Chapter Fifteen.In the Val d’Anniviers.There are few more beautiful and romantic scenes than the lower end of the Val d’Anniviers as, having after a long and tedious ascent by very abrupt zig-zags reached Niouc, you leave the Rhone Valley with its broad, snake-like river and numberless watch-towers, its villages and whitewashed churches, and Sion with its cathedral and dominated by its castled rock in the distance—you leave all this behind and turn your face mountainwards.Far below, glimpsed like a thread from the road, the churning waters of the Navigenze course through their rocky channel with a sullen roar, their hoarse raving, now loud, now deadened, as a bend of the steep mountain-side opens or shuts out the view beneath, and with it the sound. From the river the slopes shoot skyward in one grand sweep—abrupt, unbroken, well-nigh precipitous. Pine forests, their dark-green featheriness looking at that height like a different growth of grass upon the lighter hue of the pastures—huge rocks and boulders lying in heaped-up profusion even as when first hurled from the mountain-side above, seeming mere pebble heaps—châlets, too, in brown groups like toy chocolate houses or standing alone perched on some dizzy eyrie among their tiny patches of yellow cornland—all testify to the stupendous vastness of Nature’s scale. And at the head of the valley the forking cone of the Besso, and beyond it, rising from its amphitheatre of snow, the white crest of the Rothhorn soaring as it were to the very heavens in its far-away altitude. And the air! It is impossible to exaggerate its clear exhilaration. It is like drinking in the glow of sunshine even as golden wine—it is like bathing in the entrancing blue of the firmament above.“Alma, you have treated me shockingly,” Philip was saying, while they two were seated by the roadside to rest and await the arrival of the others, who might be seen toiling up the zig-zags aforesaid, but yet a little way off. “Shockingly, do you hear. You never wrote me a line, as you promised, and but that by great good luck we happened to be in the same train I should never have known you were coming here at all.”“That’s odd. Is the place we are going to of such enormous extent that we could both be in it without knowing of each other’s proximity?” she said innocently, but with a mischievous gleam lurking in her eyes.“No—er—why?”Alma laughed—long and merrily. “You are a very poor schemer, Phil. Your friend would have had his answer ready—but you have regularly—er—‘given yourself away’—isn’t that the expression? Confess now—and remember that it is only a full and unreserved confession that gains forgiveness. You were not going to Zinal at all—and you have hoodwinked my uncle shamefully?”“What a magician you are!” was the somewhat vexed answer. And then he joined in her laugh.“Am I? Well I thought at first that the coincidence was too striking to be a coincidence. Where were you going?”“To Zermatt. But what a blessed piece of luck it was that I happened to put my head out of the window at that poky little station. But for that only think what we should have missed. Heavens! It’s enough to make a fellow drop over the cliff there to think of it.”“Is it! But only think what an unqualified—er—misstatement you have committed yourself to. Doesn’t that weigh on your conscience like lead?”“No,” replied the sinner, unabashed. “It’s a clear case of the end justifying the means. And then—all’s fair in love and war,” he added, with a gleeful laugh.“You dear Phil. You are very frivolous, you know,” she answered, abandoning her inquisitorial tone for one that was very soft and winsome. “Well, as we are here—thanks to your disgraceful stratagem—I suppose we must make the best of it.”“Darling!” was the rapturous response—“Oh, hang it!”The latter interpolation was evoked by the sudden appearance of the others around a bend of the road, necessitating an equally sudden change in the speaker’s attitude and intentions. But the sting of the whole thing lay in the fact that during that alteration he had caught Fordham’s glance, and the jeering satire which he read therein inspired him with a wildly insane longing to knock that estimable misogynist over the cliff then and there.“Well, young people. You’ve got the start of us and kept it,” said the General, as they came up. His wife was mounted on a mule, which quadruped was towed along by the bridle by a ragged and unshaven Valaisan.“Alma dear, why didn’t you wait for us at that last place—Niouc, isn’t it, Mr Fordham?” said the old lady, reproachfully. “We had some coffee there.”“Which was so abominably muddy we couldn’t drink it—ha—ha!” put in the General. “But it’s a long way on to the next place—isn’t it, Fordham?”“Never mind, auntie. I don’t want anything, really,” replied Alma. “I never felt so fit in my life. Oh!” she broke off, in an ecstatic tone. “What a grand bit of scenery!”“Rather too grand to be safe just here?” returned Mrs Wyatt, “I’m afraid. I shall get down and walk.”The road—known at this point as “Les Pontis”—here formed a mere ledge as it wound round a lateral ravine—lying at right angles to the gorge—a mere shelf scooped along the face of the rock. On the inner side the cliff shot up to a great height overhead on the outer side—space. Looking out over the somewhat rickety rail the tops of the highest trees seemed a long way beneath. Twelve feet of roadway and the mule persisting in walking near the edge. No wonder the old lady preferred her feet to the saddle.Mere pigmies they looked, wending their way along the soaring face of the huge cliffs. Now and then the road would dive into a gallery or short tunnel, lighted here and there by a rough loophole—by putting one’s head out of which a glance at the unbroken sweep of the cliff above and below conveyed some idea as to the magnitude of the undertaking.“A marvellous piece of engineering,” pronounced the General, looking about him critically. “Bless my soul! this bit of road alone is worth coming any distance to see.”Philip and Alma had managed to get on ahead again.“Oh, look!” cried the latter, excitedly. “Look—look! There’s a bunch of edelweiss, I declare!”He followed her glance. Some twelve feet overhead grew a few mud-coloured blossoms. The rock sloped here, and the plant had found root in a cranny filled up with dust.“No; don’t try it! It’s too risky, you may hurt yourself,” went on Alma, in a disappointed tone. “We must give them up, I suppose.”But this was not Philip’s idea. He went at the steep rock bank as though storming a breach. There was nothing to hold on to; but the impetus of his spring and the height of his stature combined carried him within reach of the edelweiss. Then he slid back amid a cloud of dust and shale, barking his shins excruciatingly, but grasping in his fist four of the mud-coloured blossoms.“Are you hurt?” cried Alma, her eyes dilating. “You should not have tried it. I told you not to try it.”“Hurt? Not a bit! Here are the edelweiss flowers though.” And in the delighted look which came into Alma’s eyes as she took them, he felt that he would have been amply rewarded for a dozen similar troubles. But just then a whimsical association of ideas brought back to his mind the absurd postscript to that letter which had so sorely perturbed him. “Be sure you send me a big bunch of ‘adleweis’ from the top of the Matterhorn”; and the recollection jarred horribly as he contrasted the writer of that execrable epistle, and the glorious refined beauty of this girl who stood here alone with him, so appropriately framed in this entrancing scene of Nature’s grandeur.“That is delightful,” said Alma, gleefully, as she arranged the blossoms in her dress. “Now I have got some edelweiss at last. When we get to Zinal I shall be the envied of all beholders, except that every one there will have hats full of it, I suppose.”“I don’t know about that Fordham says it’s getting mighty scarce everywhere. But it’s poor looking stuff. As far as I can make out, its beauty, like that of a show bulldog, lies in its ugliness.”“Shall I ever forget this sweet walk!” she said, gazing around as though to photograph upon her mind every detail of the surroundings. “You think me of a gushing disposition. In a minute you will think me of a complaining and discontented one. But just contrast this with a commonplace, and wholly uninteresting cockneyfied suburb such as that wherein my delectable lot is cast, and then think of the difference.”“Dearest, you know I don’t think you—er—discontented or anything of the sort,” he rejoined, fervently. “But—I thought Surbiton was rather a pretty place. The river—and all that—”“A mere romping ground for ’Arry and ’Arriet to indulge their horseplay. Philip, I—hate the place. There!”“Then, darling, why go back to it? or anyhow, only to get ready to leave it as soon as possible,” he answered quickly.“Phil, you are breaking our compact, and I won’t answer that question. No. What I mean is that it is lamentable to think how soon I shall be back in that flat, stale, and unprofitable place. Why this will seem like a different state of existence, looked back upon then—indeed, it is hard to believe that the same world can comprise the two.”The road had now left its rocky windings and here entered the cool shade of feathery pine woods, the latter in no wise unwelcome, for the sun was now high enough to make himself felt. It might be that neither of them were destined to forget that walk in the early morning through an enchanted land. The soaring symmetry of the mighty peaks; the great slopes and the jagged cliffs; the fragrance of the pine needles and moist, moss-covered rocks; the golden network of sunlight through the trees, and the groups of picturesquechâletsperched here and there upon the spurs; the sweet and exhilarating air, and the hoarse thunder of the torrent far below in its rocky prison—sights and sounds of fairyland all. And to these two wandering side by side there was nothing lacking to complete the spell. It was such a day as might well remain stamped upon their memory—such a day as in the time to come they might often and often recall. But—would it be with joy, or would it be with pain?Meanwhile, the first half of the journey was over, for the picturesque grouping ofchâletsclustering around a massive church which suddenly came into sight announced that they had reached Vissoye, the most considerable place in the valley. Here a long halt was to be made; and the old people indeed were glad of a rest, for it had grown more than warm. So after breakfast in the cheerful and well-ordered hotel, the General lit his pipe and strolled forth to find a shady corner of the garden where he could smoke and doze, while his wife, spying a convenient couch in the emptysalon, was soon immersed in the shadowland attained through the medium of “forty winks.”Left to themselves, Alma and Philip strolled out into the village, gazing interestedly upon the quaint architecture and devices which ornamented the great brownchâlets. Then they wandered into the church—a massive parallelogram, with a green ash-tree springing from its belfry. Alma was delighted with the wealth of symbolism and rich colouring displayed alike upon wall and in window, roof and shrine; but Philip voted it crude and tawdry.“There speaks the true John Bull abroad,” she whispered. “As it happens, the very crudeness of it constitutes its artistic merit, for it is thoroughly in keeping. And the heavy gilding of the vine device, creeping around the scarlet ground-colour of those pillars, is anything but tawdry. It is quaint,bizarre, if you will, but striking and thoroughly effective. I suppose you want nothing but that desolate grey stone and the frightful wall tablets which give to our English cathedrals the look of so many deserted railway stations.”“Oh, I don’t care either way. That sort of thing isn’t in my line. But look, Alma, what are they putting up those trestles for? I suppose they are going to bury somebody.”“Where? Oh, very likely,” as she perceived a little old man, who, aided by a boy, was beginning to clear a space in front of the choir steps, with a view to arranging a pile of trestles which they had brought in. “We may as well go outside now.”They went out on to the terrace-like front of the graveyard, and sat down upon the low wall overhanging the deep green valley, which fell abruptly to the brawling Navigenze beneath. Gazing upon the blue arching heavens, and the emerald slopes sleeping in the golden sunshine, Alma heaved a deep sigh of happy, contented enjoyment.“Ah, the contrasts of life!” she remarked. “At this moment I am trying to imagine that I am in the same world as that hateful suburb, with its prim villas and stucco gentility—its dull, flat, mediocre pretensions to ‘prettiness.’ Yes, indeed, life contains some marvellous contrasts.”“Here comes one of them, for instance,” said Philip. “This must be the funeral they were getting ready for.”A sound of chanting—full, deep-throated, and melodious—mingled with the subdued crunch of many feet upon the gravelled walk as the head of a procession appeared, wending round the corner of the massive building. First came a little group of surpliced priests and acolytes, preceded by a tall silver crucifix and two burning tapers; then the coffin, borne by four men. Following on behind came a score of mourners—men, women, and children, hard-featured villagers all, but showing something very real, very subdued, in the aspect of their grief.“Requiem aeternam dona et, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat et.” The massive plain-song chant wailed melodiously forth, swelling upon the sunlit air in a wave of sound. The two seated there had been discussing the contrasts of life. Here was a greater contrast still—the contrast of Death.“Exultabunt Domino ossa humiliata” arose the chant again, as thecortègedefiled within the church. And through the open door the spectators could see the flash of the silver cross and the starry glitter of the carried lights moving up the centre above the heads of the mourners.“So even in this paradise-like spot we are invaded by—death,” said Alma, in a subdued voice, as having waited a moment or two they rose to leave. “Still, even death is rendered as bright as the living know how,” she went on, with a glance around upon the flower-decked graves between which they were threading their way. “Confess now, you British Philistine, isn’t all that more impressive than the black horses and plumes and hearses of our inimitable England?”“I daresay it might be if one understood it,” answered Philip, judiciously. “But I say, Alma, it isn’t cheerful whatever way you take it!”Mrs Wyatt was already on her mule as they regained the hotel, and the General, leaning on his alpenstock, stood giving directions—with the aid of Fordham—to the men in charge of the pack mules bearing their luggage.“Alma, child,” he said reprovingly, while Philip had dived indoors to get his knapsack, “you’re doing a very foolish thing, walking about all the time instead of resting. You’ll be tired to death before you get there.”“No, no I won’t, uncle dear!” she answered, with a bright smile. “You forget this isn’t—Surbiton. Why I could walk for ever in this air. I feel as fresh now as when we left Sierre this morning.”Certainly she gave no reason to imagine the contrary as they pursued their way in the glowing afternoon—on past little clusters ofchâlets, through pine woods and rocky landslips, crossing by shaky log bridges the rolling, milky torrent, which had roared at such a dizzy depth beneath their road earlier in the day. The snow peaks in front drew nearer and nearer, the bright glow of the setting sun spread in horizontal rays over the now broadening out valley, and there on the outskirts of a straggling village, surrounded by green meadows wherein the peasants were busy tossing their hay crops, stood the hotel—a large oblong house, partly of brick, partly of wood, burnt brown by exposure to the sun, like the residue of thechâletsaround.As they arrived the first bell was ringing fortable d’hôtedinner, and people were dropping in by twos and threes, or in parties, returning from expeditions to adjacent glaciers or elsewhere. Some were armed with ice-axes, and one or two with ropes and guides. Nearly all had red noses and peeled countenances, and this held good of both sexes, more especially of that which is ordinarily termed the fair. But this—at first startling—phenomenon Fordham explained to be neither the result of the cup that cheers and does inebriate nor of any organic disorder of the cuticle, but merely the action of the sun’s rays reflected from the surface of the snow or ice with the effect of a burning glass. Alma made a little grimace.