The Silent Barrier

CHAPTER IX
“ETTA’S FATHER”

Though the hut was a crude thing, a triumph of essentials over luxuries, Helen had never before hailed four walls and a roof with such heartfelt, if silent, thanksgiving. She sank exhausted on a rough bench, and watched the matter-of-fact Engadiners unpacking the stores and firewood carried in their rucksacks. Their businesslike air supplied the tonic she needed. Though the howling storm seemed to threaten the tiny refuge with destruction, these two men set to work, coolly and methodically, to prepare a meal. Barth arranged the contents of Karl’s bulky package on a small table, and the porter busied himself with lighting a fire in a Swiss stove that stood in the center of the outer room. An inner apartment loomed black and uninviting through an open doorway. Helen discovered later that some scanty accommodation was provided there for those who meant to sleep in the hut in readiness for an early ascent, while it supplied a separate room in the event of women taking part in an expedition.

Bower offered her a quantity of brandy and water. She declined it, declaring that she needed only time to regain her breath. He was a man who might be trusted not to pester anyone with well meant but useless attentions. He went to the door, lit a cigarette, and seemed to be keenly interested in the sleet as it pelted the moraine or gathered in drifts in the minor fissures of the glacier.

Within a remarkably short space of time, Karl had concocted two cups of steaming coffee. Helen was then all aglow. Her strength was restored. The boisterous wind had crimsoned her cheeks beneath the tan. She had never looked such a picture of radiant womanhood as after this tussle with the storm. Luckily her clothing was not wet, since the travelers reached the cabane at the very instant the elements became really aggressive. It was a quite composed and reinvigorated Helen who summoned Bower from his contemplation of the weather portents.

“We may be besieged,” she cried; “but at any rate we are not on famine rations. What a spread! You could hardly have brought more food if you fancied we might be kept here a week.”

The sustained physical effort called for during the last part of the climb seemed to have dispelled his fit of abstraction. Being an eminently adaptable man, he responded to her mood. “Ah, that sounds more like the enthusiast who set forth so gayly from the Kursaal this morning,” he answered, pulling the door ajar before he took a seat by her side on the bench. “A few minutes ago you were ready to condemn me as several kinds of idiot for going on in the teeth of our Switzers’ warnings. Now, confess!”

“I don’t think I could have climbed another ten yards,” she admitted.

“Our haste was due to Barth’s anxiety. He wanted to save you from a drenching. It was a near thing, and with the thermometer falling a degree a minute soaked garments might have brought very unpleasant consequences. But that was our only risk. Old mountaineer as I am, I hardly expected such a blizzard in August, after such short notice too. Otherwise, now that we are safely housed, you are fortunate in securing a memorable experience. The storm will soon blow over; but it promises to be lively while it lasts.”

Helen was sipping her coffee. Perhaps her eyes conveyed the question her tongue hesitated to utter. Bower smiled pleasantly, and gesticulated with hands and shoulders in a way that was foreign to his studiously cultivated English habit of repose. Indeed, with his climber’s garb he seemed to have acquired a new manner. There was a perplexing change in him since the morning.

“Yes,” he said. “I understand perfectly. You and I might sing lieder ohne worte, Miss Wynton. I have known these summer gales to last four days; but pray do not be alarmed,” for Helen nearly dropped her cup in quick dismay; “my own opinion is that we shall have a delightful afternoon. Of course, I am a discredited prophet. Ask Barth.”

The guide, hearing his name mentioned, glanced at them, though he was engaged at the moment in taking the wrappings off a quantity of bread, cold chicken, and slices of ham and beef. He agreed with Bower. The barometer stood high when they left the hotel. He thought, as all men think who live in the open, that “the sharper the blast the sooner it’s past.”

“Moreover,” broke in Karl, who refused to be left out of the conversation, “Johann Klucker’s cat was sitting with its back to the stove last evening.”

This bit of homely philosophy brought a ripple of laughter from Helen, whereupon Karl explained.

“Cats are very wise, fräulein. Johann Klucker’s cat is old. Therefore she is skilled in reading the tokens of the weather. A cat hates wind and rain, and makes her arrangements accordingly. If she washes herself smoothly, the next twelve hours will be fine. If she licks against the grain, it will be wet. When she lies with her back to the fire, there will surely be a squall. When her tail is up and her coat rises, look out for wind.”

