"Why?" asked Miss Ruth, regarding him full in the face.
"Because then, may be, she would have been less devoted to you."
Miss Denham did not reply for a moment.
"My aunt is very fond of me," she said gravely. "She never likes to have me absent an hour from her side."
"I can understand that," said Lynde, with an innocent air.
The girl glanced at him quickly, and went on: "She adopted me when I was only three years old; we have never been separated since. She lived in Paris all the time I was at school there, though she did not like Paris as a residence. She would make any sacrifice for me that a mother would make for a daughter. She has been mother and sister to me. I cannot overpay her devotion by any unselfishness of mine."
As she spoke, Lynde caught a hateful glimpse of the road through the stubby pine-trees beyond. It appeared to him only two minutes ago that he was a.s.sisting Miss Denham to mount the stone steps at the other extremity of the foot-path; and now he was to lose her again. She was with him alone for perhaps the last time.
"Miss Ruth!" said Lynde, with sudden earnestness in his voice. He had never before addressed her as Miss Ruth. She raised her eyes furtively to his face. "Miss Ruth"--
"Oh, there"s the carriage, Mr. Lynde!" exclaimed Miss Denham, releasing the arm she had accepted a few paces back, and hurrying down the path, which here narrowed again as at the entrance to the grove. "And there is aunt Gertrude," she added, half turning to Lynde, with a rich bloom on her cheeks, "looking as distressed as if we had slipped over some precipice. But we have not, have we, Mr. Lynde?"
"No, we haven"t slipped over any precipices," answered Lynde, with a curt laugh. "I wish we had," he muttered to himself. "She has dragged me through that grove and over those stones, and, without preventing me, has not permitted me to breathe the least word of love to her. I don"t know how she did it. That girl"s the most consummate coquette I ever saw. I am a child in her hands. I believe I"m beginning to be afraid of her."
Miss Ruth was already in the carriage, pinning the Alpine flower to the corsage of her aunt"s dress, when Lynde reached the steps. Mrs.
Denham"s features expressed no very deep anxiety that he could discover. That was clearly a fiction of Miss Ruth"s. Lynde resumed his place on the front seat, and the horses started forward. He was amused and vexed at the inconsequence of his interview with Miss Denham, and did not know whether to be wholly vexed or wholly amused. He had, at least, broken the ice, and it would be easier for him to speak when another opportunity offered. She had understood, and had not repulsed him; she had merely evaded him. Perhaps he had been guilty of a mismove in attempting to take her at a disadvantage. He was too discreet to dream of proposing any more walks. A short cut was plainly not the most direct way to reach Miss Denham.
She was in livelier spirits now than she had been in at any time during the day. "The exercise has done you good, Ruth," remarked Mrs. Denham; "I am sorry I did not accept Mr. Lynde"s invitation myself." Mr. Lynde was also politely sorry, and Miss Ruth contributed her regrets with an emphasis that struck Lynde as malicious and overdone.
Shortly before arriving at St. Martin, Miss Ruth broached her Montanvert project, which, as she had prophesied, was coldly received by the aunt. Lynde hastened to a.s.sure Mrs. Denham that the ascent was neither dangerous nor difficult. Even guides were not necessary, though it was convenient to have them to lead the animals. On the way up there were excellent views of the Flegere and the Brevent. There was a capital inn at the summit, where they could lunch, and from the cliff behind the inn one could look directly down on the Mer de Glace. Then Lynde fell back upon his Murray and Baedeker. It was here that Professor Tyndall spent many weeks, at different times, investigating the theory of glacier motion; and the Englishman"s hut, which Goethe mentions in his visit to the scene in 1779, was still standing. Miss Ruth begged with both eyes; the aunt wavered, and finally yielded. As a continuance of fine weather could not be depended on, it was agreed that they should undertake the ascent the following morning immediately after daybreak. Then the conversation drooped.
The magnificent scenery through which their route now wound began to absorb them. Here they crossed a bridge, spanning a purple chasm whose snake-like thread of water could be heard hissing among the sharp flints a hundred feet below; now they rattled through the street of a sleepy village that seemed to have no reason for being except its picturesqueness; now they were creeping up a tortuous steep gloomed by menacing crags; and now their way lingered for miles along a precipice, over the edge of which they could see the spear-like tips of the tall pines reaching up from the valley.
At the bridge between St. Martin and Sallanches the dazzling silver peaks of Mont Blanc, rising above the green pasturage of the Forclaz, abruptly revealed themselves to the travellers, who fancied for the moment that they were close upon the mountain. It was twelve miles away in a bee-line. From this point one never loses sight of those vast cones and tapering aiguilles. A bloom as delicate as that of the ungathered peach was gradually settling on all the fairy heights.
As the travellers drew nearer to the termination of their journey, they were less and less inclined to converse. At every turn of the sinuous road fresh splendors broke upon them. By slow degrees the glaciers became visible: first those of Gria and Taconay; then the Glacier des Boissons, thrusting a crook of steel-blue ice far into the valley; and then--faintly discernible in the distance, and seemingly a hand"s breadth of snow framed by the sombre gorge--the Glacier des Bois, a frozen estuary of the Mer de Glace.
The twilight was now falling. For the last hour or more the three inmates of the carriage had scarcely spoken. They had unresistingly given themselves over to the glamour of the time and place. Along the ravines and in the lower gorges and chasms the gray dusk was gathering; high overhead the domes and pinnacles were each instant taking deeper tinges of rose and violet. It seemed as if a word loudly or carelessly uttered would break the spell of the alpgluhen. It was all like a dream, and it was in his quality of spectral figure in a dream that the driver suddenly turned on the box, and, pointing over his shoulder with the handle of his whip said--
"Chamouni!"
