A Sleep and a Forgetting Read online

  Lanfear, sitting by the bed, in the light of the wasting candle, which threw a grotesque shadow of him on the wall, shook his head. After a moment he asked: “How long did you tell me her swoon had lasted after the accident to her mother?”

  “I don’t think she recovered consciousness for two days, and then she remembered nothing. What do you think are the chances of her remembering now?”

  “I don’t know. But there’s a kind of psychopathic logic—If she lost her memory through one great shock, she might find it through another.”

  “Yes, yes!” the father said, rising and walking to and fro, in his anguish. “That was what I thought—what I was afraid of. If I could die myself, and save her from living through it—I don’t know what I’m saying! But if—but if—if she could somehow be kept from it a little longer! But she can’t, she can’t! She must know it now when she wakes.”

  Lanfear had put up his hand, and taken the girl’s slim wrist quietly between his thumb and finger, holding it so while her father talked on.

  “I suppose it’s been a sort of weakness—a sort of wickedness—in me to wish to keep it from her; but I have wished that, doctor; you must have seen it, and I can’t deny it. We ought to bear what is sent us in this world, and if we escape we must pay for our escape. It has cost her half her being, I know it; but it hasn’t cost her her reason, and I’m afraid for that, if she comes into her memory now. Still, you must do—But no one can do anything either to hinder or to help!”

  He was talking in a husky undertone, and brokenly, incoherently. He made an appeal, which Lanfear seemed not to hear, where he remained immovable with his hand on the girl’s pulse.

  “Do you think I am to blame for wishing her never to know it, though without it she must remain deprived of one whole side of life? Do you think my wishing that can have had anything to do with keeping her—But this faint may pass and she may wake from it just as she has been. It is logical that she should remember; but is it certain that she will?”

  A murmur, so very faint as to be almost no sound at all, came like a response from the girl’s lips, and she all but imperceptibly stirred. Her father neither heard nor saw, but Lanfear started forward. He made a sudden clutch at the girl’s wrist with the hand that had not left it and then remained motionless. “She will never remember now—here.”

  He fell on his knees beside the bed and began to sob. “Oh, my dearest! My poor girl! My love!” still keeping her wrist in his hand, and laying his head tenderly on her arm. Suddenly he started, with a shout: “The pulse!” and fell forward, crushing his ear against her heart, and listened with bursts of: “It’s beating! She isn’t dead! She’s alive!” Then he lifted her in his arms, and it was in his embrace that she opened her eyes, and while she clung to him, entreated:

  “My father! Where is he?”

  A dread fell upon both the men, blighting the joy with which they welcomed her back to life. She took her father’s head between her hands, and kissed his bruised face. “I thought you were dead; and I thought that mamma—” She stopped, and they waited breathless. “But that was long ago, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” her father eagerly assented. “Very long ago.”

  “I remember,” she sighed. “I thought that I was killed, too. Was it all a dream?” Her father and Lanfear looked at each other. Which should speak? “This is Doctor Lanfear, isn’t it?” she asked, with a dim smile. “And I’m not dreaming now, am I?” He had released her from his arms, but she held his hand fast. “I know it is you, and papa; and yes, I remember everything. That terrible pain of forgetting is gone! It’s beautiful! But did he hurt you badly, papa? I saw him, and I wanted to call to you. But mamma—”

  However the change from the oblivion of the past had been operated, it had been mercifully wrought. As far as Lanfear could note it, in the rapture of the new revelation to her which it scarcely needed words to establish, the process was a gradual return from actual facts to the things of yesterday and then to the things of the day before, and so back to the tragedy in which she had been stricken. There was no sudden burst of remembrance, but a slow unveiling of the reality in which her spirit was mystically fortified against it. At times it seemed to him that the effect was accomplished in her by supernatural agencies such as, he remembered once somewhere reading, attend the souls of those lately dead, and explore their minds till every thought and deed of their earthly lives, from the last to the first, is revealed to them out of an inner memory which can never, any jot or tittle, perish. It was as if this had remained in her intact from the blow that shattered her outer remembrance. When the final, long-dreaded horror was reached, it was already a sorrow of the past, suffered and accepted with the resignation which is the close of grief, as of every other passion.

