Fordham's Feud

“Have you known young Orlebar long?” the old man was saying. “I gathered from what he told me that you had been travelling together for some years.”

“Well, we have only been a couple of months together this summer. Last autumn, though, we returned from a thirteen months’ trip to China and Japan, then home across the Rockies.”

“Indeed! You ought to know of what sort of stuff a fellow is made after a trip of that kind with him.”

“Yes. Phil is a good fellow enough, and he and I suit each other admirably. He always does what he’s told, and can stand being chaffed for his own good. Not many fellows of his age can do that.”

“I like the boy,” went on General Wyatt, “like him immensely. He’s a fine fellow – a finer fellow than his father was. But it’s a thousand pities he has no sort of profession, for when he comes into Claxby and the title he won’t have too much to keep up either upon.”

“I suppose not,” assented Fordham, indifferently. “But then he hasn’t got any expensive tastes or habits.”

“That’s a very good point about him. Still, if his father had put him into some profession instead of allowing him ample means to lead an idle life, it would have been all the better for him. But that’s Frank Orlebar all over. He dotes upon the boy, and so feels bound to indulge him in every particular. That sort of sentimentality was always a grave weakness in Frank Orlebar’s character. His heart was always stronger than his head, and it invariably led him into some serious blunder.”

“Didn’t he come rather to grief once and have to go abroad for a time?” said Fordham, meditatively trimming the ash of his cigar with his thumbnail. “Phil never mentioned it, but I seem to remember the case some twenty years back.”

“Oh, you remember it?” said the General, looking furtively around and lowering his voice. “Well, it wasn’t a ‘case’ exactly – never came to that, luckily. But there was the devil of a scandal, and Orlebar went abroad for a time. It was said that he went to exchange shots with the injured party, and I believe he did, but whether either of them winged his man I’ll be hanged if I know.”

On one of the benches in the forepart of the hurricane deck, gazing dreamily at the great wooded slopes sliding by as the steamer passed the storm-beaten walls of grim Chillon, revelling in the gorgeous magnificence of the flying scenery while keeping an ear for her companion’s remarks, sat Alma Wyatt.

“Do you know you answered me quite at random?” said Philip, with a laugh.

“Did I? Oh, how rude of me! But – you must make allowances. I find it quite impossible to take my attention entirely off these lovely shores and the mountains changing every minute as we go rushing through the water. Look at them – all green and gold in this exquisite sunlight! Look at the dazzling white of the Dent du Midi there, in sharp contrast to the vivid blue of the sky! And the lake – I have just counted no less than thirteen different shades on its surface where each tiny catspaw of wind sweeps it – thirteen, from the richest ultramarine to gold and plum colour and scarlet. There, I am very gushing – am I not? – and you may laugh at me accordingly.”

“I certainly shall do nothing of the sort,” he replied, eagerly. “Do you suppose I am such a boor, such a Vandal that I can’t enter into your ideas? Perhaps I was thinking just the same things, only could not for the life of me express myself so beautifully.”

She looked him steadily in the face for a moment as though to read his thoughts, as though to detect the slightest trace of make-believe about his reply. But his tones rang true and she was satisfied.

“Then I shall proceed with my gush, and really end in making you laugh,” she resumed. “But I do think that this eastern end of the Lake of Geneva must have been hewn out of a corner of Paradise.”

“And yet, there stands an eternal reminder to the contrary,” he replied, pointing to the grim towers of Chillon which lay mirrored in clear-cut reflection upon the sapphire waters. “Think of the numberless wretches racked and thumbscrewed and burnt within those walls in past centuries. Have you so soon forgotten that ghastly oubliette they were driven down under a fraudulent promise of liberty? It is said that remains occasionally come to light even to this day.”

“Ah, now you have drawn a sort of black line across my fair picture. You are upsetting my ideal just as Mr Fordham kept trying to do the other day when we were going over the castle. Do you remember he pronounced the torture stake a fraud of the first magnitude, declaring that it had been renewed since he visited Chillon five years ago, and that Byron’s name on the pillar in Bonivard’s dungeon was probably a despicable sham and the work of some latter-day ’Arry?”

“Yes, but we all agreed that even if it were genuine it was a rank act of ’Arrydom on the part of the bard, and by no means a thing to fall down in adoration before.”

“So we did. As to the other things I don’t like being disturbed in my illusions. But a visit to these old castles and prisons with their hideous and varied appliances of torture and mutilation and death invariably tempts me seriously to wonder whether the world was not for centuries under the sway of some malignant fiend instead of a beneficent Ruler. Just think a moment, as you were saying just now, over the unutterable horrors perpetrated in that castle alone, not to mention our own Tower of London and thousands of similar places scattered about the ‘civilised’ world. Why, it seems as if the one thought animating the mind of every one in authority was how to inflict the greatest and most ingenious forms of suffering upon his fellow-creatures. Does not that look as if the world was under Satanic sway? But there, you will be thinking me a very heterodox, not to say a wicked person.”

“I shall think you neither the one nor the other,” he protested, warmly. The sweet seriousness and depth of thought characterising this girl constituted by no means the least of her attractions, and with all his sunny spirits and light-hearted susceptibility Philip Orlebar was poles apart from the ruck of contemporaneous jeunesse dorée whose talk is of the green room and the daily habits of this or that star actress. He had ideas and a serious side, and could well appreciate the same in others. And if in others, how much more in this one who was now exhibiting them.

