Part 8

She rejoined that it was a pleasure to help two silly boys in love, and having said it, the boys in their turn perceived that the interview must terminate. Reluctantly, they shook hands with her, and then, as she stood with them a moment at the door of the chalet, Dick Fenton remarked the presence of two gendarmes, who were going up toward Vermala, carrying lanterns in their hands. He bethought him immediately of the comic-tragedy of the morning, and began to tell her about it, just to show that he could speak of other things than matrimony.

"They say there's been a murder up in the woods," he declared cheerfully; "that's the very latest intelligence at Vermala. Bob saw an Englishman being followed by one of the Swiss police, and he heard a weird cry a little while afterwards. Then we met an old Frenchman, who declared that he saw the gendarme fall on the slope below the Zaat. Those fellows would be going up to look for him, I suppose. There'll be a pretty hullabaloo if they find him."

She did not speak a word; they mistook her silence for lack of interest, and fearing to stay longer, said "good night" once more, and went with boyish steps down the hillside together.

*CHAPTER XI*

*THE VIGIL OF TRAGEDY*

Lily watched the boys go down the hillside, and when they were lost to view she did not move from the door of the chalet. An onlooker might have said that her eyes searched the heights for tidings they alone could give her. A bitter wind blowing up the valley, a sky pregnant with omens of tempest, did not drive her back to the shelter of the house. She was unconscious of the cold, and took a cloak from the saturnine maid with a smile and a protest.

"I really do not want it, Louise--I don't feel the cold."

"But, Madame, it is going to snow; you will be ill, Madame, and no one to nurse you."

Lily put the cloak about her shoulders, and then asked the girl another question.

"Can you see a lantern upon the hillside, Louise, up there below Vermala?" The maid, grown curious, came and stood with her, but declared she could see nothing.

"There were gendarmes by here just now, Madame. I know them both, Albert and Philip, from Sion; there will have been trouble at the hotel, then; they would not send Monsieur Albert if it were not so."

Lily nodded her head.

"You do not often have trouble up here, Louise?"

"Ah, Madame, the world is all the same whether you are up in the mountains or down in the valleys. There are wicked people at Andana, just as anywhere else. It would be one of the waiters who has robbed his master. There are Germans at Vermala, and they are all thieves--so, you see, the police must be here."

Lily made no reply. The lanterns had come into view by this time, and could be seen dancing to and fro upon the high path which leads up to the hotel perched upon the plateau below the Zaat. It was apparent that the men were not searching the hillside as she had supposed; and, when she was sure of this, she shut the door and went back to the little library. Louise, meanwhile, had returned to the kitchen to prepare the modest supper which should be served at eight o'clock. Perhaps the gendarmes would pay the chalet a visit upon their return, in view of which possibility some culinary diligence was necessary.

In the library, Lily sat down to her writing-table to finish a letter to her brother Harold, laid aside upon the appearance of the boys, and now taken up with reluctance.

She had been trying to tell her brother to concern himself less with her affairs, and to be sure that whatever she might do, due regard would be paid to the interests and the scruples of others. Such a theme had been difficult enough before the boys appeared; but she found it quite impossible when they had left. Not a line could she write; not a sentence frame. A shadow had enveloped her suddenly, and she could not escape it.

Word by word she pieced together the story she had heard and tried to give it a meaning. A man pursued upon the mountain road and another following him! Then a loud cry heard by several people, and the belief, expressed openly, that murder had been done. Shrinking from her own dread of a terrible truth, she could not quiet the voice which told her that there was but one man at Vermala in whom, the probabilities being considered, the police might be interested--and that man, her husband, Luton! Why, the whole trend of his life pointed to such an end as this. And she had feared and dreamed of it since the day she first learned to know him and to realise the tragedy of her own fate. The end would come before all the world, she had said--and the day of it was at hand!

