"Why didn't you say the ground was covered with them, 'Re? I could have believed in any number on your authority. Surely, a chap with his eyes out is entitled to the advantages which seeing nothing confers on him.
Do please perjure yourself about violets and crocuses on my behalf. It is quite a mistake to suppose I shall be jealous. You've no idea what a magnanimous elder brother you've got." So Adrian had said when they came in, and had felt his way to the piano--it was extraordinary how he had learned to feel his way about--and had played the air of "Sumer is ycumin in, lhude sing cucu," with the courage of a giant. Not only that, but actually sang it, and never flinched from:--"Groweth seed and bloweth meed and springeth wood anew." And his heart was saying to him all the while that he might never again see the springing of the young corn, and the daisies in the grass, and the new buds waiting for the bidding of the sun.
Irene, quite alive to her brother's intrepidity, but abstaining resolutely from spoken acknowledgment--for would not that have been an admission of the need for courage?--had gone through a dramatic effort on her own behalf, a kind of rehearsal of the part she had to play. She had arranged writing materials for action, and affected the attitude of a patient scribe, longing for dictation. She had assumed a hardened tone, to say:--"When you're ready!" Then Adrian had deserted the piano, and addressed himself to dictation. "Where were we?" said he. For the letter was half written, having been interrupted by visitors the day before.
"When the Parysfort women came in?" said Irene. "We had got to the old woman. After the old woman--what next?"
Adrian repeated, "After the old woman--after the old woman." Then he said suddenly:--"Bother the old woman. I tell you what, 'Re, we must tear this letter up, and start fair. Those people coming in spoiled it."
His tone was vexed and restless. The weariness of his blindness galled him. This fearful inability to write was one of his worst trials. He fought hard against his longing to cry out--to lighten his heart, ever so little, by expression of his misery; but then, the only one thing he could do in requital of the unflagging patience of this dear amanuensis, was to lighten the weight of her sorrow for him. And this he could only do by showing unflinching resolution to bear his own burden. One worst unkindest cut of all was that any word of exasperation against the cruelty of a cancelled pen might seem an imputation on her of ineffective service, almost a reproach. It was perhaps because the visitors of yesterday were so evidently to blame for the miscarriage of this letter, that Adrian felt, in a certain sense, free to grieve aloud.
It was a relief to him to say:--"The Devil fly away with the Honourable Misses Parysforts!"
"Suppose we have a clean slate, darling, and I'll tear the letter up, old woman and all. Or shall I read back a little, to start you?"
"Oh no--please! On no account read anything again.... Suppose I confess up! Make some stars, and go on like this:--'These are not Astronomy, but to convey the idea that I have forgotten where I was, and that we have to make it a rule never to re-read, for fear I should tear it up. I believe I was trying to find a new roundabout way of saying how much more to me you were than anything in Heaven or Earth.'" The dictation paused.
"Go on," said the amanuensis. "After 'Heaven and Earth'?" She paused with an expectant pen, her eyes on the paper. Then she looked up, to see that her brother's face was in his hands, dropped down on the side-cushion of the sofa. She waited for him to speak, knowing he would only think she did not see him. But she had to wait overlong for the lasting powers of this excuse; so she let it lapse, and went to sit beside him, and coaxed his hands from his face, kissing away something very like a tear. "But why now, darling?" said she. "You know what I mean. What was it in the letter?"
"Why--I was going to say," replied Adrian, recovering himself, "I was going on to 'the thing that makes day of my darkness' or something of that sort--some poetical game, you know--and then I thought what a many things I could write if I could write them myself, and shut them in the envelope for Gwen alone, that I can't say now, though the dearest sister ever man had yet writes them for me. I _can_ say to _her_, darling, that if I were offered my eyesight back, by some irritating fairy godmother--that kind of thing--in exchange for the Gwen that is mine, I would not accept her boon upon the terms. I should, on the contrary, wish I were the Lernaean Hydra, that I might give the balance of seven pairs of eyes rather than ..."
"Rather than lose Gwen." Irene spoke, because he had hesitated.
"Exactly. But I got stuck a moment by the reflection that Gwen's sentiments might not have remained altogether unchanged, in that case.
In fact, she might have run away, at Arthur's Bridge. It is an obscure and difficult subject, and the supply of parallel cases is not all one could wish."
"I don't see why we shouldn't put all or any of that in the letter." For Irene always favoured her brother's incurable whimsicality as a resource against the powers of Erebus and dark Night, and humoured any approach to extravagance, to disperse the cloud that had gathered. This one pleased him.
"How shall we put it?... somehow like this.... By-the-by, do you know how to spell Lernaean?..." He paused abruptly, and seemed to listen.
"Sh--sh a minute! What's that outside? I thought I heard somebody coming." Irene listened too.
"Ply hears somebody," she said. And then she had all but said "Look at him!" in an unguarded moment.
An instant later the dog had started up and scoured from the room as if life and death depended on his presence elsewhere. Adrian heard something his sister did not, and exclaimed "What's that?"
"Nothing," said Irene. "Only someone at the front-door. Ply's always like that."
"I didn't mean Ply. Listen! Be quiet." The room they were in was remote from the front-door of the house, and the voice they heard was no more than a musical modulation of silence. It had a power in it, for all that, to rouse the blind man to excitement. He had to put a restraint on himself to say quietly:--"Suppose you go and see! Do you mind?" Irene left the room.