“I think I shall confine my wanderings to where there’s no snow or ice—and I do so want to go on a glacier—rather than become an object like that,” lowering her voice as a tall, angular being of uncertain age—with a fearfully peeled and roasted countenance, and with her skirts tucked up to show an amount of leg which should have brought her under the ban of the Lord Chamberlain—strode by with a mien and assurance as though she held first mortgage on the whole of the Alps, as Fordham graphically put it.“You can patrol the glaciers for a week if you only cover your face with a veil,” answered the latter. “You may burn a little, but nothing near the horrible extent you would otherwise.”“The house doesn’t seem crowded,” remarked Philip, whentable d’hôtewas half through. They had secured the end of the long table, and there was a hiatus of several empty chairs between them and their next neighbours. This and the stupendous clatter of knives and forks and tongues, enabled them to talk with no more restraint than a slight lowering of the voice.“By Jove!” he went on, withdrawing his glance from an attentive scrutiny of the table, “it’s a mighty seedy crowd, anyhow. All British, too. Look at those half-dozen fellows sitting together there. Did any one ever see such an unshaven, collarless squad of bounders?”The objects of the speaker’s somewhat outspoken scorn assuredly did their best to justify it. They answered exactly to his description as to their appearance. Moreover when they spoke it was in the dialect of Edgware Road rather than that of Pall Mall. Two or three gaudily-dressed females of like stamp seemed to belong to them. Beyond were other people in couples or in parties.“Don’t you think you are rather hard on them, Philip?” objected Mrs Wyatt—for by virtue of the General’s former acquaintance with his father, and their now fast-growing intimacy with himself, the old people had taken to calling him by his Christian name.Alma broke into a little laugh.“Auntie, you remind us of ‘the Infliction’ at Les Avants. She always used to begin ‘Don’t you think.’”“Mrs Wyatt used to sit opposite her,” said Phil, slily.“You’re a naughty boy, Phil,” laughed the old lady, “and you’ve no business to poke fun at your grandmother. But I think you are too hard on those poor fellows. They may not have any luggage with them.”“No more have we. Fordham and I will have to live in our knapsacks for the next week. And even if we had no clothes we’d manage by hook or by crook to beg, borrow, or steal a razor.”“I don’t think much of the population, certainly,” put in the General. “There were a much better stamp of people at Les Avants.”“Always are,” said Fordham. “It’s a place where people go to stay, and the same people go there again and again. Moreover, it isn’t enough of a show-place to attract the mere tourist. ’Arry itinerant patronises the higher resorts, where he can walk across a glacier and brag about it ever after. But this is an exceptionally weedy crowd, as Phil says,” he added, sticking up his eyeglass and taking stock of the same.“Not all. I don’t think quite all,” objected Mrs Wyatt. “Those two ladies sitting next to the clergyman down there look rather nice. Don’t you think so, Mr Fordham?”“Might discharge both barrels of a shot-gun down the table and not damage a social equal,” was the uncompromising reply.But little it mattered to them in a general way what sort of a lot their fellow-countrymen there sojourning might or might not be. It was delightful to exchange the low stuffysalle-à-manger, with its inevitable reek of fleshpots, its clatter of knives and forks and its strife of tongues, for the sweet hay-scented evening air, with the afterglow reddening and fading on the double-horned Besso and the snowfields beyond, the stars twinkling forth one by one against the loom of the great mountain wall which seemed literally to overhang the valley. There was a lulling, soothing sense in the sequestered propinquity of the great mountains, in the dull roar of the ever-speaking torrent. Old General Wyatt, seated on a bench smoking his evening pipe, expressed unbounded satisfaction.“It’s like a paradise after that abominably rackety Grindelwald,” he pronounced.“Yes, dear,” assented his wife. “But what I want to know is,” she added in a low tone, “how is that going to end?”“How is what?—Oh—ah—yes—um!” as he followed her glance.The latter had lighted upon their niece and her now inseparable escort. They had returned from an evening stroll, and were standing looking about them as though loth to go in. Alma had thrown on a cloak, for there was a touch of sharpness in the air, and the soft fur seemed to cling caressingly round the lower part of her face, framing and throwing into greater prominence the luminous eyes and sweet, refined beauty. She was discoursing animatedly, but the old people were too far off for the burden of her ideas to reach them.“It is going to end in the child completely knocking herself up,” said the General with a disapproving shake of the head. “She must have walked twenty miles to-day if she has walked one. Now mind, she must stay at home to-morrow and rest thoroughly.”“That isn’t what I mean, and you know it isn’t,” urged the old lady in a vexed tone.“Ha-ha! I know it isn’t,” he answered with a growl that was more than half a chuckle.“Well, and what do you think of it?”“Um! ah! I don’t know what to think. If the young people like each other, I don’t see why they shouldn’t see plenty of each other—in a place like this. If they decide they don’t—well, there’s no harm done.”“But I’ve always heard you say that Sir Francis Orlebar was a poor man—a poor man with a second wife,” said Mrs Wyatt, tentatively.“So is Alma. I don’t mean with a second wife—ha-ha! But she hasn’t a sixpence, and it would be a blessed day for her that on which she got away from that mother of hers for good and all.”“But isn’t that all the more reason she should marry somebody who is well off?”“Well, yes, I suppose it is. But then, you can’t have everything. It’s seldom enough you get cash and every other desirable endowment thrown in. Now I like Phil Orlebar. I don’t know when I’ve seen a young fellow I’ve liked more. It’s a thousand pities, though, that his father didn’t put him into some profession or give him something to do; but it isn’t too late now, and Alma might do worse. Here—hang it all!” he broke off with a growl.—“What a couple of mischief-making old match-makers we are becoming. It’s getting cold. Time to go in.”
There are few more beautiful and romantic scenes than the lower end of the Val d’Anniviers as, having after a long and tedious ascent by very abrupt zig-zags reached Niouc, you leave the Rhone Valley with its broad, snake-like river and numberless watch-towers, its villages and whitewashed churches, and Sion with its cathedral and dominated by its castled rock in the distance—you leave all this behind and turn your face mountainwards.
Far below, glimpsed like a thread from the road, the churning waters of the Navigenze course through their rocky channel with a sullen roar, their hoarse raving, now loud, now deadened, as a bend of the steep mountain-side opens or shuts out the view beneath, and with it the sound. From the river the slopes shoot skyward in one grand sweep—abrupt, unbroken, well-nigh precipitous. Pine forests, their dark-green featheriness looking at that height like a different growth of grass upon the lighter hue of the pastures—huge rocks and boulders lying in heaped-up profusion even as when first hurled from the mountain-side above, seeming mere pebble heaps—châlets, too, in brown groups like toy chocolate houses or standing alone perched on some dizzy eyrie among their tiny patches of yellow cornland—all testify to the stupendous vastness of Nature’s scale. And at the head of the valley the forking cone of the Besso, and beyond it, rising from its amphitheatre of snow, the white crest of the Rothhorn soaring as it were to the very heavens in its far-away altitude. And the air! It is impossible to exaggerate its clear exhilaration. It is like drinking in the glow of sunshine even as golden wine—it is like bathing in the entrancing blue of the firmament above.
“Alma, you have treated me shockingly,” Philip was saying, while they two were seated by the roadside to rest and await the arrival of the others, who might be seen toiling up the zig-zags aforesaid, but yet a little way off. “Shockingly, do you hear. You never wrote me a line, as you promised, and but that by great good luck we happened to be in the same train I should never have known you were coming here at all.”
“That’s odd. Is the place we are going to of such enormous extent that we could both be in it without knowing of each other’s proximity?” she said innocently, but with a mischievous gleam lurking in her eyes.
“No—er—why?”
Alma laughed—long and merrily. “You are a very poor schemer, Phil. Your friend would have had his answer ready—but you have regularly—er—‘given yourself away’—isn’t that the expression? Confess now—and remember that it is only a full and unreserved confession that gains forgiveness. You were not going to Zinal at all—and you have hoodwinked my uncle shamefully?”
“What a magician you are!” was the somewhat vexed answer. And then he joined in her laugh.
“Am I? Well I thought at first that the coincidence was too striking to be a coincidence. Where were you going?”
“To Zermatt. But what a blessed piece of luck it was that I happened to put my head out of the window at that poky little station. But for that only think what we should have missed. Heavens! It’s enough to make a fellow drop over the cliff there to think of it.”
“Is it! But only think what an unqualified—er—misstatement you have committed yourself to. Doesn’t that weigh on your conscience like lead?”
“No,” replied the sinner, unabashed. “It’s a clear case of the end justifying the means. And then—all’s fair in love and war,” he added, with a gleeful laugh.
“You dear Phil. You are very frivolous, you know,” she answered, abandoning her inquisitorial tone for one that was very soft and winsome. “Well, as we are here—thanks to your disgraceful stratagem—I suppose we must make the best of it.”
“Darling!” was the rapturous response—“Oh, hang it!”
The latter interpolation was evoked by the sudden appearance of the others around a bend of the road, necessitating an equally sudden change in the speaker’s attitude and intentions. But the sting of the whole thing lay in the fact that during that alteration he had caught Fordham’s glance, and the jeering satire which he read therein inspired him with a wildly insane longing to knock that estimable misogynist over the cliff then and there.
“Well, young people. You’ve got the start of us and kept it,” said the General, as they came up. His wife was mounted on a mule, which quadruped was towed along by the bridle by a ragged and unshaven Valaisan.
“Alma dear, why didn’t you wait for us at that last place—Niouc, isn’t it, Mr Fordham?” said the old lady, reproachfully. “We had some coffee there.”
“Which was so abominably muddy we couldn’t drink it—ha—ha!” put in the General. “But it’s a long way on to the next place—isn’t it, Fordham?”
“Never mind, auntie. I don’t want anything, really,” replied Alma. “I never felt so fit in my life. Oh!” she broke off, in an ecstatic tone. “What a grand bit of scenery!”
“Rather too grand to be safe just here?” returned Mrs Wyatt, “I’m afraid. I shall get down and walk.”
The road—known at this point as “Les Pontis”—here formed a mere ledge as it wound round a lateral ravine—lying at right angles to the gorge—a mere shelf scooped along the face of the rock. On the inner side the cliff shot up to a great height overhead on the outer side—space. Looking out over the somewhat rickety rail the tops of the highest trees seemed a long way beneath. Twelve feet of roadway and the mule persisting in walking near the edge. No wonder the old lady preferred her feet to the saddle.
Mere pigmies they looked, wending their way along the soaring face of the huge cliffs. Now and then the road would dive into a gallery or short tunnel, lighted here and there by a rough loophole—by putting one’s head out of which a glance at the unbroken sweep of the cliff above and below conveyed some idea as to the magnitude of the undertaking.
“A marvellous piece of engineering,” pronounced the General, looking about him critically. “Bless my soul! this bit of road alone is worth coming any distance to see.”
Philip and Alma had managed to get on ahead again.
“Oh, look!” cried the latter, excitedly. “Look—look! There’s a bunch of edelweiss, I declare!”
He followed her glance. Some twelve feet overhead grew a few mud-coloured blossoms. The rock sloped here, and the plant had found root in a cranny filled up with dust.
“No; don’t try it! It’s too risky, you may hurt yourself,” went on Alma, in a disappointed tone. “We must give them up, I suppose.”
But this was not Philip’s idea. He went at the steep rock bank as though storming a breach. There was nothing to hold on to; but the impetus of his spring and the height of his stature combined carried him within reach of the edelweiss. Then he slid back amid a cloud of dust and shale, barking his shins excruciatingly, but grasping in his fist four of the mud-coloured blossoms.
“Are you hurt?” cried Alma, her eyes dilating. “You should not have tried it. I told you not to try it.”
“Hurt? Not a bit! Here are the edelweiss flowers though.” And in the delighted look which came into Alma’s eyes as she took them, he felt that he would have been amply rewarded for a dozen similar troubles. But just then a whimsical association of ideas brought back to his mind the absurd postscript to that letter which had so sorely perturbed him. “Be sure you send me a big bunch of ‘adleweis’ from the top of the Matterhorn”; and the recollection jarred horribly as he contrasted the writer of that execrable epistle, and the glorious refined beauty of this girl who stood here alone with him, so appropriately framed in this entrancing scene of Nature’s grandeur.
“That is delightful,” said Alma, gleefully, as she arranged the blossoms in her dress. “Now I have got some edelweiss at last. When we get to Zinal I shall be the envied of all beholders, except that every one there will have hats full of it, I suppose.”
“I don’t know about that Fordham says it’s getting mighty scarce everywhere. But it’s poor looking stuff. As far as I can make out, its beauty, like that of a show bulldog, lies in its ugliness.”
“Shall I ever forget this sweet walk!” she said, gazing around as though to photograph upon her mind every detail of the surroundings. “You think me of a gushing disposition. In a minute you will think me of a complaining and discontented one. But just contrast this with a commonplace, and wholly uninteresting cockneyfied suburb such as that wherein my delectable lot is cast, and then think of the difference.”
“Dearest, you know I don’t think you—er—discontented or anything of the sort,” he rejoined, fervently. “But—I thought Surbiton was rather a pretty place. The river—and all that—”
“A mere romping ground for ’Arry and ’Arriet to indulge their horseplay. Philip, I—hate the place. There!”
“Then, darling, why go back to it? or anyhow, only to get ready to leave it as soon as possible,” he answered quickly.
“Phil, you are breaking our compact, and I won’t answer that question. No. What I mean is that it is lamentable to think how soon I shall be back in that flat, stale, and unprofitable place. Why this will seem like a different state of existence, looked back upon then—indeed, it is hard to believe that the same world can comprise the two.”
