The Silent Barrier Part 17

"I have been to its foot twice."

"Then you go in front. There is no room to walk two abreast. Before we tackle the ice we will call a halt for refreshments."

From that point till the glacier was reached the climb was laboriously simple. There was no difficulty and not the slightest risk, even for a child; but the heavy gradient and the rarefied air made it almost impossible to sustain a conversation unless the speakers dawdled.

Helen often found herself many yards in advance of the others. She simply could not help breasting the steeper portions of the track. She was drawn forward by an intense eagerness to begin the real business of the day. Bower did not seek to restrain her. He thought her high spirits admirable, and his gaze dwelt appreciatively on her graceful poise as she stopped on the crest of some small ravine and looked back at the plodders beneath. Attractive at all times, she was bewitching that morning to a man who prided himself on his athletic tastes. She wore a white knitted jersey and a short skirt, a costume seemingly devised to reveal the lines of a slender waist and supple limbs. A white Tam o' Shanter was tied firmly over her glossy brown hair with a silk motor veil, and the stout boots which she had surveyed so ruefully when Bower brought them to her on the previous evening after interviewing the village shoemaker, were by no means so c.u.mbrous in use as her unaccustomed eyes had deemed them. Even the phlegmatic guide was stirred to gruff appreciation when he saw her vault on to a large flat boulder in order to examine an iron cross that surmounted it.

"_Ach, Gott!_" he grunted, "that Englishwoman is as surefooted as a chamois."

But Helen had found a name and a date on a triangular strip of metal attached to the cross. "Why has this memorial been placed here?" she asked. Bower appealed to Barth; but he shook his head. Karl gave details.

"A man fell on the Cima del Largo. They carried him here, and he died on that rock."

"Poor fellow!" Some of the joyous light left Helen's face. She had pa.s.sed the cross before, and had regarded it as one of the votive offerings so common by the wayside in Catholic countries, knowing that in this part of Switzerland the Italian element predominated among the peasants.

"We get a fine view of the Cima del Largo from the _cabane_," said Bower unconcernedly.

Helen picked a little blue flower that nestled at the base of the rock. She pinned it to her jersey without comment. Sometimes the callousness of a man was helpful, and the shadow of a bygone tragedy was out of keeping with the glow of this delightful valley.

The curving ma.s.s of the glacier was now clearly visible. It looked like some marble staircase meant to be trodden only by immortals. Ever broadening and ascending until it filled the whole width of the rift between the hills, it seemed to mount upward to infinity. The sidelong rays of the sun, peeping over the shoulders of Forno and Roseg, tinted the great ice river with a sapphire blue, while its higher reaches glistened as though studded with gigantic diamonds. Near at hand, where the Orlegna rushed noisily from thraldom, the broken surface was somber and repellent. In color a dull gray, owing to the acc.u.mulation of winter debris and summer dust, it had the aspect of decay and death; it was jagged and gaunt and haggard; the far flung piles of the white moraine imposed a stony barrier against its farther progress.

But that unpleasing glimpse of disruption was quickly dispelled by the magnificent volume and virgin purity of the glacier as a whole. Helen tried to imagine herself two miles distant, a tiny speck on the great floor of the pa.s.s. That was the only way to grasp its stupendous size, though she knew that it mounted through five miles of rock strewn ravine before it touched the precipitous saddle along which runs the border line between Italy and Switzerland.

Karl's sigh of relief as he deposited his heavy load on a tablelike boulder brought Helen back from the land of dreams. To this st.u.r.dy peasant the wondrous Forno merely represented a day's hard work, at an agreed sum of ten francs for carrying nearly half a hundredweight, and a liberal _pour-boire_ if the voyageurs were satisfied.

