The Queen of Sheba, and My Cousin the Colonel

At a signal from Lynde the remaining guide led the way at a brisk pace through the bustling town. In front of the various hotels were noisy groups of tourists about to set forth on pilgrimages, some bound for the neighboring glaciers and cascades, and others preparing for more distant and more hardy enterprises. It was a perfect Babel of voices—French, Scotch, German, Italian, and English; with notes of every sort of patois—above which the strident bass of the mules soared triumphantly at intervals. There are not many busier spots than Chamouni at early morning in the height of the season.

Our friends soon left the tumult and confusion behind them, and were skirting the pleasant meadows outside of the town. Passing by the way of the English church, they crossed to the opposite bank of the Arve, and in a few minutes gained the hamlet lying at the foot of Montanvert. Then the guide took the bridle of Miss Ruth's mule and the ascent began. The road stretches up the mountain in a succession of zigzags with sharp turns. Here and there the path is quarried out of the begrudging solid rock; in places the terrace is several yards wide and well wooded, but for the most part it is a barren shelf with a shaggy wall rising abruptly on one hand and a steep slope descending on the other. Higher up, these slopes become quite respectable precipices. A dozen turns, which were accomplished in unbroken silence, brought the party to an altitude of several hundred feet above the level.

"I—I don't know that I wholly like it," said Miss Ruth, holding on to the pommel of her saddle and looking down into the valley, checkered with fields and criss-crossed with shining rivulets. "Why do the mules persist in walking on the very edge?"

"That is a trick they get from carrying panniers. You are supposed to be a pannier, and the careful animal doesn't want to brush you off against the rocks. See this creature of mine; he has that hind hoof slipping over the precipice all the while. But he'll not slip; he's as sure-footed as a chamois, and has no more taste for tumbling off the cliff than you have. These mules are wonderfully intelligent. Observe how cautiously they will put foot on a loose stone, feeling all around it."

"I wish they were intelligent enough to be led in the middle of the path," said Miss Ruth, "but I suppose the guide knows."

"You may trust to him; he is a person of varied accomplishments, the chief of which is he doesn't understand a word of English. So you can scold, or say anything you like, without the least reserve. I picked him out for that," added Lynde, with a bland smile. "His comrade was a linguist."

"If I have anything disagreeable to say," replied Miss Ruth, with another bland smile, "I shall say it in French."

The guide, who spoke four languages, including English, never changed a muscle. Lynde, just before starting, had closely examined the two guides on their lingual acquirements—and retained the wrong man.

"I trust you will have no occasion, Miss Denham, to be anything but amiable, and that you will begin by granting me a favor. Will you?"

"Cela depend."

"There you go into French! I haven't offended you?"

"Oh, no. What is the favor?—in English."

"That you will let me call you Miss Ruth, instead of Miss Denham."

"I haven't the slightest objection, Mr. Lynde."

"And now I want you"—

"What, another favor?"

"Of course. Who ever heard of one favor?"

"To be sure! What is the second?"

"I want that you should be a little sorry when all this comes to an end."

"You mean when we leave Chamouni?"

"Yes."

"I shall be sorry then," said Miss Ruth frankly, "but I am not going to be sorry beforehand."

There was something very sweet to Lynde in her candor, but there was also something that restrained him for the moment from being as explicit as he had intended. He rode on awhile without speaking, watching the girl as the mule now and then turned the sharp angle of the path and began a new ascent. This movement always brought her face to face with him a moment—she on the grade above, and he below. Miss Ruth had grown accustomed to the novel situation, and no longer held on by the pommel of the saddle. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, pliantly lending herself to the awkward motion of the animal. Over her usual travelling-habit she had thrown the long waterproof which reached to her feet. As she sat there in a half-listless attitude, she was the very picture of the Queen of Sheba seated upon Deacon Twombly's mare. Lynde could not help seeing it; but he was schooling himself by degrees to this fortuitous resemblance. It was painful, but it was inevitable, and he would get used to it in time. "Perhaps," he mused, "if I had never had that adventure with the poor insane girl, I might not have looked twice at Miss Denham when we met—and loved her. It was the poor little queen who shaped my destiny, and I oughtn't to be ungrateful." He determined to tell the story to Miss Ruth some time when a fitting occasion offered.

