Left alone, Mrs. Nightingale, the elder Rosalind, seems reflective.
"A funny thing, too!" she says aloud to herself. She is thinking, clearly, of how this man in the cab, who can"t give any account of himself, once knew a Rosalind Nightingale.
Probably the handle has come off the drawer, for they are a long time over that string. Curiosity has time to work, and has so much effect that the lady seems to determine that, after all, she would like to see the man. Now that the cab is so far from the door, even if she spoke to him, she would not stand committed to anything. It is all settled, arranged, ratified, that he shall go to the police-station, or the infirmary, "or somewhere."
When the string, and Dr. Vereker, and Sally the daughter come out of the house, both exclaim. And the surprise they express is that the mother of the latter should have walked all the way after the cab, and should be talking to the man in it! It is not consistent with her previous att.i.tude.
"Now, isn"t that like mamma?" says Sally. If so, why be so astonished at it?--is a question that suggests itself to her hearer. But self-confutation is not a disorder for his treatment. Besides, the doctor likes it, in this case. His own surprise at mamma"s conduct is unqualified by any intimate acquaintance with her character. She may be inconsistency itself, for anything he knows.
"Is she going to turn the cab round and bring him to the house, after all?" It looks like it.
"I"m so glad," Sally replies to the doctor.
"I hope you won"t repent it in sackcloth and ashes."
"I shan"t. Why do you think I shall?"
"How do you know you won"t?"
"You"ll see!" Sally pinches her red lips tight over her two rows of pearls, and nods confirmation. Her dark eyes look merry under the merry eyebrows, and the lip-pinch makes a dimple on her chin--a dimple to remember her by. She is a taking young lady, there is no doubt of it. At least, the doctor has none.
"Yes, Sally, it"s all quite right." Thus her mother, arriving a little ahead of the returning cab. "Now, don"t dispute with me, child, but do just as I tell you. We"ll have him in the breakfast-room; there"s fewer steps." She seems to have made up her mind so completely that neither of the others interposes a word. But she replies, moved by a brain-wave, to a question that stirred in the doctor"s mind.
"Oh yes; he has spoken. He spoke to me just now. I"ll tell you presently.
Now let"s get him out. No, never mind calling cook. You take him on that side, doctor.... That"s right!"
And then the man, whose name we still do not know, found himself half supported, half standing alone, on the pavement in front of a little white eligible residence smelling of new paint. He did not the least know what had happened. He had only a vague impression that if some one or something, he couldn"t say what, would only give up hindering him, he would find something he was looking for. But how could he find it if he didn"t know what it was? And that he was quite in the dark about. The half-crown and the pretty girl who had given it to him, the train-guard and his cowardice about responsibility, the public-spirited gentleman, the railway-carriage itself, to say nothing of all the exciting experiences of the morning--all, all had vanished, leaving behind only the trace of the impulse to search. Nothing else!
He stood looking bewildered, then spoke thickly.
"I am giving trouble," said he. Then the two ladies and the gentleman, whom he saw dimly and did not know, looked at one another, each perhaps to see if one of the others would speak first. In the end the lady who was a woman nodded to the gentleman to speak, and then the lady who was a girl confirmed her by what was little more than an intention to nod, not quite unmixed with a mischievous enjoyment at the devolution of the duty of speech on the gentleman. It twinkled in her closed lips. But the gentleman didn"t seem overwhelmed with embarra.s.sment. He spoke as if he was used to things.
"You have had an accident, sir.... On the railway.... In the Twopenny Tube.... Yes, you"ll remember all about it presently.... Yes, I"m a doctor.... Yes, we want you to come in and sit down and rest till you"re better.... No, it won"t be a long job. _You"ll_ soon come round.... What?... Oh no, no trouble at all! It"s this lady"s house, and she wants you to come in." The speaker seems to guess at the right meanings, as one guesses in the jaws of the telephone, perhaps with more confidence. But there was but little audible articulation on the other"s part.
He seemed not to want much support--chiefly guidance. He was taken down the half-dozen steps that flanked a gra.s.s slope down to a stone paving, and through a door under the more numerous steps he had escaped climbing, and into a breakfast-room flush with the kitchen, opening on a small garden at the back. There was the marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert over the chimney-piece, and a tortoisesh.e.l.l cat with a collar on the oilskin cover of a square table, who rose as though half resenting strange visitors; then, after stretching, decided on some haven less liable to disturbance, and went through the window to it without effort, emotion, or sound. There was a clock under a gla.s.s cover on the chimney-piece whose works you could see through, with a fascinating ratchet movement of perfect grace and punctuality. Also a vertical orange-yellow gla.s.s vase, twisted to a spiral, and full of spills. Also the leaning tower of Pisa, done small in alabaster. He could see all these things quite plainly, and but that his tongue seemed to have struck work, could have described them.
But he could not make himself out, nor how and why he came to be there at all. Where ought he to have been, he asked himself? And, to his horror, he could not make that out either. Never mind. Patience was the word, clearly. Let him shut his eyes as he sat there, in the little breakfast-room, with the flies continually droning in the ceiling, and an especially large bluebottle busy in the window, who might just as easily have gone out and enjoyed the last hour of a long evening in a glorious sunshine, but who mysteriously preferred to beat himself for ever against a closed pane of gla.s.s, a self-const.i.tuted prisoner between it and a gauze blind--let him shut his eyes, and try to think out what it all meant, what it was all about.
All that he was perfectly certain of, at that moment, was that he was awake, with a contused pain all over, and a very stiff left hand and foot. And that, knowing he had been insensible, he was striving hard to remember what something was that had happened just before he became insensible. He had nearly got it, once or twice. Yes, now he _had_ got it, surely! No, he hadn"t. It was gone again.
