OF THE DOCTOR'S CAUTIOUS RESERVE, AND MRS. FENWICK'S STRONG COMMON-SENSE.
AND OF A LADY AT BUDA-PESTH. HOW HARRISSON WAS ONLY PAST FORGOTTEN
NEWSPAPERS TO DR. VEREKER. OF THE OCTOPUS'S PULSE, HOW THE HABERDASHER'S
BRIDE WOULD TRY ON AT TWO GUAS. A WEEK, AND OF A PLEASANT WALK BACK
FROM THE RAILWAY STATION
"You never mean to say you've been in the water?"
It was quite clear, from the bluish finger-tips of the gloveless
merpussy--for at St. Sennans sixes are not _de rigueur_ in the
morning--that she _has_ been in, and has only just come out. But
Fenwick, who asked the question, grasped a handful of loose black hair
for confirmation, and found it wet.
"Haven't I?" says the incorrigible one. "And you should have heard the
rumpus over getting a machine down."
"She's a selfish little monkey," her mother says, but forgivingly,
too. "She'll drown herself, and not care a penny about all the trouble
she gives." You see, Rosalind wouldn't throw her words into this
callous form if she was really thinking about the merpussy. But just
now she is too anxious about Gerry to be very particular.
What has passed between him and Dr. Conrad? What does the latter know
now more than she does herself? She falls back with him, and allows
the other two to go on in front. Obviously the most natural
arrangement.
"What has he told you, Dr. Conrad?" This is not unexpected, and the
answer is a prepared one, preconcerted under pressure between the
doctor and his conscience.
"I am going to ask you, Mrs. Fenwick, to do me a very great
kindness--don't say yes without hearing what it is--to ask you to
allow me to keep back all your husband says to me, and to take for
granted that he repeats to you all he feels certain of himself in
his own recollections."
"He _has_ told you more?"
"Yes, he has. But I am far from certain that anything he has said can
be relied upon--in his present state. Anyway, I should be very sorry
to take upon myself the responsibility of repeating it."
"He wishes you not to do so?"
"I think so. I should say so. Do you mind?"
"I won't press you to repeat anything you wish to keep back. But is
his mind easier? After all, that's the main point."
"That is my impression--much easier." He felt he was quite warranted
in saying this. "And I should say that if he does not himself tell
you again whatever he has been saying to me, it will only show how
uncertain and untrustworthy all his present recollections are. I
cannot tell you how strongly I feel that the best course is to leave
his mind to its own natural development. It may even be that the
partial and distorted images of events such as he has been speaking
of to me...."
"I mustn't ask you what they were?... Yes, go on."
"May again become dim and disappear altogether. If they are to do so,
nothing can be gained by dwelling on them now--still less by trying
to verify them--and least of all by using them as a stimulus to further
recollection."
"You think I had better not ask him questions?"
"Exactly. Leave him to himself. Keep his mind on other matters--healthy
occupations, surrounding life. I am certain of one thing--that the
effort to disinter the past is painful to him in itself, quite
independent of any painful associations in what he is endeavouring to
recall."
"I have seen that, too, in the slight recurrences he has had when
I was there. I quite agree with you about the best course to pursue.
Let us have patience and wait."
Of course, Vereker had not the remotest conception that the less
Fenwick remembered, the better his wife would be pleased. So the
principal idea in his mind at that moment was, what a very sensible
as well as handsome woman he was talking to! It was the way in which
most people catalogued Rosalind Fenwick. But her ready assent to his
wishes had intensified the doctor's first item of description. A
subordinate wave of his thought created an image of the girl Fenwick
must have pictured to himself coming out of the railway carriage. He
only repeated: "Let us have patience, and wait," with a feeling of
relief from possible further catechism.
