A Funeral in the Snow.
When Charles had recovered her consciousness, she found herself
reclining on the lap of Henry, who had been bathing her face with snow
and tears. A long, painful call of her name had reached the inmost
recess of her being whither consciousness had repaired. Springing
to her feet, startled as if from a frightful dream, she gazed around.
Memory and sight returned; folding her face in her hands, she cried
in a paroxysm of grief: "My God! what have I done?"
This was the only intimation she ever gave Aloysia that in the heat
of passion she had pushed her father over the precipice; she was his
murderer. In their conversation the old man, more, perhaps, through
impiety than conviction, misrepresented the good monks. We will not
reproduce the stereotyped calumnies that even nowadays unbelievers love
to heap upon the religious communities of the Catholic Church. The
madness of passion took control in the breast of Charles. Scarcely
knowing what she did, she pushed her aged father towards the precipice;
he slipped, fell over into the chasm, and passed into eternity with
blasphemy on his guilty lips.
The two sisters wept together for hours. Innocence, guilt, and
retribution blended together in a scene of awful tragedy amid the
glaciers of Mt. Blanc.
Seldom in the deeds of brigandage, in crimes committed in dark caves
and lonely mountain paths, was there perpetrated a fouler murder;
seldom in the sensational records of human depravity do we find the
desperado of parricidal guilt under the delicate frame of girlhood.
Yet was she rather an instrument in the hands of avenging Heaven
than a monster of moral iniquity. At that moment the cup of iniquity
was full for the wretch who had long tested the mercy of God. That
Providence which blinded the Jews in judgement for ingratitude, and
made them the instruments for the fulfilment of eternal decrees of
redemption, withdrew from Alvira the protection that made her, whilst
she accepted the guilt, the instrument of judgment.
Rising to her feet with a sense of her desperate condition, making a
few hurried explanations how her father slipped and lost his balance,
she approached tremblingly the fatal edge. Leaning over, she saw the
corpse of her father lying in a pool of blood in the deep chasm below.
The scene of that sad moment was indelibly impressed on her memory,
and in after-hours of remorse haunted her with its horrors.
With nerve and courage, called forth by the awful circumstances of
the moment, they descended the mountain to the foot of the ravine
where the body lay in the snow.
The descent was steep and treacherous, and guilty conscience made
Charles tremble lest at any moment she would lose footing and be
precipitated down the dark and gaping chasms formed by glaciers and
rocks. After hours of toil, and with imminent peril, they found the
body of Cassier. A dark pallor had clouded his features, a ghastly
stare, closed teeth, and clenched hand bespoke the last sentiment
of human passion. Alvira trembled and stood powerless for a few
moments. Still, necessity nerved her to action. She removed the
money and valuables from the body of her father, and, in the midst
of wailings that echoed mournfully through the lonely mountain, they
made a grave in the snow. Wrapping him in his cloak, they laid him
in a bank of soft crystals through which the blood had trickled in
crimson streams.
Thrilling and sad for Aloysia and Alvira the last moments of this
funeral ceremony. Gently they placed the cold snow on the remains of
their father. The wild eagle swooped around in anger, and the wind
swept with ominous sighs through deep ravines of the rugged mountain.
The gigantic cliff over which Cassier had been hurled by his maddened
child frowned over them in awful majesty. It would be in centuries
to come the cenotaph of a dishonored tomb. The winter would come again
with fresh snow to cover this valley of death; the sun would pour its
cold rays on the frozen mound that marked the grave of Cassier. No
tear of affection would moisten the icy shroud, but, in sympathy for
the hapless child stained with his blood, whose crime was condoned in
the provocation caused, the world has cast its abhorrent curse on the
grave of the reprobate.
"There let every noxious thing
Trail its filth and fix its sting;
In his ears and eyeballs tingling,
With his blood their poison mingling,
Till beneath the solar fires.
Rankling all, the curse expires."