Delphi complete works of.., p.833
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells, page 833
“When was I sad?” he asked, in turn.
“I don’t know. Weren’t you sad?”
“When I was here yesterday, you mean?” She smiled on his fortunate guess, and he said: “Oh, I don’t know. It might have begun with thinking —
‘Of old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.’
You know the pirates used to come sailing over the peaceful sea yonder from Africa, to harry these coasts, and carry off as many as they could capture into slavery in Tunis and Algiers. It was a long, dumb kind of misery that scarcely made an echo in history, but it haunted my fancy yesterday, and I saw these valleys full of the flight and the pursuit which used to fill them, up to the walls of the villages, perched on the heights where men could have built only for safety. Then, I got to thinking of other things—”
“And thinking of things in the past always makes you sad,” she said, in pensive reflection. “If it were not for the wearying of always trying to remember, I don’t believe I should want my memory back. And of course to be like other people,” she ended with a sigh.
It was on his tongue to say that he would not have her so; but he checked himself, and said, lamely enough: “Perhaps you will be like them, sometime.”
She startled him by answering irrelevantly: “You know my mother is dead. She died a long while ago; I suppose I must have been very little.”
She spoke as if the fact scarcely concerned her, and Lanfear drew a breath of relief in his surprise. He asked, at another tangent: “What made you think I was sad yesterday?”
“Oh, I knew, somehow. I think that I always know when you are sad; I can’t tell you how, but I feel it.”
“Then I must cheer up,” Lanfear said. “If I could only see you strong and well, Miss Gerald, like this girl—”
They both looked at the peasant, and she laughed in sympathy with their smiling, and beat the donkey a little for pleasure; it did not mind.
“But you will be — you will be! We must hurry on, now, or your father will be getting anxious.”
They pushed forward on the road, which was now level and wider than it had been. As they drew near the town, whose ruin began more and more to reveal itself in the roofless walls and windowless casements, they saw a man coming towards them, at whose approach Lanfear instinctively put himself forward. The man did not look at them, but passed, frowning darkly, and muttering and gesticulating.
Miss Gerald turned in her litter and followed him with a long gaze. The peasant girl said gayly in Italian: “He is mad; the earthquake made him mad,” and urged the donkey forward.
Lanfear, in the interest of science, habitually forbade himself the luxury of anything like foreboding, but now, with the passing of the madman, he felt distinctively a lift from his spirit. He no longer experienced the vague dread which had followed him towards Possana, and made him glad of any delay that kept them from it.
They entered the crooked, narrow street leading abruptly from the open country without any suburban hesitation into the heart of the ruin, which kept a vivid image of uninterrupted mediaeval life. There, till within the actual generation, people had dwelt, winter and summer, as they had dwelt from the beginning of Christian times, with nothing to intimate a domestic or civic advance. This street must have been the main thoroughfare, for stone-paved lanes, still narrower, wound from it here and there, while it kept a fairly direct course to the little piazza on a height in the midst of the town. Two churches and a simple town house partly enclosed it with their seamed and shattered façades. The dwellings here were more ruinous than on the thoroughfare, and some were tumbled in heaps. But Lanfear pushed open the door of one of the churches, and found himself in an interior which, except that it was roofless, could not have been greatly changed since the people had flocked into it to pray for safety from the earthquake. The high altar stood unshaken; around the frieze a succession of stucco cherubs perched, under the open sky, in celestial security.
He had learned to look for the unexpected in Miss Gerald, and he could not have said that it was with surprise he now found her as capable of the emotions which the place inspired, as himself. He made sure of saying: “The earthquake, you know,” and she responded with compassion:
“Oh yes; and perhaps that poor man was here, praying with the rest, when it happened. How strange it must all have seemed to them, here where they lived so safely always! They thought such a dreadful thing could happen to others, but not to them. That is the way!”
It seemed to Lanfear once more that she was on the verge of the knowledge so long kept from her. But she went confidently on like a sleepwalker who saves himself from dangers that would be death to him in waking. She spoke of the earthquake as if she had been reading or hearing of it; but he doubted if, with her broken memory, this could be so. It was rather as if she was exploring his own mind in the way of which he had more than once been sensible, and making use of his memory. From time to time she spoke of remembering, but he knew that this was as the blind speak of seeing.
He was anxious to get away, and at last they came out to where they had left the peasant girl waiting beside her donkey. She was not there, and after trying this way and that in the tangle of alleys, Lanfear decided to take the thoroughfare which they had come up by and trust to the chance of finding her at its foot. But he failed even of his search for the street: he came out again and again at the point he had started from.
“What is the matter?” she asked at the annoyance he could not keep out of his face.
He laughed. “Oh, merely that we’re lost. But we will wait here till that girl chooses to come back for us. Only it’s getting late, and Mr. Gerald—”
“Why, I know the way down,” she said, and started quickly in a direction which, as they kept it, he recognized as the route by which he had emerged from the town the day before. He had once more the sense of his memory being used by her, as if being blind, she had taken his hand for guidance, or as if being herself disabled from writing, she had directed a pen in his grasp to form the words she desired to put down. In some mystical sort the effect was hers, but the means was his.
