When the Herr Doctor had heard the innkeeper's answer, he sat for some
time with his hands planted on his knees, looking through his
spectacles at the opposite wall. Then he lifted one hand and struck
his brow impatiently. It was his way, when a chemical reaction had
come out wrong.
"Triple blockhead!" said he; "triple blockhead, thou art so bad as
Spluethner." No self-condemnation could have been worse to him than
this. Thinking again of Mrs. Knollys, he gave one deep, gruff sob.
Then he took his hat, and going out, wandered by the shore of the
glacier in the night, repeating to himself the Englishwoman's words:
"_They said that they hoped he could be recovered._" Zimmermann came
to the tent where he kept his instruments, and stood there, looking at
the sea of ice. He went to his measuring pegs, two rods of iron: one
sunk deep and frozen in the glacier, the other drilled into a rock on
the shore. "Triple blockhead!" said he again, "thou art worse than
Spluethner. The Spluethner said the glacier did not move; thou, thou
knowest that it does." He sighted from his rods to the mountain
opposite. There was a slight and all but imperceptible change of
direction from the day before.
He could not bear to see the English girl again, and all the next day
was absent from the inn. For a month he stopped at Heiligenblut, and
busied himself with his instruments. The guides of the place greeted
him coldly every day, as they started on their glacier excursions or
their chamois hunting. But none the less did Zimmermann return the
following summer, and work upon his great essay in refutation of the
Spluethner.
Mrs. Knollys went back to the little cottage in Surrey, and lived
there. The chests and cases she brought back lay unopened in the
store-room; the little rooms of the cottage that was to be their home
remained bare and unadorned, as Charles had seen them last. She could
not bring herself to alter them now. What she had looked forward to do
with him she had no strength to do alone. She rarely went out. There
was no place where she could go to think of him. He was gone; gone
from England, gone from the very surface of the earth. If he had only
been buried in some quiet English churchyard, she thought,--some green
place lying open to the sun, where she could go and scatter flowers on
his grave, where she could sit and look forward amid her tears to the
time when she should lie side by side with him,--they would then be
separated for her short life alone. Now it seemed to her that they
were far apart forever.
But late the next summer she had a letter from the place. It was from
Dr. Zimmermann. There is no need here to trace the quaint German
phrases, the formalism, the cold terms of science in which he made his
meaning plain. It spoke of erosion; of the movement of the summer; of
the action of the under-waters on the ice. And it told her, with
tender sympathy oddly blended with the pride of scientific success,
that he had given a year's most careful study to the place; with all
his instruments of measurement he had tested the relentless glacier's
flow; and it closed by assuring her that her husband might yet be
found--in five and forty years. In five and forty years--the poor
professor staked his scientific reputation on the fact--in five and
forty years she might return, and the glacier would give up its dead.
This letter made Mrs. Knollys happier. It made her willing to live; it
made her almost long to live until old age--that her Charles's body
might be given back. She took heart to beautify her little home. The
trifling articles she had bought with Charles were now brought
out,--the little curiosities and pictures he had given her on their
wedding journey. She would ask how such and such a thing looked,
turning her pretty head to some kind visitor, as she ranged them on
the walls; and now and then she would have to lay the picture down and
cry a little, silently, as she remembered where Charles had told her
it would look best. Still, she sought to furnish the rooms as they had
planned them in their mind; she made her surroundings, as nearly as
she could, as they had pictured them together. One room she never went
into; it was the room Charles had meant to have for the nursery. She
had no child.
But she changed, as we all change, with the passing of the years. I
first remember her as a woman middle-aged, sweet-faced, hardly like a
widow, nor yet like an old maid. She was rather like a young girl in
love, with her lover absent on a long journey. She lived more with the
memory of her husband, she clung to him more, than if she had had a
child. She never married; you would have guessed that; but, after the
Professor's letter, she never quite seemed to realize that her husband
was dead. Was he not coming back to her?
Never in all my knowledge of dear English women have I known a woman
so much loved. In how many houses was she always the most welcome
guest! How often we boys would go to her for sympathy! I know she was
the confidante of all our love affairs. I cannot speak for girls; but
I fancy she was much the same with them. Many of us owed our life's
happiness to her. She would chide us gently in our pettiness and
folly, and teach us, by her very presence and example, what thing it
was that alone could keep life sweet. How well we all remember the
little Surrey cottage, the little home fireside where the husband had
never been! I think she grew to imagine his presence, even the
presence of children: boys, curly-headed, like Charles, and sweet,
blue-eyed daughters; and the fact that it was all imagining seemed but
to make the place more holy. Charles still lived to her as she had
believed him in the month that they were married; he lived through
life with her as her young love had fancied he would be. She never
thought of evil that might have occurred; of failing affection, of
cares. Her happiness was in her mind alone; so all the earthly part
was absent.
There were but two events in her life--that which was past and that
which was to come. She had lived through his loss; now she lived on
for his recovery. But, as I have said, she changed, as all things
mortal change; all but the earth and the ice-stream and the stars
above it. She read much, and her mind grew deep and broad, none the
less gentle with it all; she was wiser in the world; she knew the
depths of human hope and sorrow. You remember her only as an old lady
whom we loved. Only her heart did not change--I forgot that; her
heart, and the memory of that last loving smile upon his face, as he
bent down to look into her eyes, before he slipped and fell. She lived
on, and waited for his body, as possibly his other self--who
knows?--waited for hers. As she grew older she grew taller; her eyes
were quieter, her hair a little straighter, darker than of yore; her
face changed, only the expression remained the same. Mary Knollys!
Human lives rarely look more than a year, or five, ahead; Mary Knollys
looked five and forty. Many of us wait, and grow weary in waiting, for
those few years alone, and for some living friend. Mary Knollys waited
five and forty years--for the dead. Still, after that first year, she
never wore all black; only silvery grays, and white with a black
ribbon or two. I have said that she almost seemed to think her husband
living. She would fancy his doing this and that with her; how he would
joy in this good fortune, or share her sorrows--which were few,
mercifully. His memory seemed to be a living thing to her, to go
through life with her, hand in hand; it changed as she grew old; it
altered itself to suit her changing thought; until the very memory of
her memory seemed to make it sure that he had really been alive with
her, really shared her happiness or sorrow, in the far-off days of her
earliest widowhood. It hardly seemed that he had been gone already
then--she remembered him so well. She could not think that he had
never been with her in their little cottage. And now, at sixty, I know
she thought of him as an old person too; sitting by their fireside,
late in life, mature, deep-souled, wise with the wisdom of years,
going back with her, fondly, to recall the old, old happiness of their
bridal journey, when they set off for the happy honeymoon abroad, and
the long life now past stretched brightly out before them both. She
never spoke of this, and you children never knew it; but it was always
in her mind.
There was a plain stone in the little Surrey churchyard, now gray and
moss-grown with the rains of forty years, on which you remember
reading: "Charles Knollys--lost in Carinthia"----This was all she
would have inscribed; he was but lost; no one _knew_ that he was dead.
Was he not yet to be found? There was no grassy mound beside it; the
earth was smooth. Not even the date was there. But Mrs. Knollys never
went to read it. She waited until he should come; until that last
journey, repeating the travels of their wedding-days, when she should
go to Germany to bring him home.
So the woman's life went on in England, and the glacier in the Alps
moved on slowly; and the woman waited for it to be gone.