“I have been hanging a little picture in my room,” she said. “Come upstairs, my dear, and give me your opinion of it.”
I rose and followed her. She pointed to a miniature portrait, hanging above the mantelpiece.
“Do you know whose likeness that is?” she asked, half sadly, half playfully. “George! Do you really not recognize yourself at thirteen years old?”
How should I recognize myself? Worn by sickness and sorrow; browned by the sun on my long homeward voyage; my hair already growing thin over my forehead; my eyes already habituated to their one sad and weary look; what had I in common with the fair, plump, curly-headed, bright-eyed boy who confronted me in the miniature? The mere sight of the portrait produced the most extraordinary effect on my mind. It struck me with an overwhelming melancholy; it filled me with a despair of myself too dreadful to be endured. Making the best excuse I could to my mother, I left the room. In another minute I was out of the house.
I crossed the park, and left my own possessions behind me. Following a by-road, I came to our well-known river; so beautiful in itself, so famous among trout-fishers throughout Scotland. It was not then the fishing season. No human being was in sight as I took my seat on the bank. The old stone bridge which spanned the stream was within a hundred yards of me; the setting sun still tinged the swift-flowing water under the arches with its red and dying light.
Still the boy’s face in the miniature pursued me. Still the portrait seemed to reproach me in a merciless language of its own: “Look at what you were once; think of what you are now!”
I hid my face in the soft, fragrant grass. I thought of the wasted years of my life between thirteen and twenty-three.
How was it to end? If I lived to the ordinary life of man, what prospect had I before me?
Love? Marriage? I burst out laughing as the idea crossed my mind. Since the innocently happy days of my boyhood I had known no more of love than the insect that now crept over my hand as it lay on the grass. My money, to be sure, would buy me a wife; but would my money make her dear to me? dear as Mary had once been, in the golden time when my portrait was first painted?
Mary! Was she still living? Was she married? Should I know her again if I saw her? Absurd! I had not seen her since she was ten years old: she was now a woman, as I was a man. Would she knowmeif we met? The portrait, still pursuing me, answered the question: “Look at what you were once; think of what you are now!”
I rose and walked backward and forward, and tried to turn the current of my thoughts in some new direction.
It was not to be done. After a banishment of years, Mary had got back again into my mind. I sat down once more on the river bank. The sun was sinking fast. Black shadows hovered under the arches of the old stone bridge. The red light had faded from the swift-flowing water, and had left it overspread with one monotonous hue of steely gray. The first stars looked down peacefully from the cloudless sky. The first shiverings of the night breeze were audible among the trees, and visible here and there in the shallow places of the stream. And still, the darker it grew, the more persistently my portrait led me back to the past, the more vividly the long-lost image of the child Mary showed itself to me in my thoughts.
Was this the prelude of her coming back to me in dreams; in her perfected womanhood, in the young prime of her life?
It might be so.
I was no longer unworthy of her, as I had once been. The effect produced on me by the sight of my portrait was in itself due to moral and mental changes in me for the better, which had been steadily proceeding since the time when my wound had laid me helpless among strangers in a strange land. Sickness, which has made itself teacher and friend to many a man, had made itself teacher and friend to me. I looked back with horror at the vices of my youth; at the fruitless after-days when I had impiously doubted all that is most noble, all that is most consoling in human life. Consecrated by sorrow, purified by repentance, was it vain in me to hope that her spirit a nd my spirit might yet be united again? Who could tell?
I rose once more. It could serve no good purpose to linger until night by the banks of the river. I had left the house, feeling the impulse which drives us, in certain excited conditions of the mind, to take refuge in movement and change. The remedy had failed; my mind was as strangely disturbed as ever. My wisest course would be to go home, and keep my good mother company over her favorite game of piquet.
I turned to take the road back, and stopped, struck by the tranquil beauty of the last faint light in the western sky, shining behind the black line formed by the parapet of the bridge.
In the grand gathering of the night shadows, in the deep stillness of the dying day, I stood alone and watched the sinking light.
As I looked, there came a change over the scene. Suddenly and softly a living figure glided into view on the bridge. It passed behind the black line of the parapet, in the last long rays of the western light. It crossed the bridge. It paused, and crossed back again half-way. Then it stopped. The minutes passed, and there the figure stood, a motionless black object, behind the black parapet of the bridge.
I advanced a little, moving near enough to obtain a closer view of the dress in which the figure was attired. The dress showed me that the solitary stranger was a woman.
She did not notice me in the shadow which the trees cast on the bank. She stood with her arms folded in her cloak, looking down at the darkening river.
Why was she waiting there at the close of evening alone?
As the question occurred to me, I saw her head move. She looked along the bridge, first on one side of her, then on the other. Was she waiting for some person who was to meet her? Or was she suspicious of observation, and anxious to make sure that she was alone?
A sudden doubt of her purpose in seeking that solitary place, a sudden distrust of the lonely bridge and the swift-flowing river, set my heart beating quickly and roused me to instant action. I hurried up the rising ground which led from the river-bank to the bridge, determined on speaking to her while the opportunity was still mine.
She neither saw nor heard me until I was close to her. I approached with an irrepressible feeling of agitation; not knowing how she might receive me when I spoke to her. The moment she turned and faced me, my composure came back. It was as if, expecting to see a stranger, I had unexpectedly encountered a friend.
