“Then, do you think—do you suppose—it would be any good my trying to see her again? If she wouldn’t be indifferent to my feelings, do you think there would be any hope—Really, you know, I would give anything to believe that my feelings wouldn’t offend her. You understand me?”
“Perhaps I do.”
“I’ve never met a more charming girl and—she isn’t engaged, is she? She isn’t engaged to you? I don’t mean to press the question, but it’s a question of life and death with me, you know.”
Lanfear thought he saw his way out of the coil. “I can tell you, quite as frankly as you ask, that Miss Gerald isn’t engaged tome.”
“Then it’s somebody else—somebody in America! Well, I hope she’ll be happy;Inever shall.” He offered his hand to Lanfear. “I’m off.”
“Oh, here’s the doctor, now,” a voice said behind them where they stood by the garden wall, and they turned to confront Gerald with his daughter.
“Why! Are you going?” she said to the Englishman, and she put out her hand to him.
“Yes, Mr. Evers is going.” Lanfear came to the rescue.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” the girl said, and the youth responded.
“That’s very good of you. I—good-by! I hope you’ll be very happy—I—” He turned abruptly away, and ran into the hotel.
“What has he been crying for?” Miss Gerald asked, turning from a long look after him.
Lanfear did not know quite what to say; but he hazarded saying: “He was hurt that you had forgotten him when he came to see you this afternoon.”
“Did he come to see me?” she asked; and Lanfear exchanged looks of anxiety, pain, and reassurance with her father. “I am so sorry. Shall I go after him and tell him?”
“No; I explained; he’s all right,” Lanfear said.
“You want to be careful, Nannie,” her father added, “about people’s feelings when you meet them, and afterwards seem not to know them.”
“But Idoknow them, papa,” she remonstrated.
“You want to be careful,” her father repeated.
“I will—I will, indeed.” Her lips quivered, and the tears came, which Lanfear had to keep from flowing by what quick turn he could give to something else.
An obscure sense of the painful incident must have lingered with her after its memory had perished. One afternoon when Lanfear and her father went with her to the military concert in the sycamore-planted piazza near the Vacherie Suisse, where they often came for a cup of tea, she startled them by bowing gayly to a young lieutenant of engineers standing there with some other officers, and making the most of the prospect of pretty foreigners which the place afforded. The lieutenant returned the bow with interest, and his eyes did not leave their party as long as they remained. Within the bounds of deference for her, it was evident that his comrades were joking about the honor done him by this charming girl. When the Geralds started homeward Lanfear was aware of a trio of officers following them, not conspicuously, but unmistakably; and after that, he could not start on his walks with Miss Gerald and her father without the sense that the young lieutenant was hovering somewhere in their path, waiting in the hopes of another bow from her. The officer was apparently not discouraged by his failure to win recognition from her, and what was amounting to annoyance for Lanfear reached the point where he felt he must share it with her father. He had nearly as much trouble in imparting it to him as he might have had with Miss Gerald herself. He managed, but when he required her father to put a stop to it he perceived that Gerald was as helpless as she would have been. He first wished to verify the fact from its beginning with her, but this was not easy.
“Nannie,” he said, “why did you bow to that officer the other day?”
“What officer, papa? When?”
“You know; there by the band-stand, at the Swiss Dairy.”
She stared blankly at him, and it was clear that it was all as if it had not been with her. He insisted, and then she said: “Perhaps I thought I knew him, and was afraid I should hurt his feelings if I didn’t recognize him. But I don’t remember it at all.” The curves of her mouth drooped, and her eyes grieved, so that her father had not the heart to say more. She left them, and when he was alone with Lanfear he said:
“You see how it is!”
“Yes, I saw how it was before. But what do you wish to do?”
“Do you mean that he will keep it up?”
“Decidedly, he’ll keep it up. He has every right to from his point of view.”
“Oh, well, then, my dear fellow, you must stop it, somehow. You’ll know how to do it.”
“I?” said Lanfear, indignantly; but his vexation was not so great that he did not feel a certain pleasure in fulfilling this strangest part of his professional duty, when at the beginning of their next excursion he put Miss Gerald into the victoria with her father and fell back to the point at which he had seen the lieutenant waiting to haunt their farther progress. He put himself plumply in front of the officer and demanded in very blunt Italian: “What do you want?”
The lieutenant stared him over with potential offence, in which his delicately pencilled mustache took the shape of a light sneer, and demanded in his turn, in English much better than Lanfear’s Italian: “What right have you to ask?”
“The right of Miss Gerald’s physician. She is an invalid in my charge.”
A change quite indefinable except as the visible transition from coxcomb to gentleman passed over the young lieutenant’s comely face. “An invalid?” he faltered.
“Yes,” Lanfear began; and then, with a rush of confidence which the change in the officer’s face justified, “one very strangely, very tragically afflicted. Since she saw her mother killed in an accident a year ago she remembers nothing. She bowed to you because she saw you looking at her, and supposed you must be an acquaintance. May I assure you that you are altogether mistaken?”
The lieutenant brought his heels together, and bent low. “I beg her pardon with all my heart. I am very, very sorry. I will do anything I can. I would like to stop that. May I bring my mother to call on Miss Gerald?”
He offered his hand, and Lanfear wrung it hard, a lump of gratitude in his throat choking any particular utterance, while a fine shame for his late hostile intention covered him.
When the lieutenant came, with all possible circumstance, bringing the countess, his mother, Mr. Gerald overwhelmed them with hospitality of every form. The Italian lady responded effusively, and more sincerely cooed and murmured her compassionate interest in his daughter. Then all parted the best of friends; but when it was over, Miss Gerald did not know what it had been about. She had not remembered the lieutenant or her father’s vexation, or any phase of the incident which was now closed. Nothing remained of it but the lieutenant’s right, which he gravely exercised, of saluting them respectfully whenever he met them.
Earlier, Lanfear had never allowed himself to be far out of call from Miss Gerald’s father, especially during the daytime slumbers into which she fell, and from which they both always dreaded her awakening. But as the days went on and the event continued the same he allowed himself greater range. Formerly the three went their walks or drives together, but now he sometimes went alone. In these absences he found relief from the stress of his constant vigilance; he was able to cast off the bond which enslaves the physician to his patient, and which he must ignore at times for mere self-preservation’s sake; but there was always a lurking anxiety, which, though he refused to let it define itself to him, shortened the time and space he tried to put between them.
One afternoon in April, when he left her sleeping, he was aware of somewhat recklessly placing himself out of reach in a lonely excursion to a village demolished by the earthquake of 1887, and abandoned himself, in the impressions and incidents of his visit to the ruin, to a luxury of impersonal melancholy which the physician cannot often allow himself. At last, his care found him, and drove him home full of a sharper fear than he had yet felt since the first days. But Mr. Gerald was tranquilly smoking under a palm in the hotel garden, and met him with an easy smile. “She woke once, and said she had had such a pleasant dream. Now she’s off again. Do you think we’d better wake her for dinner? I suppose she’s getting up her strength in this way. Her sleeping so much is a good symptom, isn’t it?”
