Chapter Twenty One.

Chapter Twenty One.The Falling Stone.“Peter,” said Fordham, interrupting a story over which the guides were guffawing among themselves, and which related to a certain rash tourist who had undertaken to cross the Gorner glacier alone, giving Herr Baedeker as his authority for dispensing with the services of their fraternity, and how the adventurous one being eventually missed was duly sought for, which search resulted in the discovery of him at the bottom of a small crevasse in company with a sprained ankle and a Baedeker, and how some of them in resentment of the fancied slur upon their craft had grimly suggested that, whereas Baedeker had got him into his present quandary, it was only fair that Baedeker should get him out. “Peter, how long shall we take to get down to Zermatt?”The man thus addressed stared gravely at the sky, then down at the valley, then at the surrounding heights, then at his colleague. The latter went through precisely the same formula. Then he replied—“If de gentleman”—with a look at Philip—“go down so well as he did come up, then we shall get there in about seven or eight hours.”“Right you are, Peter. You may put it at that,” cried Phil, with alacrity. “I’ll go down like a chamois, my buck. We’ll be in easy time fortable d’hôte.” But the other did not enter into this spirit of exuberance. There was a touch of grimness in his reply, given with characteristic deliberation.“You had better be late for detable d’hôtethan not get to detable d’hôteever again,” he said.“That’s a damper, anyway,” rejoined Phil.“It’s a well earned one,” said Fordham. “He wants you to realise that you can no more afford to be careless going down than you could coming up. And you can’t. You’re a heavyish chap, Phil, and there are places where if you lose your footing we are extremely likely to be unable to hold you up. And although your return to the valley we have just left may be welcome enough, I doubt if it will be adequately so if effected in fragmentary form. So don’t imagine you can afford to skip down the Rothhorn on one leg, that’s all.”Peter Anderledy, the head guide, was a swarthy, thick-set fellow, black-bearded, and Italian looking—of apparently about forty, but in reality ten years younger. The other, Conrad Spinner, was about the same age but of a different build, being tall and straight, and of the Northern type. His bronzed face was almost as dark as that of his colleague, but his hair and moustache were blonde. The countenances of both men wore the sedate almost melancholy expression common to those of their calling, but the glance of their eyes was straight and quick. Both were addicted to the unlimited consumption of tobacco—also in common with those of their craft—a consideration by the way which is difficult to reconcile with the popular notion that the soothing weed is detrimental, not to say disastrous to the nerves, for if there is one class of men which combines the most consummate coolness and courage with an unlimited supply of sheer physical endurance and quickness of resource, assuredly that class is represented by the qualified Alpine guide.Few Alpine peaks are perpendicular, even on their most precipitous side. The Rothhorn, however, is one of these, for its eastern face, if anything, slightly overhangs, falling in a magnificent drop of ironstone precipice, a depth of about fifteen hundred feet to the glacier beneath. Its summit is in reality in two peaks, one slightly lower than the other. The way lies not over but round the lower of these, effecting what is termed in mountaineering parlance a “corner.” There is excellent hold both for hand and foot, but whereas the climber at the moment of rounding this projection can neither see nor be seen by the rest of his party, and whereas, further, his body is slightly inclined outward over the dizzy height before mentioned, it follows that the novice, unless endowed with perfect steadiness of head and nerve, is apt to find the position a somewhat trying one.Now this is just what befell Philip Orlebar. At the worst point of the projection, while hanging on, thus outwardly inclined, curiosity moved him to turn his face over his shoulder and look down. The effect of the stupendous height was disastrous. His hands, gripping the rock overhead, began to tremble. A coldness ran through his legs. He could not move. He felt that if he did so he must let go. Nor could he withdraw his gaze from that awful abyss.“What on earth are you doing, Phil?” sung out Fordham, from behind, noticing that the rope had ceased moving.“I’m looking down,” came the reply.“You must not look down. You must come on,” called out the head guide, who was leading.The voices broke the spell. With an effort he pulled himself together, and in a minute stood beside Peter. The others promptly followed.“By Jove! That’s a grisly sort of place—eh, Peter?” he said. “I suppose it’s the worst of all?”“No; it is not de vorst—but itlooksde vorst,” was the slow reply. “But—you are all right. You have only to be careful—very careful.”A slight change had been made in their position on the rope for the downward climb. Peter Anderledy, the head guide, took the lead as before. Philip as the novice, came next—the theory being that as he was more likely to make a false step than Fordham, there should be two above him to increase the chances of his safety—and indeed that of the whole party—for there are two or three places during the first hour’s descent of the Rothhorn on the Zermatt side where it is difficult to believe the rope would save anybody, so steep is the face of the rock, so slight the hold.And now the work began in earnest. Almost immediately they got into a narrow gully—a mere indenture in the surface of the rock, going straight down for a considerable distance, and just sufficiently out of the perpendicular to enable them to scramble down it slowly and with infinite trouble—now sprawling face to the surface, now in ungainly, half-squatting attitude, knees almost on a level with the chin. There was hardly any hold as such; the climber preserving his position almost entirely by pressure against the snow and ice-encrusted sides of the shoot, much as an old-fashioned chimney sweeper in the prosecution of his trade. It was an ugly place, and in the slippery precariousness of the position with the whole height of the mountain to fall, was an extremely trying one.“I say, Peter,” gasped Philip, as at a peremptory call from above to halt he was striving to make good his stability. “This is a devil of a bit, you know. I suppose if a fellow were to fall he wouldn’t stop till he got right down on the Durand glacier, eh?”“Do not talk,” came the severe reply. “Take care of what you are doing. And mind de shtones.”None too soon was the warning. Hardly were the words uttered than a large flat stone, as big as a full-sized photograph album—upon which Philip had reckoned as a secure support—gave way beneath his feet with a startling suddenness that made his blood run cold, and went crashing and bounding straight for Peter. The latter, however, had seen the catastrophe almost before it had occurred. With incredible celerity he rolled aside, and, clinging to the face of the rock like a fly on the wall, felt the air of the impromptu projectile as it shot by within a foot of him and right through what a fraction of a second before had been occupied by his body. Away it went, splitting to fragments, as in a series of leaps and bounds it disappeared from sight.“I say, though, I’m awfully sorry,” said Philip, while Peter muttered some very bad language—secreta—and Fordham sung out a warning to him to be more careful and not to trust any stone until he had first well tested it.At length the gully ended and was succeeded by some very pretty rock climbing. The side of the mountain here bore the aspect of being plated with huge slabs, and it was mainly upon the projections formed by what should have been the “joints” of these, together with cracks running across their surface, that the climbers were able to make their way.“A steeple-jack’s work is a fool to this,” commented Phil, gazing at the two high above him as they descended cautiously and with cool deliberation from point to point.With ordinary care there was no risk here. Each man securing his foothold before the others moved they descended slowly but surely. It was a delightful climb, and, indeed, no form of mountaineering is more interesting than rockwork of the kind. They arrived without accident at the point where the way lies through a gap in the high rock ridge, and sat down for a short rest as well as to refresh the inner man.Experienced climbers prescribe the latter process for every two hours. Certain it is that such recuperation is exceedingly welcome no less often, thanks to the keen air of those high latitudes. But lack of time and the risk of catching a chill precludes anything but the briefest halt; wherefore, if the exertion immediate upon feeding resulteth not in excruciating indigestion, the subject may congratulate himself on an extra well-ordered internal economy. This poor Philip was destined to learn at the hands of that hardest of all preceptresses, experience. His normally buoyant spirits had deserted him, and as they resumed their way down the rugged rock-face of the mountain he felt altogether bad.“This Alpineering is a fraud, Fordham,” he pronounced. “I know I’ve got a splitting headache, and feel as if there was a ball of string in my diaphragm. I guess the little grass climbs are good enough for me.”“Look where you are going! Never mind de talking till we get down,” put in Peter Anderledy.The peremptoriness of the rebuke brought Phil’s head back from over his shoulder with the celerity of a recruit at the word “eyes right!” Then he growled. But this expression of his dissatisfaction made upon the stolid guide not the faintest impression.“Herr Gott!” imprecated the latter presently, with set teeth and a savage glance upward as he stopped to listen. “De shtones are falling.”High above among the cliffs, but slightly in front of their line of march, a hollow rattle became audible. There was something weird and uncanny about the sound. No mortal hand, no mortal agency had loosened those rocks and sent them hurtling down into the depths below. It was almost as if the demons of the air were abroad.The party was descending a longcouloiror gully, which traversed obliquely the iron face of the mountain. The crannies of the rocks were filled with snow and the footing was good. Here and there a bit of sloping ice necessitated the cutting of a step or two, but, on the whole, the way was easy. Yet the guides seem to cast anxious glances upward, and ever and anon that ghostly echoing rattle was heard.“Sunshine is a delightful thing,” quoth Fordham. “But like everything else to which that term applies it is bound to have its obverse side. I could wish just now it had been cloudier and colder.”“Why the deuce should you wish that?” said Philip.“Because then there wouldn’t be so many stones flying. You see, they’re frozen to the rock by a thin cementing of ice. As soon as the sun has any power that ice melts and they slide off. All these rock mountains are the very devil for falling stones. On the Matterhorn you hear them rattling all day long—”A vehement imprecation from both guides simultaneously, interrupted them. There was a rushing sound in the air very like the “whigge” of a shell, and a shadow seemed to swoop over their heads. Looking upward they beheld a solid mass of rock of at least two tons’ weight, sailing through the air. It had shot outward from the last projecting portion of the cliff upon which it had struck, and now describing a lofty arc it whizzed directly over their position, and striking the rocks some hundred feet lower split into fragments, which went crashing and roaring down to the glacier beneath.Fordham, contemplating this occurrence, shook his head slightly and said nothing. Philip opened his eyes wide and ejaculated, “By Jove!” The guides swore with renewed energy. Each action was characteristic.For any such edifying notions as that the average man feels subdued and reverential in the presence of impending danger may safely be relegated to the Sunday school. In nine cases out of ten he relieves his feelings pretty much as these Alpine guides did theirs—or feels inclined to—presumably as the outcome of an unwonted excitement not unmixed perhaps with a sort of irritation against the powers that be, which have, in a manner of speaking, “cornered” him.“We must get on so quick as we can. De shtones are going to fall to-day like a devil,” remarked Peter. This comparison as it stood was a correct one and graphic withal. But in point of fact no thought of the fall of Lucifer entered the honest guide’s head. He was merely reproducing a time-honoured and highly colloquial simile, the unconscious variation of which made Philip laugh.For a quarter of an hour all went well. Suddenly that ominous rattle was heard again—right overhead. The three foremost were on a small but steep slope of hard ice, nor could they move out of the steps which had been cut by the foremost guide’s axe. It follows, therefore, that the attitudes struck by them were grotesque in the extreme as they stood glaring wildly upward at a rumbling shower of stones coming down straight at them, as though the power of the human eye might at a pinch avail to deflect the dreaded volley. On it came, whizzing and ricochetting by—the three men staring at it in the most ludicrous state of helplessness, Fordham ducking violently as a small chip rebounding from the ice grazed his ear like a slug. It was but a shower of small stones—none larger than a cricket ball. But a bullet is as potent for evil as a cannon shot, as Philip was destined to learn. He was seen to pick up his right leg with a howl of pain, and then to go rather white in the face.“Are you hurt?” said the head guide, somewhat anxiously.“Oh, not much, I suppose,” was the rather doleful reply. “I believe my ankle’s broken, that’s all.”Peter, without a word, turned back to help him, but he declined any aid.“The sooner we are out of this the better,” he said. “I can hop along somehow. Hand us your flask, Fordham. That’s better!”And he was as good as his word. Though his foot was frightfully painful he found that he could still use it, and at length they left the rock-face of the mountain and gained the high icearêtewhich forms one of the spurs of the latter.It was an awkward place wherein to be incapacitated. The way lay right along the very edge of thearête, where there was not room for two to walk abreast. But Phil was very game. The pain of his bruised ankle increased with every step, but he was not going to hamper his companions by collapsing. He took another liberal pull at Fordham’s flask, and started again manfully, trying to persuade himself that he was in reality more frightened than hurt.But apart from this casualty the view as seen from the apex of the dizzyarêtewas a thing to make the very pulses bound with delight in the sheer exhilaration of living. Behind rose the stupendous cliffs of the eastern face of the Rothhorn, soaring up to its twin-peaked summit against the deep and cloudless blue. Immediately beneath, webbed and criss-crossed by innumerable cracks, lay an amphitheatre of vast glaciers flowing down from a crescent of grim and frowning cliffs culminating in the Ober-Gabelhorn, a tower of precipitous rock. Right opposite, the huge Matterhorn, a dark monolith, frowning, defiant—then a white sublimity of dazzling snow mountains, the broad hump of the Breithorn, and the two smaller ones known as Castor and Pollux—the perilous Lyskamm and the sheeny mass of the beautiful Monte Rosa. Glaciers, innumerable and vast, mighty rivers of rolling white waves, whatever way the eye should turn.There was a sudden boom as of a heavy thunderpeal—a dull, roaring rush as of a mighty torrent. A grand avalanche was pouring down the dark perpendicular precipices which shut in the head of the Trift glacier, a cataract of powdery whiteness, which, when the glass was brought to bear, revealed hundreds of tons of frozen snow and huge ice blocks, falling into a frightful chasm at the foot of the cliff, whence arose a column of powdery spray for many minutes afterward. As this vast volume flowed down the metallic face of the dark rock, each peak and precipice around re-echoed the thunderous boom in a hundred differing reverberations.Scarcely had this ceased than there came a sound of yodelling—cheery, melodious, distant. Far down in the centre of the white and crevassed plain, four specks, equidistant, were moving in a downward course.“It is a caravan who has come over de Trift-joch,” pronounced Conrad Spinner. And then he and his colleagues lifting up their voices, answered the yodel, while Philip, being unskilled in that art but moved by a British and youthful desire to make a noise of some sort, lifted up his in an ear-splitting and quite unmelodious yell.The icearêtecame to an end at last and was succeeded by a long descent over loose rocks, which, piled and packed together by the hand of Nature, made a very tedious and difficult descent at the best of times. To poor Philip with his bruised ankle it became excruciating. At length he could endure it no longer and sank to the ground with an agonised groan.“Off with your boot, and let’s appraise the damage,” said Fordham. “Yes, it’s a bad whack,” he went on, as the extent of the injury became manifest—for the whole ankle was frightfully swollen. It had been struck on the inside, and the least touch made the sufferer wince. Both guides shook their heads gloomily as they marked the angry and inflamed aspect of the contusion, and Peter Anderledy fired off a few invocations of his Maker in terms far more forcible than reverential. Even for this there might have been found some extenuation. Besides a rough and steep descent over the loose rocks aforesaid, there yet remained a bit of cliff to be climbed down, the end of a glacier to cross, then at least half an hour down a high moraine, whose edge, sharp and knife-like, entailed single file progress, before they reached a point from which a mule or a litter might be used, and even that point was some hours distant from the village.This, however, was accomplished at last—the descent of the cliff being avoided by a longdétour. With the help of Conrad’s stalwart shoulder poor Phil managed to get along with a minimum of pain. But it took them rather more than twice the ordinary time to accomplish the traject, nor did they arrive at the point whence artificial transport could be used until long after the hour when they had reckoned upon sitting safe and snug attable d’hôtein the Hôtel Mont Cervin at Zermatt.“I say, Conrad, this is a right royal sell,” said Philip, as they sat round a handful of fire which the guide had built—for Peter and Fordham had hurried on to procure a mule or achaise-à-porteur, and could not return for some hours. “Sell isn’t the word for it. We reckoned on doing the Matterhorn the day after to-morrow. I suppose there’s no chance of it now.”“If you can walk as far as de Riffel in one week you can tink you are very lucky,” answered the guide.Poor Philip groaned.“It’s deuced rough,” he said. “I didn’t come over to Zermatt to lie up a week in a confounded hotel.”“It would be worse to lie up for ever in de churchyard,” answered Conrad oracularly, as he lit his pipe.“I suppose it would—but, I say, Conrad, how is it you fellows all talk such good English? Where the dickens do you learn it?”“We learn it in de vinter. We make a class.”“But who teaches you? Do you get hold of an Englishman?”“No. It is a Swiss—a Swiss who has been five years in America. But,” added the guide, naïvely, “I don’t tink his pronunciation is very good.”Meanwhile, Fordham and Peter were making their way down the wild and desolate Trift-thal in the moonlight.“I never did see de Rothhorn so bad for de shtones as to-day,” grumbled the latter. “Dey come down, oh, like a devil.”“It’s unfortunate, but one consolation is that it was nobody’s fault. It was sheer ill-luck, Peter, and you or Conrad might equally well have been hit.”“No, it is nobody’s fault,” assented Peter. “But, if anyting goes wrong with de gentleman dere are always peoples what say it is de guide’s fault. But dat is just de very ting no guide can help—de falling shtones. We get over de place as quick as we can, but we can’trun.Ach!” he concluded, with a disgusted shake of the head.There was reason in what he said. An Alpine guide under the circumstances is in much the same position as the captain of a ship. There are casualties which can be averted neither by the skill of the one nor the seamanship of the other, nor the courage of both. Yet when such occur public opinion is equally hard on both.It was midnight before the sufferer was safely housed. The local practitioner looked grave, very grave, when he examined the injury. He peremptorily forbade the patient to set foot to the ground until he gave him leave, and that under pain of almost certainly losing his foot altogether.“Great events from little causes spring.” The little cause in this instance was that little stone. There was a grim literalness in Peter Anderledy’s unconscious variation of a well-worn simile when he predicted that the stones were going to fall “like a devil”—for the falling of that little stone was destined to alter the course of Philip Orlebar’s whole life. Its effect might well have been the result of satanic intervention.