Sandwiches and a gla.s.s of wine, diluted with water brought by the guide from a neighboring rill,--glacier water being used only as a last resource,--were delectable after a steady two hours' walk. The early morning meal of coffee and a roll had lost some of its flavor when consumed apparently in the middle of the night, and Helen was ready now for her breakfast. While they were eating, Bower and Josef Barth cast glances at some wisps of cloud drifting slowly over the crests of the southern hills. Nothing was said. The guide read his patron's wishes correctly. Unless some cause far more imperative than a slight mist intervened, the day's programme must not be abandoned.

So there was no loitering. The sun was almost in the valley, and the glacier must be crossed before the work of the night's frost was undone.

When they stepped from the moraine on to the ice Barth led, Helen followed, Bower came next, with Karl in the rear.

If it had not been for the crisp crunching sound of the hobnails amid the loose fragments on the surface, and the ring of the _pickel's_ steel-shod b.u.t.t on the solid ma.s.s beneath, Helen might have fancied that she was walking up an easy rock-covered slope. Any delusion on that point, however, was promptly dispelled by a glimpse of a narrow creva.s.se that split the foot of the glacier lengthwise.

She peered into its sea-green depths awesomely. It resembled a toothless mouth gaping slowly open, ready enough to swallow her, but too inert to put forth the necessary effort. And the thought reminded her of something. She halted and turned to Bower.

"Ought we not to be roped?" she asked.

He laughed, with the quiet confidence of the expert mountaineer.

"Why?" he cried. "The way is clear. One does not walk into a creva.s.se with one's eyes open."

"But Stampa told me that I should refuse to advance a yard on ice or difficult rock without being roped."

"Stampa, your cab driver?"

There was no reason that she could fathom why her elderly friend's name should be repeated with such scornful emphasis.

"Ah, yes. He is that because he is lame," she protested. "But he was one of the most famous guides in Zermatt years ago."

She swung round and appealed to Barth, who was wondering why his employers were stopping before they had climbed twenty feet. "Are you from Zermatt?" she demanded.

"No, _fraulein_--from Pontresina. Zermatt is a long way from here."

"But you know some of the Zermatt men, I suppose? Have you ever heard of Christian Stampa?"

"Most certainly, _fraulein_. My father helped him to build the first hut on the Hornli Ridge."

"Old Stampa!" chimed in Karl from beneath. "It will be long ere he is forgotten. I was one of four who carried him down from Corvatsch to Sils-Maria the day after he fell. He was making the descent by night,--a mad thing to do,--and there was murder in his heart, they said. But I never believed it. We shared a bottle of Monte Pulciano only yesterday, just for the sake of old times, and he was as merry as Hans von Rippach himself."

Bower was stooping, so Helen could not see his face. He seemed to be fumbling with a boot lace.

"You hear, Mr. Bower?" she cried. "I am quoting no mean authority."

He did not answer. He had untied the lace and was readjusting it. The girl realized that to a man of his portly build his present att.i.tude was not conducive to speech. It had an additional effect which did not suggest itself to her. The effort thus demanded from heart and lungs might bring back the blood to a face blanched by a deadly fear.

Karl was stocked with reminiscences of Stampa. "I remember the time when people said Christian was the best man in the Bernina," he said.

"He would never go back to the Valais after his daughter died. It was a strange thing that he should come to grief on a cowherd's track like that over Corvatsch. But Etta's affair----"

"_Schweige!_" snarled Bower, straightening himself suddenly. His dark eyes shot such a gleam of lambent fury at the porter that the man's jaw fell. The words were frozen on his lips. He could not have been stricken dumb more effectually had he come face to face with one of the horrific sprites described in the folklore of the hills.

Helen was surprised. What had poor Karl done that he should be bidden so fiercely to hold his tongue? Then she thought that Bower must have recalled Stampa's history, and feared that perhaps the outspoken peasant might enter into a piquant account of some village scandal. A chambermaid in the hotel, questioned about Stampa, had told her that the daughter he loved so greatly had committed suicide. Really, she ought to be grateful to her companion for saving her from a pa.s.sing embarra.s.sment. But she had the tact not to drop the subject too quickly.

