CHAPTER IIICONCERNING A DISOBLIGING GHOSTThe "little widow" had come to Andana under the mistaken notion that it was a nook in the backwoods of Switzerland where none might discover her. She was very much astonished and not a little dismayed to discover a middle-class society of an exuberant order and a noisy frivolity which could not but amuse her.In such a company it was hardly possible for her to remain undiscovered, and she had not been in the hotel many hours when that Admirable Crichton, Dr. Orange, invited her to his own table. There she speedily began to reign to the satisfaction of a little coterie of the elect. If she, in her turn, shrank from the greatness thus thrust upon her, she was grateful for the compliment, and hastened to accept it. She had been alone so many months—she who was but seven-and-twenty, and had the heart of a child.It was a great dinner that night, and merry the mood of the company. The "little widow" herself wore a dress of black velvet with a glorious "what-do-you-call-it" of white silk beneath it, as Bob Otway told his sister when describing it. Her diamonds were undoubtedly magnificent. Obviously a woman of fashion and of the world, she racked the animosities of prim misses from the suburbs and positively exasperated their mammas. These were of the "blouse" order, and obviously sober both in the matter of habit and of fashion. They dined with their eyes upon the "little widow" and their ears bent to every breath of gossip which stirred in an atmosphere odorous of dinner and cheap scents.Dr. Orange, meanwhile, was hardly conscious of the envy he excited. He had not heard the rhapsodies of the males or the conviction, general when the fish was served, that her eyes were divine. He saw a charming woman, with a skin that Greuze would have copied, a mouth that a suburban poet would have likened to a "rosebud," and hair so fine and silky and bewitching in its play of browns that another woman would have been tempted to ask immediately for the name of the hairdresser who supplied it. Her nose wasretrousséand just a little flat; her forehead spoke of intellect; her neck and arms of a figure which an artist alone might have criticised. And so back to the eyes again—those eyes divinely blue, which looked into a man's soul (if he had one) or sent the devil flying out of him as though holy-water had been sprinkled round about.The doctor was aware of all this, and so was Bess, who really rather despised middle-class folk and consorted with them merely because her uncle, the Cabinet Minister, was a Radical. But despite their knowledge, the usual conversation was eschewed altogether, and they discussed neither the magnificence of the latest production at His Majesty's, nor the fashionable intelligence from Monte Carlo. Andana and its excitements were topic enough—for was not this a day of prize-giving, and was not the doctor at his wits' end to find a prize-giver?"I would like you to do it," he said to the beautiful woman at his side, "but they will have a title here. I suppose it must be that amusing person, Lady Coral-Smith—her husband made his money out of red herrings, and we shall have to draw one across the scent. All this kind of thing devolves upon me. I have to run everything: the hotel, the races, the invalids—and even Miss Elizabeth here. Do you wonder I am growing older?""No one should grow older in the company of a clever woman," said Miss Bessie, pouting. "It is only the consciousness of intellectual inferiority which can say such a thing. I am angry with you, Dr. Orange. Pass me the chocolates immediately.""You see," said the doctor, appealing to them generally, "she covers me with scorn and then dies for my sake. I shall have to prescribe for her to-morrow.""But I shall leave an imperishable memory behind me, and if anyone remembers that such a person as Dr. Orange lived, they will say that he was my doctor. Thank you, sir—your chocolates are beastly. I shall keep them for the ghost."Here was a new topic, and one to which they turned with gusto. Andana was not so well amused that it had not a corner to spare for this particularly disobliging phantom, who had scared the peasants out of their wits and had actually appeared to a party coming down from Vermala at midnight. Miss Bessie told the story with a sense of drama all admirable; but she prefaced her narrative with the assurance that she would as soon believe in it as in the doctor at her side."There isn't any ghost, and so we are going out to look for it," she said; "the doctor wouldn't dress because he thinks he looks nicer in the green tie. The ghost might be feminine, you know. Perhaps she wants votes for women, and so appeals first to the weaker intelligence. They say that no end of people have seen her, including the Swan; but he doesn't count. Do you know the Swan? Oh, he's a dear, and he thinks he's swimming when he waltzes. He went up to Vermala to dinner the other night and saw the ghost as he came down. It's a great big black bird and makes a noise like a windmill. Dr. Orange says that it is troubled by asthma, but Mr. Benny says that its bones want greasing. He is an engineer, you know. He told me so yesterday. He is an engineer in principle, but in practice they won't have him, for he cannot pass the exams. Some men are so unlucky, while others—well, no one knows how they manage to get through. There is Dr. Orange, for instance; I think they must have passed him because they couldn't stand the green bow. There could not be any other reason. Well, as I was saying—what, are you going to begin already, and I haven't finished my ice? Monster!"But the doctor had risen and now announced very briefly that Lady Coral-Smith had kindly offered to present the prizes to the winners in the various competitions held during the past week; so that brisk little woman, dressed like a Grecian shepherdess, with little white daisies all over her gown, came nodding and smiling to the table and began to hand out various ridiculous presents to the winners in question. Of these, the most conspicuous were the Rider girls, now resplendent in muslin dresses with bright blue bows, and their frequent appearances at the table gave rise to resounding cheers, not unaccompanied by kindly comments of an amiably derisive order.Ian Kavanagh, that golden youth with the flaxen hair, had conducted his conversation chiefly in monosyllables during dinner; but he was a trifle more condescending at this stage, and declared it to be a pity that these accomplished young ladies had not to get their living at the Coliseum!—or other popular resort where acrobatic performances were properly rewarded. He thought that Andana was unworthy of them."They came here to win pots," he said scornfully. "The man who marries them is sure of a hundred or moreobjets d'art—to say nothing of virtue—all bought in the bazaar for one franc fifty. That ought to console him—""Is he going to marry them both?" Miss Elizabeth asked.The golden youth smiled."Two go to a pattern, I suppose. I shouldn't know one from the other in the dark.""But you'd have to know the one you married!""Ah, so I should! Why don't you write a story about it: 'The Bride Who Wasn't,' or something of that sort? Kipling would do it finely.""Well, but I'm not Kipling—and here's Mr. Rivers. Why, of course, we won the doubles together. And is it poor little me they want?—Oh, dear!"There were loud cries for Miss Elizabeth, and she rose, blushing very much at the outburst of cheering which attended her appearance—and obviously a great popular favourite. When she had received one Teddy Bear upon skis from the fat hands of the mayor's relict, she returned to the table and implored them to make plans for the ghost hunt."You're all coming, of course," she said. "We'll take luges and have coffee at Vermala. If the ghost does not appear for me, he will never appear at all. Now don't you think so, Mr. Kavanagh?""Oh, I think whatever the ladies think. Is Mrs. Kennaird coming?"He turned to the "little widow," and the doctor joined in the appeal. She would accompany them, of course. It would be a beautiful moonlight night, and they would come down on luges. It was the very thing to do: and as the amiable doctor said emphatically, so very much better than the outside edge backwards in the ball-room with a partner who could not dance. There could be but one answer to such unanimity.A brief interval for the securing of the necessary wraps and the party was away. Mrs. Kennaird had changed her dress hurriedly, and when she reached the hall she found the whole hotel restless and awakened to nomadic instincts. No one seemed to care at all for the wretched bandsmen who were, as Bob Otway put it, blowing the "Merry Widow" into three keys in the ball-room upstairs. Rather, the guests turned with expectant interest to the exquisite scene without, the snow plateau gleaming in the moonlight, the mellow radiance of the heights, the silent moonlit woods. Few of the men had dressed for dinner, and many were now garbed in the heavy sweaters and hobnailed boots indispensable to the climb. The girls were dressed as practically, and with their white woolly caps, their short skirts and heavy boots, looked like so many madcaps just let out from a seminary for young ladies where hockey was the chief study.Miss Bessie had invited the "little widow" to be of her party; but being an impulsive young lady, she herself ultimately sought the society of Mr. Robert Otway; and somehow, but not of her own will, Mrs. Kennaird found herself enjoying atête-à-têtewith Kavanagh, and mounting slowly with him toward the heights. She had hoped that the old parson would have espied her and made one of the party; but he was playing bridge with a trio of matrons when she came down, and certainly Kavanagh showed no disposition to release her from her promise. He followed her like a dog, and they had not walked a hundred yards before she became aware that it was his intention to make love to her.And why not? as he himself would have asked. Could the scene have been matched in all Switzerland? The sweet stillness of the bewitching night; the glory of the full round moon in the azure sky; the great white peaks standing out in majestic solitude; the stillness of the woods—what purpose could they serve so well as that of an amiable and meaningless flirtation with a pretty woman, who was already the well-desired of the whole community? Kavanagh had been greatly smitten at dinner, though his silence might not have been so interpreted. Who was she, and whence did she come? Upon his part, he had not spoken twenty sentences to her on the hillside before he managed to let her know that his father was Sir John Kavanagh, of Bolton, and that the heir to that ancient baronetcy now stood before her."You meet a very weird lot in these places," he began in a patronising tone. "I don't know what kind of an ark lets them loose. When at Rome, don't do as Bayswater does is my motto. It's astonishing how the nice people sort themselves, though. Why, I saw you before you got out of your sleigh, and I said, 'Thank Heaven.' We wanted reinforcements, and you came just in time. Kennaird's a name I couldn't help but know. Yorkshire, isn't it?—we're neighbours so to speak, for my old gov'nor's Sir John Kavanagh, of Bolton, and poor little me is all he's got in the world. You do come from Yorkshire, don't you?"She said that she did, and happily the darkness of the way hid the blush upon her cheek when she spoke. Oblivious of the dangerous nature of the subject, Kavanagh plunged on."I came out here just to see what this ice rot is all about. I suppose you did the same? One has to put up with something to learn, and we're paying our footing. Mine's pretty dicky on anything but good honest skates; but it's no good skating here in the 'village pond champion' style. I tried skis and resigned. It makes a fellow feel an awful fool to have one of his legs round his neck and the other at the bottom of a crevasse. All right at twenty-one, perhaps; but I'm no chicken, and I don't like to make a fool of myself for nothing. If you skate, we might have some good times here—and we can always go down the Vermala run in the afternoon—or at night if you like. I call it top notch at night, and you'll do the same, I hope. Just look at the old Weisshorn—looks like a Chinese god on a fancy ottoman, doesn't he? We can't beat that in Yorkshire, can we? Well, I'm glad you're a neighbour, anyway, and we must find out all the people we know. Do you hunt, by the way?—I've got twenty nags at home, and what they're doin' Heaven only knows. Eatin' their heads off, I suppose."She remembered that he had told her the same thing earlier in the day, and looked at him curiously from the depths of her blue eyes, grown black here in the solitude of the woods. What an amiable imbecile he was, and how odd that her lot should be cast with him. Possibly he was the only Yorkshireman in all the company, and fate had thus thrown them together at the very beginning. And with this thought there was just another, passing as a flash upon the white ground of memory, of one whose face had flushed when she spoke to him that morning, the butt of an amiable company, the derided Benny. She knew not why she wished for Mr. Benjamin's company, here upon the hillside; but the fact that she did wish for it could not be kept back."Is it far to the hotel at Vermala?" she asked presently—any question served to turn the dangerous talk. Kavanagh answered with the pride of knowledge acquired some sixty hours ago."It's just above the clump of pines there. They make top-notch coffee and have got some decent cigarettes. We've climbed about a thousand feet since we started. You'd never think it, would you; and doesn't the old show look just like the White City?