he broke in hotly.“That’s foolish,” she rejoined, but with a by no means displeased smile. “But, I say it again, you hardly know me. We meet here and see each other at our best, where everything is conducive to enjoyment and absolute freedom from worry, and then you tell me I am perfection—”“So you are,” he interrupted emphatically.“Well, we meet under the most favourable circumstances, wherein we show at our best. But that isn’t life. It is a mere idyll. Life is a far more serious thing than that.”“Why, that’s just how that fellow Fordham talks,” exclaimed Philip, aghast.“Mr Fordham is an extremely sensible man then,” she rejoined, with a queer smile. “No. What I want you to consider is, how do you know I could make you happy, only meeting as we do, up here and in this way? We must not fall into the fatal error of mistaking a mere summer idyllic existence for a sample of stern, hard life.”“Oh, darling! you cannot really care for me if you can reason so coldly, so deliberately!” he exclaimed, in piteous consternation. “I am afraid you don’t know me yet, if you think me so shallow as all that.”“I do know you, Phil, and I don’t think you shallow at all—know you better than you think—better, perhaps, than you know yourself,” she answered, placing her hand upon his, which promptly closed over it in emblematical would-be possession of its owner. “I am a bit of a character-student, and I have studied you—among others.”“Oh! only among others?”She laughed.“Is that so very derogatory? Well, for your consolation, perhaps my study has so far been satisfactory; indeed, we should hardly be talking together now as we are had it been otherwise. Now—what more do you want me to say?”“What more! Why, of course I want you to say you will give me yourself—your own sweet, dear self, Alma, you lovely, teasing, tantalising bundle of witchery. Now, say you will.”“Not now—not here. In a little more than a month I shall be at home again,” she answered, with a dash of sadness in her voice, as though the prospect of “home, sweet home” were anything but an alluring one. “Come and see me then—if you still care to. Who knows? You may have got over this—this—fancy—by that time.”“Alma! You hurt me.” His voice betrayed the ring of real pain as he gazed at her with a world of reproach in his eyes.“Do I? I don’t want to. But by then you will know your own mind better. Wait—let me have my say. By that time you will not have seen me for a month or more, as we are leaving this to-morrow. You may have more than half forgotten me by then. ‘Out of sight,’ you know. I am not going to take advantage of your warm, impulsive temperament now, and I should like to feel sure of you, Phil—once and for all—if we are to be anything to each other. So I would rather it remained that way.”“You are hurting me, dearest, with this distrust. At any rate let me tell—er, ask—er, speak to your uncle to-night—”“No. On that point I am firm,” she answered, rising. “When I am at home again I will give you a final answer—if you still want it, that is. Till then—things are as they were.”“Hard lines!” he answered, with a sigh. “Still, one must be thankful for small mercies, I suppose. But—you will write to me when we are apart, will you not, love?”“I don’t know. I ought not. Perhaps once or twice, though.”For a moment they stood facing each other in silence, then his arms were round her.“Alma, my dearest life!” he whispered passionately. “You are very cold and calculating, you know. You have not said one really sweet or loving thing to me through all this reasoning. Now—kiss me!”She looked into his eyes with a momentary hesitation, and again the sweet fair face was tinged with a suffusing flush. Then she raised her lips to his.“There,” she said. “There—that is the first. Will it be the last, I wonder? Oh, Phil, I would like to love you—and you are a very lovable subject, you know. There! Now you must be as happy as the day is long until—until—you know when,” she added, restraining with an effort the thrill of tenderness in her voice.“And I will be, darling,” he cried. “The memory of this sweet moment will soon carry me over one short month. And you will write to me?”“Not often—once or twice, perhaps, as I said before. And now we must pick up my gentians, and move on, or the others will be wondering what has become of us. Look; they are waiting for us now, on thecol,” she added, as their path emerged from the cover of the friendly pines.But by the time they gained that eminence—and we may be sure they did not hurry themselves—the rest of the party had gone on, and they were still alone together. Alone together in paradise—the air redolent with myriad narcissus blossoms, soft, sweet-scented as with the breath of Eden—alone together in the falling eve, each vernal slope, each rounded spur starting forth in vivid clearness; each soaring peak on fire in the westering rays; and afar to the southward, seen from the elevation of the path, the great domed summit of Mont Blanc, bathed in a roseate flush responsive to the last kisses of the dying sun. Homeward, alone together, amid the fragrant dews exhaling from rich and luscious pastures, the music of cow-bells floating upon the hush of evening; then a full golden moon sailing on high, above the black and shaggy pines hoary with bearded festoons of mossy lichens, throwing a pale network upon the sombre woodland path, accentuating the heavy gloom of forest depths, ever and anon melodious with the hooting of owls in ghostly cadence, resonant with the shrill cry of the pine marten and the faint mysterious rustling as of unearthly whispers. Homeward alone together. Ah, Heaven! Will they ever again know such moments as these?Never, we trow. The sweet, subtle, enchanted spell is upon them in all its entrancing, its delirious fulness.
“Wentworth, old man, here’s to your lucky escape,” cried Gedge, with his usual effusiveness, flourishing a brimming bumper of Beaune.
A roaring fire blazed in the wide chimney-place of the Châlet Soladier. The air was raw and chill, for another rain-gust had swept suddenly up; and seated around the cheerful glow our party was engaged in the comfortable and highly congenial occupation of assimilating the luncheon which had been brought along.
“That’s a most appropriate toast, and one we ought all to join in,” said the old General, approvingly. “Here, Philip, give thechâletman a full bumper. He is entitled to join if any one is, and, Alma—explain to him what it is all about.”
This was done, and the toast drunk with a hearty cheer. The recipient of the honour, however, was in no responsive mood. That he, of all people, should have been fool enough to miss his footing; he an experienced climber, and who, moreover, was in a way the leader of the expedition! It was intolerable. And this aspect of the situation tended far more towards the somewhat silent and subdued demeanour he had worn ever since, than any recollection of the ghastly peril from which he had been extricated, than even the thought of the grisly death from which he had been saved almost by a miracle. Yes, he felt small, and said so unreservedly.
But Alma came to the rescue in no ambiguous fashion.
“You are not fair to yourself, Mr Wentworth,” she declared. “The thing might have happened to anybody up there in that awful wind. Of course I don’t know anything about mountain climbing, but what strikes me is that if, as you say, you considered yourself in a way responsible for us, the fact that you incurred the danger, while we have all come down safe and sound—incurred it, too, out of care for our safety—is not a thing to feel small about, but very much the reverse.”
“Hear, hear!” sung out Gedge, lustily, stamping with his feet in such wise as to upset a whole heap of sandwiches and the residue of Fordham’s beverage. But Wentworth shook his head.
“It’s very kind of you to put it that way, Miss Wyatt. Still the fact remains that it oughtn’t to have happened; and perhaps the best side of the affair is that it happened to me after all, and not to one of yourselves. By Jove! though,” he added, with a laugh. “Friend Dufour will score off me now for all time. We are always having arguments about the Cape au Moine. I always say it is an over-rated climb, and for the matter of that I say so still.”
