Four years of wealth had not made much external alteration in Mrs. Joseph Brownlow. As she descended the staircase of her beautiful London house, one Monday morning, late in April, between flower-stands filled with lovely ferns and graceful statues, she had still the same eager girlish look. It was true that her little cap was of the most costly lace, her hair manipulated by skilful hands, and her thin black summer dress was of material and make such as a scientific eye alone could have valued in their simplicity. But dignity still was wanting. Silks and brocades that would stand alone, and velvets richly piled only crushed and suffocated the little light swift figure, and the crisp curly hair was so much too wilful for the maid, that she had been even told that madame’s style would be to cut it short, and wear it a l’ingenue, which she viewed as insulting; and altogether her general air was precisely what it had been when her dress cost a twentieth part of what it did at present.
Her face looked no older. It was thin, eager, bright, and sunny, yet with an indescribable wistfulness in the sparkling eyes, and something worn in the expression, and, as usual, she moved with a quiet nimbleness peculiar to herself.
The breakfast-table, sparkling with silver and glass, around a magnificent orchid in the centre, and a rose by every plate, was spread in the dining-room, sweet sounds and scents coming in through the widely-opened glass doors of the conservatory, while a bright wood fire, still pleasant to look at, shone in the grate.
As she rang the bell, Bobus came in from the conservatory, book in hand, to receive the morning kiss, for which he had to bend to his little mother. He was not tall, but he had attained his full height, and had a well-knit sturdy figure which, together with his heavy brow and deep-set eyes, made him appear older than his real age—nineteen. His hair and upper lip were dark, and his eyes keen with a sense of ready power and strong will.
“Good morning, Bobus; I didn’t see you all day yesterday,” said his mother.
“No, I couldn’t find you before you went out on Saturday night, to tell you I was going to run down to Belforest with Bauerson. I wanted to enlighten his mind as to wild hyacinths. They are in splendid bloom all over the copses, and I thought he would have gone down on his knees to them, like Linnaeus to the gorse.”
“I’m afraid he didn’t go on his knees to anything else.”
“Well, it is not much in his line.”
“Then can he be a nice Sunday companion?”
“Now, mother, I expected credit for not scandalising the natives. We got out at Woodgate, and walked over, quite ‘unknownst,’ to Kenminster.”
“I was not thinking of the natives, but of yourself.”
“As you are a sensible woman, Mother Carey, wasn’t it a more goodly and edifying thing to put a man like Bauerson in a trance over the bluebells, than to sit cramped up in foul air listening to the glorification of a wholesale massacre.”
“For shame, Bobus; you know I never allow you to say such things.”
“Then you should not drag me to Church. Was it last Sunday that I was comparing the Prussians at Bazeille with—”
“Hush, my dear boy, you frighten me; you know it is all explained. Fancy, if we had to deal with a nation of Thugs, and no means of guarding them—a different dispensation and all. But here come the children, so hush.”
Bobus gave a nod and smile, which his mother understood only too well as intimating acquiescence with wishes which he deemed feminine and conventional.
“My poor boy,” she said to herself, with vague alarm and terror, “what has he not picked up? I must read up these things, and be able to talk it over with him by the time he comes back from Norway.”
There, however, came the morning greeting of Elvira and Barbara, girls of fourteen and eleven, with floating hair and short dresses, the one growing up into all the splendid beauty of her early promise, the other thin and brown, but with a speaking face and lovely eyes. They were followed by Miss Ogilvie, as trim and self-possessed as ever, but with more ease and expansiveness of manner.
“So Babie,” said her brother, “you’ve earned your breakfast; I heard you hammering away.”
“Like a nuthatch,” was the merry answer.
“And Elfie?” asked Mrs. Brownlow.
“I’m not so late as Janet,” she answered; and the others laughed at the self-defence before the attack.
“It is a lazy little Elf in town,” said Miss Ogilvie; “in the country she is up and out at impossible hours.”
“Good morning, Janet,” said Bobus, at that moment, “or rather, ‘Marry come up, mistress mine, good lack, nothing is lacking to thee save a pointed hood graceless.’”
For Janet was arrayed in a close-fitting pale blue dress, cut in semblance of an ancient kirtle, and with a huge chatelaine, from which massive chains dangled, not to say clattered—not merely the ordinary appendages of a young lady, but a pair of compasses, a safety inkstand, and a microscope. Her dark hair was strained back from a face not calculated to bear exposure, and was wound round a silver arrow.
Elfie shook with laughter, murmuring—
“Oh dear! what a fright!” in accents which Miss Ogilvie tried to hush; while Babie observed, as a sort of excuse, “Janet always is a figure of fun when she is picturesque.”
“My dear, I hope you are not going to show yourself to any one in that dress,” added her mother.
“It is perfectly correct,” said Janet, “studied from an old Italian costume.”
“The Marchioness of Carabbas, in my old fairy-tale book. Oh, yes, I see!” and Babie went off again in an ecstatic fit of laughter.
“I hope you’ve got boots and a tail ready for George,” added Bobus. “Being a tiger already, he may serve as cat.”
Therewith the post came in, and broke up the discourse; for Babie had a letter from Eton, from Armine who was shut up with a sore throat.
