Chapter Twenty Two.
A Weapon to Hand.
“Hallo, Wentworth?”
“Hallo, Fordham!”
“Hot, isn’t it?”
“Beastly hot.”
Thus characteristically did these two Britons greet each other, meeting unexpectedly on the steps of one of the hotels at Zermatt. The bell was ringing for table d’hôte luncheon, and the sojourners in that extensive caravanserai were dropping in by twos and threes; ladies—ruddy of countenance, the result of sunburn—sketch-book and alpenstock in hand; spectacled Teutons in long black coats with the inevitable opera-glass slung around them; English youths armed with butterfly net or tennis racket, and a sprinkling of the ubiquitous Anglican parson whose nondescript holiday attire, which its wearer flattered himself savoured of the real mountaineer while not entirely disguising his “cloth,” imparted to him very much the aspect of a raffish undertaker in attenuated circumstances. The usual line of guides, taciturn and melancholy, roosted upon the low wall just outside the hotel, or stood in a knot in front of the wood-carving shop opposite, their normal stolidity just awakened into a gleam of speculative interest by the appearance of a string of vehicles heaving in sight amid a cloud of dust, upon the road which leads up from St. Nicolas. For this was before the days of the railway, and Zermatt, still uncockneyfied, retained most of its pristine picturesqueness in spite of the monster hotels dominating its quaint brown chalets. And then the majestic cone of the Matterhorn, towering up from its plinth of rock and glacier.
“Are you staying in this house, Wentworth?” pursued Fordham. “I thought the ‘Monte Rosa’ was the hotel patronised by all you regular climbing fellows.”
“It is, as a rule. But I thought I’d come here for a change. Besides, when I’m not climbing I like to be among ordinary people. One gets a little sick of hearing nothing but guide-and-rope ‘shop’ talked. Where have you turned up from now?”
“Zinal. Came viâ the top of the Rothhorn. Orlebar got rather a nasty whack from a falling stone. He’ll have to lie by for a day or two.”
“Did he? By Jove! Now you mention it, I heard there had been a one-horse kind of accident yesterday. I think they said it was on the Trift-joch. But I didn’t believe it, and then, you see, I started early this morning to walk up to the Stockje hut and am only just back. Poor chap! I say, though, is he badly hit?”
“Between you and me and yonder mule, he is rather. Badly enough to knock him out of any more climbing this season. He’ll have to get all the brag he can out of the Rothhorn alone until next year, at any rate. It’s rough on him, too, as he was keen on doing a few of the bigger things.”
“Rough it is. Poor chap! I must go upstairs and see him after tiffin. But, come along, Fordham, we had better go in. You can sit by me; there are a lot of empty places around my end of the room.”
From their place at table—a remote corner—they could watch the room filling. The bulk of the people were of the order already referred to, but there were some new arrivals, mostly uninteresting—a parson or two; a thick-set Scotchman with a blowsy wife and a whole tribe of wooden-faced, flaxen-haired children; a couple of undergraduates in neckties of vivid hue, presumably their college colours; item, a pair of grim spinsters of uncertain age and tract-disseminating principles; in short, the average ruck of our fellow-countrymen abroad.
“Rather a pretty girl, that,” murmured Wentworth.
Fordham, who was critically inspecting the wine-list, looked up. Two ladies had just entered the room, and it was to the younger of these that Wentworth had referred. Both were dark, and the elder bore traces of having been at one time strikingly handsome—the younger was so. In their remarkable duplication of each other Nature had unmistakably ticketed them mother and daughter.
Upon Fordham the entry of these two produced an astonishing effect. All the colour faded from his swarthy cheek, leaving a sallow livid paleness. His lips were drawn tightly against his teeth, and his black piercing eyes, half-closed, seemed to dart forth lurid lightnings, as he watched the unconscious pair moving down the long room towards their seat. Would they discover his presence? Surely there was something magnetic in that burning glance—a something to which the objects of it could hardly remain unconscious. Yet they did.