A mind that is struggling to remember some particular thing does not deal with other possibilities of oblivion. We all know the painful phenomenon of being perfectly aware what it is we are trying to remember, feeling constantly close to it, but always failing to grasp it. We know what it will sound like when we say it, what it will mean, where it was on the page we read it on. Oh dear yes!--quite plainly.
The only thing we can"t remember for the life of us is--what it _was_!
And while we are making stupendous efforts to recapture some such thing, does it ever occur to any of us to ask if we may not be mistaken in our tacit a.s.sumption that we are quite certain to remember everything else as soon as we try? That, in fact, it may be our memory-faculty itself that is in fault and that we are only failing to recall one thing because at the moment it is that one sole thing, and no other, that we are trying our brains against.
It was so in the pause of a few minutes in which this man we write of, left to himself and the ticking of the clock, and hearing, through the activity of the bluebottle and the monotony of the ceiling flies, the murmur of a distant conversation between his late companions, who for the moment had left him alone, tried in vain to recover his particular thread of memory, without any uneasiness about the innumerable skeins that made up the tissue of his record of a lifetime.
When the young doctor returned, he found him still seated where he had left him, one hand over his eyes, the other on his knee. As he sat--for the doctor watched him from the door for a moment--he moved and replaced either hand at intervals, with implied distress in the movements. They gave the impression of constant attempt constantly baffled. The doctor, a shrewd-seeming young man with an attentive pale eye, and very fair hair, seemed to understand.
"Let me recommend you to be quiet and rest. Be quite quiet. You will be all right when you have slept on it. Mrs. Nightingale--that"s the lady you saw just now; this is her house--will see that you are properly taken care of."
Then the man tried to speak; it was with an effort.
"I wish to thank--I must thank----"
"Never mind thanks yet. All in good time. Now, what do you think you can take--to eat or drink?"
"Nothing--nothing to eat or drink."
"Well, you know best. However, there"s tea coming; perhaps you"ll go so far as a cup of tea? You would be the better for it."
Rosalind junior, or Sally, slept in the back bedroom on the first-floor--that is to say, if we ignore the bas.e.m.e.nt floor and call the one flush with the street-door step the ground-floor. We believe we are right in doing so. Rosalind senior, the mother, slept in the front one. It wasn"t too late for tea, they had decided, and thereupon they had gone upstairs to revise and correct.
After a certain amount of slopping and splashing in the back room, uncorroborated by any in the front, Sally called out to her mother, on the disjointed lines of talk in real life:
"I like this soap! Have you a safety-pin?" Whereto her mother replied, speaking rather drowsily and perfunctorily:
"Yes, but you must come and get it."
"It"s so nice and oily. It"s not from Cattley"s?"
"Yes, it is."
"I thought it was. Where"s the pin?" At this point she came into her mother"s room, covering her slightly _retrousse_ nose with her fresh-washed hands, to enjoy the aroma of Cattley"s soap.
"In the little pink saucer. Only don"t mess my things about."
"Headache, mammy dear?" For her mother was lying back on the bed, with her eyes closed. The speaker left her hands over her nostrils as she spoke, to do full justice to the soap, pausing an instant in her safety-pin raid for the answer:
"I"ve been feeling the heat. It"s nothing. You go down, and I"ll come."
"Have some eau-de-Cologne?" But, alas! there was no eau-de-Cologne.
"Never mind. You go down, and I"ll follow. I shall be all right after a cup of tea." And Sally, after an intricate movement with a safety-pin, an openwork lace cuff that has lost a b.u.t.ton, and a white wrist, goes down three accelerandos of stair-lengths, with landing pauses, and ends with a dining-room door staccato. But she isn"t long gone, for in two minutes the door reopens, and she comes upstairs as fast, nearly, as she went down. In her hand she carries, visibly, Johann Maria Farina.
"Where on earth did you find that?" says her mother.
"The man had it. Wasn"t it funny? He heard me say to Dr. Vereker that I was so sorry I"d not been able to eau-de-Cologne your forehead, and he began speaking and couldn"t get his words. Then he got this out of his pocket. I remember one of the men at the station said something about his having a bottle, but I thought he meant a pocket-flask. He looks the sort of man that would have a pocket-flask and earrings."
Her mother doesn"t seem to find this inexplicable, nor to need comment. Rather the contrary. Sally dabs her brow with eau-de-Cologne, beneficially, for she seems better, and says now go; she won"t be above a couple of minutes. Nor is she, in the sense in which her statement has been accepted, for she comes downstairs within seven by the clock with the dutiful ratchet movement.
When she came within hearing of those in the room below, she heard a male voice that was not Dr. Vereker"s. Yes, the man (whom we still cannot speak of by a name) was saying something--slowly, perhaps--but fairly articulately and intelligibly. She went very deliberately, and listened in the doorway. She looked very pale, and very interested--a face of fixed attention, of absorption in something she was irresolute about, rather than of doubt about what she heard; an expression rather out of proportion to the concurrent facts, as we know them.
"What is so strange"--this is what the man was saying, in his slow way--"is that I could find words to tell you, if I could remember what it is I have to tell. But when I try to bring it back, my head fails.
Tell me again, mademoiselle, about the railway-carriage." Sally wondered why she was mademoiselle, but recognised a tone of deference in his use of the word. She did as he asked her, slightly interrupting her narrative to make sure of getting the tea made right as she did so.
"I trod on your foot, you know. (One, two, three spoonfuls.) Surely you must remember that? (Four, and a little one for the pot.)"