Part 12 (1/2)
And then what does that irritating Laet.i.tia Wilson do but say suddenly, ”I'm quite ready for the scherzo, dear, if you are.” Just as if Sally had been talking all this for her own private satisfaction and amus.e.m.e.nt! And she knew perfectly well, Laet.i.tia did, that she had been eliciting, and that she meant to wait a day or two, and begin again ever so far on, and make believe Sally had said heaps of things. And Sally had really said nothing--_nothing_!
However, Miss Wilson was certainly a very fine violin figure, and really striking in long sostenuto notes, with a fine throat and handsome fingers on her left hand with broad bones, and a handsome wrist on her bowing-arm where it was wanted. Only now, of course, she hadn't got her Egyptian bracelet that looked so well, and her hair wasn't done in a coronet, but only just twisted up anyhow. Besides, when it's a difficult scherzo and you take it quick, your appearance of having the concentration of Bonaparte and Julius Caesar, and the alacrity of a wild cat, doesn't bring out your good points. Give us an _andante maestoso_ movement, or a _diminuendo rallentando_ that reaches the very climax and acme of slowness itself just before the applause comes! It was rather as a meditation in contrasts, though, that Sally thought thus to herself; for detached musical jerks of diabolical rapidity, that have to be snapped at with the punctuality of the mosquito slayer, don't show your rounded lines to advantage, and make you clench your teeth and glare horribly.
Our story is like the scherzo in one respect: it has to be given in detached jerks--literary, not musical--and these jerks don't come at any stated intervals at all. The music was bad enough--so Sally and Laet.i.tia thought--but the chronicle is more spasmodic still. However, if you want to know its remaining particulars, you will have to brace yourself up to tolerating an intermittent style. It is the only one our means of collecting information admits of.
This little musical interlude, and the accidental chat of our two young performers, gives us a kind of idea of what was the position of things at Krakatoa Villa six months after Fenwick made his singular reappearance in the life of Mrs. Nightingale. We shall rely on your drawing all our inferences. There is only one belief of ours we need to lay stress upon; it is that the lady's scheme to do all she could to recapture and hold this man who had been her husband was no mere slow suggestion of the course of events in that six months, but a swift and decisive resolution--one that, if not absolutely made at once, paused only in the making until she was quite satisfied that the disappearance of Fenwick's past was an accomplished fact. Once satisfied of that, he became to her simply the man she had loved twenty years ago--the man who did not, could not, forgive her what seemed so atrocious a wrong, but whom she could forgive the unforgiveness of; and this all the more if she had come to know of the ruinous effect her betrayal of him had had--must have had--upon his after-life. He was this man--this very man--to all appearance with a mysterious veil drawn, perhaps for ever, over the terrible close of their brief linked life and its hideous cause--over all that she would have asked and prayed should be forgotten. If only this oblivion could be maintained!--that was her fear. If it could, what task could be sweeter to her than to make him such amends as lay in her power for the wrong she had done him--how faultfully, who shall say? And if, in late old age, no dawn of memory having gleamed in his ruined mind, she came to be able to speak to him and tell him his own story--the tale of the wreck of his early years--would not that almost, _almost_, carry with it a kind of compensation for what she had undergone?
But her terror of seeing a return of memory now was a haunting nightmare to her. She could only soothe and alleviate her anxiety by suggesting efforts at recollection to Fenwick, and observing with concealed satisfaction how utterly useless they all were. She felt guilty at heart in being so happy at his ill-success, and had to practise an excusable hypocrisy, an affectation of disappointment at his repeated failures. On one particular occasion a shudder of apprehension pa.s.sed through her; she thought he had got a clue. If he did, what was to prevent his following it up? She found it hard to say to him how sorry she was this clue led to nothing, and to forecast from it encouragement for the future. But she said to herself after that, that she was a good actress, and had played her part well. The part was a hard one.
For what came about was this. It chanced one evening, some three months after the railway adventure, when Fenwick had become an accepted and constant visitor at Krakatoa Villa, that as he took a very late leave of Sally and her mother, the latter came out with him into the always quiet road, while Sally ran back into the house to direct a letter he was to post, but which had been forgotten for the moment, just as he was departing.
They had talked a great deal, and with a closer familiarity than ever before, of the problem of Fenwick's oblivion. Both ladies had gone on the lines of suggesting clues, trying to recall to him the things that _must_ have been in his life as in others. How about his parents?
Well, he remembered that, as a fact, he had a father and mother. It was _themselves_ he could not recollect. How about his schooldays? No, that was a blank. He could not even remember having been flogged. Yet the idea of school was not unfamiliar; how, otherwise, could he laugh as he did at the absurdity of forgetting all about it, especially being flogged? But his brothers, his sisters, how _could_ he forget _them_? He _did_, although in their case, as in that of his parents, he somehow knew that some definite ident.i.ties had existed that he had forgotten. But any effort to recall any specific person came to nothing, or else he only succeeded in reviving images manifestly confused with characters in fiction or history. Then Sally, who was rather incredulous about this complete vacuity of mind, had said to him: ”But come now, Mr. Fenwick, you don't mean to say you don't know if you ever had a sweetheart?” And he had replied with a laugh: ”My dear Miss Sally, I'm sure I must have had plenty of sweethearts.
