"I don't say that. It seems probable. Do you wish her being to remain
bereft of one-half its powers?"
"Oh, how do I know what I want?" the poor man groaned. "I only know that
I trust you entirely, Doctor Lanfear. Whatever you think best will be
best and wisest, no matter what the outcome is."
He got away from Lanfear with these hopeless words, and again Lanfear
perceived that the case was left wholly to him. His consolation was the
charm of the girl's companionship, the delight of a nature knowing
itself from moment to moment as if newly created. For her, as nearly as
he could put the fact into words, the actual moment contained the past
and the future as well as the present. When he saw in her the
persistence of an exquisite personality independent of the means by
which he realized his own continuous identity, he sometimes felt as if
in the presence of some angel so long freed from earthly allegiance that
it had left all record behind, as we leave here the records of our first
years. If an echo of the past reached her, it was apt to be trivial and
insignificant, like those unimportant experiences of our remotest
childhood, which remain to us from a world outlived.
It was not an insipid perfection of character which reported itself in
these celestial terms, and Lanfear conjectured that angelic immortality,
if such a thing were, could not imply perfection except at the cost of
one-half of human character. When the girl wore a dress that she saw
pleased him more than another, there was a responsive pleasure in her
eyes, which he could have called vanity if he would; and she had at
times a wilfulness which he could have accused of being obstinacy. She
showed a certain jealousy of any experiences of his apart from her own,
not because they included others, but because they excluded her. He was
aware of an involuntary vigilance in her, which could not leave his
motives any more than his actions unsearched. But in her conditioning
she could not repent; she could only offer him at some other time the
unconscious reparation of her obedience. The self-criticism which the
child has not learned she had forgotten, but in her oblivion the wish to
please existed as perfectly as in the ignorance of childhood.
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.