Between The Dark And The Daylight by William Dean Howells
W >>
William Dean Howells >> Between The Dark And The Daylight
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 [Illustration: THEIR JOINT STUDY OF HER
DANCING-CARD DID NOT HELP THEM OUT]
BETWEEN THE DARK
AND THE DAYLIGHT
Romances
BY
W.D. HOWELLS
1907
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. A SLEEP AND A FORGETTING
II. THE EIDOLONS OF BROOKS ALFORD
III. A MEMORY THAT WORKED OVERTIME
IV. A CASE OF METAPHANTASMIA
V. EDITHA
VI. BRAYBRIDGE'S OFFER
VII. THE CHICK OF THE EASTER EGG
ILLUSTRATIONS
THEIR JOINT STUDY OF HER DANCING-CARD DID NOT HELP THEM OUT
A LIVELY MATRON, OF AS YOUTHFUL A TEMPERAMENT AS THE LIVELY GIRLS SHE
BROUGHT IN HER TRAIN, BURST UPON THEM
"SHE SHOOK HER HEAD, AND SAID,... 'NOBODY HAS BEEN HERE, EXCEPT--'"
"NO BURGLAR COULD HAVE MISSED ME IF HE HAD WANTED AN EASY MARK"
"'YOU SHALL NOT SAY THAT!'"
"SHE GLARED AT EDITHA. 'WHAT YOU GOT THAT BLACK ON FOR?'"
I
A SLEEP AND A FORGETTING
I
Matthew Lanfear had stopped off, between Genoa and Nice, at San Remo in
the interest of a friend who had come over on the steamer with him, and
who wished him to test the air before settling there for the winter with
an invalid wife. She was one of those neurasthenics who really carry
their climate--always a bad one--with them, but she had set her mind on
San Remo; and Lanfear was willing to pass a few days in the place making
the observations which he felt pretty sure would be adverse.
His train was rather late, and the sunset was fading from the French sky
beyond the Italian shore when he got out of his car and looked round for
a porter to take his valise. His roving eye lighted on the anxious
figure, which as fully as the anxious face, of a short, stout, elderly
man expressed a sort of distraction, as he stood loaded down with
umbrellas, bags, bundles, and wraps, and seemed unable to arrest the
movements of a tall young girl, with a travelling-shawl trailing from
her arm, who had the effect of escaping from him towards a bench beside
the door of the waiting-room. When she reached it, in spite of his
appeals, she sat down with an absent air, and looked as far withdrawn
from the bustle of the platform and from the snuffling train as if on
some quiet garden seat along with her own thoughts.
In his fat frenzy, which Lanfear felt to be pathetic, the old gentleman
glanced at him, and then abruptly demanded: "Are you an American?"
We knew each other abroad in some mystical way, and Lanfear did not try
to deny the fact.
"Oh, well, then," the stranger said, as if the fact made everything
right, "will you kindly tell my daughter, on that bench by the door
yonder"--he pointed with a bag, and dropped a roll of rugs from under
his arm--"that I'll be with her as soon as I've looked after the trunks?
Tell her not to move till I come. Heigh! Here! Take hold of these, will
you?" He caught the sleeve of a _facchino_ who came wandering by, and
heaped him with his burdens, and then pushed ahead of the man in the
direction of the baggage-room with a sort of mastery of the situation
which struck Lanfear as springing from desperation rather than
experience.
Lanfear stood a moment hesitating. Then a glance at the girl on the
bench, drooping a little forward in freeing her face from the veil that
hung from her pretty hat, together with a sense of something quaintly
charming in the confidence shown him on such purely compatriotic
grounds, decided him to do just what he had been asked. The girl had got
her veil up by this time, and as he came near, she turned from looking
at the sunset over the stretch of wall beyond the halting train, and met
his dubious face with a smile.
"It _is_ beautiful, isn't it?" she said. "I know I shall get well, here,
if they have such sunsets every day."
There was something so convincingly normal in her expression that
Lanfear dismissed a painful conjecture. "I beg your pardon," he said.
"I am afraid there's some mistake. I haven't the pleasure--You must
excuse me, but your father wished me to ask you to wait here for him
till he had got his baggage--"
"My father?" the girl stopped him with a sort of a frowning perplexity
in the stare she gave him. "My father isn't here!"
"I beg your pardon," Lanfear said. "I must have misunderstood. A
gentleman who got out of the train with you--a short, stout gentleman
with gray hair--I understood him to say you were his daughter--requested
me to bring this message--"
The girl shook her head. "I don't know him. It must be a mistake."
"The mistake is mine, no doubt. It may have been some one else whom he
pointed out, and I have blundered. I'm very sorry if I seem to have
intruded--"
"What place is this?" the girl asked, without noticing his excuses.
"San Remo," Lanfear answered. "If you didn't intend to stop here, your
train will be leaving in a moment."