“Peter,” said Fordham, interrupting a story over which the guides were guffawing among themselves, and which related to a certain rash tourist who had undertaken to cross the Gorner glacier alone, giving Herr Baedeker as his authority for dispensing with the services of their fraternity, and how the adventurous one being eventually missed was duly sought for, which search resulted in the discovery of him at the bottom of a small crevasse in company with a sprained ankle and a Baedeker, and how some of them in resentment of the fancied slur upon their craft had grimly suggested that, whereas Baedeker had got him into his present quandary, it was only fair that Baedeker should get him out. “Peter, how long shall we take to get down to Zermatt?”

The man thus addressed stared gravely at the sky, then down at the valley, then at the surrounding heights, then at his colleague. The latter went through precisely the same formula. Then he replied—

“If de gentleman”—with a look at Philip—“go down so well as he did come up, then we shall get there in about seven or eight hours.”

“Right you are, Peter. You may put it at that,” cried Phil, with alacrity. “I’ll go down like a chamois, my buck. We’ll be in easy time fortable d’hôte.” But the other did not enter into this spirit of exuberance. There was a touch of grimness in his reply, given with characteristic deliberation.

“You had better be late for detable d’hôtethan not get to detable d’hôteever again,” he said.

“That’s a damper, anyway,” rejoined Phil.

“It’s a well earned one,” said Fordham. “He wants you to realise that you can no more afford to be careless going down than you could coming up. And you can’t. You’re a heavyish chap, Phil, and there are places where if you lose your footing we are extremely likely to be unable to hold you up. And although your return to the valley we have just left may be welcome enough, I doubt if it will be adequately so if effected in fragmentary form. So don’t imagine you can afford to skip down the Rothhorn on one leg, that’s all.”

Peter Anderledy, the head guide, was a swarthy, thick-set fellow, black-bearded, and Italian looking—of apparently about forty, but in reality ten years younger. The other, Conrad Spinner, was about the same age but of a different build, being tall and straight, and of the Northern type. His bronzed face was almost as dark as that of his colleague, but his hair and moustache were blonde. The countenances of both men wore the sedate almost melancholy expression common to those of their calling, but the glance of their eyes was straight and quick. Both were addicted to the unlimited consumption of tobacco—also in common with those of their craft—a consideration by the way which is difficult to reconcile with the popular notion that the soothing weed is detrimental, not to say disastrous to the nerves, for if there is one class of men which combines the most consummate coolness and courage with an unlimited supply of sheer physical endurance and quickness of resource, assuredly that class is represented by the qualified Alpine guide.

