Millicent agreed. For the second time, she resolved to postpone her journey to St. Moritz.
Bower was surprised when Stampa led him into the main road. Having never seen any sign of a cemetery at Maloja, he guessed vaguely that it must be situated close to the church. Therein, in a sense, he was right. It will be remembered how Helen’s solitary ramble on the morning after her arrival in Maloja brought her to the secluded graveyard. She first visited the little Swiss tabernacle which had attracted her curiosity, and thence took the priest’s path to the last resting place of his flock. But Stampa had a purpose in following a circuitous route. He turned sharply round the base of a huge pile of logs, stacked there in readiness for the fires of a long winter.
“Look!” he said, throwing open the half door of a cattle shed behind the timber. “They found her here on the second of August, a Sunday morning, just before the people went to early mass. By her side was a bottle labeled ‘Poison.’ She bought it in Zermatt on the sixth of July. So, you see, my little girl had been thinking a whole month of killing herself. Poor child! What a month! They tell me, Herr Baron, you left Zermatt on the sixth of July?”
Bower’s face had grown cold and gray while the old man was speaking. He began to understand. Stampa would spare him none of the horror of the tragedy from which he fled like a lost soul when the news of it reached the hotel. Well, he would not draw back now. If Stampa and he were destined to have a settlement, why defer it? This was his day of reckoning,—of atonement, he hoped,—and he would not shirk the ordeal, though his flesh quivered and his humbled pride lashed him like a whip.
The squalid stable was peculiarly offensive. Owing to the gale, the cattle that ought to be pasturing in the high alp were crowded there in reeking filth. Yesterday, not long before this hour, he was humming verses of cow songs to Helen, and beguiling the way to the Forno with a recital of the customs and idyls of the hills. What a spiteful thing was Fate! Why had this doting peasant risen from the dead to drag him through the mire of a past transgression? If Stampa betrayed anger, if his eyes and voice showed the scorn and hatred of a man justly incensed because of his daughter’s untimely death, the situation would be more tolerable. But his words were mild, biting only by reason of their simple pathos. He spoke in a detached manner. He might be relating the unhappy story of some village maid of whom he had no personal knowledge. This complete self effacement grated on Bower’s nerves. It almost spurred him again to ungovernable rage. But he realized the paramount need of self control. He clenched his teeth in the effort to bear his punishment without protest.
And Stampa seemed to have the gift of divination. He read Bower’s heart. By some means he became aware that the unsavory shed was loathsome to the fine gentleman standing beside him.
“Etta was always so neat in her dress that it must have been a dreadful thing to see her laid there,” he went on. “She fell just inside the door. Before she drank the poison she must have looked once at the top of old Corvatsch. She thought of me, I am sure, for she had my letter in her pocket telling her that I was at Pontresina with my voyageurs. And she would think of you too,—her lover, her promised husband.”
Bower cleared his throat. He tried to frame a denial; but Stampa waved the unspoken thought aside.