Tims was proud of the combined style and economy of her dress. She was
constantly discovering and revealing to an unappreciative world the
existence of superb tailors who made amazingly cheap dresses. For two
years she had been vainly advising her friends to go to the man who had
made her the frock she still wore for morning; a skirt and coat of tweed
with a large green check in it, a green waistcoat with gilt buttons, and
green gaiters to match. In this costume and coiffed with a man's wig, of
the vague color peculiar to such articles, Tims came down at her usual
hour, prepared to ask Milly what she thought of hypnotism now. But there
was no Milly over whom to enjoy this petty triumph. She climbed to the
top story as soon as breakfast was over, and entering Milly's room,
found her patient still sleeping soundly, low and straight in the bed,
just as she had been the preceding night. She was breathing regularly
and her face looked peaceful, although her eyes were still stained with
tears. The servant came in as Tims was looking at her.
"I've tried to wake Miss Flaxman, miss," she said. "She's always very
particular as I should wake her, but she was that sound asleep this
morning, I 'adn't the 'eart to go on talking. Poor young lady! I expect
she's pretty well wore out, working away at her books, early and late,
the way she does."
"Better leave her alone, Emma," agreed Tims. "I'll let Miss Burt know
about it."
Miss Burt was glad to hear Milly Flaxman was oversleeping herself. She
had not been satisfied with the girl's appearance of late, and feared
Milly worked too hard and had bad nights.
Tims had to go out at ten o'clock and did not return until
luncheon-time. She went up to Milly's room and knocked at the door. As
before, there was no answer. She went in and saw the girl still sound
asleep, straight and motionless in the bed. Her appearance was so
healthy and natural that it was absurd to feel uneasy at the length of
her slumber, yet remembering the triumph of hypnotism, Tims did feel a
little uneasy. She spoke to Miss Burt again about Milly's prolonged
sleep, but Miss Burt was not inclined to be anxious. She had strictly
forbidden Tims to hypnotize--or as she called it, mesmerize--any one in
the house, so that Tims said no more on the subject. She was working at
the Museum in the early part of the afternoon, only leaving it when the
light began to fail. But after work she went straight back to Ascham.
Milly was still asleep, but she had slightly shifted her position, and
altogether there was something about her aspect which suggested a
slumber less profound than before. Tims leaned over her and spoke
softly:
"Wake up, M., wake up! You've been asleep quite long enough."
Milly's body twitched a little. A responsive flicker which was almost a
convulsion, passed over her face; but she did not awake. It was evident,
however, that her spirit was gradually floating up to the surface from
the depths of oblivion in which it had been submerged. Tims took off her
Tam-o'-Shanter and ulster, and revealed in the simple elegance of the
tweed frock with green waistcoat and gaiters, put the kettle on the
fire. Then she went down-stairs to fetch some bread and butter and an
egg, wherewith to feed the patient when she awoke.
She had not long left the room when the slumberer's eyes opened
gradually and stared with the fixity of semi-consciousness at a stem of
blossoming jessamine in the wall-paper. Then she slowly stretched her
arms above her head until some inches of wrist, slight and round and
white, emerged from the strictly plain night-gown sleeve. So she lay,
till suddenly, almost with a start, she pulled herself up and looked
about her. The gaze of her wide-open eyes travelled questioningly around
the quiet-toned room which two windows at right angles to each other
still kept light with the reflection of a yellow winter sunset. She
pushed the bedclothes down, dropped first one bare white foot, then the
other to the ground and looked doubtfully at a pair of worn felt
slippers which were placed beside the bed, before slipping her feet into
them. With the same air as of one assuming garments which do not belong
to her, she put on the faded blue flannel dressing-gown. Then she walked
to the southern window. None of the glories of Oxford were visible from
it; only the bare branches of trees through which appeared a huddle of
somewhat sordid looking roofs and the unimposing spire of St. Aloysius.
