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The Two Destinies

by Wilkie Collins · English · Gutenberg #1624 · 499,904 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Two Destinies

Author: Wilkie Collins


        
Release date: February 1, 1999 [eBook #1624]
                Most recently updated: April 17, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1624

Credits: Produced by James Rusk, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TWO DESTINIES ***




Produced by James Rusk





THE TWO DESTINIES

By Wilkie Collins




The Prelude.

THE GUEST WRITES AND TELLS THE STORY OF THE DINNER PARTY.

MANY years have passed since my wife and I left the United States to pay
our first visit to England.

We were provided with letters of introduction, as a matter of course.
Among them there was a letter which had been written for us by my wife's
brother. It presented us to an English gentleman who held a high rank on
the list of his old and valued friends.

"You will become acquainted with Mr. George Germaine," my brother-in-law
said, when we took leave of him, "at a very interesting period of his
life. My last news of him tells me that he is just married. I know
nothing of the lady, or of the circumstances under which my friend
first met with her. But of this I am certain: married or single, George
Germaine will give you and your wife a hearty welcome to England, for my
sake."

The day after our arrival in London, we left our letter of introduction
at the house of Mr. Germaine.

The next morning we went to see a favorite object of American interest,
in the metropolis of England--the Tower of London. The citizens of the
United States find this relic of the good old times of great use in
raising their national estimate of the value of republican institutions.
On getting back to the hotel, the cards of Mr. and Mrs. Germaine told us
that they had already returned our visit. The same evening we received
an invitation to dine with the newly married couple. It was inclosed in
a little note from Mrs. Germaine to my wife, warning us that we were not
to expect to meet a large party. "It is the first dinner we give, on our
return from our wedding tour" (the lady wrote); "and you will only be
introduced to a few of my husband's old friends."

In America, and (as I hear) on the continent of Europe also, when your
host invites you to dine at a given hour, you pay him the compliment of
arriving punctually at his house. In England alone, the incomprehensible
and discourteous custom prevails of keeping the host and the dinner
waiting for half an hour or more--without any assignable reason and
without any better excuse than the purely formal apology that is implied
in the words, "Sorry to be late."

Arriving at the appointed time at the house of Mr. and Mrs. Germaine, we
had every reason to congratulate ourselves on the ignorant punctuality
which had brought us into the drawing-room half an hour in advance of
the other guests.

In the first place, there was so much heartiness, and so little
ceremony, in the welcome accorded to us, that we almost fancied
ourselves back in our own country. In the second place, both husband and
wife interested us the moment we set eyes on them. The lady, especially,
although she was not, strictly speaking, a beautiful woman, quite
fascinated us. There was an artless charm in her face and manner, a
simple grace in all her movements, a low, delicious melody in her voice,
which we Americans felt to be simply irresistible. And then, it was so
plain (and so pleasant) to see that here at least was a happy marriage!
Here were two people who had all their dearest hopes, wishes, and
sympathies in common--who looked, if I may risk the expression, born to
be man and wife. By the time when the fashionable delay of the half
hour had expired, we were talking together as familiarly and as
confidentially as if we had been all four of us old friends.

Eight o'clock struck, and the first of the English guests appeared.

Having forgotten this gentleman's name, I must beg leave to distinguish
him by means of a letter of the alphabet. Let me call him Mr. A. When
he entered the room alone, our host and hostess both started, and both
looked surprised. Apparently they expected him to be accompanied by some
other person. Mr. Germaine put a curious question to his friend.

"Where is your wife?" he asked.

Mr. A answered for the absent lady by a neat little apology, expressed
in these words:

"She has got a bad cold. She is very sorry. She begs me to make her
excuses."

He had just time to deliver his message, before another unaccompanied
gentleman appeared. Reverting to the letters of the alphabet, let me
call him Mr. B. Once more, I noticed that our host and hostess started
when they saw him enter the room alone. And, rather to my surprise, I
heard Mr. Germaine put his curious question again to the new guest:

"Where is your wife?"

The answer--with slight variations--was Mr. A's neat little apology,
repeated by Mr. B.

"I am very sorry. Mrs. B has got a bad headache. She is subject to bad
headaches. She begs me to make her excuses."

Mr. and Mrs. Germaine glanced at one another. The husband's face plainly
expressed the suspicion which this second apology had roused in his
mind. The wife was steady and calm. An interval passed--a silent
interval. Mr. A and Mr. B retired together guiltily into a corner. My
wife and I looked at the pictures.

Mrs. Germaine was the first to relieve us from our own intolerable
silence. Two more guests, it appeared, were still wanting to complete
the party. "Shall we have dinner at once, George?" she said to her
husband. "Or shall we wait for Mr. and Mrs. C?"

"We will wait five minutes," he answered, shortly--with his eye on Mr. A
and Mr. B, guiltily secluded in their corner.

The drawing-room door opened. We all knew that a third married lady was
expected; we all looked toward the door in unutterable anticipation. Our
unexpressed hopes rested silently on the possible appearance of Mrs. C.
Would that admirable, but unknown, woman, at once charm and relieve
us by her presence? I shudder as I write it. Mr. C walked into the
room--and walked in, _alone_.

Mr. Germaine suddenly varied his formal inquiry in receiving the new
guest.

"Is your wife ill?" he asked.

Mr. C was an elderly man; Mr. C had lived (judging by appearances) in
the days when the old-fashioned laws of politeness were still in force.
He discovered his two married brethren in their corner, unaccompanied by
_their_ wives; and he delivered his apology for _his_ wife with the air
of a man who felt unaffectedly ashamed of it:

"Mrs. C is so sorry. She has got such a bad cold. She does so regret not
being able to accompany me."

At this third apology, Mr. Germaine's indignation forced its way outward
into expression in words.

"Two bad colds and one bad headache," he said, with ironical politeness.
"I don't know how your wives agree, gentlemen, when they are well. But
when they are ill, their unanimity is wonderful!"

The dinner was announced as that sharp saying passed his lips.

I had the honor of taking Mrs. Germaine to the dining-room. Her sense of
the implied insult offered to her by the wives of her husband's friends
only showed itself in a trembling, a very slight trembling, of the hand
that rested on my arm. My interest in her increased tenfold. Only
a woman who had been accustomed to suffer, who had been broken and
disciplined to self-restraint, could have endured the moral martyrdom
inflicted on her as _this_ woman endured it, from the beginning of the
evening to the end.

Am I using the language of exaggeration when I write of my hostess in
these terms? Look at the circumstances as they struck two strangers like
my wife and myself.

Here was the first dinner party which Mr. and Mrs. Germaine had given
since their marriage. Three of Mr. Germaine's friends, all married men,
had been invited with their wives to meet Mr. Germaine's wife, and had
(evidently) accepted the invitation without reserve. What discoveries
had taken place between the giving of the invitation and the giving of
the dinner it was impossible to say. The one thing plainly discernible
was, that in the interval the three wives had agreed in the resolution
to leave their husbands to represent them at Mrs. Germaine's table;
and, more amazing still, the husbands had so far approved of the
grossly discourteous conduct of the wives as to consent to make the most
insultingly trivial excuses for their absence. Could any crueler slur
than this have been cast on a woman at the outset of her married life,
before the face of her husband, and in the presence of two strangers
from another country? Is "martyrdom" too big a word to use in describing
what a sensitive person must have suffered, subjected to such treatment
as this? Well, I think not.

We took our places at the dinner-table. Don't ask me to describe that
most miserable of mortal meetings, that weariest and dreariest of
human festivals! It is quite bad enough to remember that evening--it is
indeed.

My wife and I did our best to keep the conversation moving as easily
and as harmlessly as might be. I may say that we really worked hard.
Nevertheless, our success was not very encouraging. Try as we might to
overlook them, there were the three empty places of the three absent
women, speaking in their own dismal language for themselves. Try as we
might to resist it, we all felt the one sad conclusion which those empty
places persisted in forcing on our minds. It was surely too plain that
some terrible report, affecting the character of the unhappy woman at
the head of the table, had unexpectedly come to light, and had at one
blow destroyed her position in the estimation of her husband's friends.
In the face of the excuses in the drawing-room, in the face of the empty
places at the dinner-table, what could the friendliest guests do, to
any good purpose, to help the husband and wife in their sore and sudden
need? They could say good-night at the earliest possible opportunity,
and mercifully leave the married pair to themselves.

Let it at least be recorded to the credit of the three gentlemen,
designated in these pages as A, B, and C, that they were sufficiently
ashamed of themselves and their wives to be the first members of the
dinner party who left the house. In a few minutes more we rose to follow
their example. Mrs. Germaine earnestly requested that we would delay our
departure.

"Wait a few minutes," she whispered, with a glance at her husband. "I
have something to say to you before you go."

She left us, and, taking Mr. Germaine by the arm, led him away to the
opposite side of the room. The two held a little colloquy together in
low voices. The husband closed the consultation by lifting the wife's
hand to his lips.

"Do as you please, my love," he said to her. "I leave it entirely to
you."

He sat down sorrowfully, lost in his thoughts. Mrs. Germaine unlocked
a cabinet at the further end of the room, and returned to us, alone,
carrying a small portfolio in her hand.

"No words of mine can tell you how gratefully I feel your kindness,"
she said, with perfect simplicity, and with perfect dignity at the same
time. "Under very trying circumstances, you have treated me with the
tenderness and the sympathy which you might have shown to an old friend.
The one return I can make for all that I owe to you is to admit you to
my fullest confidence, and to leave you to judge for yourselves whether
I deserve the treatment which I have received to-night."

Her eyes filled with tears. She paused to control herself. We both
begged her to say no more. Her husband, joining us, added his entreaties
to ours. She thanked us, but she persisted. Like most sensitively
organized persons, she could be resolute when she believed that the
occasion called for it.

"I have a few words more to say," she resumed, addressing my wife. "You
are the only married woman who has come to our little dinner party. The
marked absence of the other wives explains itself. It is not for me to
say whether they are right or wrong in refusing to sit at our table.
My dear husband--who knows my whole life as well as I know it
myself--expressed the wish that we should invite these ladies. He
wrongly supposed that _his_ estimate of me would be the estimate
accepted by his friends; and neither he nor I anticipated that the
misfortunes of my past life would be revealed by some person acquainted
with them, whose treachery we have yet to discover. The least I can
do, by way of acknowledging your kindness, is to place you in the same
position toward me which the other ladies now occupy. The circumstances
under which I have become the wife of Mr. Germaine are, in some
respects, very remarkable. They are related, without suppression or
reserve, in a little narrative which my husband wrote, at the time of
our marriage, for the satisfaction of one of his absent relatives, whose
good opinion he was unwilling to forfeit. The manuscript is in this
portfolio. After what has happened, I ask you both to read it, as
a personal favor to me. It is for you to decide, when you know all,
whether I am a fit person for an honest woman to associate with or not."

She held out her hand, with a sweet, sad smile, and bid us good night.
My wife, in her impulsive way, forgot the formalities proper to the
occasion, and kissed her at parting. At that one little act of sisterly
sympathy, the fortitude which the poor creature had preserved all
through the evening gave way in an instant. She burst into tears.

I felt as fond of her and as sorry for her as my wife. But
(unfortunately) I could not take my wife's privilege of kissing her. On
our way downstairs, I found the opportunity of saying a cheering word to
her husband as he accompanied us to the door.

"Before I open this," I remarked, pointing to the portfolio under my
arm, "my mind is made up, sir, about one thing. If I wasn't married
already, I tell you this--I should envy you your wife."

He pointed to the portfolio in his turn.

"Read what I have written there," he said; "and you will understand what
those false friends of mine have made me suffer to-night."

The next morning my wife and I opened the portfolio, and read the
strange story of George Germaine's marriage.




The Narrative.




GEORGE GERMAINE WRITES, AND TELLS HIS OWN LOVE STORY.




CHAPTER I. GREENWATER BROAD

LOOK back, my memory, through the dim labyrinth of the past, through
the mingling joys and sorrows of twenty years. Rise again, my boyhood's
days, by the winding green shores of the little lake. Come to me once
more, my child-love, in the innocent beauty of your first ten years of
life. Let us live again, my angel, as we lived in our first paradise,
before sin and sorrow lifted their flaming swords and drove us out into
the world.


The month was March. The last wild fowl of the season were floating
on the waters of the lake which, in our Suffolk tongue, we called
Greenwater Broad.

Wind where it might, the grassy banks and the overhanging trees tinged
the lake with the soft green reflections from which it took its name.
In a creek at the south end, the boats were kept--my own pretty sailing
boat having a tiny natural harbor all to itself. In a creek at the north
end stood the great trap (called a "decoy"), used for snaring the
wild fowl which flocked every winter, by thousands and thousands, to
Greenwater Broad.

My little Mary and I went out together, hand in hand, to see the last
birds of the season lured into the decoy.

The outer part of the strange bird-trap rose from the waters of the lake
in a series of circular arches, formed of elastic branches bent to the
needed shape, and covered with folds of fine network, making the roof.
Little by little diminishing in size, the arches and their net-work
followed the secret windings of the creek inland to its end. Built back
round the arches, on their landward side, ran a wooden paling, high
enough to hide a man kneeling behind it from the view of the birds on
the lake. At certain intervals a hole was broken in the paling just
large enough to allow of the passage through it of a dog of the
terrier or the spaniel breed. And there began and ended the simple yet
sufficient mechanism of the decoy.

In those days I was thirteen, and Mary was ten years old. Walking on our
way to the lake we had Mary's father with us for guide and companion.
The good man served as bailiff on my father's estate. He was, besides, a
skilled master in the art of decoying ducks. The dog that helped him (we
used no tame ducks as decoys in Suffolk) was a little black terrier;
a skilled master also, in his way; a creature who possessed, in equal
proportions, the enviable advantages of perfect good-humor and perfect
common sense.

The dog followed the bailiff, and we followed the dog.

Arrived at the paling which surrounded the decoy, the dog sat down to
wait until he was wanted. The bailiff and the children crouched behind
the paling, and peeped through the outermost dog-hole, which commanded
a full view of the lake. It was a day without wind; not a ripple stirred
the surface of the water; the soft gray clouds filled all the sky, and
hid the sun from view.

We peeped through the hole in the paling. There were the wild
ducks--collected within easy reach of the decoy--placidly dressing their
feathers on the placid surface of the lake.

The bailiff looked at the dog, and made a sign. The dog looked at the
bailiff; and, stepping forward quietly, passed through the hole, so as
to show himself on the narrow strip of ground shelving down from the
outer side of the paling to the lake.

First one duck, then another, then half a dozen together, discovered the
dog.

A new object showing itself on the solitary scene instantly became an
object of all-devouring curiosity to the ducks. The outermost of them
began to swim slowly toward the strange four-footed creature, planted
motionless on the bank. By twos and threes, the main body of the
waterfowl gradually followed the advanced guard. Swimming nearer and
nearer to the dog, the wary ducks suddenly came to a halt, and, poised
on the water, viewed from a safe distance the phenomenon on the land.

The bailiff, kneeling behind the paling, whispered, "Trim!"

Hearing his name, the terrier turned about, and retiring through the
hole, became lost to the view of the ducks. Motionless on the water,
the wild fowl wondered and waited. In a minute more, the dog had trotted
round, and had shown himself through the next hole in the paling,
pierced further inward where the lake ran up into the outermost of the
windings of the creek.