Few Alpine peaks are perpendicular, even on their most precipitous side. The Rothhorn, however, is one of these, for its eastern face, if anything, slightly overhangs, falling in a magnificent drop of ironstone precipice, a depth of about fifteen hundred feet to the glacier beneath. Its summit is in reality in two peaks, one slightly lower than the other. The way lies not over but round the lower of these, effecting what is termed in mountaineering parlance a “corner.” There is excellent hold both for hand and foot, but whereas the climber at the moment of rounding this projection can neither see nor be seen by the rest of his party, and whereas, further, his body is slightly inclined outward over the dizzy height before mentioned, it follows that the novice, unless endowed with perfect steadiness of head and nerve, is apt to find the position a somewhat trying one.

Now this is just what befell Philip Orlebar. At the worst point of the projection, while hanging on, thus outwardly inclined, curiosity moved him to turn his face over his shoulder and look down. The effect of the stupendous height was disastrous. His hands, gripping the rock overhead, began to tremble. A coldness ran through his legs. He could not move. He felt that if he did so he must let go. Nor could he withdraw his gaze from that awful abyss.

“What on earth are you doing, Phil?” sung out Fordham, from behind, noticing that the rope had ceased moving.

“I’m looking down,” came the reply.

“You must not look down. You must come on,” called out the head guide, who was leading.

The voices broke the spell. With an effort he pulled himself together, and in a minute stood beside Peter. The others promptly followed.

“By Jove! That’s a grisly sort of place—eh, Peter?” he said. “I suppose it’s the worst of all?”

“No; it is not de vorst—but itlooksde vorst,” was the slow reply. “But—you are all right. You have only to be careful—very careful.”

A slight change had been made in their position on the rope for the downward climb. Peter Anderledy, the head guide, took the lead as before. Philip as the novice, came next—the theory being that as he was more likely to make a false step than Fordham, there should be two above him to increase the chances of his safety—and indeed that of the whole party—for there are two or three places during the first hour’s descent of the Rothhorn on the Zermatt side where it is difficult to believe the rope would save anybody, so steep is the face of the rock, so slight the hold.

And now the work began in earnest. Almost immediately they got into a narrow gully—a mere indenture in the surface of the rock, going straight down for a considerable distance, and just sufficiently out of the perpendicular to enable them to scramble down it slowly and with infinite trouble—now sprawling face to the surface, now in ungainly, half-squatting attitude, knees almost on a level with the chin. There was hardly any hold as such; the climber preserving his position almost entirely by pressure against the snow and ice-encrusted sides of the shoot, much as an old-fashioned chimney sweeper in the prosecution of his trade. It was an ugly place, and in the slippery precariousness of the position with the whole height of the mountain to fall, was an extremely trying one.

“I say, Peter,” gasped Philip, as at a peremptory call from above to halt he was striving to make good his stability. “This is a devil of a bit, you know. I suppose if a fellow were to fall he wouldn’t stop till he got right down on the Durand glacier, eh?”

“Do not talk,” came the severe reply. “Take care of what you are doing. And mind de shtones.”

None too soon was the warning. Hardly were the words uttered than a large flat stone, as big as a full-sized photograph album—upon which Philip had reckoned as a secure support—gave way beneath his feet with a startling suddenness that made his blood run cold, and went crashing and bounding straight for Peter. The latter, however, had seen the catastrophe almost before it had occurred. With incredible celerity he rolled aside, and, clinging to the face of the rock like a fly on the wall, felt the air of the impromptu projectile as it shot by within a foot of him and right through what a fraction of a second before had been occupied by his body. Away it went, splitting to fragments, as in a series of leaps and bounds it disappeared from sight.

“I say, though, I’m awfully sorry,” said Philip, while Peter muttered some very bad language—secreta—and Fordham sung out a warning to him to be more careful and not to trust any stone until he had first well tested it.

At length the gully ended and was succeeded by some very pretty rock climbing. The side of the mountain here bore the aspect of being plated with huge slabs, and it was mainly upon the projections formed by what should have been the “joints” of these, together with cracks running across their surface, that the climbers were able to make their way.

“A steeple-jack’s work is a fool to this,” commented Phil, gazing at the two high above him as they descended cautiously and with cool deliberation from point to point.

With ordinary care there was no risk here. Each man securing his foothold before the others moved they descended slowly but surely. It was a delightful climb, and, indeed, no form of mountaineering is more interesting than rockwork of the kind. They arrived without accident at the point where the way lies through a gap in the high rock ridge, and sat down for a short rest as well as to refresh the inner man.

Experienced climbers prescribe the latter process for every two hours. Certain it is that such recuperation is exceedingly welcome no less often, thanks to the keen air of those high latitudes. But lack of time and the risk of catching a chill precludes anything but the briefest halt; wherefore, if the exertion immediate upon feeding resulteth not in excruciating indigestion, the subject may congratulate himself on an extra well-ordered internal economy. This poor Philip was destined to learn at the hands of that hardest of all preceptresses, experience. His normally buoyant spirits had deserted him, and as they resumed their way down the rugged rock-face of the mountain he felt altogether bad.

“This Alpineering is a fraud, Fordham,” he pronounced. “I know I’ve got a splitting headache, and feel as if there was a ball of string in my diaphragm. I guess the little grass climbs are good enough for me.”

“Look where you are going! Never mind de talking till we get down,” put in Peter Anderledy.

The peremptoriness of the rebuke brought Phil’s head back from over his shoulder with the celerity of a recruit at the word “eyes right!” Then he growled. But this expression of his dissatisfaction made upon the stolid guide not the faintest impression.

“Herr Gott!” imprecated the latter presently, with set teeth and a savage glance upward as he stopped to listen. “De shtones are falling.”

High above among the cliffs, but slightly in front of their line of march, a hollow rattle became audible. There was something weird and uncanny about the sound. No mortal hand, no mortal agency had loosened those rocks and sent them hurtling down into the depths below. It was almost as if the demons of the air were abroad.

The party was descending a longcouloiror gully, which traversed obliquely the iron face of the mountain. The crannies of the rocks were filled with snow and the footing was good. Here and there a bit of sloping ice necessitated the cutting of a step or two, but, on the whole, the way was easy. Yet the guides seem to cast anxious glances upward, and ever and anon that ghostly echoing rattle was heard.

“Sunshine is a delightful thing,” quoth Fordham. “But like everything else to which that term applies it is bound to have its obverse side. I could wish just now it had been cloudier and colder.”

“Why the deuce should you wish that?” said Philip.

“Because then there wouldn’t be so many stones flying. You see, they’re frozen to the rock by a thin cementing of ice. As soon as the sun has any power that ice melts and they slide off. All these rock mountains are the very devil for falling stones. On the Matterhorn you hear them rattling all day long—”

A vehement imprecation from both guides simultaneously, interrupted them. There was a rushing sound in the air very like the “whigge” of a shell, and a shadow seemed to swoop over their heads. Looking upward they beheld a solid mass of rock of at least two tons’ weight, sailing through the air. It had shot outward from the last projecting portion of the cliff upon which it had struck, and now describing a lofty arc it whizzed directly over their position, and striking the rocks some hundred feet lower split into fragments, which went crashing and roaring down to the glacier beneath.

Fordham, contemplating this occurrence, shook his head slightly and said nothing. Philip opened his eyes wide and ejaculated, “By Jove!” The guides swore with renewed energy. Each action was characteristic.

For any such edifying notions as that the average man feels subdued and reverential in the presence of impending danger may safely be relegated to the Sunday school. In nine cases out of ten he relieves his feelings pretty much as these Alpine guides did theirs—or feels inclined to—presumably as the outcome of an unwonted excitement not unmixed perhaps with a sort of irritation against the powers that be, which have, in a manner of speaking, “cornered” him.

“We must get on so quick as we can. De shtones are going to fall to-day like a devil,” remarked Peter. This comparison as it stood was a correct one and graphic withal. But in point of fact no thought of the fall of Lucifer entered the honest guide’s head. He was merely reproducing a time-honoured and highly colloquial simile, the unconscious variation of which made Philip laugh.

For a quarter of an hour all went well. Suddenly that ominous rattle was heard again—right overhead. The three foremost were on a small but steep slope of hard ice, nor could they move out of the steps which had been cut by the foremost guide’s axe. It follows, therefore, that the attitudes struck by them were grotesque in the extreme as they stood glaring wildly upward at a rumbling shower of stones coming down straight at them, as though the power of the human eye might at a pinch avail to deflect the dreaded volley. On it came, whizzing and ricochetting by—the three men staring at it in the most ludicrous state of helplessness, Fordham ducking violently as a small chip rebounding from the ice grazed his ear like a slug. It was but a shower of small stones—none larger than a cricket ball. But a bullet is as potent for evil as a cannon shot, as Philip was destined to learn. He was seen to pick up his right leg with a howl of pain, and then to go rather white in the face.

“Are you hurt?” said the head guide, somewhat anxiously.

“Oh, not much, I suppose,” was the rather doleful reply. “I believe my ankle’s broken, that’s all.”

Peter, without a word, turned back to help him, but he declined any aid.

“The sooner we are out of this the better,” he said. “I can hop along somehow. Hand us your flask, Fordham. That’s better!”

And he was as good as his word. Though his foot was frightfully painful he found that he could still use it, and at length they left the rock-face of the mountain and gained the high icearêtewhich forms one of the spurs of the latter.

It was an awkward place wherein to be incapacitated. The way lay right along the very edge of thearête, where there was not room for two to walk abreast. But Phil was very game. The pain of his bruised ankle increased with every step, but he was not going to hamper his companions by collapsing. He took another liberal pull at Fordham’s flask, and started again manfully, trying to persuade himself that he was in reality more frightened than hurt.

But apart from this casualty the view as seen from the apex of the dizzyarêtewas a thing to make the very pulses bound with delight in the sheer exhilaration of living. Behind rose the stupendous cliffs of the eastern face of the Rothhorn, soaring up to its twin-peaked summit against the deep and cloudless blue. Immediately beneath, webbed and criss-crossed by innumerable cracks, lay an amphitheatre of vast glaciers flowing down from a crescent of grim and frowning cliffs culminating in the Ober-Gabelhorn, a tower of precipitous rock. Right opposite, the huge Matterhorn, a dark monolith, frowning, defiant—then a white sublimity of dazzling snow mountains, the broad hump of the Breithorn, and the two smaller ones known as Castor and Pollux—the perilous Lyskamm and the sheeny mass of the beautiful Monte Rosa. Glaciers, innumerable and vast, mighty rivers of rolling white waves, whatever way the eye should turn.