The road had now left its rocky windings and here entered the cool shade of feathery pine woods, the latter in no wise unwelcome, for the sun was now high enough to make himself felt. It might be that neither of them were destined to forget that walk in the early morning through an enchanted land. The soaring symmetry of the mighty peaks; the great slopes and the jagged cliffs; the fragrance of the pine needles and moist, moss-covered rocks; the golden network of sunlight through the trees, and the groups of picturesquechâletsperched here and there upon the spurs; the sweet and exhilarating air, and the hoarse thunder of the torrent far below in its rocky prison—sights and sounds of fairyland all. And to these two wandering side by side there was nothing lacking to complete the spell. It was such a day as might well remain stamped upon their memory—such a day as in the time to come they might often and often recall. But—would it be with joy, or would it be with pain?
Meanwhile, the first half of the journey was over, for the picturesque grouping ofchâletsclustering around a massive church which suddenly came into sight announced that they had reached Vissoye, the most considerable place in the valley. Here a long halt was to be made; and the old people indeed were glad of a rest, for it had grown more than warm. So after breakfast in the cheerful and well-ordered hotel, the General lit his pipe and strolled forth to find a shady corner of the garden where he could smoke and doze, while his wife, spying a convenient couch in the emptysalon, was soon immersed in the shadowland attained through the medium of “forty winks.”
Left to themselves, Alma and Philip strolled out into the village, gazing interestedly upon the quaint architecture and devices which ornamented the great brownchâlets. Then they wandered into the church—a massive parallelogram, with a green ash-tree springing from its belfry. Alma was delighted with the wealth of symbolism and rich colouring displayed alike upon wall and in window, roof and shrine; but Philip voted it crude and tawdry.
“There speaks the true John Bull abroad,” she whispered. “As it happens, the very crudeness of it constitutes its artistic merit, for it is thoroughly in keeping. And the heavy gilding of the vine device, creeping around the scarlet ground-colour of those pillars, is anything but tawdry. It is quaint,bizarre, if you will, but striking and thoroughly effective. I suppose you want nothing but that desolate grey stone and the frightful wall tablets which give to our English cathedrals the look of so many deserted railway stations.”
“Oh, I don’t care either way. That sort of thing isn’t in my line. But look, Alma, what are they putting up those trestles for? I suppose they are going to bury somebody.”
“Where? Oh, very likely,” as she perceived a little old man, who, aided by a boy, was beginning to clear a space in front of the choir steps, with a view to arranging a pile of trestles which they had brought in. “We may as well go outside now.”
They went out on to the terrace-like front of the graveyard, and sat down upon the low wall overhanging the deep green valley, which fell abruptly to the brawling Navigenze beneath. Gazing upon the blue arching heavens, and the emerald slopes sleeping in the golden sunshine, Alma heaved a deep sigh of happy, contented enjoyment.
“Ah, the contrasts of life!” she remarked. “At this moment I am trying to imagine that I am in the same world as that hateful suburb, with its prim villas and stucco gentility—its dull, flat, mediocre pretensions to ‘prettiness.’ Yes, indeed, life contains some marvellous contrasts.”
“Here comes one of them, for instance,” said Philip. “This must be the funeral they were getting ready for.”
A sound of chanting—full, deep-throated, and melodious—mingled with the subdued crunch of many feet upon the gravelled walk as the head of a procession appeared, wending round the corner of the massive building. First came a little group of surpliced priests and acolytes, preceded by a tall silver crucifix and two burning tapers; then the coffin, borne by four men. Following on behind came a score of mourners—men, women, and children, hard-featured villagers all, but showing something very real, very subdued, in the aspect of their grief.
“Requiem aeternam dona et, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat et.” The massive plain-song chant wailed melodiously forth, swelling upon the sunlit air in a wave of sound. The two seated there had been discussing the contrasts of life. Here was a greater contrast still—the contrast of Death.
“Exultabunt Domino ossa humiliata” arose the chant again, as thecortègedefiled within the church. And through the open door the spectators could see the flash of the silver cross and the starry glitter of the carried lights moving up the centre above the heads of the mourners.
“So even in this paradise-like spot we are invaded by—death,” said Alma, in a subdued voice, as having waited a moment or two they rose to leave. “Still, even death is rendered as bright as the living know how,” she went on, with a glance around upon the flower-decked graves between which they were threading their way. “Confess now, you British Philistine, isn’t all that more impressive than the black horses and plumes and hearses of our inimitable England?”
“I daresay it might be if one understood it,” answered Philip, judiciously. “But I say, Alma, it isn’t cheerful whatever way you take it!”
Mrs Wyatt was already on her mule as they regained the hotel, and the General, leaning on his alpenstock, stood giving directions—with the aid of Fordham—to the men in charge of the pack mules bearing their luggage.
“Alma, child,” he said reprovingly, while Philip had dived indoors to get his knapsack, “you’re doing a very foolish thing, walking about all the time instead of resting. You’ll be tired to death before you get there.”
“No, no I won’t, uncle dear!” she answered, with a bright smile. “You forget this isn’t—Surbiton. Why I could walk for ever in this air. I feel as fresh now as when we left Sierre this morning.”
Certainly she gave no reason to imagine the contrary as they pursued their way in the glowing afternoon—on past little clusters ofchâlets, through pine woods and rocky landslips, crossing by shaky log bridges the rolling, milky torrent, which had roared at such a dizzy depth beneath their road earlier in the day. The snow peaks in front drew nearer and nearer, the bright glow of the setting sun spread in horizontal rays over the now broadening out valley, and there on the outskirts of a straggling village, surrounded by green meadows wherein the peasants were busy tossing their hay crops, stood the hotel—a large oblong house, partly of brick, partly of wood, burnt brown by exposure to the sun, like the residue of thechâletsaround.
As they arrived the first bell was ringing fortable d’hôtedinner, and people were dropping in by twos and threes, or in parties, returning from expeditions to adjacent glaciers or elsewhere. Some were armed with ice-axes, and one or two with ropes and guides. Nearly all had red noses and peeled countenances, and this held good of both sexes, more especially of that which is ordinarily termed the fair. But this—at first startling—phenomenon Fordham explained to be neither the result of the cup that cheers and does inebriate nor of any organic disorder of the cuticle, but merely the action of the sun’s rays reflected from the surface of the snow or ice with the effect of a burning glass. Alma made a little grimace.
“I think I shall confine my wanderings to where there’s no snow or ice—and I do so want to go on a glacier—rather than become an object like that,” lowering her voice as a tall, angular being of uncertain age—with a fearfully peeled and roasted countenance, and with her skirts tucked up to show an amount of leg which should have brought her under the ban of the Lord Chamberlain—strode by with a mien and assurance as though she held first mortgage on the whole of the Alps, as Fordham graphically put it.
“You can patrol the glaciers for a week if you only cover your face with a veil,” answered the latter. “You may burn a little, but nothing near the horrible extent you would otherwise.”
“The house doesn’t seem crowded,” remarked Philip, whentable d’hôtewas half through. They had secured the end of the long table, and there was a hiatus of several empty chairs between them and their next neighbours. This and the stupendous clatter of knives and forks and tongues, enabled them to talk with no more restraint than a slight lowering of the voice.
“By Jove!” he went on, withdrawing his glance from an attentive scrutiny of the table, “it’s a mighty seedy crowd, anyhow. All British, too. Look at those half-dozen fellows sitting together there. Did any one ever see such an unshaven, collarless squad of bounders?”
The objects of the speaker’s somewhat outspoken scorn assuredly did their best to justify it. They answered exactly to his description as to their appearance. Moreover when they spoke it was in the dialect of Edgware Road rather than that of Pall Mall. Two or three gaudily-dressed females of like stamp seemed to belong to them. Beyond were other people in couples or in parties.
“Don’t you think you are rather hard on them, Philip?” objected Mrs Wyatt—for by virtue of the General’s former acquaintance with his father, and their now fast-growing intimacy with himself, the old people had taken to calling him by his Christian name.
Alma broke into a little laugh.
“Auntie, you remind us of ‘the Infliction’ at Les Avants. She always used to begin ‘Don’t you think.’”
“Mrs Wyatt used to sit opposite her,” said Phil, slily.
“You’re a naughty boy, Phil,” laughed the old lady, “and you’ve no business to poke fun at your grandmother. But I think you are too hard on those poor fellows. They may not have any luggage with them.”
“No more have we. Fordham and I will have to live in our knapsacks for the next week. And even if we had no clothes we’d manage by hook or by crook to beg, borrow, or steal a razor.”
“I don’t think much of the population, certainly,” put in the General. “There were a much better stamp of people at Les Avants.”
“Always are,” said Fordham. “It’s a place where people go to stay, and the same people go there again and again. Moreover, it isn’t enough of a show-place to attract the mere tourist. ’Arry itinerant patronises the higher resorts, where he can walk across a glacier and brag about it ever after. But this is an exceptionally weedy crowd, as Phil says,” he added, sticking up his eyeglass and taking stock of the same.
“Not all. I don’t think quite all,” objected Mrs Wyatt. “Those two ladies sitting next to the clergyman down there look rather nice. Don’t you think so, Mr Fordham?”
“Might discharge both barrels of a shot-gun down the table and not damage a social equal,” was the uncompromising reply.
But little it mattered to them in a general way what sort of a lot their fellow-countrymen there sojourning might or might not be. It was delightful to exchange the low stuffysalle-à-manger, with its inevitable reek of fleshpots, its clatter of knives and forks and its strife of tongues, for the sweet hay-scented evening air, with the afterglow reddening and fading on the double-horned Besso and the snowfields beyond, the stars twinkling forth one by one against the loom of the great mountain wall which seemed literally to overhang the valley. There was a lulling, soothing sense in the sequestered propinquity of the great mountains, in the dull roar of the ever-speaking torrent. Old General Wyatt, seated on a bench smoking his evening pipe, expressed unbounded satisfaction.
“It’s like a paradise after that abominably rackety Grindelwald,” he pronounced.
“Yes, dear,” assented his wife. “But what I want to know is,” she added in a low tone, “how is that going to end?”
“How is what?—Oh—ah—yes—um!” as he followed her glance.
The latter had lighted upon their niece and her now inseparable escort. They had returned from an evening stroll, and were standing looking about them as though loth to go in. Alma had thrown on a cloak, for there was a touch of sharpness in the air, and the soft fur seemed to cling caressingly round the lower part of her face, framing and throwing into greater prominence the luminous eyes and sweet, refined beauty. She was discoursing animatedly, but the old people were too far off for the burden of her ideas to reach them.
“It is going to end in the child completely knocking herself up,” said the General with a disapproving shake of the head. “She must have walked twenty miles to-day if she has walked one. Now mind, she must stay at home to-morrow and rest thoroughly.”
“That isn’t what I mean, and you know it isn’t,” urged the old lady in a vexed tone.
“Ha-ha! I know it isn’t,” he answered with a growl that was more than half a chuckle.
“Well, and what do you think of it?”
“Um! ah! I don’t know what to think. If the young people like each other, I don’t see why they shouldn’t see plenty of each other—in a place like this. If they decide they don’t—well, there’s no harm done.”
“But I’ve always heard you say that Sir Francis Orlebar was a poor man—a poor man with a second wife,” said Mrs Wyatt, tentatively.
“So is Alma. I don’t mean with a second wife—ha-ha! But she hasn’t a sixpence, and it would be a blessed day for her that on which she got away from that mother of hers for good and all.”
“But isn’t that all the more reason she should marry somebody who is well off?”
“Well, yes, I suppose it is. But then, you can’t have everything. It’s seldom enough you get cash and every other desirable endowment thrown in. Now I like Phil Orlebar. I don’t know when I’ve seen a young fellow I’ve liked more. It’s a thousand pities, though, that his father didn’t put him into some profession or give him something to do; but it isn’t too late now, and Alma might do worse. Here—hang it all!” he broke off with a growl.—“What a couple of mischief-making old match-makers we are becoming. It’s getting cold. Time to go in.”
