Fordham's Feud Part 26

It is the second day after the somewhat stormily concluding interview between Fordham and old Glover, but poor Philip's prospects had in no wise been improved thereby--indeed, he could not but realise that they were hopelessly ruined. The only result achieved was that of, so to say, drawing the teeth of the aggrieved but scheming parent. That crafty plutocrat had been left, in a manner of speaking, on his back.

He had been met with a crisp, healthy decisiveness, which had left nothing to be inferred, whereas had Philip himself const.i.tuted the other party to the interview, we fear that a tendency to temporise might have wedged him into the mora.s.s firmer and deeper than ever. So far Fordham had rendered him yeoman's service.

But while released from one horn of the dilemma there was another upon which he remained firmly impaled, and whence it was beyond the power of any friend to extricate him, and that was a woman's outraged pride.

Alma Wyatt's self-contained nature was a fearfully proud one, and it had been wounded to the quick. She, to allow herself to be deceived, fooled, made a plaything of, a mere pastime to add zest to a summer holiday--while all the time this man who had been whispering undying love to her was plighted to some one else! Her face fairly blanched with fierce wrath at the thought. And the insult, the publicity of the insult which he had put upon her--for his attentions were, of course, thoroughly understood by those around! No, she would never forgive him; never as long as he lived--or even on his deathbed!

Even then the natural fairness of her mind moved her to do him what justice she could. Her own heart told her that in his love for herself there was, at any rate, no make-believe. That, at any rate, was genuine. So much the worse. It argued weakness in her eyes, an unpardonable fault in a man. And, again--that he had dared to offer her a mere place in his affections--to suppose that she would _share_ them with anybody, let alone the overdressed, underbred creature to whom he was already plighted, and who had come there and claimed him--publicly claimed him--under her eyes! It was an outrage which she could not bring herself so much as to think of condoning.

The only consolation was that she had all this time steadfastly refused to give him a definite answer--to allow him to give anybody to understand in definite terms that she was engaged to him. But what then? Had she not more than justified by implication such a conclusion on the part of those around her! Even now she was conscious of the exchanged glance, the hastily-stifled smile which her appearance evoked amid this or that group she happened to be pa.s.sing, but this she could afford to treat with unconcern. Still the sting penetrated--penetrated and rankled. Her bitterness towards the chief offender hardened to white heat.

Nothing had been said between them. She took care to allow him no opportunity for that. No explanations were needed. The situation would admit of none--absolutely none. She made no external difference in her manner towards him--did not even change her place beside him at table.

She was too proud to give him or the lookers-on to suppose that she was sorely wounded. But there was a steeliness in her tone when she addressed him or answered any remark of his, which conveyed as severe a punishment as even she could have wished. He was miserable.

Then he wrote to her--a piteous and heartbroken letter--explaining, protesting, and, above all, entreating. To ensure her receipt of this he slipped it himself beneath her door at a time when it could not escape her observation. As a result she did afford him an opportunity of speaking with her alone--an interview of just sufficient duration to allow her deliberately to tear his letter into small fragments before his face, carefully letting him see that it was unopened. Not a word did she speak. She could not trust herself. Her great eyes blazing forth such scorn from her pale face seemed to sear and burn into his.

Then she turned and left him.

After that he was desperate. Poor Phil, soft-hearted and sensitive, felt that he had wrecked his whole life. He wished he could get up a corresponding indignation. But he could not, not even the fraction of a semblance of it. His heart seemed turned to water--his brain was ablaze. He would relieve his feelings by undertaking some desperate feat--thank Heaven, it was always easy to break one's neck. And on this object intent he bounded upstairs three steps at a time in quest of his ice-axe.

But Providence, or his own forgetfulness, stood him in good stead that time, for the implement he sought was not in his room. He must have left it in Fordham's. Thither he repaired.

"What's the row, Phil?" said the latter, looking up quickly, taking in at the same time the obvious fact that things were not merely wrong with his unlucky friend, but very much more so than ever.

"Got my axe here? I'm just going for a--er--walk."

"Well, you can put it off then, for I've just been scheming out a promising climb. Got two first-rate Zermatt guides, who turned up last night and want to go back there. Everything is ready. What do you say to doing the Rothhorn? We can start for the Mountet cabin soon after lunch; sleep there, get to the top any time by midday, and go down the other side to Zermatt. What do you say?"

"I'm your man, Fordham. Just the very thing I should like. And, I say--while we are about it--we might stay at Zermatt a few days and do the Matterhorn and two or three others, eh?"

Fordham looked at him curiously.

"Just the very thing I was going to suggest," he said, "only I doubted whether you'd cotton. A smart shaking up and a change will do you all the good in the world, just now, Phil. We'll start half an hour after lunch--there goes the second bell!--and go up to the hut quietly."

This they had done, and now after an excruciatingly early start from that convenient tarrying-place, and about six hours of really difficult climbing, of scrambling from rock to rock, worming round "corners"

overhanging dizzy heights--work that called into full play every muscle and braced every nerve--here they were on the summit with the world at their feet.