—eh, what? Upon my life, I never saw such a resemblance. We might be up in the flip-flap."She smiled at his preposterous imagery, and yet words might well have failed such an intellect upon such a scene. The place where they stood was a little thicket of trees at the last bend below Vermala. All around were the frozen pines, magic in their suggestion of fairyland, enchanting in the infinite variety of their matchless tracery. Below them Andana lay like an oasis of light upon a bleak hillside. Great arc-lamps waned and waxed upon the narrow road by the skating rink and again downwards toward the village. The hotel itself blazed with radiance and suggested the antithesis to this solitude of the woods. Far, far down in the black hollow of the valley there were the lamps of Sierre and the railway; and high above them, as though uplifted to the heavens, the moonlit peaks, a very forest of them running in unbroken majesty to the great flat dome of Mont Blanc.The human side of this entrancing picture was voiced by the ripples of laughter, the joyous cries which came floating up on the still night air. A romancer would have espied lovers in the thickets, and heard the whispers of their sighs. By here and there stragglers were to be perceived upon the great plateau of the snow or plodding upward to the heights. In sharp contrast to this leisure of the climb would come the swift descent of a luge towards Andana, the loud cry, "Achtung!" the passing of the prone figure, and the lantern jolting at every rut. These cries became more frequent as the climbers neared Vermala. Some of the toboggans were bedecked gloriously with Chinese lanterns, which gave a rare splash of colour to the monotony of silhouettes, or turned the snow blood red. And dominating all was the eternal spirit of youth; thejoie de vivre; the consciousness of the present; the will to blot all else but this fulness of life which ran in the veins like fire.There was a fine crowd of people up at the little hotel at Vermala, and conspicuous among them the Rider girls and Bess Bethune. Bess, in fact, furnished the place, as someone remarked—it must have been Bob Otway—and her high spirits were so infectious that the doctor sat down to the piano and played a magnificent fantasia upon "Our Miss Gibbs," arranged as a sonata in the fashion of Schubert. Everyone took coffee, and the ladies sippedcrême de mentheunder protest. The ghost received less attention than he merited—and when the best part of the company trooped out to look for him, and did not find him, not a few took advantage of the opportunities presented by Japan (in the form of screens) and Africa (in the matter of palms) to continue discussions of a momentous nature. The "little widow," however, found herself once more with Ian Kavanagh at the head of the path, and she realised that she must make her first run on a luge or be derided by the company.How ridiculous it all seemed to her, that she should be playing a girl's part, she whose life had been so tragic and so womanly. She had the will to forget, God knows; and if the mountains had any message for her, the silent woods their consolation, it was that forgetfulness might be won, and upon forgetfulness, peace. Let there be a truce, however brief the day of it. The kingdom of a joyous childhood called her with a sweet voice—she tried to believe that she had become a child again."I have never done this before," she said to Kavanagh almost pleadingly, when he offered her the luge he had dragged up from Andana and showed her what she must do with it. "Is it so dreadful? Shall I really be able to manage it?"He assured her that it was the easiest thing in all the world."Just guide yourself with your feet. Lean over when you come to the corners and round you go. I'd better get on ahead, for I shall be faster. I'll wait at the path where we go down to the rink. You can't hurt yourself—it's just like falling into an iced blanket—now see me do it."He squatted on the luge, and going with as much dignity as he could command—which was not a great deal—he set off down the path and rounded the first of the corners successfully. Great flat hands pushed him off from the banks; his progress, if not melancholy, was certainly slow, and in the end became remote. The "little widow" heard him calling to her to "come on," and at last she seated herself and essayed to obey his interjectory instructions. But the dazzle and glory of the thing seemed less when she had started, and she reflected with irony that she could have walked much faster. Then the luge was so uncomfortable; just a few bars of wood, a cushion and two steel runners. And "the thing" would go up the banks in the most shameless way—first to the right, then to the left, now half round, now frightening her by a sudden plunge. At the corner she failed altogether, and ran high over the bank and into the soft snow upon the other side. Her white gloves were wet through by this time, her shoes full of snow, and her general condition one of misery. She picked herself up and laughed with a truer note than she had done for years. Yes, she had become a child again, and had a child's sense of irresponsibility.Kavanagh had disappeared altogether by this time. Other tobogganers came flying down the mountainside; but none pulled up because of the lonely little woman standing between the trees at the "hairpin" bend. She heard voices above and below; the wood might have been full of the spirits of dead children rejoicing. But she had lost all taste for the miserable contraption which behaved so shabbily, and it had become a burden to her. Trying to set it going again, she ran a little way and lost hold of it; and then, as a horse which has lost its rider in a steeple-chase, it went on gaily, rounding the corners upon its own account, and disappearing as her guide and philosopher had done. She was quite alone now, and very pleased to be so—at least, she thought so until she espied a black figure creeping up between the trees, and, as it were, stalking her in the shelter of the wood. This frightened her a little and she tried to go on; but her heart beat fast and she was really quite afraid. Why did the man not speak? Was he a Swiss or one of the guests at the hotel? She was just about to shout for help when the crouching figure cried out:"Mrs. Kennaird, is that you? Well, I'm Benson—you remember me?"She burst out laughing.As though anyone who had known him could forget "Benny."CHAPTER IVTHE MAN WHO KNEW"Oh," she exclaimed, recovering herself, though her heart still drummed the echoes of a panic, "oh, I thought you were the ghost."Benjamin Benson was immensely tickled."I've been taken for many things in my life," he said, "but never for a ghost. I wonder if it would be nice to be that? We always think of it from the mortal point of view. We never ask if the ghost has a good time—and yet I don't see why he shouldn't. There might be sociable ghosts—now don't you think so, Mrs. Kennaird?"She did not feel disposed to argue it."They tell me the peasants have seen a great bird in the sky. Everyone up at Vermala is looking for it. Of course they will not find it. I am not a least bit superstitious, but I must say that the idea of a great bird pleases me—even if it's untrue.""Then you are quite sure it is untrue, Mrs. Kennaird?""Now, could it be anything else? You are not serious."He laughed a little nervously."It would be a splendid thing to fly over the mountains, wouldn't it? If I have a spirit, I would sooner it played about here than in an old vault, as most of them do. Why, how it suggests power—power above men, doesn't it?"And then almost with an apology:"But I suppose you think all this is just nonsense? I'm not the kind of man who ought to be ambitious, am I? Everyone tells me that.""But you do not lose your ambition because of them?"He drew himself up—Benny could be a tower of dignity when he chose."Yes," he said, with real earnestness, "I am ambitious, and some day I shall attain my goal."They walked a little way down the hillside in silence after that. There was no sign of Ian Kavanagh, who had taken a bad "toss" at the last of the bends above Andana and was trying to get the snow out of his hair at that very moment. Benny had a toboggan with him, but it was different from the others, much longer and made of steel. He trailed it behind him indifferently, thinking that his companion wished to walk down to the hotel; but when he discovered her own luge anchored in the snow he understood the situation."Halloa!" he said, "a derelict."She told him with some shame that it was hers."A case of bolting—I suppose it wanted the curb. And now I shall have to drag it back to the hotel.""Don't do anything of the kind. We leave these things all over the place—the hotel sledges pick them up as far down as the Sanatorium sometimes. Just let it lie there. I'll take you down if you like—there's plenty of room for two, and—and—I should like it, Mrs. Kennaird; I should think it an honour."It was so simply said, the blunt words of a schoolboy speaking to the mature woman, that she forbore to smile. It would have been absurd, however, to respond in a similar vein, for the idea of a flirtation with Mr. Benjamin Benson was quite out of the question. So she accepted without any compliment at all."It's very good of you—and really I am beginning to feel the cold. Will you show me where to sit? I am absolutely ignorant, and it is so many years since I played games."He understood that."Life's a game all through. We all say it, but what else can we say? We're in the long field most of the time, and when we get an innings, Fate goes and bowls us a curly one. I've never had an innings in my life, and I've been fielding for fifteen years—since I was seventeen—and my poor old father played on in Mark Lane and lost his house the 'ashes.' That's my story, and I don't tell it to everyone. Perhaps I have no right to tell it to you—but you seem so different, Mrs. Kennaird; I feel I can talk to you, and that's what I feel about very few people.""You pay me a great compliment," she said, and then, "But we are both quite strangers here. This is my first visit to Switzerland in the winter; I know nobody."He nodded his head."But I thought that I knew you directly I saw you—I shall remember where we met by and by. Had you relatives down Newmarket way, I wonder—people who used to live at Holmswell?"She shook her head."Then I'm quite wrong; now let's get going. You sit in front and I'll steer—don't be afraid, I shan't upset you. They laugh at me in the hotel, but I'm going to have some fun with them before I get through. Are you quite ready—shall we let her rip?"She said "Yes," and he pushed the toboggan off the bank. Had he been less nervous, he would have said that the "little widow" trembled; but Benny was anxious to make a fine run and had no idea how many would have envied him his burden. And truly it was wonderful how he steered on that dark and tortuous road. To the woman the whole thing was an ecstasy, a mad rush down the mountain-side; a wonderful journey into fairyland; a magician's leap through the realms of darkness to the enchanted vales of the fables. When they stopped, Benny had steered them right down to the cross roads by the Sanatorium, and they must tramp ten minutes through the woods before they reached the hotel again. It was here that he harked back to the dangerous topic."It's odd about those Newmarket people—I could have sworn Lady Delayne was your sister," he said; "really the likeness is wonderful. I went to Holmswell from Norwich when I was in the motor shops trying to make myself an engineer. The electric light engine went wrong over at the house, and Sir Luton—that was his name—Sir Luton Delayne sent to our people. I remember him well, a little rat of a man whose temper used to go off like a cracker. It makes me laugh when I remember that he tried to bully me, until I said a word or two in my own way. He was very civil after that and showed me over the house. There was a picture of a lady in the drawing-room as like you as two peas. I thought of it directly I saw you to-day. 