Part 7

Down, down, the skis hissing in the splendid snow, the keen air bringing hot blood to their cheeks, the speed surpassing dreams of flight--so toward the woods which would hide them again, and permit them to forget that towns and hamlets, to say nothing of the inhabitants thereof, existed. Both were gasping for breath as they sailed down the last of the steeps and swung to the left at the bottom. Both were too sensible of the obvious fitness of things to utter one complaint when Miss Nellie tripped and fell right into Master Bob's arms upon the very verge of the wood. Is not the left an unlucky turn to make at any time? But who believes in luck when a pretty girl tumbles headlong into his arms and refuses to budge an inch?

"I say, Nellie, I wish you'd do that every day. Now, don't get angry--you know you rather like it."

She sat up and tried to push him from her.

"Whatever do you mean, Bob? It was your fault; you pushed me down."

"Of course I did. Let's lie here a month, just as we are--only I should like your arms a little closer round my neck. Never mind about your skis--I'll take them off."

He was as good as his word, unbuckling the straps and regretted that the monstrous boots forbade him to admire her pretty ankles. When he had removed his own impedimenta, he coolly put his arms about her waist, and lifted her from the deep snow.

"Let's sit down a bit and talk over things," he said. "There's a grand view from here, Nellie--I could see Brigue, if it wasn't for the cloud."

"Do you want to see Brigue, Bob?"

"Do I want to see Brigue?--when I can look at you! I say, Nellie, how silky your hair is--and I do believe your lips are cold. Well, that ought to warm them anyway! Shall I do it again? I will if you like!"

She shook her head; but her colour was high, and her heart beat fast.

"Why do you treat me like this, Bob?"

"Because I love you, Nellie."

"Do you mean it--every word of it?"

"I'll swear a thousand oaths if you like."

"And you'll never love anyone else?"

She put both her hands upon his shoulders, and looked straight into his eyes.

Bob admitted in confidence to his friend Dick, whom he met presently, that it was the look which did it.

"I'll never love anybody else, if I live to two hundred, Nellie. You'll just be my little girl, and when we're married--"

He paused abruptly, wondering what he had said. Nellie, however, sealed the compact instantly. She gave him a smacking kiss on his lips, and held him so tightly that he could not utter a single word.

"I'll have to tell mother, Bob--I'll have to tell her when we get back. I'm sure she'll be kind about it. I know she likes you. Wasn't it lucky we came up here to-day? Wouldn't it have been dreadful to have gone with all those people? Oh, why didn't we bring our lunch--I'm sure I ought to have thought of it. Now, I suppose, we'll have to go down."

Bob shook his head. It really was very nice to be kissed like that, and he didn't mind how long the process continued. The future became as misty as the wraith of cloud floating over Mont Blanc. After all, things might be fixed up somehow, and his two hundred a year would be all right if they didn't get married until he got something to do.

"Anyway," he said, upon reflection, "we needn't move just yet, Nellie--let's stop up here and talk. Perhaps we shall see the hares. I wonder what Marjory will say when we tell her. You know Dick Fenton's awfully gone on her. It would be a game if he had proposed, wouldn't it?"

Nellie didn't like the flippant tone, and looked a little serious. Her keen eyes were roving the valley below; but not a sign either of hares or hounds did they detect. What she did see was a man walking to and fro upon the narrow bridle-track, near Vermala, and another man who dodged upon his heels, but took good care not to be discovered. The pantomime was so engaging that she pointed it out to Bob, despite her desire to pursue that singularly interesting subject, matrimony and its preliminaries.

"Look at that man," she exclaimed in her surprise. "He's being followed by the soldier. I'm quite sure of it. Bob, look at him!"

Bob had no particular curiosity in the matter--so he put his arm about her waist, and peeped over the steep as she desired. Sure enough, the play was going on just as she had indicated. A man walked leisurely upon the path, while another dodged him in the security of the woods. Such a game of hide-and-seek carried its own explanations. There were two who played it, and one spied upon the other.

