Another visitor scored a success on behalf of Optimism by reporting that the patient had smoked a cigar in defiance of medical prohibitions.
"Can't be much wrong with his eyes," said this one, "if he can smoke.
You shut your eyes, and try!" Put to the proof, this dictum received more confirmation than it deserved, solely to secure an audience for the flattering tales of Hope.
Much of the afternoon passed too, but without visitors. Because it would never do, said Irene, for her brother not to be at his best when Gwen and her mother came to pay their visit, resolved on this morning, at what was usually the best moment of his day--about five o'clock.
Besides, he was to be got up and really dressed--not merely huddled into clothes--and this was a fatiguing operation, never carried out in dire earnest before. Doctor and Nurse had assented, on condition that Mr.
Torrens should be content to remain in his room, and not insist on going downstairs. Where was the use of his doing so, with such a journey before him to-morrow? Better surely to husband the last grain of strength--the last inch-milligramme of power--for an eighteen-mile ride, even with all the tonics in the world to back it! Mr. Torrens consented to this reservation, and promised not to be rebellious.
So--in time--the hour was at hand when he would see.... No!--_not_ see--there was the sting of it!... that girl he had spoken with at Arthur's Bridge. The vision of her in the sunset was upon him still. He had pleaded with his sister that, come what might, she should not come to him in his darkness, in the hope that this darkness might pass away and leave her image open to him as before. For this hope had mixed itself with that strong desire of his heart that his own disaster should weigh upon her as little as possible. He had kept this meeting back almost till the eleventh hour, hoping against hope that light would break; longing each day for a gleam of the dawn that was to give him his life once more, and make the whole sad story a matter of the past. And now the time had come; and here he stood awaiting the ordeal he had to pass successfully, or face his failure as he might.
If he could but rig up an hour's colourable pretext of vision, however imperfect, the reality might return in its own good time--if that was the will of Allah--and that time might be soon enough. She might never know the terrible anticipations his underthought had had to fight against.
"You look better in the blue Mandarin silk than you would in your tailor's abominations," said Irene, referring to a dressing-gown costume she had insisted on. "Only your hair wants cutting, dear boy! I won't deceive you."
"That's serious!" He lets it pass nevertheless. "Look here, 'Rene, I want you to tell me.... Where are you?--oh, here!--all right.... Now tell me--should you say I saw you, by the look of my eyes?"
"Indeed I should. Indeed, indeed, _nobody_ could tell. Your eyes look as strong as--as that hooky bird's that sits in the sun at the Zoological and nictitates ... isn't that the word?... Goes twicky-twick with a membrane...."
"Fish eagle, I expect."
"Shouldn't wonder! Only, look here!... You mustn't claw hold of Gwen like that. How can you tell, without?"
"Where they are, do you mean? Oh, I know by the voice. You go somewhere else and speak." Whereupon Irene goes furtively behind him, and says suddenly:--"Now look at me!" It is a success, for the blind man faces round, looking full at her.
She claps her hands. "Oh, Adrian!" she cries, "are you sure you don't see--aren't you cheating?" A memory, in this, of old games of blindman's-buff. "You always did cheat, darling, you know, when we played on Christmas Eve. How do I know I can trust you?" She goes close to him again caressing his face. "Oh, _do_ say, dear boy, you can see a little!" But it is no use. He can say nothing.
There are a few moments of distressing silence, and then the brother says:--"Never mind, dear! It will be all right. They say so. Take me to the window that I may look out!" They stand together at the open casement, listening to the voices of the birds. The shrewdest observer might fail to detect the flaw in those two full clear eyes that seem to look out at the leagues of park-land, the spotted deer in the distance, the long avenue-road soon indistinguishable in the trees. The sister sees those eyes, no other than she has always known them, but knows that they see nothing.
"When I was here first," says the brother, "the thrushes were still singing. They are off duty by now, the very last of them." He stops listening. "That's a yellow-hammer. And that's a linnet. _You_ can't tell one from the other."
"I know. I'm shockingly ignorant.... What, dear? What is it you want?"
Her brother has been exploring the window-frame with a restless hand, as though in search of some latch or blind-cord. He cannot find what he wants.
