Lanfear shouted. The madman flung Gerald to the ground, and fled
shrieking. Miss Gerald had leaped from her seat, and followed Lanfear as
he ran forward to the prostrate form. She did not look at it, but within
a few paces she clutched her hands in her hair, and screamed out: "Oh,
my mother is killed!" and sank, as if sinking down into the earth, in a
swoon.
"No, no; it's all right, Nannie! Look after her, Lanfear! I'm not hurt.
I let myself go in that fellow's hands, and I fell softly. It was a
good thing he didn't drop me over the edge." Gerald gathered himself up
nimbly enough, and lent Lanfear his help with the girl. The situation
explained itself, almost without his incoherent additions, to the effect
that he had become anxious, and had started out with the boy for a
guide, to meet them, and had met the lunatic, who suddenly attacked him.
While he talked, Lanfear was feeling the girl's pulse, and now and then
putting his ear to her heart. With a glance at her father: "You're
bleeding, Mr. Gerald," he said.
"So I am," the old man answered, smiling, as he wiped a red stream from
his face with his handkerchief. "But I am not hurt--"
"Better let me tie it up," Lanfear said, taking the handkerchief from
him. He felt the unselfish quality in a man whom he had not always
thought heroic, and he bound the gash above his forehead with a
reverence mingling with his professional gentleness. The donkey-girl had
not ceased to cry out and bless herself, but suddenly, as her care was
needed in getting Miss Gerald back to the litter, she became a part of
the silence in which the procession made its way slowly into Possana
Nuova, Lanfear going on one side, and Mr. Gerald on the other to support
his daughter in her place. There was a sort of muted outcry of the whole
population awaiting them at the door of the locanda where they had
halted before, and which now had the distinction of offering them
shelter in a room especially devoted to the poor young lady, who still
remained in her swoon.
When the landlord could prevail with his fellow-townsmen and townswomen
to disperse in her interest, and had imposed silence upon his customers
indoors, Lanfear began his vigil beside his patient in as great quiet
as he could anywhere have had. Once during the evening the public
physician of the district looked in, but he agreed with Lanfear that
nothing was to be done which he was not doing in his greater experience
of the case. From time to time Gerald had suggested sending for some San
Remo physician in consultation. Lanfear had always approved, and then
Gerald had not persisted. He was strongly excited, and anxious not so
much for his daughter's recovery from her swoon, which he did not doubt,
as for the effect upon her when she should have come to herself.
It was this which he wished to discuss, sitting fallen back into his
chair, or walking up and down the room, with his head bound with a
bloody handkerchief, and looking, with a sort of alien picturesqueness,
like a kindly brigand.
Lanfear did not leave his place beside the bed where the girl lay, white
and still as if dead. An inexpressible compassion for the poor man
filled his heart. Whatever the event should be, it would be tragical for
him. "Go to sleep, Mr. Gerald," he said. "Your waking can do no good. I
will keep watch, and if need be, I'll call you. Try to make yourself
easy on that couch."
"I shall not sleep," the old man answered. "How could I?" Nevertheless,
he adjusted himself to the hard pillows of the lounge where he had been
sitting and drowsed among them. He woke just before dawn with a start.
"I thought she had come to, and knew everything! What a nightmare! Did I
groan? Is there any change?"
Lanfear, sitting by the bed, in the light of the wasting candle, which
threw a grotesque shadow of him on the wall, shook his head. After a
moment he asked: "How long did you tell me her swoon had lasted after
the accident to her mother?"
"I don't think she recovered consciousness for two days, and then she
remembered nothing. What do you think are the chances of her remembering
now?"
"I don't know. But there's a kind of psychopathic logic--If she lost her
memory through one great shock, she might find it through another."
"Yes, yes!" the father said, rising and walking to and fro, in his
anguish. "That was what I thought--what I was afraid of. If I could die
myself, and save her from living through it--I don't know what I'm
saying! But if--but if--if she could somehow be kept from it a little
longer! But she can't, she can't! She must know it now when she wakes."
Lanfear had put up his hand, and taken the girl's slim wrist quietly
between his thumb and finger, holding it so while her father talked on.
"I suppose it's been a sort of weakness--a sort of wickedness--in me to
wish to keep it from her; but I _have_ wished that, doctor; you must
have seen it, and I can't deny it. We ought to bear what is sent us in
this world, and if we escape we must pay for our escape. It has cost her
half her being, I know it; but it hasn't cost her her reason, and I'm
afraid for that, if she comes into her memory now. Still, you must
do--But no one can do anything either to hinder or to help!"