The second appearance of the terrier instantly produced a second fit of
curiosity among the ducks. With one accord, they swam forward again,
to get another and a nearer view of the dog; then, judging their
safe distance once more, they stopped for the second time, under the
outermost arch of the decoy. Again the dog vanished, and the puzzled
ducks waited. An interval passed, and the third appearance of Trim took
place, through a third hole in the paling, pierced further inland up
the creek. For the third time irresistible curiosity urged the ducks to
advance further and further inward, under the fatal arches of the decoy.
A fourth and a fifth time the game went on, until the dog had lured the
water-fowl from point to point into the inner recesses of the decoy.
There a last appearance of Trim took place. A last advance, a last
cautious pause, was made by the ducks. The bailiff touched the strings,
the weighed net-work fell vertically into the water, and closed the
decoy. There, by dozens and dozens, were the ducks, caught by means of
their own curiosity--with nothing but a little dog for a bait! In a
few hours afterward they were all dead ducks on their way to the London
market.

As the last act in the curious comedy of the decoy came to its end,
little Mary laid her hand on my shoulder, and, raising herself on
tiptoe, whispered in my ear:

"George, come home with me. I have got something to show you that is
better worth seeing than the ducks."

"What is it?"

"It's a surprise. I won't tell you."

"Will you give me a kiss?"

The charming little creature put her slim sun-burned arms round my neck,
and answered:

"As many kisses as you like, George."

It was innocently said, on her side. It was innocently done, on mine.
The good easy bailiff, looking aside at the moment from his ducks,
discovered us pursuing our boy-and-girl courtship in each other's arms.
He shook his big forefinger at us, with something of a sad and doubting
smile.

"Ah, Master George, Master George!" he said. "When your father comes
home, do you think he will approve of his son and heir kissing his
bailiff's daughter?"

"When my father comes home," I answered, with great dignity, "I shall
tell him the truth. I shall say I am going to marry your daughter."

The bailiff burst out laughing, and looked back again at his ducks.

"Well, well!" we heard him say to himself. "They're only children.
There's no call, poor things, to part them yet awhile."

Mary and I had a great dislike to be called children. Properly
understood, one of us was a lady aged ten, and the other was a gentleman
aged thirteen. We left the good bailiff indignantly, and went away
together, hand in hand, to the cottage.

CHAPTER II. TWO YOUNG HEARTS.

"HE is growing too fast," said the doctor to my mother; "and he is
getting a great deal too clever for a boy at his age. Remove him from
school, ma'am, for six months; let him run about in the open air
at home; and if you find him with a book in his hand, take it away
directly. There is my prescription."

Those words decided my fate in life.

In obedience to the doctor's advice, I was left an idle boy--without
brothers, sisters, or companions of my own age--to roam about the
grounds of our lonely country-house. The bailiff's daughter, like me,
was an only child; and, like me, she had no playfellows. We met in
our wanderings on the solitary shores of the lake. Beginning by being
inseparable companions, we ripened and developed into true lovers. Our
preliminary courtship concluded, we next proposed (before I returned to
school) to burst into complete maturity by becoming man and wife.

I am not writing in jest. Absurd as it may appear to "sensible people,"
we two children were lovers, if ever there were lovers yet.

We had no pleasures apart from the one all-sufficient pleasure which
we found in each other's society. We objected to the night, because it
parted us. We entreated our parents, on either side, to let us sleep in
the same room. I was angry with my mother, and Mary was disappointed in
her father, when they laughed at us, and wondered what we should want
next. Looking onward, from those days to the days of my manhood, I can
vividly recall such hours of happiness as have fallen to my share. But I
remember no delights of that later time comparable to the exquisite and
enduring pleasure that filled my young being when I walked with Mary in
the woods; when I sailed with Mary in my boat on the lake; when I met
Mary, after the cruel separation of the night, and flew into her open
arms as if we had been parted for months and months together.

What was the attraction that drew us so closely one to the other, at an
age when the sexual sympathies lay dormant in her and in me?

We neither knew nor sought to know. We obeyed the impulse to love one
another, as a bird obeys the impulse to fly.

Let it not be supposed that we possessed any natural gifts, or
advantages which singled us out as differing in a marked way from other
children at our time of life. We possessed nothing of the sort. I had
been called a clever boy at school; but there were thousands of other
boys, at thousands of other schools, who headed their classes and
won their prizes, like me. Personally speaking, I was in no way
remarkable--except for being, in the ordinary phrase, "tall for my age."
On her side, Mary displayed no striking attractions. She was a
fragile child, with mild gray eyes and a pale complexion; singularly
undemonstrative, singularly shy and silent, except when she was alone
with me. Such beauty as she had, in those early days, lay in a certain
artless purity and tenderness of expression, and in the charming
reddish-brown color of her hair, varying quaintly and prettily in
different lights. To all outward appearance two perfectly commonplace
children, we were mysteriously united by some kindred association of the
spirit in her and the spirit in me, which not only defied discovery by
our young selves, but which lay too deep for investigation by far older
and far wiser heads than ours.

You will naturally wonder whether anything was done by our elders to
check our precocious attachment, while it was still an innocent love
union between a boy and a girl.

Nothing was done by my father, for the simple reason that he was away
from home.

He was a man of a restless and speculative turn of mind. Inheriting his
estate burdened with debt, his grand ambition was to increase his small
available income by his own exertions; to set up an establishment
in London; and to climb to political distinction by the ladder of
Parliament. An old friend, who had emigrated to America, had proposed
to him a speculation in agriculture, in one of the Western States, which
was to make both their fortunes. My father's eccentric fancy was struck
by the idea. For more than a year past he had been away from us in the
United States; and all we knew of him (instructed by his letters)
was, that he might be shortly expected to return to us in the enviable
character of one of the richest men in England.

As for my poor mother--the sweetest and softest-hearted of women--to see
me happy was all that she desired.

The quaint little love romance of the two children amused and interested
her. She jested with Mary's father about the coming union between the
two families, without one serious thought of the future--without even a
foreboding of what might happen when my father returned. "Sufficient for
the day is the evil (or the good) thereof," had been my mother's motto
all her life. She agreed with the easy philosophy of the bailiff,
already recorded in these pages: "They're only children. There's no
call, poor things, to part them yet a while."

There was one member of the family, however, who took a sensible and
serious view of the matter.

My father's brother paid us a visit in our solitude; discovered what
was going on between Mary and me; and was, at first, naturally enough,
inclined to laugh at us. Closer investigation altered his way of
thinking. He became convinced that my mother was acting like a fool;
that the bailiff (a faithful servant, if ever there was one yet) was
cunningly advancing his own interests by means of his daughter; and that
I was a young idiot, who had developed his native reserves of imbecility
at an unusually early period of life. Speaking to my mother under the
influence of these strong impressions, my uncle offered to take me back
with him to London, and keep me there until I had been brought to
my senses by association with his own children, and by careful
superintendence under his own roof.

My mother hesitated about accepting this proposal; she had the advantage
over my uncle of understanding my disposition. While she was still
doubting, while my uncle was still impatiently waiting for her decision,
I settled the question for my elders by running away.

I left a letter to represent me in my absence; declaring that no mortal
power should part me from Mary, and promising to return and ask my
mother's pardon as soon as my uncle had left the house. The strictest
search was made for me without discovering a trace of my place of
refuge. My uncle departed for London, predicting that I should live to
be a disgrace to the family, and announcing that he should transmit his
opinion of me to my father in America by the next mail.

The secret of the hiding-place in which I contrived to defy discovery is
soon told. I was hidden (without the bailiff's knowledge) in the bedroom
of the bailiff's mother. And did the bailiff's mother know it? you will
ask. To which I answer: the bailiff's mother did it. And, what is
more, gloried in doing it--not, observe, as an act of hostility to my
relatives, but simply as a duty that lay on her conscience.

What sort of old woman, in the name of all that is wonderful, was this?
Let her appear, and speak for herself--the wild and weird grandmother of
gentle little Mary; the Sibyl of modern times, known, far and wide, in
our part of Suffolk, as Dame Dermody.

I see her again, as I write, sitting in her son's pretty cottage parlor,
hard by the window, so that the light fell over her shoulder while she
knitted or read. A little, lean, wiry old woman was Dame Dermody--with
fierce black eyes, surmounted by bushy white eyebrows, by a high
wrinkled forehead, and by thick white hair gathered neatly under her
old-fashioned "mob-cap." Report whispered (and whispered truly) that
she had been a lady by birth and breeding, and that she had deliberately
closed her prospects in life by marrying a man greatly her inferior
in social rank. Whatever her family might think of her marriage, she
herself never regretted it. In her estimation her husband's memory was
a sacred memory; his spirit was a guardian spirit, watching over her,
waking or sleeping, morning or night.

Holding this faith, she was in no respect influenced by those grossly
material ideas of modern growth which associate the presence of
spiritual beings with clumsy conjuring tricks and monkey antics
performed on tables and chairs. Dame Dermody's nobler superstition
formed an integral part of her religious convictions--convictions which
had long since found their chosen resting-place in the mystic doctrines
of Emanuel Swedenborg. The only books which she read were the works
of the Swedish Seer. She mixed up Swedenborg's teachings on angels and
departed spirits, on love to one's neighbor and purity of life, with
wild fancies, and kindred beliefs of her own; and preached the visionary
religious doctrines thus derived, not only in the bailiff's household,
but also on proselytizing expeditions to the households of her humble
neighbors, far and near.

Under her son's roof--after the death of his wife--she reigned a supreme
power; priding herself alike on her close attention to her domestic
duties, and on her privileged communications with angels and spirits.
She would hold long colloquys with the spirit of her dead husband before
anybody who happened to be present--colloquys which struck the simple
spectators mute with terror. To her mystic view, the love union between
Mary and me was something too sacred and too beautiful to be tried by
the mean and matter-of-fact tests set up by society. She wrote for us
little formulas of prayer and praise, which we were to use when we met
and when we parted, day by day. She solemnly warned her son to look
upon us as two young consecrated creatures, walking unconsciously on
a heavenly path of their own, whose beginning was on earth, but whose
bright end was among the angels in a better state of being. Imagine my
appearing before such a woman as this, and telling her with tears of
despair that I was determined to die, rather than let my uncle part
me from little Mary, and you will no longer be astonished at the
hospitality which threw open to me the sanctuary of Dame Dermody's own
room.

When the safe time came for leaving my hiding-place, I committed a
serious mistake. In thanking the old woman at parting, I said to her
(with a boy's sense of honor), "I won't tell upon you, Dame. My mother
shan't know that you hid me in your bedroom."

The Sibyl laid her dry, fleshless hand on my shoulder, and forced me
roughly back into the chair from which I had just risen.

"Boy!" she said, looking through and through me with her fierce black
eyes. "Do you dare suppose that I ever did anything that I was ashamed
of? Do you think I am ashamed of what I have done now? Wait there. Your
mother may mistake me too. I shall write to your mother."

She put on her great round spectacles with tortoise-shell rims and sat
down to her letter. Whenever her thoughts flagged, whenever she was at a
loss for an expression, she looked over her shoulder, as if some visible
creature were stationed behind her, watching what she wrote; consulted
the spirit of her husband, exactly as she might have consulted a living
man; smiled softly to herself, and went on with her writing.

"There!" she said, handing me the completed letter with an imperial
gesture of indulgence. "_His_ mind and _my_ mind are written there. Go,
boy. I pardon you. Give my letter to your mother."

So she always spoke, with the same formal and measured dignity of manner
and language.

I gave the letter to my mother. We read it, and marveled over it
together. Thus, counseled by the ever-present spirit of her husband,
Dame Dermody wrote:


"MADAM--I have taken what you may be inclined to think a great liberty.
I have assisted your son George in setting his uncle's authority at
defiance. I have encouraged your son George in his resolution to be
true, in time and in eternity, to my grandchild, Mary Dermody.

"It is due to you and to me that I should tell you with what motive I
have acted in doing these things.

"I hold the belief that all love that is true is foreordained and
consecrated in heaven. Spirits destined to be united in the better world
are divinely commissioned to discover each other and to begin their
union in this world. The only happy marriages are those in which the two
destined spirits have succeeded in meeting one another in this sphere of
life.

"When the kindred spirits have once met, no human power can really part
them. Sooner or later, they must, by divine law, find each other again
and become united spirits once more. Worldly wisdom may force them into
widely different ways of life; worldly wisdom may delude them, or may
make them delude themselves, into contracting an earthly and a fallible
union. It matters nothing. The time will certainly come when that union
will manifest itself as earthly and fallible; and the two disunited
spirits, finding each other again, will become united here for the world
beyond this--united, I tell you, in defiance of all human laws and of
all human notions of right and wrong.

"This is my belief. I have proved it by my own life. Maid, wife, and
widow, I have held to it, and I have found it good.

"I was born, madam, in the rank of society to which you belong. I
received the mean, material teaching which fulfills the worldly notion
of education. Thanks be to God, my kindred spirit met _my_ spirit while
I was still young. I knew true love and true union before I was twenty
years of age. I married, madam, in the rank from which Christ chose
his apostles--I married a laboring-man. No human language can tell my
happiness while we lived united here. His death has not parted us. He
helps me to write this letter. In my last hours I shall see him standing
among the angels, waiting for me on the banks of the shining river.

"You will now understand the view I take of the tie which unites the
young spirits of our children at the bright outset of their lives.

"Believe me, the thing which your husband's brother has proposed to you
to do is a sacrilege and a profanation. I own to you freely that I look
on what I have done toward thwarting your relative in this matter as an
act of virtue. You cannot expect _me_ to think it a serious obstacle to
a union predestined in heaven, that your son is the squire's heir, and
that my grandchild is only the bailiff's daughter. Dismiss from your
mind, I implore you, the unworthy and unchristian prejudices of rank.
Are we not all equal before God? Are we not all equal (even in this
world) before disease and death? Not your son's happiness only, but your
own peace of mind, is concerned in taking heed to my words. I warn you,
madam, you cannot hinder the destined union of these two child-spirits,
in after-years, as man and wife. Part them now--and YOU will be
responsible for the sacrifices, degradations and distresses through
which your George and my Mary may be condemned to pass on their way back
to each other in later life.

"Now my mind is unburdened. Now I have said all.

"If I have spoken too freely, or have in any other way unwittingly
offended, I ask your pardon, and remain, madam, your faithful servant
and well-wisher, HELEN DERMODY."

So the letter ended.

To me it is something more than a mere curiosity of epistolary
composition. I see in it the prophecy--strangely fulfilled in later
years--of events in Mary's life, and in mine, which future pages are now
to tell.

My mother decided on leaving the letter unanswered. Like many of her
poorer neighbors, she was a little afraid of Dame Dermody; and she
was, besides, habitually averse to all discussions which turned on the
mysteries of spiritual life. I was reproved, admonished, and forgiven;
and there was the end of it.

For some happy weeks Mary and I returned, without hinderance or
interruption, to our old intimate companionship The end was coming,
however, when we least expected it. My mother was startled, one
morning, by a letter from my father, which informed her that he had been
unexpectedly obliged to sail for England at a moment's notice; that he
had arrived in London, and that he was detained there by business which
would admit of no delay. We were to wait for him at home, in daily
expectation of seeing him the moment he was free.

