by Grant Allen
‘A what?’ Elsie exclaimed, shocked as usual at my levity.
‘A Man,’ I answered, squeezing her arm. ‘A Man! A real live Man! A specimen of the masculine gender in the human being! Man, ahoy! He has come at last — the lodestar of our existence!’
Next minute, I was sorry I spoke; for as the man drew nearer, I perceived that he was endowed with very long legs and a languidly poetical bearing. That supercilious smile — that enticing moustache! Could it be? — yes, it was — not a doubt of it — Harold Tillington!
I grew grave at once; Harold Tillington and the situation were serious. ‘What can he want here?’ I exclaimed, drawing back.
‘Who is it?’ Elsie asked; for, being a woman, she read at once in my altered demeanour the fact that the Man was not unknown to me.
‘Lady Georgina’s nephew,’ I answered, with a tell-tale cheek, I fear. ‘You remember I mentioned to you that I had met him at Schlangenbad. But this is really too bad of that wicked old Lady Georgina. She has told him where we lived and sent him up to see us.’
‘Perhaps,’ Elsie put in, ‘he wants to charter a bicycle.’
I glanced at Elsie sideways. I had an uncomfortable suspicion that she said it slyly, like one who knew he wanted nothing of the sort. But at any rate, I brushed the suggestion aside frankly. ‘Nonsense,’ I answered. ‘He wants me, not a bicycle.’
He came up to us, waving his hat. He did look handsome! ‘Well, Miss Cayley,’ he cried from afar, ‘I have tracked you to your lair! I have found out where you abide! What a beautiful spot! And how well you’re looking!’
‘This is an unexpected — —’ I paused. He thought I was going to say, ‘pleasure,’ but I finished it, ‘intrusion.’ His face fell. ‘How did you know we were at Lungern, Mr. Tillington?’
‘My respected relative,’ he answered, laughing. ‘She mentioned — casually—’ his eyes met mine— ‘that you were stopping in a chalet. And as I was on my way back to the diplomatic mill, I thought I might just as well walk over the Grimsel and the Furca, and then on to the Gotthard. The Court is at Monza. So it occurred to me ... that in passing ... I might venture to drop in and say how-do-you-do to you.’
‘Thank you,’ I answered, severely — but my heart spoke otherwise— ‘I do very well. And you, Mr. Tillington?’
‘Badly,’ he echoed. ‘Badly, since you went away from Schlangenbad.’
I gazed at his dusty feet. ‘You are tramping,’ I said, cruelly. ‘I suppose you will get forward for lunch to Meiringen?’
‘I — I did not contemplate it.’
‘Indeed?’
He grew bolder. ‘No; to say the truth, I half hoped I might stop and spend the day here with you.’
‘Elsie,’ I remarked firmly, ‘if Mr. Tillington persists in planting himself upon us like this, one of us must go and investigate the kitchen department.’
Elsie rose like a lamb. I have an impression that she gathered we wanted to be left alone.
I MAY STAY, MAYN’T I?
He turned to me imploringly. ‘Lois,’ he cried, stretching out his arms, with an appealing air, ‘I may stay, mayn’t I?’
I tried to be stern; but I fear ’twas a feeble pretence. ‘We are two girls, alone in a house,’ I answered. ‘Lady Georgina, as a matron of experience, ought to have protected us. Merely to give you lunch is almost irregular. (Good diplomatic word, irregular.) Still, in these days, I suppose you may stay, if you leave early in the afternoon. That’s the utmost I can do for you.’
‘You are not gracious,’ he cried, gazing at me with a wistful look.
I did not dare to be gracious. ‘Uninvited guests must not quarrel with their welcome,’ I answered severely. Then the woman in me broke forth. ‘But indeed, Mr. Tillington, I am glad to see you.’
He leaned forward eagerly. ‘So you are not angry with me, Lois? I may call you Lois?’
I trembled and hesitated. ‘I am not angry with you. I — I like you too much to be ever angry with you. And I am glad you came — just this once — to see me.... Yes, — when we are alone — you may call me Lois.’
He tried to seize my hand. I withdrew it. ‘Then I may perhaps hope,’ he began, ‘that some day — —’
I shook my head. ‘No, no,’ I said, regretfully. ‘You misunderstand me. I like you very much; and I like to see you. But as long as you are rich and have prospects like yours, I could never marry you. My pride wouldn’t let me. Take that as final.’
