Shadows

“

It is a glorious morning. If the weather holds, your first visit to the real Alps should be memorable,” said Bower.

Helen had just descended the long flight of steps in front of the hotel. A tender purple light filled the valley. The nearer hills were silhouetted boldly against a sky of primrose and pink; but the misty depths where the lake lurked beneath the pines had not yet yielded wholly to the triumph of the new day. The air had a cold life in it that invigorated while it chilled. It resembled some vin frappé of rare vintage. Its fragrant vivacity was ready to burst forth at the first encouraging hint of a kindlier temperature.

“Why that dubious clause as to the weather?” asked Helen, looking at the golden shafts of sunlight on the topmost crags of Corvatsch and the Piz della Margna. Those far off summits were so startlingly vivid in outline that they seemed to be more accessible than the mist shrouded ravines cleaving their dun sides. It needed an effort of the imagination to correct the erring testimony of the eye.

“The moods of the hills are variable, my lady,—femininely fickle, in fact. There is a proverb that contrasts the wind with woman’s mind; but the disillusioned male who framed it evidently possessed little knowledge of weather changes in the high Alps, or else he——”

“Did you beguile me out of my cozy room at six o’clock on a frosty morning to regale me with stale jibes at my sex?”

“Perish the thought, Miss Wynton! My only intent was to explain that the ancient proverb maker, meaning to be rude, might have found a better simile.”

“Meanwhile, I am so cold that the only mood left in my composition is one of impatience to be moving.”

“Well, I am ready.”

“But where is our guide?”

“He has gone on in front with the porter.”

“Porter! What is the man carrying?”

“The wherewithal to refresh ourselves when we reach the hut.”

“Oh,” said Helen, “I had no idea that mountaineering was such a business. I thought the essentials were a packet of sandwiches and a flask.”

“You will please not be flippant. Climbing is serious work. And you must moderate your pace. If you walk at that rate from here to Forno, you will be very, very ill before you reach the hut.”

“Ill! How absurd!”

“Not only absurd but disagreeable,—far worse than crossing the Channel. Even old hands like me are not free from mountain sickness, though it seizes us at higher altitudes than we shall reach to-day. In the case of a novice, anything in the nature of hurrying during the outward journey is an unfailing factor.”

They were crossing the golf links, and the smooth path was tempting to a good walker. Helen smiled as she accommodated herself to Bower’s slower stride. Though the man might possess experience, the woman had the advantage of youth, the unattainable, and this wonderful hour after dawn was stirring its ichor in her veins.

“I suppose that is what Stampa meant when he took ‘Slow and Sure’ for his motto,” she said.

“Stampa! Who is Stampa?”

There was a sudden rasp of iron in his voice. As a rule Bower spoke with a cultivated languor that almost veiled the staccato accents of the man of affairs. Helen was so surprised by this unwarranted clang of anger that she looked at him with wide open eyes.

“He is the driver I told you of, the man who took the wheel off my carriage during the journey from St. Moritz,” she explained.

“Oh, of course. How stupid of me to forget! But, by the way, did you mention his name?”

“No, I think not. Someone interrupted me. Mr. Dunston came and spoke to you——”

He laughed gayly and drew in deep breaths of the keen air. He was carrying his ice ax over his left shoulder. With his right hand he brushed away a disturbing thought. “By Jove! yes! Dunston dragged me off to open a bank at baccarat, and you will be glad to hear that I won five hundred pounds.”

“I am glad you won; but who lost so much money?”

“Dunston dropped the greater part of it. Your American friend, Mr. Spencer, was rather inclined to brag of his prowess in that direction, it appears. He even went so far as to announce his willingness to play for four figures; but he backed out of it.”

“Do you mean that Mr. Spencer wanted to stake a thousand pounds on a single game at cards?”

“Evidently he did not want to do it, but he talked about it.”

“Yet he impressed me as being a very clear-headed and sensible young man,” said Helen decisively.

“Here, young lady, I must call you to account! In what category do you place me, then?”

“Oh, you are different. I disapprove of anyone playing for such high stakes; but I suppose you are used to it and can afford it, whereas a man who has his way to make in the world would be exceedingly foolish to do such a thing.”

“Pray, how did you come to measure the extent of Spencer’s finances?”

“Dear me! Did I say that?”

“I am sorry. Of course, I had no wish to speak offensively. What I mean is that he may be quite as well able to run a big bank at baccarat as I am.”

“He was telling me yesterday of his early struggles to gain a footing in some mining community in Colorado, and the impression his words left on me was that he is still far from wealthy; that is, as one understands the term. Here we are at the footpath. Shall we follow it and scramble up out of the ravine, or do you prefer the carriage road?”