But in order to avoid showing his wish to abate inquiry, he could talk
about aspects of the case that would not involve it. He could tell of
analogous cases well known, or in his own practice. For instance, that
of a Frenchwoman who wandered away from Amiens, unconscious of her
past and her identity, and somehow got to Buda-Pesth. There, having
retained perfect powers of using her mother-tongue, and also speaking
German fluently, she had all but got a good teachership in a school,
only she had no certificate of character. With a great effort she
recalled the name of a lady at Amiens she felt she could write to for
one, and did so. "Fancy her husband's amazement," said Dr. Conrad,
"when, on opening a letter addressed to his wife in her own
handwriting, he found it was an application from Fräulein Schmidt, or
some German name, asking for a testimonial!" He referred also to the
many cases of the caprices of memory he had met with in his studies of
the _petit-mal_ of epilepsy, a subject to which he had given special
attention. It may have crossed his mind that his companion had fallen
very thoroughly in with his views about not dissecting her husband's
case overmuch for the present. But he put it down, if it did, to her
strong common-sense. It is rather a singular thing how very ready men
are to ascribe this quality--whatever it is--to a beautiful woman.
Especially if she agrees with them.
Nevertheless the doctor was not very sorry when he saw that Sally and
Fenwick, on in front, had caught up with--or been caught up with by--a
mixed party, of a sort to suspend, divert, or cancel all conversation
of a continuous sort. Miss Gwendolen Arkwright and her next eldest
sister had established themselves on Fenwick's shoulders, and the
Julius Bradshaws had just intersected them from a side-alley. The
latter were on the point of extinction; going back to London by the
3.15, and everything packed but what they had on. It was a clear
reprieve, till 3.15 at any rate.
There could be no doubt, thought Rosalind to herself, that her
husband's conversation with Vereker had made him easier in his mind
than when she saw him last, just after breakfast. No doubt he was all
the better, too, for the merpussy's account of her exploit on the
beach; of how she managed to overrule old Gabriel and get a
machine put down, contrary to precedent, common caution, and public
opinion--even in the face of urgent remonstrance from her Swiss
acquaintance, almost as good a swimmer as herself; how she had picked
out a good big selvage-wave to pop in under, and when she got beyond
it enjoyed all the comfort incidental to being in bed with the door
locked. Because, you see, she exaggerated. However, one thing she
said was quite true. There were no breakers out beyond the said
selvage-wave, because the wind had fallen a great deal, and seemed
to have given up the idea of making any more white foam-crests for
the present. But there would be more wind again in the night, said
authority. It was only a half-holiday for Neptune.
Sally's bracing influence was all the stronger from the fact of her
complete unconsciousness of anything unusual. Her mother had said
nothing to her the day before of the revival of Baron Kreutzkammer,
nor had Dr. Conrad, acting under cautions given. And all Sally knew of
the wakeful night was that her mother had found Fenwick walking about,
unable to sleep, and had said at breakfast he might just as well have
his sleep out now. To which she had agreed, and had then gone away to
see if "the Tishies," as she called them, were blown away, and had met
the doctor coming to see if _she_ was. So she was in the best of moods
as an antidote to mind-cloudage. And Fenwick, under the remedy, seemed
to her no more unlike himself than was to be expected after not a wink
till near daylight. The object of this prolixity is that it may be
borne in mind that Sally never shared her mother's or her undeclared
lover's knowledge of the strange mental revival caused--as seemed most
probable--by the action of the galvanic battery on the previous day.
* * * * *
Vereker walked back to his Octopus, whom he had forsaken for an
unusually long time, with his brain in a whirl at the strange
revelation he had just heard. His medical experience had put him well
on his guard anent one possibility--that the whole thing might be
delusion on Fenwick's part. How could such an imperfect memory-record
be said to prove anything without confirmation from without?
His habits of thought had qualified him to keep this possibility
provisionally in the background without forgetting it. There was
nothing in the mere knowledge of its existence to prevent his trying
to recall all he could of the story of the disappearance of Harrisson,
as he read it in the newspapers a year and a half ago. There had been
a deal of talk about it at the time, and great efforts had been made
to trace Harrisson, but without success. The doctor lingered a
little on his way, conscious that he could recall very little of
the Harrisson case, but too interested to be able to leave his
recollections dormant until he should get substantial information.