“Johann Klucker’s cat has settled the dispute,” said Bower gravely in English. “A squall it is, – a most suitable prediction for a cat, – and I am once more rehabilitated in your esteem, I hope?”

A cold iridescence suddenly illumined the gloomy interior of the hut. It gave individuality to each particle of sleet whirling past the door. Helen thought that the sun had broken through the storm clouds for an instant; but Bower said quietly:

“Are you afraid of lightning?”

“Not very. I don’t like it.”

“Some people collapse altogether when they see it. Perhaps when forewarned you are forearmed.”

A low rumble boomed up the valley, and the mountain echoes muttered in solemn chorus.

“We are to be spared none of the scenic accessories, then?” said Helen.

“None. In fact, you will soon see and hear a thunder storm that would have delighted Gustave Doré. Please remember that it cannot last long, and that this hut has been built twenty years to my knowledge.”

Helen sipped her coffee, but pushed away a plate set before her by Barth. “If you don’t mind, I should like the door wide open,” she said.

“You prefer to lunch later?”

“Yes.”

“And you wish to face the music – is that it?”

“I think so.”

“Let me remind you that Jove’s thunderbolts are really forged on the hilltops.”

“I am here; so I must make the best of it. I shall not scream, or faint, if that is what you dread.”

“I dread nothing but your anger for not having turned back when a retreat was possible. I hate turning back, Miss Wynton. I have never yet withdrawn from any enterprise seriously undertaken, and I was determined to share your first ramble among my beloved hills.”

Another gleam of light, bluer and more penetrating than its forerunner, lit the brown rafters of the cabane. It was succeeded by a crash like the roar of massed artillery. The walls trembled. Some particles of mortar rattled noisily to the floor. A strange sound of rending, followed by a heavy thud, suggested something more tangible than thunderbolts. Bower kicked the door and it swung inward.

“An avalanche,” he said. “Probably a rockfall too. Of course, the hut stands clear of the track of unpleasant visitors of that description.”

Helen had not expected this courageous bearing in a man of Bower’s physical characteristics. Hitherto she had regarded him as somewhat self indulgent, a Sybarite, the product of modernity in its London aspects. His demeanor in the train, in the hotel, bespoke one accustomed to gratify the flesh, who found all the world ready to pander to his desires. Again she was conscious of that instinctive trustfulness a woman freely reposes in a dominant man. Oddly enough, she thought of Spencer in the same breath. An hour earlier, had she been asked which of these two would command her confidence during a storm, her unhesitating choice would have favored the American. Now, she was at least sure that Bower’s coolness was not assumed. His attitude inspired emulation. She rose and went to the door.

“I want to see an avalanche,” she cried. “Where did that one fall?”

Bower followed her. He spoke over her shoulder. “On Monte Roseg, I expect. The weather seems to be clearing slightly. This tearing wind will soon roll up the mist, and the thunder will certainly start another big rock or a snowslide. If you are lucky, you may witness something really fine.”

A dazzling flash leaped over the glacier. Although the surrounding peaks were as yet invisible through the haze of sleet and vapor, objects near at hand were revealed with uncanny distinctness. Each frozen wave on the surface of the ice was etched in sharp lines. A cluster of séracs on a neighboring icefall showed all their mad chaos. The blue green chasm of a huge crevasse was illumined to a depth far below any point to which the rays of the sun penetrated. On the neighboring slope of Monte Roseg the crimson and green and yellow mosses were given sudden life against the black background of rock. Every boulder here wore a somber robe. They were stark and grim. The eye instantly caught the contrast to their gray-white fellows piled on the lower moraine or in the bed of the Orlegna.

Helen was quick to note the new tone of black amid the vividly white patches of snow. She waited until the deafening thunder peal was dying away in eerie cadences. “Why are the rocks black here and almost white in the valley?” she asked.

“Because they are young, as rocks go,” was the smiling answer. “They have yet to pass through the mill. They will be battered and bruised and polished before they emerge from the glacier several years hence and a few miles nearer peace. In that they resemble men. ’Pon my word, Miss Wynton, you have caused me to evolve a rather poetic explanation of certain gray hairs I have noticed of late among my own raven locks.”