“The footpath, please. But before we drop the subject of cards, which is unquestionably out of place on a morning like this, let me say that perhaps I have done the American an injustice. Dunston is given to exaggeration. He has so little control over his face that it is rank robbery to bet with him. Such a man is apt to run to extremes. It may be that Spencer was only talking through his hat, as they say in New York.”

Helen had the best of reasons for rejecting this version of the story. Her perceptive faculties, always well developed, were strung to high tension in Maloja. The social pinpricks inflicted there had rendered her more alert, more cautious, than was her wont. She was quite sure, for instance, judging from a number of slight indications, that Spencer was deliberately avoiding any opportunity of making Bower’s acquaintance. More than once, when an introduction seemed to be imminent, the American effaced himself. Other men in the hotel were not like that—they rather sought the great man’s company. She wondered if Bower had noticed it. Despite his candid, almost generous, disclaimer of motive, there was an undercurrent of hostility in his words that suggested a feeling of pique. She climbed the rocky path in silence until Bower spoke again.

“How do the boots go?” he asked.

“Splendidly, thanks. It was exceedingly kind of you to take such trouble about them. I had no idea one had to wear such heavy nails, and that tip of yours about the extra stockings is excellent.”

“You will acknowledge the benefit most during the descent. I have known people become absolutely lame on the home journey through wearing boots only just large enough for ordinary walking. As for the clamping of the nails over the edges of the soles, the sharp stones render that imperative. When you have crossed a moraine or two, and a peculiarly nasty geröll that exists beyond the hut, if we have time to make an easy ascent, you will understand the need of extra strong footwear.”

Helen favored him with a shy smile. “Long hours of reading have revealed the nature of a moraine,” she said; “but, please, what is a geröll?”

“A slope of loose stones. Let me see, what do they call it in Scotland and Cumberland? Ah, yes, a scree. On the French side of the Alps the same thing is known as a casse.”

“How well you know this country and its ways! Have you climbed many of the well known peaks?”

“Some years ago I scored my century beyond twelve thousand feet. That is pretty fair for an amateur.”

“Have you done the Matterhorn?”

“Yes, four times. Once I followed Tyndall’s example, and converted the summit into a pass between Switzerland and Italy.”

“How delightful! I suppose you have met many of the famous guides?”

He laughed pleasantly. “One does not attempt the Cervin or the Jungfrau without the best men, and in my time there were not twenty, all told. I had a long talk with our present guide last night, and found I had used many a track he had only seen from the valley.”

“Then——”

A loud toot on a cowhorn close at hand interrupted her. The artist was a small boy. He appeared to be waiting expectantly on a hillock for someone who came not.

“Is that a signal?” she asked.

“Yes. He is a gaumer, or cowherd,—another word for your Alpine vocabulary,—the burgher whose cattle he will drive to the pasture has probably arranged to meet him here.”

Bower was always an interesting and well informed companion. Launched now into a congenial topic, he gave Helen a thoroughly entertaining lecture on the customs of a Swiss commune. He pointed out the successive tiers of pastures, told her their names and seasons of use, and even hummed some verses of the cow songs, or Kuh-reihen, which the men sing to the cattle, addressing each animal by name.

An hour passed pleasantly in this manner. Their guide, a man named Josef Barth, and the porter, who answered to “Karl,” awaited them at the milk chalet by the side of Lake Cavloccio. Bower, evidently accustomed to the leadership of expeditions of this sort, tested their ice axes and examined the ropes slung to Barth’s rucksack.

“The Forno is a glacier de luxe,” he explained to Helen; “but it is always advisable to make sure that your appliances are in good order. That pickel you are carrying was made by the best blacksmith in Grindelwald, and you can depend on its soundness; but these men are so familiar with their surroundings that they often provide themselves with frayed ropes and damaged axes.”

“In addition to my boots, therefore, I am indebted to you for a special brand of ice ax,” she cried.

“Your gratitude now is as nothing to the ecstasy you will display when Karl unpacks his load,” he answered lightly. “Now, Miss Wynton, en route! You know the path to the glacier already, don’t you?”

“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 cumbrous 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 passed 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 mass 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 accumulation of winter débris 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 pass. 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 sturdy 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 glass 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 butt on the solid mass 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 crevasse 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 crevasse 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, fräulein—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, fräulein. My father helped him to build the first hut on the Hörnli 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 attitude 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 passing embarrassment. 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 fräulein 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 passion 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 crevasse 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 passed 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 altitudes, 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 à deux.