Chapter XXXIV…

Chapter XXXIV

OF THE REV. SAMUEL HERRICK AND A SUNSET. THE WEDGE'S PROGRESS. THE BARON AGAIN, AND THE FLY-WHEEL. HOW FENWICK KNEW HIS NAME RIGHT, AND ROSALIND DIDN'T. HOW SALLY AND HER MEDICAL ADVISER WERE NOT QUITE WET THROUGH. HOW HE HAD MADE HER THE CONFIDANTE OF A LOVE-AFFAIR. OF A GOOD OPENING IN SPECIALISM. MORE PROGRESS OF THE WEDGE. HOW GERRY NEARLY MADE DINNER LATE

It was quite true, as Sally had surmised, that poor Prosy had been entangled in the meshes of his Octopus. But Sally had also recorded her conviction that he would turn up at tea. He did so, with apologies. You see, he hadn't liked to come away while his mother was asleep, in case she should ask for him when she woke up, and she slept rather longer than usual.

"She may have been trying to do too much lately," said he, with a beautiful faith in some mysterious activities practised by the Goody unseen. Sally cultivated this faith also, to the best of her ability, but she can hardly be said to have embraced it. The way in which she and her mother lent themselves to it was, nevertheless, edifying.

"You mustn't let her overdo it, doctor," said Rosalind, seriously believing herself truthful. And Sally, encouraged by her evident earnestness, added, "And make her take plenty of nourishment. That's half the battle."

Whereupon Lætitia, swept, as it were, into the vortex of a creed, found it in her to say, "As long as she doesn't get low." It was not vigorous, and lacked completion, but it reassured and enforced. By the time the little performance was done every one in the room believed that Mrs. Vereker did down the stairs, or scoured out saucepans, or at least dusted. Even her son believed, so forcibly was the unanimity. Perhaps there was a taint of the incredulous in the minds of Fenwick and Bradshaw. But each thought the other was heart-whole, and neither suspected himself of insincerity.

Sally was curious to know exactly what lines the Octopus had operated on. That would do later, though. She would get Prosy by himself, and make him tell her all about it. In the course of time tea died a natural death. Fenwick indulged in a yawn and a great shake, and remembered that he had no end of letters to answer. Mr. and Mrs. Julius Bradshaw suddenly thought, for no reasonable reason, that they ought to be getting back. But they didn't really go home. They went for a walk landward; as it was so windy, instead--remember that they were only in the third week of their honeymoon! Sally, with Talleyrand-like diplomacy, achieved that she and Dr. Conrad should go for another walk in another direction. The sea was getting up and the glass was going down, and it would be fun to go and see the waves break over the jetty. So said Sally, and Dr. Conrad thought so too, unequivocally. They walked away in the big sea-wind, fraught with a great inheritance from the Atlantic of cool warmth and dry moisture. And if you don't know what that means, you know mighty little of the ocean in question.

Rosalind watched them through the window, closed perforce, and saw them disappear round the flagstaff with the south cone hoisted, holding their heads on to all appearance. She said to herself: "Foolish fellow, why can't he speak?" And her husband answered either her thought or her words--though he could hardly have heard them as he sat driving his pen furiously through letters--with: "He'll have to confess up, Rosey, you'll see, before he goes."

She made no reply; but, feeling a bit tired, lay down to rest on the sofa. And so powerful was the sea air, and the effect of a fair allowance of exercise, that she fell into a doze in spite of the intensely wakeful properties of Mrs. Lobjoit's horsehair sofa, which only a corrugated person could stop on without a maintained effort, so that sound sleep was impossible. She never became quite unconscious of the scratching pen and the moaning wind; so, as she did not sleep, yet did not want to wake, she remained hovering on the borderland of dreams. One minute she thought she was thinking, sanely, about Sally and her silent lover--always uppermost in her thoughts--the next, she was alive to the absurdity of some dream-thing one of them had suddenly changed to, unnoticed. Once, half awake, she was beginning to consider, seriously, whether she could not legitimately approach the Octopus on the subject, but only to find, the moment after, that the Octopus (while remaining the same) had become the chubby little English clergyman that had married her to Gerry at Umballa, twenty years ago. Then she thought she would wake, and took steps towards doing it; but, as ill-luck would have it, she began to speak before she had achieved her purpose. And the result was: "Do you remember the Reverend Samuel Herrick, Gerry, at Umb----Oh dear! I'm not awake.... I was talking nonsense." Gerry laughed.

"Wake up, love!" said he. "Do your fine intelligence justice! What was it you said? Reverend Samuel who?"

"I forget, darling. I was dreaming." Then, with a nettle-grasping instinct, as one determined to flinch from nothing, "Reverend Samuel Herrick. What did you think I said?"

"Reverend Samuel Herrick or Meyrick.... 'Not negotiable.' I don't mean the Reverend Sam, whoever he is, but the payee whose account I'm enriching." He folded the cheque he had been writing into its letter and enveloped it. But he paused on the brink of its gummed edge, looking over it at Rosalind, who was still engaged getting quite awake. "I know the name well enough. He's some chap! I expect you saw him in the 'Chronicle.'"

"Very likely, darling! He must be some chap, when you come to think of it." She says this slightly, as a mere rounding-off speech. Then goes behind her husband's chair and kisses him over his shoulder as he directs the envelope.

"Marmaduke, Copestake, Dickinson, and Humphreys," says he, as he writes the names. "Now I call that a firm-and-a-half. Old Broad Street, E.C. That's all!--as far as he goes. Now, how about Puckeridge, Limited?"

"Don't write any more, Gerry dear; you'll spoil your eyes. Come and look at the sunset. Come along!" For a blood-red forecast of storm in the west, surer than the surest human barometer, is blazing through the window that cannot be opened for the blow, and turning the shell-work rabbit and the story of Goliath into gold and jewels. The sun is glancing through a rift in the cloud-bank, to say good-night to the winds and seas, and wish them joy of the high old time they mean to have in his absence, in the dark.

The lurid level rays that make an indescribable glory of Rosalind's halo-growth of hair as Gerry sees it against the window, have no ill-boding in them for either--no more, that is, than always has belonged to a rough night closing over the sea, and will do so always until the sea is ice again on a planet sick to death. As he draws her arm round his neck and she his round her waist, and they glance at each other in the flaming glow, there is no thought in either of any ill impending for themselves.

"I wish Sarah were here to see you now, Rosey."

"So should I, love! Only she would see you too. And then she'd make you vainer than you are already. All men are patches of Vanity. But I forgive you." She kisses him slightly in confirmation. They certainly were a wonderful sight, the two of them, a minute ago, when the light was at its best. Yes!--they wish Sally had been there, each on the other's account. It was difficult to say which of the two had thought of Sally first. Both had this habit of registering the rapport of everything to Sally as a first duty.

But a sunset glow, like this one, lasts, maybe, little longer than a highest song-note may be sustained. It was to die. But Rosalind and Gerry watched it out. His cheek was resting in the thick mass of soft gold, just moving slightly to be well aware of it. The sun-ray touched it, last of anything in the room, and died....

"What's that, dear love? Why?..." It was Rosalind that spoke.

"Nothing, dearest! No, nothing!... Indeed, nothing at all!"

"Gerry, what was it?"

"What was what, dear?"

"What made you leave off so suddenly?"

For the slightly intermittent movement of his cheek on her hair--what hairy thing is there that does not love to be stroked?--had stopped; and his hand that held hers had slipped from it, and rested for a moment on his own forehead.

"It's gone now. It was a sort of recurrence. I haven't been having them lately...."

"Come and sit down, love. There, now, don't fidget! What was it about?" Does he look pale?--thinks Rosalind--or is it only the vanished glow?

He is uncommunicative. Suppose they go out for a turn before dinner, he suggests. They can walk down to the jetty, to meet Sarah and her medical adviser. Soon said, soon settled. Ten minutes more, and they are on their way to the fisher dwellings: experiencing three-quarters of a gale, it appears, on the testimony of an Ancient Mariner in a blue and white-striped woollen shirt, who knows about things.

"That was very queer, that recurrence!" Thus Gerry, after leaving the Ancient Mariner. "It was just as the little edge of the sun went behind the bank. And what do you think my mind hooked it on to, of all things in the world?" Rosalind couldn't guess, of course. "Why, a big wheel I was trying to stop, that went slowly--slowly--like the sun vanishing. And then just as the sun went it stopped."

"Was there anything else?" Entire concealment of alarm is all Rosalind can attend to.

"No end of things, all mixed up together. One thing very funny. A great big German chap.... I say, Rosalind!"

"What, Gerry darling?"

"Do you recollect, when we were in Switzerland, up at that last high-up place, Seelisberg--Sonnenberg--do you remember the great fat Baron that gave me those cigars, and sang?"

"Remember the Baron? Of course I do. Perfectly!" Rosalind contrived a laugh. "Was he in it?" Perhaps this was rash. But then, not to say it would have been cowardice, when it was on her tongue-tip. Let the nettle be grasped.

"He was in it, singing and all. But the whole thing was mixed up and queer. It all went, quite suddenly. And I should have lost him out of it, as one loses a dream, if it hadn't been for seeing him in Switzerland. It was something to hold on by. Do you understand?"

"I think I do. I had forgotten what I was dreaming about when I woke on the sofa and talked that nonsense. But I held on to the name, for all that."

"But then that wasn't a real person, the Reverend--what was he?--Herrick or Derrick."

Rosalind passed the point by. "Gerry darling! I want you to do as I tell you. Don't worry your head about it, but keep quiet. If memory is coming back to you, it will come all the quicker for letting your mind rest. Let it come gradually."

"I see what you mean. You think it was really a recollection of B.C.?"

"I think so. Why should it not?"

"But it's all gone clean away again! And I can't remember anything of it at all--and there was heaps!"

"Never mind! If it was real it will come back. Wait and be patient!"

Rosalind's mind laid down this rule for itself--to think and act exactly as though there had been nothing to fear. Even if all the past had been easy to face it would have shrunk from suggestions. So thought she to herself, perhaps with a little excusable self-deception. Otherwise the natural thing would have been to repeat to him all the Baron's story.

No! She would not say a word, or give a hint. If it was all to come back to him, it would come back. If not, she could not bring it back; and she might, in the attempt to do so, merely plunge his injured mind into more chaotic confusion. Much safer to do nothing!

But why this sudden stirring of his memory, just now of all times? Had anything unusual happened lately? Naturally, the inquiry sent her mind back, to yesterday first, then to the day before. No!--there was nothing there. Then to generalities. Was it the sea bathing?--the sea air? And then on a sudden she thought of the thing nearest at hand, that she should have thought of at first. Yes!--she would ask Dr. Conrad about that: Why hadn't she thought of that before--that galvanic battery?

Meanwhile, despite her injunctions to her husband to wait and be patient, his mind kept harking back on this curious recollection. Luckily, so it seemed to her--at any rate for the present--he did not seem to recall the Baron's recognition of himself, or to connect it with this illusion or revival. He appeared to recollect the Baron's personality, and his liberality with cigars, but little else. If he was to be reminded of this, it must be after she had talked over it with Vereker.

They struggled with the weather along the seaward face of the little old fisher-town. The great wind was blowing the tar-laden atmosphere of the nets and the all-pervading smell of tar landward; and substituting flecks of driven foam, that it forced to follow landward too, for all they tried to stop and rest. The population was mostly employed getting the boats up as close to the houses as practice permitted, and the capstans were all a-creak with the strain; and one shrieked for a dab of lard, and got it, just as they passed. The man with Bessie and the anchor on his arms--for it was his--paused in his rotations with one elbow on his lever, and one foot still behind the taut cable he was crossing. His free hand saluted; and then, his position being defined, he was placed on a moral equality with his superiors, and could converse. The old-fashioned hat-touch, now dying out, is just as much a protest against the way social order parts man from man as it is an acknowledgment of its necessity.

The lover of Bessie and Elinor and Kate was disposed to ignore the efforts of the wind. There might, he said, be a bit of sea on, come two or three in the marn'n--at the full of the tide. The wind might get up a bit, if it went round suth'ard. The wind was nothing in itself--it was the direction it came from; it got a bad character from imputed or vicarious vice. It would be a bit rough to get a boat off--the lady might get a wetting.... At which point Rosalind interrupted. Nothing was further from her thoughts, she said, than navigation in any form. But had the speaker seen her daughter go by--the young lady that swam? For Sally was famous. He hadn't, himself, but maybe young Benjamin had. Who, taking leave to speak from this, announced frankly that he had seen a young lady, in company with her sweetheart, go by nigh an hour agone. The tattooed one diluted her sweetheart down to "her gentleman" reluctantly. In his land, and the one there would soon be for the freckled and blue-eyed Benjamin, there was no such artificial nonsense. Perhaps some sense of this showed itself in the way he resumed his work. "Now, young Benjamin--a-action!" said he; and the two threw themselves again against the pole of the mollified capstan.

If Rosalind fancied this little incident had put his previous experience out of her husband's mind she was mistaken. He said, as they passed on in the direction of the jetty, "I think I should like to wind up capstans. It would suit me down to the ground." But then became thoughtful; and, just as they were arriving at the jetty, showed that his mind had run back by asking suddenly, "What was the fat Baron's name?"

"Diedrich Kammerkreutz." Rosalind gave him her nearest recollection, seeing nothing to be gained by doing otherwise. Any concealment, too, the chances were, would make matters worse instead of better.

"It was Kreutzkammer, in my--dream or whatever you call it." They stopped and looked at each other, and Rosalind replied, "It was Kreutzkammer. Oh dear!" rather as one who had lost breath from some kind of blow.

He saw her distress instantly, and was all alive to soothe it. "Don't be frightened, darling love!" he cried, and then his great good-humoured laugh broke into the tenderness of his speech, without spoiling it. He was so like Gerry, the boy that rode away that day in the dog-cart, when there was "only mamma for the girl."

"But when all's said and done," said she, harking back for a reprieve, "perhaps you only recollected Sonnenberg in your dream better than I did ... just now...." She hung fire of repeating the name Herrick.

"Ach zo," he answered, teutonically for the moment, from association with the Baron. "But suppose it all true, dearest, and that I'm going to come to life again, what does it matter? It can't alter us, that I can see. Could anything that you can imagine? I should be Gerry for you, and you would be Rosey for me, to the end of it." Her assent had a mere echo of hesitation. But he detected it, and went on: "Unless, you mean, I remembered the hypothetical wife?..."

"Ye--es!--partly."

"Well! I tell you honestly, Rosey darling, if I do, I shall keep her to myself. A plaguing, intrusive female--to come between us. But there's no such person!" At which they both laughed, remembering the great original non-exister. But even here was a little thorn. For Mrs. Harris brought back the name the Baron had known Gerry by. He did not seem to have resumed it in his dream.

The jetty ran a little way out to sea. Thus phraseology in use. It might have reconsidered itself, and said that the jetty had at some very remote time run out to sea and stopped there. Ever since, the sea had broken over it at high tides, and if you cared at all about your clothes you wouldn't go to the end of it, if you were me. Because the salt gets into them and spoils the dye. Besides, you have to change everything.

There was a dry place at the end of the jetty, and along the edge of the dry place were such things as cables go round and try hard to draw, as we drew the teeth of our childhood with string. But they fail always, although their pulls are never irresolute. On two of these sat Sally and the doctor in earnest conversation.

Rosalind and her husband looked at each other and said, "No!" This might have been rendered, "Matters are no forwarder." It connected itself (without acknowledgment) with the distance apart of the two cable-blocks. Never mind; let them alone!

"Are you going to sit there till the tide goes down?"

"Oh, is that you? We didn't see you coming."

"You'll have to look sharp, or you'll be wet through...."

"No, we shan't! You only have to wait a minute and get in between...."

Easier said than done! A big wave, that was just in time to overhear this conversation imperfectly, thought it would like to wet Sally through, and leaped against the bulwark of the jetty. But it spent itself in a huge torrential deluge while Sally waited a minute. A friend followed it, but made a poor figure by comparison. Then Sally got in between, followed by the doctor.... Well! they were really not so very wet, after all! Sally was worst, as she was too previous. She got implicated in the friend's last dying splash, while Prosy got nearly scot-free. So said Sally to Fenwick as they walked briskly ahead towards home, leaving the others to make their own pace. Because it was a case of changing everything, and dinner was always so early at St. Sennans.