  Love had come to her help in the time of her need, but not love alone helped her live back to the hour of that supreme experience and beyond it. In the absorbing interest of her own renascence, the shock, more than the injury which her father had undergone, was ignored, if not neglected. Lanfear had not, indeed, neglected it; but he could not help ignoring it in his happiness, as he remembered afterwards in the self-reproach which he would not let the girl share with him. Nothing, he realized, could have availed if everything had been done which he did not do; but it remained a pang with him that he had so dimly felt his duty to the gentle old man, even while he did it. Gerald lived to witness his daughter’s perfect recovery of the self so long lost to her; he lived, with a joy more explicit than their own, to see her the wife of the man to whom she was dearer than love alone could have made her. He lived beyond that time, rejoicing, if it may be so said, in the fond memories of her mother which he had been so long forbidden by her affliction to recall. Then, after the spring of the Riviera had whitened into summer, and San Remo hid, as well as it could, its sunny glare behind its pines and palms, Gerald suffered one long afternoon through the heat till the breathless evening, and went early to bed. He had been full of plans for spending the rest of the summer at the little place in New England where his daughter knew that her mother lay. In the morning he did not wake.

  “He gave his life that I might have mine!” she lamented in the first wild grief.

  “No, don’t say that, Nannie,” her husband protested, calling her by the pet name which her father always used. “He is dead; but if we owe each other to his loss, it is because he was given, not because he gave himself.”

  “Oh, I know, I know!” she wailed. “But he would gladly have given himself for me.”

  That, perhaps, Lanfear could not have denied, and he had no wish to do so. He had a prescience of happiness for her which the future did not belie; and he divined that a woman must not be forbidden the extremes within which she means to rest her soul.

  OTHER TITLES IN THE ART OF THE NOVELLA SERIES

  BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER

  HERMAN MELVILLE

  THE LESSON OF THE MASTER

  HENRY JAMES

  MY LIFE

  ANTON CHEKHOV

  THE DEVIL

  LEO TOLSTOY

  THE TOUCHSTONE

  EDITH WHARTON

  THE HOUND OF THE

  BASKERVILLES

  ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  THE DEAD

  JAMES JOYCE

  FIRST LOVE

  IVAN TURGENEV

  A SIMPLE HEART

  GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

  THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING

  RUDYARD KIPLING

  MICHAEL KOHLHAAS

  HEINRICH VON KLEIST

  THE BEACH OF FALESÁ

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  THE HORLA

  GUY DE MAUPASSANT

  THE ETERNAL HUSBAND

  FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

  THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED

  HADLEYBURG

  MARK TWAIN

  THE LIFTED VEIL

  GEORGE ELIOT

  THE GIRL WITH THE

  GOLDEN EYES

  HONORÉ DE BALZAC

  A SLEEP AND A FORG
ETTING

  WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

  BENITO CERENO

  HERMAN MELVILLE

  MATHILDA

  MARY SHELLEY

  STEMPENYU: A JEWISH ROMANCE

  SHOLEM ALEICHEM

  FREYA OF THE SEVEN ISLES

  JOSEPH CONRAD

  HOW THE TWO IVANS

  QUARRELLED

  NIKOLAI GOGOL

  MAY DAY

  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

  RASSELAS, PRINCE ABYSSINIA

  SAMUEL JOHNSON

  THE DIALOGUE OF THE DOGS

  MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

  THE LEMOINE AFFAIR

  MARCEL PROUST

  THE COXON FUND

  HENRY JAMES

  THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH

  LEO TOLSTOY

  TALES OF BELKIN

  ALEXANDER PUSHKIN

  THE AWAKENING

  KATE CHOPIN

  ADOLPHE

  BENJAMIN CONSTANT

  THE COUNTRY OF

  THE POINTED FIRS

  SARAH ORNE JEWETT

  PARNASSUS ON WHEELS

  CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

  THE NICE OLD MAN

  AND THE PRETTY GIRL

  ITALO SVEVO

  LADY SUSAN

  JANE AUSTEN

  JACOB’S ROOM

  VIRGINIA WOOLF

  THE DUEL

  GIACOMO CASANOVA

  THE DUEL

  ANTON CHEKHOV

  THE DUEL

  JOSEPH CONRAD

  THE DUEL

  HEINRICH VON KLEIST

  THE DUEL

  ALEXANDER KUPRIN

  THE ALIENIST

  MACHADO DE ASSIS

  ALEXANDER’S BRIDGE

  WILLA CATHER

  FANFARLO

  CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

  THE DISTRACTED PREACHER

  THOMAS HARDY

  THE ENCHANTED WANDERER

  NIKOLAI LESKOV