“Do you go to your hotel, monsieur,” said Revailloud, “and leave the choice to me. I must go about it quietly. If you were to come with me, we should have to choose the first two guides upon the rota and that would not do for the Brenva climb.”
He left them at the door of the hotel and went off upon his errand. Sylvia turned at once to Hilary; her face was very pale, her voice shook.
“You will tell me everything now. Something terrible has happened. No doubt you feared it. You came to Chamonix because you feared it, and now you know that it has happened.”
“Yes,” said Chayne. “I hid it from you even as you spared me your bad news all this last year.”
“Tell me now, please. If it is to be ‘you and I,’ as you said just now, you will tell me.”
Chayne led the way into the garden, and drawing a couple of chairs apart from the other visitors told her all that he knew and she did not. He explained the episode of the lighted window, solved for her the riddle of her father’s friendship for Walter Hine, and showed her the reason for this expedition to the summit of Mont Blanc.
She uttered one low cry of horror. “Murder!” she whispered.
“To think that we are two days behind, that even now they are sleeping on the rocks, he and Walter Hine, sleeping quite peacefully and quietly. Oh, it’s horrible!” he cried, beating his hands upon his forehead in despair, and then he broke off. He saw that Sylvia was sitting with her hands covering her face, while every now and then a shudder shook her and set her trembling.
“I am so sorry, Sylvia,” he cried. “Oh, my dear, I had so hoped we should be in time. I would have spared you this knowledge if I could. Who knows? We may be still in time,” and as he spoke Michel entered the garden with one other man and came toward him.
“Henri Simond!” said Michel, presenting his companion. “You will know that name. Simond has just come down from the Grépon, monsieur. He will start with you at daylight.”
Chayne looked at Simond. He was of no more than the middle height, but broad of shoulder, deep of chest, and long of arm. His strength was well known in Chamonix — as well known as his audacity.
“I am very glad that you can come, Simond,” said Chayne. “You are the very man;” and then he turned to Michel. “But we should have another guide. I need two men.”
“Yes,” said Michel. “Three men are needed for that climb,” and Chayne left him to believe that it was merely for the climb that he needed another guide. “But there is André Droz already at Courmayeur,” he continued. “His patron was to leave him there to-day. A telegram can be sent to him to-morrow bidding him wait. If he has started, we shall meet him to-morrow on the Col du Géant. And Droz, monsieur, is the man for you. He is quick, as quick as you and Simond. The three of you together will go well. As for to-morrow, you will need no one else. But if you do, monsieur, I will go with you.”
“There is no need, Michel,” replied Chayne, gratefully, and thereupon Sylvia plucked him by the sleeve.
“I must go with you to-morrow, Hilary,” she pleaded, wistfully. “Oh, you won’t leave me here. Let me come with you as far as possible. Let me cross to Italy. I will go quick. If I get tired, you shall not know.”
“It will be a long day, Sylvia.”
“It cannot be so long as the day I should pass waiting here.”
She wrung her hands as she spoke. The light from a lamp fixed in the hotel wall fell upon her upturned face. It was white, her lips trembled, and in her eyes Chayne saw again the look of terror which he had hoped was gone forever. “Oh, please,” she whispered.
“Yes,” he replied, and he turned again to Simond. “At two o’clock then. My wife will go, so bring a mule. We can leave it at the Montanvert.”
The guides tramped from the garden. Chayne led his wife toward the hotel, slipping his arm through hers.
“You must get some sleep, Sylvia.”
“Oh, Hilary,” she cried. “I shall bring shame on you. We should never have married,” and her voice broke in a sob.
“Hush!” he replied. “Never say that, my dear, never think it! Sleep! You will want your strength to-morrow.”
But Sylvia slept little, and before the time she was ready with her ice-ax in her hand. At two o’clock they came out from the hotel in the twilight of the morning. There were two men there.
“Ah! you have come to see us off, Michel,” said Chayne.
“No, monsieur, I bring my mule,” said Revailloud, with a smile, and he helped Sylvia to mount it. “To lead mules to the Montanvert — is not that my business? Simond has a rope,” he added, as he saw Chayne sling a coil across his shoulder.
