CHAPTER VI.—MIRIAM BENARY.
I watched her carefully as she recovered from the effects of the ether. An uncommonly small quantity of that drug had sufficed to deprive her of her senses; and now her recovery was unusually speedy.
Having taken her respiration, her temperature, and her pulse, and having found each to be nearly normal, I looked her straight in the eyes, and demanded, making every syllable clear and emphatic, “Louise Massarte, do you know me?”
Had I addressed my inquiry to a month-old infant, the result would have been the same.
I repeated the question in French: “Louise Massarte, me reconnaissez vous?”—with precisely the same negative result.
I then wrote the question both in French and English upon a slip of paper, and held it before her eyes.
No sign of intelligence.
In the end I applied tests to each of her five senses, and satisfied myself that each was unimpaired.
After which, “Well, Josephine,” I said, “unless all signs fail, we have succeeded to admiration. None of her senses have sustained the slightest injury, yet she has lost the knowledge of language, both spoken and written. Louise Massarte is dead, annihilated, abolished from the face of creation. This is a new-born infant, this apparently full-grown woman lying here. Her soul is still to develop and unfold itself. It will be for us to shape it, to colour it, to direct it towards good or evil. Heredity has furnished the capacities, the propensities, which her environment will quicken, stimulate, cause to grow and to ripen. And it is for us to provide and to regulate that environment. May Heaven guide our labours.”
“Amen, heartily. It is an awful responsibility. And yet———-”
“And yet?”
“And yet I cannot help hoping for the best. Look at her, brother. See how beautiful she is. Surely, such a beautiful face must be meant to go with a beautiful spirit. Already the expression of bitterness, of hardness, of suspicion, seems to have faded from it. It is as if it had been washed in some element infinitely cleansing. I never saw a more innocent face than hers has become already. Yes, I am sure we may hope for the best.”
“Well, for the present, we need concern ourselves only for the welfare of her body. We must darken the room. Inflammation is the only ill consequence we have to fear; and that can be averted, if we keep her in darkness and in silence until the wound has healed.”
The wound healed quickly. Not an unpleasant symptom of any kind manifested itself. And, as I had foreseen she would do, our patient relearned the primary lessons of life with an ease and a rapidity that seemed almost incredible. I had anticipated this because she was an adult; because, that is to say, her brain, as an organ, was of mature development.
She began to speak as soon as ever we allowed ourselves to speak in her presence, at first simply imitating the sounds we made, but very speedily coming to employ words with understanding. A single lesson taught her how to walk. After my sister had dressed her twice, she was perfectly well able to dress herself—no trivial achievement when the intricacy of the feminine toilet is borne in mind. At the end of an incredibly short period of time she could read and write as easily as I can. Of the former capability she made good use, devouring eagerly all such books as we thought wise to give her. Her progress, in a word, precisely corresponded to that made by a bright child, only it was infinitely more rapid; and what a fascinating thing it was to observe, I need not stop to tell. It was like watching the growth and blossoming of some most wonderful and beautiful flower. We were permitted, so to speak, to be eye-witnesses of a miracle. If you had met her at the expiration of one year, and had conversed with her, you would have put her down for a singularly intelligent and well-informed, yet at the same time singularly innocent and unsophisticated, girl of eighteen. Yes, I mean it—a girl of eighteen. For the most astonishing result of my operation—most astonishing because least expected—was this: that in body as well as in mind she seemed to have been rejuvenated. With the obliteration of her memory, every trace of experience faded from her face. You would have laid a wager that it was the face of a young maiden not yet out of her teens. She had said that she was all but six-and-twenty. It was unbelievable when you looked at her now. To the desperate-eyed woman whom I had dissuaded from self-destruction on that clouded Bummer's night a year gone by, she bore only such a resemblance as a younger sister might have borne. To Josephine I remarked, “Is it possible that we have builded better than we knew? That we have stumbled upon the discovery which the alchemists sought in vain—the Elixir of Youth?”
“Indeed,” Josephine assented, “she has grown many years younger. She has the appearance and the manner of seventeen.”
“It only proves,” said I, “the truth of the oft-repeated commonplace: that it is experience and not time which ages one; time being simply the receptacle and measure of experience. Could we double the rate of our experience—experiencing as much in one year as we are now able to experience in two—we should grow old just twice as quickly, reaching at thirty-five the limit which we now reach at threescore-and-ten. Contrariwise, could we halve the rate of our experience—requiring two years to experience what we can now experience in one—we should grow old just twice as slowly, being mere boys at forty, and at seventy in the very prime of early manhood. Our consciousness of time, in other words, is simply the consciousness of so much experience. Well and good. Now, in this case, her experience has been undone. That is to say, her memory, the storehouse of her experience, has been destroyed. Past time, so far as it affects her mind, has been neutralised, has been cancelled out of her equation. Hence this return to adolescence. Her bodily structure—the size and shape of her bones, and all that—of course remains as it was. But her spirit returns to the condition of youth; and, since it is the spirit which animates the body, it gives to her body the expression and the activity of its own age.”
Then I offered to perform my operation upon Josephine herself, to the end that she also might enjoy a restored youth: which offer Josephine haughtily declined.
“It is very fortunate,” she added, “that this alteration in her appearance has taken place, for now it will be impossible for anybody who may have known her in former days to identify her: a danger which otherwise we should have had to fear.”
“Yes,” I acquiesced, “that is very true.”
The disposition which our visitor developed, furthermore, better than answered to our most sanguine anticipations. Her new environment vivified the best of those propensities which heredity had implanted in her, and left dormant those that were for evil. Her quality was so sweet and winning, that in a little while she had taken our old hearts captive, and become the delight and the treasure of our home. We loved her like a daughter; and the notion that we might some time have to part with her was intolerable. Therefore, we put our heads together, and entered into a pious conspiracy, agreeing to represent to her that she was our niece, the child of our brother, an orphan, eighteen years old, by name Miriam, who, on the 14th day of June, 1884, had sustained an accident which had destroyed her recollection of the past. As our niece, recently arrived from England, we introduced her to our friends. She reciprocated our affection in the tenderest manner, called us aunt and uncle, and was in every respect a blessing to our lives—so beautiful, so gentle, so merry, so devoted.
This mysterious and impressive circumstance I must not for one moment allow to be lost sight of:—That, of all living human beings, she who least suspected that such a woman as Louise Massarte had ever lived, sinned, suffered, was Miriam Benary. She upon whom Louise Massarte's life, sins, and sufferings had least effect or influence, was Miriam Benary. Her identity was in every respect as separate, and as distinct from that of Louise Massarte, as mine is from my reader's. Louise Massarte was dead, dead utterly. Into her tenement of clay a new soul had entered It was a fearful and wonderful metamorphosis, rich in suggestiveness; a datum, it seems to me, bearing importantly upon three sciences: Psychology, Divinity, and Ethics.
Thus nearly four years elapsed, and it was Monday, the 12th day of March, 1888, the day of the memorable snowstorm, called the Blizzard.