As they arrived the first bell was ringing for table d’hôte dinner, and people were dropping in by twos and threes, or in parties, returning from expeditions to adjacent glaciers or elsewhere. Some were armed with ice-axes, and one or two with ropes and guides. Nearly all had red noses and peeled countenances, and this held good of both sexes, more especially of that which is ordinarily termed the fair. But this – at first startling – phenomenon Fordham explained to be neither the result of the cup that cheers and does inebriate nor of any organic disorder of the cuticle, but merely the action of the sun’s rays reflected from the surface of the snow or ice with the effect of a burning glass. Alma made a little grimace.
“I think I shall confine my wanderings to where there’s no snow or ice – and I do so want to go on a glacier – rather than become an object like that,” lowering her voice as a tall, angular being of uncertain age – with a fearfully peeled and roasted countenance, and with her skirts tucked up to show an amount of leg which should have brought her under the ban of the Lord Chamberlain – strode by with a mien and assurance as though she held first mortgage on the whole of the Alps, as Fordham graphically put it.
“You can patrol the glaciers for a week if you only cover your face with a veil,” answered the latter. “You may burn a little, but nothing near the horrible extent you would otherwise.”
“The house doesn’t seem crowded,” remarked Philip, when table d’hôte was half through. They had secured the end of the long table, and there was a hiatus of several empty chairs between them and their next neighbours. This and the stupendous clatter of knives and forks and tongues, enabled them to talk with no more restraint than a slight lowering of the voice.
“By Jove!” he went on, withdrawing his glance from an attentive scrutiny of the table, “it’s a mighty seedy crowd, anyhow. All British, too. Look at those half-dozen fellows sitting together there. Did any one ever see such an unshaven, collarless squad of bounders?”
The objects of the speaker’s somewhat outspoken scorn assuredly did their best to justify it. They answered exactly to his description as to their appearance. Moreover when they spoke it was in the dialect of Edgware Road rather than that of Pall Mall. Two or three gaudily-dressed females of like stamp seemed to belong to them. Beyond were other people in couples or in parties.
“Don’t you think you are rather hard on them, Philip?” objected Mrs Wyatt – for by virtue of the General’s former acquaintance with his father, and their now fast-growing intimacy with himself, the old people had taken to calling him by his Christian name.
Alma broke into a little laugh.
“Auntie, you remind us of ‘the Infliction’ at Les Avants. She always used to begin ‘Don’t you think.’”
“Mrs Wyatt used to sit opposite her,” said Phil, slily.
“You’re a naughty boy, Phil,” laughed the old lady, “and you’ve no business to poke fun at your grandmother. But I think you are too hard on those poor fellows. They may not have any luggage with them.”
“No more have we. Fordham and I will have to live in our knapsacks for the next week. And even if we had no clothes we’d manage by hook or by crook to beg, borrow, or steal a razor.”
“I don’t think much of the population, certainly,” put in the General. “There were a much better stamp of people at Les Avants.”
“Always are,” said Fordham. “It’s a place where people go to stay, and the same people go there again and again. Moreover, it isn’t enough of a show-place to attract the mere tourist. ’Arry itinerant patronises the higher resorts, where he can walk across a glacier and brag about it ever after. But this is an exceptionally weedy crowd, as Phil says,” he added, sticking up his eyeglass and taking stock of the same.
“Not all. I don’t think quite all,” objected Mrs Wyatt. “Those two ladies sitting next to the clergyman down there look rather nice. Don’t you think so, Mr Fordham?”
“Might discharge both barrels of a shot-gun down the table and not damage a social equal,” was the uncompromising reply.
But little it mattered to them in a general way what sort of a lot their fellow-countrymen there sojourning might or might not be. It was delightful to exchange the low stuffy salle-à-manger, with its inevitable reek of fleshpots, its clatter of knives and forks and its strife of tongues, for the sweet hay-scented evening air, with the afterglow reddening and fading on the double-horned Besso and the snowfields beyond, the stars twinkling forth one by one against the loom of the great mountain wall which seemed literally to overhang the valley. There was a lulling, soothing sense in the sequestered propinquity of the great mountains, in the dull roar of the ever-speaking torrent. Old General Wyatt, seated on a bench smoking his evening pipe, expressed unbounded satisfaction.
