Ian had been so busy persuading Milly to view her own case as a simple
one, and so busy comforting her with an almost feminine intuition of
what would really afford her comfort, that it was only in the watches of
the night that certain disquieting recollections forced their way into
his mind. It was of course now part of his creed that he had loved Milly
Flaxman from the first--only he had never known her well till that
Christmas Vacation when they had skated so much together. Later on, such
disturbing events as engagement and marriage had seemed to him enough to
explain any changes he had observed in her. Later still, he had been too
much in love to think about her at all, in the true sense of the word.
She had been to him "all a wonder and a wild desire."
Now, taking the dates of her collapses of memory, he made, despite
himself, certain notes on those changes. It is to be feared he did not
often want to see Miss Timson; but on the day after Milly's return to
the world, he cycled out to visit her friend. Tims was spending the
summer on the wild and beautiful ridge which has since become a suburb
of Oxford. It was doubtful whether he would find her in, as she was
herself a mighty cyclist, making most of her journeys on the wheel,
happy in the belief that she was saving money at the expense of the
railway companies.
The time of flowers, the freshness of trees, and the glory of gorse and
broom was over. It was the season of full summer when the midlands,
clothed with their rich but sheenless mantle of green, wear a
self-satisfied air, as of dull people conscious of deserved prosperity.
But just as the sea or a mountain or an adventurous soul will always
lend an element of the surprising and romantic to the commonest corner
of earth, so the sky will perpetually transfigure large spaces of level
country, valley or plain, laid open to its capricious influences. Boars
Hill looks over the wide valley of the narrow Og to the downs, and up to
where that merges into the valley of the Upper Thames. By the sandy
track which Ian followed, the tree still stood, though no longer alone,
whence the poet of _Thyrsis_ looking northward, saw the "fair city with
her dreaming spires"; less fair indeed to-day than when he looked upon
it, but still "lovely all times," in all its fleeting shades, whether
blond and sharp-cut in the sunshine or dimly gray among its veiling
trees. The blue waving line of the downs, crowned here and there by
clumps of trees, ran far along the southwestern horizon, melting
vaporously in the distance above "the Vale, the three lone weirs, the
youthful Thames." Over the downs and over the wide valley of ripening
cornfields, of indigo hedgerow-elms and greener willow and woodland, of
red-roofed homesteads and towered churches, moved slowly the broad
shadows of rolling clouds that journeyed through the intense blue above.
Some shadows were like veils of pale gray gauze, through which the world
showed a delicately softened face; others were dark, with a rich,
indefinable hue of their own, and as they moved, the earth seemed to
burst into a deeper glow of color behind them. Close by, the broken
hill-side was set here and there with oak and thorn, was everywhere deep
in bracken, on whose large fronds lay the bluish bloom of their
maturity. It all gained a definiteness of form, an air of meaning by its
detachment from the wide background floating behind.
Following steep and circuitous lanes, Ian arrived at the lodging-house
and found Tims on the porch preparing to start on her bicycle. But
flattered and surprised by his visit, she ordered tea in the bright
little sitting-room she was inhabiting. He was shy of approaching the
real object of his visit. They marked time awhile till the thunderstorm
became their theme. Then he told something of Milly's sleep-walking, her
collapse of memory; and watched Tims meantime, hoping to see in her face
merely surprise and concern. But there was no surprise, hardly concern
in the queer little face. There was excitement, and at last a flash of
positive pleasure.
"Good old M.!" she observed. "I'm glad she has got back; though I'm a
bit proud of the other one too. I expect you feel much the same, old
boy, don't you?"
The speech was the reverse of soothing, even to its detail of "old boy."
He looked at his teacup and drew his black brows together.
"I'm afraid I don't understand, Miss Timson. I suppose you think it a
joke, but to me it seems rather a serious matter."
"Of course it is; uncommon serious," returned Tims, too much interested
in her subject to consider the husband's feelings. "Bless you! _I_ don't
want to be responsible for it. At first I thought it was a simple case
of a personality evolved by hypnotism; but if so it would have depended
on the hypnotist, and you see it didn't after the first."
