A heavy weight gradually lifted off his shoulders as he watched the wheels of the vehicle churning up the brown snow broth along the valley road. Within two hours his message would reach a telegraph office. Two more would bring it to Mackenzie. With reasonable luck, the line repairers would link Maloja to the outer world that afternoon, and Helen would hie homeward in the morning. It was a pity that her holiday and his wooing should be interfered with; but who could have foretold that Millicent Jaques would drop from the sky in that unheralded way? Her probable interference in the quarrel between Stampa and Bower put Mrs. de la Vere’s suggestion out of court. A woman bent on requiting a personal slight would never consent to forego such a chance of obtaining ample vengeance as Bower’s earlier history provided.
In any case, Spencer was sure that the sooner Helen and he were removed from their present environment the happier they would be. He hoped most fervently that the course of events might be made smooth for their departure. He cared not a jot for the tittle-tattle of the hotel. Let him but see Helen re-established in London, and it would not be his fault if they did not set forth on their honeymoon before the year was much older.
He disliked this secret plotting and contriving. He adopted such methods only because they offered the surest road to success. Were he to consult his own feelings, he would go straight to Helen, tell her how chance had conspired with vagrom fancy to bring them together, and ask her to believe, as all who love are ready to believe, that their union was predestined throughout the ages.
But he could not explain his presence in Switzerland without referring to Bower, and the task was eminently distasteful. In all things concerning the future relations between Helen and himself, he was done with pretense. If he could help it, her first visit to the Alps should not have its record darkened by the few miserable pages torn out of Bower’s life. After many years the man’s sin had discovered him. That which was then done in secret was now about to be shrieked aloud from the housetops. “Even the gods cannot undo the past,” said the old Greeks, and the stern dogma had lost nothing of its truth with the march of the centuries. Indeed, Spencer regretted his rival’s threatened exposure. If it lay in his power, he would prevent it: meanwhile, Helen must be snatched from the enduring knowledge of her innocent association with the offender and his pillory. He set his mind on the achievement. To succeed, he must monopolize her company until she quitted the hotel en route for London.
Then he thought of Mrs. de la Vere as a helper. Her seeming shallowness, her glaring affectations, no longer deceived him. The mask lifted for an instant by that backward glance as she convoyed Helen to her room the previous night had proved altogether ineffective since their talk on the veranda. He did not stop to ask himself why such a woman, volatile, fickle, blown this way and that by social zephyrs, should champion the cause of romance. He simply thanked Heaven for it, nor sought other explanation than was given by his unwavering belief in the essential nobility of her sex.
Therein he was right. Had he trusted to her intuition, and told Millicent Jaques at the earliest possible moment exactly how matters stood between Helen and himself, it is only reasonable to suppose that the actress would have changed her plan of campaign. She had no genuine antipathy toward Helen, whose engagement to Spencer would be her strongest weapon against Bower. As matters stood, however, Helen was a stumbling block in her path, and her jealous rage was in process of being fanned to a passionate intensity, when Spencer, searching for Mrs. de la Vere, saw Millicent in the midst of a group composed of the Vavasours, mother and son, the General, and his daughters.
Mrs. de Courcy Vavasour was the evil spirit who brought about this sinister gathering. She was awed by Bower, she would not risk a snubbing from Mrs. de la Vere, and she was exceedingly annoyed to think that Helen might yet topple her from her throne. To one of her type this final consideration was peculiarly galling. And the too susceptible Georgie would be quite safe with the lady from the Wellington Theater. Mrs. Vavasour remembered the malice in Millicent’s fine eyes when she refused to quail before Bower’s wrath. A hawk in pursuit of a plump pigeon would not turn aside to snap up an insignificant sparrow. So, being well versed in the tactics of these social skirmishes, she sought Millicent’s acquaintance.
The younger woman was ready to meet her more than halfway. The hotel gossips were the very persons whose aid she needed. A gracious smile and a pouting complaint against the weather were the preliminaries. In two minutes they were discussing Helen, and General Wragg was drawn into their chat. Georgie and the Misses Wragg, of course, came uninvited. They scented scandal as jackals sniff the feast provided by the mightier beasts.
Millicent, really despising these people, but anxious to hear the story of Bower’s love making, made no secret of her own sorrows. “Miss Wynton was my friend,” she said with ingenuous pathos. “She never met Mr. Bower until I introduced her to him a few days before she came to Switzerland. You may guess what a shock it gave me when I heard that he had followed her here. Even then, knowing how strangely coincidence works at times, I refused to believe that the man who was my promised husband would abandon me under the spell of a momentary infatuation. For it can be nothing more.”
“Are you sure?” asked the sympathetic Mrs. Vavasour.