Running Water Part 8

You will be tired to-morrow."

"Not till to-morrow evening," she said, with a laugh. She looked upward to the starlit sky. "It will be fine, I hope. Oh, it _must_ be fine.

To-morrow is my one day. I do so want it to be perfect," she exclaimed.

"I don't think you need fear."

She held out her hand to him.

"This is good-by, I suppose," she said, and she did not hide the regret the words brought to her.

Chayne took her hand and kept it for a second or two. He ought to start an hour and a half before her. That he knew very well. But he answered:

"No. We go the same road for a little while. When do you start?"

"At half past one."

"I too. It will be daybreak before we say good-by. I wonder whether you will sleep at all to-night. I never do the first night."

He spoke lightly, and she answered him in the same key.

"I shall hardly know whether I sleep or wake, with the noise of that stream rising through my window. For so far back as I can remember I always dream of running water."

The words laid hold upon Chayne's imagination and fixed her in his memories. He knew nothing of her really, except just this one curious fact. She dreamed of running water. Somehow it was fitting that she should. There was a kind of resemblance; running water was, in a way, an image of her. She seemed in her nature to be as clear and fresh; yet she was as elusive; and when she laughed, her laugh had a music as light and free.

She went into the chalet. Through the window Chayne saw her strike a match and hold it to the candle. She stood for a moment looking out at him gravely, with the light shining upward upon her young face. Then a smile hesitated upon her lips and slowly took possession of her cheeks and eyes. She turned and went into her room.

CHAPTER VII

THE AIGUILLE D'ARGENTIeRE

Chayne smoked another pipe alone and then walking to the end of the little terrace looked down on to the glistening field of ice below. Along that side of the chalet no light was burning. Was she listening? Was she asleep? The pity which had been kindled within him grew as he thought upon her. To-morrow she would be going back to a life she clearly hated.

On the whole he came to the conclusion that the world might have been better organized. He lit his candle and went to bed, and it seemed that not five minutes had pa.s.sed before one of his guides knocked upon his door. When he came into the living-room Sylvia Thesiger was already breakfasting.

"Did you sleep?" he asked.

"I was too excited," she answered. "But I am not tired"; and certainly there was no trace of fatigue in her appearance.

They started at half past one and went up behind the hut.

The stars shimmered overhead in a dark and cloudless sky. The night was still; as yet there was no sign of dawn. The great rock cliffs of the Chardonnet across the glacier and the towering ice-slopes of the Aiguille Verte beneath which they pa.s.sed were all hidden in darkness. They might have been walking on some desolate plain of stones flat from horizon to horizon. They walked in single file, Jean leading with a lighted lantern in his hand, so that Sylvia, who followed next, might pick her way amongst the boulders. Thus they marched for two hours along the left bank of the glacier and then descended on to ice. They went forward partly on moraine, partly on ice at the foot of the crags of the Aiguille Verte.

And gradually the darkness thinned. Dim ma.s.ses of black rock began to loom high overhead, and to all seeming very far away. The sky paled, the dim ma.s.ses of rock drew near about the climbers, and over the steep walls, the light flowed into the white basin of the glacier as though from every quarter of the sky.

Sylvia stopped and Chayne came up with her.

"Well?" he asked; and as he saw her face his thoughts were suddenly swept back to the morning when the beauty of the ice-world was for the first time vouchsafed to him. He seemed to recapture the fine emotion of that moment.

Sylvia stood gazing with parted lips up that wide and level glacier to its rock-embattled head. The majestic silence of the place astounded her.

There was no whisper of wind, no rustling of trees, no sound of any bird.

As yet too there was no crack of ice, no roar of falling stones. And as the silence surprised her ears, so the simplicity of color smote upon her eyes. There were no gradations. White ice filled the basin and reached high into the recesses of the mountains, hanging in rugged glaciers upon their flanks, and streaking the gullies with smooth narrow ribands. And about the ice, and above it, circling it in, black walls of rock towered high, astonishingly steep and broken at the top into pinnacles of an exquisite beauty.

"I shall be very glad to have seen this," said Sylvia, as she stored the picture in her mind, "more glad than I am even now. It will be a good memory to fall back upon when things are troublesome."

"Must things be troublesome?" he asked.

"Don't let me spoil my one day," she said, with a smile.

She moved on, and Chayne, falling back, spoke for a little with his guides. A little further on Jean stopped.

"That is our mountain, mademoiselle," he said, pointing eastward across the glacier.

Sylvia turned in that direction.

Straight in front of her a bay of ice ran back, sloping ever upward, and around the bay there rose a steep wall of cliffs which in the center sharpened precipitously to an apex. The apex was not a point but a rounded level ridge of snow which curved over on the top of the cliffs like a billow of foam. A tiny black tower of rock stood alone on the northern end of the snow-ridge.

"That, mademoiselle, is the Aiguille d'Argentiere. We cross the glacier here."

Jean put the rope about her waist, fixing it with the fisherman's bend, and tied one end about his own, using the overhand knot, while his brother tied on behind. They then turned at right angles to their former march and crossed the glacier, keeping the twenty feet of rope which separated each person extended. Once Jean looked back and uttered an exclamation of surprise. For he saw Chayne and his guides following across the glacier behind, and Chayne's road to the Col Dolent at the head of the glacier lay straight ahead upon their former line of advance.

However he said nothing.

They crossed the bergschrund with less difficulty than they had antic.i.p.ated, and ascending a ridge of debris, by the side of the lateral glacier which descended from the cliffs of the Aiguille d'Argentiere, they advanced into the bay under the southern wall of the Aiguille du Chardonnet. On the top of this moraine Jean halted, and the party breakfasted, and while they breakfasted Chayne told Sylvia something of that mountain's history. "It is not the most difficult of peaks," said he, "but it has a.s.sociations, which some of the new rock-climbs have not.

The pioneers came here." Right behind them there was a gap, the pa.s.s between their mountain and the Aiguille du Chardonnet. "From that pa.s.s Moore and Whymper first tried to reach the top by following the crest of the cliffs, but they found it impracticable. Whymper tried again, but this time up the face of the cliffs further on to the south and just to the left of the summit. He failed, came back again and conquered. We follow his road."

And while they looked up the dead white of that rounded summit ridge changed to a warm rosy color and all about that basin the topmost peaks took fire.

"It is the sun," said he.

Sylvia looked across the valley. The great ice-triangle of the Aiguille Verte flashed and sparkled. The slopes of the Les Droites and Mont Dolent were hung with jewels; even the black precipices of the Tour Noir grew warm and friendly. But at the head of the glacier a sheer unbroken wall of rock swept round in the segment of a circle, and this remained still dead black and the glacier at its foot dead white. At one point in the knife-like edge of this wall there was a depression, and from the depression a riband of ice ran, as it seemed from where they sat, perpendicularly down to the Glacier d'Argentiere.

"That is the Col Dolent," said Chayne. "Very little sunlight ever creeps down there."

Sylvia shivered as she looked. She had never seen anything so somber, so sinister, as that precipitous curtain of rock and its riband of ice. It looked like a white band painted on a black wall.

"It looks very dangerous," she said, slowly.

"It needs care," said Chayne.

"Especially this year when there is so little snow," added Sylvia.

"Yes. Twelve hundred feet of ice at an angle of fifty degrees."

"And the bergschrund's just beneath."

"Yes, you must not slip on the Col Dolent," said he, quietly.

Sylvia was silent a little while. Then she said with a slight hesitation: