“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.”