'She'll be a relative,' I said. You quite surprised me just now when you said you were not."She merely rejoined, "Indeed?" A problem involving tremendous issues had presented itself suddenly to her mind, and she had not the remotest idea how to deal with it. But she felt that her previous answer had been a mistake and one that was almost irreparable. Why had she made it? She did not quite know.Benny, on his part, was a little puzzled by her silence. He thought that he had pursued a subject which could be of no interest to her; and he would not have mentioned it again but for the question she put to him just before the Palace Hotel came into sight."Have you heard of Sir Luton Delayne since that date?" she asked. He replied as one greedy for the opportunity to tell her."Why, everyone in Switzerland has heard of him. He's been staying at Grindelwald, painting the place red. There was a regular row there the other night. Some fellow in the Fusiliers accused him of cheating at bridge, and Sir Luton knocked him down in the hall. They say he wouldn't fight it out, and bolted next morning. Now the police are after him, and there'll be a pretty to do if he's caught. I wonder you didn't hear of it?"She tried to smile, but the effort was vain. "I have been on a steamer, from Egypt, you know. Women do not read the papers as men do. I don't think they understand the meaning of the word 'news,' unless it concerns their own circle. When I arrived at Brindisi I was naturally anxious to get on here. I see that I am very much out of date.""Of course you are. The hotel talked about nothing else yesterday. There was a rumour that the man intended coming on here. I guess there would have been some moving if he had. But the people won't have him. The little French secretary Ardlot, who runs the Palace, told me this morning they would have no vacant room if Sir Luton Delayne presented himself.""Then he has left Grindelwald finally?""I should think he has, and wisely too. Barton of the Fusiliers would have shot him if he had stayed. Luton Delayne's the kind of man who doesn't like playing tame pheasant. He gets out of the wood before the beaters are in. I shouldn't wonder if he is a hundred miles the other side of Pontarlier this morning.""Wisdom in this case being the better part of valour—but is not this the hotel? I hope it is, for I am deadly tired, and thank you so much for your great kindness."Benny said that the evening had been the best he had ever spent at Andana—and he meant it."I'm not staying at the Palace, you know," he ran on; "my brother and I took the chalet up by the Park. I come in to lunch and dinner, that's all. I'm not a sociable person, Mrs. Kennaird. Sometimes I think the best thing in life is being alone. But, of course, I didn't think that to-night. Will you let me bring you down from Vermala again? I hope so. It's been a happy opportunity for me, I assure you."She smiled very sweetly and held out her hand. They were at the hotel door by this time, and Ian Kavanagh, hearing her voice, came forward with those expletives of apology which suited an unceremonious occasion. He was "most frightfully sorry," but how had he managed to miss her? The "little widow" declared as frankly that she did not know."I am a dreadful bungler," she said, with some reserve; "undoubtedly it was all my fault; please don't think any more about it, Mr. Kavanagh.""Oh, but I couldn't help it—I shall dream about it all night.""Then Dr. Orange must prescribe a sleeping draught for you," and with this for his consolation she left him and went to her room.How foolish she had been; how poor her courage to persist in a foolish denial which might cost her so much.CHAPTER VTHE GHOST TAKES WINGSA sense of elation quite foreign to the somewhat methodical order of his daily life accompanied Benny to the chalet, where he found his brother Jack awaiting him with some anxiety. Jack had been the baby of the family from the beginning, and this somewhat precocious infant of twenty-six lifted a shaggy head above the bedclothes upon Benjamin's entry, and asked him with real solicitude what had kept him. He would have been surprised to the point of wonder had the answer been "A woman."Possibly Jack Benson was the only human being who understood his brother wholly and had no doubt about his future. He himself was a somewhat lazy youth with few affections and no enthusiasms, unless it were for his wire-haired terrier Toby; but he knew that Benjamin Benson was a genius of whom the world would hear one day to its profit. In his own dull way he tried to serve his brother; and this was very proper, for all the legacy that Benjamin ever received from his kindly old father was one thousand pounds sterling and the care of "the baby." That charge he had undertaken faithfully. The brothers were inseparable; and if the younger added little but encouragement to the common stock, his faith was precious to the shy, reserved man who wrought so strenuously for the common good."Wherever have you been, Benny? It's after twelve o'clock, isn't it?" Jack asked as he lifted his head from the pillow. Benjamin replied by setting the candlestick down upon the table and laughing in the most ridiculous way possible."I've been up to Vermala on a luge," he said as though the idea tickled him immensely; "imagine me at the game! Well, I've been there sure enough, Jack. Do you remember the pretty little woman in violet—the one with the sad face and the dreamy eyes? You do remember her; well, then, that's all right, for I brought her down. She was a derelict, and the hee-haw man, who went up with her, had an engagement on a drift. He was getting the snow out of his neck as I went by—so, you see, I brought her down—and, well, it makes me laugh to think about it, that's all."Jack stared as though he had seen the ghost of whom the peasants spoke. He was almost tempted to prescribe hot blankets. "Benny," he exclaimed at last, "what's the matter with you? What are you going on like that for? Is it something they said to you—was it the woman, Benny?"Benny became serious in a moment. No oyster shut his shell more surely."No, she's not in it, Jack," he rejoined hastily. "I was just thinking that it was odd I should have brought her down, that's all. She's Mrs. Kennaird, one of the Yorkshire lot, I guess, though she wouldn't own up. I suppose she didn't want anyone to know too much about her—that would be very natural, eh?""But it wasn't much of a compliment to you, Benny.""Do you think so, Jack? Well, I didn't look at it in that light. Perhaps it wasn't, after all. She might have been afraid that I would go down to her house in Yorkshire and try to see her. She might have done so—and, of course, it wouldn't have done; would it, Jack?"Jack sat up in bed again. He was used to this kind of talk, and it never failed to anger him."Why wouldn't it have done? Aren't you good enough for her? You're always crying us down, Benny. Wasn't our grandfather a Brerton, and wasn't he a d——d sight better than any Kennaird in Yorkshire? Why shouldn't you call on her if you wanted to?"Benny threw himself into a chair and took a very black briar pipe from his pocket."Oh," he said almost impatiently, "the world's a funny place. The cannibals get on best, Jack—those who live on their dead ancestors. You can't draw bills on futurity nowadays; no one honours them. A man's either up or down; there's no middle course. If I were to make a hit, people would remember that I had a history. If I fail, they won't even say 'Poor devil.' Birth and breeding are all right, but you must have the trappings if they are to be any good to you. While I'm just Benjamin Benson, engineer, the little woman in violet will regard me as she does her motor driver or the man who works the lift in the hotel. She wouldn't remember that she had done it if I made my mark—they never do."He spoke with an intensity of feeling quite beyond the circumstance, and Brother Jack was altogether puzzled."I never heard you talk like this before," he said questioningly; "surely to Heaven, Benny, you're not bitten with the society craze? For goodness' sake don't tell me you're going to buy a new silk hat!"Benny laughed."The old one will do yet awhile, Jack. It's up in London, packed away with the cylinder castings we had from Anzini. No, I'm not going in for that line, old boy; but when a man does meet a pretty woman, one he's likely to remember, why then, I suppose, these thoughts will come. That's what old Shakespeare says, and he knew women better than most of us. Wasn't it the same old Billy who told us to fling away ambition, for by that sin fell the angels? Well, I hope I shan't fall to-night, for I'm going to try the Zaat again.""The Zaat—but you never told me!""The idea came as I walked along. I want to see how the new propeller is working. It's only three weeks to the day, Jack, and if I let some Frenchman in before me, you know you'd never forgive me. Ten thousand pounds, my boy—and that's fortune. Let me win them and I will be one of the richest men in Europe in five years' time. You believe that, Jack, don't you?"Jack believed every word of it. His faith had never faltered. The great prize, offered to the man who first flew from the summit of the Weisshorn round Mont Blanc to the valley of Chamonix, would be won by his brother or it never would be won at all. Such a victory would change the course of their lives in an instant. It would lift them from the ruck of mere adventurers to the high places of fame. And Benny's genius would accomplish it—the day would come speedily when the world would acknowledge him for what he was. This Brother Jack believed faithfully; this was his whole creed, with an anathema upon any Frenchman who differed from him."It's a dead certainty, Benny," he said with a real ring in his voice; "you couldn't fail if you tried."Benny shook his head at that. "I could fail right enough if I played the fool, Jack; and then there's the weather to be reckoned with. What's going to happen if I start in a blizzard? The magneto may give out on short circuit—that's one of the chances if it's wet. When it begins to do that you may sally forth with a stretcher—not before. What I'm going 'no trumps' on is the snow. If that keeps soft and I come down, there'll be a new start. And anyway, it doesn't much matter, for there'll only be one flying man less in the world; and, like the folks in Gilbert's opera, he really won't be missed. You go to sleep and don't worry over it, Jack. It will be time enough to do that when I take a toss."He stood up as upon a sudden impulse and, laughing at his brother's remonstrances, filled his pipe again and went quickly down the stairs. A moment later he shut the door of the chalet softly and turned to the wooden shed upon his right hand. Here his machine was harboured; this was his hangar, wherein he guarded secrets so precious that he believed they would revolutionise the art of aviation, youthful as it was. For three years, since the day when he first heard of the Wrights and their achievements at Pau, had Benny dreamed the dreams by night and slaved at the bench by day. And now the harvest had come to fruition and the sickle was at hand. An offer by an English newspaper of ten thousand pounds to the man who first flew over the great peaks of the Pennine Alps sent Benny to Andana with the determination to win it or court the ultimate ignominy. He worked feverishly in the dread that he might be forestalled. The day and the hour were at hand—he believed that he was ready.The moon had waned a little when he opened the door of his shed, and the night fell bitter cold. He chose such an hour purposely, that he might prove his engines under all temperatures, and know that they would serve him in that rare atmosphere. Unlike the majority of others, Benny's machine was in the shape of a light steel torpedo with a whale's snout and the fins of a monstrous fish. He sat snug within this shell, and could raise or depress the great wings by the slightest touch upon the pedals at his feet. His elevating planes were cunningly placed above the rudder at the tail, and were connected to a lever at his right hand. He had designed the seven-cylindered engines himself, and while they embodied in some part the principles of the gyroscope, they had a power and reliability he had discovered in no other. Perhaps, however, the chief merit of the design was its neatness and its response in every particular to the scientific theory upon which human flight is based. In the air it looked like some monster, half fish, half bird. But on land it was a very beautiful thing, as every expert had admitted.Upon this night of events he dressed himself in leather clothes by the aid of the powerful electric lamps in his hangar; then, pushing the machine out, he climbed to his seat and started the engine by the powerful air-pump he had designed for that purpose. Permitting it to run free for a few moments, at length he gave a cheery "Good night" to Brother Jack at the window; then, letting in a clutch, he glided swiftly over the frozen snow and was lifted almost immediately from the ground. Thereafter he towered as some monstrous eagle; and the motor running at a great speed, he drove upwards, high above the plateau of Andana to the woods of the Zaat.This miracle of flight—assuredly its secret lay in his keeping! The world and men were vanquished at his feet. He was no cramped and cabined automaton, no soulless machine, but the dominating arbiter of his own destinies. To tower upwards as a bird that drives against the blast; to swoop downwards as a hawk upon the quarry; to swing hither, thither, as his fancy chose—all this his own brain had contrived for him. And who shall wonder if a pride in his achievements attended his lonely