And yet shewasa stranger. I had never before looked on that grave and noble face, on that grand figure whose exquisite grace and symmetry even her long cloak could not wholly hide. She was not, perhaps, a strictly beautiful woman. There were defects in her which were sufficiently marked to show themselves in the fading light. Her hair, for example, seen under the large garden hat that she wore, looked almost as short as the hair of a man; and the color of it was of that dull, lusterless brown hue which is so commonly seen in English women of the ordinary type. Still, in spite of these drawbacks, there was a latent charm in her expression, there was an inbred fascination in her manner, which instantly found its way to my sympathies and its hold on my admiration. She won me in the moment when I first looked at her.
“May I inquire if you have lost your way?” I asked.
Her eyes rested on my face with a strange look of inquiry in them. She did not appear to be surprised or confused at my venturing to address her.
“I know this part of the country well,” I went on. “Can I be of any use to you?”
She still looked at me with steady, inquiring eyes. For a moment, stranger as I was, my face seemed to trouble her as if it had been a face that she had seen and forgotten again. If she really had this idea, she at once dismissed it with a little toss of her head, and looked away at the river as if she felt no further interest in me.
“Thank you. I have not lost my way. I am accustomed to walking alone. Good-evening.”
She spoke coldly, but courteously. Her voice was delicious; her bow, as she left me, was the perfection of unaffected grace. She left the bridge on the side by which I had first seen her approach it, and walked slowly away along the darkening track of the highroad.
Still I was not quite satisfied. There was something underlying the charming expression and the fascinating manner which my instinct felt to be something wrong. As I walked away toward the opposite end of the bridge, the doubt began to grow on me whether she had spoken the truth. In leaving the neighborhood of the river, was she simply trying to get rid of me?
I at once resolved to put this suspicion of her to the test. Leaving the bridge, I had only to cross the road beyond, and to enter a plantation on the bank of the river. Here, concealed behind the first tree which was large enough to hide me, I could command a view of the bridge, and I could fairly count on detecting her, if she returned to the river, while there was a ray of light to see her by. It was not easy walking in the obscurity of the plantation: I had almost to grope my way to the nearest tree that suited my purpose.
I had just steadied my foothold on the uneven ground behind the tree, when the stillness of the twilight hour was suddenly broken by the distant sound of a voice.
The voice was a woman’s. It was not raised to any high pitch; its accent was the accent of prayer, and the words it uttered were these:
“Christ, have mercy on me!”
There was silence again. A nameless fear crept over me, as I looked out on the bridge.
She was standing on the parapet. Before I could move, before I could cry out, before I could even breathe again freely, she leaped into the river.
The current ran my way. I could see her, as she rose to the surface, floating by in the light on the mid-stream. I ran headlong down the bank. She sank again, in the moment when I stopped to throw aside my hat and coat and to kick off my shoes. I was a practiced swimmer. The instant I was in the water my composure came back to me—I felt like myself again.
The current swept me out into the mid-stream, and greatly increased the speed at which I swam. I was close behind her when she rose for the second time—a shadowy thing, just visible a few inches below the surface of the river. One more stroke, and my left arm was round her; I had her face out of the water. She was insensible. I could hold her in the right way to leave me master of all my movements; I could devote myself, without flurry or fatigue, to the exertion of taking her back to the shore.
My first attempt satisfied me that there was no reasonable hope, burdened as I now was, of breasting the strong current running toward the mid-river from either bank. I tried it on one side, and I tried it on the other, and gave it up. The one choice left was to let myself drift with her down the stream. Some fifty yards lower, the river took a turn round a promontory of land, on which stood a little inn much frequented by anglers in the season. As we approached the place, I made another attempt (again an attempt in vain) to reach the shore. Our last chance now was to be heard by the people of the inn. I shouted at the full pitch of my voice as we drifted past. The cry was answered. A man put off in a boat. In five minutes more I had her safe on the bank again; and the man and I were carrying her to the inn by the river-side.
The landlady and her servant-girl were equally willing to be of service, and equally ignorant of what they were to do. Fortunately, my medical education made me competent to direct them. A good fire, warm blankets, hot water in bottles, were all at my disposal. I showed the women myself how to ply the work of revival. They persevered, and I persevered; and still there she lay, in her perfect beauty of form, without a sign of life perceptible; there she lay, to all outward appearance, dead by drowning.
A last hope was left—the hope of restoring her (if I could construct the apparatus in time) by the process called “artificial respiration.” I was just endeavoring to tell the landlady what I wanted and was just conscious o f a strange difficulty in expressing myself, when the good woman started back, and looked at me with a scream of terror.
“Good God, sir, you’re bleeding!” she cried. “What’s the matter? Where are you hurt?”
In the moment when she spoke to me I knew what had happened. The old Indian wound (irritated, doubtless, by the violent exertion that I had imposed on myself) had opened again. I struggled against the sudden sense of faintness that seized on me; I tried to tell the people of the inn what to do. It was useless. I dropped to my knees; my head sunk on the bosom of the woman stretched senseless upon the low couch beneath me. The death-in-life that had gotherhad gotme. Lost to the world about us, we lay, with my blood flowing on her, united in our deathly trance.
