The old Englischer Hof at Pontresina looked decidedly sleepy and misty at five o’clock on an August morning, when two sturdy British holiday-seekers, in knickerbockers and regular Alpine climbing rig, sat drinking their parting cup of coffee in the salle-à-manger, before starting to make the ascent of the Piz Margatsch, one of the tallest and by far the most difficult among the peaks of the Bernina range. There are few prettier villages in the Engadine than Pontresina, and few better hotels in all Switzerland than the old ivy-covered Englischer Hof. Yet on this particular morning, and at that particular hour, it certainly did look just a trifle cold and cheerless. ‘He never makes very warm in the Engadine,’ Carlo the waiter observed with a shudder, in his best English, to one of the two early risers: ‘and he makes colder on an August morning here than he makes at Nice in full December.’ For poor Carlo was one of those cosmopolitan waiters who follow the cosmopolitan tourist clientèle round all the spas, health resorts, kurs and winter quarters of fashionable Europe. In January he and his brother, as Charles and Henri, handed round absinthes and cigarettes at the Cercle Nautique at Nice; in April, as Carlo and Enrico, they turned up again with water ices and wafer cakes in the Caffè Manzoni at Milan; and in August, the observant traveller might recognise them once more under the disguise of Karl and Heinrich, laying the table d’hôte in the long and narrow old-fashioned dining-room of the Englischer Hof at Pontresina. Though their native tongue was the patois of the Canton Ticino, they spoke all the civilised languages of the world, ‘and also German,’ with perfect fluency, and without the slightest attempt at either grammar or idiomatic accuracy. And they both profoundly believed in their hearts that the rank, wealth, youth, beauty and fashion of all other nations were wisely ordained by the inscrutable designs of Providence for a single purpose, to enrich and reward the active, intelligent, and industrious natives of the Canton Ticino.
‘Are the guides come yet?’ asked Harry Oswald of the waiter in somewhat feeble and hesitating German. He made it a point to speak German to the waiters, because he regarded it as the only proper and national language of the universal Teutonic Swiss people.
‘They await the gentlemans in the corridor,’ answered Carlo, in his own peculiar and racy English; for he on his side resented the imputation that any traveller need ever converse with him in any but that traveller’s own tongue, provided only it was one of the recognised and civilised languages of the world, or even German. They are a barbarous and disgusting race, those Tedeschi, look you well, Signor; they address you as though you were the dust in the piazza; yet even from them a polite and attentive person may confidently look for a modest, a very modest, but still a welcome trink-geld.
‘Then we’d better hurry up, Oswald,’ said Herbert Le Breton, ‘for guides are the most tyrannical set of people on the entire face of this planet. I shall have another cup of coffee before I go, though, if the guides swear at me roundly in the best Roumansch for it, anyhow.’
‘Your acquaintance with the Roumansch dialect being probably limited,’ Harry Oswald answered, ‘the difference between their swearing and their blessing would doubtless be reduced to a vanishing point. Though I’ve noticed that swearing is really a form of human speech everywhere readily understanded of the people in spite of all differences of race or language. One touch of nature, you see; and swearing, after all, is extremely natural.’
‘Are you ready?’ asked Herbert, having tossed off his coffee. ‘Yes? Then come along at once. I can feel the guides frowning at us through the partition.’
They turned out into the street, with its green-shuttered windows all still closed in the pale grey of early morning, and walked along with the three guides by the high road which leads through rocks and fir-trees up to the beginning of the steep path to the Piz Margatsch. Passing the clear emerald-green waterfall that rushes from under the lower melting end of the Morteratsch glacier, they took at once to the narrow track by the moraine along the edge of the ice, and then to the glacier itself, which is easy enough climbing, as glaciers go, for a good pedestrian. Herbert Le Breton, the older mountaineer of the two, got over the big blocks readily enough; but Harry, less accustomed to Swiss expeditions, lagged and loitered behind a little, and required more assistance from the guides every now and again than his sturdy companion.
‘I’m getting rather blown at starting,’ Harry called out at last to Herbert, some yards in front of him. ‘Do you think the despotic guide would let us sit down and rest a bit if we asked him very prettily?’
‘Offer him a cigar first,’ Herbert shouted back, ‘and then after a short and decent interval, prefer your request humbly in your politest French. The savage potentate always expects to be propitiated by gifts, as a preliminary to answering the petitions of his humble subjects.’
‘I see,’ Harry said, laughing. ‘Supply before grievances, not grievances before supply.’ And he halted a moment to light a cigar, and to offer one to each of the two guides who were helping him along on either side.
Thus mollified, the senior guide grudgingly allowed ten minutes’ halt and a drink of water at the bend by the corner of the glacier. They sat down upon the great translucent sea-green blocks and began talking with the taciturn chief guide.
‘Is this glacier dangerous?’ Harry asked.
‘Dangerous, monsieur? Oh no, not as one counts glaciers. It is very safe. There are seldom accidents.’
‘But there have been some?’
‘Some, naturally. You don’t climb mountains always without accidents. There was one the first time anyone ever made the ascent of the Piz Margatsch. That was fifty years ago. My uncle was killed in it.’
‘Killed in it?’ Harry echoed. ‘How did it all happen, and where?’
‘Yonder, monsieur, in a crevasse that was then situated near the bend at the corner, just where the great crevasse you see before you now stands. That was fifty years ago; since then the glacier has moved much. Its substance, in effect, has changed entirely.’
‘Tell us all about it,’ Herbert put in carelessly. He knew the guide wouldn’t go on again till he had finished his whole story.
‘It’s a strange tale,’ the guide answered, taking a puff or two at his cigar pensively and then removing it altogether for his set narrative—he had told the tale before a hundred times, and he had the very words of it now regularly by heart. ‘It was the first time anyone ever tried to climb the Piz Margatsch. At that time, nobody in the valley knew the best path; it is my father who afterwards discovered it. Two English gentlemen came to Pontresina one morning; one might say you two gentlemen; but in those days there were not many tourists in the Engadine; the exploitation of the tourist had not yet begun to be developed. My father and my uncle were then the only two guides at Pontresina. The English gentlemen asked them to try with them the scaling of the Piz Margatsch. My uncle was afraid of it, but my father laughed down his fears. So they started. My uncle was dressed in a blue coat with brass buttons, and a pair of brown velvet breeches. Ah, heaven, I can see him yet, his white corpse in the blue coat and the brown velvet breeches!’
