The Silent Barrier

“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.