Her mother was less happy. She had asked a holiday for the next day for her two Eton boys and their cousin John, and the reply had been that though for two of the party there could be no objection, her elder boy was under punishment for one of the wild escapades to which he was too apt to pervert his excellent abilities.
“Are not they coming, mother?” asked Babie. “Armie does not say.”
“Unfortunately Jock has got kept in again.”
“Poor Jock!” said Bobus; “sixpence a day, and no expectations, would have been better pasture for his brains.”
“Yes,” said his mother with a sigh, “I doubt if we are any of us much the better or the wiser for Belforest.”
“The wiser, I’m sure, because we’ve got Miss Ogilvie,” cried Babie.
“Do I hear babes uttering the words of wisdom?” asked Allen, coming into the room, and pretending to pull her hair, as the school-room party rose from the breakfast-table, and he met them with outstretched hands.
“Ay, to despise Lag-last,” said Elvira, darting out of his reach, and tossing her dark locks at him as she hid behind a fern plant in the window; and there was a laughing scuffle, ended by Miss Ogilvie, who swept the children away to the school-room, while Allen came to the table, where his mother had poured out his coffee, and still waited to preside over his breakfast, though she had long finished her own.
Allen Brownlow, at twenty, was emphatically the Eton and Christchurch production, just well made and good-looking enough to do full justice to his training and general getting up, without too much individual personality of his own. He looked only so much of a man as was needful for looking a perfect gentleman, and his dress and equipments were in the most perfect quietly exquisite style, as costly as possible, yet with no display, and nothing to catch the eye.
“Well, Bobus,” he said, “you made out your expedition. How did the place look?”
“Wasting its sweetness,” said his mother; “it is tantalising to think of it.”
“It could hardly be said to be wasted,” said Bobus; “the natives were disporting themselves all over it.”
“Where?” asked Allen, with displeased animation.
“O, Essie and Ellie were promenading a select party about the gardens. I could almost hear Mackintyre gnashing his teeth at their inroads on the forced strawberries, and the park and Elmwood Spinney were dotted so thick with people, that we had to look sharp not to fall in with any one.”
“Elmwood Spinney!” exclaimed Allen; “you don’t mean that they were running riot over the preserves?”
“I don’t think there were more than half-a-dozen there. Bauerson was quite edified. He said, ‘So! they had on your English Sunday quite falsely me informed.’ There were a couple of lovers spooning and some children gathering flowers, and it had just the Arcadian look dear to the German eye.”
“Children,” cried Allen, as if they were vipers. “That’s just what I told you, mother. If you will persist in throwing open the park, we shall not have a pheasant on the place.”
“My dear boy, I have seen them running about like chickens in a farmyard.”
“Yes, but what’s the use, if all the little beggars in Kenminster are to be let in to make them wild! And when you knew I particularly wished to have something worth asking Prince Siegfried down to.”
“Never mind, Allen,” put in Janet; “you can ask him to shoot into the poultry yard. The poor things are just as thick there, and rather tamer, so the sport will be the more noble.”
“You know nothing about it, Janet,” said Allen, in displeasure.
“But Allen,” said his mother, apologetically, though she felt with Janet, “the woods are locked up.”
“Locked! As if that was any use when you let a lot of boys come marauding all over the place!”
“Really, Allen,” said his mother, “when I remember what we used to say about old Mr. Barnes, I cannot find it in my heart to play the same game!”
“It is quite a different thing.”
“How?”
“He did it out of mere surliness.”
“I don’t suppose it makes much difference to the excluded whether it is done out of mere surliness, or for the sake of the preserves.”
“Mother!” Allen spoke as if the absurdity of the argument were quite too much for him; but his brother and sister both laughed, which nettled him into adding—
“Well! All I have to say is, that if Belforest is to be nothing but a people’s park for all the ragamuffins in Kenminster, there will soon not be a head of game in the place, and I shall be obliged to shoot elsewhere!”
Poor Caroline! If there was a thing she specially hated, it was a battue, both for the thing itself, and all the previous preparation of preserving, and of prosecuting poachers; and yet sons have their mothers so much in their power by that threat of staying away from home, that she could not help faltering, “Oh, Allen, I’ll do my best, and tell the keepers to be very careful, and lock the gates of all the preserves.”
Allen saw she was vexed, and spoke more kindly, “There, never mind, mother. It is more than can be expected that ladies should see things in a reasonable light.”
“What is the reasonable light?” asked Bobus.
Allen did not choose to hear, regarding Bobus not indeed as a woman, but as something as little capable of appreciating his reason. It was Janet who took up the word. “The reasonable light is that the enjoyment of the many should be sacrificed to the vanity of the few, viz., that all Kenminster should be confined to dusty roads all the year round in order that Allen may bring down the youngest son of the youngest son of a German prince for one day to fire amongst some hundreds of tame pheasants who come up expecting to be fed.”
“Oh, yes,” said Allen, “we all know that you are a regular out-and-out democrat, Janet.”
“I confess, without being a democrat,” said his mother, “that I do wonder that you gentlemen, who wish the game laws to continue, should so work them as to be more aggravating than ever.”
“It is a simple question of the rights of property,” said Allen. “If I do a thing, I like it to be well done, and not half-and-half.”