‘But you can’t be fifty yourself,’ Harry said, looking at the tall long-limbed man attentively; ‘no, nor forty, nor thirty either.’
‘No, monsieur, I am twenty-seven,’ the chief guide answered, taking another puff at his cigar very deliberately; ‘and this was fifty years ago: yet I have seen his corpse just as the accident happened. You shall hear all about it. It is a tale from the dead; it is worth hearing.’
‘This begins to grow mysterious,’ said Herbert in English, hammering impatiently at the ice with the shod end of his alpenstock. ‘Sounds for all the world just like the introduction to a Christmas number.’
‘A young girl in the village loved my uncle,’ the guide went on imperturbably; ‘and she begged him not to go on this expedition. She was betrothed to him. But he wouldn’t listen: and they all started together for the top of the Piz Margatsch. After many trials, my father and my uncle and the two tourists reached the summit. “So you see, Andreas,” said my father, “your fears were all folly.” “Half-way through the forest,” said my uncle, “one is not yet safe from the wolf.” Then they began to descend again. They got down past all the dangerous places, and on to this glacier, so well known, so familiar. And then my uncle began indeed to get careless. He laughed at his own fears; “Cathrein was all wrong,” he said to my father, “we shall get down again safely, with Our Lady’s assistance.” So they reached at last the great crevasse. My father and one of the Englishmen got over without difficulty; but the other Englishman slipped; his footing failed him; and he was sinking, sinking, down, down, down, slipping quickly into the deep dark green abyss below. My uncle stretched out his hand over the edge: the Englishman caught it; and then my uncle missed his foothold, they both fell together and were lost to sight at once completely, in the invisible depths of the great glacier!’
‘Well,’ Herbert Le Breton said, as the man paused a moment. ‘Is that all?’
‘No,’ the guide answered, with a tone of deep solemnity. ‘That is not all. The glacier went on moving, moving, slowly, slowly, but always downward, for years and years. Yet no one ever heard anything more of the two lost bodies. At last one day, when I was seven years old, I went out playing with my brother, among the pine-woods, near the waterfall that rushes below there, from under the glacier. We saw something lying in the ice-cold water, just beneath the bottom of the ice-sheet. We climbed over the moraine; and there, oh heaven! we could see two dead bodies. They were drowned, just drowned, we thought: it might have been yesterday. One of them was short and thick-set, with the face of an Englishman: he was close-shaven, and, what seemed odd to us, he had on clothes which, though we were but children, we knew at once for the clothes of a long past fashion—in fact, a suit of the Louis dix-huit style. Tha other was a tall and handsome man, dressed in the unchangeable blue coat and brown velvet breeches of our own canton, of the Graubunden. We were very frightened about it, and so we ran away trembling and told an old woman who lived close by; her name was Cathrein, and her grandchildren used to play with us, though she herself was about the age of my father, for my father married very late. Old Cathrein came out with us to look; and the moment she saw the bodies, she cried out with a great cry, “It is he! It is Andreas! It is my betrothed, who was lost on the very day week when I was to be married. I should know him at once among ten thousand. It is many, many years now, but I have not forgotten his face—ah, my God, that face; I know it well!” And she took his hand in hers, that fair white young hand in her own old brown withered one, and kissed it gently. “And yet,” she said, “he is five years older than me, this fair young man here; five years older than me!” We were frightened to hear her talk so, for we said to ourselves, “She must be mad;” so we ran home and brought our father. He looked at the dead bodies and at old Cathrein, and he said, “It is indeed true. He is my brother.” Ah, monsieur, you would not have forgotten it if you had seen those two old people standing there beside the fresh corpses they had not seen for all those winters! They themselves had meanwhile grown old and grey and wrinkled; but the ice of the glacier had kept those others young, and fresh, and fair, and beautiful as on the day they were first engulfed in it. It was terrible to look at!’
‘A most ghastly story, indeed,’ Herbert Le Breton said, yawning; ‘and now I think we’d better be getting under way again, hadn’t we, Oswald?’
Harry Oswald rose from his seat on the block of ice unwillingly, and proceeded on his road up the mountain with a distinct and decided feeling of nervousness. Was it the guide’s story that made his knees tremble slightly? was it his own inexperience in climbing? or was it the cold and the fatigue of the first ascent of the season to a man not yet in full pedestrian Alpine training? He did not feel at all sure about it in his own mind: but this much he knew with perfect certainty, that his footing was not nearly so secure under him as it had been during the earlier part of the climb over the lower end of the glacier.
By-and-by they reached the long sheer snowy slope near the Three Brothers. This slope is liable to slip, and requires careful walking, so the guides began roping them together. ‘The stout monsieur in front, next after me,’ said the chief guide, knotting the rope soundly round Herbert Le Breton: ‘then Kaspar; then you, monsieur,’ to Harry Oswald, ‘and finally Paolo, to bring up the rear. The thin monsieur is nervous, I think; it’s best to place him most in the middle.’
‘If you really ARE nervous, Oswald,’ Herbert said, not unkindly, ‘you’d better stop behind, I think, and let me go on with two of the guides. The really hard work, you know, has scarcely begun yet.’
‘Oh dear, no,’ Harry answered lightly (he didn’t care to confess his timidity before Herbert Le Breton of all men in the world): ‘I do feel just a little groggy about the knees, I admit; but it’s not nervousness, it’s only want of training. I haven’t got accustomed to glacier-work yet, and the best way to overcome it is by constant practice. “Solvitur ambulando,” you know, as Aldrich says about Achilles and the tortoise.’
‘Very good,’ Herbert answered drily; ‘only mind, whatever you do, for Heaven’s sake don’t go and stumble and pull ME down on the top of you. It’s the clear duty of a good citizen to respect the lives of the other men who are roped together with him on the side of a mountain.’
