Chapter Twelve
Light
“Wentworth, old man, here’s to your lucky escape,” cried Gedge, with his usual effusiveness, flourishing a brimming bumper of Beaune.
A roaring fire blazed in the wide chimney-place of the Châlet Soladier. The air was raw and chill, for another rain-gust had swept suddenly up; and seated around the cheerful glow our party was engaged in the comfortable and highly congenial occupation of assimilating the luncheon which had been brought along.
“That’s a most appropriate toast, and one we ought all to join in,” said the old General, approvingly. “Here, Philip, give the châlet man a full bumper. He is entitled to join if any one is, and, Alma – explain to him what it is all about.”
This was done, and the toast drunk with a hearty cheer. The recipient of the honour, however, was in no responsive mood. That he, of all people, should have been fool enough to miss his footing; he an experienced climber, and who, moreover, was in a way the leader of the expedition! It was intolerable. And this aspect of the situation tended far more towards the somewhat silent and subdued demeanour he had worn ever since, than any recollection of the ghastly peril from which he had been extricated, than even the thought of the grisly death from which he had been saved almost by a miracle. Yes, he felt small, and said so unreservedly.
But Alma came to the rescue in no ambiguous fashion.
“You are not fair to yourself, Mr Wentworth,” she declared. “The thing might have happened to anybody up there in that awful wind. Of course I don’t know anything about mountain climbing, but what strikes me is that if, as you say, you considered yourself in a way responsible for us, the fact that you incurred the danger, while we have all come down safe and sound – incurred it, too, out of care for our safety – is not a thing to feel small about, but very much the reverse.”
“Hear, hear!” sung out Gedge, lustily, stamping with his feet in such wise as to upset a whole heap of sandwiches and the residue of Fordham’s beverage. But Wentworth shook his head.
“It’s very kind of you to put it that way, Miss Wyatt. Still the fact remains that it oughtn’t to have happened; and perhaps the best side of the affair is that it happened to me after all, and not to one of yourselves. By Jove! though,” he added, with a laugh. “Friend Dufour will score off me now for all time. We are always having arguments about the Cape au Moine. I always say it is an over-rated climb, and for the matter of that I say so still.”
“That may easily be,” struck in Philip. “I suppose any mountain is dangerous with a gale of five hundred hurricane power blowing.”
“Of course. But where I blame myself, Orlebar, is in not starting to come down sooner. And I fancy that is the line Miss Wyatt’s advocacy will take when she finds herself laid up with a bad cold after getting wet through up there.”
“It will take nothing of the kind, Mr Wentworth,” replied Alma, “for I am not going to be laid up with any cold at all. The walk down here almost dried my things, and this splendid fire has done the rest.”
Luncheon over pipes were produced, indeed the suggestion to that effect originated with the representatives of the softer sex there present, who preferred the, at other times much-decried, narcotic to the somewhat rancid odour emanating from sundry tubs used in cheese-making, which stood in the corner of the room. The rain beat hard upon the roof without, but nothing could have been more snug than the interior of the châlet in its semi-darkness, the firelight dancing upon the beams and quaint appointments of this rough but picturesque habitation.
“Now, Gedge, you’re by way of being a logician,” said Wentworth, blowing out a cloud of smoke. “Can you tell us why a man can’t keep his head just as well over a drop of a thousand feet as over one of six?”
“Do you mean when the wind is blowing,” answered Gedge, suspecting a “catch.”
“No. I mean when there’s no apparent reason why he shouldn’t.”
“Because he gets confoundedly dizzy, I suppose.”
“But why should he? He has the same foothold. Take that arête up there. If the drop on each side were only six feet, no fellow would hesitate to run along it like a cat along a wall.”
“Not even Scott,” muttered Fordham, in a tone just audible to Alma, who at the picture thus conjured up of the unfortunate chaplain straddling the arête, and screaming to be taken off, could hardly restrain herself from breaking forth into a peal of laughter.
“It’s a clear case of the triumph of mind over matter, I take it,” answered Gedge. “What do you say, Scott?”
“Oh, I’m no authority,” mumbled the latter hastily. “Don’t appeal to me. My head seems going round still.”
“Scott is no authority on matters outside the smoking-room,” said Fordham, mercilessly – thereby nearly causing Alma to choke again, and begetting inextinguishable resentment in the breast of the youngest Miss Ottley, who had taken the parson under her own especial wing. “Within those sacred precincts we all bow to him as supreme.”
