She smiled at his preposterous imagery, and yet words might well have failed such an intellect upon such a scene. The place where they stood was a little thicket of trees at the last bend below Vermala. All around were the frozen pines, magic in their suggestion of fairyland, enchanting in the infinite variety of their matchless tracery. Below them Andana lay like an oasis of light upon a bleak hillside. Great arc-lamps waned and waxed upon the narrow road by the skating rink and again downwards toward the village. The hotel itself blazed with radiance and suggested the antithesis to this solitude of the woods. Far, far down in the black hollow of the valley there were the lamps of Sierre and the railway; and high above them, as though uplifted to the heavens, the moonlit peaks, a very forest of them running in unbroken majesty to the great flat dome of Mont Blanc.
The human side of this entrancing picture was voiced by the ripples of laughter, the joyous cries which came floating up on the still night air. A romancer would have espied lovers in the thickets, and heard the whispers of their sighs. By here and there stragglers were to be perceived upon the great plateau of the snow or plodding upward to the heights. In sharp contrast to this leisure of the climb would come the swift descent of a luge towards Andana, the loud cry, "Achtung!" the passing of the prone figure, and the lantern jolting at every rut. These cries became more frequent as the climbers neared Vermala. Some of the toboggans were bedecked gloriously with Chinese lanterns, which gave a rare splash of colour to the monotony of silhouettes, or turned the snow blood red. And dominating all was the eternal spirit of youth; the joie de vivre; the consciousness of the present; the will to blot all else but this fulness of life which ran in the veins like fire.
There was a fine crowd of people up at the little hotel at Vermala, and conspicuous among them the Rider girls and Bess Bethune. Bess, in fact, furnished the place, as someone remarked—it must have been Bob Otway—and her high spirits were so infectious that the doctor sat down to the piano and played a magnificent fantasia upon "Our Miss Gibbs," arranged as a sonata in the fashion of Schubert. Everyone took coffee, and the ladies sipped crême de menthe under protest. The ghost received less attention than he merited—and when the best part of the company trooped out to look for him, and did not find him, not a few took advantage of the opportunities presented by Japan (in the form of screens) and Africa (in the matter of palms) to continue discussions of a momentous nature. The "little widow," however, found herself once more with Ian Kavanagh at the head of the path, and she realised that she must make her first run on a luge or be derided by the company.
How ridiculous it all seemed to her, that she should be playing a girl's part, she whose life had been so tragic and so womanly. She had the will to forget, God knows; and if the mountains had any message for her, the silent woods their consolation, it was that forgetfulness might be won, and upon forgetfulness, peace. Let there be a truce, however brief the day of it. The kingdom of a joyous childhood called her with a sweet voice—she tried to believe that she had become a child again.
"I have never done this before," she said to Kavanagh almost pleadingly, when he offered her the luge he had dragged up from Andana and showed her what she must do with it. "Is it so dreadful? Shall I really be able to manage it?"
He assured her that it was the easiest thing in all the world.
"Just guide yourself with your feet. Lean over when you come to the corners and round you go. I'd better get on ahead, for I shall be faster. I'll wait at the path where we go down to the rink. You can't hurt yourself—it's just like falling into an iced blanket—now see me do it."
He squatted on the luge, and going with as much dignity as he could command—which was not a great deal—he set off down the path and rounded the first of the corners successfully. Great flat hands pushed him off from the banks; his progress, if not melancholy, was certainly slow, and in the end became remote. The "little widow" heard him calling to her to "come on," and at last she seated herself and essayed to obey his interjectory instructions. But the dazzle and glory of the thing seemed less when she had started, and she reflected with irony that she could have walked much faster. Then the luge was so uncomfortable; just a few bars of wood, a cushion and two steel runners. And "the thing" would go up the banks in the most shameless way—first to the right, then to the left, now half round, now frightening her by a sudden plunge. At the corner she failed altogether, and ran high over the bank and into the soft snow upon the other side. Her white gloves were wet through by this time, her shoes full of snow, and her general condition one of misery. She picked herself up and laughed with a truer note than she had done for years. Yes, she had become a child again, and had a child's sense of irresponsibility.
Kavanagh had disappeared altogether by this time. Other tobogganers came flying down the mountainside; but none pulled up because of the lonely little woman standing between the trees at the "hairpin" bend. She heard voices above and below; the wood might have been full of the spirits of dead children rejoicing. But she had lost all taste for the miserable contraption which behaved so shabbily, and it had become a burden to her. Trying to set it going again, she ran a little way and lost hold of it; and then, as a horse which has lost its rider in a steeple-chase, it went on gaily, rounding the corners upon its own account, and disappearing as her guide and philosopher had done. She was quite alone now, and very pleased to be so—at least, she thought so until she espied a black figure creeping up between the trees, and, as it were, stalking her in the shelter of the wood. This frightened her a little and she tried to go on; but her heart beat fast and she was really quite afraid. Why did the man not speak? Was he a Swiss or one of the guests at the hotel? She was just about to shout for help when the crouching figure cried out:
"Mrs. Kennaird, is that you? Well, I'm Benson—you remember me?"