It was only when the likeness flashed upon Lynde suddenly, as it had done in the grove the previous day, that it now had the power to startle him. At the present moment it did not even seriously annoy him. In an idle, pensive way he noted the coincidence of the man leading the mule. The man was Morton and the mule was Mary! Lynde smiled to himself at the reflection that Mary would probably not accept the analogy with very good grace if she knew about it. This carried him to Rivermouth; then he thought of Cinderella's slipper, packed away in the old hair-trunk in the closet, and how perfectly the slipper would fit one of those feet which a floating fold of the waterproof that instant revealed to him—and he was in Switzerland again.

"Miss Ruth," he said, looking up quickly and urging his mule as closely behind hers as was practicable, "what are your plans to be when your uncle comes?"

"When my uncle comes we shall have no plans—aunt Gertrude and I. Uncle

Denham always plans for everybody."

"I don't imagine he will plan for me," said Lynde gloomily. "I wish he would, for I shall not know what to do with myself."

"I thought you were going to St. Petersburg."

"I have given that up."

"It's to be Northern Germany, then?"

"No, I have dropped that idea, too. Will Mr. Denham remain here any time?"

"Probably not long."

"What is to become of me after you are gone!" exclaimed Lynde. "When I think of Mr. Denham sweeping down on Chamouni to carry you off, I am tempted to drive this mule straight over the brink of one of these precipices!"

The girl leaned forward, looking at the rocky wall of the Flegere through an opening in the pines, and made no reply.

"Miss Ruth," said Lynde, "I must speak!"

"Do not speak," she said, turning upon him with a half-imperious, half-appealing gesture, "I forbid you;" and then, more gently, "We have four or five days, perhaps a week, to be together; we are true, frank friends. Let us be just that to the end."

"Those are mercifully cruel words," returned the young man, with a dull pain at his heart. "It is a sweet way of saying a bitter thing."

"It is a way of saying that your friendship is very dear to me, Mr. Lynde," she replied, sitting erect in the saddle, with the brightness and the blackness deepening in her eyes. "I wonder if I can make you understand how I prize it. My life has not been quite like that of other girls, partly because I have lived much abroad, and partly because I have been very delicate ever since my childhood; I had a serious lung trouble then, which has never left me. You would not think it, to look at me. Perhaps it is the anxiety I have given aunt Gertrude which has made her so tenacious of my affection that I have scarcely been permitted to form even those intimacies which girls form among themselves. I have never known any one—any gentleman—as intimately as I have known you. She has let me have you for my friend."

"But Miss Ruth"—

"Mr. Lynde," she said, interrupting him, "it was solely to your friendship that my aunt confided me to-day. I should be deceiving her if I allowed you to speak as—as you were speaking."

Lynde saw his mistake. He should have addressed himself in the first instance to the aunt. He had been lacking in proper regard for the convenances, forgetting that Ruth's education had been different from that of American girls. At home, if you love a girl you tell her so; over here, you go and tell her grandmother. Lynde dropped his head and remained silent, resolving to secure an interview with Mrs. Denham that night if possible. After a moment or two he raised his face. "Miss Ruth," said he, "if I had to choose, I would rather be your friend than any other woman's lover."

"That is settled, then," she returned, with heightened color. "We will not refer to this again;" and she brushed away a butterfly that was fluttering about her conceitedly in its new golden corselet.

Meanwhile the guide marched on stolidly with Ruth's reins thrown loosely over the crook of his elbow. In his summer courses up and down the mountain, the man, with his four languages, had probably assisted dumbly at much fugitive love-making and many a conjugal passage-at-arms. He took slight note of the conversation between the two young folks; he was clearly more interested in a strip of black cloud that had come within the half hour and hung itself over the Aiguille du Dru.

The foot-path and the bridle-road from Chamouni unite at the Caillet, a spring of fresh water halfway up the mountain. There the riders dismounted and rested five or six minutes at a rude hut perched like a brown bird under the cliff.

"I've the fancy to go on foot the rest of the distance," Lynde remarked, as he assisted Ruth into the saddle again.

"Then I'll let you lead the mule, if you will," said Ruth. "I'm not the least afraid."

"That is an excellent idea! Why did you not think of it sooner? I shall expect a buonamano, like a real guide, you know."

"I will give it you in advance," she said gayly, reaching forward and pretending to hold a coin between her thumb and finger.

Lynde caught her hand and retained it an instant, but did not dare to press it. He was in mortal fear of a thing which he could have crushed like a flower in his palm.