“That may easily be,” struck in Philip. “I suppose any mountain is dangerous with a gale of five hundred hurricane power blowing.”
“Of course. But where I blame myself, Orlebar, is in not starting to come down sooner. And I fancy that is the line Miss Wyatt’s advocacy will take when she finds herself laid up with a bad cold after getting wet through up there.”
“It will take nothing of the kind, Mr Wentworth,” replied Alma, “for I am not going to be laid up with any cold at all. The walk down here almost dried my things, and this splendid fire has done the rest.”
Luncheon over pipes were produced, indeed the suggestion to that effect originated with the representatives of the softer sex there present, who preferred the, at other times much-decried, narcotic to the somewhat rancid odour emanating from sundry tubs used in cheese-making, which stood in the corner of the room. The rain beat hard upon the roof without, but nothing could have been more snug than the interior of thechâletin its semi-darkness, the firelight dancing upon the beams and quaint appointments of this rough but picturesque habitation.
“Now, Gedge, you’re by way of being a logician,” said Wentworth, blowing out a cloud of smoke. “Can you tell us why a man can’t keep his head just as well over a drop of a thousand feet as over one of six?”
“Doyou mean when the wind is blowing,” answered Gedge, suspecting a “catch.”
“No. I mean when there’s no apparent reason why he shouldn’t.”
“Because he gets confoundedly dizzy, I suppose.”
“But why should he? He has the same foothold. Take thatarêteup there. If the drop on each side were only six feet, no fellow would hesitate to run along it like a cat along a wall.”
“Not even Scott,” muttered Fordham, in a tone just audible to Alma, who at the picture thus conjured up of the unfortunate chaplain straddling thearête, and screaming to be taken off, could hardly restrain herself from breaking forth into a peal of laughter.
“It’s a clear case of the triumph of mind over matter, I take it,” answered Gedge. “What do you say, Scott?”
“Oh, I’m no authority,” mumbled the latter hastily. “Don’t appeal to me. My head seems going round still.”
“Scott is no authority on matters outside the smoking-room,” said Fordham, mercilessly—thereby nearly causing Alma to choke again, and begetting inextinguishable resentment in the breast of the youngest Miss Ottley, who had taken the parson under her own especial wing. “Within those sacred precincts we all bow to him as supreme.”
“I don’t quite see where that comes in,” rejoined Wentworth, in answer to Gedge. “If anything it would be the other way about—triumph of matter over mind: the matter being represented by several hundred feet of perpendicularity, before, or rather above, which the ‘mind’ takes a back seat; or, in plainer English, gets in a funk.”
“That very fact proves the mind to be paramount; proves its triumph, paradoxical as it may sound,” argued Gedge. “An idiot, for instance, wouldn’t care twopence whether the drop was six feet or six hundred. As long as there was firm ground under him, he’d shuffle along it gaily. Why? Because he is incapable of thought—deficient in mind.”
“Upon that showing,” said General Wyatt, with a twinkle in his eye—“upon that showing, the Miss Ottleys and myself must be the most sensible people of the lot; for, unlike your hypothetical idiot, Gedge, we emphatically did care twopence whether the drop was six feet or six hundred. In other words, we funked it egregiously and stayed behind. Our minds, you see triumphed over matter in the most practical way of all.”
“I guess this argument’s going to end in a clean draw,” said Philip. “Hallo! the sun’s out again, and, by Jove, there isn’t a cloud in the sky,” he added, flinging the door open and going outside. “The day is young yet. How would it be to go over the Col de Falvay and work round home again by way of the Alliaz? It’s a lovely walk.”
But this, after some discussion, was voted too large an undertaking. At Alma’s suggestion it was decided that the party should stroll over thecolinto the next valley and pick flowers.
“It is our last day here, uncle,” she urged, in answer to the old General’s somewhat half-hearted objection that they would have had about enough walking by the time they reached home. “It is our last day, so we ought to make the most of it. And look how lovely it has turned out!”
It had. No sign was left now of the dour mist curtain which had swept the heavens but a short while before. Wandering in the golden sunshine, among fragrant pine woods and pastures, knee-deep in narcissus, the party soon split up as such parties will. Fordham and the General took it very easily; strolling a little, sitting down a little, they chatted and smoked many pipes, and were happy. Scott and his fair admirer paired off in search of floral and botanical specimens, and were also happy. The residue of the crowd assimilated themselves in like harmonious fashion, or did not—as they chose. Two units of it at any rate did, for crafty Phil seized an early opportunity of carrying off Alma to a spot where he knew they would find lilies of the valley. As a matter of fact they did not find any, but this was of no consequence to him. What was of consequence was the blissful fact that he had got her all to himself for the afternoon. And this was her last afternoon, their last afternoon together. And in consideration of this, the light-hearted, easy-going Phil became seized with an abnormal melancholy.
“You are a rank deceiver,” said Alma, some three hours later, as, in obedience to a shout of recall, they turned to rejoin the rest of the party now taking the homeward way, but as yet some distance off. “You told me you knew we should find the lilies there—youknew, mind, not youthought. Then when we found none at the first place, you knew we should at another; and you dragged me from place to place, but yet I haven’t found one. And now I must be content with the bundle of bell-gentians I gathered this morning. Poor things! how they have faded,” she added, undoing a corner of the handkerchief containing them. “Ah! here is some water. I must freshen them up a bit.”
“What a day this has been,” said Philip, regretfully, as Alma stooped down to freshen the gentians with water from the tiny runnel which, dripping from the mossy undergrowth beneath the shadowy pines, sped at their feet with a bell-like tinkle. There was a moist fragrance as of crushed blossoms in the air, and the unearthly glow of a cloudless evening was upon the sunlit slopes, and the grey solemn faces of the cliffs across the valley.
“Yes, indeed,” she answered, her wet, tapering hands plunged lightly among the rich blue blossoms of the bell-gentians.
“And it is your last!”
“Unfortunately it is. But—who would have thought, to look around now—who would have believed the awful time we went through up there only this morning! When Mr Wentworth was drawn up again safe and unhurt, I could not help crying for joy. Poor fellow! What must he have gone through all that time, with nothing but a rhododendron bush between him and a frightful death!”
“I reverse the usual order and begin to think I’d rather it was me than him,” said Philip, gruffly. “May I ask whether, in that case, you would have manifested the same delight?”
There was a flash of mischievous mirth in Alma’s great grey eyes as she looked up at him.
“You foolish boy! I sha’n’t answer that question. But, if you had been down there, how could you have taken such splendid care of me?”
“Oh, I did take care of you then?” he said quickly. “You did, indeed.”
“Let me take care of you for life then, Alma.” Just those few words, curt even to lameness. But there was a very volume of pent-up feeling in their tone as he stood there, his face a trifle paler, his fine frame outlined against the black background of the pines, his eyes dilated and fixed upon hers, as though to read there his answer.
