"He said they are what the j.a.ps call jelly-plums--great big fruit, very juicy."
"I know. They"re persimmons, or a sort of persimmons. We used to get lots of them in California, and even up at the Klond.y.k.e...."
He stopped abruptly and remained silent. A sudden change in him was too marked to escape notice, and there could be no doubt about the cause. The doctor walked beside him, also silent, for a few paces.
Then he spoke:
"You will have to bear this, Fenwick, and keep your head. It is just as I told you it would be. It is all coming back." He laid his left hand on his companion"s shoulder as they stood side-by-side on the chalk pathway, and with his right felt the wrist that was nearest him. Fenwick was in a quiver all through his frame, and his pulse was beating furiously as Dr. Conrad"s finger touched it. But he spoke with self-control, and his step was steady as they walked on slowly together the moment after.
"It"s all coming back. It _has_ come back. I shall remember all in time." Then he repeated Vereker"s words, "I must keep my head. I shall have to bear this," and walked on again in silence. The young man beside him still felt he had best not speak yet. Just let the physical perturbation subside. Talking would only make it worse.
They may have walked so for two minutes before Fenwick spoke again.
Then he roused himself, to say, with but little hint in his voice of any sense of the oddity of his question: "Which is my dream?--this or the other?" Then added: "That"s the question I want to ask, and n.o.body can answer."
"And of course all the while each of us knows perfectly well the answer is simply "Neither." You are a man that has had an accident, and lost his memory. Be patient, and do not torment yourself. Let it take its own time."
"All right, doctor! Patience is the word." He spoke in an undertone--a voice of acquiescence, or rather obedience. "Perhaps it will not be so bad when I remember more." They walked on again.
Then Vereker, noting that during silence he brooded under the oppression of what he had already recovered from the past, and to all appearance struck, once or twice, on some new unwelcome vein of thought, judging from a start or a momentary tension of the arm that now held his, decided that it would be as well to speak to him now, and delay no longer.
"Has anything come back to you, so far, that will unsettle your present life?"
"No, no--not that, thank G.o.d! Not so far as I can see. But much that must disquiet it; it cannot be otherwise."
"Do you mind telling me?"
"No, surely, dear fellow!--surely I will tell you. Why should I not?
But what I say to you don"t repeat to Sally or her mother. Not just now, you know. Wait!"
There was a recess in the wall of mortar-bedded flints that ran along the path, which would give shelter from the wind to light a cigar.
Fenwick stopped and took two from a cigar-case, Sally"s present to him last Christmas, and offered one to Dr. Conrad, who, however, didn"t want to smoke so early. He lighted his own in the recess, with only a slight tremor of the hand, barely visible even to Vereker"s experienced eye; and then, as he threw away the match, said, without anything that could be called emotion, though always with an apparent sense of his bewilderment at his own words:
"I am that man Harrisson that was in all the newspapers just about the time of the--you remember--when I...."
Vereker failed for the moment to grasp the degree of his own astonishment, and used the residuum of his previous calmness to say:
"I remember. The time of your accident."
"_Am_ I that man? I mean ought I to say "I _am_ that man"? I know I _was_ that man, in my old dream. I know it now, in this one."
"Well, but--so much the better! You are a millionaire, Fenwick, with mines at Klond.y.k.e...."
Dr. Conrad had been so taken aback at the suddenness of the extraordinary revelation that his amazement was quite at a loss for means of expression. A delayed laugh, not unmixed with a gasp, expressed nothing--merely recorded a welcome to the good side of it.
For, of course, when one hears of Golconda one is bound to think it good, failing evidence to the contrary.
"Yes, I _was_ that man--Algernon Harrisson. Now, the question is--and you"ll have to help me here, Vereker. Don"t look so thunderstruck, old chap--Shall I be that man again or not?"
"Why not, in Heaven"s name? How can you help it?" The speaker is too dumbfounded, so far, to be able to get the whip hand of the circ.u.mstances. But the pace may be slacker presently.
"Let"s be steady!" Fenwick"s voice, as he says this, has a sense of ease in it, as though he were relieved by his disclosure. He takes Vereker"s arm in his again, and as they walk on together is evidently on good terms with his cigar--so the doctor thinks--and the tremor has gone from his hands. A short pause, and he goes on speaking: "Until we pitched on the Klond.y.k.e just now I knew nothing of this. I shall get it all back in time. Let me see!..."
