Between The Dark And The Daylight. William Dean Howells
Читать онлайн книгу.
of entreaty in the glance that she let pass over him.
“I suppose he’s gone to look for us!” Mrs. Bell saved the situation with a protecting laugh. Miss Gerald colored intelligently, and Lanfear could not let Mrs. Bell’s implication pass.
“If it is Mrs. Bell,” he said, “I can answer that he has. I met you at Magnolia some years ago, Mrs. Bell. Dr. Lanfear.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanfear,” Miss Gerald said. “I couldn’t think—”
“Of my tag, my label?” he laughed back. “It isn’t very distinctly lettered.”
Mrs. Bell was not much minding them jointly. She was singling Lanfear out for the expression of her pleasure in seeing him again, and recalling the incidents of her summer at Magnolia before, it seemed, any of her girls were out. She presented them collectively, and the eldest of them charmingly reminded Lanfear that he had once had the magnanimity to dance with her when she sat, in a little girl’s forlorn despair of being danced with, at one of those desolate hops of the good old Osprey House.
“Yes; and now,” her mother followed, “we can’t wait a moment longer, if we’re to get our train for Monte Carlo, girls. We’re not going to play, doctor,” she made time to explain, “but we are going to look on. Will you tell your father, dear,” she said, taking the girl’s hands caressingly in hers, and drawing her to her motherly bosom, “that we found you, and did our best to find him? We can’t wait now—our carriage is champing the bit at the foot of the stairs—but we’re coming back in a week, and then we’ll do our best to look you up again.” She included Lanfear in her good-bye, and all her girls said good-bye in the same way, and with a whisking of skirts and twitter of voices they vanished through the shrubbery, and faded into the general silence and general sound like a bevy of birds which had swept near and passed by.
Miss Gerald sank quietly into her place, and sat as if nothing had happened, except that she looked a little paler to Lanfear, who remained on foot trying to piece together their interrupted tête-à-tête, but not succeeding, when her father reappeared, red and breathless, and wiping his forehead. “Have they been here, Nannie?” he asked. “I’ve been following them all over the place, and the portier told me just now that he had seen a party of ladies coming down this way.”
He got it all out, not so clearly as those women had got everything in, Lanfear reflected, but unmistakably enough as to the fact, and he looked at his daughter as he repeated: “Haven’t the Bells been here?”
She shook her head, and said, with her delicate quiet: “Nobody has been here, except—” She glanced at Lanfear, who smiled, but saw no opening for himself in the strange situation. Then she said: “I think I will go and lie down a while, now, papa. I’m rather tired. Good-bye,” she said, giving Lanfear her hand; it felt limp and cold; and then she turned to her father again. “Don’t you come, papa! I can get back perfectly well by myself. Stay with—”
“I will go with you,” her father said, “and if Dr. Lanfear doesn’t mind coming—”
“Certainly I will come,” Lanfear said, and he passed to the girl’s right; she had taken her father’s arm; but he wished to offer more support if it were needed. When they had climbed to the open flowery space before the hotel, she seemed aware of the groups of people about. She took her hand from her father’s arm, as if unwilling to attract their notice by seeming to need its help, and swept up the gravelled path between him and Lanfear, with her flowing walk.
Her father fell back, as they entered the hotel door, and murmured to Lanfear: “Will you wait till I come down?” ... “I wanted to tell you about my daughter,” he explained, when he came back after the quarter of an hour which Lanfear had found rather intense. “It’s useless to pretend you wouldn’t have noticed—Had nobody been with you after I left you, down there?” He twisted his head in the direction of the pavilion, where they had been breakfasting.
“Yes; Mrs. Bell and her daughters,” Lanfear answered, simply.
“Of course! Why do you suppose my daughter denied it?” Mr. Gerald asked.
“I suppose she—had her reasons,” Lanfear answered, lamely enough.
“No reason, I’m afraid,” Mr. Gerald said, and he broke out hopelessly: “She has her mind sound enough, but not—not her memory. She had forgotten that they were there! Are you going to stay in San Remo?” he asked, with an effect of interrupting himself, as if in the wish to put off something, or to make the ground sure before he went on.
“Why,” Lanfear said, “I hadn’t thought of it. I stopped—I was going to Nice—to test the air for a friend who wishes to bring his invalid wife here, if I approve—but I have just been asking myself why I should go to Nice when I could stay at San Remo. The place takes my fancy. I’m something of an invalid myself—at least I’m on my vacation—and I find a charm in it, if nothing better. Perhaps a charm is enough. It used to be, in primitive medicine.”
He was talking to what he felt was not an undivided attention in Mr. Gerald, who said, “I’m glad of it,” and then added: “I should like to consult you professionally. I know your reputation in New York—though I’m not a New-Yorker myself—and I 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,