to do so. Suddenly, as they stood there, the hounds burst into view, in
more or less full cry, according to their agility. Gliding, shuffling,
sprawling, the thin white line made what haste it could toward the
village of Andana, where lunch was waiting. No one cared very much
about the hares; elderly ladies, repenting of their rashness, would have
paid precious gold to have been carried to any destination; the girls
desired only that the men should admire their dexterity; the men, that
their tricks should not go unobserved by the girls. Here and there, a
fine performer rejoiced in the magic of the exercise and swooped down
the mountain-side with the dash of an eagle upon its prey. But
dash--except as an expression of the language employed--was in the main
lacking to the _cortege_, which moved as though in lingering agony.
Bob hazarded the opinion that they had better go down immediately to the
"bun-scrap" in the village, and reluctantly, with a last prolonged
embrace which threatened the stability of the feminine superstructure,
they turned and began to ski gently down through the wood. Hardly,
however, had they made a start, when there came, not from below but from
above, a loud and prolonged cry, which echoed in the very heights of the
Zaat, and brought them to a stand in an instant. Someone had fallen, up
yonder, from one of the dangerous precipices--there could not be a doubt
of it!
"It must have been that fellow who dodged the gendarme," said Bob, after
a little interval of waiting. Nellie did not know what to make of it.
The cry was not repeated, and the pines hid the truth from their view.
Nevertheless both were a little awed, and it was impossible not to
believe that something untoward had happened.
"I wonder if we ought to go up?" Bob asked her. She replied, with a very
white face, that it was not their business.
"There are always plenty of people at Vermala, and I know some of ours
have gone up to the Zaat to-day. We could do no good, Bob--I'm sure I
would go, if I thought that we could--but is it our business, when there
are so many others about?"
"And the whole thing just spoof, perhaps. By George, though; if it were
not!--if it were murder, Nellie?"
"Murder?--you make me shudder. How can you be so horrid, Bob?"
Bob hastened to protest that horrors were what most girls doted on; but
he was obviously ill at ease, and neither said much while they went down
through the wood. A little further on they disturbed, maladroitly, a
pair of lovers, who started up in guilty fashion to reveal the red face
of a certain Mr. Richard Fenton, and the tousled hair of that amiable
and athletic nymph, Miss Marjory Rider. It was the merriest meeting in
all the world, and Nellie's "Oh!" when she espied her sister would have
done credit to a lady of the theatre.
"Oh, Margy, how can you look me in the face--?"
"But we're engaged, Nell--I'm going to marry Dick."
Dick looked under his eyes at Bob, but he seemed rather abashed, and by
no means a lover who would have done credit to the heroics of the poets.
Upon his part, Bob said never a word about his own predicament; but
Nellie had it out in a twinkling, and there the four of them stood,
giggling and laughing and blushing. It remained for Bob to set matters
straight by a resounding cheer, which he did presently to the great
scandal of his _fiancee_, and the surprise of all in the vicinity of the
wood. Then he discovered that he was hungry--a meagre lover sighing for
baked meats.
"We shall miss the bun-scrap if we don't buck up," he said. "I'm sure
old Gordon Snagg will eat all the sandwiches within half a mile of him.
Let's make a dash for it, Nellie; these two will stop here spooning all
day. It makes me sick to see them."
He did not wait for his friend to put on his skis, but taking Nellie by
the hand, sailed with her down the nearest slope, and presently came out
just above Benny's cottage. Here a little Frenchman, standing on the
path which debouches from the woods below Vermala, waved his hand to
them in a frantic and demoralised appeal, and when they approached him,
began to tell them an excited tale which even one of his own countrymen
might not have followed. As for Bob, who had forgotten the only
irregular verb he ever knew, and Nellie, whose French hardly represented
the guinea expended upon it per quarter, they were at their wits' end,
until Benson himself came to their assistance; as he did almost
immediately, lurching down from the chalet and asking gruffly what was
up. To him the Frenchman now addressed himself, while Benny listened
with an amused smile. Then he interpreted the rigmarole to the others.
"He says a man's fallen down from the height up yonder. That's steep,
anyway; a baby would walk the path. Do you know anything of it? Did
you see anything, Mr. Otway?"
"We saw a man and another following him," Bob said in a halting way. "I
think the little man was a gendarme, for he had something bright on his
hat. They went off toward the Zaat, and then we heard one of them shout
out. I shouldn't wonder if this gentleman were right"--pointing to the
Frenchman--"it's very likely the pair may have had a row."
