ne Lisbeth did not think of them. She had committed no
crime against the law of the land, she was very respectable, an
honoured and well-placed person, that she knew. And as she walked
along by the margin of the sea, what was it she saw lying there? An
old hat, a man's hat. Now, where might that have been washed
overboard? She came nearer, and stopped to look at the hat. Ha! what
was lying yonder? She shuddered; but it was nothing save a heap of sea
grass and tangle flung across a long stone; but it looked just like a
corpse: it was only sea grass and tangle, and yet she was frightened
at it, and as she turned away to walk on much came into her mind that
she had heard in her childhood; old superstitions of spectres by the
sea shore, of the ghosts of drowned but unburied people whose corpses
have been washed up on to the desert shore. The body, she had heard,
could do harm to none, but the spirit could pursue the lonely
wanderer, and attach itself to him, and demand to be carried to the
churchyard that it might rest in consecrated ground. "Hold fast! hold
fast!" the spectre would then cry; and while Anne Lisbeth murmured the
words to herself, her whole dream suddenly stood before her just as
she had dreamed it, when the mothers clung to her and had repeated
this word, amid the crash of the world, when her sleeve was torn and
she slipped out of the grasp of her child, who wanted to hold her up
in that terrible hour. Her child, her own child, which she had never
loved, lay now buried in the sea, and might rise up like a spectre
from the waters, and cry "Hold fast! carry me to consecrated earth."
And as these thoughts passed through her mind, fear gave speed to her
feet, so that she walked on faster and faster; fear came upon her like
the touch of a cold wet hand that was laid upon her heart, so that she
almost fainted; and as she looked out across the sea, all there grew
darker and darker; a heavy mist came rolling onward, and clung round
bush and tree, twisting them into fantastic shapes. She turned round,
and glanced up at the moon, which had risen behind her. It looked like
a pale, rayless surface; and a deadly weight appeared to cling to her
limbs. "Hold fast!" thought she; and when she turned round a second
time and looked at the moon, its white face seemed quite close to her,
and the mist hung like a pale garment from her shoulders. "Hold fast!
carry me to consecrated earth!" sounded in her ears in strange hollow
tone