He gazed across at me compassionately.
“My poor child,” he said in a low voice, like a very affectionate friend, “it’s much better so. You have been mercifully spared a great deal of pain. Una, when I first saw you at The Grange after your father’s death, I thanked heaven you had been so seized. I thanked heaven the world had become suddenly a blank to you. I prayed hard you might never recover your senses again, or at least your memory. And now that you’re slowly returned to life once more, against all hope or fear, I’m heartily glad it’s in this peculiar way. I’m heartily glad all the past’s blotted out for you. You can’t understand that, my child? Ah, no, very likely not. But I think it’s much best for you, all your first life should be wholly forgotten.” He paused for a second. Then he added slowly: “If you remembered it all, the sense of the tragedy would be far more acute and poignant even than at present.”
“Perhaps so,” I said resolutely; “but not the sense of mystery. It’s THAT that appals me so! I’d rather know the truth than be so wrapped up in the incomprehensible.”
He looked at me pityingly once more.
“My poor child,” he said, in the same gentle and fatherly voice, “you don’t wholly understand. It doesn’t all come home to you. I can see clearly, from what Inspector Wolferstan told me, after his visit to you the other day—”
I broke in, in surprise.
“Inspector Wolferstan!” I cried. “Then he came down here to see you, did he?”
It was horrible to find how all my movements were discussed and chronicled.
“Yes, he came down here to see me and talk things over,” Dr. Marten went on, as calmly as if it were mere matter of course. “And I could see from what he said you were still spared much. For instance, you remember it all only as an event that happened to an old man with a long white beard. You don’t fully realise, except intellectually, that it was your own father. You’re saved, as a daughter, the misery and horror of thinking and feeling it was your father who lay dead there.”
“That’s quite true,” I answered. “I admit that I can’t feel it all as deeply as I ought. But none the less, I’ve come down here to make a violent effort. Let it cost what it may, I must get at the truth. I wanted to see whether the sight of The Grange and of Woodbury may help me to recall the lost scenes in my memory.”