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Fordham's Feud
Fordham's Feudполная версия

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Fordham's Feud

Язык: Английский
Год издания: 2017
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“This sort of thing” being a long day’s expedition of the nature of a picnic, a walk for the most part over the glacier to some point of interest or scenic advantage, which in the present instance was a trip to the Mountet Cabin, a structure erected by the Alpine Club high up among the rocks at the base of the Besso, for the convenience of parties ascending the Rothhorn or traversing one of the several difficult, and more or less dangerous, glacier passes leading into the next valley. The hour was early – before sunrise in fact – and our two friends were threading their way rapidly between the rows of brown châlets which constitute the picturesque hamlet of Zinal, intent on overtaking the rest of their party, who had “just strolled quietly on,” a process which in nineteen cases out of twenty may be taken to mean that if the overtaker comes up with the advance guard within a couple of hours, he or she has progressed at a rate by no means pleasant or advisable as the start for a long day’s walk or climb. This instance, however, was the twentieth, for whereas those in advance consisted of General Wyatt and his niece, two learned young ladies with short-cropped hair and spectacles, and a young clergyman, also in spectacles, the athletic pair had no difficulty in overhauling them in a very short time, and that with no inordinate effort.

“Well, Mr Fordham. It isn’t always we poor women who keep everybody waiting,” said Alma, mischievously, as they came up, with a glance at Phil, to whose reluctance to leave his snug couch until the very last moment was due the fact that the party had not started together.

“That’s what comes of doing a good action – one always gets abused for it,” replied Fordham. “If I hadn’t acted as whipper-in you’d never have seen this lazy dog until you were half-way home again.”

“Oh, the poor men! They never can bring themselves to leave their beds. And yet they call themselves the stronger sex,” put in one of the shock-headed young women, who, by virtue of being students at one of the seats of learning recently founded for their sex, looked down as from a lofty pedestal and with sublime pity upon the world at large. “The strong-minded sex, I should have said.”

“Not much use, are they, Miss Severn?” said the parson in playful banter.

“Except when the midnight mouse in the wainscotting suggests burglars, or the booming of the wind in the chimney, bogies,” rejoined Fordham, tranquilly. “In a thunderstorm, too, their presence is apt to be highly reassuring.”

To this the shock-headed one deigned no rejoinder. She and her sister had formed some slight acquaintance with the Wyatts, and had joined them in expeditions similar to the present one; in fact, were rather more glad to do so than the others were that they should. Like too many of their kind they imagined that disagreeable, not to say rude, remarks at the expense of the opposite sex demonstrated the superiority of their own in general, and such representatives of it as devoted their minds to conic sections in particular.

Nothing, as a rule, is more depressing to the poor creatures of an effete civilisation than an early morning start. Than the hour of summer sunrise in the Alps, however, nothing is more exhilarating. The cool, fresh, bracing air, the statuesque grandeur of the great mountains, the dash and sparkle of the swirling stream, the mingling aromatic fragrances distilling from opening wild flowers and resinous pines – it is a glimpse of fairyland, a very tonic to heart and brain, a reservoir of nerve power to limb and system.

And now beyond the huge projecting shoulder of the Alpe d’Arpitetta the rays of the newly-risen sun were flooding the snowfields with a golden radiancy. No more shade directly. But the air was crisp, and the sky of cloudless beauty. To two of those present it was but the beginning of a glowing halcyon day – one among many. Nearly a fortnight had gone by since their arrival, a fortnight spent in similar fashion – one day succeeding another, spent from dawn to dark amid the sublimest scenes of Nature on her most inspiring scale.

Philip Orlebar, the mercurial, the careless, had undergone a marked change. And it was a change which affected him for the better, was that brought about by this crisis of his life, in that it seemed to impart a not wholly unneeded ballast to his otherwise line character, a dignity to his demeanour which became him well, the more so that there was the stamp of a great and settled happiness upon his face, and in the straight, sunny glance of the clear eyes, that was goodly to look upon. The Fire of the Live Coal burnt bright and clear.

“Alma, darling, why not let me say something to your uncle now instead of waiting until you go home again?” he said one day, when they were scrambling about among the rocks in search of the coveted edelweiss. “Then I shall feel that you do really belong to me.”