"Why, it's a gendarme from Sierre!" exclaimed Bob presently. "I should know the fellow anywhere. What's he up to, I wonder; and who's the man? It must be one of the Vermala people--and look, he's dropped to it now--he knows what's going on!"

It really was vastly curious. The man who had been spied upon detected his enemy suddenly and stood quite still, as though meditating a plan. Presently he turned about, and began to climb the height in a direction which would have carried him to the very wood which now sheltered the lovers. This manoeuvre, closely observed by the gendarme, was not immediately answered by him; but presently he turned about and set off as though to return to the hotel at Vermala. So he became lost to view, and the wood hiding the other, the little comedy terminated abruptly.

"That's a queer game," Bob remarked presently.

Nellie, upon her part, could make nothing of it, nor had she any desire to do so. Suddenly, as they stood there, the hounds burst into view, in more or less full cry, according to their agility. Gliding, shuffling, sprawling, the thin white line made what haste it could toward the village of Andana, where lunch was waiting. No one cared very much about the hares; elderly ladies, repenting of their rashness, would have paid precious gold to have been carried to any destination; the girls desired only that the men should admire their dexterity; the men, that their tricks should not go unobserved by the girls. Here and there, a fine performer rejoiced in the magic of the exercise and swooped down the mountain-side with the dash of an eagle upon its prey. But dash--except as an expression of the language employed--was in the main lacking to the _cortege_, which moved as though in lingering agony.

Bob hazarded the opinion that they had better go down immediately to the "bun-scrap" in the village, and reluctantly, with a last prolonged embrace which threatened the stability of the feminine superstructure, they turned and began to ski gently down through the wood. Hardly, however, had they made a start, when there came, not from below but from above, a loud and prolonged cry, which echoed in the very heights of the Zaat, and brought them to a stand in an instant. Someone had fallen, up yonder, from one of the dangerous precipices--there could not be a doubt of it!

"It must have been that fellow who dodged the gendarme," said Bob, after a little interval of waiting. Nellie did not know what to make of it. The cry was not repeated, and the pines hid the truth from their view. Nevertheless both were a little awed, and it was impossible not to believe that something untoward had happened.

"I wonder if we ought to go up?" Bob asked her. She replied, with a very white face, that it was not their business.

"There are always plenty of people at Vermala, and I know some of ours have gone up to the Zaat to-day. We could do no good, Bob--I'm sure I would go, if I thought that we could--but is it our business, when there are so many others about?"

"And the whole thing just spoof, perhaps. By George, though; if it were not!--if it were murder, Nellie?"

"Murder?--you make me shudder. How can you be so horrid, Bob?"

Bob hastened to protest that horrors were what most girls doted on; but he was obviously ill at ease, and neither said much while they went down through the wood. A little further on they disturbed, maladroitly, a pair of lovers, who started up in guilty fashion to reveal the red face of a certain Mr. Richard Fenton, and the tousled hair of that amiable and athletic nymph, Miss Marjory Rider. It was the merriest meeting in all the world, and Nellie's "Oh!" when she espied her sister would have done credit to a lady of the theatre.

"Oh, Margy, how can you look me in the face--?"

"But we're engaged, Nell--I'm going to marry Dick."

Dick looked under his eyes at Bob, but he seemed rather abashed, and by no means a lover who would have done credit to the heroics of the poets.

Upon his part, Bob said never a word about his own predicament; but Nellie had it out in a twinkling, and there the four of them stood, giggling and laughing and blushing. It remained for Bob to set matters straight by a resounding cheer, which he did presently to the great scandal of his _fiancee_, and the surprise of all in the vicinity of the wood. Then he discovered that he was hungry--a meagre lover sighing for baked meats.

"We shall miss the bun-scrap if we don't buck up," he said. "I'm sure old Gordon Snagg will eat all the sandwiches within half a mile of him. Let's make a dash for it, Nellie; these two will stop here spooning all day. It makes me sick to see them."

