Nearly a week had elapsed since the departure of the Wyatts, and yet,
contrary to all precedent, the volatile Phil's normal good spirits
showed no sign of returning. He was hard hit.
No further opportunity of meeting alone did Alma afford him after that
one long, glowing evening. Her manner to him at parting had been very
kind and sweet; and with a last look into her eyes, and a pressure of
the hand a good deal more lingering on his part than etiquette demanded,
let alone justified, the poor fellow was obliged to be contented, for of
opportunities for taking a more affectionate farewell she would give him
none. They would meet again, she said, and he must wait patiently until
then. But to him such meeting seemed a very long way off, and meanwhile
the residue of the bright summer, hitherto so joyously mapped out for
walking and climbing and fun in general, to which he had been looking
forward with all the delight of a sound organisation both physical and
mental, seemed now to represent a flat and dreary hiatus--to be filled
up as best it might, to be got through as quickly as possible.
Philip Orlebar was hard hit--indeed, very hard hit. He had never been
genuinely in love in his life, though nobody had more often fancied
himself in that parlous state. But now he was undergoing his first
sharp attack of the genuine disorder, and the experience was--well,
somewhat trying.
And the symptoms, like those of hydrophobia, manifested themselves
diversely. Genial, sunny-tempered Phil became morose--"surly as a
chained bulldog developing influenza," as the elastic Gedge tersely put
it. He avoided his kind, and evinced a desire for wandering, by his own
sweet self, into all manner of breakneck places. More especially did he
avoid Fordham, whose continually cropping up sarcasms at the expense of
the sex now ennobled and deified by the production of one Alma Wyatt,
fairly maddened him.
"Damned cheap kind of cynicism, don't you know," he growled one day. "I
wonder you don't drop it, Fordham." In fact, so confoundedly
quarrelsome did he wax that it became a source of wonder how Fordham
stood it so equably, and at last some one said so. The answer was
characteristic.
"Look here, Wentworth. If you were down with fever, and delirious,
you'd think me a mighty queer chap if I took mortal offence at anything
you said in the course of your ravings. Now that poor chap is down with
the worst kind of fever and delirium. By and by, when he wakes up and
convalesces, he'll ask shamefacedly whether he didn't act and talk like
an awful fool during his delirium. No. You can't quarrel with a man
for being off his nut. You can only pity him."
On the letter whose receipt had caused him such disquietude but a week
ago Philip had since bestowed no further thought. It seemed such a far
back event--it and the individual whose existence it so inopportunely
recalled--and withal such an insignificant one. For beside the
withdrawal of Alma Wyatt's daily presence, all other ills, past,
present, and to come, looked incomparably small, and the contemplation
of them not worth undertaking.
However indulgent might be Fordham with regard to his younger friend's
disorder, secretly he hugged himself with mirth, and enjoyed the joke
hugely in his own saturnine fashion as he read off the symptoms. How
well he knew them all. How many and many a one had he seen go through
them, and live to laugh at his own abject, if helpless, imbecility--to
laugh in not a few instances with almost as much bitterness as he
himself might do. He believed that it was in his power to comfort poor
Phil, up to a certain point. As a looker on at the game, and a
keen-sighted one, he felt pretty sure that Alma Wyatt was far more
tenderly disposed towards her adorer than the latter dreamed. But it
was not in accordance with his principles to do this. Richard Fordham
turned matchmaker! More likely patchmaker! he thought, with a
diabolical guffaw as the whimsicality of the idea and the jingle thereof
struck him; for like the proverbial patching of the old garment with the
new cloth would be the lifelong alliance of his friend with Alma Wyatt--
or any other woman. No. His mission was, if anything, to bring about a
contrary result, and thus save the guileless Philip from riveting upon
his yet free limbs the iron fetters of a degrading and fraudulent
bondage--for such, we grieve to say, was Fordham's definition of the
estate of holy matrimony.
"Well, Phil," he said, as the latter, returned from a recent and
solitary climb, tired and listless, took his seat a quarter of an hour
late at _table d'hote_, "does the world present a more propitious aspect
from the giddy summit of the Corbex?"
"Oh, hang it, no! But, I say, Fordham--what a deuced slow crowd there
is here now. Just look at that table over there."
"Nine old maids--no, eleven--in a row," said the other, putting up his
eyeglass. "Four parsons--poor specimens of the breed, too. That is to
say, three old maids and a devil-dodger; then three more ditto and two
devil-dodgers; finally the balance, with the remaining sky-pilot mixed
among them somewhere. Truly an interesting crowd!"
"By Jove, rather!" growled Philip. "And just look at that infernal
tailor's boy over there laying down the law."
Following his glance, Fordham beheld a carroty-headed snobling fresh
from the counter or the cutting-board, who, in all the exuberance of his
hard-earned holiday and the enterprising spirit which had prompted him
to enjoy the same among Alpine sublimities in preference to the more
homely and raffish attractions of shrimp-producing Margate, was
delivering himself on Church and State, the House of Peers and the
Constitution in general, with a freedom which left nothing to be
desired, for the edification of his appreciative neighbours--only they
didn't look appreciative. Philip contemplated this natural product of
an age of progress and the Rights of Man with unconcealed disgust.
"Faugh! Are we going to be overrun with bounders of that description?"
he growled.
"Later on we may drop across a sprinkling of the species," said Fordham.
"Even the Alps are no longer sacred against the invasion of the modern
Hun."
"Well, it's no longer any fun sticking here, and I'm sick of it," went
on Phil.
"All right. Let's adjourn to Zermatt or somewhere, and begin climbing.
You want shaking up a bit."