It was the most interesting case I have ever had (wrote M. Chatelard, in the third volume of his "Psychologie Féminine"), and the most abnormal. The illness, caused by shock, concussion—call it what you will—was benign, yet it was long. There was a little fever, a little delirium: un petit délire très doux, tout poétique, que, plongé dans mon vieux fauteuil de chêne, au milieu du silence de cet antique manoir, j'écoutais presqu'avec plaisir. Un gazouillement d'oiseau; une ame de femme, errant comme Psyché elle-même, sur les fleurs dans les jardins embaumés; délicates puerilitiés parfumées de la vie. Jamais une note de passion. Jamais un cri de ce coeur si profondement blessé....
And when later, by almost imperceptible steps, we drew the gentle creature back to health, the singular phenomenon persisted.
We physicians are, of course, accustomed in similar circumstances, to find a strong distaste in the patient suffering from shock to any effort of memory. Memory, indeed, by one of those marvellous dispensations of nature, is reluctant to bring back the events which have caused the mischief. But, with the beautiful Lady G—— (it is always thus I must recall her) there was something more than the mere recoil of weakness....
On e?t pu croire que cette am ebrisée de passion, abreuvée de douleur, s'était dit qu'elle n'en voulait plus; qu'elle n'en pouvait plus. Co n'était pas, ici, les souvenirs, qui faisaient défaut. Je l'ai trop observée pour m'y méprendre. En avait-elle des souvenirs et d'assez poignants, mon Dieu! ... But with a strength of will which surprised me in her state, she put these memories from her and deliberately lived in the present. Elle goutait son présent, elle savourait la paix voluptueuse de sa convalescence....
Je n'ai qu'à fermer les yeux, pour la revoir, sur son lit—longue, blanche et belle. Je revois ce jeune teint—divinement jeune sous cette grande chevelure d'argent; cet air de lys au soleil, à la fois languissant et mystérieusement heureux. Ces yeux noyés dans une pensée profonde. Ces lévres entr'ouvertes par un léger sourire. A qui rêvaitelle—à quoi? Cette belle bouche muette n'en soufflait jamais mot....
Of the three who had loved her, for whom was that smile? Certes, not for the poor Sir! And of the other two? (I must here frankly set down the humiliating admission, to me, that woman was, and remains Sphynx—yes, Sphynx, even to me, her physician, who beheld her, watched, tended her, through all those moments of suffering, weakness, défaillance where the soul reveals itself.) Which of the two, then, reigned in her secret dream? The sardonic Major, who had tracked her till she could escape him no longer, whose love was merciless. There are women, and many, who would never know passion but for defeat. The husband? The reincarnated ghost? Well reincarnated, that one!—The most virile type that I ever met. Nature of fire, born lover, under all his reticence of English gentleman and soldier. I have seen that face of his, half bronze, half marble, grow crimson and white within the minute, as I spoke to him of the woman, the while there would not be a tremble in the hand that held this pipe. I will confess he had all my sympathy; he was worthy of her. But she—why, to this day I ask myself: does the man who possesses her know the secret of her heart?
The day after the damaged motor had carried away the poor Governor—machine détraquée, clopin-clopant, symbole de cette vie qui jusqu'ici semblait rouler en triomphe et qui, desormais, se trainera si gauchement—the day following Sir G——'s departure, I say, the Major B—— also left. It was the very least he could have done. And after the astounding fact of his betrothal to the pretty little Miss C——, I myself felt his presence antipathetic.... Ah, but a strategist, that officer of Guides, strategist of the first order! A masterly move, that betrothal, to disarm any possible suspicion of his friend and keep the while a footing in his beloved's house! But the little one, she deserved better ... delicieuse enfant! With what innocent eyes she looked at me when I told her that, above all things, she must not whisper to my patient a word of her engagement. "Understand well, Miss," said I to her; and was ashamed of myself thus to join with him who was deceiving her. "It is because the least agitation, even a happy one, must be avoided." "Ah, that is why," said she, "you will not let her poor husband go to her?" "That is why," I replied, dissembling, "above all things, above all things, she must not be hurried."