She started. Her face flushed, then grew pale again. Released by the tremor of her hand, another corner of the handkerchief fell, and the bell-gentians poured down into her lap and on the ground. She did not answer immediately, and a troubled look came over her face. Yet the question could not have been such a surprising one. Reading every changing expression of the lovely face eagerly, hungrily, Philip continued, and there was a quaver of forestalled despair in his voice.
“Not to be—is it?” with a ghastly attempt at a laugh. “I’m a presumptuous idiot, and had better go my way rejoicing—especially rejoicing. Isn’t that it?”
But a radiantly killing smile was the answer now, scattering his despondency as the sun-ray had dispelled the dark storm-cloud which had overshadowed them up there on thearête.
“You are in a great hurry to answer your own question,” she said. “Doesn’t it strike you that I am the right person to do that—Phil?”
The very tone was a caress. The half-timid, half-mischievous way in which his Christian name—abbreviated too—escaped her was maddening, entrancing. Hardly knowing what he said in his incoherent transport of delight, he cast himself upon the bank beside her, regardless of bristling pine needles and the outpost prowlers of a large nest of red ants hard by. But Alma was not yet prepared to allow herself to be taken by storm in any such impetuous fashion.
“Now wait a minute, you supremely foolish creature,” holding up a hand warningly as he flung himself at her side—and her face flushed again; but there was a sunny light in her eyes, and a very sweet smile playing around her lips. “What I was going to say is this. You can’t decide any important question out of hand. It requires talking over—and—thinking over.”
“You darling! you tantalising enchantress!” he cried passionately. “Let us talk over it then, as much as you like. As for thinking over it—why, we’ve done enough of that already.”
“Youhave, you mean,” she corrected, archly. “Never mind. But—now listen, Phil. You think you are very, very fond of my unworthy self. Wait—don’t interrupt,” as the expression “you think” brought to his lips an indignant protest. “Yet you hardly know me.”
“I know you to be perfection,” he broke in hotly.
“That’s foolish,” she rejoined, but with a by no means displeased smile. “But, I say it again, you hardly know me. We meet here and see each other at our best, where everything is conducive to enjoyment and absolute freedom from worry, and then you tell me I am perfection—”
“So you are,” he interrupted emphatically.
“Well, we meet under the most favourable circumstances, wherein we show at our best. But that isn’t life. It is a mere idyll. Life is a far more serious thing than that.”
“Why, that’s just how that fellow Fordham talks,” exclaimed Philip, aghast.
“Mr Fordham is an extremely sensible man then,” she rejoined, with a queer smile. “No. What I want you to consider is, how do you know I could make you happy, only meeting as we do, up here and in this way? We must not fall into the fatal error of mistaking a mere summer idyllic existence for a sample of stern, hard life.”
“Oh, darling! you cannot really care for me if you can reason so coldly, so deliberately!” he exclaimed, in piteous consternation. “I am afraid you don’t know me yet, if you think me so shallow as all that.”
“I do know you, Phil, and I don’t think you shallow at all—know you better than you think—better, perhaps, than you know yourself,” she answered, placing her hand upon his, which promptly closed over it in emblematical would-be possession of its owner. “I am a bit of a character-student, and I have studied you—among others.”
“Oh! only among others?”
She laughed.
“Is that so very derogatory? Well, for your consolation, perhaps my study has so far been satisfactory; indeed, we should hardly be talking together now as we are had it been otherwise. Now—what more do you want me to say?”
“What more! Why, of course I want you to say you will give me yourself—your own sweet, dear self, Alma, you lovely, teasing, tantalising bundle of witchery. Now, say you will.”
“Not now—not here. In a little more than a month I shall be at home again,” she answered, with a dash of sadness in her voice, as though the prospect of “home, sweet home” were anything but an alluring one. “Come and see me then—if you still care to. Who knows? You may have got over this—this—fancy—by that time.”
“Alma! You hurt me.” His voice betrayed the ring of real pain as he gazed at her with a world of reproach in his eyes.
“Do I? I don’t want to. But by then you will know your own mind better. Wait—let me have my say. By that time you will not have seen me for a month or more, as we are leaving this to-morrow. You may have more than half forgotten me by then. ‘Out of sight,’ you know. I am not going to take advantage of your warm, impulsive temperament now, and I should like to feel sure of you, Phil—once and for all—if we are to be anything to each other. So I would rather it remained that way.”
“You are hurting me, dearest, with this distrust. At any rate let me tell—er, ask—er, speak to your uncle to-night—”
“No. On that point I am firm,” she answered, rising. “When I am at home again I will give you a final answer—if you still want it, that is. Till then—things are as they were.”
“Hard lines!” he answered, with a sigh. “Still, one must be thankful for small mercies, I suppose. But—you will write to me when we are apart, will you not, love?”
“I don’t know. I ought not. Perhaps once or twice, though.”
For a moment they stood facing each other in silence, then his arms were round her.
“Alma, my dearest life!” he whispered passionately. “You are very cold and calculating, you know. You have not said one really sweet or loving thing to me through all this reasoning. Now—kiss me!”
She looked into his eyes with a momentary hesitation, and again the sweet fair face was tinged with a suffusing flush. Then she raised her lips to his.
“There,” she said. “There—that is the first. Will it be the last, I wonder? Oh, Phil, I would like to love you—and you are a very lovable subject, you know. There! Now you must be as happy as the day is long until—until—you know when,” she added, restraining with an effort the thrill of tenderness in her voice.
“And I will be, darling,” he cried. “The memory of this sweet moment will soon carry me over one short month. And you will write to me?”
“Not often—once or twice, perhaps, as I said before. And now we must pick up my gentians, and move on, or the others will be wondering what has become of us. Look; they are waiting for us now, on thecol,” she added, as their path emerged from the cover of the friendly pines.
But by the time they gained that eminence—and we may be sure they did not hurry themselves—the rest of the party had gone on, and they were still alone together. Alone together in paradise—the air redolent with myriad narcissus blossoms, soft, sweet-scented as with the breath of Eden—alone together in the falling eve, each vernal slope, each rounded spur starting forth in vivid clearness; each soaring peak on fire in the westering rays; and afar to the southward, seen from the elevation of the path, the great domed summit of Mont Blanc, bathed in a roseate flush responsive to the last kisses of the dying sun. Homeward, alone together, amid the fragrant dews exhaling from rich and luscious pastures, the music of cow-bells floating upon the hush of evening; then a full golden moon sailing on high, above the black and shaggy pines hoary with bearded festoons of mossy lichens, throwing a pale network upon the sombre woodland path, accentuating the heavy gloom of forest depths, ever and anon melodious with the hooting of owls in ghostly cadence, resonant with the shrill cry of the pine marten and the faint mysterious rustling as of unearthly whispers. Homeward alone together. Ah, Heaven! Will they ever again know such moments as these?
Never, we trow. The sweet, subtle, enchanted spell is upon them in all its entrancing, its delirious fulness.
