Chapter IV: Part 4

Nellie, upon her part, could make nothing of it, nor had she any desire to do so. Suddenly, as they stood there, the hounds burst into view, in more or less full cry, according to their agility. Gliding, shuffling, sprawling, the thin white line made what haste it could toward the village of Andana, where lunch was waiting. No one cared very much about the hares; elderly ladies, repenting of their rashness, would have paid precious gold to have been carried to any destination; the girls desired only that the men should admire their dexterity; the men, that their tricks should not go unobserved by the girls. Here and there, a fine performer rejoiced in the magic of the exercise and swooped down the mountain-side with the dash of an eagle upon its prey. But dash--except as an expression of the language employed--was in the main lacking to the _cortege_, which moved as though in lingering agony.

Bob hazarded the opinion that they had better go down immediately to the "bun-scrap" in the village, and reluctantly, with a last prolonged embrace which threatened the stability of the feminine superstructure, they turned and began to ski gently down through the wood. Hardly, however, had they made a start, when there came, not from below but from above, a loud and prolonged cry, which echoed in the very heights of the Zaat, and brought them to a stand in an instant. Someone had fallen, up yonder, from one of the dangerous precipices--there could not be a doubt of it!

"It must have been that fellow who dodged the gendarme," said Bob, after a little interval of waiting. Nellie did not know what to make of it. The cry was not repeated, and the pines hid the truth from their view. Nevertheless both were a little awed, and it was impossible not to believe that something untoward had happened.

"I wonder if we ought to go up?" Bob asked her. She replied, with a very white face, that it was not their business.

"There are always plenty of people at Vermala, and I know some of ours have gone up to the Zaat to-day. We could do no good, Bob--I'm sure I would go, if I thought that we could--but is it our business, when there are so many others about?"

"And the whole thing just spoof, perhaps. By George, though; if it were not!--if it were murder, Nellie?"

"Murder?--you make me shudder. How can you be so horrid, Bob?"

Bob hastened to protest that horrors were what most girls doted on; but he was obviously ill at ease, and neither said much while they went down through the wood. A little further on they disturbed, maladroitly, a pair of lovers, who started up in guilty fashion to reveal the red face of a certain Mr. Richard Fenton, and the tousled hair of that amiable and athletic nymph, Miss Marjory Rider. It was the merriest meeting in all the world, and Nellie's "Oh!" when she espied her sister would have done credit to a lady of the theatre.

"Oh, Margy, how can you look me in the face--?"

"But we're engaged, Nell--I'm going to marry Dick."

Dick looked under his eyes at Bob, but he seemed rather abashed, and by no means a lover who would have done credit to the heroics of the poets.

Upon his part, Bob said never a word about his own predicament; but Nellie had it out in a twinkling, and there the four of them stood, giggling and laughing and blushing. It remained for Bob to set matters straight by a resounding cheer, which he did presently to the great scandal of his _fiancee_, and the surprise of all in the vicinity of the wood. Then he discovered that he was hungry--a meagre lover sighing for baked meats.

"We shall miss the bun-scrap if we don't buck up," he said. "I'm sure old Gordon Snagg will eat all the sandwiches within half a mile of him. Let's make a dash for it, Nellie; these two will stop here spooning all day. It makes me sick to see them."

He did not wait for his friend to put on his skis, but taking Nellie by the hand, sailed with her down the nearest slope, and presently came out just above Benny's cottage. Here a little Frenchman, standing on the path which debouches from the woods below Vermala, waved his hand to them in a frantic and demoralised appeal, and when they approached him, began to tell them an excited tale which even one of his own countrymen might not have followed. As for Bob, who had forgotten the only irregular verb he ever knew, and Nellie, whose French hardly represented the guinea expended upon it per quarter, they were at their wits' end, until Benson himself came to their assistance; as he did almost immediately, lurching down from the chalet and asking gruffly what was up. To him the Frenchman now addressed himself, while Benny listened with an amused smile. Then he interpreted the rigmarole to the others.

"He says a man's fallen down from the height up yonder. That's steep, anyway; a baby would walk the path. Do you know anything of it? Did you see anything, Mr. Otway?"

