Then he sat down beside me, and took my hand in his, and with very gentle words began to reason and argue with me.
He was glad I’d struggled, he said, because that broke the first force of the terrible shock for me. Action was always good for one in any great crisis. It gave an outlet for the pent-up emotions, too suddenly let loose with explosive force, and kept them from turning inward and doing serious harm, as mine had done on that horrible night of the accident. He called it always the accident, I noticed, and never the murder. That gave me fresh hope. Could I really after all have fired unintentionally? But no; when I came to look inward,—to look backward on my past state,—I was conscious all the time of some strong and fierce resentment smouldering deep in my heart at the exact moment of firing. However it might have happened, I was angry with the man with the long white beard: I fired at him hastily, it is true, but with malice prepense and deliberate intent to wound and hurt him.
Jack went on, however, undeterred, in a low and quiet voice, soothing my hand with his as he spoke, and very kind and gentle. My spirit rebelled at the thought that I could ever for one moment have imagined him a murderer. I said so in one wild burst. Jack held my hand, and still reasoned with me. I like a man’s reasoning; it’s so calm and impartial. It seems to overcome one by its mere display of strength. If I’d changed my mind once, Jack said, I might change it again, when further evidence on the point was again forthcoming. I mustn’t give myself up to the police till I understood much more. If I did, I would commit a very grave mistake. There were reasons that had led to the firing of the shot. Very grave reasons too. Couldn’t I restore and reconstruct them, now I knew the last stage of the terrible history? If possible, he’d rather I should arrive at them by myself than that he should tell me.
I cast my mind back all in vain.
“No, Jack,” I said trustfully. “I can’t remember anything one bit like that. I can remember forward, sometimes, but never backwards. I can remember now how I flung down the pistol, and how the servants burst in. But not a word, not an item, of what went before. That’s all a pure blank to me.”
And then I went on to tell him in very brief outline how the first thing I could recollect in all my life was the Australian scene with the big blue-gum-trees; and how that had been recalled to me by the picture at Jane’s; and how one scene in that way had gradually suggested another; and how I could often think ahead from a given fact but never go back behind it and discover what led up to it.
Jack drew his hand over his chin and reflected silently.
“That’s odd,” he said, after a pause. “Yet very comprehensible. I might almost have thought of that before: might have arrived at it on general principles. Psychologically and physiologically it’s exactly what one would have expected from the nature of memory. And yet it never occurred to me. Set up the train of thought in the order in which it originally presented itself, and the links may readily restore themselves in successive series. Try to trace it backward in the inverse order, and the process is very much more difficult and involved.—Well, we’ll try things just so with you, Una. We’ll begin by reconstructing your first life as far as we can from the very outset, with the aid of these stray hints of yours; and then we’ll see whether we can get you to remember all your past up to the day of the accident more easily.”
I gazed up at him with gratitude.
“Oh, Jack,” I said, trembling, “in spite of this shock, I believe I can do it now. I believe I can remember. The scales are falling from my eyes. I’m becoming myself again. What you’ve said and what you’ve shown me seems to have broken down a veil. I feel as if I could reconstruct all now, when once the key’s suggested to me.”