There was a sudden boom as of a heavy thunderpeal—a dull, roaring rush as of a mighty torrent. A grand avalanche was pouring down the dark perpendicular precipices which shut in the head of the Trift glacier, a cataract of powdery whiteness, which, when the glass was brought to bear, revealed hundreds of tons of frozen snow and huge ice blocks, falling into a frightful chasm at the foot of the cliff, whence arose a column of powdery spray for many minutes afterward. As this vast volume flowed down the metallic face of the dark rock, each peak and precipice around re-echoed the thunderous boom in a hundred differing reverberations.

Scarcely had this ceased than there came a sound of yodelling—cheery, melodious, distant. Far down in the centre of the white and crevassed plain, four specks, equidistant, were moving in a downward course.

“It is a caravan who has come over de Trift-joch,” pronounced Conrad Spinner. And then he and his colleagues lifting up their voices, answered the yodel, while Philip, being unskilled in that art but moved by a British and youthful desire to make a noise of some sort, lifted up his in an ear-splitting and quite unmelodious yell.

The icearêtecame to an end at last and was succeeded by a long descent over loose rocks, which, piled and packed together by the hand of Nature, made a very tedious and difficult descent at the best of times. To poor Philip with his bruised ankle it became excruciating. At length he could endure it no longer and sank to the ground with an agonised groan.

“Off with your boot, and let’s appraise the damage,” said Fordham. “Yes, it’s a bad whack,” he went on, as the extent of the injury became manifest—for the whole ankle was frightfully swollen. It had been struck on the inside, and the least touch made the sufferer wince. Both guides shook their heads gloomily as they marked the angry and inflamed aspect of the contusion, and Peter Anderledy fired off a few invocations of his Maker in terms far more forcible than reverential. Even for this there might have been found some extenuation. Besides a rough and steep descent over the loose rocks aforesaid, there yet remained a bit of cliff to be climbed down, the end of a glacier to cross, then at least half an hour down a high moraine, whose edge, sharp and knife-like, entailed single file progress, before they reached a point from which a mule or a litter might be used, and even that point was some hours distant from the village.

This, however, was accomplished at last—the descent of the cliff being avoided by a longdétour. With the help of Conrad’s stalwart shoulder poor Phil managed to get along with a minimum of pain. But it took them rather more than twice the ordinary time to accomplish the traject, nor did they arrive at the point whence artificial transport could be used until long after the hour when they had reckoned upon sitting safe and snug attable d’hôtein the Hôtel Mont Cervin at Zermatt.

“I say, Conrad, this is a right royal sell,” said Philip, as they sat round a handful of fire which the guide had built—for Peter and Fordham had hurried on to procure a mule or achaise-à-porteur, and could not return for some hours. “Sell isn’t the word for it. We reckoned on doing the Matterhorn the day after to-morrow. I suppose there’s no chance of it now.”

“If you can walk as far as de Riffel in one week you can tink you are very lucky,” answered the guide.

Poor Philip groaned.

“It’s deuced rough,” he said. “I didn’t come over to Zermatt to lie up a week in a confounded hotel.”

“It would be worse to lie up for ever in de churchyard,” answered Conrad oracularly, as he lit his pipe.

“I suppose it would—but, I say, Conrad, how is it you fellows all talk such good English? Where the dickens do you learn it?”

“We learn it in de vinter. We make a class.”

“But who teaches you? Do you get hold of an Englishman?”

“No. It is a Swiss—a Swiss who has been five years in America. But,” added the guide, naïvely, “I don’t tink his pronunciation is very good.”

Meanwhile, Fordham and Peter were making their way down the wild and desolate Trift-thal in the moonlight.

“I never did see de Rothhorn so bad for de shtones as to-day,” grumbled the latter. “Dey come down, oh, like a devil.”

“It’s unfortunate, but one consolation is that it was nobody’s fault. It was sheer ill-luck, Peter, and you or Conrad might equally well have been hit.”

“No, it is nobody’s fault,” assented Peter. “But, if anyting goes wrong with de gentleman dere are always peoples what say it is de guide’s fault. But dat is just de very ting no guide can help—de falling shtones. We get over de place as quick as we can, but we can’trun.Ach!” he concluded, with a disgusted shake of the head.

There was reason in what he said. An Alpine guide under the circumstances is in much the same position as the captain of a ship. There are casualties which can be averted neither by the skill of the one nor the seamanship of the other, nor the courage of both. Yet when such occur public opinion is equally hard on both.

It was midnight before the sufferer was safely housed. The local practitioner looked grave, very grave, when he examined the injury. He peremptorily forbade the patient to set foot to the ground until he gave him leave, and that under pain of almost certainly losing his foot altogether.

“Great events from little causes spring.” The little cause in this instance was that little stone. There was a grim literalness in Peter Anderledy’s unconscious variation of a well-worn simile when he predicted that the stones were going to fall “like a devil”—for the falling of that little stone was destined to alter the course of Philip Orlebar’s whole life. Its effect might well have been the result of satanic intervention.

