|I watched her carefully as she recovered from the effects of the ether.
An uncommonly small quantity of that drug had sufficed to deprive her of
her senses; and now her recovery was unusually speedy.
Having taken her respiration, her temperature, and her pulse, and
having found each to be nearly normal, I looked her straight in the
eyes, and demanded, making every syllable clear and emphatic,
“Louise Massarte, do you know me?”
Had I addressed my inquiry to a month-old infant, the result would have
been the same.
I repeated the question in French: “Louise Massarte, _me reconnaissez
vous?_”--with precisely the same negative result.
I then wrote the question both in French and English upon a slip of
paper, and held it before her eyes.
No sign of intelligence.
In the end I applied tests to each of her five senses, and satisfied
myself that each was unimpaired.
After which, “Well, Josephine,” I said, “unless all signs fail, we have
succeeded to admiration. None of her senses have sustained the slightest
injury, yet she has lost the knowledge of language, both spoken and
written. Louise Massarte is dead, annihilated, abolished from the face
of creation. This is a new-born infant, this apparently full-grown woman
lying here. Her soul is still to develop and unfold itself. It will be
for us to shape it, to colour it, to direct it towards good or evil.
Heredity has furnished the capacities, the propensities, which her
environment will quicken, stimulate, cause to grow and to ripen. And it
is for us to provide and to regulate that environment. May Heaven guide
our labours.”
“Amen, heartily. It is an awful responsibility. And yet-------”
“And yet?”
“And yet I cannot help hoping for the best. Look at her, brother. See
how beautiful she is. Surely, such a beautiful face must be meant to
go with a beautiful spirit. Already the expression of bitterness, of
hardness, of suspicion, seems to have faded from it. It is as if it had
been washed in some element infinitely cleansing. I never saw a more
innocent face than hers has become already. Yes, I am sure we may hope
for the best.”
“Well, for the present, we need concern ourselves only for the welfare
of her body. We must darken the room. Inflammation is the only ill
consequence we have to fear; and that can be averted, if we keep her in
darkness and in silence until the wound has healed.”
The wound healed quickly. Not an unpleasant symptom of any kind
manifested itself. And, as I had foreseen she would do, our patient
relearned the primary lessons of life with an ease and a rapidity that
seemed almost incredible. I had anticipated this because she was an
adult; because, that is to say, her brain, as an organ, was of mature
development.
She began to speak as soon as ever we allowed ourselves to speak in
her presence, at first simply imitating the sounds we made, but very
speedily coming to employ words with understanding. A single lesson
taught her how to walk. After my sister had dressed her twice, she was
perfectly well able to dress herself--no trivial achievement when the
intricacy of the feminine toilet is borne in mind. At the end of an
incredibly short period of time she could read and write as easily as I
can. Of the former capability she made good use, devouring eagerly all
such books as we thought wise to give her. Her progress, in a word,
precisely corresponded to that made by a bright child, only it was
infinitely more rapid; and what a fascinating thing it was to observe, I
need not stop to tell. It was like watching the growth and blossoming
of some most wonderful and beautiful flower. We were permitted, so
to speak, to be eye-witnesses of a miracle. If you had met her at the
expiration of one year, and had conversed with her, you would have put
her down for a singularly intelligent and well-informed, yet at the same
time singularly innocent and unsophisticated, girl of eighteen. Yes,
I mean it--a girl of eighteen. For the most astonishing result of my
operation--most astonishing because least expected--was this: that in
body as well as in mind she seemed to have been rejuvenated. With the
obliteration of her memory, every trace of experience faded from her
face. You would have laid a wager that it was the face of a young
maiden not yet out of her teens. She had said that she was all but
six-and-twenty. It was unbelievable when you looked at her now. To the
desperate-eyed woman whom I had dissuaded from self-destruction on that
clouded Bummer's night a year gone by, she bore only such a resemblance
as a younger sister might have borne. To Josephine I remarked, “Is it
possible that we have builded better than we knew? That we have stumbled
upon the discovery which the alchemists sought in vain--the Elixir of
Youth?”
“Indeed,” Josephine assented, “she has grown many years younger. She has
the appearance and the manner of seventeen.”
“It only proves,” said I, “the truth of the oft-repeated commonplace:
that it is experience and not time which ages one; time being simply the
receptacle and measure of experience. Could we double the rate of our
experience--experiencing as much in one year as we are now able to
experience in two--we should grow old just twice as quickly, reaching
at thirty-five the limit which we now reach at threescore-and-ten.
Contrariwise, could we halve the rate of our experience--requiring two
years to experience what we can now experience in one--we should grow
old just twice as slowly, being mere boys at forty, and at seventy in
the very prime of early manhood. Our consciousness of time, in other
words, is simply the consciousness of so much experience. Well and good.
Now, in this case, her experience has been undone. That is to say, her
memory, the storehouse of her experience, has been destroyed. Past time,
so far as it affects her mind, has been neutralised, has been cancelled
out of her equation. Hence this return to adolescence. Her bodily
structure--the size and shape of her bones, and all that--of course
remains as it was. But her spirit returns to the condition of youth;
and, since it is the spirit which animates the body, it gives to her
body the expression and the activity of its own age.”
Then I offered to perform my operation upon Josephine herself, to the
end that she also might enjoy a restored youth: which offer Josephine
haughtily declined.
“It is very fortunate,” she added, “that this alteration in her
appearance has taken place, for now it will be impossible for anybody
who may have known her in former days to identify her: a danger which
otherwise we should have had to fear.”
“Yes,” I acquiesced, “that is very true.”
The disposition which our visitor developed, furthermore, better
than answered to our most sanguine anticipations. Her new environment
vivified the best of those propensities which heredity had implanted in
her, and left dormant those that were for evil. Her quality was so
sweet and winning, that in a little while she had taken our old hearts
captive, and become the delight and the treasure of our home. We loved
her like a daughter; and the notion that we might some time have to
part with her was intolerable. Therefore, we put our heads together, and
entered into a pious conspiracy, agreeing to represent to her that she
was our niece, the child of our brother, an orphan, eighteen years old,
by name Miriam, who, on the 14th day of June, 1884, had sustained an
accident which had destroyed her recollection of the past. As our niece,
recently arrived from England, we introduced her to our friends. She
reciprocated our affection in the tenderest manner, called us aunt and
uncle, and was in every respect a blessing to our lives--so beautiful,
so gentle, so merry, so devoted.
This mysterious and impressive circumstance I must not for one moment
allow to be lost sight of:--That, of all living human beings, she who
least suspected that such a woman as Louise Massarte had ever lived,
sinned, suffered, was Miriam Benary. She upon whom Louise Massarte's
life, sins, and sufferings had least effect or influence, was Miriam
Benary. Her identity was in every respect as separate, and as distinct
from that of Louise Massarte, as mine is from my reader's. Louise
Massarte was dead, dead utterly. Into her tenement of clay a new soul
had entered It was a fearful and wonderful metamorphosis, rich in
suggestiveness; a _datum_, it seems to me, bearing importantly upon
three sciences: Psychology, Divinity, and Ethics.
*****
Thus nearly four years elapsed, and it was Monday, the 12th day of
March, 1888, the day of the memorable snowstorm, called the Blizzard.