Anyone who had seen Adrian then for the first time, and watched him standing motionless with his hands on a chairback and the eyes that saw nothing gazing straight in front of him, but not towards the door, would have wondered to see a man of his type apparently so interested in his own image, repeated by the mirror before him as often as eyesight could trace its give-and-take with the one that faced it on the wall behind him. He was the wrong man for a Narcissus. The strength of his framework was wrong throughout. Narcissus had no bone-distances, as artists say, and his hair was in crisp curls, good for the sculptor. No one ever needed to get a pair of scissors to snip it. But though anyone might have marvelled at Adrian Torrens's seeming Narcissus-like intentness on his own manifold image, he could never have surmised that cruel blindness was its apology. He could never have guessed, from anything in their seeming, that the long perspective of gazing orbs, vanishing into nothingness, were not more sightless than their originals.
He only listened for a moment. For, distant as she was, Irene's cry of surprise on meeting some new-comer was decisive as to that new-comer's identity. It could be no one but Gwen. Irene's welcome settled that.
The blind man was feeling his way to the door when Gwen opened it. Then she was in his arms, and what cared he for anything else in the heavens above or the earth beneath? His exultation had to die down, like the resonant chords in the music he had played an hour since, before he could come to the level of speech. Then he said prosaically:--"This is very irregular! How about the solemn compact? How are we going to look our mamma in the face?"
"Did it yesterday evening!" said Gwen. "We had an explosion.... Well, I won't say that--suppose we call it a warm discussion, leading to a more reasonable attitude on the part of ... of the people who were in the wrong. The other people, that is to say!"
"Precisely. They always are. I vote we sit on the sofa, and you take your bonnet off. I know it's on by the ribbons under your chin--not otherwise."
"What a clever man he is--drawing inferences! However, bonnets _have_ got very much out of sight, I admit. Hands off, please!... There!--now I can give particulars."
Irene, who--considerately, perhaps--had not followed closely, here came in, saying:--"Stop a minute! I haven't heard anything yet....
There!--now go on."
She found a seat, and Gwen proceeded.
"I came home yesterday, with an old woman I've picked up, who certainly is the dearest old woman...."
"Never mind the old woman. Why did you come?"
"I came home because I chose. I came here because I wanted to.... Well, I'll tell you directly. What I wish to mention now is that I have not driven a coach-and-six through the solemn compact. I assented to a separation for six months, but no date was fixed. I assure you it wasn't. I was looking out all the time, and took good care."
"Wasn't it fixed by implication?" This was Irene.
"Maybe it was. But _I_ wasn't. We can put the six months off, and start fair presently. Papa quite agreed."
"Mamma didn't?" This was Adrian.
"Of course not. That was the basis of the ... warm discussion which followed on my declaration that I was coming to see you to-day. However, we parted friends, and I slept sound, with a clear conscience. I got up early, to avoid complications, and made Tom Kettering drive me here in the dog-cart. It took an hour and a half because the road's bad. It's like a morass, all the way. I like the sound of the horse's hoofs when I drive, not mud-pie thuds."
"We didn't hear any sound at all, except Ply.... Yes, dear!--of course _you_ heard. I apologize." Irene said this to Achilles, who, catching his name, took up a more active position in the conversation, which he conceived to be about himself. Some indeterminate chat went on until Gwen said suddenly:--"Now I want to talk about what I came here for."
"Go it!" said Adrian.
"I want to know all about what 'Re said to Dr. Merridew in her letter.... Well, what's the matter?"
Amazement on Irene's fact had caused this. "And that man calls himself an F.R.C.S.!" said she.
Adrian, uninformed, naturally asked why not. Gwen supplied a clue for guessing. "He said he couldn't read your handwriting, and gave me your letter to make out."
"What nonsense! I write perfectly plainly."
"So I told him. But he maintained he had hardly been able to make out a word of it. Of course I read it. Your caution to him not to tell me was a little obscure, but otherwise I found it easy enough. Anyhow, I read all about it. And now I know."
"Well--I'll never trust a man with letters after his name again. Of course he was pretending."
"But what for?"
"Because he wanted to tell you, and didn't want to get in a scrape for betraying my confidence."
Adrian struck in. Might he ask what the rumpus was about? Why Sir Merridew, and why letters?
Irene supplied the explanation. "I wrote to him about you and Septimius Severus.... Don't you recollect? And I cautioned him particularly not to tell Gwen.... Why not? Why--of course not! It was sheer, inexcusable dishonesty, and I shall tell him so next time I see him."
Gwen appeared uninterested in the point of honour. "I wonder," she said, "whether he thought telling me of it this way would prevent my building too much on it, and being disappointed. That would be so exactly like Dr. Merridew."
"I think," said Adrian deliberately, "that I appreciate the position.
Septimius Severus figures in it as a bust, or as an indirect way of describing a circumstance; preferably the latter, I should say, for it must be most uncomfortable to be a bust. As an Emperor he is inadmissible. I remember the incident--but I suspect it was only a dream." His voice fell into real seriousness as he said this; then went back to mock seriousness, after a pause. "However, I am bound to say that 'inexcusable dishonesty' is a strong expression. I should suggest 'pliable conscience,' always keeping in view the motive of ... Yes, Pelides dear, but I have at present nothing for you in the form of cake or sugar. Explain yourself somehow, to the best of your ability." For Achilles had suddenly placed an outstretched paw, impressively, on the speaker's knee.
"I see what it was," said Gwen. "You said 'pliable conscience'--just now."
"Well?"