Between the Dark and the DaylightHowells, William Dean
General
Between the Dark and the Daylight
Howells, William Dean
Short stories
Such return of memory as she now had was like memory in what we call the
lower lives. It increased, fluctuantly, with an ebb in which it almost
disappeared, but with a flow that in its advance carried it beyond its
last flood-tide mark. After the first triumph in which she could address
Lanfear by his name, and could greet her father as her father, there
were lapses in which she knew them as before, without naming them.
Except mechanically to repeat the names of other people when reminded of
them, she did not pass beyond cognition to recognition. Events still
left no trace upon her; or if they did she was not sure whether they
were things she had dreamed or experienced. But her memory grew stronger
in the region where the bird knows its way home to the nest, or the bee
to the hive. She had an unerring instinct for places where she had once
been, and she found her way to them again without the help from the
association which sometimes failed Lanfear. Their walks were always
taken with her father's company in his carriage, but they sometimes left
him at a point of the Berigo Road, and after a long détour among the
vineyards and olive orchards of the heights above, rejoined him at
another point they had agreed upon with him. One afternoon, when Lanfear
had climbed the rough pave of the footways with her to one of the
summits, they stopped to rest on the wall of a terrace, where they sat
watching the changing light on the sea, through a break in the trees.
The shadows surprised them on their height, and they had to make their
way among them over the farm paths and by the dry beds of the torrents
to the carriage road far below. They had been that walk only once
before, and Lanfear failed of his reckoning, except the downward course
which must bring them out on the high-road at last. But Miss Gerald's
instinct saved them where his reason failed. She did not remember, but
she knew the way, and she led him on as if she were inventing it, or as
if it had been indelibly traced upon her mind and she had only to follow
the mystical lines within to be sure of her course. She confessed to
being very tired, and each step must have increased her fatigue, but
each step seemed to clear her perception of the next to be taken.
Suddenly, when Lanfear was blaming himself for bringing all this upon
her, and then for trusting to her guidance, he recognized a certain
peasant's house, and in a few moments they had descended the
olive-orchard terraces to a broken cistern in the clear twilight beyond
the dusk. She suddenly halted him. "There, there! It happened
then--now--this instant!"
"What?"
"That feeling of being here before! There is the curb of the old
cistern; and the place where the terrace wall is broken; and the path up
to the vineyard--Don't you feel it, too?" she demanded, with a
joyousness which had no pleasure for him.
"Yes, certainly. We were here last week. We went up the path to the
farm-house to get some water."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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