"Let them go on in front. I want to talk to you, Dr. Conrad." Rosalind, perhaps, thinks his attention won't wander if she takes a firm tone; doesn't feel sure about it, otherwise. Maybe Sally is too definitely in possession of the citadel to allow of an incursion from without. She continues: "I have something to tell you. Don't look frightened. It is nothing but what you have predicted yourself. My husband's memory is coming back. I don't know whether I ought to say I am afraid or I hope it is so...."

"But are you sure it is so?"

"Yes, listen! It has all happened since you and Sally left." And then she narrated to the doctor, whose preoccupation had entirely vanished, first the story of the recurrence, and Fenwick's description of it in full; and then the incident of the Baron at Sonnenberg, but less in detail. Then she went on, walking slower, not to reach the house too soon. "Now, this is the thing that makes me so sure it is recollection: just now, as we were coming to the jetty, he asked me suddenly what was the Baron's name. I gave a wrong version of it, and he corrected me." This does not meet an assent.

"That was nothing. He had heard it at Sonnenberg. I think much more of the story itself; the incident of the wheel and so on. Are you quite sure you never repeated this German gentleman's story to Mr. Fenwick?"

"Quite sure."

"H'm...!"

"So, you see, I want you to help me to think."

"May I talk to him about it?--speak openly to him?"

"Yes; to-morrow, not to-day. I want to hear what he says to-night. He always talks a great deal when we're alone at the end of the day. He will do so this time. But I want you to tell me about an idea I have."

"What idea?"

"Did Sally tell you about the galvanic battery on the pier?" Dr. Conrad stopped in his walk, and faced round towards his companion. He shook out a low whistle--an arpeggio down. "Did she tell you?" repeated Rosalind.

"Miss Sa...."

"Come, come, doctor! Don't be ridiculous. Say Sally!" The young man's heart gave a responsive little jump, and then said to itself, "But perhaps I'm only a family friend!" and climbed down. However, on either count, "Sally" was nicer than "Miss Sally."

"Sally told me about the electric entertainment at the pier-end. I'm sorry I missed it. But if that's what's done it, Fenwick must try it again."

"Mustn't try it again?"

"No--must try 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. Say nothing!"

"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. But he won'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's as 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's ha! or h'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! I understood 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 ask me."

At that point Sally is quite unconscious of Fenwick's amused eyes fixed on her, and his smile in ambush. She says the last words through 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, it is blowing!" 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 a fabula narrata de Sally, 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 course he 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?

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Chapter XXXV

HOW A STONE THROWN DROVE THE WEDGE FURTHER YET. OF A TERRIBLE NIGHT IN A BIG GALE, AND A DOOR THAT SLAMMED. THE WEDGE WELL 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. But the 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 "homoeopathic," 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 cheerfulness dated 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 back of 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 from her. 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 the début of a reluctant martyr in the arena of the Coliseum? Did you, 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 and your lion, as the gate that the eager eyes of Rome were fixed on was still a respite from his? 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, we didn'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 the strong 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?

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Chapter XXXVI

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 shaken down 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 also distrait, 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 better get 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-e Comme 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's all 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. It didn'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 imaginary liqueur like maraschino. 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, diosperi he 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. It has come 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 I not? 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."

"Am I that man? I mean ought I to say 'I am that man'? I know I was that 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, I was that 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 together is 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.

"I must talk 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 most now. 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 I can't!"

"Can't?"

"No! Can't--simply can'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! It is such 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--to unsettle your present life? No; I can't understand--I can't understand." 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 I knew I 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 I know is 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."

"Quite."

"It seems--to me--perfectly incredible that you should have no recollection at all of the marriage, or divorce, or whatever it was...."

"I did not say I had no recollection at all. Listen. Don't you know this, Vereker?--of course you do, though--how one wakes from a hideous dream and remembers exactly the feeling it produced, and how the same feeling comes back when one recalls from the dream some fragment preserved from all one has forgotten of it--something nowise horrible in itself, but from its associations in the dream?"

"Oh yes, perfectly!"

"Well--that's my case. When I try to bring back the memories I know I must have had at that time in Canada, nothing comes back but a horror--something like a story read in boyhood and shuddered at in the night--but all details gone. I mean all details with horror in them. Because, do you know?..."

"Yes----?" Vereker stopped beside him on the path, as Fenwick stopped and hesitated. Utter perplexity almost forbidding speech was the impression the doctor received of his condition at this moment. After a moment's silence he continued:

"You will hardly believe me, but almost the only thing I can revive--that is, have revived so far--is an occurrence that must needs at the time have been a happiness and a delight. And yet it now presents itself to me as an excruciating torment--as part of some tragedy in which I had to be an actor, but of which I can seize no detail that does not at once vanish, leaving mere pain and confusion."

"What was it? You don't mind...."

"Mind telling you? Oh no!--why should I? I may be happier if I can tell it. It's like this. I am at a railway-station in the heat somewhere, and am expecting a girl who is coming to marry me. I can remember the heat and our meeting, and then all is Chaos again. Then, instead of remembering more, I go over and over again the old thing as at first.... No! nothing new presents itself. Only the railway-station and the palm-trees in the heat. And the train coming slowly in, and my knowing that she is in it, and coming to marry me."

"Do you mean that the vision--or scene--in your mind stops dead, and you don't see her get out of the carriage?"

They had walked on slowly again a short distance. Fenwick made another halt, and as he flicked away a most successful crop of cigar-ash that he had been cultivating--so it struck Vereker--as a kind of gauge or test of his own self-control, he answered:

"I couldn't say that. Hardly! I see a girl or woman get out of the carriage, but not her...!"

Vereker was completely at a loss--began to be a little afraid his companion's brain might be giving way. "How can you tell that," said he, "unless you know who she ought to have been?"

Fenwick resumed his walk, and when he replied did so in a voice that had less tension in it, as though something less painful had touched his mind:

"It's rum, I grant you. But the whole thing is too rum to bear thinking of--at least, to bear talking about. As to the exact reason why I know it's not her, that's simple enough!"

"What is it?"

"Because Mrs. Fenwick gets out of the train--my Rosey, here, Sally's mother. And it's just the same with the only other approach to a memory that connects itself with it--a shadowy, indistinct ceremony, also in the heat, much more indistinct than the railway-station. My real wife's image--Rosey's, here--just takes the place at the altar where the other one should be, and prevents my getting at any recollection of her. It is the only thing that makes the dream bearable."

Vereker said nothing. He did not want to disturb any lull in the storm in his companion's mind. After a slight pause the latter continued:

"The way I account for it seems to me sufficient. I cannot conceive any woman being to me what ... or, perhaps I should express it better by saying I cannot connect the wife-idea with any image except hers. And, of course, the strong dominant idea displaces the feeble memory."

Vereker was ready with an unqualified assent at the moment. For though Sally, as we have seen, had taken him into her confidence the day after her mother's wedding--and, indeed, had talked over the matter many times with him since--the actual truth was far too strange to suggest itself offhand, as it would have been doing had the doctor connected the fact that Sally's mother went out to India to be married with this meeting of two lovers at a simmering railway-station, name not known. The idea of the impossible per se is probably the one a finite intelligence most readily admits, and is always cordially welcome in intellectual difficulties--a universal resolution of logical discords. In the case of these two men, at that moment, neither was capable of knowing the actual truth had he been told it, whatever the evidence; still less of catching at slight connecting-links. Fenwick went on speaking:

"I don't know whether you will understand it--yes! I think, perhaps, you might--that it's a consolation to me this way Mrs. Fenwick comes in. It seems to bring fresh air into what else would be--ugh!" He shuddered a half-intentional shudder; then, dropping his voice, went on, speaking quickly: "The thing makes part of some tragedy--some sad story--something best forgotten! If I could only dare to hope I might remember no more--might even forget it altogether."

"Perhaps if you could remember the whole the painfulness might disappear. Does not anything in the image of the railway-station give a clue to its whereabouts?"

"No. It hardly amounts to an image at all--more a fact than an image. But the heat was a fact. And the dresses were all white--thin--tropical...."

"Then the Mrs. Fenwick that comes out of the train isn't dressed as she dresses here?"

"Why, n-n-no!... No, certainly not. But that's natural, you know. Of course, my mind supplies a dress for the heat."

"It doesn't diminish the puzzlement."

"Yes--yes--but it does, though. Because, look here! It's not the only thing. I find myself consciously making Rosey look younger. I can't help my mind--my now mind--working, do what I will! But as to where it was, I fancy I have a clue. I can remember remembering--if you understand me--that I had been in Australia--remembered it at Ontario--talked about it to Tina Clemenceau...."

If Vereker had had any tendency to get on a true scent at this point, the reference to Australia would have thrown him off it. And the thought of the Canadian girl took Fenwick's mind once more to his American life: "It was my thinking of that girl made all this come back to me, you know. Just after you left us, when we were throwing stones in the sea, last night...."

"Throwing stones in the sea?..."

"Yes--we went down to the waves on the beach, and my throwing a stone in reminded me of it all, after. I was just going to get to sleep, when, all of a sudden, what must I think of but Niagara!--at least, the rapids. I was standing with Mademoiselle Tina--no one else--on a rock overlooking the great torrent, and I threw a stone in, and she said no one would ever see that stone again. I said, 'Like a man when he dies and is forgotten,' or something of that sort. I recollect her now--poor child!--turning her eyes full on me and saying, 'But I should not forget you, Mr. Harrisson.' You see how it was? Only it seems a sort of disloyalty to the poor girl to tell it. It was all plain, and she meant it to be. I can't remember now whether I said, 'I can't marry you, Tina, because I don't know that my wife is dead,' or whether I only thought it. But I know that I then knew I was, or had been, married and divorced or deserted. And it was that unhappy stone that brought it all back to me."

"Are you sure of that?"

"Quite sure that began it. I was just off, and some outlying scrap of my mind was behindhand, and that stone saw it and pounced on it. I remembered more after that. I know I was rather glad to start off to the new gold river, because of Ernestine Clemenceau. I don't think I should have cared to marry Ernestine. Anyhow, I didn't. She seems to me Harrisson's affair now. Don't laugh at me, doctor!"

"I wasn't laughing." And, indeed, this was true. The doctor was very far from laughing.

They had walked some little way inland, keeping along a road sunk in the chalk. This now emerged on an exposed hill-side, swept by the sea wind; which, though abated, still made talk less easy than in the sheltered trench, or behind the long wall where Fenwick lit his cigar. Vereker suggested turning back; and, accordingly, they turned. The doctor found time to make up his mind that no harm could be done now by referring to his interview with Rosalind, the day before.

"Your wife told me yesterday that you had just had a tiresome recurrence when you came out after us--at the jetty-end, you know."

"Surely! So I had. Did she tell you what it was?" Evidently, in the stress and turmoil of his subsequent experience in the night, it had slipped from him. The doctor said a reminding word or two, and it came back.

"I know, I know. I've got it now. That was last night. But now--that again! Why was it so horrible? That was dear old Kreutzkammer, at 'Frisco. What could there be horrible about him?..." A clear idea shot into the doctor's mind--not a bad thing to work on.

"Fenwick!--don't you see how it is? These things are only horrible to you because you half recollect them. The pain is only the baffled strain on the memory, not the thing you are trying to recover."

"Very likely." He assents, but his mind is dwelling on Kreutzkammer, evidently. For he breaks into a really cheerful laugh, pleasant in the ears of his companion. "Why, that was Diedrich Kreutzkammer!" he exclaims, "up at that Swiss place. And I didn't know him from Adam!"

"Of course it was. But look here, Fenwick--isn't what I say true? Half the things that come back to you will be no pain at all when you have fairly got hold of them. Only, wait! Don't struggle to remember, but let them come."

"All right, old chap! I'll be good." But he has no very strong convictions on the subject, clearly. The two walk on together in silence as far as the low flint wall, in another recess of which Fenwick lights another cigar, as before. Then he turns to the doctor and says:

"Not a word of this to Rosey--nor to Sallykin!" The doctor seems perplexed, but assents and promises. "Honest Injun!--as Sally says," adds Fenwick. And the doctor repeats that affidavit, and then says:

"I shall have to finesse a good deal. I can manage with Mrs. Fenwick. But--I wish I felt equally secure with Miss Sally." He feels very insecure indeed in that quarter, if the truth is told. And he is afflicted with a double embarrassment here, as he has never left Sally without her "miss" in speaking to Fenwick, while, on the other hand, he holds a definite licence from her mother--is, as it were, a chartered libertine. But that's a small matter, after all. The real trouble is having to look Sally in the face and conceal anything.

"Miss who?" says Fenwick. "Oh--Sally, you mean! Of course she'll rush the position. Trust her!" He can't help laughing as he thinks of Sally, with Dr. Conrad vainly trying to protect his outworks.

The momentary hesitation about how to speak of Sally may have something to do with Vereker's giving the conversation a twist. It turns, however, on a point that has been waiting in his mind all through their interview, ever since Fenwick spoke of his identity with Harrisson.

"Look here, Fenwick," he says. "It's all very fine your talking about keeping Mrs. Fenwick in the dark about this. I know it's for her own sake--but you can't."

"And why not? I can't have Rosey know I have another wife living...."

"You don't know she's alive, for one thing!"

"H'm!... I don't know, certainly. But I should have known, somehow, if she were dead. Of course, if further memory or inquiry proves that she is dead, that's another matter."

"But, in the meanwhile, how can you prove your identity with Harrisson and claim all your property without her knowing?... What I mean is, I can't think it out. There may be a way...."

"My dear boy"--Fenwick says this very quietly--"that's exactly the reason why I said you would have to help me to settle whether I should be that man again or not. I say not, if the decision lies with me."

"Not?--not at all?" The doctor fairly gasps; his breath is taken away. Never perhaps was a young man freer from thought and influence of money than he, more absorbed in professional study and untainted by the supremacies of property. But for all that he was human, and English, and theoretically accepted gold as the thing of things, the one great aim and measure of success. Of other men's success, that is, and their aim, not his. For he was, in his own eyes, a humble plodder, not in the swim at all. But he ascribed to the huge sums real people had a right to, outside the limits of the likes of him, a kind of sacredness that grew in a geometrical ratio with their increase. It gave him much more pain to hear that a safe had been robbed of thousands in gold than he felt when, on opening a wrapped-up fee, what seemed a guinea to the touch turned out a new farthing and a shilling to the sight. It was in the air that he lived in--that all of us live in.

So, when Fenwick made in this placid way a choice of conduct that must needs involve the sacrifice of sums large enough to be spoken of with awe, even in the sacred precincts of a bank, poor Dr. Conrad felt that all his powers of counsel had been outshot, and that his mind was reeling on its pedestal. That a poor man should give up his savings en bloc to help a friend would have seemed to him natural and reasonable; that he should do so for honest love of a woman still more so; but that a millionaire should renounce his millions! Was it decent? was it proper? was it considerate to Mammon? But that must have been Fenwick's meaning, too. The doctor did not recover his speech before Fenwick spoke again:

"Why should I claim all my property? How should I be the gainer if it made Rosey unhappy?"

"I see. I quite see. I feel with you, you know; feel as you do. But what will become of the money?"

"The poor darling money? Just think! It will lie neglected at the bank, unclaimed, forsaken, doing no more mischief than when it was harmless dust and nuggets in the sand of the Klondyke. While it was there, gold was a bit--a mighty small bit--dearer than it has become since. Now that it is in the keeping of chaps who won't give it up half as easily as the Klondyke did, I suppose it has appreciated again, as the saying is. The difference of cost between getting it out of the ground and out of the bank is a negligible factor...." Fenwick seemed to find ease in chatting economics in this way. Some of it was so obviously true to Vereker that he at once concluded it would be classed among fallacies; he had had experience of this sort of thing. But he paid little attention, as he was thinking of how much of this interview he could repeat to Sally, to whom every step they took brought him nearer. The roar of a lion in his path was every moment more audible to the ears of his imagination. And it left him silent; but Fenwick went on speaking:

"We won't trouble about the darling dust and nuggets; let them lie in pawn, and wait for a claimant. They won't find Mr. Harrisson's heir-at-law in a hurry. If ever proof comes of the death of Mrs. Harrisson--whoever she was--I'll be Mr. Harrisson again. Till then...."

"Till then what?"

"Till then, Vereker dear"--Fenwick said this very seriously, with emphasis--"till then we shall do most wisely to say nothing further to Mrs. Fenwick or to Sally. You must see that it won't be possible to pick and choose, to tell this and reserve that. I shall speak of the recurrences of memory that come to me, as too confused for repetition. I shall tell lies about them if I think it politic. Because I can't have Rosey made miserable on any terms. As for the chick, you'll have to manage the best you can."