This news filled my mother's mind with foreboding doubts of the
stability of her husband's grand speculation in America. The sudden
departure from the United States, and the mysterious delay in London,
were ominous, to her eyes, of misfortune to come. I am now writing of
those dark days in the past, when the railway and the electric telegraph
were still visions in the minds of inventors. Rapid communication
with my father (even if he would have consented to take us into his
confidence) was impossible. We had no choice but to wait and hope.

The weary days passed; and still my father's brief letters described him
as detained by his business. The morning came when Mary and I went out
with Dermody, the bailiff, to see the last wild fowl of the season lured
into the decoy; and still the welcome home waited for the master, and
waited in vain.

CHAPTER III. SWEDENBORG AND THE SIBYL.

MY narrative may move on again from the point at which it paused in the
first chapter.

Mary and I (as you may remember) had left the bailiff alone at the
decoy, and had set forth on our way together to Dermody's cottage.

As we approached the garden gate, I saw a servant from the house waiting
there. He carried a message from my mother--a message for me.

"My mistress wishes you to go home, Master George, as soon as you can. A
letter has come by the coach. My master means to take a post-chaise from
London, and sends word that we may expect him in the course of the day."

Mary's attentive face saddened when she heard those words.

"Must you really go away, George," she whispered, "before you see what I
have got waiting for you at home?"

I remembered Mary's promised "surprise," the secret of which was only
to be revealed to me when we got to the cottage. How could I disappoint
her? My poor little lady-love looked ready to cry at the bare prospect
of it.

I dismissed the servant with a message of the temporizing sort. My love
to my mother--and I would be back at the house in half an hour.

We entered the cottage.

Dame Dermody was sitting in the light of the window, as usual, with one
of the mystic books of Emanuel Swedenborg open on her lap. She solemnly
lifted her hand on our appearance, signing to us to occupy our customary
corner without speaking to her. It was an act of domestic high treason
to interrupt the Sibyl at her books. We crept quietly into our places.
Mary waited until she saw her grandmother's gray head bend down, and
her grandmother's bushy eyebrows contract attentively, over her reading.
Then, and then only, the discreet child rose on tiptoe, disappeared
noiselessly in the direction of her bedchamber, and came back to
me carrying something carefully wrapped up in her best cambric
handkerchief.

"Is that the surprise?" I whispered.

Mary whispered back: "Guess what it is?"

"Something for me?"

"Yes. Go on guessing. What is it?"

I guessed three times, and each guess was wrong. Mary decided on helping
me by a hint.

"Say your letters," she suggested; "and go on till I stop you."

I began: "A, B, C, D, E, F--" There she stopped me.

"It's the name of a Thing," she said; "and it begins with F."

I guessed, "Fern," "Feather," "Fife." And here my resources failed me.

Mary sighed, and shook her head. "You don't take pains," she said. "You
are three whole years older than I am. After all the trouble I have
taken to please you, you may be too big to care for my present when you
see it. Guess again."

"I can't guess."

"You must!"

"I give it up."

Mary refused to let me give it up. She helped me by another hint.

"What did you once say you wished you had in your boat?" she asked.

"Was it long ago?" I inquired, at a loss for an answer.

"Long, long ago! Before the winter. When the autumn leaves were falling,
and you took me out one evening for a sail. Ah, George, _you_ have
forgotten!"

Too true, of me and of my brethren, old and young alike! It is always
_his_ love that forgets, and _her_ love that remembers. We were only two
children, and we were types of the man and the woman already.

Mary lost patience with me. Forgetting the terrible presence of her
grandmother, she jumped up, and snatched the concealed object out of her
handkerchief.

"There!" she cried, briskly, "_now_ do you know what it is?"

I remembered at last. The thing I had wished for in my boat, all those
months ago, was a new flag. And here was the flag, made for me in secret
by Mary's own hand! The ground was green silk, with a dove embroidered
on it in white, carrying in its beak the typical olive-branch, wrought
in gold thread. The work was the tremulous, uncertain work of a child's
fingers. But how faithfully my little darling had remembered my wish!
how patiently she had plied the needle over the traced lines of the
pattern! how industriously she had labored through the dreary winter
days! and all for my sake! What words could tell my pride, my gratitude,
my happiness?

I too forgot the presence of the Sibyl bending over her book. I took
the little workwoman in my arms, and kissed her till I was fairly out of
breath and could kiss no longer.

"Mary!" I burst out, in the first heat of my enthusiasm, "my father is
coming home to-day. I will speak to him to-night. And I will marry you
to-morrow!"

"Boy!" said the awful voice at the other end of the room. "Come here."

Dame Dermody's mystic book was closed; Dame Dermody's weird black eyes
were watching us in our corner. I approached her; and Mary followed me
timidly, by a footstep at a time.

The Sibyl took me by the hand, with a caressing gentleness which was new
in my experience of her.

"Do you prize that toy?" she inquired, looking at the flag. "Hide it!"
she cried, before I could answer. "Hide it--or it may be taken from
you!"

"Why should I hide it?" I asked. "I want to fly it at the mast of my
boat."

"You will never fly it at the mast of your boat!" With that answer she
took the flag from me and thrust it impatiently into the breast-pocket
of my jacket.

"Don't crumple it, grandmother!" said Mary, piteously.

I repeated my question:

"Why shall I never fly it at the mast of my boat?"

Dame Dermody laid her hand on the closed volume of Swedenborg lying in
her lap.

"Three times I have opened this book since the morning," she said.
"Three times the words of the prophet warn me that there is trouble
coming. Children, it is trouble that is coming to You. I look there,"
she went on, pointing to the place where a ray of sunlight poured
slanting into the room, "and I see my husband in the heavenly light. He
bows his head in grief, and he points his unerring hand at You. George
and Mary, you are consecrated to each other! Be always worthy of your
consecration; be always worthy of yourselves." She paused. Her voice
faltered. She looked at us with softening eyes, as those look who know
sadly that there is a parting at hand. "Kneel!" she said, in low tones
of awe and grief. "It may be the last time I bless you--it may be the
last time I pray over you, in this house. Kneel!"

We knelt close together at her feet. I could feel Mary's heart
throbbing, as she pressed nearer and nearer to my side. I could feel my
own heart quickening its beat, with a fear that was a mystery to me.

"God bless and keep George and Mary, here and hereafter! God prosper,
in future days, the union which God's wisdom has willed! Amen. So be it.
Amen."

As the last words fell from her lips the cottage door was thrust open.
My father--followed by the bailiff--entered the room.

Dame Dermody got slowly on her feet, and looked at him with a stern
scrutiny.

"It has come," she said to herself. "It looks with the eyes--it will
speak with the voice--of that man."

My father broke the silence that followed, addressing himself to the
bailiff.

"You see, Dermody," he said, "here is my son in your cottage--when he
ought to be in my house." He turned, and looked at me as I stood with
my arm round little Mary, patiently waiting for my opportunity to speak.
"George," he said, with the hard smile which was peculiar to him,
when he was angry and was trying to hide it, "you are making a fool of
yourself there. Leave that child, and come to me."

Now, or never, was my time to declare myself. Judging by appearances,
I was still a boy. Judging by my own sensations, I had developed into a
man at a moment's notice.

"Papa," I said, "I am glad to see you home again. This is Mary Dermody.
I am in love with her, and she is in love with me. I wish to marry her
as soon as it is convenient to my mother and you."

My father burst out laughing. Before I could speak again, his humor
changed. He had observed that Dermody, too, presumed to be amused. He
seemed to become mad with anger, all in a moment.

"I have been told of this infernal tomfoolery," he said, "but I didn't
believe it till now. Who has turned the boy's weak head? Who has
encouraged him to stand there hugging that girl? If it's you, Dermody,
it shall be the worst day's work you ever did in your life." He turned
to me again, before the bailiff could defend himself. "Do you hear what
I say? I tell you to leave Dermody's girl, and come home with me."

"Yes, papa," I answered. "But I must go back to Mary, if you please,
after I have been with you."

Angry as he was, my father was positively staggered by my audacity.

"You young idiot, your insolence exceeds belief!" he burst out. "I tell
you this: you will never darken these doors again! You have been taught
to disobey me here. You have had things put into your head, here, which
no boy of your age ought to know--I'll say more, which no decent people
would have let you know."

"I beg your pardon, sir," Dermody interposed, very respectfully and very
firmly at the same time. "There are many things which a master in a hot
temper is privileged to say to the man who serves him. But you have gone
beyond your privilege. You have shamed me, sir, in the presence of my
mother, in the hearing of my child--"

My father checked him there.

"You may spare the rest of it," he said. "We are master and servant
no longer. When my son came hanging about your cottage, and playing at
sweethearts with your girl there, your duty was to close the door on
him. You have failed in your duty. I trust you no longer. Take a month's
notice, Dermody. You leave my service."

The bailiff steadily met my father on his ground. He was no longer the
easy, sweet-tempered, modest man who was the man of my remembrance.

"I beg to decline taking your month's notice, sir," he answered. "You
shall have no opportunity of repeating what you have just said to me.
I will send in my accounts to-night. And I will leave your service
to-morrow."

"We agree for once," retorted my father. "The sooner you go, the
better."

He stepped across the room and put his hand on my shoulder.

"Listen to me," he said, making a last effort to control himself. "I
don't want to quarrel with you before a discarded servant. There must be
an end to this nonsense. Leave these people to pack up and go, and come
back to the house with me."

His heavy hand, pressing on my shoulder, seemed to press the spirit
of resistance out of me. I so far gave way as to try to melt him by
entreaties.

"Oh, papa! papa!" I cried. "Don't part me from Mary! See how pretty and
good she is! She has made me a flag for my boat. Let me come here and
see her sometimes. I can't live without her."

I could say no more. My poor little Mary burst out crying. Her tears and
my entreaties were alike wasted on my father.

"Take your choice," he said, "between coming away of your own accord, or
obliging me to take you away by force. I mean to part you and Dermody's
girl."

"Neither you nor any man can part them," interposed a voice, speaking
behind us. "Rid your mind of that notion, master, before it is too
late."

My father looked round quickly, and discovered Dame Dermody facing him
in the full light of the window. She had stepped back, at the outset
of the dispute, into the corner behind the fireplace. There she had
remained, biding her time to speak, until my father's last threat
brought her out of her place of retirement.

They looked at each other for a moment. My father seemed to think it
beneath his dignity to answer her. He went on with what he had to say to
me.

"I shall count three slowly," he resumed. "Before I get to the last
number, make up your mind to do what I tell you, or submit to the
disgrace of being taken away by force."

"Take him where you may," said Dame Dermody, "he will still be on his
way to his marriage with my grandchild."

"And where shall I be, if you please?" asked my father, stung into
speaking to her this time.

The answer followed instantly in these startling words:

"_You_ will be on your way to your ruin and your death."

My father turned his back on the prophetess with a smile of contempt.

"One!" he said, beginning to count.

I set my teeth, and clasped both arms round Mary as he spoke. I had
inherited some of his temper, and he was now to know it.

"Two!" proceeded my father, after waiting a little.

Mary put her trembling lips to my ear, and whispered: "Let me go,
George! I can't bear to see it. Oh, look how he frowns! I know he'll
hurt you."

My father lifted his forefinger as a preliminary warning before he
counted Three.

"Stop!" cried Dame Dermody.

My father looked round at her again with sardonic astonishment.

"I beg your pardon, ma'am--have you anything particular to say to me?"
he asked.

"Man!" returned the Sibyl, "you speak lightly. Have I spoken lightly to
You? I warn you to bow your wicked will before a Will that is mightier
than yours. The spirits of these children are kindred spirits. For time
and for eternity they are united one to the other. Put land and sea
between them--they will still be together; they will communicate in
visions, they will be revealed to each other in dreams. Bind them by
worldly ties; wed your son, in the time to come, to another woman, and
my grand-daughter to another man. In vain! I tell you, in vain! You may
doom them to misery, you may drive them to sin--the day of their union
on earth is still a day predestined in heaven. It will come! it will
come! Submit, while the time for submission is yours. You are a doomed
man. I see the shadow of disaster, I see the seal of death, on your
face. Go; and leave these consecrated ones to walk the dark ways of
the world together, in the strength of their innocence, in the light of
their love. Go--and God forgive you!" In spite of himself, my father was
struck by the irresistible strength of conviction which inspired those
words. The bailiff's mother had impressed him as a tragic actress might
have impressed him on the stage. She had checked the mocking answer on
his lips, but she had not shaken his iron will. His face was as hard as
ever when he turned my way once more.

"The last chance, George," he said, and counted the last number:
"Three!"

I neither moved nor answered him.

"You _will_ have it?" he said, as he fastened his hold on my arm.

I fastened _my_ hold on Mary; I whispered to her, "I won't leave you!"
She seemed not to hear me. She trembled from head to foot in my arms. A
faint cry of terror fluttered from her lips. Dermody instantly stepped
forward. Before my father could wrench me away from her, he had said in
my ear, "You can give her to _me_, Master George," and had released
his child from my embrace. She stretched her little frail hands out
yearningly to me, as she lay in Dermody's arms. "Good-by, dear," she
said, faintly. I saw her head sink on her father's bosom as I was
dragged to the door. In my helpless rage and misery, I struggled against
the cruel hands that had got me with all the strength I had left. I
cried out to her, "I love you, Mary! I will come back to you, Mary! I
will never marry any one but you!" Step by step, I was forced further
and further away. The last I saw of her, my darling's head was still
resting on Dermody's breast. Her grandmother stood near, and shook her
withered hands at my father, and shrieked her terrible prophecy, in
the hysteric frenzy that possessed her when she saw the separation
accomplished. "Go!--you go to your ruin! you go to your death!" While
her voice still rang in my ears, the cottage door was opened and closed
again. It was all over. The modest world of my boyish love and my boyish
joy disappeared like the vision of a dream. The empty outer wilderness,
which was my father's world, opened before me void of love and void of
joy. God forgive me--how I hated him at that moment!

CHAPTER IV. THE CURTAIN FALLS.

FOR the rest of the day, and through the night, I was kept a close
prisoner in my room, watched by a man on whose fidelity my father could
depend.

The next morning I made an effort to escape, and was discovered before
I had got free of the house. Confined again to my room, I contrived
to write to Mary, and to slip my note into the willing hand of the
housemaid who attended on me. Useless! The vigilance of my guardian was
not to be evaded. The woman was suspected and followed, and the letter
was taken from her. My father tore it up with his own hands.

Later in the day, my mother was permitted to see me.

She was quite unfit, poor soul, to intercede for me, or to serve my
interests in any way. My father had completely overwhelmed her by
announcing that his wife and his son were to accompany him, when he
returned to America.

"Every farthing he has in the world," said my mother, "is to be thrown
into that hateful speculation. He has raised money in London; he has let
the house to some rich tradesman for seven years; he has sold the plate,
and the jewels that came to me from his mother. The land in America
swallows it all up. We have no home, George, and no choice but to go
with him."

An hour afterward the post-chaise was at the door.