“I don’t quite see where that comes in,” rejoined Wentworth, in answer to Gedge. “If anything it would be the other way about – triumph of matter over mind: the matter being represented by several hundred feet of perpendicularity, before, or rather above, which the ‘mind’ takes a back seat; or, in plainer English, gets in a funk.”
“That very fact proves the mind to be paramount; proves its triumph, paradoxical as it may sound,” argued Gedge. “An idiot, for instance, wouldn’t care twopence whether the drop was six feet or six hundred. As long as there was firm ground under him, he’d shuffle along it gaily. Why? Because he is incapable of thought – deficient in mind.”
“Upon that showing,” said General Wyatt, with a twinkle in his eye – “upon that showing, the Miss Ottleys and myself must be the most sensible people of the lot; for, unlike your hypothetical idiot, Gedge, we emphatically did care twopence whether the drop was six feet or six hundred. In other words, we funked it egregiously and stayed behind. Our minds, you see triumphed over matter in the most practical way of all.”
“I guess this argument’s going to end in a clean draw,” said Philip. “Hallo! the sun’s out again, and, by Jove, there isn’t a cloud in the sky,” he added, flinging the door open and going outside. “The day is young yet. How would it be to go over the Col de Falvay and work round home again by way of the Alliaz? It’s a lovely walk.”
But this, after some discussion, was voted too large an undertaking. At Alma’s suggestion it was decided that the party should stroll over the col into the next valley and pick flowers.
“It is our last day here, uncle,” she urged, in answer to the old General’s somewhat half-hearted objection that they would have had about enough walking by the time they reached home. “It is our last day, so we ought to make the most of it. And look how lovely it has turned out!”
It had. No sign was left now of the dour mist curtain which had swept the heavens but a short while before. Wandering in the golden sunshine, among fragrant pine woods and pastures, knee-deep in narcissus, the party soon split up as such parties will. Fordham and the General took it very easily; strolling a little, sitting down a little, they chatted and smoked many pipes, and were happy. Scott and his fair admirer paired off in search of floral and botanical specimens, and were also happy. The residue of the crowd assimilated themselves in like harmonious fashion, or did not – as they chose. Two units of it at any rate did, for crafty Phil seized an early opportunity of carrying off Alma to a spot where he knew they would find lilies of the valley. As a matter of fact they did not find any, but this was of no consequence to him. What was of consequence was the blissful fact that he had got her all to himself for the afternoon. And this was her last afternoon, their last afternoon together. And in consideration of this, the light-hearted, easy-going Phil became seized with an abnormal melancholy.
“You are a rank deceiver,” said Alma, some three hours later, as, in obedience to a shout of recall, they turned to rejoin the rest of the party now taking the homeward way, but as yet some distance off. “You told me you knew we should find the lilies there – you knew, mind, not you thought. Then when we found none at the first place, you knew we should at another; and you dragged me from place to place, but yet I haven’t found one. And now I must be content with the bundle of bell-gentians I gathered this morning. Poor things! how they have faded,” she added, undoing a corner of the handkerchief containing them. “Ah! here is some water. I must freshen them up a bit.”
“What a day this has been,” said Philip, regretfully, as Alma stooped down to freshen the gentians with water from the tiny runnel which, dripping from the mossy undergrowth beneath the shadowy pines, sped at their feet with a bell-like tinkle. There was a moist fragrance as of crushed blossoms in the air, and the unearthly glow of a cloudless evening was upon the sunlit slopes, and the grey solemn faces of the cliffs across the valley.
“Yes, indeed,” she answered, her wet, tapering hands plunged lightly among the rich blue blossoms of the bell-gentians.
“And it is your last!”
“Unfortunately it is. But – who would have thought, to look around now – who would have believed the awful time we went through up there only this morning! When Mr Wentworth was drawn up again safe and unhurt, I could not help crying for joy. Poor fellow! What must he have gone through all that time, with nothing but a rhododendron bush between him and a frightful death!”
“I reverse the usual order and begin to think I’d rather it was me than him,” said Philip, gruffly. “May I ask whether, in that case, you would have manifested the same delight?”
There was a flash of mischievous mirth in Alma’s great grey eyes as she looked up at him.