"I'll do my best," the doctor says, without a particle of confidence in his voice. "But about yourself, Fenwick?"

"I shall do very well, as long as I can have a chat with you now and again. You've no idea what a lot of good it has done me, this talking to you. And, of course, I haven't told you one-tenth of the things I remember. There was one thing I wanted to say though just now, and we got off the line--what was it now? Oh, I know, about my name. It wasn't really Harrisson."

"Not really Harrisson? What was it then?" What next, and next?--is the import of the speaker's face.

"I'll be hanged if I know! But it's true, rum as it seems. I know I knew it wasn't Harrisson every time I signed a cheque in America. But as for what it was, that all belongs to the dim time before. Isn't that them coming to meet us?"

Yes, it was. And there was something else also the doctor had had it on his tongue to say, and it had got away on a siding. But it didn't matter--it was only about whether the return of memory had or had not been due to the galvanic battery on the pier.

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Chapter XXXVII

OF THE DOCTOR'S CAUTIOUS RESERVE, AND MRS. FENWICK'S STRONG COMMON-SENSE. AND OF A LADY AT BUDA-PESTH. HOW HARRISSON WAS ONLY PAST FORGOTTEN NEWSPAPERS TO DR. VEREKER. OF THE OCTOPUS'S PULSE, HOW THE HABERDASHER'S BRIDE WOULD TRY ON AT TWO GUAS. A WEEK, AND OF A PLEASANT WALK BACK FROM THE RAILWAY STATION

"You never mean to say you've been in the water?"

It was quite clear, from the bluish finger-tips of the gloveless merpussy--for at St. Sennans sixes are not de rigueur in the morning--that she has been in, and has only just come out. But Fenwick, who asked the question, grasped a handful of loose black hair for confirmation, and found it wet.

"Haven't I?" says the incorrigible one. "And you should have heard the rumpus over getting a machine down."

"She's a selfish little monkey," her mother says, but forgivingly, too. "She'll drown herself, and not care a penny about all the trouble she gives." You see, Rosalind wouldn't throw her words into this callous form if she was really thinking about the merpussy. But just now she is too anxious about Gerry to be very particular.

What has passed between him and Dr. Conrad? What does the latter know now more than she does herself? She falls back with him, and allows the other two to go on in front. Obviously the most natural arrangement.

"What has he told you, Dr. Conrad?" This is not unexpected, and the answer is a prepared one, preconcerted under pressure between the doctor and his conscience.

"I am going to ask you, Mrs. Fenwick, to do me a very great kindness--don't say yes without hearing what it is--to ask you to allow me to keep back all your husband says to me, and to take for granted that he repeats to you all he feels certain of himself in his own recollections."

"He has told you more?"

"Yes, he has. But I am far from certain that anything he has said can be relied upon--in his present state. Anyway, I should be very sorry to take upon myself the responsibility of repeating it."

"He wishes you not to do so?"

"I think so. I should say so. Do you mind?"

"I won't press you to repeat anything you wish to keep back. But is his mind easier? After all, that's the main point."

"That is my impression--much easier." He felt he was quite warranted in saying this. "And I should say that if he does not himself tell you again whatever he has been saying to me, it will only show how uncertain and untrustworthy all his present recollections are. I cannot tell you how strongly I feel that the best course is to leave his mind to its own natural development. It may even be that the partial and distorted images of events such as he has been speaking of to me...."

"I mustn't ask you what they were?... Yes, go on."

"May again become dim and disappear altogether. If they are to do so, nothing can be gained by dwelling on them now--still less by trying to verify them--and least of all by using them as a stimulus to further recollection."

"You think I had better not ask him questions?"

"Exactly. Leave him to himself. Keep his mind on other matters--healthy occupations, surrounding life. I am certain of one thing--that the effort to disinter the past is painful to him in itself, quite independent of any painful associations in what he is endeavouring to recall."

"I have seen that, too, in the slight recurrences he has had when I was there. I quite agree with you about the best course to pursue. Let us have patience and wait."

Of course, Vereker had not the remotest conception that the less Fenwick remembered, the better his wife would be pleased. So the principal idea in his mind at that moment was, what a very sensible as well as handsome woman he was talking to! It was the way in which most people catalogued Rosalind Fenwick. But her ready assent to his wishes had intensified the doctor's first item of description. A subordinate wave of his thought created an image of the girl Fenwick must have pictured to himself coming out of the railway carriage. He only repeated: "Let us have patience, and wait," with a feeling of relief from possible further catechism.

But in order to avoid showing his wish to abate inquiry, he could talk about aspects of the case that would not involve it. He could tell of analogous cases well known, or in his own practice. For instance, that of a Frenchwoman who wandered away from Amiens, unconscious of her past and her identity, and somehow got to Buda-Pesth. There, having retained perfect powers of using her mother-tongue, and also speaking German fluently, she had all but got a good teachership in a school, only she had no certificate of character. With a great effort she recalled the name of a lady at Amiens she felt she could write to for one, and did so. "Fancy her husband's amazement," said Dr. Conrad, "when, on opening a letter addressed to his wife in her own handwriting, he found it was an application from Fräulein Schmidt, or some German name, asking for a testimonial!" He referred also to the many cases of the caprices of memory he had met with in his studies of the petit-mal of epilepsy, a subject to which he had given special attention. It may have crossed his mind that his companion had fallen very thoroughly in with his views about not dissecting her husband's case overmuch for the present. But he put it down, if it did, to her strong common-sense. It is rather a singular thing how very ready men are to ascribe this quality--whatever it is--to a beautiful woman. Especially if she agrees with them.

Nevertheless the doctor was not very sorry when he saw that Sally and Fenwick, on in front, had caught up with--or been caught up with by--a mixed party, of a sort to suspend, divert, or cancel all conversation of a continuous sort. Miss Gwendolen Arkwright and her next eldest sister had established themselves on Fenwick's shoulders, and the Julius Bradshaws had just intersected them from a side-alley. The latter were on the point of extinction; going back to London by the 3.15, and everything packed but what they had on. It was a clear reprieve, till 3.15 at any rate.

There could be no doubt, thought Rosalind to herself, that her husband's conversation with Vereker had made him easier in his mind than when she saw him last, just after breakfast. No doubt he was all the better, too, for the merpussy's account of her exploit on the beach; of how she managed to overrule old Gabriel and get a machine put down, contrary to precedent, common caution, and public opinion--even in the face of urgent remonstrance from her Swiss acquaintance, almost as good a swimmer as herself; how she had picked out a good big selvage-wave to pop in under, and when she got beyond it enjoyed all the comfort incidental to being in bed with the door locked. Because, you see, she exaggerated. However, one thing she said was quite true. There were no breakers out beyond the said selvage-wave, because the wind had fallen a great deal, and seemed to have given up the idea of making any more white foam-crests for the present. But there would be more wind again in the night, said authority. It was only a half-holiday for Neptune.

Sally's bracing influence was all the stronger from the fact of her complete unconsciousness of anything unusual. Her mother had said nothing to her the day before of the revival of Baron Kreutzkammer, nor had Dr. Conrad, acting under cautions given. And all Sally knew of the wakeful night was that her mother had found Fenwick walking about, unable to sleep, and had said at breakfast he might just as well have his sleep out now. To which she had agreed, and had then gone away to see if "the Tishies," as she called them, were blown away, and had met the doctor coming to see if she was. So she was in the best of moods as an antidote to mind-cloudage. And Fenwick, under the remedy, seemed to her no more unlike himself than was to be expected after not a wink till near daylight. The object of this prolixity is that it may be borne in mind that Sally never shared her mother's or her undeclared lover's knowledge of the strange mental revival caused--as seemed most probable--by the action of the galvanic battery on the previous day.

* * * * *

Vereker walked back to his Octopus, whom he had forsaken for an unusually long time, with his brain in a whirl at the strange revelation he had just heard. His medical experience had put him well on his guard anent one possibility--that the whole thing might be delusion on Fenwick's part. How could such an imperfect memory-record be said to prove anything without confirmation from without?

His habits of thought had qualified him to keep this possibility provisionally in the background without forgetting it. There was nothing in the mere knowledge of its existence to prevent his trying to recall all he could of the story of the disappearance of Harrisson, as he read it in the newspapers a year and a half ago. There had been a deal of talk about it at the time, and great efforts had been made to trace Harrisson, but without success. The doctor lingered a little on his way, conscious that he could recall very little of the Harrisson case, but too interested to be able to leave his recollections dormant until he should get substantial information. The Octopus could recollect all about it no doubt, but how venture to apply to her? Or how to Sally? Though, truly, had he done so, it would have been with much less hope of a result. Neither Sally nor her mother were treasure-houses of the day's gossip, as his mother was. "We must have taken mighty little notice of what was going on in the world at the time," so thought the doctor to himself.

What did he actually recollect? A paragraph headed "Disappearance of a Millionaire" in a hurried perusal of an evening paper as he rode to an urgent case; a repetition--several repetitions--on the newspaper posters of the name Harrisson during the fortnight following, chiefly disclosing supposed discoveries of the missing man, sandwiched with other discoveries of their falsehood--clue and disappointment by turns. He could remember his own perfectly spurious interest in the case, produced by such announcements staring at him from all points of the compass, and his own preposterous contributions to talk-making about them, such as "Have they found that man Harrisson yet?" knowing himself the merest impostor all the while, but feeling it dutiful to be up-to-date. How came no one of them all to put two and two together?

A gleam of a solution was supplied to the doctor's mind when he set himself to answer the question, "How should I have gone about suspecting it?" How, indeed? Ordinary every-day people--you's and me's--can't lightly admit to our minds the idea that we have actually got mixed up with the regular public people in the newspapers. Have not even our innocent little announcements that we have been born, or died, or got married, always had a look of having got in by accident, or under some false pretence? Have we not felt inflated when a relation of ours has had a letter to a newspaper inserted, in real print, with his own name as bold as brass? Vereker was not surprised, on thinking it over, that he personally had missed the clue. And if he, why not others? Besides, all the Harrisson talk had been superseded by some more exciting matter before it had been recognised as possible that Fenwick's memory might never come back.

Just as he arrived at Mrs. Iggulden's a thought struck him--not heavily; only a light, reminding flick--and he stopped a minute to see what it had to say. It referred to his interview with Scotland Yard, some six weeks after Fenwick's first appearance.

He could recall that in the course of his interview one of the younger officials spoke in an undertone to his chief; who thereon, after consideration, turned to the doctor and said, "Had not your man a panama hat? I understood you to say so;" and on receiving an affirmative reply, spoke again in an undertone to his subordinate to the effect, half-caught by Vereker, that "Alison's hat was black felt." Did he say by any chance Harrisson, not Alison? If so, might not that account for a rather forbidding or opposive attitude on the Yard's part? He remembered something of fictitious claimants coming forward, representing themselves as Harrisson--desperate bidders for a chance of the Klondyke gold. They might easily have supposed this man and his quenched memory another of the same sort. Evidently if investigation was not to suffer from overgrown suspicion, only young and guileless official instinct could be trusted--plain-clothes ingénus. Dr. Conrad laughed to himself over a particularly outrageous escapade of Sally's, who, when her mother said they always sent such very young chicks of constables to Glenmoira Road in the morning, impudently ascribed them to inspector's eggs, laid overnight.

* * * * *

"My pulse--feel it!" His Goody mother greeted the doctor with a feeble voice from inarticulate lips, and a wrist outstretched. She was being moribund; to pay him out for being behindhand.

He skipped all interims, and said, with negligible inaccuracy, "It's only a quarter past."

"Don't talk, but feel!" Her failing senses could indulge a little impatience; but it was like throwing ballast out of a balloon. She meant to be all the worse directly.

Her son felt the outstretched wrist, and was relieved to find it normal--almost abnormally normal, just before lunch! But he had to pretend. A teaspoonful of brandy in half a glass of water, clearly! He knew she hated it, but she had better swallow it down. That was right! And he would hurry Mrs. Iggulden with lunch. However, Mrs. Iggulden had been beforehand, having seen her good gentleman coming and the table all laid ready, so she got the steak on, only she knew there would something happen if too much hurry and sure enough she broke a decanter. We do not like the responsibility of punctuation in this sentence.

"I thought you had forgotten me," quoth the revived Goody to her son, assisting her to lunch. But the excellent woman said me (as if it was the name of somebody else, and spelt M double E) with a compassionate moan.

Rosalind was glad to see her husband in good spirits again. He was quite like himself before that unfortunate little galvanic battery upset everything. Perhaps its effect would go off, and all he had remembered of the past grow dim again. It was a puzzle, even to Rosalind herself, that her natural curiosity about all Gerry's unknown history should become as nothing in view of the unwelcome contingencies that history might disclose. It spoke well for the happiness of the status quo that she was ready to forego the satisfaction of this curiosity altogether rather than confront its possible disturbing influences. "If we can only know nothing about it, and be as we are!" was the thought uppermost in her mind.

It certainly was a rare piece of good luck that, owing to Sally's leaving the house before Fenwick appeared, and running away to her madcap swim before he could join her and the doctor, she had just avoided seeing him during the worst of his depression. Indeed, his remark that he had not slept well seemed to account for all she had seen in the morning. And in the afternoon, when the whole party, minus the doctor, walked over to St. Egbert's Station for the honeymoon portion of it to take its departure for town, and the other three to say farewells, Fenwick was quite in his usual form. Only his wife watched for any differences, and unless it was that he gave way rather more freely than usual to the practice of walking with his arm round herself or Sally, or both, she could detect nothing. As the road they took was a quiet one, and they met scarcely a soul, no exception on the score of dignity was taken to this by Rosalind; and as for Sally, her general attitude was "Leave Jeremiah alone--he shall do as he likes." Lætitia's mental comment was that it wasn't Oxford Street this time, and so it didn't matter.

* * * * *

"I shall walk straight into papa's library," said that young married lady in answer to an inquiry from Sally, as they fell back a little to chat. "I shall just walk straight in and say we've come back."

"What do you suppose the Professor will say?"

"My dear!--it's the merest toss up. If he's got some very interesting Greek or Phoenician nonsense on hand, he'll let me kiss him over his shoulder and say, 'All right--I'm busy.' If it's only the Cosmocyclopædia work--which he doesn't care about, only it pays--he may look up and kiss me, or even go so far as to say: 'Well!--and where's master Julius?' But I don't expect he'll give any active help in the collision with mamma, which is sure to come. I rather hope she won't be at home the first time."

"Why? Wouldn't it be better to have it over and done with?" Sally always wants to clinch everything.

"Yes, of course; only the second time mamma's edge will be all taken off, and she'll die down. Besides, the crucial point is Paggy kissing her. It's got to be done, and it will be such a deal easier if I can get Theeny and Classy kissed first." Classy was the married sister, Clarissa. "After all, mamma must have got a shred of common-sense somewhere, and she must know that when things can neither be cured nor endured you have to pretend, sooner or later."

"You bottle up when it comes to that," said Sally philosophically. "But I shouldn't wonder, Tishy, if you found your Goody aggravating, too. She'll talk about haberdashers."

"Oh, my dear, haberdashers are a trifle! If that was all she might talk herself hoarse. Besides, I can stop that by the mantle department."

"What about it? Oh, I know, though!--about your being worth two guineas a week to try on. She would know you were not serious, though."

"Would she? I'm not so sure about it myself--not sure I'm not serious, I mean."

"Oh, Tishy! You don't mean you would go and try on at two guineas a week?"

"I really don't know, Sally dear. If I'm to have my husband's profession flung in my face at every turn, I may just as well have the advantage of it by a side-wind. Think what two guineas a week means! A hundred and four guineas a year--remember! guineas, not pounds. And Paggy thinks he could get it arranged for us to go out and dine together in the middle of the day at an Italian restaurant...."

"I say, what a lark!" Sally immediately warms up to the scheme. "I could come, too. Do you know, Tishy dear, I was just going to twit you with the negro and his spots. But now I won't."

* * * * *

The Julius Bradshaws must have reached home early, as our story will show later that the anticipated collision with the Dragon took place the same evening. No great matter for surprise, this, to any one who has noticed the energetic impatience for immediate town-event in folk just off a holiday. These two were too keen to grapple with their domestic problem to allow of delays. So, after getting some dinner in a hurry at Georgiana Terrace, Bayswater, they must needs cab straight away to Ladbroke Grove Road. As for what happened when they got there, we shall know as much as we want of it later. For the present our business lies with Fenwick and his wife; to watch, in sympathy with the latter, for the next development in the strange mental state of the former, and to hope with her, as it must be confessed, for continued quiescence; or, better still, for a complete return of oblivion.

