Fordham's Feud
TextChapter Five
Fordham Philosophises
“I say, Fordham. We’re getting up an expedition for to-morrow, and you’ve got to come,” cried Phil, bursting into his friend’s room just before dinner one evening.
“Have I?” replied the latter leisurely, turning round with a half-soaped visage, and razor arrested in mid-air. “But, Phil, it’s rather lucky you didn’t swoop down in such hurricane method upon a more nervous man than yours truly, or it’s wildly hunting for sticking plaster he’d be at this moment. And now, for my enlightenment, who’s we?”
“Oh, the Ottleys and the Wyatts and one or two more. We want to start early, cross the lake by steamer and get as far up that valley on the other side as we can.”
“To Novèl? Yes, and then?”
“Why then we are going to charter a boat and row back in the cool of the evening.”
“Not a bad scheme. Who do you say are going, beside the inseparables?”
“One of the Miss Milnes – the pretty one – and that fellow Scott.”
“Scott, the devil-dodger?”
“Yes. The Ottleys have asked him. I can’t think why, for he’s a rank ‘outsider.’”
“Most of the ‘shepherds’ appointed to administer ‘Dearly beloved brethren’ to their countrywomen in this otherwise favoured land are, my dear chap. But it’s all the better for you. He can take the two Ottley nymphs off your hands while you offer latria to the fair Inkermann – no Alma – I beg your pardon.”
“But – but hang it, that’s just what the beggar won’t do,” blurted Phil in desperation. “Fact is he’s always in the way, and really it’s contemptible, you know; but what’s to be done with a cad like that, who ignores a snub that another fellow would knock you down for – or try to? You’ll come along, old man, won’t you?”
“Let’s see. There’s the General, he’s too old and don’t count. Then there’s yourself and the parson; and they want a third donkey – I mean beast of burden. Two won’t be enough to sling all the panniers they’ll want along. I’m afraid, Phil, you mustn’t count upon me, unless you can manage to supply the missing steed first.”
“Bosh, Fordham! You won’t be wanted to carry anything.”
“Not, eh? Let’s see again. Four females – that means eight wraps, putting it at the lowest computation. Add to that the delicate creatures’ rations – for you can’t get anything eatable or drinkable at Novèl – and sunshades, which they must have for crossing the lake, don’t you know, and which they’ll discard directly they begin to walk. And there’s all the amateur-commissionaire business into the bargain. No, no, Phil. Having given the matter my most careful consideration, I regret to say that I am unable to undertake it – as the publisher said when he ‘chucked’ the budding author’s MS.”
“You old savage! If you weren’t shaving I’d ‘chuck’ all the boots and bolsters in the room at your head.”
“Well, I’ve done now, so you can begin. But, I say, Phil,” he went on, tranquilly, “how long have we been here?”
Philip Orlebar’s handsome head was well through the open window at that moment. His friend therefore found it necessary to repeat the question.
“Eh – what? How long? Oh, about ten days, haven’t we?”
“I believe we have,” rejoined the other in the same silky tone. “And, my dear boy, doesn’t it strike you that you are getting on ra-ather rapidly?”
“No. Why?”
“Nothing. Only that even the charm of my improving conversation does not avail to keep your head within that window, when some inexplicable instinct – for you couldn’t possibly have seen her – warns you that your divinity is on the terrace below. And yet, in a few minutes more you will be seated by her side for at least an hour – such being unfortunately the length of table d’hôte, and after that may safely be counted upon to pass the residue of the evening not a hundred yards apart from her by any means.”
“Well, I’m only one of a crowd then,” retorted Philip, with a dash of irritation. “Those confounded Ottley girls are always on hand – a good deal too much so.”
“Are they? Look here now, Phil. What is there about that girl that makes a difference between her and any other girl?”
“Ah! You – even you, you old ruffian, own that there is a difference?”
“Not so fast, my dear chap. I asked you the question. But if you want me to answer it myself, I reply ‘Nothing.’”
“What? You don’t see any difference?”
“Not a particle,” responded his tormentor, blandly. Philip stared for a moment. He hardly knew what to say. Then:
“Well, with all your shelliness, you crustaceous old cuss, I gave you credit for more discrimination. Why, confound it all, look at her alongside the rest of the crowd here. Isn’t she a head and shoulders above them all – in every particular?”
