VII

Earlier, Lanfear had never allowed himself to be far out of call from

Miss Gerald's father, especially during the daytime slumbers into which

she fell, and from which they both always dreaded her awakening. But as

the days went on and the event continued the same he allowed himself

greater range. Formerly the three went their walks or drives together,

but now he sometimes went alone. In these absences he found relief from

the stress of his constant vigilance; he was able to cast off the bond

which enslaves the physician to his patient, and which he must ignore at

times for mere self-preservation's sake; but there was always a lurking

anxiety, which, though he refused to let it define itself to him,

shortened the time and space he tried to put between them.

One afternoon in April, when he left her sleeping, he was aware of

somewhat recklessly placing himself out of reach in a lonely excursion

to a village demolished by the earthquake of 1887, and abandoned

himself, in the impressions and incidents of his visit to the ruin, to a

luxury of impersonal melancholy which the physician cannot often allow

himself. At last, his care found him, and drove him home full of a

sharper fear than he had yet felt since the first days. But Mr. Gerald

was tranquilly smoking under a palm in the hotel garden, and met him

with an easy smile. "She woke once, and said she had had such a pleasant

dream. Now she's off again. Do you think we'd better wake her for

dinner? I suppose she's getting up her strength in this way. Her

sleeping so much is a good symptom, isn't it?"

Lanfear smiled forlornly; neither of them, in view of the possible

eventualities, could have said what result they wished the symptoms to

favor. But he said: "Decidedly I wouldn't wake her"; and he spent a

night of restless sleep penetrated by a nervous expectation which the

morning, when it came, rather mockingly defeated.

Miss Gerald appeared promptly at breakfast in their pavilion, with a

fresher and gayer look than usual, and to her father's "Well, Nannie,

you _have_ had a nap, this time," she answered, smiling:

"Have I? It isn't afternoon, is it?"

"No, it's morning. You've napped it all night."

She said: "I can't tell whether I've been asleep or not, sometimes; but

now I know I have been; and I feel so rested. Where are we going

to-day?"

She turned to Lanfear while her father answered: "I guess the doctor

won't want to go very far, to-day, after his expedition yesterday

afternoon."

"Ah," she said, "I _knew_ you had been somewhere! Was it very far? Are

you too tired?"

"It was rather far, but I'm not tired. I shouldn't advise Possana,

though."

"Possana?" she repeated. "What is Possana?"

He told her, and then at a jealous look in her eyes he added an account

of his excursion. He heightened, if anything, its difficulties, in

making light of them as no difficulties for him, and at the end she

said, gently: "Shall we go this morning?"

"Let the doctor rest this morning, Nannie," her father interrupted,

whimsically, but with what Lanfear knew to be an inner yielding to her

will. "Or if you won't let _him_, let _me_. I don't want to go anywhere

this morning."

Lanfear thought that he did not wish her to go at all, and hoped that by

the afternoon she would have forgotten Possana. She sighed, but in her

sigh there was no concession. Then, with the chance of a returning

drowse to save him from openly thwarting her will, he merely suggested:

"There's plenty of time in the afternoon; the days are so long now; and

we can get the sunset from the hills."

"Yes, that will be nice," she said, but he perceived that she did not

assent willingly; and there was an effect of resolution in the readiness

with which she appeared dressed for the expedition after luncheon. She

clearly did not know where they were going, but when she turned to

Lanfear with her look of entreaty, he had not the heart to join her

father in any conspiracy against her. He beckoned the carriage which had

become conscious in its eager driver from the moment she showed herself

at the hotel door, and they set out.

When they had left the higher level of the hotel and began their clatter

through the long street of the town, Lanfear noted that she seemed to

feel as much as himself the quaintness of the little city, rising on one

hand, with its narrow alleys under successive arches between the high,

dark houses, to the hills, and dropping on the other to sea from the

commonplace of the principal thoroughfare, with its pink and white and

saffron hotels and shops. Beyond the town their course lay under villa

walls, covered with vines and topped by pavilions, and opening finally

along a stretch of the old Cornice road.

"But this," she said, at a certain point, "is where we were yesterday!"

"This is where the doctor was yesterday," her father said, behind his

cigar.

"And wasn't I with you?" she asked Lanfear.

He said, playfully: "To-day you are. I mustn't be selfish and have you

every day."

"Ah, you are laughing at me; but I know I was here yesterday."

Her father set his lips in patience, and Lanfear did not insist.

They had halted at this point because, across a wide valley on the

shoulder of an approaching height, the ruined village of Possana showed,

and lower down and nearer the seat the new town which its people had

built when they escaped from the destruction of their world-old home.

World-old it all was, with reference to the human life of it; but the

spring-time was immortally young in the landscape. Over the expanses of

green and brown fields, and hovering about the gray and white cottages,

was a mist of peach and cherry blossoms. Above these the hoar olives

thickened, and the vines climbed from terrace to terrace. The valley

narrowed inland, and ceased in the embrace of the hills drawing

mysteriously together in the distances.

"I think we've got the best part of it here, Miss Gerald," Lanfear broke

the common silence by saying. "You couldn't see much more of Possana

after you got there."

"Besides," her father ventured a pleasantry which jarred on the younger

man, "if you were there with the doctor yesterday, you won't want to

make the climb again to-day. Give it up, Nannie!"

"Oh no," she said, "I can't give it up."

"Well, then, we must go on, I suppose. Where do we begin our climb?"

Lanfear explained that he had been obliged to leave his carriage at the

foot of the hill, and climb to Possana Nuova by the donkey-paths of the

peasants. He had then walked to the ruins of Possana Vecchia, but he

suggested that they might find donkeys to carry them on from the new

town.

"Well, I hope so," Mr. Gerald grumbled. But at Possana Nuova no

saddle-donkeys were to be had, and he announced, at the café where they

stopped for the negotiation, that he would wait for the young people to

go on to Possana Vecchia, and tell him about it when they got back. In

the meantime he would watch the game of ball, which, in the piazza

before the café, appeared to have engaged the energies of the male

population. Lanfear was still inwardly demurring, when a stalwart

peasant girl came in and announced that she had one donkey which they

could have with her own services driving it. She had no saddle, but

there was a pad on which the young lady could ride.

"Oh, well, take it for Nannie," Mr. Gerald directed; "only don't be gone

too long."

They set out with Miss Gerald reclining in the kind of litter which the

donkey proved to be equipped with. Lanfear went beside her, the peasant

girl came behind, and at times ran forward to instruct them in the

points they seemed to be looking at. For the most part the landscape

opened beneath them, but in the azure distances it climbed into Alpine

heights which the recent snows had now left to the gloom of their pines.

On the slopes of the nearer hills little towns clung, here and there;

closer yet farm-houses showed themselves among the vines and olives.

It was very simple, as the life in it must always have been; and Lanfear

wondered if the elemental charm of the scene made itself felt by his

companion as they climbed the angles of the inclines, in a silence

broken only by the picking of the donkey's hoofs on the rude mosaic of

the pavement, and the panting of the peasant girl at its heels. On the

top of the last upward stretch they stopped for the view, and Miss

Gerald asked abruptly: "Why were you so sad?"

"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.