He did not wait for his friend to put on his skis, but taking Nellie by the hand, sailed with her down the nearest slope, and presently came out just above Benny's cottage. Here a little Frenchman, standing on the path which debouches from the woods below Vermala, waved his hand to them in a frantic and demoralised appeal, and when they approached him, began to tell them an excited tale which even one of his own countrymen might not have followed. As for Bob, who had forgotten the only irregular verb he ever knew, and Nellie, whose French hardly represented the guinea expended upon it per quarter, they were at their wits' end, until Benson himself came to their assistance; as he did almost immediately, lurching down from the chalet and asking gruffly what was up. To him the Frenchman now addressed himself, while Benny listened with an amused smile. Then he interpreted the rigmarole to the others.

"He says a man's fallen down from the height up yonder. That's steep, anyway; a baby would walk the path. Do you know anything of it? Did you see anything, Mr. Otway?"

"We saw a man and another following him," Bob said in a halting way. "I think the little man was a gendarme, for he had something bright on his hat. They went off toward the Zaat, and then we heard one of them shout out. I shouldn't wonder if this gentleman were right"--pointing to the Frenchman--"it's very likely the pair may have had a row."

To their great surprise and wonder, Benny turned as pale as a sheet. Muttering something about a silly tale, he, nevertheless, went about, and returned almost immediately to his chalet, leaving the young couple to appease the excited Frenchman as best they could. That worthy, perceiving their lack of understanding, renewed his appeals, this time to Dick Fenton and Marjory, who had just emerged from the wood.

"What does he say?" Dick asked his friend. Bob assumed an air of reproving superiority, and replied:

"Oh, a man has fallen off the Zaat--!"

Marjory said "Oh!" and turned very pale. Dick was not so sentimental.

"Well," he exclaimed rather pettishly, "why doesn't he go and pick him up? I expect it's all my eye; people don't fall off the Zaat, of all places. Why don't you tell him so, Bob?"

"He speaks _patois_--mine's no good to him. You have a shot, Dick, or perhaps Miss Marjory will?"

They laughed at this, and the Frenchman turned away in despair. These English assuredly were mad and without pity. He had told his story to half a dozen of them already, and all the answer he got was the gibberish of a tongue spoken neither in heaven nor on earth. Obviously, he must find one of his own countrymen, and they must go together to the slopes above. Failing that, he would return, and telephone to the police; an alternative which so pleased him that he was already half-way down to the hotel, when Benny, who had appeared on the scene again, overtook him and entered immediately into an exciting argument. Benny spoke French like a true Parisian--the stranger had no difficulty in understanding him.

The others, meanwhile, had gone down to the village of Andana. There in a little cafe, ordinarily shut during the winter, the hares and hounds browsed upon a common pasture. And curiously enough, while Bob and Dick ate with good appetite, their mood was hardly as joyous as it should have been; while those interesting young ladies, Miss Marjory and Miss Nellie Rider, wore already something of the staid demeanour of the married woman.

It was not until after lunch and much good Malvoisie that the young men drew aside to debate the situation in anxious whispers. Assuredly, as Bob admitted, they had "done it," and time alone and that far from amiable old lady, Mrs. Rider, could show them the way out.

In short, as Dick added savagely: "they were in a devil of a mess."

*CHAPTER X*

*A SPECIALIST IS CONSULTED*

The amiable discussion, begun in the interval after lunch, was continued at the Palace Hotel during that pleasant hour when tea is a memory and dinner an expectation.

The girls had gone up to their room by this time, hand in hand, and tremulous with the powers of suppressed narration. For them the supreme issue concerned an amiable lady who was quite in ignorance of the surprise prepared for her, and would certainly shed tears when the amatory bombshell exploded. For the youths it was another matter altogether. Conscience had begun to twit them with melancholy gibes upon their rashness. Or, as Bob put it tersely, a couple of wives and three hundred and ninety pounds a year between the pair of them. That was the bald truth. It had seemed otherwise in the woods when the sun shone, and the great mountains looked down kindly upon the lovers.

"What we want," said Dick resolutely, "is someone to advise us." He was a sentimental person, and given to idealism. "We ought to know how we stand before the thing goes any further. Marjory's a dear little girl, and I shall never marry anybody else. But that doesn't say I have the right to marry her on a hundred and ninety a year--you'll admit that, Bob?"

