A Book o' Nine Tales.

“Perhaps,” she answered, returning his smile. “But, really, we only did what any one would have done in our place.”

“Oh, no; and besides, few could have done it so well. It is so pleasant, I seem to have lived here always.”

“It may be,” Columbine suggested, with deliberation, “that it recalls some place you have known.”

A shadow came over his face.

“It is a pity,” he said, “that if that unlucky disaster could spare me nothing of my baggage, it could not at least have left me my few poor wits. I might make an interesting case for psychologists. They might discover from me in what part of the brain the faculty of memory is located, for that wretched wound seems to have let mine all ooze out of my cranium. I do not feel, Miss Dysart, like an idiot in all respects, since I certainly know my right hand from my left; and I have found, by experiment in the night-watches, that I could still make myself understood in two or three languages.”

“You had much better have slept,” interpolated his listener.

“But as far as my personal history goes,” he continued, replying to her words by a smile, “my mind is an absolute blank. I can give you several interesting pieces of information concerning ancient history and chronology; but I haven’t the faintest idea what my name is; and you must acknowledge that it is a little hard for a man to be ignorant of his own name.”

“Yes,” Columbine assented, bending forward and clasping her hands in front of her knees. “Yes; and it is so strange! Try and remember; you must surely recollect something.”

“I have tried; I do try; but I can only conjure up a confused mass of shifting images; things I seem to have been and to have done, all indistinguishably mixed with what I have only dreamed or hoped to do and be.”

“How strange!” she said again, fixing her wide-open dark eyes upon him, and then turning her gaze to the sea beyond; “but it will come to you in time.”

“Heavens!” he exclaimed, energetically, “I hope so, else I shall regret that you pulled me out of the water. To-day I do seem to have a glimpse of something more tangible. Since I sat here I almost thought I remembered – ”

He broke off suddenly, his bright look fading into an expression of helpless annoyance.

“What?” cried Columbine, eagerly.

“I cannot tell,” he groaned. “It is all gone.”

“Oh, what a pity!” exclaimed she, springing to her feet in a flush of sympathy and baffled curiosity. “Oh, how cruel!”

Then she remembered that she was absolutely disobeying the doctor’s orders, and was allowing her patient to become excited.

“There, there,” she said, “how wrong of me to let you worry! Everything will come back to you when you are stronger. Now it is time for your luncheon. It is so warm and bright you may have it here if you will promise not to bother your head. For I really think,” she added, wisely, giving his wraps a deft touch or two, “that the best way to remember is not to try.”

“I dare say you are right,” he agreed. “At least trying doesn’t seem to accomplish much.”

She flitted away, to return a moment or two later with an old-fashioned salver, upon which, in dainty china two or three generations old, Sarah had arranged the invalid’s luncheon. She drew the rustic table up to his side and served him, while he ate with that mixture of eagerness and disinclination which marks the appetite of one in the early stages of a convalescence.

“That pitcher,” he observed, carelessly, as she poured out the cream, “ought to belong to my past. It has a familiar look, as if it could claim acquaintance if it would only deign.”

“It was my grandmother’s,” Columbine said. “When we were little, Cousin Tom used to tease me by saying my cheeks looked like those of that fat face on the handle. I was more buxom then than now.”

Instead of replying, her companion laid down his spoon and looked at her in delighted amaze. Then he struck his hands together with sudden vigor.

“Tom!” he cried. “Tom!”

“Well?” queried she, looking at him as if he had gone distraught. “It isn’t so strange a name, is it?”

“But, don’t you see?” he exclaimed, joyously, – “I’m Tom! I have found my name!”

III

The rest of Tom’s name, however, remained as profoundly and as provokingly concealed in the wounded convolutions of his brain as ever. Columbine called him Mr. Tom, and it is not unlikely that the familiarity of the monosyllable, which seemed to place them at once upon an intimate footing, had a strong influence upon their relations. The maiden had a crisp way of pronouncing the name, as if she were half conscious of a spice of impropriety in a term so familiar, and felt it, too, to be something of a joke, which was so wholly fascinating that the patient did not have to be very far advanced toward his normal condition of health and spirits to enjoy it so well as to reflect that the name so rendered ought to be enough for any man.

Mr. Tom soon began to gather up a few stray bits from his childhood, his memory apparently returning to its former state by the same slow road it had travelled from his birth to reach it.

“I remember a few beginnings,” he had said, hopefully, on the day following that of his first visit to the arbor. “I had a carved coral of a most luscious pink color. It is even now vaguely connected in my mind with the idea of eating; so I infer that I must have cherished a fond delusion that it was good to eat.”

“It is at least good to remember,” Columbine returned, laughing. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea to open an account of things recovered from the sea of the past. You can begin by putting down: Item, one coral.”

“Yes; and one nurse. I distinctly recall the nurse. She had a large mole on her chin. Yes; I can certainly swear to the nurse.”

He was in excellent spirits to-day. The dawning of recollection gave promise of the restoration of complete remembrance; the day was enchanting; his appetite and his luncheon came to a wonderfully good agreement, while a prettier serving-maid than Miss Dysart could hardly be found.

“It must be very like being a child again,” she observed, thoughtfully; “and that is a thing, you know, for which the poets are always sighing.”

“You will have the advantage of growing up with me,” was his gay retort, “if this process continues. Only you’ll have the advantage of superior age.”

