Two years went by like this. Anthony hadn’t been home. He went out with survey parties on his vacations. I don’t know whether he ever wrote Gertrude. She never talked of him, and Old Doc thought she had forgotten him. I knew better.
Then a medical powwow came off in Croyden. Old Doc went to it, and Gordon Mitchell went down on the same train. It was in early spring — the frost was coming out — the rails had spread in one place — the engine jumped the track. Only one person was killed... Old Doc.
Gordon got to him just before he died. He hadn’t been able to speak. Just smiled... pressed Gordon’s hand... tried to say something... shut his eyes. That was all. Gertrude hadn’t even a farewell word of love for her comforting.
She was heartbroken over it all. She and her father had been such chums.
“Father and I liked each other as well as loved each other,” she had said to me once.
But a healthy grief heals in due time, no matter what its intensity. The day came when I heard her laugh again, though with something gained and something lost in her laughter.
I thought all would be plain sailing for her and Anthony now. She was her own mistress — a rich woman too, as Claremont standards went. But one autumn evening a year later Anthony came to me white to the lips with despair.
He told me the whole story, rushing up and down my study like a madman. Gertrude had told him she could never marry him; she had promised her father she would never marry Anthony “without his consent” and that consent could never now be obtained. Anthony had found her quite immoveable. So he came to beg me to go to Gertrude and use my influence on his behalf.
I went... though I had a feeling that it wouldn’t be any use. It was a cold, windy, autumnal evening, and I found Gertrude by the open fire in the living room, with Jigglesqueak snoring beside her. She sat in the old wing chair and looked so beautiful that I did not wonder at Anthony’s madness. She was not in black. Old Doc had decreed in his will that she should not follow “the barbarous survival” of mourning. She wore a gown of golden-brown velvet, a little too old and rich for a girl, I thought, but vastly becoming. She had a rope of dull beads about her slim white neck, and her black hair was pinned close to her head with rich pins. On the middle finger of her rather large firm white hand she wore a ring her father had always worn — a ring with some odd, flat, pale green stone in it. His wife, I believe, had given it to him on their honeymoon. It had been taken off Old Doc’s dead hand.
“It’s a fine evening,” said Gertrude brilliantly.
“I haven’t come to discuss the weather,” I said.
“No,” said Gertrude. “I know exactly what you have come to say. So say it and ease your conscience. But it won’t make any difference.”
I said it... and it made no difference.
“You know,” I said, for a final shot, “that your father would have given in if he had lived.”
Yes, she knew that.
“Then why the... the... the...”
“The devil,” said Gertrude calmly. “That’s what you want to say, you know. Your doth wouldn’t let you say it so I say it for you. Go on from there.”
“The mischief,” I said, because I wasn’t going to let a chit like Gertrude put a thing like that over on me. If she had no respect for my cloth she should have had some for my grey hairs. “Why the mischief can’t you be sensible?”
“It isn’t a matter of sense at all,” said Gertrude. “I promised. I shall keep that promise to my father dead as I would have kept it to him living. Don’t worry me with arguments, Mr. Crandall. Do you think you can move me when Anthony couldn’t?”
“No. I’m not so conceited as that,” I said. “But are you going to ruin Anthony’s life and your own by such Quixotic nonsense?”
“Oh, it won’t ruin our lives... Anthony’s anyway. He’ll get over it in time and marry somebody else. I may get over it myself... but I can never marry anyone else because I promised Anthony I wouldn’t.”
“Likely he will release you from that promise,” I said drily.
“I shall never ask him to,” she said. “Now, have a cup of tea with me, Mr. Crandall, and promise me that you’ll help me to become a delightful old maid. There’s nothing else for me, you see.”
She poured my tea beautifully. She made an art of pouring tea. Then she sat and looked into the fire while I sipped it, the lovely line of her chin and neck melting into the red-gold glow of the flames behind it. And this was the woman who talked of being an old maid!
