Fordham's Feud Part 14

"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 _arete_.

"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 fas.h.i.+on.

"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 pa.s.sionately. "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 circ.u.mstances, 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 pa.s.sionately. "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 s.h.a.ggy pines h.o.a.ry 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 n.o.body 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 s.e.x now enn.o.bled and deified by the production of one Alma Wyatt, fairly maddened him.

"d.a.m.ned 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.