Lanfear smiled forlornly; neither of them, in view of the possible eventualities, could have said what result they wished the symptoms to favor. But he said: “Decidedly I wouldn’t wake her”; and he spent a night of restless sleep penetrated by a nervous expectation which the morning, when it came, rather mockingly defeated.
Miss Gerald appeared promptly at breakfast in their pavilion, with a fresher and gayer look than usual, and to her father’s “Well, Nannie, youhavehad a nap, this time,” she answered, smiling:
“Have I? It isn’t afternoon, is it?”
“No, it’s morning. You’ve napped it all night.”
She said: “I can’t tell whether I’ve been asleep or not, sometimes; but now I know I have been; and I feel so rested. Where are we going to-day?”
She turned to Lanfear while her father answered: “I guess the doctor won’t want to go very far, to-day, after his expedition yesterday afternoon.”
“Ah,” she said, “Iknewyou had been somewhere! Was it very far? Are you too tired?”
“It was rather far, but I’m not tired. I shouldn’t advise Possana, though.”
“Possana?” she repeated. “What is Possana?”
He told her, and then at a jealous look in her eyes he added an account of his excursion. He heightened, if anything, its difficulties, in making light of them as no difficulties for him, and at the end she said, gently: “Shall we go this morning?”
“Let the doctor rest this morning, Nannie,” her father interrupted, whimsically, but with what Lanfear knew to be an inner yielding to her will. “Or if you won’t lethim, letme. I don’t want to go anywhere this morning.”
Lanfear thought that he did not wish her to go at all, and hoped that by the afternoon she would have forgotten Possana. She sighed, but in her sigh there was no concession. Then, with the chance of a returning drowse to save him from openly thwarting her will, he merely suggested: “There’s plenty of time in the afternoon; the days are so long now; and we can get the sunset from the hills.”
“Yes, that will be nice,” she said, but he perceived that she did not assent willingly; and there was an effect of resolution in the readiness with which she appeared dressed for the expedition after luncheon. She clearly did not know where they were going, but when she turned to Lanfear with her look of entreaty, he had not the heart to join her father in any conspiracy against her. He beckoned the carriage which had become conscious in its eager driver from the moment she showed herself at the hotel door, and they set out.
When they had left the higher level of the hotel and began their clatter through the long street of the town, Lanfear noted that she seemed to feel as much as himself the quaintness of the little city, rising on one hand, with its narrow alleys under successive arches between the high, dark houses, to the hills, and dropping on the other to sea from the commonplace of the principal thoroughfare, with its pink and white and saffron hotels and shops. Beyond the town their course lay under villa walls, covered with vines and topped by pavilions, and opening finally along a stretch of the old Cornice road.
“But this,” she said, at a certain point, “is where we were yesterday!”
“This is where the doctor was yesterday,” her father said, behind his cigar.
“And wasn’t I with you?” she asked Lanfear.
He said, playfully: “To-day you are. I mustn’t be selfish and have you every day.”
“Ah, you are laughing at me; but I know I was here yesterday.”
Her father set his lips in patience, and Lanfear did not insist.
They had halted at this point because, across a wide valley on the shoulder of an approaching height, the ruined village of Possana showed, and lower down and nearer the seat the new town which its people had built when they escaped from the destruction of their world-old home.
World-old it all was, with reference to the human life of it; but the spring-time was immortally young in the landscape. Over the expanses of green and brown fields, and hovering about the gray and white cottages, was a mist of peach and cherry blossoms. Above these the hoar olives thickened, and the vines climbed from terrace to terrace. The valley narrowed inland, and ceased in the embrace of the hills drawing mysteriously together in the distances.
“I think we’ve got the best part of it here, Miss Gerald,” Lanfear broke the common silence by saying. “You couldn’t see much more of Possana after you got there.”
“Besides,” her father ventured a pleasantry which jarred on the younger man, “if you were there with the doctor yesterday, you won’t want to make the climb again to-day. Give it up, Nannie!”
“Oh no,” she said, “I can’t give it up.”
“Well, then, we must go on, I suppose. Where do we begin our climb?”
Lanfear explained that he had been obliged to leave his carriage at the foot of the hill, and climb to Possana Nuova by the donkey-paths of the peasants. He had then walked to the ruins of Possana Vecchia, but he suggested that they might find donkeys to carry them on from the new town.
“Well, I hope so,” Mr. Gerald grumbled. But at Possana Nuova no saddle-donkeys were to be had, and he announced, at the café where they stopped for the negotiation, that he would wait for the young people to go on to Possana Vecchia, and tell him about it when they got back. In the meantime he would watch the game of ball, which, in the piazza before the café, appeared to have engaged the energies of the male population. Lanfear was still inwardly demurring, when a stalwart peasant girl came in and announced that she had one donkey which they could have with her own services driving it. She had no saddle, but there was a pad on which the young lady could ride.
“Oh, well, take it for Nannie,” Mr. Gerald directed; “only don’t be gone too long.”
They set out with Miss Gerald reclining in the kind of litter which the donkey proved to be equipped with. Lanfear went beside her, the peasant girl came behind, and at times ran forward to instruct them in the points they seemed to be looking at. For the most part the landscape opened beneath them, but in the azure distances it climbed into Alpine heights which the recent snows had now left to the gloom of their pines. On the slopes of the nearer hills little towns clung, here and there; closer yet farm-houses showed themselves among the vines and olives.
It was very simple, as the life in it must always have been; and Lanfear wondered if the elemental charm of the scene made itself felt by his companion as they climbed the angles of the inclines, in a silence broken only by the picking of the donkey’s hoofs on the rude mosaic of the pavement, and the panting of the peasant girl at its heels. On the top of the last upward stretch they stopped for the view, and Miss Gerald asked abruptly: “Why were you so sad?”
“When was I sad?” he asked, in turn.
“I don’t know. Weren’t you sad?”
“When I was here yesterday, you mean?” She smiled on his fortunate guess, and he said: “Oh, I don’t know. It might have begun with thinking—
‘Of old, unhappy, far-off things,And battles long ago.’
You know the pirates used to come sailing over the peaceful sea yonder from Africa, to harry these coasts, and carry off as many as they could capture into slavery in Tunis and Algiers. It was a long, dumb kind of misery that scarcely made an echo in history, but it haunted my fancy yesterday, and I saw these valleys full of the flight and the pursuit which used to fill them, up to the walls of the villages, perched on the heights where men could have built only for safety. Then, I got to thinking of other things—”
“And thinking of things in the past always makes you sad,” she said, in pensive reflection. “If it were not for the wearying of always trying to remember, I don’t believe I should want my memory back. And of course to be like other people,” she ended with a sigh.
It was on his tongue to say that he would not have her so; but he checked himself, and said, lamely enough: “Perhaps you will be like them, sometime.”
She startled him by answering irrelevantly: “You know my mother is dead. She died a long while ago; I suppose I must have been very little.”
She spoke as if the fact scarcely concerned her, and Lanfear drew a breath of relief in his surprise. He asked, at another tangent: “What made you think I was sad yesterday?”
“Oh, I knew, somehow. I think that I always know when you are sad; I can’t tell you how, but I feel it.”