“But come,” she resumed, gaily, changing her tone and manner with a suddenness as of the sunlight breaking through a cloud, “we had better turn our backs on gloomy Chillon, and only look upon and remember my ‘corner hewn out of Paradise.’ There – that little idea is all my own.”

Remember it? thought Philip. Would he ever forget it? The radiant glories of the summer day, the swift gliding movement over the flashing water, the great mountains around soaring up to the eternal blue, the sense of exhilaration in the mere delight of living – and tingeing, gilding all, touching with the fire of the live coal this fairyland of entrancing glow and sunlight, the magic of a subtle presence here at his side. And the fire of that live coal was Love.

Yes, it had come to this with him. In spite of his friend’s cynical warnings and more or less envenomed banter; in the teeth of all prudential considerations, of future advantage, ways and means, and such; in the face of the awkward fact that his acquaintanceship with her was one of barely ten days, Philip had come to admit to himself that life apart from Alma Wyatt would be but a dead and empty pretence at living.

Barely ten days! Could it be? Less than one brief fortnight since his glance had first rested upon her, here on this very deck! It seemed incredible.

But she? Her splendid eyes met his in conversation fully and fearlessly, their heavy dark lashes never drooping for a moment beneath his ardent gaze. Never the faintest tinge of colour came into the warm paleness of the beautiful patrician face; never a tremor shook the sweetly modulated voice in response to his most eager efforts to please, in recognition of his most unmistakable “signs of distress.” Could she not guess?

“I think the idea is a very sweet one,” he rejoined, earnestly. “A little corner of Paradise – that’s just what it is.”

“Ahem! We shall be at Bouveret in five minutes,” struck in a drawling voice, not wholly guiltless of a cockney twang, recognisable as the property of Scott. “Do you feel prepared to mount Shanks’s mare, Miss Wyatt?”

Alma murmured a very frigid reply, while Philip was obliged to turn away to conceal the fury which blazed forth from his visage, and further to quell an overmastering impulse which moved him to take the speaker by the scruff of his neck and drop him there and then overboard – in front of the paddle-wheels. The free and easy patronising drawl of this insufferable cad made his blood surge again.

“By the way, Miss Wyatt,” went on the pachydermatous pastor, “I have a great mind to ask you to arbitrate. I must say Mr Fordham is a pretty cool hand. What do you think? Here am I with this huge knapsack full of things to carry, and he positively declines to take his share. That is – I’ve hinted to him pretty plainly that he ought to.”

“Fordham isn’t a man who deals largely in hints,” said Philip, facing round upon the speaker with a fierceness that almost made the latter recoil. “If he were, he would doubtless hint that one beast of burden is sufficient for the party.”

Scott looked affronted. Then his countenance suddenly cleared. “Oh! we are going to take a horse with us then?” he said, gleefully.

“No – an ass,” returned Philip, quickly.

Even the inflated layer of the other’s self-esteem was not proof against this shaft. It collapsed with its owner, who retired with a scowl to pour his grievance into haply more sympathising ears. And by that time the steamer had crossed the broad and turgid belt where the snow-waters of the Rhone cleft in a sharply defined pathway the blue surface of the lake, and was slowing down to half-speed as she approached Bouveret pier.

Chapter Seven

The Storm on the Lake

“Is there absolutely no way of getting on to St. Gingolph, Mr Fordham?” said the eldest Miss Ottley, ruefully.

“You may put it in that way,” was the tranquil reply. “Unless we walk.”

The party, gathered round Fordham on the wooden pier, were not a little disappointed. They had reckoned on changing steamers and going straight on without delay, for the Mont Blanc went no further than Bouveret. Now they discovered that there was no steamer to change on to.

“That’s what comes of missing the early boat,” resumed Fordham, mercilessly. “You will kindly remember that I warned you I doubted the accuracy of my horaire, and that we should probably not find any steamer on this side, when you elected to come on by the Mont Blanc.”

This was undeniable, but it didn’t seem to mend matters.

“And now two courses lie open to us,” he went on. “We can either walk to St. Gingolph along the high road, or take a short cut round the base of the Grammont for Novèl. I should recommend the latter. What do you say, General?”

“Oh, I’m entirely in your hands. What do the ladies think?”

But the ladies voting unanimously for this plan it was carried forthwith. Then suddenly it occurred to them that nobody knew the way. But they reckoned without Fordham. He had never been over that identical ground, but he undertook to act as guide, and fulfilled his undertaking with admirable accuracy. But they were not to reach their original destination, and it came about in this wise.

The day was hot, and the path winding upward round the mountain-side, though charming as it led through beech and oakwoods, affording many a glimpse of the blue lake below, was both steep and rugged. After about an hour the Miss Ottleys suggested a halt – and lunch.

“This is a very tiring way, Mr Fordham,” said one of them, “and it seems a very long one. Are you quite sure we are going right?”

“I see,” was the short reply. “You want me to say I am not quite sure. Well, what do you want to do– that’s the point?”

They looked at each other.

“I think we had almost better have our picnic here,” said the one who had first spoken.

“I believe we had,” said the other sister. “This is a lovely spot.”

“If we stop here now we sha’n’t get on to Novèl at all,” said Fordham.