CURED.
"You are quite well," said the doctor to John Smith, otherwise called
Francis Trent, at the great hospital one day. "You can go out to-morrow.
There is nothing more that we can do for you."
Smith raised his dull eyes to their faces.
"Am I--cured?" he asked.
One of the doctors shrugged his shoulders a little. Another answered
kindly and pityingly,
"You will find that you are not as strong as you used to be. Not the
same man in many respects. But you will be able to get your own living,
and we see no reason for detaining you here. What was your trade?"
The patient looked down at his white, thin hands. "I don't know," he
said.
"Have you friends to go to?"
There was a pause. Some of the medical students who were listening came
a little nearer. As a matter of fact, Francis Trent's future depended
very largely on the answer he made to this question. The statement that
he was "quite well" was hazarded rather by way of experiment than as a
matter of fact. The doctors wanted to know what he would say and do
under pressure, for some of them were beginning to suggest that the man
should be removed to the workhouse infirmary or a lunatic asylum. His
faculties seemed to be hopelessly beclouded.
Suddenly he lifted his head. A new sharp light had come into his eyes.
He nodded reassuringly.
"Yes, I have friends," he said.
"You have a home where you can go? Shall we write to your friends to
meet you?"
"No, thank you, sir. I can find my own way home."
And then they conferred together a little, and left him, and reported
that he was cured.
Certainly, there seemed to be nothing the matter with him now. His
wounds and injuries had healed, his bodily strength was returning. But
the haze which hung over his mind was far more impenetrable than the
doctors guessed. Something of it had been apparent to them in the
earlier days of his illness; but his clear and decided answers to their
questions convinced them that memory had to some extent returned. As a
matter of fact it was not memory that had returned, but a sharpening of
his perceptive faculties, awakening him to the fact that he stood in
danger of being taken for an idiot or a madman if he did not frame some
answer to the questions which the doctors asked him. This new acuteness
was perhaps the precursor to a return of his memory; but as yet the Past
was like a dead wall, an abyss of darkness surrounding him. Now and then
flashes of light seemed to dart across that darkness: he seemed on the
point of recalling something--he knew not what; for the flashes faded as
quickly as they came, and made the darkness all the greater for the
contrast.
He was possessed now by the idea that if he could get out of hospital,
and walk along the London streets, he might remember all that he had
forgotten. His own name, his own history, had become a blank to him. He
knew in some vague, forlorn fashion, that he had once been what the
world calls a gentleman. He had not acknowledged so much to the doctors:
he had not felt that they would believe him. Even when the groping after
the Past became most painful, he made up his mind that he would not ask
these scientific men for help: he was afraid of being treated as a
"case," experimented on, written about in the papers. There was
something in the Past of which he knew he ought to be ashamed. What
could it be? He was afraid to ask, lest he might find himself to be a
criminal.
In these haunting terrors there was, of course, a distinct token of
possible insanity. The man needed a friendly, guiding hand to steer him
back to the world of reason and common-sense. But to whom could he go,
since he had taken up this violent prejudice against the doctors? He
felt drawn to none of the nurses, although some of them had been very
kind to him. The only person to whom he might perhaps have disburthened
himself, if he had had the opportunity, was the sweet-voiced,
sweet-faced woman whom he had warned of the ill effects of her gifts. He
did not know her name, or anything about her; but before he left the
hospital he asked one of the nurses who she was.
"Lady Alice Brooke--daughter of the Lord Courtleroy, who died the other
day," was the reply.
"Could you give me her address?"
"No; and I don't think that if I could it would be of any use to you.
She is leaving England, I believe. If you want work or help, why don't
you speak to Mr. Kenyon? He's the gentleman to find both for you--Mr.
Maurice Kenyon."
"Which is Mr. Kenyon?"
"There--he's just passing through the next ward; shall I speak to him
for you?"
"No, thank you: I don't want anything from him: I only wanted the lady's
name," said John Smith, in a dogged sullen kind of way, which made the
whitecapped nurse look at him suspiciously.
"Brooke!--Kenyon?"--How oddly familiar the names seemed to him! Of
course they were not very uncommon names; but there was a distinct
familiarity about them which had nothing to do with the names
themselves, as if they had some connection with his own history and his
own affairs.
He was discharged--"cured." He went out into the streets with
half-a-crown in his pocket, and a fixed determination to know the truth,
sooner or later, about himself. At the same time he had a great fear of
letting any one know the extent of the blanks in his memory. He thought
that people might shut him up in a madhouse if he told them that he
could not recollect his own name. A certain amount of intellectual force
and knowledge remained to him. He could read, and understand what he
read. But of his own history he had absolutely no idea; and the only
clue to it that he could find lay in those two names--Brooke and Kenyon.
Could he discover anything about the possessors of these names which
would help him? He entered a shop where a Post Office Directory was to
be found, and looked at Maurice Kenyon's name amongst the doctors. He
found Mr. Kenyon's private address; but as yet it told him nothing.
Woburn Place? Well, of course he had heard of Woburn Place, it was no
wonder that he should know it so well; but the name told him nothing
more.
He sat staring at it so long that the people of the shop grew impatient,
and asked him to shut the book. He went away, and wandered about the
streets, vaguely seeking for he knew not what. And after a time he
bought a newspaper. Here again he found the name that had attracted his
attention--the name of Kenyon. "Last appearance of Miss Kenyon at the
Frivolity Theatre--this week only."