triumphs, spake in his ear while he soared and gave him soft words when he descended? Had he not become mightier than the very mountains? The earth beneath him stood typical of the dead ages; the vista above him seemed to open the infinite to man's understanding.Benny took a wide sweep upwards from the chalet and then swung his machine about and hovered for a little while above the Park Hotel. The waning moon had robbed the scene of much of its charm, but the lights in the windows of the hotel became brighter by contrast, and he could believe that one blind at least was drawn while he rested. When next he set his motor going, it was to cross the plateau before the Palace Hotel at Andana, which he did at the bidding of a futile hope he would have been at a loss to express. Here he glided downwards almost to the level of the pinnacles upon the summit of the lofty building, and passed so close to the windows that more than one tale of his coming would be told next day. Benny laughed to himself when he recalled the stories of "the ghost"; his pride was quickened when he reflected that the secret would be known before many days had passed, and his name linked to it. It may be that there lurked in his mind some desire that Mrs. Kennaird should know the truth before the others; but he put that by as a foolish thought and, regretting his boldness and the inspiration of it, he now swung rapidly to the left and again towered upwards.The night air was intensely still and bitter cold. The woods glowed with jewels of the frost; the valleys had become but profound cavities in a mist of wavering light. Just as at the hour of sunset the weird kaleidoscope of changing lights fascinated the stranger, so now, as Benny mounted upwards to the high peak of the Zaat, did the play of the moonlight upon the summits of the giants reveal new glories to him and bewitch him by its wantonness. Here would the hollow of a glacier become for a brief instant a river of molten gold; there a needle of the rock turned to solid silver; or again a mighty circle of glittering radiance with a heart grown ashen grey. Towns were now but the tiniest of stars in a fathomless abyss. The hotels upon the heights stood for children's houses set in mockery upon a gigantic plateau. The night wind stirred rarely, and when it stirred it burned as with the breath of fire.Benny had mounted to the summit of the Zaat twice since he came to Andana, and he told himself with a laugh that the third time paid for all. The mountain itself is inconsiderable, but there is a fine view over the Wildstrubel from its summit, and the prospect of the Simplon is very fine. Chiefly, however, Benny chose it because he had determined to make it his starting point when he set out to win the great prize of ten thousand pounds; and now, when he hovered lightly above it for some minutes and then touched the snow as gently as any bird, his first thought was of this venture.To-morrow he must give notice to the English editor, who would appoint judges and send them south. Assuredly the attempt would draw aviators from all quarters of Europe—there would be special trains from Paris, from Berne, and from Milan.Benny's heart warmed when he depicted the great crowds upon the plateau of Andana; the enthusiasm he must excite and the criticism to which he would be subject. Some, no doubt, would deride him—he was prepared for that. A few would be openly incredulous, but he hoped none the less to win friendship by his initiative, and the possibilities of victory remained. Let it come to that and his fortune was made. He believed that by money his genius would conquer the world. The humblest of men as he appeared to others, his secret ambitions surpassed all reason, and were of themselves an ironic commentary upon an ancient text.He was vain, truly, and yet vanity ceased to afflict him when the need of other qualities arose. Standing there upon the summit of the Zaat, a lonely figure of the night, apart from men and the world, Benny quickly dismissed the phantom multitude and settled down to the cold logic of his task.A powerful electric lamp, fixed to the snout of the machine, focused an aureole upon his map of the Pennine Alps and confirmed its verities. He began to think of winds and weather, of what he would do in a west wind and what in a south. Determined to start very early in the day, he thought he would steer right across the plateau toward Mont Blanc; then head for the Matterhorn and, passing high above Zermatt, would return by the Weisshorn to Sierre and the plateaus. One of the conditions of flight stipulated that he must cross a high peak and start once unaided from any spot he cared to choose. Benny determined to choose Chamonix for this purpose; to descend at the foot of Mont Blanc, and thence to begin the second stage across the Matterhorn. Perilous truly such a flight must be, perilous beyond any in the story of aviation; but of peril he thought little for he had lived for such an hour as this—and it mattered not what befell him if he failed.He smoked a pipe at the summit of the Zaat and tried to forget how very cold it was. Far from being a romantic person in the abstract sense of the term, his imagination delighted in the isolation of his position and the mastery which genius had conferred upon him. Other men climbed to this height laboriously. He had heard them talking about it in the hotels, planning excursions upon skis and calculating the hours necessary for the expedition. Often they had left the Palace at eight o'clock of the morning and returned when it was quite dark. He himself had been six minutes in attaining the same position, and he could descend to the chalet in three if he chose. Pardonable vanity became something very like egotism of an unpleasant nature at that particular moment; and when he put his pipe into his pocket and spread his wings again, he was a different person from the nervous hesitating nobody who had addressed Mrs. Kennaird that morning.Had he not conquered, and would not all the world acknowledge his attainments? So he said as he started his motor once more and the whir of it droned a slumber song upon the still air. If the "little widow" could see him on this height! No schoolboy, aping a conquerer in his dreams, could have hugged a thought more tenaciously; it may be added that no schoolboy could have experienced a disappointment so swift.There is a great slope of the snow, free of wood and rock, and running down at an easy angle, perhaps a third of the way, from the summit of the Zaat to the hotel at Vermala. Over this Benny would have flown to reach the chalet; and he never could quite say why he should have bungled in such a place of all others. Bungle he did, none the less; and bending an aileron too sharply, he came round just like a yacht when the helm is put hard down. An ominous lurch, a startled cry, and he knew he was done for. He felt himself dragged downward and still downward, sliding and twisting and turning at last upon his face. Then the soft snow overwhelmed him; it was as though someone put a hand suddenly upon his mouth and defied him to breathe a full breath.His eyes perceived nothing now but a glaring whiteness; he suffered intolerable pain and believed himself to be choking. When the sensation passed, a deadly chill struck him as though his body had turned to solid ice. He understood that he had forced himself upwards by a great effort, and that he was now lying upon his chest. Such an attitude was insupportable and must quickly give place to another which would suffocate him—at least he thought so as he put forth all his strength to lift himself and failed hopelessly at the attempt.In the end he lay back and tried to reason it out. One wing of the two remained to him, and had buried itself deeply in the soft snow; and upon this was the weight of the shell and of the engine. These must drag him down, inch by inch, but down unpityingly to the depths of the crevasse. To-morrow Jack would find him—surely he would search the slopes about the Zaat—and so the end of the story would be written. Well, it was foreordained, and he had done his best. If the curse of failure lay upon his life, better that he were dead.All this, to be sure, was accompanied by a sane review of the situation which such a man might have been expected to make. Benny did not hide it from himself that he had been staring down at the Palace Hotel at the very moment when he lost control of the machine, and he could calculate just what the accident would cost him if he were saved.All hope of winning the great prize must be abandoned. Slave as he might, this night's work was irreparable. He had never trusted unfamiliar hands upon his machine and would not do so now. The great prize must go, and that hope of success which meant so much to him. It was a heavy price to pay for the sympathy of a woman to whom he had spoken for the first time yesterday, and it made strange appeals to his sense of irony. That he should have played the fool, he, "Benny the philosopher," who used to say that the Greeks were right when they kept their women in sheds at the bottom of the garden!How she would laugh when she heard the truth! He was quite sure of it, and dwelt upon it almost savagely as though he were destined to bear the world's contempt whatever he did. The "little widow" would call it an excellent joke and narrate the story in the hotel. Benny could almost pick and choose the words she would employ. He could hear the music of her laugh and read the story in her eyes—at least he thought that he could; and that was much the same thing to a man who might have an hour to live if luck stood by him.He had managed to get almost free of the cage by this time, but not of the wings themselves, and they held him tenaciously, though he did not quite understand what new thing was happening to him. Anyone familiar with skis would have told him that the smaller ailerons fixed to the tail were holding the machine in the snow, while his head and shoulders were being dragged down by the weight of it, inch by inch, with a subtlety of cruelty defying description. When Benny realised this his courage quavered, and he uttered a loud cry, more in despair than in the hope that anyone could possibly hear him. For who should be on the Zaat at such an hour of the night, and what absurd chance of ten million would bring peasants to the woods when the new day was not an hour old?Benny knew it to be impossible; but the cry was forced from him nevertheless, and upon it another and another as the machine pulled him down without pity, and the snow began to close about his ears and neck. In five minutes or in ten it would cover his mouth; but whether sooner or later, he must suffer a lingering death, dying as a man held up a little while upon the surface of lake or river and then drawn down imperceptibly but irresistibly to the depths. So much Benny understood at the crisis of it, and so much his brother, who had watched him from the window of the bedroom, perceived in a flash when he detected the black speck upon the distant slope and knew that Benny indeed had fallen.Jack was as clever upon skis as Benny was clumsy, and he was out of the house and climbing almost as soon as the truth of the accident had dawned upon his somewhat slow intelligence. Luckily he had been unable to sleep, and had dressed himself with the idea of going out to meet his brother when he returned from the Zaat. So it came about that he had but to put on his boots and skis to be up and away—the height for his goal, Benny's need for his spur.Calculating the time at a rough guess, he thought he would be at least three hours upon the journey—three hours of desperate endeavour to accomplish what the white wings had attained in six minutes. If this reflection vindicated his brother's genius, it did little to make his own heart lighter. He thought of Benny lying there in the snow, dying, perhaps dead, and he cursed the limitations of his own ignorance.In ten, in twenty, years this age of stagnant incredulity would have passed—such men as Benny were heaping contempt upon it—and the golden years would be at hand. Altogether a fine philosophic commentary, helpful in its place, but of no service whatever to the panting youth who climbed the steeps laboriously and felt the icy cold freezing his very heart. Benny had fallen in the wide snow-fields above Vermala. How far off they were, how cruel were these hours of delay!But here Pity had a word to say upon it, for Brother Jack had been but an hour upon the road when he heard voices in the wood, and presently, peering through the trees, he espied the figures of two men, and could say that one of them was his brother and the other that pleasant little abbé from the Sanatorium, who had so often accompanied him to the Zaat upon skis, and was quite the kindliest little priest in all Valais.
CHAPTER III
CONCERNING A DISOBLIGING GHOST
The "little widow" had come to Andana under the mistaken notion that it was a nook in the backwoods of Switzerland where none might discover her. She was very much astonished and not a little dismayed to discover a middle-class society of an exuberant order and a noisy frivolity which could not but amuse her.