Bob admitted it, and ordered a "mixed Vermouth." They were sitting in the bar at the time, and could hear Bess Bethune scolding the doctor in the passage outside. Distantly, from the drawing-room came the strains of one of Schubert's nocturnes, played by a "half-back" from Harrow, who had some difficulty with the bass. The charming Swiss girl, who served them, did not understand much English, but they would have consulted her for two pins, so dreadful was the emergency.

"It's my opinion, we were just rushed into it," said Bob, taking up the conversation from an unobservable point, "I like Nellie better than any girl I ever saw, but I confess it's rather a knock to hear she's been engaged three times already. Suppose I were to meet one of the other fellows when we're married! He'd have the laugh of me, anyway."

Dick sighed.

"Marjory's been engaged once--she told me so. I don't think a girl can be expected to know her own mind until she's two or three and twenty. We'd have to take a little flat somewhere, and cut it deuced close; do you think she is the girl to do that, Bob?"

Bob was far from thinking it.

"She proposes to run a motor, Dick, she told me so. You've got fifteen hundred a year and a shooting-box in Scotland, so the hotel says. My place is in Norfolk--I suppose they mean the tent Jack Stevens and I pitched by Horsey Mere last autumn. I didn't say so, though; let's keep it up as long as we can; in for a penny, in for fifteen hundred pound, you know."

Dick drained his glass and appeared to cogitate. Presently he said, almost as though it were an inspiration:

"I tell you what, Bob, let's talk to the 'little widow' about it. I'm sure she's a woman of the world. She'd put us straight, right enough; let's go up and see her."

Bob looked at him scornfully.

"Why, where do you think she is, then?"

"Who, Mrs. Kennaird? Why, in Number 43, of course. It's on the board, isn't it?"

"The board be hanged! She's left the hotel--she left this morning, and went up to the chalet, near Benny's."

"Then let's go to the chalet after her. I'm sure she's one of the nicest little women in the place. And she's been married herself; she'd know what we ought to do. Let's go and see her now."

He stood up, excited by the idea; and, really, when he came to reflect upon it, Bob did not find the notion displeasing. It was true that there had been ugly talk in the hotel concerning this very person; true that she had left under circumstances so mysterious that a hundred versions were already current, both of her past life and the promise of her future. In these the boys had taken little part, except to say that it was a pity people had nothing better to do than to slander so charming a lady; and their abstention made the proposed visit to her chalet seem quite chivalrous. Five minutes later they were climbing up the steps of the skating-rink; whence it was but a little way to the bungalow.

There were lights in the lower windows of the house, and when they knocked, a solemn-looking Swiss maid opened to them and listened as a freckled automaton to their far from coherent explanations. They wished to see Mrs. Kennaird--for they were still in ignorance of her true name--upon a private matter, and one to be explained to no other. To which Dick added the rider, that they would be very grateful to Mrs. Kennaird if she would see them, and would waste as little as possible of her valuable time; a rigmarole at which Bob would have laughed had he not been so very nervous. But, as he was nervous, he stood first upon one foot and then upon the other and never said a word until the maid returned and ushered them into the drawing-room where the "little widow" awaited them. Bob did not know quite why it was, but from that very moment he felt as though his troubles were at an end; while as for Dick, he declared afterwards that all his anxiety vanished like the mists directly he set eyes on that gracious lady.

Lily was surprised to see the boys, for she had been awaiting another--perhaps she welcomed them with a greater cordiality upon that account. Very charming, in a loose gown of black lace, it was not her beauty but her womanhood which cast a spell wherever she went; and to be sure, she was as much out of place in that mediocre medley of Andana as a diamond in a setting of German silver.

"Yes," she said, encouraging Bob to speak, "I remember you perfectly, Mr. Otway; were we not fellow-prisoners at Sierre during the blizzard? And Mr. Fenton: why, you rode in the same sleigh the day we came here."