Where were our spirits at that moment? Were they together and conscious of each other? United by a spiritual bond, undiscovered and unsuspected by us in the flesh, did we two, who had met as strangers on the fatal bridge, know each other again in the trance? You who have loved and lost—you whose one consolation it has been to believe in other worlds than this—can you turn from my questions in contempt? Can you honestly say that they have never beenyourquestions too?
THE morning sunlight shining in at a badly curtained window; a clumsy wooden bed, with big twisted posts that reached to the ceiling; on one side of the bed, my mother’s welcome face; on the other side, an elderly gentleman unremembered by me at that moment—such were the objects that presented themselves to my view, when I first consciously returned to the world that we live in.
“Look, doctor, look! He has come to his senses at last.”
“Open your mouth, sir, and take a sup of this.” My mother was rejoicing over me on one side of the bed; and the unknown gentleman, addressed as “doctor,” was offering me a spoonful of whisky-and-water on the other. He called it the “elixir of life”; and he bid me remark (speaking in a strong Scotch accent) that he tasted it himself to show he was in earnest.
The stimulant did its good work. My head felt less giddy, my mind became clearer. I could speak collectedly to my mother; I could vaguely recall the more marked events of the previous evening. A minute or two more, and the image of the person in whom those events had all centered became a living image in my memory. I tried to raise myself in the bed; I asked, impatiently, “Where is she?”
The doctor produced another spoonful of the elixir of life, and gravely repeated his first address to me.
“Open your mouth, sir, and take a sup of this.”
I persisted in repeating my question:
“Where is she?”
The doctor persisted in repeating his formula:
“Take a sup of this.”
I was too weak to contest the matter; I obeyed. My medical attendant nodded across the bed to my mother, and said, “Now, he’ll do.” My mother had some compassion on me. She relieved my anxiety in these plain words:
“The lady has quite recovered, George, thanks to the doctor here.”
I looked at my professional colleague with a new interest. He was the legitimate fountainhead of the information that I was dying to have poured into my mind.
“How did you revive her?” I asked. “Where is she now?”
The doctor held up his hand, warning me to stop.
“We shall do well, sir, if we proceed systematically,” he began, in a very positive manner. “You will understand, that every time you open your mouth, it will be to take a sup of this, and not to speak. I shall tell you, in due course, and the good lady, your mother, will tell you, all that you have any need to know. As I happen to have been first on what you may call the scene of action, it stands in the fit order of things that I should speak first. You will just permit me to mix a little more of the elixir of life, and then, as the poet says, my plain unvarnished tale I shall deliver.”
So he spoke, pronouncing in his strong Scotch accent the most carefully selected English I had ever heard. A hard-headed, square-shouldered, pertinaciously self-willed man—it was plainly useless to contend with him. I turned to my mother’s gentle face for encouragement; and I let my doctor have his own way.
“My name,” he proceeded, “is MacGlue. I had the honor of presenting my respects at your house yonder when you first came to live in this neighborhood. You don’t remember me at present, which is natural enough in the unbalanced condition of your mind, consequent, you will understand (as a professional person yourself) on copious loss of blood.”
There my patience gave way.
“Never mind me!” I interposed. “Tell me about the lady!”
“You have opened your mouth, sir!” cried Mr. MacGlue, severely. “You know the penalty—take a sup of this. I told you we should proceed systematically,” he went on, after he had forced me to submit to the penalty. “Everything in its place, Mr. Germaine—everything in its place. I was speaking of your bodily condition. Well, sir, and how did I discover your bodily condition? Providentially foryouI was driving home yesterday evening by the lower road (which is the road by the river bank), and, drawing near to the inn here (they call it a hotel; it’s nothing but an inn), I heard the screeching of the landlady half a mile off. A good woman enough, you will understand, as times go; but a poor creature in any emergency. Keep still, I’m coming to it now. Well, I went in to see if the screeching related to anything wanted in the medical way; and there I found you and the stranger lady in a position which I may truthfully describe as standing in some need of improvement on the score of propriety. Tut! tut! I speak jocosely—you were both in a dead swoon. Having heard what the landlady had to tell me, and having, to the best of my ability, separated history from hysterics in the course of the woman’s narrative, I found myself, as it were, placed between two laws. The law of gallantry, you see, pointed to the lady as the first object of my professional services, while the law of humanity (seeing that you were still bleeding) pointed no less imperatively to you. I am no longer a young man: I left the lady to wait. My word! it was no light matter, Mr. Germaine, to deal with your case, and get you carried up here out of the way. That old wound of yours, sir, is not to be trifled with. I bid you beware how you open it again. The next time you go out for an evening walk and you see a lady in the water, you will do well for your own health to leave her there. What’s that I see? Are you opening your mouth again? Do you want another sup already?”
“He wants to hear more about the lady,” said my mother, interpreting my wishes for me.
“Oh, the lady,” resumed Mr. MacGlue, with the air of a man who found no great attraction in the subject proposed to him. “There’s not much that I know of to be said about the lady. A fine woman, no doubt. If you could strip the flesh off her bones, you would find a splendid skeleton underneath. For, mind this! there’s no such thing as a finely made woman without a good bony scaffolding to build her on at starting. I don’t think much of this lady—morally speaking, you will understand. If I may be permitted to say so in your presence, ma’am, there’s a man in the background of that dramatic scene of hers on the bridge. However, not being the man myself, I have nothing to do with that. My business with the lady was just to set her vital machinery going again. And, Heaven knows, she proved a heavy handful! It was even a more obstinate case to deal with, sir, than yours. I never, in all my experience, met with two people more unwilling to come back to this world and its troubles than you two were. And when I had done the business at last, when I was wellnigh swooning myself with the work and the worry of it, guess—I give you leave to speak for this once—guess what were the first words the lady said to me when she came to herself again.”
