Delphi complete works of.., p.832
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells, page 832
This, so far as he could ever put into words, was the interior of the world where he dwelt apart with her. Its exterior continued very like that of other worlds where two young people have their being. Now and then a more transitory guest at the Grand Hotel Sardegna perhaps fancied it the iridescent orb which takes the color of the morning sky, and is destined, in the course of nature, to the danger of collapse in which planetary space abounds. Some rumor of this could not fail to reach Lanfear, but he ignored it as best he could in always speaking gravely of Miss Gerald as his patient, and authoritatively treating her as such. He convinced some of these witnesses against their senses; for the others, he felt that it mattered little what they thought, since, if it reached her, it could not pierce her isolation for more than the instant in which the impression from absent things remained to her.
A more positive embarrassment, of a kind Lanfear was not prepared for, beset him in an incident which would have been more touching if he had been less singly concerned for the girl. A pretty English boy, with the dawn of a peachy bloom on his young cheeks, and an impulsiveness commoner with English youth than our own, talked with Miss Gerald one evening and the next day sent her an armful of flowers with his card. He followed this attention with a call at her father’s apartment, and after Miss Gerald seemed to know him, and they had, as he told Lanfear, a delightful time together, she took up his card from the table where it was lying, and asked him if he could tell her who that gentleman was. The poor fellow’s inference was that she was making fun of him, and he came to Lanfear, as an obvious friend of the family, for an explanation. He reported the incident, with indignant tears standing in his eyes: “What did she mean by it? If she took my flowers, she must have known that — that — they — And to pretend to forget my name! Oh, I say, it’s too bad! She could have got rid of me without that. Girls have ways enough, you know.”
“Yes, yes,” Lanfear assented, slowly, to gain time. “I can assure you that Miss Gerald didn’t mean anything that could wound you. She isn’t very well — she’s rather odd—”
“Do you mean that she’s out of her mind? She can talk as well as any one — better!”
“No, not that. But she’s often in pain — greatly in pain when she can’t recall a name, and I’ve no doubt she was trying to recall yours with the help of your card. She would be the last in the world to be indifferent to your feelings. I imagine she scarcely knew what she was doing at the moment.”
“Then, do you think — do you suppose — it would be any good my trying to see her again? If she wouldn’t be indifferent to my feelings, do you think there would be any hope — Really, you know, I would give anything to believe that my feelings wouldn’t offend her. You understand me?”
“Perhaps I do.”
“I’ve never met a more charming girl and — she isn’t engaged, is she? She isn’t engaged to you? I don’t mean to press the question, but it’s a question of life and death with me, you know.”
Lanfear thought he saw his way out of the coil. “I can tell you, quite as frankly as you ask, that Miss Gerald isn’t engaged to me.”
“Then it’s somebody else — somebody in America! Well, I hope she’ll be happy; I never shall.” He offered his hand to Lanfear. “I’m off.”
“Oh, here’s the doctor, now,” a voice said behind them where they stood by the garden wall, and they turned to confront Gerald with his daughter.
“Why! Are you going?” she said to the Englishman, and she put out her hand to him.
“Yes, Mr. Evers is going.” Lanfear came to the rescue.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” the girl said, and the youth responded.
“That’s very good of you. I — good-by! I hope you’ll be very happy — I—” He turned abruptly away, and ran into the hotel.
“What has he been crying for?” Miss Gerald asked, turning from a long look after him.
Lanfear did not know quite what to say; but he hazarded saying: “He was hurt that you had forgotten him when he came to see you this afternoon.”
“Did he come to see me?” she asked; and Lanfear exchanged looks of anxiety, pain, and reassurance with her father. “I am so sorry. Shall I go after him and tell him?”
“No; I explained; he’s all right,” Lanfear said.
“You want to be careful, Nannie,” her father added, “about people’s feelings when you meet them, and afterwards seem not to know them.”
“But I do know them, papa,” she remonstrated.
“You want to be careful,” her father repeated.
“I will — I will, indeed.” Her lips quivered, and the tears came, which Lanfear had to keep from flowing by what quick turn he could give to something else.
An obscure sense of the painful incident must have lingered with her after its memory had perished. One afternoon when Lanfear and her father went with her to the military concert in the sycamore-planted piazza near the Vacherie Suisse, where they often came for a cup of tea, she startled them by bowing gayly to a young lieutenant of engineers standing there with some other officers, and making the most of the prospect of pretty foreigners which the place afforded. The lieutenant returned the bow with interest, and his eyes did not leave their party as long as they remained. Within the bounds of deference for her, it was evident that his comrades were joking about the honor done him by this charming girl. When the Geralds started homeward Lanfear was aware of a trio of officers following them, not conspicuously, but unmistakably; and after that, he could not start on his walks with Miss Gerald and her father without the sense that the young lieutenant was hovering somewhere in their path, waiting in the hopes of another bow from her. The officer was apparently not discouraged by his failure to win recognition from her, and what was amounting to annoyance for Lanfear reached the point where he felt he must share it with her father. He had nearly as much trouble in imparting it to him as he might have had with Miss Gerald herself. He managed, but when he required her father to put a stop to it he perceived that Gerald was as helpless as she would have been. He first wished to verify the fact from its beginning with her, but this was not easy.