“It’s like a paradise after that abominably rackety Grindelwald,” he pronounced.
“Yes, dear,” assented his wife. “But what I want to know is,” she added in a low tone, “how is that going to end?”
“How is what? – Oh – ah – yes – um!” as he followed her glance.
The latter had lighted upon their niece and her now inseparable escort. They had returned from an evening stroll, and were standing looking about them as though loth to go in. Alma had thrown on a cloak, for there was a touch of sharpness in the air, and the soft fur seemed to cling caressingly round the lower part of her face, framing and throwing into greater prominence the luminous eyes and sweet, refined beauty. She was discoursing animatedly, but the old people were too far off for the burden of her ideas to reach them.
“It is going to end in the child completely knocking herself up,” said the General with a disapproving shake of the head. “She must have walked twenty miles to-day if she has walked one. Now mind, she must stay at home to-morrow and rest thoroughly.”
“That isn’t what I mean, and you know it isn’t,” urged the old lady in a vexed tone.
“Ha-ha! I know it isn’t,” he answered with a growl that was more than half a chuckle.
“Well, and what do you think of it?”
“Um! ah! I don’t know what to think. If the young people like each other, I don’t see why they shouldn’t see plenty of each other – in a place like this. If they decide they don’t – well, there’s no harm done.”
“But I’ve always heard you say that Sir Francis Orlebar was a poor man – a poor man with a second wife,” said Mrs Wyatt, tentatively.
“So is Alma. I don’t mean with a second wife – ha-ha! But she hasn’t a sixpence, and it would be a blessed day for her that on which she got away from that mother of hers for good and all.”
“But isn’t that all the more reason she should marry somebody who is well off?”
“Well, yes, I suppose it is. But then, you can’t have everything. It’s seldom enough you get cash and every other desirable endowment thrown in. Now I like Phil Orlebar. I don’t know when I’ve seen a young fellow I’ve liked more. It’s a thousand pities, though, that his father didn’t put him into some profession or give him something to do; but it isn’t too late now, and Alma might do worse. Here – hang it all!” he broke off with a growl. – “What a couple of mischief-making old match-makers we are becoming. It’s getting cold. Time to go in.”
Chapter Sixteen
“All in the Blue Unclouded Weather.”
“When are we going to begin some real climbing – eh, Phil?”
“Oh, I don’t know. By the way, Fordham, I’m not sure that real high climbing isn’t a mistake. It seems rather a thin thing to put oneself to any amount of unmitigated fag, and go sleeping out under rocks or in huts and in all sorts of beastly places chock full of fleas, and turn out at ungodly hours in the morning – in the middle of the night, rather – merely for the sake of shinning up to the top of some confounded rock that scores of other fellows have shinned up already, and thousands more will. No; I believe there’s far more sense in this sort of thing, and I’m certain it’s far more fun.”
“This sort of thing” being a long day’s expedition of the nature of a picnic, a walk for the most part over the glacier to some point of interest or scenic advantage, which in the present instance was a trip to the Mountet Cabin, a structure erected by the Alpine Club high up among the rocks at the base of the Besso, for the convenience of parties ascending the Rothhorn or traversing one of the several difficult, and more or less dangerous, glacier passes leading into the next valley. The hour was early – before sunrise in fact – and our two friends were threading their way rapidly between the rows of brown châlets which constitute the picturesque hamlet of Zinal, intent on overtaking the rest of their party, who had “just strolled quietly on,” a process which in nineteen cases out of twenty may be taken to mean that if the overtaker comes up with the advance guard within a couple of hours, he or she has progressed at a rate by no means pleasant or advisable as the start for a long day’s walk or climb. This instance, however, was the twentieth, for whereas those in advance consisted of General Wyatt and his niece, two learned young ladies with short-cropped hair and spectacles, and a young clergyman, also in spectacles, the athletic pair had no difficulty in overhauling them in a very short time, and that with no inordinate effort.
“Well, Mr Fordham. It isn’t always we poor women who keep everybody waiting,” said Alma, mischievously, as they came up, with a glance at Phil, to whose reluctance to leave his snug couch until the very last moment was due the fact that the party had not started together.
“That’s what comes of doing a good action – one always gets abused for it,” replied Fordham. “If I hadn’t acted as whipper-in you’d never have seen this lazy dog until you were half-way home again.”