With the same air, questioning yet as in a dream, she turned to the
western window, which was open. Below, in its wintry dulness, lay the
garden of the College, bounded by an old gray wall which divided it from
the straggling street; beyond that, a mass of slate roofs. But a certain
glory was on the slate roofs and all the garden that was not in shadow.
For away over Wytham, where the blue vapor floated in the folds of the
hills, blending imperceptibly with the deep brown of the leafless woods,
sunset had lifted a wide curtain of cloud and showed between the gloom
of heaven and earth, a long straight pool of yellow light.
She leaned out of the window. A mild fresh air which seemed to be
pouring over the earth through that rift in heaven which the sunset had
made, breathed freshly on her face and the yellow light shone on her
amber hair, which lay on her shoulders about the length of the hair of
an angel in some old Florentine picture.
Miss Burt in galoshes and with a wrap over her head was coming up the
garden. She caught sight of that vision of gold and pale blue in the
window and smiled and waved her hand to Milly Flaxman. The vision
withdrew, trembling slightly as though with cold, and closed the
window.
Tims came in, carrying a boiled egg and a plate of bread and butter.
Tims put down the egg-cup and the plate on the table before she relaxed
the wrinkle of carefulness and grinned triumphantly at her patient.
"Well, old girl," she asked; "what do you say to hypnotism now? Put
_you_ to sleep, right enough, anyhow. Know what time it is?"
The awakened sleeper made a few steps forward, leaned her hands on the
table, on the other side of which Tims stood, and gazed upon her with
startling intentness. Then she began to speak in a rapid, urgent voice.
Her words were in themselves ordinary and distinct, yet what she said
was entirely incomprehensible, a nightmare of speech, as though some
talking-machine had gone wrong and was pouring out a miscellaneous stock
of verbs, nouns, adjectives and the rest without meaning or cohesion.
Certain words reappeared with frequency, but Tims had a feeling that the
speaker did not attach their usual meaning to them. This travesty of
language went on for what appeared to the transfixed and terrified
listener quite a long time. At length the serious, almost tragic,
babbler, meeting with no response save the staring horror of Tims's too
expressive countenance, ended with a supplicating smile and a glance
which contrived to be charged at once with pathos and coquetry. This
smile, this look, were so totally unlike any expression which Tims had
ever seen on Milly's countenance that they heightened her feeling of
nightmare. But she pulled herself together and determined to show
presence of mind. She had already placed a basket-chair by the fire
ready for her patient, and now gently but firmly led Milly to it.
"Sit down, Milly," she said--and the use of her friend's proper name
showed that she felt the occasion to be serious--"and don't speak again
till you've had some tea. Your head will be clearer presently, it's a
bit confused now, you know."
The stranger Milly, still so unlike the Milly of Tims's intimacy, far
from exerting the unnatural strength of a maniac, passively permitted
herself to be placed in the chair and listened to what Tims was saying
with the puzzled intentness of a child or a foreigner, trying to
understand. She laid her head back in its little cloud of amber hair,
and looked up at Tims, who, frowning portentously, once more with lifted
finger enjoined silence. Tims then concealing her agitation behind a
cupboard-door, reached down the tea-things. By some strange accident the
methodical Milly's teapot was absent from its place; a phenomenon for
which Tims was thankful, as it imposed upon her the necessity of leaving
her patient for a few minutes. Shaking her finger again at Milly still
more emphatically, she went out, and locked the door behind her. After a
moment's thought, she reluctantly decided to report the matter to Miss
Burt. But Miss Burt was closeted with the treasurer and an architect
from London, and was on no account to be disturbed. So Tims went up to
her own room and rapidly revolved the situation. She was certain that
Milly was not physically ill; on the contrary, she looked much better
than she had looked on the previous day. This curious affection of the
speech-memory might be hysterical, as her sobbing the night before had
been, or it might be connected with some little failure of circulation
in the brain; an explanation, perhaps, pointed to by the extraordinary
length of her sleep. Anyhow, Tims felt sceptical as to a doctor being of
any use.
