The Silent Barrier

“Surely Millicent did not say that I had promised to marry her?”

Though Helen was not prepared for this downright plunge into an embarrassing discussion, she managed to evade a direct answer. “There was more than a suggestion of that in her words last night,” she said. “Perhaps she thought so in all seriousness. You seem to have undeceived her to-day, and I am sure you must have dealt with her kindly, or she would not have acknowledged her mistake in such frank terms to me. There, now! That is the end of a very disagreeable episode. Shall we say no more about it?”

Helen was flushed and hurried of speech: but she persevered bravely, hoping that Bower’s tact would not desert him at this crisis. She quickened her pace a little, with the air of one who has said the last word on a difficult topic and is anxious to forget it.

Bower overtook her. He grasped her shoulder almost roughly, and drew her round till she faced him. “You are trying to escape me, Helen!” he said hoarsely. “That is impossible. Someone must have told you what I said to Millicent in the hearing of all who chose to listen. Her amazing outburst forced from me an avowal that should have been made to you alone. Helen, I want you to be my wife. I love you better than all the world. I have my faults, – what man is flawless? – but I have the abiding virtue of loving you. I shall make your life happy, Helen. For God’s sake do not tell me that you are already promised to another!”

His eyes blazed into hers with a passion that was appalling in its intensity. She seemed to lose the power to speak or move. She looked up at him like a frightened child, who hears strange words that she does not comprehend. Thinking he had won her, he threw his arms about her and strained her fiercely to his breast. He strove to kiss away the tears that began to fall in piteous protest; but she bent her head as if in shame.

“Oh, please let me go!” she sobbed. “Please let me go! What have I done that you should treat me so cruelly.”

“Cruelly, Helen? How should I be cruel to you whom I hold so dear?”

Still he clasped her tightly, hardly knowing what he did in his transport of joy at the belief that she was his.

She struggled to free herself. She shrank from this physical contact with a strange repulsion. She felt as a timid animal must feel when some lord of the jungle pulls it down and drags it to his lair. Bower was kissing her cheeks, her forehead, her hair, finding a mad rapture in the fragrance of her skin. He crushed her in a close embrace that was almost suffocating.

“Oh, please let me go!” she wailed. “You frighten me. Let me go! How dare you!”

She fought so wildly that he yielded to a dim sense that she was in earnest. He relaxed his grip. With the instinct of a hunted thing, she took a dangerous leap for safety clean across the swollen Inn. Luckily she alighted on a broad boulder, or a sprained ankle would have been the least penalty for that desperate means of escape.

As she stood there, with tears streaming down her face and the crimson brand of angry terror on her brow, the dreadful knowledge that he had lost her smote Bower like a rush of cold air from a newly opened tomb. Between them brawled the tiny torrent. It offered no bar to an active man; but even in his panic of sudden perception he resisted the impulse that bade him follow.

“Helen,” he pleaded, stretching forth his hands in frenzied gesture, “why do you cast me off? I swear by all a man holds sacred that I mean no wrong. You are dear to me as life itself. Ah, Helen, say that I may hope! I do not even ask for your love. I shall win that by a lifetime of devotion.”

At last she found utterance. He had alarmed her greatly; but no woman can feel it an outrage that a man should avow his longing. And she pitied Bower with a great pity. Deep down in her heart was a suspicion that they might have been happy together had they met sooner. She would never have loved him, – she knew that now beyond cavil, – but if they were married she must have striven to make life pleasant for him, while she drifted down the smooth stream of existence free from either abiding joys or carking sorrows.

“I am more grieved than I can tell that this should have happened,” she said, striving hard to restrain the sob in her voice, though it gave her words the ring of genuine regret. “I little dreamed that you thought of me in that way, Mr. Bower. But I can never marry you – never, no matter what the circumstances! Surely you will help me to dispel the memory of a foolish moment. It has been trying to both of us. Let us pretend that it never was.”

Had she struck him with a whip he could not have flinched so visibly beneath the lash as from the patent honesty of her words. For a time he did not answer, and the sudden calm that came quick on the heels of frenzy had in it a weird peacefulness.

Neither could ever again forget the noisy rush of the stream, the glad singing of birds in a thicket overhanging the bank, the tinkle of the cow bells as the cattle began to climb to the pastures for a luxurious hour ere sundown. It was typical of their lives that they should be divided by the infant Inn, almost at its source, and that thenceforth the barrier should become ever wider and deeper till it reached the infinite sea.

He seemed to take his defeat well. He was pale, and his lips twitched with the effort to attain composure. He looked at Helen with a hungry longing that was slowly acknowledging restraint.

“I must have frightened you,” he said, breaking a silence that was growing irksome. “Of course I apologize for that. But we cannot leave things where they are. If you must send me away from you, I may at least demand a clear understanding. Have no fear that I shall distress you further. May I join you, or will you walk to the bridge a little higher up?”

