"Eglah was terribly hurt to find Amos had heard twice from you while,
consumed with suspense, she had received not even a line. After we went
home she grew more and more restless, but I noticed she carefully
avoided any allusion to you. One night I heard her moving about, and
then she left her room. It is a lonely little place where we live,
rather unprotected, and the servants--man and wife--do not wake easily.
Eglah had a way of walking about the gallery and yard when she could not
sleep that made me uneasy. I went out to expostulate, and found her
sitting on the steps in the moonlight with that jacket of yours in her
arms. I sat down and took her hand. In a horrible dream, she had seen
you lying dead between two blue slabs of ice, a white owl on your
breast, and she was hugging and stroking that striped silk as only those
who love can caress the garments of lost darlings. You know she very
rarely cries. In all her life I never saw tears on her face more than
three or four times. I tried to soothe her, and said that full moon
overhead was making the Pole itself bright. She turned suddenly to me,
the tears dripping, and, oh, if I could give you the heartbroken tone in
which she said:
'The broad noonday was night to me,
The full-moon night was dark to me,
The stars whirled and the poles span
The hour God took him far from me.'
"After that night she guarded herself more closely against any
expression of feeling, and carefully abstained from all reference to you
until the evening she learned from a Boston paper that your vessel had
returned to Europe, and you had preferred to stay in Arctic regions. My
poor baby! She looked so white, so stunned, as if some one had struck
her a heavy blow."
Eliza sobbed and her tears streamed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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