Short stories, American; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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