In such a company it was hardly possible for her to remain undiscovered, and she had not been in the hotel many hours when that Admirable Crichton, Dr. Orange, invited her to his own table. There she speedily began to reign to the satisfaction of a little coterie of the elect. If she, in her turn, shrank from the greatness thus thrust upon her, she was grateful for the compliment, and hastened to accept it. She had been alone so many months—she who was but seven-and-twenty, and had the heart of a child.
It was a great dinner that night, and merry the mood of the company. The "little widow" herself wore a dress of black velvet with a glorious "what-do-you-call-it" of white silk beneath it, as Bob Otway told his sister when describing it. Her diamonds were undoubtedly magnificent. Obviously a woman of fashion and of the world, she racked the animosities of prim misses from the suburbs and positively exasperated their mammas. These were of the "blouse" order, and obviously sober both in the matter of habit and of fashion. They dined with their eyes upon the "little widow" and their ears bent to every breath of gossip which stirred in an atmosphere odorous of dinner and cheap scents.
Dr. Orange, meanwhile, was hardly conscious of the envy he excited. He had not heard the rhapsodies of the males or the conviction, general when the fish was served, that her eyes were divine. He saw a charming woman, with a skin that Greuze would have copied, a mouth that a suburban poet would have likened to a "rosebud," and hair so fine and silky and bewitching in its play of browns that another woman would have been tempted to ask immediately for the name of the hairdresser who supplied it. Her nose wasretrousséand just a little flat; her forehead spoke of intellect; her neck and arms of a figure which an artist alone might have criticised. And so back to the eyes again—those eyes divinely blue, which looked into a man's soul (if he had one) or sent the devil flying out of him as though holy-water had been sprinkled round about.
The doctor was aware of all this, and so was Bess, who really rather despised middle-class folk and consorted with them merely because her uncle, the Cabinet Minister, was a Radical. But despite their knowledge, the usual conversation was eschewed altogether, and they discussed neither the magnificence of the latest production at His Majesty's, nor the fashionable intelligence from Monte Carlo. Andana and its excitements were topic enough—for was not this a day of prize-giving, and was not the doctor at his wits' end to find a prize-giver?
"I would like you to do it," he said to the beautiful woman at his side, "but they will have a title here. I suppose it must be that amusing person, Lady Coral-Smith—her husband made his money out of red herrings, and we shall have to draw one across the scent. All this kind of thing devolves upon me. I have to run everything: the hotel, the races, the invalids—and even Miss Elizabeth here. Do you wonder I am growing older?"
"No one should grow older in the company of a clever woman," said Miss Bessie, pouting. "It is only the consciousness of intellectual inferiority which can say such a thing. I am angry with you, Dr. Orange. Pass me the chocolates immediately."
"You see," said the doctor, appealing to them generally, "she covers me with scorn and then dies for my sake. I shall have to prescribe for her to-morrow."
"But I shall leave an imperishable memory behind me, and if anyone remembers that such a person as Dr. Orange lived, they will say that he was my doctor. Thank you, sir—your chocolates are beastly. I shall keep them for the ghost."
Here was a new topic, and one to which they turned with gusto. Andana was not so well amused that it had not a corner to spare for this particularly disobliging phantom, who had scared the peasants out of their wits and had actually appeared to a party coming down from Vermala at midnight. Miss Bessie told the story with a sense of drama all admirable; but she prefaced her narrative with the assurance that she would as soon believe in it as in the doctor at her side.
"There isn't any ghost, and so we are going out to look for it," she said; "the doctor wouldn't dress because he thinks he looks nicer in the green tie. The ghost might be feminine, you know. Perhaps she wants votes for women, and so appeals first to the weaker intelligence. They say that no end of people have seen her, including the Swan; but he doesn't count. Do you know the Swan? Oh, he's a dear, and he thinks he's swimming when he waltzes. He went up to Vermala to dinner the other night and saw the ghost as he came down. It's a great big black bird and makes a noise like a windmill. Dr. Orange says that it is troubled by asthma, but Mr. Benny says that its bones want greasing. He is an engineer, you know. He told me so yesterday. He is an engineer in principle, but in practice they won't have him, for he cannot pass the exams. Some men are so unlucky, while others—well, no one knows how they manage to get through. There is Dr. Orange, for instance; I think they must have passed him because they couldn't stand the green bow. There could not be any other reason. Well, as I was saying—what, are you going to begin already, and I haven't finished my ice? Monster!"
But the doctor had risen and now announced very briefly that Lady Coral-Smith had kindly offered to present the prizes to the winners in the various competitions held during the past week; so that brisk little woman, dressed like a Grecian shepherdess, with little white daisies all over her gown, came nodding and smiling to the table and began to hand out various ridiculous presents to the winners in question. Of these, the most conspicuous were the Rider girls, now resplendent in muslin dresses with bright blue bows, and their frequent appearances at the table gave rise to resounding cheers, not unaccompanied by kindly comments of an amiably derisive order.
Ian Kavanagh, that golden youth with the flaxen hair, had conducted his conversation chiefly in monosyllables during dinner; but he was a trifle more condescending at this stage, and declared it to be a pity that these accomplished young ladies had not to get their living at the Coliseum!—or other popular resort where acrobatic performances were properly rewarded. He thought that Andana was unworthy of them.
"They came here to win pots," he said scornfully. "The man who marries them is sure of a hundred or moreobjets d'art—to say nothing of virtue—all bought in the bazaar for one franc fifty. That ought to console him—"
"Is he going to marry them both?" Miss Elizabeth asked.
The golden youth smiled.
"Two go to a pattern, I suppose. I shouldn't know one from the other in the dark."
"But you'd have to know the one you married!"
"Ah, so I should! Why don't you write a story about it: 'The Bride Who Wasn't,' or something of that sort? Kipling would do it finely."
"Well, but I'm not Kipling—and here's Mr. Rivers. Why, of course, we won the doubles together. And is it poor little me they want?—Oh, dear!"
There were loud cries for Miss Elizabeth, and she rose, blushing very much at the outburst of cheering which attended her appearance—and obviously a great popular favourite. When she had received one Teddy Bear upon skis from the fat hands of the mayor's relict, she returned to the table and implored them to make plans for the ghost hunt.
"You're all coming, of course," she said. "We'll take luges and have coffee at Vermala. If the ghost does not appear for me, he will never appear at all. Now don't you think so, Mr. Kavanagh?"
"Oh, I think whatever the ladies think. Is Mrs. Kennaird coming?"
He turned to the "little widow," and the doctor joined in the appeal. She would accompany them, of course. It would be a beautiful moonlight night, and they would come down on luges. It was the very thing to do: and as the amiable doctor said emphatically, so very much better than the outside edge backwards in the ball-room with a partner who could not dance. There could be but one answer to such unanimity.
A brief interval for the securing of the necessary wraps and the party was away. Mrs. Kennaird had changed her dress hurriedly, and when she reached the hall she found the whole hotel restless and awakened to nomadic instincts. No one seemed to care at all for the wretched bandsmen who were, as Bob Otway put it, blowing the "Merry Widow" into three keys in the ball-room upstairs. Rather, the guests turned with expectant interest to the exquisite scene without, the snow plateau gleaming in the moonlight, the mellow radiance of the heights, the silent moonlit woods. Few of the men had dressed for dinner, and many were now garbed in the heavy sweaters and hobnailed boots indispensable to the climb. The girls were dressed as practically, and with their white woolly caps, their short skirts and heavy boots, looked like so many madcaps just let out from a seminary for young ladies where hockey was the chief study.
Miss Bessie had invited the "little widow" to be of her party; but being an impulsive young lady, she herself ultimately sought the society of Mr. Robert Otway; and somehow, but not of her own will, Mrs. Kennaird found herself enjoying atête-à-têtewith Kavanagh, and mounting slowly with him toward the heights. She had hoped that the old parson would have espied her and made one of the party; but he was playing bridge with a trio of matrons when she came down, and certainly Kavanagh showed no disposition to release her from her promise. He followed her like a dog, and they had not walked a hundred yards before she became aware that it was his intention to make love to her.
And why not? as he himself would have asked. Could the scene have been matched in all Switzerland? The sweet stillness of the bewitching night; the glory of the full round moon in the azure sky; the great white peaks standing out in majestic solitude; the stillness of the woods—what purpose could they serve so well as that of an amiable and meaningless flirtation with a pretty woman, who was already the well-desired of the whole community? Kavanagh had been greatly smitten at dinner, though his silence might not have been so interpreted. Who was she, and whence did she come? Upon his part, he had not spoken twenty sentences to her on the hillside before he managed to let her know that his father was Sir John Kavanagh, of Bolton, and that the heir to that ancient baronetcy now stood before her.
"You meet a very weird lot in these places," he began in a patronising tone. "I don't know what kind of an ark lets them loose. When at Rome, don't do as Bayswater does is my motto. It's astonishing how the nice people sort themselves, though. Why, I saw you before you got out of your sleigh, and I said, 'Thank Heaven.' We wanted reinforcements, and you came just in time. Kennaird's a name I couldn't help but know. Yorkshire, isn't it?—we're neighbours so to speak, for my old gov'nor's Sir John Kavanagh, of Bolton, and poor little me is all he's got in the world. You do come from Yorkshire, don't you?"
She said that she did, and happily the darkness of the way hid the blush upon her cheek when she spoke. Oblivious of the dangerous nature of the subject, Kavanagh plunged on.
"I came out here just to see what this ice rot is all about. I suppose you did the same? One has to put up with something to learn, and we're paying our footing. Mine's pretty dicky on anything but good honest skates; but it's no good skating here in the 'village pond champion' style. I tried skis and resigned. It makes a fellow feel an awful fool to have one of his legs round his neck and the other at the bottom of a crevasse. All right at twenty-one, perhaps; but I'm no chicken, and I don't like to make a fool of myself for nothing. If you skate, we might have some good times here—and we can always go down the Vermala run in the afternoon—or at night if you like. I call it top notch at night, and you'll do the same, I hope. Just look at the old Weisshorn—looks like a Chinese god on a fancy ottoman, doesn't he? We can't beat that in Yorkshire, can we? Well, I'm glad you're a neighbour, anyway, and we must find out all the people we know. Do you hunt, by the way?—I've got twenty nags at home, and what they're doin' Heaven only knows. Eatin' their heads off, I suppose."
She remembered that he had told her the same thing earlier in the day, and looked at him curiously from the depths of her blue eyes, grown black here in the solitude of the woods. What an amiable imbecile he was, and how odd that her lot should be cast with him. Possibly he was the only Yorkshireman in all the company, and fate had thus thrown them together at the very beginning. And with this thought there was just another, passing as a flash upon the white ground of memory, of one whose face had flushed when she spoke to him that morning, the butt of an amiable company, the derided Benny. She knew not why she wished for Mr. Benjamin's company, here upon the hillside; but the fact that she did wish for it could not be kept back.