Chapter Twenty Two.A Weapon to Hand.“Hallo, Wentworth?”“Hallo, Fordham!”“Hot, isn’t it?”“Beastly hot.”Thus characteristically did these two Britons greet each other, meeting unexpectedly on the steps of one of the hotels at Zermatt. The bell was ringing fortable d’hôteluncheon, and the sojourners in that extensive caravanserai were dropping in by twos and threes; ladies—ruddy of countenance, the result of sunburn—sketch-book and alpenstock in hand; spectacled Teutons in long black coats with the inevitable opera-glass slung around them; English youths armed with butterfly net or tennis racket, and a sprinkling of the ubiquitous Anglican parson whose nondescript holiday attire, which its wearer flattered himself savoured of the real mountaineer while not entirely disguising his “cloth,” imparted to him very much the aspect of a raffish undertaker in attenuated circumstances. The usual line of guides, taciturn and melancholy, roosted upon the low wall just outside the hotel, or stood in a knot in front of the wood-carving shop opposite, their normal stolidity just awakened into a gleam of speculative interest by the appearance of a string of vehicles heaving in sight amid a cloud of dust, upon the road which leads up from St. Nicolas. For this was before the days of the railway, and Zermatt, still uncockneyfied, retained most of its pristine picturesqueness in spite of the monster hotels dominating its quaint brown chalets. And then the majestic cone of the Matterhorn, towering up from its plinth of rock and glacier.“Are you staying in this house, Wentworth?” pursued Fordham. “I thought the ‘Monte Rosa’ was the hotel patronised by all you regular climbing fellows.”“It is, as a rule. But I thought I’d come here for a change. Besides, when I’m not climbing I like to be among ordinary people. One gets a little sick of hearing nothing but guide-and-rope ‘shop’ talked. Where have you turned up from now?”“Zinal. Cameviâthe top of the Rothhorn. Orlebar got rather a nasty whack from a falling stone. He’ll have to lie by for a day or two.”“Did he? By Jove! Now you mention it, I heard there had been a one-horse kind of accident yesterday. I think they said it was on the Trift-joch. But I didn’t believe it, and then, you see, I started early this morning to walk up to the Stockje hut and am only just back. Poor chap! I say, though, is he badly hit?”“Between you and me and yonder mule, he is rather. Badly enough to knock him out of any more climbing this season. He’ll have to get all the brag he can out of the Rothhorn alone until next year, at any rate. It’s rough on him, too, as he was keen on doing a few of the bigger things.”“Rough it is. Poor chap! I must go upstairs and see him after tiffin. But, come along, Fordham, we had better go in. You can sit by me; there are a lot of empty places around my end of the room.”From their place at table—a remote corner—they could watch the room filling. The bulk of the people were of the order already referred to, but there were some new arrivals, mostly uninteresting—a parson or two; a thick-set Scotchman with a blowsy wife and a whole tribe of wooden-faced, flaxen-haired children; a couple of undergraduates in neckties of vivid hue, presumably their college colours; item, a pair of grim spinsters of uncertain age and tract-disseminating principles; in short, the average ruck of our fellow-countrymen abroad.“Rather a pretty girl, that,” murmured Wentworth.Fordham, who was critically inspecting the wine-list, looked up. Two ladies had just entered the room, and it was to the younger of these that Wentworth had referred. Both were dark, and the elder bore traces of having been at one time strikingly handsome—the younger was so. In their remarkable duplication of each other Nature had unmistakably ticketed them mother and daughter.Upon Fordham the entry of these two produced an astonishing effect. All the colour faded from his swarthy cheek, leaving a sallow livid paleness. His lips were drawn tightly against his teeth, and his black piercing eyes, half-closed, seemed to dart forth lurid lightnings, as he watched the unconscious pair moving down the long room towards their seat. Would they discover his presence? Surely there was something magnetic in that burning glance—a something to which the objects of it could hardly remain unconscious. Yet they did.He saw them take their places. His back was to the light. They had not seen him. But had they caught the devilish, awful, surging hate expressed in that fearful scrutiny it is doubtful whether they would have eaten their luncheon with so tranquil an appetite.“Good-looking, isn’t she?” pursued Wentworth, too intent on his own observation to perceive the change that had come over his friend. “For the matter of that, so is the mother—if it is her mother. They might easily be sisters. What do you think, Fordham?”“So they might,” replied the latter tranquilly, sticking up his eyeglass. He had entirely recovered his self-possession, although there lurked within his glance a snake-like glitter. “Older one needn’t be a day more than forty, and the girl half that. But I say, Wentworth, I thought you were past admiring that sort of cattle.”“Well, I am in a general way. But that’s a splendid-looking girl. Even you must admit that.”If a slight shrug of the shoulders amounted to admission, Wentworth was welcome to it. The object of his eulogy had all the dazzling “points” of a perfect brunette. Hair and eyelashes dark as night—and abundance of both—large clear eyes, and regular, white teeth which gleamed every now and then in a bewitching smile as their owner responded to some remark on the part of her right-hand neighbour with whom she had entered into conversation. While she was in full view of the two men her mother was not, being screened by the ample dimensions and exuberant cap strings of a portly British matron opposite.The confused clatter and buzz of a babel of tongues at length began to suffer abatement, then gave way to the rasping pandemonium of chairs pushed back by the dozen along the polished wooden floor. Fordham, watching his opportunity, left the room under cover of two large groups of people already flitting from his neighbourhood. As he did so, a sidelong glance towards the two new arrivals satisfied him that his identity was still unperceived by them, which, for reasons of his own, he particularly desired. Having thus effected his retreat undiscovered, he paused and took up his position in the passage within a few yards of the dining-room door as if awaiting the exit of somebody.The passage, unlighted by windows, was in shade—in a grateful and refreshing gloom, deepened and intensified by the glare of the midday sunshine in the room beyond. As he thus stood, his back to the wall, that expression of deadly vindictive hatred returned to his face. Standing back in the semi-gloom, he resembled some lurking beast of prey in the diabolical passions impacted upon his countenance.“What an exceedingly disagreeable-looking man,” had remarked more than one of the passers by who had noted this expression. “Whoever he is waiting for will have an unpleasant surprise, anyhow.” This was true, but not in the superficial and commonplace sense in which it was enunciated.Nearly everybody had left the room but those two. Would they sit there all day? Ah! Now!They were advancing up the room, the glowing and graceful beauty of the girl in striking contrast to the maturer and time-worn charms of the matron, who was still wonderfully handsome. It was a pleasing picture to look upon.But the effect upon him now standing there was assuredly far from a pleasing one. The expression of his countenance had become positively devilish. The two were in the doorway now—the girl making some light laughing remark to her mother.But just then the latter looked up—looked up full into Fordham’s face, into the burning, sunken eyes glowering in the shadow, and the effect was startling. A look of the most awful terror came over her face, and she put up her hands wildly as if to ward off some appalling object. Then with a quick, gasping shriek, she fell heavily to the floor in a dead faint.The shriek was echoed by another, as the girl flung herself wildly down beside her mother, adjuring the latter by every endearing name. But the poor woman lay in a ghastly and livid unconsciousness that was more like death.The lounging, chatting groups—mostly ladies—which had been scattered about the hall, startled by the shrieking, came crowding up in dubious, half-frightened fashion. Waiters came pouring out of the dining-room door. To the head of these Fordham spoke.“Is there a doctor staying in the house, Alphonse? The lady seems to be rather unwell. And—I say, Alphonse,” he added, “is Mr Wentworth still in the dining-room? I’ve been waiting for him ever so long.”“Here I am, Fordham,” answered a voice behind him. “Why, man, I’ve been out for at least ten minutes. But what’s the row?”Meanwhile the sufferer was being cared for by several of her own sex. As it happened, too, there was an English doctor staying in the house, who now appeared on the scene.“Stand back, please,” he ordered, authoritatively. “She’ll soon come round. But give her some air at any rate. What caused it?” he added to the sobbing, frightened girl. “She has had a shock of some sort.”“She couldn’t have,” was the answer. “She—she—screamed and fell down. There was n-n-nothing to startle her—in fact, there was a strange gentleman standing there as if waiting for somebody. But he was a perfect stranger.”All this Fordham—who had drawn out of the crowd and was out of sight, but not of hearing—caught. The doctor made no direct reply to the statement, though on the point of the utter unfamiliarity of the stranger’s appearance it is highly probable that he formed his own opinion.“Let’s go and look at the visitors’ book,” suggested Wentworth. “I want to see if there’s any one I know.”They strolled into the bureau and the book was produced. While Wentworth ran his eye attentively down the list of names, Fordham, standing behind him, hardly seemed to look at it. Anyhow, he evinced no interest whatever in the identity of anybody. But in reality the fact was the other way.“The same name,” he said to himself. “The same name! That simplifies matters all round. Now I see daylight. At last—at last!”Half an hour later Fordham strolled round to the village post-office and mailed a batch of letters. This was not in itself an extraordinary circumstance. But in the midst of that batch was one addressed to ‘Mrs Daventer,’ and he knew it would be delivered that same afternoon.“What sort of a crowd at lunch, Fordham?” said Philip, as the door of his room opened to admit that worthy. “Any one new? Hullo, Wentworth! Where have you dropped from?”“Oh, I’ve been around here about a week. But I say, Orlebar, it’s rather hard lines getting yourself knocked out of time this way.”“Hard lines isn’t the word for it. And—what do you think? That confounded ass of a doctor says I sha’n’t be able to do any climbing this season. But he’s only a Swiss,” he added, with the youthful John Bull’s lordly contempt for talent or attainments encased in other than an Anglo-Saxon skull.“You may depend upon it he knows his business,” responded Wentworth. “But you do as he tells you and keep your hoof up, old man, or you may be pinned up in this lively chamber for a month.”“I suppose you’ve been doing some big climbs?” said Philip, wistfully.“Not yet. Been taking it easy. I started to do the Deut Blanche the day after I came here, but the weather worked up bad and we had to turn back. I say, Orlebar, you’d better look sharp and get right. There was a deuced pretty girl attable d’hôte. Her mother fainted in the passage directly after, and there was a devil of an uproar. I believe Fordham made faces at her and scared her into a fit. He was the only person there at the time—”“Ha! ha!” laughed Philip. “Scowled at her ‘like a devil,’ as Peter would say. Eh, Fordham?”But the latter, who was lighting a cigar, made no reply.“By the way, Orlebar,” said Wentworth. “Seen anything more of that girl you were so gone on at Les Avants, Miss—Miss—”The speaker broke off with a start that was comical, for Fordham, while endeavouring to convey a mild and warning kick unseen of the third party—a thing which nobody ever succeeded in doing yet, and in all probability never will—had brought his hoof in contact with a corn, imparting to poor Wentworth the sensation as of a red-hot needle suddenly driven into his toe. In a measure it served him right, for his blundering had touched poor Philip on a very sore place. Lying there all the morning—with the prospect of a good many mornings and afternoons too, destined to be similarly spent—the poor fellow had found ample time for thought.“What a chap you are, Wentworth!” he retorted, irritably. “Here is a poor devil tied by the leg in an infernal room for Heaven knows how long, and you can find nothing better to liven him up with than a lot of feeble and second-hand chaff. Let’s have something a little more amusing. Tell us some mountaineering lies for instance.”And Wentworth spent the best part of the afternoon telling him some.

“Hallo, Wentworth?”

“Hallo, Fordham!”

“Hot, isn’t it?”

“Beastly hot.”

Thus characteristically did these two Britons greet each other, meeting unexpectedly on the steps of one of the hotels at Zermatt. The bell was ringing fortable d’hôteluncheon, and the sojourners in that extensive caravanserai were dropping in by twos and threes; ladies—ruddy of countenance, the result of sunburn—sketch-book and alpenstock in hand; spectacled Teutons in long black coats with the inevitable opera-glass slung around them; English youths armed with butterfly net or tennis racket, and a sprinkling of the ubiquitous Anglican parson whose nondescript holiday attire, which its wearer flattered himself savoured of the real mountaineer while not entirely disguising his “cloth,” imparted to him very much the aspect of a raffish undertaker in attenuated circumstances. The usual line of guides, taciturn and melancholy, roosted upon the low wall just outside the hotel, or stood in a knot in front of the wood-carving shop opposite, their normal stolidity just awakened into a gleam of speculative interest by the appearance of a string of vehicles heaving in sight amid a cloud of dust, upon the road which leads up from St. Nicolas. For this was before the days of the railway, and Zermatt, still uncockneyfied, retained most of its pristine picturesqueness in spite of the monster hotels dominating its quaint brown chalets. And then the majestic cone of the Matterhorn, towering up from its plinth of rock and glacier.

“Are you staying in this house, Wentworth?” pursued Fordham. “I thought the ‘Monte Rosa’ was the hotel patronised by all you regular climbing fellows.”

“It is, as a rule. But I thought I’d come here for a change. Besides, when I’m not climbing I like to be among ordinary people. One gets a little sick of hearing nothing but guide-and-rope ‘shop’ talked. Where have you turned up from now?”

“Zinal. Cameviâthe top of the Rothhorn. Orlebar got rather a nasty whack from a falling stone. He’ll have to lie by for a day or two.”

“Did he? By Jove! Now you mention it, I heard there had been a one-horse kind of accident yesterday. I think they said it was on the Trift-joch. But I didn’t believe it, and then, you see, I started early this morning to walk up to the Stockje hut and am only just back. Poor chap! I say, though, is he badly hit?”

“Between you and me and yonder mule, he is rather. Badly enough to knock him out of any more climbing this season. He’ll have to get all the brag he can out of the Rothhorn alone until next year, at any rate. It’s rough on him, too, as he was keen on doing a few of the bigger things.”

“Rough it is. Poor chap! I must go upstairs and see him after tiffin. But, come along, Fordham, we had better go in. You can sit by me; there are a lot of empty places around my end of the room.”

From their place at table—a remote corner—they could watch the room filling. The bulk of the people were of the order already referred to, but there were some new arrivals, mostly uninteresting—a parson or two; a thick-set Scotchman with a blowsy wife and a whole tribe of wooden-faced, flaxen-haired children; a couple of undergraduates in neckties of vivid hue, presumably their college colours; item, a pair of grim spinsters of uncertain age and tract-disseminating principles; in short, the average ruck of our fellow-countrymen abroad.

“Rather a pretty girl, that,” murmured Wentworth.

Fordham, who was critically inspecting the wine-list, looked up. Two ladies had just entered the room, and it was to the younger of these that Wentworth had referred. Both were dark, and the elder bore traces of having been at one time strikingly handsome—the younger was so. In their remarkable duplication of each other Nature had unmistakably ticketed them mother and daughter.

Upon Fordham the entry of these two produced an astonishing effect. All the colour faded from his swarthy cheek, leaving a sallow livid paleness. His lips were drawn tightly against his teeth, and his black piercing eyes, half-closed, seemed to dart forth lurid lightnings, as he watched the unconscious pair moving down the long room towards their seat. Would they discover his presence? Surely there was something magnetic in that burning glance—a something to which the objects of it could hardly remain unconscious. Yet they did.

He saw them take their places. His back was to the light. They had not seen him. But had they caught the devilish, awful, surging hate expressed in that fearful scrutiny it is doubtful whether they would have eaten their luncheon with so tranquil an appetite.

“Good-looking, isn’t she?” pursued Wentworth, too intent on his own observation to perceive the change that had come over his friend. “For the matter of that, so is the mother—if it is her mother. They might easily be sisters. What do you think, Fordham?”