The Octopus could recollect all about it no doubt, but how venture to
apply to her? Or how to Sally? Though, truly, had he done so, it would
have been with much less hope of a result. Neither Sally nor her
mother were treasure-houses of the day's gossip, as _his_ mother was.
"We must have taken mighty little notice of what was going on in the
world at the time," so thought the doctor to himself.
What _did_ he actually recollect? A paragraph headed "Disappearance
of a Millionaire" in a hurried perusal of an evening paper as he rode
to an urgent case; a repetition--several repetitions--on the newspaper
posters of the name Harrisson during the fortnight following, chiefly
disclosing supposed discoveries of the missing man, sandwiched with
other discoveries of their falsehood--clue and disappointment by
turns. He could remember his own perfectly spurious interest in the
case, produced by such announcements staring at him from all points
of the compass, and his own preposterous contributions to talk-making
about them, such as "Have they found that man Harrisson yet?" knowing
himself the merest impostor all the while, but feeling it dutiful
to be up-to-date. How came no one of them all to put two and two
together?
A gleam of a solution was supplied to the doctor's mind when he
set himself to answer the question, "How should I have gone about
suspecting it?" How, indeed? Ordinary every-day people--_you_'s
and _me_'s--can't lightly admit to our minds the idea that we
have actually got mixed up with the regular public people in the
newspapers. Have not even our innocent little announcements that we
have been born, or died, or got married, always had a look of having
got in by accident, or under some false pretence? Have we not felt
inflated when a relation of ours has had a letter to a newspaper
inserted, in real print, with his own name as bold as brass? Vereker
was not surprised, on thinking it over, that he personally had missed
the clue. And if he, why not others? Besides, all the Harrisson talk
had been superseded by some more exciting matter before it had been
recognised as possible that Fenwick's memory might never come back.
Just as he arrived at Mrs. Iggulden's a thought struck him--not
heavily; only a light, reminding flick--and he stopped a minute to
see what it had to say. It referred to his interview with Scotland
Yard, some six weeks after Fenwick's first appearance.
He could recall that in the course of his interview one of the
younger officials spoke in an undertone to his chief; who thereon,
after consideration, turned to the doctor and said, "Had not your
man a panama hat? I understood you to say so;" and on receiving an
affirmative reply, spoke again in an undertone to his subordinate
to the effect, half-caught by Vereker, that "Alison's hat was black
felt." Did he say by any chance Harrisson, not Alison? If so, might
not that account for a rather forbidding or opposive attitude on the
Yard's part? He remembered something of fictitious claimants coming
forward, representing themselves as Harrisson--desperate bidders for
a chance of the Klondyke gold. They might easily have supposed this
man and his quenched memory another of the same sort. Evidently if
investigation was not to suffer from overgrown suspicion, only young
and guileless official instinct could be trusted--plain-clothes
_ingénus_. Dr. Conrad laughed to himself over a particularly
outrageous escapade of Sally's, who, when her mother said they always
sent such very young chicks of constables to Glenmoira Road in the
morning, impudently ascribed them to inspector's eggs, laid overnight.
* * * * *
"My pulse--feel it!" His Goody mother greeted the doctor with a feeble
voice from inarticulate lips, and a wrist outstretched. She was being
moribund; to pay him out for being behindhand.
He skipped all interims, and said, with negligible inaccuracy, "It's
only a quarter past."
"Don't talk, but feel!" Her failing senses could indulge a little
impatience; but it was like throwing ballast out of a balloon. She
meant to be all the worse directly.
Her son felt the outstretched wrist, and was relieved to find it
normal--almost abnormally normal, just before lunch! But he had to
pretend. A teaspoonful of brandy in half a glass of water, clearly!
He knew she hated it, but she had better swallow it down. _That_ was
right! And he would hurry Mrs. Iggulden with lunch. However, Mrs.