She looked at him for a moment – looked at him standing over her in his straight youthful strength and patrician beauty, and hesitated. She was growing very fond of him, and, more important still, very proud of him, which with a woman of Alma’s stamp means that her surrender is already a thing to be ranked among certainties. But the circumstances of her home life had been such as to impart to her character a vein of wisdom, of caution, which was considerably beyond her years.

“No, Phil – not yet,” she answered, with a little shake of her head; but beneath all the decision of her tone there lay a hidden caress. “This is a summer idyll – a mere holiday. Wait until it is over and life – real life – begins again. No, stop – I won’t have that – here,” she broke off suddenly, springing away from him with a laugh and a blush. “Remember how many people at the hotel have telescopes, not to mention the big one planted out in front of the door. We may constitute an object of special attention at the present moment, for all we know.”

Return we to our party now bound for the Mountet hut, viâ the Durand glacier. This was not the first time they had made this expedition, consequently they were able to dispense with a guide – and Fordham, at any rate, had had sufficient previous Alpine experience. The great silent ice river locked within the vast depths of its rock-bound bed rippled in a succession of frozen billows between its lofty mountain walls, the human figures traversing it looking the merest pigmies among the awful vastness of the Alpine solitude. Myriad threads of clear water gurgled with musical murmur through the blue smooth funnels they had worn for themselves in the surface of the ice, which glistened and sparkled in the sunlight in a sea of diamond-like facets. “Tables,” viz, stones of all shapes and sizes heaved up, by the action of the glacier, upon smooth round ice-pedestals – sometimes perfectly wonderful in their resemblance to the real article of furniture – abounded, and here and there the dull hollow roar of some heavier stream plunging between the vertical blue sides of a straight chimney-like shaft, which it had worn to an incredible depth by its action.

“What an extremely good-looking fellow that young Orlebar is,” remarked the clergyman, who had been observing the pair some little distance in front.

“I can’t say that handsome men are at all to my taste,” replied the elder of the two learned sisters, loyal to a recollection of evenings spent at meetings of various scientific societies in the company of an undersized, round-shouldered professor with a huge head of unkempt hair and a very dandruffy coat-collar. “There is never anything in them. They are invariably empty-headed to a degree.”

“And desperately conceited,” put in the younger, acidly.

“And this young Orlebar is the most empty-headed and conceited of them all,” rejoined the elder. “I consider him a perfectly odious young man.”

“Really? Now, do you know – I – er – I thought him rather a nice fellow,” said the clergyman timidly. “Very pleasant and taking manners, and a perfect gentleman.”

“There is no accounting for tastes, of course,” was the severely frigid reply; and the poor parson’s heart sank within him as he wondered whether this sort of thing was to be his lot all day, and whether it would be practicable to cut adrift from his present convoy and effect a juncture with Fordham and the General, now some few score yards in the rear.

“Alma dear, who on earth cut those awful Severns into our crowd to-day?” Philip was saying, moved doubtless by that extraordinary coincidence which inspires two people simultaneously with the same idea, though that idea be entirely irrelevant to any subject then under consideration or discussion.

Alma laughed.

“I think they more than three parts cut themselves in, and having done so, cut in Mr Massiter,” she answered.

“Oh, I don’t mind the parson! He’s an inoffensive chap, you know, and a good sort, I think. But those two fearful girls, with their ‘terms’ and their ‘triposes’ and the ‘dear Principal,’ and their shock heads, and ‘quite too-too’ get-up! Faugh! They never open their mouths without saying something tart and disagreeable. I suppose they think it a sign of erudition.”

“We mustn’t abuse other people, especially on a day like this – it’s a bad habit to get into. I agree with you though – they might make themselves a little more pleasant. However, they have their use. Didn’t it ever occur to you, you dear, foolish boy, that I may not always care to be the only girl in the party? Though it amounts almost to the same thing, for you never will let any one else come near me.”

“No, I won’t,” he assented, cheerfully. “I want you all to myself. It may not last much longer. And – what a time we have had. I would willingly go back and go through it all again.”

“But we are not going away to-morrow, or the next day either,” she replied, with a sunny laugh. “We shall have many more such days as this.”

