The Silent Barrier Part 11

Helen rose first, and that gave him an opportunity to note her graceful carriage. Though born in the States, he was of British stock, and he did not share the professed opinion of the American humorist that the typical Englishwoman is angular, has large feet, and does not know how to walk. Helen, at any rate, betrayed none of these elements of caricature. Though there were several so-called "smart" women in the hotel,--women who clung desperately to the fringe of Society on both sides of the Atlantic,--his protegee was easily first among the few who had any claim to good looks.

Helen was not only tall and lithe, but her movements were marked by a quiet elegance. It was her custom, in nearly all weathers, to walk from Bayswater to Professor von Eulenberg's study, which, needless to say, was situated near the British Museum. She usually returned by a longer route, unless pelting rain or the misery of London snow made the streets intolerable. Thus there was hardly a day that she did not cover eight miles at a rapid pace, a method of training that eclipsed all the artifices of beauty doctors and schools of deportment. Her sweetly pretty face, her abundance of s.h.i.+ning brown hair, her slim, well proportioned figure, and the almost athletic swing of her well arched shoulders, would ent.i.tle her to notice in a gathering of beauties far more noted than those who graced Maloja with their presence that year. In addition to these physical attractions she carried with her the rarer and indefinable aura of the born aristocrat. As it happened, she merited that description both by birth and breeding; but there is a vast company ent.i.tled to consideration on that score to whom nature has cruelly denied the necessary hallmarks--otherwise the pages of Burke would surely be embellished with portraits.

Indeed, so far as appearance went, it was rather ludicrous to regard Helen as the social inferior of any person then resident in the Kursaal, and it is probable that a glimmering knowledge of this fact inflamed Mrs. de Courcy Vavasour's wrath to boiling point, when a few minutes later, she saw her son coolly walk up to the "undesirable"

and enter into conversation with her.

Helen was seated in a shady corner. A flood of sunlight filled the gla.s.s covered veranda with a grateful warmth. She had picked up an astonis.h.i.+ngly well written and scholarly guide book issued by the proprietors of the hotel, and was deep in its opening treatise on the history and racial characteristics of the Engadiners, when she was surprised at hearing herself addressed by name.

"Er--Miss--er--Wynton, I believe?" said a drawling voice.

Looking up, she found George de Courcy Vavasour bending over her in an att.i.tude that betokened the utmost admiration for both parties to the tete-a-tete. Under ordinary conditions,--that is to say, if Vavasour's existence depended on his own exertions,--Helen's eyes would have dwelt on a gawky youth endowed with a certain pertness that might in time have brought him from behind the counter of a drapery store to the wider arena of the floor. As it was, a reasonably large income gave him unbounded a.s.surance, and his credit with a good tailor was unquestionable. He represented a British product that flourishes best in alien soil. There exists a foreign legion of George de Courcy Vavasours, flaccid heroes of fas.h.i.+on plates, whose parade grounds change with the seasons from Paris to the Riviera, and from the Riviera to some nook in the Alps. Providence and a grandfather have conspired in their behalf to make work unnecessary; but Providence, more far-seeing than grandfathers, has decreed that they shall be effete and light brained, so the type does not endure.

Helen, out of the corner of her eye, became aware that Mrs. de Courcy Vavasour was advancing with all the plumes of the British matron ruffled for battle. It was not in human nature that the girl should not recall the slight offered her the previous evening. With the thought came the temptation to repay it now with interest; but she thrust it aside.

"Yes, that is my name," she said, smiling pleasantly.

"Well--er--the General has asked me to--er--invite you take part in some of our tournaments. We have tennis, you know, an' golf, an'

croquet, an' that sort of thing. Of course, you play tennis, an' I rather fancy you're a golfer as well. You look that kind of girl--Eh, what?"

He caressed a small mustache as he spoke, using the finger and thumb of each hand alternately, and Helen noticed that his hands were surprisingly large when compared with his otherwise fragile frame.