Fenton said that it was so, and apologised at the same time for certain frivolities upon the journey, particularly for the votive offering of snow hurled at the shrine of one Sir Gordon Snagg. When this had provoked the kindly lady to a smile, Bob took up the running.

"Everyone at the hotel is beastly sorry that you have left," he exclaimed, and then qualified it by saying: "That is, everyone who counts. The place seems quite different since you went."

"Oh, but I only left this morning, and you were paper-chasing, were you not?"

"Of course he was," cried Dick, "and proposing to Nellie Rider at the same time. That's what he came to tell you, Mrs. Kennaird."

"While Bob wants to say that he is engaged to Marjory, and doesn't know what to do about it."

"To do about it! Oh, my dear Mr. Fenton, what do you mean?"

They were both blushing very much by this time, and it was quite a charity to ask them to sit down. Lily herself took a seat upon the sofa, and, enjoying the situation immensely, encouraged them to go on.

"So I must congratulate you both; how good of you to take me into your confidence so soon. Why, it was only this morning, was it not?"

"In the woods below the Zaat," interposed Bob quickly; "I could show you the place."

"And I was just a quarter of a mile away. Was it not a coincidence, Mrs. Kennaird? We were both done for when we met."

She looked from one to the other, asking herself whether this was said in jest, or was indeed the very far from sentimental confession of a not unsentimental youth. And that was a riddle she could not read. It seemed to her that she was listening to boys from a public school, who had all the fine airs and the sporadic idiom of the city, but were at heart as simple as any Corydon from remote pastures.

"Really," she said, with just a suspicion of reproach in her tone. "Really, you must be serious, Mr. Fenton."

"I was never more serious in my life. We're both engaged, and we've got three hundred and ninety pounds a year between us; that's why we've come to you. You can tell us what we ought to do about it."

She laughed--it was so droll.

"Then you regard it altogether as a matter of money?"

Bob looked rueful.

"We don't, but Mrs. Rider will. These old girls are regular nuts on the cash; she's sure to want to know what we've got."

"Then, of course, you will tell her everything?"

They looked at each other a little sorrowfully. It was Dick who made answer.

"If we do, the engagements will be off. We shall have to cut the girls to-morrow, and it would make it awkward for them. Don't you think we could have a truce or something--lie low until the night before we go? Don't you think that, Mrs. Kennaird?"

Lily shook her head.

"I think you are a pair of babies," she said emphatically. "You don't seem to know whether you wish to marry or not. That enters into the question, I think; you certainly ought to make up your minds."

They nodded their heads as though perfectly in accord with so obvious a truth. Presently, Bob, who hugged his knee during the harangue--not under the delusion that it was Nellie Rider's waist, but because he did not know what to do with his hands--spoke for the pair of them.

"You see," he said--and Lily saw nothing but the humour of it--"you see it's this way. Dick's a sentimentalist, and I'm a philosopher, and we've tumbled into the same boat somehow. I would like to marry Nellie if I could make her happy, and all that sort of thing; but it's rotten beginning on two hundred a year, and Dick's only got a hundred and ninety. Now what I feel is this: Is it quite fair to the girls?"

"Did you think of that when you proposed to them this morning?"

Dick shook his head.

"I was never more in love in my life," he said. "I forgot everything else in heaven or earth but Marjory. I would marry her to-morrow, if it wasn't for the beastly cash."

"And you, Mr. Otway?"

"I say the same, but I don't think I should care to begin so soon. She might give me a year's grace."

Lily nodded her head; she understood now.

"I think you will have your year," she said a little merrily. "To tell you the truth, Mr. Otway, I should not be surprised if you remained a bachelor. As to Mr. Fenton, well, I think that will depend upon Mrs. Rider. Would you like me to speak to her for you, for both of you if you wish it?"

They jumped at the idea. She was a regular brick, and so very much superior to anyone at Andana that the thing was as good as done if she became their ambassador. The promise put them in the seventh heaven.

"If she says 'No,' we can let bygones be bygones," Bob added enthusiastically. "I will treat Nellie as a sister, and the hotel need know nothing about it. You don't know what a load you've taken off my back, Mrs. Kennaird; I shall never forget it."