Perhaps it's because I had so many that I have forgotten them all--all--all! They are all gone with the rest. I can do sums, and can speak French, but what school I learned to keep accounts at I can't tell you; and as to where I lived (as I must have done) among French people to speak French, I can tell no more than Adam.” And then he had become rather reserved and silent till he got up to go, and they had not liked to press him for more. The pained look they had often been distressed to see came on his face, and he pressed his fingers on his eyelids as though shutting out the present world might help him to recall the past; then with a rough head-shake of his thick hair, like a big dog, and a brus.h.i.+ng of it about with both hands, as though he would rouse this useless head of his to some sort of action, he put the whole thing aside, and talked of other matters till he left the house.
But when he and Mrs. Nightingale found themselves alone in the road, enjoying the delicious west wind that meant before the morning to become an equinoctial gale, and blow down chimney-pots and sink s.h.i.+ps, he turned to her and went back to what they had been talking of. She could see the fine strong markings of his face in the moonlight, the great jaw and firm lips, the handsome nose damaged by a scar that lay true across the bridge of it, and looked white in the gleam of the moon, the sad large eyelids and the grave eyes that had retaken the look he had shaken off. She could note and measure every change maturity had stamped upon him, and could see behind it the boy that had come to meet her at the station at Umballa twenty years before--had met her full of hope, met her to claim his reward after the long delay through the hideous days of the pestilence, to inaugurate the antic.i.p.ated hours of happiness he had trembled to dream of. And the worst of the cholera wards that had filled the last months of his life with horror had held nothing for him so bad as the tale she had to tell or conceal. She could see back upon it as they stood there in the moonlight. Do not say she was not a strong woman.
”Do you know, Mrs. Nightingale,” Fenwick said, ”it's always a night of this sort that brings back one's youth? You know what I mean?”
”I think I understand what you mean, Mr. Fenwick. You mean if”--she hesitated a moment--”if you _could_ recollect.”
He nodded a complete yes.
”Just that,” said he. ”I don't know if it's the millions of dry leaves sweeping about, or the moon scudding so quick through the clouds, or the smell of the Atlantic, or the bark coming off the plane-trees, or the wind blowing the roads into smooth dust-drifts and hard clear-ups you could eat your dinner off--I don't know what it is, but something or another on a night of this sort does always seem to bring old times back, when, as you say, they can be got back on any terms.” He half-laughed, not in earnest. She found something to say, also not very much in earnest.
”Because we remember nights of the sort when we were small, and that brings them back.”
”Come, I say now, Mrs. Nightingale! As if we couldn't remember all sorts of nights, and nothing comes back about them. It's this particular sort of night does the job.”
”Did you think you remembered something, Mr. Fenwick?” There was anxiety in her voice, but no need to conceal it. It would as readily pa.s.s muster for anxiety that he _should_ have remembered something as that he shouldn't.
”I can hardly go so far as that. But that joke of your little p.u.s.s.ycat about the sweethearts got mixed with the smell of the wind and the chrysanthemums and dahlias and sunflowers.” He pressed his fingers hard on his eyes again. ”Do you know, there's pain in it--worse than you'd think! The half-idea that comes is not painful in itself--rather the contrary--but it gives my brain a twist at the point at which I can recall no more. Yes, it's painful!”
”But there _was_ a half-idea? Forgive me if it gives you pain, and don't try. Only I'm not sure you ought not to try when the chance comes, for your own sake.”
”Oh, I don't mind trying. This time it was something about a front garden and a girl and a dog-cart.” He had not taken his hands from his eyes. Now he did so, brus.h.i.+ng them on his hair and forehead as before.
”I get no nearer,” said he.
”A front garden and a girl and a dog-cart,” thus Miss Sally saucily, coming out with the letter. ”Did you have a very touching parting, Mr.
Fenwick? Now, mind you don't forget to post it. I wouldn't trust you!”
He took the letter from her, but seemed too _distrait_ to notice her little piece of levity; then, still speaking as if in distress or pain, he said:
”It must have been some front garden, long ago. This one brought it back--this and the leaves. Only there was nothing for the dog-cart.”
”And only mamma for the girl”--thus Sally the irrepressible. And then mamma laughed, but not Mr. Fenwick at all. Only Sally thought her mother's laugh came hard, and said to herself, now she should catch it for chaffing! However, she didn't catch it, although the abruptness with which her mother said good-night and went back into the house half confirmed her impression that she should.