Fordham's Feud Part 32

He realised further that all thoughts of mountain climbing, for this season at any rate, must be abandoned. Not that he cared about that, however; for after more than a week of confinement to his room, and that in the loveliest of summer weather, all inclination towards the reaping of further mountaineering laurels seemed to have left him. His main ambition now was to get well as soon as possible and move away to fresh scenes. The lovely aspect of mountain and glacier shining in the golden summer sun was now as gall to him, intertwined as it was with recollections of Eden before his wholly unexpected and crushing expulsion therefrom. The bright laughter and cheerful voices of parties setting forth or returning--on sightseeing bent--grated irritably on his nerves, for it brought back to him the time so recent, but now divided by such an impa.s.sable gulf, when he himself was among the cheeriest of the cheery. So now as he sat in his comfortable cane chair--his injured foot propped up on another--in a sunny spot outside the hotel, his thoughts were very bitter.

Needless to say they ran upon the subject which had afforded him ample food for reflection during these long days of his irksome and enforced stagnation. To the first blank and heart-wrung sense of his loss had succeeded by degrees a feeling of angry resentment. Alma had meted out to him very harsh measure. She had allowed him no opportunity of explanation, and surely he was ent.i.tled to that amount of consideration, not to say fair play. But no. She had condemned him unheard. After all Fordham was right. The less one had to do with the other s.e.x the better. It was all alike. And a very unwonted sneer clouded the beauty of the ordinarily bright and sunny face.

This, no doubt, was very good reasoning--would have been had the reasoner but numbered a dozen or so more years of life. In that case it would doubtlessly have afforded him abundant consolation. As things were, however, he was fain to own to himself that it afforded him very little indeed. However he might pretend to himself that Alma was not worth wrecking his life over, the poor fellow knew perfectly well that were she to appear at that moment before him with but one kind word on her lips, all his rankling resentment and cynical communings would be scattered to the winds. Those wretched Glovers--underbred, shop-keeping adventurers as they were--to come there wrecking his life by their infernal malice! And then as in a mental flash he compared the two girls, the pendulum swung back again, and he reflected that however harsh and peremptory had been Alma's way of looking at things, he had got no more than he had deserved. But this idea, while it brushed aside the flimsy attempts he had been making to harden his heart towards her, left him rather more unhappy than before.

"Well, Mr Orlebar, I am glad to see you down at last," said a very pleasing feminine voice, whose owner suddenly appeared round an angle of the house.

"You're awfully good, Mrs Daventer," he replied. "But if you're only half as glad to see me down as I am to be down, why then you're-- you're--er--still more good."

"It must be delightful to feel yourself out of doors again, after being shut up all that time," she went on. "Still, it won't do to hurry matters. You must make up your mind to have a little patience."

"Just what I'm doing. Job isn't in it with me for that quality."

She laughed--and a very attractive laugh it was. So Phil thought, and he reckoned himself a judge. "A devilish nice woman, and a devilish nice-looking one," had been his verdict to Fordham, and he saw no reason to retract any part of it now.

"I shouldn't give you credit for much of the quality at any rate," she said. "You seem far too impulsive. For instance, just now you were looking anything but philosophical. However, it is slow work being a prisoner, and a lonely prisoner too. What has become of your friend?"

"Who? Fordham? Oh, he's away for a few days. He and Wentworth have gone over to Chamounix by the glacier route. I miss the chap no end. I believe he'd have put it off if I had wanted him to, but, as it is, I've been feeling a selfish dog keeping him in the best part of the day yarning to me, when he might have been having a high old time on his own account. I tell you what it is, Mrs Daventer, he's a rare good chap is Fordham."

This was amusing--rich, in fact. She did not even turn away her head to conceal a bitter curl of the lips, for she flattered herself she was past showing the faintest sign of feeling. But a ruling pa.s.sion is difficult to conceal entirely, especially when it consists of a surging, deadly hatred.

"Is he?" she said vacantly.

"Rather. I see you don't believe it though. But, between ourselves, he is a good bit of a woman-hater. So I suppose the s.e.x instinctively reciprocates the compliment. But, I say, Mrs Daventer. It was awfully good of you to come and see me as you did--and the other people too,"

added Phil, in the half-shamefaced way in which nineteen men out of twenty are wont to express their thanks or appreciation as regards a kindness rendered.

"That was nothing. Mrs Wharton's very nice, isn't she? I'm very sorry they're leaving to-morrow."

"Are they? I hope I shall see them again before they go. Wharton's a rare good sort although he's a parson. Don't look shocked. I'm afraid I don't get on with 'the cloth' over well. I daresay it's my own fault though."

"I daresay it is," she returned with a laugh.

During the latter days of his captivity Philip had not been without visitors. The British subject, when outside his (or her) native land, is the proprietor of a far more abundant and spontaneous fount of the milk of human kindness than when hedged around by the stovepipe-hat-c.u.m-proper-introductions phase of respectability within the confines of the same. Several of the people sojourning in the hotel had looked in upon the weary prisoner to lighten the irksomeness of his confinement with a little friendly chat, and foremost among them had been Mrs Daventer.

"Are you doing anything particular this morning, Mrs Daventer?

Because, if not, I wish you'd get a chair--I can't get one for you, you see--and sit and talk to me," said Phil, in that open, taking manner of his that rendered him almost as attractive to the other s.e.x as his handsome face and fine physique.

"Well, I suppose I must," she answered with a smile.

