“I know exactly how old you are,” she said maliciously. “And you could not grow a mustache to save your life.”
“Nothing would induce me to!” And then they both laughed, although he blushed very red, for he was sensitive on the subject of his age and wished that Peerages had never been invented.
Styr put her hands to her face and gave a faint scream. A column of fire had shot up in the path just ahead of the horses.
“The moon has gone under a cloud and the outrider has lit the torch,” Ordham reassured her.
She dropped her hands and leaned forward eagerly. The moon had made the wild mountain scenery, the forests and snow peaks, the upper reaches, so beautiful that more than once she had held her breath, felt as if her soul were full of crystal flowers. The flaming torch, high in the right hand of the outrider, lit the vast scene in a fashion that suggested the approach to Hell arranged in honour of distinguished visitors. The waterfalls leaping down the opposite cliffs, the glittering peaks, the gloomy roaring depths of the gorges, started out red and black, disappeared, flashed in the distance, rushed forward to hurl themselves at the flying carriage. Ordham wondered how many horses the King killed in a year. But he was too much interested in the scene, the adventure, to care. It was more wonderful, more satisfying, than anything he had ever dreamed of. For a moment he had an ecstatic desire for death, if only to avoid the anticlimax of life.
The moon came out again. The torch was extinguished. All the Alpine world was white and silver. It seemed like a sudden ascent into the vast quiet regions of space from the chaos of the Inferno. Both Ordham and his companion, who had been sitting tensely, leaned back with a sensation of contentment and peace.
In a moment she turned to him with softly shining eyes and said, “Cannot you understand the King a little better?”
“I think so.”
“Not yet! Be thankful for that.”
“When you began to sing to-night, I was frightfully oppressed by the thought of that tormented soul only a few feet from me. Then I forgot him.”