“On a sudden, through the glistening
Leaves around, a little stirred,
Came a sound, a sense of music which was rather felt than heard.
Softly, finely it inwound me;
From the world it shut me in,—
Like a fountain falling round me—”
My hand is held close and with wide eyes Little Blue Ribbons asks if she may drink at the fountain. Half-refusing, half-assenting, we are about to draw near, when from out an opening door, whence seemed to come the music, there appeared a figure bent in contemplation and wrapped in the shadows of the past. It was so like the statue on the square without that the one at my side gasps, “It is he, Mother, what shall we do?” and shrinking spellbound, I hold the dear little hand, glad to feel the human warmth of its pressure. With dread and yet with fascination I watch the lone, sad, weary figure, as it were the phantom of old age eternally unreconciled to the flight of youth. I watch while it moves eagerly toward the fountain to lean forward and drink deep, deep, with an insatiable thirst; and then with a hopeless sigh it paces back and forth among the shadows.
A bell clangs out the hour of one, and the great wooden gate swings open of itself, while we two, much affrighted, slip unnoticed behind the columns of the corridor into “the twilight gloom of a deep embrasured window” which for long years had been sealed from the light by the gray masonry of the ancient church.
Even as we look the silent figure has vanished, and we are left there with only the sound of the plaintive, ever murmuring fountain.