He saw them take their places. His back was to the light. They had not seen him. But had they caught the devilish, awful, surging hate expressed in that fearful scrutiny it is doubtful whether they would have eaten their luncheon with so tranquil an appetite.
“Good-looking, isn’t she?” pursued Wentworth, too intent on his own observation to perceive the change that had come over his friend. “For the matter of that, so is the mother—if it is her mother. They might easily be sisters. What do you think, Fordham?”
“So they might,” replied the latter tranquilly, sticking up his eyeglass. He had entirely recovered his self-possession, although there lurked within his glance a snake-like glitter. “Older one needn’t be a day more than forty, and the girl half that. But I say, Wentworth, I thought you were past admiring that sort of cattle.”
“Well, I am in a general way. But that’s a splendid-looking girl. Even you must admit that.”
If a slight shrug of the shoulders amounted to admission, Wentworth was welcome to it. The object of his eulogy had all the dazzling “points” of a perfect brunette. Hair and eyelashes dark as night—and abundance of both—large clear eyes, and regular, white teeth which gleamed every now and then in a bewitching smile as their owner responded to some remark on the part of her right-hand neighbour with whom she had entered into conversation. While she was in full view of the two men her mother was not, being screened by the ample dimensions and exuberant cap strings of a portly British matron opposite.
The confused clatter and buzz of a babel of tongues at length began to suffer abatement, then gave way to the rasping pandemonium of chairs pushed back by the dozen along the polished wooden floor. Fordham, watching his opportunity, left the room under cover of two large groups of people already flitting from his neighbourhood. As he did so, a sidelong glance towards the two new arrivals satisfied him that his identity was still unperceived by them, which, for reasons of his own, he particularly desired. Having thus effected his retreat undiscovered, he paused and took up his position in the passage within a few yards of the dining-room door as if awaiting the exit of somebody.
The passage, unlighted by windows, was in shade—in a grateful and refreshing gloom, deepened and intensified by the glare of the midday sunshine in the room beyond. As he thus stood, his back to the wall, that expression of deadly vindictive hatred returned to his face. Standing back in the semi-gloom, he resembled some lurking beast of prey in the diabolical passions impacted upon his countenance.
“What an exceedingly disagreeable-looking man,” had remarked more than one of the passers by who had noted this expression. “Whoever he is waiting for will have an unpleasant surprise, anyhow.” This was true, but not in the superficial and commonplace sense in which it was enunciated.
Nearly everybody had left the room but those two. Would they sit there all day? Ah! Now!
They were advancing up the room, the glowing and graceful beauty of the girl in striking contrast to the maturer and time-worn charms of the matron, who was still wonderfully handsome. It was a pleasing picture to look upon.
But the effect upon him now standing there was assuredly far from a pleasing one. The expression of his countenance had become positively devilish. The two were in the doorway now—the girl making some light laughing remark to her mother.
But just then the latter looked up—looked up full into Fordham’s face, into the burning, sunken eyes glowering in the shadow, and the effect was startling. A look of the most awful terror came over her face, and she put up her hands wildly as if to ward off some appalling object. Then with a quick, gasping shriek, she fell heavily to the floor in a dead faint.
The shriek was echoed by another, as the girl flung herself wildly down beside her mother, adjuring the latter by every endearing name. But the poor woman lay in a ghastly and livid unconsciousness that was more like death.
The lounging, chatting groups—mostly ladies—which had been scattered about the hall, startled by the shrieking, came crowding up in dubious, half-frightened fashion. Waiters came pouring out of the dining-room door. To the head of these Fordham spoke.
“Is there a doctor staying in the house, Alphonse? The lady seems to be rather unwell. And—I say, Alphonse,” he added, “is Mr Wentworth still in the dining-room? I’ve been waiting for him ever so long.”
“Here I am, Fordham,” answered a voice behind him. “Why, man, I’ve been out for at least ten minutes. But what’s the row?”
