A Study In Shadows

by William John Locke

That done, he gave himself up entirely to the new sweetness that had come into his life.

The few moments of the morning's meeting had lit up the day. Much still remained unspoken, but there was no longer the irritating sense of incompleteness that had filled him the night before. Yet all the deeper, subtler pulsations of his love craved immediate expression. He sat in his hotel bedroom far into the night, writing her his first letter.

For the next few days he occupied himself strenuously with the sights of Chamonix. He joined a party over the Mer de Glace, took one day over the Grands Mulets, ascended the Aiguille Verte, and then rested with a feeling of well-earned repose. His great event of the day was the Geneva post. He had received two letters from Katherine. One she had written a few hours after his departure—he put it to his lips. The second, for which he waited with a lover's impatience, was in answer to the first he had written. At first he read it with a slight shade of disappointment. It seemed to lack the spontaneity of the other. But Raine, by nature chivalrous towards women, and holding them as creatures with emotions more delicately balanced than men and subject to a thousand undreamed-of shynesses, quickly assigned to such causes the restraint he had noticed, and, reading in, as it were a touch of passion into every touch of tenderness, satisfied the longings of his heart. There were letters too from his father. The first stated that he had mooted the plan to Felicia of the little jaunt to Lucerne, and that she had acceded to it joyfully, but in the second the old man complained of sudden poorliness. From the third Raine learned that he was in bed with a bad cold, and that Lucerne had been postponed indefinitely.

The news depressed him slightly. No letter from Katherine had accompanied it, to cheer him. On the evening of his day of rest, therefore, he was less in love with Chamonix than ever. By way of compensation the weather was bright and clear, and the sunny seat under the firs in the hotel gardens, whither he had retired with his travelling edition of “Tristram Shandy,” was warm and reposeful. He was speculating over the Rabelaisian humour of Mr. Shandy's domestic concerns, and enjoying the incongruity between it and the towering masses of rock and glacier and snow on the other side of the valley, when a man sauntered up the gravelled path, stopped before him, and asked for a light.

Raine looked up, and recognizing the newcomer as one with whom he had exchanged casual remarks during the last few days, readily complied with his request.

He was a thin, wiry man of about seven and thirty, with a clean-shaven face which bore a curious expression of mingled simplicity and shrewdness. His thin lips seemed to smile at the deception practised by his guileless pale-blue eyes. Unlike Raine, who wore the Englishman's Norfolk jacket, knickerbockers and heavy heather-mixture stockings, he was attired in grey summer trousers and a black jacket. A soft felt hat of the Tyrolese shape, a pair of field-glasses slung over his shoulder, a great gold solitaire fastening his shirt-cuff, which showed conspicuously as he lit his cigar, suggested the nationality that was confirmed by his speech.

He was an American, his name was Hockmaster, and he was visiting Europe for the first time. With these facts he had already acquainted Raine on a previous occasion.

When the American had returned the match-box, he sat down on the bench by Raine's side.

“If you want to be alone, you've only got to tell me and I'll evaporate,” he said cheerfully. “But I've been getting somewhat lonesome in this valley. Nature's a capital thing in mixed society, but when you have got her all to yourself, she is a thundering dull companion.”

The remark so exactly echoed Raine's sentiments of the past few days that he burst out laughing, closed “Tristram Shandy,” and prepared to gossip sympathetically with his new acquaintance.