She went to her cupboard to take out her own teapot, and her eye fell
upon a small medicine bottle marked "Brandy." Milly was a convinced
teetotaller; all the more reason, thought Tims, why a dose of alcohol
should give her nerves and circulation a fillip, only she must not know
of it, or she would certainly refuse the remedy.
Pocketing the bottle and flourishing the teapot, Tims mounted again to
Milly's room. Her patient, who had spent the time wandering about the
room and examining everything in it, as well as she could in the
fast-falling twilight, resumed her position in the chair as soon as she
heard a step in the passage, and greeted her returning keeper with an
attractive smile. Tims uttering words of commendation, slyly poured some
brandy into one of the large teacups before lighting the candles.
"Now, my girl," she said, when she had made the tea, "drink this, and
you'll feel better."
Milly leaned forward, her round chin on her hand, and looked intently at
the tea-service and at the proffered cup. Then she suddenly raised her
head, clapped her hands softly, and cried in a tone of delighted
discovery, "Tea!"
"Excuse me," she added, taking the cup with a little bow; and in two
seconds had helped herself to three lumps of sugar. Tims was surprised,
for Milly never took sugar in her tea.
"That's right, M., you're going along well!" cried Tims, standing on the
hearth-rug, with one hand under her short coat-tails, while she gulped
her own tea, and ate two pieces of bread and butter put together. Milly
ate hers and drank her tea daintily, looking meanwhile at her companion
with wonder which gradually gave way to amusement. At length leaning
forward with a dimpling smile, she interrogated very politely and quite
lucidly.
"Pardon me, sir, you are--? Ah, the doctor, no doubt! My poor head, you
see!" and she drew her fingers across her forehead.
Tims started, and grabbed her wig, as was her wont in moments of
agitation. She stood transfixed, the teacup at a dangerous angle in her
extended hand.
"Good God!" she ejaculated. "You are mad and no mistake, my poor old
girl."
The "old girl" made a supreme effort to contain herself, and then burst
into a pretty, rippling laugh in which there was nothing familiar to
Tims's ear. She rose from her chair vivaciously and took the cup from
Tims's hand, to deposit it in safety on the chimney piece.
"How silly I was!" she cried, regarding Tims sparklingly. "Do you know I
was not quite sure whether you were a man or a woman. Of course I see
now, and I'm so glad. I do like men, you know, so much better than
women."
"Milly," retorted Tims, sternly, settling her wig. "You are mad, you
need not be bad as well. But it's my own fault for giving you that
brandy. You know as well as I do that I hate men--nasty, selfish,
guzzling, conceited, guffawing brutes! I never wanted to speak to a man
in my life, except in the way of business."
Milly waved her amber head gracefully for a moment as though at a loss,
then returned playfully, "That must be because the women spoil you so."
Tims smiled sardonically; but regaining her sense of the situation, out
of which she had been momentarily shocked, applied herself to the
problem of calling back poor Milly's wandering mind.
"Sit down, my girl," she said, abruptly, putting her arm around Milly's
body, so soft and slender in the scanty folds of the blue dressing-gown.
Milly obeyed precipitately. Then drawing a small chair close to her,
Tims said in gentle tones which could hardly have been recognized as
hers:
"M., darling, do you know where you are?"
Milly turned on her a face from which the unnatural vivacity had fallen
like a mask; the appealing face of a poor lost child.
"Am I--am I--in a _maison de santé_?" she asked tremulously, fixing her
blue eyes on Tims, full of piteous anxiety.
"A lunatic asylum? Certainly not," replied Tims. "Now don't begin
crying again, old girl. That's how the trouble began."
"Was it?" asked Milly, dreamily. "I thought it was--" she paused,
frowning before her in the air, as though trying to pursue with her
bodily vision some recollection which had flickered across her
consciousness only to disappear.
"Well, never mind that now," said Tims, hastily; "get your bearings
right first. You're in Ascham College."
