"I don"t think we shall, either of us." It was a daughter"s marriage-warrant he was being asked to sign; a doc.u.ment seldom signed without a heartache, more or less, for him who holds the pen. But his _coeur navre_ had to be concealed, for the sake of the applicant; no wet blanket should be cast on her new happiness. He kissed her affectionately. To him, for all her thirty-nine or forty birthdays, she was still the young girl he had helped and shielded in her despair, twenty years ago, he himself being then a widower, near forty years her senior. "No, Rosa dear," continued the Major. "As far as I can see, there can be no objection but one--_you_ know!"
"_The_ one?"
"Yes. It is all a _terra incognita_. He _may_ have a wife elsewhere, seeking for him. Who can tell?"
"It is a risk to be run. But I am prepared to run it"--she was going to add "for his sake," but remembered that her real meaning for these words would be, "for the sake of the man I wronged," and that the Major knew nothing of Fenwick"s ident.i.ty. She had not been able to persuade herself to make even her old friend her confidant. Danger lay that way.
She _knew_ silence would be safe against anything but Fenwick"s own memory.
"Yes, it is a risk, no doubt," the Major said. "But I am like him. I cannot conceive a man forgetting that he had a wife. It seems an impossibility. He has talked about you to me, you know."
"In connexion with his intention about me?"
"Almost. Not quite definitely, but almost. He knew I understood what he meant. It seemed to me he was fidgeting more about his having so little to offer in the way of worldly goods than about any possible wife in the clouds."
"Dear fellow! Just fancy! Why, those people in the City would take him into partnership to-morrow if he had a little capital to bring in. They told him so themselves."
"And you would finance him? Is that the idea? Well, I suppose as I"m your trustee, if the money was all lost, I should have to make it up, so it wouldn"t matter."
"Oh, Major dear! is _that_ what being a trustee means?"
"Of course, my dear Rosa! What did you think it meant?"
"Do you know, I don"t know what I _did_ think; at least, I thought it would be very nice if you were my trustee."
The conversation has gone off on a siding, but the Major shunts the train back. "That was what you and little fiddle-stick"s-end were talking about till three in the morning, then?"
"Oh, Major dear, did you hear us? And we kept you awake? What a _shame_!"
For on the previous evening, Sally being out musicking and expected home late, Fenwick and Mrs. Nightingale had gone out in the back-garden to enjoy the sweet air of that rare phenomenon--a really fine spring night in England--leaving the Major indoors because of his bronchial tubes. The late seventies shrink from night air, even when one means to be a healthy octogenarian. Also, they go away to bed, secretively, when no one is looking--at least, the Major did in this case. Of course, he was staying the night, as usual.
So, in the interim between the Major"s good-night and Sally"s cab-wheels, this elderly couple of lovers (as they would have worded their own description) had the summer night to themselves. As the Major closed his bedroom window, he saw, before drawing down the blind, that the two were walking slowly up and down the gravel path, talking earnestly. No impression of mature years came to the Major from that gravel path. A well-made, handsome man, with a bush of brown hair and a Raleigh beard, and a graceful woman suggesting her beauty through the clear moonlight--that was the implication of as much as he could see, as he drew the inference a word of soliloquy hinted at, "Not Millais"
Huguenot, so far!" But he evidently expected that grouping very soon.
Only he was too sleepy to watch for it, and went to bed. Besides, would it have been honourable?
"It"s no use, Fenwick," she said to him in the garden, "trying to keep off the forbidden subject, so I won"t try."
"It"s not forbidden by me. Nothing could be, that _you_ would like to say."
Was that, she thought, only what so many men say every day to so many women, and mean so little by? Or was it more? She could not be sure yet. She glanced at him as they turned at the path-end, and her misgivings all but vanished, so serious and resolved was his quiet face in the moonlight. She was half-minded to say to him, "Do you mean that you love me, Fenwick?" But, then, was it safe to presume on the peculiarity of her position, of which he, remember, knew absolutely nothing.
For with her it was not as with another woman, who expects what is briefly called "an offer." In _her_ case, the man beside her was her husband, to whose exorcism of her love from his life her heart had never a.s.sented. While, in his eyes, she differed in no way in her relation to him from any woman, to whom a man, placed as he was, longs to say that she is what he wants most of all mortal things, but stickles in the telling of it, from sheer cowardice; who dares not risk the loss of what share he has in her in the attempt to get the whole.
_She_ grasped the whole position, _he_ only part of it.
"I am glad it is so," she decided to say. "Because each time I see you, I want to ask if nothing has come back--no trace of memory?"
"Nothing! It is all gone. Nothing comes back."
"Do you remember that about the tennis-court? Did it go any further, or die out completely?"