My father himself took me to the carriage. I broke away from him, with
a desperation which not even his resolution could resist. I ran, I flew,
along the path that led to Dermody's cottage. The door stood open; the
parlor was empty. I went into the kitchen; I went into the upper rooms.
Solitude everywhere. The bailiff had left the place; and his mother and
his daughter had gone with him. No friend or neighbor lingered near with
a message; no letter lay waiting for me; no hint was left to tell me in
what direction they had taken their departure. After the insulting words
which his master had spoken to him, Dermody's pride was concerned in
leaving no trace of his whereabouts; my father might consider it as a
trace purposely left with the object of reuniting Mary and me. I had no
keepsake to speak to me of my lost darling but the flag which she had
embroidered with her own hand. The furniture still remained in the
cottage. I sat down in our customary corner, by Mary's empty chair, and
looked again at the pretty green flag, and burst out crying.

A light touch roused me. My father had so far yielded as to leave to my
mother the responsibility of bringing me back to the traveling carriage.

"We shall not find Mary here, George," she said, gently. "And we _may_
hear of her in London. Come with me."

I rose and silently gave her my hand. Something low down on the clean
white door-post caught my eye as we passed it. I stooped, and discovered
some writing in pencil. I looked closer--it was writing in Mary's hand!
The unformed childish characters traced these last words of farewell:

"Good-by, dear. Don't forget Mary."

I knelt down and kissed the writing. It comforted me--it was like a
farewell touch from Mary's hand. I followed my mother quietly to the
carriage.

Late that night we were in London.

My good mother did all that the most compassionate kindness could do
(in her position) to comfort me. She privately wrote to the solicitors
employed by her family, inclosing a description of Dermody and his
mother and daughter and directing inquiries to be made at the various
coach-offices in London. She also referred the lawyers to two of
Dermody's relatives, who lived in the city, and who might know
something of his movements after he left my father's service. When she
had done this, she had done all that lay in her power. We neither of us
possessed money enough to advertise in the newspapers.

A week afterward we sailed for the United States. Twice in that interval
I communicated with the lawyers; and twice I was informed that the
inquiries had led to nothing.


With this the first epoch in my love story comes to an end.

For ten long years afterward I never again met with my little Mary; I
never even heard whether she had lived to grow to womanhood or not. I
still kept the green flag, with the dove worked on it. For the rest,
the waters of oblivion had closed over the old golden days at Greenwater
Broad.

CHAPTER V. MY STORY.

WHEN YOU last saw me, I was a boy of thirteen. You now see me a man of
twenty-three.

The story of my life, in the interval between these two ages, is a story
that can be soon told.

Speaking of my father first, I have to record that the end of his career
did indeed come as Dame Dermody had foretold it. Before we had been a
year in America, the total collapse of his land speculation was followed
by his death. The catastrophe was complete. But for my mother's little
income (settled on her at her marriage) we should both have been left
helpless at the mercy of the world.

We made some kind friends among the hearty and hospitable people of the
United States, whom we were unaffectedly sorry to leave. But there were
reasons which inclined us to return to our own country after my father's
death; and we did return accordingly.

Besides her brother-in-law (already mentioned in the earlier pages of my
narrative), my mother had another relative--a cousin named Germaine--on
whose assistance she mainly relied for starting me, when the time came,
in a professional career. I remember it as a family rumor, that Mr.
Germaine had been an unsuccessful suitor for my mother's hand in the
days when they were young people together. He was still a bachelor at
the later period when his eldest brother's death without issue placed
him in possession of a handsome fortune. The accession of wealth made
no difference in his habits of life: he was a lonely old man, estranged
from his other relatives, when my mother and I returned to England. If
I could only succeed in pleasing Mr. Germaine, I might consider my
prospects (in some degree, at least) as being prospects assured.

This was one consideration that influenced us in leaving America. There
was another--in which I was especially interested--that drew me back to
the lonely shores of Greenwater Broad.

My only hope of recovering a trace of Mary was to make inquiries among
the cottagers in the neighborhood of my old home. The good bailiff had
been heartily liked and respected in his little sphere. It seemed at
least possible that some among his many friends in Suffolk might have
discovered traces of him, in the year that had passed since I had left
England. In my dreams of Mary--and I dreamed of her constantly--the
lake and its woody banks formed a frequent background in the visionary
picture of my lost companion. To the lake shores I looked, with a
natural superstition, as to my way back to the one life that had its
promise of happiness for _me_--my life with Mary.

On our arrival in London, I started for Suffolk alone--at my mother's
request. At her age she naturally shrank from revisiting the home scenes
now occupied by the strangers to whom our house had been let.

Ah, how my heart ached (young as I was) when I saw the familiar green
waters of the lake once more! It was evening. The first object that
caught my eye was the gayly painted boat, once mine, in which Mary and I
had so often sailed together. The people in possession of our house were
sailing now. The sound of their laughter floated toward me merrily over
the still water. _Their_ flag flew at the little mast-head, from which
Mary's flag had never fluttered in the pleasant breeze. I turned my eyes
from the boat; it hurt me to look at it. A few steps onward brought me
to a promontory on the shore, and revealed the brown archways of the
decoy on the opposite bank. There was the paling behind which we had
knelt to watch the snaring of the ducks; there was the hole through
which "Trim," the terrier, had shown himself to rouse the stupid
curiosity of the water-fowl; there, seen at intervals through the trees,
was the winding woodland path along which Mary and I had traced our way
to Dermody's cottage on the day when my father's cruel hand had torn us
from each other. How wisely my good mother had shrunk from looking again
at the dear old scenes! I turned my back on the lake, to think with
calmer thoughts in the shadowy solitude of the woods.

An hour's walk along the winding banks brought me round to the cottage
which had once been Mary's home.

The door was opened by a woman who was a stranger to me. She civilly
asked me to enter the parlor. I had suffered enough already; I made my
inquiries, standing on the doorstep. They were soon at an end. The woman
was a stranger in our part of Suffolk; neither she nor her husband had
ever heard of Dermody's name.

I pursued my investigations among the peasantry, passing from cottage
to cottage. The twilight came; the moon rose; the lights began to vanish
from the lattice-windows; and still I continued my weary pilgrimage; and
still, go where I might, the answer to my questions was the same. Nobody
knew anything of Dermody. Everybody asked if I had not brought news of
him myself. It pains me even now to recall the cruelly complete defeat
of every effort which I made on that disastrous evening. I passed the
night in one of the cottages; and I returned to London the next day,
broken by disappointment, careless what I did, or where I went next.

Still, we were not wholly parted. I saw Mary--as Dame Dermody said I
should see her--in dreams.

Sometimes she came to me with the green flag in her hand, and repeated
her farewell words--"Don't forget Mary!" Sometimes she led me to our
well-remembered corner in the cottage parlor, and opened the paper on
which her grandmother had written our prayers for us. We prayed together
again, and sung hymns together again, as if the old times had come back.
Once she appeared to me, with tears in her eyes, and said, "We must
wait, dear: our time has not come yet." Twice I saw her looking at me,
like one disturbed by anxious thoughts; and twice I heard her say, "Live
patiently, live innocently, George, for my sake."

We settled in London, where my education was undertaken by a private
tutor. Before we had been long in our new abode, an unexpected change
in our prospects took place. To my mother's astonishment she received an
offer of marriage (addressed to her in a letter) from Mr. Germaine.

"I entreat you not to be startled by my proposal!" (the old gentleman
wrote). "You can hardly have forgotten that I was once fond of you,
in the days when we were both young and both poor. No return to the
feelings associated with that time is possible now. At my age, all I ask
of you is to be the companion of the closing years of my life, and to
give me something of a father's interest in promoting the future welfare
of your son. Consider this, my dear, and tell me whether you will take
the empty chair at an old man's lonely fireside."

My mother (looking almost as confused, poor soul! as if she had become
a young girl again) left the whole responsibility of decision on the
shoulders of her son! I was not long in making up my mind. If she said
Yes, she would accept the hand of a man of worth and honor, who had
been throughout his whole life devoted to her; and she would recover
the comfort, the luxury, the social prosperity and position of which my
father's reckless course of life had deprived her. Add to this, that
I liked Mr. Germaine, and that Mr. Germaine liked me. Under these
circumstances, why should my mother say No? She could produce no
satisfactory answer to that question when I put it. As the necessary
consequence, she became, in due course of time, Mrs. Germaine.

I have only to add that, to the end of her life, my good mother
congratulated herself (in this case at least) on having taken her son's
advice.

The years went on, and still Mary and I were parted, except in my
dreams. The years went on, until the perilous time which comes in every
man's life came in mine. I reached the age when the strongest of all
the passions seizes on the senses, and asserts its mastery over mind and
body alike.

I had hitherto passively endured the wreck of my earliest and dearest
hopes: I had lived patiently, and lived innocently, for Mary's sake. Now
my patience left me; my innocence was numbered among the lost things of
the past. My days, it is true, were still devoted to the tasks set me by
my tutor; but my nights were given, in secret, to a reckless profligacy,
which (in my present frame of mind) I look back on with disgust and
dismay. I profaned my remembrances of Mary in the company of women
who had reached the lowest depths of degradation. I impiously said to
myself: "I have hoped for her long enough; I have waited for her long
enough. The one thing now to do is to enjoy my youth and to forget her."

From the moment when I dropped into this degradation, I might sometimes
think regretfully of Mary--at the morning time, when penitent thoughts
mostly come to us; but I ceased absolutely to see her in my dreams.
We were now, in the completest sense of the word, parted. Mary's pure
spirit could hold no communion with mine; Mary's pure spirit had left
me.

It is needless to say that I failed to keep the secret of my depravity
from the knowledge of my mother. The sight of her grief was the first
influence that sobered me. In some degree at least I restrained myself:
I made the effort to return to purer ways of life. Mr. Germaine, though
I had disappointed him, was too just a man to give me up as lost.
He advised me, as a means of self-reform, to make my choice of a
profession, and to absorb myself in closer studies than any that I had
yet pursued.

I made my peace with this good friend and second father, not only by
following his advice, but by adopting the profession to which he had
been himself attached before he inherited his fortune--the profession of
medicine. Mr. Germaine had been a surgeon: I resolved on being a surgeon
too.

Having entered, at rather an earlier age than usual, on my new way of
life, I may at least say for myself that I worked hard. I won, and kept,
the interest of the professors under whom I studied. On the other hand,
it cannot be denied that my reformation was, morally speaking, far from
being complete. I worked; but what I did was done selfishly, bitterly,
with a hard heart. In religion and morals I adopted the views of a
materialist companion of my studies--a worn-out man of more than double
my age. I believed in nothing but what I could see, or taste, or feel.
I lost all faith in humanity. With the one exception of my mother, I had
no respect for women. My remembrances of Mary deteriorated until they
became little more than a lost link of association with the past. I
still preserved the green flag as a matter of habit; but it was
no longer kept about me; it was left undisturbed in a drawer of my
writing-desk. Now and then a wholesome doubt, whether my life was not
utterly unworthy of me, would rise in my mind. But it held no long
possession of my thoughts. Despising others, it was in the logical order
of things that I should follow my conclusions to their bitter end, and
consistently despise myself.

The term of my majority arrived. I was twenty-one years old; and of the
illusions of my youth not a vestige remained.

Neither my mother nor Mr. Germaine could make any positive complaint of
my conduct. But they were both thoroughly uneasy about me. After anxious
consideration, my step-father arrived at a conclusion. He decided that
the one chance of restoring me to my better and brighter self was to try
the stimulant of a life among new people and new scenes.

At the period of which I am now writing, the home government had decided
on sending a special diplomatic mission to one of the native princes
ruling over a remote province of our Indian empire. In the disturbed
state of the province at that time, the mission, on its arrival in
India, was to be accompanied to the prince's court by an escort,
including the military as well as the civil servants of the crown. The
surgeon appointed to sail with the expedition from England was an old
friend of Mr. Germaine's, and was in want of an assistant on whose
capacity he could rely. Through my stepfather's interest, the post was
offered to me. I accepted it without hesitation. My only pride left was
the miserable pride of indifference. So long as I pursued my profession,
the place in which I pursued it was a matter of no importance to my
mind.

It was long before we could persuade my mother even to contemplate the
new prospect now set before me. When she did at length give way, she
yielded most unwillingly. I confess I left her with the tears in my
eyes--the first I had shed for many a long year past.

The history of our expedition is part of the history of British India.
It has no place in this narrative.

Speaking personally, I have to record that I was rendered incapable of
performing my professional duties in less than a week from the time when
the mission reached its destination. We were encamped outside the city;
and an attack was made on us, under cover of darkness, by the fanatical
natives. The attempt was defeated with little difficulty, and with only
a trifling loss on our side. I was among the wounded, having been struck
by a javelin, or spear, while I was passing from one tent to another.

Inflicted by a European weapon, my injury would have been of no serious
consequence. But the tip of the Indian spear had been poisoned. I
escaped the mortal danger of lockjaw; but, through some peculiarity in
the action of the poison on my constitution (which I am quite unable to
explain), the wound obstinately refused to heal.

I was invalided and sent to Calcutta, where the best surgical help was
at my disposal. To all appearance, the wound healed there--then broke
out again. Twice this happened; and the medical men agreed that the
best course to take would be to send me home. They calculated on
the invigorating effect of the sea voyage, and, failing this, on
the salutary influence of my native air. In the Indian climate I was
pronounced incurable.

Two days before the ship sailed a letter from my mother brought me
startling news. My life to come--if I _had_ a life to come--had
been turned into a new channel. Mr. Germaine had died suddenly, of
heart-disease. His will, bearing date at the time when I left England,
bequeathed an income for life to my mother, and left the bulk of his
property to me, on the one condition that I adopted his name. I accepted
the condition, of course, and became George Germaine.

Three months later, my mother and I were restored to each other.

Except that I still had some trouble with my wound, behold me now to all
appearance one of the most enviable of existing mortals; promoted to the
position of a wealthy gentleman; possessor of a house in London and of a
country-seat in Perthshire; and, nevertheless, at twenty-three years of
age, one of the most miserable men living!


And Mary?

In the ten years that had now passed over, what had become of Mary?

You have heard my story. Read the few pages that follow, and you will
hear hers.

CHAPTER VI. HER STORY.

WHAT I have now to tell you of Mary is derived from information obtained
at a date in my life later by many years than any date of which I have
written yet. Be pleased to remember this.


Dermody, the bailiff, possessed relatives in London, of whom he
occasionally spoke, and relatives in Scotland, whom he never mentioned.
My father had a strong prejudice against the Scotch nation. Dermody knew
his master well enough to be aware that the prejudice might extend to
_him_, if he spoke of his Scotch kindred. He was a discreet man, and he
never mentioned them.

On leaving my father's service, he had made his way, partly by land and
partly by sea, to Glasgow--in which city his friends resided. With his
character and his experience, Dermody was a man in a thousand to any
master who was lucky enough to discover him. His friends bestirred
themselves. In six weeks' time he was placed in charge of a gentleman's
estate on the eastern coast of Scotland, and was comfortably established
with his mother and his daughter in a new home.

The insulting language which my father had addressed to him had sunk
deep in Dermody's mind. He wrote privately to his relatives in London,
telling them that he had found a new situation which suited him, and
that he had his reasons for not at present mentioning his address. In
this way he baffled the inquiries which my mother's lawyers (failing
to discover a trace of him in other directions) addressed to his
London friends. Stung by his old master's reproaches, he sacrificed his
daughter and he sacrificed me--partly to his own sense of self-respect,
partly to his conviction that the difference between us in rank made it
his duty to check all further intercourse before it was too late.

