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
abbe 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.