"Have you friends to go to?"
There was a pause. Some of the medical students who were listening came a little nearer. As a matter of fact, Francis Trent's future depended very largely on the answer he made to this question. The statement that he was "quite well" was hazarded rather by way of experiment than as a matter of fact. The doctors wanted to know what he would say and do under pressure, for some of them were beginning to suggest that the man should be removed to the workhouse infirmary or a lunatic asylum. His faculties seemed to be hopelessly beclouded.
Suddenly he lifted his head. A new sharp light had come into his eyes. He nodded reassuringly.
"Yes, I have friends," he said.
"You have a home where you can go? Shall we write to your friends to meet you?"
"No, thank you, sir. I can find my own way home."
And then they conferred together a little, and left him, and reported that he was cured.
Certainly, there seemed to be nothing the matter with him now. His wounds and injuries had healed, his bodily strength was returning. But the haze which hung over his mind was far more impenetrable than the doctors guessed. Something of it had been apparent to them in the earlier days of his illness; but his clear and decided answers to their questions convinced them that memory had to some extent returned. As a matter of fact it was not memory that had returned, but a sharpening of his perceptive faculties, awakening him to the fact that he stood in danger of being taken for an idiot or a madman if he did not frame some answer to the questions which the doctors asked him. This new acuteness was perhaps the precursor to a return of his memory; but as yet the Past was like a dead wall, an abyss of darkness surrounding him. Now and then flashes of light seemed to dart across that darkness: he seemed on the point of recalling something—he knew not what; for the flashes faded as quickly as they came, and made the darkness all the greater for the contrast.
He was possessed now by the idea that if he could get out of hospital, and walk along the London streets, he might remember all that he had forgotten. His own name, his own history, had become a blank to him. He knew in some vague, forlorn fashion, that he had once been what the world calls a gentleman. He had not acknowledged so much to the doctors: he had not felt that they would believe him. Even when the groping after the Past became most painful, he made up his mind that he would not ask these scientific men for help: he was afraid of being treated as a "case," experimented on, written about in the papers. There was something in the Past of which he knew he ought to be ashamed. What could it be? He was afraid to ask, lest he might find himself to be a criminal.
In these haunting terrors there was, of course, a distinct token of possible insanity. The man needed a friendly, guiding hand to steer him back to the world of reason and common-sense. But to whom could he go, since he had taken up this violent prejudice against the doctors? He felt drawn to none of the nurses, although some of them had been very kind to him. The only person to whom he might perhaps have disburthened himself, if he had had the opportunity, was the sweet-voiced, sweet-faced woman whom he had warned of the ill effects of her gifts. He did not know her name, or anything about her; but before he left the hospital he asked one of the nurses who she was.