"Sally told me about the electric entertainment at the pier-end. I'm sorry I missed it. But ifthat'swhat's done it, Fenwick must try it again."
"Mustn'ttry it again?"
"No—musttry it again. Why, do you think it bad for him to remember?"
"I don't know what to think."
"My notion is that a man has a right to his own mind. Anyhow, one has no right to keep him out of it."
"Oh no; besides, Gerry isn't out of it in this case. Not out of his mind...."
"I didn't mean that way. I meant excluded from participation in himself ... you see?"
"Oh yes, I quite understand. Now listen, doctor. I want you to do me a kindness. Say nothing, even to Sally, till I tell you. Saynothing!"
"You may trust me." Rosalind feels no doubt on that point, the more so that the little passage about Sally's name has landed her at some haven of the doctor's confidence that neither knows the name of just yet. He is not the first man that has felt a welcome in some trifling word of a very special daughter's mother. But woe be to the mother who is premature and spoils all! Poor Prosy is too far gone to be a risky subject of experiment. Buthewon't say anything—not he! "After all, you know," he continues, "it may all turn out a false alarm. Or false hope, should I say?"
No answer. And he doesn't press for one. He is in a land of pitfalls.
"What have you and your medical adviser been talking about all the while, there in mid-ocean?" Fenwick forgets the late event with pleasure. Sally, with her hair threatening to come down in the wind, is enough to stampede a troop of nightmares.
"Poor Prosy!" is all the answer that comes at present. Perhaps if that uncontrolled black coil will be tractable she will concede more anon. You can't get your hair back under your hat and walk quick and talk, all at the same time.
"Poorer than usual, Sarah?" But really just at this corner it'sas much as you can do, if you have skirts, to get along at all; to say nothing of the way such loose ends as you indulge in turn on you and flagellate your face in the wind. Oh, the vicious energy of that stray ribbon! Fancy having to use up one hand to hold that!
But a lull came when the corner was fairly turned, in the lee of a home of many nets, where masses of foam-fleck had found a respite, and leisure to collapse, a bubble at a time. You could see the prism-scale each had to itself, each of the millions, if you looked close enough. Collectively, their appearance was slovenly. A chestnut-coloured man a year old, who looked as if he meant some day to be a boatswain, was seated on a pavement that cannot have soothed his unprotected flesh—flint pebbles can't, however round—and enjoying the mysterious impalpable nature of this foam. However, even for such hands as his—and Sally wanted to kiss them badly—they couldn't stop. She got her voice, though, in the lull.
"Yes—a little. I've found out all about Prosy."
"Found out about him?"
"I've made him talk about it. It's all about his ma and a young lady he's in love with...." Fenwick'sha!orh'm!or both joined together, was probably only meant to hand the speaker on, but the tone made her suspicious. She asked him why he said that, imitating it; on which he answered, "Why shouldn't he?" "Because," said Sally, "if you fancy Prosy's in love with me, you're mistaken."
"Very good! Cut along, Sarah! You've made him talk about the young lady he's in love with...?"
"Well, he as good as talked about her, anyhow!Iunderstood quite plain. He wants to marry her awfully, but he's afraid to say so to her, because of his ma."
"Doesn't Mrs. Vereker like her?"
"Dotes upon her, he says. Ug-g-h! No, it isn't that. It's the lugging the poor girl into his ma's sphere of influence. He's conscious of his ma, but adores her. Only he's aware she's overwhelming, and always gets her own roundabout way. I prefer Tishy's dragon, if you askme."
At that point Sally is quite unconscious of Fenwick's amused eyes fixed on her, and his smile in ambush. She says the last wordsthrough a hairpin, while her hands take advantage of the lull to make a good job of that rope of black hair. She will go on and tell all the story; so Fenwick doesn't speak. Surprised at first by the tale of Dr. Conrad's young lady, his ideas have by now fructified. Sally continues:
"He's often told me he thought G.P.'s were better single, for their wives' sakes—that sounds wrong, somehow!—but it isn't that. It's his ma entirely. I suppose he's told you about the epileptiform disorders?" No, he hadn't. "Well, now! Fancy Prosy not telling you that! He's become quite an authority since those papers he had in the 'Lancet,' and he's thinking of giving up general practice. Sir Dioscorides Gayler's a cousin of his, you know, and would pass on his practice to Prosy on easy terms. House in Seymour Street, Portman Square. Great authority on epilepsy and epileptiform disorders. Wants a successor who knows about 'em. Naturally. Wants three thousand pounds. Naturally. Big fees! But he would make it easy for Prosy."
