Gradually memory began to return. He asked why his wife did not come to see him. “She used to be so fond of me,” he said, “foolishly fond of me; and now she deserts me.”
Then he talked of going home again. The image of his latest dwelling-place had gradually shaped itself in his mind. He saw the hedges of pale amber roses, the carouba-trees, dark against the glittering blue of the sea, which shone through every opening in the branches like a background of lapis lazuli, and the rugged mountains rising above the low curving shore steeply towards the sky, with patches of olive here and there on their stony flanks, but for the most part bare and barren, reddish-yellow, steeped in sunlight.
Yes, he remembered every feature of that lovely and varied scene. The village of Eza yonder on the mountain-road—a cluster of stony dwellings perched upon rocky foundations, hardly to be distinguished from the rough crags upon which they were built—and higher still, in a cleft of those yellow hills, Turbia, and its cloven towers, the birthplace of Roman Emperors. How lovely it all was, and how pleasant it had been to lounge in his garden, where the light looked dazzling on beds of white gilly-flowers, and where the blue summer sea smiled in the far distance, with a faint purple cloud yonder on the horizon which represented Corsica!
Why had he ever left that familiar home? Why could he not return to it?
“Get me a carriage,” he said to one of the attendants; “I want to go home immediately. My wife is waiting for me.”
It is not customary to make explanations to patients even in the best-regulated asylums. Nobody answered him; nobody explained anything to him. He found himself confronted with a dogged silence. He wore himself out in an agony of impatience, like a bird beating itself to death against its bars. He languished in a miserable ignorance, piecing his past life together bit by bit, with a strange interweaving of fancies and realities, until by slow degrees the fancies dropped out of the web and left him face to face with the truth.
At last the record of the past was complete. He knew that his wife was dead, and remembered how she had died. He knew that he had been a prisoner, first in gaol and then in a lunatic asylum; but he did not acknowledge to himself that he had been mad. He remembered the bell tolling in the saffron light of dawn; he remembered the magistrate’s exasperating questions; he remembered everything.
After this he sank into a state of sullen despair, and silence and apathy were accepted as the indications of cure. He was told by the head physician that he could leave the institution whenever he pleased. There was an account against him as a private patient, which had been guaranteed by his landlord, who knew him to be a man of some means. His German man-servant had been to the asylum many times to inquire about him. The doctor recommended him to travel—in Switzerland—until the end of the autumn, and to take his servant as his attendant and courier. “Change of air and scene will be of inestimable advantage to you,” said the doctor; “but it would not be wise for you to travel alone.”
“What month is it?”
“August—the twenty-second.”