Caroline rose from the table, dreading, like many a mother, a regular skirmish about game-preserving, between those who cared to shoot, and those who did not. Like other ladies, she could never understand exaggerated preserving, nor why men who loved sport should care to have game multiplied and tamed so as apparently to spoil all the zest of the chase; but she had let Allen and his uncle do what ever they told her was right by the preserves, except shutting up the park and all the footpaths. Colonel Brownlow, whose sporting instincts were those of a former generation, was quite satisfied; Allen never would be so; and it was one of the few bones of contention in the family.
For Allen was walking through Oxford in a quiet, amiable way, not troubling himself more about study than to secure himself from an ignominious pluck, and doing whatever was supposed to be “good form.”
His brother accused him of carrying his idolatry of “good form” to a snobbish extent, but Allen could carry it out so naturally that no one could have suspected that he had not been to the manner born. If he did appreciate the society of people with handles to their names, he comported himself among them as their easy equal; and he was so lavish as to be a very popular man. He had no vicious tastes or tendencies, and was too gentlemanly and quiet ever to come into collision with the authorities. At home, except when his notions of “good form” were at variance with strong opinions of his mother’s, nothing could be more chivalrously deferential than his whole demeanour to her; and the worst that could be said of him was that he managed to waste a large amount of time and money with very little to show for it. His profession was to be son and heir to a large fortune, and he took to the show part of the affair very kindly.
But was this being the man his father had expected him to be? The thought would come across Caroline at times, but not very often, as she floated along easily in the stream of life. Most of the business troubles of her property were spared her by her trustees, and her income was so large that even Allen’s expenditure had not yet been felt as an inconvenience. As to the responsibilities, she contributed largely to county subscriptions, gave her clergyman whatever he asked, provided Christmas treats and summer teas for their school-children, and permitted Miss Ogilvie and Babie to do whatever they pleased among the poor when they were at home. But she was not very much at Belforest. She generally came there at Midsummer and at Christmas, and filled the house with friends. All kinds of amusements astonished the neighbourhood, and parties of the newest kinds, private theatricals, tableaux, charades, all that taste or ingenuity could devise were in vogue.
But before the spring east winds the party were generally gone to some more genial climate, and the early autumn was often spent in Switzerland. Pictures, art, and scenery were growing to be necessaries of life, and to stay at home with no special diversion in view seemed unthought of. The season was spent in London, not dropping the artist society on the one hand, but adding to it the amount of intercourse into which she was drawn by the fact of her being a rich and charming woman, having a delightful house, and a son and daughter who might be “grands partis.” Allen liked high life for her, so she did not refuse it; but probably her social success was all the greater from her entire indifference, and that of her daughter, to all the questions of exclusiveness and fashion. If they had been born duchesses they could not have been less concerned about obtaining invitations to what their maid called “the first circles,” and they would sometimes reduce Allen to despair by giving the preference to a lively literary soiree, when he wanted them to show themselves among the aristocracy at a drum.
Engagements of all kinds grew on them with every season, and in this one especially, Caroline had grown somewhat weary of the endeavour to satisfy both him and Janet, and was not sorry that her two eldest sons were starting on a yacht voyage to Norway, where Allen meant to fish, and Bobus to study natural history. She had her interview with the housekeeper, and proceeded to her own place in Popinjay Parlour, a quiet place at this time of day, save for the tinkling of the fountain and the twitterings of the many little songsters in the aviary, whom the original parrot used patronisingly to address as “Pretty little birds.”
Janet was wandering about among the flowers, evidently waiting for her, and began, as she came in—
“I wanted to speak to you, mother.”
“Well, Janet,” said Caroline, reviewing in one moment every unmarried man, likely or unlikely, who had approached the girl, and with a despairing conviction that it would be some one very unlikely indeed!
“You know I am of age, mother.”
“Certainly. We drank your health last Monday.”
“I made up my mind that till I was of age I would go on studying, and at the same time see something of the world and of society.”
“Certainly,” said Caroline, wondering what her inscrutable daughter was coming to.
“And having done this, I wish to devote myself to the study of medicine.”
“Be a lady doctor, Janet!”
“Mother, you are surely above all the commonplace, old world nonsense!”
“I don’t think I am, Janet. I don’t think your father would have wished it.”
“He would have gone on with the spirit of the times, mother; men do, while women stand still.”
“I don’t think he would in this.”
“I think he would, if he knew me, and the issues and stake, and how his other children are failing him.”
“Janet!”—and the colour flushed into her mother’s face—“I don’t quite know what you mean; but it is time we came to an understanding.”
“I think so,” returned Janet.
“Then you know—”
“I heard what papa said to you. I kept the white slate till you thought of it,” said Janet, in a tone that sounded soft from her.
“And why did you never say so, my dear?”
“I can hardly tell. I was shy at first; and then reserve grows on a person; but I never ceased from thinking about it through all these years. Mother, you do not think there is any chance of the boys taking it up as my father wished?”
“Certainly not Allen,” said Caroline with a sigh. “And as to Bobus, he would have full capacity; but a great change must come over him, poor fellow, before he would fulfil your father’s conditions.”
“He has no notion of the drudgery of the medical profession,” said Janet; “he means to read law, get up social and sanitary questions, and go into parliament.”