"We saw a man and another following him," Bob said in a halting way. "I think the little man was a gendarme, for he had something bright on his hat. They went off toward the Zaat, and then we heard one of them shout out. I shouldn't wonder if this gentleman were right"--pointing to the Frenchman--"it's very likely the pair may have had a row."

To their great surprise and wonder, Benny turned as pale as a sheet. Muttering something about a silly tale, he, nevertheless, went about, and returned almost immediately to his chalet, leaving the young couple to appease the excited Frenchman as best they could. That worthy, perceiving their lack of understanding, renewed his appeals, this time to Dick Fenton and Marjory, who had just emerged from the wood.

"What does he say?" Dick asked his friend. Bob assumed an air of reproving superiority, and replied:

"Oh, a man has fallen off the Zaat--!"

Marjory said "Oh!" and turned very pale. Dick was not so sentimental.

"Well," he exclaimed rather pettishly, "why doesn't he go and pick him up? I expect it's all my eye; people don't fall off the Zaat, of all places. Why don't you tell him so, Bob?"

"He speaks _patois_--mine's no good to him. You have a shot, Dick, or perhaps Miss Marjory will?"

They laughed at this, and the Frenchman turned away in despair. These English assuredly were mad and without pity. He had told his story to half a dozen of them already, and all the answer he got was the gibberish of a tongue spoken neither in heaven nor on earth. Obviously, he must find one of his own countrymen, and they must go together to the slopes above. Failing that, he would return, and telephone to the police; an alternative which so pleased him that he was already half-way down to the hotel, when Benny, who had appeared on the scene again, overtook him and entered immediately into an exciting argument. Benny spoke French like a true Parisian--the stranger had no difficulty in understanding him.

The others, meanwhile, had gone down to the village of Andana. There in a little cafe, ordinarily shut during the winter, the hares and hounds browsed upon a common pasture. And curiously enough, while Bob and Dick ate with good appetite, their mood was hardly as joyous as it should have been; while those interesting young ladies, Miss Marjory and Miss Nellie Rider, wore already something of the staid demeanour of the married woman.

It was not until after lunch and much good Malvoisie that the young men drew aside to debate the situation in anxious whispers. Assuredly, as Bob admitted, they had "done it," and time alone and that far from amiable old lady, Mrs. Rider, could show them the way out.

In short, as Dick added savagely: "they were in a devil of a mess."

*CHAPTER X*

*A SPECIALIST IS CONSULTED*

The amiable discussion, begun in the interval after lunch, was continued at the Palace Hotel during that pleasant hour when tea is a memory and dinner an expectation.

The girls had gone up to their room by this time, hand in hand, and tremulous with the powers of suppressed narration. For them the supreme issue concerned an amiable lady who was quite in ignorance of the surprise prepared for her, and would certainly shed tears when the amatory bombshell exploded. For the youths it was another matter altogether. Conscience had begun to twit them with melancholy gibes upon their rashness. Or, as Bob put it tersely, a couple of wives and three hundred and ninety pounds a year between the pair of them. That was the bald truth. It had seemed otherwise in the woods when the sun shone, and the great mountains looked down kindly upon the lovers.

"What we want," said Dick resolutely, "is someone to advise us." He was a sentimental person, and given to idealism. "We ought to know how we stand before the thing goes any further. Marjory's a dear little girl, and I shall never marry anybody else. But that doesn't say I have the right to marry her on a hundred and ninety a year--you'll admit that, Bob?"

Bob admitted it, and ordered a "mixed Vermouth." They were sitting in the bar at the time, and could hear Bess Bethune scolding the doctor in the passage outside. Distantly, from the drawing-room came the strains of one of Schubert's nocturnes, played by a "half-back" from Harrow, who had some difficulty with the bass. The charming Swiss girl, who served them, did not understand much English, but they would have consulted her for two pins, so dreadful was the emergency.

"It's my opinion, we were just rushed into it," said Bob, taking up the conversation from an unobservable point, "I like Nellie better than any girl I ever saw, but I confess it's rather a knock to hear she's been engaged three times already. Suppose I were to meet one of the other fellows when we're married! He'd have the laugh of me, anyway."

Dick sighed.

"Marjory's been engaged once--she told me so. I don't think a girl can be expected to know her own mind until she's two or three and twenty. We'd have to take a little flat somewhere, and cut it deuced close; do you think she is the girl to do that, Bob?"