Iggulden had been beforehand, having seen her good gentleman coming
and the table all laid ready, so she got the steak on, only she knew
there would something happen if too much hurry and sure enough she
broke a decanter. We do not like the responsibility of punctuation
in this sentence.
"I thought you had forgotten me," quoth the revived Goody to her son,
assisting her to lunch. But the excellent woman said _me_ (as if it
was the name of somebody else, and spelt _M_ double _E_) with a
compassionate moan.
Rosalind was glad to see her husband in good spirits again. He was
quite like himself before that unfortunate little galvanic battery
upset everything. Perhaps its effect would go off, and all he had
remembered of the past grow dim again. It was a puzzle, even to
Rosalind herself, that her natural curiosity about all Gerry's
unknown history should become as nothing in view of the unwelcome
contingencies that history might disclose. It spoke well for the
happiness of the _status quo_ that she was ready to forego the
satisfaction of this curiosity altogether rather than confront its
possible disturbing influences. "If we can only know nothing about
it, and be as we are!" was the thought uppermost in her mind.
It certainly was a rare piece of good luck that, owing to Sally's
leaving the house before Fenwick appeared, and running away to her
madcap swim before he could join her and the doctor, she had just
avoided seeing him during the worst of his depression. Indeed, his
remark that he had not slept well seemed to account for all she had
seen in the morning. And in the afternoon, when the whole party, minus
the doctor, walked over to St. Egbert's Station for the honeymoon
portion of it to take its departure for town, and the other three to
say farewells, Fenwick was quite in his usual form. Only his wife
watched for any differences, and unless it was that he gave way rather
more freely than usual to the practice of walking with his arm round
herself or Sally, or both, she could detect nothing. As the road they
took was a quiet one, and they met scarcely a soul, no exception on
the score of dignity was taken to this by Rosalind; and as for Sally,
her general attitude was "Leave Jeremiah alone--he shall do as he
likes." Lætitia's mental comment was that it wasn't Oxford Street
this time, and so it didn't matter.
* * * * *
"I shall walk straight into papa's library," said that young married
lady in answer to an inquiry from Sally, as they fell back a little
to chat. "I shall just walk straight in and say we've come back."
"What do you suppose the Professor will say?"
"My dear!--it's the merest toss up. If he's got some very interesting
Greek or Phoenician nonsense on hand, he'll let me kiss him over
his shoulder and say, 'All right--I'm busy.' If it's only the
Cosmocyclopædia work--which he doesn't care about, only it pays--he
may look up and kiss me, or even go so far as to say: 'Well!--and
where's master Julius?' But I don't expect he'll give any active help
in the collision with mamma, which is sure to come. I rather hope she
won't be at home the first time."
"Why? Wouldn't it be better to have it over and done with?" Sally
always wants to clinch everything.
"Yes, of course; only the second time mamma's edge will be all taken
off, and she'll die down. Besides, the crucial point is Paggy kissing
her. It's got to be done, and it will be such a deal easier if I can
get Theeny and Classy kissed first." Classy was the married sister,
Clarissa. "After all, mamma must have got a shred of common-sense
somewhere, and she must know that when things can neither be cured
nor endured you have to pretend, sooner or later."
"You bottle up when it comes to that," said Sally philosophically.
"But I shouldn't wonder, Tishy, if you found your Goody aggravating,
too. She'll talk about haberdashers."
"Oh, my dear, haberdashers are a trifle! If that was all she might
talk herself hoarse. Besides, I can stop that by the mantle
department."
"What about it? Oh, I know, though!--about your being worth two guineas
a week to try on. She would know you were not serious, though."
"Would she? I'm not so sure about it myself--not sure I'm not serious,
I mean."
"Oh, Tishy! You don't mean you would go and try on at two guineas
a week?"
"I really don't know, Sally dear. If I'm to have my husband's
profession flung in my face at every turn, I may just as well have the
advantage of it by a side-wind. Think what two guineas a week means!
A hundred and four guineas a year--remember! guineas, not pounds.