She put the letter into the blotting book, and went to the window again. The lanterns were no longer to be seen, and the night had come down with a darkness so intense that even the nearer slopes were invisible. Shut from her eyes, the hidden woods were revealed to a keen imagination which filled them with alien figures, searching here and there for a truth which must so alter her own life (if such a truth existed) that hereafter the whole world would hardly offer her a harbourage from the shame of it.

As in a vision, she saw the dead man lying there, deep in the snow, and the white flakes falling anew upon his face. A glow from a lantern searched it out, and declared the horror of the secret. And up there at the hotel another waited, dreading the instant of discovery--perchance preparing already for flight in the hope that discovery might never come.

It was all hysterical, and out of harmony with her good common sense, as she admitted when she turned from the window, and, looking at the clock, discovered it to be half-past six precisely. At seven, Luton had promised to come down from Vermala to see if there were a telegram from Sir Frederick Kennaird--letter there could hardly be for another four and twenty hours. If he came, and assuredly he would come, he might very well give an account of the affair which would so deride her fancies that she would be ashamed even to remember them. Or, he might say that he knew nothing of the affair at all, had taken no part in it, and had not heard it named. The latter was quite an optimistic version, to which she clung tenaciously, sitting again at her writing-table and composing quite a satisfactory epistle upon Andana and its people; to which she added excellent reasons for her preference of the chalet she occupied. The hotel, she declared, was far too noisy--her nerves were no longer equal to the exigencies of distracted youth, nor could she support the banalities of a middle-age which sought to stamp out the years by a grotesque display of elephantine energies. From these she had fled to the solitude of the chalet--a half-truth which entirely overlooked the personal element and skimmed over the broken ground where the seeds of slander had fallen.

Seven o'clock struck while she was still at the table, but there was no sign of Luton, nor any message from him at the quarter past the hour. If he were late, then, she thought, that was the first occasion she could remember when he had neglected an appointment to his own advantage and the benefit of his creditors. He had told her that his need was urgent, and had sent letters from Bothand and Co. confirming his statements. Nine thousand four hundred pounds must be paid if he would stave off those "further proceedings" with which they threatened him; and if he did not pay, then it was clear that the firm would discover at a later date excellent reasons for a criminal prosecution. In such a case, extradition would not be refused, nor would it be difficult for the police to trace a man who was at so little pains to act prudently as Luton Delayne.

The clock struck the three-quarters, and Lily put on her cloak and went to the door again. It was snowing heavily by this time, and the wind almost raging in the pass. Despite the rigours of the night, she determined to go a little way upon the road in the hope that she might meet Luton; and she set out bravely, afraid that the wrathful Louise might detect her and yet determined in her purpose. Two hundred yards from the chalet, a burst of light upon the hillside marked the spot where the brothers Benson were living, and by this she must go upon her way to Vermala. It chanced, however, that Jack Benson stood at the door of the shed when she approached, and it was natural to ask him how his brother did. Jack thought little of women, as a rule, and he dreaded this particular woman's influence with Benny; but he could not answer her uncivilly, and like the others, he was, metaphorically, at her feet before she had spoken twenty words to him.

"Is that you, Mrs. Kennaird; what a night, isn't it? Aren't you rather daring to be out?"

"Oh!" she said, "I had no idea there was such a wind blowing. Will you let me shelter a moment? I'm really quite out of breath. That's the shed where your brother keeps his aeroplane, is it not? He told me all about it, you know. I'm very much interested."

Jack muttered to himself that Benny was losing his wits, or he would never have talked about the machine to a woman; but a moment's reflection reminded him that the sex is rarely of a mechanical turn, and would hardly profit by the confidence. So he threw the door open wide, and the electric lamps blazing within cast a warm aureole upon the snow and upon Lily's pale face. Perhaps Jack understood his brother's infatuation then, if he could not condone it.

