‘What was it, Wilfrid?’
‘Oh! I can’t talk about it yet,’ I answered.
I never did tell him that dream; for even then I was often uneasy about him—he was so sensitive. The affections of my friend were as hoops of steel; his feelings a breath would ripple. Oh, my Charley! if ever we meet in that land so vaguely shadowed in my dream, will you not know that I loved you heartily well? Shall I not hasten’ to lay bare my heart before you—the priest of its confessional? Oh, Charley! when the truth is known, the false will fly asunder as the Autumn leaves in the wind; but the true, whatever their faults, will only draw together the more tenderly that they have sinned against each other.
CHAPTER XXI. THE FROZEN STREAM.
Before the Winter arrived, I was well, and Charley had recovered from the fatigue of watching me. One holiday, he and I set out alone to accomplish a scheme we had cherished from the first appearance of the frost. How it arose I hardly remember; I think it came of some remark Mr Forest had made concerning the difference between the streams of Switzerland and England—those in the former country being emptiest, those in the latter fullest in the Winter. It was—when the frost should have bound up the sources of the beck which ran almost by our door, and it was no longer a stream, but a rope of ice—to take that rope for our guide, and follow it as far as we could towards the secret recesses of its Summer birth.
Along the banks of the stream, we followed it up and up, meeting a varied loveliness which it would take the soul of a Wordsworth or a Ruskin to comprehend or express. To my poor faculty the splendour of the ice-crystals remains the one memorial thing. In those lonely water-courses the sun was gloriously busy, with none to praise him except Charley and me.
Where the banks were difficult we went down into the frozen bed, and there had story above story of piled-up loveliness, with opal and diamond cellars below. Spikes and stars crystalline radiated and refracted and reflected marvellously. But we did not reach the primary source of the stream by miles; we were stopped by a precipitous rock, down the face of which one half of the stream fell, while the other crept out of its foot, from a little cavernous opening about four feet high. Charley was a few yards ahead of me, and ran stooping into the cavern. I followed. But when I had gone as far as I dared for the darkness and the down-sloping roof, and saw nothing of him, I grew dismayed, and called him. There was no answer. With a thrill of horror my dream returned upon me. I got on my hands and knees and crept forward. A short way further the floor sank—only a little, I believe, but from the darkness I took the descent for an abyss into which Charley had fallen. I gave a shriek of despair, and scrambled out of the cave howling. In a moment he was by my side. He had only crept behind a projection for a trick. His remorse was extreme. He begged my pardon in the most agonized manner.
‘Never mind, Charley,’ I said; ‘you didn’t mean it.’
‘Yes, I did mean it,’ he returned. ‘The temptation came, and I yielded; only I did not know how dreadful it would be to you.’