I told Anthony I had done my best and failed. I told him he must bear it like a man.
“How can you bear unbearable things?” he flung back at me as he rushed out, leaving all the doors open. I did not see him again for ten years.
Gertrude made short work of Gordon. She told me that since her father’s death she simply detested him.
“I don’t know why. I used to like him well enough before. Now I can’t bear the sight of him. I’ve told him that I will never, under any circumstances, marry him and that he must stop plaguing my life out about it.”
Gordon stopped. That winter he flung himself into business and church work with feverish activity. In the latter I saw a great deal of him and I thought him much changed in some indefinable way. He acted like a person desperately anxious to forget something... drug something... which was understandable enough in a man who had been refused by Gertrude Stirling.
He did not go as much into society as he had formerly done, and when he did people said he was subject to spells of moodiness, when he seemed to be brooding over something that worried him desperately. I felt that I ought to be very sorry for him.
One Sunday in early spring I preached a certain sermon. I did mean it for somebody. A certain clique of people in the church, entirely unconnected with the Mitchells or the Stirlings, had been doing their best to worry my life out that winter with their spats and squabbles... all springing, as I knew perfectly well, from old Madam Ridgwood’s deceit and mischief-making. I meant that sermon for her; it wasn’t a hand-me-down, it was cut to fit. And everybody pinned it on to Gordon, a man whom nobody ever thought of as lying before that sermon. But I must say that they would not probably have done so if it had not been for his own behaviour.
My text was, “Deliver my soul, oh Lord, from lying lips and a deceitful tongue,” and I made my sermon pretty strong, for I was considerably annoyed over the trouble I had encountered. Gordon was not in the choir that day. He was hoarse from a bad cold and he sat with his mother in the centre of the church.
Near the end of my discourse I happened to glance at Gordon and was struck by the expression on his face. I never saw such agony on a human countenance. I was sure he must be ill. Suddenly he stood up, turned round, looked foolishly about him, and sat down again... or was pulled down by his mother. I finished my sermon, leaving some few things I had intended to say unsaid, and the concluding hymn was sung. I did not see Gordon or his mother again.
But that evening Mrs. Mitchell sent for me. She met me at the door and told me that Gordon had gone out of his mind. She was in a distracted state, poor woman. But after I had seen Gordon and talked to him I knew that he was as sane as I was. He had simply forgotten everything — everything. He didn’t even remember his own name. If he had just been born he couldn’t have known less about his past.
Nowadays newspaper reports and popular books on neurasthenia have made us tolerably familiar with cases of this sort. But at that time, in Claremont, nobody had ever known anything like it. Most people persisted in believing that Gordon had gone insane — his grandfather, they said, had been “queer.” His mother had every great alienist she could get, and they all agreed that he was perfectly sane and rational. They were quite helpless, but they said that his memory might return just as suddenly as it had gone. Meanwhile there was nothing to do but wait. His friends and his mother persisted in believing and asserting that my sermon was responsible for it all. When anyone said this to me I retorted, testily, “Do you mean to s
ay that Gordon was of lying lips and a deceitful tongue?”
That always posed everyone but Mrs. Mitchell. She said, “Gordon was so conscientious. Some little evasion that nobody else would have thought a lie would worry him... and then your terrible sermon...”
She never forgave me.
A new doctor had come to town — a young fellow who knew a good bit, though people were loath to admit that anyone knew anything but Old Doc. I used to talk Gordon’s case over with him. He had some ideas about it that were so newfangled then that I couldn’t accept them at all, though I believe they are pretty well established now.
“Mitchell has forgotten because he wanted to forget,” he said.
“Nonsense,” I said. “Who would want to forget his whole past life?”