“Oh, the poor men! They never can bring themselves to leave their beds. And yet they call themselves the stronger sex,” put in one of the shock-headed young women, who, by virtue of being students at one of the seats of learning recently founded for their sex, looked down as from a lofty pedestal and with sublime pity upon the world at large. “The strong-minded sex, I should have said.”
“Not much use, are they, Miss Severn?” said the parson in playful banter.
“Except when the midnight mouse in the wainscotting suggests burglars, or the booming of the wind in the chimney, bogies,” rejoined Fordham, tranquilly. “In a thunderstorm, too, their presence is apt to be highly reassuring.”
To this the shock-headed one deigned no rejoinder. She and her sister had formed some slight acquaintance with the Wyatts, and had joined them in expeditions similar to the present one; in fact, were rather more glad to do so than the others were that they should. Like too many of their kind they imagined that disagreeable, not to say rude, remarks at the expense of the opposite sex demonstrated the superiority of their own in general, and such representatives of it as devoted their minds to conic sections in particular.
Nothing, as a rule, is more depressing to the poor creatures of an effete civilisation than an early morning start. Than the hour of summer sunrise in the Alps, however, nothing is more exhilarating. The cool, fresh, bracing air, the statuesque grandeur of the great mountains, the dash and sparkle of the swirling stream, the mingling aromatic fragrances distilling from opening wild flowers and resinous pines – it is a glimpse of fairyland, a very tonic to heart and brain, a reservoir of nerve power to limb and system.
And now beyond the huge projecting shoulder of the Alpe d’Arpitetta the rays of the newly-risen sun were flooding the snowfields with a golden radiancy. No more shade directly. But the air was crisp, and the sky of cloudless beauty. To two of those present it was but the beginning of a glowing halcyon day – one among many. Nearly a fortnight had gone by since their arrival, a fortnight spent in similar fashion – one day succeeding another, spent from dawn to dark amid the sublimest scenes of Nature on her most inspiring scale.
Philip Orlebar, the mercurial, the careless, had undergone a marked change. And it was a change which affected him for the better, was that brought about by this crisis of his life, in that it seemed to impart a not wholly unneeded ballast to his otherwise line character, a dignity to his demeanour which became him well, the more so that there was the stamp of a great and settled happiness upon his face, and in the straight, sunny glance of the clear eyes, that was goodly to look upon. The Fire of the Live Coal burnt bright and clear.
“Alma, darling, why not let me say something to your uncle now instead of waiting until you go home again?” he said one day, when they were scrambling about among the rocks in search of the coveted edelweiss. “Then I shall feel that you do really belong to me.”
She looked at him for a moment – looked at him standing over her in his straight youthful strength and patrician beauty, and hesitated. She was growing very fond of him, and, more important still, very proud of him, which with a woman of Alma’s stamp means that her surrender is already a thing to be ranked among certainties. But the circumstances of her home life had been such as to impart to her character a vein of wisdom, of caution, which was considerably beyond her years.
“No, Phil – not yet,” she answered, with a little shake of her head; but beneath all the decision of her tone there lay a hidden caress. “This is a summer idyll – a mere holiday. Wait until it is over and life – real life – begins again. No, stop – I won’t have that – here,” she broke off suddenly, springing away from him with a laugh and a blush. “Remember how many people at the hotel have telescopes, not to mention the big one planted out in front of the door. We may constitute an object of special attention at the present moment, for all we know.”
Return we to our party now bound for the Mountet hut, viâ the Durand glacier. This was not the first time they had made this expedition, consequently they were able to dispense with a guide – and Fordham, at any rate, had had sufficient previous Alpine experience. The great silent ice river locked within the vast depths of its rock-bound bed rippled in a succession of frozen billows between its lofty mountain walls, the human figures traversing it looking the merest pigmies among the awful vastness of the Alpine solitude. Myriad threads of clear water gurgled with musical murmur through the blue smooth funnels they had worn for themselves in the surface of the ice, which glistened and sparkled in the sunlight in a sea of diamond-like facets. “Tables,” viz, stones of all shapes and sizes heaved up, by the action of the glacier, upon smooth round ice-pedestals – sometimes perfectly wonderful in their resemblance to the real article of furniture – abounded, and here and there the dull hollow roar of some heavier stream plunging between the vertical blue sides of a straight chimney-like shaft, which it had worn to an incredible depth by its action.