“You foolish boy! I sha’n’t answer that question. But, if you had been down there, how could you have taken such splendid care of me?”
“Oh, I did take care of you then?” he said quickly. “You did, indeed.”
“Let me take care of you for life then, Alma.” Just those few words, curt even to lameness. But there was a very volume of pent-up feeling in their tone as he stood there, his face a trifle paler, his fine frame outlined against the black background of the pines, his eyes dilated and fixed upon hers, as though to read there his answer.
She started. Her face flushed, then grew pale again. Released by the tremor of her hand, another corner of the handkerchief fell, and the bell-gentians poured down into her lap and on the ground. She did not answer immediately, and a troubled look came over her face. Yet the question could not have been such a surprising one. Reading every changing expression of the lovely face eagerly, hungrily, Philip continued, and there was a quaver of forestalled despair in his voice.
“Not to be – is it?” with a ghastly attempt at a laugh. “I’m a presumptuous idiot, and had better go my way rejoicing – especially rejoicing. Isn’t that it?”
But a radiantly killing smile was the answer now, scattering his despondency as the sun-ray had dispelled the dark storm-cloud which had overshadowed them up there on the arête.
“You are in a great hurry to answer your own question,” she said. “Doesn’t it strike you that I am the right person to do that – Phil?”
The very tone was a caress. The half-timid, half-mischievous way in which his Christian name – abbreviated too – escaped her was maddening, entrancing. Hardly knowing what he said in his incoherent transport of delight, he cast himself upon the bank beside her, regardless of bristling pine needles and the outpost prowlers of a large nest of red ants hard by. But Alma was not yet prepared to allow herself to be taken by storm in any such impetuous fashion.
“Now wait a minute, you supremely foolish creature,” holding up a hand warningly as he flung himself at her side – and her face flushed again; but there was a sunny light in her eyes, and a very sweet smile playing around her lips. “What I was going to say is this. You can’t decide any important question out of hand. It requires talking over – and – thinking over.”
“You darling! you tantalising enchantress!” he cried passionately. “Let us talk over it then, as much as you like. As for thinking over it – why, we’ve done enough of that already.”
“You have, you mean,” she corrected, archly. “Never mind. But – now listen, Phil. You think you are very, very fond of my unworthy self. Wait – don’t interrupt,” as the expression “you think” brought to his lips an indignant protest. “Yet you hardly know me.”
“I know you to be perfection,” he broke in hotly.
“That’s foolish,” she rejoined, but with a by no means displeased smile. “But, I say it again, you hardly know me. We meet here and see each other at our best, where everything is conducive to enjoyment and absolute freedom from worry, and then you tell me I am perfection – ”
“So you are,” he interrupted emphatically.
“Well, we meet under the most favourable circumstances, wherein we show at our best. But that isn’t life. It is a mere idyll. Life is a far more serious thing than that.”
“Why, that’s just how that fellow Fordham talks,” exclaimed Philip, aghast.
“Mr Fordham is an extremely sensible man then,” she rejoined, with a queer smile. “No. What I want you to consider is, how do you know I could make you happy, only meeting as we do, up here and in this way? We must not fall into the fatal error of mistaking a mere summer idyllic existence for a sample of stern, hard life.”
“Oh, darling! you cannot really care for me if you can reason so coldly, so deliberately!” he exclaimed, in piteous consternation. “I am afraid you don’t know me yet, if you think me so shallow as all that.”
“I do know you, Phil, and I don’t think you shallow at all – know you better than you think – better, perhaps, than you know yourself,” she answered, placing her hand upon his, which promptly closed over it in emblematical would-be possession of its owner. “I am a bit of a character-student, and I have studied you – among others.”
“Oh! only among others?”
She laughed.
“Is that so very derogatory? Well, for your consolation, perhaps my study has so far been satisfactory; indeed, we should hardly be talking together now as we are had it been otherwise. Now – what more do you want me to say?”
“What more! Why, of course I want you to say you will give me yourself – your own sweet, dear self, Alma, you lovely, teasing, tantalising bundle of witchery. Now, say you will.”
“Not now – not here. In a little more than a month I shall be at home again,” she answered, with a dash of sadness in her voice, as though the prospect of “home, sweet home” were anything but an alluring one. “Come and see me then – if you still care to. Who knows? You may have got over this – this – fancy – by that time.”