“Oh, not his whole life... no, just one particular, unbearable thing. And when his torture reached a certain point... perhaps your sermon was the last turn of the rack... perhaps it had nothing to do with it... he found relief from his agony by forgetting what was torturing him. Only,” added Dr. Mills, who was fresh enough from college to have a weakness for classical allusions, “he who drinks of Lethe must forget his good as well as his evil.”
“I don’t believe my sermon had anything to do with it,” I said.
And I couldn’t see how it had. It was quite possible that Gordon’s suffering over Gertrude’s decision was unbearable and that he wanted to forget it — but there could be no earthly connection between it and my sermon. I believed he hadn’t been listening to it at all. He had been sitting there, thinking wretchedly of Gertrude who sat just across from him, looking unbelievably lovely, and he couldn’t endure it any longer. Something gave way; in the pithy old vernacular, a screw got loose.
For a few weeks nothing was talked of but Gordon. Then Mary Curtis eloped and gossip switched to her. By the autumn everybody had accepted the new Gordon. He had accepted himself. After all, it was not correct to say that he had forgotten everything. He had not forgotten how to talk, read, write, behave in society, run his business. Of course he had forgotten everything and everybody connected with the business and had to get acquainted with it all over from the ground up. But he wasn’t long in doing that. By spring he was going ahead full blast again, and a stranger would never have suspected that there was anything wrong with him. Only those who knew him well realized certain changes in him.
For one thing, he had forgotten all his loves and hates. In that respect his emotional life was a clean slate. He didn’t love his mother... he, who had been so devoted to her. He didn’t even like her; she knew it and it broke her heart, especially as the time went by and she realized that he never would like her. He cared nothing for any of his old friends. In a few cases he built up new friendships with some of them; to others he always remained indifferent. He had no interest in church work and wouldn’t, I believe, have attended church at all if it hadn’t been for public opinion which, in Claremont, was very hard on a man who flouted the church.
The greatest change in him, or what seemed so to me, was in regard to Gertrude. She had gone into limbo with everything else. I even thought he seemed rather ill at ease in her presence, but that may only have been my imagination. Anyhow, he cared nothing for her. He even tried to go with other Claremont girls, but nobody would have anything to do with him because he was “queer” and he soon gave up trying. There was a barrier between him and his kind.
I noticed one thing about him... I don’t know whether anyone else did or not. Sometimes he would suddenly glance over his shoulder in a way I didn’t like. And it made him uncomfortable to shake hands with anyone. That could be plainly seen, but I never saw him absolutely refuse to shake hands save once.
That was when Gertrude came home from a long visit in Croyden, met him at a garden party and offered him her hand. He looked... not at her... not at her hand... but at the big ring with the pale green stone. He turned death-white and put his hands behind him. Gertrude thought it odd, but then, one must expect poor Gordon to be odd.
This was years after the fatal sermon. Time had gone on. Everybody had given up expecting Gordon Mitchell’s memory to come back... everybody but his mother, who nursed a feverish hope and lived on it. Plenty of newcomers didn’t know he had forgotten. He was our most successful businessman and was piling up a fortune. But he was nothing like as rich as Anthony Fairweather.
Anthony had got through his School of Mines and had gone surveying up in Cobalt at a dollar and a half a day. There he found the famous Lucia silver mine — named after his mother — and became, as you might say, a millionaire overnight. Even that didn’t spoil him. He kept on working hard and soon was at the top of his profession, and a recognized expert on all questions of engineering. He had a hobby for collecting violins — his collection, headed by his old Strad, which he had hunted up and bought back, was the finest in America. He had all the good luck in the world... except the one bit he really wanted.
Claremont people referred to him with pride as the “most distinguished of all our boys,” and served up the tales of his youthful pranks with an entirely different sauce. One would have supposed, from the way they talked, that there was some vital connection between offering soap for cheese and discovering silver mines and that they’d always known it. If Anthony had ever come home he would have been met at the station with a brass band and a torchlight procession.