"That would be all right; soon manage that." Fenwick speaks with the confidence of one in a thriving trade. The deity of commerce, security, can manage all things. Insecurity is atheism in the City. "But then," he adds, "Vereker wouldn't marry, even with a house and big-fee consultations, because he's afraid his mother would hector over his wife. Is that it?"
"That's it! It's his Goody mother. I say, itisblowing!" It was, and they had emerged from the shelter into the wind. No more talk!
As Fenwick, sea-blown and salted, resorted to the lodging-house allowance of fresh water and soap, in a perfunctory and formal preparation for dinner, his mind ran continually on Sally's communication. As for the other young lady being valid, that he dismissed as nonsense not worth consideration. Vereker had been resorting to a furtive hint of a declaration, disguised as fiction. It was afabula narrata deSally,mutato nomine. If she didn't see through it, and respond in kind, it would show him how merely a friend he was, and nothing more. "Perhaps he doesn't understand our daughter's character," said Fenwick to Rosalind, when he had repeated the conversation to her. "Of coursehe doesn't," she replied. "No young man of his sort understands girls the least. The other sort of young man understands the other sort of girls."
And then a passing wonderment had touched her mind, of how strange it was that Sally should be one of her own sort, so very distinctly. How about inheritance? She grew reflective and silent over it, and then roused herself to wonder, illogically, why Gerry hadn't gone on talking.
The reason was that as his mind dwelt happy and satisfied on the good prospect Vereker would have if he could step into his cousin's specialist practice as a consulting physician, with a reputation already begun, his thoughts were caught with a strange jerk. What and whence was a half-memory of some shadowy store of wealth that was to make it the easiest thing in the world for him to finance the new departure? It had nothing to do with the vast mysterious possibilities of credit. It was a recollection of some resourceful backing he was entitled to, somehow; and he was reminded by it of his dream about the furniture—(we told you of that?)—but with a reservation. When he woke from the sleep-dream of the furniture, he in a short time could distinctly identify it as a dream, and was convinced no such furniture had ever existed. He could not shake off this waking dream, and it clogged his mind painfully, and made him silent.
So much so that when Rosalind, soon completed for the banqueting-board, looked into the adjoining room to see what progress Gerry was making, and why he was silent, she only saw the back of a powerful frame in its shirt-sleeves, and a pair of hands holding on each side an unbrushed head. The elbows indispensable to them rested on the window-bar.
"Look alive, Gerry darling!—you'll make dinner late.... Anything wrong, dear love?" Sudden anxiety in her voice. "Is it another...?" Another what? No need to define, exactly!
"A sort of one," Fenwick answers. "Not so bad as the last. Hardly describable! Never mind."
He made no effort towards description, and his wife did not press him for it. What good end could be gained by fidgeting him?
But she knew now that her life would be weighted with an anxiety hard to bear, until his hesitating return of memory should make its decision of success or failure. A guarantee of the latter would have been most to her liking, but how could she hope for that now?
HOW A STONE THROWN DROVE THE WEDGE FURTHER YET. OF A TERRIBLE NIGHT IN A BIG GALE, AND A DOOR THAT SLAMMED. THE WEDGE WELLÂ IN
The speculative weather-wisdom of the tattooed capstan-driver was confirmed when three in the morning came, and the full of the tide. The wind must have gone round to the southward, or to some equally stimulating quarter, to judge by the work it got through that night in the way of roofs blown off and chimney-pots blown down; standing crops laid flat and spoiled for reaping; trees too full of leaf to bear such rough treatment compelled to tear up half their roots and fall, or pay tribute to the gale in boughs snapped asunder in time to spare their parent stem. All these results we landsmen could see for ourselves next day, after the storm had died down, and when the air was so delightful after it that we took walks in the country on purpose to enjoy it. But for the mischief it did that night at sea, from sportively carrying away the spars of ships, which they wanted for their own use, or blowing a stray reefer from the weather-earring, to sending a full crew to the depths below, or on jagged rocks no message from the white foam above could warn the look-out of in time—for the record of this we should have belated intermittent newspaper paragraphs, ever so long after.
