"There is no accounting for tastes, of course," was the severely frigid reply; and the poor parson's heart sank within him as he wondered whether this sort of thing was to be his lot all day, and whether it would be practicable to cut adrift from his present convoy and effect a juncture with Fordham and the General, now some few score yards in the rear.

"Alma dear, who on earth cut those awful Severns into our crowd to-day?"

Philip was saying, moved doubtless by that extraordinary coincidence which inspires two people simultaneously with the same idea, though that idea be entirely irrelevant to any subject then under consideration or discussion.

Alma laughed.

"I think they more than three parts cut themselves in, and having done so, cut in Mr Ma.s.siter," she answered.

"Oh, I don't mind the parson! He's an inoffensive chap, you know, and a good sort, I think. But those two fearful girls, with their 'terms' and their 'triposes' and the 'dear Princ.i.p.al,' and their shock heads, and 'quite too-too' get-up! Faugh! They never open their mouths without saying something tart and disagreeable. I suppose they think it a sign of erudition."

"We mustn't abuse other people, especially on a day like this--it's a bad habit to get into. I agree with you though--they might make themselves a little more pleasant. However, they have their use.

Didn't it ever occur to you, you dear, foolish boy, that I may not always care to be the only girl in the party? Though it amounts almost to the same thing, for you never will let any one else come near me."

"No, I won't," he a.s.sented, cheerfully. "I want you all to myself. It may not last much longer. And--what a time we have had. I would willingly go back and go through it all again."

"But we are not going away to-morrow, or the next day either," she replied, with a sunny laugh. "We shall have many more such days as this."

"It is perfect!" he continued, now in a low tone. "Almost too perfect to last. When shall we be ever again together like this?"

The remark was made without a shadow of _arriere pensee_, yet it sounded almost prophetic. Why should it, however? No cloud was in their sky any more than in the firmament of deep blue spreading overhead. No shadow was across their path any more than upon the dazzling snowfields lying aloft in pure and unbroken stretches. The morrow would be but a reproduction of to-day--a heaven of youth and its warm pulsations, of sunny freedom from care, and--of love.

And now Fordham's voice was heard behind.

"Hallo, Phil?" it shouted, characteristically addressing the stronger and, in its owner's opinion, more important and only responsible member of the pair in advance. "Better hold on till we come up. We are getting among the _seracs_."

They were. Great ma.s.ses of ice, by the side of which a five-storey house would look puny, were heaving up to the sky. The glacier here made a steep and abrupt drop, falling abroad into wide, lateral chasms-- not the black and grim creva.s.ses of bottomless depth into which an army might disappear and leave no trace, such as the smooth, treacherous surface of the upper _neves_ are seamed with, but awkward rifts for all that, deep enough to break a limb or even a neck. A labyrinthian course along the sharp ice-ridges overhanging these became necessary, and although Philip was armed with the requisite ice-axe and by this time knew how to wield it, Fordham satirically reflected that the mind of a man in the parlous state of his friend was not hung upon a sufficiently even balance to ensure the necessary equilibrium from a material and physical point of view. So he chose to rally his party.

A little ordinary caution was necessary, that was all. A little step-cutting now and then, a helping hand for the benefit of the ladies, and they threaded their way in perfect safety among the yawning rifts, the great blue _seracs_ towering up overhead, piled in t.i.tanic confusion--here in huge blocks, there standing apart in tall needle-like shafts. One of these suddenly collapsed close to them, falling with an appalling roar, filling the air with a shower of glittering fragments, causing the hard surface to vibrate beneath them with the grinding crash of hundreds of tons of solid ice.

"By Jove! What a magnificent sight?" cried the old General. "I wouldn't have missed that for the world."

"'He casteth forth His ice like morsels,'" quoted the parson to himself, but not in so low a tone as not to be heard by Alma, becoming aware of which he was conscious of a nervous and guilty start, as of one who had allowed himself to be found preaching out of church. But he had in her no supercilious or scoffing critic.

"I think the vastness of this ice-world is the most wonderful thing in Nature, Mr Ma.s.siter," she said.

"It is indeed, Miss Wyatt," was the pleased reply.

And then, catching eagerly at this chance of relief from the somewhat depressing spell of the two learned ones, the good man attached himself to her side and engaged her in conversation, not altogether to the satisfaction of Philip, who, relinquishing the entrancing but somewhat boyish amus.e.m.e.nt of heaving boulders down the smooth, slippery slope of the ice, sprang forward to help her up the narrow, treacherous path of the loose moraine--for they had left the ice now for a short time.

Virtue was its own reward, however--it and a stone--which, dislodged by Alma's foot, came bounding down with a smart whack against the left ankle of the too eager cavalier, evoking from the latter a subdued if involuntary howl, instead of the mental "cuss-word" which we regret to say might have greeted the occurrence had it owned any other author.

Steep and toilsome as this little bit of the way was, the two strong-minded ones still found breath enough to discourse to the General--or, rather, _through_ him _at_ Fordham, upon the never-failing topic, the unqualified inferiority of the other s.e.x, causing that genial veteran to vote them bores of the most virulent kind, and mentally to resolve to dispense with their company at whatever cost on all future expeditions which he might undertake.

"Why, you couldn't get on for a day without us!" said Fordham, bluntly, coming to the rescue. "How would you have got along those _seracs_ just now, for instance, if left to yourselves?"

"Life does not wholly consist in crossing glaciers, Mr Fordham," was the majestic reply.

"It runs on a very good parallel with it though. And the fact remains, as I said before. You couldn't be happy for a day without us."