“Alma! You hurt me.” His voice betrayed the ring of real pain as he gazed at her with a world of reproach in his eyes.
“Do I? I don’t want to. But by then you will know your own mind better. Wait – let me have my say. By that time you will not have seen me for a month or more, as we are leaving this to-morrow. You may have more than half forgotten me by then. ‘Out of sight,’ you know. I am not going to take advantage of your warm, impulsive temperament now, and I should like to feel sure of you, Phil – once and for all – if we are to be anything to each other. So I would rather it remained that way.”
“You are hurting me, dearest, with this distrust. At any rate let me tell – er, ask – er, speak to your uncle to-night – ”
“No. On that point I am firm,” she answered, rising. “When I am at home again I will give you a final answer – if you still want it, that is. Till then – things are as they were.”
“Hard lines!” he answered, with a sigh. “Still, one must be thankful for small mercies, I suppose. But – you will write to me when we are apart, will you not, love?”
“I don’t know. I ought not. Perhaps once or twice, though.”
For a moment they stood facing each other in silence, then his arms were round her.
“Alma, my dearest life!” he whispered passionately. “You are very cold and calculating, you know. You have not said one really sweet or loving thing to me through all this reasoning. Now – kiss me!”
She looked into his eyes with a momentary hesitation, and again the sweet fair face was tinged with a suffusing flush. Then she raised her lips to his.
“There,” she said. “There – that is the first. Will it be the last, I wonder? Oh, Phil, I would like to love you – and you are a very lovable subject, you know. There! Now you must be as happy as the day is long until – until – you know when,” she added, restraining with an effort the thrill of tenderness in her voice.
“And I will be, darling,” he cried. “The memory of this sweet moment will soon carry me over one short month. And you will write to me?”
“Not often – once or twice, perhaps, as I said before. And now we must pick up my gentians, and move on, or the others will be wondering what has become of us. Look; they are waiting for us now, on the col,” she added, as their path emerged from the cover of the friendly pines.
But by the time they gained that eminence – and we may be sure they did not hurry themselves – the rest of the party had gone on, and they were still alone together. Alone together in paradise – the air redolent with myriad narcissus blossoms, soft, sweet-scented as with the breath of Eden – alone together in the falling eve, each vernal slope, each rounded spur starting forth in vivid clearness; each soaring peak on fire in the westering rays; and afar to the southward, seen from the elevation of the path, the great domed summit of Mont Blanc, bathed in a roseate flush responsive to the last kisses of the dying sun. Homeward, alone together, amid the fragrant dews exhaling from rich and luscious pastures, the music of cow-bells floating upon the hush of evening; then a full golden moon sailing on high, above the black and shaggy pines hoary with bearded festoons of mossy lichens, throwing a pale network upon the sombre woodland path, accentuating the heavy gloom of forest depths, ever and anon melodious with the hooting of owls in ghostly cadence, resonant with the shrill cry of the pine marten and the faint mysterious rustling as of unearthly whispers. Homeward alone together. Ah, Heaven! Will they ever again know such moments as these?
Never, we trow. The sweet, subtle, enchanted spell is upon them in all its entrancing, its delirious fulness.
Chapter Thirteen
Shadow
Nearly a week had elapsed since the departure of the Wyatts, and yet, contrary to all precedent, the volatile Phil’s normal good spirits showed no sign of returning. He was hard hit.
No further opportunity of meeting alone did Alma afford him after that one long, glowing evening. Her manner to him at parting had been very kind and sweet; and with a last look into her eyes, and a pressure of the hand a good deal more lingering on his part than etiquette demanded, let alone justified, the poor fellow was obliged to be contented, for of opportunities for taking a more affectionate farewell she would give him none. They would meet again, she said, and he must wait patiently until then. But to him such meeting seemed a very long way off, and meanwhile the residue of the bright summer, hitherto so joyously mapped out for walking and climbing and fun in general, to which he had been looking forward with all the delight of a sound organisation both physical and mental, seemed now to represent a flat and dreary hiatus – to be filled up as best it might, to be got through as quickly as possible.
Philip Orlebar was hard hit – indeed, very hard hit. He had never been genuinely in love in his life, though nobody had more often fancied himself in that parlous state. But now he was undergoing his first sharp attack of the genuine disorder, and the experience was – well, somewhat trying.