Chapter Thirteen.Shadow.Nearly a week had elapsed since the departure of the Wyatts, and yet, contrary to all precedent, the volatile Phil’s normal good spirits showed no sign of returning. He was hard hit.No further opportunity of meeting alone did Alma afford him after that one long, glowing evening. Her manner to him at parting had been very kind and sweet; and with a last look into her eyes, and a pressure of the hand a good deal more lingering on his part than etiquette demanded, let alone justified, the poor fellow was obliged to be contented, for of opportunities for taking a more affectionate farewell she would give him none. They would meet again, she said, and he must wait patiently until then. But to him such meeting seemed a very long way off, and meanwhile the residue of the bright summer, hitherto so joyously mapped out for walking and climbing and fun in general, to which he had been looking forward with all the delight of a sound organisation both physical and mental, seemed now to represent a flat and dreary hiatus—to be filled up as best it might, to be got through as quickly as possible.Philip Orlebar was hard hit—indeed, very hard hit. He had never been genuinely in love in his life, though nobody had more often fancied himself in that parlous state. But now he was undergoing his first sharp attack of the genuine disorder, and the experience was—well, somewhat trying.And the symptoms, like those of hydrophobia, manifested themselves diversely. Genial, sunny-tempered Phil became morose—“surly as a chained bulldog developing influenza,” as the elastic Gedge tersely put it. He avoided his kind, and evinced a desire for wandering, by his own sweet self, into all manner of breakneck places. More especially did he avoid Fordham, whose continually cropping up sarcasms at the expense of the sex now ennobled and deified by the production of one Alma Wyatt, fairly maddened him.“Damned cheap kind of cynicism, don’t you know,” he growled one day. “I wonder you don’t drop it, Fordham.” In fact, so confoundedly quarrelsome did he wax that it became a source of wonder how Fordham stood it so equably, and at last some one said so. The answer was characteristic.“Look here, Wentworth. If you were down with fever, and delirious, you’d think me a mighty queer chap if I took mortal offence at anything you said in the course of your ravings. Now that poor chap is down with the worst kind of fever and delirium. By and by, when he wakes up and convalesces, he’ll ask shamefacedly whether he didn’t act and talk like an awful fool during his delirium. No. You can’t quarrel with a man for being off his nut. You can only pity him.”On the letter whose receipt had caused him such disquietude but a week ago Philip had since bestowed no further thought. It seemed such a far back event—it and the individual whose existence it so inopportunely recalled—and withal such an insignificant one. For beside the withdrawal of Alma Wyatt’s daily presence, all other ills, past, present, and to come, looked incomparably small, and the contemplation of them not worth undertaking.However indulgent might be Fordham with regard to his younger friend’s disorder, secretly he hugged himself with mirth, and enjoyed the joke hugely in his own saturnine fashion as he read off the symptoms. How well he knew them all. How many and many a one had he seen go through them, and live to laugh at his own abject, if helpless, imbecility—to laugh in not a few instances with almost as much bitterness as he himself might do. He believed that it was in his power to comfort poor Phil, up to a certain point. As a looker on at the game, and a keen-sighted one, he felt pretty sure that Alma Wyatt was far more tenderly disposed towards her adorer than the latter dreamed. But it was not in accordance with his principles to do this. Richard Fordham turned matchmaker! More likely patchmaker! he thought, with a diabolical guffaw as the whimsicality of the idea and the jingle thereof struck him; for like the proverbial patching of the old garment with the new cloth would be the lifelong alliance of his friend with Alma Wyatt—or any other woman. No. His mission was, if anything, to bring about a contrary result, and thus save the guileless Philip from riveting upon his yet free limbs the iron fetters of a degrading and fraudulent bondage—for such, we grieve to say, was Fordham’s definition of the estate of holy matrimony.“Well, Phil,” he said, as the latter, returned from a recent and solitary climb, tired and listless, took his seat a quarter of an hour late attable d’hôte, “does the world present a more propitious aspect from the giddy summit of the Corbex?”“Oh, hang it, no! But, I say, Fordham—what a deuced slow crowd there is here now. Just look at that table over there.”“Nine old maids—no, eleven—in a row,” said the other, putting up his eyeglass. “Four parsons—poor specimens of the breed, too. That is to say, three old maids and a devil-dodger; then three more ditto and two devil-dodgers; finally the balance, with the remaining sky-pilot mixed among them somewhere. Truly an interesting crowd!”“By Jove, rather!” growled Philip. “And just look at that infernal tailor’s boy over there laying down the law.”Following his glance, Fordham beheld a carroty-headed snobling fresh from the counter or the cutting-board, who, in all the exuberance of his hard-earned holiday and the enterprising spirit which had prompted him to enjoy the same among Alpine sublimities in preference to the more homely and raffish attractions of shrimp-producing Margate, was delivering himself on Church and State, the House of Peers and the Constitution in general, with a freedom which left nothing to be desired, for the edification of his appreciative neighbours—only they didn’t look appreciative. Philip contemplated this natural product of an age of progress and the Rights of Man with unconcealed disgust.“Faugh! Are we going to be overrun with bounders of that description?” he growled.“Later on we may drop across a sprinkling of the species,” said Fordham. “Even the Alps are no longer sacred against the invasion of the modern Hun.”“Well, it’s no longer any fun sticking here, and I’m sick of it,” went on Phil.“All right. Let’s adjourn to Zermatt or somewhere, and begin climbing. You want shaking up a bit.”
Nearly a week had elapsed since the departure of the Wyatts, and yet, contrary to all precedent, the volatile Phil’s normal good spirits showed no sign of returning. He was hard hit.
No further opportunity of meeting alone did Alma afford him after that one long, glowing evening. Her manner to him at parting had been very kind and sweet; and with a last look into her eyes, and a pressure of the hand a good deal more lingering on his part than etiquette demanded, let alone justified, the poor fellow was obliged to be contented, for of opportunities for taking a more affectionate farewell she would give him none. They would meet again, she said, and he must wait patiently until then. But to him such meeting seemed a very long way off, and meanwhile the residue of the bright summer, hitherto so joyously mapped out for walking and climbing and fun in general, to which he had been looking forward with all the delight of a sound organisation both physical and mental, seemed now to represent a flat and dreary hiatus—to be filled up as best it might, to be got through as quickly as possible.
Philip Orlebar was hard hit—indeed, very hard hit. He had never been genuinely in love in his life, though nobody had more often fancied himself in that parlous state. But now he was undergoing his first sharp attack of the genuine disorder, and the experience was—well, somewhat trying.
And the symptoms, like those of hydrophobia, manifested themselves diversely. Genial, sunny-tempered Phil became morose—“surly as a chained bulldog developing influenza,” as the elastic Gedge tersely put it. He avoided his kind, and evinced a desire for wandering, by his own sweet self, into all manner of breakneck places. More especially did he avoid Fordham, whose continually cropping up sarcasms at the expense of the sex now ennobled and deified by the production of one Alma Wyatt, fairly maddened him.