To their great surprise and wonder, Benny turned as pale as a sheet.
Muttering something about a silly tale, he, nevertheless, went about,
and returned almost immediately to his chalet, leaving the young couple
to appease the excited Frenchman as best they could. That worthy,
perceiving their lack of understanding, renewed his appeals, this time
to Dick Fenton and Marjory, who had just emerged from the wood.
"What does he say?" Dick asked his friend. Bob assumed an air of
reproving superiority, and replied:
"Oh, a man has fallen off the Zaat--!"
Marjory said "Oh!" and turned very pale. Dick was not so sentimental.
"Well," he exclaimed rather pettishly, "why doesn't he go and pick him
up? I expect it's all my eye; people don't fall off the Zaat, of all
places. Why don't you tell him so, Bob?"
"He speaks _patois_--mine's no good to him. You have a shot, Dick, or
perhaps Miss Marjory will?"
They laughed at this, and the Frenchman turned away in despair. These
English assuredly were mad and without pity. He had told his story to
half a dozen of them already, and all the answer he got was the
gibberish of a tongue spoken neither in heaven nor on earth. Obviously,
he must find one of his own countrymen, and they must go together to the
slopes above. Failing that, he would return, and telephone to the
police; an alternative which so pleased him that he was already half-way
down to the hotel, when Benny, who had appeared on the scene again,
overtook him and entered immediately into an exciting argument. Benny
spoke French like a true Parisian--the stranger had no difficulty in
understanding him.
The others, meanwhile, had gone down to the village of Andana. There in
a little cafe, ordinarily shut during the winter, the hares and hounds
browsed upon a common pasture. And curiously enough, while Bob and Dick
ate with good appetite, their mood was hardly as joyous as it should
have been; while those interesting young ladies, Miss Marjory and Miss
Nellie Rider, wore already something of the staid demeanour of the
married woman.
It was not until after lunch and much good Malvoisie that the young men
drew aside to debate the situation in anxious whispers. Assuredly, as
Bob admitted, they had "done it," and time alone and that far from
amiable old lady, Mrs. Rider, could show them the way out.
In short, as Dick added savagely: "they were in a devil of a mess."
*CHAPTER X*
*A SPECIALIST IS CONSULTED*
The amiable discussion, begun in the interval after lunch, was continued
at the Palace Hotel during that pleasant hour when tea is a memory and
dinner an expectation.
The girls had gone up to their room by this time, hand in hand, and
tremulous with the powers of suppressed narration. For them the supreme
issue concerned an amiable lady who was quite in ignorance of the
surprise prepared for her, and would certainly shed tears when the
amatory bombshell exploded. For the youths it was another matter
altogether. Conscience had begun to twit them with melancholy gibes
upon their rashness. Or, as Bob put it tersely, a couple of wives and
three hundred and ninety pounds a year between the pair of them. That
was the bald truth. It had seemed otherwise in the woods when the sun
shone, and the great mountains looked down kindly upon the lovers.
"What we want," said Dick resolutely, "is someone to advise us." He was
a sentimental person, and given to idealism. "We ought to know how we
stand before the thing goes any further. Marjory's a dear little girl,
and I shall never marry anybody else. But that doesn't say I have the
right to marry her on a hundred and ninety a year--you'll admit that,
Bob?"
Bob admitted it, and ordered a "mixed Vermouth." They were sitting in
the bar at the time, and could hear Bess Bethune scolding the doctor in
the passage outside. Distantly, from the drawing-room came the strains
of one of Schubert's nocturnes, played by a "half-back" from Harrow, who
had some difficulty with the bass. The charming Swiss girl, who served
them, did not understand much English, but they would have consulted her
for two pins, so dreadful was the emergency.
"It's my opinion, we were just rushed into it," said Bob, taking up the
conversation from an unobservable point, "I like Nellie better than any
girl I ever saw, but I confess it's rather a knock to hear she's been
engaged three times already. Suppose I were to meet one of the other
fellows when we're married! He'd have the laugh of me, anyway."
Dick sighed.
"Marjory's been engaged once--she told me so. I don't think a girl can
be expected to know her own mind until she's two or three and twenty.
We'd have to take a little flat somewhere, and cut it deuced close; do
you think she is the girl to do that, Bob?"