"You'll find us rather upside down," he said apologetically. "We're always like that when Benny's away--we haven't his idea of order. But we're pretty useful in our way, and the abbe's as good as any mechanic from Bleriot's. He's just turning up the planes, if you understand what that is, Mrs. Kennaird; sewing them up with steel wire, so to speak. I assure you, we'd have gone to pot without the abbe."

The little priest looked up and smiled pleasantly. He wore a white apron over his cassock, and sat with one of Benny's planes over his knee, repairing and relaying the canvas with the skill of a trained workman. Jack himself was enveloped in engineer's overalls, and had been working at a forge in the far corner; he, too, was liberally decorated with choice smuts, and had a very chart of carbon upon his cheeks.

"Do you say Mr. Benson is away?" Lily asked him. Jack responded as one who had a personal grievance.

"He was off before lunch. Wouldn't eat anything for some reason which he'll have forgotten by the time he comes back. I don't know where he is, I'm sure. He always goes away just when we want him most."

"But, surely, this is a dreadful night to be out; he should have returned by this time?"

The abbe nodded his head.

"Madame is quite right," he said; "he should have returned. It is very necessary for him to be here these days; he will lose a great deal of money if he behaves so foolishly; would that Madame told him as much!"

"I?" exclaimed Lily, turning her large eyes upon him. "But, surely, Mr. Benson would not listen to a woman?"

"He would listen to you," Jack rejoined with emphasis. "He thinks a good deal of your opinion--he told me so."

She smiled, but turned away her eyes nevertheless. "And what am I to say to your brother?"

"Tell him that he can do it yet, if he will only believe as much. Say that it's not the game for him to be here, there and everywhere when his future depends on what we're doing for him. If he wins the ten thousand pounds put up by the London daily paper, he's a made man for life. There's nothing Benny could not do with capital, nothing on earth, I do believe. Why, he's invented a dozen machines as clever as this, and all of them are just so many drawings, because he hasn't got the money to build them. And here's ten thousand going begging, so to speak, and he's dreaming all the time; acting like some moonsick shepherdess, and got just about as much sense in his head. If you'd tell him that, you'd be doing him a very great kindness, Mrs. Kennaird. There's no one else at Andana who could do it, I assure you."

Lily looked from one to the other: her face was very pale, her manner unusually earnest.

"And what does Monsieur l'Abbe say?"

The abbe ceased to work at the canvas upon his knee.

"I think that Madame is the only person who could help us," he said at length; and having said it he cast down his eyes and went on with his work. She was a clever woman, and she would understand that, he thought. Nor was he mistaken. Madame understood him perfectly.

"I see Mr. Benson so rarely," she said. "Now that I have left the hotel my opportunities will be fewer. But that is not to say that I will not do my best when I do see him, if you care to tell him so."

Jack was delighted.

"I'll send him down to your place in the morning," he exclaimed; "that is, with your permission, he shall come directly after breakfast. Perhaps you will be going skating or something. If so, he might meet you on the rink?"

She smiled at his eagerness.

"I shall be pleased to see your brother any time. Now I fear I must go. Is not that eight o'clock striking? My cook will never forgive me."

A miserable cuckoo-clock shrieked the hour with intolerable emphasis, and reminded them all of the flesh-pots. Jack, however, remembered his manners sufficiently to escort her down the hillside, and it was a quarter past eight when he left her at her own door. The snow still fell fast, and the wind howled dismally up the valley. It was going to be a dreadful night.

"You won't forget," he said as he turned at her gate and drew the collar of his heavy coat about his ears. She answered that she would expect Benny sometime during the morning, and immediately went in to ask her servant if anyone had come. When Louise retorted with a shrug of the shoulders and the inquiry, "Who would come upon such a night?" Madame had nothing to say.

The hours were making it very difficult for her to believe the best. The dawn found her still awake, and quite prepared for that hour of crisis which such a life as Luton's had made inevitable.