Bob was far from thinking it.

"She proposes to run a motor, Dick, she told me so. You've got fifteen hundred a year and a shooting-box in Scotland, so the hotel says. My place is in Norfolk--I suppose they mean the tent Jack Stevens and I pitched by Horsey Mere last autumn. I didn't say so, though; let's keep it up as long as we can; in for a penny, in for fifteen hundred pound, you know."

Dick drained his glass and appeared to cogitate. Presently he said, almost as though it were an inspiration:

"I tell you what, Bob, let's talk to the 'little widow' about it. I'm sure she's a woman of the world. She'd put us straight, right enough; let's go up and see her."

Bob looked at him scornfully.

"Why, where do you think she is, then?"

"Who, Mrs. Kennaird? Why, in Number 43, of course. It's on the board, isn't it?"

"The board be hanged! She's left the hotel--she left this morning, and went up to the chalet, near Benny's."

"Then let's go to the chalet after her. I'm sure she's one of the nicest little women in the place. And she's been married herself; she'd know what we ought to do. Let's go and see her now."

He stood up, excited by the idea; and, really, when he came to reflect upon it, Bob did not find the notion displeasing. It was true that there had been ugly talk in the hotel concerning this very person; true that she had left under circumstances so mysterious that a hundred versions were already current, both of her past life and the promise of her future. In these the boys had taken little part, except to say that it was a pity people had nothing better to do than to slander so charming a lady; and their abstention made the proposed visit to her chalet seem quite chivalrous. Five minutes later they were climbing up the steps of the skating-rink; whence it was but a little way to the bungalow.

There were lights in the lower windows of the house, and when they knocked, a solemn-looking Swiss maid opened to them and listened as a freckled automaton to their far from coherent explanations. They wished to see Mrs. Kennaird--for they were still in ignorance of her true name--upon a private matter, and one to be explained to no other. To which Dick added the rider, that they would be very grateful to Mrs. Kennaird if she would see them, and would waste as little as possible of her valuable time; a rigmarole at which Bob would have laughed had he not been so very nervous. But, as he was nervous, he stood first upon one foot and then upon the other and never said a word until the maid returned and ushered them into the drawing-room where the "little widow" awaited them. Bob did not know quite why it was, but from that very moment he felt as though his troubles were at an end; while as for Dick, he declared afterwards that all his anxiety vanished like the mists directly he set eyes on that gracious lady.

Lily was surprised to see the boys, for she had been awaiting another--perhaps she welcomed them with a greater cordiality upon that account. Very charming, in a loose gown of black lace, it was not her beauty but her womanhood which cast a spell wherever she went; and to be sure, she was as much out of place in that mediocre medley of Andana as a diamond in a setting of German silver.

"Yes," she said, encouraging Bob to speak, "I remember you perfectly, Mr. Otway; were we not fellow-prisoners at Sierre during the blizzard? And Mr. Fenton: why, you rode in the same sleigh the day we came here."

Fenton said that it was so, and apologised at the same time for certain frivolities upon the journey, particularly for the votive offering of snow hurled at the shrine of one Sir Gordon Snagg. When this had provoked the kindly lady to a smile, Bob took up the running.

"Everyone at the hotel is beastly sorry that you have left," he exclaimed, and then qualified it by saying: "That is, everyone who counts. The place seems quite different since you went."

"Oh, but I only left this morning, and you were paper-chasing, were you not?"

"Of course he was," cried Dick, "and proposing to Nellie Rider at the same time. That's what he came to tell you, Mrs. Kennaird."

"While Bob wants to say that he is engaged to Marjory, and doesn't know what to do about it."

"To do about it! Oh, my dear Mr. Fenton, what do you mean?"

They were both blushing very much by this time, and it was quite a charity to ask them to sit down. Lily herself took a seat upon the sofa, and, enjoying the situation immensely, encouraged them to go on.

"So I must congratulate you both; how good of you to take me into your confidence so soon. Why, it was only this morning, was it not?"

"In the woods below the Zaat," interposed Bob quickly; "I could show you the place."

"And I was just a quarter of a mile away. Was it not a coincidence, Mrs. Kennaird? We were both done for when we met."