Buried in their retirement in a remote part of Scotland, the little
household lived, lost to me, and lost to the world.

In dreams, I had seen and heard Mary. In dreams, Mary saw and heard me.
The innocent longings and wishes which filled my heart while I was still
a boy were revealed to her in the mystery of sleep. Her grandmother,
holding firmly to her faith in the predestined union between us,
sustained the girl's courage and cheered her heart. She could hear her
father say (as my father had said) that we were parted to meet no more,
and could privately think of her happy dreams as the sufficient promise
of another future than the future which Dermody contemplated. So she
still lived with me in the spirit--and lived in hope.

The first affliction that befell the little household was the death
of the grandmother, by the exhaustion of extreme old age. In her last
conscious moments, she said to Mary, "Never forget that you and George
are spirits consecrated to each other. Wait--in the certain knowledge
that no human power can hinder your union in the time to come."

While those words were still vividly present to Mary's mind, our
visionary union by dreams was abruptly broken on her side, as it had
been abruptly broken on mine. In the first days of my self-degradation,
I had ceased to see Mary. Exactly at the same period Mary ceased to see
me.

The girl's sensitive nature sunk under the shock. She had now no elder
woman to comfort and advise her; she lived alone with her father, who
invariably changed the subject whenever she spoke of the old times. The
secret sorrow that preys on body and mind alike preyed on _her_. A cold,
caught at the inclement season, turned to fever. For weeks she was in
danger of death. When she recovered, her head had been stripped of its
beautiful hair by the doctor's order. The sacrifice had been
necessary to save her life. It proved to be, in one respect, a cruel
sacrifice--her hair never grew plentifully again. When it did reappear,
it had completely lost its charming mingled hues of deep red and brown;
it was now of one monotonous light-brown color throughout. At first
sight, Mary's Scotch friends hardly knew her again.

But Nature made amends for what the head had lost by what the face and
the figure gained.

In a year from the date of her illness, the frail little child of the
old days at Greenwater Broad had ripened, in the bracing Scotch air and
the healthy mode of life, into a comely young woman. Her features were
still, as in her early years, not regularly beautiful; but the change
in her was not the less marked on that account. The wan face had filled
out, and the pale complexion had found its color. As to her figure, its
remarkable development was perceived even by the rough people about her.
Promising nothing when she was a child, it had now sprung into womanly
fullness, symmetry, and grace. It was a strikingly beautiful figure, in
the strictest sense of the word.

Morally as well as physically, there were moments, at this period of
their lives, when even her own father hardly recognized his daughter of
former days. She had lost her childish vivacity--her sweet, equable
flow of good humor. Silent and self-absorbed, she went through the daily
routine of her duties enduringly. The hope of meeting me again had sunk
to a dead hope in her by this time. She made no complaint. The bodily
strength that she had gained in these later days had its sympathetic
influence in steadying her mind. When her father once or twice ventured
to ask if she was still thinking of me, she answered quietly that she
had brought herself to share his opinions. She could not doubt that I
had long since ceased to think of her. Even if I had remained faithful
to her, she was old enough now to know that the difference between us in
rank made our union by marriage an impossibility. It would be best (she
thought) not to refer any more to the past, best to forget me, as I had
forgotten her. So she spoke now. So, tried by the test of appearances,
Dame Dermody's confident forecast of our destinies had failed to justify
itself, and had taken its place among the predictions that are never
fulfilled.

The next notable event in the family annals which followed Mary's
illness happened when she had attained the age of nineteen years. Even
at this distance of time my heart sinks, my courage fails me, at the
critical stage in my narrative which I have now reached.

A storm of unusual severity burst over the eastern coast of Scotland.
Among the ships that were lost in the tempest was a vessel bound from
Holland, which was wrecked on the rocky shore near Dermody's place of
abode. Leading the way in all good actions, the bailiff led the way in
rescuing the passengers and crew of the lost ship. He had brought one
man alive to land, and was on his way back to the vessel, when two heavy
seas, following in close succession, dashed him against the rocks.
He was rescued, at the risk of their own lives, by his neighbors. The
medical examination disclosed a broken bone and severe bruises and
lacerations. So far, Dermody's sufferings were easy of relief. But,
after a lapse of time, symptoms appeared in the patient which revealed
to his medical attendant the presence of serious internal injury. In the
doctor's opinion, he could never hope to resume the active habits of
his life. He would be an invalid and a crippled man for the rest of his
days.

Under these melancholy circumstances, the bailiff's employer did
all that could be strictly expected of him, He hired an assistant to
undertake the supervision of the farm work, and he permitted Dermody to
occupy his cottage for the next three months. This concession gave the
poor man time to recover such relics of strength as were still left to
him, and to consult his friends in Glasgow on the doubtful question of
his life to come.

The prospect was a serious one. Dermody was quite unfit for any
sedentary employment; and the little money that he had saved was not
enough to support his daughter and himself. The Scotch friends were
willing and kind; but they had domestic claims on them, and they had no
money to spare.

In this emergency, the passenger in the wrecked vessel (whose life
Dermody had saved) came forward with a proposal which took father and
daughter alike by surprise. He made Mary an offer of marriage; on the
express understanding (if she accepted him) that her home was to be her
father's home also to the end of his life.

The person who thus associated himself with the Dermodys in the time
of their trouble was a Dutch gentleman, named Ernest Van Brandt. He
possessed a share in a fishing establishment on the shores of the
Zuyder Zee; and he was on his way to establish a correspondence with the
fisheries in the North of Scotland when the vessel was wrecked. Mary had
produced a strong impression on him when they first met. He had lingered
in the neighborhood, in the hope of gaining her favorable regard, with
time to help him. Personally he was a handsome man, in the prime of
life; and he was possessed of a sufficient income to marry on. In making
his proposal, he produced references to persons of high social position
in Holland, who could answer for him, so far as the questions of
character and position were concerned.

Mary was long in considering which course it would be best for her
helpless father, and best for herself, to adopt.

The hope of a marriage with me had been a hope abandoned by her years
since. No woman looks forward willingly to a life of cheerless celibacy.
In thinking of her future, Mary naturally thought of herself in the
character of a wife. Could she fairly expect in the time to come to
receive any more attractive proposal than the proposal now addressed
to her? Mr. Van Brandt had every personal advantage that a woman could
desire; he was devotedly in love with her; and he felt a grateful
affection for her father as the man to whom he owed his life. With no
other hope in her heart--with no other prospect in view--what could she
do better than marry Mr. Van Brandt?

Influenced by these considerations, she decided on speaking the fatal
word. She said, "Yes."

At the same time, she spoke plainly to Mr. Van Brandt, unreservedly
acknowledging that she had contemplated another future than the future
now set before her. She did not conceal that there had once been an old
love in her heart, and that a new love was more than she could command.
Esteem, gratitude, and regard she could honestly offer; and, with time,
love might come. For the rest, she had long since disassociated herself
from the past, and had definitely given up all the hopes and wishes once
connected with it. Repose for her father, and tranquil happiness for
herself, were the only favors that she asked of fortune now. These she
might find under the roof of an honorable man who loved and respected
her. She could promise, on her side, to make him a good and faithful
wife, if she could promise no more. It rested with Mr. Van Brandt to say
whether he really believed that he would be consulting his own happiness
in marrying her on these terms.

Mr. Van Brandt accepted the terms without a moment's hesitation.

They would have been married immediately but for an alarming change
for the worse in the condition of Dermody's health. Symptoms showed
themselves, which the doctor confessed that he had not anticipated when
he had given his opinion on the case. He warned Mary that the end might
be near. A physician was summoned from Edinburgh, at Mr. Van Brandt's
expense. He confirmed the opinion entertained by the country doctor. For
some days longer the good bailiff lingered. On the last morning, he
put his daughter's hand in Van Brandt's hand. "Make her happy, sir," he
said, in his simple way, "and you will be even with me for saving your
life." The same day he died quietly in his daughter's arms.

Mary's future was now entirely in her lover's hands. The relatives in
Glasgow had daughters of their own to provide for. The relatives in
London resented Dermody's neglect of them. Van Brandt waited, delicately
and considerately, until the first violence of the girl's grief had worn
itself out, and then he pleaded irresistibly for a husband's claim to
console her.

The time at which they were married in Scotland was also the time at
which I was on my way home from India. Mary had then reached the age of
twenty years.


The story of our ten years' separation is now told; the narrative leaves
us at the outset of our new lives.

I am with my mother, beginning my career as a country gentleman on the
estate in Perthshire which I have inherited from Mr. Germaine. Mary is
with her husband, enjoying her new privileges, learning her new duties,
as a wife. She, too, is living in Scotland--living, by a strange
fatality, not very far distant from my country-house. I have no
suspicion that she is so near to me: the name of Mrs. Van Brandt (even
if I had heard it) appeals to no familiar association in my mind. Still
the kindred spirits are parted. Still there is no idea on her side, and
no idea on mine, that we shall ever meet again.

CHAPTER VII. THE WOMAN ON THE BRIDGE.

MY mother looked in at the library door, and disturbed me over my books.

"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 know _me_ if 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 and 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 she _was_ a 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 of 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 got _her_ had got _me_. 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 been _your_ questions too?

CHAPTER VIII. THE KINDRED SPIRITS

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 for _you_ I 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 she
_was_ a 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 we 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 shines
                   On Saint Anthony's Well.


CHAPTER IX. NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL.

I POINTED to the writing in the sketch book, and looked at my mother. I
was not mistaken. She _had_ seen 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. "What _do_ you believe in?"
I inquired.

Mr. MacGlue declined to let me hurry him.

"Wait a little," he said. "There's the _ir_rational 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 the
_ir_rational explanation for you. And, speaking for myself, I'm bound to
add that I don't set a pin's value on _that_ explanation 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."--

     * The doctor's narrative is not imaginary. It will be found
     related in full detail, and authenticated by names and
     dates, in Robert Dale Owen's very interesting work called
     "Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World." The author
     gladly takes this opportunity of acknowledging his
     obligations to Mr. Owen's remarkable book.


CHAPTER X. SAINT ANTHONY'S WELL.

I STOOD on the rocky eminence in front of the ruins of Saint Anthony's
Chapel, and looked on the magnificent view of Edinburgh and of the old
Palace of Holyrood, bathed in the light of the full moon.

The Well, as the doctor's instructions had informed me, was behind
the chapel. I waited for some minutes in front of the ruin, partly to
recover my breath after ascending the hill; partly, I own, to master
the nervous agitation which the sense of my position at that moment had
aroused in me. The woman, or the apparition of the woman--it might be
either--was perhaps within a few yards of the place that I occupied. Not
a living creature appeared in front of the chapel. Not a sound caught
my ear from any part of the solitary hill. I tried to fix my whole
attention on the beauties of the moonlit view. It was not to be done. My
mind was far away from the objects on which my eyes rested. My mind was
with the woman whom I had seen in the summer-house writing in my book.

I turned to skirt the side of the chapel. A few steps more over the
broken ground brought me within view of the Well, and of the high
boulder or rock from the foot of which the waters gushed brightly in the
light of the moon.

She was there.

I recognized her figure as she stood leaning against the rock, with her
hands crossed in front of her, lost in thought. I recognized her face as
she looked up quickly, startled by the sound of my footsteps in the deep
stillness of the night.

Was it the woman, or the apparition of the woman? I waited, looking at
her in silence.

She spoke. The sound of her voice was not the mysterious sound that
I had heard in the summer-house. It was the sound I had heard on the
bridge when we first met in the dim evening light.

"Who are you? What do you want?"

As those words passed her lips, she recognized me. "_You_ here!" she
went on, advancing a step, in uncontrollable surprise. "What does this
mean?"

"I am here," I answered, "to meet you, by your own appointment."

She stepped back again, leaning against the rock. The moonlight shone
full upon her face. There was terror as well as astonishment in her eyes
while they now looked at me.

"I don't understand you," she said. "I have not seen you since you spoke
to me on the bridge."

"Pardon me," I replied. "I have seen you--or the appearance of
you--since that time. I heard you speak. I saw you write."

She looked at me with the strangest expression of mingled resentment and
curiosity. "What did I say?" she asked. "What did I write?"

"You said, 'Remember me. Come to me.' You wrote, 'When the full moon
shines on Saint Anthony's Well.'"

"Where?" she cried. "Where did I do that?"

"In a summer-house which stands by a waterfall," I answered. "Do you
know the place?"

Her head sunk back against the rock. A low cry of terror burst from
her. Her arm, resting on the rock, dropped at her side. I hurriedly
approached her, in the fear that she might fall on the stony ground.

She rallied her failing strength. "Don't touch me!" she exclaimed.
"Stand back, sir. You frighten me."

I tried to soothe her. "Why do I frighten you? You know who I am. Can
you doubt my interest in you, after I have been the means of saving your
life?"

Her reserve vanished in an instant. She advanced without hesitation, and
took me by the hand.

"I ought to thank you," she said. "And I do. I am not so ungrateful as
I seem. I am not a wicked woman, sir--I was mad with misery when I tried
to drown myself. Don't distrust me! Don't despise me!" She stopped; I
saw the tears on her cheeks. With a sudden contempt for herself, she
dashed them away. Her whole tone and manner altered once more. Her
reserve returned; she looked at me with a strange flash of suspicion and
defiance in her eyes. "Mind this!" she said, loudly and abruptly, "you
were dreaming when you thought you saw me writing. You didn't see me;
you never heard me speak. How could I say those familiar words to a
stranger like you? It's all your fancy--and you try to frighten me by
talking of it as if it was a real thing!" She changed again; her eyes
softened to the sad and tender look which made them so irresistibly
beautiful. She drew her cloak round her with a shudder, as if she felt
the chill of the night air. "What is the matter with me?" I heard her
say to herself. "Why do I trust this man in my dreams? And why am I
ashamed of it when I wake?"

That strange outburst encouraged me. I risked letting her know that I
had overheard her last words.

"If you trust me in your dreams, you only do me justice," I said. "Do
me justice now; give me your confidence. You are alone--you are in
trouble--you want a friend's help. I am waiting to help you."

She hesitated. I tried to take her hand. The strange creature drew it
away with a cry of alarm: her one great fear seemed to be the fear of
letting me touch her.

"Give me time to think of it," she said. "You don't know what I have got
to think of. Give me till to-morrow; and let me write. Are you staying
in Edinburgh?"

I thought it wise to be satisfied--in appearance at least--with this
concession. Taking out my card, I wrote on it in pencil the address of
the hotel at which I was staying. She read the card by the moonlight
when I put it into her hand.

"George!" she repeated to herself, stealing another look at me as the
name passed her lips. "'George Germaine.' I never heard of 'Germaine.'
But 'George' reminds me of old times." She smiled sadly at some passing
fancy or remembrance in which I was not permitted to share. "There is
nothing very wonderful in your being called 'George,'" she went on,
after a while. "The name is common enough: one meets with it everywhere
as a man's name And yet--" Her eyes finished the sentence; her eyes said
to me, "I am not so much afraid of you, now I know that you are called
'George.'"

So she unconsciously led me to the brink of discovery!

If I had only asked her what associations she connected with my
Christian name--if I had only persuaded her to speak in the briefest and
most guarded terms of her past life--the barrier between us, which the
change in our names and the lapse of ten years had raised, must have
been broken down; the recognition must have followed. But I never even
thought of it; and for this simple reason--I was in love with her. The
purely selfish idea of winning my way to her favorable regard by taking
instant advantage of the new interest that I had awakened in her was the
one idea which occurred to my mind.