I was too much excited to be able to exercise my ingenuity. “I give it up!” I said, impatiently.
“You may well give it up,” remarked Mr. MacGlue. “The first words she addressed, sir, to the man who had dragged her out of the very jaws of death were these: ‘How dare you meddle with me? why didn’t you leave me to die?’ Her exact language—I’ll take my Bible oath of it. I was so provoked that I gave her the change back (as the saying is) in her own coin. ‘There’s the river handy, ma’am,’ I said; ‘do it again. I, for one, won’t stir a hand to save you; I promise you that.’ She looked up sharply. ‘Are you the man who took me out of the river?’ she said. ‘God forbid!’ says I. ‘I’m only the doctor who was fool enough to meddle with you afterward.’ She turned to the landlady. ‘Who took me out of the river?’ she asked. The landlady told her, and mentioned your name. ‘Germaine?’ she said to herself; ‘I know nobody named Germaine; I wonder whether it was the man who spoke to me on the bridge?’ ‘Yes,’ says the landlady; ‘Mr. Germaine said he met you on the bridge.’ Hearing that, she took a little time to think; and then she asked if she could see Mr. Germaine. ‘Whoever he is,’ she says, ‘he has risked his life to save me, and I ought to thank him for doing that.’ ‘You can’t thank him tonight,’ I said; ‘I’ve got him upstairs between life and death, and I’ve sent for his mother: wait till to-morrow.’ She turned on me, looking half frightened, half angry. ‘I can’t wait,’ she says; ‘you don’t know what you have done among you in bringing me back to life. I must leave this neighborhood; I must be out of Perthshire to-morrow: when does the first coach southward pass this way?’ Having nothing to do with the first coach southward, I referred her to the people of the inn. My business (now I had done with the lady) was upstairs in this room, to see how you were getting on. You were getting on as well as I could wish, and your mother was at your bedside. I went home to see what sick people might be waiting for me in the regular way. When I came back this morning, there was the foolish landlady with a new tale to tell ‘Gone!’ says she. ‘Who’s gone?’ says I. ‘The lady,’ says she, ‘by the first coach this morning!’”
“You don’t mean to tell me that she has left the house?” I exclaimed.
“Oh, but I do!” said the doctor, as positively as ever. “Ask madam your mother here, and she’ll certify it to your heart’s content. I’ve got other sick ones to visit, and I’m away on my rounds. You’ll see no more of the lady; and so much the better, I’m thinking. In two hours’ time I’ll be back again; and if I don’t find you the worse in the interim, I’ll see about having you transported from this strange place to the snug bed that knows you at home. Don’t let him talk, ma’am, don’t let him talk.”
With those parting words, Mr. MacGlue left us to ourselves.
“Is it really true?” I said to my mother. “Has she left the inn, without waiting to see me?”
“Nobody could stop her, George,” my mother answered. “The lady left the inn this morning by the coach for Edinburgh.”
I was bitterly disappointed. Yes: “bitterly” is the word—though shewasa stranger to me.
“Did you see her yourself?” I asked.
“I saw her for a few minutes, my dear, on my way up to your room.”
“What did she say?”
“She begged me to make her excuses to you. She said, ‘Tell Mr. Germaine that my situation is dreadful; no human creature can help me. I must go away. My old life is as much at an end as if your son had left me to drown in the river. I must find a new life for myself, in a new place. Ask Mr. Germaine to forgive me for going away without thanking him. I daren’t wait! I may be followed and found out. There is a person whom I am determined never to see again—never! never! never! Good-by; and try to forgive me!’ She hid her face in her hands, and said no more. I tried to win her confidence; it was not to be done; I was compelled to leave her. There is some dreadful calamity, George, in that wretched woman’s life. And such an interesting creature, too! It was impossible not to pity her, whether she deserved it or not. Everything about her is a mystery, my dear. She speaks English without the slightest foreign accent, and yet she has a foreign name.”
“Did she give you her name?”
“No, and I was afraid to ask her to give it. But the landlady here is not a very scrupulous person. She told me she looked at the poor creature’s linen while it was drying by the fire. The name marked on it was, ‘Van Brandt.’”
“Van Brandt?” I repeated. “That sounds like a Dutch name. And yet you say she spoke like an Englishwoman. Perhaps she was born in England.”
“Or perhaps she may be married,” suggested my mother; “and Van Brandt may be the name of her husband.”
The idea of her being a married woman had something in it repellent to me. I wished my mother had not thought of that last suggestion. I refused to receive it. I persisted in my own belief that the stranger was a single woman. In that character, I could indulge myself in the luxury of thinking of her; I could consider the chances of my being able to trace this charming fugitive, who had taken so strong a hold on my interest—whose desperate attempt at suicide had so nearly cost me my own life.
