“Yes. I see it.”
Unorna watched the waking sleeper narrowly. It was now night, but the sky had cleared and the starlight falling upon the snow in the lonely, open place, made it possible to see very well. Unorna seemed as unconscious of the bitter cold as her subject, whose body was in a state past all outward impressions. So far she had gone through all the familiar process of question and answer with success, but this was not all. She knew that if, when he awoke, the name he loved still remained in his memory, the result would not be accomplished. She must produce entire forgetfulness, and to do this, she must wipe out every association, one by one. She gathered her strength during a short pause. She was greatly encouraged by the fact that the acknowledgment of the delusion had been followed by no convulsive reaction in the body. She was on the very verge of a complete triumph, and the concentration of her will during a few moments longer might win the battle.
She could not have chosen a spot better suited for her purpose. Within five minutes’ walk of streets in which throngs of people were moving about, the scene which surrounded her was desolate and almost wild. The unfinished building loomed like a ruin behind her; the rough hewn blocks lay like boulders in a stony desert; the broad gray ice lay like a floor of lustreless iron before her under the uncertain starlight. Only afar off, high up in the mighty Hradschin, lamps gleamed here and there from the windows, the distant evidences of human life. All was still. Even the steely ring of the skates had ceased.
“And so,” she continued, presently, “this man’s whole life has been a delusion, ever since he began to fancy in the fever of an illness that he loved a certain woman. Is this clear to you, my Mind?”
“It is quite clear,” answered the muffled voice.
“He was so utterly mad that he even gave that woman a name—a name, when she had never existed except in his imagination.”
“Except in his imagination,” repeated the sleeper, without resistance.
“He called her Beatrice. The name was suggested to him because he had fallen ill in a city of the South where a woman called Beatrice once lived and was loved by a great poet. That was the train of self-suggestion in his delirium. Mind, do you understand?”
“He suggested to himself the name in his illness.”
“In the same way that he suggested to himself the existence of the woman whom he afterwards believed he loved?”