“Damned cheap kind of cynicism, don’t you know,” he growled one day. “I wonder you don’t drop it, Fordham.” In fact, so confoundedly quarrelsome did he wax that it became a source of wonder how Fordham stood it so equably, and at last some one said so. The answer was characteristic.
“Look here, Wentworth. If you were down with fever, and delirious, you’d think me a mighty queer chap if I took mortal offence at anything you said in the course of your ravings. Now that poor chap is down with the worst kind of fever and delirium. By and by, when he wakes up and convalesces, he’ll ask shamefacedly whether he didn’t act and talk like an awful fool during his delirium. No. You can’t quarrel with a man for being off his nut. You can only pity him.”
On the letter whose receipt had caused him such disquietude but a week ago Philip had since bestowed no further thought. It seemed such a far back event—it and the individual whose existence it so inopportunely recalled—and withal such an insignificant one. For beside the withdrawal of Alma Wyatt’s daily presence, all other ills, past, present, and to come, looked incomparably small, and the contemplation of them not worth undertaking.
However indulgent might be Fordham with regard to his younger friend’s disorder, secretly he hugged himself with mirth, and enjoyed the joke hugely in his own saturnine fashion as he read off the symptoms. How well he knew them all. How many and many a one had he seen go through them, and live to laugh at his own abject, if helpless, imbecility—to laugh in not a few instances with almost as much bitterness as he himself might do. He believed that it was in his power to comfort poor Phil, up to a certain point. As a looker on at the game, and a keen-sighted one, he felt pretty sure that Alma Wyatt was far more tenderly disposed towards her adorer than the latter dreamed. But it was not in accordance with his principles to do this. Richard Fordham turned matchmaker! More likely patchmaker! he thought, with a diabolical guffaw as the whimsicality of the idea and the jingle thereof struck him; for like the proverbial patching of the old garment with the new cloth would be the lifelong alliance of his friend with Alma Wyatt—or any other woman. No. His mission was, if anything, to bring about a contrary result, and thus save the guileless Philip from riveting upon his yet free limbs the iron fetters of a degrading and fraudulent bondage—for such, we grieve to say, was Fordham’s definition of the estate of holy matrimony.
“Well, Phil,” he said, as the latter, returned from a recent and solitary climb, tired and listless, took his seat a quarter of an hour late attable d’hôte, “does the world present a more propitious aspect from the giddy summit of the Corbex?”
“Oh, hang it, no! But, I say, Fordham—what a deuced slow crowd there is here now. Just look at that table over there.”
“Nine old maids—no, eleven—in a row,” said the other, putting up his eyeglass. “Four parsons—poor specimens of the breed, too. That is to say, three old maids and a devil-dodger; then three more ditto and two devil-dodgers; finally the balance, with the remaining sky-pilot mixed among them somewhere. Truly an interesting crowd!”
“By Jove, rather!” growled Philip. “And just look at that infernal tailor’s boy over there laying down the law.”
Following his glance, Fordham beheld a carroty-headed snobling fresh from the counter or the cutting-board, who, in all the exuberance of his hard-earned holiday and the enterprising spirit which had prompted him to enjoy the same among Alpine sublimities in preference to the more homely and raffish attractions of shrimp-producing Margate, was delivering himself on Church and State, the House of Peers and the Constitution in general, with a freedom which left nothing to be desired, for the edification of his appreciative neighbours—only they didn’t look appreciative. Philip contemplated this natural product of an age of progress and the Rights of Man with unconcealed disgust.
“Faugh! Are we going to be overrun with bounders of that description?” he growled.
“Later on we may drop across a sprinkling of the species,” said Fordham. “Even the Alps are no longer sacred against the invasion of the modern Hun.”
“Well, it’s no longer any fun sticking here, and I’m sick of it,” went on Phil.
“All right. Let’s adjourn to Zermatt or somewhere, and begin climbing. You want shaking up a bit.”
Chapter Fourteen.Fordham Proves Accommodating.“Dear me—how very disagreeable (sniff-sniff)—how exceedingly unpleasant this smoking is?”The afternoon train was crawling up the Rhone valley, wending its leisurely way over the flat and low-lying bottom as though to afford its passengers, mostly foreigners, every opportunity of admiring its native marsh. In the corner of a second-class smoking-carriage sat the typical British matron whom her feelings had moved to unburden herself as above. Beside her, half effaced by her imposing personality, sat her spouse, a mild country parson. A great number of bundles and a great number of wraps completed the outfit.“I must say it ismostdisagreeable,” went on the lady, with renewed sniffs. “And how ill-mannered these foreigners are, smoking in the presence of ladies.” This with a dagger-glance at the other two occupants of the carriage, who each, with a knapsack on the rack above his head and clad in serviceable walking attire, were lounging back on the comfortable seats, placidly blowing clouds.“Hush, my dear!” expostulated the parson. “It’s a smoking-carriage, you know. I told you so before we got in at Martigny. Why not go into the other compartment? It’s quite empty.”It was. On the Swiss lines the carriages are generally built on American principles; you can walk the entire length of them, and indeed of the whole train. They are, however, divided into two compartments, the smaller being reserved for the convenience of non-smokers, the other way about, as with us.“No, I shall certainly not take the trouble to move,” replied the offended matron. “Smoking-carriage or not, those two men are most unmannerly. Suppose, Augustus, you go over to them and ask them to put out their cigars? Remind them that it is not usual in England to smoke in the presence of ladies.”But the Rev. Augustus was not quite such a fool as that.“Not a bit of use, my dear,” he said wearily. “They’d certainly retort that we are not in England—probably request us to step into the non-smoking compartment.”Fordham, who at the first remonstrance had rapidly signalled his friend not to talk and thus betray their nationality, was leaning back enjoying the situation thoroughly.“Que diable allaitellefaire dans cette galère?” he murmured, rightly judging the other travellers’ command of modern languages to be of the limited order. Phil for his part was obliged to put his head out of the window in order to laugh undetected. Meanwhile the aggrieved British matron in her corner continued to fume and sniff and inveigh against the abominable manners of those foreigners, and otherwise behave after the manner of her kind when, by virtue of honouring it with their presence, they have taken some continental country under their august wing. Then the crawl of the train settled down to an imperceptible creep as it drew nearer and nearer to the old-world and picturesque capital of the Valais.There was whispering between the pair. Then, in obedience to a conjugal mandate, the mild parson diffidently approached our two friends.“Pardong, mossoor. Ais-ker-say See-ong?”The last word came out with a jerk of relief.“Sion? I believe it is,” replied Fordham, blandly. “We shall have a quarter of an hour to wait, if not longer.”If ever a man looked a thorough fool, it was the first speaker. The faultless and polished English of the reply! Here had they—his wife rather—been abusing these two men in their own tongue and in her usually loud key for upwards of half an hour. He turned red and began to stammer.But the poor man’s confusion was by no means shared by his spouse. That imposing matron came bustling across the carriage as if nothing had happened.“Perhaps you can tell us,” she said, “which is the best way of getting to Evolena? There is a diligence, is there not?”Philip, who had all a young man’s aversion for a fussy and domineering matron, would have returned a very short and evasive reply. The woman had been abusing them like pickpockets all the way, and now had the cheek to come and ask for information. But to Fordham her sublime impudence was diverting in the extreme.“There is a diligence,” he answered, “and I should say you’ll still be in time for it. But I should strongly recommend you to charter a private conveyance. Coach passengers are apt to beguile the tedium of the road with tobacco.”This was said so equably and with such an utter absence of resentment that the lady with all her assertiveness was dumbfoundered. Then, glaring at the speaker, she flounced away without a word, though, amid the bustle and flurry attendant upon the collecting of wraps and bundles, the offenders could catch such jerked-out phrases as “Abominable rudeness?”“Most insulting fellow!” and so forth.