During the actual process of ascent Philip's spirits seemed to return.

The hard, and, in places, really hazardous, nature of the undertaking demanded all his attention, and whether clinging spreadeagled against the face of the cliff with no real hold to speak of, or balancing with one foot upon a rock projection about the size of a walnut, the other dangling over nothing, what time the next man above should secure a footing, or skirting gingerly the treacherous line of a curling snow cornice, where the thrust of the handle of an ice-axe left a hole through which lay viewed the awful depth of s.p.a.ce which it overhung--all this const.i.tuted such a strain upon his faculties as to leave room for no other thought. Though strong and active, and in good training all round, Philip, be it remembered, was a novice at this sort of thing, consequently he found enough to do in ensuring his own safety, and, relatively, that of his companions. At one point of their progress a cloud had come over the mountain, rendering the rocks rimy and slippery, throwing out the ridge of ice crowning a sharp _arete_ spectral and drear against the misty murk, magnifying the cliffs to gigantic proportions in their uncertain and ill-defined outlines. Gazing down upon the snow-flecked rocks far, far beneath, losing themselves in the swirling vortex of vapour, Philip felt rather small as he remembered his reckless intentions of the day before. Life, strange to say, seemed still worth having; at any rate such a way of ending it as a sudden dash through s.p.a.ce on to those hideous black and white rocks struck him as grim and horrible in the extreme.

But the excitement and physical exertion over, and the summit attained, his depression returned. More over he was tired, for he had hardly slept the night before, was, in fact, just dropping off, when roused by his indefatigable friend at 2 a.m. to make a pretence at devouring the breakfast which the guides were preparing over the weather-beaten stove.

Now the magnificence and extent of the view was nothing to him. It seemed to lie outside his gaze. In spirit he was back again at the hotel at Zinal. Was Alma beginning to miss him--to think more kindly of him, now that they would not see each other for some days? Would those execrable Glovers have left by the time he returned? And would all come right again? If only it might!

But if his younger friend's thoughts were far-away down in the valley they had come up out of, Fordham's were not. That saturnine individual was, for him, in high spirits. He had got out an excellent map--in the production of such Switzerland stands in the foremost place--and with the guides was busy verifying the topographical details of the stupendous panorama lying beneath and around. The cloud which had overshadowed them during their ascent had long since vanished, and now the sky was blue and clear, and the air like an elixir of life. The only clouds were those from three pipes, for the two guides and Fordham were smoking like chimneys.

But they had been an hour on the summit, and the air, though exhilarating, was uncommonly chill. It became time to start downwards.

The guides were beginning to repack the haversacks.

"Have a pull at this, Phil," said Fordham, handing him a flask. "And--I tell you what it is, man. You don't know when you're well off."

"Oh, I don't?"

"Rather not. Look at this," with a comprehensive sweep of the hand.

"Think what a splendid climb we had to get up here. Think what a splendid one we are going to have to get down, better, in fact, because less of sheer f.a.g, and then think how many poor devils there are who would give their heads to be here to-day, instead of slaving their hearts out all their lives to support some snarling, ungrateful female, and a mob of more or less dirty and wholly detestable brats."

"Candidly, my dear chap," returned Philip, "you are becoming somewhat of the nature of a bore. I seem to have heard something very like that before--not once, nor yet twice. The salutary instructions of the immortal Mr Barlow, of 'Sandford and Merton' fame, s.h.i.+ne forth as very masterpieces of sparkling pungency when contrasted with your latter-day harangues. I want to know what the devil all this has to do with me."

"You shall! The gist of the parable is this. You are thinking all this time that Paradise lies at present in the Zinal valley in general, and very particularly in the Hotel Durand; whereas in actual fact, so far as any semblance of that inst.i.tution may be said to exist, it lies around and before you. For you are free at present, Phil, free as the air up here which is making us s.h.i.+ver, your freedom is as boundless as this rolling view of half a continent upon which we look down. You have the world at your feet as literally as we have it before us now."

"Go on, Mr Barlow. Pray proceed."

"I will. At present you are thinking what a Paradise every moment of life would be if coupled with the charmer down yonder. You are drawing all manner of glowing mental pictures of the bliss of a home illumined by her divine presence. All fustian, my dear fellow, all fustian!

These superst.i.tions are encouraged by the women from obvious motives.

But they have no foundation in actual fact. Now what _I_ am thinking of is this. I am thinking of you in two or three years' time, caged up with your charmer in some shabby-genteel suburban semi-detached--for she hasn't a s.h.i.+lling of her own, I believe--I am thinking of you, I say, the proud possessor of two or three unruly brats--who may or may not be kept clean--thus caged up, with a domineering, bad-tempered woman, who has parted with her illusions, in proportion as she has contributed towards populating this interesting orb. I am thinking of you toiling the day through, week in week out, at some sordid and uncongenial drudgery for a mere pittance. You can never be well off, my dear Phil, for to do you justice, you lack the essential qualities of rascality and sycophancy which are requisite to the manufacture of the 'successful man.' And while your scanty leisure is taken up policing a series of ever-changing and refractory domestics, or carrying on epistolary war with your landlord, _in re_ his inevitable refusal to observe the most obvious provisions of his agreement, your much-needed slumbers will be invaded by the piercing and colicky yells of the last overfed cherub, and your night devoted to hospital duties in regard to that same. And then when you look back to--this day, for instance--I am not far out in a.s.serting that you will catch yourself wondering whether such an unparalleled a.s.s is even worth the sixpenny-worth of laudanum which should send him in search of the decisive change which may possibly be for the better, but can hardly be for the worse. There--that's the other side of the orange, and now you can't say it hasn't been shown you."