It seemed so cruelly hard to Rosalind that it might not be. What had she to gain by the revival of a forgotten past--a past her own share of which she had for twenty years striven to forget? Utterly guiltless as, conceivably, she may have known herself to be, she had striven against that past as the guilty strive with the memory of a concealed crime. And here was she, at the end of this twenty years, with all she most longed for at the beginning in her possession, mysteriously attained with a thoroughness no combination of circumstances, no patience or forbearance of her own, no self-restraint or generosity of her young husband's could possibly have brought about. Think only of what we do know of this imperfect story! Conceive that it should have been possible for the Algernon Palliser of those days to know and understand it to the full; indulge the supposition, however strained it may be, that his so knowing it would not have placed him in a felon's dock for the prompt and righteous murder of the betrayer--we take the first convenient name--of the woman he loved. Convince yourself this could have been; figure to yourself a happy wedded life for the couple after Miss Sally had made her unconscious début with the supremest indifference to her antecedents; construct a hypothetical bliss for them at all costs, and then say if you can fill out the picture with a relation between Sally and her putative father to be compared for a moment to the one chance has favoured now for the stepfather and stepdaughter of our story.

Our own imagination is at fault about the would-have-beens and might-have-beens in this case. The only picture our mind can form of what would have followed a full grasp of all the facts by Algernon Palliser may be dictated or suggested by a memory of what sent Mr. Salter, of Livermore's Rents, 1808, to the hospital. Rosalind knew nothing of Mr. Salter, but she could remember well all Gerry's feats of strength in his youth--all the cracking of walnuts in his arm-joints and bending of kitchen-pokers across his neck--and also, too well, an impotence against his own anger when provoked; it had died down now to a trifle, but she could detect the trifle still. Was such an executive to be trusted not to take the law into its own hands, to fall into the grasp of an offended legislative function later--one too dull to be able to define offence so as to avoid the condemnation, now and again, of a culprit whose technical crime has the applause of the whole human race? Had the author of all her wrongs met his death at the hands of her young husband, might not this husband of her later life--beside her now--be still serving his time at the galleys, with every compulsory sharer in his condemnation thinking him a hero?

It was all so much better as it had turned out. Only, could it remain so?

At least, nothing was wrong now, at this moment. Whatever her husband had said to Vereker in that morning walk, the present hour was a breathing-space for Rosalind. The Kreutzkammer recurrence of the previous evening was losing its force for her, and there had been nothing since that she knew of. "Chaotic ideas"--the phrase he had used in the night--might mean anything or nothing.

They came back from the railway-station by what was known to them as the long short cut in contradistinction to the short short cut. The latter, Sally said, had the courage of its opinions, while the former was a time-serving cut. Could she have influenced it at the first go-off--when it originally started from the V-shaped stile your skirts stuck in, behind the Wheatsheaf--it might have mustered the resolution to go straight on, instead of going off at a tangent to Gattrell's Farm, half a mile out of the way. Was it intimidated by a statement that trespassers would be prosecuted, nailed to an oak-tree, legible a hundred years ago, perhaps, when its nails were not rust, and really held it tight--instead of, as now, merely countenancing its wish to remain from old habit? It may have been so frightened in its timid youth; but if so, surely the robust self-assertion of its straight start for Gattrell's had in it something of contempt for the poor old board, coupled with its well-known intention of turning to the left and going slap through the wood the minute you (or it) got there. It may even have twitted that board with its apathy in respect of trespassers. Had the threat ever been carried out?

The long short cut was, according to the aborigines, a goodish step longer than the road, geometrically. But there was some inner sense--moral, ethical, spiritual--somehow metaphysical or supraphysical--in which it was a short cut, for all that. The road was a dale farther, some did say, along of the dust. But, then, there was no dust now, because it was all laid. So the reason why was allowed to lapse, and the fact to take care of itself for once. Helped by an illusion that a path through an undergrowth of nut-trees and an overgrowth of oak on such a lovely afternoon as this wasn't distance at all--even when you got hooked in the brambles--and by other palliative incidents, it was voted a very short cut indeed. Certainly not too long for Rosalind's breathing-space, and had it been even a longer short cut she would have been well contented.

Every hour passed now, without a new recurrence of some bygone, was going to give her--she knew it well beforehand--a sense of greater security. And every little incident on the walk that made a change in the rhythm of event was welcome. When they paused for refreshments--ginger-beer in stone bottles--at Gattrell's, and old Mrs. Gattrell, while she undid the corks, outlined the troubles of her husband's family and her own, she felt grateful for both to have kept clear of India and "the colonies." No memories of California or the Arctic Circle could arise from Mrs. Gattrell's twin-sister Debory, who suffered from information--internal information, mind you; an explanation necessary to correct an impression of overstrain to the mind in pursuit of research. Nor from her elder sister Hannah, whose neuralgic sick headaches were a martyrdom to herself, but apparently a source of pride to her family. Of which the inflation, strange to say, was the greater because Dr. Knox was of opinion that they would yield to treatment and tonics; though the old lady herself was opposed to both, and said elder-flower-water. She was a pleasant old personage, Mrs. Gattrell, who always shone out as a beacon of robust health above a fever-stricken, paralysed, plague-spotted, debilitated, and disintegrating crowd of blood-relations and connexions by marriage. But not one of all these had ever left the soil they were born on, none of Mrs. Gattrell's people holding with foreign parts. And nothing whatever had ever taken place at St. Egbert's till the railway come; so it wasn't likely to arouse memories of the ice-fields of the northern cold or the tiger-hunts of the southern heat.

Rosalind found herself asking of each new thing as it arose: "Will this bring anything fresh to his mind, or will it pass?" The wood-path the nut-tree growth all but closed over on either side she decided was safe; it could taste of nothing but his English school-boyhood, before ever she knew him. But the sudden uprush of the covey of partridges from the stubble, and their bee-line for a haven in the next field--surely danger lay that way? Think what a shot he was in the old days! However, he only said, "Poor dears, they don't know how near the thirty-first is," and seemed to be able to know that much from past experience without discomfort at not knowing more.

When Sally proposed fortune-telling in connexion with a bona-fide gipsy woman, who looked (she said) exactly like in "Lavengro," her mother's first impulse was to try and recall if she and the Gerry of old times had ever been in contact with gipsies, authentic or otherwise, and, after decision in the negative, to feel that this wanderer was more welcome than not, as having a tendency to conduct his mind safely into new channels. Even the conclave of cows he had to disperse that they might get through a gate--cows that didn't mind how long they waited at it, having time on their hands--suggested the same kind of query. She was rapidly getting to look at everything from the point of view of what it was going to remind her husband of. She must struggle against the habit that was forming, or it would become insupportable. But then, again, the thought would come back that every hour that passed without an alarm was another step towards a safe haven; and who could say that in a week or so things might not be, at least, no worse than they were before this pestilent little galvanic battery broke in upon her peace?

The fact that he had spoken of new memories to Vereker and had not repeated them to her was no additional source of uneasiness; rather, if anything, the contrary. For she could not entertain the idea that Gerry would keep back from her anything he could tell to Vereker. What had actually happened was necessarily inconceivable by her--that a recollected recollection of his own marriage with her should be interpreted by him as a memory of a marriage with some other woman unknown, who might, for anything he knew, be still living; that his inference as to the bearing of this on his own conduct was that he should refrain, at any cost to himself, from claiming, so to speak, his own identity; should accept the personality chance had forced upon him for her sake; should even forego the treasure of her sympathy, more precious far to him than the heavy score to his credit at the banks of New York and San Francisco, rather than dig up what needs must throw doubt on the validity of their marriage, and turn her path of life, now smooth, to one of stones and thorns. For that was the course he had sketched out for himself; and had it only been possible for oblivion to draw a sharp line across the slowly reviving record, and to say to memory: "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther," Fenwick might have persevered in this course successfully till now. And then all our story would have been told--at least, as far as Rosalind and Fenwick go. And we might say farewell to them at this moment as the cows reluctantly surrender passage-way of the long short cut, and Gerry saunters on, seemingly at ease from his own mind's unwelcome activities, with Sally on one arm and his wife in the other, and Mrs. Grundy nowhere. But no conspiracies are possible to memory and oblivion. They are a couple that act independently and consult nobody's convenience but their own.

It may easily be that Rosalind, had she been mistress of all the facts and taken in the full position, would have decided to run the risks incidental to confronting her husband with his own past--taken him into her confidence and told him. With the chance in view that his reason might become unsettled from the chronic torment of constant half-revivals of memory, would it not almost be safer to face the acute convulsion of a sudden éclaircissement--to put happiness to the touch, and win or lose it all? Sally could be got out of the way for long enough to allow of a resumption of equilibrium after the shock of the first disclosure and a completely established understanding that she must not be told, come what might. Supposing that she could tell, and he could hear, the whole story of twenty years ago better than when a terrible position warped it for teller and hearer in what had since become to her an intolerable dream--supposing this done, and each could understand the other, might not the very strangeness of the fact that the small new life that played so large a part in that dream had become Sally since, and was the only means by which Sally could have been established, might not this tell for peace? Might it not even raise the question, "What does a cloud of twenty years ago matter at all?" and suggest the answer, "Nothing? For did not Sally come to us out of the cloud, and could we do without her?"

But Rosalind's half-insight into the patchwork of her husband's perceptions warranted no step so decisive. Rather, if anything, it pointed to a gradual resumption of his status quo of a few days ago. After all, had he not had (and completely forgotten) recurrences like that of the Baron and the fly-wheel? Well, perhaps the last was a shade more vivid than the others. But then see now, had he not forgotten it already to all outward seeming?

So that the minds of the two of them worked to a common end--silence. Hers in the hope that the effects of the galvanic current--if that did it--would die away and leave him rest for his; his in the fear that behind the unraised curtain that still hid his early life from himself was hidden what might become a baleful power to breed unrest for hers.

But it all depended on his own mastery of himself. Except he told it, who should know that he was Harrisson? And how he felt the shelter of the gold! Who was going to suspect that a man who could command wealth in six figures by disclosing his identity, would keep it a secret? And for his wife's sake too! A pitiful four-or five-figure man might--yes. But hundreds of thousands!--think of it!

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Chapter XXXVIII

OF AN EXPEDITION AGAINST A GOODY, AND THE WALK BACK TO LOBJOIT'S. AND THE WALK BACK AGAIN TO IGGULDEN'S. HOW FENWICK TOOK VEREKER'S CONFIDENCE BY STORM. OF A COLLIER THAT PUT TO SEA. SUCCESSFUL AMBUSCADE OF THE OCTOPUS. PROVISIONAL EQUILIBRIUM OF FENWICK'S MIND. WHY BOTHER ABOUT HORACE? WHY NOT ABOUT PICKWICK JUST AS MUCH? THE KITTEN WASN'T THERE--CERTAINLY NOT!

So it came about that during the remainder of that day and part of the next Fenwick either made no further exploration of his past; or, if he did so, concealed his discoveries. For he not only kept silence with Rosalind, but even with Vereker was absolutely reserved, never alluding to their conversation of the morning. And the doctor accepted this reserve, and asked no questions.

As for Rosalind, she was only too glad to catch at the support of the medical authority and to abstain from question or suggestion; for the present certainly, and, unless her silence--as might be--should seem to imply a motive on her part, to maintain it until her husband revived the subject by disclosing further recollections of the bygone time. Happily Sally knew nothing about it; that her mother was convinced of. And Sally wasn't likely to know anything, for Vereker's professional discretion could be relied on, even if her suspicions were excited. And, really, except that Fenwick seemed a little drowsy and reflective, and that Rosalind had a semitone of consolation in her manner towards him, there was nothing to excite suspicion.

* * * * *

After the cows--this is an expression borrowed from Sally, later in the afternoon--conversation flagged through the rest of the walk home. Except for regrets, more than once expressed, that it would be much too late for tea when we got in, and a passing word on the fact that at the seaside one got as greedy as some celebrated glutton--a Roman emperor, perhaps--very few ideas were interchanged. But a little conversation was made out of the scarcity of a good deal, for the persistent optimism of Sally recognised that it was awfully jolly saying nothing on such a lovely evening. Slight fatigue, combined with the beauty of sky and sea and distant downland, the lengthening shadows of the wheatsheaves, and the scarlet of poppies in the stubble, seemed good to justify contemplation and silence. It was an hour to caress in years to come, none the less that it was accepted as the mere routine of daily life in the short term of its existence. It was an hour that came to an end when the party arrived at the hedge of the unripe sloes that had checked the onset of Albion Villas towards the new town, and passed through the turnstile Fenwick and Vereker had passed through in the morning. Then speech came back, and each did what all folk invariably do after a long spell of silence--revealed what they were being silent about, or seemed to be. Most likely Fenwick's contribution was only a blind, as his mind must have been full of many thoughts he wished to keep to himself.

"I wonder when Paganini's young woman's row with her mother's going to come off--to-day or to-morrow?"

"I was wondering whether it would come off at all. I dare say she'll accept the inevitable." Thus Rosalind, and for our part we believe this also was not quite candid--in fact, was really suggested by her husband's remark. But Sally's was a genuine disclosure, and really showed what her mind had been running on.

"I've been meditating a Crusade," she said, with remoteness from current topics in her voice. And both her companions immediately made concessions to one that seemed to them genuine as compared with their own.

"Against whom, kitten?" said her mother.

And Fenwick reinforced her with, "Yes, who's the Crusade to be against, Sarah?"

"Against the Octopus." And Sally says this with the most perfectly unconscious gravity, as though a Crusade against an octopus was a very common occurrence in every-day life. The eyes of her companions twinkle a little interchange across her unseen, but are careful to keep anything suggesting a smile out of their voices as they apply for enlightenment.

"Because of poor Prosy," Sally explains. "You'll see now. She won't allow him to come round this evening, you see if she does!" She is so intent upon her subject-matter that they might almost have smiled aloud without detection, after all.

"When's it to come off, Sarah--the Crusade?"

"I was thinking of going round this evening if he doesn't turn up."

"Suppose we all go," Fenwick suggests. And Rosalind assents. The Crusade may be considered organized. "We'll give him till eight-forty-five," Sally says, forecasting strategy, "and then if he doesn't come we'll go."

Eight-forty-five came, but no doctor. So the Crusade came off as arranged, with the result that the Christian forces, on arriving in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, found that the Octopus responsible for the personation of the Saracens had just gone to bed. It was an ill-advised Crusade, because if the Christians had only had a little patience, the released prisoner would have looked round as soon as his janitor was asleep. As it turned out, no sooner were the visitors' voices audible than the Octopus became alive to the pleasures of society, and renounced sleep in its favour. She would slip something on and come down, and did so. Her doing so was out of keeping with the leading idea of the performance, presenting the Paynim as an obliging race; but a meek and suffering one, though it never aired its grievances. These, however, were the chief subjects of conversation during the visit, which, in spite of every failure in dramatic propriety, was always spoken of in after days as "the Crusade." It came to an end in due course, the Saracen host retiring to bed, with benedictions.

* * * * *

Vereker walked back with our friends to Mrs. Lobjoit's through the sweet night-air a considerate little shower of rain, that came down while they were sympathetically engaged, had just washed clean. Vapour-drifts that were wavering between earth and sky, and sacrificing their birthright of either cloudship or foghood, were accompanying a warm sea-wind towards the north. Out beyond, and quite clear of all responsibility for them and theirs, was a flawless heaven with the stellar and planetary universe in it, pitiless and passionless eyes perhaps--as Tennyson calls them--and strange fires; but in this case without power to burn and brand their nothingness into the visitors to St. Sennans, who laughed and talked and smoked and took no notice; and, indeed, rather than otherwise, considered that Orion's Belt and Aldebaran had been put there to make it a fine night for them to laugh and talk and smoke in.

It was pleasant to Vereker, after his walk with Fenwick in the morning, to find the latter like his usual cheerful self again. The doctor had had rather a trying time with his Goody mother, so that the day had been more one of tension than of peace, and it was a heavenly respite to him from filial duties dutifully borne, to walk home with the goddess of his paradise--the paradise that was so soon to come to an end and send him to the release of his "locum," Mr. Neckitt. Never mind. The having such a time to look back to in the future was quite as much as one general practitioner, with a duty to his mother, could in reason expect. Was Dr. Conrad aware, we wonder, how much the philosophical resignation that made this attitude of thought possible was due to the absence of any other visible favoured applicant for Miss Sally, and the certainty that he would see her once or twice a week at least after he had gone back to his prescriptions and his diary of cases?

