"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.
She said, coming down to him in a rather old-fashioned, impersonal
drawing-room which looked distinctly as if it had been left to her: "I
was so glad to get your card. When did you leave Woodbeach?"
"Mrs. Yarrow," he returned, as if that were the answer, "I think I owe
you an explanation."
"Pay it!" she bantered, putting out her hand.
"I'm so poverty-stricken that I don't know whether I can. Did you ever
notice anything odd about me?"
His directness seemed to have a right to directness from her. "I noticed
that you stared a good deal--or used to. But people _do_ stare."
"I stared because I saw things."
"Saw things?"
"I saw whatever I thought of. Whatever came into my mind was externated
in a vision."
She smiled, he could not make out whether uneasily or not. "It sounds
rather creepy, doesn't it? But it's very interesting."
"That's what the doctor said; I've been to see him this morning. May I
tell you about my visions? They're not so creepy as they sound, I
believe, and I don't think they'll keep you awake."
"Yes, do," she said. "I should like of all things to hear about them.
Perhaps I've been one of them."
"You have."
"Oh! Isn't that rather personal?"
"I hope not offensively."
He went on to tell her, with even greater fulness than he had told the
doctor. She listened with the interest women take in anything weird, and
with a compassion for him which she did not conceal so perfectly but
that he saw it. At the end he said: "You may wonder that I come to you
with all this, which must sound like the ravings of a madman."
"No--no," she hesitated.
"I came because I wished you to know everything about me
before--before--I wouldn't have come, you'll believe me, if I hadn't had
the doctor's assurance that my trouble was merely a part of my being
physically out of kilter, and had nothing to do with my sanity--Good
Heavens! What am I saying? But the thought has tormented me so! And in
the midst of it I've allowed myself to--Mrs. Yarrow, I love you. Don't
you know that?"
Alford may have had a divided mind in this declaration, but after that
one word Mrs. Yarrow had no mind for anything else. He went on.
"I'm not only sick--so sick that I sha'n't be able to do any work for a
year at least--but I'm poor, so poor that I can't afford to be sick."
She lifted her eyes and looked at him, where she sat oddly aloof from
those possessions of hers, to which she seemed so little related, and
said, with a smile quivering at the corners of her pretty mouth, "I
don't see what that has to do with it."
"What do you mean?" He stared at her hard.
"Am I in duplicate or triplicate, this time?"
"No, you're only one, and there's none like you! I could never see any
one else while I looked at you!" he cried, only half aware of his
poetry, and meaning what he said very literally.
But she took only the poetry. "I shouldn't wish you to," she said, and
she laughed.
He could not believe yet in his good-fortune. His countenance fell. "I'm
afraid I don't understand, or that you don't. It doesn't seem as if I
could get to the end of my unworthiness, which isn't voluntary. It seems
altogether too base. I can't let you say what you do, if you mean it,
till you know that I come to you in despair as well as in love. You
saved me from the fear I was in, again and again, and I believe that
without you I shall--Ah, it seems very base! But the doctor--If I could
always tell some one--if I could tell _you_ when these things were
obsessing me--haunting me--they would cease--"
Mrs. Yarrow rose, with rather a piteous smile. "Then, I am a
prescription!" She hoped, woman-like, that she was solely a passion; but
is any woman worth having, ever solely a passion?
"Don't!" Alford implored, rising too. "Don't, in mercy, take it that
way! It's only that I wish you to know everything that's in me; to know
how utterly helpless and worthless I am. You needn't have a pang in
throwing such a thing away."
She put out her hand to him, but at arm's-length. "I sha'n't throw you
away--at least, not to-night. I want to think." It was a way of saying
she wished him to go, and he had no desire to stay. He asked if he might
come again, and she said, "Oh yes."
"To-morrow?"
"Not to-morrow, perhaps. When I send. Was it _young_ Doctor Enderby?"
They had rather a sad, dry parting; and when her door closed upon him he
felt that it had shut him out forever. His shame and his defeat were so
great that he did not think of his eidolons, and they did not come to
trouble him. He woke in the morning, asking himself, bitterly, if he
were cured already. His humiliation was such that he closed his eyes to
the light, and wished he might never again open them to it.
The question that Mrs. Yarrow had to ask Dr. Enderby was not the
question he had instantly forecast for her when she put aside her veil
in his office and told him who she was. She did not seem anxious to be
assured of Alford's mental condition, or as to any risks in marrying
him. Her inquiry was much more psychological; it was almost impersonal,
and yet Dr. Enderby thought she looked as if she had been crying.
She had a difficulty in formulating her question, and when it came it
was almost a speculation.
"Women," she said, a little hoarsely, "have no right, I suppose, to
expect the ideal in life. The best they can do seems to be to make the
real look like it."
Dr. Enderby reflected. "Well, yes. But I don't know that I ever put it
to myself in just those terms."
Then she remarked, as if that were the next thing: "You've known Mr.
Alford a long time."
"We were at school together, and we shared the same rooms in Harvard."
"He is very sincere," she added, as if this were relevant.
"He's a man who likes to have a little worse than the worst known about
him. One might say he was excessively sincere." Enderby divined that
Alford had been bungling the matter, and he was willing to help him out
if he could.
Mrs. Yarrow fixed dimly beautiful eyes upon him. "I don't know," she
said, "why it wouldn't be ideal--as much ideal as anything--to give
one's self absolutely to--to--a duty--or not duty, exactly; I don't mean
that. Especially," she added, showing a light through the mist, "if one
wanted to do it."
Then he knew she had made up her mind, and though on some accounts he
would have liked to laugh with her, on other accounts he felt that he
owed it to her to be serious.
"If women could not fulfil the ideal in that way--if they did not
constantly do it--there would be no marriages for love."
"Do you think so?" she asked, with a shaking voice. "But men--men are
ideal, too."
"Not as women are--except now and then some fool like Alford." Now,
indeed, he laughed, and he began to praise Alford from his heart, so
delicately, so tenderly, so reverently, that Mrs. Yarrow laughed too
before he was done, and cried a little, and when she rose to leave she
could not speak; but clung to his hand, on turning away, and so flung it
from behind her with a gesture that Enderby thought pretty.
At this point, Wanhope stopped as if that were the end.
"And did she let Alford come to see her again?" Rulledge, at once
romantic and literal, demanded.
"Oh yes. At any rate, they were married that fall. They are--I believe
he's pursuing his archaeological studies there--living in Athens."
"Together?" Minver smoothly inquired.
At this expression of cynicism Rulledge gave him a look that would have
incinerated another. Wanhope went out with Minver, and then, after a
moment's daze, Rulledge exclaimed: "Jove! I forgot to ask him whether
it's stopped Alford's illusions!"