*CHAPTER XII*

*FLIGHT*

The Abbe Villari slept at Benny's chalet that night, fearful of the storm, and not a little concerned at the absence of its master. This anxiety he shared with Jack, who suggested a hundred reasons which might have taken Benny to Sierre, but none which could have kept him there--unless it were the storm, which in the case of such a man seemed altogether insufficient.

"He'll have gone down to see if the stuff has come," Jack declared with conviction; "they say at the stables that he engaged a sleigh shortly after ten o'clock. I know he's ordered a lot of things, and he was particularly anxious to have the new steel arms for the frame. If the snow's very bad down there, the fellow who drives the sleigh may have refused to come up, and then Benny would be on his own. That wouldn't matter much to him, though, for he's as tough as old leather, and would just as soon walk up as ride. I can't think why he hasn't done it, Abbe."

The abbe agreed, although he had a poor opinion of some of the coachmen at Andana.

"The fellows like to spend a night in the town," he said, with a suggestion of ascetic regret. "It is difficult for a stranger to think of Sierre in such a light, but, after all, these things are a question of opportunity. A showman with a bear is a great person in a village where they have never seen bears, and so a man with a fiddle is an orchestra for people who have no music. I should imagine that Andre has refused to come back, and that your brother will remain at the Terminus Hotel. If so, he will be very comfortable, for the wines are excellent, and nobody would quarrel with the cooking. I think we had better say that he has done so, and go on with our work. There is nothing so unprofitable as speculation when time alone can tell us the truth."

Jack admitted the good sense of it, but he did little work, and after they had supped he went some way down to the road toward the village of Andana in the hope that he might discover Benny and the sleigh. It was a vain quest, however, and he returned to tell the abbe that the wind had nearly blown him off his legs, and that if Benny had refused to return from Sierre, he was no fool for his choice. Thereafter they ceased to speak about it, but neither suggested bed; and although they slept a little after twelve o'clock, the dawn found them wide awake and alert for tidings of the wanderer.

Benny was at Sierre--their guess was perfectly correct. Where they were at fault was in the matter of motive, which they failed entirely to comprehend. Which mystery is the better understood by harking back to the bridle track below Vermala, at an hour when a certain foreigner spoke of a strange affair upon the hillside, and those two masters of idiomatic but obsolete French, Bob Otway and Dick Fenton, responded incoherently to his vain appeals.

Benny, it will be remembered, had heard the Frenchman's story, and immediately understood its meaning. His knowledge of Luton Delayne convinced him that such an act of folly was to be expected from a man famous in two counties for the violence of his temper. He perceived that some scandalous affair had set the police upon the baronet's track, that one of them had been set to watch him and had been detected in the act. There had been an exchange of angry words, of abuse upon the one hand and of insolence upon the other--and then the blow. Just as Luton Delayne had invited the contempt of his neighbours at Holmswell by descending to a vulgar arena in which a butcher figured not ingloriously, so here in Switzerland had his temper got the better of him and this blow been struck. What the consequences might be, Benny did not care to ask himself; but he realised that they might be momentous, and remembering that the man was Lily's husband, he went up to Vermala at once and began to search the hillside. Was it possible that the affair had been nothing but an idle fracas after all? Had the gendarme gone off to report the matter to his superiors, as one calling for a prosecution which would amuse the community? It might be that, he said, and disbelieving it utterly, he turned to the heights.

The snow was firm and hard upon the narrow track, and revealed little even to his keen eyes. He perceived that luges had gone up to the hotel, and he could almost say how many. The track itself disclosed but gentle slopes, and none which could be called a precipice even by an imaginative person. The woods harboured deep drifts of snow, and were scarred here and there by the trails of skis; but at one spot alone was there any possible scene for such a drama as the Frenchman had described. This lay immediately below the hotel; a plateau upon which two men could stand side by side, with a sheer wall of rock falling fifty or sixty feet away from it and an arbour of the pines, which the sun could hardly penetrate, at its foot.