I looked away. He bent forward again. ‘But if I were poor?’ he put in, eagerly.
I hesitated. Then my heart rose, and I gave way. ‘If ever you are poor,’ I faltered,— ‘penniless, hunted, friendless — come to me, Harold, and I will help and comfort you. But not till then. Not till then, I implore you.’
He leant back and clasped his hands. ‘You have given me something to live for, dear Lois,’ he murmured. ‘I will try to be poor — penniless, hunted, friendless. To win you I will try. And when that day arrives, I shall come to claim you.’
We sat for an hour and had a delicious talk — about nothing. But we understood each other. Only that artificial barrier divided us. At the end of the hour, I heard Elsie coming back by judiciously slow stages from the kitchen to the living-room, through six feet of passage, discoursing audibly to Ursula all the way, with a tardiness that did honour to her heart and her understanding. Dear, kind little Elsie! I believe she had never a tiny romance of her own; yet her sympathy for others was sweet to look upon.
We lunched at a small deal table in the veranda. Around us rose the pinnacles. The scent of pines and moist moss was in the air. Elsie had arranged the flowers, and got ready the omelette, and cooked the chicken cutlets, and prepared the junket. ‘I never thought I could do it alone without you, Brownie; but I tried, and it all came right by magic, somehow.’ We laughed and talked incessantly. Harold was in excellent cue; and Elsie took to him. A livelier or merrier table there wasn’t in the twenty-two Cantons that day than ours, under the sapphire sky, looking out on the sun-smitten snows of the Jungfrau.
After lunch, Harold begged hard to be allowed to stop for tea. I had misgivings, but I gave way — he was such good company. One may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, says the wisdom of our ancestors: and, after all, Mrs. Grundy was only represented here by Elsie, the gentlest and least censorious of her daughters. So he stopped and chatted till four; when I made tea and insisted on dismissing him. He meant to take the rough mountain path over the screes from Lungern to Meiringen, which ran right behind the chalet. I feared lest he might be belated, and urged him to hurry.
‘Thanks, I’m happier here,’ he answered.
I was sternness itself. ‘You promised me!’ I said, in a reproachful voice.
He rose instantly, and bowed. ‘Your will is law — even when it pronounces sentence of exile.’
Would we walk a little way with him? No, I faltered; we would not. We would follow him with the opera-glasses and wave him farewell when he reached the Kulm. He shook our hands unwillingly, and turned up the little path, looking handsomer than ever. It led ascending through a fir-wood to the rock-strewn hillside.
Once, a quarter of an hour later, we caught a glimpse of him near a sharp turn in the road; after that we waited in vain, with our eyes fixed on the Kulm; not a sign could we discern of him. At last I grew anxious. ‘He ought to be there,’ I cried, fuming.
‘He ought,’ Elsie answered.
I swept the slopes with the opera-glasses. Anxiety and interest in him quickened my senses, I suppose. ‘Look here, Elsie,’ I burst out at last. ‘Just take this glass and have a glance at those birds, down the crag below the Kulm. Don’t they seem to be circling and behaving most oddly?’
Elsie gazed where I bid her. ‘They’re wheeling round and round,’ she answered, after a minute; ‘and they certainly do look as if they were screaming.’
‘They seem to be frightened,’ I suggested.
‘It looks like it, Brownie,’
‘Then h
e’s fallen over a precipice!’ I cried, rising up; ‘and he’s lying there on a ledge by their nest. Elsie, we must go to him!’
She clasped her hands and looked terrified. ‘Oh, Brownie, how dreadful!’ she exclaimed. Her face was deadly white. Mine burned like fire.
‘Not a moment to lose!’ I said, holding my breath. ‘Get out the rope and let us run to him!’
‘Don’t you think,’ Elsie suggested, ‘we had better hurry down on our cycles to Lungern and call some men from the village to help us? We are two girls, and alone. What can we do to aid him?’
‘No,’ I answered, promptly, ‘that won’t do. It would only lose time — and time may be precious. You and I must go; I’ll send Ursula off to bring up guides from the village.’