“It is perfect!” he continued, now in a low tone. “Almost too perfect to last. When shall we be ever again together like this?”

The remark was made without a shadow of arrière pensée, yet it sounded almost prophetic. Why should it, however? No cloud was in their sky any more than in the firmament of deep blue spreading overhead. No shadow was across their path any more than upon the dazzling snowfields lying aloft in pure and unbroken stretches. The morrow would be but a reproduction of to-day – a heaven of youth and its warm pulsations, of sunny freedom from care, and – of love.

And now Fordham’s voice was heard behind.

“Hallo, Phil?” it shouted, characteristically addressing the stronger and, in its owner’s opinion, more important and only responsible member of the pair in advance. “Better hold on till we come up. We are getting among the séracs.”

They were. Great masses of ice, by the side of which a five-storey house would look puny, were heaving up to the sky. The glacier here made a steep and abrupt drop, falling abroad into wide, lateral chasms – not the black and grim crevasses of bottomless depth into which an army might disappear and leave no trace, such as the smooth, treacherous surface of the upper névés are seamed with, but awkward rifts for all that, deep enough to break a limb or even a neck. A labyrinthian course along the sharp ice-ridges overhanging these became necessary, and although Philip was armed with the requisite ice-axe and by this time knew how to wield it, Fordham satirically reflected that the mind of a man in the parlous state of his friend was not hung upon a sufficiently even balance to ensure the necessary equilibrium from a material and physical point of view. So he chose to rally his party.

A little ordinary caution was necessary, that was all. A little step-cutting now and then, a helping hand for the benefit of the ladies, and they threaded their way in perfect safety among the yawning rifts, the great blue séracs towering up overhead, piled in titanic confusion – here in huge blocks, there standing apart in tall needle-like shafts. One of these suddenly collapsed close to them, falling with an appalling roar, filling the air with a shower of glittering fragments, causing the hard surface to vibrate beneath them with the grinding crash of hundreds of tons of solid ice.

“By Jove! What a magnificent sight?” cried the old General. “I wouldn’t have missed that for the world.”

“‘He casteth forth His ice like morsels,’” quoted the parson to himself, but not in so low a tone as not to be heard by Alma, becoming aware of which he was conscious of a nervous and guilty start, as of one who had allowed himself to be found preaching out of church. But he had in her no supercilious or scoffing critic.

“I think the vastness of this ice-world is the most wonderful thing in Nature, Mr Massiter,” she said.

“It is indeed, Miss Wyatt,” was the pleased reply.

And then, catching eagerly at this chance of relief from the somewhat depressing spell of the two learned ones, the good man attached himself to her side and engaged her in conversation, not altogether to the satisfaction of Philip, who, relinquishing the entrancing but somewhat boyish amusement of heaving boulders down the smooth, slippery slope of the ice, sprang forward to help her up the narrow, treacherous path of the loose moraine – for they had left the ice now for a short time. Virtue was its own reward, however – it and a stone – which, dislodged by Alma’s foot, came bounding down with a smart whack against the left ankle of the too eager cavalier, evoking from the latter a subdued if involuntary howl, instead of the mental “cuss-word” which we regret to say might have greeted the occurrence had it owned any other author.

Steep and toilsome as this little bit of the way was, the two strong-minded ones still found breath enough to discourse to the General – or, rather, through him at Fordham, upon the never-failing topic, the unqualified inferiority of the other sex, causing that genial veteran to vote them bores of the most virulent kind, and mentally to resolve to dispense with their company at whatever cost on all future expeditions which he might undertake.

“Why, you couldn’t get on for a day without us!” said Fordham, bluntly, coming to the rescue. “How would you have got along those séracs just now, for instance, if left to yourselves?”

“Life does not wholly consist in crossing glaciers, Mr Fordham,” was the majestic reply.

“It runs on a very good parallel with it though. And the fact remains, as I said before. You couldn’t be happy for a day without us.”

“Indeed?” said the elder and more acid of the two, with splendid contempt. “Indeed? Don’t you flatter yourself. We could be happy – perfectly happy – all our lives without you.”

“That’s fortunate, for I haven’t asked you to be happy all your lives with me,” answered Fordham, blandly.

