"Bricktop has done it! You win!" she wrote on his arm.
Many days awaited him, with the pain devils in their last big dance, but with every day meaning less torture. His hearing had become distinct enough to perceive an ordinary conversation around his chair as a faint hum. The silver harness still clinched his jaw and the bandages were still over his eyes.
"Quite as he was before—only a few scars," Bricktop, whom Henriette had met coming out of his office, said in answer to her inquiry when she was on her way to Phil.
Mr. Eyes happened to be coming along the path at the time. Henriette joined him and together they crossed the court.
"What hope?" she asked. She put the question to him with increased fervour every time that she saw him; and of late she had chanced to see him frequently.
"I am going to change the bandages," he replied.
Sometimes the great man had doubts about the system of bandages, which nine out of ten specialists would not have favoured, perhaps; but when he considered an operation he fell back on them as the only way. Shell-shock was baffling, freakish, in its results, and the truth was that he was groping in professional darkness to save Phil from eternal darkness. Yesterday he had strengthened the application. A matter of daily routine the change of the bandages. It brought him every afternoon to the ward and always Helen was there to receive him, the same look of confident anticipation in her eyes, as yet unfulfilled.
He pressed his hand on Phil's forehead, and this Phil had long ago come to recognise as Mr. Eyes' private signal which preceded the removal of the bandages. He was particularly welcome to-day, as Phil had had a kind of restless sensation back of his eyeballs. As the medicated pad was withdrawn, a gurgling outcry rose from his throat and he leaned convulsively forward, fingers outstretched, opening and closing as if he were trying to grasp at a reality that might escape.
"It's not true! Imagination again!" snarled the pain devils; but they could not deceive him about this.
Light had come into his black night, soft, dreamy, vague, amazing light—just light, light, light! There were no people in it, no houses, no trees, only light which seemed like silver gauze hung before his eyes and yet to stretch to the ends of the world. It had brought something dead to life as by miracle, with a touch as soft as eiderdown, sending little thrills knitting in and out all through him. Light for the first time since he had heard that hurtling scream of the shell! Light was in his brain, his veins, his tissue, singing and frolicking as it opened the doors of dark places. He wanted to embrace it, fondle it, run it through his fingers with a miser's greed of gold and gather a store of it while he might. Out of the light, as if traced by the hand of light, a message was being traced on his arm.