The Silent Barrier Part 20

"Surely you will lunch with us. Everything is set out on the table, and we have food enough for a regiment."

"You would need it if you remained here another couple of hours, Miss Wynton. Stampa tells me that a first rate _guxe_, which is Swiss for a blizzard, I believe, is blowing up. This thunder storm is the preliminary to a heavy downfall of snow. That is why I came. If we are not off the glacier before two o'clock, it will become impa.s.sable till a lot of the snow melts."

"What is that you are saying?" demanded Bower bruskly. Helen and the two men had reached the level of the _cabane_; but Stampa, thinking they would all enter, kept in the rear, "If that fairy tale accounts for your errand, you are on a wild goose chase, Mr. Spencer."

He had not heard the American's words clearly; but he gathered sufficient to account for the younger man's motive in following them, and was furiously annoyed by this unlooked for interruption. He had no syllable of thanks for a friendly action. Though no small risk attended the crossing of the Forno during a gale, it was evident he strongly resented the presence of both Spencer and the guide.

Helen, after her first eager outburst, was tongue tied. She saw that her would-be rescuers were dripping wet, and was amazed that Bower should greet them so curtly, though, to be sure, she believed implicitly that the storm would soon pa.s.s. Stampa was already inside the hut. He was haranguing Barth and the porter vehemently, and they were listening with a curious submissiveness.

Spencer was the most collected person present. He brushed aside Bower's acrimony as lightly as he had accepted Helen's embarra.s.sed explanation. "This is not my hustle at all," he said. "Stampa heard that his adored _signorina_----"

"Stampa! Is that Stampa?"

Bower's strident voice was hushed to a hoa.r.s.e murmur. It reminded one of his hearers of a growling dog suddenly cowed by fear. Helen's ears were tuned to this perplexing note; but Spencer interpreted it according to his dislike of the man.

"Stampa heard," he went on, with cold-drawn precision, "that Miss Wynton had gone to the Forno. He is by far the most experienced guide to be found on this side of the Alps, and he believes that anyone remaining up here to-day will surely be imprisoned in the hut a week or more by bad weather. In fact, even now an hour may make all the difference between danger and safety. Perhaps you can convince him he is wrong. I know nothing about it, beyond the evidence of my senses, backed up by some acquaintance with blizzards. Anyhow, I am inclined to think that Miss Wynton will be wise if she listens to the points of the argument in the hotel."

"Perhaps it would be better to return at once," said Helen timidly.

Her sensitive nature warned her that these two men were ready to quarrel, and that she herself, in some nebulous way, was the cause of their mutual enmity.

Beyond this her intuition could not travel. It was impossible that she should realize how sorely her wish to placate Bower disquieted Spencer. He had seen the two under conditions that might, indeed, be explicable by Helen's fright; but he would extend no such charitable consideration to Bower, whose conduct, no matter how it was viewed, made him a rival. Yes, it had come to that. Spencer had hardly spoken a word to Stampa during the toilsome journey from Maloja. He had looked facts stubbornly in the face, and the looking served to clear certain doubts from his heart and brain. He wanted to woo and win Helen for his wife. He was enmeshed in a net of his own contriving, and its strands were too strong to be broken. If Helen was reft from him now, he would gaze on a darkened world for many a day.

But he was endowed with a splendid self control. That element of cast steel in his composition, discovered by Dunston after five minutes'

acquaintance, kept him rigid under the strain.

"Sorry I should figure as spoiling your excursion, Miss Wynton," he was able to say calmly; "but, when all is said and done, the weather is bad, and you will have plenty of fine days later."

Bower crept nearer. His action suggested stealth. Although the wind was howling under the deep eaves of the hut, he almost whispered.

"Yes, you are right--quite right. Let us go now--at once. With you and me, Mr. Spencer, Miss Wynton will be safe--safer than with the guides.

They can follow with the stores. Come! There is no time to be lost!"

The others were so taken aback by his astounding change of front that they were silent for an instant. It was Helen who protested, firmly enough.

"The lightning seems to have given us an attack of nerves," she said.

"It would be ridiculous to rush off in that manner----"

"But there is peril--real peril--in delay. I admit it. I was wrong."

Bower's anxiety was only too evident. Spencer, regarding him from a single viewpoint, deemed him a coward, and his gorge rose at the thought.

