The Moonstone
it.”
“Is his memory never any better than I have found it today? He has been
trying to speak to me——”
“Of something which happened before he was taken ill?” asked the
assistant, observing that I hesitated.
“Yes.”
“His memory of events, at that past time, is hopelessly enfeebled,”
said Ezra Jennings. “It is almost to be deplored, poor fellow, that
even the wreck of it remains. While he remembers dimly plans that he
formed—things, here and there, that he had to say or do before his
illness—he is perfectly incapable of recalling what the plans were, or
what the thing was that he had to say or do. He is painfully conscious
of his own deficiency, and painfully anxious, as you must have seen, to
hide it from observation. If he could only have recovered in a complete
state of oblivion as to the past, he would have been a happier man.
Perhaps we should all be happier,” he added, with a sad smile, “if we
could but completely forget!”
“There are some events surely in all men’s lives,” I replied, “the
memory of which they would be unwilling entirely to lose?”
“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-full 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