Probably he wasn't; and when, on arriving at Lobjoit's, Fenwick announced that he didn't want to go in yet, and would accompany the doctor back to Iggulden's and take a turn round, the only misgiving that could try for an insecure foothold in the mind now given up to a delirium it called Sally was one that Fenwick might have some new painful memory to tell. But he was soon at rest about this. Fenwick wasn't going to talk about himself. Very much the reverse, if one's own reverse is some one else. He was going to talk about the doctor, into whose arm he slipped his own as soon as he had lighted his second cigar. For they had not walked quick from Iggulden's.

"Now tell me about Sir Dioscorides Nayler and the epileptiform disorders."

"Miss Sally's been telling you...."

"No, she didn't--Sally did." Both laughed. The doctor will make it Sally next time--that's understood. "You told Sally and she told me. What's the damage to be?"

"How much did Sally tell you?" The little formality comes easier to the doctor's shyness as it figures, this time, quotation-wise. It is a repeat of Fenwick's use of it.

"Sally said three thousand."

"Yes, that's what I told her. But it's not official. He may want more. He may let me have it for three. Only I don't know why I should have it for less than any one else."

"Never you mind why! That's no concern of yours, my dear boy. What you've got to think of is of yourself and Mrs. Vereker. Dioscorides will take care of himself--trust him!"

"Yes, of course, I have to think of my mother." One can hear in the speaker's voice what may be either self-reproach for having neglected this aspect of the case, or very tolerant indictment of Fenwick for having mistakenly thought he had done so.

"What's the man thinking of? Of course you have, but I didn't mean your mother. She's a dear old lady"--this came grudgingly--"but I didn't mean her. I meant the Mrs. Vereker that's to come. Your wife, dear fellow, your wife."

The way the young man flushed up, hesitated, stammered, couldn't organize a sane word, amused Fenwick intensely. Of course he was, so to speak, quite at home--understood the position thoroughly. But he wasn't going to torment the doctor. He was only making it impossible for him to avoid confession, for his own sake. He did not wait for the stammering to take form, but continued:

"I mean the young lady you told Sally about--the young lady you are hesitating to propose to because there'll be what you call complications in medicine--complications about your mamma, to put it plainly.... Oh yes, of course, Sally told me all about it directly." Vereker cannot resist a laugh, for all his embarrassment, a laugh which somehow had the image of Sally in it. "She would, you know. Sally's the sort of party that--that, if she'd been Greek, would have been the daughter of an Arcadian shepherdess and a thunderbolt."

"Of course she would. I say, Fenwick, look here...."

"Have another cigar, old man."

"No, I've smoked enough. That one's lasted all the time since we came out. Look here--what I want to say is ... well, that I was a great fool--did wrong in fact--to talk to Sally about that young lady...."

"And to that young lady about Sally," Fenwick says quietly. For half a second--such alacrity has thought--Vereker takes his meaning wrong; thinks he really believes in the other young lady. Then it flashes on him, and he knows how his companion has been seeing through him all the while. But so lovable is Fenwick, and so much influence is there in the repose of his strength, that there is no resentment on Vereker's part that he should be thus seen through. He surrenders at discretion.

"I see you know," he says helplessly.

"Know you love Sally?--of course I do! So does her mother. So does yours, for that matter. So does every one, except herself. Why, even you yourself know it! She never will know it unless she hears it on the best authority--your own, you know."

"Ought I to tell her? I know I was all wrong about that humbug-girl I cooked up to tell her about. I altogether lost my head, and was a fool."

"I can't see what end you proposed to yourself by doing it," says Fenwick a little maliciously. "If Sally had recommended you to speak up, because it was just possible the young lady might be pining for you all the time, you couldn't have asked her her name, and then said, 'That's hers--you're her!' like the fat boy in 'Pickwick.' No!--I consider, my dear boy, that you didn't do yourself any good by that ingenious fiction. You know all the while you wouldn't have been sorry to think she understood you."

"I don't know that I didn't think she did. I really don't know what I did or didn't think. I quite lost my head over it, that's the truth."

"Highly proper. Quite consistent with human experience! It's the sort of job chaps always do lose their heads over. The question now is, What are we going to do next?" Which meant what was Vereker going to do next? and was understood by his hearer in that sense. He made no answer at the moment, and Fenwick was not going to press for one.

A Newcastle collier had come in to deliver her cargo some days since, before the wind sprang up, and the coal-carts had been passing and repassing across the sands at low water; for there was a new moon somewhere in the sky when she came, as thin as a sickle, clinging tight round the business moon that saw to the spring-tides, a phantom sphere an intrepid star was daring to go close to. This brig had not been disappointing her backers, for wagers had been freely laid that she would drag her moorings in the wind, and drift. Fenwick and Vereker stopped in their walk to lean on the wooden rail above the beach that skirted the two inclines, going either way, up which the waggons had been a couple of hours ago scrambling over the shingle against time, to land one more load yet while the ebb allowed it. They could hear the yeo-yeo! of the sail-hoisters at work on the big mainsail abaft, and wondered how on earth she was going to be got clear with so little sea-way and the wind dead in shore. But they were reassured by the ancient mariner with the striped shirt, whose mission in life seemed to be to stand about and enlighten land-minds about sea-facts. The master of yander craft had doon that much afower, and he'd do it again. Why, he'd known him from three year old, the striped shirt had! Which settled the matter. Then presently the clink-clink of the windlass dragging at the anchor. They watched her in silence till, free of her moorings, any one could have sworn she would be on shore to a certainty. But she wasn't. She seemed mysteriously to be able to manage for herself, and just as a berth for the night on the shingle appeared inevitable, leaned over to the wind and crept away from the land, triumphant.

Then, the show being over, as Fenwick and Vereker turned to look the lateness of the hour in the face, and get home to bed, the latter answered the question of the former, as though he had but just asked it.

"Speak to Sally. I shall have to." And then added, with an awestruck face and bated breath: "But it's awful!" A moment after he was laughing at himself, as he said to his companion, referring to a very palpable fact, "I don't wonder I made you laugh just now."

They walked on without much said till they came to Iggulden's; when the doctor, seeing no light in the sitting-room, hoped his worthy mother had fulfilled a promise made when they came away, and gone to bed. It was then past eleven. But he was reckoning without his host.

Fenwick said to him, as they stood on Iggulden's threshold and doormat respectively--presuming rashly, on imperfect information, to delay farewells--"Now look here, Conrad, my dear boy (I like your name Conrad), don't you go and boil over to Sally to-morrow, nor next day. You'll only spoil the rest of your stay, maybe.... What! well--what I mean is that nothing I say prejudices the kitten. You'll understand that, I'm sure?"

"Perfectly. Of course, if Sally were to say she knew somebody she would like a deal better, there's no reason why she shouldn't.... I mean I couldn't complain."

"Yes--yes! I see. You'd exonerate her. Good boy! Very proper." And indeed the doctor had felt, as the words passed his lips, that he was rather a horrid liar. But the point didn't matter. Fenwick laughed it off: "Just you take my advice, and refer the matter to the kitten the last day you're here. Monday, won't it be? And don't think about it!"

"Oh no! I'm a philosophical sort of chap, I am! Never in extremes. Good-night!"

"I see. Sperat infestis metuit secundis alteram sortem bene præparatum pectus--Horace." Fenwick ran this through in a breath; and the doctor, a little hazy in school-memories of the classics, said, "What's that?" and began translating it--"The bosom well prepared for either lot, fears...." Fenwick caught him up and completed the sentence:

"Fears what is good, and hopes for what is not. Cut away to bed, old chap, and sleep sound...." Then he paused a moment, as he saw the doctor looking a question at him intently, and just about to speak it. He answered it before it came:

"No, no! Nothing more. I mean to forget all about it, and take my life as it stands. Bother Mr. Harrisson!" He dropped his voice to say this; then raised it again. "Don't you fret about me, doctor. Remember, I'm Algernon Fenwick! Good-night!"

"Good-night!" And then the doctor, with the remains of heart-turmoil in him, and a brain reeling, more or less, went up into what he conceived to be an empty dark room, and was disconcerted by an ill-used murmur in the darkness--a meek, submissive voice of one accustomed to slights:

"I told her to blow it out and go to bed. It is all--quite--right, my dear. So do not complain. Now help me with my things, and I will get to bed."

"My dear mother! I am so sorry. I had no idea you had not gone long ago!"

"My dear!--it does not matter in the least now. What is done, is done. Be careful with the grease over my work. These candles drop dreadfully, unless you hold them exactly upright. And gutter. Now give me your arm, and I will go to bed. I think I shall sleep." And the worthy woman was really--if her son could only have got his eyes freed from the scales of domestic superstition, and seen it--intensely happy and exultant at this fiendish little piece of discomfort-mongering. She had scored; there was no doubt of it. She was even turning it over in her own mind whether it would not bear repetition at a future time; and quite intended, if so, to enjoy herself over it. Now the doctor was contrite and heavy at heart at his cruel conduct; walking about--just think!--and talking over his own affairs while his self-sacrificing mother was sitting in the dark, with the lamp out! To be sure there was no visible reason why she should have had it put out, except as a picturesque and imaginative way of rubbing her altruism into its nearest victim. Unless, indeed, it was done in order that the darkened window should seem to announce to the returning truant that she had gone to bed, and to lull his mind to unconsciousness of the ambush that awaited him.

Anyhow, the doctor was so impressed with his own delinquency that he felt it would be impossible, the lamp having been put out, to take his mother into his confidence about his conversation with Fenwick. Which he certainly would have done--late as the hour was--if it had been left in. So he said good-night, and carried the chaos of his emotions away to bed with him, and lay awake with them till cock-crow.

* * * * *

As Fenwick walked back home, timing his pace by his expectation of his cigar's duration, he wondered whether, perhaps, he had not been a little rash. He felt obliged to go back on interviews with Sally, in which the doctor had been spoken of. He recalled for his justification one in particular. The family conclave at Krakatoa Villa had recurred to a remark of Rosalind's about the drawback to Vereker's practice of his bachelorhood. He was then, as it were, brought up for a second reading, and new clauses added to him containing schedules of possible wives. Fenwick had noticed, then, that Sally's assent to the insertion of any candidate's name turned on two points: one, the lady's consent being taken for granted; the other, that every young single female human creature known by name or describable by language was actually out of the question, or inadmissible in its answer. She rejected almost all applicants for the post of a doctor's wife without examining their claims, on the ground of moral or physical defect--as, for instance, you never would go and tie up poor Prosy to a wife that golloped. Sylvia Peplow, indeed! Interrogated about the nature of "golloping," Sally could go no nearer than that Miss Peplow looked as if she couldn't help it. And her sister was worse: she was perfectly pecky, and shut up with a click. And as for the large Miss Baker--why, you knew how large she was, and it would be quite ridiculous! Besides, her stupidity!

The only candidates that got the least consideration owed their success to their names or expectations. Caroline Smith had, or would have sometime, a thousand a year. But she squinted. Still, she might be thought over. Mrs. Pollicitus Biggs's cousin Isabella would have two thousand when her mother died, but the vitality of the latter was indescribable. Besides, she was just like her name, Isabella, and did her hair religiously. There was Chariclea Epimenides, certainly, who had got three thousand, and would have six more. She might be worth thinking of....

"Why don't you have him yourself, Sarah?" Fenwick had asked at this point. Rosalind had just left the room to speak to Ann. But he didn't want Sarah to be obliged to answer, so he went on: "Why are all these young ladies' incomes exactly in round thousands?"

To which Sally had replied: "They always are, when you haven't got 'em." But had fallen into contemplation, and presently said--out of the blue--"Because I'm an unsettled sort of party--a vagrant. I shouldn't do for a G.P.'s wife, thank you, Jeremiah! I should like to live in a caravan, and go about the country, and wood fires out of doors." Was it, Fenwick wondered, the gipsies they had seen to-day that had made her think of this? and then he recalled how he afterwards heard the kitten singing to herself the old ballad:

"What care I for my goose-feather bed? What care I for my money oh?"

and hearing her so sing had somehow imputed to the parade of bravado in the swing of its rhythm a something that might have belonged to a touched chord. Like enough a mistake of his, said Reason. But for all that the reminiscence played its part in soothing Fenwick's misgivings of his own rashness.

"The kitten's all right," said he to himself. "And if she doesn't want Master Conrad, the sooner he knows it the better!" But he had little doubt of the course things would take as he stopped to look at that venturesome star, that seemed to be going altogether too near the moon for safety.

In a few moments he turned again towards home. And then his mind must needs go off to the thing of all others he wished not to think of--himself. He had come to see this much clearly, that until the veil floated away from between him and his past and left the whole atmosphere transparent, there could be no certainty that a recrudescence of that past would not be fatal to his wife's happiness. And inevitably, therefore, to his own. Having once formulated the idea that for the future he was to be one person and Harrisson another, he found its entertainment in practice easier than he had anticipated. He had only to say to himself that it was for her sake that he did it, and he did not find it altogether impossible to dismiss his own identity from the phantasmagoria that kept on coming back and back before his mind, and to assign the whole drama to another person; to whom he allowed the name of Harrisson all the easier from his knowledge that it never had been really his own. Very much the easier, too, no doubt, from the sense that the function of memory was still diseased, imperfect, untrustworthy. How could it be otherwise when he still was unable to force it back beyond a certain limit? It was mainly a vision of America, and, previous to that, a mystery of interminable avenues of trees, and an inexplicable horror of a struggle with death. There he always lost himself. In the hinterland of this there was that vision of a wedding somewhere. And then bewilderment, because the image of his living wife, his very soul of the world he now dwelt in, the woman whose daughter had grown into his heart as his own--yes, not only the image, but the very name of her--had come in and supplanted that of the forgotten wife of that forgotten day. So much so that more than once, in striving to follow the clue given by that railway-carriage, his mind had involuntarily called the warm living thing that came into his arms from it "Rosey." In the face of that, what was the worth of anything he should recollect now, that he should not discard it as a mere phantasm, for her sake? How almost easy to say to himself, "that was Harrisson," and then to add, "whoever he was," and dismiss him.

Do you--you who read--find this so very difficult to understand? Can you recall no like imperfect memory of your own that, multiplied a hundredfold, would supply an analogy, a standpoint to look into Fenwick's disordered mind from?

After his delirious collision with his first vigorous revival of the past, he was beginning to settle down to face it, helped by the talisman of his love for Rosalind, whom it was his first duty to shield from whatever it should prove to hold of possible injury to her. That happy hour of the dying sunset in the shorn cornfields, with her and Sally and the sky above and the sea beyond, had gone far to soothe the perturbation of the night. And his talk of the morning with this young man he had just left had helped him strongly. For he knew in his heart he could safely go to him again if he could not bear his own silence, could trust him with whatever he could tell at all to any one. Could he not, when he was actually ready to trust him with--Sally?

So, though he was far from feeling at rest, a working equilibrium was in sight. He could acquiesce in what came back to him, as it came; need never struggle to hasten or retard it. Little things would float into his mind, like house-flies into the ray from a shutter-crack in a darkened room, and float away again uncaptured, or whizz and burr round and against each other as the flies do, and then decide--as the flies do--that neither concerns the other and each may go his way. But he was nowise bound to catch these things on the wing, or persuade them to live in peace with one another. If they came, they came; and if they went, they went.

Such a one caught his thoughts, and held them for a moment as, satisfied that astronomy would see to that star, he turned to go straight home to Lobjoit's. That would just last out the cigar. But what was it now? What was the fly that flew into his sun-ray this time, that it should make him remember a line of Horace, to be so pat with it, and to know what it meant, too?