“Then I must cheer up,” Lanfear said. “If I could only see you strong and well, Miss Gerald, like this girl—”
They both looked at the peasant, and she laughed in sympathy with their smiling, and beat the donkey a little for pleasure; it did not mind.
“But you will be—you will be! We must hurry on, now, or your father will be getting anxious.”
They pushed forward on the road, which was now level and wider than it had been. As they drew near the town, whose ruin began more and more to reveal itself in the roofless walls and windowless casements, they saw a man coming towards them, at whose approach Lanfear instinctively put himself forward. The man did not look at them, but passed, frowning darkly, and muttering and gesticulating.
Miss Gerald turned in her litter and followed him with a long gaze. The peasant girl said gayly in Italian: “He is mad; the earthquake made him mad,” and urged the donkey forward.
Lanfear, in the interest of science, habitually forbade himself the luxury of anything like foreboding, but now, with the passing of the madman, he felt distinctively a lift from his spirit. He no longer experienced the vague dread which had followed him towards Possana, and made him glad of any delay that kept them from it.
They entered the crooked, narrow street leading abruptly from the open country without any suburban hesitation into the heart of the ruin, which kept a vivid image of uninterrupted mediaeval life. There, till within the actual generation, people had dwelt, winter and summer, as they had dwelt from the beginning of Christian times, with nothing to intimate a domestic or civic advance. This street must have been the main thoroughfare, for stone-paved lanes, still narrower, wound from it here and there, while it kept a fairly direct course to the little piazza on a height in the midst of the town. Two churches and a simple town house partly enclosed it with their seamed and shattered façades. The dwellings here were more ruinous than on the thoroughfare, and some were tumbled in heaps. But Lanfear pushed open the door of one of the churches, and found himself in an interior which, except that it was roofless, could not have been greatly changed since the people had flocked into it to pray for safety from the earthquake. The high altar stood unshaken; around the frieze a succession of stucco cherubs perched, under the open sky, in celestial security.
He had learned to look for the unexpected in Miss Gerald, and he could not have said that it was with surprise he now found her as capable of the emotions which the place inspired, as himself. He made sure of saying: “The earthquake, you know,” and she responded with compassion:
“Oh yes; and perhaps that poor man was here, praying with the rest, when it happened. How strange it must all have seemed to them, here where they lived so safely always! They thought such a dreadful thing could happen to others, but not to them. That is the way!”
It seemed to Lanfear once more that she was on the verge of the knowledge so long kept from her. But she went confidently on like a sleepwalker who saves himself from dangers that would be death to him in waking. She spoke of the earthquake as if she had been reading or hearing of it; but he doubted if, with her broken memory, this could be so. It was rather as if she was exploring his own mind in the way of which he had more than once been sensible, and making use of his memory. From time to time she spoke of remembering, but he knew that this was as the blind speak of seeing.
He was anxious to get away, and at last they came out to where they had left the peasant girl waiting beside her donkey. She was not there, and after trying this way and that in the tangle of alleys, Lanfear decided to take the thoroughfare which they had come up by and trust to the chance of finding her at its foot. But he failed even of his search for the street: he came out again and again at the point he had started from.
“What is the matter?” she asked at the annoyance he could not keep out of his face.
He laughed. “Oh, merely that we’re lost. But we will wait here till that girl chooses to come back for us. Only it’s getting late, and Mr. Gerald—”
“Why, I know the way down,” she said, and started quickly in a direction which, as they kept it, he recognized as the route by which he had emerged from the town the day before. He had once more the sense of his memory being used by her, as if being blind, she had taken his hand for guidance, or as if being herself disabled from writing, she had directed a pen in his grasp to form the words she desired to put down. In some mystical sort the effect was hers, but the means was his.
They found the girl waiting with the donkey by the roadside beyond the last house. She explained that, not being able to follow them into the church with her donkey, she had decided to come where they found her and wait for them there.
“Does no one at all live here?” Lanfear asked, carelessly.
“Among the owls and the spectres? I would not pass a night here for a lemonade! My mother,” she went on, with a natural pride in the event, “was lost in the earthquake. They found her with me before her breast, and her arms stretched out keeping the stones away.” She vividly dramatized the fact. “I was alive, but she was dead.”
“Tell her,” Miss Gerald said, “that my mother is dead, too.”
“Ah, poor little thing!” the girl said, when the message was delivered, and she put her beast in motion, chattering gayly to Miss Gerald in the bond of their common orphanhood.
The return was down-hill, and they went back in half the time it had taken them to come. But even with this speed they were late, and the twilight was deepening when the last turn of their road brought them in sight of the new village. There a wild noise of cries for help burst upon the air, mixed with the shrill sound of maniac gibbering. They saw a boy running towards the town, and nearer them a man struggling with another, whom he had caught about the middle, and was dragging towards the side of the road where it dropped, hundreds of feet, into the gorge below.
The donkey-girl called out: “Oh, the madman! He is killing the signor!”
Lanfear shouted. The madman flung Gerald to the ground, and fled shrieking. Miss Gerald had leaped from her seat, and followed Lanfear as he ran forward to the prostrate form. She did not look at it, but within a few paces she clutched her hands in her hair, and screamed out: “Oh, my mother is killed!” and sank, as if sinking down into the earth, in a swoon.
“No, no; it’s all right, Nannie! Look after her, Lanfear! I’m not hurt. I let myself go in that fellow’s hands, and I fell softly. It was a good thing he didn’t drop me over the edge.” Gerald gathered himself up nimbly enough, and lent Lanfear his help with the girl. The situation explained itself, almost without his incoherent additions, to the effect that he had become anxious, and had started out with the boy for a guide, to meet them, and had met the lunatic, who suddenly attacked him. While he talked, Lanfear was feeling the girl’s pulse, and now and then putting his ear to her heart. With a glance at her father: “You’re bleeding, Mr. Gerald,” he said.
“So I am,” the old man answered, smiling, as he wiped a red stream from his face with his handkerchief. “But I am not hurt—”
“Better let me tie it up,” Lanfear said, taking the handkerchief from him. He felt the unselfish quality in a man whom he had not always thought heroic, and he bound the gash above his forehead with a reverence mingling with his professional gentleness. The donkey-girl had not ceased to cry out and bless herself, but suddenly, as her care was needed in getting Miss Gerald back to the litter, she became a part of the silence in which the procession made its way slowly into Possana Nuova, Lanfear going on one side, and Mr. Gerald on the other to support his daughter in her place. There was a sort of muted outcry of the whole population awaiting them at the door of the locanda where they had halted before, and which now had the distinction of offering them shelter in a room especially devoted to the poor young lady, who still remained in her swoon.
When the landlord could prevail with his fellow-townsmen and townswomen to disperse in her interest, and had imposed silence upon his customers indoors, Lanfear began his vigil beside his patient in as great quiet as he could anywhere have had. Once during the evening the public physician of the district looked in, but he agreed with Lanfear that nothing was to be done which he was not doing in his greater experience of the case. From time to time Gerald had suggested sending for some San Remo physician in consultation. Lanfear had always approved, and then Gerald had not persisted. He was strongly excited, and anxious not so much for his daughter’s recovery from her swoon, which he did not doubt, as for the effect upon her when she should have come to herself.