The green eyes of the learned pair glared – both had green eyes – like those of cats in the dark. There was a suspicious shake in the shapely shoulders of Alma Wyatt, who, with the parson, was leading the way, and the General burst into such a frantic fit of coughing that he seemed in imminent peril of suffocation; while a series of extraordinary sounds, profuse in volume if subdued in tone, emanating from Philip’s broad chest, would have led a sudden arrival upon the scene to imagine that volatile youth to be afflicted with some hitherto undiscovered ailment, lying midway between whooping-cough and the strangles.

And now once more, the fall of the glacier surmounted, the great ice-field lay before them in smooth and even expanse. And what a scene of wild and stately grandeur was that vast amphitheatre now opening out. Not a tree, not a shrub in sight; nothing but rocks and ice – a great frozen plain, seamed and crevassed in innumerable cracks, shut in by towering mountains and grim rock-walls, the summits of which were crowned with layers of snow – the perilous “cornice” of the Alpine climber – curling over above the dizzy height – of dazzling whiteness against the deep blue of the heavens. In crescent formation they stood, those stately mountains encircling the glaciers, the snow-flecked hump of the Grand Cornier and the huge and redoubted Dent Blanche, whose ruddy ironstone precipices and grim ice-crowned arêtes glowed in the full midday sunlight with sheeny prismatic gleam; the towering Gabelhorn, and the knife-like point of the Rothhorn soaring away as if to meet the blue firmament itself. Gigantic ice-slopes, swept smooth by the driving gales, shone pearly and silver; and huge overhanging masses of blue ice, where the end of a high glacier had broken off, stood forth a wondrously beautiful contrast in vivid green. But this scene of marvellous grandeur and desolation was not given over to silence, for ever and anon the fall of a mighty sérac would boom forth with a thunderous roar. The ghostly rattle and echo of falling stones high up among those grim precipices was never entirely still, while the hoarse growling of streams cleaving their way far below in the heart of the glacier was as the voices of prisoned giants striving in agonised throes.

Chapter Seventeen

The Writing on the Wall

Not less imposing was the wild magnificence of this panorama as viewed from the Mountet cabin, which, from its eyrie-like position high up among the rocks, commanded the whole vast ice-amphitheatre. The last climb, after leaving the glacier, had been a steep and trying one, and to most of the party, at any rate, the first consideration on reaching their goal was a twofold one – rest and lunch.

“I suppose you don’t get much sleep in these places, eh, Fordham?” said the General, looking round upon the plank shelves which, plentifully covered with straw, constituted the sleeping places. From the beams above hung rugs of a heavy, coarse texture.

“It depends on a good many things – the absence of fleas, or of a crowd. When there are three or four parties, with their guides, going the same way or coinciding here for the night, a box like this is apt to get crowded and the air thick.”

“It is wonderfully ingenious,” said Alma, taking in the solidity of the building and its contrivances for safety and comfort – every stick of which had to be dragged up there by mules and porters. “Where did they sleep before these cabins were built?”

“Under the rocks. Picked out a sheltered corner and rolled in. A coldish sort of a bedroom too,” answered Fordham.

“And all for the sake of getting to the top of a peak that a hundred other fools have been up already, and a thousand more will go up afterwards,” struck in the flippant Phil. “Throw one of those hard-boiled eggs at me, Fordham. Thanks.”

“Is not that kind of reasoning – er – somewhat fatal to all enterprise?” said the parson.

“There is little enterprise, as such, in all this Alp climbing,” interrupted one of the learned young women before anybody could reply. “Not one in a hundred of all the men who spend summer after summer mountaineering ever thinks of benefiting his species by his experiences. No branch of science is the gainer by it, for the poor creature is lamentably ignorant of science in any branch – almost that such a thing exists, in fact. To him a mountain is – a mountain, and nothing more – ”

“But – what in the world else should it be, Miss Severn?” said Philip.

” – Just so many thousand feet to go up,” continued the oracle, severely ignoring the flippant interruptor.

“Or so many thousand feet to come down – and then return home in a sack,” said the latter, wickedly.

