All this you know. And I was also told more of the young girl, bride
and widow at eighteen; how she sought to throw herself into the clear
blue gulf; how she refused to leave Heiligenblut; how she would sit,
tearless, by the rim of the crevasse, day after day, and gaze into
its profundity. A guide or man was always with her at these times, for
it was still feared she would follow her young husband to the depths
of that still sea. Her aunt went over from England to her; the summer
waxed; autumn storms set in; but no power could win her from the place
whence Charles had gone.
If there was a time worse for her than that first moment, it was when
they told her that his body never could be found. They did not dare to
tell her this for many days, but busied themselves with idle cranes
and ladders, and made futile pretences with ropes. Some of the big,
simple-hearted guides even descended into the chasm, absenting
themselves for an hour or so, to give her an idea that something was
being done. Poor Mrs. Knollys would have followed them had she been
allowed, to wander through the purple galleries, calling Charles. It
was well she could not; for all Kaspar could do was to lower himself a
hundred yards or so, chisel out a niche, and stand in it, smoking his
honest pipe to pass the time, and trying to fancy he could hear the
murmur of the waters down below. Meantime Mrs. Knollys strained her
eyes, peering downward from above, leaning on the rope about her
waist, looking over the clear brink of the bergschrund.
It was the Herr Doctor Zimmermann who first told her the truth. Not
that the good Doctor meant to do so. The Herr Doctor had had his
attention turned to glaciers by some rounded stones in his garden
by the Traunsee, and more particularly by the Herr Privatdocent
Spluethner. Spluethner, like Uncle Toby, had his hobby-horse, his pet
conjuring words, his gods _ex machina_, which he brought upon the
field in scientific emergencies; and these gods, as with Thales, were
Fire and Water. Craters and flood were his accustomed scapegoats, upon
whose heads were charged all things unaccountable; and the Herr
Doctor, who had only one element left to choose from, and that a
passive one, but knew, on general principles, that Spluethner must be
wrong, got as far off as he could and took Ice. And Spluethner having
pooh-poohed this, Zimmermann rode his hypothesis with redoubled zeal.
He became convinced that ice was the embodiment of orthodoxy. Fixing
his professional spectacles on his substantial nose, he went into
Carinthia and ascended the great Venice mountains, much as he would
have performed any other scientific experiment. Then he encamped on
the shores of the Pasterzen glacier, and proceeded to make a study of
it.
So it happened that the Doctor, taking a morning stroll over the
subject of his experiment, in search of small things which might
verify his theory, met Mrs. Knollys sitting in her accustomed place.
The Doctor had been much puzzled, that morning, on finding in a rock
at the foot of the glacier the impression, or sign-manual as it were,
of a certain fish, whose acquaintance the Doctor had previously made
only in tropical seas. This fact seeming, superficially, to chime in
with Spluethnerian mistakes in a most heterodox way, the Doctor's mind
had for a moment been diverted from the ice; and he was wondering what
the fish had been going to do in that particular gallery, and secretly
doubting whether it had known its own mind, and gone thither with the
full knowledge and permission of its maternal relative. Indeed, the
good Doctor would probably have ascribed its presence to the malicious
and personal causation of the devil, but that the one point on which
he and Spluethner were agreed was the ignoring of unscientific
hypotheses. The Doctor's objections to the devil were none the less
strenuous for being purely scientific.
Thus ruminating, the Doctor came to the crevasse where Mrs. Knollys
was sitting, and to which a little path had now been worn from the
inn. There was nothing of scientific interest about the fair young
English girl, and the Doctor did not notice her; but he took from his
waistcoat-pocket a leaden bullet, moulded by himself, and marked
"Johannes Carpentarius, Juvavianus, A. U. C. 2590," and dropped it,
with much satisfaction, into the crevasse. Mrs. Knollys gave a little
cry; the bullet was heard for some seconds tinkling against the sides
of the chasm; the tinkles grew quickly fainter, but they waited in
vain for the noise of the final fall. "May the Spluethner live that he
may learn by it," muttered the Doctor; "I can never recover it."
Then he remembered that the experiment had been attended with a sound
unaccounted for by the conformity of the bullet to the laws of
gravitation; and looking up he saw Mrs. Knollys in front of him, no
longer crying, but very pale. Zimmermann started, and in his confusion
dropped his best brass registering thermometer, which also rattled
down the abyss.
"You say," whispered Mrs. Knollys, "that it can never be recovered!"
"Madam," spoke the Doctor, doffing his hat, "how would you recofer
from a blace when the smallest approximation which I haf yet been able
to make puts the depth from the surface to the bed of the gletscher at
vrom sixteen hundred to sixteen hundred and sixty _metres_ in
distance?" Doctor Zimmermann spoke very good English; and he pushed
his hat upon the back of his head, and assumed his professional
attitude.
"But they all were trying----" Mrs. Knollys spoke faintly. "They said
that they hoped he could be recovered." The stranger was the oldest
gentleman she had seen, and Mrs. Knollys felt almost like confiding in
him. "Oh, I must have the--the body." She closed in a sob; but the
Herr Doctor caught at the last word, and this suggested to him only
the language of scientific experiment.
"Recofer it? If, madam," Zimmermann went on with all the satisfaction
attendant on the enunciation of a scientific truth, "we take a body
and drop it in the schrund of this gletscher; and the ice-stream moves
so slower at its base than on the upper part, and the ice will cover
it; efen if we could reach the base, which is a mile in depth. Then,
see you, it is all caused by the motion of the ice----"
But at this Mrs. Knollys had given a faint cry, and her guide rushed
up angrily to the old professor, who stared helplessly forward. "God
will help me, sir," said she to the Doctor, and she gave the guide her
arm and walked wearily away.
The professor still stared in amazement at her enthusiasm for
scientific experiment and the passion with which she greeted his
discoveries. Here was a person who utterly refused to be referred to
the agency of ice, or even, like Spluethner, of Fire and Water; and
went out of the range of allowable hypotheses to call upon a Noumenon.
Now both Spluethner and Zimmermann had studied all natural agencies and
made allowance for them, but for the Divine they had always hitherto
proved an alibi. The Doctor could make nothing of it.
At the inn that evening he saw Mrs. Knollys with swollen eyes; and
remembering the scene of the afternoon, he made inquiries about her of
the innkeeper. The latter had heard the guide's account of the
meeting; and as soon as Zimmermann had made plain what he had told her
of the falling body, "Triple blockhead!" said he. "_Es war ihr Mann._"
The Herr Professor staggered back into his seat; and the kindly
innkeeper ran upstairs to see what had happened to his poor young
guest.
Mrs. Knollys had recovered from the first shock by this time, but the
truth could no longer be withheld. The innkeeper could but nod his
head sadly, when she told him that to recover her Charles was
hopeless. All the guides said the same thing. The poor girl's husband
had vanished from the world as utterly as if his body had been burned
to ashes and scattered in the pathway of the winds. Charles Knollys
was gone, utterly gone; no more to be met with by his girl-wife, save
as spirit to spirit, soul to soul, in ultramundane place. The
fair-haired young Englishman lived but in her memory, as his soul, if
still existent, lived in places indeterminate, unknowable to Doctor
Zimmermann and his compeers. Slowly Mrs. Knollys acquired the belief
that she was never to see her Charles again. Then, at last, she
resolved to go--to go home. Her strength now gave way; and when her
aunt left she had with her but the ghost of Mrs. Knollys--a broken
figure, drooping in the carriage, veiled in black. The innkeeper and
all the guides stood bare-headed, silent, about the door, as the
carriage drove off, bearing the bereaved widow back to England.