“We may need an extra one,” said Chayne, and the party moved off upon its long march. At the Montanvert hotel, on the edge of the Mer de Glace, Sylvia descended from her mule, and at once the party went down on to the ice.
“Au revoir!” shouted Michel from above, and he stood and watched them, until they passed out of his sight. Sylvia turned and waved her hand to him. But he made no answering sign. For his eyes were no longer good.
“He is very kind,” said Sylvia. “He understood that there was some trouble, and while he led the mule he sought to comfort me,” and then between a laugh and a sob she added: “You will never guess how. He offered to give me his little book with all the signatures — the little book which means so much to him.”
It was the one thing which he had to offer her, as Sylvia understood, and always thereafter she remembered him with a particular tenderness. He had been a good friend to her, asking nothing and giving what he had. She saw him often in the times which were to come, but when she thought of him, she pictured him as on that early morning standing on the bluff of cliff by the Montanvert with the reins of his mule thrown across his arm, and straining his old eyes to hold his friends in view.
Later during that day amongst the séracs of the Col du Géant, Simond uttered a shout, and a party of guides returning to Chamonix changed their course toward him. Droz was amongst the number, and consenting at once to the expedition which was proposed to him, he tied himself on to the rope.
“Do you know the Brenva ascent?” Chayne asked of him.
“Yes, monsieur. I have crossed Mont Blanc once that way. I shall be very glad to go again. We shall be the first to cross for two years. If only the weather holds.”
“Do you doubt that?” asked Chayne, anxiously. The morning had broken clear, the day was sunny and cloudless.
“I think there may be wind to-morrow,” he replied, raising his face and judging by signs unappreciable to other than the trained eyes of a guide. “But we will try, eh, monsieur?” he cried, recovering his spirits. “We will try. We will be the first on the Brenva ridge for two years.”
But there Chayne knew him to be wrong. There was another party somewhere on the great ridge at this moment. “Had it happened?” he asked himself. “How was it to happen?” What kind of an accident was it to be which could take place with a guide however worthless, and which would leave no suspicion resting on Garratt Skinner? There would be no cutting of the rope. Of that he felt sure. That method might do very well for a melodrama, but actually — no! Garratt Skinner would have a better plan than that. And indeed he had, a better plan and a simpler one, a plan which not merely would give to any uttered suspicion the complexion of malignancy, but must even bring Mr. Garratt Skinner honor and great praise. But no idea of the plan occurred either to Sylvia or to Chayne as all through that long hot day they toiled up the ice-fall of the Col du Géant and over the passes. It was evening before they came to the pastures, night before they reached Courmayeur.
There Chayne found full confirmation of his fears. In spite of effort to dissuade them, Garratt Skinner, Walter Hine and Pierre Delouvain had started yesterday for the Brenva climb. They had taken porters with them as far as the sleeping-place upon the glacier rocks. The porters had returned. Chayne sent for them.
“Yes,” they said. “At half past two this morning, the climbing part
y descended from the rocks on to the ice-fall of the glacier. They should be at the hut at the Grands Mulets now, on the other side of the mountain, if not already in Chamonix. Perhaps monsieur would wish for porters to-morrow.”
“No,” said Chayne. “We mean to try the passage in one day”; and he turned to his guides. “I wish to start at midnight. It is important. We shall reach the glacier by five. Will you be ready?”
And at midnight accordingly he set out by the light of a lantern. Sylvia stood outside the hotel and watched the flame diminish to a star, dance for a little while, and then go out. For her, as for all women, the bad hour had struck when there was nothing to do but to sit and watch and wait. Perhaps her husband, after all, was wrong, she said to herself, and repeated the phrase, hoping that repetition would carry conviction to her heart.
But early on that morning Chayne had sure evidence that he was right. For as he, Simond and André Droz were marching in single file through the thin forest behind the chalets of La Brenva, a shepherd lad came running down toward them. He was so excited that he could hardly tell the story with which he was hurrying to Courmayeur. Only an hour before he had seen, high up on the Brenva ridge, a man waving a signal of distress. Both Simond and Droz discredited the story. The distance was too great; the sharpest eyes could not have seen so far. But Chayne believed, and his heart sank within him. The puppet and Garratt Skinner — what did they matter? But he turned his eyes down toward Courmayeur. It was Sylvia upon whom the blow would fall.
