WHITE MOTLEY
A NOVEL
BY
MAX PEMBERTON
AUTHOR OF "THE LITTLE HUGUENOT," "THE
GARDEN OF SWORDS," ETC., ETC.
New York
STURGIS & WALTON COMPANY
1911
All rights reserved
Copyright 1911
By STURGIS & WALTON COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1911
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I [THE GRAND PRIX AT ANDANA]
II [A DARK HORSE GOES DOWN]
III [CONCERNING A DISOBLIGING GHOST]
IV [THE MAN WHO KNEW]
V [THE GHOST TAKES WINGS]
VI [A LESSON UPON SKIS]
VII [AN ULTIMATUM]
VIII [BENNY BECOMES AN OPTIMIST]
IX [IN WHICH WE BAG A BRACE]
X [A SPECIALIST IS CONSULTED]
XI [THE VIGIL OF TRAGEDY]
XII [FLIGHT]
XIII [AFTER THE STORM]
XIV [THE GENDARME PHILIP]
XV [THE CORTÈGE]
XVI [TWO OPINIONS]
XVII [HERALDS OF GREAT TIDINGS]
XVIII [THE EVE OF THE GREAT ATTEMPT]
XIX [THE THIEF]
XX [THE FLIGHT IS BEGUN]
XXI [THE FLIGHT IS FINISHED]
XXII [THE EMPTY HOUSE]
XXIII [THE NIGHT MAIL]
XXIV [THE DOCTOR INTERVENES]
XXV [THE LIGHTS OF MAGADINO]
XXVI [AT THE HOSPICE]
XXVII [BENNY SETS OUT FOR ENGLAND]
WHITE MOTLEY
PROLOGUE
THE NEW HOUSE AT HOLMSWELL
The New House at Holmswell lies, far back from the road, upon the great highway to Norwich. Local topographers delight to tell you that it is just forty-five miles from that city and five from the Cesarewitch course at Newmarket. They are hardly less eloquent when they come to speak of its late owner, Sir Luton Delayne, and of that unforgotten and well-beloved woman, the wife he so little deserved.
To be sure, the house is not new at all, for it was built at the very moment when the great Harry put his hands into the coffers of the monasteries and called upon high Heaven to witness the justice of his robberies. They faced it with wonderful tiles some years ago, and stamped the Tudor rose all over it; but the people who first called it "new" have been dead these four hundred years, and it is only the local antiquary who can tell you just where the monastery (which preceded it) was built.
Here, the master of a village which knows more about the jockeys of the day than about any Prime Minister, here lived Sir Luton Delayne and that gentle woman who won so many hearts during her brief tenure of the village kingdom. Well the people knew her and well they knew him. A florid, freckled-faced man with red hair and the wisp of an auburn moustache, the common folk said little about his principles and much about his pugnacity. Even these dull intellects knew that he had been "no gentleman" and were not afraid to tell you so. His fame, of a sort, had culminated upon the day he thrashed the butcher from Mildenhall, because the fellow would halt on the high road just when the pheasants were being driven from the Little Barton spinneys. That was no famous day for the House of Delayne; for the butcher had been a great bruiser in his time, and he knocked down the baronet in a twinkling without any regard at all for his ancestry or its dignities. Thereafter, Sir Luton's violent speech troubled the vulgar but little, and when he rated Johnny Drummond for wheeling a barrow over the tennis-court, the lad fell back upon the price of mutton and took his week's notice like a man.
To Lady Delayne local sympathy went out in generous measure. If little were known of the sorrows of her life, much was surmised. The "county" could tell you many tales and would tell them to intimates. These spoke of a ruffian who had sworn at that gentle lady before a whole company at the meet; who openly snubbed her at her own table; who had visited upon her the whims and the temper of a disposition at once vicious and uncontrollable. Darker things were said and believed, but the sudden end surprised no one; and when one day the village heard that she had gone for good, when a little while afterwards the bailiffs came to the New House and Sir Luton himself disappeared, it seemed but the sudden revelation of a tragedy which all had expected.
Whither had Lady Delayne gone, and what was the truth of the disaster? Few could speak upon matters so uncertain, but amongst the few the name of Redman Rolls, the bookmaker, stood high. Report from Newmarket said that Luton Delayne had lost twenty-seven thousand pounds upon the Cambridgeshire and that this loss, following extensive and disastrous speculation in American insecurities, had been the immediate instrument of disaster. As to Lady Delayne's hurried flight from the New House, that was a delicate affair upon which no one could throw much light. She had relatives in the North, and was believed to possess a small fortune of her own; but no news of her came to Holmswell, and the far from curious village had no particular interest in the whereabouts of a man who had browbeaten and bullied it for more than ten years. He had gone to Somaliland to join his brother who was out after big game, the parson said. It meant little to the simple folk, who had not the remotest idea where Somaliland was unless it lay somewhere beyond Norwich—a conclusion to which they arrived in the kitchen of the ancient inn.