It was this which he wished to discuss, sitting fallen back into his chair, or walking up and down the room, with his head bound with a bloody handkerchief, and looking, with a sort of alien picturesqueness, like a kindly brigand.
Lanfear did not leave his place beside the bed where the girl lay, white and still as if dead. An inexpressible compassion for the poor man filled his heart. Whatever the event should be, it would be tragical for him. “Go to sleep, Mr. Gerald,” he said. “Your waking can do no good. I will keep watch, and if need be, I’ll call you. Try to make yourself easy on that couch.”
“I shall not sleep,” the old man answered. “How could I?” Nevertheless, he adjusted himself to the hard pillows of the lounge where he had been sitting and drowsed among them. He woke just before dawn with a start. “I thought she had come to, and knew everything! What a nightmare! Did I groan? Is there any change?”
Lanfear, sitting by the bed, in the light of the wasting candle, which threw a grotesque shadow of him on the wall, shook his head. After a moment he asked: “How long did you tell me her swoon had lasted after the accident to her mother?”
“I don’t think she recovered consciousness for two days, and then she remembered nothing. What do you think are the chances of her remembering now?”
“I don’t know. But there’s a kind of psychopathic logic—If she lost her memory through one great shock, she might find it through another.”
“Yes, yes!” the father said, rising and walking to and fro, in his anguish. “That was what I thought—what I was afraid of. If I could die myself, and save her from living through it—I don’t know what I’m saying! But if—but if—if she could somehow be kept from it a little longer! But she can’t, she can’t! She must know it now when she wakes.”
Lanfear had put up his hand, and taken the girl’s slim wrist quietly between his thumb and finger, holding it so while her father talked on.
“I suppose it’s been a sort of weakness—a sort of wickedness—in me to wish to keep it from her; but Ihavewished that, doctor; you must have seen it, and I can’t deny it. We ought to bear what is sent us in this world, and if we escape we must pay for our escape. It has cost her half her being, I know it; but it hasn’t cost her her reason, and I’m afraid for that, if she comes into her memory now. Still, you must do—But no one can do anything either to hinder or to help!”
He was talking in a husky undertone, and brokenly, incoherently. He made an appeal, which Lanfear seemed not to hear, where he remained immovable with his hand on the girl’s pulse.
“Do you think I am to blame for wishing her never to know it, though without it she must remain deprived of one whole side of life? Do you think my wishing that can have had anything to do with keeping her—But this faintmaypass and she may wake from it just as she has been. It is logical that she should remember; but is it certain that she will?”
A murmur, so very faint as to be almost no sound at all, came like a response from the girl’s lips, and she all but imperceptibly stirred. Her father neither heard nor saw, but Lanfear started forward. He made a sudden clutch at the girl’s wrist with the hand that had not left it and then remained motionless. “She will never remember now—here.”
He fell on his knees beside the bed and began to sob. “Oh, my dearest! My poor girl! My love!” still keeping her wrist in his hand, and laying his head tenderly on her arm. Suddenly he started, with a shout: “The pulse!” and fell forward, crushing his ear against her heart, and listened with bursts of: “It’s beating! She isn’t dead! She’s alive!” Then he lifted her in his arms, and it was in his embrace that she opened her eyes, and while she clung to him, entreated:
“My father! Where is he?”
A dread fell upon both the men, blighting the joy with which they welcomed her back to life. She took her father’s head between her hands, and kissed his bruised face. “I thought you were dead; and I thought that mamma—” She stopped, and they waited breathless. “But that was long ago, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” her father eagerly assented. “Very long ago.”
“I remember,” she sighed. “I thought that I was killed, too. Was italla dream?” Her father and Lanfear looked at each other. Which should speak? “This is Doctor Lanfear, isn’t it?” she asked, with a dim smile. “And I’m not dreaming now, am I?” He had released her from his arms, but she held his hand fast. “I know it is you, and papa; and yes, I remember everything. That terrible pain of forgetting is gone! It’s beautiful! But did he hurt you badly, papa? I saw him, and I wanted to call to you. But mamma—”
However the change from the oblivion of the past had been operated, it had been mercifully wrought. As far as Lanfear could note it, in the rapture of the new revelation to her which it scarcely needed words to establish, the process was a gradual return from actual facts to the things of yesterday and then to the things of the day before, and so back to the tragedy in which she had been stricken. There was no sudden burst of remembrance, but a slow unveiling of the reality in which her spirit was mystically fortified against it. At times it seemed to him that the effect was accomplished in her by supernatural agencies such as, he remembered once somewhere reading, attend the souls of those lately dead, and explore their minds till every thought and deed of their earthly lives, from the last to the first, is revealed to them out of an inner memory which can never, any jot or tittle, perish. It was as if this had remained in her intact from the blow that shattered her outer remembrance. When the final, long-dreaded horror was reached, it was already a sorrow of the past, suffered and accepted with the resignation which is the close of grief, as of every other passion.
Love had come to her help in the time of her need, but not love alone helped her live back to the hour of that supreme experience and beyond it. In the absorbing interest of her own renascence, the shock, more than the injury which her father had undergone, was ignored, if not neglected. Lanfear had not, indeed, neglected it; but he could not help ignoring it in his happiness, as he remembered afterwards in the self-reproach which he would not let the girl share with him. Nothing, he realized, could have availed if everything had been done which he did not do; but it remained a pang with him that he had so dimly felt his duty to the gentle old man, even while he did it. Gerald lived to witness his daughter’s perfect recovery of the self so long lost to her; he lived, with a joy more explicit than their own, to see her the wife of the man to whom she was dearer than love alone could have made her. He lived beyond that time, rejoicing, if it may be so said, in the fond memories of her mother which he had been so long forbidden by her affliction to recall. Then, after the spring of the Riviera had whitened into summer, and San Remo hid, as well as it could, its sunny glare behind its pines and palms, Gerald suffered one long afternoon through the heat till the breathless evening, and went early to bed. He had been full of plans for spending the rest of the summer at the little place in New England where his daughter knew that her mother lay. In the morning he did not wake.
“He gave his life that I might have mine!” she lamented in the first wild grief.
“No, don’t say that, Nannie,” her husband protested, calling her by the pet name which her father always used. “He is dead; but if we owe each other to his loss, it is because he was given, not because he gave himself.”
“Oh, I know, I know!” she wailed. “But he would gladly have given himself for me.”
That, perhaps, Lanfear could not have denied, and he had no wish to do so. He had a prescience of happiness for her which the future did not belie; and he divined that a woman must not be forbidden the extremes within which she means to rest her soul.