They set to work again, in single file, with cautious steps planted firmly on the treacherous snow, to scale the great white slope that stretched so temptingly before them. Harry felt his knees becoming at every step more and more ungovernable, while Herbert didn’t improve matters by calling out to him from time to time, ‘Now, then, look out for a hard bit here,’ or ‘Mind that loose piece of ice there,’ or ‘Be very careful how you put your foot down by the yielding edge yonder,’ and so forth. At last, they had almost reached the top of the slope, and were just above the bare gulley on the side, when Harry’s insecure footing on a stray scrap of ice gave way suddenly, and he began to slip rapidly down the sheer slope of the mountain. In a second he had knocked against Paolo, and Paolo had begun to slip too, so that both were pulling with all their weight against Kaspar and the others in front. ‘For Heaven’s sake, man,’ Herbert cried hastily, ‘dig your alpenstock deep into the snow.’ At the same instant, the chief guide shouted in Roumansch to the same effect to Kaspar. But even as they spoke, Kaspar, pushing his feet hard against the snow, began to give way too; and the whole party seemed about to slip together down over the sheer rocky precipice of the great gulley on the right. It was a moment of supreme anxiety; but Herbert Le Breton, looking back with blood almost unstirred and calmly observant eye, saw at once the full scope of the threatening danger. ‘There’s only one chance,’ he said to himself quietly. ‘Oswald is lost already! Unless the rope breaks, we are all lost together!’ At that very second, Harry Oswald, throwing his arms up wildly, had reached the edge of the terrible precipice; he went over with a piercing cry into the abyss, with the last guide beside him, and Kaspar following him close in mute terror. Then Herbert Le Breton felt the rope straining, straining, straining, upon the sharp frozen edge of the rock; for an inappreciable point of time it strained and crackled: one loud snap, and it was gone for ever. Herbert and the chief guide, almost upset by the sudden release from the heavy pull that was steadily dragging them over, threw themselves flat on their faces in the drifted snow, and checked their fall by a powerful muscular effort. The rope was broken and their lives were saved, but what had become of the three others?
They crept cautiously on hands and knees to the most practicable spot at the edge of the precipice, and the guide peered over into the great white blank below with eager eyes of horrid premonition. As he did so, he recoiled with awe, and made a rapid gesture with his hands, half prayer, half speechless terror. ‘What do you see?’ asked Herbert, not daring himself to look down upon the blank beneath him, lest he should be tempted to throw himself over in a giddy moment.
‘Jesu, Maria,’ cried the guide, crossing himself instinctively over and over again, ‘they have all fallen to the very foot of the second precipice! They are lying, all three, huddled together on the ledge there just above the great glacier. They are dead, quite dead, dead before they reached the ground even. Great God, it is too terrible!’
Herbert Le Breton looked at the white-faced guide with just the faintest suspicion of a sneering curl upon his handsome features. The excitement of the danger was over now, and he had at once recovered his usual philosophic equanimity. ‘Quite dead,’ he said, in French, ‘quite dead, are they? Then we can’t be of any further use to them. But I suppose we must go down again at once to help recover the dead bodies!’
The guide gazed at him blankly with simple open-mouthed undisguised amazement. ‘Naturally,’ he said, in a very quiet voice of utter disgust and loathing. ‘You wouldn’t leave them lying there alone on the cold snow, would you?’
‘This is really most annoying,’ thought Herbert Le Breton to himself, in his rational philosophic fashion: ‘here we are, almost at the summit, and now we shall have to turn back again from the very threshold of our goal, without having seen the view for which we’ve climbed up, and risked our lives too—all for a purely sentimental reason, because we won’t leave those three dead men alone on the snow for an hour or two longer! it’s a very short climb to the top now, and I could manage it by myself in twenty minutes. If only the chief guide had slid over with the others, I should have gone on alone, and had the view at least for my trouble. I could have pretended the accident happened on the way down again. As it is, I shall have to turn back ingloriously, re infecta. The guide will tell everybody at Pontresina that I went on, in spite of the accident; and then it would get into the English papers, and all the world would say that I was so dreadfully cruel and heartless. People are always so irrational in their ethical judgments. Oswald’s quite dead, that’s certain; nobody could fall over such a precipice as that without being killed a dozen times over before he even reached the bottom. A very painless and easy death too; I couldn’t myself wish for a better one. We can’t do them the slightest good by picking up their lifeless bodies, and yet a foolishly sentimental public opinion positively compels one to do it. Poor Oswald! Upon my soul I’m sorry for him, and for that pretty little sister of his too; but what’s the use of bothering about it? The thing’s done, and nothing that I can do or say will ever make it any better.’
So they turned once more in single file down by the great glacier, and retraced their way to Pontresina without exchanging another word. To say the truth, the chief guide felt appalled and frightened by the presence of this impassive, unemotional British traveller, and did not even care to conceal his feelings. But then he wasn’t an educated philosopher and man of culture like Herbert Le Breton.
Late that evening a party of twelve villagers brought back three stiff and mangled corpses on loose cattle hurdles into the village of Pontresina. Two of them were the bodies of two local Swiss guides, and the third, with its delicate face unscathed by the fall, and turned calmly upwards to the clear moonlight, was the body of Harry Oswald. Alas, alas, Gilboa! The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places.
From Calcombe Pomeroy Ernest had returned, not to Dunbude, but to meet the Exmoor party in London. There he had managed somehow—he hardly knew how himself—to live through a whole season without an explosion in his employer’s family. That an explosion must come, sooner or later, he felt pretty sure in his own mind for several reasons: his whole existence there was a mistake and an anomaly, and he could no more mix in the end with the Exmoor family than oil can mix with vinegar, or vice versâ. The round of dances and dinners to which he had to accompany his pupil was utterly distasteful to him. Lynmouth never learnt anything; so Ernest felt his own function in the household a perfectly useless one; and he was always on the eve of a declaration that he couldn’t any longer put up with this, that, or the other ‘gross immorality’ in which Lynmouth was actively or passively encouraged by his father and mother. Still, there were two things which indefinitely postponed the smouldering outbreak. In the first place, Ernest wrote to, and heard from, Edie every day; and he believed he ought for Edie’s sake to give the situation a fair trial, as long as he was able, or at least till he saw some other opening, which might make it possible within some reasonable period to marry her. In the second place, Lady Hilda had perceived with her intuitive quickness the probability that a cause of dispute might arise between her father and Ernest, and had made up her mind as far as in her lay to prevent its ever coming to a head. She didn’t wish Ernest to leave his post in the household—so much originality was hardly again to be secured in a hurry—and therefore she laid herself out with all her ingenuity to smooth over all the possible openings for a difference of opinion whenever they occurred. If Ernest’s scruples were getting the upper hand of his calmer judgment, Lady Hilda read the change in his face at once, and managed dexterously to draw off Lynmouth, or to talk over her mother quietly to acquiesce in Ernest’s view of the question. If Lord Exmoor was beginning to think that this young man’s confounded fads were really getting quite unbearable, Lady Hilda interposed some casual remark about how much better Lynmouth was kept out of the way now than he used to be in Mr. Walsh’s time. Ernest himself never even suspected this unobtrusive diplomatist and peacemaker; but as a matter of fact it was mainly owing to Lady Hilda’s constant interposition that he contrived to stop in Wilton Place through all that dreary and penitential London season.