“I know,” said her mother, “I have always lived in hopes that sanitary theories would give him his father’s heart for the sufferers, and that search into the secrets of nature would lead him higher; but as long as he does not turn that way of himself it would be contrary to your father’s charge to hold this discovery out to him as an inducement.”
“And Jock?” said Janet, smiling. “You don’t expect it of the born soldier—nor of Armine?”
“I am not sure about Armine, though he may not be strong enough to bear the application.”
“Armine will walk through life like Allen,” scornfully said Janet; “besides he is but fourteen. Now, mother, why should not I be worthy?”
“My dear Janet, it is not a question of worthiness; it is not a thing a woman could work out.”
“I do not ask you to give it to me now, nor even to promise it to me,” said Janet, with a light in those dark wells, her eyes; “but only to let me have the hope, that when in three years’ time I am qualified, and have passed the examinations, if Bobus does not take it up, you will let me claim that best inheritance my father left, but which his sons do not heed.”
“My child, you do not know what you ask. Remember, I know more about it than only what you picked up on that morning. It is a matter he could not have made sure of without a succession of experiments very hard even for him, and certainly quite impossible for any woman. The exceeding difficulty and danger of the proof was one reason of his guarding it so much, and desiring it should only be told to one good as well as clever—clever as well as good.”
“Can you give me no hint of the kind of thing,” said Janet, wistfully.
“That would be a betrayal of his trust.”
Janet looked terribly disappointed.
“Mother,” said she, “let me put it to you. Is it fair to shut up a discovery that might benefit so many people.”
“It is not his fault, Janet, that it is shut up. He talked of it to several of the most able men he was connected with, and they thought it a chimera. He could not carry it on far enough to convince them. I do not know what he would have done if his illness had been longer, or he could have talked it out with any one, but I know the proof could only be made out by a course of experiments which he could not commit to any one not highly qualified, or whom he could not entirely trust. It is not a thing to be set forth broadcast, while it might yet prove a fallacy.”
“Is it to be lost for ever, then?”
“I shall try to find light as to the right thing to be done about it.”
“Well,” said Janet, drawing a long breath, “three years of study must come, any way, and by that time I may be able to triumph over prejudice.”
There was no time to reply, for at that moment the letters of the second delivery were brought in; and the first that Caroline opened told her that the cold which Armine had mentioned on Saturday seemed to be developing into an attack of a rather severe hybrid kind of illness, between measles and scarlatina, from which many persons had lately been suffering.
Armine was never strong, and his illnesses were always a greater anxiety than those of other people, so that his mother came to the immediate decision of going to Eton that same afternoon and remaining there, unless she found that it had been a false alarm.
She did not find it so; and as she remained with her boy, Janet’s conversation with her could not be resumed. There was so much chance of infection that she could not see any of the family again. Both the Johns sickened as soon as Armine began to improve, and Miss Ogilvie took the three girls down to Belforest. After the first few days it was rather a pleasant nursing. There was never any real alarm; indeed, Armine was the least ill of the three, and Johnny the most, and each boy was perfectly delighted to have her to attend to him, her nephew almost touchingly grateful. The only other victim was Jock’s most intimate friend, Cecil Evelyn, whose fag Armine was. He became a sharer of her attentions and the amusements she provided. She received letters of grateful thanks from his mother, who was, like herself, a widow, but was prevented from coming to him by close attendance on her mother-in-law, who was in a lingering state of decay when every day might be the last.
The eldest son, Lord Fordham, was so delicate that he was on no account to be exposed to the infection, and the boys were exceedingly anxious that Cecil should join them in the expedition that their mother projected making with them, to air them in Switzerland before returning to the rest of the family. But Mrs. Evelyn (her husband had not lived to come to the title) declined this. Fordham was in the country with his tutor, and she wished Cecil to come and spend his quarantine with her in London before joining him. The boys grumbled very much, but Caroline could hardly wonder when she talked with their tutor.
He, like every one else, liked, and even loved personally that perplexing subject, John Lucas Brownlow, alias Jock. The boy was too generous, honourable, truthful, and kindly to be exposed to the stigma of removal; but he was the perplexity of everybody. He could not be convinced of any necessity for application, and considered a flogging as a slight risk quite worth encountering for the sake of diversion. He would execute the most audacious pranks, and if he was caught, would take it as a trial of skill between the masters and himself, and accept punishment as amends, with the most good humoured grace in the world. Fun seemed to be his only moving spring, and he led everybody along with him, so as to be a much more mischievous person than many a worse lad.
The only exceptions in the house to his influence seemed to be his brother and cousin. Both were far above the average boy. Armine, for talent, John Friar Brownlow at once for industry and steadiness. They had stood out resolutely against more than one of his pranks, and had been the only boys in the house not present on the occasion of his last freak—a champagne supper, when parodies had been sung, caricaturing all the authorities; and when the company had become uproarious enough to rouse the whole family, the boys were discovered in the midst of the most audacious but droll mimicry of the masters.
As to work, Jock was developing the utmost faculties for leaving it undone, trusting to his native facility for putting on the steam at any crisis; and not believing in the warnings that he would fail in passing for the army.
What was to be done with him? Was he to be taken away and sent to a tutor? His mother consulted himself as he sat in his arm-chair.
