Fordham's Feud

“Are they? Look here now, Phil. What is there about that girl that makes a difference between her and any other girl?”

“Ah! You – even you, you old ruffian, own that there is a difference?”

“Not so fast, my dear chap. I asked you the question. But if you want me to answer it myself, I reply ‘Nothing.’”

“What? You don’t see any difference?”

“Not a particle,” responded his tormentor, blandly. Philip stared for a moment. He hardly knew what to say. Then:

“Well, with all your shelliness, you crustaceous old cuss, I gave you credit for more discrimination. Why, confound it all, look at her alongside the rest of the crowd here. Isn’t she a head and shoulders above them all – in every particular?”

“H’m, h’m! Oh, yes! no doubt. But that isn’t saying very much. She looks thoroughbred, I admit, and talks well, and has some ideas – not bad ones, either; not that I’ve ever been favoured with them myself, for I’ve never laid myself out for that honour. Women, you see, are like children. As long as you keep them at arm’s length they respect you. Directly you have ever so little to do with them, then good-bye to your peace, for they will allow you none; then, presto, the collar is round your neck and you find yourself cast for the rôle of general poodle before you know where you are. It’s fetch-and-carry, will-you-do-this and would-you-mind-doing-that. And then you are expected to act the sympathetic listener to all their infernal egotistic fads; and God help you if at any moment you forget the sympathetic part of it. But to return to our sheep. You think this particular girl an angel, because she’s good-looking and thoroughbred, and has a hovering sort of suggestion about her of being an ill-used mortal and welcoming a sympathetic spirit, and all that sort of thing. Then, again, you run against her up here, where you’re both of you showing at your best because you’ve neither of you anything in the world to put you out – splendid weather, lovely country, good old times all round – sort of paradise in which she stands out as the Eve to you, and I daresay you as the Adam to her. That’s not life, my dear fellow; that’s not life. A mere summer idyll and no more. Can’t possibly last, you know.”

“And why the deuce can’t it last?” said Phil, who had been listening somewhat impatiently to this harangue.

Fordham emitted a short, dry guffaw.

“Well now, can it? I put it to you. Just run over all the ‘happy couples’ within the circle of your acquaintance: to how many of them is life a summer idyll, or any sort of idyll at all? You needn’t go further than this house, which at present contains a good few ‘yoke-fellows,’ to use a thoroughly expressive term. If you haven’t yet found time to observe them, just keep your eyes open for the next day or two – if you can divert those killing orbs from the adorable Alma, that is – and a place like this is good for observations of the kind, because the subjects of them are always more or less off their guard. Putting it at the lowest computation, eight marriages out of every ten are abject failures – the other two very dubious.”

“Oh, indeed! And how many are there that turn out satisfactorily?” said Phil, ironically.

“Perhaps one in five thousand.”

“Oh – well – it’s something to have got you to admit that much. Now why shouldn’t I, for instance, hit off that one?”

“Why shouldn’t you? Well now, Phil, I put it to you as one not wholly unacquainted with sporting matters. What would you say to a fellow who should ask you to take tickets in a lottery where the chances were five thousand to one against you – or rather to take one ticket, and that at the price of all you were worth? You’d vote him drunk, of course. Yet if I know anything of my fellow-creatures, you are in a fair way towards perpetrating that identical suicidal imbecility. Now, what do you say? Chuck your expedition across the lake to-morrow, and let’s go on to Zermatt now instead of a week or so later. That, or your fate is sealed.”

“No you don’t, old chap; no you don’t,” said Phil, who, far from being offended by the other’s ill-conditionedness, was hugely pleased thereat, since it confirmed and encouraged certain hopes he had already more than half shaped. “By Jove, I never had such a good time in my life as I’ve been having here. Too soon to cut it just yet.”

Fordham’s shoulders went up in an expressive shrug as he turned away to the door.

“Don’t say you weren’t shown the cliff you proposed to jump over,” he said. “Jump now, and be – blessed to you.”

“By the way, Fordham,” said Phil, “isn’t it a deuced rum thing? The old General knows my governor well – or rather did, years ago.”

“Did he?” was the sharp reply, as the speaker faced suddenly round. “Ah well – yes – it is queer. But the world’s a pretty small one. There goes the second bell,” he added, in his normally unconcerned tones, as he again turned to the door.

His manner struck even Philip, though faintly. But for the fact that Fordham was literally a man in an iron mask, Philip could have sworn that the tone was a startled one. That, however, was absurd, anyhow. Fordham was not even acquainted with Sir Francis. The two had met and become intimate merely as travelling companions.

“Well, Mr Fordham, what do you think of these young people’s plan for to-morrow?” said General Wyatt as they met at table.

“Not a bad one. The valley of the Morge is well worth walking up, but you must start from here so as to catch the early steamer.”

“Make old Fordham go with us. He says he won’t,” said Phil, in an undertone, to Alma Wyatt, next to whom he was seated, for the change of places had been effected satisfactorily to all parties concerned. “You can get round him if any one can.”

“I don’t know so much about that,” she answered, with a smile. “I’ll try, though.” Then across the table, “Why do you say ‘you must start early,’ Mr Fordham, as if you weren’t going with us? You really must come. The gentians, they say, are lovely up that valley. We are quite reckoning on you.”

“To carry the gentians?” he rejoined drily. “Or to pick them?”