At last, to Ernest’s intense joy, the season began to show premonitory symptoms of collapsing from inanition. The twelfth of August was drawing nigh, and the coming-of-age of grouse, that most important of annual events in the orthodox British social calendar, would soon set free Lord Exmoor and his brother hereditary legislators from their arduous duty of acting as constitutional drag on the general advance of a great, tolerant, and easy-going nation. Soon the family would be off again to Dunbude, or away to its other moors in Scotland; and among the rocks and the heather Ernest felt he could endure Lord Exmoor and Lord Lynmouth a little more resignedly than among the reiterated polite platitudes and monotonous gaieties of the vacuous London drawing-rooms.
Lady Hilda, too, was longing in her own way for the season to be over. She had gone through another of them, thank goodness, she said to herself at times with a rare tinge of pensiveness, only to discover that the Hughs, and the Guys, and the Algies, and the Montys were just as fatuously inane as ever; and were just as anxious as before to make her share their fatuous inanity for a whole lifetime. Only fancy living with an unadulterated Monty from the time you were twenty to the time you were seventy-five—at which latter date he, being doubtless some five years older than one-self to begin with, would probably drop off quietly with suppressed gout, and leave you a mourning widow to deplore his untimely and lamented extinction for the rest of your existence! Why, long before that time you would have got to know his very thoughts by heart (if he had any, poor fellow!) and would be able to finish all his sentences and eke out all his stories for him, the moment he began them. Much better marry a respectable pork-butcher outright, and have at least the healthful exercise of chopping sausage-meat to fill up the stray gaps in the conversation. In that condition of life, they say, people are at any rate perfectly safe from the terrors of ennui. However, the season was over at last, thank Heaven; and in a week or so more they would be at dear old ugly Dunbude again for the whole winter. There Hilda would go sketching once more on the moorland, and if this time she didn’t make that stupid fellow Ernest see what she was driving at, why, then her name certainly wasn’t Hilda Tregellis.
A day or two before the legal period fixed for the beginning of the general grouse-slaughter, Ernest was sitting reading in the breakfast room at Wilton Place, when Lynmouth burst unexpectedly into the room in his usual boisterous fashion.
‘Oh, I say, Mr. Le Breton,’ he began, holding the door in his hand like one in a hurry, ‘I want leave to miss work this morning. Gerald Talfourd has called for me in his dog-cart, and wants me to go out with him now immediately.’
‘Not to-day, Lynmouth,’ Ernest answered quietly. ‘You were out twice last week, you know, and you hardly ever get your full hours for work at all since we came to London.’
‘Oh, but look here, you know, Mr. Le Breton; I really MUST go to-day, because Talfourd has made an appointment for me. It’s awful fun—he’s going to have some pigeon-shooting.’
Ernest’s countenance fell a little, and he answered in a graver voice than before, ‘If that’s what you want to go for, Lynmouth, I certainly can’t let you go. You shall never have leave from me to go pigeon-shooting.’
‘Why not?’ Lynmouth asked, still holding the door-handle at the most significant angle.
‘Because it’s a cruel and brutal sport,’ Ernest replied, looking him in the face steadily; ‘and as long as you’re under my charge I can’t allow you to take part in it.’
‘Oh, you can’t,’ said Lynmouth mischievously, with a gentle touch of satire in his tone. ‘You can’t, can’t you! Very well, then, never mind about it.’ And he shut the door after him with a bang, and ran off upstairs without further remonstrance.
‘It’s time for study, Lynmouth,’ Ernest called out, opening the door and speaking to him as he retreated. ‘Come down again at once, please, will you?’
But Lynmouth made no answer, and went straight off upstairs to the drawing-room. In a few minutes more he came back, and said in a tone of suppressed triumph, ‘Well, Mr. Le Breton, I’m going with Talfourd. I’ve been up to papa, and he says I may “if I like to.”’
Ernest bit his lip in a moment’s hesitation. If it had been any ordinary question, he would have pocketed the contradiction of his authority—after all, if it didn’t matter to them, it didn’t matter to him—and let Lynmouth go wherever they allowed him. But the pigeon-shooting was a question of principle. As long as the boy was still nominally his pupil, he couldn’t allow him to take any part in any such wicked and brutal amusement, as he thought it. So he answered back quietly, ‘No, Lynmouth, you are not to go. I don’t think your father can have understood that I had forbidden you.’
‘Oh!’ Lynmouth said again, without a word of remonstrance, and went up a second time to the drawing-room.
In a few minutes a servant came down and spoke to Ernest. ‘My lord would like to see you upstairs for a few minutes, if you please, sir.’
Ernest followed the man up with a vague foreboding that the deferred explosion was at last about to take place. Lord Exmoor was sitting on the sofa. ‘Oh, I say, Le Breton,’ he began in his good-humoured way, ‘what’s this that Lynmouth’s been telling me about the pigeon-shooting? He says you won’t let him go out with Gerald Talfourd.’
‘Yes,’ Ernest answered; ‘he wanted to miss his morning’s work, and I told him I couldn’t allow him to do so.’
‘But I said he might if he liked, Le Breton. Young Talfourd has called for him to go pigeon-shooting. And now Lynmouth tells me you refuse to let him go, after I’ve given him leave. Is that so?’
‘Certainly,’ said Ernest. ‘I said he couldn’t go, because before he asked you I had refused him permission, and I supposed you didn’t know he was asking you to reverse my decision.’
‘Oh, of course,’ Lord Exmoor answered, for he was not an unreasonable man after his lights. ‘You’re quite right, Le Breton, quite right, certainly. Discipline’s discipline, we all know, and must be kept up under any circumstances. You should have told me, Lynmouth, that Mr. Le Breton had forbidden you to go. However, as young Talfourd has made the engagement, I suppose you don’t mind letting him have a holiday now, at my request, Le Breton, do you?’
