Out of a drawer in the dresser she produced a piece of newspaper; tore off a strip; narrowed its width by folding; bound it neatly round the base of the candle; pressed the candle securely into its socket; lighted it from her own, and handed it—after its flame was sufficiently established—to the waiting man.
He took it awkwardly and tardily enough, rocking so long in silence on his feet before acceptance, with head thrown forward and chin bearing heavily over his collar, that for some moments Pam had doubts whether he was not fast asleep and about to fall prone across the outstretched candle and her. But roused at length, as it would seem, by her prolonged gaze of inquiry, he lifted his head and extended an uncertain hand—a hand so uncertain, indeed, that at the first attempt it went wide of the candlestick altogether. At the second, more through Pain's management than his, thumb and finger closed upon it and he turned to go. The look of his dazed eyes and the dry, white lips that rubbed impotently sideways upon each other to shape a soundless "Thank you," sent a great surging tide of solicitous alarm through Pam's bosom. She was after him in a moment.
"Mr. Frewin ... Mr. Frewin.... Are you ill?"
CHAPTER XIII
His foot was already on the first step when she urged her bated voice of inquiry after him. He stayed for a moment so, as though he lacked strength to ascend or purpose to speak, and then turned upon her very slowly.
"You ask that," he said, compressing his words through bloodless lips, hard and set. "Don't you know? Can't you see?"
The fixed, meaningful way he looked at her, as though his face were a written answer, and she could read it if she would, and the strange, underlying emphasis of his question, took Pam altogether by surprise. Did n't she know? Could n't she see? All the dread sicknesses under the sun seemed to swathe him and envelope him in their hideous mantles as she gazed ... a fearful kaleidoscopic counterpane of ailments. Which of all these had her blindness overlooked?
Did n't she know? Could n't she see?
"See what?" she begged, in the whispered hush of a voice that besought an answer it scarcely dared to hear. For, framed in the narrow dark inlet of the staircase, with the candle casting corpse-hollows over his eyes, and sinking his cheeks under shadow, and sharpening his nose, and hardening his nostrils—to the girl's disturbed imagination he seemed dead and coffined already. "Oh, tell me, please!—what I ought to see. Oh, I am so sorry! Is there anything you want? Is there anything I can get you?"
"You know what I want," he said, and Lazarus, wakened from the dead, might have spoken his first words in just such a voice.