But the wind had not reached its ideal when, at the end of a pleasant evening, Sally and her belongings decided that they must just go down to the beach and see the waves before going to bed. Wasn't there a moon? Well—yes, there was a moon, but you couldn't see it. That made a difference, certainly, but not a conclusive one. It wasn't a bad sort of a night, although it certainly was blowing, and the waves would be grand seen close. So the party turned out to go down to the beach. It included the Julius Bradshaws and Dr. Conrad, who had looked in as usual. Butthe doctor found out that it was past eleven, and, recalled by duty, returned to his Octopus.
The waves, seen close, would have been grand if you could have seen them from the beach, or as much of it as they had left you to stand on. But you really could only guess what was going on out in that great dark world of deep thunder, beyond the successive rushes of mad foam, each of which made up its mind to tear the coast up this time; and then changed it and went back, but always took with it stones enough for next attempt. And the indignant clamour of the rushing shoals, dragged off to sea against their will, rose and fell in the lulls of the thunder beyond. Sally wanted to quote Tennyson's "Maud" about them, but she couldn't for the tremendous wind.
The propensity to throw stones into the water, whenever there are stones and water, is always a strong one, even when the water is black mountain ranges, foam-ridged Sierras coming on to crush us, appalling us, even though we know they are sure to die in time. Stones were thrown on this occasion by Sally and her stepfather, who was credulous enough to suppose that his pebbles passed the undertow and reached the sea itself. Sally was prevented by the elements from misusing an adjective; for she wanted to say that the effect of a stone thrown into such a sea was merely "homœopathic," and abstained because her remark would have been unheard.
Fenwick wanted to say that it was like the way a man dies and vanishes into the great unknown. He, too, refrained from this, but only partly for the same reason. Its want of novelty made another.
All the others soon wanted to say it was time to go home to bed, and tried to say it. But practice seemed easier, and they all turned to go, followed by Fenwick and Sally, cheerfully discussing the point of whether Sally could have swum out into that sea or not. Sally wanted to know what was to prevent her. Obvious enough, one would have said!
But Rosalind noticed one thing that was a pleasure to her. The moment Sally came in, her husband's dream-afflictions went out. Had he ever spoken of one in her presence? She could recall no instance. This evening the return to absolute cheerfulnessdated from the reappearance of Sally after she had changed everything, and made her hair hold up. It lasted through fried soles and a huge fowl—done enough this time—and a bread-and-butter pudding impaired by too many raisins. Through the long end of a game of chess begun by Sally and Dr. Conrad the evening before, and two rubbers of whist, in which everybody else had all the good cards in their hands, as is the case in that game. And through the visit to Neptune above recorded.
But when, after half-an-hour's chat over the day's events with Rosalind, midnight and an extinguished candle left Fenwick to himself and his pillow in the little room next hers with no door between, which Mrs. Lobjoit's resources dictated, there came back to him first a recollection of his suppressed commonplace about the stone that had vanished for ever in the world of waters; then a hazy memory of the same thing having happened before and the same remark having been made by himself; then a sudden jerk of surprise, when, just as he was thinking of sleep, he was able to answer a question Space asked him spontaneously about where this happened, with what would have been, had he been quite awake, words spoken aloud to himself. "That time at Niagara, of course!" And this jerk of surprise left him wide-awake, struggling with an army of revived memories that had come on him suddenly.
He was so thoroughly waked by them that a difficulty he always had of remaining in bed when not asleep dictated a relighted candle and a dressing-gown and slippers. It was akin to his aversion to over-comfortable chairs; though he acknowledged beds as proper implements of sleep, sleep being granted. And sleep seemed now so completely out of the question, even if there had been no roaring of the gale and no constant thunder of the seas on the beach below, that Fenwick surrendered at discretion, and gave himself up a helpless prisoner in the grasp of his own past.
Not of the whole of it. But of as much as he could face here and now. Another mind that could have commanded some strange insight into the whole of this past, and his power or powerlessness to look it in the face, might have striven to avert its revival. That blow might have been too overwhelming. But there was enough, as we shall see, in the recollection that came backof the decade before his return to England, to make his breath catch and a shudder run through his strong frame as he pressed his palms hard on his eyelids, just as though by so doing he could shut it out.
Thank God Rosey was asleep, or would be soon. He would have time to think how he could tell the story he could not be silent about—that, he felt, might be impossible—and yet keep back one ominous portentous fact that had come to him, as a motive force in his former life, without the details of his early history that belonged to it. That fact Rosey must never know, even if ... well!—so many things turned on it. All he could see now—taken by surprise as he was—was that, come what might, that fact should always be kept fromher. But as to concealing from her his strange experience altogether, that was hardly to be thought of. He would conceal it while he could, though, provisionally.