Here was a dilemma indeed for Ernest. He hardly knew what to answer. He looked by chance at Lady Hilda, seated on the ottoman in the corner; and Lady Hilda, catching his eye, pursed up her lips visibly into the one word, ‘Do.’ But Ernest was inexorable. If he could possibly prevent it, he would not let those innocent pigeons be mangled and slaughtered for a lazy boy’s cruel gratification. That was the one clear duty before him; and whether he offended Lord Exmoor or not, he had no choice save to pursue it.
‘No, Lord Exmoor,’ he said resolutely, after a long pause. ‘I should have no objection to giving him a holiday, but I can’t allow him to go pigeon-shooting.’
‘Why not?’ asked Lord Exmoor warmly.
Ernest did not answer.
‘He says it’s a cruel, brutal sport, papa,’ Lynmouth put in parenthetically, in spite of an angry glance from Hilda; ‘and he won’t let me go while I’m his pupil.’
Lord Exmoor’s face grew very red indeed, and he rose from the sofa angrily. ‘So that’s it, Mr. Le Breton!’ he said, in a short sharp fashion. ‘You think pigeon-shooting cruel and brutal, do you? Will you have the goodness to tell me, sir, do you know that I myself am in the habit of shooting pigeons at matches?’
‘Yes,’ Ernest answered, without flinching a muscle.
‘Yes!’ cried Lord Exmoor, growing redder and redder. ‘You knew that, Mr. Le Breton, and yet you told my son you considered the practice brutal and cruel! Is that the way you teach him to honour his parents? Who are you, sir, that you dare set yourself up as a judge of me and my conduct? How dare you speak to him of his father in that manner? How dare you stir him up to disobedience and insubordination against his elders? How dare you, sir; how dare you?’
Ernest’s face began to get red in return, and he answered with unwonted heat, ‘How dare you address me so, yourself, Lord Exmoor? How dare you speak to me in that imperious manner? You’re forgetting yourself, I think, and I had better leave you for the present, till you remember how to be more careful in your language. But Lynmouth is not to go pigeon-shooting. I object to his going, because the sport is a cruel and a brutal one, whoever may practise it. If I have any authority over him, I insist upon it that he shall not go. If he goes, I shall not stop here any longer. You can do as you like about it, of course, but you have my final word upon the matter. Lynmouth, go down to the study.’
‘Stop, Lynmouth,’ cried his father, boiling over visibly with indignation: ‘Stop. Never mind what Mr. Le Breton says to you; do you hear me? Go out if you choose with Gerald Talfourd.’
Lynmouth didn’t wait a moment for any further permission. He ran downstairs at once and banged the front door soundly after him with a resounding clatter. Lady Hilda looked imploringly at Ernest, and whispered half audibly, ‘Now you’ve done it.’ Ernest stood a second irresolute, while the Earl tramped angrily up and down the drawing-room, and then he said in a calmer voice, ‘When would it be convenient, Lord Exmoor, that I should leave you?’
‘Whenever you like,’ Lord Exmoor answered violently. ‘To-day if you can manage to get your things together. This is intolerable, absolutely intolerable! Gross and palpable impertinence; in my own house, too! “Cruel and brutal,” indeed! “Cruel and brutal.” Fiddlesticks! Why, it’s not a bit different from partridge-shooting!’ And he went out, closely followed by Ernest, leaving Lady Hilda alone and frightened in the drawing-room.
Ernest ran lightly upstairs to his own little study sitting-room. ‘I’ve done it this time, certainly, as Lady Hilda said,’ he thought to himself; ‘but I don’t see how I could possibly have avoided it. Even now, when all’s done, I haven’t succeeded in saving the lives of the poor innocent tortured pigeons. They’ll be mangled and hunted for their poor frightened lives, anyhow. Well, now I must look out for that imaginary schoolmastership, and see what I can do for dear Edie. I shan’t be sorry to get out of this after all, for the place was an impossible one for me from the very beginning. I shall sit down this moment and write to Edie, and after that I shall take out my portmanteau and get the man to help me put my luggage up to go away this very evening. Another day in the house after this would be obviously impossible.’
At that moment there came a knock at the door—a timid, tentative sort of knock, and somebody put her head inquiringly halfway through the doorway. Ernest looked up in sudden surprise. It was Lady Hilda.
‘Mr. Le Breton,’ she said, coming over towards the table where Ernest had just laid out his blotting-book and writing-paper: ‘I couldn’t prevent myself from coming up to tell you how much I admire your conduct in standing up so against papa for what you thought was right and proper. I can’t say how greatly I admire it. I’m so glad you did as you did do. You have acted nobly.’ And Hilda looked straight into his eyes with the most speaking and most melting of glances. ‘Now,’ she said to herself, ‘according to all correct precedents, he ought to seize my hand fervently with a gentle pressure, and thank me with tears in his eyes for my kind sympathy.’
But Ernest, only looking puzzled and astonished, answered in the quietest of voices, ‘Thank you very much, Lady Hilda: but I assure you there was really nothing at all noble, nothing at all to admire, in what I said or did in any way. In fact, I’m rather afraid, now I come to think of it, that I lost my temper with your father dreadfully.’
‘Then you won’t go away?’ Hilda put in quickly. ‘You think better of it now, do you? You’ll apologise to papa, and go with us to Dunbude for the autumn? Do say you will, please, Mr. Le Breton.’
‘Oh dear, no,’ Ernest answered, smiling quietly at the bare idea of his apologising to Lord Exmoor. ‘I certainly won’t do that, whatever I do. To tell you the truth, Lady Hilda, I have not been very anxious to stop with Lynmouth all along: I’ve found it a most unprofitable tutorship—no sense of any duty performed, or any work done for society: and I’m not at all sorry that this accident should have broken up the engagement unexpectedly. At the same time, it’s very kind of you to come up and speak to me about it, though I’m really quite ashamed you should have thought there was anything particularly praiseworthy or commendable in my standing out against such an obviously cruel sport as pigeon-shooting.’