Fortunately, we had a good long coil of new rope in the house, which Mrs. Evelegh had provided in case of accident. I slipped it on my arm, and set out on foot; for the path was by far too rough for cycles. I was sorry afterwards that I had not taken Ursula, and sent Elsie to Lungern to rouse the men; for she found the climbing hard, and I had difficulty at times in dragging her up the steep and stony pathway, almost a watercourse. However, we persisted in the direction of the Kulm, tracking Harold by his footprints; for he wore mountain boots with sharp-headed nails, which made dints in the moist soil, and scratched the smooth surface of the rock where he trod on it.
We followed him thus for a mile or two, along the regular path; then of a sudden, in an open part, the trail failed us. I turned back, a few yards, and looked close, with my eyes fixed on the spongy soil, as keen as a hound that sniffs his way after his quarry. ‘He went off here, Elsie!’ I said at last, pulling up short by a spindle bush on the hillside.
‘How do you know, Brownie?’
‘Why, see, there are the marks of his stick; he had a thick one, you remember, with a square iron spike. These are its dints; I have been watching them all the way along from the chalet!
‘But there are so many such marks!’
‘Yes, I know; I can tell his from the older ones made by the spikes of alpenstocks because Harold’s are fresher and sharper on the edge. They look so much newer. See, here, he slipped on the rock; you can know that scratch is recent by the clean way it’s traced, and the little glistening crystals still left behind in it. Those other marks have been wind-swept and washed by the rain. There are no broken particles.’
‘How on earth did you find that out, Brownie?’
How on earth did I find it out! I wondered myself. But the emergency seemed somehow to teach me something of the instinctive lore of hunters and savages. I did not trouble to answer her. ‘At this bush, the tracks fail,’ I went on; ‘and, look, he must have clutched at that branch and crushed the broken leaves as the twigs slipped through his fingers. He left the path here, then, and struck off on a short cut of his own along the hillside, lower down. Elsie, we must follow him.’
She shrank from it; but I held her hand. It was a more difficult task to track him now; for we had no longer the path to guide us. However, I explored the ground on my hands and knees, and soon found marks of footsteps on the boggy patches, with scratches on the rock where he had leapt from point to point, or planted his stick to steady himself. I tried to help Elsie along among the littered boulders and the dwarf growth of wind-swept daphne: but, poor child, it was too much for her: she sat down after a few minutes upon the flat juniper scrub and began to cry. What was I to do? My anxiety was breathless. I couldn’t leave her there alone, and I couldn’t forsake Harold. Yet I felt every minute might now be critical. We were making among wet whortleberry thicket and torn rock towards the spot where I had seen the birds wheel and circle, screaming. The only way left was to encourage Elsie and make her feel the necessity for instant action. ‘He is alive still,’ I exclaimed, looking up; ‘the birds are crying! If he were dead, they would return to their nest — Elsie, we must get to him!’
She rose, bewildered, and followed me. I held her hand tight, and coaxed her to scramble over the rocks where the scratches showed the way, or to clamber at times over fallen trunks of huge fir-trees. Yet it was hard work climbing; even Harold’s sure feet had slipped often on the wet and slimy boulders, though, like most of Queen Margherita’s set, he was an expert mountaineer. Then, at times, I lost the faint track, so that I had to diverge and look close to find it. These delays fretted me. ‘See, a stone loosed from its bed — he must have passed by here.... That twig is newly snapped; no doubt he caught at it.... Ha, the moss there has been crushed; a foot has gone by. And the ants on that ant-hill, with their eggs in their mouths — a man’s tread has frightened them.’ So, by some instinctive sense, as if the spirit of my savage ancestors revived within me, I managed to recover the spoor again and again by a miracle, till at last, round a corner by a defiant cliff — with a terrible foreboding, my heart stood still within me.
We had come to an end. A great projecting buttress of crag rose sheer in front. Above lay loose boulders. Below was a shrub-hung precipice. The birds we had seen from home were still circling and screaming.
They were a pair of peregrine hawks. Their nest seemed to lie far below the broken scar, some sixty or seventy feet beneath us.
‘He is not dead!’ I cried once more, with my heart in my mouth. ‘If he were, they would have returned. He has fallen, and is lying, alive, below there!’
I ADVANCED ON MY HANDS AND KNEES TO THE EDGE OF THE PRECIPICE.