Chapter Sixteen.“All in the Blue Unclouded Weather.”“When are we going to begin some real climbing—eh, Phil?”“Oh, I don’t know. By the way, Fordham, I’m not sure that real high climbing isn’t a mistake. It seems rather a thin thing to put oneself to any amount of unmitigated fag, and go sleeping out under rocks or in huts and in all sorts of beastly places chock full of fleas, and turn out at ungodly hours in the morning—in the middle of the night, rather—merely for the sake of shinning up to the top of some confounded rock that scores of other fellows have shinned up already, and thousands more will. No; I believe there’s far more sense in this sort of thing, and I’m certain it’s far more fun.”“This sort of thing” being a long day’s expedition of the nature of a picnic, a walk for the most part over the glacier to some point of interest or scenic advantage, which in the present instance was a trip to the Mountet Cabin, a structure erected by the Alpine Club high up among the rocks at the base of the Besso, for the convenience of parties ascending the Rothhorn or traversing one of the several difficult, and more or less dangerous, glacier passes leading into the next valley. The hour was early—before sunrise in fact—and our two friends were threading their way rapidly between the rows of brownchâletswhich constitute the picturesque hamlet of Zinal, intent on overtaking the rest of their party, who had “just strolled quietly on,” a process which in nineteen cases out of twenty may be taken to mean that if the overtaker comes up with the advance guard within a couple of hours, he or she has progressed at a rate by no means pleasant or advisable as the start for a long day’s walk or climb. This instance, however, was the twentieth, for whereas those in advance consisted of General Wyatt and his niece, two learned young ladies with short-cropped hair and spectacles, and a young clergyman, also in spectacles, the athletic pair had no difficulty in overhauling them in a very short time, and that with no inordinate effort.“Well, Mr Fordham. It isn’t always we poor women who keep everybody waiting,” said Alma, mischievously, as they came up, with a glance at Phil, to whose reluctance to leave his snug couch until the very last moment was due the fact that the party had not started together.“That’s what comes of doing a good action—one always gets abused for it,” replied Fordham. “If I hadn’t acted as whipper-in you’d never have seen this lazy dog until you were half-way home again.”“Oh, the poormen! They never can bring themselves to leave their beds. And yet they call themselves the stronger sex,” put in one of the shock-headed young women, who, by virtue of being students at one of the seats of learning recently founded for their sex, looked down as from a lofty pedestal and with sublime pity upon the world at large. “The strong-minded sex, I should have said.”“Not much use, are they, Miss Severn?” said the parson in playful banter.“Except when the midnight mouse in the wainscotting suggests burglars, or the booming of the wind in the chimney, bogies,” rejoined Fordham, tranquilly. “In a thunderstorm, too, their presence is apt to be highly reassuring.”To this the shock-headed one deigned no rejoinder. She and her sister had formed some slight acquaintance with the Wyatts, and had joined them in expeditions similar to the present one; in fact, were rather more glad to do so than the others were that they should. Like too many of their kind they imagined that disagreeable, not to say rude, remarks at the expense of the opposite sex demonstrated the superiority of their own in general, and such representatives of it as devoted their minds to conic sections in particular.Nothing, as a rule, is more depressing to the poor creatures of an effete civilisation than an early morning start. Than the hour of summer sunrise in the Alps, however, nothing is more exhilarating. The cool, fresh, bracing air, the statuesque grandeur of the great mountains, the dash and sparkle of the swirling stream, the mingling aromatic fragrances distilling from opening wild flowers and resinous pines—it is a glimpse of fairyland, a very tonic to heart and brain, a reservoir of nerve power to limb and system.And now beyond the huge projecting shoulder of the Alpe d’Arpitetta the rays of the newly-risen sun were flooding the snowfields with a golden radiancy. No more shade directly. But the air was crisp, and the sky of cloudless beauty. To two of those present it was but the beginning of a glowing halcyon day—one among many. Nearly a fortnight had gone by since their arrival, a fortnight spent in similar fashion—one day succeeding another, spent from dawn to dark amid the sublimest scenes of Nature on her most inspiring scale.Philip Orlebar, the mercurial, the careless, had undergone a marked change. And it was a change which affected him for the better, was that brought about by this crisis of his life, in that it seemed to impart a not wholly unneeded ballast to his otherwise line character, a dignity to his demeanour which became him well, the more so that there was the stamp of a great and settled happiness upon his face, and in the straight, sunny glance of the clear eyes, that was goodly to look upon. The Fire of the Live Coal burnt bright and clear.“Alma, darling, why not let me say something to your uncle now instead of waiting until you go home again?” he said one day, when they were scrambling about among the rocks in search of the coveted edelweiss. “Then I shall feel that you do really belong to me.”She looked at him for a moment—looked at him standing over her in his straight youthful strength and patrician beauty, and hesitated. She was growing very fond of him, and, more important still, very proud of him, which with a woman of Alma’s stamp means that her surrender is already a thing to be ranked among certainties. But the circumstances of her home life had been such as to impart to her character a vein of wisdom, of caution, which was considerably beyond her years.“No, Phil—not yet,” she answered, with a little shake of her head; but beneath all the decision of her tone there lay a hidden caress. “This is a summer idyll—a mere holiday. Wait until it is over and life—real life—begins again. No, stop—I won’t have that—here,” she broke off suddenly, springing away from him with a laugh and a blush. “Remember how many people at the hotel have telescopes, not to mention the big one planted out in front of the door. We may constitute an object of special attention at the present moment, for all we know.”Return we to our party now bound for the Mountet hut,viâthe Durand glacier. This was not the first time they had made this expedition, consequently they were able to dispense with a guide—and Fordham, at any rate, had had sufficient previous Alpine experience. The great silent ice river locked within the vast depths of its rock-bound bed rippled in a succession of frozen billows between its lofty mountain walls, the human figures traversing it looking the merest pigmies among the awful vastness of the Alpine solitude. Myriad threads of clear water gurgled with musical murmur through the blue smooth funnels they had worn for themselves in the surface of the ice, which glistened and sparkled in the sunlight in a sea of diamond-like facets. “Tables,” viz, stones of all shapes and sizes heaved up, by the action of the glacier, upon smooth round ice-pedestals—sometimes perfectly wonderful in their resemblance to the real article of furniture—abounded, and here and there the dull hollow roar of some heavier stream plunging between the vertical blue sides of a straight chimney-like shaft, which it had worn to an incredible depth by its action.“What an extremely good-looking fellow that young Orlebar is,” remarked the clergyman, who had been observing the pair some little distance in front.“I can’t say that handsome men are at all to my taste,” replied the elder of the two learned sisters, loyal to a recollection of evenings spent at meetings of various scientific societies in the company of an undersized, round-shouldered professor with a huge head of unkempt hair and a very dandruffy coat-collar. “There is never anything in them. They are invariably empty-headed to a degree.”“And desperately conceited,” put in the younger, acidly.“And this young Orlebar is the most empty-headed and conceited of them all,” rejoined the elder. “I consider him a perfectly odious young man.”“Really? Now, do you know—I—er—I thought him rather a nice fellow,” said the clergyman timidly. “Very pleasant and taking manners, and a perfect gentleman.”“There is no accounting for tastes, of course,” was the severely frigid reply; and the poor parson’s heart sank within him as he wondered whether this sort of thing was to be his lot all day, and whether it would be practicable to cut adrift from his present convoy and effect a juncture with Fordham and the General, now some few score yards in the rear.“Alma dear, who on earth cut those awful Severns into our crowd to-day?” Philip was saying, moved doubtless by that extraordinary coincidence which inspires two people simultaneously with the same idea, though that idea be entirely irrelevant to any subject then under consideration or discussion.Alma laughed.“I think they more than three parts cut themselves in, and having done so, cut in Mr Massiter,” she answered.“Oh, I don’t mind the parson! He’s an inoffensive chap, you know, and a good sort, I think. But those two fearful girls, with their ‘terms’ and their ‘triposes’ and the ‘dear Principal,’ and their shock heads, and ‘quite too-too’ get-up! Faugh! They never open their mouths without saying something tart and disagreeable. I suppose they think it a sign of erudition.”“We mustn’t abuse other people, especially on a day like this—it’s a bad habit to get into. I agree with you though—they might make themselves a little more pleasant. However, they have their use. Didn’t it ever occur to you, you dear, foolish boy, that I may not always care to be the only girl in the party? Though it amounts almost to the same thing, for you never will let any one else come near me.”“No, I won’t,” he assented, cheerfully. “I want you all to myself. It may not last much longer. And—what a time we have had. I would willingly go back and go through it all again.”“But we are not going away to-morrow, or the next day either,” she replied, with a sunny laugh. “We shall have many more such days as this.”“It is perfect!” he continued, now in a low tone. “Almost too perfect to last. When shall we be ever again together like this?”The remark was made without a shadow ofarrière pensée, yet it sounded almost prophetic. Why should it, however? No cloud was in their sky any more than in the firmament of deep blue spreading overhead. No shadow was across their path any more than upon the dazzling snowfields lying aloft in pure and unbroken stretches. The morrow would be but a reproduction of to-day—a heaven of youth and its warm pulsations, of sunny freedom from care, and—of love.And now Fordham’s voice was heard behind.“Hallo, Phil?” it shouted, characteristically addressing the stronger and, in its owner’s opinion, more important and only responsible member of the pair in advance. “Better hold on till we come up. We are getting among theséracs.”They were. Great masses of ice, by the side of which a five-storey house would look puny, were heaving up to the sky. The glacier here made a steep and abrupt drop, falling abroad into wide, lateral chasms—not the black and grim crevasses of bottomless depth into which an army might disappear and leave no trace, such as the smooth, treacherous surface of the uppernévésare seamed with, but awkward rifts for all that, deep enough to break a limb or even a neck. A labyrinthian course along the sharp ice-ridges overhanging these became necessary, and although Philip was armed with the requisite ice-axe and by this time knew how to wield it, Fordham satirically reflected that the mind of a man in the parlous state of his friend was not hung upon a sufficiently even balance to ensure the necessary equilibrium from a material and physical point of view. So he chose to rally his party.A little ordinary caution was necessary, that was all. A little step-cutting now and then, a helping hand for the benefit of the ladies, and they threaded their way in perfect safety among the yawning rifts, the great blueséracstowering up overhead, piled in titanic confusion—here in huge blocks, there standing apart in tall needle-like shafts. One of these suddenly collapsed close to them, falling with an appalling roar, filling the air with a shower of glittering fragments, causing the hard surface to vibrate beneath them with the grinding crash of hundreds of tons of solid ice.“By Jove! What a magnificent sight?” cried the old General. “I wouldn’t have missed that for the world.”“‘He casteth forth His ice like morsels,’” quoted the parson to himself, but not in so low a tone as not to be heard by Alma, becoming aware of which he was conscious of a nervous and guilty start, as of one who had allowed himself to be found preaching out of church. But he had in her no supercilious or scoffing critic.“I think the vastness of this ice-world is the most wonderful thing in Nature, Mr Massiter,” she said.“It is indeed, Miss Wyatt,” was the pleased reply.And then, catching eagerly at this chance of relief from the somewhat depressing spell of the two learned ones, the good man attached himself to her side and engaged her in conversation, not altogether to the satisfaction of Philip, who, relinquishing the entrancing but somewhat boyish amusement of heaving boulders down the smooth, slippery slope of the ice, sprang forward to help her up the narrow, treacherous path of the loose moraine—for they had left the ice now for a short time. Virtue was its own reward, however—it and a stone—which, dislodged by Alma’s foot, came bounding down with a smart whack against the left ankle of the too eager cavalier, evoking from the latter a subdued if involuntary howl, instead of the mental “cuss-word” which we regret to say might have greeted the occurrence had it owned any other author.Steep and toilsome as this little bit of the way was, the two strong-minded ones still found breath enough to discourse to the General—or, rather,throughhimatFordham, upon the never-failing topic, the unqualified inferiority of the other sex, causing that genial veteran to vote them bores of the most virulent kind, and mentally to resolve to dispense with their company at whatever cost on all future expeditions which he might undertake.“Why, you couldn’t get on for a day without us!” said Fordham, bluntly, coming to the rescue. “How would you have got along thoseséracsjust now, for instance, if left to yourselves?”“Life does not wholly consist in crossing glaciers, Mr Fordham,” was the majestic reply.“It runs on a very good parallel with it though. And the fact remains, as I said before. You couldn’t be happy for a day without us.”“Indeed?” said the elder and more acid of the two, with splendid contempt. “Indeed? Don’t you flatter yourself. We could be happy—perfectly happy—all our lives without you.”“That’s fortunate, for I haven’t asked you to be happy all your liveswithme,” answered Fordham, blandly.The green eyes of the learned pair glared—both had green eyes—like those of cats in the dark. There was a suspicious shake in the shapely shoulders of Alma Wyatt, who, with the parson, was leading the way, and the General burst into such a frantic fit of coughing that he seemed in imminent peril of suffocation; while a series of extraordinary sounds, profuse in volume if subdued in tone, emanating from Philip’s broad chest, would have led a sudden arrival upon the scene to imagine that volatile youth to be afflicted with some hitherto undiscovered ailment, lying midway between whooping-cough and the strangles.And now once more, the fall of the glacier surmounted, the great ice-field lay before them in smooth and even expanse. And what a scene of wild and stately grandeur was that vast amphitheatre now opening out. Not a tree, not a shrub in sight; nothing but rocks and ice—a great frozen plain, seamed and crevassed in innumerable cracks, shut in by towering mountains and grim rock-walls, the summits of which were crowned with layers of snow—the perilous “cornice” of the Alpine climber—curling over above the dizzy height—of dazzling whiteness against the deep blue of the heavens. In crescent formation they stood, those stately mountains encircling the glaciers, the snow-flecked hump of the Grand Cornier and the huge and redoubted Dent Blanche, whose ruddy ironstone precipices and grim ice-crownedarêtesglowed in the full midday sunlight with sheeny prismatic gleam; the towering Gabelhorn, and the knife-like point of the Rothhorn soaring away as if to meet the blue firmament itself. Gigantic ice-slopes, swept smooth by the driving gales, shone pearly and silver; and huge overhanging masses of blue ice, where the end of a high glacier had broken off, stood forth a wondrously beautiful contrast in vivid green. But this scene of marvellous grandeur and desolation was not given over to silence, for ever and anon the fall of a mightyséracwould boom forth with a thunderous roar. The ghostly rattle and echo of falling stones high up among those grim precipices was never entirely still, while the hoarse growling of streams cleaving their way far below in the heart of the glacier was as the voices of prisoned giants striving in agonised throes.
“When are we going to begin some real climbing—eh, Phil?”
“Oh, I don’t know. By the way, Fordham, I’m not sure that real high climbing isn’t a mistake. It seems rather a thin thing to put oneself to any amount of unmitigated fag, and go sleeping out under rocks or in huts and in all sorts of beastly places chock full of fleas, and turn out at ungodly hours in the morning—in the middle of the night, rather—merely for the sake of shinning up to the top of some confounded rock that scores of other fellows have shinned up already, and thousands more will. No; I believe there’s far more sense in this sort of thing, and I’m certain it’s far more fun.”
“This sort of thing” being a long day’s expedition of the nature of a picnic, a walk for the most part over the glacier to some point of interest or scenic advantage, which in the present instance was a trip to the Mountet Cabin, a structure erected by the Alpine Club high up among the rocks at the base of the Besso, for the convenience of parties ascending the Rothhorn or traversing one of the several difficult, and more or less dangerous, glacier passes leading into the next valley. The hour was early—before sunrise in fact—and our two friends were threading their way rapidly between the rows of brownchâletswhich constitute the picturesque hamlet of Zinal, intent on overtaking the rest of their party, who had “just strolled quietly on,” a process which in nineteen cases out of twenty may be taken to mean that if the overtaker comes up with the advance guard within a couple of hours, he or she has progressed at a rate by no means pleasant or advisable as the start for a long day’s walk or climb. This instance, however, was the twentieth, for whereas those in advance consisted of General Wyatt and his niece, two learned young ladies with short-cropped hair and spectacles, and a young clergyman, also in spectacles, the athletic pair had no difficulty in overhauling them in a very short time, and that with no inordinate effort.