“H’m, h’m! Oh, yes! no doubt. But that isn’t saying very much. She looks thoroughbred, I admit, and talks well, and has some ideas – not bad ones, either; not that I’ve ever been favoured with them myself, for I’ve never laid myself out for that honour. Women, you see, are like children. As long as you keep them at arm’s length they respect you. Directly you have ever so little to do with them, then good-bye to your peace, for they will allow you none; then, presto, the collar is round your neck and you find yourself cast for the rôle of general poodle before you know where you are. It’s fetch-and-carry, will-you-do-this and would-you-mind-doing-that. And then you are expected to act the sympathetic listener to all their infernal egotistic fads; and God help you if at any moment you forget the sympathetic part of it. But to return to our sheep. You think this particular girl an angel, because she’s good-looking and thoroughbred, and has a hovering sort of suggestion about her of being an ill-used mortal and welcoming a sympathetic spirit, and all that sort of thing. Then, again, you run against her up here, where you’re both of you showing at your best because you’ve neither of you anything in the world to put you out – splendid weather, lovely country, good old times all round – sort of paradise in which she stands out as the Eve to you, and I daresay you as the Adam to her. That’s not life, my dear fellow; that’s not life. A mere summer idyll and no more. Can’t possibly last, you know.”
“And why the deuce can’t it last?” said Phil, who had been listening somewhat impatiently to this harangue.
Fordham emitted a short, dry guffaw.
“Well now, can it? I put it to you. Just run over all the ‘happy couples’ within the circle of your acquaintance: to how many of them is life a summer idyll, or any sort of idyll at all? You needn’t go further than this house, which at present contains a good few ‘yoke-fellows,’ to use a thoroughly expressive term. If you haven’t yet found time to observe them, just keep your eyes open for the next day or two – if you can divert those killing orbs from the adorable Alma, that is – and a place like this is good for observations of the kind, because the subjects of them are always more or less off their guard. Putting it at the lowest computation, eight marriages out of every ten are abject failures – the other two very dubious.”
“Oh, indeed! And how many are there that turn out satisfactorily?” said Phil, ironically.
“Perhaps one in five thousand.”
“Oh – well – it’s something to have got you to admit that much. Now why shouldn’t I, for instance, hit off that one?”
“Why shouldn’t you? Well now, Phil, I put it to you as one not wholly unacquainted with sporting matters. What would you say to a fellow who should ask you to take tickets in a lottery where the chances were five thousand to one against you – or rather to take one ticket, and that at the price of all you were worth? You’d vote him drunk, of course. Yet if I know anything of my fellow-creatures, you are in a fair way towards perpetrating that identical suicidal imbecility. Now, what do you say? Chuck your expedition across the lake to-morrow, and let’s go on to Zermatt now instead of a week or so later. That, or your fate is sealed.”
“No you don’t, old chap; no you don’t,” said Phil, who, far from being offended by the other’s ill-conditionedness, was hugely pleased thereat, since it confirmed and encouraged certain hopes he had already more than half shaped. “By Jove, I never had such a good time in my life as I’ve been having here. Too soon to cut it just yet.”
Fordham’s shoulders went up in an expressive shrug as he turned away to the door.
“Don’t say you weren’t shown the cliff you proposed to jump over,” he said. “Jump now, and be – blessed to you.”
“By the way, Fordham,” said Phil, “isn’t it a deuced rum thing? The old General knows my governor well – or rather did, years ago.”
“Did he?” was the sharp reply, as the speaker faced suddenly round. “Ah well – yes – it is queer. But the world’s a pretty small one. There goes the second bell,” he added, in his normally unconcerned tones, as he again turned to the door.
His manner struck even Philip, though faintly. But for the fact that Fordham was literally a man in an iron mask, Philip could have sworn that the tone was a startled one. That, however, was absurd, anyhow. Fordham was not even acquainted with Sir Francis. The two had met and become intimate merely as travelling companions.
“Well, Mr Fordham, what do you think of these young people’s plan for to-morrow?” said General Wyatt as they met at table.
“Not a bad one. The valley of the Morge is well worth walking up, but you must start from here so as to catch the early steamer.”
“Make old Fordham go with us. He says he won’t,” said Phil, in an undertone, to Alma Wyatt, next to whom he was seated, for the change of places had been effected satisfactorily to all parties concerned. “You can get round him if any one can.”
“I don’t know so much about that,” she answered, with a smile. “I’ll try, though.” Then across the table, “Why do you say ‘you must start early,’ Mr Fordham, as if you weren’t going with us? You really must come. The gentians, they say, are lovely up that valley. We are quite reckoning on you.”
“To carry the gentians?” he rejoined drily. “Or to pick them?”
“Neither. You shall talk to us while we pick them. And you shall not carry anything, and we’ll promise to be very good and give no trouble.”
Few men could have stood this appeal, or the look which accompanied it. Phil felt quite hot. Though used to his friend’s ways, he thought him an ill-conditioned dog at that moment. Had he not unequivocally snubbed his – Phil’s – divinity? But the said divinity rather enjoyed it than otherwise. For, in spite of the extremely derogatory deliverances we have just heard from Fordham’s lips concerning her, Alma Wyatt was the only woman in the hotel to whom he had addressed a spontaneous remark; and she, so far from being offended at his brusqueness or taciturnity, looked upon him as a character, to be studied with avidity.
