The Complete Short Stories of W.D. Howells (Illustrated Edition). William Dean HowellsЧитать онлайн книгу.
like those unimportant experiences of our remotest childhood, which remain to us from a world outlived.
It was not an insipid perfection of character which reported itself in these celestial terms, and Lanfear conjectured that angelic immortality, if such a thing were, could not imply perfection except at the cost of one-half of human character. When the girl wore a dress that she saw pleased him more than another, there was a responsive pleasure in her eyes, which he could have called vanity if he would; and she had at times a wilfulness which he could have accused of being obstinacy. She showed a certain jealousy of any experiences of his apart from her own, not because they included others, but because they excluded her. He was aware of an involuntary vigilance in her, which could not leave his motives any more than his actions unsearched. But in her conditioning she could not repent; she could only offer him at some other time the unconscious reparation of her obedience. The self-criticism which the child has not learned she had forgotten, but in her oblivion the wish to please existed as perfectly as in the ignorance of childhood.
This, so far as he could ever put into words, was the interior of the world where he dwelt apart with her. Its exterior continued very like that of other worlds where two young people have their being. Now and then a more transitory guest at the Grand Hotel Sardegna perhaps fancied it the iridescent orb which takes the color of the morning sky, and is destined, in the course of nature, to the danger of collapse in which planetary space abounds. Some rumor of this could not fail to reach Lanfear, but he ignored it as best he could in always speaking gravely of Miss Gerald as his patient, and authoritatively treating her as such. He convinced some of these witnesses against their senses; for the others, he felt that it mattered little what they thought, since, if it reached her, it could not pierce her isolation for more than the instant in which the impression from absent things remained to her.
A more positive embarrassment, of a kind Lanfear was not prepared for, beset him in an incident which would have been more touching if he had been less singly concerned for the girl. A pretty English boy, with the dawn of a peachy bloom on his young cheeks, and an impulsiveness commoner with English youth than our own, talked with Miss Gerald one evening and the next day sent her an armful of flowers with his card. He followed this attention with a call at her father’s apartment, and after Miss Gerald seemed to know him, and they had, as he told Lanfear, a delightful time together, she took up his card from the table where it was lying, and asked him if he could tell her who that gentleman was. The poor fellow’s inference was that she was making fun of him, and he came to Lanfear, as an obvious friend of the family, for an explanation. He reported the incident, with indignant tears standing in his eyes: “What did she mean by it? If she took my flowers, she must have known that—that—they—And to pretend to forget my name! Oh, I say, it’s too bad! She could have got rid of me without that. Girls have ways enough, you know.”
“Yes, yes,” Lanfear assented, slowly, to gain time. “I can assure you that Miss Gerald didn’t mean anything that could wound you. She isn’t very well—she’s rather odd—”
“Do you mean that she’s out of her mind? She can talk as well as any one—better!”
“No, not that. But she’s often in pain—greatly in pain when she can’t recall a name, and I’ve no doubt she was trying to recall yours with the help of your card. She would be the last in the world to be indifferent to your feelings. I imagine she scarcely knew what she was doing at the moment.”
“Then, do you think—do you suppose—it would be any good my trying to see her again? If she wouldn’t be indifferent to my feelings, do you think there would be any hope—Really, you know, I would give anything to believe that my feelings wouldn’t offend her. You understand me?”
“Perhaps I do.”
“I’ve never met a more charming girl and—she isn’t engaged, is she? She isn’t engaged to you? I don’t mean to press the question, but it’s a question of life and death with me, you know.”
Lanfear thought he saw his way out of the coil. “I can tell you, quite as frankly as you ask, that Miss Gerald isn’t engaged to me.”
“Then it’s somebody else—somebody in America! Well, I hope she’ll be happy; I never shall.” He offered his hand to Lanfear. “I’m off.”
“Oh, here’s the doctor, now,” a voice said behind them where they stood by the garden wall, and they turned to confront Gerald with his daughter.
“Why! Are you going?” she said to the Englishman, and she put out her hand to him.
“Yes, Mr. Evers is going.” Lanfear came to the rescue.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” the girl said, and the youth responded.
“That’s very good of you. I—good-by! I hope you’ll be very happy—I—” He turned abruptly away, and ran into the hotel.
“What has he been crying for?” Miss Gerald asked, turning from a long look after him.
Lanfear did not know quite what to say; but he hazarded saying: “He was hurt that you had forgotten him when he came to see you this afternoon.”
“Did he come to see me?” she asked; and Lanfear exchanged looks of anxiety, pain, and reassurance with her father. “I am so sorry. Shall I go after him and tell him?”
“No; I explained; he’s all right,” Lanfear said.
“You want to be careful, Nannie,” her father added, “about people’s feelings when you meet them, and afterwards seem not to know them.”
“But I do know them, papa,” she remonstrated.
“You want to be careful,” her father repeated.
“I will—I will, indeed.” Her lips quivered, and the tears came, which Lanfear had to keep from flowing by what quick turn he could give to something else.
An obscure sense of the painful incident must have lingered with her after its memory had perished. One afternoon when Lanfear and her father went with her to the military concert in the sycamore-planted piazza near the Vacherie Suisse, where they often came for a cup of tea, she startled them by bowing gayly to a young lieutenant of engineers standing there with some other officers, and making the most of the prospect of pretty foreigners which the place afforded. The lieutenant returned the bow with interest, and his eyes did not leave their party as long as they remained. Within the bounds of deference for her, it was evident that his comrades were joking about the honor done him by this charming girl. When the Geralds started homeward Lanfear was aware of a trio of officers following them, not conspicuously, but unmistakably; and after that, he could not start on his walks with Miss Gerald and her father without the sense that the young lieutenant was hovering somewhere in their path, waiting in the hopes of another bow from her. The officer was apparently not discouraged by his failure to win recognition from her, and what was amounting to annoyance for Lanfear reached the point where he felt he must share it with her father. He had nearly as much trouble in imparting it to him as he might have had with Miss Gerald herself. He managed, but when he required her father to put a stop to it he perceived that Gerald was as helpless as she would have been. He first wished to verify the fact from its beginning with her, but this was not easy.
“Nannie,” he said, “why did you bow to that officer the other day?”
“What officer, papa? When?”
“You know; there by the band-stand, at the Swiss Dairy.”
She stared blankly at him, and it was clear that it was all as if it had not been with her. He insisted, and then she said: “Perhaps I thought I knew him, and was afraid I should hurt his feelings if I didn’t recognize him. But I don’t remember it at all.” The curves of her mouth drooped, and her eyes grieved, so that her father had not the heart to say more. She left them, and when he was alone with Lanfear he said:
“You see how it is!”
“Yes, I saw how it was before. But what do you wish to do?”