So, too, when a few minutes later Cantyre came over to give me his welcome. It was the welcome of old, with a shocked pity in it.
“Didn’t expect to see you so badly mauled,” was his sorrowful comment after the first demonstrations. “I knew you were wounded, of course, and that you had been blind. Regina wrote me that from Taplow. But I didn’t look for your being so—”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” I interposed, in the effort to shut off his sympathy.
Having asked me a few professional questions in reference to the ways in which I had been wounded, he said: “Well, now that we’ve got hold of you again we mean to feed you up and take care of you. You’re going to be my patient, Frank. For the present, at any rate, we’ll be living in the same old house, and I shall be able to keep a daily eye on you. Lovey here has your apartment as clean as an operating-room. See you there later. Just now I’ve got to go back to—to Regina. And by the way”—his habitually mournful expression brightened as a lowering day lights up when the sun bursts through the masses of drifting cloud—“by the way, I shall have something to tell you by and by. The most wonderful thing has happened, Frank—something you and I used to talk about before you went abroad.”
He wrung my hand with that way he had of pulling it downward and pulling it hard, which betrayed all sorts of raptures breaking in on a spirit that had never known common, every-day happiness. His whole face asked me to rejoice with him, and, though I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t do the other thing.
It was on my lips to say, “You can’t have her because I’m going to take her away from you.” But the words died before they were formed. The very thought died in my mind. Whatever I did, I shouldn’t be able to do it that way; and so I let him go.
“Do you know what he meant, Slim—when he said them things—the doctor?”
This was Lovey’s question as he sat beside me in the taxicab and we drove up-town.
As I made no answer, he mumbled, mysteriously: “I do. I ’aven’t valeted ’im for nothink.”
I still made no answer, and the mumble ceased.