CHAPTER V—AMONG THE SNOWS

AS Jean stepped outside the hut it seemed as though she had walked straight into the heart of the storm. The bitter, ice-laden blast that bore down from the mountains caught away her breath, the fine driving flakes, crystal-hard, whipped her face, almost blinding her with the fury of their onslaught, whilst her feet slipped and slid on the newly fallen snow as she trudged along beside the Englishman.

“This is a good preparation for a dance!” she gasped breathlessly, forcing her chilled lips to a smile.

“For a dance? What dance?”

“There’s a fancy dress ball at the hotel to-night. There won’t be—much of me—left to dance, will there?”

The Englishman laughed suddenly.

“My chief concern is to get you back to the hotel—alive,” he observed grimly.

Jean looked at him quickly.

“Is it as bad as that?” she asked more soberly.

“No. At least I hope not. I didn’t mean to frighten you”—hastily. “Only it seemed a trifle incongruous to be contemplating a dance when we may be struggling through several feet of snow in half an hour.”

The fierce gusts of wind, lashing the snow about them in bewildering eddies, made conversation difficult, and they pushed on in a silence broken only by an occasional word of encouragement from the Englishman.

“All right?” he queried once, as Jean paused, battered and spent with the fury of the storm.

She nodded speechlessly. She had no breath left to answer, but once again her lips curved in a plucky little smile. A fresh onslaught of the wind forced them onwards, and she staggered a little as it blustered by.

“Here,” he said quickly. “Take my arm. It will be better when we get into the pine-wood. The trees there will give us some protection.”

They struggled forward again, arm in arm. The swirling snow had blotted out the distant mountains; lowering storm-filled clouds made a grey twilight of the day, through which they could just discern ahead the vague, formless darkness of the pine-wood.

Another ten minutes walking brought them to it, only to find that the blunted edge of the storm was almost counterbalanced by the added difficulties of the surrounding gloom. High up overhead they could hear the ominous creak and swing of great branches shaken like toys in the wind, and now and again the sharper crack of some limb wrenched violently from its parent trunk. Once there came the echoing crash of a tree torn up bodily and flung to earth.

“It’s worse here,” declared Jean, “I think”—with a nervous laugh—“I think I’d rather die in the open!”

“It might be preferable. Only you’re not going to die at all, if I can help it,” the Englishman returned composedly.

But, cool though he appeared, he experienced a thrill of keen anxiety as they emerged from the pine-wood and his quick eyes scanned the dangerously rapid drifting of the snow.

The wind was racing down the valley now, driving the snow before it and piling it up, inch by inch, foot by foot, against the steep ground which skirted the sheet of ice where they had been skating but a few hours before.

Through the pitiless beating of the snow Jean strove to read her companion’s face. It was grim and set, the lean jaw thrust out a little and the grey eyes tense and concentrated.

“Can we get through?” she asked, raising her voice so that it might carry against the wind.

“If we can get through the drifted snow between here and the track on the left, we’re all right,” answered the man.

“The wind’s slanting across the valley and there’ll be no drifts on the further side. I wish I’d got a bit of rope with me.”

He felt in his pockets, finally producing the rolled-up strap of a suit-case.

“That’s all I have,” he said discontentedly.

“What’s it for?”

“It’s to go round your waist. I don’t want to lose you”—smiling briefly—“if you should stumble into deep snow.”

“Deep snow? But it’s only been snowing an hour or so!” she objected.

“Evidently you don’t know what a blizzard can accomplish in the way of drifting during the course of an ‘hour or so.’ I do.”

Deftly he fastened the strap round her waist, and, taking the loose end, gave it a double turn about his wrist before gripping it firmly in his hand.

“Now, keep close behind me. Regard me”—laughing shortly—“as a snow-plough. And if I go down deep rather suddenly, throw your weight backward as much as you can.”

He moved forward, advancing cautiously. He was badly handicapped by the lack of even a stick with which to gauge the depth of drifting snow in front of him, and he tested each step before trusting his full weight to the delusive, innocent-looking surface.

Jean went forward steadily beside him, a little to the rear. The snow was everywhere considerably more than ankle-deep, and at each step she could feel that the slope of the ground increased and with it the depth of the drift through which they toiled.

The cold was intense. The icy fingers of the snow about her feet seemed to creep upward and upward till her whole body felt numbed and dead, and as she stumbled along in the Englishman’s wake, buffeted and beaten by the storm, her feet ached as if leaden weights were attached to them.

But she struggled on pluckily. The man in front of her was taking the brunt of the hardship, cutting a path for her, as it were, with his own body as he forged ahead, and she was determined not to add to his work by putting any weight on the strap which bound them together.

All at once he gave a sharp exclamation and pulled up abruptly.

“It’s getting much deeper,” he called out, turning back to her. “You’ll never get through, hampered with your skirts. I’m going to carry you.”

Jean shook her head, and shouted back:

“You wouldn’t get through, handicapped like that. No, let’s push on as we are. I’ll manage somehow.”

A glint of something like admiration flickered in his eyes.

“Game little devil!” he muttered. But the wind caught up the words, and Jean did not hear them. He raised his voice again, releasing the strap from his wrist as he spoke.