He was talking in a husky undertone, and brokenly, incoherently. He made
an appeal, which Lanfear seemed not to hear, where he remained immovable
with his hand on the girl's pulse.
"Do you think I am to blame for wishing her never to know it, though
without it she must remain deprived of one whole side of life? Do you
think my wishing that can have had anything to do with keeping her--But
this faint _may_ pass and she may wake from it just as she has been. It
is logical that she should remember; but is it certain that she will?"
A murmur, so very faint as to be almost no sound at all, came like a
response from the girl's lips, and she all but imperceptibly stirred.
Her father neither heard nor saw, but Lanfear started forward. He made a
sudden clutch at the girl's wrist with the hand that had not left it and
then remained motionless. "She will never remember now--here."
He fell on his knees beside the bed and began to sob. "Oh, my dearest!
My poor girl! My love!" still keeping her wrist in his hand, and laying
his head tenderly on her arm. Suddenly he started, with a shout: "The
pulse!" and fell forward, crushing his ear against her heart, and
listened with bursts of: "It's beating! She isn't dead! She's alive!"
Then he lifted her in his arms, and it was in his embrace that she
opened her eyes, and while she clung to him, entreated:
"My father! Where is he?"
A dread fell upon both the men, blighting the joy with which they
welcomed her back to life. She took her father's head between her hands,
and kissed his bruised face. "I thought you were dead; and I thought
that mamma--" She stopped, and they waited breathless. "But that was
long ago, wasn't it?"
"Yes," her father eagerly assented. "Very long ago."
"I remember," she sighed. "I thought that I was killed, too. Was it
_all_ a dream?" Her father and Lanfear looked at each other. Which
should speak? "This is Doctor Lanfear, isn't it?" she asked, with a dim
smile. "And I'm not dreaming now, am I?" He had released her from his
arms, but she held his hand fast. "I know it is you, and papa; and yes,
I remember everything. That terrible pain of forgetting is gone! It's
beautiful! But did he hurt you badly, papa? I saw him, and I wanted to
call to you. But mamma--"
However the change from the oblivion of the past had been operated, it
had been mercifully wrought. As far as Lanfear could note it, in the
rapture of the new revelation to her which it scarcely needed words to
establish, the process was a gradual return from actual facts to the
things of yesterday and then to the things of the day before, and so
back to the tragedy in which she had been stricken. There was no sudden
burst of remembrance, but a slow unveiling of the reality in which her
spirit was mystically fortified against it. At times it seemed to him
that the effect was accomplished in her by supernatural agencies such
as, he remembered once somewhere reading, attend the souls of those
lately dead, and explore their minds till every thought and deed of
their earthly lives, from the last to the first, is revealed to them out
of an inner memory which can never, any jot or tittle, perish. It was as
if this had remained in her intact from the blow that shattered her
outer remembrance. When the final, long-dreaded horror was reached, it
was already a sorrow of the past, suffered and accepted with the
resignation which is the close of grief, as of every other passion.
Love had come to her help in the time of her need, but not love alone
helped her live back to the hour of that supreme experience and beyond
it. In the absorbing interest of her own renascence, the shock, more
than the injury which her father had undergone, was ignored, if not
neglected. Lanfear had not, indeed, neglected it; but he could not help
ignoring it in his happiness, as he remembered afterwards in the
self-reproach which he would not let the girl share with him. Nothing,
he realized, could have availed if everything had been done which he did
not do; but it remained a pang with him that he had so dimly felt his
duty to the gentle old man, even while he did it. Gerald lived to
witness his daughter's perfect recovery of the self so long lost to her;
he lived, with a joy more explicit than their own, to see her the wife
of the man to whom she was dearer than love alone could have made her.
He lived beyond that time, rejoicing, if it may be so said, in the fond
memories of her mother which he had been so long forbidden by her
affliction to recall. Then, after the spring of the Riviera had whitened
into summer, and San Remo hid, as well as it could, its sunny glare
behind its pines and palms, Gerald suffered one long afternoon through
the heat till the breathless evening, and went early to bed. He had been
full of plans for spending the rest of the summer at the little place in
New England where his daughter knew that her mother lay. In the morning
he did not wake.
"He gave his life that I might have mine!" she lamented in the first
wild grief.
"No, don't say that, Nannie," her husband protested, calling her by the
pet name which her father always used. "He is dead; but if we owe each
other to his loss, it is because he was given, not because he gave
himself."
"Oh, I know, I know!" she wailed. "But he would gladly have given
himself for me."
That, perhaps, Lanfear could not have denied, and he had no wish to do
so. He had a prescience of happiness for her which the future did not
belie; and he divined that a woman must not be forbidden the extremes
within which she means to rest her soul.