‘Ah, but I do think so, whatever you may say, Mr. Le Breton,’ Hilda went on eagerly. ‘I do think so, and I think it was very good of you to fight it out so against papa for what you believe is right and proper. For my own part, you know, I don’t see any particular harm in pigeon-shooting. Of course it’s very dreadful that the poor dear little things should be shot and wounded and winged and so forth; but then everything, almost, gets shot, you see—rabbits, and grouse, and partridges, and everything; so that really it’s hardly worth while, it seems to me, making a fuss about it. Still, that’s not the real question. You think it’s wrong; which is very original and nice and proper of you; and as you think it’s wrong, you won’t countenance it in any way. I don’t care, myself, whether it’s wrong or not—I’m not called upon, thank goodness, to decide the question; but I do care very much that you should suffer for what you think the right course of action.’ And Lady Hilda in her earnestness almost laid her hand upon his arm, and looked up to him in the most unmistakable and appealing fashion.
‘You’re very good, I’m sure, Lady Hilda,’ Ernest replied, half hesitatingly, wondering much in his own mind what on earth she could be driving at.
There was a moment’s pause, and then Hilda said pensively, ‘And so we shall never walk together at Dunbude on the Clatter any more, Mr. Le Breton! We shall never climb again among the big boulders on those Devonshire hillsides! We shall never watch the red deer from the big pool on top of the sheep-walk! I’m sorry for it, Mr. Le Breton, very sorry for it. Oh, I do wish you weren’t going to leave us!’
Ernest began to feel that this was really growing embarrassing. ‘I dare say we shall often see one another,’ he said evasively; for simple-minded as he was, a vague suspicion of what Lady Hilda wanted him to say had somehow forced itself timidly upon him. ‘London’s a very big place, no doubt; but still, people are always running together unexpectedly in it.’
Hilda sighed and looked at him again intently without speaking. She stood so, face to face with him across the table for fully two minutes; and then, seeming suddenly to awake from a reverie, she started and sighed once more, and turned at last reluctantly to leave the little study. ‘I must go,’ she said hastily; ‘mamma would be very angry indeed with me if she knew I’d come here; but I couldn’t let you leave the house without coming up to tell you how greatly I admire your spirit, and how very, very much I shall always miss you, Mr. Le Breton. Will you take this, and keep it as a memento?’ As she spoke, she laid an envelope upon the table, and glided quietly out of the room.
Ernest took the envelope up with a smile, and opened it with some curiosity. It contained a photograph, with a brief inscription on the back, ‘E. L. B., from Hilda Tregellis.’
As he did so, Hilda Tregellis, red and pale by turns, had rushed into her own room, locked the door wildly, and flung herself in a perfect tempest of tears on her own bed, where she lay and tossed about in a burning agony of shame and self-pity for twenty minutes. ‘He doesn’t love me,’ she said to herself bitterly; ‘he doesn’t love me, and he doesn’t care to love me, or want to marry me either! I’m sure he understood what I meant, this time; and there was no response in his eyes, no answer, no sympathy. He’s like a block of wood—a cold, impassive, immovable, lifeless creature! And yet I could love him—oh, if only he would say a word to me in answer, how I could love him! I loved him when he stood up there and bearded papa in his own drawing-room, and asked him how dare he speak so, how dare he address him in such a manner; I KNEW then that I really loved him. If only he would let me! But he won’t! To think that I could have half the Algies and Berties in London at my feet for the faintest encouragement, and I can’t have this one poor penniless Ernest Le Breton, though I go down on my knees before him and absolutely ask him to marry me! That’s the worst of it! I’ve humiliated myself before him by letting him see, oh, ever so much too plainly, that I wanted him to ask me; and I’ve been repulsed, rejected, positively refused and slighted by him! And yet I love him! I shall never love any other man as I love Ernest Le Breton.’
Poor Lady Hilda Tregellis! Even she too had, at times, her sentimental moments! And there she lay till her eyes were red and swollen with crying, and till it was quite hopeless to expect she could ever manage to make herself presentable for the Cecil Faunthorpes’ garden-party that afternoon at Twickenham.
Ernest had packed his portmanteau, and ordered a hansom, meaning to take temporary refuge at Number 28 Epsilon Terrace; and he went down again for a few minutes to wait in the breakfast-room, where he saw the ‘Times’ lying casually on the little table by the front window. He took it up, half dreamily, by way of having something to do, and was skimming the telegrams in an unconcerned manner, when his attention was suddenly arrested by the name Le Breton, printed in conspicuous type near the bottom of the third column. He looked closer at the paragraph, and saw that it was headed ‘Accident to British Tourists in Switzerland.’ A strange tremor seized him immediately. Could anything have happened, then, to Herbert? He read the telegram through at once, and found this bald and concise summary before him of the fatal Pontresina accident:—
‘As Mr. H. Oswald, F.R.S., of Oriel College, Oxford, and Mr. Le Breton, Fellow and Bursar of St. Aldate’s College, along with three guides, were making the ascent of the Piz Margatsch, in the Bernina Alps, this morning, one of the party happened to slip near the great gulley known as the Gouffre. Mr. Oswald and two of the guides were precipitated over the edge of the cliff and killed immediately: the breaking of the rope at a critical moment alone saved the lives of Mr. Le Breton and the remaining guide. The bodies have been recovered this evening, and brought back to Pontresina.’
Ernest laid down the paper with a thrill of horror. Poor Edie! How absolutely his own small difficulties with Lord Exmoor faded out of has memory at once in the face of that terrible, irretrievable calamity. Harry dead! The hope and mainstay of the family—the one great pride and glory of all the Oswalds, on whom their whole lives and affections centred, taken from them unexpectedly, without a chance of respite, without a moment’s warning! Worst of all, they would probably learn it, as he did, for the first time by reading it accidentally in the curt language of the daily papers. Pray heaven the shock might not kill poor Edie!
There was only a minute in which to make up his mind, but in that minute Ernest had fully decided what he ought to do, and how to do it. He must go at once down to Calcombe Pomeroy, and try to lighten this great affliction for poor little Edie. Nay, lighten it he could not, but at least he could sympathise with her in it, and that, though little, was still some faint shade better than nothing at all. How fortunate that his difference with the Exmoors allowed him to go that very evening without a moment’s delay. When the hansom arrived at the door, Ernest told the cabman to drive at once to Paddington Station. Almost before he had had time to realise the full meaning of the situation, he had taken a third-class ticket for Calcombe Road, and was rushing out of London by the Plymouth express, in one of the convenient and commodious little wooden horse-boxes which the Great Western Railway Company provide as a wholesome deterrent for economical people minded to save half their fare by going third instead of first or second.