"I want to come to a clearness about the position of this blessed window," he says. "Which direction is the bed in now? Well--describe it this way, suppose! Say I'm looking north now, with my shoulder against the window. Where's the bed? South-west--south-east--due south?"
"South-west by south. Perhaps that's not nautical, but you know what I mean."
"All right! Now, look here! As I stand here--looking out slantwise--where's the sunset? I mean, where would it be?--where does it mean to be?"
"You would be looking straight at it. Of course, you are not really looking north.... There--now you are!" She had taken her hands from the shoulder they were folded on and turned his head to the right. "But, I say, Adrian dear!..." She hesitates.
"What, for instance?"
"Don't try to humbug too much. Don't try to do it, darling boy. You'll only make a hash of it."
"All right, goosey-woosey! I'll fry my own fish. Don't you be uneasy!"
And then they talk of other things: the journey home to-morrow, and how it shall be as good as lying in bed to Adrian, in the big carriage with an infinity of cushions; the new friends they have made here at the Towers, with something of wonderment that this chance has been so long postponed; the kindness they have had from them, and the ill-requital Adrian made for it yesterday by breaking that beautiful blue china tea-cup--any trifle that comes foremost--anything but the great grief that underlies the whole.
For Irene would have her brother at his best, that the visit to him of her new-made friend Gwen may go off well, and steer clear of the ambushes that beset it. Better that that visit should never come off, than that her friend should be left to share their fears for the future.
Each is hiding from the other a weakening confidence in the renewal of suspended eyesight, weaker at the outset than either had been prepared to admit to the other.
"Look here, 'Rene," says Adrian, an hour later, during which his sister has read aloud to him, lying by the open window. "Never mind Becky Sharp; she'll keep till the evening. Can we see Arthur's Bridge from this window, where I saw your friend Lady Gwen? It was Arthur's, wasn't it? What Arthur? King Arthur?"
"Yes, if you like. Only don't go and call it Asses' Bridge, as you did the other day--not when the family's here. It sounds disrespectful."
"Not a bit. It only looks as if Euclid had been round. But answer my question.... Oh, we _can_ see it! Very well, then; show me which way it lies. Is it visible--the actual bridge itself, I mean--not the place it's in?"
Irene got up and looked out of the window from behind her brother's chair. "Yes," she said. "One sees the stone arch plain. How can I show you?" She took his head in her hands again to guide it to a true line of sight.
"Between us and the sunset?"
"Thereabouts. Rather on the left."
"Very good. Now we can go on with Becky Sharp."
"That's it, my lord, is it? Where was I?--oh, Sir Pitt Crawley...." And then the reading was continued, till tea portended, and Irene went away to capture her visitors.
All the sting of his darkness came upon him in its fulness as he heard that voice on the stairs. Oh, could he but see her for one moment--only one moment--to be sure that that dazzling image of three weeks since was not a mere imagination! He knew well the enchantment of the rainbow gleam on sea and earth and sky--the glory that makes Aladdin's palace of the merest hovel. He could scarcely have said to a nicety why a self-deception on this score seemed to him fraught with such evil. If it was a terror on Gwen's behalf, that a false image cherished through a period of reviving eyesight should in the end prove an injustice to her, and cast a chill over his own passionate admiration--for it was that at least that a chance of five minutes had enthralled him with--he banished that terror artificially from his mind. What could it matter to _her_, if he _was_ taken aback and disappointed at her not turning out what his excited fancy had made her that evening at Arthur's Bridge? What was he to _her_ that any chance man might not have been, after so scanty an interchange of words?
That was his dominant feeling, or underlying it, as her voice neared the door of his room, saying:--"Fancy your carrying him away without our seeing him--so much as thinking of it! I call you a wicked, unprincipled sister." To which another voice, a maternal sort of voice, said what must have been: "Don't speak so loud!"--or its equivalent. For the girl's voice dropped, her last words being:--"_He_ won't hear, at this distance."
