"Why--what I said before!"
"But what _was_ it?"
"Do you know, I think it was only a sort of attempt to get a little sleep. You were so fearfully on my conscience, and it made it so much easier to bear.... Only it worried me to think that perhaps she might turn round and say:--'This was no fault of mine. Why should I bear for life the burden of other people's sins?' ... If she was a perfect beast--_beast_, you know!..."
"The hypothesis would not have been a perfect beast. She would have been a perfect lady, and Mrs. Bailey would have attested it. She would have pointed out the desirability of a sister's love--at reasonable intervals; visits and so on--for a man with his eyes poked out. She might even have gone the length of insinuating that the finger of Providence did it...."
"Now you are talking nonsense again. Do be serious!"
"Well--let's be serious! Suppose you tell me what it was you were thinking that made the existence of that very dry and unsatisfying hypothesis such a consolation!"
"I should like to tell you--only I know I shall say it wrong, and you will think me an odd girl; or unfeeling; which is worse."
"I should do nothing of the sort. But I'll tell you what I should think--what I have thought all this time I have been hearing your voice--I merely mention it as a thing of pathological interest...."
"Go on."
"I should think it didn't matter what you said so long as you went on speaking. Because whenever I hear your voice I can shut my eyes and forget that I am blind."
"Is that empty compliment, or are you in earnest?"
"I was jesting a minute ago, but now I am in earnest. I mean what I say.
Your voice takes the load off my heart and the darkness off my brain, and we are standing again by that stone bridge over yonder--Arthur's Bridge--and I see you in all your beauty--oh! such beauty--as I look up from Ply's cut collar against the sunset sky. That was my last hour of vision, and its memory will go with me to the grave. And now when I hear your voice, it all comes back to me, and the terrible darkness has vanished--or the sense of it anyhow!..."
"If that is so you shall hear it until your sight comes back--it will--it must!"
"How if it never comes back? How if I remain as I am now for life?"
"I shall not lose my voice."
How it came about neither could ever say; but each knew that it happened then, just at that turn in the conversation, and that no one came rushing into the drawing-room as they easily might have done--this lax structure of language was employed later in reference to it--nor did any of the thousand interruptions occur that might have occurred. Mrs.
Bailey might have come to Mr. Torrens to know how many g's there were in agreeable, or a tea-collector might have prowled in to add relics to her collection, or even the sound of the carriage afar--inaudible by man--might have caused Achilles to requisition the opening of the drawing-room door, that he might rush away to sanction its arrival. Two guardian angels--the story thinks--stopped any of these things happening. What did happen was that Gwen and Adrian, who a moment before were nominally a lady and gentleman chatting on a sofa near the piano, whose separation involved no consequences definable for either, were standing speechless in each other's arms--speechless but waiting for the power to speak. For nobody can articulate whose heart is thumping out of all reason. He has to wait--or she, as may be. One of each is needed to develope an earthquake of this particular kind.
It was just as well that the Hon. Percival Pellew and Aunt Constance Smith-Dickenson, who had started to walk from the flower-show with a couple of young monkeys whose object in life was to spare everybody else their company from selfish motives, did _not_ come rushing into the drawing-room just then, but a quarter of an hour later. For even if the parties had caught the sound of their arrival in time, the peculiarity of Mr. Torrens' blindness would have stood in the way of any successful pretence that he and Lady Gwendolen had been keeping their distance up to Society point. We know how easy it is for normal people, when caught, to pretend they are looking at dear Sarah's interesting watercolours together, or anything of that sort. And even if the blind man had been able to strike a bar or two carelessly on the piano, to advertise his isolation, their faces would have betrayed them. Not that the tears of either could have been identified on the face of the other. It was a matter of expression. Every situation in this world has a stamp of its own for the human face, and no stamp is more easily identified than that on the face of lovers who have just found each other out.
Anyhow this story cannot go on, until the absurd tempest that has passed over these two allows them to speak. Then they do so on an absolutely new footing, and the man calls the girl his dearest and his own, and Heaven knows what else. There one sees the difference between the B.C.
and A.D. of the Nativity of Love. It is a new Era. Call it the Hegira, if you like.
"I saw you once, dear love,"--he is saying--"I saw you once, and it was you--you--you! The worst that Fate has in store for me cannot kill the memory of that moment. And if blindness was to be the price of this--of this--why, I would sooner be blind, and have it, than have all the eyes of Argus and ... and starve."
"You wouldn't know you were starving," says Gwen, who is becoming normal--resuming the equanimities. "Besides, you would be such a Guy.
No--please don't! Somebody's coming!"
"Nobody's coming. It's all right. I tell you, Gwen, or Gwendolen--do you know I all but called you that, when you came in, before we sang...?"
"Why didn't you quite? However, I'm not sorry you didn't on the whole.
It might have seemed paternal, and I should have felt squashed. And then it might never have happened at all, and I should just have been a young lady in Society, and you a gentleman that had had an accident."
"It would have happened just the same, _I_ believe. Because why? I had _seen_ you. At least, it _might_ have."
"It _has_ happened, and must be looked in the face. Now whatever you do, for Heaven's sake, don't go talking to papa and being penitent, till I give you leave."
"What should I be able to say to him? _I_ don't know. I can't justify my actions--as the World goes...."
"Why not?"
"Nobody would hold a man blameless, in my circumstances, who made an offer of marriage to a young lady under...."
"It's invidious to talk about people's ages."
"I wasn't going to say twenty-one. I was going to say under her father's roof...."
"Nobody ever makes offers of marriage on the top of anybody's father's roof. Besides, you never made any offer, strictly speaking. You said...."
