The Silent Barrier

“That is the son lost at Lucerne,” she decided, finding in his face some of the physical traits but none of the calculating shrewdness of his mother.

After a repast of many courses Helen wandered into the great hall, found an empty chair, and longed for someone to speak to. At the first glance, everybody seemed to know everybody else. That was not really the case, of course. There were others present as neglected and solitary as Helen; but the noise and merriment of the greater number dominated the place. It resembled a social club rather than a hotel.

Her chair was placed in an alley along which people had to pass who wished to reach the glass covered veranda. She amused herself by trying to pick out the Wraggs, the Burnham-Joneses, and the de la Veres. Suddenly she was aware that Mrs. Vavasour and her son were coming that way; the son unwillingly, the mother with an air of determination. Perhaps the Lucerne episode was about to be explained.

When young Vavasour’s eyes fell on Helen, the boredom vanished from his face. It was quite obvious that he called his mother’s attention to her and asked who she was. Helen felt that an introduction was imminent. She was glad of it. At that moment she would have chatted gayly with even a greater ninny than George de Courcy Vavasour.

But she had not yet grasped the peculiar idiosyncrasies of a woman who was famous for snubbing those whom she considered to be “undesirables.” Helen looked up with a shy smile, expecting that the older woman would stop and speak; but Mrs. Vavasour gazed at her blankly – looked at the back of her chair through her body – and walked on.

“I don’t know, George,” Helen heard her say. “There are a lot of new arrivals. Some person of no importance, rather déclassée, I should imagine by appearances. As I was telling you, the General has arranged – ”

Taken altogether, Helen had crowded into portions of two days many new and some very unpleasant experiences.

CHAPTER V

AN INTERLUDE

Helen rose betimes next morning; but she found that the sun had kept an earlier tryst. Not a cloud marred a sky of dazzling blue. The phantom mist had gone with the shadows. From her bed room window she could see the whole length of the Ober-Engadin, till the view was abruptly shut off by the giant shoulders of Lagrev and Rosatch. The brilliance of the coloring was the landscape’s most astounding feature. The lakes were planes of polished turquoise, the rocks pure grays and browns and reds, the meadows emerald green, while the shining white patches of snow on the highest mountain slopes helped to blacken by contrast the somber clumps of pines that gathered thick wherever man had not disputed with the trees the tenancy of each foot of meager loam.

This morning glory of nature gladdened the girl’s heart and drove from it the overnight vapors. She dressed hurriedly, made a light breakfast, and went out.

There was no need to ask the way. In front of the hotel the narrow Silser See filled the valley. Close behind lay the crest of the pass. A picturesque château was perched on a sheer rock overhanging the Vale of Bregaglia and commanding a far flung prospect almost to the brink of Como. On both sides rose the mountain barriers; but toward the east there was an inviting gorge, beyond which the lofty Cima di Rosso flung its eternal snows heavenward.

A footpath led in that direction. Helen, who prided herself on her sense of locality, decided that it would bring her to the valley in which were situated, as she learned by the map, a small lake and a glacier.

“That will be a fine walk before lunch,” she said, “and it is quite impossible to lose the way.”

So she set off, crossing the hotel golf course, and making for a typical Swiss church that crowned the nearest of the foothills. Passing the church, she found the double doors in the porch open, and peeped in. It was a cozy little place, cleaner and less garish than such edifices are usually on the Continent. The lamp burning before the sanctuary showed that it was devoted to Roman Catholic worship. The red gleam of the tiny sentinel conveyed a curiously vivid impression of faith and spirituality. Though Helen was a Protestant, she was conscious of a benign emotion arising from the presence of this simple token of belief.

“I must ascertain the hours of service,” she thought. “It will be delightful to join the Swiss peasants in prayer. One might come near the Creator in this rustic tabernacle.”

She did not cross the threshold of the inner door. At present her mind was fixed on brisk movement in the marvelous air. She wanted to absorb the sunshine, to dispel once and for all the unpleasing picture of life in the high Alps presented by the stupid crowd she had met in the hotel overnight. Of course, she was somewhat unjust there; but women are predisposed to trust first impressions, and Helen was no exception to her sex.

