"Please do not tell me: it makes me miserable--indeed, I must not listen."
Again Maurice stood silent for a moment.
"_Must_ not listen?" he repeated at length, with a keen look at her.
"Why must you not?"
Lesley made no answer.
"You speak strangely," said Kenyon, with some slight coldness beginning to manifest itself in his manner. "Why should you not listen to me? If you are thinking of your father, I can a.s.sure you that he has no objection to me. I have consulted him already. He would be honestly glad, I believe, if you could care for me--he has told me so. Does his opinion go for nothing?"
She shook her head.
"I can"t explain," she said brokenly. "I can only ask you not to say anything--at least--I have promised----"
"Promised not to listen to me?"
"To anything of the kind," said Lesley, feeling that she was making a terrible mess of the whole affair, and yet unable to loosen her tongue sufficiently to explain.
"May I ask to whom you gave this promise?"
"No," said Lesley.
There was another silence, but this time it was a silence charged with ominous significance. Maurice"s face was very white, and a peculiar rigidity showed itself in the lines of his features. He was very much disappointed, and he also felt that he had some right to be displeased.
"If you were bound by any such promise, Miss Brooke," he said, "I think it would have been better that your friends should have known of it. I don"t think that Mr. Brooke was aware----"
"Oh, no, he knew nothing about it."
"It was a promise made before you came here?"
"Yes."
"Of which your mother--Lady Alice--approves?"
"Oh, yes--it was to her--because she----"
Lesley stammered and tried to explain. There was a tremendous oppression upon her, such as one feels sometimes in a nightmare dream. She longed to speak out, to clear herself in Maurice"s eyes, and yet she could not frame a single intelligible sentence. It was as though she were afflicted with dumbness.
"I think," said Maurice, deliberately, "that your father and your aunt had a right to know this fact. You seem to have kept them in ignorance of it. And I have been led into a mistake. I can a.s.sure you, Miss Brooke, that if I had been aware of any previous promise--or--or engagement of yours, I should never have presumed to speak as I have spoken to-day. I can but apologize and withdraw."
Before Lesley could answer, he had taken his hat, bowed profoundly, and left the room.
And Lesley, with lips from which all color had faded, and hands pressed tightly together, watched him go, and stood for some minutes in dazed, despairing silence before she could say, even to herself, with a burst of hot and bitter tears,
"Oh, I did not mean him to think _that_. And now I cannot explain! What shall I do? What _can_ I do to make him understand?"
But that was a question for which she found no answer.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CURED.
"You are quite well," said the doctor to John Smith, otherwise called Francis Trent, at the great hospital one day. "You can go out to-morrow.
There is nothing more that we can do for you."
Smith raised his dull eyes to their faces.
"Am I--cured?" he asked.
One of the doctors shrugged his shoulders a little. Another answered kindly and pityingly,
"You will find that you are not as strong as you used to be. Not the same man in many respects. But you will be able to get your own living, and we see no reason for detaining you here. What was your trade?"
The patient looked down at his white, thin hands. "I don"t know," he said.
"Have you friends to go to?"
There was a pause. Some of the medical students who were listening came a little nearer. As a matter of fact, Francis Trent"s future depended very largely on the answer he made to this question. The statement that he was "quite well" was hazarded rather by way of experiment than as a matter of fact. The doctors wanted to know what he would say and do under pressure, for some of them were beginning to suggest that the man should be removed to the workhouse infirmary or a lunatic asylum. His faculties seemed to be hopelessly beclouded.
Suddenly he lifted his head. A new sharp light had come into his eyes.
He nodded rea.s.suringly.
"Yes, I have friends," he said.
"You have a home where you can go? Shall we write to your friends to meet you?"
"No, thank you, sir. I can find my own way home."
And then they conferred together a little, and left him, and reported that he was cured.
Certainly, there seemed to be nothing the matter with him now. His wounds and injuries had healed, his bodily strength was returning. But the haze which hung over his mind was far more impenetrable than the doctors guessed. Something of it had been apparent to them in the earlier days of his illness; but his clear and decided answers to their questions convinced them that memory had to some extent returned. As a matter of fact it was not memory that had returned, but a sharpening of his perceptive faculties, awakening him to the fact that he stood in danger of being taken for an idiot or a madman if he did not frame some answer to the questions which the doctors asked him. This new acuteness was perhaps the precursor to a return of his memory; but as yet the Past was like a dead wall, an abyss of darkness surrounding him. Now and then flashes of light seemed to dart across that darkness: he seemed on the point of recalling something--he knew not what; for the flashes faded as quickly as they came, and made the darkness all the greater for the contrast.
He was possessed now by the idea that if he could get out of hospital, and walk along the London streets, he might remember all that he had forgotten. His own name, his own history, had become a blank to him. He knew in some vague, forlorn fashion, that he had once been what the world calls a gentleman. He had not acknowledged so much to the doctors: he had not felt that they would believe him. Even when the groping after the Past became most painful, he made up his mind that he would not ask these scientific men for help: he was afraid of being treated as a "case," experimented on, written about in the papers. There was something in the Past of which he knew he ought to be ashamed. What could it be? He was afraid to ask, lest he might find himself to be a criminal.
In these haunting terrors there was, of course, a distinct token of possible insanity. The man needed a friendly, guiding hand to steer him back to the world of reason and common-sense. But to whom could he go, since he had taken up this violent prejudice against the doctors? He felt drawn to none of the nurses, although some of them had been very kind to him. The only person to whom he might perhaps have disburthened himself, if he had had the opportunity, was the sweet-voiced, sweet-faced woman whom he had warned of the ill effects of her gifts. He did not know her name, or anything about her; but before he left the hospital he asked one of the nurses who she was.
"Lady Alice Brooke--daughter of the Lord Courtleroy, who died the other day," was the reply.
"Could you give me her address?"
"No; and I don"t think that if I could it would be of any use to you.
She is leaving England, I believe. If you want work or help, why don"t you speak to Mr. Kenyon? He"s the gentleman to find both for you--Mr.
Maurice Kenyon."
"Which is Mr. Kenyon?"