To be sure, there were many tales told of the final separation of these unhappy people, and some of them were sad enough. The servants at the New House well remembered how Sir Luton had come home upon that unlucky day; and what he had done and what he had said upon his arrival. To begin with, Martin, the motor-man, could speak of a savage, silent figure, driving blindly through the twilight of an October afternoon, of the narrow escape from accident at the lodge gate and of the oaths with which his attentions were received. Morris, the butler, would tell how Sir Luton had almost knocked him down when he opened the door, and had cursed her ladyship openly when he heard she had company. There was the maid Eva, to tell of her mistress half dressed for dinner and of a scene which in some part she had witnessed. Few believed her wholly when she said that her master had attributed his misfortunes to the day when he met his wife, and had told her that "he had done with her, by Heaven!" And then upon that there would be Morris's further story of the table laid for dinner, the candles lighted, the soup hot and steaming—and not a soul in the great room where dinner was served. They waited a long time, this faithful old gossip and the lean footman with the dull eyes; but neither Sir Luton nor her ladyship came down. And then, shortly before nine, the old horse and the single brougham were ordered—and the kindest lady they would ever know went from them and they heard of her no more.
But the man remained, though he had become but a shadow in the house. All night he drank in the little study behind the billiard room, and a light still burned there at six o'clock next morning, as Jelf, the under-gardener, could testify. If he made any effort to recall the wife, who would willingly have stood by him in the darkest hour, none knew of it. For a few days, Morris carried his meals to the study and would discover him there, sitting at a table and staring blankly over the drear park as though dim figures of his own life's story moved beneath the stately trees. Then, following an outburst which surpassed all the servants could remember, an outburst of passion and of obscenity inconceivable, he was driven one morning to Mildenhall Station, and Holmswell heard with a satisfaction it made no attempt to conceal that this was the end.
The New House was the scene of a great sale shortly afterwards, and brokers came from London to buy the porcelain and the pictures, while many a country gentleman drove in to bid for the well-proved '63 port and the fine bin of Steinberg Cabinet. Few in the village could be more than spectators at such a scene as that; but the old clergyman, Mr. Deakins, bought Lady Delayne's mirror for three pounds fifteen shillings, and when they asked him why, had a ready answer.
"An old man's fancy," he said; "and yet—who knows that some day it may not show me again the face of the gentlest lady I have ever known?"
CHAPTER I
THE GRAND PRIX AT ANDANA
The sleigh climbed the heights laboriously, jolting heavily in the ruts which last night's frost had hardened. Minute by minute now new pictures were revealed. The Rhone valley appeared to be shaping itself more clearly at every zigzag; so that, while Sierre below had become but a toy village upon a child's board, the majestic Weisshorn now stood up in detached sovereignty and all the encircling peaks could be named with assurance.
There had been a blizzard blowing for thirty hours, and it had detained the little company at Sierre; but the morning of the day broke gloriously fine, so that the travellers set off at eight o'clock and were to reach the hotel at Andana before eleven.
A truly British company, some of them had come to winter in Switzerland for the first time. Others were veterans, who brought their own skis, talked knowingly of Vermala and the Zaat, and could show you, even when far down the valley, exactly where the Palace Hotel lurked behind a forest of pines. Of these the gentle old clergyman, Harry Clavering, was the most prominent—and he, as one of whom much was expected, offered generous and courtly help to the more timid of the wayfarers.
But even Harry Clavering, despite his seven and fifty years, was not insensible to the charm of the "little widow," and his conscience found a ready excuse when he craved permission to share a sleigh with her—and obtained it, to the great annoyance of Sir Gordon Snagg, the coal-merchant from Newcastle, who had already confided to his intimates of the company the unnecessary information that the "little woman" in violet was the best "view" he hoped to see in Switzerland.
There were five sledges in all taking the company to Andana, and two of them devoted to ungovernable youth. These lads from the universities and the schools, convinced that Switzerland existed as a republic merely by their patronage, hastened at every turn to give some demonstration of their superiority, either as performers upon the bugle, or as "yoodlers," or merely as marksmen, with the passers-by on the slopes below for their targets. The newly-fallen snow delighted them by its promise of good ski-ing for some days to come. But for the glorious panorama of the Rhone, for the wonder of height and valley, they cared not a straw.
Of the others, a fat man in a well-made suit of tweeds, and a bright little woman, whose luggage was marked "Lady Coral-Smith," were the subjects of some mischief in the other sleighs and of not a little gossip. They were old friends, as they were careful to tell everyone who did not ask; and by the oddest coincidence in the world, they met on the platform at the Gare de Lyon. So they were travelling to Andana together—where, as Lady Coral-Smith explained, her poor dead husband, who had thrice been mayor of Brampton-upon-Sea, died after a long illness some four years ago. She would tell this with the air of one who invited sympathy for what she had gone through and some tolerance for a gaiety of spirit natural to the circumstance. Nor was she without a certain measure of good looks, bravely as her "art" strove to disguise them.