“You appear to know and love these hills so well that I wonder – if you will excuse a personal remark – I wonder you ever were able to tear yourself away from them.”

“I have missed too much of real enjoyment in the effort to amass riches,” he said slowly. “Believe me, that thought has held me since – since you and I set foot on the Forno together.”

“But you knew? You were no stranger to the Alps? I am beginning to understand that one cannot claim kinship with the high places until they stir the heart more in storm than in sunshine. When I saw all these giants glittering in the sun like knights in silver armor, I described them to myself as gloriously beautiful. Now I feel that they are more than that, – they are awful, pitiless in their indifference to frail mortals; they carry me into a dim region where life and death are terms without meaning.”

“Yes, that is the true spirit of the mountains. I too used to look on them with affectionate reverence, and you recall the old days. Perhaps, if I am deemed worthy, you will teach me the cult once more.”

He bent closer. Helen became conscious that in her enthusiasm she had spoken unguardedly. She moved away, slightly but unmistakably, a step or two out into the open, for the hut on that side was not exposed to the bitter violence of the wind.

“It is absurd to imagine us in a change of rôle,” she cried. “I should play the poorest travesty of Mentor to your Telemachus. Oh! What is that?”

While she was speaking, another blinding flare of lightning flooded moraine and glacier and pierced the veil of sleet. Her voice rose almost to a shriek. Bower sprang forward. His left hand rested reassuringly across her shoulders.

“Better come inside the hut,” he began.

“But I saw someone – a white face – staring at me down there!”

“It is possible. There is no cause for fear. A party may have crossed from Italy. There would be none from the Maloja at this hour.”

Helen was actually trembling. Bower drew her a little nearer. He himself was unnerved, a prey to wilder emotions than she could guess till later days brought a fuller understanding. It was a mad trick of fate that threw the girl into his embrace just then, for another far-flung sheet of fire revealed to her terrified vision the figures of Spencer and Stampa on the rocks beneath. With brutal candor, the same flash showed her nestling close to Bower. For some reason, she shuddered. Though the merciful gloom of the next few seconds restored her faculties, her face and neck were aflame. She almost felt that she had been detected in some fault. Her confusion was not lessened by hearing a muttered curse from her companion. Careless of the stinging sleet, she leaped down to a broad tier of rock below the plateau of the hut and cried shrilly:

“Is that really you, Mr. Spencer?”

A more tremendous burst of thunder than any yet experienced dwarfed all other sounds for an appreciable time. The American scrambled up, almost at her feet, and stood beside her. Stampa came quick on his heels, moving with a lightness and accuracy of foothold amazing in one so lame.

“Just me, Miss Wynton. Sorry if I have frightened you, but our old friend here was insistent that we should hurry. I have been tracking you since nine o’clock.”

Spencer’s words were nonchalantly polite. He even raised his cap, though the fury of the ice laden blast might well have excused this formal act of courtesy. Helen was still blushing so painfully that she became angry with herself, and her voice was hardly under control. Nevertheless, she managed to say:

“How kind and thoughtful of you! I am all right, as you see. Mr. Bower and the guide were able to bring me here before the storm broke. We happened to be standing near the door, watching the lightning. When I caught a glimpse of you I was so stupidly startled that I screamed and almost fell into Mr. Bower’s arms.”

Put in that way, it did not sound so distressing. And Spencer had no desire to add further difficulties to a situation already awkward.

“Guess you scared me too,” he said. “I suppose, now we are at the hut, Stampa will not object to my waiting five minutes or so before we start for home.”

“Surely you will lunch with us. Everything is set out on the table, and we have food enough for a regiment.”

“You would need it if you remained here another couple of hours, Miss Wynton. Stampa tells me that a first rate guxe, which is Swiss for a blizzard, I believe, is blowing up. This thunder storm is the preliminary to a heavy downfall of snow. That is why I came. If we are not off the glacier before two o’clock, it will become impassable till a lot of the snow melts.”

“What is that you are saying?” demanded Bower bruskly. Helen and the two men had reached the level of the cabane; but Stampa, thinking they would all enter, kept in the rear, “If that fairy tale accounts for your errand, you are on a wild goose chase, Mr. Spencer.”