"It would be a real act of Christian charity. And--"

He broke off in confused amazement, caused by the arrival of a third person upon the scene. "A good-looking girl," was his mental verdict.

"Wentworth was right, by Jove!"

"Laura, dear, see if there are any chairs in the hall," said Mrs Daventer. "Thanks, love," she went on, as her daughter returned, bearing a light garden-chair. "Mr Orlebar claims that it is a Christian duty on our part to sit and gossip with him. I suppose one must concede him the privileges of an invalid."

"I am glad your ankle is so much better," said the girl, quite unaffectedly, but with the slightest possible tinge of shyness, which added an indescribable piquancy to her rich Southern type of beauty.

"It must be so hideously trying to see every one else going about enjoying themselves, while you feel yourself literally chained."

"That's just how it is," a.s.sented Philip. "And they say it's the best climbing season that has been known for ten years."

"You are a great climber, I suppose?"

"No. A rank greenhorn, in fact. The Rothhorn was the first--the first real high thing--I've done, and it seems likely to be the last."

"We heard about your accident the morning after we arrived. It made quite a little excitement."

"I suppose so," said Philip, with a laugh. "'Terrible tragedy. A cow fell over the bridge and broke one horn,' as the country reporter put it."

"Get yourself a chair, dear," said Mrs Daventer. And as the girl moved away with that intent, Philip could not, for the life of him, keep his glance from following the graceful, lithe gait. She was a splendid-looking girl, he told himself.

"How is it you are not away among the glaciers this lovely day, Miss Daventer?" he asked, when she had returned.

"I don't know. I suppose I felt lazy. Some of the people near us at table have gone up to the Theodule to-day, and wanted me to go with them. But I should have had to decide last night; besides, they were going to make such a woefully early start. So I didn't want to tie myself."

"Quite right," said Philip. "That early start side of the question takes half the edge off the fun of any undertaking here. Still, once you are squarely out it's all right, and you feel all the better for it."

"Always provided you have had a fair night's rest. But these big hotels are apt to be very noisy--people getting up at all hours and taking abundant pains to render the whole house aware of the fact."

"Rather," said Philip. "Every one turns in ridiculously early, but what's the good of that when just as you are dropping off to sleep somebody comes into the room above you and practices for the next day's walk during about two hours, in a pair of regulation nail boots? I've been having a bad time of late. Getting no exercise in the daytime, I find it hard to sleep at night, and there's always some one stumping about overhead. I was obliged to ring up the night porter at last and send him up to inform the gentleman overhead that I should take it as very kind of him if he would defer his rehearsal of step-cutting, jumping creva.s.ses, etc, until he could practise upon real ice the next day. Well, the porter went, for I heard his voice through the floor. I asked him in the morning if the gentleman had sworn a great deal or only a little. 'Gentleman?' he said, in mild surprise. 'It was not a gentleman, it was a lady.'"

"Wasn't she awfully sorry?" said Laura.

"She may have been, but she didn't seem so. By way of impressing me with the honour I ought to consider it to be lulled to sleep by the tread of her fairy feet, I am bound to record that she made rather more row than before."

"Who was it? Do you know?"

"I don't. I had my suspicions, but they were only suspicions."

"Well, it couldn't have been either of us," laughed Mrs Daventer, "for we happen to be on the same floor. But to whom do your suspicions point?"

"I fancy it must have been one of those two grim spinsters who have been keeping me supplied with sacred literature."

"No--have they?" said the girl, a swift laugh darting from her dark eyes. "I know who you mean, though I don't know their names. They are dreadful old people. I notice at table they never have the same next-door neighbours two days running. I suppose they force their ideas on that head upon everybody, judging from the sc.r.a.ps of conversation that float across."

"I ought to be grateful to them," went on Philip. "Every day I found a fresh tract slipped under my door. The t.i.tles, too, were uniformly appropriated to the sojourner in Zermatt. 'Where are you going to climb to-day?' or 'Looking Upward.' 'The Way that is Dark and Slippery,'

which reminded me of that high moraine coming down from the Rothhorn the other night. But what really did hurt my feelings was one labelled, '_On whomsoever it Shall Fall it shall Grind him to Powder_.' It seemed too personal. I felt that they were poking fun at my misfortune, don't you know, and it didn't seem kind. But it occurred to me that they meant well. They meant to amuse me, and a.s.suredly they succeeded. By the way, these interesting doc.u.ments bore the injunction: 'When done with, pa.s.s this on to a friend.' Wherefore, Miss Daventer, I shall feel it my duty to endow you with the whole lot."

"I must decline the honour. I couldn't think of depriving you of so valuable a possession," was the laughing reply. "But we are wandering dreadfully from the point. Why do you think it was one of those old things who was walking about over your head?"

"It is only bare suspicion, mind, and founded upon circ.u.mstantial evidence--acreage, I mean. I have become observant since my enforced detention, and while contemplating the populace--from a three-storey window--I have noticed that n.o.body else could show such an acreage of shoeleather."

"Your imprisonment has rendered you satirical, Mr Orlebar," said Mrs Daventer, in mild reproof, though at heart joining in the laugh wherewith the remark was received by her daughter, as, indeed, nineteen women out of twenty are sure to do whenever a man makes a joke at the expense of another member of their own s.e.x.

Thus they sat, exchanging the airiest of gossip, laughing over mere nothings. Then the luncheon bell rang. Philip's countenance fell. It was surprising how soon the morning had fled. He said as much--but dolefully.