Fordham's Feud

“It is a caravan who has come over de Trift-joch,” pronounced Conrad Spinner. And then he and his colleagues lifting up their voices, answered the yodel, while Philip, being unskilled in that art but moved by a British and youthful desire to make a noise of some sort, lifted up his in an ear-splitting and quite unmelodious yell.

The ice arête came to an end at last and was succeeded by a long descent over loose rocks, which, piled and packed together by the hand of Nature, made a very tedious and difficult descent at the best of times. To poor Philip with his bruised ankle it became excruciating. At length he could endure it no longer and sank to the ground with an agonised groan.

“Off with your boot, and let’s appraise the damage,” said Fordham. “Yes, it’s a bad whack,” he went on, as the extent of the injury became manifest – for the whole ankle was frightfully swollen. It had been struck on the inside, and the least touch made the sufferer wince. Both guides shook their heads gloomily as they marked the angry and inflamed aspect of the contusion, and Peter Anderledy fired off a few invocations of his Maker in terms far more forcible than reverential. Even for this there might have been found some extenuation. Besides a rough and steep descent over the loose rocks aforesaid, there yet remained a bit of cliff to be climbed down, the end of a glacier to cross, then at least half an hour down a high moraine, whose edge, sharp and knife-like, entailed single file progress, before they reached a point from which a mule or a litter might be used, and even that point was some hours distant from the village.

This, however, was accomplished at last – the descent of the cliff being avoided by a long détour. With the help of Conrad’s stalwart shoulder poor Phil managed to get along with a minimum of pain. But it took them rather more than twice the ordinary time to accomplish the traject, nor did they arrive at the point whence artificial transport could be used until long after the hour when they had reckoned upon sitting safe and snug at table d’hôte in the Hôtel Mont Cervin at Zermatt.

“I say, Conrad, this is a right royal sell,” said Philip, as they sat round a handful of fire which the guide had built – for Peter and Fordham had hurried on to procure a mule or a chaise-à-porteur, and could not return for some hours. “Sell isn’t the word for it. We reckoned on doing the Matterhorn the day after to-morrow. I suppose there’s no chance of it now.”

“If you can walk as far as de Riffel in one week you can tink you are very lucky,” answered the guide.

Poor Philip groaned.

“It’s deuced rough,” he said. “I didn’t come over to Zermatt to lie up a week in a confounded hotel.”

“It would be worse to lie up for ever in de churchyard,” answered Conrad oracularly, as he lit his pipe.

“I suppose it would – but, I say, Conrad, how is it you fellows all talk such good English? Where the dickens do you learn it?”

“We learn it in de vinter. We make a class.”

“But who teaches you? Do you get hold of an Englishman?”

“No. It is a Swiss – a Swiss who has been five years in America. But,” added the guide, naïvely, “I don’t tink his pronunciation is very good.”

Meanwhile, Fordham and Peter were making their way down the wild and desolate Trift-thal in the moonlight.

“I never did see de Rothhorn so bad for de shtones as to-day,” grumbled the latter. “Dey come down, oh, like a devil.”

“It’s unfortunate, but one consolation is that it was nobody’s fault. It was sheer ill-luck, Peter, and you or Conrad might equally well have been hit.”

“No, it is nobody’s fault,” assented Peter. “But, if anyting goes wrong with de gentleman dere are always peoples what say it is de guide’s fault. But dat is just de very ting no guide can help – de falling shtones. We get over de place as quick as we can, but we can’t run. Ach!” he concluded, with a disgusted shake of the head.

There was reason in what he said. An Alpine guide under the circumstances is in much the same position as the captain of a ship. There are casualties which can be averted neither by the skill of the one nor the seamanship of the other, nor the courage of both. Yet when such occur public opinion is equally hard on both.

It was midnight before the sufferer was safely housed. The local practitioner looked grave, very grave, when he examined the injury. He peremptorily forbade the patient to set foot to the ground until he gave him leave, and that under pain of almost certainly losing his foot altogether.

“Great events from little causes spring.” The little cause in this instance was that little stone. There was a grim literalness in Peter Anderledy’s unconscious variation of a well-worn simile when he predicted that the stones were going to fall “like a devil” – for the falling of that little stone was destined to alter the course of Philip Orlebar’s whole life. Its effect might well have been the result of satanic intervention.

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.