But this fact, that he could not tell how he came to know its meaning, showed him how decisively the barrier line across the memory of his boyhood was drawn, or, it might be, his early manhood. He could not remember, properly speaking, the whole of his life in the States, but he could remember telling a man--one Larpent, a man with a club-foot, at Ontario--that he had been there over fifteen years. This man has nothing to do with this story, but he happens to serve as an illustration of the disjointed way in which small details would tell out clear against a background of confusion. Why, Fenwick could remember his face plainly--how close-shaven he was, and black over the razor-land; how his dentist had inserted an artificial tooth that didn't match, and shone out white. But as to the fifteen years he had spent in the States, that he had told Mr. Larpent of, they grew dimmer and dimmer as he tried to carry his recollection further back. Beyond them--or rather, longer ago than they, properly speaking--came that endless, intolerable labyrinth of trees, and then, earlier still, that railway-carriage. It was getting clearer; but the worst of it was that the clearer it got, the clearer grew the Rosey that came out of it. As long as that went on, there was nothing of it all he could place faith in. He had been told that no man could be convinced, by his own reason, of his own hallucination. He would supply a case to the contrary. It would amuse him one day, if ever he came to know that girl of the railway-carriage was dead, to tell Rosalind all his experiences, and how bravely he fought against what he knew to be delusion.

But he must make an effort against this sort of thing. Here was he, who had just made up his mind--so he phrased it--to remain himself, and refuse to be Harrisson, no sooner was he left alone for a few minutes than he must needs be raking up the past. And that, too, because of a line of Horace!--sound in itself, but quite cut asunder from its origin, the book he read it in, or the voice he heard read it. What did that line matter? Leave it for Mr. Harrisson in that state of pre-existence. As well make a point of recalling the provenance of any little thing that had happened in this his present life. Well, for instance, Mary and the fat boy in "Pickwick." Rosalind had read him that aloud, he knew, but he couldn't say when. Was he going to worry himself to recall that which could do him no harm to know? Surely not. And if so, why strive to bring back things better forgotten? It is useless to endeavour to make the state of Fenwick's mind, at this point of the imperfect revival of memory, appear other than incredible. A person who has had the painful experience of forgetting his own name in a dream would perhaps understand it best. Or, without going so far, can no help be got towards it from our frequent certainties about some phrase (for instance) that we think we cannot possibly forget? about some date that we believe no human power will ever obliterate? And in five minutes--gone--utterly gone! Truly, there is no evidence but a man's own word for what he does or does not, can or cannot, recollect.

* * * * *

"I say, Rosey, when was it you read to me about Mary and the fat boy in 'Pickwick'?" Fenwick, having suggested a doubt to himself about his power to recall what he supposed to have happened recently, had, of course, set about doing it directly. His question was asked of his wife as he came into her bedroom on his return. He mounted the stairs singing to himself,

"Que nous mangerons Marott-e, Bec-à-bec et toi et moi,"

till he came in to where Rosalind was sitting reading, with her wonderful hair combed free--probably by Sally for a treat. Then he asked his question rather suddenly, and it made her start.

"I was in the middle of my book, and you made me jump." He gave her a kiss for apology. "What's the question? When did I read to you about Mary and the fat boy? I couldn't say. I feel as if I had, though."

"Was it out in the garden at K. Villa? It wasn't here." He usually called Krakatoa "K." for working purposes.

"No, it certainty wasn't here. It must have been at home, only I can't recollect when. Ask Sally."

"The kitten wasn't there."

"She would know, though. She always knows. She's not asleep yet ... Sallykin!" The young person is on the other side of a mere wooden partition, congenial to the architecture of Lobjoit's, and her reply conveys the idea of a speaker in bed who hasn't moved to answer.

"What? Be quick. I'm going to sleep."

"I'm so sorry, chick. When was it I read to this man Mary and the fat boy in 'Pickwick'?"

"How should I know? Not when I was there."

"All right, Sarah." Thus Fenwick, to whom Sarah responds:

"Good-night, Jeremiah. Go to bed, and don't keep decent Christian people awake at this hour of the night. Take mother's book away, and cut it."

Rosalind closes her book and says: "I don't know, darling, if Sally doesn't. Why do you want to know?"

"Couldn't say. It crossed my mind. I know the kitten wasn't there, though. Good-night, love.... Oh yes, I shall sleep to-night. Ta, ta, Sarah--pleasant dreams!"

But he had not reached the door when the voice of Sarah came again, with the implication of a mouth that had come out into the open.

"Stop, Jeremiah!" it said. "It wasn't at K. Villa."

"Why not, chick?"

"Because Pickwick's lost! It was lent to those impossible people at Turnham Green, and they stole it. I know they did. Name like Marylebone."

"The Haliburtons? Why, that's ever so long ago." Thus Rosalind.

"Of course it is. It's been gone ages. I'm going to sleep. Good-night!" And Jeremiah said good-night once more and departed.

Sally didn't go straight to sleep, but she made a start on her way there. It was not a vigorous start, for she had hardly begun upon it when she desisted, and sat up in bed and listened.

"What's that, mother? Nothing wrong, is there?"

"No, darling child, what should be wrong? Go to sleep."

"I thought I heard you gasp, or snuffle, or sigh, or sob, or click in your throat. That's all. Sure you didn't?"

"Quite sure. Now, do be a reasonable kitten, and go to sleep; I shall be in bed in half-a-second."

And Sally subsides, but first makes a stipulation: "You will sleep in your hair, mother darling, won't you? Or, at least, do it up, and not that hateful nightcap?"

But though Rosalind felt conscientiously able to disclaim any of the sounds Sally had described, something audible had occurred in her breathing. Sally's first word had gone nearest, but it was hardly a full-grown gasp.

Her husband's question about "Pickwick" had scarcely taken her attention off an exciting story-climax, and she really did want to know why the Archbishop turned pale as death when the Countess kissed him. Gerry was looking well and cheerful again, and there was nothing to connect his inquiry with any reminiscence of "B.C." So, as soon as he had gone, she reopened her book--not without a mental allusion to a dog in Proverbs--and went on where she had left off. The writer had not known how to manage his Archbishop and Countess, and the story went flat and slushy like an ill-whipped zabajone. She put the book aside, and wondered whether "Pickwick" really had been alienated by the impossible Haliburtons; sat thinking, but only of the thing of now--nothing of buried records.

So she sat, it might be for two minutes. Then, quite suddenly, she had bitten her lip and her brows had wrinkled. And her eyes had locked to a fixed look that would stay till she had thought this out. So her face said, and the stillness of her hand.

For she had suddenly remembered when and where it was she had read to that man about Mary and the fat boy. It was in the garden at her mother's twenty-two years ago. She remembered it well now, and quite suddenly. She could remember how Gerry, young-man-wise, had tried to utilise Thackeray to show his greater knowledge of the world--had flaunted Piccadilly and Pall Mall before the dazzled eyes of an astonished suburban. She could remember how she read it aloud to him, because, when he read over her shoulder, she always turned the page before he was ready. And his decision that Dickens's characters were never gentlemen, and her saying perhaps that was why he was so amusing. And then how he got the book from her and went on reading while she went away for her lawn-tennis shoes, and when she came back found he had only two more pages to read, and then he would come and play.

But it spoke well for her husband's chances of a quiet time to-night that he should hold this memory in his mind, and yet be secure against a complete resurrection of the past. Nothing else might grow from it. He evidently thought the reading had been at Shepherd's Bush. He would hardly have said, "the kitten wasn't there," unless his ideas had been glued to that spot. But then--and Rosalind's mind swam to think of it--how very decisively the kitten was "not there" in that other garden two-and-twenty years ago.

It was at that moment the gasp, or sigh, or sob, or whatever it was, awoke Sally. Her mother had been strong against the mere memory of the happy hour of thoughtless long ago; but then, this that was to come--this thing the time was thoughtless of! Was it not enough to force a gasp from self-control itself? a cry from any creature claiming to be human? "The kitten wasn't there!" No, truly she was not.

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Chapter XXXIX

HOW MEMORY CREPT BACK AND BACK, AND FENWICK KEPT HIS OWN COUNSEL. ROSALIND NEED NEVER KNOW IT. OF A JOLLY BIG BLOB OF MELTED CANDLE, AND SALLY'S HALF-BROTHER. OF FENWICK'S IMPROVED GOOD SPIRITS

That was a day of many little incidents, and a fine day into the bargain. Perhaps the next day was helped to be a flat day by the barometer, which had shown its usual untrustworthiness and gone down. The wind's grievance--very perceptible to the leeward of keyholes and window-cracks--may have been against this instability. It had been looking forward to a day's rest, and here this meteorology must needs be fussing. Neptune on the contrary was all the fresher for his half-holiday, and was trotting out tiny white ponies all over his fields, who played bo-peep with each other in and out of the valleys of the plough-land. But they were grey valleys now, that yesterday were smiling in the sun. And the sky was a mere self-coloured sky (a modern expression, as unconvincing as most of its congeners), and wanted to make everything else as grey as itself. Also there came drifts of fine rain that wetted you through, and your umbrella wasn't any good. So a great many of the visitors to St. Sennans thought they would stop at home and get those letters written.

Sally wouldn't admit that the day was flat per se, but only that it had become so owing to the departure of Lætitia and her husband. She reviewed the latter a good deal, as one who had recently been well under inspection and had stood the test. He was really a very nice fellow, haberdasher or no, wasn't he, mother? To which Rosalind replied that he was a very nice fellow indeed, only so quiet. If he had had his violin with him, he would have been much more perceptible. But she supposed it was best to travel with it as little as possible. For it had been decided, all things considered, that the precious Strad should be left locked up at home. "It's got an insurance policy all to itself," said Sally, "for three hundred pounds." She was quite awestruck by the three hundred golden sovereigns which these pounds would have been if they had had an existence of their own off paper.

"You ought to have an insurance policy all to yourself, Sarah," said Fenwick. "Only I don't believe any office would accept you. Fancy your swimming out like that yesterday! How far did you go?"

"Round the buoy and aback again. I say, Jeremiah, if ever I get drowned, mind you rush to the bathing-machine and see if there's a copy of 'Ally Sloper' or 'Tit-Bits'. Because there'd be fifty pounds for each. Think of that!" Sally is delighted with these sums, too, to the extent of quite losing sight of the sacrifice necessary for their acquisition.

"Two whole fifties!" Fenwick says, adding after consideration: "I think we had sooner keep our daughter, eh, Rosey?" And Rosalind agreed. Only she really was a shocking madcap, the kitten!

Had some flavour of Fenwick's mental history got in the air, that Sally, presumably with no direct information about its last chapter, should say to him suddenly: "It is such a puzzle to me, Jeremiah, that you've never recollected the railway-carriage"? He was saved from telling fibs in reply--for he had recollected the railway-carriage, and left it, as it were, for Mr. Harrisson--by Sally continuing: "When you were Mr. Fenwick, and I wasn't at liberty to kiss you." She did so to illustrate.

"I don't see how I could reasonably have resented your kissing me, Sarah. And I'm Mr. Fenwick now."

"On the contrary, you're Jeremiah. But if you were he ever so, I'm puzzled why Mr. Fenwick now can't remember Mr. Fenwick then."

"He can't, Sarah dear. He can no more remember Mr. Fenwick then than if no such person had ever existed." It was a clever equivocation, for though he had so far made nothing of the name on his arm, he was quite clear he came back to England Harrisson. His gravity and sadness as he said it may have been not so much duplicity as a reflection from his turgid current of thought of the last two days. It imposed on Sally, who decided in her own mind on changing the topic as soon as she could do it without a jerk. Meanwhile, a stepping-stone was available--extravagant treatment of the subject with a view to help from laughter.

"I wonder what Mr. Fenwick then would have thought if I had kissed him in the railway-carriage."

"He'd have thought you must be Sally, only he hadn't noticed it. He wouldn't have made a rumpus on high moral grounds, I'm sure. But I don't know about the old cock that talked about the terms of the Company's charter...."

"Hullo!" Sally interrupts him blankly. He had better have let it alone. But it wouldn't do to admit anything.

"What's 'hullo,' Sarah?"

"See how you're recollecting things! Jeremiah's recollecting the railway-carriage, mother--the electrocution-carriage."

"Are you, darling?" Rosalind, coming behind his chair, puts her hands round his neck. "What have you recollected?"

"I don't think I've recollected anything the kitten hasn't told me," says Fenwick dreamily. But Sally is positive she never told him anything about the terms of the Company's charter.

Rosalind adheres to her policy of keeping Sally out of it as much as possible. In this case a very small fib indeed serves the purpose: "You must have told him, chick; or perhaps I repeated it. I remember your telling me about the elderly gentleman who was in a rage with the Company." Sally looked doubtful, but gave up the point.

Nevertheless, Fenwick felt certain in his own heart that "the terms of the Company's charter" was a bit of private recollection of his own. And Rosalind had never heard of it before. But it was true she had heard of the elderly gentleman. Near enough!

* * * * *

As to the crowd of memories that kept coming, some absolutely clear, some mere phantoms, into the arena of Fenwick's still disordered mind, they would have an interest, and a strong one, for this story if its object were the examination of strange freaks of memory. But the only point we are nearly concerned with is the rigid barrier drawn across the backward pathway of his recollection at some period between ten and fifteen years ago. Till this should be removed, and the dim image of his forgotten marriage should acquire force and cohesion, he and his wife were safe from the intrusion of their former selves on the scene of their present happiness--safe possibly from a power of interference it might exercise for ill--safe certainly from risk of a revelation to Sally of her mother's history and her own parentage--but safe at a heavy cost to the one of the three who alone now held the key to their disclosure.

However vividly Fenwick had recalled the incidents of his arrival in England, and however convinced he was that no part of them was mere dream, they all belonged for him to that buried Harrisson whose identity he shrank from taking on himself--would have shrunk from, at the cost that was to be paid for it, had the prize of its inheritance been ten times as great. Still, one or two connecting links had caught on either side, the chief one being Sally, who had actually spoken with him whilst still Harrisson--although it must be admitted she had not kissed him--and the one next in importance, the cabman. The pawnbroker made a very bad third--in fact, scarcely counted, owing to his own moroseness or reserve. But the cabman! Why, Fenwick had it all now at his fingers' ends. He could recall the start from New York, the wish to keep the secret of his gold-mining success to himself on the ship, and his satisfaction when he found his name printed with one s in the list of cabin passengers. Then a pleasant voyage on a summer Atlantic, and that nice young American couple whose acquaintance he made before they passed Sandy Hook, every penny of whose cash had been stolen on board, and how he had financed them, careless of his own ready cash. And how then, not being sure if he should go to London or to Manchester, he decided on the former, and wired his New York banker to send him credit, prompt, at the bank he named in London; and then Livermore's Rents, 1808, and the joy of the cabman; and then the Twopenny Tube; and then Sally. He tried what he could towards putting in order what followed, but could determine nothing except that he stooped for the half-crown, and something struck him a heavy blow. Thereupon he was immediately a person, or a confusion, sitting alone in a cab, to whom a lady came whom he thought he knew, and to this lady he wanted to say, "Is that you?" for no reason he could now trace, but found he could scarcely articulate.

Recalling everything thus, to the full, he was able to supply links in the story that we have found no place for so far. For instance, the loss of a small valise on the boat that contained credentials that would have made it quite unnecessary for him to cable to New York for credit, and also an incident this reminded him of--that he had not only parted with most of his cash to the young Americans, but had given his purse to the lady to keep her share of it in, saying he had a very good cash pocket, and would have plenty of time to buy another, whereas they were hurrying through to catch the tidal boat for Calais. This accounted for that little new pocket-book without a card in it that had given no information at all. He could remember having made so free with his cards on the boat and in the train that he had only one left when he got to Euston.

He found himself, as the hours passed, better and better able to dream and speculate about the life he now chose to imagine was Harrisson's property, not his; and the more so the more he felt the force of the barrier drawn across the earlier part of it. Had the barrier remained intact, he might ultimately have convinced himself, for all practical purposes, that Harrisson's life was all dream. Yes, all a dream! The cold and the gold of the Klondyke, the French Canadians at Ontario, four years on a cattle-ranch in California, five of unsuccessful attempts to practise at the American Bar--all, all a dream of another man named Harrisson, dreamed by Algernon Fenwick, that big hairy man at the wine-merchant's in Bishopsgate, who has a beautiful wife and a daughter who swims like a fish. One of the many might-have-beens that were not! But a decision against its reality demanded time, and his revival of memory was only forty-eight hours old so far.

Of course, he would have liked, of all things, to make full confession, and talk it all out--this quasi-dream--to Rosalind; but he could not be sure how much he could safely bring to light, how much would be best concealed. He could not run the slightest risk when the thing at stake was her peace of mind. No, no--Harrisson be hanged! Him and his money, too.

So, though things kept coming to his recollection, he could hold his peace, and did so. There was nothing to come--not likely to be--that could unsay that revelation that he had been a married man, and did not know of his wife's death; not even that he and she had been divorced, which would have been nearly as bad. He knew the worst of it, at any rate, and Rosalind need never know it if he kept it all to himself, best and worst.