He stopped a moment in his walk, and flicked the ash from his cigar; then, after a moment"s thought, replied:
"I am not sure. It seemed to get mixed with my name--on my arm. I think it was only because tennis and Fenwick are a little alike." His companion thought how near the edge of a volcano both were, and resolved to try a crucial experiment. Better an eruption, after all, or a plunge in the crater, than a life of incessant doubt.
"You remembered the name Algernon clearly?"
"Not _clearly_. But it was the only name with an "A" that felt right.
Unless it was Arthur, but I"m sure my name never was Arthur!"
"Sally thought it was hypnotic suggestion--thought I had laid an unfair stress upon it. I easily might have."
"Why? Did you know an Algernon?"
"My husband"s name was Algernon." She herself wondered how any voice that spoke so near a heart that beat as hers did at this moment could keep its secret. Yet it betrayed nothing, and so supreme was her self-control that she could say to herself, even while she knew she would pay for this effort later, that the pallor of her face would betray nothing either; he would put that down to the moonlight. She _was_ a strong woman. For she went steadily on, to convince herself of her own self-command: "I knew him very little by that name, though.
I always called him Gerry."
He merely repeated the name thrice, but it gave her a moment of keen apprehension. Any stirring of memory over it might be the thin end of a very big wedge. But if there was any, it was an end so thin that it broke off. Fenwick looked round at her.
"Do you know," he said, "I rather favour the hypnotic suggestion theory. For the moment you said the name Gerry, I fancied I too knew it as the short for Algernon. Now, that"s absurd! No two people ever made Gerry out of Algernon. It"s always Algy."
"Always. Certainly, it would be odd."
"I am rather inclined to think," said Fenwick, after a short silence, "that I can understand how it happened. Only then, perhaps, my name may not be Algernon at all. And here I have been using it, signing with it, and so on."
"What do you understand?"
"Well, I suspect this. I suspect that you did lay some kind of stress, naturally, on your husband"s name, and also on its abbreviation. It affected me somehow with a sense of familiarity."
"Is it so _very_ improbable that you were familiar with the name Gerry too? It might be----"
"Anything might be. But surely we almost know that two accidental adoptions of Gerry as a short for Algernon would not come across each other by chance, as yours and mine have done."
"What is "almost knowing"? But tell me this. When I call you Gerry--Gerry ... there!--does the a.s.sociation or impression repeat itself?" She repeated the name once and again, to try. There was a good deal of nettle-grasping in all this. Also a wish to clinch matters, to drive the sword to the hilt; to put an end, once and for all, to the state of tension she lived in. For surely, if anything could prove his memory was really gone, it would be this. That she should call him by his name of twenty years ago--should utter it to him, as she could not help doing, in the tone in which she spoke to him then, and that her doing so should arouse no memory of the past--surely this would show, if anything could show it, that that past had been finally erased from the scroll of his life. She had a moment only of suspense after speaking, and then, as his voice came in answer, she breathed again freely. Nothing could have shown a more complete unconsciousness than his reply, after another moment of reflection:
"Do you know, Mrs. Nightingale, that convinces me that the name Algernon _was_ produced by your way of saying it. It _was_ hypnotic suggestion! I a.s.sure you that, however strange you may think it, every time you repeat the name Gerry, it seems more familiar to me. If you said it often enough, I have no doubt I should soon be believing in the diminutive as devoutly as I believe in the name itself. Because I am quite convinced of Algernon Fenwick. Continually signing _per-pro_"s has driven it home." He didn"t seem quite in earnest over his conviction, though--seemed to laugh a little about it.
But a sadder tone came into his voice after an interval in which his companion, frightened at her own temerity, resolved that she would not call him Gerry again. It was sailing too near the wind. She was glad he went back from this side-channel of their talk to the main subject.
"No, I have no hope of getting to the past through my own mind. I feel it is silence. And that being so, I should be sorry that any illumination should come to me out of the past, throwing light on records my mind could not read--I mean, any proof positive of what my crippled memory could not confirm. I would rather remain quite in the dark--unless, indeed----"
"Unless what?"
"Unless the well-being of some others, forgotten with my forgotten world, is involved in--dependent on--my return to it. That would be shocking--the hungry nestlings in the deserted nest. But I am so convinced that I have only forgotten a restless life of rapid change--that I _could_ not forget love and home, if I ever had them--that my misgivings about this are misgivings of the reason only, not of the heart. Do you understand me?"
"Perfectly. At least, I think so. Go on."
"I cannot help thinking, too, that a sense of a strong link with a forgotten yesterday would survive the complete effacement of all its details in the form of a wish to return to it. I have none. My to-day is too happy for me to wish to go back to that yesterday, even if I could, without a wrench. I feel a sort of shame in saying I should be sorry to return to it. It seems a sort of ... a sort of disloyalty to the unknown."