She sat now at the window with no thought of Trouville
or their hurried flight. With each throb of the
carriage-wheels the train flashed nearer to Chamonix.
She opened the book which lay upon her lap—the
book in which she had been so interested when Monsieur
de Camours and his mother passed her by. It was
a volume of the “Alpine Journal,” more
than twenty years old, and she could not open it but
some exploit of the pioneers took her eyes, some history
of a first ascent of an unclimbed peak. Such
a history she read now. She was engrossed in it,
and yet at times a little frown of annoyance wrinkled
her forehead. She gave an explanation of her
annoyance; for once she exclaimed half aloud, “Oh,
if only he wouldn’t be so funny!”
The author was indeed being very funny, and to her
thinking never so funny as when the narrative should
have been most engrossing. She was reading the
account of the first ascent of an aiguille in the
Chamonix district, held by guides to be impossible
and conquered at last by a party of amateurs.
In spite of its humor Sylvia Thesiger was thrilled
by it. She envied the three men who had taken
part in that ascent, envied them their courage, their
comradeship, their bivouacs in the open air beside
glowing fires, on some high shelf of rock above the
snows. But most of all her imagination was touched
by the leader of that expedition, the man who sometimes
alone, sometimes in company, had made sixteen separate
attacks upon that peak. He stared from the pages
of the volume—Gabriel Strood. Something
of his great reach of limb, of his activity, of his
endurance, she was able to realize. Moreover
he had a particular blemish which gave to him a particular
interest in her eyes, for it would have deterred most
men altogether from his pursuit and it greatly hampered
him. And yet in spite of it, he had apparently
for some seasons stood prominent in the Alpine fraternity.
Gabriel Strood was afflicted with a weakness in the
muscles of one thigh. Sylvia, according to her
custom, began to picture him, began to talk with him.
She wondered whether he was glad to have reached that
summit, or whether he was not on the whole rather
sorry—sorry for having lost out of his
life a great and never-flagging interest. She
looked through the subsequent papers in the volume,
but could find no further mention of his name.
She perplexed her fancies that morning. She speculated
whether having made this climb he had stopped and
climbed no more; or whether he might not get out of
this very train on to the platform at Chamonix.
But as the train slowed down near to Annemasse, she
remembered that the exploit of which she had read
had taken place more than twenty years ago.
CHAPTER II
INTRODUCES ONE OF STROOD’S SUCCESSORS
But though Gabriel Strood occupied no seat in that
train, one of his successors was traveling by it to
Chamonix after an absence of four years. Of those
four years Captain Chayne had passed the last two among
the coal-stacks of Aden, with the yellow land of Arabia
at his back, longing each day for this particular
morning, and keeping his body lithe and strong against
its coming. He left the train at Annemasse, and
crossing the rails to the buffet, sat down at the table
next to that which Mrs. Thesiger and her daughter
already occupied.