* * * * *
She must not be hurried!
"If she wants me?" had said Harry English to Dr. Chatelard, in that dawn hour of dire omen.
"My dear sir," had answered the other, "immediately, of course!"
Rosamond lay, restored to those that loved her, a pale rose among her white tresses, and Harry English still waited her summons.
Still waiting!
* * * * *
"Above all," repeated the genial physician, who had stood by them so stoutly in their hour of trouble, as he took his reluctant departure from a house where his presence was, obviously, no longer needed, and where yet—unfortunate psychologist—he had failed to probe the story to the core, "above all, she must not be hurried!"
These were his farewell instructions.
It seemed to him that the patient husband had a strange smile on hearing this admonition.
"How much does he know?" asked Chatelard of himself, clinging with characteristic pertinacity to his peculiar interpretation of events. "How much does he suspect?"
Never before, perhaps, had the active-minded and gregarious Frenchman found himself thus regretting the prospect of a return to the congenial movement of his native city. But it was with a definite sense of reluctance that, on this March morning, he drove away through the budding orchard trees, leaving the Old Ancient House and all the desolate moorland behind him. This lonely antique habitation still held close the enigma of lives in which he had become deeply interested—interested, not only with that vivid intelligence which was ever eager to know, but with the warmth of a very excellent heart.
He would dearly have loved to know, true; but, above all, he would dearly have loved to help.
"Eh, Dieu sait," he sighed, as the fly jingled and bumbled over the grass-grown avenue, "Dieu sait ce qui va se passer là-bas, maintenant que je n'y suis plus!"
He gave a lingering look at the twisted chimney-stacks against the pale sky, before setting his face for Paris, Ville Lumière, once more.
* * * * *
"She must not be hurried!—Until she asks for me; then," had resolved Harry English, "I will wait."
And at first, indeed, it seemed as if the waiting could not be hard. For with the young year had come new hopes to the Old Ancient House. And with Rosamond turning to life in her room upstairs under the gables, he who loved her could well afford to sit with patience below.
Yet time went by, and the summons came not.
Upon that first blessed morning, indeed, when after all these long days she had awakened at last, and looked upon the world with seeing eyes once more, Rosamond had whispered to Aspasia:
"Harry—is he here?"
The girl's heart had leaped with joy.
"Yes," came her eager answer. "Will you see him?"
Like a little Mercury, one foot poised, hand outstretched to grasp the happy moment, Aspasia stood ready to take flight upon her errand of comfort. But the pale woman in the bed shrank. The old shy withdrawal from the thought of emotion—as once from sorrow, now from joy—seemed to be upon her.
"Not yet," she faintly sighed.
And, day by day, the singular little scene was re-enacted. In defiance of doctor's orders, Baby—with the sense of that other's hungry disappointment heavy upon her heart—would put her query ever more pleadingly:
"Will you not see him? Can you not see him? May it not be for to-day?"
But ever would come the same reply, while the lids sank over the timid eyes, and colour mounted slowly in the transparent face:
"Not yet."
Then the woman would fall back into her secret dream, lying hours in that quietude at which her physician marvelled, while he welcomed its healing power. It was a pause in life. So the young mother may lie and hold her infant in her languid arms and be happy because of its very weakness and incompleteness; and deem it more safely her own that it has yet no speech for her, no will to meet hers, even no power of love with which to answer hers.
It is harder to be patient in happiness than in sorrow. These days of waiting began to tell upon Harry English more than all the years had done.
Yet it was idle to say: "She must not be hurried," since time marches with us all, whether we will or no; and with time, the events which change our destiny. The most guarded being cannot escape the influence of those lives with which Fate has thrown his fortune, and Rosamond was destined at last to be shaken out of her dreams by the combined energies of other fortunes.
M. Chatelard had been gone some time. The green buds were swelling over the March land. The convalescent had been promoted to her armchair for an hour or two daily, when a telegram summoned ............