"Is it far to the hotel at Vermala?" she asked presently—any question served to turn the dangerous talk. Kavanagh answered with the pride of knowledge acquired some sixty hours ago.
"It's just above the clump of pines there. They make top-notch coffee and have got some decent cigarettes. We've climbed about a thousand feet since we started. You'd never think it, would you; and doesn't the old show look just like the White City?—eh, what? Upon my life, I never saw such a resemblance. We might be up in the flip-flap."
She smiled at his preposterous imagery, and yet words might well have failed such an intellect upon such a scene. The place where they stood was a little thicket of trees at the last bend below Vermala. All around were the frozen pines, magic in their suggestion of fairyland, enchanting in the infinite variety of their matchless tracery. Below them Andana lay like an oasis of light upon a bleak hillside. Great arc-lamps waned and waxed upon the narrow road by the skating rink and again downwards toward the village. The hotel itself blazed with radiance and suggested the antithesis to this solitude of the woods. Far, far down in the black hollow of the valley there were the lamps of Sierre and the railway; and high above them, as though uplifted to the heavens, the moonlit peaks, a very forest of them running in unbroken majesty to the great flat dome of Mont Blanc.
The human side of this entrancing picture was voiced by the ripples of laughter, the joyous cries which came floating up on the still night air. A romancer would have espied lovers in the thickets, and heard the whispers of their sighs. By here and there stragglers were to be perceived upon the great plateau of the snow or plodding upward to the heights. In sharp contrast to this leisure of the climb would come the swift descent of a luge towards Andana, the loud cry, "Achtung!" the passing of the prone figure, and the lantern jolting at every rut. These cries became more frequent as the climbers neared Vermala. Some of the toboggans were bedecked gloriously with Chinese lanterns, which gave a rare splash of colour to the monotony of silhouettes, or turned the snow blood red. And dominating all was the eternal spirit of youth; thejoie de vivre; the consciousness of the present; the will to blot all else but this fulness of life which ran in the veins like fire.
There was a fine crowd of people up at the little hotel at Vermala, and conspicuous among them the Rider girls and Bess Bethune. Bess, in fact, furnished the place, as someone remarked—it must have been Bob Otway—and her high spirits were so infectious that the doctor sat down to the piano and played a magnificent fantasia upon "Our Miss Gibbs," arranged as a sonata in the fashion of Schubert. Everyone took coffee, and the ladies sippedcrême de mentheunder protest. The ghost received less attention than he merited—and when the best part of the company trooped out to look for him, and did not find him, not a few took advantage of the opportunities presented by Japan (in the form of screens) and Africa (in the matter of palms) to continue discussions of a momentous nature. The "little widow," however, found herself once more with Ian Kavanagh at the head of the path, and she realised that she must make her first run on a luge or be derided by the company.
How ridiculous it all seemed to her, that she should be playing a girl's part, she whose life had been so tragic and so womanly. She had the will to forget, God knows; and if the mountains had any message for her, the silent woods their consolation, it was that forgetfulness might be won, and upon forgetfulness, peace. Let there be a truce, however brief the day of it. The kingdom of a joyous childhood called her with a sweet voice—she tried to believe that she had become a child again.
"I have never done this before," she said to Kavanagh almost pleadingly, when he offered her the luge he had dragged up from Andana and showed her what she must do with it. "Is it so dreadful? Shall I really be able to manage it?"
He assured her that it was the easiest thing in all the world.
"Just guide yourself with your feet. Lean over when you come to the corners and round you go. I'd better get on ahead, for I shall be faster. I'll wait at the path where we go down to the rink. You can't hurt yourself—it's just like falling into an iced blanket—now see me do it."
He squatted on the luge, and going with as much dignity as he could command—which was not a great deal—he set off down the path and rounded the first of the corners successfully. Great flat hands pushed him off from the banks; his progress, if not melancholy, was certainly slow, and in the end became remote. The "little widow" heard him calling to her to "come on," and at last she seated herself and essayed to obey his interjectory instructions. But the dazzle and glory of the thing seemed less when she had started, and she reflected with irony that she could have walked much faster. Then the luge was so uncomfortable; just a few bars of wood, a cushion and two steel runners. And "the thing" would go up the banks in the most shameless way—first to the right, then to the left, now half round, now frightening her by a sudden plunge. At the corner she failed altogether, and ran high over the bank and into the soft snow upon the other side. Her white gloves were wet through by this time, her shoes full of snow, and her general condition one of misery. She picked herself up and laughed with a truer note than she had done for years. Yes, she had become a child again, and had a child's sense of irresponsibility.
Kavanagh had disappeared altogether by this time. Other tobogganers came flying down the mountainside; but none pulled up because of the lonely little woman standing between the trees at the "hairpin" bend. She heard voices above and below; the wood might have been full of the spirits of dead children rejoicing. But she had lost all taste for the miserable contraption which behaved so shabbily, and it had become a burden to her. Trying to set it going again, she ran a little way and lost hold of it; and then, as a horse which has lost its rider in a steeple-chase, it went on gaily, rounding the corners upon its own account, and disappearing as her guide and philosopher had done. She was quite alone now, and very pleased to be so—at least, she thought so until she espied a black figure creeping up between the trees, and, as it were, stalking her in the shelter of the wood. This frightened her a little and she tried to go on; but her heart beat fast and she was really quite afraid. Why did the man not speak? Was he a Swiss or one of the guests at the hotel? She was just about to shout for help when the crouching figure cried out:
"Mrs. Kennaird, is that you? Well, I'm Benson—you remember me?"
She burst out laughing.
As though anyone who had known him could forget "Benny."
CHAPTER IV
THE MAN WHO KNEW
"Oh," she exclaimed, recovering herself, though her heart still drummed the echoes of a panic, "oh, I thought you were the ghost."
Benjamin Benson was immensely tickled.
"I've been taken for many things in my life," he said, "but never for a ghost. I wonder if it would be nice to be that? We always think of it from the mortal point of view. We never ask if the ghost has a good time—and yet I don't see why he shouldn't. There might be sociable ghosts—now don't you think so, Mrs. Kennaird?"
She did not feel disposed to argue it.
"They tell me the peasants have seen a great bird in the sky. Everyone up at Vermala is looking for it. Of course they will not find it. I am not a least bit superstitious, but I must say that the idea of a great bird pleases me—even if it's untrue."
"Then you are quite sure it is untrue, Mrs. Kennaird?"
"Now, could it be anything else? You are not serious."
He laughed a little nervously.
"It would be a splendid thing to fly over the mountains, wouldn't it? If I have a spirit, I would sooner it played about here than in an old vault, as most of them do. Why, how it suggests power—power above men, doesn't it?"
And then almost with an apology:
"But I suppose you think all this is just nonsense? I'm not the kind of man who ought to be ambitious, am I? Everyone tells me that."
"But you do not lose your ambition because of them?"
He drew himself up—Benny could be a tower of dignity when he chose.
"Yes," he said, with real earnestness, "I am ambitious, and some day I shall attain my goal."
They walked a little way down the hillside in silence after that. There was no sign of Ian Kavanagh, who had taken a bad "toss" at the last of the bends above Andana and was trying to get the snow out of his hair at that very moment. Benny had a toboggan with him, but it was different from the others, much longer and made of steel. He trailed it behind him indifferently, thinking that his companion wished to walk down to the hotel; but when he discovered her own luge anchored in the snow he understood the situation.
"Halloa!" he said, "a derelict."
She told him with some shame that it was hers.
"A case of bolting—I suppose it wanted the curb. And now I shall have to drag it back to the hotel."
"Don't do anything of the kind. We leave these things all over the place—the hotel sledges pick them up as far down as the Sanatorium sometimes. Just let it lie there. I'll take you down if you like—there's plenty of room for two, and—and—I should like it, Mrs. Kennaird; I should think it an honour."
It was so simply said, the blunt words of a schoolboy speaking to the mature woman, that she forbore to smile. It would have been absurd, however, to respond in a similar vein, for the idea of a flirtation with Mr. Benjamin Benson was quite out of the question. So she accepted without any compliment at all.
"It's very good of you—and really I am beginning to feel the cold. Will you show me where to sit? I am absolutely ignorant, and it is so many years since I played games."
He understood that.
"Life's a game all through. We all say it, but what else can we say? We're in the long field most of the time, and when we get an innings, Fate goes and bowls us a curly one. I've never had an innings in my life, and I've been fielding for fifteen years—since I was seventeen—and my poor old father played on in Mark Lane and lost his house the 'ashes.' That's my story, and I don't tell it to everyone. Perhaps I have no right to tell it to you—but you seem so different, Mrs. Kennaird; I feel I can talk to you, and that's what I feel about very few people."
"You pay me a great compliment," she said, and then, "But we are both quite strangers here. This is my first visit to Switzerland in the winter; I know nobody."
He nodded his head.
"But I thought that I knew you directly I saw you—I shall remember where we met by and by. Had you relatives down Newmarket way, I wonder—people who used to live at Holmswell?"
She shook her head.
"Then I'm quite wrong; now let's get going. You sit in front and I'll steer—don't be afraid, I shan't upset you. They laugh at me in the hotel, but I'm going to have some fun with them before I get through. Are you quite ready—shall we let her rip?"
She said "Yes," and he pushed the toboggan off the bank. Had he been less nervous, he would have said that the "little widow" trembled; but Benny was anxious to make a fine run and had no idea how many would have envied him his burden. And truly it was wonderful how he steered on that dark and tortuous road. To the woman the whole thing was an ecstasy, a mad rush down the mountain-side; a wonderful journey into fairyland; a magician's leap through the realms of darkness to the enchanted vales of the fables. When they stopped, Benny had steered them right down to the cross roads by the Sanatorium, and they must tramp ten minutes through the woods before they reached the hotel again. It was here that he harked back to the dangerous topic.
"It's odd about those Newmarket people—I could have sworn Lady Delayne was your sister," he said; "really the likeness is wonderful. I went to Holmswell from Norwich when I was in the motor shops trying to make myself an engineer. The electric light engine went wrong over at the house, and Sir Luton—that was his name—Sir Luton Delayne sent to our people. I remember him well, a little rat of a man whose temper used to go off like a cracker. It makes me laugh when I remember that he tried to bully me, until I said a word or two in my own way. He was very civil after that and showed me over the house. There was a picture of a lady in the drawing-room as like you as two peas. I thought of it directly I saw you to-day. 'She'll be a relative,' I said. You quite surprised me just now when you said you were not."