“What an extremely good-looking fellow that young Orlebar is,” remarked the clergyman, who had been observing the pair some little distance in front.
“I can’t say that handsome men are at all to my taste,” replied the elder of the two learned sisters, loyal to a recollection of evenings spent at meetings of various scientific societies in the company of an undersized, round-shouldered professor with a huge head of unkempt hair and a very dandruffy coat-collar. “There is never anything in them. They are invariably empty-headed to a degree.”
“And desperately conceited,” put in the younger, acidly.
“And this young Orlebar is the most empty-headed and conceited of them all,” rejoined the elder. “I consider him a perfectly odious young man.”
“Really? Now, do you know – I – er – I thought him rather a nice fellow,” said the clergyman timidly. “Very pleasant and taking manners, and a perfect gentleman.”
“There is no accounting for tastes, of course,” was the severely frigid reply; and the poor parson’s heart sank within him as he wondered whether this sort of thing was to be his lot all day, and whether it would be practicable to cut adrift from his present convoy and effect a juncture with Fordham and the General, now some few score yards in the rear.
“Alma dear, who on earth cut those awful Severns into our crowd to-day?” Philip was saying, moved doubtless by that extraordinary coincidence which inspires two people simultaneously with the same idea, though that idea be entirely irrelevant to any subject then under consideration or discussion.
Alma laughed.
“I think they more than three parts cut themselves in, and having done so, cut in Mr Massiter,” she answered.
“Oh, I don’t mind the parson! He’s an inoffensive chap, you know, and a good sort, I think. But those two fearful girls, with their ‘terms’ and their ‘triposes’ and the ‘dear Principal,’ and their shock heads, and ‘quite too-too’ get-up! Faugh! They never open their mouths without saying something tart and disagreeable. I suppose they think it a sign of erudition.”
“We mustn’t abuse other people, especially on a day like this – it’s a bad habit to get into. I agree with you though – they might make themselves a little more pleasant. However, they have their use. Didn’t it ever occur to you, you dear, foolish boy, that I may not always care to be the only girl in the party? Though it amounts almost to the same thing, for you never will let any one else come near me.”
“No, I won’t,” he assented, cheerfully. “I want you all to myself. It may not last much longer. And – what a time we have had. I would willingly go back and go through it all again.”
“But we are not going away to-morrow, or the next day either,” she replied, with a sunny laugh. “We shall have many more such days as this.”
“It is perfect!” he continued, now in a low tone. “Almost too perfect to last. When shall we be ever again together like this?”
The remark was made without a shadow of arrière pensée, yet it sounded almost prophetic. Why should it, however? No cloud was in their sky any more than in the firmament of deep blue spreading overhead. No shadow was across their path any more than upon the dazzling snowfields lying aloft in pure and unbroken stretches. The morrow would be but a reproduction of to-day – a heaven of youth and its warm pulsations, of sunny freedom from care, and – of love.
And now Fordham’s voice was heard behind.
“Hallo, Phil?” it shouted, characteristically addressing the stronger and, in its owner’s opinion, more important and only responsible member of the pair in advance. “Better hold on till we come up. We are getting among the séracs.”
They were. Great masses of ice, by the side of which a five-storey house would look puny, were heaving up to the sky. The glacier here made a steep and abrupt drop, falling abroad into wide, lateral chasms – not the black and grim crevasses of bottomless depth into which an army might disappear and leave no trace, such as the smooth, treacherous surface of the upper névés are seamed with, but awkward rifts for all that, deep enough to break a limb or even a neck. A labyrinthian course along the sharp ice-ridges overhanging these became necessary, and although Philip was armed with the requisite ice-axe and by this time knew how to wield it, Fordham satirically reflected that the mind of a man in the parlous state of his friend was not hung upon a sufficiently even balance to ensure the necessary equilibrium from a material and physical point of view. So he chose to rally his party.
A little ordinary caution was necessary, that was all. A little step-cutting now and then, a helping hand for the benefit of the ladies, and they threaded their way in perfect safety among the yawning rifts, the great blue séracs towering up overhead, piled in titanic confusion – here in huge blocks, there standing apart in tall needle-like shafts. One of these suddenly collapsed close to them, falling with an appalling roar, filling the air with a shower of glittering fragments, causing the hard surface to vibrate beneath them with the grinding crash of hundreds of tons of solid ice.
