WAS not the only one of Alison Deming's friends to whom her marriage with Scarboro seemed menacing. I was one of those nearest to her when the calamity of blindness befell her. I saw her go through with this crucifixion with incredible gallantry. As far as she let me or any one else see, she accepted blindness as another woman might have accepted old age—I mean that blindness might have been the inevitable lot of all mankind, for all the outward signs she gave. She had the intense spiritual modesty that keeps the wounds of the spirit concealed. She only showed what it must have meant to her by achieving in the end the hard-won and beautiful serenity of spirit that is sometimes given to the blind. She showed it, too, by her altered attitude toward the men she knew. She seemed to be somehow beyond any one's reach—twice born, unapproachable, as if she had returned to us from the holy places of the earth. I suppose it was sentimental on my part to feel that this marriage with Scarboro had an element of the sacrilegious, like some ordinary person aspiring to the hand of a haloed saint.
Perhaps it was this unapproachable quality of hers that made us dubious as to Godfrey Scarboro. One could understand her loving him; it wasn't that. Any woman might have loved Godfrey Scarboro. Indeed, it might well have frightened us, considering what he was—one of those peccable, lovable creatures perpetually being forgiven for everything.
One felt that Alison should have married some one having her own other-world, unattainable quality, instead of a man who smiled in the eyes of the world, as sure of his welcome as an unusually attractive child, and who had denied himself as little as a child. In marrying Alison there had to be a certain consecration. A man had necessarily to be sure of his own temperament before he had the right to join his life with hers. No man had the right to make her risk anything. The thing which I felt most keenly about Scarboro was that he lacked the unshakable quality that a man should have for such a marriage. There are only a few men and a few women who have that quality—who make you feel of them that they will go on caring from the other side of the grave. Godfrey was not one of these. He had everything except this one thing which he should have had. That was how it seemed to those of us who loved Alison the most.
After five years we had to admit that our forebodings had come to nothing. Indeed, it seemed as if all Godfrey asked of life was to devote himself to her service. Under his love Alison bloomed into a creature of extraordinary perfection. It seemed as if life had taken her sight from her so that she might specialize in love, taste more deeply of love, than would otherwise have been possible to her. For once it seemed as if life had miraculously compensated for an apparently irreparable disaster. Godfrey was an artist in life, and he set himself to making the relation with Alison a perfect thing. He loved her with greater delicacy, with more imagination, with a higher degree of completeness than any one else could have done.
Such unions have an element of fatality to me. One is then so at the mercy of life; any alienation means such a terrible and mortal rending of the fibers of the spirit.
I had often visited them, and Alison's letter asking me to come to them roused in me happy anticipation. It was a warmer letter and more urgent than usual, and conveyed to me a flattering impression of their being eager to see me. Their greeting, when I arrived, bore out the note which Alison's letter had struck.
The first afternoon with them was more delightful than usual. Godfrey had never been more charming. Our supper on the porch was of a piece with the afternoon, so what happened then was to me entirely unexpected, unaccountable, and yet it was made of so slight a fabric that it is hard for me to attempt to convey the extraordinarily shocking impression that I had of them.
I had drawn my chair away from the supper-table that I might look down the long, sloping lawn to the hills and the sunset beyond. After a few moments I turned to them, about to make some idle remark, but the words that I would have uttered died on my lips, so deeply absorbed were the two in their own thoughts. The light, shining through the leaves, made fantastic green on Alison's white dress, on her pale hair, and on the white of her neck.
Godfrey was not watching her. He sat inert, brooding, incredibly relaxed, his eyes on the distance. He had the air of a man who sits alone in his room, secure from all observation. It was his unconscious and terrible acknowledgment of the fact that Alison was blind. He had forgotten me.