“Great Scott! What do you think of that for a zoological specimen, Phil?” said Fordham, as the train steamed slowly away from the platform where their late fellow-passengers still stood bustling around a pile of boxes and bundles. “The harridan deliberately and of her own free will gets into a tobacco cart—out of sheer cussedness, in fact, for there stands the non-smoker stark empty—and then has the unparalleled face to try and boss us out of it. And there are idiots with whom she would have succeeded too.”“Well, you know, it’s beastly awkward when a woman keeps on swearing she can’t stand smoke, even though you know she has no business there. What the deuce are you to do?”“Politely ask her to step into the next compartment, whose door stands yearningly open to receive her. Even the parson had wit enough to see that.”“Yes, that’s so. But, I say, what an infernally slow train this is?”“This little incident,” went on Fordham, “which has served to break the monotony of our journey, reminds me of a somewhat similar joke which occurred last year on my way back to England. We fetched Pontarlier pretty late at night, and of course had to turn out and undergo the Customs ordeal. Well, I was sharp about the business, and got back into my carriage and old corner first. It was an ordinary compartment—five a side—not like this. Almost immediately after in comes a large and assertive female with an eighteen-year-old son, a weedy, unlicked cub as ever you saw in your life, and both calmly took the other end seats. Now I knew that one of these seats belonged to a Frenchman who was going through, so sat snug in my corner waiting to enjoy the fun. It came in the shape of the Frenchman. Would madame be so kind, but—the seat was his? No, madame would not be so kind—not if she knew it. Possibly if madame had been young and pretty the outraged Gaul might have subsided more gracefully, for subside he had to—but her aggressiveness about equalled her unattractiveness, which is saying much. So a wordy war ensued, in the course of which the door was banged and the deposed traveller shot with more vehemence than grace half-way across the compartment, and the train started. He was mad, I can tell you. Instead of his snug corner for the night, there the poor devil was, propped up on end, lurching over every time he began to nod.“Well, we’d finished our feed—we’d got a chicken and some first-rate Burgundy on board—and were looking forward to a comfortable smoke. In fact, we’d each got a cigar in our teeth, and the chap who was with me—whom we’ll call Smith—was in the act of lighting up, when—“‘I object to smoke. This isn’t a smoking-carriage, and I won’t have it.’“We looked at the aggressive female, then at each other. Her right was unassailable. It was not a tobacco cart, but on French lines they are not generally too particular. Still, in the face of that protest we were floored.“Smith was awfully mad. He cursed like a trooper under his breath—swore he’d be even with the harridan yet—and I believed him.“Some twenty minutes went by in this way, Smith licking his unlit cigar and cursing roundly to himself. Presently she beckoned him over. He had half a mind not to go; however, he went.“‘I don’t mind your smoking,’ says she—‘out of the window.’“‘Oh, thanks,’ he says. ‘It’s rather too cold to stand outside on the footboard. Besides, it’s risky.’“‘Well, I mean I don’t mind if you have part of the window open. But I can’t stand the place full of smoke and no outlet. And’—she hurries up to add—‘I hope you won’t mind if I draw the curtain over the lamp so that my boy can go to sleep.’“Smith was on the point of answering that he preferred not to smoke, but intended to read the night through, and could on no account consent to the lamp being veiled, when it occurred to him that it was of no use cutting off his nose to spite his face. He was just dying for a smoke. So the bargain was struck, and we were soon puffing away like traction engines.“Now the Frenchman who had been turned out of his seat was no fool of a Gaul. Whether suggested by the settling of our little difference or originating with himself, the idea seemed to strike him that he too might just as well obtain terms from the enemy to his own advantage. The unlicked cub aforesaid was slumbering peacefully in his corner, his long legs straight across the compartment, for we were three on that side, and there was no room to put them on the seat. The first station we stop at, up gets the Frenchman, flings open the door, letting in a sort of young hurricane, and of course stumbling over the sleeper’s legs. Aggressive female looks daggers. But when this had happened several times—for the stoppages were pretty frequent, and even though but for a minute the Frenchman took good care to tumble out—she began to expostulate.“‘It was cruel to disturb her poor boy’s slumbers continually like that. Surely there was no necessity to get out at every station.’“That Frenchman’s grin was something to see. He wasdésolé; butenfin! What would madame? He had been turned out of his corner seat, and could not sleep sitting bolt upright. It was absolutely necessary for him to get a mouthful of fresh air and stretch his legs at every opportunity. But the remedy was in madame’s hands. Letmonsieurchange places with him. Monsieur was young, whereas he was—well, not so young as he used to be. Otherwise he was sorry to say it, but his restlessness would compel him to take exercise at every station they stopped at.“Heavens! that old termagant looked sick. But she was thoroughly bested. If she refused the enemy would be as good as his word, and her whelp might make up his mind to stay awake all night. So she caved in, sulkily enough, and with much bland bowing and smiling the Frenchman got back his corner seat, or one as good, and the cub snored on his dam’s shoulder. Thus we all regained our rights again, and everybody was happy.”“Devilish good yarn, Fordham,” said Phil. “But you be hanged with your Smith, old man. Why, that was you—you all over.”“Was it? I said it was Smith. But the point is immaterial, especially at this time of day. And now, Phil, own up, as you contemplate this howling, hungry crowd of the alpenstock contingent, that you bless my foresight which coerced you into posting on every stick and stone you possess, bar your trusty knapsack. If you don’t now, you will when we get to Visp and tranquilly make our way through a frantic mob all shouting for its luggage at once. Here we are at Sierre. Sure to be a wait. I wonder if there’s abuffet. Hallo! What now?”For his companion, whose head was half through the window, suddenly withdrew it with a wild ejaculation, then rushed from the carriage like a lunatic, vouchsafing no word of explanation as to the phenomenon—or apology for having stamped Fordham’s pet corn as flat as though a steam roller had passed over it. The latter, scowling, looked cautiously forth, and then the disturbing element became apparent. There, on the platform, in a state of more than all his former exuberance, stood Philip, talking—with all his eyes—to Alma Wyatt, and with all his might to her uncle and aunt, who had just stepped out of the train to join her. And at the sight Fordham dropped back into his seat with a saturnine guffaw.But the next words uttered by his volatile friend caused him to sit up and attend.“This is a most unexpected pleasure, General,” Philip was saying. “Why I thought you were a fixture at the Grindelwald for the rest of your time.”“Couldn’t stand it. Far too much bustle and noise. No. Some one told us of a place called Zinal, and we are going there now.”“What an extraordinary coincidence!” cried Phil, delightedly. “The fact is we are bound for that very place.”“The devil we are!” growled Fordham to himself at this astounding piece of intelligence. “I have hitherto been under the impression, friend Phil, that we were bound for Visp—en routefor Zermatt.”“But—where’s Mr Fordham? Is he with you?” went on Mrs Wyatt.“Rather. He’s—er—just kicking together our traps. I’ll go and see after him. Fordham, old chap, come along,” he cried, bursting into the carriage again.“Eh?” was the provokingly cool reply.“Don’t you see?” went on Phil, hurriedly. “Now be a good old chap, and tumble to my scheme. Let’s go to Zinal instead.”“I don’t care. How about our traps though? They’re posted to t’other place.”“Hang that. We can send for ’em. And er—I say, Fordham, don’t let on we weren’t going there all along. I sort of gave them to understand we were. You know?”“I do. I overheard you imperil your immortal soul just now, Philip Orlebar. And you want me to abet you in the utter loss thereof? It is a scandalous proposal, but—Here, hurry up if you’re going to get out. The train is beginning to move on again.”“Delighted to meet you again, Fordham,” said the old General, shaking the latter heartily by the hand. “What are your plans? They tell us we ought to sleep here, in Sierre, to-night and go on early in the morning.”“That’s what we are going to do.”“A good idea. We might all go on together. They tell me there’s a capital hotel here. Which is it,” he went on, glancing at the caps of two rival commissionaires.“The ‘Belle Vue.’ But it’s only a step. Hardly worth while getting into the omnibus.”