"Don't wait to write to me," I said. "Don't put it off till to-morrow.
Who knows what may happen before to-morrow? Surely I deserve some little
return for the sympathy that I feel with you? I don't ask for much. Make
me happy by making me of some service to you before we part to-night."

I took her hand, this time, before she was aware of me. The whole woman
seemed to yield at my touch. Her hand lay unresistingly in mine; her
charming figure came by soft gradations nearer and nearer to me; her
head almost touched my shoulder. She murmured in faint accents, broken
by sighs, "Don't take advantage of me. I am so friendless; I am so
completely in your power." Before I could answer, before I could move,
her hand closed on mine; her head sunk on my shoulder: she burst into
tears.

Any man, not an inbred and inborn villain, would have respected her at
that moment. I put her hand on my arm and led her away gently past the
ruined chapel, and down the slope of the hill.

"This lonely place is frightening you," I said. "Let us walk a little,
and you will soon be yourself again."

She smiled through her tears like a child.

"Yes," she said, eagerly. "But not that way." I had accidentally taken
the direction which led away from the city; she begged me to turn toward
the houses and the streets. We walked back toward Edinburgh. She eyed
me, as we went on in the moonlight, with innocent, wondering looks.
"What an unaccountable influence you have over me!" she exclaimed.

"Did you ever see me, did you ever hear my name, before we met that
evening at the river?"

"Never."

"And I never heard _your_ name, and never saw _you_ before. Strange!
very strange! Ah! I remember somebody--only an old woman, sir--who might
once have explained it. Where shall I find the like of her now?"

She sighed bitterly. The lost friend or relative had evidently been dear
to her. "A relation of yours?" I inquired--more to keep her talking than
because I felt any interest in any member of her family but herself.

We were again on the brink of discovery. And again it was decreed that
we were to advance no further.

"Don't ask me about my relations!" she broke out. "I daren't think of
the dead and gone, in the trouble that is trying me now. If I speak of
the old times at home, I shall only burst out crying again, and distress
you. Talk of something else, sir--talk of something else."


The mystery of the apparition in the summer-house was not cleared up
yet. I took my opportunity of approaching the subject.

"You spoke a little while since of dreaming of me," I began. "Tell me
your dream."

"I hardly know whether it was a dream or whether it was something else,"
she answered. "I call it a dream for want of a better word."

"Did it happen at night?"

"No. In the daytime--in the afternoon."

"Late in the afternoon?"

"Yes--close on the evening."

My memory reverted to the doctor's story of the shipwrecked passenger,
whose ghostly "double" had appeared in the vessel that was to rescue
him, and who had himself seen that vessel in a dream.

"Do you remember the day of the month and the hour?" I asked.

She mentioned the day, and she mentioned the hour. It was the day when
my mother and I had visited the waterfall. It was the hour when I had
seen the apparition in the summer-house writing in my book!

I stopped in irrepressible astonishment. We had walked by this time
nearly as far on the way back to the city as the old Palace of Holyrood.
My companion, after a glance at me, turned and looked at the rugged old
building, mellowed into quiet beauty by the lovely moonlight.

"This is my favorite walk," she said, simply, "since I have been in
Edinburgh. I don't mind the loneliness. I like the perfect tranquillity
here at night." She glanced at me again. "What is the matter?" she
asked. "You say nothing; you only look at me."

"I want to hear more of your dream," I said. "How did you come to be
sleeping in the daytime?"

"It is not easy to say what I was doing," she replied, as we walked on
again. "I was miserably anxious and ill. I felt my helpless condition
keenly on that day. It was dinner-time, I remember, and I had no
appetite. I went upstairs (at the inn where I am staying), and lay down,
quite worn out, on my bed. I don't know whether I fainted or whether I
slept; I lost all consciousness of what was going on about me, and I got
some other consciousness in its place. If this was dreaming, I can only
say it was the most vivid dream I ever had in my life."

"Did it begin by your seeing me?" I inquired.

"It began by my seeing your drawing-book--lying open on a table in a
summer-house."

"Can you describe the summer-house as you saw it?"

She described not only the summer-house, but the view of the waterfall
from the door. She knew the size, she knew the binding, of my
sketch-book--locked up in my desk, at that moment, at home in
Perthshire!

"And you wrote in the book," I went on. "Do you remember what you
wrote?"

She looked away from me confusedly, as if she were ashamed to recall
this part of her dream.

"You have mentioned it already," she said. "There is no need for me to
go over the words again. Tell me one thing--when _you_ were at the
summer-house, did you wait a little on the path to the door before you
went in?"

I _had_ waited, surprised by my first view of the woman writing in my
book. Having answered her to this effect, I asked what she had done or
dreamed of doing at the later moment when I entered the summer-house.

"I did the strangest things," she said, in low, wondering tones. "If you
had been my brother, I could hardly have treated you more familiarly.
I beckoned to you to come to me. I even laid my hand on your bosom. I
spoke to you as I might have spoken to my oldest and dearest friend. I
said, 'Remember me. Come to me.' Oh, I was so ashamed of myself when
I came to my senses again, and recollected it. Was there ever such
familiarity--even in a dream--between a woman and a man whom she had
only once seen, and then as a perfect stranger?"

"Did you notice how long it was," I asked, "from the time when you lay
down on the bed to the time when you found yourself awake again?"

"I think I can tell you," she replied. "It was the dinner-time of the
house (as I said just now) when I went upstairs. Not long after I had
come to myself I heard a church clock strike the hour. Reckoning from
one time to the other, it must have been quite three hours from the time
when I first lay down to the time when I got up again."

Was the clew to the mysterious disappearance of the writing to be found
here?

Looking back by the light of later discoveries, I am inclined to think
that it was. In three hours the lines traced by the apparition of her
had vanished. In three hours she had come to herself, and had felt
ashamed of the familiar manner in which she had communicated with me in
her sleeping state. While she had trusted me in the trance--trusted me
because her spirit was then free to recognize my spirit--the writing had
remained on the page. When her waking will counteracted the influence of
her sleeping will, the writing disappeared. Is this the explanation? If
it is not, where is the explanation to be found?

We walked on until we reached that part of the Canongate street in which
she lodged. We stopped at the door.

CHAPTER XI. THE LETTER OF INTRODUCTION.

I LOOKED at the house. It was an inn, of no great size, but of
respectable appearance. If I was to be of any use to her that night, the
time had come to speak of other subjects than the subject of dreams.

"After all that you have told me," I said, "I will not ask you to admit
me any further into your confidence until we meet again. Only let me
hear how I can relieve your most pressing anxieties. What are your
plans? Can I do anything to help them before you go to rest to-night?"

She thanked me warmly, and hesitated, looking up the street and down the
street in evident embarrassment what to say next.

"Do you propose staying in Edinburgh?" I asked.

"Oh no! I don't wish to remain in Scotland. I want to go much further
away. I think I should do better in London; at some respectable
milliner's, if I could be properly recommended. I am quick at my needle,
and I understand cutting out. Or I could keep accounts, if--if anybody
would trust me."

She stopped, and looked at me doubtingly, as if she felt far from sure,
poor soul, of winning my confidence to begin with. I acted on that hint,
with the headlong impetuosity of a man who was in love.

"I can give you exactly the recommendation you want," I said, "whenever
you like. Now, if you would prefer it."

Her charming features brightened with pleasure. "Oh, you are indeed a
friend to me!" she said, impulsively. Her face clouded again--she saw
my proposal in a new light. "Have I any right," she asked, sadly, "to
accept what you offer me?"

"Let me give you the letter," I answered, "and you can decide for
yourself whether you will use it or not."

I put her arm again in mine, and entered the inn.

She shrunk back in alarm. What would the landlady think if she saw her
lodger enter the house at night in company with a stranger, and that
stranger a gentleman? The landlady appeared as she made the objection.
Reckless what I said or what I did, I introduced myself as her relative,
and asked to be shown into a quiet room in which I could write a letter.
After one sharp glance at me, the landlady appeared to be satisfied that
she was dealing with a gentleman. She led the way into a sort of parlor
behind the "bar," placed writing materials on the table, looked at
my companion as only one woman can look at another under certain
circumstances, and left us by ourselves.

It was the first time I had ever been in a room with her alone.
The embarrassing sense of her position had heightened her color and
brightened her eyes. She stood, leaning one hand on the table, confused
and irresolute, her firm and supple figure falling into an attitude
of unsought grace which it was literally a luxury to look at. I said
nothing; my eyes confessed my admiration; the writing materials lay
untouched before me on the table. How long the silence might have
lasted I cannot say. She abruptly broke it. Her instinct warned her that
silence might have its dangers, in our position. She turned to me with
an effort; she said, uneasily, "I don't think you ought to write your
letter to-night, sir."

"Why not?"

"You know nothing of me. Surely you ought not to recommend a person who
is a stranger to you? And I am worse than a stranger. I am a miserable
wretch who has tried to commit a great sin--I have tried to destroy
myself. Perhaps the misery I was in might be some excuse for me, if you
knew it. You ought to know it. But it's so late to-night, and I am so
sadly tired--and there are some things, sir, which it is not easy for a
woman to speak of in the presence of a man."

Her head sunk on her bosom; her delicate lips trembled a little; she
said no more. The way to reassure and console her lay plainly enough
before me, if I chose to take it. Without stopping to think, I took it.

Reminding her that she had herself proposed writing to me when we met
that evening, I suggested that she should wait to tell the sad story of
her troubles until it was convenient to her to send me the narrative
in the form of a letter. "In the mean time," I added, "I have the most
perfect confidence in you; and I beg as a favor that you will let me put
it to the proof. I can introduce you to a dressmaker in London who is at
the head of a large establishment, and I will do it before I leave you
to-night."

I dipped my pen in the ink as I said the words. Let me confess frankly
the lengths to which my infatuation led me. The dressmaker to whom I
had alluded had been my mother's maid in former years, and had been
established in business with money lent by my late step-father, Mr.
Germaine. I used both their names without scruple; and I wrote my
recommendation in terms which the best of living women and the ablest of
existing dressmakers could never have hoped to merit. Will anybody find
excuses for me? Those rare persons who have been in love, and who have
not completely forgotten it yet, may perhaps find excuses for me. It
matters little; I don't deserve them.

I handed her the open letter to read.

She blushed delightfully; she cast one tenderly grateful look at me,
which I remembered but too well for many and many an after-day. The next
moment, to my astonishment, this changeable creature changed again. Some
forgotten consideration seemed to have occurred to her. She turned pale;
the soft lines of pleasure in her face hardened, little by little; she
regarded me with the saddest look of confusion and distress. Putting the
letter down before me on the table, she said, timidly:

"Would you mind adding a postscript, sir?"

I suppressed all appearance of surprise as well as I could, and took up
the pen again.

"Would you please say," she went on, "that I am only to be taken on
trial, at first? I am not to be engaged for more"--her voice sunk lower
and lower, so that I could barely hear the next words--"for more than
three months, certain."

It was not in human nature--perhaps I ought to say it was not in the
nature of a man who was in my situation--to refrain from showing some
curiosity, on being asked to supplement a letter of recommendation by
such a postscript as this.

"Have you some other employment in prospect?" I asked.

"None," she answered, with her head down, and her eyes avoiding mine.

An unworthy doubt of her--the mean offspring of jealousy--found its way
into my mind.

"Have you some absent friend," I went on, "who is likely to prove a
better friend than I am, if you only give him time?"

She lifted her noble head. Her grand, guileless gray eyes rested on me
with a look of patient reproach.

"I have not got a friend in the world," she said. "For God's sake, ask
me no more questions to-night!"

I rose and gave her the letter once more--with the postscript added, in
her own words.

We stood together by the table; we looked at each other in a momentary
silence.

"How can I thank you?" she murmured, softly. "Oh, sir, I will indeed be
worthy of the confidence that you have shown in me!" Her eyes moistened;
her variable color came and went; her dress heaved softly over the
lovely outline of her bosom. I don't believe the man lives who could
have resisted her at that moment. I lost all power of restraint;
I caught her in my arms; I whispered, "I love you!" I kissed her
passionately. For a moment she lay helpless and trembling on my breast;
for a moment her fragrant lips softly returned the kiss. In an instant
more it was over. She tore herself away with a shudder that shook
her from head to foot, and threw the letter that I had given to her
indignantly at my feet.

"How dare you take advantage of me! How dare you touch me!" she said.
"Take your letter back, sir; I refuse to receive it; I will never speak
to you again. You don't know what you have done. You don't know how
deeply you have wounded me. Oh!" she cried, throwing herself in despair
on a sofa that stood near her, "shall I ever recover my self-respect?
shall I ever forgive myself for what I have done to-night?"

I implored her pardon; I assured her of my repentance and regret in
words which did really come from my heart. The violence of her agitation
more than distressed me--I was really alarmed by it.

She composed herself after a while. She rose to her feet with modest
dignity, and silently held out her hand in token that my repentance was
accepted.

"You will give me time for atonement?" I pleaded. "You will not lose all
confidence in me? Let me see you again, if it is only to show that I am
not quite unworthy of your pardon--at your own time; in the presence of
another person, if you like."

"I will write to you," she said.

"To-morrow?"

"To-morrow."

I took up the letter of recommendation from the floor.

"Make your goodness to me complete," I said. "Don't mortify me by
refusing to take my letter."

"I will take your letter," she answered, quietly. "Thank you for writing
it. Leave me now, please. Good-night."

I left her, pale and sad, with my letter in her hand. I left her, with
my mind in a tumult of contending emotions, which gradually resolved
themselves into two master-feelings as I walked on: Love, that adored
her more fervently than ever; and Hope, that set the prospect before me
of seeing her again on the next day.

CHAPTER XII. THE DISASTERS OF MRS. VAN BRANDT.

A MAN who passes his evening as I had passed mine, may go to bed
afterward if he has nothing better to do. But he must not rank among
the number of his reasonable anticipations the expectation of getting
a night's rest. The morning was well advanced, and the hotel was astir,
before I at last closed my eyes in slumber. When I awoke, my watch
informed me that it was close on noon.

I rang the bell. My servant appeared with a letter in his hand. It had
been left for me, three hours since, by a lady who had driven to the
hotel door in a carriage, and had then driven away again. The man had
found me sleeping when he entered my bed-chamber, and, having received
no orders to wake me overnight, had left the letter on the sitting-room
table until he heard my bell.

Easily guessing who my correspondent was, I opened the letter. An
inclosure fell out of it--to which, for the moment, I paid no attention.
I turned eagerly to the first lines. They announced that the writer
had escaped me for the second time: early that morning she had left
Edinburgh. The paper inclosed proved to be my letter of introduction to
the dressmaker returned to me.

I was more than angry with her--I felt her second flight from me as a
downright outrage. In five minutes I had hurried on my clothes and was
on my way to the inn in the Canongate as fast as a horse could draw me.

The servants could give me no information. Her escape had been effected
without their knowledge.

The landlady, to whom I next addressed myself, deliberately declined to
assist me in any way whatever.

"I have given the lady my promise," said this obstinate person, "to
answer not one word to any question that you may ask me about her. In
my belief, she is acting as becomes an honest woman in removing herself
from any further communication with you. I saw you through the keyhole
last night, sir. I wish you good-morning."