"I meant to get off, I suppose," she said. "I don't believe I'm going
any farther." She leaned back against the bars of the bench, and put up
one of her slim arms along the top.
There was something wrong. Lanfear now felt that, in spite of her
perfect tranquillity and self-possession; perhaps because of it. He had
no business to stay there talking with her, but he had not quite the
right to leave her, though practically he had got his dismissal, and
apparently she was quite capable of taking care of herself, or could
have been so in a country where any woman's defencelessness was not any
man's advantage. He could not go away without some effort to be of use.
"I beg your pardon," he said. "Can I help you in calling a carriage; or
looking after your hand-baggage--it will be getting dark--perhaps your
maid--"
"My _maid_!" The girl frowned again, with a measure of the amazement
which she showed when he mentioned her father. "_I_ have no maid!"
Lanfear blurted desperately out: "You are alone? You came--you are going
to stay here--alone?"
"Quite alone," she said, with a passivity in which there was no
resentment, and no feeling unless it were a certain color of dignity.
Almost at the same time, with a glance beside and beyond him, she called
out joyfully: "Ah, there you are!" and Lanfear turned, and saw scuffling
and heard puffing towards them the short, stout elderly gentleman who
had sent him to her. "I knew you would come before long!"
"Well, I thought it was pretty long, myself," the gentleman said, and
then he courteously referred himself to Lanfear. "I'm afraid this
gentleman has found it rather long, too; but I couldn't manage it a
moment sooner."
Lanfear said: "Not at all. I wish I could have been of any use to--"
"My daughter--Miss Gerald, Mr.--"
"Lanfear--Dr. Lanfear," he said, accepting the introduction; and the
girl bowed.
"Oh, doctor, eh?" the father said, with a certain impression. "Going to
stop here?"
"A few days," Lanfear answered, making way for the forward movement
which the others began.
"Well, well! I'm very much obliged to you, very much, indeed; and I'm
sure my daughter is."
The girl said, "Oh yes, indeed," rather indifferently, and then as they
passed him, while he stood lifting his hat, she turned radiantly on him.
"Thank you, ever so much!" she said, with the gentle voice which he had
already thought charming.
The father called back: "I hope we shall meet again. We are going to the
Sardegna."
Lanfear had been going to the Sardegna himself, but while he bowed he
now decided upon another hotel.
The mystery, whatever it was, that the brave, little, fat father was
carrying off so bluffly, had clearly the morbid quality of unhealth in
it, and Lanfear could not give himself freely to a young pleasure in the
girl's dark beauty of eyes and hair, her pale, irregular, piquant face,
her slender figure and flowing walk. He was in the presence of something
else, something that appealed to his scientific side, to that which was
humane more than that which was human in him, and abashed him in the
other feeling. Unless she was out of her mind there was no way of
accounting for her behavior, except by some caprice which was itself
scarcely short of insanity. She must have thought she knew him when he
approached, and when she addressed him those first words; but when he
had tried to set her right she had not changed; and why had she denied
her father, and then hailed him with joy when he came back to her? She
had known that she intended to stop at San Remo, but she had not known
where she had stopped when she asked what place it was. She was
consciously an invalid of some sort, for she spoke of getting well under
sunsets like that which had now waned, but what sort of invalid was she?
II
Lanfear's question persisted through the night, and it helped, with the
coughing in the next room, to make a bad night for him. None of the
hotels in San Remo receive consumptive patients, but none are without
somewhere a bronchial cough. If it is in the room next yours it keeps
you awake, but it is not pulmonary; you may comfort yourself in your
vigils with that fact. Lanfear, however, fancied he had got a poor
dinner, and in the morning he did not like his coffee. He thought he had
let a foolish scruple keep him from the Grand Hotel Sardegna, and he
walked down towards it along the palm-flanked promenade, in the gay
morning light, with the tideless sea on the other hand lapping the rough
beach beyond the lines of the railroad which borders it. On his way he
met files of the beautiful Ligurian women, moving straight under the
burdens balanced on their heads, or bestriding the donkeys laden with
wine-casks in the roadway, or following beside the carts which the
donkeys drew. Ladies of all nations, in the summer fashions of London,
Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, and New York thronged the path. The sky
was of a blue so deep, so liquid that it seemed to him he could scoop it
in his hand and pour it out again like water. Seaward, he glanced at the
fishing-boats lying motionless in the offing, and the coastwise steamer
that runs between Nice and Genoa trailing a thin plume of smoke between
him and their white sails. With the more definite purpose of making sure
of the Grand Hotel Sardegna, he scanned the different villa slopes that
showed their level lines of white and yellow and dull pink through the
gray tropical greenery on the different levels of the hills. He was duly
rewarded by the sight of the bold legend topping its cornice, and when
he let his eye descend the garden to a little pavilion on the wall
overlooking the road, he saw his acquaintances of the evening before
making a belated breakfast. The father recognized Lanfear first and
spoke to his daughter, who looked up from her coffee and down towards
him where he wavered, lifting his hat, and bowed smiling to him. He had
no reason to cross the roadway towards the white stairway which climbed
from it to the hotel grounds, but he did so. The father leaned out over
the wall, and called down to him: "Won't you come up and join us,
doctor?"
