In the summer of 1882, the little Carinthian village of Heiligenblut
was haunted by two persons. One was a young German scientist, with
long hair and spectacles; the other was a tall English lady, slightly
bent, with a face wherein the finger of time had deeply written tender
things. Her hair was white as silver, and she wore a long black veil.
Their habits were strangely similar. Every morning, when the eastern
light shone deepest into the ice-cavern at the base of the great
Pasterzen glacier, these two would walk thither; then both would sit
for an hour or two and peer into its depths. Neither knew why the
other was there. The woman would go back for an hour in the late
afternoon; the man, never. He knew that the morning light was
necessary for his search.
The man was the famous young Zimmermann, son of his father, the old
Doctor, long since dead. But the Herr Doctor had written a famous
tract, when late in life, refuting all Spluethners, past, present, and
to come; and had charged his son, in his dying moments, as a most
sacred trust, that he should repair to the base of the Pasterzen
glacier in the year 1882, where he would find a leaden bullet, graven
with his father's name, and the date A. U. C. 2590. All this would be
vindication of his father's science. Spluethner, too, was a very old
man, and Zimmermann the younger (for even he was no longer young) was
fearful lest Spluethner should not live to witness his own refutation.
The woman and the man never spoke to each other.
Alas, no one could have known Mrs. Knollys for the fair English girl
who had been there in the young days of the century; not even the
innkeeper, had he been there. But he, too, was long since dead. Mrs.
Knollys was now bent and white-haired; she had forgotten, herself, how
she had looked in those old days. Her life had been lived. She was now
like a woman of another world; it seemed another world in which her
fair hair had twined about her husband's fingers, and she and Charles
had stood upon the evening mountain, and looked in one another's eyes.
That was the world of her wedding-days, but it seemed more like a
world she had left when born on earth. And now he was coming back to
her in this. Meantime the great Pasterzen glacier had moved on,
marking only the centuries; the men upon its borders had seen no
change; the same great waves lifted their snowy heads upon its
surface; the same crevasse still was where he had fallen. At night,
the moonbeams, falling, still shivered off its glassy face; its pale
presence filled the night, and immortality lay brooding in its
hollows.
Friends were with Mrs. Knollys, but she left them at the inn. One old
guide remembered her, and asked to bear her company. He went with her
in the morning, and sat a few yards from her, waiting. In the
afternoon she went alone. He would not have credited you, had you told
him that the glacier moved. He thought it but an Englishwoman's fancy,
but he waited with her. Himself had never forgotten that old day. And
Mrs. Knollys sat there silently, searching the clear depths of the
ice, that she might find her husband.
One night she saw a ghost. The latest beam of the sun, falling on a
mountain opposite, had shone back into the ice-cavern; and seemingly
deep within, in the grave azure light, she fancied she saw a face
turned toward her. She even thought she saw Charles's yellow hair, and
the self-same smile his lips had worn when he bent down to her before
he fell. It could be but a fancy. She went home, and was silent with
her friends about what had happened. In the moonlight she went back,
and again the next morning before dawn. She told no one of her going;
but the old guide met her at the door, and walked silently behind her.
She had slept, the glacier ever present in her dreams.
The sun had not yet risen when she came; and she sat a long time in
the cavern, listening to the murmur of the river, flowing under the
glacier at her feet. Slowly the dawn began, and again she seemed to
see the shimmer of a face--such a face as one sees in the coals of a
dying fire. Then the full sun came over the eastern mountain, and the
guide heard a woman's cry. There before her was Charles Knollys! The
face seemed hardly pale; and there was the same faint smile--a smile
like her memory of it, five and forty years gone by. Safe in the
clear ice, still, unharmed, there lay--O God! not her Charles; not the
Charles of her own thought, who had lived through life with her and
shared her sixty years; not the old man she had borne thither in her
mind--but a boy, a boy of one and twenty lying asleep, a ghost from
another world coming to confront her from the distant past, immortal
in the immortality of the glacier. There was his quaint coat, of the
fashion of half a century before; his blue eyes open; his young, clear
brow; all the form of the past she had forgotten; and she his bride
stood there to welcome him, with her wrinkles, her bent figure, and
thin white hairs. She was living, he was dead; and she was two and
forty years older than he.
Then at last the long-kept tears came to her, and she bent her white
head in the snow. The old man came up with his pick, silently, and
began working in the ice. The woman lay weeping, and the boy with his
still, faint smile, lay looking at them, through the clear ice-veil,
from his open eyes.
I believe that the Professor found his bullet; I know not. I believe
that the scientific world rang with his name and the thesis that he
published on the glacier's motion, and the changeless temperature his
father's lost thermometer had shown. All this you may read. I know no
more.
But I know that in the English churchyard there are now two graves,
and a single stone, to Charles Knollys and Mary, his wife; and the boy
of one and twenty sleeps there with his bride of sixty-three: his
young frame with her old one, his yellow hair beside her white. And I
do not know that there is not some place, not here, where they are
still together, and he is twenty-one and she is still eighteen. I do
not know this; but I know that all the pamphlets of the German doctor
cannot tell me it is false.
Meantime the great Pasterzen glacier moves on, and the rocks with it;
and the mountain flings his shadow of the planets in its face.