RUNNING WATER
by
A. E. W. MASON
Author of _The Four Feathers_, etc.
1907
CONTENTS
I SHOWS MRS. THESIGER IN HER HOME
II INTRODUCES ONE OF STROOD'S SUCCESSORS
III THE FINDING OF JOHN LATTERY
IV MR. JARVICE
V MICHEL REVAILLOUD EXPOUNDS HIS PHILOSOPHY
VI THE PAVILLON DE LOGNAN
VII THE AIGUILLE D'ARGENTIÈRE
VIII SYLVIA PARTS FROM HER MOTHER
IX SYLVIA MAKES THE ACQUAINTANCE OF HER FATHER
X A LITTLE ROUND GAME OF CARDS
XI SYLVIA'S FATHER MAKES A MISTAKE
XII THE HOUSE OF THE RUNNING WATER
XIII CHAYNE RETURNS
XIV AN OLD PASSION BETRAYS A NEW SECRET
XV KENYON'S JOHN LATTERY
XVI AS BETWEEN GENTLEMEN
XVII SYLVIA TELLS MORE THAN SHE KNOWS
XVIII BOTH SIDES OF THE QUESTION
XIX THE SHADOW IN THE ROOM
XX ON THE DOWN
XXI CHAYNE COMES TO CONCLUSIONS
XXII REVAILLOUD REVISITED
XXIII MICHEL REVAILLOUD'S _FÜHRBUCH_
XXIV THE BRENVA RIDGE
XXV A NIGHT ON AN ICE-SLOPE
XXVI RUNNING WATER
CHAPTER I
SHOWS MRS. THESIGER IN HER HOME
The Geneva express jerked itself out of the Gare de Lyons. For a few
minutes the lights of outer Paris twinkled past its windows and then with
a spring it reached the open night. The jolts and lurches merged into one
regular purposeful throb, the shrieks of the wheels, the clatter of the
coaches, into one continuous hum. And already in the upper berth of her
compartment Mrs. Thesiger was asleep. The noise of a train had no unrest
for her. Indeed, a sleeping compartment in a Continental express was the
most permanent home which Mrs. Thesiger had possessed for a good many
more years than she would have cared to acknowledge. She spent her life
in hotels with her daughter for an unconsidered companion. From a winter
in Vienna or in Rome she passed to a spring at Venice or at
Constantinople, thence to a June in Paris, a July and August at the
bathing places, a September at Aix, an autumn in Paris again. But always
she came back to the sleeping-car. It was the one familiar room which was
always ready for her; and though the prospect from its windows changed,
it was the one room she knew which had always the same look, the same
cramped space, the same furniture--the one room where, the moment she
stepped into it, she was at home.
Yet on this particular journey she woke while it was yet dark. A noise
slight in comparison to the clatter of the train, but distinct in
character and quite near, told her at once what had disturbed her. Some
one was moving stealthily in the compartment--her daughter. That was all.
But Mrs. Thesiger lay quite still, and, as would happen to her at times,
a sudden terror gripped her by the heart. She heard the girl beneath her,
dressing very quietly, subduing the rustle of her garments, even the
sound of her breathing.
"How much does she know?" Mrs. Thesiger asked of herself; and her heart
sank and she dared not answer.
The rustling ceased. A sharp click was heard, and the next moment through
a broad pane of glass a faint twilight crept into the carriage. The blind
had been raised from one of the windows. It was two o'clock on a morning
of July and the dawn was breaking. Very swiftly the daylight broadened,
and against the window there came into view the profile of a girl's head
and face. Seen as Mrs. Thesiger saw it, with the light still dim behind
it, it was black like an ancient daguerreotype. It was also as motionless
and as grave.
"How much does she know?"
The question would thrust itself into the mother's thoughts. She watched
her daughter intently from the dark corner where her head lay, thinking
that with the broadening of the day she might read the answer in that
still face. But she read nothing even when every feature was revealed in
the clear dead light, for the face which she saw was the face of one who
lived much apart within itself, building amongst her own dreams as a
child builds upon the sand and pays no heed to those who pass. And to
none of her dreams had Mrs. Thesiger the key. Deliberately her daughter
had withdrawn herself amongst them, and they had given her this return
for her company. They had kept her fresh and gentle in a circle where
freshness was soon lost and gentleness put aside.