“The story cannot be true,” cried Simond.
But Chayne bethought him of another day long ago, when a lad had burst into the hotel at Zermatt and told with no more acceptance for his story of an avalanche which he had seen fall from the very summit of the Matterhorn. Chayne looked at his watch. It was just four o’clock.
“There has been an accident,” he said. “We must hurry.”
CHAPTER XXIV
THE BRENVA RIDGE
THE PEASANT WAS right. He had seen a man waving a signal of distress on the slopes of Mont Blanc above the great buttress. And this is how the signal came to be waved.
An hour before Chayne and Sylvia set out from Chamonix to cross the Col du Géant, and while it was yet quite dark, a spark glowed suddenly on an island of rocks set in the great white waste of the Brenva glacier. The spark was a fire lit by Pierre Delouvain. For Garratt Skinner’s party had camped upon those rocks. The morning was cold, and one by one the porters, Garratt Skinner, and Walter Hine, gathered about the blaze. Overhead the stars glittered in a clear, dark sky. It was very still; no sound was heard at all but the movement in the camp; even on the glacier a thousand feet below, where all night long the avalanches had thundered, in the frost of the early morning there was silence.
Garratt Skinner looked upward.
“We shall have a good day,” he said; and then he looked quickly toward Walter Hine. “How did you sleep, Wallie?”
“Very little. The avalanches kept me awake. Besides, I slipped and fell a hundred times at the corner of the path,” he said, with a shiver. “A hundred times I felt emptiness beneath my feet.”
He referred to a mishap of the day before. On the way to the gîte after the chalets and the wood are left behind, a little path leads along the rocks of the Mont de la Brenva high above the glacier. There are one or two awkward corners to pass where rough footsteps have been hewn in the rock. At one of these corners Walter Hine had slipped. His side struck the step; he would have dropped to the glacier, but Garratt Skinner had suddenly reached out a hand and saved him.
Garratt Skinner’s face changed.
“You are not afraid,” he said.
“You think we can do it?” asked Hine, nervously, and Garratt Skinner laughed.
“Ask Pierre Delouvain!” he said, and himself put the question. Pierre laughed in his turn.
“Bah! I snap my fingers at the Brenva climb,” said he. “We shall be in Chamonix to-night”; and Garratt Skinner translated the words to Walter Hine.
Breakfast was prepared and eaten. Walter Hine was silent through the meal. He had not the courage to say that he was afraid; and Garratt Skinner played upon his vanity.
“We shall be in Chamonix to-night. It will be a fine feather in your cap, Wallie. One of the historic climbs!”
Walter Hine drew a deep breath. If only the day were over, and the party safe on the rough path through the woods on the other side of the mountain! But he held his tongue. Moreover, he had great faith in his idol and master, Garratt Skinner.
“You saved my life yesterday,” he said; and upon Garratt Skinner’s face there came a curious smile. He looked steadily into the blaze of the fire and spoke almost as though he made an apology to himself.
“I saw a man falling. I saw that I could save him. I did not think. My hand had already caught him.”
He looked up with a start. In the east the day was breaking, pale and desolate; the lower glacier glimmered into view beneath them; the gigantic amphitheater of hills which girt them in on three sides loomed out of the mists from aerial heights and took solidity and shape, westward the black and rugged Peuteret ridge, eastward the cliffs of Mont Maudit, and northward sweeping around the head of the glacier, the great ice-wall of Mont Blanc with its ruined terraces and inaccessible cliffs.
“Time, Wallie,” said Garratt Skinner, and he rose to his feet and called to Pierre Delouvain. “There are only three of us. We shall have to go quickly. We do not want to carry more food than we shall need. The rest we can send back with our blankets by the porters.”
Pierre Delouvain justified at once the ill words which had been spoken of him by Michel Revailloud. He thought only of the burden which through this long day he would have to carry on his back.