And Paggy thinks he could get it arranged for us to go out and dine
together in the middle of the day at an Italian restaurant...."
"I say, what a lark!" Sally immediately warms up to the scheme. "I
could come, too. Do you know, Tishy dear, I was just going to twit
you with the negro and his spots. But now I won't."
* * * * *
The Julius Bradshaws must have reached home early, as our story will
show later that the anticipated collision with the Dragon took place
the same evening. No great matter for surprise, this, to any one who
has noticed the energetic impatience for immediate town-event in folk
just off a holiday. These two were too keen to grapple with their
domestic problem to allow of delays. So, after getting some dinner in
a hurry at Georgiana Terrace, Bayswater, they must needs cab straight
away to Ladbroke Grove Road. As for what happened when they got there,
we shall know as much as we want of it later. For the present our
business lies with Fenwick and his wife; to watch, in sympathy with
the latter, for the next development in the strange mental state of the
former, and to hope with her, as it must be confessed, for continued
quiescence; or, better still, for a complete return of oblivion.
It seemed so cruelly hard to Rosalind that it might not be. What had
she to gain by the revival of a forgotten past--a past her own share
of which she had for twenty years striven to forget? Utterly guiltless
as, conceivably, she may have known herself to be, she had striven
against that past as the guilty strive with the memory of a concealed
crime. And here was she, at the end of this twenty years, with all
she most longed for at the beginning in her possession, mysteriously
attained with a thoroughness no combination of circumstances, no
patience or forbearance of her own, no self-restraint or generosity of
her young husband's could possibly have brought about. Think only of
what we do know of this imperfect story! Conceive that it should have
been possible for the Algernon Palliser of those days to know and
understand it to the full; indulge the supposition, however strained
it may be, that his so knowing it would not have placed him in a
felon's dock for the prompt and righteous murder of the betrayer--we
take the first convenient name--of the woman he loved. Convince
yourself this could have been; figure to yourself a happy wedded
life for the couple after Miss Sally had made her unconscious _début_
with the supremest indifference to her antecedents; construct a
hypothetical bliss for them at all costs, and then say if you can
fill out the picture with a relation between Sally and her putative
father to be compared for a moment to the one chance has favoured
now for the stepfather and stepdaughter of our story.
Our own imagination is at fault about the would-have-beens and
might-have-beens in this case. The only picture our mind can form of
what would have followed a full grasp of all the facts by Algernon
Palliser may be dictated or suggested by a memory of what sent Mr.
Salter, of Livermore's Rents, 1808, to the hospital. Rosalind knew
nothing of Mr. Salter, but she could remember well all Gerry's feats
of strength in his youth--all the cracking of walnuts in his
arm-joints and bending of kitchen-pokers across his neck--and also,
too well, an impotence against his own anger when provoked; it had
died down now to a trifle, but she could detect the trifle still.
Was such an executive to be trusted not to take the law into its own
hands, to fall into the grasp of an offended legislative function
later--one too dull to be able to define offence so as to avoid the
condemnation, now and again, of a culprit whose technical crime has
the applause of the whole human race? Had the author of all her
wrongs met his death at the hands of her young husband, might not
this husband of her later life--beside her now--be still serving his
time at the galleys, with every compulsory sharer in his condemnation
thinking him a hero?
It was all so much better as it had turned out. Only, could it
remain so?
At least, nothing was wrong now, at this moment. Whatever her husband
had said to Vereker in that morning walk, the present hour was a
breathing-space for Rosalind. The Kreutzkammer recurrence of the
previous evening was losing its force for her, and there had been
nothing since that she knew of. "Chaotic ideas"--the phrase he had
used in the night--might mean anything or nothing.