“Well, Mr Fordham. It isn’t always we poor women who keep everybody waiting,” said Alma, mischievously, as they came up, with a glance at Phil, to whose reluctance to leave his snug couch until the very last moment was due the fact that the party had not started together.
“That’s what comes of doing a good action—one always gets abused for it,” replied Fordham. “If I hadn’t acted as whipper-in you’d never have seen this lazy dog until you were half-way home again.”
“Oh, the poormen! They never can bring themselves to leave their beds. And yet they call themselves the stronger sex,” put in one of the shock-headed young women, who, by virtue of being students at one of the seats of learning recently founded for their sex, looked down as from a lofty pedestal and with sublime pity upon the world at large. “The strong-minded sex, I should have said.”
“Not much use, are they, Miss Severn?” said the parson in playful banter.
“Except when the midnight mouse in the wainscotting suggests burglars, or the booming of the wind in the chimney, bogies,” rejoined Fordham, tranquilly. “In a thunderstorm, too, their presence is apt to be highly reassuring.”
To this the shock-headed one deigned no rejoinder. She and her sister had formed some slight acquaintance with the Wyatts, and had joined them in expeditions similar to the present one; in fact, were rather more glad to do so than the others were that they should. Like too many of their kind they imagined that disagreeable, not to say rude, remarks at the expense of the opposite sex demonstrated the superiority of their own in general, and such representatives of it as devoted their minds to conic sections in particular.
Nothing, as a rule, is more depressing to the poor creatures of an effete civilisation than an early morning start. Than the hour of summer sunrise in the Alps, however, nothing is more exhilarating. The cool, fresh, bracing air, the statuesque grandeur of the great mountains, the dash and sparkle of the swirling stream, the mingling aromatic fragrances distilling from opening wild flowers and resinous pines—it is a glimpse of fairyland, a very tonic to heart and brain, a reservoir of nerve power to limb and system.
And now beyond the huge projecting shoulder of the Alpe d’Arpitetta the rays of the newly-risen sun were flooding the snowfields with a golden radiancy. No more shade directly. But the air was crisp, and the sky of cloudless beauty. To two of those present it was but the beginning of a glowing halcyon day—one among many. Nearly a fortnight had gone by since their arrival, a fortnight spent in similar fashion—one day succeeding another, spent from dawn to dark amid the sublimest scenes of Nature on her most inspiring scale.
Philip Orlebar, the mercurial, the careless, had undergone a marked change. And it was a change which affected him for the better, was that brought about by this crisis of his life, in that it seemed to impart a not wholly unneeded ballast to his otherwise line character, a dignity to his demeanour which became him well, the more so that there was the stamp of a great and settled happiness upon his face, and in the straight, sunny glance of the clear eyes, that was goodly to look upon. The Fire of the Live Coal burnt bright and clear.
“Alma, darling, why not let me say something to your uncle now instead of waiting until you go home again?” he said one day, when they were scrambling about among the rocks in search of the coveted edelweiss. “Then I shall feel that you do really belong to me.”
She looked at him for a moment—looked at him standing over her in his straight youthful strength and patrician beauty, and hesitated. She was growing very fond of him, and, more important still, very proud of him, which with a woman of Alma’s stamp means that her surrender is already a thing to be ranked among certainties. But the circumstances of her home life had been such as to impart to her character a vein of wisdom, of caution, which was considerably beyond her years.
“No, Phil—not yet,” she answered, with a little shake of her head; but beneath all the decision of her tone there lay a hidden caress. “This is a summer idyll—a mere holiday. Wait until it is over and life—real life—begins again. No, stop—I won’t have that—here,” she broke off suddenly, springing away from him with a laugh and a blush. “Remember how many people at the hotel have telescopes, not to mention the big one planted out in front of the door. We may constitute an object of special attention at the present moment, for all we know.”
Return we to our party now bound for the Mountet hut,viâthe Durand glacier. This was not the first time they had made this expedition, consequently they were able to dispense with a guide—and Fordham, at any rate, had had sufficient previous Alpine experience. The great silent ice river locked within the vast depths of its rock-bound bed rippled in a succession of frozen billows between its lofty mountain walls, the human figures traversing it looking the merest pigmies among the awful vastness of the Alpine solitude. Myriad threads of clear water gurgled with musical murmur through the blue smooth funnels they had worn for themselves in the surface of the ice, which glistened and sparkled in the sunlight in a sea of diamond-like facets. “Tables,” viz, stones of all shapes and sizes heaved up, by the action of the glacier, upon smooth round ice-pedestals—sometimes perfectly wonderful in their resemblance to the real article of furniture—abounded, and here and there the dull hollow roar of some heavier stream plunging between the vertical blue sides of a straight chimney-like shaft, which it had worn to an incredible depth by its action.
“What an extremely good-looking fellow that young Orlebar is,” remarked the clergyman, who had been observing the pair some little distance in front.
“I can’t say that handsome men are at all to my taste,” replied the elder of the two learned sisters, loyal to a recollection of evenings spent at meetings of various scientific societies in the company of an undersized, round-shouldered professor with a huge head of unkempt hair and a very dandruffy coat-collar. “There is never anything in them. They are invariably empty-headed to a degree.”
“And desperately conceited,” put in the younger, acidly.
“And this young Orlebar is the most empty-headed and conceited of them all,” rejoined the elder. “I consider him a perfectly odious young man.”
“Really? Now, do you know—I—er—I thought him rather a nice fellow,” said the clergyman timidly. “Very pleasant and taking manners, and a perfect gentleman.”
“There is no accounting for tastes, of course,” was the severely frigid reply; and the poor parson’s heart sank within him as he wondered whether this sort of thing was to be his lot all day, and whether it would be practicable to cut adrift from his present convoy and effect a juncture with Fordham and the General, now some few score yards in the rear.
“Alma dear, who on earth cut those awful Severns into our crowd to-day?” Philip was saying, moved doubtless by that extraordinary coincidence which inspires two people simultaneously with the same idea, though that idea be entirely irrelevant to any subject then under consideration or discussion.
Alma laughed.
“I think they more than three parts cut themselves in, and having done so, cut in Mr Massiter,” she answered.
“Oh, I don’t mind the parson! He’s an inoffensive chap, you know, and a good sort, I think. But those two fearful girls, with their ‘terms’ and their ‘triposes’ and the ‘dear Principal,’ and their shock heads, and ‘quite too-too’ get-up! Faugh! They never open their mouths without saying something tart and disagreeable. I suppose they think it a sign of erudition.”
“We mustn’t abuse other people, especially on a day like this—it’s a bad habit to get into. I agree with you though—they might make themselves a little more pleasant. However, they have their use. Didn’t it ever occur to you, you dear, foolish boy, that I may not always care to be the only girl in the party? Though it amounts almost to the same thing, for you never will let any one else come near me.”
“No, I won’t,” he assented, cheerfully. “I want you all to myself. It may not last much longer. And—what a time we have had. I would willingly go back and go through it all again.”
“But we are not going away to-morrow, or the next day either,” she replied, with a sunny laugh. “We shall have many more such days as this.”
“It is perfect!” he continued, now in a low tone. “Almost too perfect to last. When shall we be ever again together like this?”
The remark was made without a shadow ofarrière pensée, yet it sounded almost prophetic. Why should it, however? No cloud was in their sky any more than in the firmament of deep blue spreading overhead. No shadow was across their path any more than upon the dazzling snowfields lying aloft in pure and unbroken stretches. The morrow would be but a reproduction of to-day—a heaven of youth and its warm pulsations, of sunny freedom from care, and—of love.
And now Fordham’s voice was heard behind.
“Hallo, Phil?” it shouted, characteristically addressing the stronger and, in its owner’s opinion, more important and only responsible member of the pair in advance. “Better hold on till we come up. We are getting among theséracs.”
They were. Great masses of ice, by the side of which a five-storey house would look puny, were heaving up to the sky. The glacier here made a steep and abrupt drop, falling abroad into wide, lateral chasms—not the black and grim crevasses of bottomless depth into which an army might disappear and leave no trace, such as the smooth, treacherous surface of the uppernévésare seamed with, but awkward rifts for all that, deep enough to break a limb or even a neck. A labyrinthian course along the sharp ice-ridges overhanging these became necessary, and although Philip was armed with the requisite ice-axe and by this time knew how to wield it, Fordham satirically reflected that the mind of a man in the parlous state of his friend was not hung upon a sufficiently even balance to ensure the necessary equilibrium from a material and physical point of view. So he chose to rally his party.
A little ordinary caution was necessary, that was all. A little step-cutting now and then, a helping hand for the benefit of the ladies, and they threaded their way in perfect safety among the yawning rifts, the great blueséracstowering up overhead, piled in titanic confusion—here in huge blocks, there standing apart in tall needle-like shafts. One of these suddenly collapsed close to them, falling with an appalling roar, filling the air with a shower of glittering fragments, causing the hard surface to vibrate beneath them with the grinding crash of hundreds of tons of solid ice.
“By Jove! What a magnificent sight?” cried the old General. “I wouldn’t have missed that for the world.”
“‘He casteth forth His ice like morsels,’” quoted the parson to himself, but not in so low a tone as not to be heard by Alma, becoming aware of which he was conscious of a nervous and guilty start, as of one who had allowed himself to be found preaching out of church. But he had in her no supercilious or scoffing critic.
“I think the vastness of this ice-world is the most wonderful thing in Nature, Mr Massiter,” she said.
“It is indeed, Miss Wyatt,” was the pleased reply.
And then, catching eagerly at this chance of relief from the somewhat depressing spell of the two learned ones, the good man attached himself to her side and engaged her in conversation, not altogether to the satisfaction of Philip, who, relinquishing the entrancing but somewhat boyish amusement of heaving boulders down the smooth, slippery slope of the ice, sprang forward to help her up the narrow, treacherous path of the loose moraine—for they had left the ice now for a short time. Virtue was its own reward, however—it and a stone—which, dislodged by Alma’s foot, came bounding down with a smart whack against the left ankle of the too eager cavalier, evoking from the latter a subdued if involuntary howl, instead of the mental “cuss-word” which we regret to say might have greeted the occurrence had it owned any other author.
Steep and toilsome as this little bit of the way was, the two strong-minded ones still found breath enough to discourse to the General—or, rather,throughhimatFordham, upon the never-failing topic, the unqualified inferiority of the other sex, causing that genial veteran to vote them bores of the most virulent kind, and mentally to resolve to dispense with their company at whatever cost on all future expeditions which he might undertake.
“Why, you couldn’t get on for a day without us!” said Fordham, bluntly, coming to the rescue. “How would you have got along thoseséracsjust now, for instance, if left to yourselves?”
“Life does not wholly consist in crossing glaciers, Mr Fordham,” was the majestic reply.
“It runs on a very good parallel with it though. And the fact remains, as I said before. You couldn’t be happy for a day without us.”
“Indeed?” said the elder and more acid of the two, with splendid contempt. “Indeed? Don’t you flatter yourself. We could be happy—perfectly happy—all our lives without you.”
“That’s fortunate, for I haven’t asked you to be happy all your liveswithme,” answered Fordham, blandly.
The green eyes of the learned pair glared—both had green eyes—like those of cats in the dark. There was a suspicious shake in the shapely shoulders of Alma Wyatt, who, with the parson, was leading the way, and the General burst into such a frantic fit of coughing that he seemed in imminent peril of suffocation; while a series of extraordinary sounds, profuse in volume if subdued in tone, emanating from Philip’s broad chest, would have led a sudden arrival upon the scene to imagine that volatile youth to be afflicted with some hitherto undiscovered ailment, lying midway between whooping-cough and the strangles.
And now once more, the fall of the glacier surmounted, the great ice-field lay before them in smooth and even expanse. And what a scene of wild and stately grandeur was that vast amphitheatre now opening out. Not a tree, not a shrub in sight; nothing but rocks and ice—a great frozen plain, seamed and crevassed in innumerable cracks, shut in by towering mountains and grim rock-walls, the summits of which were crowned with layers of snow—the perilous “cornice” of the Alpine climber—curling over above the dizzy height—of dazzling whiteness against the deep blue of the heavens. In crescent formation they stood, those stately mountains encircling the glaciers, the snow-flecked hump of the Grand Cornier and the huge and redoubted Dent Blanche, whose ruddy ironstone precipices and grim ice-crownedarêtesglowed in the full midday sunlight with sheeny prismatic gleam; the towering Gabelhorn, and the knife-like point of the Rothhorn soaring away as if to meet the blue firmament itself. Gigantic ice-slopes, swept smooth by the driving gales, shone pearly and silver; and huge overhanging masses of blue ice, where the end of a high glacier had broken off, stood forth a wondrously beautiful contrast in vivid green. But this scene of marvellous grandeur and desolation was not given over to silence, for ever and anon the fall of a mightyséracwould boom forth with a thunderous roar. The ghostly rattle and echo of falling stones high up among those grim precipices was never entirely still, while the hoarse growling of streams cleaving their way far below in the heart of the glacier was as the voices of prisoned giants striving in agonised throes.
