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 a nd my spirit might yet be united again?