Beyond the church the path was not so definite. Oddly enough, it seemed to go along the flat top of a low wall down to a tiny mountain stream. Steps were cut in the opposite hillside, but they were little used, and higher up, among some dwarf pines and azaleas, a broader way wound back toward the few scattered chalets that nestled under the château.

As the guidebook spoke of a carriage road to Lake Cavloccio, and a bridle path thence to within a mile of the Forno glacier, she came to the conclusion that she was taking a short cut. At any rate, on the summit of the next little hill she would be able to see her way quite distinctly, so she jumped across the brook and climbed through the undergrowth. Before she had gone twenty yards she stopped. She was almost certain that someone was sobbing bitterly up there among the trees. It had an uncanny sound, this plaint of grief in such a quiet, sunlit spot. Still, sorrow was not an affrighting thing to Helen. It might stir her sympathies, but it assuredly could not drive her away in panic.

She went on, not noiselessly, as she did not wish to intrude on some stranger’s misery. Soon she came to a low wall, and, before she quite realized her surroundings, she was looking into a grass grown cemetery. It was a surprise, this ambush of the silent company among the trees. Hidden away from the outer world, and so secluded that its whereabouts remain unknown to thousands of people who visit the Maloja each summer, there was an aspect of stealth in its sudden discovery that was almost menacing. But Helen was not a nervous subject. The sobbing had ceased, and when the momentary effect of such a depressing environment had been resolutely driven off, she saw that a rusty iron gate was open. The place was very small. There were a few monuments, so choked with weeds and dank grass that their inscriptions were illegible. She had never seen a more desolate graveyard. Despite the vivid light and the joyous breeze rustling the pine branches, its air of abandonment was depressing. She fought against the sensation as unworthy of her intelligence; but she had some reason for it in the fact that there was no visible explanation of the mourning she had undoubtedly heard.

Then she uttered an involuntary cry, for a man’s head and shoulders rose from behind a leafy shrub. Instantly she was ashamed of her fear. It was the old guide who acted as coachman the previous evening, and he had been lying face downward on the grass in that part of the cemetery given over to the unnamed dead.

He recognized her at once. Struggling awkwardly to his feet, he said in broken and halting German, “I pray your forgiveness, fräulein. I fear I have alarmed you.”

“It is I who should ask forgiveness,” she said. “I came here by accident. I thought I could go to Cavloccio by this path.”

She could have hit on no other words so well calculated to bring him back to every day life. To direct the steps of wanderers in his beloved Engadine was a real pleasure to him. For an instant he forgot that they had both spoken German.

“No, no!” he cried animatedly. “For lek him go by village. Bad road dissa way. No cross ze field. Verboten!”

Then Helen remembered that trespassers are sternly warned off the low lying lands in the mountains. Grass is scarce and valuable. Until the highest pastures yield to the arid rock, pedestrians must keep to the beaten track.

“I was quite mistaken,” she said. “I see now that the path I was trying to reach leads here only. And I am very, very sorry I disturbed you.”

He hobbled nearer, the ruin of a fine man, with a nobly proportioned head and shoulders, but sadly maimed by the accident which, to all appearances, made him useless as a guide.

“Pardon an old man’s folly, fräulein,” he said humbly. “I thought none could hear, and I felt the loss of my little girl more than ever to-day.”

“Your daughter? Is she buried here?”

“Yes. Many a year has passed; but I miss her now more than ever. She was all I had in the world, fräulein. I am alone now, and that is a hard thing when the back is bent with age.”

Helen’s eyes grew moist; but she tried bravely to control her voice. “Was she young?” she asked softly.

“Only twenty, fräulein, only twenty, and as tall and fair as yourself. They carried her here sixteen years ago this very day. I did not even see her. On the previous night I fell on Corvatsch.”

“Oh, how sad! But why did she die at that age? And in this splendid climate? Was her death unexpected?”

“Unexpected!” He turned and looked at the huge mountain of which the cemetery hill formed one of the lowermost buttresses. “If the Piz della Margna were to topple over and crush me where I stand, it would be less unforeseen than was my sweet Etta’s fate. But I frighten you, lady, – a poor return for your kindness. That is your way, – through the village, and by the postroad till you reach a notice board telling you where to take the path.”