“So they might,” replied the latter tranquilly, sticking up his eyeglass. He had entirely recovered his self-possession, although there lurked within his glance a snake-like glitter. “Older one needn’t be a day more than forty, and the girl half that. But I say, Wentworth, I thought you were past admiring that sort of cattle.”

“Well, I am in a general way. But that’s a splendid-looking girl. Even you must admit that.”

If a slight shrug of the shoulders amounted to admission, Wentworth was welcome to it. The object of his eulogy had all the dazzling “points” of a perfect brunette. Hair and eyelashes dark as night—and abundance of both—large clear eyes, and regular, white teeth which gleamed every now and then in a bewitching smile as their owner responded to some remark on the part of her right-hand neighbour with whom she had entered into conversation. While she was in full view of the two men her mother was not, being screened by the ample dimensions and exuberant cap strings of a portly British matron opposite.

The confused clatter and buzz of a babel of tongues at length began to suffer abatement, then gave way to the rasping pandemonium of chairs pushed back by the dozen along the polished wooden floor. Fordham, watching his opportunity, left the room under cover of two large groups of people already flitting from his neighbourhood. As he did so, a sidelong glance towards the two new arrivals satisfied him that his identity was still unperceived by them, which, for reasons of his own, he particularly desired. Having thus effected his retreat undiscovered, he paused and took up his position in the passage within a few yards of the dining-room door as if awaiting the exit of somebody.

The passage, unlighted by windows, was in shade—in a grateful and refreshing gloom, deepened and intensified by the glare of the midday sunshine in the room beyond. As he thus stood, his back to the wall, that expression of deadly vindictive hatred returned to his face. Standing back in the semi-gloom, he resembled some lurking beast of prey in the diabolical passions impacted upon his countenance.

“What an exceedingly disagreeable-looking man,” had remarked more than one of the passers by who had noted this expression. “Whoever he is waiting for will have an unpleasant surprise, anyhow.” This was true, but not in the superficial and commonplace sense in which it was enunciated.

Nearly everybody had left the room but those two. Would they sit there all day? Ah! Now!

They were advancing up the room, the glowing and graceful beauty of the girl in striking contrast to the maturer and time-worn charms of the matron, who was still wonderfully handsome. It was a pleasing picture to look upon.

But the effect upon him now standing there was assuredly far from a pleasing one. The expression of his countenance had become positively devilish. The two were in the doorway now—the girl making some light laughing remark to her mother.

But just then the latter looked up—looked up full into Fordham’s face, into the burning, sunken eyes glowering in the shadow, and the effect was startling. A look of the most awful terror came over her face, and she put up her hands wildly as if to ward off some appalling object. Then with a quick, gasping shriek, she fell heavily to the floor in a dead faint.

The shriek was echoed by another, as the girl flung herself wildly down beside her mother, adjuring the latter by every endearing name. But the poor woman lay in a ghastly and livid unconsciousness that was more like death.

The lounging, chatting groups—mostly ladies—which had been scattered about the hall, startled by the shrieking, came crowding up in dubious, half-frightened fashion. Waiters came pouring out of the dining-room door. To the head of these Fordham spoke.

“Is there a doctor staying in the house, Alphonse? The lady seems to be rather unwell. And—I say, Alphonse,” he added, “is Mr Wentworth still in the dining-room? I’ve been waiting for him ever so long.”

“Here I am, Fordham,” answered a voice behind him. “Why, man, I’ve been out for at least ten minutes. But what’s the row?”

Meanwhile the sufferer was being cared for by several of her own sex. As it happened, too, there was an English doctor staying in the house, who now appeared on the scene.

“Stand back, please,” he ordered, authoritatively. “She’ll soon come round. But give her some air at any rate. What caused it?” he added to the sobbing, frightened girl. “She has had a shock of some sort.”

“She couldn’t have,” was the answer. “She—she—screamed and fell down. There was n-n-nothing to startle her—in fact, there was a strange gentleman standing there as if waiting for somebody. But he was a perfect stranger.”

All this Fordham—who had drawn out of the crowd and was out of sight, but not of hearing—caught. The doctor made no direct reply to the statement, though on the point of the utter unfamiliarity of the stranger’s appearance it is highly probable that he formed his own opinion.

“Let’s go and look at the visitors’ book,” suggested Wentworth. “I want to see if there’s any one I know.”

They strolled into the bureau and the book was produced. While Wentworth ran his eye attentively down the list of names, Fordham, standing behind him, hardly seemed to look at it. Anyhow, he evinced no interest whatever in the identity of anybody. But in reality the fact was the other way.

“The same name,” he said to himself. “The same name! That simplifies matters all round. Now I see daylight. At last—at last!”

Half an hour later Fordham strolled round to the village post-office and mailed a batch of letters. This was not in itself an extraordinary circumstance. But in the midst of that batch was one addressed to ‘Mrs Daventer,’ and he knew it would be delivered that same afternoon.

“What sort of a crowd at lunch, Fordham?” said Philip, as the door of his room opened to admit that worthy. “Any one new? Hullo, Wentworth! Where have you dropped from?”

“Oh, I’ve been around here about a week. But I say, Orlebar, it’s rather hard lines getting yourself knocked out of time this way.”

“Hard lines isn’t the word for it. And—what do you think? That confounded ass of a doctor says I sha’n’t be able to do any climbing this season. But he’s only a Swiss,” he added, with the youthful John Bull’s lordly contempt for talent or attainments encased in other than an Anglo-Saxon skull.

“You may depend upon it he knows his business,” responded Wentworth. “But you do as he tells you and keep your hoof up, old man, or you may be pinned up in this lively chamber for a month.”

“I suppose you’ve been doing some big climbs?” said Philip, wistfully.

“Not yet. Been taking it easy. I started to do the Deut Blanche the day after I came here, but the weather worked up bad and we had to turn back. I say, Orlebar, you’d better look sharp and get right. There was a deuced pretty girl attable d’hôte. Her mother fainted in the passage directly after, and there was a devil of an uproar. I believe Fordham made faces at her and scared her into a fit. He was the only person there at the time—”

“Ha! ha!” laughed Philip. “Scowled at her ‘like a devil,’ as Peter would say. Eh, Fordham?”

But the latter, who was lighting a cigar, made no reply.

“By the way, Orlebar,” said Wentworth. “Seen anything more of that girl you were so gone on at Les Avants, Miss—Miss—”

The speaker broke off with a start that was comical, for Fordham, while endeavouring to convey a mild and warning kick unseen of the third party—a thing which nobody ever succeeded in doing yet, and in all probability never will—had brought his hoof in contact with a corn, imparting to poor Wentworth the sensation as of a red-hot needle suddenly driven into his toe. In a measure it served him right, for his blundering had touched poor Philip on a very sore place. Lying there all the morning—with the prospect of a good many mornings and afternoons too, destined to be similarly spent—the poor fellow had found ample time for thought.

“What a chap you are, Wentworth!” he retorted, irritably. “Here is a poor devil tied by the leg in an infernal room for Heaven knows how long, and you can find nothing better to liven him up with than a lot of feeble and second-hand chaff. Let’s have something a little more amusing. Tell us some mountaineering lies for instance.”

And Wentworth spent the best part of the afternoon telling him some.