“Yes, that is right,” he said. “We will take what we need for the day. To-night we shall be in Chamonix.”
And thus the party set off with no provision against that most probable of all mishaps — the chance that sunset might find them still upon the mountain side. Pierre Delouvain, being lazy and a worthless fellow, as Revailloud had said, agreed. But the suggestion had been made by Garratt Skinner. And Garratt Skinner was Gabriel Strood, who knew — none better — the folly of such light traveling.
The rope was put on; Pierre Delouvain led the way, Walter Hine as the weakest of the party was placed in the middle, Garratt Skinner came last; the three men mounted by a snow-slope and a gully to the top of the rocks which supported the upper Brenva glacier.
“That’s our road, Wallie,” said Garratt Skinner. He pointed to a great buttress of rock overlain here and there with fields of snow, which jutted out from the ice-wall of the mountain, descended steeply, bent to the west in a curve, and then pushed far out into the glacier as some great promontory pushes out into the sea. “Do you see a hump above the buttress, on the crest of the ridge and a little to the right? And to the right of the hump, a depression in the ridge? That’s what they call the Corridor. Once we are there our troubles are over.”
But between the party and the buttress stretched the great ice-fall of the upper Brenva glacier. Crevassed, broken, a wilderness of towering séracs, it had the look of a sea in a gale whose breakers had been frozen in the very act of over toppling.
“Come,” said Pierre.
“Keep the rope stretched tight, Wallie,” said Garratt Skinner; and they descended into the furrows of that wild and frozen sea. The day’s work had begun in earnest; and almost at once they began to lose time.
Now it was a perilous strip of ice between unfathomable blue depths along which they must pass, as bridge-builders along their girders, yet without the bridge-builders’ knowledge that at the end of the passage there was a further way. Now it was some crevasse into which they must descend, cutting their steps down a steep rib of ice; now it was a wall up which the leader must be hoisted on the shoulders of his companions, and even so as likely as not, his fingers could not reach the top, but hand holds and foot holds must be hewn with the ax till a la
dder was formed. Now it was some crevasse gaping across their path; they must search this way and that for a firm snow-bridge by which to overpass it. It was difficult, as Pierre Delouvain discovered, to find a path through that tangled labyrinth without some knowledge of the glacier. For, only at rare times, when he stood high on a sérac, could he see his way for more than a few yards ahead. Pierre aimed straight for the foot of the buttress, working thus due north. And he was wrong. Garratt Skinner knew it, but said not a word. He stood upon insecure ledges and supported Delouvain upon his shoulders, and pushed him up with his ice-ax into positions which only involved the party in further difficulties. He took his life in his hands and risked it, knowing the better way. Yet all the while the light broadened, the great violet shadows crept down the slopes and huddled at the bases of the peaks. Then the peaks took fire, and suddenly along the dull white slopes of ice in front of them the fingers of the morning flashed in gold. Over the eastern rocks the sun had leaped into the sky. For a little while longer they advanced deeper into the entanglement, and when they were about half way across they came to a stop. They were on a tongue of ice which narrowed to a point; the point abutted against a perpendicular ice-wall thirty feet high. Nowhere was there any break in that wall, and at each side of the tongue the ice gaped in chasms.
“We must go back,” said Pierre. “I have forgotten the way.”
He had never known it. Seduced by a treble fee, he had assumed an experience which he did not possess. Garratt Skinner looked at his watch, and turning about led the party back for a little while. Then he turned to his right and said:
“I think it might go in this direction,” and lo! making steadily across some difficult ground, no longer in a straight line northward to Mont Blanc, but westward toward the cliffs of the Peuteret ridge under Garratt Skinner’s lead, they saw a broad causeway of ice open before them. The causeway led them to steep slopes of snow, up which it was just possible to kick steps, and then working back again to the east they reached the foot of the great buttress on its western side just where it forms a right angle with the face of the mountain. Garratt Skinner once more looked at his watch. It had been half-past two when they had put on the rope, it was now close upon half-past six. They had taken four hours to traverse the ice-fall, and they should have taken only two and a half. Garratt Skinner, however, expressed no anxiety. On the contrary, one might have thought that he wished to lose time.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 445