They found the girl waiting with the donkey by the roadside beyond the last house. She explained that, not being able to follow them into the church with her donkey, she had decided to come where they found her and wait for them there.
“Does no one at all live here?” Lanfear asked, carelessly.
“Among the owls and the spectres? I would not pass a night here for a lemonade! My mother,” she went on, with a natural pride in the event, “was lost in the earthquake. They found her with me before her breast, and her arms stretched out keeping the stones away.” She vividly dramatized the fact. “I was alive, but she was dead.”
“Tell her,” Miss Gerald said, “that my mother is dead, too.”
“Ah, poor little thing!” the girl said, when the message was delivered, and she put her beast in motion, chattering gayly to Miss Gerald in the bond of their common orphanhood.
The return was down-hill, and they went back in half the time it had taken them to come. But even with this speed they were late, and the twilight was deepening when the last turn of their road brought them in sight of the new village. There a wild noise of cries for help burst upon the air, mixed with the shrill sound of maniac gibbering. They saw a boy running towards the town, and nearer them a man struggling with another, whom he had caught about the middle, and was dragging towards the side of the road where it dropped, hundreds of feet, into the gorge below.
The donkey-girl called out: “Oh, the madman! He is killing the signor!”
Lanfear shouted. The madman flung Gerald to the ground, and fled shrieking. Miss Gerald had leaped from her seat, and followed Lanfear as he ran forward to the prostrate form. She did not look at it, but within a few paces she clutched her hands in her hair, and screamed out: “Oh, my mother is killed!” and sank, as if sinking down into the earth, in a swoon.
“No, no; it’s all right, Nannie! Look after her, Lanfear! I’m not hurt. I let myself go in that fellow’s hands, and I fell softly. It was a good thing he didn’t drop me over the edge.” Gerald gathered himself up nimbly enough, and lent Lanfear his help with the girl. The situation explained itself, almost without his incoherent additions, to the effect that he had become anxious, and had started out with the boy for a guide, to meet them, and had met the lunatic, who suddenly attacked him. While he talked, Lanfear was feeling the girl’s pulse, and now and then putting his ear to her heart. With a glance at her father: “You’re bleeding, Mr. Gerald,” he said.
“So I am,” the old man answered, smiling, as he wiped a red stream from his face with his handkerchief. “But I am not hurt—”
“Better let me tie it up,” Lanfear said, taking the handkerchief from him. He felt the unselfish quality in a man whom he had not always thought heroic, and he bound the gash above his forehead with a reverence mingling with his professional gentleness. The donkey-girl had not ceased to cry out and bless herself, but suddenly, as her care was needed in getting Miss Gerald back to the litter, she became a part of the silence in which the procession made its way slowly into Possana Nuova, Lanfear going on one side, and Mr. Gerald on the other to support his daughter in her place. There was a sort of muted outcry of the whole population awaiting them at the door of the locanda where they had halted before, and which now had the distinction of offering them shelter in a room especially devoted to the poor young lady, who still remained in her swoon.
When the landlord could prevail with his fellow-townsmen and townswomen to disperse in her interest, and had imposed silence upon his customers indoors, Lanfear began his vigil beside his patient in as great quiet as he could anywhere have had. Once during the evening the public physician of the district looked in, but he agreed with Lanfear that nothing was to be done which he was not doing in his greater experience of the case. From time to time Gerald had suggested sending for some San Remo physician in consultation. Lanfear had always approved, and then Gerald had not persisted. He was strongly excited, and anxious not so much for his daughter’s recovery from her swoon, which he did not doubt, as for the effect upon her when she should have come to herself.
It was this which he wished to discuss, sitting fallen back into his chair, or walking up and down the room, with his head bound with a bloody handkerchief, and looking, with a sort of alien picturesqueness, like a kindly brigand.
Lanfear did not leave his place beside the bed where the girl lay, white and still as if dead. An inexpressible compassion for the poor man filled his heart. Whatever the event should be, it would be tragical for him. “Go to sleep, Mr. Gerald,” he said. “Your waking can do no good. I will keep watch, and if need be, I’ll call you. Try to make yourself easy on that couch.”
“I shall not sleep,” the old man answered. “How could I?” Nevertheless, he adjusted himself to the hard pillows of the lounge where he had been sitting and drowsed among them. He woke just before dawn with a start. “I thought she had come to, and knew everything! What a nightmare! Did I groan? Is there any change?”
Lanfear, sitting by the bed, in the light of the wasting candle, which threw a grotesque shadow of him on the wall, shook his head. After a moment he asked: “How long did you tell me her swoon had lasted after the accident to her mother?”
“I don’t think she recovered consciousness for two days, and then she remembered nothing. What do you think are the chances of her remembering now?”
“I don’t know. But there’s a kind of psychopathic logic — If she lost her memory through one great shock, she might find it through another.”
“Yes, yes!” the father said, rising and walking to and fro, in his anguish. “That was what I thought — what I was afraid of. If I could die myself, and save her from living through it — I don’t know what I’m saying! But if — but if — if she could somehow be kept from it a little longer! But she can’t, she can’t! She must know it now when she wakes.”