She merely rejoined, "Indeed?" A problem involving tremendous issues had presented itself suddenly to her mind, and she had not the remotest idea how to deal with it. But she felt that her previous answer had been a mistake and one that was almost irreparable. Why had she made it? She did not quite know.
Benny, on his part, was a little puzzled by her silence. He thought that he had pursued a subject which could be of no interest to her; and he would not have mentioned it again but for the question she put to him just before the Palace Hotel came into sight.
"Have you heard of Sir Luton Delayne since that date?" she asked. He replied as one greedy for the opportunity to tell her.
"Why, everyone in Switzerland has heard of him. He's been staying at Grindelwald, painting the place red. There was a regular row there the other night. Some fellow in the Fusiliers accused him of cheating at bridge, and Sir Luton knocked him down in the hall. They say he wouldn't fight it out, and bolted next morning. Now the police are after him, and there'll be a pretty to do if he's caught. I wonder you didn't hear of it?"
She tried to smile, but the effort was vain. "I have been on a steamer, from Egypt, you know. Women do not read the papers as men do. I don't think they understand the meaning of the word 'news,' unless it concerns their own circle. When I arrived at Brindisi I was naturally anxious to get on here. I see that I am very much out of date."
"Of course you are. The hotel talked about nothing else yesterday. There was a rumour that the man intended coming on here. I guess there would have been some moving if he had. But the people won't have him. The little French secretary Ardlot, who runs the Palace, told me this morning they would have no vacant room if Sir Luton Delayne presented himself."
"Then he has left Grindelwald finally?"
"I should think he has, and wisely too. Barton of the Fusiliers would have shot him if he had stayed. Luton Delayne's the kind of man who doesn't like playing tame pheasant. He gets out of the wood before the beaters are in. I shouldn't wonder if he is a hundred miles the other side of Pontarlier this morning."
"Wisdom in this case being the better part of valour—but is not this the hotel? I hope it is, for I am deadly tired, and thank you so much for your great kindness."
Benny said that the evening had been the best he had ever spent at Andana—and he meant it.
"I'm not staying at the Palace, you know," he ran on; "my brother and I took the chalet up by the Park. I come in to lunch and dinner, that's all. I'm not a sociable person, Mrs. Kennaird. Sometimes I think the best thing in life is being alone. But, of course, I didn't think that to-night. Will you let me bring you down from Vermala again? I hope so. It's been a happy opportunity for me, I assure you."
She smiled very sweetly and held out her hand. They were at the hotel door by this time, and Ian Kavanagh, hearing her voice, came forward with those expletives of apology which suited an unceremonious occasion. He was "most frightfully sorry," but how had he managed to miss her? The "little widow" declared as frankly that she did not know.
"I am a dreadful bungler," she said, with some reserve; "undoubtedly it was all my fault; please don't think any more about it, Mr. Kavanagh."
"Oh, but I couldn't help it—I shall dream about it all night."
"Then Dr. Orange must prescribe a sleeping draught for you," and with this for his consolation she left him and went to her room.
How foolish she had been; how poor her courage to persist in a foolish denial which might cost her so much.
CHAPTER V
THE GHOST TAKES WINGS
A sense of elation quite foreign to the somewhat methodical order of his daily life accompanied Benny to the chalet, where he found his brother Jack awaiting him with some anxiety. Jack had been the baby of the family from the beginning, and this somewhat precocious infant of twenty-six lifted a shaggy head above the bedclothes upon Benjamin's entry, and asked him with real solicitude what had kept him. He would have been surprised to the point of wonder had the answer been "A woman."
Possibly Jack Benson was the only human being who understood his brother wholly and had no doubt about his future. He himself was a somewhat lazy youth with few affections and no enthusiasms, unless it were for his wire-haired terrier Toby; but he knew that Benjamin Benson was a genius of whom the world would hear one day to its profit. In his own dull way he tried to serve his brother; and this was very proper, for all the legacy that Benjamin ever received from his kindly old father was one thousand pounds sterling and the care of "the baby." That charge he had undertaken faithfully. The brothers were inseparable; and if the younger added little but encouragement to the common stock, his faith was precious to the shy, reserved man who wrought so strenuously for the common good.
"Wherever have you been, Benny? It's after twelve o'clock, isn't it?" Jack asked as he lifted his head from the pillow. Benjamin replied by setting the candlestick down upon the table and laughing in the most ridiculous way possible.
"I've been up to Vermala on a luge," he said as though the idea tickled him immensely; "imagine me at the game! Well, I've been there sure enough, Jack. Do you remember the pretty little woman in violet—the one with the sad face and the dreamy eyes? You do remember her; well, then, that's all right, for I brought her down. She was a derelict, and the hee-haw man, who went up with her, had an engagement on a drift. He was getting the snow out of his neck as I went by—so, you see, I brought her down—and, well, it makes me laugh to think about it, that's all."
Jack stared as though he had seen the ghost of whom the peasants spoke. He was almost tempted to prescribe hot blankets. "Benny," he exclaimed at last, "what's the matter with you? What are you going on like that for? Is it something they said to you—was it the woman, Benny?"
Benny became serious in a moment. No oyster shut his shell more surely.
"No, she's not in it, Jack," he rejoined hastily. "I was just thinking that it was odd I should have brought her down, that's all. She's Mrs. Kennaird, one of the Yorkshire lot, I guess, though she wouldn't own up. I suppose she didn't want anyone to know too much about her—that would be very natural, eh?"
"But it wasn't much of a compliment to you, Benny."
"Do you think so, Jack? Well, I didn't look at it in that light. Perhaps it wasn't, after all. She might have been afraid that I would go down to her house in Yorkshire and try to see her. She might have done so—and, of course, it wouldn't have done; would it, Jack?"
Jack sat up in bed again. He was used to this kind of talk, and it never failed to anger him.
"Why wouldn't it have done? Aren't you good enough for her? You're always crying us down, Benny. Wasn't our grandfather a Brerton, and wasn't he a d——d sight better than any Kennaird in Yorkshire? Why shouldn't you call on her if you wanted to?"
Benny threw himself into a chair and took a very black briar pipe from his pocket.
"Oh," he said almost impatiently, "the world's a funny place. The cannibals get on best, Jack—those who live on their dead ancestors. You can't draw bills on futurity nowadays; no one honours them. A man's either up or down; there's no middle course. If I were to make a hit, people would remember that I had a history. If I fail, they won't even say 'Poor devil.' Birth and breeding are all right, but you must have the trappings if they are to be any good to you. While I'm just Benjamin Benson, engineer, the little woman in violet will regard me as she does her motor driver or the man who works the lift in the hotel. She wouldn't remember that she had done it if I made my mark—they never do."
He spoke with an intensity of feeling quite beyond the circumstance, and Brother Jack was altogether puzzled.
"I never heard you talk like this before," he said questioningly; "surely to Heaven, Benny, you're not bitten with the society craze? For goodness' sake don't tell me you're going to buy a new silk hat!"
Benny laughed.
"The old one will do yet awhile, Jack. It's up in London, packed away with the cylinder castings we had from Anzini. No, I'm not going in for that line, old boy; but when a man does meet a pretty woman, one he's likely to remember, why then, I suppose, these thoughts will come. That's what old Shakespeare says, and he knew women better than most of us. Wasn't it the same old Billy who told us to fling away ambition, for by that sin fell the angels? Well, I hope I shan't fall to-night, for I'm going to try the Zaat again."
"The Zaat—but you never told me!"
"The idea came as I walked along. I want to see how the new propeller is working. It's only three weeks to the day, Jack, and if I let some Frenchman in before me, you know you'd never forgive me. Ten thousand pounds, my boy—and that's fortune. Let me win them and I will be one of the richest men in Europe in five years' time. You believe that, Jack, don't you?"
Jack believed every word of it. His faith had never faltered. The great prize, offered to the man who first flew from the summit of the Weisshorn round Mont Blanc to the valley of Chamonix, would be won by his brother or it never would be won at all. Such a victory would change the course of their lives in an instant. It would lift them from the ruck of mere adventurers to the high places of fame. And Benny's genius would accomplish it—the day would come speedily when the world would acknowledge him for what he was. This Brother Jack believed faithfully; this was his whole creed, with an anathema upon any Frenchman who differed from him.
"It's a dead certainty, Benny," he said with a real ring in his voice; "you couldn't fail if you tried."
Benny shook his head at that. "I could fail right enough if I played the fool, Jack; and then there's the weather to be reckoned with. What's going to happen if I start in a blizzard? The magneto may give out on short circuit—that's one of the chances if it's wet. When it begins to do that you may sally forth with a stretcher—not before. What I'm going 'no trumps' on is the snow. If that keeps soft and I come down, there'll be a new start. And anyway, it doesn't much matter, for there'll only be one flying man less in the world; and, like the folks in Gilbert's opera, he really won't be missed. You go to sleep and don't worry over it, Jack. It will be time enough to do that when I take a toss."
He stood up as upon a sudden impulse and, laughing at his brother's remonstrances, filled his pipe again and went quickly down the stairs. A moment later he shut the door of the chalet softly and turned to the wooden shed upon his right hand. Here his machine was harboured; this was his hangar, wherein he guarded secrets so precious that he believed they would revolutionise the art of aviation, youthful as it was. For three years, since the day when he first heard of the Wrights and their achievements at Pau, had Benny dreamed the dreams by night and slaved at the bench by day. And now the harvest had come to fruition and the sickle was at hand. An offer by an English newspaper of ten thousand pounds to the man who first flew over the great peaks of the Pennine Alps sent Benny to Andana with the determination to win it or court the ultimate ignominy. He worked feverishly in the dread that he might be forestalled. The day and the hour were at hand—he believed that he was ready.
The moon had waned a little when he opened the door of his shed, and the night fell bitter cold. He chose such an hour purposely, that he might prove his engines under all temperatures, and know that they would serve him in that rare atmosphere. Unlike the majority of others, Benny's machine was in the shape of a light steel torpedo with a whale's snout and the fins of a monstrous fish. He sat snug within this shell, and could raise or depress the great wings by the slightest touch upon the pedals at his feet. His elevating planes were cunningly placed above the rudder at the tail, and were connected to a lever at his right hand. He had designed the seven-cylindered engines himself, and while they embodied in some part the principles of the gyroscope, they had a power and reliability he had discovered in no other. Perhaps, however, the chief merit of the design was its neatness and its response in every particular to the scientific theory upon which human flight is based. In the air it looked like some monster, half fish, half bird. But on land it was a very beautiful thing, as every expert had admitted.
Upon this night of events he dressed himself in leather clothes by the aid of the powerful electric lamps in his hangar; then, pushing the machine out, he climbed to his seat and started the engine by the powerful air-pump he had designed for that purpose. Permitting it to run free for a few moments, at length he gave a cheery "Good night" to Brother Jack at the window; then, letting in a clutch, he glided swiftly over the frozen snow and was lifted almost immediately from the ground. Thereafter he towered as some monstrous eagle; and the motor running at a great speed, he drove upwards, high above the plateau of Andana to the woods of the Zaat.