They came back from the railway-station by what was known to them as
the long short cut in contradistinction to the short short cut. The
latter, Sally said, had the courage of its opinions, while the former
was a time-serving cut. Could she have influenced it at the first
go-off--when it originally started from the V-shaped stile your skirts
stuck in, behind the Wheatsheaf--it might have mustered the resolution
to go straight on, instead of going off at a tangent to Gattrell's
Farm, half a mile out of the way. Was it intimidated by a statement
that trespassers would be prosecuted, nailed to an oak-tree, legible
a hundred years ago, perhaps, when its nails were not rust, and really
held it tight--instead of, as now, merely countenancing its wish to
remain from old habit? It may have been so frightened in its timid
youth; but if so, surely the robust self-assertion of its straight
start for Gattrell's had in it something of contempt for the poor old
board, coupled with its well-known intention of turning to the left
and going slap through the wood the minute you (or it) got there. It
may even have twitted that board with its apathy in respect of
trespassers. Had the threat _ever_ been carried out?
The long short cut was, according to the aborigines, a goodish
step longer than the road, geometrically. But there was some
inner sense--moral, ethical, spiritual--somehow metaphysical or
supraphysical--in which it was a short cut, for all that. The road
was a dale farther, some did say, along of the dust. But, then, there
was no dust now, because it was all laid. So the reason why was allowed
to lapse, and the fact to take care of itself for once. Helped by an
illusion that a path through an undergrowth of nut-trees and an
overgrowth of oak on such a lovely afternoon as this wasn't distance
at all--even when you got hooked in the brambles--and by other
palliative incidents, it was voted a very short cut indeed. Certainly
not too long for Rosalind's breathing-space, and had it been even
a longer short cut she would have been well contented.
Every hour passed now, without a new recurrence of some bygone, was
going to give her--she knew it well beforehand--a sense of greater
security. And every little incident on the walk that made a
change in the rhythm of event was welcome. When they paused for
refreshments--ginger-beer in stone bottles--at Gattrell's, and old
Mrs. Gattrell, while she undid the corks, outlined the troubles of her
husband's family and her own, she felt grateful for both to have kept
clear of India and "the colonies." No memories of California or the
Arctic Circle could arise from Mrs. Gattrell's twin-sister Debory,
who suffered from information--internal information, mind you; an
explanation necessary to correct an impression of overstrain to the
mind in pursuit of research. Nor from her elder sister Hannah, whose
neuralgic sick headaches were a martyrdom to herself, but apparently
a source of pride to her family. Of which the inflation, strange to
say, was the greater because Dr. Knox was of opinion that they would
yield to treatment and tonics; though the old lady herself was opposed
to both, and said elder-flower-water. She was a pleasant old personage,
Mrs. Gattrell, who always shone out as a beacon of robust health above
a fever-stricken, paralysed, plague-spotted, debilitated, and
disintegrating crowd of blood-relations and connexions by marriage.
But not one of all these had ever left the soil they were born on,
none of Mrs. Gattrell's people holding with foreign parts. And nothing
whatever had ever taken place at St. Egbert's till the railway come;
so it wasn't likely to arouse memories of the ice-fields of the
northern cold or the tiger-hunts of the southern heat.
Rosalind found herself asking of each new thing as it arose: "Will
this bring anything fresh to his mind, or will it pass?" The wood-path
the nut-tree growth all but closed over on either side she decided
was safe; it could taste of nothing but his English school-boyhood,
before ever she knew him. But the sudden uprush of the covey of
partridges from the stubble, and their bee-line for a haven in the
next field--surely danger lay that way? Think what a shot he was in the
old days! However, he only said, "Poor dears, they don't know how near
the thirty-first is," and seemed to be able to know that much from
past experience without discomfort at not knowing more.
When Sally proposed fortune-telling in connexion with a _bona-fide_
gipsy woman, who looked (she said) exactly like in "Lavengro," her
mother's first impulse was to try and recall if she and the Gerry
of old times had ever been in contact with gipsies, authentic or
otherwise, and, after decision in the negative, to feel that this
wanderer was more welcome than not, as having a tendency to conduct
his mind safely into new channels. Even the conclave of cows he had
to disperse that they might get through a gate--cows that didn't mind
how long they waited at it, having time on their hands--suggested the
same kind of query. She was rapidly getting to look at everything
from the point of view of what it was going to remind her husband
of. She must struggle against the habit that was forming, or it
would become insupportable. But then, again, the thought would come
back that every hour that passed without an alarm was another step
towards a safe haven; and who could say that in a week or so things
might not be, at least, no worse than they were before this pestilent
little galvanic battery broke in upon her peace?