"Who's Miss Ethel Kenyon?" he asked--drawing a bow at a venture--of his
neighbor in the dingy little coffeehouse into which he had turned. It
was ten to one that the man would not know; but he would ask.
As it happened, the young man did know. "She's an actress," he said. "I
went to see her the other night. Pretty girl--going to get married and
leave the stage. My brother's a scene shifter at the Frivolity--knows
all about her."
"Who is she going to marry?"
"Oh, I don't know--some idle young chap that wants her money, I believe.
She ain't the common sort of actress, you know. Bit of a swell, with
sixty thousand pounds of her own."
"Oh," said his interlocutor, vaguely. "And--has she any relations?"
"Well, that I can't tell you. Stop a bit, though: I did hear tell of a
brother--a doctor, I believe. But I couldn't be sure of it."
"Could you get to know if you wanted?"
The young fellow turned and surveyed his questioner with some doubt.
"Dare say I could if I chose," he said. "What do you want to know for,
mate?"
"I've been away--out of England for a long time--and I think they're
people who used to know me," said Francis Trent, improvising his story
readily. "I thought they could put me on the way of work if I could come
across them; but I don't know if it's the same."
"Why don't you go to see her to-night? She's worth a look: she's a
pretty little thing--but she don't draw crowds: the gallery's never
full."
"I think I'll go to-night," said Francis, rising suddenly from his seat.
He fancied that the young man looked at him suspiciously. "Yes, no
doubt, I should know her if I saw her: I'll go to-night."
He made his way hastily into the street, while his late companion sent a
puzzled glance after him. "Got a tile loose, that chap has," he said to
the girl at the counter as he also passed out. "Or else he was a bit
screwed."
So that night Francis Trent went to the Frivolity, and witnessed, from a
half-empty gallery, a smart, sparkling little society play, in which
Ethel Kenyon had elected to say farewell to her admirers.
He saw her, but her face produced no impression upon his mind.
It was not familiar to him, although her name was familiar enough. Those
gleaming dark eyes in the saucy piquante face, the tiny graceful figure,
the silvery accents of her voice, were perfectly strange to him. They
suggested absolutely nothing. It was the name alone that he knew; and he
was sure that it was in some way connected with his own.
Before the end of the play, he got up and went out. The lights of the
theatre made him dizzy: his head ached from the hot atmosphere and from
his own physical weakness. He was afraid that he should cry out or do
something strange which would make people look at him, if he sat there
much longer. So he turned into a side street and leaned against a wall
for a little time, until he felt cool and refreshed. The evening was
warm, considering that the month was March, and the air that played upon
his face was soft and balmy. When he had recovered himself a little, he
noticed a group of young men lighting their cigarettes and loitering
about a door in the vicinity. Presently he made out that this was the
stage-door, and that these young men were waiting to see one of the
actresses come out. By the fragments of their talk that floated to him
on the still evening air in the quiet side street, Francis Trent
gathered that they spoke a good deal of Ethel Kenyon.
"So this is the last we shall see of pretty little Ethel," he heard one
man say. "Who's the man she's hooked, eh?"
Nobody seemed to know.
"Why did she go on the boards at all, I wonder? She's got money, and
belongs to a pre-eminently respectable family. Her brother's a doctor."
"Stage-struck," said another. "She'll give it up now, of course. Here's
her carriage. She'll be here directly."
"And the happy man at her heels, I suppose," sneered the first speaker.
"They say she's madly in love with him, and that he, of course, wants
her money."
"He's a cad, I know that," growled a younger man.
Impelled by an interest of which he himself did not know the source,
Francis Trent had drawn nearer to the stage door as the young fellows
spoke. He was quite close to it, when it opened at last and the pretty
actress came forth.
She was escorted by a train of admirers, rich and poor. Her maid was
laden with wraps and bouquets. The manager and the actor who played the
leading part were on either side of her, and Ethel was laughing the
merry, unaffected laugh of a perfectly happy woman as she made her
triumphal exit from the little theatre where she had achieved all her
artistic success. Another kind of success, she thought, was in store for
her now. She was to know another sort of happiness. And the whole world
looked very bright to her, although there was one little cloud--no
bigger than a man's hand, perhaps--which had already shown itself above
the horizon, and might one day cloud the noontide of her love.
Francis Trent was so absorbed in watching her lovely face, and in
wondering why her name had seemed so familiar, that he paid scant
attention to her followers. It was only as the carriage drove off that
his eye was caught by the face of a man who sat beside her. A gleam from
a gas-lamp had fallen full upon it, revealing the regular, passionless
features, the dark eyes and pale complexion of Ethel's lover. And as
soon as he saw that face, a great change came over the mental condition
of Francis Trent. He stood for a moment as if paralyzed, his worn
features strangely convulsed, a strange lurid light showed itself in his
haggard eyes. Then he threw his arms wildly in the air, uttered a
choked, gasping cry, and rushed madly and vainly after the retreating
carriage, heedless of the shouts which the little crowd sent after him.
"He's mad--he'll never catch up that carriage! What does he run after it
for, the fool?" said one of the men on the pavement.
And indeed he soon relinquished the attempt, and sat down on a doorstep,
panting and exhausted, with his face buried upon his arms.
But he was not mad. He was sure of that now. It was only that he
had--partially and feebly, but to some extent effectually--remembered
what had happened to him in the dark dead Past.