The Major on his part—Major Boodle to be exact—was an excellent example of the half-pay officer, who is driven to a perpetual conflict between his desires and his pension. He had seen a little service in the South African War and in Egypt, and spoke of it good humouredly, but without any sense of proportion. To him, the Boers were still "those d——d Dutchmen," and he remembered little about the campaign apart from the attack of enteric which kept him three months at Colesberg. His laugh was loud, his face fat and without distinction, and his chief concern the absence of any restaurant between Sierre and the hotel. Someone, he thought, should write to the Times about that, and he had said as much to the "little widow" before they started—and would have said more but for the sharp eyes of the mayor's relict, who called him to her side with the asperity of a colonel on parade.
This was the little company which left Sierre at eight o'clock upon the morning of the first day of February and searched with eager eyes for the first glimpse of the plateau of Andana and its destination. The most part of them, newly come out of England, discussed the glorious sunshine to begin with, and upon that the fog and rain which would then be exasperating their own countrymen. By here and there, they paused to cast backward glances at the genial parson and the "little widow"; while Bob Otway, a mature philosopher of one-and-twenty, remarked to his friend, Dick Fenton, a practised cynicist of like years, that "old Harry" was certainly "going it." Which reflection he capped by the assurance that Andana was a "devilish mouse-trap" for the men, and that a fellow was wise to be careful.
"It's perfectly impossible not to propose to a girl if her Q's are all right," he said—and then, by way of illustration—"look at Mondy Thurl, who was here last year. He married that Toogood girl just because she could hold out the tails of her threes. Rotten idea, I call it—"
Dick Fenton, who was tramping doggedly by the side of his sledge, admitted that there was something in it—but he spoke of consolations.
"Anyway, my boy, she didn't hold out the tails of your threes, and that's something. Poor old Mondy! I expect he's wondering what he did it for now. He must have thawed a bit before he got back to town. A man can't be expected to know what he's doing out here—and that Toogood girl could fall down. Why, I believe she practised it before the glass just to show what a pretty ankle she had got. She always used to come down just when old Mondy was there to pick her up."
"Of course she did. She specialised in him, just as those Rider girls would specialise in you, Dick, if they got the chance. You heard they came over from Caux on Thursday?"
"Yes, the parson told me—what an old dear he is, making love to the 'little widow' at his time of life! Why, she can't be five-and-twenty—"
"And she is undoubtedly 'it.' I'm beginning to be sorry for the Rider girls, Dick."
Dick sighed.
"It's the way they take the last corner on the ice-run," he said sorrowfully, "I know I shall be done for if I win the doubles with Marjory. She holds my neck so tight that I believe she'll strangle me some day—"
"She'll do that unless you propose to her; you'd better get it over, old chap, and I'll write to your people. By Jove, though, it's hot, isn't it?—couldn't you drink a lager beer?"
He stopped to wipe his forehead and to look back for an instant at the valley below and the little town of Sierre, now become more toy-like than ever, but for its skating rink, which sparkled like a jewel dropped from the heights. Even the pines carried a burden of the hoar to-day, and every thicket upon the steep slopes, every wood through which the sleighs carried them, had some picture more fantastic than its predecessors to show them. The air was keen as a breath of life itself; it had brought the colour anew to the "widow's" pale cheeks, and her eyes were dancing while she listened to the rhapsodies of the genial old clergyman, who knew and loved the scene and delighted to dwell upon it. Twenty times already had he named the different peaks to her, but his enthusiasm was unabated.
"Vermala is up above the forest," he said, "we often take luges and have tea up there. You can see the Matterhorn from the plateau before the tea-house. Oh, yes, and Mont Blanc; there's a fine view of that and of the Dents Blanches from the Park Hotel. Beginners always go there to learn to ski—I suppose you are already an expert?"
The "little widow" shook her head.
"It's all quite new to me. I have been to Switzerland many times in the summer; but never in the winter—I had expected something quite different. All this is very beautiful—but is it not just a little too exciting? Would not one have to be something of an acrobat to enjoy it thoroughly?"
Harry Clavering laughed.
"Ah," he said, "everyone thinks that when he first comes out. But we all become acrobats and do the most wonderful things before we have been here a week. Why, even I have been down the ice-run at my age—dear, dear, to think of it—and I am fifty-seven.
"Do you not believe, then, that a man is as old as his capacities?"
The parson beamed beneath his glasses—she certainly was a delightful woman to travel with, and he had yet to learn her name.
"I believe in thinking of pleasant things," he said, "old age is pleasant enough if you forget it. And we all become young here; the air inspires us—I think it makes us quite mad sometimes. Then the scenery is so beautiful, so very, very beautiful. Look at those peaks—how the sun shines upon them! And I have wasted one whole week in London when I might have been here. Deplorable! That week has gone forever—"
She liked his enthusiasm, yet could not forbear to intrude upon it.
"But I hear of blizzards," she exclaimed. "Whatever do you do at Andana when there is a blizzard?"
"We grumble and are happy. Snow is as necessary to us here as water to the Arab of the desert. We are thankful to see the snow falling, and we go into our corners and play bridge. I suppose you will join us there? I felt sure you played bridge directly I saw you."
She laughed, showing him how white were her teeth, and how deeply the blue of her eyes contrasted with the azure of the cloudless sky.
"Oh," she said, "one has to do the necessary things. But I am a dreadful player, and the old ladies get very angry with me. I should never have the courage to play with strangers—"
He hastened to correct her.