He had not heard the American’s words clearly; but he gathered sufficient to account for the younger man’s motive in following them, and was furiously annoyed by this unlooked for interruption. He had no syllable of thanks for a friendly action. Though no small risk attended the crossing of the Forno during a gale, it was evident he strongly resented the presence of both Spencer and the guide.

Helen, after her first eager outburst, was tongue tied. She saw that her would-be rescuers were dripping wet, and was amazed that Bower should greet them so curtly, though, to be sure, she believed implicitly that the storm would soon pass. Stampa was already inside the hut. He was haranguing Barth and the porter vehemently, and they were listening with a curious submissiveness.

Spencer was the most collected person present. He brushed aside Bower’s acrimony as lightly as he had accepted Helen’s embarrassed explanation. “This is not my hustle at all,” he said. “Stampa heard that his adored sigñorina– ”

“Stampa! Is that Stampa?”

Bower’s strident voice was hushed to a hoarse murmur. It reminded one of his hearers of a growling dog suddenly cowed by fear. Helen’s ears were tuned to this perplexing note; but Spencer interpreted it according to his dislike of the man.

“Stampa heard,” he went on, with cold-drawn precision, “that Miss Wynton had gone to the Forno. He is by far the most experienced guide to be found on this side of the Alps, and he believes that anyone remaining up here to-day will surely be imprisoned in the hut a week or more by bad weather. In fact, even now an hour may make all the difference between danger and safety. Perhaps you can convince him he is wrong. I know nothing about it, beyond the evidence of my senses, backed up by some acquaintance with blizzards. Anyhow, I am inclined to think that Miss Wynton will be wise if she listens to the points of the argument in the hotel.”

“Perhaps it would be better to return at once,” said Helen timidly. Her sensitive nature warned her that these two men were ready to quarrel, and that she herself, in some nebulous way, was the cause of their mutual enmity.

Beyond this her intuition could not travel. It was impossible that she should realize how sorely her wish to placate Bower disquieted Spencer. He had seen the two under conditions that might, indeed, be explicable by Helen’s fright; but he would extend no such charitable consideration to Bower, whose conduct, no matter how it was viewed, made him a rival. Yes, it had come to that. Spencer had hardly spoken a word to Stampa during the toilsome journey from Maloja. He had looked facts stubbornly in the face, and the looking served to clear certain doubts from his heart and brain. He wanted to woo and win Helen for his wife. He was enmeshed in a net of his own contriving, and its strands were too strong to be broken. If Helen was reft from him now, he would gaze on a darkened world for many a day.

But he was endowed with a splendid self control. That element of cast steel in his composition, discovered by Dunston after five minutes’ acquaintance, kept him rigid under the strain.

“Sorry I should figure as spoiling your excursion, Miss Wynton,” he was able to say calmly; “but, when all is said and done, the weather is bad, and you will have plenty of fine days later.”

Bower crept nearer. His action suggested stealth. Although the wind was howling under the deep eaves of the hut, he almost whispered. “Yes, you are right – quite right. Let us go now – at once. With you and me, Mr. Spencer, Miss Wynton will be safe – safer than with the guides. They can follow with the stores. Come! There is no time to be lost!”

The others were so taken aback by his astounding change of front that they were silent for an instant. It was Helen who protested, firmly enough.

“The lightning seems to have given us an attack of nerves,” she said. “It would be ridiculous to rush off in that manner – ”

“But there is peril – real peril – in delay. I admit it. I was wrong.”

Bower’s anxiety was only too evident. Spencer, regarding him from a single viewpoint, deemed him a coward, and his gorge rose at the thought.

“Oh, nonsense!” he cried contemptuously. “We shall be two hours on the glacier, so five more minutes won’t cut any ice. If you have food and drink in there, Stampa certainly wants both. We all need them. We have to meet that gale all the way. The two hours may become three before we reach the path.”

Helen guessed the reason of his disdain. It was unjust; but the moment did not permit of a hint that he was mistaken. To save Bower from further commitment – which, she was convinced, was due entirely to regard for her own safety – she went into the hut.

“Stampa,” she said, “I am very much obliged to you for taking so much trouble. I suppose we may eat something before we start?”

“Assuredly, fräulein,” he cried. “Am I not here? Were it to begin to snow at once, I could still bring you unharmed to the chalets.”