Then, she was actually coming in at the door! He could hear the prodigious skirt-rustle that is now a thing of womanhood's past--though we adored every comely example, mind you, we oldsters in those days, for all that she carried a milliner's shop on her back--and as it climaxed towards entry had to remember by force how slight indeed had been his interchange of words with the visitor he wished to see--to see by hearing, and to touch the hand of twice. For he had counted his coming privileges in his heart already, even if his reason had made light of its arithmetic. He would be on the safe side now--so he said to himself--and think of the elder lady as the player of the leading _role_. No disparagement to her subordinate; the merest deference to convention!
There was no mishap about the first meeting; only a narrow escape of one. The man in the dark reckoned it safest to extend his hand and leave it, to await the first claimant. He took for granted this would be the mother, and as his hand closed on a lady's, not small enough to call his assumption in question, said half interrogatively:--"Lady Ancester?"
"That's Gwen," said his sister's voice. And at the word an electric shock of a sort passed up his arm, the hand that still held his showing no marked alacrity to release it.
"Yes, this is _me_," says the voice of its owner, "_that's_ mamma."
Lady Ancester, standing close to her, meets his outstretched hand and shakes it cordially. Then follows pleasantry about mistaking the mother for the daughter, with assumption of imperfect or dim vision only to account for it, and a declaration from Adrian that he had been cautioned not to confuse the one with the other. There _is_ a likeness, as a matter of fact, and Irene has talked to him of it. The whole thing is slighter than the telling of it.
Then the three ladies and the one man have grouped--composed themselves--for reasonable chat. He is in his invalid chair by special edict, at the window, and the two visitors face him half-flanking it.
His sister leans over him behind on the chair-back. She has kept very close to him, guiding him under pretence that he wants support, which is scarcely the case now, so rapid has been his progress in this last week.
She is very anxious lest her brother should venture too rashly on fictitious proofs of eyesight that does not exist. But it can all be put down to uneasiness about his strength.
The platitudes of mere chat ensue, the Countess being prolocutrix. But she can be sincerely earnest in speaking of her own concern about the accident, and her family's. Also to the full about the rejoicing of everyone when it was "certain that all would turn out well." She has been bound over to say nothing about the eyesight, and keeps pledges; almost too transparently, perhaps. A word or two about it as a thing of temporary abeyance might have been more plausible.
Gwen has become very silent since that first warmth of her greeting. She is leaving the conversation to her mother, which puzzles Irene, who had framed a different picture of the interview, and is disappointed so far.
Achilles, the dog, too, may be disappointed--may be feeling that something more demonstrative is due to the position. Irene imputes this view to him, inferring it from his restless appeals to Gwen, as he leans against her skirts, throwing back a pathetic gaze of remonstrance for something too complex for his powers of language. Her comment:--"He is always like that,"--seems to convey an image of his whereabouts to his master, confirmed perhaps by expressive dog-substitutes for speech.
"You mustn't let my bow-wow worry you, Lady Gwendolen. He presumes till he's checked, on principle. Send him to lie down over here. Here, Ply, Ply, Ply!... Oh, won't he come?" Probably Achilles knows that his master, who speaks, is only being civil.
"No--because I'm holding him. I want him here. He's a darling!" So says Gwen; and then continues:--"Oh yes, _I_ know why he's Ply--short for Pelides. I think he thinks I think it was his fault, and wants forgiveness."
"Possibly. But it is also possible that he sees his way by cajolery to all the sweet biscuits with a little crown on them that come about with tea. He wants none of us to have any. Pray do not think any the worse of him. How is he to know that a well-bred person hungers for little crown biscuits? We are so affected that there is nothing for him to go by."
"And he's a dear, candid darling! Of course he is. He shall have everything he wants." Achilles appears to accept the concession as deserved, but to be ready to requite it with undying love.
"It is all the excellence of his heart, I am aware, and a certain simplicity and directness," says Adrian. "But all the same he mustn't spoil ladies' dresses--beyond a certain point, of course. I have been very curious to know, Lady Gwendolen, whether his paws came off--the marks of them, I mean--on that lovely India muslin I saw you in three weeks ago, just before this unfortunate affair which has given so much trouble to everybody at--at ... Arthur's Bridge, of course! Couldn't think of the name at the moment. At Arthur's Bridge. I'm afraid he didn't do that dress any good."