"No one is a stranger here. That is the best of it. In a way, we are all friends—though, of course, there are people we like better than others."
"Which means to say that you find yourself already devoted heart and soul to Lady Coral-Smith, and the intimate acquaintance of that dreadful person in the yellow suit, Sir Gordon Snagg."
He shook his head as one who would not do battle with her.
"Come, come," he said. "We must not be unkind. Some give and take is necessary in a society like this—and we can always choose our own road if we prefer. Sometimes, I wander by myself all day—once, when I felt the need of rest, I went over to Grindelwald—with a guide for my companion."
She turned upon him with a face grown suddenly white.
"Grindelwald! But we are not near Grindelwald? It can't be."
"Indeed," he said, quite unconscious of her embarrassment, "it is quite near for the climbers, though men of my age generally prefer to go by train. Do you know Grindelwald, by chance?"
She feigned an answer, glad to think that her betrayal had escaped the ears of her kindly cicerone.
"I stayed there three nights; it seems a century ago, but I was on my honeymoon, and you will understand—"
"Perfectly, perfectly; I should not have put the question. You must forgive me."
The "little widow" replied with a commonplace, but both were silent for a full mile or more, and when next Clavering spoke, they had come out upon a wide plateau of the snow and were within twenty minutes of their destination. Here the scene changed in a measure, for there were woods upon the right hand, while the broad expanse of the snow hid the valley from their sight. A little village with a winding street and houses that should have come out of a child's play-box, stood between the plateau and the hotel; and when they had passed it, they entered the forest itself, following a tortuous path amid the pines and already meeting many of the revellers. From these, news of Andana was to be had, especially from a delightful woman of the world, whose age was thirteen and whose uncle was a Cabinet Minister. Skis permitted her to follow the sledge gracefully, and she talked as though the end of the world were at hand and would find her budget undelivered.
"Keith Rivers is here and he's winning everything," she said. "I'm in for the doubles with him to-morrow, and it's a certainty. Dr. Orange came yesterday. Of course, everyone is more in love with him than ever. The ice has been beastly, but we've put in a protest—in fact, we've riddled the enemy with potholes, and I suppose he'll do something. Do you know Ian Kavanagh, I wonder? He was a blue, and his father left him thousands and thousands. It's awful to start life with that on your shoulders, isn't it? But he seems strong. Of course, he can't skate a bit, but we forgive him, because he can do other things. Then I must tell you, there's Benny—do you know Benny? If you do not, you have missed the joy of your life. He's the most good-natured, stupidest, obstinate creature I ever met in all my days. Think of it—he'd never been on skis before, and he went out the day before the blizzard and actually tried to jump. I thought he was going to fall over the edge of the world before he'd stop. Oh, he is such a dear, and I do wish he'd move into the hotel, and not stop at that awful villa—"
An empty sleigh, drawn by two sturdy horses tandem fashion, came cantering down the path and the business of passing in so difficult a place stilled the ravenous tongue for a moment. When they got on again, Harry Clavering ventured upon an introduction:
"This is our philosopher and reigning monarch," he said genially—"Miss Elizabeth Bethune. Permit me to introduce her"; and he turned and waited, remembering that he had not yet the "little widow's" name. She remembered it also, and her face was crimson when she said:
"I am Mrs. Kennaird—I am glad to meet my sovereign."
"Oh, indeed," exclaimed Miss Elizabeth with a pretty pout; "this is not a golden age, I assure you, Mrs. Kennaird, and Mr. Clavering never will be sensible; I don't believe he could be if he tried. It would serve him right if I said nothing about the ghost—"
They both looked at her.
"The ghost! Here at Andana?"
"I should think so; everybody's seen it but Mr. Benny, and, of course, he's blind. Do you know the people in the villages are so frightened that some of them are going down to Sierre? Well, it's true, and even that horrid Dr. Orange, who believes in nothing but his 'brackets,' why, he's in a dreadful way about it. We're to have a picnic after dinner to-night, just to see if we can find it."
"I shall certainly come," rejoined Clavering; and then to Mrs. Kennaird he said:
"Perhaps you will join the expedition?"
But the "little widow" shook her head sadly.
"No," she said, "I think not—my life is too full of ghosts. I would not add to the number."
And that was the end of it, for the drivers whipped up their horses at the moment, and with a jangling of bells and guttural cries from the men, they emerged from the wood, and the Palace Hotel was before them. Here Dr. Orange and a few others were gathered, waiting the bell for luncheon. They greeted such of the new-comers as were known to them with an exuberant welcome; nor did they fail to bestow their interest upon the "little widow."
"A devilish dainty little woman," said that condescending young gentleman, Keith Rivers.
Dr. Orange, however, a slim, good-looking man of forty, had become suddenly preoccupied.
"By Jove!" he said, "I know that face almost as well as my own. Now where—?"
CHAPTER II
A DARK HORSE GOES DOWN
The morning of the following day surpassed the expectation even of those who wrote the story of Andana for the English newspapers. People who were out of the hotel by nine o'clock returned to tell their friends that the sun was broiling. Others went to the little bazaar for blue glasses at one franc fifty.
