CHAPTER IV—THE STOLEN DAY

“E NCORE une fois! Bravo! That went better!” Monsieur Griolet’s understudy had amply justified his claim to capability. After a morning’s tuition at his hands, Jean found her prowess in the art of skating considerably enhanced. She was even beginning to master the mysteries of “cross-cuts” and “rocking turns,” and a somewhat attenuated figure eight lay freshly scored on the ice to her credit.

“You are really a wonderful instructor,” she acknowledged, surveying the graven witness to her progress with considerable satisfaction.

Her self-appointed teacher smiled.

“There is something to be said for the pupil, also,” he replied. “But now”—glancing at his watch—“I vote we call a halt for lunch.”

“Lunch!” Jean’s glance measured the distance to the hotel with some dismay.

“But not lunch at the hotel,” interposed her companion quickly.

Jean regarded him with curiosity.

“Where then, monsieur?”

“Up there!” he pointed towards the pine-woods. “Above the woods there is a hut of sorts—erected as a shelter in case of sudden storms for people coming up from the lower valley to Montavan and beyond. It’s a rough little shanty, but it would serve very well as a temporary salle 脿 manger. It isn’t a long climb,” he added persuasively. “Are you too tired to take it on after your recent exertion?”

“Not in the least. But are you expecting a wayside refuge of that description to be miraculously endowed with a well-furnished larder?”

“No. But I think my knapsack can make good the deficiency.” he replied composedly.

Jean looked at him with dancing eyes. Having once yielded to the day’s unconventional adventure, she had surrendered herself whole-heartedly to the enjoyment of it.

She made one reservation, however. Some instinct of self-protection prevented her from enlightening her companion as to her partly English nationality. There was no real necessity for it, seeing that he spoke French with the utmost fluency, and his assumption that she was a Frenchwoman seemed in some way to limit the feeling of intimacy, conferring on her, as it were, a little of the freedom of an incognito.

“A la bonne heure!” she exclaimed gaily. “So you invite me to share your lunch, monsieur le professeur?”

“I’ve invited you to share my day, haven’t I?” he replied, smiling.

They steered for the bank, and when he had helped off her skates and removed his own, slinging them over his arm, they started off along the steep white track which wound its way upwards through the pine-woods.

As they left the bright sunlight that still glittered on the snowy slopes behind them, it seemed as though they plunged suddenly into another world—a still, mysterious, twilit place, where the snow underfoot muffled the sound of their steps and the long shadows of the pines barred their path with sinister, distorted shapes.

Jean, always sensitive to her surroundings, shivered a little.

“It’s rather eerie, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s just as if someone had suddenly turned the lights out.”

“Quite a nice bit of symbolism,” he returned enigmatically.

“How? I don’t think I understand.”

He laughed a little.

“How should you? You’re young. Fate doesn’t come along and snuff out the lights for you when you are—what shall we say? Eighteen?”

“You’re two years out,” replied Jean composedly.

“As much? Then let’s hope you’ll have so much the longer to wait before Madame Destiny comes round with her snuffers.”

He spoke with a kind of bitter humour, the backwash, surely, of some storm through which he must have passed. Jean looked across at him with a vague trouble in her face.

“Then, do you think”—she spoke uncertainly—“do you believe it is inevitable that she will come—sooner or later?”

“I hope not—to you,” he said gently. “But she comes to most of us.”

She longed to put another question, but there was a note of finality in his voice—a kind of “thus far shalt thou come and no further”—that warned her to probe no deeper. Whatever it was of bitterness that lay in the Englishman’s past, he had no intention of sharing the knowledge with his chance companion of a day. He seemed to have become absorbed once more in his own thoughts, and for a time they tramped along together in silence.

The ascent steepened perceptibly, and Jean, light and active as she was, found it hard work to keep pace with the man’s steady, swinging stride. Apparently his thoughts engrossed him to the exclusion of everything else, for he appeared to have utterly forgotten her existence. It was only when a slip of her foot on the beaten surface of the snow wrung a quick exclamation from her that he paused, wheeling round in consternation.

“I beg your pardon! I’m walking you off your legs! Why on earth didn’t you stop me?”

There was something irresistibly boyish about the quick apology. Jean laughed, a little breathless from the swift climb uphill.

“You seemed so bent on getting to the top in the least possible time,” she replied demurely, “that I didn’t like to disappoint you.”

“I’m afraid I make a poor sort of guide,” he admitted. “I was thinking of something else. You must forgive me.”

They resumed their climb more leisurely. The trees were thinning a bit now, and ahead, between the tall, straight trunks winged with drooping, snow-laden branches, they could catch glimpses of the white world beyond.