Josef Barth had borne Stampa’s reproaches with surly deference; but he refused to be degraded in this fashion – before Karl, too, whose tongue wagged so loosely.

“That is the talk of a foolish boy, not of a man,” he cried wrathfully. “Am I not fitted, then, to take mademoiselle home after bringing her here?”

“Truly, on a fine day, Josef,” was the smiling answer.

“I told monsieur that a guxe was blowing up from the south; so did Karl; but he would not hearken. Ma foi! I am not to blame.” Barth, on his dignity, introduced a few words of French picked up from the Chamounix men. He fancied they would awe Stampa, and prove incidentally how wide was his own experience.

The old guide only laughed. “A nice pair, you and Karl,” he shouted. “Are the voyageurs in your care or not? You told monsieur, indeed! You ought to have refused to take mademoiselle. That would have settled the affair, I fancy.”

“But this monsieur knows as much about the mountains as any of us. He might surprise even you, Stampa. He has climbed the Matterhorn from Zermatt and Breuil. He has come down the rock wall on the Col des Nantillons. How is one to argue with such a voyageur on this child’s glacier?”

Stampa whistled. “Oh – knows the Matterhorn, does he? What is his name?”

“Bower,” said Helen, – “Mr. Mark Bower.”

“What! Say that again, fräulein! Mark Bower? Is that your English way of putting it?”

Helen attributed Stampa’s low hiss to a tardy recognition of Bower’s fame as a mountaineer. Though the hour was noon, the light was feeble. Veritable thunder clouds had gathered above the mist, and the expression of Stampa’s face was almost hidden in the obscurity of the hut.

“That is his name,” she repeated. “You must have heard of him. He was well known on the high Alps – years ago.” She paused before she added those concluding words. She was about to say “in your time,” but the substituted phrase was less personal, since the circumstances under which Stampa ceased to be a notability in “the street” at Zermatt were in her mind.

“God in heaven!” muttered the old man, passing a hand over his face as though waking from a dream, – “God in heaven! can it be that my prayer is answered at last?” He shambled out.

Spencer had waited to watch the almost continuous blaze of lightning playing on the glacier. Distant summits were now looming through the diminishing downpour of sleet. He was wondering if by any chance Stampa might be mistaken. Bower stood somewhat apart, seemingly engaged in the same engrossing task. The wind was not quite so fierce as during its first onset. It blew in gusts. No longer screaming in a shrill and sustained note, it wailed fitfully.

Stampa lurched unevenly close to Bower. He was about to touch him on the shoulder; but he appeared to recollect himself in time.

“Marcus Bauer,” he said in a voice that was terrible by reason of its restraint.

Bower wheeled suddenly. He did not flinch. His manner suggested a certain preparedness. Thus might a strong man face a wild beast when hope lay only in the matching of sinew against sinew. “That is not my name,” he snarled viciously.

“Marcus Bauer,” repeated Stampa in the same repressed monotone, “I am Etta’s father.”

“Why do you address me in that fashion? I have never before seen you.”

“No. You took care of that. You feared Etta’s father, though you cared little for Christian Stampa, the guide. But I have seen you, Marcus Bauer. You were slim then – an elegant, is it not? – and many a time have I hobbled into the Hotel Mont Cervin to look at your portrait in a group lest I should forget your face. Yet I passed you just now! Great God! I passed you.”

A ferocity glared from Bower’s eyes that might well have daunted Stampa. For an instant he glanced toward Spencer, whose clear cut profile was silhouetted against a background of white-blue ice now gleaming in a constant flutter of lightning. Stampa was not yet aware of the true cause of Bower’s frenzy. He thought that terror was spurring him to self defense. An insane impulse to kill, to fight with the nails and teeth, almost mastered him; but that must not be yet.

“It is useless, Marcus Bauer,” he said, with a calmness so horribly unreal that its deadly intent was all the more manifest. “I am the avenger, not you. I can tear you to pieces with my hands when I will. It would be here and now, were it not for the presence of the English sigñorina who saved me from death. It is not meet that she should witness your expiation. That is to be settled between you and me alone.”

