Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (674 page)

“That is, I hope, to be said of most men, Mr. Blake. I am afraid it cannot truly be said of ALL. Have you any reason to suppose that the lost remembrance which Mr. Candy tried to recover — while you were speaking to him just now — was a remembrance which it was important to YOU that he should recall?”

In saying those words, he had touched, of his own accord, on the very point upon which I was anxious to consult him. The interest I felt in this strange man had impelled me, in the first instance, to give him the opportunity of speaking to me; reserving what I might have to say, on my side, in relation to his employer, until I was first satisfied that he was a person in whose delicacy and discretion I could trust. The little that he had said, thus far, had been sufficient to convince me that I was speaking to a gentleman. He had what I may venture to describe as the UNSOUGHT SELF-POSSESSION, which is a sure sign of good breeding, not in England only, but everywhere else in the civilised world. Whatever the object which he had in view, in putting the question that he had just addressed to me, I felt no doubt that I was justified — so far — in answering him without reserve.

“I believe I have a strong interest,” I said, “in tracing the lost remembrance which Mr. Candy was unable to recall. May I ask whether you can suggest to me any method by which I might assist his memory?”

Ezra Jennings looked at me, with a sudden flash of interest in his dreamy brown eyes.

“Mr. Candy’s memory is beyond the reach of assistance,” he said. “I have tried to help it often enough since his recovery, to be able to speak positively on that point.”

This disappointed me; and I owned it.

“I confess you led me to hope for a less discouraging answer than that,” I said.

Ezra Jennings smiled. “It may not, perhaps, be a final answer, Mr. Blake. It may be possible to trace Mr. Candy’s lost recollection, without the necessity of appealing to Mr. Candy himself.”

“Indeed? Is it an indiscretion, on my part, to ask how?”

“By no means. My only difficulty in answering your question, is the difficulty of explaining myself. May I trust to your patience, if I refer once more to Mr. Candy’s illness: and if I speak of it this time without sparing you certain professional details?”

“Pray go on! You have interested me already in hearing the details.”

My eagerness seemed to amuse — perhaps, I might rather say, to please him. He smiled again. We had by this time left the last houses in the town behind us. Ezra Jennings stopped for a moment, and picked some wild flowers from the hedge by the roadside. “How beautiful they are!” he said, simply, showing his little nosegay to me. “And how few people in England seem to admire them as they deserve!”

“You have not always been in England?” I said.

“No. I was born, and partly brought up, in one of our colonies. My father was an Englishman; but my mother — We are straying away from our subject, Mr. Blake; and it is my fault. The truth is, I have associations with these modest little hedgeside flowers — It doesn’t matter; we were speaking of Mr. Candy. To Mr. Candy let us return.”

Connecting the few words about himself which thus reluctantly escaped him, with the melancholy view of life which led him to place the conditions of human happiness in complete oblivion of the past, I felt satisfied that the story which I had read in his face was, in two particulars at least, the story that it really told. He had suffered as few men suffer; and there was the mixture of some foreign race in his English blood.

“You have heard, I dare say, of the original cause of Mr. Candy’s illness?” he resumed. “The night of Lady Verinder’s dinner-party was a night of heavy rain. My employer drove home through it in his gig, and reached the house wetted to the skin. He found an urgent message from a patient, waiting for him; and he most unfortunately went at once to visit the sick person, without stopping to change his clothes. I was myself professionally detained, that night, by a case at some distance from Frizinghall. When I got back the next morning, I found Mr. Candy’s groom waiting in great alarm to take me to his master’s room. By that time the mischief was done; the illness had set in.”

“The illness has only been described to me, in general terms, as a fever,” I said.

“I can add nothing which will make the description more accurate,” answered Ezra Jennings. “From first to last the fever assumed no specific form. I sent at once to two of Mr. Candy’s medical friends in the town, both physicians, to come and give me their opinion of the case. They agreed with me that it looked serious; but they both strongly dissented from the view I took of the treatment. We differed entirely in the conclusions which we drew from the patient’s pulse. The two doctors, arguing from the rapidity of the beat, declared that a lowering treatment was the only treatment to be adopted. On my side, I admitted the rapidity of the pulse, but I also pointed to its alarming feebleness as indicating an exhausted condition of the system, and as showing a plain necessity for the administration of stimulants. The two doctors were for keeping him on gruel, lemonade, barley-water, and so on. I was for giving him champagne, or brandy, ammonia, and quinine. A serious difference of opinion, as you see! a difference between two physicians of established local repute, and a stranger who was only an assistant in the house. For the first few days, I had no choice but to give way to my elders and betters; the patient steadily sinking all the time. I made a second attempt to appeal to the plain, undeniably plain, evidence of the pulse. Its rapidity was unchecked, and its feebleness had increased. The two doctors took offence at my obstinacy. They said, ‘Mr. Jennings, either we manage this case, or you manage it. Which is it to be?’ I said, ‘Gentlemen, give me five minutes to consider, and that plain question shall have a plain reply.’ When the time expired, I was ready with my answer. I said, ‘You positively refuse to try the stimulant treatment?’ They refused in so many words. ‘I mean to try it at once, gentlemen.’ — ’Try it, Mr. Jennings, and we withdraw from the case.’ I sent down to the cellar for a bottle of champagne; and I administered half a tumbler-f of it to the patient with my own hand. The two physicians took up their hats in silence, and left the house.”

“You had assumed a serious responsibility,” I said. “In your place, I am afraid I should have shrunk from it.”