"Oh, nonsense!" he cried contemptuously. "We shall be two hours on the glacier, so five more minutes won't cut any ice. If you have food and drink in there, Stampa certainly wants both. We all need them. We have to meet that gale all the way. The two hours may become three before we reach the path."

Helen guessed the reason of his disdain. It was unjust; but the moment did not permit of a hint that he was mistaken. To save Bower from further commitment--which, she was convinced, was due entirely to regard for her own safety--she went into the hut.

"Stampa," she said, "I am very much obliged to you for taking so much trouble. I suppose we may eat something before we start?"

"a.s.suredly, _fraulein_," he cried. "Am I not here? Were it to begin to snow at once, I could still bring you unharmed to the chalets."

Josef Barth had borne Stampa's reproaches with surly deference; but he refused to be degraded in this fashion--before Karl, too, whose tongue wagged so loosely.

"That is the talk of a foolish boy, not of a man," he cried wrathfully. "Am I not fitted, then, to take mademoiselle home after bringing her here?"

"Truly, on a fine day, Josef," was the smiling answer.

"I told monsieur that a _guxe_ was blowing up from the south; so did Karl; but he would not hearken. _Ma foi!_ I am not to blame." Barth, on his dignity, introduced a few words of French picked up from the Chamounix men. He fancied they would awe Stampa, and prove incidentally how wide was his own experience.

The old guide only laughed. "A nice pair, you and Karl," he shouted.

"Are the voyageurs in your care or not? You told monsieur, indeed! You ought to have refused to take mademoiselle. That would have settled the affair, I fancy."

"But this monsieur knows as much about the mountains as any of us. He might surprise even you, Stampa. He has climbed the Matterhorn from Zermatt and Breuil. He has come down the rock wall on the Col des Nantillons. How is one to argue with such a _voyageur_ on this child's glacier?"

Stampa whistled. "Oh--knows the Matterhorn, does he? What is his name?"

"Bower," said Helen,--"Mr. Mark Bower."

"What! Say that again, _fraulein_! Mark Bower? Is that your English way of putting it?"

Helen attributed Stampa's low hiss to a tardy recognition of Bower's fame as a mountaineer. Though the hour was noon, the light was feeble.

Veritable thunder clouds had gathered above the mist, and the expression of Stampa's face was almost hidden in the obscurity of the hut.

"That is his name," she repeated. "You must have heard of him. He was well known on the high Alps--years ago." She paused before she added those concluding words. She was about to say "in your time," but the subst.i.tuted phrase was less personal, since the circ.u.mstances under which Stampa ceased to be a notability in "the street" at Zermatt were in her mind.

"G.o.d in heaven!" muttered the old man, pa.s.sing a hand over his face as though waking from a dream,--"G.o.d in heaven! can it be that my prayer is answered at last?" He shambled out.

Spencer had waited to watch the almost continuous blaze of lightning playing on the glacier. Distant summits were now looming through the diminishing downpour of sleet. He was wondering if by any chance Stampa might be mistaken. Bower stood somewhat apart, seemingly engaged in the same engrossing task. The wind was not quite so fierce as during its first onset. It blew in gusts. No longer screaming in a shrill and sustained note, it wailed fitfully.

Stampa lurched unevenly close to Bower. He was about to touch him on the shoulder; but he appeared to recollect himself in time.

"Marcus Bauer," he said in a voice that was terrible by reason of its restraint.

Bower wheeled suddenly. He did not flinch. His manner suggested a certain preparedness. Thus might a strong man face a wild beast when hope lay only in the matching of sinew against sinew. "That is not my name," he snarled viciously.

"Marcus Bauer," repeated Stampa in the same repressed monotone, "I am Etta's father."

"Why do you address me in that fashion? I have never before seen you."

"No. You took care of that. You feared Etta's father, though you cared little for Christian Stampa, the guide. But I have seen you, Marcus Bauer. You were slim then--an elegant, is it not?--and many a time have I hobbled into the Hotel Mont Cervin to look at your portrait in a group lest I should forget your face. Yet I pa.s.sed you just now!

Great G.o.d! I pa.s.sed you."

A ferocity glared from Bower's eyes that might well have daunted Stampa. For an instant he glanced toward Spencer, whose clear cut profile was silhouetted against a background of white-blue ice now 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 a.s.sert 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!"