There had been mist in the Rhone valley at dawn and wisps of it still hung about the entrance to the Simplon. Weather prophets detected a good omen here, and stood before the porch of the hotel to peer down into that unsurpassable ravine and to say that the cluster of black dots immediately below them stood for the church and streets of Sierre. To the right and left were the great clefts of the mighty chasm, a vast pit digged by the waters that flowed before man was, and were now sown with towns and villages and the iron links of civilisation.
The hotel at Andana stands upon the brink of the valley at a height of five thousand feet. Immediately facing it upon the farther side are the twin peaks of the Weisshorn with its sheer and glistening precipices, and a little to the right of that, the Rothhorn and the shining glaciers which are the windows to that supreme escarpment. Look farther to the right across the vast abyss, and you have Sion in the hollow and for your heights the Becs de Bosson—or farther yet, the Aiguilles Rouges and all their story of hazard and achievement. These stand up amid countless peaks, while from the lesser mountains of the Simplon upon the one hand, right away to Mont Blanc upon the other, the eye is spellbound both by the number and the grandeur of these dominating summits.
Deep in the valley lies the Rhone, but a thread of silver to those upon the heights. Andana stands high above its right bank, and the mountains behind it, lacking something in variety, are yet incomparable in the delights they afford to the winter sportsman. Here the climber seeks the wider fields of untrodden snows, the gentler valleys and the vanquished summits. And here in the woods there is a solitude of winter whose charm is not readily to be forgotten.
The "little widow" had slept well after her long journey, and she awoke to the delights of this unfamiliar scene just when the clocks were striking nine. Lying a little while to speculate upon the events of the long journey from Egypt and to wonder if any in the hotel would know her, presently her ears became aware of an unusual clatter below her window. When she looked out she discovered a party on skis about to set out for a paper chase, and announcing the fact with the boisterous spirit of the mountains.
There they were, fathers of families and their sons; generals who had cast off the shackles of Whitehall; colonels from India; merchants waxed fat; boys from the universities—all dressed in the once-white sweaters, the short knee-breeches and the regulation boots. Troops of girls and of ladies of uncertain age accompanied them—gliding, sliding, staggering upon the ungainly runners; and thus, in splendid disorder, the motley march began.
When they were gone, the two young gentlemen who had come up with the party from Sierre yesterday appeared upon the plateau with Miss Bessie Bethune, and having bestowed upon her the gift of a few buckets of snow applied chiefly to the nape of her neck, began to ask ironically when the "show" would begin.
"Rivers said nine o'clock. I put my three-and-six-penny watch down the back of the customs' man at Pontarlier, so I don't know, but I'll bet it's nearly ten. Beastly shame to keep the cracks waiting. Snagg ought to ask a question in Parliament about it."
To which Dick Fenton replied that Rivers was certainly "a nut" and that they had better go up and crack him—which suggestion, adopted nem. con., left Miss Bessie to herself for an instant and then to a duologue with the "little widow," whom she espied at the window.
"Aren't you coming down to see the races, Mrs. Kennaird?"
"Oh, I hope so; what time do they begin?"
"That's what I want to know. If they don't come down soon, I shall race by myself, and then they'll have to give me a prize. Do come and help me. I'm in a dreadful minority."
"Then I must certainly come to your assistance. Is Mr. Clavering down yet?"
"I haven't seen him; but, of course, we don't want the Church until Sunday. There's no one on the run at all but Benny, and he doesn't count. Have you seen Benny? Then it's a thing to dream about. He lives all by himself in the chalet up there—such a wonderful man, and always going about as though he were looking for his own soul. You'll see him in a minute, for he's just gone up—but I don't suppose he'll come down on the luge—I really can't believe that Benny would be faithful to anything for more than five minutes. And, oh! here's Mr. Kavanagh—I would like to introduce you, for he is such a dear!"
A tall, fair-haired man emerged from the hotel door at the moment, and Miss Bessie immediately took possession of him, to his apparent satisfaction, for they were gossiping like two old women when next the "little widow" saw them. Immediately afterwards, someone shouted "Achtung!" and a figure came flying down the ice-run which finishes at the very door of the hotel. Roughly clad in a grey sweater and check breeches, wearing no hat, and showing a thick crop of black hair, Mr. Benjamin Benson, for it was he, clung to his toboggan wildly, his teeth set and his eyes staring. When at last it flung him violently to the snow, he got up with the smile of a child, and looked at it for many minutes almost reproachfully. Then, patiently and laboriously he set out to climb the hill again to have another try.
When he had gone, the "little widow" dressed herself without further delay, and by a quarter to ten she also joined the throng before the hotel door, and was immediately recognised by Harry Clavering, who told her that the races were about to begin.
"Perhaps you would like to go up with me," he suggested a little nervously. "I am time-keeper to-day, and I can show you just how it is done. Everyone toboggans here, and you will like to begin as soon as possible. Shall we go now?"