“Like Rob!” he said, and made up a face.
“Rob is doing very well in the militia.”
“No; don’t do that, mother! Never fear, I’ll put on a spurt when the time comes!”
“I don’t believe a spurt will do. Now, seriously, Jock—”
“Don’t say, seriously, mother: it’s like H.S.H.”
“Perhaps if I had been like her, you would not be vexing me so much now.”
“Come, come, mother, it’s nothing to be vexed about. My tutor needn’t have bothered you. I’ve done nothing sneaking nor ungentlemanly.”
“There is plenty of wrong without that, Jock. While you never heed anything but fun and amusement I do not see how you are to come to anything worth having; and you will soon get betrayed into something unworthy. Don’t let me have to take you away in disgrace, my boy; it would break my heart.”
“You shan’t have to do that, mother.”
“But don’t you think it would be wiser to be somewhere with fewer inducements to idleness?”
“Leave Eton? O no, mother! I can’t do that till the last day possible. I shall be in the eight another year.”
“You will not be here another year unless you go on very differently. Your tutor will not allow it, if I would.”
“Has he said so?”
“Yes; and the next half is to be the trial.”
Jock applied himself to extracting a horsehair from the stuffing of the elbow of his chair; and there was a look over his face as near sullenness as ever came to his gay, careless nature.
Would he attend? or even could he?
When his bills came in Caroline feared, as before, that he was the one of all her children whom Belforest was most damaging. Allen was expensive, but in an elegant, exquisite kind of way; but Jock was simply reckless; and his pleasures were questionable enough to be on the borders of vices, which might change the frank, sweet, merry face that now looked up to her into a countenance stained by dissipation and licence!
A flash of horror and dismay followed the thought! But what could she do for him, or for any of her children? Censure only alienated them and made them worse, and their love for her was at least one blessing. Why had this gold come to take away the wholesome necessity for industry?
Very merry was the party which arrived at the roughly-built hotel of Schwarenbach which serves as a half-way house to the Altels.
Never had expedition been more enjoyed than that of Mrs. Brownlow and her three boys. They had taken a week by the sea to recruit their forces, and then began their journey in earnest, since it was too late for a return to Eton, although so early in the season that to the Swiss they were like the first swallows of the spring, and they came in for some of the wondrous glory of the spring flowers, so often missed by tourists.
In her mountain dress, all state and ceremony cast aside, Caroline rode, walked, and climbed like the jolly Mother Carey she was, to use her son’s favourite expression, and the boys, full of health and recovery, gambolled about her, feeling her companionship the very crown of their enjoyment.
Johnny, to whom all was more absolutely new than to the others, was the quietest of the three. He was a year older than Lucas, as Jock was now called to formal outsiders, while Friar John, a reversal of his cousin’s two Christian names, was a school title that sometimes passed into home use. Friar John then had reached an age open to the influences of beautiful and sublime scenery, and when the younger ones only felt the exhilaration of mountain air, and longings to get as high as possible, his soul began to expand, and fresh revelations of glory and majesty to take possession of him. He was a very different person from the rough, awkward lad of eight years back. He still had the somewhat loutish figure which, in his mother’s family, was the shell of fine-looking men, and he was shy and bashful, but Eton polish had taken away the rude gruffness, and made his manners and bearing gentlemanly. His face was honest and intelligent, and he had a thoroughly good, conscientious disposition; his character stood high, and he was the only Brownlow of them all who knew the sweets of being “sent up for good.” His aunt could almost watch expression deepening on his open face, and he was enjoying with soul and mind even more than with body. Having had the illness later and more severely than the other two, his strength had not so fully returned, and he was often glad to rest, admire, and study the subject with his aunt, to whose service he was specially devoted, while the other two climbed and explored. For even Armine had been invigorated with a sudden overflow of animal health and energy, which made him far more enterprising and less contemplative than he had ever been before.
They four had walked up the mountain after breakfast from Kandersteg, bringing their bags for a couple of nights, the boys being anxious to go up the Altels the next day, as their time was nearly over and they were to be in school in ten days’ time again. After luncheon and a good rest on the wooden bench outside the door, they began to stroll towards the Daubensee, along a path between desolate boulders, without vegetation, except a small kind of monkshood.
“I call this dreary,” said the mother. “We don’t seem to get a bit nearer the lake. I shall go home and write to Babie.”
“I’ll come back with you,” said Johnny. “My mother will be looking for a letter.”
“Not giving in already, Johnny,” said Armine. “I can tell you I mean to get to the lake.”
“The Friar is the slave of his note-book,” said Jock. “When are we to have it—‘Crags and Cousins,’ or ‘From Measles to Mountains’?”
“I don’t want to forget everything,” said Johnny, with true Kencroft doggedness.
“Do you expect ever to look at that precious diurnal again?”
“He will leave it as an heirloom to his grandchildren!”
“And they will say how slow people were in the nineteenth century.”
“There will have been a reaction by that time, and they will only wonder how anybody cared to go up into such dreary places.”
“Or perhaps they will have stripped them all, and eaten the glaciers up as ices and ice-creams!”
“I think I’ll set up that as my pet anxiety,” said their mother, laughing; “just as some people suffer from perplexity as to what is to become of the world when all the coal is used up! You are not turning on my account, are you, Johnny? I am quite happy to go back alone.”