The fact that he had spoken of new memories to Vereker and had not
repeated them to her was no additional source of uneasiness; rather,
if anything, the contrary. For she could not entertain the idea that
Gerry would keep back from her anything he could tell to Vereker. What
had actually happened was necessarily inconceivable by her--that
a _recollected recollection_ of his own marriage with her should be
interpreted by him as a memory of a marriage with some other woman
unknown, who might, for anything he knew, be still living; that his
inference as to the bearing of this on his own conduct was that he
should refrain, at any cost to himself, from claiming, so to speak,
his own identity; should accept the personality chance had forced upon
him for her sake; should even forego the treasure of her sympathy,
more precious far to him than the heavy score to his credit at the
banks of New York and San Francisco, rather than dig up what needs
must throw doubt on the validity of their marriage, and turn her path
of life, now smooth, to one of stones and thorns. For that was the
course he had sketched out for himself; and had it only been possible
for oblivion to draw a sharp line across the slowly reviving record,
and to say to memory: "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther,"
Fenwick might have persevered in this course successfully till now.
And then all our story would have been told--at least, as far as
Rosalind and Fenwick go. And we might say farewell to them at this
moment as the cows reluctantly surrender passage-way of the long short
cut, and Gerry saunters on, seemingly at ease from his own mind's
unwelcome activities, with Sally on one arm and his wife in the other,
and Mrs. Grundy nowhere. But no conspiracies are possible to memory
and oblivion. They are a couple that act independently and consult
nobody's convenience but their own.
It may easily be that Rosalind, had she been mistress of all the facts
and taken in the full position, would have decided to run the risks
incidental to confronting her husband with his own past--taken him
into her confidence and told him. With the chance in view that his
reason might become unsettled from the chronic torment of constant
half-revivals of memory, would it not almost be safer to face the
acute convulsion of a sudden _éclaircissement_--to put happiness
to the touch, and win or lose it all? Sally could be got out of the
way for long enough to allow of a resumption of equilibrium after
the shock of the first disclosure and a completely established
understanding that she _must not be told_, come what might. Supposing
that she could tell, and he could hear, the whole story of twenty
years ago better than when a terrible position warped it for
teller and hearer in what had since become to her an intolerable
dream--supposing this done, and each could understand the other, might
not the very strangeness of the fact that the small new life that
played so large a part in that dream had become Sally since, and was
the only means by which Sally could have been established, might not
this tell for peace? Might it not even raise the question, "What does
a cloud of twenty years ago matter at all?" and suggest the answer,
"Nothing? For did not Sally come to us out of the cloud, and could
we do without her?"
But Rosalind's half-insight into the patchwork of her husband's
perceptions warranted no step so decisive. Rather, if anything, it
pointed to a gradual resumption of his _status quo_ of a few days ago.
After all, had he not had (and completely forgotten) recurrences like
that of the Baron and the fly-wheel? Well, perhaps the last was a
shade more vivid than the others. But then see now, had he not
forgotten it already to all outward seeming?
So that the minds of the two of them worked to a common end--silence.
Hers in the hope that the effects of the galvanic current--if that did
it--would die away and leave him rest for his; his in the fear that
behind the unraised curtain that still hid his early life from himself
was hidden what might become a baleful power to breed unrest for hers.
But it all depended on his own mastery of himself. Except he told it,
who should know that he was Harrisson? And _how_ he felt the shelter
of the gold! Who was going to suspect that a man who could command
wealth in six figures by disclosing his identity, would keep it
a secret? And for his wife's sake too! A pitiful four-or five-figure
man might--yes. But hundreds of thousands!--think of it!