"Indeed?" said the elder and more acid of the two, with splendid contempt. "Indeed? Don't you flatter yourself. We could be happy-- perfectly happy--all our lives without you."

"That's fortunate, for I haven't asked you to be happy all your lives _with_ me," answered Fordham, blandly.

The green eyes of the learned pair glared--both had green eyes--like those of cats in the dark. There was a suspicious shake in the shapely shoulders of Alma Wyatt, who, with the parson, was leading the way, and the General burst into such a frantic fit of coughing that he seemed in imminent peril of suffocation; while a series of extraordinary sounds, profuse in volume if subdued in tone, emanating from Philip's broad chest, would have led a sudden arrival upon the scene to imagine that volatile youth to be afflicted with some hitherto undiscovered ailment, lying midway between whooping-cough and the strangles.

And now once more, the fall of the glacier surmounted, the great ice-field lay before them in smooth and even expanse. And what a scene of wild and stately grandeur was that vast amphitheatre now opening out.

Not a tree, not a shrub in sight; nothing but rocks and ice--a great frozen plain, seamed and creva.s.sed in innumerable cracks, shut in by towering mountains and grim rock-walls, the summits of which were crowned with layers of snow--the perilous "cornice" of the Alpine climber--curling over above the dizzy height--of dazzling whiteness against the deep blue of the heavens. In crescent formation they stood, those stately mountains encircling the glaciers, the snow-flecked hump of the Grand Cornier and the huge and redoubted Dent Blanche, whose ruddy ironstone precipices and grim ice-crowned _aretes_ glowed in the full midday sunlight with sheeny prismatic gleam; the towering Gabelhorn, and the knife-like point of the Rothhorn soaring away as if to meet the blue firmament itself. Gigantic ice-slopes, swept smooth by the driving gales, shone pearly and silver; and huge overhanging ma.s.ses of blue ice, where the end of a high glacier had broken off, stood forth a wondrously beautiful contrast in vivid green. But this scene of marvellous grandeur and desolation was not given over to silence, for ever and anon the fall of a mighty _serac_ would boom forth with a thunderous roar. The ghostly rattle and echo of falling stones high up among those grim precipices was never entirely still, while the hoa.r.s.e growling of streams cleaving their way far below in the heart of the glacier was as the voices of prisoned giants striving in agonised throes.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

THE WRITING ON THE WALL.

Not less imposing was the wild magnificence of this panorama as viewed from the Mountet cabin, which, from its eyrie-like position high up among the rocks, commanded the whole vast ice-amphitheatre. The last climb, after leaving the glacier, had been a steep and trying one, and to most of the party, at any rate, the first consideration on reaching their goal was a twofold one--rest and lunch.

"I suppose you don't get much sleep in these places, eh, Fordham?" said the General, looking round upon the plank shelves which, plentifully covered with straw, const.i.tuted the sleeping places. From the beams above hung rugs of a heavy, coa.r.s.e texture.

"It depends on a good many things--the absence of fleas, or of a crowd.

When there are three or four parties, with their guides, going the same way or coinciding here for the night, a box like this is apt to get crowded and the air thick."

"It is wonderfully ingenious," said Alma, taking in the solidity of the building and its contrivances for safety and comfort--every stick of which had to be dragged up there by mules and porters. "Where did they sleep before these cabins were built?"

"Under the rocks. Picked out a sheltered corner and rolled in. A coldish sort of a bedroom too," answered Fordham.

"And all for the sake of getting to the top of a peak that a hundred other fools have been up already, and a thousand more will go up afterwards," struck in the flippant Phil. "Throw one of those hard-boiled eggs at me, Fordham. Thanks."

"Is not that kind of reasoning--er--somewhat fatal to all enterprise?"

said the parson.

"There is little enterprise, as such, in all this Alp climbing,"

interrupted one of the learned young women before anybody could reply.

"Not one in a hundred of all the men who spend summer after summer mountaineering ever thinks of benefiting his species by his experiences.

No branch of science is the gainer by it, for the poor creature is lamentably ignorant of science in any branch--almost that such a thing exists, in fact. To him a mountain is--a mountain, and nothing more--"

"But--what in the world else should it be, Miss Severn?" said Philip.

"--Just so many thousand feet to go up," continued the oracle, severely ignoring the flippant interruptor.

"Or so many thousand feet to come down--and then return home in a sack,"

said the latter, wickedly.

"Just one more peak to add to the number he can already boast of having scaled. n.o.body the gainer by it. Grand opportunities thrown away. The only end effected, the aggravation of one man's already inflated conceit."

"I don't know about n.o.body being the gainer by it, Miss Severn," said the General. "I am disposed to think this rage for mountaineering by no means a bad thing--in fact a distinctly good one, as anything that calls forth pluck, determination, and endurance is bound to be. Now, by the time a man has done two or three of these gentry there," with a wave of the hand in the direction of the surrounding peaks, "his nerve is likely to be in pretty good order, and his training and condition not very deficient. No, I don't agree with you at all, Miss Severn."

"The guides are very considerably the gainers by it, too," said Fordham--"the gainers by enough cash to tide them comfortably through the winter."

"These are all very secondary considerations," was the lofty rejoinder.

"n.o.body touches my point after all. General Wyatt thinks that the object of penetrating the wonders of these stupendous ice-worlds has been gained when a man has got himself into the hard muscular training of a mere brutal prize-fighter; while Mr Fordham thinks it quite sufficient if a few hundred francs find their way into the pockets of a few Swiss peasants. But what does science gain by it? Of course I except the researches of such men as Tyndall--but they are the rare exceptions." And the speaker looked around as if challenging a reply.