“Just one more peak to add to the number he can already boast of having scaled. Nobody the gainer by it. Grand opportunities thrown away. The only end effected, the aggravation of one man’s already inflated conceit.”

“I don’t know about nobody being the gainer by it, Miss Severn,” said the General. “I am disposed to think this rage for mountaineering by no means a bad thing – in fact a distinctly good one, as anything that calls forth pluck, determination, and endurance is bound to be. Now, by the time a man has done two or three of these gentry there,” with a wave of the hand in the direction of the surrounding peaks, “his nerve is likely to be in pretty good order, and his training and condition not very deficient. No, I don’t agree with you at all, Miss Severn.”

“The guides are very considerably the gainers by it, too,” said Fordham – “the gainers by enough cash to tide them comfortably through the winter.”

“These are all very secondary considerations,” was the lofty rejoinder. “Nobody touches my point after all. General Wyatt thinks that the object of penetrating the wonders of these stupendous ice-worlds has been gained when a man has got himself into the hard muscular training of a mere brutal prize-fighter; while Mr Fordham thinks it quite sufficient if a few hundred francs find their way into the pockets of a few Swiss peasants. But what does science gain by it? Of course I except the researches of such men as Tyndall – but they are the rare exceptions.” And the speaker looked around as if challenging a reply. She was disappointed, however. Nobody seemed to think it worth their while to undertake one. Presently Fordham said —

“It has often been remarked that we are not a logical nation. Hardly a day passes without emphasising that fact to the ordinarily wide-awake observer.”

“How so? Please explain. I don’t quite follow you,” said Miss Severn, briskly, fiercely elate that her challenge had been taken up.

“Well, we British are perennially grumbling at our abominably cold climate – winter all the year round, and so forth; and yet during the few weeks of summer vouchsafed to us away we rush to places like this, and stow ourselves as close to the snow and ice as we possibly can.”

“I – I really don’t see the connection,” said the would-be debater, in tart mystification. “Isn’t that rather a pointless remark – not to say irrelevant?”

“Oh, no. If anything, the reverse,” answered Fordham, tranquilly. “The idea was suggested by seeing several of us shiver, and it naturally occurred to me that we had probably sat as long as was safe if we wanted to avoid catching cold. For present purposes it may be taken to mean that we should be wise to think of going down, still wiser to go down and take the thinking as thought. What do you say, General?”

“I agree with you, Fordham. It doesn’t do to sit too long in this sharp air, after getting heated coming up, too.”

So the wisdom of the elders prevailed, and the party started upon the homeward way. Philip having found a long, steep snow-shoot, preferred the risky delights of a glissade to the more sober and gradual descent of a series of zig-zags. But the snow was soft, with the result that when half-way the adventurous one went head over heels, convulsing with mirth those who witnessed his frantic flounderings from the security of the zig-zag footpath aforesaid. Meanwhile the two erudite damsels were confiding to the parson their rooted conviction that Fordham was the most abominably disagreeable man they had ever met – which view, however, being that of the bulk of their sex on the same subject, was neither original nor striking.

And then as they gained the level of the glacier once more, again the wily Phil managed to pair off – to straggle indeed considerably from the main body – to straggle away almost to the base of the huge cliffs of the Grand Cornier. Here crevasses began to open in all directions – real ones, yawning black in the glistening surface.

“By Jove! look at that!” cried Phil, as a huge rift came into view right across the way they were following. It was overhung by a wreath of frozen snow, and the “lip” thus formed was fringed and festooned with gleaming icicles. It was a lovely and at the same time forbidding spectacle, as the sunlight fell upon the myriad smooth needles of ice – catching the star-like facets in gleaming scintillation – playing upon the translucent walls of the chasm in many a prismatic ray – roseate and gold, and richest azure. Then, below, the black, cold depths, as of the bottomless pit.

“It is splendid, but gruesome,” said Alma, peering tentatively into the silent depths – a process which needed a steadying, not to say supporting, hand. “I wonder how deep it is.”

“It’s a pity, in the interests of science – but on that ground alone – that we haven’t got our two learned friends along,” said Philip, proceeding to roll a big stone, of which there were several on the surface of the glacier, to the brink. “They could locate the depth by the time it takes to fall. Now, listen!”

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