But he never did come home. He never wrote to Gertrude, but now and then he sent her something rare and beautiful in the way of curios. It was always something that belonged to her — something which must have made Anthony say, the moment his eyes lighted on it, “That is Gertrude’s... it couldn’t be anybody else’s.” And on every one of her birthdays came a great sheaf of crimson roses from the Croyden florist. Anthony never forgot a birthday.
Gertrude seemed to be enjoying her life. She had a good time. Travelled a bit... entertained a bit... organized and ran some good clubs and societies... was a Regent of the Claremont Chapter of the I.O.D.E. and President of the Women’s Canadian Club and the backbone of the Hypatia Circle. Her home was a thing of beauty, and the talks she and I had by her fireside, in the days of her maturity, were sometimes all that kept me sane amid the distracting problems of a minister’s daily life.
“Drop in whenever you like,” Gertrude had said to me. “You’ll always find a chair by the fire and a cat on the rug.”
Cats! I should say so. When Jigglesqueak had finally gone where good dogs go, lamented by all who had the privilege of knowing him, Gertrude went in for cats, being bound, so she said, to have all the prescriptive rights of old maidenhood. She wasn’t really particularly fond of cats but she admired their general effect.
“Cats give atmosphere... charm... suggestion,” she averred.
She had a big blue Persian that Anthony had sent her and four inky black toms. The Persian had some high-falutin name I’ve forgotten, but Gertrude called all the toms “Soot” — Soot I, II, III, and IV. They used to sit about looking so uncannily knowing, with their insolent green eyes, that their very expression would have sent Gertrude to the stake three hundred years ago. I am reasonably fond of cats, but those four black demons of Gertrude’s always gave me a slightly weird sensation.
Well, there she was. I groaned inwardly when I looked at her — beautiful, desirable, a king’s daughter, glorious without and within, but — I was certain of it in spite of her jokes and her philosophy — a lonely, empty-hearted, starved woman.
Ten years after Old Doc’s death Anthony came home. He was home for a week, staying with his old aunt, before anyone else — unless it was Gertrude — knew of it. He said he had come to Claremont for a good rest and meant to stay a month. Most people believed and said that he had come back to warm up the cold soup with Gertrude Stirling. Myself, I thought he had too. I wished he could and I knew he couldn’t.
He was a splendid-looking fellow, fit as a fiddle, strong, distinguished, and graceful. There was an air of immortal, unquenchable youth about
him. Beside him Gordon Mitchell looked tubby and middle-aged. Gordon had forgotten his hate of Anthony along with everything else and was prepared to be quite cordial to him. But Anthony had forgotten nothing. He believed that Gordon had poisoned Old Doc’s mind in regard to him at the very beginning and he hated him with as much intensity as ever.
“Sneaking cad!” he said bitterly to me. “If it hadn’t been for him... but it maddens me to think of it!”
“Isn’t there any chance, Anthony?” I asked, although I knew there wasn’t. “Have you said anything to Gertrude?”
“Said anything! Said anything! Is there anything I haven’t said? I’ve prayed and stormed and raged and threatened and grovelled... man, I’ve even cried! I came back... I had to come back... I thought perhaps she’d have changed her mind in those ten infernal years. She hasn’t... she never will. Unless Old Doc comes back out of his grave to set her free she’ll never marry me... never!”
Anthony groaned, and then said, in his old whimsical way, as if he wanted to camouflage the intensity of his feelings, “And we would make such a darn good-looking couple, wouldn’t we, Mr. Crandall?”
“I’m a bit out of patience with Gertrude,” I said. “I think the whole thing is absolute nonsense.”
“I won’t have Gertrude abused,” said Anthony. “Thank God there’s one woman in the world anyhow that will keep her word. I don’t blame her. It’s all Gordon’s doings. He told Old Doc lies about me years ago... I know he did. Hound! I tell you that if Gordon Mitchell were in deadly danger of his life and I could save him by lifting a finger I wouldn’t lift it!”
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 756