Chapter Twenty Three.Forging the Link.A pile of rocks overgrown with stunted rhododendron bushes and shaggy, weather-beaten pines, also stunted. Among these a foaming mountain torrent cleft its way, dashing through the deep, narrow chasm which walled it in some fifty feet below. A seldom-frequented path wound around the base of the rocks, passing over a crazy wooden bridge.On the morning subsequent to the events just detailed Richard Fordham sat among the rocks aforesaid, smoking a cigar. He had lighted it on first arriving at this sequestered spot, and now the glowing end was almost burning his fingers. This showed that he had been waiting there for some time—half an hour at least.Waiting? That was just what he was doing. But there was no impatience attendant on the process. His gaze had scarcely wandered from the stretch of open meadowland lying between his position and the brown roofs of Zermatt nearly a mile away—yet in it there was no concern, no anxiety.An object was approaching along the path—a grey sunshade. Beneath this was a human figure—a female figure. Watching its approach, the expression of his countenance underwent a change; but in it there was still no impatience. The expression of that dark, saturnine countenance was one of exultant ferocity, such as might animate that of the concealed leopard as it watches the unsuspecting antelope advance step by step within easy springing distance of its lurking-place.The new arrival continued to advance slowly until she had reached the rickety wooden bridge. There she paused and looked around as though puzzled.At the sound of a cough above she started and changed colour, then catching sight of another path, began to ascend to where he stood. This was a platform of rock on the edge of the chasm. It was shut in by the trees in such fashion that any one standing there would be scarcely discernible from without, while commanding the approaches from the quarter whence any one would be in the least likely to advance.The new-comer was an extremely well-preserved woman of middle age. She was slightly above the medium height, and her dark, flashing eyes and strongly marked brows gave her an imperious look which it needed not the firm jaw and erect figure to confirm. But the expression stamped upon her pale features at that moment was not that of power, rather it was one of apprehension—of undisguisable dread, dashed with strong abhorrence. As she stood there, panting with the exertion of the ascent, or agitation, or both, a chance observer might have discovered in her countenance a curious likeness to that of Fordham himself.The latter made no gesture, uttered no word of greeting. The evil expression in his face was qualified by a thin, cold sneer. Thus they confronted each other—the one pale, apprehensive, yet with strong aversion and defiance in her eyes; the other self-possessed, thoroughly conscious of power, and returning hate for hate in fullest measure.“Well?” broke from her at last, to the accompaniment of a half-checked stamp of the foot.“Well?”“What have you got to say to me?” she said curtly; adding, in a repressed volcano-storm of wrath and bitterness. “I have obeyed orders, you see.”“You could not have done otherwise. Even you have the sense thoroughly to realise that.”“But I didn’t knowyouwere here,” she went on; “not yet, anyhow. When I saw you I got something of a shock, for my system is not what it was. You quite took me by surprise.”“I believe you—for once. Finished actress as you are, even you could hardly have counterfeited the tragic effect produced by my unexpected appearance yesterday. The devil himself could hardly have scared you more.”“Of the two it is the devil himself that I should have preferred to see.”“Undoubtedly. But the malevolent powers commonly attributed to that functionary are nothing to those I shall bring to bear on you if you neglect to carry out my instructions implicitly. On you and yours, I should have said.”Was it there that the secret of his power lay? An involuntary spasm passed through her frame as if she had received a stab.“Perhaps, then, you will oblige me by communicating them,” she hastened to reply. “For it happens I have made arrangements to leave here this very day—or to-morrow at latest.”“Those arrangements you will have the trouble of cancelling, then.”“Indeed! And may I ask why?”“Certainly. Your appearance here yesterday is going to supply the weapon I have been working to forge for years. Nothing is now wanting to complete the chain. Yours is the hand that shall do so. To that end you will remain here—as long as I require your presence.”“That is a very odd turn for events to take—that you should require my presence,” she said, with a bitter sneer.“Very. In fact, the irony of the situation is unique. And yet there are people who say there is no such thing as poetic justice.”“But now, suppose you begin by giving one some idea as to the nature of this wonderful plan of yours. I take for granted it is for nobody’sgood, anyhow.”“You are wrong there. It will tend most distinctly to the good of two people. And—calm your amazement—one of those people is yourself.”“Your warning is wholly needed. The idea that any action ofyourscould tend tomyadvantage is sufficient to justify the wildest amazement, were there room for any other emotion than complete incredulity,” she answered, with a scornful smile.“You shall see directly. But, first of all, let me congratulate you on the extremely fascinating appearance of—your daughter. It really does you the greatest credit—”“We will leave her out of the question, if you please,” she interrupted, speaking quickly.“But I don’t please—and that for the best possible reason. I said just now that the scheme in which I require your aid will tend to the advantage of two persons, one of them being yourself. The other is—your daughter.”“Then you will certainly not obtain my aid. In anything that tends to involve my child in co-operation—however indirect—with yourself, I flatly refuse to have any hand.”The sardonic smile deepened around Fordham’s mouth. He opened his cigar-case, took out a fresh cigar, and lighted it with the greatest deliberation.“It is always a pity to commit oneself to a rash statement,” he said. “The determination just expressed you will directly see reason to reconsider—certainly before you leave this delightful spot.”“Never!”“Oh, but you will! You are, to do you justice, far too much a woman of the world—life has been far too comfortable, too prosperous for you—for you both—during, we’ll say, the last twenty years, for you to face the alternative now.”“Has it? I will risk anything—face any alternative.”“Even that of starvation?”“Even that. But it will not come to that. Poverty it may be—but—we can work—we can live somehow.”“Ha! ha! ha! Can you? Only try it. I see I was giving you undue credit just now when I defined you as a woman of the world. Those who talk airily of poverty are always the ones who have spent life in luxury. Think of it in all its aspects—of being on the very verge of starvation, of the fireless grate, and weeks of north-east wind and snowstorm, of the foul, insanitary den—kennel rather—covered by the same roof as that which shelters the most debased two-legged animals which ever bore semblance to the stamp of humanity. Think of the sights and sounds, the mad-drunk ruffians, and the fighting, clawing, screaming, harpies; the ‘language of the people,’ and nights made hideous with the yells of some one being murdered. This is what poverty is going to mean in your case. This is what you and your—child will come to. Stay a moment. You think I am exaggerating? You think, no doubt, you have friends who will help you—who will never see you come to this? But don’t flatter yourself. I will prevent them from helping you. I will cause them to spurn you from their doors—both of you. In fact, I will hunt you down into utter and complete ruin—both of you. Both of you—mark it well! Why do I not do so in any case? I don’t know. But oppose me in the slightest particular—neglect in the minutest detail the scheme I am going to set you to carry out—and this—and more than all this shall come upon you—shall come upon you both—as sure as I am a living man.”Her face was as white as a sheet, and in her flashing eyes there was the look of a tigress whose whelps are menaced, as she advanced a step nearer to him, her breast heaving violently.“Dare you boast that youarea living man?” she panted, clenching and unclenching her hands. “Are you not afraid I shall kill you where you stand? I shall some day—I know it!”“Do—if you can. And, by the way, this would have been an excellent opportunity. In the first place, you would be entirely free from interruption, for I have already scouted the whole of this covert to ensure the absence of the regulation dauber intent on evolving the pictorial presentment of a dissipated-looking sugar-loaf, under the impression that he or she is sketching the Matterhorn. In the next, this country has practically abolished the death penalty, so that you would get a dozen years at most, and your child would have the honour of being the daughter of a convict as well as—But drop these melodramatics, and return to sound sense. Heavens, woman! I wonder you dare talk tomelike this.” And as his memory leaped back his deep voice took the snarling rumble of an enraged wild beast.Man and Nature are ever offering the most vivid and jarring contrasts. The brown roofs of the village, dominated by the white cubes of the great hotels, lay nestling amid the green meadows, against a background of stately mountains. The hoarse rush of the torrent, pent up in the narrow fissure at their feet, joined with the deeper roar of the churning Visp, gathering hourly in volume as the midday sun told in power upon its feeder, the great Gorner glacier, whose sheenyséracsreared their dazzling battlements in a blue and white line above the vernal pastures at the head of the valley, while the stately monolith of the giant Matterhorn towered aloft into the vivid blue of the cloudless heavens. Yet there, amid the sequestered solitude of the jagged pines, stood these two, confronting each other with deadly rage in their hearts, with bitterest hate and defiance flashing from their set faces and burning eyes—a very hell of evil passions surging alike in both.“Now take your choice,” he went on. “Carry out my plan as I am about to lay it before you, and you will benefit yourself in doing so. Refuse, or mar it in the slightest detail, either by bungling or of set design, and I will utterly crush you both, beginning from this day. You know me.”She made no answer. She never removed her eyes from his, and her breath came in quick, hard gasps. Her aspect was that of some dangerous animal cornered, driven to bay. Barely a couple of yards behind him was the brink of the narrow fissure by which the churning torrent cleft its way through the heart of the rocks. The sneering, mocking smile which came into his face as he read her thoughts was devilish in its maddening provocation.“No go,” he said. “You couldn’t do it. I am much too firm on my pins. You would be extremely likely to go over yourself, and then what would become of Laura, left tomytender mercies?”“You fiend! I think Satan himself must be a god compared with you.”“Am I to take that as a compliment? Well, now to business. Sit down.”“Thank you. I prefer to stand.”“I don’t,” seating himself upon a boulder and puffing deliberately at his cigar. “Please yourself, however. And now kindly give me your best attention.”Then for the next twenty minutes he did all the talking, though every now and then an ejaculation of anger, disgust, or dissidence would escape her. This, however, affected him not in the slightest degree. The cold, cutting, sarcastic tones flowed evenly on, laying down the details of what was to her a strange and startling plan. Not until he had unfolded it in all its bearings did he pause, as though to invite comment.But by that time it was noticeable that the horror and decisiveness in her refusal to co-operate with which the woman had first received his suggestion had undergone a very marked abatement. She could even bring herself to discuss the scheme in some of its details.“Now,” he concluded—“now you see I am practically proposing to be Laura’s greatest benefactor; yours, too, in a secondary degree, for the event will render you, to a large extent, free from my bondage.”“That indeed would be to benefit me,” she answered, with a return of the old, rancorous aversion. “But even now the motive you have given is not above suspicion. It is too inadequate.”“Not so. If you look at it all round you will perceive it is complete. I am of a revengeful disposition, and now, after half a lifetime, I see my opportunity for taking a most sweeping revenge. But I like my retribution to be as original as it is far-reaching. This one is. In fact, it is unique.”How unique it was even she could not at the moment fathom. But she was destined to learn it later, in all its grim and undreamed-of horror.“I hope I may be allowed to change my mind,” said Mrs Daventer, sweetly, as she entered the bureau of the hotel that afternoon. “I wish to counter-order the arrangements I made for leaving to-morrow. It can be managed, I hope?”“I will see immediately, madame,” said the civilemployé, looking up from the pile of letters he was sorting, and which had just come in. “I tink de mules are already ordered. One moment—I will just inquire.”He went out, leaving Mrs Daventer alone in the bureau. She turned over some of the letters. Among the uppermost in the half-sorted pile was one addressed “Philip Orlebar, Esq.” The handwriting was rather large and bold, but distinctly feminine, and the envelope bore the Zinal postmark. At sight of this Mrs Daventer’s pulses quickened and her eyes dilated. Then she heard theemployé’ssteps returning.“It will be all right, madame,” he said. “Another party is going down who will be very glad of de mules.”She thanked him, entered into a few pleasant commonplaces as to the attractions of the locality, the number of people abroad that year, the fineness of the season, and so forth, and expressing a little disappointment at the man’s reply that the pile of letters just delivered contained none for her or her daughter, she went out.Philip Orlebar received several letters that afternoon, but they did not comprise one bearing the Zinal postmark, which circumstance, however, conveyed no disappointment, inasmuch as he had never expected they would.

A pile of rocks overgrown with stunted rhododendron bushes and shaggy, weather-beaten pines, also stunted. Among these a foaming mountain torrent cleft its way, dashing through the deep, narrow chasm which walled it in some fifty feet below. A seldom-frequented path wound around the base of the rocks, passing over a crazy wooden bridge.

On the morning subsequent to the events just detailed Richard Fordham sat among the rocks aforesaid, smoking a cigar. He had lighted it on first arriving at this sequestered spot, and now the glowing end was almost burning his fingers. This showed that he had been waiting there for some time—half an hour at least.

Waiting? That was just what he was doing. But there was no impatience attendant on the process. His gaze had scarcely wandered from the stretch of open meadowland lying between his position and the brown roofs of Zermatt nearly a mile away—yet in it there was no concern, no anxiety.

An object was approaching along the path—a grey sunshade. Beneath this was a human figure—a female figure. Watching its approach, the expression of his countenance underwent a change; but in it there was still no impatience. The expression of that dark, saturnine countenance was one of exultant ferocity, such as might animate that of the concealed leopard as it watches the unsuspecting antelope advance step by step within easy springing distance of its lurking-place.

The new arrival continued to advance slowly until she had reached the rickety wooden bridge. There she paused and looked around as though puzzled.

At the sound of a cough above she started and changed colour, then catching sight of another path, began to ascend to where he stood. This was a platform of rock on the edge of the chasm. It was shut in by the trees in such fashion that any one standing there would be scarcely discernible from without, while commanding the approaches from the quarter whence any one would be in the least likely to advance.

