第25章 CHAPTER VIII(4)

"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.