“To put it on other grounds,” she went on gaily. “Uncle will be quite lost without you. What will become of him all day with no one to argue with?” She could not have ventured upon safer ground. Fordham, though he detested women, by no means extended his antipathy to his own sex, and when away from the obnoxious skirts no man was better company. He was a power in the smoking-room, and as a travelling companion very nearly perfect. He and General Wyatt had become great friends during their short acquaintance, and now as it struck him that the old man had probably been relying upon his company for the proposed undertaking, his mind was made up.
“Well, General, I shall be happy to make one of the party,” he said. “And after all, if it’s a case of rowing back across the lake, another oar won’t come out of place.”
“Don’t you think it very dangerous to cross the lake in a small boat?” struck in the Infliction, at his elbow.
“Not if the weather’s fine.”
“Ah, but don’t you think storms come up very suddenly on this lake?”
“Oh, Lord,” said Phil in an undertone, “the Gadfly is getting her sting into old Fordham.”
“Be quiet, she’ll hear you,” replied Alma, trying to hide a laugh. “Besides, I want to enjoy the fun.”
But while Fordham was ruminating over a suitable extinguisher, a mild clergyman on the opposite side of the table struck in eagerly, and requested to know if that was really the case, and further manifested such a desire for information on that particular subject that the Infliction turned to him with reinvigorated purpose, and the rest were spared. The good man had only arrived that evening, and little knew what floodgates he was opening.
Chapter Six
The Fire of the Live Coal
“I believe we are all here now,” remarked Fordham, ironically, sending a significant glance round the little group assembled on the débarcadère at Montreux.
“Better count and make sure,” responded Scott, the parson, with an asinine guffaw.
The first remark was evoked by the recollection that, even as they now stood watching the swift, shearing approach of the Mont Blanc sweeping up to the jetty, so had they arrived on that spot some three hours earlier, just in time to gaze after the steamer preceding, as she disappeared round the promontory previous to standing in for Territet. And for having missed their boat, and lost three hours of the day, they had to thank the Miss Ottleys, or rather the maternal parent of those young ladies, who, with the usual feminine lack of a sense of the eternal fitness of things, had instructed them to combine business with pleasure, and execute sundry commissions for her in Montreux, on the way to the steamer. Wherefore they – and the parson – had arrived at the pier in time to find the residue of the party gazing discontentedly after the receding boat.
But no one would fall in with Fordham’s suggestion to return. If they had lost three hours’ the days were long and the evenings moonlight. All agreed that they would wait for the next boat.
“En route!” shouted the skipper, with his lips to the speaking-tube. The gangway was withdrawn with a bang – the great paddle-wheels churned the blue water into creamy foam, and the fine vessel, panting and snorting like a courser impatient of the momentary restraint, plunged forward as she swung round obedient to the hand of the helmsman.
“What a disagreeable chap that man Fordham is,” remarked Scott to the Miss Ottleys, with whom he had withdrawn to a comfortable corner of the deck.
“He can be about as rude as any man I ever knew,” returned the younger of the two girls, who had a hazy sort of idea that any man ought to think it rather an honour than otherwise to have all his arrangements thrown out by her dilatoriness.
“I don’t think we can blame him this time,” objected the elder. “It must have been very provoking to the dear old General as well.”
“Ah, he’s different,” said Scott. “But that fellow Fordham just thinks the world was made to suit his convenience. By the bye, who asked him to come to-day?”
“Well, you see, it was Mr Orlebar who suggested the trip, and it isn’t likely he’d leave his friend out.”
“Oh, ah – I see! Pity he didn’t though. The fellow is a regular wet blanket.”
There was reason in the speaker’s venom. Scott, who held the proud position of English chaplain at Les Avants for that month, was a fair specimen of the young “masher” parson. He wore a carefully-trimmed moustache and talked with a drawl. He affected lawn tennis in preference to any other form of exercise because it enabled him to array his graceful five foot six of dimensions in faultlessly fitting flannels, and when so arrayed he was under the impression that Apollo himself might take a back seat. He was not a gentleman by birth, and, having all the exuberant assurance of the self-estimating “ranker,” was a standing offence to those who were. Though made much of by a large section of the ladies, always ready to constitute a pet tame cat of a young parson, the men abhorred him. His bumptiousness and chronic infringements of good form met with systematic snubbing, and on more than one occasion nothing but his “cloth” had saved him from being incontinently kicked. Now of all the “setting down” he had received since his arrival at the hotel, that which he had encountered at the hands of Fordham had been the most merciless and exhaustive.
The latter and General Wyatt were leaning against the taffrail smoking their cigars.
“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.