Presently they came out above the pine-wood on to the edge of a broad plateau and Jean uttered an exclamation of delight, gazing spell-bound at the scene thus suddenly unfolded.

Behind them, in the pine-ringed valley, a frozen reach of water gleamed like a dull sheet of metal, whilst before them, far above, stretched the great chain of mountains, pinnacle after pinnacle, capped with snow, thrusting up into the cloud-swept sky. Through rifts in the cloud—almost, it seemed, torn in the breast of heaven by those towering peaks—the sunlight slanted in long shafts, chequering the snows with shimmering patches of pale gold.

“It was worth the climb, then?”

The Englishman, his gaze on Jean’s rapt face, broke the silence abruptly. She turned to him, radiant-eyed.

“It’s so beautiful that it makes one’s heart ache!” she exclaimed, laying her hand on her breast with the little foreign turn of gesture she derived from her French ancestry.

She said no more, but remained very still, drinking in the sheer loveliness of the scene.

The man regarded her quietly as she stood there silhouetted against the skyline, her slim, brown-clad figure striking a warm note amid the chill Alpine whites and greys. Her face was slightly tilted, and as the sunshine glinted on her hair and eyes, waking the russet lights that slumbered in them, there was something vividly arresting about her—a splendour of ardent youth which brought a somewhat wistful expression into the rather weary eyes of the man watching her.

His thought travelled hack to the brief snatch of conversation evoked by the sudden gloom of the pine-woods. Surely, for once, Fate would lay aside her snuffers and let this young, eager life pass by unshadowed!

Even as the thought took shape in his mind, Jean turned to him again, her face still radiant, “Thank you for bringing me up here,” she said simply. “It has been perfect.”

She stretched out her hand, and he took it and held it in his for a moment.

“I’m glad you’ve liked it,” he answered quietly. “It will always be a part of our day together—the day we stole from les convenances”—he smiled whimsically. “And now, if you can bring yourself back to more prosaic matters, I suggest we have lunch. Scenery, however fine, isn’t exactly calculated to sustain life.”

“Most material person!” She laughed up at him. “I suppose you think a ham sandwich worth all the scenery in the world?”

“I’ll admit to a preference for the sandwich at the moment,” he acknowledged. “Come, now, confess! Aren’t you hungry, too?”

“Starving! This air makes me feel as if I’d never had anything to eat in my life before!”

“Well, then, come and inspect my salle 脿 manger.”

The proposed refuge proved to be a roughly constructed little hut—hardly more than a shed provided with a door and thick-paned window, its only furniture a wooden bench and table. But that it had served its purpose as a kind of “travellers’ rest” was proved by the fragments of appreciation, both in prose and verse, that were to be found inscribed in a species of “Visitors’ Book” which lay on the table, carefully preserved from damp in a strong metal box. Jean amused herself by perusing the various contributions to its pages while the Englishman unpacked the contents of his knapsack.

The lunch that followed was a merry little meal, the two conversing with a happy intimacy and freedom from reserve based on the reassuring knowledge that they would, in all probability, never meet again. Afterwards, they bent their energies to concerting a suitable inscription for insertion in the “Visitors’ Book,” squabbling like a couple of children over the particular form it should take.

So absorbed were they in the discussion that they failed to notice the perceptible cooling of the temperature. The sun no longer warmed the roofing of the hut, and there was a desolate note in the sudden gusts of wind which shook the door at frequent intervals as though trying to attract the attention of those within. Presently a louder rattle than usual, coincident with a chance pause in the conversation, roused them effectually.

The Englishman’s keen glance flashed to the little window, through which was visible a dancing, whirling blur of white.

“Great Scott!” he exclaimed in good round English. “It’s snowing like the very dickens!”

In two strides he had reached the door, and, throwing it open, peered out. A draught of icy air rushed into the hut, accompanied by a flurry of fine snow driven on the wind.

When he turned back, his face had assumed a sudden look of gravity.

“We must go at once,” he said, speaking in French again and apparently unconscious of his momentary lapse into his native tongue. “If we don’t, we shan’t be able to get back at all. The snow drifts quickly in the valley. Half an hour more of this and we shouldn’t be able to get through.”

Jean thrust the Visitors’ Book back into its box, and began hastily repacking her companion’s, knapsack, but he stopped her almost roughly.

“Never mind that. Fasten that fur thing closer round your throat and come on. There’s no taking chances in a blizzard like this. Don’t you understand?”—almost roughly. “If we waste time we may have to spend the night here.”

Impelled by the sudden urgency of his tones, Jean followed him swiftly out of the hut, and the wind, as though baulked by her haste, snatched the door from her grasp and drove it to with a menacing thud behind them.