If she had gone as far as Edinburgh (which she would surely do, being bent on avoiding discovery), the prospect of finding her again—in that great city, and in my present weak state of health—looked doubtful indeed. Still, there was an underlying hopefulness in me which kept my spirits from being seriously depressed. I felt a purely imaginary (perhaps I ought to say, a purely superstitious) conviction that we who had nearly died together, we who had been brought to life together, were surely destined to be involved in some future joys or sorrows common to us both. “I fancy I shall see her again,” was my last thought before my weakness overpowered me, and I sunk into a peaceful sleep.
That night I was removed from the inn to my own room at home; and that night I saw her again in a dream.
The image of her was as vividly impressed on me as the far different image of the child Mary, when I used to see it in the days of old. The dream-figure of the woman was robed as I had seen it robed on the bridge. She wore the same broad-brimmed garden-hat of straw. She looked at me as she had looked when I approached her in the dim evening light. After a little her face brightened with a divinely beautiful smile; and she whispered in my ear, “Friend, do you know me?”
I knew her, most assuredly; and yet it was with an incomprehensible after-feeling of doubt. Recognizing her in my dream as the stranger who had so warmly interested me, I was, nevertheless, dissatisfied with myself, as if it had not been the right recognition. I awoke with this idea; and I slept no more that night.
In three days’ time I was strong enough to go out driving with my mother, in the comfortable, old-fashioned, open carriage which had once belonged to Mr. Germaine.
On the fourth day we arranged to make an excursion to a little waterfall in our neighborhood. My mother had a great admiration of the place, and had often expressed a wish to possess some memorial of it. I resolved to take my sketch-book: with me, on the chance that I might be able to please her by making a drawing of her favorite scene.
Searching for the sketch-book (which I had not used for years), I found it in an old desk of mine that had remained unopened since my departure for India. In the course of my investigation, I opened a drawer in the desk, and discovered a relic of the old times—my poor little Mary’s first work in embroidery, the green flag!
The sight of the forgotten keepsake took my mind back to the bailiff’s cottage, and reminded me of Dame Dermody, and her confident prediction about Mary and me.
I smiled as I recalled the old woman’s assertion that no human power could “hinder the union of the kindred spirits of the children in the time to come.” What had become of the prophesied dreams in which we were to communicate with each other through the term of our separation? Years had passed; and, sleeping or waking, I had seen nothing of Mary. Years had passed; and the first vision of a woman that had come to me had been my dream a few nights since of the stranger whom I had saved from drowning. I thought of these chances and changes in my life, but not contemptuously or bitterly. The new love that was now stealing its way into my heart had softened and humanized me. I said to myself, “Ah, poor little Mary!” and I kissed the green flag, in grateful memory of the days that were gone forever.
We drove to the waterfall.
It was a beautiful day; the lonely sylvan scene was at its brightest and best. A wooden summer-house, commanding a prospect of the falling stream, had been built for the accommodation of pleasure parties by the proprietor of the place. My mother suggested that I should try to make a sketch of the view from this point. I did my best to please her, but I was not satisfied with the result; and I abandoned my drawing before it was half finished. Leaving my sketch-book and pencil on the table of the summer-house, I proposed to my mother to cross a little wooden bridge which spanned the stream, below the fall, and to see how the landscape looked from a new point of view.
The prospect of the waterfall, as seen from the opposite bank, presented even greater difficulties, to an amateur artist like me, than the prospect which he had just left. We returned to the summer-house.
I was the first to approach the open door. I stopped, checked in my advance by an unexpected discovery. The summer-house was no longer empty as we had left it. A lady was seated at the table with my pencil in her hand, writing in my sketch-book!
After waiting a moment, I advanced a few steps nearer to the door, and stopped again in breathless amazement. The stranger in the summer-house was now plainly revealed to me as the woman who had attempted to destroy herself from the bridge!
There was no doubt about it. There was the dress; there was the memorable face which I had seen in the evening light, which I had dreamed of only a few nights since! The woman herself—I saw her as plainly as I saw the sun shining on the waterfall—the woman herself, with my pencil in her hand, writing in my book!
My mother was close behind me. She noticed my agitation. “George!” she exclaimed, “what is the matter with you?”
I pointed through the open door of the summer-house.
“Well?” said my mother. “What am I to look at?”
“Don’t you see somebody sitting at the table and writing in my sketch-book?”
My mother eyed me quickly. “Is he going to be ill again?” I heard her say to herself.
At the same moment the woman laid down the pencil and rose slowly to her feet.
She looked at me with sorrowful and pleading eyes: she lifted her hand and beckoned me to approach her. I obeyed. Moving without conscious will of my own, drawn nearer and nearer to her by an irresistible power, I ascended the short flight of stairs which led into the summer-house. Within a few paces of her I stopped. She advanced a step toward me, and laid her hand gently on my bosom. Her touch filled me with strangely united sensations of rapture and awe. After a while, she spoke in low melodious tones, which mingled in my ear with the distant murmur of the falling water, until the two sounds became one. I heard in the murmur, I heard in the voice, these words: “Remember me. Come to me.” Her hand dropped from my bosom; a momentary obscurity passed like a flying shadow over the bright daylight in the room. I looked for her when the light came back. She was gone.
My consciousness of passing events returned.