Returning to my hotel, I left no attempt to discover her untried. I
traced the coachman who had driven her. He had set her down at a shop,
and had then been dismissed. I questioned the shop-keeper. He remembered
that he had sold some articles of linen to a lady with her veil down and
a traveling-bag in her hand, and he remembered no more. I circulated a
description of her in the different coach offices. Three "elegant young
ladies, with their veils down, and with traveling-bags in their hands,"
answered to the description; and which of the three was the fugitive
of whom I was in search, it was impossible to discover. In the days of
railways and electric telegraphs I might have succeeded in tracing
her. In the days of which I am now writing, she set investigation at
defiance.

I read and reread her letter, on the chance that some slip of the pen
might furnish the clew which I had failed to find in any other way. Here
is the narrative that she addressed to me, copied from the original,
word for word:


"DEAR SIR--Forgive me for leaving you again as I left you in Perthshire.
After what took place last night, I have no other choice (knowing my own
weakness, and the influence that you seem to have over me) than to
thank you gratefully for your kindness, and to bid you farewell. My sad
position must be my excuse for separating myself from you in this rude
manner, and for venturing to send you back your letter of introduction.
If I use the letter, I only offer you a means of communicating with me.
For your sake, as well as for mine, this mu st not be. I must never give
you a second opportunity of saying that you love me; I must go away,
leaving no trace behind by which you can possibly discover me.

"But I cannot forget that I owe my poor life to your compassion and your
courage. You, who saved me, have a right to know what the provocation
was that drove me to drowning myself, and what my situation is, now that
I am (thanks to you) still a living woman. You shall hear my sad story,
sir; and I will try to tell it as briefly as possible.

"I was married, not very long since, to a Dutch gentleman, whose name
is Van Brandt. Please excuse my entering into family particulars. I have
endeavored to write and tell you about my dear lost father and my old
home. But the tears come into my eyes when I think of my happy past
life. I really cannot see the lines as I try to write them.

"Let me, then, only say that Mr. Van Brandt was well recommended to
my good father before I married. I have only now discovered that he
obtained these recommendations from his friends under a false pretense,
which it is needless to trouble you by mentioning in detail. Ignorant of
what he had done, I lived with him happily. I cannot truly declare that
he was the object of my first love, but he was the one person in the
world whom I had to look up to after my father's death. I esteemed him
and respected him, and, if I may say so without vanity, I did indeed
make him a good wife.

"So the time went on, sir, prosperously enough, until the evening came
when you and I met on the bridge.

"I was out alone in our garden, trimming the shrubs, when the
maid-servant came and told me there was a foreign lady in a carriage at
the door who desired to say a word to Mrs. Van Brandt. I sent the maid
on before to show her into the sitting-room, and I followed to receive
my visitor as soon as I had made myself tidy. She was a dreadful woman,
with a flushed, fiery face and impudent, bright eyes. 'Are you Mrs. Van
Brandt?' she said. I answered, 'Yes.' 'Are you really married to him?'
she asked me. That question (naturally enough, I think) upset my temper.
I said, 'How dare you doubt it?' She laughed in my face. 'Send for Van
Brandt,' she said. I went out into the passage and called him down from
the room upstairs in which he was writing. 'Ernest,' I said, 'here is
a person who has insulted me. Come down directly.' He left his room the
moment he heard me. The woman followed me out into the passage to meet
him. She made him a low courtesy. He turned deadly pale the moment he
set eyes on her. That frightened me. I said to him, 'For God's sake,
what does this mean?' He took me by the arm, and he answered: 'You shall
know soon. Go back to your gardening, and don't return to the house till
I send for you.' His looks were so shocking, he was so unlike himself,
that I declare he daunted me. I let him take me as far as the garden
door. He squeezed my hand. 'For my sake, darling,' he whispered, 'do
what I ask of you.' I went into the garden and sat me down on the
nearest bench, and waited impatiently for what was to come.

"How long a time passed I don't know. My anxiety got to such a pitch at
last that I could bear it no longer. I ventured back to the house.

"I listened in the passage, and heard nothing. I went close to the
parlor door, and still there was silence. I took courage, and opened the
door.

"The room was empty. There was a letter on the table. It was in my
husband's handwriting, and it was addressed to me. I opened it and read
it. The letter told me that I was deserted, disgraced, ruined. The woman
with the fiery face and the impudent eyes was Van Brandt's lawful wife.
She had given him his choice of going away with her at once or of being
prosecuted for bigamy. He had gone away with her--gone, and left me.

"Remember, sir, that I had lost both father and mother. I had no
friends. I was alone in the world, without a creature near to comfort or
advise me. And please to bear in mind that I have a temper which feels
even the smallest slights and injuries very keenly. Do you wonder at
what I had it in my thoughts to do that evening on the bridge?

"Mind this: I believe I should never have attempted to destroy myself if
I could only have burst out crying. No tears came to me. A dull, stunned
feeling took hold like a vise on my head and on my heart. I walked
straight to the river. I said to myself, quite calmly, as I went along,
'_There_ is the end of it, and the sooner the better.'

"What happened after that, you know as well as I do. I may get on to the
next morning--the morning when I so ungratefully left you at the inn by
the river-side.

"I had but one reason, sir, for going away by the first conveyance that
I could find to take me, and this was the fear that Van Brandt might
discover me if I remained in Perthshire. The letter that he had left on
the table was full of expressions of love and remorse, to say nothing
of excuses for his infamous behavior to me. He declared that he had been
entrapped into a private marriage with a profligate woman when he was
little more than a lad. They had long since separated by common consent.
When he first courted me, he had every reason to believe that she was
dead. How he had been deceived in this particular, and how she had
discovered that he had married me, he had yet to find out. Knowing
her furious temper, he had gone away with her, as the one means
of preventing an application to the justices and a scandal in the
neighborhood. In a day or two he would purchase his release from her by
an addition to the allowance which she had already received from him:
he would return to me and take me abroad, out of the way of further
annoyance. I was his wife in the sight of Heaven; I was the only woman
he had ever loved; and so on, and so on.

"Do you now see, sir, the risk that I ran of his discovering me if I
remained in your neighborhood? The bare thought of it made my flesh
creep. I was determined never again to see the man who had so cruelly
deceived me. I am in the same mind still--with this difference, that I
might consent to see him, if I could be positively assured first of the
death of his wife. That is not likely to happen. Let me get on with my
letter, and tell you what I did on my arrival in Edinburgh.

"The coachman recommended me to the house in the Canongate where you
found me lodging. I wrote the same day to relatives of my father, living
in Glasgow, to tell them where I was, and in what a forlorn position I
found myself.

"I was answered by return of post. The head of the family and his wife
requested me to refrain from visiting them in Glasgow. They had business
then in hand which would take them to Edinburgh, and I might expect to
see them both with the least possible delay.

"They arrived, as they had promised, and they expressed themselves
civilly enough. Moreover, they did certainly lend me a small sum of
money when they found how poorly my purse was furnished. But I don't
think either husband or wife felt much for me. They recommended me, at
parting, to apply to my father's other relatives, living in England. I
may be doing them an injustice, but I fancy they were eager to get me
(as the common phrase is) off their hands.

"The day when the departure of my relatives left me friendless was
also the day, sir, when I had that dream or vision of you which I have
already related. I lingered on at the house in the Canongate, partly
because the landlady was kind to me, partly because I was so depressed
by my position that I really did not know what to do next.

"In this wretched condition you discovered me on that favorite walk
of mine from Holyrood to Saint Anthony's Well. Believe me, your kind
interest in my fortunes has not been thrown away on an ungrateful woman.
I could ask Providence for no greater blessing than to find a brother
and a friend in you. You have yourself destroyed that hope by what you
said and did when we were together in the parlor. I don't blame you: I
am afraid my manner (without my knowing it) might have seemed to give
you some encouragement. I am only sorry--very, very sorry--to have no
honorable choice left but never to see you again.

"After much thinking, I have made up my mind to speak to those other
relatives of my father to whom I have not yet applied. The chance that
they may help me to earn an honest living is the one chance that I have
left. God bless you, Mr. Germaine! I wish you prosperity and happiness
from the bottom of my heart; and remain, your grateful servant,

                                   "M. VAN BRANDT.

"P.S.--I sign my own name (or the name which I once thought was mine) as
a proof that I have honestly written the truth about myself, from first
to last. For the future I must, for safety's sake, live under some other
name. I should like to go back to my name when I was a happy girl at
home. But Van Brandt knows it; and, besides, I have (no matter how
innocently) disgraced it. Good-by again, sir; and thank you again."


So the letter concluded.

I read it in the temper of a thoroughly disappointed and thoroughly
unreasonable man. Whatever poor Mrs. Van Brandt had done, she had done
wrong. It was wrong of her, in the first place, to have married at all.
It was wrong of her to contemplate receiving Mr. Van Brandt again, even
if his lawful wife had died in the interval. It was wrong of her to
return my letter of introduction, after I had given myself the trouble
of altering it to suit her capricious fancy. It was wrong of her to take
an absurdly prudish view of a stolen kiss and a tender declaration,
and to fly from me as if I were as great a scoundrel as Mr. Van Brandt
himself. And last, and more than all, it was wrong of her to sign her
Christian name in initial only. Here I was, passionately in love with a
woman, and not knowing by what fond name to identify her in my thoughts!
"M. Van Brandt!" I might call her Maria, Margaret, Martha, Mabel,
Magdalen, Mary--no, not Mary. The old boyish love was dead and gone, but
I owed some respect to the memory of it. If the "Mary" of my early days
were still living, and if I had met her, would she have treated me as
this woman had treated me? Never! It was an injury to "Mary" to think
even of that heartless creature by her name. Why think of her at all?
Why degrade myself by trying to puzzle out a means of tracing her in her
letter? It was sheer folly to attempt to trace a woman who had gone I
knew not whither, and who herself informed me that she meant to pass
under an assumed name. Had I lost all pride, all self-respect? In the
flower of my age, with a handsome fortune, with the world before me,
full of interesting female faces and charming female figures, what
course did it become me to take? To go back to my country-house, and
mope over the loss of a woman who had deliberately deserted me? or to
send for a courier and a traveling carriage, and forget her gayly among
foreign people and foreign scenes? In the state of my temper at that
moment, the idea of a pleasure tour in Europe fired my imagination.
I first astonished the people at the hotel by ordering all further
inquiries after the missing Mrs. Van Brandt to be stopped; and then I
opened my writing desk and wrote to tell my mother frankly and fully of
my new plans.

The answer arrived by return of post.

To my surprise and delight, my good mother was not satisfied with only
formally approving of my new resolution. With an energy which I had
not ventured to expect from her, she had made all her arrangements for
leaving home, and had started for Edinburgh to join me as my traveling
companion. "You shall not go away alone, George," she wrote, "while I
have strength and spirits to keep you company."

In three days from the time when I read those words our preparations
were completed, and we were on our way to the Continent.

CHAPTER XIII. NOT CURED YET.

WE visited France, Germany, and Italy; and we were absent from England
nearly two years.

Had time and change justified my confidence in them? Was the image of
Mrs. Van Brandt an image long since dismissed from my mind?

No! Do what I might, I was still (in the prophetic language of Dame
Dermody) taking the way to reunion with my kindred spirit in the time to
come. For the first two or three months of our travels I was haunted
by dreams of the woman who had so resolutely left me. Seeing her in my
sleep, always graceful, always charming, always modestly tender toward
me, I waited in the ardent hope of again beholding the apparition of her
in my waking hours--of again being summoned to meet her at a given place
and time. My anticipations were not fulfilled; no apparition showed
itself. The dreams themselves grew less frequent and less vivid and then
ceased altogether. Was this a sign that the days of her adversity
were at an end? Having no further need of help, had she no further
remembrance of the man who had tried to help her? Were we never to meet
again?

I said to myself: "I am unworthy of the name of man if I don't forget
her now!" She still kept her place in my memory, say what I might.

I saw all the wonders of Nature and Art which foreign countries could
show me. I lived in the dazzling light of the best society that Paris,
Rome, Vienna could assemble. I passed hours on hours in the company
of the most accomplished and most beautiful women whom Europe could
produce--and still that solitary figure at Saint Anthony's Well, those
grand gray eyes that had rested on me so sadly at parting, held their
place in my memory, stamped their image on my heart.

Whether I resisted my infatuation, or whether I submitted to it, I still
longed for her. I did all I could to conceal the state of my mind from
my mother. But her loving eyes discovered the secret: she saw that I
suffered, and suffered with me. More than once she said: "George, the
good end is not to be gained by traveling; let us go home." More than
once I answered, with the bitter and obstinate resolution of despair:
"No. Let us try more new people and more new scenes." It was only when
I found her health and strength beginning to fail under the stress of
continual traveling that I consented to abandon the hopeless search
after oblivion, and to turn homeward at last.

I prevailed on my mother to wait and rest at my house in London before
she returned to her favorite abode at the country-seat in Perthshire.
It is needless to say that I remained in town with her. My mother now
represented the one interest that held me nobly and endearingly to life.
Politics, literature, agriculture--the customary pursuits of a man in my
position--had none of them the slightest attraction for me.

We had arrived in London at what is called "the height of the season."
Among the operatic attractions of that year--I am writing of the days
when the ballet was still a popular form of public entertainment--there
was a certain dancer whose grace and beauty were the objects of
universal admiration. I was asked if I had seen her, wherever I went,
until my social position, as the one man who was indifferent to the
reigning goddess of the stage, became quite unendurable. On the next
occasion when I was invited to take a seat in a friend's box, I accepted
the proposal; and (far from willingly) I went the way of the world--in
other words, I went to the opera.

The first part of the performance had concluded when we got to the
theater, and the ballet had not yet begun. My friends amused themselves
with looking for familiar faces in the boxes and stalls. I took a chair
in a corner and waited, with my mind far away from the theater, from the
dancing that was to come. The lady who sat nearest to me (like ladies
in general) disliked the neighborhood of a silent man. She determined to
make me talk to her.

"Do tell me, Mr. Germaine," she said. "Did you ever see a theater
anywhere so full as this theater is to-night?"

She handed me her opera-glass as she spoke. I moved to the front of the
box to look at the audience.

It was certainty a wonderful sight. Every available atom of space (as
I gradually raised the glass from the floor to the ceiling of the
building) appeared to be occupied. Looking upward and upward, my range
of view gradually reached the gallery. Even at that distance, the
excellent glass which had been put into my hands brought the faces of
the audience close to me. I looked first at the persons who occupied
the front row of seats in the gallery stalls.

Moving the opera-glass slowly along the semicircle formed by the seats,
I suddenly stopped when I reached the middle.

My heart gave a great leap as if it would bound out of my body. There
was no mistaking _that_ face among the commonplace faces near it. I had
discovered Mrs. Van Brandt!

She sat in front--but not alone. There was a man in the stall
immediately behind her, who bent over her and spoke to her from time to
time. She listened to him, so far as I could see, with something of a
sad and weary look. Who was the man? I might, or might not, find that
out. Under any circumstances, I determined to speak to Mrs. Van Brandt.

The curtain rose for the ballet. I made the best excuse I could to my
friends, and instantly left the box.