Elsie shrank back against the wall of rock. I advanced on my hands and knees to the edge of the precipice. It was not quite sheer, but it dropped like a sea-cliff, with broken ledges.
I could see where Harold had slipped. He had tried to climb round the crag that blocked the road, and the ground at the edge of the precipice had given way with him; it showed a recent founder of a few inches. Then he clutched at a branch of broom as he fell; but it slipped through his fingers, cutting them; for there was blood on the wiry stem. I knelt by the side of the cliff and craned my head over. I scarcely dared to look. In spite of the birds, my heart misgave me.
There, on a ledge deep below, he lay in a mass, half raised on one arm. But not dead, I believed. ‘Harold!’ I cried. ‘Harold!’
He turned his face up and saw me; his eyes lighted with joy. He shouted back something, but I could not hear it.
I turned to Elsie. ‘I must go down to him!’
Her tears rose again. ‘Oh, Brownie!’
I unwound the coil of rope. The first thing was to fasten it. I could not trust Elsie to hold it; she was too weak and too frightened to bear my weight: even if I wound it round her body, I feared my mere mass might drag her over. I peered about at the surroundings. No tree grew near; no rock had a pinnacle sufficiently safe to depend upon. But I found a plan soon. In the crag behind me was a cleft, narrowing wedge-shape as it descended. I tied the end of the rope round a stone, a good big water-worn stone, rudely girdled with a groove near the middle, which prevented it from slipping; then I dropped it down the fissure till it jammed; after which, I tried it to see if it would bear. It was firm as the rock itself. I let the rope down by it, and waited a moment to discover whether Harold could climb. He shook his head, and took a notebook with evident pain from his pocket. Then he scribbled a few words, and pinned them to the rope. I hauled it up. ‘Can’t move. Either severely bruised and sprained, or else legs broken.’
There was no help for it, then. I must go to him.
My first idea was merely to glide down the rope with my gloved hands, for I chanced to have my dog-skin bicycling gloves in my pocket. Fortunately, however, I did not carry out this crude idea too hastily; for next instant it occurred to me that I could not swarm up again. I have had no practice in rope-climbing. Here was a problem. But the moment suggested its own solution. I began making knots, or rather nooses or loops, in the rope, at intervals of about eighteen inches. ‘What are they for?’ Elsie asked, looking on in wonder.
‘Footholds, to climb up by.’
‘But the ones above will
pull out with your weight.’
‘I don’t think so. Still, to make sure, I shall tie them with this string. I must get down to him.’
I threaded a sufficient number of loops, trying the length over the edge. Then I said to Elsie, who sat cowering, propped against the crag, ‘You must come and look over, and do as I wave to you. Mind, dear, you must! Two lives depend upon it.’
‘Brownie, I daren’t? I shall turn giddy and fall over!’
I smoothed her golden hair. ‘Elsie, dear,’ I said gently, gazing into her blue eyes, ‘you are a woman. A woman can always be brave, where those she loves are concerned; and I believe you love me.’ I led her, coaxingly, to the edge. ‘Sit there,’ I said, in my quietest voice, so as not to alarm her. ‘You can lie at full length, if you like, and only just peep over. But when I wave my hand, remember, you must pull the rope up.’
She obeyed me like a child. I knew she loved me.
I GRIPPED THE ROPE AND LET MYSELF DOWN.
I gripped the rope and let myself down, not using the loops to descend, but just sliding with hands and knees, and allowing the knots to slacken my pace. Half-way down, I will confess, the eerie feeling of physical suspense was horrible. One hung so in mid-air! The hawks flapped their wings. But Harold was below; and a woman can always be brave where those she loves — well, just that moment, catching my breath, I knew I loved Harold.
I glided down swiftly. The air whizzed. At last, on a narrow shelf of rock, I leant over him. He seized my hand. ‘I knew you would come!’ he cried. ‘I felt sure you would find out. Though, how you found out, Heaven only knows, you clever, brave little woman!’
‘Are you terribly hurt?’ I asked, bending close. His clothes were torn.
‘I hardly know. I can’t move. It may only be bruises.’
‘Can you climb by these nooses with my help?’
He shook his head. ‘Oh, no. I couldn’t climb at all. I must be lifted, somehow. You had better go back to Lungern and bring men to help you.’
