The Complete Short Stories of W.D. Howells (Illustrated Edition). William Dean Howells
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don’t know any of the doctors here. I suppose I’ve done rather a wild thing in coming off the way I have, with my daughter; but I felt that I must do something, and I hoped—I felt as if it were getting away from our trouble. It’s most fortunate my meeting you, if you can look into the case, and help me out with a nurse, if she’s needed, and all that!” To a certain hesitation in Lanfear’s face, he added: “Of course, I’m asking your professional help. My name is Abner Gerald—Abner L. Gerald—perhaps you know my standing, and that I’m able to—”
“Oh, it isn’t a question of that! I shall be glad to do anything I can,” Lanfear said, with a little pang which he tried to keep silent in orienting himself anew towards the girl, whose loveliness he had felt before he had felt her piteousness.
“But before you go further I ought to say that you must have been thinking of my uncle, the first Matthew Lanfear, when you spoke of my reputation; I haven’t got any yet; I’ve only got my uncle’s name.”
“Oh!” Mr. Gerald said, disappointedly, but after a blank moment he apparently took courage. “You’re in the same line, though?”
“If you mean the psychopathic line, without being exactly an alienist, well, yes,” Lanfear admitted.
“That’s exactly what I mean,” the elder said, with renewed hopefulness. “I’m quite willing to risk myself with a man of the same name as Dr. Lanfear. I should like,” he said, hurrying on, as if to override any further reluctance of Lanfear’s, “to tell you her story, and then—”
“By all means,” Lanfear consented, and he put on an air of professional deference, while the older man began with a face set for the task.
“It’s a long story, or it’s a short story, as you choose to make it. We’ll make it long, if necessary, later, but now I’ll make it short. Five months ago my wife was killed before my daughter’s eyes—”
He stopped; Lanfear breathed a gentle “Oh!” and Gerald blurted out:
“Accident—grade crossing—Don’t!” he winced at the kindness in Lanfear’s eyes, and panted on. “That’s over! What happened to her—to my daughter—was that she fainted from the shock. When she woke—it was more like a sleep than a swoon—she didn’t remember what had happened.” Lanfear nodded, with a gravely interested face. “She didn’t remember anything that had ever happened before. She knew me, because I was there with her; but she didn’t know that she ever had a mother, because she was not there with her. You see?”
“I can imagine,” Lanfear assented.
“The whole of her life before the—accident was wiped out as to the facts, as completely as if it had never been; and now every day, every hour, every minute, as it passes, goes with that past. But her faculties—”
“Yes?” Lanfear prompted in the pause which Mr. Gerald made.
“Her intellect—the working powers of her mind, apart from anything like remembering, are as perfect as if she were in full possession of her memory. I believe,” the father said, with a pride that had its pathos, “no one can talk with her and not feel that she has a beautiful mind, that she can think better than most girls of her age. She reads, or she lets me read to her, and until it has time to fade, she appreciates it all more fully than I do. At Genoa, where I took her to the palaces for the pictures, I saw that she had kept her feeling for art. When she plays—you will hear her play—it is like composing the music for herself; she does not seem to remember the pieces, she seems to improvise them. You understand?”
Lanfear said that he understood, for he could not disappoint the expectation of the father’s boastful love: all that was left him of the ambitions he must once have had for his child.
The poor, little, stout, unpicturesque elderly man got up and began to walk to and fro in the room which he had turned into with Lanfear, and to say, more to himself than to Lanfear, as if balancing one thing against another: “The merciful thing is that she has been saved from the horror and the sorrow. She knows no more of either than she knows of her mother’s love for her. They were very much alike in looks and mind, and they were always together more like persons of the same age—sisters, or girl friends; but she has lost all knowledge of that, as of other things. And then there is the question whether she won’t some time, sooner or later, come into both the horror and the sorrow.” He stopped and looked at Lanfear. “She has these sudden fits of drowsiness, when she must sleep; and I never see her wake from them without being afraid that she has wakened to everything—that she has got back into her full self, and taken up the terrible burden that my old shoulders are used to. What do you think?”
Lanfear felt the appeal so keenly that in the effort to answer faithfully he was aware of being harsher than he meant. “That is a chance we can’t forecast. But it is a chance. The fact that the drowsiness recurs periodically—”
“It doesn’t,” the father pleaded. “We don’t know when it will come on.”
“It scarcely matters. The periodicity wouldn’t affect the possible result which you dread. I don’t say that it is probable. But it’s one of the possibilities. It has,” Lanfear added, “its logic.”
“Ah, its logic!”
“Its logic, yes. My business, of course, would be to restore her to health at any risk. So far as her mind is affected—”
“Her mind is not affected!” the father retorted.
“I beg your pardon—her memory—it might be restored with her physical health. You understand that? It is a chance; it might or it might not happen.”
The father was apparently facing a risk which he had not squarely faced before. “I suppose so,” he faltered. After a moment he added, with more courage: “You must do the best you can, at any risk.”
Lanfear rose, too. He said, with returning kindness in his tones, if not his words: “I should like to study the case, Mr. Gerald. It’s very interesting, and—and—if you’ll forgive me—very touching.”
“Thank you.”
“If you decide to stay in San Remo, I will—Do you suppose I could get a room in this hotel? I don’t like mine.”
“Why, I haven’t any doubt you can. Shall we ask?”
III
It was from the Hotel Sardegna that Lanfear satisfied his conscience by pushing his search for climate on behalf of his friend’s neurasthenic wife. He decided that Ospedaletti, with a milder air and more sheltered seat in its valley of palms, would be better for her than San Remo. He wrote his friend to that effect, and then there was no preoccupation to hinder him in his devotion to the case of Miss Gerald. He put the case first in the order of interest rather purposely, and even with a sense of effort, though he could not deny to himself that a like case related to a different personality might have been less absorbing. But he tried to keep his scientific duty to it pure of that certain painful pleasure which, as a young man not much over thirty, he must feel in the strange affliction of a young and beautiful girl.
Though there was no present question of medicine, he could be installed near her, as the friend that her father insisted upon making him, without contravention of the social formalities. His care of her hardly differed from that of her father, except that it involved a closer and more premeditated study. They did not try to keep her from the sort of association which, in a large hotel of the type of the Sardegna, entails no sort of obligation to intimacy. They sat together at the long table, midway of the dining-room, which maintained the tradition of the old table-d’hôte against the small tables ranged along the walls. Gerald had an amiable old man’s liking for talk, and Lanfear saw that he willingly escaped, among their changing companions, from the pressure of his anxieties. He left his daughter