It was useless to attempt to purchase my admission to the gallery. My
money was refused. There was not even standing room left in that part of
the theater.

But one alternative remained. I returned to the street, to wait for Mrs.
Van Brandt at the gallery door until the performance was over.

Who was the man in attendance on her--the man whom I had seen sitting
behind her, and talking familiarly over her shoulder? While I paced
backward and forward before the door, that one question held possession
of my mind, until the oppression of it grew beyond endurance. I went
back to my friends in the box, simply and solely to look at the man
again.

What excuses I made to account for my strange conduct I cannot now
remember. Armed once more with the lady's opera-glass (I borrowed it and
kept it without scruple), I alone, of all that vast audience, turned my
back on the stage, and riveted my attention on the gallery stalls.

There he sat, in his place behind her, to all appearance spell-bound
by the fascinations of the graceful dancer. Mrs. Van Brandt, on
the contrary, seemed to find but little attraction in the spectacle
presented by the stage. She looked at the dancing (so far as I could
see) in an absent, weary manner. When the applause broke out in a
perfect frenzy of cries and clapping of hands, she sat perfectly
unmoved by the enthusiasm which pervaded the theater. The man behind her
(annoyed, as I supposed, by the marked indifference which she showed
to the performance) tapped her impatiently on the shoulder, as if he
thought that she was quite capable of falling asleep in her stall. The
familiarity of the action--confirming the suspicion in my mind which had
already identified him with Van Brandt--so enraged me that I said or did
something which obliged one of the gentlemen in the box to interfere.
"If you can't control yourself," he whispered, "you had better leave
us." He spoke with the authority of an old friend. I had sense enough
left to take his advice, and return to my post at the gallery door.

A little before midnight the performance ended. The audience began to
pour out of the theater.

I drew back into a corner behind the door, facing the gallery stairs,
and watched for her. After an interval which seemed to be endless, she
and her companion appeared, slowly descending the stairs. She wore a
long dark cloak; her head was protected by a quaintly shaped hood, which
looked (on _her_) the most becoming head-dress that a woman could wear.
As the two passed me, I heard the man speak to her in a tone of sulky
annoyance.

"It's wasting money," he said, "to go to the expense of taking _you_ to
the opera."

"I am not well," she answered with her head down and her eyes on the
ground. "I am out of spirits to-night."

"Will you ride home or walk?"

"I will walk, if you please."

I followed them unperceived, waiting to present myself to her until
the crowd about them had dispersed. In a few minutes they turned into a
quiet by-street. I quickened my pace until I was close at her side, and
then I took off my hat and spoke to her.

She recognized me with a cry of astonishment. For an instant her face
brightened radiantly with the loveliest expression of delight that I
ever saw on any human countenance. The moment after, all was changed.
The charming features saddened and hardened. She stood before me like a
woman overwhelmed by shame--without uttering a word, without taking my
offered hand.

Her companion broke the silence.

"Who is this gentleman?" he asked, speaking in a foreign accent, with an
under-bred insolence of tone and manner.

She controlled herself the moment he addressed her. "This is Mr.
Germaine," she answered: "a gentleman who was very kind to me in
Scotland." She raised her eyes for a moment to mine, and took refuge,
poor soul, in a conventionally polite inquiry after my health. "I hope
you are quite well, Mr. Germaine," said the soft, sweet voice, trembling
piteously.

I made the customary reply, and explained that I had seen her at the
opera. "Are you staying in London?" I asked. "May I have the honor of
calling on you?"

Her companion answered for her before she could speak.

"My wife thanks you, sir, for the compliment you pay her. She doesn't
receive visitors. We both wish you good-night."

Saying those words, he took off his hat with a sardonic assumption of
respect; and, holding her arm in his, forced her to walk on abruptly
with him. Feeling certainly assured by this time that the man was no
other than Van Brandt, I was on the point of answering him sharply, when
Mrs. Van Brandt checked the rash words as they rose to my lips.

"For my sake!" she whispered, over her shoulder, with an imploring look
that instantly silenced me. After all, she was free (if she liked) to go
back to the man who had so vilely deceived and deserted her. I bowed and
left them, feeling with no common bitterness the humiliation of entering
into rivalry with Mr. Van Brandt.

I crossed to the other side of the street. Before I had taken three
steps away from her, the old infatuation fastened its hold on me again.
I submitted, without a struggle against myself, to the degradation
of turning spy and following them home. Keeping well behind, on the
opposite side of the way, I tracked them to their own door, and entered
in my pocket-book the name of the street and the number of the house.

The hardest critic who reads these lines cannot feel more contemptuously
toward me than I felt toward myself. Could I still love a woman after
she had deliberately preferred to me a scoundrel who had married her
while he was the husband of another wife? Yes! Knowing what I now knew,
I felt that I loved her just as dearly as ever. It was incredible, it
was shocking; but it was true. For the first time in my life, I tried to
take refuge from my sense of my own degradation in drink. I went to my
club, and joined a convivial party at a supper table, and poured glass
after glass of champagne down my throat, without feeling the slightest
sense of exhilaration, without losing for an instant the consciousness
of my own contemptible conduct. I went to my bed in despair; and through
the wakeful night I weakly cursed the fatal evening at the river-side
when I had met her for the first time. But revile her as I might,
despise myself as I might, I loved her--I loved her still!

Among the letters laid on my table the next morning there were two which
must find their place in this narrative.

The first letter was in a handwriting which I had seen once before, at
the hotel in Edinburgh. The writer was Mrs. Van Brandt.

"For your own sake" (the letter ran) "make no attempt to see me, and
take no notice of an invitation which I fear you will receive with this
note. I am living a degraded life. I have sunk beneath your notice. You
owe it to yourself, sir, to forget the miserable woman who now writes to
you for the last time, and bids you gratefully a last farewell."

Those sad lines were signed in initials only. It is needless to say
that they merely strengthened my resolution to see her at all hazards. I
kissed the paper on which her hand had rested, and then I turned to the
second letter. It contained the "invitation" to which my correspondent
had alluded, and it was expressed in these terms:

"Mr. Van Brandt presents his compliments to Mr. Germaine, and begs
to apologize for the somewhat abrupt manner in which he received Mr.
Germaine's polite advances. Mr. Van Brandt suffers habitually from
nervous irritability, and he felt particularly ill last night. He trusts
Mr. Germaine will receive this candid explanation in the spirit in which
it is offered; and he begs to add that Mrs. Van Brandt will be delighted
to receive Mr. Germaine whenever he may find it convenient to favor her
with a visit."

That Mr. Van Brandt had some sordid interest of his own to serve in
writing this grotesquely impudent composition, and that the unhappy
woman who bore his name was heartily ashamed of the proceeding on which
he had ventured, were conclusions easily drawn after reading the two
letters. The suspicion of the man and of his motives which I naturally
felt produced no hesitation in my mind as to the course which I had
determined to pursue. On the contrary, I rejoiced that my way to
an interview with Mrs. Van Brandt was smoothed, no matter with what
motives, by Mr. Van Brandt himself.

I waited at home until noon, and then I could wait no longer. Leaving a
message of excuse for my mother (I had just sense of shame enough left
to shrink from facing her), I hastened away to profit by my invitation
on the very day when I received it.

CHAPTER XIV. MRS. VAN BRANDT AT HOME.

As I lifted my hand to ring the house bell, the door was opened from
within, and no less a person than Mr. Van Brandt himself stood before
me. He had his hat on. We had evidently met just as he was going out.

"My dear sir, how good this is of you! You present the best of all
replies to my letter in presenting yourself. Mrs. Van Brandt is at home.
Mrs. Van Brandt will be delighted. Pray walk in."

He threw open the door of a room on the ground-floor. His politeness was
(if possible) even more offensive than his insolence. "Be seated, Mr.
Germaine, I beg of you." He turned to the open door, and called up the
stairs, in a loud and confident voice:

"Mary! come down directly."

"Mary"! I knew her Christian name at last, and knew it through Van
Brandt. No words can tell how the name jarred on me, spoken by his lips.
For the first time for years past my mind went back to Mary Dermody
and Greenwater Broad. The next moment I heard the rustling of Mrs. Van
Brandt's dress on the stairs. As the sound caught my ear, the old times
and the old faces vanished again from my thoughts as completely as if
they had never existed. What had _she_ in common with the frail,
shy little child, her namesake, of other days? What similarity was
perceivable in the sooty London lodging-house to remind me of the
bailiff's flower-scented cottage by the shores of the lake?

Van Brandt took off his hat, and bowed to me with sickening servility.

"I have a business appointment," he said, "which it is impossible to put
off. Pray excuse me. Mrs. Van Brandt will do the honors. Good morning."

The house door opened and closed again. The rustling of the dress came
slowly nearer and nearer. She stood before me.

"Mr. Germaine!" she exclaimed, starting back, as if the bare sight of me
repelled her. "Is this honorable? Is this worthy of you? You allow me to
be entrapped into receiving you, and you accept as your accomplice Mr.
Van Brandt! Oh, sir, I have accustomed myself to look up to you as a
high-minded man. How bitterly you have disappointed me!"

Her reproaches passed by me unheeded. They only heightened her color;
they only added a new rapture to the luxury of looking at her.

"If you loved me as faithfully as I love you," I said, "you would
understand why I am here. No sacrifice is too great if it brings me into
your presence again after two years of absence."

She suddenly approached me, and fixed her eyes in eager scrutiny on my
face.

"There must be some mistake," she said. "You cannot possibly have
received my letter, or you have not read it?"

"I have received it, and I have read it."

"And Van Brandt's letter--you have read that too?"

"Yes."

She sat down by the table, and, leaning her arms on it, covered her face
with her hands. My answers seemed not only to have distressed, but to
have perplexed her. "Are men all alike?" I heard her say. "I thought I
might trust in _his_ sense of what was due to himself and of what was
compassionate toward me."

I closed the door and seated myself by her side. She removed her hands
from her face when she felt me near her. She looked at me with a cold
and steady surprise.

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

"I am going to try if I can recover my place in your estimation," I
said. "I am going to ask your pity for a man whose whole heart is yours,
whose whole life is bound up in you."

She started to her feet, and looked round her incredulously, as if
doubting whether she had rightly heard and rightly interpreted my last
words. Before I could speak again, she suddenly faced me, and struck her
open hand on the table with a passionate resolution which I now saw in
her for the first time.

"Stop!" she cried. "There must be an end to this. And an end there shall
be. Do you know who that man is who has just left the house? Answer me,
Mr. Germaine! I am speaking in earnest."

There was no choice but to answer her. She was indeed in
earnest--vehemently in earnest.

"His letter tells me," I said, "that he is Mr. Van Brandt."

She sat down again, and turned her face away from me.

"Do you know how he came to write to you?" she asked. "Do you know what
made him invite you to this house?"

I thought of the suspicion that had crossed my mind when I read Van
Brandt's letter. I made no reply.

"You force me to tell you the truth," she went on. "He asked me who you
were, last night on our way home. I knew that you were rich, and that
_he_ wanted money. I told him I knew nothing of your position in the
world. He was too cunning to believe me; he went out to the public-house
and looked at a directory. He came back and said, 'Mr. Germaine has a
house in Berkeley Square and a country-seat in the Highlands. He is not
a man for a poor devil like me to offend; I mean to make a friend of
him, and I expect you to make a friend of him too.' He sat down and
wrote to you. I am living under that man's protection, Mr. Germaine. His
wife is not dead, as you may suppose; she is living, and I know her to
be living. I wrote to you that I was beneath your notice, and you have
obliged me to tell you why. Am I sufficiently degraded to bring you to
your senses?"

I drew closer to her. She tried to get up and leave me. I knew my
power over her, and used it (as any man in my place would have used it)
without scruple. I took her hand.

"I don't believe you have voluntarily degraded yourself," I said. "You
have been forced into your present position: there are circumstances
which excuse you, and which you are purposely keeping back from me.
Nothing will convince me that you are a base woman. Should I love you as
I love you, if you were really unworthy of me?"

She struggled to free her hand; I still held it. She tried to change the
subject. "There is one thing you haven't told me yet," she said, with a
faint, forced smile. "Have you seen the apparition of me again since I
left you?"

"No. Have _you_ ever seen _me_ again, as you saw me in your dream at the
inn in Edinburgh?"

"Never. Our visions of each other have left us. Can you tell why?"

If we had continued to speak on this subject, we must surely have
recognized each other. But the subject dropped. Instead of answering her
question, I drew her nearer to me--I returned to the forbidden subject
of my love.

"Look at me," I pleaded, "and tell me the truth. Can you see me, can you
hear me, and do you feel no answering sympathy in your own heart? Do you
really care nothing for me? Have you never once thought of me in all the
time that has passed since we last met?"

I spoke as I felt--fervently, passionately. She made a last effort to
repel me, and yielded even as she made it. Her hand closed on mine,
a low sigh fluttered on her lips. She answered with a sudden
self-abandonment; she recklessly cast herself loose from the restraints
which had held her up to this time.

"I think of you perpetually," she said. "I was thinking of you at the
opera last night. My heart leaped in me when I heard your voice in the
street."

"You love me!" I whispered.

"Love you!" she repeated. "My whole heart goes out to you in spite of
myself. Degraded as I am, unworthy as I am--knowing as I do that nothing
can ever come of it--I love you! I love you!"

She threw her arms round my neck, and held me to her with all her
strength. The moment after, she dropped on her knees. "Oh, don't tempt
me!" she murmured. "Be merciful--and leave me."

I was beside myself. I spoke as recklessly to her as she had spoken to
me.

"Prove that you love me," I said. "Let me rescue you from the
degradation of living with that man. Leave him at once and forever.
Leave him, and come with me to a future that is worthy of you--your
future as my wife."

"Never!" she answered, crouching low at my feet.

"Why not? What obstacle is there?"

"I can't tell you--I daren't tell you."

"Will you write it?"

"No, I can't even write it--to _you_. Go, I implore you, before Van
Brandt comes back. Go, if you love me and pity me."

She had roused my jealousy. I positively refused to leave her.

"I insist on knowing what binds you to that man," I said. "Let him come
back! If _you_ won't answer my question, I will put it to _him_."

She looked at me wildly, with a cry of terror. She saw my resolution in
my face.

"Don't frighten me," she said. "Let me think."

She reflected for a moment. Her eyes brightened, as if some new way out
of the difficulty had occurred to her.

"Have you a mother living?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Do you think she would come and see me?"

"I am sure she would if I asked her."

She considered with herself once more. "I will tell your mother what the
obstacle is," she said, thoughtfully.

"When?"

"To-morrow, at this time."

She raised herself on her knees; the tears suddenly filled her eyes. She
drew me to her gently. "Kiss me," she whispered. "You will never come
here again. Kiss me for the last time."

My lips had barely touched hers, when she started to her feet and
snatched up my hat from the chair on which I had placed it.

"Take your hat," she said. "He has come back."

My duller sense of hearing had discovered nothing. I rose and took
my hat to quiet her. At the same moment the door of the room opened
suddenly and softly. Mr. Van Brandt came in. I saw in his face that he
had some vile motive of his own for trying to take us by surprise, and
that the result of the experiment had disappointed him.

"You are not going yet?" he said, speaking to me with his eye on Mrs.
Van Brandt. "I have hurried over my business in the hope of prevailing
on you to stay and take lunch with us. Put down 

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