grape-like clusters of blossoms; the perfume of lemon flowers wandered vaguely upwards from some point which they could not fix.
Nothing of all the beauty seemed lost upon the girl, so bereft that she could enjoy no part of it from association. Lanfear observed that she was not fatigued by any such effort as he was always helplessly making to match what he saw with something he had seen before. Now, when this effort betrayed itself, she said, smiling: “How strange it is that you see things for what they are like, and not for what they are!”
“Yes, it’s a defect, I’m afraid, sometimes. Perhaps—”
“Perhaps what?” she prompted him in the pause he made.
“Nothing. I was wondering whether in some other possible life our consciousness would not be more independent of what we have been than it seems to be here.” She looked askingly at him. “I mean whether there shall not be something absolute in our existence, whether it shall not realize itself more in each experience of the moment, and not be always seeking to verify itself from the past.”
“Isn’t that what you think is the way with me already?” She turned upon him smiling, and he perceived that in her New York version of a Parisian costume, with her lace hat of summer make and texture and the vivid parasol she twirled upon her shoulder, she was not only a very pretty girl, but a fashionable one. There was something touching in the fact, and a little bewildering. To the pretty girl, the fashionable girl, he could have answered with a joke, but the stricken intelligence had a claim to his seriousness. Now, especially, he noted what had from time to time urged itself upon his perception. If the broken ties which once bound her to the past were beginning to knit again, her recovery otherwise was not apparent. As she stood there her beauty had signally the distinction of fragility, the delicacy of shattered nerves in which there was yet no visible return to strength. A feeling, which had intimated itself before, a sense as of being in the presence of a disembodied spirit, possessed him, and brought, in its contradiction of an accepted theory, a suggestion that was destined to become conviction. He had always said to himself that there could be no persistence of personality, of character, of identity, of consciousness, except through memory; yet here, to the last implication of temperament, they all persisted. The soul that was passing in its integrity through time without the helps, the crutches, of remembrance by which his own personality supported itself, why should not it pass so through eternity without that loss of identity which was equivalent to annihilation?
Her waiting eyes recalled him from his inquiry, and with an effort he answered, “Yes, I think you do have your being here and now, Miss Gerald, to an unusual degree.”
“And you don’t think that is wrong?”
“Wrong? Why? How?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She looked round, and her eye fell upon her father waiting for them in his carriage beside the walk. The sight supplied her with the notion which Lanfear perceived would not have occurred otherwise. “Then why doesn’t papa want me to remember things?”
“I don’t know,” Lanfear temporized. “Doesn’t he?”
“I can’t always tell. Should—should you wish me to remember more than I do?”
“I?”
She looked at him with entreaty. “Do you think it would make my father happier if I did?”
“That I can’t say,” Lanfear answered. “People are often the sadder for what they remember. If I were your father—Excuse me! I don’t mean anything so absurd. But in his place—”
He stopped, and she said, as if she were satisfied with his broken reply: “It is very curious. When I look at him—when I am with him—I know him; but when he is away, I don’t remember him.” She seemed rather interested in the fact than distressed by it; she even smiled.
“And me,” he ventured, “is it the same with regard to me?”
She did not say; she asked, smiling: “Do you remember me when I am away?”
“Yes!” he answered. “As perfectly as if you were with me. I can see you, hear you, feel the touch of your hand, your dress—Good heavens!” he added to himself under his breath. “What am I saying to this poor child!”
In the instinct of escaping from himself he started forward, and she moved with him. Mr. Gerald’s watchful driver followed them with the carriage.
“That is very strange,” she said, lightly. “Is it so with you about everyone?”
“No,” he replied, briefly, almost harshly. He asked, abruptly: “Miss Gerald, are there any times when you know people in their absence?”
“Just after I wake from a nap—yes. But it doesn’t last. That is, it seems to me it doesn’t. I’m not sure.”
As they followed the winding of the pleasant way, with the villas on the slopes above and on the slopes below, she began to talk of them, and to come into that knowledge of each which formed her remembrance of them from former knowledge of them, but which he knew would fade when she passed them.
The next morning, when she came down unwontedly late to breakfast in their pavilion, she called gayly:
“Dr. Lanfear! It is Dr. Lanfear?”
“I should be sorry if it were not, since you seem to expect it, Miss Gerald.”
“Oh, I just wanted to be sure. Hasn’t my father been here, yet?” It was the first time she had shown herself aware of her father except in his presence, as it was the first time she had named Lanfear to his face.
He suppressed a remote stir of anxiety, and answered: “He went to get his newspapers; he wished you not to wait. I hope you slept well?”
“Splendidly. But I was very tired last night; I don’t know why, exactly.”
“We had rather a long walk.”
“Did we have a walk yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“Then it was so! I thought I had dreamed it. I was beginning to remember something, and my father asked me what it was, and then I couldn’t remember. Do you believe I shall keep on remembering?”
“I don’t see why you shouldn’t.”
“Should you wish me to?” she asked, in evident, however unconscious, recurrence to their talk of the day before.
“Why not?”
She sighed. “I don’t know. If it’s like some of those dreams or gleams. Is remembering pleasant?”
Lanfear thought for a moment. Then he said, in the honesty he thought best to use with her: “For the most part I should say it was painful. Life is tolerable enough while it passes, but when it is past, what remains seems mostly to hurt and humiliate. I don’t know why we should remember so insistently the foolish things and wrong things we do, and not recall the times when we acted, without an effort, wisely and rightly.” He thought he had gone too far, and he hedged a little. “I don’t mean that we can’t recall those times. We can and do, to console and encourage ourselves; but they don’t recur, without our