“No, indeed. I want to write my letter, and I have had enough,” said John.
“Tired!” said Armine. “Poor old monk! Swiss air always makes me feel like a balloon full of gas. I could go on, up and up, for ever!”
“Well, keep to the path, and don’t do anything imprudent,” she said, turning back, the boys saying, “We’ll only have a look down the pass! Here, Chico! Chico! Chick! Chick!”
Chico, the little dog so disdainfully rejected by Elvira, had attached himself from the first to Jock. He had been in the London house when they spent a day there, and in rapture at the meeting had smuggled himself, not without his master’s connivance, among the rugs and wrappers, and had already been the cause of numerous scrapes with officials and travellers, whence sometimes money, sometimes politeness, sometimes audacity, bought off his friends as best they could.
There was a sort of grave fascination in the exceeding sternness of the scene—the grey heaps of stone, the mountains raising their shining white summits against the blue, the dark, fathomless, lifeless lake, and the utter absence of all forms of life. Armine’s spirit fell under the spell, and he moved dreamily on, hardly attending to Jock, who was running on with Chico, and alarming him by feints of catching him and throwing him into the water.
They came to the gap where they expected to look over the pass, but it was blotted out by a mist, not in itself visible though hiding everything, and they were turning to go home when, in the ravine near at hand, the white ruggedness of the Wildstrube glacier gleamed on their eyes.
“I didn’t know it was so near,” said Jock. “Come and have a look at it.”
“Not on it,” said Armine, who had somewhat more Swiss experience than his brother. “There’s no going there without a guide.”
“There’s no reason we should not get on the moraine,” said Jock; and they presently began to scramble about among the rocks and boulders, trying to mount some larger one whence they might get a more general view of the form of the glacier. Chico ran on before them, stimulated by some reminiscence of the rabbit-holes of Belforest, and they were looking after him and whistling him back; Armine heard a sudden cry and fall—Jock had disappeared. “Never mind!” he called up the next instant. “I’m all right. Only, come down here! I’ve twisted my foot somehow.”
Armine scrambled round the rock over which he had fallen, a loose stone having turned with him. He had pulled himself up, but even with an arm round Armine’s neck, he could not have walked a step on even ground, far less on these rough debris, which were painful walking even for the lightest, most springy tread.
“You must get to the inn and bring help,” he said, sinking down with a sigh.
“I suppose there’s nothing else to be done,” said Armine, unwillingly. “You’ll have a terrible time to wait, unless I meet some one first. I’ll be as quick as I can.”
“Not too quick till you get off this place,” said Jock, “or you’ll be down too, and here, help me off with this boot first.”
This was not done quickly or easily. Jock was almost sick with the pain of the effort, and the bruise looked serious. Armine tried to make him comfortable, and set out, as he thought, in the right direction, but he had hardly gone twenty steps before he came to a sudden standstill with an emphatic “I say!” then came back repeating “I say, Jock, we are close upon the glacier; I was as near as possible going down into an awful blue crack!”
“That’s why it’s getting so cold,” said Jock. “Here, Chick, come and warm me. Well, Armie, why ain’t you off?”
“Yes,” said Armine, with a quiver in his voice, “if I keep down by the side of the glacier, I suppose I must come to the Daubensee in time.”
“What! Have we lost the way?” said Jock, beginning to look alarmed.
“There’s no doubt of that,” said Armine, “and what’s worse, that fog is coming up; but I’ve got my little compass here, and if I keep to the south-west, and down, I must strike the lake somewhere. Goodbye, Jock.”
He looked white and braced up for the effort. Jock caught hold of him. “Don’t leave me, Armie,” he said; “you can’t—you’ll fall into one of those crevasses.”
“You’d better let me go before the fog gets worse,” said Armine.
“I say you can’t; it’s not fit for a little chap like you. If you fell it would be ever so much worse for us both.”
“I know! But it is the less risk,” said Armine, gravely.
“I tell you, Armie, I can’t have you go. Mother will send out for us, and we can make no end of a row together. There’s a much better chance that way than alone. Don’t go, I say—”
“I was only looking out beyond the rock. I don’t think it would be possible to get on now. I can’t see even the ridge of stones we climbed over.”
“I wish it was I,” said Jock, “I’ll be bound I could manage it!” Then impatiently—“Something must be done, you know, Armie. We can’t stay here all night.”
Yet when Armine went a step or two to see whether there was any practicability of moving, he instantly called out against his attempting to go away. He was in a good deal of pain, and high-spirited boy as he was, was thoroughly unnerved and appalled, and much less able to consider than the usually quieter and more timid Armine. Suddenly there was a frightful thunderous roar and crash, and with a cry of “An avalanche,” the brothers clasped one another fast and shut their eyes, but ere the words “Have mercy” were uttered all was still again, and they found themselves alive!
“I don’t think it was an avalanche,” said Armine, recovering first. “It was most likely to be a great mass of ice tumbling off the arch at the bottom of the glacier. They do make a most awful row. I’ve heard one before, only not so near. Anyway we can’t be far from the bottom of the glacier, if I only could crawl there.”
“No, no;” cried Jock, holding him tight; “I tell you, you can’t do it.”
