CHAPTER II.
BEGINNING LIFE AGAIN
Wha happened after is far more vague to me. Compared with thevividness of that one initial Picture, the events of the next fewmonths have only the blurred indistinctness of all childishmemories. For I was a child once more, in all save stature, and hadto learn to remember things just like other children.
I will try to tell the whole tale over again exactly as it thenstruck me.
After the Picture, I told you, I shut my eyes in alarm for a second.When I opened them once more there was a noise, a very great noise,and my recollection is that people had burst wildly into the room,and were lifting the dead body, and bending over it in astonishment,and speaking loud to me, and staring at me. I believe they broke thedoor open, though that's rather inference than memory; I learnt itafterwards. Soon some of them rushed to the open window and lookedout into the garden. Then, suddenly, a man gave a shout, and leapingon to the sill, jumped down in pursuit, as I thought, of themurderer. As time went on, more people flocked in; and some of themlooked at the body and the pool of blood; and some of them turnedround and spoke to me. But what they said or what they meant Ihadn't the slightest idea. The noise of the pistol-shot still rangloud in my ears: the ineffable Horror still drowned all my senses.
After a while, another man came in, with an air of authority, andfelt my pulse and my brow, and lifted me on to a sofa. But I didn'teven remember there was such a thing as a doctor. I lay there for awhile, quite dazed; and the man, who was kindly-looking andclose-shaven and fatherly, gave me something in a glass: after whichhe turned round and examined the body. He looked hard at therevolver, too, and chalked its place on the ground. Then I saw nomore, for two women lifted me in their arms and took me up to bed;and with that, the first scene of my childhood seemed to endentirely.
I lay in bed for a day or two, during which time I was dimly awareof much commotion going on here and there in the house; and thedoctor came night and morning, and tended me carefully. I suppose Imay call him the doctor now, though at the time I didn't call himso--I knew him merely as a visible figure. I don't believe I THOUGHTat all during those earliest days, or gave things names in any knownlanguage. They rather passed before me dreamily in long procession,like a vague panorama. When people spoke to me, it was like thesound of a foreign tongue. I attached no more importance to anythingthey said than to the cawing of the rooks in the trees by therectory.
At the end of five days, the doctor came once more, and watched me agreat deal, and spoke in a low voice with a woman in a white cap anda clean white apron who waited on me daily. As soon as he was gone,my nurse, as I learned afterwards to call her,--it's so hard not todrop into the language of everyday life when one has to describethings to other people,--my nurse got me up, with much ado andsolemnity, and dressed me in a new black frock, very dismal andugly, and put on me a black hat, with a dreary-looking veil; andtook me downstairs, with the aid of a man who wore a suit of blueclothes and a queer kind of helmet. The man was of the sort I nowcall a policeman. These pictures are far less definite in my mindthan the one that begins my second life; but still, in a vague kindof way, I pretty well remember them.
On the ground floor, nurse made me walk; and I walked out to thedoor, where a cab was in waiting, drawn slowly by a pair of horses.People were looking on, on either side, between the door and thecab--great crowds of people, peering eagerly forward; and two moremen in blue suits were holding them off by main force from surgingagainst me and incommoding me. I don't think they wanted to hurt me:it was rather curiosity than anger I saw in their faces. But I wasafraid, and shrank back. They were eager to see me, however, andpressed forward with loud cries, so that the men in blue suits hadhard work to prevent them.
I know now there were two reasons why they wanted to see me. I wasthe murdered man's daughter, and I was a Psychological Phenomenon.
We drove away, through green lanes, in the cab, nurse and I; and inspite of the Horror, which surrounded me always, and the Picture,which recurred every time I shut my eyes to think, I enjoyed thatdrive very much, with all the fresh vividness of childish pleasure.Though I learnt later I was eighteen years old at least, I was in myinner self just like a baby of ten months, going ta-ta. At the endof the drive, we drew up sharp at a house, where some more men stoodabout, with red bands on their caps, and took boxes from the cab andput them into a van, while nurse and I got into a differentcarriage, drawn quickly by a thing that went puff-puff, puff-puff. Ididn't know it was a railway, and yet in a way I did. I half forgot,half remembered it. Things that I'd seen in my previous state seemedto come back to me, in fact, as soon as I saw them; or at least tobe more familiar to me than things I'd never seen before. Especiallyafterwards. But while things were remembered, persons, I foundby-and-by, were completely forgotten. Or rather, while I rememberedafter a while generalities, such as houses and men, recognising themin the abstract as a house, or a man, or a horse, or a baby, Iforgot entirely particulars, such as the names of people and theplaces I had lived in. Words soon came back to me: names and factswere lost: I knew the world as a whole, not my own old part in it.