One o'clock by his watch on the dressing-table under the candle. St. Sennans must have struck unheard. No wonder—in this wind! Surely it had rather increased, if anything. Fenwick paced with noiseless care about the little room; he could not be still. The sustained monotone of wind and sea was only crossed now and then by a sound of fall or breakage, to chronicle some little piece of mischief achieved by the former on land, and raise the latter's hopes of some such success in its turn before the night should end....
Two o'clock by the dressing-table watch, and still the noiseless slippered feet of the sleepless man came and went. Little fear of any one else hearing him! For the wind seemed to have got up the bit that was predicted of it, and had certainly gone round to the suth'ard. If any sleeper could cling to unconsciousness through the rattle of the windows and the intermittent banging of a spectral door that defied identification—the door that always bangs in storms everywhere—the mere movement of a cautious foot would have no effect. If unable to sleep for the wind, none would be alive to it. It would be lost in the storm....
Three o'clock! Did you, who read this, ever watch through a night with something on your mind you are to be forced to speak of in the morning—a compulsion awaiting you as a lion awaiting thedébutof a reluctant martyr in the arena of the Coliseum? Didyou, so watching, feel—not the tedium—but the maddening speed of the hours, the cruelty of the striking clocks? Were you conscious of a grateful reliance on your bedroom door, still closed between you andyourlion, as the gate that the eager eyes of Rome were fixed on was still a respite fromhis? Fenwick was; keenly conscious. And when on a sudden he heard with a start that a furtive hand was on the old-fashioned door-latch, he, knowing it could be none other than Rosalind, sleepless in the storm, felt that the lion had stolen a march on him, and that he must make up his mind sharp whether he would go for complete confidence or partial reserve. Certainly the latter, of necessity, said Alacrity. There could be no doubt of it, on her account—for the present, at any rate.
For he had recollected, look you, that at the time of that stone-throw into the rapids above Niagara he was a married man somehow separated from his wife. And the way that he knew this was that he could remember plainly that the reason he did not make an offer of marriage, there by the great torrent that was rushing to the Falls, to a French girl (whose name he got clearly) was that he did not know if his wife was dead or living. He did not know it now. The oddity of it was that, though he remembered clearly this incident hinging on the fact that he was then a married man, he could remember neither the wife he had married nor anything connected with her. He strove hard against this partial insight into his past, which seemed to him stranger than complete oblivion. But he soon convinced himself that a slight hazy vision he conjured up of a wedding years and years ago was only a reflex image—an automatic reaction—from his recent marriage. For did not the wraith of his present wife quietly take its place before the altar where by rights he should have been able to recall her predecessor? It was all confusion; no doubt of it.
But his mind had travelled quickly too; for when Rosalind looked in at his door he knew what he had to say, for her sake.
"Gerry darling, have you never been to bed?"
"For a bit, dearest. Then I found I couldn't sleep, and got up."
"Isn't it awful, the noise? One hears it so in this house.... Well,I suppose it's the same in any house that looks straight over the sea."
"Haven't you slept?"
"Oh yes, a little. But then it woke me. Then I thought I heard you moving."
"So I was. Now, suppose we both go to bed, and try to sleep. I shall have to, because of my candle. Is that all you've got left?"
"That's all, and it's guttering. And the paper will catch directly." She blew it out to avoid this, and added: "Stop a minute and I'll take the paper off, and make it do for a bit."
"You can have mine. Leave me yours." For Fenwick's was, even now, after burning so long, the better candle-end of the two. He took it out of the socket, and slipped its paper roll off, an economy suggested by the condition of its fellow.
But as he did so his own light flashed full on his face, and Rosalind saw a look on it that scarcely belonged to mere sleeplessness like her own—unrest that comes to most of us when the elements are restless.
"Gerry, you've been worrying. You know you have, dear. Speak the truth! You've been trying to recollect things."
"I had nobody here to prevent me, you see." He made no denial; in fact, thought admission of baffled effort was his safest course. "I get worried and fidgeted by chaotic ideas when you're not here. But it's nothing." Rosalind did not agree to this at all.
"I wish Mrs. Lobjoit could have put us both in one room," she said.
"Well,wedidn't see our way, you know," he replied, referring to past councils on sleeping arrangements. "It's only for a week, after all."
