Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (984 page)

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. Recognising 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 neighbourhood. My mother had a great admiration of the place, and had often expressed a wish to possess some memorial of it. I resolved to take my sketch-book: with me, on the chance that I might be able to please her by making a drawing of her favorite scene.

Searching for the sketch-book (which I had not used for years), I found it in an old desk of mine that had remained unopened since my departure for India. In the course of my investigation, I opened a drawer in the desk, and discovered a relic of the old times — my poor little Mary’s first work in embroidery, the green flag!

The sight of the forgotten keepsake took my mind back to the bailiff’s cottage, and reminded me of Dame Dermody, and her confident prediction about Mary and me.

I smiled as I recalled the old woman’s assertion that no human power could “hinder the union of the kindred spirits of the children in the time to come.” What had become of the prophesied dreams in which we were to communicate with each other through the term of our separation? Years had passed; and, sleeping or waking, I had seen nothing of Mary. Years had passed; and the first vision of a woman that had come to me had been my dream a few nights since of the stranger whom I had saved from drowning. I thought of these chances and changes in my life, but not contemptuously or bitterly. The new love that was now stealing its way into my heart had softened and humanized me. I said to myself, “Ah, poor little Mary!” and I kissed the green flag, in grateful memory of the days that were gone forever.

We drove to the waterfall.

It was a beautiful day; the lonely sylvan scene was at its brightest and best. A wooden summer-house, commanding a prospect of the falling stream, had been built for the accommodation of pleasure parties by the proprietor of the place. My mother suggested that I should try to make a sketch of the view from this point. I did my best to please her, but I was not satisfied with the result; and I abandoned my drawing before it was half finished. Leaving my sketch-book and pencil on the table of the summer-house, I proposed to my mother to cross a little wooden bridge which spanned the stream, below the fall, and to see how the landscape looked from a new point of view.

The prospect of the waterfall, as seen from the opposite bank, presented even greater difficulties, to an amateur artist like me, than the prospect which he had just left. We returned to the summer-house.

I was the first to approach the open door. I stopped, checked in my advance by an unexpected discovery. The summer-house was no longer empty as we had left it. A lady was seated at the table with my pencil in her hand, writing in my sketch-book!

After waiting a moment, I advanced a few steps nearer to the door, and stopped again in breathless amazement. The stranger in the summer-house was now plainly revealed to me as the woman who had attempted to destroy herself from the bridge!

There was no doubt about it. There was the dress; there was the memorable face which I had seen in the evening light, which I had dreamed of only a few nights since! The woman herself — I saw her as plainly as I saw the sun shining on the waterfall — the woman herself, with my pencil in her hand, writing in my book!

My mother was close behind me. She noticed my agitation. “George!” she exclaimed, “what is the matter with you?”

I pointed through the open door of the summer-house.

“Well?” said my mother. “What am I to look at?”

“Don’t you see somebody sitting at the table and writing in my sketch-book?”

My mother eyed me quickly. “Is he going to be ill again?” I heard her say to herself.

At the same moment the woman laid down the pencil and rose slowly to her feet.

She looked at me with sorrowful and pleading eyes: she lifted her hand and beckoned me to approach her. I obeyed. Moving without conscious will of my own, drawn nearer and nearer to her by an irresistible power, I ascended the short flight of stairs which led into the summer-house. Within a few paces of her I stopped. She advanced a step toward me, and laid her hand gently on my bosom. Her touch filled me with strangely united sensations of rapture and awe. After a while, she spoke in low melodious tones, which mingled in my ear with the distant murmur of the falling water, until the two sounds became one. I heard in the murmur, I heard in the voice, these words: “Remember me. Come to me.” Her hand dropped from my bosom; a momentary obscurity passed like a flying shadow over the bright daylight in the room. I looked for her when the light came back. She was gone.

My consciousness of passing events returned.

I saw the lengthening shadows outside, which told me that the evening was at hand. I saw the carriage approaching the summerhouse to take us away. I felt my mother’s hand on my arm, and heard her voice speaking to me anxiously. I was able to reply by a sign entreating her not to be uneasy about me, but I could do no more. I was absorbed, body and soul, in the one desire to look at the sketch-book. As certainly as I had seen the woman, so certainly I had seen her, with my pencil in her hand, writing in my book.

I advanced to the table on which the book was lying open. I looked at the blank space on the lower part of the page, under the foreground lines of my unfinished drawing. My mother, following me, looked at the page too.

There was the writing! The woman had disappeared, but there were her written words left behind her: visible to my mother as well as to me, readable by my mother’s eyes as well as by mine!

These were the words we saw, arranged in two lines, as I copy them here:

                  
When the full moon 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?