“Neither. You shall talk to us while we pick them. And you shall not carry anything, and we’ll promise to be very good and give no trouble.”

Few men could have stood this appeal, or the look which accompanied it. Phil felt quite hot. Though used to his friend’s ways, he thought him an ill-conditioned dog at that moment. Had he not unequivocally snubbed his – Phil’s – divinity? But the said divinity rather enjoyed it than otherwise. For, in spite of the extremely derogatory deliverances we have just heard from Fordham’s lips concerning her, Alma Wyatt was the only woman in the hotel to whom he had addressed a spontaneous remark; and she, so far from being offended at his brusqueness or taciturnity, looked upon him as a character, to be studied with avidity.

“To put it on other grounds,” she went on gaily. “Uncle will be quite lost without you. What will become of him all day with no one to argue with?” She could not have ventured upon safer ground. Fordham, though he detested women, by no means extended his antipathy to his own sex, and when away from the obnoxious skirts no man was better company. He was a power in the smoking-room, and as a travelling companion very nearly perfect. He and General Wyatt had become great friends during their short acquaintance, and now as it struck him that the old man had probably been relying upon his company for the proposed undertaking, his mind was made up.

“Well, General, I shall be happy to make one of the party,” he said. “And after all, if it’s a case of rowing back across the lake, another oar won’t come out of place.”

“Don’t you think it very dangerous to cross the lake in a small boat?” struck in the Infliction, at his elbow.

“Not if the weather’s fine.”

“Ah, but don’t you think storms come up very suddenly on this lake?”

“Oh, Lord,” said Phil in an undertone, “the Gadfly is getting her sting into old Fordham.”

“Be quiet, she’ll hear you,” replied Alma, trying to hide a laugh. “Besides, I want to enjoy the fun.”

But while Fordham was ruminating over a suitable extinguisher, a mild clergyman on the opposite side of the table struck in eagerly, and requested to know if that was really the case, and further manifested such a desire for information on that particular subject that the Infliction turned to him with reinvigorated purpose, and the rest were spared. The good man had only arrived that evening, and little knew what floodgates he was opening.

Chapter Six

The Fire of the Live Coal

“I believe we are all here now,” remarked Fordham, ironically, sending a significant glance round the little group assembled on the débarcadère at Montreux.

“Better count and make sure,” responded Scott, the parson, with an asinine guffaw.

The first remark was evoked by the recollection that, even as they now stood watching the swift, shearing approach of the Mont Blanc sweeping up to the jetty, so had they arrived on that spot some three hours earlier, just in time to gaze after the steamer preceding, as she disappeared round the promontory previous to standing in for Territet. And for having missed their boat, and lost three hours of the day, they had to thank the Miss Ottleys, or rather the maternal parent of those young ladies, who, with the usual feminine lack of a sense of the eternal fitness of things, had instructed them to combine business with pleasure, and execute sundry commissions for her in Montreux, on the way to the steamer. Wherefore they – and the parson – had arrived at the pier in time to find the residue of the party gazing discontentedly after the receding boat.

But no one would fall in with Fordham’s suggestion to return. If they had lost three hours’ the days were long and the evenings moonlight. All agreed that they would wait for the next boat.

“En route!” shouted the skipper, with his lips to the speaking-tube. The gangway was withdrawn with a bang – the great paddle-wheels churned the blue water into creamy foam, and the fine vessel, panting and snorting like a courser impatient of the momentary restraint, plunged forward as she swung round obedient to the hand of the helmsman.

“What a disagreeable chap that man Fordham is,” remarked Scott to the Miss Ottleys, with whom he had withdrawn to a comfortable corner of the deck.

“He can be about as rude as any man I ever knew,” returned the younger of the two girls, who had a hazy sort of idea that any man ought to think it rather an honour than otherwise to have all his arrangements thrown out by her dilatoriness.

“I don’t think we can blame him this time,” objected the elder. “It must have been very provoking to the dear old General as well.”

“Ah, he’s different,” said Scott. “But that fellow Fordham just thinks the world was made to suit his convenience. By the bye, who asked him to come to-day?”

“Well, you see, it was Mr Orlebar who suggested the trip, and it isn’t likely he’d leave his friend out.”

“Oh, ah – I see! Pity he didn’t though. The fellow is a regular wet blanket.”

There was reason in the speaker’s venom. Scott, who held the proud position of English chaplain at Les Avants for that month, was a fair specimen of the young “masher” parson. He wore a carefully-trimmed moustache and talked with a drawl. He affected lawn tennis in preference to any other form of exercise because it enabled him to array his graceful five foot six of dimensions in faultlessly fitting flannels, and when so arrayed he was under the impression that Apollo himself might take a back seat. He was not a gentleman by birth, and, having all the exuberant assurance of the self-estimating “ranker,” was a standing offence to those who were. Though made much of by a large section of the ladies, always ready to constitute a pet tame cat of a young parson, the men abhorred him. His bumptiousness and chronic infringements of good form met with systematic snubbing, and on more than one occasion nothing but his “cloth” had saved him from being incontinently kicked. Now of all the “setting down” he had received since his arrival at the hotel, that which he had encountered at the hands of Fordham had been the most merciless and exhaustive.

The latter and General Wyatt were leaning against the taffrail smoking their cigars.