"Why, yes!" Lanfear consented, and in another moment he was shaking
hands with the girl, to whom, he noticed, her father named him again. He
had in his glad sense of her white morning dress and her hat of
green-leafed lace, a feeling that she was somehow meeting him as a
friend of indefinite date in an intimacy unconditioned by any past or
future time. Her pleasure in his being there was as frank as her
father's, and there was a pretty trust of him in every word and tone
which forbade misinterpretation.
"I was just talking about you, doctor," the father began, "and saying
what a pity you hadn't come to our hotel. It's a capital place."
"_I've_ been thinking it was a pity I went to mine," Lanfear returned,
"though I'm in San Remo for such a short time it's scarcely worth while
to change."
"Well, perhaps if you came here, you might stay longer. I guess we're
booked for the winter, Nannie?" He referred the question to his
daughter, who asked Lanfear if he would not have some coffee.
"I was going to say I had had my coffee, but I'm not sure it _was_
coffee," Lanfear began, and he consented, with some demur, banal enough,
about the trouble.
"Well, that's right, then, and no trouble at all," Mr. Gerald broke in
upon him. "Here comes a fellow looking for a chance to bring you some,"
and he called to a waiter wandering distractedly about with a "Heigh!"
that might have been offensive from a less obviously inoffensive man.
"Can you get our friend here a cup and saucer, and some of this good
coffee?" he asked, as the waiter approached.
"Yes, certainly, sir," the man answered in careful English. "Is it not,
perhaps, Mr. and Misses Gerald?" he smilingly insinuated, offering some
cards.
"Miss Gerald," the father corrected him as he took the cards. "Why,
hello, Nannie! Here are the Bells! Where are they?" he demanded of the
waiter. "Bring them here, and a lot more cups and saucers. Or, hold on!
I'd better go myself, Nannie, hadn't I? Of course! You get the crockery,
waiter. Where did you say they were?" He bustled up from his chair,
without waiting for a distinct reply, and apologized to Lanfear in
hurrying away. "You'll excuse me, doctor! I'll be back in half a minute.
Friends of ours that came over on the same boat. I must see them, of
course, but I don't believe they'll stay. Nannie, don't let Dr. Lanfear
get away. I want to have some talk with him. You tell him he'd better
come to the Sardegna, here."
Lanfear and Miss Gerald sat a moment in the silence which is apt to
follow with young people when they are unexpectedly left to themselves.
She kept absently pushing the cards her father had given her up and down
on the table between her thumb and forefinger, and Lanfear noted the
translucence of her long, thin hand in the sunshine striking across the
painted iron surface of the garden movable. The translucence had a
pathos for his intelligence which the pensive tilt of her head enhanced.
She stopped toying with the cards, and looked at the addresses on them.
"What strange things names are!" she said, as if musing on the fact,
with a sigh which he thought disproportioned to the depth of her
remark.
"They seem rather irrelevant at times," he admitted, with a smile.
"They're mere tags, labels, which can be attached to one as well as
another; they seem to belong equally to anybody."
"That is what I always say to myself," she agreed, with more interest
than he found explicable.
"But finally," he returned, "they're all that's left us, if they're left
themselves. They are the only signs to the few who knew us that we ever
existed. They stand for our characters, our personality, our mind, our
soul."
She said, "That is very true," and then she suddenly gave him the cards.
"Do you know these people?"
"I? I thought they were friends of yours," he replied, astonished.
[Illustration: A LIVELY MATRON, OF AS YOUTHFUL A TEMPERAMENT AS THE
LIVELY GIRLS SHE BROUGHT IN HER TRAIN, BURST UPON THEM]
"That is what papa thinks," Miss Gerald said, and while she sat dreamily
absent, a rustle of skirts and a flutter of voices pierced from the
surrounding shrubbery, and then a lively matron, of as youthful a
temperament as the lively girls she brought in her train, burst upon
them, and Miss Gerald was passed from one embrace to another until all
four had kissed her. She returned their greeting, and shared, in her
quieter way, their raptures at their encounter.
"Such a hunt as we've had for you!" the matron shouted. "We've been
up-stairs and down-stairs and in my lady's chamber, all over the hotel.
Where's your father? Ah, they did get our cards to you!" and by that
token Lanfear knew that these ladies were the Bells. He had stood up in
a sort of expectancy, but Miss Gerald did not introduce him, and a
shadow of embarrassment passed over the party which she seemed to feel
least, though he fancied a sort 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 tete-a-tete, 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?"
[Illustration: "SHE SHOOK HER HEAD, AND SAID,... 'NOBODY HAS BEEN HERE,
EXCEPT--'"]
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, 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?"
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11