She offered no objection, and they set out at once, climbing steep steps cut in the snow to a little bridge above the final straight of the course. To his question whether she had discovered any friends at Andana, she replied in the negative; but added that Mrs. Allwater and her daughter Pansy were coming on from Caux in a few days' time—"and they," she said, "are very old friends of mine."
When they arrived at the bridge they found quite a concourse of people, that very self-conscious person, Ian Kavanagh, among the number. Hardly had he set eyes on the "little widow" when he begged the parson to introduce him.
"Do you do this sort of thing, Mrs. Kennaird?" he asked her, as he took his stand near by. She answered with a smile that she was quite unaccomplished on the ice.
"Prefer hunting, I suppose? Well, so do I, though what my twenty nags are doing just now I won't ask. Eating their heads off, I suppose. Let me get you a seat; this sun takes it out of one, and some of the girls are staggering. You'll want all your courage, I can tell you."
He brought a cane chair, and set it upon the high bank so that she could see the toboggans as they passed under the little bridge. Harry Clavering watched all this ceremony with some impatience, and hastened to cut in before the thing went any farther.
"I think they are wanting you, Mr. Kavanagh, at the starting-post," he said with a smile of entreaty. "There's no flag there, and we must have one. Would you very much object?"
"I should indeed, but, of course, if you command—" And the man, with a look at the "little widow" which he meant to be unutterable, set out for the unwelcome duty. Then the parson spoke.
"I don't understand Kavanagh," he said; "no energy at all—so listless—and he is only twenty-seven, I believe. They say he has a large fortune; it really is a great pity if it is true. Young men with much money are dreadfully handicapped in the race for happiness—but there, it is not my business after all, and I have no right to mention it. Can you see quite well, Mrs. Kennaird?—the start is up there, you know, by the little white cottage. I take the time directly the red flag is lowered, and the man at the finish signals to me with his flag when the course is finished. This is what we call an ice-run. They flood the surface every night, and that makes it very fast. These high banks are to guard the corners. If it were flat, they could not get round at all. Some of them are very clever—Mr. Rivers, for instance. He is standing over there, just by Lady Coral-Smith—the thin man in the sweater with our Trinity colours."
He babbled on as though she had been a child; nor could her ignorance quarrel with the lesson. Not for many a month had she felt so much alive as out here upon the mountain-side, with the valley at her feet and the whited woods above. The sense of vast space and dominion delighted her—the merry people; the skaters upon the rink to the right of her; the curlers upon the rink to the left; the sunshine, the feeling that all the men and women in the world had suddenly become children and were at play, combined to suggest an ecstasy of repose and forgetfulness.
"Tell me, for I am very ignorant," she said, "do two people come down the slide together?"
Harry Clavering was startled.
"We don't call it a slide—an 'ice-run' is the proper name," he said almost apologetically. "There is only room for one runner at a time, as you will see presently. They go so very fast. Why, it's more than a mile from the cottage up there to the door of the hotel, and they do it in a minute and a half! You must watch them as they take the corners; that's the real fun—that's where they generally fall off."
"So we are here to support their miseries. How very noble of us! And the man with the red flag up on the hillside?"
"He is the starter. Now see, there is young Bob Otway just about to come down."
He was very excited, and watched the starting-box with restless eyes, while she tried to follow him and to trace the serpentine course of the run which might have been just a wide stretch of the ice extending from the pine-woods above to the door of the hotel upon the plateau. Half-way down, the track swept suddenly to the right, and then to the left again—and here were the high banks of snow to ease the corners and make them possible at high speeds. The "little widow" had just fallen to a memory of her own girlhood and of the joy such a game would have afforded her before the dark days, when Harry Clavering waved his red flag violently and there was a general shout:
"He's off!"
"Only Bob Otway," said some kindly friend in the crowd who was an optimist. "He's sure to take a toss." And it was a true saying, for Master Bob came at the corner like a bull and was clean up and over it before many realised that he started at all.
"Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" exclaimed the old parson, quite as excited as any boy about it. "He should not have taken the bank so high. Poor boy, I hope he has not hurt himself." A comment which provoked a muttered "D——d fool!" from a choleric colonel, who had seen the thing done in Canada, and did not believe it possible to do it better in Switzerland. Then a second competitor, Dick Fenton, started, and he came down prettily enough, riding low at the banks and getting a splendid course in the final straight. It was quite thrilling to see him, the "little widow" declared; and when Harry Clavering announced the time as one minute thirty-one seconds, she believed that Fenton must have won. Not so the others. "Wait until Rivers has been down," they said. That splendid personage obviously was their pièce de resistance.
Meanwhile, there were "heats" for the ladies, and these found the men a little nearer to the edge of the bank and frankly enjoying themselves. Some of the girls rode very well—and, significantly, Marjory Rider, whose name suggested proficiency, acquitted herself with hardly less aplomb than her sister Nellie. Tall girls, and excessively thin, it remained for an artist in the background to suggest that they never would have got their living as "models." But they flashed down the ice-run with a bravado that was incontestable, and their corners were, in Bob Otway's words, "divine." They were followed by a pretty little girl with a superb figure, who considerately parted company with her toboggan on the second bank and went half-way down the straight with her face to the heights and her back toward the winning post. Even this, however, was capped by a mature lady of forty-three, who rolled over and over at the first turn and had to be helped up the slope with a curler's besom. In no way daunted, she set out immediately for the summit to repeat a performance so diverting to the company.