"That all, Fordham?"

"Nearly. But think it over, think it over, my dear chap. The gift of freedom is a grand and a glorious one. Don't throw it away for the traditional mess of pottage--a comestible which may or may not be an excellent thing, but cannot in my humble judgment maintain its savour if subsisted on for the term of one's natural life to the exclusion of all other articles of diet."

"I appreciate the point of that highly finished hyperbole--at its true valuation," returned Philip, ironically. "And, look here, Fordham, I feel it necessary to amend my former comment. A man who will undertake to deliver such an unconscionably prosy preachment, on the very apex of a high Alp, is no longer merely becoming a bore, but has become one--in fact _is_ a bore, and that of the first magnitude."

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE.

THE FALLING STONE.

"Peter," said Fordham, interrupting a story over which the guides were guffawing among themselves, and which related to a certain rash tourist who had undertaken to cross the Gorner glacier alone, giving Herr Baedeker as his authority for dispensing with the services of their fraternity, and how the adventurous one being eventually missed was duly sought for, which search resulted in the discovery of him at the bottom of a small creva.s.se in company with a sprained ankle and a Baedeker, and how some of them in resentment of the fancied slur upon their craft had grimly suggested that, whereas Baedeker had got him into his present quandary, it was only fair that Baedeker should get him out. "Peter, how long shall we take to get down to Zermatt?"

The man thus addressed stared gravely at the sky, then down at the valley, then at the surrounding heights, then at his colleague. The latter went through precisely the same formula. Then he replied--

"If de gentleman"--with a look at Philip--"go down so well as he did come up, then we shall get there in about seven or eight hours."

"Right you are, Peter. You may put it at that," cried Phil, with alacrity. "I'll go down like a chamois, my buck. We'll be in easy time for _table d'hote_." But the other did not enter into this spirit of exuberance. There was a touch of grimness in his reply, given with characteristic deliberation.

"You had better be late for de _table d'hote_ than not get to de _table d'hote_ ever again," he said.

"That's a damper, anyway," rejoined Phil.

"It's a well earned one," said Fordham. "He wants you to realise that you can no more afford to be careless going down than you could coming up. And you can't. You're a heavyish chap, Phil, and there are places where if you lose your footing we are extremely likely to be unable to hold you up. And although your return to the valley we have just left may be welcome enough, I doubt if it will be adequately so if effected in fragmentary form. So don't imagine you can afford to skip down the Rothhorn on one leg, that's all."

Peter Anderledy, the head guide, was a swarthy, thick-set fellow, black-bearded, and Italian looking--of apparently about forty, but in reality ten years younger. The other, Conrad Spinner, was about the same age but of a different build, being tall and straight, and of the Northern type. His bronzed face was almost as dark as that of his colleague, but his hair and moustache were blonde. The countenances of both men wore the sedate almost melancholy expression common to those of their calling, but the glance of their eyes was straight and quick.

Both were addicted to the unlimited consumption of tobacco--also in common with those of their craft--a consideration by the way which is difficult to reconcile with the popular notion that the soothing weed is detrimental, not to say disastrous to the nerves, for if there is one cla.s.s of men which combines the most consummate coolness and courage with an unlimited supply of sheer physical endurance and quickness of resource, a.s.suredly that cla.s.s is represented by the qualified Alpine guide.

Few Alpine peaks are perpendicular, even on their most precipitous side.

The Rothhorn, however, is one of these, for its eastern face, if anything, slightly overhangs, falling in a magnificent drop of ironstone precipice, a depth of about fifteen hundred feet to the glacier beneath.

Its summit is in reality in two peaks, one slightly lower than the other. The way lies not over but round the lower of these, effecting what is termed in mountaineering parlance a "corner." There is excellent hold both for hand and foot, but whereas the climber at the moment of rounding this projection can neither see nor be seen by the rest of his party, and whereas, further, his body is slightly inclined outward over the dizzy height before mentioned, it follows that the novice, unless endowed with perfect steadiness of head and nerve, is apt to find the position a somewhat trying one.

Now this is just what befell Philip Orlebar. At the worst point of the projection, while hanging on, thus outwardly inclined, curiosity moved him to turn his face over his shoulder and look down. The effect of the stupendous height was disastrous. His hands, gripping the rock overhead, began to tremble. A coldness ran through his legs. He could not move. He felt that if he did so he must let go. Nor could he withdraw his gaze from that awful abyss.

"What on earth are you doing, Phil?" sung out Fordham, from behind, noticing that the rope had ceased moving.