"Yes, darling; but a week's a week, and I can't have you worried to death." She made him lie down again, and sat by him, holding his hand. So unnerved was he by his glance back into his past, so long unknown to him, and so sweet was the comfort of her presence and the touch of her living hand after all those hours of perturbation alone, that Fenwick made no protest against her remaining beside him. But a passiveness that would have belonged to an invalid or a sluggish temperament seemed unlike thestrong man Rosalind knew him for, and she guessed from it that there was more behind. Still, she said nothing, and sat on with his hand grasping hers and finding in it his refuge from himself. To her its warm pressure was a sure sign that his memory had not penetrated the darkness of his earlier time. If God willed, it might never do so. Meanwhile, what was there for it but patience?
As she sat there listening to the roaring of the gale outside, and watching with satisfaction the evident coming of sleep, she said to herself that it might easily be that some new thing had come back to him which he would be unwilling she should know about, at least until his own mind was clearer. He might speak with less reserve to Vereker. She would give the doctor leave to talk to him to-morrow. Fear of what she would hear may have influenced her in this.
So when, sooner than she had expected, she caught the sound of the first breath of indisputable sleep, she rose and slipped away quietly, and as she lay down again to rest again asked herself the question: Was it the galvanism that had done it?
HOW FENWICK AND VEREKER WENT FOR A WALK, AND MORE MEMORIES CAME BACK. HOW FENWICK WAS A MILLIONAIRE, OR THEREABOUTS. OF A CLUE THAT KILLED ITSELF. HARRISSON'S AFFAIR NOW! BOTHER THE MILLIONS! IS NOT LOVE BETTER THAN MONEY? ONLY FENWICK'S NAME WASN'T HARRISSON NEITHER
"We thought it best to let you have your sleep out, dear. Sally agreed. No, leave the pot alone. Mrs. Lobjoit will make some fresh coffee."
"Who's the other cup?"
"Vereker. He came in to breakfast; to see if we were blown away."
"I see. Of course. Where are they now?"
"They?... oh, him and Sally! They said they'd go and see if Tishy and her husband were blown away."
"Well, I have had my sleep out with a vengeance. It's a quarter to ten."
"Never mind, darling. So much the better. Let's have a look at you...." And the little self-explanatory colloquy ends with Rosalind kissing her husband and examining him with anxious eyes. She sees a face less haggard than the one she saw last night, for is it not daylight and has not the wind fallen to a mere cheerful breeze you can quite stand upright in, leaning slightly seawards? And are not the voices and the footsteps of a new day outside, and the swift exchanges of sunlight and cloud-shadow that are chasing each other off the British Channel? And has not a native of eighty years of age (which he ignores) just opened the street door on his own responsibility and shouted along the passage that pra'ans are large this morning? He is more an institution than a man, and is freely spoken of as "The Shrimps." A flavour of a Triton who has got too dry on the beach comes in with the sea air, and also a sense of prawns, emptied from a wooden measure they have been honourably shakendown into, falling on a dish held out to receive them by an ambassador of four, named by Sally little Miss Lobjoit, the youngest of her race.
But for all that the rising life of the hours and the subsiding gale may do to chase away the memory of the oppressions of the night from one who was defenceless in its solitude, Rosalind can see how much they leave behind. Her husband may do his best to make light of it—to laugh it off as nothing but the common bad night we all know so well; may make the most of the noises of the storm, and that abominable banging door; but he will not conceal from her the effort that it costs him to do so. Besides, had he not admitted, in the night, that he "got worried and fidgeted by chaotic ideas"? What were these ideas? How far had he penetrated into his own past? She was not sorry for the few words she had had time to exchange with Dr. Conrad while Sally went to seek her hat. She had renewed and confirmed her permission to him to speak to her husband freely about himself.
"Are Mr. and Mrs. Paganini gone to sea?" This is said as Fenwick opens negotiations rather mechanically with the fresh coffee Mrs. Lobjoit has produced, and as that lady constructs for removal a conglomerate of plates and effete eggs.
"Gone to sea, Gerry? Not very likely. What's the meaning of that? Explain."
"Why, Sally and her doctor are staring out at the offing...."
"Well?"
"And didn't you say they had gone to find out if they were blown away?"
"I supposed they changed their minds." Rosalind talks absently, as if they didn't matter. All her thoughts are on her husband. But she doesn't fancy catechizing him about his experiences in the night, neither. She had better let him alone, and wait new oblivion or a healthy revival.