She looked from one to the other, asking herself whether this was said in jest, or was indeed the very far from sentimental confession of a not unsentimental youth. And that was a riddle she could not read. It seemed to her that she was listening to boys from a public school, who had all the fine airs and the sporadic idiom of the city, but were at heart as simple as any Corydon from remote pastures.

"Really," she said, with just a suspicion of reproach in her tone. "Really, you must be serious, Mr. Fenton."

"I was never more serious in my life. We're both engaged, and we've got three hundred and ninety pounds a year between us; that's why we've come to you. You can tell us what we ought to do about it."

She laughed--it was so droll.

"Then you regard it altogether as a matter of money?"

Bob looked rueful.

"We don't, but Mrs. Rider will. These old girls are regular nuts on the cash; she's sure to want to know what we've got."

"Then, of course, you will tell her everything?"

They looked at each other a little sorrowfully. It was Dick who made answer.

"If we do, the engagements will be off. We shall have to cut the girls to-morrow, and it would make it awkward for them. Don't you think we could have a truce or something--lie low until the night before we go? Don't you think that, Mrs. Kennaird?"

Lily shook her head.

"I think you are a pair of babies," she said emphatically. "You don't seem to know whether you wish to marry or not. That enters into the question, I think; you certainly ought to make up your minds."

They nodded their heads as though perfectly in accord with so obvious a truth. Presently, Bob, who hugged his knee during the harangue--not under the delusion that it was Nellie Rider's waist, but because he did not know what to do with his hands--spoke for the pair of them.

"You see," he said--and Lily saw nothing but the humour of it--"you see it's this way. Dick's a sentimentalist, and I'm a philosopher, and we've tumbled into the same boat somehow. I would like to marry Nellie if I could make her happy, and all that sort of thing; but it's rotten beginning on two hundred a year, and Dick's only got a hundred and ninety. Now what I feel is this: Is it quite fair to the girls?"

"Did you think of that when you proposed to them this morning?"

Dick shook his head.

"I was never more in love in my life," he said. "I forgot everything else in heaven or earth but Marjory. I would marry her to-morrow, if it wasn't for the beastly cash."

"And you, Mr. Otway?"

"I say the same, but I don't think I should care to begin so soon. She might give me a year's grace."

Lily nodded her head; she understood now.

"I think you will have your year," she said a little merrily. "To tell you the truth, Mr. Otway, I should not be surprised if you remained a bachelor. As to Mr. Fenton, well, I think that will depend upon Mrs. Rider. Would you like me to speak to her for you, for both of you if you wish it?"

They jumped at the idea. She was a regular brick, and so very much superior to anyone at Andana that the thing was as good as done if she became their ambassador. The promise put them in the seventh heaven.

"If she says 'No,' we can let bygones be bygones," Bob added enthusiastically. "I will treat Nellie as a sister, and the hotel need know nothing about it. You don't know what a load you've taken off my back, Mrs. Kennaird; I shall never forget it."

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?"

"I struck him on the face, and he tried to draw a revolver on me--we were on the plateau, and he went over. If he's hurt, I'll pay compensation. What more do you want?"

Benny looked at him curiously. Was he lying outright, or merely reciting a defence he had rehearsed in the interval? It was difficult to say. The truth must be told without delay, for the truth alone could move him.

"You say the man went over. Did you see him after he fell?"

"See him! What do you mean?"

"I ask if you saw him after he fell--he might have been injured, you know?"

Delayne returned to the table, and took a deep draught from the tumbler there.

"You know something," he said, averting his eyes. "Well, I'm not a child; tell me."

Benny crossed over, and looked him full in the face.

"It's a pity you didn't stop," he said quietly--"the man's dead--!"

Delayne began to tremble, a little at first and then as one stricken by an ague. Reaction had come in an instant--the man's hands were as cold as ice, he could not keep still.

"How do you know he's dead?"

"I have seen him, touched him! He's stone dead at the foot of the clump of pines: that's what I came here to tell you."

Delayne said: "My God!" and sank into the chair. He began to blubber like a child; his whole body twitched in a nervous collapse to be expected of such a temperament. The truth had stricken him; it prevailed above any thought of his own safety, which was left to the man who had come to him with so little ceremony.

