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Gabriel Strood, of whom she had made a hero, whose exploits she knew almost by heart, had suffered from a physical disability which might well have kept the most eager mountaineer to the level. It was because of his mastery over his disability that she had set him so high in her esteem.
Hine's words drummed in Chayne's ears: "Nevertheless he left us all behind." Garratt Skinner: Gabriel Strood. Surely, surely! He replaced the volumes and took others down. In the first which he opened it was the autumn number of nineteen years ago there was again mention of the man; and the climb described was the ascent of Mont Blanc from the Brenva Glacier.
Suspense, too, was visible in his quiet attitude. There was a mystery which for Sylvia's sake he wished to unravel. Why did Gabriel Strood now call himself Garratt Skinner? That was the mystery. But he must unravel it without doing any hurt to Sylvia. He could not go too warily of that he had been sure, ever since Kenyon had refused to speak of it.
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.
Some memory, however, lingers still in Strood of St Thomas, for certain folks there hated him and to spite him one day as he rode through the village they cut the tail from his horse. Mark now the end of this misdeed. In Strood thereafter everyone of their descendants was born, it is said, with a tail, even as the brutes which perish.
From one of these, in the "Mercurius Publicus" of October, 1661, the following is taken: "His body being brought to the parish of Strood was accompanied from thence to the west door of the Cathedral Church of Rochester by the Prebendaries of the said church in their formalities, with the gentry and commonalty of the said City and places adjacent, with torches before them.
Yet after six years he came back no more. He disappeared. Why?" Kenyon stood absolutely silent, absolutely still. Perhaps the trouble deepened a little on his face; but that was all. Chayne, however, was bent upon an answer. For Sylvia's sake alone he must have it, he must know the father into whose clutches she had come. "You knew Gabriel Strood. Why?"
On their first meeting he had understood at once when she had spoken to him of the emotion which her first mountain peak had waked in her. And before that yes, her guide had cried aloud to her, "You remind me of Gabriel Strood." She owed it to him that she had turned to the Alps as to her heritage, and that she had brought to them an instinctive knowledge.
When we emerged from the long tunnel he was as white as a ghost and he hopped out on to Strood platform almost before the train had begun to slow down. "I reached my bag down from the rack and got out after him, smiling at my own folly.
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.