I should like to give the story of Alford’s experiences just as Wanhope told it, sitting with us before the glowing hearth in the Turkish room, one night after the other diners at our club had gone away to digest their dinners at the theatre, or in their bachelor apartments up-town, or on the late trains which they were taking north, south, and west; or had hurried back to their offices to spend the time stolen from rest in overwork for which their famished nerves would duly revenge themselves. It was undoubtedly overwork which preceded Alford’s experiences if it did not cause them, for he was pretty well broken from it when he took himself off in the early summer, to put the pieces together as best he could by the seaside. But this was a fact which Wanhope was not obliged to note to us, and there were certain other commonplaces of our knowledge of Alford which he could omit without omitting anything essential to our understanding of the facts which he dealt with so delicately, so electly, almost affectionately, coaxing each point into the fittest light, and then lifting his phrase from it, and letting it stand alone in our consciousness. I remember particularly how he touched upon the love-affair which was supposed to have so much to do with Alford’s break-up, and how he dismissed it to its proper place in the story. As he talked on, with scarcely an interruption either from the eager credulity of Rulledge or the doubt of Minver, I heard with a sensuous comfort—I can use no other word—the far-off click of the dishes in the club kitchen, putting away till next day, with the musical murmur of a smitten glass or the jingle of a dropped spoon. But if I should try to render his words, I should spoil their impression in the vain attempt, and I feel that it is best to give the story as best I can in words of my own, so far from responsive to the requisitions of the occult incident.
The first intimation Alford had of the strange effect, which from first to last was rather an obsession than a possession of his, was after a morning of idle satisfaction spent in watching the target practice from the fort in the neighborhood of the little fishing-village where he was spending the summer. The target was two or three miles out in the open water beyond the harbor, and he found his pleasure in watching the smoke of the gun for that discrete interval before the report reached him, and then for that somewhat longer interval before he saw the magnificent splash of the shot which, as it plunged into the sea, sent a fan-shaped fountain thirty or forty feet into the air. He did not know and he did not care whether the target was ever hit or not. That fact was no part of his concern. His affair was to watch the burst of smoke from the fort and then to watch the upward gush of water, almost as light and vaporous to the eye, where the ball struck. He did not miss one of the shots fired during the forenoon, and when he met the other people who sat down with him at the midday dinner in the hotel, his talk with them was naturally of the morning’s practice. They one and all declared it a great nuisance, and said that it had shattered their nerves terribly, which was not perhaps so strange, since they were all women. But when they asked him in his quality of nervous wreck whether he had not suffered from the prolonged and repeated explosions, too, he found himself able to say no, that he had enjoyed every moment of the firing. He added that he did not believe he had even noticed the noise after the first shot, he was so wholly taken with the beauty of the fountain-burst from the sea which followed; and as he spoke the fan-like spray rose and expanded itself before his eyes, quite blotting out the visage of a young widow across the table. In his swift recognition of the fact and his reflection upon it, he realized that the effect was quite as if he had been looking at some intense light, almost as if he had been looking at the sun, and that the illusion which had blotted out the agreeable reality opposite was of the quality of those flying shapes which repeat themselves here, there, and everywhere that one looks, after lifting the gaze from a dazzling object. When his consciousness had duly registered this perception, there instantly followed a recognition of the fact that the eidolon now filling his vision was not the effect of the dazzled eyes, but of a mental process, of thinking how the thing which it reported had looked.
By the time Alford had co-ordinated this reflection with the other, the eidolon had faded from the lady’s face, which again presented itself in uninterrupted loveliness with the added attraction of a distinct pout.
“Well, Mr. Alford!” she bantered him.
“Oh, I beg your pardon! I was thinking—”
“Not of what I was saying,” she broke in, laughingly, forgivingly.
“No, I certainly wasn’t,” he assented, with such a sense of approaching creepiness in his experience that when she challenged him to say what hewasthinking of, he could not, or would not; she professed to believe that he would not.
In the joking that followed he soon lost the sense of approaching creepiness, and began to be proud of what had happened to him as out of the ordinary, as a species of psychological ecstasy almost of spiritual value. From time to time he tried, by thinking of the splash and upward gush from the cannon-shot’s plunge in the sea, to recall the vision, but it would not come again, and at the end of an afternoon somewhat distraughtly spent he decided to put the matter away, as one of the odd things of no significance which happen in life and must be dealt with as mysteries none the less trifling because they are inexplicable.
“Well, you’ve got over it?” the widow joked him as he drew up towards her, smiling from her rocker on the veranda after supper. At first, all the women in the hotel had petted him; but with their own cares and ailments to reclaim them they let the invalid fall to the peculiar charge of the childless widow who had nothing else to do, and was so well and strong that she could look after the invalid Professor of Archaeology (at the Champlain University) without the fatigues they must feel.
“Yes, I’ve got over it,” he said.
“And what was it?” she boldly pursued.
He was about to say, and then he could not.
“You won’t tell?”
“Not yet,” he answered. He added, after a moment, “I don’t believe I can.”
“Because it’s confidential?”
“No; not exactly that. Because it’s impossible.”
“Oh, that’s simple enough. I understand exactly what you mean. Well, if ever it becomes less difficult, remember that I should always like to know. It seemed a little—personal.”
“How in the world?”
“Well, when one is stared at in that way—”
“Did I stare?”
“Don’t youalwaysstare? But in this case you stared as if there was something wrong with my hair.”
“There wasn’t,” Alford protested, simple-heartedly. Then he recollected his sophistication to say: “Unless its being of that particular shade between brown and red was wrong.”
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Alford! After that Imustbelieve you.”
They talked on the veranda till the night fell, and then they came in among the lamps, in the parlor, and she sat down with a certain provisionality, putting herself sideways on a light chair by a window, and as she chatted and laughed with one cheek towards him she now and then beat the back of her chair with her open hand. The other people were reading or severely playing cards, and they, too, kept their tones down to a respectful level, while she lingered, and when she rose and said good-night he went out and took some turns on the veranda before going up to bed. She was certainly, he realized, a very pretty woman, and very graceful and very amusing, and though she probably knew all about it, she was the franker and honester for her knowledge.
He had arrived at this conclusion just as he turned the switch of the electric light inside his door, and in the first flash of the carbon film he saw her sitting beside the window in such a chair as she had taken and in the very pose which she had kept in the parlor. Her half-averted face was lit as from laughing, and she had her hand lifted as if to beat the back of her chair.
“Good Heavens, Mrs. Yarrow!” he said, in a sort of whispered shout, while he mechanically closed the door behind him as if to keep the fact to himself. “What in the world are you doing here?”
Then she was not there. Nothing was there; not even a chair beside the window.
Alford dropped weakly into the only chair in the room, which stood next the door by the head of his bed, and abandoned himself a helpless prey to the logic of the events.
It was at this point, which I have been able to give in Wanhope’s exact words, that, in the ensuing pause, Rulledge asked, as if he thought some detail might be denied him: “And what was the logic of the events?”
Minver gave a fleering laugh. “Don’t be premature, Rulledge. If you have the logic now, you will spoil everything. You can’t have the moral until you’ve had the whole story. Go on, Wanhope. You’re so much more interesting than usual that I won’t ask how you got hold of all these compromising minutiae.”
“Of course,” Wanhope returned, “they’re not for the general ear. I go rather further, for the sake of the curious fact, than I should be warranted in doing if I did not know my audience so well.”
