“I would respect any confidence religiously—you know that?”
“Indeed, yes,” said Mr. Petre, touched, “but ... sincerely ... I must keep my rule. It was not lightly made.”
“Very well, sir, very well!” sighed Sir William Bland.
He asked a few common questions on diet and habit, all easily answered and all normally.
Then the great business was seriously approached.
“I must ask you,” said the Magician, “to do one or two things if you please. In the first place” (he opened a drawer in a little table and pulled out a little book), “would you mind looking through this, page by page, and telling me if anything in it strikes even the slightest echo within you?”
Mr. Petre took the book. It was a polyglot New Testament. There was the French, which seemed to him pretty dull. He glanced at a few words in Italian which he recognized, and one or two German words with which he was familiar. The rest meant nothing to him, except that he could distinguish the Spanish as Spanish and no more, and he noted the odd script of the eastern versions. He laid it down again.
“No, Sir William, it recalls nothing,” he said.
“The sacred words,” said Sir William Bland earnestly (Mr. Petre had been dealing with the Genealogy in St. Matthew), “recall nothing of childhood? No tender associations?” There was infinite pathos in his voice, and he went so far as to lay a sympathetic hand upon his patient’s arm.
“No, sir, no,” said Mr. Petre, a little abruptly for him. “The fact is, I must tell you plainly. Loss of Memory is a weak term. At a certain recent date” (here he remembered that he had divulged it, and his terror returned), “I lost all sense of what I had been, where I had been, who I was. I retained my habit of mind, and all my knowledge of general things in life, but not one personal association.... It is very distressing,” he added.