"You have twenty hours at the best, six at the worst," Benny said, ignoring the outbreak and knowing that it would pass. "If the little Frenchman who saw him fall doesn't blab, the police may not be here until the morning. You'll have to answer for this sooner or later, but you'll answer it better across the frontier. Are you going to start at once, or wait for them to come for you? Take another drop of that whisky, and then tell me. I can give you that long."

The man obeyed him like a child. He was already trying to excuse himself, to make a case which might be put to a jury subsequently.

"It's no more than mischance, look at it how you like. He provoked me--I had no intention to kill him. If he'd have gone away, it would have been all right. What business had he to follow me, I ask you, what business had he? Is this a free country? Then why did he spy on me? Let the police answer that: what right had he to spy on me?"

Benny became contemptuous now.

"They'll answer it sharp enough when they are here. You'll learn pretty quick whether it's a free country or not. If I were you, I would choose another, and let my lawyers do the talking from there. You could catch the afternoon train through the tunnel, if you were quick about it. You'd be in Italy to-morrow, and in my house opposite Magadino the day after. There's nobody there but an old Italian woman, and she couldn't pronounce your name if she knew it. I have the shanty until the winter--the hydroplanes I was running in the fall are still there, and some other stuff. Say you come on my business, and no one will question you. That's what I would do if I were you, and I wouldn't be long in doing it either."

He stood waiting for an answer, his arms still thrust deep into his trousers pockets and his hat awry. The expression of low cunning which crept upon the baronet's face did not deter him in any way. He cared not a straw for any imputations of motive, whatever they might be. A determination to save Lily Delayne from the shame of this madness drove him as a spur. Had it been otherwise he would not have crossed the street at this man's beck.

Delayne understood the situation perfectly, and was upon the point of confessing as much. He knew how sure was his wife's influence over men, and for an instant a savage impulse of jealousy impelled him to turn on the man who would have befriended him for his wife's sake and to say all that was in his mind. From this an instinct of prudence saved him at the last moment. He remembered the words: "The man is dead," and began to shudder. Yes, flight was his only chance--but flight must imply guilt!

"Oh," he exclaimed, after a moment's hesitation, "that's all very well, but if I go, what will they say? And my valet, Paul--what of him? Is he ready to hold his tongue, do you think?"

"I think nothing. Send him to Paris by the Simplon to-night. Tell him you're following later. You're not going to say that you've been mad enough to take him into your confidence?"

"Nothing of the kind; but he's a Swiss. They may question him about me?"

"In Paris--"

Delayne shrugged his shoulders.

"If I go, I admit that the police had the right to molest me."

"If you stay, by God, they'll guillotine you. Don't you understand that--don't you see that this man was in the service of the State? Lord, a child would know better. And you're losing the minutes. I say, the minutes; and every one may be the most precious you'll ever live."

Delayne still hesitated, pacing the room, and muttering all the jargon of defence he had recited a hundred times since the instant of his passion. Despite his dilemma, certain instincts of his pride remained. How should he tell this bull-dog of an engineer that he was at his wits' end to pay his hotel bill? He would never have told him had not Benny guessed it from the first.

"You want money, perhaps?" he said, speaking in a new tone, which a sense of delicacy forced upon him. "Well, I'll see you through this, and you can pay me when you like. I'll give you a hundred at Brigue, and you can run the shanty with that until I come. Ten pounds should see your man to Paris--let him go to a back-street hotel until you come. You know the place well enough for that, and can direct him. I'm going down to order the sleigh. It'll be at the cross-roads above the Palace in half an hour. If you're not there when I bring it, a telegram will go to Sierre. As sure as I stand here, I'll dispatch that if you keep me waiting five minutes. Now go, and do what I tell you--you've played the fool long enough."

He strode from the room and the hotel. Half an hour afterwards, Luton Delayne and the valet, Paul, met him at the cross-roads above Andana, and stepped aboard the sleigh he had hired from Karl Meyer, the jobmaster at the Park. Benny's excuse, that he wished to go down alone to bring up "stuff" from Sierre, satisfied the phlegmatic German, who had a good customer in this active Englishman. He promised to telephone for a second horse to be at the Terminus Hotel in the valley that night, and gave no further thought to the matter.