The doctor recovered his presence of mind. "Stop a minute," said he.
"Do you know, Fenwick, if I were you I shouldn"t try to tell anything until you"re clearer about the whole thing. Don"t talk to me now.
Wait till you are in a state to know how much you wish to tell."
But Fenwick would have none of this. He shook his head decidedly.
"I _must_ talk to some one about it. And my wife I cannot...."
"Why not?"
"You will see. You need not be frightened of too many confidences.
I haven"t recollected any grave misdemeanours yet. I"ll keep them to myself when they come. Now listen to what I can and do recollect pretty clearly." He paused a second, as if his first item was shaky; then said, "Yes!--of course." And went on as though the point were cleared up.
"Of course! I went up to the Klond.y.k.e almost in the first rush, in "97. I"ll tell you all about that after. Others besides myself became enormously rich that summer, but I was one of the luckiest. However, I don"t want to tell you about Harrisson at Klond.y.k.e--(that"s how I find it easiest to think of myself, third person singular!)--but to get at the thing in the dream, that concerns me most _now_. Listen!... Only remember this, Vereker dear! I can only recall jagged fragments yet awhile. I have been stunned, and can"t help that...." He stopped the doctor, who was about to speak, with: "I know what you are going to say; let it stand over a bit--wait and be patient--all that sort of game! All very good and sensible, but I _can"t_!"
"Can"t?"
"No! Can"t--simply _can"t_. Because, look you! One of the things that has come back is that I am a married man--by which I mean that Harrisson was. Oh dear! It _is_ such an ease to me to think of Harrisson as somebody else. You can"t understand that." But Vereker is thoroughly discomposed.
"But didn"t you say--only just now--there was nothing--_nothing_--to unsettle your present life? No; I can"t understand--I _can"t_ understand." His reply is to Fenwick"s words, but the reference is to the early part of his speech.
"You will understand it better if I tell you more. Let me do it my own way, because I get mixed, and feel as if I might lose the clue any moment. All the time I was with the Clemenceaux at Ontario I was a married man--I mean that I _knew_ I was a married man. And I remember knowing it all that time. Indeed, I did! But if you ask me who my wife was--she wasn"t there, you know; you"ve got all that clear?--why, I can"t tell you any more than Adam! All I know is that all that time little Ernestine was growing from a girl to a woman, the reason I felt there could be no misunderstanding on that score was that Clemenceau and his wife knew quite well I had been married and divorced or something--there was something rum, long before--and you know Papists would rather the Devil outright than have their daughter marry a divorced man. But as to who the wife had been, and what it was all about...."
He stopped again suddenly, seizing Vereker by the arm with a strong hand that trembled as it had done before. His face went very white, but he kept self-possession, as it were mechanically; so completely that the long ash on his half-smoked cigar remained unbroken. He waited a moment, and then spoke in a controlled way.
"I can remember nothing of the story; or what seems to come I _know_ is only confusion ... by things in it...." Vereker thought it might be well to change the current of his thoughts.
"Who were the Clemenceaux at Ontario?" said he.
"Of course, I ought to tell you that. Only there were so many things.
Clemenceau was a jeweller at Ontario. I lived in the flat over his shop, and used to see a great deal of his family. I must have lived almost entirely among French Canadians while I was there--it was quite three or four years...."
"And all that time, Fenwick, you thought of yourself as a married man?"
"Married or divorced--yes. And long before that."
"It is quite impossible for me--you must see it--to form any picture in my mind of how the thing presents itself to you."
"Quite."
"It seems--to me--perfectly incredible that you should have no recollection at all of the marriage, or divorce, or whatever it was...."
"I did not say I had no recollection _at all_. Listen. Don"t you know this, Vereker?--of course you do, though--how one wakes from a hideous dream and remembers exactly the feeling it produced, and how the same feeling comes back when one recalls from the dream some fragment preserved from all one has forgotten of it--something nowise horrible in itself, but from its a.s.sociations in the dream?"
"Oh yes, perfectly!"
"Well--that"s my case. When I try to bring back the memories I know I _must_ have had at that time in Canada, nothing comes back but a horror--something like a story read in boyhood and shuddered at in the night--but all details gone. I mean all details with horror in them. Because, do you know?..."
"Yes----?" Vereker stopped beside him on the path, as Fenwick stopped and hesitated. Utter perplexity almost forbidding speech was the impression the doctor received of his condition at this moment. After a moment"s silence he continued: