“Surely you told her you would marry her, Herr Baron?” he said gently. “Was it not to implore you to keep your vow that she journeyed all the way from Zermatt to the Maloja? She was but a child, an innocent and frightened child, and you should not have been so brutal when she came to you in the hotel. Ah, well! It is all ended and done with now. It is said the Madonna gives her most powerful aid to young girls who seek from her Son the mercy they were denied on earth. And my Etta has been dead sixteen long years,—long enough for her sin to be cleansed by the fire of Purgatory. Perhaps to-day, when justice is done to her at last, she may be admitted to Paradise. Who can tell? I would ask the priest; but he would bid me not question the ways of Providence.”
At last Bower found his voice. “Etta is at peace,” he muttered. “We have suffered for our folly—both of us. I—I could not marry her. It was impossible.”
Stampa did look at him then,—such a look as the old Roman may have cast on the man who caused him to slay his loved daughter. Yet, when he spoke, his words were measured, almost reverent. “Not impossible, Marcus Bower. Nothing is impossible to God, and He ordained that you should marry my Etta.”
“I tell you——” began Bower huskily; but the other silenced him with a gesture.
“They took her to the inn,—they are kind people who live there,—and someone telegraphed to me. The news went to Zermatt, and back to Pontresina. I was high up in the Bernina with my party. But a friend found me, and I ran like a madman over ice and rock in the foolish belief that if only I held my little girl in my arms I should kiss her back to life again. I took the line of a bird. If I had crossed the Muretto, I should not be lame to-day; but I took Corvatsch in my path, and I fell, and when I saw Etta’s grave the grass was growing on it. Come! The turf is sixteen years old now.”
Breaking off thus abruptly, he swung away into the open pasture. Bower, heavy with wrath and care, strode close behind. He strove to keep his brain intent on the one issue,—to placate this sorrowing old man, to persuade him that silence was best.
Soon they reached a path that curved upward among stunted trees. It ended at an iron gate in the center of a low wall. Bower shuddered. This, then, was the cemetery. He had never noticed it, though in former years he could have drawn a map of the Maloja from memory, so familiar was he with every twist and turn of mountain, valley, and lake. The sun was hot on that small, pine sheltered hillock. The snow was beginning to melt. It clogged their feet, and left green patches where their footprints would have been clearly marked an hour earlier. And they were not the only visitors that day. There were signs of one who had climbed the hill since the snow ceased falling.
Inside the wall the white covering lay deep. Bower’s prominent eyes, searching everywhere with furtive horror, saw that a little space had been cleared in one corner. The piled up snow was strewed with broken weeds and tufts of long grass. It bore an uncanny resemblance to the edges of a grave. He paused, irresolute, unnerved, yet desperately determined to fall in with Stampa’s strange mood.