“Dear me—how very disagreeable (sniff-sniff)—how exceedingly unpleasant this smoking is?”
The afternoon train was crawling up the Rhone valley, wending its leisurely way over the flat and low-lying bottom as though to afford its passengers, mostly foreigners, every opportunity of admiring its native marsh. In the corner of a second-class smoking-carriage sat the typical British matron whom her feelings had moved to unburden herself as above. Beside her, half effaced by her imposing personality, sat her spouse, a mild country parson. A great number of bundles and a great number of wraps completed the outfit.
“I must say it ismostdisagreeable,” went on the lady, with renewed sniffs. “And how ill-mannered these foreigners are, smoking in the presence of ladies.” This with a dagger-glance at the other two occupants of the carriage, who each, with a knapsack on the rack above his head and clad in serviceable walking attire, were lounging back on the comfortable seats, placidly blowing clouds.
“Hush, my dear!” expostulated the parson. “It’s a smoking-carriage, you know. I told you so before we got in at Martigny. Why not go into the other compartment? It’s quite empty.”
It was. On the Swiss lines the carriages are generally built on American principles; you can walk the entire length of them, and indeed of the whole train. They are, however, divided into two compartments, the smaller being reserved for the convenience of non-smokers, the other way about, as with us.
“No, I shall certainly not take the trouble to move,” replied the offended matron. “Smoking-carriage or not, those two men are most unmannerly. Suppose, Augustus, you go over to them and ask them to put out their cigars? Remind them that it is not usual in England to smoke in the presence of ladies.”
But the Rev. Augustus was not quite such a fool as that.
“Not a bit of use, my dear,” he said wearily. “They’d certainly retort that we are not in England—probably request us to step into the non-smoking compartment.”
Fordham, who at the first remonstrance had rapidly signalled his friend not to talk and thus betray their nationality, was leaning back enjoying the situation thoroughly.
“Que diable allaitellefaire dans cette galère?” he murmured, rightly judging the other travellers’ command of modern languages to be of the limited order. Phil for his part was obliged to put his head out of the window in order to laugh undetected. Meanwhile the aggrieved British matron in her corner continued to fume and sniff and inveigh against the abominable manners of those foreigners, and otherwise behave after the manner of her kind when, by virtue of honouring it with their presence, they have taken some continental country under their august wing. Then the crawl of the train settled down to an imperceptible creep as it drew nearer and nearer to the old-world and picturesque capital of the Valais.
There was whispering between the pair. Then, in obedience to a conjugal mandate, the mild parson diffidently approached our two friends.
“Pardong, mossoor. Ais-ker-say See-ong?”
The last word came out with a jerk of relief.
“Sion? I believe it is,” replied Fordham, blandly. “We shall have a quarter of an hour to wait, if not longer.”
If ever a man looked a thorough fool, it was the first speaker. The faultless and polished English of the reply! Here had they—his wife rather—been abusing these two men in their own tongue and in her usually loud key for upwards of half an hour. He turned red and began to stammer.
But the poor man’s confusion was by no means shared by his spouse. That imposing matron came bustling across the carriage as if nothing had happened.
“Perhaps you can tell us,” she said, “which is the best way of getting to Evolena? There is a diligence, is there not?”
Philip, who had all a young man’s aversion for a fussy and domineering matron, would have returned a very short and evasive reply. The woman had been abusing them like pickpockets all the way, and now had the cheek to come and ask for information. But to Fordham her sublime impudence was diverting in the extreme.
“There is a diligence,” he answered, “and I should say you’ll still be in time for it. But I should strongly recommend you to charter a private conveyance. Coach passengers are apt to beguile the tedium of the road with tobacco.”
This was said so equably and with such an utter absence of resentment that the lady with all her assertiveness was dumbfoundered. Then, glaring at the speaker, she flounced away without a word, though, amid the bustle and flurry attendant upon the collecting of wraps and bundles, the offenders could catch such jerked-out phrases as “Abominable rudeness?”
“Most insulting fellow!” and so forth.
“Great Scott! What do you think of that for a zoological specimen, Phil?” said Fordham, as the train steamed slowly away from the platform where their late fellow-passengers still stood bustling around a pile of boxes and bundles. “The harridan deliberately and of her own free will gets into a tobacco cart—out of sheer cussedness, in fact, for there stands the non-smoker stark empty—and then has the unparalleled face to try and boss us out of it. And there are idiots with whom she would have succeeded too.”
“Well, you know, it’s beastly awkward when a woman keeps on swearing she can’t stand smoke, even though you know she has no business there. What the deuce are you to do?”
“Politely ask her to step into the next compartment, whose door stands yearningly open to receive her. Even the parson had wit enough to see that.”
“Yes, that’s so. But, I say, what an infernally slow train this is?”