Didcot, Swindon, Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Newton Abbot, all followed one after another, and by the time Ernest had reached Calcombe Road Station he had begun to frame for himself a definite plan of future action. He would stop at the Red Lion Inn that evening, send a telegram from Exeter beforehand to Edie, to say he was coming next day, and find out as much as possible about the way the family had borne the shock before he ventured actually to see them.
The Calcombe omnibus, drawn by two lean and weary horses, toiled its way slowly up the long steep incline for six miles to the Cross Foxes, and then rattled down the opposite slope, steaming and groaning, till it drew up at last with a sudden jerk and a general collapse in front of the old Red Lion Inn in the middle of the High Street. There Ernest put up for the present, having seen by the shutters at the grocer’s shop on his way down that the Oswalds had already heard of Harry’s accident. He had dinner by himself, with a sick heart, in the gloomy, close little coffee-room of the village inn, and after dinner he managed to draw in the landlord in person for a glass of sherry and half an hour’s conversation.
‘Very sad thing, sir, this ‘ere causality in Switzerland,’ said the red-faced landlord, coming round at once to the topic of the day at Calcombe, after a few unimportant preliminary generalities. ‘Young Mr. Oswald, as has been killed, he lived here, sir; leastways his parents do. He was a very promising young gentleman up at Oxford, they do tell me—not much of a judge of horses, I should say, but still, I understand, quite the gentleman for all that. Very sad thing, the causality, sir, for all his family. ‘Pears he was climbing up some of these ‘ere Alps they have over there in them parts, covered with snow from head to foot in the manner of speaking, and there was another gentleman from Oxford with him, a Mr. Le Breton——’
‘My brother,’ Ernest put in, interrupting him; for he thought it best to let the landlord know at once who he was talking to.
‘Oh, your brother, sir!’ said the red-faced landlord, with a gleam of recognition, growing redder and hotter than ever; ‘well, now you mention it, sir, I find I remember your face somehow. No offence, sir, but you’re the young gentleman as come down in the spring to see young Mr. Oswald, aren’t you?’
Ernest nodded assent.
‘Ah, well, sir,’ the landlord went on more freely—for of course all Calcombe had heard long since that Ernest was engaged to Edie Oswald—‘you’re one of the family like, in that case, if I may make bold to say so. Well, sir, this is a shocking trouble for poor old Mr. Oswald, and no mistake. The old gentleman was sort of centred on his son, you see, as the saying is: never thought of nobody else hardly, he didn’t. Old Mr. Oswald, sir, was always a wonderful hand at figgers hisself, and powerful fond of measurements and such kinds of things. I’ve heard tell, indeed, as how he knew more mathematics, and trigononomy, and that, than the rector and the schoolmaster both put together. There’s not one in fifty as knows as much mathematics as he do, I’ll warrant. Well, you see, he brought up this son of his, little Harry as was—I can remember him now, running to and from the school, and figgerin’ away on the slates, doin’ the sums in algemer for the other boys when they went a-mitchin’—he brought him up like a gentleman, as you know very well, sir, and sent him to Oxford College: “to develop his mathematical talents, Mr. Legge,” his father says to me here in this very parlour. What’s the consequence? He develops that boy’s talent sure enough, sir, till he comes to be a Fellow of Oxford College, they tell me, and even admitted into the Royal Society up in London. But this is how he did it, sir: and as you’re a friend of the family like, and want to know all about it, no doubt, I don’t mind tellin’ you on the strict confidential, in the manner of speakin’.’ Here the landlord drew his chair closer, and sipped the last drop in his glass of sherry with a mysterious air of very private and important disclosures. Ernest listened to his roundabout story with painful attention.
‘Well, sir,’ the landlord went on after a short and pensive pause, ‘old Mr. Oswald’s business ain’t never been a prosperous one—though he was such a clover hand at figgers, he never made it remunerative; a bare livin’ for the family, I don’t mind sayin’; and he always spent more’n he ought to ‘a done on Mr. Harry, and on the young lady too, sir, savin’ your presence. So when Mr. Harry was goin’ to Oxford to college, he come to me, and he says to me, “Mr. Legge,” says he, “it’s a very expensive thing sending my boy to the University,” says he, “and I’m going to borrow money to send him with.” “Don’t you go a-doin’ that, Mr. Oswald,” says I; “your business don’t justify you in doin’ it, sir,” says I. For you see, I knowed all the ins and outs of that there business, and I knowed he hadn’t never made more’n enough just to keep things goin’ decent like, as you may say, without any money saved or put by against a emergence. “Yes, I will, Mr. Legge,” says he; “I can trust confidentially in my son’s abilities,” says he; “and I feel confidential he’ll be in a position to repay me before long.” So he borrowed the money on an insurance of Mr. Harry’s life. Mr. Harry he always acted very honourable, sir; he was a perfect gentleman in every way, as YOU know, sir; and he began repayin’ his father the loan as fast as he was able, and I daresay doin’ a great deal for the family, and especially for the young lady, sir, out of his own pocket besides. But he still owed his father a couple of hundred pound an’ more when this causality happened, while the business, I know, had been a-goin’ to rack and ruin for the last three year. To-day I seen the agent of the insurance, and he says to me, “Legge,” says he, most private like, “this is a bad job about young Oswald, I’m afeard, worse’n they know for.” “Why, sir?” says I. “Well, Legge,” says he, “they’ll never get a penny of that there insurance, and the old gentleman’ll have to pay up the defissit on his own account,” says he. “How’s that, Mr. Micklethwaite?” says I. “Because,” says he, “there’s a clause in the policy agin exceptional risks, in which is included naval and military services, furrin residences, topical voyages, and mountain-climbin’,” says he; “and you mark my words,” says he, “they’ll never get a penny of it.” In which case, sir, it’s my opinion that old Mr. Oswald’ll be clean broke, for he can’t never make up the defissit out of his own business, can he now?’
Ernest listened with sad forebodings to the red-faced landlord’s pitiful story, and feared in his heart that it was a bad look-out for the poor Oswalds. He didn’t sleep much that evening, and next day he went round early to see Edie. The telegram he found would be a useless precaution, for the gossip of Calcombe Pomeroy had recognised him at once, and news had reached the Oswalds almost as soon as he arrived that young Mr. Le Breton was stopping that evening at the Red Lion.