The "little widow" found all this new enough to be pleasing, and there was a curious fascination in watching this whirring from the heights; while the prone figures, the drone of the runners, the leap at the corners, the hard set faces, suggested that conquest of space and time which never fails to be exciting. When they told her that Keith Rivers was about to perform, she craned forward in her chair to see that dashing youth, with his curly brown hair and his frank open face and his contempt of other rivals. He had just left Eton and was going into the army, they told her. And none at Andana could keep pace with him, whether upon skis or skates. To be sure, he rode magnificently, taking the corners with unerring judgment, and making a sweep into the straight which dazzled the company. When the time was announced—one minute twenty-nine seconds—it seemed that there was nothing for his friends to do but to throw their caps into the air and claim the stakes. None was left in now but Benny, and to think of Mr. Benjamin Benson as the winner of the Grand Prix at Andana was too ridiculous.
Benny had just gone up to the starting-post, a well-made figure of a man enough, with the kindliest eyes in all Switzerland. He walked with the lurch of the sailor ashore; and the chaff that followed him was like hail upon a pent-house roof. To Bess Bethune, who asked him if he were going to beat record, he shouted back over his shoulder that he meant to try. It was evident that he had little skill in repartee; and when anyone wished him luck he took the words as he found them and missed the irony. To Bob Otway, who recommended him to tie himself on with a rope, he retorted that he would be the better for the loan of a monkey's tail; and quite satisfied with the shot, he went plodding on up the hill to the amusement of every superior person in the company.
There was a little delay at the post, for Benny would fall off his toboggan before he got on to it, as the starter declared; and when they did get him going, he leaped high into the air and fell with such a thud upon the cushion of the machine that any other man's bones would have been broken. From that moment his performance became entirely astonishing. No one at Andana had ever taken the earlier bends of the course so fast and so furiously, and it seemed quite impossible that he could remain upon the course at all. Benny, however, was a sticker. "Where I drop, there I lie," was one of the maxims of his life, and so he lay very close to his toboggan, hugging it as though it were a pretty girl, and never lifting his eyes from a form so attractive. Approaching the corner he began to attain a speed which delighted the cognoscenti. Uproarious applause mingled with mocking laughter. All said and done, the world likes a butt—and what other role could such a man have filled?
"Stick to it, old chap!" "Hang on, Benjamin!" "Give him his head!" "Now we're jumping!" "Benny's a nut!" "Oh, my hat, see that!" "Hard to starboard, Benjamin!"—such were the cries that were to be heard above the din as the rider approached the corner. Here, surely, the gallery believed that this meteoric display must terminate. The leap from the second bank to a long straight run carried Benny to the first of the monstrous corners, and here he must be unshipped. As the flash of a blackbird against a curtain of the snow, he rushed the straight and struck the great mound which defended the bend. People saw him shoot high into the air, then fall again with hands gripping the bars of the runners, and eyes which stared from his head. A great "Oh!" went up, a murmur of wonder and amazement. Someone said that he was round the second bank, but no one believed it until a cry from the final straight turned all eyes thither, and Benny was espied leaping to the goal. Then the red flag fell. The race was over—and more wonderful to tell, Benny had won it!
No one believed the thing at first. Even Harry Clavering felt very dubious about it, and looked at his watch a good many times before daring to announce the result. "One minute twenty-seven and four-fifth seconds," the chronograph said, and, to be sure, it was no good disputing that. So the kindly little man admitted almost apologetically at last that he really believed Mr. Benson had won. Upon which a curious, half-mocking silence fell upon the company. In a way its pride of judgment was hurt, and it had not the manliness to say so. That the Grand Prix, the race of the year, should be won by a half-savage sailor-man, who knew no more of the science of the game than a heathen Chinee, was surely an insult to the elect of Andana! And then all the fine talk on the part of men like Ian Kavanagh and Keith Rivers, the attitudes and devotions of the Rider girls, were those to count for nothing? An unspoken resentment against the dark horse, who certainly had gone down, left Benny without a cheer. There was only one person in the crowd who spoke an honest word to him, and she was the "little widow."
"I'm so glad you won," she said, meeting him in the veranda of the hotel, and quite regardless of the formalities. Benny's eyes lighted up like lamps when he heard her.
"Do you really mean that, Mrs. Kennaird?"
"I mean every word of it. Pride has had many falls to-day. I am not at all sorry."
"Thank you very much," he said; and then, as simply as a boy, he added: "I knew I should do it if I could stick on."
"That's why you won," she rejoined; "because you knew you would," and with a smile that he would never forget she passed on into the hall.
The "little widow" had awarded Benny his prize. He fell there and then to wondering if it were the last he would ever win from her.
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 was retroussé and 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 more objets 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 a tête-à-tête with 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; the joie 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 sipped crême de menthe under 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.