“This little incident,” went on Fordham, “which has served to break the monotony of our journey, reminds me of a somewhat similar joke which occurred last year on my way back to England. We fetched Pontarlier pretty late at night, and of course had to turn out and undergo the Customs ordeal. Well, I was sharp about the business, and got back into my carriage and old corner first. It was an ordinary compartment—five a side—not like this. Almost immediately after in comes a large and assertive female with an eighteen-year-old son, a weedy, unlicked cub as ever you saw in your life, and both calmly took the other end seats. Now I knew that one of these seats belonged to a Frenchman who was going through, so sat snug in my corner waiting to enjoy the fun. It came in the shape of the Frenchman. Would madame be so kind, but—the seat was his? No, madame would not be so kind—not if she knew it. Possibly if madame had been young and pretty the outraged Gaul might have subsided more gracefully, for subside he had to—but her aggressiveness about equalled her unattractiveness, which is saying much. So a wordy war ensued, in the course of which the door was banged and the deposed traveller shot with more vehemence than grace half-way across the compartment, and the train started. He was mad, I can tell you. Instead of his snug corner for the night, there the poor devil was, propped up on end, lurching over every time he began to nod.
“Well, we’d finished our feed—we’d got a chicken and some first-rate Burgundy on board—and were looking forward to a comfortable smoke. In fact, we’d each got a cigar in our teeth, and the chap who was with me—whom we’ll call Smith—was in the act of lighting up, when—
“‘I object to smoke. This isn’t a smoking-carriage, and I won’t have it.’
“We looked at the aggressive female, then at each other. Her right was unassailable. It was not a tobacco cart, but on French lines they are not generally too particular. Still, in the face of that protest we were floored.
“Smith was awfully mad. He cursed like a trooper under his breath—swore he’d be even with the harridan yet—and I believed him.
“Some twenty minutes went by in this way, Smith licking his unlit cigar and cursing roundly to himself. Presently she beckoned him over. He had half a mind not to go; however, he went.
“‘I don’t mind your smoking,’ says she—‘out of the window.’
“‘Oh, thanks,’ he says. ‘It’s rather too cold to stand outside on the footboard. Besides, it’s risky.’
“‘Well, I mean I don’t mind if you have part of the window open. But I can’t stand the place full of smoke and no outlet. And’—she hurries up to add—‘I hope you won’t mind if I draw the curtain over the lamp so that my boy can go to sleep.’
“Smith was on the point of answering that he preferred not to smoke, but intended to read the night through, and could on no account consent to the lamp being veiled, when it occurred to him that it was of no use cutting off his nose to spite his face. He was just dying for a smoke. So the bargain was struck, and we were soon puffing away like traction engines.
“Now the Frenchman who had been turned out of his seat was no fool of a Gaul. Whether suggested by the settling of our little difference or originating with himself, the idea seemed to strike him that he too might just as well obtain terms from the enemy to his own advantage. The unlicked cub aforesaid was slumbering peacefully in his corner, his long legs straight across the compartment, for we were three on that side, and there was no room to put them on the seat. The first station we stop at, up gets the Frenchman, flings open the door, letting in a sort of young hurricane, and of course stumbling over the sleeper’s legs. Aggressive female looks daggers. But when this had happened several times—for the stoppages were pretty frequent, and even though but for a minute the Frenchman took good care to tumble out—she began to expostulate.
“‘It was cruel to disturb her poor boy’s slumbers continually like that. Surely there was no necessity to get out at every station.’
“That Frenchman’s grin was something to see. He wasdésolé; butenfin! What would madame? He had been turned out of his corner seat, and could not sleep sitting bolt upright. It was absolutely necessary for him to get a mouthful of fresh air and stretch his legs at every opportunity. But the remedy was in madame’s hands. Letmonsieurchange places with him. Monsieur was young, whereas he was—well, not so young as he used to be. Otherwise he was sorry to say it, but his restlessness would compel him to take exercise at every station they stopped at.
“Heavens! that old termagant looked sick. But she was thoroughly bested. If she refused the enemy would be as good as his word, and her whelp might make up his mind to stay awake all night. So she caved in, sulkily enough, and with much bland bowing and smiling the Frenchman got back his corner seat, or one as good, and the cub snored on his dam’s shoulder. Thus we all regained our rights again, and everybody was happy.”
“Devilish good yarn, Fordham,” said Phil. “But you be hanged with your Smith, old man. Why, that was you—you all over.”
“Was it? I said it was Smith. But the point is immaterial, especially at this time of day. And now, Phil, own up, as you contemplate this howling, hungry crowd of the alpenstock contingent, that you bless my foresight which coerced you into posting on every stick and stone you possess, bar your trusty knapsack. If you don’t now, you will when we get to Visp and tranquilly make our way through a frantic mob all shouting for its luggage at once. Here we are at Sierre. Sure to be a wait. I wonder if there’s abuffet. Hallo! What now?”
For his companion, whose head was half through the window, suddenly withdrew it with a wild ejaculation, then rushed from the carriage like a lunatic, vouchsafing no word of explanation as to the phenomenon—or apology for having stamped Fordham’s pet corn as flat as though a steam roller had passed over it. The latter, scowling, looked cautiously forth, and then the disturbing element became apparent. There, on the platform, in a state of more than all his former exuberance, stood Philip, talking—with all his eyes—to Alma Wyatt, and with all his might to her uncle and aunt, who had just stepped out of the train to join her. And at the sight Fordham dropped back into his seat with a saturnine guffaw.
But the next words uttered by his volatile friend caused him to sit up and attend.
“This is a most unexpected pleasure, General,” Philip was saying. “Why I thought you were a fixture at the Grindelwald for the rest of your time.”
“Couldn’t stand it. Far too much bustle and noise. No. Some one told us of a place called Zinal, and we are going there now.”
“What an extraordinary coincidence!” cried Phil, delightedly. “The fact is we are bound for that very place.”
“The devil we are!” growled Fordham to himself at this astounding piece of intelligence. “I have hitherto been under the impression, friend Phil, that we were bound for Visp—en routefor Zermatt.”
“But—where’s Mr Fordham? Is he with you?” went on Mrs Wyatt.
“Rather. He’s—er—just kicking together our traps. I’ll go and see after him. Fordham, old chap, come along,” he cried, bursting into the carriage again.
“Eh?” was the provokingly cool reply.
“Don’t you see?” went on Phil, hurriedly. “Now be a good old chap, and tumble to my scheme. Let’s go to Zinal instead.”
“I don’t care. How about our traps though? They’re posted to t’other place.”
“Hang that. We can send for ’em. And er—I say, Fordham, don’t let on we weren’t going there all along. I sort of gave them to understand we were. You know?”
“I do. I overheard you imperil your immortal soul just now, Philip Orlebar. And you want me to abet you in the utter loss thereof? It is a scandalous proposal, but—Here, hurry up if you’re going to get out. The train is beginning to move on again.”
“Delighted to meet you again, Fordham,” said the old General, shaking the latter heartily by the hand. “What are your plans? They tell us we ought to sleep here, in Sierre, to-night and go on early in the morning.”
“That’s what we are going to do.”
“A good idea. We might all go on together. They tell me there’s a capital hotel here. Which is it,” he went on, glancing at the caps of two rival commissionaires.
“The ‘Belle Vue.’ But it’s only a step. Hardly worth while getting into the omnibus.”