Chapter Seventeen.The Writing on the Wall.Not less imposing was the wild magnificence of this panorama as viewed from the Mountet cabin, which, from its eyrie-like position high up among the rocks, commanded the whole vast ice-amphitheatre. The last climb, after leaving the glacier, had been a steep and trying one, and to most of the party, at any rate, the first consideration on reaching their goal was a twofold one—rest and lunch.“I suppose you don’t get much sleep in these places, eh, Fordham?” said the General, looking round upon the plank shelves which, plentifully covered with straw, constituted the sleeping places. From the beams above hung rugs of a heavy, coarse texture.“It depends on a good many things—the absence of fleas, or of a crowd. When there are three or four parties, with their guides, going the same way or coinciding here for the night, a box like this is apt to get crowded and the air thick.”“It is wonderfully ingenious,” said Alma, taking in the solidity of the building and its contrivances for safety and comfort—every stick of which had to be dragged up there by mules and porters. “Where did they sleep before these cabins were built?”“Under the rocks. Picked out a sheltered corner and rolled in. A coldish sort of a bedroom too,” answered Fordham.“And all for the sake of getting to the top of a peak that a hundred other fools have been up already, and a thousand more will go up afterwards,” struck in the flippant Phil. “Throw one of those hard-boiled eggs at me, Fordham. Thanks.”“Is not that kind of reasoning—er—somewhat fatal to all enterprise?” said the parson.“There is little enterprise, as such, in all this Alp climbing,” interrupted one of the learned young women before anybody could reply. “Not one in a hundred of all the men who spend summer after summer mountaineering ever thinks of benefiting his species by his experiences. No branch of science is the gainer by it, for the poor creature is lamentably ignorant of science in any branch—almost that such a thing exists, in fact. To him a mountain is—a mountain, and nothing more—”“But—what in the world else should it be, Miss Severn?” said Philip.”—Just so many thousand feet to go up,” continued the oracle, severely ignoring the flippant interruptor.“Or so many thousand feet to come down—and then return home in a sack,” said the latter, wickedly.“Just one more peak to add to the number he can already boast of having scaled. Nobody the gainer by it. Grand opportunities thrown away. The only end effected, the aggravation of one man’s already inflated conceit.”“I don’t know about nobody being the gainer by it, Miss Severn,” said the General. “I am disposed to think this rage for mountaineering by no means a bad thing—in fact a distinctly good one, as anything that calls forth pluck, determination, and endurance is bound to be. Now, by the time a man has done two or three of these gentry there,” with a wave of the hand in the direction of the surrounding peaks, “his nerve is likely to be in pretty good order, and his training and condition not very deficient. No, I don’t agree with you at all, Miss Severn.”“The guides are very considerably the gainers by it, too,” said Fordham—“the gainers by enough cash to tide them comfortably through the winter.”“These are all very secondary considerations,” was the lofty rejoinder. “Nobody touches my point after all. General Wyatt thinks that the object of penetrating the wonders of these stupendous ice-worlds has been gained when a man has got himself into the hard muscular training of a mere brutal prize-fighter; while Mr Fordham thinks it quite sufficient if a few hundred francs find their way into the pockets of a few Swiss peasants. But what does science gain by it? Of course I except the researches of such men as Tyndall—but they are the rare exceptions.” And the speaker looked around as if challenging a reply. She was disappointed, however. Nobody seemed to think it worth their while to undertake one. Presently Fordham said—“It has often been remarked that we are not a logical nation. Hardly a day passes without emphasising that fact to the ordinarily wide-awake observer.”“How so? Please explain. I don’t quite follow you,” said Miss Severn, briskly, fiercely elate that her challenge had been taken up.“Well, we British are perennially grumbling at our abominably cold climate—winter all the year round, and so forth; and yet during the few weeks of summer vouchsafed to us away we rush to places like this, and stow ourselves as close to the snow and ice as we possibly can.”“I—I really don’t see the connection,” said the would-be debater, in tart mystification. “Isn’t that rather a pointless remark—not to say irrelevant?”“Oh, no. If anything, the reverse,” answered Fordham, tranquilly. “The idea was suggested by seeing several of us shiver, and it naturally occurred to me that we had probably sat as long as was safe if we wanted to avoid catching cold. For present purposes it may be taken to mean that we should be wise to think of going down, still wiser to go down and take the thinking as thought. What do you say, General?”“I agree with you, Fordham. It doesn’t do to sit too long in this sharp air, after getting heated coming up, too.”So the wisdom of the elders prevailed, and the party started upon the homeward way. Philip having found a long, steep snow-shoot, preferred the risky delights of aglissadeto the more sober and gradual descent of a series of zig-zags. But the snow was soft, with the result that when half-way the adventurous one went head over heels, convulsing with mirth those who witnessed his frantic flounderings from the security of the zig-zag footpath aforesaid. Meanwhile the two erudite damsels were confiding to the parson their rooted conviction that Fordham was the most abominably disagreeable man they had ever met—which view, however, being that of the bulk of their sex on the same subject, was neither original nor striking.And then as they gained the level of the glacier once more, again the wily Phil managed to pair off—to straggle indeed considerably from the main body—to straggle away almost to the base of the huge cliffs of the Grand Cornier. Here crevasses began to open in all directions—real ones, yawning black in the glistening surface.“By Jove! look at that!” cried Phil, as a huge rift came into view right across the way they were following. It was overhung by a wreath of frozen snow, and the “lip” thus formed was fringed and festooned with gleaming icicles. It was a lovely and at the same time forbidding spectacle, as the sunlight fell upon the myriad smooth needles of ice—catching the star-like facets in gleaming scintillation—playing upon the translucent walls of the chasm in many a prismatic ray—roseate and gold, and richest azure. Then, below, the black, cold depths, as of the bottomless pit.“It is splendid, but gruesome,” said Alma, peering tentatively into the silent depths—a process which needed a steadying, not to say supporting, hand. “I wonder how deep it is.”“It’s a pity, in the interests of science—but on that ground alone—that we haven’t got our two learned friends along,” said Philip, proceeding to roll a big stone, of which there were several on the surface of the glacier, to the brink. “They could locate the depth by the time it takes to fall. Now, listen!”He rolled over the stone. It was a large one, and spoke volumes for his excellent condition that he was able to move it at all. There was a crash and a shatter like the breaking of glass, as it crushed through the fringe of icicles—then a long pause, followed by a far-away and hollow clang.“What an awful depth,” said Alma, with a shudder, instinctively drawing back. “Wait!” warned Philip. “There it goes again!” Another clang—this time very faint, together with a ghostly rumbling roar as the prisoned echo strove to break free—told that the crevasse was of appalling depth, even if its bottom was yet reached. The listeners looked at each other.“Not much chance once over this little bit of crushed snow,” said Philip, breaking away the overhanging edge with the end of his ice-axe.“Horrible!” rejoined Alma, with a shudder. “Now I think we had better go back to the others, for it seems to me we are getting more and more in among the crevasses, and it must be a trifle dangerous.”It was even as she said. The whole surface of the glacier was seamed and criss-crossed with yawning rifts—many of them like the one before them—of unknown depth. To a fairly experienced man, and one of average gumption withal, the situation would have held no obstacle. To such the lay of the glacier would have been understood, and he could have threaded his way to safer ground without difficulty. But Philip was not experienced in Alpine features, and there was just a little too much of the bull-at-a-gate about his disposition for him to supplement this lack by ordinary prudence. So they got deeper and deeper into the labyrinth—and moreover the sun was already shut out behind the towering mountain walls rearing up immediately overhead.Under these circumstances neither of the pair was sorry to hear a shout, and to make out a figure approaching at some distance over the ice.“It’s Fordham,” cried Phil. “He’ll show us the right line. He’s about as good as a professional guide.”Not the least lovable trait in Philip Orlebar’s character was his perfect readiness to yield to another’s superior knowledge, and this he was wont to do, not grudgingly or as one making a concession, but fully, frankly, and as a matter of course. It did not, for instance, occur to him that his fortnight of knocking about among the mountains and glaciers in the neighbourhood of Zinal—said knocking about being mostly in picnic fashion, as in the present case—had rendered his experience a trifle superior to that of Fordham, who had done a good deal of serious Alpine climbing in times past; and in stating this we are not dealing with so obvious a truism as the uninitiated would assume. For to many of his age and temperament that very thing would have occurred, and does occur, not infrequently to their own ultimate discomfiture if not disaster. We speak of that which we know.Philip therefore hailed the advent of his friend with genuine pleasure, not to say relief. But the other in no wise reciprocated that warming sentiment. He didn’t see any fun in coming about two miles out of his way—and towards the end of the day, too—in order to benefit two people whom he had every reason to suppose would be wishing him in Halifax all the time.“Tired of life already, Miss Wyatt?” he said sourly, as he came up, pointing to a great black crevasse the two were gingerly skirting. “Or do you want to anticipate death, and defeating his ravages and decay, ensure remaining beautiful for ever, although within the depths of a glacier?”“What a weird style of compliment,” answered Alma, with a little laugh. “But any sort of compliment coming from Mr Fordham should be duly treasured.”“Well, there’s a far weirder fact underlying it. Look here! If you knew there were half a dozen even indifferent shots posted behind yonderséracspractising at you with rifles, I believe you’d think your run of life was held on exceedingly frail and uncertain tenure. Well, left to yourselves here, the same tenure is a good deal more uncertain than it would be under the other contingency—you two poor greenhorns.”“Oh, come; I say, Fordham?” exclaimed Philip, deprecatorily. But Alma broke into a ringing laugh.“You think it a laughing matter, do you?” went on Fordham. “Now you wouldn’t think that a dozen steps further of the line you’re following would perform your own funerals? You’d never be seen again.”“Now you’re cramming us, old chap,” said Philip, airily, surveying the white unbroken surface in front.“Am I? Very well. Now, look.”He counted exactly ten paces forward, then halted, advanced half a pace, and holding his ice-axe by the head, drove the point into the surface. In it went without resistance, as far as he allowed it to, which was almost to the head. Then working it round he made a hole about half a yard in diameter.“Come, now, and look.” He went on cautiously knocking away more of the snow-crust.They obeyed, and in a moment were peering through the hole into black depths. The sheeny surface of the opposite ice-wall glared at them through the aperture as with the disappointed glare of the eye of some evil beast baulked of its prey.“By Jove!” cried Philip, aghast. “You never spoke a truer word, Fordham. There would have been an end of us, sure enough. But I say, old chap, how on earth did you know there was a crevasse there—a dev—, hum—I mean an awful one it is, too? There’s no sign or difference of colour in the surface.”“I knew that there was bound to be one by the lay of the land. Now look,” he went on, pointing to the main crevasse, which yawned broadly parallel to the line they were pursuing, and out of which a lateral one sprung, and seeming to change its mind, had abruptly terminated—apparently so, at any rate. “I knew that this other crack wasn’t going to end there, although it seems to; it was too deep to start with. Consequently I knew that it was bound to run a considerable wayunderthe surface, and so it does. A dozen more steps, I repeat, and one or both of you would have disappeared for ever.”“By Jove!” ejaculated Phil again, in mingled admiration and dismay, while Alma shuddered, as she gazed into the ghastly death-trap with a horrible fascination.“At the same time you’re wrong in saying there is no sign or difference of colour in the surface,” went on Fordham. “There is the last—faint I admit—but quite enough to catch a practised eye. And now, while we are prosing away here, the other people are waiting for us over on themoraineyonder. So keep close behind me, and let’s get out of this.”Under such able and experienced pilotage they soon got clear of the more dangerous part of the glacier—doubling and zigzaging in the most labyrinthine fashion to avoid perils hidden or displayed.“You can’t afford to go playing about among bottomless pits in any such careless way, Phil, still more among masked deathtraps like some of those we passed,” said Fordham, as they drew near their party. “So if you must go skylarking on dangerous ground, you’d better have some one with you who knows the ropes rather more than you do, and not rather less.”But this recollection of peril past added something of a spice to the keen enjoyment of a delightful day as they took their way homeward. And then, as they left the wild wilderness of rocks and ice behind, the great silent glaciers and piled masses of ruggedmoraine, the westering sunlight flushing upon the soaring peaks as with a glow of fire, to these two it meant one more day closing as it had begun—in a golden unearthly beauty—closing into a brief night, which in its turn should soon melt into another glowing day, even as this one which had just fled. But—would it?“Two people have arrived, sir,” said the head waiter, meeting Philip in the hall. “Dey ask for you, sir, first thing. One gentleman and lady.”“Gentleman and lady?” echoed Phil, in amazement. “Who the deuce can it be? Who are they, Franz?”“I not know, sir. Dey ask first for you; then they ask if we cannot send messenger to find you. I tell them you away to the Mountet cabin—you come back quick as the messenger.”“The deuce! Who can it be? By Jove—of course! The governor and her ladyship! It’ll be right good getting the old man out here. Don’t know about her ladyship though,” he parenthesised, dubiously. “Where are they, Franz?”“Here we are, Philip,” cried a masculine voice, which was certainly not that of Sir Francis Orlebar, and a hand dropped upon his shoulder with would-be cordiality.The recipient of this unceremonious salute started as if he had been shot. Then he turned—turned with what cordiality he could muster, to confront the speaker.The latter was an elderly man of portentous aspect, ruddy of countenance, and keen of eye. A thick white beard hid the lower half of his face, and a crop of bristling white hair adorned his summit, which last, however, was now concealed by a large pith helmet and puggaree. He wore a great expanse of waistcoat, covering a redundancy of person which went far towards bearing out his sleek and aggressively prosperous appearance. He looked the sort of man who would be a law unto a roomful—the sort of man whose thumbs would oft seek the armholes of his waistcoat. He looked what he was—the prosperous, comfortable British merchant who had begun life a good deal lower down than that. But he did not look what he was not—viz, a gentleman.“Why, how d’you do, Mr Glover?” blurted out Philip at last. “Who on earth would have thought of seeing you here?”“Aha! who’d have thought it, indeed! But the little girl wouldn’t give me any peace. Said you hadn’t written to her for so long she didn’t know what had become of you, and we’d better go and see. So we left the rest of them at St. Swithins and started off, and here we are. Why, where is she? Edie—where have you got to?”