Lanfear had put up his hand, and taken the girl’s slim wrist quietly between his thumb and finger, holding it so while her father talked on.
“I suppose it’s been a sort of weakness — a sort of wickedness — in me to wish to keep it from her; but I have wished that, doctor; you must have seen it, and I can’t deny it. We ought to bear what is sent us in this world, and if we escape we must pay for our escape. It has cost her half her being, I know it; but it hasn’t cost her her reason, and I’m afraid for that, if she comes into her memory now. Still, you must do — But no one can do anything either to hinder or to help!”
He was talking in a husky undertone, and brokenly, incoherently. He made an appeal, which Lanfear seemed not to hear, where he remained immovable with his hand on the girl’s pulse.
“Do you think I am to blame for wishing her never to know it, though without it she must remain deprived of one whole side of life? Do you think my wishing that can have had anything to do with keeping her — But this faint may pass and she may wake from it just as she has been. It is logical that she should remember; but is it certain that she will?”
A murmur, so very faint as to be almost no sound at all, came like a response from the girl’s lips, and she all but imperceptibly stirred. Her father neither heard nor saw, but Lanfear started forward. He made a sudden clutch at the girl’s wrist with the hand that had not left it and then remained motionless. “She will never remember now — here.”
He fell on his knees beside the bed and began to sob. “Oh, my dearest! My poor girl! My love!” still keeping her wrist in his hand, and laying his head tenderly on her arm. Suddenly he started, with a shout: “The pulse!” and fell forward, crushing his ear against her heart, and listened with bursts of: “It’s beating! She isn’t dead! She’s alive!” Then he lifted her in his arms, and it was in his embrace that she opened her eyes, and while she clung to him, entreated:
“My father! Where is he?”
A dread fell upon both the men, blighting the joy with which they welcomed her back to life. She took her father’s head between her hands, and kissed his bruised face. “I thought you were dead; and I thought that mamma—” She stopped, and they waited breathless. “But that was long ago, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” her father eagerly assented. “Very long ago.”
“I remember,” she sighed. “I thought that I was killed, too. Was it all a dream?” Her father and Lanfear looked at each other. Which should speak? “This is Doctor Lanfear, isn’t it?” she asked, with a dim smile. “And I’m not dreaming now, am I?” He had released her from his arms, but she held his hand fast. “I know it is you, and papa; and yes, I remember everything. That terrible pain of forgetting is gone! It’s beautiful! But did he hurt you badly, papa? I saw him, and I wanted to call to you. But mamma—”
However the change from the oblivion of the past had been operated, it had been mercifully wrought. As far as Lanfear could note it, in the rapture of the new revelation to her which it scarcely needed words to establish, the process was a gradual return from actual facts to the things of yesterday and then to the things of the day before, and so back to the tragedy in which she had been stricken. There was no sudden burst of remembrance, but a slow unveiling of the reality in which her spirit was mystically fortified against it. At times it seemed to him that the effect was accomplished in her by supernatural agencies such as, he remembered once somewhere reading, attend the souls of those lately dead, and explore their minds till every thought and deed of their earthly lives, from the last to the first, is revealed to them out of an inner memory which can never, any jot or tittle, perish. It was as if this had remained in her intact from the blow that shattered her outer remembrance. When the final, long-dreaded horror was reached, it was already a sorrow of the past, suffered and accepted with the resignation which is the close of grief, as of every other passion.
Love had come to her help in the time of her need, but not love alone helped her live back to the hour of that supreme experience and beyond it. In the absorbing interest of her own renascence, the shock, more than the injury which her father had undergone, was ignored, if not neglected. Lanfear had not, indeed, neglected it; but he could not help ignoring it in his happiness, as he remembered afterwards in the self-reproach which he would not let the girl share with him. Nothing, he realized, could have availed if everything had been done which he did not do; but it remained a pang with him that he had so dimly felt his duty to the gentle old man, even while he did it. Gerald lived to witness his daughter’s perfect recovery of the self so long lost to her; he lived, with a joy more explicit than their own, to see her the wife of the man to whom she was dearer than love alone could have made her. He lived beyond that time, rejoicing, if it may be so said, in the fond memories of her mother which he had been so long forbidden by her affliction to recall. Then, after the spring of the Riviera had whitened into summer, and San Remo hid, as well as it could, its sunny glare behind its pines and palms, Gerald suffered one long afternoon through the heat till the breathless evening, and went early to bed. He had been full of plans for spending the rest of the summer at the little place in New England where his daughter knew that her mother lay. In the morning he did not wake.
“He gave his life that I might have mine!” she lamented in the first wild grief.
“No, don’t say that, Nannie,” her husband protested, calling her by the pet name which her father always used. “He is dead; but if we owe each other to his loss, it is because he was given, not because he gave himself.”
“Oh, I know, I know!” she wailed. “But he would gladly have given himself for me.”
That, perhaps, Lanfear could not have denied, and he had no wish to do so. He had a prescience of happiness for her which the future did not belie; and he divined that a woman must not be forbidden the extremes within which she means to rest her soul.