Sylvia Thesiger was at this time seventeen, although her mother dressed
her to look younger, and even then overdressed her like a toy. It was of
a piece with the nature of the girl that, in this matter as in the rest,
she made no protest. She foresaw the scene, the useless scene, which
would follow upon her protest, exclamations against her ingratitude,
abuse for her impertinence, and very likely a facile shower of tears at
the end; and her dignity forbade her to enter upon it. She just let her
mother dress her as she chose, and she withdrew just a little more into
the secret chamber of her dreams. She sat now looking steadily out of the
window, with her eyes uplifted and aloof, in a fashion which had become
natural to her, and her mother was seized with a pang of envy at the
girl's beauty. For beauty Sylvia Thesiger had, uncommon in its quality
rather than in its degree. From the temples to the round point of her
chin the contour of her face described a perfect oval. Her forehead was
broad and low and her hair, which in color was a dark chestnut, parted in
the middle, whence it rippled in two thick daring waves to the ears, a
fashion which noticeably became her, and it was gathered behind into a
plait which lay rather low upon the nape of her neck. Her eyes were big,
of a dark gray hue and very quiet in their scrutiny; her mouth, small and
provoking. It provoked, when still, with the promise of a very winning
smile, and the smile itself was not so frequent but that it provoked a
desire to summon it to her lips again. It had a way of hesitating, as
though Sylvia were not sure whether she would smile or not; and when she
had made up her mind, it dimpled her cheeks and transfigured her whole
face, and revealed in her tenderness and a sense of humor. Her complexion
was pale, but clear, her figure was slender and active, but without
angularities, and she was of the middle height. Yet the quality which the
eye first remarked in her was not so much her beauty, as a certain
purity, a look almost of the Madonna, a certainty, one might say, that
even in the circle in which she moved, she had kept herself unspotted
from the world.
Thus she looked as she sat by the carriage window. But as the train drew
near to Ambérieu, the air brightened and the sunlight ministered to her
beauty like a careful handmaid, touching her pale cheeks to a rosy
warmth, giving a luster to her hair, and humanizing her to a smile. Sylvia
sat forward a little, as though to meet the sunlight, then she turned
toward the carriage and saw her mother's eyes intently watching her.
"You are awake?" she said in surprise.
"Yes, child. You woke me."
"I am very sorry. I was as quiet as I could be. I could not sleep."
"Why?" Mrs. Thesiger repeated the question with insistence. "Why couldn't
you sleep?"
"We are traveling to Chamonix," replied Sylvia. "I have been thinking of
it all night," and though she smiled in all sincerity, Mrs. Thesiger
doubted. She lay silent for a little while. Then she said, with a
detachment perhaps slightly too marked:
"We left Trouville in a hurry yesterday, didn't we?"
"Yes," replied Sylvia, "I suppose we did," and she spoke as though this
was the first time that she had given the matter a thought.
"Trouville was altogether too hot," said Mrs. Thesiger; and again silence
followed. But Mrs. Thesiger was not content. "How much does she know?"
she speculated again, and was driven on to find an answer. She raised
herself upon her elbow, and while rearranging her pillow said carelessly:
"Sylvia, our last morning at Trouville you were reading a book which
seemed to interest you very much."
"Yes."
Sylvia volunteered no information about that book.
"You brought it down to the sands. So I suppose you never noticed a
strange-looking couple who passed along the deal boards just in front of
us." Mrs. Thesiger laughed and her head fell back upon her pillow. But
during that movement her eyes had never left her daughter's face. "A
middle-aged man with stiff gray hair, a stiff, prim face, and a figure
like a ramrod. Oh, there never was anything so stiff." A noticeable
bitterness began to sound in her voice and increased as she went on.
"There was an old woman with him as precise and old-fashioned as himself.
But you didn't see them? I never saw anything so ludicrous as that
couple, austere and provincial as their clothes, walking along the deal
boards between the rows of smart people." Mrs. Thesiger laughed as she
recalled the picture. "They must have come from the Provinces. I could
imagine them living in a chateau on a hill overlooking some tiny village
in--where shall we say?" She hesitated for a moment, and then with an air
of audacity she shot the word from her lips--"in Provence."
The name, however, had evidently no significance for Sylvia, and Mrs.
Thesiger was relieved of her fears.
"But you didn't see them," she repeated, with a laugh.
"Yes, I did," said Sylvia, and brought her mother up on her elbow again.
"It struck me that the old lady must be some great lady of a past day.
The man bowed to you and--"
She stopped abruptly, but her mother completed the sentence with a
vindictiveness she made little effort to conceal.
"And the great lady did not, but stared in the way great ladies have.
Yes, I had met the man--once--in Paris," and she lay back again upon her
pillow, watching her daughter. But Sylvia showed no curiosity and no
pain. It was not the first time when people passed her mother that she
had seen the man bow and the woman ignore. Rather she had come to expect
it. She took her book from her berth and opened it.