Meanwhile the sufferer was being cared for by several of her own sex. As it happened, too, there was an English doctor staying in the house, who now appeared on the scene.
“Stand back, please,” he ordered, authoritatively. “She’ll soon come round. But give her some air at any rate. What caused it?” he added to the sobbing, frightened girl. “She has had a shock of some sort.”
“She couldn’t have,” was the answer. “She—she—screamed and fell down. There was n-n-nothing to startle her—in fact, there was a strange gentleman standing there as if waiting for somebody. But he was a perfect stranger.”
All this Fordham—who had drawn out of the crowd and was out of sight, but not of hearing—caught. The doctor made no direct reply to the statement, though on the point of the utter unfamiliarity of the stranger’s appearance it is highly probable that he formed his own opinion.
“Let’s go and look at the visitors’ book,” suggested Wentworth. “I want to see if there’s any one I know.”
They strolled into the bureau and the book was produced. While Wentworth ran his eye attentively down the list of names, Fordham, standing behind him, hardly seemed to look at it. Anyhow, he evinced no interest whatever in the identity of anybody. But in reality the fact was the other way.
“The same name,” he said to himself. “The same name! That simplifies matters all round. Now I see daylight. At last—at last!”
Half an hour later Fordham strolled round to the village post-office and mailed a batch of letters. This was not in itself an extraordinary circumstance. But in the midst of that batch was one addressed to ‘Mrs Daventer,’ and he knew it would be delivered that same afternoon.
“What sort of a crowd at lunch, Fordham?” said Philip, as the door of his room opened to admit that worthy. “Any one new? Hullo, Wentworth! Where have you dropped from?”
“Oh, I’ve been around here about a week. But I say, Orlebar, it’s rather hard lines getting yourself knocked out of time this way.”
“Hard lines isn’t the word for it. And—what do you think? That confounded ass of a doctor says I sha’n’t be able to do any climbing this season. But he’s only a Swiss,” he added, with the youthful John Bull’s lordly contempt for talent or attainments encased in other than an Anglo-Saxon skull.
“You may depend upon it he knows his business,” responded Wentworth. “But you do as he tells you and keep your hoof up, old man, or you may be pinned up in this lively chamber for a month.”
“I suppose you’ve been doing some big climbs?” said Philip, wistfully.
“Not yet. Been taking it easy. I started to do the Deut Blanche the day after I came here, but the weather worked up bad and we had to turn back. I say, Orlebar, you’d better look sharp and get right. There was a deuced pretty girl at table d’hôte. Her mother fainted in the passage directly after, and there was a devil of an uproar. I believe Fordham made faces at her and scared her into a fit. He was the only person there at the time—”
“Ha! ha!” laughed Philip. “Scowled at her ‘like a devil,’ as Peter would say. Eh, Fordham?”
But the latter, who was lighting a cigar, made no reply.
“By the way, Orlebar,” said Wentworth. “Seen anything more of that girl you were so gone on at Les Avants, Miss—Miss—”
The speaker broke off with a start that was comical, for Fordham, while endeavouring to convey a mild and warning kick unseen of the third party—a thing which nobody ever succeeded in doing yet, and in all probability never will—had brought his hoof in contact with a corn, imparting to poor Wentworth the sensation as of a red-hot needle suddenly driven into his toe. In a measure it served him right, for his blundering had touched poor Philip on a very sore place. Lying there all the morning—with the prospect of a good many mornings and afternoons too, destined to be similarly spent—the poor fellow had found ample time for thought.
“What a chap you are, Wentworth!” he retorted, irritably. “Here is a poor devil tied by the leg in an infernal room for Heaven knows how long, and you can find nothing better to liven him up with than a lot of feeble and second-hand chaff. Let’s have something a little more amusing. Tell us some mountaineering lies for instance.”
And Wentworth spent the best part of the afternoon telling him some.