quintessential soup, roast chicken, and a milk pudding. As Mrs.
Mason knows, if there is one thing I hate more than another it is
milk pudding, but very little she cared.
As we sat down to luncheon my friend said suddenly, “I have forgotten
my medicine.”
Here was a cue. I tried to show no absorbing interest and to ask
quite casually, “What medicine do you mean?”
The look of pained anxiety which had quite left her face now came
back again. “What medicine do I mean?” she repeated. “There was
something--always--before luncheon. Please don’t ask me any
questions. It’s no good. I can’t remember, and it makes me so
wretched.” She seemed to be on the verge of tears. I asked her no
more questions, and I felt like a perfect pig for having asked her
that one, but I had the usual fool-consolation that I had acted for
the best. I could not find out that there was anything wrong with
her mind. Distinctly she had a humorous side. She could see all
that was quaint in Mrs. Mason, and asked numberless questions about
her. She was not in the least surprised when I told her that I was
an engineer.
“Almost everybody’s something nowadays,” she remarked, and I was
quite certain that it was not her own remark; it was an echo which
her subconscious mind had caught up from the time before she lost her
memory and had now reproduced at the call of a fitting occasion. But
of whatever subject we spoke she always came back to the same thing.
It was always, “I am safe now. I’m quite safe. I needn’t bother any
more. It will come right. Oh, you are good to me!”
I made her drink one glass of port at luncheon, and I made her sleep
afterwards. At first she hesitated, but I told her that I was not
going out--that I should be in the next room all the time. Then she
consented. This was a crucial test with me. I went into her room
twice, and found her fast asleep. It would not have surprised me if,
when she woke again, she had entirely failed to remember me or the
circumstances which had led to her making my acquaintance. On the
contrary, she remembered me perfectly. The only curious thing that
struck me at tea-time was that she called me Rose at times. “Thanks
awfully, Rose,” she would say when I passed her anything.
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask why she called me Rose, but the
other question which I had put to her had been disastrous, and I
refrained. After tea she put her head in her hands and said she was
going to think hard and it would all come back. She made me renew a
promise that I would not go to the police. I think she struggled in
this way for about an hour, and then she flung herself back in her
chair and burst into tears. I consoled her as well as I could, and
by dinner-time she was quite herself again; there was even a touch of
colour in her face. She talked well; I think even it would have been
said that she talked brilliantly. There was nothing apparently wrong
with her but her lapse of memory.
After dinner I said to her, “I have sent for my doctor. He’s quite a
nice old man, and you won’t mind him a bit. I have not told him that
you have lost your memory, and I shall not tell him so. Perhaps he
will be able to give you something that is good for you.”
Dr. Morning (whose acquaintance I had continued) came and saw my
friend, and saw me afterwards. I gave him no information and no lead.
“Well?” I said.
“Yes, Miss Castel,” said the doctor. “Your friend--by the way you
forgot to give me her name--is extremely anæmic. She is recovering
from a severe illness. She has had diphtheria badly. Let her rest
and feed her up, and don’t let her worry. She seems inclined to
worry about something or other. I’ll send something round for her
directly.”
After the doctor had gone I found from my friend that she had been
perplexed by some of his questions. She hoped that she had answered
rightly--that he had suspected nothing. I recalled the faintest
possible twinkle in Dr. Morning’s eye as he told me that I had
forgotten to give him my friend’s name. I wished now that I had made
a clean breast of it. He was probably aware, anyhow, that he was
dealing with a quite interesting case of amnesia.
The whole thing came out as my friend was going to bed. I had gone
to her room with her, and as she was saying good night she suddenly
observed, “But I don’t know your name. It’s ridiculous. I never
asked you. Do tell me what your name is.”
“I’m Miss Castel--Wilhelmina Castel.”
She clasped her hands impulsively together, and then pressed them
over her eyes.
“Wait!” she cried. “Wait! It’s all coming back. You cannot be Miss
Castel. I’m Miss Castel--Cynthia Castel. I remember it distinctly.
