The Silent Barrier
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
_signorina_ 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, _fraeulein_," 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. "_Vorwaertz_, Barth. You lead. Stop at my
call. Karl next--then the _fraeulein_ 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.
"_Vorwaertz!_" 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 seracs, 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.
"Make for the ice--quick!" cried Stampa, and Barth turned sharply to
the left. Falling stones were now their chief danger, and both men
were anxious to avoid it.
After a brief scramble they mounted the curving glacier. A fiercer
gust shrieked at them and swept some small space clear of snow. Helen
had a dim vision of lightning playing above the crest of a great mound
on the edge of the ice field,--a mound that she did not remember
seeing before. Then the gale sank back to its sustained howling, the
snow swirled in denser volume, and the specter vanished.
Ere they had gone another hundred yards, Barth's hoarse warning
checked them again. "The bridge has fallen!" was his cry. "There has
been an ice movement."
There was a question in the man's words. Here was a nice point
submitted to his judgment,--whether to follow the line of the recently
formed schrund yawning at his feet, or endeavor to cross it, or go
back to the scene of the landslip? That was where Barth was lacking.
In that instant he resigned his pride of place without further effort
to retain it. He was in the van, but did not lead. Thenceforth Stampa
was master.
"What is the width--ten meters?" demanded the old guide cheerfully.
"About that."
"All the better. It is not deep here. The shock of that avalanche
opened it up. You will find a way down. Cut the steps close together.
You know how to polish them, Karl?"
"Yes, I can do that," said the porter.
"And watch the _signorina's_ feet."
"Yes, I'll take care."
Barth was peering fixedly into the chasm. To Helen's fancy it was
bottomless, though in reality it was not more than forty feet deep,
and the two walls fell away from each other at a practicable angle. In
normal summer weather, a small crevasse always formed there owing to
the glacier flowing over a transverse ridge of rock beneath. To-day
the impact of many thousands of tons of debris had disrupted the ice
to an unusual extent. Having decided on the best line, the leading
guide stepped over into space. Helen heard his ax ringing as he
fashioned secure foothold down the steep ledge he had selected. He was
quite trustworthy in such work.
Stampa, who had a thought for none save Helen, gave her a reassuring
word. "Barth will find a way, _fraeulein_," he said. "And Herr Spencer
knows how you should cross your feet and carry your ax, while Karl
will see to your foothold. Remember too that you will be at the bottom
before I begin the descent, so no harm can come to you. Try and stand
straight. Don't lean against the slope. Lean away from it. Don't be
afraid. Don't trust to the rope or the grip of the ax. Rely on your
own stand."
It was no time to pick and choose phrases, yet Helen realized the
oddity of the absence of any reference to Bower. One other in the
party had a thought somewhat akin to hers; but he slurred it over in
his mind, and seized the opportunity to help her by a casual remark.
"Guess you hardly expected genuine ice work in to-day's trip?" he