The Silent Barrier

There was no reason that she could fathom why her elderly friend’s name should be repeated with such scornful emphasis.

“Ah, yes. He is that because he is lame,” she protested. “But he was one of the most famous guides in Zermatt years ago.”

She swung round and appealed to Barth, who was wondering why his employers were stopping before they had climbed twenty feet. “Are you from Zermatt?” she demanded.

“No, fräulein– from Pontresina. Zermatt is a long way from here.”

“But you know some of the Zermatt men, I suppose? Have you ever heard of Christian Stampa?”

“Most certainly, fräulein. My father helped him to build the first hut on the Hörnli Ridge.”

“Old Stampa!” chimed in Karl from beneath. “It will be long ere he is forgotten. I was one of four who carried him down from Corvatsch to Sils-Maria the day after he fell. He was making the descent by night, – a mad thing to do, – and there was murder in his heart, they said. But I never believed it. We shared a bottle of Monte Pulciano only yesterday, just for the sake of old times, and he was as merry as Hans von Rippach himself.”

Bower was stooping, so Helen could not see his face. He seemed to be fumbling with a boot lace.

“You hear, Mr. Bower?” she cried. “I am quoting no mean authority.”

He did not answer. He had untied the lace and was readjusting it. The girl realized that to a man of his portly build his present attitude was not conducive to speech. It had an additional effect which did not suggest itself to her. The effort thus demanded from heart and lungs might bring back the blood to a face blanched by a deadly fear.

Karl was stocked with reminiscences of Stampa. “I remember the time when people said Christian was the best man in the Bernina,” he said. “He would never go back to the Valais after his daughter died. It was a strange thing that he should come to grief on a cowherd’s track like that over Corvatsch. But Etta’s affair – ”

“Schweige!” snarled Bower, straightening himself suddenly. His dark eyes shot such a gleam of lambent fury at the porter that the man’s jaw fell. The words were frozen on his lips. He could not have been stricken dumb more effectually had he come face to face with one of the horrific sprites described in the folklore of the hills.

Helen was surprised. What had poor Karl done that he should be bidden so fiercely to hold his tongue? Then she thought that Bower must have recalled Stampa’s history, and feared that perhaps the outspoken peasant might enter into a piquant account of some village scandal. A chambermaid in the hotel, questioned about Stampa, had told her that the daughter he loved so greatly had committed suicide. Really, she ought to be grateful to her companion for saving her from a passing embarrassment. But she had the tact not to drop the subject too quickly.

“If Barth and you agree that roping is unnecessary, of course I haven’t a word to say in the matter,” she volunteered. “It was rather absurd of me to mention it in the first instance.”

“No, you were right. I have never seen Stampa; but his name is familiar. It occurs in most Alpine records. Barth, fix the rope before we go farther. The fräulein wishes it.”

The rush of color induced by physical effort – effort of a tensity that Helen was wholly unaware of – was ebbing now before a numbing terror that had come to stay. His face was drawn and livid. His voice had the metallic ring in it that the girl had detected once already that day. Again she experienced a sense of bewilderment that he should regard a trivial thing so seriously. She was not a child. The world of to-day pulsated with far too many stories of tragic passion that she should be shielded so determinedly from any hint of an episode that doubtless wrung the heart’s core of this quiet valley one day in August sixteen years ago. In some slight degree Bower’s paroxysm of anger was a reflection on her own good taste, for she had unwittingly given rise to it.

Nevertheless, she felt indebted to him. To extricate both Bower and herself from an awkward situation she took a keen interest in Barth’s method of adjusting the rope. The man did not show any amazement at Bower’s order. He was there to earn his fee. Had these mad English told him to cut steps up the gentle slope in front he would have obeyed without protest, though it was more than strange that this much traveled voyageur should adopt such a needless precaution.

As a matter of fact, under Barth’s guidance, a blind cripple could have surmounted the first kilometer of the Forno glacier. The track lay close to the left bank of the moraine. It curved slightly to the right and soon the exquisite panorama of Monte Roseg, the Cima di Rosso, Monte Sissone, Piz Torrone, and the Castello group opened up before the climbers. Helen was enchanted. Twice she half turned to address some question to Bower; but on each occasion she happened to catch him in the act of swallowing some brandy from a flask. Governed by an unaccountable timidity, she pretended not to notice his actions, and diverted her words to Barth, who told her the names of the peaks and pointed to the junctions of minor ice fields with the main artery of the Forno.