He is alsodistrait, and when he spoke of Sally and the doctor he had shown no interest in his own words. His eyes do not kindle at hers in his old way, and might be seeing nothing, for all there is in them to tell of it. He makes very short work of a cup of coffee, and a mere pretence of anything else; and then, suddenly rousing himself with a shake, says this won't do, and he must go out and get a blow. All right, says Rosalind, and he'd betterget Dr. Conrad, and make him go for a walk. Only they are not to fall over the cliff.
"Fall over the cliff!" repeats Fenwick. He laughs, and she is glad at the sound. "You couldn't fall over the cliff against such a wind as this. I defy any one to." He kisses her and goes out, and she hears him singing, as he hunts for a stick that has vanished, an old French song:
"Auprès de ma blond-eComme c'est bon—c'est bon—c'est bon...."
Only, when he has found the stick and his hat, he does not go at once, but comes back, and says, as he kisses her again: "Don't fidget about me, darling; I'm all right." Which must have been entirely brain-wave or thought-reading, as Rosalind had said never a word of her anxiety, so far.
Fenwick walked away briskly towards the flagstaff where Sally and Vereker had been looking out to sea. In the dazzling sunshine—all the more dazzling for the suddenness of its come and go—and the intoxicating rush of well-washed air that each of those crested waves out yonder knew so much about—and they were all of a tale—and such a companion in the enjoyment of it as that white sea-bird afloat against the blue gap of sky or purple underworld of cloud, what could he do other than cast away the thoughts the night had left, the cares, whatever they were, that the revival of memory had brought back?
If he could not succeed altogether in putting them aside, at least he could see his way to bearing them better, with a kiss of his wife still on his face, and all St. Sennans about him in the sunshine, and Sally to come. However, before he reached the flagstaff he met the doctor, and heard that Miss Sally had actually gone down to the machines to see if Gabriel wouldn't put one down near the water, so that she could run a little way. She was certain she could swim in that sea if she could once get through what she called the selvage-wave. If Gabriel wouldn't, she should take her things up to the house and put them on and walk down to the sea in a cloak. It was quite ridiculous, said the merpussy, people making such a fuss about a few waves. What was the world coming to?
"She'll be all safe," was Fenwick's comment when he heard this."They won't let her go in, at the machines. They won't let her leave the Turkey-twill knickers and the short skirt. She always leaves them there to dry.She'sall right. Let's take a turn across the field; it's too windy for the cliff."
"You had a bad night, Fenwick."
"All of us had. About three in the morning I thought the house would blow down. And there was a door banged, etc...."
"You had a worse night than the rest of us. Look at me straight in the face. No, I wasn't going to say show me your tongue." They had stopped a moment at the top of what was known as The Steps—par excellence—which was the shortest cut up to the field-path. Dr. Conrad looks a second or so, and then goes on: "I thought so. You've got black lines under your eyes, and you're evidently conscious of the lids. I expect you've got a pain in them, one in each, tied together by a string across here." That is to say, from eyebrow to eyebrow, as illustrated fingerwise.
Fenwick wasn't prepared to deny it evidently. He drew his own fingers across his forehead, as though to feel if the pain were really there. It confirmed a suspicion he couldn't have sworn to.
"Yes; I suppose I did have a worse night than the rest of you. At least, I hope so, for your sakes." His manner might have seemed to warrant immediate speculation or inquiry about the cause of his sleeplessness, but Vereker walked on beside him in silence. The way was along a short, frustrated street that led to the field-pathway that was grass-grown, more or less, all but the heaps of flints that were one day to make a new top-dressing, but had been forgotten by the local board, and the premature curb-stones whose anticipations about traffic had never been fulfilled. The little detached houses on either side were unselfish little houses, that only wanted to be useful and afford shelter to the wanderer, or provide a refuge for old age. All made use, on placards, of the cautious expression "Apartments"; while some flung all reserve to the winds and said also they were "To let" outright. The least satisfactory one of the lot was almost invisible owing to its egotism, but distinguishable from afar because the cross-board on a standard that had been placed in the garden-front had fallen forward over the palings like Punch's gallows. Itdidn't much matter, because the placard attached was dissolving off in the rains, and hanging down so low that a goat was eating it with relish, standing against the parapet of the garden-fence.