I saw the lengthening shadows outside, which told me that the evening was at hand. I saw the carriage approaching the summerhouse to take us away. I felt my mother’s hand on my arm, and heard her voice speaking to me anxiously. I was able to reply by a sign entreating her not to be uneasy about me, but I could do no more. I was absorbed, body and soul, in the one desire to look at the sketch-book. As certainly as I had seen the woman, so certainly I had seen her, with my pencil in her hand, writing in my book.
I advanced to the table on which the book was lying open. I looked at the blank space on the lower part of the page, under the foreground lines of my unfinished drawing. My mother, following me, looked at the page too.
There was the writing! The woman had disappeared, but there were her written words left behind her: visible to my mother as well as to me, readable by my mother’s eyes as well as by mine!
These were the words we saw, arranged in two lines, as I copy them here:
When the full moon shinesOn Saint Anthony’s Well.
I POINTED to the writing in the sketch book, and looked at my mother. I was not mistaken. Shehadseen it, as I had seen it. But she refused to acknowledge that anything had happened to alarm her—plainly as I could detect it in her face.
“Somebody has been playing a trick on you, George,” she said.
I made no reply. It was needless to say anything. My poor mother was evidently as far from being satisfied with her own shallow explanation as I was. The carriage waited for us at the door. We set forth in silence on our drive home.
The sketch-book lay open on my knee. My eyes were fastened on it; my mind was absorbed in recalling the moment when the apparition beckoned me into the summer-house and spoke. Putting the words and the writing together, the conclusion was too plain to be mistaken. The woman whom I had saved from drowning had need of me again.
And this was the same woman who, in her own proper person, had not hesitated to seize the first opportunity of leaving the house in which we had been sheltered together—without stopping to say one grateful word to the man who had preserved her from death! Four days only had elapsed since she had left me, never (to all appearance) to see me again. And now the ghostly apparition of her had returned as to a tried and trusted friend; had commanded me to remember her and to go to her; and had provided against all possibility of my memory playing me false, by writing the words which invited me to meet her “when the full moon shone on Saint Anthony’s Well.”
What had happened in the interval? What did the supernatural manner of her communication with me mean? What ought my next course of action to be?
My mother roused me from my reflections. She stretched out her hand, and suddenly closed the open book on my knee, as if the sight of the writing in it were unendurable to her.
“Why don’t you speak to me, George?” she said. “Why do you keep your thoughts to yourself?”
“My mind is lost in confusion,” I answered. “I can suggest nothing and explain nothing. My thoughts are all bent on the one question of what I am to do next. On that point I believe I may say that my mind is made up.” I touched the sketch-book as I spoke. “Come what may of it,” I said, “I mean to keep the appointment.”
My mother looked at me as if she doubted the evidence of her own senses.
“He talks as if it were a real thing!” she exclaimed. “George, you don’t really believe that you saw somebody in the summer-house? The place was empty. I tell you positively, when you pointed into the summer-house, the place was empty. You have been thinking and thinking of this woman till you persuade yourself that you have actually seen her.”
I opened the sketch-book again. “I thought I saw her writing on this page,” I answered. “Look at it, and tell me if I was wrong.”
My mother refused to look at it. Steadily as she persisted in taking the rational view, nevertheless the writing frightened her.
“It is not a week yet,” she went on, “since I saw you lying between life and death in your bed at the inn. How can you talk of keeping the appointment, in your state of health? An appointment with a shadowy Something in your own imagination, which appears and disappears, and leaves substantial writing behind it! It’s ridiculous, George; I wonder you can help laughing at yourself.”
She tried to set the example of laughing at me—with the tears in her eyes, poor soul! as she made the useless effort. I began to regret having opened my mind so freely to her.
“Don’t take the matter too seriously, mother,” I said. “Perhaps I may not be able to find the place. I never heard of Saint Anthony’s Well; I have not the least idea where it is. Suppose I make the discovery, and suppose the journey turns out to be an easy one, would you like to go with me?”
“God forbid” cried my mother, fervently. “I will have nothing to do with it, George. You are in a state of delusion; I shall speak to the doctor.”
“By all means, my dear mother. Mr. MacGlue is a sensible person. We pass his house on our way home, and we will ask him to dinner. In the meantime, let us say no more on the subject till we see the doctor.”
I spoke lightly, but I really meant what I said. My mind was sadly disturbed; my nerves were so shaken that the slightest noises on the road startled me. The opinion of a man like Mr. MacGlue, who looked at all mortal matters from the same immovably practical point of view, might really have its use, in my case, as a species of moral remedy.
We waited until the dessert was on the table, and the servants had left the dining-room. Then I told my story to the Scotch doctor as I have told it here; and, that done, I opened the sketch-book to let him see the writing for himself.
Had I turned to the wrong page?
I started to my feet, and held the book close to the light of the lamp that hung over the dining table. No: I had found the right page. There was my half-finished drawing of the waterfall—but where were the two lines of writing beneath?
Gone!
I strained my eyes; I looked and looked. And the blank white paper looked back at me.
I placed the open leaf before my mother. “You saw it as plainly as I did,” I said. “Are my own eyes deceiving me? Look at the bottom of the page.”
My mother sunk back in her chair with a cry of terror.
“Gone?” I asked.
“Gone!”
I turned to the doctor. He took me completely by surprise. No incredulous smile appeared on his face; no jesting words passed his lips. He was listening to us attentively. He was waiting gravely to hear more.