“Nannie,” he said, “why did you bow to that officer the other day?”
“What officer, papa? When?”
“You know; there by the band-stand, at the Swiss Dairy.”
She stared blankly at him, and it was clear that it was all as if it had not been with her. He insisted, and then she said: “Perhaps I thought I knew him, and was afraid I should hurt his feelings if I didn’t recognize him. But I don’t remember it at all.” The curves of her mouth drooped, and her eyes grieved, so that her father had not the heart to say more. She left them, and when he was alone with Lanfear he said:
“You see how it is!”
“Yes, I saw how it was before. But what do you wish to do?”
“Do you mean that he will keep it up?”
“Decidedly, he’ll keep it up. He has every right to from his point of view.”
“Oh, well, then, my dear fellow, you must stop it, somehow. You’ll know how to do it.”
“I?” said Lanfear, indignantly; but his vexation was not so great that he did not feel a certain pleasure in fulfilling this strangest part of his professional duty, when at the beginning of their next excursion he put Miss Gerald into the victoria with her father and fell back to the point at which he had seen the lieutenant waiting to haunt their farther progress. He put himself plumply in front of the officer and demanded in very blunt Italian: “What do you want?”
The lieutenant stared him over with potential offence, in which his delicately pencilled mustache took the shape of a light sneer, and demanded in his turn, in English much better than Lanfear’s Italian: “What right have you to ask?”
“The right of Miss Gerald’s physician. She is an invalid in my charge.”
A change quite indefinable except as the visible transition from coxcomb to gentleman passed over the young lieutenant’s comely face. “An invalid?” he faltered.
“Yes,” Lanfear began; and then, with a rush of confidence which the change in the officer’s face justified, “one very strangely, very tragically afflicted. Since she saw her mother killed in an accident a year ago she remembers nothing. She bowed to you because she saw you looking at her, and supposed you must be an acquaintance. May I assure you that you are altogether mistaken?”
The lieutenant brought his heels together, and bent low. “I beg her pardon with all my heart. I am very, very sorry. I will do anything I can. I would like to stop that. May I bring my mother to call on Miss Gerald?”
He offered his hand, and Lanfear wrung it hard, a lump of gratitude in his throat choking any particular utterance, while a fine shame for his late hostile intention covered him.
When the lieutenant came, with all possible circumstance, bringing the countess, his mother, Mr. Gerald overwhelmed them with hospitality of every form. The Italian lady responded effusively, and more sincerely cooed and murmured her compassionate interest in his daughter. Then all parted the best of friends; but when it was over, Miss Gerald did not know what it had been about. She had not remembered the lieutenant or her father’s vexation, or any phase of the incident which was now closed. Nothing remained of it but the lieutenant’s right, which he gravely exercised, of saluting them respectfully whenever he met them.
VII
Earlier, Lanfear had never allowed himself to be far out of call from Miss Gerald’s father, especially during the daytime slumbers into which she fell, and from which they both always dreaded her awakening. But as the days went on and the event continued the same he allowed himself greater range. Formerly the three went their walks or drives together, but now he sometimes went alone. In these absences he found relief from the stress of his constant vigilance; he was able to cast off the bond which enslaves the physician to his patient, and which he must ignore at times for mere self-preservation’s sake; but there was always a lurking anxiety, which, though he refused to let it define itself to him, shortened the time and space he tried to put between them.
One afternoon in April, when he left her sleeping, he was aware of somewhat recklessly placing himself out of reach in a lonely excursion to a village demolished by the earthquake of 1887, and abandoned himself, in the impressions and incidents of his visit to the ruin, to a luxury of impersonal melancholy which the physician cannot often allow himself. At last, his care found him, and drove him home full of a sharper fear than he had yet felt since the first days. But Mr. Gerald was tranquilly smoking under a palm in the hotel garden, and met him with an easy smile. “She woke once, and said she had had such a pleasant dream. Now she’s off again. Do you think we’d better wake her for dinner? I suppose she’s getting up her strength in this way. Her sleeping so much is a good symptom, isn’t it?”
Lanfear smiled forlornly; neither of them, in view of the possible eventualities, could have said what result they wished the symptoms to favor. But he said: “Decidedly I wouldn’t wake her”; and he spent a night of restless sleep penetrated by a nervous expectation which the morning, when it came, rather mockingly defeated.
Miss Gerald appeared promptly at breakfast in their pavilion, with a fresher and gayer look than usual, and to her father’s “Well, Nannie, you have had a nap, this time,” she answered, smiling:
“Have I? It isn’t afternoon, is it?”
“No, it’s morning. You’ve napped it all night.”
She said: “I can’t tell whether I’ve been asleep or not, sometimes; but now I know I have been; and I feel so rested. Where are we going to-day?”