"I said that if I had my choice I would have chosen it all as it now is, only to hear your voice in the dark, rather than to be without it and have all the eyes of ... didn't I say Argus?"
"Yes--you said Argus. But that was a _facon-de-parler_; at least I hope so, for the sake of the Hypothesis.... Oh dear!--what nonsense we two are talking...." Some silence; otherwise the _status quo_ remained unchanged. Then he said:--"_I_ wonder if it's all a dream and we shall wake." And she replied: "Not both--that's absurd!" But she made it more so by adding:--"Promise you'll tell me your dream when we wake, and I'll tell you mine." He assented:--"All right!--but don't let's wake yet."
By now the sun was sinking in a flame of gold, and every little rabbit's shadow in the fern was as long as the tallest man's two hours since, and longer. The level glare was piercing the sheltered secrets of the beechwoods, and choosing from them ancient tree-trunks capriciously, to turn to sudden fires against the depths of hidden purple beyond--the fringe of the mantle the vanguard of night was weaving for the hills.
Not a dappled fallow-deer in the coolest shade but had its chance of a robe of glory for a little moment--not a bird so sober in its plumage but became, if only it flew near enough to Heaven, a spark against the blue. And the long, unhesitating rays were not so busy with the world without, but that one of them could pry in at the five-light window at the west end of the Jacobean drawing-room at the Towers, and reach the marble Ceres the Earl's grandfather brought from Athens. And on the way it paused and dwelt a moment on a man's hand caressing the stray locks of a flood of golden hair he could not see--might never see at all. Or who might live on--such things have been--to find it grey to a half-illuminated sight in the dusk of life. So invisible to him now; so vivid in his memory of what seemed to him no more than a few days since! For half the time, remember, had been to him oblivion--a mere blank. And now, in the splendid intoxication of this new discovery, he could well afford to forget for the moment the black cloud that overhung the future, and the desperation that might well lie hidden in its heart, waiting for the day when he should know that Hope was dead. That day might come.
"Shall I tell you now, my dearest, my heart, my life"--this is what he is saying, and every word he says is a mere truth to him; a sort of scientific fact--"shall I tell you what I was going to say an hour ago?..."
"It's more than an hour, but I know when. About me sticking my hand out?"
"Just exactly then. I was thinking all the while that in another moment I should have your hand in mine, and keep it as long as I dared. Eyes were nothing--sight was nothing--life itself was nothing--nothing was anything but that one moment just ahead. It would not last, but it would fill the earth and the heavens with light and music, and keep death and the fiend that had been eating up my soul at bay--as long as it lasted.
Dear love, I am not exaggerating...."
"Do you expect me to believe that? Now be quiet, and perhaps I'll tell you what I was thinking when I found out you couldn't see--have been thinking ever since. I thought it well over in the night, and when I came into this room I meant it. I did, indeed."
"Meant what?"
"Meant to get at the truth about that ring of yours. I had got it on the brain, you see. I meant to find out whether she was anybody or nobody.
And if she was nobody I was going to...." She comes to a standstill; for, even now--even after such a revelation, with one of his arms about her waist, and his free hand caressing her hair--Marcus Curtius sticks in her throat a little.
"What were you going to?" said Adrian, really a little puzzled. Because even poets don't understand some women.
"Well--if it wasn't you I wouldn't tell. I ... I had made up my mind to apply for the vacant place." This came with a rush, and might not have come at all had she felt his eyes could see her; knowing, as she did, the way the blood would quite unreasonably mount up to her face the moment she had uttered it. "It all seemed such plain sailing in the middle of the night, and it turned out not quite so easy as I thought it would be. You know.... Be quiet and let me talk now!... it was the guilt--my share in it--that was so hard to bear. I wanted to do _something_ to make it up to you. And what could I do? A woman is in such a fix. Oh, how glad I was when you opened fire on your own account!
Only _frightened_, you know." He was beginning to say something, but she stopped him with:--"I know what you are going to say, but that's just where the difficulty came in. If only I hadn't cared twopence about you it would have been so easy!... Did you say how? Foolish man!--can't you see that if I hadn't loved you one scrap, or only half across your lips as we used to say when we were children, it would have been quite a let-off to be met with offers of a brother's love ... and that sort of thing.... Isn't that them?" This was colloquial. No doubt Gwen was exceptional, and all the other young ladies in the Red Book would have said:--"Are not these they?"
This story does not believe that Gwen's statement of her recent embarrassment covered the facts. Probably a woman in her position would be less held at bay by the chance of a rebuff, than by a deadly fear of kisses chilled by a spirit of self-sacrifice.... Ugh!--the hideous suspicion! The present writer, from information received, believes that little girls like to think that they are made of sugar and spice and all that's nice, and that their lover's synthesis of slugs and snails and puppy-dogs' tails doesn't matter a rap so long as they are ravenous. But they mustn't snap, however large a percentage of puppy-dogs they contain.
Anyhow, Marcus Curtius never came off. He was really impossible; and, as we all know, what's impossible very seldom comes to pass. And this case was not among the exceptions.
It wasn't them. But a revision of the relativities was necessary. When Miss Dickenson and the Hon. Percival did come in, Gwen was at the piano, and Adrian at the right distance for hearing. Nothing could have been more irreproachable. The newcomers, having been audibly noisy on the stairs, showed as hypocritical by an uncalled-for assumption of preternatural susceptibility to the absence of other members of their party acknowledging their necessity to make up a Grundy quorum. There is safety in number when persons are of opposite sexes, which they generally are.
"Can't imagine what's become of them!" said Mr. Pellew, rounding off some subject with a dexterous implication of its nature. "By Jove!--that's good, though! Mr. Torrens down at last!" Greetings and civilities, and a good pretence by the blind man of seeing the hands he meets half-way.