“I declare to you, on my word of honor,” I said to him, “that I saw the apparition writing with my pencil at the bottom of that page. I declare that I took the book in my hand, and saw these words written in it, ‘When the full moon shines on Saint Anthony’s Well.’ Not more than three hours have passed since that time; and, see for yourself, not a vestige of the writing remains.”
“Not a vestige of the writing remains,” Mr. MacGlue repeated, quietly.
“If you feel the slightest doubt of what I have told you,” I went on, “ask my mother; she will bear witness that she saw the writing too.”
“I don’t doubt that you both saw the writing,” answered Mr. MacGlue, with a composure that surprised me.
“Can you account for it?” I asked.
“Well,” said the impenetrable doctor, “if I set my wits at work, I believe I might account for it to the satisfaction of some people. For example, I might give you what they call the rational explanation, to begin with. I might say that you are, to my certain knowledge, in a highly excited nervous condition; and that, when you saw the apparition (as you call it), you simply saw nothing but your own strong impression of an absent woman, who (as I greatly fear) has got on the weak or amatory side of you. I mean no offense, Mr. Germaine—”
“I take no offense, doctor. But excuse me for speaking plainly—the rational explanation is thrown away on me.”
“I’ll readily excuse you,” answered Mr. MacGlue; “the rather that I’m entirely of your opinion. I don’t believe in the rational explanation myself.”
This was surprising, to say the least of it. “Whatdoyou believe in?” I inquired.
Mr. MacGlue declined to let me hurry him.
“Wait a little,” he said. “There’s theirrational explanation to try next. Maybe it will fit itself to the present state of your mind better than the other. We will say this time that you have really seen the ghost (or double) of a living person. Very good. If you can suppose a disembodied spirit to appear in earthly clothing—of silk or merino, as the case may be—it’s no great stretch to suppose, next, that this same spirit is capable of holding a mortal pencil, and of writing mortal words in a mortal sketching-book. And if the ghost vanishes (which your ghost did), it seems supernaturally appropriate that the writing should follow the example and vanish too. And the reason of the vanishment may be (if you want a reason), either that the ghost does not like letting a stranger like me into its secrets, or that vanishing is a settled habit of ghosts and of everything associated with them, or that this ghost has changed its mind in the course of three hours (being the ghost of a woman, I am sure that’s not wonderful), and doesn’t care to see you ‘when the full moon shines on Saint Anthony’s Well.’ There’s theirrational explanation for you. And, speaking for myself, I’m bound to add that I don’t set a pin’s value onthatexplanation either.”
Mr. MacGlue’s sublime indifference to both sides of the question began to irritate me.
“In plain words, doctor,” I said, “you don’t think the circumstances that I have mentioned to you worthy of serious investigation?”
“I don’t think serious investigation capable of dealing with the circumstances,” answered the doctor. “Put it in that way, and you put it right. Just look round you. Here we three persons are alive and hearty at this snug table. If (which God forbid!) good Mistress Germaine or yourself were to fall down dead in another moment, I, doctor as I am, could no more explain what first principle of life and movement had been suddenly extinguished in you than the dog there sleeping on the hearth-rug. If I am content to sit down ignorant in the face of such an impenetrable mystery as this—presented to me, day after day, every time I see a living creature come into the world or go out of it—why may I not sit down content in the face of your lady in the summer-house, and say she’s altogether beyond my fathoming, and there is an end of her?”
At those words my mother joined in the conversation for the first time.
“Ah, sir,” she said, “if you could only persuade my son to take your sensible view, how happy I should be! Would you believe it?—he positively means (if he can find the place) to go to Saint Anthony’s Well!”
Even this revelation entirely failed to surprise Mr. MacGlue.
“Ay, ay. He means to keep his appointment with the ghost, does he? Well, I can be of some service to him if he sticks to his resolution. I can tell him of another man who kept a written appointment with a ghost, and what came of it.”
This was a startling announcement. Did he really mean what he said?
“Are you in jest or in earnest?” I asked.
“I never joke, sir,” said Mr. MacGlue. “No sick person really believes in a doctor who jokes. I defy you to show me a man at the head of our profession who has ever been discovered in high spirits (in medical hours) by his nearest and dearest friend. You may have wondered, I dare say, at seeing me take your strange narrative as coolly as I do. It comes naturally, sir. Yours is not the first story of a ghost and a pencil that I have heard.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” I said, “that you know of another man who has seen what I have seen?”
