Please go slowly, Jack, or you will undo all that your long rest has accomplished. There is plenty of time."

"But Miss Thayer," he replied, not heeding her admonition and glancing about searchingly. "Where is Miss Thayer? She was injured, too?"

"Not seriously," Helen rea.s.sured him.

"Then where is she?"

"I don't know exactly, but she is not far away."

"You have not sent her away while I have been ill?" he asked, with a touch of his former suspicion.

"No, Jack." All of the tired, strained tone came back in Helen's voice as she turned away from the bed to conceal her disappointment.

Armstrong sensed it all as he had failed to do at other times since the gap had begun to widen.

"I did not mean that, Helen," he said, and reaching over he took her hand and drew her to him; "I really did not mean it."

"It is all right, Jack," Helen replied, withdrawing her hand and trying to smile; "I will find Inez and send her to you." And before he could remonstrate she had left the room.

While he waited Armstrong had a brief moment of introspection. Again he had wounded her, and for no cause. He had enjoyed the short period since his awakening, particularly on account of the tender and affectionate care Helen had given him, which she had for a long time withheld because of his own self-centred interest. It was with real regret that he found this little visit with his wife so abruptly brought to an end, yet he himself had forced the termination. He must fight against this unfortunate attribute, he told himself, and show Helen his real feelings toward her.

His reveries were interrupted by Inez' entrance. Silently she stood beside him, holding out her hand, which he quietly grasped for a moment and then released. He wondered at the color in her face and at her apparent unwillingness to meet his glance.

"They tell me we have been through an accident together," he said, slowly. "Thank G.o.d it was I who was injured and not you."

Inez turned from him, closing her eyes involuntarily. "Don't speak of it!" she cried, impulsively; "it was too awful!"

"But it is all over now."

"All but the memory," she replied, faintly. "Let us forget it, I beg of you."

"I was going to ask you for some of the details," Armstrong continued, "which you alone can give."

"Oh, I beg of you," she repeated; "I could not bear it."

"Then by all means let us forget it," he replied, curiously affected by the girl's emotion. "Perhaps some time later you will feel more like talking about it. You see, I can remember nothing after the crash against the wall."

"Thank G.o.d!" cried Inez, pa.s.sionately, turning away her head.

"I suppose it is better so," Armstrong a.s.sented, still wondering at the intensity of her emotion. "But when one has had a whole fortnight of his life blotted out, he naturally feels a bit of curiosity concerning what happened during all that time."

"You must excuse me, Mr. Armstrong. You don't know how this tortures me, and I really cannot bear it."

Armstrong watched the girl as she turned and fairly fled from the room, completely mystified by her extraordinary att.i.tude.

"What in the world can have happened?" he asked himself; and then he settled back on the pillow and tried to answer his own question.

XXV

There is no place like the sick-room for self-examination and introspection. In the still monotony of the slow-pa.s.sing days, the invalid's mind is freed from the conventions of every-day complexities, and can view its problems with a veracity and a clearness at other times impossible. As Armstrong's convalescence continued, he marshalled before him certain events which had occurred since his arrival in Florence, and examined them with great minuteness. Some of these seemed trivial, and he wondered why they came back at this time and forced themselves upon him with such persistence; some of them were important, and he realized that Helen had much of which she might justly complain.

His eyes followed her as she moved about the room, quick to antic.i.p.ate each wish or necessity, and sweetly eager to respond; yet he distinctly felt the barrier between them. He was conscious now that this barrier had existed for some time, and he found it difficult to explain to himself why he had only recently become aware of it. Helen's conversations with him came back with renewed force and vital meaning.

He had resented it when she had told him that his work at the library had made him indifferent to everything else, yet she had been quite right in what she said. He had wilfully misunderstood her efforts to bring him back to himself, and had openly blamed her for faults which existed only in his own neglect. He had accused her of being jealous of his intimacy with Miss Thayer, yet her att.i.tude toward Inez was a constant refutation. He had treated her even with incivility and unpardonable irritability.

The fault was his, he admitted, yet were there not extenuating circ.u.mstances? No one could have foreseen how completely engrossed he was to become in his work, or the extent of the mastery which the spell of this old-time learning was to gain over him. Naturally, he would have avoided it had he foreseen it; but once under its influence he had been carried forward irresistibly, unable to withdraw, unwilling to oppose.

And yet he had boasted of his strength!

"You have become infinitely bigger and stronger and grander," Helen had said to him, even when her heart was breaking, "and I admire you just so much the more."

Armstrong winced as these words came home to him. With so much real cause for complaint and upbraiding, Helen had gently tried to show him his shortcomings, tempering her comment with expressions full of loyalty and affection.