"Who is the General?" she inquired.

"Oh, Wragg, you know. He looks after everything in the amus.e.m.e.nt line, an' I help. Do let me put you down for the singles an' mixed doubles.

None of the women here can play for nuts, an' I haven't got a partner yet for the doubles. I've been waitin' for someone like you to turn up."

"You have not remained long in suspense," she could not help saying.

"You are Mr. Vavasour, are you not?"

"Yes, better known as Georgie."

"And you arrived in Maloja last evening, I think. Well, I do play tennis, or rather, I used to play fairly well some years ago----"

"By gad! just what I thought. Go slow in your practice games, Miss Wynton, an' you'll have a rippin' handicap."

"Would that be quite honest?" said Helen, lifting her steadfast brown eyes to meet his somewhat too free scrutiny.

"Honest? Rather! You wait till you see the old guard pullin' out a bit when they settle down to real business. But the General is up to their little dodges. He knows their form like a book, an' he gets every one of 'em shaken out by the first round--Eh, what?"

"The arrangement seems to be ideal if one is friendly with the General," said Helen.

Vavasour drew up a chair. He also drew up the ends of his trousers, thus revealing that the Pomeranian brown and myrtle green stripes in his necktie were faithfully reproduced in his socks, while these master tints were thoughtfully developed in the subdominant hues of his clothes and boots.

"By Jove! what a stroke of luck I should have got hold of you first!"

he chuckled. "I'm pretty good at the net, Miss Wynton. If we manage things properly, we ought to have the mixed doubles a gift with plus half forty, an' in the ladies' singles you'll be a Queen's Club champion at six-stone nine--Eh, what?"

Though Vavasour represented a species of inane young man whom Helen detested, she bore with him because she hungered for the sound of an English voice in friendly converse this bright morning. At times her life was lonely enough in London; but she had never felt her isolation there. The great city appealed to her in all its moods. Her cheerful yet sensitive nature did not shrink from contact with its hurrying crowds. The mere sense of aloofness among so many millions of people brought with it the knowledge that she was one of them, a human atom plunged into a heedless vortex the moment she pa.s.sed from her house into the street.

Here in Maloja things were different. While her own ident.i.ty was laid bare, while men and women canva.s.sed her name, her appearance, her occupation, she was cut off from them by a social wall of their own contriving. The att.i.tude of the younger women told her that trespa.s.sers were forbidden within that sacred fold. She knew now that she had done a daring thing--outraged one of the cheap conventions--in coming alone to this clique-ridden Swiss valley. Better a thousand times have sought lodgings in some small village inn, and mixed with the homely folk who journeyed thither on the diligence or tramped joyously afoot, than strive to win the sympathy of any of these shallow nonent.i.ties of the smart set.

Even while listening to "Georgie's" efforts to win her smiles with slangy confidences, she saw that Mrs. Vavasour had halted in mid career, and joined a group of women, evidently a mother and two daughters, and that she herself was the subject of their talk. She wondered why. She was somewhat perplexed when the conclave broke up suddenly, the girls going to the door, Mrs. Vavasour retreating majestically to the far end of the veranda, and the other elderly woman drawing a short, fat, red faced man away from a discussion with another man.

"Jolly place, this," Vavasour was saying. "There's dancin' most nights. The dowager brigade want the band to play cla.s.sical music, an'

that sort of rot, you know; but Mrs. de la Vere and the Wragg girls like a hop, an' we generally arrange things our own way. We'll have a dance to-night if you wish it; but you must promise to----"

"Georgie," cried the pompous little man, "I want you a minute!"

Vavasour swung round. Evidently he regarded the interruption as "a beastly bore." "All right, General," he said airily. "I'll be there soon. No hurry, is there?"

"Yes, I want you now!" The order was emphatic. The General's only military a.s.set was a martinet voice, and he made the most of it.

"Rather rotten, isn't it, interferin' with a fellow in this way?"

muttered Vavasour. "Will you excuse me? I must see what the old boy is worryin' about. I shall come back soon--Eh, what?"