IX
MONTANVERT
The mist was still lingering in the valleys, though the remote peaks had been kindled more than an hour by the touch of sunrise. As Lynde paced up and down the trottoir in front of the Couronne hotel, he drew out his watch from time to time and glanced expectantly towards the hotel entrance. In the middle of the street stood a couple of guides, idly holding the bridles of three mules, two of which were furnished with side-saddles. It was nearly half an hour past the appointment, and the Denhams, who had retired at eight o"clock the night before in order to be fresh for an early start up the mountain, had made no sign. Lynde himself had set the lark an example that morning by breakfasting by candle-light. Here were thirty minutes lost. He quickened his pace up and down in front of the hotel, as if his own rapidity of movement would possibly exert some occult influence in hastening the loiterers; but another quarter of an hour dragged on without bringing them.
Lynde was impatiently consulting his watch for the twentieth time when Miss Denham"s troubled face showed itself in the doorway.
"Isn"t it too bad, Mr. Lynde? Aunt Gertrude can"t go!"
"Can"t go!" faltered Lynde.
"She has a headache from yesterday"s ride. She got up, and dressed, but was obliged to lie down again."
"Then that"s the end of it, I suppose," said Lynde despondently. He beckoned to one of the guides.
"I don"t know," said Miss Denham, standing in an att.i.tude of irresolution on the upper step, with her curved eyebrows drawn together like a couple of blackbirds touching bills. "I don"t know what to do...she insists on our going. I shall never forgive myself for letting her see that I was disappointed. She added my concern for her illness to my regret about the excursion, and thought me more disappointed than I really was. Then she declared she would go in spite of her headache... unless I went."
The gloom which had overspread Lynde"s countenance vanished.
"It is not one of her severest turns," continued Miss Ruth, ceasing to be a statue on a pedestal and slowly descending the hotel steps with her waterproof trailing from her left arm, "and she is quite capable of executing her threat. What shall we do, Mr. Lynde?"
"I think we had better try the mountain--for her sake," answered Lynde.
"We need not attempt the Mer de Glace, you know; that can be left for another day. The ascent takes only two hours, the descent half an hour less; we can easily be back in time for lunch."
"Then let us do that."
Lynde selected the more amiable-looking of the two mules with side-saddles, dismissed one of the guides after a brief consultation, and helped Miss Denham to mount. In attending to these preliminaries Lynde had sufficient mastery over himself not to make any indecorous betrayal of his intense satisfaction at the turn affairs had taken.
Fortune had given her into his hands for five hours! She should listen this time to what he had to say, though the mountain should fall.
At a signal from Lynde the remaining guide led the way at a brisk pace through the bustling town. In front of the various hotels were noisy groups of tourists about to set forth on pilgrimages, some bound for the neighboring glaciers and cascades, and others preparing for more distant and more hardy enterprises. It was a perfect Babel of voices--French, Scotch, German, Italian, and English; with notes of every sort of patois--above which the strident ba.s.s of the mules soared triumphantly at intervals. There are not many busier spots than Chamouni at early morning in the height of the season.
Our friends soon left the tumult and confusion behind them, and were skirting the pleasant meadows outside of the town. Pa.s.sing by the way of the English church, they crossed to the opposite bank of the Arve, and in a few minutes gained the hamlet lying at the foot of Montanvert.
Then the guide took the bridle of Miss Ruth"s mule and the ascent began. The road stretches up the mountain in a succession of zigzags with sharp turns. Here and there the path is quarried out of the begrudging solid rock; in places the terrace is several yards wide and well wooded, but for the most part it is a barren shelf with a s.h.a.ggy wall rising abruptly on one hand and a steep slope descending on the other. Higher up, these slopes become quite respectable precipices. A dozen turns, which were accomplished in unbroken silence, brought the party to an alt.i.tude of several hundred feet above the level.
"I--I don"t know that I wholly like it," said Miss Ruth, holding on to the pommel of her saddle and looking down into the valley, checkered with fields and criss-crossed with shining rivulets. "Why do the mules persist in walking on the very edge?"
"That is a trick they get from carrying panniers. You are supposed to be a pannier, and the careful animal doesn"t want to brush you off against the rocks. See this creature of mine; he has that hind hoof slipping over the precipice all the while. But he"ll not slip; he"s as sure-footed as a chamois, and has no more taste for tumbling off the cliff than you have. These mules are wonderfully intelligent. Observe how cautiously they will put foot on a loose stone, feeling all around it."
"I wish they were intelligent enough to be led in the middle of the path," said Miss Ruth, "but I suppose the guide knows."
"You may trust to him; he is a person of varied accomplishments, the chief of which is he doesn"t understand a word of English. So you can scold, or say anything you like, without the least reserve. I picked him out for that," added Lynde, with a bland smile. "His comrade was a linguist."
"If I have anything disagreeable to say," replied Miss Ruth, with another bland smile, "I shall say it in French."
The guide, who spoke four languages, including English, never changed a muscle. Lynde, just before starting, had closely examined the two guides on their lingual acquirements--and retained the wrong man.
"I trust you will have no occasion, Miss Denham, to be anything but amiable, and that you will begin by granting me a favor. Will you?"
"Cela depend."
"There you go into French! I haven"t offended you?"
"Oh, no. What is the favor?--in English."
"That you will let me call you Miss Ruth, instead of Miss Denham."
"I haven"t the slightest objection, Mr. Lynde."