After that he told her each morning what he had been able to recover from forgetfulness since the previous day. It is difficult to imagine the strangeness of this relation. It possessed all the piquancy of fiction to which its ingenious author added new incidents from day to day; yet it had, too, the strong attractiveness of truth and personal interest. Columbine listened and commented, deeply engrossed and fascinated by the novel experience which gave her an acquaintance with the entire past life of her stranger guest, yet an acquaintance which was etherealized and marked by a certain charm not to be found in actual companionship. Had she really shared the childhood thus narrated to her it would have been in no way remarkable; but now she seemed to live it herself, with a vitality and interest more vivid each day. Often the freakish faculty, upon whose vigor depended the continuity of Mr. Tom’s narration, would for days concern itself with the veriest trifles, advancing the essentials of the story not a whit; or, again, it would seem to turn perversely backward, although no efforts availed to speed it forward.

The main facts of Mr. Tom’s story, so far as they were gathered up in the first week of this odd story-telling, were as follows: He made his acquaintance with the world doubly orphaned, his father being lost at sea upon a return voyage from India before the boy’s birth, and his mother dying in childbed. Reflecting upon what he was able to recall, Tom concluded that his parents were persons of wealth. His surroundings had at least been luxurious. The truth was, as he came, in time, to remember, that, being left without near relatives, he had been, by his guardian, confided to the care of trusty people, who spoiled and adored him until he was transferred to boarding-school.

“I have grown to be a dozen years old,” Tom remarked to Miss Dysart one afternoon as they sat in the arbor, she sewing, and he idly pulling to pieces a purple aster. “I have even conducted myself to boarding-school, and I cannot conceive why I can’t get hold of my family name. I must have been called by it sometimes. I remember being dubbed Tom, Tommy, Thomas, – that was when I was stubborn; Tom Titmouse – that was by nurse; Tom Tattamus – that by the particularly odious small boy next door; but beyond that I might as well never have had a name at all. My trunks, I know, were marked with a big W, but all the names beginning with that letter that I can hit upon seem equally strange to me. I do not see why, of all things, it is precisely that which I cannot remember.”

“It is because you worry about it,” his companion suggested; “probably that particular spot in your brain where your name is lodged is kept irritated by your impatience.”

“Heavens!” laughed he. “How psychologic and physiological you are! Well, if I’ve no name, I can invent one, I suppose.”

“Or make one. Do you realize what a fascinating position you are in? Common mortals have only the consolation of speculating about their future; but you can also amuse yourself with boundless speculations concerning your past. You are relieved from all responsibility – ”

“Oh, no,” he interrupted; “that is the worst of it. I have responsibilities without knowing what they are. The past holds me like a giant from behind, and I cannot even see my captor.”

“Oh, you look at it all too seriously!” Columbine returned. “You can fashion your past, as we all do our futures, just as you like. I think you are decidedly to be envied.”

“Envied!”

The bitterness of the exclamation brought to her a sudden realization of the difference of their points of view, and revealed how deep was the man’s humiliation at his helpless position. A quick flush of pity and sympathy mantled her cheek.

“Forgive me,” she exclaimed, impulsively. “I had no right to be so thoughtless. I beg your pardon.”

“There is no occasion. You are right. It is certainly better to laugh than to cry over the inevitable, especially as things are righting themselves. But we, or, rather, I, must go into the house. It is growing cool.”

IV

Life at the old Dysart place went forward in a slow and decorous fashion, little allied to the bustling manners of the present day. Mr. Dysart was getting now to be an old man, albeit it is doubtful if in any abundant sense he can ever have been a young one. In any case he had, by long burrowing among musty records and genealogical parchments, acquired a dry and antique appearance, as, to use a somewhat presumptuous yet not inexact metaphor, certain scholarly worms had taken on a brown hue from continued dining on the bindings of his venerable folios. He inhabited a remote and essentially unworldly sphere, from which the existence of his daughter was wholly separate. He was conscious of her presence in an unrealizing way; was even aware that just now she had in the house a guest who had come ashore from a wreck. But that was the affair of Columbine and old Sarah; he could not of course be expected to loosen his hold upon the clew which he hoped would lead him to the exact connection between the Dysarts and the Van Rensselaers of two generations back, to pay attention to a chance waif from that outer world with which he had never considered it worth his while to concern himself.

As far as Mr. Tom was concerned, Mr. Dysart might as well not have existed. They did once meet in the passage before the study door when the invalid in his first days of walking was one rainy morning wandering restlessly about the halls; but the owner of the house hurried furtively past, as if he were the interloper and the other lord of the manor; and even when the convalescent was well enough to join the family at table, Mr. Dysart was very seldom there, so that the meals were for the most part taken tête-à-tête by Columbine and her patient.

The result of such a situation is evident from the beginning. Exceptional natures might be imagined, perhaps, that would not have grown dangerously interested in each other under such circumstances; but at least these two drew every day closer together. Neither had any tie belonging to the past; or, more exactly, Columbine had none, and he, for the time being, at least, had no past. His helplessness and the mystery enshrouding him would have appealed to the heart of any woman, and Columbine had no distractions to fill her life and crowd out this ever-deepening interest. Of Mr. Tom, her beauty and freshness, her simplicity, which was so far removed from insipidity, her innocence, which never suggested ignorance, won the respect and admiration long before he was conscious that love, too, was growing in his heart.