Bower did not utter a syllable until they struck out toward the center of the glacier. A crevasse some ten feet in width and seemingly hundreds of feet deep, barred the way; but a bridge of ice, covered with snow, offered safe transit. The snow carpet showed that a number of climbers had passed quite recently in both directions. Even Helen, somewhat awed by the dimensions of the rift, understood that the existence of this natural arch was as well recognized by Alpinists as Waterloo Bridge is known to dwellers on the south side of the Thames.

“Now, Miss Wynton, you should experience your first real thrill,” said Bower. “This bridge forms here every year at this season, and an army might cross in safety. It is the genuine article, the first and strongest of a series. Yet here you cross the Rubicon. A mixture of metaphors is allowable in high altitudes, you know.”

Helen, almost startled at first by the unaffected naturalness of his words, was unfeignedly relieved at finding him restored to the normal. Usually his supply of light-hearted badinage was unceasing. He knew exactly when and how to season it with more serious statements. It is this rare quality that makes tolerable a long day’s solitude à deux.

“I am not Cæsar’s wife,” she replied; “but for the credit of womankind in general I shall act as though I was above suspicion – of nervousness.”

She did not look round. Barth was moving quickly, and she had no desire to burden him with a drag on the rope. When she was in the center of the narrow causeway, a snow cornice in the lip of the crevasse detached itself under the growing heat of the sun and shivered down into the green darkness. The incident brought her heart into her mouth. It served as a reminder that this solid ice river was really in a state of constant change and movement.

Bower laughed, with all his customary gayety of manner. “That came at a dramatic moment,” he said. “Too bad it could not let you pass without giving you a quake!”

“I am not a bit afraid.”

“Ah, but I can read your thoughts. There is a bond of sympathy between us.”

“Hemp is a non-conductor.”

“You are willfully misunderstanding me,” he retorted.

“No. I honestly believed you felt the rope quiver a little.”

“Alas! it is the atmosphere. My compliments fall on idle ears.”

Barth interrupted this play of harmless chaff by jerking some remark over his shoulder. “Looks like a guxe,” he said gruffly.

“Nonsense!” said Bower, – “a bank of mist. The sun will soon melt it.”

“It’s a guxe, right enough,” chimed in Karl, who had recovered his power of speech. “That is why the boy was blowing his horn – to show he was bringing the cattle home.”

“Well, then, push on. The sooner we are in the hut the better.”

“Please, what is a guxe?” asked Helen, when the men had nothing more to say.

“A word I would have wished to add later to your Alpine phrase book. It means a storm, a blizzard.”

“Should we not return at once in that event?”

“What? Who said just now she was not afraid?”

“But a storm in such a place!”

“These fellows smell a tourmente in every little cloud from the southwest. We may have some wind and a light snowfall, and that will be an experience for you. Surely you can trust me not to run any real risk?”

“Oh, yes. I do, indeed. But I have read of people being caught in these storms and suffering terribly.”

Helen was fully alive to the fact that a woman who joins a mountaineering party should not impose her personal doubts on men who are willing to go on. She flourished her ice ax bravely, and cried, “Excelsior!”

In the next instant she regretted her choice of expression. The moral of Longfellow’s poem might be admirable, but the fate of its hero was unpleasantly topical. Again Bower laughed.

“Ah!” he said. “Will you deny now that I am a first rate receiver of wireless messages?”

She had no breath left for a quip. Barth was hurrying, and the thin air was beginning to have its effect. When an unusually smooth stretch of ice permitted her to take her eyes from the track for a moment she looked back to learn the cause of such haste. To her complete astonishment, the Maloja Pass and the hills beyond it were dissolved in a thick mist. A monstrous cloud was sweeping up the Orlegna Valley. As yet, it was making for the Muretto Pass rather than the actual ravine of the Forno; but a few wraiths of vapor were sailing high overhead, and it needed no weatherwise native to predict that ere long the glacier itself would be covered by that white pall. She glanced at Bower.

He smiled cheerfully. “It is nothing,” he murmured.

“I really don’t care,” she said. “One does not shirk an adventure merely because it is disagreeable. The pity is that all this lovely sunshine must vanish.”

“It will reappear. You will be charmed with the novelty in an hour or less.”

“Is it far to the hut?”

“Hardly twenty minutes at our present pace.”