But on one point she had been wholly wrong. It was natural that she should have misinterpreted the intimacy which a community of interests had brought about between Miss Thayer and himself. Inez was, of course, much stronger intellectually than Helen, and by reason of this was far better fitted to a.s.sist him in his own intellectual expressions. But their intimacy had never extended beyond this even in thought or suggestion. Helen had insisted that Inez was in love with him, and he had tried to show her the absurdity of her suspicion. Here, at least, he had been in the right. Throughout their close a.s.sociation, and even after Helen had spoken, he had never discovered the slightest evidence that any such affection existed. The still unexplained remarks of the contessa's might or might not be significant. Emory, of course, was prejudiced, and his comments did not require serious consideration. Miss Thayer's refusal to continue the work, the comparative infrequency of her visits to his sick-chamber--in fact, everything went to show how far Helen had wandered from the actual facts.

Armstrong found some comfort in this conclusion. With Helen so unquestionably wrong in this hypothesis, it of course went without saying that she was equally wrong in what she had said later. She believed that he had a career before him. Cerini had said the same thing, Miss Thayer had said so--and Armstrong himself believed, in the consciousness of having completed an unusual piece of work, that such a possibility might exist. He felt no conceit, but rather that overpowering sense of hopefulness which comes to a man as a result of successful endeavor--not yet crowned, but completed to his own satisfaction. If this career was to be his, he could not follow Helen's a.s.sumption that it must separate them. That was, of course, as ridiculous as her feelings about Inez. Success for him must mean the same to her, his wife. When the right time came he would take up these two points specifically with her and show her the error which had misled her.

This self-examination covered several days. At first Armstrong found himself unable to think long at a time without becoming mentally wearied; but by degrees his mind gained in vigor, and proved fully equal to the demands made upon it. The details of what had happened on the day of the accident came back to him one by one up to the point of the accident itself, but he felt annoyed that he could not learn more of this. From Helen, Uncle Peabody, and the doctor he knew of the early belief that he had been killed and of the excitement caused by his revived respiration. Of his period of delirium, the nurse had given him more information than the others; but of the break between the moment when the car struck the wall, and the time when Helen arrived upon the scene, Miss Thayer alone held the key. Armstrong's curiosity regarding this interval was, perhaps, heightened by the evident aversion which she felt to discussing it. To mention the subject in her presence was certain to drive her from the room, her face blazing with color, her body trembling in every nerve.

The patient was able to move about a little by this time, and at the close of each day he found relief from the monotony of his room and the veranda by short walks in the garden, rich in its midsummer gorgeousness of color. A couch had been placed near the retaining wall, so that he could rest upon it whenever he felt fatigued. Between his solicitude concerning the situation with Helen, and his determination to discover from Miss Thayer the occasion of her remarkable att.i.tude, his thoughts were fully occupied.

On this particular afternoon Armstrong had thrown himself upon the couch, and for a moment closed his eyes. With no warning he saw a scene enacted before his mental vision in which he himself was the central figure. He was lying still and lifeless upon the gra.s.s by the roadside at the foot of the hill. Four other figures were in the picture. He recognized Inez, but the other women and the boy he had never seen. The figures moved about, as in a kinetoscope. One of the women ran into the cottage and returned with a basin of water. Inez knelt beside him and bathed his forehead. He could see the tense expression on her face. She seemed to speak to the women, but he could distinguish no words. Then he saw himself lifted and carried into the cottage. At this point the picture disappeared as suddenly as it had come.

Armstrong opened his eyes when he found the picture gone, and sat up, gazing about him excitedly. He saw Inez crossing the veranda and called to her abruptly.

"Tell me," he cried, as she hastened to obey the summons and before she reached him, "who carried me into the cottage after the accident?"

The girl paled at the suddenness and intensity of the question. "There were four of us," she said, faintly--"two peasant women, a boy, and myself."

Armstrong pa.s.sed his hand over his forehead and gazed at Inez intently.

So far, then, his vision had been correct. Breathlessly he pursued his interrogations.

"Before that did one of the women bring some water from the cottage, and did you kneel beside me and bathe my face?"

"Yes. Who has told you?"

"Then it all happened just like that?"

"Like what?" Inez was trembling, vaguely apprehensive.

Armstrong rose. "Why, as you have just said," he replied. "You know I have been trying to get you to tell me about it."

"You are unkind," Inez retorted, quickly. "You know how much all mention of this pains me, yet you persist."

"Forgive me." Armstrong controlled himself and held out his hand kindly.

"I don't mean to hurt you, believe me, but my mind is ever searching out that connecting link. You won't tell me about it, so I suppose I shall never find it."