Benny climbed to the plateau, and kneeling there he peered down to the depths. A great drift of snow had culminated about the trunks of three trees which appeared to grow straight out of the hillside. On the plateau itself there were footprints which clearly indicated that two people had faced each other, and that a scuffle had taken place. But, and this was the more remarkable thing, save for a curious wraith of snow some twenty feet down the abyss, there was no scar upon the unbroken sheet of white which stretched from the plateau to the trees; not a mark which would have invited the suspicions of the most watchful. Many men, satisfied with the scrutiny, would have gone on at once, convinced that the glen could tell them nothing; but Benny was not that kind of man, and when he had reflected upon it a little while, and had made sure that his acts would not be observed, an idea came to him, and he put it into practice immediately. It was nothing less than this: to descend the precipice by the help of the trees, and to discover for himself the secret of the snow wraith, if secret there were.

The feat was not a little difficult, perhaps really dangerous. But here was a man who had ploughed the "roaring forties" in an old Scotch brig, and had the foot of a goat upon a height. Swinging himself out upon a branch, to which he leaped, Benny climbed over to other branches; then he slid down the trunk of a pine as a sailor down a pole. He was five minutes in the hollow below the plateau, and a quarter of an hour making his way back through the heavy drifts to the path he had quitted. Then he went straight on to the hotel at Vermala--a silent man, with set face and eyes which saw nothing but the track before him.

To the porter who told him that the Englishman, Mr. Faikes, was engaged in his private room Benny merely replied: "Go back, and say he'll have to see me." Thereafter, he waited, standing immobile in the hall, and quite unconscious of the guests who studied him with critical eyes. Some of these knew him for the winner of the Grand Prix down at Andana, and wondered that such a man should interest himself in Alpine sports; but others made a jest upon his earnestness, and said, behind their papers, that he looked like the impersonification of tragedy.

Luton Delayne had a sitting-room looking over toward the Weisshorn, and here Benny discovered him a few moments later. A whisky-and-soda stood at his side, and the ends of innumerable cigarettes lay in a tawdry Swiss ash-tray. Evidently he had but recently returned from the open, for he still wore heavy boots and puttees, and these were wet with the snow. His manner was characteristically aggressive, and his question, "Well, what the devil do you want with me?" quite in the expected tone.

Benny shut the door of the room carefully behind him, and then crossed it on tip-toe, an unnecessary proceeding, but one in keeping with his own desire for secrecy. His hands were thrust deep in his trousers pockets, and he had quite forgotten to take off the old Alpine hat without which his best friends at Andana would not have recognised him. Delayne could not but see that this man had a right to come to him as he did, and his face blanched suddenly.

"You know why I have come here, Sir Luton--none but a d----d fool would ask that question. I've come to save your neck!"

Delayne puffed hard at his cigarette, and then laid the end of it down with the others.

"Oh," he exclaimed in the grand manner; "so you know about the row, then?"

Benny went to the window and looked out. The plateau lay a hundred yards from the hotel, but was hidden by a belt of trees. He wondered if others had already made their way there--searching for what he had found. The minutes were precious if he would save this madman for a woman's sake.

"Yes," he said, swinging round on his heel, "I know about the row. Half the place is talking about it. I suppose you'll be joining in yourself just now--when the police come along. That should be before morning with any luck--it won't be much later anyway."

The baronet rose and walked across to the window. Benny could see that his hands were twitching, while his eyes almost danced in his head.

"The man followed me," he said inconsequently. "It was the most damnably impertinent thing I ever saw in all my life. When I asked him what he wanted, he wouldn't say a word. I warned him to keep off, and he was on my heels again in five minutes. Would you stand that yourself? You're a man, and can judge between us? Would you stand it?"

Benny shrugged his shoulders.

"What we have to stand depends on our footing. The man who grubs in dirty soil mustn't complain that his hands are black. You came to blows, I suppose, and he went over. Is that what you would say?"