So that day passed, and there was nothing to note about it, unless we mention that Sally was actually kept out of the Channel by Neptune's little white ponies aforesaid, which spoiled the swimming water--though, of course, it wasn't rough--backed by the fact that these little sudden showers wetted you through, right through your waterproof, before you knew where you were. Dr. Conrad came in as usual in the evening, reporting that his mother was "rather better." It was a discouraging habit she had, when she was not known to have been any worse than usual. This good lady always caught Commiseration napping, if ever that quality took forty winks. The doctor was very silent this evening, imbibing Sally without comment. However, St. Sennans was drawing to a close for all others. That was enough to account for it, Sally thought. It was the last day but one, and poor Prosy couldn't be expected to accept her own view--that the awful jolliness of being back at Krakatoa Villa would even compensate--more than compensate--for the pangs of parting with the Saint. Sally's optimism was made of a stuff that would wash, or was all wool.

According to her own account, she had spent the whole day wondering whether the battle between Tishy and her mother had come off. She said so last thing of all to her mother as she decanted the melted paraffin of a bedroom candle whose wick, up to its neck therein, was unable to find a scope for its genius, and yielded only a spectral blue spark that went out directly if you carried it. Tilted over, it would lick in the end--this was Sally's testimony; and if you dropped the grease on the back of the soap-dish and thickened it up to a good blob, it would come off click when it was cold, and not make any mess at all.

"Yes, I've been wondering all day long," said she. "How I should enjoy being there to see! How freezing and dignified the Dragon will be! Mrs. Sales Wilson! Or perhaps she'll flare. (I wish this wick would; and it's such disgraceful waste of good candle!)"

"I do think, kitten, you're unkind to the poor lady. Just think how she must have dreamed about the splendid match her handsome daughter was going to make! And, you know, it is rather a come down...."

"Yes, of course it's a come down. But I don't pity the Dragon one bit. She should have thought more of Tishy's happiness, and less of her grandeur. (It's just beginning; the flame will go white directly.)"

"She'd got some one else in view then?" Rosalind was quickly perceptive about it.

"Oh yes; don't you know? Sir Penderfield. (That'll do now, nicely; there's the white flame!) Sir Oughtred Penderfield. He's a Bart., of course. But he's a horror, and they say his father was even worse. Like father, like son! And the Dragon wanted Tishy to accept him."

At the name Rosalind shivered. The thought that followed it sent a knife-cut to her heart. This man that Sally had spoken of so unconsciously was her brother--at least, he was brother enough to her by blood to make that thought a blade to penetrate the core of her mother's soul. It was a case for her strength to show itself in--a case for nettle-grasping with a vengeance. She would grasp this nettle directly; but oh, for one moment--only one moment--just to be a little less sick with the slice of the chill steel! just to quench the tremor she knew would come with her voice if she tried now to say, "What was the name? Tishy's prétendu's, I mean; not his father's."

But she could take the whole of a moment, and another, for that matter. So she left her words on her tongue's tip to say later, and felt secure that Sally would not look up and see the dumb white face she herself could see in the mirror she sat before. For, of course, she saw Sally's reflection, too, its still thoughtful eyelids half shrouded in a broken coil of black hair their owner's pearly teeth are detaining an end of, to stop it falling in the paraffin she is so intent on, as she watches it cooling on the soap-dish.

"I've made it such a jolly big blob it'll take ever so long to cool. You can, you know, if you go gently. Only then the middle stops soft, and if you get in a hurry it spoils the clicket." But it is hard enough now to risk moving the hair over it, and Sally's voice was free to speak as soon as her little white hand had swept the black coils back beyond the round white throat. Mrs. Lobjoit's mirror has its defects apart from some of the quicksilver having been scratched off; but Rosalind can see the merpussy's image plain enough, and knows perfectly well that before she looks up she will reap the harvest of happiness she has been looking forward to. She will "clicket" off the "blob" with her finger.

The moment of fruition comes, and a filbert thumbnail spuds the hardened lozenge off the smooth glaze. "There!" says Sally, "didn't I tell you? Just like ice.... What, mother?" For her mother's question had been asked, very slightly varied, in a nettle-grasping sense. She has had time to think.

"What was Tishy's man's name--the other applicant? Christian name, I mean; not his father's."

"Sir Oughtred Penderfield. Why?"

"I remember there was a small boy in India, twenty-two years ago, named Penderfield. Is Oughtred his only name?" The nettle-grasping there was in this! Rosalind felt consoled by her own strength.

"Can't say. He may have a dozen. Never seen him. Don't want to! But his hair's as black as mine, Tishy says.... I say, mother, isn't it deliciously smooth?" But this refers to the paraffin lozenge, not to the hair.

"Yes, darling. Now I want to get to bed, if you've no objection."

"Certainly, mother darling; but say I'm right about the Dragon and Sir Penderfield. Because I am, you know."

"Of course you are, chick. Only you never told me about him; now, did you?"

"Because I was so honourable. It was a secret. Very well, good-night, then.... Oh, you poor mother! how cold you are, and I've been keeping you up! Good-night!"

And off went Sally, leaving her mother to reason with herself about her own unreasonableness. After all, what was there in the fact that the little chap she remembered, seven years old, at the Residency at Khopal twenty odd years ago had grown up and inherited his father's baronetcy? What was there in this to discompose and upset her, to make her breath catch and her nerves thrill? A longing came on her that Gerry should not look in to say good-night till she was in a position to refuse interviewing on the score of impending sleep. She made a dash for bed, and got the light out, out-generalling him by perhaps a minute.

What could she expect? Not that little Tamerlane, as his father called him, should die just to be out of her path. It was no fault of his that he was his father's son, with--how could she doubt after what Sally had just said?--the curse of his father's form of manhood or beasthood upon him. And yet, might it not have been better that he should have died, the innocent child she knew him, than live to follow his father's footsteps? Better, best of all that the whole evil brood should perish and be forgotten.... Stop!

For the thought she had framed caught her breath and held it, caught her by the heart and checked its beating, caught her by the brain and stopped its thinking; and she was glad when her husband's voice found her, dumb and stunned in the silence, and brought a respite to the unanswerable enigma she was face to face with.

"Hullo! light out already? Beg your pardon, darling. Good-night!"

"I wasn't asleep." So he came in and said good-night officially and departed. His voice and his presence had staved off a nightmare idea that was on the watch to seize on her--how if chance had brought Sally across this unsuspected relation of hers, and events had forced a full declaration of their kinship? Somnus jumped at the chance given by its frustration; the sea air asserted itself, and went into partnership with him, and Rosalind's mind was carried captive into dreamland.

But not before she had heard her husband stop singing to himself a German student's song as he closed his door on himself for the night.

"War ich zum grossen Herrn geboren, wie Kaiser Maximilian...."

There could be no further unwelcome memories there, thank Heaven! No mind oppressed by them could possibly sing "Kram-bam-bambuli, krambam-bu-li!"

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Chapter XL

BATHING WEATHER AGAIN, AND A LETTER FROM TISHY BRADSHAW. THE TRIUMPH OF ORPHEUS. BUT WAS IT EURYDICE OR THE LITTLE BATTERY? THE REV. MR. HERRICK. OF A REVERIE UNDER A BATHING-MACHINE, AND OF GWENDOLEN'S MAMMA'S CONNECTING-LINK. OF DR. CONRAD'S MAMMA'S DONKEY-CHAIR, AND HIS GREAT-AUNT ELIZA. HOW SALLY AND HE STARTED FOR THEIR LAST WALK AT ST. SENNANS

The next day the morning was bright and the sea was clear of Poseidon's ponies. They had gone somewhere else. Therefore, it behooved Mrs. Lobjoit to get breakfast quick, because it was absurd to expect anybody to go in directly after, and the water wouldn't be good later than half-past ten. Which Sally, coming downstairs at eight, impressed on Mrs. Lobjoit, who entered her own recognisances that it should appear as by magic the very minute your mamma came down. For it is one of the pleasures of anticipation-of-a-joy-to-come to bring about its antecedents too soon, and so procure a blank period of unqualified existence to indulge Hope in without alloy. Even so, when true prudence wishes to catch a train, she orders her cab an hour before, and takes tickets twenty minutes before, and arrives on the platform eighteen minutes before there is the slightest necessity to do so; and then she stands on the said platform and lives for the train that is to be, and inquires of every guard, ticket-taker, and pointsman with respect to every linear yard of the platform edge, whether her train is going to come up there; and they ask each other questions, and give prismatic information; and then the train for Paradise (let us say) comes reluctantly backwards into the station with friends standing on its margin, and prudence seizes her valise and goes at a hand-gallop to the other end, where the _n_th class is, and is only just in time to get a corner seat.

So, though there was no fear of the tide going out as fast as the train for Paradise, Sally, relying on Mrs. Lobjoit, who had become a very old friend in eight weeks, felt she had done well to be beforehand, and, as breakfast would be twenty minutes, sat down to write a letter to Tishy. She wrote epistle-wise, heedless of style and stops, and as her mother was also twenty minutes--we are not responsible for these expressions--she wrote a heap of it. Then events thickened, as Fenwick, returning from an early dip, met the postman outside, and came in bearing an expected letter which Sally pounced upon.

"All about the row!" said she, attacking an impregnable corner of the envelope with a fork-point, in a fever of impatience to get at the contents. "Hang these envelopes! There, that's done it! Whatever they want to sticky them up so for I can't imagine...."

"Get your breakfast, kitten, and read it after."

"I dare say. Catch me! No, I'm the sort that never waits for anything.... No, mummy darling; it shan't get cold. I can gormandize and read aloud both at once."

But she doesn't keep her promise, for she dives straight into an exploration ahead, and meanly says, "Just half a minute till I see what's coming," or, "Only to the end of this sentence," and also looks very keen and animated, and throws in short notes of exclamation and well's and there's and think of that's till Fenwick enters a protest.

"Don't cheat, Sarah!" he says. "Play fair! If you won't read it aloud yourself, let somebody else."

"There's the first sheet to keep you quiet, Jeremiah!" Who, however, throws it over to Rosalind, who throws it back with a laugh.

"What a couple of big babies you two are!" she exclaims. "As if I couldn't possess my soul in peace for five minutes! Do put the letter by till you've had your breakfasts."

But this course was not approved, and the contents of Lætitia's epistle came out by fits and jerks and starts, and may be said to have been mixed with tea and coffee and eggs and bacon and toast. Perhaps we had better leave these out, and give the letter intact. Here it is:

"DEAREST SALLY,

"I am going to keep my promise, and write you a long letter at once, and tell you all about our reception at home. You will say it wasn't worth writing, especially as you will be back on Monday. However, a promise is a promise!

"We got to Victoria at seven, and were not so very late considering at G. Terrace; but when we had had something to eat I propounded my idea I told you of, that we should just go straight on, and beard mamma in her own den, and have it out. I knew I shouldn't sleep unless we did. Paggy said, 'Wouldn't it do as well if he called there to-morrow for the Strad--which we had left behind last time as a connecting-link to go and fetch away--and me to meet him as he came from the shop?' But surprise-tactics were better--I knew they would be--and now Paggy admits I was right.

"Of course, Thomas stared when he saw who it was, and was going to sneak off without announcing us, and Fossett, who just crossed us in the passage, was perfectly comic. Pag said afterwards she was bubbling over with undemonstrativeness, which was clever for him. I simply said to Thomas that I thought he had better announce us, as we weren't expected, and he asked who he was to announce, miss! Actually, I was rather relieved when Pag said, 'Say Mr. and Mrs. Julius Bradshaw.' I should have laughed, I know. Thomas looked a model of discretion that wouldn't commit itself either way, and did as he was bid in an apologetic voice; but he turned round on the stairs to say to me, 'I suppose you know, msam, there's two ladies and a gentleman been dining here?' Because he began miss and ended ma'am, and then turned scarlet. Pag said after he thought Thomas wanted to caution us against a bigamist mamma was harbouring.

"Papa was very nice, really. His allusion to our little escapade was the only one made, and might have meant nothing at all. 'Well, you're a nice couple of people, upon my word!' and then, seeing that mamma remained a block (which she can), he introduced Paggy to one of the two ladies as 'My son-in-law, Mr. Julius Bradshaw.' I'm sure mamma gave a wooden snort and was ashamed of it before visitors, because she did another rather more probable one directly after, and pretended it was only that sort. Really, except a peck for me and saying howd and nothing more to Paggy, she kept herself to herself. But it didn't matter, because of what happened. Really, it quite made me jump--I mean the way the lady Pag was introduced to rushed into his arms. I wasn't sure I hadn't better take him away at once. She was a celebrated German pianiste that had accompanied him in Paris. Mamma was at school with her at Frankfort. She had been inconsolable at the disappearance of the great Carissimi, whose playing of the Kreutzer was the only perfectly sympathetic one she had ever met. Was she never to play it with him again? Alas, no! for she was off to Vienna to-morrow, and then to New York, and if the ship went down she would never play the Kreutzer with Signore Carissimi again!

"I saw papa's eye looking mischievous, and then he pointed to the Strad, where it was lying on the piano--locked up safe; we saw to that--and said there was Paganini's fiddle, why not play the Cruet-stand, or whatever you called it, now? Mamma found her voice, but lost her judgment, for she tried to block the performance on a fibby ground. Think how late it was, and how it would be keeping Madame von Höfenhoffer! She put her head in the lion's mouth there, for the Frau immediately said she would play all night rather than lose a note of Signore Carissimi. The other two went, and nobody wanted them. I've forgotten the woman's second husband's name--he's dead--but her son's the man I told you about. Of course, he hadn't expected to meet me, and I hope he felt like a fool. I was so glad it wasn't him, but Paggy. They played right through the Kreutzer, and didn't want the music, which couldn't be found, and then did bits again, and it was absolutely glorious. Even mamma (she's fond of music--it's her only good quality--and where should I get mine from if she wasn't?) couldn't stop quite stony, though she did her best, I promise you. As for papa, he was chuckling so over mamma's dilemma--because she wanted to trample on Paggy, and it was a dilemma--that he didn't care how long it went on. And do you know, dear, it did go on--one thing after another, that Frau glued to the clavier like a limpet not detachable without violence--till nearly one in the morning, having begun at ten about! And there was papa and Egerton and Theeny all sniggering at mamma, I know, in secret, and really proud of the connexion, if the truth were known. Mamma tried to get a little revenge by saying to me freezingly when the Höfenhoffer had gone: 'I suppose you are going home with Mr. Bradshaw, Lætitia? Good-night.' And then she said goodn to Paggy just as she had said howd. I thought Paggy behaved so nicely. However, I'll tell you all about that on Monday.

"Papa was very nice--came out on the doorstep to say good-night, and, do you know--it really is very odd; it must be the sea air--papa said to Paggy as we were starting: 'How's the head--the nerves, you know--eh, Master Julius?' And actually Paggy said: 'Why, God bless my soul, I had forgotten all about them!' Oh, Sally darling, just think! Suppose they got well, and all because I treated him to a honeymoon! Oh, my gracious, what a long letter!"

"There now! that is a letter and a half. 'With love from us both,' mine affectionately. And twelve pages! And Tishy's hand's not so large, neither, as all that." This is Sally, as epilogue; but her mother puts in a correction:

"It's thirteen pages. There's a bit on a loose page you haven't read." Sally has seen that, and it was nothing--so she says; but Fenwick picks it up and reads it aloud:

"P.S.--Just a line to say I've remembered that name. She's Herrick--married a parson in India soon after her Penderfield husband died. She's great on reformatories."

Sally reread her letter with a glow of interest on her face and a passing approval or echo now and then. She noticed nothing unusual in either her mother or her stepfather; but she did not look up, so absorbed was she.

Had she done so she might have wondered why her mother had gone so pale suddenly, and why there should be that puzzled absent look on the handsome face her eyes remained fixed on across the table; but her own mind was far away, deep in her amusement at her friend's letter, full of her image of the disconcerted Dragon and the way Paganini and Beethoven in alliance had ridden rough-shod over Mrs. Grundy and social distinctions. She saw nothing, and finished a cup of coffee undisturbed, and asked for more.

