Between The Dark And The Daylight. William Dean HowellsЧитать онлайн книгу.
in the pause which Mr. Gerald made.
“Her intellect—the working powers of her mind, apart from anything like remembering, are as perfect as if she were in full possession of her memory. I believe,” the father said, with a pride that had its pathos, “no one can talk with her and not feel that she has a beautiful mind, that she can think better than most girls of her age. She reads, or she lets me read to her, and until it has time to fade, she appreciates it all more fully than I do. At Genoa, where I took her to the palaces for the pictures, I saw that she had kept her feeling for art. When she plays—you will hear her play—it is like composing the music for herself; she does not seem to remember the pieces, she seems to improvise them. You understand?”
Lanfear said that he understood, for he could not disappoint the expectation of the father’s boastful love: all that was left him of the ambitions he must once have had for his child.
The poor, little, stout, unpicturesque elderly man got up and began to walk to and fro in the room which he had turned into with Lanfear, and to say, more to himself than to Lanfear, as if balancing one thing against another: “The merciful thing is that she has been saved from the horror and the sorrow. She knows no more of either than she knows of her mother’s love for her. They were very much alike in looks and mind, and they were always together more like persons of the same age—sisters, or girl friends; but she has lost all knowledge of that, as of other things. And then there is the question whether she won’t some time, sooner or later, come into both the horror and the sorrow.” He stopped and looked at Lanfear. “She has these sudden fits of drowsiness, when she must sleep; and I never see her wake from them without being afraid that she has wakened to everything—that she has got back into her full self, and taken up the terrible burden that my old shoulders are used to. What do you think?”
Lanfear felt the appeal so keenly that in the effort to answer faithfully he was aware of being harsher than he meant. “That is a chance we can’t forecast. But it is a chance. The fact that the drowsiness recurs periodically—”
“It doesn’t,” the father pleaded. “We don’t know when it will come on.”
“It scarcely matters. The periodicity wouldn’t affect the possible result which you dread. I don’t say that it is probable. But it’s one of the possibilities. It has,” Lanfear added, “its logic.”
“Ah, its logic!”
“Its logic, yes. My business, of course, would be to restore her to health at any risk. So far as her mind is affected—”
“Her mind is not affected!” the father retorted.
“I beg your pardon—her memory—it might be restored with her physical health. You understand that? It is a chance; it might or it might not happen.”
The father was apparently facing a risk which he had not squarely faced before. “I suppose so,” he faltered. After a moment he added, with more courage: “You must do the best you can, at any risk.”
Lanfear rose, too. He said, with returning kindness in his tones, if not his words: “I should like to study the case, Mr. Gerald. It’s very interesting, and—and—if you’ll forgive me—very touching.”
“Thank you.”
“If you decide to stay in San Remo, I will—Do you suppose I could get a room in this hotel? I don’t like mine.”
“Why, I haven’t any doubt you can. Shall we ask?”
III
It was from the Hotel Sardegna that Lanfear satisfied his conscience by pushing his search for climate on behalf of his friend’s neurasthenic wife. He decided that Ospedaletti, with a milder air and more sheltered seat in its valley of palms, would be better for her than San Remo. He wrote his friend to that effect, and then there was no preoccupation to hinder him in his devotion to the case of Miss Gerald. He put the case first in the order of interest rather purposely, and even with a sense of effort, though he could not deny to himself that a like case related to a different personality might have been less absorbing. But he tried to keep his scientific duty to it pure of that certain painful pleasure which, as a young man not much over thirty, he must feel in the strange affliction of a young and beautiful girl.
Though there was no present question of medicine, he could be installed near her, as the friend that her father insisted upon making him, without contravention of the social formalities. His care of her hardly differed from that of her father, except that it involved a closer and more premeditated study. They did not try to keep her from the sort of association which, in a large hotel of the type of the Sardegna, entails no sort of obligation to intimacy. They sat together at the long table, midway of the dining-room, which maintained the tradition of the old table-d’hôte against the small tables ranged along the walls. Gerald had an amiable old man’s liking for talk, and Lanfear saw that he willingly escaped, among their changing companions, from the pressure of his anxieties. He left his daughter very much to Lanfear, during these excursions, but Lanfear was far from meaning to keep her to himself. He thought it better that she should follow her father in his forays among their neighbors, and he encouraged her to continue such talk with them as she might be brought into. He tried to guard her future encounters with them, so that she should not show more than a young girl’s usual diffidence at a second meeting; and in the frequent substitution of one presence for another across the table, she was fairly safe.
A natural light-heartedness, of which he had glimpses from the first, returned to her. One night, at the dance given by some of the guests to some others, she went through the gayety in joyous triumph. She danced mostly with Lanfear, but she had other partners, and she won a pleasing popularity by the American quality of her waltzing. Lanfear had already noted that her forgetfulness was not always so constant or so inclusive as her father had taught him to expect; Mr. Gerald’s statement had been the large, general fact from which there was sometimes a shrinking in the particulars. While the warmth of an agreeable experience lasted, her mind kept record of it, slight or full; if the experience were unpleasant the memory was more apt to fade at once. After that dance she repeated to her father the little compliments paid her, and told him, laughing, they were to reward him for sitting up so late as her chaperon. Emotions persisted in her consciousness as the tremor lasts in a smitten cord, but events left little trace. She retained a sense of personalities; she was lastingly sensible of temperaments; but names were nothing to her. She could not tell her father who had said the nice things to her, and their joint study of her dancing-card did not help them out.
Her relation to Lanfear, though it might be a subject of international scrutiny, was hardly a subject of censure. He was known as Dr. Lanfear, but he was not at first known as her physician; he was conjectured her cousin or something like that; he might even be her betrothed in the peculiar American arrangement of such affairs. Personally people saw in him a serious-looking young man, better dressed and better mannered than they thought most Americans, and unquestionably handsomer, with his Spanish skin and eyes, and his brown beard of the Vandyke cut which was then already beginning to be rather belated.
Other Americans in the hotel were few and transitory; and if the English had any mind about Miss Gerald different from their mind about other girls, it would be perhaps to the effect that she was quite mad; by this they would mean that she was a little odd; but for the rest they had apparently no mind about her. With the help of one of the English ladies her father had replaced the homesick Irish maid whom he had sent back to New York from Genoa, with an Italian, and in the shelter of her gay affection and ignorant sympathy Miss Gerald had a security supplemented by the easy social environment. If she did not look very well, she did not differ from most other American women in that; and if she seemed to confide herself more severely to the safe-keeping of her physician, that was the way of all women patients.
Whether the Bells found the spectacle of depravity at Monte Carlo more attractive than the smiling face of nature at San Remo or not, they did not return, but sent for their baggage from their hotel, and were not seen again by the Geralds. Lanfear’s friend with the invalid wife wrote from Ospedaletti, with apologies which inculpated