"I don't think we need bother about hypnotism"--there was a note of
impatience in Ian's voice--"it's just a case of collapse of memory. But
as you were with her the first time it happened, I want to know exactly
how far the collapse went. There were signs of it every now and then in
her work, but on the whole it improved."
"You never can tell what will happen in these cases," said Tims. "She
remembered her book-learning pretty well, but she forgot her own name,
and as to people and things that had happened, she was like a new-born
babe. If I hadn't nursed her through she'd have been sent to a lunatic
asylum. But it wasn't that, after all, that made it so exciting. It was
the difference between Milly's two personalities. You don't mean to say,
old chap, you've lived with her for seven months and can't see the
difference?"
Tims looked at him. She held strong theoretical views as to the
stupidity of the male, but circumstances had seldom before allowed her
to put them to the test. Behold them more than justified; for Ian was
far above the average in intelligence. He, for a fraction of a minute,
paused, deliberately closing the shutter of his mind against an
unpleasant search-light that shot back on the experiences of his
courtship and marriage.
"Well, I suppose I'm not imaginative," he returned, with a dry laugh. "I
only see certain facts about her memory and want more of them, to tell
Norton-Smith when I take her up to see him."
"Norton-Smith!" exclaimed Tims. "What is the good? Englishmen are all
right when it's a question of filling up the map of Africa, but they're
no good on the dark continent of ourselves. They're cowards. That's
what's the matter with them. Don't go to Norton-Smith."
Stewart made an effectual effort to overcome his irritation. He ought to
have known better than to turn to an oddity like Tims for advice and
sympathy.
"Whom ought I to go to, then?" he asked, good-humoredly, and looking
particularly long as he rose from the depths of the low wicker chair. "A
medicine-man with horns and a rattle?"
"Well," returned Tims with deliberation, pulling on a pair of thread
gloves, "I dare say he could teach Norton-Smith a thing or two. Mind
you, I'm not talking spiritualistic rot; I'm talking scientific facts,
which every one knows except the English scientific men, who keep on
clapping their glass to the blind eye like a lot of clock-work Nelsons.
The effects of hypnotism are as much facts as the effects of a bottle of
whiskey. But Milly's case is different. In my opinion she's developed an
independent double personality. It's an inconvenient state of things,
but I don't suppose it'll last forever. One or the other will get
stronger and 'hold the fort.' But it's rather a bad business anyhow."
Tims paused and sighed, drawing on the other glove. "I'm--I'm fond of
them both myself, and I expect you'll feel the same, when you see the
difference."
Ian laughed awkwardly, his brown eyes fixed scrutinizingly upon her.
"So long as the fort holds somebody, I sha'n't worry," he said, lightly.
They went out, and as he led his own bicycle towards the upper track,
Tims spun down the steep drive, and, turning into the lane, kissed her
hand to him in farewell from under the brim of her perennially crooked
hat.
"That Timson girl's more than queer," he mused to himself, going on.
"There's a streak of real insanity in her. I'm afraid it's not been good
for a highly strung creature like Mildred to see so much of her; and why
on earth did she?"
He tried to clear his mind of Tims's fantastic suggestions; of
everything, indeed, except the freshness of the air rushing past him,
the beauty of the wide view, steeped in the romance of distance. But
memory, that strange, recalcitrant, mechanical slave of ours, kept
diving, without connivance of his, into the recesses of the past twenty
months of his life, and presenting to him unsolicited, circumstances,
experiences, which he had thrust away unclassified--his own surprise,
almost perplexity, when Mildred had brought him work for the first time
after her illness that autumn Term before last; his disappointment and
even boredom in his engagement and the first three weeks of his
marriage; then the change in his own feelings after her long sleep at
the Hôtel du Chalet; besides a score of disquieting trifles which meant
nothing till they were strung on a thread. He felt himself beginning to
be infected with Flora Timson's mania against his will, against his
sober judgment; and he spun down Bagley Hill at a runaway speed, only
saved by a miracle from collision with a cart which emerged from
Hincksey Lane at the jolting pace with which the rustic pursues his
undeviating course.