“You’ll do what I tell you. It’s only a matter of getting through this bit of drift, and we’ll be out of the worst of it. Put your arms round my neck.” Then, as she hesitated: “Do you hear? Put your arms round my neck—quick!”

The dominant ring in his voice impelled her. Obediently she clasped her arms about his neck as he stooped, and the next moment she felt herself swung upward, almost as easily as a child, and firmly held in the embrace of arms like steel.

For a few yards he made good progress, thrusting his way through the yielding snow. But the task of carrying a young woman of average height and weight is no light one, even to a strong man and without the added difficulty of plunging through snow that yields treacherously at every step, and Jean could guess the strain entailed upon him by the double burden.

“Oh, do put me down!” she urged him. “I’m sure I can walk it—really I am.”

He halted for a moment.

“Look down!” he said. “Think you could travel in that?”

The snow was up to his knees, above them whenever the ground hollowed suddenly.

“But you?” she protested unhappily. “You’ll—you’ll simply kill yourself!”

“Small loss if I do! But as that would hardly help you out of your difficulties, I’ve no intention of giving up the ghost just at present.”

He started on again, pressing forward slowly and determinedly, but it was only with great difficulty and exertion that he was able to make headway. Jean, her cheek against the rough tweed of his coat, could hear the labouring beats of his heart as the depth of the snow increased.

“How much further?” she whispered.

“Not far,” he answered briefly, husbanding his breath.

A few more steps. They were both silent now. Jean’s eyes sought his face. It was ashen, and even in that bitter cold beads of sweat were running down it; he was nearing the end of his tether. She could bear it no longer. She stirred restlessly in his arms.

“Put me down,” she cried imploringly. “Please put me down.”

But he shook his head.

“Keep still, can’t you?” he muttered between his teeth. She felt his arms tighten round her.

The next moment he stumbled heavily against some surface root or boulder, concealed beneath the snow, and pitched forward, and in the same instant Jean felt herself sinking down, down into a soft bed of something that yielded resistlessly to her weight. Then came a violent jerk and jar, as though she had been seized suddenly round the waist, and the sensation of sinking ceased abruptly.

She lay quite still where she had fallen and, looking upwards, found herself staring straight into the eyes of the Englishman. He was lying flat on his face, on ground a little above the snow-filled hollow into which his fall had flung her, his hand grasping the strap which was fastened round her body. He had caught the flying end of it as they fell, and thus saved her from sinking into seven or eight feet of snow.

“Are you hurt?”

His voice came to her roughened with fierce anxiety.

“No. I’m not hurt. Only don’t leave go of your end of the strap!”

“Thank God!” she heard him mutter. Then, aloud, reassuringly: “I’ve got my end of it all right. How, can you catch hold of the strap and raise yourself a little so that I can reach you?”

Jean obeyed. A minute later she felt his arms about her shoulders, underneath her armpits, and then very slowly, but with a sure strength that took from her all sense of fear, he drew her safely up beside him on to the high ground.

Eor a moment they both rested quietly, recovering their breath. The Englishman seemed glad of the respite, and Jean noticed with concern the rather drawn look of his face. She thought he must be more played out than he cared to acknowledge.

Across the silence of sheer fatigue their eyes met—Jean’s filled with a wistful solicitude as unconscious and candid as a child’s, the man’s curiously brilliant and inscrutable—and in a moment the silence had become something other, different, charged with emotional significance, the revealing silence which falls suddenly between a man and woman.

At last:

“This is what comes of stealing a day from Mrs. Grundy,” commented the man drily.

And the tension was broken.

He sprang up, as though, anxious to maintain the recovered atmosphere of the commonplace.

“Come! Having shot her bolt and tried ineffectually to down you in a ditch, I expect the old lady will let us get home safely now. We’re through the worst. There are no more drifts between here and the hotel.”

It was true. Anything that might have spelt danger was past, and it only remained to follow the beaten track up to the hotel, though even so, with the wind and snow driving in their faces, it took them a good half-hour to accomplish the task.

Monsieur and Madame de Varigny, a distracted ma卯tre d’h么tel, and a little crowd of interested and sympathetic visitors welcomed their arrival.

“Mon dieu, mademoiselle! But we rejoice to see you back!” exclaimed Madame de Varigny. “We ourselves are only newly returned—and that, with difficulty, through this terrible storm—and we arrive to find that none knows where you are!”

“Me, I made sure that mademoiselle had accompanied Madame la Comtesse.” asseverated Monsieur Vautrinot, nervously anxious to exculpate himself from any charge of carelessness.

“We were just going to organise a search-party,” added the little Count. “I, myself”—stoutly—“should have joined in the search.”

Weary as she was, Jean could hardly refrain from smiling at the idea of the diminutive Count in the r么le of gallant preserver. He would have been considerably less well-qualified even than herself to cope with the drifting snow through which the sheer, dogged strength of the Englishman had brought her safely.

Instinctively she turned with the intention of effecting an introduction between the latter and the Varignys, only to find that he had disappeared. He had taken the opportunity presented by the little ferment of excitement which had greeted her safe return to slip away.

She felt oddly disconcerted. And yet, she reflected, it was so like him—so like the conception of him which she had formed, at least—to evade both her thanks and the enthusiasm with which a recital of the afternoon’s adventure Would have been received.