The Silent Barrier Part 21

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 pa.s.sion.

"h.e.l.lo, 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 s.h.i.+ngle 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, _fraulein_," 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 h.o.a.rd a secret, Miss Wynton. I too have lost my appet.i.te," 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 quant.i.ty of wine and drank it at a gulp. He refilled the gla.s.s 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. "_Vorwartz_, Barth. You lead. Stop at my call. Karl next--then the _fraulein_ and my monsieur. Yours follows, and I come last."

"No, no!" burst out Bower, lowering a third gla.s.s 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.

"_Vorwartz!_" 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 creva.s.se, bringing plainly before the eye c.h.i.n.ks 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 s.p.a.ce 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 hoa.r.s.e 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."