Edie opened the door for him herself, pale of face and with eyes reddened by tears, yet looking beautiful even so in her simple black morning dress, her mourning of course hadn’t yet come home—and her deep white linen collar. ‘It’s very good of you to have come so soon, Mr. Le Breton,’ she said, taking his hand quietly—he respected her sorrow too deeply to think of kissing her; ‘he will be back with us to-morrow. Your brother is bringing him back to us, to lay him in our little churchyard, and we are all so very very grateful to him for it.’
Ernest was more than half surprised to hear it. It was an unusual act of kindly thoughtfulness on the part of Herbert.
Next day the body came home as Edie had said, and Ernest helped to lay it reverently to rest in Calcombe churchyard. Poor old Mr. Oswald, standing bowed and broken-hearted by the open grave side, looked as though he could never outlive that solemn burial of all his hopes and aspirations in a single narrow coffin. Yet it was wonderful to Ernest to see how much comfort he took, even in this terrible grief, from the leader which appeared in the ‘Times’ that morning on the subject of the Pontresina accident. It contained only a few of the stock newspaper platitudes of regret at the loss of a distinguished and rising young light of science—the ordinary glib commonplaces of obituary notices which a practised journalist knows so well how to adapt almost mechanically to the passing event of the moment; but they seemed to afford the shattered old country grocer an amount of consolation and solemn relief that no mere spoken condolences could ever possibly have carried with them. ‘See what a wonderful lot they thought of our boy up in London, Mr. Le Breton,’ he said, looking up from the paper tearfully, and wiping his big gold spectacles, dim with moisture. ‘See what the “Times” says about him: “One of the ablest among our young academical mathematicians, a man who, if his life had been spared to us, might probably have attained the highest distinction in his own department of pure science.” That’s our Harry, Mr. Le Breton; that’s what the “Times” says about our dear, dead Harry! I wish he could have lived to read it himself, Edie—“a scholar of singularly profound attainments, whose abilities had recently secured him a place upon the historic roll of the Royal Society, and whom even the French Academy of Sciences had held worthy out of all the competitors of the civilised world, to be adjudged the highest mathematical honours of the present season.” My poor boy! my poor, dear, lost boy! I wish you could have lived to hear it! We must keep the paper, Edie: we must keep all the papers; they’ll show us at least what people who are real judges of these things thought about our dear, loved, lost Harry.’
Ernest dared hardly glance towards poor Edie, with the tears trickling slowly down her face; but he felt thankful that the broken-hearted old father could derive so much incomprehensible consolation from those cold and stereotyped conventional phrases. Truly a wonderful power there is in mere printer’s ink properly daubed on plain absorbent white paper. And truly the human heart, full to bursting and just ready to break will allow itself to be cheated and cajoled in marvellous fashions by extraordinary cordials and inexplicable little social palliatives. The concentrated hopes of that old man’s life were blasted and blighted for ever; and he found a temporary relief from that stunning shock in the artificial and insincere condolences of a stock leader-writer on a daily paper!
Walking back by himself in such sad meditations to the Red Lion, and sitting there by the open window, Ernest overheard a tremulous chattering voice mumbling out a few incoherent words at the Rector’s doorway opposite. ‘Oh, yes,’ chirped out the voice in a tone of cheerful resignation, ‘it’s very sad indeed, very sad and shocking, and I’m naturally very sorry for it, of course. I always knew how it would be: I warned them of it; but they’re a pig-headed, heedless, unmannerly family, and they wouldn’t be guided by me. I said to him, “Now, Oswald, this is all very wrong and foolish of you. You go and put your son to Oxford, when he ought to be stopping at home, minding the shop and learning your business. You borrow money foolishly to send him there with. He’ll go to Oxford; he’ll fall in with a lot of wealthy young gentlemen—people above his own natural station—he’ll take up expensive, extravagant ways, and in the end he’ll completely ruin himself. He won’t pay you back a penny, you may depend upon it—these boys never do, when you make fine gentlemen of them; they think only of their cigars and their horses, and their dog-carts and so forth, and neglect their poor old fathers and mothers, that brought them up and scraped and saved to make fine gentlemen of them. You just take my advice, Oswald, and don’t send him to college.” But Oswald was always a presumptuous, high-headed, independent sort of man, and instead of listening to me, what does he do but go and send this sharp boy of his up to Oxford. Well, now the boy’s gone to Switzerland with one of the young Le Bretons—brother of the poor young man they’ve inveigled into what they call an engagement with Miss Edith, or Miss Jemima, or whatever the girl’s name is—very well-connected people, the Le Bretons, and personal friends of the Archdeacon’s—and there he’s thrown himself over a precipice or something of the sort, no doubt to avoid his money-matters and debts and difficulties. At any rate, Micklethwaite tells me the poor old father’ll have to pay up a couple of hundred pound to the insurance company: and how on earth he’s ever to do itIdon’t know, for to my certain knowledge the rent of the shop is in arrears half-a-year already. But it’s no business of mine, thank goodness!—and I only hope that exposure will serve to open that poor young Le Breton’s eyes, and to warn him against having anything further to say to Miss Jemima. A designing young minx, if ever there was one! Poor young Le Breton’s come down here for the funeral, I hear, which I must say was very friendly and proper and honourable of him; but now it’s over, I hope he’ll go back again, and see Miss Jemima in her true colours.’
Ernest turned back into the stuffy little coffee-room with his face on fire and his ears tingling with mingled shame and indignation. ‘Whatever happens,’ he thought to himself, ‘I can’t permit Edie to be subjected any longer to such insolence as this! Poor, dear, guileless, sorrowing little maiden! One would have thought her childish innocence and her terrible loss would have softened the heart even of such a cantankerous, virulent old harridan as that, till a few weeks were over, at least. She spoke of the Archdeacon: it must be old Miss Luttrell! Whoever it is, though, Edie shan’t much longer be left where she can possibly come in contact with such a loathsome mass of incredible and unprovoked malice. That Edie should lose her dearly-loved brother is terrible enough; but that she should be exposed afterwards to be triumphed over in her most sacred grief by that bad old woman’s querulous “I told you so” is simply intolerable!’ And he paced up and down the room with a boiling heart, unable to keep down his righteous anger.