Jock could not have defined whether he was most actuated by fears for his brother’s safety or by actual terror at being left alone and helpless. At any rate Armine much preferred remaining, in all the certain misery and danger, to losing sight of his brother, with the great probability of only being further lost himself.
“I wonder whether Chico would find mother,” he said.
Jock brightened; Armine found an envelope in his pocket, and scribbled—
“On the moraine. Jock’s ankle sprained—Come.”
Then Jock produced a bit of string, wherewith it was fastened to the dog’s collar, and then authoritatively bade Chico go to mother.
Alas! cleverness had never been Chico’s strong point, and the present extremity did not inspire him with sagacity. He knew the way as little as his masters did, and would only dance about in an unmeaning way, and when ordered home crouch in abject entreaty. Jock grew impatient and threatened him, but this only made him creep behind Armine, put his tail between his legs, hold up his little paw, and look piteously imploring.
“There’s no use in the little brute,” sighed Jock at last, but the attempt had done him good and recalled his nerve and good sense.
“We are in for a night of it,” he said, “unless they find us; and how are they ever to do that in this beastly fog?”
“We must halloo,” said Armine, attempting it.
“Yes, and we don’t know when to begin! We can’t go on all night, you know,” said Jock; “and if we begin too soon, we may have no voice left just at the right time.”
“It is half-past seven now,” said Armine, looking at his watch. “The food was to be at seven, so they must have missed us by this time.”
“They won’t think anything of it till it gets dark.”
“No. Give them till half-past eight. Somewhere about nine or half-past it may be worth while to yodel.”
“And how awfully cold it will be by that time. And my foot is aching like fun!”
Armine offered to rub it, and there was some occupation in this and in watching the darkening of the evening, which was very gradual in the dense white fog that shut them in with a damp, cold, moist curtain of undeveloped snow.
The poor lads were thinly clad for a summer walk, Jock had left his plaid behind him, and they were beginning to feel only too vividly that it was past supper-time, when they could dimly see that it was past nine, and began to shout, but they soon found this severe and exhausting.
Armine suggested counting ten between each cry, which would husband their powers and give them time to listen for an answer. Yet even thus there was an empty, feeble sound about their cries, so that Jock observed—
“It’s very odd that when there’s no good in making a row, one can make it fast enough, and now when it would be of some use, one seems to have no more voice than a little sick mouse.”
“Not so much, I think,” said Armine. “It is hunger partly.”
“Hark! That sounded like something.”
Invigorated by hope they shouted again, but though several times they did hear a distant yodel, the hope that it was in answer to themselves soon faded, as the sound became more distant, and their own exertions ended soon in an utter breakdown—into a hoarse squeak on Jock’s part and a weak, hungry cry on Armine’s. Jock’s face was covered with tears, as much from the strain as from despair.
“There!” he sighed, “there’s our last chance gone! We are in for a night of it.”
“It can’t be a very long night,” Armine said, through chattering teeth. “It’s only a week to the longest day.”
“Much that will matter to us,” said Jock, impatiently. “We shall be frozen long before morning.”
“We must keep ourselves awake.”
“You little ass,” said poor Jock, in the petulant inconsistency of his distress; “it is not come to that yet.”
Armine did not answer at once. He was kneeling against the rock, and a strange thrill came over Jock, forbidding him again to say—“It was not come to that,” but a shoot of aching pain in his ankle presently drew forth an exclamation.
Armine again offered to rub it for him, and the two arranged themselves for this purpose, the curtain of damp woolliness seeming to thicken on them. There was a moon somewhere, and the darkness was not total, but the dreariness and isolation were the more felt from the absence of all outlines being manifest. They even lost sight of their own hands if they stretched out their arms, and their light summer garments were already saturated with damp and would soon freeze. No part of their bodies was free from that deadly chill save where they could press against one another.
They were brave boys. Jock had collected himself again, and for some time they kept up a show of mirth in the shakings and buffetings they bestowed on one another, but they began to grow too stiff and spent to pursue this discipline. Armine thought that the night must be nearly over, and Jock tried to see his watch, but decided that he could not, because he could not bear to believe how far it was from day.
Armine was drowsily rubbing the ankle, mechanically murmuring something to himself. Jock shook him, saying—
“Take care, don’t doze off. What are you mumbling about leisure?”
“O tarry thou the Lord’s leisure. Be strong and—Was I saying it aloud?” he broke off with a start.
“Yes; go on.”
Armine finished the verse, and Jock commented—
“Comfort thine heart. Does the little chap mean it in a fix like this?”
“Jock,” said Armine, now fully awake, “I do want to say something.”
“Cut on.”
“If you get out of this and I don’t—”
“Stop that! We’ve got heat enough to last till morning.”
“Will they find us then? These fogs last for days and turn to snow.”
“Don’t croak, I say. I can’t face mother without you.”
“She’ll be glad enough to get you. Please listen, Jock, while I’m awake. I want you to give her and all of them my love, and say I’m sorry for all the times I’ve vexed them.”