“In my place, Mr. Blake, you would have remembered that Mr. Candy had taken you into his employment, under circumstances which made you his debtor for life. In my place, you would have seen him sinking, hour by hour; and you would have risked anything, rather than let the one man on earth who had befriended you, die before your eyes. Don’t suppose that I had no sense of the terrible position in which I had placed myself! There were moments when I felt all the misery of my friendlessness, all the peril of my dreadful responsibility. If I had been a happy man, if I had led a prosperous life, I believe I should have sunk under the task I had imposed on myself. But I had no happy time to look back at, no past peace of mind to force itself into contrast with my present anxiety and suspense — and I held firm to my resolution through it all. I took an interval in the middle of the day, when my patient’s condition was at its best, for the repose I needed. For the rest of the four-and-twenty hours, as long as his life was in danger, I never left his bedside. Towards sunset, as usual in such cases, the delirium incidental to the fever came on. It lasted more or less through the night; and then intermitted, at that terrible time in the early morning — from two o’clock to five — when the vital energies even of the healthiest of us are at their lowest. It is then that Death gathers in his human harvest most abundantly. It was then that Death and I fought our fight over the bed, which should have the man who lay on it. I never hesitated in pursuing the treatment on which I had staked everything. When wine failed, I tried brandy. When the other stimulants lost their influence, I doubled the dose. After an interval of suspense — the like of which I hope to God I shall never feel again — there came a day when the rapidity of the pulse slightly, but appreciably, diminished; and, better still, there came also a change in the beat — an unmistakable change to steadiness and strength. THEN, I knew that I had saved him; and then I own I broke down. I laid the poor fellow’s wasted hand back on the bed, and burst out crying. An hysterical relief, Mr. Blake — nothing more! Physiology says, and says truly, that some men are born with female constitutions — and I am one of them!”

He made that bitterly professional apology for his tears, speaking quietly and unaffectedly, as he had spoken throughout. His tone and manner, from beginning to end, showed him to be especially, almost morbidly, anxious not to set himself up as an object of interest to me.

“You may well ask, why I have wearied you with all these details?” he went on. “It is the only way I can see, Mr. Blake, of properly introducing to you what I have to say next. Now you know exactly what my position was, at the time of Mr. Candy’s illness, you will the more readily understand the sore need I had of lightening the burden on my mind by giving it, at intervals, some sort of relief. I have had the presumption to occupy my leisure, for some years past, in writing a book, addressed to the members of my profession — a book on the intricate and delicate subject of the brain and the nervous system. My work will probably never be finished; and it will certainly never be published. It has none the less been the friend of many lonely hours; and it helped me to while away the anxious time — the time of waiting, and nothing else — at Mr. Candy’s bedside. I told you he was delirious, I think? And I mentioned the time at which his delirium came on?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I had reached a section of my book, at that time, which touched on this same question of delirium. I won’t trouble you at any length with my theory on the subject — I will confine myself to telling you only what it is your present interest to know. It has often occurred to me in the course of my medical practice, to doubt whether we can justifiably infer — in cases of delirium — that the loss of the faculty of speaking connectedly, implies of necessity the loss of the faculty of thinking connectedly as well. Poor Mr. Candy’s illness gave me an opportunity of putting this doubt to the test. I understand the art of writing in shorthand; and I was able to take down the patient’s ‘wanderings’, exactly as they fell from his lips. — Do you see, Mr. Blake, what I am coming to at last?”

I saw it clearly, and waited with breathless interest to hear more.

“At odds and ends of time,” Ezra Jennings went on, “I reproduced my shorthand notes, in the ordinary form of writing — leaving large spaces between the broken phrases, and even the single words, as they had fallen disconnectedly from Mr. Candy’s lips. I then treated the result thus obtained, on something like the principle which one adopts in putting together a child’s ‘puzzle.’ It is all confusion to begin with; but it may be all brought into order and shape, if you can only find the right way. Acting on this plan, I filled in each blank space on the paper, with what the words or phrases on either side of it suggested to me as the speaker’s meaning; altering over and over again, until my additions followed naturally on the spoken words which came before them, and fitted naturally into the spoken words which came after them. The result was, that I not only occupied in this way many vacant and anxious hours, but that I arrived at something which was (as it seemed to me) a confirmation of the theory that I held. In plainer words, after putting the broken sentences together I found the superior faculty of thinking going on, more or less connectedly, in my patient’s mind, while the inferior faculty of expression was in a state of almost complete incapacity and confusion.”

“One word!” I interposed eagerly. “Did my name occur in any of his wanderings?”

“You shall hear, Mr. Blake. Among my written proofs of the assertion which I have just advanced — or, I ought to say, among the written experiments, tending to put my assertion to the proof — there IS one, in which your name occurs. For nearly the whole of one night, Mr. Candy’s mind was occupied with SOMETHING between himself and you. I have got the broken words, as they dropped from his lips, on one sheet of paper. And I have got the links of my own discovering which connect those words together, on another sheet of paper. The product (as the arithmeticians would say) is an intelligible statement — first, of something actually done in the past; secondly, of something which Mr. Candy contemplated doing in the future, if his illness had not got in the way, and stopped him. The question is whether this does, or does not, represent the lost recollection which he vainly attempted to find when you called on him this morning?”

“Not a doubt of it!” I answered. “Let us go back directly, and look at the papers!”

“Quite impossible, Mr. Blake.”

“Why?”

“Put yourself in my position for a moment,” said Ezra Jennings. “Would you disclose to another person what had dropped unconsciously from the lips of your suffering patient and your helpless friend, without first knowing that there was a necessity to justify you in opening your lips?”