“By Jove! What a magnificent sight?” cried the old General. “I wouldn’t have missed that for the world.”
“‘He casteth forth His ice like morsels,’” quoted the parson to himself, but not in so low a tone as not to be heard by Alma, becoming aware of which he was conscious of a nervous and guilty start, as of one who had allowed himself to be found preaching out of church. But he had in her no supercilious or scoffing critic.
“I think the vastness of this ice-world is the most wonderful thing in Nature, Mr Massiter,” she said.
“It is indeed, Miss Wyatt,” was the pleased reply.
And then, catching eagerly at this chance of relief from the somewhat depressing spell of the two learned ones, the good man attached himself to her side and engaged her in conversation, not altogether to the satisfaction of Philip, who, relinquishing the entrancing but somewhat boyish amusement of heaving boulders down the smooth, slippery slope of the ice, sprang forward to help her up the narrow, treacherous path of the loose moraine – for they had left the ice now for a short time. Virtue was its own reward, however – it and a stone – which, dislodged by Alma’s foot, came bounding down with a smart whack against the left ankle of the too eager cavalier, evoking from the latter a subdued if involuntary howl, instead of the mental “cuss-word” which we regret to say might have greeted the occurrence had it owned any other author.
Steep and toilsome as this little bit of the way was, the two strong-minded ones still found breath enough to discourse to the General – or, rather, through him at Fordham, upon the never-failing topic, the unqualified inferiority of the other sex, causing that genial veteran to vote them bores of the most virulent kind, and mentally to resolve to dispense with their company at whatever cost on all future expeditions which he might undertake.
“Why, you couldn’t get on for a day without us!” said Fordham, bluntly, coming to the rescue. “How would you have got along those séracs just now, for instance, if left to yourselves?”
“Life does not wholly consist in crossing glaciers, Mr Fordham,” was the majestic reply.
“It runs on a very good parallel with it though. And the fact remains, as I said before. You couldn’t be happy for a day without us.”
“Indeed?” said the elder and more acid of the two, with splendid contempt. “Indeed? Don’t you flatter yourself. We could be happy – perfectly happy – all our lives without you.”
“That’s fortunate, for I haven’t asked you to be happy all your lives with me,” answered Fordham, blandly.
The green eyes of the learned pair glared – both had green eyes – like those of cats in the dark. There was a suspicious shake in the shapely shoulders of Alma Wyatt, who, with the parson, was leading the way, and the General burst into such a frantic fit of coughing that he seemed in imminent peril of suffocation; while a series of extraordinary sounds, profuse in volume if subdued in tone, emanating from Philip’s broad chest, would have led a sudden arrival upon the scene to imagine that volatile youth to be afflicted with some hitherto undiscovered ailment, lying midway between whooping-cough and the strangles.
And now once more, the fall of the glacier surmounted, the great ice-field lay before them in smooth and even expanse. And what a scene of wild and stately grandeur was that vast amphitheatre now opening out. Not a tree, not a shrub in sight; nothing but rocks and ice – a great frozen plain, seamed and crevassed in innumerable cracks, shut in by towering mountains and grim rock-walls, the summits of which were crowned with layers of snow – the perilous “cornice” of the Alpine climber – curling over above the dizzy height – of dazzling whiteness against the deep blue of the heavens. In crescent formation they stood, those stately mountains encircling the glaciers, the snow-flecked hump of the Grand Cornier and the huge and redoubted Dent Blanche, whose ruddy ironstone precipices and grim ice-crowned arêtes glowed in the full midday sunlight with sheeny prismatic gleam; the towering Gabelhorn, and the knife-like point of the Rothhorn soaring away as if to meet the blue firmament itself. Gigantic ice-slopes, swept smooth by the driving gales, shone pearly and silver; and huge overhanging masses of blue ice, where the end of a high glacier had broken off, stood forth a wondrously beautiful contrast in vivid green. But this scene of marvellous grandeur and desolation was not given over to silence, for ever and anon the fall of a mighty sérac would boom forth with a thunderous roar. The ghostly rattle and echo of falling stones high up among those grim precipices was never entirely still, while the hoarse growling of streams cleaving their way far below in the heart of the glacier was as the voices of prisoned giants striving in agonised throes.