We joined in a murmur of gratification, and he went on to say that Alford’s first coherent thought was that he was dreaming one of those unwarranted dreams in which we make our acquaintance privy to all sorts of strange incidents. Then he knew that he was not dreaming, and that his eye had merely externated a mental vision, as in the case of the cannon-shot splash of which he had seen the phantom as soon as it was mentioned. He remembered afterwards asking himself in a sort of terror how far it was going to go with him; how far his thought was going to report itself objectively hereafter, and what were the reasonable implications of his abnormal experiences. He did not know just how long he sat by his bedside trying to think, only to have his conclusions whir away like a flock of startled birds when he approached them. He went to bed because he was exhausted rather than because he was sleepy, but he could not recall a moment of wakefulness after his head touched the pillow.
He woke surprisingly refreshed, but at the belated breakfast where he found Mrs. Yarrow still lingering he thought her looking not well. She confessed, listlessly, that she had not rested well. She was not sure, she said, whether the sea air agreed with her; she might try the mountains a little later. She was not inclined to talk, and that day he scarcely spoke with her except in commonplaces at the table. They had no return to the little mystery they had mocked together the day before.
More days passed, and Alford had no recurrence of his visions. His acquaintance with Mrs. Yarrow made no further advance; there was no one else in the hotel who interested him, and he bored himself. At the same time his recovery seemed retarded; he lost tone, and after a fortnight he ran up to talk himself over with his doctor in Boston. He rather thought he would mention his eidolons, and ask if they were at all related to the condition of his nerves. It was a keen disappointment, but it ought not to have been a surprise, for him to find that his doctor was off on his summer vacation. The caretaker who opened the door to Alford named a young physician in the same block of Marlborough Street who had his doctor’s practice for the summer, but Alford had not the heart to go to this alternate.
He started down to his hotel on a late afternoon train that would bring him to the station after dusk, and before he reached it the lamps had been lighted in his car. Alford sat in a sparsely peopled smoker, where he had found a place away from the crowd in the other coaches, and looked out of the window into the reflected interior of his car, which now and then thinned away and let him see the weeds and gravel of the railroad banks, with the bushes that topped them and the woods that backed them. The train at one point stopped rather suddenly and then went on, for no reason that he ever cared to inquire; but as it slowly moved forward again he was reminded of something he had seen one night in going to New York just before the train drew into Springfield. It had then made such another apparently reasonless stop; but before it resumed its course Alford saw from his window a group of trainmen, and his own Pullman conductor with his lantern on his arm, bending over the figure of a man defined in his dark clothing against the snow of the bank where he lay propped. His face was waxen white, and Alford noted how particularly black the mustache looked traversing the pallid visage. He never knew whether the man was killed or merely stunned; you learn nothing with certainty of such things on trains; but now, as he thought of the incident, its eidolon showed itself outside of his mind, and followed him in every detail, even to a snowy stretch of the embankment, until the increasing speed of the train seemed to sweep it back out of sight.
Alford turned his eyes to the interior of the smoker, which, except for two or three dozing commuters and a noisy euchre-party, had been empty of everything but the fumes and stale odors of tobacco, and found it swarming with visions, the eidolons of everything he remembered from his past life. Whatever had once strongly impressed itself upon his nerves was reported there again as instantly as he thought of it. It was largely a whirling chaos, a kaleidoscopic jumble of facts; but from time to time some more memorable and important experience visualized itself alone. Such was the death-bed of the little sister whom he had been wakened, a child, to see going to heaven, as they told him. Such was the pathetic, foolish face of the girl whom long ago he had made believe he cared for, and then had abruptly broken with: he saw again, with heartache, her silly, tender amaze when he said he was going away. Such was the look of mute astonishment, of gentle reproach, in the eyes of the friend, now long dead, whom in a moment of insensate fury he had struck on the mouth, and who put his hand to his bleeding lips as he bent that gaze of wonder and bewilderment upon him. But it was not alone the dreadful impressions that reported themselves. There were others, as vivid, which came back in the original joyousness: the face of his mother looking up at him from the crowd on a day of college triumph when he was delivering the valedictory of his class; the collective gayety of the whole table on a particularly delightful evening at his dining-club; his own image in the glass as he caught sight of it on coming home accepted by the woman who afterwards jilted him; the transport which lighted up his father’s visage when he stepped ashore from the vessel which had been rumored lost, and he could be verified by the senses as still alive; the comical, bashful ecstasy of the good fellow, his ancient chum, in telling him he had had a son born the night before, and the mother was doing well, and how he laughed and danced, and skipped into the air.
The smoker was full of these eidolons and of others which came and went with constant vicissitude. But what was of a greater weirdness than seeing them within it was seeing them without in that reflection of the interior which travelled with it through the summer night, and repeated it, now dimly, now brilliantly, in every detail. Alford sat in a daze, with a smile which he was aware of, fixed and stiff as if in plaster, on his face, and with his gaze bent on this or that eidolon, and then on all of them together. He was not so much afraid of them as of being noticed by the other passengers in the smoker, to whom he knew he might look very queer. He said to himself that he was making the whole thing, but the very subjectivity was what filled him with a deep and hopeless dread. At last the train ceased its long leaping through the dark, and with its coming to a stand the whole illusion vanished. He heard a gay voice which he knew bidding some one good-bye who was getting into the car just back of the smoker, and as he descended to the platform he almost walked into the arms of Mrs. Yarrow.
“Why, Mr. Alford! We had given you up. We thought you wouldn’t come back till to-morrow—or perhaps ever. What in the world will you do for supper? The kitchen fires were out ages ago!”
In the light of the station electrics she beamed upon him, and he felt glad at heart, as if he had been saved from something, a mortal danger or a threatened shame. But he could not speak at once; his teeth closed with tetanic force upon each other. Later, as they walked to the hotel, through the warm, soft night in which the south wind was roaming the starless heavens for rain, he found his voice, and although he felt that he was speaking unnaturally, he made out to answer the lively questions with which she pelted him too thickly to expect them to be answered severally. She told him all the news of the day, and when she began on yesterday’s news she checked herself with a laugh and said she had forgotten that he had only been gone since morning. “But now,” she said, “you see how you’ve been missed—howanyman must be missed in a hotel full of women.”
She took charge of him when they got to the house, and said if he would go boldly into the dining-room, where they detected, as they approached, one lamp scantly shining from the else darkened windows, she would beard the lioness in her den, by which she meant the cook in the kitchen, and see what she could get him for supper. Apparently she could get nothing warm, for when a reluctant waitress appeared it was with such a chilly refection on her tray that Alford, though he was not very hungry, returned from interrogating the obscurity for eidolons, and shivered at it. At the same time the swing-door of the long, dim room opened to admit a gush of the outer radiance on which Mrs. Yarrow drifted in with a chafing-dish in one hand and a tea-basket in the other. She floated tiltingly towards him like, he thought, a pretty little ship, and sent a cheery hail before.
“I’ve been trying to get somebody to join you at a premature Welsh-rarebit and a belated cup of tea, but I can’t tear one of the tabbies from their cards or the kittens from their gambols in the amusement-hall in the basement. Do you mind so very much having it alone? Because you’ll have to, whether you do or not. Unless you call me company, when I’m merely cook.”
