CHAPTER III.
A partial paralysis had befallen Reginald Grove. At his first stage of consciousness, Mrs. Mancredo noticed that when a servant in clearing the room took up the withered rosebud, his heavy gaze followed it. She replaced it, and then bending over him said: “Do you want to see her?”
The eagerness of his attempt to respond showed his wish. Mrs. Mancredo ordered her carriage for a drive past the gardens of the town, on the lookout for moss roses.
“She must be a widow,” she was saying to herself, when her thoughts were interrupted by the sight of a rosebush, much beaten down on the side next the house-steps; and on the other, in the full glory of its mossy beauty.
“Turn round, John, and go slowly back, and then come to this spot and on, till I tell you to stop.”
As they passed the house the second time, Mrs. Mancredo had a good view of the roses, and of a young woman whose every nervous motion meant purpose, watering the bush. Mrs. Mancredo stopped the carriage and descended. On approaching Miss Daksha she looked at her steadily a moment, and then presented her card.
“I came—I came to look at your moss roses, and to talk about them. What has happened to this bush?” she said abruptly.
“It has been abused.”
“Did you ever live on a farm?” said Mrs. Mancredo then, after a long pause.
Ethelbert turned and looked at her, and then drawing chairs into the shade, said with a strange, sweet smile: “No, I never did. Now please sit here and I’ll sit with you, and you shall tell me what you really want to know.”
Mrs. Mancredo was a bit overwhelmed; but she sat, and wheeling her guns, said as suddenly as possible: “Reginald Grove wants to see you.”
“Is he ill?”
“You know him, then?”
“Why don’t you say whatever you have to say?” said Ethelbert simply.
“If I did, I should say that you gave him a rosebud and loaned him a volume of Petrarch’s ‘De Vita Solitaria,’ and that he loves you, and is sick, paralyzed, dying!—and wants to see you,” she said with Italian impetuosity, leaning more and more toward Ethelbert, trying to shock the secret out of her, with each added word. “You know him, you gave him the rosebud—the book?”
“I spoke to him for the first time yester-morn. I have seen him several times. I gave him the rosebud; I did not loan him the book.” She laid her cool hand on this woman’s burning hot hand, saying: “He is nothing to me more than any and every human being is. Any child five years old, with beautiful possibilities, is more interesting.”
“Then why pin a rosebud on his coat?”
“He pinned it there as a sort of symbol of his lost sweet childhood, which he wishes he could regain, and which I think he could.”
“O, this is stupidity!” said Mrs. Mancredo in quick Italian. “We all know that can never be done! What is he, that he should have his childhood back again, more than I should—more than thousands? No! he has made his bed, and there he shall lie upon it, a paralyzed idiot, for what I know. He is a bad man! Do you understand what that means? And he is a rich bad man, and his visits to this simple house and to you mean no good! Do you understand that?”
“I understand you,” said Ethelbert, rising and looking down upon her visitor, “but you don’t understand me, and cannot. Till you have known me a long while, you will misinterpret everything I say or do.”
“How old are you?” was the next angry question.
“Ages old. I am able to help you and this sick friend of yours. I am sorry for your trouble,” said Ethelbert, with a divine pity in her voice and look, and an uplifting power going forth like a cooling shadow displacing the glare and scorch of passion; until, in the cool of it, the tears which, unshed, had burned Mrs. Mancredo’s eyes ever since she had seen Reginald groping upstairs the night before his shock, came forth, relieving her spirit.
Then altogether perplexed, but believing Ethel’s every word, she said: “Can you come down to the hotel and see if you can ease him? The doctor says that his paralysis comes from the ‘functional disorder of the nervous centers,’ whatever all-that-is.”
“That is hemiplegia,” said Ethelbert, “and means ‘I strike one-half,’—so he is paralyzed on one side. If that is it, one corner of his mouth will be drawn a little, and one cheek will look in a sort, withered and drooping. If it is that, his mind will be curious.”
“You are a cold-blooded thing, any way,” said Mrs. Mancredo, frightened and angry.
Ethelbert opened her eyes reflectively.
“Forgive me,” said the excitable woman, “and get into my carriage and come now.”
“In a minute,” said Ethelbert; and in about that time she came back with her hat and her mother, whom she introduced, saying:
“My mother will go, too.” And cutting some fresh roses she followed the two elder ladies into the carriage, and they drove away to the hotel.
Reginald was awake when they entered; and Ethelbert had given the flowers to Mrs. Mancredo, who walked with them to the sick man. He smiled that strange half smile, which was contradicted by the paralyzed muscles on the other side of his mouth. “He will get on in a way, you know,—in a way,” said the physician. “He will perhaps be talking and about again, in a way, you know,—in a way.”
“I found her, Reginald, she is here,” said Mrs. Mancredo, and she motioned to Miss Daksha to approach. A look of heavenly rapture overspread his countenance. In a strange, full voice he cried out: “My mother!”
With an exclamation the physician started forward, but fell back, as Ethelbert said all motherly: “Yes, Reginald.”
He looked at her with consuming eagerness. “You have been gone so long,” he said, a little thickly. “Where is Cousin Alitza?”
A muffled shriek from Mrs. Mancredo thrilled through the room.
“You know what he means!” asserted Ethelbert, looking at Mrs. Mancredo, who, with a perfectly bloodless face and a shrinking, stealthy step, approached. Reginald Grove looked at her puzzled, and then said fretfully, lifting his eyes to Ethelbert: “You have all been gone so long; see how she has grown.”
There was an oppressive hush of bewilderment. The doctor was held back by the unmoved air with which Ethelbert kept her post, giving way to her as if she were the physician of the occasion in whom he trusted. She stood, gently stroking Reginald’s head. He raised his other hand and patted hers languidly, as a pleased child would do, and so presently fell asleep. Then the other physicians came in, and a little apart discussed the case, perplexed.
“He called you Alitza. Your card was marked Corrinne,” said Ethelbert; and after scarce a moment’s halt Mrs. Mancredo said with truthful rapidity: “I am—I was—Alitza Corrinne Roccoca, his cousin. I have seen him but twice since I was seventeen, until I met him in this city. He loved me when we were children; he hated me when I was older. He never dreamed that Mrs. Mancredo was—is—Alitza.”
Ethelbert was silent; she was thinking of his perplexed words: “You have all been away so long; see how she has grown,” and of the childlike manner in which he had clung to her and called her “mother.” She remembered a curious case of mental-aberration ofwhich she had read. “Doctors,” she said, “your patient’s mind has become blank, back to the time before his mother’s death. Don’t you see? He thinks I am his mother; and his mother passed away when he was five years old. He is a child again; that is all.”
“Yes, but a paralyzed one,” said the physicians.