Mrs. Thesiger was satisfied. Sylvia clearly did not suspect that it was
just the appearance of that stiff, old-fashioned couple which had driven
her out of Trouville a good month before her time--her, Mrs. Thesiger of
the many friends. She fell to wondering what in the world had brought
M. de Camours and his mother to that watering place amongst the brilliant
and the painted women. She laughed again at the odd picture they had
made, and her thoughts went back over twenty years to the time when she
had been the wife of M. de Camours in the château overlooking the village
in Provence, and M. de Camours' mother had watched her with an unceasing
jealousy. Much had happened since those days. Madame de Camours'
watchings had not been in vain, a decree had been obtained from the Pope
annulling the marriage. Much had happened. But even after twenty years
the memory of that formal life in the Provencal château was vivid enough;
and Mrs. Thesiger yawned. Then she laughed. Monsieur de Camours and his
mother had always been able to make people yawn.
"So you are glad that we are going to Chamonix, Sylvia--so glad that you
couldn't sleep?"
"Yes."
It sounded rather unaccountable to Mrs. Thesiger, but then Sylvia was to
her a rather unaccountable child. She turned her face to the wall and
fell asleep.
Sylvia's explanation, however, happened to be true. Chamonix meant the
great range of Mont Blanc, and Sylvia Thesiger had the passion for
mountains in her blood. The first appearance of their distant snows
stirred her as no emotion ever had, so that she came to date her life by
these appearances rather than by the calendar of months and days. The
morning when from the hotel windows at Glion she had first seen the twin
peaks of the Dent du Midi towering in silver high above a blue corner of
the Lake of Geneva, formed one memorable date. Once, too, in the
winter-time, as the Rome express stopped at three o'clock in the morning
at the frontier on the Italian side of the Mont Cenis tunnel, she had
carefully lifted the blind on the right-hand side of the sleeping
compartment and had seen a great wall of mountains tower up in a clear
frosty moonlight from great buttresses of black rock to delicate
pinnacles of ice soaring infinite miles away into a cloudless sky of
blue. She had come near to tears that night as she looked from the
window; such a tumult of vague longings rushed suddenly in upon her and
uplifted her. She was made aware of dim uncomprehended thoughts stirring
in the depths of her being, and her soul was drawn upward to those
glittering spires, as to enchanted magnets. Ever afterward Sylvia looked
forward, through weeks, to those few moments in her mother's annual
itinerary, and prayed with all her heart that the night might be clear of
mist and rain.
She sat now at the window with no thought of Trouville or their hurried
flight. With each throb of the carriage-wheels the train flashed nearer
to Chamonix. She opened the book which lay upon her lap--the book in
which she had been so interested when Monsieur de Camours and his mother
passed her by. It was a volume of the "Alpine Journal," more than twenty
years old, and she could not open it but some exploit of the pioneers
took her eyes, some history of a first ascent of an unclimbed peak. Such
a history she read now. She was engrossed in it, and yet at times a
little frown of annoyance wrinkled her forehead. She gave an explanation
of her annoyance; for once she exclaimed half aloud, "Oh, if only he
wouldn't be so _funny_!" The author was indeed being very funny, and to
her thinking never so funny as when the narrative should have been most
engrossing. She was reading the account of the first ascent of an
aiguille in the Chamonix district, held by guides to be impossible and
conquered at last by a party of amateurs. In spite of its humor Sylvia
Thesiger was thrilled by it. She envied the three men who had taken part
in that ascent, envied them their courage, their comradeship, their
bivouacs in the open air beside glowing fires, on some high shelf of
rock above the snows. But most of all her imagination was touched by the
leader of that expedition, the man who sometimes alone, sometimes in
company, had made sixteen separate attacks upon that peak. He stared
from the pages of the volume--Gabriel Strood. Something of his great
reach of limb, of his activity, of his endurance, she was able to
realize. Moreover he had a particular blemish which gave to him a
particular interest in her eyes, for it would have deterred most men
altogether from his pursuit and it greatly hampered him. And yet in
spite of it, he had apparently for some seasons stood prominent in the
Alpine fraternity. Gabriel Strood was afflicted with a weakness in the
muscles of one thigh. Sylvia, according to her custom, began to picture
him, began to talk with him.
She wondered whether he was glad to have reached that summit, or whether
he was not on the whole rather sorry--sorry for having lost out of his
life a great and never-flagging interest. She looked through the
subsequent papers in the volume, but could find no further mention of his
name. She perplexed her fancies that morning. She speculated whether
having made this climb he had stopped and climbed no more; or whether he
might not get out of this very train on to the platform at Chamonix. But
as the train slowed down near to Annemasse, she remembered that the
exploit of which she had read had taken place more than twenty years ago.