It was from the Hotel Sardegna that Lanfear satisfied his conscience by
pushing his search for climate on behalf of his friend's neurasthenic
wife. He decided that Ospedaletti, with a milder air and more sheltered
seat in its valley of palms, would be better for her than San Remo. He
wrote his friend to that effect, and then there was no preoccupation to
hinder him in his devotion to the case of Miss Gerald. He put the case
first in the order of interest rather purposely, and even with a sense
of effort, though he could not deny to himself that a like case related
to a different personality might have been less absorbing. But he tried
to keep his scientific duty to it pure of that certain painful pleasure
which, as a young man not much over thirty, he must feel in the strange
affliction of a young and beautiful girl.
Though there was no present question of medicine, he could be installed
near her, as the friend that her father insisted upon making him,
without contravention of the social formalities. His care of her hardly
differed from that of her father, except that it involved a closer and
more premeditated study. They did not try to keep her from the sort of
association which, in a large hotel of the type of the Sardegna, entails
no sort of obligation to intimacy. They sat together at the long table,
midway of the dining-room, which maintained the tradition of the old
table-d'hôte against the small tables ranged along the walls. Gerald had
an amiable old man's liking for talk, and Lanfear saw that he willingly
escaped, among their changing companions, from the pressure of his
anxieties. He left his daughter very much to Lanfear, during these
excursions, but Lanfear was far from meaning to keep her to himself. He
thought it better that she should follow her father in his forays among
their neighbors, and he encouraged her to continue such talk with them
as she might be brought into. He tried to guard her future encounters
with them, so that she should not show more than a young girl's usual
diffidence at a second meeting; and in the frequent substitution of one
presence for another across the table, she was fairly safe.
A natural light-heartedness, of which he had glimpses from the first,
returned to her. One night, at the dance given by some of the guests to
some others, she went through the gayety in joyous triumph. She danced
mostly with Lanfear, but she had other partners, and she won a pleasing
popularity by the American quality of her waltzing. Lanfear had already
noted that her forgetfulness was not always so constant or so inclusive
as her father had taught him to expect; Mr. Gerald's statement had been
the large, general fact from which there was sometimes a shrinking in
the particulars. While the warmth of an agreeable experience lasted, her
mind kept record of it, slight or full; if the experience were
unpleasant the memory was more apt to fade at once. After that dance she
repeated to her father the little compliments paid her, and told him,
laughing, they were to reward him for sitting up so late as her
chaperon. Emotions persisted in her consciousness as the tremor lasts in
a smitten cord, but events left little trace. She retained a sense of
personalities; she was lastingly sensible of temperaments; but names
were nothing to her. She could not tell her father who had said the nice
things to her, and their joint study of her dancing-card did not help
them out.
Her relation to Lanfear, though it might be a subject of international
scrutiny, was hardly a subject of censure. He was known as Dr. Lanfear,
but he was not at first known as her physician; he was conjectured her
cousin or something like that; he might even be her betrothed in the
peculiar American arrangement of such affairs. Personally people saw in
him a serious-looking young man, better dressed and better mannered than
they thought most Americans, and unquestionably handsomer, with his
Spanish skin and eyes, and his brown beard of the Vandyke cut which was
then already beginning to be rather belated.
Other Americans in the hotel were few and transitory; and if the English
had any mind about Miss Gerald different from their mind about other
girls, it would be perhaps to the effect that she was quite mad; by this
they would mean that she was a little odd; but for the rest they had
apparently no mind about her. With the help of one of the English ladies
her father had replaced the homesick Irish maid whom he had sent back to
New York from Genoa, with an Italian, and in the shelter of her gay
affection and ignorant sympathy Miss Gerald had a security supplemented
by the easy social environment. If she did not look very well, she did
not differ from most other American women in that; and if she seemed to
confide herself more severely to the safe-keeping of her physician, that
was the way of all women patients.
Whether the Bells found the spectacle of depravity at Monte Carlo more
attractive than the smiling face of nature at San Remo or not, they did
not return, but sent for their baggage from their hotel, and were not
seen again by the Geralds. Lanfear's friend with the invalid wife wrote
from Ospedaletti, with apologies which inculpated him for the
disappointment, that she had found the air impossible in a single day,
and they were off for Cannes. Lanfear and the Geralds, therefore,
continued together in the hotel without fear or obligation to others,
and in an immunity in which their right to breakfast exclusively in that
pavilion on the garden wall was almost explicitly conceded. No one,
after a few mornings of tacit possession, would have disputed their
claim, and there, day after day, in the mild monotony of the December
sunshine, they sat and drank their coffee, and talked of the sights
which the peasants in the street, and the tourists in the promenade
beyond it, afforded. The rows of stumpy palms which separated the road
from the walk were not so high but that they had the whole lift of the
sea to the horizon where it lost itself in a sky that curved blue as
turquoise to the zenith overhead. The sun rose from its morning bath on
the left, and sank to its evening bath on the right, and in making its
climb of the spacious arc between, shed a heat as great as that of
summer, but not the heat of summer, on the pretty world of villas and
hotels, towered over by the olive-gray slopes of the pine-clad heights
behind and above them. From these tops a fine, keen cold fell with the
waning afternoon, which sharpened through the sunset till the dusk; but
in the morning the change was from the chill to the glow, and they could
sit in their pavilion, under the willowy droop of the eucalyptus-trees
which have brought the Southern Pacific to the Riviera, with increasing
comfort.
In the restlessness of an elderly man, Gerald sometimes left the young
people to their intolerable delays over their coffee, and walked off
into the little stone and stucco city below, or went and sat with his
cigar on one of the benches under the palm-lined promenade, which the
pale northern consumptives shared with the swarthy peasant girls resting
from their burdens, and the wrinkled grandmothers of their race
passively or actively begging from the strangers.
While she kept her father in sight it seemed that Miss Gerald could
maintain her hold of his identity, and one morning she said, with the
tender fondness for him which touched Lanfear: "When he sits there among
those sick people and poor people, then he knows they are in the world."
She turned with a question graver in her look than usual, and he said:
"Yes, we might help them oftener if we could remember that their misery
was going on all the time, like some great natural process, day or dark,
heat or cold, which seems to stop when we stop thinking of it. Nothing,
for us, at least, exists unless it is recalled to us."
"Yes," she said, in her turn, "I have noticed that. But don't you
sometimes--sometimes"--she knit her forehead, as if to keep her thought
from escaping--"have a feeling as if what you were doing, or saying, or
seeing, had all happened before, just as it is now?"
"Oh yes; that occurs to every one."
"But don't you--don't you have hints of things, of ideas, as if you had
known them, in some previous existence--"
She stopped, and Lanfear recognized, with a kind of impatience, the
experience which young people make much of when they have it, and
sometimes pretend to when they have merely heard of it. But there could
be no pose or pretence in her. He smilingly suggested:
"'For something is, or something seems,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams.'