She put her utensils on the table beside the forbidding tray the waitress had left, and helped lift herself by pressing one hand on the top of a chair towards the electric, which she flashed up to keep the dismal lamp in countenance. Alford let her do it. He durst not, he felt, stir from his place, lest any movement should summon back the eidolons; and now in the sudden glare of light he shyly, slyly searched the room for them. Not one, fair or foul, showed itself, and slowly he felt a great weight lifting from his heart. In its place there sprang up a joyous gratitude towards Mrs. Yarrow, who had saved him from them, from himself. An inexpressible tenderness filled his breast; the tears rose to his eyes; a soft glow enveloped his whole being, a warmth of hope, a freshness of life renewed, encompassed him. He wished to take her in his arms, to tell her how he loved her; and as she bustled about, lighting the lamp of her chafing-dish, and kindling the little spirit-stove she had brought with her to make tea, he let his gaze dwell upon every pose, every motion of her with a glad hunger in which no smallest detail was lost. He now believed that without her he must die, without her he could not wish to live.
“Jove,” Rulledge broke in at this point of Wanhope’s story, which I am telling again so badly, “I think Alford was in luck.”
Minver gave a harsh cackle. “The only thing Rulledge finds fault with in this club is ‘the lack of woman’s nursing and the lack of woman’s tears.’ Nothing is wanting to his enjoyment of his victuals but the fact that they are not served by a neat-handed Phyllis, like Alford’s.”
Rulledge glanced towards Wanhope, and innocently inquired, “Was that her first name?”
Minver burst into a scream, and Rulledge looked red and silly for having given himself away; but he made an excursion to the buffet outside, and returned with a sandwich with which he supported himself stolidly under Minver’s derision, until Wanhope came to his relief by resuming his story, or rather his study, of Alford’s strange experience.
Mrs. Yarrow first gave Alford his tea, as being of a prompter brew than the rarebit, but she was very quick and apt with that, too; and pretty soon she leaned forward, and in the glow from the lamp under the chafing-dish, which spiritualized her charming face with its thin radiance, puffed the flame out with her pouted lips, and drew back with a long-sighed “There! That will make you see your grandmother, if anything will.”
“My grandmother?” Alford repeated.
“Yes. Wouldn’t you like to?” Mrs.. Yarrow asked, pouring the thick composition over the toast (rescued stone-cold from the frigid tray) on Alford’s plate. “I’m sure I should like to see mine—dear old gran! Not that I ever saw her—either of her—or should know how she looked. Did you ever see yours—either of her?” she pursued, impulsively.
“Oh yes,” Alford answered, looking intently at her, but with so little speculation in the eyes he glared so with that he knew her to be uneasy under them.
She laughed a little, and stayed her hand on the bail of the teapot. “Which of her?”
“Oh, both!”
“And—and—did she look so much likeme?” she said, with an added laugh, that he perceived had an hysterical note in it. “You’re letting your rarebit get cold!”
He laughed himself, now, a great laugh of relaxation, of relief. “Not the least in the world! She was not exactly a phantom of delight.”
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Alford. Now, it’s your tea’s getting cold.”
They laughed together, and he gave himself to his victual with a relish that she visibly enjoyed. When that question of his grandmother had been pushed he thought of an awful experience of his childhood, which left on his infant mind an indelible impression, a scar, to remain from the original wound forever. He had been caught in a lie, the first he could remember, but by no means the last, by many immemorable thousands. His poor little wickedness had impugned the veracity of both these terrible old ladies, who, habitually at odds with each other, now united, for once, against him. He could always see himself, a mean little blubbering-faced rascal, stealing guilty looks of imploring at their faces, set unmercifully against him, one in sorrow and one in anger, requiring his mother to whip him, and insisting till he was led, loudly roaring, into the parlor, and there made a liar of for all time, so far as fear could do it.
When Mrs. Yarrow asked if he had ever seen his grandmother he expected instantly to see her, in duplicate, and as a sole refuge, but with little hope that it would save him, he kept his eyes fast on hers, and to his unspeakable joy it did avail. No other face, of sorrow or of anger, rose between them. For the time his thought was quit of its consequence; no eidolon outwardly repeated his inward vision. A warm gush of gratitude seemed to burst from his heart, and to bathe his whole being, and then to flow in a tide of ineffable tenderness towards Mrs. Yarrow, and involve her and bear them together heavenward. It was not passion, it was not love, he perceived well enough; it was the utterance of a vital conviction that she had saved him from an overwhelming subjective horror, and that in her sweet objectivity there was a security and peace to be found nowhere else.
He greedily ate every atom of his rarebit, he absorbed every drop of the moisture in the teapot, so that when she shook it and shook it, and then tried to pour something from it, there was no slightest dribble at the spout. But they lingered, talking and laughing, and perhaps they might never have left the place if the hard handmaiden who had brought the tea-tray had not first tried putting her head in at the swing-door from the kitchen, and then, later, come boldly in and taken the tray away.
Mrs. Yarrow waited self-respectfully for her disappearance, and then she said, “I’m afraid that was a hint, Mr. Alford.”
“It seemed like one,” he owned.
They went out together, gayly chatting, but she would not encourage the movement he made towards the veranda. She remained firmly attached to the newel-post of the stairs, and at the first chance he gave her she said good-night and bounded lightly upward. At the turn of the stairs she stopped and looked laughing down at him over the rail. “I hope you won’t see your grandmother.”
“Oh, not a bit of it,” he called back. He felt that he failed to give his reply the quality of epigram, but he was not unhappy in his failure.
Many light-hearted days followed this joyous evening. No eidolons haunted Alford’s horizon, perhaps because Mrs. Yarrow filled his whole heaven. She was very constantly with him, guiding his wavering steps up the hill of recovery, which he climbed with more and more activity, and keeping him company in those valleys of relapse into which he now and then fell back from the difficult steeps. It came to be tacitly, or at least passively, conceded by the other ladies that she had somehow earned the exclusive right to what had once been the common charge; or that if one of their number had a claim to keep Mr. Alford from killing himself by all sorts of imprudences, which in his case amounted to impieties, it was certainly Mrs. Yarrow. They did not put this in terms, but they felt it and acted it.
She was all the safer guardian for a delicate invalid because she loathed manly sports so entirely that she did not even pretend to like them, as most women, poor things, think themselves obliged to do. In her hands there was no danger that he would be tempted to excesses in golf. She was really afraid of all boats, but she was willing to go out with him in the sail-boat of a superannuated skipper, because to sit talking in the stern and stoop for the vagaries of the boom in tacking was such good exercise. She would join him in fishing from the rotting pier, but with no certainty which was a cunner and which was a sculpin, when she caught it, and with an equal horror of both the nasty, wriggling things. When they went a walk together, her notion of a healthful tramp was to find a nice place among the sweet-fern or the pine-needles, and sit down in it and talk, or make a lap, to which he could bring the berries he gathered for her to arrange in the shallow leaf-trays she pinned together with twigs. She really preferred a rocking-chair on the veranda to anything else; but if he wished to go to those other excesses, she would go with him, to keep him out of mischief.
There could be only one credible reading of the situation, but Alford let the summer pass in this pleasant dreaming without waking up till too late to the pleasanter reality. It will seem strange enough, but it is true, that it was no part of his dream to fancy that Mrs. Yarrow was in love with him. He knew very well, long before the end, that he was in love with her; but, remaining in the dark otherwise, he considered only himself in forbearing verbally to make love to her.
