But the violent tongue of his stepmother, coupled with his father’s sensitive horror of the same, was destined to work such woe in poor Philip’s eventual fate as even that vindictive matron little dreamed. Strange are the trivialities that combine together for stupendous results. Had Sir Francis adhered to his first and laudable resolve what widespread ruin might have been averted. But he did not. He abandoned it for the sake of peace, of course with the best intentions.
Chapter Twenty Five.
Taken at the Rebound.
When Philip at length managed to leave his room and hobble downstairs with the aid of a stick and one of the hotel porters he realised to the full that it was high time he did.
He realised further that all thoughts of mountain climbing, for this season at any rate, must be abandoned. Not that he cared about that, however; for after more than a week of confinement to his room, and that in the loveliest of summer weather, all inclination towards the reaping of further mountaineering laurels seemed to have left him. His main ambition now was to get well as soon as possible and move away to fresh scenes. The lovely aspect of mountain and glacier shining in the golden summer sun was now as gall to him, intertwined as it was with recollections of Eden before his wholly unexpected and crushing expulsion therefrom. The bright laughter and cheerful voices of parties setting forth or returning—on sightseeing bent—grated irritably on his nerves, for it brought back to him the time so recent, but now divided by such an impassable gulf, when he himself was among the cheeriest of the cheery. So now as he sat in his comfortable cane chair—his injured foot propped up on another—in a sunny spot outside the hotel, his thoughts were very bitter.
Needless to say they ran upon the subject which had afforded him ample food for reflection during these long days of his irksome and enforced stagnation. To the first blank and heart-wrung sense of his loss had succeeded by degrees a feeling of angry resentment. Alma had meted out to him very harsh measure. She had allowed him no opportunity of explanation, and surely he was entitled to that amount of consideration, not to say fair play. But no. She had condemned him unheard. After all Fordham was right. The less one had to do with the other sex the better. It was all alike. And a very unwonted sneer clouded the beauty of the ordinarily bright and sunny face.
This, no doubt, was very good reasoning—would have been had the reasoner but numbered a dozen or so more years of life. In that case it would doubtlessly have afforded him abundant consolation. As things were, however, he was fain to own to himself that it afforded him very little indeed. However he might pretend to himself that Alma was not worth wrecking his life over, the poor fellow knew perfectly well that were she to appear at that moment before him with but one kind word on her lips, all his rankling resentment and cynical communings would be scattered to the winds. Those wretched Glovers—underbred, shop-keeping adventurers as they were—to come there wrecking his life by their infernal malice! And then as in a mental flash he compared the two girls, the pendulum swung back again, and he reflected that however harsh and peremptory had been Alma’s way of looking at things, he had got no more than he had deserved. But this idea, while it brushed aside the flimsy attempts he had been making to harden his heart towards her, left him rather more unhappy than before.