Bob was far from thinking it.
"She proposes to run a motor, Dick, she told me so. You've got fifteen
hundred a year and a shooting-box in Scotland, so the hotel says. My
place is in Norfolk--I suppose they mean the tent Jack Stevens and I
pitched by Horsey Mere last autumn. I didn't say so, though; let's keep
it up as long as we can; in for a penny, in for fifteen hundred pound,
you know."
Dick drained his glass and appeared to cogitate. Presently he said,
almost as though it were an inspiration:
"I tell you what, Bob, let's talk to the 'little widow' about it. I'm
sure she's a woman of the world. She'd put us straight, right enough;
let's go up and see her."
Bob looked at him scornfully.
"Why, where do you think she is, then?"
"Who, Mrs. Kennaird? Why, in Number 43, of course. It's on the board,
isn't it?"
"The board be hanged! She's left the hotel--she left this morning, and
went up to the chalet, near Benny's."
"Then let's go to the chalet after her. I'm sure she's one of the
nicest little women in the place. And she's been married herself; she'd
know what we ought to do. Let's go and see her now."
He stood up, excited by the idea; and, really, when he came to reflect
upon it, Bob did not find the notion displeasing. It was true that
there had been ugly talk in the hotel concerning this very person; true
that she had left under circumstances so mysterious that a hundred
versions were already current, both of her past life and the promise of
her future. In these the boys had taken little part, except to say that
it was a pity people had nothing better to do than to slander so
charming a lady; and their abstention made the proposed visit to her
chalet seem quite chivalrous. Five minutes later they were climbing up
the steps of the skating-rink; whence it was but a little way to the
bungalow.
There were lights in the lower windows of the house, and when they
knocked, a solemn-looking Swiss maid opened to them and listened as a
freckled automaton to their far from coherent explanations. They wished
to see Mrs. Kennaird--for they were still in ignorance of her true
name--upon a private matter, and one to be explained to no other. To
which Dick added the rider, that they would be very grateful to Mrs.
Kennaird if she would see them, and would waste as little as possible of
her valuable time; a rigmarole at which Bob would have laughed had he
not been so very nervous. But, as he was nervous, he stood first upon
one foot and then upon the other and never said a word until the maid
returned and ushered them into the drawing-room where the "little widow"
awaited them. Bob did not know quite why it was, but from that very
moment he felt as though his troubles were at an end; while as for Dick,
he declared afterwards that all his anxiety vanished like the mists
directly he set eyes on that gracious lady.
Lily was surprised to see the boys, for she had been awaiting
another--perhaps she welcomed them with a greater cordiality upon that
account. Very charming, in a loose gown of black lace, it was not her
beauty but her womanhood which cast a spell wherever she went; and to be
sure, she was as much out of place in that mediocre medley of Andana as
a diamond in a setting of German silver.
"Yes," she said, encouraging Bob to speak, "I remember you perfectly,
Mr. Otway; were we not fellow-prisoners at Sierre during the blizzard?
And Mr. Fenton: why, you rode in the same sleigh the day we came here."
Fenton said that it was so, and apologised at the same time for certain
frivolities upon the journey, particularly for the votive offering of
snow hurled at the shrine of one Sir Gordon Snagg. When this had
provoked the kindly lady to a smile, Bob took up the running.
"Everyone at the hotel is beastly sorry that you have left," he
exclaimed, and then qualified it by saying: "That is, everyone who
counts. The place seems quite different since you went."
"Oh, but I only left this morning, and you were paper-chasing, were you
not?"
"Of course he was," cried Dick, "and proposing to Nellie Rider at the
same time. That's what he came to tell you, Mrs. Kennaird."
"While Bob wants to say that he is engaged to Marjory, and doesn't know
what to do about it."
"To do about it! Oh, my dear Mr. Fenton, what do you mean?"
They were both blushing very much by this time, and it was quite a
charity to ask them to sit down. Lily herself took a seat upon the sofa,
and, enjoying the situation immensely, encouraged them to go on.
"So I must congratulate you both; how good of you to take me into your
confidence so soon. Why, it was only this morning, was it not?"
"In the woods below the Zaat," interposed Bob quickly; "I could show you
the place."
"And I was just a quarter of a mile away. Was it not a coincidence,
Mrs. Kennaird? We were both done for when we met."