The new-comer was an extremely well-preserved woman of middle age. She was slightly above the medium height, and her dark, flashing eyes and strongly marked brows gave her an imperious look which it needed not the firm jaw and erect figure to confirm. But the expression stamped upon her pale features at that moment was not that of power, rather it was one of apprehension—of undisguisable dread, dashed with strong abhorrence. As she stood there, panting with the exertion of the ascent, or agitation, or both, a chance observer might have discovered in her countenance a curious likeness to that of Fordham himself.

The latter made no gesture, uttered no word of greeting. The evil expression in his face was qualified by a thin, cold sneer. Thus they confronted each other—the one pale, apprehensive, yet with strong aversion and defiance in her eyes; the other self-possessed, thoroughly conscious of power, and returning hate for hate in fullest measure.

“Well?” broke from her at last, to the accompaniment of a half-checked stamp of the foot.

“Well?”

“What have you got to say to me?” she said curtly; adding, in a repressed volcano-storm of wrath and bitterness. “I have obeyed orders, you see.”

“You could not have done otherwise. Even you have the sense thoroughly to realise that.”

“But I didn’t knowyouwere here,” she went on; “not yet, anyhow. When I saw you I got something of a shock, for my system is not what it was. You quite took me by surprise.”

“I believe you—for once. Finished actress as you are, even you could hardly have counterfeited the tragic effect produced by my unexpected appearance yesterday. The devil himself could hardly have scared you more.”

“Of the two it is the devil himself that I should have preferred to see.”

“Undoubtedly. But the malevolent powers commonly attributed to that functionary are nothing to those I shall bring to bear on you if you neglect to carry out my instructions implicitly. On you and yours, I should have said.”

Was it there that the secret of his power lay? An involuntary spasm passed through her frame as if she had received a stab.

“Perhaps, then, you will oblige me by communicating them,” she hastened to reply. “For it happens I have made arrangements to leave here this very day—or to-morrow at latest.”

“Those arrangements you will have the trouble of cancelling, then.”

“Indeed! And may I ask why?”

“Certainly. Your appearance here yesterday is going to supply the weapon I have been working to forge for years. Nothing is now wanting to complete the chain. Yours is the hand that shall do so. To that end you will remain here—as long as I require your presence.”

“That is a very odd turn for events to take—that you should require my presence,” she said, with a bitter sneer.

“Very. In fact, the irony of the situation is unique. And yet there are people who say there is no such thing as poetic justice.”

“But now, suppose you begin by giving one some idea as to the nature of this wonderful plan of yours. I take for granted it is for nobody’sgood, anyhow.”

“You are wrong there. It will tend most distinctly to the good of two people. And—calm your amazement—one of those people is yourself.”

“Your warning is wholly needed. The idea that any action ofyourscould tend tomyadvantage is sufficient to justify the wildest amazement, were there room for any other emotion than complete incredulity,” she answered, with a scornful smile.

“You shall see directly. But, first of all, let me congratulate you on the extremely fascinating appearance of—your daughter. It really does you the greatest credit—”

“We will leave her out of the question, if you please,” she interrupted, speaking quickly.

“But I don’t please—and that for the best possible reason. I said just now that the scheme in which I require your aid will tend to the advantage of two persons, one of them being yourself. The other is—your daughter.”

“Then you will certainly not obtain my aid. In anything that tends to involve my child in co-operation—however indirect—with yourself, I flatly refuse to have any hand.”

The sardonic smile deepened around Fordham’s mouth. He opened his cigar-case, took out a fresh cigar, and lighted it with the greatest deliberation.

“It is always a pity to commit oneself to a rash statement,” he said. “The determination just expressed you will directly see reason to reconsider—certainly before you leave this delightful spot.”

“Never!”

“Oh, but you will! You are, to do you justice, far too much a woman of the world—life has been far too comfortable, too prosperous for you—for you both—during, we’ll say, the last twenty years, for you to face the alternative now.”

“Has it? I will risk anything—face any alternative.”

“Even that of starvation?”

“Even that. But it will not come to that. Poverty it may be—but—we can work—we can live somehow.”

“Ha! ha! ha! Can you? Only try it. I see I was giving you undue credit just now when I defined you as a woman of the world. Those who talk airily of poverty are always the ones who have spent life in luxury. Think of it in all its aspects—of being on the very verge of starvation, of the fireless grate, and weeks of north-east wind and snowstorm, of the foul, insanitary den—kennel rather—covered by the same roof as that which shelters the most debased two-legged animals which ever bore semblance to the stamp of humanity. Think of the sights and sounds, the mad-drunk ruffians, and the fighting, clawing, screaming, harpies; the ‘language of the people,’ and nights made hideous with the yells of some one being murdered. This is what poverty is going to mean in your case. This is what you and your—child will come to. Stay a moment. You think I am exaggerating? You think, no doubt, you have friends who will help you—who will never see you come to this? But don’t flatter yourself. I will prevent them from helping you. I will cause them to spurn you from their doors—both of you. In fact, I will hunt you down into utter and complete ruin—both of you. Both of you—mark it well! Why do I not do so in any case? I don’t know. But oppose me in the slightest particular—neglect in the minutest detail the scheme I am going to set you to carry out—and this—and more than all this shall come upon you—shall come upon you both—as sure as I am a living man.”

Her face was as white as a sheet, and in her flashing eyes there was the look of a tigress whose whelps are menaced, as she advanced a step nearer to him, her breast heaving violently.

“Dare you boast that youarea living man?” she panted, clenching and unclenching her hands. “Are you not afraid I shall kill you where you stand? I shall some day—I know it!”

“Do—if you can. And, by the way, this would have been an excellent opportunity. In the first place, you would be entirely free from interruption, for I have already scouted the whole of this covert to ensure the absence of the regulation dauber intent on evolving the pictorial presentment of a dissipated-looking sugar-loaf, under the impression that he or she is sketching the Matterhorn. In the next, this country has practically abolished the death penalty, so that you would get a dozen years at most, and your child would have the honour of being the daughter of a convict as well as—But drop these melodramatics, and return to sound sense. Heavens, woman! I wonder you dare talk tomelike this.” And as his memory leaped back his deep voice took the snarling rumble of an enraged wild beast.

Man and Nature are ever offering the most vivid and jarring contrasts. The brown roofs of the village, dominated by the white cubes of the great hotels, lay nestling amid the green meadows, against a background of stately mountains. The hoarse rush of the torrent, pent up in the narrow fissure at their feet, joined with the deeper roar of the churning Visp, gathering hourly in volume as the midday sun told in power upon its feeder, the great Gorner glacier, whose sheenyséracsreared their dazzling battlements in a blue and white line above the vernal pastures at the head of the valley, while the stately monolith of the giant Matterhorn towered aloft into the vivid blue of the cloudless heavens. Yet there, amid the sequestered solitude of the jagged pines, stood these two, confronting each other with deadly rage in their hearts, with bitterest hate and defiance flashing from their set faces and burning eyes—a very hell of evil passions surging alike in both.

“Now take your choice,” he went on. “Carry out my plan as I am about to lay it before you, and you will benefit yourself in doing so. Refuse, or mar it in the slightest detail, either by bungling or of set design, and I will utterly crush you both, beginning from this day. You know me.”

She made no answer. She never removed her eyes from his, and her breath came in quick, hard gasps. Her aspect was that of some dangerous animal cornered, driven to bay. Barely a couple of yards behind him was the brink of the narrow fissure by which the churning torrent cleft its way through the heart of the rocks. The sneering, mocking smile which came into his face as he read her thoughts was devilish in its maddening provocation.

“No go,” he said. “You couldn’t do it. I am much too firm on my pins. You would be extremely likely to go over yourself, and then what would become of Laura, left tomytender mercies?”

“You fiend! I think Satan himself must be a god compared with you.”

“Am I to take that as a compliment? Well, now to business. Sit down.”

“Thank you. I prefer to stand.”

“I don’t,” seating himself upon a boulder and puffing deliberately at his cigar. “Please yourself, however. And now kindly give me your best attention.”

Then for the next twenty minutes he did all the talking, though every now and then an ejaculation of anger, disgust, or dissidence would escape her. This, however, affected him not in the slightest degree. The cold, cutting, sarcastic tones flowed evenly on, laying down the details of what was to her a strange and startling plan. Not until he had unfolded it in all its bearings did he pause, as though to invite comment.

But by that time it was noticeable that the horror and decisiveness in her refusal to co-operate with which the woman had first received his suggestion had undergone a very marked abatement. She could even bring herself to discuss the scheme in some of its details.

“Now,” he concluded—“now you see I am practically proposing to be Laura’s greatest benefactor; yours, too, in a secondary degree, for the event will render you, to a large extent, free from my bondage.”

“That indeed would be to benefit me,” she answered, with a return of the old, rancorous aversion. “But even now the motive you have given is not above suspicion. It is too inadequate.”

“Not so. If you look at it all round you will perceive it is complete. I am of a revengeful disposition, and now, after half a lifetime, I see my opportunity for taking a most sweeping revenge. But I like my retribution to be as original as it is far-reaching. This one is. In fact, it is unique.”

How unique it was even she could not at the moment fathom. But she was destined to learn it later, in all its grim and undreamed-of horror.

“I hope I may be allowed to change my mind,” said Mrs Daventer, sweetly, as she entered the bureau of the hotel that afternoon. “I wish to counter-order the arrangements I made for leaving to-morrow. It can be managed, I hope?”

“I will see immediately, madame,” said the civilemployé, looking up from the pile of letters he was sorting, and which had just come in. “I tink de mules are already ordered. One moment—I will just inquire.”

He went out, leaving Mrs Daventer alone in the bureau. She turned over some of the letters. Among the uppermost in the half-sorted pile was one addressed “Philip Orlebar, Esq.” The handwriting was rather large and bold, but distinctly feminine, and the envelope bore the Zinal postmark. At sight of this Mrs Daventer’s pulses quickened and her eyes dilated. Then she heard theemployé’ssteps returning.

“It will be all right, madame,” he said. “Another party is going down who will be very glad of de mules.”

She thanked him, entered into a few pleasant commonplaces as to the attractions of the locality, the number of people abroad that year, the fineness of the season, and so forth, and expressing a little disappointment at the man’s reply that the pile of letters just delivered contained none for her or her daughter, she went out.

Philip Orlebar received several letters that afternoon, but they did not comprise one bearing the Zinal postmark, which circumstance, however, conveyed no disappointment, inasmuch as he had never expected they would.

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