The Silent Barrier

“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.

CHAPTER X

ON THE GLACIER

Barth, a good man on ice and rock, was not a genius among guides. Faced by an apparently unscalable rock wall, or lost in a wilderness of séracs, he would never guess the one way that led to success. But he was skilled in the technic of his profession, and did not make the mistake now of subjecting Helen or Spencer to the risk of an ugly fall. The air temperature had dropped from eighty degrees Fahrenheit to below freezing point. Rocks that gave safe foothold an hour earlier were now glazed with an amalgam of sleet and snow. If, in his dull mind, he wondered why Spencer came next to Helen, rather than Bower or Stampa, – either of whom would know exactly when to give that timely aid with the rope that imparts such confidence to the novice, – he said nothing. Stampa’s eye was on him. His pride was up in arms. It behooved him to press on at just the right pace, and commit no blunder.

Helen, who had been glad to get back to the moraine during the ascent, was ready to breathe a sigh of relief when she felt her feet on the ice again. Those treacherous rocks were affrighting. They bereft her of trust in her own limbs. She seemed to slip here and there without power to check herself. She expected at any moment to stumble helplessly on some cruelly sharp angle of a granite boulder, and find that she was maimed so badly as to render another step impossible. More than once she was sensible that the restraining pull on the rope alone held her from disaster. Her distress did not hinder the growth of a certain surprise that the American should be so sure footed, so quick to judge her needs. When by his help a headlong downward plunge was converted into a harmless slide over the sloping face of a rock, she half turned.

“I must thank you for that afterward,” she said, with a fine effort at a smile.

“Eyes front, please,” was the quiet answer.

Under less strenuous conditions it might have sounded curt; but the look that met hers robbed the words of their tenseness, and sent the hot blood tingling in her veins. Bower had never looked at her like that. Just as some unusually vivid flash of lightning revealed the hidden depths of a crevasse, bringing plainly before the eye chinks and crannies not discernible in the strongest sunlight, so did the glimpse of Spencer’s soul illumine her understanding. He was not only safeguarding her, but thinking of her, and the stolen knowledge set up a bewildering tumult in her heart.

“Attention!” shouted Barth, halting and making a drive at something with his ax.

The line stopped. Stampa’s ringing voice came over Helen’s head:

“What is that ahead there?”

“A new fall, I think. We ought to leave the moraine a little lower down; but this was not here when we ascended.”

How either man, Stampa especially, could see anything at all, was beyond the girl’s comprehension. The snow was absolutely blinding. The wind was full in their faces, and it carried the huge flakes upward. They seemed to spring from beneath rather than drop from the clouds. Ever and anon a weirdly blue gleam of lightning would give a demoniac touch to a scene worthy of the Inferno.