“Let us return to the hotel,” she protested.

“No, no. We are not children. We have broken no law of God or man. Why should I be ashamed of having asked you to marry me, or you to listen, even though it be such a hopeless fantasy as you say?”

Helen, deeply moved in his behalf, walked to a bridge of planks a little distance up stream. Bower joined her there. He had deliberately resolved to do a dastardly thing. If Spencer was the cause of Helen’s refusal, that obstacle, at any rate, could be smashed to a pulp.

“Now, Helen,” he said, “I want you to believe that your happiness is my only concern. Perhaps, at some other time, you may allow me to renew in less abrupt manner the proposal I have made to-day. But when you hear all that I have to tell, you will be forced to admit that I placed your high repute above every other consideration in declaring my love before, rather than after, you learned how and why you came to Switzerland.”

His manner was becoming more calm and judicial each moment. It reacted on Helen, who gazed at him with a very natural surprise in her still tear-laden eyes.

“That, at least, is simple enough,” she cried.

“No. It is menacing, ugly, a trick calculated to wound you sorely. When first it came to my ears I refused to credit the vile meanness of it. You saw that telegram which reached my hands as we quitted the hotel? It is a reply to certain inquiries I caused to be made in London. Read it.”

Helen took the crumpled sheets of thin paper and began to read. Bower watched her face with a maleficent confidence that might have warned her had she seen it. But she paid heed to nothing else at that moment save the mysterious words scrawled in a foreign handwriting:

“Have investigated ‘Firefly’ incident fully. Pargrave compelled Mackenzie to explain. The American, Charles K. Spencer, recently residing at Embankment Hotel, is paying Miss Helen Wynton’s expenses, including cost of publishing her articles. He followed her on the day of her departure, and has since asked Mackenzie for introduction. Pargrave greatly annoyed, and holds Mackenzie at your disposal.

    “Kennett.”

Helen went very white; but she spoke with a firmness that was amazing, even to Bower. “Who is Kennett?” she said.

“One of my confidential clerks.”

“And Pargrave?”

“The proprietor of ‘The Firefly.’”

“Did Millicent know of this – plot?”

“Yes.”

Then she murmured a broken prayer. “Ah, dear Heaven!” she complained, “for what am I punished so bitterly?”

Karl, the voluble and sharp-eyed, retailed a bit of gossip to Stampa that evening as they smoked in Johann Klucker’s chalet. “As I was driving the cattle to the middle alp to-day, I saw our fräulein in the arms of the big voyageur,” he said.

Stampa withdrew his pipe from between his teeth. “Say that again,” he whispered, as though afraid of being overheard.

Karl did so, with fuller details.

“Are you sure?” asked Stampa.

Karl sniffed scornfully. “Ach, Gott! How could I err?” he cried. “There are not so many pretty women in the hotel that I should not recognize our fräulein. And who would forget Herr Bower? He gave me two louis for a ten francs job. We must get them together on the hills again, Christian. He will be soft hearted now, and pay well for taking care of his lady.”

“Yes,” said Stampa, resuming his pipe. “You are right, Karl. There is no place like the hills. And he will pay – the highest price, look you! Saperlotte! I shall exact a heavy fee this time.”

CHAPTER XVI

SPENCER EXPLAINS

A sustained rapping on the inner door of the hut roused Helen from dreamless sleep. In the twilight of the mind that exists between sleeping and waking she was bewildered by the darkness, perhaps baffled by her novel surroundings. She strove to pierce the gloom with wide-open, unseeing eyes, but the voice of her guide broke the spell.

“Time to get up, sigñora. The sun is on the rock, and we have a piece of bad snow to cross.”

Then she remembered, and sighed. The sigh was involuntary, the half conscious tribute of a wearied heart. It needed an effort to brace herself against the long hours of a new day, the hours when thoughts would come unbidden, when regrets that she was fighting almost fiercely would rush in and threaten to overwhelm her. But Helen was brave. She had the courage that springs from the conviction of having done that which is right. If she was a woman too, with a woman’s infinite capacity for suffering – well, that demanded another sort of bravery, a resolve to subdue the soul’s murmurings, a spiritual teeth-clenching in the determination to prevail, a complete acceptance of unmerited wrongs in obedience to some inexplicable decree of Providence.

So she rose from a couch which at least demanded perfect physical health ere one could find rest on it, and, being fully dressed, went forth at once to drink the steaming hot coffee that filled the tiny hut with its fragrance.

“A fine morning, Pietro?” she asked, addressing the man who had summoned her.

“Si, sigñora. Dawn is breaking with good promise. There is a slight mist on the glacier; but the rock shows clear in the sun.”