“As if you had ever—”
“And please Jock, if I was nasty and conceited about the champagne—”
“Shut up, I can’t stand this,” cried Jock, chiefly from force of habit, for it was a tacit agreement among the elder brothers that Armine must not be suffered to “be cocky and humbug,” by which they meant no implication on his sincerity, but that they did not choose to hear remonstrances or appeals to higher motives, and this had made him very reticent with all except his sister Barbara and Miss Ogilvie, but he now persisted.
“Indeed I want you to forgive me, Jock. You don’t know how often I’ve thought all sorts of horridness about you.”
Jock laughed, “Not more than I deserved, I’ll be bound. How can you be so absurd! If anyone wants forgiveness, it is I. I say, Armie, this is all nonsense. You don’t really think you are done for, or you would not take it so coolly.”
“Of course I know Who can bring us through if He will,” said Armine. “There’s the Rock. I’ve been asking Him all this time—every moment—only I get so sleepy.”
“If He will; but if He won’t?”
“Then there’s Paradise. And Himself and father,” said Armine, still in a dreamy tone.
“Oh, yes; that’s for you! But how about a mad fellow like me? It’s so sneaking just to take to one’s prayers because one’s in a bad case.”
“Oh, Jock! He is always ready to hear! More ready than we to pray!”
“Now don’t begin to improve the occasion,” broke out Jock. “By all the stories that ever were written, I’m the one to come to a bad end, not you.”
“Don’t,” said Armine, with an accent of pain that made Jock cry, hugging him tighter. “There, never mind, Armie; I’ll let you say all you like. I don’t know what made me stop you, except that I’m a beast, and always have been one. I’d give anything not to have gone on playing the fool all my life, so as to be able to mind this as little as you do.”
“I don’t seem awake enough to mind anything much,” said the little boy, “or I should trouble more about Mother and Babie; but somehow I can’t.”
“Oh!” wailed Jock, “you must! You must get out of it, Armie. Come closer. Shove in between me and the rock. Here, Chico, lie down on the top of us! Mother must have you back any way, Armie.”
The little fellow was half-dozing, but words of prayer and faith kept dropping from his tongue. Pain, and a stronger vitality alike, kept Jock free from the torpor, and he used his utmost efforts to rouse his brother; but every now and then a horrible conviction of the hopelessness of their condition came over him.
“Oh!” he groaned out, “how is it to be if this is the end of it? What is to become of a fellow that has been like me?”
Armine only spoke one word; the Name that is above every name.
“Yes, you always cared! But I never cared for anything but fun! Never went to Communion at Easter. It is too late.”
“Oh, no, no!” cried Armine, rousing up, “not too late! Never! You are His! You belong to Him! He cares for you!”
“If He does, it makes it all the worse. I never heeded; I thought it all a bore. I never let myself think what it all meant. I’ve thrown it all away.”
“Oh! I wish I wasn’t so stupid,” cried Armine, with a violent effort against his exhaustion. “Mother loves us, however horrid we are! He is like that; only let us tell Him all the bad we’ve done, and ask Him to blot it out. I’ve been trying—trying—only I’m so dull; and let us give ourselves more and more out and out to Him, whether it is here or there.”
“That I must,” said Jock; “it would be shabby and sneaking not.”
“Oh, Jock,” cried Armine, joyfully, “then it will all be right any way;” and he raised his face and kissed his brother. “You promise, Jock. Please promise.”
“Promise what? That if He will save us out of this, I’ll take a new line, and be as good as I know how, and—”
Armine took the word, whether consciously or not: “And manfully to fight under His banner, and continue Christ’s faithful soldiers and servants unto our lives’ end. Amen!”
“Amen,” Jock said, after him.
After that, Jock found that the child was repeating the Creed, and said it after him, the meanings thrilling through him as they had never done before. Next followed lines of “Rock of Ages,” and for some time longer there was a drowsy murmur of sacred words, but there was no eliciting a direct reply any more; and with dull consternation, Jock knew that the fatal torpor could no longer be broken, and was almost irritated that all the words he caught were such happy, peaceful ones. The very last were, “Inside angels’ wings, all white down.”
The child seemed almost comfortable—certainly not suffering like himself, bruised and strained, with sharp twinges rending his damaged foot; his limbs cramped, and sensible of the acute misery of the cold, and the full horror of their position; but as long as he could shake even an unconscious murmur from his brother, it seemed like happiness compared with the utter desolation after the last whisper had died away, and he was left intolerably alone under the solid impenetrable shroud that enveloped him, and the senseless form he held on his breast. And if he tried to follow on by that clue which Armine had left him, whirlwinds of dismay seemed to sweep away all hope and trust, while he thought of wilfulness, recklessness, defiance, irreverence, and all the yet darker shades of a self-indulgent and audacious school-boy life!
It was a little lighter, as if dawn might be coming, but the cold was bitterer, and benumbing more than paining him. His clothes were stiff, his eyelashes white with frost, he did not feel equal to looking at his watch, he would not see Armine’s face, he found the fog depositing itself in snow, but he heeded it no longer. Fear and hope had alike faded out of his mind, his ankle seemed to belong to some one else far away, he had left off wishing to see his mother, he wanted nothing but to be let alone!
He did not hear when Chico, finding no comfort, no sign of life in his masters, stood upon them as they lay clasped together in the drift of fine small snow, and in the climax of misery he lifted up the long and wretched wailing howlings of utter dog-wretchedness.