The Complete Short Stories of W.D. Howells (Illustrated Edition). William Dean Howells
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decided to take the thoroughfare which they had come up by and trust to the chance of finding her at its foot. But he failed even of his search for the street: he came out again and again at the point he had started from.
“What is the matter?” she asked at the annoyance he could not keep out of his face.
He laughed. “Oh, merely that we’re lost. But we will wait here till that girl chooses to come back for us. Only it’s getting late, and Mr. Gerald—”
“Why, I know the way down,” she said, and started quickly in a direction which, as they kept it, he recognized as the route by which he had emerged from the town the day before. He had once more the sense of his memory being used by her, as if being blind, she had taken his hand for guidance, or as if being herself disabled from writing, she had directed a pen in his grasp to form the words she desired to put down. In some mystical sort the effect was hers, but the means was his.
They found the girl waiting with the donkey by the roadside beyond the last house. She explained that, not being able to follow them into the church with her donkey, she had decided to come where they found her and wait for them there.
“Does no one at all live here?” Lanfear asked, carelessly.
“Among the owls and the spectres? I would not pass a night here for a lemonade! My mother,” she went on, with a natural pride in the event, “was lost in the earthquake. They found her with me before her breast, and her arms stretched out keeping the stones away.” She vividly dramatized the fact. “I was alive, but she was dead.”
“Tell her,” Miss Gerald said, “that my mother is dead, too.”
“Ah, poor little thing!” the girl said, when the message was delivered, and she put her beast in motion, chattering gayly to Miss Gerald in the bond of their common orphanhood.
The return was down-hill, and they went back in half the time it had taken them to come. But even with this speed they were late, and the twilight was deepening when the last turn of their road brought them in sight of the new village. There a wild noise of cries for help burst upon the air, mixed with the shrill sound of maniac gibbering. They saw a boy running towards the town, and nearer them a man struggling with another, whom he had caught about the middle, and was dragging towards the side of the road where it dropped, hundreds of feet, into the gorge below.
The donkey-girl called out: “Oh, the madman! He is killing the signor!”
Lanfear shouted. The madman flung Gerald to the ground, and fled shrieking. Miss Gerald had leaped from her seat, and followed Lanfear as he ran forward to the prostrate form. She did not look at it, but within a few paces she clutched her hands in her hair, and screamed out: “Oh, my mother is killed!” and sank, as if sinking down into the earth, in a swoon.
“No, no; it’s all right, Nannie! Look after her, Lanfear! I’m not hurt. I let myself go in that fellow’s hands, and I fell softly. It was a good thing he didn’t drop me over the edge.” Gerald gathered himself up nimbly enough, and lent Lanfear his help with the girl. The situation explained itself, almost without his incoherent additions, to the effect that he had become anxious, and had started out with the boy for a guide, to meet them, and had met the lunatic, who suddenly attacked him. While he talked, Lanfear was feeling the girl’s pulse, and now and then putting his ear to her heart. With a glance at her father: “You’re bleeding, Mr. Gerald,” he said.
“So I am,” the old man answered, smiling, as he wiped a red stream from his face with his handkerchief. “But I am not hurt—”
“Better let me tie it up,” Lanfear said, taking the handkerchief from him. He felt the unselfish quality in a man whom he had not always thought heroic, and he bound the gash above his forehead with a reverence mingling with his professional gentleness. The donkey-girl had not ceased to cry out and bless herself, but suddenly, as her care was needed in getting Miss Gerald back to the litter, she became a part of the silence in which the procession made its way slowly into Possana Nuova, Lanfear going on one side, and Mr. Gerald on the other to support his daughter in her place. There was a sort of muted outcry of the whole population awaiting them at the door of the locanda where they had halted before, and which now had the distinction of offering them shelter in a room especially devoted to the poor young lady, who still remained in her swoon.
When the landlord could prevail with his fellow-townsmen and townswomen to disperse in her interest, and had imposed silence upon his customers indoors, Lanfear began his vigil beside his patient in as great quiet as he could anywhere have had. Once during the evening the public physician of the district looked in, but he agreed with Lanfear that nothing was to be done which he was not doing in his greater experience of the case. From time to time Gerald had suggested sending for some San Remo physician in consultation. Lanfear had always approved, and then Gerald had not persisted. He was strongly excited, and anxious not so much for his daughter’s recovery from her swoon, which he did not doubt, as for the effect upon her when she should have come to herself.
It was this which he wished to discuss, sitting fallen back into his chair, or walking up and down the room, with his head bound with a bloody handkerchief, and looking, with a sort of alien picturesqueness, like a kindly brigand.
Lanfear did not leave his place beside the bed where the girl lay, white and still as if dead. An inexpressible compassion for the poor man filled his heart. Whatever the event should be, it would be tragical for him. “Go to sleep, Mr. Gerald,” he said. “Your waking can do no good. I will keep watch, and if need be, I’ll call you. Try to make yourself easy on that couch.”
“I shall not sleep,” the old man answered. “How could I?” Nevertheless, he adjusted himself to the hard pillows of the lounge where he had been sitting and drowsed among them. He woke just before dawn with a start. “I thought she had come to, and knew everything! What a nightmare! Did I groan? Is there any change?”
Lanfear, sitting by the bed, in the light of the wasting candle, which threw a grotesque shadow of him on the wall, shook his head. After a moment he asked: “How long did you tell me her swoon had lasted after the accident to her mother?”
“I don’t think she recovered consciousness for two days, and then she remembered nothing. What do you think are the chances of her remembering now?”
“I don’t know. But there’s a kind of psychopathic logic—If she lost her memory through one great shock, she might find it through another.”
“Yes, yes!” the father said, rising and walking to and fro, in his anguish. “That was what I thought—what I was afraid of. If I could die myself, and save her from living through it—I don’t know what I’m saying! But if—but if—if she could somehow be kept from it a little longer! But she can’t, she can’t! She must know it now when she wakes.”
Lanfear had put up his hand, and taken the girl’s slim wrist quietly between his thumb and finger, holding it so while her father talked on.
“I suppose it’s been a sort of weakness—a sort of wickedness—in me to wish to keep it from her; but I have wished that, doctor; you must have seen it, and I can’t deny it. We ought to bear what is sent us in this world, and if we escape we must pay for our escape. It has cost her half her being, I know it; but it hasn’t cost her her reason, and I’m afraid for that, if she comes into her memory now. Still, you must do—But no one can do anything either to hinder or to help!”
He was talking in a husky undertone, and brokenly, incoherently. He made an appeal, which Lanfear seemed not to hear, where he remained immovable with his hand on the girl’s pulse.
“Do you think I am to blame for wishing her never to know it, though without it she must remain deprived of one whole side of life? Do you think my wishing that can have had anything to do with keeping her—But this faint may pass and she may wake from it just as she has been. It is logical that she should remember; but is it certain that she will?”
A murmur, so very faint as to be almost no sound at all, came like a response from the girl’s lips, and she all