"If Barth and you agree that roping is unnecessary, of course I haven't a word to say in the matter," she volunteered. "It was rather absurd of me to mention it in the first instance."

"No, you were right. I have never seen Stampa; but his name is familiar. It occurs in most Alpine records. Barth, fix the rope before we go farther. The _fraulein_ wishes it."

The rush of color induced by physical effort--effort of a tensity that Helen was wholly unaware of--was ebbing now before a numbing terror that had come to stay. His face was drawn and livid. His voice had the metallic ring in it that the girl had detected once already that day.

Again she experienced a sense of bewilderment that he should regard a trivial thing so seriously. She was not a child. The world of to-day pulsated with far too many stories of tragic pa.s.sion that she should be shielded so determinedly from any hint of an episode that doubtless wrung the heart's core of this quiet valley one day in August sixteen years ago. In some slight degree Bower's paroxysm of anger was a reflection on her own good taste, for she had unwittingly given rise to it.

Nevertheless, she felt indebted to him. To extricate both Bower and herself from an awkward situation she took a keen interest in Barth's method of adjusting the rope. The man did not show any amazement at Bower's order. He was there to earn his fee. Had these mad English told him to cut steps up the gentle slope in front he would have obeyed without protest, though it was more than strange that this much traveled _voyageur_ should adopt such a needless precaution.

As a matter of fact, under Barth's guidance, a blind cripple could have surmounted the first kilometer of the Forno glacier. The track lay close to the left bank of the moraine. It curved slightly to the right and soon the exquisite panorama of Monte Roseg, the Cima di Rosso, Monte Sissone, Piz Torrone, and the Castello group opened up before the climbers. Helen was enchanted. Twice she half turned to address some question to Bower; but on each occasion she happened to catch him in the act of swallowing some brandy from a flask. Governed by an unaccountable timidity, she pretended not to notice his actions, and diverted her words to Barth, who told her the names of the peaks and pointed to the junctions of minor ice fields with the main artery of the Forno.

Bower did not utter a syllable until they struck out toward the center of the glacier. A creva.s.se some ten feet in width and seemingly hundreds of feet deep, barred the way; but a bridge of ice, covered with snow, offered safe transit. The snow carpet showed that a number of climbers had pa.s.sed quite recently in both directions. Even Helen, somewhat awed by the dimensions of the rift, understood that the existence of this natural arch was as well recognized by Alpinists as Waterloo Bridge is known to dwellers on the south side of the Thames.

"Now, Miss Wynton, you should experience your first real thrill," said Bower. "This bridge forms here every year at this season, and an army might cross in safety. It is the genuine article, the first and strongest of a series. Yet here you cross the Rubicon. A mixture of metaphors is allowable in high alt.i.tudes, you know."

Helen, almost startled at first by the unaffected naturalness of his words, was unfeignedly relieved at finding him restored to the normal.

Usually his supply of light-hearted badinage was unceasing. He knew exactly when and how to season it with more serious statements. It is this rare quality that makes tolerable a long day's solitude _a deux_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: She flourished her ice axe bravely.

_Page 163_]

"I am not Caesar's wife," she replied; "but for the credit of womankind in general I shall act as though I was above suspicion--of nervousness."

She did not look round. Barth was moving quickly, and she had no desire to burden him with a drag on the rope. When she was in the center of the narrow causeway, a snow cornice in the lip of the creva.s.se detached itself under the growing heat of the sun and shivered down into the green darkness. The incident brought her heart into her mouth. It served as a reminder that this solid ice river was really in a state of constant change and movement.

Bower laughed, with all his customary gayety of manner. "That came at a dramatic moment," he said. "Too bad it could not let you pa.s.s without giving you a quake!"

"I am not a bit afraid."

"Ah, but I can read your thoughts. There is a bond of sympathy between us."