“That’s just what I mean to tell you,” rejoined the doctor. “The man was a far-away Scots cousin of my late wife, who bore the honorable name of Bruce, and followed a seafaring life. I’ll take another glass of the sherry wine, just to wet my whistle, as the vulgar saying is, before I begin. Well, you must know, Bruce was mate of a bark at the time I’m speaking of, and he was on a voyage from Liverpool to New Brunswick. At noon one day, he and the captain, having taken their observation of the sun, were hard at it below, working out the latitude and longitude on their slates. Bruce, in his cabin, looked across through the open door of the captain’s cabin opposite. ‘What do you make it, sir?’ says Brace. The man in the captain’s cabin looked up. And what did Bruce see? The face of the captain? Devil a bit of it—the face of a total stranger! Up jumps Bruce, with his heart going full gallop all in a moment, and searches for the captain on deck, and finds him much as usual, with his calculations done, and his latitude and longitude off his mind for the day. ‘There’s somebody at your desk, sir,’ says Bruce. ‘He’s writing on your slate; and he’s a total stranger to me.’ ‘A stranger in my cabin?’ says the captain. ‘Why, Mr. Bruce, the ship has been six weeks out of port. How did he get on board?’ Bruce doesn’t know how, but he sticks to his story. Away goes the captain, and bursts like a whirlwind into his cabin, and finds nobody there. Bruce himself is obliged to acknowledge that the place is certainly empty. ‘If I didn’t know you were a sober man,’ says the captain, ‘I should charge you with drinking. As it is, I’ll hold you accountable for nothing worse than dreaming. Don’t do it again, Mr. Bruce.’ Bruce sticks to his story; Bruce swears he saw the man writing on the captain’s slate. The captain takes up the slate and looks at it. ‘Lord save us and bless us!’ says he; ‘here the writing is, sure enough!’ Bruce looks at it too, and sees the writing as plainly as can be, in these words: ‘Steer to the nor’-west.’ That, and no more.—Ah, goodness me, narrating is dry work, Mr. Germaine. With your leave, I’ll take another drop of the sherry wine.
“Well (it’s fine old wine, that; look at the oily drops running down the glass)—well, steering to the north-west, you will understand, was out of the captain’s course. Nevertheless, finding no solution of the mystery on board the ship, and the weather at the time being fine, the captain determined, while the daylight lasted, to alter his course, and see what came of it. Toward three o’clock in the afternoon an iceberg came of it; with a wrecked ship stove in, and frozen fast to the ice; and the passengers and crew nigh to death with cold and exhaustion. Wonderful enough, you will say; but more remains behind. As the mate was helping one of the rescued passengers up the side of the bark, who should he turn out to be but the very man whose ghostly appearance Bruce had seen in the captain’s cabin writing on the captain’s slate! And more than that—if your capacity for being surprised isn’t clean worn out by this time—the passenger recognized the bark as the very vessel which he had seen in a dream at noon that day. He had even spoken of it to one of the officers on board the wrecked ship when he woke. ‘We shall be rescued to-day,’ he had said; and he had exactly described the rig of the bark hours and hours before the vessel herself hove in view. Now you know, Mr. Germaine, how my wife’s far-away cousin kept an appointment with a ghost, and what came of it.” *
Concluding his story in these words, the doctor helped himself to another glass of the “sherry wine.” I was not satisfied yet; I wanted to know more.
“The writing on the slate,” I said. “Did it remain there, or did it vanish like the writing in my book?”
Mr. MacGlue’s answer disappointed me. He had never asked, and had never heard, whether the writing had remained or not. He had told me all that he knew, and he had but one thing more to say, and that was in the nature of a remark with a moral attached to it. “There’s a marvelous resemblance, Mr. Germaine, between your story and Bruce’s story. The main difference, as I see it, is this. The passenger’s appointment proved to be the salvation of a whole ship’s company. I very much doubt whether the lady’s appointment will prove to be the salvation of You.”
I silently reconsidered the strange narrative which had just been related to me. Another man had seen what I had seen—had done what I proposed to do! My mother noticed with grave displeasure the strong impression which Mr. MacGlue had produced on my mind.
“I wish you had kept your story to yourself, doctor,” she said, sharply.
“May I ask why, madam?”
“You have confirmed my son, sir, in his resolution to go to Saint Anthony’s Well.”
Mr. MacGlue quietly consulted his pocket almanac before he replied.
“It’s the full moon on the ninth of the month,” he said. “That gives Mr. Germaine some days of rest, ma’am, before he takes the journey. If he travels in his own comfortable carriage—whatever I may think, morally speaking, of his enterprise—I can’t say, medically speaking, that I believe it will do him much harm.”
“You know where Saint Anthony’s Well is?” I interposed.
“I must be mighty ignorant of Edinburgh not to know that,” replied the doctor.
“Is the Well in Edinburgh, then?”
“It’s just outside Edinburgh—looks down on it, as you may say. You follow the old street called the Canongate to the end. You turn to your right past the famous Palace of Holyrood; you cross the Park and the Drive, and take your way upward to the ruins of Anthony’s Chapel, on the shoulder of the hill—and there you are! There’s a high rock behind the chapel, and at the foot of it you will find the spring they call Anthony’s Well. It’s thought a pretty view by moonlight; and they tell me it’s no longer beset at night by bad characters, as it used to be in the old time.”
My mother, in graver and graver displeasure, rose to retire to the drawing-room.
“I confess you have disappointed me,” she said to Mr. MacGlue. “I should have thought you would have been the last man to encourage my son in an act of imprudence.”
“Craving your pardon, madam, your son requires no encouragement. I can see for myself that his mind is made up. Where is the use of a person like me trying to stop him? Dear madam, if he won’t profit by your advice, what hope can I have that he will take mine?”
Mr. MacGlue pointed this artful compliment by a bow of the deepest respect, and threw open the door for my mother to pass out.
When we were left together over our wine, I asked the doctor how soon I might safely start on my journey to Edinburgh.
“Take two days to do the journey, and you may start, if you’re bent on it, at the beginning of the week. But mind this,” added the prudent doctor, “though I own I’m anxious to hear what comes of your expedition—understand at the same time, so far as the lady is concerned, that I wash my hands of the consequences.”—