They reached the point at which Albion Villas had been thwarted by a hedge, rich in unripe sloes and green abortive blackberries, in their attempt to get across a stubble-field to the new town, and passed in instalments through its turnstile, or kissing-gate. Neither spoke, except that Fenwick said, "Look at the goat," until, after they had turned on to the chalk pathway, nearly dry in the warm sun and wind, he added a question:
"Did you ever taste a sloe?"
"Yes, once."
"That is what every one says if you ask him if he ever tasted a sloe. Nobody ever does it again."
"But they make sloe-gin of them?"
"That, my dear Vereker, is what everybody always says next. Sally told me they did, and she's right. They console themselves for the taste of the sloe by an imaginaryliqueurlikemaraschino. But that's because they never tasted sloe-gin."
Vereker thinks he may conclude that Fenwick is talking for talk's sake, and humours him. He can get to the memory-subject later.
"A patient of mine," he says, "who's been living at Spezzia, was telling me about a fruit that was very good there,diosperihe called them. They must be very unlike sloes by his description."
"And naturally sloes made you think of them. I wonder what they are—diosperi—diosperi——" He repeated the word as though trying to recall it. Dr. Conrad helped the identification.
"He said they are what the Japs call jelly-plums—great big fruit, very juicy."
"I know. They're persimmons, or a sort of persimmons. We used to get lots of them in California, and even up at the Klondyke...."
He stopped abruptly and remained silent. A sudden change in him was too marked to escape notice, and there could be no doubt about the cause. The doctor walked beside him, also silent, for a few paces. Then he spoke:
"You will have to bear this, Fenwick, and keep your head. It is just as I told you it would be. It is all coming back." He laid his left hand on his companion's shoulder as they stood side-by-side on the chalk pathway, and with his right felt the wrist that was nearest him. Fenwick was in a quiver all through his frame, and his pulse was beating furiously as Dr. Conrad's finger touched it. But he spoke with self-control, and his step was steady as they walked on slowly together the moment after.
"It's all coming back. Ithascome back. I shall remember all in time." Then he repeated Vereker's words, "I must keep my head. I shall have to bear this," and walked on again in silence. The young man beside him still felt he had best not speak yet. Just let the physical perturbation subside. Talking would only make it worse.
They may have walked so for two minutes before Fenwick spoke again. Then he roused himself, to say, with but little hint in his voice of any sense of the oddity of his question: "Which is my dream?—this or the other?" Then added: "That's the question I want to ask, and nobody can answer."
"And of course all the while each of us knows perfectly well the answer is simply 'Neither.' You are a man that has had an accident, and lost his memory. Be patient, and do not torment yourself. Let it take its own time."
"All right, doctor! Patience is the word." He spoke in an undertone—a voice of acquiescence, or rather obedience. "Perhaps it will not be so bad when I remember more." They walked on again.
Then Vereker, noting that during silence he brooded under the oppression of what he had already recovered from the past, and to all appearance struck, once or twice, on some new unwelcome vein of thought, judging from a start or a momentary tension of the arm that now held his, decided that it would be as well to speak to him now, and delay no longer.
"Has anything come back to you, so far, that will unsettle your present life?"
"No, no—not that, thank God! Not so far as I can see. But much that must disquiet it; it cannot be otherwise."
"Do you mind telling me?"
"No, surely, dear fellow!—surely I will tell you. Why should Inot? But what I say to you don't repeat to Sally or her mother. Not just now, you know. Wait!"
There was a recess in the wall of mortar-bedded flints that ran along the path, which would give shelter from the wind to light a cigar. Fenwick stopped and took two from a cigar-case, Sally's present to him last Christmas, and offered one to Dr. Conrad, who, however, didn't want to smoke so early. He lighted his own in the recess, with only a slight tremor of the hand, barely visible even to Vereker's experienced eye; and then, as he threw away the match, said, without anything that could be called emotion, though always with an apparent sense of his bewilderment at his own words:
"I am that man Harrisson that was in all the newspapers just about the time of the—you remember—when I...."
Vereker failed for the moment to grasp the degree of his own astonishment, and used the residuum of his previous calmness to say:
"I remember. The time of your accident."
"AmI that man? I mean ought I to say 'Iamthat man'? I know Iwasthat man, in my old dream. I know it now, in this one."
"Well, but—so much the better! You are a millionaire, Fenwick, with mines at Klondyke...."