"I am going out," said Helen; "but we shall meet again. I remain here a month."

"You'll enter for the tournament?" he asked over his shoulder.

"I--think so. It will be something to do."

"Thanks awfully. And don't forget to-night."

Helen laughed. She could not help it. The younger members of the Wragg family were eying her sourly through the gla.s.s part.i.tion. They seemed to be nice girls too, and she made up her mind to disillusion them speedily if they thought that she harbored designs on the callow youth whom they probably regarded as their own special cavalier.

When she pa.s.sed through the inner doorway to go to her room she noticed that the General was giving Georgie some instructions which were listened to in sulky silence. Indeed, that remarkable ex-warrior was laying down the law of the British parish with a clearness that was admirable. He had been young himself once,--dammit!--and had as keen an eye for a pretty face as any other fellow; but no gentleman could strike up an acquaintance with an unattached female under the very nose of his mother, not to mention the noses of other ladies who were his friends. Georgie broke out in protest.

"Oh, but I say, General, she is a lady, an' you yourself said----"

"I know I did. I was wrong. Even a wary old bird like me can make a mistake. Mrs. Vavasour has just warned my wife about her. It's no good arguing, Georgie, my boy. Nowadays you can't draw the line too rigidly. Things permissible in Paris or Nice won't pa.s.s muster here.

I'm sorry, Georgie. She's a high stepper and devilish taking, I admit.

Writes for some ha'penny rag--er--for some cheap society paper, I hear. Why, dash it all, she will be lampooning us in it before we know where we are. Just you go and tell your mother you'll behave better in future. Excellent woman, Mrs. Vavasour. She never makes a mistake.

Gad! don't you remember how she spotted that waiter from the Ritz who gulled the lot of us at the Jetee last winter? Took him for the French marquis he said he was, every one of us, women and all, till Mrs. V.

fixed her eye on him and said, 'Gustave!' Damme! how he curled up!"

George was still obdurate. A masquerading waiter differed from Helen in many essentials. "He was a Frenchman, an' they're mostly rotters.

This girl is English, General, an' I shall look a proper sort of an a.s.s if I freeze up suddenly after what I've said to her."

"Not for the first time, my boy, and mebbe not for the last." Then, in view of the younger man's obvious defiance, the General's white mustache bristled. "Of course, you can please yourself," he growled: "but neither Mrs. Wragg nor my daughters will tolerate your acquaintance with that person!"

"Oh, all right, General," came the irritated answer. "Between you an'

the mater I've got to come to heel; but it's a beastly shame, I say, an' you're all makin' a jolly big mistake."

Georgie's intelligence might be superficial; but he knew a lady when he met one, and Helen had attracted him powerfully. He was thanking his stars for the good fortune that numbered him among the earliest of her acquaintances in the hotel, and it was too bad that the barring edict should have been issued against her so unexpectedly. But he was not of a fighting breed, and he quailed before the threat of Mrs.

Wragg's displeasure.

Helen, after a delightful ramble past the chateau and along the picturesque turns and twists of the Colline des Artistes, returned in time for tea, which was served on the veranda, the common rendezvous of the hotel during daylight. No one spoke to her. She went out again, and walked by the lake till the shadows fell and the mountains glittered in purple and gold. She dressed herself in a simple white evening frock, dined in solitary state, and ventured into the ball room after dinner.

Georgie was dancing with Mrs. de la Vere, a languid looking woman who seemed to be pining for admiration. At the conclusion of the waltz that was going on when Helen entered, Vavasour brought his partner a whisky and soda and a cigarette. He pa.s.sed Helen twice, but ignored her, and whirled one of the Wragg girls off into a polka. Again he failed to see her when parties were being formed for a quadrille. Even to herself she did not attempt to deny a feeling of annoyance, though she extracted a bitter amus.e.m.e.nt from the knowledge that she had been slighted by such a vapid creature.