There was a crude gentility in his manner that added to the pathos of his words. Helen was sure that he wished to be left alone with his memories. Yet she lingered.

“Please tell me your name,” she said. “I may visit St. Moritz while I remain here, and I shall try to find you.”

“Christian Stampa,” he said. He seemed to be on the point of adding something, but checked himself. “Christian Stampa,” he repeated, after a pause. “Everybody knows old Stampa the guide. If I am not there, and you go to Zermatt some day – well, just ask for Stampa. They will tell you what has become of me.”

She found it hard to reconcile this broken, careworn old man with her cheery companion of the previous afternoon. What did he mean? She understood his queer jargon of Italianized German quite clearly; but there was a sinister ring in his words that blanched her face. She could not leave him in his present mood. She was more alarmed now than when she saw him rising ghostlike from behind the screen of grass and weeds.

“Please walk with me to the village,” she said. “All this beautiful land is strange to me. It will divert your thoughts from a mournful topic if you tell me something of its wonders.”

He looked at her for an instant. Then his eyes fell on the church in the neighboring hollow, and he crossed himself, murmuring a few words in Italian. She guessed their meaning. He was thanking the Virgin for having sent to his rescue a girl who reminded him of his lost Etta.

“Yes,” he said, “I will come. If I were remaining in the Maloja, fräulein, I would beg you to let me take you to the Forno, and perhaps to one of the peaks beyond. Old as I am, and lame, you would be safe with me.”

Helen breathed freely again. She felt that she had been within measurable distance of a tragedy. Nor was there any call on her wits to devise fresh means of drawing his mind away from the madness that possessed him a few minutes earlier. As he limped unevenly by her side, his talk was of the mountains. Did she intend to climb? Well, slow and sure was the golden rule. Do little or nothing during four or five days, until she had grown accustomed to the thin and keen Alpine air. Then go to Lake Lunghino, – that would suffice for the first real excursion. Next day, she ought to start early, and climb the mountain overlooking that same lake, – up there, on the other side of the hotel, – all rock and not difficult. If the weather was clear, she would have a grand view of the Bernina range. Next she might try the Forno glacier. It was a simple thing. She could go to and from the cabane in ten hours. Afterward, the Cima di Rosso offered an easy climb; but that meant sleeping at the hut. All of which was excellent advice, though the reflection came that Stampa’s “slow and sure” methods were not strongly in evidence some sixteen hours earlier.

Now, the Cima di Rosso was in full view at that instant. Helen stopped.

“Do you really mean to tell me that if I wish to reach the top of that mountain, I must devote two days to it?” she cried.

Stampa, though bothered with troubles beyond her ken, forgot them sufficiently to laugh grimly. “It is farther away than you seem to think, fräulein; but the real difficulty is the ice. Unless you cross some of the crevasses in the early morning, before the sun has had time to undo the work accomplished by the night’s frost, you run a great risk. And that is why you must be ready to start from the cabane at dawn. Moreover, at this time of year, you get the finest view about six o’clock.”

The mention of crevasses was somewhat awesome. “Is it necessary to be roped when one tries that climb?” she asked.

“If any guide ever tells you that you need not be roped while crossing ice or climbing rock, turn back at once, fräulein. Wait for another day, and go with a man who knows his business. That is how the Alps get a bad name for accidents. Look at me! I have climbed the Matterhorn forty times, and the Jungfrau times out of count, and never did I or anyone in my care come to grief. ‘Use the rope properly,’ is my motto, and it has never failed me, not even when two out of five of us were struck senseless by falling stones on the south side of Monte Rosa.”

Helen experienced another thrill. “I very much object to falling stones,” she said.

Stampa threw out his hands in emphatic gesture. “What can one do?” he cried. “They are always a danger, like the snow cornice and the névé. There is a chimney on the Jungfrau through which stones are constantly shooting from a height of two thousand feet. You cannot see them, – they travel too fast for the eye. You hear something sing past your ears, that is all. Occasionally there is a report like a gunshot, and then you observe a little cloud of dust rising from a new scar on a rock. If you are hit – well, there is no dust, because the stone goes right through. Of course one does not loiter there.”