Bower made one last effort to assert himself. “You are talking in riddles, man,” he said. “If you believe you have some long forgotten grievance against one of my name, come and see me to-morrow at the hotel. Perhaps – ”

“Yes, I shall see you to-morrow. Do not dream that you can escape me. Now that I know you live, I would search the wide world for you. Blessed Mother! How you must have feared me all these years!”

Stampa was using the Romansch dialect of the Italian Alps. Bower spoke in German. Spencer heard them indistinctly. He marveled that they should discuss, as he imagined, the state of the weather with such subdued passion.

“Hello, Christian,” he cried, “the clouds are lifting somewhat. Where is your promised snow?”

Stampa peered up into Bower’s face; for his twisted leg had reduced his own unusual height by many inches. “To-morrow!” he whispered. “At ten o’clock – outside the hotel. Then we have a settlement. Is it so?”

There was no answer. Bower was wrestling with a mad desire to grapple with him and fling him down among the black rocks. Stampa crept nearer. A ghastly smile lit his rugged features, and his pickel clattered to the broken shingle at his feet.

“I offer you to-morrow,” he said. “I am in no hurry. Have I not waited sixteen years? But it may be that you are tortured by a devil, Marcus Bauer. Shall it be now?”

The clean-souled peasant believed that the millionaire had a conscience. Not yet did he understand that balked desire is stronger than any conscience. It really seemed that nothing could withhold these two from mortal struggle then and there. Spencer was regarding them curiously; but they paid no heed to him. Bower’s tongue was darting in and out between his teeth. The red blood surged to his temples. Stampa was still smiling. His lips moved in the strangest prayer that ever came from a man’s heart. He was actually thanking the Madonna – mother of the great peacemaker – for having brought his enemy within reach!

“Mr. Bower!” came Helen’s voice from the door of the cabane. “Why don’t you join us? And you, Mr. Spencer? Stampa, come here and eat at once.”

“To-morrow, at ten? Or now?” the old man whispered again.

“To-morrow – curse you!”

Stampa twisted himself round. “I am not hungry, fräulein,” he cried. “I ate chocolate all the way up the glacier. But do you be speedy. We have lost too much time already.”

Bower brushed past, and the guide stooped to recover his ice ax. Spencer, though troubled sufficiently by his own disturbing fantasies, did not fail to notice their peculiar behavior. But he answered Helen with a pleasant disclaimer.

“Christian kept his hoard a secret, Miss Wynton. I too have lost my appetite,” said he.

“Once we start we shall hardly be able to unpack the hamper again,” said Helen.

The American was trying her temper. She suspected that he carried his hostility to the absurd pitch of refusing to partake of any food provided by Bower. It was a queer coincidence that Spencer harbored the same notion with regard to Stampa, and wondered at it.

“I shall starve willingly,” he said. “It will be a just punishment for declining the good things that did not tempt me when they were available.”

Bower poured out a quantity of wine and drank it at a gulp. He refilled the glass and nearly emptied it a second time. But he touched not a morsel of meat or bread. Helen, fortunately, attributed the conduct of the men to spleen. She ate a sandwich, and found that she was far more ready for a meal than she had imagined.

Stampa’s broad frame darkened the doorway. He told Karl not to burden himself with anything save the cutlery. Now that he was the skilled guide again, the leader in whom they trusted, his worn face was animated and his voice eager.

Helen heard Spencer’s exclamation without.

“By Jove, Stampa! you are right! Here comes the snow.”

“Quick, quick!” cried Stampa. “Vorwärtz, Barth. You lead. Stop at my call. Karl next – then the fräulein and my monsieur. Yours follows, and I come last.”

“No, no!” burst out Bower, lowering a third glass of wine from his lips.

“Che diavolo! It shall be as I have said!” shouted Stampa, with an imperious gesture. Helen remarked it; but things were being done and said that were inexplicable. Even Bower was silenced.

“Are we to be roped, then?” growled Barth.

“Have you never crossed ice during a snow storm?” asked Stampa.

In a few minutes they were ready. The lightning flashes were less frequent, and the thunder was muttering far away amid the secret places of the Bernina. The wind was rising again. Instead of sleet it carried snowflakes, and these did not sting the face nor patter on the ice. But they clung everywhere, and the sable rocks were taking unto themselves a new garment.

“Vorwärtz!” rang out Stampa’s trumpet like call, and Barth leaped down into the moraine.