This miracle of flight—assuredly its secret lay in his keeping! The world and men were vanquished at his feet. He was no cramped and cabined automaton, no soulless machine, but the dominating arbiter of his own destinies. To tower upwards as a bird that drives against the blast; to swoop downwards as a hawk upon the quarry; to swing hither, thither, as his fancy chose—all this his own brain had contrived for him. And who shall wonder if a pride in his achievements attended his lonely triumphs, spake in his ear while he soared and gave him soft words when he descended? Had he not become mightier than the very mountains? The earth beneath him stood typical of the dead ages; the vista above him seemed to open the infinite to man's understanding.
Benny took a wide sweep upwards from the chalet and then swung his machine about and hovered for a little while above the Park Hotel. The waning moon had robbed the scene of much of its charm, but the lights in the windows of the hotel became brighter by contrast, and he could believe that one blind at least was drawn while he rested. When next he set his motor going, it was to cross the plateau before the Palace Hotel at Andana, which he did at the bidding of a futile hope he would have been at a loss to express. Here he glided downwards almost to the level of the pinnacles upon the summit of the lofty building, and passed so close to the windows that more than one tale of his coming would be told next day. Benny laughed to himself when he recalled the stories of "the ghost"; his pride was quickened when he reflected that the secret would be known before many days had passed, and his name linked to it. It may be that there lurked in his mind some desire that Mrs. Kennaird should know the truth before the others; but he put that by as a foolish thought and, regretting his boldness and the inspiration of it, he now swung rapidly to the left and again towered upwards.
The night air was intensely still and bitter cold. The woods glowed with jewels of the frost; the valleys had become but profound cavities in a mist of wavering light. Just as at the hour of sunset the weird kaleidoscope of changing lights fascinated the stranger, so now, as Benny mounted upwards to the high peak of the Zaat, did the play of the moonlight upon the summits of the giants reveal new glories to him and bewitch him by its wantonness. Here would the hollow of a glacier become for a brief instant a river of molten gold; there a needle of the rock turned to solid silver; or again a mighty circle of glittering radiance with a heart grown ashen grey. Towns were now but the tiniest of stars in a fathomless abyss. The hotels upon the heights stood for children's houses set in mockery upon a gigantic plateau. The night wind stirred rarely, and when it stirred it burned as with the breath of fire.
Benny had mounted to the summit of the Zaat twice since he came to Andana, and he told himself with a laugh that the third time paid for all. The mountain itself is inconsiderable, but there is a fine view over the Wildstrubel from its summit, and the prospect of the Simplon is very fine. Chiefly, however, Benny chose it because he had determined to make it his starting point when he set out to win the great prize of ten thousand pounds; and now, when he hovered lightly above it for some minutes and then touched the snow as gently as any bird, his first thought was of this venture.
To-morrow he must give notice to the English editor, who would appoint judges and send them south. Assuredly the attempt would draw aviators from all quarters of Europe—there would be special trains from Paris, from Berne, and from Milan.
Benny's heart warmed when he depicted the great crowds upon the plateau of Andana; the enthusiasm he must excite and the criticism to which he would be subject. Some, no doubt, would deride him—he was prepared for that. A few would be openly incredulous, but he hoped none the less to win friendship by his initiative, and the possibilities of victory remained. Let it come to that and his fortune was made. He believed that by money his genius would conquer the world. The humblest of men as he appeared to others, his secret ambitions surpassed all reason, and were of themselves an ironic commentary upon an ancient text.
He was vain, truly, and yet vanity ceased to afflict him when the need of other qualities arose. Standing there upon the summit of the Zaat, a lonely figure of the night, apart from men and the world, Benny quickly dismissed the phantom multitude and settled down to the cold logic of his task.
A powerful electric lamp, fixed to the snout of the machine, focused an aureole upon his map of the Pennine Alps and confirmed its verities. He began to think of winds and weather, of what he would do in a west wind and what in a south. Determined to start very early in the day, he thought he would steer right across the plateau toward Mont Blanc; then head for the Matterhorn and, passing high above Zermatt, would return by the Weisshorn to Sierre and the plateaus. One of the conditions of flight stipulated that he must cross a high peak and start once unaided from any spot he cared to choose. Benny determined to choose Chamonix for this purpose; to descend at the foot of Mont Blanc, and thence to begin the second stage across the Matterhorn. Perilous truly such a flight must be, perilous beyond any in the story of aviation; but of peril he thought little for he had lived for such an hour as this—and it mattered not what befell him if he failed.
He smoked a pipe at the summit of the Zaat and tried to forget how very cold it was. Far from being a romantic person in the abstract sense of the term, his imagination delighted in the isolation of his position and the mastery which genius had conferred upon him. Other men climbed to this height laboriously. He had heard them talking about it in the hotels, planning excursions upon skis and calculating the hours necessary for the expedition. Often they had left the Palace at eight o'clock of the morning and returned when it was quite dark. He himself had been six minutes in attaining the same position, and he could descend to the chalet in three if he chose. Pardonable vanity became something very like egotism of an unpleasant nature at that particular moment; and when he put his pipe into his pocket and spread his wings again, he was a different person from the nervous hesitating nobody who had addressed Mrs. Kennaird that morning.
Had he not conquered, and would not all the world acknowledge his attainments? So he said as he started his motor once more and the whir of it droned a slumber song upon the still air. If the "little widow" could see him on this height! No schoolboy, aping a conquerer in his dreams, could have hugged a thought more tenaciously; it may be added that no schoolboy could have experienced a disappointment so swift.
There is a great slope of the snow, free of wood and rock, and running down at an easy angle, perhaps a third of the way, from the summit of the Zaat to the hotel at Vermala. Over this Benny would have flown to reach the chalet; and he never could quite say why he should have bungled in such a place of all others. Bungle he did, none the less; and bending an aileron too sharply, he came round just like a yacht when the helm is put hard down. An ominous lurch, a startled cry, and he knew he was done for. He felt himself dragged downward and still downward, sliding and twisting and turning at last upon his face. Then the soft snow overwhelmed him; it was as though someone put a hand suddenly upon his mouth and defied him to breathe a full breath.
His eyes perceived nothing now but a glaring whiteness; he suffered intolerable pain and believed himself to be choking. When the sensation passed, a deadly chill struck him as though his body had turned to solid ice. He understood that he had forced himself upwards by a great effort, and that he was now lying upon his chest. Such an attitude was insupportable and must quickly give place to another which would suffocate him—at least he thought so as he put forth all his strength to lift himself and failed hopelessly at the attempt.
In the end he lay back and tried to reason it out. One wing of the two remained to him, and had buried itself deeply in the soft snow; and upon this was the weight of the shell and of the engine. These must drag him down, inch by inch, but down unpityingly to the depths of the crevasse. To-morrow Jack would find him—surely he would search the slopes about the Zaat—and so the end of the story would be written. Well, it was foreordained, and he had done his best. If the curse of failure lay upon his life, better that he were dead.
All this, to be sure, was accompanied by a sane review of the situation which such a man might have been expected to make. Benny did not hide it from himself that he had been staring down at the Palace Hotel at the very moment when he lost control of the machine, and he could calculate just what the accident would cost him if he were saved.
All hope of winning the great prize must be abandoned. Slave as he might, this night's work was irreparable. He had never trusted unfamiliar hands upon his machine and would not do so now. The great prize must go, and that hope of success which meant so much to him. It was a heavy price to pay for the sympathy of a woman to whom he had spoken for the first time yesterday, and it made strange appeals to his sense of irony. That he should have played the fool, he, "Benny the philosopher," who used to say that the Greeks were right when they kept their women in sheds at the bottom of the garden!
How she would laugh when she heard the truth! He was quite sure of it, and dwelt upon it almost savagely as though he were destined to bear the world's contempt whatever he did. The "little widow" would call it an excellent joke and narrate the story in the hotel. Benny could almost pick and choose the words she would employ. He could hear the music of her laugh and read the story in her eyes—at least he thought that he could; and that was much the same thing to a man who might have an hour to live if luck stood by him.
He had managed to get almost free of the cage by this time, but not of the wings themselves, and they held him tenaciously, though he did not quite understand what new thing was happening to him. Anyone familiar with skis would have told him that the smaller ailerons fixed to the tail were holding the machine in the snow, while his head and shoulders were being dragged down by the weight of it, inch by inch, with a subtlety of cruelty defying description. When Benny realised this his courage quavered, and he uttered a loud cry, more in despair than in the hope that anyone could possibly hear him. For who should be on the Zaat at such an hour of the night, and what absurd chance of ten million would bring peasants to the woods when the new day was not an hour old?
Benny knew it to be impossible; but the cry was forced from him nevertheless, and upon it another and another as the machine pulled him down without pity, and the snow began to close about his ears and neck. In five minutes or in ten it would cover his mouth; but whether sooner or later, he must suffer a lingering death, dying as a man held up a little while upon the surface of lake or river and then drawn down imperceptibly but irresistibly to the depths. So much Benny understood at the crisis of it, and so much his brother, who had watched him from the window of the bedroom, perceived in a flash when he detected the black speck upon the distant slope and knew that Benny indeed had fallen.
Jack was as clever upon skis as Benny was clumsy, and he was out of the house and climbing almost as soon as the truth of the accident had dawned upon his somewhat slow intelligence. Luckily he had been unable to sleep, and had dressed himself with the idea of going out to meet his brother when he returned from the Zaat. So it came about that he had but to put on his boots and skis to be up and away—the height for his goal, Benny's need for his spur.
Calculating the time at a rough guess, he thought he would be at least three hours upon the journey—three hours of desperate endeavour to accomplish what the white wings had attained in six minutes. If this reflection vindicated his brother's genius, it did little to make his own heart lighter. He thought of Benny lying there in the snow, dying, perhaps dead, and he cursed the limitations of his own ignorance.
In ten, in twenty, years this age of stagnant incredulity would have passed—such men as Benny were heaping contempt upon it—and the golden years would be at hand. Altogether a fine philosophic commentary, helpful in its place, but of no service whatever to the panting youth who climbed the steeps laboriously and felt the icy cold freezing his very heart. Benny had fallen in the wide snow-fields above Vermala. How far off they were, how cruel were these hours of delay!
But here Pity had a word to say upon it, for Brother Jack had been but an hour upon the road when he heard voices in the wood, and presently, peering through the trees, he espied the figures of two men, and could say that one of them was his brother and the other that pleasant little abbé from the Sanatorium, who had so often accompanied him to the Zaat upon skis, and was quite the kindliest little priest in all Valais.