And the symptoms, like those of hydrophobia, manifested themselves diversely. Genial, sunny-tempered Phil became morose – “surly as a chained bulldog developing influenza,” as the elastic Gedge tersely put it. He avoided his kind, and evinced a desire for wandering, by his own sweet self, into all manner of breakneck places. More especially did he avoid Fordham, whose continually cropping up sarcasms at the expense of the sex now ennobled and deified by the production of one Alma Wyatt, fairly maddened him.
“Damned cheap kind of cynicism, don’t you know,” he growled one day. “I wonder you don’t drop it, Fordham.” In fact, so confoundedly quarrelsome did he wax that it became a source of wonder how Fordham stood it so equably, and at last some one said so. The answer was characteristic.
“Look here, Wentworth. If you were down with fever, and delirious, you’d think me a mighty queer chap if I took mortal offence at anything you said in the course of your ravings. Now that poor chap is down with the worst kind of fever and delirium. By and by, when he wakes up and convalesces, he’ll ask shamefacedly whether he didn’t act and talk like an awful fool during his delirium. No. You can’t quarrel with a man for being off his nut. You can only pity him.”
On the letter whose receipt had caused him such disquietude but a week ago Philip had since bestowed no further thought. It seemed such a far back event – it and the individual whose existence it so inopportunely recalled – and withal such an insignificant one. For beside the withdrawal of Alma Wyatt’s daily presence, all other ills, past, present, and to come, looked incomparably small, and the contemplation of them not worth undertaking.
However indulgent might be Fordham with regard to his younger friend’s disorder, secretly he hugged himself with mirth, and enjoyed the joke hugely in his own saturnine fashion as he read off the symptoms. How well he knew them all. How many and many a one had he seen go through them, and live to laugh at his own abject, if helpless, imbecility – to laugh in not a few instances with almost as much bitterness as he himself might do. He believed that it was in his power to comfort poor Phil, up to a certain point. As a looker on at the game, and a keen-sighted one, he felt pretty sure that Alma Wyatt was far more tenderly disposed towards her adorer than the latter dreamed. But it was not in accordance with his principles to do this. Richard Fordham turned matchmaker! More likely patchmaker! he thought, with a diabolical guffaw as the whimsicality of the idea and the jingle thereof struck him; for like the proverbial patching of the old garment with the new cloth would be the lifelong alliance of his friend with Alma Wyatt – or any other woman. No. His mission was, if anything, to bring about a contrary result, and thus save the guileless Philip from riveting upon his yet free limbs the iron fetters of a degrading and fraudulent bondage – for such, we grieve to say, was Fordham’s definition of the estate of holy matrimony.
“Well, Phil,” he said, as the latter, returned from a recent and solitary climb, tired and listless, took his seat a quarter of an hour late at table d’hôte, “does the world present a more propitious aspect from the giddy summit of the Corbex?”
“Oh, hang it, no! But, I say, Fordham – what a deuced slow crowd there is here now. Just look at that table over there.”
“Nine old maids – no, eleven – in a row,” said the other, putting up his eyeglass. “Four parsons – poor specimens of the breed, too. That is to say, three old maids and a devil-dodger; then three more ditto and two devil-dodgers; finally the balance, with the remaining sky-pilot mixed among them somewhere. Truly an interesting crowd!”
“By Jove, rather!” growled Philip. “And just look at that infernal tailor’s boy over there laying down the law.”
Following his glance, Fordham beheld a carroty-headed snobling fresh from the counter or the cutting-board, who, in all the exuberance of his hard-earned holiday and the enterprising spirit which had prompted him to enjoy the same among Alpine sublimities in preference to the more homely and raffish attractions of shrimp-producing Margate, was delivering himself on Church and State, the House of Peers and the Constitution in general, with a freedom which left nothing to be desired, for the edification of his appreciative neighbours – only they didn’t look appreciative. Philip contemplated this natural product of an age of progress and the Rights of Man with unconcealed disgust.
“Faugh! Are we going to be overrun with bounders of that description?” he growled.
“Later on we may drop across a sprinkling of the species,” said Fordham. “Even the Alps are no longer sacred against the invasion of the modern Hun.”
“Well, it’s no longer any fun sticking here, and I’m sick of it,” went on Phil.
“All right. Let’s adjourn to Zermatt or somewhere, and begin climbing. You want shaking up a bit.”