“All right, dad; here I am,” and the owner of the voice emerged from the bureau, where she had been arranging about rooms. “Why Phil, dear, thisisnice!” she went on, advancing upon him with extended hand and a would-be effective blush.“Ha ha!” chuckled the old man. “She wouldn’t give me any peace until I brought her here. Now you’ll find plenty to talk about, I’ll warrant.”Heavens! this was fearful. The feelings of a wild bull in a net must be placidity itself compared with those of poor Philip on finding himself thus cornered and publicly taken possession of. Every soul in the hotel was getting the benefit of these effusive and affectionate greetings, for it was just that time beforetable d’hôtewhen everybody was coming in to change, and every head was more or less turned for a glance at the new-comers as its owner passed by. Why Alma herself, who was standing talking to some other ladies in the hall, was well within hearing! What would she think? What sort of construction would she put upon all the affection wherewith these people were bespattering him? Heavens! what would she think?Ha! there was Fordham. Capital! He would plant the new arrivals upon him.“Hullo, Fordham!” he sung out, as his friend at that moment passed through the hall. “I want to introduce you to Mr Glover here; just arrived, you know. Miss Glover—Mr Fordham. Knows the country like a book,” he went on, desperately.But this manoeuvre, so far from helping him had precisely the opposite effect; for the old man, with effusive cordiality, at once buttonholed Fordham, leaving the girl free to take possession of Phil.Well, what then? To all appearances the situation was the very reverse of an unenviable one—indeed, more than one man passing through the hall at the time looked upon the ill-starred Philip with eyes of downright envy as he grumbled to himself, “Is that conceited ass Orlebar going to monopolise every pretty girl who comes near the place?” Poor Phil! how willingly he would have yielded up this one to the attentions of each and all who might choose to offer them.In one particular they were right. Edith Glover was a very pretty girl. She had large blue eyes, and profuse brown hair falling in a natural wavy fringe around her brows. She had a clear complexion, regular features, and a bright, laughing expression. She was of medium height, had a good figure, and dressed well. But with all these advantages she lacked one thing, in common with her father, and that was the hallmark of birth. There was no mistake about it. With all her engaging prettiness and tasteful attire there was this one thing painfully, obviously lacking. She would have looked far more in keeping—and therefore possibly more attractive—in the cap, apron, and print dress of a housemaid, and her speech would have agreed thereto.It is an accepted saying that the letter “h” constitutes a crucial shibboleth to the individual of dubious birth and British nationality; but there is another letter to which this applies with almost equal force, and that is the letter “a”. Now the first letter of the alphabet as enunciated by Edith Glover sounded uncommonly like the ninth—to wit, the letter “i.”“We will sit together at table, dear, of course,” she murmured, sweetly, with a killing glance into his eyes.“Um—ah—er,” mumbled Philip. “Awful sorry, but afraid our end of the table’s full up—in fact, crowded.”“Oh, but you can come down to ours.”“Er—hardly. You see I’m with some people—very jolly party—came up here together. Can’t desert them, don’t you know.”Edith Glover had a temper, but now she judiciously dropped her eyes so that he should not see the expression which had come into them.“Oh, well,” she said, with a little pout, and heaving up an attempt at a sob for the occasion; “of course, if you prefer to be with other people, when I have made Pa bring me all this way because I couldn’t bear to be away from you any longer, I—I—” And the heave became very much more pronounced.“This is gaudy!” thought Philip to himself. “They have been pretty well giving me away for the benefit of the whole hotel already, and now she is going to scare up a scenepro bono publico. A scene, by Jove!” he reflected, in dismay. And then, at this additional indication of her want of breeding, he felt hardened. Fancy Alma, for instance, making such an exhibition of her feelings in public! and this idea brought with it a dire foreboding—what if he were to undergo some private but unmistakable indication of Alma’s feelings, as a sequel to this abominablecontretemps!Just then the dinner-bell rang.“There goes the second bell, and I’m still in my nailed boots and climbing gear. We left at six this morning, you know, to go up to the Mountet Hut, and are only just back,” he added, with forced gaiety and unconcern. “I must really go and change. Sha’n’t be down till dinner is half over as it is.”“Friends of yours, those new arrivals, aren’t they, Philip?” said the General, soon after the latter had taken his seat.“They are some people I used to know down at Henley. They had a big riverside place there, and gave dances.”“What a pretty girl!” said Mrs Wyatt, putting up her glasses to look over at the objects under discussion, who were seated at another table at the further end of the room. “Isn’t she, Mr Fordham?”“I’m afraid I’m not a competent judge on that point,” was the reply.“Mr Fordham won’t be betrayed into saying anything in favour of any of us,” said Alma, maliciously.Poor Philip was in a state of mind which even his worst enemy might have commiserated. He had, with quick instinct, grasped the certainty that all was changed. There was a touch of frostiness in Alma’s manner that betokened this only too plainly. Her serenity was absolutely unruffled, she was as brightly conversational as ever; but there was just that in her manner towards himself, imperceptible however to others, which told him only too unmistakably that the barrier was reared between them. Was she not within earshot during the horrible obtrusive suddenness of this most inopportune meeting! Her woman’s wit had been prompt to put two and two together. He was done for.Still he would not give up without a struggle. He would tell her all. She might see extenuating circumstances, and then—oh, he hardly dared think of a contingency so entrancing. Now was the time. He would dodge those hateful Glovers somehow, and get her to come out with him for that short twilight stroll which they two, in common with nearly everybody in the hotel, were in the habit of taking almost every night aftertable d’hôte.“Which way shall we go to-night, Alma?” he said softly, as she rose from the table.She paused and turned her glance upon him, her eyes full on his.“Don’t you think you ought to go and do the civil to your—friends? I do,” she said. And without another word she left him—left him quickly and decisively, her very action, her manner of performing it, laying upon him a curt prohibition to follow.Philip, however, did not obey her injunction as regarded the Glovers. Avoiding those ill-omened persons, he stole away into the darkness, choosing the most hilly, and therefore, to after-dinner promenaders, unfrequented way. There, in company with his pipe and his thoughts, he wandered, and the latter were very bitter. He saw through the situation only too clearly. There was no exaggerating the magnitude of the disaster. The Glovers were not the sort of people to hide their grievance under a bushel. Every one in the hotel would promptly be made free of it. Alma would never forgive him for putting upon her—however unintentionally—the most unpardonable slight of all—a public slight. No. It was the one unpardonable sin. She would never forgive it.His estimate of the Glovers proved singularly accurate. Stung by his defection, his marked neglect of her—seeing, moreover, with woman’s instinct the real lay of the land—the fair Edith had by no means buried the secret of her relationship towards Philip within her own breast. Before bedtime it was whispered all over the hotel that the pretty girl who had arrived that evening was no other than hisfiancée, whom he had heartlessly jilted in favour of Miss Wyatt.No; assuredly this was not a thing that Alma was likely to forgive.
Not less imposing was the wild magnificence of this panorama as viewed from the Mountet cabin, which, from its eyrie-like position high up among the rocks, commanded the whole vast ice-amphitheatre. The last climb, after leaving the glacier, had been a steep and trying one, and to most of the party, at any rate, the first consideration on reaching their goal was a twofold one—rest and lunch.
“I suppose you don’t get much sleep in these places, eh, Fordham?” said the General, looking round upon the plank shelves which, plentifully covered with straw, constituted the sleeping places. From the beams above hung rugs of a heavy, coarse texture.
“It depends on a good many things—the absence of fleas, or of a crowd. When there are three or four parties, with their guides, going the same way or coinciding here for the night, a box like this is apt to get crowded and the air thick.”
“It is wonderfully ingenious,” said Alma, taking in the solidity of the building and its contrivances for safety and comfort—every stick of which had to be dragged up there by mules and porters. “Where did they sleep before these cabins were built?”
“Under the rocks. Picked out a sheltered corner and rolled in. A coldish sort of a bedroom too,” answered Fordham.
“And all for the sake of getting to the top of a peak that a hundred other fools have been up already, and a thousand more will go up afterwards,” struck in the flippant Phil. “Throw one of those hard-boiled eggs at me, Fordham. Thanks.”
“Is not that kind of reasoning—er—somewhat fatal to all enterprise?” said the parson.
“There is little enterprise, as such, in all this Alp climbing,” interrupted one of the learned young women before anybody could reply. “Not one in a hundred of all the men who spend summer after summer mountaineering ever thinks of benefiting his species by his experiences. No branch of science is the gainer by it, for the poor creature is lamentably ignorant of science in any branch—almost that such a thing exists, in fact. To him a mountain is—a mountain, and nothing more—”
“But—what in the world else should it be, Miss Severn?” said Philip.
”—Just so many thousand feet to go up,” continued the oracle, severely ignoring the flippant interruptor.
“Or so many thousand feet to come down—and then return home in a sack,” said the latter, wickedly.
“Just one more peak to add to the number he can already boast of having scaled. Nobody the gainer by it. Grand opportunities thrown away. The only end effected, the aggravation of one man’s already inflated conceit.”
“I don’t know about nobody being the gainer by it, Miss Severn,” said the General. “I am disposed to think this rage for mountaineering by no means a bad thing—in fact a distinctly good one, as anything that calls forth pluck, determination, and endurance is bound to be. Now, by the time a man has done two or three of these gentry there,” with a wave of the hand in the direction of the surrounding peaks, “his nerve is likely to be in pretty good order, and his training and condition not very deficient. No, I don’t agree with you at all, Miss Severn.”
“The guides are very considerably the gainers by it, too,” said Fordham—“the gainers by enough cash to tide them comfortably through the winter.”
“These are all very secondary considerations,” was the lofty rejoinder. “Nobody touches my point after all. General Wyatt thinks that the object of penetrating the wonders of these stupendous ice-worlds has been gained when a man has got himself into the hard muscular training of a mere brutal prize-fighter; while Mr Fordham thinks it quite sufficient if a few hundred francs find their way into the pockets of a few Swiss peasants. But what does science gain by it? Of course I except the researches of such men as Tyndall—but they are the rare exceptions.” And the speaker looked around as if challenging a reply. She was disappointed, however. Nobody seemed to think it worth their while to undertake one. Presently Fordham said—
“It has often been remarked that we are not a logical nation. Hardly a day passes without emphasising that fact to the ordinarily wide-awake observer.”
“How so? Please explain. I don’t quite follow you,” said Miss Severn, briskly, fiercely elate that her challenge had been taken up.
“Well, we British are perennially grumbling at our abominably cold climate—winter all the year round, and so forth; and yet during the few weeks of summer vouchsafed to us away we rush to places like this, and stow ourselves as close to the snow and ice as we possibly can.”
“I—I really don’t see the connection,” said the would-be debater, in tart mystification. “Isn’t that rather a pointless remark—not to say irrelevant?”
“Oh, no. If anything, the reverse,” answered Fordham, tranquilly. “The idea was suggested by seeing several of us shiver, and it naturally occurred to me that we had probably sat as long as was safe if we wanted to avoid catching cold. For present purposes it may be taken to mean that we should be wise to think of going down, still wiser to go down and take the thinking as thought. What do you say, General?”
“I agree with you, Fordham. It doesn’t do to sit too long in this sharp air, after getting heated coming up, too.”
So the wisdom of the elders prevailed, and the party started upon the homeward way. Philip having found a long, steep snow-shoot, preferred the risky delights of aglissadeto the more sober and gradual descent of a series of zig-zags. But the snow was soft, with the result that when half-way the adventurous one went head over heels, convulsing with mirth those who witnessed his frantic flounderings from the security of the zig-zag footpath aforesaid. Meanwhile the two erudite damsels were confiding to the parson their rooted conviction that Fordham was the most abominably disagreeable man they had ever met—which view, however, being that of the bulk of their sex on the same subject, was neither original nor striking.
And then as they gained the level of the glacier once more, again the wily Phil managed to pair off—to straggle indeed considerably from the main body—to straggle away almost to the base of the huge cliffs of the Grand Cornier. Here crevasses began to open in all directions—real ones, yawning black in the glistening surface.
“By Jove! look at that!” cried Phil, as a huge rift came into view right across the way they were following. It was overhung by a wreath of frozen snow, and the “lip” thus formed was fringed and festooned with gleaming icicles. It was a lovely and at the same time forbidding spectacle, as the sunlight fell upon the myriad smooth needles of ice—catching the star-like facets in gleaming scintillation—playing upon the translucent walls of the chasm in many a prismatic ray—roseate and gold, and richest azure. Then, below, the black, cold depths, as of the bottomless pit.
“It is splendid, but gruesome,” said Alma, peering tentatively into the silent depths—a process which needed a steadying, not to say supporting, hand. “I wonder how deep it is.”
“It’s a pity, in the interests of science—but on that ground alone—that we haven’t got our two learned friends along,” said Philip, proceeding to roll a big stone, of which there were several on the surface of the glacier, to the brink. “They could locate the depth by the time it takes to fall. Now, listen!”
He rolled over the stone. It was a large one, and spoke volumes for his excellent condition that he was able to move it at all. There was a crash and a shatter like the breaking of glass, as it crushed through the fringe of icicles—then a long pause, followed by a far-away and hollow clang.
“What an awful depth,” said Alma, with a shudder, instinctively drawing back. “Wait!” warned Philip. “There it goes again!” Another clang—this time very faint, together with a ghostly rumbling roar as the prisoned echo strove to break free—told that the crevasse was of appalling depth, even if its bottom was yet reached. The listeners looked at each other.
“Not much chance once over this little bit of crushed snow,” said Philip, breaking away the overhanging edge with the end of his ice-axe.
“Horrible!” rejoined Alma, with a shudder. “Now I think we had better go back to the others, for it seems to me we are getting more and more in among the crevasses, and it must be a trifle dangerous.”
It was even as she said. The whole surface of the glacier was seamed and criss-crossed with yawning rifts—many of them like the one before them—of unknown depth. To a fairly experienced man, and one of average gumption withal, the situation would have held no obstacle. To such the lay of the glacier would have been understood, and he could have threaded his way to safer ground without difficulty. But Philip was not experienced in Alpine features, and there was just a little too much of the bull-at-a-gate about his disposition for him to supplement this lack by ordinary prudence. So they got deeper and deeper into the labyrinth—and moreover the sun was already shut out behind the towering mountain walls rearing up immediately overhead.