Well, not to make my story too long in these early childish stages,we went on the train, as it seemed to me, a long way across fieldsto Aunt Emma's. I didn't know she was Aunt Emma then for, indeed, Ihad never seen her before; but I remember arriving there at herpretty little cottage, and seeing a sweet old lady--barely sixty, Ishould say, but with smooth white hair,--who stood on the steps ofthe house and cried like a child, and held out her hands to me, andhugged me and kissed me. And it was there that I learned my firstword. A great many times over, she spoke about "Una." She said it sooften, I caught vaguely at the sound. And nurse, when she answeredher, said "Una" also. Then, when Aunt Emma called me, she alwayssaid "Una." So it came to me dimly that Una meant ME. But I didn'texactly recollect it had been my name before, though I learned indue time afterwards that I'd always been called so. However, just atfirst, I picked up the word as a child might pick it up; and when,some months later, I began to talk easily, I spoke of myself alwaysin the third person as Una. I can remember with a smile now how Iwent one day to Aunt Emma--I, a great girl of eighteen--and held upmy skirt, that I'd muddied in the street, and said to her, withgreat gravity:
"Una naughty girl: Una got her frock wet. Aunt Emma going to scoldpoor Una for being so naughty!"
Not that I often smiled, in those days; for, in spite of Aunt Emma'skindness, my second girlhood, like my first, was a very unhappy one.The Horror and the Picture pursued me too close. It was months andmonths before I could get rid for a moment of that persistentnightmare. And yet I had everything else on earth to make me happy.Aunt Emma lived in a pretty east-coast town, with high bracken-claddowns, and breezy common beyond; while in front stretched greatsands, where I loved to race about and to play cricket and tennis.It was the loveliest town that ever you saw in your life, with abroken chancel to the grand old church, and a lighthouse on a hill,with delicious views to seaward. The doctor had sent me there (Iknow now) as soon as I was well enough to move, in order to get meaway from the terrible associations of The Grange at Woodbury. Aslong as I lived in the midst of scenes which would remind me of poorfather, he said, and of his tragical death, there was no hope of myrecovery. The only chance for me to regain what I had lost in thatmoment of shock was complete change of air, of life, ofsurroundings. Aunt Emma, for her part, was only too glad to take mein: and as poor papa had died intestate, Aunt Emma was now, ofcourse, my legal guardian.
She was my mother's sister, I learned as time went on; and there hadbeen feud while he lived between her and my father. Why, I couldn'timagine. She was the sweetest old soul I ever knew, indeed, and whaton earth he could have quarrelled with her about I never couldfathom. She tended me so carefully that as months went by, theHorror began to decrease and my soul to become calm again. I grewgradually able to remain in a room alone for a few minutes at atime, and to sleep at night in a bed by myself, if only there was acandle, and n
urse was in another bed in the same room close by me.
Yet every now and again a fresh shivering fit came on. At such timesI would cover my head with the bedclothes and cower, and see thePicture even so floating visibly in mid-air like a vision before me.
My second education must have been almost as much of a business asmy first had been, only rather less longsome. I had first to relearnthe English language, which came back to me by degrees, muchquicker, of course, than I had picked it up in my childhood. Then Ihad to begin again with reading, writing, and arithmetic--all newto me in a way, and all old in another. Whatever I learned andwhatever I read seemed novel while I learned it, but familiar themoment I had thoroughly grasped it. To put it shortly, I couldremember nothing of myself, but I could recall many things, after atime, as soon as they were told me clearly. The process was rather aprocess of reminding than of teaching, properly so called. But ittook some years for me to recall things, even when I was reminded ofthem.
I spent four years at Aunt Emma's, growing gradually to my own ageagain. At the end of that time I was counted a girl of twenty-two,much like any other. But I was older than my age; and the shadow ofthe Horror pursued me incessantly.
All that time I knew, too, from what I heard said in the house thatmy father's murderer had never been caught, and that nobody evenknew who he was, or anything definite about him. The police gave himup as an uncaught criminal. He was still at large, and might alwaysbe so. I knew this from vague hints and from vague hints alone; forwhenever I tried to ask, I was hushed up at once with an air ofauthority.
"Una, dearest," Aunt Emma would say, in her quiet fashion, "youmustn't talk about that night. I have Dr. Wade's strict orders thatnothing must be said to you about it, and above all nothing thatcould in any way excite or arouse you."
So I was fain to keep my peace; for though Aunt Emma was kind, sheruled me still in all things like a little girl, as I was when Icame to her.