She looked from one to the other, asking herself whether this was said
in jest, or was indeed the very far from sentimental confession of a not
unsentimental youth. And that was a riddle she could not read. It
seemed to her that she was listening to boys from a public school, who
had all the fine airs and the sporadic idiom of the city, but were at
heart as simple as any Corydon from remote pastures.
"Really," she said, with just a suspicion of reproach in her tone.
"Really, you must be serious, Mr. Fenton."
"I was never more serious in my life. We're both engaged, and we've got
three hundred and ninety pounds a year between us; that's why we've come
to you. You can tell us what we ought to do about it."
She laughed--it was so droll.
"Then you regard it altogether as a matter of money?"
Bob looked rueful.
"We don't, but Mrs. Rider will. These old girls are regular nuts on the
cash; she's sure to want to know what we've got."
"Then, of course, you will tell her everything?"
They looked at each other a little sorrowfully. It was Dick who made
answer.
"If we do, the engagements will be off. We shall have to cut the girls
to-morrow, and it would make it awkward for them. Don't you think we
could have a truce or something--lie low until the night before we go?
Don't you think that, Mrs. Kennaird?"
Lily shook her head.
"I think you are a pair of babies," she said emphatically. "You don't
seem to know whether you wish to marry or not. That enters into the
question, I think; you certainly ought to make up your minds."
They nodded their heads as though perfectly in accord with so obvious a
truth. Presently, Bob, who hugged his knee during the harangue--not
under the delusion that it was Nellie Rider's waist, but because he did
not know what to do with his hands--spoke for the pair of them.
"You see," he said--and Lily saw nothing but the humour of it--"you see
it's this way. Dick's a sentimentalist, and I'm a philosopher, and
we've tumbled into the same boat somehow. I would like to marry Nellie
if I could make her happy, and all that sort of thing; but it's rotten
beginning on two hundred a year, and Dick's only got a hundred and
ninety. Now what I feel is this: Is it quite fair to the girls?"
"Did you think of that when you proposed to them this morning?"
Dick shook his head.
"I was never more in love in my life," he said. "I forgot everything
else in heaven or earth but Marjory. I would marry her to-morrow, if it
wasn't for the beastly cash."
"And you, Mr. Otway?"
"I say the same, but I don't think I should care to begin so soon. She
might give me a year's grace."
Lily nodded her head; she understood now.
"I think you will have your year," she said a little merrily. "To tell
you the truth, Mr. Otway, I should not be surprised if you remained a
bachelor. As to Mr. Fenton, well, I think that will depend upon Mrs.
Rider. Would you like me to speak to her for you, for both of you if
you wish it?"
They jumped at the idea. She was a regular brick, and so very much
superior to anyone at Andana that the thing was as good as done if she
became their ambassador. The promise put them in the seventh heaven.
"If she says 'No,' we can let bygones be bygones," Bob added
enthusiastically. "I will treat Nellie as a sister, and the hotel need
know nothing about it. You don't know what a load you've taken off my
back, Mrs. Kennaird; I shall never forget it."
She rejoined that it was a pleasure to help two silly boys in love, and
having said it, the boys in their turn perceived that the interview must
terminate. Reluctantly, they shook hands with her, and then, as she
stood with them a moment at the door of the chalet, Dick Fenton remarked
the presence of two gendarmes, who were going up toward Vermala,
carrying lanterns in their hands. He bethought him immediately of the
comic-tragedy of the morning, and began to tell her about it, just to
show that he could speak of other things than matrimony.
"They say there's been a murder up in the woods," he declared
cheerfully; "that's the very latest intelligence at Vermala. Bob saw an
Englishman being followed by one of the Swiss police, and he heard a
weird cry a little while afterwards. Then we met an old Frenchman, who
declared that he saw the gendarme fall on the slope below the Zaat.
Those fellows would be going up to look for him, I suppose. There'll be
a pretty hullabaloo if they find him."
She did not speak a word; they mistook her silence for lack of interest,
and fearing to stay longer, said "good night" once more, and went with
boyish steps down the hillside together.
*CHAPTER XI*
*THE VIGIL OF TRAGEDY*
Lily watched the boys go down the hillside, and when they were lost to
view she did not move from the door of the chalet. An onlooker might
have said that her eyes searched the heights for tidings they alone
could give her. A bitter wind blowing up the valley, a sky pregnant
with omens of tempest, did not drive her back to the shelter of the
house. She was unconscious of the cold, and took a cloak from the
saturnine maid with a smile and a protest.