"A College!" repeated Milly vaguely, but in a moment her face
brightened, "I know. A place of learning where they have professors and
things. Are you a professor?"
"No, I'm a student. So are you."
Milly looked fixedly at Tims, then smiled a melancholy smile. "I see,"
she said, "we're both studying--medicine--medicine for the mind." She
stood up, locked her hands behind her head in her soft hair and wailed
miserably. "Oh, why won't some kind person come and tell me where I am,
and what I was before I came here?"
Tears of wounded feelings sprang to Tims's eyes. "Milly, my beauty!" she
cried despairingly, "I'm trying to be kind to you and tell you
everything you want to know. Your name is Mildred Flaxman and you used
to live in Oxford here, but now all your people have gone to Australia
because your father's got a deanery there."
"Have they left me here, mad and by myself?" asked Milly; "have I no one
to look after me, no one to give me a home?"
"I suppose Lady Thomson or the Fletchers would," returned Tims, "but you
haven't wanted one. You've been quite happy at Ascham. Do try and
remember. Can't you remember getting your First in Mods. and how you've
been working to get one in Greats? Your brain's been right enough until
to-day, old girl, and it will be again. I expect it's a case of collapse
of memory from overwork. Things will come back to you soon and I'll help
you all I can. Do try and recollect me--Tims." There was an unmistakable
choke in Tims's voice. "We have been such chums. The others are all
pretty nasty to me sometimes--they seem to think I'm a grinning, wooden
Aunt Sally, stuck up for them to shy jokes at. But you've never once
been nasty to me, M., and there's precious few things I wouldn't do to
help you. So don't go talking to me as though there weren't any one in
the world who cared a brass farthing about you."
"I'm sure I'm most thankful to find I have got some one here who cares
about me," returned Milly, meekly, passing her hand across her eyes for
lack of a handkerchief. "You see, it's dreadful for me to be like this.
I seem to know what things are, and yet I don't know. A little while ago
it seemed to me I was just going to remember something--something
different from what you've told me. But now it's all gone again. Oh,
please give me a handkerchief!"
Tims opened one of Milly's tidy drawers and sought for a handkerchief.
When she had found it, Milly was standing before the high
chimney-piece, over which hung a long, low mirror about a foot wide and
divided into three parts by miniature pilasters of tarnished gilt. The
mirror, too, was tarnished here and there, but it had been a good glass
and showed undistorted the blue Delft jars on the mantel-shelf, glimpses
of flickering firelight in the room, amber hair and the tear-bedewed
roses of a flushed young face. Suddenly Milly thrust the jars aside,
seized the candle from the table, and, holding it near her face, looked
intently, anxiously in the glass. The anxiety vanished in a moment, but
not the intentness. She went on looking. Tims had always perceived
Milly's beauty--which had an odd way of slipping through the world
unobserved--but had never seen her look so lovely as now, her eyes wide
and brilliant, and her upper lip curved rosily over a shining glimpse of
her white teeth.
Beauty had an extraordinary fascination for Tims, poor step-child of
nature! Now she stood looking at the reflection of Milly without
noticing how in the background her own strange, wizened face peered dim
and grotesque from the tarnished mirror, like the picture of a witch or
a goblin behind the fair semblance of some princess in a fairy tale.
"I do remember myself partly," said Milly, doubtfully; "and yet--somehow
not quite. I suppose I shall remember you and this queer place soon, if
they don't put me into a mad-house at once."
"They sha'n't," said Tims, decisively. "Trust to me, M., and I'll see
you through. But I'm afraid you'll have to give up all thought of your
First."
"My what," asked Milly, turning round inquiringly.
"Your First Class, your place, you know, in the Final Honors School,
Lit. Hum., the biggest examination of the lot."
"Do I want it very much, my First?"
"Want it? I should just think you do want it!"
Milly stared at the fire for a minute, warming one foot before she spoke
again. Then:
"How funny of me!" she observed, meditatively.