She turned to Lanfear while her father answered: “I guess the doctor won’t want to go very far, to-day, after his expedition yesterday afternoon.”
“Ah,” she said, “I knew you had been somewhere! Was it very far? Are you too tired?”
“It was rather far, but I’m not tired. I shouldn’t advise Possana, though.”
“Possana?” she repeated. “What is Possana?”
He told her, and then at a jealous look in her eyes he added an account of his excursion. He heightened, if anything, its difficulties, in making light of them as no difficulties for him, and at the end she said, gently: “Shall we go this morning?”
“Let the doctor rest this morning, Nannie,” her father interrupted, whimsically, but with what Lanfear knew to be an inner yielding to her will. “Or if you won’t let him, let me. I don’t want to go anywhere this morning.”
Lanfear thought that he did not wish her to go at all, and hoped that by the afternoon she would have forgotten Possana. She sighed, but in her sigh there was no concession. Then, with the chance of a returning drowse to save him from openly thwarting her will, he merely suggested: “There’s plenty of time in the afternoon; the days are so long now; and we can get the sunset from the hills.”
“Yes, that will be nice,” she said, but he perceived that she did not assent willingly; and there was an effect of resolution in the readiness with which she appeared dressed for the expedition after luncheon. She clearly did not know where they were going, but when she turned to Lanfear with her look of entreaty, he had not the heart to join her father in any conspiracy against her. He beckoned the carriage which had become conscious in its eager driver from the moment she showed herself at the hotel door, and they set out.
When they had left the higher level of the hotel and began their clatter through the long street of the town, Lanfear noted that she seemed to feel as much as himself the quaintness of the little city, rising on one hand, with its narrow alleys under successive arches between the high, dark houses, to the hills, and dropping on the other to sea from the commonplace of the principal thoroughfare, with its pink and white and saffron hotels and shops. Beyond the town their course lay under villa walls, covered with vines and topped by pavilions, and opening finally along a stretch of the old Cornice road.
“But this,” she said, at a certain point, “is where we were yesterday!”
“This is where the doctor was yesterday,” her father said, behind his cigar.
“And wasn’t I with you?” she asked Lanfear.
He said, playfully: “To-day you are. I mustn’t be selfish and have you every day.”
“Ah, you are laughing at me; but I know I was here yesterday.”
Her father set his lips in patience, and Lanfear did not insist.
They had halted at this point because, across a wide valley on the shoulder of an approaching height, the ruined village of Possana showed, and lower down and nearer the seat the new town which its people had built when they escaped from the destruction of their world-old home.
World-old it all was, with reference to the human life of it; but the spring-time was immortally young in the landscape. Over the expanses of green and brown fields, and hovering about the gray and white cottages, was a mist of peach and cherry blossoms. Above these the hoar olives thickened, and the vines climbed from terrace to terrace. The valley narrowed inland, and ceased in the embrace of the hills drawing mysteriously together in the distances.
“I think we’ve got the best part of it here, Miss Gerald,” Lanfear broke the common silence by saying. “You couldn’t see much more of Possana after you got there.”
“Besides,” her father ventured a pleasantry which jarred on the younger man, “if you were there with the doctor yesterday, you won’t want to make the climb again to-day. Give it up, Nannie!”
“Oh no,” she said, “I can’t give it up.”
“Well, then, we must go on, I suppose. Where do we begin our climb?”
Lanfear explained that he had been obliged to leave his carriage at the foot of the hill, and climb to Possana Nuova by the donkey-paths of the peasants. He had then walked to the ruins of Possana Vecchia, but he suggested that they might find donkeys to carry them on from the new town.
“Well, I hope so,” Mr. Gerald grumbled. But at Possana Nuova no saddle-donkeys were to be had, and he announced, at the café where they stopped for the negotiation, that he would wait for the young people to go on to Possana Vecchia, and tell him about it when they got back. In the meantime he would watch the game of ball, which, in the piazza before the café, appeared to have engaged the energies of the male population. Lanfear was still inwardly demurring, when a stalwart peasant girl came in and announced that she had one donkey which they could have with her own services driving it. She had no saddle, but there was a pad on which the young lady could ride.
“Oh, well, take it for Nannie,” Mr. Gerald directed; “only don’t be gone too long.”
They set out with Miss Gerald reclining in the kind of litter which the donkey proved to be equipped with. Lanfear went beside her, the peasant girl came behind, and at times ran forward to instruct them in the points they seemed to be looking at. For the most part the landscape opened beneath them, but in the azure distances it climbed into Alpine heights which the recent snows had now left to the gloom of their pines. On the slopes of the nearer hills little towns clung, here and there; closer yet farm-houses showed themselves among the vines and olives.
It was very simple, as the life in it must always have been; and Lanfear wondered if the elemental charm of the scene made itself felt by his companion as they climbed the angles of the inclines, in a silence broken only by the picking of the donkey’s hoofs on the rude mosaic of the pavement, and the panting of the peasant girl at its heels. On the top of the last upward stretch they stopped for the view, and Miss Gerald asked abruptly: “Why were you so sad?”
