And I felt somehow that player watched us. I made an angry sign to him to go. But it was the sudden touch upon my arm that made me turn round with such a sudden start that I almost cried aloud. O'Malley in his night-clothes stood close against me on the floor, slight as a spirit, eyes a-shine, lips moving faintly into speech through the most wonderful smile a human face has ever shown me.
"Do not send him away," he whispered, joy breaking from him like a light, "but tell him that I love it. Go out and thank him. Tell him I hear and understand, and say that I am coming. Will you…?"
Something within me whirled. It seemed that I was lifted from my feet a moment. Some tide of power rushed from his person to my own. The room was filled with blinding light. But in my heart there rose a great emotion that combined tears and joy and laughter all at once.
"The moment you are back in bed," I heard my voice like one speaking from a distance, "I'll go—"
The momentary, wild confusion passed as suddenly as it came. I remember he obeyed at once. As I bent down to tuck the clothes about him, that fragrance as of flowers and open spaces rose about my bending face like incense—bewilderingly sweet.
And the next second I was standing in the street. The man who played upon the pipe, I saw, was blind. His hand and fingers were curiously large.
I was already close, ready to press all that my pockets held into his hand—ay, and far more than merely pockets held because O'Malley said he loved the music—when something made me turn my head away. I cannot say precisely what it was, for first it seemed a tapping at the window of his room behind me, and then a little noise within the room itself, and next—more curious than either,—a feeling that something came out rushing past me through the air. It whirled and shouted as it went…
I only remember clearly that in the very act of turning, and while my look still held that beggar's face within the field of vision, I saw the sightless eyes turn bright a moment as though he opened them and saw. He did most certainly smile; to that I swear.
But when I turned again the street immediately about me was empty.
The beggar-man was gone.
And down the pavement, moving swiftly through the curtain of fog,
I saw his vanishing figure. It was large and spreading. In the fringe of
light the lamp-post gave, its upper edges seemed far above the ground.
Someone else was with him. There were two figures.