The Invader: A Novel

by Margaret L. Woods

The time of flowers, the freshness of trees, and the glory of gorse and broom was over. It was the season of full summer when the midlands, clothed with their rich but sheenless mantle of green, wear a self-satisfied air, as of dull people conscious of deserved prosperity. But just as the sea or a mountain or an adventurous soul will always lend an element of the surprising and romantic to the commonest corner of earth, so the sky will perpetually transfigure large spaces of level country, valley or plain, laid open to its capricious influences. Boars Hill looks over the wide valley of the narrow Og to the downs, and up to where that merges into the valley of the Upper Thames. By the sandy track which Ian followed, the tree still stood, though no longer alone, whence the poet of Thyrsis looking northward, saw the "fair city with her dreaming spires"; less fair indeed to-day than when he looked upon it, but still "lovely all times," in all its fleeting shades, whether blond and sharp-cut in the sunshine or dimly gray among its veiling trees. The blue waving line of the downs, crowned here and there by clumps of trees, ran far along the southwestern horizon, melting vaporously in the distance above "the Vale, the three lone weirs, the youthful Thames." Over the downs and over the wide valley of ripening cornfields, of indigo hedgerow-elms and greener willow and woodland, of red-roofed homesteads and towered churches, moved slowly the broad shadows of rolling clouds that journeyed through the intense blue above. Some shadows were like veils of pale gray gauze, through which the world showed a delicately softened face; others were dark, with a rich, indefinable hue of their own, and as they moved, the earth seemed to burst into a deeper glow of color behind them. Close by, the broken hill-side was set here and there with oak and thorn, was everywhere deep in bracken, on whose large fronds lay the bluish bloom of their maturity. It all gained a definiteness of form, an air of meaning by its detachment from the wide background floating behind.

Following steep and circuitous lanes, Ian arrived at the lodging-house and found Tims on the porch preparing to start on her bicycle. But flattered and surprised by his visit, she ordered tea in the bright little sitting-room she was inhabiting. He was shy of approaching the real object of his visit. They marked time awhile till the thunderstorm became their theme. Then he told something of Milly's sleep-walking, her collapse of memory; and watched Tims meantime, hoping to see in her face merely surprise and concern. But there was no surprise, hardly concern in the queer little face. There was excitement, and at last a flash of positive pleasure.

"Good old M.!" she observed. "I'm glad she has got back; though I'm a bit proud of the other one too. I expect you feel much the same, old boy, don't you?"

The speech was the reverse of soothing, even to its detail of "old boy." He looked at his teacup and drew his black brows together.

"I'm afraid I don't understand, Miss Timson. I suppose you think it a joke, but to me it seems rather a serious matter."

"Of course it is; uncommon serious," returned Tims, too much interested in her subject to consider the husband's feelings. "Bless you! I don't want to be responsible for it. At first I thought it was a simple case of a personality evolved by hypnotism; but if so it would have depended on the hypnotist, and you see it didn't after the first."

"I don't think we need bother about hypnotism"—there was a note of impatience in Ian's voice—"it's just a case of collapse of memory. But as you were with her the first time it happened, I want to know exactly how far the collapse went. There were signs of it every now and then in her work, but on the whole it improved."

"You never can tell what will happen in these cases," said Tims. "She remembered her book-learning pretty well, but she forgot her own name, and as to people and things that had happened, she was like a new-born babe. If I hadn't nursed her through she'd have been sent to a lunatic asylum. But it wasn't that, after all, that made it so exciting. It was the difference between Milly's two personalities. You don't mean to say, old chap, you've lived with her for seven months and can't see the difference?"

Tims looked at him. She held strong theoretical views as to the stupidity of the male, but circumstances had seldom before allowed her to put them to the test. Behold them more than justified; for Ian was far above the average in intelligence. He, for a fraction of a minute, paused, deliberately closing the shutter of his mind against an unpleasant search-light that shot back on the experiences of his courtship and marriage.

"Well, I suppose I'm not imaginative," he returned, with a dry laugh. "I only see certain facts about her memory and want more of them, to tell Norton-Smith when I take her up to see him."