Fenwick, caught by some memory or association he could not define or give its place to, for the moment looked at neither of his companions. Rosalind, only too clear about all the postscript of the letter had brought before her own mind, saw reason to dread its effect on his. The linking of the name of Penderfield and that of the clergyman who had married them at Umballa--a name that, two days since, had had a familiar sound to him when she incautiously uttered it--was using Suggestion to bait a trap for Memory. She felt she was steering through shoal-waters perilously near the wind; but she made no attempt to break his reverie. She might do as much harm as good. She only watched his face, feeling its contrast to that of the absorbed and happy merpussy, rejoicing in the fortunate outcome of her friend's anxieties.

It was a great relief when, with a deep breath and a shake, akin to a horse's when the flies won't take a hint, Fenwick flung off the oppression, whatever it was, and came back into the living world on a stepping-stone of the back-talk.

"Well done, Paganini! Nothing like it since Orpheus and Eurydice--only this time it was Proserpine, not Pluto, that had to be put to sleep.... What's the matter, darling? Anything wrong?"

"Nothing at all. I was looking at you."

"Well, I'm all right!" And Sally looked up from her letter for a moment to say, "There's nothing the matter with Jeremiah," and went on reading as before. Sally's attitude about him always implied a kind of proprietorship, as in a large, fairly well-behaved dog. Rosalind felt glad she had not looked at her.

Presently Fenwick said: "Now, who's coming for a walk with me?" But Sally was off directly to find the Swiss girl she sometimes bathed with, and Rosalind thought it would be nice in a sheltered place on the beach. She really wanted to be alone, and knew the shortest way to this was to sit still, especially in the morning; but Gerry had better get Vereker to go for a walk. Perhaps she would look in at his mother's later. So Fenwick, after a customary caution to Sally not to drown herself, went away to find Conrad, as he generally called him now.

Rosalind was shirking a problem she dared not face from a cowardly conviction of its insolubility. What would she do if Gerry should, without some warning, identify her? She had to confess to herself that she had no clue at all to the effect it would have, coming suddenly, on him. She could at least imagine aspects, attitudes, tones of voice for him if it came slowly; but she could not supply any image of him, under other circumstances, not more or less founded on her recollections of twenty years ago. Might she not lose him again, as she lost him then? She must get nearer to safety than she was now. Was she not relying on the house not catching fire instead of negotiating insurance policies or providing fire extinguishers?

She would go and sit under the shelter of one of the many unemployed machines--for only a few daring spirits would follow Sally's example to-day--and try to think it out. Just a few instructions to Mrs. Lobjoit, and a word or two of caution to Gerry not to fall over cliffs, or to get run over at level-crossings or get sunstrokes, or get cold, etc., and she would fall back on her own society and think....

Yes, that was the question! Might she not lose him again? And if she did, how live without him?... Oh yes, she would be no worse off than before, in a certain sense. She would have Sally still ... but....

Which would be the worse? The loss of the husband whom every day taught her to love more dearly, or the task of explaining the cause of her loss to Sally? The one she fixed her mind on always seemed intolerable. As for the other contingencies--difficulties of making all clear to friends, and so forth--let them go; they were not worth a thought. But she must be beforehand, and know how to act, how to do her best to avert both, if the thing she dreaded came to pass....

There now! Here she was settled under the lee of a machine--happily the shadow-side, for the sun was warm--and the white foam of the undertow was guilty of a tremendous glare--the one the people who can't endure the seaside get neuralgia from--and Sally was going to come out of the second machine directly in the Turkey-twill knickers, and find her way through the selvage-wave and the dazzle, or get knocked down and have to try back. Surely Rosalind, instead of saying over and over again that she must be ready to meet the coming evil, possibly close at hand, ought to make a serious effort to become so. She found herself, even at this early hour of the day, tired with the strain of a misgiving that an earthquake was approaching; and as those who have lived through earthquakes become unstrung at every slightest tremor of the earth's crust beneath them, so she felt that the tension begun with that recurrence of two days ago had grown and grown, and threatened to dominate her mind, to the exclusion of all else. Every little thing, such as the look on her husband's face half an hour ago, made her say to herself, as the earthquake-haunted man says at odd times all through the day and night, "Is this it? Has it come?" and she saw before her no haven of peace.

What was it now she really most feared? Simply the effect of the revelation on her husband's mind--an effect no human creature could make terms with. She was not the least afraid of anything he could say or do, delirium apart; but see what delirium had made of him--she was sure it was so--in that old evil hour when he had flung her from him and gone away in anger to try to get her sentence of banishment ratified. How could she guard against a repetition, in some form or other, of the disastrous errors of that unhappy time?

As we know, she was still in ignorance of all the revived memories he had told to Vereker; but she knew there had been something--disjointed, perhaps, and not to be relied on, as the doctor had said, but none the less to be feared on that account. She had seen the effect of his sleepless night before he went away with Vereker, and knew it to be connected with mental disturbance outside and beyond mere loss of rest; and she had an uneasy sense that something was being kept from her. She could not but believe Gerry's cheerfulness was partly assumed. Had he been quite at ease about his recollections, surely he would have told them to her. Then this had all come on the top of that Kreutzkammer one. The most upsetting thing of all, though, was the change that had come over him suddenly at breakfast, just after he had read aloud the name Herrick--a name he had seemed not free from memory of when her tongue was betrayed into speaking it--and the name Penderfield. If it was due to this last, so much the worse! It was the name of all others that was best for oblivion.

How hard it seemed that it must needs force itself to the fore in this way! Its present intrusion into her life and surroundings was utterly unconnected with anything in the past. Sally's friendship with Lætitia began in a music-class six years ago. The Sales Wilsons were people to all appearance as un-Indian as any folk need be. Why must Sally's friend, of all others, be the object of its owner's unwelcome admiration? To think, too, how near she had been to a precipice without knowing it! Suppose she had come face to face with that woman again! To be sure, her intercourse with Ladbroke Grove Road was limited to one stiff exchange of calls in "the season." Still, it might have happened ... but where was the use of begging and borrowing troubles?

Was it, or was it not, the fact, she asked herself, that now, after all these years, she thought of this woman as worse than her husband, the iniquity of the accomplice as more diabolical than that of the principal? She found she could not answer this in the negative off-hand. The paradox was also before her that that incorrigible amphibious treasure of hers, whose voice was even now shouting to her more timorous friend from beyond the selvage-wave she had just contemptuously dived through--that that Sally, inexchangeable for anything she could conceive or imagine, must needs have been something quite other than she was, had she come of any other technical paternity than the accursed one she had to own to. Was there some terrible law in Nature that slow forgiveness of the greatest wrong that can be wrought must perforce be granted to its inflictor, through the gracious survivor of a brutal indifference that would almost add to his crime, if that were possible? If, so, surely the Universe must be the work of an Almighty Fiend, a Demiurgus with a cruel heart, and this the masterstroke of all his cunning. But what, in Heaven's name, was the use of bruising her brains against the conundrums of the great unanswered metaphysical sphinx? Better be contented with the easy vernacular solution of the rhymester:

"Praise God from whom all blessings flow, Evils from circumstances grow."

Because she felt she was getting no nearer the solution of her own problem, and was, if anything, wandering from the point.

Another way of looking at the matter was beginning to take form: had hung about her mind and forsaken it more than once. Might it not be better, after all, to dash at the position and capture it while her forces were well under control? To pursue the metaphor, the commissariat might not hold out. Better endure the ills we have--of course, Rosalind knew all that--than fly to others that we know not of. But suppose we have a chance of flying to others we can measure the length and breadth of, and staving off thereby an uncalculable unknown? She felt she almost knew the worst that could come of taking Gerry into her confidence, telling him boldly all about himself, provided she could choose her opportunity and make sure Sally was well out of the way. The concealment from Sally was the achievement whose failure involved the greatest risk. Her husband's mind would bear the knowledge of his story well or ill according to the way in which it reached him; but the necessity of keeping her girl in ignorance of it was a thing absolute. Any idea that Sally's origin could be concealed from her, and her stepfather's identity made known, Rosalind dismissed as simply fantastic.

A lady who had established herself below high-water mark with many more books than she could read, and plant capable of turning out much more work than she could do, at this point fled for safety from a rush of white foam. It went back for more, meaning to wet her through next time; but had to bear its disappointment. Mrs. Arkwright--for it was Gwendolen's mamma--being driven from the shadow of the breakwater, cast about her for a new lodgment, and perceived one beside Mrs. Fenwick, whom she thought very well for the seaside, but not to leave cards on. Might she come up there, beside you? Rosalind didn't want her, but had to pretend she did, to encourage her advent. It left behind it a track of skeins and volumes, which had trickled from the fugitive, but were recovered by a domestic, and pronounced dry. Besides, they were only library books, and didn't matter.

"I haven't seen you since the other day on the pier, Mrs. Fenwick, or I wanted to have asked you more about that charming young couple, the Julian Attwoods. Oh dear! I knew I should get the name wrong.... Bradshaw! Yes, of course." Her vivid perception of what the name really is, when apprised of it, almost amounts to a paroxysm. You see, on the pier that day, she made a bad blunder over those Bradshaw people, and though she had consoled her conscience by admitting to her husband that she had "mis le pied dans le plat," still, she thought, if she was actually going to plump down on Mrs. Fenwick's piece of beach, she ought to do a little more apology. By-the-bye, why is it that ladies of her sort always resort to snippets of French idiom, whenever they get involved in a quagmire of delicacy--or indelicacy, as may be? Will Gwendolen grow like her mother? However, that doesn't concern us now.

A little stiffness on Rosalind's part was really due to her wish to be by herself, but Mrs. Arkwright ascribed it to treasured resentment against her blunders of two days since. Now, she was a person who could never let anything drop--a tugging person. She proceeded to develop the subject.

"Really a most interesting story! I need hardly say that my informants had given me no particulars. Very old friends of my husband's. Quite possible they really knew nothing of this young gentleman's musical gifts. Simply told my husband the tale as I told it to you. Just that the daughter of an old friend of theirs, Professor Sales Wilson--the Professor Sales Wilson--of course, quite a famous name in literature--scholarship--that sort of thing--had run away with a shopman! That was what my husband heard, you know. I merely repeated it."

"Wasn't it, as things go, rather a malicious way of putting it--on their part?"

Mrs. Arkwright gave sagacious nods, indicative of comfortable "we-know-the-world-we-live-in-and-won't-pretend" relationships between herself and the speaker. They advertised perfect mutual understanding on a pinnacle of married experience. Fancy there being any need for anything else between us! they said. Their editor then supplied explanatory text: "Of course there may have been a soupçon of personal feeling in the case--bias, pique, whatever one likes to call it. You know, dear Mrs. Fenwick?" But Mrs. Fenwick waited for further illumination. "Well, you know ... I suppose it's rather a breach of confidence, only I know I shall be safe with you...."

"Don't tell me any secrets, Mrs. Arkwright. I'm not safe." But Mrs. Arkwright was not a person to be put off in this way. Not she! She meant elucidation, and nothing short of bayonets would stop her.

"Well, really, perhaps I'm making it of too much importance to talk of breaches of confidence. After all, it only amounts to a gentleman having been disappointed. Of course, his relations would ... don't you see?..."

"Was it some man that was after Tishy?" asked Rosalind, wondering how many more rejected suitors were wearing the willow about the haberdasher's bride. She had heard of one, only last night. She was not putting two and two together.

"I dare say everybody knows it, and it's only my nonsensical caution. But one does get so timorous of saying anything. You know, dear Mrs. Fenwick! However, it's better to say it out now--of course, quite between ourselves, you know. It was Mrs. Samuel Herrick's son, Sir Charles Penderfield. He's the present baronet, you know. Father was in the army--rather distinguished man, I fancy. Her second husband was a clergyman...." Here followed social analysis, some of which Rosalind could have corrected. The speaker floundered a little among county families, and then resumed the main theme. "Mrs. Herrick is a sort of connexion of my husband's (I don't exactly know what; but then, I never do know--family is such a bore), and it was she told him all about this. I always forget these things when they're told me. But I can quite understand that the young man's mother, in speaking of it ... you understand?..."

"Oh, of course, naturally. I think my daughter's coming out. I saw her machine-door move." Rosalind began collecting herself for departure.

"But, of course, you won't repeat any of this--but, of course, I know I can rely upon you--but, of course, it doesn't really matter...." A genial superior tone of toleration for mankind's foibles as seen by the two speakers from an elevation comes in at this point juicily. It meets an appreciative response in the prolonged first syllable of Rosalind's "_Cer_tainly. I never should dream," etc., whose length makes up for an imperfect finish--a dispersal of context from which a farewell good-morning emerges clear, hand-in-hand with a false statement that the speaker has enjoyed sitting there talking.

Rosalind had not enjoyed it at all. She was utilising the merpussy's return to land as a means of escape, because, had there been no Mrs. Arkwright, and no folk-chatter, Sally would have come scranching up the shingle, and flung herself down beside her mother. As it was, Rosalind's "Oh, I am so glad to get away from that woman!" told a tale. And Sally's truthful soul interpreted the upshot of that tale as prohibitive of merely going away and sitting down elsewhere. She and her mother were in honour bound to have promised to meet somebody somewhere--say, for instance, Mrs. Vereker and her son and donkey-chair. Sally said it, for instance, seeing something of the sort would soothe the position; and the two of them met the three, or rather the three and a half, for we had forgotten the boy to whom the control of the donkey was entrusted, and whose interpretation of his mission was to beat the donkey incessantly like a carpet, and to drag it the other way. The last held good of all directions soever. Which the donkey, who was small, but by nature immovable, requited by taking absolutely no notice whatever of his exertions.

"What's become of my step-parent? I thought he was going to take you for a walk." So spoke Sally to Dr. Conrad as she and her mother met the three others, and the half. The doctor replied:

"He's gone for a walk along the cliff by himself. I would have gone...." The doctor pauses a moment till the donkey-chair is a few paces ahead, accompanied by Mrs. Fenwick. "I would have gone, only, you see, it's just mother's last day or two...." Sally apprehends perfectly. But he shouldn't have dropped his voice. He was quite distant enough to be inaudible by the Octopus as far as overhearing words went. But any one can hear when a voice is dropped suddenly, and words are no longer audible. Dr. Conrad is a very poor Machiavelli, when all is said and done.

"I can hear every word my boy is saying to your girl, Mrs. Fenwick." This is delivered with exemplary sweetness by the Octopus, who then guesses with diabolical acumen at almost the exact wording of her son's speech. Apparently, no amount of woollen wraps, no double thickness of green veil to keep the glare out, no smoked glasses with flanges to make it harmless if it gets in, can obscure the Goody's penetrative powers when invoked for the discomfiture of her kind. "But does not my dear boy know," she continues gushily, "that I am _al_ways content to be alone as long as I can be sure that he is happily employed elsewhere. I am a dull old woman, I know; but, at least, my wish is not to be a burden. That was the wish of my great-aunt Eliza--your great-great-aunt, Conrad; you never saw her--in her last illness. I borrow her expression--'not to be a burden.'" The Octopus, having seized her prey in this tentacle, was then at liberty to enlarge upon the unselfish character of her great-aunt, reaping the advantages of a vicarious egoism from an hypnotic suggestion that that character was also her own. The great-aunt had, it appeared, lost the use, broadly speaking, of her anatomy, and could only communicate by signs; but when she died she was none the less missed by her own circle, whose grief for her loss took the form of a tablet. The speaker paused a moment for her hearers to contemplate the tablet, and perhaps ask for the inscription, when Sally saw an opening, and took advantage of it.

"Dr. Conrad's going to be very selfish this afternoon, Mrs. Vereker, and come with us to Chalke, where that dear little church is that looks like a barn. I mean to find the sexton and get the key this time."

"My dear, I shall be _per_fectly happy knitting. Do not trouble about me for one moment. I shall think how you are enjoying yourselves. When I was a girl there was nothing I enjoyed more than ransacking old churches...."

And so forth. Rosalind felt almost certain that Sally either said or telegraphed to the doctor, who was wavering, "You'll come, you know. Now, mind; two-thirty punc.," and resolved, if he did not come, to go to Iggulden's and extract him from the tentacles of his mamma, and remain entangled herself, if necessary.

In fact, this was how the arrangement for the afternoon worked out. Dr. Conrad did not turn up, as expected, and Rosalind carried out her intention. She rescued the doctor, and sent him round to join her husband and Sally, promising to follow shortly and catch them up. The three started to walk, but Fenwick, after a little slow walking to allow Rosalind to overtake them, had misgivings that she had got caught, and went back to rescue her, telling Sally and the doctor it was no use to wait--they would follow on, and take their chance. And the programme so indicated was acted on.

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