CHAPTER VI
A LESSON UPON SKIS
The "ghost" had been seen by many of the guests in the Palace Hotel, but not by the "little widow," despite her wakefulness. For her the night was fruitful of other thoughts, and chiefly the thought of her own situation, of its difficulties and its dangers.
They had christened her the "little widow" down at Sierre, and the embarrassing distinction of a pardonable error had followed her to Andana. So much she had achieved by her desire to obliterate the past and to recall, if it were possible, the innocence and the freedom of her girlhood. But she knew now that the attempt had failed, and that she stood upon the brink of a discovery which must be attended by shame. Luton Delayne would come to Andana sooner or later, and all would know the truth.
It is true that she did not lack courage, and had the perception to see that worldly sympathy, so far as she cared to win it, must be upon her side; but the ordeal through which she must pass, in a sense the exposure, affrighted her and robbed her even of a desire to sleep. The morning of the day might bring the man to the hotel; the evening might send her upon her way again, a derelict upon a lonely sea which offered no safe harbourage.
There had been no child of her marriage, and thus no chain upon her desire for freedom. Her father, Sir Frederick Kennaird, had married again at the age of fifty-seven; and while the gates of the old home were not shut against her, she shrank from the thought of such a shelter. Her only brother, Harold, was with his regiment in India, and had already condemned her conduct in strenuous letters full of childish complaints. "Would she drag her story into the papers? Wash their dirty linen in public?"—and all that sort of thing. To these she made answer that she would be the arbiter of her own fortune, and that if the family honour depended upon her tolerance of such a man as Luton Delayne, she would not lift a finger to save it.
This was well enough as an expression of her promise, but more difficult as a practice. Enjoying an allowance of three thousand a year from her father, whose collieries brought him ten times that sum, she discovered presently that candour is a factor in the due enjoyment of life, and that the world has little love of anonymity. Go where she would, to remote cities of Europe, to the East, even to America, there were some who knew her story and would sell secrecy at a price. She made no friends, won no sure refuge, could find no sanctuary. Sometimes she regretted her determination to be known henceforth as Lily Kennaird, and wondered if her brother were not right when he described such a subterfuge as madness. Sacrifice carried her into a new world, and one with which she was unfamiliar. She missed the amenities of the state she had abandoned, its overt dignities, its influence and power. Mrs. Kennaird was merely the "little widow" to the multitude. It had been otherwise when she was Lady Delayne.
All this troubled her during the night, and the new day found her afflicted by apprehensions to which she had long been a stranger. Twice in as many years she had seen her husband, Luton, and upon each occasion at a crisis of his life. A wanderer like herself, he lived chiefly upon the allowance of one thousand a year which she made him, and when that was exhausted, upon his wits, which were considerable. The latter occupation was not unattended by danger and the curiosity of the police. Lily wondered sometimes at her patience.
And now he had followed her to Switzerland, and unquestionably would visit her at Andana. What shameful story lay behind the pursuit she could not imagine; but of the existence of such a story she was sure. Luton Delayne rarely troubled her unless his case were desperate—and desperate indeed it must be for him to abandon the purlieus of Monte Carlo at such a season. She resolved, upon her part, to refuse him audience if that were possible; and if it were not possible, then to summon all her courage and insist that this interview should be final. The day for compromise was past.
It had been her promise to the parson, Harry Clavering, that she would submit to the ordeal of the skis on this morning; and when, with Kavanagh, she met him on the veranda of the hotel, he reminded her pleasantly of her obligations.
Unwilling to disappoint, she professed her readiness to face the ordeal, and skis having been commanded from the hotel porter, the parson upon one side and Kavanagh upon the other set to work to imprison the smallest pair of feet in Andana and to tell the owner the news while they did so.
"You've heard that the ghost has been seen?" asked Clavering, a little excitedly. She shook her head incredulously.
"Oh, but it's quite true. Miss Nellie Rider saw it from her bedroom window and so did her sister. Sir Gordon Snagg is another. He declares it was a man in a flying machine. I shouldn't wonder if he were right."
Kavanagh was of this opinion.
"There are fools in the world who will do anything," he said. "Some idiot out of Hanwell may have brought his aeroplane here to scare the natives; and jolly well he's succeeded. I hope he may break his neck, that's all. He deserves to, that's sure."
He thought that the "little widow" would agree with him as a matter of course, and her answer rather astonished him.
"Then you think that pioneers are very wicked people?" she remarked; "you have no sympathy with them, Mr. Kavanagh?"
"Oh, I won't say that—good for science and all that sort of thing. What I mean is, let's keep the mountains anyway. We don't want ginger-beer bottles on our heads up here—do we now? I'm sure Mr. Clavering agrees to that."
The parson dissented altogether.
"I think it would be a brave thing to fly here," he said quietly, "a very brave thing. And I hope the day when we cannot admire courage is distant. If there had been no pioneers in the world, I should not be travelling through the Simplon Tunnel to Bellagio in three weeks' time, and you would not be smoking that excellent tobacco. If there is an aeroplane at Andana, it must be owned by one of the men who is about to fly for the great prize offered by the English daily paper. I hope he will win it."
"But you wouldn't go up in one yourself?" Kavanagh insisted.