"I really do not want it, Louise--I don't feel the cold."
"But, Madame, it is going to snow; you will be ill, Madame, and no one
to nurse you."
Lily put the cloak about her shoulders, and then asked the girl another
question.
"Can you see a lantern upon the hillside, Louise, up there below
Vermala?" The maid, grown curious, came and stood with her, but
declared she could see nothing.
"There were gendarmes by here just now, Madame. I know them both, Albert
and Philip, from Sion; there will have been trouble at the hotel, then;
they would not send Monsieur Albert if it were not so."
Lily nodded her head.
"You do not often have trouble up here, Louise?"
"Ah, Madame, the world is all the same whether you are up in the
mountains or down in the valleys. There are wicked people at Andana,
just as anywhere else. It would be one of the waiters who has robbed
his master. There are Germans at Vermala, and they are all thieves--so,
you see, the police must be here."
Lily made no reply. The lanterns had come into view by this time, and
could be seen dancing to and fro upon the high path which leads up to
the hotel perched upon the plateau below the Zaat. It was apparent that
the men were not searching the hillside as she had supposed; and, when
she was sure of this, she shut the door and went back to the little
library. Louise, meanwhile, had returned to the kitchen to prepare the
modest supper which should be served at eight o'clock. Perhaps the
gendarmes would pay the chalet a visit upon their return, in view of
which possibility some culinary diligence was necessary.
In the library, Lily sat down to her writing-table to finish a letter to
her brother Harold, laid aside upon the appearance of the boys, and now
taken up with reluctance.
She had been trying to tell her brother to concern himself less with her
affairs, and to be sure that whatever she might do, due regard would be
paid to the interests and the scruples of others. Such a theme had been
difficult enough before the boys appeared; but she found it quite
impossible when they had left. Not a line could she write; not a
sentence frame. A shadow had enveloped her suddenly, and she could not
escape it.
Word by word she pieced together the story she had heard and tried to
give it a meaning. A man pursued upon the mountain road and another
following him! Then a loud cry heard by several people, and the belief,
expressed openly, that murder had been done. Shrinking from her own
dread of a terrible truth, she could not quiet the voice which told her
that there was but one man at Vermala in whom, the probabilities being
considered, the police might be interested--and that man, her husband,
Luton! Why, the whole trend of his life pointed to such an end as this.
And she had feared and dreamed of it since the day she first learned to
know him and to realise the tragedy of her own fate. The end would come
before all the world, she had said--and the day of it was at hand!
She put the letter into the blotting book, and went to the window again.
The lanterns were no longer to be seen, and the night had come down with
a darkness so intense that even the nearer slopes were invisible. Shut
from her eyes, the hidden woods were revealed to a keen imagination
which filled them with alien figures, searching here and there for a
truth which must so alter her own life (if such a truth existed) that
hereafter the whole world would hardly offer her a harbourage from the
shame of it.
As in a vision, she saw the dead man lying there, deep in the snow, and
the white flakes falling anew upon his face. A glow from a lantern
searched it out, and declared the horror of the secret. And up there at
the hotel another waited, dreading the instant of discovery--perchance
preparing already for flight in the hope that discovery might never
come.
It was all hysterical, and out of harmony with her good common sense, as
she admitted when she turned from the window, and, looking at the clock,
discovered it to be half-past six precisely. At seven, Luton had
promised to come down from Vermala to see if there were a telegram from
Sir Frederick Kennaird--letter there could hardly be for another four
and twenty hours. If he came, and assuredly he would come, he might
very well give an account of the affair which would so deride her
fancies that she would be ashamed even to remember them. Or, he might
say that he knew nothing of the affair at all, had taken no part in it,
and had not heard it named. The latter was quite an optimistic version,
to which she clung tenaciously, sitting again at her writing-table and
composing quite a satisfactory epistle upon Andana and its people; to
which she added excellent reasons for her preference of the chalet she
occupied. The hotel, she declared, was far too noisy--her nerves were
no longer equal to the exigencies of distracted youth, nor could she
support the banalities of a middle-age which sought to stamp out the
years by a grotesque display of elephantine energies. From these she
had fled to the solitude of the chalet--a half-truth which entirely
overlooked the personal element and skimmed over the broken ground where
the seeds of slander had fallen.