He rendered what help he could, but when they had laid the poor woman on her bed, Miss Garland motioned him away.
"I think you make her worse," she said.
Rowland went to his own chamber.The partitions in Swiss mountain-inns are thin, and from time to time he heard Mrs.Hudson moaning, three rooms off.Considering its great fury, the storm took long to expend itself; it was upwards of three hours before the thunder ceased.But even then the rain continued to fall heavily, and the night, which had come on, was impenetrably black.This lasted till near midnight.
Rowland thought of Mary Garland's challenge in the porch, but he thought even more that, although the fetid interior of a high-nestling chalet may offer a convenient refuge from an Alpine tempest, there was no possible music in the universe so sweet as the sound of Roderick's voice.
At midnight, through his dripping window-pane, he saw a star, and he immediately went downstairs and out into the gallery.
The rain had ceased, the cloud-masses were dissevered here and there, and several stars were visible.In a few minutes he heard a step behind him, and, turning, saw Miss Garland.
He asked about Mrs.Hudson and learned that she was sleeping, exhausted by her fruitless lamentations.Miss Garland kept scanning the darkness, but she said nothing to cast doubt on Roderick's having found a refuge.Rowland noticed it.
"This also have I guaranteed!" he said to himself.
There was something that Mary wished to learn, and a question presently revealed it.
"What made him start on a long walk so suddenly?" she asked.
"I saw him at eleven o'clock, and then he meant to go to Engelberg, and sleep.""On his way to Interlaken?" Rowland said.
"Yes," she answered, under cover of the darkness.
"We had some talk," said Rowland, "and he seemed, for the day, to have given up Interlaken.""Did you dissuade him?"
"Not exactly.We discussed another question, which, for the time, superseded his plan."Miss Garland was silent.Then--"May I ask whether your discussion was violent?" she said.
"I am afraid it was agreeable to neither of us.""And Roderick left you in--in irritation?""I offered him my company on his walk.He declined it."Miss Garland paced slowly to the end of the gallery and then came back.
"If he had gone to Engelberg," she said, "he would have reached the hotel before the storm began."Rowland felt a sudden explosion of ferocity."Oh, if you like,"he cried, "he can start for Interlaken as soon as he comes back!"But she did not even notice his wrath."Will he come back early?"she went on.
"We may suppose so."
"He will know how anxious we are, and he will start with the first light!"Rowland was on the point of declaring that Roderick's readiness to throw himself into the feelings of others made this extremely probable;but he checked himself and said, simply, "I expect him at sunrise."Miss Garland bent her eyes once more upon the irresponsive darkness, and then, in silence, went into the house.Rowland, it must be averred, in spite of his resolution not to be nervous, found no sleep that night.When the early dawn began to tremble in the east, he came forth again into the open air.
The storm had completely purged the atmosphere, and the day gave promise of cloudless splendor.Rowland watched the early sun-shafts slowly reaching higher, and remembered that if Roderick did not come back to breakfast, there were two things to be taken into account.
One was the heaviness of the soil on the mountain-sides, saturated with the rain; this would make him walk slowly:
the other was the fact that, speaking without irony, he was not remarkable for throwing himself into the sentiments of others.
Breakfast, at the inn, was early, and by breakfast-time Roderick had not appeared.Then Rowland admitted that he was nervous.
Neither Mrs.Hudson nor Miss Garland had left their apartment;Rowland had a mental vision of them sitting there praying and listening;he had no desire to see them more directly.There were a couple of men who hung about the inn as guides for the ascent of the Titlis;Rowland sent each of them forth in a different direction, to ask the news of Roderick at every ch; afalet door within a morning's walk.
Then he called Sam Singleton, whose peregrinations had made him an excellent mountaineer, and whose zeal and sympathy were now unbounded, and the two started together on a voyage of research.
By the time they had lost sight of the inn, Rowland was obliged to confess that, decidedly, Roderick had had time to come back.
He wandered about for several hours, but he found only the sunny stillness of the mountain-sides.Before long he parted company with Singleton, who, to his suggestion that separation would multiply their resources, assented with a silent, frightened look which reflected too vividly his own rapidly-dawning thought.The day was magnificent;the sun was everywhere; the storm had lashed the lower slopes into a deeper flush of autumnal color, and the snow-peaks reared themselves against the near horizon in glaring blocks and dazzling spires.
Rowland made his way to several chalets, but most of them were empty.
He thumped at their low, foul doors with a kind of nervous, savage anger;he challenged the stupid silence to tell him something about his friend.
Some of these places had evidently not been open in months.
The silence everywhere was horrible; it seemed to mock at his impatience and to be a conscious symbol of calamity.
In the midst of it, at the door of one of the chalets, quite alone, sat a hideous cretin, who grinned at Rowland over his goitre when, hardly knowing what he did, he questioned him.The creature's family was scattered on the mountain-sides; he could give Rowland no help to find them.Rowland climbed into many awkward places, and skirted, intently and peeringly, many an ugly chasm and steep-dropping ledge.