Under these circumstances neither of the pair was sorry to hear a shout, and to make out a figure approaching at some distance over the ice.
“It’s Fordham,” cried Phil. “He’ll show us the right line. He’s about as good as a professional guide.”
Not the least lovable trait in Philip Orlebar’s character was his perfect readiness to yield to another’s superior knowledge, and this he was wont to do, not grudgingly or as one making a concession, but fully, frankly, and as a matter of course. It did not, for instance, occur to him that his fortnight of knocking about among the mountains and glaciers in the neighbourhood of Zinal—said knocking about being mostly in picnic fashion, as in the present case—had rendered his experience a trifle superior to that of Fordham, who had done a good deal of serious Alpine climbing in times past; and in stating this we are not dealing with so obvious a truism as the uninitiated would assume. For to many of his age and temperament that very thing would have occurred, and does occur, not infrequently to their own ultimate discomfiture if not disaster. We speak of that which we know.
Philip therefore hailed the advent of his friend with genuine pleasure, not to say relief. But the other in no wise reciprocated that warming sentiment. He didn’t see any fun in coming about two miles out of his way—and towards the end of the day, too—in order to benefit two people whom he had every reason to suppose would be wishing him in Halifax all the time.
“Tired of life already, Miss Wyatt?” he said sourly, as he came up, pointing to a great black crevasse the two were gingerly skirting. “Or do you want to anticipate death, and defeating his ravages and decay, ensure remaining beautiful for ever, although within the depths of a glacier?”
“What a weird style of compliment,” answered Alma, with a little laugh. “But any sort of compliment coming from Mr Fordham should be duly treasured.”
“Well, there’s a far weirder fact underlying it. Look here! If you knew there were half a dozen even indifferent shots posted behind yonderséracspractising at you with rifles, I believe you’d think your run of life was held on exceedingly frail and uncertain tenure. Well, left to yourselves here, the same tenure is a good deal more uncertain than it would be under the other contingency—you two poor greenhorns.”
“Oh, come; I say, Fordham?” exclaimed Philip, deprecatorily. But Alma broke into a ringing laugh.
“You think it a laughing matter, do you?” went on Fordham. “Now you wouldn’t think that a dozen steps further of the line you’re following would perform your own funerals? You’d never be seen again.”
“Now you’re cramming us, old chap,” said Philip, airily, surveying the white unbroken surface in front.
“Am I? Very well. Now, look.”
He counted exactly ten paces forward, then halted, advanced half a pace, and holding his ice-axe by the head, drove the point into the surface. In it went without resistance, as far as he allowed it to, which was almost to the head. Then working it round he made a hole about half a yard in diameter.
“Come, now, and look.” He went on cautiously knocking away more of the snow-crust.
They obeyed, and in a moment were peering through the hole into black depths. The sheeny surface of the opposite ice-wall glared at them through the aperture as with the disappointed glare of the eye of some evil beast baulked of its prey.
“By Jove!” cried Philip, aghast. “You never spoke a truer word, Fordham. There would have been an end of us, sure enough. But I say, old chap, how on earth did you know there was a crevasse there—a dev—, hum—I mean an awful one it is, too? There’s no sign or difference of colour in the surface.”
“I knew that there was bound to be one by the lay of the land. Now look,” he went on, pointing to the main crevasse, which yawned broadly parallel to the line they were pursuing, and out of which a lateral one sprung, and seeming to change its mind, had abruptly terminated—apparently so, at any rate. “I knew that this other crack wasn’t going to end there, although it seems to; it was too deep to start with. Consequently I knew that it was bound to run a considerable wayunderthe surface, and so it does. A dozen more steps, I repeat, and one or both of you would have disappeared for ever.”
“By Jove!” ejaculated Phil again, in mingled admiration and dismay, while Alma shuddered, as she gazed into the ghastly death-trap with a horrible fascination.
“At the same time you’re wrong in saying there is no sign or difference of colour in the surface,” went on Fordham. “There is the last—faint I admit—but quite enough to catch a practised eye. And now, while we are prosing away here, the other people are waiting for us over on themoraineyonder. So keep close behind me, and let’s get out of this.”
Under such able and experienced pilotage they soon got clear of the more dangerous part of the glacier—doubling and zigzaging in the most labyrinthine fashion to avoid perils hidden or displayed.
“You can’t afford to go playing about among bottomless pits in any such careless way, Phil, still more among masked deathtraps like some of those we passed,” said Fordham, as they drew near their party. “So if you must go skylarking on dangerous ground, you’d better have some one with you who knows the ropes rather more than you do, and not rather less.”
But this recollection of peril past added something of a spice to the keen enjoyment of a delightful day as they took their way homeward. And then, as they left the wild wilderness of rocks and ice behind, the great silent glaciers and piled masses of ruggedmoraine, the westering sunlight flushing upon the soaring peaks as with a glow of fire, to these two it meant one more day closing as it had begun—in a golden unearthly beauty—closing into a brief night, which in its turn should soon melt into another glowing day, even as this one which had just fled. But—would it?
“Two people have arrived, sir,” said the head waiter, meeting Philip in the hall. “Dey ask for you, sir, first thing. One gentleman and lady.”
“Gentleman and lady?” echoed Phil, in amazement. “Who the deuce can it be? Who are they, Franz?”
“I not know, sir. Dey ask first for you; then they ask if we cannot send messenger to find you. I tell them you away to the Mountet cabin—you come back quick as the messenger.”
“The deuce! Who can it be? By Jove—of course! The governor and her ladyship! It’ll be right good getting the old man out here. Don’t know about her ladyship though,” he parenthesised, dubiously. “Where are they, Franz?”
“Here we are, Philip,” cried a masculine voice, which was certainly not that of Sir Francis Orlebar, and a hand dropped upon his shoulder with would-be cordiality.
The recipient of this unceremonious salute started as if he had been shot. Then he turned—turned with what cordiality he could muster, to confront the speaker.
The latter was an elderly man of portentous aspect, ruddy of countenance, and keen of eye. A thick white beard hid the lower half of his face, and a crop of bristling white hair adorned his summit, which last, however, was now concealed by a large pith helmet and puggaree. He wore a great expanse of waistcoat, covering a redundancy of person which went far towards bearing out his sleek and aggressively prosperous appearance. He looked the sort of man who would be a law unto a roomful—the sort of man whose thumbs would oft seek the armholes of his waistcoat. He looked what he was—the prosperous, comfortable British merchant who had begun life a good deal lower down than that. But he did not look what he was not—viz, a gentleman.
“Why, how d’you do, Mr Glover?” blurted out Philip at last. “Who on earth would have thought of seeing you here?”
“Aha! who’d have thought it, indeed! But the little girl wouldn’t give me any peace. Said you hadn’t written to her for so long she didn’t know what had become of you, and we’d better go and see. So we left the rest of them at St. Swithins and started off, and here we are. Why, where is she? Edie—where have you got to?”
“All right, dad; here I am,” and the owner of the voice emerged from the bureau, where she had been arranging about rooms. “Why Phil, dear, thisisnice!” she went on, advancing upon him with extended hand and a would-be effective blush.
“Ha ha!” chuckled the old man. “She wouldn’t give me any peace until I brought her here. Now you’ll find plenty to talk about, I’ll warrant.”
Heavens! this was fearful. The feelings of a wild bull in a net must be placidity itself compared with those of poor Philip on finding himself thus cornered and publicly taken possession of. Every soul in the hotel was getting the benefit of these effusive and affectionate greetings, for it was just that time beforetable d’hôtewhen everybody was coming in to change, and every head was more or less turned for a glance at the new-comers as its owner passed by. Why Alma herself, who was standing talking to some other ladies in the hall, was well within hearing! What would she think? What sort of construction would she put upon all the affection wherewith these people were bespattering him? Heavens! what would she think?
Ha! there was Fordham. Capital! He would plant the new arrivals upon him.
“Hullo, Fordham!” he sung out, as his friend at that moment passed through the hall. “I want to introduce you to Mr Glover here; just arrived, you know. Miss Glover—Mr Fordham. Knows the country like a book,” he went on, desperately.
But this manoeuvre, so far from helping him had precisely the opposite effect; for the old man, with effusive cordiality, at once buttonholed Fordham, leaving the girl free to take possession of Phil.
Well, what then? To all appearances the situation was the very reverse of an unenviable one—indeed, more than one man passing through the hall at the time looked upon the ill-starred Philip with eyes of downright envy as he grumbled to himself, “Is that conceited ass Orlebar going to monopolise every pretty girl who comes near the place?” Poor Phil! how willingly he would have yielded up this one to the attentions of each and all who might choose to offer them.
In one particular they were right. Edith Glover was a very pretty girl. She had large blue eyes, and profuse brown hair falling in a natural wavy fringe around her brows. She had a clear complexion, regular features, and a bright, laughing expression. She was of medium height, had a good figure, and dressed well. But with all these advantages she lacked one thing, in common with her father, and that was the hallmark of birth. There was no mistake about it. With all her engaging prettiness and tasteful attire there was this one thing painfully, obviously lacking. She would have looked far more in keeping—and therefore possibly more attractive—in the cap, apron, and print dress of a housemaid, and her speech would have agreed thereto.
It is an accepted saying that the letter “h” constitutes a crucial shibboleth to the individual of dubious birth and British nationality; but there is another letter to which this applies with almost equal force, and that is the letter “a”. Now the first letter of the alphabet as enunciated by Edith Glover sounded uncommonly like the ninth—to wit, the letter “i.”
“We will sit together at table, dear, of course,” she murmured, sweetly, with a killing glance into his eyes.
“Um—ah—er,” mumbled Philip. “Awful sorry, but afraid our end of the table’s full up—in fact, crowded.”
“Oh, but you can come down to ours.”
“Er—hardly. You see I’m with some people—very jolly party—came up here together. Can’t desert them, don’t you know.”
Edith Glover had a temper, but now she judiciously dropped her eyes so that he should not see the expression which had come into them.
“Oh, well,” she said, with a little pout, and heaving up an attempt at a sob for the occasion; “of course, if you prefer to be with other people, when I have made Pa bring me all this way because I couldn’t bear to be away from you any longer, I—I—” And the heave became very much more pronounced.
“This is gaudy!” thought Philip to himself. “They have been pretty well giving me away for the benefit of the whole hotel already, and now she is going to scare up a scenepro bono publico. A scene, by Jove!” he reflected, in dismay. And then, at this additional indication of her want of breeding, he felt hardened. Fancy Alma, for instance, making such an exhibition of her feelings in public! and this idea brought with it a dire foreboding—what if he were to undergo some private but unmistakable indication of Alma’s feelings, as a sequel to this abominablecontretemps!
Just then the dinner-bell rang.
“There goes the second bell, and I’m still in my nailed boots and climbing gear. We left at six this morning, you know, to go up to the Mountet Hut, and are only just back,” he added, with forced gaiety and unconcern. “I must really go and change. Sha’n’t be down till dinner is half over as it is.”
“Friends of yours, those new arrivals, aren’t they, Philip?” said the General, soon after the latter had taken his seat.
“They are some people I used to know down at Henley. They had a big riverside place there, and gave dances.”
“What a pretty girl!” said Mrs Wyatt, putting up her glasses to look over at the objects under discussion, who were seated at another table at the further end of the room. “Isn’t she, Mr Fordham?”
“I’m afraid I’m not a competent judge on that point,” was the reply.
“Mr Fordham won’t be betrayed into saying anything in favour of any of us,” said Alma, maliciously.
Poor Philip was in a state of mind which even his worst enemy might have commiserated. He had, with quick instinct, grasped the certainty that all was changed. There was a touch of frostiness in Alma’s manner that betokened this only too plainly. Her serenity was absolutely unruffled, she was as brightly conversational as ever; but there was just that in her manner towards himself, imperceptible however to others, which told him only too unmistakably that the barrier was reared between them. Was she not within earshot during the horrible obtrusive suddenness of this most inopportune meeting! Her woman’s wit had been prompt to put two and two together. He was done for.
Still he would not give up without a struggle. He would tell her all. She might see extenuating circumstances, and then—oh, he hardly dared think of a contingency so entrancing. Now was the time. He would dodge those hateful Glovers somehow, and get her to come out with him for that short twilight stroll which they two, in common with nearly everybody in the hotel, were in the habit of taking almost every night aftertable d’hôte.
“Which way shall we go to-night, Alma?” he said softly, as she rose from the table.
She paused and turned her glance upon him, her eyes full on his.
“Don’t you think you ought to go and do the civil to your—friends? I do,” she said. And without another word she left him—left him quickly and decisively, her very action, her manner of performing it, laying upon him a curt prohibition to follow.
Philip, however, did not obey her injunction as regarded the Glovers. Avoiding those ill-omened persons, he stole away into the darkness, choosing the most hilly, and therefore, to after-dinner promenaders, unfrequented way. There, in company with his pipe and his thoughts, he wandered, and the latter were very bitter. He saw through the situation only too clearly. There was no exaggerating the magnitude of the disaster. The Glovers were not the sort of people to hide their grievance under a bushel. Every one in the hotel would promptly be made free of it. Alma would never forgive him for putting upon her—however unintentionally—the most unpardonable slight of all—a public slight. No. It was the one unpardonable sin. She would never forgive it.
His estimate of the Glovers proved singularly accurate. Stung by his defection, his marked neglect of her—seeing, moreover, with woman’s instinct the real lay of the land—the fair Edith had by no means buried the secret of her relationship towards Philip within her own breast. Before bedtime it was whispered all over the hotel that the pretty girl who had arrived that evening was no other than hisfiancée, whom he had heartlessly jilted in favour of Miss Wyatt.
No; assuredly this was not a thing that Alma was likely to forgive.