I remember Marley Court, and my sweet nurse Rose. Yes, I remember
everything.”
I laughed. “It’s all quite simple,” I said. “Marley Court is where
my grandfather lives. He quarrelled with my father--you may have
heard him speak of it. You are a daughter of my father’s younger
brother. I heard of you as a baby once in days long back. We are
first cousins. Isn’t it ridiculous and melodramatic?”
After that there was a long hour’s talk. My cousin’s memory had come
back as suddenly as it had gone. This, I was told afterwards, is not
unusual. She could tell me a good deal about my grandfather. One
sentence stuck in my memory, “He’s not violent any more.” Cynthia
had lived with him since her parents’ death. I was calling her
Cynthia before the end of that hour’s talk, when I reproached myself
for keeping her awake too long and insisted on leaving her. Her joy
at recovering her memory was pathetic, and her intense gratitude to
myself was absurd.
“Suppose,” she said, “that I had not asked you for your name?”
“Well,” I said, “aren’t your things marked?”
She shook her head.
“Only initials.”
“And the bag?” I asked.
We hunted up the bag. It contained the return half of her ticket, a
handkerchief, and a purse with four shillings and sixpence in it, but
nothing by which I could certainly have identified her. She could
remember now why she had come to London; it was an old and
unimportant engagement with a dressmaker. It had been cancelled in
consequence of her health. She could not remember going to the
station. From that point until she met me everything was like a
forgotten dream.
There were advertisements in every paper next morning--discreet
advertisements with no name given. I put her into the train, and
spoke to the guard about her. I might have travelled with her, but
I did not wish to meet grandpapa. I had not forgotten the letter he
wrote to me when my father died.
I did meet him in the end. One has to forgive one’s own flesh and
blood. The letter which he sent to me was pathetic in its senile
shakiness and absolutely right. He could not begin to thank me, so
he said, for what I had done for Cynthia; all he wanted was to say he
was sorry and ashamed. He would have liked to be friends with me
before he died, but he supposed that was impossible. He would have
liked also to have been of service to me, but from what he heard I no
longer needed his help and was too proud to take it in any case.
“Otherwise I should have liked a chance to have made up to you a very
little for my obstinate cruelty to your father.”
The letter touched me, and I am an impulsive person. I sent a
telegram and followed it.
Cynthia met me at the station, driving a fat pony in a governess
cart, and very much inclined to cry when she saw me. I met my
grandfather, who was very vague and grey and shrunk and sad. We
became friends at once. I met Rose, the woman who had nursed
Cynthia, and Rose said that I had supplanted her and she would call
me out. She was quite charming. Many people were staying at the
house, amongst others I met----
Let me get it over quickly, for the one thing that I will not tell is
my love-story. It was very brief and tempestuous. In a few months I
was playing with the lone hand no longer. I, with all my
independence and all my common sense, fell hopelessly in love, and
acknowledged in white satin, Honiton lace and orange blossom that I
was a woman after all. Well, one might be worse things. One of the
most expensive of my wedding presents came from Mr. James. The 36
h.-p. Pegasus car is of importance. I taught my husband to drive it.
POSTSCRIPT
I have been looking at these pages over again. I wrote them at the
time when the things happened, and that is years ago; yet they all
seem but yesterday. It seems but yesterday that Minnie Saxe brought
to me, in the days of my extreme poverty and hunger, six kippers, fat
and well-liking. It seems but yesterday that I stepped out on the
platform at Charing Cross station and drove from there with the man
whom I had never met in my life in order that I might personate a
dead woman. And now?
And now, right away in the country, it is all very quiet but for the
voices of two small children overhead. Even as I write this I am
interrupted by a grave man of imperturbable mien--a man who may
possibly have seen a joke in the servants’ hall, but has never
permitted himself to see one outside of it. He announces, with the
utmost solemnity, “Master Bernard desired me to say, m’lady, that the
head of the toy duck has come off, and he would be glad if your
ladyship would step upstairs and see about it.”
“Thanks, Jenkins,” I said. “Tell him I’m coming.”
THE END
WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD.
PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH