Part 78

The sound of her name brought her image before me. What horrible thing had been done to me that I should have forgotten her very existence?

Strength failed, and I fell back, a dampness coming out on my forehead. Above all, what had been done to her? “Don’t leave me alone,” she had begged; yet I had deserted her. I was—here.

The motoring days came back to me; happy, hopeful days in the open air. How long ago were they that I should be thus broken, that I should feel like a man grown old?

Slowly, and cold as the trail of a snake, a thought crawled into my mind.

I remembered a short story I had read once. It was by Gertrude Atherton, and at the time I had thought it the most harrowing story ever written. A woman had gone to sleep, young, beautiful, beloved. She had waked to find her hair grey, her hands old and veined. Twenty blank years of madness she had spent in a lunatic asylum, after being driven mad by a shock, waking to sanity at last only to find herself an old woman.

Had I been mad? Was I old now, with my wasted white hands?

Tingling with dread I touched my face. My chin was rough with a stubble of beard. I fancied there were hollows in my cheeks. Was my hair grey?

Somewhere there must be a mirror. I tried to struggle up and find it, that I might see my own image and know the worst; but a giddiness came over me, and I had to lie down again, or I knew that I should faint.

“I have Carmona to thank for this,” I said aloud, furiously. But then I asked myself, how did I know that there ever had been a Carmona, that there ever had been a girl called Monica Vale? Perhaps I had dreamed them both, in the time of madness.

There had been many dreams. Suddenly I remembered a man’s voice saying: “Only keep him till after I’m married.” The voice had been Carmona’s. I knew that now.

No, I had never been mad. A horrible trick had been played on me—in the gypsy’s cave. I remembered that. Everything was blank since, except for the dreams. Perhaps some of them had been true. Perhaps, half-unconscious—(for somebody must have come out from behind that red curtain and struck me on the head)—I had been taken to him, that he might be sure it was the right man. Somebody had been ordered to keep me, until after—Again I sat up, with a groan. I must get out of this. I must save Monica from the man, and from her own mother. But—if it was already too late?

There was a sound in the room. From a door I could not see, someone had come in. A key had turned, and was being turned again. The dream of the Inquisition came back to my mind, for the man in the black capucha stood looking at me.

“Who are you?” I asked. Although for many years I had spoken English, and Spanish only for a few weeks, it was mechanically that I used Spanish now.

“Your good friend,” came from under the capucha, while there was a glitter of eyes through the two slanting slits in the black silk.

“If you’re my friend, you’ll let me out of this place, wherever it is,” I said.

“But I am your doctor as well, and you are too weak to go out. This is the first time you have spoken sensible words, and now they are not wise.”

“I’m not too weak to hear how I came here, how long I have been, and—” He cut me short, with a wave of a yellow old hand. Under the capucha he wore an ordinary black coat, such as elderly Spaniards of the middle class wear every day.

“You must not excite yourself,” he said. “As for your coming here, I found you lying in the road one dark night, with your head cut open, and out of compassion I brought you into my house.”

“If you are a doctor, and have no reason to hide your face from me, why do you cover it up with a capucha?” I went on incredulously.

“It is the capucha of the cofradìa to which I belong,” explained the man. “I wear it at certain hours because of a vow which will not expire till Corpus Christi. If I were a wicked person, who wished you harm, why need I trouble to hide my face so that you should not know it again? I live alone in this house, and if I wished you evil, I need never let you leave these rooms. But instead, I have taken care of you, and you have repaid some experiments I have made, for now I think you are getting well. You have only to be patient.”

“Tell me how long since you played good Samaritan and picked me up by the roadside,” said I. “Then perhaps I shall try to be patient.”

“How long?” he echoed. “I can’t tell you that. To a philosopher like me days and weeks are much the same.”

“Philosophers have often been in the pay of dukes,” I said.

“Those days have passed. I live my life without dukes.”

“Without the Duke of Carmona?”

“The Duke of Carmona? That is a mere name to me. Why do you speak it?”

“I think you can guess.”

“I fear that after all your brain is not clear. We must have a little more of the good medicine.”