Dr. Conrad had been so taken aback at the suddenness of the extraordinary revelation that his amazement was quite at a loss for means of expression. A delayed laugh, not unmixed with a gasp, expressed nothing—merely recorded a welcome to the good side of it. For, of course, when one hears of Golconda one is bound to think it good, failing evidence to the contrary.
"Yes, Iwasthat man—Algernon Harrisson. Now, the question is—and you'll have to help me here, Vereker. Don't look so thunderstruck, old chap—Shall I be that man again or not?"
"Why not, in Heaven's name? How can you help it?" The speaker is too dumbfounded, so far, to be able to get the whip hand of the circumstances. But the pace may be slacker presently.
"Let's be steady!" Fenwick's voice, as he says this, has a sense of ease in it, as though he were relieved by his disclosure. He takes Vereker's arm in his again, and as they walk on togetheris evidently on good terms with his cigar—so the doctor thinks—and the tremor has gone from his hands. A short pause, and he goes on speaking: "Until we pitched on the Klondyke just now I knew nothing of this. I shall get it all back in time. Let me see!..."
The doctor recovered his presence of mind. "Stop a minute," said he. "Do you know, Fenwick, if I were you I shouldn't try to tell anything until you're clearer about the whole thing. Don't talk to me now. Wait till you are in a state to know how much you wish to tell." But Fenwick would have none of this. He shook his head decidedly.
"Imusttalk to some one about it. And my wife I cannot...."
"Why not?"
"You will see. You need not be frightened of too many confidences. I haven't recollected any grave misdemeanours yet. I'll keep them to myself when they come. Now listen to what I can and do recollect pretty clearly." He paused a second, as if his first item was shaky; then said, "Yes!—of course." And went on as though the point were cleared up.
"Of course! I went up to the Klondyke almost in the first rush, in '97. I'll tell you all about that after. Others besides myself became enormously rich that summer, but I was one of the luckiest. However, I don't want to tell you about Harrisson at Klondyke—(that's how I find it easiest to think of myself, third person singular!)—but to get at the thing in the dream, that concerns me mostnow. Listen!... Only remember this, Vereker dear! I can only recall jagged fragments yet awhile. I have been stunned, and can't help that...." He stopped the doctor, who was about to speak, with: "I know what you are going to say; let it stand over a bit—wait and be patient—all that sort of game! All very good and sensible, but Ican't!"
"Can't?"
"No! Can't—simplycan't. Because, look you! One of the things that has come back is that I am a married man—by which I mean that Harrisson was. Oh dear! Itissuch an ease to me to think of Harrisson as somebody else. You can't understand that." But Vereker is thoroughly discomposed.
"But didn't you say—only just now—there was nothing—nothing—tounsettle your present life? No; I can't understand—Ican'tunderstand." His reply is to Fenwick's words, but the reference is to the early part of his speech.
"You will understand it better if I tell you more. Let me do it my own way, because I get mixed, and feel as if I might lose the clue any moment. All the time I was with the Clemenceaux at Ontario I was a married man—I mean that IknewI was a married man. And I remember knowing it all that time. Indeed, I did! But if you ask me who my wife was—she wasn't there, you know; you've got all that clear?—why, I can't tell you any more than Adam! All I know is that all that time little Ernestine was growing from a girl to a woman, the reason I felt there could be no misunderstanding on that score was that Clemenceau and his wife knew quite well I had been married and divorced or something—there was something rum, long before—and you know Papists would rather the Devil outright than have their daughter marry a divorced man. But as to who the wife had been, and what it was all about...."
He stopped again suddenly, seizing Vereker by the arm with a strong hand that trembled as it had done before. His face went very white, but he kept self-possession, as it were mechanically; so completely that the long ash on his half-smoked cigar remained unbroken. He waited a moment, and then spoke in a controlled way.
"I can remember nothing of the story; or what seems to come Iknowis only confusion ... by things in it...." Vereker thought it might be well to change the current of his thoughts.
"Who were the Clemenceaux at Ontario?" said he.
"Of course, I ought to tell you that. Only there were so many things. Clemenceau was a jeweller at Ontario. I lived in the flat over his shop, and used to see a great deal of his family. I must have lived almost entirely among French Canadians while I was there—it was quite three or four years...."
"And all that time, Fenwick, you thought of yourself as a married man?"
"Married or divorced—yes. And long before that."
"It is quite impossible for me—you must see it—to form any picture in my mind of how the thing presents itself to you."