“Well!” Rulledge snarled at this point, “hewasa chump.”
Wanhope at the moment opposed nothing directly to the censure, but said that something pathetically reproachful in Mrs. Yarrow’s smiling looks penetrated to Alford as she nodded gayly from the car window to him in the little group which had assembled to see her off at the station when she left, by no means the first of their happy hotel circle to go.
“Somebody,” Rulledge burst out again, “ought to have kicked him.”
“What’s become,” Minver asked, “of all the dear maids and widows that you’ve failed to marry at the end of each summer, Rulledge?”
The satire involved flattery so sweet that Rulledge could not perhaps wish to make any retort. He frowned sternly, and said, with a face averted from Minver: “Go on, Wanhope!”
Wanhope here permitted himself a philosophical excursion in which I will not accompany him. It was apparently to prepare us for the dramatic fact which followed, and which I suppose he was trying rather to work away from than work up to. It included some facts which he had failed to touch on before, and which led to a discussion very interesting in itself, but of a range too great for the limits I am trying to keep here. It seems that Alford had been stayed from declaring his love not only because he doubted of its nature, but also because he questioned whether a man in his broken health had any right to offer himself to a woman, and because from a yet finer scruple he hesitated in his poverty to ask the hand of a rich woman. On the first point, we were pretty well agreed, but on the second we divided again, especially Rulledge and Minver, who held, the one, that his hesitation did Alford honor, and quite relieved him from the imputation of being a chump; and the other that he was an ass to keep quiet for any such silly reason. Minver contended that every woman had a right, whether rich or poor, to the man who loved her; and, moreover, there were now so many rich women that, if they were not allowed to marry poor men, their chances of marriage were indefinitely reduced. What better could a widow do with the money she had inherited from a husband she probably did not love than give it to a man like Alford—or to an ass like Alford, Minver corrected himself.
Hisreductio ad absurdumallowed Wanhope to resume with a laugh, and say that Alford waited at the station in the singleness to which the tactful dispersion of the others had left him, and watched the train rapidly dwindle in the perspective, till an abrupt turn of the road carried it out of sight. Then he lifted his eyes with a long sigh, and looked round. Everywhere he saw Mrs. Yarrow’s smiling face with that inner pathos. It swarmed upon him from all points; and wherever he turned it repeated itself in the distances like that succession of faces you see when you stand between two mirrors.
It was not merely a lapse from his lately hopeful state with Alford, it was a collapse. The man withered and dwindled away, till he felt that he must audibly rattle in his clothes as he walked by people. He did not walk much. Mostly he remained shrunken in the arm-chair where he used to sit beside Mrs. Yarrow’s rocker, and the ladies, the older and the older-fashioned, who were “sticking it out” at the hotel till it should close on the 15th of September, observed him, some compassionately, some censoriously, but all in the same conviction.
“It’s plain to be seen what ails Mr. Alford,now.”
“Well, I guess itis.”
“Iguess so.”
“Iguessit is.”
“Seems kind of heartless, her going and leaving him so.”
“Like a sick kitten!”
“Well, I should say asmuch.”
“Your eyes bother you, Mr. Alford?” one of them chanted, breaking from their discussion of him to appeal directly to him. He was rubbing his eyes, to relieve himself for the moment from the intolerable affliction of those swarming eidolons, which, whenever he thought of this thing or that, thickened about him. They now no longer displaced one another, but those which came first remained fadedly beside or behind the fresher appearances, like the earlier rainbow which loses depth and color when a later arch defines itself.
“Yes,” he said, glad of the subterfuge. “They annoy me a good deal of late.”
“You want to get fitted for a good pair of glasses. I kept letting it go, when I first began to get old-sighted.”
Another lady came to Alford’s rescue. “I guess Mr. Alford has no need to get fitted for old sight yet a while. You got little spidery things—specks and dots—in your eyes?”
“Yes—multitudes,” he said, hopelessly.
“Well, I’ll tell you what: you want to build up. That was the way with me, and the oculist said it was from getting all run down. I built up, and the first thing I knew my sight was as clear as a bell. You want to build up.”
“You want to go to the mountains,” a third interposed. “That’s where Mrs. Yarrow’s gone, and I guess it’ll do her more good than sticking it out here would ever have done.”
Alford would have been glad enough to go to the mountains, but with those illusions hovering closer and closer about him, he had no longer the courage, the strength. He had barely enough of either to get away to Boston. He found his doctor this time, after winning and losing the wager he made himself that he would not have returned to town yet, and the good-fortune was almost too much for his shaken nerves. The cordial of his friend’s greeting—they had been chums at Harvard—completed his overthrow. As he sank upon the professional sofa, where so many other cases had been diagnosticated, he broke into tears. “Hello, old fellow!” the doctor said, encouragingly, and more tenderly than he would have dealt with some women. “What’s up?”
“Jim,” Alford found voice to say, “I’m afraid I’m losing my mind.”
The doctor smiled provisionally. “Well, that’soneof the signs you’re not. Can you say how?”
“Oh yes. In a minute,” Alford sobbed, and when he had got the better of himself he told his friend the whole story. In the direct examination he suppressed Mrs. Yarrow’s part, but when the doctor, who had listened with smiling seriousness, began to cross-examine him with the question, “And you don’t remember that any outside influence affected the recurrence of the illusions, or did anything to prevent it?” Alford answered promptly: “Oh yes. There was a woman who did.”
“A woman? What sort of a woman?”
Alford told.
“That is very curious,” the doctor said. “I know a man who used to have a distressing dream. He broke it up by telling his wife about it every morning after he had dreamt it.”
“Unluckily, she isn’t my wife,” Alford said, gloomily.
“But when she was with you, you got rid of the illusions?”
“At first, I used to see hers; then I stopped seeing any.”
“Did you ever tell her of them?”
“No; I didn’t.”
“Never tell anybody?”
“No one but you.”
“And do you see them now?”
“No.”
“Do you think, because you’ve told me of them?”
“It seems so.”
The doctor was silent for a marked space. Then he asked, smiling: “Well, why not?”
“Why not what?”
“Tell your wife.”
“How, my wife?”
“By marriage.”
Alford looked dazed. “Do you mean Mrs. Yarrow?”
“If that’s her name, and she’s a widow.”
“And do you think it would be the fair thing for a man on the verge of insanity—a physical and mental wreck—to ask a woman to marry him?”
“In your case, yes. In the first place, you’re not so bad as all that. You need nothing but rest for your body and change for your mind. I believe you’ll get rid of your illusions as soon as you form the habit of speaking of them promptly when they begin to trouble you. You ought to speak of them to some one. You can’t always have me around, and Mrs. Yarrow would be the next best thing.”
“She’s rich, and you know what I am. I’ll have to borrow the money to rest on, I’m so poor.”
“Not if you marry it.”
Alford rose, somewhat more vigorously than he had sat down. But that day he did not go beyond ascertaining that Mrs. Yarrow was in town. He found out the fact from the maid at her door, who said that she was nearly always at home after dinner, and, without waiting for the evening of another day, Alford went to call upon her.